The presence of right-wing vigilantes along the U.S.-Mexico border has become so normalized in recent years that their activities—which usually entail harassing immigrants before turning them over to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents—scarcely even raise any eyebrows anymore. This is particularly the case in their dealings with the CBP itself, which has developed an increasingly cozy relationship with these groups.
That dynamic has been playing out in recent weeks near Yuma, Arizona, where the rabidly nativist, pro-Trump group AZ Patriots has been livestreaming its presence at a frequently used border crossing at the Morelos Dam. As Phoenix News Times reports, the group’s leader, Jennifer Harrison, can be seen harassing border-crossing asylum seekers, including children, as she shepherds them to awaiting CBP agents.
Harrison interrogates the immigrants in the videos: “Why are you here?” she can be heard demanding in several. She also is seen demanding passports and other papers, asking the immigrants where they’re from. She also demands they remove their face masks. In one video, as a family from Chile clambers up a slope towards her with a child in the father’s arms, she can be heard saying: “Well, we’ll be supporting this baby for the next 20 years.”
It’s clear from the videos posted on AZ Patriots’ YouTube channel that the flow of migrants Harrison and her cohorts recorded coming over this crossing almost entirely comprises asylum-seekers, primarily because they come from extraordinarily far-flung locales: Chile, India, Venezuela, Columbia. These are in fact countries undergoing the kind of violent internal turmoil that produces asylum-seekers.
A woman from Colombia tells her, between sobs, that her husband has been killed—though it’s unclear if that is why she fled in the first place. But the fact that these immigrants are seeking asylum—which in fact is perfectly legal under international and American law—doesn’t matter to Harrison. She describes them in the video titles as “illegal aliens” and claims that they are all “entering illegally.”
At the end of one of them, Harrison boasts: “I’m back, bitches. You might think you can cancel me, delete me, ban me, block me, shadow me. I ain’t going anywhere. I will be down here, boots on the ground, bitches.”
Harrison has a long history of notoriously ugly far-right activism. AZ Patriots (also known as the Patriot Movement of Arizona) won notoriety in 2018 for a Facebook video posted by a leading member of the group showing her entering a Muslim mosque and removing articles, leading eventually to a felony conviction for the woman. Harrison, who was sued by several churches for harassing immigrant children by posting videos of them arriving by bus, herself currently faces a felony identity theft charge in Maricopa County.
Most recently, in the wake of the November 2020 presidential election—which Democrat Joe Biden surprisingly won in Arizona—Harrison was one of the leading figures protesting outside election-counting centers. Harrison also led a small delegation inside the building in the early moments of one protest, where video showed her demanding to be permitted to observe the count, and being denied.
AZ Patriots claims that it is in Yuma County assisting CBP, but as New Times notes, it’s not clear whether CBP actually wants them there. The agents who appear in Harrison’s video seem to pay only glancing attention to her. However, it also is apparent that the agents have no interest in stopping her from harassing the border crossers.
CBP spokesperson John Mennell told New Times the agency “does not endorse or support New Times any private group or organization taking matters into their own hands as it could have disastrous personal and public safety consequences.”
Mennell noted that detaining migrants could be an issue: “Forced detention can also be viewed as a criminal offense and violators will be referred to local, state or federal prosecutors for potential legal action,” he said.
Previous border “Patriot” groups have gotten into serious trouble with the law for similar behavior, harassing immigrants at the border. One group, dubbed the United Constitutional Patriots, that hassled border crossers in New Mexico in 2019 ran afoul of authorities by posing as Border Patrol officers while doing so. After the local community ran their operation out of town, federal authorities charged their leader, Jim Benvie, with impersonating a federal agent. He was convicted and sentenced to 21 months in prison.
There is a long, deep tradition of sociopathic behavior within the border-vigilante movement, dating back to its origins 20 years ago. That’s a product of its fundamentally anti-empathetic politics, which revolve around the crude demonization of immigrant “others.” Harrison and her cohort are keeping up the tradition, and then some.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●VT-Sen: Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat who is the chamber’s longest-serving sitting member from either party, announced Monday that he would not seek a ninth term in 2022. While Leahy is, famously, the only Democrat ever elected to represent the Green Mountain State in the Senate (Bernie Sanders campaigned as an independent in all three of his successful campaigns), there’s little question that Team Blue’s eventual nominee will prevail in this 66-31 Biden state.
While Politico reported back in May that the 81-year-old senator was leaning towards another run despite being briefly hospitalized months earlier for what he described as muscle spasms, observers have spent months speculating who could run in an open seat race. Most of the attention on the Democratic side has been directed at Rep. Peter Welch, who has represented the entire state in the lower chamber since 2007, and VT Digger wrote Monday he is “widely expected” to seek a promotion. The congressman, for his part, put out a statement that day that merely praised Leahy and did not allude to his own 2022 plans.
Welch may be able to deter most would-be foes should he run, though one could decide to take her chances. The day before Leahy announced his departure, The Intercept published an interview with state Rep. Tanya Vyhovsky where she said she was interested in taking on Welch in an open seat Senate race. Vyhovsky, however, said she’d stay out if Sanders backed the congressman, declaring, “That is a big piece of this—if Bernie is going to endorse Peter there’s not much point doing it.”
VT Digger also mentioned Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, state Senate President Pro Tem Becca Balint, and state Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale as potential candidates, though the story noted that they’d each “suggested” they wouldn’t go up against Welch. They could, though, campaign for an open House seat if there is one. Each member of the trio declined to comment about any potential campaigns on Monday. Vermont is the only remaining state that has never elected a woman to Congress, so a win by any of those potential candidates for either Senate or House would finally break that streak.
