“Trump advisers said the couple will speak at the event on behalf of the president and express support for him.”
The Daily Beast adds: “The McCloskeys, who became a conservative cause célèbre for pointing loaded firearms at demonstrators outside their mansion, have already participated in Trump campaign events this summer. Despite the couple’s repeated claims they were in fear for their lives and the protesters threatened them, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner charged them last month with unlawful use of a weapon. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, however, has indicated he will pardon the McCloskeys if they are convicted.”
Just distraction trying to pull focus from the DNC
Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Monday that he planned “a pardon tomorrow on someone who is very, very important.”
“He declined to offer further details except to say it was not Flynn nor Snowden, a former U.S. National Security Agency contractor now living in Russia who has been charged with leaking secret information,” Reuters reported.
Marked by COVID founder Kristin Urquiza, who lost her father to the coronavirus, delivered another blistering denunciation of Donald Trump during the first night of the virtual Democratic National Convention. Urquiza’s father spent his last days on a ventilator several weeks after contracting COVID at a karaoke bar with friends in May.
“My dad, Mark Anthony Urquiza, should be here today but he isn’t,” Urquiza said, in a damning, heartbreaking speech (watch it below). “He had faith in Donald Trump. He voted for him, listened to him, believed him and his mouthpieces when they said that coronavirus was under control and going to disappear.”
“My dad was a healthy 65-year-old.,” Urquiza added. H”is only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life.”
It was a very good speech. We'll see if it gets the press it deserves to
On Monday, Michelle Obama delivered an incredibly powerful speech to close out the first night of the Democratic National Convention. She talked about America’s place in the world today compared to four years ago, she talked about how white supremacists have been empowered in the age of Trump, she talked about systemic racism, and most importantly, she talked about the ongoing efforts to suppress the vote, and that we must be ready to fight to elect Joe Biden:
We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.
And she absolutely eviscerated Donald Trump:
So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.
Good evening, everyone. It’s a hard time, and everyone’s feeling it in different ways. And I know a lot of folks are reluctant to tune into a political convention right now or to politics in general. Believe me, I get that. But I am here tonight because I love this country with all my heart, and it pains me to see so many people hurting.
I’ve met so many of you. I’ve heard your stories. And through you, I have seen this country’s promise. And thanks to so many who came before me, thanks to their toil and sweat and blood, I’ve been able to live that promise myself.
That’s the story of America. All those folks who sacrificed and overcame so much in their own times because they wanted something more, something better for their kids.
There’s a lot of beauty in that story. There’s a lot of pain in it, too, a lot of struggle and injustice and work left to do. And who we choose as our president in this election will determine whether or not we honor that struggle and chip away at that injustice and keep alive the very possibility of finishing that work.
I am one of a handful of people living today who have seen firsthand the immense weight and awesome power of the presidency. And let me once again tell you this: the job is hard. It requires clear-headed judgment, a mastery of complex and competing issues, a devotion to facts and history, a moral compass, and an ability to listen—and an abiding belief that each of the 330,000,000 lives in this country has meaning and worth.
A president’s words have the power to move markets. They can start wars or broker peace. They can summon our better angels or awaken our worst instincts. You simply cannot fake your way through this job.
As I’ve said before, being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are. Well, a presidential election can reveal who we are, too. And four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didn’t matter. Maybe they were fed up. Maybe they thought the outcome wouldn’t be close. Maybe the barriers felt too steep. Whatever the reason, in the end, those choices sent someone to the Oval Office who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes.
In one of the states that determined the outcome, the winning margin averaged out to just two votes per precinct—two votes. And we’ve all been living with the consequences.
When my husband left office with Joe Biden at his side, we had a record-breaking stretch of job creation. We’d secured the right to health care for 20,000,000 people. We were respected around the world, rallying our allies to confront climate change. And our leaders had worked hand-in-hand with scientists to help prevent an Ebola outbreak from becoming a global pandemic.
Four years later, the state of this nation is very different. More than 150,000 people have died, and our economy is in shambles because of a virus that this president downplayed for too long. It has left millions of people jobless. Too many have lost their health care; too many are struggling to take care of basic necessities like food and rent; too many communities have been left in the lurch to grapple with whether and how to open our schools safely. Internationally, we’ve turned our back, not just on agreements forged by my husband, but on alliances championed by presidents like Reagan and Eisenhower.
And here at home, as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and a never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered, stating the simple fact that a Black life matters is still met with derision from the nation’s highest office.
Because whenever we look to this White House for some leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness, what we get instead is chaos, division, and a total and utter lack of empathy.
Empathy: that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. The ability to walk in someone else’s shoes; the recognition that someone else’s experience has value, too. Most of us practice this without a second thought. If we see someone suffering or struggling, we don’t stand in judgment. We reach out because, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” It is not a hard concept to grasp. It’s what we teach our children.
And like so many of you, Barack and I have tried our best to instill in our girls a strong moral foundation to carry forward the values that our parents and grandparents poured into us. But right now, kids in this country are seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They’re looking around wondering if we’ve been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.
They see people shouting in grocery stores, unwilling to wear a mask to keep us all safe. They see people calling the police on folks minding their own business just because of the color of their skin. They see an entitlement that says only certain people belong here, that greed is good, and winning is everything because as long as you come out on top, it doesn’t matter what happens to everyone else. And they see what happens when that lack of empathy is ginned up into outright disdain.
They see our leaders labeling fellow citizens enemies of the state while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists. They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protestors for a photo-op.
Sadly, this is the America that is on display for the next generation. A nation that’s underperforming not simply on matters of policy but on matters of character. And that’s not just disappointing; it’s downright infuriating, because I know the goodness and the grace that is out there in households and neighborhoods all across this nation.
And I know that regardless of our race, age, religion, or politics, when we close out the noise and the fear and truly open our hearts, we know that what’s going on in this country is just not right. This is not who we want to be.
So what do we do now? What’s our strategy? Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, “When others are going so low, does going high still really work?” My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight.
But let’s be clear: going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty. Going high means taking the harder path. It means scraping and clawing our way to that mountain top. Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God, and if we want to survive, we’ve got to find a way to live together and work together across our differences.
And going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth.
So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.
Now, I understand that my message won’t be heard by some people. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. But enough of you know me by now. You know that I tell you exactly what I’m feeling. You know I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation. You know how much I care about all of our children.
So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.
I know Joe. He is a profoundly decent man, guided by faith. He was a terrific vice president. He knows what it takes to rescue an economy, beat back a pandemic, and lead our country. And he listens. He will tell the truth and trust science. He will make smart plans and manage a good team. And he will govern as someone who’s lived a life that the rest of us can recognize.
When he was a kid, Joe’s father lost his job. When he was a young senator, Joe lost his wife and his baby daughter. And when he was vice president, he lost his beloved son. So Joe knows the anguish of sitting at a table with an empty chair, which is why he gives his time so freely to grieving parents. Joe knows what it’s like to struggle, which is why he gives his personal phone number to kids overcoming a stutter of their own.
His life is a testament to getting back up, and he is going to channel that same grit and passion to pick us all up, to help us heal and guide us forward.
Now, Joe is not perfect. And he’d be the first to tell you that. But there is no perfect candidate, no perfect president. And his ability to learn and grow—we find in that the kind of humility and maturity that so many of us yearn for right now. Because Joe Biden has served this nation his entire life without ever losing sight of who he is; but more than that, he has never lost sight of who we are, all of us.
Joe Biden wants all of our kids to go to a good school, see a doctor when they’re sick, live on a healthy planet. And he’s got plans to make all of that happen. Joe Biden wants all of our kids, no matter what they look like, to be able to walk out the door without worrying about being harassed or arrested or killed. He wants all of our kids to be able to go to a movie or a math class without being afraid of getting shot. He wants all our kids to grow up with leaders who won’t just serve themselves and their wealthy peers but will provide a safety net for people facing hard times.
And if we want a chance to pursue any of these goals, any of these most basic requirements for a functioning society, we have to vote for Joe Biden in numbers that cannot be ignored. Because right now, folks who know they cannot win fair and square at the ballot box are doing everything they can to stop us from voting. They’re closing down polling places in minority neighborhoods. They’re purging voter rolls. They’re sending people out to intimidate voters, and they’re lying about the security of our ballots. These tactics are not new.
But this is not the time to withhold our votes in protest or play games with candidates who have no chance of winning. We have got to vote like we did in 2008 and 2012. We’ve got to show up with the same level of passion and hope for Joe Biden. We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.
We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.
Look, we have already sacrificed so much this year. So many of you are already going that extra mile. Even when you’re exhausted, you’re mustering up unimaginable courage to put on those scrubs and give our loved ones a fighting chance. Even when you’re anxious, you’re delivering those packages, stocking those shelves, and doing all that essential work so that all of us can keep moving forward.
Even when it all feels so overwhelming, working parents are somehow piecing it all together without child care. Teachers are getting creative so that our kids can still learn and grow. Our young people are desperately fighting to pursue their dreams.
And when the horrors of systemic racism shook our country and our consciences, millions of Americans of every age, every background rose up to march for each other, crying out for justice and progress.
This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another. And it is well past time for our leaders to once again reflect our truth.
So, it is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.
And if we want to keep the possibility of progress alive in our time, if we want to be able to look our children in the eye after this election, we have got to reassert our place in American history. And we have got to do everything we can to elect my friend, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States.
The Trump administration appears set to postpone politically fraught decisions on ethanol until after the November election to avoid a backlash from the feuding agriculture and petroleum sectors, according to several people in both industries who have been in contact with the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency.
EPA faces a late-November deadline to decide how many billion gallons of ethanol the oil refining industry must blend into the nation's gasoline and diesel supply, but the agency has yet to even issue its proposal, which is itself months overdue. That decision has been delayed because of a battle over small oil refiners' request for exemptions that corn farmers say would undercut the 2007 law that is designed to promote biofuels.
The oil and agriculture industries have fought for years over the EPA's ethanol mandate, which was created under the George W. Bush administration to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil and cut carbon emissions. About 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop goes to producing ethanol, which makes up about 10 percent of the U.S. fuel market for cars and small trucks. But refiners say the program saddles them with heavy costs that are driving small plants out of business.
"It's a no-win proposition because you’re going to alienate (one or) the other group," said Tom Kloza, analyst at the oil price service OPIS, who has not been in touch with the Trump administration. "To the extent that they can, they’ll probably stall or wait. And they can get away with it because its such an uncertain environment in terms of what volumes are going to look like next year."
Trump has held several Oval Office meetings on the biofuel disputes, and he has been in regular telephone conversation with biofuel champion Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who has admonished the president to pump up ethanol volumes. But he has also faced pressure from Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), two oil refining advocates who have pressed Trump to side with the industry’s blue collar workers.
But Trump has failed to craft a deal that satisfies both sides. And even his efforts to placate farm country — such as an agreement to allow year-round sales of higher-ethanol blends of gasoline — have been overshadowed by corn growers' anger over EPA's expanded use of exemptions for refineries.
Oil refiners are now pressing EPA to grant them biofuel exemptions dating back to 2012, a move they say could allow EPA to skirt a January court decision that sharply curtailed the agency's power to issue those waivers.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said last week on a trip to the Midwest that he could not promise a decision on the waivers and 2021 blending levels, calling the issue "complicated."
In a statement to POLITICO, the agency said it's still working on the 2021 blending volume requirements but did not give a timeline for their release.
"EPA continues to work with all federal partners on the 2021 [levels] including assessing the potential impacts of COVID-19 and outstanding legal issues,” EPA spokesperson James Hewitt told POLITICO in a statement.
People in communication with senior Trump administration officials say neither Wheeler nor the White House wants to inflame tensions over the ethanol program. Granting the small refinery exemptions to gasoline makers would infuriate farmers who have so far been loyal Trump supporters, but denying them would be a blow to refiners struggling to survive amid the collapse in fuel demand because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Until the administration decides that issue, the release of the annual ethanol-blending mandate — known as the Renewable Volume Obligation — remains in limbo.
