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A forthcoming subpoena and a cascade of disadvantageous court rulings made last week particularly trying for the ex-president.
Last week was a particularly trying one for Trump. He faced a blizzard of bad news, on multiple fronts, underscoring his exposure now that he is just a regular citizen and not president.
The highlight came on Thursday, when the House January 6 committee held its last public hearing before the midterm elections in November. Committee members made the case that Trump himself brought on the January 6 insurrection aimed at stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president. The committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., called Trump the “central player” of January 6.
During the hearing, the committee revealed evidence that Trump incited the insurrection, even though he had privately acknowledged that he knew he’d lost. The committee aired testimony from a former Trump White House aide who recalled going into the Oval Office a week after the November, 2020 election, and finding Trump watching television. “Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy?” Trump asked the aide, referring to Biden.
The panel voted unanimously to subpoena Trump to testify. But that was just the beginning of Trump’s very bad week.
While the House hearing was underway on Thursday, the Supreme Court, which Trump had packed with three ultraconservative justices, and which he might thus have expected to be sympathetic to his cause, ruled against him. The court rejected a key Trump appeal of a lower-court ruling, part of his broader legal strategy to stop the Justice Department and the FBI from using the classified documents found during a court-authorized search of his Mar-a-Lago home in August. Trump wants the government to be forced to return the documents to him, which he apparently thinks would stop the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation in connection with the documents; the Supreme Court’s terse order effectively rejected that notion.
The ruling followed press reports Wednesday that a Trump employee has told the FBI that, as government officials sought to retrieve thousands of documents that Trump was keeping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump personally ordered the employee to move the boxes containing the documents to his residence. Security camera footage of the employee moving the boxes appears to corroborate his story. Such testimony could be damning evidence in an obstruction of justice case against Trump.
Other legal problems for Trump surfaced elsewhere last week. Marc Short, the chief of staff for former Vice President Mike Pence, testified Thursday before a federal grand jury in Washington in connection with the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump had sought to block Short’s testimony, invoking executive privilege, but a judge rejected that claim. The ruling could ultimately make it easier for federal prosecutors to get other former top Trump administration officials to testify before the grand jury.
The former president’s legal problems continued in New York, where Attorney General Letitia James asked a judge on Thursday to prevent Trump’s company from selling or moving assets without court approval. James wants to stop Trump from trying to shield his money from the possible penalties he may face as a result of the lawsuit she filed in September against Trump, three of his children, and their family business. In that suit, James accused them of engaging in a prolonged fraud by falsifying the value of company assets. Her office has also referred the evidence gathered in her civil lawsuit to federal prosecutors for a criminal investigation.
Finally, in yet another courtroom back in Washington, Trump’s long-standing efforts to discredit the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin took another damaging hit this week. While Trump was still president, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr appointed John Durham as special prosecutor to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. The appointment was Barr’s gift to Trump; Durham’s mission was to search for wrongdoing in the way the investigation was opened and conducted.
But while Durham has stayed on as a special prosecutor long after the end of the Trump administration, his attempts to prove that the Trump-Russia case was a politicized bad faith effort to undermine Trump have largely failed. He has had only two cases that have led to charges, and the first one fell apart in May, when Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was acquitted on charges of lying to the FBI for sharing a tip about Trump and Russia.
This week, his last remaining case, against FBI informant Igor Danchenko, has taken a series of damaging hits. Durham charged Danchenko with lying to the FBI about issues related to the Trump-Russia investigation, particularly the so-called Steele dossier, a collection of rumors and tips about possible ties between Trump and Russia compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Danchenko was a source for Steele, while also serving as an FBI informant.
But the FBI agents who Durham brought in to testify have undermined Durham’s case and defended Danchenko. They have said that he was a valuable informant, and one testified that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. On Friday, the judge in the case dismissed one of the charges brought against Danchenko, damaging Durham’s prosecution even further.
A few more weeks like this one might bankrupt Trump or land him in prison — or he might just officially announce that he’s running for president in 2024.
