newrepublic--2020-09-22--Wendell Willkie’s World Without Borders

Wendell Willkie’s World Without Borders

On a brisk morning in late August 1942 , Wendell Willkie—a corporate lawyer , failed presidential candidate , and media darling—got onto an airplane for a trip around the world .
Soon , he ’ d be holding court with kings , premiers , the shah , as well as soldiers and civilians across Africa and Asia .
As the Axis powers seized a terrifying amount of territory , Willkie had been dispatched by the president of the United States on an audacious , if vague , mission to introduce the U.S. to the world .
From his perch in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ differently—a planet that could be .
Looking down , there weren ’ t any nation states , or , in his words , “ splotches of color ” that you ’ d find on a map .
The world was “ small and completely interdependent.
” Going abroad also gave him a unique vantage point on the different people of the world .
Schmoozing with government officials in Chongking or mingling with ordinary Egyptians in cafés , Willkie witnessed firsthand the shared desires of people around the world : peace , freedom , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Wendell Willkie is an oddball in the history of internationalism .
He wasn ’ t an intellectual .
Nor was he a statesman .
And he did not actively participate in any of the dozens of vibrant American organizations—such as the League of Nations Union—that sought to integrate the U.S. into the emerging interwar world order .
Rather , Willkie spent those years working for big business and criticizing big government .
But he was also , paradoxically , an avowed anti-racist ( the NAACP even named its headquarters the Wendell Willkie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wall Streeter became the star of internationalist efforts during World War II is a peculiar story .
It is , as Samuel Zipp demonstrates in his exhilarating and timely new book , The Idealist , a story of media , technology , and a critique of empire that proved to be palatable—if only for a short while—for midcentury America .
Willkie leapt onto the national stage in the 1930s as a handsome , youthful force in the anti–New Deal coalition ( which was , Zipp observes , an otherwise “ dour and stuffy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ electrical utility conglomerate in the country , he launched a public campaign against FDR ’ s plans to break up utility monopolies and provide cheap electricity to the impoverished Tennessee Valley .
Willkie ’ s combination of a ferocious defense of free enterprise with small-town Indiana charm led one New Dealer to refer to him as that “ barefoot boy from Wall Street.
” Willkie ’ s cause was unpopular .
But it didn ’ t matter that Willkie led a losing fight against the New Deal .
It had nudged him into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ granted him , Zipp deftly argues , a novel form of power : celebrity .
Thanks to radio , millions of Americans could tune in to hear his voice .
In one radio appearance , on the highly popular Town Meeting of the Air , he trounced the assistant attorney general in a debate on whether the government should embrace the market .
Magazines and newspapers covered Willkie obsessively : Puff pieces floated a presidential run , and photo essays in Life and Look made him a recognizable star .
His hair—short on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ usually flopping over his forehead—was the subject of media attention .
The New Yorker even interviewed Willkie ’ s barber .

Willkie and FDR struck up an improbable friendship after the election. Despite the wide ideological gap that separated the two, they saw eye to eye on foreign policy, and Willkie became an important booster for FDR’s wartime policies. After Japan bombarded Pearl Harbor and other U.S. territories in the Pacific, and after the U.S. entered the conflict, the pair hatched a plan to send Willkie on a trip around the world. It was to be, as Zipp describes it, “something between a fact-finding tour and a propaganda circuit.”
And so Willkie took off, visiting Palestine, Iran, China, and many more countries and colonies on his 49-day, 28,000-mile journey. He dined with local leaders (such as with King Farouk of Egypt), talked strategy with generals (including with the esteemed British General Bernard Montgomery), gave speeches (locals and reporters regularly crowded around him), and always found ways to escape protocol. One journalist wrote that everywhere he went, Willkie “made formal diplomatic calls in a lounge suit instead of the sacred striped pants and tail coat of tradition,” imparting to everything “an atmosphere of clambake.” In one memorable scene, Willkie cheerfully debated communism with a Soviet engineer on a visit to a factory. In another, Willkie engaged Joseph Stalin in a tête-à-tête (after finessing around the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union). The two made merry, and Willkie scribbled down a shopping list of Lend-Lease material for the U.S. to provide to the Soviets: 500 airplanes, 10,000 cargo trucks, two million tons of wheat, and so on. Willkie’s casual approach delighted Stalin, who remarked: “Mr. Willkie, you know I grew up a Georgian peasant. I am unschooled in pretty talk. All I can say is that I like you very much.”
It is tempting to dismiss the flight—and the hoopla that accompanied Willkie—as a P.R. stunt for a failed politician. But, as Zipp shows, this overlooks the very real influence that Willkie wielded. His freewheeling ways pulled diplomatic negotiations out of wood-paneled, smoke-filled rooms and pushed them into the public sphere. And this troubled imperial metropoles. British officials closely monitored Willkie, worrying that his anti-imperialist antics would yank American support from Britain. An exasperated Churchill even felt compelled to respond to Willkie’s critiques in a now-famous speech. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” Churchill announced in November 1942, only weeks after Willkie returned home. Meanwhile, his unbuttoned diplomacy charmed Asian and African officials, who were accustomed to the high-handedness of Europeans. In Iran, under occupation by both Britain and the Soviet Union, Willkie took a keen 23-year-old shah on his very first plane ride.


newrepublic--2020-09-22--The Naive Futility of Calling Out Mitch McConnell’s Hypocrisy

Stop the presses !
Mitch McConnell has a nonsensical explanation for why his insistence that the Senate confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Ginsburg six weeks before Election Day does not contradict his refusal , in 2016 , to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia eight months before Election Day .
McConnell ’ s hypocrisy in this matter is so naked that it ’ s given at least momentary pause to Sens .
Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski .
It may also lose him the support of Sen. Mitt Romney .
For most people , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will be roughly as surprising as the news that professional wrestling is staged .
Still , we need to give this instance our attention , if for no other reason than to observe a sad decline in the art of political chicanery .
American politicians have been bamboozling the public since the dawn of the republic , but in bygone days they at least tried to sound convincing .
There was such a thing as skill , damn it , and craft .
No more .
McConnell ( and Trump , for that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mere gibberish .
It makes a sort of cockeyed political sense .
Why make a big effort to deceive when you ’ re no longer actually trying to convince anybody ?
These days , Republican politics is more about herding voters than persuading them .
But we shouldn ’ t let it pass without protest that the American voter is being treated like cattle .
Here ’ s what McConnell said about ramming a Supreme Court nomination through the Senate in six weeks :

In the last midterm election before Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise. President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
As has been noted widely, McConnell did not, back in 2016, say that blocking President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland had anything to do with the Senate going Republican in 2014. His argument rested entirely on the fact that there would be a presidential election that year (even though it was more than half a year away). There was nothing unusual about that. Since 1900, the Senate has confirmed a Supreme Court justice during a presidential election year no fewer than seven times.
After Trump’s election, McConnell stopped contending that no Senate since the 1880s had ever confirmed a Supreme Court justice in a presidential election year, which wasn’t true, and started insisting that since the 1880s no “opposite-party” Senate had confirmed a Supreme Court justice in a presidential election year, which also wasn’t true. The last time it happened was in February 1988, when a Democratic Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy, who was nominated by a Republican president (Ronald Reagan).
What McConnell could have said truthfully was that no Senate since the 1880s had confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in an election year—except when the nomination was made the year before. (Reagan nominated Kennedy in November 1987.) But that’s awfully complicated, and not particularly salient. So McConnell jettisoned that final clause—or perhaps just couldn’t remember it.


newrepublic--2020-09-22--The Promising New Covid-19 Therapy You Probably Haven’t Heard About

When President Trump announced an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a “ historic ” and game-changing treatment for the coronavirus last month , experts were baffled .
Although plasma donations from recovered patients have been used to speed recoveries for over a century and may help patients in early stages of Covid-19 , there ’ s not enough research yet on how well this approach works and which antibodies best battle this virus .
Now , however , there are preliminary results on a different but related treatment that could help coronavirus patients and solve some of those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t said much about it .
It ’ s called monoclonal antibodies .
Not all antibodies a body produces in response to this coronavirus are created equal .
Some are better at battling SARS-CoV-2 than others .
A recovered patient might have a low number of antibodies , but if the antibodies they do have are all really good at neutralizing the virus , then plasma from that patient will be more effective .
Another patient could have a high number of antibodies , but none of the antibodies are particularly good against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Convalescent plasma as a treatment , therefore , is “ a little bit of a crude method , ” said Rogier Sandiers , a professor of virology at the University of Amsterdam ’ s Faculty of Medicine .
You need large quantities of plasma from recovered patients , and “ you have to be lucky with the plasma you get .
If there ’ s no neutralizing antibodies in the plasma at hand , then it ’ s not going to be very effective.
” But what if the best , most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lab and then mass-produced ?
To produce what are known as monoclonal antibodies , researchers start from the same convalescent plasma with which patients may now be infused .
But then they pull out the antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 , and from there , they identify the one or two antibodies that rise to the top—the ones that outperform the competition by being the most effective , the stickiest , the most potent .
“ And then , ” said Sandiers , “ you just make it in a manufacturing facility .
”

