Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 53
January 18, 2025
January 17, 2025
January 17, 2025
As President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris prepare to leave office at noon on Monday and President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance prepare to be sworn in, on the one hand last-minute orders are being made and goodbyes are being said, while on the other, the incoming administration is setting expectations.
On Thursday, Biden issued an executive order to strengthen the cyber defenses of the United States after hackers from China, Russia, and other countries have broken into federal agencies. The executive order requires software manufacturers like Microsoft to prove that their products meet security requirements before the federal government will buy them.
Today, Biden issued a statement declaring his belief that the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex is the law of the land. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 and sent it off to the states for ratification, imposing on that ratification a seven-year deadline. Thirty states ratified the ERA within the next year, but a fierce opposition campaign led by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly eroded support among Republicans, and although Congress extended the deadline by three years, only 35 states had signed on by 1977. And, confusing matters, legislatures in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to take back their earlier ratification.
In 2017, Nevada became the first state to ratify the ERA since 1977. Then Illinois stepped up, and finally, in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, putting it over the required three quarters of states needed for the amendment to become part of the Constitution. But the radical right worried that women’s legal equality to men would protect abortion rights and that, as Catholic bishops of the United States wrote to senators, it would prohibit “discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ and other categories.” Opponents have challenged the amendment’s ratification over both the original deadline and whether the states’ rescinding of previous ratifications has merit.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) agrees that the amendment would help to protect abortion rights and has spearheaded efforts to get Biden to direct the national archivist, Colleen Shogan, to certify and publish the ERA, pointing out that the American Bar Association agrees that it has been ratified. But the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel says it considers the ERA expired unratified in 1982, and Shogan says she will defer to the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel.
The executive branch doesn’t have a role in the ratification of constitutional amendments, and Biden’s announcement did not direct the archivist to certify the amendment. But a president’s public disagreement with the Office of Legal Counsel will add weight to the argument that the amendment has been ratified.
“We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all,” Biden said.
Biden also set out to right the wrong embedded in the 1986 Anti–Drug Abuse Act. That law imposed a mandatory minimum of five years in federal prison without the possibility of parole for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, which urban Black Americans favored, while the same penalty applied to 500 grams of powdered cocaine, the form of the drug favored by white Americans. That disparity has been a symbol of racial injustice in the federal justice system, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission called for its reform in April of 1995. Today, Biden shortened the sentences of 2,490 nonviolent drug offenders convicted of crimes related to crack cocaine.
Biden and administration officials have been saying goodbye to their teams. On Thursday, Biden bid farewell to U.S. service members, thanking them for “your service to our nation and for allowing me to bear witness to your courage, your commitment, your character.” He asked them to “remember your oath” and to protect “American values: [o]ur commitment to honor, to integrity, to unity, to protecting…and defending not a person or a party or a place, but an idea…that we’re all created equal.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland also bid his team farewell yesterday, thanking them for their work confronting fentanyl dealers who threaten our communities, disrupting threats from both foreign and domestic terrorists and from authoritarian leaders that threaten the country’s security, protecting economic competition and prosecuting fraud and corruption, and defending civil rights. “You have worked to pursue justice—not politics,” he said. “That is the truth, and nothing can change it.”
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked those in the State Department for building partnerships and strengthening alliances, “rallying the world in common cause.” “We come from different places, different experiences, different motivations and backgrounds,” he said, “But I think what brings all of us together in this place, in this time, is that unique feeling that you get going to work every single day with the Stars and Stripes behind your back,” “working every day to make things just a little bit better, a little bit more peaceful, a little bit more full of hope, of opportunity.”
Blinken told members of the department, “the custodians of the power and the promise of American diplomacy,” that he would always be their champion, but that he was returning “to the highest calling in a democracy, that of being a private citizen.”
As Biden administration officials leave, the incoming Trump administration is vowing to unleash “shock and awe” in the first days of Trump’s presidency as the new president issues what Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) called a “blizzard of executive orders” to reshape the country according to his policies. In The Bulwark today, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Mark Hertling, former Commanding General of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army, explained that the concept of shock and awe calls for gaining an advantage over an enemy with overwhelming firepower followed by brilliant execution. The plan anticipates paralyzing the enemy with “such overwhelming force that resistance is futile.”
