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Tuesday, February 6, 2024
POLITICO Nightly: Trump suffers a major legal setback
Sunday, June 26, 2022
RSN: FOCUS: Jeannie Suk Gersen | When the Supreme Court Takes Away a Long-Held Constitutional Right
26 June 22
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The crude reality of the political machinations involved in overruling Roe v. Wade makes it galling to read the Court’s self-portrayal as a picture of proper judicial restraint.
As expected, Chief Justice John Roberts declined to join his conservative colleagues’ opinion, and concurred only in the judgment to uphold the challenged Mississippi law, which bans most abortions after fifteen weeks. Calling the Court’s overruling of Roe “unnecessary to decide the case,” Roberts would instead have allowed states to ban abortion sometime before fetal viability, but would also have reaffirmed a right to abortion that would “ensure a reasonable opportunity to choose.” That more moderate position might have been the Court’s ruling had Ruth Bader Ginsburg not died during the Trump Presidency and been replaced with Amy Coney Barrett, or had the Senate acted on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, instead of waiting to install Trump’s eventual nominee, Neil Gorsuch. And, had neither of those events occurred, we would still have a constitutional right to abortion in the United States.
The difference between preserving and eliminating a long-held constitutional right involves a crude reality of political machinations and contingency in filling these seats—which makes it galling to read the Court’s righteous condemnation of Roe v. Wade as an exercise of “raw judicial power,” and its self-portrayal as a picture of proper judicial restraint. It is hard to imagine something more like an exercise of raw judicial power than the Court’s removal of the right to abortion, which is precisely what these Justices were put on the Court to achieve. As the dissent put it, the Court is “rescinding an individual right in its entirety and conferring it on the State, an action the Court takes for the first time in history.”
Some have speculated that last month’s draft-opinion leak was intended to make it difficult for Justice Brett Kavanaugh to defect from the majority and join the Chief Justice’s compromise position. Kavanaugh didn’t defect, but he did write a notable concurrence that seemed to take some distance from the possible perceived extremity of the majority. It confirmed that he is the Justice whom the majority will need to worry about keeping on board if they wish to go further than Dobbs in the future.
Kavanaugh flexed this muscle by addressing questions about decisions that may come after Dobbs. “The Constitution neither outlaws abortion nor legalizes abortion,” he wrote. As a result, “this Court does not possess the authority either to declare a constitutional right to abortion or to declare a constitutional prohibition of abortion,” he proclaimed, and in so doing seemed to indicate that a possible future development—the eventual enshrining of a constitutional right of the fetus—is not something for which he would provide a fifth vote. Similarly, regarding the constitutional rights to contraception and same-sex marriage, Kavanaugh made a point of emphasizing, with italics, that “overruling Roe does not mean the overruling of those precedents, and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.” Additionally, he expressed his view that a state may not bar its residents from travelling to another state for an abortion, because of the constitutional right to interstate travel. To the extent that anyone is grasping for a silver lining, Kavanaugh appears to want us to know that he personally intends to—and can—stand in the way of a post-Dobbs parade of horribles, even if his colleagues might want to go there.
And at least one of his brethren plainly does want the Court to go there. Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate concurrence made crystal clear that he would indeed do away with the entire substantive due-process doctrine on which the right to abortion rested, and that would mean eventually sweeping away the rights to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage. He referred to the fact that the Court used substantive due process in Dred Scott v. Sandford to affirm the right of enslavers to enslave people, and he concluded that “the harm caused by this Court’s forays into substantive due process remains immeasurable.”
Thomas’s comments contradict the majority opinion he signed, in which the Court claimed that other rights protected by the Court’s substantive due-process precedents are safe, the reason being that only abortion involves an interest in the life of a fetus. The Dobbs ruling’s insistence that the Court should not impede states from making policies in which they weigh the interest in life for themselves, through their democratic processes, is tragicomic, even gruesome, coming the very day after the Court did just that in striking down a New York State gun-licensing law, based on the Court’s expansion of an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the plurality that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade wrote that “liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt”—meaning that, if the public is in doubt about whether constitutional rights are in danger of disappearing, that is not liberty. Dobbs leaves no doubt that the federal constitutional right to abortion is gone. And it ushers in an era of grave doubt about the status of liberty in the United States.
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Saturday, April 24, 2021
RSN: FOCUS: Robert Reich | The Supreme Court Should Be Ashamed of Itself
24 April 21
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: FOCUS: Robert Reich | The Supreme Court Should Be Ashamed of Itself Reich writes: "In an appalling ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court's conservative majority rolled back restrictions on sentencing juveniles to life without parole. It's both legally and morally heinous." Not only does this ruling upend clearly established precedent, it imposes patently cruel punishment on some of the most vulnerable members of society. As Sonia Sotomayor noted in her blistering dissent, "70 percent of all youths sentenced to life without parole are children of color,” and oftentimes their crimes are the result of severe trauma and the fact that juveniles’ brains are not fully developed. The ruling, written by Brett Kavanaugh, shreds two precedent rulings stipulating that both mandatory sentences (sentences imposed automatically upon conviction) and discretionary sentences (sentences imposed at the discretion of a judge) of juvenile life without parole violate the 8th Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishments. The previous rulings created a requirement that a judge make a finding of “permanent incorrigibility” of the defendant in order to sentence them to life without parole, meaning the crime must be so rare and heinous that there is no possibility of rehabilitation. The conservative majority’s ruling essentially lifted this requirement for finding “permanent incorrigibility,” giving judges much broader discretion in sentencing juveniles to life without parole. It’s the first time in almost two decades that the court has imposed harsher rules for juvenile offenders rather than enacting more leniency. It’s unimaginably cruel, and the Court should be ashamed of itself. |
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
RSN: Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman | Will a Detroit Democrat Hand Trump His Crown?
28 October 20
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RSN: Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman | Will a Detroit Democrat Hand Trump His Crown?
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Excerpt: "A single election administrator in Detroit could give Donald Trump four more years."
Election protectionists warn that she was key to Trump’s illegitimate victory in 2016, and that she could do it again in 2020 if she is not removed (not likely at this point) or intensely monitored.
Four years ago, Trump was awarded Michigan’s 16 key Electoral College votes based on an official margin of less than 11,000 votes. But more than 70,000 ballots from around the state came in without presidential preferences — a state record.
These “beheaded” ballots were allegedly cast by voters who stood in line for hours, only to apparently not bother to choose between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Sophisticated hackers can perpetrate ballot beheading with a well-known algorithm that has surfaced in numerous US elections. In 2004, a similar outcome on Indigenous reservations helped give New Mexico to George W. Bush.
In the wake of the 2016 fiasco, the Michigan Election Reform Alliance (MERA) demanded that their state repair their dysfunctional system. MERA had predicted what would go wrong in 2016 in their seminal 2014 report, “Michigan’s Coming Election Cliff.”
Unfortunately, MERA’s predictions all came true. Detroit’s 13-year-old ES&S voting machines broke down en masse, voters waited in long lines, and poorly trained poll workers left a trail of mismatching numbers and missing ballots.
MERA cited their own published research figures pointing out that Michigan vote tabulators had an error rate between 0.26 percent and 1.78 percent. Even the smallest error rate was larger than the 2016 Clinton-Trump margin: 0.22%.
MERA issued a statement following that election documenting the mismanagement of administration in various Michigan jurisdictions.
