Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 152
June 21, 2023
June 21, 2023
Just before midnight yesterday, ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski published a story reporting that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in 2008 flew on a private jet to a luxury fishing vacation in Alaska thanks to the hospitality of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, whose business was based on hard-hitting litigation. Since that trip, Singer has had that litigation before the Supreme Court at least ten times. Alito neither disclosed the gift of the flight on the private jet nor recused himself from ruling on those cases.
In the last decade, according to the authors, Singer has donated more than $80 million to Republican political groups. While in Alaska, Alito stayed as a guest at the lodge of another wealthy Republican donor, who had, in the past, entertained former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Lodging there cost $1000 a night.
This revelation adds to the many recently-revealed ties between the court’s right-wing justices and wealthy donors. In April, ProPublica, which is a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on abuses of power, began a series revealing that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted lavish gifts from Texas billionaire and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, as well as private school tuition for a relative and real estate deals. Thomas did not disclose those gifts.
Then it turned out that the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts made more than $10 million in commissions over 8 years as she matched top lawyers with top law firms, including some that brought cases before the court. Roberts misleadingly disclosed the money as “salary” rather than commissions. Then news broke that nine days after Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the court, a property in which he held an interest sold after two years on the market. The buyer was the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm that routinely practices before the court. Gorsuch did not disclose the buyer’s identity.
Last night’s story got weirder, though, because Alito waded into it to attack ProPublica for their reporting. The reporters had reached out to the justice last week to get his side of the story. Yesterday, Alito’s office told the authors he had no comment and then several hours later—before the ProPublica story dropped—Alito published in the Wall Street Journal an op-ed “prebuttal” of what was to come. It was titled: “ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”
Alito didn’t deny that he had accepted the gifts, but claimed that he didn’t need to disclose the valuable flight because it was a “facility” and that the vacation did not involve $1,000 bottles of wine (remember that no one had yet read the ProPublica story, which quoted one of the lodge’s fishing guides as saying that a member of Alito’s party said the wine they were drinking cost $1,000 a bottle). He also said he did not know Singer was associated with the cases before the court.
Today Leonard Leo, the person who organized the 2008 fishing trip, also jumped in. In 2008, Leo was the head of the Federalist Society, which came together in 1982 to roll back the business regulations and the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II era by remaking the courts with judges who stood against what they called “judicial activism.” (Leo is now in charge of Marble Freedom Trust, a nonprofit organized in May 2020 with a $1.6 billion donation from donor Barre Seid to push right-wing politics at every level.)
Leo released a statement supporting Alito and warning: “We all should wonder whether this recent rash of ProPublica stories questioning the integrity of only conservative Supreme Court Justices is bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.” (Justice Elena Kagan, one of the justices Leo suggests is being unfairly given a pass by ProPublica, reportedly declined to accept a basket of bagels and lox from her high-school classmates out of concern about the ethics of accepting gifts.)
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed that Leo seems to have used his extensive network to set up relationships between judges and donors in a reinforcing ecosystem.
This is, of course, precisely why there is pressure on the Supreme Court to adopt ethics reform. In April, Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) introduced the Supreme Court Code of Conduct Act, which would simply ask the court to develop its own code of conduct and oversight, a system that, unlike every other state and federal court, it does not currently have. That measure remains in committee.
But the day had just begun. John Durham, appointed as special counsel by Trump attorney general William Barr on October 19, 2020, to investigate the behavior of federal investigators who examined the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives, testified for over six hours today before the House Judiciary Committee. While Trump and his loyalists repeatedly predicted Durham would find damning evidence against the investigators, in fact his 306-page report, released on May 15 after a four-year, $6.5 million investigation, simply said the FBI should have launched a preliminary investigation rather than a full investigation (a 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded the opposite).
There was little new information presented in the hearing, although Durham did answer a question from Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) about the report that when Durham and Barr had asked Italian officials for evidence in favor of Trump, they had instead passed on information that implicated Trump in financial crimes. Durham responded, “The question’s outside the scope of what I think I’m authorized to talk about—it’s not part of the report,” but added: “I can tell you this. That investigative steps were taken, grand jury subpoenas were issued and it came to nothing.”
The hearing served mostly to keep the Russia investigation in front of the public, which appears to be important to the former president and his allies as they continue to attack the FBI and the Justice Department. But Democrats on the committee pressed Durham on the facts of the Russia investigation itself, and he, seemingly somewhat reluctantly, agreed under oath in response to questions by Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) that the facts of the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report were correct: Russia interfered in the 2016 election for the benefit of Trump, Trump’s campaign welcomed the help and shared information and secret meetings with Russian operatives, and the FBI was justified in investigating that interference.
Also significant in the hearing was the prominence of Schiff, who was the House manager for Trump’s first impeachment trial. That effort earned him Trump’s fury, and Trump loyalists today demanded a vote on the motion by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) to censure Schiff.
Notwithstanding Durham’s sworn testimony, House Resolution 521 began: “Whereas the allegation that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 Presidential election has been revealed as false by numerous in-depth investigations, including the recent report by Special Counsel John Durham….”
The resolution was a red-meat pro-Trump document, insisting that the Trump campaign did not work with the Russians, that Schiff “misled the public” over Trump’s call asking for a “favor” from Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, and that, as then-chair of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff must be censured “for misleading the American public and for conduct unbecoming of an elected Member of the House of Representatives.” It also requires the Ethics Committee to “conduct an investigation into…Schiff’s falsehoods, misrepresentations, and abuses of sensitive information.”
