18 November 22
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In Arizona, voters from both parties overwhelmingly demanded that big, anonymous political donors reveal their identities.
Proposition 211, known as the Voters’ Right to Know Act, requires that any donor giving more than five thousand dollars to a nonprofit that uses the money on political advertising and spends more than fifty thousand dollars on a state campaign or ballot proposition must publicly disclose their name. In order to insure transparency, the new rule applies even if the contribution was routed through a front group attempting to screen the identity of the original donor. “Voters have a right to know who is behind ‘Americans for Peanut Butter,’ or whatever else,” Terry Goddard, Arizona’s former attorney general, who spearheaded the ballot measure, told me in a phone interview. “Everyone knows [shell organizations are] just a cover and they resent it. But without this, there’s no way to get the truth.”
The measure is designed to expose the funders of the dark-money front groups that have proliferated since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, in 2010. Since then, there has been an explosion of anonymized campaign spending by a tiny but extraordinarily wealthy group of donors, including in this year’s races.
As Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the nonpartisan group Open Secrets, recently told the Times, “We’ve broken records with our broken records.” Her organization estimated that total spending in the 2021 and 2022 midterm races would reach $16.7 billion, easily surpassing the previous midterm record of fourteen billion dollars, set in 2018. More than fifteen per cent of the total spent on federal races, according to the Times, has been contributed by billionaires, of whom there are fewer than eight hundred nationwide. Because contributions are often transferred from one shell group to another before reaching the group that actually spends the money, the original donors often remain untraceable. The system has proved to be a bonanza for self-serving, and critics say corrupt, private interests.
As was shown in a leaked recording of a conference call between conservative dark-money groups about which I wrote last year, top political operatives know that voters in both parties resent the manipulation of elections by secretive billionaires. In order to preserve the anonymity of their wealthy backers, they have tried to kill reform efforts behind closed doors in Congress rather than risk public votes on the issue, such as the Arizona referendum. A variety of related reform measures have been put in place to shed light on dark-money donors in Alaska, Montana, and Maine.
Unsurprisingly, the Arizona measure was opposed by some of the wealthiest and most powerful dark-money groups in the country. Leading the opposition was an organization known as the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, which, according to past financial disclosure records, has been a recipient of funds from the billionaire Koch family’s dark-money group, Americans for Prosperity.
Despite the deep-pocketed opposition, the Arizona measure sailed through so handily—winning more than seventy-per-cent support—that the Associated Press declared it a victory even as the votes were still being counted in the state’s agonizingly drawn-out Senate and governor’s races. While the measure’s lopsided success this year made it look surprisingly easy to pass, the victory was actually the culmination of a nearly decade-long struggle largely led by Goddard, who refused to give up. The measure was, in fact, his fourth attempt at a petition drive. Reached by phone in his office in Phoenix, where he previously served as mayor, Goddard, who is seventy-five, and has the unassuming manner of an aging Jimmy Stewart, acknowledged, “It’s been a long road.”
His long crusade began in 2014, when Goddard, an Arizona Democrat, ran for secretary of state on a platform demanding more disclosure of campaign spending. Ironically, he was defeated, in part, by a flood of dark money spent against him and several other candidates that year. Documents show that in a race that year the state’s largest electric company funded dark-money groups that paid for attack ads that helped defeat consumer-oriented candidates for seats on a state commission that oversees public utilities. Soon after, Arizona consumers were saddled with significant rate hikes. “They got their return on investment, all right,” Goddard told me. “The attacks were vicious and highly inflammatory, and if the funders had had to put their names on those ads, they would never have run,” he added. “But because it was dark money, they could disown them, and do it with impunity.”
In an effort to flush out dark money, in 2016 Goddard launched the first of his petition efforts. But, Goddard said, his principal backer that year lost interest after realizing that the initiative would curtail unlimited spending by anonymous donors, including himself. “It was a learning experience, you could say,” he recalled, dryly. His next effort, in 2018, resulted in the state Supreme Court finding deficiencies in his petition drive’s signatures, and in 2020, a subsequent drive was stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year, though, the drive generated critical momentum. One breakthrough was the support of high-profile Republicans, some of whom have also grown leery of the amount of undisclosed spending flooding the state. The measure perhaps surprisingly drew support from one of Goddard’s former campaign opponents: Fife Symington, a Republican who served as Arizona’s governor from 1991 until 1997. Goddard told me that, “I’m a relatively liberal Democrat, but my former opponent, to whom I hadn’t spoken for something like thirty years, endorsed it.” In arguing for the measure, Symington likened attacks from dark-money groups to “being in a boxing match with an opponent you can’t see.”
Goddard also credited the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan watchdog group founded by Trevor Potter, a former Republican chair of the Federal Election Commission, with providing him with “expert legal assist” this time. Whether the measure will survive legal challenge, however, remains to be seen. “I do expect legal challenges,” David Kolker, a senior counsel at C.L.C. who worked closely with Goddard on drafting the ballot initiative, told me. “The enemies of disclosure aren’t shy.” (In the interest of transparency, a relative works at the C.L.C. on unrelated issues.)
Just before Election Day, Scot Mussi, the president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, which is itself a conservative dark-money group, gave an interview to The Center Square, a publication sponsored by yet another conservative dark-money group, in which he argued that Proposition 211 represented an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. “One of the bedrock principles our country was founded upon was the right to free speech, which includes being able to support causes and issues they believe in without fear of harassment and intimidation,” he asserted.
