Dec. 22, 2023 ❧ Trump gets banned, Elon starts a university, and the Big Apple ends solitary confinement...
Plus the NRA's financial woes, lewd license plates, and armadillos on the march
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Here comes news, here comes news, right down news lane
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
NYC ENDS SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, DEFIES ERIC ADAMS
On Wednesday, the New York City Council overwhelmingly approved a new measure that would ban most cases of solitary confinement in the city’s jails. Known as Introduction 549-A, the legislation guarantees that “All people in city custody would have at least 14 hours of out-of-cell time in shared spaces,” and “would allow separation from the general population only in instances where a person engages in a violent incident.” It’s a long-awaited reform, and one which groups like the New York ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have advocated for in the past. Experts with the United Nations consider prolonged solitary confinement a form of torture, and it’s well-documented that the practice causes long-term harm to prisoners’ mental health, worsening existing illness and even causing psychiatric conditions in patients who previously had none. For these reasons, multiple legal scholars have argued that solitary confinement violates the Eighth Amendment, and constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.” In 2019, the family of Kalief Browder—who was jailed at the age of 16 for allegedly stealing a backpack, and spent two years in solitary—were awarded $3.3 million in damages after Browder took his own life, in part because of the psychological trauma of his confinement. The case led to renewed scrutiny of New York City’s imprisonment practices, which has now borne results.
In the same legislative session, the City Council also approved a measure requiring New York police to formally report every street stop they make. Back in June, a court-appointed monitor found that the NYPD’s so-called “Neighborhood Safety Teams” were carrying out unlawful pedestrian stops similar to the infamous “stop-and-frisk” policing of Michael Bloomberg’s mayorship. In a random sample, “more than 97 percent” of the people stopped by the NSTs were either Black or Hispanic, and roughly 93 percent were male, showing clear evidence of profiling. The Council’s new legislation, popularly known as the “How Many Stops Act”, is designed to end these blatant violations of New Yorkers’ civil rights, and bring some real accountability and transparency to the NYPD.
One person isn’t happy about these changes, though: New York City mayor Eric Adams. When he’s not dealing with investigations into his own alleged corruption, Adams has been fighting against both of these reforms. He’s already promised to veto the How Many Stops Act, claiming that it will “endanger public safety” by making police fill out too much paperwork. And in 2021, he was outraged when 29 City Council members dared to write a letter asking him to change his “pro-solitary confinement position”:
The one thing that's different from everyone that signed that letter and Eric Adams: I wore a bulletproof vest for 22 years and protected the people of this city. And when you do that, then you have the right to question me on safety and public safety matters.
Despite Adams’ patented cop-bluster, though, the Council has defied his wishes. The How Many Stops Act was approved by a vote of 35-9 in favor, and Introduction 549-A had an even bigger mandate, passing with a vote of a 39-7. In other words, both have a veto-proof majority, and there’s nothing the Mayor can do about it.
POEM OF THE WEEK
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame.
- Oscar Wilde, from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
BIG STORY
TRUMP BANNED FROM COLORADO BALLOTS (FOR NOW)
The Colorado Supreme Court has kicked former President Trump off the 2024 ballot in the state under a provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifying from office anyone who previously engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, an amendment put into place to prevent those who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War from reassuming office. The ruling, of course, follows charges by special counsel Jack Smith for Trump’s role in fomenting the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his false claims of voter fraud to have his electoral defeat decertified.
“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the Colorado Supreme Court wrote in its 4-3 decision to oust Trump from the ballot. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.” With this ruling, Colorado becomes the first state to bar the former president from running for office, an act which could set off an avalanche of other states doing the same thing—lawsuits have been filed in 16 other states attempting to have Trump removed as well.
This is an extraordinary step into uncharted legal and political territory. Only eight officials—all former Confederates—have formally been disqualified from the ballot using this measure throughout history (though thousands more were informally understood to have been disqualified from office after fighting against the Union). The last time it was invoked was in 1872, and it’s the first time such an action has been taken against a presidential candidate. The legal footing against Trump also seems rather shaky—not only has he not been convicted of insurrection, he has not even been charged with it. Though, as the Congressional Research Service points out, “Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not expressly require a criminal conviction, and historically, one was not necessary.”
