There’s a very brief moment in a Simpsons episode from 1994 that I think about constantly.
First, we see a clip of a Republican convention, where banners above the stage read “We want what’s worst for everyone” and “We’re just plain evil.” Then, we see the Democratic convention, with different banners: “We hate life and ourselves” and “We can’t govern!”
It’s hard not to lose faith in the Democratic Party’s ability to govern when its members control both houses of Congress and the White House but can pass hardly any progressive legislation thanks to one or two impossible-to-please holdouts. As my colleague Noah Kim pointed out earlier this week, Democrats appear unlikely to pass the Build Back Better social spending bill this year, and even less likely to succeed with voting rights reform. That leaves Democrats in the undesirable position of having to spend 2022 campaigning on an infrastructure bill whose tangible benefits could take years to build.
It’s hard to pass laws, and I can’t fault Joe Biden for Joe Manchin’s obstinance. But there has been a flippancy about the Biden administration’s attitude toward the struggles of ordinary Americans that I find frustrating. Asked at a press conference why the government doesn’t make rapid COVID tests free, press secretary Jen Psaki asked sarcastically—to the internet’s immediate derision—”Should we just send one to every American?” Whether such a rapid testing program would mitigate the virus’s spread in the United States is beside the point. It was Psaki’s tone that stung.
And then there’s the issue of student loans. The Trump administration suspended loan payments when the pandemic broke out, but they’re set to resume in January. Biden’s proposal to eliminate $10,000 in student loan debt has not come to fruition. Asked about it in a press conference, Psaki again delivered a dose of sass: “If Congress sends him a bill, he’s happy to sign it. They haven’t sent him a bill on that yet.”
I’m supposed to rest my hopes of financial solvency on Congress? The body that won’t even pass a child tax credit to lift more than 4 million kids out of poverty?
With abortion rights in the hands of a staunchly conservative Supreme Court, I have to keep reminding myself that an inability to govern is better than the alternative: “just plain evil.”
—Abigail Weinber-Mother Jones Daily
P.S. Before we head into the weekend, I wanted to boost MoJo’s big December fundraising campaign. On an all-staff call yesterday, our membership lead Brian said that the fundraiser is humming along but that there’s still an eye-popping amount of money left to raise this month. So check out our CEO Monika Bauerlein’s post about the year that was and the work ahead, and please consider pitching in today if you can!
Understanding original sin without religious certainty
Michael Pulley – Yesterday 5:28 AM
Some things were expected and sure, like measles, chicken pox and mumps. I was over-the-top sick with all of them, staying home from school, then watching kids walk home — I’d lift a Venetian blind louver and peer at them, as though I’d done something reprehensible not to be walking home, something I could have avoided if I’d only been more upright and wary.
Perhaps I thought that way because of a theological construct called “original sin.” I didn’t know the phrase when young, but might have thought that if I could work harder and believe the right things, I might free myself from some stain I was born with, that the human race shared with me.
Imagine a newborn first breathing oxygen, being brought into this planet through no agency of its own with its first act a bawling scream, as if to say, “I was once cozy, my cells dividing rapidly as I rested in a comforting fluid, only to be thrust into bright lights, loud noises and handlers tossing me back and forth! Any way I could go back?”
And then years later, the once-newborn learned it was born into “original sin,” that is, “bad to the bone.” And if asked “Why?” answered with a statement such as, “It was God’s will.”
“And who is this God that thrust me into sin I had nothing to do with?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“Any chance I was born into ‘original goodness’?”
“No chance at all.”
Such theological certainties not only made me scratch my naïve head as a child but continue to baffle me to the point of my casting off such notions like original sin. I’ve left so many absolutes behind, that discussions with people who hold them so often turn into fruitless talking — my wheels spin and go nowhere. What do I have to prove? Nothing, really.
Barbara Brown Taylor (priest, theologian): “I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place. We are a motley crew.”
Does arriving at religious certainty require more or less imagination than the holy ignorance Barbara Brown Taylor speaks of? Novelist Zadie Smith wondered “what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal opportunity voyeur … above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks: “Imagination helps you perceive reality, try on other realities, predict possible futures, experience other viewpoints.” In other words, try on many outfits, see what looks good on and for me.
I was once ill-equipped to ponder more closely original sin, thinking I might need to work my way out of a guilty stain — possibly avoiding measles, chicken pox and mumps. My immaturity and naivete blocked my imagination to question what others had set before me as sureties.
Brooks goes on: “What happens to a society that lets so much of its imagination lie fallow? Perhaps you wind up where people are strangers to one another and themselves.” Where certainties cannot be formed by testing many hypotheses through the lens of imagining what might be.
