19 November 20
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Warren to Biden: Raise Minimum Wage, Cancel Student Debt, Invest in Child Care
Lauren Hirsch, The New York Times
Hirsch writes: "Senator Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday urged the incoming Biden administration to use all the 'tools in their toolbox' to push through Democrats' priorities."
.... — even as the party gave up seats in the House and remains at risk of being unable to take the Senate.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris “won on the most progressive agenda that a general election candidate has ever run on in the United States of America,” the senator told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. She cited some down-ballot victories, calling out Florida’s vote to raise the minimum wage and Arizona’s vote to raise taxes on higher incomes to fund education.
The election, she said, “is a mandate to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to do the things we can do.” She pressed for the cancellation of student loan debt, calling it the “single biggest stimulus we could add to the economy.” Ms. Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, also urged the incoming administration to invest in child care — “because we can do it” — and to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for employees of government contractors.
Sen. Lindsey Graham. (photo: Getty)
Lindsey Graham Becomes Subject of Senate Ethics Complaint Over Contacts With Georgia Secretary of State
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Three attorneys have filed an ethics complaint against U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, accusing the South Carolina Republican of pressuring a Georgia elections official to toss out legally cast absentee votes in the presidential race."
Lawyers accuse the South Carolina lawmaker, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, of pressuring Republican state official to throw out ballots
In a complaint filed Wednesday with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, Claire Finkelstein, Richard Painter and Walter Shaub “urge the committee to investigate whether Senator Graham suggested that Secretary Raffensperger disenfranchise Georgia voters by not counting votes lawfully cast for the office of president.” They also “demand clarity as to whether Senator Graham has threatened anyone with a Senate investigation of the Georgia vote tally and or taken steps to initiate such an investigation.”
The complaint also requests that Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “be recused from any investigation or other Senate matter relating to alleged irregularities in the 2020 election” while any probe of his comments is ongoing.
The complaint stems from comments by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who said this week that Graham asked him whether he had the power to reject certain absentee ballots, a question Raffensperger interpreted as a suggestion to toss out legally cast votes. Raffensperger told the Washington Post he’s faced rising pressure from fellow Republicans who want to see Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead in the state reversed.
The Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Biden leads President Donald Trump by 0.3 percentage point. There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage point. It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is — or is likely to become — subject to a recount.
Projections of other major news organizations have awarded Georgia’s 16 electoral votes to Biden, giving him a final winning margin of 306-232, matching Trump’s advantage four years earlier over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump has continuously touted that outcome as a landslide.
Election officials have said a hand recount has turned up more than 5,000 votes in four counties that weren’t previously counted but won’t alter the overall outcome of the race, in which nearly 5 million votes were cast in the state. Officials have said the margin between Trump and Biden will be about 12,800 votes when those previously uncounted votes are accounted for.
When Georgia voters return an absentee ballot, they have to sign an oath on an outer envelope. County election office workers are required to ensure the signature matches the one on the absentee ballot application and the one in the voter registration system, Raffensperger has said.
“He asked if the absentee ballots could be matched back to the envelope,” Raffensperger told the Associated Press this week, of his conversation with Graham. “I thought that then Sen. Graham implied for us to audit the envelopes and throw out ballots of counties who had the highest frequency error rate of signatures, and I told him that’s something that we couldn’t do.”
Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop called the attorneys “longtime vocal critics” of both Graham and Trump, adding, “Their complaint should be viewed in that light.” Painter has called Graham “Putin’s favorite senator,” while Finkelstein said this week Trump “will likely be indicted” after leaving office.
Schaub, the former head of the federal Office of Government Ethics, complained in 2017 about Graham’s tweets that he said improperly promoted Trump International Golf Club.
When asked about the conversation with Raffensperger, Graham said Monday that he was “trying to find out how the signature stuff worked” and that Raffensperger “did a good job of explaining to me how they verify signatures.”
Asked about Raffensperger’s interpretation that he was suggesting legally cast ballots should be thrown out, Graham said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Trump — who has made unfounded claims of widespread voting irregularities and fraud — and his campaign have repeatedly taken to social media to criticize Raffensperger and the way the state’s hand tally was being conducted. Once the hand tally is complete and the results certified, the losing campaign can request a recount, which would be done using scanners that read and tally the votes.
