Citizen Cartwright

Global migrants converge at U.S.-Mexico border

Some migrants streamed across the border and others gathered in makeshift camps as America’s pandemic-era Title 42 restrictions ended on Thursday, a milestone that officials worried could trigger a major new wave of migration that strains border facilities and cities across the country, The New York Times reports.

 

Title 42 was a holdover from the Trump administration and began in March 2020. The authority allowed U.S. officials to turn away migrants at the Southern border, on the grounds of preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

 

The Biden administration has put in place a series of new policies cracking down on illegal crossings and creating new legal pathways. Anybody seeking asylum who didn’t first seek protection in a country they traveled through, or first applied online, will be turned away.

 

U.S. officials plan to open 100 regional migration hubs across the Western Hemisphere, where people can seek placement in other nations, including Canada and Spain.

 

President Biden and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez are holding talks at the White House on Friday.

 

"It was a huge boon for the White House to get Spain and Canada to agree to take in asylum seekers from Latin America,” says The Associated Press. "And it helps reinforce the Biden administration’s argument that the current migration quandary facing the Americas is a global problem that needs a global solution.”

 

The United States increasingly has seen migrants arrive at its Southern border who are from China, Ukraine, Haiti, Russia and other nations far from Latin America, and who are increasingly family groups and children traveling alone, AP says. Thirty years ago, illegal crossings were almost always single adults from Mexico who were easily turned back over the border.

Spain, like many other nations globally, needs workers, and it will be able to choose migrants who have skills needed in the country, AP says. 

 

On Thursday, the House passed legislation that would restart border wall construction and restrict asylum. The vote was 219-213, with no Democrats supporting the bill and two Republicans voting against it.

Democrats confirmed more federal judges in Biden’s first 2 years than GOP did in Trump’s

I want to mention a trend I missed.  

 

We all heard about the historic number of judges confirmed during the Trump administration.

 

But "Democrats fell just short of an ambitious goal of confirming 100 new federal judges as time ran out on the 117th Congress, but they are optimistic they can continue to reshape the courts over the final two years of President Biden’s term,” long-time New York Times reporter on Congress Carl Hulse wrote in a Dec. 29 article.

 

The 97 judges Democrats seated, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, passed the Trump total of 85 judges. And Trump’s total "was compiled with what to that point was one of the most intense efforts ever to fill court slots under the stewardship of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who vowed to 'leave no vacancy behind,'" Hulse says.

 

The Senate’s top two Democrats say their ability to outpace Trump’s first two years was especially noteworthy considering they did it with a 50-50 Senate, an evenly divided Judiciary Committee and little cooperation from most Republicans.

 

“We had three or four Republicans who were really open-minded and helped us on the votes,” says Sen. Dick Durbin, Ill., who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, led the judicial push. Durbin mentioned Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who says he believes that presidents are entitled to confirmation of qualified judges of their choosing, and was the most frequent Republican backer of Biden nominees on the committee.

 

The nominees were historically diverse, including 92 women, 60 of whom were women of color out of a total of 85 people of color, along with eight LGBTQ nominees. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., noted that of 28 appeals court judges confirmed, 11 were African American women, more than under all previous presidents combined.

 

“I’m particularly proud of the professional diversity,” Schumer says. “For the first time, we have a bunch of public defenders, immigration lawyers, consumer people, so it’s not just the corporate perspective or the prosecutorial perspective that’s on the bench.”

 

Federal judges are appointed for life.

Trump tax returns to be released, IRS didn’t do audits

The House Ways and Means Committee voted on party lines Tuesday to release six years of the former president's tax returns. The returns will cover the period between 2015 and 2021, the years Trump was running for president and serving in the White House, according to panel members. The returns are to be redacted to remove information like Social Security and bank account numbers and released in several days.

 

Hours later, a report released by the panel’s Democratic majority said the IRS didn't follow its own policy because it didn't audit Trump during his first two years in office. 

 

An accompanying report released by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also found repeated faults with the IRS’s approach to auditing Trump and his companies. 

 

The reports released Tuesday renew one of the biggest questions that's surrounded Trump, says The Associated Press: Why did he abandon the post-Watergate tradition of White House hopefuls releasing their tax returns? 

 

Trump and those around him consistently have said IRS audits prevented him from doing so. There aren’t any laws that would have barred Trump from voluntarily releasing his returns even if they were being audited, AP says.

 

In response to the report findings, the Ways and Means Committee is proposing legislation to beef up the IRS’ approach, requiring an initial report no later than 90 days after the filing of a president’s tax returns. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House will “move swiftly” to advance the legislation. 

 

Democrats say the IRS is ill-equipped to audit high-income, complex tax returns and instead targets filers in lower-income brackets — something the lawmakers have tried to remedy in their work on the panel.

 

“Because of the dismantling of funding to the IRS, they have not been unable to do their job,” says Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev.

