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Wednesday, May 17, 2023
TOP NEWS: Texas GOP On Verge of 'Egregious Power Grab' to Crush Local Democracy
Michael Tomasky | Why Clarence Thomas's Troubles Have Just Begun
17 May 23
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Two of the more aggressive Senate Democrats are asking Thomas and Harlan Crow questions. And they have a lot of ways to get answers.
I mention this because I wonder a lot these days about the dollar value of Harlan Crow’s gifts to Clarence Thomas. ProPublica reported, for example, that Thomas flew around on Crow’s jet. A chartered private jet can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $18,000 per billable hour. If we split the difference and say $10,000, Thomas would need to have spent just 16 hours on Crow’s plane over the years to get up into Fortas country (and we know of at least one trip to distant Indonesia, which also included nine days of island-hopping on a 162-foot yacht).
But we don’t know the full extent of Crow’s gifts to Thomas, of course, because Thomas and Crow refuse to say. On April 24, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden wrote to Crow asking him to detail all his gifts to Thomas (the letter notes, for example, that the market value of island-hopping on a yacht like Crow’s is $245,000 a week). More recently, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee made a similar request.
The requests have been greeted as you’d expect. Thomas says these gifts were “personal hospitality,” not business, and thus didn’t have to be reported. Crow responded to Wyden’s letter with a letter of his own, or more specifically from his lawyer, arguing in essence that Congress has no legitimate legislative purpose in exposing Crow’s gifts to Thomas and is constrained by separation of powers issues.
Sheldon Whitehouse of the Judiciary Committee has pursued a complementary angle. He asked the Judicial Conference, the policymaking body for federal courts, to reveal how it handled an inquiry into Ginni Thomas’s income in 2011. He too has received no answer yet.
Wyden and Whitehouse mean business. Whitehouse has been the Democrats’ point person in the Senate for years on these ethics matters. But of the two, Wyden spells more potential trouble for Thomas and Crow because as chairman of one of Congress’s tax-writing committees, he has what’s called 6103 authority: the power to ask for any citizen’s tax returns at any time for any reason (actually, under the relevant law, he wouldn’t even have to give a reason). Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee until the GOP retook the House this year, used this same law to get several years of Trump’s returns. In 2021, the Supreme Court ordered the IRS to give Neal’s committee Trump’s returns.
In other words, if the Supreme Court says that even the president’s tax returns can be sent to Congress, surely that means that anyone’s can be. Even if that person sits on the very Supreme Court that will be passing judgment.
There are certain downsides to invoking 6103 authority—namely, that once the request is made, the person doing the requesting can’t discuss the matter at all. But a source confirms that invoking that authority and requesting the tax returns of both Thomas and Crow is on the table.
Step back and think about that. A member of the United States Supreme Court is hiding from and stonewalling the United States Senate to such an extent that the latter might be compelled to order the release of his tax returns. And either the Finance or the Judiciary Committee might subpoena Thomas as well (now that Dianne Feinstein is back at work, the Democrats have their majority on Judiciary and could subpoena Thomas—that’s assuming Feinstein would agree, which strikes me as not a sure thing). The Senate has only ever subpoenaed a Supreme Court justice once, in the 1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Justice Thomas Clark, but that was over something he had done in a previous position, not while on the court (Clark never appeared).
Clarence Thomas and his defenders say he’s done nothing wrong. Well, if he’s done nothing wrong, why not detail the extent of the gifts? I think it’s pretty obvious why. They must come to gargantuan sums. Supreme Court justices make only $265,600. You can’t expect a man of Thomas’s tastes and appetites to live on that. He has to fly first class and stay in five-star hotels and smoke the world’s finest cigars and sample its most complex cognacs. Hence Ginni has to rake in some dubious cash from organizations trying to influence her husband’s votes, and Clarence needs to live off the “personal hospitality” of people like Crow.
It’s my understanding that there’s more news coming on Thomas and Crow. It seems highly possible that what we know so far, ghastly as it is, barely scratches the surface. And Wyden and Whitehouse are going to keep at this. To paraphrase Churchill, this isn’t the end of the story. This is just the beginning of the end.
