James.galbraith

The man Donald Trump has nominated to be No. 3 at the Pentagon already has a proven history of pushing racist anti-Obama conspiracy theories, but the latest nonsense uncovered by CNN's KFile really takes the cake. 

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata pushed a loony tunes tale that former CIA Director John Brennan tried to orchestrate a coup to overthrow Trump—and even tweeted out a coded order in 2018 to assassinate him. 

It's almost as if the White House did zero vetting on the guy Trump tapped to run the Department of Defense's policy shop. In multiple radio and television interviews, Tata slandered Brennan—an outspoken critic of Trump—as a "former communist," and accused him of manipulating intelligence.

"I think that John Brennan is a clear and present danger and a threat to this nation," Tata told Fox News in August 2018 after Trump had revoked Brennan's security clearance. "He supports the overthrow of this particular president and he needed to have his access to information revoked." 

Speaking to the right-wing outlet One America News in 2018, Tata accused Brennan of being "allied" with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian efforts to sow division and discord in the U.S. "You look at his tweets, you look at what he says, and he is doing Putin's bidding every day on Twitter. He is dividing this nation and he's trying to ossify the left against the right," Tata charged. Huh, kinda sounds familiar—a high-level Putin puppet cleaving the nation. 

But a tweet Tata sent in May 2018 is really the capper. Replying to a tweet in which Brennan quoted Cicero, Tata wrote: "As incompetent as @JohnBrennan was as a #CIA analyst (failure at Khobar Towers), we must assume he knows spy tradecraft. This is a signal to someone, somewhere. Cicero was assassinated for political reasons. This is a clear threat against @POTUS."

Previously, KFile turned up tweets in which Tata hurled the right's favorite epithets at former President Obama, calling him a "Muslim" and a "terrorist leader" who tried to "subvert U.S. national interests to Islam." Tata also accused both Obama and Hillary Clinton of sedition and treason on Twitter. Tata has been in a mad dash, trying to erase all the tweets that reveal that he is completely and utterly unfit for the post for which he's been nominated, but frankly, he's simply spewed too much stupid to cover it up. 

When CNN asked DOD officials to comment on Tata's latest inanity, "[t]he Pentagon referred CNN to the White House for comment. The White House stood by Tata and referred CNN to a previous statement defending the nominee from last week."

In other words, Tata is just too indefensible for words. 

But Tata, trying to salvage his nomination, told CNN: "I deeply regret comments I made on social media several years ago," adding, "my tweets were completely out of character."

Right, just a couple of errant tweets—not a distorted worldview that would render one incapable of making coherent policy for the most powerful military in the world. Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee have already indicated they will oppose Tata’s nomination.

In a region where food is already scarce, billions of insects are now eating everything in sight.

Since late 2019, East Africa and the Middle East have been experiencing their worst locust outbreaks in decades.

A small locust swarm can eat more food than 35,000 people. But some swarms in the area have grown to more than 2,000 times that size. Billions of insects have formed swarms so thick that airplanes have been forced to divert their course. Some areas in Ethiopia have reported nearly a 100 percent loss in vital crops. And controlling the locusts has been especially difficult alongside the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions put in place to fight it.

What exactly made this year so bad? The weather. The desert locust thrives when dry weather turns wet. And in 2018 and 2019, a series of freak weather events brought record-setting rainfall to the Middle East and East Africa.

To learn more, check out the video above and read our in-depth article by Umair Irfan.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Tesla)

On Wednesday, J.D. Power has just released its Initial Quality Survey for 2020. Conducted annually for the past 34 years, the survey queries buyers of new cars of that model year to find out what, if any, problems they encountered within the first 90 days of ownership. Each brand is then ranked on the number of problems it experienced per 100 vehicles (PP100).

2020 is the first year that Tesla has been included in the survey, and as readers of our recent story on Model Y problems might have guessed, things don't look great for the California-based electric car company. Meanwhile, things look very good for Dodge, which shares the top spot with Kia.

According to J.D. Power's survey, Tesla's initial quality score is 250 PP100, a feat which makes even Audi and Land Rover seem reliable by comparison. Although to be entirely accurate, Tesla isn't officially ranked last, because the brand won't allow J.D. Power to survey its customers in 15 states where OEM permission is apparently required. "However, we were able to collect a large enough sample of surveys from owners in the other 35 states and, from that base, we calculated Tesla's score," said Doug Betts, president of the automotive division at J.D. Power.

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Three white men linked to the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery were indicted on murder charges Wednesday after allegations of prosecutorial misconduct significantly delayed accountability in the case. Cobb County District Attorney Joyette Holmes, who is the fourth prosecutor assigned to the case, announced online Wednesday that Glynn County’s Grand Jury has indicted former Georgia cop Greg McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and the man who filmed parts of the deadly encounter, William Bryan.

Along with the malice murder charge, they face four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. “This is another step forward in seeking justice for Ahmaud,” Holmes said.

She added: “Our team from the Cobb Judicial Circuit has been committed to effectively bringing forward the evidence in this case and today was no exception. It has been an effort of many agencies including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice who have worked together to get to this point. We will continue to be intentional in the pursuit of justice for this family and the community at large as the prosecution of this case continues.”

Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was unarmed when he was accused of breaking into a South Georgia home, hunted down, and fatally shot Feb. 23, 2020, for doing little more than jogging, his family’s attorneys have said. Even though the Glynn County Police Department obtained Bryan’s video of the incident the same day, suspects Gregory and Travis McMichael weren't arrested until Thursday, May 7, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. That was a full 74 days after Arbery’s death, which was ruled a homicide.

Two different Georgia district attorney offices are being investigated for “possible prosecutorial misconduct” in the case. District Attorney Tom Durden, who was assigned to take over the case as a special prosecutor, later passed on the role he said was better suited for a prosecutor with more resources. Holmes, the first Black woman to serve as Cobb County’s district attorney, announced she would be prosecuting the case in May.

Read the rest of her post announcing the indictment here:

The Cobb DA’s Office was able to present this case today to Glynn County’s Grand Jury pursuant to the Second Order Extending the Declaration of Statewide Judicial Emergency, signed by Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Harold D. Melton on May 11, 2020, which states: “Grand juries that are already impaneled or are recalled from a previous term of court may meet to attend to time-sensitive essential matters, but these grand juries should not be assembled except when necessary and only under circumstances in which social distancing and other public health guidance can be followed.”

This was reiterated in the Third Order Extending the Declaration of Statewide Judicial Emergency, issued on June 12, 2020. The additional Guidance from the Supreme Court authorizes a district attorney to assemble an existing grand jury if the district attorney determines the matter is essential to the administration of justice, if a delay may substantially harm to public interest, and if the grand jury can be assembled safely.

The full document can be found at:

https://www.gasupreme.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Further-Guidance-on-Grand-Juries_May-11.pdf

The defendants’ arraignment before Judge Timothy R. Walmsley has not yet been scheduled.

RELATED: Father and son FINALLY arrested on murder and aggravated assault charges in Ahmaud Arbery case

RELATED: Questions abound for the man whose leaked video resulted in the arrest of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers

RELATED: 'It was a lynching': Ex-Georgia cop and son accused of tracking down and killing Black jogger

RELATED: 'Killed in cold blood': Joe Biden advocates for justice in death of unarmed Black man in Georgia

Enlarge / The light-colored layers in this 3D printed block are much harder steel, while the dark layers in between are more ductile. (credit: Frank Vinken)

Damascus steel—and modern versions of the steelmaking technique—is generally synonymous with artisan forgework. In traditional Japanese sword-making, for example, the steel is repeatedly folded to produce hundreds or thousands of alternating layers, producing intricate patterns in the finished product. That’s not just for the visual effect—the layers alternate between hard-but-brittle and more flexible steel, combining for the best of both worlds.

A new study led by Philipp Kürnsteiner of the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research shows that it is possible to do something very similar with laser additive manufacturing—3D printed metals.

Traditional folded steels combined two steels that varied by carbon content and in their microscale structure, which is controlled by how quickly it cools (by quenching). In this case, the researchers were using a nickel-titanium-iron alloy steel that works well with these 3D printing techniques, in which metal powder is fed onto the work surface and heated with a laser.

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Welcome to whose bar chart is it anyway: where the geometries are made up and the numbers don’t matter. [via @dannypage]

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The Democratic Party is starting to look more like Democratic voters.

In the 2018 midterms, the most successful candidates were women. In 2020, a year shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic and nationwide protests against police brutality, Black candidates are proving they’re the ones to watch — winning a spate of key races on Tuesday night.

In New York and Virginia, young, progressive candidates of color swept races against powerful incumbents and in open competitions alike. In Kentucky, where a key Senate primary is too close to call, Black progressive candidate Charles Booker is still locked in a competitive race with Marine Corps veteran Amy McGrath.

“In 2018, Dem voters showed an unprecedented desire to nominate women,” Cook Political Report House editor Dave Wasserman tweeted. “In 2020, we’re witnessing another sea change in desire, this time toward Black candidates.”

Progressive candidates of color winning a slate of New York primaries, in particular, represents a significant generational changing of the guard in the Democratic Party.

Middle school principal Jamaal Bowman, 44, soundly defeated the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, 73. Though it could take days (if not longer) for all of New York’s votes to be counted, Bowman was leading Engel by more than 25 points as of Wednesday afternoon. Mondaire Jones, 32, won the open seat to replace retiring House Appropriations Committee Chair Nita Lowey. And in New York’s 12th Congressional District, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney is clinging to a slim 1.7 percent lead over progressive challenger Suraj Patel.

“The old guard in New York is on its way out,” Wasserman told Vox on Wednesday.

In a phone interview with Vox Wednesday morning, Jones said New York voters sent a clear message: They backed candidates who understand first-hand the daily struggles of Black and brown communities. Jones grew up in Section 8 housing; Bowman and New York City Council member Ritchie Torres, who is currently leading in New York’s 15th Congressional District, talked openly about growing up in public housing.

“[Voters] want to see people who reflect their own lived experiences represent them in Congress — not people who are wealthy or come from a political family,” Jones told Vox. “Whereas the Democratic establishment would coronate its own candidates in any number of districts, the actual people who are voting at the polls and experiencing a government that has never worked for everyone. ... They’re making their own decisions.”

Wins by young candidates of color weren’t limited to New York. In Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District, Dr. Cameron Webb, 37, emerged victorious over Emily’s List-backed Marine veteran Claire Russo. That district will be an uphill battle for Democrats, but if Webb wins the general election, he would be the first Black physician to serve as a voting member in Congress.

The Fifth Congressional District encompasses a massive part of the state stretching from Northwest Virginia all the way down to its southern borders with North Carolina. It contains the city of Charlottesville and both suburban and rural areas, and it’s nearly 75 percent white and 20 percent Black. Cook currently rates the district Lean Republican, with an R+6 rating.

“Democrats need a perfect storm to win Virginia’s Fifth Congressional district, but that storm may be brewing,” Wasserman said. “Webb could be uniquely positioned for the moment given his background in medicine, his race, and his family roots.”

Webb’s candidacy will be a key test of whether a young Black candidate can do well in a district that is very different from blue New York City.

While younger progressives pulled off some startling upsets, they didn’t have a 100 percent success rate. For instance, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D) fended off challenger Adem Bunkeddeko, both of whom are Black and progressive, after Bunkeddeko came close to beating her in 2018. This year, Clarke’s win was resounding — she won 62 percent of the vote compared to 17 for Bunkeddeko.

Although the highly watched Kentucky Democratic primary for Senate only had a fraction of votes counted on Wednesday morning, it was clear that Charles Booker, the youngest Black state lawmaker in Kentucky, was not letting Marine Corps veteran Amy McGrath sweep the race.

“The constituencies now leading grassroots movements will only become more essential to the Democratic Party’s future,” Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid told Vox in a statement. “The Squad is here to stay, and it’s growing.”

Candidates of color broke through talking about systemic poverty and inequality

Candidates including Jones, Bowman, Webb, and Booker were all campaigning months before Covid-19 hit and protests against police brutality had engulfed multiple American cities.

But there’s no question the past few months have laid bare long-standing racial inequalities in jobs, policing, and health care — in places from New York City to Louisville. Late endorsements from the Democratic Party’s progressive icons and organizing with groups like Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party might have helped boost several of the New York candidates in particular, but they say their messages had particular resonance in the country’s current moment.

“We need more people in Congress for whom policy is personal. I was the only candidate talking about racial justice before the events of the past several weeks,” Jones told Vox. “I’m grateful more people now are seeing it.”

Looking at returns, Wasserman said Black candidates who won in New York and Virginia weren’t just capturing nonwhite voters; they were also winning a large share of white voters in their districts as well.

“The difference is white voters,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of evidence of an electoral shift among white Republicans, but we now do among white Democrats. It’s possible that when all is said and done, Jamaal Bowman will have won white voters in the primary, not just nonwhites.”

Black candidates running in the June 23 primaries often talked about poverty and how it was personal to them. On the campaign trail in Kentucky, Booker — who is diabetic — shared how he would have to ration his insulin because he couldn’t afford it.

“Poverty is a policy choice, and it’s not a partisan thing,” Booker told Vox in a recent interview. “For many of us, the only thing we have to look forward to is a lot of struggle, is a lot of heartache. I’ve lived that struggle.”

In a Tuesday night speech, Bowman talked about eradicating poverty at length, and seeing the impacts of poverty on the New York school children he’s worked with as a public educator.

“Poverty is not a result of children and families who don’t work hard,” Bowman said. “Our children and families work as hard as anyone else. Poverty is by political design, and it’s rooted in a system that has been fractured and corrupt and rotten from its core from the inception of America.”

A progressive operative in New York told Vox the races in the state were about much more than the ideological split of progressives versus moderate Democrats. It was also about which candidates were present in the community and understood the struggles of its poorest members. For instance, Engel’s district was hit hard by Covid-19, a disease disproportionately killing Black and brown people.

“Candidates who felt responsive and right for this moment won,” a person close to the Bowman campaign told Vox.

As Vox’s Emily Stewart wrote, even though Engel was successful at bringing money and resources back home, “he was unable to overcome the perception that he had become disconnected from his district,” which is a diverse one encompassing parts of the Bronx and Westchester County.

As Stewart wrote, “during the coronavirus crisis and then the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the narrative that the Congress member was not attentive enough to his district — one he denied — took even stronger hold.” Even with endorsements from powerful New York Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Engel could not survive his primary.

Even with the Kentucky Senate race too close to call, the June 23 primaries show young Black candidates have momentum on their side this year.

“Eliot Engel used to say he was a thorn in the side of Donald Trump, but you know what Donald Trump is more afraid of than anyone, anything else? A Black man with power,” Bowman said during his Tuesday night speech.

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[A 2-1 ruling concludes that the district court cannot even hold a hearing on the subject.]

Today the D.C. Circuit granted Michael Flynn's petition for a writ of mandamus, ordering District Judge Sullivan to grant the government's motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn. Judge Rao, joined by Judge Henderson, concluded that District Judge Sullivan erred in appointing an amicus to defend continuation of the Flynn prosecution and in scheduling a hearing on the Government's motion.  For more background on the case, see my post here and Jonathan's post here.

The critical legal issue is the district judge's role, under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a), in deciding whether to grant "leave of court" for the Government to dismiss a criminal case.  Judge Sullivan had taken an expansive view of his role, even appointing an amicus (distinguished retired District Judge John Gleeson) to argue against the Government's unopposed motion to dismiss. The majority found this appointment a "troubling indication" of the district court's "mistaken understanding" of its role in ruling on an unopposed Rule 48(a) motion:

Whatever the extent of the district court's "narrow" role under Rule 48(a), see Fokker Servs., 818 F.3d at 742, that role does not include designating an advocate to defend Flynn's continued prosecution. The district court's order put two "coequal branches of the Government … on a collision course." Cheney, 542 U.S. at 389. The district court chose an amicus who had publicly advocated for a full adversarial process. Based on the record before us, the contemplated hearing could require the government to defend its charging decision on two fronts—answering the district court's inquiries as well as combatting Gleeson's arguments. Moreover, the district court's invitation to members of the general public to appear as amici suggests anything but a circumscribed review. This sort of broadside inquiry would rewrite Rule 48(a)'s narrow "leave of court" provision.

The majority's conclusion on the impropriety of appointing an amicus seems correct to me. In discharging his leave-of-court obligations, the district judge had no need to enlist advocates for a particular conclusion, particularly where the judge was well familiar with the details of the case.

The majority, however, stands on weaker footing in concluding that the district judge could not even hold a hearing on the dismissal motion.  As Judge Wilkins explained in his dissent,

it is not inconsistent with the separation of powers for a district court to conduct regular proceedings and afford consideration to a motion, even if the eventual grant or denial of the motion might intrude on the Executive's exercise of his prosecutorial discretion. Again, this is not a case where we are being asked to decide whether the district judge may call the prosecutor to the stand or whether a Rule 48(a) motion may lead to an evidentiary hearing. This is a case about whether a district judge may even hold a hearing on a Rule 48(a) motion. While the selective-prosecution context is admittedly different than Rule 48(a), these cases nonetheless contradict the majority's conclusion that holding a hearing, in and of itself, is a per se improper intrusion upon executive power. If the presumption of regularity does not prevent holding a hearing or independently examining prosecutorial discretion in the selective-prosecution context, there is no good reason why the presumption of regularity precludes a hearing on a motion to dismiss under Rule 48(a), disallowing any consideration whatsoever and forbidding the district court from expressing its views on the record with respect to its previous findings on materiality and guilt—all in the name of the separation of powers.

The majority rebutted this conclusion, arguing that "[t]his is not a case about whether 'a district judge may even hold a hearing on a Rule 48(a) motion.' Rather, it is about whether, after the government has explained why a prosecution is no longer in the public interest, the district judge may prolong the prosecution by … probing the government's motives. On that, both the Constitution and cases are clear: he may not."

The Constitution and the cases are not "clear" on this subject. Indeed, the majority's reading of Rule 48(a) essentially turns it into a dead letter. Rule 48(a) specifically envisions some role–albeit a limited one–for the district court in evaluating motions to dismiss. It is hard to understand how the mere holding of a hearing on whether to grant leave of court is such an extraordinary abuse of power to warrant granting a writ of mandamus. On this point, I agree with former Judge Michael Luttig, who wrote in a prescient op-ed last month in the Washington Post that "[i]f the court of appeals were to order Sullivan to dismiss the case now, the full appeals court or, if not, the Supreme Court, should reverse that error."

In venturing my conclusion that the district judge should have been allowed to hold a hearing, I don't mean to comment on the ultimate merits of the underlying motion to dismiss from the Government. Indeed, if anything it sounds like the arguments favoring dismissal may have only grown stronger since the Government filed its motion. News reports yesterday suggest that additional exculpatory notes from Peter Strzok have surfaced recently that only further undercut the Government's criminal case.

