Earlier this week, the FBI — executing a lawful warrant and with the approval of the United States attorney general himself — searched Donald Trump’s gaudy Mar-a-Lago club/residence in Florida.
The search was at least in part related to an investigation into whether Donald Trump illegally took classified and top secret documents from the White House.
MAGA militants, irresponsible “journalists” at right-wing outlets like Fox News, and even many Republican elected officials have reacted by calling for violence and outright civil war. Over a search warrant.
And the two most powerful Republicans in Congress — Senator Mitch McConell and Representative Kevin McCarthy — haven’t uttered so much as a single word denouncing this incendiary rhetoric.
Not even after an armed Trump adherent (who may have taken part in the January 6 insurrection) mounted a one-man assault on an FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio. (The man was fatally shot by police after a car chase, a multi-hour standoff, and failed attempts at negotiation.)
Experts in political violence are sounding the alarm. The spread — and acceptance — of threats and calls to arms makes actual political violence much more likely. Supposed leaders must loudly reject such dangerous rhetoric.
⇨ McConnell is counting on Republicans to win in Arizona and Georgia so he can rip away our Senate majority and destroy President Biden’s agenda.
⇨ And Politico just reported that a McConnell-aligned SuperPAC is dumping $141,OOO,OOO into key swing state races!
⇨ Our Democrats are still virtually-tied with their far-right Republican opponents! So we need to keep up this momentum and fight back against McConnell’s mega-millions.
We’ve set a $25,000 fundraising goal this week to drastically boost Democratic turnout in Arizona and Georgia this November.
After Democrats' historic victories in 2020, we know that there’s no such thing as a red district or a red county.
To save and expand our Congressional majorities, Democrats in red districts need to be shown that their vote counts!
That’s why we’re using our expert staff or organizers to invest in flipping rural seats blue. Our cutting-edge programs work to turn out Democrats and build on the progressive agenda we've fought so hard for.
We CANNOT afford to lose!
If you’d like to chip in to help us elect our endorsed Democratic candidates, click here.
PAID FOR BY BLUE WAVE AMERICA (BLUEWAVEAMERICA.ORG) AND NOT AUTHORIZED BY ANY CANDIDATE OR CANDIDATE'S COMMITTEE
Ted Cruz is about to take the stage at a MASSIVE rally in Nevada to defeat me! I can’t fight back against his vicious attacks without your immediate support.
It’s no secret why Cruz is flying across the country for this rally: Donald Trump was JUST here for an emergency MAGA rally after a brand-new poll showed me SURGING. I’m only ONE point behind my Trump-endorsed opponent, and I’m on the verge of taking the lead. That’s why the GOP is sending all of their radical extremists to attack me and destroy our momentum!
Even though CNN has named me the most vulnerable senator in the country, we are SO CLOSE to winning this race and saving our Senate majority. But Cruz and Trump’s rallies will erase all the ground we’ve gained — unless we fight back now! That’s why I urgently need your help to hit this emergency $50,000 rapid response goal before Cruz takes the stage.
I can’t win this race without your support. So I can’t thank you enough for stepping up at this critical moment.
Mark Kelly was a Captain in the U.S. Navy and astronaut. Use of his military rank, job titles and photographs in uniform does not imply endorsement by the Department of the Navy or Department of Defense and reference to NASA does not imply endorsement by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
After Democrats' historic victories in 2020, we know that there’s no such thing as a red district or a red county.
To save and expand our Congressional majorities, Democrats in red districts need to be shown that their vote counts!
That’s why we’re using our expert staff or organizers to invest in flipping rural seats blue. Our cutting-edge programs work to turn out Democrats and build on the progressive agenda we've fought so hard for.
We CANNOT afford to lose!
If you’d like to chip in to help us elect our endorsed Democratic candidates, click here.
PAID FOR BY BLUE WAVE AMERICA (BLUEWAVEAMERICA.ORG) AND NOT AUTHORIZED BY ANY CANDIDATE OR CANDIDATE'S COMMITTEE
Just as the mind recoils at the sight of a single book burned, the spilled blood of an author inspires revulsion.
Salman Rushdie has had a price on his head for 33 years. He is a writer who has lived with the fear of being killed for his words. Whatever other opinion one might have about Rushdie and his skills as a novelist or his public persona, this much is true: He has understood what it means to be targeted and hated—burned in effigy—forced to hide and, even in recent years, to continue to look over his shoulder. All because he wrote a book.
