As amendments to the bipartisan infrastructure bill were being debated in the Senate, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Thursday that only about half of the $550 billion in new spending proposed by the bill will be paid for and the rest will add to the deficit.
The CBO announced that the bill would add about $256 billion to the deficit over the next ten years despite the fact that the bipartisan group working on the bill had promised the entire bill would be paid for.
Republicans have warned for weeks that they may not support the bill if it wasn’t fully funded. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said in June that might not support a bill that added to the deficit. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told The Hill on Thursday that, despite the good provisions in the bill, he believes half of the “pay-fors” in the bill are “fake.”
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has evidently been warning his colleagues for weeks that the bill would likely not be fully covered. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and Portman circulated a statement saying that the CBO score may not be fully accurate and that the bill would still be fully funded, in an attempt to assuage concerns for now.
Still, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) is hesitant after the CBO report, falling in step with McConnell’s announcement in June that GOP lawmakers wouldn’t vote for a bill that added to the deficit. A spokesperson for Hagerty told Politico that the senator “cannot in good conscience agree to expedite a process immediately after the CBO confirmed that the bill would add over a quarter of a trillion dollars to the deficit.”
Senators, mostly Republicans, introduced a flurry of amendments on Thursday evening but Hagerty’s opposition held up a vote to end debate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has rescheduled the vote for Saturday. The bill must receive at least 60 votes to advance, thanks to the Senate filibuster.
Though Republican opposition to adding to the deficit — and thus potential opposition to the entire infrastructure bill — is unsurprising, it comes after months of negotiations in which the GOP has rejected a wide swath of Democratic proposals that could have prevented any deficit issues at all.
President Joe Biden had originally proposed a modest tax increase on corporations and wealthy people to pay for his $4 trillion package. Republicans categorically rejected this proposal, not wanting to undo Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Instead, they offered to pay for the bill with user fees, a proposal that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) pointed out was really a tax on the middle and lower classes.
Republicans also rejected a proposal to enforce existing tax law on the rich. This pay-for would fund the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after rich tax dodgers — many who often donate handsomely to the Republican Party. The IRS funding proposal in the bipartisan bill would have raised an estimated $100 billion over 10 years.
The GOP, then, has created its own catch-22 on the infrastructure bill. They won’t agree to a bill that would add to the deficit, but they also won’t agree to any of the pay-fors that would cover additional spending. It’s unclear if Hagerty or other Republicans could be swayed to support the bill — but as Republicans have been delaying the bill for months, Democrats and progressives are growing more impatient.
Earlier this year, The New York Times revealed that Donald Trump’s campaign had extracted tens of millions of dollars in extra contributions from his supporters by surreptitiously signing them up for recurring donations, mostly by using pre-checked boxes in online forms. That practice was widely criticized and drew the attention of federal election officials, but it definitely hasn’t stopped. Trump’s fundraising appeals still appear to be automatically opting in donors for multiple contributions, which may partly account for $100 million-plus war chest the former president has accumulated since losing last year’s election. Other Republican candidates and elected officials have followed along, embracing Trump’s dubious fundraising practices just as they have embraced his politics.
Concerns around Trump’s donation scheme first emerged in April, when a Times investigation found that the former president’s campaign operation had routinely been signing up contributors for monthly — or even weekly — recurring contributions, through deliberately bewildering online forms and pre-checked authorizations. In the weeks before Election Day last fall, the Trump campaign rolled out an increasingly opaque array of these boxes, which featured huge blocks of boldface or all-caps text, full of aggressive phrasing, evidently intended to distract donors from the opt-out language in smaller, fainter type below.
This tactic, the Times reported, “ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.”
Trump’s campaign was forced to refund $122.7 million as a result of 200,000 disputed transactions in 2020. Refunds to donors who exceed legal limits are not infrequent in political campaigns, but that was a vastly higher sum than the amount refunded by Joe Biden’s campaign. This captured the attention of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which in May sent a formal recommendation to Congress, asking for an outright ban on pre-checked recurring donation boxes.
That doesn’t appear to have had made any meaningful impact on Trump’s fundraising effort. In fact, Salon’s reporting reveals that dozens of other Republican candidates and organizations now rely on pre-checked boxes to keep the money flowing, so much so that it can essentially be regarded as standard operating procedure on conservative fundrasing.
On donaldjtrump.com, where the former president is collecting funds for his Save America Joint Fundraising Committee, the website’s contribution page automatically signs donors up for both monthly recurring donations and an additional mid-month donation — both of which match whatever contribution amount is initially specified by the donor.
“The Left is putting AMERICA LAST,” one box readsin bold letters. “I need all hands on deck if we’re going to SAVE AMERICA! My team is handing me an updated Donor List soon — will I see your name? Step up NOW to increase your impact by 400%!”
Below that paragraph is smaller, lighter text that reads: “Donate an additional [amount specified] automatically on 8/13.” In both paragraphs, the separation between the pre-checked box, the boldface message and the line that authorizes a donation appears constructed to be intentionally confusing.
A number of experts on political fundraising said they viewed the pre-checked boxes as unethical or worse, noting their obvious potential to dupe potential donors who are less technologically savvy.
Michael Beckel, research director at Issue One, called the Trump campaign’s continued reliance on recurring donations “outrageous,” saying in an email exchange with Salon that such pre-checked boxes “have been shown to lead to consumer complaints and unhappy supporters.” He continued, “Giving donors the choice to opt in to recurring donations is a much better business practice than stealthily signing people up for recurring donations.”
The FEC’s recommendation to Congress, Beckel added, “should be a clear sign to all candidates to cease this practice.”
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an assistant professor in the College of Law at Stetson University, also said by email that it was “outrageous that donaldjtrump.com is still running the pre-checked box gambit on their donors.” She added, “It shows contempt for their financial supporters. If any donor wants to make a recurring donation, just have them opt in. Don’t trick them into it.”
Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, called the pre-checked boxes “ripoffs” in an interview with Salon. He noted that such tactics “invariably hit elderly people the most, because they are the ones who are more likely to contribute without knowing the ramifications of checkboxes or any similar kinds of gimmicks.”
Salon reached out to Trump’s team, which declined to respond to questions on whether the use of pre-checked boxes was a sound fundraising practice. The former president’s director of communications, Taylor Budowich, sent a statement by email that did not address that issue:
With the help of millions of American Patriots, President Trump has raised a record-setting amount of money to help elect America First conservatives and win back the House and Senate for Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections. The liberals hate this, as they should, because their days of ruinous leadership are numbered.
Though Trump’s messaging remains distinctive in terms of strident, overheated rhetoric, Salon’s reporting makes clear that he is far from the only Republican to rely on pre-checked boxes in fundraising appeals.
In fact, a significant number of high-profile Republican senators employ the tactic, ranging across the GOP spectrum from loyal Trump supporters like Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to Trump skeptics like Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Three of the most prominent Trump backers in the House, Devin Nunes of California, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Matt Gaetz of Florida, also use pre-checked boxes.
Salon reached out to all of the lawmakers mentioned above for comment. Only Gaetz responded, writing by email: “While Democrats and Republicans alike ‘check the box’ for lobbyists and PACs on K street, I’m the only Republican in Congress who totally refuses their dirty money.”
“I hope Salon criticizes me daily for funding my campaign only and directly from regular folks,” the scandal-plagued Florida congressman added, without comment on his use of pre-checked boxes.
As things stand, campaign finance law does not address deceptively-structured payment schemes such as pre-checked donation boxes.
“This is an unfair, misleading, and predatory practice, said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in an interview with Salon. “But at the moment, it’s a legal one.”
Bookbinder continued, “You would hope that after the kind of attention this received four months ago, campaigns and parties would just stop doing it. But where that doesn’t seem to be the case, I think there would need to be agency or legal action.”
Republican lawmakers, Bookbinder suggested, are taking cues from Trump’s open disregard for fundraising ethics. “You have the tone being set by organizations that are working for Donald Trump, who has shown this kind of contempt for any type of rules or traditions meant to make things more fair,” he said. “This seems to be a natural outgrowth of that.”
On campaign finance ethics, the FEC has been described as “notoriously dysfunctional” by one of its commissioners. The agency has frequently bogged down in partisan bickering that stalls or kills efforts to crack down on violations of the law. In fact, from July to December of 2020, under the Trump administration, the FEC lacked a quorum sufficient even to hold meetings, generating a massive backlog of 446 unresolved cases.
“The usual situation has been that the Democratic FEC commissioners have tried to enforce campaign finance law against both Democrats and Republicans, have tried to enforce it somewhat stringently,” a senior director for trial litigation and chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center told NPR last year. “And the Republican commissioners have generally opposed enforcement of the law, regardless of whether the law-breaker was a Republican group or a Democratic group.”
On the subject of pre-checked donation boxes, however, the FEC’s recommendation to Congress was unanimous. Democratic commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub was principal author of the letter released in May, urging Congress to set rules for those soliciting political contributions:
(1) receive affirmative consent of contributors when setting up recurring contributions, not to include implied consent through such means as pre-checked boxes; (2) provide a receipt and clearly and conspicuously disclose all material terms of recurring contributions to contributors at the time the contributions are set up and at the time of each individual contribution; (3) in each communication with the contributor regarding a recurring contribution, provide information needed to cancel the recurring contribution; and (4) immediately cancel recurring contributions upon the request of contributors. The same requirements should apply to those seeking recurring donations to fund electioneering communications.
To a considerable degree, the pre-checked box tactic was pioneered by WinRed, a for-profit company that serves as the RNC’s designated fundraising platform. In April, four state attorneys generals opened a probe into multiple platforms’ donation tactics, including those of WinRed and its Democratic counterpart, ActBlue, over their use of pre-checked boxes. ActBlue later told the Times it had begun phasing pre-checked boxes out of its platform. This appears to be true: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee do not automatically opt donors into recurring donations.
WinRed has accused the attorneys general of “exploiting their positions of power for partisan gain.”
“Only when Republicans began challenging the Democrats’ long-held advantage in online fund-raising did these Democrat Attorneys General activate,” WinRedtold The Washington Examiner in July. “It’s troubling to see these AGs attempt to use the power of their offices for the purpose of helping the Democrat Party.”
WinRed CEO Gerrit Lansing did not respond to Salon’s request for a comment.
A legislative push against this tactic has also begun on Capitol Hill. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., recently announced the introduction of a billthat would prohibit the use of pre-checked recurring donation boxes once and for all. “Following the FEC’s unanimous vote,” Klobuchar wrote, “it’s clear we should take action to ban this practice and ensure contributors are fully informed. This legislation will do just that.”
Emblematic of our times, the Berniecrat organization Our Revolution – never remotely revolutionary – has rebranded itself as “pragmatic progressive.” This innovation is based on the realization that progressive reforms will never be enacted unless they are fought for. And, since they are not about to fight President Biden, then it is only programmatic to accept that these reforms won’t happen.
Our Revolution surrenders
Good bye, Medicare-for-All, now that Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and even Bernie Sanders have abandoned the cause. Never mind that a majority of the electorate still favors the proposal. But to get Medicare-for-All, progressives would have to stand up to the Democratic Party. And that would entail a fight and therefore is not pragmatic.
A major reason for the Democrat’s obstruction of Medicare-for-All is that the health insurance industry and big pharma bought them off plus the entrenchment of corporate interests more broadly in the party. However, another factor is at work. Access to healthcare free-at-the-point-of-service would make working people more secure. For the exploiting class, it is better to forego a small gain in profits as the tradeoff for keeping workers precarious and thus less demanding. The people who run the Democratic Party know which side of the class barricades they are on; unfortunately, some progressives do not.
Some of the dump-Trump veterans, who are now AWOL in the battle against the current leader of the imperialist camp, proclaim Joe Biden is the political incarnate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lost in the fog of war is the fact that, for over forty years, Biden has been among the architects of the neoliberal project associated with the Democratic Leadership Group to bury FDR’s New Deal.
The New Deal was an experiment in a mild form of social democracy, where the capitalist ruling class allowed a degree of social welfare state functions in return for labor peace. Ever since Carter, gaining steam with Reagan and Clinton, and continuing now with Biden, neoliberal reform has entailed privatization of education, health, and other state enterprises, economic austerity for working people, and deregulation and tax relief for the corporations, while augmenting the coercive apparatus of the state. In short, since the 1970s, neoliberalism has been the form of contemporary capitalism.
This is what democracy looks like
In the run-up to the US 2020 presidential election, some erstwhile progressives told us to hold our noses and get on the Biden bandwagon. Then, as they worked alongside the decadent Democrats, they became desensitized to the redolence of being in proximity to power. And now some counsel us to stand down to the powerful and join in attacking the official enemies of Washington.
However, some Berniecrats have resisted the succor of the Democrat’s big tent and are still fighting the good fight under the banner of the Movement for a People’s Party. They have had the temerity to picket Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to hold her feet to the fire on her campaign promises.
This is what democracy looks like. Politicians can hardly be blamed for gravitating to the rewards of party orthodoxy, if their constituents fail to demand that they follow through on the platform that got them elected. But for demanding that politicians that talk progressive also walk progressive, those who speak truth to power are attacked by those who no longer consistently do so.
So, we often see the following progression. After shirking from criticizing the powerful, the next career move is to find legitimacy by criticizing those who do. For example, the Young Turks show accused anti-imperialist Grayzone reporter Aaron Mate falsely and without evidence of being “paid by the Russians.”
This is symptomatic of elements of progressivism who have become ever more comfortable with the Democrats as the only alternative to what they perceive as the greater evil of the Republicans. Since they now eschew criticizing those actually in power, they are relegated to attacking the genuine left. Rather than “battling Biden” as they promised after “dumping Trump,” some progressives have descended the slippery slope into providing left cover for the Democrats both on domestic and, as argued below, international fronts.
Covering for imperialism
The domestic capitulation of some self-identified progressives also translates into a deafening silence about opposing the imperialism of the Democratic Party. Shortly after the dawn of the new millennium, the US anti-war movement experienced a resurgence against Republican President George W. Bush’s Iraq war. But soon as Democrat Barack Obama took office, with Bush’s Secretary of Defense Gates still in charge, the anti-war movement collapsed and has been since largely quiescent.
More recently, imperialist ventures have been greeted with more than silence. There are now, unfortunately, full-throated echoes of the imperialist’s talking points by former anti-war activists and intellectuals.
Take the arguably once progressive NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) in a recent article specifically calling for “taking off the cloak of silence.” NACLAreports on the “long-standing totalitarian Cuban government.” According to the author, an expert on “social and cultural entrepreneurship” (i.e., promotion of capitalism), the US blockade of Cuba “isn’t responsible for the island’s economic downfall. Instead that is a result of the powerful [Cuban government] elite’s iron grip and stockpiling.” Of course, if that were anywhere near the truth, the US would have no need for the blockade.
This takes place in the context of President Biden doubling down on a regime-change offensive, reversing campaign promises to reverse Trump’s illegal sanctions on Cuba. Washington now believes Cuba is close to falling due to the deprivation caused by the ever-tightening US blockade exacerbated by the COVID pandemic.
Further, NACLA tells us that the view of Cuba as a “model for many anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements” is not only wrong but that the Cuban’s attempt at socialism is based on “an economic model that is inherently ineffective.” Unfortunately, that verdict has a perverse element of truth. As long as the US can impose suffocating unilateral coercive measures on Cuba and other small nations striving for an alternative to neoliberalism, the socialist model will not be allowed to succeed.
Socialism is supposed to satisfy people’s needs, while capitalism is inherently a system that creates unlimited perceived needs without the means for their fulfillment. That is, under capitalism, a system driven by individual greed, one cannot ever accumulate too much. The carrot on a stick, perpetually dangled out of reach, is the essence of what the author of the NACLA article proudly calls “entrepreneurship.”
But what happens when – as the NACLA article admonishes – the nation striving for socialism can no longer “cover the basic necessities to make daily life worth living”? Apparently, solidarity with the Cubans against attacks by the world’s superpower is not paramount for some self-identified progressives who issued a recent petition to the Cuban government.
Their Change.org petition, quoting Rosa Luxemburg on freedom from a repressive state, demanded the release of Frank García Hernández arrested by the Cuban government on July 11. However, the Mr. García had already been released the following day, while the petition was still being circulated.
Whatever the intentions of the individual signatories of the petition, its actual impact had nothing to do with freeing someone who was already free and everything to do with providing a left cover for imperialism. Had the signatories been genuinely concerned with what they perceived as an overreaction by the Cubans to a manifestly existential security threat to their revolution, they should have also addressed the petition to the White House and demanded the ending or at least easing of that security threat. Some of these same individuals have also signed petitions against Nicaragua, Syria, and other official enemies of the US.
Struggling on two fronts
Meanwhile, the neoliberal order is becoming more and more exposed, with billionaires increasing their net worth astronomically while working people face a yet to be contained pandemic with inadequate healthcare, unemployment, and austerity. This is fuel for the populist right-wing, which could be the shock troops of a fascist movement. But we are not there yet.
