‘Raise the age’ gun bill passes Texas committee after months of advocacy by Uvalde families
Niki Griswold, USA TODAY NETWORK – May 9, 2023
In a shocking and last-minute turn of events in Texas, a bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase AR-15 style semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21 passed out of a House committee Monday, advancing the measure hours before a key deadline.
Several Uvalde victims’ relatives burst into sobs and cheers in the Capitol hearing room when two Republicans joined all the Democrats on the committee to advance the bill by an 8-5 vote.
“I’m feeling very overwhelmed, very emotional,” Kimberly Garcia said through tears after the committee vote. Her 10-year-old daughter, Amerie Jo Garza, was one of the 19 fourth graders and two teachers killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022.
“I was super worried, but I feel like my daughter did this, and I feel like she’s making a difference, and I’m proud of her. I hate that it’s come down to this, but I know that she’s always with me, and I know that I’m not going to let anyone ever forget her,” Garcia said.
Uvalde victims’ relatives have been advocating for lawmakers to pass House Bill 2744 for months, coming to the Capitol nearly every week during the legislative session to demand its passage and even waiting more than 13 hours to testify in support of the bill in a committee hearing in April.
Their unrelenting push for lawmakers to pass gun control legislation has been an uphill battle in a Republican-dominated Legislature that has loosened gun restrictions in recent sessions. Monday’s vote, however, was a significant victory for the families.
As recently as 10 a.m. Monday, Rio Grande City Republican Rep. Ryan Guillen, who chairs the committee where the bill was pending, had said he was not planning to bring the bill up for a vote because he didn’t believe it had the votes to pass in the full House.
But by 11 a.m., after an emotional protest and news conference by the Uvalde families and gun control activists Monday, Guillen changed course.
The Uvalde gunman purchased his AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle legally just days after his 18th birthday, having unsuccessfully tried to acquire one before he was legally old enough to do so under state law.
While Monday’s progress was a major, and unexpected, step forward, the future of the bill remains uncertain. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan previously said he would be willing to let a debate on the bill play out on the House floor but cautioned that he doesn’t believe it has the votes to pass the House.
Gov. Greg Abbott has said he believes the measure to be unconstitutional. A spokesperson for the speaker’s office declined to comment on the bill’s progress Monday, and a representative for the governor did not immediately return a request for comment.
Family members of Uvalde victims Julissa Rizo and Javier Cazarez hug after the House Select Committee on Community Safety votes HB2744 out of committee at the Texas Capitol Monday, May 8, 2023. HB2744 would raise the age to purchase assault weapons.
Putin tells WWII event West is waging a ‘real war’ on Russia
The Associated Press – May 9, 2023
Military vehicles move toward Red Square to attend a Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, May 9, 2023, marking the 78th anniversary of the end of World War II. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)APTOPIX Russia Victory Day Parade Iskander, mobile short-range ballistic missile system launchers, drive past during the Victory Day military parade at Dvortsovaya (Palace) Square to celebrate 78 years after the victory in World War II in St. Petersburg, Russia, Tuesday, May 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)
President Vladimir Putin declared Tuesday that the West has unleashed “a real war” against Russia, reprising a familiar refrain at scaled-down Victory Day celebrations that may reflect the toll the Ukraine conflict is taking on his forces.
Putin’s remarks came just hours after Moscow fired its latest barrage of cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine, which Russia invaded more than 14 months ago. Ukrainian authorities said air defenses destroyed 23 of 25 missiles launched.
The Russian leader has repeatedly sought to paint his invasion of Ukraine as necessary to defend against a Western threat. Kyiv and its Western allies say they pose no such threat and that Moscow’s war is meant to deter Western influence in a country that Russia considers part of its sphere of influence.
“Today civilization is once again at a decisive turning point,” Putin said at the annual commemorations celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. “A real war has been unleashed against our motherland.”
Putin has often used patriotic rhetoric that harkens back to the earlier war in an effort to rally his citizens and forces — and May 9 is one of the most important dates in the Russian political calendar. But this year’s celebrations were markedly smaller, at least partially because of security concerns after several drone attacks have been reported inside Russia.
Some 8,000 troops took part in the parade in Moscow’s Red Square on Tuesday — the lowest number since 2008. Even the procession in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, featured some 13,000 soldiers, and last year, 11,000 troops took part. There was no fly-over of military jets, and the event lasted less than the usual hour.
“This is weak. There are no tanks,” said Yelena Orlova, watching the vehicles rumble down Moscow’s Novy Arbat avenue after leaving Red Square. “We’re upset, but that’s all right; it will be better in the future.”
The Kremlin’s forces deployed in Ukraine are defending a front line stretching more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles), presumably thinning the ranks of troops available for such displays.
“This is supposed to be a showpiece for Russian military might. But so much of that military might has already been mauled in Ukraine that Russia has very little to show on its parade in Red Square,” said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at London’s Chatham House think tank.
Meanwhile, the traditional Immortal Regiment processions, in which crowds take to the streets holding portraits of relatives who died or served in World War II — a pillar of the holiday — were canceled in multiple cities.
