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07 February 21
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Ed Kilgore | What the Filibuster Has Cost America
Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
Kilgore writes: "But in weighing the value of zapping the filibuster in part or in whole the moment it becomes possible, it's important to take a longer look at what it has cost the country over the years."
s Democrats mull a reform or even an abolition of the hoary and disreputable institution of the Senate filibuster, it’s easy to confine the stakes of the debate to desirable legislative items that are currently front-and-center: reforming democracy, fighting climate change, and reforming health care, and other progressive goals that simply cannot get through Congress to Joe Biden’s desk because 41 senators can and will veto every one of them.
Fundamentally, the filibuster (which really didn’t exist in a meaningful sense until the late 19th century) allows any determined Senate minority to resist and in many cases kill legislation it dislikes. Until 1917, with the invention of “cloture,” there was no way to force the end to a filibuster. Still, the filibuster didn’t achieve its full evil flowering as the favored tool for preservation of Jim Crow until between the world wars, and then the late stages of segregation. And it didn’t become a de facto supermajority requirement until a 1970s “reform,” designed to let the Senate function during a filibuster, relieved those using it of the exhausting chore of actually holding down the floor and gabbing incessantly.
But in weighing the value of zapping the filibuster in part or in whole the moment it becomes possible, it’s important to take a longer look at what it has cost the country over the years. While it has been fully available to progressive as well as conservative senators, it has most often been used to defend reactionary institutions and practices, especially those aimed at preserving white supremacy.
Reconstruction
The Houthis are also the victims of US Iranophobia, the paranoid policy framing that sees Iranian devils behind every difficulty in the Middle East, regardless of any lack of evidence. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is an Iranophobe, as well as a Christo-fascist. In a midnight news dump on January 10, Pompeo announced the terrorist designation to go into effect on January 19. The announcement provided little basis in policy or fact and received bipartisan criticism because its most likely impact would have been to exacerbate human suffering in Yemen.
[D]uring the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, senators launched filibusters against civil rights bills, deployment of federal troops in southern states, and repayment of income taxes from the Civil War, Koger said.
“The last gasp of Republican efforts to ensure the political rights of southern blacks was the 1890-91 elections bill, which died in a Senate filibuster,” Koger said. “The Republicans were chastened after this last effort. They were surprised by the vehemence of Southern opposition to the bill, and found that northern interest in civil rights was low.”
It wasn’t until 1957 — when southern senators abandoned a filibuster to help their friend Lyndon Johnson take credit for a toothless bill — that the Senate addressed voting rights. They wouldn’t be actually guaranteed until 1965.
Anti-Lynching Legislation
White Southern determination to use the filibuster to kill anything remotely like civil-rights legislation became manifest in the interwar period, when on two occasions federal legislation to outlaw lynching, for many decades a prevalent form of racist terrorism, succumbed to the filibuster. The first time was in 1922, when the Dyer anti-lynching bill passed the House and was reported to the floor by the relevant Senate committee before southern Democrats talked it to death. And again in 1938, the Wagner-Van Nuys anti-lynching legislation was filibustered for 30 days before a cloture vote (then requiring two-thirds of senators) failed. Cynically enough, many Republican senators who allegedly favored the legislation opposed cloture.
The End of Jim Crow
By the 1950s, southern Democratic senators (with some support from conservative Republicans) had created a well-oiled filibuster machine against civil-rights legislation under the leadership of Georgia’s racist Richard Russell — for whom one of the Senate’s office buildings is still named. In 1957, they succeeded in stripping the first civil-rights bill they allowed to pass of most of its most significant features (though creation of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department remained). This bill was the object of the longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour marathon undertaken by former Dixiecrat presidential candidate (and future Republican) Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Russell and his men waged the longest filibuster war ever against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin. The filibuster lasted 60 working days and was broken through the determined leadership of Russell’s former protégé LBJ, now president, who swore to dedicate the legislation to John F. Kennedy’s memory, with future vice-president Hubert Humphrey leading the fight on the Senate floor and Republican leader Everett Dirksen supplying crucial late support.
By the time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came to the Senate floor, 70 votes were available for cloture and a filibuster never really materialized. As late as 1982, however, long after opposition to civil-rights legislation had moved decisively into the Republican Party, Jesse Helms of North Carolina briefly filibustered a Voting Rights Act extension that strengthened its provisions after a Supreme Court decision had required proof of discrimination by the jurisdictions the act covered.
It’s impossible to measure the damage the filibuster did over the years to the causes of equal rights and racial justice, and to innumerable Americans suffering from discrimination and outright oppression. Suffice it to say that the filibuster was the institutional handmaiden of Jim Crow from start to finish, and the old reliable friend of bigots past and present.
A Functioning Senate
A reform of the filibuster in 1974 reduced the the two-thirds vote needed for cloture to a smaller supermajority of 60 votes, but also provided that the Senate could continue to function when facing a filibuster threat (simply putting aside the legislation being filibustered). Since then filibuster has evolved from an occasionally utilized weapon aimed at select areas of progressive legislation to a virtual 60-vote supermajority requirement for major legislation. The number of cloture motions that have proved necessary to keep the Senate functioning has skyrocketed.
And now filibusters are being used to kill not only controversial but highly popular legislation, as Jonathan Chait noted recently: “After the horrifying Newtown massacre, pro-gun Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican Pat Toomey negotiated a handful of concrete steps that had overwhelming public support (including among gun owners), such as background checks for purchasing firearms. The bill died of a Republican filibuster, the brief debate a mere afterthought.”
