Saturday, February 17, 2024
The GOP Is Abandoning the Fight Against Evil
Friday has been a dark day for freedom. In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces are on the verge of taking the city of Avdiivka after a months-long fight, thereby bringing closer Vladimir Putin’s goal of fully annexing yet another Ukrainian province: Donetsk. And in a Russian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, Russia’s foremost dissident, Alexei Navalny, was pronounced dead at age 47.
I am filled with anger and despair as I write these words. Not because I am surprised by the Russian president’s villainy — that, by now, is sadly well-established. But because I am shocked and dismayed that America, the bastion of freedom, might abandon the fight against Putin’s evil. House Republican leaders are giving every indication that they are willing to reward Navalny’s killer by cutting off Russia’s Ukrainian victims from further U.S. aid, thereby making it inevitable that more good people will suffer his fate.
The circumstances of Navalny’s death remain murky. But whatever cause of death is listed on his death certificate, there is no doubt as to who killed him: He was murdered by Putin. Navalny was a tireless and fearless crusader against corruption and in favor of freedom. He was thus a mortal threat to a dictator who has established the most complete personal tyranny in Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin.
Putin had already tried to kill Navalny once, in 2020, by poisoning him with a nerve agent. Navalny survived, thanks to medical care he received in Germany. He could easily have stayed in the West with his beautiful family, yet in January 2021 he chose to return to Russia to lead the fight against Putin in person. He knew what would happen to him upon landing: He would be sent to prison on trumped-up charges. And he was. Yet he willingly sacrificed himself, because he calculated he could be a more effective advocate for freedom within Russia than outside it.
[A]lthough Navalny refused to condemn Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — a move that was widely popular in Russia — he was a steadfast opponent of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last year, he called for Ukraine to return to its internationally recognized 1991 borders, which would mean the return of Crimea.
Even with Navalny behind bars, his associates continued to expose Putin’s breathtaking corruption — including the dictator’s construction of a $1.3 billion palace. The video about Putin’s palace swiftly reached more than 93 million views on YouTube. We can only imagine Putin’s rage. Navalny’s prison sentence kept getting longer, and the conditions of his imprisonment kept getting worse.
In December, Navalny was sent to a former gulag north of the Arctic Circle, where he died Friday. He thus joins a long list of martyrs for Russian democracy — including Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov — who have been murdered by Putin’s odious regime.
There is not much more the United States can realistically do on the sanctions front without more cooperation from those nations. But there are two things that the West can do that would get Putin’s attention:
First, send to Ukraine the estimated $300 billion in frozen Russian assets held in the West, primarily in a Belgian clearinghouse. The European Union and the Group of Seven recently agreed to send to Ukraine the profits from the Russian holdings, which could amount to $4 billion this year. But it would be far more effective to send the entire amount to make clear to Putin that aggression does not pay — literally.
Second, pass the $60 billion aid package for Ukraine that was just approved on a bipartisan vote of 70-29 in the Senate but that remains stuck in the House. Avdiivka is falling because the defenders are running out of ammunition. It would be a tragedy and disaster if that occurred elsewhere along the front lines — or if Ukraine ran out of air-defense ammunition to protect its cities from Putin’s murderous missile and drone strikes.
The only way to avoid Ukraine’s defeat is by providing more U.S. aid. Yet House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in thrall to former president Donald Trump and his “America First” isolationists, refuses to grant the aid bill a floor vote. A failure to pass the aid bill will reward Navalny’s killer.
It might be no coincidence that Navalny died when he did . . . . Putin is feeling confident because of the emergence of a pro-Kremlin caucus on the American right. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the very definition of a “useful idiot,” traveled to Russia recently for a simpering interview with Putin followed by the posting of propaganda videos about how much better life supposedly is in Russia than in the United States. Even worse, Trump . . . . recently said he would not protect NATO members who failed to pay their nonexistent “dues” and said that he would encourage the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want” to those supposed deadbeats.
Putin feels as though he is winning — and thus as though he can get away with murder. Giving that rapacious dictator a sense of impunity and invincibility is extremely dangerous. We can still fight back, however, by giving Ukraine the funds and military equipment it needs to defend itself. Only by defeating Putin’s aggression in Ukraine can we hope to see the emergence of a better, freer Russia — the dream that Navalny gave his life for.