For his part, Hertling seems unimpressed, noting that “[i]f your plan calls for your side being all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect in execution, and immune to surprise—when you’re working with human beings and you presume your enemy is stupid, weak, and all but inanimate—the plan probably isn’t worth all that much.”
Aaron Zitner and Xavier Martinez of the Wall Street Journal reported today on a new Wall Street Journal poll revealing that American voters want what they call “MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.” More than 60% oppose Trump’s plan to replace nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. More than 60% also oppose Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education. Almost 75% of voters oppose his plans for sweeping deportation raids, wanting only those with criminal records to be removed from the country. More than two thirds oppose calls to take control of Greenland, and only 46% approve of his choices for cabinet positions.
But the Republican-dominated Senate seems poised to approve Trump’s picks for cabinet secretaries and other appointees that require Senate confirmation. As they have been appearing before the committees responsible for vetting those candidates before they go on to the vote of the full Senate, key appointees have been demonstrating that their primary qualification is their loyalty to Trump.
Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth revealed that he knows close to nothing about the actual requirements for the job but declined to say he would refuse an unconstitutional order. Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said she would “study” the Fourteenth Amendment after being asked about the birthright citizenship embedded in it, and she refused to say that Biden won the 2020 election.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has apparently caved to Trump’s demand that he remove Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) from the chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, an action that will remove him from the committee altogether because of term limits for those committee members who are not the chair. Turner was well respected in that post by members of both parties, but was a staunch defender of Ukraine who last April had warned that it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”
Alice Miranda Ollstein, Caitlin Oprysko, and Irie Sentner of Politico reported yesterday that experts expect Trump and his allied political action committees to pull in as much as $250 million for Trump’s inauguration. But much of the cost of the inauguration is actually covered by taxpayer dollars, they report, and while laws require the inaugural committee to disclose its donors, there is no requirement to say where the money goes. Trump’s Inaugural Committee fundraiser told the reporters that any money not spent on the inauguration will likely go toward Trump’s presidential library.
The weather forecast for Washington, D.C., for Monday’s inauguration predicts a high in the low 20s (approximately –5° Celsius), and late this afternoon, Trump announced on his social media company that he was moving the inauguration inside to the Capitol Rotunda because of the cold. This leaves workers less than 72 hours to change the plan for an outdoor inauguration they had begun preparing for on September 18.
Members of Congress have been distributing tickets to their constituents, but because of the change, the Joint Inaugural Committee of Congress has told the public that the “vast majority of ticketed guests will not be able to attend the ceremonies in person.” The House sergeant at arms suggested to members of Congress that they should tell their constituents that their tickets should now be considered “commemorative.”
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Notes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/biden-executive-order-cybersecurity-microsoft-solarwinds-hack
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2025/01/17/clemency-recipient-list-8/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/us/era-virginia-vote.html
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/equal-rights-amendment-explained
Thomas Jipping, “The ERA Has Just One Purpose Left: Abortion,” The Heritage Foundation, February 21, 2023.
https://www.usccb.org/resources/ERA_Letter_and_Backgrounder_2023.pdf
https://www.propublica.org/article/anti-abortion-activists-fighting-to-change-election-law
https://www.gillibrand.senate.gov/eranow/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/15/opinion/trump-biden-legacy.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/17/nx-s1-5264378/biden-era-national-archivist-constitution
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/22/politics/crack-powder-cocaine-sentences/index.html
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/06/22/equal.act.testimony-.final.pdf
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5090560-biden-military-final-speech/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-merrick-b-garland-delivers-farewell-address
The BulwarkTeam Trump Promises ‘Shock and Awe.’ Do They Know What That Means?THE MEMO HAS CLEARLY GONE OUT: The phrase the incoming Trump administration is using to describe its opening days is “shock and awe.” Tom Homan, the incoming designated border czar, when asked during an interview on ABC what illegal immigrants should expect, repeated “Shock and awe” twice, with a smile. Sen. John Barr…Read morea day ago · 280 likes · Mark Hertlinghttps://www.axios.com/2025/01/16/mike-johnson-turner-intelligence-committee-anger
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/donald-trump-policy-approval-poll-849feb84
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/17/politics/inauguration-moving-indoors-cold-weather
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/01/13/trump-inauguration-2025-tickets/77599929007/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/16/trump-inauguration-corporate-donors-004242
Bluesky:
January 16, 2025
In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.