The surge in items subject to the filibuster has placed a huge premium on the limited avenues available for getting around filibusters. One stratagem has been to package enormous amounts of legislation into must-pass omnibus appropriations bills necessary to keep the federal government functioning. But as more and more controversial “riders” have been attached to such measures, the risk of actual government shutdowns has risen, with disruptions of services occurring in 2013 and 2018-19.
For truly controversial legislation, however, the go-to stratagem forced by the filibuster has been the use of budget reconciliation bills that require only a Senate majority, beginning back in 1981 when Ronald Reagan used the device to package and enact much of his legislative agenda. The process, which also has streamlined rules on debates, was subsequently used by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and Democrats are currently in the process of making it available to Joe Biden as well.
While reconciliation has proved to be an effective and indeed indispensable way to get around the filibuster in recent years, it severely limits legislative options, and has a distorting effect on the provisions that do make it into such bills. Under rules bearing the name of longtime senator Robert Byrd, reconciliation bills cannot include items that aren’t germane to the federal budget. This has excluded broad areas of legislation, including, during Barack Obama’s initial legislation blitz, a climate-change bill that passed in the House but never saw the light of day in the Senate. The “Byrd Rule” currently means that a vitally important package of election-reform legislation is likely a dead letter in the Senate. But even widely popular legislation like modest bipartisan gun-safety measures have succumbed to recent filibusters.
Reconciliation hasn’t just excluded types of legislation; it has had a bad effect on the legislation it includes, thanks to the Byrd Rule and the necessity of demonstrating fiscal impact at all costs.
The much-discussed complexity of many federal programs owes a lot to the process necessary to enact or adjust them. It’s not the only reason that Obamacare, for example, is so confusing, but it didn’t help that the final version of the Affordable Care Act was enacted via reconciliation when Democrats lost a Senate supermajority in 2010.
What price can you place on years of failure to address climate change? And given the perilous lack of confidence in our democracy, how much blame for a near-slide into authoritarianism in 2020 do we assign to the filibuster that has made national election reform impracticable?
A Huge and Avoidable Price to Pay
There’s no way to add up all the costs associated with the filibuster over the decades, and it’s obviously harder to assess the bad legislation the dilatory tactic and its theoretical availability has prevented from enactment. Had Republicans been able to repeal Obamacare in 2017 via a straightforward piece of legislation rather than jumping through the hoops required by reconciliation, they might have succeeded.
But all in all, the filibuster has been used to halt progress more often that it has been useful to facilitate it or defend it from attacks. And it remains incontestable that limited reforms — such as restrictions on the measures subject to the filibuster, or a return to the days when “talking filibusters” were required — are available short of its outright abolition which could preserve minority rights in the Senate without thwarting majority rule. Filibuster reform should remain at the top of every progressive legislative agenda. Those center-left or center-right politicians who always find excuses to oppose reform need to be regularly asked: How much damage to America and Americans are you willing to accept to maintain this terrible tradition?
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Joseph Cress/Iowa Press Citizen)
Sanders Criticizes Democrats Willing to Pare Down Eligibility for Stimulus Checks
Celine Castronuovo, The Hill
Castronuovo writes: "Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday hit fellow Democrats who he says are looking to lower the eligibility thresholds for coronavirus stimulus checks."
The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee tweeted Saturday evening that it was “unbelievable” that there were some Democrats “who want to lower the income eligibility for direct payments from $75,000 to $50,000 for individuals, and $150,000 to $100,000 for couples.”
“In other words, working class people who got checks from Trump would not get them from Biden,” the Vermont senator tweeted from his personal account. “Brilliant!”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday hit fellow Democrats who he says are looking to lower the eligibility thresholds for coronavirus stimulus checks.
The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee tweeted Saturday evening that it was “unbelievable” that there were some Democrats “who want to lower the income eligibility for direct payments from $75,000 to $50,000 for individuals, and $150,000 to $100,000 for couples.”
“In other words, working class people who got checks from Trump would not get them from Biden,” the Vermont senator tweeted from his personal account. “Brilliant!”
In another tweet minutes later, Sanders posted from his Senate account that he “strongly” opposes lowering the eligibility threshold, adding, “In these difficult times, ALL working class people deserve the full $1,400.”
“Last I heard, someone making $55,000 a year is not ‘rich,’” Sanders added.
Several Twitter users indicated support for Sanders’ remarks, including fellow prgressive, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who retweeted Sanders’ post, writing, “It would be outrageous if we ran on giving more relief and ended up doing the opposite.”
Under President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan, stimulus checks have been set at $1,400, though the proposal kept the structure of phasing out the payments for individuals who made more than $75,000 or couples who made more than $150,000.
However, senators in recent days have been discussing making changes to the phase-out structure of the next round of stimulus checks amid broader concern that high-income earners would be eligible for payments unless Congress makes changes.
The Washington Post first reported Tuesday that some senior Democrats had been discussing a proposal to begin phasing out stimulus checks for those who earn above $50,000 for single taxpayers, $75,000 for people who file as the heads of households and $100,000 for married couples.
On Thursday, the Senate voted 99-1 on an amendment from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) related to "targeting" the checks and making sure that "upper-income taxpayers are not eligible."
"I don't think a single person on this floor would disagree to target the relief to our neighbors who are struggling to pay rent and put food on the table,” Manchin said ahead of the vote.
Collins added, “Do we want stimulus checks to go to households with family incomes of $300,000 or do we want to target the assistance to struggling families who need the help and provide a boost for the economy?"