"There remains no political decision on the SRE mess so, hence, no decision on RVO," a person in the oil industry told POLITICO.
Trump is likely to campaign in Iowa and other Corn Belt states on his support for ethanol and his decision to allow year-round 15-percent ethanol blend sales — a message Vice President Mike Pence delivered last week.
But that message may be hard to sell amid the recession. The downturn has forced ethanol producers to idle as much as 40 percent of their capacity and oil refiners to cut output by as much as 20 percentage points, according to the Energy Information Administration.
EPA's tough decision concerns what to do with 52 "gap year" exemption requests the agency has received from small refiners. The requests, which would grant the refiners waiver dating back nearly a decade, are an effort to allow them to comply with the January decision from U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which said a refinery can receive new exemptions only if they have received them continuously since the program began. Ethanol producers see the requests as undermining Trump's effort to ensure maximum biofuel blending.
Wheeler has indicated that EPA is in no rush to make the call on those refiners' requests, telling a crowd in Wisconsin last week that the Department of Energy, which advises its EPA on the decisions, had already provided its feedback.
“I’m not sure how long it's going to take us to review them,” Wheeler said at a tour of a Wisconsin dairy, according to Biomass Magazine.
With the exemptions up in the air and no sign of the 2021 volumes, ethanol producers are getting frustrated.
"If someone asked me, 'Has President Trump kept his promise?' I can’t say yes," said Monte Shaw, head of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol producers trade group.
Shaw said plenty of time remains for EPA to make a decision on the waivers and the requirements, a move that could bolster support for Trump among farmers.
And at least one person in the refining industry worried that Sen. Joni Ernst's (R-Iowa) neck-and-neck reelection race could push the administration to issue a rule favorable to corn and ethanol interests.
If EPA were to propose blending volumes in November, it would likely mean no final rule for 2021 until after the year had begun. For their part, refiners would like to see a rule, but don't want one that would force them to absorb too much blending.
"Regulatory certainty is always important to refiners, but at the same time it’s better that EPA get this rulemaking right than simply get it done fast," said a spokesperson with the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a refiners trade association. "With market upheaval from COVID and policy decisions needed around the SREs, it is even more important that annual volumetric mandates be achievable, reflect reduced fuel consumption and do not put consumers or refining jobs at risk."
Who could have possibly predicted it? oh wait...everyone
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is ending in-person instruction for undergrads just a week after reopening, after dozens of students living in dorms and a fraternity house tested positive for coronavirus.
UNC is hardly the only institution experiencing an uptick in infections within days of students returning to campus. Bethel College in North Newton, Kan., reported a cluster of 46 confirmed cases of Covid-19 through mandatory entry testing. Officials said 482 people have been tested and many still await their results. At Oklahoma State University, a sorority house is under quarantine after reporting 23 cases.
The University of Notre Dame is seeing a spike in coronavirus cases, too. More than a quarter of its 58 confirmed cases rolled in over the weekend. University officials said the the vast majority of new cases could be "traced to a single off-campus gathering."
Only a fraction of colleges have started their fall semester. As August and September progress and more institutions resume teaching, the academic term could see a wave of similar outbreaks and sharp pivots to online learning if students don't adhere to rules and guidelines about masks and social distancing.
President Donald Trump, lawmakers and state governing boards have pressured universities to reopen for in-person lessons.Trump threatened colleges tax-exempt status and his administration changed the rules about international students' coming to the U.S. if their colleges offered online-only courses.
At UNC, the chancellor and provost did not have the “full freedom” to decide whether or not to reopen their campus because “the [Board of Governors] told system universities they had to reopen and that individual university chancellors could not make those decisions independently,” Barbara K. Rimer, dean of UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, wrote Monday.
With the growing number of infections among students and reports of off-campus behavior showing “drinking, no masks or distancing and crowds,” Rimer said the university should return to remote instruction.
The semester began Aug. 10, and students moved in about one week earlier. In all, more than 500 UNC students are in isolation or being quarantined on or off campus.
“After only one week of campus operations, with growing numbers of clusters and insufficient control over the off-campus behavior of students (and others), it is time for an off-ramp,” Rimer said. “We have tried to make this work, but it is not working.”
Heading into the fall term, colleges across the country looking to open for at least part-time in-person instruction were cautiously optimistic. Campus leadership touted reopening plans that included entry tests, setting social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines, creating safe conduct pledges they ensured their students would honor, and lowering the typical packing together of students in dorms and dining halls by inviting back a limited number of students.
Starting Wednesday, all undergraduate in-person instruction at UNC will shift to remote learning, Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and Provost Robert A. Blouin wrote in a joint message. “As much as we believe we have worked diligently to help create a healthy and safe campus living and learning environment, we believe the current data presents an untenable situation,” they wrote.
The in-person starts at some colleges went very much against what some local leaders wanted. Several said that while students may behave on campus, getting them to abide by strict social distancing guidelines off campus could be a challenge.
Before class resumed at UNC, Orange County’s Health Director Quintana Stewart had warned that if students moved back, Chapel Hill "could quickly become a hot spot for new cases.”
Stewart had recommended to Guskiewicz that classes be conducted entirely online for the first five weeks of the semester. Earlier this summer, UNC students had not been cooperative with the communicable disease investigation and control measures, Stewart said late last month.
UNC officials say they expect the majority of their undergraduate residential students will change their living plans for the fall and will be able to do so without penalties. The university will notify students with more information in coming days, but said those "who have hardships, such as lack of access to reliable internet access, international students or student-athletes will have the option to remain."
At Oklahoma State University, officials told The Oklahoman that the outbreak in the sorority house was "expected."
“When you bring back 20,000 students, there will invariably be more cases related to campus," said Monica Roberts, OSU director of media relations. "We’ve prepared for this for five months and have protocols in place to manage the situation."
After watching a surge in large gatherings and parties on social media, Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker called the University of Virginia's plan to bring students back to campus a “recipe for disaster.”
The pushback prompted the university ended to delay undergraduate in-person instruction and residence hall move-in dates by two weeks — to try to avoid a situation like that of UNC.
Somehow the Republican Party has politicized the science around the COVID-19 pandemic and the reopening of schools. It’s not surprising. It’s not shocking. It’s mostly just a public health nightmare, an economic nightmare, and a depressing reminder of how low a large swath of our country will go to pretend they are right. Texas, like many states in the union, is trying to reopen its school system. Texas, like many conservative-run states, is trying to reopen schools without really thinking about the true ramifications, in a rushed way, without the level of forethought one might hope.
Meanwhile, every school system that has reopened with in-person classes has very quickly found out that living in a pandemic world where local, state, and federal officials have not done their job to protect the public makes it very difficult to just reopen schools. However, Texas has a solution to this problem: If you don’t report the coronavirus numbers and data, no one need know how good or bad a job you’re doing!
KBTX-TV reports that the state of Texas is not collecting COVID-19 data provided by school districts. The Texas Education Agency that oversees all primary and secondary public education in the state says it has yet to decide on whether or not it will collect COVID-19 data from its schools: “This question on data collection is still under active deliberation by the agency, and we expect to have an update in the coming weeks on what, if any, data will be required and how it will be recorded.”
Educators and parents are not happy about this. As KVUE reports, many parents in the system are frustrated by the lack of information. As Austin teacher and parent Brennan Cruser told the outlet: “I can't really control what the district decides for me personally in my job, but I can control what my family decides for my kids. And so I need information to make those decisions.” Cruser went on to call the fact that this is even up for debate “really concerning.”
So far, the Texas Department of State Health Services has not responded to inquiries into this seemingly negligent position on public health and the impact of reopening schools during a pandemic. The Texas Department of State Health Services has been busy digging a hole in the sand and trying to get its collective head inside of that hole.
In case you haven't noticed, COVID-19 cases among U.S. children have been "steadily increasing" since last March. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed this in new data released today, also noting that "evidence suggests that children likely have the same or higher viral loads in their nasopharynx compared with adults and that children can spread the virus effectively in households and camp settings."
Says the CDC: "Due to community mitigation measures and school closures, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to and among children may have been reduced in the United States during the pandemic in the spring and early summer of 2020. This may explain the low incidence in children compared with adults."
And there's a hint of professional optimism to be had here, if you're an infectious disease expert! No, not optimism over possibly reducing the spread of the disease, don't be silly. The reason for optimism is that we're soon going to be able to tell for sure if the "low incidence in children" we've seen over the summer was indeed just because schools were closed.
"Comparing trends in pediatric infections before and after the return to in-person school and other activities may provide additional understanding about infections in children," the report said
We're doing the human experiment: opening those same schools. If American kids start dying off, somebody owes somebody a Coke.
The CDC has no direct control over whether schools reopen, of course—at least, not that they are willing to use. Around the country, but primarily in states with Republican "leadership," the experiment is being run and sure enough, reopening schools and universities is already resulting in hundreds of new COVID-19 hotspots. We now know for a fact that schools are prime candidates for superspreader events; so far, children have proved to be more resilient than adults in not dying from the new coronavirus, but infection rates have been climbing steeply in recent weeks, with nearly 100,000 U.S. children testing positive in the last two weeks of July alone. In Florida, cases among children soared almost 140% during July; nonetheless, Republican governors are especially keen on reopening schools to establish a temporary—very temporary—pretense of normality.
It's almost a given that those reopening schools will be swiftly reclosing. There is no plausible way to have in-person education during a pandemic using only the resources our schools currently have access to. There aren't enough masks, or tests, or classrooms, or social distancing precautions, and there will not be because the United States, nearly alone among developed nations, pissed away six months of pandemic time making only halfhearted stabs at solutions to any of those things. Even if conservative leaders "demand" schools stay open, parents, teachers, and students will not necessarily be willing to comply.
In the meantime, though, the schools will be spreading the virus. The CDC notes that "1 in 3 children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States were admitted to the intensive care unit, which is the same in adults," and that "similar to adults, children with severe COVID-19 may develop respiratory failure, myocarditis, shock, acute renal failure, coagulopathy, and multi-organ system failure."
We know it's going to happen. But many states will be doing the experiment anyway, out of deference to a conservative, Trumpian theory that even a worldwide pandemic is nothing more than a way to make conservative leaders look bad.
Yeah it's rather hard to remember things within the last year but before the pandemic
Tim Harford, writing for Financial Times (not paywalled): Last spring, I returned from the holiday of a lifetime in Japan, and reflected on the richness of the memories it had generated. Time flew by while I was there, but in hindsight 10 days somewhere vividly new had produced more memories than 10 weeks back home. I likened the effect to the compression of a film. Instead of storing each frame separately, video compression algorithms will start with the first frame of a scene and then store a series of "diffs" -- changes from one frame to the next. A slow, contemplative movie with long scenes and fixed cameras can be compressed more than a fast-moving action flick. Similarly, a week full of new experiences will seem longer in retrospect. A month of repeating the same routine might seem endless, but will be barely a blip in the memory: the "diffs" are not significant enough for the brain to bother with. After months of working from home, I now realise that there was something incomplete about this account. New experiences are indeed important for planting a rich crop of memories. But, by itself, that is not enough. A new physical space seems to be important if our brains are to pay attention.
The Covid-19 lockdown, after all, was full of new experiences. Some were grim: I lost a friend to the disease; I smashed my face up in an accident; we had to wear masks and avoid physical contact and worry about where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. Some were more positive: the discovery of new pleasures, the honing of new skills, the overcoming of new challenges. But I doubt I am alone in finding that my memory of the lockdown months is rather thin. No matter how many new people or old friends you talk to on Zoom or Skype, they all start to smear together because the physical context is monotonous: the conversations take place while one sits in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.>
AmiMoJo writes: Facebook's algorithm "actively promotes" Holocaust denial content according to an analysis that will increase pressure on the social media giant to remove antisemitic content relating to the Nazi genocide. An investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, found that typing "holocaust" in the Facebook search function brought up suggestions for denial pages, which in turn recommended links to publishers which sell revisionist and denial literature, as well as pages dedicated to the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving. The findings coincide with mounting international demands from Holocaust survivors to Facebook's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to remove such material from the site. Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people "controlling the world." However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that ISD describe as a "conceptual blind spot." The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell listens to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 20. | Doug Mills (Pool)/Getty Images
Does Mitch McConnell want Trump to be a one-term president?
