Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 154
March 30, 2023
March 30, 2023
The New York grand jury investigating Trump’s 2016 hush-money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels has voted to indict the former president. While we don’t know the full range of charges, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office confirmed that they were forthcoming tonight when it released a statement saying, “This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal.”
This is the first time in history a former United States president has been indicted, although it is worth remembering that it is not new for our justice system to hold elected officials accountable. Mayors have been indicted and convicted. So have governors: in fact, four of the past ten Illinois governors have gone to prison. Vice presidents, too, have been charged with crimes: Aaron Burr was indicted on two counts of murder in 1804 while still in office and was tried for treason afterward. And in 1973, Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to tax evasion to avoid prison time.
That Trump’s indictment is happening in New York has likely made it harder for Trump to drum up the mobs he has been inciting to defend him. New York City notoriously dislikes the former real estate man. Voters of Tomorrow official Victor Shi was at the Manhattan district attorney’s office this evening and found no one protesting. When people did show up, he tweeted, they were not Trump supporters. They were women carrying signs that said, “‘Trump is guilty’ and ‘The Time Is Now,’” he wrote. “People in the background are chanting, ‘Way to go, ladies!’ NYC is rejoicing.”
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, to whom Trump people feel comfortable talking, said that the Trump camp at Mar-a-Lago is “in…shock” at the news. They thought yesterday’s announcement that the grand jury will go on a break in early April indicated that nothing would happen before the jury reconvened. As Haberman points out, Trump has been afraid of indictments for many years, and while some speculate this indictment might help his political profile (I disagree with that, by the way), he is unhappy to see it finally arrive. He did, though, immediately start fundraising off it.
Trump also released quite a long, antisemitic statement blaming “Radical Left Democrats” for a “Witch-Hunt” and saying this is “blatant Election interference.” House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) also quickly reinforced Trump's argument, saying that Bragg had “irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election,” and a number of other Republican officials reinforced that sentiment.
That is quite a position to take. The vote to indict came not from Bragg himself, but from a grand jury made up of ordinary Americans, and none of us knows what’s in the indictment, so one can hardly object to it in good faith.
CNN reporter Melanie Zanona reports that Trump has been working the phones tonight, reaching out to Republican allies to shore up support. Some of them, of course, are trying to discredit Bragg’s work by investigating him.
Trump is at his company’s property in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. Florida governor Ron DeSantis echoed Trump’s antisemitism and accusations, tweeting that Florida would “not assist in an extradition request.” But Article IV, Section 2, of the United States Constitution says, “A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.”
So either DeSantis is planning to violate the Constitution, or he recognizes that Trump will probably return to New York voluntarily, or—and this is the most likely—he is posturing to pick up Trump voters while secretly rejoicing that this will likely make it harder for Trump to win the Republican presidential nomination. While all eyes were on Trump this evening, paperwork was filed in the Florida Senate to begin the process of revising election laws, possibly so that DeSantis can run for president without resigning as governor, as under current Florida law he must.
But there was something striking about Trump’s statement. In blaming the “Radical Left Democrats” for their “Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement,” he wrote, “You remember it just like I do: Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”
It's not a list to be proud of, but that wording—“you remember it just like I do”—jumped out. Trump always goes back to what he calls the Russia hoax, his second attempt to rewrite the way people thought about his presidency (the first was the size of the crowd at his inauguration).
From the very start of his presidency, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation caught Trump's then–national security advisor Michael Flynn lying about his contact with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, more and more information has come out tying the Trump campaign to Russian operatives. As it did, Trump insisted that his followers must believe that all that information was a lie. If they believed his lies rather than the truth over the Russia scandal, they would trust him rather than believe the truth about everything.
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has given a new frame to Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. A piece by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times Magazine in November 2022 pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs. Rutenberg showed that in 2016, Russian operatives had presented to Trump advisor and later campaign manager Paul Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”
In exchange for weakening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to put their finger on the scale to help Trump win the White House.
Rutenberg notes that Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine looks a lot like a way to achieve the plan it suggested in 2016 but, thanks to a different president in the U.S., that invasion did not yield the results Russian president Vladimir Putin expected. The Russian economy is crumbling, and Tuesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia's Wagner group of mercenaries is "suffering an enormous amount of casualties in the Bakhmut area.” He called it a “slaughter-fest" for the Russians. Today, Putin issued an order to conscript another 147,000 soldiers by July 15.
Pressure on Putin continues to mount. The International Criminal Court’s March 17 arrest warrant against him and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, for war crimes apparently caught Russian leadership by surprise. It isolates Russia and worries other Russian lawmakers that they will be charged as well, weakening their support for Putin. “Now proximity to the president isn’t just talk,” one political strategist said, “it’s a real step towards being prosecuted by international law enforcement.”
And President of the European Commission (which is the executive of the European Union) Ursula von der Leyen today warned that as the European Union rethinks its trade policies, China could find itself isolated as well if it continues to support Russia. “How China continues to interact with Putin’s war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward,” she said.
Meanwhile, Turkey today dropped its opposition to Finland’s membership in NATO, a membership Finland has pursued in the wake of Russia’s recent aggression. Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia, and now it will be part of NATO.
Under such pressure, Russia today took the extraordinary step of detaining American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, accusing him of spying. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed deep concern and urged U.S. citizens living or traveling in Russia to “leave immediately.”
Yesterday, another study of the Russian invasion of Ukraine invited us to look backward as well as forward. Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a government-affiliated think tank, released a report on Russia’s “covert and clandestine operations, psychological operations, subversion, sabotage, special operations and intelligence and counterintelligence activities” designed to destabilize Ukraine and take it over. The report’s focus was on the current war in Ukraine, but as Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo notes, it establishes that some of the same people behind the destabilization of Ukrainian politics were part of Trump’s world. Notably, Russian operative Andrii Derkach not only worked to grab Ukraine for Russia, but also escorted Trump ally Rudy Giuliani around Ukraine in 2019 to dig up dirt on Biden.
