This Politico article suggests that the White House is deeply concerned about the vote subversion/suppression going on in the states and plans to try to exert pressure through various means to alert the public and avert disaster in 2022.
Okay … but, really?
In January, standing on the steps of the Capitol, President Joe Biden warned of “an attack on democracy.”
In April, standing inside the House chamber, Biden declared that the only way to restore the country’s soul was “to protect the sacred right to vote.”
And earlier this month, standing on what was once Black Wall Street where as many as 300 Black people were murdered in 1921 by a white mob in Tulsa, Okla., Biden said he’d “fight like heck” to “combat the new assault on the right to vote.”
The White House says it’s using every tool it has to draw attention to restrictive voting laws being passed in GOP-led states across the country, including potential legal challenges. Administration officials say Biden talks about attacks on voting access in all of his major speeches to send a signal not just to voters, but to those in power, that it’s a personal priority. And though the decision to give Vice President Kamala Harris the voting rights portfolio was interpreted as a sign that the White House viewed the issue as intractable, senior officials insist that giving her “convening power” actually demonstrated how seriously they’re taking it.
“It’s a broad strategy,” said Cedric Richmond, director of the White House Office of public engagement. “It’s all hands on deck, and we are willing to meet the challenge.”
This coming week, the Senate is expected to vote on their own sweeping set of voting and election reforms, after the House narrowly passed its version earlier this year. Despite the road blocks, the White House isn’t conceding legislative defeat. “Sometimes it’s not the most attractive process,” said Richmond. “It’s the process of crafting legislation, but we’re not waiting on it.”
To build momentum, the White House has turned to Harris. In the past month, the vice president traveled to South Carolina to hold a listening session with local voting rights advocates, and she met with Texas legislators Wednesday to elevate their efforts to beat back a state GOP law restricting voting. Republican legislatures in states across the country are proposing or instituting new barriers to mail voting and are targeting election administrators with criminal penalties in response to false conspiracies of a stolen election spread by former President Donald Trump.
In an effort to combat changes in Republican-led states, the White House has also looked for allies in the private sector.
“We’ve talked to business all over the place,” said Richmond. “We want companies to step up and talk about the importance of a meaningful right to vote.”
That’s nice. But I don’t know that it has a real chance of changing anything.
On TV this morning the pundits are saying that this plan is to try to get Republican voters to push their representatives. It couldn’t hurt but you’ll have to forgive me if I remain pessimistic about changing the minds of people who think that orange psycho was the greatest leader in world history and had the election stolen from him. These are not rational people.
Perhaps more pressure on the Democratic fools who want to preserve the filibuster for Mitch McConnell to further destroy democracy and ensure that his party can rig elections for the foreseeable future? Seems to me that might be the priority.
During the Trump years it always felt as if the news cycle was running at 110 miles an hour and we were just hanging on for dear life. And it was true. There’s was always something terrible going on. Most people looked forward to the day that everything would slow down to a normal pace and we’d all be able to spend more time thinking about something other than the latest lunacy coming from the White House.
That has more or less, sort of, come to pass. The daily outrage meter has been turned down to eleven and it feels as if the whole government is operational instead of just the oval office and whichever corrupt Trump minion happens to be in the headlines. But there is still a whole lot going on, from foreign policy settling down into something vaguely recognizable as sane American participation in world affairs, to the Justice Department coming to terms with the wholesale corruption of the institution over the past four years to the gripping saga of the Democratic agenda wending its way through the congress. On Thursday, we even saw the Supreme Court once again uphold the Affordable Care Act, eliciting a huge sigh of relief from the 30 million people who had been waiting with bated breath to find out if they were going to have health insurance when they woke up this morning.
The federal government is busy and for the most part it’s doing what Americans employ it to do. It’s not always pretty but it seems to be cranking up and becoming at least somewhat functional.
But that doesn’t mean the craziness has stopped or that we can assume that bad dream we just went through for the past four years is over.Sadly, it’s not. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte noted yesterday, Trump and his loyal servants in the right wing media (or is it the other way around?) have whizzed passed delusional and have moved into full blown insanity. She wonders what the Democrats are going to do about it and I agree with her that it doesn’t look like much. As she says, “the [Republican] party has reorganized itself entirely around the goal of making sure that next time Trump tries to steal an election, he pulls it off.”
