07 July 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
What we’ve gotten instead has been riveting and terrifying. The usual suspects are, of course, nit-picking at the details — although never over the crucial points, like Donald Trump’s desire to participate in an armed assault on the Capitol, and never, tellingly, under oath — and some in the news media are, shamefully, playing along. But realistically there is no longer any doubt that Trump tried to overturn the results of a lawful election, and when all else had failed, encouraged and tried to abet a violent attack on Congress.
I’ll leave it to the legal experts to figure out whether the evidence should lead to formal criminal proceedings and, in particular whether Trump himself should be charged with seditious conspiracy. But no reasonable person can deny that what happened after the 2020 election was an attempted coup, a betrayal of everything America stands for.
I still see some people comparing this scandal to Watergate. That’s like comparing assault and battery to a traffic violation. Trump’s actions were by far the worst thing any American president has ever done.
But here’s the thing: Dozens of people in or close to the Trump administration must have known what was going on; many of them surely have firsthand knowledge of at least some aspects of the coup attempt. Yet only a handful have come forward with what they know.
And what about Republicans in Congress? Almost surely many, if not most, of them realize the enormity of what happened — after all, the assault on the Capitol placed their own lives in danger. Yet 175 House Republicans voted against creating a national commission on the Jan. 6 insurrection, with only 35 in favor.
How can we explain this abdication of duty? Even now, full-on MAGA cultists are probably a minority among G.O.P. politicians. For every Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, there are most likely several Kevin McCarthys — careerists, not crazies, apparatchiks rather than fanatics. Yet the noncrazy wing of the G.O.P., with only a handful of exceptions, has nonetheless done everything it can to prevent any reckoning over the attempted coup.
Which has me thinking about the nature of courage, and the way courage — or cowardice — is mediated by institutions.
Human beings can be incredibly brave. As we see in the news from Ukraine every day, many soldiers are willing to hold their ground under deadly artillery barrages. Firefighters rush into burning buildings. Indeed, members of the Capitol Police were heroic in their defense of Congress on Jan. 6.
Such displays of physical courage aren’t commonplace; most of us will never know how we’d perform in such circumstances. Yet if physical courage is rare, moral courage — the willingness to stand up for what you believe to be right, even in the face of social pressure to conform — is even rarer. And moral courage is what Trump’s associates and Republican members of Congress so conspicuously lack.
Is this a partisan thing? We can’t really know how members of the other party would respond if a Democratic president tried a similar coup — but that’s partly because such an attempt is more or less inconceivable. For as political scientists have long noted, the two parties are very different not just in their policies but in their institutional structures as well.
The Democratic Party, while it may be more unified than in the past, remains a loose coalition of interest groups. Some of these interest groups are praiseworthy, some not so much, but in any case, the looseness gives Democrats room to criticize their leaders and, if they choose, take a stand on principle.
The Republican Party is a far more monolithic entity, in which politicians compete over who adheres most faithfully to the party’s line. That line used to be defined by economic ideology, but these days it is more about positioning in the culture wars — and personal loyalty to Trump. It takes great moral courage for Republicans to defy the party’s diktats, and those who do are promptly excommunicated.
There’s an exception that proves the rule: the surprising pro-democracy stand of the neocons, the people who gave us the Iraq war. That was a terrible sin, never to be forgotten. But during the Trump years, as most of the G.O.P. bent its knee to a man whose awfulness it fully understood, just about all the prominent neocons — from William Kristol and Max Boot to, yes, Liz Cheney — sided firmly with the rule of law.
Where’s this coming from? I don’t think it’s a slur on these people’s courage to note that the neocons were always a distinct group, never fully assimilated by the Republican monolith, with careers that rested in part on reputations outside the party. This arguably leaves them freer than garden-variety Republicans to act in accord with their consciences.
Unfortunately, that still leaves the rest. If the Democrats are a coalition of interest groups, Republicans are now a coalition of crazies and cowards. And it’s hard to say which Republicans present the greater danger.
