Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 54
January 13, 2025
January 12, 2025
January 12, 2025
Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.
Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.
In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.
The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.
Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.
There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.
It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.
The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.
When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.
When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.
“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.
The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.
The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.
There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.
As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.
This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.
The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.
In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.
Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.
That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.
When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.
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Notes:
David Daley, RATF**KED: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy (New York: Liveright, 2016), pp. xxi–xxii.
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx
https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2018/11/gerrymandering-election-nc-1118
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/27/us-supreme-court-2020-election-gerrymandering
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/28/court-north-carolina-gerrymandering-060677
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/anatomy-north-carolina-gerrymander
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ukfND5aznBvzDGXB10Kf8Gui_VpaKvp4/view
https://www.vox.com/politics/394114/north-carolina-republican-supreme-court-riggs-griffin
https://www.wunc.org/politics/2025-01-02/north-carolina-supreme-court-race-riggs-griffin-congress
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/12/13/trump-administration-conservative-states-agendas/
https://ncnewsline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/SB382.pdf
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-enslaved-households-of-martin-van-buren
https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2017/06/the-erie-canal-new-york-city-and-democratic-government/
Robert V. Remini, The Albany Regency,” New York History 39 (October 1958): 341–355.
Joseph Hobson Harrison, Jr., “Martin Van Buren and His Southern Supporters,” The Journal of Southern History 22 (Nov., 1956): 438–458.
https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article298266238.html
X:
January 11, 2025
January 11, 2025
We’re home tonight after a week on the road, coming back to a light snowfall that made everything look like it was tucked into bed for the winter. And now, after an evening of killer cribbage, I’m going to tuck myself into bed, too, probably not for the whole winter, but for many, many hours.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo “Four Gulls” by Peter Ralston.]
Notes:
You can find Peter and his wife Terri at their gallery in Rockport, Maine, or here: https://www.ralstongallery.com/
January 10, 2025
January 10, 2025
Today the Department of Labor released the final jobs report of Joe Biden’s presidency. The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%.
Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.
In a statement, Biden noted that when he took office, economic forecasts projected that it would take years for the country to recover fully from the effects of the coronavirus shutdown. In fact, the U.S. economy has grown faster and created more jobs than any other country with an advanced economy. Working-age women are now employed at record levels, and the gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level on record. The administration has brought the inflation of the early recovery back down almost to target levels, while incomes have increased about $4,000 more than prices. The administration, Biden said, has “achieved the soft landing that few thought was possible.”
CNBC economist Carl Quintanilla quoted Matt Peterson of Barron’s, who wrote: “It looks a lot like U.S. consumers are happy with the way things are...[a]nd so are the markets.... The only one who doesn’t seem to be happy with the way things are is Trump.”
Brian Platt of Bloomberg reports that Trump’s threats of tariffs against Canada already have Canadian officials drafting plans for retaliation. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau told CNN yesterday that Trump is talking about annexing Canada to divert attention from how significantly his tariff plans would raise consumer prices.
As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted late last year, MAGA was never an ideological movement so much as a vehicle to pull together different constituencies in order to get Trump elected president. Since members of those constituencies have little in common, that effort centers around creating a false world that demonizes Democrats and insists they have created a dangerous world that is biased against MAGA. The only one who can stand against them, the story goes, is Trump, who is being persecuted for his defense of his supporters. That narrative has helped MAGAs to find common ground in their defense of Trump and his cronies and their support for Trump’s vows to retaliate against those he considers his enemies.
That impulse appears to be stronger than ever after Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump today in the New York election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies for covering up payments to an adult film actress to keep her quiet about their sexual encounter before the 2016 presidential election. Merchan said that he could not impose a punishment without encroaching on the presidency, so in an unusually light sentence, he released Trump without restrictions. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained, Trump knew he would not get jail time or a fine, but wanted to avoid the sentencing itself because just a month after the sentencing, the designation of convicted felon will become permanent.
