Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 152
April 16, 2023
April 16, 2023
A few quick notes tonight about some ongoing stories:
There is more news about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his misreporting of his financial connections. This morning, Shawn Boburg and Emma Brown of the Washington Post reported that for twenty years, Thomas has reported rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a real estate firm that was shut down in 2006.
The misstatement might be dismissed as a problem with paperwork, the authors note. “But it is among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades, a review of those records shows. Together, they have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public.”
The cascade of stories about Thomas threatens to continue to undermine the legitimacy of this Supreme Court.
Last night, the nation suffered one mass shooting in Dadeville, Alabama, that killed four people and wounded twenty-eight others, and another in Louisville, Kentucky, that killed two and wounded four. On Friday, Republican hopefuls for the 2024 presidential nomination courted members of the National Rifle Association, the NRA, at the organization’s 2023 annual convention, promising looser gun laws.
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem complained about liberals who “want to take our guns,” and boasted that her granddaughter, who is not yet two, has a shotgun and a rifle.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to focus on rebalancing the Indo-Pacific to counter China. Just two weeks after the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and nearly thirty years after the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1995, the U.S. has broken ground on a new $1.2 billion embassy compound in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh yesterday and vowed to “broaden and deepen” relations between the two countries.
Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Samantha Power, and members of Congress have all visited Vietnam recently as part of a long-term strategy to help area friends and allies counterbalance China in the Indo-Pacific region.
Yesterday, Blinken emphasized how the U.S. and Vietnam, working together, “can advance a free and open Indo-Pacific, one that is at peace and grounded in respect for the rules-based international order.” But, as Vietnam has a one-party communist government, he explained, “When we talk about ‘free and open,’ we mean countries being free to choose their own path and their own partners and that problems will be dealt with openly; rules will be reached transparently and applied fairly; and goods, ideas, and people will flow freely across land, the seas, the skies, and cyberspace.”
Vice President Harris spoke yesterday at a march for reproductive rights in Los Angeles, where she emphasized how deeply our international standing depends on our commitment to freedom at home. “I’ve been traveling around the world as your Vice President,” she said. “When we, as Americans, walk in those rooms around the world, we have traditionally walked in those rooms, shoulders back, chin up, having some authority to talk about the importance of rule of law, human rights.
“But here’s the thing we all know about what it means to be a role model: People watch what you do to see if it matches what you say. So let us understand that what is happening in our nation right now, by extension, can impact people around the world who dare to say, ‘I want my country to be like the United States and protect rights.’ And those autocrats and those dictators might look at those folks and say, ‘What are you pointing to as the example?’”
“We are seeing, around the country, in a myriad of ways, those who would dare to attack fundamental rights and, by extension, attack our democracy,” Harris said. “Around our country, supposed so-called extremist leaders…dare to silence the voices of the people.”
“A United States Supreme Court, the highest court in our land, that took a constitutional right that had been recognized from the people of America.
“We have seen attacks on voting rights; attacks on fundamental rights to love and marry the people that you love; attacks on the ability of people to be themselves and be proud of who they are.
“And so, this is a moment that history will show required each of us, based on our collective love of our country, to stand up and fight for and protect our ideals…. [W]e have been called upon to be the next generation of the people who will help lead and fight in this movement for freedom and liberty based on our love of our country…. [W]e stand for our democracy. And we stand for foundational and fundamental principles that have everything to do with freedom, liberty, and equality for all people.”
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/dadeville-alabama-shooting-party-137935e7cbc5b2470571eaee7febb161
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chickasaw-park-louisville-shooting-kentucky-gun-violence/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/politics/nra-convention-republican-2024-presidential-race/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/us-vietnam-blinken-china-b208e75ba674ae7f6c77e481f818031a
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-a-press-availability-33/
https://www.state.gov/department-of-state-begins-construction-on-new-u-s-embassy-in-hanoi-vietnam/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/politics/nra-convention-republican-2024-presidential-race/index.html
April 15, 2023
April 15, 2023
After all the action of the past several weeks and in anticipation of more action still to come, it seems to me tonight is definitely a night for a breather.
Last week, Buddy and I ran away up the coast to see Campobello, just over the Maine border in Canada, where FDR had a summer home. The house was cool to see (and freezing cold to visit that day!) and so was the hiking we did along the Maine coast.