The legitimate concern about fascism, when associated exclusively with Trump and his followers, has been used by some self-identified progressives as an excuse to embrace the Democrats. The struggle against “neofascist” Trumpism has been coopted into a surrender into the main party now in charge of the imperialist state and increasingly distinguishing itself as the leadingproponent of war.
The January 6th riot by Trump supporters at the Capital Building was conflated by Democrats into a coup attempt of new kind where the perpetrators, instead of taking state power, took selfies and went home. Some of the villains of January 6th, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, turned out to be friendly with the FBI and possible agents with get-out-of-jail-free passes.
It would be cold comfort for progressives to discover that they have triumphed against the crude fascism of working-class guys with tattoos only to find that the friendly fascism of Saint Robert Mueller’s national security state has prevailed. Progressives, who have their canons aimed at Mar-a-Lago, may be leaving their backs exposed to those who now hold state power in Washington.
The ensuing clamor after January 6 from would-be progressives to expand the already enormous police powers of the state against protesters is an example of the dictum that you should be careful about what you wish for. The state coercive apparatus – police, military, homeland security, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. – has been and will be used against the left.
The genuinely progressive solution is not to support one or the other neoliberal party, which are collectively the perpetrators of the current calamity, but to struggle against the conditions that foster a right-wing insurgency. That is, resist both right-wing populism and the established ruling class, with the main emphasis on those in power.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday skewered conservative members of the House Democratic caucus who left town for vacation instead of backing an effort to extend the nationwide eviction moratorium that officially expired this weekend, leaving millions of people at imminent risk of being forced out of their homes.
“The House and House leadership had the opportunity to vote to extend the moratorium. And there was frankly a handful of conservative Democrats in the House that threatened to get on planes rather than hold this vote, and we have to really just call a spade a spade,” the New York Democrat said in an appearance onCNNSunday morning, hours after the eviction moratorium lapsed.
“We cannot in good faith blame the Republican Party when House Democrats have the majority,” she added.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did just that in aseries of tweetson Saturday, claiming that she “led a relentless campaign to extend the CDC eviction moratorium” only to be thwarted by the GOP.
“In an act of pure cruelty,” Pelosi wrote, “Republicans blocked this measure — leaving children and families out on the streets.”
While it’s true that House Republicans opposed prolonging the moratorium, the Democratic leadership made it easy for the GOP to tank the proposed extension by attempting to pass it viaunanimous consent. With that procedure, justone Republican objectionwas enough to defeat the extension — and instead of going on to hold a full House vote, Democratic leaders opted to adjourn the chamber for a seven-week recess.
In aletterto her caucus on Saturday, Pelosi noted that House members are “on call” to return to Washington at any point — but she did not say she would reconvene the chamber for a vote on extending the eviction moratorium.
CNN’s @jaketapper: “Who’s to blame” for the failure to extend the eviction moratorium?
Rep. @AOC gives a very honest answer about conservative House Democrats threatening to get on planes and Biden WH waiting ’til the day before. pic.twitter.com/3zVncWDpb7
In herCNNinterview on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez stressed that theBiden White Housealso deserves blame for the lapse of the eviction reprieve, which was first implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last September and extended four times thereafter.
“The White House waited until the day before the House adjourned to release a statement asking Congress to extend the moratorium,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who accused the Biden administration of not being “forthright” about its position on the moratorium when pressed by lawmakers in recent weeks. “The House was put into, I believe, a needlessly difficult situation.”
“So, there’s a couple of contributing factors here,” she continued. “We have governors here who are also not getting this emergency rental assistance out in time… But the fact of the matter is that the problem is here. The House should reconvene and call this vote and extend the moratorium. There’s about 11 million people that are behind on their rent, at risk of eviction — that’s one out of every six renters in the United States.”
The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.
― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(
It is time to recalibrate the government.
For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.
By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.
We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.
This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.
These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.
That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.
This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.
“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”
Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.
There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.
The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.
So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?
It won’t be easy.
We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.
This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.
We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.
We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.
We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.
In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.
That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.
In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.
The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.
Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.
Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.
Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.
Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?
As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”
Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.
We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.
What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?
In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.
These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.
This way lies madness.
Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.
How to do this? It’s not rocket science.
There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.
Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.
Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.
Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.
Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election was once a fringe idea. It was thought up by Trump and his team to throw the election into chaos and, he hoped, keep Trump in power, no matter the election results.
Republicans in Congress didn’t have to follow suit, but they did and have been repeating the lies about the election for months. Even after their lives were put in danger on January 6 by an angry mob of Trump hooligans, 147 of them voted to overturn the election results. Republicans at the state level, meanwhile, have now passed 30 laws to restrict voting based on the lies about “voter fraud.”
This is all despite the fact that, evidently, Republican lawmakers don’t even believe in the Big Lie. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) said on CNN on Wednesday that nearly all of his colleagues in Congress don’t actually believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election — but they repeat the lie anyway.
“Save one or two maybe out here, nobody — and I think it’s very important to repeat — nobody actually believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump, but a lot of them are happy to go out and say it was,” Kinzinger told Wolf Blitzer.
Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the House committee to investigate January 6, also said that Republican colleagues are quietly supportive of his work on the committee. “There is a lot of people, you know, that come up and say it. And it’s not any of them that go on TV and spout the Big Lie and then say it. It’s the ones that stay more quiet that I think appreciate the stand,” he said. “But it’s a lot.”
Most observers would have a hard time believing that Republicans who don’t stand behind the Big Lie are actually the silent majority in Congress. GOP members have been repeating the lie for months and have even convinced their voter base that the election was stolen, even if they claim in private that they don’t believe it themselves. They had even voted to oust the other Republican on the January 6 committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), from party leadership back in May for not repeating Trump’s lie.
Kinzinger and Cheney aren’t angels. They are, as William Pitt recently wrote for Truthout, “hardcore House Republicans” that count as moderates only because they reject the Big Lie — a very low bar. “At first blush, the inclusion of Cheney and Kinzinger would seem to represent a giant step back” because of their heinous views on LGBTQ rights, health care and the forever wars in the Middle East, Pitt wrote.
But the party as a whole has become so extreme that the two seem like middle-of-the-road legislators. The drama stirred by the party over the January 6 committee did even more to exaggerate that stance.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) had raised a stink over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) rejection of his picks, Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Indiana), from the January 6 committee. He called the process a “sham” and said that the Republican Party would not take part, making it seem as though the entire caucus was opposed to the process.
As Kinzinger has said, however, this is clearly not the case. Though many Trump-allied Republicans downplay the attack today, it would appear that many of them are still alarmed about the severity of the attack, even if they won’t admit it.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia), for instance, has referred to the attack as a “normal tourist visit,” a comparison that he still stands by today. But photos from the day show him and fellow lawmakers barricading the door of the House chamber, suggesting that even he believed it was anything but normal six months ago.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), who had told the Trump mob to “start taking down names and kicking ass” before they attacked the Capitol, recently admitted to Slate that he was warned of the risks of the day and wore body armor to protect himself. Still, he thinks that the January 6 committee isn’t necessary and the conservative attack to reinstate Trump as president despite the will of over 81 million voters would be somehow more politicized than it already has been because of the hearings.
Former Oregon Republican state Rep. Mike Nearman has pleaded guilty to official misconduct after he let a violent far right mob into the state Capitol late last year.
Nearman must now pay a $2,700 fine, perform 80 hours of community service and is banned from entering the state Capitol grounds for 18 months. The fine is meant to pay for damages done to the building. The Republican was expelled from office in June for allowing the mob into the state Capitol.
But, as The Washington Post points out, Nearman said after his sentencing on a conservative radio show that he doesn’t think that he did anything wrong that day, despite having pleaded guilty. “I don’t think I committed a crime, and I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said.
The statement is clearly confounding after Nearman’s guilty plea earlier that day, and the video footage of Nearman allowing the QAnon-affiliated supporters into the building is clear cut and damning. Though the former lawmaker said on the radio show that he pleaded guilty in order to avoid a long and expensive court battle, his motivations for denying fault may have more to do with his political career than legal consequences he might face.
In court, Nearman revealed his true intentions for letting the mob into the building: he told the judge that he believed it “would make me appear favorable to certain citizen groups,” reports The Oregonian. Those groups, presumably, would be the QAnon mob and other far right conspiracy peddlers who were behind the protests that day.
The group had been outside the Oregon Capitol in December protesting coronavirus restrictions that barred the public from entering the building. Some of the individuals were armed, and they had wanted to occupy the Capitol.
After Nearman opened the door to the mob, they clashed with police, trying to shove their way in and using bear spray against the officers. Lawmakers from both parties condemned Nearman’s actions when voting to expel him.
“The facts are clear that Mr. Nearman unapologetically coordinated and planned a breach of the Oregon state Capitol,” Oregon Democrat and House Speaker Tina Kotek said. “His actions were blatant and deliberate, and he has shown no remorse for jeopardizing the safety of every person in the Capitol that day.”
The Republican leader of the House agreed, saying that there could “easily have been a death on that day.” Nearman was expelled 59 to 1, with Nearman being the only opposing vote.
The facts of Nearman’s case echo that of January 6, when a violent Donald Trump-supporting mob shoved and fought their way into the U.S. Capitol. Then, too, the mob chanted conspiracy theories fueled by Trump and the far right, clashed with police and called Black officers racial slurs. The January 6 attack happened just over two weeks after Nearman let the far right mob into the Oregon Capitol.
The judge in Nearman’s case said that she was listening to testimony from Capitol Police officers on her way to the courthouse on Tuesday. Officers testified in front of the House committee to investigate the January 6 attack. They expressed anger that Republicans like Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia) — who said, and still defends, his statement that the attack was a “normal tourist visit” — continue to deny the severity of the attack.
This, again, is similar to Nearman stating that he didn’t believe he did anything wrong. And the congressional Republicans’ motivations for denying the gravity of the attack and the subsequent deaths are likely similar to Nearman’s: gain support with far right QAnon and conspiracy theory believers who want the violence downplayed, perhaps so they can do it again.
For a moment, put yourself in a pair of Republican shoes. The news today is dominated by testimony given by four police officers about the gruesome beatings they absorbed at the hands of a furiously violent tide of red-hatted Trump lovers on January 6.
You’re a Republican today. How do you react to that?
“Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham had a decidedly sarcastic reaction to the harrowing Tuesday testimonies of police who defended the Capitol from pro-Trump supporters on January 6,” reportsBusiness Insider. Ingraham accused the officers of acting, and Carlson scolded one of the officers who compared his experience at the Capitol with his time as a soldier in Iraq. “It’s not Fallujah,” said Carlson, while Fox aired a conveniently mellow portion of the riot that merely showed people wandering around the building.
Over at the laboriously far right One America News Network (OAN), they didn’t even bother to air the testimony beyond a 20-second clip they talked over as it played. They did, however, give detailed coverage of an early GOP press conference where House Speaker Pelosi was blamed for the calamity because she is somehow in charge of the Capitol Police (she isn’t).
Later, OAN played another GOP press conference featuring Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed the people under arrest for sacking the Capitol were “political prisoners.” That protest was broken up by someone blowing a whistle, which was apparently so unnerving that one of the cars carrying the lawmakers sped the wrong way down 9th St. NW in order to escape. “It swerved in front of oncoming traffic onto Pennsylvania Avenue amid a hail of honking horns,” reportsThe Washington Post.
If you reacted like that, you’re doing it wrong. You can take those shoes off now. They pinch, I know.
This sort of desperately bizarre poo-slinging was not relegated to a couple of shameless “news” outlets and the Goofball Caucus of Gaetz and Greene. “I have yet to meet a Republican in Congress who has minimized and doesn’t believe that what happened on January 6 was serious,” serial denialist Rep. Jim Banks — who along with Jim Jordan was blessedly bounced from the committee by Pelosi — toldCNN yesterday.
Banks has clearly never met Sen. Ron Johnson, who calls 1/6 a “peaceful protest.” Banks likewise ignores Rep. Andrew Clyde, who called the insurrection a “normal tourist visit,” after screaming in terror during the attack. In fact, there appears to be only two Republicans in Congress — Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney — willing to call this thing what it was in public, and both of them now sit on the select committee investigating that day. Only 35 House Republicans voted to create the committee in the first place, and almost all of them have been keeping their heads down ever since.
The unreality of all this denial serves to underscore the broader surrealist landscape we find ourselves in. The testimony of the four officers was deeply compelling — one of them, Michael Fanone, had a death threat called into his cell while he was testifying — but there were also police officers participating in the insurrection, and law enforcement’s support for Donald Trump is notorious. Cheney and Kinzinger comported themselves well yesterday, but on balance, their voting records make me want to hide under the bed. These are the heroes today?
Finally, and fundamentally, the idea that Republican officeholders and their supporters can somehow be reached took a mighty blow yesterday. Almost to a person, congressional Republicans bore witness to the horrors of 1/6 while inside the building that day, and then again yesterday as captured on camera and described in testimony. They either turned on their heels and called it no big deal, or they said nothing at all.
I guess I understand why. The last thing House Republicans want is to have these hearings on their backs as they prepare for the 2022 midterms. It’s bad enough that Trump is still lurking out there, waiting to smash and sabotage his own party at any given opportunity. The video and testimony from yesterday will become fodder for 10,000 Democratic campaign commercials next year, if not sooner, and that is bad news for the faithful.
Every Trump-backing Republican making money off the MAGA crowd’s fathomless credulity can perceive a reckoning because of that fealty not too far down the line. It is uncertain when the next 1/6 hearing will be taking place, but when it does, Republicans would do well to try and stave off a similar backlash reaction once confronted by the consequences of their deeds. Of course, they won’t. I’m really not sure they can.
The first four witnesses in today’s opening hearing into the 1/6 Capitol attack — DC Metropolitan Police Officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone, alongside Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell — took their seats a little after 9:00 am Eastern time. A few minutes before, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan and a handful of other congressional Republicans had just finished a press conference in which they blamed Speaker Pelosi for what went down last January.
It’s that kind of day, week, however long these hearings take. By muffing his little stunt trying to foist the unserious Jordan onto the committee, McCarthy created a situation in which the only two Republicans on the panel are no longer under his control. McCarthy has no means of disrupting the hearings, so you can expect he and his minions will run around waving their arms and screaming, anything to distract from the conversation taking place in that hearing room. If today was any indication, it will not work.
Those two Republicans — Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney — have been working diligently with Democrats on the committee since they were named to it, no doubt another detail that’s infuriating for McCarthy. The minority leader’s immediate response was to call the two co-operating GOP House members “Pelosi Republicans,” which… yeah. One of those days.
Both Kinzinger and Cheney have emphasized the need for “facts” (from Kinzinger, who has spread lies about abortion, LGBTQ rights and Iran, to name a few) and the need to “rise above politics” (from Cheney, whose Republican hawkishness spurred the way toward ongoing war, in the model of her father Dick Cheney). Neither of these people will be redeemed by their presence on the committee — far from it — but today their presence was something of a relief, given the alternative.
Chairman Thompson has made it clear that no person or topic will be off limits during these hearings, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has signaled the Justice Department will not interfere with subpoenas sent to former Trump officials, so a number of familiar names may find themselves called to testify.
Sgt. Gonell spoke after Thompson and Cheney, raw with emotion. The story he told was harrowing. “What we were subjected to that day was like something from a Medieval battle,” said Gonell. “We fought hand to hand.” He expected to die guarding the doorway where he and his fellow officers clashed with the rioters.
Officer Fanone spoke next. His was a familiar face, as he has appeared on the news channels multiple times to tell his story, and to scald congressional Republicans for insulting the truth of 1/6. His fury was likewise palpable as he described being tasered on the back of the skull, of getting beaten ruthlessly, and of nearly being killed by his own service weapon as the crowd chanted, “Kill him with his own gun!”
“The treatment shown my colleagues [by Republicans who deny the facts of the day] is DISGRACEFUL,” Fanone roared at one juncture, pounding the table loud enough to make the room jump. Following Fanone was Officer Hodges, who recounted his similar experiences with a brittle calm. Of the three, Hodges was the most unsparing in his clear declaration that the mob which attacked him was by, for and with Donald Trump.
Hodges, too, wept during his testimony when he reached the portion of his story recounting his close brush with death when he got caught between the two masses of fighting bodies. Most who have followed this story since January will recognize Hodges; he was the officer screaming for help as a man “foaming at the mouth” battered him in his helplessness and tore off his gas mask.
Officer Dunn opened his testimony with a request for a moment of silence for Brian Sicknick, one of the Capitol Police officers who died after the attack. Dunn — the officer who was captured on camera leading rioters away from vulnerable Congress members — laid out the evident tactical planning that went into the attack, the deliberate coordination of forces for the specific purpose of sacking the Capitol and disrupting the certification of the election.
