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How Facebook Became the Social Media Home of the Right

While the left has flowed to Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg has laid out the welcome mat to the Trump legions.

Not too long after Donald J. Trump was elected president, a pattern started to emerge on Facebook that had not taken place in the company’s history. Millions of young people started to abandon the social network, either quitting Facebook entirely or deleting it from their phones and other devices. At the time the theory floating around tech circles was that Facebook was full of old people and boring posts, and other platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, were more youthful and fun. But in recent weeks it’s become clear that the exodus was likely a result of something larger. Facebook has become the home of right-wing America, while Twitter and Snap have become the home of the left.

This become clearly apparent in the past week, when Jack Dorsey finally decided to start labeling Trump’s most dangerous posts as “glorifying violence” and even fact-checking other posts where Trump lied about mail-in ballots contributing to voter fraud (they don’t). At the same time Mark Zuckerberg chose to go in the completely opposite direction, ceding that he is not the arbiter of free speech, and even going as far as to have a call with Trump himself to vociferate Facebook’s stance. Conversely, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, announced that he will no longer promote any of Trump’s posts on the platform. “We simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform,” Spiegel said in a memo to employees.

In reality, by ceding, and even groveling, to the conservatives in the way that Zuckerberg has, he has already created a divide not within Facebook itself, but within the entire internet. Facebook has become the home of the conservative right, and as a result, the most shared content on Facebook is almost always conservative in nature. For example, Kevin Roose, a reporter with the New York Times, often posts (on Twitter) a list of the top 10 posts shared on Facebook in the past 24 hours, which almost always come predominantly from conservative voices, including Fox News, Ben Shapiro, ForAmerica, and the right-wing conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza. On the other hand, Twitter has largely become the voice of the left, where the most shared stories, content, videos, and opinions are often much more latitudinarian in nature. Think about almost every video that has gone viral in recent years showing something dumb Trump has done or said, a moment of police brutality, or someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez berating a Republican senator or CEO banker. They all found their vitality on Twitter. Or go and look at the trending topics of the day, which are almost always topics of the left. On Thursday the number one post on Facebook was a video shared by the conservative commentator and political activist Candace Owens, where Owens said that George Floyd was a “horrible human being” and that “racially motivated police brutality is a myth.” The video was viewed on Facebook 24 million times in less than a day.

Internally at these companies, employees have responded accordingly. At Twitter, current and former employees have voiced pride in the fact that Twitter has finally taken a stance against the most divisive user on its platform. “It’s about time!” a former employee told me. “I’m proud of Twitter.” In comparison, at Facebook, hundreds of employees staged a virtual walkout, while some even quit working for the company, publicly denouncing Zuckerberg’s views. The New York Times reported that internally at Facebook, employees have called out Zuckerberg’s decision as “weak leadership” showing a “lack of backbone.” In and around Silicon Valley, anyone I’ve spoken to who has worked with Zuckerberg at one point or another has called him every name in the book for his actions around allowing Trump to act this way on his platform. “Fuck Zuck” has been texted to me more than once.

The turmoil unfurling within Facebook, and the decisions by Dorsey and Spiegel, are in many ways a reflection of what’s happening in society today. There’s strife when the people on the platform don’t get their way, and celebration and pride when they do. In the same way that some employees quit at Facebook when Zuckerberg sucked up to Trump, you’re seeing the same thing happen in society, where people have abandoned one platform in lieu of another, largely because one agrees with your viewpoint and the other does not. If this is the case, it leads back to the age-old question of whether social media is a net positive or a net negative for society. As someone who has covered these companies since their earliest days, this is a question I have always struggled to answer. For example, in the same week that Trump accused a media commentator of murder, lied about voting, and incited violence against Americans, the video of George Floyd being killed largely might not have been seen had it not been for people on social media sharing it. The images and videos of protests in large cities led to more protests across America, until, in a matter of days, every single state, and even other countries, saw their streets filled with millions marching in protest against police brutality and racism.

I spoke to both a former Twitter employee and a former Facebook employee about this, and their answers were surprisingly similar. Social networks are neither a net negative nor a net positive for society, they both said. Rather, they magnify our most visceral feelings and beliefs, at a blazingly fast speed. We yell at one another and point fingers, these former employees said, until we eventually abandon the platform that does not align with our views, and instead go to the one that does. And it appears, that after Facebook and Twitter both took two completely different stances on Trump, that one has finally cemented itself as the home of the right, the other, the left. And in the same way that there is only left and right in America, on social media, there is nothing in the middle.

I follow a few liberal FB groups. In the past couple of days TWO of them have suddenly disappeared, taken down by FB. For one of them, this is the second time. Yet all of these secret groups we keep finding out about where police and ICE agents and what not are saying horrible things seem to survive just fine.

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I recently deactivated my FB account, just didn’t enjoy spending any time that site anymore. It’s all clickbait, buy now, and hate Democrats. Still on the gram but I’d love to just declare total social media bankruptcy and close all my accounts.

https://youtu.be/jPCIiUAXBN4

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Yes, tough call…all of them aggregate your interests and filter you through accordingly. All are free…but being a pawn to their POV is not a free place to reside. I use FB cautiously.

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Thank you. Glad this editorial from a Republican can call out T for his egregious claims that the election will be rigged.

Benjamin L. Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration .

Legions of Republican lawyers have searched in vain over four decades for fraudulent double voting. At long last, they have a blatant example of a major politician urging his supporters to illegally vote twice.

The only hitch is that the candidate is President Trump.

The president, who has been arguing that our elections are “rigged” and “fraudulent,” last week instructed voters to act in a way that would fulfill that prophecy. On Wednesday in North Carolina, he urged supporters to double vote, casting ballots at the polls even if they have already mailed in absentee ballots. A tweet claiming he meant only for people to check that their ballots had been received and counted sounded fine — until Trump renewed his original push on Thursday evening in Pennsylvania and again Friday at a telerally.

The president’s actions — urging his followers to commit an illegal act and seeking to undermine confidence in the credibility of election results — are doubly wrong. They impose an obligation on his campaign and the Republican Party to reevaluate their position in the more than 40 voting cases they’re involved in around the country.

These cases are part of a torrent of 2020 voting litigation that pits Republicans’ belief that election results won’t be credible without state law safeguards against Democrats’ charges that many such rules are onerous and designed to suppress the votes of qualified citizens inclined to vote Democratic.

The president’s words make his and the Republican Party’s rhetoric look less like sincere concern — and more like transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage. And they come as Republicans trying to make their cases in courts must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud.

These are painful conclusions for me to reach. Before retiring from law practice last month, I spent 38 years in the GOP’s legal trenches. I was part of the 1990s redistricting that ended 40 years of Democratic control and brought 30 years of GOP successes in Congress and state legislatures. I played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount and several dozen Senate, House and state contests. I served as counsel to all three Republican national party committees and represented four of the past six Republican presidential nominees (including, through my law firm, Trump 2020).

Each Election Day since 1984, I’ve been in precincts looking for voting violations, or in Washington helping run the nationwide GOP Election Day operations, overseeing the thousands of Republican lawyers and operatives each election on alert for voting fraud. In every election, Republicans have been in polling places and vote tabulation centers. Republican lawyers in every state have been able to examine mail-in/absentee ballot programs.