I am not a painter, but I have always imagined that one of the reasons Maine has sported so many artists is the extraordinary light. On one of our evening hikes, just about every shot I took looked like this.
Going to take the night off. I'll see you tomorrow.
April 14, 2023
April 14, 2023 (Friday)
The Biden administration today announced a series of actions it has taken and will continue to take to disrupt the production and distribution of illegal street fentanyl around the world. The efforts involve the Department of Justice, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the State Department; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP); the Office of National Drug Control Policy; and the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department.
On a press call today, various administration officials gave an overview of the crisis. Calling street fentanyl “the deadliest drug threat that our country has ever faced,” an official from the DEA explained that all of the street fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico at the hands of two cartels: the Sinaloa and the Jalisco.
Most of the street fentanyl in the U.S. is distributed by the Sinaloa cartel, which operates in every U.S. state and in 47 countries. This cartel used to be led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who began serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison in 2019 after Mexican authorities arrested him and extradited him to the U.S. Now four of his sons run it: Ovidio, Iván, Joaquín, and Alfredo, who are known as the “Chapitos.” DEA administrator Anne Milgram said they took their father’s “global drug trafficking empire” and “made it more ruthless, more violent, more deadly—and they used it to spread a new poison, fentanyl.”
According to the DEA official, the Chapitos started the manufacture and trafficking of street fentanyl and are behind the flood of it into the U.S. in the past 8 years. It is a global business. While illicit drugs used to be plant-based, newer ones like street fentanyl are made with synthetic chemicals. The cartels import the chemicals necessary to make fentanyl from China into Mexico and Guatemala. Then they manufacture the drug, distribute it in the U.S., and launder the money, much of it through cryptocurrency.
They have hundreds of employees and are equipped with military-grade weapons. The Department of Justice added that they “allegedly used cargo aircraft, private aircraft, submarines and other submersible and semi-submersible vessels, container ships, supply vessels, go-fast boats, fishing vessels, buses, rail cars, tractor trailers, automobiles, and private and commercial interstate and foreign carriers to transport their drugs and precursor chemicals. They allegedly maintained a network of couriers, tunnels, and stash houses throughout Mexico and the United States to further their drug-trafficking activities…to import the drugs into the United States,” where they kill as many as 200 people a day.
Rather than simply targeting individual traffickers, which would leave the operation intact, the DEA mapped the cartel’s networks in 10 countries and 28 U.S. cities. Its officers identified the cartel’s supply chain and all its leaders, including the people in China and Guatemala supplying them with chemicals to make the illegal fentanyl, the production managers, the enforcers around the world, the trafficker leaders who moved both drugs and guns, and the money launderers.
That information has enabled the Department of Justice to bring new charges against 28 of the cartel’s key figures (some were already facing charges) for fentanyl trafficking, narcotics, firearms, and money laundering. Seven of them were arrested in Colombia, Greece, and Guatemala several weeks ago and are in extradition proceedings. Mexican authorities arrested Ovidio even before that.
At the same time, the State Department increased the reward money offered for information that leads to the arrest or conviction of drug traffickers operating in other countries, and said it is working with partners to disrupt the supply chain for the drug’s manufacture, by which it appears to mean the precursor chemicals and manufacturing equipment coming from China. The White House also released a joint statement from Canada, Mexico, and the United States vowing to work together to stop the inflow of chemicals and manufacturing equipment to Mexico from China, a vow that somewhat gives Mexico a way to deflect blame for the crisis away from the factories in its own country to the supply chains based in China.
The Department of Homeland Security noted today that seizures of illegal fentanyl by U.S. Customs and Border Protection are up 400% since September 2019 and continue to increase. DHS has seized more fentanyl and arrested more traffickers in the past two years than it did in the previous five.This increased interception comes from new inspection equipment to find the drug in vehicles, and also from a focus on finding those incoming chemicals in plane and ship cargoes. It has also focused on catching equipment—pill presses, for example—whose loss stops production.
In March the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Blue Lotus, which in its first month of operation seized more than 2,400 pounds of illegal fentanyl at U.S. ports of entry—as well as more than 3,500 pounds of methamphetamines and nearly 1,000 pounds of cocaine—and arrested 156 people. CBP has captured another 800 pounds of fentanyl. To build on these operations, the Department of Homeland Security has stationed labs at ports of entry to test substances instantly.
