More than half of the Americans questioned in a new poll they would support a law that clarifies that an acting vice president can’t reject state-certified electoral votes.
The Morning Consult/Politico poll, published on Wednesday, found that 62 percent of respondents said that they would support Congress passing such a law, while 14 percent said they would not.
Forty-eight percent of respondents also said that they would support a federal law that requires 20 percent of both congressional chambers to force a vote on objecting to electoral votes in U.S. presidential elections, instead of one member from each, while 18 percent of respondents said they will oppose it.
Sixty-four percent, meanwhile, said that they would support legislation that ensures resources for both the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates to aid in the transition if there is any reasonable doubt about the election outcome, as 13 percent of respondents such a measure.
And when asked about Congress passing a law that doubles the penalties for those who intimidate election officials, 74 percent of respondents said they would support that type of legislation, while 11 percent of respondents would oppose it.
A bipartisan group of senators last week unveiled plans to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which clarifies that the sitting vice president doesn’t have the power to overturn a presidential election and makes it harder for lawmakers to object to the Electoral College results.
The proposed measure comes in response to the Jan 6, 2021 attack at the Capitol, where a mob of then-President Trump’s supporters stormed the building in an effort to stop the certification of President Biden’s victory, resulting in the deaths of five people.
Fifty-one percent of respondents in the new survey said they believe Republican lawmakers have some responsibility for what transpired during the rioting, as 38 percent of respondents that lawmakers are not responsible for what happened on Jan. 6.
The Morning Consult/Politico poll was conducted from July 22 to July 24 with a total of 2,006 respondents participating in the survey. The poll’s margin of error is 2 percentage points.
The first week of the death penalty trial of Nikolas Cruz — the person who killed 17 people and wounded 17 more on Feb. 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. — was nothing short of gut wrenching.
Cases like Cruz’s pose a painful dilemma for death penalty abolitionists.
Opponents of capital punishment have made substantial progress in their efforts to end it by shifting the national conversation away from the horrors of cases like Cruz’s; instead, they stress the day-to-day realities of a death penalty system that risks executing the innocent, that is plagued by racial discrimination, and that is very costly to administer.
Each time a horrible crime grips the nation’s attention, abolitionists have to decide whether to rally to the murderer’s defense and offer arguments about why even cold-blooded, mass murderers should not be executed. But what words can anyone say to explain why a killer like Cruz should not be put to death?
In the Parkland case, should death penalty opponents take a pass and stay silent, fearful that not doing so would damage the abolitionist cause?
Cruz’s guilt was never in doubt. In October of last year, he entered guilty pleas for the murders or attempted murders of the people he shot.
At that time he also apologized to his victims and their families and asked them to spare his life. “I am very sorry,” Cruz said, “for what I did, and I have to live with it every day … It brings me nightmares, and I can’t live with myself sometimes … I am really sorry, and I hope you’ll give me a chance to try to help others. I believe it’s your decision — not the jury’s — whether I live or die. I’m sorry.”
But Florida law requires that the sentencing decision be made by a jury after what is called a sentencing trial. A death sentence requires a unanimous jury decision. Jury selection in the Parkland case began in April and consumed many weeks.
Last week, Satz began trying to persuade the jury to sentence Cruz to death by reading, one at a time, the names of each of Cruz’s victims and recounted the number of times each one of them had been shot. He showed the jurors videos taken inside the classrooms during Cruz’s rampage and had them listen to the sound of gunshots and the children and their teachers.
The jury will also tour the school building where the shooting took place, which has been closed since day of the shooting.
When they present their case, Cruz’s lawyers plan to show that he had a very difficult and troubled childhood and suffers from serious mental health problems. He had tried unsuccessfully to get treatment.
But by the time they get to a chance to do so, the prosecution’s story will have reached well beyond the courtroom and made headlines across this country. It is impossible for anyone, including the most ardent opponents of capital punishment, not to be shocked, horrified and deeply moved by what we will have read or heard.
As the New York Times reports, “In modern times, no American gunman who killed so many people in a single attack has survived to face trial until now.”
In that case the court approved a Georgia statute which required among other things “a separate sentencing hearing following a jury’s finding that a capital murder has been committed.” In the sentencing hearing “the jury must find the existence of one or more specified aggravating circumstances” and consider almost any mitigating factor that the defense wishes to present to the jury. While bifurcated trials are not constitutionally required, soon after Gregg, almost all death penalty states adopted the Georgia model.
For a long time, commentators have noted that such penalty phase hearings are strange and unsettling.
In 2004 Dalia Lithwick called them “trials of the heart.” In such trials, she said, the jury often hears that “The defendant was abused as a baby; the victim was a wonderful wife and mother. Witnesses are, in short, encouraged to take the stand and emote — describing how desperately they miss the victim, or how tragic the life circumstances of the defendant really were.”
Cruz may not have been technically right when he said that the victims and the families of the survivors would decide his fate, but as the prosecution presented its case last week, one couldn’t help but wonder whether there was a glimmer of truth in what he said.
As Lithwick puts it, “The penalty phase no longer represents a contest between the defendant and the state but, rather, becomes a contest between the defendant and the victims’ survivors.”
In this contest, it can be hard for opponents of the death penalty to find a place to stand.
Arguing that Cruz should not get the death penalty risks seeming heartless or insensitive to the horror of what he did. And doing so would come at the cost of associating the campaign against the death penalty with one of America’s most heinous killers. Concentrating efforts on the case of one infamous criminal might divert attention from the daily realities of capital punishment and the damage it does to our democracy and our culture.
