Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 153
June 12, 2023
June 11, 2023
All weekend, Trump supporters have flooded media channels with accusations that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice to use as a political cudgel against former president Trump, whom they characterize as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
On Thursday the Department of Justice indicted Trump on 37 counts of hanging onto classified national security documents, deliberately hiding those documents from his lawyers and the government after a subpoena, lying about them, and showing them to people without security clearances and without any need to know about them.
Trump and his loyalists insist the indictment makes the United States a “banana republic,” by which they appear to mean a country with a corrupt ruling elite that uses the machinery of government against political opponents (though the historical meaning of that term actually is much more complicated). Sometimes in the same breath they call for arresting members of the Biden administration in retaliation; on the Fox News Channel on Friday, personality Greg Gutfield added First Lady Jill Biden as a potential target after Jesse Watters called for arresting “all of them, [former House speaker Nancy] Pelosi, too.”
There are a number of problems with their characterization of what is going on.
First of all, Biden’s Department of Justice has operated as it is supposed to: independently. While Trump apparently tried to use the department for his own political ends—we learned just last month, for example, that the Department of Justice kept an investigation of the Clinton Foundation open for almost Trump’s entire term, although prosecutors thought the rumors about the foundation were bogus from the start—Biden has gone out of his way to emphasize that he will not interfere with the Justice Department.
To underline that independence, after Trump announced his candidacy for president last November—an early announcement many thought was an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution—Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the two federal investigations that touched on the former president, thus deliberately moving those investigations outside the department. The special counsel is Jack Smith, and those investigations are the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the documents case currently in the news.
Still, the indictment came not from Smith, but from a federal grand jury of ordinary American citizens in Florida who reviewed evidence and determined that there was probable cause to believe that Trump committed crimes and should be tried for them. Trump’s defenders are trying to blur this reality by saying it was Biden who charged Trump, when it was really the members of a grand jury.
Trump supporters’ evidence for Biden’s corruption is that the Justice Department has indicted neither President Biden nor former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for what they claim are similar offenses. (It hasn’t charged Republican former vice president Mike Pence, either, but they are not talking about that.) The crucial difference in all three of those cases is that Biden, Clinton, and Pence did not try to hide the documents found in their possession and they cooperated fully with the Department of Justice to return them. (In addition, in Clinton’s case, most of the 110 emails that contained classified information did not bear classified markings.)
As Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post notes, Trump was not charged for illegally keeping any of the 197 documents he returned. He was charged only for ones he kept, lied about, showed to other people, and hid.
Republicans who are trying to pick up Trump’s voters, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, are not defending Trump but are instead trying to argue that the Democrats are discriminating against Trump. “Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president?” DeSantis asked.
That line of reasoning is swaying Republican primary voters, 88% of whom, according to a CBS News poll, say the indictment was politically motivated, although 24% of them agree that the loose handling of the documents was a national security risk. Trump and key supporters are playing to that base, using thinly veiled calls for violence. Meanwhile, Republicans who are likely hoping this will sink Trump are either dodging questions about the issue or, like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, remaining steadfastly silent.
But for all the focus on the politics of this moment and the apparent attempt to rally the Republican base to violence, this is a legal case. Trump is accused of serious crimes that endangered—and likely continue to endanger—our national security, which means the safety of every American.
His alleged criminal activity endangers the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in charge of imagery, maps, and intelligence concerning them), the National Reconnaissance Office (in charge of space-based surveillance and reconnaissance), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
It is notable that the two Republican presidential candidates who have served as U.S. attorneys—Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson—have both spoken out against Trump over it. So has Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who told Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel today: “I think the counts under the Espionage Act, that he willfully retained those documents, are solid counts… I do think we have to wait and see what the defense says, and what proves to be true, but I do think that…if even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning.”
Trump is reportedly having trouble finding lawyers to represent him in this matter, with Marc Caputo of The Messenger reporting today that one federal criminal defense lawyer he contacted in the Southern District of Florida said: “The problem is none of us want to work for the guy…. He’s a nightmare client.”
While committed Republican partisans seem to believe Trump is a victim, according to the CBS News poll, 38% of likely Republican primary voters do, in fact, believe Trump endangered our security—and national security, after all, is the primary job of the president.
Smith said on Friday that the department would seek a “speedy trial,” and if that indeed happens, the American people will hear Trump’s own lawyers and aides—for all the witnesses are his own hand-picked team members—testify under oath about Trump’s behavior. Under similar conditions, the testimony of Trump’s people before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol effectively countered Trump’s propaganda. That Republican leaders see Trump as vulnerable is evidenced by how many candidates are already in the presidential race.
The question is how much damage the fight for control will do to the Republican Party, especially in light of the fact that Smith’s other investigation, the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has not yet been concluded. There is reason to suspect those congress members involved in that effort might have been spooked by just how thorough the investigation of the documents case turned out to be.
Guided by President Biden, the Democrats are refusing to comment on the indictment, likely in part to undermine the argument that it is about politics and also because they recognize that many Americans are just tired of drama.
Overall, though, they seem determined to redirect people’s attention to the reality that the Biden administration and the Democrats are actually governing according to the principles of a democracy. Frustrating as this tactic is to partisans, scholars who study how to restore democratic norms in a faltering democracy suggest that emphasizing those norms is crucial.