COMMENTS:
Yes, and "Daffy Don" had more turnovers in his administration - of the "Best People" that he himself had appointed! He was "only going to get the best people, really good people" in his Cabinet and his advisors and other minions. He appointed not only bad people, but WORSE CASE SCENARIO people like Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, and DeJoy to head the USPS. You can all see where that got us. Then there's Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Rudy "Ghouliani", Mark Meadows and the rest. Maybe Trump was too used to saying his favorite line from "The Apprentice", "You're fired."
It's almost comical when the right wingers promote 'DRAIN THE SWAMP' when Daffy Don hired the SWAMP MONSTERS!
Is Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Actually A Closet Full of Fascists?
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/02/17/trumps-billionaire-cabinet-actually-closet-full-fascists
Don't forget ZINKE.
MERCER recommended STEVE BANNON that MERCER generously supported & BREITBART, JOHN BOLTON who couldn't be confirmedby a Republican Senate to be UN Ambassador (that MERCER also supported).... KOCH is a member of Mar A Lago and had his input...
MUNCHIN the Munchkin with a lengthy history?
BEN CARSON who's still trying to figure out the history of the PYRAMIDS while buying expensive furniture.
MARK MEADOWS? REGISTERED IN 3 STATES TO VOTE????
Mark Meadows Was Simultaneously Registered To Vote In 3 Different States
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-meadows-voter-fraud-trump_n_6262a659e4b0dc52f495b938
WILBUR ROSS?
CABINET OF CORRUPTION
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/donald-trump-administration-cabinet-picks-so-far
MEET THE CABINET: Here are the 24 people Trump has appointed to the top leadership positions
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-white-house-cabinet-senior-leadership-positions-bios-2016-11?op=1
STAFF & ADVISORS
https://ballotpedia.org/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign_key_staff_and_advisors,_2016
David Cay Johnston wrote 2 books about tRump's casinos failures that were well reserched and footnoted.
David Cay Johnston has written numerous other books that are worth reading.
'Too cute by half': Tax expert David Cay Johnston explains why Trump’s grift was wire fraud
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-was-too-cute-by-half-david-cay-johnston-explains-why-trumps-grift-was-wire-fraud/
The Big Cheat
How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and dean of Trumpologists David Cay Johnston reveals years of eye-popping financial misdeeds by Donald Trump and his family.
While the world watched Donald Trump’s presidency in horror or delight, few noticed that his lifelong grifting quietly continued. Less than forty minutes after taking the oath of office, Trump began turning the White House into a money machine for himself, his family, and his courtiers.
More than $1.7 billion flowed into Donald Trump’s bank accounts during his four years as president. Foreign governments rented out whole floors of his hotel five blocks from the White House while lobbyists conducted business in the hotel’s restaurants. Payday lenders and other trade groups moved their annual conventions to Trump golf resorts. And individual favor seekers joined his private Mar-a-Lago club with its $200,000 admission fee in hopes of getting a few minutes with the President. Despite earning more than $1 million every day he was in office, Trump left the White House as he arrived—hard up for cash. More than $400 million in debt comes due by 2024, and Trump still lacks the resources to pay it back.
“Few people are as well positioned to write an exposé of the former president as Johnston” (The Washington Post), and The Big Cheat offers a guided tour of how money flowed in and out of Trump’s hundreds of enterprises, showing in simple terms how a corrupt president used our government for his benefit, even putting national security at risk. Johnston details the four most recent years of the corruption that has defined the Trump family since 1885 and reveals the costs of Trump’s extravagant lifestyle for American taxpayers.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Big-Cheat/David-Cay-Johnston/9781982178031
The information is out there if people just look for it.
Luhansk's Governor Serhiy Haidai says Russian forces are 'burning down and destroying everything on their way.' (photo: Alexander Frmochenko/Reuters)
Luhansk’s Governor Serhiy Haidai says Russian forces are ‘burning down and destroying everything on their way’.
Indiscriminate shelling by Russian forces over the past 24 hours had killed at least eight civilians and wounded 25 more, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday.
