HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 7, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, President Biden signed nine bipartisan bills designed to improve veterans’ health care and to honor those who have served in our nation’s military. It was an upbeat hour in the midst of a storm gathering as the nation takes on both gun safety legislation and the events of January 6.
Today, Good Morning America ran an 8-minute segment with teacher Arnulfo Reyes, who was wounded in the massacre at Uvalde, Texas, where on May 24 a gunman murdered 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers and wounded 17 others. The gunman badly wounded Reyes before murdering all 11 of the children in his classroom. In a powerful interview, Reyes vowed, “I will not let these children and my coworkers die in vain. I will not. I will go to the end of the world to not let my students die in vain.”
Then, actor Matthew McConaughey, who is from Uvalde, gave a passionate speech to reporters from the press podium at the White House. A gun owner himself, McConaughey called for strengthening our gun safety laws with background checks, raising the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21, instituting a waiting period for those rifles, and establishing red-flag laws. “These are reasonable, practical, tactical regulations to our nation, states, communities, schools, and homes,” he said.
McConaughey described the children and teachers who lost their lives at the Robb Elementary School, and explained just how the killer's AR-15 so destroyed their bodies that they had to be identified by DNA…or by their signature sneakers. He warned that “Responsible gun owners are fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals. These regulations are not a step back; they’re a step forward for a civil society and—and the Second Amendment,” he said.
He urged lawmakers—and Americans—to come together to pass legislation to protect our children. “Because I promise you, America—you and me, who—we are not as divided as we’re being told we are…. How about we get inspired? Give ourselves just cause to revere our future again. Maybe set an example for our children, give us reason to tell them, ‘Hey, listen and watch these men and women. These are great American leaders right here. Hope you grow up to be like them.’ And let’s admit it: We can’t truly be leaders if we’re only living for reelection…. We’ve got to make choices, make stands, embrace new ideas, and preserve the traditions that can create true—true progress for the next generation.”
As McConaughey finished and left the podium, James Rosen from Newsmax called out: “Were you grandstanding just now, sir?”
That response reflects the continuing dislike of Republicans for gun safety regulations. While the House will begin tomorrow to discuss passing a federal red-flag law, a minimum age requirement that a buyer has to be 21 to purchase a semiautomatic rifle, and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines, these measures will not get through the Senate, where the filibuster enables Republicans to stop legislation unless Democrats can muster a supermajority of 60 votes.
Senate Republicans have already said that they will not consider the regulations experts think are central to stopping mass shootings: an assault weapons ban such as we had until 2004, limits on ammunition magazines, and expansions of background checks to cover private gun sales are all off the table. They also say an age limit of 21 to purchase an assault-type rifle like that AR-15 is unlikely.
Republicans seem to be feeling the pressure of constituents angry at more and more frequent mass shootings. “This moment is different,” McConaughey said, in an echo of gun safety activist and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg. “We are in a window of opportunity right now that we have not been in before, a window where it seems like real change—real change can happen.”
And yet, Republicans who have embraced an ideology that rejects federal regulations and celebrates the idea of gun-carrying men cannot accept the gun safety rules most people want. So they are turning to extremist rhetoric. Jennifer Bendery reported in the Huffington Post that the extremist American Firearms Association warned of “tens of thousands of Bloomberg-funded, red shirt radical, commie mommies all over the Capitol complex.” Its leaders told members to prepare for “battle” at the U.S. Capitol. “They’re coming after us right now,” a fundraising email warned.
Republicans are also under pressure from the upcoming hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have announced that they will launch counterprogramming to the committee hearings, and those Republicans most likely to carry water for Trump are already on social media trying to undercut the committee and to stir up new scandals of one sort or another.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jim Banks (R-IN) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) will lead the way in arguing that the committee is illegitimate and out of touch. According to a document obtained by Vox, Trump has asked his chief supporters to shape the media coverage of the hearings and to ??“control and drive messaging using the channels we control.”
Republican leaders appear eager to attack the committee without explicitly defending Trump, for it’s not clear yet just how bad he will appear in the story the committee tells. Tonight, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered lawyer John Eastman to turn over another file of emails…by tomorrow. Some of them, he said, fall under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, and he outlined how “Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan to disrupt the Joint Session was fully formed and actionable as early as December 7, 2020.”
The Fox News Channel says it will not carry the January 6 committee hearings live, although CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and CNN will. As Sawyer Hackett, a co-host of the Our America podcast, noted, the Fox News Channel “ran 1,098 primetime segments on Benghazi from the day of the attack until the committee hearings, which they carried live for more than 7 hours.”
The Department of Homeland Security today issued a new bulletin in the National Terrorism Advisory System, stating that the U.S. “remains in a heightened threat environment.” It noted that “[t]he continued proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding current events could reinforce existing personal grievances or ideologies, and in combination with other factors, could inspire individuals to mobilize to violence.” Stories that the government is unwilling or unable to secure the southern border and the upcoming Supreme Court decision about abortion rights might lead to violence, it said.
Also, it noted: “As the United States enters mid-term election season this year, we assess that calls for violence by domestic violent extremists directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers will likely increase.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 8, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, the Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio complained to reporters that there have been “two standards” in the way we have seen the vandalism at some of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection. “We have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re going to make that a major deal.”
