In February this year I was asked by friends – who mistook my interest in war and foreign policy for expertise – whether Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine. No, I told them. This build-up was just posturing, precisely as there had been for years by that stage.
Yet, quite soon after this I woke up to see that Russian armoured columns were streaming into Ukraine. And that centrist and Tory Russophobes and hawks were claiming that they were right all along to hype the threat of Russia. A first to be sure, though more by luck than judgement. A broken clock is right twice day after all.
Add to this unpredictability the fact that anti-war voices are attacked by the powerful, and we’re faced with a dangerous climate.
Great Powers
What is clear is that, since February 2022, much has changed in terms of the rivalry between the Great Powers. Today, anything could happen – and US speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on 2 August seems to highlight this.
Only minutes after Pelosi landed, China announced it would start live fire drills close to Taiwan, which it historically claims as its own territory.
By law, the U.S. is obligated to provide Taiwan with weapons and services. But the U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” keeps open the question of whether it would intervene in the case of a military invasion by China.
Yet in these conflicted times, where assumptions – including my own – have been up-ended, it’s hard to even guess at the future.
Misdirection
Meanwhile in the UK, the few prominent voices for peace are mocked by the self appointed ‘adults in the room’:
This is beyond reprehensible. What is it about the far left and the far right that makes them such push overs when it comes to Russia and other autocracies? Is it stupidity, is it a blind hatred of western liberal democracy? Either way.. know it when you see it and fight it. https://t.co/PNMLw7XDL0
This being despite none other than Tony Blair, whose politics closely align with Farron’s, making almost identical arguments:
Wild that the people tearing their own hair out about Jeremy Corbyn calling for a negotiated peace in Ukraine were utterly silent about Blair saying the same thing. https://t.co/KbpxK0VsKy
— Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives (@darren_cullen) August 4, 2022
It also ignores the fact that Blair himself has a long history of taking pro-Putin positions:
A periodic reminder that the former Labour leader with actual connections to Putin is Tony Blair, not Jeremy Corbyn. pic.twitter.com/6bDnBtD7u4
The potential for an escalation with China can’t be ignored. This is a historical moment, as Ukraine shows, when events can run away from us. The West’s large-scale material support of Ukraine suggests that it might be hard to do the same in Taiwan if it were invaded in terms of resources – and we can’t predict if the US and UK will open up a proxy war on that front too.
Given these tensions, prominent voices for peace are more important than ever. However, they are coming under increasing pressure from both out-and-out hawks and misguided centrists who are more concerned with attacking the Left than ending wars.
The US government has been preparing for war with China over Taiwan. The extremely provocative trip by top official Nancy Pelosi was only the latest US escalation.
The Pentagon has made plans for war with China, top CIA officials openly call for fighting Beijing, and US troops are on the ground in Taipei.
Washington has sold Taiwan tens of billions of dollars worth of military equipment, and influential DC think tanks are even calling to send it nuclear weapons.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo in 1914 was an instructive lesson on how the dumb do, at some point, ask for it. Bosnia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was desired by the Kingdom of Serbia. With the Serbs also well represented in Bosnia, a visit by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was always to be tricky, if not downright foolish.
This was not all. Already unpopular, Ferdinand took his cue to visit on a day regarded with mournful reverence by Serbs: Vidovdan (or St. Vitus’ Day). In 1389 on that blood-inked day, the Serbs fought the Turks in the Battle of Kosovo with catastrophic losses. Myth and fact commingled, thereby producing legend.
Few security measures were taken for this provocative trip. The drive through Sarajevo was made in an open-topped car. In the ensuing farce that followed, the Archduke and his wife, the equally unpopular Countess Sophie, were clumsily, even miraculously butchered. The Serbian nationalist group, the Black Hand, was initially foiled. The lobbed hand grenade by Nedjelko Čabrinović failed to strike the intended target, injuring the occupants of the car behind.
Instead of lying low in humbled terror, the Archduke and his wife continued to the planned reception at City Hall. They then made themselves inviting targets by wishing to see members of the injured party in hospital. On the way to the hospital, the driver took the wrong turn, presenting Gavrilo Princip with a juicy target. The couple were shot and killed by a Browning pistol.
Riots and protests followed, with Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia on July 28. This set the trains of war in motion across Europe, leaving millions of dead and a continent primed for the next global conflict. The dumb had gotten a good number of Europe’s populace killed.
Like the doomed Archduke, Pelosi has shown, and continues to show, little awareness about what her trip to Taiwan entails. This is not a harmless visit to the village vicarage for a cup of a tea, or a casual stop by to see old chums. The Biden administration forgives it as an independent decision made by a person independent of government. This is a lawyer’s explanation and far from a good one, given Pelosi’s position as House Speaker. Should Biden shuffle off the mortal coil, she will find herself, after the hungry Vice President, second in line for the White House.
Pelosi has been merrily hawkish in stirring the PRC. “Our visit,” she tweeted, “reiterates that America stands with Taiwan: a robust, vibrant democracy and our important partner in the Indo-Pacific.” In travelling to the province, the Speaker was honouring a commitment to democracy, “reaffirming that the freedoms of Taiwan – and all democracies – must be respected.”
This is all a bit rum, given that Washington does not, in principle, recognise Taiwan’s independence. National Security coordinator John Kirby, back in Washington, reiterated the point in a press briefing. “We are clear that nothing has changed about our One China policy which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act. We do not support Taiwan’s independence.” The Biden administration continued to be “clear with the Chinese about where we stand on the issues and the One China policy and our support for a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Despite stating that position, Kirby was being decidedly two-faced about the Pelosi jaunt. President Joe Biden had noted in late July that the then rumoured trip was not prudent, at least in the mind of some voices in the Pentagon. “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.” He then went on to say that he knew “what the status of it is.”
Unfortunately for those outside the US, such a status is simply not clear. While Kirby did say that the President had “made clear that Congress is an independent branch of government and that Speaker Pelosi makes her own decisions, as other members of Congress do, about their overseas travel,” those unacquainted with the US political system will take no notice. The visitors are from the governing political party in Washington, which would normally suffice in most cases.
Nor should it be forgotten that Biden has taken three shots against the strategic ambiguity of the One China policy by suggesting at various points that US forces would be deployed in a battle over Taiwan. It was a point that has not escaped students of the field, and certainly not China’s President Xi Jinping. Pelosi’s visit will simply be seen as consistent with such a change, a blast of clarity when, before, there was ambiguity.
Rather than admitting this development, the Biden administration has hidden behind the trappings of US political protocol. Let Congress decide what it wants, and we will have our own policy. Focus, instead, on Beijing’s bad faith and refusal to understand. “We expect to see China use inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation in the coming days,” chirps Kirby. And not just that, given that China was “positioning itself to potentially take further steps in the coming days and, perhaps, over the long-time horizon.”
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi threatened ahead of the visit that US politicians who “play with fire” with respect to Taiwan would “come to no good end.” Officially, Beijing’s officials have warned of “serious consequences”. Spokesman Zhao Lijian’s warning came with a note of theatrical indignation: “If the US side is bent on going its own way, China will take strong measures to resolutely respond and counteract.” So far, Chinese war planes have flown close to the median line of the Taiwan Strait, while Beijing has imposed a number of import bans on select Taiwanese products.
The political arithmetic is clear. Pelosi’s arrival, along with a delegation from Congress, risks sparking a fourth Taiwan strait crisis. The locals, for the most part, showed little initial interest. There has been much chat about heatwaves, the usual celebrity gossip, and discussion about local elections.
But the arrival at Songshan airport of the most significant US political figure in years signalled something of a shift. Protesters gathered at the Grand Hyatt where she was due to stay, accusing Pelosi of being a warmonger. Other protesters preferred to vent their ire at the CCP itself. All it takes now is a bullet, a misfire, an accident, and the dumb will be dead, again, taking the rest of us along with them.
America’s Taiwan policy hasn’t changed much in the past 40 years. For many experts, that’s a good thing. They argue that Washington’s careful balancing act between Beijing and Taipei, enshrined in part in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, has kept tensions low and allowed Taiwan to transform from a notorious dictatorship into a full-fledged democracy.
But Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) aren’t satisfied with the status quo. The pair recently introduced a bill, known as the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, that they touted as “the most comprehensive restructuring of U.S. policy towards Taiwan” since 1979. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Menendez chairs, is set to take up the proposal on Wednesday.
The Biden administration is turning up the heat against China yet again, as news leaks that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is traveling to Taiwan in August—another in a series of majorly escalatory acts.
Brian is joined by Dr. Ken Hammond, professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University, founding director of the Confucius Institute at New Mexico State University, and activist with Pivot to Peace.
China considers this belligerent approach as a threat to their stated One Country, Two Systems policy as well as a threat to the 1992 consensus. The two sides of the Taiwan Strait reached the consensus in 1992 that “both sides belong to one China and will work together toward national reunification”. It defines the fundamental nature of the cross-Strait relationship and lays the political foundation for its development.
Taiwan is being used as a casus belli (an act or an event that either provokes or is used to justify war) in the very same way that Ukraine was used and is currently used. A war of media, tremendous even brutal propaganda to their own citizens to paint the enemy as evil to justify their own actions, continual accusations using a human rights platform, and doubling down!
The House passed a bill on Thursday that is aimed at protecting access to contraception across the country in anticipation of a potential ruling from far right Supreme Court justices that could restrict contraceptive access.
The Right to Contraception Act passed on Thursday by a 228 to 195 vote. All Democrats and only eight Republicans voted in favor of the bill, while 195 Republicans voted against its passage.