Most of the civilian casualties occurred in Donetsk province, where Russia has stepped up its offensive in recent days, the Ukrainian presidential office said.
Listing the numbers of civilians killed, Donetsk’s Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko vowed in a Telegram post that “every crime will be punished”.
Kyrylenko had urged the province’s more than 350,000 remaining residents to flee late on Tuesday, saying that evacuating Donetsk was necessary to save lives and to allow the Ukrainian army to put up a better defence against the Russian advance.
Donetsk is part of the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking industrial area where Ukraine’s most experienced soldiers are concentrated.
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared on Monday that his forces had completed the seizure of the Donbas region’s other province, Luhansk, after Ukrainian troops withdrew from the last city under their country’s control.
Luhansk’s Governor Serhiy Haidai denied Wednesday that the Russians had completely captured the province, whose last city, Lysychansk, fell to Moscow’s forces on Sunday. Heavy fighting continues in villages around Lysychansk, he said.
“The Russians have paid a high price, but the Luhansk region is not fully captured by the Russian army,” Haidai said.
“Some settlements have been overrun by each side several times already,” he said.
The governor accused Russian forces of scorched-earth tactics: “Burning down and destroying everything on their way”.
Up to 15,000 residents remain in Lysychansk and some 8,000 in the nearby city of Severodonetsk, which Russian and separatist fighters seized last month, Haidai said.
‘No safe areas’
The Ukrainian armed forces General Staff said in its regular social media update late on Wednesday that Ukrainian troops had rebuffed enemy units advancing towards Sloviansk in Donetsk, which is seen as a potential key target for Moscow.
Separatist authorities in Donetsk also said that four civilians were killed and another 14 wounded in Ukrainian shelling over the past 24 hours. News reports said the shelling hit an ammunition depot on Tuesday, triggering massive explosions.
To the north of Donetsk, Russian forces also hit Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with missile strikes overnight, the Kharkiv regional Governor Oleh Synyehubov said on Telegram. Three districts of the city were targeted. One person was killed and three, including a toddler, sustained injuries, according to the governor.
In the south of the country, the port of Mykolaiv was also being heavily shelled, Oleksandr Senkevych, its mayor, told a briefing.
“There are no safe areas in Mykolaiv,” he said. “I am telling the people … that they need to leave.”
The city has already shed about half of its pre-war population of half a million.
‘Wrath of God’
In a sign that Moscow is not preparing to end its military offensive against Ukraine anytime soon, Russia’s parliament rushed through laws on Wednesday requiring businesses to supply goods to the armed forces and obliging employees at firms supporting the war effort to work overtime.
According to drafts of the laws, businesses will be required by law to supply goods and services necessary for conducting the “special military operation” in Ukraine to the armed forces, and employees of certain enterprises producing goods and services needed by the Russian military will be required to work overtime at night, on weekends or during holidays.
“In the context of operations carried out by the armed forces of the Russian Federation outside of Russia, including on the territory of Ukraine, there is a need to repair weapons, military equipment and provide the armed forces with material and technical means,” an explanatory note to one of the bills stated.
A top Russian official also warned on Wednesday that the United States and Western allies could face the “wrath of God” if attempts were made to punish a nuclear power such as Russia for crimes committed in its war in Ukraine.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, denounced the US for what he described as its efforts to establish an international court and to “spread chaos and destruction across the world for the sake of ‘true democracy’”.
Crosses with the names of victims of a school shooting, are pictured at a memorial outside Robb Elementary school, after a gunman killed nineteen children and two teachers, in Uvalde, Texas, U.S., May 26, 2022. (photo: Marcos Bello/Reuters)
Some of the 21 victims at Robb Elementary School, including 19 children, possibly "could have been saved" on May 24 had they received medical attention sooner while police waited more than an hour before breaching the fourth-grade classroom, a review by a training center at Texas State University for active shooter situations found.
The report is yet another damning assessment of how police failed to act on opportunities that might have saved lives in what became the deadliest school shooting in the U.S. since the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
"A reasonable officer would have considered this an active situation and devised a plan to address the suspect," read the report published by the university's Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training program.
