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David Remnick | The Devastating New History of the January 6th Insurrection
David Remnick, The New Yorker
Remnick writes: "In the weeks while the House select committee to investigate the insurrection at the Capitol was finishing its report, Donald Trump, the focus of its inquiry, betrayed no sense of alarm or self-awareness."
The House report describes both a catastrophe and a way forward.
In the weeks while the House select committee to investigate the insurrection at the Capitol was finishing its report, Donald Trump, the focus of its inquiry, betrayed no sense of alarm or self-awareness. At his country-club exile in Palm Beach, Trump ignored the failures of his favored candidates in the midterm elections and announced that he was running again for President. He dined cheerfully and unapologetically with a spiralling Kanye West and a young neo-fascist named Nick Fuentes. He mocked the government’s insistence that he turn over all the classified documents that he’d hoarded as personal property. Finally, he declared that he had a “major announcement,” only to unveil the latest in a lifetime of grifts. In the old days, it was Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Ice. This time, he was hawking “limited edition” digital trading cards at ninety-nine dollars apiece, illustrated portraits of himself as an astronaut, a sheriff, a superhero. The pitch began with the usual hokum: “Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite President of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington.”
In his career as a New York real-estate shyster and tabloid denizen, then as the forty-fifth President of the United States, Trump has been the most transparent of public figures. He does little to conceal his most distinctive characteristics: his racism, misogyny, dishonesty, narcissism, incompetence, cruelty, instability, and corruption. And yet what has kept Trump afloat for so long, what has helped him evade ruin and prosecution, is perhaps his most salient quality: he is shameless. That is the never-apologize-never-explain core of him. Trump is hardly the first dishonest President, the first incurious President, the first liar. But he is the most shameless. His contrition is impossible to conceive. He is insensible to disgrace.
On December 19, 2022, the committee spelled out a devastating set of accusations against Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the nation; conspiracy to make false statements; and, most grave of all, inciting, assisting, aiding, or comforting an insurrection. For the first time in the history of the United States, Congress referred a former President to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. The criminal referrals have no formal authority, though they could play some role in pushing Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to issue indictments. The report certainly adds immeasurably to the wealth of evidence describing Trump’s actions and intentions. One telling example: The committee learned that Hope Hicks, the epitome of a loyal adviser, told Trump more than once in the days leading up to the protest to urge the demonstrators to keep things peaceful. “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused,” she wrote in a text to another adviser. When Hicks questioned Trump’s behavior concerning the insurrection and the consequences for his legacy, he made his priorities clear: “Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose. So, that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning.”
Trump has been similarly dismissive of the committee’s work, going on the radio to tell Dan Bongino, the host of “The Dan Bongino Show,” that he had been the victim of a “kangaroo court.” On Truth Social, his social-media platform, he appealed to the loyalty of his supporters: “Republicans and Patriots all over the land must stand strong and united against the Thugs and Scoundrels of the Unselect Committee…. These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, the people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
Experience makes it plain that Trump will just keep going on like this, deflecting, denying, lashing out at his accusers, even if it means that he will end his days howling in a bare and echoing room. It matters little that the report shows that even members of his innermost circle, from his Attorney General to his daughter, know the depths of his vainglorious delusions. He will not repent. He will not change. But the importance of the committee’s report has far less to do with the spectacle of Trump’s unravelling. Its importance resides in the establishment of a historical record, the depth of its evidence, the story it tells of a deliberate, coördinated assault on American democracy that could easily have ended with the kidnapping or assassination of senior elected officials, the emboldenment of extremist groups and militias, and, above all, a stolen election, a coup.
The committee was not alone in its investigation. Many journalists contributed to the steady accretion of facts. But, with the power of subpoena, the committee was able to uncover countless new illuminating details. One example: In mid-December, 2020, the Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit filed by the State of Texas that would have challenged the counting of millions of ballots. Trump, of course, supported the suit. He was furious when it, like dozens of similar suits, was dismissed. According to Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked directly for Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, Trump was “raging” about the decision: “He had said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.’”
In large measure, this report is the story of how Trump, humiliated by his loss to Joe Biden, conspired to obstruct Congress, defraud the country he was pledged to serve, and incite an insurrection to keep himself in power.
The origins of the committee and its work are plain: On January 6, 2021, thousands marched on the Capitol in support of Trump and his conspiratorial and wholly fabricated charge that the Presidential election the previous November had been stolen from him. Demonstrators breached police barricades, broke through windows and doors, and ran through the halls of Congress threatening to exact vengeance on the Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, and other officeholders. Seven people died as a result of the insurrection. About a hundred and fourteen law-enforcement officers were injured.
Half a year later, the House of Representatives voted to establish a panel charged with investigating every aspect of the insurrection—including the role of the former President. An earlier attempt in the Senate to convene an investigative panel had met with firm resistance from the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, who called it an “extraneous” project; despite support from six Republican senators, it failed to get the sixty votes required. It was left to the Democratic leadership in the House to form a committee. The vote, held on June 30, 2021, was largely along party lines, but the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol officially came into existence.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi then asked the Republicans to name G.O.P. members to join the panel. The House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, responded by proposing some of the most prominent election deniers in his caucus, including Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who had attended “Stop the Steal” demonstrations and was sure to behave as an ardent obstructionist. Pelosi, who had named Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, to the panel, rejected two of McCarthy’s five recommendations, saying, “The unprecedented nature of January 6th demands this unprecedented decision.” After conferring with Trump, McCarthy refused to provide alternatives, and abruptly withdrew all of his proposals, gambling that doing so would derail or discredit the initiative. Pelosi, in turn, asked a second Republican who had, with Cheney, voted to impeach the President on a vote held on January 13th—Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois—to serve on the committee. Both Cheney and Kinzinger accepted.
Cheney, a firm conservative and the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, had made her judgment of Trump well known. “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said not long after the insurrection. “Everything that followed was his doing.” She knew that by opposing Trump and joining Kinzinger and the Democrats on the committee she was almost sure to lose her seat in Congress. She didn’t care, she said later, declaring her work on the panel, on which she served as vice-chair, the “most important” of her career. The G.O.P. leadership was unimpressed with this declaration of principle. In February, 2022, the Republican National Committee censured both Cheney and Kinzinger.
In deciding how to proceed with its investigation, the committee’s chairman, Bennie G. Thompson, of Mississippi, along with Liz Cheney and the seven other members, looked to a range of similarly high-profile investigative panels of the past, including the so-called Kefauver Committee, which investigated organized crime, in 1950-51; the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission, in 1963-64; the Senate Watergate hearings, in 1973; the Iran-Contra hearings, in 1987; and, particularly, the 9/11 Commission, in 2002-04. The committee hired staff investigators who had worked in the Department of Justice and in law enforcement, and they conducted more than a thousand interviews. Teams were color-coded and tasked with making “deep dives” into various aspects of January 6th. The division of labor included a “blue team,” which examined the preparation for and the reaction to events by law enforcement; a “green team,” which examined the financial backing for the plot; a “purple team,” which conducted an analysis of the extremist groups involved in the storming of the Capitol; a “red team,” which studied the rally on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal movement; and a “gold team,” which looked specifically at Trump’s role in the insurrection.
Committee members also insisted on inquiring into whether Trump planned to use emergency powers to overturn the vote, call out the National Guard, and invoke the Insurrection Act. Was Trump’s inaction during the rioting on Capitol Hill merely a matter of miserable leadership, or was it a deliberate strategy of fomenting chaos in order to stay in the White House? “That dereliction of duty causes us real concern,” Thompson said. In this way, an inquiry into a specific episode broadened to encompass a topic of still greater significance: Had the President sought to undermine and circumvent the American system of electoral democracy?
The political urgency of the committee’s work was geared to the calendar. Members had initially hoped to complete and publish a report before the 2022 midterm elections. But that proved impossible, such was the volume of evidence. Still, the committee members knew they could not go on indefinitely. The Republicans were likely to win back a majority in the House, in November, and McCarthy, who was the most likely to succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, would almost certainly choose not to reauthorize the committee, effectively shutting it down; it was also quite possible, they knew, that McCarthy and the Republicans might generate “counter” hearings as an act of retribution.