Dunn recounted the torrent of racial abuse he absorbed from the mob, and shared that other Black officers he later spoke to had similar experiences to recount. Dunn quoted McCarthy’s searing criticism of Trump, spoken immediately after the attack was over, a vivid counterpoint to the minority leader’s abrupt about-face.
As we recognize the weight of these witness statements, we are by no means asserting the righteousness of the police or policing; we’re simply sharing the words of those impacted by this right-wing attack. All of us must simultaneously hold the fact that there were police officers involved in the January 6 attack, and that white supremacy — which drove so many of the Capitol attackers — also drives the core of policing.
Meanwhile, it is easy enough to see why Republicans want to thwart these hearings, if today is any indication of what is to come. January 6 was a Trump riot, a Republican riot, and the four witnesses today made no equivocation on that score. If it hasn’t happened already, I’m betting McCarthy will be getting an angry call from the Beast of Bedminster. Fortunately for democracy, all McCarthy and Trump can do is watch like the rest of us.
Former-slave-state Missouri Senator Josh Hawley doesn’t want America’s white children to be exposed to the simple reality that slavery was not only legal at the founding of our country but was, in several places, written into our Constitution.
And that the rest of America subsidized the slave-owners’ states and continues to subsidize them to this day.
Hawley, of course, is the guy who gave a fist-salute to the armed white supremacist traitors who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th to assassinate Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi. He hopes to ride his white supremacy shtick to the White House.
Doubling down on the GOP notion that America is a nation exclusively of, by and for white people, Hawley has now proposed a law he calls “The Love America Act of 2021.” The bill is only 3 ½ pages long. There’s a bit of legalese to make it into legislation, defining what “school” means, etc., but this is what it says:
“RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — …[N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.”
That’s it. That’s the gist of the entire bill.
In other words, public schools that teach the actual history of our Constitution lose all their federal funds — our tax dollars — and essentially go out of business. It’s really just that simple: white supremacist Republicans like Hawley don’t want your kids to know the true history of America.
Black children, they say, are old and tough enough to experience racism but white children are just waaay too young and fragile to learn about it.
Hawley’s protests notwithstanding, racism and white supremacy were very much a part of our founding documents. Consider “Father of the Constitution” (and slaveholder) James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
It was the third week of August and the issue of America taxing “property” (a code word for slaves) got tied to the debate about how many representatives each state should have in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The five slave states wanted all their enslaved people counted toward representation — even though they couldn’t vote or enjoy any of the rights of citizenship — but didn’t want to pay any “property tax” on them. The eight “free” states vehemently objected both to counting enslaved people to increase the slave states’ representation in Congress and to subsidizing them via tax law.
It produced one of the great speeches at the Constitutional Convention, which Madison dutifully transcribed.
Gouverneur Morris (“Gouverneur” was his first name, not his title) represented Pennsylvania, and single-handedly wrote the Preamble to the Constitution. He was 35 years old, a lawyer and a graduate of Kings College (what we now call Columbia University). And he was an ardent abolitionist.
“He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery,” Madison wrote, summarizing Morris’ speech. “It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.”
Warming to his topic, Morris began an extended rant about how destructive slavery was to the new nation they were birthing. It illustrates how wrong Hawley is in saying that racism and white supremacy had nothing to do with writing the Constitution.
“Compare the [slave]-free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people,” Morris said, “with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other states having slaves. Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery.”
Morris said the enslavement of people was a curse on America that was visible to anybody who simply looked. The free north was prosperous; the south, where people were enslaved, was poor.
“The moment you leave the Eastern [slave] States,” he said, “and enter New York, the effects of the institution become visible. Passing through the Jerseys, and entering Pennsylvania, every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed southwardly, and every step you take, through the great regions of slaves, presents a desert increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings.”
But the white supremacist slaveholders representing the slave states in the Convention wanted more power in Congress and lower taxes in their own states, much like today’s Republicans. The key to that, they believed, was having some or all of their states’ enslaved Black people counted toward representation in Congress, even though they were in chains and unable to vote.
In an echo of this very argument last month the white supremacists of the Georgia legislature passed, and Governor Brian Kemp signed into law in front of a painting of a slave plantation, legislation that would give Georgia’s Republicans the ability to simply toss out the votes of people in largely Black districts with the excuse that they “suspect,” with or without evidence, that “fraud” happened.
It’s such a radical law that the CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, Nsé Ufot, bluntly told Politico that unless the law is overturned by ending the filibuster and passing the For The People Act, “we’re fucked.”
As if we’re torn in half through some weird time machine, Madison continued with his transcription of Gouverneur Morris’ speech.
“Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation?” Morris demanded of his colleagues. “Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is no other property included [in determining representation}? The houses in this city (Philadelphia) are worth more than all the wretched slaves who cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.”
And then Morris nailed down precisely how and why racism and white supremacy were written into the Constitution with the so-called “3/5ths compromise” (among other places) that gave southern states more members in the House of Representatives than their white population would justify.
“The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this,—that the [white] inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina, who go to the coast of Africa, and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow-creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes… than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, who views, with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.”
It was all about using racism and white supremacy to increase the power of white people in the South, and then force the rest of the country to subsidize them.
Keep in mind that Democrats in the U.S. Senate today represent 41 million more people than do the Senate’s Republicans. And, echoing 1787, Georgia and 17 other Republican-controlled mostly-former-slave-states have now put into law the power for them to deny the vote to Black people or simply refuse to count their votes.
But back to 1787:
Morris paused to gather his thoughts, and then, Madison noted, continued, this time calling out the Southern oligarchs who flaunted their riches made possible by slave labor while asking the northern states to pay for their defense and otherwise subsidize them with northern tax dollars.
“He would add,” Madison wrote, “that domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution. The vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of aristocracy.”
Morris was probably shouting at this point; such language is rarely found in our founding documents and may help explain why Madison kept his “notes” secret until his death nearly 50 years later. Morris pointed out how the south was essentially demanding that the north subsidize them financially, something that continues to this day.
“And what is the proposed compensation to the Northern States,” Morris demanded, “for a sacrifice of every principle of right, of every impulse of humanity? … The … tea used by a northern freeman will pay more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave….”
Morris lost the argument and the southern slave states got extra representation in Congress along with no federal taxation of their “property.” But the GOP sure doesn’t want you or your kids to know that.
If Hawley’s bill were to become law, any public school that taught Morris’ anti-slavery speech would lose all federal funding. This is how white supremacy works today and, indeed, has worked in this nation since our founding.
Their strategy is straightforward: Control history (from Texas editing Martin Luther King out of its textbooks to generations of statues of Confederate generals), suppress the political power of Black people while subsidizing Red states, and do it all with a thin patina of legalese.
Northern states generally make it easy for all people to vote while former slave states do everything they can to suppress the Black vote (along with the votes of young people and older Social Security voters).
Former slave states like Hawley’s Missouri represent the overwhelming majority of states to have passed voter suppression legislation. And they’re still hustling tax dollars from the rest of us, just as Morris complained about in 1787.
Northern states get back a fraction of every dollar they send to Washington, DC while former slave states get as much as $2 for every tax dollar they send the federal government.
“Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.
“Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for tax every dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.”
White supremacy, racism and the rest of America subsidizing Red states weren’t just realities in 1787: they’re alive and well today.
Hawley and his white supremacist buddies in the GOP want to keep it that way, and their hateful “Love America Act” is just the latest disgusting part of their strategy. We’ve been tolerating and subsidizing these losers since 1787 and it’s time to stop.
So, maybe it didn’t begin there, but is that where it all came together and became the lip signed treaty between President and Party? Was the infamous 2017 around-the-table butt-kissing spectacle the inflection point; the official surrender of the Republican Party to Donald Trump?
They took turns demeaning themselves and the America people, with Reince Priebus offering up the best summation: “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda … and the American people.”
It might have come as a surprise, even to him – not just the willingness, but the seeming eagerness with which they bent over publicly and gave up their human dignity and the charade of serving their country. They were all in. If he hadn’t already known it, Trump must surely have looked around the table that afternoon and realized he could do anything; anything at all and there would be no resistance. “What a bunch of gutless suckers,” he likely thought. “I can work with these people.”
The scene was made more deplorable in knowing the subsistence level of all those present. All were men and women of enviable means. Their economic livelihoods were not at risk. Their families were not held in jeopardy. Each could have stepped away to un-toady respectability and a more than comfortable lifestyle. But none did. They instead made political reality of Trump’s Access Hollywood braggart admission of sexual assault: “They let you do it. You can do anything.”
What if they had laughed when Mike Pence first pursed his lips and commenced the parade of abdication: “It’s the greatest privilege of my life to serve as vice president to a president who is keeping his word to the American people, and assembling a team that’s bringing real change, real prosperity, real strength back to our nation.” What if even just one of them had spontaneously laughed out loud, would it have broken the spell? Could the Party (and perhaps the country) have been saved with some animating laughter at the cringe-worthy pandering?
More than four years have lurched by since that memorable day. They’re not sitting around the adoration table anymore, and many of the faces have changed, but the groveling still goes on. They now pay homage individually with trips to Mar-a-Lago and testimonials on Fox News, Trump TV, or any media outlets offering a kneeling bench.
In absentia, the former president presides over an emasculated Party. Trump’s presidency is now gone, but his will is still here. His Party is still here, but its will is now gone. They are letting him do it. The Republican Party (and American democracy) is dissolving under the acidic tongue of political butt-kissing. The dissolution is too far along. The 2017 potential off-ramp was missed; the spell can’t be broken with awakening laughter. The Republican Party has immolated itself. The residue still left is the Party of Trump. The POT platform has but one unstable pillar: the autocratic will of Trump.
What happened to the once proud, even macho-inclined culture of the Republican Party? How was it so easily seduced into fulfilling the desires of a man whose moral credo is: “They let you do it. You can do anything.”
An acclaimed social psychology study might offer a clue. The Righteous Mind (2012) by Jonathan Haidt explored social/political morality. He examined the perceptions we hold that nudge us towards liberal or conservative stances and often into left-leaning or right-leaning political parties. Haidt delineated a moral matrix of six primary spectrums that influence our social and political leanings: Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. Through widespread survey and scrutiny, he discerned a difference in weighting to the components held by liberal, libertarian, and conservative mind-sets.
As charted below, the liberal moral matrix heavily weights the first three components (but especially Care/harm), the libertarian moral matrix heavily weights the second two components (but especially Liberty/oppression), while the conservative moral matrix weights all components about equally (none are heavily weighted).
It’s been almost a decade since publication. There appears to be a “new kid” on the block who wasn’t present in 2012. The balanced weighting of Haidt’s conservative moral matrix is not evident in what has become the POT, nor does it conform to either of the other two moral matrix mixes. If its values were charted, it would likely show an extremely heavy line drawn to the Authority/subversion component. It would be the one line of significant breadth. The overwhelming propensity of the POT is to reflect the will of its leader. All other matrix components have been marginalized. The POT is an authoritarian political entity that fell out of the conservative moral matrix once characterizing the GOP.
So what really changed? It wasn’t a wholesale swap of physical bodies. Most of the prior GOP constituency is intact; many of its stewards are still there, but somehow it has managed to mutate into a POT morality with hardly more than a hiccup. How could that be? It’s as if a congregation went to church one Sunday morning, found its traditional god replaced, yet was still able to sing familiar hymns as if nothing of substance had occurred.
The Righteous Mind’s aim was not to denigrate one camp over another, but to explore their differences in hopes of stimulating awareness and receptive dialogue between opposing advocates (its subtitle is, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion). That said, the transformation of the GOP into the POT begs at least one partisan sounding question: Does the GOP’s morph into the POT indicate that the conservative moral matrix mix is unstable and prone to transmutation? Put another way, despite the air of individualistic bravado, are conservative minds more easily manipulated into abandoning former values and embracing authoritarian voices?
Again, looking at the charts, the liberal moral matrix is moored to Care/harm and the libertarian matrix is tethered to Liberty/oppression. It’s only the conservative moral matrix that is equally weighted, showing no anchor to any particular component. Is that a clue to its apparent instability?
“Equally weighted” usually speaks to stability, but as a moral matrix feature, it means just a little weight added to any component makes that component dominant. The conservative moral matrix has no preexisting heavily weighted component to resist such manipulation. With relatively little effort, a demagogue can add a thumb to the weight of any component, suddenly giving it (and the demagogue) overriding influence.
The conservative moral matrix is not moored to the Care/harm component, nor is the libertarian matrix. Both are thus susceptible to bypassing or devaluing its import. Broadly speaking, Care/harm is a measure of one’s sensitivity to the distress and well-being of others. Its exclusion or downplay is dangerous to humanity. A political party without Care/harm sentiment is like a physician without a “first, do no harm” principle; pretext is easily justified and ruthlessness has little hindrance.
It may not have begun with Trump, but a transmutation of this sort has certainly “blossomed” under his watch. His thumb has altered the POT matrix into something that is no longer the conservative moral matrix. When he pushes the Authority/subversion button, all other values are marginalized. The party voice might sound the same; the choir might sing long familiar hymns (freedom, independence, patriotism, etc.) but it does so while dismantling its prior core values (and with it, American democracy). The “only I can fix it” former president presides while his minions “fix” democracy to his authoritarian liking. It’s happening now. In state after state, suffrage is being suppressed, past elections are being invalidated, and future elections are being primed for manipulation. If he and his party prevail, democracy won’t. “American democracy,” like “Russian democracy,” will be a misnomer.
The POT threat to democracy is coming from the right. Could it just as easily have come from the left? It’s another partisan sounding question, but an almost automatic follow-on to the first.
Does its anchor in Care/harm protect liberal ambition from authoritarian intrusion and manipulation? Might an “only I can fix it” liberal arise to such prominence that Care/harm values could be abandoned in pursuit of another supposed need? Or could the Care/harm value be so threatened that only the power of a demagogue could save it?
Demagogues and authoritarians usually arise through promises to address the fears/concerns of one part of a population over another. Demagogues are willing to inflict pain and suffering on one group in order to cement support from another. It’s hard to imagine a would-be leader infused with Care/harm values seeking power in such manner. It’s equally hard to imagine a Care/harm constituency that would be taken in by such tactics. But, “hard to imagine” doesn’t mean impossible. Twenty years ago, could one have reasonably imagined a proud GOP’s devolution into the POT? Could one have imagined “strong” and outspoken GOP leaders like McConnell, McCarthy, Pence, Graham, Cruz, Meadows, Jordan, and too many others so weakly offering themselves up to a wuss-demanding figure like Trump? Could one have imagined a GOP constituency willing to follow and support such sheepish leaders?
But there’s no point right now in imagining which party or matrix might be most susceptible to decay or manipulation. One has already disintegrated; the GOP is gone. There’s no conservative moral matrix holding party left on the field. There’s only the POT and an authoritarian leader in its place. Its moral matrix is whatever its leader wishes it to be. His supplicants have assumed the position: They are letting him do it. They are letting him do anything.
Not everyone; they didn’t all bend over. There still are individuals with a balanced conservative moral matrix base. They still do have some grounding in its Care/harm component. While the POT easily presides, perhaps as many as 34% of the former GOP would rather that it didn’t. It’s a minority, but a significant minority. It’s one that can’t control the POT’s direction, but it can determine its fate. Trump is taking the country down the road to authoritarianism. Today, the easy way there is through the ballot. Tomorrow, the only way back will be through blood, the blood of our children. The POT will let him do it; they will let him do anything. But it will take more than just that. He needs all of what used to be the GOP. He needs the acquiescence of its 34% to succeed.
So, it’s a question for the 34%, the one that must be answered: Will you let him do it?
As Republicans scuffled with Democrats and the White House over the massively watered-down bipartisan infrastructure package on Monday, former President Donald Trump issued a statement pressuring the GOP to drop the negotiations entirely.
Trump said that the negotiations make the Republicans look weak and criticized Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) for capitulating to Democrats’ demands on the infrastructure bill, even though McConnell isn’t part of the bipartisan group forming the package. It’s McConnell, too, who has been unforgivingly critical of the Democrats’ proposals on infrastructure.
The former president also said that the Republicans should wait until 2022 to pass an infrastructure package, when he thinks “proper election results” — Republican-favoring results — could come in.
“Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise, and regain a strong negotiating stance,” Trump said. “Republicans, don’t let the Radical Left play you for weak fools and losers!”
Trump’s statement comes as Republican senators are blaming Democrats for yet another delay in the process, despite the fact that it’s the GOP that has dragged the infrastructure talks on for months. The statement from the former president, not known to mince words as much as his Republican colleagues, is also a show of the Republican mindset on the bill.
President Joe Biden and Democrats have already agreed to massive cuts to the infrastructure bill. The topline new spending has come down from $4 trillion to $579 billion, shedding many of the climate and socioeconomic measures from Biden’s original proposal along the way. Republicans have also had their way with the pay-fors on the bill, successfully cutting provisions to tax corporations and the wealthy and even nixing a proposal to fund the Internal Revenue Service to enforce existing tax laws on the rich.
