Middleboro Review 2: 08/17/22

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

POLITICO NIGHTLY: The impeachment revenge tour’s unexpected fallout

Sen. Lisa Murkowski walks to the Senate chamber for a vote. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

SAVED BY THE BALLOT — For House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump, the 2022 primaries have been a bloodbath. Four of the 10 lost their primaries. Another four decided against running again. Just two made it to the November ballot.

The two primary season survivors, Reps. David Valadao of California and Dan Newhouse of Washington, have something in common — both ran in states that use a top-two primary system rather than traditional partisan primaries. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who voted to convict Trump but advanced to the general election Tuesday night, was also the beneficiary of an alternative primary format. Her survival in Tuesday’s election was almost certainly due to a top-four ranked choice voting initiative that passed in 2020. (We’re still waiting for results from Alaska’s special election to fill late Republican Rep. Don Young’s seat; the election will likely come down to Republican Sarah Palin and Democrat Mary Peltola.)

At a time of rising political polarization and growing frustration with the two-party system , Trump’s impeachment revenge tour has put these alternative voting systems in the national spotlight.

It’s clear that voters are fed up and ready for serious change. This July, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that 58 percent of voters believe our democracy needs “major reforms” or “a complete overhaul.” New ways of voting for our elected representatives promise a more accurate representation of the will of the people — or at the very least a fighting chance for politicians who don’t gravitate toward extremes.

“Candidates who do well in ranked choice elections tend to be those who connect with the widest group of voters possible,” said Deb Otis, the director of research at FairVote, an advocacy organization focused on electoral reform. “Our current elections often appeal to only one niche base of voters.”

Otis’ organization has taken up the cause of ranked choice voting, a system gaining traction around the country that will get a big test in Alaska’s Senate race in November, where Murkowski and her Trump-backed GOP challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, and two other candidates will face off.

The system is fairly simple: You rank your preferred candidates in order. After all of the ballots are cast, the candidate with the lowest first-place vote total is eliminated, and the remaining candidates divvy up their second-place votes. This continues until one candidate reaches a majority of votes.

According to Jeanne Massey, an RCV advocate based in Minneapolis (where the city has held RCV elections since 2009), the system can quickly usher in a new era of politics.

“It immediately changed three things [in Minneapolis]: who decided to run, how campaigns were run and who could be elected.”

As Massey tells it, candidates are forced to run more positive, honest campaigns, because they want second- and third-place votes in open elections with more participants. The system can also deliver surprising results. In Maine — which passed an RCV ballot initiative in 2016 — Democrat Jared Golden defeated Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin in the largely rural 2nd Congressional District by the slimmest of margins in 2018. He did so thanks to ranked choice voting — while Golden was trailing by about 2,000 votes on election night, the second-choice votes of independents broke toward Golden, giving him a final victory of over 3,000 votes.

Murkowski is hoping that Alaskans can similarly coalesce around her as a moderate alternative to Tshibaka. She’s looked to attract a cocktail of moderate Republicans, Democrats and independents in order to win in a red state.

“It’s easier for moderate and centrist candidates to do better under these alternative primary methods because it makes the candidates accountable to all voters, instead of just primary voters from one party,” said Otis.

This November, as Alaskans use ranked choice voting to determine their next senator, another state may be added to the RCV roster. A ballot measure in Nevada will ask voters in the key swing state whether they want to establish a top-five RCV format similar to Alaska’s. A recent poll found voters in favor by a 15-percentage-point margin.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on Twitter at @calder_mchugh.

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WHAT'D I MISS?

— Ousted Florida prosecutor sues DeSantis over suspension: Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren today filed a federal lawsuit arguing Gov. Ron DeSantis abused his power when suspending him from office over, among other things, a pledge to not prosecute women who violate Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban. DeSantis detractors immediately condemned Warren’s Aug. 4 suspension as political overreach and targeting a political foe. The governor characterized Warren’s suspension as removing a progressive prosecutor who refused to enforce laws.

