Vivek Ramaswamy says US ‘climate change agenda’ is a ‘hoax’
Nick Robertson – August 12, 2023
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy railed against climate-conscious business policy at an Iowa State Fair appearance Saturday.
In an fireside chat with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Ramaswamy said that environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) business policies are among the “grave threats to liberty,” and said “the climate change agenda” is a “hoax.”
“They’re using our money… to implement social and environmental agendas through the backdoor. Through corporate America,” Ramaswamy said. “Using your retirement funds and your investment accounts to vote for racial equity audits or Scope 3 emissions caps that you didn’t know they were using your money to do, and that Congress would have never passed through the front door.”
ESG has become a political punching bag for conservatives, who view it as corporations overreaching into the political space. The policies increase diverse hiring, reduce carbon emissions and manage how they invest their money with climate in mind.
“This is actually one of the grave threats to liberty today. Wherever you stand on climate change — I think most of the climate change agenda is, I’m just going to say it, is a hoax,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m going to call that for what it is.”
The entrepreneur also claimed ESG is comparable to the “back-rooms deals” of Old World Europe, and called for more public debate on the topic.
“Wherever you stand on that, we should settle that through free space and open debate in the public square in a constitutional republic,” he said. “That’s the way we do things, post-1776, on this side of the Atlantic.”
Conservatives’ crusade against ESG has drawn ire from Democrats, who have called many of the follies a waste of time. Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) called a House hearing over the issue the “stupidest hearing I’ve ever been to.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign has gained steam in recent months, rising from an unknown political figure to third in national polling averages — passing former Vice President Mike Pence last month. A biotech entrepreneur from Ohio, Ramaswamy has garnered about 7 percent support in recent polls.
Some say Thomas’ longstanding acceptance of freebies shows the need for ethics reform on the Supreme Court.
“This is a shameless lifestyle underwritten for years by a gaggle of fawning billionaires,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote on Twitter. “Justices Thomas and [Samuel] Alito have made it clear that they’re oblivious to the embarrassment they’ve visited on the highest court in the land.”
He said that if the court wouldn’t reform itself, Congress should step in and do it for them.
Other lawmakers went further, demanding that Thomas to step down.
“Thomas takes cash bribes while crushing your freedoms,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) wrote on Twitter. “He’s corrupt as hell and should resign today.”
Others also called on him to pack up his robes:
Thomas once bragged that when it came to travel, he preferred camping in Walmart parking lots ― where budget RV travelers often gather ― and “seeing the regular parts of the United States.”
“I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that,” he said in a documentary financed by one of his travel benefactors, according to Slate.
And as for camping, Thomas owns a $267,230 luxury RV financed by a wealthy friend in a deal he also failed to disclose.
The Thomas scandal has led to growing call for ethics reform of the court ― but at least one justice has bristled publicly at the notion of Congress stepping in.
“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court,” Associate Justice Samuel Alito told the Wall Street Journal last month. “Period.”
Alito, according to ProPublica, took a luxury fishing vacation funded by a billionaire who later had cases before the Supreme Court.
Abortion rights won big in Ohio. Here’s why it wasn’t particularly close.
Madison Fernandez, Alice Miranda Ollstein and Zach Montellaro – August 8, 2023
Sholten Singer/The Herald-Dispatch via AP
Ohioans on Tuesday soundly defeated a proposal that would have made it more difficult to alter the state’s Constitution.
The move is a lightning-rod moment for abortion rights, even if the issue wasn’t directly on the ballot. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year, the issue motivated voters to storm the polls. But this measure, which didn’t directly take on abortion, was a closely watched measure of if the issue still resonates with voters.
Voters had the answer. They overwhelmingly rejected Issue 1, an amendment that would have raised the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent, as well as complicate the process to bring citizen-initiated ballot measures to voters in the first place. Though it had profound implications for a number of issues, it was widely seen in the state as a way to thwart November’s measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.
The measure’s defeat now gives abortion-rights supporters a clearer path to victory.
Opponents of Issue 1 view the victory as the first battle on abortion in the coming cycle, when the issue will be a factor in competitive Senate and House races that could help determine who controls Congress — as well as a number of direct ballot measures in swing states in the works.
But opponents also frame their victory as one that protects the power of the simple majority.
“I think sometimes, a lot of these fights get viewed in a single entity and the state gets viewed in a single moment as its value to the presidential battleground map,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters. “And I get that, but democracy matters everywhere,” pointing to Arkansas and South Dakota, where voters similarly rejected efforts to implement a supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives.
Here are three takeaways from Tuesday’s election in Ohio:
Abortion still a serious turnout driver
Tuesday’s election proved that the state-by-state battle over abortion rights is still a serious motivator to get voters to the polls — even when abortion isn’t directly on the ballot.
Ohio Republicans moved in January to cancel most August elections because they were low turnout affairs that voters rarely paid attention to. Just over 8 percent of voters turned up in an August 2022 state legislative primary election, for example.
So when the GOP-controlled legislature pulled an about face months later by scheduling Issue 1 on the August ballot, abortion rights supporters cried foul, saying it was an attempt to kneecap them without voters noticing.
But voters turned up in droves anyway. More than 600,000 people voted early — a number that could still rise from late-arriving mail ballots — which outpaced the entirety of the turnout for that 2022 August election. It was also more than twice the number of people who voted early in the May 2022 primaries, which featured competitive Senate or gubernatorial contests.
Both pro-abortion rights groups and anti-abortion activists invested heavily in getting their supporters to show up. And conservatives emphasized supporters voting early as well, as Republicans try to close the gap created, in part, by former President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on early voting.
Instead of a summer snoozer, turnout was off the charts.
Anti-abortion messaging isn’t evolving, or resonating
Anti-abortion groups that have invested millions in ballot initiative fights have deployed similar messages in each state since the post-Roe contests kicked off last summer — focusing on areas they see as political vulnerabilities, including parental consent, abortions later in pregnancy, and gender-affirming care for minors.
In Ohio this week and in Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan and other states last year, groups poured millions into TV ads arguing that codifying abortion rights in the state constitution would lead to the abolition of any restrictions on the procedure — including requirements that parents be notified when a minor terminates a pregnancy and bans on most abortions after the point of fetal viability.
