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US ambassador: Japanese in 'disbelief' over Shinzo Abe assassination

Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, said on Sunday that the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was a “shock to the system.”

“It hasn’t been totally absorbed into the society or the politics,” Emanuel told ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “People are walking around with a sense of disbelief.”

Abe, who was assassinated on Friday during a campaign event in the western city of Nara, was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. He gained a reputation for railing against the country’s enshrinement of pacifism and implementing economic reforms as he sought to bolster Japan’s power on the global stage.

Emanuel said he visited with Abe’s family earlier on Sunday to pay his condolences.

Emanuel pointed to the nation’s strict gun laws and relative lack of gun violence, saying the “bubble has been pierced” by the assassination.

“This is a nation that’s an island, and a lot of what ails other countries — it is immune and feels immune,” he said on Sunday. 

“It’s a very trusting society,” Emanuel added. “And so to have something like this is a total, I mean, shock to the system, a shock to the culture.”

Abe stepped down from the prime minister role in 2020 for health reasons but remained active in the country’s politics. 

Abe regularly stumped for Liberal Democratic Party candidates, including on Friday, when he was speaking in advance of elections for Japan’s upper legislative chamber on Sunday. The election still took place as scheduled in the wake of Abe’s assassination.

President Biden said on Friday that he was “stunned, outraged and deeply saddened” by Abe’s killing. He signed a condolence book at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C. later that day and ordered flags on federal property to be flown at half-staff.

Emanuel on Sunday hailed Abe’s achievements in the global economy and national security, in particular praising his involvement setting up a strategic security dialogue between the United States, Japan, India and Australia, known as the “The Quad.”

He called Abe a “visionary” who was committed to building a free and open Indo-Pacific.

“He has been a force that, as I said, not only ahead of his time, now time is catching up to him,” Emanuel said.

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The Supreme Court’s impact on the midterms and American democracy

The Supreme Court has just concluded what will most likely be remembered as one of the most consequential terms in modern history.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority delivered major victories for the right’s agenda — on abortion, guns, and environmental regulations — that were in many ways at odds with the American public’s own views. Even so, the court’s term will likely have a negligible political impact on the midterms, given Democrats’ own messaging failures generally and on these issues specifically. 

In a decision that sent a shockwave through the country, the court erased half a century of precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade and ending the legal right to an abortion — even though a majority (56 percent) of Americans, including 53 percent of Independents, opposed the court doing so.

Additionally, days after Congress passed the first bipartisan gun safety bill in decades — at a time when a majority of Americans believe controlling gun violence (59 percent) is more important than protecting gun rights (35 percent) — the court expanded gun rights in a decision that is expected to lead to more Americans being legally armed in public.

Furthermore, even as concern about the environment reached a 20-year high this year, the Supreme Court curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to fight climate change by ruling that the agency can no longer regulate greenhouse gas emissions without explicit direction from Congress.

Some have theorized that the collective blow of these conservative rulings could enable Democrats to turn the midterms into a referendum on right-wing conservativism — given that the electorate largely supports abortion as a legal right, favors common-sense gun safety measures, and is concerned about curbing climate change.

However, as long as Democrats lack both an inclusive agenda and a set of center-left policies that offer voters a viable alternative to right-wing conservativism, the party will be unable to weaponize these issues to their political benefit in 2022 and even 2024.

On abortion, Democrats have struggled to unite around a cohesive narrative — beyond their standard ‘choice’ articulation — about why, when, and under what circumstances abortion should be legal.

This failure, along with voters’ own lack of knowledge on the subject, has made it possible for GOP-led states around the country to pass restrictive abortion bans without much national political blowback. Further, given that most Americans support abortion legality with some restrictions, the messaging from the progressive wing of the party about legalizing abortion in all cases is clearly out of touch.

With respect to the issue of guns, instead of taking a conciliatory tone and promoting the bipartisan gun safety bill as a positive development, prominent Democrats continue to pile blame for mass shootings — the most recent of which took place at a Fourth of July parade in Illinois — on Republicans and to call for more sweeping gun restrictions that have no chance of becoming national law.