Progressive lawmakers expressed horror that the vast majority of the Republican caucus voted against the bill. “19[5] Republicans in Congress don’t want you to have access to contraceptives. If they had the chance they would ban it,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) warned.
The bill, introduced last week by Rep. Kathy Manning (D-North Carolina), would establish a federal right to contraceptive access and would bar states from implementing laws that would restrict such a right. If those rights are violated, the Justice Department and health care providers can bring a state or government official attempting to restrict access to contraception to court.
A range of contraceptive methods, including birth control pills, IUDs and Plan B, would be protected under the bill.
The vote came before the Supreme Court reconvenes for its next session, during which Justice Clarence Thomas has warned that the Court’s Christofascist justices could take up a case challenging the right to contraception, which was established under Griswold v. Connecticut. Thomas also warned that the Court may soon revoke the established right to same sex marriage under Obergefell v. Hodges, and the right for same sex couples to engage in consensual sex, as afforded by Lawrence v. Texas.
The House also passed a bill this week that would federally protect the right to gay marriage and repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which established that the federal government can only recognize marriage between a man and a woman.
While Republican senators have said that the Respect for Marriage Act could have the votes to pass the Senate, it’s unclear if the Right to Contraception Act will have the same support. Opposing contraceptive access is such an extremist view that only a handful of countries still restrict access, and it’s unclear if there are any countries with all-out bans like the ones that some Republicans are suggesting.
“It is outrageous — we keep using that word — 60 years after Griswold was decided, 60 years after Griswold, women must again fight for our basic right to birth control against an extremist Republican Party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said on Wednesday in support of the Right to Contraception Act. “Let us be clear: We are not going back. For our daughters, or granddaughters, we are not going back.” Trans men and nonbinary people can also experience menstruation and pregnancy, and also benefit from contraception access.
Pelosi further said that Democrats are hoping to put Republicans on the record about whether or not they support contraceptive access. Some Republicans, in announcing their opposition to the bill, falsely claimed that it would fund abortions.
Revoking access to contraception would be nothing short of devastating. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found in surveys that over 72 million people rely on birth control, and nearly all people who can get pregnant use some form of contraception in their lifetimes.
Medication like hormonal contraceptives is not only crucial to preventing unwanted pregnancies — especially now, as states criminalize abortion seekers and providers — but also to help tame menstrual symptoms, treat conditions like endometriosis and even reduce the risk of endometrial, ovarian and colorectal cancers. If access to contraception were curtailed, it could havewide-reaching and disastrous consequences for the public’s mental and physical health and could deepen wealth inequalities for people who have the ability to get pregnant, sending the country back generations.
In the few countrieswhere contraceptive access is restricted, either by law or due to poverty, people who experience unwanted pregnancy are much more likely to experience poverty or have their career prospects greatly decreased. Fields that require an advanced degree like scientific research, medicine and law also become much more dominated by cisgender men.
The Senate passed a compromise gun reform bill on Thursday night, after weeks of negotiation between Democrats and Republicans in response to a surge in mass shootings throughout the country.
The bill is a far cry from what gun reform advocates have been calling for, as it doesn’t address the root causes of the U.S.’s gun violence epidemic, including the deep-pocketed and politically powerful gun lobby. But the bipartisan group of 20 senators — which includes 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans — still praised the legislation as being a worthwhile step forward.
“This bill is a compromise. It doesn’t do everything I want,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut). “But what we are doing will save thousands of lives without violating anyone’s Second Amendment rights.”
After the bill was passed in the Senate, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said that the House of Representatives would take up the legislation “first thing” Friday morning to ensure a quick passage in that chamber so that President Joe Biden can sign the bill into law.
Myriad polling data has demonstrated that the American public wants stricter standards enacted when it comes to who can purchase a weapon in the U.S. An Economist/YouGov poll published earlier this week, for example, found that 55 percent of Americans wanted stricter gun laws, while only 36 percent said that laws should be unchanged or made less strict.
Pressure for lawmakers to pass gun legislation intensified earlier this month following congressional testimony from victims of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, where 10 individuals were killed by a white supremacist at grocery store, and in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed by a gunman in an elementary school. Among those who testified to the House Oversight and Reform committee was Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grader who covered herself with the blood of a classmate and pretended to be dead in order to hide from the shooter in her school.
The Senate compromise bill would increase funding for mental health and school safety measures, and enhance background checks for gun purchases by those under the age of 21. It would also create incentives for states, through $750 million in federal funding, to implement “red flag laws,” which allow for guns to be temporarily taken away from individuals that judges deem to be a risk to themselves or others.
The new legislation would also close the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” restricting gun purchases for any person charged with domestic abuse. Currently, those convicted of domestic violence against their spouses, their live-in partners or those they co-parent with are restricted from buying guns, but individuals who have been convicted of domestic violence in relationships that don’t fit that criteria are unaffected.
Gun safety advocates have been critical about what’s not included in the Senate bill, noting that guns themselves are largely ignored. The bill does not include, for example, bans or restrictions on semi-automatic weapons or high-capacity magazines, both of which are commonly used in mass shootings.
Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has previously voiced concerns about whether the bill will be effective, due to its focus on bolstering law enforcement and increasing criminal punishment. “I am disappointed to hear a focus on increased criminalization and juvenile criminalization instead of having the focus on guns,” she said in a recent interview with CNN.
New polling finds that the vast majority of likely voters believes that members of Congress should be banned from trading stocks as legislation to implement such a ban has stalled in Congress.
About 70 percent of likely voters say that they support efforts to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, while 68 percent believe that lawmakers’ spouses should also be banned from the practice, the poll by Data for Progress finds, as first reported by Insider.
About half of the poll’s respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports a stock trading ban, with 50 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats in agreement. The poll was done on behalf of progressive anti-corruption group Stand Up America.
These findings are consistent with January polling from Data for Progress, in which 67 percent of respondents supported the ban, including a majority of Democratic, Republican and independent likely voters. Numerous polls conducted over the past year have similarly found that most Americans across the political spectrum agree that members of Congress should be barred from buying and selling stocks.
“Very little unifies the American public these days, but widespread national outrage at public corruption … comes close,” Brett Edkins, Stand Up America’s managing director for policy and political affairs, told Insider. “It’s an issue of democracy and fairness, and whether our representatives are working for us or for their bank accounts.”
The polling comes amid frustration that, despite momentum behind the idea earlier this year, negotiations over stock trading bans have been stalled indefinitely, while dozens of members of Congress continue to violate the current, relatively lax laws that were previously established by the STOCK Act. Although the STOCK Act is meant to prevent insider trading and increase transparency, members of Congress regularly violate reporting laws because the punishment for doing so is essentially a slap on the wrist.
Earlier this year, lawmakers introducedseveral bills that would ban members of Congress — and, in some cases, certain members of their families — from being able to trade individual stocks while members are in office.
The proposals varied in strictness, ranging from full divestment of individual stocks, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) suggested; or allowing members to continue owning stocks as long as they are put in a blind trust, as Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) put forth.
But, as of April, congressional Democrats hadn’t been able to meet an agreement over whether or not lawmakers should be allowed to put the stocks in a blind trust. Some anti-corruption groups have advised against the blind trust route, as lawmakers may still be regulating companies that they know are a major part of their stock portfolios, even if they aren’t able to see their portfolios in real time.
Democrats were also torn on whether or not lawmakers’ spouses or families should be included in the ban. Those who support including spouses in the ban sometimes point to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) husband, who owns millions of dollars in stocks and who beats the market at such a rate that other stock traders often mirror his stock trades in their own portfolios — perhaps because he knows more about regulations or market patterns due to his relationship with his wife.
In fact, it’s possible that Pelosi has been a major player in keeping legislation implementing a ban from coming to a vote. “I think that they’re trying to run out the clock,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia), a cosponsor of one of the stock trading bans introduced in Congress, told Insider in late May.
The legislation is “100 percent being stonewalled by anyone who has the ability to move it forward,” she said. While Spanberger didn’t name Pelosi directly, the speaker, who exercises control over what bills come to a vote in the House and when, has voiced opposition to the ban before.
In several midterm primaryraces across the United States, political organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party — including Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority PAC — are spending big to boost far-right Republican candidates in the hopes of securing more favorable general election matchups for Democrats.
What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, according to progressive critics who have warned in recent days that the strategy has a strong chance of backfiring horribly, potentially ushering into office extremist candidates who pose an even greater threat to democracy than the run-of-the-mill establishment Republican.
“On the one hand, they’re trying to motivate voters to come to the polls by raising legitimate concerns about what will happen to the country if Republicans retake power,”The New Republic’s Alex Shephardnotedin a column on Tuesday. “On the other, they’re working behind the scenes to elevate many of the most dangerous Republicans running for office right now. It’s untenable for Democrats to ally themselves with their own executioners.”
In Colorado’s newly created 8th Congressional District, the Pelosi-aligned House Majority PAC has spent tens of thousands of dollars on television and digital ads spotlighting the far-right record and policy positions of Weld County Commissioner Lori Saine, who is competing against three other Republicans in the June 28 primary for a spot in the U.S. House.
TheColoradoSunreportsthat while one of the Democratic-funded Saineadsis “framed as an attack on Saine, it also calls her a ‘conservative warrior’ and highlights her strident positions on abortion, immigration, and guns — stances that appeal to many Republicans.”
A new Democratic super PAC is alsorunning adscharacterizing Colorado state Rep. Ron Hanks — a far-right U.S. Senate candidate whoattendedthe rally and march that preceded the January 6 Capitol attack — as “one of the most conservative members in the statehouse,” a portrayal that’s likely to bolster his status among many GOP primary voters.
