The Court rejected the case on standing grounds so theoretically another case could come along raising the same issues . But it was a dumbass case that nobody took seriously or even thought it would reach the Court in the first place so that’s unlikely. And every year hat the law stands, it becomes more solidified in Americans’ lives. The last I heard more than 30 million people were on Obamacare.
The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act, saying Republican-led states do not have the legal standing to try to upend the law.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the court’s 7 to 2 decision that preserves the law that provides millions of Americans with health coverage.
Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M Gorsuch dissented.
The decision meant the attempt to derail President Barack Obama’s landmark domestic achievement met the fate of past legal challenges, in 2012 and 2015.
The key issue this time was whether a 2017 decision by Congress to remove the penalty for not buying health insurance — the so-called individual mandate — meant that the law was unconstitutional and should be wiped from the books.
That would end popular provisions such as keeping young adults on their parents’ insurance policies, and ensuring coverage for those with preexisting medical conditions.
But the court said the states did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.
President Biden, in contrast to former president Donald Trump, has said he plans to build on the program to offer more Americans health care coverage.
The red-state challenge came to the Supreme Court at an inopportune time — endangering the health-care coverage of more than 20 million Americans during the country’s gravest health crisis in a century.
Even congressional Republicans who have targeted Obamacare in the past distanced themselves from the suit brought by the Republican state attorneys general and joined by the previous administration.
The case posed three questions: Do the challengers have legal standing to bring the challenge? Did changes made by Congress in 2017 render unconstitutional the ACA’s requirement for individuals to buy insurance? And if so, can the rest of the law be separated out, or must it fall in its entirety?
“We do not reach these questions of the Act’s validity, however, for Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them,” Breyer wrote.
The cases are California v. Texas and Texas v. California.
Even Clarence Thomas signed on to this one. And he hates everything.
The elevator incident Wednesday with Republican Rep. Andrew S. Clyde of Georgia along with President Biden’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva brought back a post from the early days of the Trump presidency before Adam Server coined the phrase, “the cruelty is the point.”
Benjamin Wittes was onto that truth earlier on, but just wasn’t as pithy.
Two years ago, Heather Cox Richardson writing for Salon spoke about the Republican abandonment of truth for utility. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker attempted to write the search for truth out of the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement, replacing it with “meet the state’s workforce needs.” She traced the impulse back to William F. Buckley’s 1951 “God and Man at Yale” in which he proposed that The Enlightenment had led western civilization astray, in the mid-twentieth century, specifically, towards the New Deal.
Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology.
By the ascent of George W. Bush to the presidency, Buckley’s view had won:
As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. It has given us, for example, a senator claiming words he spoke on the Senate floor were “not intended to be a factual statement.” It has given us “dynamic scoring,” a rule changing the way the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the economic impact of tax cuts, to reinforce the idea that cuts fuel economic growth despite the visibly disastrous effects of recent tax cuts on states such as Kansas. And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history. Politicians have always spun information to advance their own policies. The practice infuriates partisans but it reflects the Enlightenment idea of progress through reasoned argument. Movement Conservatives’ insistence on their own version of reality, in defiance of facts, is something different altogether.
Now Donald Trump is a president. A Republican president. With this walking bundle of pathologies, the descent into alternate reality returns and the slope is even steeper. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway insist we should accept the White House’s “alternative facts” over the evidence of our own eyes. And who, for instance, will ever forget the Bowling Green Massacre she fabricated?
What’s more confounding is how many Americans — Americans — buy into the kind of Soviet fantasy they once railed against.
Mikhail Iossel writes for The New Yorker that even Soviet citizens knew better than to believe the kind of propaganda Trump and his coterie spew daily. But in the name of making America great again, Trump’s supporters (the older ones, anyway) embrace what they once feared:
… Everyone knew that they, the Soviet people, lived in a veritable funhouse of a giant isolated world unto itself, in the parallel reality of that endless hall of crazily distorted mirrors. People were not fooled, to put it mildly. Still, there was nothing they, including myself and everyone I knew, could do with or about that understanding. There was no place for them to take it, to pour it out on. Being exposed to constant, relentless irradiation by that funhouse reality, forever aswim in a sea of lies, had made people lethargic and apathetic, cynical and fatalistic, dumbfounded into mute infantilism, drunkenness, and helpless rage in the meagreness of their tiny private, personal worlds.
Lethargic, cynical, fatalistic, etc. Hardly how Trump fanciers fancy themselves, but beware. Believe the lie, become the lie. What’s different is how amateur-hour similar propaganda efforts are here at home. No one is fooled.
“This American Life” took a skeptical look at the Trump travel ban over the weekend. They interviwed Benjamin Wittes, a national security expert from the Brookings Institution. Wittes wrote a scathing review of the Trump executive order, calling its purpose malevolent in addition to “the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.” Specifically, Wittes calls out the thinly veiled lie at the heart of it. Wittes writes:
What’s more, the document also takes steps that strike me as utterly orthogonal to any relevant security interest. If the purpose of the order is the one it describes, for example, I can think of no good reason to burden the lives of students individually suspected of nothing who are here lawfully and just happen to be temporarily overseas, or to detain tourists and refugees who were mid-flight when the order came down. I have trouble imagining any reason to raise questions about whether green card holders who have lived here for years can leave the country and then return. Yes, it’s temporary, and that may lessen the costs (or it may not, depending on the outcome of the policy review the order mandates), but temporarily irrational is still irrational.
Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.
When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.
Then you lie about why you’re really doing it, not because anyone will believe the lie, but because it’s company policy, as I once read about a meeting between a dissatisfied customer and a regional manager for GM:
“He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”
The thing with Trump cultists such as Reps. Clyde, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, and the rest, plus those Trumpublicans in the Senate, is that over time Trump company policy here in the U.S. starts to look like company policy in Russia. Only Russians are not lining up to be fooled, or fools.
D.C. police officer Michael Fanone visited congressmen on Wednesday when he ran into Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), who infamously described the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “normal tourist visit” after being photographed helping security personnel barricade the doors to the House chamber. Remember Clyde?
This is Rep. Andrew Clyde (Q-GA) saying the January 6 insurrection looked like “a normal tourist visit” inside the Capitol.
But El Jefe said the Jan. 6 rioters met Capitol Police with hugs and kisses and posed “zero threat.” So, that is the Gospel according to Donald. Repeating that bullshit became the new litmus test of obedience for the Trump cult. Clyde will say (maybe actually believe) whatever he’s told. Truth be damned.
Fanone was beaten unconscious after he voluntarily rushed to the Capitol to help defend it from those who breached the building. He suffered a concussion and a mild heart attack. In the months since, Fanone has been one of the leading voices pushing back against Republicans who have sought to downplay the severity of what happened Jan. 6.
Fanone, joined by Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, returned to the Capitol on Wednesday, the day after 21 House Republicans voted against the Gold Medal resolution, in an effort to meet them and tell his story.
Fanone recognized Rep. Clyde at the elevator. He and Dunn got on with him.
“I simply extended my hand and said, “How are you doing today, Congressman.’ I knew immediately he recognized me by the way he reacted. He completely froze. He just stared at me,” Fanone said in an interview.
Fanone said Clyde did not motion to shake his hand in return.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not going to shake my hand?’ ” Fanone said he told Clyde.
He said Clyde answered, “I don’t know who you are.”
Fanone said he responded, “’I’m sorry, sir, my name is Michael Fanone. I’m a D.C. police officer and I fought to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6.” He said he described being stunned repeatedly in the back of the neck and beaten unconscious, stripped of his badge and radio.
“His response was nothing,” Fanone said. “He turned away from me, pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps.” Fanone said Clyde turned on the camera app but did not point the phone in his direction. Fanone said he believes Clyde was trying to record audio of the encounter.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid Wednesday the cell phone story not included in his tweet above. Clyde pulled out his phone to record Fanone as if a he was a potential threat.
I just called Officer Fanone and confirmed this story. This is really incredible. Also relayed an interaction he had with another members Chief of Staff that was really incredibly bad and disrespectful. https://t.co/fERYjK6dWg
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) June 16, 2021
This article by Justin Ling in Foreign Policy is the best thing I’ve read about the Wuhan lab leak. Here are some excerpts:
When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself.
When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.”
And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.
Blaming humans for disease is as old as time itself. It’s inherently hard to trace outbreaks that take tangled paths from their origin point to where they’re first detected. Without firm answers, humankind loves to invent stories, from the Black Death of the 14th century to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. In the absence of certainty, both sets of theories—natural or man-made—seem plausible: like Schrödinger’s cat, for virology.
When infectious diseases can be explained, however, nature is almost always the culprit. After SARS emerged, scientists suspected that the coronavirus had jumped from a bat to another mammal—probably the masked palm civet—but couldn’t explain how it had appeared on a farm in Foshan, in China’s Guangdong province.
More than a decade after the outbreak, researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered something interesting: Villagers who lived near bat-ridden caves in Yunnan province, around 900 miles from where the first outbreaks were recorded, had high levels of SARS antibodies, despite having never been infected. While it is next to impossible to figure out exactly how SARS traveled that distance, scientists are now fairly sure the journey began in that cave before passing to a mammal that ultimately infected a person.
Bats likely played a crucial role in incubating Ebola as well. A very similar strain of HIV to the ones seen in humans was discovered in chimpanzees in 1999, although it’s still unclear when exactly it jumped to humans. It’s still uncertain where Ebola or Lyme disease truly came from—and we may never know. But what we do know is that they almost certainly did not come from a U.S. government lab.
But, of course, sometimes governments do experiment on unwitting civilians. Sometimes viruses do escape from labs.
Yet although lab spillovers do happen, the vast majority are rapidly contained. Instances of serious outbreaks caused by malice or incompetence are vanishingly rare. One of the only known examples dates back to 1977, when a previously eliminated strain of H1N1 reemerged, likely as the result of a Soviet live vaccine program gone awry.
Given that history, it was no surprise that theories around COVID-19’s supposed lab origins emerged. But this time around, it’s not just idle speculation. It’s being taken as a serious possibility by some of the highest levels of the U.S. government—and by media keen for a new narrative.
When COVID-19 was first detected in December 2019, the Chinese government responded in its usual fashion: with repression and secrecy. Weeks of cover-up suddenly switched to countrywide containment. The ham-fisted attempt at secrecy raised the question: What else were they hiding?
It didn’t take long for online sleuths to hold up a compelling piece of evidence: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same one that had helped identify the likely origin of SARS, was just about 9 miles from the first reported outbreak.