These replicated top-tier antibodies could be used both as a treatment for those in the early stages of Covid-19 and as a “passive vaccine” that high-risk individuals could receive every month. While vaccines and other treatments, like antivirals and convalescent plasma, have taken much of the spotlight, researchers say monoclonal antibodies could be a “major advance” in controlling the pandemic—and could even be used to make sure early vaccines are effective.
Last week, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced in a press release that a monoclonal antibody its researchers have developed reduced the rate of hospitalization by 72 percent among those with mild Covid-19 in a preliminary study, compared to those who received a placebo. It’s very soon to tell if the drug actually works this well; the phase two trial, conducted among 452 participants, was intended to make sure there were no major side effects before moving to the next phase, which would look at how effective the treatment is in a greater number of people. Even so, Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer, told STAT News that he hoped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would consider an emergency use authorization to make the treatment available before all of the clinical data is in.
Lilly had hoped its medication would be ready by the end of this month but recently revised the timeline to the end of the year. Clinical trials to test monoclonal antibodies have been plagued by a lack of tests, overstretched hospitals, and hesitant participants. The pharma company Regeneron, which has won $500 million in federal funding commitments to manufacture its two-antibody treatment, was aiming for an ambitious launch of the medication by the end of this summer; instead, now it’s hoping to have initial results this month. In preliminary results of its animal trial, Regeneron’s treatment seemed to help monkeys recover faster with less damage to their lungs. Phase three trials for Regeneron and Lilly both began enrolling participants in August.


newrepublic--2020-09-22--What a Defiant Democratic Party Looks Like

On Friday night , Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s death shocked an already reeling country .
What came next , however , was sadly unsurprising .
Mere hours after Ginsburg ’ s passing , McConnell had already affirmed that he would hold a vote for Trump ’ s nominee to fill the vacancy , contravening the ersatz standard he set out in 2016 .
Or , as Senator Chris Murphy put it , “ Nobody ’ s word means anything in this place anymore .
All that matters is raw power.
” It ’ s a bit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unafraid to use their power to achieve their desired ends .
Will Democrats respond in kind ?
Contrary to their own representations , Democrats do have power to wield .
Whether in the House , where they hold the majority , or in the Senate , where a sizable minority and procedural maneuvers afford options , Democratic lawmakers have a few tools in their belt .
No one should imagine that these are foolproof : Democrats could release every arrow in the quiver and still come up short .
It is nevertheless essential @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spite of that risk .
Taking the shot , even and especially if they miss their mark , will only bolster the case for the structural reforms that must follow in Trump ’ s wake , while teaching Republicans that actions have consequences .
This course of action goes against the Democratic Party establishment ’ s every instinct .
Throughout Trump ’ s tumultuous first term , Democrats have been faced with one desperately important fight after another , many of which were winnable , if not easily .
With very few exceptions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ring .
Underlying this timidity seems to be the misguided belief that voters will reward the party for its restraint .
Nothing , in reality , bears this out .
Republicans are eager to label even the most innocuous Democratic action partisan and to send that assertion into a conservative media ecosystem that echoes and amplifies the claim , no matter how ridiculous .
Ever fearful of how they ’ ll be perceived if they try to exert what power they have in a maximal fashion , Democrats take refuge in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the party ’ s base , which presumably put it in power to , well , govern .
Indeed , to the degree that Democrats have suffered electoral consequences as a result of partisanship , it is , arguably , for not having been partisan enough .
The defeats of several senior Democratic House members ( and numerous other near misses ) in this year ’ s primaries owed , in part , to a perception that these figures were not doing enough to oppose Trump ( or indeed , doing too much @ @ @ @ @ @ @

The consequences of this surrender have not only been political. Setting aside the unknowable, alternative reality in which House Democrats took up more fights, it seems safe to assume that taking up the same fights with more conviction would have produced a terrain at least marginally better than our current hellscape. Instead, leadership has focused on downplaying even the most minimal steps. It’s not hard to grasp how labeling your own proposals as mere “messaging” bills might suggest to the public that these measures are not worth fighting for. No one wants to waste their time on a losing battle: If Democrats want to rally public support, they need to fight like they think they can win, and as hard as the evident stakes (which seem to include the preservation of our democracy) merit.
So what would Democrats, unrestrained, look like?
Let’s start with the Senate. Although Democrats may not hold the majority, they are not without options. There are scant legislative days left in the year, let alone prior to the election. And if Democratic candidate Mark Kelly wins the Arizona special election (as he is currently favored to do), Mitch McConnell’s window of opportunity may close on November 30. As others have detailed, Democratic senators can use a full arsenal of procedural tricks to gum up the Senate’s gears just at a moment when Republicans need things to run smoothly.


newrepublic--2020-09-22--We’ll Never Know the Pandemic’s True Toll on the Working Class

The single most important thing to understand about the coronavirus pandemic so far is that it has not affected everyone the same .
( Though if you are the president , you could start with acknowledging that it affects more people than “ virtually nobody.
” ) We are not “ all in this together.
” In fact , for a lot of pretty well-off people , things are mostly fine .
In keeping with how we do everything else , America is botching this aspect of responding to the pandemic .
We are failing the poor , most notably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fallout but also those who have been exposed to the virus—and we may never know exactly badly we let them down .
According to research compiled on Covid-19 cases during the first few months of the pandemic , the poorest among us have consistently been hit harder by the virus .
In May , the New York City Department of Health reported that people in less affluent zip codes were dying at far greater rates .
A recent study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine , based on data from April @ @ @ @ @ @ @ called out sick from work with coronavirus were more likely to be low income and have less education ; 29 percent of those calling out sick were uninsured , roughly three times the percentage of uninsured people in the general population .
As of mid-May , according to a federal analysis , older Americans who were also poor enough to qualify for Medicaid were four times more likely to get the disease than those who just had Medicare , which covers everyone regardless of income .
These dynamics may have changed throughout the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clusters in places like New York and we started to see more scolding stories about naughty millennials spreading the virus at bars ( as opposed to their naughty governments reopening bars before it was safe ) .
After all , it makes sense that as lockdown measures eased , more people who had previously been financially stable enough to avoid leaving home for work would get sick .
At the height of the strictest lockdown measures in the spring , in the hardest-hit states , those with no financial choice but to work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their previous daily routines .
We will never know the name of every person who died from the coronavirus , nor every fact and facet of how this disease spread , who was most affected , who was most let down .
But we are nevertheless missing key data on how this virus has affected different income groups .
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps data on cases and deaths by race/ethnicity , age group , and gender .
It has data for outbreaks in prisons and cases among health care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Medicaid Services has data on nursing home deaths , though it reports fewer deaths ( 54,437 ) than the Kaiser Family Foundation ’ s tracker ( 80,006 ) .
Yet it is still hard to find a good , definitive answer for just how much worse the virus has been for low-income Americans .
We know it is worse , and we know it is worse for people of color , who also tend to be lower-income ( though the virus has been worse for people of color across the income spectrum ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to come from pieces of academic research , like those mentioned above , not our government .
But we will never know exactly how far this has been a disease of poverty , and every day that we continue without this data , the harder it will be ever to get a clear picture about how this disease has impacted the United States .

There are obvious challenges with collecting data on the class distribution of coronavirus cases and deaths. People don’t like to talk about their income; race and ethnicity are something that can, in some cases, be observed by medical staff, but income can’t be guessed at so easily. And the particular character of American income inequality, where rich neighborhoods can sit right next to poor ones, means data at the city or county level can obscure class differences: Los Angeles County has Beverly Hills and Bel Air but also one of the poorest zip codes in America. The CDC only keeps county-level coronavirus data, though some states and cities keep more granular data: Hard-hit Los Angeles provides city and community-level data, from which some conclusions can be drawn. (Rich West Hollywood has 14 deaths per 100,000; mid-gentrification East Hollywood has 147.) Gaps in the available data are, perhaps, inevitable. Still, it seems likely that this will be another instance in which the plight of the poor will remain largely obscured for no particular reason other than indifference.
Every now and then, a reporter uncovers a new angle of oppression in the lives of low-income, low-profile Americans, a particular note in the background hum of misery in this country. In 2018, The New York Times reported on how big companies like Walmart successfully demand money from accused (sometimes falsely) shoplifters. In 2019, ProPublica covered a town in Kansas where debt collectors have managed to wrangle themselves “a government-sanctioned shakedown of the uninsured and underinsured,” arresting people who cannot pay their medical bills. Just last week, The New York Times explored how nursing homes evict unprofitable Medicaid patients with spurious claims of psychiatric distress.
These are a few examples of very particular grifts that the state allows to be run on the poor; it’s likely that there are countless similar stories, about other hidden schemes, that have yet to be written. (When the wealthiest among us can afford to influence politicians to keep their hands off their money, the richest vein left to tap is the people with no money.) I bring these scams up not because they have anything to do with the coronavirus, but because it is only occasionally that stories like these, which cast a light upon one particular grotesque angle of inexcusable torment, manage to break through into the public eye—and it is even rarer that such stories provide accountability or spur policy change. We lack a good public record of exactly how much bullshit low-income people put up with, and the absence of good data on the extent of the coronavirus pandemic among low-income people is just another gaping hole.