As the committee began its work, it was soon clear that the Republican leadership in the House had made a tactical error in refusing to appoint any members to the panel. Even Republicans less vociferous than Jordan would have had the power to slow down the investigations, debate points with Democratic members, and appoint less aggressive staff members. Instead, the committee, with its seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans, worked in relative harmony, taking full advantage of a sense of common purpose and the capacities of a congressional committee.
Still, they faced predictable obstacles. Not only did many Trump loyalists refuse to testify; much of the American public was, after so many previous investigations, impeachments, scandals, and news alerts, weary of hearing about the unending saga of Donald Trump. Who would pay attention? What more was there to learn? In a polarized America, who was left to be persuaded? Committee members such as Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, insisted that the real purpose of the investigation was to establish the truth. What prosecutors and the electorate make of those facts is beyond the committee’s authority.
The committee members determined that they could not go about the hearings in the old way, with day after day of interminable questioning of witnesses. Instead, they needed to produce discrete, well-produced, briskly paced multimedia “episodes” designed to highlight various aspects of the insurrection: its origins, its funding, the behavior of the President, the level of involvement by white nationalists, militias, and other menacing groups. The members agreed that, in an age of peak TV, they needed to present a kind of series, one that was dramatic, accessible, accurate, evidence-rich, and convincing. Ideally, they would provide a narrative that did not merely preach to the converted but reached the millions of Americans who were indifferent to or confused by the unending stream of noise, indirection, hysteria, lying, and chaos that had characterized the hyperpolarized era. The committee also recognized that only a minority would watch the full hearings, much less read every word of a long narrative report months later. They needed to produce the hearings in a way that could also be transmitted effectively in bits on social media and go viral. They needed memorable moments and characters. In the words of one staffer, “We needed to bring things to life.”
To help with that effort, the committee hired an adviser, the British-born television producer James Goldston, who had been a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Northern Ireland and Kosovo. Goldston had also covered the impeachment of Bill Clinton. In 2004, he moved to New York and went to work at ABC, where he ran “Good Morning America” and “Nightline”; between 2014 and 2021, he served as president of ABC News. The committee decided to videotape its depositions, and Goldston was among those who helped to select brief and particularly vivid moments from those long interviews, the way a journalist uses quotations or scenes to enliven a piece of narrative prose. The committee’s presentations also employed everything from surveillance video to police radio traffic to the e-mails and tweets of government officials, right-wing media personalities, militia leaders, and the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill.
“We live in an era where, no matter how important the subject, it’s competing for attention,” Goldston told a reporter for TheWrap. “People are distracted, people have got a lot going on. And so, the hope was, by bringing these new techniques to this format, that we could engage people in a way that perhaps they wouldn’t otherwise have been.” The second prime-time hearing brought in nearly eighteen million viewers, an audience comparable to NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” The Republican House leadership was predictably unimpressed with the committee’s commitment to narrative, prompting Kevin McCarthy to say that the Democrats had hired Goldston to “choreograph their Jan. 6 political theater.”
The committee’s published report does not have a single authorial voice. Rather, it is a collaborative effort written mainly by a team of investigators and staffers, with input from members of the committee. And, while it lacks a mediating, consistent voice, it is a startlingly rich narrative, thick with details of malevolent intent, political conspiracy, sickening violence, and human folly. There is no question that historians will feast on these pages; what the Department of Justice does with this evidence remains to be seen.
At times, there’s comedy embedded in this tragic narrative. A figure such as Eric Herschmann, a Trump adviser, holds the stage long enough to recount telling the Trump lawyer John Eastman that his plan to overturn the election is “completely crazy”: “Are you out of your effing mind?” And: “Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.” Viewers of Herschmann’s deliciously profane taped testimony were transfixed by at least two artifacts on the wall behind him: a baseball bat with the word “Justice” written on it and a print of “Wild Thing,” Rob Pruitt’s image of a panda, which also makes an appearance in the erotic thriller “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Anyone who watched the hearings and who now reads this report will dwell at times on the outsized figures who emerge, either in their own testimony or as described by others: the neo-fascistic campaign strategist and onetime White House aide Steve Bannon; the blandly ambitious Mark Meadows, the chief of staff in the final year of the Trump Administration; and, of course, the oft-inebriated Rudy Giuliani, the onetime New York City mayor and Trump’s personal lawyer.
Time and again, senior figures in the drama refused to testify, hiding behind claims of executive privilege. The report includes many comical instances of would-be witnesses claiming their Fifth Amendment rights and refusing to answer questions as benign as where they went to college. And so it was often the junior staffers in the Administration, with far less to spend on legal fees and with their futures at risk, who stepped forward to describe what they had seen and heard. The most memorable such episode came on June 28th, when Cassidy Hutchinson, the earnest young aide to Meadows, testified live before the committee. Hutchinson had already been deposed four times, for a total of more than twenty hours. Liz Cheney, as the vice-chair, began the session by announcing that Hutchinson had received an ominous phone call from someone in Trump’s circle saying, “He wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal. And you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.” Cheney bluntly referred to this as tantamount to witness tampering. When the report and its accompanying materials were finally released, we learned that Hutchinson told the committee that a former Trump White House lawyer named Stefan Passantino, who represented her early in the process, had instructed her to feign a faulty memory and “focus on protecting the President.” She said Passantino made it plain that he would help find her “a really good job in Trump world” so long as she protected “the family.” Hutchinson also testified that an aide to Meadows, Ben Williamson, had passed along a message from Meadows that he “knows that you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.”
But Hutchinson, who had been a loyal staffer in the Trump White House, privy to countless conversations in and around the offices of the President and the chief of staff, would not be intimidated. She found new counsel and thwarted the thuggish attempts to gain her silence, delivering some of the most damning testimony of the investigation. She described conversations, some secondhand, that made it plain that Trump knew full well that he had lost the election but would stop at nothing to keep power. Because of her preternatural calm before the microphone, the uninflected, more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone of her delivery, Hutchinson was often compared to John Dean, the White House counsel under Richard Nixon, who emerged from the Watergate hearings as the most memorable and decisive witness.
But the nature of Hutchinson’s testimony, in keeping with the era, was distinctly more lurid than Dean’s. She recalled how Trump hurled his lunch against the wall, splattering ketchup everywhere, when he learned that Attorney General William Barr had publicly declared that there was, in fact, no evidence of election fraud. On other occasions, she said, the President pulled out “the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.” She recounted the names of the many Trumpists—including Meadows, Giuliani, Matt Gaetz, and Louie Gohmert—who had requested that Trump grant them pardons in connection with the Capitol attack. She said that, three days before the insurrection, the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, told Trump that, if he carried out his plan to march to the Capitol with the crowds, “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” Hutchinson testified that on January 6th Cipollone told Meadows, “They’re literally calling for the Vice President to be effing hung.” As she recalled, “Mark had responded something to the effect of ‘You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’ ”
Finally, Hutchinson made it clear just how much Trump had wanted to join the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill. Trump was so incensed with his Secret Service detail for refusing to take him there, she testified, that he lunged at the agent driving his car and struggled for the wheel. The report corroborates Hutchinson’s testimony, saying that the “vast majority” of its law-enforcement sources described a “furious interaction” between the President and his security contingent in his S.U.V. The sources said that Trump was “furious,” “insistent,” “profane,” and “heated.” The committee concluded that Trump had hoped to lead the effort to overturn the election either from inside the House chamber or from a stage outside the building.
Hutchinson was equally forthright about Trump’s disregard for public safety. Despite being told that many of the supporters who came out to see him speak on January 6th were armed, she said, Trump insisted that the Secret Service remove the “mags”—the metal detectors. He was not terribly concerned that someone might be killed or injured, so long as it wasn’t him. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” he said, according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to hurt me.”