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January 6. (photo: Erin Scott/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
The memo sent via email to now FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate — first revealed by NBC News — is the latest ominous sign of increasing politicization of policing organizations that are supposed to be without partisan bias.
“There’s no good way to say it, so I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since Jan. 6, there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol,” the email reads.
The sender’s name has been redacted, which was part of a trove of documents released this week by the FBI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The message is marked “external email” but may have been written by a current or former agent or official on a personal computer. The writer refers to a past FBI “unit” and talking with agents. Abbate, who was then associate deputy director of the bureau, personally responded to the writer with a thank you for sharing the information. The sender addressed Abbate by his first name.
In the message, the sender referred to an unnamed retired senior FBI analyst who had packed his Facebook page with “Stop the Steal” propaganda, referring to former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the election he lost was rigged.
The email noted that several agents insisted the violence at the Capitol was little different than Black Lives Matter protests. Still, Capitol rioters were being singled out because of “political correctness.”
Violence was far more significant at the Capitol riot that apparently involved a bid to disrupt the U.S. government. Nearly 900 people have been arrested and charged with crimes for involvement in the insurrection.
The writer recounted “literally” having to “explain” to a fellow agent the difference between “opportunists burning and looting during [Black Lives Matter] protests that stemmed [from] legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president. One is a smattering of criminals; the other is an organized group of domestic terrorists,” the message added.
The divide on law and order enforcement — often impacted by racism — is so pronounced in the bureau that the email author claimed Black agents were afraid to join SWAT teams for fear their co-workers would not protect them.
The FBI has not commented on the email.
Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University, told USA Today that the email didn’t surprise him.
“It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t expect already,” he said. “But I think it’s important to substantiate the suspicions me and many other people had. They clearly are on notice about a much more serious problem within the FBI.”
A source involved in the Jan. 6 investigation agreed in an interview with NBC News that “there are definitely varying degrees of enthusiasm from agents across the country” to cracking down on the rioters.
The source added it was “disappointing” to see a “lackluster response” in the investigation from some special agents — but also noted that many at the FBI diligently did their jobs regardless of politics.
Agents have successfully gathered a tremendous amount of evidence to bring rioters to justice.
Ironically, the FBI has also come under fire, especially from Republicans, for enforcing the law. Trump blasted the bureau as seditious, abusive, criminal and “sleazy” after agents in August hauled out several boxes of White House material, including classified and top secret information, from his Mar-a-Lago resort and home.
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) last month hailed an FBI agent “patriotic” who refused to work on Jan. 6 cases — and was suspended from his job because of it.
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Russian men, conscripted to fight in Ukraine, say goodbye to family members Oct. 7 at a recruiting office in Moscow. (photo Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
“I have no idea why they took him,” said Alexei, who, like dozens of others in the office complex, was rounded up and taken to the nearest military enlistment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian drive.
In cities and towns across Russia, men of fighting age are going into hiding to avoid the officials who are seizing them and sending them to fight in Ukraine.
Police and military press-gangs in recent days have snatched men off the streets and outside Metro stations. They’ve lurked in apartment building lobbies to hand out military summonses. They’ve raided office blocks and hostels. They’ve invaded cafes and restaurants, blocking the exits.
At a predawn sweep on the MIPSTROY1 construction company dormitories on Thursday, they took more than 200 men. On Sunday, they rounded up dozens at a Moscow shelter for the homeless.
The press-gangs appear to descend at random. It is terrifying — and, at times, comically haphazard. Alexei, a 30-something pacifist, lives with his cat and, until he was hauled off, enjoyed hanging out with friends in bars, cafes and parks, going to concerts and planning his next holiday in Europe. (He and others in this report spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld out of concern for his safety. The Washington Post has confirmed the raid, but could not independently verify the details he provided.)
An official barged into Alexei’s office on Tuesday. Two police officers and several plainclothes military officials arrived and demanded his identification. They ordered him to go with them quietly “or we will use force,” he said.
“I was panicking,” he said. “I’d never been detained before. Everyone knows that if you are detained by the police in Russia, it’s very bad.”