newrepublic--2020-09-22--Four New Justices, No Matter What

Four New Justices, No Matter What

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg , one of the most influential Supreme Court justices of all time , is first and foremost a cause for national mourning .
But it is also a political opportunity .
The Republicans , of course , see it that way—but the Democrats should , too .
President Trump has announced he ’ ll nominate Ginsburg ’ s successor by week ’ s end , and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to bring that pick to a vote this year—even if it has to be done in the lame-duck session after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Senate and the White House .
Despite leading Republicans ’ sanctimonious arguments in 2016 that a court vacancy must not be filled during an election year , they intend to do exactly that in 2020 .
The Republicans , who have fought every political battle of the past dozen years as though it were their last , can be expected to keep their word .
But even if they unexpectedly stand down from yet another divisive political escalation , or somehow fail in their effort to replace Ginsburg , Democrats must be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ justices—if they win resoundingly on November 3 .
Such a radical gambit is justified by the fact that America ’ s political institutions this century have consistently translated minority support for Republicans into political majorities .
GOP presidential candidates have won the popular vote just once since 1992 .
Republicans have not won the total popular vote of any three consecutive Senate elections in the twenty-first century , but due to the absurdity of that chamber ’ s composition—where half a million people in Wyoming have the same number of senators as 38 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ often than not for more than two decades .
Now 53 Republican senators—several of whom won their seats in achingly close elections that would have gone blue without the GOP voter suppression tactics upheld by the Roberts court , and who represent a minority of the American population—may well confirm another right-wing justice , the third nominated in four years by a president elected by a minority of the American people thanks to the Electoral College , the most plainly undemocratic electoral institution in the democratic world .

McConnell’s quest to fill a Supreme Court vacancy weeks before a presidential election should fuel outrage that finally radicalizes even committed institutionalists. While the Roberts court has issued the occasional heterodox decision, it has always reinforced Republican political power when given the opportunity. In 2010, it overturned decades of campaign finance law so that idle rich people could try to buy our elections, and in 2013 it gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing states across the South to make it harder for people to vote. This will get worse unless and until Democrats do something about it.
Yet the party, until very recently, seemed oblivious to its predicament. During the early years of Obama’s presidency, Democratic elites clung to the outmoded, anti-democratic filibuster in the Senate, allowing Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans to exercise veto power over their agenda. The national party largely ignored GOP voter suppression tactics in the states, even when GOP legislatures were gleefully passing cookie-cutter voter ID laws transparently designed to quash Democratic turnout. The first strict voter ID law was passed in 2005, and Democrats did nothing about it with their towering congressional majorities from 2009 to 2011.
When, nine months before the 2016 election, McConnell refused to consider Obama’s nominee for a critical swing seat on the Supreme Court, it should have been the last straw for Democrats. Merrick Garland would have given liberals their first court majority since the 1960s. McConnell’s ruthless maneuver was itself an exercise in manipulating the size of the Supreme Court, shrinking it to eight for more than a year. Yet even then, Democrats refused to threaten court enlargement, choosing instead to issue stern statements of displeasure before meekly rolling over.


newrepublic--2020-09-22--Why We Can’t Ignore McConnell’s Hypocrisy

Stop the presses !
Mitch McConnell has a nonsensical explanation for why his insistence that the Senate confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Ginsburg six weeks before Election Day does not contradict his refusal , in 2016 , to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia eight months before Election Day .
McConnell ’ s hypocrisy in this matter is so naked that it ’ s given at least momentary pause to Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski .
It may also lose him the support of Senator Mitt Romney .
For most people , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be roughly as surprising as the news that professional wrestling is staged .
Still , we need to give this instance our attention , if for no other reason than to observe a sad decline in the art of political chicanery .
American politicians have been bamboozling the public since the dawn of the republic , but in bygone days they at least tried to sound convincing .
There was such a thing as skill , damn it , and craft .
No more .
McConnell ( and Trump , for that matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gibberish .
It makes a sort of cockeyed political sense .
Why make a big effort to deceive when you ’ re no longer actually trying to convince anybody ?
These days , Republican politics is more about herding voters than persuading them .
But we shouldn ’ t let it pass without protest that the American voter is being treated like cattle .
Here ’ s what McConnell said about ramming a Supreme Court nomination through the Senate in six weeks :


newrepublic--2020-09-23--The Case for Calling Climate Change “Genocide”

Alberta holds one of the world ’ s most ravaged regions .
In the north of the Canadian province , a vast sprawl of industry the size of Florida has been erected to haul tar sands from beneath the forests , desiccating the land in pursuit of profitable oil , which in turn warms the planet and destroys its ecosystems .
The Indigenous peoples who live among these gray wastes have a word to describe what has long been happening to them .
“ If we don ’ t have land and we don ’ t have anywhere to carry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Poitras of the Mikisew Cree First Nation told a journalist in 2007 , “ we lose who we are as a people .
So if there ’ s no land , then it ’ s equivalent in our estimation to genocide of a people.
” Tony de Brum , the revered former leader of the Marshall Islands—a low-lying Pacific atoll once abused as an American nuclear testing lab , where homes are already being washed away by rising waters—also uses this provocative term .
The “ displacement of populations and destruction of cultural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2015 , “ is equivalent in our minds to genocide.
” Scholars and organizers have long warned that as the planet decays , genocides will become more likely .
Infrastructure collapse , resource scarcity , and authority vacuums could , they hypothesize , throw entire peoples from the lands of their birth , forced to battle each other to survive .
Some governments will draw down the portcullis or build up the border wall—islands of reaction .
But climate change is not just an imminent threat—something about to happen , hanging portentously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In fact , it is already here ; we live amid its damages .
And those threatened Indigenous nations raise an important question : Is it possible that climate change is not just a trigger of genocide but also a genocidal force in and of itself ?
Could this incendiary form of international law really be used as tool against the biggest polluters and destroyers of our homes ?
When we think about genocide today , we think of a particular kind of violence—a singular event of incredible destruction carried out by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group , such as the Ottoman Empire ’ s mass deportation of Armenians , Serbian camps for Bosnian Muslims , Hutu pogroms of Tutsi , and perhaps above all , the Nazi murder of millions of Jews .
The techniques of obliteration can be crude and fanatical or high-tech and methodical , but they share three criteria : the targeting of particular and distinct victims—a tribal , ethnic , or religious unit ; the deliberate and calculated conspiracy to murder , provable in common criminal court as if only one person had killed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sense that such violence is unique and discrete , not a normal thing to occur .
By this kind of strict legal understanding , it would be a waste of breath and effort to haul the chiefs of Chevron , Aramco , DuPont , Bayer , Nestlé , Tyson , or any of the largest carbon emitters into the dock at the International Criminal Court and charge them with genocide by climate change .
For starters , the multitude of ways our ecology has been altered does not create a uniform method @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crisis comes from more than just carbon accumulation .
Rather , in David Wallace-Wells ’ s evocative term , it is a “ cascade ” : a rolling compound of ozone depletion , aerosol loading , freshwater exhaustion , phosphorous- and nitrogen-cycle imbalances , general pollution , and so on .
As instruments of slaughter , infernos in California and New South Wales have little in common with floods in Miami and Manila , or heatwaves in Karachi and Kirkuk .
And even when these forces are at their most devastating , one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ specific ethnic , religious , or tribal group suffering on its own—it appears to afflict all nature and all people , albeit not remotely equally .

Then there’s the issue of intent: Those corporate captains and their political accessories are not strictly speaking conspiring, a defense lawyer might argue, to produce a particular drought or outbreak of disease through their emissions. Their assault on the planet isn’t so finely honed. Each of them has been guilty of other crimes and might have even paid meager penalties for polluting rivers, busting unions, tainting topsoil, commissioning death squads, deforesting whole districts, stirring cancer in local populations, or in earlier times, as with United Fruit or BP or Brown Brothers, ordering the overthrow of governments. One could allege the grossest kind of negligence where global warming is concerned. But is that the same thing as genocide?
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was the product of messy, reluctant negotiations. Even after the harrowing experience of the Second World War and the trials of Nazi officials at Nuremberg, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States had to be harried and badgered into accepting genocide as law. The resulting convention defined genocide as encompassing not just the deliberate killing of members of a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” but also actions like causing them “serious bodily or mental harm” or imposing conditions “calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Allied powers who reluctantly agreed to this were themselves, by any measure, guilty of that very crime in their recent pasts. Only through the efforts of Rafael Lemkin, a dogged Jewish prosecutor from Poland who coined the term “genocide,” was the Convention established at all. In his lobbying, Lemkin had to gut and neuter his original, more radical proposal. Had his early theory taken hold, calling climate change “genocide” might be much more widespread today.
Lemkin’s conception of genocide had three phases. First, Barbarism, which is what we think of as genocide today: “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” Second, and importantly, came Vandalism: the deliberate destruction of culture. In Lemkin’s mind, culture meant art, ritual, literature, language, music, treasure houses of sacred texts. Every people on the planet produced culture, and all of it was equally valuable. As he wrote rather beautifully, “The contribution of any particular collectivity to world culture as a whole forms the wealth of all of humanity.” Vandalism, therefore, was an assault on “world culture.” An injury to one is an injury to all. Lastly came Denial: “the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”


newrepublic--2020-09-23--Immigrant Street Vendors Are Feeding Others to Feed Themselves During the Pandemic