That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.
But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.
Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.
Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.
News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was "the single most important economic issue of the day." But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.
There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.
It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.
In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”
Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”
Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.
But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.
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Notes:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/12/15/elon-musk-trump-election-wealth/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/unitedhealth-employer-slain-exec-brian-175429944.html
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:144.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record.aspx?libID=o286435
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-madison-square-garden-new-york-city-1
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
Bluesky:
zacheverson.com/post/3lfsikgtt262c
X:
January 16, 2025
January 15, 2025
January 15, 2025
It is somehow fitting that President Joe Biden’s farewell address to the nation, scheduled for 8:00 Eastern time tonight, was overshadowed today by the dramatic announcement that after months of negotiation backed by the United States and facilitated by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, negotiators from Israel and Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire and to exchange Israeli hostages taken on October 7, 2023, for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
From when he broke his foot playing with his dog shortly after he was elected in 2020 and opted to forgo time-consuming physical therapy to address the stiffness in his gait in order to focus on his work, to the day of his January 2021 inauguration when he went straight to the office, through his decision to negotiate the historic 2024 Ankara prisoner exchange involving 26 prisoners and at least five nations at the expense of his reelection campaign, to today’s focus on the long-awaited ceasefire rather than his final speech, Biden has approached the office of the presidency as an opportunity to work for the goals he thinks advance the interests of the United States of America and its people.
This afternoon, Biden appeared, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Good afternoon,” he said to the press. “And it’s a very good afternoon, because at long last I can announce a ceasefire and a hostage deal has been reached between Israel and Hamas. [After] more than 15 months of conflict that began with [Hamas’s] brutal massacre of October the seventh, more than 15 months of terror for the hostages, their families, the Israeli people, more than fifteen months of suffering by the innocent people in Gaza, fighting in Gaza will stop and soon the hostages will return home to their families.”
“The elements of this deal were what I laid out in detail this past May,” Biden said. That plan “was embraced by countries around the world and endorsed overwhelmingly by the U.N. Security Council.” It has three phases.
Phase one is a six-week ceasefire in which Israeli forces will withdraw from all the populated areas of Gaza and Palestinians can return to their homes. Hamas will release the women, elderly, wounded, and American hostages it holds. Humanitarian assistance will surge into Gaza.
“During the next six weeks,” Biden said, “Israel will negotiate the necessary arrangements to get to phase two, which is a permanent end of the war.” The ceasefire will continue throughout the negotiations, even if they take longer than six weeks. Once phase two begins, the remaining living hostages will come home and all remaining Israeli forces will be withdrawn from Gaza.
In phase three the final remains of hostages who have been killed will be returned to their families, and a major reconstruction plan for Gaza will begin.
Biden noted that he has worked in foreign policy for decades and that “[t]his is one of the toughest negotiations I’ve ever experienced.”
Tonight, Biden began his farewell address by reiterating that negotiators had reached a ceasefire deal. Although incoming president Trump has already tried to take credit for the deal, Biden said: “This plan was developed and negotiated by my team. And it will be largely implemented by the incoming administration. That’s why I told my team to keep the incoming administration fully informed. Because that’s how it should be. Working together as Americans.”
Biden then turned to his farewell message to the nation. He began by reflecting on the need to protect our institutions against the abuse of power. “Our system of separation of powers, checks and balances…may not be perfect,” he said, “but it’s maintained our democracy for nearly 250 years, longer than any other nation in history that’s ever tried such a bold experiment.”
“In the past four years, our democracy has held strong,” he said, “And every day, I’ve kept my commitment to be president for all Americans through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history.” He praised Vice President Kamala Harris as his partner, calling it the honor of his life to see Americans working together to come through a once-in-a-century pandemic, “standing up for our rights and our freedoms instead of losing their jobs to an economic crisis,” with “millions of entrepreneurs and companies creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products.”
“Together,” Biden said, “we’ve launched a new era of American possibilities, one of the greatest modernizations of infrastructure in our entire history, from new roads, bridges, clean water, affordable high-speed Internet for every American.” We brought back semiconductor manufacturing to the United States, “creating thousands of jobs.” We have given “Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for millions of seniors” protected children and families “by passing the most significant gun safety law in 30 years and bringing violent crime to a 50-year low,” and met “our sacred obligation to over one million veterans so far who were exposed to toxic materials and to their families, providing medical care and education benefits.”
