Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 157
May 3, 2023
May 2, 2023
The end of the semester is always rough and I’ve had too many long nights, so tonight I am going to offer just one explanation about the debt clause in the Fourteenth Amendment:
The debt ceiling crisis continues to dominate the news, with some speculation now that White House officials are wondering whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution might require the government to continue to pay its bills whether Congress actually raises the debt ceiling or not.
The fourth section of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
This statement was a response to a very specific threat.
During the Civil War, the U.S. Treasury issued more than $2.5 billion in bonds to pay for the war effort. To make those bonds attractive to investors, Congress had made most of them payable in gold, along with their interest. That gold backing made them highly valuable in an economy plagued by inflation.
In contrast, most working Americans used the nation’s first national currency, the greenbacks, introduced by Congress in 1862 and so called because they were printed with green ink on the back and black ink on the front—as our money still is; check out a dollar bill. Because greenbacks were backed only by the government’s ability to pay, their value tended to fluctuate. As Congress pumped more and more of them into the economy to pay expenses, inflation made their value decrease.
National taxes funded the bonds, which meant that workers whose salary was paid in the depreciating greenbacks paid taxes to the government, which in turn paid interest to bondholders in rock-solid gold. After the war, workers noted that inflation meant their real wages had fallen during the war, while war contracts had poured money into the pockets of industrialists.
Workers couldn’t do much about the war years and still faced years of paying off the wartime bonds. They began to call for repaying war bonds not in gold but in depreciated currency, insisting that taxpayers should not be bled dry for rich bondholders. Democrats, furious at wartime policies that had enriched industrialists and favored bankers, promised voters that if voters put them in control of Congress, they would put this policy into law.
Republican legislators who had created the bonds in the first place were horrified at the idea that Democrats were claiming the right to change the terms under which the debt had been sold. This, they said, was “repudiation” and would turn those who had invested in the United States against it.
Bonds were about far more than just money. When the war broke out, the Treasury had turned to bankers to underwrite the war. But the bankers were notably reluctant to bet against the cotton-rich South and refused to provide the amount of help necessary. To keep the government afloat, Treasury officers had been forced to turn to ordinary Americans, who for four years had shouldered the financial burden of supporting their government.
“It is your war,” Treasury Secretary William Pitt Fessenden wrote to the public in 1864. “Much effort has been made to shake public faith in our national credit, both at home and abroad…yet we have asked no foreign aid. Calm and self-reliant, our own means thus far have proved adequate to our wants. They are yet ample to meet those of the present and the future.”
On April 3, 1865, the day the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, fell, bond salesman Jay Cooke hung from his office window a sign that featured the nicknames of the two most popular bond issues, along with an even larger banner that read:
“The Bravery of our Army
The Valor of our Navy
Sustained by our Treasury
Upon the Faith and
Substance of
A Patriotic People.”
The debt was a symbol of a newly powerful national government that represented ordinary Americans rather than the elite enslavers who had controlled it before the war. “There has never been a national debt so generously distributed among and held by the masses of the people as all the obligations of the United States,” wrote an Indianapolis newspaper in 1865. “This shows at once the strength of popular institutions, and the confidence the people have in their perpetuity.”
Undermining the value of U.S. bonds was an attack not just on the value of investments, but on the nation itself. When Republican lawmakers wrote the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, they recognized that a refusal to meet the nation’s financial obligations would dismantle the government, and they defended the sanctity of the commitments the government had made. When voters ratified that amendment in 1868, they added to the Constitution, our fundamental law, the principle that the obligations of the country “shall not be questioned.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/us/politics/debt-limit-us-constitution.html
May 2, 2023
May 1, 2023
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) today to warn him that the Treasury will be unable to pay the government’s bills by early June, possibly as early as June 1. She wrote: “I respectfully urge Congress to protect the full faith and credit of the United States by acting as soon as possible.”
President Biden promptly called McCarthy and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), along with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for a meeting on May 9 to discuss the crisis. The delay is caused by the fact that the House is not in session and McCarthy is in Israel with a House delegation. They will have only a week to confer before Biden is off to Japan for the 2023 summit of the International Group of Seven, or G7, a political forum consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, along with the European Union, which is a "non-enumerated member."
Biden has said his position remains the same: he will not negotiate over paying the nation’s bills, although he is happy to negotiate over the national budget as part of the normal process.
Last week, the House passed a bill that would raise the debt ceiling for about a year and cap government spending at 2022 levels, which amounts to cuts of about $130 billion in non-defense spending.
Republicans are angry at a warning from the Department of Veterans Affairs— the VA— that the House bill will force a 22% cut to the department’s budget, costing 81,000 jobs in health services, reducing outpatient visits for veterans by 30 million, increasing food insecurity for about 1.3 million veterans, and adding 134,000 claims to disability backlogs. Republicans insist this is a lie, but they have declined to say where their cuts would come from.
Meanwhile, Schumer wrote to his colleagues today to condemn what he called the Republicans’ “Default on America Act,” or “DOA,” which “offers two choices: either default on the debt or default on America, forcing steep cuts to law enforcement, veterans, families, teachers, and kids.” He said that the bill would “gut Medicaid for over 20 million Americans, rip away SNAP benefits for over a million recipients and eliminate Pell grants for tens of thousands of American students every year.”
Schumer has prepared for the Senate to take up two bills: a clean debt ceiling bill and McCarthy’s bill, which if it passes would become part of normal budget negotiations.
In another story with major implications, tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Supreme Court ethics. Supreme Court justices are the only federal judges that are not explicitly bound by a code of conduct and, aside from the decisions that have made the justices seem to be advancing a political agenda, the court appears to be plagued with ethics scandals. Confidence in the court is draining away.
After Justice Samuel Alito’s early draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision of last June leaked, an angry chief justice vowed to find the leaker, only to have an antiabortion activist claim in December that he and his colleagues had courted the goodwill of justices with donations to the Supreme Court Historical Society. He claimed that he had received advance notice of the court’s decision in the Burwell v.Hobby Lobby case, important to antiabortion activists, from someone connected to Justice Alito.