For Republicans, cutting nearly all of the transformative measures from the bill evidently isn’t enough. Democrats sent Republicans an offer on Sunday to wrap up outstanding disagreements on the bill, which Republicans not only rejected but also branded as an insult, saying that the items on the Democrats’ offer were already decided.
The debacle is laying bare what appears to be the Republican strategy on negotiating for the bill, and elsewhere: Force Democrats to capitulate, or else threaten to withdraw GOP support altogether, thus imperiling the passage of the bill itself. It’s also possible that the Republicans, forever dangling the bipartisanship carrot in front of Democrats, were always planning to make good on their threats to kill the legislation in the end and make Democrats look weak.
Now Trump telling Republicans to withdraw their support reinforces that message. Republicans have largely gotten everything they wanted; the total figure for new spending in the bipartisan bill, $579 billion, is far closer to the GOP-only infrastructure offer of $257 billion from May, than Biden’s original proposal of $2.25 trillion.
Allowing Republicans to delay and weaken the bill over the course of several months is precisely what progressives were warning against early in the process for the bill. In May, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) warned the White House against negotiating with the Republicans, saying, “the bottom line is the American people want results.”
The public doesn’t always consider whether or not a bill was bipartisan when they see tangible positive results, Sanders said. “Frankly, when people got a, you know, $1,400 check or $5,600 check for their family, they didn’t say, ‘Oh, I can’t cash this check because it was done without any Republican votes,’” said the senator, referring to the direct relief payments passed in the American Rescue package.
Sanders warned later that month that Democrats could lose Congress in the midterm elections if they push too hard for bipartisanship with the party that has a stated disinterest in the practice. Progressives in Congress also put pressure on the White House to stop giving in to Republican demands on infrastructure, saying that they would withdraw their support for the bill if it omitted crucial proposals to address the climate crisis.
After Republican officials in Michigan voted to award themselves bonuses totaling $65,000 from federal COVID relief funds set aside for frontline workers, they have vowed to return the money — but only after public outcry and the filing of a lawsuit against them.
Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in Shiawassee county voted 6-0 to give themselves a significant portion of the $557,000 allotted to 250 county employees as hazard pay for working through the pandemic. MLive reports that they are the only county to have voted to do so.
While county employees received $1,000 to $2,000 for their work, the commissioners voted to give themselves much more. Commission chairman Jeremy Root received $25,000 last week. Two commissioners received $10,000, while others got $5,000 each.
The commissioners, all Republicans, voted to award higher sums to other top Republican officials as well — like Sheriff Brian BeGole, who received $25,000.
Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan) criticized the commissioners’ vote. A spokesperson for Kildee told ABC12 that the commissioners decided “to benefit themselves instead of the community.”
“American Rescue Plan dollars were intended to help frontline workers and families impacted by the pandemic, not elected officials,” Kildee said. While health department officials received $2,500 and other lower-level staff received only $1,000, the commissioners awarded themselves 10 times those amounts.
One Michigan resident has sued the officials, accusing them of violating the law by holding a “secret private meeting” in which they voted on the amounts that they were going to pocket “outside the view of the public.” Meanwhile, other county employees only received an average of $2,148 for their work, the lawsuit says.
The county prosecutor, Scott Koerner, also pushed back on the officials’ vote, saying that he believed the bonuses were illegal. The commissioners had voted to give Koerner $12,500.
It’s likely that the bonuses were, indeed, given out in violation of guidelines for the funds from the federal government. A Justice Department spokesperson told MLive that “[American Rescue Plan] dollars used for hazard pay should prioritize low-income workers who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and essential workers who have faced the greatest risk of exposure,” MLive wrote.
The GOP commissioners pushed back on the criticism. “Since these payments were made, confusion about the nature of these funds has run rampant,” they said in a statement. They wrote that they “deeply regret that this gesture has been misinterpreted, and have unanimously decided to voluntarily return the funds to the county, pending additional guidance from the state of Michigan.”
One of the commissioners, Marlene Webster, pushed back on the statement that the public “misinterpreted” the bonuses. Webster wrote in a Facebook post — where she also insisted that she didn’t realize she was voting for a bonus for herself — that the statement issued by the board of commissioners is “an insult to the citizens of Shiawassee county.”
Republicans have rejected a Democratic offer to wrap up outstanding final details on the bipartisan infrastructure package, imperiling promises from the Senate group to have the bill finished by Monday. This week is crucial for moving ahead on the bill, but there are still outstanding issues over things like funding for mass transit.
Republicans in the bipartisan group objected to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) filing to advance the bill last week, saying that the bill would be ready by Monday. Every Republican in the Senate voted against advancing the bill, making it fall far short of the 60 votes it needed to advance to debate on the floor.
Now, Monday has arrived, and there are still multiple issues that have yet to be hammered out within the group — and the two parties can’t even agree on which issues are still outstanding.
“The ‘global offer’ we received from the White House and Chuck Schumer was discouraging since it attempts to reopen numerous issues the bipartisan group had already agreed to,” a GOP source told CNN. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said over the weekend that the outstanding issue was on funding for mass transit on the Republican side.
But, according to Democrats familiar with the negotiations, there are more unresolved issues than just mass transit. Funding for crucial infrastructure like highways, water and broadband are still in question. There’s also still disagreement in terms of how much of the leftover COVID stimulus funds can be used to pay for the bill and on a rule called the Davis-Bacon, which says that federal contractors can’t pay employees less than the “prevailing wage” for construction projects.
Senators were optimistic over the weekend that it can be done soon. “We’re down to the last couple of items, and I think you’re going to see a bill Monday afternoon,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) said on Sunday on Fox News. With Republicans rejecting the Democrats’ last offer, that deadline could very well be missed.
If the senators come to an agreement on the bill soon, then Schumer could call a vote to advance the bill again this week. If it fails to garner the required votes, he’ll have to start the process of filing for cloture all over again, which could delay the bill even further.
Time is of the essence as the Senate is set to leave for recess in two weeks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) emphasized again over the weekend that she wants the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill to be passed with the infrastructure bill, so this week is crucial for getting the bills moving.
Not only are Republicans in disagreement over what’s left to negotiate, they’ve also expressed frustration with Democrats over the transit issue. They claim to have made fair offers to Democrats on transit, and have threatened to withdraw their support unless the Democrats capitulate to their offers. “Unless Democrats show more flexibility, this deal is unlikely to happen,” a GOP source told Politico.
It isn’t much of a surprise that Republicans again seem to be delaying the infrastructure bill. They’ve held up the bill for months in negotiations, and are still unsatisfied with it despite having whittled it down to nearly an eighth of the original size that President Joe Biden had proposed. And, still, they blamed the delay on Monday on Democrats.
“If this is going to be successful, the White House will need to show more flexibility as Republicans have done and listen to the members of the group that produced this framework,” a GOP source told CNN. But the White House has already capitulated to a wide swath of Republican demands, watering the bill down to what it is today.
Instead, it’s Republicans who bear more responsibility for delaying the bill than Democrats. In the first Senate-wide vote on the measure, they had rejected Schumer’s cloture filing last week despite the fact that final details don’t need to be ironed out in order for the bill to advance to debate on the Senate floor, as the majority leader pointed out.
Democrats and progressives have said repeatedly that the months-long delay is a tactic employed by the GOP to polarize and water down Democratic proposals. They point to the example of the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama when Republicans similarly dragged out talks for months only to vote against it anyway. In the process, however, they achieved what they set out to do — politicize and weaken the bill considerably.
“My fear is that we could see a repetition of what we saw with the Affordable Care Act,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) told ABC last week, “where discussions went on and on and on and then never went any place.”
Republican lawmakers are attempting to pass legislation making it harder to vote in the US, forcing Democrats to take extraordinary action to combat it.
GOP legislators in several states are advancing bills that place more restrictions on voting, prompting Democrats to leave the state to stop the bills from passing. This comes after Donald Trump’s election loss last year, which he falsely claimed was due to voter fraud.
But it’s not just in the US where voting rights are under threat. In the UK, the Tories also have plans that threaten the franchise.
Flying out of the state
In Republican-controlled Texas, lawmakers advanced a bill earlier this month that would stop drive-thru voting, 24-hour polling stations, place new ID requirements on mail-in ballots, and ban drop boxes.
In response, Democrats flew out of the state – as the Republicans need a two-thirds quorum to go ahead with state business. Quorum refers to the minimum number of members of a legislature that must be present to make the meeting valid.
Texas Democrats had employed a similar walk-out in May to protest the voting bill at an earlier stage – but the last time they actually left the state to stop the progress of a bill was 2003.
Texas already has some of the tightest voting laws in the US, with only those meeting specific criteria – such as being disabled or over 65 – able to vote by post. Trump won the state in the 2020 election, but it had some of the lowest turnout figures across the country.
Country-wide issue
Texas isn’t the only state where Republicans are trying to curb voting rights – the GOP has also advanced restricting bills in states such as Alabama and Florida.
President Joe Biden has criticised the attempts, saying:
There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are as Americans.
Biden has asked for reinstatement of some of the parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court got rid of in 2013.
However, he did not endorse a change many Democrats are asking for. Voting rights advocates want him to support alterations to the Senate filibuster rule so Democrats need only a simple majority vote to pass legislation.
Filibustering
In the meantime, Democrats are also using filibustering as a tactic as they try to resist voting laws. In Alabama, walking out to block the quorum is impossible as Republicans there have a supermajority, meaning a quorum can be formed without Democrats.
As a result, Democrats in Alabama attempted to launch a filibuster to block Republican voting restrictions in May, but it was unsuccessful.
And with a Republican majority in the Supreme Court – Democrats have little support there either. At the beginning of July, the Supreme Court decided a big voting rights case. It upheld two restrictive Arizona voting laws that “essentially gutted what’s left of the Voting Rights Act”.
The scale of the problem
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of 14 July, 18 states across the US have enacted 30 laws that restrict voting access just this year. More than 400 bills intending to make it harder to vote were introduced during the 2021 legislative session, across nearly every state.
But the Biden administration is fighting back. The ‘For the People Act’ could make state-level laws less effective. It has passed the House, but still needs to pass the Senate to be enacted into law.
Voting rights advocates Common Cause are calling for US residents to write to their senators and ask them to support the For the People Act:
We the People deserve a responsive, accountable government that gives us all a stronger voice and puts our needs ahead of special interests.
Congress must pass the For The People Act (H.R. 1) — a bold, comprehensive package of democracy reforms including independent redistricting commissions, citizen-funded elections, closing the revolving door between government and corporate interests, and protecting voters against discrimination.
H.R. 1 — is the boldest democracy reform since Watergate. It’s a massive overhaul of money-in-politics, voting, and ethics laws — all to make our democracy more inclusive.
Voter suppression in the UK
It’s not just the US enacting laws to disenfranchise voters – the UK government has also set out plans to introduce a mandatory requirement for voters to provide photo ID.
Opposition MPs and campaigners have slammed the move as one that will decrease turnout, and particularly target minority voters.
When the plans were announced, Labour MP Nadia Whittome said:
Requiring photo ID to vote when 1 in 4 don’t have it will stop people from voting. But that’s the point. Because this isn’t about stopping voter fraud – it’s about disenfranchising the young, the poor, and people of colour. People less likely to vote Tory.
Global voter suppression
There is no evidence that these restrictions are necessary in either the UK or the US. In the UK voter fraud is such a small problem the reforms are in no way justified, and in the US, new voter restrictions only play into Trump’s false claims that voter fraud led to his loss last year.
The concurrent attempts to disenfranchise parts of the electorate on both sides of the Atlantic are concerning for the future of democracy – particularly because such laws disproportionately affect those less likely to vote Republican or Conservative.
President Joe Biden said late Wednesday that he remains opposed to eliminating the legislative filibuster even as the Senate GOP uses the archaic procedural tool to obstruct his agenda, including a popular bill that would shield voting rights from state-level Republicans hellbent on eroding them.
During a CNNtown hall in Cincinnati, Biden reiterated his support for bringing back the so-called talking filibuster, which required senators to hold the floor and speak continuously in order to block legislation.
But abolishing the filibuster outright — a move supported by a growing coalition of Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate — would “throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done,” the president claimed, even as he agreed that the filibuster is a Jim Crow relic.
Biden went on to insist, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that some congressional Republicans “know better” and can be won over to the cause of protecting the right to vote — which the GOP is working aggressively to curtail in dozens of states nationwide.
“They know better than this,” the president said. “What I don’t want to do is get wrapped up right now in the argument whether or not this is all about the filibuster.”
While some observers were encouraged by Biden’s support for filibuster reform, others criticized the president for clinging to his hope for a Republican epiphany that did not materialize during his first six months in office.
“This answer from Biden on the filibuster just doesn’t make sense,” said Sawyer Hackett, executive director of People First Future. “Republicans aren’t going to wake up and ‘know better’ than suppressing the vote. The filibuster encourages them to obstruct and our reluctance to end it emboldens them to do worse.”
Adam Jentleson, executive director of the Battle Born Collective and a former Senate aide, argued that “sometime soon, it will become clear that there is no voting rights compromise that can get 60 votes” — the number necessary to break a legislative filibuster.
“At that point, there is no more wiggle room, no more vague talk about bringing Republicans along,” Jentleson said. “The choice will be, reform the filibuster or let voting rights die on your watch.”
This answer from Biden on the filibuster just doesn’t make sense.
Republicans aren’t going to wake up and “know better” than suppressing the vote. The filibuster encourages them to obstruct and our reluctance to end it emboldens them to do worse. pic.twitter.com/DnOx59a1Wp
Biden’s remarks came just a month after Senate Republicans wielded the legislative filibuster to block debate on the For the People Act, a sweeping bill that would expand ballot access and undercut voter suppression efforts by Republicans at the state level. Since January, at least 14 Republican-led states have enacted more than 20 laws aimed at restricting voting rights.
Following the Senate GOP’s obstruction of the For the People Act, Biden delivered a speech in Philadelphia in which he described passage of the bill as “a national imperative” and slammed Republican voter suppression efforts as a “21st century Jim Crow assault.”
But the president didn’t mention the filibuster, which can be eliminated with a simple-majority vote in the Senate. Such a vote would require the support of the entire Democratic caucus plus Vice President Kamala Harris, who would act as a tie-breaker.
In an open letter published online Wednesday, more than 30 former chiefs of staff to Democratic senators called for complete repeal — or, at the very least, reform — of the legislative filibuster, which they said “has put a chokehold” on the upper chamber.
Contrary to Biden’s claim that abolishing the filibuster would throw the Senate into chaos — a claim that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also made — the former Senate aides argued that “ending the filibuster will not make the Senate more partisan.”
“The filibuster has been weaponized by an increasingly partisan Senate,” the former aides wrote. “Removing this weapon would be a step toward — not away from — comity.”
Eli Zupnick, a spokesperson for the advocacy group Fix Our Senate, said in a statement Wednesday that “few understand and respect the Senate and its members more than the former chiefs of staff who signed onto this letter.”
“Their strong call for reform,” Zupnick continued, “is the latest in a growing chorus of respected voices making the case that the filibuster is being abused and has become a clear roadblock to progress of any kind.”
The number of federal political committees that have spent money in the first half of 2021 at Trump Organization properties has dropped dramatically from the same period two years ago, Federal Election Commission filings show. Those continuing to spend: a smaller circle of loyal supporters of former President Donald Trump and candidates jockeying for his favor in contested Republican primaries.
During the first six months of 2021, 27 federal committees have reported spending $348,000 at Trump Organization properties, with the Republican National Committee accounting for more than half the total. That’s a steep decline from the 177 committees that did so during the 2019-2020 election cycle or the 78 committees that spent more than $1.6 million at Mar-a-Lago, the Trump International Hotel in Washington and other company sites in the first half of 2019, filings show.
Of course, that spending came in the run-up to a presidential election in which Trump was the incumbent. The biggest spenders in 2019 were the RNC and Trump’s own political committees raising money to support his campaign.
While the RNC is the top spender so far in 2021, many of the other PACs that used Trump properties as venues for fundraising events and other activities appear to have stopped their spending. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the fundraising arm of House Republicans, has not reported spending any money at Trump properties through May of this year after spending $32,532 during the previous election cycle. (National party committees will file reports covering activity in June on July 20, which may show some spending at Trump’s facilities.)
Those that have spent money at Trump properties this year represent some of the former president’s most fervent loyalists, including Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who is running for an open Senate seat, and Ronny Jackson of Texas, who previously was the White House physician. Overall, 13 of the 23 committees spending this year are connected to current members of the House or Senate.
“Republican candidates are in a delicate moment, I think, because of uncertainty surrounding Trump’s future power,” said Abby Wood, a professor of law, political science and public policy at the University of Southern California, in an email. “Trump’s power in the next election is much less certain than it was from the vantage point of folks spending money (and enriching him) at his properties in 2019.”