“That seems to be for fear that those people who have lost their relatives in this current war on Ukraine might actually join the processions and show just the scale of the casualties that Russia has suffered in its current war,” Giles said.
Russian media counted 24 cities that also scrapped military parades — another staple of the celebrations — for the first time in years. Regional officials blamed unspecified “security concerns” or vaguely referred to “the current situation” for the restrictions and cancelations. It wasn’t clear whether their decisions were taken in coordination with the Kremlin.
Last week, Russia claimed it foiled an attack by Ukrainian drones on the Kremlin that it called an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Putin. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied involvement.
There was no independent verification of the purported attack, which Russia authorities said occurred overnight but presented no evidence to support it.
On a tribune in Red Square, Putin praised soldiers taking part in the war in Ukraine and urged Russians to stand together.
“Our heroic ancestors proved that there is nothing stronger, more powerful and more reliable than our unity. There is nothing in the world stronger than our love for the motherland,” Putin said.
The guest list was also light amid Putin’s broad diplomatic isolation over the war. Initially, only one foreign leader was expected to attend this year’s parade — Kyrgyz President Sadyr Zhaparov. That was one more foreign guest than last year, when no leaders went.
At the last minute on Monday, officials announced that the leaders of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan would head to Moscow as well.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian air force said in a Telegram post that eight Kalibr cruise missiles were fired from carriers in the Black Sea toward the east and 17 from strategic aircraft.
The missiles came hours before European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Union’s executive branch, arrived in Kyiv.
Von der Leyen urged EU member nations to take measures to prevent countries from helping Russia to circumvent the bloc’s sanctions. The EU has noticed that certain products that have been banned to undermine Russia’s war effort are still getting through, she said.
Von der Leyen did not name the countries, but unusual trade flows through China and Turkey have been on the EU’s radar for some time.
Ukraine is keen to join the EU, but membership has many requirements and is still a long way off. Ukraine is also hoping to join NATO, after moving close to the Western military alliance during the war.
In the latest help from a NATO member, the U.S. was expected to announce Tuesday that it will provide $1.2 billion more in long-term military aid to Ukraine to further bolster its air defenses.
A Colorado school board was taken over by Trump-loving conservatives. Now nearly half its high-school teachers are bailing.
Grace Eliza Goodwin – May 9, 2023
Desks and chairs arranged in classroom at high schoolMaskot / Getty Images
A newly elected conservative school board in Colorado is enraging many residents and teachers.
About 40% of the district’s high-school teachers have said they’re leaving next year, NBC News said.
The board has adopted a conservative teaching standard and argued against mental-health resources.
A Colorado school district’s board was taken over by conservatives aiming to emulate former President Donald Trump — and its new policies are set to drive off nearly half the district’s high-school teachers, NBC News reported.
At the end of 2021, a group of conservatives won control of the school district in Woodland Park, Colorado.
Since then, it has enacted a number of conservative policies that have infuriated many teachers, residents, and even staunch Republicans in the town of just 8,000 people, NBC News reported.
Nearly 40% of the district’s high-school teachers have decided to leave at the end of this school year, a district administrator told NBC News.
At least four higher-ups in the district have quit over the new board’s policies, according to interviews and emails viewed by NBC News.
“This is the flood the zone tactic, and the idea is if you advance on many fronts at the same time, then the enemy cannot fortify, defend, effectively counter-attack at any one front,” David Illingworth, a new member of the school board, wrote to another member shortly after being elected, NBC News reported.
“Divide, scatter, conquer,” he wrote. “Trump was great at this in his first 100 days.”
Among its most controversial new policies is the board’s decision to adopt the American Birthright social-studies standard. The curriculum standard, created by a conservative advocacy group, emphasizes patriotism, discourages civic engagement, and criticizes the federal government’s control of public schools, NBC News said.
The board also pushed against mental-health resources for students, with the superintendent musing how a school social worker didn’t help stop a student’s killing off campus, the NBC News report said.
DOJ charges ‘Pink Beret’ Jan. 6 rioter IDed after an ex spotted her in a viral FBI tweet
Ryan J. Reilly – May 8, 2023
WASHINGTON — A woman who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 while wearing a pink beret and was recently identified to the FBI by an ex-romantic partner was charged with four federal counts Monday.
As NBC News first reported, an ex identified Jennifer Inzunza Vargas Geller of California and reported her to the FBI after the bureau featured her in a viral tweet last month. She faces four misdemeanor counts: entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, disorderly conduct in the Capitol grounds or buildings and unlawfully parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building. She was not in custody Monday, a law enforcement source said, but there is now a warrant out for her arrest.
For more than two years, online sleuths who identified hundreds of participants in connection with the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, had been unable to determine Vargas Geller’s identity, and the woman they dubbed #PinkBeret had been the subject of online conspiracy theories. An attorney for another Jan. 6 defendant suggested she was working at the behest of the government.
But the last weekend of April, a clothing designer Vargas Geller used to date was standing in the checkout line at a Joann Fabric and Crafts store when his buddy showed him a funny tweet from the FBI’s Washington field office on his phone.
Jennifer Vargas outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C.)
