Category: Labor and Working

At Davos, Rick Perry makes bizarre claim about U.S. fossil fuel exports

ThinkProgress

At Davos, Rick Perry makes bizarre claim about U.S. fossil fuel exports

Exporting climate-destroying fuels is not “exporting freedom.”

Joe Romm    January 25, 2018

Rick Perry wtih Kellyanne Conway March 2, 2017. CREDIT: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Rick Perry with Kellyanne Conway, March 2, 2017. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s big push to export fossil fuels should be seen as an effort to spread freedom throughout the world — since it gives countries another choice regarding where they get their energy.

“The United States is not just exporting energy, we’re exporting freedom,” Perry said during a Fox Business interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

For Perry, giving other countries a choice of who satisfies their addiction to climate-destroying fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas is somehow increasing their freedom. But it’s really exporting dependence and exporting carbon pollution.

If the U.S. were to promote zero-carbon fuels, like solar and wind power, however, that would free countries from dependence on anyone’s dirty hydrocarbons.

CREDIT: TWITTER/PEDRO SIRGADO

In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels

Indeed, the whole point of the landmark December 2015 Paris climate agreementis that more than 190 of the world’s leading countries unanimously agreed with the overwhelming science that says the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to leave most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground.

Today, thanks to Trump, the United States literally sits alone as the only one of those countries now saying it will abandon this global deal, after the last two other holdouts, Nicaragua and Syria, signed on last fall.
A visitor watches protest banners outside the COP 23 Fiji UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Monday, Nov. 6, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Martin Meissner

And then there was one: Syria joins Paris agreement leaving the U.S. behind

A country in the midst of civil war is doing better on climate change than the United States.

“There’s no strings attached when you buy American LNG [liquefied natural gas],” Perry told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “So that’s world-changing.”

Well, American LNG is world-changing — or, rather, climate changing — but not in a good way.

Back in 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy released an analysis of total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG. One of the country’s top methane experts told me at the time, “a close reading of the DOE report in the context of the recent literature indicates that exporting natural gas from the U.S. as LNG is a very poor idea” from a climate perspective.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/STEVEN SENNE

Energy Department Bombshell: LNG Has No Climate Benefit For Decades, IF EVER*

More recent research paints an equally grim picture. A study in the journal Energylast month on the overall emissions impact of “U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports,” concluded that “emissions are not likely to decrease and may increase significantly due to greater global energy consumption, higher emissions in the U.S., and methane leakage.”

Total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions for LNG are much higher than they are for regular pipeline gas because the liquefaction process is so energy-intensive and because there are even more leaks from that process and from shipping the LNG overseas.

Remember, natural gas is mostly methane, and some 86 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. And earlier this month, a NASA analysis found that the jump in fossil-fuel methane emissions in the past decade “is substantially larger than in previous literature.”

UK fracking protest, February 25, 2017. CREDIT: Ashley Cooper/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

NASA just made a stunning discovery about how fracking fuels global warming

Natural gas is not part of the climate solution, it’s part of the problem.

And if fracked gas domestically is part of the climate problem, then liquefying that gas and shipping it to other countries is an even bigger problem.

When you add in our exports of coal and oil, then America is one of the biggest exporters of carbon pollution in the world. And that is not exporting freedom.

How We Can Lower Drug Prices?

Robert Reich added a new episode.
How We Can Lower Drug Prices? (When Big Pharma Pulls the Strings)

Senate Republicans’ first order of business this week after shutting down the government was to confirm Alex Azar — a former pharmaceutical executive who jacked up the prices on medications at Eli Lilly — as secretary of health and human services. If we are ever going to rein in the soaring cost of prescription drugs in America, we must break Big Pharma’s grip on our political system.

How We Can Lower Drug Prices? (When Big Pharma Pulls the Strings)

Senate Republicans' first order of business this week after shutting down the government was to confirm Alex Azar — a former pharmaceutical executive who jacked up the prices on medications at Eli Lilly — as secretary of health and human services. If we are ever going to rein in the soaring cost of prescription drugs in America, we must break Big Pharma's grip on our political system.

Posted by Robert Reich on Thursday, January 25, 2018

Wisconsin Republicans Abruptly Decide To Oust Top State Elections And Ethics Officials

HuffPost

Wisconsin Republicans Abruptly Decide To Oust Top State Elections And Ethics Officials

Sam Levine, HuffPost         January 25, 2018
Republicans in Wisconsin voted not to confirm the heads of the state's election and ethics commission on Tuesday. (Getty Images)Wisconsin Republicans voted Tuesday to remove the state’s top election and ethics officials, despite looming state and federal elections.