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Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-most-see-security-risk-after-trump-indictment/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/us/politics/fbi-clinton-foundation.html
https://www.justice.gov/d9/press-releases/attachments/2022/11/18/2022.11.18_order_5559-2022.pdf
https://www.npr.org/live-updates/trump-indictment-documents-grand-jury
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/15/1137052704/trump-2024-president-campaign
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/06/trump-indictment.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/politics/jack-smith-special-counsel-trump-indictment.html
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/special-counsel-jack-smith-delivers-statement
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/10/trump-indictment-speeches-georgia-north-carolina/
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/a-guide-to-clintons-emails/
June 10, 2023
June 10, 2023
Taking the evening off, as I spent the entire day with my family (which was a really nice antidote to the firehose of this week’s events). But there is some personal news to share….
People have noted that I have been posting the letters earlier than usual lately, and have wondered if everything is okay. First of all, thank you for your concern, and second, yes, it is.
When I first started writing these letters in September 2019, they concerned only Trump’s first impeachment. I wrote them after teaching and posted them usually no later than 10:00. I vividly remember the first time I stayed in the office until midnight, thinking that was really too much and it couldn’t happen again.
But then, as the letters began to involve more aspects of the news, they got later and later. Stories from the Trump White House often dropped after Hannity’s show went off the air at 10:00, and then, once Biden took office and news dumps went back to normal hours, I started writing a book. That meant the letter writing stayed late. And got later.
And that is my personal news. The reason the letters are posting earlier again is that the book is done.
It is called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and in 30 short chapters in three sections for a total of 250 pages of text, it tries to explain how we got to this political moment…and how we get out. There is a lot of material in it you all will recognize—on the Trump years, for example, and how we got to them and how we got through them—but there is a lot that is new, too, reflecting how the last several years have made me reconceive the way I think about the meaning of history. In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.
Writing the book was a very odd experience. Because I was writing so much else, I could never focus on the book exclusively as I have done for previous books. I would write in the mornings, but every afternoon I would have to pack up whatever was in front of me and start working on the nightly letter. When one chapter was done, I would throw it aside and ignore it while working on the next. It was almost as if I was seeing the project only in my peripheral vision while looking intently at what was in front of me.
I took a break from the manuscript before picking it up for the second draft, and when I did turn back to it, I discovered something curious: it was almost as if the chapters had been chatting together while I ignored them, and they demanded an entire reworking. In the end, I rewrote close to 80% of the manuscript and developed a much different thesis than I had set out to write two years ago. It was rather as if I had seen things more clearly out of the corner of my eye than if I had been looking directly at them.
The manuscript turned into a voyage of discovery for me, and it ended up feeling very much like I didn’t have a lot of control over it: I was just bringing a definitive shape to the questions, comments, concerns, and hopes of so many people who have been part of the crazy journey of the past three and a half years.
It will come out in mid-September and I think it is…not bad, which is about as far as any writer will—or should—go on a new book.
I am extraordinarily relieved to have this project off my desk, and hope to write earlier going forward, although always with an eye to the idea that each letter tries to encapsulate a full 24-hour period in the nation’s historical record.
There are new projects in the works, but for now a heartfelt thank you to all of you who have cheered me, the letters, and this new book on, all in the midst of trying to protect our democracy. It’s been quite a journey already, and I am eager to see what comes next.
Oh, and here’s the cover. It’s not an accident that it’s a sunrise.
I’ll be back at the national news tomorrow.
June 9, 2023
June 9, 2023
At 3:00 today, Washington D.C., time, Special Counsel Jack Smith delivered a statement about the recently unsealed indictment charging former president Donald J. Trump on 37 counts of violating national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Although MAGA Republicans have tried to paint the indictment as a political move by the Biden administration over a piddling error, Smith immediately reminded people that “[t]his indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida, and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.”
The indictment is, indeed, jaw dropping.
It alleges that during his time in the White House, Trump stored in cardboard boxes “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” The indictment notes that “[t]he unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
Nonetheless, when Trump ceased to be president after noon on January 20, 2021, he took those boxes, “many of which contained classified documents,” to Mar-a-Lago, where he was living. He “was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents.” The indictment makes it clear that this was no oversight: Trump was personally involved in packing the boxes and, later, in going through them and in overseeing how they were handled. The employees who worked for him exchanged text messages referring to his personal instructions about them.
Mar-a-Lago was not an authorized location for such documents, but he stored them there anyway, “including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.” They were stacked in public places, where anyone—including the many foreign nationals who visited Mar-a-Lago—could see them. On December 7, 2021, Trump’s personal aide Waltine Nauta took two pictures of several of the boxes fallen on the floor, with their contents, including a secret document available only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, spilled onto the floor.
The indictment alleges that Trump showed classified documents to others without security clearances on two occasions, both of which are well documented. One of those occasions was recorded. Trump told the people there that the plan he was showing them was “highly confidential” and “secret.” He added, “See, as president I could have declassified it….Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
This recording undermines his insistence that he believed he could automatically declassify documents; it proves he understood he could not. In addition, the indictment lists Trump’s many statements from 2016 about the importance of protecting classified information, all delivered as attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, whom he accused of mishandling such information. “In my administration,” he said on August 18, 2016, “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
The indictment goes on: When the FBI tried to recover the documents, Trump started what Washington Post journalist Jennifer Rubin called a “giant shell game”: he tried to get his lawyer to lie to the FBI and the grand jury, saying Trump did not have more documents; worked with Nauta to move some of the boxes to hide them from Trump’s lawyer, the FBI and the grand jury; tried to get his lawyer to hide or destroy documents; and got another lawyer to certify that all the documents had been produced when he knew they hadn’t.