The president has said that “the only way we can lose … is if cheating goes on.” He has asserted that mail-in voting is “very dangerous” and that “there is tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality.”

The lack of evidence renders these claims unsustainable. The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged. Absentee ballots use the same process as mail-in ballots — different states use different labels for the same process.

The Trump 2016 campaign, of which I was not a part, could produce no hard evidence of systemic fraud. Trump established a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 to expose all the fraud he maintains permeates our elections. He named the most vociferous hunters of Democratic election fraud to run the commission. It disbanded without finding anything.

The Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database has compiled every instance of any kind of voter fraud it could find since 1982. It contains 1,296 incidents, a minuscule percentage of the votes cast. A study of results in three states where all voters are mailed actual ballots, a practice at the apex of the president’s outrage, found just 372 possible cases of illegal voting of 14.6 million cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections — 0.0025 percent.

The president’s rhetoric has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out. Republicans need to take a hard look before advocating laws that actually do limit the franchise of otherwise qualified voters. Calling elections “fraudulent” and results “rigged” with almost nonexistent evidence is antithetical to being the “rule of law” party.

Many of the GOP’s litigation concerns are meritorious in principle. But the president’s inflammatory language undercuts the claim that Republicans seek merely to uphold statutory safeguards needed to validate the results’ credibility.

Republicans need to rethink their arguments in many of the cases in which they are involved — quickly. Otherwise, they risk harming the fundamental principle of our democracy: that all eligible voters must be allowed to cast their ballots. If that happens, Americans will deservedly render the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.

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At this juncture, what would surprise us? Words like ‘dithered’ ‘failed to act’ are now just part of his horrific legacy. The driver for T was of course the election, getting re-elected, and using terms like “did not want people to panic,” had entirely to do with the financial markets to ‘panic,’ was we know as his barometer for having a winning position for election.

I want this long nightmare of a Presidency to end. Shocking of course, like every other bit of it.

He lied about the coronavirus anyway.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.


On Feb. 7, during a taped interview with Bob Woodward, President Trump acknowledged that the coronavirus could be transmitted through the air, that it was very dangerous and that it would be difficult to contain.This is deadly stuff,” he told the investigative journalist.

You just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed,” the president warned.

Despite his apparent understanding of the severity of the disease and its method of transmission, over the next month, in five cities around the country, Mr. Trump held large indoor rallies, which were attended by thousands of his supporters.

Mr. Trump spent weeks insisting in public that the coronavirus was no worse than a seasonal flu. It would “disappear” when the seasons changed, he promised in late February. “We’re doing a great job,” he said in early March.

Why lie to the American people? Why — as the administration accuses the Chinese government of doing — lie to the world about the severity of what was declared a pandemic only days later?

I wanted to always play it down,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.

Mr. Trump and a great many of his supporters and political allies did play down the severity of the coronavirus and did criticize the public health measures deployed to prevent its spread. As a result, the coronavirus spread faster and sickened or killed more people in the United States than in any of its peer nations. If the United States had the same coronavirus fatality rate as Canada, more than 100,000 Americans could still be alive today.

Much of the responsibility for the fatal mishandling of the pandemic lies with the president. But with every public lie out of Mr. Trump’s mouth, or on his Twitter feed, how many members of his administration who knew better stayed silent?

The president has repeatedly tried to muzzle and sideline scientists and health officials who disagree with his sunny assessments, often replacing them with less qualified people willing to sing his praises.

So it was that the president’s coronavirus task force revised guidelines on testing for asymptomatic people, while the task force’s leading infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, was having surgery. So it is that, in the pandemic’s seventh month, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious disease outbreaks, is arguing that it’s not the government’s job to stamp out the coronavirus, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remain silent.

Mr. Trump’s lack of leadership almost certainly made the nation’s suffering greater, its death toll higher and its economic costs more severe in the long term. When the president dithered on testing and contact tracing, when he failed to make or execute a clear and effective plan for securing personal protective equipment, when he repeatedly belittled and dismissed mask mandates and other social distancing edicts, Mr. Trump knew the virus was deadly and airborne. He knew that millions of people could get sick, and many would die.

Furthermore, Mr. Woodward’s tapes make clear that members of the Trump administration failed to act — even behind the scenes — based on what they knew at the time.

Nearly 200,000 people in the United States have already died, and hundreds of thousands more have suffered grave illness — often followed by a slow, hard recovery and, in some cases, permanent disability. Tens of millions of people have lost their jobs, and millions are on the cusp of losing their homes. School systems and elder care networks are struggling to function. The economy is in tatters.

Imagine what this picture could look like today if the president had been honest with the American public on Feb. 7, calmly taken charge of the nation’s response to the pandemic and did his best to protect them.

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Another hard hitting Opinion from Paul Krugman, economist - from Aug 7th. What the reality looks like vs what the numbers might be saying.

Seems like there are some rumblings about the CARES act, but the divide between parties is vast.

So let’s talk about that employment report.

One important thing to bear in mind about official monthly job statistics is that they’re based on surveys conducted during the second week of the month. That’s why I used scare quotes around “August”: What Friday’s report actually gave us was a snapshot of the state of the labor market around Aug. 12.

This may be important. Private data suggest a slowdown in job growth since late July. So the next employment report, which will be based on data collected this week — and will also be the last report before the election — will probably (not certainly) be weaker than the last.

In any case, that August report wasn’t great considering the context. In normal times a gain of 1.4 million jobs would be impressive, even if some of those jobs were a temporary blip associated with the census. But we’re still more than 11 million jobs down from where we were in February.

And the situation remains dire for the hardest-hit workers. The pandemic slump disproportionately hit workers in the leisure and hospitality sector — think restaurants — and employment in that sector is still down around 25 percent, while the unemployment rate for workers in the industry is still over 20 percent, more than four times what it was a year ago.


So the economy is still bypassing those who need a recovery most.

Yet most of the safety net that temporarily sustained the economic victims of the coronavirus has been torn down.

> The CARES Act, enacted in March, gave the unemployed an extra $600 a week in benefits. This supplement played a crucial role in limiting extreme hardship; poverty may even have gone down.

But the supplement ended on July 31, and all indications are that Republicans in the Senate will do nothing to restore aid before the election. President Trump’s attempt to implement a $300 per week supplement by executive action will fail to reach many and prove inadequate even for those who get it. Families may have scraped by for a few weeks on saved money, but things are about to get very hard for millions.

The bottom line here is that before you cite economic statistics, you want to think about what they mean for people and their lives. The data aren’t meaningless: A million jobs gained is better than a million jobs lost, and growing G.D.P. is better than shrinking G.D.P. But there is often a disconnect between the headline numbers and the reality of American life, and that is especially true right now.

The fact is that this economy just isn’t working for many Americans, who are facing hard times that — thanks to political decisions by Trump and his allies — are just getting harder.

Can you put under OPINIONS please - @Pet_Proletariat or @MissJava? Thanks!

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‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’

A measure of social progress finds that the quality of life has dropped in America over the last decade, even as it has risen almost everywhere else.