— Pence ‘would consider’ testifying to Jan. 6 committee: Former Vice President Mike Pence hasn’t ruled out testifying before the Jan. 6 select committee investigating efforts by his former boss and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it,” Pence told a packed room at an event this morning. The Jan. 6 panel has weighed whether to formally seek Pence’s testimony for months.

— CDC director orders agency overhaul, admitting flawed Covid-19 response: The CDC is launching an overhaul of its structure and operations in an attempt to modernize the agency and rehabilitate its reputation following intense criticism of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and, more recently, the growing monkeypox outbreak. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky today shared a series of changes with CDC leadership and staff designed to “transform” the organization and its work culture by improving how the agency shares information, develops public health guidance and communicates with the American public.

— Groups to sue Florida Medicaid program over ban on gender-affirming care: A coalition of transgender-rights organizations is preparing to sue Florida to stop the state’s Medicaid regulator from banning coverage of treatments such as puberty blockers, hormone therapies or surgical procedures for gender dysphoria. Simone Criss, director of the Southern Legal Counsel’s Transgender Rights Initiative, said today the coalition is expecting to file the case in federal court and will seek a preliminary injunction to halt the ban, which takes effect on Sunday, from going forward.

— Planned Parenthood to spend a record $50 million in midterms: The money will be used to elect abortion access advocates and surpasses the $45 million the group committed to in 2020. Planned Parenthood has identified Georgia, Nevada, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin as 2022 targets.

AROUND THE WORLD

CRIMEA CO-SIGN — Attacking Crimea is fair game for Ukraine — and it has America’s support to hit the Russians there, writes Alex Ward.

Kyiv was behind the three explosions this past week on the Russian-annexed peninsula, per a CNN-obtained Ukrainian government document, including a large blast at Saki airbase that destroyed several of Moscow’s warplanes.

No Ukrainian official has yet publicly admitted to Kyiv’s involvement in the Crimea campaign. But Defense Minister Oleksii Rezikov told Voice of America today that Ukraine hasn’t ruled out striking the occupied territory with U.S.-provided weapons.

And a senior U.S. administration official told POLITICO the U.S. supports strikes on Crimea if Kyiv deems them necessary. “We don’t select targets, of course, and everything we’ve provided is for self-defense purposes. Any target they choose to pursue on sovereign Ukrainian soil is by definition self defense,” this person said.

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NIGHTLY NUMBER

$650 million

The amount in damages awarded today to two Ohio counties that won a landmark lawsuit against national pharmacy chains CVS, Walgreens and Walmart , claiming the way they distributed opioids to customers caused severe harm to communities and created a public nuisance. The judge said the money will be used to abate a continuing opioid crisis in Lake and Trumbull counties, outside Cleveland.

PARTING WORDS

NASA's Space Launch System rocket with the Orion spacecraft in Cape Canaveral, Florida. | Joel Kowsky/NASA via Getty Images

GIANT LEAP — NASA is preparing to launch its first moon mission to pave the way for returning astronauts to the lunar surface — this time to stay.

Now all they have to do is find someone to run it, writes Bryan Bender.

Just three years from now, NASA plans to begin regularly rotating astronauts to the lunar surface to establish a base for scientific research and extract water and other resources to live and make fuel — all in preparation for sending humans to Mars. The series of increasingly complex missions is known as the Artemis program.

But there’s little sign of a solid plan. Dan Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the former head of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission, warned Congress this spring that NASA’s “piecemeal, uncoordinated approach is doomed to failure.”

And he’s not alone. A number of agency insiders, veterans and oversight authorities are sounding the alarm ahead of the maiden launch of the Space Launch System, the biggest rocket ever built, and the Orion capsule that are set to blast off in late August.

Congress this month passed a NASA policy bill, the first in five years, that requires the agency to swiftly set up a dedicated Artemis program office to manage a host of increasingly complex programs. Still, “three years is not a lot of time,” said Patricia Sanders, chair of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. And though NASA has set an aggressive course in its return to the moon, it remains to be seen whether all of the pieces can fit together.

