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14 April 22
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For years, Democrats have pledged to address the massive secret corporate spending that now dominates US politics. But they are poised to once again break their long-standing promise.
The stipulation, part of a deal with Republicans to keep the government up and running, means that Democrats are poised to once again break their long-standing promise to shed light on the massive secret corporate spending that now dominates US politics — just as a Biden appointee appeared ready to finally tackle the issue.
For more than a decade, Democrats have been pledging to bring increased transparency to America’s elections by requiring corporations to disclose their political spending, as a way to counteract the flood of “dark money” that’s been flooding into elections since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision granted businesses and nonprofits the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.
But Democrats have repeatedly allowed Republicans to include language in must-pass spending bills blocking any efforts by the government to require public companies to disclose their spending — and they quietly did so again last month, too.
A History of Blocking Spending Disclosures
In late April 2010, following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, which would have required publicly traded companies to disclose independent expenditures and electioneering communications to their shareholders.
While the measure passed the House, it died in the Senate, and subsequent attempts to reintroduce it or pass similar laws, such as the For the People Act, Democrats’ ambitious political reform bill, have also been stymied.
In September 2015, Hillary Clinton made corporate spending disclosure a plank of her failed presidential campaign, promising to compel publicly traded companies to disclose their political giving. Biden’s 2020 campaign went a step further, promising he would “end dark money groups” by barring 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations from spending to influence elections and forcing politically active nonprofits to disclose their donors. Those pledges were echoed in the 2020 Democratic platform.
The 2020 election cycle saw more than $1 billion in dark money spending — much of it going to support Democrats, who once in office, waited months before leading a half-hearted, doomed effort to overhaul election reform.
But even if Democrats were willing to really tackle the issue of corporate dark money, the federal agency in charge of such matters has long been hamstrung in what it can do on the subject.
Every year since December 2015, federal budget legislation has contained a provision prohibiting the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency tasked with regulating the securities markets, from developing any new rules pertaining to political spending.
For years, the agency didn’t appear eager to tackle the issue of corporate political spending anyway. President Barack Obama’s SEC chair Mary Jo White, as well as her Trump-appointed successor, Jay Clayton, took minimal action on the matter.
But that seemed to change when Biden nominated Gary Gensler, a Wall Street veteran who served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama years, for SEC chair.
At his confirmation hearing last March, Gensler suggested there was a growing demand among investors for a company’s political spending to be considered “material” to company business, and therefore need-to-know.
At the time, Democrats were trying to repeal the anti-transparency rider legislatively. Representative Andy Levin (D-MI) had introduced the Transparency in Corporate Political Spending Act in January 2021 as a standalone version of part of the For the People Act of 2021, the Democrats’ major election reform bill that also included the repeal. Levin had previously introduced the bill in February 2019.
As Democratic efforts at repeal have failed, Republicans have continually attached the SEC political disclosure ban to must-pass spending legislation, as they did with the recent omnibus bill. Democrats have effectively accepted the rider as the cost of keeping the government open.
Corporate Interests Are Keeping Their Dark Money Dark
Big business interests, meanwhile, have consistently lined up against efforts to compel political spending transparency.
In March 2019, the US Chamber of Commerce, many of its chapters, and other national, state, regional, and local lobbying groups submitted a letter to the US House of Representatives opposing the For the People Act. The letter singled out the DISCLOSE Act. Signatories included the American Forest … Paper Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the American Bankers Association.
The National Right to Work Committee, a nonprofit that is leading a national fight for anti-union legislation, as well as the United States Telecom Association, which represents the telecommunications industry, also lobbied on the DISCLOSE Act last year.
The big-money network of oil tycoon Charles Koch has been particularly active in trying to keep its political operations completely obscure. At the federal level, the Koch network has been waging calculated warfare against both the DISCLOSE Act and the For the People Act. Lobbying disclosures reveal that Koch Industries’ lobbying arm hired the corporate law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer … Feld to lobby on the bill in the second, third, and fourth quarters of 2021.
At the state level, Koch’s organizations have also been working for years to keep their dark-money operations secret. In 2014, Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) — the Koch political network’s charitable arm — sued the state of California over its requirement that nonprofit groups submit their Internal Revenue Service tax forms to state officials. AFPF argued that such requirements violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free association. The case worked its way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in AFPF’s favor in April 2021, striking down California’s requirement.
In the wake of that ruling, Republican state legislators in a number of states began pushing bills to prevent state officials from compelling donor disclosure from political nonprofits, including in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
Several of those bills have similar language to a model from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-backed pay-to-play operation that serves as a channel for corporations to influence state legislators.
Corporate interests are winning their fight to keep dark money dark. Democrats’ new omnibus spending bill means that the SEC, with Gensler at its head, will once again be unable to do anything to compel disclosure by public companies to their shareholders of political spending for at least another year.