County election officials were instructed to complete the count by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. The deadline for the state to certify election results is Friday.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in 2019. (photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Arizona's Top Election Official Said She's Getting Violent Threats Due To Trump's Lies
Stephanie K. Baer, BuzzFeed
Baer writes: "A top election official in Arizona said Wednesday that President Donald Trump's continued efforts to undermine the election through baseless lies and conspiracies have contributed to 'ongoing and escalating' threats of violence directed against herself, her family, and her staff."
"Words and actions have consequences," said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs as she discussed threats made against her, her family, and her staff.
top election official in Arizona said Wednesday that President Donald Trump's continued efforts to undermine the election through baseless lies and conspiracies have contributed to "ongoing and escalating" threats of violence directed against herself, her family, and her staff.
"There are those, including the president, members of Congress and other elected officials, who are perpetuating misinformation and are encouraging others to distrust the election results in a manner that violates the oath of office they took," Katie Hobbs, Arizona's secretary of state, said in a statement. "It is well past time that they stop. Their words and actions have consequences."
As the state's chief election officer, Hobbs is in charge of overseeing and certifying the results of all elections in Arizona. While the results for the Nov. 3 presidential election have not yet been certified, multiple media outlets, including BuzzFeed News, have named Joe Biden the winner of Arizona's electoral votes. According to unofficial results, Biden won the state by a margin of more than 10,000 votes.
In the days after Election Day, as more mail-ballots were counted and it became clear that Trump had lost, armed supporters converged on elections offices in Arizona, demanded entry to a vote-counting site in Michigan, and disrupted a press conference in Nevada.
The confrontations made election officials and ballot counters fearful for their safety and prompted additional security at the offices where they were working.
But as the president continues spreading lies about the results in an attempt to undermine and delay Biden's win, Hobbs, a Democrat, said she and her staffers have continued to receive threats of violence.
"These actions are utterly abhorrent, especially when directed at my family and my staff," she said. "They are a symptom of a deeper problem in our state and country — the consistent and systematic undermining of trust in each other and our democratic process."
The statement comes after Hobbs told KPNX, a local news station, that a death threat was made against her and her family on Parler, a social media site that's popular among far-right extremists.
“The threat was something like, ‘Let’s burn her house down and kill her and her family, and teach these fraudsters a lesson,’” Hobbs told the local TV station.
A spokesperson for the secretary of state's office told BuzzFeed News the threats have come via email, social media, and phone calls, adding that they have been reporting the threats to their security officer, who has been working with the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center.
"Personal contact information, including her address, have been published, resulting in additional harassment," Sophia Solis, public information officer for the secretary of state, said in an email.
Surveillance video obtained by ABC 15 showed protesters waving flags and playing music, including "God Bless the USA," which is often played at Trump rallies, outside the secretary's home.
Hobbs also placed blame on Arizona's Republican governor and Trump surrogate Doug Ducey, saying his "deafening silence has contributed to the growing unrest" over the election.
When asked about the secretary's statement during a press conference on the coronavirus pandemic, Ducey called the threats "completely unacceptable" but declined to accept the election results, saying he wanted to wait for the legal challenges to be resolved in court.
"I denounce any threats of violence against anyone in elective office or any Arizonan or American," Ducey told reporters. "That’s different than a court challenge, OK? A court challenge will play itself out, but it's completely unacceptable [for] any threats of violence."
He added that his office is working with the secretary to make resources from the state's Department of Public Safety available as "necessary in any way to protect her."
Hobbs called on him to "stand up for the truth."
"When facing unimaginable challenges this election year, Arizonans stepped up," she said. "More people are registered to vote in our state than ever before, election participation has been at historic highs, thousands have answered the call to work at voting locations during a pandemic, and people have made their voices heard."
A girl looks through the border fence into New Mexico as U.S. Border Patrol agents conduct a training exercise in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on January 31, 2020. (photo: Herika Martinez/Getty)
ALSO SEE: White House Killed Deal to Pay for Mental Health Care
for Migrant Families Separated at Border
Will Biden Dismantle Trump's Immigration Police State?
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "The pace and aggression were staggering. By the end of his first week in office, Donald Trump had already signed orders banning travelers from multiple Muslim-majority countries and tossed out rules establishing who the nation's sprawling immigration enforcement apparatus should prioritize for arrest."
