Sometimes I wake up to texts sent at 2 a.m. Sometimes they’re from Meg, who lives in Scotland and is several time zones ahead, telling us her 4-year-old woke up with a fever. Sometimes Kea, who lives in Maine, was up overnight with her 2-year-old. More texts come through the day in trickles and floods, in the group chat that’s been our support group since we were all pregnant at the same time. How’s your back? How’s your kid’s earache? How long did they tantrum for today? Make sure to swab their throat!
I get up, I make my own toddler breakfast. My husband drives him to day care. I text my friends back, I try to get to work. And I wait.
There is a knife hanging over our heads, as there is for every parent of a kid under 5. The text alert will come, or the phone will ring with a call from school. An exposure. A symptom. Come get them. Come get them and stay home.
We just had to make it to the end of January, I thought. Past the peak of omicron. Maybe we’d even have an under-5 vaccine within sight. Anthony Fauci suggested spring might be possible. Unvaccinated and largely too young to mask, my son and his classmates are still subject to the full 10-day quarantine after an exposure. (A vaccinated 5-year-old who’s been exposed gets to come to school like normal as long as they don’t have symptoms.) We’d had exposures before—one over Thanksgiving 2020, then one in March 2021, both stretching into school holidays for extra measure—but during the summer and fall of last year we let go of the breath we’d been holding. Even through delta, our state kept its numbers low. But then omicron, and then the holidays, and then we were desperate again for the light at the end of the tunnel. When, the week before Christmas, we learned that the Pfizer trial for the under-5 vaccine was extended because the two-shot dose wasn’t triggering a strong-enough immune response, I was the one helping my friends stay positive: Don’t worry, Moderna’s working on it, too. We just had to make to the end of January.
Apparently not. I was chasing my son around the house this weekend—literally, he runs laps to a playlist of four 30-second songs from Blaze and the Monster Machines, and he insists that one of us adults runs with him—when I saw the news: The Moderna vaccine trial for kids under 5 was being extended. Extended and delayed. And I felt like I’d been punched in the chest. I wandered off from the racetrack while Blaze kept blaring and hoped my son didn’t notice while I searched my phone for answers.
The worst part, maybe, was that this wasn’t even a press release. It wasn’t even big news. My colleague (with whom I was texting just this morning about her son’s latest fever; the network of parent support is diffuse and desperate) pointed out that we only found this out at all because a co–principal investigator on the Moderna clinical trials told a local Wisconsin news outlet, and someone else noticed and tweeted about the extended timeline for the study. January was no more. Now it was April. The worst part might be that no one even thought to officially announce it.
It is the awful feeling that the world has moved on. The White House blithely anticipates a “winter of death” and suffering for the unvaccinated, but, well, that’s their own fault, isn’t it! If you’re fully vaxxed, which you of course could be, omicron will be a sniffle and a five-day reality TV binge! The Atlantic writes of reasonable people saying they’re “vaxxed and done,” people who reasonably say “COVID is becoming something like the seasonal flu for most people who keep up with their shots,” as if everyone has the option of shots to keep up with.
I want to scream. If I can scream, for a second? The pandemic is not fucking over, because children under 5 cannot get fucking vaccinated.
Do not tell me it’s usually really mild for kids. I know it’s usually really mild for kids. Do not tell me about your neighbor’s toddler who didn’t even have a sniffle. I know it would probably be at most few days of fever and endless episodes of Blaze. I’ll even accept that my kid might throw up, and I won’t even tell you the hot wave of anxiety that floods my body when that happens. (I just don’t like it, OK.) I won’t even mention that “mild COVID” for adults, which I very well might get—because I would be taking care of my toddler, because you cannot isolate from a sick toddler—just means “not hospitalized.” I won’t mention that if I get it, too, I’ll be able to take off the mask I will have been wearing around the clock inside my own home, but I might have the sniffles or I might spend a few days feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck. I won’t mention that either way I will still have to parent, and by then my son will probably be well enough to run more laps to Blaze.
I won’t mention that hospitals are overwhelmed already, and even where they’re not, health care workers are exhausted. Just this morning I reassured myself with the thought that I live 20 minutes from a very good children’s hospital, which at least won’t be overrun by adult patients. It made sense at the time.
What I will mention is how a 10-day quarantine is enough to break a person. I love my son to the end of the world, but this is not about whether I love him enough. This is about claustrophobia, and monotony, and how the little things in the world that help parents stay sane—a library, a play date, running errands and dragging him along—are off the table when you’ve been exposed. He’s old enough to need friends and playmates, to need the blessed, skilled teachers who can guide a tiny human tornado through a day of activities and circling up and songs. I am not one of those teachers. I am not everything that my son needs. He needs school, even though school right now is the scariest place for him to be.
I will mention how the unemployment relief that once upon a time helped me get through the loss of child care due to COVID has been gone for four months now. I’m a freelancer. I don’t have paid leave to draw from. I can’t even get unemployment at all. But I know my husband and I are lucky to even have the option not to work (and not get paid) so we can care for him. We’re lucky to have a good enough relationship that the negotiations of the work/care schedule, figuring out whose stress and deadlines need to supersede the other’s, hasn’t broken us yet.
I thought we could make it to the end of January. I know we’ll make it to April, or whenever the moving goal posts finally stop, because we have to. Someday we’ll look back on how we lived through something historic. Someday I’ll tell my son about the pandemic that happened when he was a baby, how at first we took walks to the park and he touched cherry blossoms, and the songs we sang when we were trapped inside for the second winter in a row. Hopefully I’ll have to tell him the story because hopefully it will end before he’s old enough to remember. We’ll make it to whenever he gets vaccinated, because we don’t have a choice. I’ll help him through a day of little toddler side effects with juice and liquid Tylenol, grateful he likes liquid Tylenol and that he’s old enough that I can try to explain what will be happening. I’ll read him his little board book about vaccines. He’ll get his second and third shots or however many he needs, and eventually he’ll be just like you, as protected as possible, safe enough to go about his toddlery business with COVID being just another risk like accidents or the flu.
But we aren’t there yet. And what’s worse than not being there yet is how the world seems to have utterly forgotten we exist. How “close everything but keep schools open” turned into “well I’m vaxxed and I just want to go to a bar.” How “keep schools open” became “you must hate teachers” and “you must hate your child,” when the truth is I love my son’s teachers more than I ever dreamed was possible, because I know how badly he needs them, how we all do. Because I know how hard they’re working to keep him safe, and how eventually it won’t be enough.
Kea texted the group chat last Tuesday, the second day back after the holidays—her daughter’s classmate was positive. (Her daughter, weirdly, luckily, had been out on the exposure day for vomiting, too.) “That one day of day care was so deluxe,” she texted. I guess we’ll just take what we can get.
The Filibuster Is Made-Up and Stupid, and So Is the Made-Up, Stupid History to Justify It
Jack Holmes January 11, 2022
Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla – Getty Images
The filibuster was created when Cain and Abel were locked in those fraternal spats about who’d made a better sacrifice to God. The filibuster dates back to Sumerian debates over how to regulate the trade of obsidian and lapis lazuli in the Fertile Crescent. The filibuster can be traced to the ancient Roman custom of filibusta, wherein the tribune of the plebs could block a Senate initiative he feared would add to inflation. The filibuster emerged during the Hundred Years’ War as England and France each demanded any peace treaty receive the backing of a supermajority of noblemen in both countries. There are cave drawings at Lascaux that depict the very first use of the filibuster.
These backstories are only marginally less true than the one Senator Joe Manchin offered on Monday: The filibuster has been “the tradition of the Senate here in 232 years now,” he told Chad Pergram of Fox News. “We need to be very cautious what we do…That’s what we’ve always had for 232 years. That’s what makes us different than any place else in the world.”
No, the filibuster is not 232 years old. It is not as old as American democracy because the Founders did not write it into the Constitution. It emerged, essentially by accident, because they failed to outline a constitutional procedure for ending debate on a bill. They had no interest in governance by supermajority. Its first use was 50 years after the founding. Many of its uses after that were very bad. The Senate was already an undemocratic body that is now supercharged to enshrine the tyranny of a minority. And the filibuster has been changed many, many times. Recently, Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell changed the filibuster to make it easier for them to get their Supreme Court nominees through. Even more recently—like, last month—the Senate made an exception to the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling.
Yet somehow, people routinely get away with casting the filibuster as an essential building block of American democracy that verges on an essential virtue in human nature. All of this is completely made up, along with all of the ridiculous procedural workarounds that have sprung up around the filibuster: reconciliation, the Parliamentarian, the Byrd rule. All of it is made up and stupid. It’s a tool of obstruction, but it’s also cover that allows lawmakers to avoid actually voting on policy proposals. If the bill never comes up for a vote because it’s been blocked using the filibuster, you don’t have a record of voting against shoring up voting rights. It’s not unlike the eagerness that members of Congress have shown to fork over the legislature’s war powers to the Executive Branch in order to avoid having to own any of our endless military interventions abroad. It is a device abused by cowards to avoid accountability in office. If you’re against the voting-rights bill, or the Build Back Better act, then vote against those bills. Don’t prevent the bills ever getting a vote.
