13 December 22
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In the meantime, we need to use the sun we’ve already got.
That it comes with equally requisite caveats does not diminish the glory of the achievement, but they’re important, too. As a fusion expert at the University of Cambridge, in England, told CNN on Monday, “This result is miles away from actual energy gain required for the production of electricity. Therefore, we can say (it) is a success of the science but a long way from providing useful energy.” Among other things, producing this reaction required one of the largest lasers in the world, and the reaction creates neutrons that can destroy the very equipment required to produce it. As the Post put it, “Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale” would “require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce.” It is therefore still “at least a decade—maybe decades—away from commercial use.”
Happily, we have a bridge technology that might get us through those decades: it’s the first sun, the one that hangs in the sky above Lawrence Livermore and the rest of the planet. We know how to capture its rays on photovoltaic panels, and we know how to take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, creating breeze that we can capture in giant turbines. The advantage of this technology is that we’ve long known how to build it—I’m writing these words on a computer powered by a panel on my roof that was installed in 2001—and, indeed, that we can now do so cheaply. During the past few years, the cost of renewable energy dropped below the price of fossil fuels.
Of course, the first sun comes with caveats, too. It inconveniently dips beneath the horizon every night, so there’s a need for batteries to store its power (though they’re also plummeting in cost). And we’ll need to occupy some portion of the earth’s surface (though less than often imagined) with machinery to generate necessary levels of power. That would be both a cost and a benefit, because it would mean that communities around the world would end up with local control of their energy supply. But, since one of these technologies—renewable energy—is ready to go and the other isn’t, the sequencing is pretty clear. Imagine, if everything goes right, a world where, in a quarter-century’s time, we can take down the solar panels and wind turbines we’re now erecting and replace them with elegant fusion reactors. (Or maybe small-scale fission reactors; there have been new developments in this technology, too.) But, if we don’t make that first transition right now, those elegant reactors will be deployed, if at all, on a badly degraded, even broken, planet. Thanks to the blanket of carbon we’ve thrown up, Sun 1 is steadily more dangerous.
A reason that the breakthrough is causing such hoopla is that it implicitly promises that we could use fusion to run the world in almost its current form. It’s centralized power that fits the old model that electricity should move down a one-way grid to its final users, instead of an interlocked web of smaller-scale solar and wind providers. We like the status quo, all else being equal. But that bias shades other new research that might point us in equally fascinating directions. On Monday, for instance, the premier scientific journal, Nature, published an important commentary from several topflight researchers about the idea of “degrowth,” which they explain as follows: “Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.” Their analysis looks at everything from reducing debt loads in the Global South to financing public services in wealthy countries. “Addressing the question of how to prosper without growth will require a massive mobilization of researchers in all disciplines, including open-minded economists, social and political scientists, modellers and statisticians,” they write. Which would take money—though probably quite a bit less than an international effort to build fusion power.
A component of that work already has some robust backing: last month, the Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor released the first results of global experiments that she had designed to test the proposition that a four-day workweek might both increase satisfaction and decrease carbon production. The numbers were remarkable: of the thirty-three companies around the world in the study that, in February, instituted a thirty-two-hour work week, almost all want to continue with the new scheme. And 99.6 per cent of their more than nine hundred employees were in favor. Companies and employees both reported higher productivity and, with it, revenues. There was a slight drop in resignations (even in the wake of the Great Resignation), and people did not use their day off to take on a second job. The effects on carbon emissions were “incomplete,” Schor observed, but there were “significant decreases in the frequency and duration of commuting.”
Taken all in all, the news—from the fusion lab to the four-day workweek—is encouraging: a reminder, perhaps, that even in a world that seems stuck there’s often something new under (or in) the sun.
“When we lose Trump we lose our Republic,” one current congressman texted Trump's chief of staff.
South Carolina Congressman Ralph Norman, for example, called for “invoking Marshall [sic] Law!” in a Jan. 17 text to Meadows, three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Texas Rep. Brian Babin, meanwhile, told Meadows on Nov. 6 that “when we lose Trump we lose our Republic.”
“We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship,” Babin wrote. “Fight like hell and we’ll find a way.”
Meadows received at least 364 text messages from GOP members of Congress about overturning the results and sent nearly 100 of his own, Talking Points Memo reported. Meadows’ texts were obtained by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the events leading up to it.