This is a common charge on the right, but it is a myth. An AP study showed that more than 120 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial for rioting, arson, and conspiracy for the 2020 protests, and that they are from all over the political spectrum, with many of them far-right extremists who traveled across state lines to the protests. And the January 6 attack was hardly victimless: 5 people died at the Capitol riot or just after it, more than 100 law enforcement officers were injured, and the rioters did more than $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol.
What happened on January 6th was not a “dust-up.” It was an attempt to overturn our democracy and install as president someone who had lost the popular vote and the Electoral College, upending the Constitution that is the law of our land.
As a report from the Brookings Institution put it: “President Joe Biden legitimately won a fair and secure 2020 presidential election—and Donald Trump lost. This historical fact has been uncontroverted by any evidence since at least November 7, 2020, when major news outlets projected Biden’s victory. But Trump never conceded. Instead, both before and after Election Day, he tried to delegitimize the election results by disseminating a series of far-fetched and evidence-free claims of fraud. Meanwhile, with a ring of close confidants, Trump conceived and implemented unprecedented schemes to—in his own words—“overturn” the election outcome. Among the results of this “Big Lie” campaign were the terrible events of January 6, 2021—an inflection point in what we now understand was nothing less than an attempted coup.”
Part of the crisis in which we find ourselves today is that many people don’t understand what is at stake in the hearings, in part because commentators have turned the attempt of Trump and his supporters to overturn our democracy into a mud-wrestling fight between Democrats and Republicans rather than showing it as an existential fight for rule of law. Today in his Presswatchers publication, Dan Froomkin explored how U.S. news organizations have failed to communicate to readers that we are on a knife edge between democracy and authoritarianism.
Froomkin notes that journalists have framed the January 6 hearings as a test for the Democrats or as a waste of time because they will not change anyone’s mind or perhaps because no one cares. He begged journalists not to downplay the hearings and present them as a horse race, but to frame the events of January 6 in the larger context of Republican attempts to overturn our democracy.
Tomorrow night, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its first hearing to explain to the American people what happened at the end of the Trump administration. The hearings will be broadcast on C-SPAN, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, and the Fox Business Channel and streamed on the YouTube channel of the House Select Committee on June 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, and 23.
We have some idea of what the hearings will entail.
According to committee member Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the hearings will establish that the attack was the result of “concerted planning and premeditated activity.” The hearings will show who was behind the January 6th attack on the Capitol, ultimately connecting the attack to Trump and his closest aides. Raskin told the Washington Post that “we are going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”
As the Brookings report put it: “Trump attempted to retain power by any means necessary.” He prepared to argue that the election was stolen long before it took place on November 3, 2020. Trump’s stories about voter fraud shifted and were inconsistent, and he “was repeatedly told by trusted advisors, experts, and courts that there was no fraud.”
Committee members have said there will be new evidence produced at the hearings, and new information has been dropping all week.
We learned that Trump expressed great interest in the Insurrection Act, which enables the president to call out the military to put down an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Court filings say that members of the Oath Keepers expected Trump to invoke the act to enable them to fight against those counting the electoral votes for Joe Biden.
We also learned that Trump badgered his Secret Service detail to permit him to walk with his supporters to the Capitol building after his speech at the Ellipse on January 6.
We have learned that Republican officials in at least 11 places in Michigan breached local election systems to try to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the citizen initiative petition to limit voting rights in order to combat “fraud” had about 20,000 fraudulent signatures on it. In addition, there were allegations that petition circulators had lied to voters to get them to sign the petition, a practice that is legal in Michigan despite the attempts of Democratic lawmakers to prohibit it.
And, crucially, we learned that the Trump campaign told the fake electors in Georgia to operate in “complete secrecy.” The apparent plan of the Trump plotters was to get fake electors to present an uncertified slate of electoral votes that gave their state to Trump, rather than to Biden as voters had chosen. But, as a Trump official wrote in an email: "I must ask for your complete discretion in this process. Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result—a win in Georgia for President Trump—but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion." The official asked the electors to avoid the media and to lie to security guards about why they were at the statehouse. This email suggests the plotters knew they were acting illegally.
But perhaps the biggest sign that the hearings will turn heads is how hard Trump Republicans are trying to distance themselves from it, or to create a distraction.
Significantly, a piece in the New York Times by Peter Baker, published today, distanced Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump from the debacle of the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election. “No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen…. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency,” the story reads.
If the former president’s daughter and son-in-law, both key White House advisors, are now trying to distance themselves from the events of January 6, perhaps the panic in the party more generally was best demonstrated today when the Republican National Committee responded to news of a man looking to harm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It sent out an email with the subject heading: “The Democrat SCOTUS Assassin.”
In his comment today about January 6, for which he later apologized, Del Rio claimed he just wanted to “apply the same standard,” and “to be reasonable with each other” and to “have a discussion.” The open-mindedness he calls for is a perfect approach to this month’s hearings.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 9, 2022 (Thursday)