Morally, the case is somewhat more clear. Trump is obviously a danger to democracy: In an effort to reverse his electoral defeat, he spread claims of widespread voter fraud that many of his associates have since admitted under oath were fabricated. He has publicly said that he thought the January 6 attack on the Capitol was “a beautiful day” and that the rioters had “love in their heart,” while associates have testified that he resisted calling off the violence for hours behind the scenes. In his post-presidency, he’s pledged to be a “dictator” but “only on Day 1” should he return to power (how reassuring). He has pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” He’s described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country” and pledged to build a massive new network of internment camps to detain and remove immigrants without due process. It seems highly possible that he would not simply stop at detaining immigrants. He has said “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within” and to that end, he’s asked members of a prospective second-term Justice Department to prosecute critics, members of the media, and former associates and has drafted plans to use the military to crush protests to his inauguration. For those who have called Trump’s fascist rhetoric what it is, his spokesman Steven Cheung responded that “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
With all of this in mind, it’s difficult to say that trying to stop Trump from winning re-election is not morally justified. The question is whether Colorado’s maneuver here is politically smart. For one thing, it absolutely bolsters Trump’s assertion that his opponents are plotting against him and upending the democratic process (even if they have a constitutional justification for what they are doing). Colorado’s high court has decided that voters are not allowed to choose Trump, which is undoubtedly an abridgment of democratic principles. Trump has correctly pointed out that he is currently blowing Biden out of the water in the polls. Even if a moral case can be made, kicking Trump off the ballot looks like a desperate maneuver by people who expect to lose. Morally, the question remains open whether it’s reasonable to violate democratic norms a little bit in order to stop someone who’d violate them a lot.
Beyond that, there is a very good chance that Colorado’s maneuver will fail. Likely early next year, this matter will be decided by the US Supreme Court, which is controlled by a 6-3 conservative majority that would presumably rule in Trump’s favor (though there is always the outside possibility that they will side with the core of Republican donors that is desperate to claw the party back from Trump). If Colorado’s maneuver fails, it still invites retaliation. For instance, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has already suggested that Biden should be kicked off the ballot there in retaliation. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has gone further, saying that Biden and the Democrats “should be held accountable for treason over what is happening at our southern border” and agreed with a tweet saying “red states…should act to ban President Biden, and all relevant Democrats, from their state ballots.” “The Democrat Party has opened a door they should have NEVER opened,” she said. “They should be forced to live by their own rules.” While Republicans certainly may have done this eventually even without provocation, kicking presidential candidates off the ballot seems like a very bad thing for a democracy to normalize. But we could now be on that track.
While the desire to oust Trump is completely understandable given his undisguised dictatorial impulses, the decision by Colorado’s court seems liable to only strengthen him and invite a more authoritarian response from Republicans. This would not be such a massive problem if Democrats had a viable alternative to Trump, but they are instead inexplicably pinning all their hopes on the desiccated corpse of Joe Biden, who is near his absolute nadir of popularity. If Trump does win and impose the authoritarian crackdown he’s now openly promising, Democrats will deserve the lion’s share of the blame for not taking the imperative of defeating him seriously.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ As if he doesn’t already have enough to worry about, Elon Musk is now founding his own university in Austin, Texas. According to tax filings uncovered by Bloomberg, Musk donated $100 million to his foundation to establish a primary and secondary STEM school. This is not Elon’s first attempt to create a school—a decade ago, he founded his own academy called Ad Astra (Latin for “To the Stars”) for his five kids on the SpaceX campus. Elon has spent the last couple years teasing the creation of a university which he has previously suggested will have tuition paid in the cryptocurrency DogeCoin and also allow students to purchase “epic merch.” But while Musk has said the college will initially offer spots to 50 students based on “merit” and hire “experienced faculty,” details about how this endeavor will be realized are scarce for now. Austin seems to be the destination of choice for well-heeled right-wingers to launch quixotic forays into higher education: Bari Weiss also founded her “anti-woke” University of Austin there in 2021. Weiss’ university is still not an accredited educational institution after two years of operation, does not have a physical campus, and had many of its big names, like Harvard professor Steven Pinker and Heather Heying, resign before classes even began. It’s difficult to imagine Musk’s endeavor going worse than that, but given how badly Twitter has imploded under his watch, it’s seems like he should not be in charge of something like education, which actually matters.
