President Joe Biden’s historic Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 has been hailed as “the most significant U.S. climate law ever enacted.” To earn this title, it supplanted a climate law signed by former President Donald Trump. History shows that while the IRA was a Democratic initiative, it builds on Republican-backed laws that have brought economic development to all 50 states. We will need bipartisan leadership going forward to advance effective solutions to climate change.
On Dec. 27, 2020, Trump lent his signature to a bipartisan appropriations law that extended tax credits for solar, wind and carbon capture technologies. It also initiated a major reduction in hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are highly potent greenhouse gases. Leading environmentalists celebrated the act as the most significant federal climate law to that point.
Democrats were able to pass the IRA, which also includes health and tax provisions, along party lines through the budget reconciliation process because they control the House, Senate and White House. Had the climate provisions been considered as part of a bipartisan package, there may have been some Republican support for pieces of the bill. Clean energy incentives in the IRA and the December 2020 appropriations bill evolved from laws with bipartisan roots.
Iowa’s Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley is the original author of the wind energy production tax credit (PTC), which was established in 1992. The solar investment tax credit (ITC) was established in 2005 through an energy law signed by Republican President George W. Bush. These marquee policies, which were extended in the IRA, helped wind and solar energy grow to produce 12 percent of U.S. electricity in 2021, and become the leading sources of new generating capacity in recent years. Half of the top 10 states for wind and four of the top 10 states for solar are represented by Republican U.S. senators.
Renewable energy is not alone in benefiting from tax breaks. Among other policies, fossil fuels continue to benefit from the percentage depletion allowance, which has been in the tax code for oil and gas since 1926 and coal since 1932. While the first scientific paper linking greenhouse gases with climate warming was published by Eunice Newton Foote in 1856, it was over a century before carbon management for fossil resources was widely discussed. The tax credit for carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) was first signed into law by Bush in 2008. Projects that capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks or directly from the air are already helping reduce emissions and will play a greater role going forward.
The IRA builds on the tradition of incentivizing energy production and provides a decade-long window of policy certainty for renewable energy, energy storage, carbon capture, hydrogen, nuclear, clean energy manufacturing, clean cars and clean fuels. Over the next decade, this “all of the above” approach to clean energy will lead to investment throughout the country, create more than 9 million jobs, and save up to $220 per year for the average American electric consumer. Realizing these investments will bolster America’s leadership in addressing climate change with benefits to both red states and blue states.
Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso recently said, “We all believe climate change is real. We believe mankind is certainly contributing to that. And we also believe that if China and India don’t do things, even if we were to go to zero emissions in the United States, the global emissions continue to go up.”
He is right that we need to work with other countries on climate. American leadership has helped solve global environmental problems before. The Montreal Protocol, a treaty signed by President Ronald Reagan, successfully addressed ozone-depleting gases. While we have a long way to go on carbon, other nations, including China and India, are investing in clean energy, too. North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer made a strong case for the U.S. to use its leadership position within the Paris climate agreement “to latch onto what unifies us and promulgate it to the world.” He suggested we do this by marketing our carbon capture and nuclear technologies abroad.
This month’s historic climate bill will help the United States do just that. The Paris Agreement sets up a framework for international cooperation that will only be successful if nations act. With the IRA incentives in place, the United States can cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels. This puts us in a better position to market our homegrown technologies worldwide and help other countries meet their commitments. We will need to continue progress to achieve President Biden’s goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
While climate change is a global issue, the investments unlocked by the IRA will be implemented at the state and local level through permitting decisions for electric generating projects, transmissions lines and carbon capture proposals. At its best, the law could encourage large-scale expansion of U.S. manufacturing, new clean energy jobs and economic diversification for communities, with targeted investments in oil, gas and coal producing areas. Americans will need leaders from both sides of the aisle to foster this economic opportunity. Initiatives from Democrats and Republicans have gotten us where we are today, and bipartisan cooperation will be needed to maximize the deployment of climate solutions going forward.
Tom Carlson is board president for the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition. He is also director of regulatory and legislative affairs for EDF Renewables as well asthe government affairs co-lead for the company’s joint venture Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind.
Police in Texas have arrested a woman on charges of assault bodily injury and making terroristic threats after a video appeared to show her verbally and physically attacking a group of Indian American women.
The Plano Police Department, located in northern Texas near Dallas, said in a Facebook post that officers responded to a disturbance in a parking lot of a business at around 8:15 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
A release from the department states that several women told officers upon arrival that another woman assaulted them in the parking lot. An officer completed a report for the two charges against the woman based on witness statements.
Police detectives arrested Esmerelda Upton, a resident of Plano, on Thursday afternoon for the charges, and her bail was set at $10,000.
Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime, and they may bring additional charges against Upton, the release states.
One of the women present recorded a video of the incident. The video shows a woman yelling at them to “go back to India” adding “we don’t want you here.”
The video shows the woman hitting the person recording, and later on, one woman at the scene calls the police. The alleged attacker walks away on a few occasions but then returns and attempts on strike the other women at times.
The attacker says that she is Mexican American and was born in this country and has “paid her way here.” She repeatedly uses expletives while yelling at the women, according to the footage.
The police department said in a post on Friday that it had received questions about why Upton was not arrested at the scene. The department said an arrest was not made immediately because the criminal offenses did not occur in officers’ presence, and they needed an arrest warrant to take her into custody.
“The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure (CCP) outlines the arrest authority of Texas peace officers. The offenses committed by Ms. Upton were misdemeanor crimes,” the post states. “Based on the CCP, Texas peace officers, generally, can arrest for misdemeanors when the offenses occur in their presence.”
The department said it is working with the FBI and Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and the incident may also be a hate crime under federal law.
Others are free to disagree, of course, but I believe the United States to be the greatest nation on the face of the earth. Our nation was envisioned and created — at great risk to their personal safety, as well as to that of their families — by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, John Hancock, John Adams and other Founding Fathers.
Yet, many on the political left want to “cancel” those founders.
In one of the latest examples of this cancel culture movement, following a year-long campaign, an elementary school in New Jersey has changed its name from honoring Thomas Jefferson to honoring Delia Bolden, the first Black woman to graduate from high school locally.
Another example involves an “inadvertent” proposal from the Virginia Department of Education, seeking to delete references to George Washington as the “Father of our Country” and to James Madison as the “Father of the Constitution.” It was a proposal that Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, instantly condemned, making clear that his administration would “reinforce” the fact that the Founding Fathers did create our nation.
Said the governor, “I believe we should tell our history accurately, the good and the bad. And part of the history we’re going to tell is that our Founding Fathers, including George Washington and James Madison, and let’s not forget about Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry and the others, played an extraordinary role in the founding of our nation.”
This comes on the heels of a recent protest in Boston to remove the name of Founding Father Peter Faneuil from historic Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston. Why? Because, according to one of the protestors, “We should not have the name of a white supremacist attached to a publicly-owned building. That’s who he was: a white supremacist, a human trafficker.”
Prior to that were recent articles in the New York Post and elsewhere, reporting that the homes of Jefferson and Madison, Monticello and Montpelier, respectively, are going “woke” and being turned against their legacies.
Just before the July 4 weekend, a California school board member called for that holiday to be “boycotted,” rather than celebrated; some Arizona Democrats advertised a “F*** the Fourth” event; and city officials in Orlando, Fla., later apologized for a July 4 statement which said, in part, that “A lot of people probably don’t want to celebrate our nation right now, and we can’t blame them … .”
In May, an opinion column in The Washington Post called for the renaming of George Washington University. Why? You guessed it: Because the school, according to the columnist, is “rooted in systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy.”
And before that … well, you get the idea.
Alarmingly — at least to me, since I spent the past year writing a book celebrating these Founding Fathers, the Fourth of July, and our seemingly disappearing rights and liberties — the desire to cancel our Founders, to sandblast their names from buildings, remove their statues and belittle their genius, courage and sacrifice, appears to be a growing, potentially unstoppable trend.
It should not be.
If our history is bad, let’s condemn it and learn from it. If our history is good, let’s praise it and build upon it. But let’s not cancel our shared history, which is what totalitarian regimes do.
Many of these attacks and the canceling of the Founding Fathers comes down to the subject of slavery. The practice of slavery was — and in some places, remains — obscene, a crime against humanity. On this subject, President Biden recently declared: “Great nations don’t hide from their slavery.”
He is absolutely correct — but I would add this: “Great and free nations also don’t cancel their history.”
To view the actions and what might have been in the minds, hearts and souls of those men born some 300 years ago via the increasingly biased prism of 2022 is not only problematic; it can be irresponsible, too. Yet that is precisely what is occurring in some quarters.
This growing list of Founding Fathers labeled as “white supremacist” means we are defining, diminishing and dismissing them over one issue. And any of the significant, valuable contributions they made to the creation of our republic are being deemed irrelevant.
Instead of focusing on centuries-dead men, those who condemn a single dimension of our Founders should consider using their time, energy and resources to tackle the slavery and human trafficking going on in today’s world. Look no further than China for modern-day slavery and labor-camp abuses, or any city in the world where you happen to be at the moment for human-trafficking abuses.
As for the rest of us, rather than standing idly by while some try to twist, rewrite or cancel our shared history, can’t we discuss or debate the subject of our Founders and their pasts?