I’ve no desire to be a stranger to others and myself, when I could — maybe for a brief time — imagine what others unlike me are thinking. Might be something there I could try on. See if it fits. Could just be worth a try.
Michael Pulley lives in Springfield. He can be reached at mpulley634@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Understanding original sin without religious certainty
Comments Off on The GOP Still Reaching Backwards To Move Forward
As the article below shows, the GOP is still obstructing progress for the sake of their big money donors and their own wellbeing. As voters we need to be aware of what the GOP is doing in “our names” as they have done for years (remember the “2017 tax reform” that added 1.7 billion to the deficit)). MA
The Cold War ended 30 years ago, but you’d be hard-pressed to know that watching Saule Omarova’s confirmation hearing Thursday. One after another, Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee hinted darkly at the idea that Omarova — who was born in the Soviet Union — is a not-so-secret communist devoted to destroying American capitalism.
The truth is that Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee to be comptroller of the currency, has no interest in reviving the USSR. And what’s truly ridiculous about the attacks on her is that in another era, Omarova’s biography not only wouldn’t have been a hindrance — it likely would have been seen as an asset by anti-communist Republicans.
If confirmed, Omarova would be the top regulator of the biggest banks in the country and their combined $14.9 trillion in assets.
The gig she’s up for combines a low profile with high stakes. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which sits independently inside the Treasury Department, “charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks.” If she is confirmed, Omarova would be the top regulator of the biggest banks in the country and their combined $14.9 trillion in assets.
That oversight capability is why Republicans and the banking lobby have spent the last two months trashing Omarova. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., opened the salvo last month in a floor speech that claimed she’s a “more radical choice for any regulatory spot in our federal government” than any he’d ever seen.
Toomey, as the ranking member of the Banking Committee, also sent Omarova a letter demanding “a copy of the original Russian-language thesis” from her undergraduate studies at Moscow State University. (She doesn’t have it, she recently told New York Magazine.) Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., also made sure to emphasize her past as a “Lenin scholarship recipient” when talking to Fox News in late October. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Sunday labeled her “a radical” who “literally trained in the Soviet Union.”
Things only got worse during Thursday’s hearing. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., pressed Omarova about whether she was a member of a group called The Young Communists. Yes, she answered — because every schoolchild was made to join. “Have you resigned from that group?” Kennedy followed up. Omarova explained that it’s something you age out of, not something you’d send a letter to resign from — but Kennedy asked her to search her records for a letter anyway.
While Kennedy and others insinuate that she’s the reincarnation of Vladimir Lenin himself, Omarova’s life story is one that would have made for ideal anti-Soviet propaganda. “My grandmother was orphaned because Stalin sent her entire family to Siberia and they died there,” she told The Financial Times. “Her family was destroyed because they were educated Kazakhs who didn’t join the party.”
And that paper that Toomey requested? “I was in the Soviet Union, where there was no academic freedom, and this was a mandatory assigned topic,” she explained. “What I wrote in that paper has nothing to do with what I believed in then or in what I believe in now.” Indeed, rather than being indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist thought while at college, Omarova added, she instead became radicalized against totalitarianism:
“I was really lucky to get to Moscow State University.… I was 18, and within a year I became an anti-communist like most of my classmates. We were reading stuff that was prohibited. We were listening to Pink Floyd, which was illegal, we were talking about Solzhenitsyn,” the author and Soviet dissident.
When she began her Ph.D. program, she chose to study American democratic theory. And when the Soviet Union collapsed while she was on exchange at the University of Wisconsin, she opted to stay in the U.S., she told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes last year.
“She really impressed us, taking a full load of graduate courses. She came first of all to study democratic political theory, so the idea that she’s a Leninist is absurd,” Omarova’s dissertation director at Wisconsin told New York Magazine as part of its excellent profile of her.
Omarova went on to study law at Northwestern University before working in the financial sector and President George W. Bush’s Treasury Department. From there, she became an academic writing about the banking industry in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, centering her research on how to improve banking laws and prevent another collapse.
MARCH 7, 201804:34
Omarova sounds like a dream cobbled together in a Reaganite fantasy: Descended from dissidents, she admired America from afar, and rather than embrace communism, she chose to fight to improve the stability of the U.S.’s capitalist systems. What’s not to love for a red-hating Republican?
Well, it turns out a lot — if you’re indebted to the big banks. Instead of accepting her rejection of Soviet thinking, opponents are using her past to dismiss and demonize her research. That especially includes a paper Omarova wrote last year and had published in the Vanderbilt Law Review last month.
Omarova sounds like a dream cobbled together in a Reaganite fantasy.
