It’s an outrage that Saudis use Arizona’s water for free. I’ll work to stop it
Kris Mayes – November 4, 2022
Arizona should not be giving its water away to the Saudi Arabians, or anyone else for that matter. Yet, for the past seven years, the attorney general and governor have allowed a Saudi company to pump out more than $38 million worth of groundwater from La Paz County for free.
That’s right. Arizona is giving away its groundwater for nothing to one of the richest nations on Earth – and to the severe detriment of Arizonans.
It is an outrage and a scandal at a time when the Saudi government is deliberately raising the price of gasoline for U.S. citizens by cutting back OPEC oil supplies.
As attorney general, I will work to put an end to these sweetheart Saudi deals.
Below-market leases short Arizona schools
As first disclosed in The Arizona Republic last June, the State Land Department has leased state trust land to the Saudi-owned Fondomonte corporation for $25 per acre, so that the Saudi company could grow alfalfa and send it back to Saudi Arabia to feed that country’s cows.
More unbelievably, the state is allowing this company to pump groundwater for free. The $25/acre land lease is well below market rates, and the water being given away comes from the Butler Valley Basin and Vicksburg – areas that Arizona cities may very well need to rely on for their water needs in the near future.
To comply with the Gift Clause, a government expenditure must (1) serve a public purpose, and (2) the consideration the public has paid must not far exceed the value received.
As stated by the Arizona Supreme Court 38 years ago, the deal between the government and the private entity cannot be “so inequitable and unreasonable” that it amounts to providing a subsidy to the private party.
Giving away more than $38 million of groundwater for free is both inequitable and unreasonable. Agreeing to lease state land to a Saudi company for only one-sixth of the market price for similar land is probably inequitable and unreasonable as well. Pursuant to the Arizona Constitution, money that is generated from state trust land leases must go to benefit Arizona K-12 schools.
Wells are going dry, complaints unanswered
Ground water is used to irrigate an alfalfa field, April 7, 2022, at Fondomonte’s Butler Valley Ranch near Bouse.
Four months ago, the La Paz County supervisors filed a complaint with Attorney General Mark Brnovich concerning the below-market Fondomonte lease and the groundwater giveaway. To date, Brnovich has done nothing, not even respond to the county supervisors.
Moreover, several years ago, more than 500 La Paz County residents signed a petition that they hand-delivered to Gov. Doug Ducey’s advisers, voicing their outrage about the free groundwater giveaway.
Recently, I traveled to Vicksburg and met with La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin, who showed me the Fondomonte farm in that western Arizona community. Alfalfa fields stretch for miles, and commercial wells can be seen from the road gushing the state’s precious and irreplaceable water at thousands of gallons per minute.
Irwin also took me to a nearby Baptist church whose well has been dewatered. She told me that many of her constituents living around the Fondomonte farms have had their wells sucked dry by the Saudi-owned farms.
Records at the Department of Water Resources show that the Saudis are drilling deeper and deeper wells, which will likely cause residential wells to go dry.
During my first week as attorney general, I will request an auditor general’s audit of all industrial-scale leases of state trust land where water is being pumped to determine if the rates are below market and how much school funding has been lost as a result.
If such abuses have occurred, I will work to ensure that the companies are required to restore the proper funding to the state and our schools.
I will also proactively advise the Arizona State Land Department on an ongoing basis that leasing water at rates that are significantly below market rates could represent a violation of the state’s Gift Clause and that the leaseholders could face efforts to recover undercharges in the future.
Arizona’s water supplies have never been more threatened.
Lakes Mead and Powell are less than 150 feet from “dead pool” status and hydrologists believe they will hit dead pool sometime in 2023. It is time for Arizona’s leaders to act like they care about Arizona more than a country thousands of miles away that is trying to harm America.
I will do that as Arizona’s next attorney general.
Kris Mayes is the Democratic candidate for Arizona attorney general. She served two terms on the Arizona Corporation Commission.
‘Morning Joe’ Host Scarborough Explodes on Lack of ‘Humanity’ in GOP: ‘I’m So Sick and Tired of This Bulls–‘ (Video)
Benjamin Lindsay – November 4, 2022
A week out from the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough became uncharacteristically irate Friday while discussing the Republican Party’s overall response. He even warned viewers at one point to “cover the kids’ ears” so he could curse them out: “I’m so sick and tired of this bulls—!”
The explosive diatribe against the GOP began with Scarborough highlighting the party’s lack of empathy in their response to the attack. Many within the party haven’t responded it all, and of those who have, very few have outright denounced the attack, instead opting to mock Pelosi and spread conspiracy theories about his assailant.
“Here’s a guy who’s in great shape, but he’s 82 years old. He got brutally attacked, he got hit in the head, he had emergency surgery because of a fractured skull. And Republicans and the most powerful people in the world are making fun of this guy and spreading lies,” Scarborough said. “This is not ‘our politics are broken.’ Let’s stop saying, ‘Our politics are broken.’ The Republican Party is broken. The MAGA Right is broken. There is a sickness here.”
The morning show host then acknowledged Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s speaking out against the attack, “but not many others spoke out about it.” He also compared the response seen today to how Democrats responded to Louisiana’s Steve Scalise when he was shot in 2017.
“I’ve gotta say this – cover the kids’ ears – I’m so sick and tired of this bulls— about, ‘Oh but what about Steve Scalise?’ Nancy Pelosi was practically in tears after Steve Scalise was shot, and she said, ‘We’re all one family.’ There is no humanity in the Republican Party. No humanity at all, and this has proven it,” Scarborough said. “Where are these people? They’re mocking Paul Pelosi!
“By the way,” he continued, “the same people who in primetime mocked police officers who wept about Jan. 6 – they wanna support the blue, unless the blue is trying to save American democracy against their most freakish supporters. They wanna support law enforcement – unless it’s the FBI, who’s investigating corruption at the the highest level in the Republican Party. It’s select enforcement. They only support Madisonian Democracy if their side wins. They only support law enforcement if their side gets a free pass. It is a sickness in the Republican Party. It is not a sickness in American politics.”
Watch Scarborough’s “Morning Joe” rant in full in the video above.
Wisconsin Republicans Stand on the Verge of Total, Veto-Proof Power
Reid J. Epstein – November 4, 2022
Gov. Tony Evers campaigns at the Blue Wave Inn in Ashland, Wis., on Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (Tim Gruber/The New York Times)
FRANKS FIELD, Wis. — The three counties in Wisconsin’s far northwest corner make up one of the last patches of rural America that have remained loyal to Democrats through the Obama and Trump years.
But after voting Democratic in every presidential election since 1976, and consistently sending the party’s candidates to the state Legislature for even longer, the area could now defect to the Republican Party. The ramifications would ripple far beyond the shores of Lake Superior.
If Wisconsin Democrats lose several low-budget state legislative contests here on Tuesday — which appears increasingly likely because of new and even more gerrymandered political maps — it may not matter who wins the $114 million tossup contest for governor between Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Tim Michels, a Republican. Those northern seats would put Republicans in reach of veto-proof supermajorities that would render a Democratic governor functionally irrelevant.
Even though Wisconsin remains a 50-50 state in statewide elections, Democrats would be on the verge of obsolescence.
“The erosion of our democratic institutions that Republicans are looking to take down should be frightening to anyone,” said John Adams, a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly from Washburn, on the Chequamegon Bay of Lake Superior. “When you start losing whole offices in government, I don’t know where they’re going to stop.”
This rural corner of Wisconsin — Douglas, Bayfield and Ashland counties — has become pivotal because it has three Democratic-held seats that Republicans appear likely to capture; two in the Assembly and one in the state Senate. Statewide, the party needs to flip just five Assembly districts and one in the Senate to take the two-thirds majorities required to override a governor’s veto.
That outcome — “terrifying,” as Melissa Agard, a Democratic state senator and the leader of the party’s campaign arm in the chamber, described it — would clear a runway for Republican state legislators to follow through on their promises to eliminate the state’s bipartisan elections commission and take direct control of voting procedures and the certification of elections.
Wisconsin is not the only state facing the prospect of a Democratic governor and veto-proof Republican majorities in its legislature.
North Carolina Republicans, who also drew a gerrymandered legislative map, need to flip just three seats in the state House and two in the state Senate to be able to override vetoes by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, a Democrat in a tight contest for reelection, already faces veto-proof Republican majorities, as do the Democratic governors of deep-red Kentucky and Louisiana.
Wisconsin Republicans, who have had a viselike grip on the Legislature since enacting the nation’s most aggressive gerrymander after their 2010 sweep of the state’s elections, make no apologies for pressing their advantage to its limits. Michels, the party’s nominee for governor, told supporters this week, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.”