Friday, February 16, 2024
Trump’s Contempt for Members of the Military
The presumptive Republican nominee showed yet again this weekend how little he thinks of America’s men and women in uniform.
Donald Trump made news over the weekend by saying that he would invite Russian aggression against NATO members. I wrote on Saturday that these statements were far more dangerous than his usual disconnected blustering. But in the midst of this appalling business, Trump also reminded Americans how little he values the service of American military personnel.
At a campaign stop in Conway, South Carolina, on Saturday, Trump tried to zing his only remaining GOP primary rival, his own United Nations ambassador (and a former Palmetto State governor) Nikki Haley, by asking why her husband was not on the campaign trail with her. Army Major Michael Haley, as Trump almost certainly knew, was not with his wife because he was with the South Carolina National Guard on his second deployment, this time to Africa. . . . Where is he? He’s gone.” As The New York Times reported, Trump “then paused, before adding suggestively: ‘He knew. He knew.’”
He knew what, exactly? Trump’s insinuation was that Major Haley asked to be sent half a world away from his family because he didn’t want to be around his wife, an innuendo disgusting in itself but especially to anyone who has ever seen the sacrifices made by military families. Nikki Haley rightly fired back at Trump: “With that kind of disrespect for the military,” she said to supporters at a stop yesterday in Elgin, South Carolina, “he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them.”
[I]f President Joe Biden walked out in front of a crowd and said the things Trump says, in the odd and strained cadences Trump often says them, Biden’s opponents would likely insist that this mental acuity was so deteriorated that the Cabinet should remove him immediately. . . . But Trump has been held, by supporters and critics alike, to such a low standard for so long that her comment on that score didn’t gain much traction.
Haley, however, got more personal when speaking to reporters later: “The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart, and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military? I don’t care what party you’re in, that’s not okay.”
Not content with his initial smear of a military family, he posted today on his Truth Social network that Nikki Haley’s campaign was “an embarrassment to her wonderful husband, in Africa” and then added: “I think he should come back home to help save her dying campaign.”
Major Haley, of course, will not (and cannot) up and leave his comrades and his military duties in Africa because he is being taunted by a cowardly politician thousands of miles away, and Trump knows it. But Trump’s contempt for people who serve in uniform long predates his most recent offensive belches on the subject.
In a better and more decent political era, his now-infamous 2015 comments about John McCain’s time in a North Vietnamese prison camp would have ended his first presidential campaign; his subsequent attacks on the Gold Star family of fallen U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan would have ended his welcome presence anywhere else in American public life. Instead, Republicans (including more than a few veterans) looked away and supported Trump in 2016.
Trump, for his part, provided top cover to his voters by hugging flags and demanding military parades. But no matter how much he professed his love for martial virtue, he could barely contain his sneering about military service even among his own aides, many of whom were retired military officers.
As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported in 2020, Trump went to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2017 with his then–secretary of homeland security, retired Marine General John Kelly, where they stopped to pay respects at the grave of Kelly’s son (who was killed serving in Afghanistan). Trump, standing among the headstones in one of America’s most sacred places, said to the slain soldier’s father: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” A year later, Trump refused to visit a military cemetery while he was in Europe, because it was “filled with losers.” On the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
After he lost in 2020, Trump fumed at senior officers, including General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for what he saw as “treasonous” activity—in Trump’s world, this translates to “serving the Constitution instead of Trump”—and suggested that Milley should get the death penalty. . . . He also seems to admire the Nazi military. “You fucking generals,” he reportedly exclaimed to Kelly, “why can’t you be like the German generals [in World War II]?”
He also has no comprehension of any human activity that does not carry some obvious bottom-line material benefit for himself. As Kelly (who later served as Trump’s chief of staff) put it in a discussion with Goldberg last year: Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” Kelly and other former administration officials, Goldberg wrote, believed that the 45th president’s “contemptuous view of the military” made it “extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty.”
On the campaign trail, Trump still serves up faux-military spangle and glitter to a base that will forgive him anything, including snide attacks on Army families such as the Haleys. A decent man—especially one who once had the privilege to be the commander in chief of America’s armed forces—would have wished Major Haley a safe return home after serving his nation in uniform overseas. Trump, however, is not a decent man, and he does not wish anyone well, military or civilian, whose first loyalty is not to Donald Trump.