Although a unanimous jury convicted him, Trump insisted the trial was “a political witch hunt…done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election…. The fact is I’m totally innocent.” He seemed to think that ratings should override reality, telling the judge: “I got the largest number of votes by far by any Republican in history,” he said, “and won, as you know, all seven swing states—won conclusively all seven swing states.”
Trump’s version of the case appeared to be convincing to MAGA pundits and lawmakers, who echoed his calls for retribution. Trump’s lawyer Mike Davis warned: “Right now the Democrats think they’re the hunters. And guess what? On January 20th at noon, they’re going to become the hunted.” Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Nancy Mace (R-SC), and Ronnie Jackson (R-TX) all echoed Trump. “Trump will win in the end and America wins in 10 days when we get Trump back!!” Jackson posted on X.
MAGA supporters have embraced Trump’s attacks on Democrats and on the government, most notably with their fact-free attacks on the Biden administration's handling of natural disasters—first the terrible flooding in North Carolina, when the right wing spread the lie that government officials were stealing people’s land, and now the terrible fires in Los Angeles that have been fueled in large part by the climate change that cut rainfall since last May and brought an unusually hot summer.
While local, state, and federal officials are doing their best to battle the Los Angeles fires in raging winds and dry conditions, Trump and his allies are lying to create the belief that the Democratic government is to blame for the fires. Trump lied that there is a shortage of water because Democratic governor Gavin Newsom refused to divert water to the area. Others claimed—falsely—that Democratic Mayor Karen Bass cut the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department, when in fact a 7% increase in funding came through negotiations outside the budget.
They have blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts for the blazes because the Los Angeles Fire Department is headed by Kristin Crowley, an LGBT woman who came up through the ranks in the department over twenty years. And Trump sidekick Elon Musk agreed with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that the fires are part of a “globalist plot” to trigger “total collapse” in the United States. “Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!” Trump posted.
In reality, firefighters are hard at work, with crews from both Canada and Mexico working along with Californians to suppress the fires.
Trump’s false version of reality has been a potent weapon against the Democrats, and he is promising to continue constructing that false reality: this week he has said he would replace the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), who is responsible for collecting the documents that establish the historical record of the actions of the national government. The archivist’s predecessor was the person who pursued the classified documents Trump took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt he would make sure that he had a loyalist in that position.
But it is an open question whether Trump’s false reality will be as convincing when he is back in the White House as it has been when he was sniping from outside. Trump has promised a number of conflicting things to the different constituencies in MAGA, and it is not clear that he can deliver them. And if he does, it’s not clear the American people will want what he is delivering.
Trump says he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services; more than 18,000 physicians have signed a letter warning that he is “unqualified” and “actively dangerous” to the health of Americans. Trump’s plan to elevate him to a position that impacts Americans is “a slap in the face to every health care professional who has spent their lives working to protect patients from preventable illness and death.”
Trump has vowed mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and the reinstatement of Title 42 to close the border to migrants, but as Biden and others repeatedly pointed out when Trump complained about Biden’s ending it, Title 42 is part of a 1944 public health law that can be invoked only to stop disease from coming into the U.S. Once the government declared the coronavirus pandemic over, Title 42 had to go. Yesterday, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that Trump’s advisors, led by Stephen Miller, are searching for a disease to invoke to reinstate Title 42. They have even considered invoking the old trope that immigrants might bring an unknown disease.
But, unlike non-emergency immigration law, Title 42 does not impose penalties for those who try to cross the border repeatedly, a reality Trump used to great effect against Biden as border encounters soared when people made multiple attempts. Now those numbers will be on Trump’s account if he uses Title 42 going forward.
In the meantime, the Biden administration today extended temporary protected status for about a million immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela who meet certain criteria. Their protection will be extended for 18 months under a 1990 law that stops the deportation of immigrants to countries at war or suffering from natural disasters. The new protection does not cover immigrants from 13 other nations who currently have protected status.
Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti and Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post noted that when he was in office before, Trump tried to end protections for Salvadorans and others, saying they came from “sh*thole” countries, and that he is expected to let protections expire during his second term.
When he was running for office, Trump pledged he would end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 24 hours, a vow Russian president Vladimir Putin has dismissed. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that Putin wants to meet with him and that they are setting that meeting up; the Kremlin denied that statement was true and noted it would be more appropriate to meet after Trump takes office.
Today the Treasury Department under Biden imposed new sanctions on more than 180 vessels, many of them in Russia's “shadow fleet” that carries oil, as well as on dozens of oil traders, oilfield service providers, insurance companies, and energy officials in an attempt to reduce the money Russia can realize from energy exports. The United Kingdom and Japan also imposed additional sanctions.
According to U.S. Ambassador to China R. Nicholas Burns, the Biden administration is also making a last effort to try to stop China from supplying Russia with equipment that it can use in its war against Ukraine. The U.S. is warning China that it is aligning “with the most unreliable agents of disorder in the international system.”
Trump may or may not be able to turn his promises into reality, but it is clear that some of his supporters’ plans will not go over well with the majority of Americans, especially as Trump fills his Cabinet with billionaires and spends his time next to the richest man in the world, who spent more than $250 million on Trump’s election.
Today, Ben Leonard, Meredith Lee Hill, and Kelsey Tamborrino reported in Politico that the Republicans on the House Budget Committee, chaired by Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), have made a list of more than $5 trillion in budget cuts they could make to fund Trump’s deportation plans as well as his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Options include cuts to 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.
For decades now, there has been enough wiggle room in our system to paper over the gulf between image and reality. That slack may continue.
But at least in some places, reality is catching up to the fake stories. During the 2016 presidential campaign, right-wing media spread the lie that leading Democrats were operating a child sex-trafficking wing out of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Those lies convinced a man to drive from North Carolina to the restaurant with an assault rifle to stop the crimes, only to discover the story was a hoax. He pleaded guilty to carrying a gun across state lines and assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to four years in prison. This week, two North Carolina police officers shot the same man after he pulled a gun on them during a traffic stop. He later died from his injuries.
Yesterday a New York State appeals court refused to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the electronic voting systems company Smartmatic against the parent company of the Fox News Channel for the lies that channel’s hosts told about Smartmatic rigging the 2020 presidential election. Smartmatic is suing for $2.7 billion.
And today the figure the “Pizzagate” conspiracy was designed to put into the highest office in the land, and that the Fox News Channel hosts’ lies were intended to keep there, officially became a convict.
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Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/10/iden-job-gains-obama-trump
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-gets-sentenced-to-be-first-convict-president
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-sentencing-new-york-hush-money-case/
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-hush-money-conviction-juan-merchan-2012433
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance WhiplashIf you’ve been trying to keep up with the news at the intersection of law and politics for the last 48 hours, you undoubtedly have some whiplash. It’s not technically the Trump administration yet, but it has that old, familiar, and distinctly unpleasant feel to it…Read more3 days ago · 3093 likes · 438 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-sentencing-new-york-hush-money-case/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-gets-sentenced-to-be-first-convict-president
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-has-emotional-meltdown-after-trump-is-declared-a-felon/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/us/politics/trump-national-archives.html
https://committeetoprotect.org/RFK-ACTION/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/us/politics/trump-title-42-migrants.html
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/10/trump-news-media-fact-checking-reality
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/10/el-salvador-temporary-protected-status/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/10/spending-cuts-house-gop-reconciliation-medicaid-00197541
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-11/trump-waters-down-ukraine-peace-deal-commitment/104806454
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-putin-wants-meet-him-meeting-being-set-up-2025-01-10/
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2777
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/business/nicholas-burns-ambassador-china.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/politics/pizzagate-gunman-killed-police-shooting/index.html
Bluesky:
profile/mrsbettybowers.bsky.social/post/3lfcxbnjxp22a
profile/governor.ca.gov/post/3lfg2uzc32s24M
profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3lffwr47o7c26
X:
January 9, 2025
January 9, 2025
Family members, friends, and political leaders gathered today at the Washington National Cathedral to honor the life of former president Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29 at age 100. All five living presidents and most of their wives attended: George W. Bush and Laura Bush were there, along with Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Melania Trump, and Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden.
Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, were also there, meeting Trump for the first time since January 6, 2021, when Trump tweeted to the rioters attacking the U.S. Capitol that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” redoubling the crowd’s fury and sparking chants of “Hang Mike Pence.”
Pence shook Trump’s hand; his wife stayed seated, looking straight ahead. While Obama, sitting next to Trump, spoke to him, former president Bush refused to acknowledge Trump, instead walking past him and giving a familiar greeting to Obama.
By virtue of living to age 100, Carter survived many of his contemporaries, and some left behind eulogies for him. Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, died in 2021 but recorded his memories of working with Carter in the White House from 1977 to 1981. His son Ted Mondale read the eulogy at today’s service.
Mondale recalled how he and Carter had redefined the role of the vice president of the United States, which had fallen into eclipse when President George Washington shut his own vice president, John Adams, out of his central circle of advisors and never recovered. Mondale recalled that Carter had honored his wish to change that pattern by becoming a full partner in the administration. Carter conferred with him regularly, put him in charge of certain central issues, and the two men became close friends.
Mondale also remembered that Carter was farsighted, ignoring short-term political interests to protect the next generations from harm. He tried to put the nation on a path that would find alternatives to fossil fuels, and did his best to advance women’s rights. He pushed for a law to extend the time for states to approve the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to make women’s equality part of the nation’s fundamental law, and he appointed women to positions in his administration and the federal judiciary. Mondale noted that Carter “appointed five times as many women to the federal bench as all of his predecessors combined.”
Mondale recalled Carter’s “extraordinary years of principled and decent leadership, [and] his courageous commitment to civil rights and human rights.” He recalled that toward the end of their time in the White House, in the years immediately after the tumultuous years of President Richard Nixon, with his covert bombing of Cambodia and cover-up of the Watergate break-in, the two men were summing up their administration. The sentence they came up with was: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.”
President Gerald Ford also left behind a eulogy for Carter, who had defeated Ford’s reelection attempt in 1976. Despite their political differences, the two men had become friends in 1981 when they traveled to and from the funeral of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who along with Israel’s Menachem Begin had signed the 1978 Camp David Accords negotiated by Carter’s administration that established a framework for a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Over time, Ford and Carter became close friends and agreed to deliver eulogies for each other.
Carter fulfilled his promise in 2006, and today Ford’s son Steve fulfilled his father’s.
Ford spoke to Carter’s deep faith in God when he noted that the former president “pursued brotherhood across boundaries of nationhood, across boundaries of tradition, across boundaries of caste. In America’s urban neighborhoods and in rural villages around the world, he reminded us that Christ had been a carpenter.” “I’m looking forward to our reunion,” Ford concluded. “We have much to catch up on. Thank you, Mr. President. Welcome home, old friend.”
Carter’s grandson Jason Carter, chair of the Carter Center’s board of trustees and a former Georgia state senator, emphasized Carter’s integrity: his grandfather’s political convictions reflected his private beliefs. “As governor of Georgia half a century ago, he preached an end to racial discrimination and an end to mass incarceration. As president in the 1970s...he protected more land than any other president in history.... He was a climate warrior who pushed for a world where we conserved energy, limited emissions, and traded our reliance on fossil fuels for expanded renewable sources. By the way, he cut the deficit, wanted to decriminalize marijuana, deregulated so many industries that he gave us cheap flights and…craft beer. Basically, all of those years ago, he was the first millennial. And he could make great playlists.”