On social media, Trump had called for primary challengers against any Republican who voted against the censure. The Republicans fell into line. During the debate, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said: “The other side has turned this chamber...into a puppet show. A puppet show, and you know what? The puppeteer, Donald Trump, is shining a light on the strings. You look miserable. Miserable.” The final vote was 213 to 209, with 6 representatives voting present. When the motion passed, the House Democrats erupted into chants of “Shame” and “Disgrace.”
Owen Tucker-Smith of the Los Angeles Times noted that in the past 40 years, the House has censured just five people: Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in 2021 for tweeting a video showing a character with his face killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and attacking President Biden, Charles Rangel (D-NY) in 2010 for finance violations, Gerry Studds (D-MA) and Dan Crane (R-IL) in 1983 for sexual misconduct with House pages, and now Schiff.
Earlier today, Schiff had his own take on his censure: “To my Republican colleagues who introduced this resolution, I thank you,’ he said. “You honor me with your enmity. You flatter me with this falsehood. You, who are the authors of a big lie about the last election, must condemn the truth-tellers and I stand proudly before you. Your words tell me that I have been effective in the defense of our democracy and I am grateful.”
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Notes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-paul-singer-scotus-supreme-court
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/22/politics/dark-money-donation-conservative-group-invs/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/republican-dark-money.html
https://www.axios.com/2020/01/07/leonard-leo-crc-advisors-federalist-society
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-investigation-origins
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/neil-gorsuch-colorado-property-sale-00093579
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/leonard-leos-scotus-fedsoc-sponsor-family-program
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23854155-statement-from-leonard-leo-june-2023
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1290/text
https://forward.com/fast-forward/546201/elena-kagan-clarence-thomas-bagels-and-lox/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/us/politics/john-durham-special-counsel-russia.html
https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1671562659525689347
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1671652320621350915
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hres521/BILLS-118hres521ih.pdf
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-06-21/house-republicans-censure-adam-schiff-senate
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adam-schiff-censure-resolution-vote-house/
June 20, 2023
June 20, 2023
After years of accusations and rumors swirling around Hunter Biden, the 53-year-old son of President Joe Biden, the Department of Justice has reached a tentative deal with the younger Biden: He will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of failing to file income tax returns for 2017 and 2018 by the filing date, for which he owed more than $100,000 each year. Biden’s representatives say he has since paid the Internal Revenue Service what he owed. Prosecutors will ask for two years’ probation.
Biden will also admit to the fact that he possessed a firearm as an addict, for which he and prosecutors have agreed he will enter a pretrial diversion agreement that will require that he stay clean for two more years, after which the charge will be removed from his record.
Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, promptly accused “the Bidens” of “corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery” and called the deal “a slap on the wrist.” Throughout the day, right-wing figures have insisted that the deal is proof that President Biden is using the Justice Department to shield his family and to persecute his enemies.
In fact, Biden worked hard to reestablish the independence of the Justice Department after Trump had used it for personal ends. Trump broke the tradition that FBI directors should serve out their ten-year term—a term chosen to emphasize that the position should not be political—by firing FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to stop the bureau’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives; Biden tried to reestablish the guardrails around the position when he declined to replace FBI director Christopher Wray, appointed by Trump.
Biden also left in place the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware—the person overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden that began in 2018—to make the independence of the investigation clear. That Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss, is responsible for the deal. Georgetown University policy professor Don Moynihan pointed out that Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years and “[b]est they could do is tax charges which rarely get this level of attention. If Comer has anything real, the prosecutor would have used it.”
Indeed, rather than going easy on Hunter Biden, there are signs that prosecutors treated him more harshly than is typical for similar crimes. Roger Sollenberger, a senior political writer for the Daily Beast, explained that “Roger Stone and his wife settled a $2 million unpaid taxes civil case with DOJ last year—they weren't charged criminally, unlike Hunter Biden, so they didn't even get probation.” Justice reporter for NBC News Ryan Reilly noted that it is very rare for prosecutors to bring the addict in possession of a weapon charge they used against Biden. In the past it has been used to find a charge that will stick or alongside charges concerning violent crime.
As right-wing leaders, including House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), nonetheless attacked the Justice Department for what they claimed was a “two-tiered justice system” that went easy on Biden, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post noted, "The right doesn’t seem to care about the legal process—they care about the results. Their aim is the destruction of the independence of federal law enforcement in favor of a weaponized justice system, and they will keep creating new pretexts until they get it."
Trump had his own reaction to the Biden charges, calling them “a massive INTERFERENCE COVERUP & FULL SCALE ELECTION ‘SCAM’ THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN IN OUR COUNTRY BEFORE. A ‘TRAFFIC TICKET,’ & JOE IS ALL CLEANED UP & READY TO GO INTO THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION - AND THIS AS CROOKED DOJ, STATE, & CITY PROSECUTORS, MARXISTS & COMMUNISTS ALL, HIT ME FROM ALL SIDES & ANGELS WITH BULL….! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” [sic]
Eric Lipton of the New York Times reported today on the Trump family’s ties to a multibillion-dollar project in Oman. The resort project is backed by the Omani government, which has put up the land for the project and is investing up to a billion dollars to upgrade the infrastructure near the project and to fund the project’s initial phase. It will also take a cut of the profits. A Saudi real estate firm closely allied with the Saudi government brought Trump into the deal. The Trump family will not put any money into the project, but the Omani government has paid the Trump Organization at least $5 million for the use of his name and will pay the Trump Organization to manage a hotel, golf course, and golf club for the next 30 years.