Sanders said in his own remarks before the vote that no one supported families with incomes of $300,000 per year getting a check, adding that lawmakers should back direct assistance for individuals who make up to $75,000 or couples who make up to $150,000.
The Hill has reached out to Manchin, as well as Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), for comment on Sanders’s Saturday tweets.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) gives a news conference on Capitol Hill on Friday. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)
Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Turning Her 'Cancellation' Into a Cash Grab
Paul Blest, Vice
Blest writes: "QAnon congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene might not have a lot to do in the House after being stripped of her committee roles, but that'll just give her more time to swim around in the cash she's raised off being an unrepentant conspiracy-theory peddler."
“This is how the swamp treats people who stand up to them, because we stand up for YOU.”
Anon congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene might not have a lot to do in the House after being stripped of her committee roles, but that’ll just give her more time to swim around in the cash she’s raised off being an unrepentant conspiracy-theory peddler.
On Wednesday, Greene was formally removed from the House Budget and Education committees she’d been assigned to on a mostly party-line vote, a move that will take her out of one of the main duties of her job. Before the vote, Greene made a speech where she tried to walk back her past comments and embrace of conspiracy theories. But she couldn’t keep it up for long, at one point equating the mainstream media to QAnon, arguing that both spread misinformation.
“When I say that I absolutely believe with all my heart that God's creation created male and female, when I am censured for saying those types of things, that is wrong,” Greene said at one point.
Greene predictably sent out a fundraising plea Wednesday downplaying her own comments, and asking why House Democrats instead don’t censure their own members, including Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib.
In the fundraising pitch, Greene outright lied about the members of the House progressive “Squad,” including making the obviously false claim that Ocasio-Cortez “encouraged protestors to ‘punch a cop,’” and falsely claiming Omar has called for the “eradication of Israel” and that Tlaib has “known ties to terrorists in Hezbollah” because the Palestinian-American congresswoman once posed for a photo with a man who has praised Hezbollah. (Tlaib said she didn’t known the man, denounced his statements, and said it’s “obvious he thrives on media attention from his recent posts.”)
Greene also claimed her expulsion from the committees was revenge, rather than a consequence of harassing victims of the Parkland shooting, liking Facebook comments calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s death, saying Omar and Tlaib (who were born in Somalia and Detroit, respectively) “really should go back to the Middle East,” and blaming wildfires in California on Jewish space lasers.
“This is all retribution because they know I still question the results of the 2020 election and I filed my bill to impeach Joe Biden last month,” Greene said in the fundraising pitch. “This is how the swamp treats people who stand up to them, because we stand up for YOU.”
“So please remember, they are coming after me because I am standing up for you,” the pitch read. “We need to stick together. Please donate today.”
Of the half of Americans who’ve heard of her, Greene’s approval rating is underwater at 37% disapproval and 15% approval, a FiveThirtyEight average of three recent polls on Greene and other Republicans found.
But even as she’s unpopular nationally, Greene’s attempt to grift for campaign dollars off her own removal for being a crank is working, according to Greene. Greene told the Washington Examiner this week that she’d raised more than $300,000 in the two days leading up to her removal, and last month she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she had raised $1.6 million after calls for her expulsion from Congress.
Taken together, that’s nearly as much as Greene raised from contributions during her entire 2020 campaign, which she won unopposed, and could help pay off a $950,000 loan from that campaign. It could also form the basis for a run for higher office—after all, Georgia has another Senate election next year.
OAN's Chanel Rion asks a question during a White House press briefing on May 22, 2020 in Washington, DC. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
I Spent 11 Hours Inside the MAGA Bubble
Tina Nguyen, Politico
Nguyen writes: "Since the election, conservative networks have been locked in a three-way wrestling match for who gets the MAGA television audience."
One America News is making a play for the pro-Trump audience, but it's missing its star player. Here's what I saw during a day-long binge.
ast Monday in Washington, the news was President Joe Biden’s attempt to pass a massive $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package through Congress, the agita over Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old Facebook posts calling for the assassination of Democratic leaders, the coup in Myanmar.
In my living room, the news was Hunter Biden’s lawyer’s supposed connection to a DOJ official, CNN’s Brian Stelter Biden toadyism, the “pedo money” flowing out of the Lincoln Project, and a pro-Trump beauty vlogger claiming Sephora had “canceled” her.
My assignment was to watch One America News (OAN) for a full day: 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., no turning the television off, no leaving my apartment and no channel-switching whatsoever.
Since the election, conservative networks have been locked in a three-way wrestling match for who gets the MAGA television audience. Fox News has been deemed traitorous by Trump’s fans for reporting that Joe Biden fairly won the presidential election, and is seeing its worst ratings in decades. Newsmax initially ate into Fox’s pro-Trump audience post-election, but more recently the network has alienated many of its fans for the same reason.
Which leaves the truest espousers of MAGAology at OAN—which was founded in 2013, but which didn’t get mainstream awareness until the middle of Donald Trump’s administration, thanks to Trump’s relentless promotion on Twitter. The network has historically played coy with revealing its viewership numbers, but OAN saw record ratings in 2020, according to the network’s president—a boost that came largely in the fourth quarter, in no small part because Trump directed his followers to their unquestioning coverage of his election fraud claims.
OAN is still airing their grievances about cancel culture, and tiptoeing around the cries of stolen elections, even as it faces potential multi-billion-dollar lawsuits for broadcasting conspiracies about voting machine companies. But the network is missing the thing that made MAGA compelling to its audience: Trump and his tweets, which had driven countless news cycles and set their agenda for days. In short: It's missing its star player.
