Opinions Review

Scholz and Macron feud over arms for Ukraine

James Angelos and Joshua Posaner — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 06:12:59 -0500

As Ukraine runs short on ammunition, the German and French leaders are at odds over military aid.

GAO: Billions wasted on federal health insurance program

Kelly Hooper — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 05:01:00 -0500

For 12 years, a Department of Transportation employee fraudulently enrolled his sister and niece on his federal health benefits plan. He claimed the two were his wife and stepchild.

An equipment repair worker at an Army facility in Alabama kept an ex-wife covered for 14 years, and was caught only when he tried to add his new wife. And at the Department of Justice, an employee added a friend and her friend’s four children, asserting they were her family members.

These are a few of what federal officials believe to be thousands of health insurance enrollment scams that cost the federal government as much as $3 billion every year.

And it’s surprisingly easy to do.

The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees health insurance for 8 million federal workers and their families at a cost of more than $60 billion a year, has never checked the eligibility of those on its rolls, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, which has been pushing OPM for years to improve its oversight. And that failure is costing taxpayers billions and raising premiums for millions of civil servants.

That’s unacceptable, said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who plans to introduce a bill in March to require OPM to audit its members.

“OPM does not care about fraud, or they would do it. It's not that hard,” said Scott, who requested the GAO report. “Companies do it all the time, and states do it all the time. It's real simple to put a program in place to do it, so if you don't do it, that means you support fraud.”

A spokesperson for OPM balked at claims that fraud is not a high priority, telling POLITICO the agency “takes the integrity of the [Federal Employees Health Benefits] Program very seriously and is working diligently with agencies to address improper enrollments within the constraints of our resources from Congress.”

Despite prodding from the GAO, the agency has no plans to conduct an audit because it said it would be too expensive. The agency relies on more than 160 government employing offices and more than 70 contracts with health insurance carriers to enroll and verify the eligibility of Federal Employees Health Benefits Program members.

That means the $120 million audit would come out of OPM’s budget while the savings accrue to enrolling agencies, according to OPM.

“It's not an easy problem to fix, there's no doubt about that,” said Assistant Inspector General for Audits Michael Esser, who oversees audits of all programs administered by OPM. “But it is potentially a very costly problem to not address.”

Esser’s office estimates that ineligible enrollees cost the federal health program between $250 million and $3 billion a year — calling the lack of accounting for improper payments “a persistent top management challenge” at OPM.

‘OPM’s passivity’

While OPM might claim that addressing ineligibility is a priority, “they certainly don't act like it,” said Seto Bagdoyan, a director on GAO’s forensic audits and investigative service team who authored the 2022 report. Bagdoyan said congressional action might be the only way to force OPM to address the issue.

“With what we found to be OPM’s passivity in its oversight role, we essentially concluded that program integrity and managing risk are not apparent priorities for OPM,” Bagdoyan said.

Scott’s bill offers no new funding for OPM but would mandate it implement the GAO recommendations, including removing ineligible members from the program, assessing the likelihood and impact of fraud and documenting its assessment.

The Florida senator is confident the bill will garner bipartisan support.

“Unless they were going to go campaign that they like fraud, I can't imagine anybody would be against it,” he said.

Scott, when he was governor of Florida, conducted an audit of the state health benefits plan, which found roughly 3 percent of enrollees were ineligible, resulting in more than $20 million a year in savings to the state.

At least 25 states have conducted audits of their benefit programs, according to GAO. New Jersey saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars after its 2019 audit led to more than 13,000 ineligible dependents being removed from the state health plan.

In California, a multi-year project to verify member eligibility of the state Public Employees' Retirement System health plans resulted in 2.6 percent of dependents being removed in 2015, saving the state nearly $122 million during the years of the audit.

And all 50 states have for the past year been reviewing the eligibility of every Medicaid recipient for the first time since the end of the Covid public health emergency, which so far has led to at least 17 million people losing coverage, according to a KFF tracker.

OPM has no plans to conduct an audit, but a spokesperson said the agency has launched a new FEHB Master Enrollment Index — a list of all federal employees and family members enrolled in the program that the agency can use “to more easily identify ineligible enrollees for removal.”

The spokesperson said the office is also “training agencies and providers on enrollment verification and deploying centralized enrollment for every new benefit program offered to federal employees since 2000.” OPM is developing a centralized enrollment system for the new Postal Service Health Benefits Program — a separate initiative within FEHB for postal employees — the spokesperson said.

Enrollment verification and tracking for FEHB is largely decentralized and left up to federal agencies, rather than OPM. “The clear path forward” for OPM is a “fully funded, centralized enrollment system for FEHB that would address the issues underlying improper enrollments,” rather than conducting a backward-looking audit, the spokesperson said.

OPM declined to comment on whether it is pursuing funding for a centralized enrollment system or the status of implementing the system.

“We will continue to work with Congress to modernize and improve the FEHB Program and deliver for federal employees and their families,” the spokesperson said.

‘Potential magnitude’

GAO, which performed its audit between May 2021 and December 2022, interviewed five government agencies and five of the program’s health insurance carriers, which reported not regularly identifying and removing ineligible family members.

The employing offices and carriers might discover members are ineligible only when an employee makes a coverage change or when they are tipped off by an employee.

That’s how one federal worker was caught in January 2017. A health insurance carrier noticed an enrollee submitted altered court documents to remove his ex-wife from their health plan when adding his new wife to the plan. The document showed he divorced his ex-wife in 2017 — when the divorce actually occurred in 1993. The government paid out more than $150,000 in claims on behalf of the ex-wife over 14 years of ineligible coverage.

In another instance, the agency’s Office of Inspector General received a hotline tip alleging that a federal employee enrolled their child as a dependent incapable of self-support to keep the child enrolled in health coverage past their 26th birthday — despite the child allegedly being capable of self-support and not having a qualifying disability. The government paid more than $160,000 in improper payments, including claims from several drug rehabilitation centers.

Through another hotline tip, OIG discovered that a former Federal Highway Administration division employee had claimed for 12 years that his sister and niece were his wife and step-child to get them coverage. The government spent more than $100,000 in premiums and reimbursements on behalf of the two ineligible members.

The GAO report notes that OPM doesn’t have a precise estimate of how many ineligible members there are in the program. But based on audits of state health plans, the number could be in the thousands.

There are varying estimates on how much ineligible enrollees cost the program. The GAO report estimates the cost to be $1 billion a year, but the number is based on information from OPM and gives “a very rough sense of the potential magnitude” of the fraud in the program, Bagdoyan said. The amount could be much higher, considering the tens of millions of dollars in savings states have realized when conducting audits of their health plans, he said.

Since the federal employee health benefit program’s start in 1960, OPM had never required employing offices to review documentation that would verify family member eligibility for new hire, qualifying life event or open season enrollments. The agency updated its guidance in April 2021 to require the offices to verify family member eligibility for new hires and qualifying life events — but not during open enrollment.

But the GAO report found that not all of the offices are following guidance from OPM on new enrollees, and that they don’t regularly monitor for eligibility of currently enrolled family members.

The new guidance also didn’t address those who might be fraudulently enrolled in the program. And OPM doesn’t monitor whether employing offices and carriers are adhering to the agency’s guidance on eligibility checks.

“It just feeds into this passivity of, ‘Well, you know, everybody else is responsible. We're not really responsible,’” Bagdoyan, the GAO report author, said. “That's what we get over the last several years that we've been working on this issue.”

And controlling health costs — especially as workplace premiums jumped in 2023 — is something all employers should pay more attention to, said Chris Deacon, a former assistant director in the Division of Pensions and Benefits in New Jersey who helped oversee the state’s 2019 audit.

OPM — as the manager of the largest self-funded health plan in the U.S. — has an opportunity to set an example for other large employers across the country instead of taking “a sit-back approach” and “letting the vendors and the contractors and the providers call the shots,” Deacon said. Instead, the agency is taking “a somewhat territorial” and “defensive attitude” to the findings of fraud, waste and abuse within the program, she added.

“They're dealing with taxpayer dollars, and, arguably, that trust and that fiduciary obligation to spend that money wisely and prudently is even heightened than what employers have to do,” Deacon said. “So it's an opportunity missed that they are not playing a leading role in how to purchase health care more prudently and in a manner that benefits the plan and the plan members.”

Trump tried to ignore Haley. He barely lasted a day.

Adam Wren — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

For a full 24 hours on Saturday, Donald Trump did not mention Nikki Haley by name, ignoring her both in a freewheeling address to the Conservative Political Action Conference and after he won the primary in South Carolina.

His campaign said they were turning the page, focusing squarely on the general election. One aide, when asked about the absence of Haley, quipped: “Who?”

By Sunday, that strategic restraint was gone.

In a torrent of posts on Truth Social, just weeks before he is expected to clinch the nomination, Trump had no appetite for comity, blasting Haley as “BRAINDEAD” and “BIRDBRAIN.” He relished the news that Americans for Prosperity would stop spending on Haley’s presidential campaign. He touted a polling lead in Michigan’s primary. “When will Nikki realize,” he posted, “that she is just a bad candidate?”

This was not a magnanimous candidate looking to mend the intraparty fracture on full display in exit polls from each of the early electoral contests. This was not a competitor looking to pivot to going after President Joe Biden.

This was a former president entering the general election actively exacerbating divisions within the GOP — at a time when some Republicans are openly warning about the risk of alienating even a small segment of the Republican electorate. Trump has every rational incentive to make overtures to Haley and her supporters, who delivered her roughly 40 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and South Carolina and who are the kind of voters Trump will need to turn out in Michigan and Pennsylvania in November. But he refused to do so — or, perhaps, was incapable of it — despite making head feints in that direction.

“In the exit polls in the three early states, roughly 20 percent are saying they’re not going to vote for Trump,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster and president of Bellwether Research and Consulting. “If that’s true, you need to have like 85 to 90 percent of your base. I do think that he'll have some problems consolidating, particularly your well-educated, suburban Republicans.”

For a brief moment Saturday, it appeared Trump had located some previously untapped realm of long-term focus.

“There has never been a spirit like this,” Trump said Saturday night in South Carolina. “I have never seen the Republican Party so unified.”

Unity might be too much — and too soon — a thing to ask for in a primary in which Trump questioned Haley's deployed husband’s whereabouts and his advisers described in a memo as a “wailing loser hell-bent on an alternative reality and refusing to come to grips with her imminent political mortality.”

If a real denouement of this primary is best signaled by Trump easing up on his current and former rivals, we’re not there yet. And his refusal to turn his attention away from Haley now risks him a riven party ahead of November.

“Trump is 100 percent exerting his dominance in the GOP and appealing to the political blood lust of his MAGA cult,” said Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “But what empowers him inside the echo chamber is like Kryptonite to the college educated white voters he needs. The fact that he’s a functional incumbent losing four out of 10 voters in his base is the canary in the coal mine.”

Or as Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist from California, put it, “It’s stupid. It’s borderline Kari Lake telling John McCain voters she doesn’t want their vote.”

Stutzman, who is advising a political action committee formed to support a potential third-party No Labels ticket in November, said that given that Trump’s invectives may turn some voters off, “I hope they keep doing it.”

Trump has never been one to take a soft-touch approach to campaigns, mocking and belittling his political rivals from the day he entered the 2016 primary. Even after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis got out of the race — and endorsed Trump — the Trump team has been unloading on him. “Chicken fingers and pudding cups is what you will be remembered for you sad little man,” Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita posted on X, formerly Twitter, after reports emerged of DeSantis reportedly blaming top Trump adviser Susie Wiles and other former employees who now work for Trump for the negative attacks against him during the primary.

As for Haley, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on X that she would “drop down to kiss a— when she quits.”

“He's not gonna stop because she's still in the ring, she’s still in the fight,” said David Urban, a Trump campaign adviser in 2016 and 2020. “He's not going to lift his foot off the gas pedal until the checkered flag comes down and he's the nominee.”

Trump allies say that his team is merely responding to the punches being thrown their way; and that it would be odd to expect them to simply take it. And few, if any, operatives in Trump’s circles are worried. The prevailing sentiment is that the party, including Haley’s supporters, will rally behind the former president when the inevitability of his nomination takes hold, just as Republicans did eight years ago when the factionalism was worse. They believe they can pound away at their GOP rivals and at President Joe Biden, too, and scoff at the idea that Trump would do anything other than punch back at his critics.