Nauta lied to the grand jury about his knowledge of what Trump did with the boxes. Both he and Trump have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction and of engaging in a conspiracy to hide the documents.
Eventually, Trump had many of the boxes moved to his property at Bedminster, New Jersey, where on two occasions he showed documents to people without security clearances. He showed a classified map of a country that is part of an ongoing military operation to a representative of his political action committee.
Trump has been indicted on 31 counts of having “unauthorized possession of, access to, and control over documents relating to the national defense,” for keeping them, and for refusing “to deliver them to the officer and employee of the United States entitled to receive them”: language straight out of the Espionage Act. Twenty-one of the documents were marked top secret, nine were marked secret, and one was unmarked.
These documents are not all those recovered—some likely are too sensitive to risk making public—but they nonetheless hold some of the nation’s deepest secrets: “military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States,” “military activities and planning of foreign countries,” “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” “military attacks by a foreign country,” “military contingency planning of the United States,” “military options of a foreign country and potential effects on United States interest,” “foreign country support of terrorist acts against United States interests,” “nuclear weaponry of the United States,” “military activity in a foreign country.”
Smith put it starkly in his statement, “The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
On Twitter, Bill Kristol said it more clearly: “These were highly classified documents dealing with military intelligence and plans. What did Trump do with them? Who now has copies of them?” Retired FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi noted that there is a substantial risk that “foreign intelligence services might have sought or gained access to the documents.”
There is also substantial risk that other countries will be reluctant to share intelligence with the United States in the future. At the very least, it is an unfortunate coincidence that the Central Intelligence Agency in October 2021 reported an unusually high rate of capture or death for foreign informants recruited to spy for the United States.
Since Trump supporters have taken the position that Trump’s indictment over the stolen documents is the attempt of the Biden administration to undermine Trump’s presidential candidacy, it is worth remembering that Trump’s early announcement of his campaign was widely suspected to be an attempt to enable him to avoid legal accountability. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith precisely to put arms length between the administration and the investigations into Trump.
Smith noted today, “Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws. Collecting facts. That’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice. They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards. And they will continue to do so as this case proceeds.”
Smith added: “It’s very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter. Consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused. We very much look forward to presenting our case to a jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida.”
Likely responding to MAGA attacks on the FBI and the rule of law, Smith thanked the “dedicated public servants of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom my office is conducting this investigation and who worked tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country,” before closing his brief statement.
The indictment revealed just how much detailed information Smith’s team has uncovered, presenting a shockingly thorough case to prove the allegations. Trump’s lawyers will have their work cut out for them…although the team has shifted since this morning: two of Trump’s lawyers quit today. The thoroughness of the indictment also suggests that Trump and his allies might have reason to be nervous about Smith’s other investigation: the one into the attempt to overturn results of the 2020 election.
Some of Trump’s supporters are calling for violence. After Louisiana representative Clay Higgins appeared to be egging on militias to oppose Trump’s Tuesday arraignment, Democratic senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) issued a joint statement calling for “supporters and critics alike to let the case proceed peacefully in court.” Legal scholar Joyce White Vance noted that it was “extremely sad for our country that this isn’t a bipartisan statement being made by leaders from both parties.”
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Notes:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/special-counsel-jack-smith-delivers-statement
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/09/politics/walt-nauta-trump-indicted/index.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0_2.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/us/politics/trump-indictment-lawyers-trusty-rowley.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793
Twitter links:
BillKristol/status/1667332834514616320
JRubinBlogger/status/1667287186616754177
JoyceWhiteVance/status/1667277258183065601
petestrzok/status/1667276941043351555
djrothkopf/status/1667237607388880922
June 8, 2023
June 8, 2023
This morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Allen v. Milligan, a case that challenged the Alabama legislature’s redistricting of the state after the 2020 census on the grounds that the new districts had been configured to pack the state’s growing numbers of Black voters into a single district and thus dilute their vote. Such discrimination based on race, plaintiffs charged, violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).
District courts agreed with the plaintiffs and told the state it couldn’t use the new map, but in February 2022 the Supreme Court issued a stay of the injunction prohibiting that map. The Supreme Court ruling left the Alabama map intact for the 2022 election. Legal scholar Stephen Vladeck noted that the decision was part of the court’s recent use of the “shadow docket,” unsigned, unexplained orders issued without a hearing.
Today’s 5–4 decision upheld the verdicts of the lower courts, agreeing that the new Alabama map was, after all, illegal, because it violates Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits the denial of the right to vote on account of race. This leaves intact the ability of plaintiffs to sue when states appear to discriminate against minority voters. Similar lawsuits are pending in ten different states.
But, as Vladeck notes, the Supreme Court’s February 2022 decision leaving the discriminatory map in Alabama, as well as similar maps in other states, in place for the November election, is likely responsible for the Republicans’ current majority in the House of Representatives. The Cook Political Report, which follows elections, immediately changed their ratings for the leanings of five House districts after news of the Supreme Court decision.
