The New York Times just published the latest bombshell about right-wing corruption of the Supreme Court.1
At the center of this latest scandal is a little-known nonprofit organization called the Supreme Court Historical Society, which is ostensibly devoted to preserving and explaining the court’s history.
But wealthy right-wing special interests like the NRA, Big Oil, and the anti-abortion movement have turned this organization into a vehicle for buying access and influence with Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh.
In fact, of the nearly $11 million in donations the paper could trace, almost two-thirds came from parties who regularly do business before the court — and astonishingly, there are no rules for reporting or disclosing donations to the public. That’s why it’s long past time for Congress to pass ethical standards for the highest court in the land.
The Supreme Court has become the federal government’s most powerful body of policymakers and lawmakers, overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting local gun laws, unleashing unlimited corporate money in politics, and more.
The nine justices are appointed for life, and despite their virtually unchecked power, there are no rules regarding when they must recuse themselves or even reveal potential conflicts of interest.2Without ethical standards, we’ve seen the court breach its duty to be impartial and independent time and again.
Last month, Justice Brett Kavanaugh was spotted at a party hosted by Matt Schlapp, the right-wing leader of the Conservative Political Action Conference, along with a who’s who of Nazis and special interests with matters before the court.3
The leaked decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was well in line with activist groups’ long-standing protocols to exploit the lack of rules.4
The bottom line: The Supreme Court is supposed to be impartial and above influence from special interests. But today’s justices look increasingly poised to throw that tenet out the window.
Sources: 1. The New York Times, "A Charity Tied to the Supreme Court Offers Donors Access to the Justices," January 1, 2023. 2. Brennan Center for Justice, "Brennan Center Urges Supreme Court Justices to Adopt a Code of Ethics," September 24, 2019. 3. Bloomberg Law, "Kavanaugh Holiday Party Appearance Raises Ethics Questions (1)," December 12, 2022. 4. The New York Times, "Former Anti-Abortion Leader Alleges Another Supreme Court Breach," November 19, 2022.
PAID FOR BY DEMAND PROGRESS (DemandProgress.org) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Contributions are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. Join our online community on Facebook or Twitter.
A new lawsuit against CNN reveals just how much Donald Trump hates being compared to “Adolph” Hitler.
Former President Donald Trump is doubling down on his “I am not Hitler” defamation lawsuit against CNN by adopting the Nazi strategy of attacking journalists as liars, with court papers claiming—without irony—that “Americans are split when asked if the media is actually an enemy of democracy.”
Since October, Trump has been waging war against the Cable News Network over the way it has increasingly drawn comparisons between his Make America Great Again movement and the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany.
But in the latest court filings, Trump’s lawyers paradoxically argued that now is the “perfect” time to peel back First Amendment protections for American journalists by asking courts to review legal precedent established in a 1964 case called New York Times v. Sullivan.
“The sustained defamation of falsely linking President Trump to Nazis provides a perfect vehicle for Supreme Court reexamination of Sullivan,” lawyers wrote in their Dec. 30 filing.
The former president’s disgust for journalists isn’t new. For years, he has attacked reporters as the “enemy of the people.” And political scientists who study authoritarianism have noted how his favorite insult against reporters—calling them “fake news”—is a near-direct translation of Lügenpresse, the derogatory term used by Nazis against who they called the “lying press.”
Trump, who tried to misuse the Justice Department and frivolous lawsuits to remain in power after losing re-election in 2020 and directed insurrectionists to march on Congress in 2021, is actively seeking a return to the White House in 2024. He is under federal investigation for his anti-democratic campaign of fraud and for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
In the CNN lawsuit, his lawyers insist that “this case does not attack Constitutional principles or thwart legitimate political discourse,” even as their client, three weeks earlier, publicly called for tearing up the U.S. Constitution. Trump, still fuming over his loss to President Joe Biden, on Dec. 4 called for a new election in a Truth Social post that demanded “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” The statement was not disavowed by Republicans, who largely plan to vote for whoever wins the Republican nomination for president—even if it turns out to be Trump.
The Dec. 30 court memo mentions “Hitler” 29 times and “Nazi” 21 times in a breathless screed that claims Trump was unfairly treated by the network. The memo largely hinges on something that CNN anchor Don Lemon said during a morning program when he asked whether journalists should reconfigure their news coverage of billionaire Elon Musk the same way they did with Trump—taking a hardened stance that recognizes a powerful individual as a threat to American values and norms.