Mussi claimed that the Voters’ Right to Know Act threatened speech because it would force donors to run the risk of being targeted by “cancel culture.” He charged, without evidence, that “They want the names of private citizens so that they can dox, harass and cancel them in their communities.”
Goddard, who had never heard the term “dox” before, dismissed the criticism as off-base. He noted that the Arizona measure is narrowly tailored, and gives donors notification and opt-out provisions, enabling them to specify that they don’t want their contributions to a nonprofit group to be spent on political advertising. This gives donors the option of supporting causes, while avoiding having their identities disclosed.
Further, Goddard noted, Arizona’s campaign-disclosure law already requires those who donated fifty dollars or more to a candidate to reveal their name, address, and workplace. The new measure simply restores the status quo that was in place before dark-money groups sprang up in 2010, encasing campaign donors in layers of secrecy. Moreover, Goddard notes, there is no constitutional right to secret campaign spending.
No less of a conservative than the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made this point in a case about the disclosure of petition signatures, in 2010. In it, Scalia argued that “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously . . . hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”
Still, Goddard expects a protracted battle ahead. After his ballot measure finally passed, he told the Arizona Republic that the fight is far from over. Speaking of dark-money groups with seemingly unlimited resources he said, “These guys never say die.”
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Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. (photo: Getty)
Court filing says Saudi crown prince’s promotion to the role of prime minister meant that he was ‘the sitting head of government and, accordingly, immune’
In a filing released on late on Thursday night, the Biden administration said the crown prince’s recent promotion to the role of prime minister meant that he was “the sitting head of government and, accordingly, immune” from the lawsuit.
“The United States government has expressed grave concerns regarding Jamal Khashoggi’s horrific killing and has raised these concerns publicly and with the most senior levels of the Saudi government,” the Department of Justice said in its filing, adding that the US had also imposed financial sanctions and visa restrictions related to the murder.
“However, the doctrine of head of state immunity is well established in customary international law and has been consistently recognized in longstanding executive branch practice as a status-based determination that does not reflect a judgment on the underlying conduct at issue in the litigation,” it said.
The government’s filing included an attached letter from Richard Visek, acting legal adviser to the US state department, instructing the Department of Justice to submit a “suggestion of immunity” to the court.
Legal experts say the US government’s position, which was filed to a US district court, will likely lead judge John Bates to dismiss a civil case brought against Prince Mohammed and his alleged accomplices by Hatice Cengiz, the outspoken fiancee of Khashoggi.
Dawn, a pro-democracy advocacy group that was founded by the murdered Washington Post columnist, was a co-plaintiff in the case, which alleged that Prince Mohammed and other Saudi officials acted in a “conspiracy and with premeditation” when Saudi agents kidnapped, bound, drugged, tortured and killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
Sarah Leah Whitson, Dawn’s executive director, issued a scathing rebuke of the administration in the wake of its decision, calling it an “unnecessary, elective action that will serve only to undermine the most important action for accountability for Khashoggi’s heinous murder”.
“It’s beyond ironic that President Biden has single-handedly assured [Mohammed bin Salman] can escape accountability when it was President Biden who promised the American people he would do everything to hold him accountable. Not even the Trump administration did this,” she said.
In June, Bates invited the Biden administration to weigh in on whether it believed Prince Mohammed should be granted sovereign immunity in the matter, and agreed to give the US government two extensions before demanding that it file its views by 17 November.
A legal observer close to the matter said it has always been understood that, even though the US government is not a party to the civil claim, its views would be decisive, and that the judge in the matter would very likely proceed with the case or dismiss it depending on the US government’s position.
The Biden administration’s decision – which in effect will extinguish Cengiz’s last hope for justice – will likely be met with intense criticism by Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have pressed the administration to take a tougher stance against its Middle East partner. One lawyer close to the matter said the decision was “disastrous for accountability, for human rights, for impunity”.
The legal decision also makes clear that US president Joe Biden has fully abandoned a campaign promise to hold Prince Mohammed accountable for Khashoggi’s murder.
It raises questions about Biden’s public remarks last month, in which he said Saudi Arabia would face “consequences” for leading an Opec+ decision to cut oil production, a move that was seen by the US administration as siding with Russia over the interests of American allies.
People familiar with the matter said the decision was reached after a “big debate” at the top levels of the White House, with some senior US officials arguing that it would be difficult to defend the Biden administration’s claim that human rights are at the centre of its foreign policy while simultaneously allowing “MBS”, as the crown prince is known, to skirt accountability for his alleged role in the murder.
Cengiz’s lawyers have argued that she turned to the US courts for help because no other forum – including her native Turkey – had an independent enough judiciary to fairly adjudicate her complaint. Prince Mohammed has denied he had personal involvement in the Khashoggi murder.
It has been clear since June that the future of the case hinged on the question of whether in the eyes of the US government Prince Mohammed – widely seen as Saudi’s de facto ruler – was considered a sovereign, like a president or king, since in most cases sovereigns are considered immune from US lawsuits.
When Biden first entered the White House, he declined to engage with Prince Mohammed directly. His press secretary argued repeatedly at the time that the prince – though seen as Saudi’s de facto leader – was not Biden’s counterpart.
At the same time, US intelligence agencies released an unclassified report that said Prince Mohammed had likely ordered Khashoggi’s murder. The president’s stance changed last summer, when he visited Jeddah and met with the crown prince, giving the heir to the throne a fist bump.