Ukrainian soldiers and firefighters search in a destroyed building after a Russian bombing attack in Kyiv. "Ukrainian resistance is certainly not going away," said Oxana Shevel. "People are incredibly committed." (photo: Vadim Ghirda/AP)
Since the war began in late February, the Biden administration has made multiple changes to a classified directive that governs what U.S. agencies are supposed to share with Ukraine. Much of what the United States collects is shared; some is not. Where the line is drawn depends on protecting the sources and methods of the intelligence, but also trying to limit the risk of escalation with a nuclear-armed Russia.
The latest changes occurred last week when U.S. intelligence officials lifted some geographic limits on the transfer of actionable information — the kind of information used in minute-by-minute decisions on the battlefield. According to several people familiar with the issue who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, officials removed language that had caused delays and meant limits on specific locations of targets in parts of eastern Ukraine.
The shifts in the intelligence rules reflect the administration’s changing calculations of what Putin might consider escalatory. The U.S. is also trying to step up support to Ukrainian forces that have surprised much of the world in how they have held back Russia but remain undermanned and outgunned. The Pentagon this week also announced $800 million in new military assistance that could include more powerful weapons and defensive equipment.
Some people familiar with the directive say there is ambiguity about the new limits. One question is whether the U.S. would delay or limit information about a possible Russian target in areas internationally recognized as Ukrainian territory but that Moscow or its proxies controlled before the war, including the Crimean Peninsula and parts of the Donbas. U.S. personnel have at times limited intelligence that they believed Ukrainian forces could use to retake previously lost territory.
The directive still limits information given to Ukrainians about forces in Russia or neighboring Belarus, where Russian forces have staged and previously attacked from Ukraine’s north.
“We are intensely sharing timely intelligence with the Ukrainians to help them defend themselves throughout their country, including in areas held by Russia before the 2022 invasion,” said one U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the classified directive. The Wall Street Journal first reported the directive had been changed.
Another U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters said the administration was “providing detailed, timely intelligence to the Ukrainians on a range of fronts.”
A letter sent Monday by Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee — after the new guidance — urges Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, to “proactively share intelligence with the Ukrainians to help them protect, defend, and retake every inch of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, which includes Crimea and the Donbas.”
The senators said they “remain deeply concerned that not enough is being done to share critical intelligence that would assist the Ukrainians as Russian forces move to secure territory in the southern and eastern parts of the country.”
Unlike a Feb. 9 letter to Biden urging intelligence sharing “to the fullest extent possible,” Democrats on the committee did not join this week’s letter, reflecting apparent divisions in how members view the administration’s current guidance.
The White House insists it is providing information in line with Ukraine’s current goals. Analysts say the war is shifting from a conflict fought across the country to a stronger focus on the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine that Russia has seized or attacked recently. One expected point of focus is the strategic port city of Mariupol, whose mayor says more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in the Russian siege.
In addition to its own intelligence capabilities, Ukraine relies on U.S. and Western support to help it plan and repel attacks. Before and during the war, the U.S. has publicly and privately shared intelligence about what it believes are Putin’s battle plans in the hopes of undercutting Russia and building support for a forceful Western response.
Lawmakers from both parties have spoken broadly about the limits since the Russian invasion.
Rep. Adam Smith, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a television interview in March that the White House was holding back some real-time intelligence “because that steps over the line to making us participating in the war.” A spokesperson for Smith, D-Wash., declined an interview request Wednesday.
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., on March 1 accused the White House of delaying intelligence due to “overly-lawyered processes,” adding that “information about where an invading Russian tank was 12 hours ago does squat to prevent civilian bloodshed.”
The directive has been changed to limit delays, officials said. The latest update, according to one intelligence official, is intended to give U.S. officers “added clarity” allowing for faster and more fulsome cooperation with Ukraine.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last week if the U.S. was giving Ukraine intelligence to carry out operations in Crimea or parts of the Donbas previously controlled by Russian proxies.
“We want to make sure that’s clear to our force, and so updated guidance that goes out today will make sure that’s clear,” Austin said, adding: “Certainly the current guidance was not clear in that regard, so we’ll make sure it’s clear.”
Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, late last month asked Gen. Tod Wolters, the supreme NATO commander for Europe, whether he was satisfied with the speed of information getting to Ukraine.
“Congressman, I’m comfortable, but I want it to speed up,” Wolters said. “And I always will say that even if it occurs in one second, I want it tomorrow to be in a half a second.”
"Bills such as Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' bill are likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools." (photo: Oskar Poss/Getty)
Some pundits say that talking with little kids about sex and gender primes them to be taken advantage of. Sex-ed researchers say that the opposite is true.