Notably, the Treasury Department added its own weight to this effort. It announced sanctions against two companies in China and five people in China and Guatemala who, they allege, provide the Mexican cartels with the chemicals to make fentanyl. Acknowledging that it’s been hard for U.S. officials to talk to their counterparts in China, administration officials say U.S. diplomats have been working with friends and partners to pressure China to stop the export of the chemicals that make drugs not only because it hurts the U.S., but because it is hurting the world.
Asking for support against drug trafficking on moral grounds is fair enough, but the sanctions against the chemical producers and the money launderers will bite. All properties the sanctioned companies and people have in the U.S. are blocked; their owners cannot do business with anyone in the U.S.
For all that the effort to neutralize the scourge of illegal fentanyl is vital to our country, what jumped out at me about this story was the power of the Treasury Department to disrupt what drug trafficking is really about: money. At the end of the day, for all their violence and deadliness, the Chapitos are businessmen, and the U.S. can cut them off at the knees through our financial power.
But that power is not guaranteed. Today, Sarah Ferris and Jordain Carney of Politico reported that House speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans continue to insist they will refuse to lift the debt ceiling unless they get massive spending cuts and policy changes. These are not normal budget negotiations, which Biden and the Democrats welcome, but a threat to let the U.S. default on its debt. Their willingness to hold the Treasury hostage until they get their way threatens to rip the foundation out from our global financial power.
As I read about the U.S. Treasury sanctions on fentanyl supply chains today and then thought about how Treasury sanctions against Russia have hamstrung that nation without a single shot from U.S. military personnel, I wondered if people really understand how much is at stake in the Republicans’ attack on our financial system.
—
Notes:
https://www.state.gov/u-s-actions-targeting-transnational-criminals-for-illicit-fentanyl-activity/
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2023/04/14/operation-blue-lotus-stops-over-4000-pounds-fentanyl-first-month
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1413
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/us/politics/el-chapo-sons-fentanyl-charges.html
April 14, 2023
An Interesting Disconnect
I am fascinated today by the disconnect between what seems to me the day’s big news and what is above the fold in the media.
The media focus today has been on Jack Teixeira, who is allegedly the leaker of more than 100 classified documents to his buddies in a gaming group. Then, this afternoon, headlines started to appear about the hold on the mifeprist…
April 13, 2023
April 13, 2023
“Today the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information.”
In a press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made the announcement that the FBI had arrested Teixeira, a 21-year-old employee of the United States Air Force National Guard. Teixeira allegedly is the source of more than 100 classified U.S. documents that surfaced on social media gaming channels and then spread across the internet over the past several months.
Friends who spoke anonymously to reporters say Teixeira showed them the documents to impress them. They described him as a Christian libertarian who is worried about the direction the country is going. Materials from Teixeira online also reveal racist and antisemitic behavior.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) immediately took to Twitter to defend Teixeira. He is “white, male, christian [sic], and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” she wrote. She went on to attack U.S. support for Ukraine.
But there is likely more here than her usual attacks on the Biden administration and support for Russia. Removing, retaining, and transmitting classified national defense information sounds an awful lot like what it appears former president Trump did (recent reports suggest that federal investigators seem to be building a case that he showed at least one document to people, although removing and retaining documents are crimes by themselves). Now a young man has been arrested for that behavior, unceremoniously arrested by armed FBI agents with an armored vehicle as a news helicopter caught the arrest on film.
It makes sense that Trump supporters who are concerned about the former president’s similar behavior will do their best to downplay Teixeira’s case. As the media begins to talk about just how serious espionage is and makes people aware of its legal perils, they will want to disparage the charges against Teixeira in case the former president ends up with the same problem.
And speaking of problems, it turns out that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas neglected to disclose not only the “hospitality” he enjoyed at the hands of Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, but also a real estate deal. Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica—which broke the initial story about Thomas’s involvement with Crow—revealed today that Crow paid Thomas more than $100,000 for a house in which his mother was living and for two vacant lots.
The reporters note that, by law, justices are required to disclose real estate sales of more than $1,000. Thomas did not report the sale, thus obscuring the flow of money—not just hospitality—to him from Crow. Further, Crow then made significant improvements to the home, where Thomas’s 94-year-old mother still lives, and bought and tore down the house next door.