Manchin’s Coal Corruption Is So Much Worse Than You Knew
Jeff Goodell January 10, 2022
R1360_NAT_AFF_Manchin_horiz – Credit: Illustration by Victor Juhasz
One of the hardest things to grasp about the climate crisis is the connectedness of all things. One recent drizzly afternoon, I drove from Charleston, West Virginia, to the John Amos coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Kanawha River, near the town of Nitro. In the rain, the plant looked like one of the dark satanic mills that poet William Blake wrote about, with three enormous cooling towers that steamed like giant witches’ cauldrons. Across the river from the plant, mobile homes cluttered the bank of the Kanawha, streaked black with pollution that rained down on them 24/7.
I had visited the plant 20 years ago, on my first reporting trip to West Virginia. Back then, the plant seemed like an indomitable monument to the power of Big Coal. The facility, owned by Ohio-based utility giant American Electric Power, is capable of generating 3,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 2 million homes. It is also one of the biggest carbon polluters on the planet, emitting 13 million tons of CO2 each year, which is equal to the annual emissions of about 3 million cars.
When I look at John Amos today, I see fire and rising seas, disease and hunger. I see a rusting industrial contraption that takes CO2 captured by trees 300 million years ago and rereleases it into the sky, bringing the heat of the past to our future. Coal plants are one of the primary reasons why shopping malls were burning in Colorado this winter and reservoirs in the West are dry. They are why Antarctica is cracking up, threatening the future of virtually every low-lying city in the world, from Boston to Bangkok. They are why infectious-disease patterns are changing in Nepal and crops are failing in Kenya and roads are washing out in Appalachia.
At this point in human evolution, burning coal for power is one of the stupidest things humans do. Coal plants are engines of destruction, not progress. Thanks to the rapid evolution of clean energy, there are many better, cheaper, cleaner ways to power our lives. The only reason anyone still burns coal today is because of the enormous political power and inertia that the industry has acquired since the 19th century. In America, that power and inertia is embodied in the cruel and cartoonish character of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who, paradoxically, may have more control over the trajectory of the climate crisis than any other person on the planet right now. Kidus Girma, a 26-year-old Sunrise Movement activist who helped organize protests against Manchin this past fall, calls him “the final villain.”
Chairman Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., greets Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources hearing on the FY 2022 budget request for the Department of Energy in Dirksen Building on Tuesday, June 15, 2021. – Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP Images
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP Images
Manchin’s influence comes from the fact that in an evenly divided Senate, he is the swing vote that can make or break legislation. He presents himself as a pragmatic man from a hardscrabble state who is always trying to do the right thing. He values good manners and civility, and sometimes seems to be channeling the folksy charm of another famous West Virginian, test pilot Chuck Yeager, who was immortalized in The Right Stuff.
The truth is, Manchin is best understood as a grifter from the ancestral home of King Coal. He is a man with coal dust in his veins who has used his political skills to enrich himself, not the people of his state. He drives an Italian-made Maserati, lives on a houseboat on the Potomac River when he is in D.C., pals around with corporate CEOs, and has a net worth of as much as $12 million. More to the point, his wealth has been accumulated through controversial coal-related businesses in his home state, including using his political muscle to keep open the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia, which paid him nearly $5 million over the past decade in fees for coal handling, as well as costing West Virginia electricity consumers tens of millions of dollars in higher electricity rates (more about the details of this in a moment). Virginia Canter, who was ethics counsel to Presidents Obama and Clinton, unabashedly calls Manchin’s business operations “a grift.” To Canter, Manchin’s corruption is even more offensive than Donald Trump’s. “With Trump, the corruption was discretionary — you could choose to pay thousands of dollars to host an event at Mar-a-Lago or not,” Canter tells me. In contrast, Manchin is effectively taking money right out of the pockets of West Virginians when they pay their electric bills. They have no say in it. “It’s one of the most egregious conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.”
Manchin’s grift is emblematic of generations of political leadership in West Virginia. I’m always struck by the difference between coal country and the rest of the state. Unmined places like New River Gorge (now a national park) hint at the spectacular beauty of West Virginia before the coal barons arrived; up in Morgantown, you see a thriving city that is not entirely built with money from mining and burning black rocks. But much of the state is a landscape of corporate exploitation, a place that has been pillaged by outsiders who have sucked out its gas and mined its coal and built mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Hamptons, but left little behind beyond black lung and broken labor unions. The people I have met in coal country in my many visits over the years are tougher than the blade of a bulldozer, smart, self-reliant, deeply connected to the natural world. But the poverty and quiet distress is heartbreaking. If fossil fuels brought prosperity to a place, West Virginians would be dancing on gold-paved streets. Instead, West Virginia is the second-poorest state by median income, and near the bottom of virtually every social indicator of well-being, from obesity to opioid addiction to education. The few well-paying coal jobs that are left are disappearing fast. In 1950, there were 120,000 coal workers in the state; today there are only around 13,000 workers, less than two percent of the state’s workforce.
Despite the relentless hardship, Manchin figured out a way to do pretty well for himself. “Joe Manchin will absolutely throw humanity under the coal train without blinking an eye,” says Maria Gunnoe, director of the Mother Jones Community Foundation and a longtime West Virginia activist. “My friends and I have a joke about his kind: They’d mine their momma’s grave for a buck.”
So it was no surprise to Gunnoe that during an appearance on Fox News a week before Christmas, Manchin knifed President Biden’s first-term agenda by announcing that he could not support the $1.8 trillion Build Back Better Act: “I have tried everything I know to do” to support this, he told Fox host Bret Baier. Never mind that the bill includes billions of dollars in programs that would help West Virginians struggling with poverty and hardship, or that without the tax breaks and other clean-energy measures in the bill, Biden’s goal of cutting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions in half from 2005 levels would be all but impossible to achieve. And without U.S. leadership on climate, the chances that the nations of the world will reduce emissions fast enough to hold warming at 1.5 C, which is the threshold for dangerous climate change, is virtually zero. “If Build Back Better goes down,” says John Podesta, a Democratic powerbroker and former special adviser to President Obama who has been deeply involved in international climate negotiations, “then we are completely fucked.”
All this could change overnight. “I think that the climate thing is one that we probably can come to agreement much easier than anything else,” Manchin said a few weeks after his appearance on Fox. Perhaps Manchin’s takedown of BBB was a negotiating ploy, and deals will be cut and a pared-down version of the bill will be passed. Or perhaps, as a recent report in The Washington Post suggested, he’s decided to walk away from negotiations with the White House. However it plays out, the idea that the fate of the Earth’s climate has wound up in the hands of a Maserati-driving senator from coal country is a plot twist that belongs in a Hollywood disaster movie, not here in the real world where millions of people suffer as a consequence.
“Humanity should have phased out coal yesterday,” climate scientist Peter Kalmus tells me. “Burning fossil fuels is what’s driving the crazy heat waves, flooding, and ecosystem deaths we’re now experiencing, and which are rapidly intensifying. And coal is the worst of the worst in terms of carbon-emissions intensity.”
But coal was not phased out yesterday. Globally, 40 percent of electricity comes from burning coal, creating 30 percent of global carbon emissions. The biggest coal burner is China, which consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined. Here in the U.S., coal is gradually being displaced by cheap natural gas, wind, and solar. But there are still 179 active coal plants in the U.S., generating 20 percent of U.S. electricity. Virtually the entire states of West Virginia and Wyoming are powered by coal.
In the long run, coal is roadkill to technological progress. The problem is that it isn’t dying fast enough. “No scenario for stabilizing warming below truly dangerous levels allows for substantial additional extraction and burning of coal,” says Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War. “Even the conservative International Energy Agency has said that there can be no new fossil-fuel infrastructure (especially coal) if we are to keep warming under 1.5 C/3 F, a level beyond which we commit to some of the worst impacts of climate change.”
There are lots of reasons why coal has proved to be so hard to get rid of. Part of it has to do with the sheer scale of coal-industry infrastructure — the mines, the railroads, the power plants. Part of it has to do with the cultural bias that real men burn rocks for power. Part of it has to do with dark money and political influence. And part of it has to do with us, the energy consumers who don’t know where our power comes from and don’t really care.
But now the endgame of coal has begun in earnest. You could feel that at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow last fall. “Sometimes, the coal industry isn’t just the elephant in the room,” commented Wolfgang Blau, co-founder of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, “but the actual room itself.” Overnight, 23 countries made commitments for the first time to phase out coal power. In addition, 25 countries and public-finance institutions pledged to end overseas public funding for fossil fuels by the end of 2022, and major international banks said they would stop financing new coal power by the end of 2021. Still, the agreement nearly fell apart in a last-minute dispute when a pledge to “phase out” coal was diluted to “phase down.” More than 40 countries signed the pledge, but the U.S., perhaps fearful of offending Manchin, was not one of them.