The question over whether the prince was indeed a sovereign got more complicated in September when King Salman declared that Prince Mohammed would be elevated to the position of prime minister. The decision, which was made public just days before the US government was due to weigh in on the Cengiz case, was seen by human rights defenders as a ploy to avoid accountability for the Khashoggi killing.
If the civil case is allowed to proceed – which is unlikely – it would allow Cengiz and Dawn to seek a deposition of the crown prince. If Prince Mohammed lost the case, he could be liable for damages.
“It would mean that any time he comes to the US – if he were to be found guilty – they would be able to serve notice and issue a fine. It would be humiliating and would effectively mean he could not travel to the US again,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and fellow at Brookings.
It is unlikely any of this will now come to pass.
“The pariah is now above the law,” Riedel said.
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"The FBI paid $5 million to an Israeli software company for a license to use its 'zero-click' surveillance software called Pegasus." (photo: Getty)
Before revealing any of this to the two congressional intelligence committees to which the FBI reports, it experimented with the software. The experiments apparently consisted of testing Pegasus by spying — illegally and unconstitutionally since no judicially issued search warrant had authorized the use of Pegasus — on unwitting Americans by downloading data from their devices.
When congressional investigators got wind of these experiments, the Senate Intelligence Committee summoned FBI Director Christopher Wray to testify in secret about the acquisition and use of Pegasus, and he did so in December 2021. He told the mostly pliant senators that the FBI only purchased Pegasus “to be able to figure out how bad guys could use it.” Is that even believable?
In follow-up testimony in March 2022, Wray elaborated that Pegasus was used “as part of our routine responsibilities to evaluate technologies that are out there, not just from a perspective of could they be used someday legally, but also, more important, what are the security concerns raised by those products.” More FBI gibberish.
Last week, dozens of internal FBI memos and court records told a different story — a story that has caused Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to question the veracity of Wray’s testimony. Wyden’s healthy skepticism caused the FBI reluctantly to reveal that it had ordered its own version of Pegasus, called Phantom, which the Israelis tailor-made for hacking American mobile devices.
Here is the backstory.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was written to preserve the natural right to privacy and to cause law enforcement to focus on crimes, not surveillance. The instrument of these purposes is the requirement of a judicially issued search warrant before the government can engage in any surveillance.
A search warrant can only be issued based on probable cause of crime demonstrated under oath to the issuing judge and a showing that the place to be searched or person or thing to be seized is more likely than not to reveal evidence of crime. As well, the warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched and things to be seized. Warrants can only be issued for investigations of actual crimes that have already occurred, not for experiments.
More Napolitano:A bias for liberty
The Fourth Amendment contains some of the most precise language in the Constitution, as it was written intentionally to thwart the rapacious appetite of governments to snoop, which the British did to the colonists using general warrants.
General warrants were not based on probable cause of crime and lacked all specificity. Rather, they were based on government need — a totalitarian standard because whatever the government wants it will claim it needs — and they authorized the bearer to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.
The Fourth Amendment was intended to put a stop to general warrants. As we know from the wildly unconstitutional FISA court and the NSA’s secret criminal spying on all Americans, that amendment, like much of the Constitution, has failed abysmally to restrain the government.
Now back to the FBI and Phantom.
In July 2021, President Joseph Biden personally put a stop to the FBI’s use of Phantom, and the congressional intelligence committees assumed that that was the end of it.
Yet, last week, when reporters revealed the results of Freedom of Information Act requests for memos and court documents pertaining to Phantom, a different story emerged. The documents that the FBI furnished show a vast determination by FBI management to showcase and deploy Phantom to FBI agents and other federal law enforcement personnel.
The procedures under which the House and Senate Intelligence Committees operate require that secrets be kept secret. Thus, when the FBI director testifies before those committees, the representatives and senators who hear the testimony may not reveal what they heard to the press or even to their congressional colleagues. Wyden has apparently had enough of law enforcement deception and secrecy. Hence his complaints in letters to Wray — letters that more or less tell us what’s going on.
All of this leaves us with an FBI out of control and run by a director who has been credibly accused of misleading Congress while under oath — a felony — and whose agents have been credibly accused of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking — also a felony. Who knows what other liberty-assaulting widgets the FBI has in its unconstitutional toolbox about which Wyden and his investigators have yet to learn?
When Daniel Ellsberg courageously removed the Pentagon Papers from his office and gave them to reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post, he was charged with espionage. The papers revealed that Pentagon generals were lying to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Johnson was lying to the public about the Vietnam war.
During Ellsberg’s trial, FBI agents broke into the office of his psychiatrist and stole his medical records so as to use them at the trial. The federal judge presiding at the trial was so outraged at the FBI’s misconduct that he dismissed the indictment against Ellsberg, and the government did not appeal the dismissal.
The Ellsberg break-in took the FBI a few hours and was destructive and dangerous.
Today's FBI could have done the Ellsberg heist remotely in a few minutes. Today’s FBI has agents who are the bad guys they have warned us about. Today’s FBI has morphed from crime fighting to crime anticipating. Today's FBI is effectively a domestic spying operation nowhere sanctioned in the Constitution. It should be defunded and disbanded.
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The first woman to be elected speaker of the House, Pelosi has led House Democrats with an unflinching grasp on the caucus. (photo: Elizabeth Frantz/The Washington Post)
The first woman to be elected speaker of the House, Pelosi has led House Democrats with an unflinching grasp on the caucus
“For me, the hour’s come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect,” Pelosi said in a speech on the House floor Thursday afternoon. She will continue to serve as a member of the House.