On an evening in late September at Corona Plaza , an open-air commercial hub in Queens , the bachata blaring from a Boost Mobile competes with the noise of trains clattering overhead ; kids on scooters dart around clusters of teens taking selfies ; and inescapable franchises like McDonald ’ s and Dunkin ’ Donuts share real estate with makeshift vending food carts hawking tacos , tamales , pork rinds , elotes , fruit juices , and arepas .
It ’ s a busy scene , and the kind of place people conjure up when they think about New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ city is a great opportunity , ” Froilan Flores told me in Spanish as the steak bits cooking on his cart released curly tendrils of smoke into the newly chilly air .
“ This is one of the greatest cities in the world.
” For seven years , Flores worked as a buser at a café in another Queens neighborhood , but he found himself out of a job when New York ’ s stay-at-home order went into effect in March .
Soon , his bills were mounting and he fell behind on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with three other immigrant families from his native Puebla , Mexico .
Flores wasn ’ t the only restaurant worker to lose his income during the pandemic , but he was , like millions of undocumented workers in this country , locked out of the unemployment and other benefits that have kept so many of his industry colleagues above water .
“ If it comes , it comes , ” Flores remembered thinking early in the pandemic about whether he ’ d receive stimulus aid .
That sense of resignation was common : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they didn ’ t bother looking for state support , assuming they wouldn ’ t qualify .
Others , though , said they were surprised that they were ineligible because , despite their undocumented status , they paid their taxes using their Individual Taxpayer Identification Number .
Without other support , Flores turned to vending , joining workers throughout the city who , often excluded from the same systems , feed others to help feed themselves and their families .
“ There has definitely been an increase in street vendors in Corona , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kaufman-Gutierrez , deputy director of the Street Vendor Project , which provides legal and advocacy support to street vendors , told me .
“ There is a need to be your own source of income when a crisis happens.
” Since the economic downturn induced by Covid-19 , social service agencies across the city report that upward of 90 percent of their immigrant clients have lost their job .
Before the pandemic , despite their labor participation outpacing U.S.-born citizens ’ , New York ’ s undocumented immigrants were the city ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beyond losing income now , there are little to no savings for people to fall back on .

Gabriela Almaraz has been cleaning houses for nearly 25 years, since she first came to the United States from Mexico in 1996. As the cleaning jobs dried up in March, she started selling food from her house as a way to make ends meet. But as the pandemic got worse and the service economy began hemorrhaging jobs, she said, “people stopped working and couldn’t order food, so I headed to the street.”
Standing nearby, Gabriela’s sister-in-law, Miriam, interrupted to add that the story was actually bigger than just that: Gabriela’s husband was a chef at a restaurant in Manhattan who was laid off in March. In June, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. With her husband unable to work because of chemotherapy treatments, Gabriela has become the sole breadwinner for her family. “People complain, Look, they are not scared,” she said of those who may be critical of the workers congregating in the plaza to sell food and other things. “It’s a necessity.”
So far, New York State has paid out the equivalent of 20 years’ worth of unemployment benefits to 3.5 million New Yorkers, or the equivalent of $43.7 billion, according to local news outlet The City. Yet the people on the plaza vending, like Gabriela, haven’t received a dime of it.


newrepublic--2020-09-23--McConnell Will Sacrifice Anything to Fill Ginsburg’s Seat—Even His Senate Majority

I promised myself that I wouldn ’ t make predictions in 2020 .
I would write about what I wanted to happen , or what I feared could happen , but I would not play the game of definitively saying what would happen , both in order to avoid common pundit fallacies and ( more importantly ) to avoid looking stupid .
I broke that promise pretty definitively last Friday night , when I predicted that President Donald Trump would nominate Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court , and that U.S. Senate would confirm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is still plenty of time for me to be proven wrong , and I very much hope to be .
But I still think my on-the-spot vision of the immediate post-Ginsburg future is more plausible than that of , to take just one example , Missouri ’ s former senator Claire McCaskill .
“ Everyone take a deep breath , ” she wrote last Friday evening .
“ McConnell wants power .
Period .
Forcing this vote before Nov 3 guarantees he loses the Senate .
Forcing this vote lame duck probably loses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Portman , Toomey , Rubio , Iowa , etc ) .
” McCaskill believed , in other words , that fear of an electoral backlash would cause Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hit the brakes on a potential Ginsburg replacement , in order to protect senators representing states where energized and outraged Democrats could turn out in droves to defeat Trump .
And McCaskill and I largely agree about the political implications of “ forcing this vote ” before November 3 .
Maine ’ s Susan Collins , for example has signaled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before holding a vote , but voters now reminded of her complicity in the rest of the GOP ’ s judiciary shenanigans could still turn her out .
That is exactly why I predicted a lame duck confirmation .
It ’ s simply very difficult to imagine these Republican senators , with this leader , trading a thing they very much want—a period of complete dominance over the Supreme Court that could last decades—for the possibility of keeping a few Senate seats a few years from now .

If you understood that, it should have been easy, on Friday, to imagine McConnell, on Monday, absolutely slathering on the smarm, bathing in liberal agita over the Merrick Garland nomination, serenely announcing that whatever pretext he invented for his former actions no longer applied, and that he had some new justification for simply doing the thing he wanted to do. That it was predictable made it no less enraging, but Democrats crying hypocrisy or warning of dire electoral consequences will not dent McConnell’s determination.
The majority leader does believe in protecting his most vulnerable members, of course. That is why he allows senators such as Susan Collins to cast dissenting votes—when he has votes to spare. He will either allow Collins and Lisa Murkowski to oppose Trump’s nominee before the election, or (more likely) he will simply hold the vote after the election, when Collins will have already won or lost. McConnell’s vulnerable members cease being vulnerable, win or lose, on November 4. As for Rob Portman and the rest of the class up for reelection in the future, McConnell will count on the electorate’s short attention span and his own proven ability to exploit popular backlash to an incoming Democratic president to win back (or maintain) control of the Senate for himself (or even his successor) in short order.
Even if that expected electoral redemption does not come, Mitch McConnell would still have reached his own brass ring. Everyone who follows American politics should understand McConnell clearly: He would not necessarily do so cheerfully, but he would sacrifice a Senate majority for a Supreme Court one. He lives to be majority leader, but he has accomplished that goal, and he would consider winning the war for the courts to be a more gratifying legacy than any single piece of legislation. The entire point of winning this power was to do this now.


newrepublic--2020-09-23--How to End the Judicial Wars, Once and for All

There are two great losses in Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s death .
First and foremost among them is the person herself .
The 87-year-old justice was a tireless and formidable figure in American law—an impressive jurist during her nearly three decades on the Supreme Court and a groundbreaking advocate for women ’ s rights throughout her entire legal career .
She is mourned not just by those who respected and admired her but also by those whose lives were made possible by her victories and those who found her a source of inspiration to advance the cause of justice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the American republic .
Her death marks the third time in four years that the Supreme Court ’ s ideological balance is up for grabs , and likely the third time that it will move the court even further to the right .
Conservatives are now emboldened to pursue more aggressive victories at the high court ; liberals , stung by yet another defeat , are now considering more sweeping reforms of the court itself to reverse the tide .
No matter who President Donald Trump chooses to replace Ginsburg , their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , toxic exercise in political theater .
There remains only one solution to the warping disruptions of America ’ s judicial wars : End them altogether .
End the confirmation process that displays the worst qualities of lawmakers on both sides and undermines two branches of government at the same time .
End the partisan timing of justices ’ retirements and the morbid instability that ensues when they die in office .
End the sprawling , donor-fueled machinery that pre-screens judicial nominees most favorable to its agenda and helps install them .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ independence of the courts while ensuring regular turnover and which allows the people ’ s branches to shape their future without undermining them .
How did it come to this ?
Liberals pin most of the blame on Mitch McConnell , one of the most nihilistic figures in American political life .
But for all of his deleterious effects on American democracy , neither McConnell nor any other senators “ stole ” a Supreme Court seat in 2016 .
As I noted last year , presidents have every right to nominate a Supreme @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the Senate has every right to consider ( or not consider ) that nominee .
McConnell ’ s justification was shamelessly disingenuous : Republicans couldn ’ t say outright that they want to impose a certain ideological vision upon the courts , so they conjured up the “ Biden rule ” ( or “ McConnell rule ” or whatever you want to call it ) as a convenient excuse not to consider well-qualified nominees like Merrick Garland .
Republicans ’ justifications for their reversal on these “ rules ” this year may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is sound .
That ’ s why it ’ s also unrealistic for liberals to expect that conservative Republican senators , who owe their seats to conservative voters and conservative donors , will turn down the opportunity to place conservative justices on the Supreme Court .
If Democrats controlled the Senate right now , they would not hesitate to block whomever Trump nominates to replace Ginsburg , and everyone to the left of Joe Manchin would not hesitate to support it .
If Democratic voters had turned out in sufficient numbers in key @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Clinton ’ s election , this entire debate would be very different .
McConnell threw down a gauntlet four years ago that Democrats did not pick up , and they will likely regret it for decades to come .