Far from the excruciating drama of the Parkland case, in many less celebrated cases, the death penalty continues to legitimize vengeance, intensify racial divisions, risk condemning the innocent, and damage our political and legal institutions in ways that are now being recognized by the American people.
But the Parkland case offers abolitionists the chance to explain that whatever we think about Cruz and the crimes he committed, the choice that the jury is being asked to make is not just about what he did or what they may think he deserves.
It is also about those who impose punishment and the society that authorizes it.
At a time when gun violence is plaguing American streets and communities, abolitionists should ask all of us to consider whether responding to even the most gruesome and horrific kind of violence with more violence serves us well. If they are ever to end the death penalty for everyone, they cannot avoid the cases of even those who society brands the “worst of the worst.”
As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote almost a century ago, “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” In the Parkland case, the jury must consider what kind of example it wants to set.
The Supreme Court’s six-member conservative majority has increasingly adhered to a jurisprudence that seeks to enforce the Constitution’s “original meaning,” which was “fixed” at the time of ratification. In case after case, the majority has discovered arrays of mostly obscure historical sources revealing that the original meaning of the Constitution just happens to coincide with the objectives of the Republican Party. It is poor judging and worse history.
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for example, Justice Samuel Alito looked to what he called our nation’s “history and tradition” to declare that the Constitution “does not confer a right to abortion.” Neither the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons,” nor the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of liberty and equal protection, or even the Eighth Amendment’s recognition of unenumerated rights “retained by the people” met Alito’s historical test, which included a survey of “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century.”
Alito’s tour of historical sources invoked such “eminent common-law authorities” as Sir Matthew Hale, a British jurist in the late 1600s, who once sentenced two “witches” to death and is best known today for advising juries to disbelieve rape victims.
Justice Clarence Thomas likewise relied on “the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” to strike down a century-old New York handgun licensing statute in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, although it involved a fair bit of intellectual contortion.
First, Thomas had to dismiss the relevance of “boatloads” of gun control laws and ordinances, dating back to the founding era, as insufficiently similar to the challenged New York law. Then he explained that the absence of a “well-established and representative historical analogue” rendered the New York law unconstitutional.
Today’s world would be unrecognizable to the drafters of the Second Amendment – with unforeseeable population density, powerful semi-automatic weapons and frequent mass shootings — but that counts for nothing in Thomas’s historical method. His only concern is whether a contemporary gun control law maps directly, by his own lights, onto practices in the 19th century.
Not to be outdone, Justice Neil Gorsuch “focused on original meaning and history” to determine, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, that a local school board could not require a football coach to refrain from demonstrative prayers, joined by team members, at midfield following every game. The board was rightly concerned that some students might feel excluded from their classmates or, worse, pressured to join the prayers. Gorsuch figured they could just get over it, citing “a long constitutional tradition under which learning how to tolerate diverse expressive activities has always been ‘part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society.’”
In each of these cases, and others, the court’s conservative majority claimed to find support for its decisions in ages past, with scores of references to long-dead writers, philosophers and political figures. As the ACLU’s David Cole put it, they are committed to a method that “mirror[s] eighteenth- and nineteenth-century laws,” leaving our rights at best “frozen by conditions in early America.”
The justices bolster their decisions with a litany of old sources, sometimes ranging over centuries, as though they had actually engaged in objective research to determine the exact legal, social and political conditions surrounding adoption of the relevant constitutional amendments. In fact, they lack the time, resources and education to do anything of the sort.
A case is typically pending in the Supreme Court for a year or so, from the time the court accepts it for review until the decision is announced. The Dobbs case, for example, was accepted on May 17, 2021, with briefing completed on Oct. 13. That gave Alito (a public and international affairs major at Princeton) about seven months to research, draft and circulate his opinion before it was issued on June 24, 2022.
That is far too short a time for even the most single-minded, full-time professional historian to accurately survey abortion law and practices spanning the Atlantic over many centuries, as Alito purports to have done (while also writing another 19 majority, concurring and dissenting opinions, and participating in an additional 49 cases then before the Supreme Court).
What should be obvious is that Alito, with his clerks’ assistance, plucked his sources from partisan briefs, selectively plugging them into his opinion, where they provided ostensible support. Granting that he checked the citations for accuracy, there is virtually no chance that he engaged in primary archival research of the sort that would take a history dissertation writer years to complete. Gorsuch (political science, Princeton) and Thomas (English literature, Holy Cross) were operating under the same time and resource constraints. Thomas admitted in a footnote that he bases his opinions “on the historical record compiled by the parties,” a practice that allows him to pick and choose the sources that best fit his narrative.
The result is a display of faux erudition. The originalist justices affect mastery of a vast literature, when in truth they barely scratch the surface, with no acknowledgement of what they missed, misunderstood, exaggerated or omitted.
Even in the best of circumstances, historical evidence is hard to pin down. As the British historian E.H. Carr put it, facts are like “fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will [be] determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.”
Perhaps that is why the late Justice Antonin Scalia had reservations about law office history. “I’m an originalist,” he explained on National Public Radio, “not a nut.” Those were the days.
Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the author of “Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial” and three other books on 19th century legal history.
Three in four Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents surveyed in a new CNN poll said they don’t want President Biden as their party’s presidential nominee in 2024.
The poll found that 75 percent said they want someone else as the Democratic nominee in 2024, while 25 percent supported Biden.