In the end, as legal dominoes begin to fall, it might be that Americans do not, in fact, remember the history of his presidency from “Russia, Russia, Russia” forward the same way Trump does.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/30/trump-ny-indictment/
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/30/nyregion/trump-indictment-news
https://www.kcra.com/article/what-are-grand-jury-indictments/43380155#
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/4-of-illinois-past-10-governors-went-to-prison/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-falls-under-the-shadow-of-spiro-agnew
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/7050/?Tab=BillText
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/03/23/like-a-slap-in-the-face
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/31/turkey-formally-approves-finlands-nato-membership.html
https://static.rusi.org/202303-SR-Unconventional-Operations-Russo-Ukrainian-War-web-final.pdf.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-economy-is-starting-to-come-undone-431a2878
https://www.state.gov/russias-arrest-of-a-u-s-citizen/
Too much breaking news on Twitter; I’ve gone over my space limit. So, on Twitter:
SecBlinken/status/1641479253874159635
MZanona/status/1641636032939433985
JoyceWhiteVance/status/1641278615122767875
Victorshi2020/status/1641567835448016896
GovRonDeSantis/status/1641575007552778243
ManhattanDA/status/1641579988360019968
meridithmcgraw/status/1641576453333499906
Generational Change
I’ve finally wrapped the copy edit on the new book, and will be playing a bit over here. This is casual, today: just some thoughts, sparked by an email this morning….
People ask me all the time if people like obstructionist Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell or flame-throwing Colorado representative Lauren Boebert really believe what they’re saying. My ans…
March 29, 2023
March 29, 2023
After a lot of very late nights in a row, I came home from work early today and fell asleep, which is quite unlike me. It feels like I never really properly work up, and so am admitting defeat and going to bed again for real.
I missed posting a picture last weekend, so will make it up to you now with a dreamy image from my friend Peter. Kind of where my head seems to be tonight, and not a bad respite for all of us from what seems, once again, to be a daily firehose of news.
[Image, “Aubade”—which means “dawn serenade”— by Peter Ralston.]
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Notes:
You can find Peter at his gallery in Rockport, Maine, or here: https://www.ralstongallery.com/
March 28, 2023
Today, House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) sent a letter to President Joe Biden accusing him of being “missing in action” on efforts to address the approaching debt ceiling crisis. McCarthy accused Biden of “putting an already fragile economy in jeopardy” and tried to portray himself as the reasonable party, trying to negotiate “what is best for the American people.”
It was a simply astonishing document, brazen in its suggestion that it is Biden who is taking an “extreme position” on the debt ceiling when in fact it is the Republicans who are threatening to destroy the world’s economy to get their way. They are insisting they will hold the debt ceiling hostage to force a wide range of spending cuts, and also to push policies like easier access to drilling permits.
Once again, the debt ceiling is not about future spending. It’s about meeting the obligations past Congresses have incurred. And a great deal of that debt was incurred during the Trump administration, in large part from the 2017 tax cuts that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cost almost $2 trillion over 11 years.
Congress voted to increase the debt ceiling three times during the Trump administration. Biden had been clear that he expects it to do so again; he will not negotiate over paying the nation’s bills.
But, as part of the normal budget process, he has also been clear that he is more than happy—eager, even—to debate budget proposals with the Republicans. Biden produced a budget on March 9 and has said that he will enter into negotiations just as soon as the Republicans produce a budget proposal of their own.
But this they cannot do. McCarthy has promised dramatic cuts to the budget that he cannot deliver without cutting Social Security and Medicare, which the Republicans have agreed not to cut. At the same time, House Republicans have vowed to get rid of the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that fund the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), invest in addressing climate change, establish a minimum tax on the wealthy, and give the government the power to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, provisions that the Committee for a Responsible Budget projects will save the government almost $2 trillion over 2 decades.
And so, McCarthy published a letter trying to blame Biden for the mess the House speaker is in.
Biden responded immediately to McCarthy’s extraordinary public letter with one of his own, thanking the speaker for his communication and reiterating that Congress has always increased the debt ceiling without conditions and should “act quickly to do so now.”
“We can agree,” he wrote, “that an unprecedented default would inflict needless economic pain on hard-working Americans and that the American people have no interest in brinksmanship. That is why House Democrats joined with House Republicans and voted to avoid default throughout the Trump Administration—without conditions, despite disagreements about budget priorities. That same standard should apply today.”
Biden noted that he had already provided the American people with his own detailed budget, one that would reduce the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over ten years by increasing taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, cutting subsidies for the oil and gas industries, and expanding the list of drugs over which Medicare can negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. “My proposals enable us to lower costs for families and invest in our economic growth, all while reducing the deficit,” Biden wrote.
“Unfortunately,” he continued, the Republicans' proposals would “exacerbate the debt problem I inherited by adding over $3 trillion” with more tax cuts “skewed to the same constituencies who should be paying more, like multinational corporations and the richest taxpayers.” He urged McCarthy, once again, to produce a detailed budget plan rather than vague calls for savings, “so we can understand the full, combined impact on the deficit, the economy, and American families.”
Biden asked McCarthy to produce a Republican budget plan before Congress’s Easter recess “so that we can have an in-depth conversation when you return. As I have repeatedly said, that conversation must be separate from prompt action on the Congress’ basic obligation to pay the Nation’s bills and avoid economic catastrophe.”
Republicans are using similar brinksmanship with regard to the military to push their extremist agenda.
Back in July, just after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Pentagon officials warned the House Armed Services Committee that the abortion restrictions promptly imposed by Republican-dominated legislatures were adding to the military’s recruiting crisis by creating new family planning problems for military families. More than 100 military installations with about 240,000 service members are located in states that have total abortion bans, and Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s chief of personnel and readiness, warned that the new laws would hurt recruiting and that service members would leave the military rather than continue to live in those states.