“There is a big wealth concentration in the world, which means that those people will more and more demand more exclusive products and more exclusive projects,” the chief executive of the London-based DarGlobal subsidiary of the Saudi real estate firm said earlier this year. The project is being constructed by migrants paid as little as $340 a month for ten hours a day of grueling work in heat above 100°F, or 38°C.
Tonight news broke that on Friday, Owen Shroyer, who worked alongside Alex Jones at the right-wing conspiracy media site InfoWars, will change his plea for charges associated with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to “guilty,” which might signal that he has flipped.
Shroyer was at the so-called “War Room” on January 5 with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, advisors Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, General Michael Flynn, and Christina Bobb, the lawyer who later signed off on Trump’s statement that he had returned all the classified documents in his possession (he had not). Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly expressed interest to his aide Cassidy Hutchinson in joining the people in that command center, but in the end was talked into calling the group rather than going over.
Shroyer was also part of the 47-member “Friends of Stone” encrypted chat group that organized in 2019 to support Trump in the upcoming election and then to keep him in office after he lost in 2020. If Shroyer has, indeed, flipped, he could provide an important window into the upper levels of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have recently reported that several months ago, officials in the Biden administration began indirect talks with Iran in hopes of stopping Iran’s proxy attacks on U.S. forces in Syria, bringing home three Iranian American business executives being held on charges the U.S. considers false—Emad Shargi (detained 2018), Morad Tahbaz (detained 2018), and Siamak Namazi (detained 2015)—and reining in that country’s nuclear weapons development program. In 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran that limited Iran’s nuclear research and development. Tehran quickly restarted its uranium enrichment, research and development of advanced centrifuges, and expansion of its stockpile of nuclear fuel. According to Colum Lynch of Foreign Policy, this cut in half the time Iran would need to produce enough weapons-grade fuel to build a nuclear weapon.
Biden yesterday announced a $600 million investment in addressing climate change, with that investment focused on coastal areas and communities around the Great Lakes. Funding for projects, including modernizing electrical grids to make them resilient to extreme weather events, national disasters, and wildfires, comes from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/2942b8c5-9b35-4ccd-a4fc-26b2980d9a2b.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/2c4e5203-5c3b-47bd-b0c2-565030806ce2.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/20/hunter-biden-plea-deal/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/politics/trump-real-estate-deal-oman.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/22/roger-stone-alex-jones-subpoenas-capitol-attack
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5022109/user-clip-willard-hotel-jan-5th-stone-flynn-meadows
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/us/politics/christina-bobb-trump-lawyer-investigation.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/infowars-host-owen-shroyer-to-plead-guilty-in-jan-6-capitol-riot-case
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/08/iran-advances-nuclear-program-withdrawal-jcpoa/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/20/iran-us-nuclear-talks-prisoners/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/us/politics/roger-stone-jan-6.html
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-r...
Twitter links:
SollenbergerRC/status/1671180412498878464
donmoyn/status/1671163439333650436
MuellerSheWrote/status/1671262234352451589
ThePlumLineGS/status/1671226546676170787
SykesCharlie/status/1671230641831129088
harrylitman/status/1671179022313865220
harrylitman/status/1671157442921791488
June 19, 2023
June 19, 2023
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China, where he has met in the past two days for a total of more than ten hours with China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, and with Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Today, he met for 35 minutes with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Blinken called the talks “candid, substantive, and constructive.“
The backdrop to the talks is that under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the United States has taken steps to bring supply chains back to the United States and has also limited the export to China of technology that can be used for the development of military weapons. Those actions have led Chinese leaders to accuse the U.S. of seeking to “decouple” from China and to contain China’s economic development. China’s economy is reeling after shutting down for the pandemic, raising concerns about a global economic slowdown.
In the past two and a half years, the U.S. has also worked hard to create and deepen alliances around the world. Those alliances, especially in the Indo-Pacific region and in Africa, have shifted the balance of global power at the same time that China’s support for Russia has tied China to an epic mess. As David Ignatius put it this week in the Washington Post, Biden is trying to create a more stable strategic balance between China, India, and Japan. “Rather than walking a bipolar tightrope between Washington and Beijing,” Ignatius notes, “the administration is trying to build a matrix of relationships, with the United States as a key interlocutor in each node.”
Those relationships include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—an international organization that includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—and an alliance with the Pacific Islands Forum, an 18-member organization, with which the U.S. held its first summit ever in September 2022. They also include AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom, designed to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable.”
For the U.S. these alliances have meant stronger military cooperation with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as with India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, will make a state visit to Washington, D.C., this week in a demonstration of India’s deepening ties to the U.S. just as both India and China have revoked the credentials of each other’s journalists. China has been building up its military presence on India’s border, pushing India toward the U.S.
While Blinken was in China, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was in Japan for a trilateral meeting with Japan and the Republic of Korea, and other meetings with the U.S., Japan, the ROK, and the Philippines.
