17 November 20
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16 November 20
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Reader Supported News
How Pence and GOP Senators Could Try to Steal the Election
David Sirota and Julia Rock, The Daily Poster
Excerpt: "Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig says Americans must act now to prevent the vice president and Senate from trying to use the Electoral College to give Trump a second term."
ince Donald Trump lost the election, he and GOP state legislators have suggested that the race was marred by voter fraud, and Trump administration officials have been publicly talking about Trump remaining president. On Friday, Vice President Mike Pence reportedly told a conservative group that there is already a “plan” for a second Trump term.
Though Republicans have not produced any evidence to substantiate the fraud claims, they have continued to promote the fraud allegations — which could serve as a rationale for state legislatures, Republican electors and Mike Pence to try to use the Electoral College system to hand Trump a second term.
The unlikely-but-possible scenario revolves around the prospect of competing slates of electors. That situation has only arisen once in the modern era, when in 1960 then-vice president Richard Nixon faced a decision on whether to recognize Hawaii’s Republican or Democratic electors during the joint session of Congress to certify that year’s election results.
The mini controversy spotlighted the pivotal role that the vice president can potentially play in the Electoral College system — and according to Harvard University law professor Larry Lessig, it should worry everyone right now.
In an interview with The Daily Poster, Lessig explained how Vice President Mike Pence could try to recognize slates of Republican electors sent to Congress from five Biden states where GOP legislators have started voicing allegations of voter fraud. In that situation, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate would be in a position to decide on Pence’s move — and if they backed him up, Lessig says they could potentially throw the presidency to Trump.
So far, GOP leaders in four of those states are saying they will not try to replace Biden electors with Trump electors in defiance of certified election results.
Lessig’s group Equal Citizens is launching a petition on its website that calls on Republican U.S. senators to commit right now to uphold elector slates that represent the will of the popular vote in all states.
What follows is an excerpt of The Daily Poster’s discussion with Lessig. The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Do you think it is a real possibility that Trump and the Republicans can use the Electoral College system to steal the election?
We have a very creaky and poorly thought-out system for moving from the vote that people cast for president to the actual inauguration of a president. And that system has worked, so long as both parties act in good faith. And so in good faith, Al Gore walked away from a contest in December of 2000. In good faith, Richard Nixon walked away from a contest in December of 1960. And that's the way the system has worked. It has depended on good faith.
If one party doesn't act in good faith, making up claims of fraud, making up challenges to the ordinary process, the system is extremely fragile and no one really knows how it spins out of control. Especially if the vice president is aligned with the party who is acting in bad faith.
What does the vice president have to do with it?
We have to back up to see where he enters this story. The people vote, and the votes in the states determine who the electors from each state are. And as this happened in every single election since 1876, states send one slate of electors to the Electoral College and those electors vote for the candidate they've been sent to support... And the process for counting those votes is one that the vice president oversees.
The Constitution makes him the custodian of the electoral votes, and he opens them and Congress then counts them. And so long as there's one slate from every state, there's no problem, but if he opens them and there's more than one slate from a state, then, all sorts of shenanigans could unfold.
Let's start with where the dispute could start, which is at the state legislative level. How possible is it for Republican state legislatures to choose a slate of electors different from the one chosen by voters, and do states have laws preventing this from happening?
This theory that the state legislatures have the power to appoint a slate of electors contradicting the results of the election has been pushed by the right wing radio talk show, host, Mark Levin. There are two grounds on which you might rest that theory.
One is federal law (which) says that if a state has decided to pick its electors through an election, and that election has "failed," then the legislature can select the slate of electors in another way.
The other ground that this theory could rest on is just the Constitution itself. And that's what Mark Levin says, that Article II of the Constitution gives the state legislatures the power to pick whatever slate of electors they want... But there are problems with each of these theories…
If you say that it's a "failed" election, you actually have to show it was a failed election. You can't just make up the idea that there was fraud here. You've got to establish that there was fraud. And if there was fraud that somehow undermines the election, then maybe we should be able to talk about this as being a failed election. But there's been nothing that's established that there is any kind of fraud…
That means we have to look at the constitutional argument. And the constitutional argument has three fundamental flaws with it. The first fundamental flaw is, the Constitution gives the legislatures the power to pick the electors, no doubt, but it also gives Congress the say on what day... Congress said the electors will be selected on November 3rd. November 3rd has already happened. And the only electors that can be appointed under federal law are the people who are appointed on November 3rd. There's no power for the state legislatures now to appoint a slate of electors because obviously it's after November 3rd.
