15 January 23
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But of course there’s never been any valid comparison. Trump repudiated the Constitution and staged an attempted coup, which he’s still mounting, among other things.
And now we have the specter of Biden being accused of having done exactly what Trump did when Trump brazenly stole top-secret documents from the United States.
But let’s be clear: The Biden documents were discovered by Biden’s own lawyers, who then reported the discovery to the Justice Department. The Trump documents were requested repeatedly by the National Archives. Trump repeatedly refused to produce them. They were then found by the FBI over the objections of Trump and his lawyers.
Democrats have an old-fashioned belief that democracy requires truth, facts, and logic. So when mistakes are made, they usually try to explain them to the public, as the White House is now doing with regard to the documents found in Biden’s possession.
Unfortunately, the White House did not disclose their discovery to the public for two months, apparently waiting until after the November midterm elections before which the disclosure could have been damaging to Democrats.
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland, citing what he called “extraordinary circumstances,” appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of the documents — inviting more false equivalence between two investigations: Biden’s unknowing possession of such documents and Trump’s knowing possession.
Republicans have no such qualms about democracy, facts, and logic. A Republican House hellbent on investigating Hunter Biden, the FBI, and anything they can find to embarrass Biden and the Democrats is already making as much political hay as possible out of the discovery of the documents in Biden’s possession, as are their mouthpieces on Fox News.
The task for Biden and the White House will be to keep an even keel by not getting distracted by this commotion, and continuing the important business of governing the nation.
Over the long term — in particular, during the next two years of run-up to the 2024 election — the contrast between the House Republicans’ zany partisan escapades and Biden’s seriousness of public purpose will offer the most potent means of avoiding all false equivalences.
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One of the few remaining sculptures in the Kherson Regional Art Museum, which curators say Russian forces spent several days looting last year. (photo: Finbarr O'Reilly/NYT)
Russian forces have looted tens of thousands of pieces, including avant-garde oil paintings and Scythian gold. Experts say it is the biggest art heist since the Nazis in World War II, intended to strip Ukraine of its cultural heritage.
Five large trucks pulled up. So did a line of military vehicles, ferrying Russian agents who filed in through several doors. It was a carefully planned, highly organized, military-style assault — on an art museum.
Over the next four days, the Kherson Regional Art Museum was cleaned out, witnesses said, with Russian forces “bustling about like insects,” porters wheeling out thousands of paintings, soldiers hastily wrapping them in sheets, art experts barking out orders and packing material flying everywhere.
“They were loading such masterpieces, which there are no more in the world, as if they were garbage,” said the museum’s longtime director, Alina Dotsenko, who recently returned from exile, recounting what employees and witnesses had told her.
When she came back to the museum in early November and grasped how much had been stolen, she said, “I almost lost my mind.”
Kherson. Mariupol. Melitopol. Kakhovsky. Museums of art, history and antiquities.
As Russia has ravaged Ukraine with deadly missile strikes and brutal atrocities on civilians, it has also looted the nation’s cultural institutions of some of the most important and intensely protected contributions of Ukraine and its forebears going back thousands of years.
International art experts say the plundering may be the single biggest collective art heist since the Nazis pillaged Europe in World War II.
In Kherson, in Ukraine’s south, Ukrainian prosecutors and museum administrators say the Russians stole more than 15,000 pieces of fine art and one-of-a-kind artifacts. They dragged bronze statues from parks, lifted books from a riverside scientific library, boxed up the crumbling, 200-year-old bones of Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover, and even stole a raccoon from the zoo, leaving behind a trail of vacant cages, empty pedestals and smashed glass.
Ukrainian officials say that Russian forces have robbed or damaged more than 30 museums — including several in Kherson, which was retaken in November, and others in Mariupol and Melitopol, which remain under Russian occupation. With Ukrainian investigators still cataloging the losses of missing oil paintings, ancient steles, bronze pots, coins, necklaces and busts, the number of reported stolen items is likely to grow.
The plundering is hardly a case of random or opportunistic misbehavior by a few ill-behaved troops, Ukrainian officials and international experts say, or even a desire to turn a quick profit on the black market. Instead, they believe the thefts are a broadside attack on Ukrainian pride, culture and identity, consistent with the imperial attitude of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has constantly belittled the idea of Ukraine as a separate nation and used that as a central rationale for his invasion.
“It’s not like one soldier putting a silver chalice in his rucksack,” said James Ratcliffe, general counsel of The Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that traces stolen art. “This is a far, far larger scale.”
At one museum in Melitopol, a southern Ukrainian city that the Russians seized in the first days of the war, witnesses said that a mysterious man in a white lab coat had arrived to carefully extract, with gloves and tweezers, the most valuable objects from the collection, including gold pieces from the Scythian empire crafted 2,300 years ago. As he lifted out the priceless antiquities, a squad of Russian soldiers stood firmly behind him, in case anyone should try to stop him.
In each case of looting, witnesses — including caretakers, security guards and other museum employees, who said they had been pressured or forced to help — reported a centrally controlled expert-led operation.
“Shocked is not the word. I am furious,” Oleksandr Tkachenko, Ukraine’s culture minister, said in a broadcast interview as he toured the looted Kherson art museum, visibly upset. “If they stole our heritage, they believe that we wouldn’t continue to live and to create. But we will.”
The Ukrainians have a lot of battles on their hands. Towns in the east like Bakhmut are being pummeled. Drone swarms continue to take out critical infrastructure, plunging thousands into the dark. Vast swaths of territory in the south and east remain occupied, and one out of three Ukrainians has been forced to flee from home.