On the Republican side, a spokesperson for Gov. Phil Scott immediately said there was “No chance!” of a Senate run. Scott himself has not yet committed to seeking re-election to his current post.
However, he still looked like a decided longshot once the seat opened up. The Washington Post didn’t even initially mention the state’s attorney, who had long aspired to run for governor, in its list of potential candidates. Leahy had no trouble winning the Democratic primary, but he faced a very difficult race that fall against Republican Rep. Richard Mallary. The state was anything but a blue stronghold at the time: Vermont had only ever backed one Democratic presidential nominee, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Richard Nixon had easily carried it 63-36 two years before as Mallary was prevailing 65-35 statewide.
The Watergate scandal, however, had utterly devastated the GOP nationwide, and Leahy successfully pitched himself as an outsider. Leahy, who Vermont Business Magazine’s Chris Graff writes “fashioned his image as Chittenden County state’s attorney into a high-profile, television-savvy lawman,” also emphasized public finance reform at a time when the issue was quite popular. Leahy ultimately won 49-46, with Sanders, his future colleague, taking 4% running under the banner of the Liberty Union Party.
Few could have guessed it at the time, but 1980 would be Leahy’s last close election. Six years later, Leahy defeated Snelling, whom Reagan had recruited to run here, in a 63-35 landslide in a race that had initially looked very close. In 1992, Leahy turned back Secretary of State Jim Douglas, who would later become governor himself, 54-43; that race coincided with Bill Clinton’s 46-30 win, which started an unbroken streak of Democratic presidential victories in this one-time GOP bastion.
Leahy had no trouble in 1998 after dairy farmer Fred Tuttle, who had starred in a 1996 film about a Senate campaign, won the GOP primary before dropping out and endorsing the incumbent, and Leahy’s final three campaigns were afterthoughts. He was a major force in D.C. as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee (though plenty of Democrats remain furious at him for allowing Republican senators to essentially veto lower-court nominees from their states), and he took over as chair of the Appropriations Committee in February.
●AK Redistricting: Alaska’s redistricting commission issued a proclamation finalizing the state’s new legislative maps last week, giving them the force of law, though litigation over the new lines remains likely.
●CO Redistricting: Colorado’s Supreme Court, which is required to review any new redistricting plans under a pair of 2018 amendments to the state constitution, has given its approval to new legislative maps drawn up by the state’s redistricting commission. As with the new congressional map it ruled on earlier this month, the court found that the commissioners had not engaged in an “abuse of discretion” in carrying out their duties.
The new plans by and large reflect Colorado’s shift to the left in recent years. Joe Biden would have won a 25-10 majority of seats in the state Senate and a 46-19 majority in the state House. In both cases, the median seat would have gone for Biden by about 12 points, slightly to the right of his 13.5-point win statewide. However, the breakdown is much less favorable for Democrats when looking at 2016: Hillary Clinton would have carried the Senate just 18-17 and the House 38-27. It’s worth noting as well that Colorado Republicans submitted briefs to the court in favor of the maps (Democrats did not file any briefs).
●GA Redistricting: Both chambers in Georgia’s Republican-run legislature have passed new maps for the state Senate and state House on party-line votes, sending them to Gov. Brian Kemp. The plans would lock in wide GOP advantages in both chambers despite the fact that Joe Biden carried the state last year. Work remains ongoing on congressional redistricting.
●ID Redistricting: Idaho’s bipartisan redistricting commission has forwarded its newly adopted congressional and legislative maps to the secretary of state, meaning they now take effect. The congressional lines make minimal changes to the previous map and will continue to easily elect two Republicans.
●UT Redistricting: Republican Gov. Spencer Cox has signed Utah’s new GOP-drawn congressional redistricting plan, which splits the blue bastion of Salt Lake County between all four of the state’s districts in order to prevent Democrats from winning any seats. Lawmakers also recently passed new legislative maps but Cox has yet to sign off on them.
Senate
●NC-Sen: While Democratic state Rep. Rachel Hunt, daughter of former four-term Gov. Jim Hunt, didn’t rule out a statewide campaign back in February, she announced this week that she would run for the state Senate instead.
●NY-Gov: Politico reports that New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams will announce this week that he’s entering the Democratic gubernatorial primary against incumbent Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Tish James. One person who will not be running, though, is state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, who earlier this month told City & State that he had decided to sit the race out.
O’Rourke, who was elected to the House in 2012 from an El Paso-based seat, emerged in the national spotlight in 2018 when he went up against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a contest that very few initially thought he could win. The Democrat, though, raised close to $80 million thanks in large part to Cruz’s utter radioactivity, as well O’Rourke’s own strong social media campaign, and he held the incumbent to a 51-48 victory during that blue wave year.
O’Rourke’s near-loss, which was the closest Team Blue had come to winning a Texas Senate seat since Democrat Lloyd Bentsen earned his final term all the way back in 1988, only magnified his stardom, but he turned down the chance to challenge Sen. John Cornyn in 2020. Instead, the former congressman launched a bid for the presidency that started out with strong fundraising and national coverage (though O’Rourke himself would later regret the Vanity Fair cover story where he said, “I’m just born to be in it”), but he struggled to maintain his momentum as the campaign continued and dropped out well before the Iowa caucus.
O’Rourke launched his bid for governor Monday by taking Abbott to task for signing the state’s infamous anti-abortion law and for the February power grid failure that resulted in massive blackouts. The former congressman also said of his foe, “He doesn’t trust women to make their health care decisions, doesn’t trust police chiefs when they tell him not to sign the permitless carry bill into law, he doesn’t trust voters so he changes the rules of our elections, and he doesn’t trust local communities.”