Additionally, rather than coming together around an environmental agenda that balances Americans’ concerns about climate change with the public’s wariness toward enacting sweeping changes that will stifle America’s energy independence, the left continues to dominate discourse with talk of their expensive, unpopular, and uncompromising Green New Deal.

Moreover, it is highly unlikely that any of these three rulings will supplant the economy and inflation as the top midterm issues — especially as long as President Biden and Democrats continue failing to offer a solutions-oriented economic agenda.

Indeed, a recent ABC News poll found that 80 percent of Americans say inflation will be a very important factor in their vote in 2022 – a troubling sign for Democrats, given that just over one-quarter of Americans (28 percent) approve of President Biden’s handling of inflation.

While it is helpful to understand the potential political impact of the Supreme Court’s decisions, it is arguably even more important to acknowledge what these decisions tell us about how American democracy is functioning.

In just one term, the Supreme Court dramatically altered the course of American law and culture in a way that went against the will of the American public and — in the case of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision — upended decades of precedent.

The Supreme Court’s outsized ability to shape the direction of the country is indicative of how polarized our politics have become. The court’s duty is to interpret the law — not to make the law — yet, the country has become so divided that Congress lacks the will or the ability to legislate based on public will.  

As a result, the Supreme Court is now increasingly viewed as a partisan institution and a political weapon — even though the Founding Founders intended for the judiciary to be insulated from politics — and public trust in the court is at an all-time low.

After the news broke that the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, only one-quarter of Americans said they were confident in the Supreme Court — down 11 points from one year ago.

Ultimately, the court’s ascendancy is indicative of the era we are living in — which is one of dangerously extreme polarization and division that has the country on the verge of a constitutional crisis.

Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to former President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. He is the author of “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.” 

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Of RINOs, DINOs and the zombie ant apocalypse

Missouri GOP Senate candidate Eric Greitens’s martial “RINO-hunting” campaign ad, in which he invites the listener to join the MAGA crew and get a RINO-hunting license (with no limits on “bagging” or “tagging” so-called Republicans in name only), may have been tongue in cheek but it underscores the displacement by Trump-style populism of many formerly mainstream Republicans.   

This is a remarkable transformation, considering that as of 2015, the RINO hunters’ champion, Donald Trump, had never been a Republican himself. In fact, when Trump declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, he was labeled the outlier, the recent convert, the “very definition of a RINO.”   

What has happened? How can we make sense of the transformation of the GOP so that traditional Republicans are targeted for “bagging and tagging” even before Democrats? 

As the director of an Institute of Politics, I have read hundreds of hand-wringing explanations for the inscrutable grip that Trump seems to have on his followers, and for the woeful state of our democracy; I have even contributed a few myself. But the best explanation, I have come to believe, comes not from politics but from natural science. To paraphrase The Atlantic, “[T]o find the world’s most sinister example of mind control, don’t look to science fiction,” or, for that matter, to politics, but to a natural process known as “adaptive parasite manipulation.”   

This refers to the capacity of some parasites not only to infect the host but to direct, if not become, the host, steering its stupefied form in unanticipated directions. The emerald cockroach wasp, for example, “injects a venom that blocks a neurotransmitter that allows the insect to control its movements.” The wasp then leads its zombified host into the wasp’s nest “to serve as host and food for wasp larvae.”   

Perhaps the best example of “adaptive parasite manipulation” is the tropical rainforest C. Leonardi ant species, which is susceptible to infection by a particularly insidious parasite, which, once it infects the ant, effects “a hostile takeover of a uniquely malevolent kind,” directing the ant to leave its colony, ascend the leaves of a nearby plant, and then, having colonized the zombie ant’s brain, bursting the ant’s head open and raining hundreds of spores down on the unsuspecting ant colony, which is then presumably transformed to a zombie ant army. “In essence,” said Penn State Professor David Hughes, “these manipulated animals were a fungus in ants’ clothing.”   