The grooming charges lump together concerns that kids are being introduced too early to sexually explicit material, to the existence of transgender people, and to non-heterosexual sexual orientations. In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that discourages teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation in classrooms. Versions of the measure have been proposed in at least a dozen other states. Referring to the bill, DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” A pastor even organized an “anti-grooming” rally at Disney’s headquarters in California.
This type of rhetoric is damaging in its own right. As the commentator David French writes in his newsletter, “Throwing around accusations of pedophilia, sympathy for pedophilia, grooming, or sympathy for grooming is a recipe for threats and violence”—an assessment that some historians endorse. This latest pedophilia panic overlaps with the false beliefs of the QAnon movement, which fueled the Pizzagate incident in 2016.
But bills such as Florida’s are also likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools, with deleterious effects. Comprehensive sex ed doesn’t just help prevent bullying; it helps kids have healthier relationships of all kinds, improves their communication skills, and even boosts their media literacy. Compared with abstinence-only sex education or no sex education at all, comprehensive sex ed helps reduce teen pregnancy rates. One meta-analysis found that European countries, many of which offer comprehensive, mandatory sex ed, including for young children, tend to have the lowest rates of child sexual abuse in the world. Sex education is “the exact opposite” of grooming, says Nora Gelperin, the director of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a sex-ed nonprofit. “Sex education, even when started in the earliest grades, has shown to be protective for kids, especially around child sexual abuse.”
A 2020 study that examined three decades of research on sex education found that comprehensive sex ed that begins in elementary school can help prevent child sex abuse, among other benefits. “Stranger danger”–type language isn’t recommended these days; about 93 percent of child sexual-abuse victims know their abusers. Instead, these programs help children identify the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, the difference between “tattling” and keeping unsafe secrets, and how to identify abusive situations. In other words, sex ed isn’t grooming—it helps protect kids from grooming.
Modern sex ed also seems to give kids a sense of empowerment, including by teaching them the correct names for their own genitals. “Predators are less likely to select a child who can accurately talk about those body parts,” Gelperin says, “than a child that is ignorant of what those body parts are actually called.” It also makes kids less likely to victimize one another: One program for eighth graders, called Safe Dates, was associated with lower rates of physical and sexual dating violence four years later, compared with a control group.
Experts recommend starting sex education as early as kindergarten and teaching it the way you would math. Five-year-olds don’t tend to learn geometry, but they do learn about numbers and shapes. Similarly, experts say kindergartners don’t need to be told about, for example, orgasms, but they are encouraged to understand what their body parts are and how to protect themselves from unwanted touching.
One of the best-regarded American sex-ed curricula is “Rights, Respect, and Responsibility,” or the “3Rs,” developed by Advocates for Youth and available for free online. For kindergartners and first graders, the lessons focus on preventing bullying, setting boundaries about touching, and learning what types of things make babies (elephants, but not pizza). The most explicit section covers the proper names of genitalia, including an explanation that most girls have a “hole” called “the vagina that is used when a female has a baby.” The use of correct anatomical terms is meant to ensure that kids are understood if they ever report abuse. But also, “this is your body and you have a right to know what the different parts are called,” the curriculum explains.
The first-grade lesson plans also include a section about gender identity, in which teachers are encouraged to say something like “You might feel like you’re a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘girl’ parts. You might feel like you’re a girl even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘boy’ parts. And you might not feel like you’re a boy or a girl, but you’re a little bit of both. No matter how you feel, you’re perfectly normal!”
Though this message does not exactly comport with a socially conservative worldview, it hardly amounts to “grooming” children to be molested by pedophiles. The argument for providing information on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary school is that children are likely to encounter these concepts in the wild. Between 2 million and 4 million American children are being raised by a non-straight parent. Some children might either be transgender themselves or have a parent who is. Advocates of this type of curriculum say these concepts can be explained more accurately in school, and help make kids who are not straight or cisgender feel welcomed.
But just because the “3Rs” curriculum is recommended doesn’t mean it gets taught. Far from it: Sex ed, like all lesson plans, varies dramatically by school district, and usually reflects the values of the surrounding community. For example, Texas, which has more children than almost any other state, does not require high schools to teach sex ed. As of 2017, most Texas schools districts took an abstinence-only approach to sex ed, and though the state has recently introduced some discussion of contraceptives in middle school, abstinence must be emphasized. Instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation is not currently offered in Florida from kindergarten to third grade, the ages targeted by the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Most European countries do provide comprehensive sex ed in every school, however. Experts link Europeans’ superior sexual-health outcomes—lower teen pregnancy rates, lower rates of sexual abuse, and lower STD rates among young people—to better, earlier sex ed. In Western Europe, sex ed tends to be mandatory and blunt, and start before kindergarten; it’s like the “3Rs,” but more graphic.