Trump’s most recent court memo opens up with a quote from Lemon during his mid-December interview with journalist Ben Smith of Semafor, in which the anchor asks, ““Should we—should journalists pull out their Trump playbook in order to deal with what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter? Is it a—is it a page out of the same book?”
The court filing then goes on to attack CNN for repeatedly drawing comparisons between Trump’s right-wing, nationalist, and anti-democratic MAGA movement and Adolf Hitler’s right-wing, nationalist, and anti-democratic Nazi Party. Trump’s lawyers say that “being compared to Hitler in this manner causes and did cause reputational harm.”
“Some CNN’s audience members have been unjustly led to believe that [sic] plaintiff literally is a fascist leader,” Trump’s lawyers wrote. “CNN’s statements seriously attempt to falsely state that the plaintiff intentionally used a Nazi-like propaganda technique to preserve his political power.”
However, they refused to explain why the allusion doesn’t hold up, noting in a footnote that “there is no case law requiring a plaintiff to plead facts that show why a false statement is, in fact, false.” They wrote that their original lawsuit “clearly states” Trump “is not Hitler-like nor would be Hitler-like in any future political role.”
Trump is being represented by James M. Trusty of Washington, D.C., and Lindsey Halligan of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They are two of the same attorneys he used to slow down the Department of Justice investigation into the way he hoarded classified documents long after he had the proper national security authority to do so at his oceanside estate of Mar-a-Lago in South Florida.
Trump takes issue with the way American journalists have come to regard his concerted effort to stay in power by peddling 2020 election conspiracy theories as the “Big Lie.” Court papers criticize how CNN in particular has broadcast historical imagery of Nazis as anchors discuss Trump’s insistence that he did indeed win the election, despite plain evidence to the contrary. Hitler used the term große Lüge, or “big lie,” to describe a deceit so large and outlandish that nobody would dare question it—and some historians have since used the term to explain how Hitler used that same tactic to blame German’s economic and political woes after World War I on Jews.
“Under these circumstances, the correlation between the ‘Big Lie,’ and Nazism is unmistakable,” Trump’s recent court filing states.
Journalists far and wide have indeed drawn parallels to Hitler’s authoritarianism and the threat to the future of American democracy posed by Trump’s unquenchable thirst for power. But when journalists do it, they tend to spell Hitler’s name correctly. In their filing, Trump’s lawyers repeatedly referred to “Adolph” Hitler.
Bills not expected to advance in Senate but underscore Republican majority’s legislative priorities ahead of 2024 election
The Republican-led House on Wednesday pressed ahead with a pair of anti-abortion measures, despite warning signs that the issue had galvanized the opposition in the wake of the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade last year.
Voting mostly along party lines, Republicans first approved a bill that would compel doctors to provide care for an infant who survives an attempted abortion – an occurrence that is exceedingly rare.
After its passage, Republicans broke into applause on the House floor as the bill’s sponsor, congresswoman Ann Wagner, a Republican of Missouri, waved the text of the legislation in celebration.
Democrats, several of them wearing white in protest, remained silent. However, on the measure, two Texas Democrats broke with the party: the congressman Henry Cuellar, who opposes abortion, supported it while his colleague Vicente González voted present.
The House also passed a non-binding resolution condemning attacks on pregnancy crisis centers, with the support of all Republicans and three Democrats.
The proposals, among the first moves made by Republicans’ new, narrow House majority, are unlikely to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate. But their passage will provide the Republican majority an opportunity to draw a sharp contrast with Democrats on the issue of abortion ahead of the 2024 elections.
“I am proud that Republicans are following through on the promises that we made to the American people,” the majority leader, Steve Scalise, the second-highest-ranking House Republican and a staunch anti-abortion advocate, told reporters this week. “All life is sacred and must be protected.”
Anti-abortion groups have long pushed so-called “born alive” legislation similar to the version under consideration in the House, which could carry a prison sentence of up to five years for medical workers.
Critics, including medical professionals, say such measures are based on distortions and misinformation about what is often an extremely painful and often unwanted decision to end a pregnancy. Abortions after the point of viability, which is defined as about 23 weeks, are extremely uncommon, according to federal and state data. In the rare instances they do happen, they often involve serious fetal abnormalities or risks to the life of the mother.
Moreover, opponents say newborns are already protected by a bipartisan law passed in 2002, which established full legal rights for infants born at any stage of development.