“He’s always on Twitter, and he said something like, ‘Yo, check out this chick,'” the designer said.“I stopped dead in my tracks,” he said. “I’m like, ‘That’s Jenny.’”
While most recent tweets from the Washington field office account had received a few thousand views, the tweet featuring Vargas Geller racked up millions. Twitter users dubbed her “Insurrection Eva Braun” and “fascist Matilda” and compared her to April Ludgate, the character played by Aubrey Plaza in NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” Several users joked that she seemed straight out of a Wes Anderson movie, and one user tweeted “Emily in-carceration,” referring to the show “Emily in Paris.”
Vargas Geller was charged 11 days after the viral tweet, which is an extremely quick turnaround compared to other Jan. 6 cases. Online sleuths have identified hundreds of additional Capitol riot participants who have not been charged, some of whom were first IDed more than two years ago, in 2021.
Jennifer Vargas outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C.)
Vargas Geller was from Sacramento, the clothing designer said, and she went to meet him in Los Angeles in early 2019, when they were in their early 20s. “We weren’t, like, trying to get married or anything,” he said. “We were hooking up for a few months.”
But there was a red flag that sparked a breakup: Vargas Geller, he said, wrote on Discord that she was reading Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto.
“I was just instantly turned off, like, ‘Yo, I don’t think this is going to work out,’” he said. “You’re, like, reading ‘Mein Kampf.’ You think immigrants don’t deserve X, Y, Z.” (A social media account linked to Vargas Geller, viewed by NBC News, also referred to Hitler.)
Vargas Geller could not be reached for comment.
Kira West, the defense attorney for Jan. 6 defendant Darrell Neely, who suggested “Pink Beret” was working as a government agent, said after Vargas Geller was identified that the government should have tried to ID her sooner.
“Our question is why they weren’t looking sooner when we brought it to their attention long ago? Especially with Mr. Neely’s liberty on the line,” West said.
Jennifer Vargas outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C.)
Vargas Geller’s ex knew she had traveled to Washington and asked her whether she was on the “no fly” list in a message he wrote to her a few days after the attack.
“Nope, cause I didn’t go into the [Capitol],” she wrote, despite extensive video evidence later viewed by NBC News and cited in Monday’s affidavit that the FBI says shows her inside the building.
“But you still crossed state lines to riot,” he replied.
“I was there to support the president. Not to partake in that riot. I support the police,” Vargas Geller responded on Jan. 10, 2021, in a conservation shared with NBC News.
Jennifer Vargas inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C.)
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,000 people in connection with the Capitol attack, and hundreds of additional participants who have been identified have not yet been arrested.
Most defendants who face charges similar to Vargas Geller’s have received either probation or short sentences of incarceration. The longest sentence — more than 14 years in federal prison — went to a violent rioter with an extensive criminal record.
Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas Are About to Learn About Gift Taxes
Martin Sheil – May 5, 2023
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Getty
Gift taxes were probably not a topic discussed on the yacht or around the campfire during the Harlan Crow-subsidized luxury vacations for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni. But maybe they should have been.
Recent reports indicate that Crow provided Thomas’ grandnephew with tuition to a pricey boarding school in the 1990s. Thomas did not report this gift from Harlan Crow as required on his annual disclosure forms. But that is nothing new. ProPublica had previously reported on multiple luxury vacations provided to Justice Thomas and his wife via Crow’s yacht and jets—including an island-hopping junket in Indonesia that ProPublica valued at $500,000.
That Thomas has made multiple lapses in ethical judgment in not reporting the receipt of such valued largesse from Crow is something for him, SCOTUS, and now Congress to muse over.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-11-1/html/r-sf-flx.html
But what about Crow’s judgment? Did he file gift tax returns and pay gift taxes on any of the gifts he provided to the Thomas family?
It is a reasonable question to ask, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) appears to have formally done so, with a reported due date of a response May 8. In lieu of gift taxes, did Crow expense the value of the trips and tuition provided the Thomases on either personal or business income tax returns? Wyden wants to know.
If Crow took business expense deductions for the above referenced “gifts,” then he can’t claim they were gifts. And if that’s the case, he wouldn’t have had to file gift tax returns which—given a potential tax rate of up to 40 percent—would represent a pretty price for the billionaire real estate magnate.
The criteria for what constitutes an untaxed gift that exceeds the limit to avoid paying tax vary by year. For example, the limit was $13,000 per recipient in 2013, but $17,000 in 2023. The Indonesian junket—valued at over $500,000 by ProPublica—would generate gift taxes of approximately $200,000 for Mr. Crow.
Executive Director of MoveOn.org Rahna Epting speaks at a demonstration where MoveOn.org delivered over 1 million signatures calling for Congress to immediately investigate and impeach Clarence Thomas at the US Supreme Court on July 28, 2022 in Washington, D.C.Jemal Countess / Getty
Now, if Crow did take business deductions for the value of the luxury vacations provided to the Thomases, he would have opened up another can of worms for himself tax-wise. That’s because Crow has publicly stated he did not discuss any business before the court with Justice Thomas.
