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Top Sanders aide calls Manchin a 'phony' on lowering drug prices
A top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday called Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) a “phony” after the West Virginia senator called for action to lower drug prices.
Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ staff director for the Senate Budget Committee, tweeted that Manchin’s call for drug pricing action was empty given the senator opposed President Biden’s Build Back Better package, which included measures to lower drug prices.
“What a phony. THE reason we failed to keep our promises to seniors is because @Sen_JoeManchin sabotaged the Build Back Better Act & refuses to end the filibuster,” Gunnels tweeted. “In Joe’s world, protecting the filibuster is more important than protecting seniors. No wonder billionaires love him.”
Gunnels was responding to a tweet from Manchin after the senator met with AARP’s West Virginia branch, stating: “By allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month, and allowing the importation of drugs from Canada, we can lower prescription drug prices in America. We must take action & keep the promises we’ve made to our seniors.”
Manchin has long supported action to lower drug prices, but it remains to be seen if he can reach a deal with Democratic leaders on a broader package that would include the drug pricing reforms. Because of Republican opposition, any measure must use the reconciliation process to bypass a GOP filibuster in the Senate.
Action to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices is a top priority for vulnerable Democrats ahead of the midterms, and getting action on that front is a reason some Democrats still hold out hope some legislation will be able to pass this year.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), another key moderate swing vote, has been the greater question mark on sweeping drug pricing action, though she did reach a deal with Democratic leaders in the fall to allow for Medicare to negotiate lower prices for a limited subset of drugs.
Manchin, speaking at the AARP event on Tuesday, gave some hope to Democrats eager for a deal.
“Drug pricing is something we all agree on,” Manchin said. “If we do nothing else this year, I think we can do a lot more, but if we do nothing more this year, that’s the one thing that must be done.”
“We’re negotiating on a lot of things right now, and we’re going to see to make sure this is the highest thing on the order to get done,” he later added.
Sanders and Manchin, representing opposite ideological ends of the Democratic caucus, have clashed before.
When Manchin announced his opposition to an earlier version of the Build Back Better package in December, Sanders responded that he “doesn’t have the guts to stand up to powerful special interests.”
Source: TEST FEED1
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Five takeaways from Biden’s inflation plan
Ahead of a Tuesday meeting with Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, President Biden laid out a plan in a Wall Street Journal op-ed to fight inflation levels that are topping 8 percent annually and reaching nearly 40-year highs. Biden has said that bringing down inflation is his top economic priority.
The gist of the plan is to get out of the way while the Fed raises interest rates to bolster the purchasing power of the dollar while supporting damaged supply chains to make sure that demand for goods doesn’t outpace their supply.
The plan also talks about bringing down demand by continuing to reduce the federal deficit, which is projected to fall by $1.7 trillion this year, something the White House is happy to show off as a win.
The goal for both Biden and the Fed is a “soft landing” – meaning a drop in prices for American consumers without a drop in overall economic growth. Whether or not they can thread this needle, Biden is emphasizing aspects of the recovery from the pandemic that further his economic agenda. Here are five takeaways from his plan.
Biden needs the labor market to cool and is depending on the Fed
The labor market is a positive for Biden on the economy, but a problem for inflation. Unemployment is now at 3.6 percent, which has led to growth in nominal wages, up well over 5 percent since last year. It’s also given job seekers more opportunity to find a job and extra bargaining power over their employers once they get hired.
But economists say that without higher unemployment rates, or what they call a “looser” labor market, it will be difficult for consumer prices to come down. This is because higher wages and higher employment levels are mutually reinforcing.
“It’s going to be very difficult to get through this now that we have wage inflation running at close to a 6-percent rate and the tightest labor markets we’ve ever seen in our country,” economist and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Tuesday during an online event hosted by The Washington Post. “I don’t see how we can get inflation to substantially decelerate without wage inflation falling substantially.”
“I don’t think there’s a durable reduction in inflation without a meaningful reduction in wage growth,” he added.