In February, the military launched a policy permitting military personnel up to three weeks’ leave and reimbursement for travel expenses to go to a state that permits abortion care and fertility treatments. Those rules went into effect this month.
Now, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is refusing to permit senior military promotions—at this point 160 of them—in protest of the military’s rules covering reproductive health care. “You all have the American taxpayer on the hook to pay for travel and time off for elective abortions,” Tuberville said to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin today as he spoke before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “And you did not make this [policy] with anybody in this room or Congress taking a vote.”
Austin responded that women make up almost 20% of the military and about 80,000 are stationed in states that don’t have access to abortion (and men want to plan their families as well). Tuberville’s hold on promotions means that senior officials cannot rotate into new positions, leaving the military without leaders in places like the Navy’s 5th Fleet, which oversees military operations in the Middle East and which is due for a new leader within the next few months. Those holes will become worse over the next several months as key military leaders are set to retire or rotate out of their posts.
Austin warned that Tuberville’s stance affects military readiness, and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that Tuberville’s brinksmanship with the military risks “permanently politicizing the confirmation of military personnel…. If every single one of us objected to the promotion of military personnel whenever we feel passionately or strongly about an issue, our military would simply grind to a halt,” Schumer pointed out.
Tuberville says he will not stop his objections until the abortion policy is ended.
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Notes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mccarthy-debt-ceiling-letter-biden
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/ira-saves-almost-2-trillion-over-two-decades
President Biden @POTUSMy letter in response to Speaker McCarthy. 
10:23 PM ∙ Mar 28, 202325,974Likes5,929Retweetshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/28/military-abortion-tommy-tuberville/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/28/lloyd-austin-military-promotions-blockade-00089183
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/29/military-abortion-recruiting/
March 28, 2023
March 27, 2023
Seven people died today in a school shooting in Nashville. Three of them were nine-year-olds. Three were staffers. One was the shooter. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Joe Biden once again urged Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons, to which today’s Republican lawmakers will never agree because gun ownership has become a key element of social identity for their supporters, who resent the idea that the legal system could regulate their ownership of firearms.
In the wake of the shooting, Representative Andrew Ogles (R-TN), who represents Nashville thanks to redistricting by the Republican legislature that cut up a Democratic district, said he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting and offered “thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost.”
In 2021, Ogles, his wife, and two of his three children held guns as they posed for a Christmas card with a caption that read: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference—they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”
Meanwhile, protests continue in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to hamstring his country’s Supreme Court and put the legislature in charge of judicial review has sparked fierce opposition.
Netanyahu regained power last November while he was facing criminal charges of fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. His far-right coalition put together a government and elevated two critics of the Israeli judiciary, who promptly put forward a plan of “legal reforms.”
According to Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany in Lawfare, supporters of those changes claim that unelected judges who are part of a “liberal deep state” have too much power, often using it to pursue criminal proceedings against senior politicians, prohibit Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, or to refuse religious exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.
On January 4, 2023, Netanyahu’s minister of justice Yariv Levin proposed an overhaul of the judicial system that would put Netanyahu’s slim majority—just 64 seats in the 120-member Knesset—in complete control of the country’s laws, enabling the far-right majority to avoid any checks on its power (as well as enabling Netanyahu to evade the criminal trials he faces).
But Netanyahu did not campaign on remaking the judiciary; it is the far-right members of his coalition who have made it their signature issue. Protests against the measures began almost immediately as alarmed Israelis realized the move would destroy their democracy.
The protests continued until this Saturday, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned that the massive backlash against the judicial overhaul, including more and more military members who are boycotting their training missions, threatened the nation’s military readiness. He called for a halt to the attempt to force through the changes. Two members of the coalition backed Gallant and one appeared to be wavering, thus threatening Netanyahu’s majority. The next day, Netanyahu fired Gallant.
The firing sparked massive demonstrations and widespread strikes. At first, the far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition refused to stop their plans to overhaul the judiciary and called for their supporters to turn out to oppose the protesters, but Netanyahu apparently cut a deal with them. He has announced that the judicial reforms will be postponed while the two sides look for a compromise, and that he has agreed to the formation of a civil “national guard” the right will control. While Bethan McKernan of The Guardian called this move an empty gesture, Zach Beauchamp of Vox noted that the new paramilitary unit will be under the control of the extremist minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in 2008 was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and who used to keep a photograph of a mass murderer in his living room.
Still, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, the halt is “pretty transparently a stalling tactic,” launched in the hope that the protests will die down and the package can go forward later, although, as Marshall points out, polls show that the so-called reforms are very unpopular.
The crisis in Israel threatens the country’s relationship with the United States. During the Trump administration, Netanyahu cozied up to Trump and his Republican allies, and Israel’s continued rightward shift has alarmed foreign observers. In early March, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the state to “erase” a Palestinian town, and he has called himself a “proud homophobe” and a “fascist.” In Israel, Netanyahu’s son tweeted that the U.S. State Department is behind the protests, hoping to overthrow Netanyahu, a sentiment to which Netanyahu himself has nodded.
When Smotrich visited Washington, D.C., earlier this month, White House officials declined to meet with him, and more than ninety Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden asking him to use “all diplomatic tools available to prevent Israel’s current government from further damaging the nation’s democratic institutions and undermining the potential for two states for two peoples.” According to Josh Lederman of NBC News, more than 300 rabbis last year said that members of Netanyahu’s coalition were not welcome to speak at their synagogues.
The threats to the Israeli judiciary threaten the nation’s economy, as billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month. “Companies and investors place enormous value on strong and independent judicial systems because courts help protect them — not only against crime and corruption but also government overreach. Just as important, they protect what their employees value most: individual rights and freedoms,” he wrote.