In the Netherlands, sex ed begins before many kids can read. “From age 5, children are taught about reproduction, about pregnancy and birth of a baby,” says Elsbeth Reitzema, the sexuality-education program officer at Rutgers, a Dutch nonprofit that helps run the country’s sex-ed programs. “They also learn the main physical differences between boys and girls, about the genitals and their functions. By the end of primary school, children have learned about reproduction, pregnancy, and birth. They know that a woman, if she is fertile, can become pregnant through sex in the manner of penis-in-vagina sex.” They also learn about being intersex, transgender, and nonbinary. When they’re 11, kids learn about masturbation.
One popular Dutch sex-ed curriculum explains to fourth graders that “the clitoris is a very sensitive place. Touching it can give a nice feeling,” according to Beyond Birds and Bees, a 2018 book in part about the Dutch approach to sex ed by Bonnie Rough, who has written on the same topic for The Atlantic. “It is not customary for parents to take their children out of the lesson,” Reitzema told me. “Should parents object to the lessons, then the school will explain what the content of the lessons is. This usually removes the parents’ resistance to the lessons.”
In Sweden’s mandatory sex-ed program, 7-to-9-year-olds learn “about all body parts, and discuss gender,” Hans Olsson, the country’s senior adviser on sexuality education, told me. “School has a duty to counteract limiting gender patterns, already at [the] preschool level.” Also in preschool, kids learn about bodily integrity and name their sexual organs. Rather than the proper terminology, though, Swedish kids use snopp, which is like “willy,” and snippa. (“Don’t know the equivalent word in English,” Olsson said.) Starting in fourth grade, Swedish kids learn about LGBTQ issues.
Sara Zaske, the author of the German comparative-parenting book Achtung Baby, told me that her 7-year-old daughter’s class in Berlin read the children’s book Mummy Laid an Egg without asking parents’ permission first. The picture book, which was originally published in English, features cartoon drawings of “Daddy’s tube” and “Mummy’s hole,” along with the ways “mummies and daddies fit together.” Unlike in the United States, Zaske writes in her book, “German kids learn much more about sex than conception.” German schools cover STD prevention, yes, but also masturbation, orgasms, and homosexuality. Zaske quotes one doctor in an article on the city of Berlin’s official website as saying, “Sex education cannot begin early enough.”
Rough and others don’t see these types of lessons as “giving children ideas” about sex and sexuality. After all, adults openly do things—drink alcohol, use the stove, drive—that kids can’t. Kids understand when an activity is for adults only. She and other advocates reject the notion that telling kids about different sexual orientations or gender identities “turns” kids gay or gender-nonconforming. “Teaching about the topics is not creating new LGBTQ students,” says Elizabeth Schroeder, a sexuality educator and co-author of the “3Rs” curriculum.
But most important, early sex ed opens up lines of communication between kids and responsible adults. “If we start giving off the impression that sex is a topic that when you ask me a question … that I’m going to start acting weird and funny and dishonest about it, they quickly pick up that this is something off-limits,” says Emily Rothman, a health-sciences professor at Boston University. “So they’re either gonna think, Well, I can go to my friends or I can go to the internet.” By which she means: to porn.
The larger point of this kind of instruction is what the Dutch call “sexual assertiveness”: “If somebody is saying or doing something that makes your body feel uncomfortable, you’ve been taught how to notice that and what to do next,” Rough told me. One aim of communicating freely about sex with a teacher or another trusted adult is the “development of a trusting, trustworthy relationship with a grown-up who has the child’s best interests at heart.”
Meanwhile, only a quarter of U.S. public schools report that students practice communication, decision making, goal setting, or refusal skills as part of sex ed, Rough writes in her book. Instead, some American children learn about sex through porn, through experimentation, or, tragically, from an abuser. Because so much of American sex education treats sexual activity as dangerous or shameful, kids who are victimized by adults may feel that they have to keep it secret. European children who learn about their body, and are warned about inappropriate touching, can better protect themselves. There, Rough writes, “those who prey on children can no longer benefit from their ignorance.”
Members of the press surrounded the chair in which Gary Gilmore sat when facing the firing squad in Draper, Utah, in 1977. (photo: Getty)
With a scarcity of lethal injection drugs, South Carolina has brought back an archaic execution method. In other states, men on death row are asking for it.
Dozier’s death, in 2019, was ruled a suicide, but now his words seem prescient. On Thursday, South Carolina scheduled the execution of Richard Moore — convicted of murder in a 2001 convenience story robbery — for April 29. Because state officials say they can’t secure lethal injection drugs, they will give him the choice between the electric chair and the firing squad. Officials have spent $53,000, by their own estimate, to renovate part of a prison to allow a three-person firing squad to carry out executions, including adding bulletproof glass to protect witnesses.