But the process is important here. Rule 48(a) requires "leave of court" before the Government can dismiss a case.  And that leave-of-court requirement exists not only for protecting defendant's interests (as the majority opinion discusses) but also for protecting other interests, such as those crime victims (as the majority does not substantively discuss). As I explained in my earlier post on this case,

for the reasons I wrote about long ago in my earlier law review article, I continue to believe that judges should always be required to consider a crime victim's views before dismissing a case. It may well be that most Government dismissal motions continue to be granted, even when a victim objects. But as a procedural matter, consideration of the victim's view ensures greater fairness–and certainly greater perceived fairness–in the process.

This conclusion is reinforced by the drafting history of Rule 48(a), recently summarized nicely in a short, on-line piece by Thomas Frampton. As he explains, "Rule 48(a)'s 'principal object' was never 'to protect a defendant against prosecutorial harassment,' Rinaldi v. United States, 434 U.S. 22, 30 n.15 (1977) (per curiam). Rather, it was implemented to give district judges a modest means of safeguarding the public interest when evaluating a motion like the one that has been filed in United States v. Flynn."

Other circuits have taken a more expansive view of the role of district judge's under Rule 48(a) than did the D.C. Circuit today. I wouldn't be surprised to see further review of this divided opinion–which essentially reads Rule 48(a)'s long standing leave-of-court requirement out of the rules of criminal procedure.

Enlarge / This dog was part of widespread protests against the FBI's attempts to penetrate iPhone encryption. (credit: Dünzlullstein bild / Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced yet another bill attempting to poke holes in data encryption, called the Lawful Access To Encrypted Data Act. This bill follows previous US efforts to weaken encryption, including March's proposed EARN IT Act and demands made by US Attorney General William Barr in his 2019 keynote address at the International Conference on Cyber Security.

A press release from the Senate Judiciary Committee—which is chaired by Graham—describes the bill as "a balanced solution that keeps in mind the constitutional rights afforded to all Americans, while providing law enforcement the tools needed to protect the public from everyday violent crime and threats to our national security." It goes on to emphasize—in both bold and italic text—that the bill would "only" require service providers to grant law enforcement a back door after a court issues a warrant.

Graham expresses his personal position in strong terms:

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Enlarge / A T-Mobile logo at a store in New York on April 30, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile is already trying to get out of merger conditions imposed by state regulators in California less than three months after completing its acquisition of Sprint.

T-Mobile yesterday filed a petition with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), asking the agency to provide two extra years to meet 5G build-out requirements and to eliminate a requirement to add 1,000 new employees. T-Mobile, which had agreed to other conditions imposed by the federal government, completed the Sprint merger on April 1 without waiting for California's approval. T-Mobile claimed the state has no jurisdiction over wireless transactions. CPUC, which says it does have jurisdiction, imposed conditions when it approved the merger on April 16.

T-Mobile's petition to CPUC could be a prelude to a lawsuit against California if the carrier doesn't get what it wants. On 5G, T-Mobile's petition targets a condition requiring average speeds of 300Mbps to 93 percent of California by the end of 2024. T-Mobile asked the CPUC for an extra two years to comply, saying it should have until the end of 2026. T-Mobile claims the 2024 date was a mistake "because the 2024 date was a proxy—used [by T-Mobile] at the beginning of the regulatory approval process in 2018—for the period ending six years after closing (which of course occurred in 2020)." Changing the deadline to 2026 would bring the condition "in line with the company's network model, which includes coverage projections for three- and six-year periods from close," T-Mobile said.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is forging ahead on Wednesday with a procedural vote on a useless police "reform" bill, one which has been rejected by the NAACP and is what the Congressional Black Caucus calls "a completely watered-down fake reform bill." In a letter to the Senate provided by Sen. Chuck Schumer's office, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—a coalition of more than 220 civil and human rights organizations—says it "falls woefully short of the comprehensive reform needed" and it "is deeply problematic to meet this moment with a menial incremental approach that offers more funding to police, and few policies to effectively address the constant loss of Black lives at the hands of police."

McConnell is forcing this vote even after Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolinian who is also the only Black member of the Republican conference, bared his soul to his colleagues Tuesday, sharing with them the racist vitriol he gets in calls and emails every day. Instead of taking this moment—this point in time when real change have never been more critical—McConnell is playing games. He's claiming that Democrats want to "rewrite the bill behind closed doors in advance." That's also known as regular order, where the Judiciary Committee meets—with cameras rolling, so it is very much not behind closed doors—to write legislation, with both Republicans and Democrats contributing. McConnell wants instead to shield his Republicans from that public venue. He doesn't want the American public to see what his Republicans really think about Black people, or what they really think about police brutality.

He wants this bill to fail. He wants to say Republicans offered reform and Democrats rejected it, when in truth Republicans offered nothing of substance and told Democrats they could take it or leave it. And just to punctuate how very little McConnell cares about the Black community, the other vote he's conducting Wednesday is on yet another one of Donald Trump's and the Federalist Society's deplorable judicial picks. This time it's Cory Wilson for the Fifth Circuit appeals court, a nominee who the entire civil rights community has rejected because of his anti-civil rights record and rhetoric. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, where Wilson would be seated, said in a call of civil rights leaders opposing Wilson that he "has written, worked, and voted in support of laws that have the necessary effect of suppressing minorities’ right to vote—most notably by supporting voter ID laws. He also has derided federal efforts to ensure everyone, including minorities, has the right to vote. […] Wilson's nomination to the Fifth Circuit is unconscionable but it aptly fulfills the Trump conservative agenda of rolling back the rights of minorities."

McConnell is insulting and harming Black Americans twice on Wednesday: He's pushing this racist judge, and he's preventing any kind of real progress on ending racist and brutal policing.

In an astounding ruling, the D.C. circuit of the Court of Appeals has ordered the district court to accept the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) motion to dismiss all charges against Michael Flynn. This action completely overturns the actions of U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan and explicitly dismisses the findings of former federal judge John Gleeson, who was appointed by Sullivan to review the case following the DOJ’s extraordinary move to end prosecution.

Two weeks ago, Gleeson produced a lengthy document that blasted the DOJ’s efforts to undermine and withdraw from their own case. But all of Gleeson’s findings appear to be set aside by this brief ruling. 

Making the ruling even more unusual, even though it was Flynn’s attorneys who filed for writ of mandamus, it appears the appeals court has ruled in favor of … the DOJ, which was not a party to that claim. And it comes following previous suggestions that the appeals court was prepared to reject Flynn’s appeal.

Expect more updates shortly.

For generations, a single street paying homage to Robert E. Lee and his Confederate allies has upheld Richmond’s racist foundations. Change is coming.

Start at the southeastern end of Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue, and you’ll see a nearly 30-foot-tall bronze statute of J.E.B. Stuart, the Confederate cavalry commander and intelligence officer that Gen. Robert E. Lee once praised as the “eyes of the army.” Continue driving northwest, and you’ll see monuments honoring Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Lee’s close subordinate Stonewall Jackson, and Confederate naval commander Matthew Fontaine Maury.

The five Confederate monuments have dominated Richmond’s landscape for decades — some of them even longer — since they were first erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a swell of passion for the white Southern “lost cause.” The Lee statue alone is simply enormous, made of bronze and looming 61 feet high on a granite and marble base reminiscent of a shrine honoring a Roman emperor.

Once staunch defenders of slavery, the men celebrated along Monument Avenue stand as symbols of a racist and treasonous past, one that many Americans still look upon with nostalgia. Richmond, once the South’s most vibrant industrial center, built ordinance for the Confederacy’s cannons, track for its railroads, and iron cladding for its warships. After Virginia seceded from the Union, Confederates moved their capital to Richmond.

Today, monuments to Confederate leaders line a divided boulevard, the sort of street where victorious armies march in parades to celebrate their triumphs. They’re surrounded by mansions that housed many of Richmond’s wealthiest white families.

But these statues are finally starting to come down. This month, anti-racism protesters splattered the Davis statue in pink paint and tore it down using ropes attached to a small car. Police hauled away the statue on a tow truck as nearby protesters cheered and chanted taunts at the fallen Confederate leader.

The four remaining statues, already covered in graffiti touting anti-racist messages like “No more white supremacy” and “Amerikkka,” will soon join Davis in similar ignominy.

Parker Michels-Boyce/AFP via Getty Images

At a press conference earlier this month, Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam — a man alleged to have his own fraught history with racist blackface — announced the state would “remove the statue of Robert E. Lee as soon as possible.” Of the five monuments, the Lee statue is the only one that sits on state-owned land, and therefore must be removed by state officials.

Northam had already signed legislation permitting Virginia cities to remove monuments on their own land. (The law takes effect in just days, on July 1.) This means that Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a young, African American Democrat, will soon be able to remove the remaining monuments with the consent of the City Council — an act that he’s made clear he will pursue.

“It’s time to heal, ladies and gentlemen,” Stoney said at the same press conference, with Northam standing nearby. “Richmond is no longer the capital of the Confederacy.”

For the moment, the Lee statue remains, due to an unusual court order handed down by a judge who warned that if Northam has the power to tear down the Lee monument, he could also take down a “monument to George Washington.” But that court order is unlikely to remain in effect for very long. In the interim, Lee and the other statues stand, not only as monuments to Confederate treason and white supremacy but also as reminders that the city’s racist past infected many of its most elite residents.

One need travel only a couple of miles from Monument Avenue to find the Commonwealth Club, an exclusive social club that, for a century, was both all-white and all-male. State lawmakers used to gather there to socialize and plan the next day’s strategies; it was a club where, according to one 1979 profile, “When members toast ‘Mr. President,’ it is said they raise their glasses to a portrait of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.”

Past members reportedly include Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, US Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr., governors John Dalton and Mills Godwin, and Clement Haynsworth, a federal judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court failed over allegations that, among other things, he supported segregation in public schools.

Richmond’s old racist institutions have long stood in tension with more liberal forces that have slowly transformed Virginia into a blue state. Former Democratic Gov. Douglas Wilder, a Black man, humiliated the Commonwealth Club when he turned down the offer of membership it traditionally extends to the state governor shortly after his election in 1989. As a state senator, Wilder had denounced the old Richmond institution as “a racist club, a retreat from the world where social gains are being made.”

The remaking of Monument Avenue will be the culmination of those social gains. It is the final chapter of a story that begins in racist rebellion and will end in a city led by an ambitious Black mayor expelling the Confederacy’s leaders once and for all.

Richmond was the locus of the worst sin Americans have ever committed. It was the capital of a treasonous regime founded on the idea that white people could and should own Black people because they believed white people were inherently superior. And the city celebrated that sin for more than a century. It was irredeemable.

But the Richmond of today looks very different than the racist white elites who once filled Monument Avenue’s mansions. Years of demographic change replaced the city’s Confederate sympathizers with the kind of people who protest racist symbols and have no desire to live near giant monuments to slave-owning traitors.

The irredeemable city is gone, and a new city is tearing down the shrines to an unforgivable past.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

The heart of a prosperous, racist community

Henry Grady was one of the white South’s greatest evangelists of the post-Civil War era. Part owner of what was then known as the Atlanta Constitution, Grady turned the newspaper into a nationally prominent platform touting his vision for a “New South,” one that, as Grady told a gathering prominent of New York businessmen in 1886, would reject its feudal history of masters and slaves in favor of a brighter, more capitalist vision.

“The old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth,” Grady said in a speech to the New England Society. But the New South was a middle-class society, powered by an emergent bourgeoisie. It was “less splendid on the surface” than antebellum society, Grady said, “but stronger at the core — a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace — and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age.”

Grady’s vision, however, always had a sinister side. The New South was no longer dominated exclusively by plantation owners who lorded over Black workers like medieval viscounts. But the emerging class of white professionals and capitalists were often just as racist and exploitative as their slave-owning ancestors.

Less than four years after Grady spoke in New York, around 150,000 people gathered in Richmond to watch the dedication of Monument Avenue’s Robert E. Lee statue. It was a celebration of a man who killed his own countrymen in defense of slavery. And it was a baptism, of sorts, for an American traitor. Lee’s sin of treason was washed away, and the Confederate general was reborn as a heroic figure.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

But the dedication of this monument wasn’t just a declaration of a racist ideology. It was also a sales pitch to the very businessmen whom Grady touted as the region’s new heroes.

It was “an opportunity to showcase a new real-estate development that included wide boulevards and Monument Avenue itself,” historian Kevin Levin wrote in the Atlantic. The neighborhood would attract a wide range of Richmond’s new oligarchs. “Bank presidents, manufacturers, lawyers, and real-estate developers” — all of whom were white — “purchased lots and built impressive homes along Monument Avenue,” he continued.

Monument Avenue’s merger of Confederate nostalgia with an emerging capitalist ethic proved a microcosm of the New South. Like any good salesman, Grady targeted his pitch to his audience. When he spoke in New York, he touted a kind of racial symbiosis between the kind of men who owned homes along Monument Avenue and the formerly enslaved. “No section shows a more prosperous laboring population than the Negroes of the South; none in fuller sympathy with the employing and land-owning class,” Grady said to his northern audience.

Grady offered a very different message for his Southern audience in Dallas the following year. “Those who would put the Negro race in supremacy would work against infallible decree,” he said, “for the white race can never submit to its domination, because the white race is the superior race.”

In Richmond, these two messages were often woven together. Early 20th century Richmonders often tried to entice businesses into the city by ”playing the line of being a New South city that still reveres its past,” says Karen Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The lawyers and bank owners who built Monument Avenue’s homes also filled institutions that celebrated Richmond’s Confederate past. The Commonwealth Club was conveniently located so that businessmen living in the shadow of the street’s statues could grab a drink on their way home from work. It did not admit its first African American member until 1988.

After enjoying a glass of bourbon at the club, Richmond’s white elites could drive down Monument Avenue to play golf at the Country Club of Virginia, which did not admit a Black member until 1992 — 84 years after it opened.

Gabriel Benzur/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

Someone traveling between the two clubs would pass St. Christopher’s School, a private boys’ school that educated many of Richmond’s sons of wealth. For 95 years, elementary students at St. Christopher’s were divided into the “Lee literary society” and the “Jackson literary society” as an homage to two of the Confederate generals honored on Monument Avenue. The school did not rename the societies until 2010.

One of the more unlikely activists calling for the statues to come down on Monument Avenue is the Rev. Robert W. Lee, the general’s great-great-great-great-nephew. Like many white men in the South, he grew up surrounded by Confederate iconography and immersed in a sanitized view of the past — a view he rejected as he trained for the ministry.

We spoke about why white Richmonders continued to cling to these icons for well over a century after Rev. Lee’s ancestor surrendered his army. “As a white man in the South,” he says, “you want that connection [to Confederate symbols] to be as deep as it can be because it is a connection to power.” That was never more true than in Richmond.

A white child born into Richmond’s high society could spend their life immersed in Confederate nostalgia. They played on streets celebrating Confederate leaders, swam in a whites-only pool surrounded by an exquisitely manicured golf course. They graduated, secured jobs working for companies owned by the families that lived in the shadow of Confederate generals, and started to amass the kind of wealth that might allow them to buy their own homes on Monument Avenue someday.

And in due time, they were welcomed into the city’s white elite as members of the Commonwealth Club, where they raised glasses to Jefferson Davis alongside senators, governors, and federal judges.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

How cheap real estate liberalized Richmond

One of the ironies of Richmond’s history, and of the recent history of much of the urban South, is that capitalism is now helping to tear down the racist culture it helped build. As the makeup of Southern cities changes, part of what’s driving the changes are “just the trends of the economy of the United States,” says Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, a history professor at the University of Dayton.

Richmond offers something that simply cannot be found in the nation’s largest and most prosperous cities: cheap real estate. Employers can rent office space for a fraction of what they’d pay in places like New York or Washington, DC, making Richmond an especially attractive area for businesses looking to expand. And these businesses’ employees can rent a comfortable home for what it would cost to rent a single room in a group house in a major city. As the Virginia Business journal noted in 2017, “A one-bedroom apartment [in DC] can rent for as much as $2,221 compared to Richmond’s rate of $972. Overall, the cost of living in Richmond is 5 percent below the national average, and housing costs are 11 percent below the national average.”

Urban centers with warm weather and a low cost of living are an attractive package for young professionals trying to figure out where to build their lives. A lot of Southern cities are attracting people who are moving from places like Connecticut, New York, and Ohio. The effect of these migrants is fraught, as they are often gentrifiers, says Lawrence-Sanders, but they also “bring liberal politics with them.”

Many of the newcomers are white, but there’s also a “reverse-migration pattern of Black people moving back to the South,” including “millennials and Gen Xers who weren’t raised [there],” says Lawrence-Sanders. Often they are surprised — and dismayed — to discover Confederate monuments dotting the view from their new homes.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Additionally, the number of South Asians living in the American South almost tripled between 2000 and 2017, with much of the growth occurring in Richmond. As the New York Times noted in 2019, “Of the 10 metro areas that had the largest South Asian growth, five are in the South ... One of them was Richmond.”

Virginia, according to the Times, is now “the land of Indian grocery stores, Korean churches and Diwali festivals.”

This changing culture creates a kind of virtuous circle that attracts even more left-leaning professionals. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias writes, there’s “a well-known finding in political psychology that people who score high in a personality attribute known as ‘openness to experience’ tend to have more left-wing political opinions.” That is, the very sort of people who like living in diverse communities, appreciate a wide range of cuisines, or enjoy a glass of gingerbread stout aged in apple brandy barrels are also the same sort of people likely to recoil at Confederate monuments.

Moreover, many local activists are well aware of how their city is changing, and they view this change as a force they can tap into to fight the city’s old power structures.

Amy Wentz, for example, works with BLK RVA, a project promoting Black tourism in Richmond. When she attended meetings with local tourism officials, she says, their presentations would often feature a slide noting how many people came to Richmond each year to see the Confederate monuments.

The focus of these meetings, Wentz said, “is to bring in visitors.” And the city makes money off those visitors, even if those visits are driven by Confederate nostalgia.

But two can play at that game. Richmond’s Black community launched a film festival featuring Black filmmakers and a restaurant week highlighting Black-owned restaurants, among other things. As these events grew in popularity, Wentz said, they started to offer a counterbalance to Confederate tourism, showing that the city does not “have to highlight our painful history” in order to bring in tourist dollars.

Steve Helber/AP

Today, city officials not only have to weigh the cost of lost tourism dollars if they tear down the monuments but also consider whether Black tourists will be less likely to spend money in Richmond if they are confronted by an enormous statue of a Confederate general. “Black folks,” says Michael Dickinson, an assistant professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University in downtown Richmond, “have always understood the legacy of these monuments.”

The many businesses considering relocating to Richmond have also had to consider whether they wanted to move their headquarters to a city that so visibly celebrates a slave-holding past. “The idea that their clients or employees might not feel welcome,” Rev. Lee says, “creates a real problem for these companies.”