In case anyone missed the obvious comparison between what is happening in Israel and what might transpire in the U.S., Bloomberg continued: “In the United States, our founding fathers’ insistence on checks and balances to control the tyrannical tendencies of majorities was part of their genius. Our Constitution is not perfect—no law is—but its many checks and balances have been essential to protecting and advancing fundamental rights and maintaining national stability. It was only through those safeguards that the United States has managed to withstand extreme shocks to our democracy in recent years—including a disgraceful attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—without a catastrophic fracturing.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/27/us/nashville-shooting-covenant-school
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/27/tennessee-congressman-mass-shooting-school/
Ali Velshi @AliVelshiAmericans should watch developments in Israel, in which a sitting prime minister, facing criminal charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery, was returned to office, and is now attempting to pass laws that would, among other things, limit the ways in which he can be declared… https://t.co/YQ62Kh1Sm11:22 PM ∙ Mar 27, 202330,221Likes8,984Retweetshttps://www.dw.com/en/benjamin-netanyahu-wins-majority-in-israeli-election/a-63643822
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/25/israel-defense-minister-yoav-gallant-netanyahu/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/26/israel-judicial-reform-netanyahu-protests/
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166134644/benjamin-netanyahu-fires-defense-minister-yoav-gallant
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65083776
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-observations-on-the-unfolding-crisis-in-israel
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/27/israel-netanyahu-judiciary-plans-halt
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/opinion/israel-protests-benjamin-netanyahu.html
Drezner’s WorldIsrael is Going Through It Right Now. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been reluctant to write about developments in Israel for quite a long time. That was particularly true after Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition won last November’s election. Netanyahu’s cabinet elevated some…Read morea day ago · 28 likes · 2 comments · Daniel W. Dreznerhttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/05/opinion/michael-bloomberg-israel-netanyahu.html
March 26, 2023
March 26, 2023
Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff landed midday today in Accra, the capital of Ghana, a country of about 33 million people slightly larger than Michigan on Africa’s west coast.
The 54 countries in Africa vary widely in language, religion, and culture, and Harris will visit three countries which initially seem unrelated. During her week on the African continent, in addition to Ghana, Harris will also visit Tanzania, a country bigger than Texas of about 62 million people on the east coast that is known for its natural wonders—Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti plain are both on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List. She will then visit neighboring Zambia, a landlocked country slightly larger than Texas with about 20 million people, where about one third of the country is game management areas or national parks, including one that protects the famous waterfall Mosi-oa-Tunya, or Smoke that Thunders—also known as Victoria Falls.
Harris’s visit is part of the Biden administration’s plan to counter Chinese and Russian influence on the African continent. That continent is rich in natural resources, and other countries want access to them. Between 2000 and 2016, China invested heavily in a number of African nations, sometimes in exchange for resources, sometimes for political alliances. It has become Africa’s second most important trading partner with about $250 billion in trade in 2021, just slightly behind the European Union, while U.S.-Africa trade in 2021 was about $64 billion.
Russia’s interests in Africa have tended toward support for authoritarian regimes. Russia focused on Africa after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate it from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources.
The Wagner Group has supported anti-democratic movements across the semi-arid Sahel region, which stretches across the northern part of the continent in a band above Ghana. After recent failures in Ukraine, the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, says he will turn his attention back to Africa, although it is unclear that he will be able to raise the necessary forces to make a major push.
African nations have historical reasons to be leery of European governments, who have tended to want to exploit the continent’s resources for themselves at the expense—often the deadly expense—of Africa’s inhabitants. They are also leery of the U.S., for when African nations began to throw off colonial rule, the Soviet Union tended to support those movements while the U.S. tended instead to support right-wing forces. More recently, the Trump years continued to weaken ties between the U.S and Africa as the United States withdrew from engagement with what the former president allegedly called “sh*thole countries.”
The Biden administration has worked to repair relations between the U.S. and Africa on the stated principle that Africans must have control over their own countries and their own future. The administration hosted the U.S.-Africa leaders summit in December 2022, where it announced that it backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20, welcoming the 55 member states of the African Union to the intergovernmental forum that focuses on global issues. The African Union has wanted admission to the G20 for years, noting that they are currently left out of discussions that affect them—most recently, the plans to address the coronavirus—and the administration’s promise that it would back the African Union’s admission was an important sign of the administration’s focus on strengthening ties between the continent and the U.S.
Since then, the Biden administration has pledged more than $6.5 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent.
Harris is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit and will emphasize the deep connections between Africa and the spread of Africans around the world, a process known as the African diaspora. In Ghana, Harris will visit the Cape Coast slave castle, used to hold enslaved Africans before they were shipped across the Atlantic for sale, primarily in the Caribbean. But the connections between Africa and the Americas reach far beyond the legacy of enslavement: Accra is the burial place of early twentieth-century U.S. writer and intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, for example. Harris will also visit Lusaka, Zambia, where as a child she visited her maternal grandfather when he worked there as a civil engineer.
The administration’s outreach to Africa is not simply a way to counter China and Russia on the continent. The White House explained that Harris is visiting these three countries specifically because their governments are investing in their democracies at a time when democracies around the globe are under siege.
Harris will launch her meeting with Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo. When the two leaders met before, in September 2021, Akufo-Addo identified the key issue facing Africa and the world, saying: “[O]ur big challenge—and it is a challenge of all those who want to develop democratic institutions on our continent—is to ensure and reassure our people that democratic institutions can be a vehicle for the resolution of their big problem—that is economic development as the means to eradicate poverty on the continent.”
This is a great summary of the central issue for democracy today.
In Africa the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, alongside a rise in interest rates, has made it hard for a number of nations to pay their international debts, which quintupled between 2000 and 2020. At the same time, the Russian blockade of Ukraine has cut food supplies while international sanctions against Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine has cut fertilizer supplies to the continent, increasing food shortages.
Those crises offer possibilities for international cooperation to invest in the African continent, especially as the new African Continental Free Trade Area agreement smooths trade across the continent and, with luck, brings rural regions into better contact with more urban areas.