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North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper ignites a crowd of about 1,000 abortion-rights supporters gathered in Raleigh, N.C., before he vetoes legislation banning nearly all abortions after 12 weeks, Saturday, May 13, 2023. (photo: Hannah Schoenbaum/AP)
The bill now becomes law and takes effect July 1. It severely restricts abortion access in the state — one of the last which had access in the region since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year.
Cooper vetoed Senate Bill 20 on Saturday, which sent it back to the General Assembly. Cooper warned the legislation would make women jump through hoops to receive care and could lead to clinics closing.
"Forward is the only way ahead, but I know one thing for certain, standing in the way of progress right now is this Republican supermajority legislature that only took 48 hours to turn the clock back 50 years on women's health," Cooper said at a veto rally in Raleigh on Saturday. "That's exactly what this bill does."
Cooper decried the override in a statement Tuesday night, saying, "Strong majorities of North Carolinians don't want right-wing politicians in the exam room with women and their doctors, which is even more understandable today after several Republican lawmakers broke their promises to protect women's reproductive freedom."
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in a statement called the law a "dangerous bill that is out of touch with the majority of North Carolinians and will make it even more difficult for women to get the reproductive health care they need."
Senate Bill 20 — named the Care for Women, Children and Families Act — bans abortion after 12 weeks, with limited exceptions. The state currently allows abortion through 20 weeks. It passed in the House 71 to 46 earlier this month and then the Senate 29 to 20 a day later.
But unlike previous efforts in the legislature to restrict abortion access — only recently did North Carolina Republicans obtain a supermajority in the state legislature — which gave them the ability to override the Democratic governor's veto.
State Republican House Speaker Tim Moore said in his own statement that he was "proud" that the veto was overridden, calling the new law "meaningful, mainstream legislation."
North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton called it "dangerous legislation that puts politicians in the middle of deeply personal health care decisions and abandons the medical advice of doctors who urged lawmakers to stop this ban."
It comes after State Representative Tricia Cotham, who represents the 112th district in Mecklenburg, announced unexpectedly in early April that she was switching parties to become a Republican. While Cotham ran as a Democrat on a platform to protect abortion rights — she voted with Republicans for the legislation.
With no room for error in the Republican caucuses, Democrats and abortion rights groups unsuccessfully mounted a pressure campaign in the hopes that even one Republican legislator would vote against overriding the veto and leave it in place.
While the legislation bans abortion at 12 weeks, it also requires any abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy take place in a hospital. It also requires a physician to verify the gestational age of a fetus is under 10 weeks for a medication abortion — or 70 days — and puts additional requirements in place such as visits to a clinic and counseling. There are additional license requirements for clinics that perform abortions.
Although opponents have blasted the legislation and how it was fast-tracked through the legislative process – proponents have praised additional resources such as increased money for contraceptives, child care, paid leave for state employees, and other provisions folded into the bill.
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Ukrainian soldiers near Bakhmut on Friday. (photo: Libkos/AP)
The advances have been small, and Russians still hold most of the city, but Ukrainians say they see a meaningful shift in momentum.
“The pincers are closing,” said Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group that spearheaded Russia’s bloody drive.
He was wrong. The pincers never closed, and now Ukrainian forces have pried them farther open, taking back territory north and south of the ruined city in a few days that it took the Russians many weeks to capture.
Dozens of videos on social media show empty construction sites and farms even before a new law goes into effect.
The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, is the latest move by DeSantis to capitalize on immigration politics as he prepares for a likely but as-yet-unannounced 2024 presidential campaign. The law, one of the most stringent state immigration measures in the US, seems intended to contrast President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy as the controversial pandemic-era health rule Title 42 expired last week. But the impact of the bill, critics say, will amount to a wide-ranging and intrusive crackdown on the state’s large immigrant communities, which stand to face the brunt of the new rules.
Florida is home to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants, and many work in the kinds of businesses that would be impacted by the law, known as SB 1718. Many of those affected are also members of mixed-status families — where a son or daughter, for example, might be a US citizen while their parents are not. The bill’s impact extends beyond the workplace to health care and highways: Even family members could be targets of law enforcement under a new provision that punishes anyone who transports an undocumented person “knowingly and willfully” into Florida across state lines.