Led by Republicans in a vote along party lines, the state Senate voted to oust Ethics Administrator Brian Bell and Elections Administrator Michael Haas from their respective roles by denying to confirm them on a permanent basis. Both men did not get a customary public hearing before the vote.

Haas and Bell previously worked for the state’s Government Accountability Board when it was probing whether the campaign of Gov. Scott Walker (R) illegally coordinated with outside conservative groups. The probe was shut down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2015, but The Guardian obtained information from the investigation and published an article on its contents. Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel (R) conducted an investigation into the leak and recommended charges against nine people who worked on the probe, but not Bell and Haas. Despite that, House Speaker Robin Vos (R) and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) both called on Haas and Bell to resign.

The Government Accountability Board was disbanded in 2015 and replaced with the state ethics commission and election commission.

In 2016, the members of the elections commission, which is bipartisan, unanimously picked Haas to lead it. The six-member body is charged with overseeing and implementing Wisconsin’s election laws.

Haas’ removal comes just weeks before a Feb. 20 primary in the state and a little under three months before the first day when candidates can begin circulating petitions for the 2018 fall election. As Wisconsin’s chief election official, Haas is responsible for administering those elections, ensuring compliance with federal law and overseeing investigation and enforcement of the state’s election code. He is also charged with overseeing the state’s election equipment, a role with increased importance this year because Wisconsin was one of 21 states targeted by Russian hackers ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Mark Thomsen, a Democrat and the election commission’s chairman, noted during a meeting Wednesday that Haas was the only person in the agency with the required clearance to work with the Department of Homeland Security to secure the state’s election system.

Haas only had a peripheral role in the Walker probe, where he was responsible for legal documents, but not the core part of the investigation into the governor’s campaign, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

Meanwhile, the members of the state’s ethics commission unanimously picked Bell to serve as their administrator in 2016. The six-member panel is charged with overseeing the state’s campaign finance, lobbying and ethics laws. An investigation by the ethics commission into Bell found there was “not a scintilla of evidence” he was partisan in his duties at the Government Accountability Board. Earlier this month, Bell said he left the board because it was too partisan.

Fitzgerald, the Republican Senate leader, said Tuesday the fact that neither men had been linked to wrongdoing didn’t really matter to him.

“I can’t have confidence in an agency that still is employing some of the individuals that were there [the Government Accountability Board],” he told the Wisconsin State Journal on Tuesday.

Chris Ott, the executive director of the Wisconsin ACLU, said the timing of Haas’ dismissal was suspicious and said the sudden push to oust the officials was out of the blue.

“The Wisconsin Senate’s vote yesterday along party lines to try ousting the head of our Elections Commission looks like political interference in a nonpartisan agency that helps and protects Wisconsin voters, just a few weeks before important statewide elections start,” he said in a statement.

Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, called the vote not to confirm Haas and Bell “one of the most grotesque abuses of power that has occurred in Wisconsin in its history.”

“No evidence, no charges, no specific examples of misconduct, nothing. Just secret agreement among the members of the majority party in the State Senate to get rid of them both, right before important elections, and replace them, presumably, with sycophants and pawns that the Republicans will dictate what they decide and what the result of their work on elections and ethics will be,” Heck said in a statement.

Wisconsin law says both the election and ethics commissions ”shall be under the direction and supervision of an administrator, who shall be appointed by a majority of the members of the commission, with the advice and consent of the senate” to a four-year term. While the law says the administrator will only serve on an interim basis until approved by the state Senate, it also says the administrator can only be removed “by the affirmative vote of a majority of all members of the commission voting at a meeting of the commission called for that purpose.”

The Walker administration said Wednesday it does not believe the commission can legally appoint Haas to lead it. “Because the Senate voted against confirmation of the potential Administrator who was serving as the interim, there was no way for the statutory requirement of ‘consent of the Senate’ to be met and thus the appointment had to end. This is not a removal of an administrator because the administrator serves as interim until consented to,” Steven Michels, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Administration, said in an email to HuffPost.

A legal fight is expected over Haas’ future at the election commission.

Thomsen, the commission’s chairman, believes only the commissioners can vote to fire Haas despite the Senate vote. The panel met Wednesday afternoon and split along party lines about keeping Haas, with Republicans saying they believed the law made the administrator position vacant after the Senate vote on Tuesday. The election panel eventually voted 4-2 to keep Haas as administrator through April 30 to oversee some of the state’s elections.