History is history. It should never be “written by the victors,” nor canceled by those unwilling to learn from it.
Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration. His latest book is “The 56: Liberty Lessons From Those Who Risked All to Sign the Declaration of Independence.”
(NEXSTAR) – Academia is all well and good, but it’s certainly better with a view.
The Princeton Review has released its rankings of the 25 prettiest college campuses in the country, as determined by a survey of over 160,000 students from colleges and universities across the nation.
The results come as part of the Princeton Review’s annual “Best Colleges” publication, which seeks to rank higher-education facilities by “Best Classroom Experience,” “Best Athletic Facilities” and even LGBTQ-friendliness, among dozens of other categories.
The rankings, according to the Princeton Review, are to be viewed as a tool to help college applicants choose a school based on their interests and the qualities they find most important.
“Since 1992, when we debuted our multiple ranking lists as an alternative to a single academics-only mega list, our mission has been to give students a more useful resource to find the best college for them,” said Rob Franek, the editor-in-chief of the Princeton Review, in a press release.
But if students are purely in it for the aesthetics, they can’t go wrong with the University of San Diego (not to be confused with the University of California, San Diego), which took the top spot for “Most Beautiful Campus” on the 2023 list. Students gave USD high marks for its weather, beach-adjacent location, and a “campus so beautiful [that] most students spend time outside,” according to the Princeton Review.
Rounding out the top five were Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania; the University of Richmond, in Virginia; Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles; and Vanderbilt University, in Nashville.
All of the Princeton Review’s rankings are based on the survey results from more than 160,000 current students at 388 colleges throughout the country. Each student is instructed to answer 85 questions about their school’s academics, campus life and student body, and final rankings in any given category are based on students indicating “a very high consensus of opinion” in one of 50 different categories.
The Princeton Review itself also selects which colleges are chosen to participate — 388 in total for the 2023 edition — based on data its staff has collected (on the school’s offerings, faculty, etc.), recommendations from its advisory board, and student evaluations, according to Franek.
Additional information on the review’s methods, as well as its ranked lists in 49 other categories, can be found at the publication’s website.
The federal government is set to suspend its offer of free at-home COVID-19 tests by Friday, Sept. 2 without congressional authorization for an extension.
The U.S. Postal Service’s page for ordering the tests states that orders will pause by next Friday “or sooner if supplies run out.”
“Ordering through this program will be suspended on Friday, September 2 because Congress hasn’t provided additional funding to replenish the nation’s stockpile of tests,” a message on the federal government’s COVID-19 website reads.
The Biden administration originally announced that it would offer 1 billion free at-home COVID-19 tests in January. The federal government used COVID-19 funding from the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic stimulus and COVID-19 recovery package that he signed into law last year.
Biden has since offered additional rounds of tests for Americans to order, most recently in May. Households could order an additional eight tests in the most recent round.
The seven-day rolling average of COVID-19 cases has declined slightly in recent weeks following an increase fueled by the highly contagious BA.5 omicron subvariant. But a senior administration official told USA Today that the government needs to hold onto tests for a possible rise in the fall.
The official said that the administration will use its existing “limited” resources to obtain as many tests as it can, but distribution could resume on a large scale if Congress provides the funding for it.
Conservative defenders of religious liberty are pushing a new version of an old argument: Liberals and secularists, they contend, will not protect religious liberty in the public square. What this means, conservatives argue, is that the secular left is only willing to tolerate religious practice in private locations, such as one’s home or house of worship. But If religious believers leave those cloistered environments, they will find that the special protection religious liberty receives does not follow them. It only remains in force behind closed doors. Thus, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito suggested in his recent speech in Rome, the liberty of religious individuals will not be respected by secularists “when you step outside into the public square in the light of day.”
There are two fundamental flaws with this argument, leaving aside the obvious rejoinder that it doesn’t seem to comport with the reality many of us experience. When Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons follow the dictates of their beliefs and (unsolicited) knock on my door to discuss their religion with me, that doesn’t seem like the proselytizing faithful are being restricted to their homes or temples.
The first flaw with the “religion is only protected in private outside of the public square” argument is that it confuses two understandings of what private and public mean. Private can connote something which is confidential and out of the hearing or sight of others. Public, in contrast, means out in the open and exposed to third parties. Under this understanding, religion is not and should not be excluded from the public square. It is a strawman argument to insist that secular people want religion to be hidden from view.
There is another understanding of private and public, however, and here there are legitimate and important concerns about religion in the public square. Private is understood as something owned and controlled by individuals and institutions that are not affiliated with or part of the government. A private sector business enterprise such as a Walmart store is an obvious example. But private here has nothing to do with the idea that private means out of sight or hidden. Walmart stores, like most private sector institutions, are fully visible and open to third parties.