Her decision to not seek reelection as the top Democrat in Congress’s lower chamber marks the culmination of a political career widely seen as setting the standard for wielding political power. Historians largely agree that Pelosi redefined the speakership, and she made history climbing the ranks of Democratic leadership, becoming the first woman to be second in line to the presidency — twice.
In her more than three decades serving in the House, Pelosi earned a reputation for amassing power in the face of male colleagues who at times undermined her opinions, and she earned respect by delivering votes on her party’s top priorities, even if that meant twisting the arms of her colleagues to take a bill over the finish line. Pelosi’s ability to keep her caucus in line has led to bipartisan recognition that she alone may be capable of wrangling Democrats’ disparate factions. She led the House Democratic caucus through a bitter fight in 2010 to pass the Affordable Care Act, and most recently managed a razor-thin majority in passing several key pieces of President Biden’s legislative agenda. The White House said in a statement that Biden spoke with Pelosi on Thursday morning and “congratulated her on her historic tenure.”
“History will note she is the most consequential Speaker of the House of Representatives in our history,” Biden said in a statement. “There are countless examples of how she embodies the obligation of elected officials to uphold their oath to God and country to ensure our democracy delivers and remains a beacon to the world.”
Pelosi’s decision to step back has been somewhat expected. She said in 2020 that she would not seek reelection to a leadership position, but she revealed little about her intentions outside a small and extremely loyal circle of trusted confidants, and her plans were never fully clear.
Her choice to step back from leadership comes weeks after her husband, Paul Pelosi, was violently attacked in their San Francisco home by an intruder who was searching for the speaker. The attack on her husband played a major role as she deliberated on her decision, Pelosi said during a recent television interview. She noted in the interview that she felt guilt about the violent attack as the intruder was looking for her.
In her speech Thursday, she thanked her husband, calling him “my pillar of support,” and said she was grateful for “all of the prayers and well wishes as he continues his recovery.”
“I’m endlessly grateful for all of life’s blessings, for my Democratic colleagues whose courage and commitment — with the support of your families — have made many of these accomplishments possible,” she said.
Shortly after her announcement, it became clear that a new generation of Democrats was stepping in to take the torch.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, will run for House minority leader, according to two people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations. Jeffries, 52, would be the first Black person to lead a party in Congress, and has long been seen as a potential heir when Pelosi stepped down.
Jeffries will be joined by Reps. Katherine M. Clark (Mass.) and Pete Aguilar (Calif.), who will seek the No. 2 and No. 3 positions, respectively. Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.) would stay on as assistant leader, a position that used to be third in line, but will now be fourth in the leadership structure.
While those four leaders have held private conversations about running for leadership posts, or stepping aside like Clyburn, the intentions of Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) were less clear. But minutes after Pelosi announced her decision, Hoyer announced he would not seek reelection to leadership and endorsed Jeffries for the top spot.
“You know when Nancy said, ‘there’s a time and a season.’ I think it’s the time and the season, and I think we have excellent alternatives,” said Hoyer, who has served in leadership for over 30 years.
A rise from Baltimore
Nancy Pelosi’s entrance to politics began the moment she was born in 1940 to Annunciata M. D’Alesandro and then-Rep. Thomas D’Alesandro (D-Md.), who later became mayor of Baltimore. Pelosi moved to San Francisco in 1969, where she remained active in Democratic politics and quickly became known as an activist helping the Democratic National Committee. It was there she started to gain a reputation as a prolific fundraiser, a trait that has set her apart in recent years as the Democrat who consistently raised the most money for her House colleagues’ reelection efforts.
In 1986, Rep. Sala Burton (D-Calif.) — whose husband, Rep. Phillip Burton (D-Calif.), mentored Pelosi before his death — gave Pelosi her blessing to mount a congressional campaign as her successor if a special election were to be called in the event of her death. In 1987, Pelosi faced her first — and last — competitive race against a crowded field of 13 candidates, edging out Harry Britt, a gay activist who succeeded Harvey Milk on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Several months later, the 47-year-old mother of five won the seat against Republican Harriet Ross to finish Burton’s two-year term.
Sworn into office a week later, Pelosi was invited to dinner in Washington to meet a crop of young House Democrats, including Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), now Senate majority leader; Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), now Senate majority whip; Barbara Boxer (Calif.), now a former senator, and others. Rep. George Miller (Calif.) introduced Pelosi to them by making a bold prediction — meet the future first woman speaker of the House.
Pelosi wasted no time making her mark in the House, taking up China’s threats against Taiwan as a top priority for her and her constituents in San Francisco’s Asian American community. In 1991, Pelosi famously stood alongside Reps. Ben Jones (D-Ga.) and John Miller (R-Wash.) to unfurl a banner reading, “To those who died for democracy in China” at Tiananmen Square, where students defending democracy were killed two years earlier. Those who know her best point to the massacre at Tiananmen Square as a catalyst, drawing Pelosi in both as a lawmaker representing San Francisco’s prominent Chinese community and as a mother who was pained watching college-age students, like her own children, being persecuted for defending democracy.
Her chance to enter leadership came in 1999, when she decided to challenge Hoyer for majority whip, assuming that the seat opened up if Democrats won back the majority in November 2000. Although Republicans kept the majority that year, then-Democratic Minority Whip David E. Bonior (Mich.) resigned the post in 2001, sparking a rematch between the two former interns to Rep. Daniel Brewster (D-Md.). Pelosi became the first woman to win the post — by about 20 votes.