But I actually think it may be worse than that. The various undemocratic power grabs in the state are raising expectations among the faithful to such an extent that they may actually be leading to another insurrection.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump and the Bulwark’s Tim Miller both wrote pieces in the last week or so taking a look at the way the “audit” in Arizona and the flurry of similar activity in some of the other states (including those Trump won, which means the point is nothing more than to further discredit the entire electoral system) and they concluded that energy these gambits are producing may inevitably result in more violence.
Bump notes that there were two factors which led to what happened on January 6th. First, Trump’s followers were persuaded that the election had been stolen with a steady stream of lies from Trump and the right wing media. Second, they were called to gather on the specific day the vote was to be formally certified by a joint session of congress to stand against it. We know what happened. But they remain agitated and upset over the Big Lie even today and there hasn’t been anywhere for them to focus all that wrath. In light of this week’s FBI assessment that QAnon may be moving away from digital extremism into real world violence, this bogus Arizona audit may be the catalyst they’ve been looking for.
In his piece, Miller points out that the GOP establishment is ostensibly dismissing the three ring “Cyber Ninja” circus happening in Arizona’s Maricopa county as a joke while the Trump supporters are taking it very, very seriously. And when this audit eventually concludes, as it surely will, that the Arizona election was definitely stolen, the odds are that some Trump supporters are going to believe they have an obligation to take action.
Miller writes:
Activists in the QAnon movement have described the audit as the first step in “The Great Awakening.” And Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward has threatened “arrests” of those who did not comply with the audit. (N.B.: The Arizona Republican Party does not yet have the power to detain citizens for crimes against MAGA.)…
Steve Bannon’s War Room, which was the official podcast of the “Stop The Steal” rallies last fall, is playing the same role in unofficial fashion in Arizona and has found an audience for the grift. (At the time of this writing, War Room was the tenth-biggest news podcast on the Apple charts.) The thirstiest and craziest MAGA Republicans around the country have all made the hajj to Maricopa to either learn how they can bring the insurrection to their states or signal their allegiance to primary voters. The frontrunner in the Missouri race to succeed the retiring Senator Roy Blunt, Eric Greitens, is the latest of this latter group.
Miller asks, “doesn’t this sound familiar?” Indeed it does. It was this churning and agitation for someone to “do something” to “save the country” that led all those people to lose their minds that day in January and start beating cops and hunting down former Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Miller then wonders, “when the Arizona audit bell tolls, what exactly is McConnell and McCarthy’s plan?” Unfortunately, I think I have the answer. The New York Times’ Jonathan Weissman reported that the GOP plan to win in 2022 is to ensure that America believes it is “in crisis.”
There is an economic crisis, they say, with rising prices and overly generous unemployment benefits; a national security crisis; a border security crisis, with its attendant homeland security crisis, humanitarian crisis, and public health crisis; and a separate energy crisis. Pressed this week on whether the nation was really so beleaguered, the No. 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, thought of still more crises: anti-Semitism in the Democratic ranks, “yet another crisis,” he asserted, and a labor shortage crisis.
“Unfortunately they’re all real,” he said, capping a 25-minute news conference in which the word “crisis” was used once a minute, “and they’re all being caused by President Biden’s actions.”
It’s highly debatable if they can convince Americans that all those concerns represent a crisis and I don’t think Scalise believes it either. He’s really ginning up the Republican base about the Big Lie “crisis” which is literally the only thing they really care about. They most certainly believe that all their troubles are “being caused by President Biden’s actions” — in allegedly stealing the election. If this audit or series of audits inspire some die hards to commit a little domestic terrorism for the cause , that’s all to the good. After all, that really will be a crisis and Republicans have decided that’s just what the doctor ordered.
The rise of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and its QAnon cousin has left a lot of mainstream journalism as unprepared to cope as we all were the night in 2016 when Trump won the presidency. Deferrence to the office, if not to the man, meant even in his exile the press is both-sidesing if not normalizing the GOP’s public rejection of democracy and remaining neutral in the fight to preserve the republic from rising authoritarianism.