Forty-two percent said they don’t want Biden to be the party’s 2024 nominee because they don’t want him to be reelected as president, while 32 percent said that they don’t believe Biden can defeat a Republican nominee in an election, pollsters discovered.
By comparison, 51 percent of Democrats questioned in a similar poll earlier this year said they wanted a different candidate to be their presidential nominee in the next election, while 45 percent of respondents showed interest in Biden running again.
Fifty-five percent of Republican respondents in the new survey, meanwhile, said that they don’t want former President Trump to be their party’s nominee in 2024, while 44 percent of respondents said the opposite.
This is a 6-point increase from a poll earlier this year when 49 percent of Republican respondents said they wanted a different candidate to be their presidential nominee, and 50 percent of respondents showed interest in Trump running for office again.
A majority of respondents in the new poll — 54 percent — also said that they believe American democracy is under attack, while 40 percent of respondents said American democracy is being tested but not under attack. Six percent of respondents said that democracy isn’t under attack.
The CNN poll was conducted from July 22 to July 24 with a total of 1,002 respondents participating in the survey. The poll’s margin of error is 4 percentage points.
A survey of likely 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary voter released on Tuesday found that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg received slightly more support than Biden.
Buttigieg had 17 percent support in the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Survey Center Granite Poll compared to Biden’s 16 percent.
Vice President Harris was supported by 6 percent of respondents in that survey, which had a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points.
As he leaves for work each day, Jeff Kelly, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Fish and Game Department director looks out at the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) crossing the Missouri River near his home. “I pray that the pipeline does not break today,” he often says to himself, thinking of the more than 500,000 barrels of oil that flow underneath Lake Oahe daily.
DAPL crosses the Missouri River and Lake Oahe about 800 feet upstream of the tribe’s Reservation and Cannonball Community, where Director Kelly lives. For more than five years, Standing Rock has lived with the looming threat that an oil spill may destroy treaty homelands, natural and cultural resources, sacred sites, and drinking waters.
The proximity of DAPL to Standing Rock is no coincidence. The pipeline was originally routed to cross the Missouri River just north of Bismarck, N.D., but concerns that an oil spill could pollute the drinking waters of the state capital convinced project planners to go back to the drawing board. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hastily approved a new pipeline route near the tribe using a streamlined permitting process that, this time, concluded with an issuance of a Finding of No Significant Impact.
Today, with the worsening impacts of drought and climate change, the threat to the Standing Rock community is even more grave. The Missouri River is currently at historically low water levels, making boat launches near the pipeline unusable and surrounded by mud. If an oil spill were to occur, emergency response boat travel around the DAPL crossing—the critical zone for oil spill remediation—would be close to impossible in the increasingly shallow depths.
The tribes’ concerns and needs around the pipeline keep getting ignored. Just last year, the Army Corps failed to disclose critical data that Standing Rock needed to draft its own threat assessments and emergency response plans. The tribe felt they had no viable remaining option but to withdraw their status as a Cooperating Agency.
H.R. 2021, the Environmental Justice for All Act, offers a solution for both Standing Rock and countless other communities across the country that are facing these kinds of injustices. The bill, which is being voted on by the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources this Wednesday, July 27, would ensure that the communities most affected by federal actions like permits and environmental reviews have a seat at the table in the decision-making process.
The Environmental Justice For All Act also adds to the considerations that federal agencies must make before issuing Clean Water and Clean Air Act permits. If a project cannot demonstrate that there will be no harm to human health, the permit will not be issued. For Standing Rock, that would mean that the Army Corps would have had to consider the serious threats of DAPL to the water quality of the Missouri River, the tribe’s primary source of drinking water, before issuing a permit.
In addition, the Environmental Justice For All Act requires federal agencies to prepare a “community impact report” and mandates early involvement opportunities for affected communities under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Army Corps would not be able to get away with ignoring communities like Standing Rock again.
While the situation for Standing Rock is unquestionably dire, it’s unfortunately nothing new. Across the country, polluting industries have been expediting dirty, dangerous projects in communities that don’t have enough political influence or high-income brackets to stop them. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight for transparency, accountability, and justice is one that resonates with far too many Americans.
Until Congress passes the Environmental Justice For All Act, this disturbing status quo is the law of the land. When the committee takes a vote on the bill this Wednesday, it’s an opportunity for us to finally take a stand and show communities like Standing Rock that their lives and wellbeing are more valuable than another industry profit windfall. It’s a moment to show the 140 million Americans who are poor or low income that their health and safety can’t be bought and sold.
For Standing Rock, environmental justice has been elusive since the U.S. government first flooded the forests, wildlife, and agricultural lands along the Missouri River in order to create Lake Oahe. DAPL adds another grim chapter to that story. With the Environmental Justice For All Act, we have a chance to start over with a new history that treats every American with the dignity and respect they deserve. Let’s not miss it.
Janet Alkire is chairwoman of the Standing Rock Tribe and Raúl M. Grijalva is chairman of the Natural Resources Committee.
Joseph Stalin was wrong about most things, but he was spot on in allegedly saying that “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” The Russo-Ukrainian War provides ample evidence of the truth of Stalin’s remark.
We were shocked when the first Russian missiles struck Ukrainian cities. We were more shocked when Russian missiles hit an infirmary and a theater serving as a hideout for scores of children — in Mariupol, a city that was subsequently leveled. We were still more shocked when the Ukrainian armed forces uncovered mass graves in several towns north of Kyiv. Bucha, one of those towns, even became emblematic of Russian atrocities and therefore became an obligatory stop for foreign dignitaries hoping to express their outrage.