Abbott’s team quickly responded by utilizing a clip from O’Rourke’s presidential bid of him advocating for a mandatory assault weapon buyback program by proclaiming, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.” O’Rourke two years ago trumpeted that debate line by tweeting, “If it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on the battlefield, we’re going to buy it back,” while Abbott’s campaign is now trying to caricature him as an enemy of gun rights.
We’ve seen two October polls, which were each conducted online by YouGov for different clients, but they very much disagreed on how competitive this race is right now. The survey for the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation and Rice University had Abbott edging out O’Rourke just 43-42, while a poll done later in the month for the University of Texas at Austin for the Texas Tribune showed the incumbent up 46-37.
House
●CA-10: Former Trump administration official Ricky Gill announced Friday that he was running for Congress again in a state where redistricting is far from complete.
Florida Politics also writes that there’s “talk” that former state Rep. Adam Hattersley or 2016 state House candidate Rena Frazier could try; Hattersley lost last year’s primary to Cohn 41-33, while Frazier’s own campaign ended in a 54-45 defeat against Republican state Rep. Ross Spano as Trump was narrowly carrying HD-59. (Spano was elected to the 15th Congressional District two years later only to lose renomination to Franklin in 2020.)
●FL-20: Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott on Friday declared that businesswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick was the “apparent winner” in the Nov. 2 Democratic primary after she retained her 5-vote lead over Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness with all the district’s overseas and military ballots counted. Holmes said later that evening, “I will be talking to my attorneys in the next few days to determine our course of action.”
The Democratic nominee should have absolutely no trouble in the January special election to succeed the late Rep. Alcee Hastings, who decisively beat Cherfilus-McCormick in their 2018 and 2020 primaries, in this 77-22 Biden seat.
●IN-05: Former Democratic state Rep. Melanie Wright said Monday that she was ending her month-long campaign against Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz in favor of running for the state Senate. Wright’s old GOP colleagues in the legislature did everything they could to secure the 5th District with a new gerrymander that transforms it from a seat Donald Trump carried just 50-48 to one he took 57-41.
●MI-03: Conservative commentator John Gibbs has announced that he’ll challenge incumbent Peter Meijer, who is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump earlier this year, and Trump himself endorsed Gibbs for the Republican nomination soon thereafter. Gibbs joins a nomination contest that includes Army National Guard veteran Tom Norton, who ran in the primary last year, and so-called “MAGA bride” Audra Johnson.
Gibbs, who spent three years working in the Trump-era U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was in the national spotlight for a short time in 2020 when his nomination to head the Office of Personnel Management failed because of his conspiratorial ravings. Among other things, Gibbs repeatedly amplified the batshit conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair, John Podesta, had partaken in some sort of satanic ritual, based on personal emails stolen by Russian hackers.
Barrett, who also revealed he was leaving the Army after 21 years, said, “I’ve spent my entire career fighting for freedom in the Army and as a state legislator, yet Joe Biden wants to discard me because I oppose his coercive, forced vaccination mandate.” The state senator, who came down with COVID-19 last year, has worn a “naturally immunized” wrist band and refused to say if he’s vaccinated.
●MO-04: Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin kicked off his bid for this safely red open seat on Monday by doing his part to spread the Big Lie, saying, “(COVID19 election changes) led to the exploitation of it and the capability of the fraudulent voting,” and, “I do believe that Trump did win the election.” Brattin is a former state representative who won a promotion last year by beating one of his colleagues in a close GOP primary.
Several other Republicans are running to succeed Senate candidate Vicky Hartzler in this west-central Missouri seat, and the Missouri Scout reports that former state Sen. Kurt Schaefer is considering joining the field. Schaefer campaigned statewide for attorney general, but he lost the primary by a rough 64-36 margin to Josh Hawley, who successfully ran for the U.S. Senate two years later.
●NC-04: Democrat Pat Timmons-Goodson, who was the 2020 nominee in the current 8th District, said Monday she’d decided against running in this new open seat.
●NC-14: Republican state Sen. Kevin Corbin said Monday that he was thinking about running for this new western North Carolina seat, which is open because GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn decided to campaign for the neighboring 13th District instead. (Republican officials in the 13th expressed, shall we say, some choice words about Cawthorn’s announcement.)
Local GOP party official Michele Woodhouse also says that, should she also run to replace Cawthorn in the 14th, she’d announce “relatively quickly.” We’re not sure how she defines that, but the state’s Dec. 17 filing deadline certainly is coming up “relatively quickly.”
●NE-01: Democratic state Rep. Patty Pansing Brooks said Monday that she would challenge Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, who was indicted last month for lying to federal investigators. Pansing Brooks, though, said she didn’t plan to focus on her opponent’s legal predicament, and she instead took him to task for voting against the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill.
●OH-01: Businessman Gavi Begtrup, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Cincinnati earlier this year, has decided to run for the state House rather than take on Republican Rep. Steve Chabot.
Blackmon doesn’t appear to have said why he thinks that Sessions should be fired, though we’re guessing it’s not because he’s mad about how the incumbent got to this constituency in the first place. The congressman spent 22 years representing the Dallas area until losing the 32nd District to Democrat Colin Allred in 2018, but he quickly turned around and campaigned for the 17th District about 80 miles (and two or three congressional districts) away.
Retiring Rep. Bill Flores was pissed at his old colleague for parachuting back to his childhood home of Waco, where he hadn’t lived in decades, but primary voters were more forgiving. Sessions beat a Flores-backed opponent 54-46 in the GOP runoff, and he had no trouble in the fall as Donald Trump was carrying the 17th by a 55-44 margin. Only a little more than half of this new seat, though, includes Sessions’ existing district (and no, none of the current 32nd District made its way in here), so he’ll have to introduce himself to plenty of new voters once again.