If that is true, then it is possible that Crow falsified his income tax returns by expensing the cost of the vacation provided the Thomases. It’s also possible the vacations provided the Thomas family could be viewed as income to Thomas—since he would be viewed as providing value to Crow through business discussions. To be very clear, this is speculative and none of this is proven, but the possibility alone makes it worth investigating.
What seems much more clear-cut is that Justice Thomas doesn’t seem to think he has to report gifts from wealthy businessmen, who also are generous corporate political donors, like Harlan Crow.
“Not reportable” is the phrase used by Thomas’ attorney/friend Mark Paoletta when he tweeted (incorrectly) about how the tuition payment by Crow to the school attended by the grandnephew was not reportable as a gift.
Such an admission by Paoletta suggests knowledge of gift tax requirements by both Thomas and Crow going all the way back to the 1990s. It also raises additional questions. Was Justice Thomas motivated not to disclose valuable junkets provided to him and his family in order to abet his buddy Crow’s non-filing of gift tax returns and/or expensing of the value of the trips on his tax returns?
Oh me oh my!
Now, Mr. Crow may think he has insulated himself by procuring a golden passport from St. Kitts and Nevis—which is a notorious tax haven and money laundering refuge in the Caribbean. Then there’s the fact that Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, has a registered ownership under an entity called Rochelle Marine Limited—a company domiciled in Guernsey, another notorious tax haven located just off the shores of the U.K.
Mr. Crow clearly has employed some clever tax accountants and lawyers over the years. And we all look forward to the answers he provides to the questions posed by Sen. Wyden but, clearly, Crow has exhibited a predisposition for tax avoidance behavior. Did he cross the line into tax fraud? That is something to contemplate and discuss around the campfire.
Analilia Mejia of the Center for Popular Democracy, center, joins other activists calling for ethics reform in the U.S. Supreme Court, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, May 2, 2023. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has been criticized for accepting luxury trips nearly every year for more than two decades from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow without reporting them on financial disclosure forms.J. Scott Applewhite / AP
But why is this question even significant?
It is murky as to whether any of Crow’s business dealings were ever subject to SCOTUS review—even indirectly. What is not unclear are the heavy-duty political campaign contributions made by Harlan Crow.
Has Mr. Crow donated to dark money PACs? We don’t know, because anonymity is the whole point of dark money PACs.
What about corporate political donations?
There is no limit to those given the Citizens United decision, wherein SCOTUS bestowed personhood on corporations and concluded that limiting corporate political contributions was tantamount to limiting freedom of speech—which was unconstitutional.
Might that issue have ever come up when Thomas was sailing on Crow’s yacht or flying on his corporate jet? Justice Thomas voted with the majority in Citizens United, which certainly had to make corporate executives everywhere in the U.S. pleased—even if it opened the door to contributions from overseas, and not just from Caribbean tax havens, and not just from dual passport holders.
That Justice Thomas was unethical in not disclosing receipt of luxury gifts provided to him is transparently obvious, though it seems inconsequential to date. But it does raise the question as to whether those who provide wealthy gifts to civil servants that hold positions of power should face any consequences, particularly when tax responsibilities are clear.
Should wealthy corporate executives who make large political donations to obtain results favorable to their business (or make luxury gifts to powerful people) be held accountable? Bottom line—does the wealth, power, and position of the wealthy insulate them from the consequences of their actions? (Normal tax-paying citizens would certainly face such a reckoning.)
These questions are bigger than just Thomas and Crow. They speak to the integrity of our political systems, and whether ordinary Americans should have to live by different rules than the wealthy and politically powerful.
“No mention of Ginni.’ Conservative activist directed money to wife of Justice Clarence Thomas
John Fritze, USA TODAY – May 5, 2023
WASHINGTON − A well-known conservative legal activist who has helped shape the modern Supreme Court arranged for the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas to receive tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work, according to a report Thursday in The Washington Post.
“No mention of Ginni, of course,” The Post quoted Leo instructing Conway.
The Post reported that Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, paid Ginni Thomas’s firm $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012 and expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012. It was not clear what the money was for, though Leo told The Post in a statement that it “involved gauging public attitudes and sentiment.”
The revelation was the latest in a series of reports in recent weeks about money and gifts Thomas and his family have received from outside interests. Earlier Thursday, ProPublica reported that GOP megadonor Harlan Crow had paid private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew. Last month, ProPublica revealed new details about private jet travel and luxury yacht trips Thomas also accepted from Crow.
In his statement to The Post, Leo explained his desire to keep Ginni Thomas’ name off the paperwork by asserting he has “always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni” because of how “disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be.”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas listens as President Donald Trump speaks before administering the Constitutional Oath to Amy Coney Barrett on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Monday, Oct. 26, 2020, after she was confirmed by the Senate earlier in the evening. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Clarence Thomas’s problems multiply at Supreme Court
Al Weaver – May 5, 2023
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing a fresh round of scrutiny after the third blockbuster report in less than a month links him financially to GOP megadonor Harlan Crow.
ProPublica reported Thursday that Crow, a Dallas-based real estate developer, paid thousands of dollars in tuition to a private boarding school for Thomas’s great-nephew, whom Thomas has said he raised “as a son.”