This should be a wake-up call: New data suggest that the United States is one of just a few countries worldwide that is slipping backward.

The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

“The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action,” Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and the chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index, told me. “It’s like we’re a developing country.”

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — to measure quality of life. Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand. South Sudan is at the bottom, with Chad, Central African Republic and Eritrea just behind.

The United States, despite its immense wealth, military power and cultural influence, ranks 28th — having slipped from 19th in 2011. The index now puts the United States behind significantly poorer countries, including Estonia, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Greece.

“We are no longer the country we like to think we are,” said Porter.

The United States ranks No. 1 in the world in quality of universities, but No. 91 in access to quality basic education. The U.S. leads the world in medical technology, yet we are No. 97 in access to quality health care.

The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia. A majority of countries have lower homicide rates, and most other advanced countries have lower traffic fatality rates and better sanitation and internet access.

The United States has high levels of early marriage — most states still allow child marriage in some circumstances — and lags in sharing political power equally among all citizens. America ranks a shameful No. 100 in discrimination against minorities.

The data for the latest index predates Covid-19, which has had a disproportionate impact on the United States and seems likely to exacerbate the slide in America’s standing. One new study suggests that in the United States, symptoms of depression have risen threefold since the pandemic began — and poor mental health is associated with other risk factors for well-being.

Michael Green, the C.E.O. of the group that puts out the Social Progress Index, notes that the coronavirus will affect health, longevity and education, with the impact particularly large in both the United States and Brazil. The equity and inclusiveness measured by the index seem to help protect societies from the virus, he said.

“Societies that are inclusive, tolerant and better educated are better able to manage the pandemic,” Green said.

The decline of the United States over the last decade in this index — more than any country in the world — is a reminder that we Americans face structural problems that predate President Trump and that festered under leaders of both parties. Trump is a symptom of this larger malaise, and also a cause of its acceleration.

David G. Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist, has new research showing that the share of Americans reporting in effect that every day is a bad mental health day has doubled over 25 years. “Rising distress and despair are largely American phenomenon not observed in other advanced countries,” Blanchflower told me.

This decline is deeply personal for me: As I’ve written, a quarter of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus in rural Oregon are now dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide — what are called “deaths of despair.” I lost one friend to a heroin overdose this spring and have had more friends incarcerated than I could possibly count; the problems are now self-replicating in the next generation because of the dysfunction in some homes.

You as taxpayers paid huge sums to imprison my old friends; the money would have been far better invested educating them, honing their job skills or treating their addictions.

That’s why this is an election like that of 1932. That was the year American voters decisively rejected Herbert Hoover’s passivity and gave Franklin Roosevelt an electoral mandate — including a flipped Senate — that laid the groundwork for the New Deal and the modern middle class. But first we need to acknowledge the reality that we are on the wrong track.

We Americans like to say “We’re No. 1.” But the new data suggest that we should be chanting, “We’re No. 28! And dropping!”

Let’s wake up, for we are no longer the country we think we are.

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Must read

QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded

Gregory Stanton

A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.

I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.

The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.


Do Not Forget

It’s been there all along. This is just the latest online incarnation. It’s disgraceful and beyond disgusting
:unamused:

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Some of the ‘tricks’ that Barr maybe up to in the next couple of months. Barr is known for under serving (Read - lying) the truth and we can anticipate the release of the Durham Report and other news. This is a piece from Just Security writer Ryan Goodman and special counsel to Dept of Defense, as well as Joshua Geltzer - former deputy legal adviser to National Security Council. It was written in August.

Barr may try to spin his ‘investigation’ before the election. Don’t believe him.

August 1, 2020 at 4:00 a.m. PDT

One of William P. Barr’s weaknesses is a godsend for the rule of law: The attorney general is not completely effective at lying. Or at least close observers of Barr have learned over time how to spot his many tricks. Barr’s behavior in his prior career in government and in his current office reveals voluminous and specific examples in which he misled the public and Congress. Within hours, if not minutes, leading fact checkers documented several of Barr’s deceptions in his congressional testimony on Tuesday. And there’s every reason to suspect Barr will soon try again to mislead — this time regarding one of his most important initiatives to date, an investigation by his handpicked U.S. attorney, John Durham — in an effort to skew the 2020 elections.

The problem is that there are two types of lies that Barr is willing to employ. One can be detected quickly. The other often takes time to uncover, and by that point, Barr may already have succeeded in his goal.

Based on Barr’s track record, it’s important for the public to realize now that they can’t take Barr’s word on what Durham actually has found. The urgency of bracing people to disbelieve the attorney general increased dramatically on Tuesday, as Barr was asked whether he’d apply long-standing Justice Department policy not to announce politically sensitive new cases before an election by holding Durham’s findings until after Nov. 3. Barr’s answer was, for him, a rarity in its clarity: He said no.

Durham’s investigation has become Barr’s pet project. Durham’s main task is an investigation of the investigators who tried to understand and protect the United States against Russian election interference in 2016. We don’t know what Durham will conclude, but we’re confident in this: Barr will likely distort those conclusions in a way favorable to President Trump’s political ambitions. That goal seems to have driven Barr’s public anticipation of “developments” from Durham “before the end of the summer” — that is, in time to influence the November election.

Barr has a history of mischaracterizing and even lying about the results of investigations before their details are public. That’s what Barr did to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. The attorney general released his own “distorted” and “misleading” summary while delaying the release of Mueller’s actual conclusions by weeks. Don’t just take our word for it; those are the words of the federal judge who excoriated Barr for his deceit. By the time Barr allowed the rest of the country to see Mueller’s actual conclusions — which were relentlessly damning for Trump — Barr’s mischaracterization of Mueller’s investigation as having exonerated the president had taken hold among key constituencies. And by the time the federal judge ruled on the matter, almost a year had passed. Far fewer Americans were even paying attention.

There were several other flat-out lies by Barr during the course of those events: He misrepresented the role that the Justice Department’s view that a sitting president can’t be indicted had played in how Mueller approached his work, claiming it hadn’t constrained Mueller’s conclusions when Mueller clearly said it had; he told Congress he was unaware that Mueller’s team was upset with his summary of their report, when in fact Mueller had conveyed his concern and frustration to Barr in writing; and he declared that the White House had “fully cooperated” with Mueller, when Trump refused to testify under oath, sit down for an interview or answer a whole set of questions.

Barr’s summary wrought such havoc inside Congress that it likely succeeded in sharply narrowing the articles of impeachment against Trump, according to a book released earlier this week by Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the process.

That’s far different from Barr’s other lies that implode on impact. Consider a recent example. After meeting in person with U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman and failing to coerce Berman’s resignation, Barr nonetheless announced publicly that Berman had stepped down. When Berman set the record straight that evening with a public statement that he had not in fact resigned, Barr was forced to regroup and, ultimately, name a different successor to Berman — the one mandated by law — before Berman then agreed to resign. The most remarkable part of the whole episode was Barr’s brazen and easily disprovable public lie, and how quickly it was exposed thanks to Berman.