But even with the war raging, a group of Ukrainian lawyers and art experts are working day and night to collect evidence for what they hope will be future prosecutions of cultural crimes. From dimly lit offices in frosty buildings with no power or heat, wearing gloves and woolly hats indoors, they make meticulous lists of missing objects, comb through museum records and try to identify potential witnesses and local collaborators who might have helped the Russians steal.
The Ukrainians are also working with international art organizations, like The Art Loss Register, to track the looted pieces.
“Everyone in the art market is on red alert to look out for this material,” Mr. Ratcliffe said. “Every auction house that sees material from Ukraine is going to start asking a lot of questions.”
His organization, he said, has already registered more than 2,000 items from Ukraine believed to have been stolen and others at risk, including paintings from Kherson’s art museum and Scythian gold from Melitopol.
The Ukrainians accuse the Russians of breaking international treaties that outlaw art looting, such as the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Created in the wake of World War II, the treaty calls for signatories to “prohibit, prevent and, if necessary, put a stop to any form of theft” of cultural property. Both Ukraine and Russia signed it.
But the Russians have flipped the narrative and presented their actions not as theft but liberation.
“Don’t panic,’’ said Kirill Stremousov, Kherson’s Russia-installed deputy administrator, when he explained in October what had happened to the statues that disappeared from Kherson. He said that when the fighting stopped, the monuments would “definitely return,” and that “everything was being done for the benefit of preserving the historical heritage of the city of Kherson.”
The statues have yet to be returned. (And a few weeks later, just as Ukrainian troops were liberating Kherson, Mr. Stremousov was killed in a suspicious car crash.)
Many of the paintings looted from the Kherson art museum, including beloved classics like “Piquet on the Bank of the River. Sunset,” by the miniaturist Ivan Pokhytonov, and “Autumn Time,” by Heorhii Kurnakov, recently showed up at a museum in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia snatched from Ukraine in 2014.
The director of the museum, Andrei Malguin, offered a familiar rationale. “We have 10,000 pieces and we are inventorying them,” he told a Spanish newspaper, El País. He said his museum was keeping the collection for its own “protection.”
(Russian soldiers similarly displayed the four-legged booty they had “liberated” from Kherson’s zoo. In videos that went viral everywhere, paratroopers declared that the stolen raccoon was now their mascot, traveling with them along the front, and had been named Kherson. That led to a popular meme on the Ukrainian internet: Saving Private Raccoon).
This is hardly the first time that Russia has interfered with Ukrainian art or culture. For hundreds of years during imperial Russia and then in the 20th century during Soviet times, Moscow constantly tried to suppress the Ukrainian language and anything that would bolster Ukrainian identity.
After Russia grabbed Crimea, Interpol, the international police organization, said that it was searching for 52 paintings by Ukrainian artists that had been illegally transferred to an art museum in Simferopol, Crimea’s second-largest city, in March 2014.
So this time, when war erupted in February, Ukrainian officials were quick to wrap outdoor statues in sheaths of sandbags and move precious works of art into underground vaults. But the Russians were not so easily deterred.
In Melitopol, Russian soldiers kidnapped the art museum’s director and a caretaker and eventually found the Scythian gold hidden in cardboard boxes in the cellar.
In Kherson, after Ms. Dotsenko fled for Kyiv, pro-Russia collaborators took over the art museum. Ukrainian officials said that in August, a well-dressed delegation from Crimean museums had arrived to scout out the goods.
But they didn’t have much time. Ukrainian forces pressed in from three sides. By October, Russia’s hold on Kherson was unraveling faster than anyone expected. At the art museum, Russian agents rushed to get everything out as fast as possible.
“The removal took place with the participation of museum specialists but with gross violations of the transportation and packaging of the works,” said Vitalii Tytych, a Ukrainian lawyer who is part of a special military unit documenting war crimes against the cultural heritage of Ukraine. “Paintings were taken out of the frames in a hurry, frames were broken, cultural objects were also damaged or destroyed.”
“Many works,” he lamented, “will be lost.”
Touring Kherson’s museums now is depressing. Virtually all of the thousands of oil paintings that had been stowed in the art museum’s basement — and the computer records documenting them — are gone.
“I am the daughter of an officer who raised me to be strong, but I cried for two weeks,” said Ms. Dotsenko, who has worked at the art museum for 45 years.
“No,” she corrected herself, “I didn’t cry, I sobbed. I bit the walls. I gnawed.”
Across the street, at the Kherson Museum of Local Lore, there is one shattered display case after another. Deep gouges have been cut into the floor from soldiers dragging out centuries-old artifacts. Sometimes they didn’t succeed. Denys Sykoza, an inspector of cultural objects for the Kherson government, stood in front of the remains of a delicate glass cup from the fifth century, staring at the shards.
“They broke this trying to steal it,” he said quietly. “And there was only one like it.”
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Yousef Mesheh, 15, holds a portrait of his brother, Wael in the bedroom where they were sleeping when Israeli forces stormed into their home at 3.a.m., in the Balata Refugee Camp in the northern West Bank, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023. They were both arrested, but Wael is still imprisoned. (photo: Maya Alleruzzo/AP)
Within moments, the 15-year-old Palestinian said he was lying on the floor as troops punched him, shouting insults. A soldier struck his mother’s chest with his rifle butt and locked her in the bedroom, where she screamed for her sons.
Yousef and his 16-year-old brother, Wael, were hauled out of their home in Balata refugee camp in the northern West Bank. Yousef was in a sleeveless undershirt and couldn’t see without his glasses.
