Tuesday, June 13, 2023
Supreme Court preview, Trump's indictment, a UPS strike, climate calamities, Pat Robertson, and more...
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I. WHAT’S IN THE NEWS?
NEW EDICTS FROM THE COUNCIL OF ROBED ELDERS
Because America is a normal and very real democracy, we leave some of our most important decisions—like whether women have rights or corporations can dump pollutants in rivers—up to a small, unelected body of partisans with degrees from fancy law schools, otherwise known as the “Supreme Court.” Our magical council of elders insists it does not enact its political preferences, but acts merely as a group of neutral umpires, meting out pure, uncorrupted justice. (This is why it has been deemed perfectly acceptable for billionaires with cartoon bad-guy names like Harlan Crow to take them aboard their yachts and pay for their grand-nephew’s school tuition.) These robed sages have once again descended to pass judgment on new matters and tell us which rights we still possess.
A few of the Supreme Court’s biggest decisions for this term have already been made.
Its decision in Allen v. Milligan was actually quite good: The Court voted 5-4 to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, “which bars election practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race.” It struck down an obvious racial gerrymander in Alabama’s redistricting map, which attempted to cram most of the state’s Black residents into a single congressional district and spread the rest out into majority white districts to dilute their voting power as much as possible.
The map that was struck down, which “pack[ed] African American residents from Birmingham to Montgomery to Tuscaloosa to Selma into one single district.”
But, as usual with the Supreme Court, the good is outweighed by the horrendous. In our previous briefing, we discussed the decision in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters, which delivered another blow to union rights. Another disastrous ruling in Sackett v. EPA narrowed the number of waterways protected under the Clean Water Act only to those that have uninterrupted access to “waters of the United States,” (which, contrary to what you might think, are only a subset of the actual waters in the United States) opening up millions of acres of wetlands to pollution. As the minority pointed out, this leaves many wetlands along the Mississippi River, which are broken up by levees, open for pollution.
More opinions are scheduled to be released on Thursday and Friday, when the Court may decide on whether…
President Biden’s $400 billion in student debt relief will be upheld
The government can prosecute people for verbally “encouraging” illegal immigration (a case which puts the Biden administration up against the Cato Institute and the ACLU.)
Employers have to accommodate days off for religious observances
TRUMP INDICTED OVER “BOXES HOAX”
Former President Donald Trump has been indicted by a Florida grand jury on thirty seven federal felony counts related to his post-presidency handling of classified information, along with his former aide Waltine Nauta. The activity alleged in the indictment, which was released on Friday, is nothing short of flabbergasting. (Even Ben Shapiro calls it “NUTS.”) We recommend checking out the Lawfare Blog’s thorough summary of the charges.
The thorough indictment references audio evidence and testimony indicating that Trump knowingly showed off classified national security information—including a secret attack plan for Iran and a map of a classified operation—to people without security clearances, all the while acknowledging that the information was classified and that he should not be showing it to people.
“It is, like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information,” Trump said to two unnamed staffers without security clearances on tape. “Look at this. This was done by the military and given to me.” Trump has thereby demolished his own previous defense that his possession of these documents was legal because he had declassified them in his mind (which was already absurd to begin with). Alan Dershowitz, who has written multiple books defending Trump, was left shaking his head in disbelief, calling Trump’s conduct (blowing apart his own defense on tape) what “every defense lawyer dreads.”
Trump also left sensitive documents lying around in boxes strewn across the Mar-a-Lago compound, including in the bathroom and the ballroom, some of which contained info about “defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” But who among us doesn’t have something like that lurking in at least one of our clubhouse’s bathrooms?
After his presidency, Trump was not legally allowed to possess these documents, nor store them at Mar-a-Lago, according to the National Archives. When NARA asked Trump to return these documents (under threat of an FBI investigation if he did not comply), the indictment says Trump ordered his underlings to squirrel certain ones away while sending others back. When the FBI subpoenaed the remaining documents, Trump asked “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” One of Trump’s attorneys says that Trump “made a funny motion as though—well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Trump’s lawyers ended up falsely telling the Bureau that all of the documents had been returned.