The drop in political spending comes at a precarious time for the Trump Organization, which in early July was hit with 10 felony charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., as well as additional charges against Allen Weisselberg, the organization’s chief financial officer. Both Weisselberg and the company have pleaded not guilty to the charges, but the impact of the investigation and the fallout of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol appear to have damaged the company’s business prospects. The Washington Post described the company as at its “lowest point in decades.”
The other spenders include congressional candidates advertising their ties to Trump, such as Lynda Blanchard, who is one of Brooks’ opponents for the GOP nomination in the Alabama Senate race, and Josh Mandel, who’s running for an open Senate seat in Ohio. Brooks, Blanchard and Mandel have each paid to use Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s property in Palm Beach, Florida, while Jackson paid for an event at the Trump hotel in Washington.
“It is my intention to do fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago as often as I can, so long as they help generate positive cash flow for my Senate campaign for America First policies,” Brooks said in a statement. “I personally thank President Trump for allowing me to use Mar-a-Lago and hope he will continue to be so generous in the future.”
The campaigns of Blanchard, Jackson and Mandel, along with the RNC and the Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment. The RNC has spent more money for events at other locations this year, including $529,000 for a donor event at the Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach in April.
Mar-a-Lago, a private club that also doubles as the former president’s residence, has been the leading recipient of federal political committee spending among Trump properties, bringing in at least $283,000 this year, much of it for hosting an RNC donor retreat in May. In addition to getting the venue and Florida weather, politicians holding events at the club stand a good chance of having Trump make an appearance.
The Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and the BLT Prime restaurant located there, have seen a significant drop-off in political spending compared to the first half of 2019. Two years ago, the D.C. hotel and restaurant brought in more than $518,000, according to FEC records. This year, without Trump in the White House nearby, the total is less than $15,000.
“Given Trump is no longer president and there is less need to curry favor with him, congressional incumbents and party committees may choose less expensive venues,” said Paul Herrnson, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut.
Donald Trump lost the presidential election more than eight months ago, yet for many of his followers, it is a matter of faith that at some point later this summer, he will somehow be “reinstated” as president.
The drip-drip of conspiracist rhetoric by Trump and his acolytes, as well as the congressional GOP’s craven refusal to throw its weight behind a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol breach, has had a measurable impact in this era of disinformation and social media panics.
In less fraught times, such a gaping lack of understanding of how basic political processes in this country work would be dismissed as the rantings of a fringe cult. But in the wake of January 6, when thousands of hard rightists, with Trump’s tacit blessing, stormed the Capitol and went on a hunt for political figures they viewed as enemies, it’s hard to over-emphasize the dangers that this movement poses to the future of U.S. democracy.
Earlier this summer, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed Congress specifically on the danger that this movement could turn to violence again. As the supposed August “Trump reinstatement” date neared, the DHS worried the individuals and groups could shed blood as a way to somehow trigger a broader conflict. Far from easing his foot off the accelerator in this moment, Trump has, once more, poured gasoline on a fire, this time through valorizing insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt — who was shot dead by a police officer as she and others surged into the Capitol — and claiming, without evidence, that she was actually assassinated by a Democratic security official.
Last week, reports circulated about how the top military brass was convinced, in the run-up to the January 6 congressional certification of the Electoral College vote, and in the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration, that Trump was about to order a military coup.
A new book, I Alone Can Fix It, by two Washington Post reporters, has detailed how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and other top generals believed such an order was a real possibility and discussed mass resignations as a way to stymie Trump’s democracy-busting plans.
That such discussions were taking place at the very highest levels of the military is surreal in and of itself, indicative of just how far off the rails the Trumpites were heading in their final days in office, and just how far removed from democratic norms that entire rotten regime had gotten.
Milley’s willingness, along with that of his top military colleagues, to resign rather than carry out illegal orders was honorable, but of itself it would not have been adequate. If they were so concerned, why didn’t they go public with those grave worries in late 2020, warning the public that coup-plotters were gaining traction inside the White House, instead of waiting months after the fact to belatedly air their sense of unease to reporters? Silence in such a desperate situation, even if mandated by a desire to remain politically neutral, seems sorely insufficient.
Had those hunkered down with Trump in his final redoubt ended up declaring a form of martial law and ordering new elections in key swing states, Trump’s team could simply have appointed other, more pliable generals to replace those unwilling to be complicit in his dictatorial ambitions — men and women whom he would undoubtedly have tried to portray as “enemies of the people” and against whom his fierce propaganda apparatus would instantly have been turned.
Moreover, while the top generals grew increasingly wary of Trump’s methods and his values as his presidency wore on, among military veterans, a majority continued to support the real estate mogul into the 2020 election and beyond. Veterans and other weapons-trained personnel (especially in law enforcement) formed the backbone of extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers, who were central to both the Capitol breach and other pro-Trump protests around the country. There’s no guarantee they would have followed the generals over Trump in such a battle of the wills.
The more we learn about Trump’s last months in office, and his willingness to lean on the muscle provided by paramilitary groups such as the Oath Keepers, the clearer it becomes that talk of coups and martial law was far more than just idle chatter. Trump couldn’t fathom losing his reelection bid and bowing out gracefully; he had no interest in a peaceful transfer of power and a preservation of basic democratic principles, and he felt no moral limits on his exercise of power to beget more power. The recent revelations about how worried the military’s top brass were about being ordered into action against U.S. civilians give further evidence of just how close the American democratic experiment came to a catastrophic collapse.
Alas, that danger was not neatly and finally put to rest on the evening of January 6, when Trump’s insurrection collapsed; nor was it eradicated on January 20, when Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president. More than a half year later, it is still percolating, fanned by a graceless ex-president and his preening, egotistical fantasies about a summertime Second Coming.
State senators in Texas passed a bill on Friday that removes requirements that schools include topics like Native American history and historical documents relating to the suffrage and civil rights movements, building upon previously passed legislation in the state.
The bill, SB 3, removes requirements to teach about civil rights work by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass. Works by women’s suffragists are also no longer required to be taught.
The Republicans’ bill also removes requirements to teach “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”
On top of removing requirements to teach about the civil rights and suffragist movements, the bill bars schools from compelling teachers to teach on current events or controversial issues. If they do teach such subjects, the teachers must not give deference to any one point of view.
Though the bill passed the Senate 18 to 4 along party lines, it’s unlikely to pass the House as the Democrats have fled the state to deny quorum in that chamber in hopes of blocking the Republicans’ voter suppression legislation.
SB 3 is a continuation of the state GOP’s efforts to stifle teachers from teaching history accurately, especially as it pertains to the country’s history with racism and white supremacy. The bill removes requirements set by a previous House bill on similar subjects that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law earlier this year. The requirements were Democratic proposals that were included in the bill after criticism from Democrats and educators in the state.
Democrats have criticized the law, saying that it muzzles teachers from teaching their students the truth about history.
“How could a teacher possibly discuss slavery, the Holocaust or the mass shootings at the Walmart in El Paso or at the Sutherland Springs Church in my district without giving deference to any one perspective?” one Democratic lawmaker asked, per Dallas News.
“The amendments the House added were essential to ensure that we were teaching students all of American history — the good, the bad and the ugly,” state Democratic Rep. James Talarico told the Texas Tribune. “They were put in place to ensure that teachers wouldn’t be punished for telling their students the truth…. It’s a frightening dystopian future that starts to come into focus.”
Texas Republicans, like many other conservatives across the country, claim that they are opposing the teaching of critical race theory. But in reality, they’re likely setting out to erase Black history from the nation’s collective knowledge and make teachers afraid to create lesson plans addressing race.
The wave of anti-education Republican legislation has already had a chilling effect on teachers, leading them to censor themselves from talking about racism. Some teachers are quitting because of attacks from conservatives accusing them of teaching critical race theory, which is only taught in certain higher education contexts.
Republicans have made critical race theory their new boogeyman despite either not understanding what it is or wilfully misrepresenting it, as also where it is taught. Indeed, Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who introduced SB 3, has admitted that schools don’t actually teach critical race theory, but wanted to press forward with his bill anyway.
As Republicans are sweeping the country with stifling bills under the guise of limiting critical race theory, Democrats and progressives in Congress have criticized the effort.
“The Texas Senate has voted to remove civil rights and women’s suffrage from public school curriculum,” wrote Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) on Twitter. “It was never about Critical Race Theory. It was always about teaching white supremacy.”
Facing pressure from conservative groups and their wealthy donors, Republicans in the bipartisan group of centrists negotiating the infrastructure bill have dropped a provision to increase tax enforcement on wealthy people from the latest draft of the package.
Joe Biden has proposed giving the IRS an additional $80 billion in funding to crack down on wealthy and corporate tax cheats, which would raise an estimated $700 billion over 10 years. A previous draft of the bipartisan centrists’ infrastructure bill also included a proposal similar to Biden’s to empower the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to increase tax enforcement on the wealthy.
But that proposal was much smaller than Biden’s, and reportedly would have raised only $100 billion over a decade to help pay for the already meager infrastructure bill that’s currently on the table.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told CNBC that Republicans pushed back against the proposal after they learned that Democrats may be including a more comprehensive version of the IRS expansion in their reconciliation bill, which they plan to pass with a simple majority in the Senate.
“That created quite a problem,” said Portman, who said Republicans believed that the much smaller IRS proposal in the bipartisan bill would be the only IRS funding in this round of legislation. Now, with Republicans standing against the reconciliation bill, too, it appears the party is standing against all extra IRS funding.
Previous reporting found that GOP resistance to the IRS funding may have come not only from political maneuvering but also from a genuine opposition to the Democrats’ proposal of giving the agency more power to go after wealthy tax cheats.
“I think there needs to be constraints on what the use of those IRS agents would be. So we’re taking a look at that. That pay-for has some red flags among Republicans,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) last week.
When CNN asked if Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota) would support the IRS pay-for, he said “No. No, no, no. I’m not committed or totally guaranteed on it .… I want to support it, but I’m going to wait and see the final product as well, but I’m hoping that it works.”
Though none of the Republicans have come out and expressed their opposition to the IRS proposal in explicit terms, it’s not at all surprising that they would be opposed to increasing tax enforcement on the rich.
Headline: Republicans will only vote for an infrastructure package that makes it easy for corporations and the wealthy elite to avoid taxes. https://t.co/TVo5MyWlDs
Earlier drafts of Biden’s infrastructure proposal included provisions to pay for the bill with relatively moderate tax hikes on corporations and the rich, slightly undoing Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts for the same groups. GOP legislators came out against that proposal very early in the infrastructure negotiations process.
It follows, then, that they would also be interested in protecting wealthy peoples’ ability to dodge taxes. A recent bombshell report from ProPublica found that, thanks partially to the 2017 tax cuts and existing tax loopholes, many of the wealthiest Americans on earth pay extremely low federal income tax rates.
Republicans have also helped to shrink the IRS over the years. Chipping away at the IRS’s budget has weakened the agency’s ability to go after rich tax cheats, who often have methods to hide their money that are too sophisticated and complicated for the IRS to spend time unraveling. Instead, the IRS disproportionately goes after low-income people because they’re cheaper to audit.
Corporations, too, have benefited from cuts to the IRS. A recent report by The Washington Postfound that federal audits of corporations have decreased drastically in recent years because Republicans have slashed the agency’s budget.
Right wing groups, meanwhile, have been mobilizing against the proposed IRS funding, telling Republican leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) to oppose any increases to IRS funding. Many of the groups pushing against the funding, as The Washington Post pointed out, are funded by the very people who would likely be affected by increased IRS enforcement.
“As a result, the federal government now examines just half of all large company tax returns, despite businesses claiming increasing tax benefits over this period that they say could be overturned by authorities,” wrote The Washington Post.
Indeed, opposing extra IRS funding appears to be at the behest of corporations and the wealthy, who have been opposed to recent tax raise proposals and would likely also be affected by increased IRS enforcement.
Early this year, dozens of corporations pledged to pause or review their political donations after a pro-Trump crowd attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and 147 Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the 2020 election results the same day.
Despite these pledges, many companies have now resumed such donations — and now, half a year after the attack, the list of companies making donations, some in violation of their own pledges, is growing.
American Airlines, for instance, gave Rep. Sam Graves (R-Missouri) $2,500 in June, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings analyzed by The Washington Post. Graves objected to the certification of electoral votes in the 2020 election and issued a statement with other Missouri Republicans saying that they had to “protect the integrity of each vote cast” in the state by voting to overturn the election results.
The air travel company had pledged in January to pause all political donations. When the company restarted donations, an American Airlines spokesperson said, it would choose lawmakers who support aviation and “our values, including bringing people together.”
American Airlines isn’t alone in resuming donations to the group of election objectors, however. Judd Legum of Popular Information has chronicled many companies that, according to new FEC filings, have resumed such donations, potentially breaking their own pledges.
Companies like Cheniere Energy, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Ameren, Ford and Delta Air Lines have resumed giving to Republicans who voted to overturn election results, according to Legum.
Many companies who had pledged to pause donations have not only resumed giving to the election objectors, but have also given generously or to multiple lawmakers.
UPS, for instance, in June gave $10,000 to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and $5,000 to Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter (R-Georgia), both of whom voted to overturn the election results.
UPS had indefinitely suspended all political contributions after January 6, and a spokesperson for the company defended the donations, The Washington Post reported, saying “Engagement with those with whom we disagree is a critical part of the democratic process and our responsibility in legislative advocacy as a company.”
Duke Energy also sent out large donations to election objectors in June, sending $10,000 each to Representatives Will Timmons (R-South Carolina) and Tom Rice (R-South Carolina) and $5,000 to Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-South Carolina). Duke Energy also gave generous donations to Republicans in May, including another $10,000 to Timmons and other GOP objectors like McCarthy and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana).
Duke Energy issued a statement after January 6 pledging to pause donations, though only for 30 days. “We were shocked and dismayed by the events at the Capitol last week. Duke Energy is taking this very seriously and taking a pause on all federal political contributions for 30 days.”
Lockheed Martin, Aflac, Tyson, Boeing and Cigna have also given to several Republicans who voted to overturn election results despite pledges to pause donations, according to Legum.
Cigna’s donations are especially egregious, as it promised after January 6 that it would stop giving to politicians who “hindered the peaceful transition of power.” Yet they’ve given at least $14,000 recently to Republicans who objected to Biden’s win.
The large and growing list of corporations reneging on their promises shows that the pledges were likely more about publicity than principle. A report in June found that Toyota, for instance, leads corporations in giving to election objectors, with $55,000 in donations this year alone. At first, the company defended the donations, but announced Thursday it would be stopping such donations after a huge backlash from the public and the company’s shareholders.
In the past year, following last summer’s uprising against racial injustice, Republican-led legislatures across the South have created new criminal penalties for protesters, some of which could empower police to conduct mass arrests if even a single protester creates a risk of property damage.
Those new laws are part of a broader nationwide crackdown against protests. According to the International Center for Not-for-profit Law, 45 states have considered and 36 states have enacted new anti-protest laws since January 2017, a year that saw massive actions against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Trump administration. Among the Southern states that have passed such laws in that time are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia, with others pending in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
Florida’s new law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in April, is particularly harsh. It created new riot-related felonies and also invented the new crime of “mob intimidation,” which lawmakers defined as a group of people trying to compel another person to, among other things, “maintain a particular viewpoint.” It carries a penalty of up to a year in prison.
During a legislative hearing about the measure earlier this year, state Sen. Dianne Hart (D) argued it would impact people of color who were exercising their constitutional right to protest. Ben Frazier, a community leader in Jacksonville, warned that under the new law, “Martin Luther King would’ve never been able to march in Selma to Montgomery, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.”
Questions have been raised about whether people participating in ongoing Miami protests against Cuba’s communist government will be arrested for violating the law. Hundreds of protesters marched down one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares this week, but they weren’t cited for violating the new law, which prohibits blocking roads.
Meanwhile, a new Kentucky law makes it a crime to insult police officers or deride them with gestures that tend “to provoke a violent response.” Two new Arkansas laws toughen the penalties for blocking traffic, defacing monuments, and trespassing on oil and gas pipelines. The Tennessee House passed a bill that would have imposed a potential six-year prison sentence for obstructing a sidewalk, but it didn’t move in the Senate.
Civil liberties advocates are already challenging some of these new laws in court, charging they violate the First Amendment. In May, a federal judge declined to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a Louisiana law that drastically toughened penalties for trespassing on “critical infrastructure,” which includes oil and gas pipelines.
And after DeSantis signed the Florida bill into law, a coalition of civil rights groups immediately sued the state. A federal judge ordered mediation in the case to be completed by late November, but the state is fighting the order, saying it would not be “a worthwhile use of the parties or the court’s resources.”
Detaining Protesters in Alabama?
In Alabama, the state House and Senate couldn’t agree on anti-protest legislation this year, but lawmakers recently pre-filed a bill for next year’s session. Its Republican sponsor, Rep. Allen Treadaway, retired last year as Birmingham’s assistant police chief.
