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Casey urges colleagues to change their thinking on gun control: 'I didn't burst into flames'

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) urged his colleagues in the upper chamber to consider changing their position on gun control measures, arguing “I didn’t burst into flames or get run out of town” after he changed his own stance on the issue years ago.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post on Wednesday, Casey said that when he first served in the Senate in 2007, he had been against gun control measures, saying he had “the firm belief that to support and honor Pennsylvania’s deep-rooted hunting culture meant that I should not support restrictions on gun sales or increased regulations.”

But he said the tragedy of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting changed his stance, and that he and his colleagues did not have to accept the idea that there was little they could do to stop shootings. 

Casey said that expanding background checks and banning certain firearms, like semiautomatic AR-15-style rifles, were measures that the country could take “to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people and criminals.”

“A decade ago, I changed my position because I didn’t want to see Americans dying every day without doing something about it. I shouldn’t be alone. Our children are depending on us,” he wrote.

Casey’s op-ed, though not a new stance, comes against the backdrop of several high-profile shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa, Okla. A group of bipartisan senators are working on gun reform negotiations while the House is expected to vote on gun control legislation this week. 

Actor Matthew McConaughey, who was born in Uvalde, made an emotional appeal to members of both parties to act during a White House press briefing on Tuesday.

“Can both sides see beyond the political problem at hand and admit that we have a life preservation problem on our hands?” he asked. 

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Senate fails to clear Biden nominee with Harris in LA

The Senate on Wednesday voted against President Biden’s nominee for an assistant secretary post for the Labor Department, with Vice President Harris in Los Angeles and unable to cast a tie-breaking vote.

The upper chamber voted 49-51 on Lisa Gomez’s nomination to become assistant secretary for the Labor Department’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), with the vote splitting along party lines in the evenly divided Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) changed his vote to “no” amid Harris’ absence and filed a motion to reconsider to allow him to bring up the nomination for another vote in the future.

According to Bloomberg, Republicans voted against Gomez for the post after GOP members expressed concerns about the agency’s retirement investing proposals, making Harris’ tie-breaking vote vital for confirmation.

Harris is visiting Los Angeles this week to attend the Summit of the Americas. It’s the first time the U.S. has hosted the gathering of leaders from North, Central and South America since the inaugural summit in 1994.

The event is seen as a major priority for Biden, who is also attending the gathering, where he is expected to meet with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Harris is also expected to play a significant role in the gathering, where she is set to deliver remarks and potentially address immigration.

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The Jan. 6 committee must play its unused trump cards — prison and fines

The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is endowed with inherent contempt power summarily to imprison or fine any person for defying a subpoena for documents or testimony. That power was unanimously confirmed by the United States Supreme Court nearly a century ago in McGrain v. Daugherty.    

The congressional need for every person’s evidence is at its zenith in investigating the unprecedented resort to criminal force and violence to prevent the peaceful transition of presidential power when all peaceful avenues of redress — including courts populated with President Donald Trump’s appointees — were open and functioning. The supreme evil of Jan. 6 cannot be ignored because the United States cannot survive that evil being repeated.   

The use of the committee’s inherent contempt power is urgent. Televised hearings are scheduled to commence tomorrow evening. Six members of the House have refused to talk: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.). Until last month, when five of the six were sent subpoenas, the committee neglected to even subpoena their colleagues despite the absence of any privilege under the speech or debate clause of the Constitution. It shields members from coercion by the executive or judicial branches, but not from Congress itself.   

Further, last week, the Department of Justice informed the committee that it would decline to bring criminal contempt prosecutions against Mark Meadows, chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, or communications chief Daniel Scavino, for defying committee subpoenas. Even if criminal prosecutions had been forthcoming, the trials would have come too late to assist the paramount informing function of the committee. The criminal contempt prosecutions against Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro will prove equally otiose to the committee’s purpose. Courts are lead-footed, not mercury-footed, which is the whole purpose behind the committee’s summary inherent contempt power. Timing is everything in politics. Yet the power remains mothballed by the committee like a stowed wedding dress.  