As an example of why they are confident the party will rally behind Trump, they point to general election polls showing Trump is currently beating Biden in many general election polls.

“We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Cheung said last week. “We can certainly focus on Biden and we can certainly train our sights on Nikki. That’s not a problem for us. When Trump is the official nominee the party is going to coalesce around him. There is no question about it.”

Trump does not view Haley as a threat, according to aides, but her lingering presence in the primary has surprised him — who expected her to get out earlier — and Trump allies who think she is staying in only to raise her profile.

“The purpose of Nikki staying in is two-fold: First off, she is clearly trying to hurt Trump and help Biden in the general election — though based on the fact that Trump is leading Biden in most polls, it’s clear he’s already winning over the bulk of her voters,” said Andy Surabian, a GOP consultant and adviser to Donald Trump Jr.

“Secondly, this is about her setting herself up for life post-politics,” he said. “She knows full well that her political career is over, and so she is trying to curry favor with anti-Trump donors in the hope that she is rewarded with corporate board seats and lucrative speaking gigs, since its clear that she will never be a national player in the GOP.”

But even if Trump is convinced the primary is over, handing over an olive branch simply isn’t Trump’s style.

“I don’t think mending fences is his way,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist. “You genuflect to him and everything’s good. You don’t, and everything’s not.”

Roe called the response from Trump’s orbit “a little disproportionate.” But he doubted it would cause Trump lasting problems in the general election. “With Trump, conventional wisdom, you throw out the window,” he said. “For most politicians, this would not be the right strategy. But what Trump does seems to work for him.”

Just look at what happened with an earlier primary rival, for example. One day after Trump attacked his then fellow candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in Iowa, the biotech entrepreneur endorsed him and is now on the short list to be Trump’s vice presidential running mate.

In an interview, Ramaswamy, who is now a surrogate for the Trump campaign, said he believed that the ex-president was properly focused on the general election.

“I think Nikki Haley is irrelevant at this point, I think that she has been irrelevant for a long time, and she is certainly after the first two early voting states,” Ramaswamy said. “I think the more [Trump] focuses, and the more we all focus on the general election, and he’s already done that and I think that’s exactly the right strategy.”

Meridith McGraw and Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.

GOP governors face pressure campaign to feed kids in the summer

Marcia Brown — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

More than a dozen Republican governors have been holding out for months against a bipartisan plan to feed hungry children during the summer. But they are under mounting pressure to reconsider — with one already reversing course.

The program, known as Summer EBT, aims to make it easier for kids to access food when school’s out by providing pre-loaded cards, rather than prepared meals that need to be picked up from select locations. It represents the first major expansion of federal nutrition programs in decades, and the Biden administration estimates it could help feed 30 million eligible schoolchildren in the summer months.

As of the initial deadline, however, 15 states, all GOP-led, had declined to participate in the new program over cost concerns and philosophical opposition to expanding federal benefits. Their decision has outraged anti-hunger groups, rural advocates, teachers and local youth, and prompted intense lobbying efforts to convince the governors to change their minds.

In one case, it’s worked: Nebraska announced earlier this month it was opting into the program, after GOP Gov. Jim Pillen had previously stated he would reject the aid — “I don’t believe in welfare,” he’d said at a press conference in December.

Pillen’s change of heart, as well as USDA’s recent announcement that the agency would consider accepting states into the program for summer 2024 even if they missed the agency’s initial deadlines, has injected new momentum into the pressure campaigns in several of the remaining hold-out states. At stake, according to the Agriculture Department: hundreds of millions in food assistance for as many as 9 million eligible children.

“The fact that our governor changed his mind, … from the day he said it, we were hoping other states will do the same,” said Eric Savaiano, program manager for food and nutrition access with Nebraska Appleseed, an anti-poverty organization that was part of the lobbying campaign that convinced Pillen to reverse course.

In Iowa and South Carolina, advocates are “leveraging that change in Nebraska’s stance” to push their governors to expand summer EBT, said Kelsey Boone, senior nutrition policy analyst with the Food Research & Action Center. She added that during the 2021-2022 school year, 360,000 kids received free and reduced price lunch in Iowa, a marker of eligibility for summer EBT, but just 18,353 kids received summer meals in 2022.

The federal government already funds summer nutrition assistance programs, but they require kids and their families to travel to community centers and other sites to receive their meals. In rural areas, that can be a particular burden, and it’s one of the reasons the existing programs don’t reach even a majority of the kids who are eligible.

After Covid-19 hit, the federal government launched Pandemic-EBT, the precursor to the new Summer EBT, to provide cash to eligible children — $40 per month per child — rather than requiring them to travel to retrieve meals. Initial data and research from earlier pilots have shown the program significantly reduced hunger when school is out. Congress agreed in 2022 to make the program permanent, with the backing of key Republicans like Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, the top GOP lawmaker on the Senate Agriculture Committee.

But the bipartisan deal also requires states to underwrite half of the administrative costs for the program, unlike during the pandemic, when the federal government footed the entire bill.

As of Feb. 27, 36 states, five U.S. territories and four tribes have notified the Department of Agriculture they plan to participate in Summer EBT in its inaugural year. That includes 14 Republican-led states. But the GOP governors of the 14 holdout states have remained adamant that Summer EBT was only necessary during the Covid emergency.

In Iowa, where advocates held a rally at the statehouse for summer EBT in January, a spokesperson for Gov. Kim Reynolds told POLITICO the governor remains “firm” in her decision.

“Pandemic-era programs were not intended to be permanent,” Deputy Communications Director Kollin Crompton wrote in an e-mail. “The answer isn’t creating a new government program, instead we should be investing in existing programs that work.”

Advocates for the new program counter that Summer EBT has bipartisan support and is proven effective at addressing the longstanding challenge of feeding low-income kids during the summer months.

“This is not a partisan issue; members of the General Assembly on both sides of the aisle understand that hungry children cannot learn, and hunger does not stop during summer break,” South Carolina state Sens. Darrell Jackson and Katrina Shealy, both Democrats, wrote in a recent Post and Courier op-ed. And they pointed to Gov. Pillen’s about-face in Nebraska to bolster their appeal.

So did Louisiana Democratic Rep. Troy Carter, who issued a statement addressed to the state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, following Pillen’s announcement earlier this month. “It’s not too late to reverse course and do the right thing for Louisiana’s children. Nebraska showed the way and Louisiana can too!”

Another Democratic in Louisiana, state Rep. Jason Hughes, recently introduced a bill that would force the state to join the program. Hughes said he is in discussions with Landry and also has received assurances from USDA that Louisiana can still participate in 2024, despite missed deadlines.

“Louisiana prides itself on being a pro-life state,” said Hughes in an interview. “Our children do not ask to be born. And so we have an obligation to do all that we can to ensure that our children grow up to be healthy, productive, tax-paying citizens. We don't do that by denying them food.”

Landry’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has said his state will participate in 2024, but will pull out after this year and rely on their own state programs to avoid “duplicative” programming.

“For me, it was a little bit like a business decision or pragmatic decision except you’re dealing with kids and their ability to eat which is not business and pragmatic. It’s personal and human,” said Lee when asked about his decision at POLITICO’s Governors Summit last week. “For me it’s pragmatic. Make sure kids get fed and then do it the most efficient way possible.”

With just a few months before school lets out for summer, the time for states to develop a working plan to distribute the new benefits in 2024 is fast disappearing.

USDA spokesperson Allan Rodriguez has repeatedly emphasized that the department did not want deadlines to impede kids from accessing critical federal nutrition aid, but also cautioned that a last-minute rolloutNebraska’s February decision to join the program, more than a month after the Ag Department’s initial deadline for states to apply, was in part facilitated by ongoing behind-the-scenes preparation even before the governor’s announcement.

“They submitted their plan of action [to USDA] the next day. That took months and weeks of work and willing staff,” said Nebraska Appleseed’s Savaiano.

Anti-hunger advocates continue to press their state leadership to reconsider the program, if not in time for 2024, then ahead of summer 2025. As part of their strategy, they are working to refute some of the arguments governors have cited in declining to participate. In particular, they point to Summer EBT pilot programs USDA conducted as early as 2011, as the federal government sought ways to close the summer hunger gap.

“It’s not some holdover pandemic benefit,” said Carolyn Vega, No Kid Hungry’s associate director of policy analysis. “It is a long-standing policy option to address a very long-standing problem.”

Some advocates are still holding out hope their states will pull a Nebraska this year. South Carolina state Sens. Jackson and Shealy said they are scheduled to meet with the state’s GOP Gov. Henry McMaster on Wednesday to discuss the issue.

“I am cautiously, somewhat optimistic,” said Jackson. “Both she and I only have one agenda, and that is let's do right by the children.”

The Government Really Is Spying On You — And It’s Legal

Steven Overly — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

The freakout moment that set journalist Byron Tau on a five-year quest to expose the sprawling U.S. data surveillance state occurred over a “wine-soaked dinner” back in 2018 with a source he cannot name.

The tipster told Tau the government was buying up reams of consumer data — information scraped from cellphones, social media profiles, internet ad exchanges and other open sources — and deploying it for often-clandestine purposes like law enforcement and national security in the U.S. and abroad. The places you go, the websites you visit, the opinions you post — all collected and legally sold to federal agencies.

In his new book, Means of Control, Tau details everything he’s learned since that dinner: An opaque network of government contractors is peddling troves of data, a legal but shadowy use of American citizens’ information that troubles even some of the officials involved. And attempts by Congress to pass privacy protections fit for the digital era have largely stalled, though reforms to a major surveillance program are now being debated.

On today’s episode of POLITICO Tech, Tau and I discussed the state of our personal privacy and the checks on all this government surveillance. I asked what differentiates the U.S. from authoritarian states like China when it comes to data collection, how our digital footprints will impact policy areas like abortion and what broader implications we can expect for civil liberties. He didn’t sugarcoat his responses.

“Any nightmare use for data you can think of will probably eventually happen,” Tau said. “It might not happen immediately, but it’ll happen eventually.”

The following interview has been edited down for length and clarity. Listen to the longer interview with Tau on today’s episode of POLITICO Tech, available on Apple, Spotify and Simplecast.

Tell me about this dinner. Why did it leave you so freaked out that you had to write a whole book?

This source described essentially a world in which the government had figured out that it could buy the geolocation data of cellphones, millions, possibly even billions of cellphones, mostly collected through apps or online advertisers, and it could use it in a surveillance program. And that’s what the Pentagon was experimenting with. It would eventually stand up and become a full-fledged program within the DOD. It would also expand to other government agencies like DHS. And it was a peek into a whole new way of doing surveillance that I hadn’t thought about.

The data that you’re talking about in this book, a lot of times it’s not data that’s collected through traditional legal channels or even through cyberattacks, but rather the government purchasing it from companies that have scraped it from mobile phones, ad exchanges, social media. What difference has that made in terms of both what the government knows about people and also how it uses that information?

A lot of these companies that I profiled in the book are virtually unknown to the average American. I think everyone knows what Google has about them. I think everyone knows what Facebook does. But these are companies, tiny, obscure data brokers, in some cases massive billion-dollar companies, but very little public-facing presence and almost no direct consumer relationship. Some of these companies focus on consumer data. Some focus on social data. Some focus on movement data.

Companies often claim that this data is collected with your consent and that it’s completely anonymous. But is that true?

When you dig deep into those claims, you’ll realize that neither is really true. That, for the most part, yes, perhaps there is some clause in a privacy policy that says that location data may be resold to other entities, but generally speaking, those privacy policies indicate that it will be sold for commercial purposes or for targeted advertising. Rarely, if ever, do they mention that there might be a government buying it; there might be some public safety entity or military unit using this data.

So the second main claim that a lot of these vendors make is that the data is anonymized, that they’ve stripped it of names or addresses that could reveal who a phone belongs to, say, in a geographical movement set. And that isn’t true either, because where your phone spends its evenings, for example, is likely the address of its owner, and it can be cross-checked against other property records. And in many other kinds of data sets, there’s ample evidence that you can be re-identified even if your name is not in them.

How much tension did you find there is within the government when it comes to the accessibility and use of this data?