The understanding of public is different here as well. When we speak of the public sector in comparison to the private sector, we are talking about government. Similarly, in discussing religious participation in the public square in this sense, we are referring to religious participation in government operations and activities. Both secular and many religious people recognize that when religion is involved in government — in the public square — religious liberty issues implicate distinctive concerns which need to be addressed.
Significant problems arise when religion is mixed into government activities and programs. For example, government officials often exercise discretionary authority in determining whether individuals will receive benefits or be subject to sanction. Given that reality, government officials or employees praying and proselytizing raises serious risks of religious coercion. This is true when public school teachers invite students to join them in prayer, when judges ask litigants and their attorneys to pray with them before a proceeding begins, or when welfare administrators proselytize potential beneficiaries.
There is no implicit coercion when a Jehovah’s Witness knocks on your door. They have no authority over your well being, and you can close the door as you see fit. Protecting their religious liberty does not undermine your freedom. A different dilemma confronts individuals addressed by government proselytizers.
Consider another example. Government often funds non-governmental actors to provide public services. When religious institutions receive such contracts or grants, often for social welfare programs, once again we confront special problems. Often religious institutions insist on religious liberty grounds on the right to discriminate in hiring only the members of their own faith to staff these programs. It is one thing to recognize that privately funded religious institutions may use the donations they receive to promote their religious beliefs. It is a very different issue when religious institutions operating taxpayer funded programs claim the right to reserve the jobs created to staff these programs solely for members of their faith.
A similar problem arises with regard to the beneficiaries of publicly funded programs. Most government funded programs are intended to serve the general public without regard to the religious beliefs of potential beneficiaries. Yet religious institutions may claim under the banner of religious liberty the authority to deny benefits to otherwise eligible beneficiaries who do not abide by the institution’s beliefs.
When the public square is understood to be government, religion entering the square and receiving special religious liberty protection raises far more legitimate concerns than spurious claims about religious individuals surrendering their faith when they walk out the front door.
The second flaw involves the failure to recognize the overlap and tension between the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. Religion is a powerful voice in American society. Religious exercise is often expressive in nature. Prayer, sermons, hymns, proselytizing are speech. They communicate messages. Often, the same activity can be accurately characterized as both religious exercise and speech.
Given this overlap, how are we to understand the argument that in the public square — that is, in public places like sidewalks or the lobby of a government office building — religious exercise should receive “special” protection beyond that provided to secular activities? Does this argument maintain that in these public places religious speech should receive more protection than secular speech?
This contention would violate the most basic and rigorously enforced principle of free speech doctrine: Viewpoint discrimination is prohibited unless it can be justified under the strictest scrutiny courts apply. The Supreme Court has held in numerous cases, such as Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001), that religion is a viewpoint of speech. Accordingly, free speech doctrine prohibits government from engaging in viewpoint discrimination by providing religious expression and speakers lesser or greater protection than secular expression and speakers receive in the same marketplace of ideas. If the government prohibits leafletting or soliciting in the lobby of government office buildings, the standard of review for that regulation of speech should be applied with equal rigor, without regard to whether those distributing leaflets or soliciting funds consider their activities to be required by their faith.
Thus, even if we are discussing access to the open public places in our society, the public or town square, while religion cannot be denied access to such locations, when the religious exercise at issue is expression, it is not at all clear that it can be provided special protection beyond that provided to secular speech.
Alan Brownstein is a professor of law emeritus at the University of California, Davis School of Law. He has written numerous articles for academic journals and opinion pieces for other media on a range of constitutional law subjects. He is a member of the American Law Institute and served on the Legal Committee of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union. He received his B.A. degree from Antioch College and earned his J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School, where he served as a Case Editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Fatima says the Taliban have been hunting her since the U.S. withdrew from the country a year ago.
Speaking from an undisclosed location in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the former translator who worked with a U.S-headquartered relief organization said she is now in hiding, fearful of being found out by the new regime.
“The Taliban came to my father and told him they knew his daughter was working with U.S. ‘spies’. [They] don’t like women working with U.S. projects,” Fatima, whose name has been changed at her request, told The Hill.
“I don’t go out. My children don’t go out. My parents live with other family members because they are scared.”
Fatima, 36, is one of many Afghan women who say that they’ve been let down by the U.S. and Western allies after two decades fighting in Afghanistan. Now at the mercy of the Taliban, they say they have not only lost all freedoms, but are struggling to feed their families amid tightening restrictions and a nosediving economy.