“The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy” is a 71-page academic study on how to separate big banks’ lending features from their role as safekeepers of Americans’ savings through setting up universal bank accounts at the Federal Reserve to replace private bank deposits. It’s a bold plan, one that is “deliberately ambitious in scope and substance” and “defines the frontier of reform possibilities.” Which, as she told the senators Thursday, was her job as an academic — to come up with the biggest-swing policy ideas and leave them to Congress to enact or reject.
Rather than engage with the ideas in the paper — which she’d have no power to enact as comptroller — the right has instead chosen to focus on a single line plucked out of context: “By separating their lending function from their monetary function, the proposed reform will effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it.” That phrase is a play on another author’s book title, which Omarova makes clear in the footnote. But it doesn’t matter. Her Republican opponents have the talking point they want.
Omarova can expect zero GOP support for her nomination moving out of committee, and she wouldn’t have gotten any even if she hadn’t been born in the Soviet Union. I even have some respect for Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who said he opposes her policies but not her origin story: “I don’t have any concern with where she came from: You can’t pick where you were born, and you picked the greatest nation on Earth to become a citizen.”
The biggest question is whether she can count on the support of moderate Democrats Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who’ve been noncommittal. My hope is that they end up greenlighting her for the role. Someone needs to be able to both rein in the lawless frontier that is the cryptocurrency market and prevent the major banks from preying on their depositors. Omarova, who chose capitalism over communism and the American public over the big banks, seems primed to do both.
Tonight, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol held a televised hearing to vote on whether to hold Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena. Their answer was yes, unanimously, by a vote of 9–0. More, even than that, though, was that in order to justify their votes they dropped some details about what happened on January 6.
What they revealed was eye-popping.
All members of the committee spoke tonight, underscoring the importance of the moment.
Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) grabbed the headlines, though, as she read text messages Meadows received on January 6. They included texts from lawmakers to Meadows begging Trump to call off the rioters, making it crystal clear that those closest to him understood that those attacking the Capitol would respond to his orders. Dozens of texts urged the president to act to stop the protesters: “Someone is going to get killed.” “POTUS needs to calm this sh*t down.”
Those writing the texts to Meadows about the president also included his son Donald Trump, Jr. (why was he communicating with his father through Meadows?), and Fox News Channel personalities Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, and Sean Hannity, revealing how dangerously intertwined the right-wing media system is with Republican lawmakers. “This is hurting all of us,” Ingraham wrote to Meadows during the insurrection.
Cheney said: “These texts leave no doubt: the White House knew exactly what was happening at the Capitol. Members of Congress, the press, and others wrote to Mark Meadows as the attack was underway.”
And yet, Trump remained unmoved for 187 minutes while our Capitol was under attack and lawmakers hid from the mob. As Cheney said: “Hours passed without necessary action by the president. These non privileged texts are further evidence of President Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes.”
Cheney took the fight directly to Trump with her accusation of “dereliction of duty.” The Capitol was under attack, and the one person who everyone believed could stop the attack, the commander-in-chief, refused to. A number of lawmakers tossed the term “dereliction of duty” around immediately after the insurrection, but it has faded from conversation as Republicans have lined up again behind the former president. It is, though, an offense under the U.S. military code, and therefore is something that people understand is serious.
Cheney was more specific in another accusation of criminal behavior. After establishing that many lawmakers and media personalities begged then-president Trump to call off the rioters, she asked: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s proceedings?”
What Cheney did tonight was courageous. She put herself on the line in the struggle to hold Trump and his loyalists accountable. As other lawmakers claim to be afraid to stand up to Trump out of fear for their safety, she has made herself a key target of the Trump loyalists in order to defend our democracy.
But that was not all that happened in the hearing.
To underscore that the material Meadows handed over was not privileged, Representative Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) explained that Meadows conducted business on a personal cell phone and over personal email accounts, as well as over Signal, a secure messaging system that encrypts messages so they cannot be unlocked by anyone but the receiver.
The committee members also increased pressure on those continuing to protect the former president.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) revealed other messages, from unnamed lawmakers, expressing sympathy for the insurrection. One lawmaker texted Meadows: “On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.” A message from a lawmaker the next day read. “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked.”
This evening, Thompson told reporters that “the information we received has been quite revealing about members of Congress involved in the activities of January 6th as well as staff.” He said the names of the lawmakers involved in the events of that day will come out. One of those involved is almost certainly Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has been evasive about when and how many times he talked to Trump on January 6, although says with certainty he did.
Rolling Stone reported tonight that two people who helped to organize the January 6 rally at the Ellipse are saying they will cooperate with the committee fully. Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who have both been subpoenaed by the committee, are longtime activists who tended to operate on the margins of established politics.