The report outlines failures in Uvalde
Authors of the 26-page report said their findings were based off video taken from the school, police body cameras, testimony from officers on the scene and statements from investigators. Among their findings:
— It appeared that no officer waiting in the hallway during the shooting ever tested to see if the door to the classroom was locked. The head of Texas' state police agency has also faulted officers on the scene for not checking the doors.
— The officers had "weapons (including rifles), body armor (which may or may not have been rated to stop rifle rounds), training, and backup. The victims in the classrooms had none of these things."
— When officers finally entered the classroom at 12:50 p.m. — more than an hour after the shooting began — they were no better equipped to confront the gunman than they had been up to that point.
—"Effective incident command" never appears to have been established among the multiple law enforcement agencies that responded to the shooting.
The gunman, an 18-year-old with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, entered the building at 11:33 a.m. Before that a Uvalde police officer, who the report did not identify, saw the gunman carrying a rife toward the west hall entrance. The officer asked a supervisor for permission to open fire, but the supervisor "either did not hear or responded too late," the report said.
When the officer turned back toward the gunman, he already gone inside "unabated," according to the report.
The report is one of multiple fact-finding reviews launched in the aftermath of the worst school shooting in Texas history. A committee formed by Texas legislators has also interviewed more than 20 people, including officers who were on the scene, behind closed doors for several weeks. It is unclear when they will release their findings.
A top Texas official has called the police response an "abject failure"
It follows testimony last month in which Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the state Senate that the police response was an "abject failure." He pinned particular blame on Chief Pete Arredondo, saying that as on-scene commander the Uvalde schools police chief made "terrible decisions" and stopped officers from confronting the gunman earlier.
Arredondo has tried to defend his actions, telling the Texas Tribune that he didn't consider himself the commander in charge of operations and that he assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response. He said he didn't have his police and campus radios but that he used his cellphone to call for tactical gear, a sniper and the classroom keys.
According to the report released Wednesday, Arredondo and another Uvalde police officer spent 13 minutes in the school hallway during the shooting discussing tactical options, whether to use snipers and how to get into the classroom windows.
"They also discussed who has the keys, testing keys, the probability of the door being locked, and if kids and teachers are dying or dead," the report read.
McCraw said police had enough officers and firepower on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building, and they would have found the door to the classroom where he was holed up unlocked if they had bothered to check it.
A lawyer for Arredondo and a spokeswoman for the Uvalde city police department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Arredondo is on leave from his job with the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and resigned from his position as a city councilor last week.
Public leaders, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, initially praised the police response in Uvalde. Abbott said officers reacted quickly and ran toward the gunfire with "amazing courage" to take out the killer, thereby saving lives. He later said he was misled. In the days and weeks after the shooting, authorities gave conflicting and incorrect accounts of what happened. The fallout has driven recriminations and rifts between local at state authorities. On Tuesday, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin and state Sen. Roland Gutierrez released a letter asking Abbott to move administration of a victims relief fund from the local prosecutor's office to the Texas Department of Emergency Management. They wrote that they've received numerous complaints about District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee, "including the failure to timely deliver victim's compensation resources to those in need.″
Busbee's office declined to comment Wednesday.
Peggy Nienaber, left, the vice president of the Faith & Liberty evangelical group, prays outside the Supreme Court in 2009. Next to her is the Rev. Rob Schenck, who led the group's predecessor organization, Faith and Action, for years before leaving in 2018. (photo: Jewel Samad/Getty)
A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade
This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.
In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.
Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith … Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.
The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”
But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.
Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”
In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as “Ministry Row.” The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes — and, most of all, reverse Roe v. Wade. The street view offers few clues as to what transpires behind the painted brick facades, save for a granite slab inscribed with the Ten Commandments planted in the grassy patch before a modest cream-colored Victorian with maroon trim.