The committee has inexplicably not issued subpoenas for former President Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. (The House Judiciary Committee voted an article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon for flouting four committee subpoenas). Trump and Pence are the marquee and best witnesses regarding the subject under investigation.    

Public evidence is overwhelming that Trump repeatedly badgered Pence with a corrupt motive to unconstitutionally refuse to count state-certified electoral votes for the 2020 presidency that had cleared more than 50 court challenges, Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr and Trump’s own cybersecurity chief Christopher Krebs, who characterized the voting processes as “the most secure in American history.” Many others within Trump’s circle have echoed Barr and Krebs.    

Trump’s undisputed browbeating of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to falsify Georgia’s presidential election results corroborates Trump’s corrupt motive in badgering Pence, as does Trump’s tacit condoning of the ambition of the Capitol insurrectionists to “Hang Mike Pence.”   

To hold committee hearings without Trump, Pence and others previously identified would be like holding the Senate Watergate hearings without President Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Domestic Policy Advisor John Ehrlichman, Attorney General John Mitchell, and White House Counsel John Dean. It would trivialize the monumental importance of the exercise to remaining a government of laws rather than of men.   

The committee should thus vote to imprison and fine every person who has defied a subpoena, including Meadows, Scavino, Bannon, and Navarro. It should subpoena Jackson and follow through on subpoenas to McCarthy, Jordan, Perry, Biggs and Brooks by likewise imprisoning and fining them if compliance is not forthcoming. The same should be done for Trump and Pence.

Maybe the committee fears that inherent contempt power if unsheathed could be used against its members or Democrats generally if Republicans capture control of the House in November.  Maybe the committee thinks like Shakespeare’s Falstaff that, “the better part of valor is discretion.”  But that cowardliness will not save the country. Where, as here, the Constitution and the rule of law are in the balance, there is no room for summer soldiers or sunshine patriots.  

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and is the author of “Constitutional Peril: The Live and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy.” 

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House GOP mounts media battle in prebuttal to Jan. 6 hearing

House Republicans are casting Thursday’s primetime hearing by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a media production aimed at smearing former President Trump.

The effort by Republicans to push back at the hearing has started days before the spectacle is set to be carried live by the major networks and news networks — with the notable exception of Fox News Channel, which will air its regular programming.

Democrats have set expectations for the hearing high, both by putting it in primetime and with statements signaling they believe it will give voters new information about what happened the day a mob of Trump’s supporters overwhelmed Capitol Police and forced the evacuation of a Congress certifying President Biden’s win in the presidential race.

The GOP is arguing the effort is just meant to distract voters from inflation and crime, two issues that Republicans expect to be a big part of their effort to win back the House and Senate this fall.

“They are scrambling to change the headlines, praying that the nation will focus on their partisan witch hunt instead of our pocketbooks. It will not work,” House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said in a Wednesday press conference.

Stefanik, who replaced Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) — one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 panel — as conference chair, called it a “smear campaign against President Donald Trump.”

She also dinged the committee for enlisting the help of former ABC president James Goldston in producing Thursday’s hearing. She and other House Republicans criticized Goldston for overseeing ABC’s killing of stories about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif), who has received a subpoena from the committee, pointed to a letter he sent the then-ABC News executive in 2019 about a hot mic video of ABC News anchor Amy Robach saying that the network killed a story about Epstein and her interview with one of his accusers. The hearing, McCarthy tweeted, will be “political theatre.”

The committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those assertions.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who was originally selected by McCarthy to sit on the Jan. 6 panel but was blocked by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), took aim at the committee bringing Nick Quested, who filmed the Proud Boys leading up to and on Jan. 6., as a witness.

“Their first witness is the documentarian. So that sort of tells you how political this thing is,” said Jordan, who has also been subpoenaed by the committee.

The comments at the GOP press conference were a part of the House Republican effort to push its own storyline on the hearing. 