Calls for at least an investigation of Thomas are growing louder. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who is a leader of the effort to clean up the courts, said: “It would be best for the Chief Justice to commence a proper investigation, but after a week of silence from the Court and the latest disturbing reporting, I’m urging the Judicial Conference to step in and refer Justice Thomas to the Attorney General for investigation” for possibly breaking government ethics laws.
The Judicial Conference meets twice a year to examine policy and administration of the federal court system and to recommend new laws to make it function better. It is made up primarily of leading circuit judges and led by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, in this case John Roberts.
The speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, which recently expelled two young Black lawmakers who have since been returned to office, is also in trouble. Judd Legum of Popular Information first chased down that speaker Cameron Sexton is living in Nashville rather than the district he represents.
With more digging, Legum has turned up that Sexton apparently bought a $600,000 home in Nashville and hid that purchase, keeping his name off the documents and keeping his wife’s signature obscure. He has argued that he could legally continue to represent Crossville, his alleged place of residence, because so long as he has a “definite intention of returning,” Tennessee law okays lawmakers living elsewhere. But the purchase of a $600,000 home in Nashville seems like a pretty permanent abandonment of Crossville.
Legum also notes that Sexton has been drawing $313 a day to commute back to his district while he is not, in fact, commuting back to his district. Since 2021, he has claimed $92,071 in expenses, likely enough to cover his mortgage.
The Republican lawmakers in Tennessee may come to regret the attention they’ve drawn to themselves and their habits of governance.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is also in trouble, although his trouble is political.
Today the Republican-dominated Florida legislature passed a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, which is before many people even know they’re pregnant. The measure is popular with the Republican base, whose support DeSantis will need for a presidential bid, should he decide to make one. But abortion restrictions are hugely unpopular across the country, giving Democrats a big leg up in every election that has come since the Supreme Court last summer overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
DeSantis signed into law a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks last April, before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision that overturned Roe. In that case, he held a midday press conference and made a speech. But Dobbs has created a powerful backlash. This time around, for this even stricter measure, DeSantis signed the bill late tonight and released a picture of the signing after 11:00 p.m., when few people would see it. He appears to be trying to appeal to the base while also keeping his actions quiet enough to slide them under the radar screens of non-MAGA voters.
DeSantis’s secret signing stands in marked contrast to the scene in Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer today signed into law two new gun safety measures, one requiring guns to be locked away rather than left loose in a home with a minor child, and one requiring background checks for gun show and private purchases. A mass shooting at Michigan State University two months ago killed three students and badly wounded five others.
Whitmer signed the bills during the day, before a crowd at Michigan State University’s Spartan Stadium. Although Republicans oppose the new laws and have already sued to stop them from going into effect as scheduled next year, Whitmer said, “All of these initiatives are supported by a majority of Michiganders…. I’ve gotten letters from all across our state asking for us to get this done.”
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1646634271816253440
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jack-teixeira-leaked-documents-pentagon-suspect/
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/13/florida-abortion-six-week-ban/
April 12, 2023
April 12, 2023
Justin J. Pearson, along with Representatives Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson—the Tennessee Three—joined supporters this morning at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, before a scheduled special meeting of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners to decide whether to reappoint Pearson to the Tennessee legislature after it expelled him last week. Republicans expelled Pearson and Jones from that body after they and Johnson engaged in a protest for gun safety without being recognized by the chair. The Nashville Metropolitan Council reinstated Jones on Monday.
Meeting at the Lorraine Motel conjured up the history of an earlier era. The motel had been built during segregation in 1925, when it was a white-only business, but after World War II it was Black owned and became one of the few establishments in Memphis that would accept Black patrons. Thus it was that Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr. were staying there in April 1968 during the Poor People’s Campaign, designed to achieve economic justice for poor Americans. They were in Memphis to support a strike of the city’s 1,300 sanitation workers, whose work was dangerous and pay was low.
And it was there, at the Lorraine Motel, that white supremacist James Earl Ray assassinated Reverend King on April 4, 1968, as he stood on a balcony.
This morning, Pearson called out the people at the rally. "This is the democracy that changes the status quo," he said. “But we’ve got news—the status quo needs changing and the status quo needs you, so today we march and we’re going to keep fighting, we’re going to keep pushing, because we believe that this is what democracy looks like.”