Monument Avenue has quickly become a financial liability for the city.

Movements are more powerful than people

Northam, the Democratic governor who gave the order to tear down the Lee statue — an order that will soon be carried out, in the likely event that the court order protecting the statue is lifted — is another unlikely champion of this cause.

In 2019, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper discovered that Northam’s medical-school yearbook page featured an image of two unknown men, one of whom was dressed in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Northam at first confessed that he was one of the two men in the picture, but he later recanted this confession. A formal investigation by the university, Eastern Virginia Medical School, was unable to determine if Northam was one of the men in the photo.

A long list of Virginia luminaries, including Wilder (the former governor), members of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, and both of the state’s Democratic US senators, called for Northam to step down. He did not.

Northam, says Lawrence-Sanders, came out of a culture where no matter what your politics were, they were “secondary to Confederate nostalgia.” But that culture is dead. The Democratic Party depends on African American votes, and more broadly on voters who see the Confederacy as a vile, racist slavocracy.

“Now that the Democratic Party has moved in this direction,” Lawrence-Sanders says, “it’s not surprising to me that Northam is there, too.” Northam fits within the broader context of past political leaders, such as President Lyndon Johnson and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who set aside their own racist pasts to advance racial justice. (Northam also picked lawyer Rita Davis, a descendant of enslaved African Americans, as his top legal counsel. She’s spent the last year building the case for removing the Lee statue.)

Black people have “always had to work within a system of politicians who do not personally like them,” Lawrence-Sanders adds. They ”gotta assume that’s how politics works, and take the wins.”

Zach Gibson/Getty Images

In a 2012 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist laid out an unusually narrow view of the presidency. “We are not auditioning for fearless leader,” he said of the presidential election. “We just need a president to sign” the legislation Republicans already supported. “Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.”

It was a cynical quip, but Norquist was on to something. Political parties are more than just vehicles to work an executive’s will. They are coalitions made up of lawmakers, activists, policy experts, and ordinary voters, all of whom the executive depends on to make lasting changes. Presidents and governors are far from powerless to shape policy, but an executive who thumbs his nose at the people who got them their job is likely to have a singularly unsuccessful tenure in office.

In many ways, Northam is the Democratic mirror image of the man-with-enough-working-digits that Norquist hoped to elect in 2012. Whatever Northam may have done while he was a medical student, Northam as governor approved legislation expanding Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of Virginians, barred LGBTQ discrimination, rolled back restrictions on abortion, signed several new gun regulations, and expanded voting rights. And that’s on top of the actions he’s taken against Confederate monuments.

Northam has governed as a fairly conventional liberal Democrat because that’s what his fellow Democrats require of him. Like any successful politician, he is responsive to demands from activists who help shape his party’s consensus.

And there is reason to hope that anti-racism activists will have an unusually large influence on Democratic leaders in the near future.

A problem that can no longer be ignored

Sally Belfrage’s account of her work during 1964’s “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi is an astonishing narrative of the danger civil rights workers faced to expose the violence of Jim Crow. Even the story of her “basic training” for this work is harrowing.

Hundreds of volunteers gathered in Ohio to be trained on how to educate Black children in Mississippi and register those children’s parents to vote.

These volunteers were taught to assume the fetal position when they were being beaten, using their arms to protect their heads. They were warned to avoid wearing sandals, and told that “a T-shirt will save you some skin if you are being dragged on your stomach.” And they role-played scenarios, such as what to do if pulled over by white state troopers on a lonely highway.

Bob Moses, the civil rights icon who led the training, was clear about what these volunteers were stepping into. “The way some people characterize this project,” he told them, “is that it is an attempt to get some people killed so that the federal government will move into Mississippi.”

The volunteers would surrender their own bodies — even their lives — to billy clubs, police dogs, and potentially even bullets in the hopes that someone up north would catch a glimpse of the violence and decide it could not continue.

Half a century later, racism, police violence, and similar American sins can no longer be ignored by powerful officials who would prefer not to see them. Protesters filled our nation’s streets for weeks after a video of a police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes spread across the internet. Efforts to characterize the protesters as anarchic looters quickly faded as videos circulated of police brutalizing peaceful demonstrators. As of this writing, a Google spreadsheet compiled by many of these protesters includes more than 500 videos capturing alleged incidents of police misconduct against demonstrators.

“Those added technologies allow for Black voices to not be ignored, as they were in the past,” says Dickinson, the history professor.

The nation can no longer claim that the stories Black people have told for generations are not true. It can no longer dismiss threats to Black lives as a handful of isolated incidents. And as the nation comes to terms with the reality of Black life in the United States, it’s much harder for anyone to defend monuments to racism.

Just as Moses hoped that news of indefensible violence would sway the hearts of a nation, these recent images have reshaped public sentiment with shocking speed. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last week found that 64 percent of Americans support the protests against police violence. And 52 percent of voters support taking down Confederate statues, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, compared with 39 percent in 2017.

Old Richmond, in other words, is staggering under a one-two punch. At the very moment the demographics of the community are transforming, violence and racism are losing their ability to thrive in the dark.

But removing the monuments is also the easy part. Richmond is a fundamentally different place than it was decades ago, when senators and governors plotted legislative strategy at the Commonwealth Club. The monuments are relics of a past that the vast majority of Richmonders now reject. The city will no longer celebrate slavery and racism on one of its most cherished streets. Children will no longer gaze up at the statue of Robert E. Lee and imagine him as a hero.

John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The harder question is whether Richmond — and more broadly, the US — is willing to combat the legacy of racism when it also means providing “tangible things,” like affordable housing and high-quality schools, says Dickinson. “The larger conversation is how do we go about increasing equity for Black communities.”

The last man standing

There are two other statues in Richmond that I haven’t mentioned yet. The first was installed just last year at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, less than half a mile from Monument Avenue.

At the dedication for this monument, its sculptor, the Black artist Kehinde Wiley, described his first visit to Richmond. “When I came here, all those years back, and I saw Monument Avenue, and I saw some extraordinary sculpture,” he said. “People took a lot of time to make something powerful, beautiful, elegant. And menacing.”

Wiley’s statue, named “Rumors of War,” captures that sense of elegant power. Modeled after Richmond’s statue of J.E.B. Stuart, it depicts a Black man in a hoodie, riding off on horseback as if he were at the head of a mighty army, perhaps one that will soon vanquish its foes on nearby Monument Avenue.

Zach Gibson/Getty Images

The second statue is more unassuming. But it is also the only statue on Monument Avenue that points towards a more hopeful future.

Arthur Ashe, who grew up in Richmond, was one of the preeminent tennis stars of the 1960s and 1970s. Among other things, he was the first Black man to win the US Open and the first to win Wimbledon. Shortly before Ashe’s death in 1993, artist Paul di Pasquale met the tennis legend and decided to make a sculpture of him.

Wilder, who was then winding down his term as governor, saw a mock-up of the work and declared, “This statue needs to go on Monument Avenue.”

A battle to keep Ashe from integrating Monument Avenue ensued, making national headlines. City Hall received hundreds of calls protesting Wilder’s proposal. The president of a local “Heritage Preservation Association” called Monument Avenue “hallowed ground” and warned the statue should be placed elsewhere to avoid “violating the historic sensibilities of Richmond’s Confederate-American population.” Leonidas B. Young, the city’s African American mayor at the time, floated the idea of tearing down two former department stores to build “Arthur Ashe Park” as an alternative.

John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images

But Wilder’s view prevailed, and on July 10, 1996, Ashe became the sixth man honored on Monument Avenue.

If you are unaware of the political significance of Ashe’s statue, it is easy to drive by the statue today and see it as a non-sequitur. When di Pasquale spoke to Ashe about making the sculpture, the former tennis star was dying of AIDS. He told the artist to sculpt him as he was then, emaciated as he fought the terrible disease that took his life in 1993. Surrounded by statues of powerful men on powerful horses riding off to do violence in the name of upholding slavery, Ashe stands gaunt and surrounded by children, holding just two books and a tennis racket.

Very soon, however, the army of the Confederacy will finally be defeated. And Ashe — the only one worthy of the honor — will be the only person left on Monument Avenue.

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the Constitution. He grew up in Richmond, Virginia, just a short drive away from Monument Avenue.

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Bill Barr is the most powerful law enforcement officer in the country. What does he want?

Last Friday, Attorney General Bill Barr announced that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, was “stepping down” from his position.

The announcement caught everyone by surprise, including Berman, who quickly denied that he had any plans to resign. But the following day Barr announced that Trump had dismissed Berman, putting an end to the bizarre standoff (though Trump, later in the day, claimed he was “not involved” in Berman’s firing).

In any other administration, the firing of a US attorney who had been conducting investigations of the president’s allies would be scandalous. But this is not a typical administration and this is not a typical Department of Justice. Under Barr, the DOJ has become a political instrument for the president. Whether it’s misleading the public about the Mueller report or using tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters so that Trump could stage a photo op, or trying to fire Berman, Barr has repeatedly sacrificed the dignity of his office in order to please his boss.

If you don’t know much about Barr’s history, it’s hard to make sense of his behavior. Having already served as AG under George H.W. Bush’s administration, Barr had a solid reputation as a serious guy. When he reemerged in 2018 as Trump’s pick for attorney general, he was widely seen as a creature of the Republican establishment, and his selection was “greeted with a measure of relief” within the DOJ, according to the New York Times.

But events since have shown him to be a more than willing accomplice in Trump’s slow-motion destruction of democratic norms. Which raises the question: Why has someone like Bill Barr given himself over to an aspiring authoritarian like Trump?

To get some answers, I reached out to David Rohde, an editor at the New Yorker who profiled Barr for the magazine back in January. Beyond the obvious questions, I wanted to know who Barr really is and what’s driving his political decision-making in this moment. As Rohde put it, Barr is “a culture warrior from the ’80s” who is “fully committed” to protecting Trump. We talk about the ideology animating Barr’s loyalty to Trump and why there’s no going back for him at this point.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

What’s the most important thing people should know about William Barr?

David Rohde

I think the most important thing to understand is that he has one of the most extreme views of how powerful an American president should be.

Sean Illing

What does that mean?

David Rohde

It means that he does not believe that we should have three co-equal branches of government. He believes the president should be more powerful than Congress and the courts. In his mind, that’s the only thing that can keep the country safe when it is threatened by war, natural disaster, or economic collapse. He believes that is what the founders intended.

Sean Illing

I wonder why Barr’s radicalism wasn’t reflected in the commentary when he was first nominated by Trump. The conventional wisdom at the time was that he was a banal establishment type. Why do you think this was missed?

David Rohde

Barr has held these views consistently throughout his life. But he was seen as a traditionalist when Trump nominated him to be attorney general. In hindsight, it looks like the extremism of Barr’s views didn’t emerge during his first tenure as attorney general because the president he served then, George H. W. Bush, was a traditionalist. Bush had witnessed Nixon’s abuses and resignation. Bush accepted that the three branches were co-equal.

Working as attorney general for Donald Trump, obviously, is completely different. Trump is contemptuous of post-Watergate norms and of congressional and judicial oversight. Trump has enabled Barr to pursue his decades-long goal of increasing the power of the presidency. And Barr has enabled Trump to stonewall congressional investigations to an extent not seen since Nixon. It’s an ideologue meets grifter.

Sean Illing

But the idea of “checks and balances” is literally the basis of our constitutional system. Why does he find it so inadequate?

David Rohde

He believes that if you look at American history, it’s been the presidency that has been able to intervene when we’ve faced war or economic calamity or natural disaster. And Congress has dithered and the courts simply don’t have the mechanisms to respond. He really believes this in his bones.

In fact, I just spoke to someone who knows him well, who works closely with him, and he told me that Barr is fully committed, that he stands by every action he’s taken in this administration, from clearing Lafayette Park with tear gas to trying to fire the US attorney in Manhattan this weekend. And this person said that Barr is doing these actions because he himself believes in empowering the presidency. It is not because he’s being pressured or bullied by Trump.

Sean Illing

So he’s a real ideological warrior?

David Rohde

Yes, he’s fully committed. And if you pay attention to what he’s been saying for decades, nothing he’s doing now is all that surprising. He’s been calling for tough law-and-order policies for a long time. His reaction to the demonstrations in Washington was nothing new.

When the Rodney King riots erupted in the 1990s, Barr was attorney general for George H.W. Bush. He sent thousands of federal agents out to Los Angeles to put down the riots and saw it as a missed opportunity to crack down on gangs in Los Angeles. He agreed to bring charges against the officers who beat Rodney King, but he complained it was a missed opportunity and federal civil rights charges should have been brought against the gangs as well.

So the idea of dominating the streets, the idea of overwhelming force to bring order, is something he’s advocated for decades. It’s not something that he’s mouthing for Trump.

Sean Illing

The thing about Barr is that he’s sort of a quiet revolutionary, or at least that’s the way he comes across in your profile. He understands how power works and he’s willing to methodically transform the system from within.

David Rohde

Very much so. I mean, it’s funny watching interviews with him. He’s very measured in how he speaks, but what he is saying is very far right and deeply conservative across the board. And his actions are extraordinary, at times unprecedented, for an attorney general, from dispatching National Guard troops from multiple states all over DC, to setting up a command bunker where he oversaw all of that, to removing prosecutors and pushing for lower sentences for the president’s allies. He speaks carefully but his actions are anything but measured.

Sean Illing

How important is Barr’s Catholicism to his moral and political project?

David Rohde

I can’t read his mind and I can’t say for sure what role his faith plays, but he’s pretty open about what he believes and why he believes it. He has said things in the past that showed a kind of moral conservatism. He said, for example, that he thought crime was a result of moral failings, not poverty, at a Federalist Society symposium in the ’90s. He’s aggressively backed tough sentences in the past and today for drug crimes. And he feels that people who are religiously observant are mocked in popular culture and that practicing one’s religion consistently is under assault today by liberal elites in the United States.

Sean Illing

Barr gave a speech at Notre Dame in 2019 that most people are not aware of but it’s incredibly revealing. What stands out to me isn’t his religiosity but his profound hostility to secular culture, which he calls “organized destruction” and an engine of “moral relativism.” He really does see himself on the front lines of an epic religious and cultural struggle, doesn’t he?

David Rohde

Yeah, he does. And again, I just spoke today with someone who works closely with him. He told me that Barr is convinced that mail-in ballots are a source of mob rule, that he’s worried about mob rule in the US. He complains that tech companies, when they label the president’s tweets, are taking away the free press rights of conservatives. In other words, all of these banal conservative talking points you hear all the time — he really believes them. He’s a culture warrior from the ’80s, but he’s back in the position of attorney general 40 years later and fighting the same battles.

Sean Illing

The obsession with cultural decline is worth lingering on because it really does seem like the guiding motivation for Barr. In that Notre Dame speech, he basically blames every “social pathology” (from depression to suicide rates to violence and drug addiction) on secularism.

Do you know what he means by that?

David Rohde

He argues that the founding fathers believed that for American democracy to succeed, Americans had to be religiously observant, because religion provides a mechanism for people to control their behavior and to not abuse their power, and so those moral guideposts should come from religion, not from the government itself. And he felt that the courts made a variety of decisions in the 1960s that produced a bunch of toxic social changes.

Sean Illing

What does he actually want? Does he want a theocracy?

David Rohde

No, he wants a presidential republic where the chief executive is judged in two ways: impeachment and reelection every four years. He sees federal judges declaring Trump’s travel ban illegal or independent counsels like Robert Mueller investigating the president as improper infringements on presidential power by the judicial and legislative branches. They’re denying the president his legitimate constitutional right to run the executive branch as he sees fit.

In a speech last fall at the Federalist Society, he said part of the reason he joined the Trump administration was to halt the weakening of the presidency that he felt was going on in the Trump era, that judges and Democrats in Congress were setting dangerous precedents that would leave the country with a powerless president who couldn’t hold the country together in a crisis.

Sean Illing

What I hear when I listen to him speak is someone who has decided that democracy is too problematic, that the culture has been hijacked, and that the only response is to exercise power from the top down.

David Rohde

Well, I think what Barr believes is that the Hollywood cultural elite is forcing cultural change that most Americans oppose, and that the news media and Hollywood together are exaggerating the number of liberals in the country. And I think he believes that liberals engage in the same sort of rough-and-tumble politics as Trump. So there’s a sense that this is a game for power and you either win or lose.

There’s a fierce belief among Barr and other administration officials that whatever Trump’s problems and behavioral issues, and there are lots of them, they still believe Trump is delivering on a conservative agenda. And one person close to Barr just basically replied, “Of course we support this president and of course we’re going to continue working for him.”

Sean Illing

And what decisions or what changes is Barr reacting against?

David Rohde

He cites Roe v. Wade as the primary example. And he blames a wide variety of social problems, from children born out of wedlock to drug addiction, on what he claims is an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values by militant secularists.

Sean Illing

Barr has this reputation as a very shrewd operator but it does seem like he’s misreading the room lately.

David Rohde

Clearing protesters from Lafayette Square and the attempt to remove Berman, the US attorney in New York, were both off politically. Barr mishandled them. I think that how Trump has responded to the pandemic and the George Floyd demonstrations gives me the sense that both Trump and Barr are off their game. The fact that Trump and Barr lost two major Supreme Court decisions last week, that Berman so openly defied Barr’s order to resign, shows that their political capital could be decreasing.

So there’s an argument that Trump and Barr are just out of touch with the sentiment of this country right now. As I was saying earlier, Barr is still mouthing the same “law and order” talking points you heard in the ’80s. And even in interviews now, Barr will acknowledge that racism exists but he rejects the idea that there’s systemic racism in this country. He clearly doesn’t feel the sense of urgency that so many Americans feel.

Sean Illing

For better or worse, Barr sees this moment as his last stand, right? There’s no going back at this point.

David Rohde

He’s all in. Again, the person I spoke to who’s close to Barr says he really believes what he’s doing is right. And friends of Barr have told me that none of these views are new. And he has nothing to lose. He’s had a long, successful career. Nothing is more important to him than this right now. And I was told today Barr will absolutely be serving through the November election and the remainder of Trump’s term. He is fully committed to seeing this through.

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Stephen Colbert took former national security adviser John Bolton to task for his naïveté in thinking he could somehow over come the chaos within the Trump administration and Trump’s inflated ego.

“You had to know that [going into the Trump administration] was a whirlpool of chaos,” said Colbert. “Even those of us looking from the outside who never got to go in could see it. Why did you go in knowing how chaotic it was?”

Replied Bolton: “I certainly heard all the stories. …. It was my belief that this could be overcome, that you could set up an orderly process. … I entered aware of the problems but optimistic that they could be overcome.”

Colbert noted that Bolton described Trump as having a soft spot for autocrats, and asked “who took advantage of that the most?”

“Every one of them,” Bolton replied. “It’s a close race to see who could see through him the clearest and tried to manipulate him – Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Erdowan of Turkey – there’s a long list of them.”