Without Trump providing feedback or free advertising in real time, OAN was a strange, empty temple to MAGA culture, with its acolytes and prophets filling in the gaps of his silence with their fantasies—often illogical, frequently venomous and largely a collection of memes—of what they thought their leader would want them to say.
And they missed him. Boy, did they miss him. “Pass our best wishes on to President Trump if you could, please,” primetime host Dan Ball said to Trump adviser Jason Miller at one point. “And I'll throw it out there, we're requesting that interview. We keep asking. We're gonna ask again.” Miller gamely laughed.
It's Morning in (One) America: The 4-Hour Biden Hate
I should say at the outset that this was not an easy channel to watch. I do not have a cable package that broadcasts OAN—many do not, but the network does ask its viewers to badger their carriers to add it. Most streaming services don’t carry it live either. To watch, I ended up having to download KlowdTV, a niche streaming service created by OAN’s parent company Herring Networks Inc., which also carries Infowars and Newsmax for free. And even then, I couldn’t log in through its app, or cast it from my computer browser, and I resorted to downloading the app onto my phone, and casting it from my iPhone onto my television.
And then, on Monday, February 1st, 2021, I began my morning by hating the Democrats for 10 minutes.
At 7:40 a.m. One America News aired, in immediate succession, the following segments:
— A lawyer suggesting Trump’s impending post-presidency impeachment trial was unconstitutional
— A professor claiming Biden’s gender equality council would exacerbate racial and gender tensions, arguing that it was racist against Black men
— A report suggesting that a Biden appointee had connections to his son Hunter, under investigation for business dealings with China. (Well, almost: Nicholas McQuaid, the acting attorney general of the criminal division, was previously a partner at the same multinational law firm as Hunter’s defense attorney.)
— An update on the Covid-19 relief package, implying that Dems were about to throw bipartiship aside and sidestep Republican lawmakers through using the budget reconciliation process
— A report swiping Biden for halting troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, breaking Trump’s “historic peace agreement with the Taliban”
— A segment about millennial MAGA influencer Gavin Wax holding a press conference in front of Wall Street about the GameStop controversy, while wearing a Robin Hood hat
— The assault on the Democrats went on for hours, and hours, and hours, an endless march of enmity anchored by fresh-faced young white women with perfect, HD-friendly skin, and the occasional middle-aged adult man.
But other enemies also made an appearance, in segments that aired repeatedly in the ensuing programming blocks. Sometimes there were takes on the biggest stories on the day: OAN repeatedly attacked the never-Trump Lincoln Project’s co-founder, John Weaver, who was recently accused of being a serial sexual harasser, sending lewd messages to young men as young as 14. An effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom for his bungling of the Covid-19 response was gaining traction, I was told. The recent Myanmar coup, too, got massive play—and reporters repeatedly noted that the Biden administration had not weighed in on yet.
Other segments seemed purely spiteful. CNN media critic and anchor Brian Stelter, for instance, was the subject of several, pilloried for praising a New York Times fact check while being inaccurate about Biden and for not having enough conservative voices on his shows. The network went after Los Angeles city officials for getting fat paychecks while bungling their response to the homelessness crisis. (Pro-Trump messaging crept into that story in the form of a clip of Trump rambling about the crisis in September 2019.) And several times, the hosts hit Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for a recent video in which he suggested Trump’s rhetoric was “irresponsible” and may have contributed to the January 6th riots on Capitol Hill. “This could be seen as a betrayal,” one host said.
White nationalism made an appearance, in the form of a straight news story about a Nazi sympathizer fined $10 million by the FBI for making thousands of harassing, racist robocalls. To my puzzlement, OAN showed photos of California Senator Dianne Feinstein, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and DNC chair Jaime Harrison during the report. (It turned out they were the subjects of the calls in question, but during the approximately six times OAN hosts and reporters visited this story during the day, the network never mentioned this.)
Occasionally, OAN took time to celebrate the accomplishments of the Trump administration, highlighting Jared Kushner’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination, submitted by pro-Trump lawyer and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.
The only notable guest in the morning hours—and the first of two middle-aged women I saw on OAN that whole day—was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman and QAnon adherent, who was facing punishment in the House for her history of statements promoting QAnon conspiracy theories and calling for the assassination of Democratic House members. In the safe space of an OAN Skype interview, she refused to back down from the “liberal mob” and the “radical bloodthirsty media.”
The travails of Greene’s impending “cancellation” were repeated ad nauseam all day, with OAN hosts replaying the same defense: that Greene’s assistants had made the posts on her behalf; that she was being “cancelled” by the Democrats and the media. Not once did they mention the substance of her comments—including her assertion that “Jewish space lasers” had started the California wildfires.
But though they neatly sidestepped the matter of Zionist light beams, Greene made it a point to tell OAN that she would not apologize for her other comments—in particular, a 2018 video of her chasing David Hogg, a teenage gun control advocate who had survived the Parkland shootings, to demand he answer whether he was working for George Soros. “I looked up his age before I talked to him, [and] found out he was a legal adult before I talked to him,” she said.
Halfway through, she boasted that she’d been talking on the phone with Donald Trump, now a virtual recluse doing God knows what in Mar-a-Lago. Greene seemed eager to act as his spokeswoman. “He’s doing really well. I’m excited to go visit him soon and continue to give him a call and talk to him frequently,” she bragged to OAN reporter Jenn Pellegrino. “Great news is he supports me 100 percent, and I’ve always supported him. President Trump is always here for the people and he’s not going anywhere.”
(When asked if Greene was indeed going to visit him—or had even talked to him at all—representatives for Trump declined to comment. A representative for Greene said that they “do not discuss the details of private conversations of Rep. MTG.”)