One year after her victory over Hoyer, Pelosi led a Democratic rebellion against the Iraq War resolution that her congressional mentor, Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (Mo.), crafted with President George W. Bush’s administration. While the resolution passed in October 2002, Pelosi whipped a large majority of Democrats to vote against it, signaling a major shift in Democratic caucus politics toward coastal liberals opposed to war.
In 2002, Gephardt announced his intention to run for president, creating an opening for Pelosi to run for the top Democratic spot in the House. She formally became minority leader after intraparty elections that year, becoming the highest-ranking woman to achieve such a feat.
The rise to House speaker
As the Iraq and Afghanistan wars dragged on, Pelosi became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, strongly rebuking the president in stark terms ahead of his reelection campaign in 2004.
“Bush is an incompetent leader. In fact, he’s not a leader. He’s a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has decided upon,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in May 2004. “Not to get personal about it, but the president’s capacity to lead has never been there. In order to lead, you have to have judgment. In order to have judgment, you have to have knowledge and experience. He has none.”
Bush went on to win reelection, while House Democrats lost seats that year, a rebuke that motivated Pelosi to aggressively work to win back the majority in 2006. In the first of many times Pelosi had to successfully hold her caucus together, she pushed back against Bush’s plan to reform Social Security and urged her members to coalesce in opposition, which they did.
Democrats’ support for the war also began to wane, mirroring public opinion at the time, and they began to position themselves as the party supporting withdrawal. As questions swirled over whether Bush had misled Congress about the rationale for invading Iraq, Democrats began to call for impeachment proceedings against him. But with her eyes on the majority, Pelosi told The Washington Post in May 2006 that a Democratic-controlled House would launch investigations into the administration — stressing that impeachment was not the goal but acknowledging, “You never know where it leads to.”
The antiwar effort helped House Democrats successfully clinch 30 seats in the 2006 midterms, paving the way for the party to regain the House majority for the first time since 1993. Largely credited for relentlessly campaigning and fundraising for candidates, Pelosi was then the unanimous selection by House Democrats to become speaker of the House, setting up the historic moment months later when she became the first woman to hold the position. Bush commemorated the moment during his 2007 State of the Union speech, turning to her before uttering, “Madame Speaker,” which garnered loud applause.
Ahead of the 2008 election, Pelosi faced her first major defeat as the top Democrat on the House floor when members overwhelmingly voted against a $700 billion plan to bail out Wall Street. But working aggressively with the Senate, she clinched a new deal four days later that passed both chambers and averted economic collapse.
The election of President Barack Obama later that year gave congressional Democrats the ability to finally pass legislation they were unable to do under a Republican.
The Obama administration spent much of its political capital crafting the Affordable Care Act to broadly overhaul health care. And for more than a year before the 2010 midterm elections, Pelosi worked relentlessly to muscle the bill into law — an almost insurmountable challenge as House Democrats knew they were risking their political careers if they supported the controversial legislation. After the Senate lost its filibuster-proof majority, many considered a “skinny” health-care bill as an alternative to get bipartisan support. Instead, Pelosi took charge and worked to get the legislation over the finish line in the House.
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi will go down as one of most accomplished legislators in American history — breaking barriers, opening doors for others, and working every day to serve the American people. I couldn’t be more grateful for her friendship and leadership,” Obama tweeted Thursday.
As House Democrats predicted, the passage of the ACA led them to lose a historic 63 seats and with it their majority in 2010. Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars vilifying Pelosi during those midterm elections, sinking her popularity to new lows. But she stayed on as minority leader, defeating a token challenge from moderate Rep. Heath Shuler (N.C.), a Blue Dog Democrat who survived the political bloodbath.
A challenge from within
Pelosi spent the subsequent years trying to claw back the majority and defending Obama’s legacy as Republicans moved to overturn the landmark health-care bill. As the 2016 elections approached, Pelosi banked that Democrats would win 15 or more seats thanks to the momentum behind Hillary Clinton to become the first female president. But the expectations were never met as Donald Trump was elected president and only six Democrats picked up seats that year, prompting members to question her agility atop the caucus.
It was then that Pelosi faced the toughest internal challenge of her two decades leading Democrats, as fuming members began to openly call for a generational change that would oust her, Hoyer and Clyburn as caucus leaders. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), a relatively unknown lawmaker at the time, launched a fierce challenge to her in late 2016 that left her pleading with members to secure the necessary two-thirds majority vote. While she was able to amass the support needed to stay on as minority leader, the encounter weakened her internally.
Trump’s declining popularity and Republicans’ attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act boosted Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Not wanting to distract from that energy, Pelosi adopted “Just win, baby” as her mantra in public and private, a blessing for moderate candidates running in crucial swing districts to say they would not vote for her as speaker if Democrats regained the majority.
Pelosi also helped recruit a diverse class of candidates that would appeal to voters in 2018, including a historic number of women, with military and national security roles that would work to counter what they claimed was Trump’s unwavering threat to democracy. It helped bring a “blue wave” to Congress, with 41 moderate and liberal Democrats flipping GOP seats to win back the majority.
On Jan. 3, 2019, Pelosi became the first speaker since Sam Rayburn (D-Tex.) in the early 1950s to lose the gavel and stay around long enough to reclaim it.
During that first year back in charge, several liberal activists joined the Democratic caucus, all eager to defy leadership and push their liberal priorities. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), who ousted Pelosi’s presumed heir, Rep. Joseph Crowley, staged a sit-in at Pelosi’s office to protest Democrats’ inaction on climate change. The more confrontational approach, which defied the deference often given to leadership, fomented tensions that have persisted between moderates and liberals in the caucus, even though Ocasio-Cortez and members of the liberal “Squad” have often fallen in line with Pelosi’s desires since then.