Jason Carter called his grandfather’s life a “love story, about love for his fellow humans and about living out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.” He highlighted his grandfather’s work to bring cases of Guinea worm disease from 3.5 million cases in humans every year to fourteen.
Carter noted that “this disease is not eliminated with medicine. It’s eliminated…by neighbors talking to neighbors about how to collect water in the poorest and most marginalized villages in the world. And those neighbors truly were my grandfather’s partners for the past forty years [and have] demonstrated their own power to change their world.” When Jimmy Carter “saw a tiny 600-person village that everybody else thinks of as poor, he recognized it. That’s where he was from. That’s who he was.” He saw it as “a place to find partnership and power and a place to carry out that commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Essentially, he eradicated a disease with love and respect. He waged peace with love and respect. He led this nation with love and respect.”
President Joe Biden, who was the first senator to endorse Carter’s run for president in 1976, also gave a eulogy today. In what appeared to be a reflection on the incoming president in the audience, who for years has mocked Carter as the worst president in history, Biden focused on what he called Carter’s “enduring attribute: character, character, character.” And, Biden said, quoting the famous saying from ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “Character…is destiny,” both in our lives and in the life of the nation.
Carter taught him, Biden said, that “strength of character is more than title or the power we hold. It’s the strength to understand that everyone should be treated with dignity, respect. That everyone, and I mean everyone, deserves an even shot. Not a guarantee, but just a shot…. [W]e have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor, and to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all: the abuse of power.”
Character, Biden said, is not about being perfect, for none of us are perfect. It’s about “asking ourselves: Are we striving to do…the right things?… What are the values that animate our spirit? To operate from fear or hope, ego or generosity? Do we show grace? Do we keep the faith when it’s most tested?”
Biden noted that Carter lived a faith that commanded its adherents to love their neighbors. He also noted that such a commandment is hard to follow, and that it requires action. It is, he said, the essence of the Gospel and many other faith traditions, and it is also “found in the very idea of America. Because the very journey of our nation is a walk of sheer faith. To do the work, to be the country we say we are, to be the country we say we want to be: a nation where all are created equal in the image of God and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives.”
“We’ve never fully lived up to that idea of America,” Biden said, but thanks to patriots like Jimmy Carter, “[w]e’ve never walked away from it either.”
Carter was “[a] white Southern Baptist who led on civil rights. A decorated Navy veteran who brokered peace. A brilliant nuclear engineer who led on nuclear nonproliferation. A hard-working farmer who championed conservation and clean energy.” He “also established a model post-presidency by making a powerful difference as a private citizen in America,” Biden said, showing “us how character and faith start with ourselves and then flow to others.”
“At our best,” Biden said, “we share the better parts of ourselves: joy, solidarity, love, commitment. Not for reward, but in reverence for the incredible gift of life we’ve all been granted. To make every minute of our time here on Earth count.”
“That’s the definition of a good life,” Biden said. It was the life Jimmy Carter lived for 100 years: a “good life of purpose and meaning, of character driven by destiny and filled with the power of faith, hope, and love.”
—
Notes:
https://americanoversight.org/timeline/224-p-m/
https://people.com/karen-pence-refuses-greet-donald-trump-jimmy-carter-funeral-8772193
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/adams-vice-presidency/
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/jimmy-carter-eulogy-walter-mondale-full-text/
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/read-gerald-ford-jimmy-carter-eulogy-full-text-rcna187015
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/30/1161050106/jimmy-carter-biden-relationship
https://apnews.com/article/jimmy-carter-president-biden-eulogy-ccf9d465ff5e2f662571630c732df7da
January 8, 2025
January 8, 2024
At least four wildfires tearing across Los Angeles have killed at least five people and forced the evacuation of at least 130,000 more, and have flattened about 42 square miles (109 square kilometers). The fires are being driven by unusually high winds with gusts of up to 98 miles per hour (158 km per hour). Although January is typically part of California’s wet season, conditions are terribly dry. Downtown Los Angeles has received just 0.16 inches (0.4 cm) of rain since May 6, 2024, and the summer was unusually hot.