Of his meetings in China, Blinken told reporters that he emphasized to his Chinese counterparts that the U.S. is interested in reducing the risk of economic cooperation, not in “decoupling.” The U.S. and China engaged in almost $700 billion in trade last year, he said, and that trade benefits both countries. But the U.S. is “investing in our own capacities and in secure, resilient supply chains; pushing for level playing fields for our workers and our companies; defending against harmful trade practice; and protecting our critical technologies so that they aren’t used against us.” Blinken also emphasized that the U.S. does “not support Taiwan independence” and opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo there, noting that if China provokes a crisis there, it could produce an economic crisis that affects the entire world. With 70% of the world’s semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan and 50% of commercial container traffic going through the Taiwan Strait, there is no room for a conflict there.
The U.S. is pushing China to stop violating human rights and to release the U.S. citizens it holds. It is also calling for China to cooperate on stopping its exportation of the precursor chemicals that enable drug lords to manufacture synthetic opioids and street fentanyl, which is the number one killer of Americans from ages 18 to 49.
Blinken told reporters that he had emphasized “direct engagement and sustained communication at senior levels,” to avoid conflict, but China has, so far, refused to reinstate communication between military leaders. Blinken also noted that China is in a unique position to play a constructive role in working toward a just peace in Ukraine, and in pressing North Korea to stop its nuclear program and to start engaging responsibly with the rest of the world.
When a reporter asked why the U.S. should continue to engage in talks when China won’t agree to military-to-military channels of communication, Blinken answered: “Because, as we’ve seen, we’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas—on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress and we are moving forward…. At the end of the day, the best way that we can advance our interests, stand up for our values, and make sure that we are very clear about our intent—the best way to do that is through direct engagement, through diplomacy.”
The other big news today was an eye-popping interview of former president Trump by Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel, in which Trump seemed to agree that he had broken the law by retaining documents, saying he had not handed over to the National Archives the documents he kept because he wanted to take his personal material out of the boxes and was “very busy.” Legal commentator and former U.S. acting solicitor general Neal Katyal tweeted: “The breaking news is that the Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, has a new addition to his legal team tonight. An unpaid new deputy Special Counsel. His name is Donald J. Trump.”
In the interview, Trump also denied that he had the secret document he claimed to have on a recorded tape, saying he is up against “dishonest…thugs.”
Today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered Trump’s lawyers not to disclose evidence to the public about the classified documents at the heart of the case involving Trump’s refusal to return those documents. He also limited Trump’s access to that material, saying he may review the materials only “under the direct supervision” of his lawyers and that he “shall not retain copies.”
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/07/biden-administration-tech-restrictions-china
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/15/blinken-china-trip-japan-india-asia-diplomacy/
https://www.state.gov/u-s-pacific-islands-forum-leaders-dialogue-in-papua-new-guinea/
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/18/1182941008/indian-prime-minister-modi-visits-the-u-s
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/16/india-china-journalism-reporters-diplomacy/
https://www.state.gov/secretary-of-state-antony-j-blinkens-press-availability/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/business/economy/china-economy-stimulus.html
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-interview-bret-baier-key-moments-1807742’
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1670919463837769729
June 18, 2023
June 18, 2023
Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it.
So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their hatred of the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the postwar United States.
The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States. But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds.
On Friday, June 16, 2023, the Department of Justice—created in 1870 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—released the report of its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and the City of Minneapolis in the wake of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The 19-page document found systemic “conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” discriminating against Black and Native American people, people with behavioral health disabilities, and protesters. Those systemic problems in the MPD’s institutional culture enabled Floyd’s killing.
Minneapolis police performed 22% more searches, 27% more vehicle searches, and 24% more uses of force on Black people than on white residents behaving in similar ways. They conducted 23% more searches and used force 20% more on Indigenous Americans.
The Justice Department’s press release specified that the city and the police department “cooperated fully.” The two parties have “agreed in principle” to fix the problem with sweeping reforms based on community input, with an independent monitor rather than litigation.
While the Senate unanimously approved the measure creating the Juneteenth holiday last year, fourteen far-right Republicans voted against it, many of them complaining that such a holiday would be divisive.
How we remember our history matters.
[General Order No. 3, National Records and Archives Administration, public domain.]
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Notes:
https://www.archives.gov/news/articles/juneteenth-original-document
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/475
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html
J. Evetts Haley, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (1949; rpt. University of Oklahoma Press, 1981).
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1587661/download
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/juneteenth
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/juneteenth
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1587666/download
June 17, 2023
June 17, 2023
It’s not officially summer yet, but it sure feels like the seasons are changing. And it doesn’t matter how long these late spring days are, they are never, never, never long enough.
Going to hit bed early and be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
June 16, 2023
June 16, 2023
In one of the quirky coincidences that history deals out, Daniel Ellsberg died today at age 92 on the eve of the fifty-first anniversary of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Ellsberg was a military analyst in the 1960s, disturbed by the gulf between what the government was telling the public about the war in Vietnam and what he was seeing behind the scenes.
After serving as a Marine, Ellsberg earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined the RAND Corporation, where he learned to apply game theory to warfare. By 1964 he was an advisor to Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1967, Ellsberg was part of the team tapped by McNamara to compile a history of the conflict in Vietnam to evaluate the success of different programs.