“I wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced,” Pearson wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times today. “We who were elected to represent all Tennesseans—Black, white, brown, immigrant, female, male, poor, young, transgender and queer—are routinely silenced when we try to speak on their behalf. Last week, the world was allowed to see it in broad daylight.”
“Republican-led statehouses across the country are proposing and passing staggering numbers of bills that serve a fringe, white evangelical agenda that abrogates the rights and freedoms of the rest of us,” he continued. “[W]e have a nation in pain and peril.”
The crowd marched together from the Lorraine Motel to the Shelby County Commissioners’ meeting, where spectators there cheered when Pearson arrived. The commissioners voted unanimously to reinstate Pearson until a special election can be held. The Republicans on the commission didn’t show up to vote.
The echoes of another historical moment also reverberated today. On April 12, 1861, Confederate soldiers fired on Ft. Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor. Southern leaders had convinced their followers that they must separate from the United States government because it threatened their way of life.
Their economy depended on crops grown by enslaved Black people; their society depended on a racial and patriarchal hierarchy dominated by white men. Southern leaders had taken over first the Democratic Party, then the White House and Senate and Supreme Court, to protect their system and spread it into the West, but the majority of Americans wanted to bottle the system of slavery up in the South.
When that majority put Abraham Lincoln into the White House in 1860, southern leaders concluded that they must start their own country where wealthy white men could rule their states, running things as they saw fit without the interference of the federal government.
The firing on Ft. Sumter was a key early blow in their attempt to replace American democracy with a new system, based on the idea that some men were better than others. It was no accident that on January 6, 2021, one of the men who attacked the United States Capitol carried a Confederate battle flag. Like his predecessors in the Old South, he rejected the outcome of a presidential election and sought to overturn it to create a nation based on white supremacy.
That modern story was in the news today as Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis sanctioned the Fox News Channel and the Fox Corporation for withholding evidence in the defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems has launched against them over their lies about the 2020 election. The information that FNC had withheld evidence came from Abby Grossberg, former producer of Tucker Carlson’s show, who is suing FNC for trying to set her up to take the fall for hosts’ systemic lies about the 2020 election.
Grossberg recorded Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and others saying they didn’t have evidence for their accusations of fraud. A Trump advisor also emphasized that January 6 was the “backstop” for determining who won the election. Grossberg’s lawyers say they gave the recordings to FNC, but FNC did not produce them during discovery for the Dominion lawsuit. “This is a problem,” Judge Davis said. “I need to feel comfortable when you represent something to me that is the truth.”
Not a great note for the FNC to have hit before the trial later this month.
Meanwhile, Josh Dawsey, Devlin Barrett, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post broke the story that special counsel Jack Smith’s office appears to be looking into whether Trump raised money off his election lies. Laws against wire fraud make it illegal to ask for money over email using lies. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee raised more than $250 million between the election and January 6 by claiming the election had been “rigged.” They urged people to send money to an “election defense fund” that didn’t exist.
For his part, Trump appears to be trying to distract from his own legal troubles by inflicting legal trouble on others. Today he sued his former fixer Michael Cohen for more than $500 million for violating attorney-client privilege and “spreading falsehoods.” Many pundits have noted that these two charges are incompatible.
Trump has also asked Judge Lewis Kaplan to delay the trial for E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him for a month, complaining that the intense media coverage surrounding Trump’s recent indictment—a media circus Trump fed, of course—might have tainted the jury pool.
In an interview with host Tucker Carlson on the Fox News Channel last night, Trump once again revealed the tight relationship between the modern Republicans and the destruction of democracy in favor of a strongman. In the interview, Trump indicated his support for Russian president Vladimir Putin and suggested Putin would at some point gain control over all of Ukraine. The International Criminal Court has, of course, indicted Putin for war crimes as his regime has kidnapped children from Ukraine. Today, a horrific video circulated on social media showing what purported to be a Russian soldier beheading a Ukrainian captive.
Aside from the criminality of this action, scholars of war suggest it shows that in the absence of loyalty or patriotism, the Russian army is trying to create cohesion among disaffected troops through war crimes.