“I can’t forget that night,” Yousef told The Associated Press from his living room, decorated with photos of Wael, who remains in detention. “When I go to sleep I still hear the shooting and screaming.”
The Israeli military arrested and interrogated hundreds of Palestinian teenagers in 2022 in the occupied West Bank, without ever issuing a summons or notifying their families, according to an upcoming report by the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked.
The charges against those being arrested ranged from being in Israel without a permit to throwing stones or Molotov cocktails. Some teens say they were arrested to obtain information about neighbors or family members.
In the vast majority of the military's pre-planned arrests of minors last year, children were taken from their homes in the dead of the night, HaMoked said. After being yanked out of bed, children as young as 14 were interrogated while sleep-deprived and disoriented. Water, food and access to toilets were often withheld. Yousef said soldiers beat him when he asked to relieve himself during his seven-hour journey to the detention center.
The Israeli army argues it has the legal authority to arrest minors at its discretion during late-night raids.
Lawyers and advocates say the tactic runs counter to Israel’s legal promises to alert parents about their children’s alleged offenses.
In response to a petition to the Supreme Court by HaMoked two years ago, there had been some small improvement when Israel asked the military to first summon Palestinian parents about their accused children. But the progress was short-lived. Last year, the Israeli military rounded up hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank ages 12-17 in late-night arrests, according to HaMoked. Rights activists say they believe such tactics are meant to create fear.
“The fact that the military is making no effort to reduce these traumatic night arrests indicates to us that the trauma is part of the point,” said Jessica Montell, director of HaMoked. “This intimidation and terrorizing of communities seems actually part of the policy.”
According to figures reported to the Supreme Court, the army summoned Palestinian parents to question their children only a handful of times in 2021. Last year, not a single family received a summons in nearly 300 cases HaMoked tracked in the West Bank.
Petty offenses and cases where children were released without charge — as happened to Yousef — were no exception. HaMoked said the numbers are incomplete because it believes scores of similar cases are never reported.
“They are not implementing the procedure they created themselves,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director for Defense for Children International in the Palestinian territories. “The beating and mistreatment of children during night arrests is really what we’re concerned about.”
In response to a request for comment, the Israeli military said it tries to summon Palestinian children suspected of minor offenses who have no history of serious criminal convictions. But, the army argued, this policy does not apply to serious offenses or “when a summons to an investigation would harm its purpose.”
The army would not comment on Yousef's arrest, but said his brother, Wael, faces charges related to “serious financial crimes,” including “contacting the enemy,” “illegally bringing in money” and helping “an illegal organization.” These charges typically reflect cases of Palestinians communicating with people in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Although HaMoked found most cases were soon dropped, the late-night arrests haunted children long after.
Since his Nov. 7 arrest, Yousef “is not like he was before,” said his mother, Hanadi Mesheh, who also recounted her ordeal to the AP. He can’t focus in school. He no longer plays soccer. She sleeps beside him some nights, holding him during his nightmares.
“I feel like I’m always being watched,” Yousef said. “I'm frightened when my mother wakes me in the morning for school.”
Similar stories abound in the area. The northern city of Nablus emerged as a major flashpoint for violence last year after Israel began a crackdown in the West Bank in response to a spate of Palestinian attacks in Israel.
Last year Israeli forces killed at least 146 Palestinians, including 34 children, the Israeli rights group B'Tselem reported, making 2022 the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank in 18 years. According to the Israeli army, most of the Palestinians killed have been militants. But youths protesting the incursions and others not involved in confrontations have also been killed. Palestinian attacks, meanwhile, killed at least 31 Israelis last year.
Israel says the operations are meant to dismantle militant networks and thwart future attacks. The Palestinians have decried the raids as collective punishment aimed at cementing Israel’s open-ended 55-year-old occupation of lands they want for a future state. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Nighttime arrest raids are not limited to the West Bank. Israeli police also carry out regular raids in Palestinian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem.
Last fall in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, Rania Elias heard pounding on the door before dawn. Her youngest son, 16-year-old Shadi Khoury, was sleeping in his underwear. Israeli police burst into their home, shoved Khoury to the floor and pummeled his face. Blood was everywhere, she said, as police dragged him to a Jerusalem detention center for interrogation.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like to feel helpless to save your child,” Elias said.
In response to a request for comment, the Israeli police said they charged Khoury with being part of a group that threw stones at a Jewish family's car on Oct. 12, wounding a passenger.
Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new ultra-nationalist government, parents say they fear for their children more than ever. Some of the most powerful ministers are Israeli settlers who promise a hard-line stance against the Palestinians.
“This is the darkest moment,” said activist Murad Shitawi, whose 17-year-old son Khaled was arrested last March in a night raid on their home in the West Bank town of Kfar Qaddum. “I’m worried for my sons."
Kim Phuong Taylor, 49, was arrested Thursday and pleaded not guilty to the charges before being released on a personal recognizance bond, the Sioux City Journal reported. Her trial is scheduled to begin March 20.
Prosecutors allege in an indictment unsealed Thursday that Phuong Taylor filled out voter registration forms or delivered absentee ballots for people in Sioux City's Vietnamese community who had limited ability to read and understand English.
She filled out "dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot request forms, and absentee ballots containing false information," and delivered absentee ballots, sometimes without the knowledge of the people whose names were used, according to the indictment.
Pat Gill, who is Woodbury County's auditor and election commissioner, said Thursday that he notified the Iowa secretary of state's office after someone contacted his office because a ballot had been fraudulently cast in their name in November 2020.