After Bolton said “I always had the feeling sitting in these meetings that they could see right through him,” Colbert replied, “But none of that could be surprising because you saw from the campaign that he was completely incurious person who had no interest in knowledge or the truth.”

Said Bolton: “Whatever we think of him, he’s not going to be a Democrat subject to the pressure — especially now — of the Left. I bought that argument in 2016.”

“No, he’s going to be subject to the pressure of Vladimir Putin!” interjected Colbert. “And Xi Jinping! He’s a person willing to sell out the interest of the American people for his own reelection. What could be worse in Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden’s philosophy than betraying your country to a hostile foreign leader?”

Replied Bolton: “What I thought in 2016 was, ‘Well, at least we have to try it out.'”

“I guess what’s exasperating is there is absolutely nothing that Donald Trump has done that is surprising to me,” Colbert later added. “My rule is: Everything you think about Donald Trump is probably true, because he’s not deep enough to get your socks wet in. He’s incredibly readable, that’s why when he ran casinos, the house lost. There’s nothing to learn about him. How did you not know beforehand that he was just callow?”

“Because I couldn’t believe it was that bad.”

“But you’re an international negotiator,” Colbert argued. “How could you be naive? You’ve dealt with the worst people in the world?

“You’ve really insulted me now by calling me naive,” said Bolton, continuing to try and explain his way out of it.

More of the interview:

The post Stephen Colbert Grills John Bolton Over ‘Naive’ Support for Trump: ‘How Could You Not Know He Was Just Callow?’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A federal prosecutor who withdrew from the Roger Stone case in protest will testify Wednesday that the political interference he witnessed in the case was "unprecedented," reaching the "highest levels" of the Justice Department. In his opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee, assistant U.S. attorney Aaron Zelinsky writes that he had "never seen political influence play any role in prosecutorial decision making — with one exception: United States v. Roger Stone." 

Zelinsky, a career Justice Department line attorney since 2014, withdrew from the Stone case earlier this year along with three other career DOJ prosecutors after their superiors undercut their original sentencing recommendation for Stone to make it lighter. In his opening statement, Zelinsky said that he repeatedly heard Stone was "being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President." That special treatment, Zelinsky added, ran afoul of every "ethical and legal obligation" he had been taught about dealing with defendants equitably and fairly.  

Zelinsky used the word "unprecedented" five times throughout his 13-page opening statement to describe Justice Department's actions regarding Stone. According to his account, the handling of the case was unprecedented, the decision to override the original sentencing recommendation was unprecedented, the filing not including the signature of any line attorney was unprecedented, the leniency Stone was given was unprecedented, and the treatment Stone was getting from the acting U.S. attorney overseeing the case—toady of Attorney General William Barr—was unprecedented.

"I was told that the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Timothy Shea, was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break, and that the U.S. Attorney’s sentencing instructions to us were based on political considerations," writes Zelinsky. "I was also told that the acting U.S. Attorney was giving Stone such unprecedentedly favorable treatment because he was 'afraid of the President.'” What do ya know—Barr installed a gutless wonder into that position after he ousted the office's former U.S. attorney, Jessie Liu.

Zelinsky said he and his fellow line attorneys working the case objected to the interference both in writing and verbally, but "our objections were not heeded."

What Zelinsky describes is a Department of Justice in complete and utter moral and ethical decay under William Barr's stewardship. Zelinksy will surely elaborate on those themes during the Judiciary Committee hearing on threats to the department's prosecutorial independence on Wednesday at 12 PM ET.

Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec issued a statement in response to Zelinsky's written testimony, saying that Barr himself "determined" the original sentencing recommendation for Stone was "excessive and inconsistent with similar cases." The statement also claims Barr never spoke with Trump about "the sentencing" of Stone and "made the decision to correct the filing before the President tweeted about the case."

Noted: Barr's his own man and supposedly didn't take any Twitter orders from Trump.  

But confirmed: the "highest levels" at DOJ definitely interfered. 

Over about half a century, police unions have become one of the most powerful lobbies in local government.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by now-former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin, few have been inclined to defend Chauvin or his colleagues who stood by and watched as he suffocated Floyd to death. Few, that is, except Bob Kroll.

In a letter to membership, Kroll — the president of the MPD’s police union — referred to protesters outraged by police brutality as a “terrorist movement” and defended the officers who killed Floyd and were subsequently fired, arguing they were “terminated without due process” and lamenting, “What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd.” (Floyd had a criminal record, but mostly for nonviolent drug and theft charges.)

Kroll’s statements illustrate a central challenge in American efforts to transform policing: Police unions, the groups that represent police officers, are a powerful force that stands in the way of holding police accountable. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told the New York Times that Kroll and his union are a major reason it’s hard to bring order to the Minneapolis Police Department, saying they create a “nearly impenetrable barrier” to reform.

It’s not just in Minneapolis. Around the country, as protesters take to the streets to condemn police violence and demand change, police unions have emerged as the protesters’ most vocal and implacable foe.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

In Buffalo, the city’s Police Benevolent Association president John Evans has actively defended officers who pushed 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino to the ground. When the officers who pushed Gugino were seen leaving their arraignment on felony assault charges, a large crowd of police union members and sympathizers was seen cheering them on. In New York State broadly, police unions led opposition to newly signed legislation that prevents police from hiding misconduct complaints and criminalizes chokeholds.

These are hardly aberrations. Police unions in general have become the most vocal interest group opposing criminal justice reforms and especially reforms to police discipline and use of force. Historically, they have, unlike most unions, been profoundly conservative institutions that uphold a particular white ethnic, “law and order”-focused variant of right-wing politics. They have been among Donald Trump’s most fervent allies; Kroll spoke at a Trump rally in 2018, and the International Union of Police Associations has already endorsed Trump for reelection.

The foregrounding of police unions’ role in the warping of American law enforcement has also prompted some difficult conversations on the left. The presence of a segment of a union movement that’s unapologetically right-wing and hostile to Black communities has tested the limits of solidarity from more left-wing unionists.

As long as police forces exist, police unions will exist in some form as well, even if just as political pressure groups. It is therefore natural to think that reforming police unions in some way must be part of the broader agenda of changing policing in America. They are among the biggest stakeholders in the way the system works now; without addressing their power, other reforms may never get off the ground.

A brief history of police, unions, and police unions

The creation of police unions was a somewhat ironic twist in American labor history, University of Minnesota labor historian Will Jones tells me, given that the creation of urban police forces was largely spurred by a desire to contain union activism and protest.

“The whole creation of the police force in the late 19th century was largely in response to labor conflict,” Jones says. Police departments emerged and evolved as adjuncts to the sheriff’s departments and private detective agencies (like the Pinkertons) that bosses typically enlisted to fight union activists.

The anniversary of the Haymarket affair of 1886, in which an unknown assailant threw a bomb at Chicago police and the police responded by opening fire on a crowd of labor demonstrators, is still commemorated on May 1 as International Workers’ Day in numerous countries worldwide. Union demonstrators and police would square off repeatedly in ensuing decades: in Cleveland in 1894, Philadelphia in 1910, Minneapolis in 1934, Chicago in 1937, and Hilo, Hawaii, in 1938, among many other incidents.

Tim Boyle/Getty Images

The anti-union role of police began to ebb in the first half of the 20th century with the coming of the New Deal and the Great Migration of Black workers from the South to Northern cities, says Aaron Bekemeyer, a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard whose dissertation documents the emergence of police unions in Philadelphia and nationally.

The New Deal, especially the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, legalized a lot of union activity, including strikes, and so shunted the task of managing labor conflict from local police to federal bureaucrats. The Great Migration, in turn, gave urban police another population to police, namely Black people. “Policing of Black neighborhoods, drug policing, gang policing become what these big-city police forces do,” Bekemeyer says.

The trend of allowing public sector unions began in New York City, when Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., the son of Sen. Robert Wagner who wrote the National Labor Relations Act, issued regulations that allowed collective bargaining by municipal employees in 1958. Wisconsin followed suit in 1959, and many states came after that. In 1962, the federal government under John F. Kennedy legalized collective bargaining for its employees. The spread of this idea helped fuel the growth of teachers unions, sanitation workers unions, and other public employee unions — including police unions.

The rise in violent crime in the 1960s, riots in places like Watts in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, and nationwide in 1968, and the rise of tough-on-crime policing targeted at Black neighborhoods also enhanced the political power of police unions: “The police unions say, ‘Hey, we’re the ones doing this work and protecting you, implied white listener, from dangerous Black people, and you need the gains unions need. Union interests are public interests,’” says Bekemeyer.

While the jobs are very different in obvious ways, the rhetoric parallels arguments that teachers unions under leaders like Al Shanker were making to the public around the same time: that the demands teachers were making would help students and parents too, and thus teachers deserve the public’s solidarity.

“The stakes are very different because the jobs are very different, but it’s useful to see the police union movement as one of the most successful examples of social movement unionism,” Bekemeyer notes.

Police unions and white ethnic conservatism

Police unionism is just a very different kind of social movement unionism than that involved in, say, collaborations between civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin and union leaders like United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther during the postwar years.

Bekemeyer notes that police officers, especially in the Northeast, tended disproportionately in the 1950s through 1970s to be working-class “white ethnic” conservatives: mostly Irish, but occasionally Italian or Polish, too. “It’s a broader white ethnic politics that uses the language of tradition, neighborhood integrity, hard work, etc., to defend segregated institutions that they benefit from, from schools to certain union jobs in the trade to religious institutions,” Bekemeyer says.

This pattern comes through across the country, but Bekemeyer’s case study of Philadelphia is instructive, largely because one specific politician there embodied this identity better than any other American official of the time: Frank Rizzo, who served as Philadelphia police commissioner from 1968 to 1971 and mayor from 1972 to 1980.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Rizzo was about as blatant a racist as led a major American city in the modern era. During his 1978 reelection bid, he urged supporters to “Vote White”; he fervently fought efforts to desegregate Philadelphia schools and build public housing in white neighborhoods. In a deposition, he stated he “considered public housing to be the same as Black housing in that most tenants of public housing are Black. Mayor Rizzo therefore felt that there should not be any public housing placed in White neighborhoods because people in White neighborhoods did not want Black people moving in with them.”

This extended to Rizzo’s governance of the police. He once famously declared that his treatment of protesters would “make Attila the Hun look like a fa**ot.” As commissioner, he ordered a raid on Black Panther headquarters in which suspects were publicly stripped in front of photographers, and at least once ordered police to beat stationary protesters with nightsticks.

On this, police unions were mostly a strong ally, echoing the role they would play in many cities as representatives of white ethnic conservative interests in ensuing decades. Alphonso Deal, a Black police officer in Philadelphia who began a separate union for Black officers who faced discrimination from leaders like Rizzo, once tried to run for the presidency of the Fraternal Order of Police local in the hope of breaking the police out of this mold, but Bekemeyer describes this attempt as “quixotic.” FOP was more interested in resisting affirmative action measures that it viewed as allowing officers who hadn’t “earned their place” to get in ahead of the white ethnics the union represented.

The Philadelphia case is especially vivid, but you see examples of this kind of behavior from police unions around the country from the 1960s to the present.

In one particularly glaring case, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (since renamed the Police Benevolent Association for gender equality reasons) rioted around City Hall against David Dinkins, New York City’s first and to date only Black mayor, to protest Dinkins’s plan to create a civilian review board to oversee the police. Ten thousand protesters, mostly off-duty cops, appeared, and more than 4,000 broke through police barricades, surrounded City Hall, and took over Brooklyn Bridge. Protesters hurled the n-word and other racial slurs at Black people nearby, including city councilor Una Clarke.

One hears similar rhetoric, albeit with the sharp edges sanded down a bit, out of police unions today. Their rhetoric remains rooted in the notion that police are the one barrier between civilization and chaos. “The scenes we witnessed earlier this month — burning police vehicles, looted storefronts and violent clashes between protesters and police officers — will remain etched in New Yorkers’ collective memory. They are symbols of a breakdown in our social contract that none of us want to see repeated,” Pat Lynch of New York City’s Police Benevolent Association declared in a statement on June 17.

Where police unions fit into use of force problems

It is perhaps not surprising, given both police unions’ historic conservatism and their charge of defending members against unjust or arbitrary discipline, that defending and preventing discipline against police who kill or wound unarmed civilians, particularly Black civilians, has become a major preoccupation of police unions since the Black Lives Matter movement’s emergence.

Tellingly, when the International Union of Police Associations endorsed Trump for president in late 2015, they specifically cited as a root cause what they viewed as the Democratic presidential candidate’s slander of Darren Wilson, the white officer who in 2014 shot 18-year-old Black teenager Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Missouri.

“Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims,” union president Sam Cabral wrote. “Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary.” (A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder, and the US Department of Justice declined to prosecute him for civil rights violations. However, the DOJ also found a pattern of racial bias and brutality in the Ferguson police department.)

In local cases, this attitude has translated to a defense of officers who kill or wound innocent civilians. The Louisville Metro Police Department has been limited to just announcing its “intention” to fire Brett Hankison, a detective who shot his gun 10 times during the raid that killed Breonna Taylor, rather than actually firing him outright. This limitation is largely because of the city’s contract with the police union, which gives Hankison multiple opportunities to appeal. He is first allowed a “pretermination hearing” with counsel, and then, once terminated, an appeal to the police merit board, of which Hankison himself is a member.

In extreme cases, this resistance to discipline has translated into “depolicing,” in which police forces cease making arrests as a protest against civilian leaders and activists whom they perceive as demonizing police.

The NYPD conducted a work slowdown in late 2014 and early 2015 over perceived disrespect from Mayor Bill de Blasio — though crime actually fell during the slowdown according to a subsequent study analyzing the period (but that might just be because the slowdown was limited to low-level offenses). PBA president Pat Lynch called for another slowdown in 2019 when the police commissioner fired officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death five years earlier.

In Baltimore, a police slowdown known as “the pullback” ensued after the district attorney indicted officers for the death of Freddie Gray in 2015; many analysts, like ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, attribute the 62 percent jump in homicides in 2015 at least in part to police just giving up on their jobs.

There is also some limited evidence that police unions themselves make use of force problems worse.

University of Chicago Law School’s Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard McAdams, and John Rappaport looked at a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision that gave collective bargaining rights to sheriffs’ deputies. They use police departments, which were unaffected, as a control group, and find that in the wake of the decision, misconduct violations rose in sheriff’s offices but not in police departments. That suggests that collective bargaining itself caused a rise in misconduct, perhaps by making sheriff’s deputies feel like they could get away with it.

Another study by economists Rob Gillezeau, Jamein Cunningham, and Donna Feir, which has yet to be published but was discussed by one of its authors on NPR’s Planet Money podcast, used the varying times at which different states rolled out collective bargaining rights to police unions starting in the late 1950s to see if introducing police unions made a difference in police killings.

They found it did, Gillezeau told NPR:

We found that after officers gained access to collective bargaining rights that there was a substantial increase in killings of civilians — 0.026 to 0.029 additional civilians are killed in each county in each year, of whom the overwhelming majority are nonwhite. That’s about 60 to 70 per year civilians killed by the police in an era historically where there were a lot fewer police shootings. So that’s a humongous increase.

Another study by Oxford’s Abdul Rad found that police union contract provisions protecting police are correlated with greater police abuse, though the study warns that it’s hard to prove the relationship is causal.

Another way to look at this question is to examine the text of police union contracts. In 2018, Stephen Rushin, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, examined 656 police union contracts and found that “the vast majority of these departments give police officers the ability to appeal disciplinary sanctions through multiple levels of appellate review. At the end of this process, the majority of departments allow officers to appeal disciplinary sanctions to an arbitrator selected, in part, by the local police union or the aggrieved officer.”

Rushin notes, “While each of these appellate procedures may be individually defensible, they combine in many police departments to create a formidable barrier to officer accountability.”

Rushin has found similar problems examining provisions of police contracts not related to the appeals process, including, for instance, rules giving officers a heads-up that they will be interviewed by internal affairs detectives or other investigators in a few days about a case of potential wrongdoing. “Most people, including myself, would say if you provide officers with delays telling them we’ll interview you in two days, that probably is a barrier to accountability,” Rushin told me.

“Notifying that you’re about to talk gives them time to compare stories” and potentially come up with fake alibis or other lies. It’s a subtle matter, however: Notification that enables an officer to obtain legal representation seems like an essential due process provision, but notification long enough to enable cover stories goes too far.

Much of the difficulty in studying police unions is in how to think about these kinds of provisions, Rushin told me. “One thing I’ve learned going through this process is what one person calls due process, another person calls a problematic provision,” he says. “A lot is in the eye of who’s doing the coding.”

Police unions pose unique challenges for the labor left

Beyond the difficulty police unions present as a state and local policy matter, they pose a particularly grave challenge to the labor movement at large.

The American left and labor have been close allies for more than a century, and often the struggle for racial equality and labor rights went hand in hand (see, for instance, A. Philip Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized Black passenger train stewards to fight for both Black equality and economic gains).

Some on the left want to abolish both police and the unions who organize them. Kim Kelly, a labor journalist and vocal activist within Writers Guild of America, East (of which I am also a member), led the charge to push police unions out of the labor movement in a New Republic article. Activism from her and others led WGA-E to call on its parent federation, the AFL-CIO, to disaffiliate from the International Union of Police Associations.

Some veteran labor lawyers and academic labor activists are also opening up to the idea of sharply limiting police union power, recognizing this as an unusual case.

A group of faculty at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations school — Ifeoma Ajunwa, Virginia Doellgast, Shannon Gleeson, Kate Griffith, and Verónica Martínez-Matsuda — argued in a public statement that the labor movement “must also acknowledge that contemporary police unions have contributed to racism.” Benjamin Sachs, the Kestenbaum professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School and a leading voice in labor law debates, published a blog post suggesting openness to limiting what issues police unions can legally bargain over, perhaps excluding from bargaining matters like discipline for police who beat or kill civilians.

“The consequence of police abusing [collective bargaining] power is that people end up dead,” Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law and a member of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, told me. “That is happening at a significant rate and that’s just a completely different context from the rest of the public sector” or unionism generally.

So far, these efforts have come to little. The AFL-CIO itself has firmly resisted calls to disaffiliate, and no limitations on police unions were included in House Democrats’ call to reform policing.

Moreover, there are many in the labor movement who think calls for purging or outlawing police unions go much too far and risks endangering other public sector workers, like teachers, whose collective bargaining rights have been threatened in recent decades.

“If you look back at prior incidents in American labor history where labor groups kicked out other labor groups over fundamental disagreements about strategy, about priorities, it generally didn’t turn out well for the cause of labor,” Catherine Fisk, a law professor at UC Berkeley and a prominent voice on labor law, told me.

Ideas for fixing the police union problem

There are two extremes on the police union debate. On one end of the spectrum, there’s the attitude of local police union leaders like Pat Lynch and Bob Kroll, who state they are open to reform while in practice they fight almost every measure, even mild ones, meant to rein in police misconduct.