The home serves as Faith … Liberty’s headquarters. The Ten Commandments statue had been placed there by Schenck, an evangelical minister famous for orchestrating high-profile anti-abortion stunts, such as shoving an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Schenck had opened the ministry in the 1990s as Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, a nonprofit dedicated to ending federal abortion rights. The organization operated on a “utopian ‘trickle-up’ theory” of influence: building access “higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target — members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices — even presidents,” Schenck wrote in his 2018 autobiography.
The group established a strong foothold in both chambers of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But Faith and Action ultimately directed its energies toward the judicial branch. “There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices, who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions,” Schenck wrote. “We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench — they were appointed for life — so why not convert them while in office?” (Schenck has since reversed course: He is now a fierce critic of evangelical politicking and says Liberty Counsel assumed Faith and Action’s operations in 2018. He says he has no knowledge of the group’s inner workings after he left.)
At first, the high court regarded Faith and Action and its peer organizations as nuisances, according to Schenck. “Justice Thomas would say to me, ‘You know those groups outside? Are they crazy or are they good people?’” Schenck recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone. When Schenck first began his approach in 1994, prayer activities on the Supreme Court’s property was considered an act of demonstration, and therefore illegal. Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)
To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.
Sometimes the prayers would be general; other times, on specific subjects, such as ending abortion, according to Schenck. He says Faith and Action took assiduous care to avoid speaking blatantly about cases in the Supreme Court’s pipeline, discussing the political agenda only in broad strokes. Even so, under the time period Schenck describes, prayers with the justices occurred as Faith and Action signed onto several amicus briefs for landmark SCOTUS cases such as Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which ultimately upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
Schenck walked away from his life on the Hill after receiving a late-career doctorate on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who questioned the collaborative relationship between Adolf Hitler and 1930s German evangelicals. He drew parallels between the Republican Party and American evangelicalism, concerned that he’d weaponized worship to fuel a hate-filled agenda. No longer an anti-abortion activist, Schenck views his past efforts with regret. “Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.
“I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck says. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.”
When Liberty Counsel absorbed Faith and Action in 2018, Peggy Nienaber, who had worked alongside Schenck since at least 2005, continued with the group. In a July 2021 conversation with Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder, Nienaber described the group’s new incarnation as similar to Faith and Action’s mission. It’s “the ministry right here on Capitol Hill,” she said, devoted to “changing the hearts and minds of not only our elected officials, but the staffers all the way down.” Nienaber highlighted Faith … Liberty’s proximity to the court by pointing to the window of the conference room where the justices decide their cases. ”When you’re sitting in that conference room, you cannot miss those Ten Commandments,” she said. (Faith … Liberty sits so close to the Supreme Court, in fact, that it has been included in the “buffer zone” surrounding the high court, shut off to protesters and the public. There’s irony here, given that Liberty Counsel has for decades litigated to abolish buffer zones near abortion clinics.)
“There’s a lot of things that Faith … Liberty does — and that you do — that obviously we can’t put in an email, can’t put in a newsletter, can’t put in a press release,” Staver said to Nienaber during their chat, “because it’s private relationships that are spiritually transformative.” Nienaber’s social media accounts show her hobnobbing with high-profile Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and former Vice President Mike Pence. She hung close to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018: She posted photographs from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, as well as a screenshot of her invitation to Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony.
Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”
In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coach who recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”
Nienaber was recorded telling the livestreamer that she prayed with Supreme Court justices on June 27, the Monday after the high court issued the Dobbs ruling. She was at a celebration she helped organize with Sean Feucht, a prominent Christian-worship musician. Nienaber identifies herself only as “Peggy” in the footage, but she references the ministry she runs behind the court and its 850-pound replica of the Ten Commandments. For most of the interview, Nienaber is not on camera. But when the video pans on her briefly, she can be seen wearing the same dress and necklace she has on in a selfie with Feucht posted to Faith … Liberty’s website.
Last week, Rolling Stone spoke to Patty Bills, the director of constituency affairs at Faith … Liberty. Bills did not want to discuss Faith … Liberty’s ministry practices, citing privacy concerns. Bills would not, however, deny that Faith … Liberty ministers to Supreme Court justices. “I never said we didn’t — I just said we provide privacy,” she said.