Despite all of this, there’s an underlying kernel of truth in liberals’ concerns about the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. Republican presidential candidates have won the popular vote in only one of the last seven elections. By the end of the year, it’s likely that one-third of the court’s current justices will have been chosen by a president who didn’t win the most votes in an election. The Senate’s anti-democratic structure also strongly favors small states over more populous states. In 2018, for example, Republicans expanded their majority by two seats despite receiving roughly seven million fewer votes in the Senate races than the Democrats—and that’s after excluding 11 million votes cast in California, where two Democrats vied for the open Senate seat without a GOP opponent.
So while Republicans have the power to implement their vision for the courts, it’s only because our systems allow them to hold power without receiving the most votes. To make matters worse, the judges and justices they install will likely hold views out of step with most Americans on major issues. Survey after survey shows that a sizable majority of Americans want Roe v. Wade to remain the law of the land. Supermajorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike don’t want gay and transgender Americans to face employment or medical discrimination. A majority of Americans supported the high court’s decision in June that fended off a Trump administration attempt to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. A Supreme Court with six reliably conservative justices is far more likely to be out of sync with those preferences (and others) in the future.
That ideological trajectory, plus the actuarial math behind possible future vacancies, means that the Supreme Court will likely be hostile to progressive policy goals for at least a generation. This realization is pushing liberals toward proposals that would have been unthinkable five years ago. A growing number of lawmakers and commentators are warming up to the idea of court-packing to offset Trump’s influence. Others are taking a look at jurisdiction stripping, a practice by which Congress could limit the Supreme Court’s power to review certain cases. Some have even questioned judicial review itself, proposing that future presidents could simply treat the high court’s rulings as advisory or ignore them altogether.


newrepublic--2020-09-23--The Strangely Persistent Myth of the Suburbs

While Democrats pin their electoral hopes on turning wealthy suburbs blue , Donald Trump tells “ Suburban housewives ” on @ @ @ @ @ “ destroy ” their “ American dream.
” But who are suburban voters really ?
@ @ @ @ @ Politics of Everything , hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene speak with four guests about @ @ @ @ @ since the 1960s , and what those changes mean for electoral politics .
Katie McDonough @ @ @ @ @ The New Republic , offers a tour of the suburban fantasy by way of real @ @ @ @ @ , an anthropologist and journalist , and Willow Lung-Amam , an associate professor in urban @ @ @ @ @ University of Maryland , discuss the shifting economic and racial profile of the areas outside @ @ @ @ @ Lily Geismer , the author of Don ’ t Blame Us : Suburban Liberals and @ @ @ @ @ Party , describes the mistakes politicians are making in their efforts to capture the suburban @ @

While Democrats pin their electoral hopes on turning wealthy suburbs blue, Donald Trump tells “Suburban housewives” on Twitter that Joe Biden will “destroy” their “American dream.” But who are suburban voters really? On Episode 16 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene speak with four guests about how the suburbs have transformed since the 1960s and what those changes mean for electoral politics. Katie McDonough, a deputy editor at The New Republic, offers a tour of the suburban fantasy by way of real estate listings. Brian Goldstone, an anthropologist and journalist, and Willow Lung-Amam, an associate professor in urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland, discuss the shifting economic and racial profile of the areas outside the urban core. And Lily Geismer, the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, describes the mistakes politicians are making in their efforts to capture the suburban vote.


newrepublic--2020-09-23--Miranda July Takes on the Rigged System

Miranda July Takes on the Rigged System

Two closing parentheses , a “ less than ” sign , a “ greater than ” sign , then two opening parentheses : ) ) < > ( ( .
Anyone who has seen Miranda July ’ s 2005 feature debut , Me and You and Everyone We Know , will recognize this code at once .
In the film , a soulful five-year-old boy , Robby ( Brandon Ratcliff ) , improvises it while typing in an online chat room with a grown woman : “ I ’ ll poop into her butthole , and then she ’ ll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he explains to his older brother , who has initiated the first conversation with her .
“ And then we ’ ll just keep doing it , back and forth , with the same poop .
Forever.
” To the brother ’ s astonishment—he ’ s been striving to impress her with whatever he imagines a real man might fantasize about—the woman is disarmed and turned on by this image of profound intimacy .
Before long , she ’ s begging Robby to meet her in person .
Like much of July @ @ @ @ @ @ @ line , in which woman and child both eventually show up for their sexual assignation in a park , balances right on the edge between sweetness and repulsion , between alt-weirdness and a humanistic , rom-com–style message about connection , vulnerability , and acceptance .
It works on the assumption that most of the population feels we are at heart uniquely freakish .
When I first saw it in the theater , it felt thrilling , a little risky , but the recipe is precise : July had intended that “ back and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ huge meme , and that ’ s what happened .
The movie cleaned up at Cannes and was a hit ; a lot of people bought the T-shirt printed with ) ) < > ( ( , and some even got the tattoo .
July , who usually appears in her own films , started out as a solo performance artist , often inhabiting multiple personae in the course of an hour or two , and her directorial style bears the stamp of that work—eccentric enough to hold your attention , yet not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crowd .
She also spent years on a feminist video project ( now called “ Joanie 4 Jackie ” ) , collecting and circulating short films , and distributing zines in which she interviewed random women on the street , asking what they ’ d make a film about if they had the time , money , or opportunity .
Characters in her movies likewise make video pieces or sidle into sudden dance sequences .
Some are artists , but that ’ s not why they do these things : It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the impulse to express , to communicate , to try something weird and see what happens , is a universal one .
That ’ s what Robby and his career-woman paramour are each doing in the chat room .
And it ’ s partly what Robby ’ s shoe-salesman father ( John Hawkes ) is up to when , in an early scene , during his breakup with their mother , he calls his sons away from the computer to watch him standing in the garden outside the window , having set his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ d intended , he later explains to July ’ s character , to replicate a trick he ’ d seen in which alcohol flames up around an object and then burns out , doing no harm , but hadn ’ t fully considered the consequences of subbing in lighter fluid : “ It ’ s OK though , it ’ s better this way.
” There ’ s nothing all that formally experimental in Me and You and Everyone We Know , a funny , sunny , neatly plotted ensemble piece , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and secret rituals that people , even or especially strangers , develop with one another when no one else is looking , it creates an unpredictable , conspiratorial mood , as if the audience is being invited to embarrass ourselves as part of someone ’ s art project .
July ’ s second film , The Future , though less broadly likable , as it focuses on a couple ’ s mid-thirties doldrums , contains many similar whimsical elements : The male lead can stop time ; an emotionally significant yellow shirt crawls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own steam ; a foster cat with an injured paw provides raspy , existentialist voice-over narration , waiting for the couple to get it together to bring her home .
In Me and You , July ’ s sensibility was markedly nonjudgmental , favoring freewheeling spirit over social convention .
Adults are childlike , often needy , bewildered by their obligations and unready to commit to much ( except the bit ) ; children , left to their own devices , operate pretty autonomously ; and , with a bit of luck , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come at anyone else ’ s expense .
The Future marked a darkening of tone , and July ’ s new film , Kajillionaire , though livelier , explores the disturbing notion that just as games have losers , experiments have subjects—and their side effects may vary .
At its heart is one of the central problems of maturity—the trade-off between freedom and responsibility .
Not quite a critique of the adorable whimsy of her early work , Kajillionaire is a head-on encounter with the psychic tensions that always undergirded it .

The center of the film is Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), a young woman living with her parents, Robert and Theresa (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger), in a barely habitable basement office space underneath a soap factory. Several times a week, the three of them pitch in with giant mops to fight back an avalanche of pink bubbles pouring from the floor above, a surrealist touch that recalls the wobbly, colored shapes that float across the screen in some of July’s early shorts. Old Dolio’s voice is low and creaky, as if from disuse, and her long, dirty-blonde hair hides her, evoking a prettier Cousin Itt.
Old Dolio’s whole existence has been warped by her parents’ worldview and the tactics with which they support it. “Most people want to be kajillionaires,” Robert says with contempt. “That’s the dream, that’s how they get you, hooked on sugar, hooked on coffee, hahaha, cry cry cry, mother-daughter getaway!” He looks down on consumer culture and rejects participation in the mainstream economy, preferring to skim around the edges, but this ideological framing is designed to serve and conceal his personal neuroses, allowing him to feel superior to the suckers out there, while avoiding the many parts of life that frighten him: He resembles an older, sourer, and more rigid iteration of the John Hawkes character in Me and You, who says “I don’t want to have to do this living…. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers.”
The parents here are archetypes: Robert a selfish, domineering patriarch who takes out his weaknesses and resentments within the small sphere he gets to control, and Theresa the wife throwing her lot in with him for lack of a better idea, with the occasional apologetic shrug at their daughter. They chose Old Dolio’s name in tribute to a man they hoped would be moved to leave her money in his will (which didn’t pay off). They thought it “seemed insulting to treat you like a child,” and so there were no hugs, no pet names, no vacations. She learned to write by forging checks, and to feed herself by mastering the pentagram security-camera systems used in supermarkets, so that she always knows in which aisles the goods are “free.” She has grown up dodging surveillance cameras and backflipping over barriers: Every time the family leaves their living space, all three abruptly bend 90 degrees from the waist, so that the low wall conceals them from the landlord’s attempts to collect his already nominal rent. Only by accident, when offered 20 bucks one day to impersonate another woman at her mandated parenting classes, does Old Dolio stumble on the news that physical affection is meant to play a role in child development.


newrepublic--2020-09-23--Is Defector the Future of Media?