According to onerecent survey, just 21% of Republican voters believe President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was legitimate.
“The eleventh-dimensional chess-like thinking behind this spending is clear: The 2022 midterms will be tight, and boosting ultraconservatives more likely to alienate moderate voters might help Democrats in desperate need of a leg up,” Shephard wrote Tuesday. “And yet this elliptical strategy is also incredibly reckless given the increasingly authoritarian turn within the Republican Party.”
If extremist, election-denying Republicans win the races in which Democratic groups are intervening, added Shephard, “Democrats would have played a role — and perhaps a decisive one — in the ongoing MAGAfication of the Republican Party.”
As Audrey Fahlberg ofThe Dispatchreportedlast week, “Democrats are deploying similar tactics across the country and down the ballot.”
“Take Pennsylvania,” Fahlberg noted, “where Democratic gubernatorial candidate and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro spent $1.7 million on TV ads boosting the conservative credentials of gubernatorial candidate and state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a far-right candidate who bussed rally-goers to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and who was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the events of that day.”
“That single ad buy,” according to Fahlberg, “amounted to more money than Mastriano’s campaign spent during the entire primary.”
Mastriano, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump,wonthe key battleground state’s Republican gubernatorial primary last month.
The Democratic Governors Association (DGA), which is running ads characterizing far-right Illinois gubernatorial hopeful Darren Bailey as a candidate who “embraces the Trump agenda,” insisted in a statement toThe Dispatchthat its efforts are simply educational, an attempt to make voters aware of the danger posed by GOP extremists.
“These elected and formerly elected officials want to deceptively retell their histories,” said DGA spokesperson David Turner, “and we’re just filling in the gaps.”
While the approach of assisting supposedly unpalatable candidates in primaries has beentouted as a successin the recent past, it infamously crashed and burned in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election after her campaignworked to elevateTrump in the GOP nominating contest.
Concerns that the Democratic groups’ strategy could backfire like it did in 2016 aren’t just being voiced by progressive commentators and watchdogs; some establishment Democrats are also raising alarm, particularly as Republicans appearwell-positionedto seize control of at least one chamber of Congress in November.
“I think it’s very dangerous and potentially very risky to elevate people who are hostile to democracy,” Democratic strategist Howard WolfsontoldtheWashington Postearlier this month. “Either this is a crisis moment or it isn’t. And if it is — which it is — you don’t play cute in a crisis.”
Sometimes, all you can do is stand back and breathe.
“I never expected the ultra-MAGA Republicans who seemed to control the Republican Party now,” the president of the United States said on Monday. “I never anticipated that happening.”
To all of us who have now been shouting for decades about the inexorable march toward this precise state of affairs, the willful obliviousness of this statement from Biden is truly stunning.
Imagine if Bill Gates announced that he only recently realized the electron is a thing, or if Luciano Pavarotti just thought he was yelling the whole time, or if they started using Diet Coke and Mentos in the fountains at the Bellagio. People would flip out, right? This is not reality. I’m not sure what sort of perspective the president is leaning on when he makes the kind of proclamation he coughed up on Monday, but it has little to do with the goings-on down here on this ball of dirt we call Earth.
Almost completely without fail, President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Schumer and every other member of the ossified Democratic Party “leadership” somehow fail time and again to see what has been staring them in the face since Ronald Reagan rewired the country. Even this article isn’t new; I’ve written a version of it annually for more than 20 years now, and not even the damn names change.
The big abortion vote in the Senate yesterday? This was supposed to be Schumer’s big strategic move, or something. The point? To get Republicans on the record as opposing abortion. WELL STONE THE CROWS, nobody thought it would turn out like it did, right?
Nearly all the Republicans in Congress live to vocalize their disdain for Roe, and if I make my bet, each of those votes promptly went into a direct fundraising mailer to the GOP base. Ol’ Chuck made some money for his pals across the aisle, and gave Joe Manchin another chance to stick his thumb in Schumer’s eye. May as well have had them vote on whether or not they are actually mammals.
Help me out here, because maybe it’s me… but how many clues do you need before you come to conclude that the GOP is no longer a political party, but a well-funded far-right insurrection club packed to bursting with a rancid concoction of woman-haters, gay-bashers, flagrant racists, gun fetishists, Christian dominionists and warmongers with dreams of empire oozing from their eyes?
Trump didn’t do this; politically and historically speaking, he came down with the last drop of rain. All he did was flip the switch, applying the proper lack of shame to every petulant grievance these people have been rubbing together for 40 years. They haven’t been quiet about it, either. Where’s the damn mystery here?
It was maybe a clue when Newt Gingrich turned the House of Representatives into a single-minded engine of destruction arrayed against the Clinton White House.
It was not hidden when Republican activists like Roger Stone violently attacked the vote count in Florida and delivered the 2000 election to another right-bent Supreme Court.
It was right there when George W. Bush and a bunch of Reagan cast-offs lied us into a pair of two-decade wars.
It wasn’t magic when Bush supporters became Tea Partiers and then MAGA fanatics. It’s all the same GOP base, the grandchildren of Barry Goldwater. All they did was change t-shirts and bollix the spelling on a whole new set of protest signs. They are the same people with the same goals, and they have been with us since before Bobby got shot. Would flash cards be helpful?
President Biden shouldn’t need to be reminded of this one, because he was right there in the front row when it happened: GOP governors from a pile of red states refused to take free money to start their ACA exchanges, because doing so would badly damage the program’s rollout and deny Barack Obama a clean win. These guys screwed their states and millions of their constituents just to brick the nation’s first Black president. I can draw you a map.
More recently? Hm… how about four long years of Donald Trump frothing hate and madness into every available camera? How about his supporters backing him no matter what career-killing blunder he committed? How about the violence of his rallies and the swelling ranks of the “patriot” militias? How about the Gohmerts and the Greenes and the Gosars and the Jordans not-so-quietly becoming the voice and face of the party, even as they labor to defenestrate the very government they work for? Back in Lincoln’s day, people like that were called “Copperheads” and cast as poisonous snakes wielding venom to support the Confederacy. Now, they’re called “Republicans,” and the Democratic leadership barely bats an eye.
How about the attack on the Capitol? The world saw the Confederate battle flag being carried down those august marble halls as rabid Trump fans feverishly threatened to hang Democrats from a gibbet that was waiting out on the lawn. Trump offered his own vice president as a blood sacrifice to the mob, a turn of events that was only narrowly avoided because Pence can run faster than his ambitions when the chips are down.
How about Trump leading the 2024 presidential election pack by galactic margins, even in the face of all that has transpired? That isn’t enough to inform Biden that his old pals in the Republican Party are literally or figuratively dead and buried, and bourbons with secessionists is no longer on the menu because they’d just as soon throw him down the stairs as pass a word with him?
Here’s what I’d like, and it should not be hard to pull off. Get Biden, Pelosi and Schumer in a locked room with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Have Cheney and Kinzinger explain in excruciating detail why they just subpoenaed five Republican House members over the 1/6 insurrection. Further, have them explain how Trump and his people are laboring mightily to steal the next presidential election in broad daylight.
Cheney and Kinzinger are perfect for this role, because absent a few extra genes, they come from the same family tree as the bedlamists currently running their party. How long has it been like this? They know. What can be done to thwart it? They probably have some ideas.
At a bare-bones minimum, such a meeting might serve to drill some much-needed reality into the skulls of these Democrats, who seem constitutionally incapable of properly judging the caliber and intentions of their opponents. The republic is sliding down the edge of a keen knife right now, and doe-eyed surprise that there are mean people in the building is precisely not what is required in the moment.
It won’t actually solve anything, of course, but God help us, it’s a start. Maybe I can finally stop writing this article every year.
Congressional staffers are in dire need of unionization to combat long hours, low pay and abusive working conditions, members of the Congressional Workers Union recently argued in a new op-ed.
While congressional staffers work to secure better working conditions for the public, they face the same conditions they’re seeking to end, two Democratic staffers argued in an op-ed for The New Republic. On behalf of the 12-person organizing committee, which has been organizing for over a year, the staffers urged Congress to pass Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-Michigan) resolution, which would unlock a provision in a decades-old law that would allow staffers to form unions on an office-by-office basis.
“The cruel ironies of our jobs in Congress are hard to swallow,” wrote the workers, whose names were kept anonymous to avoid potential retaliation from their bosses.
“We advocate for livable wages while qualifying for food stamps due to low pay. We write speeches condemning corporations’ failure to protect against sexual harassment in the workplace, even as we too, lack sufficient recourse,” they continued. “We assure our constituents they’re being represented, even if we are the only person of color in the room. We fight for working families while questioning whether we can financially survive another year in public service.”
Low salaries mean that the offices only hire candidates who can afford to live in D.C.; as a result, opportunities often go to white people from privileged backgrounds.
“In 2020, 89 percent of top Senate aides and 81 percent of top House aides were white,” the op-ed went on. “If Congress is advised by workers far whiter and wealthier than the communities we represent, how can we ever hope to achieve our promise of equal justice under the law?”
Low wages are also causing a “brain drain” from Congress, as well-qualified staffers are taking better paying jobs in the private sector, often as lobbyists. “Collective bargaining will help Congress retain the talent it needs to serve the American people,” the staffers said.
The writers then asked lawmakers if they would live up to the principles they claim to uphold for the public by voting to pass the resolution. Last year, every Democrat but one, Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas), voted for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it far easier for workers across the country to form unions.
