The Tarbabys Blog

Reuters

Explainer-Why does Joe Biden want to scrap the U.S. Senate’s ‘filibuster’ rule?

By Andy Sullivan January 11, 2022

Activists push for voting rights legislation during news conference near the White House in Washington.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden on Tuesday said the U.S. Senate should consider scrapping a longstanding supermajority rule known as the “filibuster” if necessary to pass voting-rights legislation that is opposed by Republicans.

Critics say the filibuster, which requires 60 of the 100 senators to agree on most legislation, is an anti-democratic hurdle that prevents Washington from addressing pressing problems.

Supporters say it forces lawmakers to seek consensus, serves as important check on the party in power and ensures that major laws that affect American life don’t change radically with every election.

Once a rarity, the filibuster is now routinely invoked. In recent months, Republicans have used it to block voting-rights bills and bring the United States perilously close to a crippling debt default.

Democrats could use their razor-thin Senate majority to eliminate the filibuster altogether. But centrist Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose this move, saying that it will shatter the few bipartisan bonds that remain and give Republicans free rein if they take a majority in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has warned that his party would use other tactics to bring the chamber to a halt if the filibuster is eliminated.

WHAT IS THE FILIBUSTER?

Unlike the House of Representatives, the Senate was set up to allow for unlimited debate. In the 19th century, lawmakers developed the filibuster – a word derived from Dutch and Spanish terms for Caribbean pirates – as a way to talk a bill to death.

Then-Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond set the record in 1957, when spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes to block a major civil rights bill. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy spoke for nearly 15 hours in 2016 to press for gun-control legislation and Republican Senator Ted Cruz spoke for more than 21 hours in 2013 to protest President Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. None of those efforts were successful.

Senators agreed in 1917 that a vote by a two-thirds majority could end debate on a given bill. That majority was reduced in 1975 to three-fifths of the Senate, currently 60 senators.

Under current rules, senators don’t need to talk to gum up the works — they merely need to register their objection to initiate a filibuster.

Over the past 50 years, the number of filibusters has skyrocketed as Democrats and Republicans have become more politically polarized. From 1969 to 1970 there were six votes to overcome a filibuster, the nearest reliable proxy. There were 298 such votes in the 2019-2020 legislative session.

WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM FOR DEMOCRATS?

Democrats control 50 seats in the Senate, which allows them to eke together a majority with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking 51st vote when needed. They can’t overcome filibusters unless at least 10 Republicans vote with them.

Democrats were able to bypass the filibuster to pass Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus plan using a special process known as “reconciliation” that only requires a simple majority for certain budget bills. But that process is subject to complex limitations and cannot be used regularly.

Republicans have blocked many other Democratic priorities, though 19 of them did vote for a $1 trillion package to revamp the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

CAN THE FILIBUSTER BE CHANGED?

There have already been changes.

In 2013, Democrats removed the 60-vote threshold for voting on most nominees for administration jobs, apart from the Supreme Court, allowing them to advance on a simple majority vote.

In 2017, Republicans did the same thing for Supreme Court nominees. Both the 2013 and 2017 Senate rule changes were made by simple majority votes.

Some Democrats have called for eliminating the filibuster entirely, but they lack the 50 votes needed to take that step.

Democrats plan to vote sometime over the next week to scale back the filibuster so it would not apply to voting-related legislation. But it’s not clear whether they have the votes for this either; Manchin said last week that he would prefer to get some Republican buy-in for that change.

On Sunday he said he might support making the tactic more “painful” by requiring senators to keep talking on the Senate floor.

Biden, who spent 36 years in the Senate, long supported the filibuster but has grown more open to changing it as Republicans have blocked several of his major initiatives over the past year.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan, additional reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)

Senate Battle for America’s Democracy Heats up. President Biden and McConnell trade jabs.

The Hill

Ocasio-Cortez: Democrats need to to ‘crack down’ on ‘old boys club’ in Senate

December 20, 2021

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Monday called on Democrats to “crack down on the Senate,” which she likened to “an old boys club.”

The progressive lawmaker in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” slammed the chamber’s inability to pass voting rights legislation because of GOP-led filibusters.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html

Ocasio-Cortez has previously called on the Senate to abolish the filibuster, a move that moderate Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have opposed.