But those same crises also open the way for strongmen to take over by promising to solve their country’s shortages. Russian disinformation in Africa drives pro-Russian and anti-European sentiment; a new Russian social media network launched on the continent in February 2022. Last week, Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed to have written off $20 billion of African debt and blamed the West for his inability to deliver the fertilizer he had promised.
But while democracy is under siege around the world, Freedom House, the non-profit organization that tracks the health of democracy worldwide, noted last September that African countries have shown important efforts to expand the rule of law and strong democratic institutions. Ghana, for example, has become more democratic but is threatened by the instability to its north.
Still, in August, the pan-African, nonpartisan research network Afrobarometer found that African voters want democratic institutions. According to a report from Chatham House that reviewed the polling, Africans “believe that the military should stay out of politics, that political parties should freely compete for power, that elections are an imperfect but essential tool for choosing their leaders, and that it is time for the old men who cling to power to step aside.” Seventy percent of Africans say they prefer democracy to any other form of government, 82% reject “strongman” rule, 77% reject one-party rule, and 75% reject military rule (even in countries that have recently experienced military coups).
Those impressive numbers in a continent of very young people—the median age is just 19—are an obvious reason for the U.S. to want better relations at a time when both President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have been very clear that they believe democracy at home depends at least in part on democracy overseas.
And the danger to democracy at home was crystal clear last night, as former president Trump held a rally in Waco, Texas, where in 1993 a 51-day government siege of the headquarters of a religious cult gave birth to the modern anti-government militia movement. Since then, Waco has been a touchstone for violent attacks on the government. There, last night, Trump stood on stage with his hand over his heart while loudspeakers played not the national anthem but a song recorded by January 6 insurrectionists. Footage from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol played on a screen behind him.
—
Notes:
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/12/response-debt-distress-africa-and-role-china
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234977/main-trade-partners-of-africa/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/world/asia/china-diplomacy-africa.html
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/mar/25/harris-heads-to-africa-amid-bidens-courtship-of-co/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-64451376
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/africa-worlds-future-touring-us-090551181.html
https://freedomhouse.org/article/how-african-democracies-can-rise-and-thrive-amid-instability
https://www.csis.org/analysis/prioritizing-partnerships-africa
Brian Klaas @brianklaasThis is who Trump always was. I cannot tell you how many people ridiculed those of us who warned he was an authoritarian wannabe despot way back in 2015, 2016, and 2017. But my God, it was so obvious. This man should never be in charge of anything, ever again. 
Evan Vucci @evanvucciAs footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is displayed in the background, former President Donald Trump stands while a song, “Justice for All,” is played during a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport, Saturday, March 25, 2023, in Waco, Texas. https://t.co/j8y1XSfJD111:48 PM ∙ Mar 26, 20236,685Likes1,561Retweetshttps://www.mo.be/en/analysis/russian-mercenaries-exchange-african-natural-resources
March 25, 2023
March 25, 2023
On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was visiting with a friend who lived near Washington Square in New York City when they heard fire engines and screams. They rushed out to the street to see what the trouble was. A fire had broken out in a garment factory on the upper floors of a building on Washington Square, and the blaze ripped through the lint in the air. The only way out was down the elevator, which had been abandoned at the base of its shaft, or through an exit to the roof. But the factory owner had locked the roof exit that day because, he later testified, he was worried some of his workers might steal some of the blouses they were making.
“The people had just begun to jump when we got there,” Perkins later recalled. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump, the[y] were trying to get that out and they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump. The…weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”
By the time the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was out, 147 young people were dead, either from their fall from the factory windows or from smoke inhalation.
Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25.
By the next day, New Yorkers were gathering to talk about what had happened on their watch. “I can't begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” Perkins said. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn't have been. We were sorry…. We didn't want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”
The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith—who would a few years later go on to four terms as New York governor and become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928—went to visit the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief. “It was a human, decent, natural thing to do,” Perkins said, “and it was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”
“This was the kind of shock that we all had,” Perkins remembered.
The next Sunday, concerned New Yorkers met at the Metropolitan Opera House with the conviction that “something must be done. We've got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action….” One man contributed $25,000 to fund citizens’ action to “make sure that this kind of thing can never happen again.”
The gathering appointed a committee, which asked the legislature to create a bipartisan commission to figure out how to improve fire safety in factories. For four years, Frances Perkins was their chief investigator.
She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission 'till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”
And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.
Perkins later mused that perhaps the new legislation to protect workers had in some way paid the debt society owed to the young people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”
But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state’s labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his “misleading statements” were “cruel and irresponsible.” She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.
In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
Frances Perkins, and all those who worked with her, transformed the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire into the heart of our nation’s basic social safety net.
“There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done,” Perkins said. “It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”
—
Notes:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1933-02-19/ed-1/seq-23/
https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/
https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/lectures/
https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html
Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Al Smith: Hero of the Cities, A Political Portrait Drawing on the Papers of Frances Perkins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969).
March 24, 2023
March 24, 2023
A follow-up to last night’s examination of the confusion among the Republicans about their budget plans: today when a reporter said to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) that the chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), had said that he and McCarthy were finalizing a list of proposals to give to President Biden about spending cuts, McCarthy answered: “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
Noise also continues from former president Donald Trump, who early this morning posted on social media that his indictment could lead to “potential death & destruction”; hours later, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg received a death threat in an envelope with white powder in it. For three days this week, Russian accounts have emailed bomb threats to the court buildings where the grand jury is meeting.
Tomorrow, Trump will hold a rally in Waco, Texas, where a 1993 government siege to extricate the leader of a religious cult who witnesses said was stockpiling weapons led to a gun battle and a fire that left seventy-six people dead.
Although a Republican investigation cited “overwhelming evidence” that exonerated the government of wrongdoing, right-wing talk radio hosts jumped on the events at Waco to attack the administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton. Rush Limbaugh stoked his listeners’ anger with talk of the government’s “murder” of citizens, and Alex Jones dropped out of community college to start a talk show on which he warned that the government had “murdered” the people at Waco and was about to impose martial law.