As part of a nativist effort to remake the U.S. relationship to immigration through an “unshackling” of the Department of Homeland Security, armed federal agents took thousands of immigrant children from their parents to terrify others from making the journey north. Families were turned out into some of the border’s most dangerous cities by the tens of thousands. Mothers and fathers who dutifully checked-in at Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices for years walked into those same spaces only to find themselves handcuffed and deported.
And those were only the most infamous of the administration’s initiatives. Asylum and refugee admissions came under withering attack through waves of critical but under-the-radar regulations and policy changes.
Now, it seems, that era is coming to an end, raising a critical question: How much of what Trump built will remain?
Last week, sources close to President-elect Joe Biden told CBS News that upon entering office, the incoming administration will swiftly and fully restore the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA, rescind Trump’s Muslim ban, and “look to implement a 100-day freeze on deportations while his administration issues guidance narrowing who can be arrested by immigration agents.” Among other key initiatives on the agenda, sources said a Biden White House will also end the punishing Migrant Protections Protocol program, otherwise known as “Remain in Mexico,” create a task force for locating children separated by DHS, and raise the nation’s cap on refugees — which fell to a record low of 15,000 under Trump — to 125,000.
The ambitious vows, which tracked with promises made on the campaign trail, came one day after the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, published a policy brief examining the incoming administration’s immigration plans. Pointing to more than 400 executive orders as evidence, MPI reported that the outgoing administration had “methodically dismantled and reconstructed” the immigration system “based on a worldview of immigration as a security and economic threat to Americans.”
Unfortunately for immigrant rights advocates, MPI noted: “The grafting of a dizzying array of Trump executive actions, policy guidance, and regulatory changes — some interlocking and thus difficult to unwind — atop a long-antiquated immigration system presents complex hurdles for an incoming administration that has vowed to roll back key Trump changes and advance bold reforms.”
Some of the challenges would be logistical. Biden’s refugee resettlement plan, for example, has to contend with the fact that after nearly four years of the Trump administration strangling refugee admissions, the capacity of the existing nonprofit infrastructure to take in refugees has been severely diminished.
Similarly, while the incoming administration could swiftly end the “Remain in Mexico” program, which forced more than 67,000 people to wait out their asylum cases on the southern side of the border — in some instances in dangerous and squalid camps — Biden has not said whether he would allow individuals in the program into the U.S. As of September, roughly 24,500 people remained in the program, while fewer than 1 percent have been granted asylum. The challenge is not that the remaining cases necessarily reflect an unmanageable burden on the system; it’s that the 24,500 figure represents human beings whose needs and rights will require careful planning, attention, and resources if the Biden administration sincerely intends to distinguish itself from its predecessor.
In a phone call with reporters last week, MPI’s analysts and experts stressed that much of what a Biden White House could accomplish hinges on political will and timing, neither of which look particularly promising. Hanging over the procedural and logistical challenges is the overarching question of whether the incoming Biden administration can realistically accomplish the goals it has set for its first 100 days, said Sarah Pierce, an MPI policy analyst.
“Will immigration actually be their key priority?” Pierce asked, before answering her own question: “We know it’s not going to be.” Pierce pointed to speeches Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris gave after their electoral victory. “They mentioned a lot of issues, but they didn’t mention immigration and during the Trump administration, immigration was the top policy priority,” she said. “They poured everything they had into enacting their agenda. I think under a Biden administration, we’re about to see the pace of immigration changes slow down significantly.”
Noting Biden’s pledge to deliver a bill on comprehensive immigration reform within his first 100 days, Muzaffar Chishti, an MPI senior fellow and director, said this was the third moment in the last 20 years when the public has witnessed the prospect of a “big move on immigration reform” run up against national political realities outside of the immigration sphere. “One can expect that there will be some movement towards immigration reform legislation,” Chishti said. “But we know that’s an uphill task.”
Chishti described how “mega-events” over the past two decades have repeatedly foiled efforts at immigration reform. For George W. Bush, who Chishti described as “probably the most pro-immigrant Republican president in recent history,” it was the September 11 attacks, “one of the biggest mega-events” of all time. Then there was Barack Obama, who took office in 2009. “He was confronted with the Great Recession, and there was no possibility of any immigration reform legislation in the first term,” Chishti said. “Unfortunately, similarly, when this administration takes effect with a lot of hope that there will be significant change on immigration, the first thing that the president-elect will have to deal with is the pandemic.”
