gun violence

600+ convictions for the events of January 6th. What comes next for Merrick Garland and Donald Trump?

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

May 4, 2023

Today began with another story about yet more ties between Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Republican billionaire Harlan Crow. Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that Crow paid the private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew, to the tune of more than $6,000 a month, ultimately adding up to an amount that may have been more than $150,000. Thomas did not report the payments.

Then news broke that a jury in Washington, D.C., found four members of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys—Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl—guilty of seditious conspiracy for their participation in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but, like the others, was found guilty of other serious charges including obstructing Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results and conspiring to prevent Congress and federal officers from discharging their duties.

In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland noted that the Department of Justice has secured more than 600 convictions for criminal conduct surrounding the events of January 6, including fourteen “leaders of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy—specifically conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power. Our work will continue,” he said.

It is unlikely that Garland’s statement about ongoing work was casual.

Defense attorneys for the Proud Boys emphasized that their clients believed then-president Trump—who, after all, had told them in September 2020 to “stand back and stand by”—had called them to Washington to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Although there were no explicit orders to attack the Capitol, members of the Proud Boys testified that they believed there was an implicit agreement to prevent Biden from becoming president.

Tarrio, convicted today, was not at the Capitol during the attack, but a jury convicted him of seditious conspiracy nonetheless, suggesting that leaders who incited the violence can be found guilty, even if they weren’t present.

Today attorneys for E. Jean Carroll, who is suing the former president in a civil trial for battery and defamation connected with his alleged rape of her, rested their case. So did Trump’s lawyers, but District Judge Lewis Kaplan gave Trump the weekend to rethink testifying. “He has a right to testify which has been waived but if he has second thoughts, I’ll at least consider it and maybe we’ll see what happens,” Kaplan said.

Other investigations of the former president continue. The New York Times today broke the story that prosecutors in the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith investigating the storage of classified documents are talking to a confidential witness who worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago. There are questions about whether Trump deliberately moved boxes containing documents in order to hide them from the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, the debt ceiling crisis has not gone away. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines today told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats that a U.S. default on our debts would enable both Russia and China to say “such an event [demonstrates] the chaos within the United States, that we’re not capable of functioning as a democracy, and the governance issues associated with it.” She explained: “It would be…almost a certainty that they would look to take advantage of the opportunity.”

Moody’s Analytics has weighed in on the economic effects of House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) plan, noting that with a clean debt limit increase, real gross domestic product is expected to grow 2.25% this year. Under McCarthy’s plan, that growth will be 1.6%. “The significant government spending cuts in the [plan] are substantial headwinds to near-term economic growth,” it wrote. “Adding to the economic headwinds created by the legislation is the considerable uncertainty created by having to address the debt limit again a year from now.”

Weirdly, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) at a Senate Budget Committee hearing today blamed Democrats for not raising the debt ceiling themselves last year without help from the Republicans. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo broke down this argument. If the Democrats had raised the debt ceiling through reconciliation, without Republican votes, Republicans would have insisted that it was the Democrats, not them, who had burdened the country with debt when, in fact, the Republicans added almost $8 trillion to the debt under Trump.

Romney’s complaint amounts to berating the responsible Democrats for not protecting the country against the Republicans, who are willing to burn down the country. As Riga put it: “Darn you Democrats for not taking care of the debt ceiling then, because you knew we’d refuse to raise the limit unless you conceded to our demands, and look what a sticky spot we’re in now.”

Meanwhile, the editorial board of the Fresno Bee, from McCarthy’s district, today called out the speaker for approving the huge increases of the Trump years and, now that a Democrat is in the White House, insisting on drastic cuts. The board reiterated that the debt ceiling and the budget are separate issues. “McCarthy is pandering to the hard-right members who only backed him for House speaker on the 15th vote in exchange for concessions on the issues like the debt,” it said. “Speaker McCarthy, don’t take America to the brink of default. Stop the posturing, raise the debt ceiling, then have the honest budget debate the nation needs.”

Finally, the day ended where it began, with another scandal involving Justice Clarence Thomas.

This evening, Emma Brown, Shawn Boburg, and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post broke the story that right-wing judicial activist Leonard Leo, who as a leader of the Federalist Society that backs originalist judges has been key to transforming the federal judiciary, a decade ago arranged for payments of tens of thousands of dollars to Thomas’s wife Ginni. Leo and Thomas are close friends.