Even with the endgame underway, the power of coal is reasserting itself in the U.S. Something like a fossil-fuel confederacy is taking shape, devoted to maintaining our addiction to fossil fuels. Politicians in West Virginia and Texas and Wyoming are aligning with lobbying groups like the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to keep coal alive, no matter the cost to their economy, their constituents, or the climate. Just as red-state politicians are trying to rig democracy by commandeering local election boards and oversight committees, coal boosters are taking over public-service committees that regulate utilities to help slow transition to clean energy. Republican state legislatures are cutting taxes on fossil-fuel extraction, stoking false fears about blackouts, and pushing studies that exaggerate the positive economic impact of fossil fuels. As climate journalist Brian Kahn tweeted, “Republican state legislatures are trying to create a world where it’s illegal to do anything but say nice things about fossil fuels and give the industry all your money.” In West Virginia, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is leading a fight to the Supreme Court to undercut the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions. ALEC is pushing treasurers and state financiers in 15 states to fight back against “woke capitalism” — banks and financial institutions that focus on clean energy and refuse to do business with fossil-fuel companies.
There is no future for coal in America. It is a new Lost Cause. But that won’t stop Manchin and the fossil-fuel confederacy from spreading the big lie that life as we know it today depends on burning black rocks for power.
Manchin grew up in Farmington, West Virginia, a small town about two and a half hours northeast of Charleston, West Virginia. Manchin’s grandfather first worked in the mines, eventually owning a grocery store. His father expanded the business to a furniture store. The family was always deeply entwined in West Virginia politics: His father and his grandfather both served as Farmington’s mayor. His uncle was a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, serving stints as West Virginia’s secretary of state and state treasurer in the years between. Like his uncle, Manchin worked his way up through state politics. In 2005, he was elected to a five-year term as governor, then won a special election for U.S. Senate in 2010, and was reelected in 2012 and 2018. Today, he effectively lords over the West Virginia Democratic Party like a mob boss, demanding fealty. “He controls everything,” says Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal-country activist and daughter of a coal miner who ran against Manchin in the 2018 West Virginia Democratic primary.
How much of West Virginia’s troubles is Manchin responsible for? “West Virginia has always been a classic natural-resources-dependent economy,” says John Kilwein, chair of the political-science department at West Virginia University. “When coal was down, we were down. When coal was up, we were up. It was boom, bust, boom, bust. I don’t know that you can lay that on Manchin’s doorstep.” But what you can lay on Manchin’s doorstep, Kilwein says, is the failure to plan for a post-coal economy. Tragically, despair and addiction have often filled the gap: Over the past decade or so, West Virginia became the capital of the opioid crisis. To cite just one example: Between 2006 and 2014, 81 million opioid pills were shipped to pharmacies in one small West Virginia city. Between April 2020 and April 2021, overdose deaths in the U.S. topped 100,000 for the first time, with some of the largest increases in West Virginia, where more than 1,600 people died. “Joe Manchin is deeply responsible for this,” says Swearengin. She points to Manchin’s ties with the pharmaceutical industry, including the fact that Mylan Inc. — which manufactured opiates, as well as other drugs — where Manchin’s daughter was CEO from 2012 to 2020, was one of the largest campaign contributors to Manchin, donating around $211,000 through PACs and employees since 2009. “Joe Manchin doesn’t need to be in Congress,” Swearengin says. “He needs to be in jail.”
Manchin’s personal wealth is directly linked to a small coal-fired power plant about 10 miles outside Farmington, in a place called Grant Town. The Grant Town Power Plant, which went online in 1993, sits in a holler littered with rusty double-wides and muddy ATVs. The plant itself doesn’t look like much more than a flimsy steel warehouse with a smokestack. As far as power plants go, it’s an old clunker in a world of Teslas. It generates 80 megawatts of electricity, about enough to power 40,000 homes. It’s operated by a privately held company called American Bituminous Power Partners (AmBit), which sells the electricity under contract to Mon Power, a West Virginia utility that’s a subsidiary of Ohio-based FirstEnergy, one of the largest electric companies in the United States.
A contractor at West Virginia’s Grant Town coal-fired power plant, gestures toward the small facility’s smokestack, Thursday, Aug. 23, 2018 in Grant Town, W.Va. – Credit: Ellen Knickmeyer/AP Images
Ellen Knickmeyer/AP Images
Perversely, the Grant Town plant is a byproduct of clean-energy legislation. The Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA), passed in 1978 in response to the energy crisis of 1973, was meant to break the monopoly of utilities over electric-power generation and encourage independent power producers to build smaller, more innovative power plants fueled by hydroelectric power, solar, and natural gas. In 1992, PURPA was reformed to include waste coal — basically piles of dirt and coal waste excavated from nearby mines — as an “alternative” fuel. The Grant Town plant, which burns waste coal, or “gob” as it’s called, took advantage of that rule change. Although burning gob can help clean up abandoned mine sites, it also transfers pollutants from the land into the air, which is why, on a pollutants-per-kilowatt-hours basis, Grant Town is the dirtiest coal plant in West Virginia.
Manchin doesn’t own the power plant or the gob. Instead, his firm, Enersystems, simply brokers the transaction between the owners of the gob (usually abandoned mine sites) and AmBit.
Enersystems is a mysterious company. Manchin co-founded it in 1988, then put it into a so-called blind trust when he was elected governor. It is now operated by his son, Joe Manchin IV, and has virtually no online presence and is largely unknown outside a small circle of people in West Virginia. Its registered address is in the Manchin Professional Building plaza in Fairmont, where it is located two suites down from the Manchin Law Group, a firm founded by Joe’s cousin Timothy Manchin. (Enersystems didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Manchin has a long history of using his political muscle to boost the company, and the coal industry in general. In 1994, he was state chair of ALEC and a national director of the Koch-backed pro-fossil-fuel group that has been one of the central forces spreading climate disinformation. As governor, Manchin recast the state’s Department of Environmental Protection from enforcement toward what he called “compliance assistance,” which accelerated the growth of mountaintop-removal mining and loosened safety regulations in underground mines. Just in case Manchin’s pro-coal views weren’t clear enough, during a 2010 Senate campaign ad, he literally aimed a rifle at President Obama’s cap-and-trade legislation and shot a bullet through it.
As governor, Manchin had control over appointments to the all-powerful West Virginia Public Service Commission (PSC), which in turn gave him influence over the committee’s decisions to set utility rates and approve contracts. According to reporting first published by The Intercept, in 2006, Manchin, according to an unnamed source, instructed his then-chief of staff, Larry Puccio, to meet with Mon Power lobbyists so that they would petition the PSC to increase the Grant Town plant’s rate from $27.25 to $34.25 per megawatt hour, pocketing an additional $4.5 million per year from customers. Not surprisingly, the PSC agreed. It even agreed to extend the contract from 2028 until 2036. According to one study by a consumer-rights group, Mon Power customers have seen their rates increase by 30 percent since 2008.
That deal is still in effect today. Nevertheless, even after the rate hikes, PSC records show that the Grant Town plant has lost $117 million over the past five years. But somehow, Enersystems has figured out a way to suck cash out of the money loser. Since 2010, the fees from transactions on this one coal plant have earned Manchin $5 million, including nearly $500,000 in 2020 alone.
It’s difficult to overstate how fucked up this is. If the PSC were working in the best interests of West Virginians, it would have demanded that the money-losing Grant Town plant be shut down years ago. Instead, West Virginians have been paying millions of dollars each year in higher electricity costs in order to keep running a dirty, inefficient power plant that is sickening and killing people with dirty air, but paying the Manchin family handsomely.
And who knows how deep this cesspool of corruption really goes. Exhibit A: FirstEnergy, the parent company of Mon Power, was recently enmeshed in an epic scandal in which it paid $60 million in bribes in a complex scheme to pass a state bailout of nuclear plants in Ohio. The criminal enterprise was led by then-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, who was removed from office last year and now faces federal racketeering charges. FirstEnergy agreed to pay $230 million to resolve charges against the company. U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers described the operation as “likely the largest bribery, money-laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio.”
When Manchin is pressed about the fact that he makes a half-million dollars a year from a company that brokers waste coal, he lashes out. “I have been in a blind trust for 20 years. I have no idea what they’re doing,” he snapped at a reporter who grilled him about it last September. “You got a problem?” (Despite numerous emails and phone calls, Manchin’s office refused to make the senator available and declined to comment for this story.)
In fact, Manchin’s blind trust covers only a fraction of his earnings from Enersystems. “He must take us for idiots,” says Canter. According to Canter, Manchin’s business dealing may not break the letter of the law, but it is still highly unethical. The fact that most of his profits from Enersystems is reportable income, disclosed on his financial statement, means “there is nothing blind about this,” Canter says. Manchin has even signed a sworn statement saying he is aware of his Enersystems earnings, which is pretty strong evidence that he is not blind to them. Canter calls Manchin’s whole scheme “the definition of a conflict of interest.”
Once you understand how the Manchin family business works, you understand why the senator drives a Maserati (“Hollywood could not cast a better vehicle for this guy to be driving,” says Kidus Girma). And you can also understand why he knifed the Build Back Better bill, which has a variety of provisions that would accelerate the demise of coal. Central among them was the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which was basically the most important piece of climate legislation to come before Congress in more than a decade. The provision offered a carrot-and-stick approach to cutting carbon pollution, providing federal payments to utilities that increase their share of clean energy by four percent each year, while imposing federal fees on those that do not.