“Before, all girls and women were free to go to school, to work, go out for fun, or wear whatever clothes they wanted,” said Shaista Safi, 34, a former Afghan government employee and member of Afghanistan Women’s Solidarity Team, which still protests against the Taliban government despite the threat of reprisals.
Afghan girls read the Quran in the Noor Mosque outside the city of Kabul, Afghanistan. Associated Press-Ebrahim Noroozi
“But now we don’t have any of these freedoms. We don’t go to school. We don’t have jobs. We don’t have the freedom to go out, or to travel without a man. We don’t even have our basic rights. No work. No food. No education,” she said through an Islamabad-based Afghan translator who managed to flee last year.
During 20 years in Afghanistan, the U.S. made empowerment of girls and women a top priority of its mission in the country.
In 2001, at the start of the war, then first lady Laura Bush kicked off “a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the Al Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban.”
A decade later, during the Obama administration in 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged to Afghan women that “we will not abandon you” and vowed to “stand” with them “always.”
In July, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken conceded that “women and girls have largely been erased from public life” under the Taliban.
“It’s a terrible waste. It’s especially difficult to accept because we all remember how different it was not so very long ago.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken
There were indeed slow but steady signs of progress for Afghan women over the last two decades.
A 20-year review by UNESCO, for example, found that the number of girls in secondary school rose from around 5,000 in 2001 — the year of the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion — to around 90,000 in 2018.
Additionally, by 2020, about 27 percent of the Afghan parliament was composed of women — giving them an important voice in their own government.
Soon after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, the Biden administration appointed Rina Amiri, a former U.S. government adviser, as special envoy for Afghan women, girls and human rights. It also launched a “consultative platform” for Afghan women and civil society in May this year to deepen the U.S. government’s engagement in the country.
Amnesty International says, women and girls face a bleak future in which these rights have been largely rescinded.Associated Press-Ebrahim Noroozi
However, that has done little to curb the sense of betrayal felt by Afghan women like Fatima, who at least want U.S. help in escaping the militants now in control of the country.
“I don’t think the U.S. has completed the promises it made,” says Fatima, who remains in hiding along with her husband, a former defense lawyer.
“Both my husband and I had made a beautiful life for ourselves, but now we both are jobless. We are living at home. Sometimes we cannot even find food for my children. We [get] the money to feed our children, rent or clothes from a shelter.”
Fereshta Abbasi, a London-based researcher with Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said girls are banned from attending secondary school, making any attempt to attend university an impossible dream.
And while some women are technically allowed to attend university, harsh conditions imposed by the Taliban — including a gender segregation policy — make it almost impossible for them to go.
“It’s been exactly one year that girls haven’t gone to school,” Abbasi adds. “In the next couple of years, we won’t have any girls who are eligible or qualified to go to university.”
Virtually all aspects of life have been dramatically altered for Afghan women. Before the fall of Kabul, women were allowed to travel without a man, and — at least in urban centers — were able to go to work and to parks.
Now, Amnesty International says, women and girls face a bleak future in which these rights have been largely rescinded.
“The Taliban are deliberately depriving millions of women and girls of their human rights, and subjecting them to systematic discrimination,” said Agnès Callamard, the group secretary general, in July.
“If the international community fails to act, it will be abandoning women and girls in Afghanistan, and undermining human rights everywhere.”
The Taliban will not allow girls back to secondary school. Some girls and parents are trying to find ways to keep education from stalling for a generation of young women. Associated Press-Ebrahim Noroozi
Women are also less likely to qualify for U.S. visas that might allow them to leave the country.
“I weep. … Every day I see posts from other people who have money ready and are waiting for a flight or for their visas or an interview but can’t get out,” said Fatima. “Like me, I’m a woman and I worked for the U.S. government and for women’s rights, but unfortunately I remain in Afghanistan.”
According to statistics from Association of Wartime Allies (AWA), a member-based organization focused on saving the lives of Afghan and Iraqi applicants for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV), women make up less than 10 percent of the at-risk Afghan community who are able to apply for an SIV, due to men holding most of the military-related jobs making them eligible for the program.
However, the State Department told The Hill that it does not track statistics for visas broken down by gender.
It added that it continues to receive and process submissions for Afghans who may be eligible for referral to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.
“We also continue to identify ways to support other Afghans at risk,” a State Department spokesperson added.
Now activists are demanding that the U.S. and the West open more avenues for women looking to seek asylum.
According to Laura Deitz and Sara Gilliam, the co-founders of Task Force Nyx, an NGO that provides emergency humanitarian support to the most at-risk women activists, a significant portion of Afghan women employed by foreign organizations were tasked with sensitive jobs, such as running safehouses for victims of domestic violence or serving as legal advisers for victims of gender-based violence.