⚜ LONG READ: The National Rifle Association is nearing rock bottom. In The Daily Beast, Roger Sollenberger tracks how the gun lobby’s revenue has dramatically declined since 2008 and how the organization is reeling from mismanagement and corruption scandals.
The NRA’s most recent tax return, filed in November of this year for 2022, reveals dramatic declines along almost every conceivable metric: revenue, assets, member dues, lobbying, and political spending—with conversely sharp increases in legal costs and deficits. And as the NRA’s power and influence has waned, gun violence has perversely soared, particularly suicides, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
In one view, the NRA’s decline might be seen as a consequence of its own “success,” as its gargantuan lobbying efforts in the early to mid-2010s effectively froze the national gun control debate, diminishing the advocacy group’s utility. Still, that might be changing.
In 2022, 15 GOP senators repudiated the NRA, passing the first meaningful gun control package in decades. That could be a signal of the NRA’s demise, but it also could be interpreted as a reaction to the surging gun violence that continues to this day in part because of the lax gun laws that the NRA advocated for and won over that time.
What is clear is that the NRA today is in a dismal state. On the income side, 2022 was the fourth year in a row that revenue fell, marking its weakest fundraising year since at least 2008. Membership dues are at all-time lows, according to available public data, and staffing is at the lowest point since those costs began their downward plunge in 2016, while the group’s legal costs—largely driven by civil actions alleging rampant mismanagement of funds and self-dealing—are proportionately higher than ever…
With less money coming in, the nonprofit has been running up staggering legal fees from its ongoing civil disputes. Those include its court fights in New York, which involve millions of dollars in alleged self-dealing and mismanagement—including on behalf of the organization’s beleaguered CEO, Wayne LaPierre—as well as a battery of complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission alleging unlawful political coordination and shell company shenanigans.
The NRA has fought the New York lawsuit tooth and nail. The group went on the offensive with its own separate lawsuit against the state, which made its way to the Supreme Court this November. Last year, those efforts yielded a small victory when a New York court stopped that state’s AG, James, from dissolving the organization entirely, though she was allowed to pursue narrower damages and is actively doing so.
As a result, the NRA’s legal costs in 2022 were proportionately the highest they’ve ever been, with its $44 million in legal payments accounting for nearly 20 percent of expenses—roughly one of every five dollars spent. (In 2017, the NRA’s legal costs were 2 percent of expenses.) The group’s largest single vendor last year was its principal law firm, Brewer Attorneys and Counselors, which received about $23.5 million, or nearly 10 percent of the NRA’s 2022 budget.
Illinois has released its annual “naughty list” of rejected license plates. In total, the state vetoed more than 300 combinations of letters—some for being too vulgar, too political, or just plain weird. Here are some of the best ones:
IOWASUX
URANUS
TOOWOKE
BS
EATBUTT
FUKBDN
BUKFIDN
GANG (No particular gang, just “GANG”)
KOKAINE
MEATY
NOGOD
POOTER
WESUCK
YVYVYVV
You can find the full list here, or watch Illinois’ Secretary of State struggle to pronounce a few plates with a straight face:
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ After serious disagreements with Saudi Arabia, Angola has left OPEC. Tensions had been rising between the two countries since June, when the Saudi-led coalition cut production quotas for both Angola and Nigeria, while allowing the United Arab Emirates to raise theirs. The move was part of Saudi Arabia’s overall strategy of lowering oil production in order to raise global prices, and to wield geopolitical influence with the United States in particular. At the time, Angola’s representatives reportedly “stormed out” of a June 4 meeting; now, the country has left OPEC entirely. Their exit weakens the production bloc, which now has just 12 member states, and caused crude oil futures to fall by around $1 a barrel when the news was first announced. From an environmental perspective, at least, this can be seen as a minor win. After all, petroleum production itself is the single largest driver of climate change, and OPEC had a major hand in weakening the climate agreements at the recent COP28 summit. Anything that reduces the cartel’s power can only be good for the rest of the world.