He said his office later provided the FBI with suspected fraudulent registration forms and absentee ballots.
Phuong Taylor committed the fraud before the June 2020 primary, in which her husband, Jeremy Taylor, a former Iowa House member, finished a distant third in the race for the Republican nomination to run for Iowa's 4th District congressional seat, prosecutors allege. The winner of that race, Randy Feenstra, easily won election to Congress that November.
Prosecutors contend that Phuong Taylor committed the same fraud before the November 2020 election in which Jeremy Taylor was elected to the Woodbury County Board, according to the indictment.
Jeremy Taylor is not named in the indictment and is not accused of wrongdoing.
Kim Phuong Taylor's attorney, John Greer of Spencer, Iowa, declined to comment on the charges, the Journal reported.
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Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi receives the gavel from Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) during the first session of the 116th Congress at the US Capitol on January 3, 2019, in Washington, DC. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The discharge petition, explained.
But Democrats and GOP moderates have one weird trick they could use to stop him: the discharge petition.
This procedure was crafted to allow a majority of the House to force action on a bill that the speaker or key committees aren’t holding a House floor vote on. For instance, if McCarthy won’t allow a vote on a “clean” debt ceiling increase bill, 218 members of the House can sign a discharge petition forcing such a vote — and, since that’s a majority, that bill would likely then pass. Once a vacant Democratic seat in blue territory is filled in a special election next month, only five Republicans would have to join 213 Democrats to make a discharge petition succeed.
There are various procedural and timing technicalities that could complicate this if it had to happen right before a debt ceiling or government shutdown deadline. But in theory, it could happen, if a mere handful of Republican members want it to.
The real problem, of course, is politics — because there are many political reasons that even moderate Republicans would be reluctant to take this step.
A discharge petition is a bold challenge to the speaker’s authority, effectively wrenching control of the chamber out of his hands. In this case, it would also undercut his negotiating strategy, since he is purportedly trying to win concessions Republicans want. Working with Democrats on a petition would also be a marker of partisan disloyalty. Anyone who does it would get a target on their backs in next year’s primary — and, if they survive it, Democrats would turn around and try to beat them in the general.
Few moderates feel as empowered to defy their party on key issues as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and recent history has shown that House Republican moderates are particularly unlikely to do such a thing. But this partisan loyalty and reluctance to take a bold stance could well lead the country into crisis. So while there may be a trick that could save us from the brink, its success will still depend on navigating the political polarization that has brought us to the brink in the first place.
One weird trick to circumvent House leaders
Through much of the House’s history, the chamber’s members have battled over who should have control over the chamber’s agenda — what gets brought up for a vote and when. Should it be the speaker? Should it be key committee chairs? Or should a disparate group of rank-and-file members be able to have a voice?
By 1910, old-guard Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon had centralized power in his hands to an unprecedented degree. But eventually enough Progressive Republicans joined with Democrats and revolted, forcing Cannon to make concessions limiting his authority. One of those changes to House rules established the discharge petition, though the details of how it works changed in subsequent decades.
Frequently threatened and attempted, successful discharge petitions have been rare — but some have been extremely consequential.
In 1938, Rep. Mary Norton (D-NJ) used it to get the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and a ban on “oppressive child labor,” out of the Rules Committee. (Democrats had an enormous House majority, but several Southern Democrats had opposed the bill and held key seats on the Rules Committee.)
In 1963, Democrats forced conservative Rules Committee chair Howard Smith to hold hearings on civil rights legislation with a discharge petition — Smith caved before they got 218 signatures, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the following year.
Democrats repeated that play in 1965 to advance their bill to let the District of Columbia govern itself past another conservative Democrat committee chair, though the bill did not become law that session. (Notably, in all three of these cases, a Democratic president had endorsed the discharge effort to bypass conservative Southern Democrats holding key committee seats.)
But it hasn’t only been used for bold liberal wins — interest groups also discovered the discharge petition could help them circumvent committee chairs they disliked.
Soft drink distributors sought and won an antitrust exemption in 1980, the banking industry rolled back a new tax withholding law in 1983, and the National Rifle Association got a gun rights bill through in 1986 — and all used the motion to discharge to get around Democratic committee chairs who opposed those measures. Similarly, the last discharge petition to win 218 votes got the Export-Import Bank’s reauthorization past a conservative GOP committee chair in 2015.
The discharge petition has also been employed to force party leaders to hold votes they’d prefer to avoid.
While Democrats controlled Congress in the 1980s and early 1990s, Republicans and conservative Democrats repeatedly used the discharge petition to force votes on a constitutional amendment to balance the budget (though, since a constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of the chamber for approval, it didn’t pass).
In the Republican-controlled House of 2002, Democrats and moderate Republicans used it to get campaign finance reform to the floor of the House, despite Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert’s reluctance. They succeeded, passing the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold.
Lessons from the last big discharge petition fight
But to understand why Republicans might be gun-shy about using it this year, it’s worth revisiting the last discharge petition that came close to succeeding, in 2018.
The battle then was over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided temporary deportation protections for some unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children. President Obama had established the program through executive authority, but now Trump was trying to phase it out. Many believed that if a legislative fix for DACA was presented to the House, it would pass (with the support of Democrats and some moderate Republicans). But Republicans controlled the chamber and, deferring to conservatives, they hadn’t acted.
So eventually, Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) and Jeff Denham (R-CA) put together a discharge petition to try to force the House to vote on four different DACA bills, including a bipartisan compromise bill. Eighteen Republicans signed first, and then over the next month, every Democrat, as well as a few more Republicans, added their names, raising the number of signatures to 216 — two short of what was needed.