Staver, in denying that members of Faith … Liberty prayed with Supreme Court justices, says that such prayers would have been inappropriate, especially given Liberty Counsel’s litigation efforts. “That’s why we wouldn’t do that,” he says. “And especially on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, we would make a very clear firewall. We just would never do something like that.”
In a written statement to Rolling Stone, Nienaber says of her hot-mic comments: “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” She adds that Covid restrictions have limited public access to the Supreme Court: “The public has not been allowed access, and I am no different.” When she has had access to public areas of the court, she says, “I will generally silently pray for the justices, their staff, and the Court.”
But after this story was published, Nienaber acknowledged her remarks and conceded she has prayed personally with Supreme Court justices. Despite speaking in the present tense on the livestream, Nienaber asserted, “My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years.” Nienaber added: “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer. Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID. It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”
Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by Staver. The organization is an uncommon hybrid of religious ministry and legal practice, dedicated to “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family through strategic litigation.” Staver is the organization’s senior pastor as well as its top litigator. This mix of law and religion is central to Staver’s career; he previously served as dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Staver has argued numerous cases in front of the Supreme Court. He started in 1994 in a case that struck a blow against protest-limiting buffer zones near abortion clinics. In the court’s most recent term, Staver argued and won a 9-0 judgment in Shurtleff v. Boston, a case in which the court ruled a Christian flag couldn’t be excluded from a public flagpole that displayed a rotating assortment of secular flags.
Staver also wrote an amicus brief in the Dobbs case that purports to tie abortion and birth control to eugenics. Calling Roe “the low watermark in this Court’s history,” it argued that Dobbs was ”an ideal vehicle for the Court to finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny, which have constitutionalized eugenic abortions as a fundamental right.”
In the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he cited this brief to impugn the motives of pro-abortion-rights advocates, arguing that “some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” adding, “it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” because “a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.”
When Roe v. Wade was reversed, Staver was triumphant: “I have dedicated my life to defend life and overturn the bloody decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he wrote. “This global earthquake will impact the world.”
Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith … Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.
But even among legal experts troubled by the court’s ties, they acknowledge there are few remedies to address ethical conflicts. A federal statute governs when judges and justices should step away from cases, but the Constitution leaves questions of partiality to the justices themselves. Their general unwillingness to step aside isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Virelli, the Stetson law professor, says: When justices recuse themselves from a case, no one replaces them, a scenario that can create more problems than it solves. “The court changes shape,” he explains. “That makes the decision to recuse difficult.”
That the justices are their own keepers in regard to those rules creates complications, however, says Steve Vladeck, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Texas Law School. The relationship between Faith … Liberty and Liberty Counsel, as described by Rolling Stone, “could make a reasonable observer worry about the appearance of partiality,” he says. But the concerns the scenario raised shouldn’t be about recusal. “What that really reveals is how problematic it is that there isn’t an objective mechanism to resolve these sorts of questions.”
For Winkler, the greater concern is not prayers, but the “religious-themed” decisions he’s seen come down from the high court this term, pointing to not only the Roe reversal but also opinions that permit unchecked free exercise of First Amendment rights. “The problematic aspect isn’t whether they’re praying,” Winkler says, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”
Protesters hold signs during an Arizona Republican Party news conference on Nov. 5, 2020, in Phoenix, Arizona. (photo: Matt York/AP)
Measure signed by Republican governor in March a ‘textbook violation’ of law designed to protect voters, department says
The challenged Arizona measure, HB 2492, was signed into law by the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, in March, requires anyone who wants to vote in a presidential election, or vote by mail in any election, to provide proof of citizenship.
The law was among several pushed by the Arizona legislature following the 2020 election in a state where Donald Trump and his allies have spread baseless claims of fraud. Voting by mail is widely used in Arizona, a key battleground state, and Republicans in the state have made numerous attempts to make it harder to cast a ballot that way.