The insurrection at the Capitol was of such grave consequence for liberal democracy and the rule of law that commentators have struggled ever since to find some historical precedent to provide context and understanding to a nation in a state of continuing crisis. Some thought immediately of the sack of the Capitol, in 1814, though the perpetrators then were foreign, soldiers of the British crown. Others have pointed to contested Presidential elections of the past—1824, 1876, 1960, 2000—but those ballots were certified, peacefully and lawfully, by Congress. None of the losers sought to foment an uprising or create a national insurgency. Compare Trump’s self-absorption and rage with Al Gore’s graceful acceptance of the Supreme Court’s decision handing the election to George W. Bush: “Tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”
Still, there have been efforts to overturn the constitutional order, notably in the “secession winter” of 1860-61, when seven slaveholding states, having warned that they would never accept the election of Abraham Lincoln, declared themselves in opposition to the United States itself. As Lincoln prepared for his inauguration, to be held in March, he received a series of warnings that an army raised in Virginia might invade Washington, D.C. So prevalent were the rumors of a Confederate conspiracy that Congress assembled a committee to “inquire whether a secret organization hostile to the government of the United States exists in the District of Columbia.” Lincoln was particularly concerned about a potential plot to undermine the counting of electors, an event scheduled for February. In the end, John Breckinridge, James Buchanan’s Vice-President and a loser in the 1860 Presidential race, obeyed the law. Although Breckinridge was sympathetic to the secessionist cause, he presided with “Roman fidelity” at the certification vote, according to Representative Henry Dawes, of Massachusetts, “and the nation was saved.” But only temporarily. On April 12, 1861, the South Carolina militia opened fire on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter and the Civil War began.
A civil war, in the nineteenth-century understanding of the term, is not at hand. But what makes the events of January 6, 2021, so alarming is that they were inspired and incited by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who remains popular among so many Republicans and a contender to return to the White House.
The events of January 6th were the culmination of a long campaign that Trump and members of his circle have led against the legitimacy of American elections. The campaign’s most powerful weapon was the undermining of truth itself, the insidious deployment of conspiracy theories and “alternative facts.”
Trump first announced his emergence from the worlds of New York real estate and reality-show television by declaring that Barack Obama, the first Black President, had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and was, therefore, ineligible to hold office. After joining the 2016 Presidential race, Trump continued to traffic in casual accusations and unfounded conspiracy theories: Ted Cruz’s father was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald. Antonin Scalia might have been murdered. Obama and Joe Biden might have staged the killing of Osama bin Laden with a body double. Trump welcomed the endorsement of the professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who had earlier claimed that Hillary Clinton had “personally murdered and chopped up and raped” children, and that the mass murder at Sandy Hook had been “staged.” The most consequential conspiracy theory of Trump’s political career, however, charged that American elections were rigged.
In 2016, Trump, once he had a hold on the Republican Party nomination, began the process of undermining confidence in the entire electoral system. The reporter Jonathan Lemire, in his book, “The Big Lie,” recalls attending a rally, in Columbus, Ohio, at which Trump told his followers, weeks before the nominating Convention, “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest.” On Fox News, talking with Sean Hannity, Trump again expressed his doubts: “I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.” Trump began to warn that he was not necessarily prepared to accede to the election results. At one of the Presidential debates, the moderator, Chris Wallace, asked Trump if he would make a commitment to accept the outcome, no matter what. Trump refused: “I will look at it at the time. What I’ve seen is so bad.”
Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of more than two per cent, but, because she fell well short in the Electoral College, there was no compulsion on Trump’s part to consider extralegal action. But four years later, as Trump lagged behind Joe Biden in the polls, he revived the theme. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS,” he tweeted. “IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Once more, Trump refused to promise a peaceful transfer of power. A month and a half before the election, he said, “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”
This kind of rhetoric was of grave concern to Democrats, including Speaker Pelosi, who privately told confidants, “He’s going to try to steal it.” And, not long after the voting ended, the tweets from Trump began:
Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run … controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the pollsters got it completely … historically wrong!
They are finding Biden votes all over the place—in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!
On November 7th, the Associated Press, Fox News, and, soon, all the other major news outlets called Pennsylvania, and the election, for Biden. The battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—all went Biden’s way, and, in the end, he won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. In his victory speech, the President-elect said, “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature.”
This was a vain hope. As the Trump White House emptied, a motley assemblage of satraps and third-raters—Giuliani; a former federal prosecutor, Sidney Powell; the MyPillow C.E.O., Mike Lindell; the former law professor and Federalist Society leader John Eastman—stayed behind to encourage Trump in his most conspiratorial fantasies and schemes. In their effort to challenge election results in various states, Trump’s lawyers filed sixty-two federal and state lawsuits. They lost sixty-one of those suits, winning only on an inconsequential technical matter in Pennsylvania. By mid-December, even Mitch McConnell began referring to “President-elect Joe Biden.” When Trump called to berate him for conceding the ballot, McConnell, for once, stood up to him. “The Electoral College has spoken,” he said. “You lost the election.”
The only option Trump had left was to challenge the certification of the vote. With Eastman in the lead, his team concocted a plan that called on Vice-President Pence to declare that voting in seven states was still in dispute and to eliminate those electors. If the remaining forty-three states put forward their electors, Trump would win the election, 232–222. As part of that plan—what Chairman Thompson called, from the first day of the hearings, “an attempted coup”—Trump pressured government and election officials to coöperate. Former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue testified that Trump did not conceal his intent, telling Donoghue, “What I’m asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” Once Trump unleashed his campaign of intimidation against local election officials, the death threats against those officials came from all directions. Ruby Freeman, an election worker in Georgia, testified, “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United States target you?”
Another version of the plan had Pence calling for a ten-day-long recess and sending the slates back to the so-called “disputed” states. Eastman himself conceded that this plan would be rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court. Even so, the White House could surely be retained if Trump could convince Pence to “do the right thing.”
On the night of January 5th, the President met with Pence at the White House and tried to pressure him into adopting the scheme that Eastman had devised. For years, Pence had been the most loyal of deputies, never daring to challenge the falsehoods or the cruelties of his master. Trump, after all, had rescued him from political oblivion. But Pence would not go along with the plot. His job on January 6th, he told the President, was ceremonial. He was only there “to open envelopes.”
Trump was outraged. “You’ve betrayed us,” he told Pence. “I made you. You were nothing.”
The committee’s report is not a work of scholarship removed from its era. It was compiled by politicians and staff members and published at a moment of continuing peril and uncertainty. And the committee was formed in the contrails of the terrifying episode it was charged with investigating.
Although an abundance of new details has surfaced, the contours of what happened have never been in doubt. The events on January 6, 2021, began with a well-planned rally on the Ellipse, the fifty-two-acre park south of the White House. Trump had tweeted in advance, “Be there, will be wild!” Katrina Pierson, a spokeswoman for Trump’s 2016 campaign and one of the organizers of the rally, had texted another organizer saying that Trump “likes the crazies,” and wanted Alex Jones to be among the speakers. Jones did not speak, but Trump himself supplied the inflammatory rhetoric. In the seventy-minute-long speech he gave on the Ellipse, he told his followers they would “save our democracy” by rejecting “a fake election,” and warned them that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He taunted his Vice-President: “Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.” He set a tone of combativeness, defiance, and eternal resistance. And he put the life of his own Vice-President in jeopardy. As Chairman Thompson put it at one hearing, “Donald Trump turned the mob on him.”
Even though senior officials around Trump had told him that it was long past time to step aside—William Barr informed congressional investigators that he told Trump that reports of voting fraud were “bullshit”—Trump refused to listen. (“I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, he’s become detached from reality,” Barr recalled.) Trump was unrelenting. “We will never give up,” he told the crowd on the Ellipse. “We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.” After listening to the President’s repeated calls to fight, and to march to the Capitol building—“you’ll never take back our country with weakness”—thousands of his followers, some of them armed, some of them carrying Confederate symbols, some deploying flagpoles as spears, headed toward Capitol Hill.