The staffers also detailed facing “abusive bosses” and working 60 to 70 hour weeks while having no room for recourse or seeking accountability. The abusive conditions became especially clear after the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, which triggered psychological fallout among staffers — as one staffer told Roll Call last year, “When I see those members in the hallway or the basement, I think to myself that they wouldn’t care if I was dead.”
It’s unclear if Democrats will vote to pass the resolution, which was amended and approved by the House Administration Committee earlier this year. When workers first announced their union in February, many Democratic lawmakers voiced their support for the effort, including Pelosi and figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — but conservative Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) essentially announced his opposition to the drive, and it’s unclear if there are lawmakers in the House that share Manchin’s anti-union opinion.
House leadership has scheduled a vote for a resolution that would allow House staffers to unionize, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced on Friday. The announcement comes three months after congressional workers first announced that they were unionizing.
Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-Michigan) resolution, introduced shortly after workers brought their union efforts public in February, would give workers the green light to start unionizing office-by-office. Some Democrats, including Pelosi, have voiced their support for the effort, but it’s as yet unclear whether it will have enough votes to pass.
In reaction to the news of the upcoming vote, the Congressional Workers Union (CWU) pressured lawmakers to approve the resolution. “Next week, the credibility of lawmakers will be put to the test. Will our bosses finally lead by example?” the union said in a statement. “With this vote, every member of Congress will have the opportunity to grant their own workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, free from retaliation.”
“We welcome and look forward to the vote, and we expect that every member who has stood up for workers’ rights will vote for our right to form a union,” the union continued. “If Democrats are For the People, we are people too.”
Levin celebrated the news. “I’m excited that my resolution to grant House staffers the right to unionize and bargain collectively will be considered on the House Floor next week,” he said. “Congressional staff have waited long enough. Let’s go!”
CWU has been organizing for over a year. Last month, they sent a letter urging Pelosi to schedule a vote on the resolution, saying that staffers have waited long enough to be allowed to unionize. (The legislation that sets the groundwork for staffers’ unions passed nearly three decades ago, but was never implemented.)
The union says that workers often face abusive conditions at work, as they’re expected to work long hours and for low pay. Conditions are especially bad for non-white staffers, who say that they feel as though there’s no room for advancement for them. Non-white people are already in the minority among congressional staff, which is largely white, and non-white staffers have reported experiencing racism at work.
In a first, Pelosi also announced that she is now setting a minimum pay for House staffers. Starting September 1, the pay floor will be set at $45,000. This is slightly lower than the Washington, D.C. living wage of around $49,000 for a single adult without children, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, but still higher than the $30,000 that some staffers are reportedly making.
“With a competitive minimum salary, the House will better be able to retain and recruit excellent, diverse talent. Doing so will open the doors to public service for those who may not have been able to afford to do so in the past,” Pelosi said in a press release. “This is also an issue of fairness, as many of the youngest staffers working the longest hours often earn the lowest salaries.”
Staff turnover is incredibly high on Capitol Hill, and it reached a new high last year. With low pay and long hours, there is a high incidence of so-called brain drain among congressional staff – often highly qualified individuals – with many leaving for private sector jobs with higher pay.
Early in the first year of Donald Trump’s bedlam tour of Washington D.C., the Democratic Party spent a good deal of time yelling at itself. How in the name of tub-thumping Christ did we lose to this clown? Recriminations flew, but by springtime, blame for the defeat had lighted upon a truly strange perch.
“Nancy Pelosi Says Democrats’ Focus on Abortion Access Is Hurting the Party,” declared the New York Magazine headline on May 3, 2017. “Earlier this month,” read the article, “Senator Bernie Sanders and DNC head Tom Perez gave a ‘unity tour, during which they suggested abortion rights were a disposable part of Democratic ideology — later, Sanders added that stumping for anti-choice candidates is the kind of thing Democrats need to do ‘if we’re going to become a 50-state party.’ And on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi added to that, telling the WashingtonPost that the party should be open to anti-choice candidates.”
Speaker Pelosi went further, arguing that Clinton lost because of the Democrats’ focus on “social issues” like abortion and marriage rights. “You know what?” she said. “That’s why Donald Trump is president of the United States — the evangelicals and the Catholics, anti-marriage equality, anti-choice. That’s how he got to be president. Everything was trumped, literally and figuratively by that.”
Hillary lost because of abortion? That’s the best explanation Nancy Pelosi could offer?
Five years later almost to the day, and the nation is still encompassing the looming demise of Roe v. Wade, the right to choose an abortion that has been on the books for 50 years. The leak of Justice Alito’s harrowing draft decision in Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the political version of a thermonuclear explosion, and Democratic officeholders today are blinking at the mushroom cloud as it screams into the sky, wondering how such a thing could have come to pass.
Not all Democrats, of course. A moment to take advantage of disaster is at hand, it seems. “But in what otherwise looks to be a difficult year for Democrats,” reportsThe New York Times, “party strategists see the looming rollback of reproductive rights as an opportunity to galvanize key voting blocs, limit Republican gains and perhaps even pick up seats in certain states. ‘We don’t know exactly what the political environment will be,’ said Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which helps Democratic candidates for state legislature. ‘But abortion has the potential to be a game-changing issue.’”
Nice to see some excitement in a party that has been down in the doldrums since electing a center-right vanilla wafer whose version of soaring, motivational rhetoric involves multiple usages of “C’mon, man!” in his speeches. President Biden’s own track record on abortion rights is sketchy at best; until very recently, Biden stridently supported the Hyde Amendment’s ban on using federal funds for abortions. That ban, in place since 1980, was only recently lifted in Biden’s latest budget proposal, but it had his active support over all the years he served in the Senate.
Those years, and particularly the decade of the 1980s, was the span when opposition to abortion became part of the lifeblood of the GOP base. Once Ronald Reagan embraced Jerry Falwell and the evangelical Moral Majority’s “holy” quest to obliterate Roe, there was no mistaking their intent. And all of a sudden the argument was everywhere. I vividly recall hearing fellow students argue over abortion in the halls of my high school during Reagan’s second term.
The media — TV, newspapers and radio — was the main battlefield where this war was fought, but it was not the only battlefield. Out where the activists live, a new kind of campaign began to reveal itself in the very shadow of the facilities abortion-seekers visited to avail themselves of their rights.
***
The Planned Parenthood on Commonwealth Avenue in Brookline, Massachusetts looks like something Frank Lloyd Wright might have constructed had he ever gotten into building fortresses. Large, windowless, with decorative touches swirling over the front façade, the dominant feature is the main door.
The door is all business, steel reinforced and opened remotely from within by an armed security guard, and leads to a small box and another door, also opened from within. The door is there, and is how it is because a man named John Salvi passed through a lesser version of that door with a rifle in 1994 and murdered receptionist Shannon Lowney. After fleeing the scene, Salvi murdered receptionist Lee Ann Nichols at the offices of Preterm Health Services on Beacon Street. They put the door in afterward, and now, you’re not getting in unless the guard clears you.
A dozen years after Salvi’s rampage, I found myself at that Planned Parenthood (PP) as escort for a friend. My friend was not there for an abortion; like millions of low-income women lacking health insurance, she depended on PP for basic gynecological care. PP always came through, charging for services on a sliding scale to remain affordable. Despite what the shouters have to say, this is the core of the medical practice at PP, the majority of what they do.
Had my friend been going to an appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital or Brigham & Women’s, no escort would have been necessary. To enter the Planned Parenthood in Brookline, however, required one to run one of the more disturbing gauntlets in modern American society.
There at the big steel door, every day, rain hail or shine, like Salvi’s own ghost, would be two or three people holding anti-choice signs and chanting, “Praise God … praise God … praise God …” While legally prohibited from barring entrance to the facility, these protesters nonetheless managed to make themselves menacing enough to drive some care-seekers away.
When my friend got out of the car, the two protesters shuffled toward her, eyes like fish stuck in a bucket, and they were on her by the time I got around to her side of the car. Hands with spindled pamphlets reached out as the one on the left droned, “Praise God,” while the one on the right launched into a spittle-flecked diatribe — “It’s your baby don’t you want to save your baby don’t kill your baby it’s a baby don’t you want to save your baby” — until I got between them and made for the door.
I actually tried to reason with the second one, if you can believe it. “She’s here for a pelvic exam,” I said, as if she needed an excuse to be there at all. Of course, if she’d been there for an abortion, she would have had just as much of a right to access care unfettered. It was a fumbled moment on my part, and made no dent whatsoever in the rant, which only cut off with the KA-CHUNK of the metal door slamming closed between us. We composed ourselves in the box as the guard looked us over, and when the second door opened, we joined a room filled with people who had endured the same bullshit to get inside. Very little eye contact was made; it was a facility under siege, and the tension fairly hummed.
All across the country, every single day, protesters of this ilk arrayed themselves at the entrances of reproductive care clinics. My friend got her exam that day, and when we left, the pair of protesters were still there, yelling, “Praise God.”
Not long after, PP called my friend. They had found, and removed, cancer cells from her cervix. This was something she would have to be on the watch for from now on because the cells could easily grow back, but for the time being, she was safe. That visit to the clinic saved her life.
***
If you had asked me about the standing of Roe v. Wade 30 years ago, you’d have gotten a smug answer that tastes like ashes in my mouth today. Back then, the anti-Clinton mania had not overtaken the Republican Party, and Newt Gingrich was still two years away from pouring a barrel of poison into the well of public politics. The Religious Right was a force, but only in certain sectors of the country, and the GOP had not devolved into an unruly mob that believes “pedophile” Democrats and “Hollywood elites” are running the country.