Federal ethics laws require the justices to report gifts given to a “dependent child,” but that term is defined to only include the justices’ children or stepchildren. Thomas’s allies have insisted the payment doesn’t violate the disclosure law since it was for Thomas’s sister’s grandson.
But the revelation has only added to the increasing pressure from Democrats for the justices to adopt a binding code of ethics.
“Today’s report continues a steady stream of revelations calling Justices’ ethics standards and practices into question. I hope that the Chief Justice understands that something must be done—the reputation and credibility of the Court is at stake,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement.
When asked during a SiriusXM interview about impeaching Thomas, however, Durbin said “no.” He noted that only one justice, Samuel Chase, had been impeached previously, and Chase was acquitted in the Senate in 1805.
“I don’t think an impeachment is in the works, particularly with the House in a political situation that it’s in today,” Durbin said on “The Briefing with Steve Scully.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a Judiciary Committee member, argued the matter should be referred to the Department of Justice.
“There’s a potential criminal violation in the misreporting or failure to report certain benefits, gifts and financial transactions. There’s just a drip, drip, drip of additional information that is gravely undermining the Court, but also creating the need for a full factual investigation,” Blumenthal said.
“If [the Justice Department] fails to do so, Congress definitely has a role,” he added.
Thomas did not return a request for comment through a court spokesperson.
Later on Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Leonard Leo, a conservative judicial activist who played a key role in the Supreme Court’s rightward shift, directed tens of thousands of dollars be paid to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, roughly a decade ago.
Leo requested that she not be named in the paperwork, according to the Post. Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist herself, has long insisted that she doesn’t talk about the court’s business with her husband.
Judiciary Committee Democrats have been hamstrung on taking action regarding the court, including on a potential subpoena for Chief Justice John Roberts. He declined an invitation from Durbin to appear at a Tuesday hearing on Supreme Court ethics, noting that it is “exceedingly rare” for a chief justice to give testimony.
That could change if Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who has been absent for months due to shingles, returns and once again gives Democrats an 11-10 majority on the panel — though even then subpoenaing the chief justice of the Supreme Court would be an extraordinary step.
Thursday’s ProPublica report was the latest financial transaction involving Thomas and Crow to come to light. The investigative outlet last month reported Thomas had accepted luxury trips from Crow, including flying on his private jet, without disclosing the travels.
ProPublica also reported Crow had purchased real estate from Thomas’s mother that Thomas had an interest in.
“The definition of insanity is seeing the same Supreme Court justice violate ethics rules over and over again and expecting him to actually hold himself accountable,” Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, said in a statement. “How many more examples of Thomas flouting disclosure rules do our elected leaders need to see before they intervene? Thomas needs to answer for his misconduct. It’s time to subpoena him.”
Republicans, on the other hand, indicated little willingness to wade into the waters related to the justice who has served on the court for 32 years. They say this is an issue for the Supreme Court to deal with and not something that requires congressional oversight. Interfering, they argue, would go against the separation of powers.
“The Supreme Court … writes its own rules and if there is any policing of those rules to be done, I think it ought to be done by them,” Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters. “I assume the members of the Court, who I have a high level of confidence in, will make the right decisions for the justices on the Court and for the people who work at the Supreme Court in the same way as we make the rules for all members of Congress.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who recently indicated that he was dismayed by reports of the ethical issues for Thomas, said the Court needs to make ethics changes.
“These revelations with regards to a number of justices, both those appointed by Republicans and by Democrats, suggest that the Court itself needs to evaluate what their disclosure rules are and ethics rules are and methods for enforcing those,” Romney said. “I presume that the chief justice will undertake that.”
Republicans have further portrayed the Thomas scrutiny as a double standard, taking aim at the ethics of the high court’s liberal justices.
They note that liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accepted an award in 2010 from the Woman’s National Democratic Club.
They have also pointed to liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor not recusing herself when the court considered taking up two cases involving book publisher Penguin Random House, despite disclosing payments from the conglomerate for her books. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who also received payments from the publisher for his book, similarly did not recuse.
The nonprofit insurance associations were already a backstop measure, stepping in after 2022’s Hurricane Ian drove insurance companies in the Gulf Coast into failure, causing the cancellation of tens of thousands of homeowners’ policies and leaving millions in unpaid claims.
But those unpaid claims were so high that the associations have had to turn to emergency borrowing of hundreds of millions of dollars at significant interest rates. “We’re currently in the midst of an insurance crisis,” Jim Donelon, Louisiana’s insurance commissioner, said in a news briefing. The crisis is “largely…a result of hurricane activity in our state the last couple of years.”
A home destroyed by Hurricane Delta in Louisiana.
Climate change is making insurance more expensive along the US Gulf Coast
The increased burden of debt, including the high borrowing costs, will be shouldered by Florida and Louisiana residents in the form of higher premiums for homeowners’ insurance as well as higher costs for auto and theft insurance.
A study published in April confirmed that climate change is making hurricanes stronger, and will cause more catastrophic storms to hit the US East and Gulf Coasts in the coming decades.