For Manchin, the entire Build Back Better debate has been a moment of extraordinary political leverage. “Manchin could say, ‘Give me roads, bridges, broadband, and I will give you my vote.’ And Biden would do it,” Faiz Shakir, a political adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told me. “Manchin could lower prescription-drug costs for West Virginians. He could expand health and dental insurance.” Kilwein contrasts Manchin with legendary West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who was famous for bringing home the pork. “If Byrd were in this catbird seat,” says Kilwein, “he’d be bringing a lot back to the state, a lot more than Manchin’s going to bring. West Virginia would be paved in gold to get Build Back Better through.”
Demonstrators in boats and kayaks protest near Senator Joe Manchin’s houseboat in the Washington marina. Protesters – including some of his constituents from West Virginia – are calling on him to pass the Build Back Better Act and its investments in healthcare, citizenship, and climate solutions. – Credit: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/AP Images
Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/AP Images
With the clean-electricity standard, Manchin kept everyone on edge until a few weeks before the Glasgow climate summit, in which Biden and his team hoped to prove to the world that the U.S. was serious about climate action. If Manchin had signaled support for the clean-electricity standard, it would have given the U.S. tremendous momentum. Instead, Manchin announced in a closed-door meeting with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House aides just two weeks before the conference began that he couldn’t support the clean-electricity standard. His explanation: Why should the government pay utilities to do what they are doing anyway?
And with that, any meaningful chance for the U.S. to assert itself in climate negotiations in Glasgow died. Many staffers and climate hawks who had been working on the bill felt betrayed by Manchin’s negotiating tactics. “It was a sad moment,” says Leah Stokes, an expert on energy policy who advised Senate Democrats. “We had all worked extremely hard on this. It would not have gone as far as it had with the White House and the Senate leadership if Manchin had not indicated he was open to it. It was not just a bunch of hippies out on a ledge smoking too much. A lot of the utilities were behind the bill, and Manchin had been engaged in good-faith negotiations with us for months. Or at least we thought they were good-faith negotiations. But in the end, he was not as interested in listening to the utilities as he was in listening to the fossil-fuel industry.”
Manchin’s public rationale that power companies are already transitioning away from fossil fuels as rapidly as possible is blatantly false: Ninety percent of the electricity generated in West Virginia still comes from coal. Perhaps his decision was shaped by the good ol’ boys he hangs out with. He’s had a long romance with climate-denying coal barons and the CEOs of companies like American Electric Power and ExxonMobil (in a much-publicized Zoom meeting secretly recorded by climate activists posing as recruiters looking to hire lobbyists, a senior Exxon-Mobil lobbyist claimed that he talked to Manchin’s office every week, calling the senator “a kingmaker”), all of whom have billions of dollars invested in fossil-fuel infrastructure that is rapidly losing value. Manchin is currently by far the biggest recipient in Congress of cash from the oil-and-gas industry, pulling in more than $570,000 this year, nearly four times as much as the next highest senator. Manchin, who is up for reelection in 2024, also profited from right-wing donors who appreciated him mucking up Biden’s agenda. During the first nine months of 2021, he raked in $3.3 million in campaign donations — 14 times more than his haul through the same period the previous year. Not surprisingly, being the roadblock to climate action is a lucrative position.
Forget clean-energy jobs, or the devastation West Virginians will suffer from floods due to increasingly intense storms. One recent study found that more than half the state’s critical infrastructure — including fire, police, and power stations — is at risk. In McDowell County, in the heart of West Virginia’s southern coal fields, 60 percent of homes are vulnerable to structural damage from flooding. Who cares? For Manchin, the decision to oppose the clean-electricity standard probably wasn’t a tough decision at all. After all, coal made Joe Manchin. Why would he want to kill it?
The coal powered John E. Amos Power Plant in Winfield, W.Va. – Credit: Richard Jopson/Camera Press/Redux
Richard Jopson/Camera Press/Redux
Big coal plants like John Amos in West Virginia are dinosaurs from another age. The good news is, there will never be another conventional coal plant like it built in America again. Forget the climate: In sheer economic terms, the price of renewables is far cheaper than coal, even in places like West Virginia. The bad news: Big old coal plants are surrounded by a phalanx of politicians, regulators, and engineers who believe civilized life depends on keeping these old coal burners running.
Now, due to ever-escalating maintenance and capital costs, they are bankrupting West Virginians. One fall day last year, I talked with Sandra Blankenship, a former critical-care nurse who runs a bed-and-breakfast in McDowell County, the county with the highest poverty of West Virginia. “My electric bill from AEP is $1,000 this month,” she told me. “It’s going to put me out of business.” Her 26-year-old daughter Kierstein Lester and her husband live a few miles away in a 1920s home with four young kids. They both work part time at an ATV shop, making $10 an hour. Their electric bill runs $500 a month. “Sometimes we pay more for electricity than food,” Lester says. “Everybody does,” adds Blankenship. The mother and daughter both supported Trump in 2016 and 2020. But now, due to skyrocketing electric bills, Blankenship says, “I’m gonna campaign as hard as I can to make sure Joe Manchin is not reelected.”
Plants like John Amos are also ground zero for the climate crisis. In a world that took climate action seriously, they would be shut down tomorrow. If the U.S. has any hope of meeting Biden’s goal of a zero-carbon grid by 2035, there are two basic options for how to deal with a big old coal burner like John Amos.
The first is to keep the plant running by adding on an expensive new device that captures the CO2 from the exhaust stack, compresses it, and buries it underground. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is technically doable and is already used at about 20 different industrial facilities around the world, from steel making to natural-gas processing. Coal-country politicians love to tout the promise of CCS as a magical technology to keep coal alive. “Innovation, not elimination,” Manchin often says.
But that’s just a cute slogan. CCS for coal plants is wildly expensive — the technology to capture and bury the CO2 can cost almost as much as the plant itself. Despite the fact that the power industry has been touting CCS for more than 20 years, there is precisely one coal-fired power plant in the world right now that actually captures and buries CO2. And it injects the compressed CO2 into old oil fields to push more oil out of the ground, making any climate benefit dubious. As Saul Griffith, an Australian American inventor and engineer, and MacArthur “genius” grant winner, recently put it: “Carbon capture and storage is a fraught fantasy of the fossil-fuel industry trying to extend the period of its relevance. We should be enormously skeptical, and as a populace demand far more transparency around any government plans to engage in such boondoggles.”
In many ways, CCS is just another grift, a way for power companies to harvest billions of dollars in federal funding and perpetuate the big lie that coal has a future in a world that takes the climate crisis seriously. But indulging in this fantasy may be the cost of accelerating the transition to clean energy. In an effort to win Manchin’s support, the Build Back Better bill includes a provision that would give utilities billions in dollars in tax breaks for each ton of carbon that is captured and stored. And the billions may not be entirely wasted. John Thompson, a CCS expert at the environmental organization Clean Air Task Force, makes the case that just because CCS is expensive, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth investing in. For one thing, it could reduce carbon pollution from recently built coal plants that are unlikely to be retired any time soon. “What are you going to do with all those coal plants in China?” asks Thompson. “If we can pioneer the technology here, the Chinese are very good at commercializing it.”
The second option is to accelerate the retirement of big old coal plants like John Amos. “They are going to get shut down sooner or later,” says Justin Guay, director for global climate strategy at the Sunrise Project. “We just need to figure out a way to grease the skids to make it happen faster.” One recent study found that local wind and solar could replace 80 percent of the U.S. coal fleet, giving immediate savings to customers, as well as saving lives by cutting air pollution and saving the climate by dramatically reducing carbon pollution. In Guay’s view, what we need is essentially a cash-for-clunkers program, where financial deals are structured to pay coal-plant owners to take their plants offline ASAP.
“For five percent of what we paid for Covid, we could have bought out every coal plant in the world,” Guay argues. “Money is not the issue.”
But coal plants do not just generate power. They also generate jobs and community purpose and identity. And that can’t be replaced with a simple cash buyout, Guay says. “What would a just transition look like for West Virginia? How do you replace the good pay and union jobs that will be lost as we shut down the coal industry?” Guay argues that for all the talk about the Green New Deal, there has been no real thinking about how to actually manage the transition away from coal. Build Back Better targets $300 million to rebuild coal communities, but much more is needed.
“What’s necessary now to bring about change in places like West Virginia is that we have that frank conversation about the endgame on a national level,” says Guay. “We still have this abstract conversation about decarbonization and emissions, and it’s explicitly, purposefully devoid of words like coal or oil or gas, because our national leaders want markets to do the dirty work, and they really don’t want to get their hands dirty with some of the legacy politics in places like West Virginia. We need to start by saying that these coal plants have to come offline now. And once you start doing that, you can start talking about the hard stuff.”
The other big hurdle to shutting down coal plants is the explicitly fossil-fuel-friendly character of regulators. In West Virginia, they don’t even try to hide the pro-fossil-fuel bias: One of the three members of the Public Service Commission is Bill Raney, the former head of the West Virginia Coal Association, and well-known as one of the most powerful pro-coal lobbyists in the U.S. “The job of the PSC is to make sure that customers are getting the lowest power rates they can from electric-power utilities,” says James Van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at the West Virginia University College of Law. “But in West Virginia, the PSC basically sees it as their job to protect the coal industry at any cost.”