Although questions about her age and ability bubbled up, Pelosi often made up for it by the way in which she would defy Trump. House Democrats, including those who did not plan to support her if she mounted a bid this cycle, say the memorable photo of her standing in the White House’s Roosevelt Room and pointing at Trump during a confrontation is an excellent example of her dedication to standing up against anyone who crosses her or her party.
Pelosi spent most of 2019 turning down the temperature on demands to impeach Trump from within her conference, telling The Washington Post in March of that year that Trump was “just not worth it.” But after months of holding back the liberal flank’s demands, Pelosi’s hand was forced after it emerged that Trump had urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for business dealings ahead of the 2020 presidential election, linking the request to the release of U.S. military aid.
In early 2020, Trump was impeached on a party-line vote for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate acquitted the president, but Pelosi’s disgust toward Trump persisted. Two months later, as Trump finished a defiant State of the Union speech, an angry Pelosi stood behind him and ripped apart her copy of his speech.
Shortly thereafter, the world was overcome by an invisible common threat: the coronavirus pandemic. Pelosi largely oversaw negotiations with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that resulted in a bipartisan agreement to inject $2.5 trillion into the economy. Pelosi also instituted remote voting to allow House business to continue, a decision routinely attacked by Republicans.
Pelosi again calculated that Democrats would keep their majorities and possibly expand them as the country was set to rebuke Trump and elect Biden as the 46th president. While Biden did win the election, split-ticket voters helped Republicans flip seats in 2020, resulting in a narrow nine-seat House majority for Democrats and foreshadowing troubles ahead for keeping an ideologically fractured caucus together.
But before congressional Democrats could help a Democratic president pass priority legislation, Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen enraged his supporters, who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a final effort to overturn the results of the election.
After getting whisked away to Fort McNair as rioters ransacked the Capitol, Pelosi began impeachment proceedings against Trump almost immediately. A week after the attack, Pelosi held an impeachment vote and witnessed 10 Republicans join all House Democrats in supporting the article against Trump — the most bipartisan impeachment vote in American history. The Senate again acquitted Trump, but seven Republicans joined Democrats in voting to convict.
With Biden as president, Pelosi faced her most daunting task as she tried to meld support within her caucus for two planks of his administration’s priorities. After the Senate crafted and passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, Pelosi held the legislation as leverage to ensure her chamber could first find agreement on Biden’s social spending package and pass both bills together. But as negotiations for Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill stalled — and with moderate and vulnerable Democrats clamoring for legislative wins to tout ahead of this year’s midterms — Pelosi got Biden to break the stalemate by telling House Democrats that he supported decoupling the legislation and promising liberals he would work with the Senate to pass their priority bills.
Then, in late 2020, after the infrastructure bill passed, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) announced that he would not support the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill, citing climbing inflation. His statement sent leaders, including Pelosi, back to the drawing board.
During that time, Pelosi effectively kept her slim majority together to pass numerous bills, including on global competitiveness against China, helping veterans exposed to burn pits get health care, gun control and, most recently, an assortment of measures funding the police. Most of those bills were not passed easily, including the police funding, which were often pulled from floor-vote consideration after liberals and Congressional Black Caucus members objected.
While the slim margin allowed members to easily raise objections to measures, Pelosi was still able to use the powerful ability she has to find the votes and bend members’ will to get there. It’s a trait that even Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), have admitted admiring.
“You could argue she’s been the strongest speaker in history,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) said in an interview last year. “She has shown more capacity to organize and muscle, with really narrow margins, which I would’ve thought impossible.”
The Iron Gate Dam, powerhouse and spillway is seen in 2020 on the lower Klamath River near Hornbrook, California. (photo: Gillian Flaccus/AP)
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's unanimous vote on the lower Klamath River dams is the last major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone for a $500 million demolition proposal championed by Native American tribes and environmentalists for years. The project would return the lower half of California's second-largest river to a free-flowing state for the first time in more than a century.
Native tribes that rely on the Klamath River and its salmon for their way of life have been a driving force behind bringing the dams down in a wild and remote area that spans the California and Oregon border. Barring any unforeseen complications, Oregon, California and the entity formed to oversee the project will accept the license transfer and could begin dam removal as early as this summer, proponents said.
"The Klamath salmon are coming home," Yurok Chairman Joseph James said after the vote. "The people have earned this victory and with it, we carry on our sacred duty to the fish that have sustained our people since the beginning of time."
The dams produce less than 2% of PacifiCorp's power generation — enough to power about 70,000 homes — when they are running at full capacity, said Bob Gravely, spokesperson for the utility. But they often run at a far lower capacity because of low water in the river and other issues, and the agreement that paved the way for Thursday's vote was ultimately a business decision, he said.
PacifiCorp would have had to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in fish ladders, fish screens and other conservation upgrades under environmental regulations that were not in place when the aging dams were first built. But with the deal approved Thursday, the utility's cost is capped at $200 million, with another $250 million from a California voter-approved water bond.
"We're closing coal plants and building wind farms and it all just has to add up in the end. It's not a one-to-one," he said of the coming dam demolition. "You can make up that power by the way you operate the rest of your facilities or having energy efficiency savings so your customers are using less."