OAN Direction: An afternoon of hate plus voting machines
By this point, I had entered a comfortable groove, coasting on a steady, reliable stream of hating, in no particular order, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, various media outlets, certain hedge funds, public health officials, the homeless people occupying a Washington hotel and Ted Cruz.
I was told repeatedly that investing in silver was a good idea, as a populist way to stick it to the greedy bastards on Wall Street getting richer off the backs of the poor—except, wasn’t it great that the stock market was so high during the Trump administration?—and that Biden had failed to take responsibility for the 40,000 people who had died of Covid during his first week and a half in office, as if he’d promised that people would suddenly stop dying of Covid the moment he took the oath of office.
The lineup became so ingrained in my brain that I took the opportunity to clean my apartment as it played in the background, only looking up whenever a new story entered the churn. When I looked up, I learned that afternoon that Prince Harry had won a libel suit against the Daily Mail, that RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel had released a statement celebrating Black History Month and that Nintendo sales were up. A lawyer named Bruce Fein came on to discuss the legal questions surrounding Trump’s upcoming impeachment, gamely bantering with a smirking host over whether Congress could impeach someone who had already left office. “Textual ambiguity,” said the host. “I like that.”
Minutes later, Mike Lindell, the pro-Trump CEO of MyPillow, came on to boast that MAGA fans had flocked to buy HisPillows, even though big box retailers had dropped his products after he wouldn’t stop repeating claims that the election was stolen through Dominion voting machines.
The anchor dutifully nodded along—a markedly different reaction to Lindell’s later appearance on Newsmax the next day, which turned into a nuclear meltdown after its hosts pointed out that Lindell’s claims about Dominion were unsubstantiated. (Dominion has threatened to file a defamation suit against Newsmax.) OAN has continued to side with Lindell, swiping Newsmax for “censor[ing]” their interview with the CEO, and later airing his documentary about voter fraud—albeit with a two-minute long disclaimer saying that Lindell was solely responsible for these claims.
The host of the 6 p.m. block had the night off, so OAN instead re-broadcast a documentary they had aired on Inauguration Day, entitled “Trump: the Legacy of a Patriot.” For the next 45 minutes, a man in a star-spangled tie presented a stream of bullet points detailing Trump’s accomplishments. I used that opportunity to make potato dumplings.
Prime Time Trump Time
“Legacy of a Patriot” was only the beginning of the most intensely pro-Trump block of the night.
The moment I settled back on the couch with my dumplings, topics that hadn’t been visited for most of the day came roaring into view: election fraud, border control, the benefits of hydroxychloroquine that the mainstream media wouldn’t tell you, and that Trump had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for the fourth time in a row. And in the subsequent primetime opinion shows, the company line emerged: OK, fine, Biden was the legitimate president, but why did the Democrats continue to hate Trump so much?
It began at 8 p.m. with Real America, hosted by Dan Ball, a man who looked to be in his mid-40s and nevertheless kept offhandedly mentioning MAGA internet memes like “Orange Man Bad,” as if the audience and his guests knew what that meant. (For the less online people, “orange man bad” is a mockery of liberals trying to find ways to criticize Trump.) Ball was happy to tell his guests that the orange man was, in fact, good—at times as if he was trying to outdo his guests in his praise of Trump. As he told a game-looking Jason Miller:
I wish that we could just get this partisanship moved aside. And all this corporate, corrupt, mainstream media pushed to the side, and the American people can see all the positives that this administration in just four years did for our country. That right there, I think will be one of the biggest legacies peace in the Middle East. No new wars, first president over 37 years not to put us in a war. And nobody talks about these facts. They just want it you know, it's ‘orange man bad.’
Tipping Point with Kara McKinney was exactly like Real America, except for the fact that Ball was now replaced with a younger woman. McKinney’s guests ran the gamut, from a stone-faced Victoria Coates—a former Trump administration official on the National Security Council, who was on to protest America rejoining the Iran nuclear deal—to a MAGA online beauty influencer railing against Sephora for dropping their sponsorship of her, after her apparent support for the January 6th insurrection emerged. “Since I came out supporting Trump last year, and also my conservative and Christian values, I've been canceled,” she complained, before going on to promote her newest endeavors: a cruelty-free vegan makeup line, and a beauty tutorial campaign to “make makeup great again.”
At one point, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a right-wing millennial celebrity popular among college students, appeared on the show to discuss abortion. Knowles’s home streaming setup looked noticeably higher-quality than the interviewer’s studio.
McKinney then closed her hour with a segment praising Walt Disney for his McCarthyism, airing a clip of him in front of a Senate panel alleging that he’d been intimidated by a Communist union boss. “So if you're wondering how Marxists have been able to be so successful in their long march through the institution, it's because they've been playing this game for a long time.”
After Hours with Alex Salvi closed out the day of OAN. For once, there were serious discussions about what a post-Trump landscape looked like. (Salvi is one of the few big-name OAN hosts with a liberal background.) It was one where the culture wars reigned supreme, where GameStop was the harbinger of populist activism on Wall Street, and one where Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn’t be cancelled by the GOP for her views. “I mean if the people don’t want her to be representing them, that's for them to decide,” he said during an interview with former Kansas attorney general Phill Kline. “So, moving ahead, is this something that Republicans should be focusing on?” (Once again, Greene’s views were not elaborated upon.)
Not that Salvi wasn’t pro-Trump—he still supported Trump’s agenda and hit the Democrats as hard as possible—but it was hardly the tongue bath of the previous two hours.