As the march began, at around 1 p.m., Representative Paul Gosar, of Arizona, and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, both conservative Republicans, rose in Congress to object to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona. But Pence had already told Trump he would not go along with his plot, and there was no sign that Gosar, Cruz, and Trump’s loyalists in Congress had the numbers to succeed. McConnell, at that time the Senate Majority Leader, said, “Voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken—they’ve all spoken. If we overrule them all, it would damage our republic forever.”
By 2 p.m., demonstrators began to overrun the Capitol Police, sometimes using improvised weapons. Caroline Edwards, of the Capitol Police, testified to the committee that there was “carnage” in the halls: “I was slipping in people’s blood.” The insurrectionists kept coming, breaking through windows and doors, assaulting police officers, and, once inside, they went hunting for the Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, and other officials who refused to participate in the President’s scheme to overturn the election. At around 2:20 p.m., the Senate, and then the House, went into emergency recess, as Capitol Police officers rushed members of both chambers to safety. The two Democratic congressional leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, fearing for their lives and the lives of their colleagues, were reduced to sequestering in a safe location. In the final session of the committee’s investigation, we saw footage of Pelosi, enraged yet composed, deploying her cell phone to get someone to come to the aid of the legislative branch.
Trump watched these events on television at the White House with scant sense of alarm. He refused to send additional police or troops to quell the violence. At 2:24 p.m., he tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” By 3 p.m., insurrectionists, some of them in cosplay battle gear, had swarmed into the Senate chamber. Trump’s passivity was not passivity at all. As Adam Kinzinger put it, “President Trump did not fail to act. He chose not to act.” Liz Cheney was no less blunt. “He refused to defend our nation and our Constitution,” she said during the hearings. “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible, there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”
For Trump, the choice was simple. The insurrectionists were his people, his shock troops, there to do his bidding. Nothing about the spectacle seemed to disturb him: not the gallows erected outside the building, not the savage beatings, not threats to Pence and Pelosi, not graffiti like “Murder the Media,” not the chants of “1776! 1776!” And so he ignored calls to action even from his own party. At 3:11 p.m., Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, tweeted, “We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now. @realdonaldtrump you need to call this off.” Trump would not tell his supporters to go home until the early evening, when the damage had been done.
And though Trump and the insurrectionists failed to halt the certification of the ballot, they did get substantial support: a hundred and forty-seven Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the election results. At 3:42 a.m. on January 7th, Vice-President Pence, speaking to a joint session of Congress, certified the election of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth President of the United States. When, however, the midterms were held, two years later, dozens of Republican candidates continued to claim that his election was fraudulent. Those few Republicans, like Liz Cheney, who took a stand against Trump were swept out of office.
January 6th was a phenomenon rooted both in the degraded era of Trump and in the radicalization of a major political party during the past generation. The very power of these developments explains why many people may approach this congressional report with a sense of fatigue, even denial. Part of Trump’s dark achievement has been to bludgeon the political attention of the country into submission.
When a nation has been subjected to that degree of cynicism—what is politely called “divisiveness”—it can lose its ability to experience outrage. As a result, the prospect of engaging with this congressional inquiry into Trump’s attempt to delegitimatize the machinery of electoral democracy is sometimes a challenge to the spirit. That is both understandable and a public danger. And yet a citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an investigation or to absorb its astonishing findings risks moving even farther toward a disturbing “new normal”: a post-truth, post-democratic America.
A republic is predicated on faith—not religious faith but a faith in the fundamental legitimacy of its political institutions and the decisions they issue. To concede the legitimacy of statutes, rulings, and election returns is not necessarily to favor them. It’s simply to participate in the basic system that gives them form and force; citizens can, through democratic machinery, seek to defeat or contest candidates they deplore, initiatives that offend them, court opinions they consider misguided. By contrast, the campaign that culminated in the Capitol attack of January 6th was, fatefully, against democracy itself. It sought to instill profound mistrust in the process of voting—the mechanism through which, even in highly imperfect democracies, accountability is ultimately secured.
The committee and its work were far from apolitical, and yet to dismiss the report as merely political would be a perilous act of resignation and defeatism. The questions that hovered over the inquiry from the start—what more is there to learn? who is really listening?—persisted and loomed over the midterm elections. When the hearings began, the polling outfit FiveThirtyEight reported that Trump’s approval rating was 41.9 per cent; when the hearings ended, it was 40.4 per cent, a minuscule dip. As Susan B. Glasser, of The New Yorker, wrote, “All that damning evidence, and the polls were basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty per cent of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by anything.” And yet the Republicans failed in their promise to produce a “red wave” in the midterms. The Democrats maintained their slender hold on the Senate and lost far fewer seats in the House than was expected. And while the reasons behind the Republican failure were many, ranging from the imperilment of abortion rights to the dismal quality of so many of the Party’s candidates, it was clear that one of the principal reasons was a deep concern about the future of democracy.
The most urgent thing to learn is whether a two-and-a-half-century-old republic will resist future efforts to undercut its foundations—to steal, through concerted deception, the essential legitimacy of its constitutional order. The contents of the report insist that complacency is not an option. The report also insists on accountability, though that will ultimately be the responsibility of the Department of Justice and the American public. The report has provided the evidence, the truth. Now it remains to be seen if it will be acted upon.
The violation of January 6th was ultimately so brazen that many of Trump’s own loyalists could not, in the end, bring themselves to defend him. Even some on the radical right have come to recognize the insurrection’s implications for the future. Jason van Tatenhove was once the media spokesman for the militia group known as the Oath Keepers, which played a crucial role in the uprising. He left the group well before January 6th, but he remained well connected enough to know that the Oath Keepers were eager to take part in an “armed revolution.” Testifying before the committee, he expressed his sense of betrayal by Donald Trump, and a growing sense of alarm: “If a President that’s willing to try to instill and encourage, to whip up, a civil war among his followers uses lies and deceit and snake oil, regardless of the human impact, what else is he going to do?”
Trump is running again for President. Perhaps his decline is irreversible. But it would be foolish to count on that. Should he win back the White House, he will come to office with no sense of restraint. He will inevitably be an even more radical, more resentful, more chaotic, more authoritarian version of his earlier self. And he would hardly be an isolated figure in the capital. Following the results of the midterm elections, Congress is now populated with dozens of election deniers and many more who still dare not defy Trump. The stakes could not be higher. If you are reaching for optimism—and despair is not an option—the existence and the depth of the committee’s project represents a kind of hope. It represents an insistence on truth and democratic principle. In the words of the man who tried and failed to overturn a Presidential election, you don’t concede when there’s theft involved.
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A doctor and patient. (photo: Rawpixel/Getty Images)
Millions at Risk of Losing Medicaid Under $1.7 Trillion Federal Spending Bill
Spencer Kimball, CNBC
Kimball writes: "Millions of people who enrolled in the Medicaid public health insurance program during the Covid pandemic could lose their coverage in the spring if their state determines they no longer meet the program’s eligibility requirements."
Millions of people who enrolled in the Medicaid public health insurance program during the Covid pandemic could lose their coverage in the spring if their state determines they no longer meet the program’s eligibility requirements.
Enrollment in Medicaid surged 30% to more than 83 million people during the pandemic, after Congress basically barred states from kicking people out of the program for the duration of the federal public health emergency declared in response to Covid.
Tucked inside a more than 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion bill that funds the federal government through September is a provision that would eliminate the Medicaid coverage protections from the public health emergency. Instead, states could start terminating recipients’ coverage in April 2023 if they no longer meet the program’s eligibility criteria.
“As of April 1, Medicaid agencies conducting redeterminations for people enrolled in the program can result in a termination of Medicaid coverage,” said Jack Rollins, director of federal policy at the National Association of Medicaid Directors. “Whereas right now since the Covid-19 public health emergency started, states were not allowed to terminate Medicaid coverage.”
Congress has to pass the legislation by Friday in order to avoid a government shutdown.