After the Waco siege the modern militia movement took off, and Trump is clearly using the anniversary to tap into domestic violence against the government to defend him in advance of possible indictments.
But will it work? His supporters turned out on January 6, 2021, when he was president and had the power—they thought—to command the army to back him. In the end, that didn’t happen. Since then, Trump’s foot soldiers have been going to prison while he dines at Mar-a-Lago and rails about how unfairly he has been treated.
Trump is also in more trouble today, as Judge Beryl Howell ruled last week that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, former top Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, former national security advisor Robert O'Brien, former top aide Stephen Miller, former deputy chief of staff and social media director Dan Scavino, and former Trump aides Nick Luna and John McEntee all have to testify before the federal grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Special counsel Jack Smith had subpoenaed these members of the Trump administration, and Trump had tried to stop their testimony by claiming it was covered by executive privilege. Howell rejected that claim. In the past, she rejected a similar claim by arguing that only the current president has the right to claim executive privilege and Biden had declined to do so. Meadows is the key witness to Trump’s involvement in the events of January 6.
Also today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal of so-called right-to-work legislation passed in 2012 by a Republican-controlled legislature, whose members pushed it through in a lame-duck session without hearings.
That legislation had a long history. U.S. employers had opposed workers’ unions since the organization of the National Labor Union in 1866, but the rise of international communism in the early twentieth century provoked a new level of violence against organized workers. In 1935, as part of the New Deal, Democrats passed the National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed it into law.
The Wagner Act confirmed workers’ right to organize and to bargain with employers collectively (although to appease southern Democrats, it exempted domestic and agricultural workers, who in the South were mostly Black). It also defined unfair labor practices and established a new National Labor Relations Board that could issue cease and desist orders if workers testified that employers were engaging in them.
The Wagner Act gave workers a unified voice in American politics and leveled the playing field between them and employers. But while most Americans of both parties liked the Wagner Act, right-wing Republicans hated it because it put large sums of money into the hands of labor officials, who used the money to influence politics. And organized workers had backed Democrats since the 1860s.
So, in 1947, a Republican-led Congress pushed back against the Wagner Act. The previous year, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had launched “Operation Dixie” to organize Black workers, which seemed a threat to segregation as well as white employers. Together, business Republicans and segregationist Democrats passed the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Ohio Senator Robert Taft (who was the son of President William Howard Taft) claimed that the Taft-Hartley Act would simply equalize power between workers and employers after the “completely one-sided” Wagner Act gave all the power to labor leaders.
The Taft-Hartley Act limited the ways in which workers could organize; it also went after unions’ money. Although the Wagner Act had established that if a majority of a company’s workers voted to join a union, that union would represent all the workers in the company, it didn’t require all the workers to join that union. That presented a problem: if workers were going to get the benefits of union representation without joining, why should they bother to pay dues?
So labor leaders began to require that everyone employed in a unionized company must pay into the union to cover the cost of bargaining, whether or not they joined the union.
The Taft-Hartley Act undermined this workaround by permitting states to get rid of the requirement that employees who didn’t join a union that represented them must pay fees to the union.
Immediately, states began to pass so-called right-to-work laws. Their supporters argued that every man should have the right to bargain for his work on whatever terms he wanted, without oversight by a union. But lawmakers like Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who pushed a right-to-work law in his own state, were clear that they were intent on breaking the power of organized workers. He was determined to destroy the political power of unions because, he said, their leaders were stealing American freedom. They were, he said, “more dangerous than Soviet Russia.”
Michigan had been known as a pro-union state, but in 2012, Republicans there pushed through two right-to-work laws over waves of protest. Repealing the laws has been a priority for Democrats, and now that they are in control of state government, they have made it happen.
Joey Cappelletti of the Associated Press notes that twenty-six states currently have right to work laws, and although Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work law in 2017, it has been 58 years since a state repealed one. Indiana voters repealed theirs in 1965; Republicans put it back into place in 2012.
Republicans say that since the neighboring states of Indiana and Wisconsin have right-to-work laws—although there were huge protests when those laws went into place in 2012 and 2015—Michigan’s repeal of right to work will make that state less attractive to employers.
But after signing the law today, Governor Whitmer embraced a different vision for the state, saying: "Today, we are coming together to restore workers' rights, protect Michiganders on the job, and grow Michigan's middle class."
—
Notes:
Acyn @AcynReporter: Arrington said you were finalizing a list of proposals to give to Biden about spending cutsMcCarthy: I don’t know what he’s talking about 3:45 PM ∙ Mar 24, 2023481Likes104Retweetshttps://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/24/death-threat-to-manhattan-da-bragg-after-trump-warning.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/meadows-top-trump-aides-ordered-testify-jan-6/story?id=98101813
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/national-labor-relations-act#transcript
https://hotelworkers.org/article/michigan-becomes-a-so-called-right-to-work-state
https://www.law360.com/articles/1589920
https://www.mlive.com/news/2012/12/gov_snyder_signs_right-to-work.html
March 23, 2023
March 23, 2023
While the latest machinations from Trump are taking up oxygen, the debt ceiling crisis hasn’t gone away. Indeed, just as it is becoming more and more urgent, Republican far-right extremists are becoming more committed to using the opportunity to blow up the economy as a way to get their wishes.
The uncertainty that followed the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank illustrated just how quick and how dangerous even a relatively minor banking crisis could be, but far-right Republicans are not backing off on their threat to refuse to raise the debt ceiling without concessions from Democrats. Two months ago, in response to a question about “whether you think this debt ceiling is going to be used as a bargaining chip in some way that could turn dangerous?” the chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), said, “I believe it will and I believe it has to.”