They also demanded the resignation of Detroit’s chief election official, Janice Winfrey. “In Detroit, where scores of voting machines malfunctioned, poll workers weren’t properly trained and thousands of presidential ballots can’t be recounted because of numerous voting irregularities,” writes Steve Neavling of the Motor City Muckraker.
Neavling also says that Winfrey “has refused to take responsibility for the massive failures that make a mockery of the democratic system and further eroded trust in a fair and accurate election.”
Winfrey is a Democrat. But election protection activists warn that by short-changing vote-rich Detroit, which is dominated by Democrat-leaning voters, she could once again help throw Michigan to Donald Trump.
Key to that warning are the findings of a recount effort prompted by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose court case was dismissed when Hillary Clinton refused to support a recount appeal that could have also benefited her own numbers. “We observed the aborted Stein recount and received the reports from several hundred recount observers for Stein, Clinton, and other candidates for President,” stated Jan BenDor, MERA statewide coordinator.
After the three-state recount initiated by 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump’s final victory margin remained at 10,704 votes in the Wolverine State – the closest presidential contest in the nation. The official margin between Clinton and Trump, out of Michigan’s 4.8 million votes cast, was .22 percent. The incomplete presidential recount showed that the tabulators miscounted 5 percent of the ballots.
“There was so much documentation of lawbreaking that I asked for a meeting with the FBI to present our summary,” BenDor said.
“Then-US Attorney Barb McQuade arranged for the meeting, which took place in late January 2017. After Mueller was appointed, I called the two agents and asked them to make sure to send our FBI report to the Mueller team,” BenDor added.
MERA outlined arguments that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and related legislation were violated. They alleged widespread under-funding of the elections in majority minority communities including broken down vote tabulators, noting that “30-50 percent of precincts [were] declared too compromised to be ‘recountable.’”
MERA also claimed that there had been violations of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, with the high rate of voters arriving at their polling site, finding they were not on the voter rolls, and having to vote provisionally. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 was violated as well, MERA alleged, by the “failure by local clerks to properly maintain and update centralized voter registration data.” The Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act was violated based on the nearly 75,000 under-voted ballots in the presidential race, according to MERA.
Many people believe Michigan elections will be more functional this year with fewer irregularities, due to the 2018 election of Democrats Jocelyn Benson as Secretary of State and Gretchen Whitmer as Governor.
BenDor is not so sure.
In August 2018, Michigan first used its 7,000 new digital scan vote tabulators. In Detroit, using 100 Dominion scanners to count absentee ballots, 25% of the machines jammed in the first two hours, as witnessed by our election observers. Statewide, clerks were poorly trained in the capabilities of these machines, and none of them correctly set the machines to save ballot images. When MERA tried to help several minority candidates to get image copies so they could review their suspicious results in detail, there were no images retained as required by state and federal law.
In November 2018, Michigan elected Whitmer and Benson. MERA met with Whitmer to get her support for their long-ready risk-limiting vote count audit legislation, which had bipartisan sponsors. Whitmer enthusiastically agreed and showed a mastery of their proposal, noted BenDor. During her campaign, Benson met with MERA and incorporated many of their election security recommendations into her platform.
But once in office, Benson proceeded to renege on her promises. As BenDor explains it: “She has refused to order the wireless modems removed from all three brands of tabulators in use. These modems violate federal EAC standards. She has refused our requests to mandate the retention of all digital ballot images and associated security documents. She outright refused to endorse our risk-limiting audit legislation, stating she does not need it. She has basically ignored the recommendations of her own security advisers, including Professor Phil Stark of the University of California-Berkeley, the developer of risk-limiting audits, and Professor Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, an expert in voting technology security.” (Halderman has become a legend in election protection circles by programming an allegedly “unhackable” voting machine to play the University of Michigan fight song).
Says BenDor: “Benson has never shown much interest in actually improving election administration, has never worked an election, and has a very sketchy knowledge of rules and procedures. She has hired staff who are similarly incompetent and has driven out the civil service veterans. Statewide, the local Clerks are not her fans, and they use unflattering nicknames.”
If Benson is problematic, Detroit election clerk Winfrey perhaps poses an even greater threat to an accurate vote count. The investigatory website Motor City Muckraker called on Detroit election clerk Janice Winfrey to “resign immediately” after the 2016 election.
“Pattern of problems plagues Detroit’s elections for fifteen years” a 2020 Detroit News headline declared, summarizing Winfrey’s election supervision.
“Benson also hired the former longtime Bureau of Elections czar, Chris Thomas. Throughout his 35+ year tenure, Chris Thomas has turned a blind eye to election corruption in Detroit and other minority communities. We keep asking, what is he going to do differently this time?” BenDor asked. “I have talked to poll workers in Detroit who tried to work the August Primary and they describe absolute chaos. Their phone calls to sign up were ignored, the training was useless, many workers did not even show up to their assigned precinct.”
The hope is that the November 2020 election will result in a clear winner in Michigan. Trump is currently trailing Biden by eight points in the polls. No one wants another attempted recount like the one Clinton killed in 2016.
The Stein campaign paid $973,250 for the Michigan recount, but MERA argued it was “doomed from the start.”
Michigan was a toss-up state with both Trump and Clinton having 46.8 percent of the exit polls. Although Trump ended up with 10,704 more votes than Clinton, there was a major problem with “undervotes.” This made the state an ideal recount target. In most other states, the narrow margin would have automatically triggered a statewide recount. Michigan’s trigger is a minuscule 2000 or less vote margin, according to the MERA.
On 75,335 ballots in the presidential election, constituting 1.5 percent of all Michigan votes, there was no vote for president. Michigan voters cast paper ballots on three brands of optical scan tabulators. The state-appointed emergency manager had denied Detroit’s request to spend money on newer voting machines. All of Michigan’s vote tabulators then were at least a decade old, according to the Associated Press. This is the same emergency management lawyer who forced Flint residents to drink from improperly treated, lead-poisoned water to save money.
The recount effort revealed serious operating problems with Michigan’s voting machines. In Detroit, at least 87 voting machines malfunctioned on Election Day, according to city election officials. Numerous precincts in Detroit also lost their poll books — the only record of how many people signed in to vote. Other problems included improperly sealed and transported ballot boxes. A Detroit precinct reported to contain 307 ballots could only produce 52.
Nearly a quarter of all ballots in Wayne County were not properly handled, resulting in discrepancies between the number of ballots in the ballot box and the total number of ballots issued. Detroit election officials also reported finding numerous broken security seals on the bags containing ballots and voting material. Under a 1954 law, 610 of the county’s precincts could not be counted because of the discrepancy between the poll books and the number of ballots issued and counted. Detroit had 30% unrecountable, which was 149 out of 497.
Approximately 11 percent of all the precincts counted statewide showed documented irregularities. In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Lynch, Stein’s attorney Jonathan Abady pointed out that the number was much higher in low-income counties like Branch, where 27 percent of the precincts showed irregularities.
There was an all-out Republican blitz to stop the recount from happening, including legal action. State and federal courts blocked Stein’s recount with two-thirds of the vote uncounted. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette led the charge to shut it down. At the time of Schuette’s actions, the recount was revealing irregularities.