Fitzgerald told reporters Tuesday he hoped the Republicans on the commission would decline to support Haas. He said he also wants lawmakers to get rid of the positions of two civil servant lawyers at the ethics and elections commission who worked at the Government Accountability Board.

“It’s just hard to develop any type of cooperative relationship or establish credibility as long as some of those people are over there,” he said, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

American democracy is failing. The courts are finally starting to notice.

ThinkProgress

American democracy is failing. The courts are finally starting to notice.

Democracy’s lost decade.

Ian Millhiser     January 24, 2018

Washington, D.C. – January 20, 2017: Former Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former President George W. Bush attend Donald Trump inauguration on the West front of the U.S. Capitol. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

There is something profoundly wrong with the United States of America’s system of government.

For proof, briefly take stock of the last ten years in American democracy, in which a combination of factors — the filibuster, the way we draw legislative districts, Senate malapportionment, and the Electoral College — converged to rob American voters of a meaningful ability to choose their own leaders.

  • In 2008, President Obama won a resounding victory, defeating Republican Sen. John McCain by nearly 10 million votes. Democrats also won commanding majorities in both houses of Congress, with Democrats holding 60 seats in the Senate at their peak. Nevertheless, the rump Republican minority was able to wield the filibuster to block many Democratic priorities altogether, and to effectively force Democrats to water down major legislation such as the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, because the most conservative Democrats’ (and, sometimes, even some Republicans’) votes were needed to pass such bills.
  • In 2010, in part because the watered down stimulus did not juice up the economy enough to keep the incumbent party from being blamed for the ongoing effects of the recession, Democrats took a bath at the polls. Though Democrats recovered their standing with the voters in the very next federal election, their deep losses in 2010 had profound consequences because they gave Republicans control of many crucial state legislatures and governors’ mansions during a redistricting cycle. Republicans drew state legislative and congressional maps that were so aggressively gerrymandered that, in some states, Republicans won over 70 percent of the congressional seats even in election years where Democrats won the popular vote.
  • In 2012, President Obama won reelection. Democratic U.S. House candidates also won nearly 1.4 million more votes nationwide than their Republican counterparts. Yet, in large part due to gerrymandering, Republicans enjoyed a commanding 233-200 majority in the House at the beginning of the 113th Congress. This undemocratic result not only prevented Democrats from enacting legislation that could have fired up their base, stimulated the economy, and improved their party’s chances of winning the 2014 and 2016 elections, it also gave Republicans the leverage to shut down the government in 2013.
  • Meanwhile, Republicans enjoyed even bigger windfalls in state-level races. In 2012, for example, Republican candidates for the state assembly received “48.6% of the two-party statewide vote share for Assembly candidates and won 60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly.” Two years later, they “received 52% of the two-party statewide vote share and won 63 assembly seats.” More recently, in the 2017 election that resoundingly elected Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Democratic candidates of the House of Delegates outperformed Republican candidates by more than 9 percentage points. Yet Republicans still enjoy a narrow 51-49 majority.
  • In February of 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died. Scalia’s body was barely cold before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced that he would not allow anyone nominated by President Obama to be confirmed. Senate Republicans then successfully held the seat open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it. McConnell was able to pull this stunt because Republicans enjoyed a 54-46 majority in the Senate in 2016. They held this majority, moreover, due to the fact that the Senate is so egregiously mal-apportioned that its membership bears no resemblance to the nation’s partisan preferences. The 46 Democrats in the Senate in 2016 represented more than 20 million more people than the 54 Republicans.
  • More than a year after Scalia’s death, Senate Republicans confirmed Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. The 45 senators who opposed Gorsuch’s confirmation represent more than 25 million more people than the senators who supported him.
  • And then there is the ultimate insult to the American voter. Donald Trump occupies the White House, despite the fact that he received 2,864,974 fewer votes than his Democratic opponent.

The government of the United States no longer derives its powers from the consent of the governed. And by the time voters head to the polls in November to elect a new Congress, America will have existed in this state of profound undemocracy for nearly a decade.

There is a gleam of hope amid this wreckage. The courts appear to be awakening to the problem of gerrymandering — and are beginning to do something about it.

Just this week, Pennsylvania’s state supreme court struck down that state’s gerrymandered congressional maps and ordered new maps to be drawn by for the 2018 elections. A federal court struck down North Carolina’s similarly gerrymandered congressional maps earlier this month. A majority of the Supreme Court appears poised to strike down Wisconsin’s state assembly maps — potentially marking the first time the Supreme Court declared a partisan gerrymander unconstitutional.