The second problem with it is that this power that Levin says legislatures have –– the power to ignore what the people have said in an election –– no legislature ever in the history of the nation has exercised (it). No legislature has ever thought it had the power to veto the vote of the people and pick its own slate of electors. So this power that Mark Levin says is (in) our Constitution, is a power that just has never been exercised by anyone.
And the third problem with this claim is in relation to the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in July about the power that electors have. In that case, the question was whether electors, people who actually cast the vote, can cast their ballots however they want... what the Supreme Court said was, it may be that originally electors had this discretion, but democracy has overtaken the framers' design.
What about the idea that the Republicans can manufacture a political context and environment outside of the scope of the current law, that then creates the conditions for the state legislatures to change their state laws. Is that possible?
You're right to worry about what the political environment empowers these legislatures to do. They're not empowered by the law. I think the law is clear. But in this political context, if they can raise enough anxiety or panic about these elections…
Let's imagine that these five (Biden states with Republican) state legislatures do appoint another slate of electors. And let's imagine that the slates of electors cast their ballots on December 14th and they send their certified results to Mike Pence and Pence opens them on January 6th and begins to process them…
The Arizona slate gets opened up, and there's one slate that purports to be for Joe Biden, and another slate that purports to be for Donald Trump. Now, this turns out to be really important. Arizona has a Republican governor. So imagine the Republican governor signs the slate for Donald Trump...
Under the rules for counting electoral votes, the vice president could say, I've got two slates here, I'm going to recognize the slate signed by the Republican governor. There would be an objection. And if there's an objection that's signed by both a senator and a member of the House of Representatives, then the two bodies would separate, the senators would walk back over into the Senate, and they would decide whether they're going to uphold the objection or reject it.
Now we can imagine that the Democratic House will vote to uphold the objection. They'll say that Biden's slate should be counted. Then the question is whether the Republican Senate votes to reject the objection. So let's start with the most partisan assumption — let's assume all the Republicans hang together. That means that the houses have disagreed about which slate should be counted. And if the houses disagree about which slate should be counted, under the rules for counting the slate of electors, it's the slate of electors signed by the governor that gets counted. So that means it would be the Republican slate that gets counted.
But here's why that would be a very stupid move for the Republicans to make. Because of the five states that this game could be played in, three states have Democratic governors and only two states have Republican governors, Arizona, and Georgia. So that means if they counted the slates that the governors of count have assigned, Joe Biden would still have enough votes in the electoral college, because he would have Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and that would put him over 270. So that's not what they would do if they're going to play this game.
Instead, what they would do if they're going to play this game, is that the houses would separate, the Republican Senate would vote to affirm the Republican slate of electors, the Democratic house would vote to affirm the Democratic slate of electors. That means that both houses have not voted to reject the move by the vice president to count the Republican slates. And if they don't reject the move by the vice president to count the Republican slate, the Republican slate gets counted. And so what that means is, if the houses disagree, Mike Pence's ruling stands and Mike Pence's ruling would be, on the assumption we're making, would be for the Republican slate in all five of those cases. And he would therefore count Donald Trump and himself into the presidency.
If voters want to call their elected officials to ensure that the popular vote in their state is respected, which politicians should they be pressuring?
We are launching a petition on our website at equalcitizens.us. that calls on Republican senators to affirm that they are not going to vote against the vote of the people in any of these states.
What is the actual vote you are asking those senators to commit to casting?
So again, the scenario we're imagining is Arizona comes up, and there's a Republican slate signed by the governor and the Democratic slate that is in accord with the certification of the secretary of state in Arizona. And Mike Pence says, I believe the Constitution gives the Republican legislature the power to appoint their electors however they want, because I've read the words of the great constitutional scholar, Mark Levin, and that's what he has said. Immediately there's an objection filed to the ruling of the chair and each body that has to decide how it's going to vote on the objection.
And what the objection is saying is no, you can't recognize the Republican slate. You have to recognize the Democratic slate, the Democratic House will vote to say, we agree with the objection and the Republican Senate will have to vote to decide whether it's going to agree with the objection.
So five Republican senators would have to vote with the Democrats in the Senate to say that they believe that the objection should be sustained…
Who exactly sends each slate to Mike Pence in the Arizona example?