Republicans want to make it harder for people to vote and easier for the GOP to invalidate election results. That’s the distressing, historic truth as the party fully embraces an anti-democratic agenda.
Hiding behind Both Sides journalism, which portrays all political skirmishes as being the product of each party, the D.C. press continues to struggle to be honest about the GOP’s radical turn. Recently the New York Times, as if trying to create a Both Sides archetype, including flawless examples of everything that’s wrong and dangerous about the faulty form of journalism, published a painfully bad piece about GOP voter suppression. “Museum quality,” was how New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen dubbed the Times’ pitch-perfect Both Sides entry.
Strictly adhering to the he said/she said construct that the Times newsroom finds so comforting, the article made no effort to reach a logical conclusion in terms of which side in the voting ‘debate’ was being honest and accurate. Functioning as a clearing house for the Democratic and Republican quotes that were collected, the Times saw its job not as illuminating news consumers about a gravely important topic, but to simple type up competing quotes.
After reading the piece, former Seattle Times editor Mike Fancher tweeted it was, “an example of journalism that is accurate but not truthful. It is also harmful to democracy.” Addressing the Times’ executive editor he added, “Please, @deanbaquet, hire a public editor to help your newsroom become stewards of democracy.”
Museum quality 'he said, she said' reporting by the New York Times about the most grave challenge facing the polity at this time. https://t.co/gxl0HqEwwx
People say stuff. Other people say different stuff. That's where we are. Best we can do. Signed, @nytpolitics
“In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril,” reads the headline of the offending article. Republicans shrugged at torches and “Jews will not replace us.” They shrug at majority rule if they cannot control the outcome or overturn it after the vote-counting.
At this point, Republicans as an organization are only going through the motions of particpating in democracy. The press should state plainly what is obvious to the rest of us.
She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.” — from “The Rise of the New Global Elite” by Chrystia Freeland, The Atlantic, January/February 2011.
That snippet of conversation from a Manhattan dinner party, “20 is only 10 after taxes,” has stuck with me since 2011. “The very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “are different from you and me.” Chrystia Freeland observed the way money makes the very rich a nation unto themselves, rootless, and highly mobile (and rude drivers.) Their concerns are not those of mortals. They are disconnected from plebian trifles. Freeland quotes Thomas Wilson, then CEO of Allstate, explained offshoring jobs bluntly, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …”
And American workers’ problems? They’re on their own.
One reason progressive taxation exists is spelled out in the Gospels: To whom much is given, much will be required (Luke 12:48). Those who profit most from the markets and system of laws and infrastructure that undergird their vast enterprises are expected to pay the most for their upkeep. Another reason is to prevent such accumulation of wealth as to create family dynasties that mimic those of hereditary royalty. We fought the American Revolution, at least in theory, to escape that sort of stratified society and create a more equal one. What we find today, however, is that taxing income alone is inadequate to prevent the sort of wealth inequality not seen since the first Gilded Age. Hence Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s call for an annual tax on wealth.
A decade after Freeland’s study of the super-rich, Disney heiress Abigail Disney has awakened perhaps late in life to what it means to be a trust beneficiary. What shocked her about ProPublica’s report on 25 of America’s richest was not that they paid so little in taxes, but that it was all legal. And very, very familiar:
What’s worse, these methods and practices—things such as offsetting income with losses in unrelated businesses; structuring assets to grow rather than generate income, then borrowing against those growing assets for cash needs; and deducting interest payments and state taxes from taxable income—are so downright mundane and commonly applied that most rich people don’t see them as unethical. The more interesting question is not how the men in ProPublica’s report were able to avoid paying much or anything in federal income taxes, but why. What motivates people with so much money to try to withhold every last bit of it from the public’s reach?
A common ideology underlies wealth accumulation, Disney writes. “The government is bad and cannot be trusted with money.” Better for the elite — those whose wealth confirms success with it — to distribute theirs through philanthropy instead, though not so conspicuously as to be gauche.