In January 2020, the theory began on the fringes, with allegations of a secretive bioweapons program. Within weeks, the theory had broken loose on a network of shady and disreputable websites armed with little more than questions and supposition. The mainstream media’s silence, they said, was evidence of their complicity. They latched on to crumbs of evidence emerging in the early bedlam of the global pandemic, like a paper, later withdrawn, suggesting HIV genes had been inserted in the virus.
Then, the theory found a powerful constituent. Fox News reported in April 2020 of “increasing confidence” in the U.S. intelligence community around the idea that the virus came from the Wuhan lab—maybe not as a biological weapon, but as the result of an accidental leak. Then-President Donald Trump, in response to the news network, coyly endorsed the theory.
By that May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was promising “conclusive” evidence to back up the hypothesis.
That conclusive evidence didn’t materialize: Instead, there were dodgydossiers and yet more sources talking up an “agreement” among “most of” America’s 17 intelligence agencies around the lab leak theory. (The Times would later report that then-Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger had endorsed the lab leak theory early on and had been pressing intelligence agencies to back him up.)
But while the theory was reported, many media outlets also dismissed it as conspiracy mongering. The possibility of a routine lab accident became caught up in the theories about bioweapons and germ warfare. Scientists were keen to focus debate on how to deal with the pandemic, not a geopolitical fracas.
Some circumstantial evidence emerged to support the theory, such as State Department cables reporting security issues at the Wuhan lab from 2018—although the full cable was less dramatic than the headlines about it. Big claims by the proponents didn’t pan out, however. Not one other country from the Five Eyes intelligence community backed up the claim that certainty was mounting—Australia even contradicted it outright, as did other parts of the U.S. intelligence community.
But as the Trump administration was collapsing, its former members saw pushing the theory as a path to future credibility.
In late December 2020, Pottinger popped up again in the British press, after telling Conservative members of Parliament that “there is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus.” One Tory MP reported Pottinger had said a Chinese whistleblower was providing the U.S. government with evidence for the theory.
A “fact sheet” from Pompeo’s State Department from around that time was simultaneously more ambiguous than Pompeo had been, acknowledging that it was indeterminate whether the virus’s origins were natural or accidental, and more conclusive, reporting that “several researchers inside the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
The article then lays out all the recent speculation. You can click over to the article to go deeply into it …
But it’s a mirage. Despite proclamations to the contrary, there has been scant new, hard evidence pointing to the lab leak theory. What we have are the same conclusions drawn from China’s malign incompetence, the same pieces of circumstantial evidence, and a speculative theory.
None of this means a lab leak is impossible. But the “growing evidence” simply isn’t there.
“I don’t think that we’ve learned anything new in the last few months,” said Stephen Goldstein, who studies evolutionary virology at the University of Utah.
“We’re completely in want of evidence.”
To date, there are few—perhaps just a couple—peer-reviewed papers seriously entertaining the lab leak idea. Meanwhile, there have been numerous credible studies pointing to COVID-19’s natural origins. An exhaustive study published in Nature in March 2020 found “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” The paper’s author Kristian G. Andersen said in a statement that the conclusions in the paper “have only since been further strengthened by additional evidence, of which there is a great deal.”
One of the most effective parts of the lab leak theory is not the quality of evidence but the quantity. Bits and pieces are fired out at a rapid pace, some of them even contradicting each other, before they can be adequately discussed or broken down.
Take the report of the sick lab workers: “What does it mean that three people, out of a large research staff, were sick with flu-like symptoms in flu season?” Goldstein said. Snappy headlines highlighting that the workers “sought hospital care” fall apart when the context is considered; in China, primary care is largely delivered through hospitals, and sick notes are compulsory for time off. Visiting a hospital in Wuhan was the equivalent of a trip to the doctor’s office in the United States.
Cheryl Rofer spent 35 years as a chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and specializes in arms control. She spent years handling plutonium in tightly controlled and highly secretive lab environments. “If these people became ill while working on a weapons program, or gain-of-function research, or anything like that—they would not go to a hospital,” she said.
Even the damning coincidence of the lab’s proximity to the outbreak is weak. It’s not certain that Wuhan was the origin of the virus, rather than simply where it happened to first be detected. As with SARS, the virus may have originated hundreds of miles away and gone unnoticed amid China’s underdeveloped rural medical system even when it jumped to humans. How SARS spread in 2003 makes a mockery of Wade’s claim that the distance involved is implausible.
Recently, the Daily Mail and New York Post trumpeted an “explosive” new study that supposedly offered firm proof that the COVID-19 virus was man-made. One of the paper’s authors told the Mail that four positively charged amino acids in the virus’s genetic makeup were the key evidence: “The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,” the author told the British paper.
Scientists wasted no time shredding the idea. One, calling it “unbelievable bullshit,” pointed out that a third of the proteins in the human body carry that characteristic. As another noted, “even man-made things must obey the laws of physics.”
“It has gotten utterly crazy,” Rofer said. “Even intelligent people are just losing it.”
Claims about the intelligence community’s conclusions must be viewed with a careful and cynical eye as well. U.S. intelligence contains a huge range of agencies—some with much better hit rates than others, and none of them geared toward answering complicated scientific questions. An exhaustive Vanity Fair feature, digging into the intelligence community’s inquiries—or lack thereof—provides much fanfare to the same meager pieces of evidence offered by Baker and Wade. The story provides the backstory to Pompeo’s brash claims of “enormous” evidence for the lab leak. The story reveals that a team inside the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance had doggedly pursued the theory as recently as this January. The feature alleges that Christopher Ford, then the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, was “so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance.”