Federal Judge Mark Goldsmith initially allowed the recount to go forward but then reversed himself after Schuette and Michigan courts, including the state Supreme Court, ruled in favor of stopping it. The Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by a 3-2 vote with two recusals. (Chief Justice Robert Young and Justice Joan Larsen recused themselves because they were on President-elect Trump’s short list to be nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court.)
Before Judge Goldsmith halted the recount, 2725 of Michigan’s 7786 precincts, roughly a third, were recounted. In the Stein recount, more than 1600 votes were discovered and recorded that had not been counted the first time. This raised the question: In 2016, did the optical scan tabulators decide the US presidency?
Detroit’s performance in the August 2020 State Primary did not offer encouragement. The state’s purchase of new Dominion digital scan tabulators in 2018 did not improve basic election administration. After the primary, there was such an “outcry” that Benson announced she would be jointly overseeing the city of Detroit under the supervision of the highly-criticized Winfrey. The outcry was over the clerk moving polling locations at the last minute and widespread problems with the absentee vote count. “Issues in Detroit threatened voter confidence in the Clerk’s ability to successfully run an election in Michigan’s largest city with the presidency possibly at stake,” the Detroit Free Press reported.
“There is a reason for this corruption, and it goes back to the unholy alliance between big Republican-run corporations and certain Democratic players who got propped up by their money. This year there is a $250 million bond issue on the Detroit ballot. This is money in the cookie jar for those corporate contractors to keep knocking down foreclosed homes. The resulting cleared land will be a boon for Dan Gilbert and Quicken Loans, and the developers who have extensive plans to gentrify the city.
Benson’s husband, Ryan Friedrichs, has been the attorney for the Detroit Land Bank,” says BenDor. It “purchases these homes and knocks them down rather than rehab and rescue them.
Says BenDor: “Friedrichs reported directly to Mayor Duggan, known as ‘Dirty Duggan’ to the locals. Now Friedrichs is working for the big developer Steven Ross. Benson is not going to do anything to get in the way of Duggan staying in power, and he will keep endorsing her.”
Meanwhile, Detroit’s 480,00 voters’ ballots hang in the balance — along with the question of who will win the 2020 presidential election.
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-convene the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition. They’ve co-authored six books on election protection at www.freepress.org, where Bob’s Fitrakis Files reside. Harvey’s People’s Spiral of US History awaits Trump’s departure at www.solartopia.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Joe Biden. (photo: AP)
With One Week Left, Biden's Lead Over Trump Grows to 12 Points - His Biggest Yet
Andrew Romano, Yahoo! News
Romano writes: "Heading into the final week of the 2020 presidential campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden now holds his largest-ever lead over President Trump..............
.... according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — a 12-point margin that’s four times the size of Hillary Clinton’s national advantage over Trump at this point in 2016.
The survey, which was conducted from Oct. 23 to 25, found that 54 percent of likely voters have either already voted for Biden or plan to vote for him by Election Day. Just 42 percent of likely voters say they are casting their ballots for Trump.
In comparison, a YouGov poll conducted one week before the 2016 election showed Clinton leading Trump by 3 percentage points among likely voters, 48 percent to 45 percent; at that stage, the average of all national surveys gave Clinton a lead of 2.2 percentage points.
As the polls predicted, Clinton wound up winning the national popular vote by 2.1 points, 48.2 percent to 46.1 percent — even as a combined 77,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania put Trump over the top in the Electoral College.
None of these numbers guarantees a Biden victory, let alone a dozen-point landslide. No candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984 has won the presidency by a double-digit margin, and no incumbent since Herbert Hoover in 1932 has lost by more than 10.
Yet the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll underscores how much more challenging it will be than it was in 2016 for Trump to pull off another upset on Election Day.
According to the survey, Biden is stronger than Clinton with every key demographic group:
- Just 3 percent of 2016 Clinton voters say they are now voting for Trump. More than twice as many 2016 Trump voters (7 percent) say they are voting for Biden.
- The Democrat leads by 9 points (45 percent to 36 percent) among independents — a bloc that Trump won by 4 points (46 percent to 42 percent) in 2016.
- Four years ago, Trump trounced Clinton by 20 points (57 percent to 37 percent) among white voters. Today, Biden trails by just 3 points (47 percent to 44 percent).
- There has been a similar swing among suburban voters, who backed Trump by 4 percentage points in 2016 (49 percent to 45 percent) but now favor Biden by 14 (52 percent to 38 percent).
- Meanwhile, the former vice president is ahead by a nearly 2-to-1 margin among those who voted third party in 2016 or didn’t vote at all — an advantage that adds 4 percentage points to his overall lead.
As a result, the same forecaster who gave Trump a 28.8 percent chance of winning one week before the 2016 election now gives him a 12 percent chance of winning.
One-in-eight isn’t nothing; the president could still get reelected. But again, Trump is facing steeper odds now than in 2016. The numbers suggest two reasons why.
The first is that he’s running out of time. With expanded access to early voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, more than half of all likely voters (56 percent) say they have already cast their ballots, according to the Yahoo News/YouGov poll, up from 38 percent last week. With eight days still left to go, election offices have tallied 61 million early votes, which exceeds the total number of early votes cast in all of 2016 by 14 million. So far, registered Democrats have cast the vast majority of these votes. YouGov expects about 85 million people to have voted by the end of this week.
The problem for Trump is that the more votes Biden banks, the fewer minds he can potentially change at the last minute. In 2016, Trump benefited from eleventh-hour news about Clinton’s emails that helped convince most of that year’s relatively large pool of undecided voters to break his way. But while he has seized on reports about a laptop allegedly belonging to Biden’s son Hunter to accuse the former vice president of unspecified wrongdoing, the Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests this gambit has yet to move any votes.
Most voters say they have heard either a lot (39 percent) or a little (38 percent) about the laptop, and views are predictably polarized on whether the media is paying enough attention, with 77 percent Trump voters saying there’s been too little coverage of the controversy and three-quarters of Biden voters saying there’s either been too much (56 percent) or about the right amount (19 percent). The same goes for views on Joe Biden’s involvement: 82 percent of Trump voters are convinced the former vice president did something wrong, while 79 percent Biden voters are sure he didn’t.
The survey does show that independents are evenly divided (41 percent yes vs. 40 percent no) on the question of whether Biden committed any wrongdoing. Yet by an 11-point margin, independents also say Trump and his family are more “corrupt” (50 percent) than Biden and his family (39 percent) — a view shared by the majority of registered voters (53 percent to 39 percent).
And so unless new information about Hunter Biden’s laptop emerges between now and Election Day, persuadable voters seem unlikely to gravitate toward Trump because of concerns about the Bidens. Even then, Trump couldn’t rely solely on persuadable voters to make this a winning issue — there simply aren’t enough of them. According to the poll, a mere 3 percent of voters remain undecided; likewise, just 3 percent of Biden voters say there is “a chance I will change my mind between now and the election.” Instead, any late-breaking news would have to be so shocking as to trigger widespread defections among the shrinking number of solid Biden supporters who have not yet voted.
The final debate, held last Thursday, was also a missed opportunity for the president. With time running out to alter the dynamic of the race, 48 percent of voters who watched say Biden won the encounter, versus just 41 percent who say Trump won.
The second reason Trump faces steeper odds than four years ago is that while Biden’s advantage across the key battleground states (about 4 to 6 percentage points) is smaller than his average national lead (about 9 percentage points), it’s larger than Clinton’s battleground edge one week before the 2016 election.