Indeed, it was a simpler time, and my answer on the safety of Roe was simplicity itself. Would the GOP ever actually allow that right to be overturned? Never in hell. Opposition to abortion had become the most important platform for the Republican base, and in particular the highly energized evangelical Christian wing of that base. Lose that, and the whole thing would unspool.
Abortion made them the most reliable voting bloc in the country; I used to say that if it were raining live jaguars on Election Day, the anti-choicers would head to the polls with cement umbrellas. A direct-mail flyer to the base with a picture of Hillary Clinton next to a fetus was good for $2 million in donations within 48 hours. They were the Energizer Bunny of constituencies and the Establishment GOP knew it all too well. If the dog ever did manage to catch the car, what would become of the Republican Party? If that portion of the base declared victory and went home, the GOP wouldn’t win another national election in 100 years. I could not envision them risking that, and for a while, I was right.
That, as they say, was then. A different sort of writing has been encroaching on the walls over the last two decades, and it appears the Democrats were the last ones to see it. My belief is that a sea change overtook the GOP base after eight years of George W. Bush failed to result in any meaningful damage done to Roe. I strongly suspect that base came to realize how they were being used, and that Roe wasn’t going anywhere unless they took a more active hand in politics. They began taking over local Republican organizations and ran their own people.
It was Donald Trump who gave them control of the party by taking it over and then letting them off the leash. This, in combination with the laser-like focus on the judiciary by elements of the anti-choice brigades and senators like Mitch McConnell, has brought us to this fraught crossroads.
None of the present crisis would be possible, however, without the intentional neglect exerted by the Democratic Party and its eternal blame game. Even today, you can hear Hillary people blaming Bernie Sanders for Alito’s draft, and Sanders people blaming Hillary because the Democratic base expects more from a candidate than Republican Lite.
It didn’t take a weatherman to know Roe was in trouble, and yet the Democrats spent all these years staring at it like a deer pinned by oncoming headlights, relentlessly confident that five far-right political hack Supreme Court justices wouldn’t finally do what the Republican Party has been vowing to do since the year after I was born.
They thought Roe was another third rail. Now that the GOP has grabbed it and lived to tell the tale, how many other third rails will that newly emboldened court reach for? Marriage? Contraception? The very notion of privacy?
But hey, at least the Democrats have something to run on for November, right?
That would be true if voters trust them to fight for a right their elected officials have taken for granted and now pissed away.
Following the leak of a draft opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court indicating that the institution is set to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling making abortion legal throughout the U.S., more attention has been given to three specific justices who have likely endorsed that opinion — and what they said during their confirmation hearings just a few years ago.
The draft order says it represents the majority opinion of the High Court. With all three liberal bloc justices likely to vote against it — and reports indicating conservative Chief Justice John Roberts was also unlikely to support completely dismantling the established precedent — the remaining five conservative bloc members are the most likely to potentially upend Roe.
Three of those conservative justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were confirmed in the past five years, under former President Donald Trump. Amid criticism and examination of how detrimental such a ruling could become, renewed scrutiny has been given to those three justices in particular, as their appointments directly led to the possibility of Roe being officially overturned later this year.
All three justices, as nominees at the time, gave answers indicating they would give deference to the nearly 50-year-old precedent protecting abortion rights. Their private conversations with lawmakers, too, are inconsistent with what appears to be their ruling on dismantling Roe.
In 2017, Gorsuch was nominated by Trump, who had himself promised only to select anti-abortion nominees to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch sought to assure senators tasked with approving him that he would not take the issue of abortion lightly, telling them during his hearings that he would have “walked out the door” had the former president demanded he overturn Roe.
In an exchange with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) during those same hearings, Gorsuch was asked whether he agreed with specific findings from Roe, including the idea that, for the purposes of the 14th Amendment’s interpretations, a fetus is not a person.
“Do you accept that?” Durbin asked.
“That is the law of the land. I accept the law of the land, senator, yes,” Gorsuch responded.
In 2018, Kavanaugh also described Roe in similar terms. In private discussions with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), she said that the nominee had told her that the case and others like it protecting abortion rights were “settled law.”
Kavanaugh tweaked that language a little bit during his hearings, but what he did say seemed to match what Collins suggested: that he believed Roe was mostly settled precedent.
“It is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis,” Kavanaugh said. He added:
The Supreme Court has recognized the right to abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade case. It has reaffirmed it many times.
And while Barrett tried to avoid calling Roe a super-precedent — a type of precedent that is seen as untouchable, in terms of how much harm it could cause if reversed — she herself acknowledged that her opinion on its status “doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled.”
Taken together, these statements imply that the three justices, when they were nominees being considered by the Senate to serve on the nation’s highest court, would take a cautious approach to changing Roe’s abortion protections, if they took any action on the matter at all. Instead, all three appear to have eagerly signed on to a draft order (authored by Justice Samuel Alito, another anti-abortion member of the conservative bloc) to undo the decades of precedent at the very first opportunity that presented itself.
Several lawmakers have spoken out against the draft order, stating that, if it indeed becomes the opinion of the Supreme Court when it comes to abortion rights, it was done so erroneously and without consideration of precedent, as those justices had promised.
Collins herself has expressed disappointment in confirming Kavanaugh specifically, noting that her private conversations with him did not indicate he’d upend Roe.
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said in a statement this week.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) blasted the draft opinion as wrongly decided. They also described the conservative justices who comprised the majority in the decision as liars.
“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement.
On Wednesday, organizing congressional workers sent a letter to House leaders urging them to bring a resolution that would greenlight their ability to unionize to a swift vote.
House Res. 915, which was filed by Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) in early February, would activate existing policies that would allow congressional staffers to begin petitioning for and forming unions. In its letter, the Congressional Workers Union argues that there’s no reason to keep delaying action on the over two month-old resolution and that it must be brought to the floor.
“We, as congressional workers, fight every day for a better future for ourselves, our families, this institution, and the American people. However, we currently lack the basic protections and legal processes to organize enjoyed by other federal workers and workers across this country,” the group wrote. “Many of us write and work tirelessly to advance the very laws that protect and promote every worker’s right to organize. We deserve those same rights.”
The workers asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), and chairs of the House Education and Labor; Rules; and Administration committees to bring the resolution to a vote during the week of April 25, or in roughly two weeks.
It’s unclear why the resolution hasn’t yet been brought to a vote. Early last month, the House Administration Committee held a hearing on the subject to explore and finalize the resolution. Though the legislation allowing the union, the Congressional Accountability Act (CAA), was passed nearly three decades ago, lawmakers never took the last step to formally authorize workers to unionize.
The resolution would flip the switch on the legislation, and each Congress member’s office would qualify as a separate bargaining unit that could unionize.
“For 26 years, Congress has failed to act, and workers have suffered for it,” wrote the Congressional Workers Union. “As the leaders of this institution responsible for protecting American democracy, you now have an opportunity to fulfill the promises of the CAA by extending congressional workers these basic rights — protecting the freedom of association and fostering democracy in your own workplaces.”
House leaders appear to be in support of the effort. In February, a spokesperson for Pelosi said that she would offer her “full support” for unionization, while Administration Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-California) has said that it is “well past time” for the resolution to be passed. President Joe Biden is also in favor of the push, according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
The resolution appears to have the support of much of the House Democratic caucus. When it was first introduced, it had 136 cosponsors; since then, it has picked up nearly 30 more.
Congressional workers have been in the midst of organizing for over a year, citing low wages and grueling working conditions. These conditions have led to a “brain drain” from Congress, they say, as well-qualified workers flee for better wages and conditions in the private sector.
The Committee on House Administration will soon hold a hearing on proposals to ban members of Congress from being able to trade individual stocks, taking a step toward eventually voting on such legislation.
According to Insider, which spoke to two anonymous sources, the committee has requested testimony from government watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Lawmakers have also invited the Congressional Research Service to testify.
The committee didn’t confirm the hearing with Insider, saying that hearings aren’t typically announced until a week before they’re held. A committee hearing would be a big step to move the proposal forward within the House. Republicans have not yet chosen a witness for the hearing.
It’s unclear if a stock trading ban would pass if it came to a vote now. However, recent bills have had rare bipartisan support, and some Senate Republicans are in favor of such proposals. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) back the idea; an early draft of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address slated for Tuesday night included support for the effort, but may be taken out to include other priorities.
Lawmakers in the House and the Senate have introduced several different stock trading bans. One of the strictest proposals was introduced in February by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Steve Daines (R-Montana) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Matt Rosendale (R-Montana).
The bipartisan, bicameral legislation would outright ban members of Congress and their spouses from owning stocks, requiring them to divest from all stocks other than widely held investment funds while in office. Violations would carry a $50,000 fine per infraction.
This goes slightly further than other proposals, like one from Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona). Ossoff and Kelly introduced a bill in January that would ban more family members from owning stocks; it would also ban spouses and dependent children from actively trading stocks.
But the bill would only require that those stocks be put into a blind trust when members take office, meaning that lawmakers can still influence their stock portfolios in a blind trust with legislation that could affect companies that they had previously invested in.
Government watchdogs say that a stock trading ban must be strict in order to be effective. In guidelines circulated to Congress, CREW says that stock trading bans must not allow members to put their portfolios in a blind trust, must ban spouses and dependent children from trading stock and must have a strict enforcement mechanism. Bans also shouldn’t allow for intent loopholes, CREW says – in other words, there shouldn’t be a carveout for the lawmakers who supposedly unknowingly violated the law.