“We’ve created nearly 17 million new jobs—more than any other single administration in a single term. More people have healthcare than ever before. And overseas, we’ve strengthened NATO. Ukraine is still free. And we’ve pulled ahead of our competition with China…. I’m so proud of how much we’ve accomplished together for the American people. And I wish the incoming administration success. Because I want America to succeed.”
Then Biden issued a warning that will stand alongside other prescient warnings outgoing president’s have delivered, like President George Washington famously warning about the dangers of foreign entanglements, and President Dwight Eisenhower warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”
Biden warned the country of “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.” There are dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked, he said. “Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
Biden pointed out that a century ago the American people stood up to the robber barons and made them “play by the rules everybody else had to…. And it helped put us on a path to building the largest middle class in the world [and] the most prosperous century any nation in the world has ever seen.”
He and his administration worked to accomplish this plan for the last four years, he said, with legislation aimed at both “protecting the environment and growing the economy,” but “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit.” He warned about “the concentration of technology, power, and wealth.”
While President Eisenhower warned of the rise of the military-industrial complex and “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” Biden said that six decades later he is “equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation,” he said, “enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling [or] disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit…. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”
Going forward, Biden said, “it’s going to be up to the president…, the Congress, the courts, the free press, and the American people to confront these powerful forces.” He called for reforming the tax code to make billionaires pay their fair share, and for getting rid of the flood of dark money in politics.
He called for ethics rules and an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, and for banning members of Congress from trading stock. He also called for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that no president is immune from crimes they commit in office. “The president’s power is not unlimited,” he said. “It’s not absolute.”
The concentration of wealth and power threatens democracy, Biden warned, by eroding “the sense of unity and common purpose,” noting that when people feel they don’t have a fair shot at success, staying engaged in the process becomes “exhausting and even disillusioning.” It is essential to democracy for people to feel like they can go as far as their hard work and talent can take them.
Biden noted the “short distance between peril and possibility” but promised that “what I believe is the America of our dreams is always closer than we think. It’s up to us to make our dreams come true.”
After thanking members of his administration, public servants and first responders across the country and around the world, U.S. service members and their families, Vice President Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and their family, Biden offered his “eternal thanks to you, the American people.”
“After 50 years of public service,” he said, “I give you my word: I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. A nation where the strengths of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure.
“Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith.
“I love America.
“You love it too.
“God bless you all.”
—
Notes:
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/israel-hamas-ceasefire
YouTube:
January 14, 2025
January 14, 2025
Shortly after midnight last night, the Justice Department released special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on former president Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The 137-page report concludes that “substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump…engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power.”
The report explains the case Smith and his team compiled against Trump. It outlines the ways in which evidence proved Trump broke laws, and it lays out the federal interests served by prosecuting Trump. It explains how the team investigated Trump, interviewing more than 250 people and obtaining the testimony of more than 55 witnesses before a grand jury, and how Justice Department policy governed that investigation. It also explains how Trump’s litigation and the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprising determination that Trump enjoyed immunity from prosecution for breaking laws as part of his official duties dramatically slowed the prosecution.
There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.
It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.
Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.
The report explains why the Justice Department did not bring charges against Trump for insurrection, noting that such cases are rare and definitions of “insurrection” are unclear, raising concerns that such a charge would endanger the larger case.
The report explained that prosecuting Trump served important national interests. The government has an interest in the integrity of the country’s process for “collecting, counting, and certifying presidential elections.” It cares about “a peaceful and orderly transition of presidential power.” It cares that “every citizen’s vote is counted” and about “protecting public officials and government workers from violence.” Finally, it cares about “the fair and even-handed enforcement of the law.”
While the report contained little new information, what jumped out from its stark recitation of the events of late 2020 and early 2021 was the power of Trump’s lies. There was no evidence that he won the 2020 election; to the contrary, all evidence showed he lost it. Even he didn’t appear to believe he had won. And yet, by the sheer power of repeating the lie that he had won and getting his cronies to repeat it, along with embellishments that were also lies—about suitcases of ballots, and thumb drives, and voting machines, and so on—he induced his followers to try to overthrow a free and fair election and install him in the presidency.
He continued this disinformation after he left office, and then engaged in lawfare, with both him and friendly witnesses slowing down his cases by challenging subpoenas until there were no more avenues to challenge them. And then the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in.