Former Rep. Reid Ribble, a Republican who served northeastern Wisconsin, said, “There’s a lot of complaining about gerrymandered House or state Assembly seats, and there’s some truth to that.”
But he added: “At the end of the day, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a district in rural Wisconsin that would elect a Democrat right now.”
Republican control of the Wisconsin Legislature is so entrenched that party officials now use it as a campaign tactic. Craig Rosand, the GOP chairman in Douglas County, said that because Democrats had so little influence at the state Capitol, voters who want a say in their government should elect Republicans.
“The majority caucus always determines what passes,” he said. “Having a representative that’s part of the majority gets them in the room where the decisions are made.”
Of Wisconsin’s 33 state Senate seats, 17 are on the ballot on Tuesday, including two Democratic-held districts that President Donald Trump carried in 2020. The picture is similarly bleak for Democrats in the state Assembly, where President Joe Biden, who won the state by about 20,000 votes, carried just 35 of 99 districts.
“When you can win a majority of voters and have close to a third of the seats, it’s not true democracy,” said Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the State Assembly. “We are very much at risk of people deciding that it’s not worthwhile for them to continue to engage because they see how rigged the system is against the people of the state in favor of Republican politicians.”
As former President Barack Obama campaigned for Wisconsin Democrats on Saturday in Milwaukee, he addressed the implications of Republican supermajorities in the Legislature.
“If they pick up a few more seats in both chambers, they’ll be able to force through extreme, unpopular laws on everything from guns to education to abortion,” Obama said. “And there won’t be anything Democrats can do about it.”
The Republican leaders in the Wisconsin Legislature say they will bring back all 146 bills Evers has vetoed during his four years in office — measures on elections, school funding, pandemic mitigation efforts, policing, abortion and the state’s gun laws — if they win a supermajority or if Michels is elected. Evers warned of “hand-to-hand combat” to find moderate Republican legislators to sustain vetoes if he is reelected with a GOP supermajority.
“Katy, bar the door,” Evers said Thursday during an interview on his campaign bus in Ashland. “They’re going to shove all this stuff down our throat and it’s going to happen quickly and before anybody can pay attention. It could be bad.”
Evers predicted that Democrats would be able to narrowly sustain veto power in the Assembly. The state Senate, he said, is “tougher.”
In northwest Wisconsin, the three incumbent Democratic legislators decided against running for reelection under new, more Republican-friendly maps. Under the old maps, Biden carried each of the districts, which are home to large numbers of unionized workers in paper mills, mines and shipyards. Under the new lines Republicans adopted last year, Trump would have won them all.
Kelly Westlund, a Democrat running for the state Senate here, spent Wednesday morning going up and down the long driveways of rural homes 15 miles south of Superior. It was grueling door-to-door outreach that illustrated the difficulty of introducing herself to voters as a new candidate in a new district that includes three media markets.
“You don’t find a whole lot of folks here that are super jazzed about Joe Biden,” Westlund said. “But you do find people that understand there’s a lot at stake.”
Her pitch included warnings about what would happen if Republicans flip her seat and claim a supermajority. Few of the voters she met knew much about the candidates for the Legislature — but they did express strong feelings about the national parties.
“The Democrats have to own up to a certain amount of things that are going on now,” said John Tesarek, a retired commercial floor installer who would not commit to voting for Westlund. “I’m not totally certain I’m hearing them own up to much.”
The picture wasn’t much different during early voting at the city clerk’s office in Superior.
Ann Marie Allen, a hospital janitor, said she had voted for Evers and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democrat challenging Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican. But she said she had also backed Westlund’s Republican opponent, Romaine Quinn, because she liked that he had his toddler son in his commercials. Quinn has spent eight times as much on TV ads as Westlund has.
“There was no smut in his ads,” Allen said. “You know how they cut down on other people? There wasn’t that much of that.”
Chad Frantz, a plumber, said he had voted a straight Republican ticket.
“I’ve been watching the Democrats bash every Republican,” he said. “They’ve been trying to make out every guy that’s a Republican running for a position into a male chauvinist pig.”
Mayor Jim Paine of Superior, a Democrat, said Republicans were capitalizing on “fissures” in local Democratic politics between union workers and environmentalists.
“Labor and the environment are both very important, but it’s leading to very real challenges,” Paine said. “They’re breaking up. That’s why you see more Republicans getting elected.”
The Republicans likely to head to Madison are far different from their Democratic predecessors.
Nick Milroy, a moderate Democrat, won seven terms in the Assembly and ran unopposed for a decade until he was reelected in 2020 by just 139 votes. His old district was Democratic in presidential years; Trump carried the new one by two percentage points.
The Republican who would replace him is Angie Sapik, a marketing executive. During the Capitol riot in 2021, Sapik tweeted, “It’s about time Republicans stood up for their rights,” “Rage on, Patriots!” and “Come on, Mike Pence!”
In a brief phone call, Sapik agreed to an interview, then ended the call and did not respond to subsequent messages.
Her Democratic opponent is Laura Gapske, a Superior school board member who said she had to call the police after receiving threatening calls when advertising that promoted Sapik’s candidacy included her cellphone number.
Democrats here described an uphill battle against better-funded Republican opponents, with the political atmosphere colored by inflation, concerns about faraway crime and an unpopular president.
They also spoke of the difficulty of spreading their message in what is effectively a news desert.
Adams, the Assembly candidate, is running in a district Trump would have carried by four points. Last week, Adams — an organic farmer who previously worked at small-town newspapers in Minnesota and Montana — drove two hours each way to Rhinelander to be interviewed by a local TV station.
“Because we live in a low-media environment up here, too many of us are getting our cable news and not enough are getting our local news,” he said. “If Fox News is telling the story of Democrats, then we lose.”
The party of Trump is hardly about law and order. (Photo/NPR)
Opinion. The 2022 midterm elections, which are less than two weeks away, are important to the future of our country. On November 9, we will all wake up to discover the pathway to this country’s future.
For the millions of Native Americans who believe in democracy and a pathway to progress for Indian Country, now is the time to pay attention to what is real and what is false.
Last weekend I flew to Madison, Wisconsin to cover the Midterm Elections Town Hall ‘22 event presented by Four Directions, National Congress of American Indians, Native American Rights Fund and Wisconsin Tribes. While I was there, I saw a local TV station air an ad that attempted to portray the U.S. Senate Democratic candidate, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, as being “soft on crime.”
The ad showed clips of the Black man convicted recently of running his vehicle into a 2021 Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin that killed six people. The violent ad ended with an image placing Barnes, who is Black, next to progressive Democratic House members, all of whom are women of color.
What the ad doesn’t do is explain how Barnes was in any way responsible for the deadly deed committed by the convicted Black man. Nor does the ad give any explanation at all as to why the progressive Democratic lawmakers are in any way linked to the crime — or why they’re even in the ad.
Never mind facts or logic, this ad is just the latest in a long line of GOP election ads that try to stoke fear among White voters by pushing images and false messages that violent crimes are committed by people of color at a disproportionate rate.
Barnes is running against incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who is an avid Trump supporter and a 2020 presidential election denier.
The attack against Barnes is just one of many GOP ads being shown across the country that imply Democrats are “soft on crime.” The ads reverberate back to the 1988 presidential election when Republicans introduced Willie Horton into the campaign.
Willie Horton, an African American man, is a convicted felon serving a life sentence. In 1986, Horton was released as part of a weekend furlough program, but did not return as scheduled. While on a weekend furlough he committed assault, armed robbery and rape in Maryland.
Supporters of Republican nominee George H.W. Bush used the horrific crimes to attack the Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. A political action committee (PAC) paid for the infamous Willie Horton ad, which was a classic dog-whistle tactic.
Here’s the truth about violent crime rates in the country. The Brennan Center for Justice analyzed the trends in murders across the country. In a report called “Myths and Realities: Understanding Recent Trends in Violent Crime” the data shows that jurisdictions run by Democrats are not necessarily more crime ridden than those run by Republicans.
“Despite politicized claims that this rise was the result of criminal justice reform in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, murders rose roughly equally in cities run by Republicans and cities run by Democrats. So-called ‘red’ states actually saw some of the highest murder rates of all,” the report says.
When Republicans show ads that depict Black and brown people are violent, it’s a racist tactic. Clearly these ads love to portray Democrats as “left-wing fanatics” who don’t care about crime.
Republicans for decades have sold the GOP as the party of law and order. One can even hearken back to 1968 when Richard Nixon ran for office as a “law and order president.” Six years later, he resigned the presidency in disgrace because of illegal activities.
The American voter should take into account one of the largest crimes committed against the United States was the January 6th insurrection.