In January 2012, Leo told Kellyanne Conway, who was then a Republican pollster, to bill the Judicial Education Project, a nonprofit organization with which he was associated, and then pass the money on to Ginni Thomas. He told Conway to “give” Thomas “another $25K,” and emphasized that she should include “No mention of Ginni, of course,” in the paperwork. She did so. Later that year, the Judicial Education Project filed a brief before the court in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder case, in which the court, by a vote of 5–4, gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Thomas voted on the side of the Judicial Education Project.

And this is the profound national crisis at the heart of the stories emerging about Thomas. His votes were decisive not only in Shelby County v. Holder, but also in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, also decided by a vote of 5–4, which opened the floodgates for dark money in political campaigns. Those decisions dramatically undermined our democracy. It now seems imperative to grapple with the fact it appears a key vote on the court that decided those cases was compromised.

GOP embraces replacing democracy with white Christian nationalism

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 17, 2023

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was in New York City today, trying to calm jitters among investors by explaining to members of the New York Stock Exchange that the Republicans will not allow the government to default on its debts even as he insisted that the Republican Party must use the debt ceiling to enact legislative policies it can’t win through normal political negotiations.

The debt ceiling is an artificial limit to how much the Treasury can borrow to pay existing obligations to which Congress has already committed. It has nothing to do with future spending, which is hammered out in budget negotiations. 

But McCarthy has not offered a budget proposal because the Republican conference cannot agree on one. Yesterday, for example, McCarthy floated the idea of cuts to food assistance for millions of low-income Americans, which Senate Republicans want no part of. Unlike House members, many of whom represent such gerrymandered districts they feel insulated from any backlash to extreme proposals, Senators run at-large. For them, cutting food support while backing tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would be politically dangerous.

Instead, McCarthy is trying to use the threat of national default to extract the cuts extremist members of his conference want. The Biden administration has made it clear that it will not negotiate over paying the nation’s bills, especially since about a quarter of the debt was accumulated under former president Trump, $2 trillion of it thanks to tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In those years, Congress raised the debt ceiling three times. Biden presented his own long, detailed budget, full of his own priorities, as a start to negotiations in March, and he says he is eager to sit down and hammer out the budget once McCarthy produces his own plan. McCarthy is trying to deflect from his inability to do that but is confusing the issue, suggesting that he has the right to negotiate instead over whether or not to pay our bills. 

Since defaulting, or even approaching default, would devastate both the U.S. and the global economy, not even all Republicans back McCarthy’s threats. When Sara Eisen of CNBC asked McCarthy if he had the support of his party for what he is proposing, McCarthy answered, “I think I have the support of America,” and that he would “get the party behind it.” 

Meanwhile, when asked about a potential default, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Tony Romm of the Washington Post, “It will be financial chaos…. Our fiscal problems will be meaningfully worse.… Our geopolitical standing in the world will be undermined.”

Today, McCarthy offered to kick the can down the road by a year, raising the debt ceiling so long as the Democrats agree to cuts that he described only vaguely. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) rejected this idea out of hand, saying: “If Speaker McCarthy continues in this direction, we are headed to default.” Schumer reiterated that the Democrats will be happy to negotiate with McCarthy over the budget when he can produce a detailed plan that can get the 218 votes it needs to pass the House. He noted that McCarthy’s vague proposals are “a recycled pile of the same things he’s been saying for months, none of which has moved the ball forward an inch.” 

In part, McCarthy’s problem is that many of the members of his conference are in the majority for the first time. They are discovering that it is much easier to say no when opponents are in charge than it is to hammer coalitions together to advance realistic legislation. In the New York Times today, editorial board member Michelle Cottle called many of the current House Republicans “chaos monkeys” but noted that it is McCarthy’s fault that he gave them so much power by promising things he can’t deliver—like refusing to hike the debt ceiling without cuts—and by putting them at the head of important committees.

Ohio representative Jim Jordan, for example, sits at the head of the Judiciary Committee, as well as the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and his investigations so far have not produced the results he promised the Republican base. As Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel put it last month: “Make me feel better, guys. Tell me this is going somewhere. Can I throw someone in prison? Can someone go to jail? Can someone get fined?”

Instead, Democrats on the committees have met Jordan’s wild rapid-fire accusations with facts that show the difference between unchallenged myth-making on right-wing media and actual governance. Today, at Jordan’s insistence, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing in New York City, a venue Jordan suggested was chosen to highlight how the policies of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had exacerbated violent crime, although in reality, Jordan’s attacks on Bragg for investigating former president Trump started even before Trump’s indictment in that jurisdiction.  