The report calls out the extraordinary July 2024 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. United States declaring that presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts. “Before this case,” the report reads, “no court had ever found that Presidents are immune from criminal responsibility for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution explicitly confers such criminal immunity on the President.” It continued: “[N]o President whose conduct was investigated (other than Mr. Trump) ever claimed absolute criminal immunity for all official acts.”
The report quoted the dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, noting that the decision of the Republican-appointed justices “effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”
That observation hits hard today, as January 14 is officially Ratification Day, the anniversary of the day in 1784 when members of the Confederation Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and formally recognized the independence of the United States from Great Britain. The colonists had thrown off monarchy and determined to have a government of laws, not of men.
But Trump threw off that bedrock principle with a lie. His success recalls how Confederates who lost the Civil War resurrected their cause by claiming that the lenience of General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States toward officers and soldiers who surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 showed not the mercy of a victor but rather an understanding that the Confederates’ defense of human slavery was superior to the ideas of those trying to preserve the United States as a land based in the idea that all men were created equal.
When no punishment was forthcoming for those who had tried to destroy the United States, that story of Appomattox became the myth of the Lost Cause, defending the racial hierarchies of the Old South and attacking the federal government that tried to make opportunity and equal rights available for everyone. In response to federal protection of Black rights after 1948, when President Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. military, Confederate symbols and Confederate ideology began their return to the front of American culture, where they fed the reactionary right. The myth of the Lost Cause and Trump’s lie came together in the rioters who carried the Confederate battle flag when they breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is adamant about restoring the names of Confederate generals to U.S. military installations. His confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee began today.
The defense secretary oversees about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard and employed in Reserves and civilian positions, as well as a budget of more than $800 billion. Hegseth has none of the usual qualifications of defense secretaries. As Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare pointed out today, he has “never held a policy role…never run anything larger than a company of 200 soldiers…never been elected to anything.”
Hegseth suggested his lack of qualifications was a strength, saying in his opening statement that while “[i]t is true that I don’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years…as President Trump…told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly ‘the right credentials’...and where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
The “dust on his boots” claim was designed to make Hegseth’s authenticity outweigh his lack of credentials, but former Marine pilot Amy McGrath pointed out that Trump’s defense secretary James Mattis and Biden’s defense secretary Lloyd Austin, both of whom reached the top ranks of the military, each came from the infantry.
Hegseth has settled an accusation of sexual assault, appears to have a history of alcohol abuse, and has been accused of financial mismanagement at two small veterans’ nonprofits. But he appears to embody the sort of strongman ethos Trump craves. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”
When Hegseth was in the Army National Guard, a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations. Hegseth lobbied Trump to intervene in the cases of service members accused of war crimes, and he cheered on Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally. Hegseth has said women do not belong in combat and has been vocal about his opposition to the equity and inclusion measures in the military that he calls “woke.”
Wittes noted after today’s hearing that “[t]he words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up. The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed. By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly. The nominee sparred with members of the committee over the difference between ‘equality’ and ‘equity.’”
Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) spoke today in favor of Hegseth, and Republicans initially uncomfortable with the nominee appear to be coming around to supporting him. But Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the committee, and they made it clear that they will not make the vote easy for Republicans.
The top Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) said he did not believe Hegseth was qualified for the position. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) exposed his lack of knowledge about U.S. allies and bluntly told him he was unqualified, later telling MSNBC that Hegseth will be an easy target for adversaries with blackmail material.
Hegseth told the armed services committee that all the negative information about him was part of a “smear campaign,” at the same time that he refused to say he would refuse to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs or refuse an unconstitutional order.
After the release of Jack Smith’s report, Trump posted on his social media channel that regardless of what he had done to the country, voters had exonerated him: “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” he wrote, lying about a victory in which more voters chose someone other than him. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
It’s as if the Confederates’ descendants have captured the government of the United States.
Notes:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0026-0004
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--the-cult-of-unqualified-authenticity
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Jack Smith's Report & BeyondWe’ve now seen Volume 1 of Jack Smith’s report, released just after midnight when Judge Aileen Cannon’s order prohibiting DOJ from making it public lapsed. We already knew a lot of the information in Volume 1, which covered the January 6/election fraud case Smith charged Donald Trump with in Washington, D.C. We know less about the classified documents c…Read more11 hours ago · 718 likes · 94 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/pete-hegseth-books-trump/680744/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/politics/pete-hegseth-confederate-generals-military-bases/index.html
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January 13, 2025
January 13, 2025
The incoming Trump administration is working to put its agenda into place.