Yet none of these past incidents seems as near and dear to Barr’s heart as what’s still to come: the conclusion of the Durham investigation. It’s an investigation no ordinary attorney general would have ordered in the first place. Criminally investigating the investigators without any apparent wrongdoing is a bizarre step to take, and the very issues being explored by Durham already have been investigated by the Justice Department’s inspector general, who found that the opening of the Russia investigation (code-named “Crossfire Hurricane”) was properly predicated, with no evidence it was influenced by political bias. Yet Barr has pressed ahead — hard — with demanding that Durham investigate the FBI and, apparently, even other components of the intelligence community for their counterintelligence work in 2016. In a wild step for an attorney general, Barr has reportedly personally traveled the world to urge foreign governments to cooperate with Durham.

There are signs that Barr has already enabled Durham’s unorthodox behavior, which could foreshadow his own efforts to distort the public’s understanding of whatever conclusions Durham will reach, whether those take the form of criminal charges, a written report or some combination. When the inspector general issued his much-anticipated report, Durham was in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation — a situation in which a federal prosecutor should, according to Justice Department policy, refrain from commenting publicly. Yet Durham did the opposite: He released a public statement indicating that, even though he was still conducting his investigation, he disagreed with the inspector general’s conclusions. This was extraordinary, in addition to being a mid-investigation public commentary. It was also a public rebuke of the Justice Department’s inspector general by another department official, and one that, it turns out, was misleading about where exactly Durham and the inspector general differed.

But Barr’s spin works only if others take his word for it or imbue him with the credibility of an attorney general faithfully executing his oath of office. Whatever conclusions Durham actually reaches, Barr’s history indicates that he’ll make them sound better for Trump and worse for the counterintelligence work of America’s public servants. As The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips wrote about Barr’s most recent testimony, takeaway number one is: “He is all in as a partisan player.”

When it comes to spin, being forewarned is being forearmed: Don’t buy it. It’s essential that Congress, the media and the public refuse to accept what Barr says at face value. Wait till we see what Durham’s investigation actually concludes — then we can applaud or criticize those results as we all see fit, but at least we’ll elude the grasp of Barr’s distortions.

Joshua A. Geltzer, a former senior director for counterterrorism and a deputy legal adviser at the National Security Council, serves as executive director of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

Ryan Goodman a former special counsel at the Department of Defense, is a law professor at New York University and co-editor-in-chief at Just Security.

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The whiny core of Trumpism

Few Trump White House members have survived the administration’s tumult as well as Peter Navarro. The economics professor and failed California political candidate is officially the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy; unofficially, he has elbowed his way into the government’s coronavirus response. As The Post reported earlier this month, two coronavirus-related contracts Navarro championed are under internal scrutiny, yet his position appears to remain secure because of “his one true ally: President Trump.” That should be no surprise: When you strip away the glitz that inherited money can buy, Navarro embodies the whiny core of Trumpism.

From the moment Navarro appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, it was clear he hadn’t agreed to this question-and-answer session to actually answer questions. When host Jake Tapper opened by inquiring about the administration’s response to the West Coast wildfires, Navarro had other priorities in mind. “Before we get started … I would really like to congratulate President Trump on being nominated for the peace prize, the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said, before rattling off a list of the president’s groundbreaking work like “relative stability on the Korean Peninsula.”

Tapper steered the interview back to the fires, and specifically their relationship to climate change. It was an obvious question, since as Tapper pointed out, Navarro co-wrote a paper 20 years ago that called climate change “one of the most important environmental problems of our time.” So, asked Tapper, “is anyone at the White House listening to you on this issue?” Navarro stammered, “Look, I’m not — that’s not my expertise, Jake. And, really, I came here to talk about a lot of things. … That was the last on my list.” Yes, the wildfires that have burned millions of acres of land and killed 33 people at last count were the last thing this White House wanted to discuss.

Instead, Navarro urged Tapper turn to the revelations from Bob Woodward’s new book, a request the host was only too happy to oblige. Tapper played two clips, the first a recording of Trump telling Woodward on Feb. 7 that the coronavirus is far deadlier than the flu, the second a video of the president then saying the opposite to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta later that month. “He was misleading the American people, why?” asked Tapper. First, Navarro tried to change the subject to giving the president credit for the China travel ban, claiming Trump was “called a xenophobe and a racist by Joe Biden … who later had to apologize.” When Tapper jumped in to point out neither of those allegations were true, Navarro replied, “Well, you’re wrong.”

And then it became clear why Navarro was so eager to talk about the coronavirus: “On Feb. 7, President Trump talks to Woodward. What happens on Feb. 9? This is the most important thing. A memo — I write a memo that goes out to the task force here that basically outlines President Trump’s strategy for dealing with the virus.” Yes, Navarro wanted to defend something as indefensible as the White House’s pandemic response because he wanted to highlight his contribution.

Nevertheless, again and again Tapper tried to get Navarro to answer the question. Again and again, Navarro dodged. Finally, when Tapper said, “He was not honest with the American people,” Navarro snapped, “You’re not honest with the American people. CNN is not honest with the American people.” At that point, Tapper ended the interview. “I would just like to remind the American people watching,” said Tapper, “that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, and the United States has more than 20 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. That is a fact. It does not matter how many times he insults CNN.”

Superficially, Navarro’s appearance was another television interview gone off the rails — uncommon, but not unheard of. But what makes the wreck instructive for understanding the Trump era is Navarro’s combination of schoolyard insults with demands for credit for faux accomplishments. It mirrored his boss. Trump, because of his office and his inherited wealth, has been able to dress up that combination in all sorts of gild and glitz and yes-men. But take all that away, and you’re left with an angry man wanting everyone to know he won the nonexistent “Bay of Pigs” award. When Trump was a wannabe mogul, that sort of thing was funny. Now, it’s just sad.

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I think Barr’s actions described here may be a violation of the Hatch Act.

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This is a must read, even if it’s only Trump adjacent.

The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit.

The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained markings that showed exactly where and when it had been printed, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker.

On June 3, about three weeks after Ms. Winner sent her letter, two F.B.I. agents showed up at her home in Georgia to arrest her. They announced the arrest soon after The Intercept’s article was published on June 5.

“They sold her out, and they messed it up so that she would get caught, and they didn’t protect their source,” her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said in a telephone interview last week. “The best years of her life are being spent in a system where she doesn’t belong.”

Failing to protect an anonymous leaker is a cardinal sin in journalism, though the remarkable thing in this instance is that The Intercept didn’t seem to try to protect its source. The outlet immediately opened an investigation into its blunder, which confirmed the details that the Justice Department had gleefully announced after it arrested Ms. Winner. They included the fact that The Intercept led the authorities to Ms. Winner when it circulated the document in an effort to verify it, and then published the document, complete with the identifying markings, on the internet.

:unamused:

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From Facebook Dan Rather’s feed

Dan Rather

SetoSprptftnemorbtmehr nhnesSsmm10o altar 1e1d:13ngaso AnrMS ·

There’s no vaccine for climate change.

This thought ricochets as I hear from friends and see the pictures out west of huge swaths of our beautiful, beloved country beset by flames. Fresh air is a precious commodity in any time, but especially in a moment where being outdoors is to hold on to some faint wisp of normalcy in our pandemic lives. And now, the air is dangerous. Meanwhile hurricane season is still here, temperatures fluctuate by huge margins, and the news from around the globe of sinkholes in Siberia, dying coral, disappearing species, and on and on, shows a world that is sick and hurting. And the evidence points to things getting worse.