“What we really need to do is crack down on the Senate, which operates like an old boys club that has a couple of gals in it that have managed to break through, and we need to actually institute some, we actually need implementing institutional discipline,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Monday.

“If people want to threaten to block ambassadorships, if they want to threaten dysfunction, they actually need to show up and do it, need to show up and do a talking filibuster, when – and by the way, that is a compromise because there shouldn’t even be a filibuster in the first place. And they need to really make sure that we are actually calling people to her threats,” she added.

The House has already passed the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which have been stalled in the Senate because of GOP opposition.

“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida, asserted that the Senate is “operating in bad faith” and does not want to pass voting rights. He pointed to a deal struck in the chamber between both parties that allowed for a one-time exemption of the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling earlier this month.

Ocasio-Cortez agreed with Scarborough’s analysis before knocking Republicans for threatening filibusters.

“This idea that again, over time, has switched from talking filibuster to now just being able to stand up and posture and make a threat, God forbid that they might actually have to show up and stand or sit and actually have to talk and actually live out the threat of their filibuster,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“It is unconscionable, the way that the Senate operates, it’s fundamentally undemocratic,” she added.

“We are in a crisis. Nineteen states have passed over 33 laws to limit or restrict the right to vote in the United States of America. We are beyond the time for something to pass. And my concern is that even Manchin’s compromise, or the fact that he was making statements just this past week that he was just having conversations with the parliamentarian about voting rights that were illuminating. How has this not happened all year long,” she added.

Ocasio-Cortez also said President Biden needs to “be more forceful on the filibuster” and lean “on his executive authority and say, ‘if you’re going to get in the way, we’re going to find other ways to do this,’ and it’s either you’re either with us or you’re not with us, but this train is moving and we need to govern because the United States House of Representatives is delivering an agenda for the people.”

“We cannot blame Mitch McConnell, and we cannot blame Joe Manchin either, because we have tools at our disposal with a trifecta,” she added.

The Guardian

Republicans are shamelessly working to subvert democracy. Are Democrats paying attention?

Sam Levine and David Smith December 19, 2021

A dry run. A dress rehearsal. A practice coup. As the first anniversary of the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol approaches, there is no shortage of warnings about the danger of a repeat by Republicans.

But even as Donald Trump loyalists lay siege to democracy with voting restrictions and attempts to take over the running of elections, there are fears that Democrats in Washington have not fully woken up to the threat.

“At the state level we’re raising hell about it but the Democrats on the national level are talking about Build Back Better, the infrastructure bill, lots of other things,” said Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin. “When we think about voting rights and democracy, I would hope we would hear a little bit more about that from the national level.”

Hopes that the attack on the Capitol would break the fever of Trumpism in the Republican party were soon dashed. All but a handful of its members in Congress voted against a 9/11-style commission to investigate the riot and many at national level have downplayed it, rallying to the former president’s defense.

But it is an attritional battle playing out state by state, county by county and precinct by precinct that could pose the bigger menace to the next election in 2024, a potential rematch between Trump and Joe Biden.

An avalanche of voter suppression laws is being pushed through in Republican-led states, from Arizona to Florida to Georgia to New Hampshire. Gerrymandered maps are being drawn up to form districts where demographics favour Republican candidates.

Backers of Trump’s big lie of a stolen election are running to be the secretary of state in many places, a position from which they would serve as the chief election official in their state. Trump has endorsed such candidates in Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada – all crucial swing states.

The all-out assault suggests that Trump and his allies learned lessons from their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, identifying weak points in the system and laying the groundwork for a different outcome next time.

Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, said: “It looks like Plan B is populating state elected offices with believers of the big lie and morally corrupt candidates. We should all be concerned about that and, by the way, not just Democrats: everybody.”

Yet despite waves of media coverage – recently including the Atlantic magazine and the Guardian and New York Times newspapers – Democrats face the challenge of getting their voters to care. Many are confronting inflation, crime and other priorities and may assume that, having defeated Trump last year, they can stop paying attention.

Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state, said: “It’s still very difficult to imagine the severity and depth of what Donald Trump tried to pull off. It’s hard sometimes to recognise something when it’s new. For the president of the United States to try and stage a coup is unprecedented. It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around it.”