The law also requires Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid to collect the immigration status of patients and calculate and report the cost of health care for undocumented people to the state; it no longer permits undocumented people to use driver’s licenses issued from other states and prohibits state ID cards to be issued to them.
Combined, these provisions may also deal a devastating blow to Florida businesses that rely on migrant labor, as it may force workers and their families to flee Florida, Samuel Vilchez Santiago, the Florida state director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, told Vox.
“The narrative that immigrants are not welcome here is going to have a huge impact on our business community — in particular industries such as construction, hospitality, health care, and agriculture — because they rely solely or primarily on migrant labor. As fear becomes the norm in immigrant communities, a lot of these migrant workers will start leaving the state and looking somewhere else,” Vilchez Santiago said. “And there is a lot of fear in migrant communities across the state.”
@flowerinspanish Acres and acres, tons and tons, of rotting food in Florida fields. FARM WORKERS ARE NO LONGER SHOWING UP TO WORK. LET’S STAND IN SOLIDARITY AND BOYCOTT FLORIDA, BOYCOTT FLORIDA’S ORANGE JUICES AND PRODUCE!! #Florida #boycottflorida #floridastate #farmworkers ♬ Immigrants (We Get The Job Done) - K'naan & Snow Tha Product & Riz MC & Residente
The law was already causing panic across Florida before DeSantis signed it. In South Florida, reporters with a local CBS News affiliate tracked empty construction sites across Miami-Dade County and spoke with construction workers who said that many of their coworkers were not showing up to work because they feared deportation. An NBC affiliate interviewed farmworkers in South Florida considering moves out of the state because of fear of persecution.
DeSantis’s office referred Vox to comments the governor made during a press conference this week. “When we have something like an E-Verify, that’s a tool to make sure that longstanding Florida law is enforced,” DeSantis said. “You can’t build a strong economy based on illegality.”
Gina Fraga, an immigration attorney in Palm Beach, told Vox that she knows of many families preparing moves out of the state because of “panic” over the law. Undocumented workers she knows in the construction, landscaping, and agricultural business are now receiving notices of termination because of the law, which includes strict human trafficking punishments that don’t make exceptions for mixed-status families, or for those who came to the US as children and are covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The penalties under SB 1718 are severe: Businesses that fail to use E-Verify would be fined $1,000 per day and the state would suspend an employer’s license if they are caught employing an undocumented person. The law also enhances human trafficking and smuggling penalties for people, including US citizens, making it a second-degree felony, punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to 15 years in prison, to transport five or more undocumented people or an undocumented minor into the state of Florida.
DeSantis has called it an “honor to usher this bill through the process” and said it should serve “as the model for the nation to combat this crisis created by our very own President.”
Fraga, who volunteers with the Farmworker Coordinating Council, a nonprofit advocacy group for agricultural workers, said that the harsher punishment for crossing state lines is a direct attack against farmworkers because of the seasonal nature of their jobs. “Depending on the veggies, they travel to South Carolina, to Georgia — so they’re scared now, and a bunch of them are moving to Georgia, and they’re planning on not coming back to Florida,” she said. “That means everyone is going to be affected in our grocery stores in terms of price because nobody wants to do these jobs.”
And all this fear and confusion has been recorded online, through various kinds of clips showing workers leaving their jobs after learning of the new law’s restrictions. Other videos show truck drivers calling for boycotts of Florida because of the threat crossing a state border would mean for them.
@ms.amarilys it might be the best time to get into construction work in Florida
♬ DOGTOOTH NEVER DULL REMIX - Never Dull
Those calls for boycotts have been compiled by independent journalist Arturo Dominguez on Twitter, and have been shared by Democratic politicians criticizing the new state law: “Ron’s ‘woke’ war will cause prices to increase on all goods and services. Congrats Ron on tanking Florida’s economy and creating inflation,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried, a former agriculture commissioner, tweeted over the weekend.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also shared Dominguez’s thread, arguing that “the US has such deep needs right now, particularly in labor. Yet policymakers (of ALL stripes) take our immigrant communities for granted. No más. Time to stop biting the hands that feed.”