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RSN: FOCUS: The Killing of a Portland Antifascist Activist Went Unsolved. Then Journalists Sued the City

17 August 22

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FOCUS: The Killing of a Portland Antifascist Activist Went Unsolved. Then Journalists Sued the City
Alice Speri, The Intercept
Speri writes: "Three years after Sean Kealiher was killed, police arrested a suspect, just as The Intercept's public records lawsuit neared a ruling."

Three years after Sean Kealiher was killed, police arrested a suspect, just as The Intercept’s public records lawsuit neared a ruling.

For months after her son’s killing, Laura Kealiher waited for the results of a police investigation. The case seemed an easy one: Sean Kealiher, a 23-year-old antifascist well known in Portland’s protest scene and to police, was run over by a car following an argument outside a bar popular with leftist activists. As he bled on the sidewalk, the people in the car left on foot, leaving the vehicle behind. Surveillance cameras captured much of the incident.

That was October 2019. More than a year later, as Portland had become the epicenter of a national protest movement following the police killing of George Floyd, Laura Kealiher, frustrated by authorities’ inaction, took to Facebook, where in a public video she named two of the men that she said were in the car that night. A detective called her, asking to know how she knew their identities. Still, the investigation went nowhere.

This month, one of the men, Christopher Knipe, was arrested after confessing to police that he was at the wheel of the car that killed her son. On Tuesday, he was arraigned on second-degree murder charges and entered a not guilty plea.

Laura Kealiher, who had missed a call from the district attorney’s office and learned about the arrest when the news became public, questioned the timing of the arrest: nearly three years after Sean’s killing and long after she had revealed Knipe’s identity (though she had publicly posted that she believed he was only a passenger in the car, and that another man was at the wheel). Kealiher also credited The Intercept, which filed a lawsuit against the city of Portland over the police investigation records in the case, with pushing police to finally solve it.

“They would have let this go nowhere if it hadn’t been for you guys,” Kealiher told The Intercept. “They literally, in my opinion, waited until they were like, ‘Oh, shit. They’re going to prove that we have not done anything even though we have all this evidence.’”

Last March, The Intercept published a long feature and podcast about the case, detailing Sean Kealiher’s life and death as well as the long-running and intensifying conflict in Portland between far-left and far-right groups. In the story, his mother and many of his friends suggested that Portland police had no interest in solving the murder of an activist who made no secret of his contempt for them. “They know who owns the car, I think everybody knows who owns the car,” a fellow antifascist activist told The Intercept at the time, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with a common conviction among antifascists about the need to protect their identities. “You’d think they’d just go arrest the guy, but they haven’t. And they won’t, because Sean was somebody they hated.”

Before publication of its story and podcast, The Intercept filed a series of public records requests, seeking documentation that would show what police had done to investigate the case. In June 2021, we sued the city for failure to comply with public records laws. Separately, Oregon Public Broadcasting, which covered Sean Kealiher’s killing in a podcast series of its own, also sued the city for records, and was in the process of appealing the city’s redactions when Knipe was arrested.

The legal actions led to some disclosures — over 2,000 pages of heavily redacted documents — but the city refused to release most records, including those that would answer The Intercept’s core question: Were police doing anything to solve this case?

That question remains unanswered, as does the question of whether police belatedly made an arrest in the case only as a result of legal pressure from The Intercept and OPB.

Unanswered Questions

It’s not clear, for instance, when police obtained surveillance video of the incident, cited in court documents, that reportedly shows Knipe driving away from the bar, then turning around, hitting Sean Kealiher, and finally “nonchalantly walking away from the crash.”

Laura Kealiher believes police had that video all along, and noted that one of the prosecutors originally assigned to the case had told her early on that homicide charges would be filed soon. When that prosecutor left the office, a few months later, the new one told her that the assessment had been premature, and that the first prosecutor should have never told her that homicide charges were imminent. For two years, the office had no updates for her, until this summer.