This article was published in partnership with The Guardian.
South Carolina’s not alone: Oklahoma and Mississippi have also formally adopted the firing squad, though Utah remains the only state that has actually used the method in the last century. The U.S. Supreme Court has told death row prisoners that if they want to fight lethal injection in court, they need to propose an alternative. Following dozens of botched, evidently painful lethal injections in recent years, prisoners in at least 10 states have been making a surreal argument: They would prefer the firing squad.
So, are we really about to start shooting prisoners? Although the method strikes many as cruel and archaic, conversations with scholars and a review of history suggest we should also ask why we have so consistently avoided the firing squad. The answers suggest that this is about more than just another execution method. The firing squad dredges up some of the core contradictions at the heart of American capital punishment.
“It’s an almost instantaneous death, it’s the cheapest, it’s the simplest, it has the lowest ‘botch’ rate,” said Corinna Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond. (Federal judges have made similar points.) At the same time, it’s “more honest,” she said. Lain and other scholars have argued that Americans have long wanted — not always consciously — to disguise the violence of capital punishment. “We don’t want a mess,” wrote Douglas B. Kamerow, a former assistant surgeon general, in The BMJ, a medical journal published by the British Medical Association. “We want these evil people to disappear, to be dead, but most of us don’t want to feel bad about how they died.”
At one time, Americans didn’t seem to feel so bad about the firing squad. Numerous men were executed this way during the Civil War, and soon after, the Supreme Court approved of the method. In the 1930s, a Utah prisoner named John Deering allowed a doctor to hook him up to an electrocardiogram as he faced the guns, and his heart stopped in 15.6 seconds. (Even when nothing goes wrong in a lethal injection, the process takes minutes.)
But the method fell out of favor, as state leaders came to prefer executions that would appear technologically ‘modern’ and wouldn’t invite a public spectacle. In the early 20th century, hangings — which many felt looked too much like illegal lynchings — were moved from courthouse squares to behind prison walls, and eventually replaced by the electric chair. “We’ve gone from stoning to crucifixion, to quartering, to burning people at the stake, to hanging,” Texas legislator Ben Z. Grant told his colleagues in 1977, asking them to abandon the electric chair, which “has become a circus sideshow” and “has a way of making heroes out of those being punished.”
Instead, Grant proposed lethal injection, which premiered in Texas in 1982 and became the dominant method throughout the country. But around 2010, big pharmaceutical companies began saying they didn’t want their products to be used to kill, and cut off the supply of drugs. Some prison officials started buying drugs secretly, using cash and hiding the names of their new suppliers. Some experimented with new drugs, including fentanyl. Tennessee returned to the electric chair, while Alabama and Arizona built and refurbished gas chambers, which they have yet to use.
In many states, prisoners went to court, arguing that various drug combinations would violate the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” And they had evidence: Men were gasping and choking on the gurney. In 2014, an Oklahoma prisoner named Clayton Lockett writhed, groaned and convulsed for more than 40 minutes after he was administered lethal injection drugs. His peers sued, but the Supreme Court ruled against them, declaring that “some risk of pain is inherent in any method of execution,” and “while most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune.”
But the court went further, issuing what Justice Sonia Sotomayor derided as a “macabre challenge”: If prisoners want to fight an execution method, they need to propose a “known and available” alternative in court. In Oklahoma, the state asked men on death row to indicate their choice on a paper form. Some refused to engage. “Suggesting a method for how the State will kill me would make me complicit in my own death,” Julius Jones (who separately maintains his innocence) said in an affidavit.
Defense lawyers, charged with trying to save the lives of death row clients, now have to advise those clients on what way of dying they should fight for. “I’ve talked to many lawyers in that position, and it is dark, dark, dark,” said Laura Porter, a lawyer who directs the anti-death penalty 8th Amendment Project. “What the Supreme Court has asked of people feels impossible.”
Across the country, prisoners are proposing the firing squad as a better alternative to lethal injection. To make that argument, they’ve enlisted James Williams, a Texas emergency room doctor and firearms instructor who regularly appears in courtrooms as an “expert in the firing squad protocols.” Williams, who declined an interview for this story, testified on behalf of a Nevada prisoner at a court hearing last November.
According to a transcript, Williams said he’d studied the protocols of Utah, the U.S. military and several other countries. He’s spoken to gunshot victims, and when he was 18 he took a bullet to the chest. All of this led him to conclude that being shot is “relatively painless compared to virtually all of the other means of execution that we have historically used through the past four centuries.”