Suffering massive military casualties and repeated defeats in Ukraine, Russia has begun cannibalizing its male population. The hard-eyed pundits on state television are demanding more Ukrainian blood and more sacrifice from Russian men who they say have grown too used to soft living.
But the new phase of Putin’s mobilization risks denting Russians’ tacit support for the war and even his manufactured popularity — and could stir social unrest. Particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, major cities that until now have been largely untouched by the war.
More than 300,000 Russian men and their families have fled Russia since mobilization, reports from neighboring countries indicate. Authorities have set up mobilization points at border crossings to prevent departures. Many others want to leave after seeing the aggressive police raids and the first reports of the newly conscripted men dying in the war.
Activist Grigory Sverdlin, who left Russia and is based in Georgia, this month launched an organization, Go By The Forest, to advise men in Russia on avoiding the draft. He said group has consulted with 2,700 men in 11 days and told 60 drafted men how to surrender in Ukraine. At least eight have succeeded, he said.
“Obviously, people are very stressed because they are worried they will be pushed to shoot other people,” Sverdlin said. “So people are afraid not only for themselves, but about taking part in this unjust war.”
Yevgeny, 24, quit his job as a mechanic and is hiding at a relative’s dacha far from Moscow. He has deleted his social media profiles and cut contact with friends. He spends his days working in the garden, and he goes to bed early and watches a lot of YouTube.
“I don’t want to kill people, and I don’t want to be killed, so I really have to lie low now,” he said. “But even here, I don’t feel safe. We live at a time when your neighbors could report on you. They might call police and say that there is a young guy staying in this house when he should be fighting fascists in Ukraine.”
Yevgeny never supported the war. Now he has stopped driving for fear of being pulled over by police. He cannot leave Russia, because he has no passport, and even going to the store in the small village feels risky.
“I am panicking, and my mom is very nervous,” he said. “I’m stressed, and I’m depressed. I try not to think how long this could go on, because you can go crazy.”
Two of his friends are worse off. They were conscripted late last month, he said, and with little training are on their way to the front.
“I have a couple of friends who supported the war believing that there are Nazis there who kill poor Ukrainians and that Ukrainians should be liberated and so on. But they are changing their opinions after mobilization. They have started to ask questions and surf the internet for information,” Yevgeny said.
“They don’t want to die, especially when you don’t understand why you should die,” he said. “What is the point?”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that 222,000 of the 300,000 target had been conscripted and that the process would be completed within two weeks. Pro-war hard-liners insist a second round will be needed.
The raids in Moscow and St. Petersburg have been deeply controversial, in part because the cities have suffered comparatively few casualties in Ukraine. The burden of fighting has largely been borne by small ethnic groups and poorly educated men from impoverished rural regions.
In a sign that the government fears a growing urban backlash over the raids, Andrei Klishas, a senior member of Putin’s United Russia party, said Friday that the conscription drives were illegal.
“It is inadmissible to grab everyone on the street indiscriminately,” he said.
Antiwar sentiment could harden as the bodies of soldiers who were deployed just weeks earlier begin returning home for burial. Alexei Martynov, the 29-year-old head of a Moscow government department, was mobilized Sept. 23 and was killed Oct. 10. He was buried last week. Five soldiers from the Southern Urals region, mobilized on Sept. 26 and Sept. 29, were killed in Ukraine in early October, authorities in Chelyabinsk reported.
A comrade of the Chelyabinsk men who survived an overwhelming Ukrainian assault called a friend and described what happened, according to the transcript of a phone call published by BBC News Russian. He said he had been given no training. When he fled, he said, corpses lay everywhere.
“We got there the first day, having never fired a shot, and they sent us, like meat, straight to an assault unit, with two grenade launchers. I had at least read the instructions on how to use them.” By Day 3, the soldier and his comrades were in front-line trenches.