An heiress herself, Disney was schooled in these principles from a tender age. The isolation that comes with great wealth means she saw no reason to question them:
Practically speaking, the way the trusts were devised meant that I came into a significant amount of money at the tender age of 21. I became an asset manager before a lot of people get their first apartment. I’m 61 now, meaning I’ve been the recipient of four decades’ worth of tax advice from the decent, good, kind men (yes, they were all men) who were put in place by my grandparents, and then my parents, to ensure that I wouldn’t do anything stupid with what I had been given.
Asset managers taught her how to take advantage of what is standard practice for the wealthy.
When you come into money as I did—young, scared, and not very savvy about the world—you are taught certain precepts as though they are gospel: Never spend the “corpus” (also known as the capital) you were left. Steward your assets to leave even more to your children, and then teach them to do the same. And finally, use every tool at your disposal within the law, especially through estate planning, to keep as much of that money as possible out of the hands of government bureaucrats who will only misuse it.
Thus do family dynasties build and perpetuate themselves. Great wealth is seductive, Disney explains somewhat sheepishly. Like “20 is only 10 after taxes,” having more creates a thirst for still more. And more is never enough:
As time has passed, I have realized that the dynamics of wealth are similar to the dynamics of addiction. The more you have, the more you need. Whereas once a single beer was enough to achieve a feeling of calm, now you find that you can’t stop at six. Likewise, if you move up from coach to business to first class, you won’t want to go back to coach. And once you’ve flown private, wild horses will never drag you through a public airport terminal again.
“What’s shocking about the ProPublica report is not just that the tax bills are so low, but that these billionaires can live with themselves,” Disney writes, explaining her crisis of conscience (my words).
If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.
The very rich are different from you and me. Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones explores how “America’s dynastic bloat” in the trillions manages and grows itself. No doubt the Disney family business has a family office:
The billionaires themselves rarely do the lobbying and financial voodoo that let them grow and protect their wealth. Rather it’s the minions in their exceedingly low-key offices. You’d never even notice Walton Enterprises, LLC, the entity that keeps the Walmart dynasty humming. This family office is located in a nondescript building in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas, across the street from a Cajun restaurant called the Flying Fish. (“Mudbugs Are Here,” noted a recent advertising banner.) A Flying Fish hostess told me she’d heard of Walton Enterprises only because its employees sometimes eat there, “but we don’t know what it is or what they do.”
They do a lot of stuff. One wealth professional I interviewed got her start in a multibillionaire’s family office with dozens of employees, including real estate experts, estate lawyers, accountants, financiers, and aircraft managers. Larger offices hire CEOs and chief information officers, and are overseen by boards consisting of family members and outsiders. Staffers pay the family’s bills and wrangle its club memberships. They manage vacation properties, planes, yachts, and household employees. They book meetings, travel, and medical appointments. They work with architects and contractors and security consultants and see to the education and financial literacy of children and grandchildren. They devise “tax-efficient” strategies for philanthropy, insurance, and risk-management, plan parties and vacations, plan weddings, funerals, and reunions—the tasks are endless. A full-service office, EY [Ernst & Young] estimates, costs $10 million a year or more to operate.
Some family offices, Mechanic offers, even pay for themselves through tax avoidance. And so, financial aristocracies “thrive and reproduce” unseen, growing more politically influential even as they grow more distant from the common folk whose share of the economic pie continues to shrink. Hungry for more, dynastic wealth grows like science-fiction serranium, expanding until large enough, if not to throw Earth out of its orbit, to render democracy irrelevant. Barring the arrival of pitchforks, of course.
It was true when I said it then. Truer now. Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming (Nick Hanauer | TEDSalon NY2014) https://t.co/VvNf2ShK9X via @TEDTalks
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph Ellis recounts exchanges between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the nature of aristocracy. That “all men are created equal” might be true in some theoretical sense, thought Adams, but not here on God’s Earth. Aristocracies were inevitable.
Jefferson believed the unique properties of this new continent meant feudal privileges, inherited titles, etc., held no sway here, and “rank, and birth, and tinsel-aristocracy will finally shrink into insignificance.”
“As long as Property exists,” Adams responded, “it will accumulate in Individuals and Families…the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.”
The latest developments in the Arizona audit only raise more questions about its legitimacy. According to CNN, voting data used for the Maricopa County, Ariz., audit has been transferred to a remote “lab” in Swan Lake, a rural community located in northwest Montana.