One you-gotta-be-fucking-kidding-me example: In 2021, as the result of expert testimony from the Sierra Club, the West Virginia PSC considered whether the three big West Virginia coal plants, including John Amos, should be shut down as planned in 2028 or keep them running until 2040. The Sierra Club basically argued that it was long since time to shut down the plants — they are expensive, inefficient, and highly polluting. It was because of West Virginia’s dependence on outdated coal plants that power prices in West Virginia had risen five times faster than the national average over the past decade, according to Van Nostrand. The Sierra Club cited economic models that projected that keeping the plants running could cost West Virginia rate payers as much as $1.8 billion in additional costs.
So what did the PSC do? They not only greenlighted $400 million in investments to keep the old coal plants running until 2040, but, according to Van Nostrand, they also basically directed the utility to spend whatever it takes to keep them running, even if clean energy is cheaper. “I’ve worked on utility regulation for over 40 years,” says Van Nostrand. “West Virginia is the worst. They don’t care about rate payers. They only care about keeping coal alive.”
Few people understand the high cost of coal better than Keena Mullins. She is a 36-year-old solar entrepreneur with four kids, who works in an unadorned office about a few miles from the John Amos plant. She grew up in Dickenson County, Virginia, on the Kentucky state line. Her great-grandfather was killed in a coal-mining accident. Her grandfather, also a miner, died of black lung disease. Her father, who worked in coal mines when he was young, later became hooked on opiates, and was murdered during a dispute over a handful of Percocets when Mullins was just 24 years old. As a teen, she rode dirt bikes and ATVs in old strip mines. Coal was everywhere around her — and it still is. She breathes the pollution from the John Amos plant every time she steps outside her office.
For Mullins, growing up in coal country just made her tougher, smarter, and more determined to fight for a better life. After high school, she won a scholarship to Berea College in Kentucky. She was interested in biology and, specifically, in climate science. But she dropped out of Berea in her senior year after her brother was hospitalized while intervening in a domestic-violence incident. Mullins ended up back in Virginia, pregnant with her first child, and working as a waitress at Applebee’s. Sometime circa 2015, she heard a report on NPR about the beginning of the solar industry in Appalachia. It seemed obvious to her that coal was going to die and solar was the future. She moved to West Virginia and worked for Solar Holler, a pioneering solar company, where she learned the basics of the business. In 2019, she co-founded her own solar company, Revolt Energy, betting her career that after decades of dominance by King Coal, the energy transition in West Virginia had begun. In 2020, Revolt, which focuses on residential, industrial, and commercial-scale solar, did $1.3 million worth of work. Mullins thought she had caught the wave.
But thanks largely to Manchin and his decision to gut the Build Back Better Act, she is now worried she will have to lay off employees. “I’m not even sure the company will survive,” Mullins tells me, sitting in her spare office, with a few pictures of her kids.
Part of the trouble for solar in rough and mountainous West Virginia is the lack of flat land. But a larger part of the trouble is that the coal industry runs the state, and the fundamental belief of everyone in the coal business, according to Van Nostrand, “is that the power business in West Virginia is a zero-sum game. If you build renewable power, it takes away from coal. If you pass energy-efficiency rules, it takes away from coal. So we don’t have any renewable power, and we don’t have any energy-efficiency rules.” West Virginia has the dubious distinction of being one of the first states to pass a renewable-energy standard — and then roll it back a few years later.
On the day we spoke, Mullins had just come back from a meeting in Kentucky to pitch Revolt Energy to a solar developer backed by global investors who is exploring investments in West Virginia. Mullins explains that she is worried that clean-energy development, when it inevitably comes to West Virginia, will be driven by outsiders rather than homegrown companies. Instead of training workers in West Virginia, these big solar developers often bring in contractors from out of state (or, sometimes, out of the country) to build their projects. “We’ve been working for so long to change the way Appalachia gets its power and to build solar for us, by us, right here in our communities,” Mullins tells me. “And it’s really disappointing to know that out-of-state interests and global developers will be able to come in and be able to generate maximum economic gain from solar developments. We’ve been through the rise and decline of coal, the rise and decline of gas. Now we’re going to get screwed again, on solar.”
To Mullins, this is one of the invisible legacies of King Coal: It built a patriarchal economy and political culture, where rich outsiders come to Appalachia, extract what they want, suck out all the profits, and leave the people of West Virginia with nothing. It has created a culture of dependency and resentment, one that is exactly the opposite of the culture of entrepreneurship that drives Silicon Valley and other centers of 21st-century innovation. Since 2016, West Virginia has attracted less venture capital than any other state. And it’s a big reason why West Virginia has about as many people as Philadelphia, but only 25 percent of the GDP of Philadelphia.
“Joe Manchin is always talking about jobs, jobs, jobs,” Mullins says. “I’ve invited him here to see what we are doing many times. But he won’t come. Why is that? He’s always hanging out with CEOs, but has no time for people like me.”
Beckley, a small city in the heart of West Virginia’s southern coal fields, is an old company town, where for decades men (and they were almost all men) worked to haul hundreds of millions of tons of coal out of the ground. The coal miners helped build America, but it was brutal work — if a coal-gas explosion didn’t kill them, black lung would. The work put dinner on the table and pride in their hearts, but not much else. In Beckley today, there is a lot of chamber-of-commerce hype about the promise of tourism — the toll booths on Interstate 64 leading into the city are plastered with images of men fly-fishing in pristine mountain creeks — but the hard truth is people are leaving West Virginia faster than any other state in the nation. For many West Virginians, the state’s like a drunk relative they just can’t handle being around anymore.
But hope emerges in unexpected places. At the Dish diner, five miles down the road in Daniels, I had lunch with Joe Bevil, who manages land for the Beaver Coal Co. He’s in charge of a huge tract, some 50,000 acres in West Virginia. I had called Bevil because I read in the local paper that Beaver Coal had just leased land to a solar company, and I wondered if this was the beginning of a change.
Bevil is a rough-hewn guy who worked most of his life as a mining engineer for West Virginia coal companies. Now, as general manager for Beaver Coal, he has one simple job: maximizing income from all of the property the company owns. “We have a mixture of timber, gas, and coal development, real estate, and soon, we hope, solar,” Bevil explains. The company recently agreed to lease 225 acres to a solar developer.
Right now, the company’s income from solar doesn’t compare with the income from coal. Most of the coal that is mined on the company’s land is metallurgical coal, used to make steel, which was selling for $200 a ton in recent years, a very good price that Bevil was clearly happy about. The mines on Beaver Coal’s land produce about 1 million tons a year, and they get a six percent cut. That means some $10 million a year in revenue from coal.
In contrast, the lease for the 225-acre solar plant will comprise only about two percent of Beaver Coal’s annual revenue. “It’s no comparison,” Bevil says.
But then he says something else: “The coal is going to be gone some day,” he tells me. “We know that. And we have to start planning for that.”
Bevil is no tree-hugger. He grew up in a hardcore Democratic family outside Pittsburgh, but then drifted to the right in recent years. He voted for Trump twice. He’s not convinced the climate crisis is real (at one point, he suggests to me that microwaves from cellphones might be heating up the planet). But he says that if the climate crisis is real, he thinks it’s China’s job to solve it, since they are the biggest polluters on the planet.
Bevil looks around him and he knows what is happening. He knows that coal will soon be a fuel of the past, and that West Virginia politicians have misled the people of the state for years about this. Bevil knows that despite blips in the market, coal is never coming back to its former glory, and he knows that dependency on coal is hurting the state. He tells me about a Fortune 500 company that had considered locating in Beckley, then pulled out because West Virginia’s coal-fired power didn’t fit with their corporate sustainability goals. “If building a solar farm on our land helps accelerate the transition, that is a good thing, as far as I am concerned,” he tells me.
What made me feel hopeful talking to Bevil is his pragmatism. He has spent a lifetime in the mines, doing a job that helped keep America’s lights on, but he has no sentimental attachment to it. He’d be happy to cover all 50,000 acres of Beaver Coal’s land with solar if the economics were right. And in Bevil, you can see how a rural coalition that could reinvent the West Virginia economy might emerge — if only there were some enlightened political leadership.
“The tragedy of West Virginia is that no politician has stepped up and said, ‘Listen, this is the future,’ ” says political adviser Shakir. “ ‘You guys are proud, hardworking people, but this isn’t going to last forever. And I’ve got to find something that’s going to give you that same mission and purpose that you long for.’ That’s what Joe Manchin should be doing, instead of talking about the virtues of coal.”
Both Goldman Sachs and the United Mine Workers of America — two voices from opposite ends of the economic universe — apparently agree. After Manchin told Fox he couldn’t vote for the Build Back Better bill, Goldman Sachs cut next year’s growth forecast; UMWA President Cecil Roberts put out a statement urging Manchin “to revisit his opposition to [Build Back Better].” Roberts specifically pointed to provisions in the bill that extend an expiring fee mandated of coal companies to compensate miners suffering from black lung disease, encourage businesses to build manufacturing facilities for miners who have lost their jobs, and penalize companies that deny workers the right to unionize.