Despite the fact that these roles were often extremely risky, Dietz said women who did the work haven’t been given any sort of visa or referral pathways. Since the fall of Kabul, many of these women have been detained — and some tortured — by Taliban authorities, she said.
“We’ve given them absolutely nowhere to go, and that isn’t just ‘we’, as in the United States, to be quite honest. That’s we, the West,” Gillam adds. “That’s where the global community should really be standing up for these women.”
And while the international community struggles to find solutions, Afghan women are struggling to see a future that looks anything like what the U.S. promised over the past two decades.
“I’ve had an ache in my heart for months from worrying too much. I know I cannot have a future in Afghanistan and I don’t have an avenue to leave,” Fatima says. “My daughters are seven and five. They must go to school at this age. I get depressed when I think of their future.”
The State Department in an emailed response to The Hill’s request for comment for this article said, “Our commitment to the people of Afghanistan is enduring. We will support Afghans in as many ways as we can by providing humanitarian assistance in partnership with the international community.”
“We recognize it is currently extremely difficult for Afghans to depart Afghanistan or find a way to enter a third country, and they may face significant challenges fleeing to safety. The United States continues to call for safe passage for all those who wish to leave Afghanistan. We call on the Taliban to allow freedom of movement for all Afghans and strongly encourage Afghanistan’s neighbors and other countries to allow entry for Afghans seeking protection.”
-State Department spokesperson in an email to The Hill.
Even amid worsening conditions, some Afghan women in the country have resisted the Taliban.
As the world marked the one year anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan this month, around 40 women in Kabul took to the streets — despite the threat to their own safety — to protest their government’s hard line, fundamentalist policies.
This resistance began mostly as an online campaign and has been most notable in Kabul, where on Aug. 13 Taliban fighters were forced to use guns to disperse a protest by women demanding “bread, work and freedom”. Women at the protest told the BBC that previous protests had been swiftly stamped out, often resulting in participants being beaten.
Resistance has also spread to social media, where Afghan women and their supporters abroad have taken to sites including Twitter and Instagram to call on the international community to take action, using the hashtag “BanTalibanTravel,” which calls on the UN to re-apply a travel ban on the Taliban’s senior leadership.
An open letter from 15 organizations to the UN Security Council was careful to note that allowing a travel ban exemption for Taliban officials to expire would be a targeted gesture — applying to fewer than 15 people — but would send a strong message.
“This action would not hurt ordinary Afghans, yet would effectively send a message that there is international accountability for the Taliban,” the letter said.
The Taliban government itself is far from the only challenge facing Afghan women today.
Research released by Women for Women International in March also highlighted deteriorating access to health care and water as a result of deteriorating infrastructure and a lack of services.
As an example, Abbasi notes that her 40-year-old aunt in the country’s Ghazni province died a “totally preventable death” as a result of a health care system unable to provide even basic services.
“The lack of a health care system and health care services definitely impacts everyone but the effects are stronger on women, especially pregnant women and those who are breastfeeding,” she said.
According to Abbasi, while some aid has been dispatched to the country in the past 12 months, the West’s refusal to recognize the Taliban government continues to stifle the banking system and wider economy.
Afghan women and their supporters abroad have taken to sites including Twitter and Instagram to call on the international community to take action, using the hashtag “BanTalibanTravel”. Associated Press-Ebrahim Noroozi
Activists are advocating for the U.S. to release $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan central bank funds in order to help the Afghan people. However, U.S. officials said last week that they had no immediate plans to do so, citing abiding terrorism concerns related to the Taliban.
“By withholding them, we are responsible for the continuing and deepening humanitarian crisis,” said Marie Clarke, chief programs officer for Women for Women International.
Heather Barr, the co-director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, said the U.S. and its allies must take concrete steps that go beyond condemnation of the Taliban.
“It’s quite clear at this point who the Taliban are and what vision they have for Afghanistan, but what we keep asking is what will the world do about this in 2022,” she said. “There’s been very little resembling actual concern where you do something as opposed to a level of concern where you just write a statement.”
A Taliban spokesperson did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
Prior to the fall of Kabul, Barr recalls, the international community was quick to “pat themselves” on the back for their work with Afghan women, such as through the State Department’s yearly Women of Courage Awards.
“I would have felt like there was some kind of feeling for them. Maybe not an obligation, but that it would be embarrassing to one day just say ‘good luck ladies, take care’,” she said. “’You can’t go to school anymore, girls. That’s tough.’”
Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania and a state senator, appeared in a faculty picture at the Army War College dressed in a Confederate soldier’s uniform, according to a copy of the photo obtained by Reuters.