In a floor speech, Jerry Nadler, a Democrat of New York, said the measure “does nothing new to protect infants” but neither was it “harmless”.
“The bill directly interferes with a doctor’s medical judgment and dictates a medical standard of care that may not be appropriate in all circumstances, which could, in fact, put infants’ lives at greater risk,” Nadler said.
Abortion rights advocates also reacted to the bill. “Let’s be clear: doctors are already required to provide appropriate medical care by law,” Jacqueline Ayers, a senior vice-president at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “This is not how medical care works. It’s wrong, irresponsible, and dangerous to suggest otherwise.”
But Wagner, who has repeatedly championed the measure, argued, without evidence, that additional protections for infants born after abortion attempts were necessary because “many of these sweet little ones are denied the medical care they need to survive and thrive”.
Public support for abortion rights has climbed since the supreme court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion last summer. In November, voters punished Republicans for building the conservative court that overturned Roe. Despite rampant inflation and Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, Democrats defied expectations in November, keeping control of the Senate and limiting Republican gains in the House, where their razor-thin majority is already proving to be a challenge.
Efforts to restrict abortion have even been met with fierce resistance in traditionally Republican states. In Montana, a conservative western state, voters rejected an initiative related to infants born after attempted abortions that is similar to the one House Republicans passed on Wednesday.
Abortion remains a top concern among conservative Republicans and anti-abortion activists alarmed by the backlash to the supreme court decision. Yet the early focus on abortion has given some Republicans in swing districts cause for concern.
“We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week. Millions of women across the board were angry over overturning Roe v Wade,” Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
Noting that the bills had little chance of becoming law, she called the move “tone-deaf” and said Republicans were merely “paying lip-service to life”.
“If you want to make a difference and reduce the number of abortions with a Democratic-controlled Senate, the No 1 issue we should be working on is access to birth control,” she said. Nevertheless, Mace voted for the bills alongside her party.
Republicans also advanced a resolution, which carries no legislative weight, condemning violence against “pro-life facilities, groups and churches” which drew Democratic opposition because of its failure to address the threats targeting women’s healthcare clinics and abortion providers.
“By ignoring these acts of violence, Republicans are sending a very dangerous message that will only embolden the extremists behind them,” said Diana DeGette, a Democrat of Colorado and co-chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus.
Speaking on the House floor ahead of the vote, DeGette urged Republicans instead to adopt a counter-resolution that would condemn acts of political violence in any form.
Republicans, arguing in favor of the resolution, said anti-abortion groups had become targets of political violence since the supreme court’s June decision, and denounced the department of justice’s response to these attacks as inadequate.
“This resolution is very simple and its language is clear,” said Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, who has been critical of what he says is evidence of political bias within federal law enforcement against anti-abortion groups. “It also calls upon the Biden administration to take action now to bring the perpetrators to justice. Who could be opposed to that?”
In a statement, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, affirmed that the bills were “doomed” in the Senate, where he said Democrats would act as a “firewall against this extreme anti-choice Maga Republican agenda”.
“Just months after a historically disappointing midterm election, the Maga Republican-controlled House is putting on full display their truly extreme views on women’s health with legislation that does not have the support of the American people,” Schumer said ahead of the House vote. “Once again, Republicans are proving how dangerously out of touch they are with mainstream America.”
Reproductive rights activists won another political victory this week in Virginia, where abortion was at the center of a closely watched state senate race. Democrats flipped the seat, a result that will probably prevent the state legislature from enacting a 15-week abortion ban backed by the state’s conservative governor, Glenn Youngkin.
While Ukrainian forces quietly gained ground in Luhansk, the focus has been on a ferocious Russian offensive on the eastern towns of Bakhmut and Soledar. (photo: BBC)
While Ukrainian forces quietly gained ground in Luhansk, the focus has been on a ferocious Russian offensive on the eastern towns of Bakhmut and Soledar.
Ukraine and Russia are locked in an information war as well as a deadly struggle on the ground in Soledar, a salt mining town in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, at the end of the 46th week of the war.
The Wagner Group’s mercenaries have been fighting to take Soledar for weeks in an apparent effort to encircle Bakhmut, 10km (four miles) to the south, which has been the focus of Russian offensive operations since September.
“Units of the Wagner PMC have taken control of the entire territory of Soledar. A cauldron has been formed in the centre of the city, in which urban battles are being fought,” he said, using a common Russian military term for an enclave of defenders.