“I don’t think our messaging will change at all, because we’ve seen positive movement from the messaging,” Mike Hartley, a veteran GOP strategist in Ohio and campaign manager for Protect Women Ohio, the coalition against the abortion-rights measure, said last month. “We’re gonna keep hammering … that it’s not just about abortion.”
Though polling indicates majority support for those restrictions, even among Democrats, the arguments have not swayed voters in these races amid a general surge in support for abortion rights in the year since Roe was overturned.
“Dobbs changed everything. Any polling done prior to then is obsolete,” said Ashley All, who led the successful Kansas campaign to defeat an anti-abortion rights ballot measure last summer and is now advising other states through the group Families United for Freedom. “People now see the real consequences of these bans. They see children having to cross state lines to get care. They see women almost dying in childbirth. So they don’t buy the arguments the other side is making.”
The fight drags on
Abortion in Ohio remains legal for now thanks to a court injunction blocking enforcement of the state’s near-total ban. But Ohio voters have an opportunity to directly weigh in on a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to permanently protect the right to the procedure — making any anti-aboriton legislation obsolete.
With Congress lacking the votes to pass either national abortion restrictions or bring back the protections of Roe, abortion-rights groups see state ballot measures as one of their best tools for maintaining or restoring access in red and purple states.
Similar efforts to put abortion rights to a popular vote are also brewing in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nevada and South Dakota. Activists in many of these states are hoping to get the issue before voters in 2024, in which turnout will be especially high due to the presidential election.
Arizonans tried and failed to hold a referendum in 2022, falling short in signature-gathering. On Tuesday, they launched a new push, hoping to scrap the state’s current 15-week ban. A poll released by progressive groups Data for Progress and Indivisible on Tuesday found its presence on the ballot would drive higher turnout among Democrats but not Republicans — potentially shaping the results of the state’s Senate and presidential races.
Clarence Thomas’s $267,230 R.V. and the Friend Who Financed It
By Jo Becker and Julie Tate – August 5, 2023
The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.
Justice Clarence Thomas, circa 2000, with his great-nephew and his Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon motor coach.
Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.
With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.
There he is behind the wheel during a rare 2007 interview with “60 Minutes,” talking about how the steel-clad converted bus allows him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” He regularly slips into his speeches his love of driving it through the American heartland — “the part we fly over.” And in a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Justice Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
But there is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.
His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.
A circa 1991 advertisement for Marathon coaches. Credit…Marathon
He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.
In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.
But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas.
He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.
“‘Satisfied’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,” said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. “‘Satisfied’ could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.”
Justice Thomas, for his part, did not respond to detailed questions about the loan, sent to him through the Supreme Court’s spokeswoman.
The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Justice Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.
Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.
Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said that when it comes to questions of disclosure, the ethics treatment of gifts and income often parallels the tax treatment. But those intricacies aside, he said, “justices just should not be accepting private loans from wealthy individuals outside their family.” If they do, he added, “you have to ask, why is a justice going to this private individual and not to a commercial lender, unless the justice is getting something he or she otherwise could not get.”
The Times’s unearthing of the loan arrangement is the latest in a series of revelations showing how wealthy benefactors have bestowed an array of benefits on Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas: helping to pay for his great-nephew’s tuition, steering business to Mrs. Thomas’s consulting firm, buying and renovating the house where his mother lives and inviting the Thomases on trips both domestic and foreign that included travel aboard private jets and a yacht.
Ethical Issues Inside the Supreme Court
A Crisis of Ethics: A debate over ethical standards for Supreme Court justices has intensified after a series of revelations about lavish gifts and financial largess. Our reporter explains the allegations of misconduct and the growing calls for tighter rules.
Scalia Law: George Mason University’s law school cultivated ties to some of the court’s conservative justices with generous pay and unusual perks. In turn, the school gained prestige, donations and influence.
Justice Thomas has pointed to interpretations of the disclosure rules to defend his failure to report much of the largess he has received. He has said he was advised that the trips fell under an exemption for gifts involving “personal hospitality” from close friends, for instance, and a lawyer close to the Thomases contended in a statement that the justice did not need to disclose the tuition because it was a gift to his great-nephew, over whom he had legal custody, rather than to him.
The Thomases’ known benefactors include wealthy men like the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and several members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which honors people who succeed despite adversity. Among them: the longtime Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who flew the justice around on his jet.
Mr. Welters, while also a Horatio Alger member, stands apart. For one thing, the two men’s friendship predates Justice Thomas’s time on the federal bench. They met around 1980, when both were members of a small, informal club of Black congressional aides to Republican lawmakers — Mr. Welters worked for Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York and Justice Thomas for Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri.
Anthony Welters, shown with his wife Beatrice in 2016, was a close friend of Justice Thomas’s from their time working as congressional aides. Credit…Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for NYU Langone Medical Center
“It wasn’t exactly fashionable to be a Black person working for a Republican, and it was comforting to meet others in the same boat,” the justice wrote in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
They had much in common. Like Justice Thomas, Mr. Welters was raised in poverty, sharing a cramped tenement in Harlem with his parents and three brothers and, after his mother’s death when he was 8, shining shoes under an elevated subway to help make ends meet.
As both men climbed the ladder as political appointees in the Reagan administration, their friendship grew. They stayed close after Justice Thomas joined the federal appeals court in Washington in 1990 and Mr. Welters left government to found AmeriChoice, a Medicaid services provider that he sold to UnitedHealthcare for $530 million in stock in 2002 and continued to lead until retiring in 2016. Mr. Welters and his wife, Beatrice, named Justice Thomas the godfather of one of their two boys, according to The Village Voice.
When Justice Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court nomination ran into trouble after a former subordinate, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment, Mr. Welters stood by his friend, providing behind-the-scenes advice, according to a book on the hearings written by Mr. Danforth.
And in 1998, the year before the motor coach purchase, Justice Thomas returned the favor. That is when Mr. Welters and his wife, through their foundation, started the AnBryce scholarship program, which gives underprivileged students a full ride to New York University’s law school, along with networking opportunities and career support. Justice Thomas lent his considerable imprimatur to the program, interviewing applicants in his Supreme Court chambers, mentoring scholars and later hiring one graduate as a clerk.
By that point, the justice had become fixated on owning an R.V., and not just any R.V., but the Rolls-Royce of motor coaches: a custom Prevost Marathon, or as he once put it, a “condo on wheels.”