Ellsberg was concerned by investigators’ conclusions. The 7,000-page secret government study detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Harry Truman’s presidency to Lyndon Johnson’s. It outlined how successive presidents had lied to the American people, expanding the war with promises of victory even as the costs of the war mounted and the chances of victory moved farther and farther away.
Ellsberg copied the secret study and shared it with congressmen, who buried it. Finally, Ellsberg shared the report with a New York Times correspondent on the condition the reporter would only take notes and would not copy the pages. But the correspondent broke the agreement, believing the documents were “the property of the people” who had paid for them with “the blood of their sons.”
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, showing how presidents had lied to the American people about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warned the New York Times that the publication was jeopardizing national security and warned that the government would prosecute. The editors decided to continue publication—the Supreme Court later agreed that the newspaper had the right to publish the information—while Ellsberg leaked the report to other newspapers.
The study ended before the Nixon administration, but the president was deeply concerned about it. The report showed that presidents had lied to the American people for years, and Nixon worried that the story would hurt his administration by souring the public on his approach to the Vietnam War. Worse, if anyone looked at his own administration, they might well find evidence of his own secret actions in the Vietnam arena: the Chennault affair, in which a Nixon ally undermined peace talks before the 1968 presidential election in order to undercut Johnson’s reelection campaign, and what was then the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia.
News of either could, at the very least, destroy Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Nixon became obsessed with the idea that the Pentagon Papers proved that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection.
Frustrated when the FBI did not seem to be taking an investigation into Ellsberg seriously enough, in July 1971, Nixon put together in the White House a special investigations unit to stop leaks. And who stops leaks?
Plumbers.
Officially known as the White House Special Investigations Unit, Nixon’s “plumbers” burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on September 9, 1971, hoping to find damaging information about him that would discredit the Pentagon Papers. (Their burglary, showing gross governmental misconduct, was later key to the dismissal of charges against Ellsberg for leaking the report.)
Some of the plumbers began to work with the Committee to Reelect the President (aptly called “CREEP” as its methods came to light) to sabotage Nixon’s Democratic opponents by “ratf*cking” them, as they called it, planting fake letters in newspapers, hiring vendors for Democratic rallies and then running out on the unpaid bills, and planting spies in Democrats’ campaigns.
Finally, CREEP turned back to the plumbers.
Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The White House denied all knowledge of what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and most of the press took the denial at face value. But two young reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the sloppy money trail behind the burglars directly to the White House.
The fallout from the burglary gained no traction before the election, which Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7 percent of the vote. But the scandal erupted in March 1973, when one of the burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing, saying that he had lied at his trial, under pressure to protect government officials. McCord had been the head of security for CREEP, and Sirica, known by reporters as “Maximum John,” later said, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”
Sirica made the letter public, White House counsel John Dean promptly began cooperating with prosecutors, and the Watergate scandal was in full swing. On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.
Ellsberg decided to release the Pentagon Papers to alert the American people to the fact that their government was lying to them about the Vietnam War. But he helped set in motion a series of events that determined the shape of the political world we live in today.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/siricaobit.htm
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/418/683
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/us/daniel-ellsberg-dead.html
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/505/new-york-times-co-v-united-states
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/2011_PENTAGON_PAPERS.html?_r=1
June 15, 2023
June 15, 2023
Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.
I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.
This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”
Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.”
It is?
Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.
Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”
Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.
The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.
When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.
The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.
That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.
So why is there a growing debt?
Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent.
“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”
When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.
—
Notes:
https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/rsc_2023_budget_final_version.pdf
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/11/18/nbsp-government-percent-fm/
https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
https://rollcall.com/2023/06/14/conservatives-budget-plan-renews-battle-over-seniors-benefits/
June 14, 2023
On Monday, the World Day Against Child Labor, Democrats led by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced into Congress the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act. It seeks to raise the minimum age for farm work from 12 to 14, repairing a carveout from the era of the Jim Crow 1930s that permitted children to work on farms at two years younger than in other sectors.
Democrats have introduced similar bills since 2005, but the measures have failed because opponents say such rules would hurt family farms. Kristi Boswell, a lobbyist for the agricultural industry and former member of the agricultural bureau under Trump, said at a hearing that her “niece and nephews would not have been able to detassel corn at ages 12 and 13, despite their parents knowing they were mature enough to handle the job.”
This bill, Ruiz notes, has exemptions for family farms. It is intended not to stop the passing of farming knowledge from parents to kids, but to protect Latinx children “who are working in the fields because they’re living in extreme poverty.”
Pressure for federal legislation to protect children is mounting, in part because of the recent effort of Republican-dominated state legislatures to weaken child labor laws. As recently as 2017 a historical review of the history of child labor from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that “child labor like that…in the decades leading up to the passage of the [Fair Labor Standards Act] no longer exists.” But, now, thanks to a red-hot labor market that is driving up wages, immigration bans, and an influx of unaccompanied minor children who have been released to sponsors after arriving in the U.S., child labor is on the rise.
In February 2023 the Department of Labor reported that it had seen a 69% increase—note that these were only cases that were caught—in “children being employed illegally by companies.” In the same month it announced a $1.5 million settlement with Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., one of the nation’s largest food safety sanitation services providers, after officials found the company employed at least 102 children aged 13–17 during overnight shifts at thirteen meat-processing facilities in eight states, where they used hazardous chemicals and cleaned dangerous meat processing equipment. At least three got hurt.