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in October 2010.
The unemployment rate was 9.4 percent that month. The need for stimulus was desperate. But led by McConnell, Republicans blocked Democrats’ every attempt at further support. The GOP didn’t have a better plan for restarting the economy, but they didn’t need one. The belief, then, was that relentless opposition reflected the strategic incentives of the minority party. Obama and the Democrats carried the burden of governance, and would bear the blame for failure. The red wave in the 2010 election seemed to prove McConnell’s approach right, tactically if not morally.
Today, unemployment stands at 10.2 percent — higher than during the peak of the previous financial crisis, and that’s almost certainly an underestimate of the true employment calamity. The death toll from Covid-19 has likely passed 200,000. Vast swaths of the US remain at varying levels of lockdown. But McConnell — and, to be fair, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — is acting as if the most important thing to achieve is for President Trump to be a one-term president.
This is the strange truth of 2020: The dynamic in Congress is virtually identical to what we saw in 2010. Democrats want more economic support; they passed a $3.5 trillion bill in the House in May. Republicans don’t, and they’ve refused to act on the House bill, or offer an alternative that reflects the size of the crisis — the main feature of the $1 trillion HEALS Act is that it cuts the expanded unemployment benefits in an attempt to push people back to work, even though the virus is anything but controlled.
Worse, in the absence of an agreement, they’ve let the provisions from previous packages expire or run out of money, draining aid from workers and businesses that remain under lockdown and now face poverty or bankruptcy. The total failure of governance is matched by a bizarre absence of urgency: McConnell could hold round-the-clock sessions in an attempt to strike a deal. Instead, the Senate is adjourned until September.
What’s baffling is that Republicans are running this strategy while they are in the majority. Donald Trump is president of the United States, and Mitch McConnell is Senate majority leader. They carry the burden of governance, and they will bear the blame for failure. If polls are to believed, both of them are likely to lose those jobs come November. What, after all, is the case for reelecting a Republican Party that has no coherent policy response to a virus that Europe and Asia have managed to control, or to an economy in free fall? “GOP 2020: More of this!” is not a winning slogan when 70 percent of Americans say the country is on the wrong track.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the briefing room of the White House on August 14, 2020, in Washington, DC.
Politically, the Republican Party’s current approach is so self-sabotaging that I figured I must be missing something. Someone must have a plan, a theory, an alternative. Chaos is Trump’s brand, but surely McConnell won’t walk passively back into the minority. And so I began asking Republican Hill staffers and policy experts for correction. What wasn’t I seeing? What was the GOP’s policy theory right now? What do Republicans actually want?
I posed these questions to Tea Party conservatives, populist reformers, and old-line Reaganites. The answer, in every case, was the same. Different Republican senators have different ideas, but across the party as a whole, there is no plan. The Republican Party has no policy theory for how to contain the coronavirus, nor for how to drive the economy back to full employment. And there is no plan to come up with a plan, nor anyone with both the interest and authority to do so. The Republican Party is broken as a policymaking institution, and it has been for some time.
“I don’t think you’re missing anything,” said a top Republican Senate staffer. “You have a whole bunch of people in the Senate posturing for 2024 rather than governing for the crisis we’re in.”
“There hasn’t been a coherent GOP policy on anything for almost five years now,” a senior aide to a conservative Senate Republican told me. “Other than judges, I don’t think you can point to any united policy priorities.”
Oh. Well, then.
Four theories for the GOP’s governance crisis
The Republicans I spoke to were clear-eyed on the electoral disaster that threatens their party. There is no campaign ad that will overwhelm mass death, no tweetstorm that will convince Americans to ignore immiseration. So what accounts for the governing political party ceasing to govern amid a global crisis and the prospect of an electoral wipeout? A few theories dominated.
It’s Trump’s fault. There was wide agreement that Trump has broken the Republican Party’s ability to govern — particularly on coronavirus. It’s not just that he is uninterested in the daily, difficult work of governance. It’s that he poses a threat to anyone who tries to step out in front of him. Any strategy congressional Republicans attempt could be shredded the next time the president picks up his phone. And with Trump still at 91 percent among Republican voters, few GOP members of Congress are comfortable crossing him.
“A lot of the Republicans I talk to seem almost emasculated by the White House,” says Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who spent six years as Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) chief economist. “The president will do what he’s going to do. Any strategy they come up with will be undermined tomorrow by a tweet. Their fate is tied to a president they can’t control or even influence.”
Joshua Lott/Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 14, 2020.
The result has been, effectively, paralysis. Trump won’t govern. Without clarity on what he will support, congressional Republicans feel they can’t govern.
“A lot of Republican politicians are still fundamentally perplexed by Trump’s immense popularity with their core voters,” says Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “They just don’t think they can pick a fight with him and win it on any subject. They’re just not sure what the dynamics are, where the boundaries are. They’re so afraid of being in the crosshairs that they really aren’t doing a damn thing.”
Conservative thinking has no room for Covid-19. The coronavirus death toll shows that whatever it is America is doing now, it’s not working. The experiences of Europe and Asia show that the virus can be controlled. So what do congressional Republicans think should happen next?
On this question, every answer was a verbal shrug. Collectively, congressional Republicans have no theory for containing the virus. And they don’t really see it as their job to come up with one. It may have been the Trump administration’s job, but the White House decided to leave it to state and local governments.
That’s left congressional Republicans in a bind. To admit a new strategy is needed is to say that Trump is failing, and few are willing to risk the predictable reprisals. Moreover, congressional Republicans are uncomfortable proposing the kinds of strategies that have worked elsewhere. For instance: Pushing America back into lockdown while spending tens of billions to set up a true test-trace-isolate strategy would also require a multitrillion-dollar support package so families and businesses could survive the return to economic deep-freeze. Few Republicans want to do that.
“There’s a certain amount of motivated reasoning here,” says the top GOP staffer. “If you’re not going to have government intervention, you can’t have the lockdowns.”
Managing a pandemic is difficult in the best of circumstances, but it’s almost impossible if the party is built around mistrust of the government and opposition to social services.
They’re worried about Tea Party 2.0. The most unexpected argument that recurred in my reporting is that congressional Republicans are already acting in fear of a post-Trump backlash, with the coronavirus-support bills playing the role in 2022 that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) vote played in 2010.
“They are already looking ahead to a Tea Party reawakening in the next couple of years, and they’re voting with that in mind,” says Riedl.
One Senate staffer noted that many of the GOP’s loudest voices against further stimulus won their seats in the Tea Party wave of 2010. “Ted Cruz was elected on Cut, Cap, and balance. Rand Paul was in the 2010, post-TARP election. Nikki Haley won her governor’s race in 2010 on the TARP issue. Ron Johnson was 2010. Those are the four loudest anti-spending folks on the right.” Opposing Democratic stimulus bills is, on some level, the foundation of their politics.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A surprising number of Republicans think the Tea Party will roar back. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), among others, wants to be ready.
That ideology has a firmer hold on the White House now, too. Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Congress member who is now Trump’s chief of staff, also rode the Tea Party energy to Congress, winning in 2012 and becoming a leader in the Freedom Caucus. He’s heading a faction inside the White House that’s trying to block Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from cutting another multitrillion-dollar deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
They’ve given up on 2020, and many are looking toward 2024. Some Senate GOP aides griped to me that Trump’s falling poll numbers have led to too many GOP senators looking past 2020 and beginning to position themselves for 2024. Those senators know they can’t cross powerful factions in their own party — the Trumpist faction chief among those — but they also need to build their own profiles. Being the loudest voice against whatever it is the Democrats want to do is the easiest way to square the circle. But it’s left America without a governing party at a time when good governance is desperately needed.
That brings me to the explanation for GOP behavior that is almost unanimous among Senate Democrats I’ve spoken to. They believe Republicans are readying themselves to run the strategy against former Vice President Joe Biden they ran against President Obama: Weaponize the debt — which Republicans ran up by trillions during the Trump administration — as a cudgel against anything and everything the Democrats want to do. Force Democrats to take sole ownership of an economic response that’s too small to truly counteract the pain.
If Republicans are behaving like an opposition party that primarily wants to stop Democrats from doing anything, that’s because it’s the role they’re most comfortable playing, and one many of them expect to reprise soon.
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To understand why protesters have taken to the streets of Portland, Oregon, for 80 straight days and counting—and why the Portland Police Bureau continues to arrest and harass protesters—consider how the police have handled two recent noteworthy incidents: The pipe bombs that were hurled at protesters last weekend, and the arrest one night later of “Wall of Moms” organizer Demetria Hester at a downtown rally.
The differences are telling, and help explain why the citizens of Portland are protesting: Namely, they have come to believe that a police force that’s supposed to be protecting and serving them instead not only will not defend them—and especially the targeted minorities in their community—from ongoing attacks by the far-right extremists eager for violence who have been descending on them for the past three years, but have actively taken the side of those attacking them.
The contrasts could not be more stark:
In the early Saturday morning pipe bombing case, police responded slowly to the scene and—despite having a wealth of information available online about the likely perpetrator—have only announced an investigation into the case, but have apparently not yet contacted several key witnesses.
In the case of Demetria Hester, they targeted for arrest a respected community leader who was the victim of a notorious hate crime in which a tepid and racist police response resulted in a horrific fatal assault the next day on a Portland commuter train.
A good deal is already known about the man believed to be at least one of the participants in the pipe bombing attempt, identified after video showed him fleeing the scene: Louis Garrick Fernbaugh, 52, a retired Navy SEAL who claims to have been a contractor for the CIA, and most recently co-managed a private business in suburban Portland that specializes in providing tactical training and “threat assessments for schools, businesses, and other venues.”
He was identified after a video shared on Instagram (and then on Twitter) showed protesters chasing darkly clad men out of the park following the blast. Another video, also shared on Twitter, showed one of the independent journalists at the park pursuing one of those men, who was carrying what appear to be night vision goggles, apparently to the man’s car, where he behaved threateningly toward the journalist.
The man recording the incident—Portland videographer Scott Keeler, who said he had observed the man in the park earlier walking away from the explosions—was using a flashlight, and first asked the man to stop as he walked up to him at a car the man appeared to be using. "Why are you throwing pipe bombs at people?" Keeler asked.
"Look man, I'm not the guy you wanna fuck with," the man responded. Keeler again queried him about the bombs, to which the man replied: "I don't know what you're talking about. But I'm not that guy you wanna fuck with. I'm fucking telling you."
Shortly after these videos were posted, a number ofantifascists quickly identified the man as Fernbaugh. Fernbaugh deleted his Facebook account, but antifascist internet sleuths were able to find archived versions and created an archive of his posts and comments gathered from various social media platforms.
One of the anti-Semitic images from Nazi propaganda shared by Garrick Fernbaugh.
For the most part, Fernbaugh’s account is full of pro-Trump talking points—accusing Hillary Clinton of criminality, claiming that Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump was fraudulent, and so on—but his underlying far-right extremism lurks throughout, too. A couple of 2015 posts reproduced World War II-era anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. Others included alt-right memes.
In a video rant he posted on Facebook, Fernbaugh claimed that “leftists” were responsible for “political terrorism” in the United States and was skeptical about the attempted mail bombings of liberal figures in October 2018. In the post’s description, he wrote: “I'm surprised no one has slaughtered these sheep that have grown horns (ANTIFA)."
Fernbaugh claimed in a 2018 Facebook post warning of a coming civil war that “George Soros is known to have paid ANTIFA to instigate rioting and create chaos that has caused millions in damage across numerous cities, but especially Portland, OR.” In a more recent comment on Facebook, Fernbaugh claimed to have “infiltrated ANTIFA” during a downtown Portland protest.