Alito claimed the Dobbs leak had made the justices “targets for assassination” and the final report on the Dobbs leak called the leak “a grave assault on the judicial process,” but the report said investigators could not determine who had leaked. Court employees had been grilled, but it was not clear that the justices themselves had been questioned.
Then, last month, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas did not disclose gifts and trips worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, or that Crow had bought and improved a home in which Thomas’s mother still lives.
Then, Politico reported that Justice Neil Gorsuch did not disclose the purchaser of his jointly-owned log home in Colorado. After two years on the market, the house sold nine days after Gorsuch was confirmed to the court; Gorsuch reported making between a quarter- and a half-million dollars on the sale. The buyer was the head of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm that has been involved in at least 22 cases before the court since Gorsuch joined it.
In late April, Insider reported another appearance of conflict: a whistleblower filed an official complaint against Chief Justice Roberts himself in December, alleging that he had listed his wife’s income as “salary” when the $10.3 million she received from 2007 to 2014 came from commissions paid by corporations and law firms for her work as a legal recruiter.
On April 20 the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin (D-IL) invited Chief Justice John Roberts or anyone he designated to testify about how Supreme Court justices address ethical issues. “The status quo is no longer tenable,” wrote Durbin. “The time has come for a new public conversation on ways to restore confidence in the Court’s ethical standards.
On April 25, Roberts declined Durbin’s invitation, writing that he was concerned about the separation of powers and about “preserving judicial independence.” He promised that the justices subscribe to a statement of ethics principles and practices, which he attached.
On April 27 the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee responded with a letter saying: “It is noteworthy that no Justice will speak to the American people after numerous revelations have called the Court’s ethical standards into question, even though sitting Justices have testified before Senate or House Committees on at least 92 occasions since 1960.” They asked when the justices had agreed to the statement of ethics.
Today, Roberts responded that they had agreed to the ethics statement on April 25, and said that justices policed their own ethics as they “consult a wide variety of guidance on ethics issues, including statutes, judicial opinions, advice [from legal experts], scholarly commentary, and historical practice, among other sources.”
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee responded that “[t]hese answers further highlight the need for meaningful Supreme Court ethics reform.” Pressure for that reform is growing.
On April 26, Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) introduced the Supreme Court Code of Conduct Act, a bill to reform Supreme Court ethics that gets around the separation of powers issue by requiring the court to write its own code of conduct and appoint an official to review potential conflicts and public complaints. It is a remarkably simple bill, designed, King and Murkowski say, to shore up the public’s confidence in the Supreme Court. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post suggested that at the very least, the measure should force lawmakers who oppose it to explain why.
The crisis in the Supreme Court is headed for another major test. The court today agreed to hear a case that could gut the government’s ability to regulate business. The court will reconsider the 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision, which affirmed that judges should defer to government agencies in their reasonable interpretation of a law if the wording of the law is vague. This court seems likely to reject this idea and to allow judges to rein in regulation according to their own interpretation of the law.
Only eight justices will decide the case, since Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was on the circuit court that first heard the case at the heart of the challenge to Chevron, has recused herself.
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Notes;
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Debt_Limit_Letter_Congress_Members_05012023.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/us/politics/debt-limit-date-janet-yellen.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/01/u-s-could-breach-debt-limit-by-june-1-yellen-warns-00094731
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/neil-gorsuch-colorado-property-sale-00093579
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/us/politics/supreme-court-historical-society-donors-justices.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/19/supreme-court-leak-roberts/
https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20Chairman%20Durbin%2004.25.2023.pdf
https://twitter.com/JudiciaryDems/status/1653119545157058560
https://twitter.com/JudiciaryDems/status/1653119545157058560
https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-justice-sit-out-high-stakes-case-1797660
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/22/politics/chief-justice-john-roberts-clarence-thomas/index.html
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/dear_colleague_-_5123.pdf
https://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=5874
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3976425-veterans-sound-alarm-on-mccarthy-budget-cuts/
May 1, 2023
April 30, 2023
Thanks to Heather Timmons, White House editor for Reuters, whom I met a lifetime ago in summer 2016 as we tried to figure out what on earth was going on in the Republican Party, I got to hear President Biden’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in person last night. Speaking in the giant hall in the Washington Hilton where the event was held, the president was relaxed and funny, poking fun at himself, entrepreneur Elon Musk, former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, and House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Finally, he embraced the Dark Brandon meme that suggests he has a laser-eyed alter-ego who ingeniously defeats his opponents.
Biden also joked about his age, most memorably when he said he believes in the First Amendment that protects freedom of the press, and “not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it.”
But right now, the First Amendment itself is no joke. A member of the U.S. press corps is in prison in Russia on trumped-up charges of “espionage.” Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was covering Russia’s mercenary military organization the Wagner Group when Russian officials arrested him on March 29. The U.S. State Department has called him “wrongfully detained,” which means the government sees him as a political hostage.
In contrast, around 2,600 people showed up last night to witness humorist Roy Wood Jr. make fun of the president and vice president to their faces. It was theater, but theater that demonstrates an important principle: our government has no right to silence our criticism of it.
The Framers of our government enshrined the right to freedom of the press in our Constitution along with the right to gather together, to practice any religion we want (including none at all), the right to say what we want, and the right to ask our government to do (or not to do) things. After writing a new constitution that created a far stronger national government than existed under the Articles of Confederation, which had created the government since 1777 (although the Articles were not ratified until 1781), the Framers designed the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights to hold back government power.
The power to control what citizens can publish about the government would give leaders the power to destroy democracy. A free press is imperative to keep people informed about what leaders are doing. Lose it, and those in power can do whatever they wish without accountability.
From the beginning of the American republic, though, the press was openly partisan. This meant the president worked quite closely with newspaper reporters from his own party, while ignoring, or sometimes even trying to silence, his opponents. By the 1880s the country had begun to turn against the partisan press and to “independent” newspapers, and the number of papers took off.
No longer advocates for a party position and eager to attract readers, reporters began to look for new, exciting stories. And not much was more exciting in 1886 than a marriage in the White House. On June 2 of that year, 49-year-old President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom, who had been his unofficial ward, in the Blue Room.