Jordan set out to argue that Bragg was neglecting violent crime in New York City only to have Democrats point out that New York City is “not only safer than most large cities in America, it is safer than most cities of any size, and on a per capita basis, New York City is safer than most of the states of the members sitting…on the majority side,” as Jim Kessler, the co-founder and senior vice president for policy for Third Way, explained. Indeed, in 2020, Ohio’s murder rate was higher than the rate in New York City. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) asked Jordan if the hearing could be moved to Ohio.

If one part of McCarthy’s problem is his extremist colleagues, another is that his argument is out of date. In what Catie Edmondson and Jim Tankersley of the New York Times called “a speech that was sprinkled with misleading statements and erroneous assertions,” McCarthy told the Wall Street executives, “We’re seeing in real time the effects of reckless government spending: record inflation and the hardship it causes….”

In reality, the inflation that plagued the U.S. as it reopened from the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed dramatically, making it clear that the policies of the Biden administration are working. As Jennifer Rubin noted yesterday in the Washington Post, the annual inflation rate for producers is 2.7%—the lowest rate in more than two years—while consumer price increases are at their lowest point since May 2021: 5%. Gasoline prices have dropped 17.4% since the high prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The overall declines mark nine months of slowing inflation. 

At the same time, labor force participation is at record high levels and unemployment is at a 50-year low of 3.5%. Black unemployment, which stands at 5%, has never been lower.  Real incomes—that is, incomes after inflation is factored in—have risen 7% for those making $35,000 a year or less and 1.3% across the whole economy. Meanwhile, the deficit has dropped more than $1.7 trillion in two years.  

The successes of Biden’s policies would seem worth considering in negotiations, but as Sarah Longwell noted in Bulwark+ today, the Republican Party has abandoned normal democratic politics. She notes that it is a mistake to look at the Trump years as a wild period from which the party will return to normality. Instead, she notes, “You have to think of Trump’s election as year zero” because “Republican voters say they don’t want any part of a Republican party that looks anything like it did before 2016.”

Trump’s administration was a culmination of forty years of Republican attempts to get rid of taxes and regulations by insisting that anyone calling for business regulation and a basic social safety net was a socialist who wanted to redistribute tax dollars from hardworking white men to minorities and women. But the racism, sexism, and religion in that formula used to be the quieter undertones of the call for small government. Now, though, the party is openly embracing the replacement of democracy with a strong government that would make white Christian nationalism the law of the land.  

In illustration of that position, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has used the government to impose a Christian agenda on his state, today continued his crusade against the Walt Disney Company. A year ago, angry that then–chief executive officer Bob Chapek opposed his measure limiting discussion of gender identity in public school classrooms, DeSantis tried to take control of the company’s special self-governing district through a new board. Shortly before the takeover, Disney CEO Bob Iger outfoxed DeSantis by legally changing the terms of the agreement under which it has operated for decades, limiting the power of the board in perpetuity.

After Trump officials mocked him for being beaten by Mickey Mouse, DeSantis today suggested he is determined to use the power of the government to force Disney, a private company, to bend to his authority. He threatened to build a rival amusement park or a state prison on land next to Disney’s Florida park. 

Disney promptly responded by advertising a “first-ever Disneyland After Dark” LGBTQIA+ themed event night at its California Disneyland resort, and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele tweeted: “When families stop visiting & Disney’s $75.2B economic impact & $5.8B tax revenues drop; its 75K employees face layoffs & 463K jobs are also imperiled what would your analytics say caused that to happen? WTF, Dumbo.”

Clarence Thomas’ relationship with ‘right-wing megadonor’ Harlan Crow

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 7, 2023

This Friday night’s news dump is a biggie: Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an antiabortion Trump appointee, has ruled that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug mifepristone in 2000 was flawed and must be suspended. In the 23 years since its approval, the drug has been widely proved to be safe, and this is the first time a court has ordered the FDA to remove a drug from the market. 

Mifepristone is used to induce abortions as well as for other medical applications. Although the Supreme Court argued last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, that getting rid of Roe would enable states to make their own decisions about abortion, Kacsmaryk’s decision would remove mifepristone across the entire United States. Mifepristone accounts for about 53% of medically induced abortions. 

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has led the administration’s policy on reproductive rights, noted that Kacsmaryk’s decision does not simply impact abortion: it opens the door to politicizing chemotherapy drugs, asthma medicine, blood pressure pills, insulin, and so on.