The commercial breaks, however, provided all the Trump worship lacking from Salvi’s broadcast — and a hint that OAN is not prepared to let Trump go, not even for generations. One commercial encouraged viewers to purchase a set of illustrated picture books for their children—The Kids’ Guide to Donald Trump, Celebrate Our Liberty, and a link for a free video lesson called “Great Again.”
On an iPad, the app showed a picture of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington administering the Oath of Office to Trump. “To learn more and order the Kids’ Guide to President Trump gift bundle, just go to FreeTrumpGuide.com,” said the cheerful narrator, directing me straight to a website featuring its author — Mike Huckabee, of all people — and reviews from parents like “Sandy D.” from Orlando, Fla.:
"I ordered this for my daughter who's in the fifth grade. She studied the Trump presidency in school, but her lessons were biased like the media. The Kids Guides and video lessons are great!”
COVID-19 patient (center) Bennie Henley is aided during an occupational and physical therapy session at Tampa General Hospital last summer. (photo: Michael S. Williamson/WP)
UK Coronavirus Variant Spreading Rapidly Through United States, Study Finds
Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
Achenbach writes: "The coronavirus variant that shut down much of the United Kingdom is spreading rapidly across the United States, outcompeting other mutant strains and doubling its prevalence among confirmed infections every week and a half, according to new research made public Sunday."
The report, posted on the preprint server MedRxiv and not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, comes from a collaboration of many scientists and provides the first hard data to support a forecast issued last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed the United Kingdom variant becoming dominant in the U.S. by late March.
The variant, known as B.1.1.7, is more contagious than earlier forms of the coronavirus and may also be more lethal, although that is far less certain. It carries a package of mutations, including many which change the structure of the spike protein on the surface of the virus and enhance its ability to bind to human receptor cells. People infected with the variant have higher viral loads, studies have shown, and they may shed more virus when coughing or sneezing.
The authors of the new study urge action to limit the spread of the variant.
“Our study shows that the U.S. is on a similar trajectory as other countries where B.1.1.7 rapidly became the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant, requiring immediate and decisive action to minimize covid-19 morbidity and mortality,” the authors write.
Masks and social distancing will continue to limit its spread, and vaccines remain effective against it, disease experts point out.
Florida stands out as the state with the highest prevalence of the variant. The new report estimated the doubling time of B.1.1.7 prevalence in positive test results at 9.1 days.
Florida also leads the nation in reported cases involving B.1.1.7, with 187 infections as of Thursday, followed by much-more-populous California with 145 infections, according to the CDC.
Last’s month’s CDC forecast was based on a simple model that extrapolated from trends in the United Kingdom. The new research posted Sunday confirms the forecasted trend through the end of January. The researchers scrutinized genomic analyses of the virus samples from 10 states, including from 212 infections involving the variant, officially known as B.1.1.7.
The report concludes that the variant has been 35 to 45 percent more transmissible than other strains of the virus in the United States.
“It is here, it’s got its hooks deep into this country, and it’s on its way to very quickly becoming the dominant lineage,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new paper.
The United States is just emerging from a disastrous winter surge in cases, with new infections and hospitalizations dropping — although the numbers remain higher than they were during the summer surge.The CDC forecast shows that, with a steady rate of a million vaccinations a day, infections will most likely continue to decline even in the presence of the more transmissible variant.
But the decline will be more gradual than if the variant had not taken hold, according to the CDC’s forecast. And there are other wild cards in play, in the form of additional variants. They include B.1.351, first seen in South Africa and of elevated concern to the medical community because it contains a mutation (E484K, nicknamed “Eeek”) that limits but does not entirely undermined the efficacy of vaccines.
Even more worrisome is preliminary evidence from a clinical trial in South Africa conducted by Novavax, maker of a successful vaccine, showing that people previously infected by the coronavirus and given a placebo were becoming reinfected with B.1.351. There was no evidence these follow-on infections were severe or deadly, but authorities view the South Africa variant as well as another that emerged first in Brazil as posing a particularly high risk for reinfections.
The United Kingdom variant does not generally include the worrisome “Eeek” mutation, though it has appeared sporadically. A report published recently in the journal Science, based on laboratory research using different variants of the virus, found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine remained effective against B.1.1.7.
But the virus is continuing to mutate, and with transmission at such high levels — both in the United States and globally — the variants have abundant opportunities to change further as they react to the human immune system and to therapies administered to patients with protracted infections.
“We should vaccinate as fast as we can,” said James Lu, a co-author of the new report and president and co-founder of Helix, a genomics company that provided much of the data used in the research.
The new study does not include any data on the South Africa variant because it has been detected in only a handful of cases in the U.S., while the United Kingdom variant has been seen hundreds of times already. The new study concluded that the United Kingdom variant had multiple introductions to the United States by end of November.
The variant first appeared in genomic surveys in the United Kingdom on Sept. 20, but did not get tagged as a “variant of concern” until early December when its rapid spread stunned scientists and spurred lockdowns in southern England.
When the CDC issued its warning last month about B.1.1.7, it was still present in less than one-half of 1 percent of cases. That jumped to about 3.6 percent at the end of January, the new research found. Those numbers remain small, but the new research highlights the exponential increase in prevalence among positive test results — doubling every 9.8 days nationally.
“What concerns me is the exponential growth in the early stages doesn’t look very fast,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine who was not part of the new study. “It kind of putzes along — and then goes boom.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (photo: EPA)
International Criminal Court Paves Way for Probe in Palestine
Toby Sterling and Stephanie van den Berg, Reuters
Excerpt: "Judges at the International Criminal Court on Friday found the court has jurisdiction over war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, paving the way for a possible criminal investigation, despite Israeli objections."