The public health emergencyi, first declared in January 2020 by the Trump administration, has been renewed every 90 days since the pandemic began. The powers activated by the emergency declaration have had a vast impact on the U.S. health-care system, allowing hospitals to act more nimbly when infections surge and Medicaid to keep millions enrolled in its public health insurance.
The Health and Human Services Department has estimated that about 15 million people will lose coverage through Medicaid once the enrollment protections are no longer in place and states review individuals’ eligibility based on the criteria used before the pandemic. Medicaid is the federal insurance program for the poor and those who lose their health insurance because they can’t work due to a disability.
“It’s important to contextualize that Medicaid coverage loss doesn’t necessarily mean health insurance coverage loss,” Rollins said. “Many of those folks will be transitioning to other sources of coverage.”
People generally lose Medicaid coverage if their income rises and falls outside the program’s parameters. Rollins said most people who are disenrolled for this reason starting in April will probably transition to coverage in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. HHS estimates that about a third of those who will lose Medicaid coverage will qualify for tax credits for marketplace insurance.
But some people are disenrolled even though they remain eligible for Medicaid because they either don’t receive their renewal notice, can’t provide documentation required by the state, or they don’t submit the documents by the deadline, among other reasons. HHS has estimated that 6.8 million people will lose Medicaid coverage even though they remain eligible for the program
“There has to be a process for renewing coverage or re-determining coverage and disenrolling people who are no longer eligible,” said Jennifer Tolbert, a Medicaid expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“The key is to do this in a way that minimizes to the extent possible coverage losses among people who remain eligible,” Tolbert said.
The legislation requires states to make a good faith effort to contact the individual whose eligibility is under review through more than one communication method. States cannot terminate someone’s Medicaid coverage on the basis of returned mail alone in response to outreach efforts.
“We’re trying to ensure that states do have the most up-to-date contact information for their enrollees,” Rollins said. “Because we know that without accurate contact information, that increases the likelihood of inappropriate or unnecessary coverage loss and that is something that we are working to avoid.”
Republican governors on Monday called on the Biden administration to end the Covid public health emergency in April so their states can start disenrolling people who no longer meet Medicaid eligibility requirements, arguing that the costs of higher enrollment in the program is too high.
However, Tolbert said KFF found that states spent about $47 billion to cover the additional Medicaid enrollees through September 2022 while they received $100 billion federal funds.
“The costs were more than covered by the enhanced federal funding,” Tolbert said.
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Many agricultural operations are drawing down the state’s underground water reserves for free. (photo: Rebecca Noble/Reuters)
Arizona Is in a Race to the Bottom of Its Water Wells, With Saudi Arabia's Help
Natalie Koch, The New York Times
Koch writes: "Arizona's water is running worryingly low. Amid the worst drought in more than a millennium, which has left communities across the state with barren wells, the state is depleting what remains of its precious groundwater. Much of it goes to private companies nearly free, including Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company."
Arizona’s water is running worryingly low. Amid the worst drought in more than a millennium, which has left communities across the state with barren wells, the state is depleting what remains of its precious groundwater. Much of it goes to private companies nearly free, including Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company.
Thanks to fresh scrutiny this year from state politicians, water activists and journalists, the Saudi agricultural giant Almarai has emerged as an unlikely antagonist in the water crisis. The company, through its subsidiary Fondomonte, has been buying and leasing land across western Arizona since 2014. This year The Arizona Republic published a report showing that the Arizona State Land Department has been leasing 3,500 acres of public land to Almarai for a suspiciously low price.
The case has prompted calls for an investigation into how a foreign company wound up taking the state’s dwindling water supplies for a fee that might be as low as one-sixth the market rate. But the focus on the Saudi scheme obscures a more fundamental problem: pumping groundwater in Arizona remains largely unregulated. It’s this legal failing that, in part, allows the Saudi company to draw unlimited amounts of water to grow an alfalfa crop that feeds dairy cows 8,000 miles away.
Even if Fondomonte leaves the state, it will be only a matter of time before Arizona sucks its aquifers dry. While a 1980 state law regulates groundwater use in a handful of urban areas, water overuse is common even in these places. The situation is worse in the roughly 80 percent of Arizona’s territory that falls outside these regulations. In most of rural Arizona, whoever has the money to drill a well can continue to pump till the very last drop.
Many more agricultural operations are drawing down the state’s underground water reserves for free. And most of them are U.S.-owned. Minnesota’s Riverview Dairy company, for example, has a farm near Sunizona, Ariz., that has drained so much of the aquifer that local residents have seen their wells dry up. Meanwhile, some California-based farms, facing tougher groundwater regulations at home, are looking to relocate to neighboring Arizona for cheap water. These companies and other megafarms can afford to drill deep wells, chasing the rapidly sinking water table.
And it’s not just farming operations. Other sectors like mining and the military, which have a huge presence in the state, also benefit from Arizona’s lax water laws. It’s difficult to know how much water is being used up by one of the state’s largest employers, Raytheon Missiles and Defense, which, like Almarai, has a footprint in Arizona and Saudi Arabia. But manufacturing missiles has a water cost, too. And like Fondomonte’s alfalfa, Raytheon’s product is being shipped to Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi farm scandal may have helped to spotlight the severity of Arizona’s water crisis, but the state will have to go further to address the root cause. Arizona needs to apply groundwater pumping regulations across the entire state, not just in its metropolitan areas. It won’t be easy. This year special interest groups scuttled a far more modest effort that would have allowed rural communities to opt in to groundwater enforcement. In all likelihood, when these groups have to pay fair prices for water, they will have to give up on growing water-hungry crops like alfalfa in the desert. This kind of race-to-the-bottom approach to water in Arizona is insupportable today, if it ever was.
Arizona is one of the last places in the United States that should be reckless with its water resources. The state is dependent on the Colorado River, which has been depleted by overuse and climate change and hit extreme lows this year. Water managers from seven states in the river basin failed in August to meet a federal deadline to make dramatic reductions. As a result, the Bureau of Reclamation ordered Arizona to cut its use of water from the river by 21 percent. Arizona’s cities and rural areas alike are at risk if they lose access to Colorado River water only to find their groundwater reserves sucked dry, too.
In August, Kris Mayes, then a candidate for state attorney general, released a 16-point plan to stop what it called the “Saudi water grab.” Ms. Mayes, who narrowly won the November election (though results of an automatic recount are pending), has some good ideas. In her plan, she promised to seek back payment for Almarai’s underpriced water and land usage since 2015, urged support for counties that want to manage their groundwater and said the legislature should update Arizona’s water code to prevent overuse in rural areas. But she failed to clearly state the action that it needed: groundwater regulation across the entire state.
A few months after that plan was released, Saudi-U.S. relations deteriorated after Saudi Arabia announced oil production cuts. “Saudi Arabia has stated their intention to rob Arizonans at the gas pump, but they are already stealing our water,” said Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, one of many politicians in the state to take aim at the Saudi agriculture deal.
As a geographer who studies Saudi Arabia’s history, I can’t help but think about how muddy the lines between victim and victimizer are when I hear this rhetoric. Ironically, American farmers helped kick-start the Saudi dairy industry. In the 1940s the U.S. State Department sent Arizona farmers to Saudi Arabia and coordinated two Saudi royal visits to Arizona to tout the state’s spectacular desert agriculture. The unsustainable alfalfa and dairy enterprise that Saudi Arabia set up in the wake of these visits drained the kingdom’s groundwater, sowing the seeds for Saudi companies to look to Arizona for cheap water.
It’s a cycle that has to end: Arizona should put a stop to Fondomonte’s shady deal, and the sooner the better. But Arizona is not the victim of evil outsiders; it’s the victim of its own hubris and political failings that allow such a system to exist. Blaming the Saudis may be a good political play, but the problems won’t go away until state lawmakers properly reform Arizona’s groundwater laws.
Standing up to special interests tied to Arizona’s free-for-all water system won’t be as easy as the anti-Saudi saber rattling seen across the state, but it is the step that is needed to prevent Arizona’s water crisis from becoming a water catastrophe.