Reporters had dogged their courtship (many thought he was interested in her more age-appropriate mother), and they flocked after the newlyweds, finally prompting the irritated president to ask his personal secretary to keep them away. But while the president was angry at the scrutiny, editors recognized a good story, and by the end of Cleveland’s first term, a reporter had figured out he could just stay at the White House and write columns based on interviews with people coming from meetings with the president. Other papers immediately stationed their own people at the White House.
In Cleveland’s second term, which started in 1893, his private secretary worked directly with the press. Through the next few presidencies, the role of press secretary began to take shape. Theodore Roosevelt relished attention from reporters. When his shy successor William Howard Taft shunned them, they complained he was hiding things.
So, shortly after he took office in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson held the nation’s first press conference, only to complain both that reporters were quoting statements he considered off the record, and that the conferences were a free-for-all in which anyone could shout out questions, often ones Wilson found Irritating (like his opinion about Groundhog Day).
In 1914, rumors circulated that Congress might begin to choose which reporters would be allowed at Wilson’s press conferences. In alarm, eleven White House reporters organized the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA). In 1921, as part of their annual election of officers, fifty members of the growing WHCA held a dinner. With former newspaperman Warren G. Harding in the White House, they were in a celebratory mood, despite Prohibition (which they ignored). Taking their cue from the famous Gridiron Club, which held dinners where they roasted politicians, WHCA members poked fun at the administration and Congress.
While at first the reporters simply wanted access to the president, as the WHCA became an established force it came to work for transparency more generally, recognizing that journalists are the main eyes and voice of the people. It now protects press passes for journalists who regularly cover the White House and assigns seats in the briefing room. It also funds scholarships for aspiring journalists and gives journalism awards; the annual dinner is their main fundraising event.
In the modern era there is plenty of criticism over the glitzy dinner and what seems too much chumminess between journalists and lawmakers. But the demonstration that the government cannot censor the press is valuable. For the four years of the past administration, the president refused to attend the dinner and barred his staff and other officials from attending.
The same president called the press the “enemy of the people,” encouraging his supporters to attack reporters. Angry at negative stories about him from Voice of America, Trump replaced the independent editor of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, with Michael Pack, a close ally of Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Pack set out to turn the channel into a pro-Trump mouthpiece. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell later concluded that Pack’s firing, disciplining, and investigating of journalists who didn’t toe the line violated the First Amendment.
The dance between the government and the press is intricate and full of missteps, but last night, at an event where journalists wore pins that read, “I Stand With Evan,” this historian found the public reminder that the president must answer to journalists, with grace if at all possible, oddly moving.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/world/europe/wrongfully-detained-us-citizens.html
https://www.vox.com/culture/23300286/biden-dark-brandon-meme-maga-why-confusing-explained
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/press-room/press-timelines/the-white-house-and-the-press-timeline
https://whca.press/about/history/
https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/
https://whca.press/news/annual-dinner/
https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-correspondents-dinner-does-taxpayer-pay-it-1403484
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437610-trump-calls-press-the-enemy-of-the-people
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/white-house-voice-of-america.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/22/donald-trump-propaganda-war-199799
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/business/voice-of-america-violated-journalists-rights/index.html
April 30, 2023
April 29, 2023
A self-portrait from our trip up the coast a few weeks ago. Perfect commentary on the solution to a very long week.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
April 28, 2023
April 28, 2023
According to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, legislatures in at least ten states have set out to weaken federal child labor laws. In the first three months of 2023, legislators in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota introduced bills to weaken the regulations that protect children in the workplace, and in March, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law repealing restrictions for workers younger than 16.
Those in favor of the new policies argue that fewer restrictions on child labor will protect parents’ rights, but in fact the new labor measures have been written by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a Florida-based right-wing think tank. FGA is working to dismantle the federal government to get rid of business regulations. It has focused on advancing its ideology through the states for a while now, but the argument that its legislation protects parental rights has recently enabled them to wedge open a door to attack regulations more broadly.
FGA is part of a larger story about Republicans’ attempt to undermine federal power in order to enact a radical agenda through their control of the states.
That goal has been part of the Republican agenda since the 1980s, as leaders who hated federal regulation of business, provision of a social safety net, and protection of civil rights recognized that a strong majority of Americans actually quite liked those things and getting Congress to repeal them would be a terribly hard sell. Instead, Republicans used their control of federal courts to weaken the power of the federal government and send power back to the states.
Historically, states have been far easier than the much larger, more diverse federal government for a few wealthy men to dominate. After 1986, Republicans began to restrict voting in the states they controlled, giving themselves an advantage, and after 2010 they focused on taking over the states through gerrymandering. This has enabled them to stop Congress from enacting popular legislation and has created quite radical state legislatures. Currently, in 29 of them, Republicans have supermajorities, permitting them to legislate however they wish.
The process of taking control of the states by choosing who can vote got stronger today when the North Carolina Supreme Court, now controlled by Republicans, revisited an earlier ruling concerning partisan gerrymandering. Overruling the previous decision, the court green-lighted partisan gerrymandering, opening the door for even more extreme gerrymanders in the future. The court also okayed voter restrictions that primarily affect Black people.
Gutting the federal government and throwing power to the states makes it easier for business leaders to cozy up to legislators and slash business regulations. It also enables a radical minority to enact its own worldview despite the wishes of the state. This dynamic is very clear over abortion rights and gun safety.
Last June, quite dramatically, the Supreme Court overturned federal protection of the right to an abortion guaranteed in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. In the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision the right-wing court said that decisions about abortion rights belonged to voters at the state level.
But as the last ten months have made clear, the right wing does not really intend to let the voters of the states make decisions that contradict right-wing ideology.
After the Dobbs decision, Republican-dominated legislatures immediately began to restrict the right to abortion, although it remains popular in the country and voters have rejected extreme abortion restrictions in every special election held since the decision. Now Republican legislators in Ohio are trying to head off an abortion rights amendment scheduled for a popular vote in November by requiring 60% of voters, rather than 50%, to amend the state constitution.