The decision prompted swift reactions from both Israel, which is not a member of the court and rejects its jurisdiction, and the Palestinian Authority, which welcomed the ruling. The United States objected to the decision.
ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said her office was studying the decision and would decide what to do next “guided strictly by its independent and impartial mandate” to prosecute grave war crimes and atrocities when countries are unable or unwilling to do so themselves.
The ICC judges said their decision was based on the fact that Palestine has been granted membership to the tribunal’s founding treaty, and had referred the situation to the court. The judges said the jurisdiction decision does not imply any attempt to determine Palestinian statehood, which is uncertain, or national borders.
“The Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the Situation in Palestine ... extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” they said.
Bensouda had found in December 2019 that “war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.”
She named both the Israeli Defense Forces and armed Palestinian groups such as Hamas as possible perpetrators.
She said then that she saw no reason not to open an investigation, but asked judges to first rule on whether the situation fell under the court’s jurisdiction.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the decision, saying in a video statement: “When the ICC investigates Israel for fake war crimes, this is pure antisemitism.”
He condemned the court for investigating Israel when it “defends itself against terrorists” while refusing to investigate what he said were brutal dictatorships in Iran and Syria that committed horrific atrocities almost daily.
“We will fight this perversion of justice with all our might,” Netanyahu said in the video, shaking a fist.
Human Rights Watch called the decision “pivotal” and said it “finally offers victims of serious crimes some real hope for justice after a half century of impunity,” said Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director.
“It’s high time that Israeli and Palestinian perpetrators of the gravest abuses - whether war crimes committed during hostilities or the expansion of unlawful settlements - face justice.”
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was a “historic day for the principle of accountability.”
Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas official, described the decision as “an important development that contributes in protecting the Palestinian people.”
“We urge the international court to launch an investigation into Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people,” said Abu Zuhri, who is currently outside Gaza.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price wrote on Twitter: “The United States objects to today’s @IntlCrimCourt decision regarding the Palestinian situation.”
“We will continue to uphold President Biden’s strong commitment to Israel and its security, including opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly,” Price added.
The Trump administration had vehemently opposed the ICC.
Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program, said U.S. President Joe Biden should do nothing to undermine the ICC’s independence.
“It’s important to remember that the ICC investigation would also target Palestinian perpetrators of war crimes in the context of hostilities between Israel and Palestinian armed groups, especially in the Gaza Strip,” Dakwar said on Twitter.
Gray wolf and the monarch butterfly. (photo: The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Trump Almost Doomed These Species. Can Biden Save Them?
David Axe, The Daily Beast
Axe writes: "President Joe Biden has a fleeting chance to help save two of America's most iconic species. But to protect gray wolves and monarch butterflies, he needs to move fast-and perhaps get a little lucky."
ray wolves and monarch butterflies are both in danger of extinction. And both are victims of some truly egregious policy decisions by the Trump administration.
President Joe Biden has a fleeting chance to help save two of America’s most iconic species. But to protect gray wolves and monarch butterflies, he needs to move fast—and perhaps get a little lucky.
Wildlife populations are in decline all over the world, victims of pollution, deforestation, poaching, and the habitat-altering ravages of runaway climate change.
But in North America, wolves and monarchs stand out for their beauty and popularity and the role they play as “keystone” species—that is, symbols of entire landscapes and ecosystems that harbor other vulnerable flora and fauna.
The two species—one a delicate and short-lived insect and the other an intelligent close relative of our pet dogs—couldn’t be more different. But they share a common plight.
Both are in danger of extinction. And both are victims of some truly egregious policy decisions by the administration of disgraced former president Donald Trump.
In late October, the Trump administration “delisted” wolves, stripping them of federal protection under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The delisting leaves fragile populations vulnerable to trophy-hunters, vindictive ranchers and pro-industry state wildlife officials.
A few weeks later in late December, Trump officials rejected scientists’ effort to place rapidly dwindling monarch populations under federal protection. Not because the monarchs didn’t meet the legal and scientific requirements for endangered status, but because the feds didn’t think the iconic orange-and-black butterflies were worth the cost of protecting them.
Biden’s administration can reverse both of those decisions. And there are indications the administration is at least going to try.
Biden recently signed an executive order committing the federal government to combating climate change and other environmental crises. “It is… the policy of my administration to listen to the science; to improve public health and protect our environment,” Biden stated.
The order includes a directive to federal agencies to review all of Trump’s environmental policies, with an eye to rolling back any that the Biden administration deems to be harmful.
The order itself doesn’t mention wolves or butterflies, but a preview of the order that the administration circulated before the signing specifically cited Trump’s wolf delisting and rejection of monarch protections as targets of Biden’s review.
New conservation rules could take months or even years to take effect. To avoid massive bloodshed and possible extinction in the meantime, the administration probably needs to get lucky. Favorable court rulings could help conserve wolves, and good weather could boost butterflies—all while the feds scramble to set up new rules under the Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife, which administers the Endangered Species Act, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. The U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the wildlife service, declined to comment. The department is under acting leadership pending Senate confirmation of Biden’s nominee for interior secretary, New Mexico congresswoman Deb Haaland.
Four years under Trump was devastating to America’s wildlife. The former reality TV star oversaw the biggest-ever shrinking of federal lands, which provide vital habitats for rare plants and animals. Trump officials also rolled back anti-pollution rules for many of the country’s rivers and streams.