@tigre_vengador Replying to @Yo homegirl lulu #Florida #rondesantis #construction #work #trabajo #migracion ♬ original sound - Agustin Alanis
Still, the law isn’t in effect just yet, and there may be legal challenges raised against it, Fraga said. And just how much of an economic effect this new law will have on Florida is unknown — though anecdotally, business owners and employers seem to be bracing for significant churn in the labor force at a time when Florida has a near record-low unemployment rate and tight labor market. “The reality is Florida needs workers,” Vilchez Santiago said. “The only way we can keep our economy moving is by ensuring that our businesses have access to the labor they need.”
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Paul Gosar. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we look now at the newly confirmed direct connection between a white supremacist leader and the digital director for one of Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress.
We’re joined in New York by Hunter Walker, an investigative reporter at Talking Points Memo, where his exclusive new story is headlined “Capitol Hill Staffer Is A Prominent Follower Of Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.”
Fuentes is a far-right leader who rose under Trump. The staffer who was revealed in the piece works for far-right Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, who’s linked to organizers of the deadly January 6 insurrection and was censured for posting an animated video on social media where he murders Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacks President Biden. That’s the congressman, Gosar. Gosar also spoke at the openly racist America First conference, organized by Nick Fuentes to compete with the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC. This new story reveals Gosar’s ties to the white supremacist movement go even deeper.
Hunter Walker, if you can lay out what you found about his digital director?
HUNTER WALKER: Well, Amy, great to see you, first off.
And as you pointed out, Paul Gosar already has been linked directly and personally to Nick Fuentes. But his relationship with this neo-Nazi leader has been one of alternately embracing him and distancing himself from him. As you alluded to, Paul Gosar has appeared at two editions of Nick Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference, once in person, once by video. But after that second one caused a backlash, Gosar said, you know, “Nick has a problem with his mouth,” and sort of attempted to disavow him somewhat. So, he’s operated with a bit of plausible deniability as he’s repeatedly been tied to extremist activity, including, you know, having antisemitic websites appearing in his official newsletter. And I think this story, one of the key things about it is it really removes that veil of plausible deniability for Paul Gosar.
And what I found is that, you know, this staffer in his office, Wade Searle, evidence appears to link him to this sort of digital persona, “Chikkenright,” this network of interlinked social media accounts, that has put out extremist content, including statements, you know, referring to Jews as, quote-unquote, “hook-nosed bankers,” disparaging Asians, minimizing slavery. And also, in addition to just being a social media account, this, quote-unquote, “Chikken” persona was a leading figure in Nick Fuentes’s organization. And we know that because of accusations from defectors from Fuentes’s inner circle, who released internal chats showing this “Chikken” person participating in the leadership conversations, telling them about what was going on in Gosar’s office. And then, also, he’s a moderator on Nick Fuentes’s regular stream.
So, you know, this guy has been linked to being a prominent follower of Nick Fuentes, who is an outright neo-Nazi, and the evidence is extensive. These accounts posted pictures that appear to show Wade Searle with Fuentes. It was identified as coming from Searle’s hometown, being the same age as Searle. And at its inception, this “Chikkenright” account was credited to, quote-unquote, “Wade” and another person, quote-unquote, “Landen,” who we believe appears to be Landen Peterson, an intern in Gosar’s office. So there are multiple people in the congressman’s office linked to this incredibly extremist online activity and Nick Fuentes’s “Groyper” movement.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain more, Hunter Walker, how you know “Chikken” and “Chikkenright” — C-H-I-K-K-E-N — how you directly linked him — because this is a very serious allegation — to Paul Gosar’s office, to his staffer, Wade Searle.
HUNTER WALKER: Well, first off, there’s no question he works in Paul Gosar’s office. You know, we looked at the disclosures. And one thing that’s extremely —
AMY GOODMAN: Right, but how Wade Searle is “Chikken” or “Chikkenright”?