“This is an extraordinary event for us,” John Wells, executive director of the Louisiana Insurance Guaranty Association, the state-chartered association, said of the emergency borrowing. “What everybody has to come to terms with is how much it takes to cover catastrophic losses.”
Climate change is causing property insurance markets to collapse
Insurance companies are built on their ability to predict loss. But worsening disasters are injecting more uncertainty into calculations, and insurers in the most climate-affected areas are struggling to cope with it.
Reinsurance companies, which help insurers deal with catastrophes, have been fleeing high-risk areas, particularly those prone to wildfires or flooding.
“Just as the US economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is overexposed to climate risk,” Eric Andersen, president of Aon PLC, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, said during a Senate hearing in March.
California’s wildfires are also driving an insurance crisis, causing higher premiums and lower coverage limits—if property owners can get coverage at all—as insurers withdraw from the market.
In the Gulf Coast, analysts are warning that more insurers could become insolvent before hurricane season starts again on June 1.
America is refusing to do the one simple thing that would solve the Great People Shortage
Gaby Del Valle – May 4, 2023
The US needs more workers or it will face serious economic chaos. There’s a clear fix: more immigration.Tyler Le/Insider
Two simple words: more immigrants
America needs more workers.
The United States is already running low on critical positions such as nurses, home-health aides, farmworkers, and truckers. And there are fewer young people on the way to make up the difference: The National Bureau of Economic Research found that birth rates in the US have declined by nearly 20% since 2007, while the fertility rate has been below the replacement level for decades.
That means that unless people start having a lot more kids, the US population could eventually start to shrink — just like China’s population has. The problem, though, isn’t just a smaller population, but an aging one. With fewer people to pay into Social Security to support the growing number of retirees and fewer workers in critical industries, including healthcare and agriculture, a declining population would have devastating consequences for the American economy.
“This is the issue of the future, because this is going to become the first-order issue for all kinds of industries in America,” Lant Pritchett, a development economist and RISE Research director at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, told me. “They just won’t be able to attract workers.”
Politicians have suggested various ways to encourage people to have more children: “We will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom,” former President Donald Trump said at a conference in March. But even if these policies went into effect, we’d still have to wait for those kids to grow up before they could enter the workforce. The labor imbalance is already here, and the economy needs more workers now. That’s why a growing number of demographers, economists, and business executives support letting more immigrants into the US as a more immediate way to fill in the gaps. President Joe Biden’s economic advisors even said in March that more legal immigration is needed to boost the economy. And while immigration is a politically touchy solution, the quickly aging US economy is running out of options to keep itself afloat.
“The only solution is more workers,” Pritchett said.
America’s People Shortage
The US fertility rate first dipped below the replacement level — the rate needed to sustain the population, which is about 2.1 births per woman — in the 1970s. After rebounding in the 1990s and early 2000s, the rate began a steady decline in 2007 that has not reversed. While the US population has managed to avoid an outright drop, population growth reached an unprecedented low of 0.12% in 2021. Some of this loss can be attributed to the deaths of over 1 million Americans during the pandemic, but the COVID crisis only exacerbated preexisting demographic trends. Americans are getting older: The median age of the US population has increased by roughly 3.5 years since 2000, according to the Census Bureau, and 2021 saw the largest upward shift in the population age ever recorded.
According to estimates, these trends won’t reverse anytime soon. The Congressional Budget Office estimated this year that population growth will slow between 2023 and 2053, and that by 2042, any growth will be from immigration, not births. Kenneth Johnson, a professor of sociology and a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, pointed out that the demographic mismatch is even more dire when you look at county-by-county data. Deaths outnumbered births in two-thirds of US counties in 2021, creating a phenomenon that demographers call “natural decrease.” Even before the pandemic, roughly half of all US counties had more deaths than births, he said.
Johnson said that one big debate among demographers is whether people are simply delaying having children or just putting it off altogether. It’s possible that a combination of factors, including the lingering effects of the Great Recession, coupled with crushing student-loan debt, the rising cost of housing, and the pandemic simply pushed back the timeline for many people to have children. After all, birth rates did rise slightly in 2021, likely because of stimulus payments and the flexibility of remote work. But Johnson told me, “Right now, my impression is that a fair number of those babies aren’t going to be born.”
Policymakers and economists have suggested myriad ways to increase the number of babies people are having — ranging from “baby bonds” to a stronger social-safety net. But some ideas to boost fertility come with a sinister undercurrent. The preoccupation with increasing birth rates has particularly taken hold on the political right, which has long had a fascination with the racist conspiracy theory that there is a global plot to “replace” white Americans with immigrants. Trump’s baby-boom plan, for instance, may have been inspired by Hungary’s family-planning program, which is designed to encourage white heterosexual couples to have more children. “Migration for us is surrender,” Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in 2019.
Kenneth Johnson, University of New Hampshire
The pronatalist movement, which argues that people should be having more babies, has also grabbed hold in Silicon Valley — but some of its adherents don’t believe that just anyone should be having children. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk (who has 10 children) have become convinced that they need to have lots of children to save the human race. And one Silicon Valley couple has started a campaign to encourage more people like themselves to have children, speaking openly about their use of reproduction technology to select embryos based on genetic testing.