●TX-30: Longtime Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson has an “important special announcement” set for Saturday, and the Democrat’s media advisory notably included a logo bearing the word “Re-Elect!” The 85-year-old Johnson, who is the second-oldest member of the House, said two years ago that her 2020 campaign would be her last, but she and her staff have rebuffed all efforts to confirm her plans since she claimed her 15th term.
Legislatures
●Special Elections: Louisiana held three special legislative elections on Saturday, and we’ve recapped the results below:
●Orleans Parish, LA Sheriff: Longtime Sheriff Marlin Gusman was forced into a Dec. 11 runoff against a fellow Democrat after he narrowly failed to take the majority he needed to prevail outright in a Saturday all-party primary that criminal justice reformers were watching closely. Gusman won 48% of the vote while former New Orleans Police Department Independent Monitor Susan Hutson outpaced her nearest foe 35-9 for second place.
Hutson and the other challengers argued that the four-term sheriff has done a poor job overseeing the Orleans Justice Center, a jail that has been under a federal consent decree since 2013 for what the Justice Department called “unlawful conditions at the prison.” WWNO’s Bobbi-Jeanne Misick writes, “Gusman lost operational authority over the jail — the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s main duty, as deputies do not typically patrol the city’s streets — after an independent monitor reported a lack of progress in reforming the facility.”
Control was restored to the sheriff last year, but Misick adds that in recent weeks, federal monitors have “blasted the Orleans Justice Center for slow progress in achieving the goals set out in the consent decree, particularly in mental and medical health care.” The judge overseeing the consent decree, however, still commended Gusman for making needed improvements and declared that his pandemic measures were “nothing short of life-saving.”
Hutson and his other opponents have also faulted the incumbent for trying to build a new facility to house inmates with mental health problems, which critics argue will only increase the number of prisoners overall. They’ve further focused on the 15 deaths that were reported at the Orleans Justice Center from 2014 to 2019, a death count that Politico’s Jessica Pishko says was exceeded in Louisiana by just two jails that were each larger than Gusman’s.
Gusman, who has the backing of Gov. John Bel Edwards and Rep. Troy Carter, has pushed back by arguing that he’s helped reduce the number of inmates during his long tenure. “When I was elected, there were 13 jails,” said the sheriff, adding, “I have since closed, abandoned or demolished every single one. We had 7,000 inmates when I came in. Now we have less than 900.” Misick writes, “Much of that reduction in the jail population has been attributed to pressure from criminal justice reform groups.”
Gusman additionally has talked about reforms he’s made during his tenure, including re-entry programs. His side has also portrayed Hutson as too inexperienced to hold the sheriff’s post while insisting that only he understands the problems afflicting the jail enough to solve them.
Only about 27% of registered voters took part in Saturday’s all-party primary in the city of New Orleans, which is coterminous with Orleans Parish, and turnout could plunge much further next month. That’s because, while four statewide ballot measures and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s easy re-election campaign took center stage this weekend, there will be far less to bring voters back next month. It’s possible this will be good news for Hutson, who could benefit from disproportionate turnout among voters upset with the status quo, but no one can know for sure.
“The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me—roads, airports, bridges. I know how to build. Pols only know how to talk!” —Trump, May 2015
“We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.” —Trump, November 2016
“President Trump is a builder. Throughout his career, he made his name constructing big things. He applies that builder’s mindset to all aspects of the presidency, but especially to his bold vision for rebuilding infrastructure in America.” —Dept. of Transportation, 2017
Continued (I think you know where this is headed)…
“Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land.” —Trump, 2017 Speech to joint session of Congress
“We will build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways all across our land. And we will do it with American heart, and American hands, and American grit.” —Trump, 2018 State of the Union
“That was a Gary [Cohn] bill. That bill was so stupid. … I’ll lead on this.” —Trump, 2019, on his 2018 bill
We must also rebuild America’s infrastructure. I ask you to pass Senator John Barrasso’s highway bill to invest in new roads, bridges, and tunnels all across our land. —Trump, 2020 State of the Union
President Donald Trump has been promising a $1 trillion infrastructure plan since his 2016 campaign —ABC News, Feb. 2020
As Trump enters the final months of his term, we’ve seen no action on this promise, so we rate it Promise Broken. —PolitiFact, July 2020
– The End –
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Note: Our sincere thoughts and prayers to the family of Marge Johnson, who died over the weekend after a tragic War on Christmas fruitcake catapult-cleaning accident. At least we think she died. No, wait. She’s still breathing and…oh, she was just sleeping and also we’re being told there was no catapult-cleaning accident. Our bad. —Mgt.
Percent of Americans who say the federal government should regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources such as power plants, cars, and factories in an effort to reduce global warming, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll: 70%
Percent in the same poll who believe it’s important to teach students about the history of racism in schools: 70%
Support in the same poll for Joe Biden’s BBB bill: 58%
Amount for which an Apple-1 (only 200 of which were produced, in kit form) sold at auction: $400,000
Percent in a YouGov poll who believe it’s acceptable to start listening to holiday music before Thanksgiving: 18%
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Annual fall leaf-raking day portrait of Haley, C&J’s rescue lab mix, who turns nine in a few weeks…
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CHEERS to Infrastructure Week. I don’t know what to wear or what to do. I don’t know the customs and traditions, nor the words and music to the Infrastructure Week carols. (“Silent Prius”? “I’m Dreaming of A Reliable Rural Broadband Connection”? “Grandma Got Run Over By A Solar Powered Metro Bus?”) The store shelves are bare of Infrastructure Week greeting cards. I can’t find an Infrastructure Week recipe book. Oh, it’s just a big jumbled-up flibbedy floo! But we’ll figure it out. We have to. We have no choice now. Because as of today, thanks to Democratic President Joe Biden.…
…it’s Infrastructure Week! Please: if you plan to celebrate by marauding in the streets, overturn internal combustion-powered vehicles responsibly. (Lift with your legs, not your back.)