The federal government has vowed to crack down on violations of child labor laws, but the Economic Policy Institute, which examines the economic impact of government policies, reports that in the last two years, at least fourteen states have either passed or introduced measures to weaken the laws protecting children from dangerous working conditions. They permit longer work hours and more dangerous work, lower the ages for work around alcohol, or introduce new subminimum wages for children.
Those calling for rollbacks of child labor protections say they are protecting parents’ rights from an intrusive state. They portray child labor as family oriented and good work experience. But the measures are backed—and sometimes written—by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a right-wing Florida think tank founded in 2011 whose goal is to cut the social safety net and antipoverty programs. Far-right donors who want to dismantle the federal government provide the financial support for the FGA.
David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame, told Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl of the Washington Post, “When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular…. You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.”
A January 2022 FGA white paper provides talking points for weakened child labor laws, including the ideas that “teenagers are a critical source of labor for businesses struggling to find help” and that “with a national labor crisis and teenagers opting to join the workforce at record-high rates, cutting bureaucratic red tape can help stabilize the economy.” “THE BOTTOM LINE: States should restore decision-making to parents by eliminating youth work permits.”
This language echoes that of the early 1900s, when factories and mines employed children because they earned lower wages than adults and their small bodies could fit more easily into tight spaces, and when parents pushed their children to work because, in an era when most men made below-subsistence wages and there was no social safety net, families needed the money children earned to survive. In 1900 a quarter of the workers in the South’s textile factories were children under 16; by 1904, that number had climbed to a half, with 20,000 of them under age 12.
Factory fires and mine collapses, as well as the frequent injuries that cost children fingers or legs, brought popular attention to the dangers of child labor, but children could not vote and had no power to change legislation. Mill and mine owners lobbied legislators against regulating child labor, insisting that child labor laws would ruin their businesses by strengthening the power of unions as adult workers no longer had to worry about being undercut by cheaper child workers. And laws put children firmly under the control of their parents, who had the right to their children’s wages and who needed that income to make ends meet.
What would eventually throw a monkey wrench into this economic system was the recognition by Republican progressive reformers that children growing up in factories without education would never have the opportunity to become good citizens, whose education was crucial to a democracy. They would never learn to read or write, leaving them at the mercy of employers, and immigrant children caught in this system would never fully integrate into society.
Reformers worried that the nation would develop a permanent underclass that threatened the continued survival of democracy. In 1904 they organized as the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to work against child labor in factories. In 1906, progressive senator Albert Beveridge (R-IN) introduced a federal child labor law, using the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to ban the transport of any products mined or manufactured by children under 14.
“We cannot permit any man or corporation to stunt the bodies, minds, and souls of American children,” Beveridge said. “We cannot thus wreck the future of the American Republic.”
When Beveridge’s bill failed, the NCLC hired photographer Lewis Hine to take the now-iconic pictures of the nation’s children in the streets, mines, and factories. In 1908, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, who shared Beveridge’s concerns that the stunted children from the factories and mines would not grow up to become the foundation for a strong democracy, told Congress: “Child labor should be prohibited throughout the Nation.”
By 1916, Congress was ready to pass the Keating-Owen Act, a law prohibiting the shipment of goods produced by children across state lines. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1918, saying such federal legislation was unconstitutional. Congress then tried to stop child labor by levying a ten percent tax on businesses that hired children; the Supreme Court struck that down, too.
Finally, in 1938, as part of the New Deal effort to level the playing field between workers and employers, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It established a federal minimum wage, a 44-hour work week, and an end to work for those under 16. During his quest for the legislation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Congress, “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker's wages or stretching workers’ hours.”
By the time the FLSA passed, laws requiring children to attend school had joined with the high unemployment of the Depression years to shift the idea that children should work to the idea that they should stay in school, and worker protections and Social Security, passed in the same era, meant that parents no longer needed their children’s wages to survive.
In the years after World War II, when people in the United States were determined to stand strong against both fascism and communism, the nation embraced the idea that children should be in school rather than in factories. An education would permit them to be upwardly mobile economically, thus lessening the likelihood that they would be tempted by authoritarian leaders who promised to improve their standard of living, and it would guarantee that they would be informed citizens who would work to advance democracy.
Until recently, that idea seemed permanent.
—
Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181472559/child-labor-farms-agriculture-human-rights-congress
https://projects.propublica.org/trump-town/staffers/kristi-boswell
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/rise-child-labor-stokes-fight-worker-laws/story?id=99930387
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is-on-the-rise
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/23/child-labor-lobbying-fga/
https://thefga.org/research/streamline-hiring-process-for-teen-workers/
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osec/osec20230227
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/
June 14, 2023
June 13, 2023
“DONALD TRUMP UNDER ARREST, IN FEDERAL CUSTODY.”
It was quite a chyron from CNN, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America’s adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it’s not financial fraud, it’s not hush money to porn stars, this is the national security of the United States at stake. I think we’ve got to take the politics out of this business when national security is at stake.”
Cameras were barred in the courtroom as Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges in Miami today. Presiding magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman ordered Trump not to communicate with witnesses about the case, including co-defendant Waltine Nauta, then released him on his own recognizance, that is, without needing to post bail. Special prosecutor Jack Smith was in the courtroom; ABC’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reported that Trump did not look at Smith.