I don’t want to give the impression that these government programs are poorly run or are violating the civil rights and civil liberties of Americans day to day. That isn’t the case that I found in my reporting. However, it’s certainly true that there is this tension between the United States being a society that’s privacy-oriented, that’s skeptical of the government, and the public safety and national security missions of all these government agencies. Lawyers and program managers and elected officials have to try to balance the fact that this data is out there. It’s available for purchase. It’s something that Home Depot can use to target ads. And the question that gets asked over and over again inside government is, if Home Depot can use it to target ads, why can’t we use it for our very important national security or public safety mission?

What exactly does the government do with this data?

The data is used in a wide variety of law enforcement, public safety, military and intelligence missions, depending on which agency is doing the acquiring. We've seen it used for everything from rounding up undocumented immigrants or detecting border tunnels. We've also seen data used for man hunting or identifying specific people in the vicinity of crimes or known criminal activity. And generally speaking, it's often used to identify patterns. It's often used to look for outliers or things that don't belong. So say you have a military facility, you could look for devices that appear suspicious that are lingering near that facility.

Is there an example of what this leads to in the real world?

I’d point to the example of an Arizona man who was arrested because law enforcement saw that there were phones moving between a restaurant he owned on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexico. They figured out that there was a tunnel there and found a pretense to search his car and found drugs. [They] later got a search warrant to search his restaurant. So, we've seen it used in a wide variety of areas, including in situations where the government would otherwise need a warrant or some other sort of court order to get data on American citizens.

You compare to some degree the state of surveillance in China versus the U.S. You write that China wants its citizens to know that they’re being tracked, whereas in the U.S., “the success lies in the secrecy.” What did you mean by that?

That was a line that came in an email from a police officer in the United States who got access to a geolocation tool that allowed him to look at the movement of phones. And he was essentially talking about how great this tool was because it wasn’t widely, publicly known. The police could buy up your geolocation movements and look at them without a warrant. And so he was essentially saying that the success lies in the secrecy, that if people were to know that this was what the police department was doing, they would ditch their phones or they would not download certain apps.

That is the main theme of what I saw in looking at these government programs in the United States: That, by and large, the lawyers justified them on the grounds that they were open source, that this was data you could buy. But if you started poking around asking about them, FOIA-ing the contracts, they really didn’t want to talk about them.

You write in the book about what you call “gray data,” which is information that’s generated by this widening world of connected devices. How is that changing the nature of surveillance and this data that the government and others have access to?

So what I call gray data is essentially data that’s sort of there for the taking; that’s the byproduct of moving around the web or using some sort of service. So think of these Bluetooth devices that we all increasingly carry now. Your Bluetooth wireless headphones are actually just constantly pinging everything around it trying to tell a phone, another endpoint, that it’s there. And these clever governments or their contractors or these private companies have figured out, “Hey, you know, I could just run a little bit of code on a million phones around the world and just start vacuuming up all the Bluetooth signals around it.” And some of these contractors have found willing government buyers for this data.

Another example I give in the book is car tires. For example, did you know that your car tires actually broadcast a wireless signal to the central computer of your car, telling it what the tire pressure is? Well, that’s all well and good, and it’s there for perfectly legitimate safety reasons. But of course, governments have figured this out. They figured out that the car tire is a proxy for the car. And if you just put little sensors somewhere or you run the right code on devices that you scatter around the world, then you can kind of track people with car tires. I am familiar with governments experimenting with it. And there is a company that has put up sensors in various American cities that they claim is for traffic monitoring, and I think that’s probably correct. But I’m also aware that, at the very least, the intelligence community has figured out how to do it for national security purposes, too. I don't know how deeply it’s penetrated to being a mass surveillance kind of technology, but it's definitely something governments know how to use.

I wonder if you might connect some of these bigger questions about surveillance and about civil liberties to the ways it can affect everyday lives. One example that comes up in the book was abortion access.

With abortion access, you think about the fact now that there’s a patchwork of state laws around abortion and that in the previous era, before the Roe v. Wade decision, that was the reality as well. And in some states, there were these underground abortion clinics where people could go and have the procedure, even though it was against state law. And if you imagine trying to set up something like that today, I just don’t think it would be possible, and it wouldn’t be possible because all the devices we carry around, everywhere we go on an app like Uber, every email or Google query that we make or send is logged somewhere. The fact is that if a prosecutor in a state where abortion is illegal wants access to that data, they will get it. And so, essentially, we’ve built a society where everything is logged and when everything is logged, it’s very hard to move around the world with any sort of privacy or anonymity.

There’s a Good Reason Haley’s Still Running – And It’s Not Trump’s Legal Problems

Henry Olsen — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign started as an excellent adventure, but it now appears to many Republicans to be a bogus journey. Why is she still in the race after six consecutive stinging defeats?

I have a theory: The answer might be buried in the Republican National Committee’s rules and their potential effect on her voice at the July convention.

Haley will arrive in Milwaukee in possession of a cache of delegates — how many is unclear; at the moment, she has 20.

The rules don’t simply give power to a candidate based on the number of delegates they possess. Candidates cannot have their names placed into nomination, and thereby get television airtime at the convention, unless they have a plurality of delegates in at least five states.

That threshold makes a big difference for Haley in terms of her clout — if any — at the convention. Modern political conventions have morphed into four-day long infomercials for a nominee whose identity has long been known. Every winner wants to use that platform to broadcast a structured, convincing message. Do that right and you can give your candidacy a significant, and perhaps decisive, bounce in the polls.

But that requires ensuring that there are no fights, or alternative messages coming from the convention floor — something winners cannot fully control. Defeated candidates can still deploy their delegates to obstruct the winner’s will by posing contentious amendments to the party platform or by using their nominating speeches to criticize the nominee. That can become news, and prospective nominees will cut deals to prevent that from happening.

Against that backdrop, Haley’s continued campaign makes a great deal of sense. The more delegates she can acquire, the more power she can exert on the floor. And the more power she can exert on the floor, the stronger hand she has to deal from to get concessions from former President Donald Trump on things she cares about, such as U.S. support for NATO. Indeed, given that the party did not even write a platform in 2020, simply insisting that it draft a new one for this election might be a significant request.

Of course, winning at least five states will be hard, owing to her deep weakness with conservative Republicans. She almost certainly can’t win any state where the rules limit the electorate to registered Republicans. She’s also unlikely to win any caucus state because those events tend to draw the most committed — and ideological — party members.

Yet there are a number of states voting on or before Super Tuesday that suit her. How? Haley’s best chances will be in those that are both more moderate than Iowa or South Carolina and that are either open to all registered voters or which permit registered independents to vote in the GOP primary. And they need to have larger shares of college educated voters, Haley’s only consistently strong demographic thus far.

Her travel schedule until Super Tuesday seems perfectly aligned with this strategy. She first held two rallies in Michigan in advance of that state’s primary. She then headed to Minnesota for a Minneapolis event. Both upper Midwestern states are known for their relatively moderate politics and have no party registration, allowing independents and stray Democrats to cast Republican ballots. The fact that Marco Rubio won Minnesota’s 2016 caucuses surely adds credence to Haley’s thought that it might be in play.

Haley jetted to Colorado this week, another moderate state with a high level of educational attainment that allows registered independents to cast Republican ballots. Her rally’s location — Centennial, in the Denver suburbs — speaks volumes about her target audience. Centennial has a median household income of nearly $125,000, according to the Census Bureau, with over 61 percent of adults 25 and older having at least a four-year college degree.

A best case scenario there would be to replicate Joe O’Dea’s nine-point win over a MAGA opponent in the GOP’s 2022 Senate primary. O’Dea won large margins in the Denver metro area and the state’s liberal college and ski counties to drown out his foe’s rural strength.

Then Haley streaks to Utah, which holds a caucus on Super Tuesday. That appears to be a strange choice until one recalls that Mormons strongly opposed Trump in 2016. He finished third in that year’s GOP contest, garnering only 14 percent. He’ll do much better than that this year, but there’s enough lingering discontent among members of the Church of Latter-day Saints to give her an outside shot.

After that, she’s back to the East Coast where she holds rallies in North Carolina, Virginia, and the nation’s capital. D.C. is probably her best bet to win because it’s the headquarters of the anti-Trump GOP elite. Rubio and John Kasich combined to get nearly 73 percent here in 2016. If Haley can’t win here, she can’t win anywhere.

Virginia and North Carolina offer more longshot chances at victory. Trump barely beat Ted Cruz in North Carolina’s 2016 contest, with Cruz winning many of the state’s urban areas. Haley’s rallies will be in Charlotte and Raleigh, the state’s two biggest cities that have seen an influx of newcomers, and the fact independents can vote also works to her favor.

The Old Dominion is on the target list for two reasons: there’s no partisan registration and a lot of anti-Trump Republicans. Haley will rally in Richmond and Falls Church, another upper income, high education place that broadly mirrors the broader D.C. suburbs. Marco Rubio handily won metro Richmond and D.C.’s Virginia suburbs in 2016 and nearly carried the state. She clearly hopes Rubio and Kasich voters — and perhaps more than a few non-Republicans — can deliver an upset win.

Her final scheduled events are in especially telling locations. One will unfold in Needham, Massachusetts. Needham makes Centennial look like a slum from the wrong side of the tracks. Its median household income exceeds $200,000 and over 80 percent of adults have a four-year degree or better. Then comes a rally in Vermont, where moderate Phil Scott is one of the few Republican governors to have endorsed her.

Massachusetts, neighboring Vermont and Maine all allow independents to vote in their Super Tuesday contests and typically prefer more moderate Republicans. Haley will be betting they will make a final stand despite the odds against her.

Winning five of these states is a huge stretch, but it’s not impossible. Pull it off and she has the strength she needs to negotiate the terms of her departure with Trump. She won’t get much, but anything tangible gives her something to crow about — and perhaps a springboard for future elections?

Perhaps Haley has no grand strategy, just a desire to keep going and hope for the best. But win or lose, Haley will soon have to end her guerrilla struggle. Whatever her intent, it’s much better for her to exit with a negotiated peace than an unconditional surrender. Soon we’ll see whether she has the leverage to get something from the master of the deal.

US tech giants refuse to work with Britain’s top secret military censorship board

Laurie Clarke and Tamlin Magee — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:38:34 -0500

The century-old committee is struggling to keep pace with new trends in social media and open source journalism.

Trump marches to victory in Michigan primary, though with a familiar note of caution

Alex Isenstadt — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 23:24:24 -0500

Former President Donald Trump easily won Tuesday’s Michigan primary, continuing his march toward the Republican Party nomination.

But his opponent, Nikki Haley, continued to score a significant enough percentage of the vote so as to raise questions about the former president’s standing in the general election.

Trump appeared on path to win roughly 70 percent in the state’s GOP primary. That will increase the pressure on Haley to exit the race, though the former U.N. ambassador has said she plans to remain in it at least through the March 5 “Super Tuesday” primary, when 15 states hold nominating contests.

The former president has swept the primaries so far, notching clear wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. And while Haley drew more than a quarter of the vote, she did not match her vote shares in the last two head-to-head contests with Trump in South Carolina (40 percent) and New Hampshire (43 percent). That suggests that as the campaign becomes more nationalized on Super Tuesday, she may struggle to replicate those stronger performances.

Trump’s unbroken swing of victories underscores the commanding position he has in Republican politics. But there remain clear warning signs beyond just Haley’s vote share. The former president is embroiled in legal peril over his business practices and time in office. And he has made little effort to reach out to voters who do not support him and continues to slash at primary rivals — past and present — even after they have ceased to threaten him politically.

In remarks to the Michigan Republican Party on Tuesday evening, Trump said his vote share in the primary was “far greater than we even anticipated.” He also stressed the importance of the state in the general election, saying, “We win Michigan; we win the whole thing.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to claim more direct operational control of the party. He has also issued a series of endorsements that may anoint winners in upcoming down-ballot primary elections. He has also moved to install loyalists at the Republican National Committee, including Michael Whatley to succeed outgoing chair Ronna McDaniel, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to serve as co-chair and senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita to be the committee’s chief operating officer.

Trump is expected to spend part of the next week campaigning in Super Tuesday states, including Virginia and North Carolina. That also includes a trip to the Texas border on Thursday to speak about the immigration crisis, an issue he is looking to make a centerpiece of his campaign.

Trump’s victory nets him most of the state’s at-large delegates to the Republican convention in July, which will be allocated proportionally. But because the Michigan primary is technically not binding on the RNC’s process for picking a nominee — only the four “carve-out” states are permitted to hold primaries before March 1 — the bulk of the state’s delegates will actually be awarded by congressional district at the state party’s convention this weekend, where Trump is also expected to romp.