A Toy for the Rich
Justice Thomas was turned on to the luxury brand by Bernie Little, a fellow Horatio Alger member and the flamboyantly wealthy owner of the Miss Budweiser hydroplane racing boat. Mr. Little had owned 20 to 25 custom motor coaches over the years, Mr. Thomas told C-SPAN in 2001.
Back in those days, a basic Prevost Marathon sold for about a million dollars, and could fetch far more depending on the bells and whistles. It was a rich man’s toy, and the company marketed it that way.
“You drive through a neighborhood in South Florida and you see these $10 million homes,” Bob Phebus, Marathon’s vice president, told The South Florida Business Journal in 2006. “You condense that down, put it on wheels and that’s what we have. It’s the same guy that will have a 100-foot yacht and a private aircraft. They’re accustomed to the finer things in life.”Got a news tip about the courts?If you have information to share about the Supreme Court or other federal courts, please send us a secure tip at nytimes.com/tips.
At the time, the Thomases’ primary source of income was the justice’s salary, then $167,900. He had yet to sell his autobiography, and property and other records show that the couple had significant debt: They had purchased their house in 1992 for $552,000 with 5 percent down, then refinanced it two years later, taking out a 15-year mortgage of $496,000. Plus, they had at least one line of credit of between $15,000 and $50,000.
So, in Justice Thomas’s telling, he began searching for a used Prevost at Mr. Little’s suggestion, one with enough miles on it to depreciate the value. “The depreciation curve — it’s very steep,” he made a point of saying in the 2001 C-SPAN interview.
All these years later, he still hasn’t told some of his closest friends how he was really able to swing the purchase.
“He told me he saved up all his money to buy it,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend who worked closely with Justice Thomas in the Reagan administration.
The title history documents reviewed by The Times show that when the motor coach was sold for $267,230 to the Thomases in 1999, it had only 93,618 miles on it, relatively few for a vehicle that experts say can easily log a million miles in its lifetime. It came equipped with plush leather seating, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom in the back. In addition to its orange flame motif, it had a large Pegasus painted on the back, according to Jason Mang, the step-grandson of the previous owner, Bonnie Owenby.
“It was superluxury, really bougie,” he recalled.
On Nov. 19, 1999, after spotting the motor coach on the lot of Desert West Coach in Phoenix and putting a hold on it, Justice Thomas attended a dinner at the conservative Goldwater Institute. In a speech that night, he said he had never yearned to be a federal judge. “Pure and simple, I wanted to be rich,” he said.
Wayne Mullis, the owner of the now-defunct Desert West, said in an interview that Justice Thomas never discussed obtaining traditional financing with him, and that “as far as I know, he paid for it.”
Indeed, Justice Thomas would have been hard-pressed to get a loan from a traditional lender. Banks, and even finance companies that specialize in R.V. loans, are particularly reluctant to lend money on used Prevost Marathons because the customized features are hard to value, according to three leading industry executives interviewed by The Times.
“As a rule, the majority of buyers are cash buyers — they don’t finance the Prevost, generally,” said Chad Stevens, owner of an Arizona-based dealership specializing in high-end motor coaches, whose clients include celebrities and politicians. “In 1999, you would need a very strong down payment and a strong financial portfolio to finance one. It is a luxury item.”
While the terms of Mr. Welters’s loan to Justice Thomas are unclear, rules governing loans of more than $10,000 between friends and family are not.
Loans can be reclassified as gifts or income to the borrower, either of which would have to be reported by the justice under court disclosure rules, if any portion of the debt is forgiven or discharged as uncollectable. But even if a lender does not take those steps, a loan can still be considered a reportable gift or income if it doesn’t meet certain standards.
Loan terms should be spelled out in a written agreement, with a clearly defined, regular repayment schedule, tax experts said. Lenders must charge at least the applicable federal interest rate, which was a little over 6 percent in December 1999, when the deal to buy the motor coach closed. And if a borrower is in arrears, lenders must make a good-faith effort to collect, even to the point of going to court.
“Absent that, it’s more of a gift,” said Rich Lahijani, tax director of Edelman Financial Engines, an independent wealth planning and investment advisory firm.
The title history records held by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles do not contain detailed information about the loan itself. What they show is that when the Thomases drove their motor coach back home to Virginia, they registered it in Prince William County, which does not charge personal property tax on R.V.s stored there, unlike Fairfax County, where they live.
Mr. Welters said he released the lien on the vehicle in 2008, and provided this photo of the original title to The Times as evidence. (Addresses and vehicle identification number have been redacted.) Credit…via Anthony Welters
And as of late last month, when The Times reviewed the records, they still listed Mr. Welters as the lien holder, notwithstanding the signed release he said he gave Justice Thomas in 2008 so he could obtain a new, clear title.
Mr. Welters said he could not explain why he was still listed as the holder of the lien. After he gave Justice Thomas the paperwork, he said, “I don’t know what process the borrower should have followed.” (To clear the title, the paperwork should have been brought to the D.M.V., where the lien release would have been recorded and a replacement title issued.) As for Justice Thomas, that was among the matters he declined to discuss with The Times.
‘A Warm, Safe Place’
As details about Justice and Mrs. Thomas’s subsidized trips to vacation homes and resorts have become public in recent months, his professed preference for traveling by motor coach has become something of a “yeah, right” punchline.
But by all accounts, he loves the anonymity, the freedom and the community it affords. He has hosted at least one event at the Supreme Court for a Marathon owners’ club.
Members of the Marathon Coach Club International on the steps of the Supreme Court.Credit…via Marathon Coach
When he hits the road, he often goes unrecognized, which at times has allowed him to travel without a U.S. Marshals’ security detail. Chris Weaver, who worked at Desert West Coach, said the justice had frequently gotten his motor coach serviced there before it closed. “Nine out of 10 times, he was just wearing sweats and a T-shirt,” he said.
Traveling largely through red-state America has also meant that when he is recognized, more often than not it is by fans. Juan Williams, a Fox News commentator who has known Justice Thomas since the Reagan administration, said the motor coach was both the fulfillment of a boyish fantasy and a metaphorical “womb.”
“He talked about the R.V. a lot,” he said. “It was a warm, safe place where he didn’t have to be attacked by liberals and Blacks on the left. What he liked about it was not being pilloried.”
In a 2007 interview, Justice Thomas told Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” that the motor coach enabled him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” Credit…CBS News
In a 2019 Q. and A. at the court, Justice Thomas said he had made it to nearly two dozen states, and declared himself the proud owner of a KOA campground discount card.