The Bucha revelations occurred in early April. Since then, our capacity for genuine outrage has visibly diminished. Missiles continue to strike civilian targets; Ukrainians continue to die; Russian leaders continue to boast of their genocidal intentions; the West continues to shake its collective head. In reality, however, our outrage is less outraged than it used to be. We’ve gotten used to daily reports of senseless death and destruction. We’ve gotten tired of following a genocide-in-progress.
That’s not too surprising. The ongoing genocide lacks drama. It lacks immediacy and overwhelming presence. Scores or more of non-combatant Ukrainians are being killed every day, and even though the numbers are still far from a million, they are progressively becoming more of a statistic than a tragedy. We are becoming jaded and increasingly unmoved by what seemed to be a river but is now merely a steady stream of death in Ukraine. Western press coverage illustrates this declining interest, with Ukraine moving from screaming headlines on page one to straightforward stories on pages three or four.
But jadedness is also a welcome condition, a happy relief, as it distracts us from an awful reality that our stated commitment to human rights should compel us to end. We all know that genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity. It can’t be excused, and it must be prevented. Theoretically, that is. In fact, we hope that genocides will just go away and stop interfering in our mundane affairs. Because the only way to stop a genocide is to employ some degree of force — whether economic compulsion or military interference. It’s far easier to rail against China for genocidal policies against the Uyghurs. Easier still is to look the other way, as did the Dutch peacekeepers while several thousand Bosnians were taken to Srebrenica to die — or the millions of Germans who pretended that the concentration camps were benign, or the millions of Russians who ignored Stalin’s repressions and the dire reality of the Gulag.
The world’s response to the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides was no less tepid than its response to the Holodomor, Stalin’s famine genocide of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933, and of course the Holocaust. The entire world knew of these and many other crimes and did next to nothing. No country stands absolved of some degree of complicity, both in committing crimes against humanity and in failing to respond to crimes against humanity.
The world’s current genocide fatigue is thus nothing new. The ongoing Russian extermination of Ukrainians for being Ukrainians should distress all of Russia’s sympathizers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, if only because it so strongly resembles their own colonial experiences. But it doesn’t, because they can pretend that the Russians are resisting American imperialism.
The Ukrainian genocide should positively outrage the West. After all, it challenges Europe both normatively and geopolitically. If Russia succeeds in slaughtering tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians without any significant opposition from the collective West, then the European Union, which claims to be a community of values, will be exposed as an amoral institution bereft of the right to laud liberalism, rule of law, and democracy and to oppose war-mongering, revanchism, and imperialism. Such a European Union will not survive long.
But indifference to the Ukrainian genocide will also herald the EU’s geopolitical irrelevance. If Vladimir Putin can get away with genocide, then the West will have signaled to him that he can target any other country and be assured of the West’s silence. That wouldn’t matter if he had no expansionist agenda, but since he hopes to reconstitute some form of imperial Russia, no country on the Russian Federation’s borders will be safe from Russian encroachments on its sovereignty — and that means Estonia and Poland as much as Georgia and Kazakhstan.
Unfortunately, genocide fatigue is so much more comfortable. One can claim to be concerned, while drinking beer and shrugging helplessly. Moreover, claiming that genocide is too strong a word for Putin’s barbarity is one way of pretending that things aren’t quite that bad. Hoping that negotiations with a sociopathic barbarian can produce a lasting peace is another convenient way of pretending genocide isn’t taken place.
But genocide fatigue won’t stop the ongoing genocide in Ukraine. It can only delay the ultimate reckoning and eviscerate the West.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
The White House, lawmakers and the Federal Reserve today will add to an increasingly gloomy outlook about inflation, supply shortages and predictions of recession — in the United States and worldwide.
Economic realities and doomsday predictions are altering this year’s politics and Americans’ overall confidence that the U.S. is on the right track.
The Fed, scrambling to tamp down record inflation, is expected today to announce it will again raise its benchmark interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point (The Hill and CNBC). Arguments are escalating about whether the nation’s central bank is steering the U.S. economy into a short or long period of future contraction or whether slowing U.S. output means the economy is already there. The government on Thursday will report growth in the second quarter (The Hill).
President Biden, who has sounded upbeat notes that a recession can be avoided during a midterm election year, says the employment picture is so strong that it can weather rising prices and the Fed’s aggressive efforts to cool a too-hot economy.
“We’re not going to be in a recession, in my view,” Biden said Monday. “My hope is we go from this rapid growth to steady growth.”
Major U.S. companies have been lobbying Congress to improve the overall economic picture by subsidizing computer chip manufacturing in America and asking Biden to loosen some tariffs levied by the Trump administration on Chinese goods.
The Senate on Tuesday moved a compromise semiconductor bill closer to the finish line after more than a year of halting negotiations and appeared ready to provide $52 billion in subsidies to bolster U.S. competitiveness in an arena considered essential to national security (The Hill). Final Senate votes on the measure are scheduled today, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has pledged to take up the bill as soon as it reaches the House (The Hill).
General Motors on Tuesday reported that its profits fell 40 percent in the three months ending in June as input costs surged amid a global computer chip shortage (The New York Times).
There are growing signs that inflation is shifting some consumers’ shopping habits, according to companies that are among the first to feel the effects (The New York Times). Passing higher prices on to customers has led some to buy less or trade down to cheaper store brands, a trend seen at Unilever, the maker of Dove soap, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Hellmann’s mayonnaise. It’s also a factor at Walmart, which is altering its profit outlook for the year. The company’s profit warning this week in the middle of the quarter was viewed as rare and sparked new worries about how the highest inflation in 40 years is affecting the entire retail sector (The Associated Press).