Gun safety shows the same pattern. A new Fox News poll out yesterday shows that 87% of voters favor background checks for gun purchases, 81% favor making 21 the minimum age to buy a gun, 80% want mental health care checks on all gun buyers, 80% want flags for people who are dangerous to themselves or others, 77% want a 30-day waiting period to buy a gun, and 61% want an assault weapons ban.
And yet, Republican majorities in state legislatures are rapidly rolling back gun laws. Republican lawmakers in the Tennessee legislature went so far recently as to expel two young Black representatives when they encouraged protesters after the majority quashed their attempts to introduce gun safety measures after a mass shooting in Nashville. But they were not alone. Last week, when the Nebraska senate passed a permitless concealed carry law, Melody Vaccaro, executive director of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence, shouted “Shame!” multiple times. She has since been “barred and banned” from the Nebraska statehouse.
The attempt of a radical minority to enforce their will on the rest of us, who constitute a majority, by stealing control of the states and then, through them, control of the federal government is precisely what the Confederates tried to do before the Civil War: it is no accident that one of the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, carried a replica of a Confederate battle flag.
And yet, in the wake of the Civil War, when former Confederates tried to dominate their Black neighbors despite the defeat of their ideology on the battlefields, Congress tried to make it impossible to pervert our democracy by capturing the states. It passed and in 1868 the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, putting into our fundamental laws the principle that the federal government trumps state power.
It reads, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” and it gives Congress the “power to enforce…the provisions of this article.”
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Notes:
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-ikea-the-new-model-for-the-conservative-movement
https://thefga.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FGA-Annual-Report-2021.pdf
https://northplattepost.com/posts/3603f063-d69f-43d0-8227-5be82ba4fdfd
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/cleta-mitchell-voting-college-students/
https://apnews.com/article/north-carolina-redistricting-voting-maps-bfe03c47daeca14444f15bc9e6438d4a
April 27, 2023
Catie Edmondson and Carl Hulse in the New York Times yesterday noted that House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) cannot bring his conference together behind a budget plan. He wanted to pass a bill demanding major concessions from President Biden before the Republicans would agree to raise the debt ceiling, both to prove that he could get his colleagues behind a bill and to put pressure on the Biden administration to restore the old Republican idea that the only way to make the economy work is to slash taxes, business regulation, and government spending.
McCarthy was pleased to have passed his measure with not a single vote to spare, but it appears he got the vote because everyone knew it was dead on arrival at the Senate. According to Edmonson and Hulse, McCarthy got the bill through only by begging his colleagues to ignore the provisions of the measure because it would never become law. He urged them to focus on the symbolic victory of showing Biden they could unite behind cuts.
But today at the Brookings Institution, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan outlined a very different vision of the global economy and American economic leadership. First of all, just the fact this happened is significant: Sullivan is a national security advisor, and he was talking about economics. He outlined how Biden’s “core commitment,” “his daily direction” is “to integrate domestic policy and foreign policy.”
Sullivan argued for a new economic approach to the challenges of the twenty-first century. The Biden administration is trying to establish “a fairer, more durable global economic order, for the benefit of ourselves and for people everywhere.”
The U.S. faces economic challenges, he noted, many of which have been created by the economic ideology that has shaped U.S. policy for the past 40 years. The idea that markets would spread capital to where it was most needed to create an efficient and effective economy has been proven wrong, Sullivan said. The U.S. cut taxes and slashed business regulations, privatized public projects, and pushed free trade on principle with the understanding that all growth was good growth and that if we lost infrastructure and manufacturing, we could make up those losses in finance, for example.
As countries lowered their economic barriers and became more closely integrated with each other, they would also become more open and peaceful.
But that’s not how it played out. Privileging finance over fundamental economic growth was a mistake. The U.S. lost supply chains and entire industries as jobs moved overseas, while countries like China discarded markets in favor of artificially subsidizing their economies. Rather than ushering in world peace, the market-based system saw an aggressive China and Russia both expanding their international power. At the same time, climate change accelerated without countries making much effort to address it. And, most of all, the unequal growth of the older system has undermined democracy.
Biden has attempted to counter the weaknesses of the previous economic system by focusing on building capacity to produce and innovate, resilience to withstand natural disasters and geopolitical shocks, and inclusiveness to rebuild the American middle class and greater opportunity for working people around the world.
After two years, the results have been “remarkable.”
Large-scale investment in semiconductor and clean energy production has jumped 20-fold since 2019, with private money following government seed money to mean about $3.5 trillion in public and private investment will flow into the economy in the next decade. Building domestic capacity will bring supply chains home and create jobs.
But this vision is not about isolating the United States from other countries. Indeed, much of the speech reinforced U.S. support for the positions of the European Union.
Instead, the U.S. is encouraging our allies—including developing nations—to build similarly to increase our united economic strengths and to enable the world to address climate change together, a field that offers huge potential for economic growth. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework with 13 Indo-Pacific nations is designed to create international economic cooperation in that region, and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, which includes Barbados, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay, is designed to do the same here in the Americas. The U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council and our trilateral coordination with Japan and Korea are part of the same economic program.
With this economic approach, the U.S. does not seek to cut ties to China, but rather aims to cut the risks associated with supply chains based in China by investing in our own capacities, and to push for a level playing field for our workers and companies. The U.S. has “a very substantial trade and investment relationship” with China that set a new record last year, and the U.S. is looking not to create conflict but to “manage competition responsibly” and “work together on global challenges like climate, like macroeconomic stability, health security, and food security.” “But,” he said, “China has to be willing to play its part.”
In today’s world, Sullivan said, trade policy is not just about the tariff deals that business leaders have criticized the administration for neglecting. It is about a larger economic strategy both at home and abroad to build economies that offer rising standards of living for working people.
The administration is now focusing on labor rights, climate change, and banking security in this larger picture. Through organizations like the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment the administration hopes to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars in financing in the next seven years to build infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries and to relieve debt there.
“The world needs an international economic system that works for our wage-earners, works for our industries, works for our climate, works for our national security, and works for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries,” Sullivan said. That means replacing the idea of free markets alone with “targeted and necessary investments in places that private markets are ill-suited to address on their own.” Rather than simply adjusting tariff rates, it means international cooperation.