Back then, many state polls underestimated Trump’s final share of the vote, which is why his narrow wins in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania seemed so surprising. It’s unlikely that surveys taken in 2020 will be off by the same amount, and in the same direction, as they were in 2016; pollsters have adjusted their methodology so as not to repeat their mistake of undercounting voters without a college education, especially white, rural ones, and the polls for the 2018 midterms were more accurate in this regard. Also, polling errors rarely repeat themselves from cycle to cycle; in 2012, for instance, the state and national polls underestimated Barack Obama’s support by nearly 4 points.
Yet either way, Biden’s overall lead is so substantial that he would still be in position to win 280 electoral votes even if the state polls were precisely as wrong as they were in 2016, according to a New York Times analysis. If Biden were to win the states he currently leads by 3 points or more, meanwhile, he would win 341 electoral votes. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to secure the presidency.
The Yahoo News/YouGov poll illustrates the breadth and depth of Biden’s advantage. Asked about a variety of issues, either a majority or a plurality of registered voters say, by substantial margins, that all of them have gotten worse over the last four years: bipartisanship (+70 percent worse), race relations (+59 percent), crime (+45 percent), the environment (+33 percent), health care (+25 percent), immigration (+19 percent), the economy (+14 percent), the Supreme Court (+11 percent) and foreign policy (+10 percent).
Asked which candidate would do a better job handling each of these issues, a plurality or majority of registered voters say Biden rather than Trump: on race relations (52 percent to 33 percent); health care (51 percent to 37 percent); the environment (54 percent to 30 percent); bipartisanship (45 percent to 25 percent); immigration (48 percent to 40 percent); foreign policy (47 percent to 40 percent) and the Supreme Court (45 percent to 39 percent).
Biden even leads Trump on the economy (45 percent to 43 percent) and crime (43 percent to 40 percent) — issues commonly thought to be Trump’s strongest. On the biggest challenge confronting America, the coronavirus pandemic, voters think Biden would do a better job than Trump by 16 percentage points (50 percent to 34 percent).
In a similar vein, there is only one issue — boosting the stock market — that a majority of registered voters (54 percent) describe as a “major accomplishment of the Trump administration.” Among the issues that most voters list as “major failures” of the Trump administration? Managing COVID-19 (62 percent), helping Black Americans (55 percent), protecting people with preexisting health conditions (51 percent) and “draining the swamp” (51 percent).
Asked whether “things are normal in America right now,” 89 percent of registered voters say no. In the midst of a global pandemic, half (50 percent) say the president is “the main reason” why things aren’t normal. Just 44 percent say he isn’t.
Voters aren’t convinced that Biden can usher in a return to normalcy; 46 percent predict he won’t, compared with only 35 percent who predict he will. But as Nov. 3 approaches, most seem to be coming to the conclusion that not-quite-normal life under Biden is at least better than the alternative — and the election is increasingly looking like his to lose.
'Wallace was a 27-year-old father of seven who had just gotten married this month.' (photo: NBC)
National Guard Troops Mobilized in Philadelphia as Protests Over Walter Wallace Killing Continue
Robert Klemko, Katie Shepherd and Maura Ewing, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf authorized the state's National Guard to deploy troops Tuesday."
n the second night of mass demonstrations over the fatal police shooting of a 27-year-old Black man, about 1,000 protesters marched through the streets of West Philadelphia on Tuesday demanding justice for Walter Wallace Jr.
Following a smaller protest that turned destructive on Monday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) on Tuesday authorized the state’s National Guard to deploy to help police protect property and quell unrest in the state’s largest city.
Monday’s demonstrations and looting left shops damaged and at least 30 officers injured, including one hospitalized with a broken leg after being struck by a truck. On Tuesday, police and protesters clashed again, but officers took a more aggressive tack, filling the streets with lines of riot police who stopped marchers and made several arrests earlier in the evening.
On Tuesday evening, a racially diverse crowd gathered at Malcolm X Park in West Philadelphia, near the neighborhood where Wallace was shot in a police killing on Monday. The group wound through residential streets until their path collided with a line of police officers in riot gear. Protesters chanted directly to the police.
“Who killed Walter Wallace?” they asked. “No justice, no peace! No racist police!”
Wallace died Monday after two Philadelphia police officers shot him multiple times while responding to a call reporting a man with a knife. His family said he suffered from mental health issues, which his doctors had been treating with medication. A lawyer for the family told the Associated Press Tuesday that Wallace’s relatives had called for an ambulance to take him to the hospital for medical care, but police showed up instead.
A video of the fatal encounter raised questions about why officers approached an apparent mental health crisis with guns drawn and why they did not first attempt to subdue Wallace with a less lethal weapon, such as a Taser.
“We’re out here to decimate the system that’s meant to decimate us,” said Mikal Woods, a 24-year-old Black man who lives in the West Philadelphia neighborhood that has been rocked by the shooting and subsequent protests. “They shot that man to kill him. Fourteen times.”
“I’ve been afraid of the police every day of my life,” he added.
Some pockets of the city’s demonstrations remained calm as late evening turned to night. As protesters marched, a truck lit up with photos of Wallace rolled through a largely peaceful crowd in West Philadelphia. A neon message displayed on its rear doors read: “I don’t hate cops. I hate that cops don’t speak against the killing of Blacks by cops.”
Pascale Vallee, a 34-year-old graduate student studying public health, said that the killing of Wallace was “shameful.”
She said she saw his death as “the intersection of so many ‘-isms’: Racism, ableism.”
“He needed social supports,” she added, “not bullets.”
A large protest also broke out in New York on Tuesday night, as demonstrators gathered in Brooklyn. People shattered windows at several stores, lit fires and sprayed graffiti on a police van, the New York Daily News reported. New York police arrested about 30 people before the protests largely broke up.
As the protests spread out from West Philadelphia into several other parts of the city and grew increasingly volatile late Tuesday, the Philadelphia Police Department issued a request for residents near the unrest to stay home and remain indoors.
“These areas are experiencing widespread demonstrations that have turned violent with looting,” the city’s Office of Emergency Management said in statement on Twitter Tuesday night.
According to a statement by the Philadelphia Police Department, people in the large crowd began to loot businesses near Castor and Aramingo avenues in North Philadelphia just before 9 p.m.
Helmeted police armed with batons and others with large riot shields took an aggressive posture against demonstrators and media Tuesday night, breaking up large groups with targeted arrests after identifying accused brick- and bottle-throwers.
Protesters who yelled for the arrested to say their names as they were being detained with met with taunts from police: “His name is ‘caught,’ ” one officer responded. Other officers called demonstrators “motherf---ers” as they shoved them with batons.
By 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, the protests near 52nd Street were broken up by police, who detained and arrested dozens as they marched toward angry crowds. Officers chanted, “Move, back! Move, back!” and repelled rocks, bricks, kicks and shoves with scuffed plastic shields and batons. It is unclear how many arrests were made overnight.
Police said a shooting that injured two teenagers may have been connected to looting near Castor and Aramingo avenues, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Philadelphia police did not release any additional details on the how the shooting happened, a possible motive, or who was involved.
Walter Wallace Sr., the father of the man killed at the hands of police Monday, denounced the looting Tuesday evening.
