ROBERT REICH: I just checked the polls, and I'm coming to you with a personal request

 

I just read that Wall Street executives are planning to spend a whopping $80 million in Georgia to elect Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and keep Mitch McConnell in power.¹

According to new campaign finance documents, Steven Schwarzman, a Wall Street CEO and close Trump confidant, just forked over $15 million to a McConnell-aligned Super PAC, and billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin also wired $10 million—all to be spent in Georgia.²

Let's be clear about why Wall Street titans are dumping so much money into the Georgia races: It's because they're terrified. They know that, just last month, we flipped Georgia blue and that we're on the brink of doing so again—and they know that this time, we'll also rip the Senate gavel away from their favorite lapdog: Mitch McConnell.

The races are down to the wire. For Democrats to win, grassroots groups on the ground as well as national powerhouses like MoveOn are doing everything they can to energize the Democratic base and win over independent voters. Right now, MoveOn is

• flooding Georgia's airwaves with television and radio ads to drum up support and enthusiasm for Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff,
• blanketing Atlanta with billboards that get the truth out to voters about Loeffler and Perdue's corrupt records and ties to shady Wall Street deals, and
• engaging 55,000 MoveOn members in an ambitious and innovative get-out-the-vote campaign.

As the runoff elections in Georgia show, Wall Street and other Big Money interests continue to corrupt American politics—creating a vicious cycle that funnels more wealth and power to those at the top and erodes our democracy.

Here's how that vicious cycle works: Republicans cut taxes and slash regulations for their wealthy campaign donors. Megadonors and corporations funnel some of that money back into our political system to keep their lackeys in power. Those Republican politicians then propose another round of tax cuts, subsidies, or bailouts to secure even more donations.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

We must put an end to this corruption, and that starts by winning in Georgia. While Kelly Loeffler—herself a former Wall Street CEO—and David Perdue—a shady corporate executive—are bankrolled by Big Money, Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff have pledged to reject every cent of corporate PAC money. Which means that it's going to be up to grassroots activists like you to propel Warnock and Ossoff to victory.

I just checked the polls, and both runoff races are neck and neck.³ In races this close, every ad, every billboard, and every dollar could make all the difference and open the door to the passage of real reform in a Democratically controlled Senate. So I'm coming to you with a personal request.

Thanks for all you do.

–Robert Reich

Sources:

1. "Wall Street donates millions to back Republicans in Georgia Senate race," The Guardian, December 15, 2020
LINK

2. Ibid.

3. "Latest Polls," FiveThirtyEight, accessed December 21, 2020
LINK

Republicans plan "largest and most aggressive" poll watching in GA history

 

Daily Kos: “Proving that racism is the Republican Party's defining trait, the Georgia Republican Party has recruited more than 4,000 volunteers in what they told Fox News is the ‘largest and most aggressive’ poll-watching operation in the state's history ahead of the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs.”   Aggressive Trumpers who are following a cowardly commander-in-chief who can’t admit defeat may soon be harassing voters of color as they attempt to cast their ballots in one of the most crucial Senate races in memory.   The good news is, the work of voting rights activists like Stacey Abrams has laid a solid groundwork for these marginalized communities to make their voices heard in untold numbers -- which is exactly what we’ll need if we hope to wrestle the Senate from Mitch McConnell and enact policies that benefit racial justice and help create a better America in the next administration.   But the GOP is powerful in the South. They’ve already succeeded in closing crucial polling stations placed in communities of color. We’re fighting this voter suppression war on the Republican Party’s home turf -- and they just might win.   We want these seats to go blue. We want every Black voter in Georgia to be heard. And we want to codify into law bills like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act so that nothing like this can ever happen again.   But right now we’re short on funds, which means we’re not answering this Jim Crow-era Republican toxicity exactly the way we’d like. Please, could you pitch in what you can now to help us out -- and show you stand with Stacey Abrams, Fair Fight, and all of the voting rights activists and organizers working to stop the GOP from suppressing voices of color this election? We could not be more grateful for your support. You’re doing nothing more or less than protecting democracy.   Progressive Majority