Most of the accounts associated with Fernbaugh were deleted shortly after he was identified. But at a Twitter account linked to his former business, he posted two comments on Wednesday, one a taunt and the other a threat: “ANTIFA had fireworks thrown at them and called the police. hahaha, yeah whatever,” and “Training to shoot commies.” The tweets were deleted shortly afterwards.
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) promptly announced that it was opening an investigation. However, it has so far been remarkable for its passivity: On Tuesday, a police spokesperson told reporters that investigators still had not heard from “someone who was actually there” early Saturday morning.
“Investigators would like to remind the public that PPB still needs in-person witnesses and/or potential victims to come forward. Detailed in-person witness accounts are crucial in moving this case forward. Those with knowledge who have spoken to the press are encouraged to contact investigators,” PPB’s statement read.
Police acknowledged that they had identified the man in the video, calling Fernbaugh a “person of interest” in the case, “and he still needs to be interviewed.” The spokesperson said investigators had “attempted to contact him” but apparently failed, adding that officers “would encourage” him to contact PPB.
On Wednesday, Keeler told The Oregonianthat investigators still had not contacted him, as he had earlier mentioned on Twitter.
Face to face with hate
Passivity by Portland police officers in the face of extremist violence features prominently in the case of Demetria Hester as well.
Jeremy Christian’s booking shot
Hester met Jeremy Christian on a Portland MAX commuter train late in the evening on May 25, 2017. When Christian boarded, he promptly announced that he was a Nazi and was looking to recruit others to join him. He shouted that he hated Jews, Mexicans, Japanese, and anyone who wasn’t Christian.
Hester—the only person of color on the train—spoke up and told Christian he needed to keep it down. What she didn’t know was that the large, bellicose white man had, two weeks before, marched with a far-right group called Patriot Prayer, wrapped in an American flag—and had been kicked out for giving a Nazi salute and calling a counterprotester a “white n----r.”
“Fuck you bitch!” he screamed at her, adding that she had neither the right to speak nor to be on the train.
“I built this country!” He shouted. “You don’t have a right to speak. You’re black. You don’t have a right to be here. All you Muslims, blacks, Jews, I will kill all of you.”
As the train pulled into Hester’s stop, she stood up to leave. Christian made clear he intended to get off and began shouting loudly at everyone on the train that he didn’t care if anyone wanted to call the police because he wasn’t scared.
“I will kill anyone who stands in my way because I have a right to do this,” he told them. He looked at Hester and seethed: “Bitch, you’re about to get it now.”
As she stepped off the train, Christian lunged at her with a Gatorade bottle and smacked her above the right eye with it just as she whipped out her can of mace and gave him a faceful. It knocked him down on the platform. She staggered away and awaited police, who finally arrived about 20 minutes later. Hester said the officers treated her as a likely suspect, even though witnesses pointed out Christian—still washing pepper spray out of his eyes—standing feet away.
Christian wound up walking away from the scene and going home for the night. Police later blamed this on confusion regarding who the perpetrator was.
Hester later testified that, when she asked why Christian was being allowed to walk away, a PPB officer told her: “He didn’t do it”—even though she and every witness who remained on the scene had told them he had.
The next day, May 26, Christian boarded another MAX train—the Green Line, at the Lloyd Center—during rush hour. This time he had a knife.
Unlike the night before, when he had harassed Hester, this train was full of people. But that didn’t stop Christian. No sooner had he boarded than he spotted two young women of color—one of whom was wearing a hijab—and immediately stood in front of them, shouting about how they didn’t belong in Portland. That Muslims should die, because they had been killing Christians for hundreds of years. That the girl in the hijab should go back to Saudi Arabia.
The girls got up and fled to the back of the train, seeking another seat. Christian followed them, still shouting.
Three men, regular commuters who had been watching the scene unfold, stepped between Christian and the two women. One of them—Rick Best, 53, a Portland city employee—stood closest to Christian and tried using reason: “I know you are taxpayer, but this is not OK. You’re scaring people.” Christian kept shouting that it was about his free speech.
As they neared the next stop, Taliesen Myrddin Namkai-Meche, 23, pleaded with Christian: “Please get off this train.”
Another of the trio, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, 21, recognized Christian from the alt-right march the month before, when he had marched with the counterprotesters and Christian had made a scene. He tried pushing himself between Christian and the women.
“You fucking touch me again and I’ll kill you,” Christian snarled at him. At that moment he lost his balance and fell back; when he came back up, he had a knife in his hand, and he plunged it into Best’s neck, then turned to Namkai-Meche and Fletcher and did the same to each of them. Then he ran from the train and away from the Hollywood station. The two dark-skinned girls fled the train, too, leaving their belongings behind.
Best bled out before help could arrive and was declared dead at the scene. Namkai-Meche, who told everyone who stopped to help that he loved them, died in the intensive care ward at the nearby hospital. Only Fletcher, who remained in the hospital for a month recovering from his wound, survived the attack.
At his arraignment on murder and attempted murder charges—but, mysteriously, no hate-crime charges involving Hester’s confrontation—two days later, Christian ranted behind the glass for the benefit of the press.
“Free speech or die, Portland!” He shouted. “You got no safe place. This is America! Get out if you don’t like free speech!
After hearing the official charges being read, he shouted again: “Death to the enemies of America! Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to antifa!
“You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism!”
The police take a side
“Free speech” was, as it happened, the radical right’s battle cry nine days later, June 4, when Patriot Prayer—which denounced Christian and claimed he was never a member, pointing to his earlier ejection—held what would be the first of many right-wing rallies in downtown Portland over the next few years, ignoring the pleas of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler to postpone the event so soon after the MAX murders. The rally featured a number of notable alt-right and “Patriot” figures, including Proud Boys cofounder Kyle Chapman, Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.
A Portland citizen shames police officers during a protest.
However, their modestly large turnout of several hundred supporters was dwarfed by the thousands of protesters—including groups from local unions, peace activists, and various leftist and antifascist organizations. For the bulk of the afternoon, the scene remained peaceful if contentious, with police generally keeping both sides separated.
But there was disturbing behavior by the police throughout. At one point, uniformed officers made an arrest of a man being detained by a “Patriot” militiaman, with his assistance. Late in the afternoon, police became aggressive against the counterprotesters, kettling antifascist demonstrators who had marched downtown at the rally’s end. Some 14 people were arrested, all counterprotesters.
The message was clear: Portland police were eager to protect the “free speech” rights of the assembled far-right extremists, yet had no compunction at all about trampling the free speech rights of the people who turned out to protest them. It was self-evident at the scene that the police had taken a side in the conflict—aligning themselves against ordinary Portland citizens with the extremist out-of-towners whose questionable insistence that their “free speech” was under attack had just inspired a horrific hate crime.
This established what became a routine pattern over the next few years. Patriot Prayer and its leader—a onetime “doomsday prepper” from Vancouver, Washington, named Joey Gibson—began organizing a seemingly endless series of “protests” in the Portland and Seattle areas that continued for the next two years and more, many of which produced clashes between protesters, counterprotesters, and police. At each of these events, arrests of counterprotesters became common, while only handfuls of arrests of the right-wing extremists involved in the violence occurred.
The ostensible causes for these protests were highly mutable and opportunistic, depending largely on whatever was the right-wing cause célèbre of the moment: One event was held to protest Portland’s “sanctuary city” status for immigrants. Another rally at which Patriot Prayer was a violent presence, in Seattle, was titled a “March Against Sharia.” An October 2018 protest was called a march “for law and order.” There was even a “Him Too” protest defending men’s rights, held shortly after televised hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court amid a flurry of sexual harassment and abuse accusations.
The point of the events wasn’t the controversy du jour: the point was the violence. As the ranks of the Patriot Prayer rally-goers filled with Proud Boys and other thuggish street-brawling elements, it became clear that the main reason most of the men—the vast majority of whom did not live in the city—out marching in Portland’s streets were present was that they were eager to provoke violence with “antifa” and the counterprotesters. And it frequently was very violent indeed, particularly a June 30, 2018, event dedicated to “cleaning the streets of Portland” of leftists.
The culmination of all these protests was the Aug. 17, 2019, Proud Boys march through downtown Portland, which drew hundreds of the street brawlers from around the nation—and yet was still badly outnumbered by thousands of antifascists and their supporters. There were relatively few confrontations between the Proud Boys and counterprotesters, largely because police maintained rigorous security around the marchers, and even provided personal escorts for some of them.
Portland police arrest Hannah Ahern, who spat on the street in front of an officer.
However, police again behaved very differently toward the counterprotesters. They arrested 13 of them, the majority under dubious circumstances, including a woman arrested for revving her motorbike in the vicinity of Proud Boys marchers. Another was a woman named Hannah Ahern, who was arrested for spitting on the street in front of officers: “I wanted to express my general disagreement with what was going on,” she told the Portland Mercury later. “I felt compelled to show disgust.”
She was speaking for many Portlanders. By then, the PPB’s chummy behavior with the Patriot Prayer contingent had gone beyond mere impressions from the rallies—the problem was substantiated when Portland journalists uncovered texts and emails between Gibson and a police liaison demonstrating the latter’s eagerness to help the group organize and even how to avoid the arrest of one far-right activist with an established record of violence. The disgust became even more tangible when PPB’s internal investigation of the matter completely exonerated the officer and the department.
The right-wing protests became infrequent and sporadic after that, including a planned Ku Klux Klan rally at which no klansmen actually showed up, though there was once again a large crowd of counterprotesters. When the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown measures first hit in mid-March, protests vanished altogether—until the May 25 murder of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests, including in Portland.
Most of these protests lasted one or two days; however, in Portland, where police brutality issues had taken on an extraordinary edge, the protests became a daily affair—one that has now surpassed 80 consecutive days. By early July, most of the protests had become quiet and nonviolent, with only sporadic violence and vandalism, with the notable exception of an arson attack on the federal courthouse downtown—which is about the time that federal agents under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began showing up, wearing anonymous military gear, arresting protesters on the streets, and spiriting them away in unmarked vans.
Over the next few nights, they clashed with protesters in the area around the courthouse, using flashbangs and munitions to disperse the crowds. One protester was shot in the forehead by an “impact weapon” round that caused him brain damage. Another protester—a Navy veteran who was attempting to speak with the DHS officers—was brutally beaten with batons, breaking his hand.
That was when the scene exploded. On the night of July 24, thousands of Portlandians took to the streets to protest the arrests. The protest was entirely peaceful—drum circles, groups of teachers and nurses, a marching band, a “Wall of Moms” wearing yellow shirts—until the DHS officers began unleashing tear gas on the crowd. A brigade of “fathers” arrived with leaf blowers and blew the gas back at the officers.
The escalated protests continued nightly. DHS officials called the protests “criminal violence perpetrated by anarchists targeting city and federal properties.” It brought in reinforcements on July 28, even though many of these officers lacked proper training, and both Mayor Wheeler and Gov. Kate Brown—along with both of the state’s senators—demanded the DHS police be withdrawn. Eventually, they negotiated a phased withdrawal, and the DHS arrests ceased.
The protests went on, though at a lower level of violence. However, once again dealing with Portland police, protesters found themselves frequently assaulted and faced with aggressive new tactics by police, including slashing the tires of vehicles containing protesters and marching double-time in phalanxes down city streets to clear them of protesters, often with brutal results. An American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit points out that police targeted journalists and legal observers as well as protesters.
“As the national media focuses on the unconstitutional abductions of protesters from the streets of Portland and the nightly litany of assaults on protesters, the much longer and more persistent history of local police engaging in some of the very same attacks is lost,” Lewis and Clark College professor Elliott Young, a witness to the violence, remarked in a Houston Chronicle op-ed. “Since the George Floyd protests erupted in Portland, the local police have been using tear gas, pepper spray and flash bang grenades to disperse crowds of peaceful protesters.”