“I want to emphasise that no units except for the fighters of the Wagner PMC took part in the assault on Soledar,” Prigozhin said, who has recently highlighted the role of his 50,000 mercenaries over regular army units.
Prigozhin published a photograph of himself allegedly taken in the salt mines of Soledar, standing next to Wagner fighters.
Hours later, Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesman of Ukraine’s eastern forces, denied Soledar had fallen and called Prigozhin’s picture propaganda.
“It seems that the location of Prigozhin does not correspond to reality,” Ukraine’s armed forces said, calling the photo a psychological operation “aimed at the internal audience in order to somehow justify the insane losses among the prisoners” – a reference to Wagner’s extensive recruitment of convicts.
A similar debacle took place the previous day, when military reporters posted geolocated footage of Russian soldiers in the centre of Soledar, claiming the city had fallen. The UK’s defence intelligence confirmed that Russian forces had captured most of the town.
But Prigozhin himself denied those reports. “On the western outskirts of Soledar, there are heavy bloody battles. The Armed Forces of Ukraine honourably defend the territory of Soledar,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
The battle for Soledar intensified on the night of January 5, when Wagner forces were first reported to have broken through Ukrainian defences. By December 9, Russia’s Rybar news service said Russian forces had encircled Soledar from the northeast, taking the villages of Podgorodny, Bakhmutsky, Krasnaya Gora, and Paraskovievka.
Cherevaty spoke of “very brutal battles, bloody”.
Soledar’s strategic value was low, analysts have said. “Russian forces are still far from being within striking distance of an operational encirclement of Bakhmut,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), as they would have to reach two key highways kilometres behind Ukrainian lines.
“Considering that the recent rate of gains in this area has been on the order of a few hundred metres a day, at most, it is highly unlikely that Russian forces will be successful in cohering a mechanised push towards these [areas],” ISW said.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak said a victory in Soledar would “not make any sense” strategically for Russia.
“For the Russians there is no strategic goal. It is an open space and our positions are more advantageous. We see a completely irresponsible attitude – to put it mildly – from the Russian elite towards their own military personnel, who are dying there by the thousands,” Podolyak said.
‘Central dilemmas’
While attention was focused on Soledar, whose fall would be the first Russian capture of a town since Lysychansk last July, Ukrainian troops seized territory further north in Luhansk.
Ukrainian forces captured Pidkuichansk, just eight kilometres (three miles) northwest of Svatove, and geolocated battles showed they moved within 17km (six miles) of nearby Kreminna, confirming they were gaining ground.
The Ukrainian threat to these towns was a problem for Moscow’s planners, British military intelligence reported, because Russia had also been strengthening its defences in the southern region of Zaporizhia, fearing a Ukrainian counteroffensive towards Melitopol.
“Deciding which of these threats to prioritise countering is likely one of the central dilemmas for Russian operational planners,” a UK intelligence assessment said.
Ukraine’s movement on two fronts led to its successes in Kharkiv, in the north, and Kherson, in the south, last year.
Weapons, weapons, weapons
Ukraine has been crying out for more heavy armour, longer-range weapons, and air defence systems to end the war.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has judged that political support among allies would not last another winter.
“It is necessary to put an end to Russian aggression this year and not delay any of those defence opportunities that can speed up the defeat of the terrorist state,” he said, referring to military aid.
His military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said Ukraine would mount a major counteroffensive in the coming months when winter ended and expected fighting to be “hottest” in March.
“This will happen throughout Ukraine from Crimea to the Donbas,” he said, using the collective term for Donetsk and Luhansk.
The chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, said last month that, despite Ukraine’s slender resources, the army planned to capture Melitopol, in Zaporizhia region, in order to reach the shores of the Sea of Azov.
From there, it could effectively cut off Russia from Crimea by firing on the Kerch bridge. But it remained unclear whether Ukraine had reserves of trained manpower and weaponry to do so.
Ukraine received some welcome reinforcements in the 46th week. France said it was preparing to send 50 AMX-10RC light armoured vehicles and Bastion APCs to Ukraine, breaking a taboo on sending Western military vehicles. On the same day, US President Joe Biden confirmed the US will send 50 Bradley fighting vehicles to Ukraine.
The following day, Germany announced it would supply Ukraine with about 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles and a Patriot air defence missile battery.