In a lengthy rebuttal, Ford notes that he actually supported the lab leak theory—his main crime, it seems, was insisting that the conclusion that COVID-19 was a lab leak be put to independent experts. When those independent experts got a look at the State Department’s analysis, he wrote in an email at the time, they found it rested on a single statistical analysis prepared by one scientist “a pathologist, rather than a virologist, epidemiologist, or infectious disease modeler” without expertise in that type of modeling. The “statistical case seems notably weak,” Ford wrote.
CNN reported similar problems: “The way they did their work was suspicious as hell,” one source told the network, adding that “it smelled like they were just fishing to justify predetermined conclusions and cut out experts who could critique their ‘science.’”
Imagine that. There’s a lot more about the ways in which these theories are super thin and where the current science is. He concludes:
Were some people, myself included, too glibly dismissive of the lab leak theory early on? Can a theory be right even when it’s pushed by bad actors for political ends and crank theorists? Sure. But that doesn’t mean the possibility wasn’t being actively explored. It was. There was not a conspiracy to silence research or speculation about the Wuhan lab.
Yet even after more than a year of study, the odds that the lab leak theory is correct remain roughly the same as when it was reported on a year ago—it’s theoretically possible but far less likely than zoonotic origin.
The origin of this virus matters. Yes, if Beijing is culpable for the origin of the novel coronavirus it merits repercussions—and even if it is not, China still needs to be held accountable for its obfuscation.
If the caves of Yunnan and the surrounding ecosystem gave us two highly infectious coronaviruses in two decades, there is no telling when the next such coronavirus could emerge—or from where.
If the COVID-19 virus, as previous viruses have done, hopped between various animals, perfecting its ability to infect humans along the way, it’s another indicator of how humanity’s intrusions into wilderness are unearthing new pathogens at a worryingly fast rate. That requires a substantial rethink of how we settle the Earth and how we manage wild nature.
That, of course, is a more unsettling prospect than simply blaming Beijing.
Discovering, with absolute certainty, the exact origin of COVID-19 may be impossible. But it is crucial that we let science, not hype or anxiety, determine the possible scenarios.
Those are all highlights that I pulled out, probably without the necessary scientific knowledge to know what’s truly important. I urge you to read the whole thing. But I think the opening is what’s really relevant. Pandemics always spur conspiracy theories and people always have their reasons for buying into them.
Skepticism or maybe more importantly, agnosticism is the smart way to deal with this. People who know a lot more than the rest of us are not in agreement about this. And they may never be.
Vladimir Putin said today, in so many words, that America is a violent hellhole and frankly, it’s hard to argue with that. (Not that Russia is any better in its own way, of course.) But our gun violence problem is insane as this awful story illustrates:
A fight between two groups of people on Sixth Street in Downtown Austin led to a mass shooting that hurt more than a dozen people and ended up killing one tourist from New York, according to an affidavit obtained by KVUE.
According to the affidavit obtained by KVUE and Austin American-Statesman’s Tony Plohetski, it all started when two groups of people who knew each other from middle school saw each other in the entertainment district.
According to the affidavit, a person, identified only as a juvenile, was with a group of his friends when he saw Tabb and “his crew” walking by. The two groups were outside a bar in the 400 block of E. Sixth St.
The juvenile said he’s known Tabb for several years, since middle school.
The juvenile said that Tabb had recently shot him in the leg in Killeen, Texas. According to the affidavit, there is a Killeen police report detailing that shooting.
When the juvenile saw Tabb walking by, the juvenile told police that Tabb said, “What y’all wanna do? Y’all wanna fight?”
“It’s whatever,” one of the juveniles responded, according to the affidavit.
Tabb then allegedly pulled out a gun from his waistband as the juveniles started to run away. The juveniles said they could hear gunshots behind them.
Another witness to the shooting said she saw one of the juveniles pull out a gun in response to Tabb showing his gun. That juvenile told police that he shot back “for their own protection,” the affidavit said.
Investigators found eight shell casings in front of the bar. The shell casings appeared to be fired from the same gun.
Tabb is currently charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
No, Joe Biden hasn’t poisoned the leader of his opposition and our system, while creaky, is still at least somewhat upholding democracy. But this gun violence is unique among developed countries. It is horrific — and inexcusable.
So, it appears that America now has two leaders. One is overseas handling foreign policy. The other is in Washington speaking with high level campaign donors about what he plans to do about the peasants.
The remarks were given on a Zoom teleconference session that was obtained by The Intercept.
The meeting was hosted by the group No Labels, a big money operation co-founded by former Sen. Joe Lieberman that funnels high-net-worth donor money to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans. Among the gathering’s newsworthy revelations: Manchin described an openness to filibuster reform at odds with his most recent position that will buoy some Democrats’ hopes for enacting their agenda.Join Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you.I’m in
The call included several billionaire investors and corporate executives, among them Louis Bacon, chief executive of Moore Capital Management; Kenneth D. Tuchman, founder of global outsourcing company TeleTech; and Howard Marks, the head of Oaktree Capital, one of the largest private equity firms in the country. The Zoom participant log included a dial-in from Tudor Investment Corporation, the hedge fund founded by billionaire Paul Tudor Jones. Also present was a roster of heavy-hitting political influencers, including Republican consultant Ron Christie and Lieberman, who serves as a representative of No Labels and now advises corporate interests.
The meeting was led by Nancy Jacobson, the co-founder of No Labels.