Now, in the wake of the banking crisis, Arrington says the uncertainty after the banking instability means that “[t]his is the best time to do it.” Republicans are arguing that the inflation of the past year is the result of pandemic-era spending and that by threatening the debt ceiling, they can bring that spending under control.
But let’s be very clear on this: the debt ceiling is not about future spending. It is about the amount of money Congress authorizes the Treasury to borrow in order to pay obligations that already exist. It is not associated with any individual bill, and it is not an appropriation for any specific program. It enables the government to borrow money to pay for programs in bills already passed. If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling when necessary, the government will default on its debts, sparking a financial catastrophe.
Future spending is in the government’s annual budget. The budget process starts when the president submits a detailed budget request to Congress for the fiscal year that starts on October 1, usually by the first Monday in February, though sometimes that is delayed (as it was this year). The president’s budget shows what the administration thinks is important to fund and how much that will cost.
Congress is then supposed to consider the president’s budget, hold hearings to ask administration officials why they need certain items or have gotten rid of others, and then develop its own plan. This budget resolution, as it is called, sets amounts that Congress thinks are appropriate for different parts of the budget. Congress is supposed to pass that budget resolution by April 15 (even though it rarely does). Appropriations bills then fund the items in the budget.
President Biden introduced his detailed budget on March 9, deliberately using it as a way to signal his determination to use the government to help ordinary Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations. He is operating under the belief that the economy grows fastest and does better for most people when the government invests in jobs, education, and social services rather than when it tries to free up as much capital as possible for wealthy investors. This is the Republican plan, which is based on the idea that the wealthy will invest in the economy and create jobs. Biden called for funding programs—while also cutting the deficit—by rolling back the Republicans' 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, by imposing a 25% tax on billionaires, and by raising the tax on stock buybacks.
Republicans have attacked Biden’s budget, but they have not produced one of their own. They likely can’t produce one, because the only way for House Republicans to deliver the cost savings they have promised is to cut Social Security and Medicare, cuts they have advocated for years. But at his State of the Union address, when prominent Republicans yelled that he was a liar for suggesting they wanted to cut those popular programs, Biden backed them into vowing not to cut them.
Then, earlier this month, in response to a request from Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Congressional Budget Office wrote that if the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations stay in place as Republicans wish and defense spending, Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ programs are all protected—as Republicans now say they want to do—even zeroing out all other discretionary spending in the budget will not balance it by 2033.
Arrington and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) say they will release the Republican budget after April 15, blaming Biden’s own late budget for their delay. But because they have not launched an official plan, they have left an opening for the far-right House Freedom Caucus of around three dozen lawmakers to step into the gap.
On March 10, Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was in front as members of the Freedom Caucus issued a statement laying out the demands they want met before they will consider raising the debt ceiling. They want laws that cut current spending by stopping student loan relief, clawing back all unspent Covid-19 funds, and repealing the $80 billion in appropriations for the Internal Revenue Service and all the monies appropriated by the Inflation Reduction Act for addressing climate change. They want to cap future spending at 2022 levels, claiming a cap will cut “the wasteful, woke, and weaponized federal bureaucracy.” They demand further business deregulation and more work requirements on programs like Medicaid.
If all that gets written into law, Freedom Caucus members “will consider voting to raise the debt ceiling.” Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), whose 11-point plan to “rescue America” was the one Biden pointed to most frequently as a Republican plan to cut Social Security and Medicare because it called for every law to end in five years and have to be repassed, said he was “very optimistic” about the Freedom Caucus’s plan. Just this week, McCarthy added the idea of tying changes to the permitting process for oil and mining development to the debt ceiling.
But, in fact, the things the Republicans call for are not popular in the country, and the administration has been laying out piece by piece how the devastating cuts in the proposal would impact families, consumers, the elderly, and working Americans, all to increase tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
In any case, while it claims to be eager to negotiate over the budget, the Biden White House maintains it will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, especially as the current financial woes are attributable in large part to the explosion of the deficit and debt under Trump. Republicans seem hell-bent on doing so, expecting that the Democrats will ultimately back down rather than permit the Republicans to destroy the economy. In the past, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has managed to bring Republicans around, but now he is out of commission from his fall.
It is against this backdrop that Republicans have rushed to defend Trump, who is pretty clearly trying to whip up his supporters to violence. His antics have gotten so extreme that he posted an image today of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg beside an image of himself brandishing a baseball bat. Today, citing Trump’s apparent calls for violence, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered that the jurors in the case of E. Jean Carroll’s rape accusations against Trump be kept anonymous for their own safety. The case goes to trial next month.
Republicans seem to be working with Trump to keep him in the news, perhaps aware that he is drowning out both the debt ceiling crisis and their inability to produce a budget.
Three days ago, Jim Jordan (R-OH), James Comer (R-KY), and Bryan Steil (R-WI) demanded that Bragg deliver to them all information related to his investigation into Trump. Today the Manhattan DA’s general counsel Leslie B. Dubeck correctly called their demand an “unprecedented” federal intrusion into an independent local investigation that unlawfully undermined New York’s sovereignty. She added: “The Letter only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested the next day and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene. Neither fact is a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry.” She noted that Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, had written a letter to Jordan encouraging Congress to investigate Bragg.
Now a different case is suddenly imperiling Trump. Yesterday a federal appeals court ruled that Trump attorney Evan Corcoran must turn over records to Special Counsel Jack Smith and testify before the grand jury in the investigation into Trump’s theft of classified documents. Judge Beryl Howell said last week that Trump could not use attorney-client privilege to block Corcoran’s participation because prosecutors in Smith’s office had shown sufficient evidence to support the claim that Trump had committed a crime, triggering the “crime-fraud” exception to attorney-client privilege. Trump’s lawyers appealed, and the appeals court agreed with Howell.
A Trump spokesperson told ABC News: "There is no factual or legal basis or substance to any case against President Trump."
Corcoran is testifying tomorrow.