One could argue that, like the zombie ants of the Amazon, Trump loyalists appear to move forward in stupefied fidelity, transformed by their host, impervious to the drumbeat of overwhelming evidence that he has been lying to them about the 2020 election; taking their money, reportedly to support his false claims; directing them to march on our nation’s Capitol in service to his lies; and turning them, at every turn, against the stalwarts of their party, people such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) or Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), whose fidelity to their oaths of office has inoculated them against infection by Trumpian untruths.   

If Trump’s supporters are disturbed by overwhelming evidence of false claims, or by the litany of former allies now considered RINO traitors — a list of dozens ranging from former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to former Attorney General Bill Barr and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) — they aren’t showing it. Untruth keeps marching on, zombie-like. 

Lest the Democrats become too smug at this exposition, consider that a similar, although less crystallized, phenomenon has been growing among them. Increasingly, Democrats’ stature within the party depends on their fealty to certain fashionable and unwavering dogmatic beliefs. As one woman in a Virginia focus group put it, the Democrats “fight for the right things and I usually vote for them, but they believe some crazy things. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t know the right words for things, they think I am a bigot.” She is far from alone; people are leaving the Democratic Party by the tens of thousands, if not millions.  

“DINO” is a less frequently used pejorative, and the Democrats lack an autocratic avatar or a Looney Tunes narrative to match Trump’s “Stop the Steal,” but there is little doubt that many lifelong Democrats find themselves on the outside looking in, bewildered at being considered racists when they reject the notion that “all cops are bastards”; transphobes when they express concern about prescribing adolescence-suppressing drugs to prepubescents; outcasts when they express even qualified support for Israel; and closet Republicans when they question the role of an outsize stimulus in fueling record levels of inflation.   

Ultimately, the zombie ant peril is transpartisan because we all exist in the same poisoned Petri dish of monetized public discourse, in which people unwittingly rehearse the profit-laundered talking points they have been issued on their talk shows, in their news feeds, and over their social media platforms, rejecting former fellow travelers while talking past one another like … well, like zombies.  

So welcome, newly outcast RINOs and DINOs, to the politics of the excluded middle. We independents have dwelled here for years, disenfranchised by political parties, which (like abortion) are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, but which enjoy a stranglehold on both Congress, by means of gerrymandered “safe” districts, and the U.S. Supreme Court, appointment to which is conditioned on fidelity to the far-out orthodoxies of one party or the other.   

We, the excluded middle, comprise most of America. We’re the ones who cherish the Constitution not as a document of Talmudic mysteries requiring scriptural exegesis but as a pragmatic framework for settling differences while frustrating the natural political tendency to try to dominate.     

But our bedrock understanding — that, as Justice Robert H. Jackson put it in 1949 in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” — assumes precisely what parasitic indoctrination destroys: a willingness to compromise, to settle our differences. In the world of the zombie ants, we no longer settle our differences; we settle our scores.   

We must find a way to unite, RINOs and DINOs alike, because if the center truly cannot hold, the zombie ants of extremism will rule the day, eventually turning on each other and achieving their shared and ultimate goal: a zombie ant apocalypse that will consume us all. 

John J. Farmer Jr. is director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.  He is a former Attorney General of New Jersey, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, and dean of Rutgers Law School. He is the author of “The Ground Truth” (NY Times Notable Book 2009) and “Way Too Fast: An American Reckoning” (2022).

Source: TEST FEED1

Zelensky: Russia fired 'deliberately, purposefully' at 'ordinary houses'

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that Russian forces were conducting “brutal” strikes in residential areas as part of Moscow’s campaign to capture the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east.

“[Russia] fired precisely at the residential sector – absolutely deliberately, purposefully, at ordinary houses and civilian objects,” Zelensky said in a video address.

“There are casualties – dead, wounded,” he continued. “The brutal strikes of the Russian artillery in Donbas do not stop for a single day – the Sloviansk direction, Bakhmut, Avdiyivka.”

Russia captured the city of Lysychansk last week, the last major stronghold for the Ukrainians in the Luhansk province. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory in the region on Monday.

According to the Ukrainian general staff, Russian forces are now pushing into the Donetsk region, which alongside Luhansk makes up the Donbas. Russia currently controls roughly half of Donetsk.

Months into Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians and international watchdogs have condemned civilian casualties, and many world leaders, including President Biden, have said Russia has committed war crimes.