Bloomberg News: Shoppers spend without splurging, clouding U.S. recession call.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday roiled the debate further by predicting that a global contraction may be at hand. According to its latest report, the likelihood of a worldwide recession is rising. It said the probability of a recession starting in one of the Group of Seven advanced economies was now nearly 15 percent, four times its usual level. And it said some indicators suggested that the U.S. already is in a “technical” recession, which the IMF defines as two consecutive quarters of negative growth (The New York Times).
▪ The Hill: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he will not comment on a House-passed bill protecting gay marriage rights until it reaches the Senate floor.
▪ The Hill: The House is poised to restrict private ownership of big cats with legislation that has a chance to clear the Senate.
▪ The Washington Post: Key Democrats want Joseph Cuffari, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, removed from a probe of missing Secret Service texts tied to Jan. 6.
LEADING THE DAY
➤ POLITICS
Former President Trump on Tuesday made his first appearance in Washington since departing at the end of his term in January 2021 and used the opportunity to repeat falsehoods about the 2020 election, direct his venom at the Jan. 6 committee and hint at a third White House bid in 2024.
The ex-president was addressing an event hosted by the America First Policy Institute, a group of former Trump officials and Cabinet members who are crafting an agenda in preparation for a possible second White House term. While he stuck to the policy script for a while, he veered away a number of times as he usually does, and reinvoked his 2020 loss.
“It was a catastrophe that election. A disgrace to our country,” Trump said, winking at his possible future plans. “We may just have to do it again” (The Associated Press).
Hours after Trump’s address, news emerged that the Department of Justice is investigating the former president’s actions as part of its probe into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
According to The Washington Post, prosecutors have asked witnesses in recent days about conversations with Trump and his allies during that time, including detailed questions about meetings the former president took part in during December 2020 and January 2021. The probe has also obtained phone records from the likes of Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House chief of staff at the end of his term.
▪ NBC News: Attorney General Merrick Garland during a Tuesday interview called the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 probe the “most wide ranging investigation in its history.”
Meanwhile, former Vice President Mike Pence also appeared in Washington on Wednesday and attempted to turn the page once again toward the 2022 elections, but with a wink to his back-and-forth with the former president.
Speaking to the Young America’s Foundation, Pence acknowledged he and former President Trump may differ in their approaches to advancing their agendas as he urged conservatives to focus on the future to win elections.
“I don’t know that the president and I differ on issues. But we may differ on focus,” Pence told attendees on Tuesday morning. “I truly do believe that elections are about the future, and that it’s absolutely essential at a time when so many Americans are hurting, so many families are struggling, that we don’t give way to the temptation to look back” (The Hill).
The former vice president’s appearance coincided with the revelation that his book, titled “So Help Me God,” will be released on Nov. 15 — exactly a week after the midterm elections. According to Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, the memoir will “chronicle [Trump’s] severing of their relationship” due to Pence going ahead with the certification of the electoral results on Jan. 6, 2021.
“This is the inside story of the Trump administration from its second-highest ranking official and of a profound faith that has guided Pence throughout his life,” the publisher said, calling it “the most robust defense of the Trump record of anyone who served in the administration” (The Hill).
▪ The Hill: Trump to hold rally in Wisconsin next month, but Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declines to attend.
▪ Max Greenwood, The Hill: Trump wades into state legislature contests in quest to install loyalists.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has adopted a front-facing role as a party surrogate, endorsing candidates she believes will help Democrats retain control of Congress while pushing moderates to fight harder for the middle class.
With the midterm contests nearing, her supporters approve.
“President Biden has made it clear he intends to run for reelection and has my full support. But in the extremely unlikely event he changes his mind, I hope she runs,” said Charlotte Clymer, a writer and Democratic political strategist. “I would follow Elizabeth Warren anywhere” (The Hill).
IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES
➤ PANDEMIC, POTUS & HEALTH
Still working in isolation at the White House on Tuesday, Biden’s COVID-19 “symptoms have now almost completely resolved” following his Thursday diagnosis and Monday completion of treatment with the antiviral pill Paxlovid, according to his doctor (The Hill). The president has been cleared to resume his exercise routine but will continue to isolate until he tests negative.
More than 4 out of 10 parents with children under age 5 and now eligible to be vaccinated against COVID-19 say they will “definitely not” let their offspring get the shots, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey released on Tuesday. Republican parents are three times as likely as Democratic parents to say they will “definitely not” get their child vaccinated (64 percent vs. 21 percent). Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of parents who are unvaccinated feel the same way. Even among parents who are vaccinated themselves, about 1 in 4 (27 percent) say they will “definitely not” get their young child vaccinated against the coronavirus (CNN).
🦠Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), 76, announced on Monday through his office that he contracted COVID-19 — his second bout since January (Baltimore Sun).
“Long COVID” can leave people with more health deficits than previously understood, according to an expansive study published in Nature. Hair loss, loss of libido, incontinence and erectile dysfunction in men are among the symptoms. More common complaints: loss of smell, shortness of breath, chest pain and fever, nausea and vomiting, bowel incontinence, fatigue and limb swelling. Researchers from the University of Birmingham analyzed the health records of some 2.4 million people in the United Kingdom, finding that those who had been infected with COVID-19 reported 63 symptoms more frequently 12 weeks after they were infected compared to those who hadn’t been infected. The study divided symptoms into three categories: respiratory issues, mental health and cognitive problems (New York Post).