Approval of the order to surrender the dams' operating license is the bedrock of the most ambitious salmon restoration plan in history and the project's scope — measured by the number of dams and the amount of river habitat that would reopen to salmon — makes it the largest of its kind in the world, said Amy Souers Kober, spokesperson for American Rivers, which monitors dam removals and advocates for river restoration.
More than 300 miles of salmon habitat in the Klamath River and its tributaries would benefit, she said.
The decision is in line with a trend toward removing aging and outdated dams across the U.S. as they come up for license renewal and confront the same government-mandated upgrade costs as the Klamath River dams would have had.
Across the U.S., 1,951 dams have been demolished as of February, including 57 in 2021, American Rivers said. Most of those have come down in the past 25 years as facilities age and come up for relicensing.
Commissioners on Thursday called the decision "momentous" and "historic" and spoke of the importance of taking the action during National Native American Heritage Month because of its importance to restoring salmon and reviving the river that is at the heart of the culture of several tribes in the region.
"Some people might ask in this time of great need for zero emissions, 'Why are we removing the dams?' First, we have to understand this doesn't happen every day ... a lot of these projects were licensed a number of years back when there wasn't as much focus on environmental issues," said FERC Chairman Richard Glick. "Some of these projects have a significant impact on the environment and a significant impact on fish."
Glick added that, in the past, the commission did not consider the effect of energy projects on tribes but said that was a "very important element" of Thursday's decision.
Members of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley tribes and other supporters lit a bonfire and watched the vote on a remote Klamath River sandbar via a satellite uplink to symbolize their hopes for the river's renewal.
"I understand that some of those tribes are watching this meeting today on the (river) bar and I raise a toast to you," Commissioner Willie Phillips said.
The vote comes at a critical moment when human-caused climate change is hammering the Western United States with prolonged drought, said Tom Kiernan, president of American Rivers. He said allowing California's second-largest river to flow naturally, and its flood plains and wetlands to function normally, would mitigate those impacts.
"The best way of managing increasing floods and droughts is to allow the river system to be healthy and do its thing," he said.
The Klamath Basin watershed covers more than 14,500 square miles (37,500 square kilometers) and the Klamath itself was once the third-largest salmon producing river on the West Coast. But the dams, constructed between 1918 and 1962, essentially cut the river in half and prevent salmon from reaching spawning grounds upstream. Consequently, salmon runs have been dwindling for years.
The smallest dam, Copco 2, could come down as early as this summer. The remaining dams — one in southern Oregon and two in California — will be drained down very slowly starting in early 2024 with the goal of returning the river to its natural state by the end of that year.
Plans to remove the dams have not been without controversy.
Homeowners on Copco Lake, a large reservoir, vigorously oppose the demolition plan and rate payers in the rural counties around the dams worry about taxpayers shouldering the cost of any overruns or liability problems. Critics also believe dam removal won't be enough to save the salmon because of changing ocean conditions the fish encounter before the return to their natal river.
"The whole question is, will this add to the increased production of salmon? It has everything to do with what's going on in the ocean (and) we think this will turn out to be a futile effort," said Richard Marshall, head of the Siskiyou County Water Users Association. "Nobody's ever tried to take care of the problem by taking care of the existing situation without just removing the dams."
U.S. regulators raised flags about the potential for cost overruns and liability issues in 2020, nearly killing the proposal, but Oregon, California and PacifiCorp, which operates the hydroelectric dams and is owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway, teamed up to add another $50 million in contingency funds.
PacifiCorp will continue to operate the dams until the demolition begins.
The largest U.S. dam demolition to date is the removal of two dams on the Elwha River on Washington's Olympic Peninsula in 2012.
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Starbucks employees say they're seeking better pay, more consistent schedules and higher staffing levels in busy stores. (photo: Matt York/AP)
The walkouts coincide with Starbucks’ annual Red Cup Day, when the company gives free reusable cups to customers.
The walkouts coincide with Starbucks’s annual Red Cup Day, when the company gives free reusable cups to customers who order a holiday drink. Workers say it’s often one of the busiest days of the year.
Workers say they’re seeking better pay, more consistent schedules and higher staffing levels in busy stores. Stores in 25 states planned to take part in the labour action, according to Starbucks Workers United, the group organising the effort. Strikers are handing out their own red cups with union logos.
Starbucks, which opposes the unionisation effort, said it is aware of the walkouts and respects its employees’ right to lawfully protest. The Seattle company noted that the protests are happening at a small number of its 9,000 company-run US locations.
“We remain committed to all partners and will continue to work together, side-by-side, to make Starbucks a company that works for everyone,” the company said Thursday in a statement.
Some workers planned to picket all day while others will do shorter walkouts. The union said the goal is to shut stores down during the strikes and noted that the company usually has difficulty staffing during Red Cup Day because it’s so busy.
Willow Montana, a shift manager at a Starbucks store in Brighton, Massachusetts, planned to strike because Starbucks hasn’t begun bargaining with the store despite a successful union vote in April.
“If the company won’t bargain in good faith, why should we come to work where we are understaffed, underpaid and overworked?” Montana said.
Others, including Michelle Eisen, a union organiser at one of the first stores to organise in Buffalo, New York, said workers are angry that Starbucks promised higher pay and benefits to non-union stores. Starbucks says it is following the law and can’t give union stores pay hikes without bargaining.
Contentious negotiations
At least 257 Starbucks stores have voted to unionise since late last year, according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Fifty-seven stores have held votes where workers opted not to unionise.
Starbucks and the union have begun contract talks at 53 stores, with 13 additional sessions scheduled, Starbucks Workers United said. No agreements have been reached so far.