Facebook left us no choice

The Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general are bringing anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook. According to NPR, “Both lawsuits spell out the same harm to consumers: People who want to use social media have fewer options … because of Facebook’s actions.”   For the past four years, Donald Trump has used social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to share misinformation and exert his influence, and both sites have done little to stop this flow of dangerous misinformation. Would things have been different if these tech giants didn’t have such a monopoly? It’s possible that Trump would’ve had a smaller audience to peddle his lies to.   In addition to failing to rein in misinformation, Facebook has also bought up rivals, suffocated competition to ensure its own dominance, and doubled back on privacy and data-sharing agreements. We’re reaching out to our Democratic supporters to see if they think Big Tech companies should have a shorter leash.  Progressive Majority Progressive Majority PAC 410 1st St, SE Suite 310 Washington, DC 20003   Paid for by Progressive Majority PAC

ALERT: NRA spending MILLIONS in Georgia!

 

BREAKING: THE NRA IS SPENDING MILLIONS IN GEORGIA TO STOP US! Did you hear that the NRA is backing David Perdue? They’re spending MILLIONS of dollars to defeat Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock here. And it’s no secret why -- David Perdue is a shill for special interest groups.

He feels no allegiance whatsoever to his constituents, but he’ll do anything to protect and enrich his biggest donors.

Here’s the thing that Perdue doesn’t seem to realize: Special interest groups don’t choose our Senators.  Voters do. YOU do.

Our political system needs to be reformed so there isn’t this vast influence of special interests and corporate PACs.

One of the reasons Congress takes no meaningful action on climate change, health care, or criminal justice is because of the power of the oil and gas lobby, the insurance lobby, and the private prison lobby. 

We need to ban dark money, we need to bar federal lobbyists from making political contributions, and we need to get corporate money and corporate PACs out of politics.

We’re not accepting any contributions from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists. Jon’s building a grassroots movement around Health, Justice, and Jobs, powered by people like you.

Thanks for supporting Jon's campaign, 

Team Ossoff

P.O. Box 450326, Atlanta, GA 31145

PAID FOR BY JON OSSOFF FOR SENATE

Retaliation

 

Yikes!

AOC put herself forward for a spot on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. The night before it was made official, Henry Cuellar (yes, the guy we tried to primary) led a hostile campaign to keep AOC off the committee and hand the seat to a corporate Dem.

Behind closed doors, Cuellar said, “I'm taking into account who works against other members in primaries and who doesn't.” He’s talking about when Justice Democrats and AOC supported Jessica Cisneros.

Corporate Democrats are striking back. They’re retaliating because we’re holding them accountable. But we’re not going to stop. In fact, we’re just getting started.

Henry Cuellar, backed by Big Oil and private prisons, beat Jess Cisneros by fewer than 3,000 votes. And, who knows what could happen this cycle? If Justice Democrats can raise enough money to run a strong slate of campaigns, we can get corporate Dems like Henry Cuellar out, and more progressives like AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush in.

Thanks for helping us keep up the fight,

Team JD

Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
JusticeDemocrats.com
P.O. Box 910 Knoxville, TN 37901

A serial code found among the death and debris

The villagers of Arhab were celebrating. They’d just struck water on a new well when a precision-guided missile detonated — 31 died, many more were maimed.

The serial code found among the death and debris showed the missile’s origin: Tucson, Arizona.

This missile ONLY landed in Yemen because for *five* years the United States has given the greenlight to the Saudi and UAE war there: approving arms sales, fueling fighter jets, and providing intelligence. And it gets worse: just days ago the Trump administration upped the ante, announcing plans to sell 7,500 MORE bombs to Saudi Arabia — including the very same kind that devastated Arhab.