Inslee described Trump as “a clear and present danger” who is “trying to remove the impediments that rescued democracy last time”. State governors are not the only ones sounding the alarm about the dangers of complacency or assuming that normal service has resumed.

Jena Griswold, a Colorado Democrat seeking re-election, is chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, which focuses on electing Democrats to those positions. She said while there’s been a surge of attention from activists and donors to those races, “it is not enough.”

“I think one of the issues happening is that because this is the United States, the idea that our most fundamental freedom of living in a democracy is under attack, is hard to really grasp,” she said. “It’s important that we keep leaning in because the folks on the other side are definitely leaning in.”

In Michigan, one of the leading candidates in the Republican field is Kristina Kamaro, who has spread lies about 6 January and the election. She is seeking to oust Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who became one of the most high profile secretaries of state in 2020 when she took steps to make it easier to vote by mail in her state.

Like Griswold, Benson, who describes herself as “avowedly not a partisan”, said she noticed increased interest from voters and independent donors, but not from the national Democratic party.

“We’re not seeing the same sense of urgency that perhaps ‘the other side’ has shown in investing in these offices,” she said. “With the exception of the vice-president, who’s been enormously supportive and gets the importance of these offices from a voting rights standpoint, I have seen no significant increase in support from national party leaders than what we experienced in 2018, which wasn’t insignificant.”

Acolytes of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement are drilling down even deeper, targeting local election oversight positions that have traditionally been nonpartisan and little noticed, with only a few hundred votes at stake and candidates often running unopposed. Yet these too could pull at the threads of the democratic fabric.

In Pennsylvania, for example, there is concern that election deniers are running for a position called judge of elections, a little-known office that plays a huge role in determining how things are run on election day.

Scott Seeborg, Pennsylvania state director of All Voting is Local, a voting advocacy group, said the role is essentially the top position at the precinct polling place on election day. They could cause huge disruptions at the polls based on how the office holder interprets rules around ID and spoiling mail-in ballots, he added.

Seeborg agreed that not enough attention has been paid to these local races. “There’s no precedent for this, as far as we know in sort of the modern history of elections,” he said. “I don’t think folks anticipated this, I’m not sure how seriously entities like the Democratic party are taking this, but they ought to.”

Similar anxieties emerged earlier this week when the grassroots movement Indivisible ran a focus group with members from Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina and elsewhere.

Ezra Levin, the group’s co-founder and co-executive director, said: “They’re worried about their governors, they’re worried about their secretaries of state and they’re worried even at a more local level about previously nonpartisan or uncontroversial election administration officials being taken over by a well-funded and very focused operation led by people who have embraced the big lie.

“These are not positions, especially at the local level, that are getting as much attention but it’s real. We see Steve Bannon [former White House chief of staff, now a rightwing podcaster] trying to lead the charge, getting folks to take up the lowest level spots in the election administration ecosystem. It’s happening right in front of our eyes.”

Levin, a former congressional staffer, noted that the Democratic party is not a monolith but warned that Biden has devoted his political capital – traveling the country to make speeches, holding meetings on Capitol Hill – to causes such as infrastructure rather than the future of democracy.

“The big missing puzzle piece in this entire fight for the last 11 months has been the president.”

Pressure on the Senate to act intensified this week when 17 governors wrote a joint letter expressing concern over threats to the nation’s democracy. Evers of Wisconsin was among them.

In a phone interview, he said Democrats in his crucial battleground state are highlighting the “full throated attack on voting rights” but acknowledged that voters have numerous other concerns.

“Everybody’s talking about it but when they go home from the capital and they’re visiting with people, I’m guessing that the conversation talks about more bread and butter things like ‘I want my roads fixed,’ and ‘Thank you for reducing taxes,” Evers added.

What would the Supreme Court’s “originalists” think of the filibuster?

If they were honest, they’d find it unconstitutional

By Robert Reich January 11, 2022

Yesterday, a member of our group named Emmet Bondurant, a distinguished constitutional lawyer from Georgia, commented on this page about the filibuster:

The biggest lie of all is the Senate’s claim that it “is the greatest deliberative body in the world.” The filibuster makes the Senate the least deliberative legislative and least democratic legislative body by allowing a minority of Senators to prevent the Senate from debating, much less voting on, any legislation that is opposed by the minority party.