And, Sullivan said, “it means returning to the core belief we first championed 80 years ago: that America should be at the heart of a vibrant, international financial system that enables partners around the world to reduce poverty and enhance shared prosperity. And that a functioning social safety net for the world’s most vulnerable countries is essential to our own core interests.”
This strategy, he said, “is the surest path to restoring the middle class, to producing a just and effective clean-energy transition, to securing critical supply chains, and, through all of this, to repairing faith in democracy itself.” He called for bipartisan support for this approach to the global economy.
Sullivan noted that the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” came from President John F. Kennedy, not from later supply-side ideologues who used it to defend their tax cuts and business deregulation. “President Kennedy wasn’t saying what’s good for the wealthy is good for the working class,” Sullivan said, “He was saying we’re all in this together.”
Sullivan quoted Kennedy further: “If one section of the country is standing still, then sooner or later a dropping tide drops all the boats. That’s true for our country. That’s true for our world. [And] economically, over time, we’re going to rise—or fall—together.”
“And that goes for the strength of our democracies as well as for the strength of our economies.”
Foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen noted that David Wessel of Brookings asked Sullivan for a quick summary of this new economic vision. Sullivan answered: “We’re at a moment now where we need to build capacity to build the goods & invent the technologies of [the] future & we’re going to make the investments to do that—us, +everyone who wants to be in on [the] deal. & then we’re going to build the resilience we need…so that no natural disaster or geopolitical shock can stop us from getting things we need when we need them….”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/us/politics/debt-limit-vote-republicans.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/27/jake-sullivan-china/
https://twitter.com/bensonel/status/1651647302480609280
April 27, 2023
April 26, 2023
[Warning: the third and fourth paragraphs of this piece refer to the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit.]
Well, the Republicans did it. After middle-of-the-night negotiations to include more of the far right’s wish list, House Republicans passed a bill agreeing to a short-term raising of the debt ceiling, so long as it is accompanied by massive spending cuts and a rollback of Biden’s major accomplishments. The bill squeaked through by a vote of 217 to 215, mostly along party lines. Four extremist Republicans voted no because they believed the measure didn’t go far enough to slash spending.
The administration reiterated that it would not negotiate over paying the nation’s bills. “In our history, we have never defaulted on our debt or failed to pay our bills,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. “Congressional Republicans must act immediately and without conditions to avoid default and ensure that the full faith and credit of the United States is not put at risk. That is their job. Economists have warned that default could spark a dangerous financial crisis, lead to a recession costing millions of Americans their jobs, endanger hard-working Americans’ retirement savings, and increase long-term federal borrowing costs, adding to deficits and debt. We are not a deadbeat nation.”
“I am here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” E. Jean Carroll said in court today for the former president’s civil trial for rape. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back.” Carroll offered a detailed account of what she says was Trump’s attack nearly 30 years ago, an attack that warped her life.
While she testified, Trump attacked Carroll on social media. The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, warned Trump’s lawyer that his client’s statement was “entirely inappropriate,” saying he was trying to influence the jury. Any more commentary might open up “a new source of potential liability,” Kaplan said. The lawyer said he would do the best he could to silence Trump, but later in the day, Trump posted another attack and his son Eric Trump followed suit.
“I wanted to address my senators, Cruz and Cornyn,” Amanda Zurawski told the Senate Committee on the Judiciary today at a hearing on reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision. Zurawski’s water broke 18 weeks into her pregnancy, making it impossible for her fetus to survive. Because of the vague and extreme antiabortion bill Texas lawmakers had passed, her health care providers refused to treat her so long as the fetus had a heartbeat, denying her an abortion. Zurawski developed deadly sepsis and, after giving birth to a stillborn daughter, spent three days in intensive care as doctors worked to save her life.
Zurawski said she wanted the two Texas Republican senators to know “that what happened to me I think most people in this room would agree was horrific. But it’s a direct result of the policies they support. I nearly died on their watch, and…I may have been robbed of the opportunity to have children in the future. And it’s because of the policies that they support.”
Neither Cruz nor Cornyn showed up to hear her. Cornyn later said Zurawski should consider suing her doctors for misinterpreting the law. Zurawski responded: “[M]y physician and my team of health care professionals that I saw over the course of three days, while I was repeatedly turned away from health care access, made the decision to not provide an abortion because that’s what they felt they had to do under Texas’ law…. And that will continue to happen and it is continuing to happen, and it’s not a result of misinterpretation. It’s the result of confusion, and the confusion is because [of] the way the law is written.”
Today, the Walt Disney Company sued Florida governor Ron DeSantis over his “relentless campaign to weaponize government power” and attack free speech. Disney’s former chief executive officer last year spoke out against the governor’s law prohibiting teachers from mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity. The lawsuit says that DeSantis’s attack “now threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”
“For more than half a century,” the lawsuit reads,” Disney has made an immeasurable impact on Florida and its economy, establishing Central Florida as a top global tourist destination and attracting tens of millions of visitors to the State each year. People and families from every corner of the globe have traveled to Walt Disney World,” but that relationship is now in jeopardy, the lawsuit warns. “A targeted campaign of government retaliation—orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech—now threatens Disney’s business operations, jeopardizes its economic future in the region, and violates its constitutional rights.”
Meanwhile, DeSantis is overseas on what has been billed as a trade mission.
Tonight, the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s last-ditch attempt to prevent former vice president Mike Pence from testifying before the grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. The grand jury has issued a subpoena for Pence; Trump tried to argue that Pence’s testimony was barred because of executive privilege. The court of appeals disagreed.
Today, two associates of former Trump ally Steve Bannon were sentenced to four years and three years in prison for soliciting donations for their “We Build the Wall” charity and then pocketing the money. Bannon was also charged in the case, but Trump pardoned him for his involvement in it before he left office.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., today, President Joe Biden and President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea reaffirmed what Biden called the “ironclad” alliance between the two countries. They announced a new agreement, the so-called Washington Declaration, to increase cooperation in order to strengthen the message of nuclear deterrence conveyed to North Korea. This deterrence will include military training and exercises, the establishment of a joint nuclear consultative group, and the visit of a nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea. “We’re not going to be stationing nuclear weapons on the peninsula, but we will have visits to ports, visits of nuclear submarines and things like that,” Biden said.