Then Republican Speaker Paul Ryan acted to prevent anyone else from going wobbly. He cut a deal in which he’d agree to hold votes on certain DACA measures — but not the bipartisan bill. Instead, Ryan wanted Republicans to make a deal among themselves that would include border security measures sought by conservatives. Ryan argued that only that process could advance a bill that President Trump would sign into law (though Politico suggested Ryan feared the potential “huge embarrassment” of the bipartisan bill passing and infuriating conservatives). The eventual deal failed overwhelmingly on the House floor that June, with opposition from most Republicans and all Democrats.
Did GOP moderates just so happen to fall two votes short of what they needed — meaning, if only two more sympathetic members happened to be in Congress, they could have succeeded? If so, that might bode well for a discharge petition in this Congress, since just five moderates rather than 25 would be necessary this time.
A cynic might suspect, though, that the key moderates were always likely to cave if they were close to success — making the whole effort look more like image-burnishing for reelection purposes than a genuine revolt. Alternatively, perhaps they were just trying to force some action but felt more comfortable if that was Republican action rather than banding with Democrats to enrage their own party.
The prospects this year
So what are the chances the discharge petition will be deployed this year, to seize control from McCarthy and the right on certain issues?
One complication is that there are certain procedural and timing restrictions with how it can be used. The process would likely take significantly more than a month from start to finish, as Josh Huder outlined on Twitter. It’s not an accident the process is cumbersome — it’s meant as a last resort rather than a first resort. As Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig points out, these complications could pose a problem when there’s a hard deadline in play, like for raising the debt ceiling or funding the government.
But there’s another, more political difference from past cases in which discharge petitions were successfully used. Typically, frustrated members of the majority party turn to them when their own party leaders or members are seeking to avoid an issue, taking no action on it at all.
On both the debt ceiling and government funding, though, the House GOP will likely be actively trying to make something happen in negotiations with Democrats — spending cuts that the vast majority of Republicans want in exchange for a debt ceiling increase.
McCarthy’s strategy there is to drive a hard bargain, holding tough to force the Senate and President Biden to make concessions to the GOP. That means, for Republicans, joining a discharge petition would mean undercutting their party leaders’ negotiating strategy and reducing the GOP’s leverage — a betrayal. (One could, of course, argue that it’s unethical to hold the nation’s credit rating hostage at all, but good luck convincing Republicans of that.)
Take Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, one of the most moderate Republicans in the House. Fitzpatrick told Semafor that a discharge petition was “one of many options” to avoid default, but also told Politico that he’d need moderate Democrats to “get on board” with spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. That is: He wants a deal where Democrats make concessions.
Indeed, the more a discharge petition effort is seen as defying McCarthy, rather than defying an extreme group of hardline House Republicans, the less likely House moderates will do it. The pressures to be a good partisan soldier are quite strong. Swing-district Republicans will face tough reelections and may think they need the money McCarthy and his allies can steer their way.
They also have to get through the primary before even making it to the general, which makes many reluctant to anger the right. Only some members have the appetite to truly be mavericks — for most, the path of least resistance is to stick with the team (though there could theoretically be a scenario where McCarthy tacitly approves of a discharge petition, so he could argue to the right that his hand was forced).
Again, these members of Congress do have agency, and it’s important to keep in mind that five Republicans really could act boldly, embracing the discharge the petition to save the nation from a dangerous crisis, if they wanted to. They just probably won’t want to, because they won’t see it as in their political self-interest.
More broadly, there’s a long-running centrist fantasy of the coalition of commonsensical moderates coming together, dramatically seizing power from the extremes, and doing reasonable things — funding the government, preventing a debt ceiling breach, and maybe passing other good policies, too.
In one sense, this never happens, because partisanship is too strong.
But in another sense, it happens all the time — just less dramatically. The appropriations process regularly proceeds with bipartisan support in the Senate. Even during the last eight-year stint of Republican House control, there was only one really big fight on the debt ceiling and one on government funding. For the rest of that span, GOP leaders regularly allowed bipartisan deals with Democrats on those matters to come to the floor and pass over conservative opposition.
No discharge petition was necessary for all that. The question is whether McCarthy is so beholden to the right that one will be necessary now.
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'Alabama abortion ban specifically doesn’t allow prosecutors to go after women who have had abortions. (photo: Brian Branch Price/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock)
In Alabama, pregnant women are subjected to a work around law in the name of protecting the fetus: chemical endangerment of a child
Alabama’s abortion ban, which has only limited exemptions for women’s lives, makes providing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison. But like nearly all of the abortion bans that have sprung into effect since the US supreme court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health overturned Roe v Wade last June, the law has no mechanism to prosecute women who receive abortions. But that doesn’t mean that patients are safe from criminal charges, according to the state’s top prosecutor.
“The Human Life Protection Act targets abortion providers, exempting women upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed from liability under the law,” a spokesperson for attorney general Marshall told Alabama’s 1819 News, referring to the law that bans abortion itself. However, he continued, “It does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws.”
In other words, just because the Alabama abortion ban specifically doesn’t allow prosecutors to go after women who have had abortions, doesn’t mean that those women will not be arrested and jailed for their procedures. It just means that the prosecutors will have to find another law.
Which other law? The AG pointed to one in particular: Alabama’s law barring the so-called “chemical endangerment of a child”. The law, which was originally designed to protect kids from exposure to home meth labs, makes it a felony to “knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally cause or permit a child to be exposed to, to ingest or inhale, or to have contact with any controlled substance, chemical substance, or drug paraphernalia”. The Alabama state supreme court ruled in 2013 that the law can be applied to “children” who have not been born yet – that is, embryos and fetuses.