CHEERS to bucking the trend. There are many reasons for the supply-chain trouble the world’s most powerful nation (that’s us!) is having. But a lot of attention is focused on our ports, especially the ones out west where ships are stacked up like planes on the tarmac at O’Hare during a thunderstorm. But here in New England, the greatest port on Earth is wondering what all the fuss is about:
Maine’s only container port is busier than ever and running smoothly despite last year’s economic downturn and supply chain disruptions that have caused backups in harbors nationwide.
At least 36,700 shipping containers are expected to cross the docks at the International Marine Terminal in Portland this year. That’s five times the number of containers that came through the port in 2013, when the Icelandic shipping company Eimskip opened its headquarters in Portland. […]
Portland Harbor. The container action is located up there by the bridge. The bodies of my enemies are located…whoops, almost let it slip.
“(There) has been incredible growth and support,” said Andrew Haines, executive vice president of Eimskip’s North America division. In his decades in the shipping industry, Haines cannot recall the renovation and subsequent growth of any other U.S. port in the way it has happened in Portland.
Consequently, the children in the northeast are going to have a very merry Christmas this year. Thanks to our uninterrupted Icelandic trade, they’re all getting a stocking full of rock gunnels and a shiny new blob of aluminum slag under the tree. Bless us one and all.
CHEERS to home where the buffalo roam. Happy Birthday, Oklahoma! The “Hey, that state looks like a skillet!” state—home of Mauree Turner, elected last year as the first Muslim legislator from Oklahoma and the first nonbinary legislator in America—officially nabbed the 46th star on the flag 114 years ago today. Fun facts: the state animal is the buffalo, the state insect is the honey bee, and the state flower is the Oklahoma rose, which is quite lovely:
Also: the state rock is “rose barite,” which you’ll find in the greatest abundance, as usual, between state dinosaur Jim Inhofe’s ears. (Hey, you go for the easy layups where you can get ‘em.)
CHEERS to bowing out before God has you bowed out. Well, at least Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy—who’s been in office since Jaws came out—knows when it’s time to find a comfy rockin’ chair and get down to some serious front-porch whittling. The dependable Democrat announced yesterday that he’s retiring at the end of his term:
“It is time to pass the torch to the next Vermonter who will carry on this work for our great state. It’s time to come home,” Leahy said. Leahy, 81, is the longest-serving current senator, having served since 1975. […]
“Psst. Dianne. Come away with me. We could be happy…”
Notably, Leahy presided over former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. “When I preside over the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, I will not waver from my constitutional and sworn obligations to administer the trial with fairness, in accordance with the Constitution and the laws,” he said in a statement at the time.
The seat should be safe for Democrats … President Joe Biden won Vermont by 35 percentage points in 2020.
I’m told that his likely successor, should he decide to run, would be Congressman Peter Welch, who at a spry 75 would inject some much-needed white male youth into the Senate. (Fair warning: Chuck Grassley never gets tired of the old “pull my finger, Sonny” routine.)
CHEERS to TIME. On this date 23 years ago, in 1998, the magazine provided lengthy coverage of the spectacular implosion and resignation of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Margaret Carlson sums up that blissful week:
Friday was the day he died a Washington death, stripping himself of power and becoming in that instant just a guy in a suburban tract house in Marietta, Ga., carrying out the trash.
We all should have seen his resignation coming when, on Tuesday night, he came out swinging at the media, blaming them for his party’s shellacking. With Nixonian petulance, he rejected suggestions that his party tanked because he had put all its eggs in Monica’s basket. Well, the media charge is laughably bogus. Yet what else is there to do but grasp at scapegoats when, in the blink of an eye, the discussion moves from “Can Clinton Survive?” to whether you can?
And today isn’t a federal holiday because…???
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Ten years ago in C&J: November 16, 2011
JEERS to following the herd. Last week Mainers rejected a ban on same-day voter registration by a margin of 61-39, a double-kabubble-landslide of epic proportions. So how are Republicans up here reacting to the people’s unequivocal demand to keep their mitts off our excellent voting system? Of course…they’re following the lead of GOP legislatures across the country by going after stricter Voter ID requirements:
State Rep. Ben Chipman, an independent from Portland, said that he views the proposal to require IDs as he viewed the rejected law eliminating same-day registration—a solution in search of a problem. “I’m strongly opposed to any type of measures that make it harder for people to vote,” said Chipman, who serves on the Veterans and Legal Affairs committee that will take up the bill again in January. “We don’t have a problem.”
That should be their new motto: Republicans: We don’t fix problems. We “fix” “problems.”
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And just one more…
JEERS to eye candy denied. Well, poo. I waited all day for Steve Bannon’s mug shot to be published, but apparently whatever namby-pamby channel of the justice system is processing him, it doesn’t do mug shots.
I should back up: Bannon surrendered like a lily-livered coward to federal authorities yesterday to be processed in anticipation of his trial on contempt-of-Congress charges. Naturally, I thought that there would be a mug shot, and I was going to post it down here so we could all have a big laugh about it. But I’m just a simple caveman, and I don’t understand your—[waggles fingers wildly]—strange American legal system. There is no mugshot, apparently. So, in a fit of panic, we’re posting this one as a replacement:
See that? It matches the color of his soul. We’re nothing if not thoughtful.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
“If we are going to have one nation under Bill in Portland Maine—which we must—we have to have one Cheers and Jeers kiddie pool.”