Lawyers for Nevada countered that some firing squad executions didn’t go as planned and were likely painful. They debated the data on the subject, which is scant and contested. Williams explained that in one Utah case it appeared “that the execution team deliberately did not aim for the target for reasons that are unclear to me, possibly to make the individual suffer more.” In one of the hearing’s stranger moments, Williams went so far as to tell the court there is a way of using a gun that’s even less prone to error: “a nice quiet bullet to the back of the head, aiming for the brainstem and instantaneous death.”
That returns us to the question of why Americans didn’t return to the firing squad until now. Legislators have used words like “medieval,” “archaic” and “barbaric” to describe it. “I think there is a deep-seated need to differentiate state killing from the actions of the person being put to death,” said Lain, the law professor. “The firing squad is so explicitly violent … The state is doing what murderers do.”
As the only state to use the firing squad in the last century, Utah is a place to look for insights, although the method’s use there is idiosyncratic, bound up with Mormon beliefs about the necessity of blood being literally shed. On three occasions since 1977, the state placed a hood over a prisoner’s head and strapped him to a chair set amid sandbags. Five shooters stood roughly 20 feet away and aimed for a round white target over his heart; one had a non-lethal bullet, based on an old tradition allowing each shooter to preserve a kind of deniability. Utah lawmakers have often expressed a fear that the method makes the state look bad and places too much attention on the condemned.
At the last firing squad execution, in 2010, more than 150 journalists showed up, and according to Fordham law professor Deborah Denno, many people around the world volunteered to shoot the guns. “It showed a side of the death penalty that’s kind of sadistic, people clamoring to be an executioner,” she said, which makes it more difficult to separate state executions from the public frenzy that accompanied lynchings well into the 20th century. “People think of lethal injection, and they think of a flu shot. It seems so violent to have a bullet go in you.”
In South Carolina, the new protocol also involves a hood and a target over the heart, but the shooters will be just 15 feet away. Prisoners and their lawyers are asking the state courts to hold off on any executions until the plan has been subjected to more legal scrutiny, calling it “barbaric.” (They’re also contesting the electric chair and other elements of the state’s law around execution methods, passed last year.) They focus on the fact that, unlike Utah, the state plans to use just three shooters and has not disclosed the caliber of rifle, “thus increasing the risk of error.” In response, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Corrections pointed to the agency’s filings in state court, asserting that the method is “quick,” has a long history in the U.S. and has gained the approval of various federal judges.
Ultimately, Denno and others said, the death penalty remains popular, but not if it’s bloody. Judging by Utah’s experience, if a firing squad execution is carried out this year, it will tap into the public’s ambivalence and set off public debate about executions as a whole. Federal judge Alex Kozinski wrote in 2014, “If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the status of Arizona’s gas chamber, which the state used until 1999 and recently refurbished.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a measure that bans most abortions after 15 weeks. (photo: Getty)
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as State Passes Worst Bill Yet
The law will take effect on July 1. DeSantis signed the bill, HB 5, at a Spanish-speaking church in Kissimmee. The measure represents the most significant restriction on abortion in state history and comes amid other Republican-controlled states taking steps to limit abortion.
“We’re here today to protect life. We’re here today to defend those who can’t defend themselves,” DeSantis said, standing in front of dozens of people, mostly women and some state agency chiefs, and a large video wall broadcasting the message “Florida is Pro Life” in English and Spanish.
“This will represent the most significant protection for life in this state in a generation,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis signed the bill on the last day of Lent, which ends 40 days of prayer and fasting that Christians go through ahead of Easter.
One Planned Parenthood official said the fight over preserving access to abortion is not over. Stephanie Fraim, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, wrote a statement that stopped short of threatening all-out legal action.
“If these politicians think the fight against this abortion ban is over they are sadly mistaken,” Fraim wrote. “We won’t rest until our rights are restored. No one has the right to control what we can and cannot do with our own bodies.”
Florida’s Republican-led Legislature approved HB 5 in March despite heavy opposition from Democrats and hours of testimony by abortion rights supporters. The law reduces the state’s previous 24-week ban, and it’s similar to a 15-week ban approved by Mississippi lawmakers in 2018.
Like Mississippi, Florida’s law only permits abortions to occur after 15 weeks of pregnancy in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, and it includes no exceptions for survivors of rape, incest and human trafficking.
The Florida law also includes provisions that beef up the state’s smoking cessation program to include women who are pregnant or want to become pregnant. It also gives the state Department of Health $1.6 million to establish infant mortality review committees throughout the state.
The passage of the Mississippi ban prompted a lawsuit managed by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hand down a ruling in the next several weeks, which if approved would give the green light to Florida’s new measure and a similar 15-week ban also passed by Arizona last month.
A favorable high court ruling on the Mississippi law would overturn precedent established by the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which protects access to abortion under federal privacy law. The Florida measure was sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Kelli Stargel (R-Lakeland), who said she would never have dreamed of the day that Roe v. Wade would be toppled.