CNN business journalist Brian Stelter noted that right-wing media channels—including the Fox News Channel, Newsmax, and One America News—did not cover the January 6 committee hearing at all tonight. Hannity, though, did interview Meadows, opening his show by telling viewers: “The hyperpartisan predetermined-outcome anti-Trump January 6 committee just voted 9 to 0 to hold Mark Meadows in contempt for refusing to comply with their orders.” He went on to ask Meadows why Congress is not investigating what Hannity painted as the terrible riots in the summer of 2020.
Their discomfort might reflect, in part, that they, too, were implicated in the events of January 6. After begging Trump to call off his supporters during the insurrection, the same personalities went in front of their audiences on camera and lied that Trump had nothing to do with the insurrection. Ingraham, for example, blamed Antifa for the attack on the Capitol, suggested the riot was staged by provocateurs, and suggested there were just three dozen people.
The suggestion that Antifa was the real culprit on January 6 might or might not have been related to the plan suggested yesterday that Trump had expected counter-protesters and had been prepared to use the ensuing violence as a pretext to declare martial law. At 5:25 p.m. on January 5, Trump tweeted: “Antifa is a Terrorist Organization, stay out of Washington. Law enforcement is watching you very closely!”
Just three days ago, on Friday, December 10, Ingraham interviewed Trump, who told her he wasn’t involved in the rioting on January 6 and that his words that day “were extremely calming.”
The resolution to hold Meadows in contempt will go to the full House tomorrow.
I’m often asked how I keep up with the news. Obviously, I avoid the unhinged rightwing outlets pushing misinformation, disinformation and poisonous lies.
But I’ve also grown wary of the mainstream media – not because it peddles “fake news” but because of three more subtle biases.
First, it often favors the status quo. Mainstream journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy rip into progressives for the costs of their proposals, but never ask self-styled “moderates” how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or doing too little about the same problems.
A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about the climate crisis will almost certainly cost far more. Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s cruel and dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere.
Second, it fails to report critical public choices. Any day now, the Senate will approve giving $778bn to the military for this fiscal year. That’s billions more than the Pentagon sought. It’s four times the size of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which comes to around $175bn a year. But where’s the reporting on the effects of this spending on the national debt, or on inflation, or whether it’s even necessary?
Third, it indulges in false equivalence, claiming that certain Republican and Democratic lawmakers are emerging as “troublemakers” within their parties or that extremists “on both sides” are “radicalizing each other”.
These reports equate Republican lawmakers who are actively promoting Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen with Democratic lawmakers who are fighting to protect voting rights. These are not equivalent. Trump’s big lie is a direct challenge to American democracy.
In the looming fight over whether to preserve the Senate filibuster, the mainstream media gives equal weight to both sides’ claims of radicalism. But ask yourself which is more radical – abolishing the filibuster to save American democracy or destroying American democracy to save the filibuster?
The old labels “left” versus “right” are fast becoming outdated. Today, it’s democracy versus authoritarianism. Equating them is misleading and dangerous.
Why doesn’t the mainstream media see this? Not just because of its dependence on corporate money. I think the source of the bias is more subtle.
Top editors and reporters, usually based in New York and Washington, want to be accepted into the circles of the powerful – not only for sources of news but also because such acceptance is psychologically seductive. It confers a degree of success. But once accepted, they can’t help but begin to see the world through the eyes of the powerful.
I follow the mainstream media, but I don’t limit myself to it. And I don’t rely on it to educate the public about bold, progressive ideas that would make America and the world fairer and stronger.
The picture of what was happening at the White House in the days before the January 6 insurrection is becoming clearer. (While we also have a decent idea of what was happening at the Department of Justice, what was happening at the Pentagon remains unclear.)
Shortly after Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows announced on Tuesday that he would no longer cooperate with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) wrote a letter noting that Meadows had already shared material—thus indicating he did not consider it privileged—that he is now saying he won’t discuss. Thompson identified some of that material.
He said Meadows had provided the committee with an “email regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled ‘Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN’ that was to be provided ‘on the hill’; and, among others, a January 5, 2021 email about having the National Guard on standby.”
Journalists immediately began looking for that PowerPoint. Slides began to surface, and then a whole slide deck appeared on the internet. The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell verified it on Friday. The fact that members of the president’s inner circle actually prepared a presentation for an audience about how to overturn an election crystallized just how close the nation came to a successful coup on January 6.
The PowerPoint presented three ways for then–Vice President Mike Pence to overturn Biden’s election and hand the presidency back to Trump. Pence could simply seat the slates of electors Trump supporters had organized to replace the official slates certified by the states. Pence could insist on rejecting all electronic ballots. Or Pence could delay the counting of the ballots long enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there were more Republican-dominated states than Democratic-dominated states, Trump would be reelected.