We begin today’s roundup with Paul Waldman at The Washington Post and hist take on the indictment of Steve Bannon, who surrendered to authorities yesterday:
There is simply no serious person anywhere who thinks Bannon has the legal right to thumb his nose at this subpoena, or that his claim of executive privilege is anything but preposterous. He was a private citizen at the time of the events in question; he left the White House over three years before. Furthermore, executive privilege belongs to the office of the presidency, which gives the current president the right to assert it; former presidents don’t get to use it to hide their misdeeds and those of their cronies as long as they live. […]
Yet Republicans seem unified in their defense of Bannon. As The Post reports, Republicans are “rallying around” him, “warning that Democrats’ efforts to force Bannon to comply with what they say is an unfair subpoena paves the way for them to do the same if they take back the House in 2022.”
There aren’t a lot of things you can count on in this life, but one thing on which you definitely, 100% always can is Republicans rallying around the absolute worst members of society. Whether it’s an unsympathetic teen who killed two people, a colleague who proudly harasses school shooting survivors, or a Supreme Court justice accused of attempted rape, the GOP just loves to go to bat for these people. So naturally, their new pet cause is Steve Bannon, the indicted former Trump adviser who is literally still trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
In the wake of the Friday news that a grand jury had charged Bannon for refusing to appear for a deposition with January 6 investigators and refusing to turn over requested documents—neither of which is in dispute!—Republican lawmakers have flown to the man’s defense, claiming, amazingly, that he’s a victim of a zealous Department of Justice and vowing to get revenge against the people who have wronged him.
James Downie at The Washington Post highlights the Biden administration’s’s messaging problem and their inability to cut through a media that is frustrating unable and/or unwilling to explain the success of the administration:
Instead, The Post-ABC poll suggests two fundamental issues. The first — pandemic-fueled inflation darkening Americans’ perceptions of the economy — would be a struggle for any president. But the latter is entirely of a few Democrats’ making: Just 35 percent of voters say Biden has accomplished much during his first 10 months, while only 31 percent believe he’s keeping his campaign promises. Both are worse scores thanBill Clinton, Donald Trump and Barack Obamareceived ahead of midterm drubbings two years into their presidencies.
But still, as Eugene Robinson points out, it’s actually the Republicans that are disarray, though it’s hardly ever covered that way by the press:
Today’s Republicans agree wholeheartedly on one thing: ambition for power. That’s because, at least in Washington, they have so little of it: Under President Donald Trump, the GOP lost the White House and control of both the House and Senate, a rare trifecta not achieved since Herbert Hoover.
Thanks to Trump, the party also lost anything resembling a coherent philosophy.
Ryan Cooper at The Week looks at the doctrine of executive privilege:
Former President Donald Trump was just about to experience a consequence Friday when federal courts once again stepped in to delay his day of reckoning.
The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 putsch has subpoenaed Trump administration records, and two different judges rejected his argument that the documents should be kept secret because of executive privilege. Then, on Thursday, Trump got a last-minute reprieve from the D.C. circuit court of appeals, which temporarily blocked the documents’ release.
On a final note, don’t miss this piece by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic about the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism:
The future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town.
I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.
In the news today: Steve Bannon, an apparent key plotter of the January 6 insurrection, was defiant and mocking as he surrendered to federal authorities after his indictment for ignoring a congressional subpoena demanding his testimony. House Republicans, meanwhile, are already vowing retribution against those that would dare indict Bannon in the first place. A new memo shows that the Trump White House acted in orchestrated fashion to prod Mike Pence into announcing the nullification of the electoral votes that cemented Trump’s loss. It wasn’t a one-off idea from a single lawyer: Mark Meadows and other Trump allies were actively promoting the seditious plan.
An activist and military father who has advocated for deported veterans as co-director of Unified Deported Veterans in Tijuana now gets to return back home himself. Robert Vivar “walked back to San Diego from Tijuana on Veterans Day,” nearly two decades after he was initially deported and had his life upended over a shoplifting offense, The San Diego Union-Tribunereports.
Waiting for him on the U.S. side of the San Ysidro port of entry was his son, an Air Force and National Guard veteran,also named Robert Vivar. “They hugged,” CBS8 News reported. “Dad, welcome back to the United States, welcome back,” he cried.
“Thanks to a law passed in recent years that allows immigrants to challenge old convictions if they weren’t warned about potential immigration consequences before accepting plea deals, he was finally able to get the conviction undone,” The Union-Tribunereported.
Vivar had been given bad advice by an attorney during his criminal case. He thought he had agreed to a rehabilitation program when, in reality, he’d agreed to “a charge that meant automatic deportation.” He would try to reenter the U.S., only to be again deported. Following a win at the California Supreme Court, Vivar’s legal team then made a successful case at the Board of Immigration Appeals to secure his return to the U.S. from Tijuana, where he’d been a forceful advocate for U.S. veterans deported after serving their country. Veterans have been deported penniless and with only the clothes on their backs.
”Sometimes one of the veterans he served would be allowed back into the U.S., and he would accompany them as far as the border allowed,” the report continued. “On Thursday, it was his turn.” Advocates were also there to greet him. Others congratulated him over social media.
“Despite not being a veteran himself, Robert has worked tirelessly to repatriate deported veterans and provide them with the tools and information they need to survive in Mexico—a country the majority of them barely know,” ImmDef wrote in a thread. “As we welcome Robert home, we thank him for all his dedication to bettering the lives of hundreds of migrants, deportees, and local communities in Tijuana and throughout the border regions of Mexico.”