The police aggression now appears to have been picked up as a green light by right-wing extremists. Following the previous weekend’s pipe bombing attempt, Proud Boys marched Saturday in downtown Portland, and were involved in numerous violent brawls with counterprotesters. It culminated with police declaring the protest a riot; afterward, one of the Proud Boys marchers was recorded firing two shots from a 9 mm weapon in the direction of protesters as he exited a parking garage in a car. The shots did not strike anyone, but witnesses recovered shell casings at the scene.
The man firing the weapon was identified by antifascists as Skylor Jernigan, a Patriot Prayer member and regular participant in far-right protests who, in 2019, had posted a video rant on social media warning antifascists that “you’re going to be getting knives put into your throat, you’re going to be getting bullets put into your head, if you don’t stop this shit with us.”
So far, Portland police have only told The Oregonianthat they “are aware of the allegation that shots were fired and will investigate.”
Witnessing against hate
Demetria Hester was a key witness in Jeremy Christian’s trial in early 2020, detailing her ordeal for the jury at length. She was questioned by one of Christian’s defense attorneys about the testimony she gave to legislators in June 2019 regarding a state Senate bill to expand Oregon’s hate-crime laws.
“Why do you feel so strongly about speaking out about this?” Hester was asked.
“There are a lot of hate crimes in the world today and they need to be stopped,” she replied.
Christian was convicted by unanimous verdict in February on multiple counts of first-degree murder and hate crimes for his threats against the two young women. At his sentencing in June, Hester again testified, and turned her moment on the stand into a condemnation of police inaction when dealing with far-right violence.
“I blame the system for creating and facilitating people like Jeremy, and then we the community have to deal with him,” she said. “In my case, the white supremacist got special treatment from the police officer reacting, believing the assault was made against the assailant. He didn’t believe me or the two Trimet supervisors.” She ended by telling Christian to “rot in hell.”
Her comments set off Christian, who tore off his face mask and began screaming at her: “I should’ve killed you, bitch!” He was carried out of the courtroom. The judge sentenced Christian to life in prison with no chance of parole.
The next month, Hester became heavily involved in helping to organize the “Wall of Moms” brigade that began showing up first at the protests against DHS officers, and then at the protests involving the PPB that followed. The original group dissolved amid internal debate over its largely white leadership, and Hester assumed leadership of the group that replaced it: Moms United for Black Lives.
She told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the intent remained the same: “The same idea that was there before: moms uniting for Black Lives Matter, and being on the front line to show the unity that we have as moms, period, to come together for Black Lives Matter because that’s what matters. And the moms come out there and support and they’re diehard, and that’s what we need.”
Hester helped lead the Moms brigade at protests beginning in late July. However, on Aug. 9, she was arrested by Portland police, a day after the police union headquarters was vandalized. Officers walked into a group of people at what had been a peaceful protest and told her: “You’re under arrest.”
The PPB claimed she was arrested because someone threw a “mortar” at officers. Hester was charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a police officer.
However, the next day, Hester was released as the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announced that its was dismissing the charges, saying it “was in the interest of justice upon reviewing the police reports in this matter.”
Hester spoke to a crowd of supporters outside the courthouse. “This is about our future, this is about peace,” she said. “Our peace of mind to walk down the street and care for each other again. Peace to go to your neighbors and say, ‘I love you. What do you need?’”
Hester’s release, however, was only part of a larger official rebuke handed to PPB for its handling of protest-related arrests by the district attorney’s office. The next day, it announced that it would not prosecute over 500 cases involving charges brought by police related to the protests.
“As prosecutors, we acknowledge the depth of emotion that motivates these demonstrations and support those who are civically engaged through peaceful protesting,” the office said in a prepared statement. “We recognize that we will undermine public safety, not promote it, if we leverage the force of our criminal justice system against peaceful protestors who are demanding to be heard.”
The shift came about under the auspices of new management in the office: District Attorney Mike Schmidt was elected in May on an agenda promising sweeping reforms in the criminal justice system; he garnered over 75% of the vote against an establishment candidate who had been avidly supported by the Portland Police Association. The message in that outcome was unmistakable—but then fully ignored by the police afterwards.
There are many possible explanations for the obdurate culture of police forces in places like Portland and Seattle that seems to encourage outright contempt for the citizens they are ostensibly serving and protecting. These attitudes were summed up in a recent video on social media capturing a protester’s conversation with a Seattle officer who drove onto a sidewalk full of protesters at high speed, after which he described with relish how the protesters on the sidewalk scattered like “cockroaches.”
Some of the problems originate with the longtime drive by police forces around the country to emphasize their “professionalization” during training—which also has the effect of conditioning police officers to see themselves as separate from the communities they serve. Other problems include the increasing trend of urban police officers living in suburban and exurban places distantly removed culturally and otherwise from the communities in which they serve—which is notably the case in both Portland (where only 18% of police live inside the city) and Seattle.
But the heart of the Portland situation—the invisibility of right-wing extremist violence to police officers as a serious community threat—is one that infects police forces throughout the nation. And until that failure—a massive one for any urban area with both minorities and white supremacists in the mix—is addressed, the conflicts between police and the people they serve will continue, both in Portland and elsewhere.
As Hester, reflecting on how Christian’s attack affected her, told Oregon Public Broadcasting: “I couldn’t believe we were in 2017 because I’m from Memphis, Tennessee, where they do burn crosses, and they do drag you out of your house — the KKK, which are the police. That Portland, Oregon, allows people like Jeremy Joseph Christian to spew hate to everyone and to then back him up.
“That’s what pushed me, because the night of the incident, the police knew who he was, allowed him to do what he did, treated me like the assailant, wanted my ID, had no compassion. I asked him [the police officer] why he wasn’t pursuing him, and he said ‘He said he didn’t do it.’ Those types of things, being a victim and then having to be revictimized by the system.”
When I asked Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, what the former vice president’s plan for his first 100 days in office was, her answer was blunt.
“Wouldn’t everybody like to know?”
Sanders was being coy — in fact, she had just finished walking me through Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, an umbrella term that the campaign has been using for policies meant to aid the economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis.
But the answer is yes: Everybody would like to know what Joe Biden would do were he to take office. And the formal platform on which he’s running, and his five-decade record as a public servant, offer markedly different predictions as to what a Biden presidency would look like.
Matt Rourke/AP
Joe Biden with his senior adviser Symone Sanders during a campaign event in Iowa City, Iowa, on January 27.
Biden is attempting to take office amid a world-historic crisis, which has already claimed more American lives than World War I, Korea, and Vietnam combined and has produced the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression. By May, advisers were telling New York magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti that Biden wanted an “FDR-sized” administration.
There are aspects of Biden’s policy agenda that rise to this level of ambition. To tackle Covid-19, he’s promised nationwide testing, a 100,000-person Public Health Jobs Corps, hazard pay for essential workers, massive vaccine stockpiles produced ahead of approval for the speediest deployment, and much more.
But there is a tension between this ambition and the man himself. For all of the avowed boldness of an agenda shaped by Covid-19, the man pitching it remains … Joe Biden. He is a creature of the establishment, a product of a Democratic Party built for the (relative) boom times of the 1980s and ’90s, a Senate from a less polarized era, and an Obama administration that believed it could transcend Washington (it could not).
When you talk to his campaign, you can see glimpses of that Biden. Yes, he’s proposing these multitrillion-dollar plans — but his advisers insist he’s a deficit hawk at heart. “The vice president has said from the beginning of the campaign that he wants to show how he’s going to pay for all of the long-term costs of the investments that he makes,” senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan, who also served as a key policy staffer to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and was Biden’s national security adviser in 2013-14, says.
His campaign also seemed to back away from an earlier hint that Biden might support blowing up the Senate filibuster if the Republicans abuse it to block his agenda. Biden “has not supported the elimination of the filibuster,” Sanders told me. “I don’t think anyone should read his comments as saying he supports that.”
Ted Kaufman, who took Biden’s Delaware Senate seat in 2009 and has been a loyal aide to the former vice president for decades, remembers that the last time Biden entered the White House, Senate Republicans chose to block absolutely everything the Obama-Biden administration tried. My question, I told Kaufman, was what would Biden do if Senate Republicans do the exact same thing again?
We shouldn’t be too despondent, he said. Biden worked out deals with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, like the 2011 budget deal involving $1.2 trillion in brutal, across-the-board spending cuts. He’s willing to do the hard work to figure out “what is something everyone can agree on?” Kaufman sought to reassure me.
There are two visions of a Biden presidency. One involves sweeping investments in clean energy, new jobs, and a fast recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and recession.
The other involves McConnell forcing Biden into brutal, humiliating budget deals that usher in austerity and strangle the recovery in the crib.
Therein lies the fundamental tension in Biden’s candidacy: To enact his promised agenda, President Biden will have to be bolder than Sen. Biden and Vice President Biden ever were.
Biden’s four-point plan to “Build Back Better”
Joe Biden’s self-styling as the next FDR is, in some ways, natural. Both men ran for president amid a historic economic collapse that demanded massive government intervention to ameliorate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people.
As Vox’s Ella Nilsen has reported, some Biden advisers make the comparison explicitly, with economic adviser Jared Bernstein telling her, “Much like FDR faced a structural crisis of economic insecurity, we’re at a similar place. The vice president recognizes that the extent of market failure here is not something you can fix with a Band-Aid and that structural reforms are necessary.”
So what does Biden’s version of the New Deal, forged by the Covid-19 crisis, look like?
Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
President Roosevelt called upon the nation’s voters to elect New Deal candidates during a radio broadcast from his home in Hyde Park, New York, on November 4, 1938.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Joe Biden lays out his agenda for growth during a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 28.
The best encapsulation comes out of the candidate’s “Build Back Better” plan. Ben Harris, who served as Biden’s chief economist from 2014 to 2017 and is currently a top economic adviser to the campaign, describes the plan as a road map for “recovery” over the medium to long run, not near-run stimulus relief.
“Relief is designed to plug the holes immediately, and recovery is designed to build a base for growth for the next decade,” Harris told me. “If you look at Build Back Better combined, it lays out his agenda for growth over the first term and beyond.”
Biden’s aides point to the plan as proof that Biden is not the tepid moderate his critics sometimes paint him as. “One of the things that’s differentiated him in the primary and has confused people is they say, ‘He’s moderate.’ No,” Kaufman says.
All four central planks are out now, and the campaign expects them to remain the top policy themes, and the top priorities of a Biden presidency.
Plank 1: Clean energy
In dollar terms, the biggest component of the plan is the $2 trillion commitment to investments in green energy over just four years. This is also, perhaps surprisingly, the part of Build Back Better with the longest history on the Biden campaign. He originally proposed an investment of $1.7 trillion over a decade in June 2019, well before any primaries had been held. The amount has been upped by $300 billion, but the rough scale of the commitment has been there for well over a year.
The actual spending will include subsidies creating jobs working on electric vehicles, infrastructure projects “from roads and bridges to green spaces and water systems to electricity grids and universal broadband,” and providing “every American city with 100,000 or more residents with high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation options.”
The size of the investment is exceptionally large; for comparison’s sake, the coverage provisions of Obamacare had a gross cost, before taxes and penalties, of $938 billion over 10 years. Even adjusting for inflation and a larger economy, Biden’s $2 trillion plan is significantly bigger, especially if it’s spent over just four years rather than a decade. Perhaps even more important than the dollar amount is the clean energy standard embedded in the plan, which will mandate that all of America’s electricity come from carbon-free sources (whether solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, biomass, etc.) by 2035.
The plan’s ambition and sweep earned widespread acclaim from environmental activists. The Sunrise Movement, which gave Biden an “F-” grade for his climate policies during the primaries, put out a statement praising the plan, tweeting that it’s “a major step forward, & parts are more ambitious than what Bernie Sanders ran on in 2016, or Jay Inslee championed in 2020.” Julian Brave NoiseCat, director of Green New Deal strategy for Data for Progress, called the plan “a Green New Deal in all but name.”