Then, also on Friday, news dropped that Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis had produced two memos—one previously unknown—outlining far-fetched legal arguments to justify Pence throwing the election to Trump. One, dated December 31, said he could simply refuse to open the envelopes containing the electoral votes of states whose results Trump contested.
A second, dated January 5, made a more complicated argument claiming for Pence more authority to determine the outcome of the election than the vice president has exercised since the 1887 Electoral Count Act.
Today, Robert Costa, the Washington Post reporter who wrote the book Peril with veteran journalist Bob Woodward about the fraught weeks surrounding the January 6 insurrection, laid out the timeline for early January in the White House.
In December, right-wing lawyer John Eastman began drafting the Eastman Memo calling for Pence to refuse to count electors from states Biden won and laying out a number of ways Pence could throw the election to Trump. (Trump’s own loyal attorney general, William Barr, and his deputy Jeffrey Rosen, who replaced Barr when he resigned on December 23, 2020, had already concluded the election was not fraudulent.) The plan, as Costa and Woodward put it in Peril, was: “Either have Pence declare Trump the winner, or make sure it is thrown to the House where Trump is guaranteed to win.”
The White House had the memo by January 1. Meadows was working with the Trump team to push the ideas in it. Someone in the White House gave it to Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and others on January 2. Meadows met with both Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Meadows’s office on January 2 to brief Graham, who was then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on what they claimed was voter fraud. Graham demanded proof.
On January 3, Pence conferred with the Senate parliamentarian, who told him he was simply there to count the votes. It was clear he was not on board with Trump’s plan.
On January 4, Trump called Pence to the Oval Office to pressure him. Eastman presented his case to Pence; Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short; and Pence’s legal counsel, Greg Jacob. On that day, someone presented the PowerPoint to a number of Republican senators and members of the House.
Apparently, none of the people briefed called the attention of the FBI to the coming attempt to overturn the election.
On the evening of January 5, Trump called Pence to a meeting as his supporters were gathering on Freedom Plaza near the White House. The people in the streets were cheering and waving “Make America Great Again” flags. Trump asked Pence to throw the election to the House of Representatives; Pence again said he did not have authority to do anything other than count the certified electoral votes.
And then, according to Costa and Woodward in Peril, Trump asked: “Well, what if these people say you do?” gesturing to the crowds outside. “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?”
Pence, who would have been the face of the insurrection if he had done as he was asked, still said no.
That night, Trump called his people in the so-called “war room” at the Willard Hotel, where loyalists had been trying to figure out a way to delay certification if Pence didn’t cave. He called the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, since Giuliani wanted to preserve attorney-client privilege. “He’s arrogant,” Trump told his lieutenant Stephen Bannon.
They appear to have settled on a plan to get Republican lawmakers to raise enough objections that it would delay the counting long enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives. (This squares with the voicemail Giuliani left for newly elected Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) in the midst of the insurrection, saying: “The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow.”)
Since his memo became public, John Eastman has said it “was not being provided to Trump or Pence as my advice…. The memo was designed to outline every single possible scenario that had been floated, so that we could talk about it.” When subpoenaed by the January 6 committee, Eastman declined to appear, asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Since journalist Lowell broke the story of Trump’s calls to the Willard the night of January 5, Trump’s spokesperson has said that the account “is totally false” but provided no more information.
Since the story of the PowerPoint dropped, retired U.S. Army colonel Phil Waldron, who was working with the Trump team to challenge the election results, claimed authorship of it. Waldron told the Washington Post that he met with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and was the one who briefed several members of Congress about the information in his presentation on January 5.
Since Politico dropped the story about her memos, Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis said: “At no time did I advocate for overturning the election or that Mike Pence had the authority to do so…. As part of my role as a campaign lawyer and counsel for President Trump, I explored legal options that might be available within the context of the U.S. Constitution and statutory law.”
Yesterday, the January 6 committee subpoenaed six more people who had been involved in planning the rallies in Washington on January 5 and January 6. Some of them communicated with Trump directly; one communicated with Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL). Subpoenas went to Bryan Lewis, Ed Martin, Kimberly Fletcher, Robert “Bobby” Peede Jr., Max Miller, and Brian Jack.
On Monday, December 6, we learned that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, has been cooperating with the January 6 committee.