President Joe Biden is supporting state and local responses to the fire with federal resources. Today, he approved a major disaster declaration, which enables people and towns to access funds immediately in order to jump-start their recovery. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will reimburse California for some of the costs of fighting the fires. Five U.S. Forest Service large air tankers and ten federal firefighting helicopters have been deployed to support the local firefighters; ten Navy helicopters with water delivery buckets are joining them. California governor Gavin Newsom has deployed the California National Guard, and the Nevada National Guard is standing by.
Canada, too, has sent water-dropping helicopters and a pair of planes, which are part of a firefighting contract with California that’s been in place for 14 years.
At a fire station in Santa Monica, Biden stood beside Newsom and said: “We’re prepared to do anything and everything for as long as it takes to contain these fires.”
In contrast to federal support for California under Biden, in the midst of the ongoing crisis President-elect Donald Trump blamed California governor Gavin “Newscum and his Los Angeles crew” for the fires, suggesting he had put the needs of fish over the people of California. He posted: “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.” "Let this stand as a symbol of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newsom duo,” Trump posted. “January 20th cannot come fast enough!"
Newsom’s office responded: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration—that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
Trump is apparently claiming that water that could be used to fight the fires has been diverted to protect the endangered Delta smelt. But the water systems in California are complicated, and importing water from northern California would make no difference for the wildfires.
Los Angeles water doesn’t come from northern California. It comes from an aqueduct east of the Sierra Nevada, from groundwater, and from the Colorado River. Right now, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has more water stored than it has ever had before, according to Mark Gold, a board member. “It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire,” he told Alastair Bland of CalMatters. “It’s about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate.”
Hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick told Taryn Luna, Liam Dillon, and Alex Wigglesworth of the Los Angeles Times that Trump’s linking of water policy to the raging fires was “blatantly false, irresponsible and politically self-serving.”
The two different responses of the current president and the incoming one reveal dramatically different approaches to the presidency.
Yesterday the Biden administration announced the finalization of a new rule that will remove medical debt from all credit reports. Until now, medical debt has meant that consumers could be denied mortgages, car loans, or small business loans. In addition, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that funds from the American Rescue Plan, passed by Democrats shortly after Biden took office in 2021, have enabled the elimination of more than $1 billion in medical debt for 700,000 Americans. Jurisdictions are on track to eliminate about $15 billion in medical debt for nearly 6 million Americans, the White House said.
“No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency,” Harris said.
While Biden and Harris are working to solve problems for regular Americans, Trump has simply gone on the offensive, attacking Democrats for what he claims is their mismanagement without offering any ideas of his own. “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA,” he posted. “THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!”
By now, we know that Trump goes on offense to hide his own shortcomings. As Judd Legum of Public Notice pointed out, “The largest wildfire in California history—the August Complex Fire, which burned more than 1 million acres—occurred during the Trump administration.”
That pattern of going on offense to hide his own behavior was also on display today when CNN’s Hadas Gold reported that someone inside the Fox News Channel (FNC) gave the Trump team the questions that Trump would be asked at an Iowa town hall last January just before the Iowa caucus. A forthcoming book by Alex Isenstadt of Politico details the close relationship between Trump and people within FNC. It says that after Trump refused to prepare for that town hall, someone inside Fox texted the questions to a senior Trump aide, enabling them to prep him with answers.
After Trump fell apart during his debate with Vice President Harris, he accused her of knowing the questions ahead of time and said the debate was “rigged.”
Trump apparently went on the offensive yesterday when he called Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just hours before Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request with the court asking it to stop Manhattan judge Juan Merchan from sentencing Trump Friday in the election interference case in which a jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. Alito told reporters that they talked only about a job opportunity for one of Alito’s law clerks and did not discuss the case, but it is highly unusual for a president or president-elect to talk with a Supreme Court justice when that official has business before the court. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said such a thing was “almost unheard of.”