Although experts on the National Security Council usually carry over from one administration to the next, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller of the Associated Press today reported that incoming officials for the Trump administration are interviewing career senior officials on the National Security Council about their political contributions, how they voted in 2024, and whether they are loyal to Trump. Most of them are on loan from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency and, understanding that they are about to be fired, have packed up their desks to head back to their home agencies.
The National Security Council is the main forum for the president to hash out decisions in national security and foreign policy, and the people on it are picked for their expertise. But Trump’s expected pick to become his national security advisor—his primary advisor on all national security issues—Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL) told right-wing Breitbart News that he wants to staff the NSC with people who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”
Ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) warned that the loyalty purge “threatens our national security and our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the ongoing and very real global threats in a dangerous world.”
But during Trump’s first term, it was Alexander Vindman, who was detailed to the NSC, and his twin Eugene Vindman, who was serving the NSC as an ethics lawyer, who reported concerns about Trump’s July 2019 call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to their superiors. This launched the investigation that became Trump’s first impeachment, and Trump appears anxious to make sure future NSC members will be fiercely loyal to him.
With extraordinarily slim majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans are talking about pushing through their entire agenda through Congress as a single bill in the process known as budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation, which deals with matters related to spending, revenue, and the debt limit, is one of the few things that cannot be filibustered, meaning that Republicans could get a reconciliation bill through the Senate with just 50 votes. If they can hold their conference together, they could get the package through despite Democratic opposition.
House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders have said that the House intends to pass a reconciliation bill that covers border security, defense spending, the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, spending cuts to social welfare programs, energy deregulation, and an increase in the national debt limit.
But Li Zhou of Vox points out that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds to get everything at once, because budget reconciliation measures are not supposed to include anything that doesn’t relate to the budget, and the Senate parliamentarian will advise stripping those things out. In addition, the budget cuts Republicans are circulating include cuts to popular programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.
Still, a lot can be done under budget reconciliation. Democrats under Biden passed the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act under reconciliation, and Republicans under Trump passed the 2017 Trump tax cuts the same way.
A wrinkle in those plans is the Republicans’ hope to raise the national debt limit. As soon as they take control of Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to deal immediately with the treasury running up against the debt limit, a holdover from World War I that sets a limit on how much the country can borrow. Although he has complained bitterly about spending under Biden, Trump has demanded that Congress either raise or abandon the debt ceiling because the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts he wants to extend will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, and cost estimates for his deportation plans range from $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
Republicans are backing away from adding a debt increase to the budget reconciliation package out of concern that members of the far-right Freedom Caucus will kill the entire bill if they do. Those members want no part of raising the national debt and have demanded $2 trillion in budget cuts before they will consider it. Tonight, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told Jordain Carney of Politico that Senate Republicans expect the debt limit to be stripped out of the budget reconciliation measure.
So Republicans are currently exploring the idea of leveraging aid to California for the deadly fires in order to get Democrats to sign on to raising the debt ceiling. Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Trump met with a group of influential House Republicans over dinner Sunday night at Mar-a-Lago to discuss tying aid for the wildfires to raising the debt ceiling. Today, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed to reporter Hill that this plan is under discussion.
Indeed, Republicans have been in the media suggesting that disaster aid to Democratic states should be tied to their adopting Republican policies. The Los Angeles fires have now claimed at least 24 lives. More than 15,000 firefighters are working to extinguish the wildfires, which have been driven by Santa Ana winds of up to 98 miles (158 km) an hour over ground scorched by high temperatures and low rainfall since last May, conditions caused by climate change.
On the Fox News Channel today, Representative Zach Nunn (R-IA) said: "We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who have been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy.... Those governors need to change their tune now.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) blamed Democrats for the fires and said of federal disaster relief: “I certainly wouldn't vote for anything unless we see a dramatic change in how they're gonna be handling these things in the future.”