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A statue commemorating the Ukrainian famine, in which millions died. (photo: Ukrainian Presidency/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
What Is the Holodomor? 90 Years Later, Ukraine Remembers Moscow-Backed Famine That Killed Millions
Orlando Mayorquin, USA Today
Mayorquin writes: "As the Ukrainian government worked to restore power and water following recent Russian military strikes, Ukrainians were mourning a Moscow-backed atrocity that began 90 years ago: the Holodomor."
As the Ukrainian government worked to restore power and water following recent Russian military strikes, Ukrainians were mourning a Moscow-backed atrocity that began 90 years ago: the Holodomor.
The Holodomor, which translates roughly to “death by hunger” in Ukrainian, is also known as the Great Famine. More than 3 million people died over two years as the Soviet government under Josef Stalin confiscated food and grain supplies and deported many Ukrainians.
Pope Francis linked the current suffering of Ukrainians to the 1930s man-made famine, describing it Wednesday as “genocide artificially caused by Stalin.”
He noted that Saturday marks the 90th anniversary of the start of the famine, which Ukraine commemorates every fourth Saturday of November with a Day of Memory. “Let us pray for the victims of this genocide and let us pray for so many Ukrainians – children, women, elderly, babies – who today are suffering the martyrdom of aggression," Francis said.
Ninety years after the atrocity, Russia has "unleashed a full-scale war against us and wants to organize Holodomor 2.0," Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said Saturday on Twitter.
"The crime must be punished," he said. "The world must hold the aggressor accountable."
What is the Holodomor and what caused it?
The Holodomor translates roughly to “death by hunger” in Ukrainian. It is how Ukrainians refer to the mass starvation deaths of millions in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The Holodomor was part of a larger famine that swept the Soviet Union as Stalin collectivized the agricultural economy by taking over small farms and prohibiting independent farmers from selling their crops. But specific policy decisions targeting Ukraine intensified the famine there, leading Ukraine and many nations to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. It’s held that Stalin allowed Ukrainians to starve in order to quash Ukrainian resistance to the reorganization of its farms.
When did the Holodomor start?
The Holodomor took place from the early 1930s.
Did Stalin deny the Holodomor?
Stalin and the Soviet Union never recognized the Holodomor as a genocide. Discussion of the event was heavily repressed inside the Soviet Union and the USSR undertook a campaign to conceal the atrocity from the rest of the world.
As Anne Applebaum reported in the Atlantic, journalists in the Soviet Union were subject to intense censure from Moscow. Western reporters, including New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer-prize winner, downplayed the situation in Ukraine. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he infamously wrote in one 1933 story.
The present-day Russian government minimizes what happened. In 2017, Russian Spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters that the characterization of the starvation as a genocide “contradicts historical facts.”
How many people died in the Holodomor?
Scholars have estimated that anywhere from 3 to 7 million people died.
When is Holodomor Remembrance Day?
Holodomor Remembrance day is observed on the final Saturday of November.
Does the United States recognize the Holodomor?
The United States opened in 2015 a memorial for the Holodomor on the National Mall in DC, and the Obama and Biden White Houses have issued remembrance statements on Holodomor Remembrance Day. But the United States has been stopped short of calling the Holodomor a genocide, even as several countries, including Canada, recognize it as such.
Last year, Biden released a statement that said the millions of Ukrainians who died were “victims of the brutal policies and deliberate acts of the regime of Joseph Stalin.”
“As we remember the pain and the victims of the Holodomor,’ the statement read, “the United States also reaffirms our commitment to the people of Ukraine today and our unwavering support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have passed resolutions recognizing the Holodomor as genocide, as have more than 20 U.S. states. The Holodomor Museum lists the U.S. among the 16 states in addition to Ukraine that have recognized the famine as genocide: Australia, Ecuador, Estonia, Canada, Colombia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, and the Vatican. Some other countries, such as Argentina, Chile and Spain, have condemned it as “an act of extermination.”
Images from the Russian invasion:'Brutal act of war': Photos of Russia invading Ukraine show mass evacuations, rockets
Ukrainian cities under attack:Ukraine-Russia crisis: How do you pronounce Donetsk? And is it Kyiv or Kiev?
Why is the Holodomor important?
Despite the death of millions resulting from deliberate policy decisions by Stalin's regime, the Holodomor isn’t widely known in the United States. But it is a key part to understanding the deep divisions between Russia and Ukraine. It marks an early and brutal example in what many Ukrainians say is a long history of Moscow’s hostility toward its southwestern neighbor.
Russians and Ukrainians are now retracing much of the history that has long been at the core of the tension between the two former Soviet Republics.
One of Vladimir Putin’s central justifications for launching a war against Ukrainewas his claims that the two countries constitute one people.
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Pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
Texas Lawmakers Plan to Further Decimate Abortion Rights in Upcoming Legislative Session
Mary Tuma, The Intercept
Tuma writes: "All Texas clinics have halted abortion care, but the anti-abortion movement says its work isn't over."
All Texas clinics have halted abortion care, but the anti-abortion movement says its work isn’t over.
Months before the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated nearly 50 years of abortion rights by overturning Roe v. Wade, Texans were already living in a grim post-Roe world. Senate Bill 8 — in effect since September 2021 due to the Supreme Court’s refusal to block the measure — barred abortion care once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, typically at six weeks of pregnancy. Then considered the most restrictive abortion law in the country, SB 8 halted the overwhelming majority of care in the nation’s second most populous state. The draconian law carried no exception for rape, incest, or severe fetal abnormality.
Next came the high court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which struck the final blow to abortion rights in Texas by allowing a full “trigger” ban to take effect. Performing an abortion in Texas is now a felony punishable by up to life in prison. Adding to the reproductive health crisis, state officials sought to push criminal enforcement of a 1925 pre-Roe ban. Today, all 23 abortion clinics in Texas have stopped providing abortion care at any stage, the most of any state in the nation.
It may come as a surprise then that after decades of aggressive lobbying, the state’s largest and most influential anti-abortion organization, Texas Right to Life, isn’t content to sit back and celebrate. Even though they helped shut down abortion care for the state’s 7 million women of reproductive age, the group doesn’t want the public to conclude that its mission is complete.
“We were concerned that people would assume the movement has accomplished everything, that our work here is done,” John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, told The Intercept. “But we have spent the last six months articulating that even with Roe overturned, there is still a lot we need to do in Texas. Thankfully, that’s been completely well received by the Republican Party of Texas.”
Seago’s brazen sentiment underscores the insatiable appetite of the anti-abortion movement — and by extension, Republican lawmakers — to further dismantle the marginal rights that remain in a state that gutted abortion care well before Roe’s demise. As Texas lawmakers convene on January 10 for their legislative session, held once every two years, they will have an opportunity to make those efforts come to fruition. While abortion rights saw victories in red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana, the November midterms in Texas only solidified the power of the Republican-dominated Legislature and emboldened conservative activists.
“After Roe and after the midterms, we have even more space in the room and more focus to build a truly pro-life culture in this state,” Seago said. “This is the first session after Roe has been overturned, so it’s really important that we take decisive action now to address all the lingering and significant challenges that remain for the movement.”
While lawmakers have until March to file bills for the 140-day session, early plans discussed among Republicans include efforts to expand the power of local district attorneys to prosecute abortion providers in counties across the state; penalize online groups that help Texans receive abortion medication; criminally punish companies that financially support out-of-state abortion travel; and other measures that would prevent patients from crossing state lines for care. Often at the forefront of modeling extreme anti-abortion measures, Texas may offer a glimpse of what other states can expect.
Restricting Travel
Before any formal lawsuit was filed over Senate Bill 8, the punitive measure sent a ripple of fear through Texas abortion clinics and the medical community. Rather than state officials enforcing the law, as is typical, SB 8 carries a novel private enforcement mechanism, empowering any individual to file a civil suit against an abortion provider or anyone who “aids or abets” care. Those who bring forth lawsuits can be awarded judgments of at least $10,000. The threat of a flood of frivolous lawsuits and legal fees forced most clinics in Texas to immediately cease abortion care last fall.