If you’re in Austria and test positive for COVID-19 but are asymptomatic, you will no longer have to quarantine, the country’s health minister announced Tuesday. People in that situation by next month will simply be required to wear masks, which they can remove if they are outdoors or able to maintain distance from other people (The Associated Press).
NBC News veteran journalist Pete Williams, who retires at the end of the month after 29 years with the network and has been a go-to guest moderator on WETA’s Washington Week, has attracted laudatory farewell news coverage and send-offs (Poynter, Variety and AdWeek). NBC announced the Supreme Court beat will be handled on an interim basis by senior White House correspondent Kelly O’Donnell, who layers the court into other responsibilities, Justice Department and intelligence coverage will be handled by Ken Dilanian, and Julia Ainsley becomes NBC’s homeland security correspondent. Williams was feted Tuesday night at the Cosmos Club in Washington by colleagues and admirers, including NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Kristen Welker, Peter Alexander and Mike Memoli; CNN’s David Chalian, Kaitlan Collins and Sam Feist; and The Hill’s editor-in-chief Bob Cusack.
■ Democratic meddling in GOP primaries has reached a new level of absurd, by Henry Olsen, columnist, The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/3b5sO8S
■ Walmart rings more alarm bells for the U.S. economy, by Andrea Felsted, columnist, Bloomberg Opinion. https://bloom.bg/3BscIki
WHERE AND WHEN
The House will meet at 10 a.m. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform will hold a hearing about the role of the firearms industry in America’s gun violence.
TheSenate convenes at 10 a.m. to resume consideration of the CHIPS bill.
The president will virtually receive the President’s Daily Brief at 9:30 a.m.
The vice president has no public events scheduled.
The Federal Reserve concludes a two-day meeting with a 2 p.m. policy statement and a news conference with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell at 2:30 p.m.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will deliver remarks to the press at 2 p.m.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff at 9:50 a.m. will participate in a Wall of Remembrance dedication at Washington’s Korean War Memorial.
The White House daily briefing is scheduled at 3 p.m.
Russia will drop out of the International Space Station after 2024 and focus on building its own orbiting outpost, the country announced on Tuesday amid high tensions between Moscow and the West over the war in Ukraine. The space station, orbiting 250 miles from Earth, is jointly run by the space agencies of Russia, the U.S., Europe, Japan and Canada. The first piece was put in orbit in 1998, and the outpost has been continuously inhabited for nearly 22 years. NASA and other international partners would like to keep the station running until 2030, but in the meantime, NASA has been working with U.S. companies on establishing their own private space stations to eventually replace the International Space Station. NASA hopes that these commercial space stations will be up and running by the end of the decade (The Associated Press).
Meanwhile, the Russian conflict in Europe took another turn as Moscow further cut its gas delivery to European nations on Wednesday. As of this morning, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline’s capacity has been slashed to a fifth of its total load, making it tougher and more expensive for European countries to store gas ahead of the winter months (Reuters).
Uber announced on Tuesday that it is expanding its electric vehicle choices in seven additional cities as a step in its efforts to reach zero emissions by 2030. Comfort Electric, the company’s fleet of all-electric vehicles, will be offered in Las Vegas; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Denver; Austin; Texas; Philadelphia; and Baltimore. The company originally launched Comfort Electric across California cities in May (The Hill).
➤ THE POT GETS RICHER
The Mega Millions lottery jackpot increased to $1.02 billion on Tuesday after no one notched the correct six numbers to win the prize, marking the fourth highest total in the lottery’s history. As The Associated Press notes, no individual has won the game dating back to April 15, and that there have been 29 consecutive drawings without a winner. The next one is Friday night.
And finally … From the moon to the highest bidder.
The jacket worn by Buzz Aldrin on the Apollo 11 flight that landed man on the moon for the first time in history is now in the hands of someone else — for nearly $2.8 million. A bidder paid $2,772,500 for Aldrin’s Inflight Coverall Jacket from the mission, marking the highest total fetched for an American space-flown item at an auction (The Associated Press).
Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first individuals to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969.
In January 2020, former New York City mayor and then-presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, in a move of profound patriotism and high principle, told The New York Times that he was open to donating $1 billion to elect Democrats — regardless of whom the party nominated for president.
With one of the most important elections in modern history coming soon, the public figure I call Citizen Bloomberg has an extraordinary opportunity to change the course of history, rally the forces of truth and justice and save the planet and our democracy.
Andrew Jackson once said that one man with courage can make a majority. Today, one person with vision and the willingness to act can help make a majority to get the votes to save the planet and defend democracy.
As the 2022 midterm elections approach, the U.S. and the Earth face existential emergencies. The 50-50 Senate is unable to enact legislation to save the Earth and lower prices for consumers using new forms of energy. Those who profit from planet-destroying fossil fuels spend vast sums of campaign money to find enough votes to kill programs that would save the Earth.
The emergency of democracy gravely escalates the emergency of the Earth, and also gravely threatens the rights of women. Recently, 195 House Republicans opposed a bill to guarantee women the right to birth control. The emergency of democracy is so extreme and unprecedented that former President Trump, the loser of the 2020 presidential election, sought to throw out the winner of that election and install himself as president. Trump was supported by a large majority of House Republicans.
It is no exaggeration to say that Bloomberg could help defeat the greatest threat to democracy our country has ever faced.