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
So Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, damned her Republican colleagues at tonight's first hearing on the January 6 insurrection.
And that was only a piece of what we heard tonight.
Calmly, carefully, convincingly, and in plain, easy to understand language, committee leaders Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Cheney placed former president Donald Trump at the center of an attempt to overturn our democracy. They were very clear that what happened on January 6 was an attempted coup, an “attempt to undermine the will of the people.” All Americans should remember, they reminded us, that on the morning of January 6, Donald Trump intended to remain president, despite his loss in the 2020 election and his constitutional obligation to step down in favor of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, as every president before him had done.
The committee established that there was no fraud in the 2020 election that would have changed the results of the election, showing testimony from Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr that the argument that Trump had won was “bullsh*t.” The committee presented testimony from other administration figures, including Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and his daughter Ivanka, that Trump had been told repeatedly that he had lost. And yet, even with his inner circle telling him he had lost, and even with more than 60 failed lawsuits over the election, Trump continued to lie that he had been cheated of victory.
It was Trump who “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame” for January 6, the committee says. Unable to accept his loss and determined to remain in power, Trump organized and deployed an attack on our democracy.
The committee established that the attack on the Capitol was not a random, spontaneous uprising. The rioters came at Trump’s invitation. While they had been muttering about the results since immediately after the election, it was Trump’s tweet of December 19, 2020, that lit the fuse. That night, the former president met with lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and others at the White House. Shortly after the meeting, Trump tweeted that it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Members of the extremist organizations the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers took Trump’s December 19th tweet as a call to arms. On December 20, they began to organize to go to Washington. These radical white supremacists had taken great pride in Trump’s shout-out in a presidential debate on September 29 that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” After that comment, membership in the Proud Boys had tripled.
Members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers testified that they went to Washington because Trump personally asked them to. “Trump has only asked me for two things,” one man testified: “my vote, and he asked me to come on January 6.”
The committee provided evidence that 250 to 300 Proud Boys arrived in Washington to stop the counting of the electoral votes. Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker working to film the gang, testified that the riot was not spontaneous: the Proud Boys, who were allegedly in Washington to hear Trump speak, walked away from the rally at the Ellipse even before then-president Trump spoke, walking to the Capitol and checking out the police presence there. The Oath Keepers, too, were in Washington to stop the count and were expecting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, enabling them to fight for him to remain president.
The groups quite deliberately fought their way into the Capitol in a planned and coordinated attack. Meanwhile, Trump continued to stoke the crowd’s fury at then–vice president Mike Pence for refusing to overturn the election in his role as the person in charge of counting the certified electoral votes. The rioters stormed the Capitol and went in search of Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), their calls for “Oh, Nancy,” echoing like the singsong chant from a horror movie. When he learned that the rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” the president said: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” He said that Pence “deserves it.”
Videos of the violence outside the Capitol further undercut the attempt of Republicans to downplay the rioters as “tourists.” Asked by Thompson if any one memory from January 6 stood out to her, Officer Caroline Edwards, who fought to protect the Capitol, said yes: the scene of “carnage” and “chaos.” It was like a war scene from the movies, she said, with officers bleeding on the ground, vomiting. She was slipping in people’s blood, catching people as they fell. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think… I would find myself in the middle of a battle,” she said. More than 100 police officers were wounded in the fighting, attacked with cudgels and bear spray, and at least nine people died then and immediately after.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was only one of many people caught up in the violence to contact Trump and beg him to call off the rioters. Clearly, Republicans as well as Democrats knew the mob were his people and that they would respond to his instructions. And yet, he refused. He did nothing to call out the military or the National Guard to defend the Capitol.
Ultimately, those requests came from Vice President Pence, in what appears so far to be an unexplained breakdown in the usual chain of command. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that Pence was very clear that the military needed to turn up and fast to “put down this situation.” In contrast, Meadows talked to Milley not about protecting the Capitol, but to say “we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions.” Milley said he saw this as “politics, politics, politics.”
After the attempt to overturn the election and keep Trump in power had failed, according to Cheney, Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) and "multiple other Republican congressmen" tried to get Trump to pardon them for their participation. While they are now insisting they did nothing wrong, the requests for a presidential pardon show that they were aware that they were in trouble.
After the hearing, CNN congressional correspondent Ryan Nobles talked to Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is on the committee. “It’s actually a pretty simple story of a president who lost, who couldn’t stand losing, who cared nothing about the constitution and was determined to hold on to power and who incited a mob when everything else failed,” Schiff said.
The hearing provided some new information about the January 6 coup attempt that had not previously been publicly available. It also put what we already knew into a clear and compelling narrative using the words of Trump’s own advisors, including his daughter, and video previously unseen by the public. That story singled Trump out as the author of an attack on our democracy and isolated him even from those in his inner circle in a way that could weaken his influence in his party.
At the same time, the committee’s presentation was horrifying, reviving the pain of January 6 and clarifying it by bringing together the many different storylines that we have previously seen only in isolation. The timeline juxtaposed the mob violence with Trump’s own statements about how Pence was letting them down, for example. It showed Officer Edwards being knocked unconscious while Trump claimed the mob was made up of “peaceful people… great people,” and described “the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Pundits had speculated before tonight’s televised hearing that it would not make compelling television, but they could not have been more wrong. The Fox News Channel, some of whose personalities were involved in the events surrounding January 6, refused to air the proceedings. Nonetheless, that channel inadvertently proved just how powerful the hearing was when it ran Tucker Carlson’s show without commercial breaks, apparently afraid that if anyone began to channel surf they might be drawn in by the hearing on other channels.
Veteran reporter Bob Woodward called the evening “historic.” Looking back at the 1954 hearings that destroyed the career of Senator Joe McCarthy by revealing that he was lying to the American public, Woodward said that tonight’s event “was the equivalent of the Army-McCarthy hearings."