“They’re not helping my family, they’re showing disrespect,” Wallace Sr. told the Inquirer. “Stop this violence and chaos. People have businesses. We all got to eat.”
Tuesday night’s tension between protesters and police is nothing new, said Charles M., a local middle school math teacher who declined to give his last name.
“West Philly and the cops have had a problem for a long time,” he said.
The teacher, who is Black, stood to the side of the crowd, scanning it.
“My main reason for being out here is making sure people don’t mess it up,” he said.
He was on the lookout for “agitators,” who he said were generally White people dressed in all black with their faces covered. A cohort meeting this description did later wind through the crowd.
“They’re the ones that spray paint, they’re the ones that throw bricks,” he said. “When you talk with them, engage with them, they split.”
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Kavanaugh's Opinion in Wisconsin Voting Case Raises Alarms Among Democrats
Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti, The New York Times
Excerpt: "An opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh set off alarms among civil rights and Democratic Party lawyers, who viewed it as giving public support to President Trump's arguments that any results counted after November 3 could be riddled with fraudulent votes - an assertion unsupported by the history of elections in the United States."
The Supreme Court justice’s suggestion that ballots arriving after Election Day could “flip the results” left voting rights activists concerned about how the court might rule in postelection fights.
he Supreme Court decision on Monday barring the counting of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin that arrive after Election Day was not a surprise for many Democrats, who had pressed for it but expected to lose.
But a concurring opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh set off alarms among civil rights and Democratic Party lawyers, who viewed it as giving public support to President Trump’s arguments that any results counted after Nov. 3 could be riddled with fraudulent votes — an assertion unsupported by the history of elections in the United States.
The decision also unnerved Democrats and local election officials in Pennsylvania, where Republicans are asking the Supreme Court to weigh in again on whether the state can accept ballots received up to three days after Election Day. While Democrats in Wisconsin had been appealing for an extension, the current rules in Pennsylvania allow for ballots to arrive three days after the election. Any change could threaten the more than 1.4 million absentee ballots not yet returned.
People wait in line to vote in Georgia's Primary Election on June 9, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
DHS Is Using Immigration Crackdown to Suppress the Latino Vote, Critics Say
Maurizio Guerrero, In These Times
Guerrero writes: "In the lead up to Election Day, the Department of Homeland Security is trumpeting its raids of undocumented immigrants, expediting deportations, and putting up 'wanted' billboard ads of 'criminal aliens.'"
n the lead up to Election Day, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trumpeting its raids of undocumented immigrants, expediting deportations, and putting up “wanted” billboard ads of “criminal aliens” across Pennsylvania. Rights advocates say these tactics appear aimed at boosting President Donald Trump’s reelection chances by intimidating immigrants, Latinos and other Black and Brown voters, who are more likely to favor Democratic candidates.
“We are walking a fine line,” says Philip Wolgin, managing director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank that is influential with the leadership of the Democratic Party. “We want to make sure that people are aware of what’s going on and how to be prepared, particularly local officials who have the onus of protecting elections, while also not causing fear in immigrant communities and ending up doing the type of voter suppression that we think the DHS and the government are trying to do right now.”
As voter participation sets record numbers, DHS may be seeking to dampen this enthusiasm, critics say. On October 21, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) — a DHS agency in charge of combating “unauthorized” immigration—announced the implementation of its expedited removal policy, whereby it can arrest individuals anywhere in the country and deport them in a matter of days without a court hearing if individuals cannot prove, to the satisfaction of the officials, that they have resided in the United States for at least two years. The timing of the announcement of this policy, suggests Wolgin, could dampen voter participation.
“Most U.S. citizens probably do not carry on them documents that show that they’ve been in the country for two years. I personally do not carry my passport with me at all times,” says Wolgin. “So, there’s a real concern that, given the long history of racial profiling and using immigration to go after Black and Brown people, we could end up with ICE detaining some folks based on this provision. That’s not out of the realm of possibility.”
False rumors have amplified this possibility. According to an October report by the Brennan Center for Justice — a nonpartisan law and policy institute at the New York University School of Law — groups that are intentionally trying to suppress the vote among people of color have spread the falsehood that ICE agents will surely patrol the vicinity of polling places. “Some of these rumors appear to have come from groups that are intentionally trying to suppress the vote among Latinos and other people of color,” states the report. “These rumors create real fear in communities ICE has targeted with increasingly aggressive tactics.”
On top of expedited removals, DHS appears to be publicly championing its crackdown on immigrants. Earlier in October, the Acting DHS secretary, Chad Wolf, touted in two press releases the arrests of almost 300 immigrants after week-long operations in six cities and the whole state of California. The operations, however, did not mark a shift in course but were consistent with the Trump administration’s high arrest rates.
Rights advocates say the timing of these public statements about DHS arrests is no coincidence. “The DHS is doing everything it can to promote these political stunts two weeks before the presidential election,” says Salvador Sarmiento, national campaign director at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), a grassroots organization that promotes immigrant workers’ rights. Sarmiento adds that the Trump administration’s objective is to instill fear in immigrants and people of color, who out of caution may be discouraged from interacting with any kind of officials, including at the polling stations.
NDLON has denounced a prominent DHS initiative to criminalize undocumented immigrants. In early October, ICE started putting up in Pennsylvania six billboards with “wanted” ads showing the pictures of “criminal aliens” — all of them people of color. ICE claims the individuals pose a “safety threat,” even though five of them have not been convicted. According to a memo by the Center for American Progress, the “wanted” ads represent a new gambit. “Such race-baiting may especially lead to escalated risks for Black and Brown citizens seeking to cast their vote, which in turn could have a chilling effect on their ability to participate fully in the election,” states the document.
New tactics are paired with the old myth that undocumented immigrants do vote and sway elections. With no proof whatsoever, Trump himself repeated as recently as 2018 that millions of undocumented immigrants voted in California in the 2016 election. He set up an investigative commission led by Vice President Mike Pence and then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which failed to find any evidence of voter fraud.
Despite the commission’s failure, ICE did manage to announce in August 2018 charges against 19 foreign individuals for voting illegally in North Carolina in 2016, although in similar cases elsewhere people were just confused about their eligibility to vote. Those votes were negligible considered the 4.8 millions votes cast in 2016 in North Carolina. These stunts could contribute to mobilizations across battleground states for the “Army for Trump’s election security,” which was convened by Donald Trump Jr. and aims to establish a 50,000-strong army of “observers.”
Climate of intimidation
There is already reason to be concerned that this climate is encouraging vigilante intimidation of voters. As of October 23, there have been at least four documented instances of voter intimidation during the early voting processes. In September, a group of Trump supporters waving campaign flags in Fairfax, Virginia, stood in the way of voters attempting to reach the polling station. In Florida, a police officer in uniform was photographed outside a voting site wearing a pro-Trump mask and a holstered firearm. In Philadelphia, the Trump campaign videotaped citizens depositing their mail-in-ballots, which local authorities considered improper conduct. And in St. Petersburg, Florida, two armed security guards at a polling station prompted officials to station deputies at five voting sites.
There have been initiatives to prevent further voter intimidation. In Minnesota, the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued the private security company Atlas Aegis for recruiting ex‑U.S. military special operations soldiers to deploy to polling places, calling it a breach of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Michigan, the Secretary of State ordered a ban on the open carrying of firearms within 100 feet of polling places.