In 2013, the supreme court ruled 7-2 in a case called Arizona v Inter Tribal Council of Arizona that the state could not require anyone who used the federal government’s voter registration application to provide proof of citizenship when they registered.
As a result of that decision, there are tens of thousands of voters in Arizona who are only allowed to vote in federal elections, not state contests, because they have not provided proof of citizenship. As of March, there were roughly 31,500 federal-only voters in the state.
Arizona lawmakers said that the decision only applied to congressional elections, not presidential ones, even though a lawyer for the legislature advised them the measure was probably illegal. A 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act, requires all states to accept a federal form for voter registration – the form does not require proof of citizenship, but asks voters to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.
“House Bill 2492’s onerous documentary proof of citizenship requirement for certain federal elections constitutes a textbook violation of the National Voter Registration Act,” Kristen Clarke, who leads the justice department’s civil rights division said on Tuesday. “Arizona is a repeat offender when it comes to attempts to make it harder to register to vote. HB 2492 is in direct with the 2013 US supreme court decision.”
Some see the law as a blatant effort to get the US supreme court to reconsider its 2013 decision. The court has become significantly more conservative since then; three of the justices who were in the majority in that case – Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – have been replaced with more conservative justices. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented in 2013, saying they believed Arizona could require proof of citizenship for those who use the federal form.
The court’s new conservative majority has shown a blunt hostility to voting access, siding with state lawmakers and upholding nearly every voting restriction that has come before it in recent years.
Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, vowed on Friday that he would continue to defend the law. “Please be assured I will defend this law to the US supreme court if necessary and defeat the federal government’s efforts to interfere with our state’s election safeguards,” Brnovich, a Republican running for US Senate, wrote in a letter to Clarke.
The justice department is also challenging other provisions of the Arizona law. The measure also required Arizona to add a section to its own state registration form asking voters to provide their place of birth. It also instructs election officials not to accept a voter registration form if the voter forgets to check the box indicating they are a US citizen. Those requirements violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal to reject someone’s voter registration if they fail to provide information that is immaterial to their eligibility to vote, Clarke said.
“Checking this box is not material to establishing the voting qualifications of applicants who have already proven that they are US citizens,” she said. “That information is not material to establishing whether a voter is a US citizen because of naturalization an expatriation patterns among other reasons.”
A photo of Juan Wilmer Tulul hangs over a small altar in his family home in Tzucubal, Guatemala, July 2, 2022. (photo: Jeff Abbott)
Families are in mourning after dozens were found dead in an abandoned trailer en route to a ‘better future’.
The community was in mourning after two local teenagers who had left for the United States were found dead late last month in an abandoned trailer in Texas. A total of 53 people from Mexico and Central America died after being trapped inside the vehicle in the sweltering summer heat on the outskirts of San Antonio.
This past weekend, neighbours and family members gathered in Tzucubal to remember two of the Guatemalan victims: cousins Pascual Melvin Guachiac, 13, and Juan Wilmer Tulul, 14. Pascual’s childhood home buzzed with activity as his grandmother, Manuela Coj, worked alongside other family and friends to prepare food for people visiting to express their condolences.
“Our family is saddened by the loss,” she told Al Jazeera in her native Kiche language, speaking through a translator. “His dream was to finish his studies there in the United States. He wanted to leave a better future for his family members.”
The young boy had planned to join his father, who had been in the US for a year. But in the wake of the tragedy, his father returned to Guatemala to be with the family.
Down a narrow, unpaved road and along a footpath that passes through a cornfield, sits the home of Pascual’s cousin, Juan. His father appeared overwhelmed with grief.
“My sister and brother-in-law are in pain; neither can speak,” the victim’s uncle, Manuel Tziac, told Al Jazeera. “My nephew left just weeks ago. There is a dream that ended on the way. He died due to poverty.”
Searching for opportunities
Both families told Al Jazeera that they had not received any support from the Guatemalan government, which has been slow to provide information on the tragedy. The Guatemalan foreign ministry told reporters that it would continue to work with families and US authorities to identify the bodies.
The continuing flow of migration has highlighted a growing desperation in Guatemala, driving children to set off for the US in search of opportunities.