If the coronavirus is a test run for how we as a species, and particularly as a country, deal with the challenges of our natural world, well there is no other conclusion than that the portents are worrisome. The same ignorance, selfishness, short-term thinking, corruption, and other destructive forces that have made the coronavirus worse than it had to be are at play with the climate crisis.

But here’s the thing. It is bad. It can get worse. But we also have it in our power to mitigate the damage, to be resourceful, empathetic, and creative. This is what this election is about. Will we succumb to stupidity or build on science and ingenuity? Will we be problem makers or problem solvers? As I said earlier, there is no vaccine coming for climate change. But we know that we can do a lot better. And if we unleash the power of the human mind on a path of knowledge, buoyed by an awareness of our basic human needs and challenges, then we make more progress than we may imagine is possible.

Over the course of my life, I have seen many times when the depths of crises have been underestimated. I have seen bungling and malevolence. I have seen violence and tragedy. But I have also seen common action, when it was unexpected. I have seen breakthroughs when none were imaginable. I have seen human beings be forces for goodness and justice as well as selfishness and evil. This is a moment of reckoning to be sure. But that makes it a moment of promise as much as of peril. We have a lot that is broken. And that means that the demand for new solutions, built from optimism and determination, is great. When I look around today, I see many people eager to pitch in to help.

VOTE!

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Slow recovery for the nation from the dreaded Covid-19 with no end-date specifically is quite a huge lump to take considering the fact we have spent half the year just going in circles. At least Dr. Fauci has the wisdom to tell it like it is…a long, arduous, unexpected and unwanted stall out to life as we know it.

And an election to pin more hopes on…

Turtle and the hare…not the one who comes in first who wins the race.

https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1305949928418676736?s=19

NYTimes: Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year

https://nyti.ms/3mmRBpR

It is completely understandable that many are tiring of restrictions due to Covid-19. Unfortunately, their resolve is weakening right when we need it to harden. This could cost us dearly.

The unrealistic optimism stems in part from the fact that people have started pinning their hopes on a medical breakthrough. There have been promising developments. Remdesivir holds potential for those who are hospitalized. Convalescent plasma might do the same. Antibody treatments might improve outcomes for some or prevent infections in those at highest risk.

But most cases don’t benefit from these treatments. Further, none of these therapies can prevent infections or hospitalizations on a broad scale. The concern over an unflattened curve isn’t just about death, although that’s certainly a concern. It’s also about an overwhelmed health care system where so many beds are filled that we can’t get care for the many other conditions people experience. Untreated or undertreated heart attacks, strokes, cancer and more will also cause a spike in morbidity and mortality.

Americans are also overestimating what a vaccine might do. Many are focusing on whether approval is being rushed as a campaign ploy, but that’s almost beside the point. It seems likely that a vaccine will be approved this fall and that it will be “effective.” But it’s very unlikely that this vaccine will be a game changer.

All immunizations are not the same. Some, like the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, provide strong, nearly lifelong benefits after a few doses. Others, like the influenza vaccine, produce limited benefits that last for a season. We don’t know yet where a coronavirus vaccine will fall, although something along the lines of a flu shot seems more probable. We don’t know how long whatever immunity it provides will last. We don’t know whether there will be populations that derive more or less benefit.

Because of all these unknowns, we will need to continue to be exceedingly careful even as we immunize. Until we see convincing evidence that a vaccine has a large population-level effect, we will still need to mask and distance and restrain ourselves. Too many of us won’t. Too many will believe that the vaccine has saved them, and they will throw themselves back into more normal activities.

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A message from Dan Coats, former head of DNI and someone who left the administration frustrated with the actions of the President and speaking out today to ask for a bipartisan committee to over see the elections. He has said very little so far publically, and this maybe one of his first rebukes of the President and Congress in general.

No member of Congress could have any valid reason to reject any step that could contribute to the fundamental health of our Republic.”

If we cannot find common ground now, on this core issue at the very heart of our endangered system, we never will.”

Opinion

What’s at Stake in This Election? The American Democratic Experiment

Congress should establish a bipartisan commission to monitor voting and ensure that laws and regulations are followed.

By Dan Coats

Mr. Coats served as the director of national intelligence from 2017 to 2019.

We hear often that the November election is the most consequential in our lifetime. But the importance of the election is not just which candidate or which party wins. Voters also face the question of whether the American democratic experiment, one of the boldest political innovations in human history, will survive.

Our democracy’s enemies, foreign and domestic, want us to concede in advance that our voting systems are faulty or fraudulent; that sinister conspiracies have distorted the political will of the people; that our public discourse has been perverted by the news media and social networks riddled with prejudice, lies and ill will; that judicial institutions, law enforcement and even national security have been twisted, misused and misdirected to create anxiety and conflict, not justice and social peace.

If those are the results of this tumultuous election year, we are lost, no matter which candidate wins. No American, and certainly no American leader, should want such an outcome. Total destruction and sowing salt in the earth of American democracy is a catastrophe well beyond simple defeat and a poison for generations. An electoral victory on these terms would be no victory at all. The judgment of history, reflecting on the death of enlightened democracy, would be harsh.

The most urgent task American leaders face is to ensure that the election’s results are accepted as legitimate. Electoral legitimacy is the essential linchpin of our entire political culture. We should see the challenge clearly in advance and take immediate action to respond.

The most important part of an effective response is to finally, at long last, forge a genuinely bipartisan effort to save our democracy, rejecting the vicious partisanship that has disabled and destabilized government for too long. If we cannot find common ground now, on this core issue at the very heart of our endangered system, we never will.

Our key goal should be reassurance. We must firmly, unambiguously reassure all Americans that their vote will be counted, that it will matter, that the people’s will expressed through their votes will not be questioned and will be respected and accepted. I propose that Congress creates a new mechanism to help accomplish this purpose. It should create a supremely high-level bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election. This commission would not circumvent existing electoral reporting systems or those that tabulate, evaluate or certify the results. But it would monitor those mechanisms and confirm for the public that the laws and regulations governing them have been scrupulously and expeditiously followed — or that violations have been exposed and dealt with — without political prejudice and without regard to political interests of either party.

Also, this commission would be responsible for monitoring those forces that seek to harm our electoral system through interference, fraud, disinformation or other distortions. These would be exposed to the American people in a timely manner and referred to appropriate law enforcement agencies and national security entities.

Such a commission must be composed of national leaders personally committed — by oath — to put partisan politics aside even in the midst of an electoral contest of such importance. They would accept as a personal moral responsibility to put the integrity and fairness of the election process above everything else, making public reassurance their goal.

Commission members undertaking this high, historic responsibility should come from both parties and could include congressional leaders, current and former governors, “elder statespersons,” former national security leaders, perhaps the former Supreme Court justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, and business leaders from social media companies.

This commission would be created by emergency legislative action. During that process, its precise mandate, composition, powers and resources would be defined. Among other aspects, the legislation would define the relationship between the commission and the intelligence and law enforcement communities with the capability necessary for the commission’s work. And it would define how the commission would work with all the individual states.