The legislature is not involved. The governor is not involved. The secretary of state is not involved. The secretary of state and governor and legislature are involved for the purpose of selecting who the electors are. In Arizona, there will be 11 people who believe that because of the election results, as certified by the secretary of state, they are the electors for the state of Arizona. They will then gather in a room, and they will cast their ballots according to the 12th Amendment, and they will sign them and certify them in the way the 12th Amendment says, and they will send them to Mike Pence, and Mike Pence will receive them. And Mike Pence, on January 6th, will open up the ballots from Arizona. And under the scenario we're talking about, there'll be one slate who purports to be voting for Joe Biden and another slate that purports to be voting for Donald Trump.
So in this example of two slates being sent from one state, the vice president is the initial judge of which slate of electors is valid, and Congress is the ultimate arbiter?
I don't think there's any question as a matter of law about the power that the vice president has. I don't think the vice president has any legal power to judge which slate of electors ought to be counted... But as a matter of practical political power, the vice president is also the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress that is counting the electoral votes. And as the presiding officer, he gets to say what he wants. And so when he opens the certificates, as the presiding officer, he can say, as presiding officer, I deem the Republican slate from Arizona to be the slate that will be counted.
And when he says that, it's open for Congress to overturn the presiding officer's ruling, that's what happens with any presiding officer, but the only way they get to overturn it is if both houses agree that it ought to be overturned. So that's where the source of this really dangerous power in the vice president lies.
What are the odds that all of this actually happens?
I'm quite certain that if ten Republican senators said tomorrow, hell no, I'm never going to vote against the vote of the legitimate vote of the people in any state, it would all fizzle out tomorrow.
But if the Republican senators continue to... play along with the president's suggestion, that there's a reason to question these results, and the political movement, which is being fueled by right-wing media right now, to get people to demand that those Republican state legislatures 'do their duty' as Mark Levin has put it, I'm scared, because if they 'do their duty' as Mark Levin conceives of it and creates an alternative slate of electors, that begins to trigger in people's minds, the possibility. And that possibility is certainly there that Mike Pence plays this game in the way I've described it. And then at that stage, it really depends on the senators standing up in the face of a real possibility of electing president Trump.
Isn’t there also a question of whether Mike Pence plays along?
Right there are many, many profiles in courage here. And this is not actually the original profile in courage because, from my perspective, at least what they would be doing is doing the right thing against great pressure from the other side. But regardless, the mini profiles in courage are at least five Republican senators saying, we believe in democracy over Donald Trump, and the mini profile in courage would be Mike Pence saying, I'm not going to sacrifice democracy for Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
What terrifies me about it is, it's clear that somebody is thinking about the violence that follows. We have a fired Defense Secretary and a replacement of pretty senior people in the Defense Department. What is that for? Why would you even waste your time as the president right now worrying about firing your Defense Secretary?
From the standpoint of, they will do whatever it takes to win, I'm telling you that's the path that they would have to follow in order to win.
John Oliver. (photo: HBO)
John Oliver on Trump's Refusal to Concede: 'Absolutely Unforgivable'
Adrian Horton, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The Last Week Tonight host debunks Trump's baseless claims of fraud and warns against the damage of humoring the president."
Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/STF/NYT)
Fauci Warns US Virus Death Toll Could Surpass 400,000 by March
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "As Covid-19 spreads throughout the United States at an alarming rate - a million cases in the last six days - Dr. Anthony Fauci delivered some dark news on CNN's State of the Union."
READ MORE
Supporters react as U.S. president Donald Trump holds a campaign rally. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
Here's What We Learned About the Far Right From Donald Trump's Presidency
Christopher Vials, Jacobin
Excerpt: "It looks like Trump is on his way out the door. Fingers crossed. But it doesn't take an expert to notice that Trumpism is not going anywhere, at least not anytime soon."
Despite his authoritarian tendencies, Donald Trump never came close to dragging us into fascism. But he did drag us further toward a xenophobic, anti–working-class, right-wing-populist abyss. Those forces will continue to destroy American and global politics — if we don’t take them on and defeat them.
Whether we want to call it Trumpism, white nationalism, right-wing populism, neofascism, or all of the above, it’s clear that toxic stew is now mainstream. But we also now know that it is not invincible. Here’s what we’ve learned from four years of Trump in office.
1: Trump’s Authoritarian Personality Is Electable.
To be sure, the United States never “went fascist.” That is to say, the federal government never became a fascist state, as some feared in 2016. Trump was far too undisciplined and politically clumsy to fully overturn deep-seated, liberal-democratic norms (though he did plenty of damage). Nor did he even seem to have a consistent road map in his own head.