Kacsmaryk also said that mailing mifepristone across state lines is illegal based on the Comstock Act, which Congress passed in 1873, making it illegal to send contraceptive materials through the mail. He went further than that, though, going far beyond the Dobbs decision to embrace the concept that a fertilized egg is an “unborn human” from the time of conception. 

He stayed the ruling for a week to give the government time to respond.

President Joe Biden vowed to fight the ruling. He noted that the Department of Justice has already filed an appeal and will seek an immediate stay. “But let’s be clear,” he wrote, “the only way to stop those who are committed to taking away women’s rights and freedoms in every state is to elect a Congress who will pass a law restoring Roe versus Wade.  Vice President Harris and I will continue to lead the fight to protect a woman’s right to an abortion, and to make her own decisions about her own health.  That is our commitment.”

Less than an hour after Kacsmaryk’s ruling, federal judge Thomas O. Rice in Washington state issued an injunction prohibiting the FDA from pulling mifepristone from the market. 

With two opposing rulings in place, the case will go quickly to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

But the Supreme Court has its own issues right now. Today, Justice Clarence Thomas released a statement saying that he did not disclose the lavish gifts he received from right-wing megadonor Harlan Crow on the advice of “colleagues and others in the judiciary,” but he did not say who those individuals were. He says he will comply with new regulations in the future.

Thomas said that he and his wife Ginni had been dear friends of the Crows for over 25 years, but he joined the court over 30 years ago, making more than one commenter note that the friendship certainly seemed to be based on Crow’s access to the Supreme Court through Thomas. In 2011, Ian Millhiser, then of ThinkProgress, noted that Thomas sided with the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Community Interest, both of which were affiliated with Crow, in every case concerning them that had come before the Supreme Court.  

A couple of other stories before I call it quits tonight: 

The Internal Revenue Service yesterday explained how it intends to use the $80 billion appropriated for it by the Inflation Reduction Act. After a decade of budget cuts, audit and enforcement rates on taxpayers earning $1 million or more annually had dropped significantly, from 7.2% in 2011 to just 0.7% in 2019. The IRS will focus on restoring those audits.

It will also look at allowing taxpayers to file directly with the government system for free, as taxpayers in other countries do. This plan has the lobbyists who work for tax preparers fighting back out of fear such a free system will cripple their businesses. They are joining with Republicans to complain that such a system will give the government too much information about individual taxpayers. 

Today’s jobs report for March showed continuing job growth as unemployment fell to 3.5% and the economy added another 236,000 jobs. Unemployment among Black Americans is at a historic low of 5%. While jobs are still being added, they are increasing at a slower rate than they have been. Wage increases are also slowing, which reinforces the idea that inflation will continue to ease and perhaps lead the Federal Reserve to slow down on the interest rate hikes that cool the economy. 

In a statement, President Biden noted the good jobs news and reminded people that the government is investing in infrastructure, innovation, and clean energy to build the economy for the long term. But, he warned, “[e]xtreme MAGA Republicans in Congress…are threatening to wreak havoc on our economy with debt limit brinkmanship. Their extreme agenda would send the unprecedented investments we’ve made here in America—along with the jobs that come with it—overseas. And it’s all to pay for even more giveaways to the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations.” He promised to stop them from moving the country backward.

Today, Vice President Harris traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, where she met with the state Democratic caucus and with the two young Black legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, whose colleagues expelled them from the state legislature yesterday. While in Nashville, she spoke at historically Black Fisk University to call for gun safety legislation and condemn the expulsion of the Democratic lawmakers.

Restricting the vote is now a central part of Republican policy

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 5, 2023

In yesterday’s election in Wisconsin, the two candidates represented very different futures for the country. One candidate for the state supreme court, Daniel Kelly, had helped politicians to gerrymander the state to give Republicans an iron lock on the state assembly and was backed by antiabortion Republicans. The other, Janet Protasiewicz, promised to stand behind fair voting maps and the protection of reproductive rights.

Wisconsin voters elected Protasiewicz by an overwhelming eleven points in a state where elections are usually decided by a point or so. Kelly reacted with an angry, bitter speech. “I wish that in a circumstance like this I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent,” he said. “But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede.”

Yesterday’s vote in Wisconsin reinforces the polling numbers that show how overwhelmingly popular abortion rights and fair voting are, and it seems likely to throw the Republican push to suppress voting into hyperdrive before the 2024 election.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed the idea of “ballot integrity” or, later, “voter fraud” to justify voter suppression. That cry began in 1986, when Republican operatives, realizing that voters opposed Reagan’s tax cuts, launched a “ballot integrity” initiative that they privately noted “could keep the black vote down considerably.”