The text messages provide further evidence that the Trump administration’s effort to steal the 2020 election was backed by many rank and file House Republicans, most of whom are still in Congress. Come January, these Republican politicians will find themselves in the House majority.
The messages with Meadows are replete with the far-right conspiracy theories that began popping up immediately following the election. Norman, for example, cited disproven claims about Dominion Voting Systems’ voting machines in his Jan. 17 message to Meadows.
“Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !!” Norman wrote.
In a statement to VICE News Tuesday, Norman said that “Martial Law was never warranted.”
“That text message came from a source of frustration, on the heels of countless unanswered questions about the integrity of the 2020 election, without any way to slow down and examine those issues prior to the inauguration of the newly elected president,” Norman added.
By the time Norman had sent those messages, though, there were no legal means remaining to challenge the results—Biden had already been certified as the winner for more than a week. Trump himself conceded on Jan. 7 that Biden would take office and that his focus at that point was “ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.”
Meadows apparently received text messages from members of Congress just repeating claims they heard as a pretext for the federal government to call for an audit. “I know of at least 2 people who told me they mailed in their ballots and voted in person so you can tell them they might be interested in going over all votes in Nevada,” Missouri Rep. Billy Long reportedly wrote.
“Ok,” Meadows responded, according to TPM. (Long’s office did not respond to a request for comment, according to TPM.)
The Jan. 6 committee—which is made up of primarily Democrats as well as two Republican critics of Trump’s efforts to block Biden from taking office—is expected to approve a report of its findings at a public meeting on Dec. 21, prior to Republicans taking control of the House in January. The committee is considering criminal referrals for Trump, Meadows, and lawyers John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Jeffrey Clark, CNN reported last week.
The overwhelming majority of Republicans who reportedly tried to overturn the election, however, will likely never face any sort of repercussions for their efforts.
North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd, for example, voted to deny certification of Pennsylvania and Arizona’s electoral votes. Budd reportedly texted Meadows on Nov. 7 alleging ties between Dominion and liberal billionaire George Soros, the target of a plethora of right-wing conspiracy theories. “Praying for your health!” Budd told Meadows. “FYI Dominion Voting Systems is owned by State Street Capital, which are Carlyle (Rubenstein alums), Rubenstein is a longtime co-investor with Soros Capital.”
Budd won’t be in the House next year—but only because the Trump-backed congressman won election to the Senate last month.
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A man wearing an Oath Keepers shirt stands outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, Nov. 19, 2021, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (photo: Paul Sancya/AP)
309 listed members of the extremist group reported having worked for various DHS agencies, including the Secret Service and Border Patrol
The Oath Keepers are a far-right, anti-government group that purports to defend the Constitution and uphold the oath made by lawmakers and law enforcement to combat enemies both foreign and domestic who they view as posing a threat to constitutional order.
The membership list contains the names of thousands of individuals recruited by the paramilitary group between its founding in 2009 and 2015, and was obtained by the transparency group Denial of Secrets in September of last year. Rolling Stone previously identified individuals on the list who held public office and who served on the NRA’s board of directors, as well as nearly 40 memberships that had been created using government domain emails.
The lists demonstrate how the organization heavily courted members of the military, veterans, and law enforcement officials to bolster their ranks. According to POGO’s review, of the 309 listed members who reported having worked for various DHS agencies, including the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and Coast Guard, more than 90 percent had retired.
But the new review identified several members who allegedly held active roles within DHS agencies at the time they joined the group. Organizations that are under the purview of the DHS are tasked with helping identify and combat threats of extremism and terrorism that pose risks to public security. One individual wrote that he was “currently a 20 year Special Agent with the United States Secret Service,” and had “been on President Clinton and President Bush’s protective detail.” Another since retired member wrote that he joined as a “whistleblowing Border Patrol Agent fighting against constitutional violations taking place at our inland border checkpoints.”
Rhodes was convicted last month on charges of seditious conspiracy in relation to the Oath Keepers participation in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The violent riot, which aimed to stop the certification of Electoral College votes that would make Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election official, was a clear indicator of the lengths domestic extremist groups are willing to go to in order to carry out their mission.
Government agencies are struggling to root out extremist ideologies from within their own ranks. A March report by the DHS found that the “department has significant gaps that have impeded its ability to comprehensively prevent, detect, and respond to potential threats related to domestic violent extremism within DHS.” The department went on to say that those shortfalls have likely “impacted DHS officials’ ability to adequately identify and address related threats.”