❧ Pope Francis has denounced Israel’s “terrorism” in the Gaza Strip after the Israel Defense Force reportedly killed an unarmed mother and daughter who’d taken refuge inside Gaza’s only Catholic church. He referred to a report from the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the highest Christian authority in the Holy Land, which said that in addition to the two women who were shot, seven others were wounded by sniper fire as they tried to protect them. “I continue to receive very grave and painful news from Gaza,” Francis said. “Unarmed civilians are the objects of bombings and shootings. And this happened even inside the Holy Family parish complex, where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick or disabled, nuns. Some would say 'It is war. It is terrorism.' Yes, it is war. It is terrorism,” he said. Israel has denied the attack—with the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, absurdly claiming that there “are no churches” and “no Christians” in Gaza before walking back the claim after being corrected (There are, in fact, around a thousand Christians in Gaza, some of whom have ancestry dating back to the religion’s founding, though under Hamas’ rule the number of Christians has declined significantly).
There were reportedly three churches in Gaza prior to October 7, and three churches have either been destroyed or badly damaged as the result of Israeli airstrikes (so the deputy mayor might actually technically be correct that there are no churches). In October, an airstrike killed at least 16 people at the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church—the third-oldest church in the world (this bombing killed relatives of former US Representative Justin Amash). The fifth-century Byzantine Church in the Jabaliya refugee camp has also reportedly taken substantial damage with the interfaith organization Heritage for Peace reporting that it has been “completely destroyed.” Now, less than a week before Christmas, the convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa at the Holy Family Parish is uninhabitable according to the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem. In addition to Christian houses of worship, multiple Israeli media outlets have reported that the IDF has also destroyed 192 mosques since the siege of Gaza began. In addition to the annihilation of more than 20,000 people—including 8,000 children, 6,200 women, 310 medical personnel, 35 civil defense personnel, and 97 journalists—the war in Gaza continues to be an act of mass cultural annihilation.
⚜ LONG READ: “Biden Has No Courage on Cuba.” In a recent report for The Intercept, journalist Ryan Grim revealed something alarming: that the Biden administration has “not even begun” the process of reviewing Cuba’s status on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Placing Cuba on the list was one of the last acts of the Trump administration, aimed at destroying Barack Obama’s policy of “normalization” with Cuba. Now, it appears that Biden will follow in Trump’s footsteps, allowing the United States’ devastating economic sanctions against the island to continue. For Responsible Statecraft, foreign policy scholar Dr. William Leogrande breaks down the situation, and calls Biden out for his cowardice:
Trump’s rationale was that Cuba, which had been hosting peace talks between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrilla movement, refused to extradite the ELN negotiators to Colombia’s new conservative government after it broke off the talks — despite the fact that Colombia had previously signed a protocol specifying that if talks collapsed, the ELN negotiators would be guaranteed safe passage back to Colombia. Norway, co-guarantor of the talks along with Cuba, sided with Havana. (Norway was not designated a state sponsor of terrorism.)
Even that thin rationale disappeared when Gustavo Petro was elected president of Colombia in 2022, restarted the peace talks, and demanded that Washington remove Cuba from the terrorism list, calling its inclusion “an injustice.”
[...] In short, there is no longer any legitimate rationale whatsoever for Cuba being designated a state sponsor of terrorism. Cuba stays on the list because the Biden administration does not have the political courage to remove it — even though Cuba and the United States have a Memorandum of Agreement and active dialogue on counter-terrorism cooperation!