In this atmosphere, rights advocates worry that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) — part of the DHS — could deploy its paramilitary unit Bortac (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) as it did in July during the protests against police brutality in Portland, Oregon, where the the force kidnapped protesters and threw them into unmarked vans. In the midterm elections of 2018, CBP planned to conduct a “crowd control exercise” near at least one polling location. Those plans were scrapped after an uproar.
“Our big fear is that we see a reprise of Portland, with ICE and CBP being used to intimidate voters on election day or around election day, whether by sending agents directly into the polls as members of the government have said or just by deploying them around cities,” says Wolgin.
Although polling station disruptions could happen on November 3, they should not be overstated, says Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice. Deploying armed forces in polling sites is illegal. Amplifying this possibility could in itself dissuade people from voting. At the same time, acknowledging that voter intimidation attempts are real allows local officials and activists to strategize on how to offset them.
“I do have some concerns that one of these incidents would get out of hand. Similarly, I worry that the police may be too quick to engage, or that some jurisdictions would be too quick to call law enforcement sort of preemptively because of these fears,” says Morales-Doyle. “I worry that people are going to respond in these moments of heightened tension by escalating rather than by de-escalating.”
This election will be less protected against voter intimidation than the previous one. During the 1981 New Jersey’s gubernatorial race, aggressive intimidation tactics by off-duty law enforcement agents were so blatant that a decree adopted a year later sharply limited the Republican National Committee’s poll monitoring activities. That decree expired in 2017.
“This would be the first presidential election where there has not been a federal judicial consent decree in place that prevents the Republican Party from engaging in certain types of ballot security operations and polling intimidation efforts,” warns Morales-Doyle. With fewer legal protections, several initiatives are planning to ward off any endeavors to tamper with the voting process.
The Voter Protection Program, for example, was formed by litigators with state and federal government experience in both Republican and Democratic administrations, as well as national experts on voting rights and election protection, and communications professionals. It also includes a bipartisan board of former governors, attorneys general, and local, state and federal law enforcement leaders.
Advocates, meanwhile, say the voters targeted by the intimidation tactics have a vital role to play in this election — and their participation is sorely needed. “Immigrants across the country have demonstrated the greatest examples of courage that we can be inspired by when they show up to work in the middle of the pandemic or when they walk thousands of miles to give their children a better life,” says Sarmiento. “We are all called today to show that same courage.”
The March is expected to arrive in Bogotá on October 30. (photo: Twitter/@CNA_Colombia)
Colombia: Ex-FARC Combatants March to Bogota
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The demonstrators, who signed the Peace Agreement, are demanding that the government guarantee security and abide by the understanding. This, after hundreds of assassinations of social leaders and ex-combatants were reported."
The FARC-EP has repeatedly denounced that since the signing of the peace agreement in Havana in April 2016, over 1000 social leaders have been killed, and 236 ex-combatants murdered. Hence, a popular mobilization is asking president Ivan Duque to defend the right to life.
x-combatants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP) continue their Pilgrimage in Defense of Life and Peace towards the capital Bogotá, where is expected to arrive on October 30.
The demonstrators, who signed the Peace Agreement, are demanding that the government guarantee security and abide by the understanding. This, after hundreds of assassinations of social leaders and ex-combatants, were reported.
According to Colombia's Communist Party, on November 1, there will be a rally at Bolívar Square. Meanwhile, hundreds of ex-combatants will meet in Ocaña municipality, North of Santander, to march together towards Bogotá.
"#Urgent murdered on the sidewalk of the Hacienda, in the village of El Plateado Argelia, Cauca, our colleague from the CNA, Carlos Navia, a founding leader of Asocomunal and promoter of the pro-credit committee. This crime occurs a few days before the beginning of the Humanitarian Caravan to the Micay Canyon."
The FARC-EP has repeatedly denounced that since the signing of the peace agreement in Havana in April 2016, over 1000 social leaders have been killed, and 236 ex-combatants murdered. Hence, a popular mobilization is asking president Ivan Duque to defend the right to life.
At the same time, several organizations have joined the claim of thousands of families. the Colombian Communist Youth (JUCO) said via Twitter that it supported the pilgrimage as they have been victims of a "brutal and systematic extermination." The JUCO also demanded president Iván Duque to stop the killings.
"#PorLaVidaYPorLaPaz | We support the dignified pilgrimage of the ex-combatants of the FARC-EP, who today, after having signed a peace agreement in 2016, are victims of brutal and systematic extermination. Iván Duque, stop the killing!"
The Social and Political Coordination of the Patriotic March also expressed its solidarity with the ex-combatants. It said in a statement that they demanded the national government "stop assassinations and massacres, comply with the agreements, and implement effective measures to safeguard the lives of the ex-guerrillas who signed the Peace Agreement, social leaders, human rights defenders and members of alternative political parties and movements."
Likewise, senator Victoria Sandino confronted government officials who tried to dismiss the march by saying they had guaranteed security following the agreement. "The extermination to which the Government has subjected us is the main reason for our Pilgrimage," Sandino states. The senator also remarked that 154 ex-combatants were killed during Ivan Duque's government alone.
Dan Simmons, right, head of the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, stands with reps from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works program and Bureau of Reclamation in front of the Hoover Dam in August. (photo: Bureau of Reclamation)
The Trump Administration Is Burying Dozens of Studies Detailing the Promise of Renewable Energy
Peter Fairley, Grist
Fairley writes: "In all, the Energy Department has blocked reports for more than 40 clean energy studies."
The Trump administration is burying dozens of studies detailing the promise of renewable energy, impeding a transition away from fossil fuels
t was a scorching August day at the Hoover Dam as three Trump administration officials gathered for a little celebration honoring pollution-free hydroelectricity. Inside the dam’s Spillway House Visitor Center, air conditioning thankfully kept people comfortable as the president’s appointees heaped praise on hydropower. A U.S. Department of Interior news release about the event calls hydroelectric dams such as Hoover —where the Colorado River slips between Arizona and Nevada — a “unique resource critical to America’s future, which supports the integration of other renewables like wind and solar onto the grid.”
But what went unsaid at the grip-and-grin was that one of those high-ranking officials, Dan Simmons of the U.S. Department of Energy doesn’t appear to fully support renewables. In fact, he has presided over his agency’s systematic squelching of dozens of government studies detailing its promise.
One pivotal research project, for example, quantifies hydropower’s unique potential to enhance solar and wind energy, storing up power in the form of water held back behind dams for moments when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. By the time of the Hoover Dam ceremony, Simmons’ office at the Energy Department had been sitting on that particular study for more than a year.
In all, the department has blocked reports for more than 40 clean energy studies. The department has replaced them with mere presentations, buried them in scientific journals that are not accessible to the public, or left them paralyzed within the agency, according to emails and documents obtained by InvestigateWest, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees at the Department of Energy, or DOE, and its national labs.
Bottling up and slow-walking studies is already harming efforts to fight climate change, according to clean energy experts and others, because Energy Department reports drive investment decisions. Entrepreneurs worry that the agency’s practices under the current White House will ultimately hurt growth prospects for U.S.-developed technology.
“There are dozens of reports languishing right now that can’t be published,” said Stephen Capanna,a former director of strategic analysis for the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — the office that Simmons runs — who quit in frustration in April 2019. “This is a systemic issue.”