Zelensky has pressed Western leaders for more military support and heavy weapons to fend off Russian forces in the country’s industrial heartland. 

Zelensky on Saturday thanked the United States for a new $400 million package announced by the Biden administration on Friday, which includes four additional High Mobility Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and ammunition. The package brings the total number of launchers, which have a range of about 40 miles, sent by Washington to 12.

Friday’s package was intended to help Ukrainian forces fight the artillery battle underway in the Donbas, a senior defense official told reporters.

“You can really stop such terrorist actions only with modern, high-precision and potent weapons,” Zelensky said on Saturday.

Source: TEST FEED1

Getting off the Title IX roller coaster

On June 23 — the 50^th anniversary of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 — the Department of Education proposed sweeping new regulations to govern allegations of campus sexual misconduct. This marks the third time in as many presidential administrations that colleges and universities confront major changes to Title IX procedures.

While Title IX continues to play a pivotal role in preserving and promoting gender equity and the proposed regulations contain many positive elements, it’s high time to get off the Title IX roller coaster. The best option, in our view, is a bi-partisan commission that will design a fair, stable, and manageable process and provide colleges and universities some flexibility to develop approaches best suited to their own communities.

In 2011, the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued its famous “Dear Colleague” letter, a 19-page document specifying how colleges and universities should handle sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination claims. Although the guidance was not legally binding, OCR made clear that noncompliance might result in the loss of an institution’s federal funding.

Citing a National Institute of Justice report that one in five women are victims of completed or attempted sexual assault while in college, the letter adopted a broad definition of sexual harassment, mandated use of the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, allowed complainants as well as respondents to appeal, strongly discouraged cross-examination of complainants, and set 60 days as the benchmark for timely resolution. At the same time, OCR began investigating allegations of inappropriate Title IX practices at hundreds of individual schools. In response, colleges and universities revamped their Title IX processes, hired Title IX coordinators, educators, and investigators, and stepped up training for students and employees.

Noting that the “Dear Colleague” letter did not go through the formal rulemaking process, critics attacked what they saw as a dearth of due process protections for the accused. They mocked campus tribunals as “kangaroo courts” succumbing to pressure from government and campus activists to find accused students responsible. Lawsuits by accused students against universities proliferated, with over 500 such suits filed between 2011 and 2019.

The Trump administration rescinded the “Dear Colleague” letter in 2017, and after an extended formal rulemaking process, mandated a quasi-judicial process in 2020 with live hearings and cross-examination of parties and witnesses, technical evidentiary procedures, and a narrowed definition of sexual harassment. Critics of the new rules complained that they created an expensive and “monumentally complex bureaucracy” with a “chilling effect on victims.”

Barely two years later, in what has become a game of “political ping-pong,” the Biden administration is undoing many of the Trump administration changes and adding its own requirements.

The proposed new rules permit — but do not require — live hearings and cross examination, expand the definition of sex-based discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity, eliminate the requirement that college officials have “actual knowledge” of alleged misconduct as a trigger for investigation, require campus authorities to address misconduct that takes place off campus as well as on, effectively require use of the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, and increase training and support obligations.

Although policies at many institutions already reflect some of the provisions that would be mandated under the proposed new rules, the constantly expanding and contracting scope of the federal mandate creates confusion, uncertainty, and expense.

Each time the rules change, college and university lawyers, Title IX coordinators, and other campus officials must sort through complicated and often obscure guidance to understand what is required of them. The Trump rules came with 2,000 pages of guidance; the Biden administration’s rules clocked in at a comparatively svelte 650 pages.

At the same time, colleges and universities must try to reconcile the new rules with sometimes conflicting state laws and court decisions. As much as colleges and universities might like to do away with live hearings and cross examination, for example, some courts consider both essential to a fair process. In some jurisdictions, doing away with either “will invite lawsuits by those found responsible for sexual misconduct.”

And the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade will make adhering to new regulations about accommodations for pregnant students and those who have miscarriages or abortions — without violating fast-changing state laws or creating records that might be used against them — extremely challenging.