The process has been contentious. Earlier this week, a regional director with the NLRB filed a request for an injunction against Starbucks in federal court, saying the company violated labour law when it fired a union organiser in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The regional director asked the court to direct Starbucks to reinstate the employee and stop interfering in the unionisation campaign nationwide.
It was the fourth time the NLRB had asked a federal court to intervene. In August, a federal judge ruled that Starbucks had to reinstate seven union organisers fired in Memphis, Tennessee. A similar case in Buffalo has yet to be decided, while a federal judge ruled against the NLRB in a case in Phoenix, Arizona.
Meanwhile, Starbucks has asked the NLRB to temporarily suspend all union elections at its US stores, citing allegations from a board employee that regional officials improperly coordinated with union organisers. A decision in that case is pending.
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A view of the U.S. Steel Edgar Thomson Works on Jan. 21, 2020, in North Braddock, Pennsylvania. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty)
The soot, known as PM 2.5, has been linked to cardiac arrest, asthma attacks and “premature deaths” from a range of cardiovascular and breathing disorders.
The coalition, organized by the Climate Action Campaign, drafted a letter to President Joe Biden earlier this week calling on federal officials to institute the most rigorous air quality standards for fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, to denote bits of pollution smaller than 2.5 microns—about one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair.
The current standard for particulate matter from soot pollution is 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air as an annual average. The advocacy groups asked Biden to toughen that standard to 8 micrograms per cubic meter.
Soot pollution has been linked to cardiac arrest, asthma attacks and what experts call “premature deaths” from a range of cardiovascular and breathing disorders. Most particulate matter is generated by vehicle exhaust, and emissions from power plants and other industrial operations.
“Each day that passes without updated limits is another day that millions of Americans are exposed to unhealthy and potentially dangerous levels of soot pollution,” the advocates wrote in a letter that was signed by more than 150 environmental groups from across the country.
The advocates cited a study released earlier this year by the Environmental Defense Fund, which found that as many as 19,600 deaths each year that are attributed to the harms of particulate matter could be avoided.
Margie Alt, campaign director of the Climate Action Campaign, noted that the federal standards on soot pollution have not been updated since 2012, and that over the past decade scientists have learned more about the potential adverse health effects related to particulate matter.
“We know the science is better and we know the technology is better,” Alt said in an interview. “We know that exposure to soot leads to increased mortality, leads to more hospitalizations and more visits to the emergency room. Asthma is the most obvious disease that’s triggered by it, but it can also trigger heart attacks and strokes and Parkinson’s and COPD”—chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—“and risk for preterm births and infant mortality.”
Alt said strengthening the standard for soot pollution is part of a broader campaign undertaken by her organization to ensure that emissions overall are reduced by at least half by the end of the decade.
Tightening the standards for soot pollution is a significant part of that effort, Alt said, noting that it is “essential to all Americans, to our health, to the health of the planet and to the U.S. role in the world when it comes to climate.”
Paul Billings, national senior vice president of public policy for the American Lung Association, said in an interview that the establishment of new standards at the federal level would set in motion a series of steps that would prompt states to identify communities that have excessive pollution levels.
States would then draft plans including a specific time frame—which, under federal guidelines, should not exceed nine years—for when they will achieve healthy air standards, Billings said.
At the same time, the standards would also drive EPA to propose more protective cleanup strategies and more rigorous rules for all pollution sources.
Billings noted that the general public may mistakenly believe that the particles do not pose a threat because they are so small. “Why should the public care?” he asked. “Because particulate matter, PM pollution, soot, whatever you want to call it, it kills people. And it kills tens of thousands of people every year.”
“These small particles get past the body’s natural defense mechanisms,” Billings said. “The big particles, they get caught in the nose, the mouth, you cough them out. The small particles get down deep and they get into the bloodstream and cause a wide range of adverse health effects. Coughing, wheezing. Shortness of breath. They’ve also been linked to lung cancer, heart attack, stroke and thousands and thousands of premature deaths in the United States every year.”
Raul Garcia, legislative director for healthy communities at the advocacy group Earthjustice, noted that the adverse effects of particulate matter pollution are not distributed evenly—people of color are 61 percent more likely to live in areas with unhealthy air quality.
“This also means that they are more likely to suffer from diseases and conditions like asthma and other very harsh respiratory conditions,” Garcia said during a virtual news conference Tuesday about the Climate Action Campaign letter. “And so we have to have urgency.”
Garfield Clunie, president of the National Medical Association—the nation’s oldest group for Black physicians—said during the news conference that the benefits of a tougher soot pollution standard are “critically important to addressing health equity in this country, not just for people of color, but for everyone.”
Garcia noted that federal officials had been expected to rule as early as Monday—roughly three months after the Environmental Protection Agency forwarded a proposed updated pollution standard to the Office of Management and Budget. He urged officials to move quickly to enact the proposal.
The management and budget office typically does not comment on pending policy reviews. The EPA decided to reexamine the standard after the Trump administration declined to raise the standard in 2020.
“We really have to look at this as a critical public health and environmental justice issue,” Garcia said. “This isn’t rulemaking that simply sits on a piece of paper. This is something that’s going to have real world impacts to everyone’s lives, but particularly those communities who have had to bear the burden of energy consumption across the country. It’s important that these standards be lowered to an adequate level because we know that the current standards do not protect human health to the level that they should.”
“We need this rule to come out today,” Garcia said, “and we need this rule to be a set of strong standards so that communities can actually live and breathe air that isn’t going to kill them.”
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