The wide-ranging conversation went into depth on the fate of the filibuster, infrastructure negotiations, and the failed effort to create a bipartisan commission to explore the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, and offers a frank glimpse into the thinking of the conservative Democrat who holds the party’s fate in his hands.
Manchin told the assembled donors that he needed help flipping a handful of Republicans from no to yes on the January 6 commission in order to strip the “far left” of their best argument against the filibuster. The filibuster is a critical priority for the donors on the call, as it bottles up progressive legislation that would hit their bottom lines.
When it came to Sen. Roy Blunt, a moderate Missouri Republican who voted no on the commission, Manchin offered a creative solution. “Roy Blunt is a great, just a good friend of mine, a great guy,” Manchin said. “Roy is retiring. If some of you all who might be working with Roy in his next life could tell him, that’d be nice and it’d help our country. That would be very good to get him to change his vote. And we’re going to have another vote on this thing. That’ll give me one more shot at it.”“Roy is retiring. If some of you all who might be working with Roy in his next life could tell him, that’d be nice and it’d help our country.”
Regarding Blunt, Manchin appears to be suggesting — without, perhaps, quite explicitly saying so — that the wealthy executives on the call could dangle future financial opportunities in front of the outgoing senator while lobbying him to change his vote. Senate ethics rules forbid future job negotiations if they create a conflict of interest or present even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Manchin, notably, doesn’t suggest that the donors discuss a job, but rather says that people who Blunt may later be working with would be likely to have significant influence, reflective of the way future job prospects can shape the legislative process even when unspoken.
The commission, Manchin tells No Labels, is important in its own right, necessary to determine how security failed and what former President Donald Trump’s role was in the riot, if any. But it’s also critical to maintaining support for the filibuster. The January 6 commission got 56 votes, four short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster — a thorough embarrassment for those like Manchin who claim bipartisanship is still possible in the divided Senate chamber.
Manchin told the donors he hoped to make another run at it to prove that comity is not lost. He noted that Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican who missed the vote, would have voted for it had he been there, meaning only three more votes are needed. “What I’m asking for, I need to go back, I need to find three more Republican, good Republican senators that will vote for the commission. So at least we can tamp down where people say, ‘Well, Republicans won’t even do the simple lift, common sense of basically voting to do a commission that was truly bipartisan.’ It just really emboldens the far left saying, ‘I told you, how’s that bipartisan working for you now, Joe?’”
Note that the entire focus is on “the far left.” No mention of the entire GOP establishment other than the small handful of retiring Senators who needs a little nudge in the wallet to do the right thing. Just straight up graft:
During the Zoom event, Manchin’s Senate office appeared in the background. It is against campaign finance ethics rules to solicit funds while in a federal building, but Manchin did no solicitation beyond the broad suggestion that donors help out Republicans who switch their votes on the commission. Rather, the group talked openly about how much money it planned to raise, and how — and on whom — it would spend that cash.
Sam Runyon, a spokesperson for Manchin, said that the meeting was not a fundraiser. “Senator Manchin was discussing the issue of money in politics and the impact campaign donations have on Senators and members of Congress. He was not soliciting donations for himself or anyone else,” Runyon told The Intercept.
Manchin says he might do something with the filibuster despite his Shermanesque pub lic statements about it:
THE GROUP IS passionately supportive of the filibuster, and when multiple donors quizzed Manchin on his stance on it, the senator displayed an openness to reform that is at odds with his latest public statements.
Last spring, he said that he could be supportive of a “talking filibuster” that required the minority to hold the floor, rather than putting the onus on the majority. After an uproar from Republicans, he penned a Washington Post op-ed saying that he would not “weaken or eliminate” the filibuster, which optimists noted left room for reforms that strengthened it in spirit, by forcing more bipartisanship.
In June, he told CNN, when asked if he was committed to maintaining the 60-vote threshold, that he wanted to “make the Senate work,” a sentiment he repeated each time he was pressed. Once again, he followed it up with an op-ed, this time in the local Charleston Gazette-Mail, saying that he had no intention of weakening the filibuster.
Manchin’s openness for filibuster reform on the call is notable given it flew in the face of many attendees’ hopes. Asked about a proposal to lower the threshold to beat back a filibuster to 55 votes, he said that it was something he was considering, but then quickly referred back to his earlier idea of forcing the minority to show up on the Senate floor in large enough numbers to maintain a filibuster.
“That’s that’s one of many good, good suggestions I’ve had,” he said of lowering the cloture total from 60 to 55. Manchin went on to discuss the last time the cloture threshold was lowered, in the 1970s.
“I looked back … when it went from 67 votes to 60 votes, and also what was happening, what made them think that it needed to change. So I’m open to looking at it, I’m just not open to getting rid of the filibuster, that’s all,” he said.“60 is where I planted my flag, but as long as they know that I’m going to protect this filibuster, we’re looking at good solutions.”
Manchin acknowledged that publicly he had drawn a line at 60, but said that he was open to other ideas. “Right now, 60 is where I planted my flag, but as long as they know that I’m going to protect this filibuster, we’re looking at good solutions,” he said. “I think, basically, it should be [that] 41 people have to force the issue versus the 60 that we need in the affirmative. So find 41 in the negative. … I think one little change that could be made right now is basically anyone who wants to filibuster ought to be required to go to the floor and basically state your objection and why you’re filibustering and also state what you think needs to change that’d fix it, so you would support it. To me, that’s pretty constructive.”