What does it mean in practice? It means that legally, a pregnancy is defined as a “person”, and a woman’s body becomes an “environment” that she has an obligation to keep free of hazards, in deference to the wellbeing of this other “person”. This is how the Alabama AG is threatening to lock up abortion patients: by defining women’s bodies not as spheres of those women’s own control, but as homes to house other people – and by defining abortion pills as hazardous “drugs”.
None of this is new. The truth is that chemical endangerment laws have long been used to criminalize pregnancy, and Alabama in particular has a long, sadistic history of prosecuting women who are pregnant – or believed to be pregnant – on suspicion that they have ingested something that might endanger a fetus.
Marijuana users and those seeking opiate addiction treatment have been arrested for supposedly endangering their fetuses in the state; in one county, the imprisonment of pregnant women on chemical endangerment charges or suspicion of drug use became so common that Pregnancy Justice, a national advocacy group that provides lawyers to those prosecuted for their pregnancy outcomes, had a whole project dedicated to getting women out of the county jail.
The substances that women are arrested for taking need not be illegal. Sometimes, they are prescriptions. In 2021, Alabama arrested a mother of six under a felony chemical endangerment charge after she refilled her longstanding painkiller prescription while pregnant (the woman, named Kim Blalock, had an old back injury from a car accident). Charges were eventually dropped, but not before Banks had her home raided by armed police, who scared her children and was dragged through court for months. Her pregnancy, by the way, was fine: amid all the antagonism from her state, Banks gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
But the comments from the Alabama AG do reveal a new trend in the anti-abortion movement: abortion opponents are being increasingly frank about their own sadism. The newest abortion bans gaining traction in the states have no exemptions for rape or incest; some, like those of Idaho and Tennessee, have no life of the mother exemptions, or require doctors to prove the medical necessity of an abortion after the fact, in court – provisions that incentivize medical providers to delay or deny care, to risk women’s health and lives.
For all the efforts of abortion opponents to put a paternalistic spin on their work, these positions are not anomalies; they are now firmly in the anti-abortion mainstream. In that sense, Marshall was just being honest: hurting women has always been the point.
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In Fennoscandia, a successful Arctic fox conservation reintroduction project led to the species being downlisted from critically endangered to endangered in Norway and Sweden. (photo: Arild Landa/NINA)
Reintroductions of this kind offer hope in the fight against declining canid biodiversity across the globe. Yet these successes, too, remain precarious, as they take place against the background of a rapidly changing and nature-depleted world.
In a recent paper, researchers warn that the sustainability of the Arctic fox conservation program is potentially being undermined by climate change, which could be disrupting the life cycle of the lemming, the fox’s primary prey.
The Arctic fox’s survival is “problematic if lemmings are disappearing,” Arild Landa, a scientist with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, told Mongabay. “You might call the lemming the engine of the high alpine areas .… [But] lemming cycles have been interrupted during recent years and that is believed to be due to a warmer climate.”
Add to that a second climate conservation challenge, as the Arctic fox is displaced by the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), which is moving northward with warming temperatures, outcompeting V. lagopus for food, and occasionally preying upon the smaller species.
To help maintain the expanded but tenuous Arctic fox population, a costly supplementary feeding program — totaling 30,000 kilograms (66,100 pounds) of dry dog feed per year — has been instituted while “control” measures to limit red fox numbers are carried out.
These efforts have so far been successful in bringing the species back from the brink, Landa and his colleagues write. “However, anthropogenic drivers facilitating red fox invasion into the Arctic fox habitat, along with climate driven irregularities and dampened small rodent cycles, could inhibit the establishment of a self-sustained population.”
Canid species around the globe are likewise at risk, not only hit by one-two punches, but staggering under three or more blows, as they take a pummeling from threats on all sides. This onslaught has engaged researchers because the loss of these predators can seriously endanger ecosystem health, while improved canid conservation not only aids in improving habitat, but may even help curb climate change in some cases.
Climate change: Canid winners and losers
The world is in the midst of a massive, chaotic, human-caused wave of biodiversity loss, with some wild canid species swept toward destruction, while others see their status improve.
The Arctic fox is just one among 36 species within the Canidae family. Though its conservation status is considered of least concern globally, its precarious status in Fennoscandia is shared by five species now recognized as globally endangered by the IUCN: the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), North America’s red wolf (Canis rufus), Asia’s dhole (Cuon alpinus), and South America’s Darwin’s fox (Lycalopex fulvipes).
Climate change is one of the perils the world’s canid species must navigate — with varying projected outcomes. A modeling study using the worst-case global warming scenario suggests that generalist canid species, like the red fox, South America’s crab-eating fox (Cerdocyon thous), and the gray wolf (Canis lupus) could gain ground as climate change escalates. Other species, with “specific niche requirements,” could lose out, says Lucas Porto, the study’s lead author and an evolutionary ecologist at Brazil’s University of São Paulo. “Species that are going to decrease live in a very small part of the planet, and have specific prey,” he says.
According to Porto’s team, the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) and hoary fox (Lycalopex vetulus), which both dwell in South America’s Cerrado savanna biome, are among those species likely to be threatened by climate change. Separate research indicates that the Ethiopian wolf could lose all its already limited habitat under every climate change scenario, likely beckoning its extinction in the wild. Still other studies find that higher temperatures could negatively influence mortality among African wild dogs by exacerbating existing threats and reducing their ability to reproduce.