Congressional leaders must see the need as urgent and move quickly with common purpose. Seeking broad bipartisan unity on such an initiative at such a fraught time goes against the nature of the political creatures we have become. But this is the moment and this is the issue that demands a higher patriotism. No member of Congress could have any valid reason to reject any step that could contribute to the fundamental health of our Republic. With what should be the unanimous support of Congress, the legislation must call upon the election campaigns of both parties to commit in advance to respect the findings of the commission. Both presidential candidates should be called upon to make such personal commitments of their own.

If we fail to take every conceivable effort to ensure the integrity of our election, the winners will not be Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Republicans or Democrats. The only winners will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei. No one who supports a healthy democracy could want that.


Dan Coats was the director of national intelligence from 2017 to 2019. He served as a U.S. senator from Indiana from 1989 to 1999 and again from 2010 to 2016. From 2001 to 2005 he was the U.S. ambassador to Germany. Currently, Mr. Coats is a senior adviser with the law firm King & Spalding.

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Wow. Trump’s lead nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, belongs to a religious group, the People of Praise, that many feel was THE inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

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The Great Liberal Reckoning Has Begun

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concludes an era of faith in courts as partners in the fight for progress and equality.

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ends an incredible legal career, one that advanced gender equality and inspired millions. RBG, as she became popularly known, was, like Thurgood Marshall before her, one of the handful of justices who, through their work as lawyers fighting for justice, can truly be said to have earned their spot on the judicial throne. But the outpouring of grief that has followed her death is not just for the passing of a revered figure in American law but also for the end of an important force in American society: the liberal faith in the Supreme Court.

This faith is more recent than many people recognize. A century ago, the biggest critics of the federal judiciary were on the left, and for good reason. For most of its history, the Supreme Court was the most conservative of the three branches of government, consistently blocking, or at least delaying, efforts at social, political, and economic reform. From Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson , in which the Court upheld the subordination of racial minorities, to Lochner , which denied the government the ability to regulate much of economic life, the Court epitomized what William F. Buckley would later identify as the conservative credo: the impulse to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” By the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, it was widely held that the Supreme Court could only hinder, not help, the cause of reform.

But then, for a few decades, everything changed. The fundamental reason was politics: Over his 12-year presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed a record eight new justices, nearly an entire Supreme Court’s worth, two of whom—the liberal icons Hugo Black and William O. Douglas—served into the 1970s. The context changed as well: The federal government’s massive expansion during the New Deal and World War II transformed both elite and popular understandings of the Constitution. This change was so profound that Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican president elected after FDR, appointed the two justices, Earl Warren and William Brennan, who would later lead the Court to its liberal zenith. These were the decades of Brown v. Board of Education , of the removal of religion from public schools, of the expansion of free speech and the rights of criminal defendants. In these decades the Court was a true partner in the political branches’ attempt to move the country forward.

Richard Nixon began the Supreme Court’s shift back to the right, appointing conservatives like Warren Burger, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist. Liberals still won a few important victories—most notably 1973’s Roe v. Wade —but since 1969 Republican presidents have appointed 14 justices. Democrats have appointed only four. The past half century of American constitutional law is defined, more than anything else, by this simple fact.

From today’s vantage point the fragility of the mid-century liberal judicial victories is abundantly clear. The Supreme Court repeatedly retreated from its promise of sweeping change. Brown repudiated the notorious “separate but equal” doctrine that justified Jim Crow segregation, but when, a year later, the Court was asked to enforce its initial ruling, it meekly held that southern states should desegregate public schools “with all deliberate speed.” Determined southern officials ran circles around cautious federal courts, and desegregation did not begin in earnest until the passage of federal civil-rights legislation in the mid-1960s. This story has played out over and over again. Criminal procedure has become steadily less friendly to criminal defendants over the past 50 years. And Roe ’s strict limits on government regulation of abortion were replaced by Planned Parenthood v. Casey ’s far laxer “undue burden” test, under which abortion rights have weakened to such an extent that many scholars view Roe as having already been essentially overruled.

While the Supreme Court was under-delivering on its promises, liberal elites were devoting much of their intellectual and emotional resources to the Court, hoping against hope that an appeal to the swing justice will eke out a 5–4 victory for this or that liberal cause. Lawyers and scholars spent a decade trying to bring Anthony Kennedy into the fold, citing his landmark rulings on gay rights and wartime civil liberties as evidence of an imminent conversion to the liberal cause. Yet all the while, Kennedy kept adding to his deeply conservative voting record, a legacy he made sure to preserve by retiring in 2018, thereby allowing a Republican to appoint his successor. Lately focus has turned to John Roberts, in the hope that his commitment to the Supreme Court as an institution will moderate his otherwise-conservative legal positions. And while Roberts, like Kennedy before him, has occasionally voted with the liberals—such as in upholding the Affordable Care Act and ruling against the Trump administration in several important cases last term—the Court’s march to the right continues.

The choice to focus on courts has had its most fateful results with abortion, in which the lion’s share of liberal organizational energy has gone into desperate, rear-guard defenses of judicially granted abortion rights. Despite the work of groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, anti-abortion-rights advocates have captured statehouses in red states and many purple ones, with one-third of the more than 1,000 abortion restrictions since Roe passed in just the past decade. Roe failed to create a durable political consensus in favor of abortion rights, as occurred over the same period in Western Europe, where abortion rights were secured by legislatures rather than courts. This failure has been one of the key criticisms of Roe from pro-choice advocates, and RBG herself criticized Roe ’s sweeping reach on these grounds in a 1985 essay, noting, “The political process was moving in the early 1970s, not swiftly enough for advocates of quick, complete change, but majoritarian institutions were listening and acting. Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.”

If the Supreme Court has proved itself, time and time again, to be unwilling or incapable of advancing the liberal conception of justice, why have so many liberals, for so long, let themselves be victims of judicial gaslighting? Part of it is that the Warren and early Burger Courts painted a vivid, alluring picture of what justice by judiciary could look like. And even if liberals understood, deep down, that those two decades were an aberration in American legal history, the Court has given them just enough victories since then to keep the dream alive. For lawyers and law professors, there is also the simple matter of professional vanity: If the Supreme Court is the vanguard of American justice, then judges, and thus the lawyers who argue before them and the scholars who analyze (and, when necessary, chastise) them, are the nation’s most important profession—the priests and elders of the civic religion that is American constitutionalism.

Fundamentally, though, many liberals loved the Supreme Court for the same reason they loved the law: a vision of universal harmony and justice brought about by reason and persuasion, not the brute forces of political power. Victory in the political arena is always incomplete and uncertain, not to mention grubby. Politics appeals to our baser instincts of greed and fear and competition—which, of course, is why it is so powerful. By contrast, law—whether through “neutral principles” or “reasoned elaboration” or elaborate moral theories, to name a few of the core organizing ideas of 20th-century legal theory—holds out the promise of something objective, something True. To win in the court of the Constitution is to have one’s view enshrined as just, not only for today but with the promise of all time.