Lapdog to hero in one night.
Pretty good evening for Pence.

IMO, even though He did the right thing that day, He's still a toad.

it's a very tough thing

pence was as loyal as a veep can be

but push came to shove

he had a higher duty

i been giving him credit ever since

Agreed. But would you vote for him?

yes

any nevertrumper is a friend o mine

say he is goin up against hillary or the don

yes. decidedly yes

say he's goin up against others

you would have to name names

OK. Here's one. Kamala Harris.

Here's another, Pete. B.

or another, Elizabeth Warren?

Have at it, sir.

well if if them three are my choices

it would be warren

she would be such a burr in the saddles of all these small businesspersons who refuse to overpay anyone but themselves

i would chortle

yeah i got a little loki in me

a no to kamala and a maybe to pete b

one thing i am sure of

pence will not subvert the process

he proved it and that's the big diggity to me right now

The only thing (besides basic Republican policy) I really don't like about Pence is his adherence to religious beliefs. I fear that he would further the shaping of policy by the religious right. I do think he proved his decency through all of this. He feels very McCain-esque to me. By that I mean a rational Republican.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 10, 2022 (Friday)

Preliminary reports say that about 20 million people watched last night’s compelling hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. That number, which does not include streaming or later views, is fewer than tune in for a normal State of the Union address, but more than for the World Series. In contrast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 11-hour testimony in a 2015 Benghazi hearing drew only about 4 million viewers.
Reviews of the hearing have generally concluded that it was a powerful presentation that effectively put former president Trump at the center of a conspiracy to overturn our democracy. And there has been little convincing pushback from Trump loyalists. Conservative commentator Bill Kristol noted: “Tons of counter-programming from the Right. But no counter-evidence.”
Although Donald Trump Jr. claimed he didn’t even know the hearing was happening and urged followers not to watch, it was clear that the Trump camp could not look away and that the program’s high ratings—a metric former president Trump cares about deeply—have stung. He snarled at the presentation on his “Truth Social” platform, complaining that the committee refused “to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements,” although he did not specify which those might be.
In fact, a great deal of the power of the committee’s presentation last night came from the fact that many of its key witnesses were themselves members of Trump’s inner circle. Those witnesses included his attorney general, William Barr; Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley; and Trump’s own daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. They established that Trump indeed knew he had lost the election, that he nonetheless stoked a movement to keep him in power, and that when the insurrectionists attacked the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, he refused to intervene to protect lawmakers, law enforcement officers, or the law.
Both Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared to turn against her father, and today he responded. Ivanka said she believed Barr when he told her that the 2020 election had not been stolen. Her testimony apparently infuriated her father, who said today that “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).”
As Trump’s attack on his daughter indicates, last night’s hearing appears to have exacerbated the chaos in the Republican Party as Trump and his supporters struggle to cling to power in the face of damning evidence that they tried to destroy our democracy.
The state of Michigan has embodied that chaos lately. Election machinery there has been compromised as pro-Trump activists got access to the system to try to prove voter fraud. Five right-wing candidates for governor got tossed off the primary ballot because the signatures on their nomination papers were fraudulent. The remaining front-runner, Ryan Kelley, is a staunch Trump supporter who was at the Capitol on January 6; yesterday, the FBI arrested him for his participation in the attack.
Someone on Twitter described the Michigan Republican Party as a “hot mess.”
Pro-Trump activism is in the news in another way today, too. In 2020, Ginni Thomas, who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote to 29 members of the Arizona legislature to urge them to ignore Biden’s victory in the state and instead to choose their own electors who would back Trump’s reelection. We knew she had written to two legislators, but it turns out that number was off by a lot. While Ginni Thomas maintains that her work is separate from her husband’s, it is at the very least a problem that he has refused to recuse himself from cases in which her activism might have caused a conflict of interest.
And yet, despite the increasing mess around Trump, other Republicans won’t risk angering him or his voters. Yesterday, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) refused four times to answer whether President Biden was legitimately elected. Asked the question by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, McCarthy avoided antagonizing pro-Trump forces by saying that Biden is president without saying he was elected legitimately or that Trump is wrong to say the election was fraudulent.
And Trump is making it clear he will tolerate no sliding away among his loyalists. Earlier, Trump threw Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), who spoke at the rally on January 6, overboard, only to discover that Brooks’s numbers rose. After considering endorsing Brooks again, Trump today instead backed his challenger in the upcoming election. Trump claimed that he has given up on Brooks because he told a crowd to put the 2020 election behind them and to move forward, but New York Times reporter Blake Hounshell wrote that Trump backed Brooks’s challenger because her husband, a former NFL player, wooed him.
There are increasing rumblings about new coalitions to ditch the radical extremists in the Republican Party who are trying to destroy democracy and replace them with candidates who still care about our democratic system. In the New Yorker yesterday, Sue Halpern outlined the effort in Utah to replace Senator Mike Lee, who participated in the effort to overturn the election, with Evan McMullin, a former Republican running as an independent. Democrats did not field their own candidate in that race and are instead backing McMullin. McMullin has made Lee’s support for Trump’s coup attempt central to his campaign, and he is now running close to Lee in the polls.
A number of bipartisan groups made up of anti-Trump Republicans and moderate Democrats are backing pro-democracy candidates for office, including Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), whose party turned against her after she supported the investigation into the attack on the Capitol.
But a Twitter thread by New York Times reporter Ben Collins today made it clear that the right wing in America has grown beyond Trump. In the right-wing spaces Collins reports on, he says that participants are aware of the hearing but unconcerned about it. Instead, they “have moved onto full-time anti-trans panic. It has consumed them.” They now care far more about fighting to control the nation’s LGBTQ population than about Trump. “They simply want a fight,” Collins wrote, “and are looking for whoever will start it fastest.”
Collins noted that on a website named for Trump that was a key site for organizing the insurrection, the lead quotation today came not from Trump, but rather from Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
At the beginning of last night’s hearing, Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) called out the link between political extremism in the U.S. and social control, both of which are about a small group of people dominating others, a minority imposing their worldview on a majority. "I'm from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching,” Thompson said. “I'm reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try to justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021."