A majority of the Supreme Court appears ready to strike down a partisan gerrymander

And then there was hope.

Meanwhile, eleven states have signed onto the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement that seeks to functionally eliminate the Electoral College once a bloc of states that control at least 270 electoral votes have signed onto it. Had this agreement been in effect in 2016, President Hillary Clinton would be in the White House and Justice Merrick Garland would likely be the swing vote on the Supreme Court.

Despite these rays of hope, American democracy still faces considerable obstacles, some of which will be difficult to overcome without a constitutional convention.

For one thing, while gerrymandering accounts for some of the GOP’s unfair advantages in legislative races, it does not account for all of it. Because Democrats tend to cluster together in cities, while Republicans tend to be more spread out over suburbs and rural areas, legislative maps made up of compact districts that do not cut across communities will tend to advantage Republicans. Courts could potentially require more competitive districts to be drawn — districts which combine urban, suburban, and rural voters — but there is no guarantee that they will do so. The recent decision out of Pennsylvania does the opposite.

The National Popular Vote Compact, meanwhile, is untested and relies on an innovative solution to overcome the Electoral College. That means that the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on its validity. Given the Supreme Court’s increasingly partisan cast, it’s possible that the Republican-dominated Court would game a challenge to this compact, upholding it if a Republican wins the national popular vote and striking it down if a Democrat does.

And then there is in the single most frightening projection facing both large-D Democrats and small-d democrats in the United States. By 2040, according to Dean David Birdsell of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, “about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states.” That means that 70 percent of Americans “will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”

If America continues to polarize on geographic lines, with Americans in densely populated areas favoring Democrats and Americans in sparsely populated states preferring Republicans, that means that Republicans may soon enjoy an all-but-guaranteed majority in the United States Senate large enough to ensure that no legislation is enacted and no judge is confirmed under a Democratic president.

The anti-democratic Senate, in other words, is one of the greatest threats to American democracy that the nation will face in most Americans’ lifetimes. And it is the single most difficult one to fix.

Even if there were a supermajority of states willing to amend the Constitution to eliminate Senate malapportionment — and there won’t be, because small states would effectively be voting away their own over-representation — the Constitution forbids amendments that deny states “equal Suffrage in the Senate.” At best, that means that the Senate can only be fixed with two constitutional amendments: one to amend the amendment process itself, and the other to amend the Constitution again to fairly apportion the Senate.

There is a grave danger that American democracy’s lost decade may become a lost century. There is an equally grave danger of a crisis of legitimacy, as the 70 percent of Americans who no longer have a voice in their own government grow tired of being governed by a rural minority. But the biggest problem facing the nation is also one of the most difficult ones to solve.

While the courts are starting to wake up to the decline of American democracy, they’ve allowed this problem to fester for a very long time. And many of the most significant challenges, such as the mal-apportioned Senate, are beyond the reach of the judiciary.

Why It’s So Exhausting to Defend Trump

Bloomberg View

Why It’s So Exhausting to Defend Trump

Every time the president’s backers respond to one scandal, another one pops up.

By Albert R. Hunt       January 24, 2018 

 Source: Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s apologists in Congress are learning that defending him is like playing whack-a-mole; every time they think they’ve knocked down some embarrassing revelation related to the Justice Department probe of Russian election meddling, something new seems to pop up.

Republican allies of the president are straining to paint the Federal Bureau of Investigation and special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the probe, as anti-Trump partisans. It’s feeble stuff.

The latest allegation involves five months of missing text messages between two FBI agents on the Mueller team who were involved in an investigation of Hillary Clinton. Trump and his supporters have dropped dark hints that the missing messages indicate the likelihood of a conspiracy against the president. The more plausible explanation comes from the FBI: a technical glitch resulted in improper storage of these and thousands of other text messages between December 2016 and May 2017. Mueller promptly fired the agent involved when other messages bad-mouthing Trump were discovered.

As Republicans struggled to keep that weak conspiracy theory afloat, a bigger story emerged: The fiancee of a former Trump foreign policy adviser who is now cooperating with Muller predicted that the adviser would emerge as a key figure in the inquiry. She compared him to John Dean, the White House counsel in President Richard Nixon’s White House who pleaded guilty to aiding the Watergate coverup and then became a key witness against other officials.