But Manchin’s record is one that has always valued corporate profits over human lives. “If you think about what we’ve been through this year with fires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, and then take that to a global scale, and then accelerate that and increase the human pain that will be caused if we can’t get on track [with carbon-pollution reductions] — it’s just so enormous,” says John Podesta. “But Trump got 69 percent of the vote in West Virginia, right? So demolishing the politics for Democrats and killing [Build Back Better] legislation probably doesn’t hurt Manchin back home. In my interactions with him over the years, I would like to think that he’s somebody who does care about people, and that maybe that would overcome some of this resistance. Rather than being nostalgic for the past, he has a chance to provide a pathway for good jobs and a cleaner and better future. But there’s a lot of skepticism about whether he’ll ever see that.”
Whatever Manchin’s political future may be, one thing is for sure: For West Virginians, the pain is only going to get worse. As other states benefit from the jobs and economic progress that come from the inevitable transition to clean energy, West Virginia risks being left even further behind. “West Virginia politicians can only deny reality for so long,” says Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who helped manage the energy transition in coal-heavy regions of southern Illinois. “One way or another, the coal plants will shut down and the industry will shut down and the economy will be decimated. That is exactly the wrong way to solve this problem. The right way to deal with it is to have the courage to tell West Virginians what the future really looks like and begin to prepare for it. But that is not what any of them are doing.”
After talking with Bevil, I drove through the broken streets of Beckley, past the abandoned beauty shops with vines growing over them, past billboards for divorce lawyers and ammo shops, past the markers commemorating dead coal miners near the courthouse, and onto the interstate toward Charleston. On the way, I detoured on a back road to Danville, a small town in Boone County, to visit the skeleton of the Hobet 21 mine, where I had first witnessed the explosions and destruction of mountaintop-removal mining 20 years earlier. At the time, Hobet 21 was one of the largest mines in West Virginia, covering 12,000 acres. It was run by Arch Coal, one of the biggest mining companies in the U.S. Since then, Arch Coal has gone bankrupt, reemerging as Arch Resources and shedding workers and benefits along the way. The mine closed down in 2015, leaving behind a blown-up mountain, streams polluted with toxic heavy metals, and workers without any preparation for life beyond coal. It’s the story of West Virginia in a nutshell.
I found the road to the mine, but it was closed with a chain-link fence. I drove around to some back roads, and was able to bushwhack up onto a ridge and get a view of the pit. Rock and coal in the ancient mountains were exposed like layers in a wedding cake. Some scrubby locust trees grew in the “reclaimed” areas, where Arch’s mining engineers had piled up dirt to make it look vaguely like a hill. A small lake at the bottom of the pit glowed toxic blue. Twenty years ago, I had stood near this spot and listened to one of those engineers tell me that blowing up mountains was a good thing because it provided more flat land for commercial development. He suggested there would be a shopping mall up here one day, maybe a factory. Hundreds of people would be employed here, he told me. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now. There are 6 million acres of abandoned mine sites in the U.S. Solar panels have popped up on a few, and not far from where I stood, a 35-acre lavender farm employs a handful of former coal miners. Hopeful as those projects may be, they are just lipstick on the coal-country cadaver that Manchin pretends is still alive. Like the disemboweled mountain itself, Manchin is a scar from a time when blasting the Earth to mine coal to burn for energy that cooked the climate was a profitable thing to do. As I stood there on the ridgetop, it occurred to me that if future historians want to tell the story of how humans turned our home into a hell zone of fire, drought, and rising seas, this would be as good of a place as any to begin.
Preston Xanthopoulos: The majority of traditional Republicans have been silenced
Alicia Preston Xanthopoulos January 7, 2022
Alicia Preston Xanthopoulos
Former Chief Justice John Broderick is one of the smartest, kindest, thoughtful gentlemen our state is graced with and his recent words in this paper are something we should all read and take heed.
While I may not agree with every assertion in “Make no mistake. America is broken.”, it is something to consider thoughtfully, as he clearly did while penning his opinion on the state of American discourse and our democracy.
Justice Broderick poses several questions and I’d like to take a stab at answering two of them. “Where are the Republican voices with the courage to speak up? Why are so many good Republicans remaining silent or objecting only in whispers or among a small circle of safe friends?” While he may have been referring to our elected Republican leaders, let me answer from the perspective of a regular Republican folk. The answer is quite simple: We’ve been silenced.
The vast majority of we Republicans, and it is the majority of us, love our country, our democracy and don’t demonize the opposition. We have friends on both sides of the political aisle and we are dismayed at the current discourse from the fringe of the Grand ‘Ole Party. But, anytime we discuss it, we get attacked, ferociously and not just from our own side.
I expect extremists in my party to get angry when we call them out for being extremists, but, we get arrows shot at us from every angle. I’ve been vocal about my thoughts on the Insurrection, and I believe it was indeed an Insurrection, and I’ve been told by those on the rabid left, “too little too late.” I’ve been told the fact I’m still a Republican shows complacency for everything Trump may have done or said—it is a “silent support” of the violent acts of those at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to not leave the Republican Party. No words are strong enough, no sentences long enough, to be simply enough to appease those that actually agree with you on certain topics, if you are members of different political parties.
If I put “hypocrite” or “hypocrisy” into the search bar at the top of the email account attached to this column, I get literally dozens of past emails sent to me responding to something I’ve written—almost every single one of them is in response to a time I disagreed with or condemned something done by my own party, or members of it. Every time in that instance, it is by a self proclaimed liberal or Democrat who is the sender.
The reality is, while Justice Broderick is authentic in his seeking for Republicans to rally against the unAmerican acts of perpetuating “The Big Lie” or not calling out Jan. 6 and its participants and motive, the vocal Democrats on the far left are not. They don’t want us to speak out as Republicans, they simply want us to become Democrats. The problem is, being a member of a political party is not like joining a social club. I’m not a Republican to have cocktails with friends. I’m a Republican because I believe in conservative principals and a free market and I am not responsible for every word or act of others in my party any more than Democrats are responsible for every word or deed of theirs.
So, to answer your question, Justice Broderick, why do so many of us stay quiet when sometimes we want to scream at the top of our lungs for the world to hear? Because, it’s not worth it, man.
Life — and we should all know this more than ever before — is simply too short to keep walking into the wolves den, particularly when every known breed of wolf is laying in wait. The country is just too angry. So, we stay quiet, at least more than we’d like to. More than we would’ve in years gone by.
We are “remaining silent or objecting only in whispers or among a small circle of safe friends,” because it is no longer worth it to speak out. We won’t convince anyone of anything except that it’s a good idea to send a nasty email saying things like, “Your life is filled with hate and ugliness ruled by greed, fear, hate and ignorance. You are a pathetic role model.” That came from a self-proclaimed progressive in response to my fierce condemnation of the Jan. 6th attack and Trump’s role in it. And, yes, that email started with telling me to save my “hypocrisy”.
So we, the majority of conservatives and Republicans, (yes, majority regardless of what silly polls say,) stay quiet more often than not. We take solace speaking with each other and knowing how most of us feel. It’s quite simply, just healthier that way and as I noted, we aren’t changing anyone’s mind right now. Heck, Trump can’t even change his own supporters minds about the vaccine, what could be expected of the rest of us?
While I have the greatest respect for Justice Broderick and I know he loves this country that he has served in many honorable ways, let me point out one place I have more optimism about America than he might.
In his piece he noted, “Unless things change, America will continue its sorry decline from being a democratic beacon to a world yearning to be free to just a sad example of a noble yet failed experiment in self-government.” I am more optimistic than that.
Things will indeed change. When all the things causing our nation angst right now get better — and they will get better — so will our national temperature. When COVID moves out, and the inflation slows and we get further away from the 2020 election cycle, we will get better. We may be broken, but as a country, we have plenty of glue — the things we all actually believe in — to put us back together again. Justice Broderick’s piece actually demonstrated that, if you look closely enough.
Alicia Preston Xanthopoulos is a former political consultant and member of the media. She’s a native of Hampton Beach where she lives with her family and three poodles. The views expressed are those of the writer. Write to her at PrestonPerspective@gmail.com.
“Why is it that the Unselect Committee of totally partisan political hacks, whose judgment has long ago been made, (sic) not discussing the rigged Presidential Election of 2020?” the former president said in a Jan. 6 statement, which spokesperson Liz Harrington tweeted. “It’s because they don’t have the answers or justifications for what happened.
“They got away with something, and it is leading to our Country’s destruction.”
“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said. “You can’t obey the law only when it’s convenient. You can’t be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies.”
The violent insurrection was predicated on the misguided belief that widespread voter fraud swayed the election in Biden’s favor. This was a baseless claim when Trump first made it in late 2020, and the year that passed since has only added to the evidence of the election’s legitimacy.
USA TODAY reached out to Harrington for comment.
Test ballots are hand counted, July 14, 2021, in the Wesley Bolin Building at the Arizona State Fairgrounds, Phoenix, Arizona.
Ample evidence fraud did not affect election outcome
In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s win, election officials insisted the results were legitimate.