If they win the midterm elections, Republicans, still very much under the power and influence of Trump, would worsen these twin emergencies. But there is hope: The summary of polling from RealClearPolitics shows Democrats ahead of Republicans in five of the last 10 match-up polls, as of Tuesday morning. A recent Quinnipiac University Poll included almost-never quoted numbers showing public approval/disapproval favoring Democrats over Republicans in the House and Senate.
Democrats could easily gain one, two or more seats. It would be a challenge, but it’s plausible that House Democrats can maintain a small majority if Bloomberg, other wealthy Democrats, grassroots Democrats, small donors, election workers and independent voters man the political barricades to answer the emergency of democracy and address the emergency of saving the Earth.
Bloomberg has an extraordinary opportunity to continue his patriotic and principled leadership at this vitally important moment in history. Electing 51 Democratic senators with a Democratic House with even a slim majority would allow for historic and unprecedented action to save the Earth. Electing 52 Democratic senators would eliminate the destruction of filibusters, which have turned our government into the cesspool of obstruction and inaction that so many Americans despise today.
By getting involved, Bloomberg, joined by other patriots who will go the distance for democracy this year, would be standing for the dream that began in 1776 — to preserve and protect our democracy and our Earth, both of which are gravely endangered today.
Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Ark.), who was chief deputy majority whip of the House of Representatives.
Just over three months before the midterms, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is coming out from behind the scenes — and doing it in some of the most closely watched states in the country.
The liberal lawmaker has kept a relatively low profile since suspending her presidential bid to endorse Joe Biden. Vowing to be a trusted ally to his administration, she’s quietly lent a hand on policy and personnel decisions and sponsored bills to advance progressives’ top concerns.
But increasingly, Warren is also resurfacing nationally, adopting a front-facing role as a campaign surrogate for progressive candidates in swing states.
That’s caused some to speculate about her own plans.
“President Biden has made it clear he intends to run for reelection and has my full support. But in the extremely unlikely event he changes his mind, I hope she runs,” said Charlotte Clymer, a writer and Democratic political strategist who supported Warren in the 2020 primary.
“I would follow Elizabeth Warren anywhere,” Clymer said.
The Warren momentum that emerged last cycle is still ever-present. Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), his closest competitor for the 2020 nomination, will both be in their 80s by 2024. And some see a lane clearly marked for Warren, one of just a handful of female progressives thought of as potential presidential contenders — if she wants it.
Of course, she, and Democrats as a whole, have to get through the midterms first.
“I’m incredibly grateful for Senator Warren’s leadership in this moment,” Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, told The Hill.
“What makes Warren such an effective surrogate is that, like Biden, she grew up in a family that had to struggle to fight for what they needed. She was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth,” she said.
Warren, 73, has said she is seeking another term in the Senate in 2024, not the White House. For now she is lending her support to candidates in tight races, wading into party primaries and racking up airline miles.
Along the way, her travel itinerary has catapulted her back into the political conversation.
In an effort to retain one of the House’s top progressives, she traveled to Michigan last weekend to stump for Rep. Andy Levin, who is competing in an incumbent-on-incumbent primary against Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s redrawn 11th Congressional District.
“This is going to be hard,” Warren acknowledged in Pontiac, a Detroit suburb, after outlining all of the ways she believes Levin is best suited for another term.
“He’s got the right ideas. He’s got the passion. He knows how to deliver. But it’s going to be hard for a really ugly reason,” she said, pivoting to one of her signature gripes: money in politics. “He’s getting outspent.”
Warren also backed Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a young Black progressive fighting for the chance to run against Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), one of the most fervent conservatives in the upper chamber. Warren traveled to Madison and Milwaukee on the second of two recent trips to the battleground state.
“As Mandela Barnes continues to show up in every community in Wisconsin to talk about the importance of protecting our hard-won rights like abortion access, having the support of a champion for women and working families like Senator Warren has been incredibly helpful,” said Lauren Chou, a campaign spokesperson for Barnes.
The Massachusetts senator will also be in Pennsylvania on behalf of Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate nominee running against Republican Mehmet Oz in one of the cycle’s biggest nail-biters.
“Elizabeth Warren has consistently been a powerful presence in the Democratic party over the last two years, advancing good ideas that make peoples’ lives better while leading the fight against MAGA overreach,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the grassroots group Indivisible.
Warren and Fetterman both appeal to working- and middle-class families, constituencies the Democratic Party is fighting to attract and keep in its corner.
“It’s no surprise that she’s widely sought-after,” Greenberg said. “The things she’s saying are resonating with a broad audience.”
While her midterm engagement has been notable to national Democrats and political observers, she has also more subtly focused her policy interests on areas, such as anti-corruption, that progressives say could appeal to a broad swath of voters.
“Sen. Warren speaking to economic issues is always massively valuable for the people of this country,” Epting said. “She has the ability to break things down very simply so that we can understand ‘what is this inflation business all about.’”
Where gas prices are soaring, another progressive operative suggested, Warren can spotlight corporate interests and the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the political system. This could be particularly useful in areas that have large concentrations of working-class residents.
“I think she’s seen obviously as a real leader on talking about and exposing corporate greed,” said Marcela Mulholland, political director at Data for Progress, a left-wing think tank and polling outfit that supports Warren’s political aspirations.
“If she’s a messenger who can really weave the fact that a lot of corporations and oil and gas companies specifically are at fault for some of the increased prices we’re seeing … That’s kind of a niche she can fill,” she said.