New scandals keep surfacing. Last week, McClatchy reported that the FBI is investigating whether a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer funneled money through the National Rifle Association to help the 2016 Trump campaign (it’s illegal to use foreign money to finance federal elections). Then came news from the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s lawyer commissioned a secret payoff to a porn star to keep her quiet about a 2006 sexual liaison with Trump.

The latest stab at distraction from the issue at the heart of the investigation — whether the Trump campaign was involved in Russia’s meddling with the presidential election — comes from House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, a California Republican. He’s pushing for the release of classified material that he claims will show illicit activities by intelligence agencies to hurt Trump.

For most of a year, Trump and congressional defenders have also tried to undermine the credibility of Christopher Steele, the former British spy and Russia expert who authored an explosive dossier on Trump’s ties with Russia. Republicans charged that the report was full of errors, was paid for by Clinton and was a political hit job that led to Mueller’s investigation. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called on the Justice Department to investigate Steele, a British citizen.

So far they’ve done nothing to dent the credibility of Steele, whose expertise has been praised by top U.S. intelligence officials. Steele has acknowledged that his leaked dossier was like a raw intelligence report that included unverified information. The Clinton campaign did secretly pay for much of the work without Steele’s knowledge, but it was initiated by a conservative news website funded by a big Republican donor.

The central Republican charge that the Steele dossier was the catalyst for the entire Russia inquiry also has fallen flat. It actually started in the summer of 2016, when Australian officials informed their American counterparts that George Papadopoulos, the Trump foreign policy adviser who has since pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI, had bragged to an Australian diplomat that Russia “had dirt” on Clinton. Papadopoulos is cooperating with Mueller. His fiancée, Simona Mangiante, told the Washington Post this week that he’s revealing more to the special counsel and that there’s “a lot to come.”

Grassley and others have also attacked the integrity of Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal reporter turned private investigator who hired Steele. Simpson spent a full day testifying in private session before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Grassley initially refused Simpson’s request to make a transcript public. When the Democrats forced its release later, Grassley’s motives became clear: It was the Trump defenders, not Simpson, who looked bad.

Other Trump backers on Capitol Hill, notably Representative Jim Jordan, a Freedom Caucus leader, have tried to impugn the FBI as politically motivated in the Trump probe. Representative Francis Rooney of Florida went so far as to call for a “purge” of the bureau.

The evidence so far is that the public is unconvinced. In last week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll, respondents gave the bureau positive marks by a margin of almost three to one.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Albert R. Hunt at ahunt1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net

Neil Gorsuch must recuse himself from DACA case after political talks with Senate GOP leadership

Daily Kos

Neil Gorsuch must recuse himself from DACA case after political talks with Senate GOP leadership

By Joan McCarter      January 23, 2018

Of course Donald Trump’s first SCOTUS nominee is unethical.

So, this happened, and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) was dim enough to let the whole world know about it:

Sen. Lamar Alexander: I enjoyed having dinner tonight at the home of Senator John Cornyn and his wife Sandy with our newest Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, Transportation Secretary Chao and a few of my other Senate colleagues to talk about important issues facing our country. Jan 22, 2018

A Supreme Court Justice was at a dinner party with Elaine Chao, the wife of the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (was he also there, Sen. Alexander?) and the number two guy in the Senate, John Cornyn to “talk about important issues facing our country.”

Let’s get some advice from long-time court reporter Nina Totenberg of NPR about that:

People often ask NPR’s Totenberg, who has known many of the justices for decades, for advice. “My experience is that people don’t really understand what they can’t talk about,” she says. “I tell them, ‘You can’t talk about a case or an issue that might come before the court. You talk about life—kids, music, movies—the things normal people talk about.'”

The issues of the day are most definitely not what a Supreme Court justice should be discussing with Republican congressional leadership. And that they had this clearly political and social get together the evening before the Supreme Court announced it will expedite considering the Trump administration’s request to overturn a judge’s ruling and allow the Trump administration to dismantle the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Only the most pressing issue of the day. Which Gorsuch should now have to recuse himself from.

Sign the petition to Neil Gorsuch: Recuse yourself from the DACA case.

This isn’t the first time, of course, that this particularly new justice has landed in deeply, deeply political water. Back in November, writing in Politico Magazine, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote about Gorsuch and his keynote speech at an event at Donald Trump’s D.C. hotel. She points out that the very day Gorsuch was making that speech, the SCOTUS announced it would hear Janus v. AFSCME, “a case that will determine whether public sector unions—which represent teachers, nurses, firefighters and police in states and cities across the country—can collect fees from all employees in the workplaces they represent” and a case in which Gorsuch will almost certainly provide the deciding vote.