The big news today is, once again, the economy. Indeed, it’s odd that the sort of numbers we’re seeing across the country aren’t constant headline news, indicating, as they do, both a rapid economic recovery from the pandemic and the success of President Biden’s return to an economic policy that focuses on getting money into the hands of ordinary Americans. In Washington Monthly, national economic consultant Robert J. Shapiro catalogued what he called the “extraordinary gains” of the past several months. “Over the first three quarters of this year, real GDP increased at a 7.8 percent annual rate—that’s adjusted for the current inflation,” he wrote. “The Federal Reserve expects real growth of 5.9 percent for all of 2021, followed by another 3.8 percent increase in 2022.” In contrast, the real GDP grew by an average rate of 2.2% every year and never actually reached 3% between 2000 and 2019. Reflecting this growth, the stock market is booming, with the S&P Index jumping 21.7% from January 20 to December 7, 2021.He continues: Americans’ disposable income grew 3% (after inflation) from January to October; in the same period in 2019 the rate was 0.5% and in 2018 it was 1.7%. Personal savings rates climbed during the pandemic, enabling households to pay off debt and make new purchases. Since January, unemployment has fallen by a third. Wages, too, have climbed, although inflation, which appears to be tied to supply chain bottlenecks, is hurting poorer Americans. Economists currently think that inflation will ease as the bottlenecks clear. “It’s a Biden boom,” the article is titled, “and no one has noticed yet.” That boom will not be undercut by another fight over the debt ceiling, which is a cap on how much the Treasury can borrow. Congress originally adopted the debt ceiling in the early twentieth century to make borrowing easier by giving the Treasury leeway to borrow through whatever instruments it wished up to a certain amount. Now, though, Republicans have been threatening to hold the nation hostage, refusing to allow the Treasury to borrow to pay bills Congress has already run up, in order to prevent the Democrats from passing legislation. Forcing the nation to default on its debt would devastate both the U.S. economy and the world economy. Today, in the Senate, 14 Republicans joined the Democrats in a complicated maneuver to avoid a filibuster and enable the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling by a simple majority vote. The Republicans were not actually voting to raise the debt ceiling, which they are eager to pin on the Democrats despite having added $7.8 trillion to the debt in the four years of the Trump presidency. They were agreeing not to stop Democrats from protecting the U.S. debt on their own. Still, it seems significant that the Senate so easily created a carve-out for a measure in which the Republicans were interested, when there appears to be determination not to create carve-outs for the voting rights bills before the Senate. Meanwhile, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol appears to be picking up momentum. Today, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously agreed with the decision of a lower court, denying Trump’s request that the court stop the National Archives and Records Administration from releasing documents subpoenaed by the January 6th committee. The court gave Trump 14 days to appeal to the Supreme Court. Also today, right-wing provocateur Ali Alexander testified before the January 6th committee for eight hours. Alexander had posted videos claiming that he had helped to plan the rallies in Washington, D.C., working with congressional representatives Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ); today Alexander claimed that he was completely uninvolved and was being accused because “[a]s a Black and Arab man, an American, it is common for people who look like me to be blamed for things we did not do.” He said his videos had been taken out of context. Kash Patel, a one-time aide to Representative Devin Nunes and a Trump loyalist, also testified for nearly five hours. On November 9, 2020, shortly after he lost the election, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper by tweet and installed Christopher Miller as acting secretary of defense. Trump named Patel as Miller’s chief of staff, but observers told Washington Post reporter David Ignatius that Patel was really the lead civilian at the Pentagon. In December 2020, Trump considered putting Patel at the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Today the National Archives and Records Administration said that they are working with the lawyer for Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows to obtain presidential records that were not properly put into his official account. This news comes after the January 6th committee pointed out that some of the emails and texts Meadows supplied to it came from a personal account. It asked if those records had been properly forwarded to an official account and stored, as is required by law under the Presidential Records Act. Evidently not. Representative Liz Cheney today tweeted that the committee has met with nearly 300 witnesses and continues to collect testimony. It has received “exceptionally interesting and important documents”—including those from Meadows—and has now won against Trump in his executive privilege case. She says “[t]he investigation is firing on all cylinders,” and that the committee “will not let” Trump “hide what happened on January 6th and…delay and obstruct. The truth will come out.” In his speech today at the Democracy Summit, Biden vowed to protect journalists around the world from persecution and to continue to fight for the passage of voting rights and election protection legislation. He mentioned by name the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would prevent voter suppression, make it easier to vote, and dismantle the 33 new restrictive elections laws that Republican-dominated legislatures in 19 states have passed. “We should be making it easy for people to vote, not harder,” Biden said. “And that’s going to remain a priority for my administration until we get it done. Inaction is not an option. “The House is doing its part. Today it passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced on September 21, 2021. This measure makes it faster and easier to enforce congressional subpoenas, stops abuse of the pardoning power, stops presidents from enriching themselves through the office, requires campaigns to disclose foreign contacts, and shores up the Hatch Act that keeps officials from using their offices to campaign. (The official name of the Hatch Act is “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.”)The measures in the bill are ones members of both parties have advocated for years, but since they are now perceived as a response to Trump’s norm-busting, only Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) got on board with all the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 220–208.