On the border, the coronavirus has made a historic impact on the nature of immigration enforcement. Earlier this year, Stephen Miller, the president’s ultra-hardline immigration adviser, successfully overcame the concerns of public health officials and pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a rule that would allow Border Patrol agents to rapidly remove immigrants at the border without due process. From March through September, border authorities used the rule to expel more than 200,000 migrants, including 8,800 unaccompanied children.
“The incoming administration has not said what it will do about that,” Doris Meissner, an MPI senior fellow and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program, as well as a former commissioner of the now-defunct U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, told reporters. “It’s highly likely that Covid conditions will continue to be in an emergency state, so it is possible that we would see a new administration maintain the CDC guidance at the border, at least for some period of time,” she said, adding that an extension of the CDC rule could give Biden, “some time for putting the changes into place that allow for a more functional system for granting asylum.”
Away from the border, Biden’s proposed deportation moratorium has been met with a combination of cautious optimism from immigrant rights advocates and questions as to how, exactly, it would work, particularly in the case of individuals currently being held in immigration detention. The answers to those questions remain unclear.
In other matters on the interior enforcement front, Biden has signaled that his administration would return to priorities set in the later years of the Obama administration that directed ICE personnel to focus their arrest activity on so-called criminal aliens and public safety threats. ICE’s union and other right-wing commentators howled that efforts to rein in the agency handcuffed deportation officers in the field, helping to pave the way for the “unshackling” rhetoric that defined the Trump era. Immigrant rights advocates, meanwhile, argued that the priorities failed in their stated goals. A New York Times analysis of government data supported those claims, and recent evidence has surfaced giving them additional weight.
Earlier this year, Netflix released a documentary series titled, “Immigration Nation,” in which a supervisory ICE officer addressed the kind of enforcement priorities that Biden could seek to reintroduce. “Even under the Obama administration, when we had the priorities, that really didn’t limit anything,” the field office director, identified as Bob, told the film crew. “What people didn’t realize, there was this little, I call it the fine print at the bottom, and it said, you can arrest anybody you basically want to if you think they present a threat to the United States or could possibly present a threat — and we did! — it’s so easy to say. … Doesn’t matter what for. There’s millions of people to choose from.”
Avoiding Obama’s Mistakes
A return to some version of the Obama era is precisely what Biden’s critics on the left are hoping to avoid.
For Roberto Lopez, a community organizer with the Texas Civil Rights Project in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, 2014 was a year of political awakening. It was the year that his community made news around the world, with thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America showing up to the border seeking asylum.
“That is when we started to really see just the images of children in the cages in the Central Processing Center here in South Texas,” Lopez told The Intercept. “That is sort of the lens that I view a Biden administration from.”
Lopez is not alone. Among many immigrant rights advocates, the Obama-Biden administration is remembered for building a network of massive, for-profit detention centers for immigrant families on the border; continuing the unprecedented expansion of Customs and Border Protection, even as the agency became the most corrupt actor in federal law enforcement; and carrying out more deportations than any administration in the history of the country, including Trump’s, with more than 3 million people removed the last time Biden was in the White House.
In addition to being an epicenter of family separations, the Rio Grande Valley has been an ongoing target for border wall expansion under the current administration, leading to heated legal battles between the federal government and private landowners that continue to this day. Biden has said that his administration would not build “one more inch” of new wall along the border — though he has not said what he would do about the sections of wall Trump has rammed through in places like southern Arizona, which has seen extensive environmental and cultural damage as a result of the president’s efforts — opting instead for a high-tech “virtual wall.”
Here, too, Lopez said there is cause for concern. In years past, virtual wall talk has largely translated into the federal government awarding lucrative contracts to military, security, and intelligence firms to install surveillance equipment in border communities.
“For a while now, we’ve been fighting the physical border wall — the concrete, the bollards, the rusted steel kind of looking thing — but there are many types of walls that exist, which I think continue to paint the borderlands as this is sort of second-class state without the same constitutional protections as the rest of the country,” Lopez said. The technological border security solutions historically favored by Biden and others in the Democratic Party also pose a threat to human and civil rights along the border, Lopez added. “That will still lead to the same violence against immigrants,” he said. “It will still lead to individuals suffering through exhaustion and entering through hazardous terrains. It will still lead to myself and the millions of people who call the border home losing their privacy.”