Lost and fragmented habitat, diminishing prey
Climate change is just one of nine planetary boundaries that researchers say humanity cannot cross without seriously endangering life on Earth. Others, such as land-use change (bringing about habitat loss and increased human contact), plus threats to biosphere integrity (bringing about prey loss) are already directly impacting wild canids. Add to that the stress of increased disease and persecution by people.
Brazil’s Cerrado, a global biodiversity hotspot, is less well known than the Amazon, yet habitat reduction and fragmentation in this vast grassland has occurred at a far faster rate than in the neighboring rainforest. In 2020-21, the savanna saw its highest rate of loss recorded thus far.
Rapidly expanding agribusiness, coupled with the building of a huge road network and dams, has isolated some Cerrado maned wolf populations, causing them to show early signs of genetic separation, according to 2022 research. While this isolation isn’t currently high, or entirely unexpected, it could, “if it continues in this direction,” lead to “losing genetic diversity,” says study co-author Frederico Gemesio Lemos, from the Cerrado Mammals Conservation Program at the Federal University of Catalao.
Elsewhere, some tropical species, while currently having a lower threatened status, are increasingly stressed by habitat loss: The elusive short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), the Amazon’s only endemic wild canid, for example, is being forced to retreat all along the so-called Arc of Deforestation, which stretches across Brazil. A 2020 study suggested this canid could lose up to 30% of its distribution by 2027.
Habitat reductions also increase human contact, thereby heightening related dangers such as roadkills and overhunting. Across Asia, the endangered dhole, dubbed the Asiatic wild dog, has lost an estimated 75% of its former range, putting it in closer proximity to humans; in Southeast Asia, rampant snaring impacts the species indirectly via bycatch, while also reducing prey abundance.
A recent study identified northeastern Cambodia as a potential stronghold for the dhole, along with remaining wild locales in Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia. “The key thing is to ensure that habitats are protected,” Pablo Sinovas, Cambodia country director with Fauna & Flora International, told Mongabay. Maintaining healthy prey populations is also essential, even as the serious threat of snaring decimates ungulates in some areas.
Declining canid prey is a recognized problem in Thailand too, says Nucharin Songsasen, head of the Center for Species Survival at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. In some cases, she notes, dwindling prey can precipitate a “domino effect” as pack hunters such as dholes leave their habitat in search of food, prey on livestock, and in turn prompt human-wildlife conflict and persecution.
“When the forest is empty, there’s nothing for them to eat, and then they might take out a whole herd of goats,” said Songsasen, who is also coordinator of the IUCN’s Dhole Working Group. “As people who study carnivores, we sometimes only focus on conserving carnivores. But now we need to start figuring out how we can maintain those prey populations [as well].”
In India, dholes are generally faring better than their counterparts in Southeast Asia, says Arjun Srivathsa, a fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR, India. But in the country’s northeast, prey depletion is a major concern for all carnivores.
“Dholes are extremely habitat-sensitive,” Srivathsa wrote in an email. “In other landscapes of India, degradation and loss of habitat connectivity between designated protected areas threatens dhole populations through impeding dispersal and movement between populations.”
The threat of disease
Habitat fragmentation and the advance of agricultural frontiers brings people, livestock, domestic animals, and wildlife together, leading many conservationists to name disease as one of the most pressing threats to canid populations.
In 2017, an outbreak of canine distemper virus (CDV) heavily impacted the population of African wild dogs in Kenya’s Laikipia county, says Samuel Mutisya, head of conservation at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy. Prior to that outbreak, 20 or so wild dogs were known to roam the Ol Pejeta Reserve; today just one or two are seen, and rarely.
But identifying the extent of the disease threat, and guarding against it, is challenging, says Ezequiel Hidalgo, director of science and conservation at Buin Zoo in Chile. He notes that viruses, such as CDV, are among the most prevalent risks faced by Chile’s endangered Darwin’s fox. However, a 2020 study found no trace of CDV in foxes there, even though CDV has high prevalence among domestic and feral dogs sharing the same environment. Hidalgo offered two theories as to what might be going on: Either there is zero or limited contact between foxes and dogs, or Darwin’s foxes that contract it are dying in the wild without a trace. The latter, he says, is most likely.
Rabies, which kills around 59,000 people annually, is one of the greatest threats to remaining populations of the Ethiopian wolf. This species lives on wild “islands in a sea of [domestic and feral] dogs,” according to Claudio Sillero, founder and director of the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme.
Since monitoring of the species began, conservationists have registered at least a dozen rabies outbreaks, with potentially devastating consequences for packs. Ethiopian wolves are also imperiled by agriculture’s continued intrusion into the species’ mountainous range, even as the impacts of climate change could “do away with” the wolves. The current priority is to address the most pressing threat: curbing disease to preserve the species for the immediate future, according to Sillero.
Are canid comebacks benefiting forests?
Efforts to address common canid threats regularly take place in the context of work to restore and rewild natural areas. For years, the archetypal example making the case for conserving often maligned canids has been found in Yellowstone National Park in the United States. Wolves were reintroduced there after a decades-long absence in 1995, and caused a much-debated tropic cascade that changed the forest ecosystem.
Extensive studies have been conducted to understand the wolves’ impact, revealing both direct and indirect effects. Researchers have connected the wolf comeback to increased diversity of tree cover, as the roving packs of canids reduced browsing elk, leading to a burst in tree growth among willow, aspen and alders — allowing plant expansion along riverbanks, thus improving streamside and aquatic habitat. In tandem, other animal species such as beavers returned, while wolf kills provided meals for a range of scavengers.