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 12, 2022 (Sunday)

Thursday’s presentation by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol made quite a splash… and the ripples are still spreading.
Today in the New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd reacted to Thursday’s revelations that Trump was “deadly serious about overthrowing the government,” by laying out the main points: Trump knew he had lost the election, and yet was willing to see his vice president hanged in order to avoid being labeled a loser. Dowd called former president Trump an “American monster,” and compared him unfavorably to Frankenstein’s monster, who at least “has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc… [and] knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage.” Our monster, in contrast, is driven only by “pure narcissistic psychopathy– and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.”
Yesterday, Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney reported that on January 5, 2021, then-vice president Pence’s attorney Greg Jacob wrote a three-page memo concluding that what the president and his supporters were demanding Pence do the next day would break the 1887 Electoral College Act– that is, the law– in four different ways. The memo responded to John Eastman’s memo laying out the plan for Pence to hand the election to Trump by refusing to count a number of Biden electors. Jacob noted that Eastman himself “acknowledges that his proposal violates several provisions of statutory law.” In addition, both historical court decisions and one as recent as the day before contradicted Eastman’s plan.
Jacob’s memo concluded that if Pence did what Trump demanded, the best possible outcome was that “The Vice President would likely find himself in an isolated standoff against both houses of Congress, as well as most or all of the applicable State legislatures….”
It is no wonder that Pence declined to participate.
Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who is on the January 6th committee, called out Republicans who have rallied behind the Big Lie, saying: “I don’t really know many people around [Trump] who truly believe the election was stolen,” and if Trump “truly believes the election was stolen, he’s not mentally competent to be President.”
After Thursday’s revelation by committee vice-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) that Representative Scott Perry (R-PA), as well as “multiple other Republican congressmen,” tried to get Trump to pardon them for their participation in his plan to overturn the election, Perry’s spokesperson called the allegation a “laughable, ludicrous, and a thoroughly soulless lie.”
But today on ABC News, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is on the January 6 committee, said the panel has evidence. Schiff said: “We will show the evidence that we have that members of Congress were seeking pardons…. I think that is some of the most compelling evidence of a consciousness of guilt…. Why would members do that if they felt that their involvement in this plot to overturn the election was somehow appropriate?”
Asked if the committee had evidence for their statement that congresspeople had asked for pardons, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), also on the panel, and a constitutional lawyer, told CNN’s Dana Bash, “everything we’re doing is documented by evidence, unlike the Big Lie, which is based on nonsense, as former Attorney General Barr said, everything we’re doing is based on facts.”
As the atmosphere around Trump gets hotter, there are cracks appearing in the Republican Party’s support for the former president. Today, Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said on Fox News Sunday that former president Trump is “politically, morally responsible” for the events of January 6, although Hutchinson expressed the opinion that the committee has not yet established that the former president is criminally liable. Hutchinson said, “Republicans need to do a lot of soul searching as to what is the right thing here and what is the right thing for our democracy in the future, and not simply adhere to the basic instincts of some of our base.”
It is not clear that his colleagues will heed Hutchinson’s call.
Yesterday, demonstrators across the country called for stronger gun safety laws, and the need for them is heightened by the fact that today is the sixth anniversary of the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, when a gunman murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others. Americans appear to have had enough of the carnage at our schools and supermarkets, nightclubs and churches: more than 80% of Americans want background checks before gun purchases and 75% of adults want to limit purchases of AR-15 style weapons to those over 21.
Today a bipartisan group of 20 senators announced they had reached an agreement on what they are willing to put into a package of gun-safety regulations. If successfully written into a bill and then enacted, this would be the first major federal gun safety legislation in almost 30 years, which is astonishing considering just what weak sauce it is.
The agreement calls for stronger red flag laws to help keep guns out of the hands of those a court has determined are a significant danger to themselves or others, “consistent with state and federal due process and constitutional protections”; investment in mental health services; an end to the so-called “boyfriend loophole” that allows unmarried partners with domestic violence records to own guns; more funding for school safety measures; penalties for those who buy guns illegally; and longer reviews for gun buyers who are under 21.
It seems likely the Democrats want the deal to establish the principle of federal regulation of guns, and the Republicans want it to say they’re doing something at a time when American voters are demanding action on gun safety. If it does little to change outcomes, Republicans will be able to say that regulations don’t make us safer.
Significantly, in his statement announcing the framework, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), did not mention gun safety or gun control, simply saying that he supports a bipartisan agreement that resolves “key issues like mental health and school safety, respects the Second Amendment, and earns broad support in the Senate.” All of those terms reinforce Republican arguments for solving our epidemic of gun deaths.
Meanwhile, what it means to empower Trump’s base became clear yesterday when law enforcement officers in Idaho arrested 31 members of the so-called “Patriot Front” white supremacist hate group. The men intended to disrupt Coeur D’Alene’s Pride in the Park, an event advertised as a “family-friendly, community event celebrating diversity and building a stronger and more unified community for ALL.” The Patriot Front rebranded itself from so-called Vanguard America after one of that group's members plowed a car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, killing counterprotester Heather Heyer, and wounding many others. Members of the gang arrested yesterday came from 11 different states, and one of those arrested for conspiring to riot– a misdemeanor– was the group’s founder, Thomas Ryan Rousseau.
Farther to the south, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, whom Trump has called a “great friend” and whose reelection he supports, has expanded his claim that the upcoming election in which he is running is being stolen. Bolsonaro is 25 percentage points behind his chief rival in the polls, but says he will lose only if the vote is fraudulent. Now, he has enlisted the support of the military in his claims. Bolsonaro recently said that election officials had “invited the armed forces to participate in the electoral process,” and reminded an audience that “the supreme chief of the armed forces is named Jair Messias Bolsonaro.” He insists that the military is only trying to keep the vote clean and safe. “For the love of God,” he said recently, “no one is engaging in undemocratic acts.”
The January 6 committee will hold its second hearing tomorrow, at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 13, 2022 (Monday)