Macron wants to lead Europe on Ukraine, but France may not let him

Clea Caulcutt — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 23:19:08 -0500

The French president faces blowback across the political spectrum for not ruling out a Western military presence in Ukraine.

Texas nuclear weapons facility pauses operations amid spreading wildfires

Associated Press — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 23:14:21 -0500

CANADIAN, Texas — Rapidly moving Texas wildfires Tuesday prompted evacuation orders in small towns and shut down a nuclear facility as strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fueled the blaze in the state’s rural Panhandle.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 60 counties as the largest fire burned nearly 400 square miles, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. That is more than twice its size since the fire sparked Monday. Authorities have not said what might have caused the blaze, which tore through sparsely populated counties surrounded by rolling plains.

“Texans are urged to limit activities that could create sparks and take precautions to keep their loved ones safe,” Abbott said.

The largest blaze, known as the Smokehouse Creek Fire, closed highways and remained zero percent contained as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the Forest Service.

The main facility that assembles and disassembles America’s nuclear arsenal shut down its operations Tuesday night in Texas as fires raged out of control near its facility. Pantex issued a statement online saying it had paused operations until further notice.

“The fire near Pantex is not contained,” the company said. “Response efforts have shifted to evacuations. There is a small number of non-essential personnel sheltered on-site.”

Since 1975, Pantex has been the U.S. main assembly and disassembly site for its atomic bombs. It assembled the last new bomb in 1991. In the time since, it has dismantled thousands of weapons.

Pantex is located 30 miles east of Amarillo.

Multiple fires were reported across Hemphill and Hutchinson counties near the Oklahoma border, where some evacuations were also ordered.

Texas state Sen. Kevin Sparks said an evacuation order was issued for the town of Canadian, a town of about 2,000 about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of Amarillo, and other areas. Later Tuesday, the Hemphill County Sheriff’s Office urged anyone who remained in Canadian to shelter in place or at the high school gym because roads were closed.

Evacuations were also ordered in nearby Miami, and schools in Canadian and Miami announced closures Wednesday. East of Canadian, fire officials across the border in the area of Durham, Oklahoma, also encouraged people to evacuate because of the fire.

Evacuations were also taking place in Skellytown, Wheeler, Allison and Briscoe, according to the National Weather Service in Amarillo.

About 40 miles southwest of Canadian, city officials in Pampa on Facebook suggested that residents evacuate to the south and said buses were available for that purpose. Officials said personnel were still fighting the fire Tuesday night but that residents of Pampa could return home.

“They were able to get the fire stopped north of town,” weather service officials said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

To the west, at least some residents in the small city of Fritch in Hutchinson County were told to leave their homes Tuesday afternoon because of another fire that had jumped a highway.

“Everything south of Highway 146 in Fritch evacuate now!” city officials said on Facebook.

Officials with Hutchinson County emergency management and in the nearby city of Borger, which had also been evacuated, posted Tuesday night on Facebook places where evacuees could shelter in both cities. They said so many fires were burning in the county that it was “extremely hard” to keep everyone on the same page while they respond on the front lines.

“We have areas without power, water, and active burning,” the post said. “Pray for the safety of all involved. And pack your go bag just in case. That is the best information we know how to provide right now.”

On Tuesday evening, the fires were 20 to 25 miles from Amarillo, and wind was blowing wildfire smoke into the city, which could affect people with respiratory issues, weather service officials said.

Your guide to all the real-time results

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 22:09:38 -0500

Stay tuned for our live coverage of the 2024 primaries.

It's primary season. Here's when every race is happening.

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 22:09:37 -0500

Biden won the Michigan primary decisively — but not by enough to calm Democratic angst

Elena Schneider and Adam Cancryn — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 21:01:38 -0500

President Joe Biden scored a decisive win in the Michigan primary on Tuesday evening, clearing an organized protest vote against his handling of the Israel-Hamas war though not necessarily by enough to calm Democratic jitters.

Tens of thousands of Michiganders on Tuesday cast their ballots for “uncommitted,” putting them on track to garner more than 10 percent of the vote statewide. That figure seemed likely to exceed past levels of “uncommitted” votes in Michigan Democratic primaries, though fall short of sparking a political earthquake.

Democrats were divided over how to treat the outcome, noting that Biden continued to dominate the primary in ways similar to, or even exceeding, past incumbents but also wary that significant pockets of discontent in the party could prove fatal in the general election.

“I don’t see a pathway for them to win Michigan with that many people not voting for them,” said Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of the Muslim advocacy organization Emgage. “I just don’t.”

In his statement late Tuesday evening, Biden thanked “every Michigander who made their voice heard today,” noting that “exercising the right to vote and participating in our democracy is what makes America great.”

He discussed abortion, union jobs, prescription drugs, and the need to protect fertility treatments. There was no mention of Gaza or Israel or the cease-fire demands that sparked the “uncommitted” protest vote campaign.

On the Republican side, a similar debate about party unity has taken place. Donald Trump also won the Michigan primary convincingly on Tuesday. But the former president continues to face a faction of Republicans who refuse to back his candidacy despite his chokehold on the nomination.

The fissures in both parties have sparked concerns over how each candidate will fare in this critical swing state in November.

For Trump, the threats have been both political and legal in nature. His unbroken swing of early state victories has given him a commanding position in Republican politics. But he remains embroiled in court cases stemming from his business practices and his time in office. And he continues to slash at primary rivals — past and present — even after they have ceased to threaten him politically.

“For Biden, the threats are strictly political. A coalition of Arab-American leaders in Michigan organized the push for the "uncommitted" vote through the “Listen to Michigan” campaign. The effort involved organized protests and phone-banks, reaching tens of thousands of voters, with an aim to pressure the president into supporting an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.

To counteract the palpable discontent over his Israel policy, Biden dispatched top administration officials and allies in Congress to Michigan to talk with community leaders about the Israel-Hamas conflict. The state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, encouraged Democrats to vote for the president even as other Democrats — including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who represents parts of Detroit and Dearborn, and former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke — pushed voters towards the “uncommitted” line.

Notably, Biden said on Monday he thought a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas could be in place in a week — “I hope by the end of the weekend,” Biden told reporters, when he was asked about the timing. His comments came ahead of Tuesday’s vote, but they’re also timed with ongoing talks between the U.S., Israel, Egypt and Qatar over a six-week pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

“Listen to Michigan” organizers have not been persuaded by the steps the administration has taken. They had set 10,000 votes as its benchmark for success in a memo sent on Monday, noting that was roughly the margin Trump won Michigan by during the 2016 general election.

That was a low estimate. “Uncommitted” earned about 20,000 voters in the last three Michigan presidential primaries. In 2012, “uncommitted” earned nearly 21,000 votes, when then-President Barack Obama ran with no opposition on the primary ballot in the state.

The “Listen to Michigan” campaign saw "uncommitted" easily clear that figure shortly after polls closed. And its organizers quickly declared that they anticipated getting more than 15 percent of the vote in at least one congressional district, which would qualify it for a delegate at the Democratic National Convention this summer.

“This means Michigan will be sending at least one delegate to Chicago to declare that they are uncommitted to the Democratic nominee as long as he or she funds Israel’s war in Gaza,” said Layla Elabed, campaign manager of "Listen To Michigan."

Judge affirms ouster of Michigan Republican Party leader Karamo

Associated Press — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 19:06:39 -0500

Kristina Karamo was properly removed as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, a judge said Tuesday, the same day that voters participated in the state’s presidential primary.

The decision against Karamo came after months of internal fighting over the financial health of the state GOP in the battleground state. Members of the state party organized a vote on Jan. 6 to oust her as leader.

Kent County Judge Joseph Rossi said the result was valid.

“Any actions of Ms. Karamo since Jan. 6, 2024, purporting to be taken on behalf of the Michigan Republican state committee are void and have no effect,” Rossi said.

The national Republican Party had also declared that Karamo was properly removed and that former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra was the new chair. Former President Donald Trump backed Hoekstra.

“It is time to unite and move forward with the business delivering the state of Michigan for our party’s presumptive nominee, Donald J. Trump,” Hoekstra said after Rossi granted an injunction sought by Karamo’s critics.

Karamo told reporters in Grand Rapids that the judge’s decision was “grossly unfair.”

She had been refusing to accept efforts to remove her and had planned to hold a convention to select presidential delegates Saturday.

A group of Republicans sued her, seeking a definitive ruling about whether she had been lawfully removed. The plaintiffs included Karamo’s former co-chair, Malinda Pego and other former allies.

Opponents called for her resignation following a year plagued by debt and infighting. Karamo was a unsuccessful candidate for secretary of state before being tapped to lead the party.

Nearly 89 percent of those present on Jan. 6 voted to oust Karamo, according to Bree Moeggenberg, a party member in attendance. Roughly 110 precinct delegates had the power to remove the chair but only 45 people, not including proxies, had attended the meeting.

Rossi, however, said there were sufficient votes.

The civil war within the state party has had little impact on the presidential contest so far, with Trump maintaining his front-runner status over Nikki Haley.

McConnell nudges Johnson as gap grows between GOP leaders

Burgess Everett and Olivia Beavers — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:26:35 -0500

During a private White House meeting on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell nudged Mike Johnson to take up the Senate’s $95 billion foreign aid bill — a move that would risk a right-flank rebellion against the speaker.

The Senate GOP leader’s public and private remarks on Tuesday advocating for his chamber's bill was a subtle but notable shift from his tactics just two weeks ago, when the Kentuckian said he didn’t “have any advice” for the speaker on how to handle President Joe Biden’s long-stalled request for new Ukraine aid. Earlier this month, McConnell even suggested potential negotiations to reconcile different House and Senate aid bills.

But after more than an hour at the White House, Johnson was on an island when it came to Ukraine, compared to Biden and his fellow three top leaders.

“What I hope is that the House will take up the Senate bill and let the House work its way. If they change it and send it back here, we have further delays,” McConnell said on Tuesday afternoon. "We don’t want the Russians to win in Ukraine. So, we have a time problem here. And I think the best way to move quickly and get the bill to the president would be for the House to take up the Senate bill and pass it."

He similarly advocated for the Senate’s legislation in the private meeting, according to two people familiar with the sitdown.

McConnell’s move underscored that the two men are dealing in dramatically disparate ways with similar pressures they face from conservatives who have no interest in passing Ukraine aid. While McConnell is sensitive to Johnson's tough position, their young relationship is different from his partnership with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who got broad deference from McConnell during last year's debt ceiling negotiations.

Nonetheless, Tuesday's meeting showcased Johnson’s isolation among congressional leaders. And while standing apart from the Senate is not an unpopular position in the raucous House GOP, it complicates Johnson’s stewardship of the chamber given the number of policy, political and tactical differences that congressional Republicans face in a crucial election year.

While McConnell, 82, views the fight for Ukraine aid as crucial to his 40-year Senate legacy, Johnson is roughly five months into a shock ascension as speaker and already facing heavy turbulence from his own members. Even Democrats are sympathetic to Johnson's ever-present threat of an ouster if conservatives decide to force a vote of no confidence in his speakership.

McConnell faces his fair share of criticisms from his rank and file, but at least he knows his conservative foes likely have to wait until November’s leadership elections to air them formally.

“I don’t know how many political lives he has," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said of the speaker. "But I think it’s really important that we get [Ukraine] done.”

Cornyn suggested Johnson could add a hardline border security bill to the Ukraine legislation, and he didn't go as far as McConnell in advising Johnson to simply pass the Senate bill. That “is easy for senators to say," Cornyn said, adding that Johnson is "trying to figure it out and I wish him well.”

Johnson faced a near-pile-on from top Democrats in the room on Tuesday, including Biden, Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) — all of whom pushed for Ukraine as well. Schumer publicly noted that “McConnell was the lead speaker in saying we needed to do Ukraine” during the meeting, describing it as among the most “intense” discussions in the room.

“It was the consensus in that room Zelenskyy and Ukraine will lose the war” if the U.S. does not provide aid, Schumer also warned.

While all four top leaders are now in apparent lockstep about avoiding a government shutdown, Johnson remained noncommittal on an emergency foreign aid bill, simply stating that lawmakers must prioritize the U.S. border before helping an ally overseas. He is pushing Biden to use executive actions to tighten security on the southern border before turning to Ukraine, and he is not alone in that view.