Speaking in Philadelphia this past summer, President Joe Biden said: “Let me say this to my MAGA Republican friends in Congress: don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on [January] the 6th.”
If Republicans are really the party of law and order, perhaps they should start at the illegal behavior of their “beloved” leader: Donald Trump, who took boxes and boxes of documents that belong to the U.S. Archives–ultimately to the American public. It stands to reason that if anyone else in the general public took government documents home with us, we would be locked up for taking them.
When voting in November, separate truth from what is false.
About the Author: “Levi Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print\/online category by the Native American Journalists Association. He serves on the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net.”
Oil giants sell thousands of California wells, raising worries about future liability
Mark Olalde, Co-published with ProPublica – October 27, 2022
Aera Energy wells in Ventura. The joint venture between Shell and Exxon has announced plans to sell thousands of California gas and oil wells to the German assett management group IKAV. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The price of oil produced in California this year reached its highest level in a decade. President Biden is releasing millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep prices in check. And fossil fuel companies’ earnings are so high that Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for a windfall tax on their profits.
It might seem like a lucrative time to drill for oil in the Golden State. Yet, some of the world’s largest oil companies, several of which have done business in the state for more than a century, are selling assets and beginning to pull out of California.
Even with strong cash flow in the short term, producers have more to gain from offloading wells and the associated liability — chiefly expensive environmental cleanup — than from pumping more oil and gas, experts say.
“This is the kind of deal you see when an industry is in its twilight,” said Andrew Logan, senior director for oil and gas at Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainability in companies and markets.
Some industry experts, lawmakers and environmentalists are concerned about the recent deals, noting that the sales shift environmental liability from corporate powerhouses to less-capitalized firms, increasing the risk that aging wells will be left orphaned, unplugged and leaking oil, brine and climate-warming methane. They see a threat that the state’s oil industry could repeat a pattern seen in other extractive industries like coal mining and lead to taxpayers bearing cleanup costs.
California Assemblymember Steve Bennett, a Democrat who has long worked on oil policy, has seen oil companies in his Ventura district walk away from environmental liability. “It gets passed on to a smaller company and to a smaller company until someone declares bankruptcy and the public is stuck with the cleanup bill,” he said.
IKAV enters the fray
Supermajors Shell and ExxonMobil recently agreed to sell more than 23,000 wells in California, which they owned through a joint venture called Aera Energy, to German asset management group IKAV for an estimated $4 billion. Aera accounts for about a quarter of California’s oil and gas production, largely from pumping in Kern and Ventura counties.
Shell and ExxonMobil say the deal will strengthen their businesses.
But Greg Rogers, an attorney and accountant who researches the oil and gas industry, said the deal allows the sellers to shed decommissioning costs. “You got bad assets with big liabilities, and you can get rid of both at the same time. That’s a win for Exxon and Shell,” he said.
IKAV will inherit a portfolio littered with wells past their prime. Nearly 9,000 Aera wells were idle as of early October, meaning about 38% of the company’s unplugged inventory isn’t producing oil or gas, according to state data.
In an email, Aera spokesperson Kimberly Ellis-Thompson said the company is capable of managing its large portfolio of idle wells. “Since 2019, when new idle well management program regulations were published, we have met or exceeded the requirements for retiring idle wells,” she said. The company has decommissioned and plugged nearly 1,000 wells on average every year since then, she said.
IKAV, Aera’s soon-to-be new owner, manages about $2.5 billion in energy-focused assets. News releases on the Aera sale quoted Constantin von Wasserschleben, IKAV’s chairman, as saying, “We advocate a co-existence between renewable and conventional energy for decades to come.”
As the world increasingly shifts to cheaper renewable energy to address climate change, IKAV has been snapping up oil and gas wells from supermajors exiting the market. The firm, which once focused exclusively on renewable energy, began expanding into oil and gas in 2020 when it purchased BP’s gas assets in the San Juan Basin, spanning New Mexico and Colorado. The deal was part of BP’s push to divest $10 billion in assets, including aging American gas fields.
BP declined to comment.
If it’s not profitable to return wells to production, they need to be plugged. But if a company doesn’t plug its wells before walking away, wells are orphaned and the cleanup costs ultimately fall to taxpayers and current operators through fees.
For example, the Greka group of companies left more than 750 wells for California to plug when its wealthy owner began pushing his businesses into bankruptcy in 2016 and retired to his Santa Maria winery. And a subsidiary of one of the country’s largest mining companies, Freeport-McMoRan, left dozens of likely orphaned wells, state records show, even though the company brought in nearly $23 billion in revenue last year.
Greka’s CEO didn’t respond to a request for comment, and a Freeport spokesperson said the company is working with the state to verify details about its orphaned wells.
To minimize the government’s exposure if wells are orphaned, producers must put up a bond, typically held as cash or a surety policy. The bonds act like a security deposit: The company gets its bond back if it cleans up its mess, but the government keeps the money if the company orphans its wells.
Newsom has called for an end to all oil extraction in the state by 2045, but his administration has yet to use another tool to hold producers responsible for cleanup.
California has the authority to ask for an additional $30 million in financial security from a single operator but only requires Aera to hold a $3-million bond. As a result, Aera’s bonds cover less than half a percent of the $1.1 billion that ProPublica estimates it would cost the state to plug the wells based on the average cost to California for past well plugging. (That estimate does not include the additional cost of full surface remediation.)
California Oil and Gas supervisor Uduak-Joe Ntuk said in a statement that his agency reviews bonds for all oil companies in the state but did not say whether the amount of Aera’s financial security would be increased through the sale.
Aera, Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond to a question about the gap between their bonds and the estimated cost to plug their wells. IKAV did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, ExxonMobil spokesperson Meghan Macdonald said that “when we make divestments, we always try to work with partners like Aera and IKAV who are also committed to a lower-emissions future.”
Costs vary widely, but states have paid $100,000 or more to plug wells — and the same to clean up surface pollution — meaning there’s a significant gap between what’s needed and what California has available in bonds.
“If they don’t have the financial resources when it comes time to plug those wells, there’s a possibility that the public will be left holding the bag and paying those costs even though it’s the company that made the profit from selling the oil,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Who will be liable?
More than 240,000 wells have pierced the state since the late 1800s, when Southern California’s first producing well spouted oil near where Dodger Stadium now stands. Of those, more than 5,300 are “orphan, deserted, and potentially deserted wells,” according to data the California Geologic Energy Management Division published in September.
Many on that list belong to individuals who died long ago or companies that dissolved in the shuffling of corporate paperwork. However, some responsible parties are still around but are no longer legally liable after offloading their wells through sales and bankruptcies.
So who will be responsible for cleanup?
California is unique because state law allows regulators to call on former operators such as Shell and ExxonMobil to help pay for plugging onshore oil wells if they are later orphaned, even by a different owner. But companies have escaped responsibility under this stronger legal standard by exploiting loopholes such as a porous bankruptcy code.
Some experts question whether Shell and ExxonMobil would be required to pay if the wells they are selling to IKAV are ultimately orphaned, saying their ownership of the wells through a separate company, Aera, might shield them from liability.
“Exxon and Shell do not directly operate those wells. There’s corporate structuring going on in between,” Rogers said. And IKAV now adds another layer of corporate paperwork, holding the wells it acquired in New Mexico, Colorado and California through companies that were registered in Delaware shortly before the sales.
Alongside Aera, two other companies — California Resources Corp. and Chevron — account for the vast majority of California’s oil and gas production, and they too are shrinking their positions in the state. California Resources, which has been in and out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in recent years, sold most of its Ventura Basin operations in November 2021. Chevron recently sold its California headquarters and plans to consolidate some of its unused Bakersfield office space as it shifts employees to Texas. Reuters reported in early October that Berry Corp., another large oil company that for many years has operated in California and Utah, was considering selling.
Berry did not respond to a request for comment.
Shell acknowledged its California wells were overvalued, suggesting the wells are even nearer to the end of their economic life than previously predicted. The company is wiping as much as $400 million off its books through the sale via an impairment charge.
Shell has been shedding assets in part to hand off associated greenhouse gas emissions. A 2021 Dutch court ruling ordered it to significantly reduce emissions, although the company has appealed the ruling. Zoe Yujnovich, the company’s upstream director, said in a news release about the sale of Aera that Shell will instead be “focusing on positions with high growth potential.”
For its part, ExxonMobil plans to focus on oil and natural gas that costs less to extract, Liam Mallon, president of ExxonMobil Upstream Co., said in a news release announcing the sale to IKAV.
Large public companies are handing off oil and gas assets around the country. Between 2017 and 2021, more than a quarter of oil and gas mergers and acquisitions took public companies private, with private equity often involved, according to a study conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund. The report voiced concern that private companies are less transparent and have less incentive to protect the environment.