That House majority is currently at an impasse that makes it impossible to conduct business. The extremist House Freedom Caucus (HFC) has revolted against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) because of the budget deal he cut with President Biden before he would agree to raise the debt ceiling. Members of the HFC are demanding deeper cuts than McCarthy agreed to. The revolt of the far right puts into danger crucial spending bills, raising fears of a government shutdown in the fall.
To placate the extremists, McCarthy has apparently agreed to take up two bills: one to kill a Biden-backed gun regulation and another to push even more strongly against abortion rights. This move, which flies in the face of popular opinion, has angered Republicans in battleground districts, who are revolting against measures that will hurt them at home. It also runs the risk of alienating Democrats McCarthy will need to pass spending measures if the far right refuses to vote for them.
The extremism of today’s Republican Party grew in large part from the work of televangelist Pat Robertson, who died today at age 93. The son of a segregationist southern Democratic senator, Baptist minister Robertson urged evangelical Christians to vote and made them a core constituency of the Republican Party. Paving the way for those today calling for an end to liberal democracy, Robertson blamed LGBTQ Americans and women for secularizing the United States, which he saw as a tragedy and frequently blamed for natural disasters.
That political ideology depended on creating a false picture of what was really going on in the country. The Republican Party has become so wedded to lying about reality that today we saw Florida governor and Republican candidate for president Ron DeSantis circulating fake images of rival candidate Donald Trump embracing right-wing nemesis Dr. Anthony Fauci as a way to discredit Trump.
Trump’s team cried foul at the fake images, but the former president himself relies on manipulating reality to garner political support. CNN national correspondent Kristen Holmes reported today that Trump’s people reached out this week to congressional allies to encourage them to flood the airwaves with a defense of Trump and attacks on special counsel Jack Smith before a possible indictment of the former president.
To that end, Trump’s supporters spent the week trying to gin up outrage over a document they claimed shows that President Biden had taken a bribe as vice president. The document in question appears to be an unverified report that came to the Department of Justice through Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, one that the Trump Department of Justice dropped after it determined that the allegation was not supported by facts. But the practice of influencing politics through sham investigations is one of the Republicans’ key tools, and Trump allies have flooded social media this week insisting that this document is a smoking gun.
They were, of course, trying to set up a defense for the former president’s possible indictment on charges related to his refusal to hand over national security documents he had taken when he left the White House.
This evening, news broke that Trump has, indeed, been indicted by a grand jury in South Florida in connection with the documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago. The indictment is sealed, but there are reports that it includes seven counts of lawbreaking, including at least one related to the Espionage Act. These charges are serious indeed.
Trump is now the first former U.S. president in history to face federal criminal charges (his first indictment, on March 30, was at the state level). As The Guardian’s David Smith puts it, “he really might be going to jail.” Smith—who is a keen observer of American politics—notes that it is hard to figure out what is important and what is not in the general drama around the former president, but this indictment is “genuinely monumental.”
According to Trump’s outraged posts on social media, he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami next Tuesday.
Trump’s team asked his allies to jump to his defense, and they did. Trump loyalists implied that the “sham indictment” was destined to distract from the blockbuster story they had invented about Biden. House speaker McCarthy implied that Biden, who has had nothing to do with the Department of Justice investigation, special counsel in charge of the investigation Jack Smith, or the grand jury deliberations, was responsible for launching a political attack on a rival. The third Republican in House leadership, New York representative Elise Stefanik, also defended Trump…in a fundraising email that assured donors their money would go to the “OFFICIAL TRUMP DEFENSE FUND” though, in fact, most of it would be diverted to Stefanik’s operations. Trump, too, lost no time in fundraising off the indictment.
Significantly, though, all Republicans who do not identify with the far right have remained steadfastly silent in the face of the day’s news. The exception has been long-shot presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, who has called for Trump to end his campaign.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who communicates with the Trump camp, says he holed up tonight not with his legal team but with political advisors. CBS News correspondent Robert Costa reports tonight that the camps of Republican rivals think that this news will actually help Trump in the short term, as his base rallies to him, but that the news of what is at stake in the theft of national security documents might well lose him support over time. If another indictment comes from Georgia concerning his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election there, rival camps say he might “bleed out.”
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Notes:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/supreme-court-shadow-docket
https://rollcall.com/2023/06/08/house-gop-leaders-work-to-tamp-down-rule-fracas/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/08/mccarthy-republican-leadership-abortion-00101045
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pat-robertson-dead-obituary-1234766208/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/politics/republicans-pat-robertson-what-matters/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/pat-robertson-dead.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/politics/kevin-mccarthy-house-republicans-mutiny.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/politics/desantis-campaign-video-fake-ai-image/index.html
https://twitter.com/KristenhCNN/status/1666844103445819413
https://www.newsweek.com/document-center-comers-fbi-request-explained-1803720
https://www.lawfareblog.com/trump-indicted-mar-lago-probe
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/08/us/trump-indictment-documents
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/us/politics/trump-indictment-club-bedminster-nj.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/us/politics/desantis-deepfakes-trump-fauci.html
Twitter links:
steve_vladeck/status/1666822494635036675
CookPolitical/status/1666870976162693137
SpeakerMcCarthy/status/1666979107681325064
jbendery/status/1666994870018269186
jordainc/status/1666965973704876033
costareports/status/1666964960516227074
June 7, 2023
June 7, 2023
Three more candidates have entered the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week. Former vice president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and current North Dakota governor Doug Burgum join former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, as well as a few others and former president Donald Trump in their hope of winning the nomination.