Political interference is a pervasive practice targeting research funded by the DOE’s efficiency and renewables office, say federal researchers, who add that the pattern is intensifying. The broad scope of meddling revealed by InvestigateWest’s two-month investigation is also affirmed by a letter sent last week to Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette from the U.S. House Science Committee. The letter cites an August 2020 InvestigateWest story that detailed the political takedown of a study dating back to 2016. It also lists six more DOE-funded studies that were “unduly delayed or modified by senior DOE officials” and another four completed reports that “are yet to be released.”
Meanwhile, insiders contacted by InvestigateWest point to two recent developments escalating the political impact on science in the Energy Department:
First, in January, Simmons’ office began cutting the frequency of annual or quarterly market updates to every other year. The delay could hurt U.S. competitiveness on clean energy innovation, according to renewable energy entrepreneurs.
“Many investors, inventors, and companies use those reports to guide their decision-making about how, where, and when to deploy capital, so the politicization and adulteration of this critical scientific process introduces the risk of slowing down investments or causing companies to make bad bets,” said Michael Webber, chief science and technology officer for Paris-based multinational energy firm ENGIE, and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “That will take a toll.”
And then in the spring, word trickled down that scientists would need political appointees’ sign-off to publish their work in peer-reviewed science journals, according to inside sources. Energy researchers say such a demand was previously unthinkable, because government scientists have long been able to share their work with other scientists without political interference. Dan Kammen, a veteran energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, calls this development “chilling.”
The political shenanigans within the Department of Energy’s clean energy research operation stem from a fundamental misalignment between Simmons’ $2-billion-a-year-plus operation and its masters. Congress has tasked the efficiency and renewables office with advancing alternatives to fossil fuels. But President Trump is a fossil fuel booster who belittles renewable energy, calling solar panels expensive and linking, without evidence, wind turbines to cancer. His annual budget proposals have consistently targeted the office for funding cuts of 65 to 71 percent — though bipartisan Congressional votes have spared its coffers each time.
That discrepancy put Trump’s original appointees — Simmons and Alex Fitzsimmons, Simmons’ chief of staff until he was promoted within the office last year — in a no-win situation. “They were never going to get a pat on the back for anything that we put out that was talking about how we could support renewables or efficiency or electric vehicles or anything like that,” Capanna said. “They were only going to hear about it if we pissed off somebody who cared about coal or nuclear or [blocking] carbon pricing.”
Trump’s Energy Department professes to follow an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which purportedly includes support for renewable energy. However, Secretary Brouillette and his deputy secretary, Mark Menezes, are both former lobbyists — Brouillette for Ford Motor Company and Menezes for power utilities. The industries they represented stood to lose money due to technological advances paid for by the efficiency and renewables office. For example, power plants combining solar panels and big batteries can — like hydroelectric dams — reduce demand for natural gas “peaker” plants favored by the electric power producers Menezes used to serve. And shifting to electric vehicles requires costly retooling by automakers.
When government scientists’ reports began appearing in the news — announcing innovations or market growth in the renewable space, or exploring policy options and grid upgrades that would further boost renewables — Trump administration political appointees were initially caught off guard. Then, they hit back.
A document obtained by InvestigateWest shows that Fitzsimmons in May 2018 established a system that enabled the appointees to intervene and, if necessary, consult their superiors before politically sensitive reports went out. It mandated that those addressing topics of greatest sensitivity — including studies that compared different energy sources or projected the future prospects of renewables — be designated “Tier 1” and flagged for review by Simmons and Fitzsimmons. (All other research was designated “Tier 2”.)
Pre-publication review of Tier 1 reports enabled the Energy Department’s top political appointees to scrutinize scientists’ findings and demand changes or prevent their release. Such interference has occurred regularly since, according to emails, documents, and interviews obtained or conducted by InvestigateWest.
Federal research staffers told InvestigateWest that they did not immediately grasp the full import of the novel review requirements after Fitzsimmons issued the new reporting demands. They didn’t have much time to think. National Renewable Energy Lab researchers were given just six days in late May 2018 to declare any reports due out in the following three months, according to an email from the lab’s leadership. Researchers said it was August 2018, when that lab’s Interconnections Seam Study hit a wall, that the implications sank in.
Fitzsimmons, along with another official who temporarily subbed in for Simmons during his Senate confirmation, buried the report, known as the “Seams” study, because it projected the accelerated demise of the coal industry, as documented previously by InvestigateWest. “Now we’re getting real on this,” is how Charlton Clark, a former grid integration program manager at DOE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office, remembers the message amid the study’s fall 2018 takedown.
Last month, the chair of the U.S. House Science Committee, Democratic Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, wrote to Brouillette, citing InvestigateWest’s reporting and demanding action and answers regarding the Energy Department’s “efforts to suppress” the Seams study. Two days later, on September 24, the House passed an energy bill that ordered its release. Last week, two years and two months after erasing Seams’ results from its website, the National Renewable Energy Lab posted a new DOE-approved version. “The end result of these changes is that the findings are diluted,” one study author told InvestigateWest.
After Seams was ensnared, the number of studies caught up by the political crackdown snowballed. According to a May 2019 email obtained via FOIA, for example, a pile of wind energy studies were stuck. “We are getting a backlog of reports in Tier One situation,” wrote Valerie Reed, then acting director of the Wind Energy Technologies Office, to her boss’ chief of staff.
The pileup left scientists — and their work — dangling. one: “There’s no feedback,” one National Renewable Energy Lab researcher said. “It just goes into a black hole.”
Career employees call the lack of transparency a self-serving shield that protects the administration from accusations of censorship. They also call it a dereliction of duty. As one efficiency and renewables office staffer put it: “They’re not doing their jobs. Period. Because they don’t want to have to say no. They don’t want to get caught saying no.”
All administrations exercise some level of control over Department of Energy research, according to veteran scientists interviewed by InvestigateWest. What distinguishes the Trump administration, they say, is the scale of the censorship and the secrecy surrounding it. “Unprecedented,” is what three senior national laboratory researchers who emailed InvestigateWest call the logjam at the efficiency and renewables office. They say they are personally aware of at least 25 reports just from the national labs that have been delayed for over six months during Trump’s term. For comparison, they claim they can count on one hand the studies held up that long during Barack Obama and George W. Bush’s combined 16 years in office.
Interviews and emails reveal that the affected studies originate throughout the efficiency and renewables office’s programs. Many of the blocked studies favor renewables over the fortunes of traditional energy sources. One is a congressionally-mandated study of a national “zero-emissions energy credit” scheme that incentivizes renewable energy, capture of carbon dioxide from coal and gas-fired generators, and nuclear power. Capanna argues that the study was delayed because it projected that incentives for zero-carbon power would protect existing nuclear plants from shuttering, but might not prompt construction of new reactors favored by the Trump administration. A group of stalled solar power studies, meanwhile, affirm prior research showing multiple mechanisms to cost-effectively scale-up solar in the western U.S., undermining Trump administration efforts to protect aging power plants.
In addition to studies held in limbo, others sent for review at the efficiency and renewables office have been downgraded to conference presentations or canceled outright. The National Renewable Energy Lab, or NREL, for one, based in Golden, Colorado, reviews all reports that it sends to Washington and, according to insiders, holds some back entirely. “We have a whole review process that involves upper management where anything controversial gets reviewed and discussed and most likely taken out,” said a lab researcher contacted by InvestigateWest.