On Tuesday, the House GOP hosted a press call on the Jan. 6 hearing with a number of conservative outlets but did not invite or include many mainstream outlets, including NBC News, Politico, and The Hill. It is a move that the GOP Conference also made in January when discussing Jan. 6 around the time of the anniversary. 

Outlets on the Tuesday call included Breitbart, The Washington Examiner and The Federalist, according to a source familiar with the call.

Republicans have long countered the committee’s work by pointing to security failures at the Capitol that day and accusing Pelosi of not doing enough to keep the campus secure.

They have not wanted to focus on Trump’s involvement in the rioting.

Trump spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally before rioters broke through the lines of Capitol Police. He and other speakers at the rally repeated false statements that the election had been stolen from Trump, and have been accused of egging on the mob.

The committee has interviewed dozens of subjects as it has investigated what happened on Jan. 6. Besides Cheney, GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) also sits on the panel.

The two have given a bit of a bipartisan veneer to the panel’s work, though the rest of the House GOP has largely ostracized the two Republicans. Kinzinger is not running for reelection while Cheney is facing a tough Trump-backed primary challenger.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who McCarthy selected to be ranking member on the committee before Pelosi blocked him, is leading a GOP counter-investigation into Jan. 6 and said that he plans to release a report.

According to Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), the chair of the House Freedom Caucus who also received a subpoena from the committee, the pushback to the Jan. 6 hearings this week is not necessarily at the direction of or in coordination with the media-savvy man of utmost interest to the committee: Trump.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus met with Trump at his Bedminster, N.J. golf club on Tuesday, but Perry said they did not discuss the Jan. 6 hearing at all.

When it comes time for the Thursday primetime show, top Republicans don’t plan to tune in.

McCarthy told The Hill he will not be watching the hearing. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said: “I’m going to be busy.”

Mychael Schnell contributed.

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Ingraham on Fox News, Jan. 6: We know how to 'cater to our audience'

Primetime Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday mocked critics of the network who have this week expressed outrage that the conservative media company will not carry live coverage of the first hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol live on its main cable channel.

“They’re all upset that Fox’s isn’t covering it live,” Ingraham said on her show. “We actually do something called ya know cater to our audience. Our audience knows what this is. We’ll cover it and we’ll do plenty of coverage … but it’s the theater, total theater.” 

Fox earlier this week announced it would provide coverage of the hearing on six of its eight platforms, including live continuous coverage on Fox Business Network and on its streaming platforms, access free. It will also make its live coverage available for its various local affiliate stations throughout the country.

But the top-rated network will not preempt its primetime lineup of opinion shows on its primary Fox New Channel, each of which draw in millions of viewers a night and dwarf the audiences of competing networks and Fox’s the other platforms.

Hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham will “cover the hearings as news warrants” the network said in a press release on Monday. Each of the three hosts have at various points dismissed the committee and its investigation as illegitimate and partisan.

Members of the committee and some Democrats this week have blasted Fox News over its coverage plans.

“Few things obstruct the American people from hearing the truth more than Fox News’s cowardly decision not to broadcast Thursday’s hearing,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at a press conference on Tuesday. ““After all of the false facts that Fox News has allowed to be put on the air by its commentators and everyone else, they have an obligation to show the true facts by allowing the hearing to be seen by their listeners.”

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Failures in Tennessee and Oklahoma offer new evidence of America’s execution problems

Disturbing new evidence of lethal injection’s flaws and failures — and of this nation’s execution problems — came to light during the last week of May in Tennessee and Oklahoma.

Such problems often have become apparent during the course of an execution. Examples include difficulties execution teams have finding a useable vein in which to insert an IV or when the condemned inmate has convulsions or otherwise registers pain after lethal drugs are administered.

But it took litigation in Tennessee and disclosure of autopsy results in Oklahoma to unearth the full dimensions of these states’ ongoing problems with lethal injection.

When it was introduced 45 years ago, this execution method was touted as America’s most humane. Supporters promised that it would kill in a “matter of a few minutes.” They claimed that executions by lethal injection would occur with “no struggle, no stench, no pain.”