The U.S. government is directly culpable for helping create the world’s largest humanitarian disaster and in 2021, we’re doubling down on every single strategy we’ve got to ensure this ENDS: piling pressure on Congress and the new administration, using constant and creative tactics to keep Yemen in the headlines, taking Yemeni voices to D.C. so decision makers hear the devastating impact directly, and more.

It'll be a HUGE lift for our small team of 12 — even longer hours, early morning meetings, and late-night calls to Congress — but we know this is what it takes, so we want to be ready.

The U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen is nothing short of a disaster. The weapons built in the United States, approved by the U.S. government, and delivered by U.S. military transportation are regularly used to commit apparent war crimes, have repeatedly fallen into the hands of violent non-state actors, and have served only to prolong the conflict. 

The only way to end the war in Yemen is a peace deal, and there’s no question that’s a tough ask. The incoming Biden administration seems to get the urgency and importance of making this happen, but there are two huge obstacles in their way.

First, a Trump administration that in its final days in office has stopped at nothing to continue to arm Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while removing any pretense for holding them accountable. Second, are the morally and literally corrupt arms dealers who know peace is bad for their business.

These multi-billion dollar companies, and the politicians they’ve spent millions in donations courting, are what we’re up against. But TWICE in 2018 we took on this David and Goliath battle and won, only to be vetoed by President Trump. Our next step is to ensure the next administration follows through on President-elect Biden’s promise to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen, but it won’t be easy.

It is a national shame that the United States has any involvement with the war in Yemen. We should not be in the business of rewarding human rights abusers with billion-dollar arms sales. We should not be making it harder for diplomats to pull Yemen back from a catastrophic breaking point.

But the possibility to change course on ALL these fronts will be in play in 2021. We know we can remake our foreign policy into a tool for good, but we must act together and we have no time to lose.

Thank you for working for peace,

Amy, Abbey, Erica, and the Win Without War team

 

 

RSN: FOCUS: Bob Bauer | The White House Counsel and Trump's Attack on the 2020 Election

 

 

26 December 20

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FOCUS: Bob Bauer | The White House Counsel and Trump's Attack on the 2020 Election

Bob Bauer, Lawfare
Bauer writes: "During Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, President Trump was famously quoted as complaining about the quality of the lawyering he was getting."

 To him, the notorious Roy Cohn set the gold standard: “a very loyal guy” who had been “vicious to others in his defense of me.” Trump did not believe that his White House counsel Don McGahn, much less his first attorney general Jeff Sessions, met the loyalty test.

And now it appears that Trump feels that Pat Cipollone, his current White House counsel, is also failing it. Jonathan Swan reports that Trump is “fed up” with this White House counsel. The president has been meeting in the Oval Office with the likes of Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, entertaining proposals for overturning the 2020 election that include the seizure of voting machines and the imposition of martial law. And Trump has apparently concluded that Cipollone is unacceptably faint of heart. Cipollone’s offense apparently lies in his strenuous objections to the various attacks on the 2020 presidential election that Powell and company are urging a willing president to consider.

The question that these appalling Oval Office stories present is not whether the president can overturn the election. He cannot. It is how Cipollone will respond. Is it enough for him to register his disapproval in Oval Office discussions? Or should the White House counsel take other action to emphasize the nature of his role and the obligations that come with it: Cipollone is a lawyer for the government, not a personal or political lawyer for the president, and he is accountable to the public for how he responds to extraordinary situations such as these.

[Disclosure: I have served as a senior adviser to the Biden presidential campaign and have also written previously on the role of the White House Counsel for Lawfare and other publications, and in After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, co-authored with Jack Goldsmith.]

In the past, Cipollone has accommodated the political pressures to which the president has subjected him. During the impeachment process, he took up what, for a White House counsel, was a discordantly political defense of the president. He participated in the impeachment trial and heaped invective on the House managers whom he accused of a “hypocrisy” so bad that, he declared, he could barely listen to it.