Treadaway claimed that his bill, which is similar to the version passed by the House this session, isn’t about “infringing on First Amendment rights, it’s just about the safety of everybody involved and that includes protesters.” But the Democratic leader in the House argued the bill “could have a very chilling effect on someone’s right to protest.”
Under the pre-filed bill, a person commits the crime of “riot” by assembling in a way that “creates an immediate danger of damage to property” and defies a curfew or “order to disperse” from police. The bill also redefines “incitement to riot” to include anyone who funds or “aids” a riot. Both offenses would carry a mandatory 30-day sentence. The measure would also require that anyone arrested for riot or obstructing traffic be imprisoned for up to 24 hours with no bail.
In addition, the Alabama bill would punish cities that reduce funding for police by withholding all of their state funding. And it creates a new felony, “assault against a first responder,” that leads to a mandatory six-month sentence.
Given the broad language in the legislation, a person could serve six months in prison for “attempting” to spit on a police officer or “dogs or horses employed by a law enforcement agency,” which jt defines as first responders.
Cops, Corporations Back Lawmakers
Police officer unions and associations have supported anti-protest laws in Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, and other states. According to Connor Gibson, who researched the laws on behalf of the Piper Fund, police officers or their labor unions have spoken out in favor of anti-protest bills in 13 states in the past year.
In 19 states where anti-protest bills have been introduced since last June, former law enforcement officers acted as sponsors, as with the Alabama bill. The Southern States Police Benevolent Association based in Georgia was the top law enforcement donor to anti-protest bill sponsors, contributing $39,300.
Many of the legislators sponsoring the new laws are also backing new voter suppression bills that will make it harder to vote. A new report from Greenpeace called it “a two-pronged attack on democracy.”
Five of the top 10 corporate donors to sponsors of anti-protest bills are also among the top 10 donors to sponsors of voter suppression bills. They include AT&T, headquartered in Dallas, and two tobacco companies, Virginia-based Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds headquartered in North Carolina. AT&T has also donated more than half a million dollars to the various campaigns of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a champion of the anti-protest legislation.
While AT&T recently affirmed its commitment to supporting laws that make voting easier, it has been criticized for both the size of its campaign contributions and what The Intercept characterized as its “lackluster attempt” to address the movement for racial justice.
The Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate says the party will try to push through its proposed voting restrictions, using a unique loophole in state law, despite a near-certain veto by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Republicans have already introduced39 voting bills in the State Senate and dozens more in the House, three of which have already passed. Whitmer has vowed to veto the proposed restrictions. Senate Republican Leader Mike Shirkey told local news outletJTV earlier this month that Republicans do not have the votes to override the veto but would instead pursue a scheme to use the state’s citizen initiative process to circumvent the veto.
“You heard it here first, keep your eyes and ears open for the potential of a citizen initiative driven by the state party on some of these more important election laws that need to be considered,” Shirkey said.
But state Sen. Erika Geiss, a Democrat, warned in an interview with Salon that “citizens will never actually see this question on their ballot.”
Despite the name, Geiss explained, such a “citizen initiative” will never come up for a vote by the full electorate. “So it’s really disingenuous,” she said.
Michigan’s unique “adopt and amend” procedure allows the state legislature to adopt a citizen initiative and then pass it into law with a simple veto-proof majority. The scheme only requires about 340,000 signatures, or 8% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election, meaning that Michigan’sheavily gerrymandered Republican majority and less than 4% of the state’s population can circumvent the governor’s power without ever putting the question before the public.
“It is really an abuse of our power as legislators,” Geiss said.
This process has only been used nine times in the last six decades, according to the state’sBureau of Elections. Ron Weiser, chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, firstfloated the scheme back in March, before the state GOPforced out its executive director for criticizing former President Donald Trump’s election lies.
The plot comes just three years after Michigan voters overwhelmingly approvedProposal 3, a ballot initiative that expanded voting rights and absentee ballot access.
“It’s really unfortunate because it does not reflect the will of the voters,” state Rep. Matt Koleszar, vice-chair of the state House Elections and Ethics Committee, said of the Republican scheme in an interview with Salon. “The other option they have is letting it go to the ballot. I don’t think they would do that, because it would be defeated.”
In fact, Michigan Republicans have beentrying to undo another ballot initiative that overwhelmingly passed in 2018 to create an independent redistricting commission, which threatens the party’s hold over the legislature. Nancy Wang, the executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a campaign launched to pass the redistricting initiative, said that attempt to reverse the will of the voters was a prelude to this year’s Republican power grab.
“It’s so shocking — the extremes they will go to to legislate and pass laws that only a tiny minority of Michiganders who still believe the Big Lie support, at the expense of the millions of Michiganders that voted for expanded voting rights,” Wang said in an interview with Salon. “It’sshocking because it’s such a small number of people that you need to get to sign on.”
Koleszar said that Republicans plan to use the citizen initiative process to circumvent Whitmer’s power on other issues as well. “We have already been told they absolutely will do that,” he said.
Republicans organized a similar citizen initiative scheme to collect enough signatures for the legislature to adopt theUnlock Michigan petition, which would repeal the governor’s emergency powers. That came in opposition to pandemic restrictions imposed by the Whitmer administration
Shirkey said the voting initiative would be much like Unlock Michigan. The Republican goal is for the legislature to adopt a bill the governor has no power to veto.
“There’s half a dozen bills I think are pretty important that the governor may have some difficulty signing,” he said. “So that is what will likely happen, is it will be packaged into a citizen’s initiative.”
Shirkey quietlyplayed a big role in the Unlock Michigan campaign and a dark money group linked to the Senate leader spent nearly $2 million to fund the campaign. Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum said she was “concerned” about Shirkey’s voting initiative scheme, given that recent history.
“The tactics that that organization used for Unlock Michigan left signers feeling deceived,” Byrum said in an interview with Salon. “What they thought they signed wasn’t actually what they signed. Frankly, it was borderline illegal.”
Byrum cited aDetroit Free Press report showing that the group’s trainer taught signature collectors “how to illegally collect voter signatures, trespass, encouraging lying under oath if they were ever called into a deposition. So that is the type of organization that Shirkey has been aligned with and I worry that’s going to be the same organization that he is going to use to push [this] new initiative.”
The State Senate has thus far passed three of the 39 restrictions proposed so far. SB 285 wouldrequire voters requesting absentee ballots to provide ID or a photocopy of the ID to their local clerk.SB 303 would require voters without an ID on Election Day to cast a provisional ballot instead of signing an affidavit to affirm their identity. AndSB 304 would allow those provisional ballots to be counted only if a voter presents an ID to their local clerk’s office within six days of the election.
The State House last monthinserted another provision into SB 303 allowing provisional ballots to be thrown out if poll workers — who have no training in signature verification — do not match the signature on the ballot to state records.
“What the House did is to kind of double down on voter suppression,” Wang said. “It passed a version that would be the most restrictive voter ID law in the entire country.”
Shirkey told JTV that he was “not sure that the signature part will ultimately get to the governor. Several lawmakers told Salon they expect the Senate to remove the House-added portion.
But Wang warned not to treat Shirkey’s comments as evidence of “what’s actually going to happen.”
Koleszar said even the original Senate-passed law was “redundant and quite frankly makes no sense at all,” since Michigan already requires voter ID.
“It would certainly have the potential to increase lines at polling places, create confusion,” he said, adding, “This is a solution in search of a problem and this problem doesn’t exist.”
Byrum argued that SB 285 amounts to a “poll tax.”
“I don’t have access to a photocopy machine in my house,” she said. “It costs money to get a photo ID and for many it’s not an easy document to get. Think of how long it takes to get your birth record, your marriage license. … Those are costly documents to get and it’s costly to get a photo ID as well.”
Though Shirkey has acknowledged that the pace of advancing Republican legislation has been slower than he would like, Democrats in the legislature expect all the bills coming out of the Senate Elections Committee to ultimately pass the Republican-led legislature.
One bill wouldrequire ballot drop boxes to close before polls close. “That is very, very restrictive,” Geiss said. “It creates another barrier to voting and that has been a concern for me.”
Byrum said she expects the bill “will only lead to frustrated voters, confusion, more time taken away from from the clerk or his or her deputies trying to explain why and how to exercise the right to vote.”
Another bill wouldallow partisan poll watchers and challengers to record video inside polling places and counting boards, which Wang warned could result in more scenes like the“madhouse” following the 2020 election, when Republican supporters were “trying to storm absentee counting boards, trying to intimidate poll workers.”
“These bills would just inject more of this kind of toxicity and partisanship and intimidation into election administration,” she said. “There’s a whole raft of them, though, and all of them are bad.”
Many of the Michigan bills mirror those proposed or enacted in other states. In fact, the head of Heritage Action, the sister organization of the conservative Heritage Foundation, was recentlycaught on video bragging that the dark money group had literally drafted model legislation for state lawmakers to adopt.
“They all concern me because they all impact access to the ballot,” Byrum said. “It is quite unfortunate that the Michigan Republicans have taken a page out of the Heritage Action Fund and introduced these bills. These are the same bills that are being introduced around our country. It’s really unfortunate that the Republicans have chosen to put their party over our country and our democracy.”
The Michigan Association of County Clerks and the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks both oppose the majority of the Republican proposals.
“This legislation was not drafted in consultation with election administrators,” Byrum said. “If they truly wanted to make our elections safer and more secure, they would have involved professional election administrators from the beginning, and they certainly did not.”
“This package of bills is nothing short of an attempt to hamper the ability of citizens to exercise the right to vote and election officials from doing our jobs any more efficiently or safely,” she added. “This legislation was introduced with one intent, and that is to make it more difficult to exercise the right to vote.”
Republicans have justified their voting restriction push by arguing that reforms are necessary to ensure “election integrity,” claiming they are responding to concerns raised by their constituents.
“They call them election reforms, I call them voter suppression,” Byrum said. “Their current claim is that people are asking for more restrictions and more safeguards. Well, the only reason people are asking for more safeguards is because they believe the lies that the same Republicans have been telling them since November.”
Areport by the Republican-led state Senate Oversight Committee last month found “no evidence of widespread or systemic fraud” and rejected other Trump-backed conspiracy theories, calling out his allies for “profiting by making false claims.”
Geiss said that report “proves that these bills are unnecessary.”
“They’re just so attached to the Big Lie and carrying the water of the former occupant of the White House that they can’t see reality,” she said. “They’re becoming incredibly divorced from reality even when the evidence is clear before them. They’re just caught up in the wave of trying to prevent people from voting and making it harder for people to exercise their right to vote because they’re upset that their candidate didn’t win.
“If your own reports show that there was no widespread voter fraud, what are you trying to accomplish?” she asked.
That State Senate report, however, has not dimmed Republican aspirations to restrict ballot access and Trump has continued to push the Big Lie, which has resulted in aflood of attacks and threats targeting election administrators.
“These attacks are the result of former President Trump providing the kindling, and others like Shirkey and some attorneys here in Michigan have been adding the lighter fluid and stoking the flames,” Byrum said. “We’re being threatened on a regular basis. We’re getting emails from people accusing us of malfeasance. It’s making people want to leave. … Professional election administrators are going to get out, they’re going to leave. Some already have — and my huge concern is that they’re going to be replaced with these conspiracy believers.”
Without safeguards in place in place to protect ballot access or election administrators in Republican-led states, and apparently some Democratic-led states with Republican legislatures, Democrats have rallied behind federal voting rights legislation and arecent proposal that would protect election officials from unjust removal and intimidation.
Democrats in the Texas Housefled the state this week to block the passage of another Republican voting package, traveling to Washington to pressure Democrats in the U.S. Senate to pass the For the People Act, which has languished in the chamber, frozen by a Republican filibuster and the reluctance of “centrist” Democrats like Sens.Joe Manchin of West Virginia andKyrsten Sinema of Arizona to consider filibuster reform.
“The For the People Act would absolutely cement that freedom to vote,” Koleszar said, adding that it would frustrate Republicans’ desire to create more barriers to voting.
There appears to be little lawmakers can do to prevent the Republican end-around on voting restrictions in Michigan, but activists plan to take to the streets to do everything they can.
“We’ve activated our entire infrastructure. We’ve gone door-to-door. We’ve dropped, I think, 10,000 pieces of literature. We’ve submitted more than 1,000 comments to legislators,” Wang said.
“If they do start that petition process to collect those signatures, then we’re going to be out on the streets telling people are exactly what is happening, because we think that [Republicans are] going to lie and say this is about election security. We’re going to be like, actually this is to prevent you from voting.”
The Tennessee health department, under pressure from Republican state lawmakers, is stopping all vaccine outreach to youth in the state and has been ordered to not publicize National Immunization Awareness Month in August.
According to documents obtained by the Tennessean, the staff at the health department have been ordered to remove the department’s logo from vaccine guidance targeted at adolescents and stop holding COVID-19 vaccine events on school campuses. Notably, the order to halt vaccine outreach to youths isn’t just for the COVID vaccine — it’s for all vaccines.
The health department will also no longer send postcards to teenagers reminding them to get the second dose of the COVID vaccine to avoid having the reminders “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” the document distributed among health department employees says.
NewsChannel 5 also found that the health department officials were ordered last week not to even acknowledge that August is National Immunization Awareness Month — a campaign backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other health organizations to boost vaccination efforts for all diseases among people of all ages.
Michelle Fiscus, the head of the health department’s vaccine outreach who was fired on Monday as part of the Republican pushback against vaccines, sent an email last week to the department’s chief medical officer asking him if they could do their normal publicity for National Immunization Awareness Month. They typically do a news release, governor’s proclamation and send communications to local health departments, Fiscus wrote in her email.
“[N]o outreach at all,” the chief medical officer Tim Jones said, attributing the decision to Tennessee Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey.
Piercey was also reportedly behind the decision to halt vaccine outreach to kids.
The Tennessee health department’s moves come as Republicans across the country and in the state have massively politicized vaccinations. Conservatives in Tennessee have put the health department in their crosshairs, calling the department “reprehensible,” accusing it of “peer pressuring” students into being vaccinated and even threatening to dissolve the entire health department and reconstituting it, presumably with people more amenable to their dangerous agenda.
Fiscus, in a scathing letter following her termination, wrote that she was fired for doing her job to provide information and education on vaccines. “Each of us should be waking up every morning with one question on our minds: ‘What can I do to protect the people of Tennessee against COVID-19?’. Instead, our leaders are putting barriers in place to ensure the people of Tennessee remain at-risk, even with the delta variant bearing down upon us.”
“I was told that I should have been more ‘politically aware’ and that I ‘poked the bear,’” wrote Fiscus in a memo she sent in the spring clarifying vaccine guidance for kids.
Though Republican state Gov. Bill Lee covertly got his COVID shot in March, GOP lawmakers in the state have been on a tirade against the vaccine. Conservative, white citizens of the state, in turn, are hesitant to accept the vaccine, according to health department polling. Meanwhile, in April, Governor Lee joined other Republicans across the country in pushing back against mandating vaccine records.
Fiscus expressed frustration over the politicization of the vaccine. “I have been terminated for doing my job because some of our politicians have bought into the anti-vaccine misinformation campaign rather than taking the time to speak with the medical experts,” Fiscus continued. “I am afraid for my state.”
Health experts and Democrats in the state have expressed concern over Fiscus’s firing. “A well-respected member of the public health community was sacrificed in favor of anti-vaccine ideology,” state Sen. Raumesh Akbari told NPR.
Tennessee has been lagging behind the rest of the country in vaccination rates. While nationally, 48 percent of the country has been fully vaccinated and 56 percent of people have received at least one shot, only 38 percent of the state has been fully vaccinated, and 43 percent have received at least one dose.
The state’s health department has estimatedthat, at the current pace, the state won’t reach 50 percent of its population fully vaccinated until March of next year. Meanwhile, as the Delta variant surges through the state, the state’s COVID case rate has risen a whopping 429 percent over the past two weeks, far higher than the national average of 109 percent.
Carter, Garcetti, and Tubbs are co-chairs of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Michael Tubbs is the former mayor of Stockton, CA. Eric Garcetti is the mayor of Los Angeles, CA and Melvin Carter is the mayor of St. Paul, MN.
On July 15, nearly every parent in America will begin receiving a guaranteed income. Labeled the Child Tax Credit, this $300 per month delivered directly to families mirrors the simplicity of a policy espoused by a range of Americans leaders, from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Richard Nixon. The cash is funded and distributed by the government, there are no restrictions on how it can be spent, and no work requirements to receive it.
The CTC is a complete 180 from the punitive, distrustful lens with which social safety net policies have been debated, developed and rolled out in our country for the past four decades—from Ronald Reagan bolstering the racist, sexist (and untrue) trope of a “welfare queen” to the more bipartisan embrace of workfare programs that too often fed into a false narrative of poverty as an ailment of the lazy and entitled.
New polling by Data for Progress and Mayors for a Guaranteed Income shows just how far we’ve come—a bipartisan majority of Americans support both guaranteed income and the CTC expansion.