Those promises quickly proved to be empty when, in 1982, Texas carried out the first execution using the method. The morning before that execution, Dr. Ralph Gray, medical director of Texan prisons, examined the Charles Brooks’s veins. Dr. Gray told the New York Times that he thought the inmate had “plenty of good veins” that could support an IV. Yet during the execution, three technicians repeatedly failed to insert an IV into Brooks’s arm — splattering blood onto the sheet covering his body. During the several minutes it took for the drugs to take effect, Brooks looked forward in terror. He wagged his head, his fingers trembled, and let out a harsh rasp. 

Dick Reavis, a journalist with Texas Monthly, had made an agreement with Brooks in the weeks leading up to his execution date: When Brooks went to be injected, he promised to move his head back and forth if he suffered any pain. As the execution proceeded, Brooks slowly turned his head from one side to the other.  

Charles Brooks was far from the last to suffer in this way.

Lethal injection has proven to be America’s most unreliable and problematic method of execution. From 1982 to 2009, 7 percent of all lethal injections were botched, a higher rate than for hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the firing squad. In the last decade that figure has risen to more than 8 percent.

The news reports from the last week in May only add to lethal injection’s documented woes.

A May 25 article in The Tennessean reporting on a lawsuit brought by death row inmates describes shocking negligence by several people involved in preparing and carrying out executions as well as willful departures from the state’s execution protocol.

Many of Tennessee’s problems can be traced to its reliance on a compounding pharmacy for the lethal injection drugs. As the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) notes, the company employed has “a checkered business and safety history, including having been fined for failing to disclose an owner’s misdemeanor charge to the state pharmacy board and being forced to recall a lot of mislabeled compounded drugs.”

In addition, the DPIC notes that the pharmacist responsible for compounding the drugs for Tennessee “had been disciplined at a previous job for allowing a pharmacy technician to work without a certification.” In a clear violation of the state’s execution protocol, she again delegated the work of preparing the lethal injection drugs to a technician who failed adequately to test those drugs.

Problems with compounding pharmacies now are a regular part of the lethal injection landscape.

Unlike larger pharmaceutical companies, compounding pharmacies, which first appeared in the United States in the 1880s, are not subject to extensive regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. In addition, though pharmacists are required to be licensed, licensure requirements vary from state to state, and the laws governing compounding facilities are often lax. This lack of meaningful oversight of drug compounding facilities has had predictable and sometimes tragic results, including distribution of contaminated drugs, patient deaths, and even jail sentences for compounding pharmacy employees.

On occasion, states like Tennessee have had to stop executions because the drugs the compounding pharmacies had provided seemed contaminated.

The Tennessean also reports that “Depositions from Tennessee’s executioner … indicate prison staff either misunderstood or failed to follow key parts of the state’s protocol and pharmacist instructions. Execution records indicate the executioner prepared two of the three lethal injection drugs too far in advance, which … could affect the potency and sterility of the cocktail … [P]rison officials also allowed hundreds of expired drugs to languish in storage against state instructions.”

The same day that The Tennessean detailed that state’s execution problems, the results of autopsies conducted on four men who were executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma between October 2021 and February 2022 showed that all of them had “excess fluid in their lungs.” Such an accumulation of fluid suggests that all of them experienced a condition called “pulmonary edema” during their executions. Oklahoma Watch reports that “[P]ulmonary edema develops minutes after the sedative midazolam, the first of three drugs in the state’s lethal injection protocol, is administered … [T]he prisoner is likely to remain conscious and experience severe pain as fluid builds in the lungs.”

Federal District Judge Stephen Friot, ruling on June 6 in a case challenging the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, was not persuaded of that contention. But he conceded that pulmonary edema develops during lethal injection because of the lung damage done when states use extremely high doses of drugs and give them quickly.

This condition makes it hard for anyone being executed to breathe and produces a feeling that they are drowning.