Taken together, the different candidates offer a window into the current Republican Party. Haley and DeSantis are embracing the cultural issues to which the Trump base is wedded. At a CNN town hall on Sunday, Haley singled out transgender girls as one of her key issues, linking (without any evidence) their presence on girls’ sports teams to an April study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a rise in the number of teenaged girls contemplating self-harm between 2019 and 2021, years that covered the height of the pandemic. (In fact, LGBTQ teenagers have a higher rate of thoughts of self-harm than their straight, gender-conforming peers.)
DeSantis has reached for the Trump base by focusing on immigration. That focus has backfired as unlawful border crossings have dropped more than 70% since President Biden’s ending of the pandemic-related Title 42, and as a new Florida law designed to “scare people from coming to Florida” has resulted in immigrants, whose labor is vital to the state, leaving it.
Apparently trying to reclaim the narrative, in the last week, DeSantis has sent two charter flights taking migrants who have legally applied for asylum in the U.S. from the Texas border to Sacramento, California. While the DeSantis administration claims the migrants went “voluntarily,” they say they were tricked into thinking they would get work in California. One set of the migrants were dropped off outside the Catholic Archdiocese of Sacramento, which had not been alerted they were coming and was closed.
Pence, Hutchinson, and Christie are directly attacking Trump, Pence by saying the events of January 6, 2021, make Trump unfit to be president, Hutchinson by saying Trump should withdraw because of the criminal charges he’s facing, and Christie by attacking Trump and his family as grifters. At Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire yesterday, Christie reminded the audience: “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis…. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?... That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.”
Scott and Burgum seem to be trying to offer exhausted Republican voters a rest. Scott is trying to offer an optimistic vision of the United States amidst the apocalyptic narratives of his rivals, denying that systematic racism is a societal problem, for example, while Burgum’s chief attribute seems to be an embrace of pre-2016 Republicanism and a low-key presentation.
That scrum of Republican hopefuls—none of whom is polling well—is the backdrop to this evening’s story from Andrew Feinberg of the Independent that prosecutors from the Department of Justice are ready to ask a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to indict former president Trump on charges that he has violated the Espionage Act and obstructed justice.
Aside from anything else, the Espionage Act includes language that anyone who “willfully retains…any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation… and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it” can be punished by as many as ten years in prison.
The story says the jury could vote as early as tomorrow, but it could also be delayed until next week, or beyond. It is worth remembering that this Department of Justice has not been known to leak, and that the sooner Trump is indicted—which certainly looks likely, at least in the case of the missing documents—the sooner his supporters can jump to another candidate, which might suggest a rival camp pushing the story that an indictment will come soon. That same calculation might have been part of what was behind Trump’s insistence to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that he has “NOT been told he’s getting indicted.” And, he added on Truth Social, “I shouldn’t be because I’ve done NOTHING wrong.”
Troubles in the Republican Party are not limited to the 2024 hopefuls. House Republicans continue to fight against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), angry over the budget deal under which he pushed through a measure to suspend the debt ceiling. McCarthy tried to head off their protests with a promise to establish a commission to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it was not enough. Yesterday, members of the House Freedom Caucus said they would not permit votes on anything until he put in writing what they believed was the deal he made to get their votes for the speakership; that revolt continued today.
Tonight, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy appears to have agreed to let appropriators write bills that come in below the agreed-upon spending levels. Sherman’s colleague John Bresnahan noted: “The Fiscal Responsibility Act isn’t even a week old & Republicans in the House and Senate are already trying to redo it.”
In other news, CNN has parted ways with Chris Licht, its chief executive officer and chair, who had sought to move the network to what he considered the center of American politics. He had done so by highlighting “both sides” of today’s political arguments, firing leading journalists he thought too far on the left and centering Trump in a town hall that became the former president’s triumphant reentry to the political stage as he lied and bullied the interviewer. Some pundits have taken Licht’s fall as a sign that there is no longer a powerful center in American politics, but my own guess is the opposite: that most of us want news based in reality rather than media giving platforms to people who are openly lying.
Yale scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder today applied this idea to coverage of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, which has rained down humanitarian, ecological, and economic disaster on Ukrainians as they appear to be launching a counteroffensive to the Russian invasion of their country.
Snyder warned journalists not to “bothsides” the story by offering equal time to both sides. “What Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests a false equality,” he wrote. “The story doesn't start at the moment the dam explodes. For the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.” “Objectivity does not mean treating an event as a coin flip between two public statements,” he said. “It demands thinking about the objects and the settings that readers require for understanding amidst uncertainty.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/05/politics/nikki-haley-transgender-girls-teen-suicide/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-teen-girls-considered-attempting-suicide-2021-cdc/story?id=98901688
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/us/politics/pence-trump-2024-announcement.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/migrants-plane-sacramento-california.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/politics/desantis-florida-migrant-flights.html
https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/6/6/23751345/tim-scott-view-race-systemic-racism-2024
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/07/media/chris-licht-cnn/index.html
https://newrepublic.com/post/173247/florida-republicans-admit-made-big-mistake-anti-immigrant-law
https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-approval-rating-2024-polls-1805073
Twitter links:
sahilkapur/status/1666257940922212352
TimothyDSnyder/status/1666480705637851136
maggieNYT/status/1666515440300859392
therecount/status/1663935439873404929
JakeSherman/status/1666570060100427778
nicholaswu12/status/1666557296648900608
June 6, 2023
June 6, 2023
Far-right Republican representatives from the House Freedom Caucus today launched a battle against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), accusing him of violating the agreement he made with them in order to get their backing for the speakership. Angry at the passage of the deal to suspend the debt ceiling and keep the United States from defaulting, they blocked two bills today and apparently have decided to oppose all legislation that comes before the House unless McCarthy puts in writing what they understand to be the deal they made.