California is just the beginning
With more than 2 million unplugged oil wells believed to be scattered across the U.S., California is the tip of the iceberg.
A massive boom in American oil and gas production over the past 15 years spurred by technological advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling unlocked previously inaccessible geologic formations. But the shale revolution and current market highs buoyed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine won’t last forever.
Longtime petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis laid out the reality at a recent conference. This shale revolution revitalized only some oil fields, and more than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells are either idle or minimally producing and unlikely to make a major comeback, according to his research.
“The bulk of the wells are producing from plays where there is no hope of another deus ex machina,” Purvis said, referencing nearly depleted oil fields.
The oil industry also faces an impending decline in demand from the shift to renewable energy and the trend toward banning the sale of new internal-combustion engine cars, as well as plans to phase out drilling in metro areas.
“The overall industry is being assaulted right now through policy changes at the state and federal level. That’s the story writ large,” Rogers said. “The industry is dying.”
Olalde reports for ProPublica.ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
And possibly Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland, and Alejandro Mayorkas, and Antony Blinken
By Barton Gellman – October 26, 2022
Photo-collage images: Graeme Jennings / Getty; Dustin Franz / Bloomberg / Getty; Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty
Sometime next year, after an interval of performative investigations, Republicans in the House are going to impeach Joe Biden. This may not be their present plan, but they will work themselves up to it by degrees. The pressure from the MAGA base will build. A triggering event will burst all restraints. Eventually, Republicans will leave themselves little choice.
This prediction rests, of course, on the assumption that Republicans will win control of the House next month, which appears likely: Democrats would need to win an improbable number of toss-up races to keep their majority. And an impeachment resolution requires just a simple majority to pass the House.
Nothing in the public record offers the slightest reason to believe that the Senate, even if it is under Republican control, would convict and remove Biden from office. Still, House Republicans will come to see plenty of advantages in impeaching Biden—and, possibly, several other top administration officials.
Already, there is enormous demand for impeachment. A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll in May found that 68 percent of Republican voters think the House should impeach Biden. A majority expect that it will impeach him. Thwarting those expectations would be dangerous for any House Republican.
The poll numbers for impeachment correspond closely to the belief among Republicans that Biden is an illegitimate president. This is no coincidence: Impeachment is the corollary of election denial—the invincible certainty that Biden cheated in 2020 and Donald Trump won. If you truly believe that and haven’t joined a militia, impeachment is the least of the remedies you will accept.
Election denial is the core position of the GOP today. Two-thirds of the Republican caucus in the House voted to overturn the presidential election in 2020—including Kevin McCarthy, who is likely to become the next speaker. A new cohort of incoming members, Republican nominees in safe red districts, has campaigned as election deniers. After a number of forced retirements and establishment defeats in primaries this year, very few party members will publicly concede that Biden won a free and fair election.
“The impeachment buzz will be at the backdrop of every conversation about a Republican agenda,” Kevin Madden, a former top GOP spokesperson and strategist, told me. MAGA true believers think establishment Republicans “for too long allowed Democrats to play hardball, and now’s the time to really sort of fight fire with fire.” Trump’s supporters, he said, want “retribution.”
McCarthy has so far equivocated on the question of impeachment. His allies tell me he will instead try to channel this energy into congressional investigations of the president, his family, and his administration. The prospective chairs of the relevant committees, Oversight and Judiciary, have already laid the groundwork for these probes in planning meetings and public pronouncements. But taking the next step toward impeachment is risky, and could backfire with voters. McCarthy wants to oversee subpoenas and Benghazi-style hearings to weaken the president ahead of the 2024 election, not issue a call for Biden’s removal. (McCarthy and his staff did not respond to a request for comment.)
But there is little reason to think that McCarthy can resist the GOP’s impulse to impeach once it gathers strength. He is a notably weak leader of a conference that proved unmanageable for his predecessors Paul Ryan and John Boehner. If he does in fact reach the speakership, his elevation will be a testament to his strategy of avoiding conflict with those forces.
Donald Trump remains the strongest influence on McCarthy’s caucus. Anytime he cares to intervene, he will be the dominant figure in setting Republican priorities in the House. “Trump has the ability to get a message out, to motivate the grassroots base of the Republican Party,” a close McCarthy ally told me. “And then that then turns around and motivates all these members.”
And what will Trump want? Doug Heye, another McCarthy ally and former member of the House leadership staff, says the answer is obvious.
“Donald Trump’s going to want to impeach everybody,” he said.
We tend to think of presidential impeachment proceedings as rare. The Constitution defined the power to impeach in 1787. Nearly a century passed before Congress picked up that weapon, impeaching and (barely) acquitting Andrew Johnson in 1868. Another hundred years passed before Richard Nixon resigned ahead of certain impeachment in 1974. Then came Bill Clinton, impeached in 1998 and acquitted the following year, and Donald Trump, impeached twice—in 2019 and 2021—and acquitted twice.
Five times, then, even if you count Nixon, in 235 years. But there is a lesser known and more extensive history. Twelve presidents—including all but one since Jimmy Carter—have been subject to impeachment resolutions. Amazingly, given the animus he attracted, the exception was Barack Obama.
“In the 21st century,” the presidential historian Barbara A. Perry told me, impeachment “is now routine.”
But while most attempts at impeachment have been symbolic gestures that had no chance to win a majority in the House, the coming Biden impeachment will not be that kind. Its prospects of passing and going to the Senate for trial will be substantial.
On January 21, 2021, Joe Biden’s first full day in office, Marjorie Taylor Greene filed the first article of impeachment against him. At the time, House Resolution 57 was no more than a sneer at a president whom Greene called illegitimate. With the House under Democratic control, Greene had to know she would get no floor vote or committee referral. The House leadership did not even acknowledge the submission.
But the threat that Greene posed to Biden was not empty. In the long term, it will prove to be very real.
Greene—for all her history of anti-Semitic, racist, and ludicrously conspiratorial remarks—holds a position of growing influence in her party. Unlike Nancy Pelosi, the current speaker, McCarthy cannot ignore Greene’s next impeachment resolutions, which she has promised in the new year.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to have, if not more of, as much a say in the message and political focus of a Republican House conference than Kevin McCarthy will,” Madden said. “That’s just a very real pressure Kevin McCarthy is going to face.”
Greene’s day-one impeachment maneuver set the tone for the Republican conference. In August of 2021 she offered three more resolutions, gathering eight co-sponsors, including fellow bomb-throwers and election deniers Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar. Soon other members of the Freedom Caucus caught on.
Another resolution was introduced the following month. Yet another less than two weeks after that. Three days later, Lauren Boebert introduced a pair of resolutions against Biden and Kamala Harris. (In a nice piece of recursive logic, one of the charges against Harris was failing to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Biden.) The barrage continued with another impeachment resolution in April, and still another—from Greene again—last month.
None of these resolutions will be the one that gets Biden impeached. They all expire shortly after the new year, when the 117th Congress draws to a close. When the next Congress gavels in, Republicans will likely control the committees, the floor, and the rules. At some point in 2023, momentum for impeachment will build.
What charge could republicans use on Biden?
Advocates will have to come up with something that a majority of the House will endorse, and that will take time.
I talked with a lot of Republicans for this story, and the subject they mentioned most often was the president’s son Hunter Biden. “Hunter” is an all-purpose emblem of scandal in the GOP, and to some extent that is justified. He has admitted to abusing drugs; he was thinly qualified for his position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company, which he held while his father was vice president; and he is reportedly under federal investigation for alleged tax crimes and for lying about his drug use on an application to buy a gun. (He has said that professional advisers helped him with his tax affairs and is confident they were handled legally.)
The problem for those who want to impeach is how to connect the president to his son’s alleged misadventures. Republicans who mentioned “the Hunter issue”—even those who predicted that it would be the central predicate for impeachment—grew vague when I asked them how it demonstrated wrongdoing by the president. One said it showed “a pay-to-play scheme,” but did not specify who paid whom for what corrupt purpose.
The only formal accusation against Biden in connection with his son came in Greene’s first impeachment resolution. The evidence she cited was scant. The best Greene had was a 2011 email in which a business associate told Hunter Biden: “We need to get these guys to an event or something where they get to just formally meet your Dad.” Greene concludes from this that Biden “allowed his son to trade appointments with his father … in exchange for financial compensation,” but no evidence suggests that Hunter agreed to arrange such a meeting, much less that it happened.
A former House leadership aide close to McCarthy said an impeachment charge against the president based on his son’s conduct would be politically effective only “if it was discovered that Joe Biden had been very significantly involved in making money for Hunter … and he had done something clearly illegal.”