Today was the second hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The day began with chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) laying out clearly and simply that what Trump and his minions did was to try to steal from Americans our right to vote for the leaders we want. That’s the heart of our system of government and central to the rule of law. The investigation of what happened in the last months of the Trump administration isn’t some abstract debate about a short riot, deadly though it was; it is an examination of an attack on the American people and an attempt to destroy our democracy.
Once again, as it did last Thursday, the committee relied entirely on senior Republican officials and on members of Trump’s own inner circle to tell the story of how Trump tried to overthrow our government. This undercuts accusations that the committee is engaging in a “partisan witch hunt.” Notably, the committee itself is measured, polite, and serious, demonstrating to viewers what hearings used to be before they became ways to produce sound bites for right-wing media.
Observers have commented that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made a bad mistake in pulling his Republican nominees off the committee. He likely expected that such a move would discredit the committee, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) inclusion of Republicans Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) made the committee bipartisan anyway, and subsequent judicial decisions have concluded that the committee was constituted legally. What McCarthy really lost in pulling Republicans was not the ability to sway the story—the evidence is so clear that no one is challenging it—but the ability to create chaos and make it impossible for people to figure out what was happening, as Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) did at the first impeachment hearings for Trump by yelling over witnesses, badgering, and bullying.
Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) directed today’s hearing as the committee laid out proof that Trump had seeded the argument that the election was fraudulent for months before November 2020. As expected, election night showed the so-called red mirage, which Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News Channel’s elections expert during the 2020 election, explained meant that they expected in-person voting to favor Republicans, while mail-in voting would favor Democrats. That meant that early returns would make it look like Trump was winning, but the later returns would swing to Biden. That’s exactly what happened.
Trump’s advisors, including his campaign manager Bill Stepien, told Trump not to claim victory the night of the election, saying the numbers were still far too preliminary to call a victor. Trump ignored them and instead listened to “an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani,” who told him to declare victory. That’s what he did, claiming that he had won and election officials needed to stop counting the remaining ballots, which he insisted were fraudulent. Stepien testified that Trump had no evidence at all to make that claim. "We want all voting to stop,” Trump told the American people. “We don't want them to find any ballots at 4:00 in the morning and add them to the list."
Trump’s most senior advisors repeatedly told the former president that he had lost the election and that the many examples of fraud he kept citing were “wild,” “bullsh*t,” “bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation,” “debunked,” “incorrect,” and “bad information,” and yet Trump continued to emphasize those same theories and insist publicly that he had won.
On November 29, after Trump suggested that the FBI and others were involved in the fraud and that the Department of Justice wasn’t investigating, Attorney General Bill Barr told an AP reporter that there was “no evidence” of voter fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. Called to the White House, Barr said he had never seen Trump so angry, but “the stuff his people were shoveling out to the public was bullsh*t.” Barr said he continually told Trump his claims about voting machines and so on were bogus. Barr actually laughed when mentioning and then debunking right-wing operative Dinesh D’Souza’s recent film “2000 Mules,” which purports to show how the election was stolen.
There was a suggestion on the part of the witnesses that Trump was being played by his disreputable associates—Barr said “if [Trump] really believes this stuff, he has become detached from reality”—but sports writer Jeff Pearlman pointed out that Trump was following an old pattern. Seeding and insisting on a particular story contrary to all evidence, just to be able to set up a personal win, was the same playbook Trump used when he bankrupted the United States Football League in order to get himself an NFL franchise.
The committee did, though, suggest that the aim of the Big Lie was not just keeping Trump in power. It established that the Trump campaign sent millions of fundraising emails based on the promise to fight to challenge the election results, ultimately raising $250 million from small donors.
But get this: the so-called Election Defense Fund was never real.