In Europe, wolves made a comeback of their own. Previously extirpated from much of Western Europe, populations migrated westward from the wilder east side of the continent.
In Poland, researchers are studying wolves in the Białowieża Primeval Forest to understand their impacts. For Dries Kuijper, with the Mammal Research Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, it comes down to the wolves’ influence on their prey: “You get some parts of the forest where red deer presence is much lower, and also their impact on the vegetation is much lower,” he said. “So, with the wolves in the forest, you get many places where trees can nicely grow. Whereas without the wolves, you would have much more impact of deer everywhere,” with heavy browse on plant species.
Research by Kuijper’s group indicates that wolves can strongly reduce deer browsing pressure by up to 25% in core wolf areas, depending on variable landscape factors.
“We know that the potential for [saplings] to grow and continue to grow increases [with wolf presence],” Kuijper said. How exactly this translates over the long term into adult tree growth in Białowieża, and thus potential carbon storage, remains an open question.
Evidence gathered by Kuijper’s team also suggests wolves bring “relatively subtle effects” to forest regeneration. “Wolves and other large carnivores can at least add something of the processes that we’ve lost. I think that’s the value, because if you get natural dynamics and natural processes back, biodiversity will profit.”
Researchers, including Oswald Schmitz, professor of population and community ecology at Yale University’s School of the Environment, underscore the integral role that wolves and other large carnivores play: “In order to really have sustainable and healthy ecosystems, we need the full complement of predators, herbivores, plants and microbes, living together,” Schmitz told Mongabay in an interview.
Research by Schmitz indicates that wolves can enhance the potential of boreal forests to take up and store carbon by controlling the abundance of prey species like moose. “If you do the scaling [up] across the entire boreal forest, [that total tree growth] can amount to as much as the equivalent of what Canada emits through fossil fuel burning,” he said. There are caveats, however, as similar carbon storage increases aren’t found in all ecosystems, such as grasslands, where wolves may suppress carbon storage capacity.
“We’re looking at nature-based solutions to try and offset human impacts. Just restoring and protecting wolves and moose and their interactions in the boreal ecosystem can actually lead to huge gains in the ability of these ecosystems to help us out in fighting the climate problem,” Schmitz concluded.
Bringing canids back: ‘Think big picture’
Approximately 9,000 kilometers (5,600 miles) south of Norway’s Arctic fox project, another successful reintroduction program is underway in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. Endangered African wild dogs, along with many other large species, were wiped out there in the latter half of the 20th century.
But in 2018, a pack of 14 wild dogs was released. Today, the population numbers more than 100. That increase in predators helped restore a “landscape of fear” among prey species, explains Paola Bouley, who was part of the reintroduction team. And that’s proven to be a good thing for park ecology. “The population is doing so well and it feels like more of a balance,” Bouley, now with NATURA Moçambique, said in an interview.
How exactly the wild dogs will impact the wider ecosystem over time remains unclear, according to ecologist Robert Pringle at Princeton University, whose lab has studied Gorongosa extensively. Shifts in behavior and distribution of prey species such as bushbuck and reedbuck have been noted. But it’s difficult to credit that improvement exclusively to the wild dogs, he said.
“Our previous research indicated that the decimation of apex carnivores had cascading [negative] impacts on the ecosystem by relaxing constraints on habitat use by herbivores,” Pringle explained via email. “We know that losing the top carnivores causes shifts in herbivore behavior, herbivore abundance, and plant communities. [But] pinpointing the importance of wild dogs relative to other carnivore species such as leopards and hyenas is a work in progress.”
With the success of the Gorongosa reintroduction, conservationists are now looking past park boundaries to create corridors for wild dog movement across the surrounding landscape, and hope to link up the park’s wild dogs with an isolated population to the east.
“We’re really trying to think big picture; larger-scale connectivity and coexistence,” Bouley said. Part of the impetus is that common threats, like disease, still loom: “It [only] takes one bad encounter with a rabid dog in a community, and you could potentially wipe out populations of lions and dogs … The [initial reintroduction] success is very short term unless we begin to think much bigger.”
For Pringle, reintroductions of this kind “are one tool with which to fight biodiversity loss and ecological decay.” He also underlines the importance of providing footholds for endangered species such as the African wild dog, helping them survive and thrive: “That’s important to me. And more generally, the fact that it is possible to restore thriving biological communities gives me hope.”
Canid survival in a rapidly changing world
Experts now know that wild canid populations play a key and essential role in well-functioning ecosystems, acting as seed dispersers, rodent controllers, and herbivore managers. Though they face many planetary threats, efforts to conserve them could aid in ecosystem restoration, and potentially benefit the fight against climate change.
Though the challenges facing wild canids are manifold, Sillero, who is also chair of the IUCN’s Canid Specialist Group, is hopeful for their survival, noting that many canid species are resilient and can bounce back from losses. Broadly speaking, he says, they may be faring better across their biological family than others, such as wild felids.
But long-term canid survival requires conservation at a bigger scale, asserts FFI’s Sinovas: “If you’re thinking about recovery, then you need to think about the ecosystem as a whole … You need to think about the balance of predators and prey. Dholes, for example, can fill part of the ecological role of other species, such as tigers.”
In the case of the Arctic fox, that may mean broader human and natural solutions. Up until very recently, conservationists have employed “a single species approach,” Landa said. “In the future it will be more of a whole ecosystem approach [that’s needed], and I think that is the necessary thing to do.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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