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) said: “The end game is freedom, less government, less spending.”
If the far right is trying to dismantle the federal government, the White House is working to advertise the effects of its use of the federal government for the American people.
Today the administration unveiled a new website called “Investing in America.” The site tracks both the public infrastructure and the private investments sparked by the laws like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, breaking those investments down by category.
While the Republicans since 1980 have claimed that tax cuts and deregulation would spur private investment in the economy, it appears that Biden’s policy of public investment to encourage private investment has, in fact, worked. So far, during his term, private companies have announced $479 billion in investments under the new system, while the government has directed more than $220 billion towards roads, bridges, airports, public transportation, addressing climate change, and providing clean water. The website locates and identifies the more than 32,000 new projects underway.
The site also highlights the high rates of employment in the U.S. and the addition of new manufacturing jobs, as well as lower costs for prescription drugs and health insurance.
Separately, the administration noted that its plan for migration across the border is “working as intended.” The pandemic-era Title 42, put in place by Trump in early 2020 to stop the spread of COVID, went out of operation at midnight on May 12, and while Republicans insisted the reversion to the normal laws governing immigration would create a crisis, in fact unlawful crossings have dropped more than 70%. Still, the administration emphasized yet again today that Congress must address “our broken immigration and asylum system.”
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are returning to the traditional idea—embraced by members of both parties before 1980—that investing in the country benefits everyone, much of the Freedom Caucus has thrown in its lot with former president Donald Trump, who calls the Democrats’ ideology “communism.” So convinced were Trump’s supporters that Democrats should not be allowed to govern that they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
One of the key figures in that attempt was Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who as a representative from North Carolina was a founder of the House Freedom Caucus (along with Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Ron DeSantis of Florida, among others). As Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows was close to the center of the attempt to keep former president Trump in the White House. His aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided some of the most compelling—and damning—testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Meadows refused to cooperate with that committee and was found in contempt of Congress, but the Department of Justice declined to prosecute. When he seemed largely to drop out of public view, there was speculation about his role in the investigations into Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
This afternoon, Jonathan Swan, Michael S. Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Meadows has testified before a federal grand jury in the investigations led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. It is not clear if Meadows testified in the matter of the election sabotage or in the matter of documents taken from the White House when Trump left office, or both. One of his lawyers refused to comment but told the New York Times reporters that “Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”
I cannot help but contrast that statement with one from another American leader seventy-nine years ago.
On June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to send Allied troops across the English Channel to France, where he hoped they would push the German troops back across Europe. More than 5,000 ships waited to transport more than 150,000 soldiers to France before daybreak the following morning. The fighting to take Normandy would not be easy. The beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers.
On the afternoon of June 5, as the Allied soldiers, their faces darkened with soot and cocoa, milled around waiting to board the ships, Eisenhower went to see the men he was almost certainly sending to their deaths. He joked with the troops, as apparently upbeat as his orders to them had been when he told them Operation Overlord had launched. “The tide has turned!” his letter had read. “The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
But after cheering his men on, he went back to his headquarters and wrote another letter. Designed to blame himself alone if Operation Overlord failed, it read:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
The letter was never delivered. Operation Overlord was a success, launching the final assault in which western democracy, defended by ordinary men and women, would destroy European fascism.
A year later, General Eisenhower was welcomed home as the hero who had won World War Two. But for all those noisy accolades, it was the letter of June 5, that he wrote in secret, alone and unsure whether the future would find him right or wrong but willing to take both the risk and the blame if he failed, that proved his heroism.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/politics/republican-revolt-mccarthy-rule-vote/index.html
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1666182487880392704
https://www.whitehouse.gov/invest/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/politics/mark-meadows-testified-trump-grand-jury.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/06/border-crossings-fall-biden-administration-00100333
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/general-eisenhowers-order-of-the-day
June 5, 2023
This morning, CBS News cameras captured on video the sight of former president Trump’s lawyers entering the Department of Justice.
Shortly after their two-hour meeting ended, a message appeared on the Trump-affiliated social media site Truth Social, in all caps: “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S [sic] WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It appears there is reason to suspect Trump’s lawyers delivered to the former president bad news about Trump’s refusal to return to the government—that is, to the American people—the classified documents he stole when he left the White House.
The Twitter account of the Republican National Committee promptly tweeted footage of House Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) suggesting that the “Biden family” has engaged in “a pattern of bribery, where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” in a system of “money laundering.” There is no evidence of these accusations, and their framing of Biden as part of a “family corruption scandal” is pretty transparently designed to make the Bidens look like the Trumps, although there is no Biden family business as there is a Trump Organization.
Republican leaders have tiptoed around former president Trump even if they were hoping to move him offstage, but that caution broke today when the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who in February said he would vote for Trump if he is the 2024 nominee, warned in a Washington Post op-ed that the Republican Party must break free of Trump and the culture wars or face “electoral irrelevance.”