Another oft-mentioned reason for impeachment is Biden’s immigration policies and border enforcement. One impeachment resolution offered last year alleged that Biden “has allowed illegal aliens to enter the United States in violation of immigration law, admitted aliens who have tested positive for COVID-19 into the United States, countered the will of Congress by not completing the southern border wall, [and] deprived border agents of the sufficient manpower and resources needed to secure the border.” This is a policy dispute, but Congress gets to define high crimes and misdemeanors any way it likes.
The botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year offers another potential basis for impeachment. A resolution backed by eight Republicans said Biden “failed to secure the extraction of thousands of American civilians and Afghan allies before and during the withdrawal.” The resolution also said, accurately, that Biden “armed our enemies by leaving numerous weapons, ammunition, and other military equipment which could be used against American citizens, allies, and other civilians in Afghanistan.”
Republicans have also offered the federal government’s temporary ban on evictions as grounds for impeachment. According to three members of the Freedom Caucus, Biden showed “disrespect for Congress” and disregard for a (nonbinding) concurring Supreme Court opinion that cast doubt on the CDC’s authority to halt evictions.
Last month, in her latest impeachment charge, Greene accused Biden of “endangering, compromising, and undermining the energy security of the United States by selling oil from the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve to foreign nations.”
None of these rises to impeachable conduct by historical standards. But the GOP will find some new cause for outrage. Some leading Republicans say the details won’t even matter.
Senator Ted Cruz, speaking on his podcast in December, opined that Biden’s impeachment, “whether it’s justified or not,” will come in revenge for Trump’s. “The Democrats weaponized impeachment. They used it for partisan purposes to go after Trump because they disagreed with him. And one of the real disadvantages of doing that … is the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
As George Conway, an establishment Republican turned Trump critic, put it, “This is a party that basically lives off of false equivalences now.”
For months, house republicans and conservative think tanks have been meeting to game out an aggressive agenda of hearings and investigations for the coming term. Much of the action will center on the Oversight and Judiciary Committees, expected to be chaired by James Comer and Jim Jordan, respectively. The overarching purpose will be to inflict political damage on the president in the run-up to the 2024 election. But Biden will not be the only target of these investigations.
Mike Howell, who leads the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and took part in a May planning retreat with senior congressional staffers, told me that oversight will quickly lead to impeachment debates—beginning with the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. “Impeachment comes up in virtually every conversation you have about what to do when the next conference gavels in,” he said. “And I’m talking about the impeachment of Mayorkas.”
Last year, an impeachment resolution against Mayorkas won 31 co-sponsors, including Scott Perry, the chair of the Freedom Caucus. This year, Heritage published what amounts to a draft impeachment resolution against him. And Republicans have already introduced articles of impeachment against Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
All of this momentum, Howell said, could naturally lead to the president. “I think the arguments are there” to impeach Biden, he told me. “You have your pick of multiple different types of impeachable conduct across the board.”
For die-hard Trump allies, impeaching Biden is good politics no matter what. But for McCarthy and the rest of the prospective House leadership, there are pitfalls. “There are lots of reasons not to go on an impeachment bonanza,” says Brendan Buck, who was a top aide to both Boehner and Ryan, “not the least of which is that it could politically be viewed as overreach and make House Republicans look crazy and make Joe Biden, by contrast, look better.”
But McCarthy’s equivocation on impeachment carries the seeds of its own collapse. He wants to mollify angry voters and zealous members of his conference by orchestrating aggressive investigations of Biden, but hopes to stop short of calling for the president’s removal. That strategy has two likely outcomes, either of which spells trouble for McCarthy. If the investigations don’t damage Biden, the party’s base will insist on stronger medicine. If they do, the base will demand that McCarthy finish the job.
The tipping point may be Jim Jordan. He is a co-founder and leading member of the Freedom Caucus, and no stranger to extreme rhetoric about Biden. But his looming chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee will nudge him toward institutional prerogatives and the orderly execution of McCarthy’s plans. So far he has been carefully ambiguous about impeachment, saying, “That’s definitely a discussion we have to have,” but raising the bar for proceeding: “The conference has to decide. You have to have complete buy-in from the entire conference and the leadership of our conference.”
So Jordan is with McCarthy’s program for now, but he has long made sure to position himself on the front lines against Democrats. He will not allow himself to be outdone by zealots like Greene and Gaetz once momentum for impeachment builds. He will want to be sure that his committee is the primary venue for confronting Biden. When he embraces impeachment, the die will be cast.
More than anything, my confidence that impeachment is coming relies in the end on a firm belief that Trump will demand it. His own impeachments humiliated him, and losing to Biden was an injury from which his ego has yet to recover. He is obsessed with revenge. His lifelong survival technique is to turn every accusation back on his opponents. And when he is on the defensive, as he is now on multiple legal fronts, he is especially prone to deflect attacks elsewhere.
In the new year, there will come an event that triggers all those instincts. Given his reaction to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, and his barely veiled warnings about violence if he is indicted, that event might well be the revelation of criminal charges against him. Trump’s explosive reaction, amplified by his followers and enablers, will change every Republican’s calculus on impeachment.
Gradually, and then suddenly, impeachment will become as much a litmus test for Republican House members as the Big Lie. McCarthy—“my Kevin,” as Trump styles him—will not hold back that tide. In the end, he will not even try.
Republicans Claim They Can Tame Inflation, but Economists Have Their Doubts
Jim Tankersley and Emily Cochrane – October 26, 2022
The U.S. Capitol Building in Washington on Sept. 27, 2022. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture the House and the Senate this fall, hammering Democrats on President Joe Biden’s economic policies, which they say have fueled the fastest price gains in 40 years.
Republican candidates have centered their economic agenda on promises to help Americans cope with everyday price increases and to increase growth. They have pledged to reduce government spending and to make permanent parts of the 2017 Republican tax cuts that are set to expire over the next three years — including incentives for corporate investment and tax reductions for individuals.
They have vowed to repeal the corporate tax increases that Biden signed into law in August while gutting funding for the IRS, which was given more money to help the United States go after high-earning and corporate tax cheats.
“The very fact that Republicans are poised to take back majorities in both chambers is an indictment of the policies of this administration,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., noting that “if you look at the spending that they did on a partisan basis, we certainly would be able to stop that.”
But while Republicans insist they will be better stewards of the economy, few economists on either end of the ideological spectrum expect the party’s proposals to meaningfully reduce inflation in the short term. Instead, many say some of what Republicans are proposing — including tax cuts for high earners and businesses — could actually make price pressures worse by pumping more money into the economy.
“It is unlikely that any of the policies proposed by Republicans would meaningfully reduce inflation in 2023, when rapidly rising prices will still be a major problem for the economy and for consumers,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee held a virtual meeting where they detailed plans to make the 2017 tax law provisions permanent, billing the move as a crucial step toward improving the nation’s economy.
“As we look forward to the strong probability of an upcoming recession, there is new urgency to preserve these pro-growth policies,” said Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla.
As they position themselves for the midterm elections, Republicans have also indicated that they might try to hold the nation’s borrowing limit hostage to achieve spending cuts. The debt ceiling, which caps how much the federal government can borrow, has increasingly become a fraught arena for political brinkmanship.
Multiple top Republicans have signaled that unless Biden agrees to reduce future government spending, they will refuse to lift the borrowing cap. That would effectively bar the federal government from issuing new bonds to finance its deficit spending, potentially jeopardizing on-time payments for military salaries and safety-net benefits, and roiling bond markets.
Biden has tried to push back against the Republicans and cast the election not as a referendum on his economic policies, but as a choice between Democratic policies to reduce costs on health care and electricity and Republican efforts to repeal those policies. He has accused Republicans of stoking further price increases with tax cuts that could add to the federal budget deficit, and of risking financial calamity by refusing to raise the debt limit.
“We, the Democrats, are the ones that are fiscally responsible. Let’s get that straight now, OK?” Biden said during remarks Monday to workers at the Democratic National Committee. “We’re investing in all of America, reducing everyday costs while also lowering the deficit at the same time. Republicans are fiscally reckless, pushing tax cuts for the very wealthy that aren’t paid for, and exploiting the deficit that is making inflation worse.”
The challenge for Biden is that voters do not seem to be demanding details from Republicans and are instead putting their trust in them to turn around an economy that voters believe is headed in the wrong direction. Polls suggest Americans trust Republicans by a wide margin to handle inflation and other economic issues.
In a nationwide deluge of campaign ads and in public remarks, Republicans have pinned much of their inflation-fighting agenda on halting a stimulus spending spree that began under President Donald Trump and continued under Biden, in an effort to help people and businesses survive the pandemic recession. Those efforts have largely ended, and Biden has shown no desire to pass further stimulus legislation at a time of rapid price growth.
Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement that “the first step in combating inflation is to stop the historically reckless spending spree occurring under one-party Democrat rule in Washington, and that will only happen with a Republican majority in Congress.”
Economists largely agree that the Federal Reserve is most responsible for fighting inflation, which policymakers are trying to do with rapid interest rates increases. But they say Congress could plausibly help the Fed by reducing budget deficits, in order to slow the amount of consumer spending power in the economy.
One way to do that would be to significantly and quickly reduce federal spending. Such a move could result in widespread government layoffs and reduced support for low-income individuals — who would be less able to afford increasingly expensive food and other staples — and could prompt a recession.
“The amount of cuts you’d have to do to move the needle on inflation are completely off the table,” said Jon Lieber, a former aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky who is now the Eurasia Group’s managing director for the United States.
Still, Lieber said that likelihood would not sully the Republican pitch to voters this fall. “Midterm votes are a referendum on the party in power,” he said, “and the party in power has responsibility for inflation.”
Biden administration officials contend that the Republican plans, rather than curbing inflation, could worsen America’s fiscal situation.
Administration economists estimate that two policies favored by Republicans — repealing a new minimum tax on large corporations included in the Inflation Reduction Act and extending some business tax cuts from Trump’s 2017 legislation — could collectively increase the federal budget deficit by about $90 billion next year.
Such an increase could cause the Federal Reserve to raise rates even faster than it already is, further choking economic growth. Or, alternatively, it could add a small amount to the annual inflation rate — perhaps as much as 0.2 percentage points. Fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would also mean raising future costs for prescription drugs for seniors on Medicare, including for insulin, and potentially raising future electricity costs.
“Their plan to repeal the IRA and double down on the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy will worsen inflation,” said Jared Bernstein, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “On top of that, they’re also explicit that they’re coming for Social Security and Medicare, making this a terribly destructive agenda that starts by fighting the Fed and moves on to devastating vulnerable seniors.”
Conservative economists say the inflation impact of extending Trump’s tax cuts could be much smaller, because those extensions could lead businesses to invest more, people to work more and growth to increase across the economy. They also say Republicans could help relieve price pressures, by following through on their proposals to reduce federal regulations governing new energy development.
“Those things are going to be positive for investment, job creation and capacity” in the economy, said Donald Schneider, a former chief economist for Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee and the deputy head of U.S. policy at Piper Sandler.
A budget proposal unveiled this year by the Republican Study Committee, a conservative policy group within the House Republican conference, included plans to permanently extend the Trump tax cuts and to impose work requirements on federal benefits programs, in hopes of reducing federal spending on the programs and increasing the number of workers in the economy.
“We know for a fact that federal spending continues to keep inflation high, which is why a top priority in next year’s Republican majority will be to root out waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money,” Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., said in a statement. Hern, who helped devise the budget, called it “one of many proposals to address the dire situation we’re in.”
As they eye the majority, top Republicans have suggested that they will consider an economically risky strategy to potentially force Biden to agree to spending cuts, including for safety-net programs. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, who is the minority leader and is seen as the clear pick to be speaker should Republicans win control of the House, suggested to Punchbowl News this month that he would be open to withholding Republican votes to raise the federal borrowing limit unless Biden and Democrats agreed to policy changes that curb spending.
How to use that leverage has divided Republicans. Some, like Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who fended off a Trump-backed primary challenger, are supportive of that option.
But other Republicans — particularly candidates laboring to present a more centrist platform in swing districts held by Democrats — have shied away from openly supporting cuts to safety-net programs.
“Absolutely not,” Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican and former mayor running in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, said when asked if she would support cuts to Medicare and Social Security as a way to rein in federal spending. “Cutting those programs is not where I, as a Republican, see myself. I want to make sure that we can fill those coffers.”
Texas Goes Permit-less on Guns, and Police Face an Armed Public
J. David Goodman – October 26, 2022
Inside a gun store in Austin, Texas, May 27, 2021. (Matthew Busch/The New York Times)
HOUSTON — Tony Earls hung his head before a row of television cameras, staring down, his life upended. Days before, Earls had pulled out his handgun and opened fire, hoping to strike a man who had just robbed him and his wife at an ATM in Houston.
Instead, he struck Arlene Alvarez, a 9-year-old girl seated in a passing pickup, killing her.
“Is Mr. Earls licensed to carry?” a reporter asked during the February news conference, in which his lawyer spoke for him.
He didn’t need one, the lawyer replied. “Everything about that situation, we believe and contend, was justified under Texas law.” A grand jury later agreed, declining to indict Earls for any crime.
The shooting was part of what many sheriffs, police leaders and district attorneys in urban areas of Texas say has been an increase in people carrying weapons and in spur-of-the-moment gunfire in the year since the state began allowing most adults 21 or over to carry a handgun without a license.
At the same time, mainly in rural counties, other sheriffs said they had seen little change, and proponents of gun rights said more people lawfully carrying guns could be part of why shootings have declined in some parts of the state.
Far from an outlier, Texas, with its new law, joined what has been an expanding effort to remove nearly all restrictions on carrying handguns. When Alabama’s “permitless carry” law goes into effect in January, half of the states in the nation, from Maine to Arizona, will not require a license to carry a handgun.
The state-by-state legislative push has coincided with a federal judiciary that has increasingly ruled in favor of carrying guns and against state efforts to regulate them.
But Texas is the most populous state to do away with handgun permit requirements. Five of the nation’s 15 biggest cities are in Texas, making the permitless approach to handguns a new fact of life in urban areas to an extent not seen in other states.
In the border town of Eagle Pass, drunken arguments have flared into shootings. In El Paso, revelers who legally bring their guns to parties have opened fire to stop fights. In and around Houston, prosecutors have received a growing stream of cases involving guns brandished or fired over parking spots, bad driving, loud music and love triangles.
“It seems like now there’s been a tipping point where just everybody is armed,” said Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County, which includes Houston.
No statewide shooting statistics have been released since the law went into effect last September. After a particularly violent 2021 in many parts of the state, the picture of crime in Texas has been mixed this year, with homicides and assaults up in some places and down in others.
But what has been clear is that far fewer people are getting new licenses for handguns even as many in law enforcement say the number of guns they encounter on the street has been increasing.
Big city police departments and major law enforcement groups opposed the new handgun law when it came before the state Legislature last spring, worried in part about the loss of training requirements necessary for a permit and more dangers for officers.
But gun rights proponents prevailed in the Republican-dominated Capitol, arguing that Texans should not need the state’s permission to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
Recent debates over gun laws in Texas have not been limited to handgun licensing. After the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, gun control advocates have pushed to raise the age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle. And after the Supreme Court struck down New York’s restrictive licensing program, a federal court in Texas found that a state law barring adults under 21 from carrying a handgun was unconstitutional. Gov. Greg Abbott has suggested he agreed, even as the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state police, is appealing.
“What I believe in is that the Second Amendment provides certain rights, and it provides those rights to adults,” Abbott said in a recent news conference. “I think that the court ruling is going to be upheld.”
The loosening of regulations also landed in the middle of a national debate over crime. Researchers have long argued over the effect of allowing more people to legally own and carry guns. But a series of recent studies has found a link between laws that make it easier to carry a handgun and increases in crime, and some have raised the possibility that more guns in circulation lead to more thefts of weapons and to more shootings by the police.
“The weight of the evidence has shifted in the direction that more guns equals more crime,” said John J. Donohue III, a Stanford Law School professor and author of several recent studies looking at gun regulations and crime.
Much of the research has been around the effects of making handgun licenses easier to obtain, part of what are known as right-to-carry laws, and Donohue cautioned that only limited data is available on laws that in most cases require no licenses at all.
“I think most people are reasoning by analogy: If you thought that right-to-carry was harmful, this will be worse,” he said.
But John R. Lott Jr., a longtime researcher whose 1998 book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” has been influential among proponents of gun rights, said the newer studies did not take into account differences between state handgun regulations that might account for increases in crime. He also pointed to some recent crime declines in Texas cities after the permitless carry law went into effect, and to what he saw as the importance of increasing lawful gun ownership in high-crime areas.
“If my research convinces me of anything,” Lott said, “it’s that you’re going to get the biggest reduction in crime if the people who are most likely victims of violent crime, predominantly poor Blacks, are the ones who are getting the permits.”
In Dallas, there has been a rise in the number of homicides deemed to be justifiable, such as those conducted in self-defense, even as overall shootings have declined from last year’s high levels.
“We’ve had justifiable shootings where potential victims have defended themselves,” said the Dallas police chief, Eddie Garcia. “It cuts both ways.”