HUNTER WALKER: Totally. But one thing that’s extremely interesting about that, that I just want to touch on first, is, you know, there was that extreme video about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And it was based on an anime, Attack on Titan, with sort of Gosar and Ocasio-Cortez’s heads superimposed on the characters of this extremely violent Japanese animation. And anime is a persistent feature of the far right. So, that video is kind of an example of how Paul Gosar’s social media has already borrowed from these far-right extremist circles. And he actually hired Wade Searle one day, officially, after being censured for that video. So, even despite getting slaps on the wrist from his fellow Republicans in Congress, Gosar has repeatedly, you know, on his official accounts, sort of winked and nodded at the far right, even as he supposedly disavowed him.
What we found with Wade Searle, you know, is just so many links. I mean, first off, Gosar joined Gab, the extremist social media site, right after Searle joined his office. At that point, he started reposting content from “Chikkenright.” “Chikkenright” was reposting content from Gosar. At points on the “Chikkenright” accounts — and they’re all linked. I mean, there’s a Twitter, a Telegram and a Gab, sort of an overall presence that all has these internal links promoting itself, an Instagram page that was credited to, quote-unquote, “Wade” and, quote-unquote, “Landen.” And all of these interlinked accounts promoted extremist content, promoted Gosar, talked about insider knowledge of Arizona Republicans.
And then, you know, the two most dramatic moments came as Wade Searle took his activism beyond social media. And Searle appeared to join Fuentes at a 2020 Stop the Steal rally. In addition to being a neo-Nazi, Fuentes was a big election denier whose followers had a major presence at January 6th. And you can see a man who appears to be Searle standing behind Fuentes at one of these rallies in Phoenix, Arizona, where he called Trump’s loss a, quote-unquote, “fraud.” And, you know, photos of that man were posted on the various “Chikkenright” social media pages, as well as Wade Searle’s more public named social media. So, he posted his own photos. You know, various things in the content, such as his hometown, the credit in the bio, seem to link him to this activity. And then, most importantly, you have these defectors from Fuentes’s organization, a man named Simon Dickerman, who has named Wade Searle as “Chikkenright.”
This was sort of an open secret on the far right. I came across it, and then I joined with two researchers, Haley Orion of Arizona Right Wing Watch and Nick Martin of The Informant, and we pooled all of the information we had found, and, you know, it just really appears to definitively show that Wade Searle was behind these accounts. But, you know, he has been previously named by his own colleagues on the far right.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what has been Gosar’s response to your investigation?
HUNTER WALKER: Not much. You know, yesterday, the only thing I noticed from Gosar is that he shut off comments on his tweets. He blocked replies. And I think that’s a really, really important thing here. You know, I noted before that he was censured for this extreme video about Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. Since then, he’s actually been brought back onto committees, after having them stripped from him, including the extremely powerful Oversight Committee. Not only did we reach out to Gosar to give him an opportunity to comment and reject this in any way or to say that he didn’t know that this was happening, but we reached out to Speaker McCarthy, and he has offered no response whatsoever. And Democrats have offered very limited response, from what we’ve seen.
And one of the reactions I’m noticing is, just because of Paul Gosar’s extensive history, you know, winking and nodding at the far right, speaking at Fuentes’s events, people have said they’re not surprised. And, you know, I would just note that you were talking earlier about the alarming rise in white supremacy in this country, in white supremacist organizations. Getting an inroad on a Capitol Hill staff is a major, major turning point in that movement. It’s a major bit of growth for them. And if we start to reach a point where we say we’re not surprised by this, where we say, you know, we expect this in Congress, then we’re allowing it to become normal. And I personally find this shocking, and I think we should remain shocked by it.
AMY GOODMAN: Hunter Walker, we want to thank you for being with us, investigative reporter at Talking Points Memo. We’ll link to your exclusive new report, “Capitol Hill Staffer Is A Prominent Follower Of Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.”
Oh, by the way, in other news from Capitol Hill, a man armed with a metal baseball bat attacked two staffers at Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly’s district office in Virginia Monday. The man arrived at the office, reportedly said, “Where is Connolly?” It’s unclear what motivated the attack. A young woman who was an intern at the office on her first day of work, he beat her with the baseball bat, as well as a senior staffer. He slammed him in the head. They were hospitalized. They are out from the hospital now.
Next up, an update from human rights advocates just back from the U.S.-Mexico border as the Trump-era Title 42 policy ends. Stay with us.