Unlike former President Donald Trump, who regularly criticized both Powell and the Federal Reserve, Biden said in his inflation plan that he’s not going to get in the way of the Fed’s interest rate hikes as it seeks to break the cycle of high wages and high employment.
Biden talks a lot about deficit cuts
The deficit is falling and Biden wants to take credit for it. The Congressional Budget Office last week projected that the budget deficit in 2022 will be $1.7 trillion less than the shortfall recorded in the previous year.
But this reduction isn’t due to increased revenues as much as to a waning in the exceptional amount of spending the government did in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the pandemic.
While economists say that deficit reduction is a way to lower demand for goods and thereby decrease inflation, greater revenues are still only a theoretical fix at this point since they require approval from Congress. The tax proposals Biden wanted to put into place in the Build Back Better Act were dead on arrival due opposition from Democratic moderates.
Biden’s proposed minimum income tax for billionaires also faces a thorny legislative path that could additionally face resistance in the courts.
Biden’s revenue proposals are also assured to go nowhere if midterm elections result in Republican majorities in the Senate or House, as many pollsters are expecting.
Biden wants to do something on housing
People are worried about finding a place to live and are seeing rents and home prices rise. Mortgage rates on the standard 30-year fixed rate mortgage have gone above 5 percent for the first time since 2011 and the share of homes owned by commercial property companies, or professional landlords, is on the rise.
Interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve could also add upward pressure to the housing market and make it more difficult for people to buy homes. Biden gives a nod to more affordable housing in his inflation plan, to show he’s conscious of property prices, which typically constitute one of the largest expenses for American consumers.
Biden’s housing efforts, which aim to build more affordable housing units, may not do much to lower inflation, since they’re sector-specific and aimed more at a symptom of inflation than its causes.
Nonetheless they could still help some people become homeowners, casting Biden as helping lower and middle-income families as well as blue-collar workers.
Moreover, they represent the sort of supply side interventions targeting inflation increasingly discussed by left-wing economists like Joseph Stiglitz.
Russia and China are causing Biden problems
Biden is keen to blame some inflation on the Russian war in Ukraine, which has driven up energy prices and led to a major reshuffling in energy markets, as both the US and now the European Union have announced plans to stop importing Russian energy products. Democrats have been using the phrase “Putin’s price hike” to describe inflation, just as Republicans have coined their own blame-casting portmanteau “Biden-flation.”
The Biden White House has also emphasized the role that supply chain issues in China play in inflation, as the country has faced criticism for enacting strict lockdowns in major cities like Shanghai, which have had affected the Chinese labor markets and global production lines. “Supply chain resilience should be incorporated into the U.S. trade policy approach towards China,” the White House said last year.
While geopolitical trends are certainly not the root cause of inflation, they create a backdrop of uncertainty that can weigh upon investor confidence and jack up the price of energy commodities used in the transportation of goods throughout the economy.
“Nobody can forecast what’s going to happen to oil prices, nobody can forecast what’s going to happen to commodity prices,” Summers said Tuesday. “They’re things that right now are very much in the realm of geopolitics.
There are fears of a recession
Biden’s plan doesn’t talk about the possibility of a recession, but if the Fed’s efforts to raise interest rates and cool the economy don’t work as anticipated, a recession starting later this year or next year could be in the works.
“Recession risks are high,” Mark Zandi, an economist with Moody’s Analytics, said Tuesday. “I would put the odds of a recession beginning in the next twelve months at about one in three, and then probably mostly even odds over the next couple of years.”
“Obviously the problem is high inflation, painfully high inflation, and the Federal Reserve is now working very hard to raise interest rates quickly to slow growth, to quell that inflation. In times past, when we’ve been in this kind of situation, recession often occurs, so we certainly can’t dismiss the possibility of recession at this point,” he added.
Higher interest rates will certainly put downward pressure on inflation, but if the supply chain issues are more intransigent than economists are currently think they are, higher interest rates could further slow an economy that’s already on a path to slowing down.