“God had a plan for every single child he allowed to be conceived,” Stargel said, adding her daughter was an unplanned pregnancy and that she grew up to defend the U.S. against terrorism. “Can you imagine a world without her?”
The House bill sponsor was state Rep. Erin Grall (R-Vero Beach), who invited her sister who had an abortion to the bill signing event. Grall said her sister is still dealing with the emotional scars left by the abortion she had more than 20 years ago, and that abortion supporters see the issue as a platform to bring equality with men.
“As a woman I refuse to accept such a perverse version of equality,” Grall said.
Florida’s new ban will not stop the vast majority of abortions from occurring in the state. A legislative analysis on the measure shows that of the 72,000 abortions that were performed in 2020, about 4,200 occurred after 13 weeks of pregnancy.
DeSantis signed the measure after a Leon County Circuit Court judge ruled in favor of a 24-hour wait period for abortions last week, which then-Gov. Rick Scott had signed into law in 2015.
The new ban is another major blow for abortion rights supporters. Before DeSantis signed the bill, state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando) wrote on Twitter that the Republican governor was merely appealing to his conservative base.
“Decisions around someone’s pregnancy are personal and should not involve politicians,” Eskamani wrote.
Florida Republicans have struggled to restrict abortions in Florida because of a privacy clause in the state constitution. Some other changes made over the years by lawmakers include requiring minors to ask parents for permission before they can have an abortion.
More than 10 years of court records analyzed by POLITICO show that the restrictions had no major impact on the number of minors who petition the courts to circumvent the parental permission requirement.
Pakistan's ousted prime minister Imran Khan gesturing as he delivers a speech during an election campaign rally in Islamabad on 30 June, 2018. (photo: AFP)
Khan promised voters a 'new' Pakistan. Instead, what they got was economic misfortune and a crackdown on dissent
Pakistan’s constitutional crisis, which emerged after Khan dissolved his own government and the National Assembly, got further complicated after the country’s supreme court restored the assembly and rescheduled a vote of no-trust against Khan.
While all eyes are fixed on what will happen next, Khan’s antagonistic brand of politics needs a review to understand how he reached this point.
From his souring relations with the military to his allegations of a foreign conspiracy against his government, Khan’s populist politics have elevated the country’s real domestic challenges to a global scale. This reflects an inflated sense of self-importance, common in the political post-truth era.
Before entering politics, Khan was perhaps the most endearing personality in Pakistan. His altruistic interests followed his retirement from sports in the early 1990s. His playboy reputation, charisma as a cricket star who captained Pakistan’s World Cup-winning team in 1992, and support from the so-called establishment won him electoral success in 2018.
In politics, Khan often stubbornly interpreted the complex realities of Pakistani politics in Manichean terms of good versus evil. A colleague and I interviewed Khan in 1996, the year he launched his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Staying at a local guesthouse with his elder sister, he seemed to me like a man with a misplaced sense of entitlement, searching for a post-retirement purpose in life.
My observations were not far removed from reality. Unprepared for the interview, he reacted so bluntly to a few of my questions that his sister had to intervene, correcting his statistics and statements.
Ignoring critics
Even now, many years down the road, when I listen to him at public gatherings and in media appearances, I often find his political logic to be far from reality. He once wanted to rid the country of western financial institutions, and his solution was to increase taxes, ignoring critics who said this would not work without controlling government expenditures.
Instead of listening to his critics, he reportedly said the country lacked people with the leadership skills to implement his vision. Khan has also expressed a desire to rid Pakistan of "evil and corrupt politicians", a populist stance that I recall from my 1996 interview with him, and which he later used to encourage people to stop paying utility bills when the Sharif government was in power.
With a huge civil-military structural imbalance, however, holding politicians solely responsible for the country’s ills would be a half-truth. Before Khan’s rule, Pakistan’s total debt and liabilities were around 30 trillion rupees ($160bn). Now, that figure has risen to around 52 trillion rupees, and inflation is soaring.
Cutting military expenditures is one option, but as the armed forces and their welfare agencies’ influence have entered almost every field of life, no government has been able to fix this problem.
Khan promised voters a "new" Pakistan. In pursuit of this ambition, he has discredited his rivals, put them behind bars, and dragged them into courts. Dissenting journalists have been silenced and media houses throttled. Those who lavished their wealth on Khan and the PTI have been rewarded. As the old Pakistan began to fall apart, the new one was marked by the increasing intervention of intelligence agencies in civilian life.