As legal analyst Quinta Jurecic observed, though, someone leaked news of this inappropriate contact astonishingly quickly. Such news usually “has taken a while to dribble out,” Jurecic noted, but “this happened THIS MORNING. [S]omebody was smug or pissed off enough to go to the press right away.”
Trump’s accusations that Biden committed a crime more likely to be chalked up to Trump himself—taking bribes from a foreign company—was also in the news today. Alexander Smirnov, the key witness for the House Republicans’ investigation into Biden, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about the alleged bribery and to tax evasion.
Julia Ainsley and Carol E. Lee of NBC News today reported another way in which Trump is threatening to go on offense: by conducting a very visible raid targeting undocumented immigrants in the Washington, D.C., area as soon as he takes office. While Presidents Barack Obama and Biden have targeted employers who violate labor laws, Trump wants to demonstrate “shock and awe” by raiding workplaces and sweeping up migrants who are in the U.S. without documentation, regardless of their criminal status. His transition team has been talking with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials about the logistics of such raids.
And then, of course, there are Trump’s frequent references to taking over other countries. Don Jr. traveled to Greenland this week with right-wing activist and media personality Charlie Kirk, ostensibly to record a podcast, but Trump Sr. followed the trip with posts saying “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!” That idea is getting traction among MAGA leaders, even though—or perhaps because—it is a direct affront to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to which both the U.S. and Denmark belong.
Over the New York Post’s map of the “Donroe Doctrine” in which Canada is labeled “51st state,” Greenland is labeled “our land,” the Gulf of Mexico is labeled “Gulf of America,” and the Panama Canal is labeled “Pana-Maga Canal,” the Republican majority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee posted today: “Our country was built by warriors and explorers. We tamed the West, won two World Wars, and were the first to plant our flag on the moon. President Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it’s un-American to be afraid of big dreams.” Journalist Jamie Dupree screenshotted the tweet before the committee deleted it.
Behind all the offense, though, things that matter deeply to the American people are going largely unnoticed.
MAGA representatives have been introducing a slew of measures to the new Congress, many of which incorporate the plans of Project 2025 into legislation. They call for turning over immigration to the states, privatizing veterans’ healthcare, and repealing the 1993 National Voting Rights Act, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Bills call for withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization; increasing oil and gas production on federal lands; abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); allowing states to spend federal education money on private school vouchers; and removing the protection of transgender rights from schools.
Other measures would revoke security clearances for “certain former members of the intelligence community,” introduce a constitutional amendment to cap the Supreme Court at nine justices, and cut off federal funding to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (the office that successfully charged Trump with election interference) and the Fulton County (GA) District Attorney’s Office (the office that has charged Trump with criminal conspiracy).
And MAGA Republicans have proposed a bill to impose a national abortion ban, along with a bill urging Congress to support a consortium of antiabortion doctors for women because, the bill says, “health care should emphasize the whole woman, including her physical, mental, and spiritual wellness,” and “health care for women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities.”
—
Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/08/california-fire-rare-climate-change-factors
https://www.newsweek.com/pacific-palisades-fire-donald-trump-gavin-newsom-california-2011882
https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2025/01/la-fires-donald-trump-fact-check/
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5075334-trump-sparks-wildfires-battle/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/media/trump-fox-news-town-hall-questions-maria-bartiromo/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-speaks-justice-alito-amid-push-halt-criminal/story?id=117386419
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/us/politics/trump-inauguration-donors.html
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/7/text
https://www.congress.gov/member/andy-biggs/B001302
Law DorkTrump and Alito, two men who disdain ethical constraints, chatted on TuesdayDonald Trump is a former president who is set to become president again on January 20 despite having faced four felony prosecutions from three different prosecutors — one of which led to conviction — relating to actions he took when seeking the presidency, while president, and after leaving the presidency…Read more9 hours ago · 64 likes · 12 comments · Chris GeidnerBluesky:
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