Not surprisingly, Gorsuch isn’t even attempting to act like principled justice who will put the rule of law and the country before his partisanship. That he was even willing to accept the nomination for this seat, which was stolen by Republicans, from Donald Trump shows that he’s got little in the way of principles. It should be noted that the Supreme Court is not bound by the Judicial Code of Ethics that guides the rest of the federal judiciary. So while Gorsuch’s activities have been exceedingly unethical, he isn’t subject to any kind of sanction from them under the code.

But he can be impeached. So when we get to the impeachment phase of this administration, the Supreme Court has to be included.

Republican senator meets with Justice Neil Gorsuch to discuss unspecified ‘important issues’

ThinkProgress:  Talk about bad optics.

Republican senator meets with Justice Neil Gorsuch to discuss unspecified ‘important issues’

Melanie Schmitz        January 23, 2018

Supreme Court Justice Neal Gorsuch speaks during an event hosted by the Fund for American Studies September 28, 2017 at Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Hours after he nearly shattered a glass elephant by tossing a “talking stick” at Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) during bipartisan spending talks on Monday (yes, that actually happened), Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) decided to buff up his image further by hastily tweeting that he was having dinner with a Supreme Court justice to discuss “important issues.”

“I enjoyed having dinner tonight at the home of Senator John Cornyn and his wife Sandy with our newest Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, Transportation Secretary Chao and a few of my other Senate colleagues to talk about important issues facing our country,” the senior senator wrote.

Sen. Lamar Alexander: I enjoyed having dinner tonight at the home of Senator John Cornyn and his wife Sandy with our newest Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, Transportation Secretary Chao and a few of my other Senate colleagues to talk about important issues facing our country.

Alexander’s tweet prompted a flurry of angry responses, with many concerned the event was a breach of ethics, or at best bad optics. “Is this type of dinner normal — legislators and Supreme Court justice[s]?” one Twitter user replied.

CNN analyst and former South Carolina Rep. Bakari Sellers (D) was more blunt with his criticism. “Justice Gorsuch is proving to be a cancer on our Judiciary,” he tweeted.

Objectively speaking, there’s nothing wrong with a member of Congress (or the executive branch) dining or hunting or hobnobbing with a Supreme Court justice. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, for instance, frequently went on hunting trips with his longtime friend, Vice President Dick Cheney, and famously came under fire for a particular duck-hunting trip they took three weeks after the Court agreed to hear an appeal in a case involving Cheney himself. (Scalia defended himself at the time by quacking.)

What’s troubling about Alexander’s dinner with Gorsuch, rather, is the fact that the two met to discuss unspecified “important issues facing our country” — something which Supreme Court justices are rightfully discouraged from doing, as it gives an obvious appearance of partiality and may flout certain ethics rules.

On its own, the dinner meeting might not merit more than a passing glance. The majority of judges and justices slip up occasionally, and even the most dedicated members of the Supreme Court sometimes say or do things that require damage control. (Just ask Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.) But Gorsuch has a backlog full of questionable behavior that makes his decision to hold partisan discussions with a member of Congress concerning.

The newest justice, appointed by President Trump, has long been scrutinized for his history of siding with religious liberty advocates, famously ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby in the landmark Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius case, while serving on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. He has also been criticized for having an anti-LGBTQ bias, one which bled into a recent dissent he wrote in a case involving two same-sex parents who sought to have both their names listed on their child’s birth certificate. However it’s his decision to blur the line between his life on the bench and his private activities that has many ethics groups troubled.

The Supreme Court is abandoning legitimacy for partisanship

What happens when the Supreme Court ignores the line between law and politics?

In September, Gorsuch was criticized by watchdog groups for delivering a speech to a conservative group at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. His remarks were far from the center of the controversy; many justices have chosen to speak to similarly partisan audiences before. Instead, because Trump refuses to divest himself from his interests in the property, activists argued Gorsuch was personally enriching the president, who continues to rake in its profits. When faced with those claims, a spokesperson for the Fund for American Studies, which organized the event, denied that the group had chosen the venue with Trump’s bank account in mind.

The venue choice wasn’t the only potential conflict of interest Gorsuch faced: the Fund for American Studies itself is partially funded by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has poured millions of dollars into anti-union causes. The same day Gorsuch delivered his speech, the Supreme Court also agreed to hear arguments challenging mandatory union fees in public sector jobs.