I guess that’s good. But I’ll believe it when I see it. This guy is being spun like a top by Mitch McConnell and I find it very hard to believe he’s going to do anything “constructive.”
As an example, Manchin said that he was prepared to specify his objections to S. 1, the For the People Act. In the voting rights and democracy reform bill, he said, he opposed automatic voter registration because some rural voting locations don’t have internet access to check a voter’s eligibility. He also opposed a provision in the bill that restricted a state’s ability to purge voter rolls, which he said would make the rolls less reliable. And he expressed reservations related to some of the campaign finance reform provisions, arguing they needed to apply equally to labor and business.
“I’m telling you why I’m against something. So I’m going to send to [No Labels leaders] Margaret [White] and to Nancy [Jacobson], everybody on the voting thing, what I support, and the voting changes that need to be made and what I oppose in S. 1. So at least I’m saying I’m against it for this reason, and here’s the things I think can make a piece of legislation better. I think we all should do that. We should be responsible for that,” he said.
Those specific objections, notably, were absent from a second Charleston Gazette-Mail opinion column written by Manchin last week, stating his opposition to the For the People Act. In the piece, Manchin argued that the bill was done in a “partisan manner” and that he objected to such a sweeping bill that is “solely supported by one party.”
The column made no mention of Manchin’s specific concerns about preserving the ability to purge voter rolls and same-day registration — the objections that were given to No Labels and its audience of wealthy donors.
Click over to the main article to see all the discussion about campaign money in S.1, which is what all this is really about for these people. Some participants actually seemed to admit to breaking campaign finance laws on behalf of centrists in the last election which nobody will ever do anything about so … whatever.
They also bragged about coordinating with the Chamber of Commerce to leverage votes for big money interests. As for infrastructure:
Manchin talked at length about paring back the initiative and bringing Republicans on board. He also zeroed in on the energy-related provisions, including opposition to direct funds for electric vehicle charging locations and the need to finance carbon sequestration plants to enhance coal-fired power plants.
“I’m not going to sign off on reconciliation, giving up on bipartisanship until you give it a try,” said Manchin, eschewing the procedural motion that would allow Democrats to pass the infrastructure legislation without any Republican votes.
Imagine that. The domestic leader from a coal state nixing the urgent need for green infrastructure.
White, the No Labels co-executive director, said in her statement to The Intercept that thinking of those in attendance as peddling influence misunderstood the situation. “No Labels believes America urgently needs a two-party infrastructure solution,” she said. “Senator Manchin has been courageously working to forge such an agreement and he was briefing a group of our supporters on progress with his colleagues in both parties. Our community from all over the country would likely not be recognized or understood by Beltway reporters or influence peddlers.”
They are recognized as exactly what they are: wealthy special interests being extorted by a US Senator to pay up. I guess that’s just how it works.
Maybe Manchin will prevail in getting his buddies on the other side handsomely paid off and we can get a January 6th commission and some puny infrastructure or voting bills. This would be better than nothing. But I doubt very much that Manchin will get what he wants. McConnell has way more juice when it comes to payoffs and he also has a very big orange stick names Donald Trump ready to make any Republican a toxic figure if they vote with the Democrats. I’m betting on the Grim Reaper — but hoping to be wrong.
Putin says he and Biden agreed to the return of their respective ambassadors
Putin on summit with Biden: "I think both sides manifested a determination to try and understand each other and try and converge our positions. I think it was very constructive."
Putin's line on Navalny is basically that he deserves what he gets
Putin commends Biden as "a very experienced politician," but then denigrates his leadership by trying to blame him for America's gun violence problem
Wow. An ABC reporter is called upon for a question, tells Putin, "the list of your political opponents who are dead, imprisoned, or jailed is long," and asks, "what are you so afraid of?" Putin doesn't exactly reject the premise of her question.
"You didn't answer my question, sir. If all of your political opponents are dead, in prison, poisoned, doesn't that send a message that you do not want a fair political fight?"
Putin responds to this question by bringing up the January 6 insurrection.
Putin says Biden didn't invite him to the White House but then offers praise for the quality of his character
"There is no happiness in life, there is only a mirage on the horizon" — Putin
A reporter congratulates Putin for Russia's win over Finland in Euro 2020
Asked about the unpredictability of Russian politics and how that impacts relations with the west, Putin puts on a master class in whataboutism
BIDEN:
Biden: "I told President Putin my agenda is not against Russia or anyone else. It's for the American people … I also told him that no President of the United States could keep faith with the American people if they did not speak out to defend our democratic values."
Biden mentions Navalny, then says "we'll continue to raise issue of fundamental human rights, because that's what we are. That's who we are … We haven't lived up to it completely, but we've always widened the arc."
Biden says he pressed Putin on the principle that critical infrastructure should be off limits to cyberattack, adds, "responsible countries need to take action against criminals who conduct ransomware activities on their territory."
Biden catches himself confusing Putin with Trump
Biden on Russia: "They are not able to dictate what happens in the world. There are other nations of significant consequence, i.e., the United States of America being one of them."
Asked what will happen if Navalny dies, Biden says, "I made it clear to [Putin] that the consequences of that would be devastating for Russia … it's about trust. It's about the ability to influence other nations in a positive way."
Good thing Biden clarified he was joking here
"We just talked about basic, fundamental things … there were no threats … just letting [Putin] know where I stood" — Biden
"That's a ridiculous comparison" — Biden on Putin's equivalence between Black Lives Matter in the US and the opposition in Russia
Biden on if he senses that Putin wants to improve freedom of the press in Russia: "I wouldn't put it that way."