[...] Cuba is living through its worst economic crisis since the 1990s, unable to access the international financial system because of the terrorism designation. But apparently, Cubans will be condemned to suffer for at least another year, branded with the Scarlet Letter T for terrorist, while the Dimmesdales of Biden’s campaign try to curry favor with Cuban Americans in south Florida who are not going to vote for him anyway.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ The Michigan GOP is an “incompetent dumpster fire,” according to its own members. Back in February, the party was taken over at the state level by Kristina Karamo—a far-right Trump supporter who has little political experience, and denies the 2020 election results. Apparently, Karamo’s tenure as Michigan party chair hasn’t been going great. Speaking to CBS Detroit, Joel Studebaker (the party’s deputy chief of staff) estimates that they’ve raised less than $1 million this year, and says they’re “struggling to get speakers” at party events. In September, the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference—usually a prestigious fundraising summit—turned into a disaster when the only presidential candidate who bothered to show up was Vivek Ramaswamy. There was also an uproar over washed-up actor and QAnon acolyte Jim Caviezel, who the party paid $110,000 for a 25-minute speech, requiring them to take out a loan. At one point, the Michigan GOP even started circulating a spreadsheet that ranked its volunteers on their ideological loyalty, from 1 (“Patriot”) to 4 (“RINO”). As you might expect, people weren’t thrilled about that. There are now escalating calls for Karamo to resign, and committee member Dawn Beattie has called her an “incompetent dumpster fire.” In ordinary circumstances, this might be good news for Democrats, who badly need to win the contested swing state—but Joe Biden, who’s currently trailing Donald Trump in both Michigan and Georgia, has his own dumpster fire to worry about.
⚜ LONG READ: “Poll Shows Student Debt Policy May Be Killing Biden.” In the Intercept, Ari Rabin-Havt discusses a poll he conducted with voters under 45 which found that those without student debt had more favorable views of Biden than those who had student debt.
… Have voters experienced a political rug pull, causing them to move away from Biden? During a crypto “rug pull,” the scammer abandons a project and runs off with their investor’s money. During a political “rug pull,” a benefit that a voter had is taken away. The taxpayers who were benefiting now feel poorer than when they started because they are forced to cover a shortfall once covered by the government.
To test this premise of whether “rug pull” voters exist, it made the most sense to look at student loan recipients. More than 43 million people hold student debt. Student loan repayments were first paused during the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden famously issued an executive order to cancel $10,000 of each borrowers’ debt. Republicans sued to block it, and the Supreme Court struck down his plan. A Republican-led Congress, as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling, forced the administration to restart loan payments this fall.
And by looking at student debt, while taking the survey, respondents would not be required to recall whether or not they received a benefit. Instead, they simply were being asked to disclose a fact about their current financial situation: whether or not they have student debt.
… I asked whether respondents currently had student loan debt, who they voted for in 2020, and who they planned to vote for in 2024. These questions were separated in the survey from political questions about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or the 2024 presidential election to avoid questionnaire bias. The results give an initial indication about the impact of student loans on voters under 45: As of November 30, voters burdened with student debt under the age of 45 prefer Trump over Biden by 3 percentage points. Voters who do not have student debt choose Biden by 9 points.
… With 11 months until the 2024 election, Biden could win back “rug pull” voters over the course of the campaign. However, while the Biden White House and Democrats place the blame for the student loan restart squarely at the feet of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and congressional Republicans, most Americans are simply not in the weeds enough to understand these explanations. (Data suggests the adage holds true: If you are explaining, you are losing.) While this data is not conclusive, it does suggest that the Biden campaign needs to do substantive work to bring these voters back into the fold.
ARMADILLO FACT OF THE WEEK
A “wave of armadillos” is moving north!
According to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, armadillo sightings are becoming more and more common in the Tar Heel State, with 167 of the little armored mammals spotted between 2019 and 2023. As climate change heats up the United States, armadillos have been steadily expanding their range northward, reaching Tennessee in 1980 and North Carolina in 2007. (How they crossed the Mississippi River remains a mystery.) So far, the vast majority of the wandering armadillos have been the nine-banded variety (Dasypus novemcinctus), but there’s been at least one sighting of the extremely loud screaming hairy armadillo. Not to worry, though: despite their vulnerability to rabies and leprosy, armadillos are generally shy, non-aggressive creatures, and they pose little danger to humans.
(BONUS ARMADILLO FACT: A group of armadillos is called a roll!)