On the other is abolishing police and police unions, as advocated from the left by labor radicals like Kelly, or simply abolishing the unions, as advocated by many right-wing opponents of public sector unions generally. If police still existed in this world, they would of course be allowed to form organizations that advocated for their interests. But police departments would not be obliged to negotiate with those organizations on pay and discipline, as they are in most unionized jurisdictions today.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Most police union experts I spoke with, though, fell in the middle: They believe that police unions can be usefully reformed without being abolished.

There are a number of possible models for this kind of reform. The organization Campaign Zero, co-founded by activists DeRay Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe, has been a leader in pushing for police union contract transparency; much of the research above relies on contracts they’ve surfaced publicly.

They recommend a bevy of contract changes, most of which involve removing provisions included in many union contracts or state laws known as Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights (LEOBRs), which provide similar protections to police officers as contracts do but are implemented as state legislation instead. Problematic provisions in contracts and LEOBRs include mandates that delay interrogations of officers (as Rushin highlighted), the ability to appeal to an arbitrator partially chosen by the police union, and bans on investigating misconduct that happened more than 100 days in the past.

Rushin has proposed allowing the public to observe collective bargaining between the police and state governments. That way, the public can exert pressure on city leaders not to yield to police union demands about discipline. A 2017 Reuters investigation found that in a number of cities, such as San Antonio, city leaders have given police unions concessions as an explicit trade-off for not offering high pay or limiting pay cuts. “If that trade-off is publicly visible, that our failure to compensate is causing cities to give significant concessions on discipline,” Rushin notes, then public pressure might force the city to increase police salaries rather than reducing accountability.

L. Song Richardson, the dean of UC Irvine School of Law and an eminent criminal law expert, and Berkeley’s Catherine Fisk have proposed a system of “minority unionism” for police departments. The idea is to use the increasing racial diversity of many police departments to push for useful reforms by enabling the creation of groups like, say, a Black Lives Matter organization within a police department that also has the right to bargain around disciplinary issues with the department.

Multiracial coalitions opposed to the current police union leadership could also form and gain power; Richardson and Fisk note that PBA president Pat Lynch faced energetic reelection challenges in the wake of his inflammatory statements about Eric Garner’s killing, suggesting a real minority within the NYPD was dissatisfied with his leadership. Black police officers, in polling data, seem to have vastly different political beliefs and are much more sympathetic to claims of racial discrimination than white officers. Pew Research Center found that while 92 percent of white officers say the US has “made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites”; only 29 percent of Black officers agree.

Beyond minority unionism, Fisk has another idea to better align cities’ incentives in bargaining: using Congress to partially overrule Monell v. Department of Social Services, a relatively obscure 1978 Supreme Court decision that among other holdings found that local governments cannot be forced to pay up in civil suits due to the actions of their employees.

Suppose that a FedEx deliveryperson pushed you onto the sidewalk, causing a head injury when you fell. The deliveryperson would be liable in a civil suit, and so would FedEx. But it’s different with government. Qualified immunity generally protects police officers and other public employees from lawsuits; meanwhile, a principle called “vicarious liability” protects police departments and city governments from such lawsuits. Fisk argues that Congress should reverse Monell and allow governments to be held liable for police officers’ misconduct.

The most dramatic reform, short of outright abolishing collective bargaining rights for police unions, is one that Harvard’s Sachs suggested sympathy toward and the Boston Globe has editorialized in favor of: limiting police unions to simply bargaining on wages and hours, not on discipline. This change is already the law in Massachusetts. (Fisk argues this would go too far. “There’s two sides to the contract; why are we focused only on what unions are asking for rather than focusing on what cities are asking for?” she says.)

Reforming police unions is hardly the only important task in efforts to reform the police generally. But there is an emerging consensus that something significant has to change in these organizations. If not, they will remain unaccountable lobbies that frustrate even mild efforts to reform police departments and save the lives of unarmed civilians.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

A new poll is giving Donald Trump more material for a Twitter tantrum (watch for it!), showing former Vice President Joe Biden with a huge national lead. Biden takes 50% to Trump’s 36% in the new New York Times/Siena College poll. White voters gave Trump the presidency: In 2016, exit polls showed white voters going for Trump by a 21-point margin. Now, even among white voters, Trump leads by just one point, 44% to 43%. Despite Biden’s well-publicized struggle for enthusiasm among young voters, he leads among white voters under 45. Black and Hispanic voters give Biden leads of 74 points and 39 points, respectively .

The bad news for Trump, which is to say the good news, doesn’t stop there. The only age group giving Trump a lead in the new poll is people 50 to 64 years old—which means even people 65 and older are going for Biden, albeit narrowly. It’s not even July and there’s a long time to keep pushing and fighting and organizing until November, but it sure is better to be Team Biden right now.

Majorities of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including majorities of white voters, of men, and of self-described moderates. Most said that fighting the spread of the virus was more important than restarting the economy.

Trump’s handling of race drew 61% disapproval, and his response to protests against the police killing of George Floyd drew a similar level of disapproval.

But Trump led Biden on the economy, 50% to 45%. This is absolutely ridiculous, since all Trump did was preside over the economy former President Barack Obama handed off to him right up until it collapsed, while Biden participated in the Obama administration’s rebuilding of the economy after the Great Recession. But it is what it is, and if the election shifts toward economic concerns, it will be a point of strength for Trump.

On Thursday the Times will release six battleground state polls: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. Here’s hoping they’re more big tantrum fodder for Trump.

MIAMI — Jacksonville voters don’t want the Republican National Committee’s convention to come to town, with most expressing concern that the event could spread the coronavirus.

A poll by the University of North Florida found that 58 percent of Jacksonville voters surveyed oppose the RNC convention, and 42 percent support it. Seventy-one percent said they were concerned the coronavirus would spread due to the convention, and 65 percent said they worried about “social unrest,” the poll showed.

When broken down by party, the survey showed 81 percent of Republicans in favor of hosting the party’s keynote convention events in Jacksonville. About nine in 10 Democrats were opposed, as were 62 percent of independents.

“National nominating conventions are polarizing events, and unsurprisingly the levels of support for Jacksonville hosting the RNC varies dramatically by partisanship,” Michael Binder, director of the Jacksonville-based university’s Public Opinion Research Lab, said in a written statement. “Under the backdrop of a global pandemic that appears to have come more fervently to Florida, the opposition to this event being hosted locally seems much more concerning.”

The RNC this month said it would move its convention keynote events, including President Donald Trump’s acceptance speech, to Jacksonville after the party came to loggerheads with officials in North Carolina, where the event was set to be held in August.

Jacksonville, a Republican-leaning city that essentially encompasses all of Duval County, offered to host the event.

That decision has dented the favorability of Mayor Lenny Curry, a Republican who has earned high marks for leading the Northeast Florida city in a bipartisan way as its coronavirus caseload remained relatively low compared to South Florida.

The UNF poll showed 45 percent of voters approve of Curry’s job performance and 49 percent disapprove, giving him a net negative approval rating. Curry had a net positive job-approval rating of 9 points in a UNF poll in June.

Jacksonville voters surveyed gave Gov. Ron DeSantis, President Donald Trump’s top ally in the state, a job approval rating of 48 percent and a disapproval rating of 50 percent.

Trump fared the worst among those surveyed, with a 61 percent disapproval rating.

Trump, who carried Duval County by 1.4 percentage points in 2018, trailed his Democratic opponent Joe Biden by 7 points in the UNF poll.

Duval County has been trending blue, like many urban areas in the U.S. and DeSantis lost it by 4.3 percentage points in 2018.

UNF surveyed 2,524 registered Duval County voters by email between June 17-22. The survey has a margin of error margin of plus or minus 1.95 percent.

Exciting things are happening in the New York primary. Although final results won’t be in for another week because most New Yorkers opted for absentee ballots, early results suggest New York City councilman Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones will win their primaries and ultimately become the first openly gay, black members of Congress.

Torres looks set to defeat a crowded field that includes uber-homophobe Ruben Diaz, Sr., the New York Post reports: “Councilman Ritchie Torres broke out to an early lead Tuesday night in the hotly contested battle for an open Bronx congressional seat, as the openly gay city lawmaker appeared to turn away a challenge from one of New York’s most high-profile conservative politicians. Torres led the crowded field to replace retiring Rep. Jose Serrano (D-Bronx) with 30 percent of the votes cast during early voting and Primary Day, according to returns from 61 percent of precincts.

LoHud reports on the race for retiring Rep. Nita Lowey’s seat, which Jones looks likely to take: “Lowey, the first woman to chair the House Appropriations Committee, has been in office for more than three decades and has been an ally of Hillary and Bill Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. … Jones, 33, a former Westchester County law department employee, would be the first openly gay Black member of Congress if he ends up winning election. He had jumped in the race a year ago, ready to primary Lowey from the left before she announced her retirement…. The district is reliably blue and stretches from Rockland County into Westchester County. Active registered Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2-to-1 in the district.”

The post NY: Ritchie Torres Poised to Squash Homophobe Ruben Diaz; Mondaire Jones Likely to Take Nita Lowey Seat; Would Be First Openly Gay, Black Members of Congress appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Jamaal Bowman, a black middle school principal from the Bronx, appears poised to unseat veteran Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel in the most closely-watched New York primary.

Reuters reports: “Bowman, 44, was leading Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, by 59.48% to 35.31%, the New York state elections board said, with 627 of 732 election precincts reporting. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination is likely to win the seat in November. … Progressive Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as well as Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Bowman, while Democratic Party stalwarts, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, rallied around Engel.”

The NYT reported: “Mr. Engel has widespread support from senior House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi; James E. Clyburn, the House majority whip; and Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic Caucus chairman. On Wednesday, he was endorsed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.But Mr. Engel has not exactly helped his cause. In early June, at a news conference in the Bronx devoted to Black Lives Matter, he was caught on microphone suggesting that he was only there because of his contested race. ‘If I didn’t have a primary,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t care.’ Even party veterans cringed. ‘This is like hanging a sign from your neck saying, ‘I’ve been in office too long,’’ tweeted David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist.”

The post Black Progressive Jamaal Bowman Poised to Oust Veteran Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel in New York Primary appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

One of the Senate’s most outspoken defenders of the filibuster is having second thoughts.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) is one of the Democratic caucus’s most vocal defenders of the filibuster — or, at least, he has been in the past. But in a recent interview, Coons expressed openness to eliminating the filibuster if Republicans push too hard to sabotage a potential Biden administration.

As pressure has grown for Democrats to support rules changes that would allow legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority vote, rather than require 60 votes to break a filibuster, Coons warned his fellow Democrats to tread cautiously.

In an interview broadcast on CNN shortly after the 2016 election, Coons said that he regretted voting to allow most presidential nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote. Then, in April 2017, Coons and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) organized a letter signed by 61 senators, which called on Senate leadership to “preserve existing rules, practices, and traditions” that allow senators to filibuster legislation.

But a Politico profile of Coons published Tuesday indicates that his views on the filibuster are evolving. Though Coons does not outright reverse his previous opposition to abolishing the filibuster, he now accepts that filibuster reform might be necessary to prevent Senate Republicans from undermining a potential Biden administration.

“I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,” Coons told Politico. “I am gonna try really hard to find a path forward that doesn’t require removing what’s left of the structural guardrails, but if there’s a Biden administration, it will be inheriting a mess, at home and abroad. It requires urgent and effective action.”

Sean Coit, a spokesperson for Coons, confirmed to me that the senator’s statement to Politico reflects his evolution on filibuster reform. The Politico statement “reflects [Coons’] perspective, which is that there is real urgency to pass legislation on several different fronts,” Coit told me. “And by the time a Biden administration would begin, the urgency would be even more intense. As he said, he’s going to try and find a bipartisan way forward, but some of these issues can’t wait.”

Coons’s openness to additional filibuster reform appears to be a recent development: When I spoke to Coons while reporting in late February, he emphasized his fear that tearing down more of the Senate’s longstanding norms could have painful long-term consequences.

Eliminating the filibuster, Coons warned me then, is the “one last step” that Trump keeps pushing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to make a reality. And “as soon as the legislative filibuster is gone, and one party controls both houses, it gives them unprecedented power to move legislation.”

Coons has often operated from a place of procedural conservatism. If Democrats fight the GOP’s pattern of tearing down longstanding norms governing the legislative process by also going after those norms, Coons told me in February, they might not like the long-term results. “You know what happens when you fight fire with fire?” he asked rhetorically. “You burn the house down.”

But now, even he appears to believe that the twin crises of a pandemic and a severe economic downturn require a Congress that can act. And if Republicans block that action, Coons says he “will not stand idly by” and allow such obstruction to happen.

Many Democrats reluctantly decided to support filibuster reform in 2013 due to obstructionism by the GOP

A common metric used to measure how often the minority party uses the filibuster to frustrate the majority is the number of “cloture” motions filed by the majority. Cloture is the process used to break a filibuster in the Senate.

That number more than doubled, from 68 cloture motions in the 109th Congress (2005-’06), to 139 in the 110th Congress (2007-’08), the first Congress where McConnell served as Senate Republican leader. It rose to 252 cloture motions in the 113th Congress (2013-’14), when Democrats decided to change the Senate’s rules to permit non-Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.

The idea of the so-called “nuclear option,” a process that allows the Senate to change its rules with a simple majority vote, has been around since at least 2005 — when Republicans threatened to deploy the nuclear option to end Democratic filibusters of some of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. But Democrats largely used the filibuster to pressure Bush to replace nominees they viewed as particularly extreme with more moderate candidates for the bench.

In 2013, by contrast, Republicans used the filibuster to effectively block anyone that President Obama nominated to fill certain seats — including three seats on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Frustrated by this tactic, many Democrats who had previously defended the filibuster, including Democrats who opposed the nuclear option in 2005, changed their mind and agreed to alter the Senate’s rules to allow Obama’s nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.

“I am very open to changing the rules for nominees,” then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told HuffPost just days before Democrats voted to invoke the nuclear option. “I was not before, because I felt we could work with [Republicans]. But it’s gotten to an extreme situation where really qualified people can’t get an up-or-down vote.”

There are two lessons to be gained from this history. One is that, now that a precedent has been established allowing the Senate to change its rules with a simple majority vote, the filibuster exists only because a majority of the Senate wants it to exist. If 51 senators agree to eliminate the filibuster in its entirety, nothing can stop them.

The second lesson is that frustration matters. Senators who previously staked out strong positions against filibuster reform may change their minds if the minority party pushes too hard to obstruct the majority’s agenda.

At the very least, Coons appears to be warning Republicans that his patience with such obstructionism has limits.

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

A world with far less policing is possible. Here’s what experts think that world could look like.

On the night of Friday, June 12, a police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, outside an Atlanta Wendy’s drive-through. Atlanta police officers were called to the scene after receiving a complaint that Brooks was sleeping in his vehicle, which was blocking the drive-through and forcing other cars to drive around it.

Video evidence shows the interaction starts out calm. Brooks repeatedly asks to leave his car parked and walk to his sister’s home, which he says is nearby. But the officer insists he take a field sobriety test, revealing that Brooks had a blood alcohol level slightly above the legal limit. The officer attempts to handcuff Brooks, Brooks resists, and a physical struggle ensues. Brooks grabs the officer’s taser, begins running away, and turns to fire it. Seconds later he is lying on the ground motionless with three bullets inside him.

This was not the first time a Black man was killed in a police interaction that began with falling asleep in a parked car. It wasn’t even the first time in recent weeks. At 5:30 am on Memorial Day — the same day of George Floyd’s killing — Dion Johnson was sleeping in his car on the side of a north Phoenix highway when he was approached by an Arizona state trooper who planned to arrest Johnson for “suspicion of driving impaired.” According to the officer’s account, Johnson resisted arrest and reached for the officer’s gun. The officer shot and killed Johnson in self-defense.

Dustin Chambers/Getty Images

Both cases raise the same basic question: Why were weapons-carrying agents of the state the chosen response to men sleeping in their cars? The same can be asked of a dispute over a (possibly) counterfeit $20 bill. A mistaken drug bust. A traffic citation. A man selling untaxed cigarettes. None of these infractions began with violence; yet, each of them ended in a Black man or woman killed at the hands of armed police. And stories abound of white, Native American, Latino, and Asian American civilians being killed by police in similar situations.

This dynamic reflects the structure of policing in the US. Here, the same officers that write accident reports and respond to noise complaints also have the capacity to shoot and kill. That means a single police officer has a monopoly over the entire force continuum, from casually talking to aggressively handcuffing to shooting and killing. A situation can escalate from calm conversation to the use of deadly force in a matter of seconds, entirely at their discretion. If whoever had responded to the call not been carrying tasers and firearms, Brooks would be alive today.

Many European countries view the use of lethal force as a narrow specialization and structure their police forces accordingly. “If this happened in the UK, the first person to approach Brooks would have been a community support officer,” says Colin Rogers, a former UK police inspector turned criminologist at the University of South Wales. “They certainly wouldn’t have been armed.” And even if that interaction went poorly, the officer’s backup would have been an officer armed with only a baton and handcuffs, not a gun.

In 2015, a Guardian investigation found that British police shot dead fewer people (55) in 24 years in England and Wales than American police killed in the first 24 days of 2015 in the US. That disparity can only be explained in part by differences in armed encounters: American police still shot and killed 161 unarmed people in 2015 alone. That’s partly because of uniquely high levels of gun ownership in America, which leaves police officers in a constant state of hypervigilance.

It’s also because in the UK, the state officials who hold a vast majority of public safety responsibilities — from patrolling the streets to responding to nonviolent crimes — do not carry firearms. Only about 10 percent of British police carry guns, and they mostly operate on teams of highly trained specialists whose full-time responsibility is to answer calls of the highest possible threat level, like an active shooter or terrorist attack.

What if we decided to do the same? What if we decided to make traditional policing — defined by the capacity to deploy deadly force — a narrow specialization, as many calling to defund the police advocate? What would that world look like? What would police no longer do and who would take their place?

“It is easy for me to imagine a world in which Rayshard Brooks gets driven home that night instead of shot to death,” says Georgetown Law professor Christy E. Lopez. “The question I have is whether we have the will and commitment to create a public safety system that makes that world a reality.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen sociologists, criminologists, policing experts, nonprofit leaders, and legal scholars to better understand the range of alternatives that exist to our current one-size-fits-all model of police response — and how we could design those alternatives to meet unique challenges like the overwhelming presence of firearms, intertwined histories of racism and policing, and relatively high rates of violent crime in the US. Here are four ideas they offered.

1) Create specialized traffic patrol officers

The vast majority of police-civilian interactions happen on the road. According to a 2015 Department of Justice report, of the 50 million Americans who came into contact with the police that year, 25 million were pulled over in a car they were driving or were a passenger in (Black Americans were the most likely to be pulled over). Another 8 million were involved in a car accident. And many of the 9 million who called the police to report non-crimes were reporting traffic accidents.