Days numbered
Rights violations are a case in point. The Pakistani state has long been accused of using the influence of local Taliban groups to control neighbouring Afghanistan. Enforced disappearances are collateral damage from the state’s use of non-state proxies, ie the Taliban - a regional power play in which security interests necessitate violence against not only dissidents, but also average civilians.
The judiciary has criticised Khan for failing to address rights violations. But the final blow to his rule came after the prime minister publicly fell out with the country’s powerful military.
It started five months ago when Khan delayed approval of the army’s recommended candidate to head the Inter-Services Intelligence. Amid significant media coverage, Khan maintained that his government and the military were on the same page, although the dispute was evident for all to see. It was clear then that Khan’s days were numbered.
Losing the trust of the military is not a good omen for any political ruler in Pakistan. During the country’s 75 years of history, civilian leaders have not only been removed from power, but one political leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged during a military dictatorship.
Instead of pointing to the powerful military, Khan thus found it convenient to blame the US for his fall, for two main reasons. Firstly, Khan’s populism requires him to feel self-important; the downfall of a leader of an Islamic country can’t happen without a global conspiracy. Secondly, he could not accept that his political opponents, who he demeaned for so long, could oust him.
The key takeaway
But by holding that Khan’s antics were unconstitutional, the court threw him back into the political ring to face the vote of no-confidence. Yet, this move also meant that Khan, as the civilian face of Pakistan’s civil-military rule, must pay the price alone for the political anger amassed during his four-year rule.
This runs the risk of further discrediting the country’s political institutions.
No elected prime minister has finished his or her five-year term in office ever since Pakistan came into being in 1947, and so Khan's removal is not a surprise. But the irony is that each failed political experience has reinforced the power of the country’s undemocratic forces, especially the military.
Khan’s replacement also does not provide a solution to the exisiting political crisis so long as Pakistani political parties are unable to put an end to the undemocratic forces' control over national politics through divide and rule, a British legacy in postcolonial Pakistan.
EPA opens civil rights investigations over pollution in Cancer Alley. (photo: Children's Health Defense)
Agency will look at whether Black citizens’ rights were violated in polluted industrial corridor in Louisiana
The news, first reported by the New Orleans Advocate, marks further enforcement action taken by the federal agency in the region since the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, visited the area late last year.
The civil rights inquiries will investigate Louisiana’s environment department (LDEQ) over a series of permits approved in both St John parish and St James parish and elsewhere in the region, where chronic air pollution in majority Black communities have led to a wave of activism and international attention.
One investigation, targeted at the state’s health department, will examine whether the department violated the rights of Black residents and schoolchildren living near a neoprene facility in St John “by allegedly failing in its duty to provide parish residents with necessary information about health threats”, and whether the department failed to make recommendations to community members and local government over how to reduce exposure to pollution.
The neoprene facility, operated by the Japanese chemicals firm Denka, is the only location in America to emit the pollutant chloroprene, listed by the EPA as a likely human carcinogen. Residential locations around the site, including an elementary school near the plant’s fence line, often record levels of chloroprene well above the EPA’s lifetime exposure guidance levels.
The investigations will also examine permits related to a proposed gargantuan plastics site in the neighboring parish of St James, operated by the Taiwanese company Formosa, permitted to emit up to 15,400lb of the cancer-causing chemical ethylene oxide. That project has been placed on hold during a federal government review.
The investigation will also examine permits for a proposed grain terminal in St John parish.
The announcement prompted praise from environmental advocates and researchers who pushed the agency to investigate in a series of complaints arguing that the permitting processes are racially biased and fail to fully include feedback from community members.
Robert Taylor, the president of the Concerned Citizens of St John, told the Guardian: “We need this investigation from the perspective of racial injustice. It is so obvious what’s happening is discriminatory.”
Darryl Malek-Wiley, a senior organizer with the Sierra Club, described the investigations as “a groundbreaking case looking at how LDEQ issues permits and doesn’t identify the impact on African American, low-income communities despite placing them a risk”.
Malek-Wiley said he hoped the investigations would be completed within six months and said the EPA could financially sanction both agencies at the end of its investigation.
A statement from LDEQ said that its permit process is “impartial and unbiased”.
“LDEQ handles all issues with a fair and equitable approach. LDEQ will work with EPA to resolve this matter,” it said.
The Louisiana health department’s general counsel, Steven Russo, said in a statement reported by the Advocate that the department had received the complaint and was “reviewing it closely”.
A spokesman for Denka, Jim Harris, argued there were “no widespread elevated cancer rates in St John the Baptist compared with the state average”, pointing to Louisiana Tumor registry data over decades. Harris accused “environmental activist groups” of “manipulating data and collecting and analyzing it in non-scientific ways”.
Recent studies have pointed to elevated cancer diagnosesin areas around the plant, and EPA data points to a cancer risk rate 50 times the national average in census tracts near the plant.
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