And once again, colleges and universities must redesign their training and education programs. Apart from the time, energy, legal fees and other costs, the Title IX roller coaster disrupts “schools’ ability to provide safe learning environments” and undermines confidence in the reliability and fairness of campus processes.

If Republicans retake the White House in 2024, colleges and universities can expect to do it all over again.

It’s time for a different approach.

A bi-partisan commission should be asked to make recommendations that foster greater accountability for campus sexual misconduct while still providing a fair process for the accused. The commission should take into account the limitations of higher education disciplinary procedures, the inability of colleges and universities to compel testimony or production of evidence, and the need for streamlined procedures that allow for reasonably prompt resolution of cases that now drag on for many months. The commission might, for example, consider a two-tier system in which the most serious cases are referred to professionally staffed Department of Education regional investigation centers. The commission should also focus as much or more on prevention as on punishment.

Even if a legislative solution is out of reach in today’s hyper-partisan political environment, the work of a bipartisan commission might at least help identify rules that can last beyond a single administration.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Isaac Kramnick) of Cornell: A History, 1940-2015.

David Wippman is the President of Hamilton College.

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Trump: Elon Musk 'another bulls— artist'

Former President Trump during an event in Alaska late Saturday called Tesla CEO Elon Musk a “bulls— artist” for supporting the former president’s opponents in 2016 and 2020.

“He said the other day, ‘oh, I’ve never voted for a Republican,’” Trump said at a rally.

“I said, ‘I didn’t know that,’” Trump continued. “He told me he voted for me, so he’s another bulls— artist.”

Last month, Musk tweeted that he voted for a Republican for the first time as he supported Mayra Flores, a Republican who flipped a traditionally Democratic House seat in a Texas special election. 

The Tesla CEO donated to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, according to Federal Elections Commission data. Musk has since confirmed the donation.

Musk said at the Qatar Economic Forum last month that he was “undecided” about a potential reelection bid by Trump after saying days earlier he was leaning toward supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in 2024.

Sources have told The Hill that Trump is becoming more serious about launching a run in 2024, even as other high-profile Republicans, like DeSantis, stoke speculation over their own White House ambitions.

In the meantime, Trump has weighed in on a number of primary and general election races in this year’s midterms. 

He stumped in Alaska on Saturday in support of the Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R), Kelly Tshibaka, who is challenging moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), and former Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

“Another one of our highest priorities under Republican Congress will be to stop left-wing censorship and to restore free speech in America,” Trump said at the rally.

Musk had entered a deal to buy Twitter, vowing to reduce the platform’s content moderation in the name of free speech and to implement other features, like an edit button.

On Friday, Musk announced he would abandon the $44 billion offer after he said the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts. Twitter said it would sue Musk to uphold the deal.

“Who the hell knows what’s going to happen,” Trump said. “He’s got a pretty rotten contract. I looked at his contract, not a good contract.”

Musk said he would reverse Trump’s ban on Twitter if he went through with buying the company, but Trump has said he would remain on his own social media platform, dubbed Truth Social.

“Go out by the way while I’m here, and sign up now for Truth Social,” Trump said on Saturday. “It’s hot as a pistol.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Russia’s continued presence on aviation safety council is a travesty

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been, quite literally, criminal. Well-documented allegations include the deliberate targeting of civilians, forced transfer of adults and children to Russia, sexual violence and arbitrary executions. These crimes are being investigated, but other, less spectacular crimes are not.

Russian transgressions – such as violations of Ukrainian airspace and endangerment of civilian aircraft – violate the principles outlined in the Convention on International Civil Aviation. As the families of passengers on Malaysian jetliner MH17, shot down by Russian forces over Ukrainian air space in 2014, will agree, Russia must be held accountable.

The place to start is a little-known, but critical international organization based in Montreal. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) codifies international aviation law, standards and practices to ensure safety and security. At once mundane, bureaucratic and complex, the international rules of the aviation road are as critical to civilian safety as actual road rules.

ICAO is limited in what it can do about Russia’s repeated violations of these rules. It has no organizational authority to sanction or act against a transgressor or punish nations for violating ICAO standards and practices. But the small, specialized United Nations agency is not without options.