No one bill that has been introduced so far adopts all of those principles; of those requirements, Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Missouri) bill only has a clear enforcement mechanism, according to CREW, requiring members to give gains from banned stock trades to the Treasury Department.
As lawmakers have shown, however, enforcement is key. Lawmakers and their aides regularly violate the STOCK Act, which places disclosure requirements on members’ stock trades. According to financial filings, members will often report multimillion dollar trades months late. But violators typically only face a small fine of around $200.
On Wednesday, Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) filed a resolution that would give the green light to congressional workers seeking to form a union.
The legislation implements existing policies that allow unionization among congressional staffers but that aren’t activated until they’re approved by Congress. If the resolution passes, House staffers will be able to begin petitioning for and forming unions.
“In recent weeks, congressional staff have shared bravely their workplace experiences, good and bad, clearly illustrating their need for the protected right to organize,” Levin said on Wednesday. “Today is about a simple proposition – that congressional staff must enjoy the same fundamental rights of freedom of association at work, to organize and bargain collectively for better conditions, that all workers deserve.”
The resolution has 130 cosponsors, including members of the progressive “squad” like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York). If it is passed, workers will have to unionize office-by-office.
Congressional workers have been organizing for over a year, according to the Congressional Workers Union. The movement recently gained steam when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) spoke out in favor of the organizing workers. Press Secretary Jen Psaki has also said that President Joe Biden supports the union push.
The Congressional Workers Union celebrated Levin’s resolution, adding that it’s time for members of Congress to live up to their professed ideals when it comes to unions and organizing.
“While we welcome the outpouring of support from lawmakers in the days since our organizing launch, we as staff remain exposed to retaliation for our organizing efforts and will remain exposed until the House passes the Resolution,” the workers said in a statement. According to Insider, the organizing workers are all Democrats.
“We urge House leadership, who has voiced support for the union effort, to bring it to the floor for a vote at the earliest opportunity,” they continued. “Now is the time to demonstrate your commitment to all workers – including your own – through action. The world is watching.”
Congressional workers face low wages and poor working conditions that have led to a “brain drain” in Congress, the organizing workers noted. Talented staffers will often go to lobbying firms or take private sector jobs with better pay. As long as staffers’ working conditions remain the same and they are denied a voice in the workplace, the organizers said, they will be unable to serve lawmakers’ constituents to the best of their abilities.
The workers’ effort has garnered support from influential labor leaders like President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA Sara Nelson and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) President Elizabeth H. Shuler, among others.
Pelosi has yet to say when she will bring the legislation to a vote. During a press conference on Wednesday, she said that House Administration Committee Chair Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) should review the legislation. Lofgren has previously voiced support for the union push.
Senate staffers will face a tougher road to unionization, however. In order for Senate workers to unionize, the chamber will have to pass its own resolution allowing offices to form a union.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is supportive of the union effort. But the resolution would likely have to pass the 60-vote filibuster threshold to be approved, and Republicans, along with conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (West Virginia), have already thrown cold water on the union push.
On Friday, congressional staffers declared that they are unionizing, an announcement that was met with an outpouring of support from progressive and Democratic lawmakers.
The Congressional Workers Union has been in the midst of organizing efforts for over a year, they said in a statement.
“[W]e are proud to publicly announce our efforts to unionize the personal offices and committees of Congress, in solidarity with our fellow workers across the United States and the world,” the staffers wrote.
“While not all offices and committees face the same working conditions, we strongly believe that to better serve our constituents will require meaningful changes to improve retention, equity, diversity, and inclusion on Capitol Hill,” they continued. “That starts with having a voice in the workplace. We call on all congressional staff to join in the effort to unionize, and look forward to meeting management at the table.”
Organizers pointed to a survey last month from the Congressional Progressive Staff Association of 516 staffers, in which 91 percent of survey respondents said that they want more protections at work.
Congressional staff are often paid insufficiently to live in Washington, D.C. Annual pay for Capitol Hill staffers starts in the $20,000 range, and even workers making a higher salary say that expenses like childcare costs can deplete entire paychecks.
A recent report found that one out of every eight staffers isn’t paid a living wage, which is about $42,000 for an adult with no children in D.C., according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator. According to the Congressional Research Service, there were about 5,700 Senate staffers in 2020 and about 9,000 staffers in the House in 2021.
“Like all Americans, our tireless Congressional staff have the right to organize their workplace and join together in a union,” spokesperson Drew Hammill said on Thursday. “If and when staffers choose to exercise that right, they would have Speaker Pelosi’s full support.”
Support from Democratic lawmakers soon followed on Twitter. “Congressional staff need unions now!” Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) wrote on Thursday night. “Congress couldn’t run without them and I’m committed to supporting their voice at work.”
Progressives like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) also chimed in.
“On Capitol Hill, interns are often unpaid, many staffers don’t make a living wage, and lack of work protections can pave the way for unhealthy environments,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “[S]ounds like a perfect place for a union.”
Last year, Ocasio-Cortez led a push from 110 House representatives requesting larger office budgets from the House Appropriations Committee so that lawmakers can afford to pay their staff fair wages.
“For years, pay and benefits for the staff of Member offices, leadership offices, and committees have fallen farther and farther behind what is offered in the private sector,” the lawmakers said. “At the same time, the cost of living here in our nation’s capital has risen substantially, placing opportunities such as homeownership, rental housing, and childcare out of reach for many.”
Because Capitol Hill staffers are paid such low wages, only a certain demographic can afford to work in Congress. Staff, especially interns, are often white and from privileged backgrounds; poorer people can’t afford to live in D.C. on such low wages, and often take private sector jobs that will pay more for the amount of experience they have. Recently, non-white staffers have taken to Instagram to post stories from current and former workers that expose poor working conditions within Congress.
On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced that she will run for another term in Congress – without specifying whether she will seek to remain leader of the Democratic caucus in the House beyond this year’s midterms.
“I am running for reelection to Congress,” Pelosi said in a video message on Twitter announcing her 19th congressional run.
Pelosi said that this year’s election was “crucial,” pointing to the attack on the U.S. Capitol building last year along with the assault on voting rights in GOP-led statehouses across the country.
“Nothing less is at stake than our democracy,” she added.
Pelosi, who has been a member of Congress since 1987, didn’t specify whether she would try to remain Speaker of the House should Democrats retain control of that legislative chamber in this year’s midterms, or whether she would seek another leadership position within the Democratic caucus if they lose. Pelosi has been the Speaker of the House since 2019, and previously served as Speaker between the years 2007 and 2011.
In late 2018, Pelosi made an agreement with her party that she would limit her tenure as Speaker to her current term unless two-thirds of the Democratic caucus were in agreement that she should serve again. If Democrats are able to retain the House after this year’s midterms, a new leader would likely have to take Pelosi’s place.
Polling shows that most Americans want a new Speaker should Democrats successfully retain control of the House. In an Economist/YouGov poll conducted from January 22-25, just 20 percent of likely voters said Pelosi should remain Speaker if Democrats win the midterms, while 47 percent said that they want another Democrat to be in charge. Among Democratic voters, however, a plurality (46 percent) said they want Pelosi to remain Speaker, while just 28 percent said they want someone else in the party to take on the role.
The results of the poll are not encouraging for Pelosi should she attempt to renege on her agreement or try to attain the two-thirds support from her party’s caucus. However, she does poll significantly better than her counterpart in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California), who serves as House Minority Leader; when a change in congressional leadership takes place, the lawmaker serving as House Minority Leader is likely to become the Speaker of the House.
When the Economist/YouGov poll asked whether McCarthy should be Speaker if Republicans win control of Congress, only 11 percent of likely voters said that he should assume the role. Fifteen percent said that former President Donald Trump should be named Speaker (a far-fetched but possible outcome), while 41 percent said that another Republican should be in charge. Among Republican voters, just 19 percent said McCarthy should be the next Speaker, while 33 percent preferred Trump and 26 percent wanted someone else in the role.
The poll also indicates that the midterm races will be contentious. When asked which party they plan to vote for in this year’s contest, 42 percent of respondents said they plan to vote for a Democrat while 38 percent said their preference was for the Republican on the ballot in their home district.
On Monday, a group of 27 House representatives sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) urging them to pass legislation that would bar Congress from trading stocks.
The letter calls such a ban a “common-sense” move that has the support of both Democrats and Republicans in the chamber. “Both of you have recently addressed this issue in public comments, but this glaring problem will not go away until it is fixed and Congress should not delay when we have the power to fix it,” the letter read.
The effort has rare bipartisan support, with 25 Democrats and two Republicans signing on to the letter. This includes progressives like Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Katie Porter (D-California) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) as well as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) from the far right.
Lawmakers said that any legislation, whether written by Democrats or Republicans, can be brought to the floor, as long as it is done swiftly. They cite Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-Georgia) Ban Conflicted Stock Trading Act or Representatives Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia) and Rep. Chip Roy’s (R-Texas) TRUST in Congress Act that were both introduced recently as bills that could be brought to a vote soon.
Both bills would bar members of Congress and their spouses and dependent children from trading stocks while in office. Aside from certain investments like those in diversified mutual funds or U.S. treasury bonds, portfolios would have to be put in a blind trust.
The letter comes just after Pelosi made a slight heel turn on the issue last week. While she doesn’t “buy into” the issue, she said, the speaker said that she would be open to supporting her caucus if members are in favor of the ban. The Speaker had previously sparked ire when she defended members’ ability to trade stocks, saying that they should be able to participate in the “free market economy.”
McCarthy, who would likely become speaker of the House if Republicans take control of the chamber in the midterm elections, also voiced his support for the issue this month.