“A nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of whatever regime were to take such an action,” he added, a public reassurance Yoon was hoping to receive when he arrived in Washington. Nervous about North Korean development of nuclear weapons, a majority of South Koreans want to develop their own nuclear weapons, a stance the U.S. strongly opposes.
This official state visit, the second of the Biden presidency, reinforced the changing political landscape in the Indo-Pacific, where the United States seeks to support Japan and South Korea to counter the growing power of China. Since 2021, Korean businesses have invested more than $100 billion in the U.S., an investment that the White House says will create more than 40,000 new jobs here, while the U.S., in turn, is investing in South Korea. The presidents vowed to continue to work together to secure supply chains, develop clean energy, and cooperate on cybersecurity and emerging technologies.
Biden and Yoon have met four times before, and the mood at the White House after the announcement was friendly and celebratory. At tonight’s dinner in President Yoon’s honor, the attendees gave the South Korean leader a standing ovation when he sang the first verse of Don McLean’s 1971 rock ballad “American Pie.”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/26/house-gop-debt-limit-debate/
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/04/26/nyregion/trump-carroll-rape-trial-updates
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-04-26%20-%20Testimony%20-%20Zurawski.pdf
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1651262879788859392
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172231546/disney-florida-governor-ron-desantis-lawsuit
https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1651426439969796099
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089221657/dont-say-gay-florida-desantis
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/politics/disney-desantis-reedy-creek-power/index.html
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23789605-disney-v-desantis-complaint
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/health/abortion-hearing-texas-senators-amanda-zurawski/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/26/desantis-disney-lawsuit/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/26/appeals-court-trump-pence-testimony-grand-jury-00094122
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/26/judge-trump-rape-trial-scam-truth-social-00093940
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/politics/kolfage-badolato-sentenced-border-wall-bannon/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/steve-bannon-pardoned-by-trump/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/politics/biden-yoon-south-korea-state-visit/index.html.
https://twitter.com/jeffmason1/status/1651418886447693824
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/04/26/washington-declaration-2/
April 26, 2023
April 25, 2023
Exactly four years after he announced he would challenge then-president Donald Trump for the leadership of the United States, President Joe Biden today announced his reelection campaign, along with running mate Vice President Kamala Harris.
The contrast between the 2019 announcement video and the one released today shows how both the country and Biden have changed over the past four years. The earlier video featured former vice president and presidential hopeful Biden alone. It began by focusing on Charlottesville, Virginia, and the promise of the Declaration of Independence, written by Charlottesville’s famous resident Thomas Jefferson, that all men are created equal. Biden claimed that while we haven’t always lived up to those ideas, we have never walked away from them. They are the foundation of who we are.
In the video, Biden contrasted the ideals in the Declaration of Independence with the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where Klansmen, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis came out into the open and were met by “a courageous group of Americans.” The resulting clash took the life of counterdemonstrator Heather Heyer. Trump answered the horror over the riot by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.”
“With those words,” Biden said, “the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment,” he continued, “I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.” We were in “a battle for the soul of this nation.” He urged us to remember who we are.
Biden’s 2019 campaign video was a rallying cry to defend American values from those who were trying to destroy them. Now, four years later, after winning the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes and working with Democrats and some Republicans to pass a raft of legislation to shore up the position of working- and middle-class Americans that rivals that of the New Deal, Biden’s message is different.
Like the previous video, today’s message begins with footage of an attack on the United States, but this time it is the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to overturn our democracy and keep voters from putting Biden into the White House. But Biden is not the centerpiece of this video; the American people are. The video is a montage of Americans from all races and all walks of life, interspersed with images of President Biden, Vice President Harris, First Lady Jill Biden, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff talking to people, laughing with them, hugging them, supporting them. It is a picture of community.
Over the image, Biden says that fighting for democracy has been the work of his first term. “This shouldn’t be a red or blue issue,” he says. He has fought “to protect our rights, to make sure that everyone in this country is treated equally, and that everyone is given a fair shot at making it.”
In contrast, the video says, MAGA extremists are threatening our “bedrock freedoms.” They have taken aim at Social Security while cutting taxes on the rich, dictated healthcare decisions for women, banned books, and attacked gay marriage, all while undermining voting rights. We are still in a battle for the soul of the nation, Biden says. The question is whether in the years ahead, “we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.”
The video switches to upbeat music and faster energy as Biden says, “I know America. I know we’re good and decent people. I know we’re still a country that believes in honesty and respect, and treating each other with dignity. That we’re a nation where we give hate no safe harbor. We believe that everyone is equal, that everyone should be given a fair shot to succeed in this country.”
“Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they have to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedom. Stand up for the right to vote, and our civil rights. And this is our moment,” Biden says, as the music changes and the video shows images of Americans coming together, laughing and working together. “We the people will not be silenced,” Biden says.
“Let’s finish this job; I know we can,” the video ends. “Because this is the United States of America. And there’s nothing, simply nothing, we cannot do if we do it together.”
“Let’s finish the job,” says writing across the screen.
It is a revealing moment. If Biden announced a presidential run in 2019 to recall the United States to its principles, he is running in 2023 on an extraordinary record of legislation and the idea that he has restored competence to Washington. And unlike Republicans eager for their party’s nomination, he appears to revel in highlighting the people around him rather than hogging the spotlight, while he touts the work the government has done for ordinary Americans.
Politico’s Eli Stokols observed that some major media outlets treated the president’s announcement as a less important story than a new revelation that yet another right-wing Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, didn’t disclose that he sold real estate to a wealthy man with business before the Supreme Court, or information coming out about the ongoing lawsuits against the former president. Stokols suggested the Biden campaign was quite happy to let the Republicans tear themselves apart in public while the president stays in the background, permitting Americans to forget the federal government is there—as they were able to in the past—because it is operating competently and without drama.