On another issue that polls across party lines, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, progressives said Warren can point to her own work on behalf of women.
As one of just two dozen women in the Senate, Warren’s outspokenness about the conservative court’s decision on Roe has transformed her back into fighter mode, the style of campaigning that many remember from her presidential bid.
Recently, she pushed Biden to use his full authority to ensure those in need of abortion and critical care services have access to them and to officially declare a public health emergency.
“Our polling does show that voters are increasingly concerned about abortion rights, and specifically among women and Democratic and independent voters that’s true,” Mulholland said.
“To the extent that Elizabeth Warren is a medium for the message that Democrats are the party in favor of common sense protections of bodily autonomy, I think that’s helpful electorally,” she added.
Warren, who became known during the last presidential campaign for making wonky plans accessible, has since fine-tuned some of her political fights. She’s still pushing against tech monopolies, including engaging in a public, ongoing battle with Amazon, but has also broadened her portfolio to include areas that could impact future campaign cycles.
She’s taken a particular interest in young voters, whom Mulholland says Warren routinely polls well with. The former Harvard professor has led the charge in the Senate pushing the Biden administration to eliminate $50,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. And she’s newly focused on preregistering college students to vote, hoping their involvement will help boost turnout in critical elections.
On the left, those efforts have been very well received.
“It’s pretty clear that Sen. Warren has been right about everything, and there has never been a greater need for her moral clarity and her extraordinary gift for coalition building,” said Clymer. “She is one of a handful of national figures who can unite the country.”
Senate Democrats are calling on the Federal Reserve to proceed cautiously on raising interest rates when board members meet this week, warning that fighting inflation too aggressively could hurt the economy.
Gross domestic product (GDP) data for the second quarter will be published this week and is expected to show a contraction in growth.
But Democrats in Congress are adopting the administration’s talking points to argue that two quarters of negative growth does not necessarily signal a recession, pointing to the strong labor market and rising wages, even if those positive developments are overshadowed by inflation.
“The economy is strong but if Fed Chair [Jerome] Powell continues these unprecedented aggressive rate increases, he could push it straight into recession,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “I’ve talked to colleagues. I’ve also talked with economists who are increasingly speaking out.”
“There’s a reason the Fed acts independently in our system but it’s critical that Jerome Powell think about the implications of knocking millions of people out of work,” she said.
Warren warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Sunday that “the Fed risks triggering a devastating recession” by raising interest rates too far too fast to fight inflation.
She argued that supply-chain problems are a bigger cause for inflation than interest rates and predicted that aggressive rate hikes would be “largely ineffective against many of the underlying causes of this inflationary spike.”
Other Democrats are voicing the same concerns.
“I constantly worry that they are making such big jumps,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said of the Federal Reserve. “These interest rates have long-term effects in terms of people building infrastructure and making long-term investments.”
“If they were to ask my advice, I might suggest that they only raise it a half or a quarter [point],” he said.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a leading progressive, said Tuesday that he agrees with Warren and other Democrats who are urging the Fed not to raise rates too aggressively.
Federal Reserve board members will wrap up their two-day meeting on Wednesday, after which they are expected to announce a 0.75 percentage point interest rate hike.
It will be the fourth Fed rate hike of the year, bringing rates to between 2.25 percent and 2.5 percent.
The Fed projected last month that it would raise rates to 3.4 percent by the end of the year, which means that rate increases are also expected in September, November and December.
The central bank is under pressure to act boldly after the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that inflation had jumped 9.1 percent in June compared to the year before.
But the three rate increases announced earlier this year already appear to be having an effect on the economy.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 5.5 percent in July, sending demand for new mortgages to a 22-year low.
Several major companies have announced layoffs or hiring slowdowns in recent weeks, including Facebook, Tesla, Shopify, Apple, Lyft and Google.
“Interest rates are a multi-edged sword, they have multiple impacts and [can be] very damaging on certain elements of our economy,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.).
“We’ve had some discussions about affordable housing. It absolutely directly impacts affordable housing, housing stock,” he said. “When you raise interest rates it has a major negative impact, certainly on affordable housing.”
The Bureau of Economic Analysis is scheduled on Thursday to release its advance estimate of economic growth in the second quarter and economists expect GDP growth to be negative for the second straight quarter.
Two consecutive quarters of economic contraction is commonly considered the technical definition of a recession, but the Biden administration is pushing back against that claim by arguing that other factors signal a strong economy, notably the 3.6 percent national unemployment rate.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend that the National Bureau of Economic Research weighs a broader set of indicators in deciding whether to declare a recession.
“We’ve got a very strong labor market,” she said. “This is not an economy that’s in recession.”
“A recession is a broad-based contraction that affects many sectors of the economy. We just don’t have that,” she said, pointing out that industrial output has grown five of the past six months and household balance sheets “are generally in good shape” even though “inflation is way too high.”
At the same time, Yellen acknowledged that economists are seeing a “slowdown” in the economy, including slowing job growth.
Slowing growth has Democrats concerned the Fed may wind up overshooting by raising rates too quickly before the midterm elections, when many voters will cast their ballots based on how they view the health of the economy.
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) said he shares Warren’s concern.
“They’ve got to make a call as to how serious this is. I agree with her. If you overdo it, you could push yourselves into a recession,” he said.
Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), an influential Democratic voice on economic issues, said “I think there’s a way to thread this needle,” urging the Fed to adopt a measured approach to rein in inflation without hurting the economy.
“I’ve heard members of the Fed themselves express their concerns as well about overshooting,” he said.