According to witnesses, the claim to have such a fund was a “marketing tactic.” The money went to Trump’s own political action committee, the Save America PAC, which used the funds to pay off people in Trump’s orbit (more than $200,000 went to Trump’s hotels, and Don Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was paid $60,000 for her two-and-a-half-minute introduction at the January 6 rally). Legal observers quickly pointed out that this sounds like wire fraud, which is illegal. The Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell reported that Attorney General Merrick Garland said he is watching the hearings and added, “I can assure you the January 6 prosecutors are watching the hearings as well.”
The committee established that Trump invented out of whole cloth the argument that he had won the election and had done so against the advice and evidence of his advisors. It concluded today’s hearing with video of the January 6th attackers using exactly Trump’s argument and even his words to justify their storming of the U.S. Capitol.
One of the key points the hearings raise is that all these senior officials who, now under oath, are saying that Trump lied and attacked our democracy against their advice and evidence, kept their mouths shut until forced to speak. They could—and should—have spoken up before January 6. And yet, Barr, for example, spent much of the summer reinforcing Trump’s lies about election integrity, and when he resigned on December 14, he wrote a congratulatory letter to Trump, defending most of his presidential policies. Even his reference to their recent argument could be read as supporting Trump’s lies: “it is incumbent on all levels of government…to do all we can to assure the integrity of elections and promote public confidence in their outcome,” he wrote.
Even more revealing is the case of Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, who now admits that there was never any evidence that Trump won the election or that the vote was fraudulent. Stepien is currently working with the campaign of hard-right, Trump-endorsed Republican Harriet Hageman, who is trying to unseat Cheney in Wyoming. Part of Hageman’s platform is her insistence that “[o]ver the past two years we’ve seen Democrats chip away at…[f]ree and fair elections…the foundation of our Republic.”
Across the country, Republicans have rewritten election laws to prevent another “stolen” election, even though they know there was no such thing. As leading Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg said today, “The 2020 election was not close.” Nonetheless, leading Republicans are willing to embrace the Big Lie in order to skew our election system to keep those like Trump in power.
It all comes down to who is welcome to participate in self-government in the United States, and we have been here before. In our nation’s first famous political coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about 2000 armed white Democrats overthrew a government of Black Republicans and white Populists. The Democrats agreed that the election had been fair, but they rejected its outcome nonetheless, saying they refused to live under the government voters had elected. They accused white men who had worked with the Republicans of tricking Black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” They killed as many as 300 Black Americans in this “reform” of the city government.
The committee’s next public hearing will be on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m., Eastern time.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 14, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today the White House announced that President Joe Biden will visit the Middle East next month. His first stop will be in Israel, and then he will go to Saudi Arabia, where he will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the man responsible for the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS recently invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s new investment fund against the advice of the funds’ advisors.
In 2019, Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” in part because of the Khashoggi killing, but administration officials have been quietly visiting for months, in part to urge Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to help ease gas prices in the U.S. While the White House maintains that it is looking for a “reset” with the Saudis in order to promote peace talks between Israel and Palestine, end the war in Yemen, and address human rights violations, it acknowledges that oil production is on the table.
Inflation is high in the U.S., as it is all over the world, because of demand, supply chain problems, the soaring costs of transportation as the world’s few carriers jack up prices, and so on. But that inflation is driven in large part by higher oil prices, which have driven up the price of gasoline and diesel in the U.S., which in turn makes everything more expensive.
Since the first public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol last week, much of the traffic on right-wing social media has been about gas prices, blaming them on President Biden. Republicans see gas prices and inflation as key issues both to distract from the hearings and to enable Republicans to take over control of Congress in the November midterm elections.