 

Republicans have vowed to cut recent increased funding for more IRS agents. It's the first bill they'll consider when they take over the House majority in less than two weeks, says AP.

House Jan. 6 panel’s subpoena of Trump, new revelations

The committee's unanimous vote Thursday to subpoena former President Trump came as it described his multi-part plan to overturn his 2020 election loss.

 

In the committee’s 10th public session, the panel summed up Trump’s “staggering betrayal” of his oath of office, as Chairman Bennie Thompson put it, describing Trump’s unprecedented attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.

 

Before any votes were cast, committee members said, Trump planned to simply claim victory on Election Day.

 

The committee presented new and previously seen material, including interviews with Trump’s top aides and Cabinet officials — including Secretary of State Pompeo, Attorney General Barr and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia — in which some described the president acknowledging he'd lost.

 

Among the new revelations was that the Secret Service was aware before Jan. 6 that some Trump supporters were using online forums to discuss plans for violence, including plots to storm the Capitol. Along with interviews, the committee is drawing on the 1.5 million pages of documents it's received from the Secret Service, says The Associated Press.

 

And the panel showed previously unseen footage of congressional leaders on the phone with the Defense Department, Justice Department and governor of neighboring Virginia, asking for help during the assault as Trump refused to call off the mob. The footage also portrays Vice President Pence telling House Speaker Pelosi and the others that he's spoken with the Capitol Police, as Congress plans to resume its session that night to certify the election of Biden.

 

Trump has been telling aides privately that he favors testifying before the panel as long as he gets to do so live, The New York Times says. The lawmakers have rejected similar demands from other witnesses, but preliminary discussions among the panel members indicate more openness to a live interview with Trump, the Times says.

 

Several former presidents voluntarily testified before Congress — including Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford — but there's no Supreme Court precedent that says whether Congress has the power to compel a former president to testify about his actions in office, according to the Times.

 

A separate AP article discusses the committee’s discussions of how to preserve its transcripts of more than 1,000 interviews and millions of other documents after the panel is shut down following the release of its final report.

House Jan. 6 panel’s likely last hearing before the election is Thursday

The committee is planning to present a summation including new information on "the entire multipart plan to overturn the election,” showing former President Trump's "centrality to the scheme from the time prior to the election,” a panel aide said in a Wednesday conference call with reporters.

 

The hearing is expected to highlight newly obtained Secret Service records showing that Trump was repeatedly alerted to brewing violence on Jan. 6 and still sought to stoke the conflict, The Washington Post reports.

And “the panel is planning to argue that Mr. Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud inspired far-right extremists and election deniers who present a continuing threat to American democracy,” says The New York Times.

 

The hearing comes at a pivotal time, weeks before midterm elections in which control of Congress is at stake and as time is running out for the panel to complete its work, including a report on its findings. 

 

Under the committee's rules, it will dissolve 30 days after publication of that report, and with the new Congress in January.

 

House Republicans are expected to drop the Jan. 6 probe and turn to other investigations if they win control after the midterm elections, primarily focusing on President Biden, his family and his administration, says The Associated Press.

 

The hearing begins at 1 p.m. You can watch it here.

New way for Americans to help resettle refugees here

As the number of people forced to flee their homes has exceeded 100 million this year, for the first time, the Biden administration is asking organizations to team up with it to launch a pilot private-sponsorship program by the end of 2022.

 

President Biden pledged in a 2021 executive order to increase opportunities for Americans to resettle refugees and restore the United States as the world’s safe haven. The Trump administration had decimated the refugee program, which traditionally has tasked nine resettlement agencies with placing refugees in communities, says The Associated Press.

 

The Sponsor Circle Program, a community-led effort, has enabled Americans to welcome newcomers from Afghanistan and Ukraine.

 

Experts say the private sponsorship model could transform the way America resettles refugees and ensure the door stays open no matter who's elected.

“I think there is a real revolution right now that is happening in terms of American communities and communities around the world that are raising their hands and saying, `We want to bring in refugees,’” says Sasha Chanoff, founder and CEO of RefugePoint, a Boston–based nonprofit that's helped jumpstart the effort.

 

The pilot program will match regular Americans with refugees overseas who've already been approved for admission to the United States. Later, the plan will allow Americans to identify a refugee overseas and apply to resettle them, AP says.

Why Republicans in politics and media who knew better went along with Trump

“America never would have gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends,” says former Republican National Committee spokesman, campaign aide and opposition researcher Tim Miller in the introduction to his book "Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell." 

"'Why We Did It' is a book about the people who submitted to every whim of a comically unfit and detestable man who crapped all over them and took over the party they had given their life to,” says Miller. "It’s about the army of consultants, politicians, and media figures who stood back and stood by as everything they ever fought for was degraded and devalued. The people who privately admitted they recognized all the risks but still climbed aboard for a ride on the SS Trump Hellship that they knew would assuredly sink.”