But eventually liberals lost faith that the Court would interpret the Constitution in their favor. What started as a trickle of disillusionment grew throughout the 1980s and ’90s and became a torrent when Roberts became chief justice in 2005 and led the conservative wing to undermine a number of liberal legal priorities, from gun control to campaign-finance law to voting rights. Although many liberal lawyers still dutifully fight in federal court to protect rights where they can, they do so with the increasing understanding that they are simply delaying the inevitable. And legal scholars have gradually given up on the Court as a guarantor of constitutional values, advancing theories of popular constitutionalism or progressive federalism to serve as a counterweight to the Court’s conservative transformation. Whatever was left of the Court’s sacred aura as above partisan politics was ripped away by Mitch McConnell’s denial of a vote to Merrick Garland in 2016 and the bitterness of the confirmation hearings over Brett Kavanaugh two years later.

The clearest sign that many liberals are giving up their remaining idealism about the Court is that, for many moderate Democrats (not to mention those on the progressive left), court packing has gone from a fringe theory to not just a viable option but a moral imperative if Joe Biden wins in November and the Democrats take back the Senate. Court packing is straightforwardly constitutional—the Court’s size fluctuated before the Civil War, and its current composition of nine justices is set by statute. But adding justices in retribution for the perfidy of Senate Republicans would require taking a wholly instrumental view of the Court—just another veto point in America’s groaning vetocracy, a super-legislature subject to the same politics as Congress or the White House. It’s a truth that many historians and political scientists have understood for a long time but that many lawyers are only beginning to accept. And it’s a hard, disenchanting truth.

The end of the liberal love of the courts will not, of course, be the end of liberals’ fight over them. Liberals will continue to work to get their judges on the Supreme Court and the lower courts. They will champion court decisions that go their way and will explore limiting the judiciary’s powers when it rules against them. Liberals will, in short, act more like conservatives, whose disillusionment with the mid-century Court freed them to view the judicial branch as an instrument of political power and to be unembarrassed by an explicit effort to staff it with the ideologically reliable, just as political parties choose their candidates. This realpolitik approach to judicial nominations is the reason for the Republican Party’s stunning success in reshaping the federal bench, and it is one that liberals will have no choice but to adopt themselves if they want to fight back.

In time, liberals may yet win the battle over the federal courts, but any victory will be bittersweet, because in their hearts they will know that the lofty dream is dead. Law is no savior from politics; it is only a temporary reprieve from the struggle between powers over power. Battle is coming. The question is: Do liberals still remember how to fight? Because conservatives certainly do.

3 ways a 6-3 Supreme Court would be different

If the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is replaced this year, the Supreme Court will become something the country has not seen since the justices became a dominant force in American cultural life after World War II: a decidedly conservative court.

A court with a 6-3 conservative majority would be a dramatic shift from the court of recent years, which was more closely divided, with Ginsburg as the leader of the liberal wing of four justices and Chief Justice John Roberts as the frequent swing vote.

As a scholar of the court and the politics of belief, I see three things likely to change in an era of a conservative majority: The court will accept a broader range of controversial cases for consideration; the court’s interpretation of constitutional rights will shift; and the future of rights in the era of a conservative court may be in the hands of local democracy rather than the Supreme Court.

A broader docket

The court takes only cases the justices choose to hear. Five votes on the nine-member court make a majority, but four is the number required to take a case.

If Roberts does not want to accept a controversial case, it now requires all four of the conservatives – Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas – to accept the case and risk the outcome.

If they are uncertain how Roberts will rule – as many people are – then the conservatives may be not be willing to grant a hearing.

With six conservatives on the court, that would change. More certain of the outcome, the court would likely take up a broader range of divisive cases. These include many gun regulations that have been challenged as a violation of the Second Amendment, and the brewing conflicts between gay rights and religious rights that the court has so far sidestepped. They also include new abortion regulations that states will implement in anticipation of legal challenges and a favorable hearing at the court.

The three liberal justices would no longer be able to insist that a case be heard without participation from at least one of the six conservatives, effectively limiting many controversies from consideration at the high court.

A rights reformation

The rise of a 6-3 conservative court would also mean the end of the expansion of rights the court has overseen during the past half-century.

Conservatives believe constitutional rights such as freedom of religion and speech, bearing arms, and limits on police searches are immutable. But they question the expansive claims of rights that have emerged over time, such as privacy rights and reproductive liberty. These also include LGBTQ rights, voting rights, health care rights, and any other rights not specifically protected in the text of the Constitution.

The court has grounded several expanded rights, especially the right to privacy, in the 14th Amendment’s due process clause: “…nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This sounds like a matter of procedure: The government has to apply the same laws to everyone without arbitrary actions. From the conservative perspective, courts have expanded the meaning of “due process” and “liberty” far beyond their legitimate borders, taking decision-making away from democratic majorities.

Consequently, LGBTQ rights will not expand further. The line of decisions that made Justice Anthony Kennedy famous for his support of gay rights, culminating in marriage equality in 2015, will advance no further.

Cases that seek to outlaw capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” will also cease to be successful. In 2019 the court ruled that excessive pain caused by a rare medical condition was not grounds for halting a death sentence. That execution went forward, and further claims against the constitutionality of the death penalty will not.

Challenges to voting restrictions will likely also fail. This was previewed in the 5-4 decision in 2018 allowing Ohio to purge voting rolls of infrequent voters. The Bill of Rights does not protect voting as a clear right, leaving voting regulations to state legislatures. The conservative court will likely allow a broader range of restrictive election regulations, including barring felons from voting. It may also limit the census enumeration to citizens, effectively reducing the congressional power of states that have large noncitizen immigrant populations.

Birthright citizenship, which many believe is protected by the 14th Amendment, will likely not be formally recognized by the court. The court has never ruled that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen. The closest it came was an 1898 ruling recognizing the citizenship of children of legal residents, but the court has been silent on the divisive question of children born of unauthorized residents.

The conservative understanding of the 14th Amendment is that it had no intention of granting birthright citizenship to those who are in the country without legal authorization.

Noncitizens may also find themselves with fewer rights: Many conservatives argue that the 14th Amendment requires state governments to abide by the Bill of Rights only when dealing with U.S. citizens.

In any case, individual rights will likely be less important than the government’s efforts to protect national security – whether fighting terrorism, conducting surveillance or dealing with emergencies. Conservatives argue that the public need for security often trumps private claims of rights. This was previewed in Trump v. Hawaii in 2018, when the court upheld the travel ban imposed against several Muslim countries.

Not all rights will be restricted. Those protected by the original Bill of Rights will gain greater protections under a conservative court. Most notably this includes gun rights under the Second Amendment, and religious rights under the First Amendment.

Until recently, the court had viewed religious rights primarily through the establishment clause’s limits on government endorsement of religion. But in the past decade, that has shifted in favor of the free exercise clause’s ban on interference with the practice of religion.

The court has upheld claims to religious rights in education and religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws. That trend will continue.

A return to local democracy

Perhaps the most important ramification of a 6-3 conservative court is that it will return many policies to local control.

For example, overturning Roe v. Wade – which is likely but not certain under a 6-3 court – would leave the legality of abortion up to each state.

This will make state-level elected officials the guardians of individual liberties, shifting power from courts to elections. How citizens and their elected officials respond to this new emphasis is perhaps the most important thing that will determine the influence of a conservative court.