This is a distinct shift from the last national poll conducted by Pew in August of 2020, which found that only a minority of voters supported basic income.
This shift is one of the few silver linings of COVID-19. Overnight, millions of people lost their jobs, struggling to make their mortgages and standing in days-long food bank lines to feed their families. The government needed a swift, effective way to curb the economic devastation that swept the country. There was no time for the typical hand-wringing over deficits and deservedness and the sanctimonious tirades that generally dominate such discussions (though that didn’t stop some from trying).
People needed help, and cash was the solution, including boosts in unemployment insurance and multiple stimulus checks.
A new analysis of cash aid between late 2020 and early 2021 found food insufficiency fell by over 40%, financial instability fell by 45%, and reported adverse mental health symptoms fell by 20%.
When Congress stalled on providing ongoing aid last year we saw the dramatic effects of not using cash, with more than eight million Americans pushed into poverty without bolstered unemployment or additional checks.
We were all mayors of major cities during the height of the pandemic last year, and saw first-hand the need for ongoing aid. We also knew that the problems of the pandemic were not new—that poverty and inequity run deep.
That’s why we launched Mayors for a Guaranteed Income in the pages of TIME. Our goal was two-fold: add to the body of data proving cash works through pilots across America, while also advocating for a federal guaranteed income policy.
In addition to solving for our communities’ immediate needs, we were driven by a moral imperative to build an economy that works for everyone.
Last year brought an inspiring wave of protests across the country, and the world, demanding equity for people of color—particularly Black Americans who have been historically excluded from economic gains. With its roots in racial and gender justice history, guaranteed income is the ideal tool to combat both the racial injustice and economic precarity brought to the fore in 2020 and that we continue to see today.
MGI was founded on the belief that in the richest country in the world, no one should live in poverty. We operate based on the truth that financial instability is not the failure of individuals, but rather policies.
Our progress over the last year has included important work at the local, state and federal levels. We’ve grown our ranks from 11 to 58 mayors, and scaled up our pilots from one to more than two dozen. We worked with state leaders, resulting in $35 million in guaranteed income pilot funding included in the California budget, a first in the country. We kept the heat on Congress to provide more stimulus checks, and we got them.
As we look to the work of our next year, we recognize that now is not the time to take our foot off the gas. We will work with the administration and Congressional leaders to ensure the CTC is made permanent.
The research from our pilots will continue to feed into the evidence base proving that cash works. We will also invest in narrative efforts to show that the economy is not numbers on a graph, it’s the financial reality of people in our communities.
Through these combined efforts at every level of government, we will relentlessly fight for our shared goal of recognizing that we already have the tool to eradicate poverty and strengthen the middle class: a guaranteed income.
Several Senate Republicans who initially said they’d support the watered down, bipartisan version of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill are now saying that they aren’t committed to voting to advance the bill, leaving the future of the proposal in the lurch.
Five out of 11 Republicans who previously said they’d support the proposal told CNN that they’re now wary of supporting it — despite the fact that Biden agreed to cut the bill down to almost an eighth of its original size and has given up a large portion of the proposals that had originally excited some progressives and Democrats.
Senators like Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) said they are concerned that Democrats plan to tie the bipartisan infrastructure bill to a larger reconciliation bill that is slated to contain a wide variety of Democratic priorities and can be passed with a simple majority in the Senate. Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) have said that they won’t raise the infrastructure bill without the reconciliation package.
Because of the filibuster, only six Republican votes in the Senate wouldn’t be enough to pass the bipartisan legislation, leaving it in limbo for now. The group of centrist senators, led on the Republican side by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), are expected to meet again Tuesday to iron out details.
“It doesn’t seem the right kind of negotiating tactic to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll support a bipartisan plan, only as long as I get a vote on everything else I want,’” Moran told CNN, explaining his wariness over supporting the plan.
“What Speaker Pelosi does I can’t control,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), “but they may not get anything if they start putting in conditions.”
But Moran and Rounds seem to ignore the fact that negotiations on the Republican side have been in bad faith — more so than how they’re perceiving the Democrats to be doing. The GOP has made it clear that they are dead set on saying no, unilaterally, to nearly everything Democrats propose. Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) himself has declared bipartisanship on big spending like the stimulus package “over” — even though he has bragged about its benefits to the people in his state, despite voting against it.
Republicans haven’t exactly been amenable to reaching across the aisle when they’ve been in power, either. When they passed Donald Trump’s tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy in 2017, for instance, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), then a ranking member of the Senate Finance committee, pointed out that “there was zero outreach from Republicans on this issue.” Wyden said there was “Not one moment when Republicans actually shared even a piece of paper or a document about ideas that might bring both sides together.”
In fact, even the centrist Republicans involved in the negotiations with Biden are still refusing to capitulate to any form of bipartisanship on the tax issue. It was Republicans who under Trump slashed the corporate tax rate from an already relatively low 35 percent to a mere 21 percent, helping many large corporations pay zero dollars in corporate taxes in recent years. But when Biden proposed a very modest raise in the corporate tax rate to 28 percent to pay for the infrastructure bill, Republicans immediately shot it down.
In fact, even the commonsense bipartisan proposal to provide the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with more resources to crack down on tax cheats, especially wealthy ones, in order to raise revenue for the infrastructure bill seems to be in contention now. Several of the senators like Rounds and Moran told CNN that they are unsure about the proposal, leaving it in question.
Meanwhile, there appears to be a battle brewing on the Democratic side over how large the reconciliation bill will be. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has proposed a $6 trillion figure, arguing that a large spending bill is crucial to address pressing issues like the climate crisis and various labor and economic problems that the country is facing.
“For decades, we have ignored the threat of climate change, a crumbling infrastructure, a disastrous child care system, a massive need for affordable housing, that we are the only major country not to guarantee paid medical leave,” Sanders tweeted on Monday. “Our budget must meet the needs of this moment.”
Key negotiators in Washington have said in recent days that they expect the reconciliation package to be only around $3.5 trillion, which Sanders says would be unacceptable. “I introduced a proposal for $6 trillion,” the senator said in a press conference on Monday. “So I am going to fight to make that proposal as robust as it can be, and I think, quite frankly, a strong majority of the members of the Democratic caucus want to go as big as we possibly can.”
Just days after the Texas state legislature convened for a special session, GOP legislators in the state are trying once again to ram through a new voter suppression bill into law. The lawmakers had failed to pass a previous version of the bill after Democrats walked off the floor at the end of the legislative session in May to deny quorum and block the legislation.
It appears that Democrats are prepared to try that strategy again. At least 58 Democratic members of the Texas House are evidently planning to flee the state on Monday, this time for weeks, to block the GOP’s new voter suppression bill as well as a slate of other Republican priorities that are planned for the session.
In fleeing the state, the legislators are risking legal consequences, according to NBC. The Texas legislature requires lawmakers to be in the chamber to reach quorum.
But the legislation that the Democrats are planning to block could result in dire consequences for voting access in the state. The slate of proposals in the most recent version of the Republican bill makes the package one of the worst, most restrictive voter-suppression bills in the country, voting advocates say. Texas is already one of the hardest states to vote in.
The new bill retains many of the proposals from the first version, such as banning drive-through and 24-hour voting, barring election officials from sending out unsolicited absentee ballot applications, empowering partisan poll watchers and adding restrictions to voting by mail, among other things.
Republican legislators rammed the bill through committee in the House after about 24 straight hours of testimony and debate, passing it along party lines early Sunday morning. The Senate advanced the bill through committee on Sunday afternoon, meaning the bill could come to a floor vote this week.
Hearings on the bill attracted hundreds of members of the public, including former member of Congress Beto O’Rourke, to testify at the hearing on the restrictive legislation. Many of the Texans who signed up to testify were against the legislation, but they had to wait nearly 18 hours to do so as legislators debated the package.
Democrats may also be hoping to block other alarming proposals that Republicans are planning to raise during this legislative session.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called the special legislative session not only to pass the voter suppression legislation but also to advance a slate of other Republican wish-list items that are currently sweeping the country, such as a ban on teaching Black American history in schools, placing further restrictions on abortions and taking steps to end what Republicans view as “censorship” on social media platforms.
The new version of the voter suppression bill, however, doesn’t contain a couple of key items from the last draft: allowing judges to overturn election results and wide restrictions on Sunday early voting, when many Black voters turn out to vote after attending church.
Getting rid of those two troubling items doesn’t necessarily signal good intentions on the part of the Republicans. The proposal to allow the overturning of election results was a last-minute and extremely controversial addition to the earlier version of the bill in the spring. The proposal to end Sunday early voting was a subject of controversy not only for its likely racist intention of suppressing Black voters, but also because the Texas GOP claimed, somewhat dubiously, that the sweeping restriction that would affect millions of voters was a mere typo.
The Republicans’ voter-suppression effort in Texas is one of hundreds of similar efforts by conservative lawmakers across the country to restrict voting. As of May, 489 restrictive bills had been filed in 48 states, many of which have advanced in the legislature and some of which have passed into law.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears to be trying to help his fellow Republicans in their efforts to throw completely unfounded questions into the election process. Just before the GOP unveiled the latest voter-suppression bill in the state, Paxton tweeted about the arrest of Hervis Rogers — which he had ordered — on two counts of illegal voting.
Rogers, who went semi-viral in a CNN clip last year for waiting over six hours in line to vote in the 2020 presidential primaries, was on parole when he voted once in 2018 and once in March of 2020. Under Texas law, it is illegal for someone in prison or on parole to cast a ballot.
However, in order to be found guilty of illegal voting, the person in question must have “knowingly” voted illegally. Rogers’s lawyers argue that he wouldn’t have talked to national TV news reporters if he had known it was illegal. “He’s really devastated,” one of Rogers’s lawyers told The Washington Post. “He does not want to go back to jail.”
Still, Paxton boasted about the arrest, saying that he is standing up against voter fraud. But considering there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, it’s more than likely that he is simply trying to build the case for more voter suppression.
Around the country, Republican legislators are using straw man arguments about voter fraud to push increasing restrictions on access to the ballot box. In response, President Joe Biden and others have slammed the changes as “un-American,” rhetorically downplaying the violence of voter suppression that has in fact been at the core of U.S. history.
When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a century had already passed since the end of the Civil War, and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that defined birthright citizenship and the political and legal rights that accompanied that.
In that century, with the exception of the first decade-and-change of Reconstruction, Black people in the South were, through webs of Jim Crow laws placed into state constitutions over a period of decades, largely blocked from exercising the right to vote. Those laws included property tax requirements for voting, literacy tests, poll taxes, sometimes even bizarre knowledge and trivia tests asked only of Black residents. In much of the South, where the then-segregationist Democratic Party had a lock on power, the Party defined itself as a private “club,” and set its own rules — including a whites-only voting restriction for primary elections.
While many of these laws also had the potential to exclude poor and under-educated white residents from the voter rolls as well, the main impact was against Black people. Indeed, the majority of Southern states moved to protect the franchise of impoverished white voters by codifying so-called “grandfather clauses,” which allowed illiterate and impoverished whites, who otherwise would be excluded from the political process, to vote so long as their grandparents had been eligible to cast ballots in the two years succeeding the Civil War — a clause that overwhelmingly, and deliberately, worked to protect whites while surgically excluding Black voters, whose grandparents hadn’t yet reaped the electoral benefits of Reconstruction in those years prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, from access to the ballot box.
Even in locales far from the old Confederacy, rampant discrimination and racialized violence meant that Black, and, in the Western states in particular, Asian American and Latinx residents, were, during these years, marginalized politically, and in many cases economically.
What made this web of laws so vastly pernicious was in part the sheer ingenuity of the methods of discrimination. Generations of politicians and lawyers worked diligently to exclude Black voters from the political process while often claiming to be doing so in a way that was “color-blind.” It was a form of don’t ask, don’t tell discrimination pushed by segregationist Democrats that, for the better part of a century, conservative judges and Supreme Court justices upheld.
Now, five generations after the original Jim Crow edifice was built, the modern GOP, with a nod and a wink of approval from a right-wing Supreme Court, has become a party dedicated to mass disenfranchisement, and to both a purging of existing voter rolls and a contraction of the franchise for future would-be voters.
The recent Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee Supreme Court ruling upheld as constitutional Arizona’s law barring the votes of those who accidentally cast ballots in the wrong precincts from being counted, and also banning so-called “harvesting” of ballots. This ruling doesn’t go as far as the rulings of the late 19th and early 20th century that upheld Jim Crow, but it’s a step along the same trajectory. For, in ruling that there wasn’t an overt intent to violate the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and coming on the heels of previous rulings that had already weakened the Act’s framework, the six conservative justices have opened the legal floodgates to creative constrictions of the franchise that pretend to be racially neutral while still having an obvious racial impact.
Like the architects of Jim Crow, today’s disenfranchisement specialists have identified a series of weak spots in the electoral systems of the country that can be exploited with racial consequences and yet maintain enough of a fiction of race-neutrality to pass a conservative Supreme Court’s half-hearted scrutiny. In Georgia, laws were passed barring morning voting on Sundays; these laws never mention race, but clearly the only point of such laws is to eliminate the “souls to the polls” efforts, in which thousands of Black voters march off to vote after church services in the South. In Arizona, the ban on the counting of votes accidentally placed in the wrong precinct will almost certainly hit non-white and low-income voters more, since infrequent voters are more likely to have problems navigating the complexities of the voting process, and, historically, for many reasons, these demographics have had lower voter participation rates. In Texas, the governor is pushing a set of restrictions that would massively roll back early voting processes in big, urban counties, where large numbers of non-white voters live.
Numerous other Republican-controlled states are moving in a similar direction; now, with the Brnovich ruling, it becomes more likely that these laws will withstand court scrutiny.
Jim Crow wasn’t implemented all in a rush; it was, in fact, a lengthy process, that, in some states, took decades, from the end of Reconstruction into the early 20th century, to complete. That, I fear, is what is unfolding here. What is being created through these laws is a precedent: a testing of the waters to see how far in coming years the disenfranchisement-boosters can go before the courts draw a red line. If the recent court decision is a harbinger of things to come, the answer, unfortunately, is that they can take things despicably far, safe in the knowledge that the court does not want to get involved as more and more Americans have obstacles placed in their path to the ballot box.
No longer content with absurd claims that the January 6 Capitol riot was as bad as the 9/11 attacks, Democratic Party-aligned pundits are now insisting that it was in fact worse.
On a recent appearance with MSNBC’s ReidOut with Joy Reid, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd said he felt the Capitol riot was “much worse” than 9/11 and that this is the “most perilous point in time” since the beginning of the American Civil War.
“To me, though there was less loss of life on January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because it’s continued to rip our country apart and get permission for people to pursue autocratic means, and so I think we’re in a much worse place than we’ve been,” Dowd said. “I think we’re in the most perilous point in time since 1861 in the advent of the Civil War.”
“I do too,” Reid said.
This is absolutely BONKERS and offensive to the thousands murdered on 9/11.
Appearing alongside MSNBC's Joy Reid, Matt Dowd says "January 6th was worse than 9/11 because it's continued to rip our country apart and give permission for people to pursue autocratic means" pic.twitter.com/UnJfAID5SN
Not to be outdone, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Smith cited Dowd’s hysterical claim but adding that not only was January 6 worse than 9/11, but it was actually going to kill more Americans somehow, even counting all those killed in the US wars which ensued from the 9/11 attacks.
“He couldn’t be more right,” Schmidt said at a town hall for the Lincoln Project. “The 1/6 attack for the future of the country was a profoundly more dangerous event than the 9/11 attacks. And in the end, the 1/6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed in the 9/11 attacks, which will include the casualties of the wars that lasted 20 years following.”
A total of 2,996 Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and a further seven thousand US troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Exactly one person was killed in the January 6 riot, and it was a rioter shot by police inside the Capitol Building. Early reports that rioters had beaten a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher turned out to have been false.
These bizarre alternate-reality takes are awful for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that this so-called “insurrection” everyone is still shrieking about never at any point in its planning or enactment had a higher than zero percent chance of overthrowing the most powerful government in the world, and the fact that they are manufacturing consent for new authoritarian measures just like 9/11 did.
But perhaps the most annoying thing about all the melodramatic garment-rending over how close the US Capitol came to being taken over by violent extremists is that the US Capitol has been under the control of violent extremists for a very long time already.
For all the fretting everyone has been doing about fascists and white supremacist groups, those are not the violent extremists posing the greatest threat and amassing the highest body count today. Neither are the communists. Neither are the anarchists. Neither are the radicalized Muslims, nor the fundamentalist Christians, nor the environmentalists, nor the incels. No, the most dangerous and deadly group of violent extremists in our day are adherents of the mainstream status quo politics of the US-centralized power alliance.
And it’s not even close. Certainly many of the groups listed above are dangerous and undesirable, but they’re not the ones raining explosives upon families around the world for power and profit. They’re not the ones brandishing nuclear weapons with steadily increasing recklessness as they ramp up a new cold war against Russia and China. They’re not the ones poisoning the air and the water and rapidly destroying the environment we all depend on for survival. They’re not the ones enslaving humanity to a brutal, oppressive and exploitative global capitalist system which leaves far too many toiling for far too little when there’s plenty for everyone.