A decade ago, when Emmet and I served on the board of Common Cause, he brought a case before federal courts, arguing that the filibuster is unconstitutional. He didn’t get very far. (The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided against Common Cause on dubious grounds, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) But this was before the high court became crammed with so-called “originalists” who believe the Constitution should be interpreted to mean what the Framers thought when they drafted it.

Originalism is an absurd position, of course. American society is so different today from what it was in the eighteenth century that any attempt to apply precepts from that time to this time is doomed to failure. But why not test the sincerity of the originalists sitting on today’s Supreme Court with an issue that the Framers would find a no-brainer? All evidence suggests they would agree with Emmet that the filibuster violates the Constitution.

The Framers went to great lengths to ensure that a minority of senators could not thwart the wishes of the majority. After all, a major reason they convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was because the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the Constitution) required a super-majority vote of nine of the thirteen states, making the government weak and ineffective.Subscribe

This led James Madison to argue against any super-majority requirement in the Constitution the Framers were then designing, writing that otherwise “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed,“ and “It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.” And it led Alexander Hamilton to note “how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced” if a minority in either house of Congress had “the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary.”

This is why the Framers required no more than a simple majority in both houses of Congress to pass legislation.

They carved out only five specific exceptions requiring a super-majority vote only in rare, high-stakes decisions: (1) impeachments, (2) expulsion of members, (3) overriding a presidential veto, (4) ratification of treaties, and (5) amendments to the Constitution. By being explicit about these five exceptions to majority rule, the Framers underscored their commitment to majority rule for the normal business of the nation. They would have rejected the filibuster, through which a minority of senators continually obstructs the majority.

So where did the filibuster come from? The Senate needed a mechanism to end debate on proposed laws and move to a vote. The Framers didn’t anticipate this problem. But in 1841, a small group of senators took advantage of this oversight to stage the first filibuster. They hoped to force their opponents to give in by prolonging debate and delaying a vote. 

This was what became known as the “talking filibuster” — as popularized in Frank Capra’s other great film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (a perfect compliment to his “It’s a Wonderful Life”). But contrary to the admirable character Jimmy Stewart plays in that film, the result was hardly admirable.

After the Civil War, the filibuster was used by Southern politicians to defeat Reconstruction legislation, including bills to protect the voting rights of Black Americans. Finally, in 1917, as a result of pressure from President Woodrow Wilson and the public, the Senate adopted a procedure for limiting debate and ending filibusters with a two-thirds vote of the Senate (67 votes). In the 1970s, the Senate reduced the number of votes required to end debate down to 60, and no longer required constant talking to delay a vote. 41 votes would do it.

Throughout much of the 20th century, filibusters remained rare. (Southern senators mainly used them to block anti-lynching, fair employment, voting rights, and other critical civil rights bills.) But that changed in 2007, after Democrats took over the Senate. Senate Republicans, now in the minority, used the 60-vote requirement with unprecedented frequency.

After Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in 2009, the Republican minority — led by Mitch McConnell — blocked virtually every significant piece of legislation. Nothing could move without 60 votes. A record 67 filibusters occurred during the first half of the 111th Congress — double the entire 20-year period between 1950 and 1969. By the time Congress adjourned in December 2010, the filibuster count had ballooned to 137. Between 2010 and 2020, there were as many cloture motions (959) as during the entire 60-year period from 1947 to 2006 (960).

Now we have a total mockery of majority rule. McConnell and his Republicans are stopping almost everything in its tracks. Just 41 Senate Republicans, representing only 21 percent of the country, are now blocking laws supported by the vast majority of Americans. This is exactly the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended. To repeat: They unequivocally rejected the notion that a minority of Senators could obstruct the majority. 

My humble suggestion, therefore: Senators whose votes have been blocked by the senate minority should themselves take the issue to the Supreme Court. If anyone has standing to make this argument, they surely do. If the conservative majority on the Court stands by its “originalist” principles, they’ll abolish the filibuster as violating the Constitution. (At the very least, the filibuster should not be allowed to block laws that are required to preserve democratic rules and norms. It must be lifted to enact voting rights legislation, such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.)

If you like my argument — which is essentially Emmet’s — please suggest it to your favorite Senator.

What do you think?