When Trump and congressional Republicans worked together to cut taxes for the wealthy back in 2017, lawmakers shoehorned into the bill language that allowed oil companies to drill in a federal wildlife reserve in Alaska. In one of its final acts in early January, the administration removed penalties for companies that kill migratory birds.
So while wolves and monarchs weren’t the only species to suffer under Trump, they might be the most visible. Gray wolves, once hunted to near-extinction in the United States, have long been symbols of the country’s slowly changing attitudes toward wildlife.
The canids were among the first animals to receive protections under the Endangered Species Act. The feds began regulating hunters and overruling state policies that encouraged the killing of wolves they suspected of “depredation”—that is, preying on ranchers’ cattle herds.
The protections worked. In the mid-20th century, just a few hundred wolves were left in the lower 48 states, mostly concentrated in Michigan and Minnesota. Today more than 6,000 wolves have returned to the species’ former habitats in the Midwest, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. Alaskan wolves were never seriously threatened and today could number as many as 10,000.
But wolf recovery is fragile. The species has reclaimed just 15 percent of its former range. Many wealthy ranchers in Western states consider wolves pests and lean on state wildlife agents to kill as many of the canids as possible. Trophy hunters with high-tech rifles can quickly slaughter entire packs.
Congress and Fish and Wildlife have eased wolf-protections several times in recent years. Each deregulation meant more dead wolves, but the overall number of animals in the United States continued to grow.
Trump’s delisting decision could reverse the gray wolf’s slow recovery. In the absence of federal protections, some states are poised to all but wipe out their wolves. “Places that don’t now have wolves or have tiny wolf populations will see an end to further wolf recovery,” Collette Adkins, a wolf expert with the Center for Biological Diversity in Arizona, told The Daily Beast.
“For example, California has just a couple packs of wolves, and even though they are state-protected, fewer wolves will reach the state because of depredation-control in neighboring Oregon,” Adkins said.
To stave off the bloodshed, six conservation groups banded together to sue the federal government.
The lawsuit is pending and the outcome is far from clear. While Trump’s rule is final and official, a judge could put a stay on it, essentially freezing the delisting until the court can make a final ruling, Jacob Carter, a conservation expert with the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists, told The Daily Beast. A stay could buy the Biden administration time to reverse the delisting and restore federal protections to wolves.
There are two ways that could happen, experts said. The feds’ lawyers could essentially switch sides in the lawsuit and offer the conservationists a settlement that would bring wolves back under the Endangered Species Act.
If a judge were to reject that settlement, the Biden administration would have to write new rules for wolf-protections. “That could take another year to two years,” Carter explained. Without a stay, wolf killings could resume while the feds write new regulations.
The fix for butterflies is clearer, but even more urgent. Monarch butterflies live in warm environments all over the world, but two distinct U.S. populations are special, because they migrate.
An eastern migratory population spends summers in the Midwest before winging its way south to Mexico for the winter.
That population is in decline, likely owing to destruction of key habitat, widespread use of insecticide and chaotic weather patterns resulting from accelerating climate-change. The number of eastern monarchs varies wildly from year to year, but the trend is clear. There are only around a fifth as many of the colorful bugs today as there were just 20 years ago.
A separate migratory population that travels up and down California every year is in even worse shape. There are still millions of eastern monarchs. But this year scientists counted just 2,000 western monarchs—down from millions in the 1990s and around 300,000 as recently as 2016.
“They are on the brink,” Bonnie Rice, a conservationist with the California-based Sierra Club, told The Daily Beast. “And they need protection.”
Terrified that they were witnessing extinction in real time, scientists sued the federal government back in 2016. They wanted the feds to consider giving monarchs endangered status. Listing the butterflies would give conservationists legal tools for saving habitats—and would also require Fish and Wildlife to launch a recovery effort aimed at growing butterfly numbers.
The Trump administration agreed to study the monarch problem and weigh a listing. After multiple delays, the administration finally announced its decision back in December. “Adding the monarch butterfly to the list of threatened and endangered species is warranted but precluded by work on higher-priority listing actions,” the agency announced.
That’s bureaucrat-speak for “butterflies need help but we can’t afford it.”
The decision, coming just weeks before scientists finished their count of the disappearing western monarch population, was a devastating blow for butterfly-lovers. “Monarchs desperately need a comprehensive recovery plan,” Tierra Curry, a Center for Biological Diversity butterfly expert, told The Daily Beast.
But Fish and Wildlife offered conservationists a consolation prize. The agency agreed to revisit the monarch question once a year until the insects recover on their own… or go extinct.
That gives Biden an opening. “The Biden administration can now simply propose them for protection under the ESA, which we are urging them to do,” Curry said. With a few strokes of a pen, “warranted but precluded” could become “warranted and included”—and monarchs would have federal protection.
The question is how quickly the administration can move. Two thousand butterflies isn’t a lot of butterflies. A cold snap, a sudden wildfire or some farmer mowing a critical patch of caterpillar-nourishing milkweed might be all it takes to tip the western monarch into oblivion.
It’s not exaggerating to say that every month matters when it comes to saving California’s migrating butterflies. A year might be too long to wait.
Karen Oberhauser, a University of Wisconsin butterfly expert, told The Daily Beast she’s trying to be optimistic. “There’s always a glimmer of hope in conservation.”
If the Biden administration can bring monarchs under the umbrella of the Endangered Species Act, there might still be time to save the western population. Saving wolves, on the other hand, just means keeping them under the law.
“Once species has the attention the Endangered Species Act brings,” Oberhauser said, “we figure out what we need to do and we’re successful.”
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