It has already taken baby steps. In February, the ICAO condemned Russia’s violation of the territorial integrity and airspace of Ukraine and “underscored the paramount importance of preserving the safety and security of international civil aviation and the related obligations of Member States.” Last month, the ICAO called on Russia to immediately cease its infractions of the Chicago Convention relating to the dual registration of aircraft, which “raises safety concerns relating to, among others, the international validity of each airplane’s certificate of airworthiness and radio station license.” 

These statements are a little lame in the face of brazen assaults on the international rule of law. But coming from an organization that has, in the past, been reluctant to address politically fraught matters, and steered well clear of offending Moscow or Beijing, they are a welcome stand.

In addition, ICAO member states can act to ensure that Russia is not rewarded with unnecessary influence within the organization. Specifically, Russia is running for reelection to the influential ICAO Council. The U.S. and allies need to pull out all the stops to block this effort. ICAO’s reputation is already tarnished after years of Chinese leadership. Allowing an international pariah to win reelection to the ICAO Council will further damage its credibility and, worse, give Russia an opportunity to further undermine the ICAO mission.

Unlike ICAO, individual nations do have more pointed options to punish Russia. The United States and others have closed airspace to Russian flights. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also downgraded its air safety rating for Russia because Moscow’s Federal Agency for Air Transport does not comply with ICAO safety standards. Inside ICAO, Washington should work to have other nations impose similar sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. should push to have ICAO issue a public warning about potential safety concerns about Russia and its airlines.

With a little bit of leadership, the United States (the largest contributor to the ICAO budget) could begin to broaden Russia’s pariah status and reclaim international organizations for legitimate democratic governments. It’s a shame that Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger chose to leave his posting as the Biden administration’s ambassador to ICAO after six months. But his departure should not signal a U.S. abdication of responsibility.

U.S. leadership is needed to counter China, Russia and other states that flout international rules and to help ensure that civilian passengers are protected from military aggression. 

Brett Schaefer is The Heritage Foundation’s Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs. Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Democrats look to quash differences amid growing voter anger

Democrats are bearing the brunt of Americans’ frustration over the direction of the country, with few distinguishing between the two wings of the party and who’s most at fault. 

Early into President Biden’s administration, progressives and moderates were constantly at odds. Each side publicly and privately blamed the other for ideological differences, and inaction defined the debate, leaving voters perplexed about which side was right. 

Now, much of that squabbling has dissipated. Just over three months from the midterms, Democrats are temporarily tabling their disagreements, watching voters’ anger, the president’s low polls, and a disastrous national climate redefine the terms of the discourse.

“It’s not about progressive or moderate at this point,” said Bill Neidhardt, an operative with the firm Left Flank Strategies and former spokesman for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) “It’s about action vs. inaction.” 

“Voters aren’t looking at ideology. They are looking at who the hell will actually do something about all of this. Inflation. Abortion rights. Mass shootings,” he said. “You name it.”

The apparent unity didn’t happen overnight. Lively scuffles over policy, candidates and strategies exposed fissures in a party still fractured from years of resentments that seemed hard to reconcile. Liberals often took to Twitter to air their grievances, while centrists countered through opinion pages and cable news. The cycle played on repeat. 

Progressives essentially wanted Biden to use his White House influence, bolstered by a Democratic-controlled Congress, to enact some of his most ambitious campaign promises. They urged him to be a president who used the power of government to make big changes for people. 

Moderates wanted to reign him in. They cautioned that Biden could be negatively seen as giving too much away and exhausting resources at a time when many thought restraint was the cure to the spoils of the Trump era. They warned that left-wing proposals and jargon could alienate the kinds of voters he needed to keep.

But many of those conversations now seem like last semester’s syllabus. The theoretical lost out to the practical, and Democrats are calling for action over endless talk before they lose everything in November.

“Our house is on fire and it feels like the president would rather criticize the people acknowledging the fire and calling 911 than go after the arsonists,” said Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins. 

“Voters don’t care about progressive vs. moderates or liberal vs. conservative, they care about whether it feels like their lives are getting better,” he said. “Voters want to feel like their candidate is fighting for them.” 