Slate

The Agony of Parents With Kids Under 5

By Jamie Green January 11, 2022 

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.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

Esquire

The Filibuster Is Made-Up and Stupid, and So Is the Made-Up, Stupid History to Justify It

Jack Holmes January 11, 2022

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.

Rolling Stone

Manchin’s Coal Corruption Is So Much Worse Than You Knew

Jeff Goodell January 10, 2022

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.”

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.

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.”

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?

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.

Portsmouth Herald

Preston Xanthopoulos: The majority of traditional Republicans have been silenced

Alicia Preston Xanthopoulos January 7, 2022

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.

More: Broderick: Make no mistake. America is broken.

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.

USA Today

Fact check: How we know the 2020 election results were legitimate, not ‘rigged’ as Donald Trump claims

Daniel Funke, USA TODAY January 6, 2022

The claim: The 2020 presidential election was ‘rigged’

As the nation marks a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump continued to promote a falsehood that he and his supporters have peddled for more than a year: that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

“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.”

The statement, which has also been widely shared on Facebook, came after President Joe Biden delivered a speech in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall in which he criticized Trump and his distortion of the 2020 election results. Biden said Trump and his supporters “held a dagger at the throat of America.”

“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.”

More: Biden accuses Trump of holding ‘dagger at the throat of democracy’ in Jan. 6 speech

On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, pushing through police barricades and smashing windows in an attempt to disrupt Congress’ certification of the presidential election results. The events of that day led to five deaths, hundreds of arrests and Trump’s second impeachment, as well as the creation of a bipartisan House select committee to investigate the attack. That committee’s work is ongoing.

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.

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.”

Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said in early December 2020 that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” Biden won the presidency with 306 electoral votes, which Congress certified in January 2021 after the Capitol riot.

Fact check roundup: Debunking false narratives about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot

At the time, some Republican lawmakers also pushed back on claims of widespread fraud.

“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.

Dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies aimed at overturning the election, some of which inspired misinformation about results in contested states like Nevada, failed. The Supreme Court refused to take up several cases challenging results in battleground states that played a key role in the outcome of the election.

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 Georgia, three separate audits found no evidence of wrongdoing affecting the state’s election outcome. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state has repeatedly quashed claims of widespread voter fraud.
• In Michigan, an audit of ballots, voting machines and election procedures affirmed Biden’s win. The bipartisan effort was the most comprehensive post-election audit in the state’s history.
• 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.
• In Wisconsin, a recount in the state’s two largest counties found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. An audit of voting machines by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, commissioned by Republican lawmakers, and an investigation by a conservative law firm also upheld the election results.

Fact check: What’s true about the 2020 election, vote counting, Electoral College

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.

Claims from conservative pundits that voting machines deleted Trump votes and changed them to Biden are false.

Companies like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic have filed defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and conservative news outlets for promoting baseless claims about their voting technology.

Our rating: False

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.

Our fact-check sources:

• USA TODAY, Jan. 5, ‘This is insane.’ Lawmakers relive Jan. 6 horror alongside fresh trauma of effort to rewrite history
• USA TODAY, Jan. 6, A year ago, Americans stormed the US Capitol. How a horrific day unfolded.
• USA TODAY, Dec. 8, 2020, Fact check: Trump lost the 2020 presidential election
• USA TODAY, Jan. 13, 2021, Live impeachment updates: Donald Trump impeached for ‘incitement’ of mob attack on US Capitol
• USA TODAY, April 7, 2021, Cause of death released for 4 of 5 people at Capitol riot – but not Officer Brian Sicknick
• USA TODAY, Jan. 6, Capitol riot arrests: See who’s been charged across the U.S.
• USA TODAY, June 30, 2021, House creates Capitol riot committee to investigate Jan. 6. GOP Reps. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger vote with Democrats
• Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Nov. 12, 2020, JOINT STATEMENT FROM ELECTIONS INFRASTRUCTURE GOVERNMENT COORDINATING COUNCIL & THE ELECTION INFRASTRUCTURE SECTOR COORDINATING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEES
• USA TODAY, Jan. 26, 2021, 2020 Election Results & Maps
• USA TODAY, Sept. 28, 2021, Fact check: Arizona audit affirmed Biden’s win, didn’t prove voter fraud, contrary to Trump claim
• USA TODAY, April 28, 2021, Fact check: No evidence election audit in Maricopa County has found widespread election fraud
• USA TODAY, June 1, 2021, Fact check: No evidence of fraud in Georgia election results
• USA TODAY, July 29, 2021, Fact check: Arizona audit hasn’t found 275,000 fraudulent votes
• Business Insider, Dec. 7, 2021, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says ‘misinformation and disinformation campaigns’ are biggest threat to US elections
• USA TODAY, Nov. 30, 2020, ‘Fantastic claims, half-truths, misinformation’: Georgia official says Trump supporters misled
• USA TODAY, Dec. 17, 2021, Fact check: No proof of widespread fraud in conservative group’s investigation of Wisconsin election
• Detroit Free Press, March 2, 2021, Michigan completes most comprehensive post-election audit in state history: What it showed
• Michigan Secretary of State, April 22, 2021, Post-election audit report confirms accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s election
• Pennsylvania Secretary of State, Feb. 5, 2021, Risk-Limiting Audit Pilot Of November 2020 Presidential Election Finds Strong Evidence Of Accurate Count
• Associated Press, Dec. 1, 2020, Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud
• National Archives, accessed Jan. 6, 2020 Electoral College Results
• USA TODAY, Nov. 7, 2020, Biden wins: Democrat who vowed return to ‘normalcy’ defeats Trump in cliffhanger election
• USA TODAY, Jan. 7, 2021, Watch VP Pence confirm 2020 election win for Joe Biden hours after mob breaches Capitol
• USA TODAY, Jan. 6, 2021, By the numbers: President Donald Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election
• USA TODAY, March 8, 2021, Supreme Court refuses to take up Trump suit about Wisconsin election results
• USA TODAY, Feb. 22, 2021, Supreme Court won’t hear 2020 election case that questioned some Pennsylvania ballots
• USA TODAY, Dec. 8, 2020, Supreme Court dismisses Trump allies’ challenge to Pennsylvania election
• USA TODAY, Dec. 11, 2020, Supreme Court denies effort to block election results in 4 key states that sealed Trump’s fate
• The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 29, 2021, What to know about Pennsylvania Republicans’ investigation of the 2020 election
• USA TODAY, Nov. 14, 2020, Fact check: Dominion voting machines didn’t delete votes from Trump, switch them to Biden
• The New York Times, Feb. 4, 2021, Fox News Is Sued by Election Technology Company for Over $2.7 Billion
• USA TODAY, Nov. 23, 2021, Fact check: Dominion Voting Systems did not lose its lawsuits against Giuliani and Powell
• USA TODAY, Feb. 4, 2021, What is QAnon? What to know about the baseless, far-right conspiracy theory connected to Marjorie Taylor Greene
• USA TODAY, Nov. 2, 2021, QAnon supporters gather over theory that JFK Jr. will emerge, announce Trump to be reinstated
• USA TODAY, July 23, 2021, Fact check: False claim persists online that Trump will be reinstated as president in August
• Newsweek, Jan. 6, 2021, Full Text of Mitch McConnell’s Speech Before ‘Most Important’ Vote of His Career
• PolitiFact, Jan. 6, 2021, Here’s how we know Trump’s repeated claim of a landslide victory is wrong
• USA TODAY, Aug. 10, 2021, Fact check: No evidence of 8 million ‘excess’ Biden votes from 2020 election
• USA TODAY, Feb. 5, 2021, Fact check: Voter fraud claims in Nevada based on failed lawsuit
• USA TODAY, Nov. 4, 2020, Fact check: That spike in the Wisconsin vote tally was expected and legitimate, not fraud
• MIT Election Data and Science Lab, Dec. 15, 2020, How We Voted in 2020: A First Look at the Survey of the Performance of American Elections.
• USA TODAY, Nov. 4, 2020, Fact check: Typo led to false post about Michigan votes showing up ‘magically’ for Biden
• USA TODAY, Dec. 14, 2020, Fact check: Georgia ‘suitcase’ video is missing context

HuffPost

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.”

Ali Alexander, the key figure behind the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally, has said Brooks was one of three Republican congressmen who helped him plan the rally — which Brooks has denied. Alexander testified before the House select committee last month.