But some of us who study fascism have seen plenty of disturbing echoes in Trump’s words and in his temperament. Trump was not a military man like the historic fascist dictators of Europe; unlike Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini, military glory was never central to his identity. And fortunately for all of us, his deep-seated elitism toward the military alienated way too many of the folks commanding the deadliest of guns.
But the grammar of fascism — strength, race, nation, violence, action — drove his rhetoric and carried with it all the necessarily authoritarian impulses, apocalyptic inflections, and historic targets of fascisms, past and present. Economics bores fascists and their followers. If one watches his full speeches at his events, it’s uncanny what this Republican candidate hardly mentions: taxes, liberty, freedom, democracy.
We now know that seventy-two million Americans are ultimately fine with that, at least in the absence of a more compelling alternative.
2: Trump Never Built a Coherent Neofascist Movement. But Stay Alert.
Trump was never disciplined enough, nor a skilled-enough tactician, to build a unified neofascist movement around his colossal ego. His early career as a confidence man for his father’s real estate empire did not equip him with the skills or the inclination to organize his middle-class base into sustainable, local institutions, however much he was able to get them to the polls. In his abilities and in his public image, Trump was more Berlusconi than Mussolini: a media playboy turned politician whose best talent was playing a rich man on TV. We’ll see if, like Silvio Berlusconi, he’s led away in handcuffs right after his term ends.
As a playboy, his narcissistic, authoritarian personality demanded (and got) adoring crowds at rallies, but he never took the time to organize those crowds into a cohesive network of cadres like we saw with the successful fascist leaders of the past. We have Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys, Oath Keepers and QAnon, Bikers for Trump and a galaxy of other right-wing armed groups and spooky conspiracy cults. All of them are dangerous, and none of them are a joke.
But at the same time, we have no mass paramilitary of the magnitude of the SA of Weimar Germany (the Brownshirts) nor Mussolini’s Arditi (the Blackshirts) of prewar Italy. The SA not only eclipsed all rival right-wing militias by 1932, but also, as a paramilitary, it had a clearly outlined if not always a stable relationship to the Nazi Party.
History never repeats itself exactly, so we shouldn’t look for an exact repeat of the SA or Franco’s Falange. But we should be very vigilant lest those atomized militias congeal into something unified, and with a clear relationship to the Republican Party.
3: The Next Month Is Crucial, but Not for the Reasons We Assumed.
Before the election, there were fears of a literal civil war breaking out between the Left and Right in the aftermath of the results. This now looks very unlikely. And it’s hard to imagine that Trump will be able to undermine democratic institutions in the next few months any more than he has already done.
But Trump is currently testing the waters of an authoritarianism so blatant and so vast in scope that it outstrips anything he has done so far in office. He’s pursued the “rigged election” narrative in the courts, and now that it’s not working, he has apparently weighed the option of getting Republican state legislatures in states that voted for Biden to flip the electoral college in his favor. And what was he planning with his last-minute leadership reshuffle in the Pentagon, anyway? And was the “rigged election” narrative supposed to set the stage for the flipping of electors, with the new Pentagon loyalists on hand to crush any dissent?
Even if there was an authoritarian playbook, nothing seems to be going according to plan. But we should closely watch how much of the Republican leadership and base goes along with such moves. It lets us know how many of those seventy-two million people who voted for Trump are truly and thoroughly authoritarian. It will also show us how much damage Trumpism has done to basic democratic values.
4: American Authoritarians Don’t Need To Reject Democracy.
There’s a common belief that fascism explicitly rejects democratic principles. If you look at the autobiographies of Mussolini or Hitler, this was certainly the case. They claimed that parliaments were just a bunch of bickering politicians who never got anything done; Italians and Germans needed a strongman to come in, drain the swamp, and do what was needed themselves.
Much of this sounds familiar. But Trump hasn’t taken the final step and rejected elections on philosophical grounds. Rather, he claims they’re “rigged” and tries to reverse the results with lawyers, not militias.
In the United States, liberal democratic values are common sense, so it would be difficult for the majority of Americans to swallow a rejection of elections in principle. Instead, what we’re seeing now with the “rigged elections” claim is something that American neofascists have pushed since the 1930s.