But the Thomases’ road trips have hardly been limited to sleeping at campsites and Walmart parking lots.
In a 2009 call-in to a morning radio talk show, for instance, Mrs. Thomas said they were driving their motor coach through the Adirondacks, on their way to “meet some families from Texas.” ProPublica has reported that the Thomases have spent part of nearly every summer for the past two decades in the Adirondacks as a guest of Mr. Crow, who owns a lakeside resort there with more than 25 fireplaces, three boathouses and a painting of the justice, his host and other guests smoking cigars.
The boathouse at Harlan Crow’s Adirondack resort, where Justice Thomas and his wife have vacationed. Credit…Nancie Battaglia for The New York Times
When the Thomases aren’t houseguests, they have stayed at upscale Marathon-endorsed destinations like the Mountain Falls Luxury Motorcoach Resort in Lake Toxaway, N.C.
There, the justice met Larry Fields, who owns a motor-coach-cleaning business. Mr. Fields said that for several days he had had no idea who Justice Thomas was, telling him he would have to wait in line to have his Prevost washed, which he patiently did.
“He was a great guy,” Mr. Fields recalled. “I think we talked about how great Reagan was. He was low-key. It was just him and his wife and a dog.”
Justice and Mrs. Thomas have traveled to Mountain Falls, a luxury motor coach resort in North Carolina. Credit…Greg Eastman
Upkeep on a motor coach like the justice’s is an expensive constant, and other friends have chipped in to help. While he did not disclose Mr. Welters’s assistance in buying the motor coach, he did report that some former clerks got together and bought him deep-cycle batteries for $1,200 the year after he acquired it. He also reported that in 2002, Greg Werner, who ran a large, family-owned, Nebraska-based trucking company, gave him tires worth $1,200.
And over time, Justice Thomas made the motor coach his own. In a photo The Times obtained that appears to date back to the early 2000s, picturing his great-nephew as a child, the motor coach no longer sported the sizzling orange flames and Pegasus logo. Instead, it was painted in an elegant black-and-gold geometric pattern.
But if the custom coach changed, the justice’s friendship with Mr. Welters endured.
While Mr. Welters was an executive at UnitedHealthcare, Justice Thomas twice recused himself from cases involving the company, in 2003 and 2005. As is the general custom of the court, he did not explain why.
In 2010, Justice Thomas traveled to the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, at the invitation of the Welterses. By then, the couple had become major Democratic fund-raisers and President Obama had named Ms. Welters ambassador to the island nation. Local newspapers captured the justice and Mr. Welters talking to students at a school.
Justice Thomas at a school in Trinidad and Tobago in 2010 with Mr. Welters, left, whose wife was the ambassador. Flight records show that the Welterses’ private plane flew to and from Dulles Airport on the days Justice Thomas traveled. Credit…U.S. Embassy Trinidad and Tobago
In disclosures, Justice Thomas wrote that the “U.S. Embassy Port of Spain” had paid for his flight. But flight records obtained through the plane-tracking services of MyRadar show that the Welterses’ private Gulfstream G-6 flew from Washington Dulles International Airport and back on the days that Justice Thomas arrived on and departed the Caribbean island.
And Matthew Cassetta, a retired embassy official who helped arrange the visit, said Ms. Welters customarily “offered the plane to people who came down,” always at her own expense to save the taxpayers money.
(Ms. Welters declined to comment on the flights or the loan, except to say, “I just want to tell you that friendships come and go, and that’s what I want to say.”)
The same year, in a speech accepting an award from the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas singled out Mr. Welters as one of his “friends for the whole journey.”
“And for Tony, a special thank you, who understood relationships and who was always there as a friend in the worst times of my life,” he said. “It is a friendship I will treasure forever.”
Reporting was contributed by Steve Eder, Riley Mellen, Robin Stein and Abbie VanSickle.
Jo Becker is a reporter in the investigative unit and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.” More about Jo Becker
There’s a very distinct possibility we could trigger our own extinction or, at the very least, greatly reduce our population while completely altering the way we currently live. Little things like going outside during daylight hours or growing food in the dirt could become relics of the past, along with birds, insects, whales and many other species. War, famine, pestilence and death — that dreaded equine quartet — threaten to topple our dominance on this planet. We are destroying our own home, sawing off the very branch we rest on.
Those who refute this reality, or climate change deniers, misinterpret the same sets of data showing a clear anthropological cause as being part of the “natural” cycle of the planet. Things are warming, they argue, and that is normal. Only, it really isn’t normal.
Climatologists and scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades: Global temperatures and planetary homeostasis are spiraling out of control, and we’re to blame. The climate crisis is no longer a hypothetical future. It’s the tangible present, and the evidence is clear in every grueling heatwave, not-so-uncommon “freak” storm and raging wildfire.
On the opposite extreme is a vocal minority, the accelerationists and nihilists who accept that humanity is overwhelmingly destructive to nature, but argue our extinction would be a welcome relief. I received many such comments on social media after interviewing Peter Ward, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, about his “Medea hypothesis,” a theory that life is not a benevolent force and often causes its own extermination. Many species in Earth’s history became so successful that they wiped themselves out — and we could do the same.
In response to that article, many readers said something such as, “Humans are a virus and should be eradicated.” Obviously, inducing human extinction is an outcome for which only a very cynical personality would advocate. But what about the first part of that statement? Are humans really like a virus, a pathogen, a cancer?
Dr. Warren Hern, a Colorado-based physician and author of the new book “Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth,” argues that human civilization indeed has many similarities with cancer. This isn’t a metaphor, but rather a literal diagnosis — and it can be addressed in the same way that an actual cancer diagnosis can be the first step to treatment.
Salon recently spoke with Hern about his new book, which acts partially as a memoir, textbook, dire diagnosis and poetic ode to a disintegrating planet, discussing the implications for such an urgent prognosis, a new name for the human species that reflects our true nature and how we can still fix this crisis.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
My opinion is that humans are part of nature — we are not separate from it. After I came across your book, I began asking myself, “Are humans really a cancer on the planet?” I thought, “Aren’t we part of this whole ecosystem?” I initially set out to disprove what you’re saying, but the argument you make is so extremely convincing. I know from your writing that when you were first conceptualizing the notion that humans are a cancer on the planet, it was very unpopular. But now it seems like this idea has earned some mainstream acceptance. Is that true?