Media on both sides of the border watching for Robert Vivar to cross back into the United States for first time in nearly a decade pic.twitter.com/1Q2F1ZeFr4
A military veteran and his father are getting quite the reunion on Veterans Day. It was decades in the making. It’s the one gift Robert Vivar wanted to give his son today. https://t.co/KElusXiTT7pic.twitter.com/2kOsIVT7Vm
With much delight we announce that Robert Vivar, who is portrayed in the @pdtmuralproject, has officially crossed into the US🇺🇸 amazing and uplifting news on such an important day as today. Felicidades @robgrpa! pic.twitter.com/itIkETkmQQ
— Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana (she/ella) (@lizbethdsantana) November 11, 2021
WELCOME HOME ROBERT! 🎉 After 8 yrs separated from his family, veterans rights activist & father, Robert Vivar is reuniting w/his family on #VeteransDay. He continues to forge a #NewWayForward fighting to create an opportunity to come home for other people who’ve been deported. pic.twitter.com/BeGIuDy7B5
“#WelcomeHome Robert,” ImmDef continued. “We can’t wait to see the amazing things you will do for our deported veterans from the U.S. but for now, enjoy your family and the joy only being back home can give.”
Like Hector Barajas-Varela, Vivar promised to continue fighting for the right of deported veterans to also return home. Barajas-Varela, himself a veteran, founded the Deported Veterans Support House in Tijuana. He won his return to the U.S. in 2018. The Union-Tribune reports Vivar “promised deported veterans and deported parents of U.S.-citizen children that he would be back to help them.” He went on to say in the report that his work “continues. We continue. Our slogan is, ‘Leave no one behind.’”
Because of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) sloppy record-keeping, it’s unknown exactly how many vets have been deported. The American Civil Liberties Union has estimated perhaps 200 veterans, while the non-partisan Government Accountability Office said ICE has put an estimated 250 veterans in proceedings, NBC News said in 2019. While President Biden announced plans to return deported veterans (and family members), Vivar wrote in a July 30 op-ed that his organization received an exiled soldier that month.
”We are asking President Biden to stop these deportations immediately,” he wrote in The Union-Tribune. “On behalf of military families and veterans, we want to send a message to the president. We salute his willingness to confront this politically complex issue. We have seen his compassion and respect toward all veterans, even our ‘forgotten’ deported veterans and military families. We are proud to support the effort in any way possible to enable our country to move forward with a plan that will bring our deported veterans home, reunite our families, and end the practice, once and for all, of deporting U.S. veterans.”
The term “scraping the bottom of the barrel” doesn’t quite do justice to the new crop of MAGA talk show hosts that think Alex Jones is too tame. One of them is Stew Peters. He went from being a failed rapper, to a failed bounty hunter, to now a full-time COVID conspiracy theorist. And yes, being full-blown MAGA, there’s the obligatory police report documenting domestic violence as well. Perhaps Trump will push him to run for Senate?
In the meantime, he hosts his own podcast that features a who’s who of Trumpian rejects: George Papadopoulos, Lin Wood, Michelle Malkin, Sidney Powell, and Karen Fann—the state senate president responsible for the disastrous Arizona audit. I don’t usually care what he’s doing, but this came across my feed. It’s as hilarious as it is sad. If there’s ever been an example of the cult-like cognitive dissonance of the MAGA crowd, this is it.
Some Q-nut told Stew Peters that he has been “magnetized” by being around people who have had the vaccine, claiming vaccinated people somehow “shed” vaccine components outside their bodies. (Obviously, this has been debunked.) As proof, he sent Stew a photo of various objects, like coins, stuck all over his body. Stew put him on the show immediately, and added that this is a phenomenon “that we’re seeing all over the place!”
Not that facts matter, but coins aren’t even magnetized. Vending machines all have magnets to reject fake coins (steel slugs) because real coins are minted mostly of nonmagnetic metals like copper and nickel. But if you are dumb enough to believe any of this, you aren’t reading Daily Kos, so I digress.
Anyway, the photo was more than enough proof for Stew to feature him on his show. Unfortunately for the guest, Stew asked the guy, Scott Taylor, to demonstrate for the audience. What happened next is comedy gold:
Man tells Stew Peters he’s been magnetized by being around vaccinated people. pic.twitter.com/8yyHTszONt
In case you can’t see it, Stew asked him to demonstrate. Scott Taylor wasn’t prepared for this, and repeatedly tried to put coins on his face, but they kept falling off. One coin managed to linger on his forehead before being dropped, but you can see the video was cut at the 58-second mark. Stew, ignoring his own eyes, closed by going on a rant of how this was absolute proof that this was real and the media was covering it up.
Twitter was not kind:
He puts on a coin and it…falls off. He tries again and it falls off. And then the interviewer takes it as proof that he’s magnetic.
“Before being around people who had been injected with this so called vaccine, you of course were not magnetic.” What a great Monty Python line that would have been.
By the way, the amazing James Randi, who is no longer with us, was a magician and scientific skeptic I loved to watch growing up. He was always invited on shows to challenge paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Sure enough, he was once asked to challenge a claim that someone was “magnetic.”
Unlike Scott Taylor, this guy actually put some real effort into the illusion, as the crowd oohed and aahed. After the trick, Randi simply asked the man to rub talcum powder on his body, which in no way should interfere with magnetic properties, and try the trick again.
R.I.P. Randi. I would say we could use your skepticism with these anti-vaxxers now, but as you can see, they won’t even believe what they see with their own eyes.
As the battle against whether or not critical race theory should be taught in schools continues nationwide, some Republicans are also targeting the LGBTQ community. After attacking a Florida school board member for escorting a group of elementary school students on a field trip to a local LGBTQ-friendly restaurant, conservatives have taken to attacking LGBTQ books. Across the country, conservatives are demanding a ban on inclusive books that talk about the queer experience, not only in schools but also in public libraries.