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A protester dressed as birth control pills rallies outside the Supreme Court in 2014. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP)
In retrospect, it was inevitable that this particular judge would come for contraception.
A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”
So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.
Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”
The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.
This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.
But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.
This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.
And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”
Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.
Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.
Kacsmaryk’s opinion is incompetently drafted and makes several obvious legal errors
Kacsmaryk’s opinion makes a number of legal errors, some of them egregious.
The Constitution, for example, does not permit litigants to file federal lawsuits challenging a government program unless they’ve been injured in some way by that program — a requirement known as “standing.” But Alexander Deanda, the father in this case seeking to stop Title X-funded programs from offering contraception to minors, does not claim that he has ever sought Title X-funded care. He does not allege that his daughters have ever sought Title X-funded care. And he does not even allege that they intend to seek Title X-funded care in the future.
Thus, this case should have been dismissed for lack of standing. As the Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit must show that they’ve been injured in a manner that is “actual or imminent” and not “conjectural” or “hypothetical.” But Deanda has offered nothing more than conjecture that, if Title X continues to operate as it has for decades, one of his daughters might, at some point in the future, obtain contraception. Kacsmaryk nevertheless allowed his suit to proceed.
Additionally, Kacsmaryk places an astonishing amount of weight on a Texas state law which provides that parents have a right to consent to their child’s “medical and dental care.” But the Constitution states explicitly that federal law is “the supreme Law of the Land,” and when state laws prevent a federal law from operating as Congress intended — including the federal law creating the Title X program — then the state law must yield.
If the law worked any other way, then states would have the power to fundamentally alter federal welfare programs. Republican state lawmakers who believe that the Medicare or Social Security eligibility age should be 75 — or 125, for that matter — could pass a law imposing this new age requirement, thus destroying Congress’s power to create universal programs that benefit all Americans regardless of whether they live in a red state or a blue state.
Kacsmaryk attempts to weaponize the Constitution against birth control
The idea that parents have a constitutional right to shape their child’s upbringing — and that this right undermines government-funded contraceptive care — has been around for nearly half a century. It’s just never gained any real traction in federal court.
In Doe v. Irwin (1980), a federal appeals court case, the plaintiffs brought a similar challenge as Deanda against a state-operated family planning clinic that served both adults and teenagers. Doe acknowledged that a line of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to the 1920s establish that parents have a limited constitutional right “to the care, custody and nurture of their children.” At the same time, however, Doe held that “as with adults, the minor’s right of privacy includes the right to obtain contraceptives.” And so the plaintiffs’ claims in Doe placed these two constitutional rights in tension.
But the court found an easy way to relieve this tension. In each of the Supreme Court’s previous parental rights cases, “the state was either requiring or prohibiting some activity” — that is, the government used its coercive power to either require a child to take an action their parents did not like, or forbid the child from taking an action their parents wanted the child to take.
A program like Title X cannot violate this rule against coercion because there is nothing coercive about it. The federal government provides grants to health providers who voluntarily offer family planning services to their patients. And those providers, in turn, offer their services to patients who voluntarily seek out contraceptive care. No one is required to receive reproductive health care services funded by Title X.
This distinction between coercive government programs which compel certain behaviors, and welfare programs which merely fund voluntary activity, is implicit in the Constitution’s text. The Supreme Court (somewhat controversially) found the right of parents to shape their children’s upbringing in the Constitution’s due process clause, which provides that no one may be deprived of “liberty” without “due process of law.” But it’s impossible to deprive someone of liberty by creating a voluntary program that no one is required to participate in. “Liberty,” by definition, means the freedom to do as you choose.
To all of this, Kacsmaryk offers a hodgepodge of half-formed arguments that layer several additional pages onto his opinion without presenting much legal reasoning. One of his primary arguments rebutting Doe, for example, relies on the fact that the Supreme Court’s parental rights decision in Troxel v. Granville (2000) “does not rely on a heavy distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘compulsory’ programs.” But Troxel involved a coercive state law governing who is allowed to interact with a child against their parents’ wishes — so there was no reason for Troxel to discuss voluntary programs because such a program was not before the Court.
Similarly, he claims that “the common law held minors were incapable of giving consent to make important life decisions.” But English and early American law permitted minors to consent to sex as early as age 12, a fact that is simultaneously deeply upsetting and completely inconsistent with Kacsmaryk’s implication that 17-year-olds historically did not have control over their sexuality.