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Yes, Putin is given a pass on everything from this administration.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

It is now an established fact, confirmed by laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union. The powerful poison, which has been used in at least one previous assassination attempt against foes of the Russian regime, was this time employed against a domestic opposition leader who operated openly to expose corruption and challenge the Kremlin. It requires a serious response.

In the face of Kremlin stonewalling, many questions remain unanswered and are likely to remain so. Chief among them is whether President Vladimir Putin ordered or approved the attempted assassination. Then there is the fact that once again, the victim survived the attack, and the nerve agent was identified. Mr. Navalny had been flying home from Siberia to Moscow when he was stricken. Did his poisoners want him to perish on the way, as the timetable of the attack suggests, and want to cover up the reason? Or was it their intention to convey a brutal warning of what happens to those who challenge the Kremlin?

Mr. Navalny may have survived largely because of the pilot’s alacrity in landing and getting him to a hospital. The government later allowed him to be taken to Germany for further treatment. Once they heard of his collapse, Mr. Navalny’s colleagues quickly collected what they could from his last hotel in Siberia and got the evidence to Germany, where traces of Novichok were found on a water bottle.

Whatever the full story, the Russian government’s contemptible posturing as an aggrieved victim of unfair suspicions only intensify the need to demand a reckoning from the Kremlin**. Mr. Putin knows what happened, or he can find out, and if he continues to hide behind glaringly phony denials and ridiculous accusations, he only strengthens the suspicion that this was a deliberate, state-sanctioned hit.** He had the greatest motive, means and opportunity.

Even if it was an operation ordered at some lower level, the attack on Mr. Navalny breaks new ground. Ranking assassinations according to degrees of infamy may seem frivolous, and attacking two former Russian double agents residing in England, Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, by nerve gas or radiation, is hard to exceed in brazenness.

But Mr. Navalny was not a former spy. He was by far the best known and most visible of Mr. Putin’s political opponents. His exposés of official corruption — most famously of the extravagant properties owned by the former president Dmitri Medvedev — were widely circulated, detailed and credible. Those who tried to kill him had to know, and not care, that the attack could be seen only as an attempt to silence a strong and effective political voice.

Even more appalling was their deployment of a banned chemical weapon on Russian soil against a Russian politician. The perpetrators knew that Novichok had been identified in the attack against Mr. Skripal and that its use was a violation of international law. Russia is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and after Germany established that Mr. Navalny had been poisoned, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons issued a statement that under the convention, “any poisoning of an individual through the use of a nerve agent is considered a use of chemical weapons.” At the very least, that obligates Russia to establish how a known nerve agent came to be used in the center of Russia.

Mr. Putin must believe that there is not much the West can do that it hasn’t already done by way of sanctions. President Trump, for reasons that remain one of the top mysteries of his administration, has largely closed his eyes to Mr. Putin’s serial transgressions, whether it’s meddling in American elections, annexing Crimea or stonewalling on the poisoning of dissidents.

The surest sign of European anger would be cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a gas conduit from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. But the project is nearly completed, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, is reluctant to take a step that would be costly for Europe and that would look like bowing to threats from the Trump administration, which has demanded cancellation of the pipeline.

Yet, as Mr. Putin looks intent on spending the rest of his life at Russia’s helm and displays ever less concern for human rights or the rule of law, it is incumbent on the West to hold him accountable for murdering or trying to murder anyone he finds troublesome. A state prepared to use banned chemical weapons against its own citizens is a danger and threat to the rest of the world as well, and that must be made clear and unambiguous also to Mr. Putin and his co-conspirators.

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The revelations are not surprising but they are coming fast so close to the election. Thanks.

I spent over 300 mornings in the Oval Office briefing the president and his senior staff. I had the privilege to manage, edit and deliver the president’s Daily Brief a summary of the most timely and critical intelligence threats to the U.S. from 2010 to 2014.

As a Deputy on the National Security Council, I spent over 1,000 hours in the White House Situation Room providing the intelligence assessments which informed critical U.S. national security policy decisions — including the raid that rendered justice for the victims of 9/11.

Since I have been eligible to vote, I have never registered with a political party. I remain an independent with a history of voting for candidates I believe in — I focused on their policy and not their party. Before this election, I have never spoken out for or against a candidate for any office.

But I can be silent no longer.

In the summer of 1976, I was 14 years old and new to Colorado, my father took command of the Western Region’s National Guard. I enrolled in the brand-new Smoky Hill High School on what was then the far eastern boundary of Aurora. As a military brat, I was accustomed to moving around and not putting down roots — but as readers will know well, Colorado has a way of pulling on your heart and it became home. It remains so as my family spends as much time as possible in our Dillon residence.

Upon graduating from Cornell University, I joined the intelligence community as an analyst during President Ronald Reagan’s increasing investments in defense — a buildup that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union by the end of the decade. In my nearly four decades of service, I had the privilege of serving under six presidents — four Republican and two Democrat. The constant across all of those administrations was the oath I took to “protect and defend” the Constitution against “all enemies — foreign and domestic.”

I know what it takes to succeed at the highest levels of our government — intellectual curiosity, the strength of moral purpose and a commitment to selfless service. Broadly speaking, I can personally attest that Americans were very well served by those they elected to fill critical national security positions.

There is one important exception to that statement — our current president.

I have briefed him up close — and I have seen and felt the effect of his faults on our nation’s security. Out of respect for the confidential nature of Oval Office conversations, I will not provide details. Suffice to say that the person you see presiding over COVID-19 press conferences is the same one in the privacy of his office. He has little patience for facts or data that do not comport with his personal world view. Thus, the conversations are erratic and less than fully thoughtful.

While it is natural for there to be tension between the intelligence community and senior policymakers, President Donald Trump’s decision to rely upon the word of dictators like Vladimir Putin is an unprecedented betrayal of his oath to the Constitution. Our current president bases his decisions on his instincts, and his instincts are based upon a personal value proposition — what’s in it for me?

As a Commander in Chief, President Trump comes up tragically short. He fails to protect our soldiers when bounties are placed on their heads by his friend Vladimir. And not only does he not respect their service, but President Trump also belittles combat heroes who were taken as prisoners of war.

As a nation, we were fortunate that a true crisis did not occur during his first three years in office.

Then 2020 happened. This has been an unprecedented year for which many of us were not prepared. In moments of crisis, the American people demand — and deserve — a leader who will put the country first. Full stop. Because the reality and the science of COVID-19 conflicted with his personal views, President Trump knowingly downplayed the pandemic.

This is not about the economy, taxes, health care or any other normal ballot considerations. This is about American lives unnecessarily lost. This is about businesses unnecessarily closed. This is about being guided by service to all Americans. This is about centering decisions on a higher morality. President Trump’s actions — and inaction — demonstrates that he is not concerned about any of this.

And as damaging as his faulty leadership has been, four more years would be devastating.

We must elect a thoughtful, moral, responsible, respectful leader on Nov. 3. Our current president is not that leader.

Robert Cardillo retired as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency after 36 years of public service that also included serving as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Acting J2 — a first for a civilian — in support of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

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