As if to honor that theme, Biden announced that Julie Chávez Rodríguez will serve as his campaign manager. The former director of the White House office of intergovernmental affairs, focused on working with state, local, and tribal officials, she has been described by a colleague as “a get-sh*t-done staffer.” Rodríguez is the granddaughter of union activist César Chávez.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who had left open the possibility that he would run as a progressive candidate, promptly threw his weight behind Biden and announced that he would support the incumbent president, suggesting the Democrats are unified behind Biden's reelection.
The Republican National Committee responded to Biden’s announcement with an entirely computer generated video warning of what the world would look like if Biden were to be reelected: a dystopian future full of international and domestic crises (including an economic crash, which promptly led Twitter users to speculate that House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s threat to force a crisis over the debt ceiling was part of a larger plot to destroy Biden’s booming economy before the election). In keeping with the party's construction of false narratives, the “news reports” in the ad are fake; the images are computer generated.
MSNBC’s Steve Benen notes that the ad “accidentally makes an important point.” Unable to find anything horrific about Biden’s actual record, “the RNC found it necessary to peddle literally fake, made-up images referring to events that have not occurred.”
Bloomberg columnist Matt Yglesias tweeted: I feel like if you have to use fake [images] of hypothetical future bad things that might happen if the *incumbent president* stays in office, that itself tells you something.”
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/bidens-campaign-launch-page-two-story-00093797
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/25/rnc-slams-biden-re-election-bid-ai-generated-ad
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1650839871219531778
https://apnews.com/article/bernie-sanders-biden-endorsement-2024-d8f0772b117e2bf83e1062708ea651c0
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/neil-gorsuch-colorado-property-sale-00093579
April 24, 2023
April 24, 2023
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement announcing that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), each trying to wrest control of Sudan from the other, have agreed to a 72-hour cease-fire starting at midnight tonight, local time. During the cease-fire, the statement says, the U.S. will work with regional partners, international partners, and Sudanese civilians to create a committee to negotiate and implement a permanent cease-fire and return Sudan to a path toward democracy.
Meanwhile, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan today said that the U.S. is working to get U.S. civilians out of Sudan by protecting a land evacuation route from Khartoum to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where Americans can get transportation out of the region on naval ships from various countries including the United States. While Sullivan said the administration will look at “every conceivable option” to get Americans out of Sudan, it will not send troops inside the country.
Meanwhile, Rachel Chason in the Washington Post reported the concern of U.S. intelligence officials evident in leaked documents that the African country of Chad is at risk from Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group, which is trying to recruit Chadian rebels to destabilize the country and overthrow the government. The leaked documents suggest that Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is trying to build a “unified ‘confederation’ of African states” across the continent in the Sahel region, including Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Sudan. Chad is an important U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism, and the attempt to keep it stable and moving toward democracy has raised concerns that the U.S. is overlooking the Chadian government’s own crackdowns on dissenters.
In other concerns about national security, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton published an op-ed in the New York Times today warning that the threat from House speaker Kevin McCarthy to hold the nation’s finances hostage until the president agrees to the wish list McCarthy presented last week has “significant national security implications.” With all the global threats looming, from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, to rising tensions with China, to future pandemics and climate change, “the world is looking to the United States for strong, steady leadership. Congressional brinkmanship on the debt ceiling sends the opposite message to our allies and our adversaries: that America is divided, distracted and can’t be counted on.”
Drawing on her own experience as secretary of state during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, Clinton recalled meeting “nervous businessmen” from across Asia at an event in Hong Kong. They worried that the “regional and global stability that America had guaranteed for decades,” “the foundation on which they had built companies and fortunes,” was at risk. If the U.S. walked away from the table, they feared that China would fill the void.
Clinton reassured them that Americans would eventually do the right thing and then, she recalled, “I crossed my fingers and hoped it was true.” In 2011 it was, but now, she writes, the risks are even higher.
“[T]the competition between democracies and autocracies has grown more intense,” she wrote. “And by undermining America’s credibility and the pre-eminence of the dollar, the fight over the debt ceiling plays right into the hands of Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia.” That the U.S. dollar is the world’s central currency enables the U.S. to use its financial power around the world, imposing sanctions, for example, and undermining that power will significantly weaken the U.S.
Grabbing headlines today at home was the unexpected news that Tucker Carlson is out at the Fox News Channel. The decision was so quick he was not permitted a final show, making Friday’s goodbye his last. There is not yet a clear story about what drove him out, but there are several things that likely contributed.
First is lawsuits: the Fox Corporation’s recent $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems; the looming lawsuit against the Fox Corporation by another voting systems company, Smartmatic; and another lawsuit from former Carlson producer Abby Grossberg accusing Carlson and other executives of creating “a work environment that subjugates women based on vile sexist stereotypes.” That lawsuit will likely bring up the many appallingly sexist things Carlson has said over the years, including a discussion with a radio shock jock in which he seemed to defend statutory rape and child marriage.
There is the potential for yet another lawsuit, this one from Ray Epps, a Trump supporter who was at the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and around whom Carlson built a conspiracy theory that led to death threats and forced him and his wife into hiding. On Sunday, Epps told 60 Minutes that Carlson was “going to any means possible to destroy my life.” “He’s obsessed with me,” Epps said.
Insurers on the hook for large settlements are likely to demand that Fox clean up its act, especially with Trump running for office again and likely back in the media lineup.
Second is Carlson’s attacks on his colleagues and private dismissal of Fox News Channel programming, revealed in the discovery process of the Dominion lawsuit, which made it quite clear the channel was lying to its audience.
There is also the possibility that FNC head Rupert Murdoch recognizes that the right wing has moved so far right that it is better to cut the extremists loose than to try to keep them from moving toward other far-right platforms, especially as the FNC is trying to renegotiate its cable fees. In a sign that the party might be splitting elsewhere, as well, Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced today that he will not attend the Georgia Republican convention this summer, choosing instead to rally supporters in his own new organization.
Bad news is likely to continue to mount for the far right.