Prior to Gorsuch’s appointment, the Court had been deadlocked, 4-4.

“Setting aside the glaring conflict of interest in Gorsuch helping to enrich a Trump property just as several cases charging that the president is violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution are making their way through the judicial system, the group he addressed is funded by the same people funding the effort to dismantle unions that Gorsuch and his fellow justices agreed to take up,” Salon Deputy Politics Editor Sophia Tesfaye wrote that month.

It’s unclear what kinds of “important issues” were discussed during Gorsuch and Sen. Alexander’s meeting on Monday night. It’s entirely possible the “issues” Alexander was referring to were whether the Supreme Court should require justices to don funny wigs, à la British judges and barristers. Whatever the case, it was one more example of bad decision-making that Justice Gorsuch simply didn’t need on his record.

This article has been updated to correct a typo in the description of Gorsuch’s potential conflict of interest. An earlier version stated that the meeting could give the appearance of “impartiality.” It has been amended to read “partiality.”

Public records show how much House Republican will gain from the tax law he repeatedly lied about

ThinkProgress

Public records show how much House Republican will gain from the tax law he repeatedly lied about

Rep. Jeff Denham has been misrepresenting the GOP’s tax law, which could save him more than $100,000 this year.

Addy Baird      January 22, 2018

Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., participates in a news conference on bipartisan legislation to address the deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) program and border security on Tuesday January 16, 2018. Credit: Photo by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA) has repeatedly lied about the effects of the GOP’s tax plan — a plan from which he stands to handsomely benefit, according to public records.

The tax plan, which was signed into law by President Trump late last year, gives owners of pass-through companies — businesses that don’t pay income taxes at the corporate level but rather allocate income across owners who then pay income taxes — their own new, lower rate. And according to public records, Denham made between $115,503 and $1,053,000 in business and rental income from LLCs (pass-through entities) in 2016.

Additionally, Denham’s salary in 2016 was a little more than $200,000. Ultimately, that means that Denham could fall into one of three new tax brackets created under his party’s new tax plan — 32 percent, 35 percent, or 37 percent — all of which would result in big savings for him personally. The congressman’s business and rental tax savings alone under GOP tax plan would, based on his public filings, range from between $8,547 an astounding $105,300.

But Denham has been lying about the effects of the bill throughout the process of crafting and passing the legislation. Last November, Denham said it was “just not true” that the GOP tax plan ultimately raises taxes on middle-class people. In an interview with KQED, Denham interrupted the host who mentioned analyses that found the tax cut for middle-income earners were merely temporary.

“Yeah, that’s just not true,” Denham cut in. “It’s very obvious.”

Expert analyses show that by 2023, 60 percent of Americans will face a tax hike or see no change in their taxes, and by 2027, a quarter of taxpayers will be paying more in taxes.

In the same interview with KQED, Denham said, “I’ve had constituents that have called in and they’ve actually run the numbers themselves, I’ve got their own testimonies. You know, when you factor in the expansion of the Child Tax Credit, ultimately it’s a very large savings here for the people in my district.”

But according to a report from The Center for American Progress (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent outlet housed in CAP), the tax law will have devastating effects on many people in Denham’s home state of California. According to the report, which analyzed the version of the bill from November that Denham was defending, more than 3.7 million people in the bottom 80 percent of the state’s income distribution would see their taxes increase by 2027.

In November, Denham also rejected the fact that eliminating the state and local income tax (SALT) deduction would hurt those he represents, according to local media.

But Denham was wrong in that front, too. In 2015, more than six million taxpayers in California claimed the SALT deduction, more than any other state. And as the California Budget and Policy Center outlined in November, eliminating the SALT deduction effectively means millions of Californians are being double taxed, a tax increase that forces Denham’s constituents and other Californians to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy and mostly benefits other states.

Some parts of the bill were changed in the final version, including capping rather than eliminating SALT, but Denham continues to misrepresent even the most basic aspects of the law.

The cherry on top is this: Denham claims it’s a lie to say that the GOP tax law is loaded with giveaways for corporations and the wealthy. After the tax bill passed, one of Denham’s Democratic challengers, a woman named Virginia Madueno, said the tax bill was “loaded with giveaways to big corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy, while leaving table scraps for the rest of us,” Denham responded in a tweet.

Our Military Spending is Out of Control

Ro Khanna‘s post to the group: Veterans against the G.O.P
Ro Khanna

As many Republicans demand another huge increase in military spending, here is a reminder that we already spend more on defense than the next eight countries combined.