That effort to restrict the vote is now a central part of Republican policy. Together with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project, The Guardian today published the story of the attempt by three leading right-wing election denial groups to restrict voting rights in Republican-dominated states by continuing the lie that voting fraud is rampant.

The Guardian’s story, by Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey, explores a two-day February meeting in Washington organized by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and attended by officials from 13 states, including the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. At the meeting, participants learned about auditing election results, litigation, and funding to challenge election results. Many of the attendees and speakers are associated with election denial.

Since the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have passed “election reform” measures that restrict the vote; those efforts are ongoing. On Thursday alone, the Texas Senate advanced a number of new restrictions. In the wake of high turnout among Generation Z Americans, who were born after 1996 and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their elders, care deeply about reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and want the government to do more to address society’s ills, Republican legislatures are singling out the youth vote to hamstring.

That determination to silence younger Americans is playing out today in Tennessee, where a school shooting on March 28 in Nashville killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. The shooting has prompted protesters to demand that the legislature honor the will of the people by addressing gun safety, but instead, Republicans in the legislature have moved to expel three Democratic lawmakers who approached the podium without being recognized to speak—a breach of House rules—and led protesters in chants calling for gun reform. As Republicans decried the breach by Representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson, protestors in the galleries called out, “Fascists!”

Republican efforts to gain control did not end there. On Twitter today, Johnson noted that she had “just had a visit from the head of HR and the House ethics lawyer,” who told her “that if I am expelled, I will lose my health benefits,” but the ethics lawyer went on to explain “that in one case, a member who was potentially up for expulsion decided to resign because if you resign, you maintain your health benefits.”

The echoes of Reconstruction in that conversation are deafening. In that era, when the positions of the parties were reversed, southern Democrats used similar “persuasion” to chase Republican legislators out of office. When that didn’t work, of course, they also threatened the physical safety of those who stood in the way of their absolute control of politics.

On Saturday night, someone fired shots into the home of the man who founded and runs the Tennessee Holler, a progressive news site. Justin Kanew was covering the gun safety struggle in Tennessee. He wrote: “This violence has no place in a civilized society and we are thankful no one was physically hurt. The authorities have not completed their investigation and right now we do not know for sure the reason for this attack. We urge the Williamson County Sheriff’s office to continue to investigate this crime and help shed light on Saturday’s unfortunate events and bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. In the meantime, our family remains focused on keeping our children healthy and safe.”

The anger coming from losing candidate Kelly last night, and his warning that “this does not end well….[a]nd I wish Wisconsin the best of luck because I think it’s going to need it,” sure sounded like those lawmakers in the Reconstruction years who were convinced that only people like them should govern. The goal of voter suppression, control of statehouses, and violence—then and now—is minority rule.

Today’s Republican Party has fallen under the sway of MAGA Republicans who advocate Christian nationalism despite its general unpopularity; on April 3, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who has destroyed true democracy in favor of “Christian democracy” in his own country, cheered Trump on and told him to “keep on fighting.” Like Orbán, today’s Republicans reject the principles that underpin democracy, including the ideas of equality before the law and separation of church and state, and instead want to impose Christian rule on the American majority.

Their conviction that American “tradition” focuses on patriarchy rather than equality is a dramatic rewriting of our history, and it has led to recent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. In Kansas today, the legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports. Kansas is the twentieth state to enact such a policy, and when it goes into effect, it will affect just one youth in the state.

Yesterday, Idaho governor Brad Little signed a law banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, and today Indiana governor Eric Holcomb did the same.

Meanwhile, Republican-dominated states are so determined to ignore the majority they are also trying to make it harder for voters to challenge state laws through ballot initiatives. Alice MIranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico recently wrote about how, after voters in a number of states overrode abortion bans through ballot initiatives, legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are now debating ways to make it harder for voters to get measures on the ballot, sometimes even specifying that abortion-related measures are not eligible for ballot challenges.

And yet, in the face of the open attempt of a minority to seize control, replacing our democracy with Christian nationalism, the majority is reasserting its power. In Michigan, after an independent redistricting commission redrew maps to end the same sort of gerrymandering that is currently in place in Wisconsin and Tennessee, Democrats in 2022 won a slim majority to control the state government. And today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a bill revoking a 1931 law that criminalized abortion without exception for rape or incest.