Like Tennessee’s problems with compounding pharmacies, pulmonary edema is not limited to lethal injections in a single state.

In fact, a National Public Radio (NPR) investigation in September 2020 found signs of pulmonary edema in 84 percent of the 216 post-lethal injection autopsies it reviewed. As NPR explained, “The findings were similar across the states and, notably, across the different drug protocols used,” but were even more prevalent in two- or three-drug cocktails using the sedative drug midazolam. 

Questionable drug suppliers, protocols that are ignored, drugs that are administered in ways that cause suffering — what happened in Tennessee and Oklahoma is just the latest evidence of lethal injection’s failure to produce executions with “no struggle, no stench, no pain.” If barely a week goes by without fresh news of this failure, why does America’s machinery of death just grind on, as if indifferent to human suffering?

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science at Amherst College and the author of “Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution.” Follow him on Twitter @ljstprof

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Watch live: Harris delivers remarks on immigration from Los Angeles

Vice President Harris will deliver remarks on immigration Wednesday afternoon.

The event is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. ET.

Watch the video above.

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SUNY students can now mark ‘X’ as gender, use chosen names on diplomas

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced Wednesday that students at all 64 campuses of the State University of New York can now select the letter ‘X’ when asked to provide their gender and can have chosen names appear on college diplomas and campus profiles.  

“Every person, regardless of their gender identity or the name they choose to go by, deserves to have identity documentation that reflects who they are,” Hochul said in a statement. 

Campuses have until the fall of 2023 to fully implement the policy changes, according to the statement, in order to ensure transgender, gender non-conforming and non-binary student identities are reflected in the public university campus system.  

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“An inclusive chosen name and pronoun policy doesn’t only help students feel safer on campus—it is also a matter of respect. This is the next concrete step toward ensuring SUNY’s current and future transgender, gender non-conforming, and non-binary students feel embraced and uplifted,” said SUNY Interim Chancellor Deborah F. Stanley.  

“To those students and families who are seeing an unprecedented effort to roll back LGBTQIA+ rights and opportunities in other states, we want you to know that New York State and SUNY’s 64 colleges and universities intend only to move forward.” 

A wealth of anti-LGBTQ laws has been introduced and passed in state legislators with the most high-profile being Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law otherwise known as the “don’t say gay” law which bars teachers from hosting discussion on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms.  

The SUNY policy changes come just weeks after Gov. Hochul announced that New Yorkers could select ‘X’ as their gender on the driver’s license.  

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Biden: Tuesday primaries sent 'clear message' voters want tough-on-crime policies

President Biden said that Tuesday’s primary results in California, Mississippi and other states sent a message that voters want leaders who will take a tough stance on crime.

“I think the voters sent a clear message last night. Both parties have to step up and do something about crime, as well as gun violence,” Biden told reporters on Wednesday before boarding Air Force One to travel to California.

He called on states and localities to spend billions of dollars allocated in the American Rescue Plan “to hire police officers and reform the police departments.”

“Very few have done it,” he said.

The president held an event at the White House last month to call on mayors and local leaders to use funds from the American Rescue Plan to bulk up police forces and safety programs ahead of the summer months.

“In addition to that, I sent Congress a request for $300 million in this year’s budget to deal with hiring costs,” he said on Wednesday.

Biden has consistently pushed for more funding for police departments, distinguishing his policies against some progressives’ calls to “defund” the police. His comments on Wednesday also come as a bipartisan group of senators is negotiating gun control measures in the wake of recent mass shootings.

On Tuesday in San Francisco, where residents have faced rising crime, District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D) was booted out of office in a recall election by a 20-point margin. Boudin is one of the most progressive top prosecutors in the country and advanced a more lenient approach to crime.

In Los Angeles, billionaire Rick Caruso, who has vowed to be tough on crime, was the top vote-getter in the mayoral race and will face a November runoff election against Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.).

Meanwhile in Mississippi and South Dakota, House Republican incumbents fought off primary challenges from pro-Trump challengers.

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