Sununu announced that he would not seek the party’s presidential nomination himself, keeping his powder dry to try to correct the Republican Party’s course. In a clear shot at the many Republicans jumping into the race, he warned that “candidates should not get into this race to further a vanity campaign, to sell books or to audition to serve as Donald Trump’s vice president.” He promised to work for whichever candidate he thought best positioned to win in 2024.
Sununu called for returning the party to “classic conservative principles of individual liberty, low taxes and local control,” saying that Republicans need to “expand beyond the culture wars that alienate independents, young voters and suburban moms” and appeal to new voters on substantive issues. He also took on the issue of abortion, which has created a groundswell of opposition to Republicans, saying that “Republicans should recognize that every time they open their mouths to talk about banning abortion, an independent voter joins the Democrats.”
Indeed, as Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo wrote today, the abortion issue is suddenly toxic for Republicans. After years of calling for the end of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans got their wish almost a year ago with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Republican-dominated states promptly began to pass antiabortion laws at the state level. But a majority of voters actually support abortion access, even in Republican-dominated states. They are eager to restore abortion rights, while the evangelical base of the Republican Party wants a federal abortion ban.
Republicans running for president are now trying to avoid the issue, since they need to support a federal ban on abortion to win base voters but will repel a majority of general voters if they do. Putting Republicans into power will likely mean a federal ban that will run badly against the popular will. It is not clear how Republican candidates will square this circle, but it is unlikely to go away simply because Republicans try not to talk about it.
While many eyes in the United States are focused on domestic political events, today’s news also included reports that the Ukrainian military may have begun its counteroffensive to push Russian invaders out of Ukraine (although Ukrainian officials denied it, saying that no single action would indicate that a counteroffensive had begun).
The U.K. Ministry of Defence reported that there has been a “substantial increase in fighting along numerous sectors of the front, including those which have been relatively quiet for several months.” It also said that the feud between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defence has “reached an unprecedented level.” It is not clear they will continue to cooperate.
Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Kylie Atwood of CNN reported today that Ukraine has encouraged sympathizers and agents in Russia to sabotage targets there, diverting Russian attention from Ukraine and bringing the threat of war home to Russians.
Tonight, part of the Nova Kakhovka Dam was breached, sending a flood down the Dnipro River. The breach will create flooding downstream. It will also affect drinking water, and the electricity for more than 3 million people. It threatens the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, whose reactors are cooled with water from the reservoir above the dam, but tonight the Ukrainian state nuclear energy company Energoatom said the situation is under control.
—
Notes:
Twitter:
RonFilipkowski/status/1665762038281322496
atrupar/status/1621233676909514757
DefenceHQ/status/1665951346464309249
MarkHertling/status/1665922657408147457
mefimus/status/1665942450362372096
Osinttechnical/status/1665907948986458113
RNCResearch/status/1665769123111129088
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/trump-justice-dept-classified-documents.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/05/belgorod-russia-ukraine-counteroffensive-militias/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/pence-2024-president-candidate.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/05/chris-sununu-trump-gop-2024/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/republican-haley-desantis-trump-abortion
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/05/politics/ukraine-sabotage-agents-russia-drone-attacks/index.html
June 5, 2023
June 4, 2023
Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, a staunch supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, last week awarded the First Degree of the Order of Glory and Honor from the Russian Orthodox Church to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán has dismantled Hungary’s liberal democratic government in favor of what he calls “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy that rejects LGBTQ and women’s rights, claiming that the equality valued by liberal democracies undermines traditional virtue. Kirill called out for praise Orbán’s “great attention to the preservation of Christian values in society and the strengthening of the institution of family and marriage.”
This award makes explicit the link between the Putin regime, which has been committing war crimes against Ukraine’s people, and Orbán, who is such a hero to America’s right wing that the Conservative Political Action Conference has twice gathered in Hungary, most recently just last month. Orbán has called for Trump’s reelection.
The common thread among these groups is a rejection of democracy, with its emphasis on equality before the law, and the embrace of a hierarchical world in which some people are better than others and have the right to rule.
In Poland today, an estimated half a million people marched in the streets to protest the loss of rights for women and LGBTQ people amid an attack on democracy by the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), which condemned the protest as a “march of hate.” Leaders for PiS claim they are only trying to protect traditional Christian values from Western ideas.
Today is the 34th anniversary of the first democratic elections in Poland in 1989 as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Former Polish prime minister and president of the European Council Donald Tusk, who called for the march, told the crowd: "Democracy dies in silence but you've raised your voice for democracy today, silence is over, we will shout.”
Today is also the 34th anniversary of the Chinese government’s crackdown on demonstrations for democracy in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with troops firing on their own citizens.
For 22 weeks now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting in the streets against the plans of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the judiciary, weakening the country’s system of checks and balances by shifting power to Netanyahu, and threatening the rights of minorities and marginalized groups.
In Sudan today, the war between two military generals who seized power from a democratic government continues. Tens of thousands of Sudan’s people have fled the country since the fighting broke out in April.
The political career of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is the epitome of Orbán’s “Christian democracy” come to the United States. DeSantis has imitated Orbán’s politics, striking at the principles of liberal democracy with attacks on LGBTQ Americans, abortion rights, academic freedom, and the ability of businesses to react to market forces rather than religious imperatives. Last week he told an audience that “the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology leave it to the dustbin of history; it’s gone.”