And so it came as a shock, but maybe not as a surprise, that Rushdie was attacked this morning onstage, in Chautauqua, New York, of all places. He was about to speak to an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, a cottage community that was founded in the late 19th century as a place for religious learning, and that has since become an oasis of education and discussion every summer. That it was here that Rushdie was struck repeatedly with a knife is a terrible irony.
We still don’t know the attacker’s motive, just that eyewitnesses were startled by how fast it happened and grateful for how quickly the attacker was detained. Of course one immediately wonders whether this act of violence was carried out by someone who intended to fulfill the fatwa issued in 1989 after furious reaction to his novel Satanic Verses—a call never truly rescinded—or whether this person had some other twisted explanation for their actions. But we know the results. Rushdie was still in surgery as of this evening, The New York Times reported. And regardless of why the violence took place, one message was unambiguous precisely because the target was a writer: Free expression is worthy of a death sentence. This alone pushes us into dangerous territory, because now it is something that has happened; something once considered a worst-case scenario is now an actuality—one that could happen again.
Maybe the most jolting immediate reaction was from PEN America: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil.” And it’s true: What other societies have given us murdered authors? Stalin’s Soviet Union is the one that comes quickest to my mind. Osip Mandelstam dying in a prison camp. Isaac Babel executed. The Yiddish poets and writers whom the dictator ordered shot in the basement of the Lubyanka prison. Rushdie has not been targeted by his own state, of course—after living in hiding for years in London, he has lived openly in New York for the past two decades. Again, we still don’t know why he was singled out for this brutality. But just as the mind recoils at the sight of a single book burned, the spilled blood of an author inspires revulsion.
Rushdie himself has become something of an absolutist on the freedom of expression. In a speech at Emory University in 2015, he said that “limiting freedom of expression is not just censorship, it’s an assault on human nature.” He rejected the relativistic notion that “freedom of expression is culturally specific” and that certain cultures can simply “reserve the right to reject it.” To him, the right to speak your mind, about anything, is universal, and he warns of the danger that accompanies the fact that it has ceased to be considered as such. In some ways, he never stopped fighting the debate that first ignited around the fatwa, with some defending him unreservedly and others arguing that perhaps his perceived insult of Islam was a mistake and a needless provocation on his part.
This morning’s violence cuts through this debate, silences it—as violence often does. Writers represent the part of our culture that engages with humanity through ideas, whose passion is expressed through sentences and paragraphs and pages. It’s a realm we should not just preserve but defend. May it never be eroded by the brute force of an arm wielding a knife. We should all hope that Rushdie survives. And not just because a writer should never have to give his life for what he has written. But because we need him to keep reminding us of the worst of what can happen—the violence that can happen—to someone who has used nothing more than his words.
Leftwing senator says party squandered chance to be bold, and takes aim at ‘corporate Democrats’ Sinema and Manchin
As Democrats celebrate the long-sought passage of Joe Biden’s sweeping health, climate and economic package, Bernie Sanders is not ready to declare victory. Instead, the Vermont senator is sounding the alarm that Congress has failed to meet the moment, with potentially grave consequences for American democracy.
“We are living in enormously difficult times,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “And I worry very much … that people are giving up on democracy because they do not believe that their government is working for them.”
The legislation, which Biden is expected to sign into law next week, is but a sliver of the ambitious domestic policy initiative that Sanders, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, helped draft last year. The original proposal was, in his view, already a compromise. But he believes it would have gone a long way in addressing the widespread economic distress that is undermining Americans’ faith in their government.
With control of Congress at stake this fall, Sanders believes Democrats squandered a major opportunity, probably their last before the midterm elections, to show voters what they could deliver with even larger majorities in Congress.
“It seems to me that what we should have done is gone forward with a bold agenda, to show the American people, ordinary people, that we understand what’s going on in their lives,” he said. “And if we cannot succeed because we don’t have the 50 votes, at least let the American people understand that we are fighting for them, and that we had to make a compromise to do far, far, far less than what is necessary.”
Sanders supported the resulting compromise, finalized after a year of strained negotiations and setbacks, because he concluded that “the pluses outweighed the negatives”.
A core pillar of the bill is nearly $400bn in climate and energy proposals, a historic sum that scientists estimate will help the US cut emissions by about 40% by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels. It also enables Medicare to negotiate the price of some prescription drugs, caps the annual out-of-pocket costs of the program’s beneficiaries at $2,000 and extends pandemic-era health insurance subsidies. To pay for it, the bill establishes a new 15% minimum tax on the nation’s biggest corporations.
But perhaps most notable, Sanders said, is what was left out.