There is no justifiable reason why armed police officers should be in charge of road safety. Police officers are not hired for a particular talent in highway navigation, accident report taking, or citation writing. And deploying armed officers to perform such routine tasks introduces the risk of unnecessary lethal force into many millions of encounters every year. The police killing of Philando Castile in 2016 was one instance (there are plenty of others) of a routine traffic stop going horribly wrong — and it simply wouldn’t have happened if the officer hadn’t been carrying a gun. Sandra Bland’s arrest and subsequent suicide following a failure to signal a lane change was another.

Pat Sullivan/AP

It isn’t difficult to imagine handing over most traffic patrol duties to specialized employees — we already do the same for plenty of other public safety roles, like restaurant and food inspection. Highways England in the UK employs unarmed traffic officers who drive around in distinct vehicles, and many other of the country’s traffic duties are left up to “community support officers” who can give out citations but are both unarmed and lack arrest power.

Some US cities are even beginning to take steps in this direction, largely because armed police officers are a uniquely expensive way to handle traffic patrol. In 2017, the city of New Orleans endorsed NOPD hiring third-party report-takers for accidents in which there is no injury and no concern about a driver under the influence.

2) Deploy community mediators to handle minor disputes

A huge number of calls to the police involve relatively minor interpersonal disputes: disputes over noise levels, trespassing, misbehaving pets, or rowdiness; disputes between spouses, family members, roommates, or neighbors.

Without a mediator present, it is possible that what starts out as a minor dispute can escalate to violence. But there is no particular reason the job of mediation has to be assigned to armed police officers; if anything, traditional police tend to unnecessarily escalate these situations, resulting in arrests or worse.

That’s why a number of countries such as the UK, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and South Africa have created a distinct class of what can be broadly called “community safety professionals.” They are unarmed, lack most formal policing powers, and perform responsibilities like youth outreach, conflict mediation, community patrol, and addressing low-level crime and disorder. Preliminary results of their impact on crime and community well-being have been promising.

“The idea was for community support officers [the UK’s version of this role] to act as a bridge between communities and police officers,” says Rogers. “Because we are unarmed, we police with and through communities, not at them.”

A similar approach has been pioneered by many “street outreach” programs in the US like Cure Violence and Advance Peace, which employ “violence interrupters” and “peacemakers” from within local communities to mediate conflicts before they escalate to the level of violence. Scholarly evaluations of these efforts have shown that non-police mediation can be quite successful when executed properly.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

“If someone is upset or thinking about shooting, the violence interrupters are almost always able to cool that person down and stop them from acting,” says Cure Violence founder Gary Slutkin. “The goal is to contain things before they get to the police. If nothing has happened yet, it’s none of the police’s business.”

I asked A.T. Mitchell, a former “violence interrupter” who now runs Cure Violence’s ManUp! program in New York, what he thought of the dispute between George Floyd and the store clerk who claimed he was using a counterfeit $20 bill.

“What that situation needed was someone to resolve a conflict,” he told me. “Did [Floyd] owe an apology? Did he even know what was happening? We don’t know. But I’ll tell you something: If we got that call, we would’ve been able to step in between, and that brother would still be here today.”

One could imagine cities hiring cadres of “community mediators” as employees of the local public health department who are trained in conflict resolution, applied psychology, and relationship management. Like their European counterparts, these mediators would be completely unarmed, lack formal policing powers, and wear uniforms distinct from traditional officers. They could spend their quiet hours building relationships with local community members and maintaining a presence in schools, neighborhoods, and highly trafficked public spaces.

Cities could even develop a special 2-11 or 3-11 number for concerned neighbors, spouses, or citizens to call when they are witnessing heated exchanges, and could redirect relevant 9-11 calls to the community mediation unit. If any of these exchanges begin to escalate toward violence, the community mediators could have special silent alert systems (similar to the ones senior citizens use for medical assistance) to call in armed police for backup.

“Imagine a world where first responders are really good at getting situations calmed down so that people can go on with their lives and nobody ends up being arrested — or worse,” says Barry Friedman, the director of the Policing Project at New York University. “In that world, we don’t need nearly as many police walking around with guns.”

3) Create a mobile crisis response unit

Oftentimes, a police officer’s role bleeds over from mediation into something that resembles social work, usually involving populations like those who are homeless, intoxicated, substance abusers, or suffering from mental illness.

The results can be disastrous. About half of prison inmates were diagnosed with a mental illness. Around a quarter of fatal encounters with law enforcement involve someone with a mental health condition (and those numbers are possibly severe undercounts). A massively disproportionate number of police calls and arrests in cities across the country involve homeless populations. In Portland, Oregon, the city’s homeless population made up 52 percent of the city’s arrests in 2017 even though they comprise less than 3 percent of Portland’s population.

“You wouldn’t try to build a house with just a jackhammer,” says Zachary Norris, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and author of We Keep Us Safe. “But that’s what we’re doing when we task police officers with dealing with public health issues like substance abuse, homelessness, and mental illness.”

One of the most promising alternatives to a police-centric model of social work is a program called Cahoots, a collaboration between local police and a community service called the White Bird Clinic that operates in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon. In these cities, police officers aren’t dispatched to handle every single 9-11 call. Instead, about 20 percent of calls — often those involving the homeless, addicted, intoxicated, or mentally ill — are routed to a separate team of specialists extensively trained in mental health counseling, social work, and crisis de-escalation.

Cahoots responders don’t brandish weapons of any kind. They dress in black sweatshirts, listen to their police radios via earbuds, and purposefully speak in calm tones with inviting body language. Their role is closer to that of an EMT for social issues than a traditional police officer: They assess the situation, assist the individual as best they can, and then direct that individual to a higher level of care or service if needed. If the situation escalates, they can also call police in for backup, but that’s rare. In 2019, Cahoots received around 24,000 calls and had to call in police backup less than 1 percent of the time.

“In 30 years, we’ve never had a serious injury or a death that our team was responsible for,” Ebony Morgan, a Cahoots crisis worker, told NPR. “I think that’s important.”

To top it off, Cahoots saves the Eugene and Springfield police departments around $15 million a year, according to clinic coordinator Ben Brubaker, by taking care of incidents that would otherwise have to be handled by law enforcement or emergency rooms, both of which are far more costly solutions.

The Cahoots model can easily be scaled to other locations. And lawmakers in cities across the country, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Minneapolis, are considering doing just that.

Cities could also think about building on and improving that model. The existing program’s biggest limit is the fact that its jurisdiction is only in decidedly “non-criminal” calls. That means ordinary police officers may very well be sent to deal with situations that Cahoots crisis workers are far better trained to handle.

There are two possible remedies here. One is the decriminalization of issues like addiction and homelessness. “Right now, police response to homelessness is driven by city laws criminalizing it,” says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. “Typically, calls about homeless people are about issues like sleeping or begging that should not be addressed by law enforcement.” Changing laws that criminalize such behavior can broaden the range of activities that a mobile crisis response unit like Cahoots is able to address.

Another idea is to deploy hybrid response units consisting of both police officers and mobile crisis responders to situations that would normally fall outside of the Cahoots purview. For instance, police might be called to the scene to break up a violent fight. But it is easy to imagine a Cahoots team entering the situation first and attempting to defuse it while police officers wait around the block, out of sight, to be called in only if deemed necessary.

“I’m really excited about imagining an entirely different model of first responders,” says Friedman. “What that means is training people in a very different way, dispatching them in a different way, and giving them a different reward system than we’ve given cops.”

4) Experiment with community self-policing

Those first three ideas involve solutions that local government officials could incorporate fairly easily into their existing policing models. But what if we changed the model completely? What if instead of policing at communities we gave them the resources to police themselves?

A little over 20 years ago, the Australian government did just that.

The history of the indigenous community in Australia is thick with repression, brutality, and violence at the hands of the state. Descriptions of indigenous-police relationships read as though they could be pulled straight from the contemporary African American experience in the United States (not to mention the US native communities). As Harry Blagg, a law professor at Charles Darwin University in Australia, writes:

Historically, policing was an instrument for controlling, limiting, denying or supervising Indigenous egress into the white domain. According to criminologists, this has left a legacy of over-policing of Indigenous people in the public realm – where they may constitute a threat to public order – and under-policing (underservicing might be a better term) of Indigenous people within their own communities.

This began to change in the 1990s when a government commission found that indigenous peoples were highly overrepresented in prisons and jails as a result of systemic bias. The authors concluded that the only way to end this injustice was to entirely reimagine the way Australians interact with the criminal justice system.

One recommendation they made was for the government to fund local forms of community self-policing, like the Julalikari Night Patrol in northern Australia. The idea behind the night patrols was simple: to enhance public safety by establishing a buffer between Aboriginal people and police forces. This is how Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey described his visit to the Nyoongar patrol in Perth, Australia, in his 2018 book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence:

I joined a team led by Annie and Rachel, two extraordinary women who were remarkable to watch in action. I looked on as they tried to calm a shirtless man who was drunk and belligerent in front of a crowded bar. I saw them talk to a man who looked unwell, lying on a bench in the middle of a city plaza, and stay with him as the emergency medical technician asked him questions and eventually took him to get treatment. …

The challenges that emerge over the course of a shift change on a nightly basis, but the overarching goal of the patrol teams is to maintain a presence in the public spaces where young people hang out, to search for Aboriginal people who look as if they could use some help, and to give anyone who is causing trouble the chance to cool off or to go home before the police get involved. At times the patrol team’s intervention comes with a stern warning, but usually it comes with a warm smile.

When reading that description, it’s hard not to think about how differently things would have gone for Rayshard Brooks or Dion Johnson if members of this local night patrol had been on duty. Maybe they drive Brooks to his sister’s house to spend the night. Maybe they take Johnson to a local shelter to sober up with a warm breakfast. The police are never called.

Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Today, hundreds of these night patrols have been established in Indigenous communities across Australia, many of them government-funded. The patrols lack formal policing powers, but their legitimacy comes from the fact that they are established by community councils, endorsed by elders, utilize local knowledge, and work within the boundaries of Indigenous law and culture.

By many indicators, the patrols have been extremely successful. “Relationships between night patrols and police [are] generally excellent these days,” Blagg says. “The police can’t manage without them.” Police don’t have a full-time presence in most communities with night patrols. They will step in to calm things down or make an arrest, but typically only when contacted by the local patrol. One study found that patrols in three areas were able to reduce arrests by around 30 percent.

“That was one of the most inspiring nights of my life,” Sharkey told me of his visit to the Nyoongar patrol. “It gave me a vision of what public safety can look like if it is driven by people acting out of genuine concern for their communities.”

A community-based approach to public safety has also been pioneered in some of America’s most violent neighborhoods by many of the “street outreach” programs that I mentioned above, the largest and most rigorously evaluated of which is Cure Violence Global.

Like the Indigenous Australian night patrollers, Cure Violence’s “violence interrupters” are locals with strong community ties, many of whom have done prison time themselves. Their job is to build relationships throughout the community such that they are aware of ongoing disputes, interpersonal tensions, and potential fights before they escalate to the level of either civilian violence or police intervention.

“We have a level of trust with the community that the police will never have,” says Mitchell. “That’s because we only hire those who are indigenous to the neighborhood. Information gets around to us long before it ever gets to the police.”

The role of violence interrupters goes beyond just on-the-spot mediation. They provide mentorship and economic opportunities to individuals who are considered “at risk” of committing violence. In the aftermath of violent shootings, they mobilize the family and friends of victims and respected community leaders to prevent retaliation. And in quiet times, they work to spread social norms of nonviolence.

Cure Violence programs have been implemented in 25 US cities, often in neighborhoods that are experiencing high levels of gun violence. And multiple independent analyses of programs in places like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore have shown that the model has the potential to bring about major reductions in violent crime and gun violence at a fraction of what it would cost police forces.

One option, then, is for local lawmakers to simply scale up the Cure Violence model from one or two neighborhoods to an entire borough or city. Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced he would be investing an extra $10 million to expand the program to the 20 New York City precincts with the most gun violence.

“The time is more than right for a large investment in Cure Violence,” says Caterina Roman, a sociologist at Temple University who has conducted research on the organization’s approach. She points out that while the organization has never been tested at the scale that is now demanded, it is also one of the few models that has been shown to successfully make highly violent communities a lot less violent without using the tools of arrest, force, and incarceration.

Another option is for local lawmakers in the US to experiment with community approaches to policing. Sharkey believes city officials should bring together local civic organizations, community leaders, and residents to form a new community entity tasked with planning a new model for public safety in a predefined number of neighborhoods.

The group would receive funding equivalent to whatever the police department in that jurisdiction would receive. They would be allowed to use the funds however they choose. They would draw up plans for their community’s relationship to the local police department, which will likely serve in some sort of backup capacity in case things escalate. Then, they would be given a minimum of 10 years to run the experiment, with rigorous monitoring and evaluation along the way.

“Communities themselves should be the ones deciding on these issues,” says Tracie L. Keesee, a former police officer and the co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “Who do you think should provide services? Who should be in charge of public safety? These questions should be put to the community.”

These ideas might fail — but the current system is already failing

There’s no guarantee that any of these suggestions will succeed across the board. When it comes to policing alternatives, even the best existing models haven’t been attempted at scale, and there’s no telling how different communities will respond to them. To implement any idea on this list would mean venturing into relatively uncharted territory.

That means there will be failures. Things will go wrong. Systems will break down. Programs will fall apart. Violence may temporarily increase in some places. Occasionally, a violence interrupter or mobile crisis worker will be seriously injured or killed.

But our current system already represents a kind of profound failure. We live in a country that has built the largest system of human incarceration on earth, where agents of the state kill unarmed members of the communities they are supposed to protect and terrorize those who are still alive. Where peaceful protesters are beaten in the streets.

The question, then, isn’t whether we are willing to live with failure; communities across the country already live with failure every single day. That failure, at least in part, stems from the fact that police officers in the United States are tasked with responsibilities — from traffic patrol to mediation to crisis response — that amplify the risk of unnecessary violence.

There are plenty of models out there of how we could transfer these responsibilities to non-police personnel and, in doing so, make the use of lethal force far rarer. The question is: Are we willing to give them a try?

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Michael Gerson/WaPo:

Trump has raised the white flag in the fight against covid-19

In addition to being a poorly attended political flop featuring a defensive, bigoted and barely coherent harangue, President Trump’s recent campaign rally in Tulsa was a presidential declaration of surrender to covid-19.

It is not possible to maintain that the United States is in a public health crisis while inviting thousands of people to yell spittle-flinging approval in an enclosed space. The provision of masks at the event was a transparent pretense. The Trump campaign must have known that the hardest core of Trump supporters would follow the example of their dear leader by going maskless. It has become a defining characteristic of MAGA macho to practice unprotected social intercourse.

This means that Trump was willing to put his audience and their community at risk of infection and death. And for what? To bask in adulation? To restart his faltering campaign? Any excuse is ridiculously reckless. And because of the demography of death from covid-19, Trump was being particularly reckless with the lives of older people.

But not just older people. The younger cohort is currently who is getting ill. And while the death dates are rising slower, they are rising. Remember there is a triple lag for deaths … time from infection to death, subsequent infection of more vulnerable populations, and overwhelming hospitals. We ain’t done yet, even if it thankfully doesn’t reinvent the Northeast experience.

Furthermore, it isn’t just death we have to be concerned about. The coronavirus can cause severe and lingering illness even in younger patients. That’s no joke.

Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:

Prepare for a Biden landslide

The biggest warning sign for Trump’s reelection: He’s starting to see softening support from his base

Indeed, Trump is seeing a little bit of slippage among white evangelical voters, the core constituency that fueled his victory in 2016. His approval rating among that voting bloc is 72 percent, with fewer than half “strongly approving” of his performance in office. The president is only winning 66 percent of the vote against Biden in a head-to-head matchup, with the former vice president tallying 25 percent support with evangelicals.

For context, Trump won the evangelical vote by a 64-point margin against Hillary Clinton, 80 to 16 percent. Winning two-thirds of the vote may sound impressive, but slipping 14 points in four years is a major problem.

Rural voters also comprised another solid bloc of Trump’s support in the 2016 election, handing him 61 percent of the vote. But the Fox poll shows Trump only winning 49 percent of the rural vote this time around, holding a mere 9-point lead over Biden. His 53 percent job approval with these small-town voters is barely above water.

Could happen.

Don't let 2016 prevent you from seeing what's in front of your eyes. Trump is in deep trouble because of what he has done. He can't fix that in 4 months because of who he is.

The existence of the virus crashed the economy, not Trump He made it worse. He made everything worse. That's why slight + economy numbers still leads to a devastating portrait. That's my interp.

And what if the 14% Other split? Or, better yet, break against the incumbent?

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

Trump’s sparse rally crowd enraged him. His advisers just revealed why.

Don’t look now, but President Trump may finally be realizing, with creeping dread, that there may be limits to his magical lying and reality-bending powers. He may be grasping that his capacity to mesmerize his supporters into disbelieving what their own eyes and ears are telling them is not absolute after all.

The iconic image of a modern president realizing he has lost control of events and of his public image is Lyndon Johnson, holed up inside the White House with advisers in March of 1968 as antiwar protesters chanted outside: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Johnson — his presidency consumed by soaring casualties in Vietnam and mounting unrest in U.S. cities — confided to the advisers that his political capital had bled away. Like Trump, Johnson had for a time persuaded himself that media elites, out to get him, were exaggerating his travails and that the people were secretly with him. Soon after, Johnson announced he wouldn’t seek reelection.

The current moment is more 1969 than 1968.

Axios:

Texas governor warns coronavirus is spreading at an "unacceptable rate"

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said at a press conference on Monday that he is concerned the coronavirus is spreading at an "unacceptable rate" following the state's reopening, but that he would only support a second shutdown as a last resort.

Why it matters: Texas is well into its "phase 3" of reopening, allowing businesses to host up to 50% capacity. But the state outbreak is one of several that has seen a surge in infections in recent weeks, averaging more than 3,500 daily new cases and a positivity rate higher than 9%.

• Abbott did not announce any new executive actions to stem the spread of the virus, but said that "wearing a mask will help us to keep Texas open because not taking action to slow the spread will cause COVID to spread even worse."
• "Closing down Texas again will always be the last option," he added.
• Abbott allowed the state's original stay-at-home order to expire on April 30.

Matt Bai/WaPo:

What Democrats get wrong about the 2016 election

Joe Biden isn’t Hillary Clinton. He’s a more naturally gifted politician, and whatever his weaknesses, phoniness and elitism have never been among them. I thought Biden would have beaten Trump walking away had he been the nominee four years ago.

There’s really only one way for Trump to win this election — which is for Democrats to hand him the all-out culture war he desperately wants.