Bennet also admitted that he personally has no idea where the lab is located in Montana.
Reports about the so-called “lab” come just two weeks after NBC Montana shed light on the lab location possibly being linked to a cabin in Swan Valley. At the time, the publication detailed highlights from an email written by Sophia Solis, the deputy communications director for the Arizona Secretary of State Karen Hobbs (D).
“We have addressed our concerns over this partisan review with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors as well as to the Senate,” Solis wrote. “Our office was only provided access to observe after we sought a court order. The policies and processes related to many of the details of this partisan review have not been provided to this office — so unfortunately we do not have the information you are looking for.”
Outlined in the Equipment Concerns section of the email, audit observers also mentioned the Montana lab as they expressed apprehension about the audit practices being used at the remote location.
“Observation: On May 24, 2021, Senate Liaison Ken Bennett confirmed that copies of voting system data was sent to a lab in Montana. He did not specify what security measures were in place, or what the lab in Montana will do with the data or how long it will be in possession of the copies,” the Equipment Concerns section read on the Arizona Secretary of State website.
Arizona Republic reporter Jen Fifield also did some digging that led her to CyFIR. Per NBC Montana:
“Fifield’s digging led her to CyFIR, a digital security company that subcontracts for Cyber Ninjas. It shows an address in Virginia, with its parent company Cyber Technology Services listing the address of the cabin near Swan Lake, technically a Bigfork address.
“Montana property records show the cabin is owned by CyTech’s CEO and CyFIR founder Ben Cotton.”
“At this point in the audit, nothing really is surprising to me, because there’s been so many connections that have come up. The Senate has never told us the full list of contractors involved and the names of the people,” Fifield said. “And so it’s been like a puzzle trying to put everything together.”
At that time, Bennet also spoke to 12 News of Phoenix where he claimed: “The original evidence was left completely intact. A copy was taken to do whatever evaluation they are doing for Cyber Ninjas.”
Despite Bennet’s claim, Fifield explained why the Montana observations are problematic. “I talked to an elections technology expert about this, and they say that the fact that the data is in Montana isn’t significant in itself, but the fact that they have unfettered access to the data without oversight, and we don’t really know what data they have — they could have our private voter information as well,” Fifield said.
She continued, “So until we know exactly what they have, and the terms they’re using to keep that data secure, that’s the overlying concern, not really that it’s in Montana.”
Earlier this week, the Wapo’s Philip Bump reviewed the new report by the FBI about the threat of QAnon turning into a violent movement and discusses the Tim Miller piece I flagged the other day and says this, which I think is believable:
Arizona is poised to be a place and a time on which Trump supporters and QAnon can focus.
And similar focal points are in the works. If there is a chain reaction leading out from Arizona, that means other similar reviews in other places and other points of focus.
“In the words of adherents, Arizona would be the first ‘domino’ to fall,” Ruelas and Fifield write. “The excitement around this theory has grown in recent days, as interest in replicating Arizona’s election audit has spread to other states. Alaska, Georgia and Pennsylvania lawmakers toured the coliseum to find out how they could do an audit just like this one back home, and a Georgia judge allowed a conspiracy-minded group to recount absentee ballots. Similar calls for audits are happening in New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin.”
As The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel pointed out, some of those observers flown in from other states did so on the dime of Voices and Votes, that OAN-linked charity. OAN has covered the Arizona review nonstop, elevating its importance and earning plaudits from Trump. More audits, as Weigel notes, mean more OAN coverage. And again, it means more points at which that energy can coalesce.
In the days after the 2020 election, Maricopa County was first a focus of attention by pro-Trump activists. The close results in that state brought a number of protesters to the streets in an effort to exert pressure on vote counters. At one point, the group tried to push inside the building where votes were being tallied. Some of those in attendance were armed.
Eventually, the votes were all counted, and the results certified for Biden. The focus turned to the Capitol and Jan. 6. But now, the “audit” being conducted on behalf of Arizona Republicans returns the spotlight to Phoenix, where conspiracy theorists now pin all of their hopes for being proved right and for Trump returning to power. An announcement seems imminent.
A place. A moment. An energy. Just like the Capitol.