Miller is a millennial who started working in GOP politics when he was 16. His publisher, HarperCollins, describes his writing style as “darkly satirical."

Miller has left the GOP and now is a political analyst for MSNBC and a writer at The Bulwark (founded in 2018 by Bill Kristol and others to focus on political analysis and reporting "without partisan loyalties or tribal prejudices,” according to its website).

Miller’s book is a mea culpa and a dispatch from the inside. “As a gay man who contorted himself into defending homophobes and a Trump abhorrer who didn’t hesitate when asked to spin for a Trump lover, I am more than capable of inhabiting the mind of the enabler,” he says.

Themes of the book:

“How many of the players in the upper echelons of American political life treated their duties as a big game, where they awarded themselves the status of public service while minimizing the responsibilities of that service in favor of performance and skulduggery.”

“How the Republican ruling class dismissed the plight of those we were manipulating, growing increasingly comfortable using tactics that inflamed them, turning them against their fellow man. How often we advanced arguments that none of us believed. How we made people feel aggrieved about issues we had no intent or ability to solve. 

"How we spurred racial resentments and bigotry among voters while prickling at anyone who might accuse us of racism. And how these tactics became not just unchecked but supercharged by a right-wing media ecosystem that we were in bed with and that had its own nefarious incentives, sucking in clicks and views through rage hustling without any intention of delivering something that might bring value to ordinary people’s lives."

Miller’s categories of the men and women who “succumbed to the MAGA wiles”:

Messiahs — "High-level staff who took it upon themselves to protect the country from disaster,” such as National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis

Junior Messiahs — Lower-level staff who “told themselves they were patriots, sacrificing on behalf of the American people, who deserved dedicated public servants like them”

Demonizers — "For some this was a dogmatic response to any signs of Democratic hostility to people of faith or the free market (or both, for those with the in-home Milton Friedman shrine). For others, it was cultural, a rejection of the liberal pieties that ground their gears, a discomfort with how fast the script around gender and race was changing. For still others it seemed more personal, emanating from a bitterness over the snooty know-it-allism of the liberals in their life.”

LOL Nothing Matters Republicans — “a comforting ethos if you are professionally obligated to defend the indefensible day in and day out.”

Tribalist Trolls — “Whatever is good for their side is good. And whatever is bad for the other side is good.”

Strivers — The old-fashioned blind ambition
 
Little Mixes — Craving the proximity to power, the ability to tell your friends back home that you were “in the room where it happened.”
 
Peter Principle Disprovers — “The Peter principle is the business management concept that people in a hierarchy rise to their maximum level of incompetence. … These hacks and maroons would have been nowhere near the Oval Office in any other administration.”
 
Nerd Revengers — "Sociable wannabes who aspired to sit at the cool kids’ table in high school but were too awkward or unlikable to get the invite."
 
The Inert Team Players — “… who lacked the imagination to conjure what else they could do with their lives. Company men and women [who] couldn’t fathom another option besides taking the next step up the political ladder."

The Compartmentalizers — “The inerts’ more anxiety ridden peers. … They would tuck bad Trump thoughts in a box in the corner of their brain somewhere and go on with their duties, clocking in and clocking out as required.”

Cartel Cashers — “The most common and obvious motivator for this or any ethically dubious endeavor: money."

Finally, the quote at the beginning of the book:

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has seen himself free — for higher dreams, for higher privileges.” — James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation”

Here is the video of Miller’s talk about the book on June 30 at Washington’s Politics and Prose bookstore.

House Jan. 6 panel’s third hearing: Pence stood up for democracy

The panel recounted on Thursday how former President Trump’s actions brought the nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis and raised fresh questions about whether those actions also were criminal, reports The New York Times.

 

The committee played videotaped testimony in which Vice President Pence’s top White House lawyer, Greg Jacob, said little-known conservative lawyer John Eastman had admitted in front of Trump two days before the Jan. 6 riot that his plan to have Pence obstruct the electoral certification violated the law.

 

The panel also provided a reconstruction of Pence’s harrowing day on Jan. 6. It began with a phone call in which Trump berated him as a “wimp” and questioned his manhood for resisting his order to obstruct the electoral count. It grew more dire as Trump, knowing his supporters were attacking the Capitol with the vice president inside, tweeted a public condemnation of him, further whipping up the crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

 

Through testimony from a conservative legal scholar, Jacob and other West Wing aides, as well as Pence’s own words, the committee dismantled the legal argument Trump and Eastman relied on, showing that it had no legal or historical precedent and went against the fundamental tenets of American democracy. They also showed that both men knew their plans weren't legitimate but pushed forward anyway.