Is Defector the Future of Media?

When the staff of Deadspin resigned en masse last fall , it felt like the end of an era of online journalism .
The fun internet—best embodied by the old Gawker Media sites and The Awl—was gone , undone by tech companies , private equity goons , and a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel .
These sites were out .
What was in ?
Nothing good .
Deadspin ’ s private equity–backed management took a look at what the staff was doing successfully and decided the wisest course of action would be to demand that they stop doing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chief and longtime staffer Barry Petchesky refused to “ stick to sports , ” per a memo from leadership , he was fired ; the rest of the site ’ s staff quit within two days .
Deadspin ’ s overlords got their wish—they replaced the walkouts with more pliant employees and have been rewarded with vastly diminished traffic , engagement , and influence .
All of the worst trends in media from a year ago are still present today , perhaps more so : mass layoffs , contraction and consolidation , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dollars .
Variety was once the calling card of internet journalism , but now it is defined by a crushing sameness , brought on by financial pressure , social media , and the frantic drumbeat of news in the Trump era .
As a result , it is surprisingly hard to find a website that you actually want to read .
Earlier this month , nearly all of the 20 staffers who quit Deadspin launched Defector , a site that they co-own .
It is , refreshingly , both very much like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the rest of the internet .
There are no advertisements , no Amazon affiliate links , no plans to sell out to venture capitalists .
Instead , the site is supported by subscriptions , which cost between $ 80 and $ 1,000 a year .
So far the model has proven a success .
Editor in Chief Tom Ley told me that the site was expected to hit 30,000 paying subscribers on Monday , which at the base rate would amount to over $ 2 million a year .
With a staff of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ subscription-based trends , neither the atomized Substack model nor the scale model being deployed by traditional newsrooms like The New York Times , The Washington Post , and The Atlantic .
Defector is a throwback to what its editors believe is a healthier and more sustainable model .
“ It really makes you think of how cyclical everything is , ” Ley told me .
“ The internet disrupted magazines , and now we ’ re basically just trying to do a zine , which feels like it ’ s from 1982 .
@

It’s also something of a last stand. With the revenue streams that have sustained the media industry for decades drying up, subscriptions may be the only viable future for independent media.
Perhaps the most positive media story of the past six months has been Substack, the newsletter subscription service. It has been a boon to solo writers and journalists—the journalism model of the future being lean and often solitary but free of a lot of expensive baggage. “There are some publications, even of the stature and historical success of The Atlantic, that will struggle to cross over into a new realm,” Substack founder Hamish McKenzie told me earlier this summer. “If you have to carry around a bunch of the legacy from previous generations of how magazines and newspapers were published, it’s like starting the race with a penalty.”
Defector is nimble by legacy media standards but wholly different from Substack’s most popular newsletters. It resembles old Deadspin in terms of content, with posts tracking whether or not Tom Brady is “crud.” It is a destination site, a place where you can scroll and forage for surprising and/or entertaining material you might not find in the silo of a Substack newsletter. It is the kind of site you visit multiple times a day, just to check in—an increasing rarity in a homogenized internet. At the same time, it doesn’t overwhelm you with content, because it doesn’t have the traffic demands that Deadspin had in its heyday. “Scale is the opposite of what we’re trying to do,” Ley told me.


newrepublic--2020-09-24--The Forgotten Feminists of the Backlash Decade

We don ’ t tend to think of the 1990s as a high point for feminism .
It was the decade of Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell , of Operation Rescue and Focus on the Family , of super-skinny supermodels and highly publicized sexual misconduct in the White House .
This period also saw welfare reform , the rollback of reproductive rights , and the entrenchment of the New Right in American politics—all things feminists tried and failed to stop .
Susan Faludi has suggested these developments were part of a “ backlash ” against women : After women liberated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and politicians conspired to convince them that the gains of feminism weren ’ t so great after all .
It was a moment , Lisa Levenstein writes in her new book , They Didn ’ t See Us Coming , when feminism “ became almost wholly invisible to the public.
” Levenstein wants to uncover a different story about the ’ 90s , one in which an “ unsung movement ” developed the techniques and laid the groundwork for much of today ’ s organizing , from the Women ’ s March to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ generation have been misunderstood , it may be in part because they expanded the scope of feminist activism : Drawing on the ideas and strategies of American women of color and activists from the global south , they saw that “ every social justice issue was a feminist issue , ” from environmentalism to reproductive justice , labor issues to human rights .
Because they focused on problems that didn ’ t immediately appear to be “ women ’ s issues , ” some observers assumed that feminist activism had diminished .
Nor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accounts of feminism tend to highlight moments of militancy , such as the 1920s and the 1970s , and miss the work that goes on in periods of supposed dormancy .
Whereas ’ 60s and ’ 70s feminists had rallied around domestic violence and abortion access in speak-outs and town halls , and had protested beauty standards at the Miss America pageant , the activism of the 1990s was less public-facing .
These feminists did their work at conferences around the world or in digital spaces .
They did grassroots organizing in their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and founded organizations that existed outside the feminist mainstream .
As Levenstein notes , many of the “ innovations ” of 1990s feminists—professionalizing activism , drawing on available foundation money , and mobilizing online—are now staples of progressive movements .
Despite receiving little publicity , feminism was active and vibrant throughout the 1990s .
Levenstein presents this recent feminist history as a success story , and there ’ s something to be said , intellectually and politically , for her focus on the positive .
Too often , stories of social movements are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ historians call attention to how activists faltered against overwhelming odds .
Under these circumstances , the left can become “ more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness , ” as the political theorist Wendy Brown has put it .
To piece together the story of the ’ 90s feminists is to recognize just how influential they were .
But it ’ s also to ask whether their influence was a wholly good thing .
How much can advocacy and mobilization achieve for feminism ?
And what is lost when professionals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the idea for her book from reading about the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing , which took place in 1995 .
This was the conference at which Hillary Clinton , then first lady , said publicly that “ women ’ s rights are human rights ” —a slogan she took from the group Gabriela , a coalition of Filipino women .
Thirty thousand activists from around the world attended , including 8,000 from the United States .
Marie Wilson , head of the Ms. Foundation and then seen as something like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ planned to use the conference events to position her organization as the feminist movement ’ s new institutional leader .
Yet when the time came , she and other white American women found themselves stepping back , while American women of color and women from Asia and Latin America took center stage .

In her 2016 book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey distinguishes among three ways groups seek to make change: advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing. The first of these “doesn’t involve ordinary people in any real way,” she writes. Advocates for a cause are often professionals, such as lawyers or researchers, who can sometimes convince an institution or a corporation to change its ways: A car company might, for instance, install seat belts. But advocacy doesn’t really challenge those in power, because it “fails to use the only concrete advantage ordinary people have over elites: large numbers.” Feminist economists and Planned Parenthood lobbyists may be knowledgeable and persuasive individuals, but there simply aren’t enough of them to force their opponents to change.
Mobilizing, the second approach, does take advantage of these large numbers. A mobilizing effort might turn out hundreds or even thousands of people to a demonstration or a committee meeting. The 2017 Women’s March is an impressive example of mobilizing on an international scale. But this approach, too, has its weaknesses. The people who show up are usually “dedicated activists”—or at least people who already believe in the cause—and while these same people may show up again and again to different events, they don’t necessarily bring their co-workers or their communities along with them. Often, a professional staff directs the mobilizing effort, planning the strategy and turning out as many people as they can. (The Women’s March, like many other mobilization campaigns, now has a board of directors and a staff.) The people who turn out to the rally or the march don’t always understand how effective this tactic is—or even expect it to be effective. For some of them, the point might simply be to show their support for a cause, regardless of whether this show of support will change anything. One can only imagine how little Trump was influenced by the high turnout at the Women’s March.
Organizing, the last approach—and the one McAlevey champions—recognizes that ordinary people outnumber the elites, and it seeks to involve them in developing a power analysis and a campaign to win. There may be professional organizers who help start a campaign, but for it to be most successful, ordinary people (not staff) must become the leaders of the movement. Ideally, these are “organic leaders,” people who already have the respect of their co-workers or who have influence in their communities (for example, a pastor). Importantly, these organic leaders aren’t necessarily activists; part of the work of organizing is persuading them, over the course of many conversations, that they have something to gain by joining the movement and bringing their co-workers and friends along with them. “In the organizing approach, specific injustice and outrage are the immediate motivation,” McAlevey writes, “but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority.”


newrepublic--2020-09-24--Some Rich People Are Hilariously Freaked Out About a Biden Presidency