That leaves him with a policy argument against the rule announced in Doe. Kacsmaryk claims that limiting the scope of parents’ constitutional rights to cases involving actual coercion would lead to “absurd results,” such as preventing “parents from becoming aware of what books their children are reading in school and deny[ing] them the right to exempt their children from an offensive reading curriculum,” or preventing parents from intervening if a doctor provides care that is genuinely harmful.
But even if you assume that parents have a right to exempt their children from public school curriculums, a mandatory school assignment is a coercive act — so decisions like Doe are consistent with a rule allowing parents to exempt their children from certain school assignments.
Similarly, Kacsmaryk’s decision reaches far beyond the unlikely circumstances when a family planning clinic prescribes medically harmful treatments to teenagers. According to Kacsmaryk, “parental consent does not depend on the particular form of contraception or the environment in which the contraception is distributed.” So his decision would even prevent a public university from leaving out a basket of free condoms that anyone, including students who are not yet 18, can take from as they choose.
Obviously, questions about teenage sexuality are fraught. But the bottom line is that the people’s elected representatives in Congress debated these difficult issues, and they chose to enact a Title X program that provides funding that Kacsmaryk finds objectionable. It is simply not a judge’s job to short-circuit this democratic process of determining how the law should approach teenage sexuality. Nor is it Kacsmaryk’s job to impose his own well-documented prudishness on a federal program like Title X.
So what happens to Title X now?
Although Kacsmaryk claims that Title X “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” he has not yet ordered the federal government to halt the program. His opinion concludes by requiring the parties in Deanda to submit proposals by this Thursday laying out just what action Kacsmaryk should take against the federal government.
But Deanda’s lawyers have already signaled that they want an aggressive injunction that could temporarily shut down Title X, and permanently harm teenagers’ ability to obtain reproductive care.
In their complaint, these lawyers ask Kacsmaryk to prohibit the federal government from “funding any family-planning project in the United States that fails to obtain parental consent before distributing prescription contraception or other family-planning services to minors.” Should Kacsmaryk issue a such a sweeping order, which he could very well do given his past record, that could force the federal government to hit pause on the entire Title X program. To comply with such an order, Title X could have to build systems to determine which reproductive health providers give parents a veto power over medical care provided to their teenaged children.
There is a decent chance that Kacsmaryk will eventually be reversed by the Supreme Court — among other things, the standing problem in this case is so glaring that it may be hard for Deanda’s lawyers to convince five justices that they are allowed to bring this case in the first place. But it may be a while before that happens. Kacsmaryk’s decision will appeal first to the exceedingly conservative Fifth Circuit, which has a history of rubber-stamping outlandish decisions handed down by Kacsmaryk and similarly minded judges.
In the short term, in other words, Kacsmaryk could create a great deal of chaos for reproductive health clinics, which may lose an important source of funding for months or longer.
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Senior Advisor Stephen Miller, senior policy advisor to President trump, at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 26, 2019. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty)
America First Legal was founded last year by Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigrant family separation policy
But today, the landmark deal on behalf of historically disadvantaged farmers is dead — successfully challenged in court by a fledgling conservative organization that argued the program racially discriminated against White farmers.
America First Legal is headed by Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. While AFL lacks the name recognition and financial heft of many conservative counterparts, it has racked up notable court victories over the Biden administration. Casting itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL has weaponized the grievance politics embodied by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement through dozens of federal lawsuits, challenging efforts to remedy racial disparities, support LGBTQ students and expand the pool of early voters.
AFL-backed suits helped doom a $29 billion program that prioritized struggling female and minority-owned restaurants last year, and last week, a council created by the Department of Education that conservative parents groups viewed as partisan. AFL has won in part by consistently filing lawsuits in a conservative-friendly judicial district in Texas and taking advantage of a larger federal court system revamped by Trump’s predominantly conservative nominees.
The group’s success is alarming civil rights advocates, who fear Miller has figured out how to harness the courts to protect America’s declining White majority and unravel government policies intended to right historical wrongs against marginalized communities.
“Many of these lawsuits are centered on making sure that White people remain in control and continue to benefit from unearned privileges, and on maintaining the systemic discriminatory policies that have harmed Black people and other people of color for generations,” said David Hinojosa, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “To argue that White men are being pushed to the back of the line is unfounded and ridiculous. What they’re being asked to do is share a place in line with other people who do not look like them.”