As the letter points out, Congress members’ ability to trade stocks is eroding public trust and leads to corruption. Though it is technically illegal for lawmakers to act on nonpublic information to trade stocks, it can be difficult to determine the true cause of certain stock trades.
“The law prohibits only those stock trades that members of Congress make or direct because of their nonpublic knowledge,” the lawmakers wrote, referring to a 2020 stock trading scandal involving several senators making trades after receiving confidential information on the pandemic’s economic effects. “But it can be nearly impossible to determine what counts as ‘nonpublic knowledge’ or how personally involved members are in their stock trades.”
Lawmakers also frequently break the law outright in regards to stock trading disclosures. The 2012 STOCK Act instituted disclosure requirements to increase transparency of Congress members’ stock trades.
But since the penalty for failing to disclose trades on time is small – often just a $200 fine – lawmakers and their staffers have little incentive to report their trades, even when they represent clear conflicts of interest. An investigation last year by Insider found that at least 54 members of Congress have violated the STOCK Act, with many late disclosures being worth upwards of a million dollars.
Regardless of the legality of these actions, the letter writers said that being able to trade stocks distracts lawmakers from doing their job to protect and serve their constituents. “Perhaps this means some of our colleagues will miss out on lucrative investment opportunities. We don’t care,” they wrote. “We came to Congress to serve our country, not turn a quick buck.”
Polling has found that the public also agrees that Congress shouldn’t be allowed to trade stocks. A recent Data for Progress poll found that 74 percent of likely voters support such a ban when presented with arguments for and against the proposal. This includes 75 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans.
As Democrats discuss implementing a ban on stock trading for members of Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) signaled on Thursday that she may be open to passing such a ban, despite her opposition to the proposal.
Pelosi reiterated her opposition at a press conference on Thursday, but said that she would support the Democratic caucus if they wanted to pass such legislation. “I just don’t buy into it, but if members want to do that I’m OK with that,” she said.
Pelosi added that she has asked the House Administration Committee to review the STOCK Act. Although the bill aims to increase transparency around lawmakers’ stock trades, it has such lax penalties that members regularly violate the law and face little consequences.
Pelosi has come under scrutiny over the past weeks for her defense of Congress members’ ability to trade stocks despite a huge scandal in 2020, when members were accused of insider trading. The accusations came after members made major stock trades directly after receiving confidential information about the pandemic’s imminent effect on the stock market.
“We’re a free market economy. [Members of Congress] should be able to participate in that,” Pelosi said in December. The speaker is among the richest of Congress’s over 500 members, and her husband, Paul Pelosi, is a very active stock trader. In fact, Paul Pelosi is such a prominent trader that people have begun following his trades as a stock trading strategy.
Pelosi faced pushback for her comment. “There is no reason members of Congress should hold and trade individual stock when we write major policy and have access to sensitive information,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) tweeted at the time. “There are many ways members can invest w/o creating actual or appeared conflict of interest, like thrift savings plans or index funds.”
Last week, Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) introduced a bill that would bar members of Congress and their families from participating in stock trading while in office. The bill would compel members to move their portfolios into a blind trust shortly after being sworn in. The proposal appears to have bipartisan support, as Republicans in Congress have signaled their support for the idea.
The public is also in favor of the ban. Just over the past few weeks, several polls by different polling groups have confirmed that a majority of Americans support banning stock trading for members of Congress. Data for Progress, for instance, found that 74 percent of voters support the proposal when they are presented with arguments for and against a ban, including a majority of respondents from across the political spectrum.
Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) proposed a similar bill that would not only disallow members of Congress from trading stocks, but also prominent federal officials like judges and presidents.
Lawmakers, including Ocasio-Cortez, introduced a bill last year that would prohibit Congress members and senior staff from trading individual stocks. The bill, which had bipartisan support, also sought to root out corruption by barring members from serving on boards of corporations.
According to the survey results, voters from across the political spectrum are largely in agreement on the issue. Seventy-five percent of Democrats, 76 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans supported a ban after hearing arguments in favor of the proposal. Overall, the issue won over the opposition by 55 points, with only 19 percent saying that they were either somewhat or strongly opposed to the idea.
The poll results are similar to another Data for Progress poll conducted in February and March of last year, which also found strong bipartisan support for the ban.
A Morning Consult/Politico poll released on Wednesday similarly found that a majority of voters are in favor of the proposal. Sixty-three percent of voters surveyed said that members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to trade stocks; once again, support for such a proposal came from a bipartisan majority of voters.
These polls add ontoa small mountain of polls that have yielded similar results in recent weeks; most Americans, it seems, agree that members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to trade stocks.
Recently, some Democrats have been pushing for a stock trading ban for members of Congress. Last week, Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) introduced a bill that would compel lawmakers and their families to move their stock portfolio into a blind trust when they took office and divest from investments that couldn’t be put in the trust.
The bill’s introduction came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) rejected the idea of banning stock trading for lawmakers, saying, “we’re a free market economy.” Her comments sparked rage and kicked off the effort among Democrats to pursue the ban.
Pelosi is among the most active stock traders in Congress, and in 2020 gained an estimated $16.7 million with her husband, partly due to stock trading. She also consistently ranks among the richest members of Congress.
Other lawmakers have waged similar efforts to ban stock trading. Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would not only bar members of Congress from trading stocks, but also other top federal officials like judges and Cabinet members. Passing such anti-corruption legislation “is a no-brainer,” she said at the time.
Lawmakers are privy to vast amounts of information that aren’t available to the public, which puts them at a distinct advantage when it comes to trading stocks. Trades made by senators who had advance notice of the impending economic turmoil at the beginning of the pandemic, for instance, have led to suspicions of insider trading. Other recent pandemic-related stock trading scandals at places like the Federal Reserve have also raised alarm bells, eroding public trust in lawmakers and their motivations.
Last year, reportsfound that members of Congress traded about $300 million of stocks in total, with over a hundred members making at least one active trade in 2021. Overall, Congress beat the market last year. Meanwhile, stock ownership among members of the public is falling as owning stock is increasingly becoming an activity available only to the rich.
On Wednesday, Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) introduced an anti-corruption bill that would ban members of Congress and their families from actively trading stocks.
The Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act would compel members, along with their spouses and dependent children, to put all of their stocks into a blind trust when they take office. Members and their families would also be required to divest any stocks that aren’t able to be put into a blind trust. Democrats say that the primary aim of the bill is to increase transparency and accountability to the public by lessening conflicts of interest.
“Members of Congress should not be playing the stock market while we make federal policy and have extraordinary access to confidential information,” Ossoff said in a statement. The bill has garnered the support of government watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
Measures to ban members of Congress from trading stocks are overwhelmingly popular with voters across the political spectrum. A recent poll of 1,706 likely voters found that, among respondents, 70 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of independents believe that members of Congress should be barred from stock trading.
Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill that is similarly aimed at curbing corruption. Warren’s bill would go slightly further, banning other top government officials from trading stocks, including the president, Cabinet members, Federal Reserve officials and federal judges. However, her ban wouldn’t apply to family members.
If the bill proposed by Ossoff and Kelly is effective, it could prevent future scandals relating to stock trading among Congress members, including scandals like one involving Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia), one of Ossoff’s predecessors in Georgia.
In 2020, the Justice Department launched an insider trading probe into Loeffler and Senators Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). The lawmakers made major stock sales just before the stock market dropped, shortly after receiving confidential briefings on the potential crash.
Those investigations were eventually dropped, but stock trading scandals remain common among Congress members. Reporters found that 54 members of Congress failed to properly report their stock trades in 2021, a move that is in violation of the STOCK Act, which aims to prevent insider trading and increase transparency around the finances of Congress members. The STOCK Act charges around $200 for each violation, a fine that is relatively low for an institution infamous for housing millionaires.
How effective the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act would be is unclear. The financial penalties for violating the proposed law are higher, as members would be fined the amount of their congressional salaries if found violating the law. According to the bill, the fines would be the “monthly equivalent of the annual rate of pay payable to the Member of Congress”; a typical member makes $174,000 a year, or about $14,500 a month.
Though $14,500 is much heftier than the fee mandated by the STOCK Act, it still may not be enough to deter certain members from handing over control of their stocks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), for instance, owns millions of dollars’ worth of stocks; others, like Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), have traded tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stocks in the past year alone.
On Wednesday, the office of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) confirmed that he was one of the lawmakers who texted Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows regarding a scheme to subvert the January 6 certification of the Electoral College.
The text message was shared by the January 6 commission this week as evidence to justify a House vote to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress. Although the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack has been seeking more information about text messages to and from Meadows – including the message from Jordan – the former chief of staff has so far refused to testify about the messages, even though he was the one who provided the documents to the commission.
Jordan’s office has maintained that the message he sent to Meadows was a forwarded one, saying that Meadows “certainly knew” this was the case. But as NBC News reported, some smartphones don’t indicate if a sent message is a forward.
The text from Jordan to Meadows encouraged him to adopt a plan to invalidate Electoral College votes from states Biden won, saying that he should use false claims of election fraud as a basis for doing so.
“On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence,” Jordan’s text read. The text then quotes Hamilton’s commentary from Federalist 78, which says that “No legislative act contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.”
“Following this rationale, an unconstitutionally appointed elector, like an unconstitutionally enacted statute, is no elector at all,” the text from Jordan concluded.
There is no evidence that electors for the Electoral College were “unconstitutionally appointed” — and according to rules outlined in the constitution, the vice president of the United States doesn’t have the authority to invalidate electors.