 

Following the riot, Eastman sought a pardon after being informed by one of Trump’s top White House lawyers that he had criminal exposure for hatching the plan, according to an email shown by the committee during the session.

The portrait that emerged of Pence was that of a man who risked his life to prevent a meltdown of democracy set in motion by the president himself, says the Times.

Future hearings are expected to focus on ways Trump and his allies pressured state officials to overturn the election; attempted to interfere with the Justice Department; created slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Biden; and amassed a mob that marched on the Capitol, while the president did nothing to stop the violence for more than three hours.

The panel has scheduled two more hearings, for June 21 and June 23, at 1 p.m.

I’m rousing myself — to give back to the democracy that’s given much to me

Yesterday, I wrote about Barton Gellman’s article on The Atlantic website titled “Trump’s next coup has already begun.”

“There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it,” Gellman writes. "Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

“We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024, but urgent action is not happening,” Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine is quoted in the article as saying.

Why? 

Well, when it comes to people like me who were trained as journalists, Gellman says in an NPR interview:

"You're accustomed, as a mainstream journalist, to not taking sides in a political dispute and not being for or against any political party. But what we're for as journalists is truth. And what we're for as journalists is democracy. We are unambiguously in favor of our democratic system and of allowing the people to choose their own leaders.

"And the conundrum is that right now we have a political party that is bowing to authoritarian forces, that is systematically lying about the political process, about the election process itself. And so we're not — I'm not trying to advance the interests of the Democratic Party in my reporting. 

 

"But we have only one party right now that is small-D democratic. We have only one party that is prepared to lose a legitimate election and another one that's prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy. And so I am calling out the mainstream of the Republican Party for its lies and for its election subversion in a way that tonally is different from what I could have imagined writing 10 or 20 years ago.”

"If [our democracy] is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves," Gellman says.

I believe in balanced reporting and journalism that’s as objective as possible and is fair to everybody. I hope that’s been clear to those of you who’ve been reading this blog over the years.

Authoritarians tend to be impatient with balanced, objective and fair journalism. President Trump certainly was.

I came to Washington many years ago to work for a Republican member of the House of Representatives. The depth and breadth of the chasm between the party then and now is beyond my ability to describe.

This blog is all about what it means to be a citizen in this democracy. 

For me, that means it’s time to change my “mainstream journalist” approach. For example, I rarely run opinion articles because there’s no on-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand balance. But mainstream journalism isn’t calling out the Republican Party as seems to be critically needed right now, and I’ll be running opinion pieces and other work by people who are.

If you come across articles, studies or reports you think our fellow citizens need to be aware of, please send them to me.

Our democracy is at risk, and 'its defenders have to rouse themselves'

That’s the bottom line of the cover story of The Atlantic magazine’s January/February 2022 special issue, which is focused on “American democracy in crisis.” 

Online, the article, by Pulitizer Prize-winning reporter Barton Gellman, is titled "Trump's next coup has already begun."

In nearly 14,000 words, the article examines the current GOP trends. Here are the main points:

— Ballots cast by American voters may not decide the presidency in 2024. People already are working on that. And "who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today,” Gellman says.

— "For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft,” Gellman says. 

"Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. 

"They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.”

— "By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response,” Gellman says.

"Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire.  … His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.”

— A main concern of Trump supporters is the “Great Replacement” — that Africans Americans or Hispanics eventually will "have more rights than whites,” as one poll put it.

— Since Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans in at least 16 states have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature, Gellman says. Under the banner of election integrity, even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote.

— Trump’s legal team — of top-tier lawyers this time around, according to Gellman — is fine-tuning a constitutional argument to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. 

It "exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an 'independent state legislature' doctrine, which contends that statehouses have ‘plenary,' or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead," Gellman says.

— President Biden’s response to the threat to democracy so far comes down to “enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws, vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand athwart their own electoral schemes,” Gelllman says.

(And Gellman says in an NPR interview about his article: "grassroots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.

"And news media, frankly, could be putting a lot more attention on this. … they are not [doing the] sort of sustained war-footing news coverage that says democracy is under threat.

"You're accustomed, as a mainstream journalist, to not taking sides in a political dispute and not being for or against any political party," Gellman says. "But what we're for as journalists is truth. And what we're for as journalists is democracy. We are unambiguously in favor of our democratic system and of allowing the people to choose their own leaders. 

"And the conundrum is that right now we have a political party that is bowing to authoritarian forces, that is systematically lying about the political process, about the election process itself. And so we're not —I'm not trying to advance the interests of the Democratic Party in my reporting. 

"But we have only one party right now that is small-D democratic. We have only one party that is prepared to lose a legitimate election and another one that's prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy. And so I am calling out the mainstream of the Republican Party for its lies and for its election subversion in a way that tonally is different from what I could have imagined writing 10 or 20 years ago.")

— "The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.”

— Gellman concludes his article: "Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.”