Almost daily, videos surface on Russian social media of conscripted soldiers, angry because they have not been given decent uniforms, weapons, training or quarters. Testimonies about men who should be exempt being sent to fight are common. Aleksei Sachkov, a 45-year-old Moscow doctor, signed a contract to treat wounded soldiers in Voronezh, Russia, near the border with Ukraine. He stopped calling his wife, Natalia, on Sept. 24. She learned from Russia’s military hotline a week later that he was fighting in Ukraine as part of a tank unit, she said in a video posted online.
As unease grows, men of military age are being turned back at borders as they try to leave the country. In March, weeks after Putin launched the invasion, he promised there would be no mobilization. But last month, he dashed the tacit assurance that the conflict would be fought only by professional soldiers in return for the Russian public’s passive acceptance of the war. The widespread anger over Putin’s Sept. 21 announcement suggests that public support for the war is lower than the Kremlin claims.
“It’s the regime’s agony, because quite a common opinion in Russia now is that this war is lost,” Sverdlin said. “And it seems that just giving out summonses, detaining many thousands of people and sending them to war just buys this regime a bit more time. But it’s just buying time, because, obviously, these people who were caught on the streets now won’t make good soldiers because they don’t know how to fight.”
As the backlash intensifies, some Russians are confronting authorities and recording videos. A woman berated a team in the lobby of her St. Petersburg apartment building. A Russian truck driver posted video of himself confronting a police officer and a military enlistment official who tried to take him to the enlistment office.
“I don’t give a s--- about your mobilization. You’re the one who is eligible, not me. You’ve got a gun after all, not me. Why don’t you go mobilize yourself?”
The police officer tried to write a charge, demanding the driver’s documents.
“I’m not giving you my documents. Why should I?” the truck driver said, “If you fail to create order in your country, why do it in another country? And how? By just destroying it completely?”
In the rowdy hubbub of the military enlistment office where Alexei wound up, he said, many of the men were agitated, some were furious and others shrank into themselves. They queued at one office after another, where they were made to sign the military summons, submit their documents and undergo a medical examination. Many were office workers seized on the street. A couple of “strange ones” told Alexei they were volunteers, looking for an exciting lifestyle change.
He was shocked by how many men meekly donned the army uniforms that were handed to them and let themselves be taken, apparently directly to training bases. One of his work colleagues was among them.
“I saw men who were lost and confused, and at the same time very weak,” he said. “They didn’t want to fight for themselves. They were given papers and obediently signed them all. They weren’t focused. They just stared into space, as if they had given up.”
For Alexei, the threats and bluff continued for hours as officials pressured him to sign the military summons. He refused. Police were called. They took no action, but a police guard at the door would not let him leave.
He watched the queues of nervous men. The drunken city worker was in a deep sleep. A member of the elite Russian Guard special police threw a noisy tantrum about the attempt to enlist him.
Alexei called a lawyer. He entered the office of the military commissar, filming him on his cellphone, demanding to know the legal basis for holding him.
“He got very angry and shouted at me to leave his office.” At 8 p.m., he was finally allowed to leave. Now he wants to leave Russia but fears he could be conscripted at the border.
“I want to wait until this is over, in a safe place.”
Hollywood actresses and others form a group of Silence Breakers in Los Angeles who have fought for justice by speaking out about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct. (photo: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
As Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Paul Haggis are all in court, it is clear that there has, in fact, been forward motion – in the courts, in our workplaces, in society
Weinstein, who was already sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault in New York, now faces trial for similar crimes in California (Weinstein is appealing the New York conviction). Paul Haggis, who won an Oscar for directing the film Crash and has famously pulled back the cover on the Church of Scientology, goes to trial next month in a civil suit filed by a film publicist who says he raped her. And Kevin Spacey is also facing a civil suit filed by actor Anthony Rapp, who says Spacey got on top of him and made a sexual advance when he was just 14 and Spacey was 26.
All three men have a few things in common. They are (or were) among Hollywood’s most powerful men. They are a tiny minority among men accused of assault as part of the #MeToo movement to actually see the inside of a courtroom. They have all been accused of sexual wrongdoing by multiple people. They all deny the claims against them. And they all demonstrate both the benefits and the limitations of the legal system adjudicating sexual assault claims – and their stories, five years on, show how much the #MeToo movement changed, and how it hasn’t.