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The US Has Military Bases in 172 Countries. All of Them Must Close.

The Nation

The US Has Military Bases in 172 Countries. All of Them Must Close.

US bases are wreaking havoc to the health and well-being of communities across the world.

By Alice Slater     January 24, 2018

People protest the planned relocation of a US military base in Japan to Okinawa’s Henoko coast on April 17, 2015.(Reuters / Issei Kato)

On the weekend of Martin Luther King Day, Baltimore University fittingly hosted more than 200 activists in the peace, environment, and social-justice movements to launch a timely new initiative, the Coalition Against US Foreign Military Bases. Ajamu Baraka, Green Party vice-presidential candidate and co-founder of the Black Alliance for Peace, opened the meeting reminding us that Reverend King, in his historic anti-war speech more than 50 years ago at Riverside Church in New York, called the government of the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” adding that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” while warning that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Taking on the very nature of capitalism, King further insisted that

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

In a series of panels over two days, conference speakers from every corner of the globe proceeded to describe the extraordinary cruelty and toxic lethality of US foreign policy despite King’s warning more than 50 years ago. We learned that the United States has approximately 800 formal military bases in 172 countries, a number that could exceed 1,000 if you count troops stationed at embassies and missions and so-called “lily-pond” bases, with some 138,000 soldiers stationed around the globe. David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Overseas Harm America and the World, reported that only 11 other countries have bases in foreign countries, some 70 altogether. Russia has an estimated 26 to 40 in nine countries, mostly former Soviet Republics, as well as in Syria and Vietnam; the UK, France, and Turkey have four to 10 bases each; and an estimated one to three foreign bases are occupied by India, China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

And, apart from the bases, there are other harmful US military impacts in many countries around the globe, which uproot many communities. John Lannon, of Ireland’s Shannonwatch works to end US military use of the civilian airport at Shannon, Ireland. The United States has flown more than 3 million troops and weapons through Shannon, en route to military actions despite Ireland’s decision not to join NATO and its official policy of military neutrality. James Patrick Jordan, with the Alliance for Global Justice, reported that after 9/11 the Northern Command of the US Pentagon added the training of many troops in Latin American countries in order to send them abroad to fight in US wars in other countries.

Peace and environmental activists from every region around the globe shared their experiences protesting the devastating environmental and health impacts caused by US military bases, which are wreaking havoc to health and well-being in so many communities. From Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium in Iraq, and munitions dumps and firing ranges in Vieques, Puerto Rico, to a toxic brew of poisons along the Potomac River, communities and soldiers as well as children born subsequent to exposure to these toxins are suffering a broad range of illnesses and inherited genetic damage, while the US government ducks any accountability for the harm caused by its mindless dumping and reckless burial of untreated toxic military wastes. Indeed, while some of the United States’ so-called “peer” nations, like Germany, have successfully sued for funds for clean-up of military bases after the US left them in dreadful condition, countries in Latin America, Asia, or Africa have been unable to hold the US to account, which is more evidence of the white patriarchy exercising its privilege, as we learned from Patricia Hynes, a former professor of environmental health at Boston University who won the US EPA Lifetime Achievement award and has created the Vietnam Peace Village Project to support third- and fourth-generation Agent Orange victims.

David Swanson, introducing the panel on US militarism in South America, observed:

Modern imperialism is unique to the US. US exceptionalism justifies imperial bullying and is a prominent sentiment we may have to cure. US nationalism has a religious character. Its destructive mission is imagined as sacred. Fort McHenry is not a historic site—it’s a “National Monument and Historic Shrine.” We may have to learn to value other things including the other 96 percent of humanity before the empire shuts down.

The global breadth of the participants was striking as we heard from activists in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, all ready and willing to expand this new network and work, not just to close down US bases, but as many expressed so eloquently, to dismantle the US empire and its patriarchal, racist, colonial policies that are causing such harm around the world. At the end of the meeting we decided to reach out and expand our coalition and took the following actions:

  • Resolution on Global Day of Actions Against Guantanamo (February 23, 2018)
  • Resolution on a National Day of Anti-War Action in Spring 2018

Most importantly, we agreed to hold a larger international conference abroad, within one year of the date of this beginning to hasten the end of the empire that subjugates people and destroys the ecosphere in order to maintain its cruel economic system. To add your voice and participate, see www.noforeignbases.org.

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Alice Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and serves on the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War.