“That would be the way it would work if we did it, if the president would do those executive actions,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who aligns with Johnson on the border.

Johnson has previously pledged to get aid to Ukraine passed. But since then he has heard loud warnings from conservatives such as Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — including threats of a vote to oust him as speaker — if he moves forward on such aid.

Ultimately, Johnson could watch a group of his own centrists solve the problem without him. Several Republicans are still open to joining hands with Democrats to bypass the constrained speaker and pass a separate Ukraine-border bill.

McConnell, meanwhile, has taken arrows for pushing forward on a border and foreign aid package that includes funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) even called for the Kentucky Republican to step down over the matter earlier this month, and conservative blanched at McConnell’s Ukraine advocacy on Tuesday.

“Who was standing up for the American taxpayer? Or for Americans harmed by Biden’s open-border policies?” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in reaction to the meeting.

There’s more daylight on the GOP’s funding strategy between Johnson and McConnell, who said Monday that Congress needs to go “toward clean appropriations and away from poison pills.” Johnson and his House allies are fighting for conservative policy restrictions in spending bills, which Democrats say they will not accept.

The first chance of a partial shutdown hits this week with Friday’s funding deadline. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who is close to Johnson, said he was unsure whether the speaker could muscle through a stopgap “continuing resolution” to avoid a funding lapse — though it appears to be the only way around a shutdown.

“I don't see a lot of coordination,” Kennedy said of House and Senate Republicans. “We could just keep doing these short-term [continuing resolutions] between now and the election."

Johnson has pledged to honor the so-called 72-hour rule and give his members time to review any deal that is secured. That leaves very little time to stop a group of government agencies from running out of money on Saturday.

He also pledged to keep trying to pass all 12 individual spending bills, which has set the expectation that Johnson will keep pushing the same type of stopgap spending patches he has promised to avoid.

Finger-pointing between Schumer and Johnson is already underway as to who would shoulder the blame in the event of a shutdown. Importantly, though, Republicans have failed to leverage shutdowns to get their demanded concessions over the last three decades.

That includes former Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995 trying to unsuccessfully use a partial shutdown to get cuts from then-President Bill Clinton. More recently, Donald Trump failed to extract money for his border wall in 2018 after a shutdown dragged on for a record 35 days.

“It’s just a road to nowhere at midnight," said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) of a shutdown. "A misery march. Nobody wins.”

Israel and Hamas indicate no deal is imminent

Associated Press — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:15:03 -0500

JERUSALEM — Israel and Hamas on Tuesday played down chances of an imminent breakthrough in talks for a cease-fire in Gaza, after President Joe Biden said Israel has agreed to pause its offensive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan if a deal is reached to release some hostages.

The president’s remarks came on the eve of the Michigan primary, where he faces pressure from the state’s large Arab American population over his staunch support for Israel’s offensive. Biden said he had been briefed on the status of talks by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, but said his comments reflected his optimism for a deal, not that all the remaining hurdles had been overcome.

In the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, Israel’s air, sea and ground campaign in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of people, obliterated large swaths of the urban landscape and displaced 80% of the battered enclave’s population.

Israel’s seal on the territory, which allows in only a trickle of food and other aid, has sparked alarm that a famine could be imminent, according to the United Nations.

With U.N. truck deliveries of aid hampered by the lack of safe corridors, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and France conducted an airdrop of food, medical supplies and other aid into Gaza on Tuesday. At a beach in southern Gaza, boxes of supplies dropped from military aircraft drifted down on parachutes as thousands of Palestinians ran along the sand to retrieve them.

But alarm is growing over worsening hunger among Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians.

Two infants died from dehydration and malnutrition at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City, said the spokesman for Gaza’s Health Ministry, Ashraf al-Qidra. He warned that infant mortality threatens to surge.

“Dehydration and malnutrition will kill thousands of children and pregnant women in the Gaza Strip,” he said.

The U.N. Population Fund said the Al Helal Al Emirati maternity hospital in Gaza’s southernmost town of Rafah reported that newborns were dying because mothers were unable to get prenatal or postnatal care. Premature births are also rising, forcing staff to put four or five newborns in a single incubator. Most of them do not survive, it said, without giving figures on the numbers of deaths.

Now the prospect of an invasion of Rafah has prompted global alarm over the fate of around 1.4 million civilians trapped there.

Talks to pause the fighting have gained momentum recently and were underway Tuesday. Negotiators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar have been working to broker a cease-fire that would see Hamas free some of the dozens of hostages it holds in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, a six-week halt in fighting and an increase in aid deliveries to Gaza.

The start of Ramadan, which is expected to be around March 10, is seen as an unofficial deadline for a deal. The month is a time of heightened religious observance and dawn-to-dusk fasting for hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. Israeli-Palestinian tensions have flared in the past during the holy month.

“Ramadan’s coming up, and there has been an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in activities during Ramadan as well, in order to give us time to get all the hostages out,” Biden said in an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers” that was recorded Monday afternoon.

In separate comments the same day, Biden said that he hoped a cease-fire deal could take effect by next week.

At the same time, Biden did not call for an end to the war, which was triggered when Hamas militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted roughly 250 people, according to Israeli authorities.

Israeli officials said Biden’s comments came as a surprise and were not made in coordination with the country’s leadership. A Hamas official played down any sense of progress, saying the group wouldn’t soften its demands.

The Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the sensitive talks with the media, said Israel wants a deal immediately, but that Hamas continues to push excessive demands. They also said that Israel is insisting that female soldiers be part of the first group of hostages released under any truce deal.

Hamas official Ahmad Abdel-Hadi indicated that optimism on a deal was premature.

“The resistance is not interested in giving up any of its demands, and what is proposed does not meet what it had requested,” he told the Pan-Arab TV channel Al Mayadeen.

Hamas has previously demanded that Israel end the war as part of any deal, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “delusional.”

At a news conference in Doha on Tuesday, Qatar Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari said his country felt “optimistic” about the talks, without elaborating.

A senior official from Egypt has said the draft deal includes the release of up to 40 women and older hostages in return for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners — mostly women, minors and older people.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said the proposed six-week pause in fighting would allow hundreds of trucks to bring desperately needed aid into Gaza every day, including to the hard-hit north.

Biden, who has shown staunch support for Israel throughout the war, left open the door in his remarks for an eventual Israeli ground offensive in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, on the border with Egypt, where more than half of the enclave’s 2.3 million people have fled under Israeli evacuation orders.

Netanyahu has said a ground operation in Rafah is an inevitable component of Israel’s strategy for crushing Hamas. This week, the military submitted for Cabinet approval operational plans for the offensive, as well as evacuation plans for civilians there.

Biden said he believes Israel has slowed its bombardment of Rafah.

“They have to, and they have made a commitment to me that they’re going to see to it that there’s an ability to evacuate significant portions of Rafah before they go and take out the remainder Hamas,” he said. “But it’s a process.”

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 29,700 people, most of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. It does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its count.

The first and only cease-fire in the war, in late November, brought about the release of about 100 hostages — mostly women, children and foreign nationals — in exchange for about 240 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, as well as a brief halt in the fighting.

Roughly 130 hostages remain in Gaza, but Israel says about a quarter of them are dead.

‘I speculated’: Key witness denies knowing details of Georgia prosecutors’ romantic relationship

Betsy Woodruff Swan — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:20:14 -0500

In a tense hearing in Atlanta Tuesday, a key witness refused to confirm details about the romantic relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and the special prosecutor she hired to lead her criminal case against Donald Trump.

Terrence Bradley, a lawyer who formerly represented special prosecutor Nathan Wade in his divorce, reluctantly answered questions under oath for two hours but repeatedly said he did not know specifics about Willis’ relationship with Wade, including if they were dating when she hired him as an outside attorney under contract with Fulton County.

Trump and his co-defendants are seeking to have Willis — and her entire office — thrown off the case. They say Willis improperly benefited from the case because after she hired Wade to run the prosecution, Wade allegedly used income from his work on the case to pay for vacations with Willis.

Willis and Wade have acknowledged a romantic relationship but have insisted under oath that it began only after Willis hired Wade in November 2021. They have denied any wrongdoing.

Lawyers for Trump and his co-defendants had signaled that Bradley would testify that Willis and Wade became romantically involved before Willis hired him. If Bradley had testified to that, it would have strengthened the bid to disqualify the prosecutors and would have opened Willis and Wade up to accusations that they lied to the judge.

Bradley, however, said he could not recall when he learned of the romantic relationship between Willis and Wade, and he claimed to have had only a single conversation about the relationship with Wade.

In the hearing, Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for one of Trump’s co-defendants, read text messages Bradley sent her saying the prosecutors’ relationship began before Wade joined Willis’ team. But Bradley — who was forced to take the stand due to a subpoena and acknowledged that he didn’t want to be testifying — wouldn’t stand by his text messages. Instead, he insisted that he was merely speculating in those texts. And he said he had no memory of ever knowing when exactly they struck up a romance.

The Trump-allied lawyers — particularly Steve Sadow, who represents the former president — laid into Bradley. But he didn’t budge.

“You want the court to believe that instead of saying nothing, you decided on your own to speculate?” Sadow asked.

“Yes, I speculated,” Bradley replied.

And Richard Rice, who represents another co-defendant, pressed Bradley on whether he lied about Wade when he communicated with Merchant. Rice noted that Bradley had described Wade as a friend.

“As a normal course of relationships with your friends, do you pass on lies about your friends?” Rice asked. “Is that something you normally do, Mr. Bradley? Do you tell lies about your friends?”

“Have I told lies about my friends?” Bradley replied. “I could have, I don’t know.”

Tuesday’s testimony from Bradley was a continuation of a dramatic evidentiary hearing that began earlier this month and featured testimony by both Willis and Wade themselves. Judge Scott McAfee has asked the lawyers to present legal arguments on the disqualification effort this Friday, with a ruling expected after that.

Chatbots’ inaccurate, misleading responses about US elections threaten to keep voters from polls

Associated Press — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:08:38 -0500

With presidential primaries underway across the U.S., popular chatbots are generating false and misleading information that threatens to disenfranchise voters, according to a report published Tuesday based on the findings of artificial intelligence experts and a bipartisan group of election officials.

Fifteen states and one territory will hold both Democratic and Republican presidential nominating contests next week on Super Tuesday, and millions of people already are turning to artificial intelligence -powered chatbots for basic information, including about how their voting process works.

Trained on troves of text pulled from the internet, chatbots such as GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini are ready with AI-generated answers, but prone to suggesting voters head to polling places that don’t exist or inventing illogical responses based on rehashed, dated information, the report found.

“The chatbots are not ready for primetime when it comes to giving important, nuanced information about elections,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia, who along with other election officials and AI researchers took the chatbots for a test drive as part of a broader research project last month.

An AP journalist observed as the group convened at Columbia University tested how five large language models responded to a set of prompts about the election — such as where a voter could find their nearest polling place — then rated the responses they kicked out.

All five models they tested — OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Meta’s Llama 2, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Mixtral from the French company Mistral — failed to varying degrees when asked to respond to basic questions about the democratic process, according to the report, which synthesized the workshop’s findings.

Workshop participants rated more than half of the chatbots’ responses as inaccurate and categorized 40% of the responses as harmful, including perpetuating dated and inaccurate information that could limit voting rights, the report said.

For example, when participants asked the chatbots where to vote in the ZIP code 19121, a majority Black neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia, Google’s Gemini replied that wasn’t going to happen.

“There is no voting precinct in the United States with the code 19121,” Gemini responded.

Testers used a custom-built software tool to query the five popular chatbots by accessing their back-end APIs, and prompt them simultaneously with the same questions to measure their answers against one another.

While that’s not an exact representation of how people query chatbots using their own phones or computers, querying chatbots’ APIs is one way to evaluate the kind of answers they generate in the real world.

Researchers have developed similar approaches to benchmark how well chatbots can produce credible information in other applications that touch society, including in healthcare where researchers at Stanford University recently found large language models couldn’t reliably cite factual references to support the answers they generated to medical questions.

OpenAI, which last month outlined a plan to prevent its tools from being used to spread election misinformation, said in response that the company would “keep evolving our approach as we learn more about how our tools are used,” but offered no specifics.