But so far, policies designed to induce people into having more kids have been a bust. Japan has struggled with a declining birthrate for decades despite efforts to encourage families to have more children. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that Japan was “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” due to population decline, adding that it was “now or never” to solve the problem. China’s population is both aging and shrinking as well, and after decades of restrictive family-planning policies, the country is trying to change course. In recent years, China has reversed its notorious “one-child policy” and started restricting abortions for “nonmedical reasons.” But the country’s population is still declining.
How immigration can boost the economy
In the face of looming population decline and resulting labor shortages, there is a clear answer staring the US in the face: immigration. Allowing more people to become Americans would not only help immediately alleviate some of the labor shortages plaguing the US economy but would also help to stem some of the country’s long-term population decline. Historically, the median age of immigrants has been younger than the median American age. And people of working age — meaning those between 18 and 64 — comprised 77% of the immigrant population in 2021, compared to just 59% of the US-born population that same year. Immigrants, Johnson said, “bring not only themselves,” but also the potential for more children, further boosting the US population and productivity.
Though current immigration rates — particularly the number of migrants apprehended at the border — are the subject of contentious national debate, recent Census data shows that the total number of immigrants arriving in the country isn’t enough to offset population losses. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of immigrants in the 20 most-populous counties in the country nearly tripled, but most of those counties still saw their overall populations decline. Despite increased immigration, Los Angeles County’s population declined by 90,000 people in 2022 — and by 180,000 people the previous year.
In order to truly prevent a people shortage, the US will need to let more people into the country. And there’s already evidence that immigrants can help boost local economies — and transform entire cities. Immigrants are 80% more likely to start a business than people born in the US, and recent data shows that they’ve started more than 25% of businesses in seven of the eight fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Because of that, research has found that immigrants actually create more jobs than they take. Plus, across the US, several key industries — including agriculture, meatpacking, manufacturing, and healthcare — depend on immigrant labor. And if we boost immigration rates, the incoming workers could help ease labor shortages in these critical fields.
Critical industries such as agriculture and healthcare rely on immigrant labor.Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images
From central Indiana to New York City, businesses are struggling because they can’t hire enough workers to fill their open roles. “If we don’t do this and have a positive conversation about immigration today, it will continue to crush Hoosier households and economy,” Patrick Tamm, the president and CEO of the Indiana Restaurant and Lodging Association, told a local publication.
Take Utica, New York. The city’s population declined from 100,410 people in 1960 to just over 60,500 in 2000. But instead of facing extinction, the postindustrial city’s population slowly began rebounding in the 1990s with the arrival of Bosnian immigrants fleeing the Yugoslav Wars, who were followed by refugees from Myanmar in the 2000s and, more recently, Bantu refugees from Somalia. The city’s relatively low cost of living has made it a hub for people fleeing conflicts around the world, who resettle with the help of refugee-aid organizations. Though the city’s population still hovers around 60,000, it would be much lower if not for the resettled refugees and their families who now make up about 25% of Utica’s population.
“The refugee population has helped the city’s economy tremendously,” Brian Thomas, the commissioner of Utica’s Department of Urban and Economic Development, told CNBC.
Political compromise?
Immigration has, of course, been a political hot potato for decades. One 2022 survey found that one-third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans believe in tenets of the so-called “Great Replacement” theory. A February Gallup poll found that just 28% of responding Americans are satisfied with our current immigration rates, and most of those who are dissatisfied want immigration to decrease. But even without a huge overhaul of the entire system, there are clear solutions that could help welcome more talented, much-needed workers to America.
One way the US could encourage more immigration is by focusing on temporary visas for specific industries that need workers. Japan took this approach and quietly opened itself to foreign workers in 2019 when it began allowing “specific skilled workers” in 14 key industries. These workers are allowed to stay in the country for up to five years on temporary labor visas — but they aren’t allowed to bring their families. Lawmakers hoped that the policy would attract around 345,000 workers in a five-year period, or an average of 5,750 people each month. Pritchett said this model could also work in the United States.
“A lot of people in the world would love to come work in a high-productivity place and would be more than willing to do so not in an exploitative way, but on a term-limited basis,” he told me.
There are already two guest-worker programs in the United States: the H-2A program for temporary agricultural laborers and the H-2B program for temporary non-agricultural workers. Both programs give temporary work visas to people tied to specific employers. The current programs are not perfect, however, and workers on H-2A and H-2B visas have sounded the alarm over squalid living conditions, wage theft, and exploitation. And the treatment of workers in the country on temporary visas has been a problem for decades. For these programs to be expanded, there would need to be significant safeguards in place to ensure workers aren’t exploited.
And there are other approaches that could work. Tara Watson, an economist and the director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, said that solutions focused on bringing people here on a long-term basis are more in line with what the US needs. “I’d rather see more expansion on the permanent side than the temporary side, because I think the challenges that we’re facing are long-run challenges and they really require long-run solutions,” Watson said.
She said that a good place to start would be expanding both family- and employment-based migration by simply allocating more visas in each category. Scaling up both programs would make an immediate difference, she said. Other simple solutions include lifting the cap on the number of skill-based green cards issued to immigrants from each country and letting people on nonimmigrant visas renew their status in the United States, rather than having to leave the country to do so.