Trump faces 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act. He is also charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, and making false statements. The most serious of these charges carry maximum prison sentences of up to 20 years each, though a first time offender would be unlikely to serve that long.
Shocking no one, Trump has been totally defiant, referring to this indictment as the “Boxes Hoax,” and comparing his actions with those of Joe Biden, Mike Pence and Hillary Clinton. And while perhaps those people should face charges for their reckless handling of classified information, we don’t have any indication that they hid documents from investigators or showed them off to random people for fun as Trump did. (This marks the difference between “negligent” and “willful” misconduct.)
We have been skeptical of the efficacy of efforts to legally corner Trump in the past (as recently as the last issue of this briefing). But this feels categorically different: the DOJ has several recordings, text messages, and emails of Trump officials essentially saying “Hey boss, how do you want us to take care of that crime for ya?” and Trump himself saying “It sure would be illegal for me to show you this highly secret, classified document. Why don’t you take a look?” As our longer analysis in Current Affairs points out, even Trump’s usual supporters seem to be having a hard time coming up with any argument in his defense other than “But Hillary didn’t get prosecuted” and “Biden is prosecuting a political opponent.” But the contention that it’s categorically wrong to “lock up political opponents” is silly on multiple levels. For one thing, sometimes your political opponents just so happen to commit crimes, and should probably be prosecuted when they do. Second, this is coming from the crowd who were all too eager to “lock up” Hillary Clinton.
II. WHAT SHOULD BE IN THE NEWS?
CLIMATE CATASTROPHE ACCELERATING FASTER THAN PREDICTED
While we were focused on the plumes of smoke that lately engulfed our land, there was yet more horrifying news suggesting that the march of climate change is happening faster than we predicted. According to a new paper from the journal Nature Communications, the Arctic could start seeing ice-free summers as soon as the 2030s, which is a decade earlier than was previously predicted. According to Smithsonian Magazine, this decline in sea ice “could have catastrophic consequences that extend to the rest of the planet, including sea level rise and disruption to weather patterns and ecosystems,” which means that the staggering increase in extreme weather events we’ve seen over the last 20 years will continue to accelerate.
Unfortunately, despite hopes that Biden would take climate change more seriously than his predecessor, neither this report or the apocalyptic wildfires have prompted him to declare any kind of climate emergency, even as activists and some progressive leaders have begged him to. While he has a few accomplishments to point to, like more investment in electric transportation, he continues to dither on many of his promises to reduce fossil fuel use. During his first two years, he approved more permits for fossil fuel drilling than Trump, has done little to curb fracking, and has been slow to connect green infrastructure projects to the power grid. The lofty target of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 is completely out of reach, especially now that any new climate legislation will have to pass a Republican House.
ONE OF THE LARGEST STRIKES IN U.S. HISTORY
More than 330,000 UPS workers are poised to go on strike under the Teamsters banner in less than eight weeks in what would be the largest single-company work stoppage in American history. The results of the vote will be announced on Friday, June 16. Negotiations have gone on since April, with the workers attempting to secure an end to the company’s two-tiered wage system, pay raises for part time employees to at least $20 an hour, an end to six-day work weeks and 14-hour shifts, and improvements to working conditions like the installation of air conditioners in UPS trucks. (Yes, somehow it takes the threat of a strike to get UPS to consider cooling drivers down in the scorching heat, even after the death of a driver from heat stroke and multiple reports from drivers of 130 degree trucks.) They also want an end to the use of surveillance cameras by management, which have been used to harass and intimidate drivers.
In a world that is increasingly reliant on speedy delivery, a strike of this scale would be massively disruptive to the national economy—UPS ships 24 million packages every day and accounts for a quarter of all U.S. parcels. But it is necessary to establish dignified conditions for workers in this increasingly large sector of the U.S. economy, especially as the delivery companies reap record profits with little trickling down to workers.
“Our contract fight matters for the entire working class. We want workers everywhere—and especially at Amazon and FedEx—to see that organizing a union leads to better pay and working conditions and greater control over their working lives, and opens the door to a better world,” write Sean Orr and Elliot Lewis, two UPS drivers and Teamsters stewards. Nearly 2 million Americans work as delivery drivers, with that number continuing to grow each year, so if the UPS drivers can win, hopefully their fight can reverberate through the industry.
III. CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with the election?”)
Shortly after the revelation of Trump’s crime tape, former Vice President Mike Pence said in an interview that even if Trump had committed a crime, he would hope that the DOJ would not take the “dramatic and drastic and divisive step of indicting” him. In other words, Pence’s view on the matter is that “No one is above the law…” unless a bunch of people really want him to be above the law.
Can Trump still run from jail? It is entirely legal for even a convicted felon to run for president. In fact, the Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs ran from jail in 1920 after being jailed for speaking out against America’s participation in the First World War. He received nearly a million votes. But as cool as that is, Debs was a third party candidate who had no chance to become president. Trump has a significant chance of winning. “The clearest path to disqualifying Donald Trump running for office would have been if the Senate had convicted him in one or both of the impeachments,” says Chris Edelson, an assistant professor at American University, since there is no constitutional provision to prevent convicted felons from holding the office. Trump had better save his one phone call for the oath of office.
Donald Trump has made several juvenile cracks about former New Jersey Governor and presidential candidate Chris Christie’s weight (which is wrong regardless of who’s doing it, but especially so given that Trump isn’t exactly svelte himself). In response, Christie called him a “baby” and accused him and his family of “breathtaking levels” of “grift.” While Christie deserves a modicum of credit (but only the merest of modicums) for not cowering before Trump as others have, it’s hard to view this as some act of moral courage: After all, Christie eagerly bent the knee to Trump in 2016 when Trump was being cruel to everyone else, only turning once he’d been snubbed for a Trump administration post. Also, the guy responsible for Bridgegate and numerous other scandals does not get to accuse others of “grifting.” What we actually have here is yet another instance of self-righteous “Never Trump” Republicans pretending the rest of the Republican Party is better than Trump, when all it is is less vulgar.
Trump fans are furious at Team DeSantis for posting an ad on Twitter which contains several A.I.-generated images of Trump hugging and kissing the hated Dr. Anthony Fauci. DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw has claimed that these ads were meant to be “parody,” but this is dubious since they appear alongside real pictures of Trump. These particular images may be pretty obviously phony, but just because these ones look shoddy doesn’t mean that A.I. deep fakes won’t become increasingly dangerous tools of political propaganda in the near future.
Burgum Fever may soon be sweeping the nation! At least, that’s what you may be led to believe if you read FiveThirtyEight. They ran a piece about why some person named Doug Burgum—supposedly the governor of North Dakota (though this is unconfirmed)—“could surprise” in the 2024 Republican primary. (Remember, political media—other than this magazine—is so dependent on election “horse race” coverage that they have to gin it up however they can.) So far, Burgum’s polling numbers are formidable: in the two surveys which have included him since May, he has received zero percent support and one percent support. We haven’t seen a candidate catch fire this fast since the whirlwind Chafee campaign of 2016.
THIS WEEK IN EVIL
Televangelist Pat Robertson died this week at the age of 93. His daily television program, The 700 Club, ran for more than six decades and garnered 16 million viewers daily at its height. Deeply involved in fundraising for socially conservative candidates for office he was one of the people most responsible for turning evangelicals into a mobilized front for hard-right social reaction. After learning of his passing, former President Trump commended him as a “powerful voice of faith and freedom.” Similar praise has come from Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and many other Republican politicians. Here is just a sampling of the views he espoused with that “powerful voice”:
On women: "I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."
On Hindus: “Demons work behind the Hindu and other Oriental religions, as well as the teaching of mind control.” Also, Christians should avoid doing yoga because it’s “really spooky” and you might end up speaking “in Hindu.”
On Jews: “The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today.” (Though Robertson was zealously pro-Zionist.)
On Haitians who were affected by the 2010 earthquake: “Haitians were originally under the heel of the French…And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘we will serve you if you will get us free from the French’…Ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”
On gay people, he issued tons of rabidly homophobic statements, blaming them for everything from hurricanes to 9/11, but here are two of the worst: “AIDS is God’s way of weeding his garden,” and “Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two seem to go together.” (Weirdly, Robertson also once made some unexpectedly trans-friendly comments.)