Erika Andiola is also concerned about the direction the incoming administration might take. In 2013, Andiola’s mother and brother were arrested by ICE officers in Phoenix. Andiola was 25 years old and already a rising force in the immigrant rights community. The arrests made national news, and Andiola’s mother and brother were eventually released.
Andiola has been fighting for radical changes to the nation’s immigration system ever since, serving as a staffer on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and now working as chief advocacy officer for the Texas-based nonprofit RAICES Action.
In her view, one of the core advocacy mistakes of the Obama era was to throw enormous time and energy into a legislative process — specifically the attempted passage of the DREAM Act, which would provide protections to young immigrants — that wedded immigration reform to the continued expansion of the immigration police state. While the agencies of DHS grew and grew, the reform never came. Instead, a hypernationalist whose top immigration policy adviser endorsed white supremacist views took control of the federal government’s increasingly militarized Homeland Security agencies, ushering in four years of terror for immigrant communities.
“I think the biggest mistake was really prioritizing enforcement,” Andiola told The Intercept. “For people who don’t understand immigration, it literally is detaining and deporting immigrants at a record number and creating programs and creating detention centers to be able to look tough on immigration for Republicans to come around.”
While she welcomed Biden’s focus on policy targets that go beyond passing sweeping legislation, such as the deportation moratorium and reversing Trump’s executive orders, Andiola expressed concern with the advisers the incoming president has surrounded himself with.
In September, news broke that Biden had added the former head of Obama’s White House Domestic Policy Council, Cecilia Muñoz, to his transition team as a senior adviser. While some immigration experts defended the decision and pointed to the Obama administration’s evolution on immigration policy, Pablo ManrÃquez, a former Democratic National Committee spokesperson, told The Hill: “Cecilia Muñoz is the one person besides Stephen Miller who has spent years of her public service dedicated to the smooth execution of mass deportation policy at the West Wing level.”
A polarizing figure in the immigrant rights community, Muñoz, who did not respond to a request for comment for this story, was the face of immigration policy under the former president and staunchly defended his most controversial efforts, even as DHS and local law enforcement collaborations fueled an extraordinary 409,849 deportations in a single year. When asked about the “collateral damage” incurred by the administration’s crackdown in a 2011 Frontline investigation, Muñoz told journalist Maria Hinojosa: “At the end of the day, when you have immigration law that’s broken and you have a community of 10 million, 11 million people living and working in the United States illegally, some of these things are going to happen. Even if the law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.”
Muñoz then made an argument that would become commonplace among immigration officials under Trump: that suffering resulting from enforcement of immigration laws should be addressed by changing those laws, and until that time, DHS agencies would continue to do their jobs. “As long as Congress gives us the money to deport 400,000 people a year, that’s what the administration is going to do,” she said. “That’s our obligation under the law.”
In the wake of the interview, the senior Obama administration official came under intense criticism from grassroots immigrant rights groups, which continued into the president’s second term. In 2015, 17 members of the American Immigration Lawyers Association called on the organization to rescind its invitation to Muñoz to appear as a keynote speaker at the group’s annual conference, describing her in a letter as “one of the principal architects of shocking, widespread, and ongoing human rights violations against vulnerable children fleeing Central America.” Muñoz ultimately delivered her address while critics held signs in protest and others booed.
Muñoz is not without her defenders. In 2011, Deepak Bhargava, a distinguished lecturer at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, was arrested alongside Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) outside the White House while protesting the Obama administration’s deportation crackdown. At the time, Bhargava was the executive director of the Center for Community Change, a progressive community organization where Muñoz formerly served as a board chair. He attended meetings with the president and to this day describes himself as a “fierce critic” of the former administration’s policies. Given that experience, Bhargava told The Intercept, “I sort of feel like I can say with authority that criticism of Cecilia is misguided — she was really the one senior level pro-immigrant voice that consistently fought for the movement on the inside.”