“It’s hard to find a measure where inflation is going up less than three or four percentage points, and I think that’s the kind of increase in interest rates that at a minimum we’re going to need if we’re going to have a prospect of containing inflation – unless of course the economy heads towards a recession on its own, which given the turbulence in the stock market and given some of the disturbing indicators about consumer confidence, is also a possibility,” Summers said during Tuesday’s event.
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The reason President Biden might not be able to cancel student debt after all
The can-kicking on student loan forgiveness is about to end. With the current repayment pause set to expire in August, and no obvious rationalization for yet another extension, the Biden administration knows it must act soon. Forcing millions of borrowers into repayment on the eve of midterm elections that experts are predicting could be brutal for Democrats would be political catastrophe. Even U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona finally admitted several weeks ago that borrowers will eventually have to start repaying their outstanding loan debts.
The dollar cost of forgiveness is not cheap. Some estimates put it at more than $320 billion. That would dwarf other well-known, large-scale federal welfare programs like SNAP, for example, which currently costs roughly $68 billion a year.
Yet it would also fundamentally, and retroactively, override decades of federal financial aid policy. These would now be taxpayer dollars with no expectation of being paid back.
That forces the question: does blanket loan forgiveness turn federal loans into federal grants?
The answer could very well determine what authority the president has to actually act on student loan debt. Loans and grants are different financial instruments. If Congress wanted federal aid to be solely in the form of grants, it would have never created a loan program to begin with.
Instead, it not only created both loan and grant programs, it has chosen over the past 50 years to prioritize each differently. Every new loan program Congress created, and every loan limit increase it approved, was a clear preference to provide student aid with debt financing. Every call over the past 30 years to shore up the declining purchasing power of the federal Pell Grant was Congress expressing it does not believe providing the majority of federal financial aid through grants makes sense.
At any point in the past Congress could have opted to fund grants more than loans. It repeatedly chose not to.
If the way Congress pays for federal programs matters, then the real question around executive authority to forgive student loan debt is not whether the ambiguous wording within the federal Higher Education Act allows for it. The bigger issue is whether President Biden can set aside, or override, how the legislative branch chooses to spend taxpayer dollars.
Would the president converting a loan instrument approved by Congress into an entirely different grant product be an example of executive branch overreach? Does a president have the authority to retroactively change how Congress spends taxpayer money? Would forgiveness essentially create a several-hundred-billion-dollar grant program that only Congress can legally authorize?
The big gamble for the Biden administration and forgiveness advocates right now is the possibility that the courts — potentially even the Supreme Court — be asked to weigh in on a constitutional matter that feels more clear-cut than parsing the wording in existing law. Even worse would be a legal challenge that does not get resolved until after the midterm elections.
If the devil is in the details, to this point there have been surprisingly few. A memo the president asked the U.S. Department of Education to draft on the options for using executive authority was authored more than a year ago but still remains hidden from public scrutiny. And despite the president repeatedly saying forgiveness is a matter for Congress to decide, the first House bill to propose it did not come out until this past February. The Senate, which has some of the highest-profile public advocates for forgiveness in Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has yet to introduce a companion bill.
Student loan forgiveness continues to capture the public’s attention. For better or worse, federal student aid policy is going to begin fundamentally changing over the next several months. The only question right now is whether the current administration, Congress or the courts end up playing the biggest role in whatever path it heads down.
Carlo Salerno, Ph.D., is an education economist and co-author of “Student Financial Success: The surprising path to fix the college completion crisis.”
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Monica Lewinsky on Depp-Heard trial: 'We are all guilty'
Monica Lewinsky weighed in on the defamation trial involving former celebrity couple Johnny Depp and Amber Heard on Tuesday, denouncing what she called “courtroom porn” as jury deliberations continue.
Lewinsky, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, wrote in a piece for the magazine that compared to past blockbuster trials, the public is now largely seeing testimony through “biased, curated and cursory” social media feeds and memes.
“We are drenched in the taint of the dirt and aggression of the social media wars,” she wrote.