Biden and his team are too smart to fall into that trap. But the same might not be said for the party’s loudest activists, such as the types who want to abolish police departments and who believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a closet Confederate.

If the fall campaign feels like another condescending, “us vs. them” indictment of the so-called deplorables, then the same people who felt trapped into voting for Trump in 2016 may do it again. And the result, despite all the evidence of his political anemia, could look the same.

USA Today:

'The stakes are high': After Tulsa rally, Trump heads to battleground states looking for a boost

But some of those issues that dominated in 2016 may feel a little out of place as the country wrestles with the twin crises of economic fallout over the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests over police brutality and racial inequity, according to Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

"Immigration may have felt more important in 2016 when there was less going on, but with the public health crisis, economic troubles, real concern about inequities in policing – does the president's focus on the same issues he focused on in 2016 have as much relevance in a different time?" Kondik said.

More than 120,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus with more than two million cases reported, according to Johns Hopkins University. The death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes, sparked nationwide protests and has exposed the country's deep racial wounds.

That’s a legitimate pollster, RABA Research (B/C rated). Take it for what it’s worth.

Gabriel Sherman/Vanity Fair:

“BRAD REALLY S--T THE BED SATURDAY NIGHT”: AFTER TULSA CATASTROPHE, PARSCALE—AND KUSHNER—IS AT THE TOP OF TRUMP’S HIT LIST

Trump is pondering putting Kushner antagonists atop the campaign—“We can’t allow Jared’s stupid disagreements to get in the way,” he said—but the problem is likely at the top.

Donald Trump’s exhausted trudge from Marine One toward the White House after his botched rally in Tulsa, his red tie undone, a grim look on his face, a crumpled MAGA hat in his hand, is now an iconic image of his presidency. And as always with Trump, he’s already looking for someone to blame. The most obvious candidate, according to sources, is his embattled campaign manager, Brad Parscale. “Brad really shit the bed Saturday night. You have to remember, execution is 95% of presidential politics,” a Republican close to the White House told me over the weekend. Parscale committed a cascade of errors, from overhyping expected turnout to blaming the half-filled arena on protesters. Trump was so furious when he saw how thin the crowd was that he threatened to not go onstage, two sources briefed on the discussions told me. The sources said that Parscale, reading the tea leaves, is planning to step down. “He knows he can’t survive,” one source told me.

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said Parscale is safe. “Brad is the campaign manager, and he’s the one in charge,” Miller said.

But one thing is for sure: The blame game has shifted into high gear.

Paul Waldman/WaPo:

Why William Barr’s corruption probably can’t save Trump

That Attorney General William P. Barr has corrupted the Justice Department so that it is singularly devoted to the president’s personal political interest is barely in question anymore. But with the election less than five months away and Barr undoubtedly planning further interventions to secure President Trump’s victory, he may have less power to save Trump than it appears — or maybe none at all.

That’s not only because Barr has discredited himself by acting more like an employee of Trump’s reelection campaign than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. It’s also because his efforts are focused on creating perceptions that will help Trump, at a moment when — if you can believe it — reality actually does matter.

Indeed, the big surprise of the moment may be that reality is now all that matters…

The only way Trump can win this election is if he disqualifies Biden in the eyes of voters, to convince them that the catastrophe of the present is not as bad as what would happen if Biden were elected. But so far, Trump’s campaign has utterly failed to make that case. And while Barr might try to create the illusion that Biden is corrupt or criminal, he has no credibility to make the public believe it.

We’re living in a moment of clarity. Our current reality is so horrific that it will not let us turn away. Spin cannot carry the day, not even when delivered from a podium at the Justice Department. At least that’s something to be pleased about.

David M Perry/Twitter:

The myths we invent about our past serve specific kinds of functions. Every confederate memorial was erected to serve white supremacy explicitly in its day; if it doesn't do that for YOU today, consider that it does for others. So supporting them causes pain.

Columbus statues, on the other hand, were erected to tell a story of shared whiteness for a persecuted minority (Italians). But they told a different story for indigenous Americans then and today, a story of genocide.

Someone like Grant is more murky to me. It's not clear myths his statues convey; but it is clear that the removal of his statue also tells a story - a story rejecting US violence against indigenous Americans in particular.I think that's a story worth telling.

Shifting gears slightly: I like the story that #Hamilton tells. It's a myth intended to cut against other dominant myths enshrined in white american ideas about this country's birth. All myths serve functions, often diverse and even contradictory ones for various audiences.

As a scholar of political myth (yes that's a thing you can study), I've been thinking about the narrative functions embedded in the materiality and public display of statues and the stories we share in public discourse. It's a busy time inside my brain.

This a good explainer of the epidemiology of current outbreaks regarding age of the cohort and the current/expected death rate.

And now for a musical interlude:

Editor’s note: This story includes a historical quote that uses a racial slur.

WARNING

THIS AREA IS BEING PATROLLED BY THE
NATIONAL BALLOT
SECURITY TASK FORCE.

IT IS A CRIME TO FALSIFY A BALLOT OR
TO VIOLATE ELECTION LAWS.

That National Ballot Security Task Force was made up of county deputy sheriffs and local police who patrolled the polling sites with guns in full view. A court complaint later lodged by the Democratic Party described the members of the task force “harassing poll workers, stopping and questioning prospective voters … and forcibly restraining poll workers from assisting, as permitted by state law, voters to cast their ballots.”

The National Ballot Security Task Force was not some rogue enterprise, or an ill-conceived product of a few extremist thinkers. It was funded by the Republican Party.

While the group’s goals were ostensibly to prevent illegal voting, it was difficult to take that at face value — it looked a lot more like a coordinated intimidation effort. Republicans hadn’t been afraid to say publicly that they didn’t want certain people to vote, after all. Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in a speech in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote. … our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

It wasn’t just Weyrich, either. During the 1971 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, civil rights activists testified that he had run “ballot security” operations in Arizona and had personally administered literacy tests to Black and Hispanic voters at Phoenix polling places. Nor are these sentiments just a relic of a bygone era: In March of this year, President Donald Trump dismissed out of hand Democratic-backed measures that called for vote-by-mail and same-day registration to help ensure people could vote amid the COVID-19 pandemic: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The political wisdom is ingrained at this point: Black and brown people don’t vote for Republicans.

[Related: Why So Many Black Voters Are Democrats, Even When They Aren’t Liberal]

From that principle flows all manner of Republican strategy. Sometimes the efforts are less legalistic and more shock jock — in 2016, the Trump campaign described “suppression efforts” aimed at Black voters, which included placing ads on radio stations popular with African Americans that played up Hillary Clinton’s 1996 comments about “superpredators.” More often, though, these moves by Republicans involve accusations of widespread voter fraud, battles over voter registration, and court challenges to laws meant to protect the franchise of America’s minorities. Talk of “election integrity” by the Grand Old Party is inextricably intertwined with its modern history of pandering to racist elements of American life; any attempt to disentangle these stories and tell them separately is disingenuous, even if it angers partisans.

Efforts to tamp down the number of minority voters will likely continue this election. Following the abuses in Trenton in 1981, the Republican National Committee entered into a court-enforced consent agreement that it would not engage in voter intimidation efforts like the ones seen in Trenton — efforts the court deemed racially motivated. In 2018, the RNC was released from that consent agreement, and in May 2020, the RNC and the Trump campaign announced that they would spend $20 million to litigate initiatives like vote-by-mail and that they would recruit 50,000 poll watchers across 15 states. ”The RNC does not want to see any voter disenfranchised. We do not. We want every voter who is legally able to vote to be able to vote,” said RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel on a call with members of the press in May. “But a national vote-by-mail system would open the door to a new set of problems such as potential election fraud.” All this effort despite little conclusive evidence that voting by mail benefits one party over the other.

But it wasn’t always the case that the GOP looked to suppress the franchise, and with it minority-voter turnout. In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter introduced a package of electoral reforms, the chair of the RNC supported it and called universal, same-day registration “a Republican concept.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower won nearly 40 percent of the Black vote in 1956, and President George W. Bush secured about the same share of Hispanic votes in 2004.

Yet in 2016, Trump won just 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 8 percent of the Black vote.

[Related: There Is No Evidence That Voting By Mail Gives One Party An Advantage]

The GOP’s whitewashed political reality is no accident — the party has repeatedly chosen to pursue white voters at the cost of others decade after decade. Since the mid-20th century, the Republican Party has flirted with both the morality of greater racial inclusion and its strategic benefits. But time and again, the party’s appeals to white voters have overridden voices calling for a more racially diverse coalition, and Republicans’ relative indifference to the interests of voters of color evolved into outright antagonism.

When I asked Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, how he thought the current GOP could go about appealing to minority groups, he declined to take the bait. “Thanks for trying to get me into the here and now, but I’m not going to get in there.”

I tried again. Bypassing Trump, did a Republican Party eight or 10 years into the future have a chance with minority voters?

“They’d better wake up to the necessity of doing it,” Rove said. “It’s a lost opportunity if we don’t.”

It’s not the first time Republicans have heard that sort of thing. But apparently it’s hard advice to take.

1968
The moderates’ last stand

Conservative Barry Goldwater’s decisive presidential loss in 1964 led to a bevy of Republican primary candidates in 1968. Everyone wanted to save the party from ruin. Michigan Gov. George Romney emerged as the golden boy — the media golden boy — of the group, a successful Republican in a Democratic state who championed civil rights for Black Americans and opposed the war in Vietnam. Talking about the latter quickly got him into trouble, though, as he was a foreign policy neophyte and almost-debilitatingly earnest. While explaining his former support for the war during a 1967 interview, Romney said: “When I came back from Vietnam [in 1965], I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”

Claiming the American military and diplomatic establishment brainwashed you wasn’t a particularly welcome thing to say back then. (Or now.) Historians mark this blunder as the beginning of the end of Romney’s chance to become the Republican candidate in 1968. And looking back, it was the beginning of the end of any liberal Republican standing a chance at winning the party’s nomination. (When Romney’s son Mitt ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, he called himself “severely conservative.” In the general election, he got 6 percent of the Black vote and 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.)

Romney fell from great heights. In 1966, Time magazine put him on its cover under the tagline “Republican Resurgence,” along with Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the country’s first Black senator since the Reconstruction Era, California Gov. Ronald Reagan and three other rising stars. Running on a strategy of courting the South, Goldwater had been flattened by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 general election, and more moderate candidates like Romney and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller were seen as the plausible Republican future. The promising candidates were, by and large, Time wrote, “moderates with immoderate ambitions.” But Romney was the man who got the most early attention. In a 1966 Harris Poll that asked who voters wanted to see as the Republican nominee in 1968, Romney beat out former Vice President Richard Nixon by 6 percentage points, Reagan by 14 and fellow moderate (and eventual vice president under Gerald Ford) Rockefeller by 13.

Romney had pushed for the adoption of a civil rights plank to the 1964 Republican platform, but his efforts failed miserably. Instead, Goldwater’s nomination marked a full embrace of a strategy that sought to win the votes of white Southern Democrats disillusioned by their party’s embrace of reforms aimed at racial equity. Today’s GOP is still informed by this “Southern strategy.”

In her book, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur describes the treatment of the few Black delegates at the 1964 convention, several of whom were detained by security for talking to the press about their anti-Goldwater sentiments. One man’s suit was set on fire, and another “ran sobbing from the convention floor, crying that he was sick of being abused by Goldwater supporters. ‘They call you “nigger,” push you and step on your feet,’ he muttered to reporters, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘I had to leave to keep my self-respect.’”

Romney, for his part, was disgusted by the nominee and his stance on race. His moral high ground was notorious — years later, when his son Mitt ran for president, a former aide to George Romney told New York magazine that the elder Romney was “messianic,” adding “This guy was John Brown.”

Black voters might have been more circumspect. When violence broke out in a Black area of Detroit in 1967, Romney and Johnson each had a role to play, with Romney as governor and Johnson as president. They circled each other as they considered the response. “Neither wanted to take responsibility for installing martial law in an American city,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in his book “Nixonland.” And Detroit was a heavily Black city, no less. Romney lost the game of chicken and eventually sent in the National Guard. Later in the campaign he toured the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and asked his driver what the word was that everyone kept calling him. “Motherfucker, sir,” he was told.

Romney, despite his best intentions, was part of a political party that had been slowly losing Black support for decades. While African Americans had long felt a sense of comity with the party of Lincoln, Republicans had been trying their patience for much of the 20th century. In 1940, Black party identification was split evenly at 42 percent. Eisenhower received a large share of the Black vote, in part because of voters’ disillusionment with Southern Democrats’ anti-civil rights beliefs.

But even those inside Eisenhower’s administration knew something was off about the GOP’s relationship with Black voters. His adviser E. Frederick Morrow, the first African American to serve in an executive staff position at the White House, was frustrated with the GOP’s often-indifferent efforts to court Black constituencies. In 1959 he gave a speech that decried the party’s apathy toward Black voters: “Republicans could not expect Negroes to be extremely grateful for what Lincoln did, since in effect he had merely returned to them their God-given rights of freedom and personal dignity.”

In 1962, Nixon told Ebony magazine that he owed his 1960 loss of the presidency to this kind of complacency: “I needed only five per cent more votes in the Negro areas. I could have gotten them if I had campaigned harder.” The African American vote was still a bloc that Republicans saw as gettable — Martin Luther King Jr.’s father was going to vote for Nixon until his opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy, called King while he was detained in an Atlanta jail.

Romney’s disastrous “brainwashing” quote exposed the weakness of his campaign, and Nixon acted swiftly to shiv Romney’s underbelly of naivete. Nixon had long understood that the racist forces in the Republican Party that brought Goldwater the nomination remained a center of power despite Goldwater’s defeat. Nixon acted quickly to play to them, tying Romney to the violence in Detroit — he was governor after all. Nixon went further, arguing that “the primary civil right” in America was “to be protected from domestic violence.” White voters’ fears of Black Americans’ demands for civil rights made them uncomfortable with politicians who might support those rights — politicians like Romney. As Time had pointed out in 1966, the Democratic Party’s FDR-era coalition was fragmenting: “Negro militancy has siphoned off much support from urban Italians, Irish and Slavs.” Nixon, who would famously run as a “law and order” candidate, wanted those white votes.

Nixon got the nomination after a contentious convention, one fought over how tightly the party should be tied to its Southern base. Reagan led a last-minute push for the nomination that was quashed only when South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond stepped in on Nixon’s behalf, while moderate delegates tried to make Romney, not the South-approved Spiro Agnew, vice president. Reflecting on the party’s turmoil, Romney deployed a graphic metaphor for the GOP, warning that, “to prevent this abscess from re-forming [Nixon and Agnew] must make the party leaders from the states that must win the election for them at least as important as Mr. Nixon made the leaders of the South and Southwest in winning the nomination.”

More than half a century later, the abscess is still there. Over and over again, Republicans have faced the choice between a big-tent strategy and specific appeals to white voters — appeals that over time have become tantamount to bigotry.

And it wasn’t as if people weren’t pleading for Republican racial attitudes to change.

THE LATE 1970s
“The Republican Party needs 
black people”

In 1978, Republican party chairman Bill Brock invited Jesse Jackson to talk to party notables in Washington, D.C. An intimate of King’s, Jackson was a political whirlwind who had proved to be a dynamic civil rights organizer. “He is one of the few militant blacks who is preaching racial reconciliation,” New York Times reporter John Herbers had written of Jackson in 1969. His address trafficked in the language of incremental advantage so beloved by electorally avaricious political strategists. Seven million unregistered Black voters were waiting to be wooed by the GOP, Jackson said. “The Republican Party needs black people if it is to ever compete for national office — or, in fact, to keep it from becoming an extinct party.” The New York Times wrote that “Jackson’s proposition seems realistic enough” given that “thirty percent of Northern and 20 percent of Southern blacks already consider themselves independents.”

Jackson got a standing ovation from the crowd, and the good feelings of the day prompted Brock to say that the “right” 1980 presidential candidate “could hope for anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the Black vote.”

Reagan would go on to win only 14 percent.

For a fleeting political moment in the wreckage of Watergate, the GOP seemed to be open (once again) to the idea that their future could lie with voters of color. The conventional wisdom of that brief period, Perlstein told me in an email, “was that the Republicans would go the way of the Whigs unless they recouped their appeal to blacks.” (Perlstein has a forthcoming book that covers this period. Called “Reaganland,” it’s the latest volume in his multipart history of modern American conservatism.)

In the late 1970s, Jackson made the argument that Black voters should want the two parties to compete for their votes to attain greater political leverage. He worried that the Democratic Party would come to take Black voters for granted. (More than 40 years later, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would tell a Black radio host, “I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”) Jackson’s own personal conservatism could be seen as emblematic of that of Black Americans, ones who could be potentially courted by the GOP. A 1979 profile of Jackson by the journalist Paul Cowan described him at an anti-abortion rally: “[He] denounced abortion as ‘murder,’ he insisted that ‘when prayers leave the schools the guns come in’ … he suggested that, while he supported women’s liberation, his wife at least should stay in her place — his home.”

But the good vibes after Jackson’s speech in 1978 did not last long. Republican bureaucrats in the Reagan era coalesced around the idea that minority voters were unwinnable.

A few months before Jackson’s speech in Washington, President Carter had introduced electoral reforms — an end to the Electoral College and same-day universal voter registration — that were met with praise from Brock, the RNC chair. But an essay that soon appeared in the conservative publication Human Events expressed an opposing view in the party. Writer Kevin Phillips said that Carter’s proposal “could blow the Republican Party sky-high” given that most of the new voters in a higher-turnout election would be Democratic.

Phillips, who worked for Nixon’s 1968 campaign, was the author of the 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” which articulated a road map for the GOP to sweep up white voters. Or as a 1970 New York Times profile of the Bronx native with “a visage that looked half scholar and half black-Irishman” put it: “Political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices, a circumstance which at last favors the Republicans.”

Phillips was one of many loud, young voices on the “New Right” that saw Reagan as the Republican future. Reagan said the Carter proposal might as well be called “The Universal Voter Fraud Bill,” and pressured Brock into reneging on his support for it, which he did. (Google NGram mentions of the term “voter fraud” spike starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s.)

Brock’s flip-flop embodies a contradiction inherent in many of the internal GOP struggles of the past few decades, and ones that continue today: Should the party invest in appeals to new voters or pluck racism’s low-hanging electoral fruit? Brock availed himself of the latter in his 1970 Tennessee Senate race. His “victory could be credited almost entirely to his sophisticated attempts to play on Tennessean’s [sic] racial fears and animosities,” according to the Almanac of American Politics. Often, the party has attempted to play both strategies, though the racial one usually seems to blot out the more ecumenical approach.

By the time Reagan appeared at a 1980 campaign stop at the National Urban League, the prominent civil rights organization, his appearance wasn’t to win over Black voters so much as to “show moderates and liberals that Reagan wasn’t anti-black,” one aide later said.