In an interview, Miller said AFL is filling a void in the conservative legal movement by challenging what he termed “a hyperracialization of American political and corporate life.” Programs seeking to remedy past injustices and boost historically disadvantaged groups are punishing people based on their skin color, he said.
“I believe that the equity agenda represents one of the single greatest threats to the survival of our constitutional system,” he said.
The group’s mission was fueled by more than $6.3 million in donations last year, recent tax filings show, including about $1.3 million from the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose leadership includes key figures in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Steve Wynn, the casino magnate who resigned as finance chair of the Republican National Committee in 2018 amid allegations of sexual misconduct, is an AFL donor, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who were not authorized to speak publicly about its fundraising. Wynn, who has denied the allegations, declined to comment.
AFL is part of a constellation of groups led by Trump allies that represent an administration-in-waiting upon his potential return to the White House. AFL’s all-White, all-male board includes loyalists who recently trekked to Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement, including Miller, who helped write the speech, former Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought and former acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker. Miller, who is expected to work for the 2024 campaign, received $110,762 from AFL last year, about $134,000 from his Save America political committee since Trump left office, and is slated to be paid about $80,000 by the General Services Administration as part of Trump’s post-presidency funds, government documents show.
In the lead-up to the midterm election, AFL also bankrolled a multimillion dollar ad campaign that included inflammatory radio and TV spots demanding an end to “anti-white bigotry” and accusing the White House, businesses and universities of discriminating against White people.
Trump critics see AFL as the extension of a White House that frequently stoked racial division and a former president who last month dined at his Florida home with two well-known antisemites.
“The Trump administration didn’t care about people like me, it was for White men, and that’s what this group represents and is fighting for,” said John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, which intervened in the AFL-backed lawsuit challenging the aid to minority farmers. “It’s continuing the legacy of divisiveness.”
Miller, though, argues that AFL is fighting against “bigotry and insanity.”
“I think that it is inescapably true that there is insidious and explicit discrimination against White Americans, Asian Americans, Indian Americans and Jewish Americans based on their skin color and their ancestry,” he said.
According to Trump advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, Miller stays in close touch with Trump, contributes to his speeches and gave significant input on his endorsements in the midterm election, where many Trump-backed candidates who rejected Biden’s 2020 victory and took other far-right positions were defeated. Miller repeatedly complained during the campaign that Republican candidates were not talking enough about culture war issues and immigration and focusing too heavily on an economic message, people who spoke to him said. America “is the apex of achievement of Western civilization,” Miller said, with “a heritage to be jealously guarded.”
Miller founded AFL in early 2021, as a newly elected President Biden issued a flurry of executive orders dismantling the former president’s nativist agenda. Miller was involved in policies fervidly challenged by civil rights groups that banned immigration from several Muslim-majority countries and separated immigrant children from their parents.
“During the four years of the Trump administration — especially in the arena of immigration — every single executive action, no matter how rigorously lawful, was subjected to a never-ending stream of activist litigation,” Miller said. “One of my goals when I left the administration was to try to help and inspire and coordinate a larger legal movement on the conservative side of the spectrum to do the same.”
AFL was among several groups incubated in the first year of the Biden administration by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a central hub of the GOP’s pro-Trump wing. CPI describes AFL as a “partner” on its website, and three AFL board members, including Mark Meadows, who served as a chief of staff to the former president, also have top CPI posts.
Neither of these tax-exempt groups are required to disclose their donors to the public, though federal campaign records show Trump’s political committee, Save America, donated $1 million to CPI last year. In its 2021 annual report, CPI called AFL “the sling that hardworking, patriotic Americans can use to fight back against the abusive Goliath of the Biden Administration’s Deep State.”
CPI’s revenue exploded last year to $45 million, up from about $7 million in 2020, according to its latest tax filing, obtained by Accountable.US and the Center for Media and Democracy. Its $1.3 million donation to AFL was the largest of eight grants that it made last year. Tax records also show AFL last year received $25,000 from DonorsTrust, a nonprofit that contributes to a number of right-wing causes, and $10,000 from Citizens for Self-Governance, which favors a convention of states to limit the power of the federal government.
Miller declined to answer questions about the group’s donors. “It’s best for your adversaries to have less rather than more information when they meet you in court,” he said.
A Washington Post review found at least four dozen AFL-backed lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country since April 2021, some of which have received little attention outside of right-wing media.
To attack Biden’s aid to disadvantaged, minority farmers, Miller’s group made a brash choice for lead plaintiff: Sid Miller, the Trump-endorsed agriculture commissioner of Texas, who has questioned Biden’s dire warnings about white supremacy and compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes in social media posts.