“The obsessive chatter around the Depp–Heard trial is just one small example of the ever-expanding, ever-demanding search for schadenfreude and titillation,” she continued. “No matter whom the jury’s verdict favors — be it defendant Heard or plaintiff Depp — we are guilty.”
The “Pirates of the Caribbean” star sued his ex-wife following an op-ed she wrote in which she made allegations of sexual violence. In return, Heard filed a counterclaim of $100 million against Depp, claiming damage to her reputation.
Depp, 58, alleges that the article ruined his reputation and cost him roles despite it not explicitly mentioning him by name. He said he hasn’t been cast in a major film since the release of the story.
Heard, 36, alleges that her former husband damaged her reputation by calling her a liar for her allegations of sexual violence.
The jury has continued to deliberate following a six-week trial in Fairfax County, Va., that at times went viral on social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Some videos have garnered millions of views in a matter of days.
Lewinsky, who in the 1990s became the center of then-President Clinton’s impeachment over their widely publicized affair while she was a White House intern, said some have “co-opted the trial” for their own purposes, devaluing “our dignity and humanity.”
“Having been on the receiving end of this kind of cruelty, I can tell you the scars never fade,” she wrote.
In addition to her role at Vanity Fair, Lewinsky has become a prominent anti-cyberbullying advocate following her involvement in the Clinton impeachment.
Lewinsky also said she “wasn’t surprised” to see that memes about Heard “far outnumbered” those about Depp. She noted viral clips highlighting Depp’s attorney, Camille Vasquez, questioning Heard and other witnesses.
“You thought we wouldn’t have any girl-on-girl action in this trial?” Lewinsky wrote. “That’s on misogyny’s greatest-hits album.”
She added that the disparity proved “larger implications for our culture” and is her most concerning takeaway from the trial.
“Because the trial has also been available live on our screens, we think, subconsciously, that we have a right to look and watch,” Lewinsky said. “To judge. To comment.”
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Ukraine joins its first NATO cyber defense center meeting
Ukrainian officials met for the first time on Monday with the steering committee of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in Tallinn, Estonia, following the country’s successful bid to join the cyber center.
Ukraine first applied to join the organization in August 2021. Its application was unanimously approved by all members of the steering committee in March.
According to a blog post released by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, members of the committee are finalizing a technical agreement on the accession that will formalize Ukraine’s participation in the organization.
“Ukraine’s accession to the CCDCOE is a significant achievement for our country in terms of strengthening international cooperation in the field of cybersecurity and cyber defense, as well as an important step towards Ukraine’s NATO membership,” said Ukraine’s national security agency in the blog post.
The meeting comes after Finland and Sweden applied to join the 30-nation military organization following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States supports the move and has said it won’t tolerate any efforts to detail their ascension process.
However, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson recently expressed concerns that her country’s decision to join NATO could possibly incite Russia to launch cyberattacks against Sweden in retaliation.
Ukraine has also expressed a strong desire to join the alliance, however, it has conceded that is unlikely to happen in the near future.
Although Ukraine has become a testing ground for Russia’s cyber operations, it has over the years received significant financial and technical assistance from the U.S. and the European Union to strengthen its cyber defenses.
The U.S. has invested some $40 million since 2017 in helping Ukraine bolster its information technology sector.
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Russia expands Europe gas supply cutoffs
Russia is cutting off additional supplies of natural gas to Europe, a decision that will impact countries including Germany as the continent moves ahead with its own ban on Russian oil.
Russian company Gazprom said in Telegram posts on Tuesday that it would cut off gas supplied under a contract with Shell to Germany and under a contract with Danish company Ørsted and Dutch company GasTerra BV.
The cutoffs come after the three companies failed to comply with Russia’s new requirement to pay for gas in Russian rubles, Gazprom said.
The announcements represent an escalation in an ongoing energy battle between Russia and Europe as Europe and its allies continue to sanction Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
A number of countries, including the U.S. have banned the import of Russian oil. On Monday, the European Union agreed to an embargo of most of Russia’s oil imports by the end of the year.