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its partners said in a November 2020 statement. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”
“Nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale, the massive scale that would have tipped the entire election – nor can public doubt alone justify a radical break when the doubt itself was incited without any evidence,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican said in his address to the chamber before it was evacuated during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Since then, a mountain of evidence – including lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and even partisan reviews – has affirmed those results.
In those battleground states, numerous audits and recounts have affirmed Biden’s win:
In Arizona, a six-month audit of election results in Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, confirmed the state’s election results. The audit was conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a firm hired by the Republican-dominated state Senate and whose founder had previously promoted unfounded claims of voter fraud. Multiple hand recounts, as well as a forensic audit of voting machines, have also confirmed Maricopa County’s results.
In Pennsylvania, a statewide risk-limiting audit found “strong evidence of the accuracy of the count of votes cast in the November 2020 presidential election. ” The audit examined ballots in 63 out of 67 counties.
Many claims of fraud stemmed from a misunderstanding of how vote counting and reporting processes work in different states.
In Wisconsin, for example, some claimed late-night vote dumps for Biden were proof of fraud. That’s wrong – the state can’t count absentee ballots until Election Day, so tallies for the largest counties can take all day to complete, or even into the night. On election night, that resulted in a late addition of absentee votes, which trended heavily Democratic in 2020.
Similar narratives targeted other contested states.
In Michigan, an election-night typo resulted in the addition of more than 100,000 votes to Biden’s tally. Although the clerical error was quickly corrected, some falsely claimed it was evidence of voter fraud. In Georgia, footage of poll workers placing ballots in their proper storage containers was also misconstrued as evidence of fraud.
Other pervasive election conspiracy theories haven’t panned out, either.
Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” Lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and partisan reviews have all affirmed the election results. Officials from both parties have repeatedly debunked claims of widespread voter fraud. With 306 electoral votes, Biden beat Trump in the election.
Rep. Mo Brooks Reportedly ‘Cheered’ Capitol Riot As Colleagues Feared For Their Lives
Mary Papenfuss January 7, 2022
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) “cheered” the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last year as his fellow lawmakers feared for their lives, said a former aide to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Brooks had urged on then-President Donald Trump’s supporters at a National Mall rally just before they stormed the Capitol, telling them to be ready to make a “blood” sacrifice, just as Americans did during the Revolution. He also told them to march on the Capitol and said it was time “patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” He was wearing body armor at the time.
Later, when a pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol, lawmakers on the House floor were “fearful for their lives. Republican members … men crying in the cloakroom for their safety,” former McCarthy aide Ryan O’Toole told Jake Tapper on Thursday on CNN.
“As we escaped the chamber — to what sounded like gunshots — to the secure location, I think people were still scared … and not sure what was happening,” added O’Toole, who’s now deputy policy director for Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the House select committee investigating the riot.
Not everyone had the same attitude, O’Toole noted.
“Mo Brooks, for example, was glad,” he added. “He was cheering on the fact that the 117th Congress started this way. That was much to the dismay of others in the room.”
Brooks denied in a statement to Alabama Political Reporter that he was cheering the attack.
He told AL.com that O’Toole’s account was “total bovine excrement” and suggested it was intended to harm his campaign for Senate this year. He added that O’Toole’s switch to Cheney’s staff “says a lot about why he lied.” Cheney has been criticized by fellow Republicans for not buying in to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him and for chastising the former president for inciting the mob attack last year based on those lies.
O’Toole told Tapper he changed employers because he wanted to work for someone who is “loyal to the Constitution.” He said McCarthy’s leadership “strategy is dictated by the most extreme wings of the party.”
Brooks also emphasized in a message to AL.com that he has previously called for prosecuting anyone involved in the insurrection who “violated the law.”
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s argument for not changing or ending the filibuster states is basically that is a tool that protects the democracy and was created for comity. It was not. In 2011, Rob Goodman and Jimmi Soni wrote in The Atlantic: “There’s a reason, after all, that there’s no filibuster written into the Constitution. Our founders had good reason to fear the consequences of a legislature addicted to minority rule.
Sen. Joe Manchin was not always against changing or eliminating the senate filibuster. In 2011, he called for overhauling the filibuster because it “paralyzed” the U.S. and prevented cooperation between the parties. Convenient “amnesia”?
This country has been so polarized for the past five years that the bipartisanship that Sen. Sinema states as a reason to keep the filibuster does not now exist. How many times have Democrats brought bills to the floor with no Republican support?
Right now, Democrats must continue to show voters they are a party of strength and push their positions of being a party for all Americans. The Democrats must not allow Republicans to dictate legislation. It is clear that after the loss in 2020 of the White House, the Congress and the Senate, the GOP is intent on regaining power at any cost, including using the filibuster to block bills that would help their own constituents because the bills were brought to the floor by Democrats.
Without changing or eliminating the filibuster, there will be no check on nationwide Republican-led voter suppression laws that would ensure a their party’s majority in Congress and the Senate, and possibly the White House. Their “agenda” is to regain power and keep it any cost. Republicans will never support voting rights legislation and will continue their obstructionist agenda against everything democratic or any legislation proposed by Democrats.
To ensure equal voting rights, to support future fair and free elections and correctly count every vote cast, the filibuster must be carved out or changed to pass protective voting rights legislation, now. Without this, Democrats could lose control of the House, the Senate and perhaps the White House, and their agenda of helping America will be squashed under boot of a party led by an aspiring autocrat intent on keeping power through fear and bullying and ultimately marking the end of our fledgling democracy.
What if the Jan. 6 insurrection had succeeded in illegally installing Trump?
David Rothkopf – January 6, 2022
As we approach the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, many questions remain. Among these, one of the most important is, “What if?”
What if the coup attempt had succeeded? What if the election results had been overturned? What if Donald Trump were illegally installed for a second term as president of the United States?
It could have happened several different ways. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman might have been out sick last Jan. 6 and not in place to divert the mob away from fleeing and hiding members of Congress. The Trumpist horde could have found their way to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Mike Pence or other members of Congress and killed or injured them.
Had they done so, it might have resulted in postponing the certification of the election and in the ensuing time, despite whatever national outrage was triggered, the former president and his supporters might have engineered politically motivated challenges in key states throwing the election’s results into question.
Do you doubt that? Then your memory has faded much in the past year. Because a coup attempt occurred, five people died, more than 140 police officers were injured, for the first time in American history we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, and the backlash with the leadership and rank and file of the GOP was shockingly minimal.
A stunning blow to democracy
Just hours after the attack, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to object to the election results – although there was zero evidence of wrongful outcomes in electoral counts. Even with massive evidence of Trump’s central role in promoting the uprising, only 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him. Just seven voted to convict him in the Senate.
What is more, within weeks of the assault, the leadership and rank and file of the GOP fell into line around the continued promotion of the Big Lie and the continued defense of Trump as their party’s standard-bearer.
This combination of gullibility or willingness to deny demonstrable facts to advance a political goal suggests that another “what if” scenario also came precariously close to succeeding.
This is the plot we are learning was being pursued by Trump supporters to get the certification stalled by peaceful means while state challenges could be pursued and – with the help of GOP legislatures, governors and judges – won. In a new memoir, Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro calls the effort “a perfect plan” and has stated, “We had over 100 congressmen committed to it.” He called the plan “the Green Bay Sweep.”
We do know that the effort came very close to success. For example, one key element was for Vice President Pence to refuse to certify the election results, sending them back to the states. Pence reportedly struggled with this issue, wanted to find a way to make it work, before being dissuaded by former Vice President Dan Quayle. What if Pence had ignored the advice?
Had the election results been flipped, it would have been a stunning blow to democracy in the United States. But it is not hard to imagine that within weeks after stealing the election, Trump would have moved quickly to consolidate power and protect himself from challenges. How do we know? He had senior officials in the Justice Department like Jeffery Clark working with him to flip the election, according to The New York Times, and who is said to have even schemed to remove an acting attorney general not deemed loyal enough to Trump.
What we face today
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Trump, a man who has joked about being president for life and envying the power of dictators, would have shredded the Constitution and likely have had the support of much of the Republican Party as he did it.
Scary as the answers to those “what if” questions are, perhaps even scarier is that today – despite Biden having won the election with more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, despite Trump having lost more than 60 court challenges to the election, despite failed recount efforts, despite public knowledge of unfounded and likely illegal attempts to pressure state officials to change their vote counts, despite the coup attempt and becoming the only American president ever impeached twice – the attempt to undermine democracy is continuing unabated.
Election laws are being changed that will make it harder for tens of millions of Americans – often minority voters and others who tend to vote Democratic – to vote. States are shifting decision-making power in contested elections to partisan officials.
And while President Biden has said that he was willing to support filibuster reform to ensure voting rights are protected – a crucial move given the threat – it is far from a sure thing that will happen.
What is more, a recent poll shows that Trump vs. Biden rematch in 2024 would be a dead heat.
The attempted coup is not over. The threat to democracy not only remains, it has also proved to be shockingly resilient. Its advocates are as shameless as they are resourceful. And this means that the most instructive aspect of “what if” questions might be that they remind us of what could lie ahead for us all if we are not more vigilant – and if we do not fight as so many of our ancestors have done to preserve and enhance democracy in America.