The program includes pledges of universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, a tax credit paying up to half of child care costs up to a maximum of $8,000 per child for families making under $125,000 a year, and subsidies ensuring that “no family earning below 1.5 times the median income in their state will have to pay more than 7% of their income for quality care,” with the typical family “pay[ing] no more than $45 per week.”
He’s also proposing a large tax credit for employers that build on-site child care centers, and other programs meant to increase the supply of child care services, not just subsidies for it.
Plank 3: “Made in All of America”
Next up is the investment of $700 billion over a decade that Biden has promised in “made in America” goods. The plan, called “Made in All of America” in recognition of its goal of reaching distressed rural, Rust Belt, Southern, and other neglected regions of the country, harks back to Biden’s focus on the manufacturing economy during his time as vice president.
The rhetoric on “reshoring” offshored jobs recalls the 2004 campaign, when John Kerry assailed “Benedict Arnold corporations,” and the 2006 midterms, where Democrats made a major issue over a Dubai corporation’s efforts to assume operations of six American ports.
The plan also promises $400 billion in direct US government purchases of goods manufactured in the US in addition to the purchases the government will make in the clean energy plan, plus $300 billion in R&D investments “from electric vehicle technology to lightweight materials to 5G and artificial intelligence.”
Biden has no single headline policy for this, like reparations or baby bonds. Rather, he has attempted to weave investments in Black- and brown-owned businesses and communities throughout his other plans. Some $30 billion of the $300 billion in R&D spending as part of his Made in All of America plan, for instance, will go to the Small Business Opportunity Fund, with the goal of reaching Black- and brown-owned small businesses. His college affordability plan will make all public universities free for families with incomes under $125,000, but will also apply to private historically Black colleges and universities. He pledges that 40 percent of his $2 trillion in clean energy investments will go to “disadvantage communities.”
“It may feel like a list, but I think it’s an indication of his priorities, which are clean energy, the care agenda, infrastructure, reshoring, and the racial wealth gap,” Harris says. “Anyone who characterizes this as anything less than bold is just not paying attention.”
Even on health care, an issue Biden has noticeably deemphasized, he is promising big changes. His staff tells me that the public option he’s proposing will be available not just to people on the Obamacare exchanges, but people with employer-based coverage they dislike, and to large employers that want another option (similar to the Center for American Progress’s Medicare Extra for All Plan). Those combined provisions could mean that Biden’s public option pushes America strongly in the direction of single-payer, if employers and individuals flock to a cheaper public insurance option.
And, of course, there’s his plan to confront the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden focuses heavily on widespread testing and contact tracing, echoing a strategy that Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer and others have been urging since early in the crisis that promises to contain the outbreak even before a vaccine or reliable treatment is available.
Biden would hire “at least 100,000 Americans” to conduct contact tracing and “massively surge a nationwide campaign and guarantee regular, reliable, and free access to testing for all, including every worker called back on the job.” He would implement hazard pay for health and other “essential” workers, offer emergency paid leave, and invest heavily in preemptively producing vaccine candidates, so they’re ready to go when testing suggests they’re reliable.
How would he pay for all these proposals?While having nothing as flashy as Elizabeth Warren’s or Bernie Sanders’s wealth tax proposals, Biden’s tax plans would raise somewhere between $3.35 trillion and $3.67 trillion over a decade, according to a compilation of think tank estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The tax hikes are incredibly top-loaded. The corporate tax, which is mostly paid by (wealthy) owners of capital, would see its rate rise from 21 to 28 percent, raising about $1.1 trillion to $1.3 trillion over a decade. The 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax would start to apply on income above $400,000. Capital gains accrued by millionaires would be taxed as ordinary income.
These proposed tax hikes are substantially bigger than any of President Obama’s successful initiatives to raise tax rates on the rich. Obama pushed through a 0.9 percent surtax on high earners’ wages, and raised the top tax bracket on ordinary income from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. He thus raised the top marginal tax rate on the rich by 5.5 points. Biden’s Social Security tax plan alone would increase the marginal rate by 12.4 points, more than double Obama’s hikes.
To enact his promised agenda, President Biden will have to be bolder than Sen. Biden and Vice President Biden ever were
Running through all of Biden’s spending proposals are his commitments on improving standards and wages for workers. Biden has supported a $15-per-hour minimum wage this whole campaign, a tenet of his candidacy that has received little attention because essentially all his primary rivals agreed. Woven through his plans to spend on clean energy, made-in-America goods, and caretaking are promises that all affected workers would get $15 an hour and be protected by the PRO Act, a sweeping piece of legislation proposed by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) that would impose new penalties on employers for anti-union organizing, expand the definition of “employer” for workers at franchise restaurants and gig economy companies like Uber, and ban state “right to work” laws.
“In every single piece of the Build Back Better plan, organized labor has been critical in helping develop the policy,” Stef Feldman, a Biden White House veteran who serves as policy director for the Biden campaign, told me. And people outside the campaign have noticed. Larry Mishel, the former longtime president of the Economic Policy Institute and one of the most prominent pro-labor economists in Washington, told the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg that Biden’s plan was “as robust and fleshed out a policy suite on labor standards and unions” as he’d seen from a Democrat in his lifetime.
It’s not just Mishel. Biden has deeply consolidated support from just about every part of the progressive institutional infrastructure, not least through the unity task forces, which offered party activists and experts aligned with Bernie Sanders a chance to build the party platform in collaboration with Biden loyalists. Groups like Sunrise that were formerly thorns in Biden’s side have been brought inside the tent, where they can influence Biden internally without creating messy public drama.
“My support for Biden is in large part because he sees this campaign through the eyes of workers and he will govern through the eyes of workers,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the loudest voice of the Democratic labor-liberal wing, told me. “It’s pretty clear whose side Biden’s on.”
The next FDR?
So Biden has plans. But here’s the question: Does he have a plan to pass his plans?
It’s an important question, given that this is Joe Biden we’re talking about. Neither of his prior presidential bids featured policy promises nearly this sweeping. In the 1980s and ’90s, he was a mainstream, even centrist Democrat who supported policies like a balanced budget amendment; in his 1988 presidential bid, he loudly rejected the idea that Democrats should move left and supported a freeze in federal spending. He was not as vocal a centrist as, say, Bill Clinton or Al Gore. But he was most certainly not a Bernie Sanders or Paul Wellstone acting as a left-wing thorn in the party establishment’s side.
In some ways, the tension between Biden’s grandiose proposals and his moderate past is the most Roosevelt-esque attribute of his campaign. Johns Hopkins political science professor Daniel Schlozman, who has studied the ways labor unions and other social movements influenced Roosevelt’s presidency, describes Biden as, like FDR, someone “notably aware of the influence of various organized groups and the strength and intensity of their preferences rather than someone with very deeply held views of his own on most policy questions.”
Mark Makela/Getty Images
Joe Biden speaks with reporters after delivering a speech on July 28.
“Joe Biden’s philosophy of the economy is the same as his philosophy of everything else, which is to respond to the pressures before him,” Schlozman elaborates. This is similar to Roosevelt but distinctly unlike most other recent Democratic presidents. Barack Obama was a true technocrat with his own views on economic policy, influenced by a handful of advisers close to him, and would often act based on his personal convictions rather than the views of the Democratic Party at large (see, for instance, his policies on foreclosure relief). Bill Clinton often bucked the congressional party; Jimmy Carter’s feuds with the broader Democratic Party are the stuff of legend; even Lyndon B. Johnson had a tendency to push for his personal convictions when putting together policy packages like the Great Society.
But Roosevelt and Biden are different. Roosevelt was not seen as a liberal firebrand upon his election in 1932, but the gravity of the Great Depression, the power of the rapidly growing labor movement, and the threat from the left of mounting support for socialism and communism combined to turn him into the liberal icon he’s remembered as today.
Similarly, “the pressure in the Democratic Party is more from the left than from the center,” Schlozman observes. “The DLC is dead, Third Way is a zombie, deficit hawks were fooled twice by the Bush and Trump administrations. The jig is up.” That helps explain why Biden has moved left in his proposals.
Can an unapologetic institutionalist enact such a bold agenda?
But Roosevelt moved left in tactics, too. The New Deal was defined by “bold, persistent experimentation” in policies, and by Roosevelt’s eagerness to fight the Conservative Coalition in Congress and the courts in order to make that experimentation happened.
By contrast, in all my conversations with them, Biden’s advisers previewed a much more cautious and familiar approach from a President Biden.
The overriding message from everyone I spoke with was clear: Joe Biden is a man who knows how to get things done. Everyone on the team emphasizes that Biden is someone who can work with Republicans to get deals across party lines.
The dissonance between this model of legislating and Biden’s platform of large-scale welfare state expansion that no Republican in Congress would ever be caught dead supporting never seems to bother his policy advisers.
When I asked Harris if Build Back Better was designed to be passable through budget reconciliation — a procedure that allows legislation to bypass a Senate filibuster and pass with 50 votes plus the vice president — he suggested the answer was no.
What Biden would do, Harris explained, is leverage his relationships in the Senate to pass his agenda with bipartisan support. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the vice president’s office when he was vice president. I sat there when he called Democratic members, and I sat there when he called Republican members,” Harris recalled. “That’s what happens when you spend so many decades in the Senate is you build these friendships and you build these relationships and you build this credibility.”
“I think that the strategy for getting [Build Back Better] done is something that will be figured out in the months right before he takes office,” Feldman stressed. “We will fight to get Democrats to vote for it. We will fight to get Republicans to vote for it. During the Recovery Act legislative process, the VP worked hard to secure votes of three Republicans to get it done.”
Of those three Republicans who voted for the 2009 Obama stimulus, one switched parties a couple of months later and then lost reelection in the 2010 Democratic primary. Another retired in 2012. The third, Susan Collins of Maine, is trailing her Democratic challenger for reelection this year; if Biden gets a Democratic Senate majority, it will probably involve Collins leaving office.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Vice President Joe Biden arrives for the final Senate vote on the health care reform bill on December 24, 2009.
So if Biden finds himself having to count to 60 senators to support Build Back Better, he will have to court more conservative Republicans than he did in 2009. And given that the three Republicans the Obama administration negotiated with that year successfully shrank the stimulus to much smaller than the economy needed, that precedent suggests that Biden in 2021 will once again be imploring Republicans to support any stimulus — and winding up with, if anything, a vastly insufficient package.
It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. Biden could echo President Obama, who recently called the legislative filibuster a “Jim Crow relic” and pushed for its abolition. A President Biden could use his authority as a 36-year veteran of the body to win over reluctant Democrats to the cause of abandoning the filibuster. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, promised to take this route during her own presidential bid, stating, “If [Republicans] fail to act, as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal.”
But Biden appears to have little appetite to do that. Instead, he is betting that his charm and experience can win over Senate Republicans to back his agenda. Biden told donors at a fundraiser last November that, “With Donald Trump out of the way, you’re going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany. Mark my words. Mark my words.” (To be fair, he has moved away from that language in more recent months, even as his advisers maintain his fealty to age-old Senate procedure has not wavered.)
Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton who studies congressional conflict, told me the incentives for Republicans to oppose stimulus under Biden will be powerful. “Republicans have stronger incentive to give way on their ideological principles of small government, deficit reduction, etc., when they need to support a president of their own party. The GOP was willing to support TARP or the enactment of Medicare Part D under George W. Bush,” she explains. (The latest piece of evidence? Overwhelming Republican congressional support for the massive Covid-19 relief package in the spring.) “I’d expect the GOP would be likely to revert to form under a President Biden.”
Left-leaning Democrats, like those involved in the Biden-Sanders unity task forces put in place to help plan the Democratic platform in the wake of the presidential primaries, also worry that Biden’s deficit hawkery will hem him in.
He told me he had a positive experience on the task force, and is keen to emphasize that he is a strong supporter of Biden. He does, however, say that disagreements about the deficit were the most prominent dividing line within the task force’s discussions.