“ They think this is going to hell in a hand basket , ” one financial adviser told Marketwatch this week , describing his conservative clients ’ growing sense of impending doom .
In an interview on Wednesday with CNBC , JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon , whose net worth is currently around $ 1.3 billion , likewise fretted about the future of the economy and , by extension , the less fortunate .
“ I remind people , the world , when you slow down the economy , you are hurting the disadvantaged more than anybody else , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , has given these members of the upper crust the vapors ?
It ’ s apparently the thought of a Joe Biden administration raising taxes , even though Biden ’ s tax plan has the distinction of being one of the mushier to emerge from a Democratic primary race in which Elizabeth Warren advocated a new wealth tax on the rich and Bernie Sanders called for the outright elimination of billionaires .
The mere prospect of Biden nominally meddling with their plunder has been enough to compel some wealthy whiners to offload stocks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ order to avoid any hypothetical capital gains tax increase that might occur .
It also led Dimon to worry over a possible wealth tax ( which Biden hasn ’ t even proposed ) —not because it would bother him , naturally , but because it would be “ extremely complicated.
” For the rich , Biden ’ s other recent great offense was to contrast his own working-class roots with Trump ’ s silver-spoon upbringing and affinity for Wall Street at a town hall in his hometown of Scranton , Pennsylvania , last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue , ” Biden said at the event .
“ How many of you all own stock in Scranton ?
Not a whole lot of people own stock.
” He later repeated the same sentiment on Twitter , to which Soledad O ’ Brien replied , “ NYC ’ s Park Avenue is amazing .
No need to knock it .
Would be nice to have a President who sees every American as worth fighting for.
” On air , MSNBC ’ s Stephanie Ruhle further huffed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Park Avenue , but I live pretty close to it .
And do you know how I got there ?
Working my butt off .
He doesn ’ t want my vote ?
” Apparently some extremely mild blue-collar signaling—from someone who is currently quite rich and hasn ’ t lived in Scranton for decades—is all it takes to wound the Park Avenue–adjacent .
What makes the flurry of distress over Biden ’ s recent ( and most likely fleeting ) attention to the nonelite even more perplexing is that while the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ depict him as a Trojan horse for bolshevism , Biden ’ s actual proposals for redistribution—far from salvos of a class war—have been mostly tepid Democratic standard fare .
He ’ s pledged numerous times not to raise taxes on anyone making below $ 400,000 annually—which is , you know , a lot of money to make in a year—and while he ’ s proposed increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent , that ’ s still less than it was before Trump ’ s 2017 tax cuts .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” Biden recently said in an interview with a Wisconsin TV station .
“ Look at my career , my whole career .
I ’ m not a socialist.
” He ’ s right .
( Unless , of course , you interpret his track record of bank deregulation and other Wall Street glad-handing as a kind of socialism for the rich . )
But the modesty of Biden ’ s proposals don ’ t matter much , since the wealthy in this country are very good at playing zero-sum games .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the RAND Corporation revealed an astonishing upward redistribution of $ 47 trillion from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018 .
In their paper , authors Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards argued that if the country ’ s economic gains over that time period had been distributed as they were in the postwar era—that is , prior to the explosion of a bipartisan free market mania that slashed taxes , hobbled unions , and eviscerated public programs—median worker pay today would be about twice what it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country versus a very small number of people , ” the Center for American Progress ’ s Ben Olinsky said of the report .
After nearly half a century of raking it in at the expense of everyone else , with the enthusiastic blessings of right-wing think tanks and policymakers from both major parties , it ’ s no wonder that the one percent is now scandalized by whispers of even the mildest reforms .

What makes the flurry of distress over Biden’s recent (and most likely fleeting) attention to the nonelite even more perplexing is that while the Trump campaign has tried its hardest to depict him as a Trojan horse for bolshevism, Biden’s actual proposals for redistribution—far from salvos of a class war—have been mostly tepid Democratic standard fare. He’s pledged numerous times not to raise taxes on anyone making below $400,000 annually—which is, you know, a lot of money to make in a year—and while he’s proposed increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, that’s still less than it was before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. “Do I look like a socialist?” Biden recently said in an interview with a Wisconsin TV station. “Look at my career, my whole career. I’m not a socialist.” He’s right. (Unless, of course, you interpret his track record of bank deregulation and other Wall Street glad-handing as a kind of socialism for the rich.) But the modesty of Biden’s proposals don’t matter much, since the wealthy in this country are very good at playing zero-sum games.
A bombshell report released last week by the RAND Corporation revealed an astonishing upward redistribution of $47 trillion from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018. In their paper, authors Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards argued that if the country’s economic gains over that time period had been distributed as they were in the postwar era—that is, prior to the explosion of a bipartisan free market mania that slashed taxes, hobbled unions, and eviscerated public programs—median worker pay today would be about twice what it is. “This really is the entire country versus a very small number of people,” the Center for American Progress’s Ben Olinsky said of the report. After nearly half a century of raking it in at the expense of everyone else, with the enthusiastic blessings of right-wing think tanks and policymakers from both major parties, it’s no wonder that the one percent is now scandalized by whispers of even the mildest reforms.


newrepublic--2020-09-24--Corporate America Is Irrationally Enthusiastic About Carbon Capture

Between 2010 and 2018 , the Department of Energy poured $ 5 billion worth of research and development funding into carbon-capturing technologies , which aim to extract the greenhouse gas from power plants and other industrial activities , limiting the extent to which they warm the planet .
In 2018 , Congress also passed a generous tax break known as 45Q , encouraging companies to partake .
This summer , however , the only coal-fired power plant capturing a meaningful amount of carbon in the United States—the country ’ s main showcase for that technology—unceremoniously closed down following months of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mothballed ” ( switched off ) until market conditions improve .
Carbon capture and storage , or CCS , has , at best , a patchy track record .
But it ’ s wildly popular in the fossil fuel industry as a potential fix for the fundamental unsustainability of its business model .
This past week has been a big one for carbon capture boosterism .
One bipartisan amendment in H.R .
4447—the massive energy bill being debated in the House of Representatives this week—will give companies another 10 years to collect an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ storing carbon .
A report out this week from the Global CCS Institute and Columbia University ’ s Center on Energy Policy argues that boosting government support for CCS will be key to making the technology viable .
It recommends additional tax breaks , grants , and R & D funding .
The Global CCS Institute , to note , was started with funding from the traditionally coal-friendly Australian government , and its paying membership includes several national governments as well as most of the world ’ s largest fossil fuel companies , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Columbia ’ s Center on Global Energy Policy has received millions of dollars ’ worth of donations from fossil fuel companies in recent years , including Cheniere Energy , BP , and ConocoPhillips .
ExxonMobil , incidentally , announced on Tuesday that it ’ ll be expanding its carbon capture partnership with the company Global Thermostat .
Carbon capture—which is an umbrella term for many different technologies—can broadly be divided into two categories : carbon captured directly from the air , and carbon captured from power plants and industrial processes .
In theory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in rock formations .
Often , though , that captured carbon is transported via pipeline to be injected into oil wells in order to dig up more fossil fuels , in a process known as enhanced oil recovery .
Direct air capture uses contraptions that look like air conditioners to draw carbon down from the air , usually funneling it into novel uses like carbonating soft drinks .
This is all well and good ; it will be a great development if and when these technologies become commercially viable .
For now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And the gap between wish and reality is becoming increasingly worrisome as everyone from fossil fuel executives to establishment politicians to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change invests an uncomfortable amount of faith in technologies that are still operating on a remarkably small scale .
Many national and international targets for emissions reductions , at present , assume that transitioning to renewables and various economic changes can get us part of the way there and that new carbon capture technologies will emerge to cover the gap by 2050 .
If a government , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ net-zero ” emissions by some date , that ’ s most likely what they mean .
The carbon capture project that shut down last month—Petra Nova , capturing carbon from one coal-burning unit of a power plant near Houston—wasn ’ t switched off because it couldn ’ t capture carbon .
It seems to have been pretty good at that , though exact amounts remain the subject of some debate .
The coal whose fumes Petra Nova was designed to capture , however , is rapidly becoming more expensive than other forms @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the business model for keeping Petra Nova going simply didn ’ t work without being able to funnel lots of the carbon dioxide captured into digging up oil ; current low oil prices , in turn , meant fewer customers willing to buy up excess carbon to inject into active wells .