While welcome, these commitments were small, security analysts told Al Jazeera.
“It’s just not serious to say that these numbers will upset the situation … Neither the numbers nor the types of vehicles are sufficient – these are not tanks, they’re light vehicles,” said Lieutenant-General Konstantinos Loukopoulos, retired, of the Hellenic Army, who has taught tank warfare at military academies in Kyiv and Moscow.
“They are enough to equip a little less than two battalions. If the allies really want to secure Ukraine they need to give them ATACMS [long-range artillery rockets], at least another 1.5 million shells of 155mm, and 700-800 tanks,” Loukopoulos said.
Last September, Zaluzhny estimated he needed 15-20 mechanised brigades to retake Luhansk and Donetsk. Ideally, said Loukopoulos, that meant 70,000-80,000 new troops with 1,500 tanks and as many armoured fighting vehicles.
‘Not entirely honest’
Other experts agreed. Retired Major-General Mick Ryan called all three types of vehicle France, the US and Germany are donating “leading edge” with “very good optics and digital communications”, but warned attrition rates in the war are high, and “hundreds of each” vehicle would be needed.
Ryan also pointed out the allies would now have to scale up the artillery, logistics vehicles, and landscaping equipment sappers use in proportion to the armoured fighting vehicles.
Strategy professor Phillips O’Brien wrote on Substack, “Modern industrial war requires top line equipment and well-trained soldiers far more than masses of poorly motivated conscripts.”
Yet, Ukraine’s allies have been holding back. Germany has resisted giving Ukraine its Leopard 2 battle tank, let alone Marders, and France has not donated its Leclerc tanks. Only the United Kingdom was rumoured to be considering a donation of just a dozen Challenger tanks.
“The US has a surplus of 3,000 Bradleys. Why doesn’t it donate them?” asked Loukopoulos. “The attitude towards Ukraine is not entirely honest.”
“For Putin, defeat is not an option,” they wrote in the Washington Post. On the other hand, allowing Russia to keep Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea to “provide future jumping-off points for renewed offensives to take the rest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast … whenever they are ready … is unacceptable”, Rice and Gates said.
They advocated arming Ukraine to resist Russian offensives and enable it to regain lost territory, with NATO allies providing heavy weapons, including Abrams tanks, long-range missiles, drones, surveillance equipment and ammunition “in weeks, not months”.
The U.N. human rights chief said that the death penalty was being weaponised by Iran's government to strike fear into the population and stamp out dissent, saying the executions amounted to "state sanctioned killing".
"The weaponization of criminal procedures to punish people for exercising their basic rights – such as those participating in or organizing demonstrations - amounts to state sanctioned killing," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said, adding the executions violated international human rights law.
Iran hanged two men on Saturday for allegedly killing a member of the security forces during nationwide protests and more have since been sentenced to death.
The U.N. Human Rights office has received information that two further executions are imminent, the statement said, while up to 100 face charges for capital crimes.
Turk said in a statement that there were numerous violations of due process and fair trial in the cases, including the application of vaguely worded criminal provisions, denial of access to a lawyer of choice, forced confession under torture and denial of a meaningful right of appeal.
The Islamic Republic, which has blamed the unrest on its foreign foes including the United States, sees its crackdown on protests as aimed at preserving national sovereignty.
The strongly worded U.N. rights office statement comes as Turk continues to push for a trip to the country and a meeting with its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a senior U.N. rights official Mohammad Ali Alnsour said at a Geneva press briefing on Tuesday.
A separate in-person meeting is planned between Turk and Iranian authorities "very soon", Alnsour added, without giving details.
"We cannot just stay silent when there are very serious violations," he said.
The Geneva-based Human Rights Council voted in November to set up a three-member independent fact-finding mission into Iran's crackdown on protests. Alnsour said it had already received thousands of submissions.
The protests, among the boldest challenges to the clerical leadership since the 1979 revolution, have drawn support from Iranians in all walks of life and challenged the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy by calling for the downfall of its rulers.
The start of executions, which have been condemned by a growing number of countries, has coincided with a slowdown in the protests.
Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls speaks at a New York rally on Sept. 5. The company had fired Smalls from its Staten Island warehouse after he helped lead a pandemic-era walkout. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty)
Amazon should recognize its first unionized warehouse in the U.S., a federal labor official has ruled, rejecting the company's bid to unravel a breakthrough union win on Staten Island.