In fact, according to a piece by E. Rosalie in the newsletter Hoaxlines, U.S. production of crude oil during Biden’s first year was actually higher than it was in Trump’s first year. To encourage production, Biden’s officials have issued more permits on federal lands than were issued in the Trump administration’s first three years, at a pace that approaches that of George W. Bush’s administration. Only 10% of all U.S. drilling takes place on federal land, but the Bureau of Land Management confirms that more than 9000 drilling permits on public land are currently approved. Not all would be productive if they were developed, and none of them could start producing immediately, but this undercuts the argument that gas prices are high because the Biden administration has choked off permits.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has also driven up global oil prices, but the U.S. gets less than 2% of its oil from Russia.
What appears to be driving U.S. gas prices is the pressure investors are putting on oil companies, whose officers answer to their investors. Limited production creates higher prices that are driving record profits. In a March 2022 survey of 141 U.S. oil producers asking them why they were holding back production, 59% said they were under investor pressure. Only 6% blamed “government regulations” for their lack of increased production.
Oil companies are seeing huge profits and are using the money for stock buybacks to raise stock prices. BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, Eni, and Equinor will give between $38 and $41 billion to shareholders through buyback programs this year. As EOG Resources wrote to its shareholders: “2021 was a record-setting year for EOG. We earned record net income of $4.7 billion, generated a record $5.5 billion of free cash flow, which funded record cash return of $2.7 billion to shareholders. We doubled our regular dividend rate and paid two special dividends, paying out about 30% of cash from operations…. This period of high oil prices allows us to further bolster the balance sheet. To support our renewed $5 billion buyback authorization and prepare to take advantage of other countercyclical opportunities, we plan to build and carry a higher cash balance going forward….”
But congressional Republicans appear uninterested in adjusting the disjunction between supply and demand that is creating such high consumer prices. In May the House passed the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act by a vote of 217 to 207 with only Democrats in the yes column and all Republicans and four Democrats voting no. The bill provided a vague warning that it is unlawful to charge “unconscionably excessive” prices for consumer fuel during presidentially declared energy emergencies, and it gave the Federal Trade Commission more power to punish price gouging.
The Senate has not moved forward with the bill. Republicans there can kill it with the filibuster and will do so, despite the fact that a Morning Consult/Politico poll shows that 77% of registered voters—including 76% of Republicans—like such a measure. Only 13% of voters outright oppose such a law (10% have no opinion).
Biden has sought to address the issue with the tools at his command. After trying to ease pressure by releasing oil from the strategic reserve, he has set out to reduce the nation’s demand for oil products by identifying the conversion to clean energy as a national security issue. On June 6 he vowed to “continue…pushing Congress to pass clean energy investments and tax cuts” but also authorized the use of the Defense Production Act to speed up the domestic production of solar panel parts, building insulation, heat pumps, and power grid infrastructure like transformers. He will also lower tariffs on solar technology coming to the U.S. from Southeast Asia for two years. These measures should ensure a reliable supply of solar panels while creating more jobs in the green energy sector, which currently employs more than 230,000 people in the solar industry alone.
In addition to Biden’s measures to ease oil prices, lawmakers are trying to curb inflation by imposing the sorts of limits on carrier prices that they refuse to on oil prices.
On Monday the House passed the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 to hamper unfair business practices among shipping carriers. The measure passed the Senate in March. Although the bills were introduced by Democrats, the votes that passed them were bipartisan, reflecting, perhaps, that the nine shipping companies that dominate the world market are multinational rather than domestic. According to Representative John Garamendi (D-CA), shippers have raised prices on U.S. businesses and consumers by more than 1000% on goods coming from Asia, enabling them to make $190 billion in profits last year, a sevenfold increase in one year. This bill, he said, “will help crush inflation and protect American jobs.” Biden has praised the bill and promises to sign it.
And tomorrow the Federal Reserve is expected to announce an interest rate hike of three quarters of a percentage point, its highest since 1994, to combat inflation. Higher interest rates will make it more expensive to borrow money, which should cool down the economy, although getting inflation down to the 2% the Fed prefers will likely slow consumer spending, dampen wage increases, and slow economic growth.
And of course, next month, Biden will visit the Saudis, who can increase oil supplies quickly if they believe it is in their best interest to do so.
And finally, a heads up: tomorrow’s hearing of the January 6 committee has been postponed. The next hearing is now scheduled for Thursday at 1:00 pm.