Amid the fallout from the 2011 Frontline interview, Bhargava’s former organization was one of 18 groups that issued a joint statement in Muñoz’s defense. In her years in the White House, Bhargava said, Muñoz won some battles and lost some battles, including against former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel and former DHS secretary Janet Napolitano. “It’s ridiculous to argue that immigrant communities would have fared better now with her absence,” Bhargava said. “It kind of just makes me sad that the very justified anger about Obama’s immigration policies is landing on sort of the one progressive woman of color who I know from experience was in there fighting for the movement, often out of public view and in a pretty hostile setting.”
“I feel like the Biden administration is going to be better than it would otherwise be on immigration because she’s there,” he added. “I don’t know all the details of the criticisms people are making but I do know her, and I’m confident about who she is and what she stands up for when she’s in the room.”
Questions of accountability for the Obama years and divergent visions of what justice and change should look like in the immigration system, especially after four years of Trump, will take on new urgency when Biden assumes office next year.
Andiola, who has called the Muñoz addition a “huge mistake,” said her concerns about the direction of the incoming administration on immigration deepened last week, when Biden and Harris released a list of agency review teams responsible for “ensuring a smooth transfer of power” and preparing the administration and its Cabinet “to hit the ground running on Day One.” Among those listed under DHS, Andiola said the only names she recognized were Obama-era officials. She said she knew of nobody from her political orbit, immigrant rights advocates who critiqued the Obama administration from the left, who had been contacted or gone to work with the incoming Biden team. “It’s definitely not a great start,” she said. “But let’s hope for the better.”
Given the experience of the past four years, Andiola argued that Biden should be seeking advisers focused on dismantling the country’s detention and deportation apparatus; advisors who won’t trade the safety of immigrant communities for long-shot political opportunities. “That’s as important as pushing Congress to do something,” she said, “because we don’t want to end up in the same situation of the Obama administration.”
“I’m just a little bit nervous that they are going to bring on board people who are not necessarily the opposite of Stephen Miller, and that’s what we need right now,” Andiola went on to say. “We need someone who can wake up every day thinking, What am I going to do for the immigrant community? Just the opposite of what Stephen Miller does, which is waking up every day thinking what the heck he’s going to do to deport us and to harm us.”
The federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, where three death row inmates are scheduled to be executed in the coming weeks. (photo: Michael Conroy/AP)
Trump's DOJ Plans Three Executions Before Biden Inauguration
Justine Coleman, The Hill
Coleman writes: "Two men and one woman are scheduled to be executed before Biden becomes president after he has declared that he will reverse the Trump administration's resumption of capital punishment."
he Department of Justice (DOJ) plans to conduct three executions in the final weeks of President Trump’s administration and ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The Trump administration restarted federal executions in July after a 17-year pause and has since executed seven people. Before the unofficial break from executions, the federal government executed only three people in the last 50 years, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
The three scheduled executions left this year are for 49-year-old Orlando Cordia Hall, 40-year-old Brandon Bernard and 52-year-old Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row.
All three inmates have ongoing litigation regarding their capital punishment, The New York Times reported. But thus far this year, the Supreme Court has not accepted their arguments on postponing their executions, even before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed.
The DOJ did not immediately return a request for comment on the scheduling.
Hall was convicted of kidnapping resulting in death after he and others abducted, raped and buried a 16-year-old alive in 1994. Bernard, along with accomplices, murdered two youth ministers in 1999, the DOJ said. One of his accomplices Christopher Vialva was executed in September.
Montgomery, who would become the first woman executed in almost 70 years had been convicted in kidnapping resulting in death in 2007 after strangling a pregnant woman and abducting the unborn child.
Biden’s campaign has vowed to end federal executions and incentivize states to halt their executions.
Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the Times that executions during a transition of power were extremely unusual.
“This is another part of the Trump legacy that’s inconsistent with American norms,” he said. “If the administration followed the normal rules of civility that have been followed throughout the history in this country, it wouldn’t be an issue. The executions wouldn’t go forward.”
The children of the radio journalist Rahim Sekander display a photo of him in their home in Khost on Oct. 27. (photo: Foreign Policy)
Atrocities Pile Up for CIA-Backed Afghan Paramilitary Forces
Emran Feroz, Foreign Policy
Feroz writes: "Members of a CIA-backed paramilitary group have allegedly killed some 14 civilians during raids in Afghanistan's restive Khost province in the past month."