“The biggest obstacle on the left for a progressive agenda is PAYGO” — that is, the congressional rule requiring most spending to be “paid for” by tax hikes or spending cuts — Hamilton says. “This is not just Biden, this is the whole Democratic Party.” When he pushed ideas like a job guarantee, the critique from the Biden side of the task force centered on costs. “To their credit, they’ve made it clear that in this time of pandemic they’re willing to spend what is necessary to get us across,” Hamilton says. But in general, they’re wary of spending in the long run without extensive pay-fors.
Biden indeed has laid out in some detail how he’ll raise revenues to pay for his programs. “No one making less than $400,000 will pay a single cent more in taxes,” Ben Harris says. “And the vice president will pay for every last dollar of his long-term economic agenda.”
Biden’s tax hikes for the rich will surely be welcomed by progressives. But insisting on PAYGO could create new political challenges. What if to pass $2 trillion in clean energy spending, Biden does not merely need to convince Republicans to want to subsidize solar and wind power — already a tall order — but also needs to convince them to pay for it by dramatically hiking taxes on corporations and the rich?
When reminded of these challenges, the Biden camp is undeterred. “He has a number of various relationships and he knows how it works,” Symone Sanders says, summarizing how Biden will approach Congress. “We’re hoping that we have a Democratic majority in the Senate, but even if we do have a Democratic majority in the Senate, we will still have to be able to work with Republicans to get some things done. Given the rules, a majority doesn’t get you everything.”
The big question, then, is what a majority can get you — and whether it will be close to enough to confront Covid-19 and the economic devastation it’s unleashed on the country.
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Protesters in Colorado Springs marched outside the mayor’s house on Friday demanding the firing of Sgt. Keith Wrede, a police officer who, using a pseudonym, wrote “KILL THEM ALL” during a livestream of a Black Lives Matter protest on the I-25 highway.
KOAA reports: “That protest happened on June 30 when protestors blocked traffic on I-25. Four of those protesters would later be criminally charged for their role. CSPD internal affairs investigated and on August 10 announced Wrede would be suspended for 40 hours and lose pay. He was also reassigned within the department. Saturday’s protesters were tired of what they see as business as usual.”
Once upon a time, most Americans would have been hard-pressed to name the postmaster general. That fabled time was any time before May of this year, when Donald Trump replaced Postmaster General Megan Brennan with Louis DeJoy. And yes, I had to look up Megan Brennan.
What position of power did Brennan occupy before taking over the Postal Service under Barack Obama? None. Brennan started as a mail carrier at the Postal Service in 1986, delivering letters to neighborhoods in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She worked her way through the ranks at the USPS. For more than a decade, she headed up distribution and transportation in the Northeast before taking over as postmaster in her 27th year with the Postal Service.
Compare that Louis DeJoy. His postal-related career was almost as long as Brennan’s. It’s just that DeJoy spent that career practicing what he’s doing now: Tearing the post office down. And DeJoy doesn’t just owe his new role to Donald Trump—he’s hugely in debt to Mitch McConnell.
Before stepping into the top job in May, DeJoy had a total of zero time with the actual USPS. However, he did have two decades of experience as CEO of a freight company that competed against the Postal Service—making it no surprise that his stock portfolio is full of reasons to destroy the institution where he works. Much more importantly in terms of landing his current position, DeJoy has long been a big fundraiser for the Republican Party in general and for Donald Trump in particular. In fact, DeJoy was named one of four finance chairs for the Republican Party, along with such luminaries as Steve Wynn and Michael Cohen. And DeJoy’s contact with Republican leadership didn’t end with cutting checks for their campaigns.
According to The Washington Post, shortly before Donald Trump met with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer at the White House, he was visited by Louis DeJoy. At the meeting with Democratic leaders, Trump made it clear that he wasn’t providing any funding for the Postal Service. In two later interviews, Trump made it absolutely clear he was depriving the Post Office of funds specifically to hinder its ability to deal with mail-in ballots. And shortly after meeting with Trump, DeJoy removed the officials in charge of day-to-day operations, reassigning 23 top executives and clearing the ranks for more Trump loyalists.
But Trump isn’t the only Republican who’s been visiting with DeJoy, and DeJoy isn’t the only Postal Service leader who can thank Republicans for his sudden rise. As Yahoo! News reports, DeJoy is in "in frequent contact with top Republican Party officials.” Presumably that means Mitch McConnell. Which is quite the coincidence seeing that every single member of the current all-white, all-male Postal Service board of governors can thank McConnell for that role.
As it turns out, since 1970, members of the board of governors have served in staggered 9-year terms. The idea is to have a board whose membership is spread across multiple administrations and which owes allegiance to no particular White House. That should mean that about half those currently seated on the board are left over from Obama’s term in office, with others appointed by Trump. But that’s not what happened. In 2015, Obama re-nominated most of the existing board members for a second term, including those members appointed under Bush. Those six members should all still be on the board. None of them are.
That’s because McConnell did what he did so often—blocked those nominations. By the time Trump stepped in, the number of remaining Bush- and Obama-appointed board members was exactly zero. Then, as with federal judges, McConnell abruptly got out of the way. That means that every single current member of the United States Postal Service board of governors was appointed by Donald Trump. That board then officially ousted lifelong Postal Service employee Megan Brennan, and replaced her with Republican fundraiser Louis DeJoy.
Those thinking that McConnell might rise up to fight against Trump aren’t just backing the wrong turtle. They’re backing the guy who co-owns this mess.
USPS Board of Governors are running for cover todfay and not putting a stop to DeJoy and Trump's destruction of the Post Office. Don't let them hide. pic.twitter.com/5IkQYsR09g
The National Weather Service on Saturday issued its first-ever warning for a firenado, “a fire induced tornado,” as wildfires in Northern California, specifically the Loyalton Fire to the east of the Sierra Valley, spread toward Reno, Nevada.
For the first time in history, a tornado warning has been issued for a likely *fire tornado*.
These are not "firewhirls." This is a rotating smoke plume being ingested into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that could produce a bonafide fire-induced tornado.
Wrote meteorologist Matthew Cappucci on Twitter: “These are not ‘firewhirls.’ This is a rotating smoke plume being ingested into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that could produce a bonafide fire-induced tornado.”
Just to emphasize how absolutely racist and white supremacist Donald Trump and his administration will be to try to win this election, the Department of Justice has determined that Yale University discriminates against white applicants, continuing the administration's war on affirmative action and a 21st-century, diverse society. To make it not look quite so blatantly racist and to try to pit communities of color against each other to slice away some votes, the DOJ says that Asian Americans have been discriminated against, too. In the letter, Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney general for civil rights, threatened that if the university failed to change its admissions policy, "the Department will be prepared to file a lawsuit." Yale says the allegation is "meritless" and "hasty."
The DOJ wrote to the college's attorneys this week reporting on its two-year investigation, which concluded that Yale "rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit." Yale issued a statement in which it "categorically denies this allegation." The university said that it cooperated fully with the investigation and has continually provided "a substantial amount of information and data," and that the Justice Department reached its conclusion before allowing it to provide all the data the government had requested.
"Given our commitment to complying with federal law, we are dismayed that the DOJ has made its determination before allowing Yale to provide all the information the Department has requested thus far," the university said in a statement. "Had the Department fully received and fairly weighed this information, it would have concluded that Yale’s practices absolutely comply with decades of Supreme Court precedent."
The Class of 2022 at Yale is 11% legacy members, aka students with alumni family members, a population that is likely to be predominately white because of the nature of legacy admissions. In contrast, "only 5.8% of the entire student population identifies as Black. Less than 10% are Hispanic, and under 15% are Asian." That leaves 42.7% of the Yale student body, which is white.
Scholars of and in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community blasted the DOJ's allegations, saying that this is a politicized effort to try to split communities of color and the the legacy issue is a larger barrier to admissions. "It's leveraging the model minority myth to undermine the opportunity to build a multiracial coalition in this country to dismantle racism," says Dona Kim Murphey, a former board member of the Korean American Association.
Michael Li, senior counsel at The Brennan Center for Justice, calls it "messaging for white people." He said, "It's like 'Hey if you're stuck at a job or not moving up the economic ladder, your income hasn't increased for decades—you can blame people of color and elites for keeping you out of schools like Yale. […] That's just political messaging for November." Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Maryland and a Yale alum, added, "The message that this sends to the AAPI community is that the DOJ is very interested in dismantling policies that create diversity and increase access to those who have been excluded to places like Yale."
"There's so much evidence that these policies create the learning environment these students thrive in," Wong said, pointing out that affirmative action does not harm but benefits the AAPI community. There's evidence that the AAPI community overwhelmingly feels that way. A 2016 survey of AAPI Americans found two-thirds support affirmative action.
Like everything else the Trump administration has done, this action against Yale stems from racism and white supremacy. It's a cynical preelection ploy to try to win over AAPI voters for Trump.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic leaders will summon the House back in session this coming week to confront President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the U.S. Postal Service, she announced Sunday night.
The House is expected to vote as early as Saturday, Aug. 22, on a proposal to block the Trump administration’s plan for overhauling the Postal Service. This is weeks earlier than Pelosi and the House Democratic leaders had originally planned to return to Washington. But the revised House schedule comes amid a national uproar over a crisis within the Postal Service ahead of a national election that will see an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots.
Democrats have grown increasingly alarmed that Trump is using the coronavirus pandemic to force service cutbacks at USPS ahead of Nov. 3. Democrats allege Trump’s appointee to lead the Postal Service, Louis DeJoy, has overseen substantial operational changes to the agency that has led to backlogs and service interruptions — an immense concern as millions of Americans prepare to receive and return their ballots through the mail.
Trump has long alleged, without evidence, that mail-in voting perpetuates election fraud.
“Alarmingly, across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the President’s campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters,” Pelosi said in a letter to fellow House Democrats on Sunday.
"That is why I am calling upon the House to return to session later this week to vote on Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman [Carolyn] Maloney’s 'Delivering for America Act,' which prohibits the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1, 2020."
Pelosi said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) would formally announce the new schedule on a call with members set for Monday. The next set of House votes had orignally been slated for the week of Sept. 14 before this latest uproar.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), a Trump ally, claimed Democrats are trying to focus on the Postal Service's problems because they weren't able to reach a deal with the White House over a new coronavirus relief package.
“Republicans are 100 percent committed to ensuring a fair and accurate election. Whether Americans choose to vote in-person — which Doctor Fauci has stated will be safe — or vote absentee, I have complete confidence in the integrity of our electoral process," McCarthy said in a statement. "House Democrats are simply attempting to distract from the fact their ridiculous demands are dragging down the American recovery and adding more uncertainty to people’s livelihoods.”
But House Democrats signaled this weekend that they will mount aggressive oversight of DeJoy, a Trump donor and loyalist, and have demanded the postmaster general appear for an emergency committee hearing on Monday, Aug. 24.
Pelosi and Maloney announced the hearing this weekend, warning that the agency’s changes “are slowing the mail and jeopardizing the integrity of the election.” Democrats in both the House and Senate had already demanded a slew of documents from DeJoy and his top staff, seeking details on why DeJoy had cracked down on overtime hours, restricted certain deliveries and offered conflicting information on the timeline for mail-in ballots.
Pelosi and her leadership team held an emergency call Saturday to discuss several options to deal with the turmoil at the Postal Service as several rank-and-file Democrats from progressives to moderates publicly demanded action.
Some Democrats, including moderate Rep. Jim Cooper (Tenn.), said DeJoy should be arrested if he ignores a congressional subpoena to testify. Democratic leaders would not pursue that option, but Cooper’s suggestion, which was echoed by other Democrats, signals how angry lawmakers are about what’s unfolding at the Postal Service.
The House is expected to vote on a modified version of a bill Maloney introduced last week that would block many of the major organizational changes DeJoy is seeking before the election.
Some top Democrats on the call this weekend also argued for having the House take additional action on other measures tied to the coronavirus pandemic, including expired federal unemployment benefits. The House could vote on other economic proposals during its emergency session, but nothing has been officially decided, according to multiple Democratic aides.