In an ironic twist, at that time, he purported to be concerned with what he believed to be the Democrats’ “naked political strategy” to overturn the results of another election—the last one, in 2016. His conduct during this episode raised ethical issues. He disregarded evidence that he was a material witness to the very matter—Trump’s pressure on the Ukraine government to launch and announce an investigation of a political opponent—that was the subject of the impeachment inquiry. Legal experts like New York University’s Stephen Gillers pointed out that a lawyer may not ethically advocate for a client in a matter in which he or she would also be a material witness. The House managers raised the issue with Cipollone, noting that he has been in the middle of discussions within the executive branch about the president’s actions. Yet Cipollone took to the floor of the Senate as a leading member of the president’s defense team.

Cipollone has remained on the job for two over years and the vast bulk of his work, as in the case of all White House counsels, does not surface for public viewing and judgment. It’s possible that we might later find, or he may one day claim, that he did the country a great service over this period by giving into the president’s demands on some issues so that he could buy himself the space to resist him on others. If you can believe current press reports, that is what he is doing now. But, as others before him have discovered, Trump does not appear to credit past loyalty in reacting to unwelcome advice.

And now, the president is behaving in a way that demands more public action from Cipollone. The president is acting like no other president before him—disregarding the duties of his office while actively undermining public confidence in the election and exploring various schemes to overturn it through blatantly unconstitutional means. Pat Cipollone is left to raising his voice during Oval Office struggles so that he can be heard above the outlandish advice from Powell, Flynn, Rudy Giuliani and others. It is wrong to see all this as just talk that Cipollone can simply wait out. A president’s words and ethical comportment matter.

In this instance, they matter a great deal. Day in and day out, the president is lying about the election: he has made demonstrably false statements about the access afforded to Republican observers, about illegal “dumps” of votes in the dead of night, about rigged voting machinery, and more. He has attacked the motives and character of state and federal judges, and of election officials. He has urged supporters to turn out to protest in Washington on the day, January 6, 2021, that Congress formally tallies the Electoral College vote in favor of President-elect Biden. And he is suggesting, with more than a hint of encouraging disruptions, that the clamor he is calling for will be “wild!”

If the president is bent on exploring unconstitutional paths and deploying mendacious, grossly irresponsible rhetoric, it seems entirely inadequate for Cipollone to simply express his objections in private and hope for the best. Yes, it better for him to carry the case for presidential behavior that respects the constitutional process and conforms to historic norms. To the extent that his approach has helped to deter the president (so far), he is to be commended.

But whatever may be his influence, and however hard he may be working to curb the president’s most dangerous urges, the fact remains that we can only guess at what is now going on in the White House. We have to rely on press reports. And these extraordinary circumstances are quite unlike the normal context for a White House counsel’s work, where a real or fanciful constitutional question raised by a policy initiative is considered and disposed of. Trump is doing what no other president before him has done in directing an all-out—if doomed—assault on the electoral process. We may need more from the White House counsel than the hope that he is doing the best he can.

Where might Cipollone look for guidance in the present circumstances?

Another senior lawyer in the administration, Attorney General Bill Barr, has decided to be very public about his views of the president’s attack on the election. He has taken the time prior to this departure to dispute the president’s claim of voting fraud and his interest in the appointment of a “special counsel” to investigate it. Certainly during his time as attorney general, Barr has made public statements and taken actions entirely inappropriate for his role and harmful to the Department of Justice. But at least on the critical matter of the president’s post-election refusal to accept the results, he has taken a stand.

Cipollone, who is much a government lawyer as the attorney general, faces a similar choice. He might take into consideration the requirements of the Code of Ethics for Government Service: “Uphold the Constitution, laws, and legal regulations of the United States … and never be a party to their evasion.”

No public report suggests that Cipollone is a party to evading the Constitution. However, he’s a witness to the efforts of others to devise just such a means of evasion. And given that the code also calls upon government officials and employees to “expose corruption wherever discovered,” he should consider resigning and calling out the president out for his conduct.