Initially envisioned as a wholesale rebuilding of the American social safety net, weakened by decades of disinvestment, widening income inequality and stagnating wealth, the plan was slashed and trimmed and slashed again in an effort to appeal to two Democratic holdouts in the Senate, where the chamber’s even split left no margin for error.
Abandoned in the process were proposals to lower the cost of childcare, establish universal pre-K, guarantee parental leave, expand care for elderly and disabled people, and make community college tuition-free for two years. These policies, he argued, are the best way to begin easing the economic hardship facing so many American families.
To underscore his point, the senator listed a series of worrying indicators – elderly Americans unable to afford home care, families struggling to pay for childcare and young people burdened by student-loan debt, all of it made worse by soaring costs of necessities such as food, fuel and rent.
“A lot of people are hurting and they’re looking to the United States Congress, asking, ‘Do you understand what’s going on in my life right now?’” he said. “And I think their conclusion is no, they don’t.”
Sanders registered his dismay in a series of sharp floor speeches before the Senate vote last weekend, during which he decried Democrats’ plan as an “extremely modest bill that does virtually nothing to address the enormous crises facing the working families of our country”.
Another tradeoff that especially infuriated Sanders, and many climate activists, was the inclusion of fossil fuel and drilling provisions, which were added to win the support of Manchin, whose conservative state is heavily dependent on the coal and gas industries.
As heatwaves, floods and wildfires wreak havoc across the country, Sanders said: “Does anybody in their right mind think this is sensible, when you’re talking about climate?”
Yet he was optimistic that there had been a “change in consciousness” among lawmakers on the issue, partly because the effects were undeniable but also because of the actions of activists and young people.
“The activists should be proud,” he said, crediting their persistence for pushing Congress to make its largest ever investment in strategies to slow global warming.
During the Senate’s marathon, overnight debate – known as a “vote-a-rama” – Sanders offered a number of amendments that sought to restore some of the policies dropped from the original bill in an effort to win support from Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They included proposals to extend the child tax credit, expand Medicare coverage, cap the cost of prescription drugs and establish a civilian climate corps.
All were defeated, overwhelmingly: 1-99, 1-98, 1-97, with Sanders offering, he later quipped, the “resounding one” vote.
The votes frustrated some of his colleagues, who determined that Sanders’ approach risked upsetting their fragile coalition.
“Come on, Bernie,” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio was overheard saying, after explaining that most Democrats supported the policies but were acting to preserve the broader deal.
Republicans, meanwhile, have derided the measure as reckless spending that would worsen not improve inflation. Sanders’ criticism of the bill as the “so-called Inflation Reduction Act” provided fodder for Republicans.“This won’t reduce inflation,” Republican senator Lindsey Graham, vice-chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said recently. “Just ask Bernie Sanders.”
Vice-President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on Sunday afternoon, and the House gave final passage the measure on Friday.
Acknowledging the political reality of Democrats thin majorities, Sanders argued that his Senate colleagues could have sent a strong message to voters by supporting his amendments, even if they were destined to fail.
“At this particular moment, we cannot leave it to conservative Democrats to define the direction in which Congress and the Democratic party is going,” Sanders said – an apparent reference to Manchin and Sinema.
Progressives in the House voiced similar reservations as Sanders, but ultimately saw the measure as the best chance to achieve some of their economic policy goals while Democrats control Congress. Ahead of the House vote on Friday, congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, a progressive from Washington, said there was much more to do but urged her colleagues to “celebrate this massive investment for the people”.
Biden declared the legislation a significant victory over “special interests”. “It required many compromises,” he said after the bill’s passage. “Doing important things almost always does.”
Sanders said the measure amounted to a “slight defeat” for Big Pharma – an industry, he noted, that counts as many as three lobbyists per member of Congress. But the senator said the prescription drug reforms were far too limited in scope, as the changes leave out most Americans, only apply to 10 drugs initially, and won’t take effect until 2026.
Senate Republicans rejected an amendment that would have capped insulin prices at $35 for Americans not on Medicare, a move Sanders said, “exposes the fraud for anyone who thinks the Republican party cares a damn about working people”.
Now as Democrats fan out across the country for the summer recess, many are testing a new pitch: touting their legislative success while asking voters to deliver them another, bigger congressional majority next year to accomplish what they could not this year.
With two more senators, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, said in a recent interview, “We would get childcare. We would get paid family leave. We would get help for the elderly, home care. We would get the kind of things that Joe Manchin was against.”
In the weeks ahead, Sanders said he plans to hit the trail for Democrats, with a blunter version of that message: “Give us two or three more seats so we don’t have to make compromises with corporate Democrats.”