Reuters first obtained a copy of the photo from the War College, which is located in the borough of Carlisle, Pa., following a Freedom of Information Act request. The news outlet reported that the photo is of the 2013-2014 faculty in the Department of Military Strategy, Plans, and Operations, where Mastriano worked at that time.
Mastriano is seen wearing a gray uniform and cap and holding a long Civil War-era gun.
Reuters reported that people familiar with the photo said faculty were allowed to dress as historical figures for the picture at the time. One person in the photo is holding an aviator’s helmet, and at least one other person in the photo is clearly dressed up, but Mastriano is the only one wearing a Confederate soldier’s uniform.
Mastriano’s campaign and the War College did not immediately return requests from The Hill for comment.
Confederate statues and symbols around the U.S. have received national scrutiny in recent years, especially since the 2015 shooting at a Black church in Charleston, S.C. The shooter promoted white supremacist views and posted Confederate battle flags online ahead of the shooting.
Reuters reported that the photo showing Mastriano in the uniform was removed from the wall where it hung with other annual faculty photos after the outlet requested the picture.
The Pentagon effectively banned the displaying of the Confederate flag in July 2020 by not including it in an updated list of flags that are allowed. This decision came in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was killed in police custody in Minneapolis.
The military has also sought to remove other segregationist symbols since rolling out the policy, Reuters reported.
The War College told Reuters that school officials reviewed all art, texts and images shown at the college in 2020 but missed the photo with Mastriano.
The college told Reuters that the photo was removed because it did not meet its values.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, tweeted that Mastriano wore the “uniform of traitors” who fought to defend slavery. He said it is “deeply offensive” and shows that he is unfit to be governor.
With Friday’s release of the redacted affidavit from the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, the largest Rorschach test in history seemed to play out on cable television. Instead of ink blots, pundits and politicians stared at pages of solid black lines and offered strikingly different “ah-ha” observations.
There already are a plethora of news and opinion columns focusing on five things we learned from the redacted affidavit.
Equally telling, I think, is what did not happen with the affidavit’s release.
Due to a series of advance leaks from the government, we already knew some of the affidavit’s contents and the results of the search. The redacted affidavit had important details on past communications and the documents that were previously retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, including the discovery of a large amount of classified documents, from the relatively mundane “confidential” to the highly classified “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information” (TS/SCI).
It also was clear that a criminal case could be brought on such allegations, though there is considerable factual and legal uncertainty about any conviction or appeal.
Not clear is whether the Justice Department intends to prosecute the former president. It is entirely possible that beneath the affidavit’s blacked-out lines lurks evidence that the government is building a case for prosecution. However, if one were to go by the unredacted portions, it is also possible this was just a heavy-handed effort to retrieve government material from Mar-a-Lago.
More striking are three things that did not happen.
The most remarkable thing that occurred on Friday is that nothing occurred on Friday. Only a week before, the Justice Department insisted that the court should not release a single line of the affidavit and that any substantive disclosure would unleash of parade of horribles, from damaging national security to sacrificing witnesses.
For those of us who have litigated cases against the Justice Department, it was an all-too-familiar claim by a department notorious for over-classification and over-redaction arguments.
For a week, media pundits mouthed the same exaggerated claims and challenged those of us who argued that it was clearly possible to release a redacted affidavit; liberals suddenly shuddered at the thought of doubting the Justice Department. Sites like Above the Law claimed that calls for greater transparency and a redacted affidavit were akin to “publishing the nuclear codes on the back of every milk carton.” Even after the judge agreed that a redacted affidavit could be released in the public interest, experts balked at the notion as dangerous in light of Justice’s earlier warnings.
As I noted earlier, affidavits contain background legal and factual sections that ordinarily can be unsealed without disclosing sensitive information. That is precisely what happened here. Pages of the affidavit were released that confirmed the legal claims as well as some of the factual allegations. As in other cases, the Justice Department had falsely claimed that no disclosures could be made without redacting so much as to make the document unintelligible. Yet, no one seemed to notice.
Something else did not happen. In rejecting Justice’s claims that nothing in the affidavit should be released, U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart set out an appellate process by which he could overrule Justice in ordering disclosures beyond those proposed by the department. Given Justice’s well-documented history of over-redacting, it was a promising start.
Then, over the course of the week, media reported a series of leaks of information that clearly was part of the affidavit. At the same time that the government was demanding total secrecy, it was selectively leaking details seemingly designed to put Trump on the defensive.
Given that history, there was every reason for the court to be skeptical of the first cut of the redactions. Yet the court appears to have accepted the government’s redactions without question. It effectively found that the Justice Department hit the Goldilocks spot on the first try in getting the redactions just right to maximize disclosures.