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The Anambra state is plagued by violence and separatist insurgency. (photo: AFP)
The attack took place in the southeastern Anambra state, with Anambra Police Command telling CNN that the attackers “murdered two police operatives and two staff of the US consulate and set their bodies and their vehicles ablaze.”
The personnel who were killed were not US citizens, according to the White House and the local police. “No US citizens were involved and therefore there were no US citizens hurt,” said John Kirby of the US National Security Council. “We are aware of some casualties, perhaps even some killed.”
When the assailants saw security forces “they made away with two police operatives and a driver of the second vehicle in the convoy,” Ikenga Tochukwu, deputy superintendent of police, said. “No US citizen was in the convoy,” he added.
Police said that joint security forces “have embarked on a rescue and recovery operation in the area.”
A State Department spokesperson said Tuesday that “Mission Nigeria personnel are working with Nigerian security services to investigate.”
They continued: “The security of our personnel is always paramount, and we take extensive precautions when organizing trips to the field,” they continued.
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The Colorado River flowing from Lake Mead toward the Hoover Dam last month. (photo: Etienne Laurent/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
States and Interior Department are still wrestling over process, compensation for conserving a river that sustains millions
The consensus emerging among these states and the Biden administration aims to conserve about 13 percent of their allocation of river water over the next three years and protect the nation’s largest reservoirs, which provide drinking water and hydropower for tens of millions of people.
But thorny issues remain that could complicate a deal. The parties are trying to work through them before a key deadline at the end of the month, according to several current and former state and federal officials familiar with the situation.
Participants are discussing cutting back about 3 million acre-feet of water over the next three years, the majority of it paid for with federal money approved in the Inflation Reduction Act. But the parties are still negotiating how much of those water savings will go uncompensated. In meetings over the last month, representatives for the three states, which form the river’s Lower Basin, have also raised doubts about the federal government’s environmental review process that is now underway to formally revise the rules that govern operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
State officials have suggested they could make a deal on their own and are resisting a May 30 deadline to comment on the alternatives the federal government has laid out in that process, according to people familiar with the talks. The review process is intended to define Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s authority to make emergency cuts in states’ water use, even if those cuts contradict existing water rights.
These developments represent a new phase in the long-running talks about the future of the river. For much of the past year, negotiations have pitted California against Arizona, as they are the states who suck the most from Lake Mead and will have to bear the greatest burden of the historic cuts that the Biden administration has been calling for to protect the river. But these states now appear more united than ever and are closing their differences with the federal government, even as significant issues remain unresolved.
The Interior Department declined to comment on the status of the private negotiations. The Colorado River commissioners from Arizona, California and Nevada also declined to comment.
Some water authorities in the West want to ensure that any deal that emerges would entail binding commitments among the Lower Basin states, which draw from Lake Mead and consume more of the river each year than the states of the Upper Basin: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
“We want to support the Lower Basin if they have significant additional reductions, verifiable, binding and enforceable,” said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s commissioner for the negotiations. “Are we going to make a choice to do better? If we don’t want the secretary to manage us, can we show we can manage ourselves?”
The Colorado River runs 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico and is a vital lifeline for cities and farms throughout the West. But climate change has made the region hotter and drier, and exposed how rules made over a century ago to share the river among Western states are inadequate to keep it from drying up.
In June, with Lake Mead and Lake Powell about a quarter full and nearing levels where the hydroelectric dams could no longer produce power, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton testified before the Senate that states needed to stop using 2 to 4 million acre-feet of water — up to one-third of the entire average annual flow — or the federal government would step in to protect the river.
That testimony launched an intense negotiation over the past year. The states and the federal government have blown past two deadlines to try to reach a deal that worked for all parties. In the fall, Interior began a process to formally revise 2007 rules that govern the reservoirs.
That culminated in an event last month at the Hoover Dam to mark the release of the 476-page environmental review. This document outlined two alternatives for how cuts could be distributed among the states — one that strictly followed water rights priority, which tend to favor major farming regions over cities; and another that made all Lower Basin states take an equal percentage of cuts. The document also threw down a legal gauntlet: It defended Haaland’s authority to make emergency cuts of states’ allocations from the river to protect the health and safety of residents, even if it violated the water rights priority system.