This is a fundamental scientific and philosophical question. And, first of all, I agree with you that we are part of nature. We evolved in a natural ecosystem, and we have obviously very intimate close ties with other species, other animals. Humans are unique in that they have culture, although we’re learning that other animals have certain levels of culture also, like whales. So, we are really not unique in that sense, but we have a different and higher level of culture that allows us to dominate other species and ecosystems.
These are cultural adaptations that allow us to survive, but they have become malignant maladaptations because they are now threatening our survival and millions of other species. We have essentially made a decision at this point as a species to go extinct. That’s what we’re doing — we’re eliminating our biosphere and our planetary support system. Consciously or not, and I think mostly unconsciously.
When I first came onto this in the late ’60s, I was horrified. It’s not an analogy; nobody ever died from an analogy. It’s a diagnosis, and that’s different. The diagnosis is the same as the hypothesis. The guy comes into the emergency room with a sore belly, and he has right lower quadrant pain. Your diagnosis is appendicitis until proven otherwise. But that’s a hypothesis because he might have some other disease, or if it’s a woman, they might have an ovarian cyst.
I work with the idea from Karl Popper that science is not advanced by proving anything, but by disproving false hypotheses. The purpose of a hypothesis is to explain reality and predict events. This hypothesis [humans as a cancer] explains what we see going on in reality around us — and has for a long time — and it predicts what is going to happen. And that means the prognosis, in medical terms, for cancer is death. The cancer continues until the host organism dies.
The difference between us and a cancer — the only difference — is we can think, and we can decide not to be a cancer. If the diagnosis is correct, things will continue until we are extinct. The biosphere can’t go extinct; it can’t die, but we can alter it to the point that we can no longer survive. And that will take out millions of other organisms. Clearly, plenty of organisms are going to survive that process. They might even be more intelligent than us. I don’t know.
That’s sort of the general picture. And whether people accept this or want to even listen to it is another thing. For example, in the book, I talk about the guy who took over the anthropology section at AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] back in the early ’90s. He didn’t like this idea, and he wanted them to drop it from the schedule because his wife had cancer and he was very offended by it. I told him, “Well, I’m really sorry that your wife has cancer, and I certainly hope she recovers. This doesn’t have anything to do with your wife’s cancer.”
I hope people can see that because it’s such a good diagnosis. I mean, it really does fit the bill. You look at maps of cities and tumors, and you can see how they kind of grow similarly. But the similarities don’t end there.
The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem.
These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.
That’s only one example. We now have 10 or 15 other new characteristics of cancer, and the human species fits all of them. And so the disturbing thing about this? If you have any two of the first four characteristics of cancer, it’s cancer until proven otherwise. And cancer does not stop until the host organism has ceased to function, which for our purposes is the biosphere.
Now, I have given the book the name “Homo Ecophagus.” That is my new name for the human species, which currently has the scientific name of Homo sapiens sapiens, or wise, wise man, which makes us the most misnamed species on the planet. Homo ecophagus means the man who devours the ecosystem — and that’s what we are doing.
We are in the process of converting all plant, animal, organic and inorganic material on the planet into human biomass and its adaptive adjuncts or support systems. The evidence for that is all around us.
So, that’s the basic idea in a nutshell, and then the rest of the book is simply manifestations of this malignancy and an explanation of the analysis. And so, the next question is: Can we do anything about this? Should we do something about this? It’s very hard under the circumstances, for example, to think about Vladimir Putin sitting down with Zelensky if they can fix the ecosystem in Ukraine.
Right, it’s a very, very difficult problem. It’s the biggest problem our society faces right now. Literally, nothing else matters if we don’t address this problem.
That’s the point: It’s an existential crisis. Yes.
I have to say that it seems like we’re not going to solve this problem. I don’t want to be negative and despair that we’re all simply going to die from climate change. I recently made a move across the country from California to Illinois. Everywhere you go, you get that dedifferentiation that you speak of, where everything looks the same. Every freeway has the same strip malls. You see all these people in these giant pickup and semi trucks and all this overconsumption. I just don’t see people giving it up. I just don’t see it happening. Not fast enough, at least.
This is what I call the “ecophasic imperative.” Robert Ardrey, a brilliant anthropologist, about 40 or 50 years ago wrote a number of outstanding books. One is called “The Territorial Imperative,” which is about how humans have an imperative need to have and expand their territories.
One of the most lurid manifestations of what we have right now is Donald Trump. Another one is Putin and the war on Ukraine, but humans have been doing this forever. And now our malignant melanoma patients have been put in a position where we are devouring the Earth. We are devouring the ecosystem. We have an imperative to do that. Look at the open pit mines that we have of various kinds. The whole alternative energy programs depend on destroying certain ecosystems to get the rare metals that we need to do that stuff.
I do not want to be negative, either. I’m basically an optimistic and positive person. I’ve been my whole life. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives us a list of horribles, and it gets more horrible every year. But what’s the underlying dynamic? I say this is a malignant process going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is not new. When the Australian Aborigines arrived on the continent of Australia, they started changing the ecosystem in very dramatic ways, and a lot of species went extinct. My colleague here at the University of Colorado, Giff Miller, has been one of the people showing that it happened in North America. It happened in the Pacific Islands. It happens every place. Humans have made other species extinct wherever they show up.
Of course, it takes individual actions. The obvious side to that is people can make changes in their lives. I’m in Boulder, Colo, for example, where they have a lot of recycling going on, and people are very conscious of that. But, at the same time, you have China putting in a coal-fired power generation plant every week. So, it’s very hard to see how all these individual actions can really have that effect that we want.
Do you have hope for the future, or maybe feel despair about everything? I often get a little bit paralyzed and feel like there’s no point to anything, like we’re all just going to go off the cliff. I’m hoping something will change, that something will shift on a major level, that we’ll all kind of come together on this issue. But I feel like I’ve been waiting for that moment for years.
It’s hard to know how to answer your question when you ask me, “Is there hope?” One of my main answers — which is true — is that young people like you give me hope, people who are looking at this stuff and thinking about it and figuring out what to do. When I look at the current political scene in the United States, it’s very hard to be optimistic because we have a violent fascist movement that occupies the attention of at least a third, if not more, of the population, supporting a man who is a sociopathic criminal.
I think that we make the decisions about these situations — the environment and our survival — through our political process. I want to be optimistic. Let me just share a little example of something with you. A week ago, I went to New Mexico to attend a special memorial service for Dave Foreman.