Last October in Port Arthur, Texas, a man with a handgun, who had a license, saw two armed robbers at a Church’s Chicken and fired through the drive-thru window, fatally striking one of the men and wounding the other. His actions were praised by the local district attorney.
Michael Mata, president of the local police union in Dallas, said that he and his fellow officers had seen no increase in violent crime tied to the new permitless carry law, though there were “absolutely” more guns on the street.
Sheriff David Soward of Atascosa County, a rural area south of San Antonio, said he had also seen no apparent increase in shootings. “Only a small percentage of people actually take advantage of the law,” he said.
But for many law enforcement officers, the connection between the new law and spontaneous shootings has been readily apparent.
“Now that everybody can carry a weapon, we have people who drink and start shooting each other,” said Sheriff Tom Schmerber of Maverick County, which includes Eagle Pass. “People get emotional,” he said, “and instead of reaching for a fist, they reach for a weapon. We’ve had several shootings like that.”
Handgun licenses are still available. The process involves a background check and a roughly five-hour training course, including on a shooting range, that covers the legal troubles that can arise when opening fire.
The number of new permits sought by Texans surged with the pandemic, but then sharply declined through 2021, as the permitless carry bill moved through the Legislature. An average of fewer than 5,000 a month were issued in 2022, lower than at any point going back to 2017.
Many Texans still seek the license because of the benefits it affords, including the ability to carry a concealed handgun into a government meeting. But it is no longer necessary.
“Somebody could go into Academy Sporting Goods here in El Paso and purchase a handgun and walk out with it after their background check,” said Ryan Urrutia, a commander at the El Paso Sheriff’s office. “It really puts law enforcement at a disadvantage because it puts more guns on the street that can be used against us.”
The law still bars carrying a handgun for those convicted of a felony, who are intoxicated or committing another crime. In Harris County, criminal cases involving illegal weapons possession have sharply increased since the new law went into effect: 3,500 so far this year, as of the middle of October, versus 2,300 in all of 2021 and an average of about 1,000 cases in prior years going back to 2012.
“It’s shocking,” said Kim Ogg, the Harris County district attorney. “We’ve seen more carrying weapons, which by itself would be legal. But people are carrying the weapons while committing other crimes, and I’m not talking just about violent crimes. I’m talking about intoxication crimes or driving crimes or property crimes, carrying weapons on school property or in another prohibited place,” including bars and school grounds.
Her office provided a sampling of arrests in the last few weeks: a 21-year-old man carrying a pistol and a second magazine while walking through the grounds of an elementary school during school hours; a man jumping from his car and opening fire at the driver of Tesla in a fit of road rage; a woman, while helping her little brother into a car, turning to shoot at another woman after an argument over a social media video.
In the case of Earls, the man accused of fatally shooting 9-year-old Arlene Alvarez while shooting at a fleeing robber, Ogg’s office presented evidence to a grand jury of charges ranging from negligent homicide to murder. The grand jury rejected those charges.
A lawyer for Earls declined to make him available to comment. The man who robbed Earls and his wife remains unidentified, Ogg said.
In May, a committee of the Texas House heard testimony from gun rights advocates who praised the passage of permitless carry and argued that it may be time to go further.
Rachel Malone, of Gun Owners of America, outlined some of her group’s priorities for the next legislative session.
“I think it would be appropriate to move the age for permit-less carry to 18,” she told the committee. “There’s really no reason why a legal adult should not be able to defend themselves.”
Takeaways from investigation of Russian general in Ukraine
Erika Kinetz – October 26, 2022
In this image from video released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Thursday, March 24, 2022, commander of the troops of the Russian Eastern Military District Alexander Chaiko speaks to Russian servicemen during a special military operation at an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)In this image from surveillance video, Russian troops take over Yablunska Street in Bucha, Ukraine on March 3, 2022, where they set up a headquarters during their month-long occupation. When Russian troops crossed from Belarus into Ukraine in late February, pressing toward Kyiv, they were ordered to block and destroy “nationalist resistance,” according to the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank that has reviewed copies of Russia’s battle plans. (AP Photo)From right, President Vladimir Putin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Lt. Gen. Alexander Chaiko listen to Syrian President Bashar Assad during a meeting in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2020. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin via AP, Pool, File) Police investigate the killing of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine on the outskirts of Kyiv, before bringing the corpses to a morgue, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)Tanks participate in the Union Courage-2022 Russia-Belarus military drills at the Obuz-Lesnovsky training ground in Belarus, Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr., File)In this image from surveillance video, Russian troops take over Yablunska Street in Bucha, Ukraine on March 3, 2022, where they set up a headquarters during their month-long occupation. Police recovered nearly 40 bodies along Yablunksa after Russian forces withdrew at the end of March. (AP Photo)Journalists examine the site of a mass grave in Bucha, Ukraine, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Tuesday, April 5, 2022, after Russian forces left. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)
ZDVYZHIVKA, Ukraine (AP) — The carnage left by Russian soldiers on the road to Kyiv wasn’t random. It was strategic brutality, perpetrated in areas that were under tight Russian control where military officers — including one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top generals accused of war crimes in Syria — were present, an investigation by The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” found.
Troops moving down from Belarus toward Kyiv had been ordered to block and destroy “nationalist resistance,” according to the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank that has reviewed copies of Russia’s battle plans. Soldiers used lists compiled by Russian intelligence and conducted “zachistki” — cleansing operations — sweeping neighborhoods to identify and neutralize anyone who might pose a threat.
The man in charge of this front of the war was Col. Gen. Alexander Chaiko, who earned a global reputation for brutality as leader of Russia’s forces in Syria.
“Those orders were written at Chaiko’s level. So he would have seen them and signed up for them,” said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at RUSI who shared the battle plans with the AP.
While there is nothing necessarily illegal about that order, it was often implemented with flagrant disregard for the laws of war as Russian troops seized territories across Ukraine.
Witnesses and survivors in Bucha, as well as Ozera, Babyntsi and Zdvyzhivka — all places under Chaiko’s command — told the AP and “Frontline” that Russian soldiers tortured and killed people on the slightest suspicion they might be helping the Ukrainian military. Sweeps intensified after Russian positions were hit with precision, interviews and video show, and soldiers, in intercepted phone calls obtained by the AP, told their loved ones that they’d been ordered to take a no-mercy approach to suspected informants.
Ukraine has indicted Chaiko for the broad crime of aggression — that is waging an illegal war on their territory. But it will take more specific evidence to land him in international court. Prosecutors would have to show that he played a key role in implementing illegal policies of the Russian Federation or should have known what his troops were doing and was in a position to stop, or punish, their behavior.
For now, Chaiko — a man implicated in some of the worst atrocities in both Syria and Ukraine — is still leading troops, once again as commander of Russia’s forces in Syria.
Here are four takeaways from the investigation:
MOM, I AM KILLING CIVILIANS
Russian soldiers openly discussed atrocities against civilians during phone calls with their mothers, wives and friends that the Ukrainian government intercepted near Kyiv.
On March 21, a soldier named Vadim told his mother: “We have the order to take phones from everyone and those who resist — in short — to hell with the f——.”
“We have the order: It does not matter whether they’re civilians or not. Kill everyone.”
The slightest movement of a curtain in a window — a possible sign of a spotter or a gunman — justified slamming an apartment block with lethal artillery. Ukrainians who confessed to passing along Russian troop coordinates were summarily executed, including teenagers, soldiers said.
“We have the order not to take prisoners of war but to shoot them all dead directly,” a soldier nicknamed Lyonya said in a March 14 phone call.
“There was a boy, 18 years old, taken prisoner. First, they shot through his leg with a machine gun, then he got his ears cut off. He admitted to everything and was shot dead,” Lyonya told his mom. “We do not take prisoners. Meaning, we don’t leave anyone alive.”
The Dossier Center, a London-based investigative group funded by Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, verified the identity of the soldiers who made those calls.
IN CHARGE OF THE CARNAGE IN BUCHA
Ukrainian prosecutors say that a unit under Chaiko’s command — the 76th Guards Airborne Assault Division — participated in a lethal cleansing operation on March 4 along Yablunska street, the deadliest road in occupied Bucha and the site of an important Russian command center.
In June, the U.S. State Department sanctioned the division and its 234th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment, as well as the 64th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, for atrocities in Bucha.
Those units were all under the ultimate command of Chaiko during the early weeks of the invasion, Ukrainian authorities told AP.