On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board's Region 28 regional director, Cornele Overstreet, dismissed Amazon's allegations that labor-board officers and union organizers improperly influenced the union vote. In the spring of last year, the upstart Amazon Labor Union won the right to represent some 8,000 workers at the massive New York warehouse.
Wednesday's decision requires Amazon to begin bargaining "in good faith" with the union. However, the company is expected to appeal the ruling before the full labor board in Washington, D.C., which it can request by Jan. 25. Labor experts say members of the board are likely to side with their regional colleagues in confirming the union's win. The case could make its way into courts.
"I think that's going to take a long time to play out," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said at a conference in September, claiming "disturbing irregularities" in the vote.
At stake is the future of labor organizing at Amazon, where unions have struggled for a foothold as the company's web of warehouses has ballooned, making it the U.S.'s second-largest private employer after Walmart.
On Staten Island, Amazon Labor Union won the first union election by more than 500 votes in April 2022. Shortly afterward, Amazon challenged the result.
The company alleged that union organizers coerced and misled warehouse workers, and that Brooklyn-based labor officials overseeing the election acted in favor of the union. In September, the NLRB attorney who presided over weeks of hearings on the case recommended that Amazon's objections be rejected in their entirety.
Guantánamo Bay “is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law,” the letter argues.
On the 21st anniversary of the first orange-jumpsuit clad “unlawful enemy combatants” arriving blindfolded and shackled to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, more than 150 international human rights organizations are urging President Joe Biden to finally shutter the prison. The letter, coordinated by the Center for Victims of Torture, or CVT, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, calls for a closure to the current prison, an end to the indefinite military detention of the men living there, and a pledge to never again use the naval base for “unlawful mass detention.”
“It is long past time for both a sea change in the United States’ approach to national and human security, and a meaningful reckoning with the full scope of damage that the post-9/11 approach has caused,” the letter says.
Following a slow trickle of transfers out of the facility under the Biden administration, 35 men remain imprisoned today. Over the last two decades, 779 men and boys passed through the catastrophic prison. Of those who remain there today, 20 are eligible for transfer out of indefinite detention; three are awaiting judgment from six different government agencies, known as the Periodic Review Board; three more have been convicted; and nine are involved in pre-trial hearings in the flawed military commission system. The case against accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators is ongoing and has not yet reached trial.
In the post-9/11 era, torture with impunity at CIA black sites, the failed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, drone strikes, botched raids across a global battlefield, domestic surveillance of Muslims, and the incalculable loss of civilian life in the Middle East have defined America’s quest for national security. But Guantánamo Bay, and its earlier iteration as a detention facility for Haitian refugees in the ’90s, “is the iconic example of the abandonment of the rule of law,” the letter argues.
“The world knows detainees were tortured, [as well as] the heinous methods, names of those who approved and participated, and that videotapes of torture were deliberately destroyed; yet not a single person has been held accountable,” Yumna Rizvi, policy analyst for CVT, told The Intercept. “The fact that all those complicit remain free, [and that] some even describe what they did without fear of prosecution, is astounding. The U.S. has lost its credibility for human rights, justice, and accountability.”
Renewed pressure and calls for the prison to finally be closed are only the beginning of ending the injustice, argues CAGE’s Mansoor Adayfi. “We need to see compensation, acknowledgement, and an apology for what happened to us,” Adayfi, a former Guantánamo prisoner, told The Intercept. “This is part of closing Guantánamo.”
Four young flammulated owls, a species found in Western North America. These owls are among the species that could benefit from a bill called Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (photo: Getty)
Recovering America’s Wildlife Act died last year in Congress, but lawmakers may soon get another shot.
Just a few months ago, the US was poised to pass one of the most significant environmental laws in history: Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. The bill, known as RAWA, would fund species conservation across the country and was considered the biggest piece of environmental legislation since the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
In June, RAWA passed the US House by a large margin. And months earlier, it cleared the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works with bipartisan support. It had the Senate votes. Then, in December, weeks before the congressional term was over, it seemed like the bill’s time was finally here: Lawmakers included RAWA in the massive government spending bill.
But just before the bill came to a vote, RAWA was cut, largely because Congress couldn’t agree on how to pay for it. Then the congressional term was over. RAWA was dead; lawmakers would have to restart the process. This was just days after more than 190 nations adopted an agreement to protect wildlife at the United Nations biodiversity summit in Montreal.