Then Trump went back to his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he gave a speech that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is close to the Trump camp, described as low energy, focusing on his insistence that he had a right to keep the classified documents (which experts agree is nonsense and amounts to a confession) and that the indictment was “the most evil and heinous abuse of power.” Right-wing Newsmax and the Fox News Channel (FNC) carried the speech; CNN and MSNBC did not.
FNC has been hemorrhaging viewers since it fired Tucker Carlson, a threat to its bottom line that might have been behind its chyron tonight attacking Biden by claiming “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
In statements similar to the one from FNC, right-wing pundits spent the day flooding Twitter and other social media with furious insistence that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted, followed by attacks on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and with allegations that there are tapes of President Biden accepting bribes—allegations that Biden openly laughed at this evening.
But that performative outrage among leaders did not translate into support on the ground in Miami. Law enforcement had been prepared for as many as 50,000 protesters, but only a few hundred to a thousand turned out (one wearing a shirt made of an American flag and carrying the head of a pig on a pole).
The lack of supporters on the ground was significant. Since the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, much of Trump’s power has rested on his ability to call out his base to silence opponents by threatening violence. That power was in full force on January 6, 2021, when his loyalists set out to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, believing they were operating under the orders of then-president Trump.
Since then, though, more than 1,000 people who participated in the events of January 6 have been charged with crimes, and many have been sentenced to prison, while Trump, who many defendants say called them to arms, has skated. That discrepancy is likely dampening the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters for protest.
Today Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the audacity of Nevada’s militia-related Bundy family simply grew as family members launched successive stands against the federal government without significant legal repercussions. Republican politicians cheered on their attacks on federal officials for political gain, while Democratic politicians didn’t push to go after them out of concern that a show of federal power would alienate Nevada voters.
Trump’s threats and determination to stir up his base seem to reflect a similar consideration: if he can just rally enough support, he might imagine, the federal government will back off.
Federal officials permitting politics to trump the rule of law in our past have brought us to this moment.
After the Civil War, officials charged Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 38 other leading secessionists with treason but decided not to prosecute when the cases finally came to trial in 1869. They wanted to avoid the anger a trial would provoke because they hoped to reconcile the North and South. They also worried they would not get convictions in the southern states where the trials were assigned.
In the end, between President Andrew Johnson’s pardons and Congress’s granting of amnesty to Confederates, no one was convicted for their participation in the attempt to destroy the country. This generosity did not create the good feeling men like General Ulysses S. Grant hoped it would. Instead, as Civil War scholar Elizabeth Varon established in her book on the surrender at Appomattox, it helped to create the myth that the southern cause had been so noble that even the conquering northern armies had been forced to recognize it. The ideology of the Confederacy never became odious, and it has lived on.
The same quest for reconciliation drove President Gerald R. Ford to grant a pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon for possible “offenses against the United States” in his quest to win the 1972 election by bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.
Ford explained that the “tranquility” the nation had found after Nixon’s resignation “could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The threat of a trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”
In an echo of 100 years before, Ford’s generosity did not bring Nixon or his supporters back into the fold. Instead, they doubled down on the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong and had been hounded from office by his “liberal” enemies. Nixon himself never admitted wrongdoing, telling the American people he was resigning because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. Although his support had collapsed because even members of his own party believed he was guilty of obstructing justice, violated constitutional rights of citizens, and abused his power, Nixon blamed the press, whose members had destroyed him with “leaks and accusations and innuendo.”
The willingness of government officials to ignore the rule of law in order to buy peace gave us enduring reverence for the principles of the Confederacy, along with countless dead Unionists, mostly Black people, killed as former Confederates reclaimed supremacy in the South. It also gave us the idea that presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes, a belief that likely made some of the presidents who followed Nixon less careful about following the law than they might have been if they had seen Nixon indicted.
Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/Fritschner/status/1668684149845028864
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/13/politics/trump-court-hearing-takeaways/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/13/us/trump-indictment-arraignment-court
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/us/politics/trump-arraignment-miami-court.html
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1668781392694591488
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/donald-trump-indictment-court-appearance-06-13-23/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/25/1165022885/1000-defendants-january-6-capitol-riot
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-end-of-bundy-clan-rules
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169189
Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Richard M. Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 1044-1045.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-and-tucker-carlson-both-lose-after-his-firing
https://watergate.info/impeachment/articles-of-impeachment
Twitter links:
ChrisDJackson/status/1668792486553088002
JuddLegum/status/1668603907184947201
MarkHertling/status/1668686293448925201
AmbJohnBolton/status/1668736977439531008
MollyJongFast/status/1668817291494998017
June 12, 2023
June 12, 2023
On Friday, while the political world was focused on the federal indictment of a former president, the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee released their new tax plan.
Not two weeks after threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling because of their stated concerns over the nation’s mounting debt, Republicans are calling for tax cuts. The nonprofit public policy organization the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates that over a decade those cuts will cost $80 billion as written and more than $1.1 trillion if made permanent. The frontloading in the measure, they estimate, will make it cost $320 billion by the end of 2025.
Meanwhile, the House Freedom Caucus is also demanding steeper cuts in spending than House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to in the budget deal he cut with President Joe Biden before agreeing to suspend the debt ceiling. The extremist Republicans have shut down House business for a week to protest what they considered a betrayal. But they cannot admit they want to cut Social Security and Medicare (although McCarthy has promised a commission to study such cuts).