There isn’t room to catalog every awful thing Robertson believed, but it’s no stretch to say that he dedicated his life to making the world a crueler place. Here at Current Affairs, we don’t like to say that the world is better off with someone dead. But in the case of Robertson’s demise, we feel comfortable saying that the world isn’t worse off.
IV. AROUND THE STATES
A group of 240 Black Tesla workers in California are launching a class-action discrimination lawsuit against the company. More than half say that higher-ups bombarded them with racial slurs and that they witnessed unequal work requirements and disciplinary measures against Black employees. Tesla has already been sued for “turning a blind eye” to harassment and there are allegations that CEO Elon Musk told workers they needed to be “thick-skinned” about racial abuse. Given how Musk's tenure running Twitter has gone, it’s no surprise that a culture of rampant racist abuse has been allowed to fester at Tesla as well.
As smoke billowed across New York, its Democratic governor Kathy Hochul announced a Republican with a history of donating to climate change deniers and lobbying on behalf of oil companies as her pick to lead the state’s energy and power operations. It is part of a pattern of Hochul bowing to oil interests—having opposed bills to expand green energy production, and nominated to state appeals court a member of the Chevron legal team that fought to jail environmental attorney Steven Donziger after he won a massive damages award for the company’s pollution of the Amazon rainforest.
Happy Pride Month! According to a new Gallup poll, support for gay marriage is at an all time high of 71 percent (including 49 percent of Republicans). It really is a seismic shift. In 1996, only 27 percent supported marriage equality, and Republicans used to issue dire warnings, with Michelle Bachman saying that if it became the law of the land “K-12 little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal, natural, and perhaps they should try it” and Rick Santorum suggesting it was the road to “man on dog” relationships. But not long ago, even liberal politicians—including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—fell over themselves insisting they believed in Traditional Marriage. Barack Obama, in an interview with megachurch pastor Rick Warren, said that “marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” because “God’s in the mix,” though he privately confessed he was “bullshitting.” The shift not only shows that social change is possible, but that the subset of conservatives who have grown more bold in attacking the LGBTQ community in the last few years are still a relatively small minority in a culture that is leaving them behind.
V. AROUND THE GLOBE
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has died at age 86. As has been chronicled in Current Affairs by Alex Bronzini-Vender, the rise of Berlusconi from TV businessman to PM was an eerie presage to the Trump era:
“His legacy policy-wise is mostly one of status quo management, spending his years in office implementing laws aimed at protecting himself, his businesses, and his class interests. Yet, he ushered in an era of Italian politics defined by his own image and perennial scandal—an era which left Italy with a scattered, powerless left and a radicalized right.”
Bronzini-Vender shows that those of us who want to stop Trump need to learn some hard lessons from Italy’s repeated failures to keep Berlusconi out of power.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Saudi Arabia, where he and Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed “fighting terrorism,” a peace deal with Israel, and OPEC oil production, among other things. Reports say they did bring up an end to the monstrous war in Yemen currently being perpetrated by the Saudis. But the Biden administration’s actions of late show them to have mostly given up pretending to care about the number of people who have been killed, which is now in excess of 377,000. Biden suspended providing certain munitions to Saudi Arabia in 2021, but since then his administration has notified Congress of at least $4 billion in arms sales and military services. The Biden administration’s “pragmatic” approach to Saudi human rights abuses (i.e. not being so rude as to bring them up) has outraged human rights organizations. Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy, even says that Biden is partly responsible for the Saudi government’s new influence in the world of golf, because “Biden made it OK for the whole world, especially the business community, to not worry about re-engaging with MbS.”
Israel is officially annexing the West Bank, something they’ve been doing unofficially for years but refused to openly admit to. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the territory will now fall under Israeli “civilian” rather than military control. Little will likely change on the ground for the Palestinians who live under the flagrantly illegal occupation: they will still be pushed from their homes to make way for Israeli settlers, deprived of the right to vote and assemble, and subject to arbitrary killing, detention and torture. What is different is that the Israeli government is finally acknowledging their occupation not as a temporary military operation, but as the colonization effort it so obviously is.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's has re-launched the country’s “People’s Pharmacy” program, which offers free or 90 percent discounted medications to those who cannot afford them. Lula began the program in 2004, during his first term as president, which led to a reduction in deaths from hypertension and diabetes, but was cut by 60 percent by right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and left many of the country’s poor unable to pay for pharmaceuticals.