In contrast to today’s Russian troops and those supporting them, patriotism was on full display today in Memphis. “You can't expel hope. You can’t expel justice,” Justin J. Pearson said. “You can't expel our voice. And you sure can’t expel our fight. We look forward to continuing to fight. Continuing to advocate. Until justice rolls down like water,” he said, echoing the Reverend Dr. King, “[a]nd righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
“Let’s get back to work.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/tennessee-vote-justin-pearson-04-12-23/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/opinion/justin-pearson-tennessee.html
https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1646229500521218061
https://www.nps.gov/places/tennessee-the-lorraine-hotel-memphis.htm
https://www.nbcnews.com/media/fox-sanctioned-withholding-evidence-dominion-case-rcna79377
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/12/trump-fundraising-fraud-special-counsel/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/politics/e-jean-carroll-trump-lawyers-trial/index.html
https://twitter.com/MattLightCrim/status/1646177167401799680
April 11, 2023
April 11, 2023 (Tuesday)
The dramatic events in Nashville last week, when Republican legislators expelled state representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two young Black men, for speaking out of turn when they joined protesters calling for gun safety, highlighted a demographic problem facing the Republican Party.
Members of Gen Z, the generation born between 1997 and 2012, grew up doing active shooter drills in their schools, and they want gun safety legislation. And yet, Republicans are so wedded to the gun industry and guns as part of party members’ identity that today, one day after five people died in a mass shooting in Louisville, Kentucky—including a close friend of Kentucky governor Andrew Beshear—the Indiana Senate Republicans passed a resolution honoring the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Later this week, Republican leaders will speak at the NRA’s annual convention in Indianapolis, where firearms, as well as backpacks, glass containers, signs, and umbrellas, are prohibited. Those speakers will include former president Trump and former vice president Mike Pence.
The resolution and the speeches at the NRA convention seem an unfortunate juxtaposition to the recent mass shootings.
Abortion rights are also a place where the Republican Party is out of step with the majority of Americans and especially with people of childbearing age. Last Tuesday, Janet Protasiewicz, who promised to protect reproductive rights, won the election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court by an astonishing 11 points in a state where elections are often decided by less than a point. Victor Shi of Voters of Tomorrow reported that the youth turnout of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, increased 240% since the last spring general election in 2019. Youth turnout at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, increased 232%. Almost 90% of those young people voted for Protasiewicz.
And yet the party needs to grapple with last Friday’s ruling by Trump-appointed Texas federal judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk that the Food and Drug Administration improperly approved mifepristone, a drug used for more than 50% of medically induced abortions, and that it must be removed from the market. The party also must grapple with a new Idaho law that makes it illegal for minors to leave the state to get an abortion without the consent of their parents.
In New York today, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg pushed back against Republican overreach of a different sort when he filed a lawsuit in federal court against Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) in his official role as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the committee itself, and Mark Pomerantz, whom the committee recently subpoenaed, in response to a “brazen and unconstitutional attack by members of Congress on an ongoing New York State criminal prosecution and investigation of former President Donald J. Trump.”
The lawsuit accuses Jordan of engaging in “a transparent campaign to intimidate and attack District Attorney Bragg” and to use congressional powers to intervene improperly in a state criminal prosecution. Like any defendant, the lawsuit says, Trump had every right to challenge his indictment in court. But rather than let that process play out, Jordan and the Republican-dominated Judiciary Committee “are participating in a campaign of intimidation, retaliation, and obstruction” that has led to multiple death threats against Bragg. Bragg’s office "has received more than 1,000 calls and emails from Mr. Trump's supporters,“ the complaint reads, “many of which are threatening and racially charged."
“Members of Congress are not free to invade New York’s sovereign authority for their or Mr. Trump’s political aims,” the document says. “Congress has no authority to ‘conduct oversight’ into District Attorney Bragg’s exercise of his duties under New York Law in a single case involving a single defendant.”
While Jordan and the Republicans defend Trump, there is a mounting crisis in the West, where two decades of drought have brought water levels in the region’s rivers to dangerously low levels. According to Benji Jones of Vox, who interviewed the former director of the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico, John Fleck, last year about the crisis, the problem has deep roots.
One hundred years ago, government officials significantly overestimated the water available in the Colorado River System when they divided it among Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming through the Colorado River Compact of 1922. The compact provided a formula for dividing up the water in the 1450 miles of the Colorado River. It was designed to stop the states from fighting over the resource, although an Arizona challenge to the system was not resolved until the 1960s. On the basis of the water promised by the compact, the region filled with people—40 million—and with farms that grow much of the country’s supply of winter vegetables.