I sure hope the authorities are on high alert. These people are working themselves up into a frenzy. For him:
Hannity has a schtick in which he mocks Biden as a drooling old fool who needs a sippy cup. Yes, I know, — there’s no doubt who needs a sippy cup. Or a golf cart to stroll 700 yards:
The hits just keep on comin' "Leaders of France, Ger, Italy, Japan, Canada & UK walk the streets of Taormina. Trump follows in a golf cart" pic.twitter.com/MAEuwkY7ud
— Kimmel to trump: Isn’t it past your jail time (@MaggieJordanACN) May 27, 2017
On that trip — his first G7 — he also sent Ivanka to stand in for him for some important appearances. Nobody knew why.
Russian President Vladimir Putin heaped praise on President Joe Biden Thursday, claiming the idea that Biden has dementia, as portrayed by various U.S. and Russian media outlets, “has nothing to do with reality.”
“The image of President Biden, which is portrayed by our, and even the American press, has nothing to do with reality,” Putin told reporters in Moscow, as translated by the Moscow Times.”Biden is a professional, you have to be very attentive when working with him so as not to miss something — because he does not miss a thing, trust me.”
The Russian president further stated that his 78-year-old American counterpart is “completely of sound mind and should be taken seriously,” per a translation from CNN senior global affairs analyst Bianna Golodryga, who was born in Moldova and speaks Russian.
Putin’s comments come just one day after meeting face-to-face with Biden in Geneva, Switzerland.
During his solo press conference following the summit, Putin called Biden a “balanced and professional man,” adding “it’s clear that he’s very experienced.”
Putin says that the image of Biden created by Russian/US media of a doddering old man suffering from dementia “has nothing to do with reality.” Says he didn’t seem affected by the jet lag, was energetic, and that you have to be on your toes with him “bc he doesn’t miss anything.” https://t.co/tO2G9Chbak
Putin on the narrative portrayed (esp by Russian state media like RT, and some in the US), questioning Biden’s mental health “has nothing to do with reality. He had no jet lag, was cheerful, we spoke eye to eye 2+ hrs. He’s completely of sound mind and should be taken seriously.” https://t.co/TWfsScGSQj
From last night, June 16, 2021, with the man that 40% of our country still believes is a very, stable genius who accomplished more than any president in history which includes, according to him, creating the greatest economy the world has ever known … twice.
it's June 16, 2021, part 2
it's June 16, 2021, part 3
Trump is incapable of learning
Hannity cuts off Trump as he starts in on an unhinged rant about wind turbines
"Frankly, we're lucky we have the vaccine, but the vaccine on very young people is something that you gotta really stop" — Trump, pushing anti-vax talking points on Hannity
Hannity tries to end the interview by asking Trump a softball about what he'll do differently if he runs in 2024. Trump responds by going on an unhinged rant about "fake investigations" and the Clintons. He doesn't even come close to answering the question.
These numbers show that the sharp turn toward authoritarianism started before the 2020 election. It’s been brewing on the right for some time:
[A] partisan gap has opened over the whole idea of defending democracy. In a 2018 Chicago Council poll, 54 percent of Democrats said “the decline of democracy around the world” was a critical threat to U.S. interests. Only 36 percent of Republicans shared that view.
A year later, 52 percent of Democrats said “the rise of authoritarianism” was a critical threat; only 30 percent of Republicans agreed.
Three months ago, in a survey by the Center for American Progress, 72 percent of Democrats agreed that “America has clear security and economic interests in building alliances with other democracies to protect individual rights and fight corruption.”
Only 52 percent of Republicans felt that way. In February, the Reagan foundation found that 71 percent of Democrats were willing to invest more money in “promoting freedom abroad,” but most Republicans weren’t.
I guess we should be relived that the Neoconservative bullshit about invading foreign countries to install Jeffersonian democracy at the point of a gun is not longer operative. But this isn’t good either, particularly as it pertains to our own country.
These people have always been temperamentally authoritarian. Now they have been given permission to apply it to their politics in ways that are incoherent (freeeeedom!, tyranny!) and dangerous.