It’s also not clear when police first interviewed Knipe, whose name was known to them at least since Laura Kealiher made it public in 2020. And it’s unknown when they first interviewed a key witness in the case, a co-worker of Knipe, who went on the record for the first time on OPB’s podcast. In an article last week, OPB suggested that the litigation by them and The Intercept’s “may have played a role” in the case.

“Looking at the timing, and the evidence that was presented in the probable cause affidavit for Christopher Knipe’s arrest, it seems like those lawsuits did maybe play a factor, because I think there were so many legal arguments against the city that there was probably this sense that these records were going to come out, eventually,” Ryan Haas, a news editor at OPB who closely followed the case, told The Intercept. “I do think the onus is on the police now, because I think this case, with the way this played out, implies that Laura’s arguments were correct. You knew who this person was, for a long time, and you did nothing about it. So what was the deal?”

Court documents indicate that when police first spoke to Knipe as part of their investigation, he told them that his car had been stolen on the evening it had been used in the killing. But it wasn’t until June of this year — just after The Intercept’s legal team filed a motion for summary judgment in its public records case — that police pushed back on his story and confronted him with the video evidence. While Knipe allegedly admitted to driving the car that killed Sean Kealiher on that occasion — telling police, according to court records, “I guess I better come clean” — he was not arrested until several weeks later, on August 4. That’s a day before OPB was supposed to receive a ruling about a motion to unredact some of the files, and two weeks before The Intercept and the city of Portland were scheduled to appear before a judge for a hearing that might conclude the case. Both publications are continuing to pursue records of the investigation.

“There is a potential for more of a case for transparency here,” said Haas. “I think there are a lot of unanswered questions in this case still.”

Rian Peck, a Portland-based attorney who is representing The Intercept in the case, called the timing of Knipe’s arrest “suspicious.”

“In the years since Sean’s killing, the city, police, and prosecutors have hinted that they were waiting for some big break in the investigation — some new piece of evidence or new witness. But it turned out that all it took was confronting Knipe with the video evidence and, boom, they have an admission,” Peck said. “It’s unclear why they couldn’t have done that years ago, before we filed The Intercept’s summary judgment motion. That’s why we still need access to these public records. The public deserves to know what police knew and when.”

Elisabeth Shepard, a spokesperson for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting Knipe, declined to comment on the specifics of the case. “It is interesting timing,” Shepard told The Intercept. “But that’s not something that’s under our authority to be able to discuss, particularly because our goal is to convict the person that murdered this person, that’s our one job.” Knipe’s court-appointed attorney, Russell Barnett, told The Intercept that he wouldn’t be able to comment on the case in detail until after reviewing discovering material.

“The time between the incident and the arrest was surprisingly long,” he added. “But every case is different. That was just my first thought on reading it, but there may be reasons, I don’t know.”

Sgt. Kevin Allen, a spokesperson for the Portland Police Bureau, declined to answer questions about when police obtained surveillance video and when they first spoke to Knipe. He added that he had “no information” about The Intercept and OPB’s lawsuits and deferred questions to the Office of the City Attorney. But the lead detective on the homicide investigation, Detective Scott Broughton, knows about The Intercept’s case: In May and July, he signed declarations that were filed in court to support the city’s motion for summary judgment.

“While an arrest has been made, the criminal justice process is still underway,” Allen wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Much more information will be made public later.” A spokesperson for the City Attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Knipe’s arrest hardly felt like resolution to Laura Kealiher, who has come to embrace many of her late son’s views, including a rejection of police, courts, and the carceral system. She wanted police held accountable, she said, not a man held in prison potentially for decades.

“What’s the guy going to prison going to do?” she told The Intercept. “It’s not going to bring Sean back. I wish we had a restorative justice setup. Because for me, literally what I have wanted from the beginning is, I want to sit down with the person who killed my son. I want to hear his life story. I want to know: What are you going to do to change that life so you don’t do something this disgusting ever again?”

“But that’s not how it works,” she added. “Instead, he is going to be put in a penal system where he’s probably going to be abused or victimized. And that’s not what Sean would want.”

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