That these three men are in court at all is itself extraordinary. The vast majority of sexual assaults are never even reported to police, let alone prosecuted or heard in a civil proceeding. And the fact that Weinstein has been convicted once, even though he is appealing, is a highly unusual outcome, especially for powerful men accused of sexual violence.
These men also haven’t been made into heroes or martyrs, and at least in mainstream media, the women and men accusing them of wrongdoing have not been smeared or shamed. Their trials have been covered but not turned into sexist spectacles.
And so the fact that these men are in a courtroom facing up to at least some of their alleged crimes and bad acts is a step forward, as is the coverage of those bad acts and subsequent trials. But the legal proceedings themselves are nonetheless following a familiar playbook. Without much in the way of exculpatory evidence, the defense lawyers are going after the accusers and attempting to sow greater empathy for the accused.
Spacey’s lawyer has zeroed in on minor inconsistencies in Rapp’s story, the kinds of small incorrect or told-differently-later details that frankly don’t seem particularly surprising coming, as they do, about an event that happened to a kid at a party in the 1990s. Haggis has just been granted permission to argue that the accusations against him are part of a Scientologist plot against him – a claim denied by the woman who has sued him, who has no known ties to the Church of Scientology, and is not the only woman to accuse Haggis of sexual assault. And Weinstein’s strategy in his New York case – we will see if it’s repeated in California – was for his lawyer to suggest the women accusing him of rape and sexual assault were manipulative, lying social climbers, using Weinstein for access and opportunities and now exploiting this moment for personal benefit.
And consider the trajectory of the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard case – whatever one thinks of that story, it’s undeniable that Heard was brutally harassed, threatened and made into a cartoonish villain by Depp’s supporters.
Between Heard’s ordeal and what many #MeToo accusers have been subjected to in court, it’s hard to see these cases as unmitigated triumphs of the movement in courts of law.
And yet it seems almost unimaginable that even a decade ago a Hollywood darling like Kevin Spacey could find himself pushed off his hit show, largely ignored in Hollywood, and in a courtroom because of decades-old accusations from a male actor - and that the public would see straight through his craven attempt to come out of the closet in response.
Whispers of Weinstein’s assaults were practically the white noise of Hollywood, a kind of invisible and pervasive static in the background until all of a sudden women’s voices rose to a chorus. Harvey Weinstein is not only behind bars but, according to his lawyers, barely able to walk, practically blind, and being held in a fetid, unhygienic and medieval cell? That would have been awfully difficult to predict just a few years ago – and was hardly the obvious outcome of the stories in the Times and the New Yorker, which in turn amplified a movement started many years before by activist Tarana Burke.
In the last five years, the national conversation on sexual assault has radically shifted; we understand better than ever that these crimes are not about sex or uncontrollable desire, but rather about power, and a very controlled and intentional exercise of it. Many men (and some women) are re-evaluating their past behavior and asking themselves if there is perhaps something to change or apologize for; many women (and some men) are finally putting language to interactions and events that never sat quite right, or were abjectly humiliating, painful, or violent. Workplaces have changed their policies; states have changed their laws.
And courts of law, notoriously and intentionally slow-moving institutions, are working their way through the tiny number of cases that meet the very high standard for prosecution, and those that meet the slightly less severe standard for a lawsuit.
Is this justice? No, not for everyone; not even for most. And while many of us are pleased to see punishment meted out for so much wrongdoing, it also probably doesn’t give many feminists much pleasure to hear that men like Weinstein are now suffering the same cruelties and dehumanizing humiliations our criminal justice system has long leveled on more invisible men.
Courts of law have always been imperfect venues for victims of sexual assault, and it has never been the case that victims of a sex crime have consistently seen justice from the legal system. But these latest #MeToo trials and the muted response to them are useful mile-markers in a movement that is much more a wide-ranging marathon than a narrow sprint. Looking back on the last five years it is clear that there has, in fact, been forward motion – in the courts, in our workplaces, in society. And there have also been stumbles and setbacks; a movement that shot hot out of the gate has slowed down, and in some instances been walked back.