A reasonable concern with this course of action is that, if Cipollone resigns, he silences his own voice in the Oval Office debates. And as far as we can tell from reports, his views may have made a difference for the better. Trump could also promptly replace him with an enabling successor—maybe Sidney Powell! This is always the trade-off: if he goes, someone worse could take his place. This is also sometimes the rationalization for staying on when professional ethics, public accountability and the dictates of conscience should pull in the other direction. Resignation serves the purposes of bringing to public attention, through an act of direct testimony, what in a case like this should not be hidden. The public and Congress should know precisely what the president is scheming to do to undermine the election and destroy public confidence in it, and not have to rely on a rash of leaks that may, or may not, capture the full story.

As one example of how Cipollone resigning and speaking out could answer important questions, the president has now denied that he discussed the potential for imposing martial law. But did Trump explore that possibility? We should not have to trust in his word for the answer.

And there are other reasons for Cipollone to resign in the present circumstances and give his reasons. There is a strong case for a White House counsel refusing continued service to a president who daily peddles dangerous falsehoods to the public about the reliability of the electoral process and the integrity of the judiciary. The act of resignation to protest both a president’s serial, public lies about the election, as well as his exploration of avenues for an unconstitutional power grab, would establish an important precedent for the Office of the White House Counsel. There must be limits to the acquiescence to a president’s misconduct that is expected of those on the president’s “team,” especially for the most senior lawyer in the White House. Resignation, accompanied by the reasons for it, would help define and affirm those limits.

It is important to distinguish carefully the reasons for a lawyer in Cipollone's position to consider his next step. Recently a former lawyer in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Erica Newland, published an apology for remaining within the Trump administration on the rationale that, by providing sound legal advice, she could limit the harm done by the president‘s policies. She has since concluded that she merely enabled the execution of those policies. Had she and other lawyers with her qualifications and policy reservations resigned, she has concluded, she would have complicated the president’s program by leaving him at the mercy of lawyers like those Trump has drawn to his election disputes—that is, lawyers far from the top ranks of the profession.

But Newland is speaking here of a very personal question that lawyers may ask themselves about whether they wish to provide legal support for policies they may disagree with. Remaining on duty and casting those policies in a legally defensible form may be a choice they come to regret. But Cipollone is in a qualitatively different position. As a senior government lawyer—as the White House counsel—he is confronted with a serious ethical challenge, which should not be confused with Newland’s more personal quandary.

For Cipollone’s problem is one that has haunted the White House counsel’s office from its very beginnings. Critics of the office have suggested that it is rife with the “potential for conflict because of its political nature.” This is true. The counsel is a senior White House aide who attends meetings and addresses issues that are shot through with political implications and significance. As a member of the president’s “team,” he or she is vulnerable to persistent demands within that environment to act like one. It is in this environment that the expectation of loyalty, even if not of the extreme sort that Trump has emphasized, can overwhelm the better judgment of lawyers who should know better. The best White House counsels can navigate that territory successfully, but there are two requirements: one, that he or she recognizes the role, which is that of a government lawyer, not a personal or political lawyer to the president and two, that the president shares this understanding.

For the counsel who struggles to advise a president who is unwilling or unable to accept the White House lawyer’s role—a president like Trump whose lawyering model is Roy Cohen—resignation must remain an option. And where the counsel is witness to serious presidential misconduct, resignation may be more a necessity than an option. Setting these clear ethical expectations for this office may help temper the fears of critics that “anything goes” for White House counsels, that even if they disagree strongly with a president’s conduct, they somehow owe continued service—and silence.

First it was McGahn, then Barr, and now Cipollone. These senior government lawyers have all faced the exceptional ethical problem of representing a government led by a president who lacks respect for the role of lawyers—beyond the “loyalty” they are prepared to show him—or for legal and constitutional boundaries. McGahn and Barr made their choices. The time has come for Pat Cipollone to make his.

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