Today, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis said that she would announce charging decisions in the investigation of the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia sometime during the fourth term of the state Superior Court, which begins July 11 and ends September 1. Tipping her hand that there will be at least some charges, she said she was announcing the timeline to allow the Sheriff’s Office and local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to prepare. “Open-source intelligence has indicated the announcement of decisions in this case may provoke significant public reaction,” Willis wrote.
Tomorrow, the civil rape trial of former president Trump will begin, in which writer E. Jean Carroll alleges that Trump raped her sometime between fall 1995 and spring 1996. No matter what happens at the trial’s conclusion, the information that will come out will almost certainly not make Trump look good to the suburban women he needs to win an election.
In contrast to the circus of the rape trial tomorrow, President Joe Biden is apparently set to announce his reelection campaign, exactly four years after he announced in 2019, when he warned that the soul of the nation was at stake in the upcoming presidential election.
—
Notes:
https://www.state.gov/announcement-of-nationwide-ceasefire-in-sudan/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/23/chad-wagner-russia-leaked-documents/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/opinion/hillary-clinton-debt-ceiling-republican-dollar.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/jan-6-ray-epps-tucker-carlson-trying-to-destroy-life-2023-4
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/24/biden-2024-election-expected-announcement
https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-to-expect-in-the-e-jean-carroll-donald-trump-rape-trial
April 23, 2023
April 23, 2023
An article by Matthew Lee, Tara Copp, and Aamer Madhani of the Associated Press gave a good overview of today’s evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. About 100 U.S. troops used three helicopters to evacuate about 70 U.S. personnel from the embassy, getting them out of Sudan to Ethiopia without major incident. Such a military evacuation is unusual, but the fight between two rival Sudanese leaders has closed the main international airport and given armed fighters control of the roads leading out of the country, making it impossible for U.S. personnel to leave by civilian routes.
Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Saudi Arabia helped to get the Americans to safety. There were no major incidents associated with the evacuation. Other nations have also evacuated their embassies, and the United Nations staffers left by road on a 19-hour trip.
U.S. officials said it would be too dangerous to evacuate the approximately 16,000 private U.S. citizens remaining in the country, whose great size contributes to the difficulty of getting them out. (Significantly larger than Alaska, Sudan is the third largest country in Africa and has more than 45 million people.) According to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), most of the remaining U.S. civilians there are dual-nationality Sudanese Americans or aid workers. They have been advised to shelter in place while the U.S. government works with other countries to get them out safely.
Vedant Patel, the principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department, noted in a press briefing on April 21 that since August 2021 the department has listed Sudan as under a Level 4 travel advisory, meaning that the U.S. government warned people not to travel there and that the U.S. might have “very limited ability” to aid travelers in a crisis. Since then, he said, “we have communicated to American citizens in the country about safety and security measures and precautions that they can take…. We have not parsed our words or been ignorant or naïve about the delicate and fragile security situation in Sudan.”
The fight in the eastern African country that erupted on April 15 grew from Sudan’s 2019 revolution. In that year, opponents of the ruling government threw out President Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power since 1989 and who had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape in his attempt to get rid of rebels in the western region of Sudan, known as Darfur.
Leading that revolt were women, known as “Kandakat” after powerful Nubian queens. In the wake of the revolution, the Sudanese people attempted a transition to democracy. But in 2021, two military leaders, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, who leads the armed forces, and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (known by the nickname Hemedti), who leads a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces that grew out of the Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur, launched a military coup and took power.
In the wake of the coup, foreign aid was halted, the economy collapsed, and the United Nations and international negotiators pressured the two generals to turn power back over to civilians this month. But talks dragged on, tensions rose, and now the two men are at war with each other for control of the country. Experts say if the crisis is not solved, and solved fast, Sudan could descend into a civil war. More than 400 people have already died, mostly in Khartoum.
The fighting in Sudan has repercussions around the world. There are signs that Russia’s Wagner group is supporting Hemedti, which would be in keeping with the statement Wagner’s founder, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, made after his group’s recent losses in Ukraine, saying he planned to concentrate on Africa, where his forces have been propping up authoritarian governments now for a while. They have been in Sudan since 2017, and in addition to the interest of Wagner-linked companies in gold mining there, Russia has long wanted to build a naval base on the Red Sea at Port Sudan, which is currently under the control of the government forces led by Burhan.
The Nile River runs through Sudan, tying Sudan to Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as to eight other African countries. Other international powers are also interested in Sudan’s resources, and in making sure the conflict doesn’t spill over into other countries. Overall, as Patel noted, the violence destabilizes not just Sudan but the region as a whole, hurting civilians and jeopardizing “the will, the aspirations, and the progress that the Sudanese people are hoping to see through some kind of transition to democracy.”
In the New York Times today, Jacqueline Burns, a former advisor to the U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan and a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, suggested that the conflict in Sudan had a much broader lesson for the international community.
Since 2005, Burns wrote, international negotiators have focused on splitting power between armed groups rather than civilians. Women and others who were not part of armed military groups were almost entirely excluded, she wrote. “Armed groups and dictatorial regimes know that as long as they are participating in a peace process, international pressures will eventually—often quickly—ebb. If they are pressed into signing an agreement, there are typically very few effective mechanisms to hold them to it.” And while they are pretending to engage in peace processes, armed groups are actually consolidating their political and military power.
This pattern was especially problematic in Sudan, she wrote, where the women who had led the uprising that got rid of al-Bashir were largely excluded from the government that followed; armed groups were at the table instead.
Burns warned the international community that if we are going to stop the “continued cycle of violence and human suffering,” negotiators must stop prioritizing the voices of “the armed and corrupt” over those actually interested in real political reform.
—
Notes:
https://www.icc-cpi.int/darfur/albashir
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/22/sudan-russia-wagner-group/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/04/23/sudan-war-live-updates/11724633002/
https://apnews.com/article/sudan-conflict-nile-africa-russia-03adebaff0c95992c6f90543dcb2c894
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/23/sudan-rsf-fighting-embassy-evacuations/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-warns-american-citizens-evacuated-sudan/story
https://www.state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-april-21-2023/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/world/africa/sudan-generals-coup-civilian-rule.html
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/18/what-is-happening-in-sudan-a-simple-guide
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/23/opinion/sudan-violence-conflict.html
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