The gas suppliers indicated Tuesday that they planned to purchase the fuel from elsewhere.
Shell spokesperson Curtis Smith said via email that the company has “access to a diverse portfolio of gas from which we will continue to supply our customers in Europe.”
Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper said the company has been “preparing for this scenario, so we still expect to be able to supply gas to our customers.” Nipper said that there is no gas pipeline that goes directly between Russia and Denmark, so Russia would not be directly cutting of the country’s supply.
GasTerra said it “has anticipated this by buying gas from other providers” but also said that it is “impossible to predict” whether the European market can absorb the lost supply without serious consequences.
GasTerra also said it would not meet Russia’s demand to pay in rubles because doing so “would risk breaching sanctions imposed by the EU” and cause “financial and operational risks” such as government control of accounts in Russia.
Meanwhile, Ørsted said in a statement that it was “under no obligation” under its contract to pay in rubles and “will continue to pay in euros.”
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Campaign Report — Biden confronts his most serious midterm issue
Welcome to The Hill’s Campaign Report, tracking all things related to the 2022 midterm elections. You can expect this newsletter in your inbox each week leading up to November’s election.
Scheduling note: With the primary season in full swing, we’re expanding our newsletter schedule. Beginning this week, you can expect to hear from us on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
mail us tips and feedback: Max Greenwood (mgreenwood@thehill.com), Julia Manchester (jmanchester@thehill.com), Tal Axelrod (taxelrod@thehill.com), Caroline Vakil (cvakil@thehill.com) and Monique Beals (mbeals@thehill.com).
Biden lays out inflation strategy
President Biden this week is confronting his most serious midterm issue: inflation.
In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal Monday evening, Biden laid out a three-pronged strategy to fight rising prices, which have helped keep his approval numbers in the high 30s and low 40s.
The first prong involves boosting the Federal Reserve and giving it the leash he says it needs to combat inflation — delivered along a knock on his “predecessor,” who he says “demeaned” the body.
The second prong focuses on making goods more affordable, including by repairing supply chains, improving infrastructure “and cracking down on the exorbitant fees that foreign ocean freight companies charge to move products.”
The final prong would lean on “common-sense reforms to the tax code” to reduce the federal deficit.
The op-ed’s release came a day before Biden met with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to discuss strategies for combating inflation. The president will also give a speech Friday on the upcoming May jobs report.
In a sign that the strategy to highlight inflation will be an administration-wide one, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese on Tuesday insisted that the White House is on strong footing to reduce record-high inflation.
“The economy we have right now is in a transition from this period of historic economic growth to a period that can be more stable, resilient growth. That requires focusing on inflation and doing so from a position of relative strength,” Deese told CNBC.
The new strategy makes sense given voters’ frustration over stubbornly high inflation.
Polls consistently show the prices of goods are the top or among the top concerns for voters — figures that haven’t budged for months. And with Democrats’ House and Senate majorities at stake, the party is increasingly desperate to reverse their fortunes before November.
However, Biden faces an uphill battle in convincing the American people to give him the benefit of the doubt on the economy.
Biden’s argument in his op-ed that “the U.S. is in a better economic position than almost any other country,” pointing to things like low unemployment and a strong stock market, could fall on deaf ears if prices for things like gas and groceries – more immediate concerns for voters – remain high.
Democrats push for change on abortion, gun control
Beyond inflation, Democrats got a new issue set in recent weeks that could allow them to go on offense: abortion and gun control.
The blockbuster leak earlier this month of the Supreme Court’s draft ruling that would essentially scrap the constitutional protections over abortion and recent mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, thrust the two issues into the spotlight, offering a chance for Democrats to go on offense on key culture war issues.
Democrats and activists lament that it took the draft opinion and horrific killings to amplify their rallying cries, but should the party be able to seize on the window to hammer Republicans on the issue, it would mark a reversal from the defensive posture Democrats have been on regarding issues like critical race theory, sex ed in schools and more.