Sid Miller did not respond to interview requests. The lawsuit was later amended to include four White plaintiffs who, unlike Sid Miller, actually carried federal farming loans, according to court documents.
The suit argued that the debt relief approved by Congress was unconstitutional because it excluded “white ethnic groups that have unquestionably suffered ethnic prejudice,” referring to Irish, Italian, German and other European immigrants and Jews. Sid Miller is White, with primarily Scotch and Irish roots, but said in the lawsuit that he has 2 percent African American ancestry.
“Any person with a traceable amount of minority ancestry must be regarded as a member of a ‘socially disadvantaged group,’” the suit said.
Sid Miller earns a $140,938 annual salary as a statewide official. He reported owning about 145 acres of land, a nursery, landscaping business and a ranch, as well as stock in dozens of companies, according to public records. Known for his signature white cowboy hat, he was first elected agriculture commissioner in 2014 and previously served as a state lawmaker.
To Black farmers who say they have felt the sting of racial bias, making Sid Miller the face of the legal challenge was an insult.
“Here is this very powerful person in a huge state who instead of wanting to assist Black farmers filed a lawsuit to block aid?” asked Boyd, who farms soybeans and other crops in southern Virginia. “It’s really disheartening.”
Judge Reed O’Connor, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, ruled in July 2021 in favor of the White plaintiffs, the third of four federal court orders that summer against the program. Congress repealed the program in August.
Boyd and three other minority farmers represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump sued the federal government two months later, alleging breach of contract by doing away with the debt relief program. That case is ongoing. Black farmers have lost more than 12 million acres in the past century, which agricultural experts attribute in part to discrimination in government loan programs.
Three weeks after AFL challenged the aid to minority farmers, it turned to an even larger federal program: the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which gave women, minorities and veterans a head start to submit applications for nearly $29 billion in pandemic relief. The suit argued that the fund was likely to run out of money before White restaurant owners got a chance to apply and thus discriminated against them.
A federal court in Texas agreed in late May of 2021, as did an appeals court in Tennessee that reviewed a similar lawsuit. At the same time, Gregory León, the son of a Venezuelan immigrant and the owner of Amilinda restaurant in Milwaukee, received notice that he would receive $285,000 from the fund to help him get through the pandemic-related downturn. Just two weeks later, as León struggled to pay vendors, he was among about 3,000 restaurant owners who got another government letter: The fund had been quashed by litigation.
León said he seriously considered closing down.
“I know the pandemic didn’t care what your race was, but it definitely affected certain people harder than others. This country was built on the backs of immigrants,” he said. “I find it quite shocking that people like Stephen Miller don’t see that ... The message is that if you’re not White you’re not welcome in this country and you do not deserve opportunity.”
AFL has notched some of its biggest successes in the Northern District of Texas, a popular venue for conservative plaintiffs because it includes divisions where one to three judges nominated by Republican presidents handle all civil cases. The lawsuits opposing federal aid for minority farmers and restaurant owners, among others, were all filed in that district.
Liberal organizations are also known for “forum shopping,” and frequently challenged Trump policies in the Northern District of California, where most judges were nominated by Democrats. But the small size of some divisions in the Northern District of Texas allows conservative plaintiffs to essentially handpick a particular judge by filing in certain courthouses.
That strategy was apparent in an AFL lawsuit filed in August 2021, which argued that the Affordable Care Act does not outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The case was filed in the Amarillo division, where Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee whose anti-LGBTQ views set off alarms, is assigned all civil cases. In response to questions from U.S. senators in 2017 about those views, Kacsmaryk promised to impartially apply the law.
Last month, Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of the AFL-backed plaintiffs, including two Texas doctors unwilling to prescribe hormone therapy to transgender minors. The judge had previously certified the case as a class-action lawsuit, extending its impact on health care providers nationwide.
“This is obviously a case that raises concerns about the most extreme form of judge shopping,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, counsel at Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ rights group. “This is also a case that ignores the reality and prevalence of health discrimination against the LGBTQ community in the health care context and the serious harm that causes.”
Miller called the ruling “epochal” and an “inflection point for what I believe is going to be the biggest legal battle for the next generation.”
The Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment.