THE 2000s
Double-talk

In 2005, RNC chair Ken Mehlman appeared at the NAACP national convention to formally apologize for the GOP’s Southern strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

It seemed an act befitting a party whose sitting president, George W. Bush, had run for office as a “compassionate conservative.” The branding was no accident. In 2018, Bush articulated why he felt the need to convey a more explicitly empathetic message. “I felt compelled to phrase it this way, because people hear ‘conservative’ and they think heartless. And my belief then and now is that the right conservative philosophies are compassionate and help people.” Rove put it a bit more bluntly when he explained that “compassionate conservatism” helped Bush “indicate that he was different from the previous Republicans.”

It was an extension of Bush’s past success with people outside the party’s usual base. When he was governor of Texas, he won more than 50 percent of the Mexican American vote. “He was comfortable with Hispanic culture. His kids went to a large public high school in Austin that was very Hispanic,” former adviser Stuart Stevens said. “Much of his appeal among Hispanics in Texas was attributed to his personal charm and charisma,” Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University, writes of Bush in his book, “The Hispanic Republican.” “He spoke Spanish, ate Mexican sweetbreads in border cities, and for Christmas he made enchiladas and tamales that he, unlike President Ford, shucked before eating.” Rove said the Hispanic population in Texas was “highly entrepreneurial,” signed up for the military at high rates, and was religious, “so they tend to have socially traditional values,” particularly on the abortion issue. “What’s not to like about that profile if you’re a Republican?”

Bush’s platform aimed to be inclusive. Stevens pointed to the potential of No Child Left Behind as one example, an education program that increased funds for low-income schools, many of them home to Black and Hispanic students. Bush signed the program into law with the support of liberal icon Ted Kennedy — there’s a picture of Kennedy standing behind Bush as he puts pen to paper. Two Black children stand directly behind the president. “This is the kind of thing that the current Republican Party would present at a war crimes trial,” Stevens said of the show of bipartisanship. These days Stevens, who also served as Mitt Romney’s chief strategist during the 2012 presidential campaign, is disillusioned with the Republican Party and has a book (his eighth) all about it, “It Was All a Lie,” due out in August.

Progress with new, diverse coalitions could have been possible, Stevens said, but “you need to have changed the substance.”

But for many in the Black community, the substance boiled down to what Kanye West said during a live 2005 telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Despite the compassionate conservatism rhetoric, the GOP of the Bush era continued to pursue policies hostile to Americans of color. The party deployed a warm and fuzzy message that belied the actions it took on voting rights. It tried to turn out Hispanic voters while tapping into efficient ways to shut down minority voting under the “voter fraud” umbrella. The abscess that George Romney had warned about not only had re-formed, it had grown.

“The first stirrings of a new movement to restrict voting came after the 2000 Florida election fiasco, which taught the unfortunate lesson that even small manipulations of election procedures could affect outcomes in close races,” Wendy Weiser, head of the Democracy Program at the left-leaning advocacy group the Brennan Center, wrote in 2014. As Carol Anderson of Emory University writes in “One Person, No Vote,” during the Bush years and beyond, Republicans who were “respectable members of society leveled the charges [of voter fraud] — U.S. senators, attorneys with law degrees from the Ivy League.”

John Ashcroft led a Department of Justice that took up a full-throated rallying cry against voter fraud. He had some of his own skin in the game — Ashcroft lost a 2000 Senate election in Missouri in which Republicans alleged mass voter fraud in Black precincts of St. Louis. A newspaper investigation later found the claims to be all but nonexistent. The Bush-era Civil Rights Division had the distinction of filing the first voting-discrimination suit on behalf of white voters in the history of the Voting Rights Act.

Perhaps no figure from the Bush Civil Rights Division emerged who was more controversial and long-lasting than Hans von Spakovsky. He promoted voter ID laws in his home state of Georgia starting in the 1990s, and gained infamy once he landed at the Justice Department for pseudonymously writing a law review paper under the name “Publius,” which promoted voter ID laws. Later, his identity revealed, he refused to recuse himself from a controversial case involving voter ID in Georgia. The case, which was handled under the auspices of the Voting Rights Act, led career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division to resign and, as journalist Ari Berman writes, “VRA enforcement came to a standstill. From 2001 to 2005 the DOJ objected to only forty-eight changes out of eighty-one thousand submitted, ten times fewer than during the first four years of the Reagan administration.”

Von Spakovsky has proved a durable advocate for his cause. Now the head of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation, he served on Trump’s now-disbanded Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission was created to investigate whether Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of widespread voter fraud. No evidence for the claim has yet to be produced.

When I spoke with von Spakovsky, I asked him if it disturbed him that so-called voter fraud protection efforts disproportionately affect minorities — academic studies in various states have shown this, as has a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. He told me my assumption was wrong, and said there were studies on voter ID and election turnout that found ID requirements had had no adverse effect. He also pointed to the greater number of VRA cases brought by the Bush administration compared with the number undertaken during the administration of Barack Obama.

But Democrats don’t see it as quite that simple. “Counting up the number of cases isn’t really meaningful,” Justin Levitt, who worked in the Civil Rights Division during Obama’s presidency, wrote in an email when I asked him about von Spakovsky’s claim. “It’s a little bit like counting up the number of reps in a workout at the gym to try to figure out who’s more physically fit, without asking which exercises, which weights, which degree of difficulty. Or counting up the number of words in a piece to try to figure out which is the best reporting.”

Testing claims about the effect that voter ID laws have on election turnout is tricky. Findings about their effect have varied from state to state, which likely has to do with the nature of state laws and their voting populations. But a measure like turnout also doesn’t take into account how the laws push some people to go through greater effort to cast a ballot successfully.

Levitt, who is now a constitutional law scholar at Loyola Marymount University, did an investigation into cases of election fraud that could have been stopped by the use of voter ID, and found, out of about a billion ballots cast, only 31 instances from the period of 2000 to 2014. The analysis and its results prompt an obvious question: If fraud is so rare, what’s the actual purpose of ID laws?

Attacks on voter franchise are more broad than voter ID laws, of course. Voter roll purges have moved front and center in recent years thanks to events like the controversial 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. And last year, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found that the closure of polling places across the state had made it more difficult for Black voters to cast their ballots.

In 2005, after Mehlman’s mea culpa to the NAACP, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that he found the RNC chair’s remarks disingenuous: “My guess is that Mr. Mehlman’s apology was less about starting a stampede of blacks into the G.O.P. than about softening the party’s image in the eyes of moderate white voters.” For all of Bush’s campaign rhetoric about compassionate conservatism and his focus on Hispanic outreach, his Republican Party had remained as devoted as ever to the cause of suppressing the franchise of people of color.

“If the apology was serious, it would mean the Southern strategy was kaput,” Herbert wrote. “And we know that’s not true.”

THE 2010s
Self-reflection

The loss of the 2012 election prompted a crisis of confidence among GOP leadership.

“I was close to RNC chairman Reince Priebus. He came to me right after the election and was like, ‘We need to do some soul-searching,’” Henry Barbour, a Mississippi political strategist, told me recently. Along with four others, he would go on to author what became glibly known as the 2012 Republican autopsy report — officially the “Growth and Opportunity Project” — that placed the GOP’s institutional problems in stark terms: “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

Yet three years after the report’s publication, the GOP nominated Donald Trump, an anti-immigrant, race-baiting candidate. “How did people abandon deeply held beliefs in four years? I think the only conclusion is they don’t. They didn’t deeply hold them. They were just marketing slogans,” Stuart Stevens said. “I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought we were beating the market.”

Priebus, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, did not respond to my requests to talk about the report he commissioned, and what has happened in the party since.

What has happened is a circling of the wagons around Trump and his race-baiting rhetoric and policies. Gone are the days of articulated philosophies like “compassionate conservatism.” Now, the GOP relies on contrarianism to distinguish itself and stoke good feelings among its core members. Just look at the ease with which ideologically driven leaders like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have been cast aside. Romney called Russia “our number-one geopolitical foe,” yet the party is now led by a president who repeatedly heaps praise on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

The one thing that the party has stayed true to is its reliance on the politics of race and racism. While membership in the party wanes and America grows more diverse, the GOP has become practiced at speaking to its core members’ desire to maintain a white-centric American society. Trump’s appeal relies heavily on attacks against the media and “PC culture,” the medium and mode of expression, respectively, of a diversifying country.

[Related: There’s A Huge Gap In How Republicans And Democrats See Discrimination]

Republicans know the bargain they’ve made. A 2007 Vanity Fair profile of Arizona Sen. John McCain during his presidential run speaks to an acute awareness that the short-term strategy of placating a white base would be damaging to the GOP’s long-term demographic expansion. In the story, McCain is asked about the political ramifications of the immigration debate: “‘In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,’ he said. ‘In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you’ll pay a heavy price.’ Then he added, unable to help himself, ‘By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.’”

During his 2010 Senate reelection campaign at the height of the Tea Party movement, McCain cut a TV spot meant to annihilate any ambiguity over immigration that he might have expressed during his presidential run. In the ad, McCain strolls along the U.S.-Mexico border, saying “Complete the dang fence,” to which a white sheriff responds, “Senator, you’re one of us.” It is perhaps the least subtle advertisement involving a politician since Bob Dole and Britney Spears appeared in that 2001 Pepsi commercial.

The post-2012 election report urged Republicans to return to what sounded a lot like Bush-era immigration stances and semantics: “We are not a policy committee, but … we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”

The strategist types I spoke with all seemed in agreement on the wisdom of this: “You grow a party with addition,” Barbour told me. “Politics is ultimately about addition, not subtraction,” Stevens said. “It’s completely dumb and destructive for their interests every time you say you’re going to target a smaller and smaller pool of voters to win,” was former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd’s take. Both he and Rove seemed irritated at what they thought was a popular misrepresentation of their infamous “base strategy” that used issues like same-sex marriage to generate the high turnout of core Republican constituencies, like evangelical voters. “You win an election by having enthusiastic turnout in your base, by swiping people from the opposition and doing well among the independents,” Rove said. To suggest otherwise was “ridiculous.”

So, had other Republicans misinterpreted that strategy as an excuse not to go after voters outside the traditional GOP core? “Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Rove answered. “Look, we lost the popular vote in 2000. What were we going to do, win again that way?” Trump had, I pointed out. “Yeah, well, and look, it’s happened five times in American history,” Rove said, reeling off the dates from memory. I asked whether he was saying it’s a fluke of history. “Oh, yeah,” he replied. So, Trump would need to win the popular vote in order to win this time around, I asked, knowing I’d pushed a little too close to the present day.

“Look, stop it, stop it, stop it,” Rove said. The conversation ended soon afterward.

Republicans with more immigrant-friendly views remain on the outs in an era when the party has focused on things like a family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are reports that Bush won’t vote for Trump in the fall. It feels as if a breaking point has been reached, given the pandemic and the paroxysms of protests and violence following the police killing of George Floyd. Trump’s leadership has been called into question, especially on race: 58 percent of Americans in a recent poll said they disapproved of how Trump was handling race relations in the country. The number is remarkable, if only for the fact that these days it’s difficult to get 58 percent of Americans to agree on anything except perhaps distaste for airline travel and love of Dolly Parton.

As the booming economy crumbled in the midst of the pandemic, so did many more moderate Republicans’ support for the president. As Trump tweeted about “thugs” and dispersed peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the move wasn’t reflective of “the America that I know,” while Bush issued a rare public statement sympathizing with the plight of Black Americans: “Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions.”

The country has taken note, and Trump’s poll numbers — for the time being — remain consistently below Biden’s, sometimes showing the Democrat with a double-digit lead. But there’s no sure thing in American politics these days. The election itself could be a chaotic, unpredictable enterprise.

2020
Crisis

The potential for disenfranchisement is very real in the upcoming presidential vote. The pandemic has given experts real concern that a poorly administered election could see thousands who want to vote essentially denied the right to do so. With that, seeds of distrust will be sown in the outcome. Just this week, Trump tweeted: “RIGGED ELECTION 2020: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”

“I am most worried in places that have had the lowest levels of mail voting, where the election officials are least prepared, where they don’t have the resources and where the rules are also hotly contested. So, states like Wisconsin, states like Georgia, where the political culture has been voting in person, there have been a lot of fights over voting access, where the rules need a lot of adjustment in order to have fair access to mail voting,” Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center told me.

Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in legal battles in various states over the rules that will govern November’s election, which could largely take place by mail. It is a fractured process and the types of cases litigated cover mail ballot deadlines, early voting access, ballot collection, prepaid postage and a host of other issues. So many separate litigations are underway that each side has their own website with clickable maps showing what fight is happening in each state. “Across the country we’ve seen Democrats under the guise of [the] COVID-19 crisis in a wholesale way try to change the election to fit their election agenda items that have existed long before this crisis,” RNC Chair McDaniel said. “We believe that many of the lawsuits they have initiated would destroy the integrity of our elections, so we’re fighting back.”

One complication of mail-in ballots could arise during their validation, which often requires a signature. Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center told me that young and Black voters tend to experience higher rates of ballot rejection based on that requirement. “Young people and minorities are less likely to have a signature on file with the state,” he said. Plus, young people might have not developed a good cursive signature, and there might be an implicit bias on the part of poll workers if an African American or Hispanic name is less familiar to them. Marc Elias, who got his start as a recount lawyer and is now directing the Democrats’ broad expanse of election-related litigation, told me that differential rejection rates on ballot signatures “has always been the silent epidemic of American voting.” The COVID-19 pandemic just helped make more people aware of it.

[Related: Our 2020 National Polling Averages]

Von Spakovsky, for his part, told me that concerns for voting in person were overblown this year. “I think you can safely hold an election under these circumstances,” he said, pointing to the precautions taken in places like grocery stores, as well as for a recent election in South Korea.

But not all Republicans share that sentiment. “I think our messaging is all wrong, frankly,” Barbour said. There are legitimate concerns being expressed by Republicans over a largely vote-by-mail election, he said. But in the midst of a pandemic, people’s fears of infection should be taken into account. “Forget the political angle, eligible voters must be able to vote.”

Some Republicans do try to intimidate people at the voting booth, Barbour said. He recounted his own experience in the 2014 primary race between Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel.

“There was this runoff — we knew we were probably going to lose if we didn’t treat it like a general election,” he said of the Cochran campaign. They courted all voters, Black, white, and Democratic. “People were furious. ‘How dare y’all?’” Barbour said of the reaction to the strategy. “All these people came out from Georgia, saying, ‘We’re going to be at these polling places, and if you show up, you’re not going to be able to vote.’ I will say, as a Republican, I was embarrassed.”

“I kind of got a taste of what it’s like to be on the other side, seeing that happen, and I found it offensive and clearly wrong.”

CORRECTION (June 24, 7:43 a.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated that Nelson Rockefeller served as vice president in the Nixon administration. He was vice president under President Ford.

CORRECTION (June 24, 8:33 a.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated where the Watts neighborhood was that Romney was touring during his primary campaign. It was in Los Angeles, not Detroit.

No!!!

The world’s #1 tennis player Novak Djokovic, who came out as an anti-vaxxer in April in a discussion with Serbian athletes about the coronavirus pandemic, has tested positive for COVID-19 after hosting an exhibition tournament in Croatia that flouted all distancing and mask rules and even included a party in a packed nightclub. Several other players have also contracted COVID-19.

Wrote Djokovic in a statement: “We organized the tournament at the moment when the virus has weakened, believing that the conditions for hosting the Tour had been met. Unfortunately, this virus is still present, and it is a new reality that we are still learning to cope and live with. I am hoping things will ease with time so we can all resume lives the way they were. I am extremely sorry for each individual case of infection. I hope that it will not complicate anyone’s health situation and that everyone will be fine. I will remain in self-isolation for the next 14 days, and repeat the test in five days.”

View this post on Instagram

"The moment we arrived in Belgrade we went to be tested. My result is positive, just as Jelena's, while the results of our children are negative. Everything we did in the past month, we did with a pure heart and sincere intentions. Our tournament meant to unite and share a message of solidarity and compassion throughout the region. The Tour has been designed to help both established and up and coming tennis players from South-Eastern Europe to gain access to some competitive tennis while the various tours are on hold due to the COVID-19 situation. It was all born with a philanthropic idea, to direct all raised funds towards people in need and it warmed my heart to see how everybody strongly responded to this. We organized the tournament at the moment when the virus has weakened, believing that the conditions for hosting the Tour had been met. Unfortunately, this virus is still present, and it is a new reality that we are still learning to cope and live with. I am hoping things will ease with time so we can all resume lives the way they were. I am extremely sorry for each individual case of infection. I hope that it will not complicate anyone's health situation and that everyone will be fine. I will remain in self-isolation for the next 14 days, and repeat the test in five days.”

A post shared by Adria Tour (@adriatourofficial) on Jun 23, 2020 at 5:28am PDT

Eurosport reports: “Viktor Troicki reportedly became the fifth participant to report a positive infection on Monday night. Grigor Dimitrov was the first player to publicly announce that he had tested positive, resulting in the cancellation of Saturday’s final. Borna Coric then followed.”

After Coric’s diagnosis, Australian player Nick Kyrgios slammed Djokovic for going ahead with the tourney: “Boneheaded decision to go ahead with the ‘exhibition’ speedy recovery fellas, but that’s what happens when you disregard all protocols. This IS NOT A JOKE.”

Djokovic was captured on video at a party at the tennis event:

The post Anti-Vaxxer Novak Djokovic Tests Positive for COVID-19 After Hosting ‘Boneheaded’ Tennis Event That Flouted Pandemic Rules, Included Dance Party: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

An endangered Republican senator has a coronavirus relief idea that would send thousands of dollars to families in need of … a vacation. Sen. Martha McSally has introduced a bill giving people $4,000 each, plus $500 for dependent children, to vacation more than 50 miles from home but inside the United States. Before you start planning a major blowout trip, there are a few catches you should know about.

First, of course, the bill isn’t passing. This is McSally engaging in a desperate ploy to get some attention as Mark Kelly leads her in the polls and swamps her in fundraising. Then there’s the pandemic, which makes most travel questionable, particularly in McSally’s COVID-19 hot spot of a home state, Arizona. But even if it passed, and was safe, most families would not get a vacation out of it.

The $4,000 or $8,000 or more would come in the form of tax credits, which is to say that only people who could afford to pay for such a vacation up front could use it. And the tax credits wouldn’t be refundable, so only people who pay substantial federal income taxes would get the benefit. That’s not even mentioning people who don’t have paid vacation time.

Translation: This is a no-chance bill that would only help people who are already very comfortable, financially speaking.

And McSally is proposing it at the same time as she is, along with other Republicans, ready to cut off expanded unemployment insurance benefits.

It’s nice to dream about a vacation these days, and McSally is playing on that wistfulness in so many of us, along with a big pander to the Arizona tourism industry. But she’s also sending a strong message about who she serves in the Senate.