There is still a long road ahead for feminists and other advocates who are working to reshape the world into a place that is less hostile to women, less accommodating of destructive men, and more embracing of both female pleasure and female freedom. Five years on, the #MeToo movement hasn’t gotten us there, and courtrooms simply may never be the primary venues in which a more just society is built. But they can be places in which justice is carried out. And when the trials of this autumn conclude, we’ll see just how prepared they were for that task.
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Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitchko, center, at one of the sites hit on Monday morning. (photo: Brendan Hoffman/NYT)
At least four people were killed in Kyiv, the capital, where the buzzing sound of the drones was followed by explosions. The attacks came during morning rush hour, one week after Moscow unleashed a missile barrage across the country that left at least 19 people dead. While Monday’s strikes were less deadly, they again struck fear into Ukrainians far from the front lines and signaled Russia’s aim of crippling power and other key services as winter looms.
A separate attack in the northeastern region of Sumy killed at least three people on Monday, the regional governor said, when Russian missiles struck an infrastructure target.
The strikes in the capital highlighted Russia’s growing use of the Iranian-made drones known as “kamikazes,” which explode on impact and are easier to shoot down, as Western analysts say Moscow’s stocks of precision missiles are running low. While Iran has officially denied supplying Russia with drones for use in Ukraine, U.S. officials said that the first batch of such weapons was delivered in August. Ukraine’s Air Force said that Russia had fired 43 of the drones on Monday, but 37 were shot down by air defense systems.
Vitaly Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said that 28 drones were spotted over the city, resulting in five strikes. Ukraine’s Air Force scrambled jets to chase and shoot the drones, while some were shot down by Ukrainian troops who fired into the air. The targets included the headquarters of Ukraine’s national energy utility and a municipal heating station.
Mr. Klitschko said at least four people were killed in the strikes in Kyiv. Among the dead were a young couple, including a woman who was six months pregnant, pulled from the wreckage of a residential building, Mr. Klitschko said.
Serhiy Kruk, head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, said 18 people were wounded, including two rescue workers who were responding to an initial strike when a second hit in the same area.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, condemned Iran, saying it was “responsible for the murders of Ukrainians.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that its forces had used “high-precision air- and sea-based weapons” to attack military targets and energy infrastructure in Ukraine. The ministry said it had hit “all designated targets,” without elaborating.
Outside a four-story building that was hit, emergency workers recovered the body of a woman from the collapsed walls. An investigator held her thin wrist, covered in dirt and debris, and then folded her arms across her chest as her body was placed in a bag.
In the attack on the municipal heating station, a drone struck near where another had hit about an hour earlier, on opposite sides of Zhylianska Street. It appeared to be what Ukrainians call a “double-tap attack,” a tactic that aims to kill emergency workers or firefighters responding to an initial strike.
In southern Ukraine, a Russian strike damaged an electrical substation, again cutting power to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, officials said on Monday. The plant’s backup diesel generators switched on, according to a statement from the Ukrainian nuclear energy company, Energoatom.
And in Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, a strike hit a piece of critical infrastructure, the regional governor said, without providing details.
Monday’s attacks highlighted the vulnerability of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. While the government has swiftly moved to repair the damage from last week’s attacks, the country has seen rolling blackouts, and officials have called on Ukrainians to reduce their electricity consumption.
Moscow has escalated its aerial bombardment after an explosion this month partially damaged the bridge linking Russia to Crimea, the peninsula that Moscow illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. But Russia’s ground forces continue to face setbacks on the battlefield in eastern and southern Ukraine, although Russian troops were attacking along part of the front in the eastern Donbas region on Sunday, the Ukrainian military said.
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Arizona voters will decide on three measures which will impact direct democracy in the state. (photo: Edgard Garrido/Reuters)
The option to bypass the legislature, which allowed for marijuana legalization and minimum wage increases, is under threat
Three upcoming measures, referred to the ballot by Republican state lawmakers, would require a supermajority to approve any taxes on the ballot, limit initiatives to one topic and allow lawmakers to alter ballot measures if any language is illegal or unconstitutional.