Anthropic plans to roll out a new intervention in the coming weeks to provide accurate voting information because “our model is not trained frequently enough to provide real-time information about specific elections and ... large language models can sometimes ‘hallucinate’ incorrect information,” said Alex Sanderford, Anthropic’s Trust and Safety Lead.

Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts called the findings “meaningless” because they don’t exactly mirror the experience a person typically would have with a chatbot. Developers building tools that integrate Meta’s large language model into their technology using the API should read a guide that describes how to use the data responsibly, he added. That guide does not include specifics about how to deal with election-related content.

“We’re continuing to improve the accuracy of the API service, and we and others in the industry have disclosed that these models may sometimes be inaccurate. We’re regularly shipping technical improvements and developer controls to address these issues,” Google’s head of product for responsible AI Tulsee Doshi said in response.

Mistral did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

In some responses, the bots appeared to pull from outdated or inaccurate sources, highlighting problems with the electoral system that election officials have spent years trying to combat and raising fresh concerns about generative AI’s capacity to amplify longstanding threats to democracy.

In Nevada, where same-day voter registration has been allowed since 2019, four of the five chatbots tested wrongly asserted that voters would be blocked from registering to vote weeks before Election Day.

“It scared me, more than anything, because the information provided was wrong,” said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat who participated in last month’s testing workshop.

The research and report are the product of the AI Democracy Projects, a collaboration between Proof News, a new nonprofit news outlet led by investigative journalist Julia Angwin, and the Science, Technology and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Most adults in the U.S. fear that AI tools— which can micro-target political audiences, mass produce persuasive messages, and generate realistic fake images and videos — will increase the spread of false and misleading information during this year’s elections, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

And attempts at AI-generated election interference have already begun, such as when AI robocalls that mimicked U.S. President Joe Biden’s voice tried to discourage people from voting in New Hampshire’s primary election last month.

Politicians also have experimented with the technology, from using AI chatbots to communicate with voters to adding AI-generated images to ads.

Yet in the U.S., Congress has yet to pass laws regulating AI in politics, leaving the tech companies behind the chatbots to govern themselves.

Two weeks ago, major technology companies signed a largely symbolic pact to voluntarily adopt “reasonable precautions” to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to generate increasingly realistic AI-generated images, audio and video, including material that provides “false information to voters about when, where, and how they can lawfully vote.”

The report’s findings raise questions about how the chatbots’ makers are complying with their own pledges to promote information integrity this presidential election year.

Overall, the report found Gemini, Llama 2 and Mixtral had the highest rates of wrong answers, with the Google chatbot getting nearly two-thirds of all answers wrong.

One example: when asked if people could vote via text message in California, the Mixtral and Llama 2 models went off the rails.

“In California, you can vote via SMS (text messaging) using a service called Vote by Text,” Meta’s Llama 2 responded. “This service allows you to cast your vote using a secure and easy-to-use system that is accessible from any mobile device.”

To be clear, voting via text is not allowed, and the Vote to Text service does not exist.

Judge tosses alleged al Qaeda operative’s suit against CIA waterboarding contractors

Josh Gerstein — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:02:08 -0500

A federal judge in Washington state has dismissed a lawsuit an alleged top al Qaeda operative brought against two psychologists the Central Intelligence Agency hired to manage the spy agency’s use of waterboarding as part of the interrogation of terror suspects.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice ruled Tuesday that the suit Abu Zubaydah filed last year against psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen was precluded by a 2006 federal law limiting the ability of war-on-terror detainees who are not U.S. citizens to sue in U.S. courts over their detention or treatment.

Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents, argued that the legislation applies only to U.S. government employees and not to contractors like Mitchell and Jessen. But Rice, an appointee of President Barack Obama, disagreed.

“The … legislative history demonstrates that Congress understood this provision would apply to government employees and contractors alike. It passed this legislation specifically to protect individuals, like Defendants, who interrogated enemy combatants,” wrote Rice, who sits in Spokane.

After being captured in Pakistan in 2002, Abu Zubaydah, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was waterboarded at least 83 times while in CIA custody, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in part in 2014. The report said he was also subjected to a variety of other torture techniques, including being confined in a small box and being placed in so-called stress positions.

Intelligence officials contend that Abu Zubaydah, now 52, was a top deputy to al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. U.S. officials who ordered the interrogations said they suspected Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about planned terror operations.

The interrogation sessions led by Mitchell and Jessen at a so-called black site in Poland continued for 17 consecutive days in August 2002. At one point, Abu Zubaydah lost consciousness and water and air bubbles began pouring out of his mouth, the Senate report said.

Since 2006, Abu Zubaydah has been held at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. He’s classified as an enemy combatant, but has never faced criminal charges.

At a military tribunal hearing for another detainee in Guantanamo in 2020, Mitchell testified that he repeatedly begged officials at CIA headquarters to be permitted to end the simulated drownings of Abu Zubaydah but officials insisted they continue, the New York Times reported.

In the 13-page ruling Tuesday, Rice said it was clear Mitchell and Jessen were acting under the direct supervision of the spy agency.

“Defendants were only asked to formulate interrogation techniques and, for a limited amount of time, perform the interrogation. The CIA oversaw and approved the interrogation, decided how long it would last, and decided when it would stop,” the judge wrote. “Defendants were required to file daily reports. Absent CIA permission and supervision, Defendants had no independent authority to interrogate Plaintiff. Defendants were therefore agents of the CIA at the time of Plaintiff’s interrogation.”

An attorney for Abu Zubaydah, Solomon Shinerock, said his client will appeal the ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We note that the decision does not address prior federal judicial opinions that governed many of the same issues, which correctly held that private contractors who torture are not immune or otherwise shielded from accountability,” Shinerock said in a statement.

A CIA spokesperson and a lawyer for Mitchell and Jessen did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2017, Mitchell and Jessen reached an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit brought by two other former war-on-terror detainees and the family of a detainee who died in CIA custody. The terms of the resolution were not disclosed.

In 2022, the Supreme Court rejected a bid by Abu Zubaydah to subpoena Mitchell and Jessen for testimony to be used in a criminal investigation in Poland into the participation of Polish citizens in the waterboarding and other incidents of torture. The high court’s ruling upheld the U.S. government’s use of the so-called state secrets privilege to block the subpoenas.

Lara Trump officially announces for RNC co-chair, as Trump tightens grip on GOP

Alex Isenstadt — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 16:55:00 -0500

Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump officially kicked off her campaign to be Republican National Committee co-chair on Tuesday, the latest step in the former president’s takeover of the RNC.

Lara Trump wrote a letter to the 168 members of the RNC saying that she was “proud to have the endorsement of my father-in-law and 45th president, Donald J. Trump, for this position and understand the fundamental importance of this role.”

“In the coming days, I look forward to connecting with you, the members of the RNC, and hopefully earning your vote,” she added.

The move comes as Trump embarks on a sweeping effort to fuse his campaign with the RNC ahead of the general election. The former president is backing an ally, North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley, to succeed outgoing RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, and is installing his senior adviser Chris LaCivita as the committee’s chief operating officer. Whatley, who appeared onstage with Trump at his South Carolina primary victory party this past weekend, launched his campaign on Monday.

Behind the scenes, the campaign has begun working with the RNC to merge their efforts in various departments, including fundraising, data and political outreach — effectively putting the party apparatus under Trump’s roof.

Lara Trump outlined her vision for the committee in her letter. Touching on an issue of central importance to her father-in-law — Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen — she wrote that the committee should “build and activate the most effective battleground state election integrity program Republicans have ever had.”

She also said the RNC would “do a deep dive through all of the RNC’s existing contracts and vendor agreements, identifying what’s useful and what isn’t to taking back the White House.” She said the committee would “prioritize the fundamental mechanics of winning elections to ensure that we triumph in close races.”

McDaniel announced on Monday that she will step down from her post early next month. The RNC will hold its leadership election on March 8 at a meeting in Houston, where the candidates for chair and co-chair will need to win a majority of support from the committee’s 168 members. Whatley and Lara Trump are expected to prevail easily, given their support from the former president, who is broadly popular among the committee’s members. So far, they are running unopposed.

As Trump tightens his grip on the Republican nomination, his team has been taking other steps to unite the party’s operation around him, even as Trump himself continues to attack Nikki Haley, his faltering chief primary rival. Earlier this month, Trump met at his Mar-a-Lago resort with House Speaker Mike Johnson and National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson to talk about House races.

Meanwhile, LaCivita and Josh Holmes, a top adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have been having back-channel conversations involving, among other things, coordinating on Trump’s involvement in Senate races. The conversations were first reported by the New York Times.

Trump’s moves to take over the RNC have met pushback within some corners of the party. Henry Barbour, an RNC committee member from Mississippi, has introduced a pair of resolutions that would prevent the committee from being used to pay Trump’s legal bills and that would ensure the committee is neutral until Trump has secured the necessary number of delegates to be the presumptive nominee. It is unclear whether the resolutions, which are non-binding, will have enough support to go to a vote before the full committee.

Trump advisers have insisted RNC funds will not be used to pay for Trump’s legal bills.

The former president recently asked his daughter-in-law to be co-chair, a person familiar with the discussion said. Lara Trump has been a high-profile surrogate for her father-in-law, frequently appearing on TV shows and on the campaign trail for him. She served as a senior adviser on Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, and was briefly mentioned as a North Carolina Senate candidate during the 2022 midterm elections.

Controversial Ohio GOP congressional candidate considers dropping out (again)

Ally Mutnick — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 16:14:23 -0500

J.R. Majewski, the controversial Ohio congressional candidate, has told people he plans to drop out of his battleground House race just days after early voting began in the Republican primary.

Majewski, who lost his 2022 bid after news reports indicated he lied about serving in combat in Afghanistan, confirmed to POLITICO that he was seriously considering ending his 2024 campaign but said he had not yet made a decision. He said he told people “what they want to hear” to keep them “at bay” while he figured out his future.

“I'm being asked by some people to drop out,” Majewski said in a brief interview. “I don't know what I'm gonna do yet.”

He acknowledged that his recent controversy over disparaging comments about the Special Olympics had changed the dynamic of the race and that he may struggle in a general election against Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur.

Majewski told at least two people that he is in talks to take a position with former President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the conversations. Majewski confirmed to POLITICO that he had briefly talked with Trump’s team but denied that those conversations had been about job opportunities.

It’s not clear when or if Majewski, an Air Force veteran, would exit the race. There are just three weeks to the March 19 primary, early voting began six days ago, and Majewski has a history of changing his mind. He’s already dropped out once this cycle and then jumped back into the race.

If he does end his bid, it could be a major victory for House GOP strategists who had feared he would cost the party one of its best opportunities to bolster a tenuous majority.

Despite his denials to POLITICO, Majewski has been unambiguous about his plans in private conversations.

In conversations and text messages reviewed by POLITICO, Majewski has explicitly told multiple people in recent days that he is going to end his campaign, according to three people familiar with the conversations and granted anonymity to discuss them.

But even people who heard directly from Majewski about his plans to drop out acknowledge that he is a volatile character. A fourth person said Majewski wants a clear off-ramp.

National Republicans are desperate to block Majewski from again winning the nomination for the seat. His 2022 bid derailed after a news report on his military records indicated he lied. (He denies misrepresenting his military service.)

Majewski ultimately lost to Kaptur by 13 points in a Toledo-based district that is again among the top targets for Republicans because Trump won it by 3 points in 2020. Party strategists feared Majewski would win the primary again, setting up a repeat of his 2022 loss. For months, they have tried to position a candidate to beat him in the primary.

He had come under fire most recently for his appearance on a podcast in which he made disparaging comments about the Special Olympics and people with mental disabilities, calling them “retarded.” The Lucas County GOP formally censured him after his comments, calling them "reprehensible, uncaring and inappropriate." Majewski apologized.

“If my comments put me in a position where I can't win the general election then I gotta do the smart thing, right?” Majewski told POLITICO, adding that his priority is helping Republicans keep the majority and Trump reclaim the White House.

His comments had clearly rattled some supporters. One local government official in Majewski’s home county wrote on Facebook that she worked with special needs children for 14 years and had removed her pro-Majewski yard signs and posts. “So many of us were hurt by this,” she wrote.

Majewski first launched a bid last year only to drop out in May, citing his mother’s health. He later reentered the race, much to the chagrin of GOP leaders.