Politico reporters Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu, who were the first to report that Jordan sent the text, said the context of the message was still unclear.
“Why did Jordan forward this analysis to Meadows? Was it something the former chief of staff solicited? Or did Jordan send it unprompted?” the journalists asked.
Jordan’s involvement in the plan to overturn the election results is significant, especially because he was initially nominated by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) to serve on the January 6 commission. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) rejected Jordan’s nomination on the basis that he was untrustworthy.
In light of the texts that the commission released this week — and the revelation that Jordan sent one of the messages — journalists are questioning the extent of McCarthy’s knowledge about Jordan’s involvement in the scheme to thwart the will of the American electorate.
“Does anyone still think Jim Jordan should have served on the Jan 6 committee? Did Kevin McCarthy know about Jordan’s activities to overthrow the election when he tried to put him on the committee investigating all this?” asked journalist Elizabeth Vargas.
During a news conference on Tuesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) said that he’d like to see Trump become the next Speaker of the House if Republicans win the 2022 midterms next year.
Although Gaetz wouldn’t divulge the details of their conversations, he said it was his preference that Trump become the next Speaker if Republicans win the midterms in 2022 — a sentiment that Gatez has also expressed in the past, including as a fundraising mechanism.
“After the next election cycle when we take back the House of Representatives, when we send [current House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi back to the filth of San Francisco, my commitment to you is that my vote for speaker of the US House of Representatives will go to Donald J. Trump,” Gaetz told supporters during a rally in July.
Far right lawmakers like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) have also voiced support for the idea. Although Trump has said that he isn’t thinking about becoming Speaker, he has called it an “interesting” proposition.
The United States Constitution allows each house of Congress to make its own rules surrounding who will manage its affairs. Article I specifically states that “the House of Representatives shall choose their speaker and other officers” — but it doesn’t say that person has to be a member of the House themselves.
Though many Republicans want to see Trump take over the role, he faces steep odds of being elected to the Speakership, should he even want to do so. While the idea of appointing a non-elected person as Speaker of the House has been considered before, there has never been a Speaker who wasn’t also an elected representative in the history of the House.
For many on the right, it isn’t Trump’s political acumen or ability to legislate that makes him a desirable candidate. As Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows commented on Gaetz’s podcast last month, the former president’s appeal lies more in the fact that it would upset people, particularly those on the left.
Meadows said that he would “love to see the gavel go from Nancy Pelosi to Donald Trump” because of the reaction it would cause.
“You talk about melting down, people would go crazy,” he added.
But while members of his own party might like the idea of Trump becoming Speaker, his ascendancy to the position would likely not be received well by Americans overall. Recent numbers from an Economist/YouGov poll show that Trump is viewed unfavorably by 56 percent of voters, while just 39 percent said they view him in a positive light.
After inaction from Democratic leaders in the House, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) introduced a resolution on Wednesday to strip Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) of her committee assignments for repeatedly waging Islamophobic attacks against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota).
As first reported by The Washington Post, Pressley is hoping that the resolution’s introduction will force leadership to take action on Boebert’s Islamophobia. Democratic leaders have been relatively quiet on the issue, condemning Boebert’s comments but so far not taking public action to pursue a formal punishment for the far right lawmaker. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has indicated that Republicans won’t be penalizing Boebert.
The resolution doesn’t carry a “privileged” status, meaning that there is nothing forcing House leaders to consider the resolution immediately; it’s up to Democratic leaders to decide when, if ever, to take up the resolution. Omar has said that she’s confident that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) will take action this week.
“For a Member of Congress to repeatedly use hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobic tropes towards a Muslim colleague is dangerous,” Pressley said. “It has no place in our society and it diminishes the honor of the institution we serve in.”
“Without meaningful accountability for that Member’s actions, we risk normalizing this behavior and endangering the lives of our Muslim colleagues, Muslim staffers and every Muslim who calls America home,” Pressley went on. “The House must unequivocally condemn this incendiary rhetoric and immediately pass this resolution. How we respond in moments like these will have lasting impacts, and history will remember us for it.”
The measure is cosponsored by 18 Democrats, including progressive “squad” members Representatives Jamaal Bowman (New York), Cori Bush (Missouri), Pramila Jayapal (Washington), Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), and others like Representatives Judy Chu (California) and Jimmy Gomez (California).
“We must be assured that no member is above accountability, and Republican leadership has failed to deliver any such accountability for Boebert,” said Bush. “It is time for Democratic leadership to act and pass our resolution to not only protect Rep. Omar, but the livelihoods and lives of Muslim communities around our country.”
It’s unclear if the resolution would pass if brought to a vote. As of last week, at least 40 Democrats have signed statements calling for Boebert to be stripped from committees.
After extremist right wing Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) posted a video depicting an anime version of him killing Ocasio-Cortez, the House took swift action to punish him, voting to censure him and remove him from committee assignments a little more than a week after the video was posted. In that instance, Gosar refused to apologize and faced additional calls to be expelled.
Although Boebert did issue a weak apology to Omar, she has shown little remorse for her comments. Since the apology, the far right lawmaker has doubled down on her hateful rhetoric, even as more videos have emerged showing her making similar Islamophobic comments about Omar.
The original video of Boebert’s hateful comments was released late last month, about 11 days ago as of Wednesday. While recounting a story about being in an elevator with Omar — which Omar later said never happened — Boebert implied that Omar was a terrorist. A video from a separate event shows Boebert calling Omar a terrorist directly, and accusing her of being a terrorist sympathizer.
“This is why so many Muslims across the country have reached out to our office and to other members of Congress. Because they know that, when anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia is unaddressed, it’s the Muslim community that ends up paying for it,” Omar said on MSNBC on Tuesday.
“I just want to make people understand how dangerous the usage of her words can be, because I am afraid that somebody like the people who have been leaving voicemails [for] my office will feel compelled to come and take out the terrorist,” she continued, referring to death threats she received after Boebert’s comments went public. “And that is not only endangering my life, but that’s endangering other Muslims.”
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) went on an eight-and-a-half hour long tirade starting on Thursday night and ending early Friday morning during his allotted “magic minute” on the House floor on Thursday.
The speech, which began at roughly 8:30 pm ET on Thursday, resembled a filibuster and appeared to be a tactic to delay a vote on the Democrats’ social spending reconciliation bill, which passed the chamber Friday morning. It is the longest recorded speech in the House, breaking a previous record set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).
Although McCarthy occasionally touched on the bill itself, his speech also included completely and bizarrely unrelated tangents, including one about his friendship with Elon Musk and his inability to afford a Tesla. Some have speculated that the speech served more than one purpose, saying that it not only delayed the bill, but also served as McCarthy’s audition to take over as House speaker in the event that Republicans take back control of the chamber.
McCarthy finally finished his “magic minute,” which allows party leaders in the House to speak for as long as they like, at about 5:00 am, with Republican colleagues nodding off behind him. At that point, he yielded his time back to Pelosi, who had left hours ago.
The bill that he was filibustering contains provisions like paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, Medicare expansion and a plan to lower the cost of certain prescription drugs. It passed 220 to 213 after the chamber reconvened at 8 am, and now goes to the Senate, where it will likely be revised.
Reporters who witnessed much of the speech described it as circular and repetitive, and nearly incoherent in theme.
McCarthy parroted oft-repeated Republican grievances that have taken over the party in recent weeks, like spurious concerns about inflation, which economists have said won’t be worsened by the Build Back Better Act. He repeatedly brought up China, a popular talking point among Republicans, and at one point suggested that the Chinese government wouldn’t bolster the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as the reconciliation bill proposes, using this talking point to paint the bill as extremist.
He straight out lied about the reconciliation bill, saying at one point that it would cost $5 trillion — far higher than the bill was going to cost even when it was planned to be a $3.5 trillion bill spread out over ten years. Democrats heckled him in response, yelling out increasingly large numbers to mock the GOP leader.
By at least 11 pm, the speech was essentially a stream of consciousness, as reporter Aaron Rupar noted. “Gas prices! Thanksgiving!” the GOP leader exclaimed about two and a half hours into his speech. During his rant about the fully paid-for bill, he touched on World War II and Hitler. His speech also contained countless non-sequiturs — “I can’t even afford to test drive a Tesla,” he said around 11, “and Elon is one of my best friends.”
He pondered what the country would be like if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated, said that he would love to debate Jim Crow, and said that he wished he had attended the Tiananmen Square massacre. Close to midnight, he mentioned January 6 as the day he got his second COVID shot.
At around 1 am, McCarthy reportedly asked, “Does the McDonald’s still have the dollar meal?” Later, after many reporters and fellow members of Congress had left, he informed the chamber of “the secret” behind baby carrots, which is that they’re large carrots that are carved down to shape. That was around 3 am; after that, he went on to talk for two more hours.
The speech was largely mocked by Democrats and progressives, who joked about its absurd length. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) in particular made several jokes at McCarthy’s expense, calling his tirade an “unhinged diatribe.” At 11:30 pm, when many of the Republicans behind McCarthy had fallen asleep, Raskin quipped, “We are hearing rumors that the front row of GOP hostages behind Kevin McCarthy are asking whether they can just be censured instead.”
Lee Camp argues that AOC and Nancy Pelosi need to dive deeper, and disputes their claim that the United States is leading the world in climate action. America and other countries have not abided by any of the promises they gave at previous global climate summits while the planet heats up as predicted. By 2030, most people will not be talking about what happened in 2021, because current “leaders” will not be in office when that time rolls around and there will have been many more summits since then. Even though Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “America is back” and a leader of climate action,