“I think part of the challenge for Democrats is that they have been too quiet while Republicans just continue to bring out the culture war battle of the day, and Democrats have just shut up instead of pushing back,” Democratic strategist Jared Leopold told Tal. “The new focus on both abortion and gun control presents an opportunity for Democrats to go on offense and define the difference between the parties on those issues that inspire voters.”
Already, Democratic governors and state legislators have pushed to enact their own abortion protections should Roe v. Wade be scrapped, and Biden and Vice President Harris recently visited Uvalde and Buffalo, respectively.
The issues present a welcome opportunity — politically, at least — to change the narrative from Biden’s low approval ratings.
However, abortion and guns are known to also rile up Republican voters, and it’s unclear if the two issues have the ability to supplant voters’ concerns over the economy.
“The people who are motivated by choice as an animating issue are very committed voters to begin with, and they are voters who have the luxury to consider cultural issues,” Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky told our own Niall Stanage. “When you wake up every day worrying about how to fill up the gas tank or how to pay for basic necessities, abortion is just not something you have time to worry about.”
RECOUNT UNDERWAY IN PENNSYLVANIA
The recount in Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary is underway, setting the stage for a photo finish to determine the Republican nominee in one of the nation’s most critical Senate contests.
Celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz is currently leading former hedge fund manager Dave McCormick by fewer than 1,000 votes. Pennsylvania acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman officially announced the recall Wednesday afternoon, and the process began Friday.
The recount should be done by June 7, with the results released the day after.
The McCormick campaign is requesting a hand recount in 12 counties, a senior McCormick campaign official told reporters Tuesday.
The official said they’re requesting the hand recount to happen “concurrently” to the state-ordered recount “so we can get a resolution to this and get behind the nominee and move forward.”
McCormick’s campaign is also suing to have counted ballots that were mailed in without a written date on the envelopes, as is typically required, but that were received on or before Election Day. Those ballots are also dated upon receipt by election officials.
The ultimate nominee will face off in November against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), who is currently recovering from a stroke.
AD WATCH
One Nation, the nonprofit arm of Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, released a new ad in Georgia Tuesday targeting Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) over inflation.
The video, part of a $17.1 million blitz in the Peach State, casts Warnock as partially responsible for the surge in prices after voting for Biden’s COVID-19 stimulus package last year.
“Senator Raphael Warnock was the deciding vote for President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar spending spree. Sending inflation through the roof and raising gas and grocery prices over ten percent on hard-working Georgians. Tell Senator Warnock to stop fighting for reckless spending – and start fighting inflation,” a narrator says in the ad.
Georgia is set to be at the center of the political universe later this year, with contested Senate and gubernatorial races up for grabs. Warnock, who won in a special election in 2021, is running for a full term of his own this year against former football star Herschel Walker, and former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams is trying to unseat Gov. Brian Kemp (R).
Democrats are bullish that Warnock and Abrams present a powerful duo at the top of the general election ballot, but Republicans boast that this year’s political atmosphere — driven mainly by inflation — could sink them.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading and check out The Hill’s Campaign page for the latest news and coverage. See you next week.
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The NRA’s anti-American narrative: No excuse for gun violence like the Uvalde school shooting
Anyone believing the nonsense spewed by speakers at the NRA convention in Houston this past weekend— which coincided with the grieving over the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre — would come away with the impression that the United States is the most evil, deranged and socially deviant nation in the world. The anti-science narrative being promoted by those who refuse to change America’s permissive gun laws, is that the easy availability of guns has absolutely no relationship to the high number of school shootings and other gun crimes that plague our nation.
According to the NRA parrots, the causes of gun violence are Americans who are evil, mentally ill and socially maladjusted, and who just happen to use guns rather than knives or fists to perpetrate their mass killings. “Guns don’t kill, people do,” according to this mantra. If this were true, then it would follow, from the indisputable fact that the United States is among the world’s leaders in gun-related violence and deaths, that we must also lead the world in people who are evil, mentally ill and socially maladjusted. But the NRA, which boasts of its patriotism, would never come out directly and level such an un-American and demonstrably false accusation against the American people.