But the bleak reservoir levels outlined in that review date back to September and the weather has improved markedly since then. Abundant snow cloaked the Rocky Mountains over the winter and atmospheric rivers doused California’s drought. Water levels in the big reservoirs have started to rise. Colorado River experts have grown increasingly confident that the most draconian cuts in fact wouldn’t be needed, at least this year. And the $4 billion in federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act pledged to this problem meant that those who voluntarily gave up their rights to water would be well-compensated for it.
Those conditions helped the Lower Basin negotiators come up with a plan to volunteer about 3 million acre-feet of cuts total until 2026, when a major renegotiation of the rules of the river is scheduled to begin. This scale of cuts is smaller than some of the most dire scenarios outlined in the environmental review if reservoirs had continued to plummet.
Even so, the negotiations have not been easy.
During an April 21 meeting at the Las Vegas offices of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Lower Basin officials presented their plan to top Interior officials, including Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau — who is the point person for these negotiations — and Touton.
The meeting did not go well. Interior officials opposed the Lower Basin plan that asked for federal compensation for all of its voluntary conservation. There was also disagreements over the environmental review process underway and about which federal officials should be involved in hammering out the solution.
“It got really contentious,” said a former senior Interior official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. “Clearly there’s some control issues going on here.”
In describing that period in the talks, one state water official said some in the Lower Basin didn’t want to overturn the water rights priority system and agree to enhanced authority of the federal government at a time when reservoir levels are improving.
“The fundamental impasse here is between the feds being able to say what is going to happen versus an agreement the Lower Basin states have come to that’s at the same amounts,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. “The dynamics are a little weird.”
But since then, in a series of meetings and conference calls, including on Saturday, progress has been made on these issues, people familiar with the talks say. During a recent meeting in Phoenix, Interior presented the states a term sheet of what potential conservation and compensation could be. The parties are now discussing getting federal compensation for between 2 to 2.5 million acre-feet out of the 3 million cuts in total, which would amount to at least $1 billion in federal funds, according to a person familiar with the situation. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, what it would take to cover an acre of land with a foot of water.
The Biden administration wants to deploy much of its Inflation Reduction Act funding to get long-term water savings — such as investing in more efficient irrigation systems and lining canals — and not simply pay farmers to temporarily fallow fields for a season or two.
During talks in recent weeks, Lower Basin states have resisted submitting formal comments on the federal government’s two alternatives by the May 30 deadline that marks the end of the 45-day comment period. These comments could be used by states to stake out legal positions on matters of water rights priority and federal authority that might push them further from a deal.
Biden administration officials want to continue this federal process to bolster the administrative record and clearly establish the ability to make cuts to protect water supplies in something more formal and enforceable than a handshake agreement among state water managers.
Federal officials have also stressed the importance of the environmental review process as being more transparent and accountable and one that takes input from stakeholders such as the 30 Native American tribes in the Colorado River basin who have often been left out of key decisions in the past.
These questions of process and the balance of power between the federal government and the states still need to be worked out. The approaching deadline has worried some river experts.
“They’ve got a deal,” the former senior Interior Department official said of the Lower Basin states. “What an opportunity lost if this doesn’t get solved here in the next couple weeks. I’m afraid we’re at the precipice.”
Mitchell, the negotiator for Colorado, said the Lower Basin should focus on finding a new relationship with how they use the Colorado River.
“They need to realize that the enemy is not any organization, agency or part of the basin,” she said. “The enemy is that the water is not there that they have been using. The enemy is the old way.”
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The GOP just tried to kick hundreds of students off the voter rolls
This year, MAGA GOP activists in Georgia attempted to disenfranchise hundreds of students by trying to kick them off the voter rolls. De...
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22 April 21 Urgent and Immediate Appeal for Donations It is — very — important to get moving on donations, right here right now. Yes we ...
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25 November 22 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News WE CANNOT FAIL ON FUNDING — There is too much to lose by failing, and too m...
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05 June 23 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News ANOTHER FAILED MONTH OF FUNDRAISING ISN’T GOING TO WORK — We haven’t covered ou...