It was just one twist in a GOP primary in Ohio’s 9th District that has been whiplash-inducing.

Party strategists were banking on former Ohio state Rep. Craig Riedel to block Majewski from the nomination. Then audio leaked late last year of him calling Trump “arrogant” and vowing to refrain from endorsing him. That revelation caused panic among Republicans who feared Riedel would not be able to win a primary filled with Trump supporters — but that Majewski would not be able to win a general election.

Their solution: recruiting a third candidate. GOP leaders convinced state Rep. Derek Merrin to jump into the race shortly before the filing deadline in late December. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Republican leadership, has spent over $500,000 so far on ads boosting Merrin, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.

But the strategy was risky. If Riedel and Merrin split the anti-Majewski vote, they could open up a path for Majewski to win.

If Majewski does leave the race, his name will remain on the ballot.

Ryan Binkley drops out of GOP primary, endorses Trump

Madison Fernandez — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 12:21:04 -0500

Republican Ryan Binkley ended his longshot presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Tuesday, after failing to gain traction in any of the early nominating states.

While the primary became a one-on-one race between Trump and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Binkley, a Texas pastor and businessperson, remained in the race since last April, generating minimal support.

It came at a high cost. He loaned himself more than $10 million and only earned just more than 2,000 votes across the four early-state nominating contests. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, he came in behind candidates who had already dropped out.

On his way out, Binkley endorsed Trump, who is expected to secure yet another win in Michigan’s presidential primary on Tuesday.

“Throughout my campaign, I have seen our party struggle to find a place for a new vision while weighing the corrupt allegations and indictments against President Trump,” Binkley wrote in a post announcing the end of his campaign. “He will need everyone’s support, and he will have mine moving forward.”

He said in his post that he looks “forward to considering other ways I can make an impact and promote my policy positions.”

The path for Binkley appeared all but impossible from the beginning, and he acknowledged that he was not resonating with voters on the trail. When POLITICO asked him after the New Hampshire primary what it would take for him to drop out, he said that “God would just have to speak to me and tell me to end it.”

How AI Is Already Transforming the News Business

Jack Shafer — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 10:23:10 -0500

The news business is falling apart and here comes AI to finish the job — at least that’s what some worry. AI isn’t the first and is surely not the last technology to upset the journalistic status quo. The telegraph and then the telephone allowed reporters to file dispatches from blocks or thousands of miles away. The Linotype machine obliterated the labor-intensive craft of hand-setting type in the 1880s. Radio moved news instantaneously. Computers replaced the Linotype, displacing thousands of skilled production workers.

The early vibrations of AI have already been shaking the newsroom. One downside of the new technology surfaced at CNET and Sports Illustrated, where editors let AI run amok with disastrous results. Elsewhere in news media, AI is already writing headlines, managing paywalls to increase subscriptions, performing transcriptions, turning stories in audio feeds, discovering emerging stories, fact checking, copy editing and more.

Felix M. Simon, a doctoral candidate at Oxford, recently published a white paper about AI’s journalistic future that eclipses many early studies. Swinging a bat from a crouch that is neither doomer nor Utopian, Simon heralds both the downsides and promise of AI’s introduction into the newsroom and the publisher’s suite.

Unlike earlier technological revolutions, AI is poised to change the business at every level. It will become — if it already isn’t — the beginning of most story assignments and will become, for some, the new assignment editor. Used effectively, it promises to make news more accurate and timely. Used frivolously, it will spawn an ocean of spam. Wherever the production and distribution of news can be automated or made “smarter,” AI will surely step up. But the future has not yet been written, Simon counsels. AI in the newsroom will be only as bad or good as its developers and users make it.

This interview was conducted over Zoom and online and has been edited for length and clarity.

Your report maintains that far from being a technology of the future, AI is already in the newsroom.

It’s not just in the newsroom, it’s in news organizations more broadly, and newsrooms are one part of that. If you consume news on a phone or computer and get any kind of article recommendation, in most cases, that is AI and machine learning. The end user is less aware of the use of AI in journalism in the production of news, like discovering information in very large datasets, which we’ve seen with the Panama Papers, which helps investigative reporters find stories in these big reams of data. Or something fairly common, like recording me and then having AI transcribe it.

Other specific uses?

The Daily Maverick in South Africa feeds original long-form content into AI systems that spits out summaries in bullet point form. In the days before AI, you would have to have a journalist write that summary and write those bullet points. Another is you can have articles read to you by an AI-generated voice. Instead of reading on your phone, or if you’re visually impaired, having a synthetic voice read to you becomes possible with the help of technology, and also possibly at scale.

What sort of road map for the adoption of AI in newsrooms do you see? Do you see expanded use in crunching big data sets? Grinding out formula stories like corporate earnings reports? AI illustrations? AI copy desks?

It will be an ongoing appropriation, but at different speeds, owing to the individual needs, capabilities, cultural mindsets and resources of different news organizations and newsrooms. So, an organization with a strong footprint in data journalism will likely use AI to drive more or deeper coverage on this front, whereas a newsroom that is focused mainly on churning out superficial fluff pieces will likely use it to that end.

Uses that will cut across are those that all newsrooms share in some ways. AI transcriptions are already standard, and everyone needs to copy edit or reformat content for different products and channels, or illustrate and visualize content — so these uses will increase. The same for content recommendation or dynamic paywalls. This was already on the rise, and I would be very surprised if this did not increase in the future. What is going to be really interesting — and most difficult to predict — are the more creative ways newsrooms will find to serve their audiences with the help of AI, not just in terms of good journalism that people will actually want to consume (and pay for), but also in formats that especially younger or currently underserved audiences will find appealing.

What can human journalists do that AI can’t?

Things like gaining someone’s trust, building up a connection to a source, maybe over months, maybe over years in some cases, which might not even lead anywhere in the beginning and then at one point you call them up and they say, I have a piece of information for you. That’s not something any AI system can do at the moment because it relies on human interaction and building rapport over a longer period of time. That’s not something you can do from typing a prompt into ChatGPT. You have to have boots on the ground, with their eyes and ears and going around and seeing what’s happening.

How will AI improve journalism?

That AI will improve journalism is not a foregone conclusion. If managers and editors decide to use it to help reporters do their work in a better way, that would be a quality improvement. But the decision has to be to made to use the technology for that end. It’s not something that happens automatically.

The opposite is also possible if you’re a news organization mainly interested in reaching lots of people, but not necessarily interested in quality journalism, as was the case in the recent CNET’s example [in which the site published shoddy AI-written pieces]. It basically comes down to what news organizations decide what to do with it.

Publishers might use it to boost quantity, not quality?

Any increase in efficiency and resources will generate an increase in resource consumption. AI can allow journalists to spend more time on the really valuable tasks. You can automate transcription with AI, make summaries with AI. But instead of giving you time to do more in-depth stuff, your editor might have you write 10 stories a day instead of five because technology speeds you up. It’s not necessarily all driven by technology, even though technology enables these different scenarios.

How should journalists relate to the current AIs? As a knowledgeable colleague? A sometimes reliable source? Or a lousy intern who fakes most assignments given to him?

The answer to this question depends on the kind of AI system we are talking about as there is no one single AI at work in news organizations. Instead, AI is best understood as an assemblage of different techniques, systems and approaches used in different places and for different tasks. I also try not to anthropomorphize them: They are computer systems. Admittedly, very good ones, but they are not human.

But if we whittle this down for the sake of argument to journalists and how they make use of chatbots such as Bard, Claude or ChatGPT, caution is advised. The underlying large language models are nondeterministic by nature — so you can get different outputs even with the same prompt and they are prone to errors. But depending on the task, this is more or less of a problem. I would not blindly trust them if I were searching for information, but they are rather good at tasks such as copy-editing or summarizing. In any case, I’d always double-check.

One pipe dream of the early internet era was a “Daily Me” news site tailored to individual tastes. That never came. Will AI build it, or is having a news product that other people have more desirable than having a customized one?

Ha! Well, in some ways, there is a bit of the “Daily Me” already, right? Recommendation systems driving things like Apple News or Google News use machine learning, in other words AI, to tailor content to individual interests — and increasingly, publishers around the world are doing the same in their apps or on their websites. So we are going down that route already.

In terms of how this is received, the picture is somewhat ambiguous. There are academic studies indicating that news recommenders are viewed as fair and useful as human editors while others show that people are generally skeptical of any kind of recommendation and tailoring — and that they fear missing out on things other people get to see. What we do know is that those with higher trust in news and institutions are more likely to be happy with automated recommendations tailored to their interests, too. Meanwhile, news organizations automatically tailoring and recommending news can sometimes clash with editors’ desire to set agendas through the stories they place. It’s a mixed picture without a clear answer.

One of your findings is that AI will reinforce existing inequalities among news outlets, with well-resourced ones outracing the less.

If you are a larger news organization, you have the time to invest in research and development, attract and retain talent, and build a customized AI. If you’re a small organization, you’re more a technology taker than a technology maker. That’s one way we see winners and losers.

The big news organizations, like the New York Times and Axel Springer [owner of POLITICO], can engage in direct negotiations with Microsoft and Google. This is not the case with the Oxford Mail or the Offenbach Post, which was my local newspaper in Germany. We’ve seen this power imbalance emerging in recent weeks with the squabbles over questions of copyright and the use of news to do data training. If you are larger, you have an advantage because you can afford to go to court [editor’s note: like the New York Times].

Is it likely that Big Tech will be able to use its power to cement control over news information?

In many ways, it’s already done that, if you look at the ways news is distributed by Google and Meta. There is already a sort of dependency. AI is already used to sort information to curate information on the platforms of those very companies and will increasingly be rolled out more deeply. If you become a technology-taker rather than a technology-maker, you are dependent on cloud computing infrastructure from places like Microsoft. They hold all the cards if they decide to raise prices or change the conditions of licensing and accessing deals. You are at the short end of the stick in many ways.

For many users, AI is a black box whose workings they don’t understand. What problems does that present for newsrooms that become AI-dependent?

If you don’t know where the information comes from, that can create problems. One could expose you as a journalist or an organization to copyright infringement or plagiarism. If you don’t quite know how these systems work, if you don’t know when they work, where they failed, what exactly they do. That can create problems in the journalistic process, of course, and in the way we consume information.

******

I rely on un-artificial intelligence less and less every day. Send IQ points to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter and Threads accounts welcome their robot masters. My dead RSS feed is a Luddite.

The House GOP’s defense against hardliners is about to get weaker

Jordain Carney and Olivia Beavers — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

House Republicans are facing a growing exodus of experienced and talented members that adds up to an alarming political maturity drain.

A growing number of their well-respected members are fleeing Congress as the conference pulls further to the right, and the departures are starting to spark worries about a further erosion of GOP lawmakers' appetite for the basic tasks of governing.

After a brutal year of their party's shaky stewardship of the House, 21 House GOP lawmakers have already announced their plans to retire at year's end — including five committee chairs. Many of the departing members share a common trait: They’re part of a loose coalition of governing-minded Republicans who are still willing to generally back leadership, support bipartisan deals and even defy former President Donald Trump at times.

And while some Republicans have cited personal or health reasons for leaving office, others in the group are blunt as they lament their party’s inflated expectations for what’s achievable when the GOP controls just one half of one branch of the government.

“People are frustrated. I think that’s pretty obvious,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), one of the exiting 21 who’s seen by colleagues as a voice of reason. Armstrong, noted he's only leaving to run for governor of his state, but pointed to a line in Rep. Mark Green’s (R-Tenn.) recent retirement announcement that blasted Congress as “broken beyond most means of repair.”

It's not uncommon for either party to lament a loss of institutional knowledge on Capitol Hill during election cycles where older members hang it up. But the current wave of House Republican exits isn't just a generational turnover. Armstrong is only 47, retiring Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) is 48 and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) recently stunned his colleagues by bowing out of Congress at 39.

Gallagher's exit came as a particular shock given his status as an up-and-comer and his chairmanship of the conference’s select committee on China. He announced the decision two days after getting intraparty blowback for voting against impeaching Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, crippling the House GOP’s first attempted vote to recommend firing President Joe Biden’s border chief.

Like many of this cycle’s retirees, Gallagher is a conservative occupying a safely red seat. Fellow mainstream Republicans fear that departures such as his point to more chaos ahead.