In total, the measures represent a final step in the Arizona legislature’s years-long attempt to hamper citizen initiatives, which allow voters to circumvent the legislature altogether by collecting signatures from their fellow residents on issues to send to the ballot. With Republicans in control of the legislature, progressive causes — like minimum wage increases in 2016 and marijuana legalization in 2020 — have used the initiative process to bypass lawmakers in recent years.
“We’ve seen, since minimum wage passed, a very deliberate effort to make direct democracy more difficult and more expensive. This is the knockout punch,” said Stacy Pearson, a spokesperson for Will of the People Arizona, a campaign against the three measures. “So we’re in the last round of the boxing match. And this would be the end.”
The citizens’ initiative process is enshrined in Arizona’s constitution, and previously led to the state implementing mandatory sick time and a higher minimum wage , legalizing both medical and recreational marijuana and banning indoor smoking.
But it’s become costly and legally complicated to run measures here in the past decade, as stricter laws pushed by a Republican legislature threaten to derail citizen-led campaigns. It now costs as much as $10m to collect signatures, not including the additional millions needed to withstand court challenges and front a successful campaign to win.
The new measures have support not only from Republican-elected officials, but heavy hitters like the Arizona chamber of commerce and industry and the state GOP.
They join a national trend of GOP-initiated attempts to curtail citizen-led ballot measures. In Arkansas, voters will weigh a measure to require a 60% majority for most ballot measures. And in South Dakota in June, voters rejected a 60% threshold for tax measures, which would have made it more difficult for voters to approve Medicaid expansion at the ballot this November.
“What we’re seeing is red states trying to curtail this tool that citizens have used really successfully to move policies that are otherwise stuck for, usually, political reasons,” said Hannah Ledford, deputy executive director and campaigns director for the Fairness Project.
Republicans are ‘watering down their own rights’
Opponents to the three measures caution that the groups that now want to hinder initiatives may have to use the process someday too, if the Republicans lose control of the governor’s office and legislature – a prospect that’s increasingly likely as the electorate moves closer to the center. Over the years, the pendulum on which party uses the ballot process has swung back and forth multiple times.
“What they’re really doing is, they’re watering down their own rights and eventually, it all comes around,” said Drew Chavez, the owner of Arizona-based signature-gathering firm Petition Partners. “They’re going to need the process, and what’s gonna happen then?”
Danny Seiden, president and CEO of the Arizona chamber of commerce and industry, said the chamber’s position on these measures would be the same regardless of whether it had strong relationships with lawmakers and the governor, as it does now.
“We believe that the best mode of government is to have a higher threshold to pass a tax increase or to require single subjects. I think we’re always going to think that,” Seiden said. “But we could be in a position of needing to use the referral and ballot initiative process – but if we do, I’d be grateful for [it] being as simple and transparent as possible.”
The three proposals from Republican lawmakers would hinder citizen initiatives in different ways, each of which will affect whether groups will decide to run measures in the first place.
Perhaps the most major change, and one similar to the measure that recently failed in South Dakota, is contained in Proposition 132, which would require 60% of voters in order to pass a ballot measure that “approves a tax”.
Arizona state representative Tim Dunn, the sponsor of the referral, said it was inspired by “outside influences” trying to raise taxes at the ballot box. Lawmakers need a two-thirds vote to pass tax increases, so this measure aligns initiatives with that requirement, he said. He initially wanted all ballot measures to meet a supermajority threshold, but then changed it to tax-related measures, he told Arizona PBS during a debate on the measure.
“Arizona is a Petri dish. We have all this outside money coming in,” he said.
Under the current law, Prop 132 will only need a simple majority of voters to approve it to become law.
But opponents of the measure and people who have run initiatives say they think the measure could apply more broadly. Ballot measures have to be revenue-neutral, and they typically include taxes or fees to fund themselves to ensure they don’t cost the state money.