President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin just met for their first summit since Biden was sworn in. They’ve known each other for years and there are many stories about their frosty interactions in the past. But hopefully, there will be something of a proverbial “reset” between the two countries coming out of this meeting after the disastrous embarrassment of the Trump years.
Back at home, however, we are very much haunted by the ghosts of old troubles. There used to be a quaint old tradition of members of outgoing administrations keeping quiet for a period of time to allow the new regime to set their own policies and establish their own relationships with foreign leaders. Needless to say, like all other norms and traditions, that one has been chucked in the garbage can and Trump and his top henchmen are all screaming that Biden has already failed.
On Tuesday, Trump issued one of his usual statesmanlike press releases in which he reminisced about his “great” meeting in Helsinki and admitted that he trusted the Russian government more than the “lowlives” who worked in US Intelligence:
Fiona Hill on Helsinki: I had exactly the same feeling that Deborah Birx had during the infamous press conference where there was the suggestion by President Trump about injecting bleach… It was mortifying frankly and humiliating for the country pic.twitter.com/JPNwbQmHdF
Trump’s closest Senate ally, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, delivered a headache-inducing spin on Fox News accusing Biden of appeasement telling Sean Hannity that “the liberals believe that we’re the problem, not Russia” and exhorting him to threaten Putin:
“We need to go on the offense. We’ve lost deterrence when it comes to the Biden administration, and we’ve lost respect. Our allies no longer respect us. Our enemies are not deterred by the president and his administration. He needs to tell Putin, ‘If there’s another cyberattack in America coming from Russian soil, you’re going to pay a price.'”
Are you feeling just a little bit disoriented reading that? It’s like a dispatch from Bizarro World. Graham’s comments are absurd, of course, and only on Fox News would they be met with anything but shock or hysterical laughter.
Trump’s behavior toward Putin was one of the most surreal and suspicious relationships between an American president and a foreign leader in American history and all you have to do is look at his statement from this week to be reminded of it. (Too bad Democrats in Congress are in such a rush to forget it.)
While Graham is just a sad toady to the president in exile now, he’s not alone.
No Trump henchman has been out there criticizing and gaslighting more than former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. As a paid Fox News contributor he’s been all over the network in recent days but he’s very obviously preparing his run for the 2024 election with appearances in early primary states. And his interpretation of the Trump national security and foreign policy “achievements” is just as deluded as Graham’s. In a scathing op-ed at the Fox News website, Pompeo wrote:
Biden has already signaled to Putin that he is timid and unprepared to confront the Russian challenge – a weakness that ex-KGB agent Putin surely senses. We in the Trump administration created real leverage against Russia he could have used. Instead, he has chosen to abandon it,
He claims that Biden’s belief that climate change is the greatest threat to our survival is a “ridiculous mindset – one apparently shared by what are supposed to be some of America’s most gifted military leaders” and says that Biden must tell Putin that he sees Russian aggression “in the highest echelon of threats” and will “support our armed forces in deterring it.” And he said that Biden really needs to crack down on all the cyberattacks and advised him to “put America first and back up your language with real deeds and not just rhetoric and name calling you’re exceedingly more likely to be successful.” Seriously.
This is coming from the man who loyally served the Putin genuflecting Donald Trump as CIA Director and Secretary of State for four years as Trump traipsed all over the world cuddling up to every tyrant he could find, excusing any and all bad behavior (other than trade infractions which he dealt with with a wrecking ball).
Even some Fox News journalists have been nonplussed by Pompeo’s whitewashing of the past. Sunday host Chris Wallace pointed out that Trump never condemned the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexy Navalny and Pompeo laughably replied “with respect to human rights, I — we take a backseat to no one.” That has to be the most fatuous comment he’s ever made and that’s saying something. There are dozens of examples of Trump’s grotesque dismissal of human rights all over the world and here in the U.S. by the Trump administration. He pardoned war criminals and made them into heroes, he celebrated the use of torture and pledged to do it again “only worse” if needed. But perhaps the most egregious was Trump’s admission to Bob Woodward that he helped to cover up the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi:
“I saved his [Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s] ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”
Pompeo went along with all of it. There is no question that Pompeo eagerly did Trump’s bidding while laying the groundwork for his own run at the presidency. (Recall that one of the many scandals of the administration was Pompeo and his wife’s extravagant taxpayer-funded “salons” at the State Department with lots of influential political benefactors.)
In fact, his weird mischaracterization of the last administration as a hawkish aggressor that dominated Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and gained massive respect from America’s allies for his (and Trump’s) adroit global leadership is obviously how he plans to present himself to the voters. He’s going to be Trump but a lot more warmongery. He’s already going all over the country, ostensibly to help with midterms but he’s actually collecting chits for his own run. He’s even ventured into the culture wars, making silly comments like “I met with the Taliban, I met with Chairman Kim. None of that scares me as much as what’s happening in our universities and on our campuses today.”
This week he announced that he’s starting a new PAC which caused quite a kerfuffle on social media:
Calling all unapologetic Americans to join me and become a Pipehitter. https://t.co/KO15jutDPi
Many people may think “pipehitter” refers to someone who smokes crack, so it’s a good thing they explained it.