In the late 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin’s pro-fascist newspaper Social Justice defended Franco’s coup d’état in Spain by claiming that extralegal violence on the Right was necessary there because the political left had come to power through fraudulent elections. Such arguments allow Americans to preserve their self-image as upholders of democracy — as they go about destroying it.
This has always been a necessary move in the United States where constitutional liberalism is ingrained into the national ideal, and thus is indispensable to any nationalist. A paradoxical faith in the Constitution has always been something that’s given American fascism its distinctly national hue.
5: Finding Another Trump Won’t Be Easy — But It’s Not Impossible.
Trump was a unique kind of celebrity, and those are not easily replaced. And as we saw in 2018, Trumpism didn’t do too well without Trump on the ballot. It’s not every day that a party can find a celebrity “un-politician” who can effectively campaign on hard-right populist and even white nationalist politics. And to find a Trump better than Trump — a charismatic, neofascist leader who also commands shrewd tactical abilities — would be an exceptionally hard task.
But we can’t lull ourselves to sleep by thinking it’s impossible.
6: There Is a Place for People of Color in Neofascism.
To be sure, there appears to have been an incremental uptick in nonwhite support for Trump. But the presence of people of color in the Trump coalition should remind us there has always been far more to fascist politics than white supremacy. We have plenty of global examples of nonwhite fascisms and crypto-fascisms, including imperial Japan, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its RSS paramilitary in India, Rodrigo Duterte’s regime in the Philippines, and Jair Bolsonaro’s election in the officially multiracial state of Brazil.
Take away white supremacy, and we find that fascist and neofascist movements still have plenty to offer their (mostly male) followers: militarism, the thrill of violence, anti-communism, authoritarian patriarchy, religious bigotry, xenophobia directed at national minorities, and more.
There’s more than enough racism in Trumpist politics to justify the term “white nationalism” for now, but we may need to rethink our labels in a demographically changing United States.
7: The Rich Are Okay With White Nationalism.
The activist backbone of fascist movements has always come from the middle class, not the working class or the rich. It confounded a lot of commentators that in 2016, many Trump voters were “whites without college degrees” who, at the same time, had incomes above the national average. The Trumpian base, much like the base of fascist movements across the twentieth century, is strongest in what is sometimes called “the old middle class.” Occupationally, it is less often white-collar professionals or office workers (“the new middle class”) and more often small business owners, independent contractors, and skilled workers.
Hitler and Mussolini arose from this middle class. Trump didn’t. But there have been fascist movements with aristocrats and other elites at the helm, as with Francisco Franco in Spain, Oswald Mosley in Great Britain, and, more recently, Martin Sellner of Austria, the de facto leader of the identitarian movement in Europe.
More to the point, fascist movements never go anywhere without elite complicity and enablement. And according to a New York Times exit poll, those making over $100,000 a year were the income bracket most likely to support Trump. We don’t know yet why that is the case, though we know they certainly benefited most from his tax cuts. We also know that racism and misogyny is not a deal-killer for them, just as they weren’t a problem for fascism’s elite enablers in the past.
8: Antifascism Is Most Effective as a Big-Tent Coalition.
Sadly, the Democratic Party offers the most likely vehicle for opposing fascism at the level of federal electoral politics, as even the Communist Party USA realized in the second half of the 1930s. (Though this doesn’t foreclose other vehicles at the state and local levels.)
With that in mind, the Left cannot ignore people who don’t identify as leftists or progressives but are willing to fight the Right. But the Democratic Party also can’t afford to ignore AOC — and the latter is what establishment Democrats are naturally inclined to do. Without supporting the demands of millions who showed up to save democracy, yet again, there is nothing really standing in the way of Trump 2.0.
Shaping the contours of a Popular Front is our most urgent political task. It’s one that will take many of us to get right, and it’s difficult to offer a blueprint in advance. In 1936, an attendee at the American League Against War and Fascism’s national convention said, “Whether or not America goes fascist depends on who gets organized first.” This is as true now as it was in 1936.
Ronnie Long stands in a hallway at the Albemarle Correctional Institution, 44 years into his sentence. (photo: Peter Weinberger/Charlotte Observer)
"I Need That Pardon": Ronnie Long, Free After 44 Years, Demands Justice for His Wrongful Conviction
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "'It's a blessing within itself for me to even be sitting here right now,' says Ronnie Long, free after 44 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit."