That would be the so-called “moderates” of the western empire, who in reality are anything but.
BREAKING: Sources report violent right-wing extremists have seized the US Capitol, established a globe-spanning empire, and murdered millions of people.
It is violent to wage nonstop campaigns of military mass murder and impose civilian-killing economic sanctions on nations which disobey your dictates. It is extremist to brutalize, brainwash and enslave humanity while continuously shoving the world in the direction of extinction and armageddon in the name of profit and unipolar hegemony. Because US officials sit almost entirely on the right side of the global political spectrum, we can accurately say that everyone is fretting about violent right-wing extremists storming a Capitol building that had already long been occupied by violent right-wing extremists.
And yet when Facebook started sending Americans warnings that they may have viewed “extremist content” scrolling through their feeds, posts supporting this most dangerous group of extremists were not the content they were being warned about, but any kind of content which opposes the status quo those extremists have created. They’re killing the ecosystem and murdering people every single day while imperiling us all with the risk of nuclear war, my social media feeds are full of Americans literally trying to crowdfund their own survival while the world’s worst add trillions to their wealth, but it’s the people who want to change this abusive system who are the dangerous extremists.
Some analysts focus primarily on criticizing the really obvious monsters who spout racist and bigoted rhetoric to advance their toxic agendas. Others focus more on criticizing the monsters that are harder to see through the fog of feigned politeness and propaganda distortion, the ones you see in government buildings and on Fortune Magazine covers and on TV news shows telling you what to think about the world. Those who spend their time criticizing the latter more than the former are often attacked and ridiculed as fascist sympathizers and Kremlin assets, but only by those who don’t actually see the monsters that they are pointing to.
Hollywood trained us to fear psychopathic killers prowling around in the dark so we won’t notice the psychopathic killers who rule our world in broad daylight. We’ve been trained to fear the serial killer covered in blood and wielding a chainsaw so we won’t notice the serial killer wearing a suit and wielding a pen.
Our collective maturity cannot begin until we learn to see the violent extremist monsters where they actually exist, and not just where we’ve been trained to look for them.
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The U.S. political system is broken, many mainstream pundits declare. Their claim rests on the idea that Republicans and Democrats are more divided than ever and seem to be driven by different conceptions not only of government, but of reality itself. However, the problem with the U.S. political system is more profound than the fact that Democrats and Republicans operate in parallel universes. The issue is that the U.S. appears to function like a democracy, but, essentially, it constitutes a plutocracy, with both parties primarily looking after the same economic interests.
In this interview, Noam Chomsky, an esteemed public intellectual and one of the world’s most cited scholars in modern history, discusses the current shape of the Democratic Party and the challenges facing the progressive left in a country governed by a plutocracy.
C.J. Polychroniou: In our last interview, you analyzed the political identity of today’s Republican Party and dissected its strategy for returning to power. Here, I am interested in your thoughts on the current shape of the Democratic Party and, more specifically, on whether it is in the midst of loosening its embrace of neoliberalism to such an extent that an ideological metamorphosis may in fact be underway?
Noam Chomsky: The short answer is: Maybe. There is much uncertainty.
With all of the major differences, the current situation is somewhat reminiscent of the early 1930s, which I’m old enough to remember, if hazily. We may recall Antonio Gramsci’s famous observation from Mussolini’s prison in 1930, applicable to the state of the world at the time, whatever exactly he may have had in mind: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Today, the foundations of the neoliberal doctrines that have had such a brutal effect on the population and the society are tottering, and might collapse. And there is no shortage of morbid symptoms.
In the years that followed Gramsci’s comment, two paths emerged to deal with the deep crisis of the 1930s: social democracy, pioneered by the New Deal in the U.S., and fascism. We have not reached that state, but symptoms of both paths are apparent, in no small measure on party lines.
To assess the current state of the political system, it is useful to go back a little. In the 1970s, the highly class-conscious business community sharply escalated its efforts to dismantle New Deal social democracy and the “regimented capitalism” that prevailed through the postwar period — the fastest growth period of American state capitalism, egalitarian, with financial institutions under control so there were none of the crises that punctuate the neoliberal years and no “bailout economy” of the kind that has prevailed through these years, as Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein very effectively review.
The business attack begins in the late 1930s with experiments in what later became a major industry of “scientific methods of strike-breaking.” It was on hold during the war and took off immediately afterwards, but it was relatively limited until the 1970s. The political parties pretty much followed suit; more accurately perhaps, the two factions of the business party that share government in the U.S. one-party state.
By the ‘70s, beginning with Nixon’s overtly racist “Southern strategy,” the Republicans began their journey off the political spectrum, culminating (so far) in the McConnell-Trump era of contempt for democracy as an impediment to holding uncontested power. Meanwhile, the Democrats abandoned the working class, handing working people over to their class enemy. The Democrats transitioned to a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street, becoming “cool” under Obama in a kind of replay of the infatuation of liberal intellectuals with the Camelot image contrived in the Kennedy years.
The last gasp of real Democratic concern for working people was the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins full employment act. President Carter, who seemed to have had little interest in workers’ rights and needs, didn’t veto the bill, but watered it down so that it had no teeth. In the same year, UAW president Doug Fraser withdrew from Carter’s Labor-Management committee, condemning business leaders — belatedly — for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war … against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.”
The one-sided class war took off in force under Ronald Reagan. Like his accomplice Margaret Thatcher in England, Reagan understood that the first step should be to eliminate the enemy’s means of defense by harsh attack on unions, opening the door for the corporate world to follow, with the Democrats largely indifferent or participating in their own ways — matters we’ve discussed before.
The tragi-comic effects are being played out in Washington right now. Biden attempted to pass badly needed support for working people who have suffered a terrible blow during the pandemic (while billionaires profited handsomely and the stock market boomed). He ran into a solid wall of implacable Republican opposition. A major issue was how to pay for it. Republicans indicated some willingness to agree to the relief efforts if the costs were borne by unemployed workers by reducing the pittance of compensation. But they imposed an unbreachable Red Line: not a penny from the very rich.
Nothing can touch Trump’s major legislative achievement, the 2017 tax scam that enriches the super-rich and corporate sector at the expense of everyone else — the bill that Joseph Stiglitz termed the U.S. Donor Relief Act of 2017, which “embodies all that is wrong with the Republican Party, and to some extent, the debased state of American democracy.”
Meanwhile, Republicans claim to be the party of the working class, thanks to their advocacy of lots of guns for everyone, Christian nationalism and white supremacy — our “traditional way of life.”
To Biden’s credit, he has made moves to reverse the abandonment of working people by his party, but in the “debased state” of what remains of American democracy, it’s a tough call.
The Democrats are meanwhile split between the management of the affluent professional/Wall Street-linked party, still holding most of the reins, and a large and energetic segment of the popular base that has been pressing for social democratic initiatives to deal with the ravages of the 40-year bipartisan neoliberal assault — and among some of the popular base, a lot more.
The internal conflict has been sharp for years, particularly as the highly successful Sanders campaign began to threaten absolute control by the Clinton-Obama party managers, who tried in every way to sabotage his candidacy. We see that playing out again right now in the intense efforts to block promising left candidates in Buffalo and the Cleveland area in northeast Ohio.
We should bear in mind the peculiarities of political discourse in the U.S. Elsewhere, “socialist” is about as controversial as “Democrat” is here, and policies described as “maybe good but too radical for Americans” are conventional. That’s true, for example, of the two main programs that Bernie Sanders championed: universal health care and free higher education. The economics columnist and associate editor of the London Financial Times, Rana Foroohar, hardly exaggerated when she wrote that while Sanders is considered the spokesperson of the radical left here, “in terms of his policies, he’s probably pretty close to your average German Christian Democrat,” the German conservative party in a generally conservative political system.
On issues, the split between the party managers and progressive sectors of the voting base is pretty much across the board. It is not limited to the relics of social welfare but to a range of other crucial matters, among them, the most important issue that has ever arisen in human history, along with nuclear weapons: the destruction of the environment that sustains life, proceeding apace.
We might tarry a moment to think about this. The most recent general assessment of where we stand comes from a leaked draft of the forthcoming IPCC study on the state of the environment. According to the report of the study, it “concludes that climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas — these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.…On current trends, we’re heading for three degrees Celsius at best.”
Thanks to activist efforts, notably of the Sunrise movement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey have been able to introduce a congressional resolution on a Green New Deal that spells out quite carefully what can and must be done. Further popular pressures could move it towards proposed legislation. It is likely to meet an iron wall of resistance from the denialist party, which increasingly is dedicated to the principle enunciated in 1936 by Francisco Franco’s companion, the fascist general Millán Astray: “Abajo la inteligencia! Viva la muerte!”: “Down with intelligence! Viva death.”
As of now, the Democratic response would be mixed. The president refuses to support a Green New Deal, a prerequisite for decent survival. Many in Congress, too. That can change, and must. A lot will depend on the coming election.
While all of this is going on here, OPEC is meeting, and is riven by conflicts over how much to increase oil production, with the White House pressuring for increased production to lower prices and Saudi Arabia worrying that if prices rise it “would accelerate the shift toward renewable energy” — that is, toward saving human society from catastrophe, a triviality not mentioned in the news report, as usual.
Going back to the crisis of 90 years ago, as the neoliberal assault faces increasingly angry resistance, we see signs of something like the two paths taken then: a drift toward proto-fascism or creation of genuine social democracy. Each tendency can of course proceed further, reawakening Rosa Luxemburg’s warning “Socialism or Barbarism.”
It is useful to recall that the primary intellectual forces behind the neoliberal assault have a long history of support for fascism. Just a few years before the assault was launched, they had conducted an experiment in neoliberal socio-economic management under the aegis of the Pinochet dictatorship, which prepared the ground by destroying labor and dispatching critics to hideous torture chambers or instant death. Under near-perfect experimental conditions, they managed to crash the economy in a few years, but no matter. On to greater heights: imposing the doctrine on the world.
In earlier years, their guru, Ludwig von Mises, was overjoyed by the triumph of fascism, which he claimed had “saved European civilization,” exulting, “The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.” Mussolini’s “achievement” was much like Pinochet’s: destroying labor and independent thought so that “sound economics” could proceed unencumbered by sentimental concerns about human rights and justice.
In defense of von Mises, we may recall that he was far from alone in admiring Mussolini’s achievements, though few sank to his depths of adulation. In his case, on principled grounds. All worth recalling when we consider the possible responses to the neoliberal disaster.
How do we explain the rise of the progressive left in the Democratic Party?
It’s only necessary to review the effects of the 40-year neoliberal assault, as we have done elsewhere. It’s hardly surprising that the victims — the large majority of the population — are rebelling, sometimes in ominous ways, sometimes in ways that can forge a path to a much better future.
Democrats may need to expand their base in order to keep the House in 2022. How do they do that, especially with the presence of so many different wings within the party?
The best way is by designing and implementing policies that will help people and benefit the country. Biden’s programs so far move in that direction — not enough, but significantly. Such efforts would show that under decent leadership, impelled by popular pressure, reform can improve lives, alleviate distress, satisfy some human needs. That would expand the Democratic base, just as social-democratic New Deal-style measures have done in the past.
The Republican leadership understands that very well. That is why they will fight tooth and nail against any measures to improve life, with strict party discipline. We have been witnessing this for years. One of many illustrations is the dedication to block the very limited improvement of the scandalous U.S. health care system in the Affordable Care Act — “Obamacare.” Another is the sheer cruelty of Republican governors who refuse federal aid to provide desperate people even with meager Medicaid assistance.
That’s one way to expand the base, which could have large effects if it can break through Republican opposition and the reluctance of the more right-wing sectors of the Democratic Party (termed “moderate” in media discourse). It could bring back to the Democratic fold the working-class voters who left in disgust with Obama’s betrayals, and further back, with the Democrats’ abandonment of working people since the reshaping of the party from the ‘70s.
There are other opportunities. Working people and communities that depend on the fossil fuel economy can be reached by taking seriously their concerns and working with them to develop transitional programs that will provide them with better jobs and better lives with renewable energy. That’s no idle dream. Such initiatives have had substantial success in coal-mining and oil-producing states, thanks in considerable measure to Bob Pollin’s grassroots work.
There is no mystery about how to extend the base: pursue policies that serve peoples’ interests, not the preferences of the donor class.
The evidence that this is happening seems slim. There was a slight shift in the last election, but the results don’t seem to depart significantly from the historical norm. Latino communities varied. Where there had been serious Latino organizing, as in Arizona and Nevada, there was no drift to Trump. Where Mexican-American communities were ignored, as in South Texas, Trump broke records in Latino support. There seem to be several reasons. People resented being taken for granted by the Democratic Party (“You’re Latino, so you’re in our pocket”). There was no effort to provide the constructive alternative to the Republican claim that global warming is a liberal hoax and the Democrats want to take your jobs away. The communities are often attracted by the Republican pretense of “defending religion” from secular attack. It’s necessary to explore these matters with some care.
Many Democrats wish to eliminate the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — because with the wafer-thin majority that they hold it is impossible to pass into law landmark pieces of legislation. However, given today’s political climate, and with the possibility looming on the horizon that Trumpist Republicans will retake the House in 2022, aren’t there risks in abolishing the filibuster?
It’s a concern, and it would have some weight in a functioning democracy. But a long series of Republican attacks on the integrity of Congress, culminating in McConnell’s machinations, have seriously undermined the Senate’s claim to be part of a democratic polity. If Democrats were to resort to filibuster, McConnell, who is no fool, might well find ways to use illegal procedures to ram through acts that would establish more firmly the rule of the far right, whatever the population might prefer. We saw that illustrated recently in his shenanigans with the Garland-Gorsuch Supreme Court appointments, but it goes far back.
Political analyst Michael Tomasky argued recently, quite seriously, that the Senate should be abolished, converted to something like the British House of Lords, with a peripheral role in governance. There has always been an argument for that, and with the evisceration of remaining shreds of democracy under Republican leadership, it is an idea whose time may have come, at least as a goal for the future.
When all is said and done, the U.S. does not have a functional democratic system, and it is probably best defined as a plutocracy. With that in mind, what do you consider to be the issues of paramount importance that progressives, both activists and lawmakers, must work on in order to bring about meaningful reform that would improve average people’s lives, as well as enhance the prospects of a democratic future?
For good reason, the gold standard in scholarship on the Constitutional Convention, by Michael Klarman, is entitled “The Framer’s Coup” — meaning, the coup against democracy by a distinguished group of wealthy, white, (mostly) slave owners. There were a few dissidents — Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (who did not take part in the Convention). But the rest were pretty much in agreement that democracy was a threat that had to be avoided. The Constitution was carefully designed to undercut the threat.
The call for plutocracy was not concealed. Madison’s vision, largely enacted, was that the new government should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Many devices were introduced to ensure this outcome. Primary power was placed in the (unelected) Senate, with long terms to insulate Senators from public pressure.
“The senate ought to come from and represent the wealth of the nation,” Madison held, backed by his colleagues. These are the “more capable set of men,” who sympathize with property owners and their rights. In simple words, “those who own the country ought to govern it,” as explained by John Jay, First Justice of the Supreme Court. In short, plutocracy.
In Madison’s defense, it should be recalled that his mentality was pre-capitalist. Scholarship recognizes that Madison “was — to depths that we today are barely able to imagine — an eighteenth century gentleman of honor,” in the words of Lance Banning. It is the “enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher” who were to exercise power. They would be “men of intelligence, patriotism, property and independent circumstances,” and “pure and noble” like the Romans of the imagination of the time; men “whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” They would thus “refine” and “enlarge” the “public views,” Banning continues, guarding the public interest against the “mischiefs” of democratic majorities.
The picture is richly confirmed in the fascinating debates of the Convention. It has ample resonance to the present, quite strikingly in the most respected liberal democratic theory.
Madison himself was soon disabused of these myths. In a 1791 letter to Jefferson, he deplored “the daring depravity of the times” as the “stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the government — at once its tools and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations.” Not a bad picture of America today. The contours have been sharpened by 40 years of bipartisan neoliberalism, now challenged by the progressive base that Democratic Party managers are working to subdue.
With all its anti-democratic features, by 18th-century standards, the American constitutional system was a significant step toward freedom and democracy, enough so as to seriously frighten European statesmen who perceived the potential domino effect of subversive republicanism. The world has changed. The plutocracy remains in place, a terrain of struggle.
Over time, popular struggles have expanded the realm of freedom, justice and democratic participation, not without regression. There are many barriers that remain to be demolished in the political system and the general social order: bought elections, the “bailout economy,” structural racism and other attacks on basic rights, suppression of labor.
It is all too easy to extend the list and to spell out more radical goals that should be guidelines for the future, all overshadowed by the imminent threats to survival.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