This definition is a Navy Seal thing that Pompeo is clearly using to boost his cred with the far-right gun and camo crowd. (He went to West Point but he got out of the service very quickly.) He may run into some trouble with that name, however. It’s also the name of accused war criminal Eddie Gallagher’s foundation. For his sake, I hope they worked that out ahead of time.
You have to wonder if he’s discussed his presidential plans with Trump as well. If not, he’d better tread carefully. You know his old boss is watching all these maneuvers with interest. Despite Pompeo’s monster ego, being Donald Trump’s loyal servant is really all he has going for him. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t realize that.
Much of the effort to address far-right extremism in this country has gone toward identifying and preempting violent plots. Too little is being done either to de-radicalize right-wing lunacy that is now “post-organizational” and “characterized by fluid online boundaries and a breakdown of formal groups and movement” and or to head off radicalization.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) writes at The Atlantic:
To fight this amorphous kind of radicalization, the federal government needs to see the problem as a whole-of-society, public-health issue. It needs to, for example, beef up security at the U.S. Capitol, but also put the same kind of effort and money into preventing radicalization years before anyone would ever think to mobilize in Washington, D.C.
Right-wing radicalization is essentially a public health problem, and our government is not well set-up for addressing those, especially mental health problems.
That does not make it impossible. Norway and New Zealand launched national action plans after major terrorist attacks there, and committed significant funds to them:
The German government introduced new legislation last year devoting more than 1 billion euros to address both racism and right-wing extremism. Initiatives are coordinated across seven different federal agencies. This adds to an already robust set of prevention programs running in local soccer clubs, theater and arts programs, and religious groups. Every city or region has a mobile advisory center, independent from law enforcement, that provides assessments and advice to any group or individual concerned about radicalization.
"Extremist militias and violent white supremacists are the top domestic threat that America faces right now." That's according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has rolled out a plan to combat domestic terrorism in the Untied States. pic.twitter.com/ugMBNOhxpk
It is not that the United States has done nothing, writes Miller-Idriss. But the amounts spent are in the range of $20 million in a country many times the size of our allies. Yet, she notes, a study of 750 parents and caregivers indicated “only seven minutes of reading to improve their understanding of how radical ideas spread online.” Recognizing the warning signs is a teachable skill.
For this approach to work, though, local communities need funding, innovative ideas, and evidence-based models for programming. Federal support is key to all of that. But until the federal government recognizes that extremism is a public-health issue that needs to be fought locally, in a holistic way, our country will struggle to fight today’s battle against extremism with the tools from yesterday’s crisis.
Let’s not point fingers, but for all their hands-over-their-hearts, pocket-Constitution-carrying, misty-eyed Americanity, there are certain of our neighbors who are just not comfortable with democracy. With one-person, one-vote. With freedom of speech and religion that is not theirs. With facts that do not support their preferred view of the world. With not being in control. Galileo Galilei knew a few. As Jesus said about the poor, they will be with us always.
The word democracy does not itself appear in the U.S. Constitution and Amendments. The words vote, elect, election, majority and their variants, however, appear dozens of times. Majority alone appears 14 times. Democracy — people vote; the majority wins, others lose — was baked into how this country of, by, and for the people governs itself from its founding. Colonists soundly renounced rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. English landed gentry, anyway.
So in case you missed this (I did), days ago Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, had this to say to the New York Times about that founding principle:
“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” Mr. Paul said. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”
Actually, that’s why the Constitution and Amendments exist: to safeguard people’s right to self-govern via their right to vote. Jim Crow laws appeared in Southern states where a corrupt faction managed to strip or intimidate a large swath of eligible fellow citizens of their ability to participate in American democracy for one hundred years. Prohibition lasted far less time.
“One of the edifying side effects of the Trump era has been that, by making democracy the explicit subject of political debate, it has revealed the stark fact many influential conservatives do not believe in it,” writes Jonathan Chait. “Mike Lee blurted out last fall that he opposes ‘rank democracy.'” Paul denies democracy is a foundational American concept. As does former President Donald Trump and his MAGA cult. That cult has expanded to assimilate the Republican party almost in its entirety.
The belief system Paul is endorsing contains a few related claims. First, the Founders explicitly and properly rejected majoritarianism. (Their favorite shorthand is “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”) Second, to the extent the current system has shortcomings, they reveal the ignorance of the majority and hence underscore the necessity of limiting democracy. Third, slavery and Jim Crow are the best historical examples of democracy run amok.
National Review has consistently advocated this worldview since its founding years, when it used these ideas to oppose civil-rights laws, and has persisted in using these ideas to argue for restrictions on the franchise. “Was ‘democracy’ good when it empowered slave owners and Jim Crow racists?,” asked NR’s David Harsanyi. Majority rule “sounds like a wonderful thing … if you haven’t met the average American voter,” argued NR’s Kevin Williamson, rebutting the horrifying ideal of majority rule with the knock-down argument: “If we’d had a fair and open national plebiscite about slavery on December 6, 1865, slavery would have won in a landslide.”
It is important to understand that these conservatives have taken Trump’s election, and escalating threats to democracy, not as a challenge to their worldview but as confirmation of it. If Trump is threatening democracy, this merely proves that the people who elected him are ignorant and therefore unfit to rule. The attempted coup of January 6, another NRcolumn sermonized, ought to “remind us of the wisdom that the Founders held dear centuries ago: We are a republic, not a direct democracy, and we’d best act like it.”
These people are royalists, not Americans, and we’d best treat them as the enemies of democracy they are.