“The world had just decided that nature needs more protection,” said Tom Cors, director of lands for US government relations at the Nature Conservancy. And here was the US, sinking a bill that would protect species even before they’re considered endangered. “It’s bittersweet, knowing that you are on a cusp of a generational advance for conservation and then realizing you have to start from scratch,” he said.
While RAWA failed in 2022, it’s not dead for good.
The core of the bill still has bipartisan support. In fact, some environmental advocates say it could pass as soon as this year, for real — on the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act. Here’s what that would mean and whether it could actually happen.
Solving a big problem in American conservation
One-third or so of species in the US are threatened with extinction, according to the Nature Conservancy. Think about that: One in three species could disappear for good. That includes things like owls, salamanders, fish, and plants, each of which contributes some function to ecosystems that we depend on.
Thankfully, there’s such a thing as conservation, and in the US, much of it is done by state wildlife agencies. Fish and game departments have a range of programs to monitor and manage species that include reintroducing locally extinct animals and setting regulations for hunting and fishing.
Their work, however, faces a couple of big problems.
The first is that states don’t have enough money. Roughly 80 percent of funding for state-led conservation comes from selling hunting and fishing licenses, in addition to federal excise taxes on related gear, such as guns and ammo. These activities aren’t as popular as they once were. “That results in less conservation work getting done,” Andrew Rypel, a freshwater ecologist at the University of California Davis, told Vox in August.
Another challenge is that states spend virtually all the money they do raise on managing animals that people like to hunt or fish, such as elk and trout. “At the state level, there’s been almost zero focus on non-game fish and wildlife,” Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis … Clark Law School, said in August. That leaves out many species — including, say, kinds of freshwater mussels — that play incredibly important roles in our ecosystems.
RAWA could be a fix. The bill would provide state wildlife agencies a total of $1.3 billion a year by 2026, based on the state’s size, human population, and the number of federally threatened species. RAWA also includes nearly $100 million for the nation’s Native American tribes, who own or help manage nearly 140 million acres of land in the US (equal to about 7 percent of the continental US).
One feature of RAWA that makes it so useful, according to environmental advocates, is that it requires states to protect animals that are imperiled, whether or not they’re targeted by hunters and fishers. “That’s funding that doesn’t exist right now,” Rohlf said.
RAWA also aims to restore wildlife populations before they’re at risk of extinction, to avoid having to list animals as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, which comes with all kinds of regulatory burdens and costs. (You can learn more about RAWA in this explainer.)
RAWA isn’t doomed
After RAWA passed the House last summer, lawmakers turned to the bill’s tallest hurdle: the “pay-for,” a.k.a. how to cover the cost of the legislation, without having to raise the deficit.
Negotiations carried on throughout the fall, and legislators put forward a number of different proposals. In the final weeks of the congressional term, it looked as though the government would pay for RAWA by closing a tax loophole related to cryptocurrency, as E…E News’s Emma Dumain reported.
Ultimately, lawmakers couldn’t agree on the details. That’s why RAWA got cut from the omnibus bill.
Yet there was never opposition to the substance of the bill, according to Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who co-sponsored RAWA. It had dozens of Republican co-sponsors. “It wasn’t for any ideological or even political reason” that it was cut, he told Vox. “We don’t really have an opposition that is mobilized.”
It’s for this reason that environmental advocates are carrying hope into the new congressional term. “The Senate bill is still completely bipartisan,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, a nonprofit that’s been advocating for the legislation. That’s huge, because few bills are bipartisan and even fewer are “fully baked,” he said — meaning the legislation is pretty much agreed on.
So what happens now? Everything that happened last year, essentially. The bill needs to be reintroduced in the House and Senate, accrue co-sponsors in both chambers, and go through committee.
Oh, and then there’s that issue of the pay-for, which remains unresolved. So far, it’s not clear what tool the government will use, O’Mara said, and other congressional priorities could get in the way of funding discussions. (New House rules adopted by the Republican-led chamber also affect what the government can use to pay for legislation.)
Still, O’Mara and Sen. Schatz are confident that Congress can get it done, and pass RAWA as soon as this year. “Structurally speaking, we’re in a pretty good position to pass this in the coming Congress,” Schatz said.
That’s a good thing, too, because “we’re in the midst of a crisis,” O’Mara said, referring to the unprecedented rate of biodiversity loss worldwide. “Failure is just not an option. We have to keep going until it gets done.”