Another ongoing AFL-backed lawsuit assigned to a judge nominated by Trump argues that the Texas A&M University’s hiring practices are unconstitutional “by giving discriminatory preferences to female or non-Asian minorities at the expense of white and Asian men,” leading to promotions for “inferior faculty.”
A Texas A&M spokesperson, Laylan Copelin, said the university is planning to recruit faculty whose research is focused on “underrepresented communities” but does not making hiring decisions based on gender or racial preferences that would hold back White or Asian men.
“It appears they were more interested in using Texas A&M to support their fundraising and publicity efforts, as opposed to addressing any actual misconduct,” Copelin said.
AFL partnered in this case and several others filed in Texas with the state’s former solicitor general, Jonathan Mitchell, who is credited with the novel legal strategy behind the state’s 2021 ban on most abortions after six weeks.
Most of the AFL-backed lawsuits are still pending and allege that federal agencies are withholding public records about a range of right-wing targets, including the prosecution of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, censorship by Big Tech, the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and a laptop used by President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Many of the records requests echo allegations made by the far right and are treated as news stories by conservative media outlets. AFL has also demanded nearly every federal agency to produce documents related to Biden’s executive order promoting racial equity, which Miller has called “government sponsored and directed racism.”
In some of the requests, AFL claims “widely recognized status as a representative of the news media” to expedite its requests.
Federal court judges have ruled against AFL in lawsuits opposing admissions criteria to ensure racial diversity at Philadelphia magnet schools, a New York program that considered race in determining eligibility for covid-19 treatment, a vaccine mandate for civilian federal employees, and Biden’s removal of Sean Spicer, a White House press secretary under Trump, and Vought, an AFL board member, from the U.S. Naval Academy Board of Visitors. AFL is appealing most of those cases.
“They step forward,” Spicer said. “No one else on the right is doing what they are doing in terms of holding the administration accountable.”
As a nonprofit charity that receives tax-deductible contributions, AFL is precluded from participating in any activity that urges voters to support or oppose particular political candidates. Instead, the group spent on ads and mailers this fall that broadly attacked the Biden administration and the left wing in states with high-stakes races for governor and Senate.
The ads, which included misleading and false claims about Biden’s policies on racial and LGBTQ issues, were condemned by left-leaning civil rights groups. “They’re trying to create mass hysteria and fear,” said Joni Madison of the Human Rights Campaign.
AFL Vice President Gene Hamilton, who worked in Trump’s Justice and Homeland Security departments, defended the ads in a previous statement that speaks to the group’s broader mission.
“The Biden administration and left-wing officials in education, business, and governments across the country are imposing policies that systemically and routinely discriminate against American citizens based solely on the color of their skin. That is illegal,” he said. “Our advertisements make the point that racism is always wrong — regardless of who it is targeted against.”
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Bolsonaro supporters clash with police after a member of their radical group was arrested for allegedly trying to incite violence that would prevent Lula from being sworn in on 1 January. (photo: Anadolu Agency)
Cars and buses torched after violence erupts following ratification of Lula’s election victory
The violence erupted on Monday evening after the leftwing politician who defeated Bolsonaro in October’s historic election – former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – had his victory officially ratified by Brazil’s electoral court.
Several hours later, hardcore Bolsonaristas who want the result overturned rampaged through the heart of Brasília, after a member of their radical group was arrested for allegedly trying to incite violence that would prevent Lula from being sworn in on 1 January.
Reuters said witnesses saw extremists, many wearing the yellow Brazil shirts that symbolise the president’s far-right movement, confronting security forces outside a federal police headquarters. Police used stun grenades and teargas to disperse the crowd.
Footage posted on social media by bystanders and local journalists showed militant Bolsonaro supporters setting fire to a bus.
“The centre of Brasília … looks like a war zone,” tweeted Alan Rios, a reporter from the local news website Metropoles, alongside images of the destruction. “Torched buses and cars, destroyed buildings and signposts, rubbish bins and gas canisters littering the floor after being used as weapons,” Rios wrote.
The political commentator Thomas Traumann tweeted his condemnation, saying: “Bolsonarismo has gone from being a popular far-right movement to being a terrorist cell.”
“It’s an attempt at [replicating] the Capitol,” Traumann added in reference to the storming of the US legislature by hardcore Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021. “It won’t work but it’s an attempt.”
The outbreak of violence, which had reportedly subsided by Tuesday morning, has sparked fears there could be further upheaval in the lead-up to Lula’s inauguration. Hundreds of thousands of supporters are expected to attend the event, at which some of Brazil’s best-known artists will perform, including Pabllo Vittar, Paulinho da Viola, Martinho da Vila and Maria Rita.