Now, after decades of drought exacerbated by the overuse permitted by the Colorado River Compact and by climate change, Lake Powell and Lake Mead have fallen to critical levels. Something must be done before the river water disappears not only from the U.S., but also from Mexico, which in 1944 was also guaranteed a cut of the water from the Colorado River. The seven states in the compact have been unable to reach an agreement about cutting water use.
Today the Interior Department released an environmental review of the situation that offered three possible solutions. One is to continue to follow established water rights, which would prioritize the California farmland that produces food. This would largely shut off water to Phoenix and Los Angeles. Another option is to cut water distribution evenly across Arizona, California, and Nevada. The third option, doing nothing, risks destroying the water supply entirely, as well as cutting the hydropower produced by the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams.
There is a 45-day period for public comment on the plans, and it appears that the threat of the federal government to impose a solution may light a fire under the states to come up with their own agreement, but it is unlikely they will worry much about Mexico’s share of the water. Historically, states have been unable to agree on how to divide a precious resource, and the federal government has had to step in to create a fair agreement.
Meanwhile, back in Tennessee, the fallout from last week’s events continues. Judd Legum has reported in Popular Information that Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, doesn’t live in his district as state law requires. And Tennessee investigative reporter Phil Williams of News Channel 5 reports that state representative Paul Sherrell, “who recently suggested bringing back lynching as a form of capital punishment, has been removed from the House Criminal Justice Committee.”
—
Notes:
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/louisville-bank-employee-livestreamed-attack-that-killed-5/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/11/republicans-face-reckoning-young-voters-00091453
https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1645121016451174401
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/05/us/idaho-out-of-state-abortions-minors-ban.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/us/politics/abortion-republicans-elections.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/alvin-bragg-lawsuit-jim-jordan-trump/index.html
Adam's Legal NewsletterMifepristone and the rule of law, part IIOn April 7, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued an order overturning the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. The order will take effect within seven days unless it is stayed or reversed by a higher court. In my prior post…Read more2 days ago · 32 likes · 26 comments · Adam Unikowskyhttps://www.vox.com/2022/9/23/23357093/colorado-river-drought-cuts
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/pdfiles/crcompct.pdf
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/phoenix/AZ100/1960/supreme_court_AZ_vs_CA.html
https://www.usbr.gov/ColoradoRiverBasin/SEIS.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/11/colorado-river-biden-review/
https://www.usbr.gov/lc/phoenix/AZ100/1940/mexican_water_treaty.html
Popular InformationUPDATE: Tennessee Speaker admits his family lives hours away from the district he representsYesterday, Popular Information published an article that posed this question: Where does the Tennessee House Speaker actually live? The issue is that Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) represents District 25, which encompasses the community of Crossville, about two hours outside of Nashville. Under the…Read morea day ago · 599 likes · 104 comments · Judd Legumhttps://twitter.com/NC5PhilWilliams/status/1645906663231356928
April 10, 2023
April 10, 2023
“Justin Jones is reentering the chamber at the Tennessee State Legislature to tremendous applause.”
So said an MSNBC commentator today, after the Nashville Metro Council voted to return Democratic state representative Justin J. Jones to the Tennessee General Assembly. Last week, Republicans expelled Jones and his colleague Justin Pearson, who represents parts of Memphis, for breaches of decorum after they joined with protesters to call for gun safety legislation in the wake of a school shooting last week that left six people, including three 9-years-olds, dead. The colleague who protested with them, Gloria Johnson, survived a motion to expel her, too, by a single vote.
The vote to reinstate Jones to the legislature in an interim seat, until a new election can be held, was 36 to 0.
After the vote, Jones led a march of thousands of people—mostly young people, from the look of the video—back to the Tennessee Capitol building where he was sworn back into office on the Capitol steps.
Once sworn back into office, Jones reentered the legislative chamber arm in arm with Representative Johnson. To great applause, he walked through the chamber, fist held high, past Republican representatives who sat silent and pretended not to see him, as the galleries cheered.
The Shelby County Commission will vote on a replacement for Representative Justin J. Pearson on Wednesday. It can, if it chooses, return Pearson to his former seat until a special election can be held.