By the way, the rest of the article goes into how these attitudes are helping Vladimir Putin, which is true but also slightly beside the point IMO. I have no love lost for that thug but I think the right’s love for Putin has more to do with the fact that Russia has a white authoritarian government than anything else. They certainly don’t like Xi Jinping and he’s just as bad.
It’s complicated. But the upshot is that the American right no longer advocates democracy, here or around the world even in the most anodyne ways. They just don’t believe in it at all.
It’s important to have some good news once in a while and today we have some, at least for now. The Garland DOJ is revoking some of the most egregious Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr immigration atrocities. Thank God:
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday reversed legal opinions issued under the Trump administration that severely restricted asylum claims based on domestic and gang violence, as well as persecution stemming from family ties.
In vacating the decisions issued by his predecessors, Jeff Sessions and William Barr, Garland cited an executive order by President Biden that instructed officials to determine whether current asylum policies provide refuge to victims of gang and domestic violence “in a manner consistent with international standards.”
The rescission of the restrictions could pave the way for a broad shift in U.S. asylum policy, since many of the protection claims made by Central American migrants along the southern border cite domestic and gang violence, which are prevalent in some parts of the region.
Over four years, the Trump administration enacted multiple rules, programs and international agreements to restrict access to the U.S. asylum system at the southwest border, arguing that most Central Americans journeying north were economic migrants ineligible for U.S. humanitarian protection.
Mr. Biden, however, decried Mr. Trump’s asylum policies as cruel and vowed to restore protections for victims of domestic and gang violence.
As attorney general, Garland oversees the Justice Department’s immigration courts and their 1.3 million pending cases. Through precedent-setting decisions, the attorney general also has the power to unilaterally set rules that govern the adjudication of asylum cases being reviewed by U.S. immigration judges and asylum officers.
In a memo explaining Wednesday’s move, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said Garland’s rulings would allow the Biden administration to address “complex and important questions” concerning U.S. asylum through formal regulations open to public comments.
Mr. Biden has given the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security until October to finish the rules, which are expected to overhaul the adjudication of asylum claims.
“These decisions involve important questions about the meaning of our Nation’s asylum laws, which reflect America’s commitment to providing refuge to some of the world’s most vulnerable people,” Gupta wrote.
In a 2018 opinion revoked on Wednesday, Sessions ruled that cases “pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors” would generally not merit asylum.
Sessions decreed that “private” criminal activity was not a basis for asylum, barring “exceptional circumstances.” The decision reversed a 2014 appellate opinion that found women who suffered domestic violence could be eligible for asylum under the “particular social group” protection in U.S. law.
To qualify for asylum, U.S. law dictates that applicants must demonstrate they suffered persecution because of their race, nationality, political views, religion or membership in a “particular social group.”
Garland said Sessions’ opinion included “broad language” that threatened the “careful case-by-case adjudication of asylum claims.”
In the other opinion that Garland overruled on Wednesday, Barr ruled that a nuclear family, “in the ordinary case,” would not constitute a “particular social group,” dooming the cases of asylum-seekers who claimed their persecution stemmed from being part of a family.
Garland on Wednesday said Barr’s analysis in 2019 was “inconsistent” with previous rulings that found families could be particular social groups.
The 2019 guidance U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) asylum officers received in the wake of Barr’s opinion was revoked last month, according to an internal memo obtained by CBS News.
USCIS did not say whether asylum officers have received new guidance regarding the adjudication of claims concerning victims of domestic and gang violence.
The asylum regulations Mr. Biden has ordered officials to craft by the fall are supposed to define “particular social group.”
In her memo, Gupta ordered Justice Department lawyers to stop defending the Trump-era asylum restrictions in lawsuits filed by immigrant advocates.
[…]
Conchita Cruz, an attorney who has represented women fleeing domestic violence, praised Garland’s move, saying some asylum-seekers were deported due to the Trump-era legal opinions. Cruz said one of her clients, a mother who suffered domestic violence in Honduras, was denied asylum during the Trump administration by a judge who cited Sessions’ 2018 opinion.
“We should be allowing these asylum-seekers to stay,” Cruz, who co-founded the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, told CBS News. “They are absolutely seeking safe haven from very real persecution.”