Cracker Barrel? More like WOKE-er BARREL!
Last week, the woke mind virus colonized Jesus’ favorite chicken joint. Now it has burrowed itself deep into the cozy oaken edifice of another of Real America’s most beloved chain restaurants. No longer is Cracker Barrel the beacon of Southern hospitality we once cherished. (“Southern hospitality” famously meaning “hospitality granted only to those exactly like you, and revoked on a whim.”) “Everyone is always welcome at our table,” the establishment now declares, even having the audacity to sully one of its sturdy, heterosexual rocking chairs with the rainbow colors of the conquering Alphabet Mafia. For conservatives, this display of basic acceptance is a slap in the face to all decent, red-blooded Americans. No, really. The reaction to Cracker Barrel’s extremely cursory acknowledgment of Pride Month may be even more absurd than their response to Chick-fil-A. As with Bud Light, Target, and Chick-fil-A, a boycott is already underway. (Since NASCAR has also gone woke, at this rate conservatives soon won’t have any consumer choices they can use to certify their political identity.) President Trump’s physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, bellowed that he would “NEVER eat there again!!” while the Texas Family Project sent this grim dispatch from the battlefield: “We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackerBarrel has fallen.” Perhaps these people would have been more comfortable at Cracker Barrel as it was in the 1990s, when it was company policy to fire employees whose “sexual preference fails to demonstrate normal heterosexual values” and the company had to pay millions to settle claims of racism and sexual harassment.
VI. UNDER THE HOOD
“How Big Pharma Rigged the Patent System”: Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect explains how the pharmaceutical industries use “legal trickery” to prevent patents from expiring, which keeps the price of life-saving drugs high by deterring the creation of generics:
“One legal strategy Big Pharma uses is filing dozens or even hundreds of patents on the same drug…Another strategy is to ‘make slight modifications to the drug,’... By making small changes to dosages, formulation, method of administration, and so forth, drug companies can then apply for a new patent or a patent extension and extend their monopoly… The point is to create a huge legal deterrent to any generic or biosimilar competitors who might attempt to enter the market when the original patent expires. Even when a competitor might have a legal right to produce the original formulation of a drug, cutting through the patent thicket would require millions of dollars in litigation and take years…All this outrageous price-gouging is a major reason why American health care is so expensive. A 2018 study found that drug spending makes up about 15 percent of U.S. health care spending—the highest fraction of any rich country and much higher in absolute terms because our health care is so expensive.”
VII. MEDIA CRITICISM
“Attacks on Freedom of the Press Are Ramping Up”: Branko Marcetic of Jacobin describes the increasing use of counterterrorism and hate speech laws to silence journalists in Western democracies:
“[Journalist Kit Klarenberg] has written copious articles critical of the British government’s foreign and national security policies for a variety of left-wing outlets: Electronic Intifada, MintPress News, the Cradle. But the British officers were interested in one outlet in particular: the Grayzone. According to Klarenberg’s account of the detention for that outlet, the officers questioned him about his pay from the news website, his contact with its editor, Max Blumenthal, and any hypothetical links between the Grayzone and the Russian government…Klarenberg was reportedly detained under Schedule 3, Section 4 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, a controversial law criticized by human rights groups and the UN that was passed by the ruling Conservative government in 2019, ostensibly in response to the Skipral poisoning two years earlier. The law gives British law enforcement wide latitude to detain and harass individuals deemed to be taking part in a ‘hostile activity’ on behalf of or in the interests of a foreign government.”
BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
Arctic Skuas are the robber barons of the bird world: They eat by stealing food from terns, puffins, and other hardworking birds as they carry fish back to their young. Fittingly, they have been nicknamed “parasitic jaegers.” Yes, there is a Bezos of birds.
A painting of Arctic skuas committing robbery, by Louis Agassiz Fuertes
Writing and research by Stephen Prager. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.