We have the misfortune of witnessing the decline of Democracy under the guise of saving America. The GOP since the days of Ronald Reagan and newt Gingrich have increasingly pushed the idea that less Government was better. Unfortunately, this touted theory has caused too many of us to rail against government programs that benefit us. It is true that government should be limited in the daily lives of Americans however a blanket ban on Government actions is at once ludicrous and dangerous. There are areas where Government can do a better job than State and local entities or at least assist them in some functions and activities. The Political class has always made (it seems) a concerted effort to divide Americans along Racial, ethnic and financial lines to maintain their power status. This power status benefits the industrial sector in tax breaks (taxes is how government is funded, no matter how much we dislike paying them) and allows unlimited spending in keeping “friendly ” politicians in office. This longevity does not benefit the taxpayers unless you earn millions. It may be difficult to understand how this happens, but it really is not. One reason for this disfunction is our collective ignorance of history and the warnings we have received at various times along with the daily rationing of mis and disinformation allowed through our open society’s media coverage. Media coverage has become as biased as the actions of our Congress and we have allowed it through our acceptance of “entertainment” reporting and the use of fabricated “government abuse” to rile us up. We (voters) must remember that the same people in government we at once rail against and support are often the same people who offer the fabrications while reaping the rewards of those fabrications. The United States has had and still has opportunities to make a correction in the promised path to better government, but we have squandered it due to “shiny objects” and promised reforms that never come to fruition. History will repeat if we do not look at what has occurred before we accede to what is “promised”. The future is never ahead but always now!
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December 5, 2021Heather Cox Richardson Dec 6 Speaking in Athens, Greece, yesterday, Pope Francis warned Americans, “We cannot avoid noting with concern how today, and not only in Europe, we are witnessing a retreat from democracy.” He warned against politicians with “an obsessive quest for popularity, in a thirst for visibility, in a flurry of unrealistic promises,” and called for people around the world to turn away from authoritarianism, individualism, and indifference. Instead, they must rededicate themselves to the common good and strengthen democracy. The pope’s public recognition of the rise of authoritarianism mirrored the increasing awareness here in the U.S. that our democracy is in crisis. That dawning awareness seems to have been sparked by the December 1 oral arguments about abortion rights before the Supreme Court, when a majority of the current justices made it clear that the constitutional right to abortion many people believed was sacrosanct is likely to be taken away. “They lied,” the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote about the testimony of the Republican-appointed justices in their confirmation hearings. In those hearings, they indicated that they saw the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion as settled law, no matter what their own personal preferences might be. “They lied to Congress and to the country…. It was all a lie, a scam, a con,” Waldman wrote, “the assurances that they were blank slates committed to ‘originalism’ and ‘textualism,’ that they wouldn’t ‘legislate from the bench,’ that they have no agenda but merely a ‘judicial philosophy.’”Also in the Washington Post, Dr. Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor who clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, noted that Sotomayor recognized that her colleagues were “embracing a cataclysmic reordering of the reproductive rights landscape.” Seeing what her colleagues were going to do, Sotomayor turned to “the American people themselves…suggesting that the court need not have the last word on abortion.” She was, Murray said, “alerting the people to the imminent threat to abortion rights in the hopes that, hearing her alarm, we might mobilize. Not with a Jan. 6–style insurrection but with the sort of grass-roots energy that once fueled the civil rights movement and other progressive social causes.” “The court will not save our rights,” Murray wrote, “But maybe we can save them ourselves.” In fact, the reactionaries in the current-day Republican Party are a minority of the country. As David Atkins points out in the Washington Monthly, Republicans are operating from a position of weakness. In the United States, Democratic counties produce more than 70% of the nation’s gross domestic product (the total market value of goods and services produced). Democratic states fund the Republican-dominated states that complain about “socialism.” Eighty-three percent of Americans now live in cities, which tend to vote Democratic, and young people are overwhelmingly progressive. The problem is this: “Democrats…need to win every single election from here to prevent the destruction of democracy, while Republicans only need to win one. And the American system is set up so that Republicans will win sooner or later, whether fairly or by cheating.” Atkins urges the American people to “start thinking about and planning for what ‘Break glass in case of emergency’ measures look like—because it’s more likely a matter of when, not if. It not only can happen here; it probably will happen here. Conservatives are guaranteed to make every attempt to turn America into the next Russia or Hungary. It will take coordinated, overlapping solidarity among both regular people and elites across various institutions to stop it.”Laura Thornton, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, lays out what American authoritarianism looks like and shows that it is already here. Focusing on Wisconsin, she deplores the statements of Senator Ron Johnson and Republican lawmakers who are openly demanding control over election management in the state. “I spent more than two decades living and working overseas to advance democracy and credible elections—giving me plenty of opportunity to see the lengths to which autocrats will go to gain power,” Thornton writes. “Even so, the proposed Wisconsin power grab is shocking in its brazenness. If this occurred in any of the countries where the United States provides aid, it would immediately be called out as a threat to democracy. U.S. diplomats would be writing furious cables, and decision makers would be threatening to cut off the flow of assistance.” How can we stop the march of authoritarianism? Thornton says that “it is up to us, the people. No party or leader will save us here. No foreign savior will shake us out of our stupor. Americans need to start caring about democracy enough to act on it…. Apathy is how democracies die. I’ve seen it.”What does minority rule look like? It looks like individual liberty and violence to make others do what those in power want. Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) grabbed attention today with a family Christmas picture in which seven people are brandishing guns, ostensibly to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. His tweeted caption read: “Merry Christmas! Ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” This can only be taken as a message: on Tuesday, a 15-year-old killed four classmates and wounded several others with a gun he received as a Christmas gift. Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a move to proceed on a law expanding background checks for gun purchases, a bill the House passed in March. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said the measure was “hostile toward lawful gun owners and lawful firearms transactions,” and he blocked it. Last night, in Washington, D.C., about 100 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched to “reclaim America.” Patriot Front was known as Vanguard America until a man affiliated with it killed Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Such people want to remake our nation as a white supremacist haven and know that this is their last chance. But while the white supremacists who joined together in Charlottesville marched openly, with their faces uncovered, those people joining the Patriot Front last night wore masks. This is important. When the Ku Klux Klan terrorized people after the Civil War, they hid their faces with white hoods designed to look like the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, knowing that if the federal government knew who they were, it would prosecute them. By the end of the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans did not hide their faces at public lynchings, knowing they represented the will of the moment. That the rioters from Charlottesville now cover their faces suggests that the white supremacy welcome among some circles in 2017 now needs to hide.With the call of so many observers to defend American democracy from those who would replace it with authoritarianism, many are reaching backward to remember what things were like in the past, when politicians of different parties worked together for the nation. In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, Will Bunch reminded readers that before politicians fetishized guns and individualism, we used to rally around something called “the public good.”
Throughout my twenties I was in fairly poor health. Like half of Dublin, I’d succumbed to a bad flu virus one winter, but unlike most, I didn’t recover. For nine years I was in a constant state of post-viral fatigue. Some doctors believed me, others didn’t. Even the ones who did were unsure of how to help. Eventually, a doctor discovered that my immune system was 10 times too active. Then they had to figure out a way to help.
This is all a long time ago now. When I hear of people living with long COVID, I remember all that exhaustion. I wear masks and try to avoid infection. The pathway into health was a slow one for me. I was frustrated when I was told that a year or two of yoga would help. I wanted a pill. But it helped.
Right off the bat, the conversation takes questions of health to a question of well-being; Richie remembers how his father, a businessman, would use a barter system for people who were short on cash. “A transmission of kindness,” he calls it; something that helps a sense of dignity is going to help a sense of well-being too. He’s interested in how medicine can be about more than diagnosing failures, something Vivek picks up when he notes how he’d want medicine to also “explore the sources of strength.”
Both guests this hour have a strong commitment to public health, research, data, and empirical testing. Especially in a time of pandemic, they know the measures that are often first at hand: hospitalizations, cases, deaths, school closures, unemployment figures, and so on. But they also want to bring other measurements into their question of healthiness in society: How is mental health among people who are isolating? What is their sense of connection to other people? Speaking about what a post-COVID world might look like, Vivek shares: “one of the things I really want to do in this job is not only help us to get through this pandemic, but to really think more deeply about how we do better when it comes to mental health, about how we have a broader conversation as a country about well-being and how we reflect that, not only in the decisions we make in our lives, but in how we design our schools, how we design our workplaces, and what we think of as success when it comes to public policy — not just the dollars and cents of it, but whether or not policy contributes to a sense of well-being.”
What both Vivek and Richie are addressing is the possibility of change: for an individual and for a society. Richie has been at the forefront of the field of neuroplasticity, a scientific term recognizing how the brain continues to change and develop — whether toward flourishing or not — as our life continues. Aware of the commodification of fear and division rife in our world, he speaks of how important it is to pay attention to the messages we’re internalizing. And he brings hope, noting that all studies that explore the changing brains of adults witness that change is possible, with small steps. Speaking about health, he mentions attention, connection, appreciation, purpose, and love.
“How can we tilt the world toward love and away from fear?” is one of the questions Vivek asks himself in his public role as Surgeon General. To know that this is the goal of public health, not just diagnosis and medication, expands the field of health into all aspects of our public life together.
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