NOT THE WORK OF ROGUE SOLDIERS
Russians transformed the village of Zdvyzhivka, an hour north of Kyiv, into a major forward operating base for their assault on the capital. From March 20 to March 31, Chaiko commanded the assault on Kyiv from this village. He was spotted about a kilometer (less than a mile) down a tightly controlled road around the same time as five men were tortured and killed in the garden of a house frequented by Russian officers. The transport of tied-up civilians to that house happened more than once, in broad daylight, within the security structures set up by the occupying forces, eyewitnesses said.
KEEPING THE BOSS HAPPY
There’s no sign Chaiko disapproved of what his troops were doing. Russia’s Ministry of Defense released a video of the general pinning medals on soldiers in Ukraine. “All units, all divisions are acting the way they were taught,” he said in the March 24 video. “They are doing everything right. I am proud of them.”
There is also no sign Moscow has sanctioned Chaiko for the very public atrocities committed on his watch. Instead, Putin praised Chaiko for his actions in Syria, awarding him the title “Hero of Russia” in 2020 and promoting him to colonel general in June 2021.
“Frontline” producers Tom Jennings and Annie Wong, co-producer Taras Lazer and AP reporters James LaPorta, Oleksandr Stashevskyi, Richard Lardner, Janine Graham and Solomiia Hera contributed to this report.
To contact AP’s investigations team, email investigative@ap.org
US politics’ post-shame era: how Republicans became the party of hate
David Smith in Washington – October 23, 2022
Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
Republicans were in trouble. Mitt Romney, their US presidential nominee, had been crushed by Barack Obama. The party commissioned an “autopsy” report that proposed a radical rethink. “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans,” it said, “we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”
Ten years after Romney’s loss, Republicans are fighting their first election since the presidency of Donald Trump. But far from entering next month’s midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, they have shown itself to be unapologetically the party of hate.
Perhaps nothing captures the charge more eloquently than a three-word post that appeared on the official Twitter account for Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee – ranking member Jim Jordan – on 6 October. It said, simply and strangely: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
The first of this unholy trinity referred to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has recently drawn fierce criticism for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at Paris fashion week and for antisemitic messages on social media, including one that said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”.
The second was billionaire Elon Musk, who published a pro-Russian peace plan for Ukraine and denied reports that he had been speaking to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.
The third was former president Donald Trump, who wrote last weekend that American Jews have offered insufficient praise of his policies toward Israel, warning that they need to “get their act together” before “it is too late!” The comment played into the antisemitic prejudice that American Jews have dual loyalties to the US and Israel.
It was condemned by the White House as “insulting” and “antisemitic”. But when historian Michael Beschloss tweeted: “Do any Republican Party leaders have any comment at all on Trump’s admonition to American Jews?”, the silence was deafening.
Jim Jordan, who recently tweeted ‘Kanye. Elon. Trump’, speaks at a rally held by Trump in Youngstown, Ohio, in September. Photograph: Gaelen Morse/Reuters
Republicans have long been accused of coded bigotry and nodding and winking to their base. There was an assumption of rules of political etiquette and taboos that could not be broken. Now, it seems, politics has entered a post-shame era where anything goes.
Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank, said: “The type of things they would say in closed rooms full of donors they’re just saying out in the open now. It’s a cliche but I always remember what I heard growing up which is, when people tell you who they are, you should believe them.”
The examples are becoming increasingly difficult to downplay or ignore. Earlier this month Tommy Tuberville, a Republican senator for Alabama, told an election rally in Nevada that Democrats support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people because “they think the people that do the crime are owed that”. The remark was widely condemned for stereotyping African Americans as people committing crimes.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, echoed the rightwing “great replacement” theory when she told a rally in Arizona: “Joe Biden’s 5 million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school and, coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture.”
Such comments have handed ammunition to Democrats as they battle to preserve wafer thin majorities in the House and Senate. Although the party is facing electoral headwinds from inflation, crime and border security, it has plenty of evidence that Trump remains dominant among Republicans – a huge motivator for Democratic turnout.
Indeed, Trump did more than anyone to turn the 2013 autopsy on its head. In his first run for president, he referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and pledged to build a border wall and impose a Muslim ban. Opponents suggest that he liberated Republicans to say the unsayable, rail against so-called political correctness and give supporters the thrill of transgression.
Antjuan Seawright, a senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said: “He has been the creator of the permission slip and the validator of the permission slip. For many of them, he is their trampoline to jump even further with their right wing red meat racial rhetoric.”
Beyond Republicans’ headline-grabbing stars, the trend is also manifest at the grassroots. In schools, the party has launched a sweeping assault on what teachers can say or teach about race, gender identity, LGBTQ+ issues and American history. An analysis by the Washington Post newspaper found that 25 states have passed 64 laws reshaping what students can learn and do at school over the past three academic years.
There are examples of the new extremism all over the country. The New York Republican Club will on Monday host an event with Katie Hopkins, a British far-right political commentator who has compared migrants to cockroaches and was repeatedly retweeted by Trump before both were banned by the social media platform.
In Idaho, long a deeply conservative state, Dorothy Moon, the new chairwoman of the state Republican party, is accused of close associations with militia groups and white nationalists. Last month she appeared on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to accuse the state’s Pride festival and parade of sexualising children.
A recent headline in the Idaho Capital Sun newspaper stated: “Hate makes a comeback in Idaho, this time with political support.”
Michelle Vincent, a senior adviser to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stephen Heidt, noted the such currents have long been a problem in Idaho but said: “Trump made hate OK. He made bad behavior seem OK because of the extremes of what he was doing. They started emulating him. People were were abused here during Black Lives Matter protests. We have so much militia here and they are out of control.”
In many cases, the naked bigotry goes hand in hand with Trump’s “big lie” that the last election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud. A New York Times investigation found that about 70% of Republican midterm candidates running for Congress in next month’s midterm elections have either questioned or flat-out denied the results of the 2020 election.
They can now count on support from Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who in 2017 met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and dismissed his entire opposition as “terrorists” Gabbard this week defected to the Republicans and campaigned for Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona and an unabashed defender of the big lie.
Another election denier is Doug Mastriano, a political novice running for governor of Pennsylvania with the help of far-right figures. He was outside the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and photographed watching demonstrators attacking police before he supposedly walked away.
Mastriano has repeatedly criticised his opponent, attorney general Josh Shapiro, for attending and sending his children to what he brands a “privileged, exclusive, elite” school, suggesting that this demonstrates Shapiro’s “disdain for people like us”. It is a Jewish day school where students receive both secular and religious instruction.
After a long courtship, Trump himself has in recent months begun embracing the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon in earnest. In September, using his Truth Social platform, the former president reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming”. A QAnon song has been played at the end of several his campaign rallies.
Ron Klein, chair of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said: “It’s very unfortunate that the Republican party is either silent and complicit in this antisemitic language that’s being put forward by Donald Trump and others that align with him. But it’s very indicative of a Republican party that does not want to take on rightwing extremists.”
Klein, a former congressman, added: “Some members of Republican party did use dog whistles and symbolic language to make their points about minorities, including the Jewish community, and that was very troubling. But the era of Donald Trump has just lifted the rock under which these people now feel it’s OK and even helpful for them to make these kinds of statements and use these kinds of words to gain political power and political stature, which is very troubling in our American political system.”
The 2013 autopsy now looks like a blip, an outlier, in half a century of Republican politics. Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” message stoked racial fear and resentment in the south. Ronald Reagan demonised “welfare queens” in 1976 and, four years later, launched his election campaign with a speech lauding “states’ rights” near the site of the “Mississippi Burning” murders – seen by many as a nod to southern states that resented the federal government enforcing civil rights.
A political action committee linked to George HW Bush’s campaign in 1988 paid for an attack advert blaming Democratic rival Michael Dukakis for the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed rape during a furlough from prison. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, bragged that he would turn Horton into “Dukakis’s running mate”.
I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it
Stuart Stevens, veteran Republican campaign strategist
The Atwater playbook is being deployed again in Senate midterm races as Republicans Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania run attack ads accusing their Democratic opponents, Mandela Barnes and John Fetterman, of being soft on crime, often with images of Black prison inmates.
Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican campaign strategist who wrote a withering indictment of the party’s trajectory, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it.”
Stevens, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, continued: “It’s a party of white grievance and anger and hate is an element of that.”
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, agreed: “The real consequence of Donald Trump’s presidency is it did give permission to so many people within the party who used to try to mask or hide their racism. They now feel like they can proudly wear it and they do.”
With hate crimes on the rise across America, there are fears that comments by Trump, Tuberville, Greene and others will lead to threats and violence that put lives in danger. Bardella added: “We learned after January 6 that, to the Republican party faithful, these aren’t just words, they are instructions. It’s a very dangerous development that one of the major political parties in America has made the conscious decision to wrap itself in the embrace of white nationalism.”