But DeSantis’s speech was a perversion of the real speech on which he based it.
On June 4, 1940, nine months into the Second World War, British prime minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons. British, Canadian, and French destroyers along with dozens of merchant ships and a flotilla of small boats had just managed to evacuate more than 338,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, in northern France, as German troops advanced.
Britain was fighting fascism, and Churchill warned his people that the war would be neither easy nor quick. But, he promised, “we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender....”
—
Notes:
https://dailynewshungary.com/pm-viktor-orban-receives-russian-order-of-glory-and-honour/
https://orthodoxtimes.com/patriarch-of-moscow-presented-russian-minister-of-defense-with-an-award/
https://www.politico.eu/article/anti-government-protest-warsaw-poland-against-pis-party/
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-tiananmen-square-demonstrations-crackdown-2023-06-04/
https://apnews.com/article/sudan-military-democracy-coup-d70cdb605bfef095eca113f77e73c68c
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/15/heavy-gunfire-heard-south-of-sudanese-capital-khartoum
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1665086349483835392
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches/
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/23/us-election-viktor-orbn-of-hungary-wants-donald-trump-to-win-.html
June 3, 2023
June 3, 2023
Spring has sprung here, and everything is a bright young green.
Going to leave you with a photo from this year’s first trip out on the water, late one afternoon this week, while I see about catching up on some sleep.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
June 2, 2023
June 2, 2023
Three years ago today, on June 2, 2020, days after then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, Martha Raddatz of ABC snapped the famous and chilling photograph of law enforcement officers in camouflage, their names and units hidden, standing in rows on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Mr. Floyd’s murder sparked protests across the country, and Trump used those protests as a pretext to crack down on his opponents. Just the day before, after a call with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump told state governors on a phone call: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.... You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.” Then he used a massive police presence wielding tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang explosives to clear peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Square across from the White House.
Tonight, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office to emphasize that democracy depends on bipartisanship.” [W]hen I ran for President,” he began, “I was told the days of bipartisanship were over and that Democrats and Republicans could no longer work together. But I refused to believe that, because America can never give in to that way of thinking…. [T]he only way American democracy can function is through compromise and consensus, and that’s what I worked to do as your President…to forge a bipartisan agreement where it’s possible and where it’s needed.”
While he noted that he has signed more than 350 bipartisan laws in his time in office, his major focus today was on the bipartisan budget agreement passed by the House and Senate after months of wrangling to get House Republicans to agree to lift the debt ceiling. Biden will sign it tomorrow, averting the nation’s first-ever default.
Biden characterized those threatening to force the U.S. into default as “extreme voices,” who were willing to cause a catastrophe. The economy, which continues to add jobs at a cracking pace—another 339,000 in May, according to the numbers released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor—would have been thrown into recession. As many as 8 million Americans would have lost their jobs, retirement savings would have been decimated, borrowing for everything from mortgages to government funding would have become much more expensive, and “America’s standing as the most trusted, reliable financial partner in the world would have been shattered.”
“It would have taken years to climb out of that hole,” he said.
But the extremists were sidelined, and the House Republicans and the White House reached an agreement. Biden went out of his way to praise House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his team, saying that the two negotiating teams “were able to get along and get things done. We were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another, and respectful with one another. Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.”
This was not entirely true—McCarthy constantly attacked Biden in the media—but Biden was hammering on the image of bipartisanship. Yesterday, Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported that Biden and his team plan to make the case for reelection on their ability to negotiate deals that get things done for the American people, acting as the “adults in the room” in contrast to Republican extremists. The budget deal that led to the suspension of the debt ceiling is a major illustration of that position.
Biden also praised House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), claiming that “[t]hey acted responsibly and put the good of the country ahead of politics.”
The solution to the debt ceiling crisis is a major victory for Biden’s team not only because it happened, but also because it leaves Biden’s key priorities intact, not least because they are popular and Republicans did not want to go into 2024 having demanded unpopular cuts.
Biden noted that the measure will cut spending as Republicans wanted (although not necessarily through the measures they insisted on adding), but reiterated that it is the Republican Party that has been on a spending spree. “We’re all on a much more fiscally responsible course than the one I inherited when I took office,” Biden said. “When I came to office, the deficit had increased every year the previous four years. And nearly $8 trillion was added to the national debt in the last administration,” while the deficit fell by $1.7 trillion in his first two years in office.
Biden laid out that the deal protects his reworking of the U.S. economy to support ordinary Americans. It protects Social Security and Medicare, as well as healthcare and veterans’ services. It protects the investments in the economy that have enabled the country to add more than 13 million new jobs, including 800,000 jobs in manufacturing. It protects investments in addressing climate change.
Finally, Biden vowed to make the wealthy—those who earn more than $400,000 a year—pay their fair share in taxes.
“I know bipartisanship is hard and unity is hard,” he concluded, “but we can never stop trying, because in moments like this one—the ones we just faced, where the American economy and the world economy is at risk of collapsing—there is no other way.
“No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together to pursue progress, secure prosperity, and keep the promise of America for everybody.”
What a difference three years can make.
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/VeraMBergen/status/1267966120662896642
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-governors.html
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/02/jobs-report-may-2023-.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/01/politics/wh-governors-call-protests/index.html.
https://twitter.com/edokeefe/status/1267478663949357057?s=20
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