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Isolationists in the GOP Forget the Lessons of the Past
When historians look back on the early days of 2024, they probably won’t recall what, precisely, an elderly Democratic president couldn’t quite remember about the names or countries of other world leaders. They will note what 26 Senate Republicans chose to forget about world leadership.
I’m referring to Tuesday morning’s Senate vote on a $95 billion supplemental foreign-aid package, including $60 billion in desperately needed military assistance for Ukraine, along with $14 billion for Israel and $10 billion for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza. The bill must still pass the House, where it faces the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and can only hope to survive via parliamentary maneuvering and the votes of Democrats plus some remaining Republican security hawks.
On paper, the 70-to-29 vote looks like a bipartisan embrace of embattled democratic allies. But it marks the moment when Republicans reverted to the isolationism of the original America First Committee of pre-World War II infamy. A majority of the G.O.P. Senate conference, including onetime Ukraine hawks like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, voted against the aid, mostly, they said, because it wasn’t paired with border-security measures.
That’s the same bill they voted against last week — a bill patiently negotiated over months by one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, Oklahoma’s James Lankford. The cynicism would be breathtaking if it weren’t so predictable coming from the Trumpified right.
From Arkansas’s Cotton, there’s the argument that support for Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas is incompatible with any civilian assistance for Gazans. From Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, we have the claim that although Vladimir Putin is “an evil war criminal,” Russia is certain to win the war, so funding Kyiv prolongs Ukrainian suffering and, by implication, wastes American money. From Ohio’s J.D. Vance, this: “The supplemental represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy.”
What a mix of cruelty, defeatism, conspiracy-mongering and political servility.
Johnson’s argument that Ukraine can’t win is belied by the fact that until it started running out of artillery shells, it was more than holding its own against Russia. It also echoes the prewar defeatism of figures like Robert Taft and Joseph Kennedy, who argued against helping Britain during the Blitz because Hitler was destined to win.
As for Vance, at least his position has the virtue of clarity: This is about sucking up to Donald Trump and his followers and abetting the Republican front-runner’s declared policy of encouraging Putin to invade underspending NATO members.
What all this makes for is a deeply unserious Republican Party at a deadly serious global moment.
There is abundant room to criticize the Biden administration’s foreign policy record, from the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan to the reluctance to arm Ukraine with the weapons it needed when it needed them (and not after the Russian Army consolidated its front lines) to, yes, its disastrous performance at the southern border, which has been both a policy and a political fiasco.
There is no conceivable reason the fate of Ukraine, a vital U.S. interest, should hinge on our border policy, however broken, any more than a patient should put off getting a skin cancer removed until he loses 50 pounds. It is an idiotic linkage guaranteed to do harm.
In January 1945, Arthur H. Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican, gave a landmark Senate speech now remembered as the moment when his party finally began to put its reflexive isolationism behind it. “We still propose to help create the postwar world on a basis which shall stop aggressors for keeps and, so far as humanly possible, substitute justice for force among freemen,” he said. “We propose to do it primarily for our own sake.”
For our own sake. The point of helping Ukraine defend itself against its despotic foe — like the point of defending Israel, or Taiwan, or NATO members rich or poor — isn’t altruism. It’s self-interest rightly understood, the kind of understanding that prewar isolationists like Vandenberg gained only from the ashes and agony of a world war. For the G.O.P. to now lose that understanding is as much a disgrace to it as it is, potentially, a disaster for us all.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Monday, February 12, 2024
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Right Wing Judges Are Threatening Democracy
Judges are supposed to recuse themselves from cases where they are biased and cannot rule based on the facts and applicable law. Increasingly, we are witnessing judges at both the state and federal level flouting this long standing standard and handing down ruling based on their own prejudices, bias, and extreme religious views. The Supreme Court Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade is a prime example of a tortured ruling that ultimately was based on nothing but the right wing majority of the justices who put personal religious belief all else. Then there is the ongoing corruption in the form of Clarence Thomas whose conduct and refusal to recuse himself from cases - even those where his wife has been implicated - makes a mockery of ethical rules and judicial impartiality. In numerous cases ranging from abortion to voting rights, right wing judges are inflicting their personal bias and allegiances above the rule of law. A column in the Washington Post looks at the damage right wing ideologues on the nation[s court are doing to the rule of law and democracy itself. Here are highlights:
The mere presence of Justice Clarence Thomas — never mind his chutzpah in asking the first question — at the oral argument in four-times indicted former president Donald Trump’s appeal of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling disqualifying him from the ballot represented a new low for the Supreme Court. It constituted one more assault on the rule of law and the credibility of the court, already at low ebb in public support. After all, Thomas’s wife worked to overturn the 2020 election (sending multiple messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, egging on fake electors, using her relationships with former Thomas clerks).