Her asylum-seeking client, Maribel, is currently appealing the judge’s initial decision. She hopes Garland’s decision will allow her to remain in the U.S.l
“I know it is going to change my life, and the life of so many women who, like me, are survivors of domestic abuse,” Maribel said. “I can rest more easily now knowing that my children and I have a chance to get justice and be safe from deportation back to my abuser.”
America can easily afford to allow these asylum seekers to enter the US. They are not “taking jobs” from Real Americans and they contribute far more than they take. The only reason to deny them is xenophobia which is the Trump Party’s life blood.
The twitter thread gives you the quick overview of Jill Filipovic’s stunning article about a subject that will break your heart. If Joe Biden wants to restore the soul of American he will do something about this:
We know that rape is endemic in conflict, and that survivors sometimes get pregnant. In most of the world, rape survivors are legally entitled to abortions. But because of the US abortion wars, women raped in conflict can almost never get safe abortions.
Reporting and writing this story took four years. It is hands down the most important thing I’ve worked on in my career. The question of why rape survivors in conflict and crisis areas cannot get safe abortions has long gone unanswered — ignored because the answer is ugly.
The human stakes are incredibly high. I have a big stack of notebooks full of devastating stories from women who can’t vote in US elections, but whose lives have been indelibly shaped by US policy — and particularly by the exportation of the American abortion wars.
This is not even a GOP vs. Dem issue. Yes, Joe Biden lifted the Global Gag Rule — but that rule had no bearing on whether women abroad can access safe abortion services if they’ve been raped. Even with Democratic presidents, USAID funding never pays for rape survivors’ abortions
The answer to “why can’t women raped in conflict access safe abortions?” may seem obvious: perhaps it seems logistically difficult to provide abortion care in refugee settings, or maybe it’s because abortion is illegal in a lot of places. Turns out very little of that is true.
Unsafe abortion is so common in emergency settings that humanitarian aid organizations overwhelmingly offer post-abortion care, which is usually either pills or a vacuum aspiration procedure — the medications & the procedures are basically the same as elective abortion.
That means that there’s a whole universe of health workers who are already functionally trained on safe abortion provision in humanitarian settings, making safe abortion provision already baked in to emergency care. And with medication abortion, it’s as easy as counting out pills
As for legality, while abortion is restricted in many many places, very few countries outlaw it in all cases. In most countries, including those with large refugee populations, abortion is legal for rape survivors and / or to save a woman’s life or health.
So what’s the barrier? How is it that “rape as a weapon of war” is well-covered by reporters and has been legally categorized as a crime against humanity, but so few people take the next step and say, “so what are we doing to make sure rape victims aren’t forced into childbirth?”
It’s partly cowardice & stigma: Abortion is “controversial” and people find it icky, so safe abortion gets pushed to the side, even for the most vulnerable women in the world. And it’s party the US, the largest funder of global health, exporting its conservative abortion politics
That’s changing: For the first time, safe abortion care was integrated into a humanitarian emergency response during the Rohingya crisis, when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims fled attacks, including mass rape, in Myanmar. But that care happened without the US.
But still, women raped in conflict largely cannot access safe abortions. There is one simple policy change that could make a huge difference: Joe Biden could clarify that the Helms Amendment, which bars USAID funding for abortion, doesn’t apply to abortions for rape survivors.
It would be better to overturn Helms wholesale, but that would require Congress to act, and that’s unlikely. Biden, though, could unilaterally clarify Helms. Obama could have, too — women’s rights advocates certainly asked — but he didn’t. Will Biden act differently?
Biden laudably removed the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortion for American women, from his budget. The question is whether he’ll do the same for women overseas — or as @SerraSippel says, if this is an “America First” moment and women abroad are disposable.
“There is not that much I am proud of,” a Rohingya woman told me. She survived rape at the hands of soldiers, escaped Myanmar, then figured out how to safely end her pregnancy. “But still I am alive after all that happened to me. I tried to save my own life. I am proud of that.”
Huge thanks to @nybooks for taking this on. @ejcnet funded the reporting & @NAFellows gave me time & support to write it. There’s nothing better than working w/ @nicholesobecki, whose images are gorgeous & sensitive. And @namlyd & @LauraRepoOrtega were crucial members of our team