In the most recent incident of conservative calls to ban, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster demanded his state’s Department of Education remove a book about gender identity from school shelves.
“We’re going to remove things that cause harm to our children or put obstacles in their path as they grow up,” McMaster told reporters Thursday.
McMaster wrongfully claimed the book is “obscene and pornographic” because it speaks of a journey to self-identity and includes illustrations of LGBTQ sexual experiences.
The book in question is the award-winning title, Gender Queer: A Memoir. On Wednesday, McMaster sent a letter to Department of Education Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, demanding it be investigated alongside other similar books to “prevent” such books from becoming available in the state’s school libraries, NBC News reported.
“For sexually explicit materials of this nature to have ever been introduced or allowed in South Carolina’s schools, it is obvious that there is or was either a lack of, or a breakdown in, any existing oversight processes or the absence of appropriate screening standards,” McMaster wrote in the letter.
According to NBC News, LGBTQ advocates condemned McMaster’s calls to ban the book, noting it was a “political attack.”
“We need to be focused on issues that are actually impacting students right now — getting education back on track after the loss of learning from the pandemic, addressing young people’s health concerns, and ensuring that everyone feels safe and welcome in school,” Ivy Hill, community health program director for the Campaign for Southern Equality, said in a statement to NBC News.
McMaster’s efforts to ban books that address LGBTQ issues follow other government and school officials attempting to do the same, including Texas, Virginia, Ohio, and New Jersey.
According to NPR, in Texas, both Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas state Rep. Jeff Cason called on books to be investigated for “pornographic or obscene material.” But LGBTQ related books were not the only issue for these Texans; Matt Krause, another lawmaker in the state, also identified at least 850 that should be questioned, including books written by women, people of color, and LGBTQ authors.
Outside of banning in Virginia, some officials have even threatened to burn books that go against their backward views.
This specific book is part of the American Library Association’s (ALA) list of the country’s “most challenged books” and had appeared on multiple ban lists across state lines. The director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, told NBC News that while challenges against books with LGBTQ content have been historically “constant,” the association has seen a rapid increase in calls to ban books this year.
“I’ve worked at ALA for two decades now, and I’ve never seen this volume of challenges come in,” Caldwell-Stone said. “The impact will fall to those students who desperately want and need books that reflect their lives, that answer questions about their identity, about their experiences that they always desperately need and often feel that they can’t talk to adults about.”
“The library becomes that safe space where they can get accurate information about these topics that they can’t otherwise find,” she added.
We already knew from an October 2020 Associated Press report that the flawed Title 42 public health order that’s used the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to quickly deport asylum-seekers in violation of their rights was implemented under political pressure by the previous administration. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists “said there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus,” but were overruled by the White House, that report said.
Now we have that on the record. Among damning documents released by a House committee last week is a transcript of Congressional testimony by Anne Schuchat, who until earlier this year served as the agency’s principal deputy director. Her testimony confirms everything we read from the AP back last fall. “Do you believe that that order was necessary to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the U.S. at that time, at this specific time, March 20, 2020?” she’s asked. “No,” Schuchat replies.
Schuchat’s testimony also confirms the previous administration’s political pressure on another top CDC official, Dr. Martin Cetron. The AP had reported that when Cetron refused to sign Title 42, the White House skipped over him and directly pressured former director Robert Redfield. He gave in. While Schuchat said during her testimony that she didn’t know exactly how the policy was instituted, she knew Cetron had refused to put his pen to paper.
“Dr. Cetron takes the regulatory authority for quarantine very seriously and weighs—you know, the typical issue is, the least restrictive means possible to protect public health is when you exert a quarantine order versus other measures. And the bulk of the evidence at that time did not support this policy proposal,” Schuchat said in testimony. She added that “his view was that the facts on the ground didn’t call for this from a public health reason.”
Schuchat said she didn’t know the thinking behind Redfield’s decision-making process, but told the committee he “was put in many impossible situations over the course of his position.”
“By impossible situations, you mean the pressure from a political perspective?” she was asked. “I would agree with that,” Schuchat responded.
That pressure would be from former unlawfully appointed acting official Chad Wolf, Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence himself, who “intervened in early March” when CDC experts refused to okay the order. The AP reported that those experts said “there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus.” So the men hopped on a call together for some good old-fashioned group bullying and instructed Redfield “to use the agency’s special legal authority in a pandemic anyway,” the report continued.
Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner writes that other documents released last week showed “both the extent to which members of the Trump White House interfered with efforts to protect the public, and the way they consistently worked to downplay the threat—leading to disaster.” That includes orders to delete emails by a political appointee, Paul Alexander, who demanded a stop to reports that negatively reflected the previous president.
Though that president is gone, all of his policies certainly aren’t. The Biden administration has shamefully continued enforcing Title 42, including defending it in court. The administration had a way out when a court in September ordered a stop to the deportation of asylum-seeking families under the policy. But the administration appealed and won. Numerous administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, have continued to defend Title 42 as a public health matter. Schuchat’s testimony continues to confirm that’s complete bullshit. The policy has also since been slammed as “illegal” by a former senior State Department official.
The administration has also since eased restrictions for fully vaccinated visitors from Canada and Mexico, yet continues to refuse to budge regarding Title 42 and asylum-seekers. Why not just vaccinate them, you might ask? Plans to do that as part of a Title 42 wind-down were briefly thought out but then “scrapped by top White House officials, including Susan Rice, who feared that unwinding the border policy would increase the political pressure on the administration,” CBS News reported.