Some studies slated for publication as official Energy Department or national lab reports, meanwhile, have been submitted instead to scientific journals. Articles in journals are usually less detailed and are published outside the public domain, thus reducing a study’s impact. But it is preferable to not publishing at all.
Researchers and some high-ranking career staff have tried in vain to push back against what they see as violations of the Energy Department’s scientific integrity policy. That rule, created in 2014 and updated a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, is intended to protect the freedom of Energy Department researchers to openly discuss and publish their research, and expressly prohibits direct actions or coercion to “suppress or alter scientific or technological findings.”
But neither of the Energy Department’s deputy secretaries, Brouillette or Menezes, appointed a scientific integrity officer, as the policy requires, to police its provisions and resolve disputes. And federal researchers say complaints to lab directors and Energy Department officials have been ineffectual. Multiple sources within the agency report that David Solan, a political appointee who arrived at the efficiency and renewables office last year, has pushed back against allegations from staff that blocking publication violates Energy Department guidelines. He has told career employees that the policy does not protect those researchers producing the kind of “techno-economic analysis” frequently designated as Tier 1. (In fact, the policy explicitly covers all Energy Department employees and contractors.)
Johnson, chair of the House Science Committee, zeroed in on scientific integrity in her September 22 letter to the Energy Department. She told Brouillette that InvestigateWest’s reporting “suggests a number of violations of your own Scientific Integrity Policy.” She has demanded a briefing on what happened to the Seams study, as well as the Energy Department’s failure to appoint a scientific integrity officer — something Brouillette promised to do last year.
Johnson’s committee has also been searching for whistleblowers. DOE researchers say they have, until now, shied away from taking complaints to the department’s inspector general, Congress, or the media. They fear retribution that will harm their careers and perhaps even prompt them to leave their federal positions — which Aaron Bloom, the manager of the Seams study, did in late 2018. And they say lab leaders fear collective retribution against their institutions. As the NREL researcher said of the reasoning of his lab’s director: “I get his position to some degree. Pissing off people within DOE or the administration more broadly could make it more difficult to get the large investments in infrastructure that the lab has been good at getting in recent years.”
NREL spokesperson David Glickson told InvestigateWestthatthe lab’s internal review processdidnot delayor cancel any reports. He also denied that NREL director Martin Keller had said that challengingDOE’sreviews might jeopardize the lab’s infrastructureprojects. InvestigateWestalso reached out to Energy Department officials for this article, including Brouillette, Menezes, Simmons, Solan, and Fitzsimmons. Neither they nor the agency responded to our repeatedrequests.
What worries scientists inside and outside of the Energy Department is a broad stifling of intelligence and expertise within its ranks — resulting in potentially serious environmental and economic consequences. Researchers say attacks on their work — and the anemic protection their managers can muster — is undermining morale, and degrading federal clean energy research. Entrepreneurs worry about the U.S. falling behind.
Many researchers, such as Bloom and Stephen Capanna, have already left. There could be a further flood of departures if Trump wins reelection. Dan Kammen, the UC Berkeley scientist, says that even if there is a change of administrations in 2021, Trump’s first term may have driven out enough “outstanding and committed” civil servants to have a lasting impact on federal research. “Censorship drives these individuals out,” Kammen said. “It is a death blow to the employees the agencies most need.”
The impact of that brain drain could radiate beyond the agency. Less expertise in-house diminishes the Energy Department’s ability to make informed decisions about the science that it funds at the national labs, in academia, and in industry. “We’re literally here spending billions of dollars on behalf of the American taxpayer; we need that knowledge to do so as well as possible,” says one career employee in the efficiency and renewables office.
Other experts see more pernicious effects. Solar entrepreneur and investor Jigar Shah says the cancellation of quarterly and annual solar benchmarks will directly disadvantage solar energy’s market appeal.
State public service commissions and other agencies use the Energy Department’s benchmarks to assess investment plans put forward by utilities, Shah noted, and less frequent reporting will delay the incorporation of solar’s rapidly falling costs into those evaluations. “Our costs have come down so dramatically that if the numbers are not updated regularly, then government regulators and others are kept in the dark,” he said.
An Energy Department insider says the new reporting schedule came down from Menezes in January, and was justified as a cost-saving measure. That rationale is debatable since data collection, which represents the greatest cost, has not slowed down. Shah sees it as part-and-parcel of a preference by both Trump and his administration for fossil fuels over solar and wind energy.
True to its pattern, the Trump administration proposes cutting the funding of the efficiency and renewables office by 75 percent in its latest proposed budget, once again undercutting its claimed all-of-the-above approach for future energy sources. In contrast, the administration’s Fiscal Year 2021 budget requests only a 3 percent trim for DOE’s fossil fuel energy office.
If clean energy research remains stalled at the Energy Department — or, worse still, a second Trump administration succeeds in defunding it — it’ll be bad news for hopes of accelerating a transition to cleaner energy and slowing climate change.
The die may have already been cast at Lake Mead. Behind Hoover Dam’s 72-story wall of concrete, the nation’s largest reservoir has been hit hard by two decades of drought — so hard that plummeting water levels are suppressing the dam’s energy output.
According to recent research, the 21st-century megadrought in southwestern North America marks the region’s driest spell in 500 years. The scientists who made that assessment blame 47 percent of the drought’s severity on warmer temperatures and lower precipitation driven by climate change. In other words, greenhouse gases, primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels, turned an “otherwise moderate drought” into a catastrophe.
And the latest projection by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates the dam, shows five more years of drought ahead.
With a Trump victory in November, federal researchers may expect nearly five more years of a publishing drought, as well.
Suspended studies
Documents obtained by InvestigateWest identify at least 46 reports from almost every program within the U.S. Energy Department’s energy efficiency and renewables office and seven national labs that have been stalled, downgraded, or spiked. They include:
- A study of hydropower’s future value and up to five more studies commissioned by DOE’s hydropower office from four national labs, including Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Argonne National Labs.
- At least two dozen reports from the Energy Department’s solar program, of which at least 10 have been trapped in review since 2019. Among those stuck in review is a pair of National Renewable Energy Lab studies on grid integration of solar powerin the western U.S., which is sitting with Energy Department Deputy Assistant Secretary David Solan since his appointment 17 months ago.
- As many as 16 reports managed by the efficiency and renewables office’s strategic priorities and impact analysis team. They include a congressionally-mandated study, requested in 2017, exploring the impact of a national “zero-emissions energy credit” scheme incentivizing renewable energy, nuclear power, and CO2 capture by coal and gas-fired generators.
- At least a dozen reports from an Energy Department grid modernization initiative, including an exploration of renewable energy options for large utility customers written by experts at the utility Xcel Energy, Walmart, and the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
- Potentially more than 10 reports from the DOE’s wind, transportation, advanced manufacturing, and biofuels offices. One report, which was shunted to a science journal, estimated that Energy Department R&D on wind energy has created $31.4 billion in economic and societal benefits, delivering an 18-to-1 return on public investment; the journal it ran in charges nearly $8,000 for an annual print subscription.
Top News | 'He’s Not Going to Run Unopposed': Sanders Rejects Schumer for Majority Leader
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