Yet virtually every fossil fuel company in the world right now is enthusiastically leaning into largely unproven, prohibitively expensive new technologies so as to extend the life of its core business model indefinitely. Token or even earnest investments in carbon capture by fossil fuel producers let them pretend to care about the climate while in reality giving themselves a loophole for keeping expensive, polluting coal plants (for instance) operating and more or less unregulated. Whether they actually reach net zero doesn’t really matter, so long as they can keep up business as usual for a couple more years by, say, slapping a costly government-sponsored doodad onto the top of their coal plant. Bullishness about capturing carbon has been a way, as well, for governments friendly to coal, oil, and gas companies—most recently, Scott Morrison’s Australia—to pay some nominal lip service to climate campaigners’ demands while keeping their favorite companies sated and secure.
In some places, the calculus is sadder. In Wyoming, some 500 coal miners have lost their jobs since March. Eager to stop the bleeding, the state government is now going all in on “clean” coal via carbon capture, with support from the DOE. The promise of preserving coal, oil, and gas jobs indefinitely has made carbon capture an attractive prospect for labor unions that represent fossil fuel workers, which put forward carbon capture as an alternative to limiting or even regulating fossil fuel production.
Still, there’s little reason to see this as more than a Band-Aid that could make things worse down the line, as communities put off planning for the end of what’s historically been their primary economic base. The reason coal, in particular, is declining is because it’s gotten more expensive relative to other fuels. Carbon capture and storage makes coal power even more expensive, and as of now can only really exist with massive infusions of public money.


newrepublic--2020-09-24--The Democrats Have a Dianne Feinstein Problem

As the first tantalizing tastes of autumn reach swampy Washington , Democrats in Congress are likely finding it hard to enjoy the cooler weather and pumpkin spice lattes : Their next few months are going to be brutal , just absolutely no fun at all .
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg last week , a cruel cosmic joke that confirmed we live in the Owned Timeline , has set up a Senate confirmation battle in the coming weeks , at the same time as America decides whether to give Donald Trump another term .
Further proof that God is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republican .
The question of what Democrats can actually do to prevent Republicans from installing another right-wing justice on the highest court remains unanswered , but it seems unlikely that they will take former Harry Reid staffer Adam Jentleson ’ s advice , published in The New York Times , and boycott the confirmation hearings .
After all , if Brett Kavanaugh crying about beer didn ’ t change anything , nothing that they can throw at Amy Coney Barrett , the likeliest nominee on Trump ’ s shortlist , will either .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Democratic charge will be led by 87-year-old Dianne Feinstein , the party ’ s ranking member of the Judiciary Committee .
Feinstein is resolutely not interested in the idea of breaking any kind of norm to win .
As recently as a week before Ginsburg ’ s death , Feinstein criticized the idea of abolishing the filibuster and refused to say whether , as chair of the committee during a Biden administration , she would continue a recent Republican practice of ignoring opposition committee members who object to judicial nominees from their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ slip ” process , she said , “ fosters bipartisan engagement in the nomination process.
” Truly , we are living in a golden age of well-fostered bipartisan engagement !
Concerns about Feinstein ’ s role in the upcoming confirmation process are not some petty , factional whining of disgruntled leftists .
As Politico reported , these fears—that Feinstein is not up to the task of grilling Trump ’ s nominee for Ginsberg ’ s seat—are “ widespread ” among Democrats in Congress , who fret that Feinstein “ gets confused by reporters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ answers to the same question depending on where or when she ’ s asked ” and appears “ frail.
” These are normal things for an 87-year-old to do or be ; they are perhaps not the ideal characteristics for the person tasked with being the face of the Democratic resistance to another right-wing psychocrat being placed on the court for decades to possess .
( The Los Angeles Times ’ report on Feinstein ’ s love of the blue slip process included the detail that she “ wasn ’ t aware ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them.
” Her office later provided a tally : The GOP has done so 17 times in the Trump era . )
More importantly , Politico notes that Feinstein whiffed badly the last go-around .
She waited weeks to disclose the letter she received from Christine Blasey Ford alleging that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her and only did so after The Intercept reported on the existence of an allegation .
One unnamed senator was candid—as candid as an anonymous source can be , I suppose—in their criticism : She ’ s “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” and the party “ may be short two senators ” because of her handling of Kavanaugh .

But another anonymous Democratic senator tells Politico that optics are also a concern, insisting that party leaders were “in an impossible position”—the idea being that “senior Democrats can’t replace a female senator for hearings on an expected female nominee to replace a deceased female Supreme Court justice.” Here’s the thing, though: They absolutely can. For a start, they could replace her with another woman. For some reason, Politico reports that some of her colleagues want to replace her with Sheldon Whitehouse or Dick Durbin. (Kamala Harris is also on the committee, and I doubt the virtual campaign trail would miss her, but sure, let’s grill the female nominee with a sexagenarian or septuagenarian man rather than a former prosecutor.)
It is very hard to imagine who would notice, let alone be angry, if Schumer did bench Feinstein, especially if he swapped in another female member—Harris, Mazie Hirono, and Amy Klobuchar come to mind. Does Politico’s anonymous source envision someone mounting a Save Feinstein campaign? This is the sort of blinkered thinking that infects people who’ve been on this Beltway shift too long. It’s also a prime example of Democrats being deathly afraid of breaking rules that have no bearing on the real world—like imagining that it matters to Mitch McConnell whether he has the “moral authority” to do something he wants to do. It’s more likely that this is just another example of Democrats coming up with reasons not to do something they don’t want to do.
Even Feinstein’s critics are prone to this cowering: Another criticism brought up in the Politico piece was her apparent misstep in telling Amy Coney Barrett that “the dogma lives loudly within you” in 2017, seized on as “anti-Catholic bias” by Republicans. This is only a problem if you act like it’s a problem. There’s hardly some creeping anti-Catholic plot in American government; in fact, Democrats recently nominated Joe Biden, a Catholic, to be their presidential candidate. More to the point: The party that spent eight years implying the first Black president was a Muslim, then embraced a president who openly tried to ban Muslims from entering the country wants a word about religious bias, does it? As my people say, jog on.


newrepublic--2020-09-24--Weaken the Presidency—Even If Biden Wins

In earlier chapters of American history , bad presidents eventually led to good government .
Andrew Johnson ’ s stupendous failures after the Civil War spurred Radical Republicans to take command of Reconstruction , briefly turning the American South into a multiracial democracy .
Richard Nixon ’ s downfall in the Watergate scandal in 1974 inspired a decade ’ s worth of reform : the creation of inspectors general , new ethics and transparency standards for public officials , stronger anti-corruption laws for campaign finance violations and foreign bribery , and more .
Donald Trump ’ s presidency requires a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nancy Pelosi and other top House Democrats unveiled a new bill aimed at fixing some of the systemic weaknesses that Trump exposed in the American system of government over the past four years .
“ Our democracy is not self-effectuating—it takes work and a commitment to guard it against those who would undermine it , whether foreign or domestic , ” six of the Democrats ’ major committee chairs said in a statement .
“ It is time for Congress to strengthen the bedrock of our democracy and ensure our laws are strong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That ’ s why we are acting today to introduce the Protecting Our Democracy Act.
” The bill is a tacit admission by Democratic leaders that existing laws have fallen short of their aspirations when constraining a president who is indifferent to the rule of law .
Many of the post-Watergate reforms , for example , rely upon the president ’ s good faith to properly function .
Other provisions , such as the purported ban on nepotism in federal hiring and the Hatch Act ’ s limits on using public resources for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ independent enforcement mechanism .
Some of Trump ’ s actions have gone beyond what past generations of lawmakers ever thought possible from a sitting president .
Perhaps the most significant provisions in the Democrats ’ bill stem from the aftermath of the Russia investigation .
During that inquiry , special counsel Robert Mueller and his team concluded that they were bound by a 1974 Justice Department policy memo that concluded a sitting president could not be prosecuted in office , limiting their ability to investigate Trump ’ s conduct and pursue obstruction of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bill would suspend the statute of limitations for crimes committed by presidents before and during their tenure to ensure they could eventually face consequences by future prosecutors .
Other measures would take aim at gaps in federal anti-corruption laws .
Mueller ’ s team was hindered by Trump ’ s all but explicit offers of pardons to key witnesses like former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and longtime adviser Roger Stone .
Trump subsequently followed through on his implicit promise by commuting Stone ’ s sentence and sparing him a prison term ; Manafort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrest after federal officials released him from prison , citing the Covid-19 pandemic .
While Congress can ’ t limit the president ’ s constitutional power to issue pardons , the bill would explicitly include pardons and pardon offers as a “ thing of value ” under federal bribery laws .

Some provisions seek to reverse various defeats that Democratic lawmakers have faced in court. Federal judges have blocked multiple lawsuits by congressional Democrats and government watchdog groups to enforce the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which theoretically bans the president from receiving income from foreign governments. Wednesday’s bill incorporates that ban into federal law and provides a mechanism to enforce it in the courts. The bill also adds a number of measures to strengthen Congress’s ability to issue subpoenas, a critical dispute in Trump’s impeachment and Senate trial. In August, a federal appeals court dealt a grievous blow to Congress’s current subpoena power in one of the lawsuits from that dispute.
For those who opposed some of the Trump administration’s more procedural scandals, Wednesday’s bill is a welcome reform. The proposal would revise the law that governs how “acting” officials can serve in Senate-confirmed jobs, which Trump used to install pliable underlings throughout the Department of Homeland Security and other key agencies. It adds new protections for whistleblowers like the one whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment by the House last year and for inspectors general, many of whom were purged after Trump’s acquittal in the Senate earlier this year. And after the Trump administration’s spree of Hatch Act violations over the past four years, the bill would finally give some teeth to its rules against politicizing government jobs and resources.
The Protecting Our Democracy Act is not the first time that Democrats have unveiled sweeping legislation for a post-Trump era. Shortly after taking office two years ago, House Democrats passed a major anti-corruption bill known as H.R. 1 that would make major changes to federal campaign finance laws, abolish partisan gerrymandering in congressional races, require presidential candidates to publicly disclose 10 years of tax returns, and impose a variety of other ethics and voting rights reforms. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and her allies proposed a bill in 2018 that would create a wave of new restrictions on lobbying and entrench some regulatory practices that could be struck down by the Roberts court over the next decade.