Seeing the success of the bounty-style strategy, some GOP lawmakers are hoping to employ that private enforcement scheme to prevent Texans from accessing care out of state — as outlined in a letter drafted in July — by allowing any citizen to sue someone who assists an abortion patient pay for travel. That could also apply to anyone who reimburses the costs associated with out-of-state abortions, even in states where the procedure remains legal.
While a state judge recently ruled that those who sue under SB 8 must show proof of injury, the decision did not strike down the law, preclude future suits from being filed, or halt legal action from those directly affected by the procedure. The plaintiff — a Chicago-based lawyer with no connection to the abortion patient in the case — plans to appeal, leaving the fate of the private enforcement scheme unclear and anti-abortion lawmakers likely undeterred.
“It’s no surprise that lawmakers want to use the SB 8-style private enforcement mechanism to do things like restrict patient travel,” said David Cohen, professor of law at Drexel University and author of “Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America.” “This is the danger — and the predictable outcome — of SCOTUS not stepping up early on to recognize the law is a threat to people’s rights.”
Whether a state can regulate a resident’s actions outside its borders might seem to be a clear-cut matter, but legal experts say it’s actually a gray area that could ultimately be swayed by the anti-abortion Supreme Court. And while Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in a concurring opinion in Dobbs that patients could not be prosecuted for out-of-state abortions under the constitutional right to interstate travel, he failed to address the civil enforcement strategy or what it might mean for providers or financial supporters of abortion patients. Kavanaugh’s opinion should not “provide comfort” in addressing this “underdeveloped” legal issue, Cohen said.
“In most people’s minds, as long as you follow the law in the state you are in, you don’t have to worry too much about the laws back in your home state, like gambling in Vegas without facing any punishment,” Cohen said. “But what we think is common sense is actually not rooted in clear doctrine by the courts. Some courts around the country have allowed extraterritorial application of their laws in certain circumstances. Those loopholes could be taken advantage of here and applied to abortion.”
The potential policy could raise complicated constitutional questions including the application of extraterritorial state law, due process, and the full faith and credit clause, as well as the dormant commerce clause, which bars states from passing legislation that discriminates against or excessively burdens interstate commerce, according to Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who specializes in reproductive health. However, damage could be done before it even sees legal pushback.
“We saw the threat of litigation alone from SB 8 freeze abortion care in Texas,” Ziegler told The Intercept. “If the same strategy is applied to out-of-state travel, it could prevent patients from leaving the state and could cause doctors in other states to feel exposed and liable to lawsuits.”
Limitations on travel would devastate Texans seeking abortions, who are completely dependent on out-of-state care. After SB 8 went into effect, nearly 1,400 residents were fleeing Texas for the procedure each month, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. That figure has likely increased since the state’s trigger law came into play. Research from the Guttmacher Institute shows that Texans are not just traveling to neighboring states, but also making long treks to the coasts, as surrounding clinics experience wait times due to an influx of patients. This is, of course, only if Texas residents are able to secure the resources — including travel and lodging, child care, and days off work or school — to make the often costly and time-consuming trip. Many have not been able to obtain care.
“We need to remember during any conversation about restricting interstate travel that so many Texans already do not have the ability to go to another state for care today, especially undocumented immigrants, young people, low-income residents, and Black and brown Texans, who take the biggest hit when it comes to abortion bans,” stressed Yaneth Flores, public policy director with the reproductive rights organization Avow Texas. “Further limitations on travel will be unbelievably harmful and end up costing lives.”
Corporate Penalties
A group of Texas Republicans, many of whom are part of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, have already set their sights on companies that have expressed support for patient travel. In May, the contingent of Republicans threatened Lyft CEO Logan Green with “swift and decisive action” if the ridesharing company failed to rescind its policy to pay for the travel expenses of Texas abortion patients. They similarly threatened local law firm Sidley Austin with criminal prosecution and the disbarment of its partners for its pledge to reimburse employees for “abortion-related travel and, if necessary, related legal-defense expenses.”
The letters were a preview of potential legislative plans: Fourteen GOP lawmakers have vowed to introduce bills in the coming session that would ban corporations from conducting business in Texas if they offer to pay for abortions in states where the procedure is legal. Lawmakers have promised to “impose additional civil and felony criminal sanctions” on executives whose companies provide employees with abortion-related financial support. Republicans also hope to allow Texas shareholders of publicly traded companies to sue executives for paying for abortion care. While these aggressive measures remain to be filed, a bill that would eliminate tax breaks for companies that assist with abortion travel costs and another that would prohibit governmental entities from helping with logistical support have already been introduced.
Texas abortion funds that assist low-income Texans with out-of-state care have battled intense intimidation by the same lawmakers. Fearing prosecution, they were forced to halt all operations following the state’s trigger law as well as threats to enforce the 1920s-era statute, which punishes anyone who “furnishes the means” for abortion. (The state Supreme Court ruled that Texas can enforce the century-old law, albeit through civil, not criminal, action, contributing to a confusing patchwork of abortion laws and punishments.) Hoping to gain legal protection, groups including the Lilith Fund and Jane’s Due Process filed a lawsuit against the state in August. After fleeing his home to avoid a subpoena to testify in federal court, Attorney General Ken Paxton is now being allowed to dodge questioning thanks to a ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “The threats have been repeated and far-ranging,” the suit reads, “and the intimidation has chilled helping professionals from providing counseling, financial, logistical, and even informational assistance to pregnant Texans who may need to access abortion care outside of the state.”
Seago’s organization isn’t interested in restricting travel so much as extending SB 8’s “sue thy neighbor” provision to abortion prior to six weeks, as well as telehealth providers on websites that help connect Texans with abortion medication, like the Europe-based nonprofit Aid Access. Requests to the abortion mail delivery service from Texans skyrocketed nearly 1,200 percent after SB 8 went into effect, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Under state law, providers are criminally barred from sending medication abortion through the mail, but that has been difficult to enforce. “We are going to ask, ‘What tools does the state legislature have to block access to or shut down these illegal websites?’” Seago said.
Freedom Caucus member state Rep. Matt Shaheen has already filed a string of bills seeking to stymie access to medication abortion by requiring, among other things, that out-of-state physicians who provide telehealth services to Texans register with state agencies and comply with all Texas laws.
Empowering District Attorneys
Amid the unraveling of abortion rights, five Texas-based district attorneys — among nearly 90 DAs and attorneys general across the country — have vowed to not prosecute abortion-related crimes, calling the criminalization of abortion care “a mockery of justice.” Bolstering the show of resistance, city councils in Texas, including in Austin and Dallas, have passed local resolutions directing their police departments to “deprioritize” investigations into criminal offenses related to abortion and refrain from surveillance of abortion care.
While Texas Right to Life and the Freedom Caucus differ on some anti-abortion priorities, they both plan to push back on those measures by seeking to empower district attorneys throughout the state to prosecute abortion-related crimes in other jurisdictions when the local district attorney fails or refuses to do so. The plan finds a strong ally in Paxton, who has expressed his eager support for prosecuting abortion providers.
Democrats and abortion advocates are hopeful that such legislation wouldn’t survive, pointing out that the Texas Constitution and rulings by the Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest court in the state for criminal cases, make clear that the only entity with prosecution authority in a given county is the office of the district attorney. This hasn’t deterred anti-abortion activists like Seago, who say that circumventing the problem will simply take some strategic bill-crafting.
“There is some creative thinking going on right now to work around DA enforcement,” Seago said. “That includes possibly granting the state attorney general more power, like allowing him to bring criminal charges at the county level and making it easier to recall local DAs.”