The comradery over shared anger comes at a pivotal moment. Biden has hit the lowest point in his presidency while anger has reached a new high. After the Supreme Court followed through on a leaked draft memo indicating that the conservative majority would overturn Roe v. Wade, the party has been spiraling. 

Democrats of all stripes are equally upset that the White House, despite getting an unofficial heads up, seemed to have no cohesive strategy or plan to ensure women’s rights to abortion wouldn’t be wiped out completely. 

On Friday, officials indicated that Biden would sign an executive action from the Department of Health and Human Services to protect things like access to birth control and take steps to secure women’s privacy during sensitive health matters.

But many Democrats thought that already came too late. 

Damaging problems have been escalating for months, with little changing. Gas prices remain at an unsustainably high rates and gun violence persists with stinging frequency, with recent figures totaling more than 300 mass shootings this year alone. 

In one shocking survey released this week by Monmouth University, only 10 percent of people who responded said they think the country is currently on the right track. The poll indicates that that figure is an “all-time low.”

To make matters worse, those issues come amid smaller optical blunders. Several top administration officials in both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ offices have headed for the exit or announced plans to depart soon, further adding to a sense of internal chaos. This week, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield confirmed that she’s leaving her post as one of Biden’s closest advisers. 

“For all of the good that Biden has done, he’s failed miserably at making the voters feel like their lives have improved under his watch,” Starr Hopkins said. 

While many Democrats see a common target in Biden, others, including lawmakers who have worked alongside him on domestic priorities, see positives in their party, especially when compared to the GOP. 

The Jan. 6 hearings investigating the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and a shadow Republican primary well ahead of 2024 are already underway, and members from both parts of the Democratic Party are ready to show how their side is different. With a little more time and attention, some say, they can make that contrast really clear for voters. 

They also acknowledge that where there was once a sense of intense division, the issues that do have crossover appeal are being spotlighted in a new way that has surprised them. 

Progressives and moderates are working together in key swing states like the Pennsylvania Senate race to elect Lt. Gov. John Fetterman over Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz, and in Ohio, where Democrats are set on elevating Rep. Tim Ryan to the Senate over J.D. Vance, another populist Republican who has the former president’s backing. That party blueprint is being replicated in a variety of other down ballot races with high stakes ramifications in November. 

“The relationships that we have with frontliners has grown,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a top House progressive, told The Hill about Democrats that the party has listed as the most vulnerable and in need of protecting. 

“The ideas that we’re pushing for are not just progressive ideas, they’re ideas that are embraced by people in the toughest districts.” 

That would have been hard to imagine last year, when opposing Democratic lawmakers were publicly battling each other during negotiations around Biden’s “Build Back Better” package and a separate infrastructure bill. Many on the left saw centrists as blocking what needed to be done to pass certain climate, health, and childcare provisions, while moderates believed they had the best approach to getting legislation to the president’s desk. 

“We just have to remind people that we are still winning,” Jayapal said, assessing the scale of what’s at stake for Democrats. “We can’t afford for people to swing out and go to the couch.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Retired general suspended after tweet critical of Jill Biden

WASHINGTON (AP) — A retired three-star Army general has been suspended from his duties as an adviser to active-duty officers, an Army spokeswoman said Saturday. The suspension followed reports that his social media account carried a comment critical of first lady Jill Biden.

Retired Lt. Gen. Gary Volesky was serving as an HQE-SM, a highly qualified expert-senior mentor, when he was suspended by Lt. Gen. Theodore Martin, commanding general of the Combined Arms Center, according to a statement from Army spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith. She did not give a reason for the suspension, which was pending the outcome of an inquiry, and no other details were provided.

USA Today reported that a Twitter account under Volesky’s name carried a reply to a statement by the first lady following the Supreme Court’s action last month overturning the abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade. “For nearly 50 years, women have had the right to make our own decisions about our bodies. Today, that right was stolen from us,” Biden said.

The newspaper reported that the tweet under Volesky’s name stated: “Glad to see you finally know what a woman is.” The tweet was later deleted.

Source: TEST FEED1