The man Lula has named as his future justice minister, Flávio Dino, tried to reassure Brazilians on Monday night, telling reporters: “Are there, unfortunately, people who want anti-democratic and illegal chaos? Yes there are. But these people did not prevail today and they will not prevail tomorrow.”
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Senators need to vote by January 3 to ban uranium mining in the Grand Canyon this year. (photo: Bruce Gordon/Ecoflight)
To get it done this year, senators need to vote by January 3.
The Senate has until January 3 to vote on the Grand Canyon Protection Act, a bill that would make a 20-year moratorium on new uranium mines near the Grand Canyon permanent, saving more than 1 million acres of public lands from development. The act has already been passed twice by the House of Representatives.
After the January 3 deadline, the legislative slate is wiped clean ahead of the start of the 118th Congress, with no promise of the Grand Canyon Protection Act being reintroduced to the Senate agenda next year.
The operations of the existing Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon would nonetheless not be impacted by the bill. While a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon was implemented in 2012, Pinyon Plain was exempt due to an earlier agreement.
The Grand Canyon forms part of the Colorado River Basin, a vast watershed with critical tributaries and reservoirs which provide water to over 40 million people in Southwest states and California. The territories of Indigenous tribes such as the Navajo Nation are also located there. But for decades, the region has been under intense economic and environmental pressure from uranium mining operations. Countless members of the Navajo Nation have suffered from higher rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses due to the nuclear waste left over from Cold War era uranium extraction.
Other Native communities in the area are also under threat from mining interests. Since the 1980s, the Havasupai Tribe, whose territory lies within the Grand Canyon, has fought against the ongoing operation of the nearby Pinyon Plain Mine. The controversial mine has been responsible for rupturing important groundwater resources during the drilling process, effectively depleting an essential natural resource.
“It is time to permanently ban uranium mining — not only to preserve the Havasupai Tribe’s cultural identity and our existence as the Havasupai People, but to protect the Grand Canyon for generations to come,” said the tribe’s chairman Thomas Siyuja, Sr.
“From an environmental standpoint, water resource standpoint and a cultural standpoint, it’s just the wrong place to do it,” said Amber Reimondo, the energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a local conservation and environmental justice organization. Reimondo explained that the Colorado River Basin is so complex and extensive that any contamination of its waters could have profound consequences for communities hundreds of miles away.
Hundreds of active uranium mining claims have been made near Grand Canyon National Park. These claims could develop into full-fledged operations if the Grand Canyon Protection Act doesn’t pass a Senate vote.
Uranium is a radioactive element that nonetheless occurs naturally in the earth’s soil, rock, and groundwater. The element is so ubiquitous in the environment that it is a major contributor to normal “background radiation.” When condensed in rock formations, uranium is far less radioactive than when it is extracted during mining operations.
Mining of uranium is essential for nuclear power generation. But to extract uranium, mining operations often use a mix of chemicals to dissolve the element from underground rock formations and into groundwater. The exposed uranium extraction – now far more radioactive – is then pumped to the surface through mine shafts and placed in surface-level evaporation ponds. The waste from the entire process can cause food, water, and air contamination.
Uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region has unsurprisingly been opposed by major environmental organizations. But mining has also faced pushback from local business owners who depend on a steady stream of tourists from around the world who expect to visit a pristine and beautiful natural environment. Arizona voters are also overwhelmingly supportive of the Grand Canyon Protection Act. The threat that uranium mining poses to healthy water resources is of particular concern in the Southwest, which is facing historic drought in the Colorado River Basin – which provides water to over 40 million Americans – and alarmingly low water levels in its reservoirs.
But banning new uranium mines on the federal lands that make up the Grand Canyon would only address part of the problem. The Pinyon Plain Mine would still pose a threat to natural resources that tribal nations depend on and visitors cherish. In addition, tribal leaders and environmental advocates are still struggling to get the federal government to clean up the radioactive waste from hundreds of abandoned mines.
In the rush to take advantage of nuclear power’s purported green energy benefits, Reimondo, of Grand Canyon Trust, says, the same mistakes of the fossil fuel era are being made in the clean energy era.
“Indigenous communities from around the world have known for hundreds of years that uranium is something you don’t touch,” she said. “Because once you expose it, it’s like a Pandora’s Box, and you can’t close it again.”
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