An Uphill Battle
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers are working to mitigate some of the damage by introducing measures that would add exceptions to the state’s abortion ban for survivors of rape; repeal the 1925 abortion statute and ensure that patients are not prosecuted; and put a constitutional amendment protecting abortion directly on the ballot. The proposed ballot measure requires approval from the GOP-controlled Legislature, likely dooming it from the start despite the fact that polls show the majority of Texas voters support abortion in “all or most cases.”
Democrats say they feel like they are flying blind entering the next legislative session. A letter they sent to Paxton in October requesting clarification on civil and criminal laws around abortion, including assistance with travel expenses, was met with no response. The AG’s office claims this is due to pending litigation; the lawmakers’ questions, however, were not associated with any current suit. Democrats believe the AG’s intent is to leave things purposefully murky.
“As Texans are faced with potential increased liability and criminalization when it comes to abortion, our attorney general — as he has done time and time again due to ideology — is obstructing our ability to get much needed clarity and guidance on what is legal today and what is not,” state Rep. Donna Howard, chair of the Texas Women’s Health Caucus, told The Intercept. “It’s incredibly frustrating as we gear up to pass laws next year.”
Howard and others hope both parties use this legislative session to focus on preventing unplanned pregnancies, alleviating the ongoing maternal mortality crisis, and expanding health care for mothers forced to give birth in the post-Roe landscape, rather than further decimating reproductive rights. But outnumbered by Republicans and up against the notoriously conservative 5th Circuit — which often rubber-stamps Texas abortion laws — and a staunchly anti-choice Supreme Court, the lawmakers are facing an uphill battle.
“There is this continued thread of despair and disbelief in Texas as we see anti-abortion politicians want to further destroy reproductive health care. And there is a strong sense of disillusionment from pro-choice activists here that the system has failed, and frankly I don’t blame them,” Howard said.
“While Democrats at the Capitol may not be able to reverse these laws, we are still very much committed to doing everything we can to ensure that there will still be pathways to abortion access. There is no other option — we have to keep fighting.”
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A health care worker checks the temperature of a tourist at Sanya Phoenix International Airport in Sanya, China. (photo: VCG/Getty Images)
China to Drop Quarantine Requirement for Overseas Visitors
Associated Press
Excerpt: "China will drop Covid-19 quarantine requirements for passengers arriving from abroad from 8 January, its National Health Commission has announced in the latest easing of the country’s once-strict virus-control measures."
ALSO SEE: Packed ICUs, Crowded Crematoriums: Covid Roils Chinese Towns
Eight days of isolation will no longer be needed, and officials say citizens’ ability to travel will be slowly restored
China will drop Covid-19 quarantine requirements for passengers arriving from abroad from 8 January, its National Health Commission has announced in the latest easing of the country’s once-strict virus-control measures.
Currently, arriving passengers must quarantine for five days at a hotel, followed by three days at home. At one stage there was a requirement to quarantine for three weeks.
The scrapping of the measure is a major step toward fully reopening travel with the rest of the world, which the government severely curtailed in a bid to keep the virus out.
The restrictions have prevented most Chinese people from travelling abroad, limited face-to-face diplomatic exchanges and sharply reduced the number of foreigners in China for work and study.
China’s health commission said that steps would be taken to make it easier for some foreigners to enter the country, though it didn’t include tourists. It did indicate that Chinese citizens would be gradually allowed to travel abroad for tourism again, an important source of revenue for hotels and related businesses in many countries.
People coming to China will still need a negative virus test 48 hours before departure and passengers will be required to wear protective masks on board planes, an online post from the health commission said.
Chinese social media users reacted with joy to the end of the restrictions that have kept the country largely closed off from the outside world since March 2020.
“It’s over … spring is coming,” said one top-voted comment on the Weibo social media site.
Online searches for flights abroad surged on the news, state media reported, with the travel platform Tongcheng seeing an 850% jump in searches and a tenfold rise in inquiries about visas.
China abruptly dropped many of its pandemic restrictions earlier this month, sparking widespread Covid outbreaks that have swamped hospital emergency facilities and funeral homes.
The move followed rare public protests against the restrictions, which have hit the economy, putting people out of work and driving restaurants and shops out of business.
For more than two and a half years, Chinese authorities enforced a strict zero-Covid approach that became a signature policy of leader Xi Jinping.
The arrival of the fast-spreading Omicron variant in late 2021 made the strategy increasingly untenable, requiring ever-wider lockdowns that stymied growth and disrupted lives.
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A black softshell turtle discovered in Nepal. (photo: Mongabay)
Of Yetis and Extinct Turtles: Top Wildlife Discoveries in Nepal in 2022
Abhaya Raj Joshi, Mongabay
Joshi writes: "It's no Yeti, but Tibetan brown bear's presence in Nepal is no longer a myth."
Throughout 2022, Mongabay reported on important biodiversity-related scientific discoveries in Nepal. The stories, some of them republished by different media outlets in Nepal and abroad, brought the country’s little-known by rich biodiversity to a wider audience, and shed light on crucial regions in the country awaiting conservation.
Here are some of the most significant stories from the past year:
It’s no Yeti, but Tibetan brown bear’s presence in Nepal is no longer a myth
A study offered the first clear photographic evidence of the presence of Tibetan brown bears (Ursus arctos pruinosus) in Nepal. The camera-trap images were taken in 2013, but the study around them was only recently published because researcher Madhu Chetri was busy with other studies on snow leopards. For Chetri, the photos put to rest folklore he heard from villagers 20 years earlier about a Yeti-like creature prowling Nepal’s Himalayan region. Other studies have also shown, through genetic analysis, that hair and other samples attributed to the Yeti come from bears.
Carnivore sightings highlight richness of Nepal’s Trans-Himalayan region
Scientists recorded images of the steppe polecat (Mustela eversmanii), Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul) and Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) in Nepal’s Trans-Himalayan region. This was the first time these species had been spotted outside the country’s protected areas, and the first confirmation that they occurred in the little-explored Trans-Himalayan region. The findings were released in a statement from Nepal’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation and Department of Forests and Soil Conservation; researchers say academic publications are forthcoming.
Enigmatic binturong photographed in Nepal for the first time
Residents in western Nepal’s Pokhara Valley captured the first known photos of a binturong, or bearcat (Arctictis binturong), in the country. The small cat-like mammal is found across much of East and Southeast Asia, and while eastern Nepal is also considered part of its range, its presence in the country had never been confirmed until now. Conservation officials were unable to examine the animal in person because it was released back into the wild by local authorities. The binturong is categorized as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with its global population thought to have declined by 30% over the past 18 years.
In Nepal, a turtle that rose from the dead makes another grand entrance
Researchers discovered a population of black softshell turtles (Nilssonia nigricans) in a wetland in southern Nepal, raising hopes for its conservation. The critically endangered species was previously thought to occur in only a handful of ponds in Bangladesh and India, and was so rare that it was briefly declared extinct in the wild in 2002. The new discovery adds to other recent findings of the black softshell turtle in the Brahmaputra River that runs through India and Bangladesh.
Experts say the wetland and river populations are less prone than the pond-confined ones to the threats of fungal infection and inbreeding, and can form the basis of an ecotourism industry benefiting locals.
First gharial hatchlings spotted in nearly two decades in Nepal’s Karnali River
Twenty-eight gharial hatchlings were spotted in a tributary of Nepal’s Karnali River, the first sign of successful nesting in this waterway in at least 16 years. The discovery by villagers living near Bardiya National Park came on June 15, two days before World Crocodile Day, and indicates the critically endangered species, Gavialis gangeticus, is on the road to recovery. Nepal is home to about 200 breeding gharials, and since 1978 has carried out conservation and breeding programs for the species.
An elusive lizard thought to live only in India makes an appearance in Nepal
Researchers confirmed the presence of the Sikkim grass lizard (Takydromus sikkimensis) in eastern Nepal, nearly 100 kilometers (60 miles) from its known range in India’s Sikkim state. The species was last year classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List because of its limited distribution and threats to its habitat from farming and a hydropower dam. Herpetologists say the discovery should prompt more research into Nepal’s little-studied reptile and amphibian life, with the potential for more species coming to light.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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