The House passed a major coronavirus relief bill in May that included a $25 billion infusion for the Postal Service and an additional $3.6 billion in election security funding.
Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the White House had agreed to provide $10 billion in Postal Service funding during coronavirus talks earlier this month before the negotiations fell apart.
Schumer on Sunday called on Senate GOP leaders to bring back their members, as well, to vote on the House’s bill to “undo the extensive damage Mr. DeJoy has done at the Postal Service.”
Slashdot reader Tekla Perry is also senior editor at IEEE Spectrum, and brings a story about San Diego's 3,300 "smart streetlights," each one equipped with "an Intel Atom processor, half a terabyte of storage, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios, two 1080p video cameras, two acoustical sensors, and environmental sensors that monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, and magnetic fields."
San Diego's smart streetlights were supposed to save money and inspire entrepreneurs to use streetlight sensor data to develop apps that would make the city a better place. The money savings didn't add up and the apps never emerged. Instead, the San Diego police realized the video data, intended to be processed at the edge by AI algorithms [and deleted after 5 days], could be tapped directly for law enforcement. Now consumer groups are looking to the city to pass legislation governing the use of data, and other cities are opting to avoid such issues by leaving cameras out of future intelligent lighting systems.
The first video accessed by police exonerated a person they'd arrested for murder in August of 2018. But over the next 10 months they'd accessed 99 more videos to investigate what they called "serious" crimes, a number climbing to up to 175 videos by early 2020. "The list included murders, sexual assaults, and kidnappings — but it also included vandalism and illegal dumping, which caused activists to question the city's definition of 'serious'..." according to IEEE Spectrum. "To date, San Diego police have tapped streetlight video data nearly 400 times, including this past June, during investigations of incidents of felony vandalism and looting during Black Lives Matter protests."
Morgan Currie, a lecturer in data and society at the University of Edinburgh, tells the site it's "a classic example of how data collection systems are easily retooled as surveillance systems, of how the capacities of the smart city to do good things can also increase state and police control."
No fucking way. Get out of those bullshit wingnut welfare contracts
The out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has renewed contracts with private prison profiteers that will extend into the next 10 years, a despicable move that advocates said “appears designed to lock in a decade worth of detention” should presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden defeat impeached president Donald Trump in November.
“Making backdoor deals to line the pockets of private prison corporations at the expense of people confined behind bars while COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire shows the complete disregard for human life in ICE custody,” Grassroots Leadership’s Bethany Carson said in a statement, “and how perverse financial incentives are the bedrock of incarceration.” The New York Timesreported, “[t]hose agreements would be difficult to unwind if Biden wins.”
Grassroots Leadership said in a statement that “CoreCivic announced on its quarterly investor conference call that it has signed a 10-year contract renewal with ICE at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas and expects a similar award for the Houston Processing Center. It also said ICE is going to make millions of dollars in repairs to the facilities. GEO Group similarly announced that it had signed a new 10-year contract for the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall, Texas.”
The organization said both Hutto and South Texas Detention have a notorious history of abuses against detained people, including allegations of sexual assault and forced labor at Hutto, while South Texas Detention has been among the most abusive facilities in terms of the use of indefinite solitary confinement, which is torture. So not only are these facilities continuing to escape accountability, they’re getting awarded for their abuses.
Officials are scrambling because their future in a Biden administration could look bleak. His platform says his administration would “end the federal government’s use of private prisons, building off an Obama-Biden administration’s policy rescinded by the Trump administration. And, he will make clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.”
So what could a Biden administration do in light of contracts intentionally designed to go past a theoretical second term?
Well, overhauling ICE so that people including asylum-seekers and their children are no longer jailed in these atrocious facilities in the first place is a start. And while, as The Times noted, it would be difficult to end these contacts, it may not be impossible. How about the federal government uses the full force of its weight to figure that out? Hell, some might say Biden could always just cite the Trump doctrine, which says that we’ll just do what we want. Except this time, it would actually help people for once.
“ICE actively hides information from the public to evade accountability and silence those that speak out against its inhumane practices,” Carson continued in the statement. “At this point, the details of the contracts including the length of their duration and justification remain shrouded in secrecy. Furthermore, the news of an expected contract award for the Houston Processing Center was particularly baffling as a contract valued at nearly $50 million was already awarded to the facility in March.”
After a top GOP senator stringently denied that his probe into Joe Biden's diplomacy in Ukraine as vice president was politically motivated, he went on a radio show and plainly admitted the investigation "would certainly help" Donald Trump, according to Politico.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, also admitted in the clip that his foregone conclusion before conducting the investigation was that corruption occurred—an assertion for which there's zero evidence to date.
"The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more we expose of the corruption within those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden," Johnson said in a Tuesday interview with Minneapolis-based radio hosts Jon Justice and Drew Lee. Again, no one has uncovered corruption in the transition process and, in fact, not a single person in Obama's squeaky clean administration was ever indicted.
Democrats have been increasingly sounding the alarm bells about Johnson using his committee to launder Russian disinformation provided to him by pro-Russian Ukrainians. At least one of those Ukrainian sources, KGB-educated Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, was also named by the U.S. director of national intelligence in a statement last week warning of Russia's ongoing interference campaign to help Trump get reelected.
Johnson has denied taking information from Derkach, but his probe bears an obvious resemblance to the investigation Trump tried to strong-arm Ukrainian officials into launching before a whistleblower complaint blew up his scheme. Johnson also knew about Trump's attempt to delay $400 million in aid to Ukraine in order to extract the probe, but Johnson sat on the information. He's also one of seven GOP senators who in 2018 decided Moscow was the perfect place to celebrate America's Independence Day—July 4—alongside top Russian officials. (Frankly, the Republicans were snubbed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom they had hoped to meet with).
Earlier this week, Johnson vigorously defended his probe in an 11-page screed accusing Democrats of spreading disinformation. He also subpoenaed the FBI for classified records related to the origins of the FBI's Russia probe. Just to be clear, Democrats aren't trying to launch a baseless probe that perfectly matches the warnings of U.S. intelligence officials about Russian efforts to "denigrate" Biden. Sen. Johnson is doing that. In fact, the day after Johnson dashed off that defense of his probe, he went on a radio show and flat-out admitted his probe has clear political implications for the November election. Care to see that again?
"I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection," Johnson said Tuesday. Case closed.
And in case there was any doubt about Johnson's malfeasance, some Republican senators on his own committee have been mounting an effort to block him from subpoenaing former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan. Johnson’s probe is just that obviously corrupt, not to mention a gift to Putin.
Enlarge / Doug Loverro, formerly NASA's chief of human spaceflight. (credit: NASA)
The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia has opened a criminal investigation of a former top NASA official, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The grand jury investigation concerns communications between Doug Loverro, then the chief of human spaceflight for NASA, and Jim Chilton, senior vice president of Boeing's space and launch division. These discussions occurred early this year, during a blackout period when NASA was taking bids to construct a Human Landing System for the Artemis Moon Program. It is not permissible to interfere with a competition for government contracts.
"Mr. Loverro, who wasn’t part of NASA’s official contracting staff, informed Mr.Chilton that the Chicago aerospace giant was about to be eliminated from the competition based on cost and technical evaluations," the report states, citing unidentified sources. "Within days, Boeing submitted a revised proposal."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell and Judge Justin Reed Walker.
A federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump ruled Friday that a Christian photographer in Louisville can turn away same-sex couples despite the city’s ordinance prohibiting LGBT discrimination.
U.S. District Judge Justin Reed Walker issued an injunction blocking the city from enforcing its Fairness Ordinance against Chelsey Walker, who claims she can only photograph weddings between a man and a woman due to her religious beliefs.
“America is wide enough for those who applaud same-sex marriage and those who refuse to,” Judge Walker wrote in a 27-page opinion, according to the Courier Journal. “The Constitution does not require a choice between gay rights and freedom of speech. It demands both.
“Just as gay and lesbian Americans ‘cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth,'” Walker wrote, quoting the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, “neither can Americans ‘with a deep faith that requires them to do things passing legislative majorities might find unseemly or uncouth.'”
The judge added that “her photography is art” and “art is speech,” saying the government can’t compel speech when it violates someone’s religious beliefs. Although photography is wordless, he wrote, “so too is refusing to salute the flag or marching in a parade, both of which the Supreme Court has said are protected forms of speech.”
More from the Courier Journal: The ACLU said in a brief that if Nelson could refuse service to same-sex couples on First Amendment grounds, another photographer could turn away interracial or interfaith couples, or African American or Muslim couples. “There is no question that Louisville has the authority to prohibit businesses that choose to operate within its boundaries from discriminating in their sales of goods and services to the public,” it said. The city also said it had never taken or threatened enforcement action against Nelson.
Trump first nominated Walker, a protégé of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to serve as a judge for the Western District of Kentucky last year. The Senate confirmed Walker despite the American Bar Association rating him “not qualified,” citing his lack of “any significant trial experience.”
Walker, 37, once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. During Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation process, Walker gave more than 70 TV interviews defending his former boss against sexual assault allegations leveled by Christine Blasey-Ford.
Earlier this year, Trump rewarded Walker by nominating him to serve on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate confirmed him to that position in June.
Lambda Legal, the LGBT civil rights group, was among the groups that opposed Walker’s confirmation.
“Judge Walker is just the latest in a long line of judicial nominees championed by right wing organizations like the Federalist Society for their zealous opposition to the Affordable Care Act, as well as other extremist views, jeopardizing the lives of LGBT people and others who need access to fair and impartial courts,” Lambda Legal wrote.
The GOP was hoping to just stay quiet and let a domestic abuser into office. Family values, indeed.
On Tuesday, the Connecticut GOP announced that “Second Congressional District Candidate Tom Gilmer was arrested late last night. With the severity of the accusations Mr. Gilmer has ended his campaign.” What were the severe accusations? Gilmer was reportedly charged with “second-degree strangulation and first-degree unlawful restraint, according to Wethersfield police,” in a domestic violence incident between Gilmer and a former girlfriend. The arrest, coming on the eve of the Republican primary, has thrown things out of wack. But that’s not the entire story.
According to the Hartford Courant, one of Gilmer’s primary opponents, Justin Anderson, had been “showing a graphic video of the alleged attack to his fellow Republicans as he worked to defeat the party-backed Gilmer.” The video reportedly shows Gilmer punching a woman in the face and then choking her from above as she falls to the ground. According to Anderson, he had received this video from the woman who had been assaulted on the condition that he only show it to fellow GOP establishment and not bring it to the authorities. According to the Courant, Anderson had been showing the video for weeks proceeding Tuesday’s arrest.
Surprisingly, the Connecticut GOP did not waver in their support of Gilmer up until primary night when the above mugshot was taken by the Wethersfield police. One Connecticut Republican politician, Lori Hopkins-Cavanagh, saw the video and said that “It was shocking,” and that she had a hard time watching the “whole thing.” That’s the kind of Republican Party we are dealing with. While Trump openly rigs the coming presidential election, Connecticut Republicans look the other way for as long as is possible when a woman has been abThomas Gilmer, used by one of their candidates.
That was bad. But even some Connecticut Republicans see this as “worse.” That’s because in this case there seems to have been clear corroborating video evidence. It also comes in tandem with reports that police had investigated a case involving the victim where she suffered fractures to multiple teeth and a cut on her forehead, but at the time she told police she had had a seizure. According to the Courant, the police’s arrest of Gilmer is tied to that incident, as the woman (and video) are now telling a different story.
Now that Gilmer has dropped out, if he receives the most votes it will not go to his closest challenger, Anderson. Instead, the Republican Party would select the candidate they hope to defeat Democratic Congressman Joe Courtney.
Gilmer says that while he is dropping out of the race he plans on fighting the charges.
Trump says he will pardon a very important person on Tuesday… Will it be Ghislaine Maxwell
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell listens to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on July 20. | Doug Mills (Pool)/Getty Images
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