“The majority of children [from Tzucubal] go to the United States,” local teacher Cristobal Sipac told Al Jazeera, noting that children as young as 12 are deciding to migrate. “They finish 6th grade, but they do not want to continue studying, because there is no work here. So it is better to go there [to the US].”
Approximately half of Guatemalans live in poverty, with Indigenous communities particularly affected – a situation made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus crisis has had “catastrophic consequences in terms of wellbeing, because it is affecting prices at a general level”, Jonathan Menkos, an economist who heads the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies, told Al Jazeera.
Most Guatemalans work in the informal sector, where wages are low. In Tzucubal, people earn up to 75 quetzals ($10) a day in the agricultural sector, local residents told Al Jazeera. For the minority who work in the formal sector, the minimum wage for non-agricultural work is about 3,000 quetzals a month.
At the same time, Guatemala has seen a sharp increase in the costs of goods and services; in Tzucubal, a pound of meat costs about 50 quetzals, residents say.
Critics say the Guatemalan government has done little to address the enormous migration wave. Congresswoman Andrea Villagran told Al Jazeera that the government appears “more interested in the remittances [migrants] send to sustain the economy”. Last year, the country received more than $15bn in remittances.
After the Texas tragedy, an activist in San Antonio confronted Foreign Minister Mario Bucaro about how the Guatemalan government would respond. The minister replied that Guatemala’s economy was “the most resilient” in the region.
Villagran called the timing of that comment “absurd”, noting that economic benefits do not trickle down to the people: “They [migrants] are the reflection of the great inequality.”
Logging in the Amazon rainforest. (photo: Leonardo Nenassato/Reuters)
The rainforest lost 1,448 square miles between January 1 and June 24 according to satellite data provided by Brasil’s Space Research Institute (INPE). That’s the largest chunk of forest lost during a six-month period since the agency began monitoring in 2016, according to CNN.
The new findings follow reports that deforestation broke records during 2022, both for the first three months of the year and for the month of April. Rainforest advocates have blamed the pro-business policies of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro for the historic losses.
“The impact of this negligence will be the increasing loss of the resilience of these surroundings, not to mention the damage done to local communities and health,” Mariana Napolitano of the Brazilian World Wildlife Fund said, as AFP reported.
Bolsonaro has issued executive orders protecting the forest, yet he has also reduced funds for government environmental agencies and argued in favor of opening Indigenous territories to extractive industries, as CNN pointed out. Deforestation increased rapidly since he took office in 2019 and drew international attention following devastating fires in the summer of that year.
This year’s fire season, which typically begins in May and June, is already shaping up to be a destructive one. The INPE recorded 2,287 fires in May, the highest since 2004. It also spotted more than 2,500 fires in June, which is the most since 2007 and an 11 percent uptick compared to last year, according to AFP.
“Agribusiness is hitting new records for forest destruction as the dry season arrives in the Amazon,” Greenpeace Brazil spokesperson Cristiane Mazzetti said in a statement responding to the news. “Illegal burnings and deforestation have accelerated over the last three years as a direct result of the Brazilian government’s anti-environmental agenda that encourages the destruction of the forest. If this trend does not change we will approach the tipping point of no return in which the Amazon could fail as a rainforest.”
Scientists have warned that the Amazon could convert to grassland if it is not protected, releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide in the process. While environmental activists hold Bolsonaro to account for the uptick in deforestation, they also think the U.S. government could do more to put pressure on the Brazilian regime.
“Up to now, the Biden administration has only legitimized the Brazilian government’s anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental agenda,” Greenpeace USA head of forests Diana Ruiz said in a statement. “The US has a responsibility to act and stop making deals with President Bolsonaro, who continues to wage an assault against Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders.”
Brazil will hold another presidential election in October, but deforestation tends to increase in the runup to elections as restrictions loosen and people want to clear as much as possible in case a new administration passes tougher regulations, Carlos Souza Jr., a researcher at Brazilian research institution Imazon, told CNN.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.