In a statement yesterday, Chair Mickell Lowery of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, a Democrat, said, “The protests at the State Capitol by citizens recently impacted by the senseless deaths of three 9-year-old children and three adults entrusted with their care at their school was understandable given the fact that the gun laws in the State of Tennessee are becoming nearly non-existent. It is equally understandable that the leadership of the State House of Representatives felt a strong message had to be sent to those who transgressed the rules.” Lowery went on to say: “However, I believe the expulsion of State Representative Justin Pearson was conducted in a hasty manner without consideration of other corrective action methods.“
Mickell noted that he was one of the more than 68,000 citizens stripped of their state representation by the state legislature and said he was “certain that the leaders in the State Capitol understand the importance of this action on behalf of the affected citizens here in Shelby County, Tennessee, and that we stand ready to work in concert with them to assist with only positive outcomes going forward.”
Yesterday, representatives Jones and Johnson flew from Nashville to Newark, and it happened that Joan Baez, the folk music legend, was on the same airplane. In the Newark airport, Jones asked Baez to sing with him. As Johnson filmed them, together they sang two spiritual-based freedom songs that became anthems in the Civil Rights Era: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “We Shall Overcome.”
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1645556522687123456
https://twitter.com/Victorshi2020/status/1645547238192734214
https://twitter.com/BlaiseGainey/status/1645550893230886912
https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-politics/justin-pearson-reinstatement-vote/
https://twitter.com/Justinjpearson/status/1645551283703619593
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cq289mCgEYV/
https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-politics/justin-pearson-reinstatement-vote/
April 9, 2023
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.
Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.
Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others.
Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred . . . never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”
But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”
So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.”
Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders.
With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.
In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced fascism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The event featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
The decision of government officials 158 years ago to trust in the goodwill of former Confederates rather than focus on justice for everyone else seemed at the time to be the honorable and best course for healing the divided nation. But it ended up protecting the Confederates’ ideology and disheartening those who had fought for the United States. “When the Union men of those States who have suffered every kind of outrage, who have been fined, mobbed, imprisoned, and have seen their Union neighbors hunted and tortured and hung for their fidelity to the Government, see… a conspicuous, leading traitor hastily pardoned by the President that he may become Governor,” wrote Harper’s Weekly a little more than a year after Lee surrendered,
“When they see members of the Cabinet deliberately annulling the law of the land in order to appoint late rebels to national offices, while the most noted and tried Union men in the insurgent States ask in vain for such recognition of their fidelity, how can such men help bitterly feeling the contemptuous scorn with which the triumphant rebels regard them? How can they help asking why they might not as well have been rebels? How can they help the conviction that the policy of the Executive is conciliation of rebels and not recognition of Union men, or avoid asking with intense incredulity whether this is the way in which treason is to be made odious?”
—
Notes:
George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1857), 353–354.
Alexander Stephens, “Cornerstone Speech,” March 21, 1861, in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens. . . Letters and Speeches (Philadelphia, PA: National Publishing Company, 1866), pp. 717–729.
James Q. Whitman, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Robert J. Miller, “Nazi Germany’s Race Laws, the United States, and American Indians,” St. John’s Law Review 94 (2020)
“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in Garden,” New York Times, February 21, 1939; Ryan Bort, “When Nazis Took Over Madison Square Garden,” Rolling Stone, February 19, 2019.
Harper's Weekly, June 2, 1866.
April 8, 2023
April 8, 2023
On April 8, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant was having a hard night.
His army had been harrying Confederate General Robert E. Lee's for days, and Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. The people in the Virginia countryside were starving, and Lee's army was melting away. Just that morning a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant's mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee still insisted his men could fight on.
So, on the night of April 8, Grant retired to bed in a Virginia farmhouse, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night "bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning." It didn't work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.
As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia. "When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache," Grant recalled, "but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured."
The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general's uniform carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the "rough garb" of a private with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general.
But the images of the wealthy, noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn't hesitate. "Certainly," he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee's answer—"about twenty-five thousand"—in stride, telling the general that "he could have...all the provisions wanted."
By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North's moneygrubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while, backed by a booming industrial economy, the Union army could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment's notice.
The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by men like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier's uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.
—
Notes:
U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885), volume 2, chapter 67, “Negotiations at Appomattox,” at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/...
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1300 followers