Long, who is African American, was convicted in 1976 of raping a white woman by an all-white jury and sentenced to 80 years in prison. In 2015, his lawyers learned that investigators had withheld exculpatory evidence proving his innocence — including semen samples and fingerprints taken from the crime scene that did not match his own — and witnesses for the state committed perjury at his trial. It would take several more years and a ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for Long to win his freedom. Long walked out of the Albemarle Correctional Institute in North Carolina a free man on August 27. He is asking North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper for a pardon, which would fully clear his name and make him eligible for financial compensation. “You’ve got people that have been victimized by the system, like myself, and then you turn around and you put me back into a society and expect for me to live a productive life,” he says. “I need that pardon in order to try to get on with my life.”
Brahim Ghali, secretary general of the Polisario Front, in 2019. Mr. Ghali issued a decree announcing the 'resumption of armed struggle in defense of the legitimate rights of our people.' (photo: Stefano Montesi/Corbis/Getty Images)
Ceasefire Ends in Occupied Western Sahara After US-Backed Moroccan Military Launches Operation
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "A nearly three-decade-old ceasefire has ended in occupied Western Sahara - what many consider to be Africa's last colony."
Fighting has broken out in several areas between the Moroccan military and the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement seeking independence, after the Moroccan military broke into a no-go buffer zone in southern Western Sahara. For the past three weeks, Sahrawi civilian protesters had blocked a Morocco-built road in the area that Sahrawis consider to be illegal. The peaceful blockade backed up traffic for miles and cut off trade between Morocco and Mauritania to the south. The Polisario Front says it is now mobilizing thousands of volunteers to join for the fight for independence. “We have not seen fighting like this in Western Sahara since 1991,” says Jacob Mundy, associate professor of peace and conflict studies and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Colgate University. “We’ve seen tensions on the rise, but to have open warfare like this is very significant.”
Red wolves. (photo: Mark Newman/Getty Images)
Conservation Groups Sue US Fish and Wildlife Service to Save Wild Red Wolves
The Southern Environmental Law Center
Excerpt: "On behalf of Red Wolf Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife, and Animal Welfare Institute, the Southern Environmental Law Center today sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina for violations of the Endangered Species Act."
“The Fish and Wildlife Service is managing this species for extinction,” said Sierra Weaver, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center which represents the conservation organizations in court. “Faced with a wild population of only seven known animals, the Fish and Wildlife Service is now claiming—without basis—that it’s not allowed to take proven, necessary measures to save the wild red wolves. The service urgently needs to restart red wolf releases from captivity, which it did regularly for 27 years. Otherwise we’re going to lose the world’s only wild population of this wolf.”
“Under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s mismanagement, the world’s most endangered wolf has only moved closer to extinction,” said Jason Rylander, senior endangered species counsel at Defenders of Wildlife. “We have given the service every opportunity to reverse course and supplement the last wild population of red wolves with captive releases. Sadly, with only seven collared wolves left in the wild, it’s apparent we can’t wait any longer.”
Two years ago, in November 2018, a federal court found that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had violated the Endangered Species Act by suspending proven conservation measures for wild red wolves after the Southern Environmental Law Center went to court on behalf of the same conservation organizations.
Rather than resolving those violations, the agency has doubled down on its abandonment of those measures and invented a new, illegal policy that it claims does not permit it to release red wolves from the captive population into the wild. The agency also now claims that its rules do not allow the agency to address hybridization with coyotes. As a result, the world’s only population of wild red wolves is now on the brink of extinction.
No red wolf pups were born in the wild in 2019 or 2020 for the first time since 1988. Meanwhile, the captive red wolf population continues to increase with more new pups being born every spring, even as the agency refuses to reinstate red wolf releases.
"We hope the USFWS will look closely at its red wolf conservation policies and enact the necessary changes that will make the survival of wild red wolves a priority." Kim Wheeler, Executive Director, RWC
Following successful conservation efforts and reintroductions from captive populations, America’s red wolves rebounded from extinction in the wild to number about 100 animals in the early 2000s. That population level persisted for approximately a decade in eastern North Carolina. Since 2018, however, the wild red wolf population has plummeted by 70 percent.
“The ESA requires USFWS to carry out programs for the conservation of the red wolf and to ensure that its actions do not jeopardize the species’ continued existence,” said Johanna Hamburger, director and senior staff attorney for the Animal Welfare Institute’s terrestrial wildlife program. “The agency is failing on both counts. The current lack of action, by USFWS’ own admission, will cause the extinction of the wild red wolf population unless the agency immediately restarts conservation efforts.”
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