The meeting was held in a campground outside of Los Alamos, and we were a scruffy-looking bunch of backpackers and tree huggers. I felt right at home with these wonderful people, who were some of the hardcore environmentalists of this country, and people who really, really were dedicated, spent their lives working on protecting the environment. We’ve been talking about people with advanced degrees, with PhDs in ecology and biology, wolf conservation, I don’t know what else.
They were an impressive bunch of people. I enjoyed meeting them, and I participated in this meeting. I admire Dave, who was a friend of mine. And I have his books, and they’re worth reading. OK, this is a highly energetic, wonderful, dedicated, altruistic group in this country. What’s been happening since they started Earth First!? Things are a lot worse than they were.
And it’s very hard to see how that has really influenced the broad scale of things, even though they’ve had a lot of very specific local victories. More people need to understand that we are in an impending extinction crisis for ourselves and for the rest of the ecosystem and other species. We are destroying the planet as we speak — as rapidly as possible — and that must stop. We must find ways to do things differently, and that’s going to make big changes in our lives.
Ahead of Ohio abortion vote, Republicans try to change the rules
Holly Honderich – in Washington – August 5, 2023
An upcoming referendum in Ohio has become a proxy fight for abortion
A pro-abortion referendum looked poised to win in the conservative state of Ohio this November. Now, Republican state legislators are accused of moving the goalposts.
Last summer, just like every summer for the past 22 years, Michael Curtin spent his days on the assorted baseball fields of central Ohio, acting as umpire for high school and college games.
Mr Curtin, retired after a 38-year career in journalism and another four in state politics, loves the game. But this summer, Mr Curtin’s umpire equipment has been neglected, shoved somewhere in the basement of his Columbus home so he could focus on the rules of Ohio politics instead.
“I’m not doing one game,” he said. “And I miss it. But this fight’s too important to lose.”
The fight in question is over Issue 1, a deceivingly dull and procedural-sounding referendum on the minimum threshold required to pass constitutional amendments.
The premise is simple: voters will decide on 8 August whether that threshold should remain at 50% plus one, or be raised to 60%.
But Ohio’s vote has become a proxy war over abortion, one of the many state-wide battles that have broken out since the US Supreme Court rescinded the nationwide right to abortion last June.
That’s because Issue 1 is not the only referendum looming. In November, Ohioans will vote on another constitutional amendment, one that would protect abortion access up until foetal viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The proponents of issue 1 claim that Tuesday’s vote is simply to protect the state’s constitution from outside influence.
But its opponents – a diverse coalition featuring political wonks like Mr Curtin, a retired Supreme Court judge and all of Ohio’s past living governors – have called foul. They claim Issue 1 is a backhanded attempt to change the rules mid-game, raising the voter threshold just in time to thwart the abortion vote.
“Look, everybody knows what’s going on here. Everybody knows,” Mr Curtin said. “This was just bad faith.”
Issue 1 has been championed by Ohio’s secretary of state Frank LaRose
Since Roe v Wade was overturned last June, the country’s abortion fight has increasingly played out in state ballot initiatives. There have been six so far, each one a win for abortion rights.
If Ohio’s vote is passed, it will be the most sweeping affirmation of reproductive rights in a state controlled by a firm Republican majority, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis and a leading authority on the US abortion debate. “It will confirm that there’s some sort of consensus around abortion rights, even in conservative states.”
But if Issue 1 is passed first, and the threshold is raised to 60%, the abortion rights amendment may be finished.
“They [anti-abortion campaigners] very clearly looked at this and said: we cannot win if we don’t change the rules,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio.
Issue 1 has had the full-throated support of Ohio’s chief election official, secretary of state Frank LaRose.
“To allow a bare majority of 50% plus one to change the very ground rules that the state operates on is just not good public policy,” he told the BBC.
Issue 1’s opponents include all four of the state’s living former governors
Mr LaRose, 44, is a veteran of the US Special Forces and now an enthusiastic envoy for the Republican Party, crisscrossing the state for more than 65 pro-Issue 1 events. He is charming, conservative and politically ambitious. In November – at the same time the abortion referendum is held – Mr LaRose will be on the ballot for the US Senate.
In public, Mr LaRose has kept the focus squarely on the constitution. But at a fundraising dinner in May, Mr LaRose made explicit the importance of Issue 1 for the anti-abortion movement.
“I’m pro-life. I think many of you are as well,” Mr LaRose said, in a video recorded by Scanner Media. “This is 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution. The left wants to jam it in there this coming November.”
In an interview with the BBC, Mr LaRose acknowledged that the “looming abortion amendment” helped bring the Issue 1 vote forward. “But that’s not the only reason,” he said.
To his opponents, Mr LaRose had been caught saying the quiet part out loud.
“There’s an old standard that our grandparents taught us that bears repeating: if you want any credibility in life… never deny the obvious,” Mr Curtin said. “Here is Mr LaRose denying the obvious.”
There have been other accusations of hypocrisy. Earlier this year, Republicans passed a law eliminating nearly all August elections, citing their high cost and low turnout. Then, in an apparent u-turn, they put Issue 1 on the calendar for 8 August.
Even some of Mr LaRose’s fellow Republicans have spoken out against Issue 1.
“You’re talking about changing a part of the Ohio constitution that has been in effect for well over 100 years,” said former Ohio Governor Bob Taft, a Republican. “And it’s worked, it’s worked well, the system is not broken.”
In the 111 years since Ohio first granted voters the power to introduce citizen-led amendments, just 19 of 71 proposed measures have passed. Ohio’s current policy requiring a simple majority is in line with most of the 17 US states that allow citizen-initiated amendments. And in 2015, Ohioans added a new restriction, passing an amendment that prohibited anyone from changing the constitution for their own financial benefit.
“This is an elaborate scheme to suppress the vote of Ohioans… It’s unconscionable,” said former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, also a Republican.
Whatever Mr LaRose’s motivations, Issue 1 has been embraced by Ohio’s anti-abortion lobby. Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, said he “led efforts” to get signatures from state politicians to put the measure on the ballot.
“In speaking with Frank LaRose I said ‘now’s our time to do this’,” he told the BBC.
Mr Gonidakis, like Mr LaRose, rejected criticism that Issue 1 was underhanded. “It’s not changing the goalposts if Ohioans weigh in and vote on it,” he said.