Regardless of the approach, the biggest hurdle is a matter of political will. “I think there will be some resistance to this as a solution,” said Watson. “But I also think it’s essentially an imperative.” After all, the US is running out of options, and soon its growing people shortage is going to spell economic disaster.
Watson said that the economic forces will eventually overwhelm the “white-nationalist far right” that has “played an outsize influence” on the immigration debate. “If we don’t solve this problem in the next couple of years, it’s going to come to a head,” she said.
Gaby Del Valle is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. She coauthors the immigration newsletter BORDER/LINES.
Flood insurance costs will soar in Florida. See the expected increases in your ZIP code
Nicolas Rivero – May 4, 2023
Brace for a few years of flood insurance rate hikes, South Florida. And they’re going to be steep — doubling, even tripling for thousands of homeowners.
FEMA has changed the way it calculates flood insurance prices. Instead of relying on old flood zone maps covering broad areas, it’s now basing premium prices on a wider range of factors, like an individual property’s distance from the ocean, rainfall levels and the cost to rebuild a home.
Last month, for the first time, FEMA shared estimates for what that will mean for the average flood insurance premium by ZIP code. For the worst-hit ZIP code in South Florida — 33469, a stretch of coastal Palm Beach County that covers parts of Jupiter and Tequesta — that will mean a 342% premium increase, on average.
In the most expensive ZIP code for flood insurance in South Florida — 33149, which covers Key Biscayne — average premiums will rise north of $7,000 a year.
How your costs compare
Type in your ZIP code to see what is happening to flood insurance costs in your community.
Some important qualifiers: The premium hikes won’t hit all at once for existing policyholders, and not everyone will see an increase. FEMA estimates that about 20% of Florida policyholders will actually see their premiums drop under the new pricing regime, known as Risk Rating 2.0.
For those with current federal flood policies, the good news is that the rate won’t immediately skyrocket. Congress has capped price hikes at 18% per year. The bad news is, you might see that flood insurance premium go up 18% every year for several years until it reaches the new Risk Rating 2.0 calculation for your home.
If you’re buying a new flood insurance policy, however, you’ll get hit with the new premium all at once. Since April 2022, new policyholders have had to enroll at the full Risk Rating 2.0 price.
FEMA says the new premiums reflect the reality of Florida’s increasing flood risk, as people continue to build homes in flood-prone areas and climate change raises sea levels and makes “rain bomb” events, like the 1,000-year floods that recently inundated Fort Lauderdale, more common.
The agency also argues that the new premium regime is more fair. “The new methodology allows FEMA to equitably distribute premiums across all policyholders based on the value of their home and the unique flood risk of their property. Currently, many policyholders with lower-value homes are paying more than they should and policyholders with higher-value homes are paying less than they should,” FEMA wrote in an April 2021 press release announcing the change.
Mortgage lenders and banks often require that home and property owners get federal flood insurance. Although Florida has the highest number of policies in the country, roughly 4 out of 5 Florida homes aren’t covered. Emergency management experts warn that just about anyone in a state vulnerable to hurricanes and heavy rains should get it.
The number of Florida flood insurance policies is likely to rise. This year, Florida lawmakers passed a bill requiring anyone with hurricane and wind policies from Citizens Insurance to also get flood insurance. That affects 1.2 million Citizens policyholders in the state.
Across South Florida, the biggest premium hikes will go to policyholders in the Keys, South Miami-Dade and coastal Broward and Palm Beach counties. Rates will remain relatively stable in North Dade and inland Broward and Palm Beach.
The 10 biggest premium hikes in South Florida affect ZIP codes up and down the coastline from Summerland Key to Jupiter — and three ZIP codes in inland Miami-Dade County.
Those hikes will eventually lead to average increases in annual insurance bills as high as $4,056 in ZIP code 33036, which covers Islamorada. But the increases will phase in gradually. In ZIP code 33469, which covers parts of Jupiter and Tequesta, the average policyholder will see eight straight years of 18% insurance hikes before their premiums stabilize at the new Risk Rating 2.0 level.
Under the new risk rating regime, the highest average premiums in South Florida will all be in ZIP codes in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. Key Biscayne, Islamorada, Marathon, Miami Beach, North Bay Village, Bal Harbor, Surfside, and Sunny Isles will be among the most expensive areas to insure against flooding in South Florida.
Key Biscayne will have the sixth highest insurance premiums of any ZIP code in the state.
In Miami-Dade, the biggest premium increases are coming in the southern part of the county, in ZIP codes where home prices are particularly high (33146, i.e. Coral Gables) or where premiums have been historically low (33033, i.e. Leisure City and 33170, which runs west from Goulds to the Everglades).
In Broward, the biggest premium increases are concentrated on the coast, especially in ZIP codes surrounding Fort Lauderdale. ZIP code 33315, which covers Edgewood, one of the worst-hit neighborhoods in the Fort Lauderdale floods, will see a relatively modest 64% premium hike. But a few miles north in ZIP code 33305, premiums are expected to double on average.