Aside from the morality of demanding concessions for disaster aid after President Joe Biden responded with full and unconditional support for regions hit by Hurricane Helene (although Tennessee governor Bill Lee is still lying that Biden delayed aid to his state, when in fact he delayed in asking for it, as required by law), there is a financial problem with this argument. As economist Paul Krugman noted today in his Krugman Wonks Out, California “is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”
In 2022, the most recent year for which information is available, California paid $83 billion more to the federal government than it got back. Washington state also subsidized the rest of the country, as did most of the Northeast. That money flowed to Republican-dominated states, which contributed far less to the federal government than they received in return.
Krugman noted that “if West Virginia were a country, it would in effect be receiving foreign aid equal to more than 20 percent of its G[ross] D[omestic] P[roduct].” Krugman refers to the federal government as “an insurance company with an army,” and he notes that there is “nothing either the city or the state could have done to prevent” the wildfires. “If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name,” he writes. “As it happens, however, California—a major driver of U.S. prosperity and power—definitely has earned the right to receive help during a crisis.”
Today, Biden announced student loan forgiveness for another 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of people relieved of student debt to more than 5 million borrowers, who have received $183.6 billion in relief. This has been achieved through making sure existing debt relief programs were followed, as they had not been in the past.
Establishment Republicans continue to fight MAGA Republicans, and MAGA fights among itself: former Trump ally Steve Bannon yesterday called Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.” But even as their enablers in the legacy media are normalizing Republican behavior, a reality-based media is stepping up to counter the disinformation.
Aside from the many independent outlets that have held MAGA Republicans to account, MSNBC today announced that progressive journalist Rachel Maddow will return to hosting a nightly one-hour show for the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.
And today journalist Jennifer Rubin joined her colleagues who have abandoned the Washington Post as it swung toward Trump. She resigned from the Washington Post with the announcement that she and former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen have started a new media outlet called The Contrarian. Joining them is a gold-star list of journalists and commentators who have stood against the rise of Trump and the MAGA Republicans, many of whom have left publications as those outlets moved rightward.
“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission—defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin wrote in her resignation announcement. In contrast, the new publication “will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat.”
“The urgency of the task before us cannot be overstated,” The Contrarian’s mission statement read. “We have already entered the era of oligarchy—rule by a narrow clique of powerful men (almost exclusively men). We have little doubt that billionaires will dominate the Trump regime, shape policy, engage in massive self-dealing, and seek to quash dissent and competition in government and the private sector. As believers in free markets subject to reasonable regulation and economic opportunity for all, we recognize this is a threat not only to our democracy but to our dynamic, vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world.”
In what appears to be a rebuke to media outlets that are cozying up to Trump, The Contrarian’s credo is “Not Owned by Anybody.”
—
Notes:
https://www.vox.com/politics/393593/trump-congress-budget-reconciliation-tax-energy-immigration
https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-nsc-loyalty-waltz-21913da0464f472cb9fef314fed488e5
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-mass-deportation-program-cost/story?id=115318034
https://rollcall.com/2025/01/05/house-senate-gop-at-odds-over-big-beautiful-budget-bill-plan/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/13/house-republicans-trump-wildfire-aid-00197766
https://rollcall.com/2025/01/05/house-senate-gop-at-odds-over-big-beautiful-budget-bill-plan/
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5080266-trump-presses-congress-debt-limit/
Krugman wonks outIn Praise of CaliforniaOne of the unwritten rules of American politics is that it’s OK to sneer at and smear our big cities and the people who live in them, while it’s an outrageous act of disrespect to suggest that there’s anything wrong with the Heartland. And many people believe the smears; visitors to New York are often shocked to find that…Read morea day ago · 1325 likes · 278 comments · Paul Krugman
Public NoticeTrump's thuggish response to the California fires is a bad omenRead morea day ago · 579 likes · 26 comments · Noah Berlatskyhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/13/biden-student-loan-debt-forgiven.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/rachel-maddow-msnbc-trump.html
The ContrarianI Have Resigned from The Washington Post, effective today Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all jour…Read morea day ago · 4781 likes · 685 comments · Jennifer RubinThe ContrarianThis is The ContrarianThe Contrarian will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat. Our pre-election warnings that Donald Trump posed an unprecedented threat to our democracy were often treated as alarmist. However, the election of an openly authoritarian figure who traff…Read morea day ago · 1811 likes · 155 comments · Jennifer Rubinhttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/10/spending-cuts-house-gop-reconciliation-medicaid-00197541
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