Marijuana legalization, which included taxes on products, received 60% of the vote in November 2020. But it’s not unusual for measures to pass with just a few percentage points.
Arizona is ‘one of the hardest states’ for ballot initiatives
Another referral, Proposition 129, calls for ballot measures to focus on a single subject, which must be reflected in the title of the measure.
Lawmakers must follow a single-subject rule. The state budget process, which frequently jammed tons of unrelated provisions into budget bills, was recently struck down by the Arizona supreme court for violating single-subject and title laws. The sponsor of the referral, Arizona Republican representative John Kavanagh, said an initiative could still have many provisions, as long as they all relate directly to the subject and title of the measure.
“So the idea is somebody couldn’t have, in the same measure, some sorely needed roads, but also include [a] provision either for or against teaching critical race theory, because they’re different subject areas,” Kavanagh said.
Pearson, who opposes the campaign, said their side believes measures that modify many parts of law – like the marijuana measure that included taxes and expungement, or an indoor smoking ban that affected many types of settings – could be removed from the ballot.
The third proposal, Proposition 128, relates to measures that contain “illegal or unconstitutional language”, as determined by the courts. If measures have such language, lawmakers can amend or repeal it – something they cannot do now, because the Voter Protection Act prevents lawmakers from tinkering with voter-approved laws unless they have a three-fourths majority and further the intent of the measure.
It’s also become more common in recent years for citizen initiatives to face multiple court challenges over their wording and signatures before voters ever see them on the ballot. The implementation of a single-subject rule likely would factor into these court cases.
The Arizona supreme court, which expanded to seven justices in 2016, all of whom are Republicans, recently aided in striking down a tax on wealthy people to fund schools and prevented a broad progressive election measure from reaching the ballot.
“Arizona is already one of the hardest states in the country to run ballot initiatives,” Ledford said. “And I think adding this extra layer of uncertainty around how many votes do you need to win, what subjects can it encompass, and will the legislature undo it immediately on the back end, I think just adds an extra layer of risk – and certainly – cost.”
Chavez, from the signature-gathering firm, thinks about 80% of those who would want to run a measure wouldn’t be able to anymore. Pearson thinks a funder would need a “limitless budget and a limitless appetite for risk with this court”.
Dunn, the sponsor of the supermajority referral, simply said: “If it’s harder, it’s harder.”
Those opposed to the three measures believe voters will see through the attempt to limit their own power and reject all three.
“They seem to have done a really good job in putting together progressives on the merits and libertarians on the government overreach, which – when you combine that – we have enough votes to defeat these,” Pearson said.
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A flooded house in the Ahoada West area of Rivers state, south Nigeria, on Oct. 9, 2022. (photo: NAN/Xinhua/Newscom)
According to the ministry, more than 2 million people have been affected by flooding that has spread across parts of the country’s south after a particularly wet rainy season.
More than 200,000 homes have been completely or partially damaged, the ministry added.
Earlier this month, Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency warned of catastrophic flooding for states located along the courses of the Niger and Benue rivers, noting that three of Nigeria’s overfilled reservoirs were expected to overflow. NEMA said the release of excess water from a dam in neighboring Cameroon had contributed to the flooding.
While many parts of Nigeria are prone to yearly floods, flooding in certain areas has been more severe than the last major floods in 2012, a Red Cross official in Kogi told CNN last week.
Nigeria’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs Sadiya Umar Farouq warned Sunday that more flooding was likely and urged regional governments to prepare accordingly.
“We are calling on the respective State Governments, Local Government Councils and Communities to prepare for more flooding by evacuating people living on flood plains to high grounds, provide tents and relief materials, fresh water as well as medical supplies for a possible outbreak of water-borne diseases,” the ministry of humanitarian affairs said on Twitter Sunday.
The country will soon implement its National Flood Emergency Preparedness and Response Plan, aimed at improving coordination of the flood response efforts.
According to the ministry, “relief has gone to every state of the federation,” and “many state governments did not prepare for the floods.”
A delegation organized by the ministry will be visiting state governors across the country to suggest strengthening states’ flood response mechanisms.
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