This is where those black lines actually may tell us something. While there were key points disclosed, the redactions of the timeline of events notably ended exactly where the leaked information ended. Many of us had stated that the critical period of interest was between June 8 and after the raid on August 8. The June date involved a demand for greater security on the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, with which the Trump team complied. The redacted affidavit only added one day of new information in noting that on June 9, Trump’s counsel acknowledged the receipt of their letter. Then the black-out followed. That information could explain why a raid was needed, as opposed to a second subpoena or a more tailored warrant.
There is every reason to believe that what followed contained some facts that could be released on the FBI’s communications with the Trump team or the breakdown of such communications. After all, the Trump team already knows about that. Yet the government is saying that everything which occurred in that critical month cannot be disclosed in even the smallest detail.
The court could have pushed for additional disclosures but chose to call it a day, based on government representations that more would cause harm. Yet this is the same department that maintained all of the pages released this week could not be released without causing harm.
There is still more that can be done by the court. One option is the special master requested, belatedly, by Trump’s team. I previously argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland should have proposed such an appointment to assure the public that this was not a pretextual search using sensitive documents as an excuse for a massive seizure. The scope of the warrant was ridiculously broad, allowing the seizure of virtually every document in the storage room and every document generated during Trump’s presidency. A special master could have sorted through this mass of material and separated privileged or immaterial documents. That would add to the legitimacy of an otherwise unlimited search.
That also did not happen. However, a special master could still serve the same interests of transparency and legitimacy. By dividing these documents into classified material, unclassified but defense-related information, and unclassified material we would have a better understanding of the scope and seriousness of any alleged crimes.
That is why the most curious thing about the redacted affidavit is what did not happen. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze,” a police inspector asks Sherlock Holmes if anything about a crime scene bothered him. The brilliant detective responds, “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” When the confused inspector objects that “the dog did nothing in the night-time,” Holmes replies: “That was the curious incident.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) does many valuable things: It reduces prescription drug prices, combats climate change and makes corporations pay a minimum tax. One of the more consequential and lasting impacts of the new law, however, could be that it highlights how Congress can move forward with pro-worker legislation. Until the Senate filibuster is reformed, the most likely path for Congress to support workers and their labor unions lies with budget reconciliation — the process used to pass the IRA with a simple majority in the Senate.
Creating good jobs — those that pay well and offer decent benefits — is central to the purpose of the IRA. As President Biden remarked earlier this month, the new law will “create thousands of good-paying jobs, apprenticeship opportunities and manufacturing jobs for clean energy construction projects, solar projects, wind projects, clean hydrogen projects, carbon capture projects and so much more.”
The bill does this through policies such as prevailing wage, buy-American and apprenticeship utilization requirements attached to various tax credits. Prevailing wage laws ensure that government spending does not drive down market standards that workers — particularly unionized workers — have been able to maintain. Buy-American preferences will support and create jobs for domestically produced clean technology and materials. Apprenticeship utilization requirements create high-skilled, educated workers who receive on-the-job training and decent pay, often because of a union contract.
With the filibuster increasingly used to block popular legislation, budget reconciliation has become a standard way for Congress to consider major policy, from the Inflation Reduction Act to former President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) to repeated failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
While a number of previous budget reconciliation bills have included provisions helpful to workers, such as a 1990 wage requirement for dialysis treatments under Medicare and a paid family and medical leave tax credit in the TCJA, these pro-worker elements were relatively small and ancillary to the goals of the broader legislation. The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), a key COVID-19 recovery package that passed in March 2021 through the budget reconciliation process, began to change this dynamic by including a host of pro-worker policies.
The IRA goes even further to completely flip the traditional script — and makes clear that pro-worker policy can be front and center in reconciliation.
Unfortunately, some of the most important and popular pro-worker bills may not fit with the arcane rules of the budget reconciliation process. For example, an increase in the federal minimum wage was scrapped from the ARPA due to the so-called “Byrd” rule.
Still, there are many policies that can walk the reconciliation tightrope. Some, such as increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board, higher fines for labor law violations and a tax deduction for union dues were included in versions of budget reconciliation bills in 2021 and 2022.
Many more policies could likely comply. Corporate union-busting activities should no longer be tax-deductible business expenses. When the government subsidizes firms with tax credits or other incentives, job-quality standards should always be included. Companies that misclassify employees as independent contractors should stop receiving favorable tax treatment. The possibilities could go on and on.
The IRA is not just a win for workers today, but importantly, also highlights the possibilities for more pro-worker policymaking under existing congressional rules. Workers are clamoring for action — from their extremely strong support for unions to the growing number of strikes and organizing campaigns. Policymakers should seize the opportunity in future reconciliation bills to help workers out.