—
Notes:
https://punchbowl.news/archive/32223-punchbowl-news-am/card/8/#group-8
@andrewrsorkin: “The question that I’d ask you is whether you think this debt ceiling is going to be used as a bargaining chip in a way that could turn dangerous?”\n\nHouse GOP Budget Chair @RepArrington: “I believe it will and I believe it has to.” ","username":"JesseLee46","name":"Jesse Lee","date":"Mon Jan 30 23:59:02 +0000 2023","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/upload/...
Jesse Lee @JesseLee46There you have it…@andrewrsorkin: “The question that I’d ask you is whether you think this debt ceiling is going to be used as a bargaining chip in a way that could turn dangerous?”House GOP Budget Chair @RepArrington: “I believe it will and I believe it has to.” 11:59 PM ∙ Jan 30, 20231,008Likes641Retweetshttps://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/introduction-to-the-federal-budget-process
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2023-03/58984-spendings.pdf
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/10/freedom-caucus-debt-ceiling-budget
https://rollcall.com/2023/03/10/freedom-caucus-lays-out-debt-limit-spending-demands/
https://rollcall.com/2023/03/21/house-republican-leaders-work-to-fuse-support-for-energy-package/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/nyregion/trump-rape-case-jurors.html
March 22, 2023
March 22, 2023
This week, news has been focused on the former president’s possible indictment for paying $130,000 in hush money to adult film performer Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their 2006 affair before the 2016 election. The information currently being thrown about has been shaped by Trump himself and is obviously suspect (among other things, he has apparently raised $1.5 million since he claimed he would be arrested on Tuesday).
Although Republican lawmakers have no more idea than any of the rest of us do what the Manhattan grand jury might have seen, or what charges might be brought against Trump, they have tried to gloss over the scandal by claiming it is about a non-disclosure agreement or that it happened seven years ago or that its investigation is “a political witch hunt perpetrated by one of the far left radical socialist district attorneys,” as Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said. But as journalist Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky explained today in Public Notice, the payment was a big deal in the larger scheme of American democracy.
Trump bought Daniels’s silence because he was willing to break laws in order to get elected. Then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen paid Daniels for her story in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. Cohen testified that he paid her through a shell company to keep Trump’s connection to the payment hidden. Then Trump reimbursed Cohen for “legal fees.”
That’s a problem with regard to business filings and tax fraud. It is also a problem for the campaign finance laws intended to protect clean elections. Cohen’s payment was a contribution to the Trump campaign because it was made “in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.” The payment was intended to make sure voters didn’t hear another sex scandal in October 2016, just after the Access Hollywood tape came out in which Trump talked vulgarly about sexually assaulting women, when it might have hurt his chances at election. The $130,000 contribution was far above the individual limit of $2,700, and the Trump campaign did not disclose it.
This is not small potatoes. When the issue came to light, Cohen pleaded guilty for his role in the payments, and he was sentenced to three years in prison. Cohen testified that he made the payments at Trump’s direction.
This is also not an isolated incident. Trump has proved himself more than willing to cheat to win elections. In the 2020 presidential election season, before he tried to overthrow the election altogether, he tried to strong-arm Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the son of the Democratic candidate about whom he was most worried: Joe Biden. Trump knew that the media would run with an announcement of an investigation, wounding Biden’s candidacy by keeping the story in the news even without any real investigation behind it.
The Trump campaign had done much the same thing in 2016. According to the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated the ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, Trump’s people were willing at the very least to work alongside Russian operatives to weaken Trump’s Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign also boosted Trump’s standing in the 2016 election season with the recurring refrain of the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails, convincing voters—falsely—that she had committed crimes.
The pending issue of the hush-money payment is not just about 2016, and it is not just about Trump. That today’s Republican leaders have not condemned any of his attempts to cheat speaks volumes about the party. As Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) pointed out today, when “Cohen was arrested, indicted, convicted, and went to prison for participating in an illegal hush money payment scheme to Stormy Daniels, not a single Republican leader complaining now said a thing about what happened to Michael Cohen.” So why the rush to defend Trump in the same case?
It appears Republicans have gotten to the point that they don’t believe they can win a free and fair election, and in their conviction that Democrats will destroy the country, they believe cheating to win is justified. They cannot condemn Trump because he delivered what they wanted: a victory.
In a democracy, the way parties are supposed to win elections is by making a better case for being in power than their opponents do. Losing elections is supposed to make leaders think deeply about how better to appeal to voters. That system keeps all parties constantly honing their policies, thinking through problems, benefiting their constituents.
Our election laws are designed to try to hold the playing field level, and a party should want to keep the system fair in order to keep itself healthy. But if a party is willing to cheat to win, it no longer has to work on policies that appeal to voters; it can simply game the system to dismantle the competition on which democracy depends and instead create a one-party state.
There are many legal problems in Trump’s front yard these days. Some, like his theft of documents with markings bearing the highest level of classification and his attempt to overturn the Georgia results for the 2020 presidential election, are heating up fast, and their significance is clear.
But for all that the case we are currently hearing so much about seems less serious on its face than the other things charged to Trump's account, a hush-money payment to silence someone whose story might have affected the 2016 election is no laughing matter.
—
Notes:
Public NoticeTrump paid off Stormy Daniels to subvert democracyBy Noah Berlatsky Donald Trump may finally be facing something like consequences for his long history of criminality and corruption. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is expected to charge the former president soon with crimes, including campaign finance violations…Read morea day ago · 80 likes · 12 comments · Aaron Rupar and Noah BerlatskyAcyn @AcynLieu: When Michael Cohen was arrested, indicted, convicted, and went to prison for participating in an illegal hush money payment scheme to Stormy Daniels, not a single Republican leader complaining now said a thing about what happened.. 4:15 PM ∙ Mar 22, 202310,623Likes3,037Retweets
Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFastStill not arrested or charged with anything 
5:37 PM ∙ Mar 22, 2023854Likes190Retweets
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