Experts said they see Ohio’s Issue 1 as part of a broader tactic employed by anti-abortion advocates to circumvent public opinion in service of their ultimate goal, outlawing abortion entirely – a goal that is unsupported by most Americans.
“They think if voters had a straight up and down decision on abortion it wouldn’t go their way, so they’re trying to do what they can to prevent that from happening,” said the University of California’s Ms Ziegler.
As a result, anti-abortion leaders and their Republican allies have found paths around popular support – either relying on the court system or on politicians willing to promote abortion policy regardless of voters’ wishes.
These manoeuvres are possible, Ms Ziegler said, because in so many cases Republican politicians fear the anti-abortion lobby more than their own constituents.
And the strategy suits the movement’s internal logic, in which banning abortion is seen as the worthiest cause.
“There’s a sense in which winning is more important than democracy,” she said.
‘Morning Joe’ Skewers Lindsey Graham for Saying Judge in Jan. 6 Indictment ‘Hates Trump’: ‘So Embarrassing’
Dessi Gomez – August 4, 2023
“Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski slammed Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham for his words about former President Donald Trump’s latest indictment as well as the judge involved and the broader judicial system of the United States.
“It is so disgusting. Lindsey knows better. He obviously knows better, but he’s slandering the judge. He’s attacking the jury system and it’s very interesting. The judge, who’s gonna actually be overseeing the case, was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2013 by a vote of 95 to zero,” Scarborough said. “She was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. It’s just like the Republicans used to defend the FBI. They were the ones defending the FBI against attacks from progressives. The second the FBI actually investigated Donald Trump… well, suddenly they hate the FBI. Suddenly they hate the military. They hate military leaders. They slander the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. We can go on and on.”
Graham appeared on Fox News after Trump was arraigned Thursday.
“Any conviction in DC against Donald Trump is not legitimate. So they’re charging him with the crime of taking bad legal advice. That’s what this is about. They’re trying to criminalize the attorney-client relationship,” Graham said. “They’re trying to criminalize exercising of the First Amendment. The judge in this case hates Trump. You could convict Trump of kidnapping Lindbergh’s baby in DC. You need to have a change of venue. We need a new judge and we need to win in 2024 to stop this crazy crap.”
Brzezinski called the senator’s words “so embarrassing.”
“Lindsey Graham’s attacking the jury, we know and they know, the bedrock, the bedrock of our judicial system. ‘We the People,’ that’s how Madison had it set up. Our former party, from Election Day 2020 through January the 6th, trashed American democracy, told Americans and the world you can’t trust fair and free elections if our side doesn’t win,” Scarborough added. “Fox News paid like close to a billion dollars for the lies that they spread about the election and they’re gonna probably have to pay close to another billion dollars. We turn the page. What lesson is learned from that? Absolutely nothing. Because now they’re trashing the judicial system, which I would say is, it’s Madison’s crown jewel. It’s the great leveler of Madisonian democracy. But now they’re trashing that again, for Donald Trump.”
Scarborough then turned to Charlie Sykes, an American political commentator, to ask if he agreed with what Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum tweeted on X Thursday.
“If the Republican Party responds to the Trump indictment solely by attacking courts and judges, and if its leaders continue to work to de-legitimize the legal system, I am not sure how we recover.”
DeSantis says he’d slash federal bureaucratic jobs on his first day as president: ‘We are going to start slitting throats’
Madison Hall – August 3, 2023
Republican Florida governor candidate Ron DeSantis speaks during a Make America Great Again Rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa, Florida, U.S., July 31, 2018.Carlos Barria/Reuters
Ron DeSantis railed against the US for having too many federal bureaucrats at a recent campaign stop.
“We are going to start slitting throats on day one,” he said.
DeSantis has previously said he’d eliminate the IRS and other agencies if elected.
GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continued on his tirade against federal bureaucrats while speaking on the campaign trail Wednesday.
“We are going to start slitting throats on day one,” DeSantis said about federal bureaucrats, leading to some dissatisfaction among the crowd at the campaign stop in New Hampshire, according to New Hampshire Public Radio.
Wednesday wasn’t the first time DeSantis said he’d slash government agencies if elected to the White House. In June, he said he wanted to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education.
“You also have to bring this administrative state to heel, the bureaucracy in Washington is totally out of control,” DeSantis said. “It is exerting power that is not therefore under the Constitution, and we need a President to come in and really, really clean house and I will do that on day one.
The president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union that represents more than 650,000 federal workers, said in a statement that DeSantis’ comments were “disgusting, disgraceful, and disqualifying.”
“These public servants deserve respect and commendation from our nation’s leaders,” said Everett Kelley. “No federal employee should face death threats from anyone, least of all from someone seeking to lead the U.S. government. Governor DeSantis must retract his irresponsible statement.”
In a recent New York Times survey, DeSantis finished second among currently declared Republican presidential candidates, trailing behind former President Donald Trump by 37 percentage points. The same survey found that likely Republican voters much prefer a presidential candidate who thinks the “government should stay out of deciding what corporations can support” rather than one who promises “to fight corporations that promote ‘woke’ left ideology,” as DeSantis has pledged to do time and time again.
DeSantis does have time to claw back supporters in the GOP primary race: he qualified for and has said he’ll attend the first Republican presidential debate on August 23.. And in an effort to get more eyes on his campaign, DeSantis just accepted an offer to debate California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who’s not running for president).
Kevin McCarthy’s way to defend Trump: Pivot, confuse and corrode democracy | Opinion
Tad Weber – August 1, 2023
Greg Nash
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is using time-tested political strategies in defense of former President Donald Trump and his legal troubles.
First, pivot. Then deflect. Lastly, confuse.
This was on display recently when the Bakersfield Republican, now the congressional representative for Clovis and eastern parts of Fresno County, was asked about the latest charges added to an indictment against the former president over his alleged mishandling of presidential records.
The Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, brought additional charges to the indictment that accuse Trump of obstructing justice and willfully keeping a top-secret document. The three charges were added to the 37 already filed.
For review, Trump is being accused of keeping a horde of confidential and top-secret documents at his Florida home in violation of the Presidential Records Act. It requires all such materials to be handed over to the National Archives once a president leaves office.
Trump allegedly did not comply. Among the evidence cited by Smith are photos of documents spilled over the floor at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
In the latest charges, Trump is alleged to have shown some visitors a battle plan for U.S. military forces if they were to attack a foreign country. CNN reported it to be Iran. Trump is heard on an audio recording talking about the document and admitting it is confidential.