Neither one of their measures will make it through the Senate. Even Republicans there are unhappy with the extremists’ attack on defense spending.
It feels like the end of an era. The idea that tax cuts and spending cuts will automatically expand the economy—the argument that Ronald Reagan rode to the White House in 1981—is no longer believable.
In the last week, two of the key architects of President Ronald Reagan’s administration have died. One was religious broadcaster and minister Pat Robertson, who ushered evangelicals into the Republican Party and blamed feminism, abortion, homosexuality, and “liberal” college professors for what he considered the decline of America.
The other was evangelical James G. Watt, Reagan’s first secretary of the interior. Watt embraced the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement to privatize federal lands in the West or, barring that, to hand them to states to lease as they saw fit. Watt took the theme of privatization to Washington, D.C., where he reversed the government’s policy of protecting the environment and embraced the commercial exploitation of resources, opening nearly all of the nation’s coastal waters to drilling, for example, and easing regulations on strip mining.
Like Robertson, Watt believed he was a warrior in a crusade to save the United States from those who believed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” he often said, “It’s liberals and Americans.” He called environmentalists “a left wing cult which seeks to bring down the type of government I believe in.” “Compromise,” he added, “is not in my vocabulary.”
People like Robertson and Watt believed they were at war with those Americans of both parties who approved of the democratic system that had ushered the nation through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War and had promoted greater economic, racial, and gender equality than the country had ever known before.
That battle to divide the American people along cultural lines in order to dismantle the federal government has, after forty years, led to a Republican Party that has embraced Christian nationalism, abandoning not only the policies of democracy but also democracy itself.
The conclusion of that movement is playing out now over the defense of former president Trump from charges that he committed crimes that threaten our national security. He and some of his most fervent supporters have urged his base toward violence—in words not unlike the ones Trump used before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, actually—and there is concern that there might be trouble tomorrow in Miami, Florida, where Trump is scheduled to be arraigned.
Miami mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican who reportedly is himself considering a run for the White House, spoke to the press today to make it clear law enforcement officers and emergency personnel are working closely with federal and state partners and are prepared for whatever might happen.
But the Trump base is not what it was in 2016, when Trump commanded the federal government. Right-wing personality Tucker Carlson is off the air and the Fox News Channel is apparently considering legal action against him to keep him from competing with his old employer. The leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who organized the Capitol attack, are scattered or in prison, and hundreds of those who were at the Capitol that day have discovered the weight of the law.
The number of candidates challenging him suggests Trump is no longer the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. Republican leaders are beholden to his base, though, and they either came out swinging over the weekend to defend Trump or kept silent.
But they, too, appear to have been thinking a bit about the weight of the law as information comes out that key evidence against Trump has come from his former lawyer M. Evan Corcoran, who apparently took notes of Trump’s requests that Corcoran break the law. While Republican presidential candidates former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and South Carolina senator Tim Scott are still defending Trump, Haley today said that “Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security,” and Scott said the case is “serious.”
They, and politicians like them, are likely making a political calculation. Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination but is unlikely to win a general election—a network tied to billionaire Charles Koch has begun to target him as unelectable—and they need to appeal to those who dislike Trump as well as those who like him.
But there is something else going on, too. As Trump and his loyalists sound more and more unhinged, both in his defense and in their attacks on everyone who isn’t in their club, people seem to be sick of them. As Charles C. W. Cooke asked in the conservative National Review, “Aren’t you all tired of this crap?”
In contrast, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have steadfastly refused to engage with the Trump drama and have quietly worked to rebuild the government that forty years of austerity and ideological attacks have undermined. Their determination to rebuild the middle class has led to strong economic growth, high employment, and now inflation at its lowest level since May 2021. Government investment in new technologies and in returning supply chains to the U.S. has led to private investment of more than $220 billion in the economy and the creation of more than 77,000 new jobs, largely in Republican-dominated states. Manufacturing construction has more than doubled in the past year.
As the architects of Reagan’s revolution exit stage right, Republican calls for more tax cuts are barely making the news, while the traditional idea of government investment in the American people appears to be showing its strength.
“The wind is shifting,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin tweeted today after listening to Haley and Scott backtrack. “Remember: change happens slowly and then all at once.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/debt-ceiling-bill-updates.html
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/wm-tax-bill-would-cost-over-1-trillion-if-made-permanent
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/12/congress-debt-limit-spending-bills-00101038
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/politics/james-watt-dead.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/12/mccarthy-trump-indictment-00101571
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/liven-blog/maga-threats-mass-around-mar-a-lago-miami-hearing
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1668359319157350400
https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1668243823128895495
https://www.jackconness.com/ira-chips-investments
https://twitter.com/NickTimiraos/status/1668273054319869957
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/11/miami-mayor-suarez-presidential-field-00101429
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/11/us/politics/trump-indictment-m-evan-corcoran.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/12/koch-network-ads-target-trump-biden.html
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/again-arent-you-all-tired-of-this-crap/
https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1668379443071467521
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/us/politics/trump-supporter-violent-rhetoric.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/biden-trump-ira-chips-manufacturing.html
https://www.axios.com/2023/06/07/fox-news-tucker-carlson-contract-breach
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