Thomas declined to recuse himself in the matter involving release of Meadows’s text messages relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. He was the sole dissent in the ruling ordering that the messages be released. At the time, constitutional scholar Leah Litman told me, “The court protects its reputation in large part through good will, and by acting like a respectable institution. Ginni Thomas is burning through that good will at a rapid pace — making the court and its justices appear corrupt, as if they are or could be casting votes in cases based on the interest or possible involvement of their spouse.”
And that brings us to Thursday’s argument about whether the attempted coup was an “insurrection.” When Trump’s counsel conceded that it was a “criminal” activity, one could barely believe that Thomas was allowed to sit there. Imagine if this were a robbery case and the judge’s wife had urged on the robbers. No one with a shred of respect for the judicial system would countenance that judge hearing such as case.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), a former prosecutor, weighed in on Thursday: “Justice Thomas’s participation in Trump’s ballot case is a shocking and intentional violation of his ethical obligations. Clarence Thomas is not above the law.” He added, “This is a true crisis at the Court.” And, of course, this makes a total mockery of the announced “ethics” guidelines.
Thomas is hardly the only right-wing judge fouling the judicial nest. Even before her latest ruling in the matter concerning Trump’s alleged snatching of highly sensitive documents and obstructing the investigation thereof, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s impartiality was sufficiently in doubt as to warrant recusal. Her ruling appointing a special master and preventing the Justice Department from continuing its national security investigation was widely vilified and reversed unanimously by the infamously conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
Since then, the argument for recusal has grown only stronger. Last month, constitutional gurus Dennis Aftergut and Laurence H. Tribe wrote that Cannon’s ruling rejecting “special counsel Jack Smith’s entirely standard request that she order Trump to state whether he intends to rely on an ‘advice of counsel’ defense” was yet another sign the judge was in Trump’s “pocket.” That followed months in which she has foot-dragged, delayed and made irrelevant demands of the prosecutors.
Then came her latest affront: Granting Trump’s motion to unseal classified documents. As the special counsel noted, this would put the identities of government witnesses at risk, reveal “signals intelligence” and identify an FBI code name. This is a bridge too far. Smith filed a motion for Canon to reconsider, citing the threats to witnesses, her “clear error” and her disregard for 11th Circuit precedent.
Multiple legal experts registered their alarm. But there is a remedy if Cannon does not reverse herself. As the Lawfare blog explained, “Section 7 [of the Classified Information Procedures Act] allows the government — and only the government — to file a fast-track interlocutory appeal of any district court ruling that would require the disclosure of classified information or penalize the government for failing to reveal such information.” Smith could exercise that right, combine it with a motion to recuse and clearly articulate the argument that in this case Cannon’s bias not only makes it impossible for the government to get a fair trial but puts national security at risk.
Whatever the timing, Smith should not let these unprecedented and dangerous rulings slide. Though the special counsel might be concerned about aggravating Cannon, she could hardly be more unfair than she has already been. Having harshly rebuked her in the civil case, the 11th Circuit might be more prepared than usual to intervene.
In short, both Thomas and Cannon pose a troublesome question: To what degree do we allow ethically challenged hacks on the bench to hijack our judicial system? If we do nothing in the face of the Supreme Court’s outlandish violations of ethical restraints or when lower-court judges become partisan flunkies, Trump’s sabotage of the rule of law will succeed. And let’s remember: In the event Trump gets a second term, the federal courts will be littered with the likes of Thomas and Cannon. Now, that’s a reason to keep him far from the Oval Office.
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