Let me start with the part you already know — probably from personal experience. Omicron is surging across the U.S.
We set several daily case records for new infections last week. Many of us watched friends and family — vaxxed and boosted — get infected, feeling as though the walls were closing in on us, too. “Name that infection” became the holidays’ most popular parlor game as we struggled to access rapid tests to know for sure whether our sniffles and scratchy throats were a common cold or something more sinister.
COVID has now infected nearly a sixth of all Americans. As omicron continues to surge, it’ll likely claim many more. And yet omicron is changing the nature of how we understand COVID. In November, I posed three questions that ought to guide our thinking about omicron. December brought us answers which may explain what we’re in for this January.
Omicron causes more breakthrough infections.
One question was whether omicron could better evade vaccine-mediated immunity. The answer is complicated: Vaccines were never intended to eliminate the risk of infection. Rather, they were tested against their ability to protect against serious symptoms among the infected. Nevertheless, the secondary benefit of protecting against infection in the first place emerged as a hallmark of vaccine messaging: that we should get vaccinated to protect ourselves and our communities.
What’s clear is that vaccinations continue to protect us from severe illness, particularly among those who are boosted. One analysis by the U.K. government of over a million people who were infected with either delta or omicron found that one dose alone was 52% effective at preventing hospitalization and two doses were 72% effective, although protection waned substantially after 25 weeks. Those who were boosted enjoyed 88% protection from hospitalization compared to the unvaccinated. Ultimately, the unvaccinated remain eight times as likely to be hospitalized from COVID.
The study also showed that booster doses were up to 75% effective at preventing infection within two to four weeks of having received the dose. But that protection waned to between 40-50% after 10 weeks. Protection from infection is more blunted, as the shocking number of breakthrough cases has demonstrated. In that respect, omicron is decidedly more vaccine evasive than previous variants.
To understand why omicron feels like it’s causing so many breakthrough cases, even among the boosted, remember that 25% of a skyrocketing number of exposures is still a lot of infections.
And that’s because …
Omicron is definitely more transmissible.
That much is certain. The vertical lines on graph after graph of COVID cases is all we need to answer that question. But the next question is more interesting: “Well, why?”
A flurry of research articles have all pointed to the same phenomenon. One study from the University of Liverpool’s Molecular Virology Research Group studied the pathophysiology of omicron in mice, and found that omicron was less likely to replicate in lung cells, opting for the cells of the throat instead. Another study from a group in Belgium found similar results in hamsters.
Replication in the throat — so close to the mouth and nose — could help explain, in part, why omicron is so transmissible. But it could also explain something else.
Omicron is less likely to require hospitalization (per individual).
Several studies have demonstrated that, indeed, each omicron case is less likely to require hospitalization. That U.K. study also showed us that, of 528,000 people infected with omicron and 573,000 people infected with delta, omicron-infected people were, at baseline, about a third as likely to require hospitalization.
That said, omicron could still paradoxically cause more hospitalizations. How? Because if there are more than three times the number of omicron cases as there are delta cases, even with a third the probability or hospitalizations, there could be more hospitalizations overall.
That complicates the way we understand “severity.” On an individual level, omicron is decidedly less severe. But on a population level, its transmissibility means that it could be more severe, causing substantially more pressure on our hospital system.
There’s another risk here. Omicron is already causing more hospitalization among young children, who for most of the pandemic have been spared the worst consequences of COVID-19. That’s in part because whereas the hospitalization rate for omicron among adults is lower, the hospitalization rate for omicron among children appears to be similar to that of delta. Multiply that by substantially more cases, and it helps explain why hospitalization among children is higher than it’s ever been.
The pathophysiology of omicron, which appears to replicate in the throat, may explain this. Pediatricians are reporting croup-like symptoms — a dry, barking cough — among patients who test positive for omicron. Because their necks are smaller, airway obstruction poses an acute risk for children, and may explain why a variant that disproportionately infects the upper airway could affect children so profoundly.
What does it mean for the state (and future) of the pandemic?
South Africa, where omicron was first discovered, has already reported that it’s beyond the peak of its omicron curve — and that it occurred without a spike in COVID mortality. What’s clear is that omicron moves fast. Infectious disease models suggest that we could hit the peak of our curve as early as next week, though most believe it’ll peak by the end of January.
In the interim, though, it’ll continue to wreak havoc. Though most cases are mild, its transmissibility has already caused disruptions across the economy — including the healthcare system and the airline industry. Over 2,000 flights were cancelled yesterday alone.
That’s, in part, what prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue new isolation guidelines for exposed and infected Americans, changing the individual isolation period from 10 days to only five. Though it’s generally true that omicron’s infection timeline appears to be shorter than previous variants, there’s no guarantee that infected people are not still not transmitting the virus after this new five-day period. Indeed, the guidelines should have required a negative test to assure that infected people weren’t spreading the extraordinarily transmissible variant after they isolated — a change the CDC is now considering.
That brings up the other challenge: there just isn’t enough testing to go around. Requiring tests would have accentuated our national testing shortage, rubbing in the egg that’s currently all over the Biden administration’s face on this. Ultimately, though, surging cases will do it just the same as people struggle to differentiate between COVID, the flu, and the common cold.
But there is a light at the end of this relatively short tunnel.
Omicron vs. delta vs. the next variant.
Right now, there’s a subcellular arms race raging between omicron and delta. Omicron’s winning: It’s more transmissible — and having had omicron seems to protect people from getting delta more than having had delta protects people from getting omicron. Immunity tends to wane with time. But because this surge is so broad and so quick, omicron is leaving a wall of acquired immunity in its wake.
Though the Great Wall of Immunity that omicron is currently constructing is no guarantee that the next variant may not drive right through it, it certainly makes it harder. In order to outcompete omicron, the next one will need to be different enough from omicron to evade omicron-mediated immunity, and/or to be yet more transmissible than it. That’s a big hurdle. Four serious variants in, I no longer put anything past SARS-CoV-2 … so I’m not saying that’s impossible. I’m just saying that once we’re finally there, omicron could potentially have played a role in getting us past the pandemic phase of COVID into the endemic phase.
What do we do now?
There’s a very difficult January ahead of us. Cases are likely to continue to skyrocket through the peak. We’re already near 500,000 cases per day, on average. A month of growth could spell tens of millions more cases.
First, if you haven’t yet boosted, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. There’s ample evidence that boosters protect against both infection and hospitalization with omicron. Get your booster now.
It’s also time to upgrade that fun cloth mask to something that’s medical grade. While any mask is better than no mask, medical grade masks are substantially better than cloth masks. The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota estimates that an N95 can extend the amount of time it would take to breathe in an infectious dose of COVID if you were breathing the same air as an infected person fifty-fold, from 15 minutes to 12.5 hours — whereas the average cloth mask buys you about 5 minutes. And that was before omicron.
Rapid antigen tests are hard to come by; there’s also some question over how well they perform on omicron. But if you can get your hands on them, they can help provide some assurances for the most important social events.
Finally, January may be the month to forgo all but the most necessary social engagements. Remember, COVID doesn’t care how “over it” you are. It’s not yet over with us.
Asked why he came to the Capitol this day, Cheney said, “It’s an important historical event,” referring to the anniversary of the insurrection. “You can’t overestimate how important it is.”
PHOTO: Former Vice President Dick Cheney and Rep. Liz Cheney recite the pledge of allegiance on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021. (House TV)
He added, “I’m deeply disappointed we don’t have better leadership in the Republican Party to restore the Constitution.”
He noted that his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., is an exception. She is the vice chair of the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, and has come under heavy fire from fellow Republicans.
PHOTO: Former Vice President Dick Cheney is interviewed in St. Michaels, Md., March 17, 2012. (David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images, FILE)
Cheney then went to the House floor with his daughter — he has lifetime floor privileges as a congressman who held the seat she now occupies — to observe a moment of silence.
One by one, Democratic members, including some liberals who castigated him and his politics when he was vice president — approached him to shake his hand and pay their respects.
Besides the Cheneys and her staffers, there were no other Republicans in sight.
PHOTO: Former Vice President Dick Cheney walks with his daughter Rep. Liz Cheney in the Capitol Rotunda at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2022. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
As Cheney departed the House chamber, walking alongside his daughter, he told ABC News, “Very proud of Liz,” when asked for some parting thoughts.
“It’s great coming back,” he told a swarm of reporters. “Liz is doing a hell of a job. I’m here to support her.”
When asked for his reaction to Republican leadership’s handling of this day, Cheney — not one to mince words — said, “Well, it’s not a leadership that resembles any of the folks that I knew when I was here for 10 years — dramatically.”
Rep Liz Cheney said it was “very concerning,” adding, “I think a party that is in thrall to a cult personality is a party that is dangerous to the country, and I think we clearly have got to get to a place we are we are focused on substance and on issues.”
The former vice president then took the long walk across the Capitol toward the Senate chamber, stopping momentarily to take in a white stone bust of himself outside the office of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who is far from the Capitol, and instead, at a funeral for a late GOP senator in Atlanta.
ABC News’ Trish Turner, Benjamin Siegel and Mariam Khan contributed to this report.