The truth, of course, is that Americans are not different enough as a people from the citizens of other democracies to explain why they have so many fewer gun crimes. There are evil people in all countries, but in our country, these evil people are much more likely to use their easily available guns to do evil things to good people. The rates of mental illness and social maladjustment are not significantly different in this country than in Sweden, Canada or most of the rest of the world. Yet, in our country, more of these people use their easily available guns to commit mayhem against innocent victims.
There is only one variable that explains the dramatically higher rate of gun violence in the United States than in any comparable country. That variable is the easy availability of guns. No one has ever successfully challenged the direct correlation between gun availability and gun violence, and no one ever will.
The correlation is so clear and dramatic that it is impossible to deny causation. It cannot be mere coincidence that the nation with one of the highest levels of gun violence also boasts the highest level of gun availability. There is no escaping that lethal relationship. No amount of NRA blather about evil, mental illness or social maladjustment can erase the fact that these constant phenomena — that are roughly equally spread out around comparable nations — cannot possibly be the variables that explain our vastly higher rates of gun violence. The relevant variable, as any honest social scientist will confirm, is the easy availability of guns.
It is possible, of course, that tightening the gun laws will not immediately reduce gun violence because there are so many guns out there and criminals will keep their guns regardless of the law. That is a fair debate to have. So, too, with the reach of the Second Amendment. What is not fair or honest is the phony attempt to deny the connection between the easy availability of guns and the high rate of gun violence, and to blame this American tragedy on factors that are not uniquely American.
It is important to assess the causes of gun violence honestly, even if the cures are not easily available. The first step to curing or reducing any problem is understanding its causes, even if they are multiple. Leaving out a major — in this case, THE major— cause of gun violence, because of political and partisan pressures, will make amelioration impossible. The reality is that people with guns they shouldn’t have, have killed and will continue killing innocent people, including many children.
The mass murderer in Uvalde was an obviously troubled 18-year-old who walked into a store and bought guns and rounds of ammunition capable of murdering hundreds of schoolchildren in a matter of minutes. It’s hard to believe that it could have been worse, but it is clear that it could have been — and may be worse in some future tragedy. This mass murderer had no background check, mental assessment, waiting period or any other of the many barriers to gun violence currently being proposed by reasonable Americans and being opposed by unreasonable ones.
Changing our gun laws to make it impossible for 18-year-olds like the mass murderer in Uvalde to buy semi-automatic or assault-style weapons and unlimited amounts of ammunition may not end school shootings. But such measures, along with other reasonable restrictions, can go a long way toward reducing the number of funerals of gun victims that have become all too common in our country.
Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus for Harvard Law School, is the author of numerous books, including “The Case Against the New Censorship,” and “The Case for Color-Blind Equality in an Age of Identity Politics.” Follow him on Twitter @AlanDersh.
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Trump on Sussmann verdict: 'Our country is going to hell'
Former President Trump on Tuesday expressed outrage at the news that Micheal Sussmann, a lawyer who represented Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic Party, was found not guilty of lying to the FBI.
Sussmann is being investigated by a special counsel in relation to the origins of the bureau’s probe of Trump’s 2016 campaign for president.
“Our Legal System is CORRUPT, our Judges (and Justices!) are highly partisan, compromised or just plain scared, our Borders are OPEN, our Elections are Rigged, Inflation is RAMPANT, gas prices and food costs are “through the roof,” our Military “Leadership” is Woke, our Country is going to HELL, and Michael Sussmann is not guilty,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, the small conservative social networking site he founded.
Trump and his allies have long claimed Sussmann and others within the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities were part of a politically motivated “deep state” attempt to undermine his first presidential campaign.
Conservative media outlets have relentlessly covered the special counsel’s probe and Sussmann’s role in the narrative.
Before his acquittal this week, prosecutors had alleged that Sussmann, a key figure in the special counsel’s investigation, had lied to the FBI regarding the case.
“While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case,” John Durham, the special counsel, said in a statement on Tuesday.
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