Many Afghans want the groups disbanded when the United States withdraws.
embers of a CIA-backed paramilitary group have allegedly killed some 14 civilians during raids in Afghanistan’s restive Khost province in the past month, in one case bursting into the home of a man in his 40s, Muhammad Shawkat, dragging him into the street, and shooting him dead for no apparent reason, according to interviews with several residents of the area.
At least one woman was among the dead, the residents said. They declined to be identified in describing the killings because they feared retribution from the group, known as the Khost Protection Force (KPF). Word of the killings also spread on social media in the past month.
The KPF controls much of Khost in southeastern Afghanistan, one of the more volatile parts of the country. The CIA established the force in the first days of the war in Afghanistan in late 2001, drawing on fighters from local Pashtun tribes for its membership. Nineteen years later, CIA operatives continue to train and arm the KPF, though it has been implicated repeatedly in atrocities against civilians, including torture and killing, according to human rights groups.
As the United States moves toward a total withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, many residents fear that the KPF and other CIA-backed paramilitary groups are stepping up their attacks to assert themselves across the country.
“Those who attacked us killed him brutally without any reason. They are violent criminals,” one of Shawkat’s relatives said in an interview. He said KPF forces raided the home in mid-October and killed eight other civilians in similar operations that day.
“Shawkat was not a member of any terrorist group. He was
Climate change activists block rush hour traffic as they pass the Trump International Hotel during a 2019 protest in Washington. (photo: Shawn Thew/EPA)
Climate Activists Want Biden to Bar Appointees With Fossil Fuel Ties
Jeff Brady, NPR
Brady writes: "Climate activists have set a high bar for President-elect Joe Biden's staff picks, asking that he exclude anyone with ties to fossil fuel industries. They've already been disappointed."
Biden faced backlash this week after naming Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond to lead the Office of Public Engagement.
Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said it "feels like a betrayal" because Richmond "has taken more donations from the fossil fuel industry during his Congressional career than nearly any other Democrat."
The oil and gas industry has been among Richmond's top campaign contributors over his career in Congress, according to Center for Responsive Politics.
Prakash called Richmond's appointment "an affront to young people who made President-Elect Biden's victory possible."
The Biden transition office defended Richmond's appointment and reaffirmed the incoming administration's commitment to addressing climate change. A House colleague of Richmond's also pointed out that the he co-sponsored legislation calling for "a 100 percent clean economy" by 2050.
In a statement provided by the transition office, Rep. A. Donald McEachin said Richmond "is committed to serving the President-elect's vision to meet this moment by prioritizing both an inclusive, clean energy future and federal investment in transitional communities, creating millions of good-paying jobs and protecting our planet for generations to come."
Last Monday, Sunrise Movement protesters marched to Biden's Philadelphia headquarters office chanting "Biden, be brave," The group also issued its own list of suggestions for key cabinet appointments.
Biden has let the Sunrise Movement down before. Instead of backing the Green New Deal, he campaigned on his own climate plan that calls for a slower transition away from coal, oil and gas. He has not committed to barring people with fossil fuel ties from his administration.
A major problem with such a litmus test is that Biden won't govern alone.
The U.S. Senate could remain under Republican leadership, depending on the outcome of two run-off races in Georgia. That means passing legislation would require compromise.
"Americans voted for divided government and as part of that I think they voted for moderation, and I think they voted for common sense," says Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council.
Bradbury sees a future for fossil fuels even under Biden's ambitious plan for the U.S. to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Conservatives worried about climate change say there are issues Republicans and Democrats likely can agree on, such as economic stimulus legislation that boosts clean energy.
Heather Reams, executive director of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, says climate activists should focus on "the art of possible with getting climate action done today, rather than arguing about the position on one's resume."
Among the names on the Biden transition's agency review teams a few have limited ties to fossil fuel, but more are from environmental groups.
"When I look at that list I think the clear message is the Biden team wants good people in place, right from the start, who have experience in these agencies and are not wasting any time," says Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School. She was a former counselor on energy and climate change in the Obama White House.
Freeman is a good example of those who could be excluded if a Biden administration rejected people connected to fossil fuel companies. She sits on the board of oil company Conoco-Phillips, but she also led Obama's effort to double car fuel-efficiency standards.
Freeman is also an expert on using presidential powers to address climate change, knowledge that likely will be necessary if both parties can't agree on new climate legislation when Biden is sworn in next year.
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