In the two obstruction charges, Trump is alleged to have directed a pair of employees to delete security-camera footage at Mar-a-Lago once the Justice Department issued a subpoena for it.
Pivot, deflect, confuse
CNN reporter Manu Raju caught up with McCarthy last Thursday to ask him about the latest charges against Trump.
“What concerns me is you have a sitting president that has a situation like this, but even worse, that had documents, but nothing’s happened,” McCarthy told Raju. “The president, when he was a senator, he took a document. How many years is that and there’s been no prosecution?”
That last point — when Biden was a senator from Delaware — is the attempt to confuse.
McCarthy did not elaborate further, so one is left to assume he is referring to a claim by Trump that Biden has 1,850 boxes of confidential records that he has not turned over.
“By the way, Biden’s got 1,850 boxes,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Georgia. “He’s fighting them on the boxes. He doesn’t want to give the boxes and then they say, ‘Trump is obstructioning’.”
The Associated Press did a fact check of Trump’s claim and found it false.
The National Archives says the 1,850 boxes are actually from Biden’s time in the Senate before he became vice president under then-President Obama. The papers are housed at the University of Delaware.
Records accumulated from serving in the Senate are personal property and not subject to the Presidential Records Act.
“While the FBI has searched the Delaware university records as part of a larger search for classified documents, there is no evidence they were withheld from authorities in any way,” the AP reported.
Corrosive effect
If McCarthy was referring to discoveries earlier this year at Biden’s home and the former private office of official documents from his vice presidential years, the comparison with Trump still does not hold up.
Unlike Trump, Biden has fully cooperated with investigators once the discoveries came to light. He was found to possess a small number of documents. Biden’s attorney general picked a special counsel to investigate the Biden records — a lawyer appointed by Trump when he was president.
Trump, by contrast, has steadfastly opposed efforts by the National Archives to return the documents in his possession. It took an FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago to secure the materials. Thirty-three boxes and 11,000 documents were taken from the Florida home. Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr said Trump took the documents to “flip the bird” at the government.
As House speaker, McCarthy is one of the most powerful politicians in America today. His constant defense of Trump, in advance of trials, that have not yet even started, is a corrosive agent on American democracy. He stirs doubt and suspicion by regularly repeating that the nation operates with a “two tiers” system of justice — one protecting Biden, one prosecuting Trump.
To see it another way, just flip the script. What if, instead of Trump having been charged for things like obstruction of justice and willful detention of records belonging to the American people, it had been Hillary Clinton? What would McCarthy be saying then?
Column: Is there any way to shift the bizarre Republican conviction that only Trump will save them?
Jonah Goldberg – August 1, 2023
Former President Donald Trump greets supporters as he arrives at New Orleans International Airport on Tuesday. (Gerald Herbert / Associated Press)
“They’re not indicting me, they’re indicting you. I just happen to be standing in the way,” Donald Trump declared (again) in the wake of a new updated federal indictment connected to the classified documents case.
The claim is as effective as it is stupid. The federal government is not, in fact, prosecuting the average Trump supporter for mishandling documents or obstructing justice (save for two Trump aides who allegedly helped him mishandle documents and obstruct justice).
But the idea that Trump is a populist sword-and-shield against the “establishment,” “Deep State,” or “elites” has ensorcelled large swaths of the GOP base, which is at least partly why he’s got a massive lead over his opponents. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll asking potential Republican primary voters which candidate they would most likely vote for, Trump is at 54%, a 37-point lead over his closest challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Among his core supporters, about 37% of the party according to a breakdown of the poll by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, literally nobody thinks he committed any crimes and 94% think the party needs to rally around him against these presumably bogus charges.
Cohn notes that no primary candidate with a lead of at least 20 points at this stage of the race has ever failed to get their party’s nomination.
This alone undermines the MAGA base’s argument for supporting Trump. If the Republican establishment forces were as powerful as Trump and his voters think, they’d be able to do something about it. If the Deep State were half as formidable as they think, Trump would never have been president in the first place.
But large segments of the GOP suffer from the delusion that they are victims of the ruling classes and that the woke left is running everything — or will — if Trump doesn’t stop them.
Even in states with Republican governors and legislative supermajorities, like Tennessee, a certain paranoia that the left could take over at any moment dominates politics. As one GOP state legislator recently said on a leaked conference call, “The left wants Tennessee so bad because if they get us, the Southeast falls and it’s ‘game over’ for the republic.”
Of course, if these left-wing overlords were as fearsome as all that, the GOP would not be in total control of the Volunteer State in the first place. Similarly, if the “RINO” establishment were in charge, Trump wouldn’t be the runaway front-runner.
This is the paradox of Republican politics today. The populists run or at least dominate the party but they derive their power and intensity from the bizarre conviction that they’re powerless victims — and that only Trump can save them.
The delusion is vexing but it also points to the only way to prevent Trump from getting the Republican nomination. The last decade has shown that the only kingmakers in American politics are precisely who they’re supposed to be: the voters. In 2008 Hillary Clinton proved that big money and establishment backing weren’t enough in the face of a popular opponent. Jeb Bush proved the same thing in 2016.
Much of the left and right have convinced themselves that American democracy has been hijacked, to one extent or another, by powerful special interests, billionaire donors, the Deep State, hegemonic party establishments and/or the media. And yet, time and again, the string-pullers have proved to be ordinary people.
Trump will be the nominee unless enough Republican voters either change their minds or consolidate around a challenger. And that remains possible.
Cohn is right that it’s unprecedented for a front-runner to lose with such a lead. But Trump is an unprecedented candidate. A former president with multiple criminal indictments despised by a quarter of his party almost as much as he’s loved by a third of it. You could argue he’s running with an incumbent president’s lead, but for an incumbent president, his lead would be disastrously narrow.
Throughout most of 2003, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was seen as the unstoppable, inevitable, Democratic nominee. “Dean has wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president of the United States,” the widely respected analyst Stuart Rothenberg declared (with some minor hedging), in November 2003. By December, Dean was nearly 20 points ahead of his nearest rivals. The next month he was crushed in the Iowa caucuses, as voters started paying attention and changed their minds. Dean didn’t score a single win outside of Vermont.
For those desperate for a Republican nominee other than Trump, hoping voters will change their minds seems scary. But that’s democracy for you.