“It’s tilted further right. ... And not necessarily in a conservative way, but more in an obstructionist way. You know, because you claim that you’re fighting for people, but what have you really accomplished?” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) said of the shift since he joined the House more than a decade ago.

Joyce added that the conference used to be more closely aligned with institutionalists, but is now grappling with a growing number of free agents willing to take a political blow torch to their own party.

”Now,” he said, “it’s 'you either do it this way or I’m going to threaten … to put you on social media as being against the movement.’"

This Congress' rush for the exits could portend an even bigger headache for GOP leadership come 2025. If they hold onto the majority, they will likely have to wrangle an even more emboldened bloc of hardliners who made their name by fighting their own party — a group that would only gain further influence if Trump returns to the White House.

And if Republicans lose the House this fall, that same bigger share of hardliners is likely to push for remodeling conference leadership.

Almost none of the 21 retirements are happening in swing districts that risk falling to Democrats. Instead, the departing members have had to personally reckon with the type of Republican who might replace them if they left, making things worse for a conference that already has a problem with political self-sabotage.

In fact, some House Republicans privately admit to each other that they chose reelection this year to prevent hardliners from claiming their seats, according to two incumbents who entertained retirement and spoke about their calculus on condition of anonymity.

For many other GOP lawmakers, though, leaving office looked far more tempting after the October ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the frenetic three-week vacuum as the House tried to replace him. Those days were marked by persistent, bitter questions among many Republicans about whether continuing to serve was worth it.

Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, a vulnerable purple-district Republican, called Gallagher’s retirement a “tough loss.” Bacon connected the backlash Gallagher faced over voting against the Mayorkas impeachment to the criticism he got during the battle to replace McCarthy.

“Everybody’s calling you. All the bullying and name calling,” Bacon said of the experience, adding: “We’re losing some good people.”

Those frustrations have only escalated within the conference since Johnson’s ascension, as Republicans watch a growing number of their colleagues tank their ability to get even run-of-the-mill legislation through. That dysfunction, they worry, sends a bad message to voters, who will decide in November whether to relegate them to the minority.

“It’s not governing at all,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.). “This is the problem we find ourselves in: We get in our own way.”

Not every senior Republican who's sticking around shares the concern about retirements hurting their ability to make policy. Several pointed to members who got elected as firebrands only to turn into team players, like the retiring McHenry or former Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.).

The 2022 cycle raised its own internal alarms as another group of senior Republicans departed, including former Reps. John Katko (N.Y.), Fred Upton (Mich.) and Kevin Brady (Texas).

But the reality for many long-serving, establishment House Republicans with conservative records is that, next to the current crop of obstructionists inside and outside the Freedom Caucus, their ideological identity can be mistaken for centrism. And that comparative confusion, they say, undercuts their ability to pass any bills at all.

“There’s a big group of governing conservatives who still exist,” Armstrong said. “It’s just a matter of how you control the floor."

Outside of retirements that expose them to surprise losses in red seats, Republicans’ path to potentially losing the majority runs through purple and blue districts occupied by other moderates or leadership allies. Then there are a handful of proxy battles that will help define the House GOP's future; Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is taking charge of several such races by boosting Trump-aligned populist allies who are trying to knock off incumbents like Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.).

McCarthy is also expected to get involved in races this fall where he believes he can be effective, potentially even working against Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) as well as the other seven Republicans who joined Democrats to oust him as speaker.

“If they want to blame me for it, if they want to blame Bob Good for the fact that we are changing Congress because we don’t think we can win with the team we have — well, I think that is blame that we’re willing to take,” Gaetz said on his podcast Thursday.

Trump himself is also poised to weigh in, and not always to protect hardliners. In the race to replace McCarthy, the former president backed the California Republican's preferred successor against a more populist rival.

When asked by reporters earlier this month about the House GOP's high number of experienced retirees this year, McCarthy likened the exits to the water that's displaced by removing your hand from "a bucket of water."

"You pull it out, [and] there's a hole," McCarthy said. "But it'll get filled. You want to make sure it gets filled by the right people.”

Biden’s Never Been Driven By Human Rights. This Time, It Might Cost Him.

Nahal Toosi — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

The Israel-Hamas war has proven much about President Joe Biden.

He cares deeply about Israel’s survival. He’s willing to devote major resources to the Middle East, despite a desire to focus more on China. And he’s really, really had it with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here’s another reality the bloodshed in Israel and Gaza has exposed: Biden is not — fundamentally — a human rights president.

This might sound harsh to Biden stans. The president, after all, is an empathetic figure. He has experienced personal tragedies, and he certainly talks the talk about helping the oppressed. Besides, doesn’t every president compromise on human rights? Especially in morally tangled cases that affect U.S. national security?

Since taking the Oval Office, Biden has often put his view of U.S. national security and the political scene ahead of rights’ activists demands, especially if he calculates he can weather the blowback. (See: his eventual willingness to engage with Mohammed bin Salman despite the Saudi strongman’s poor rights record; his seesawing on whether to reduce military aid to Egypt; and his early decision on where to set the U.S. refugee admissions cap, a topic on which Biden miscalculated.)

Still, the past 4 1/2 months have been shattering for many Biden supporters. After all, he had pledged to make human rightsa central part of his foreign policy and return the U.S. to the stronger global moral standing it had prior to Donald Trump’s presidency.

In talks with nearly a dozen activists in recent days, I’ve been struck by the sense of betrayal some — especially in Arab American and Muslim American communities — feel over Biden’s unwillingness to change U.S. policy to pressure Israel to stop its military operation in Gaza. As the humanitarian crisis there deepens, some accuse Biden of not valuing Palestinian lives. Many plan to express their anger at the ballot box, including by not voting for Biden during Tuesday's primary in Michigan, a swing state with a large Arab American population.

“Maybe he was feeding us lies,” said Yasmine Taeb, an Iranian American and prominent progressive who has frequently engaged the Biden team on rights-related issues. “It’s very painful.”

But nobody should be surprised.

For decades, Biden has been willing to de-prioritize human rights, even if it means he looks uncaring. He’s often explained that he’s serving the U.S. national interest, but he also appears keenly aware of the politics involved: voters rarely reject a candidate over a human rights issue.

Politics do change, however, as can a politician’s base, and both those things may be happening now.

Biden has had skepticism of America’s duties to the world from early in his political career.

As a young senator in 1975, he insisted the U.S. leave Vietnam, despite concerns about abandoning America’s allies. “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation,” Biden reportedly said that year about sending aid to Cambodia. “There’s a point where you are incapable of meeting moral obligations that exist worldwide.”

Biden supported going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But as those wars dragged on, Biden’s skepticism about U.S. obligations returned.

During the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, then-Vice President Biden opposed U.S. military intervention in Libya, despite dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s threats of mass slaughter. He also did not want President Barack Obama to side with protesters against Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak,whom Biden considered a valuable U.S. ally. These past Biden positions still reverberate among Arab American and Muslim American activists now watching Gaza.

When he withdrew U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021, Biden knew he’d crush the educational dreams of Afghan women. He nonetheless dismissed the idea that America owed them anything.

Biden aides point to his promotion of democracy, including hosting summits on the issue, in touting his human rights bona fides. They also note that he has often spoken out against genocide, such as in the case of Sudan’s Darfur region, or what befell the Armenians more than a century ago. He also supported military intervention in the 1990s to end massacres in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Some observers believe that could be because he saw the success of the U.S. military effort in the first Gulf War — which he had opposed.)

His defenders argue, not unfairly, that ending the Afghanistan war has saved many lives — a human rights win.

Biden has “made human rights a centerpiece of our foreign policy,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said, highlighting how, among other moves, he has used “executive orders to fight corruption and protect against misuse of commercial spyware.”

The problem with many of these arguments is that Biden has been inconsistent and his motivations aren’t necessarily about human rights.

Biden has been friendly to plenty of non-democracies as well as oppressive democracies. One big reason: China, whose rise has led Biden to make some contradictory choices on human rights.

As far back as the 1990s, he argued against linking human rights to China’s trade status. Because Biden sees India as a bulwark against China, he’s muted criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s government is accused of oppressing Muslims and an attempted assassination on U.S. soil. Bidenthrew Modi a state dinner.

Biden has infused human rights into his messaging about the importance of supporting Ukraine against Russia. But he also sees deterring Russian aggression as a vital U.S. interest regardless of human rights.

Biden was quick to use the genocide label for China’s oppression of the Uyghurs, capitalizing on anti-Beijing sentiment during his 2020 campaign. In contrast, as I’ve chronicled, his administration took an unusually long time to use the same label for Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya.

Few conflicts are as morally tortuous as the one that has pit Palestinians against Israelis for decades. For every angry statement about the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza, there’s the counterpoint that Hamas militants kicked off this war by killing 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7 and taking more than 200 hostage.

Biden has never made a secret of his love for Israelis and the state they’ve built, and he focused almost exclusively on Israelis’ trauma in the early days of the war. He’s never had the same warm relationship with Palestinians.

The domestic politics involving Israel, which long had solid bipartisan support, as well as Biden’s personal affinity for the country, have been the biggest factors in his recent decision-making, a Biden administration official familiar with the Middle East told me.

But the official, granted anonymity because they lacked permission to talk publicly, insisted Biden doesn’t value Israeli lives over Arab ones. “I believe in the man enough to just kind of dismiss that, at the core, he cares less about any one life than another,” the official said.

Israel, though, has been shedding support among Democrats as it pursues its military campaign in Gaza, and Biden faces an election where Arab American and Muslim American votes could make a difference, not to mention many younger and progressive voters who feel sympathy for Palestinians.

He’s noticed the political danger.

Biden aides have traveled to Michiganto mend fences with Arab American and Muslim American leaders. But the activists are not ready to forgive and forget, especially since they aren’t seeing policy changes, such as a stop to U.S. military aid to Israel.

It’s not that they want a second Trump era. But when they see Biden aides appear on their doorstep, some doubt it has much to do with the president’s concern for Palestinians.

“They need the Arab American vote to win in Michigan, and they’re not going to get it,” one activist in the state told me, having been granted anonymity to be candid.

For many in this crowd, their choices at the ballot box this year will come down to weighing human rights against political calculations.

Tammy Murphy does a 180 on dark money now that she's running for Senate

Matt Friedman — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:41:30 -0500

Tammy Murphy has been talking like a campaign finance reformer, calling the amount of money in politics “disgusting.”

But as New Jersey’s first lady, Murphy spent a year and a half leading a dark-money group without disclosing donors. Now she has a super PAC supporting her bid to replace Bob Menendez in the U.S. Senate.

Like many other Democrats, Murphy is taking a familiar position — working within a system that she says she wants to dismantle.

“The amount of money in politics is really disgusting. I will be the first to say that. We need to overturn Citizens United. I can’t say it any more clearly than that,” Murphy said during a debate with her main Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Andy Kim, last week.

It’s a common progressive talking point in Democratic primaries to oppose the landmark Supreme Court ruling that expanded dark money and led to unlimited spending on political advertising. Murphy’s main opponent for the Democratic nomination, Kim, has also called for overturning the decision and is backed by the group “End Citizens United.”

But Murphy’s public position overlooks the participation of her and her allies in the campaign finance system she now opposes, drawing accusations of hypocrisy.

The contest between Murphy and Kim is one of the most closely watched Senate primaries this year. Both candidates have shown their fundraising strengths, but Kim is running as a reformer who eschews large corporate dollars. With Murphy now against Citizen’s United, she joins other Democrats, such as California Senate candidate Rep. Adam Schiff, publicly saying it should end.

From February 2022 until late October 2023, Murphy chaired a PAC and a nonprofit that have spent millions of dollars to promote the agenda of her husband, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. The bulk of that money was spent through the nonprofit 501(C)(4), Stronger Fairer Forward, which never publicly disclosed its donors.

Meanwhile, Murphy claims Kim is being dishonest about his campaign finance purity by exploiting a loophole in a pledge he frequently cites to refuse corporate PAC contributions.

Both candidates have taken in millions of dollars in campaign contributions for their Senate races so far, though Kim has far more small donors than Murphy.

Murphy during the debate said that it wouldn’t make sense to unilaterally disarm on campaign finance until the system is changed. A complete overhaul of the Citizens United ruling would require a constitutional amendment or new Supreme Court ruling — both two unlikely scenarios.

“The challenge is that if we don’t do this, then the other side is going to have access to all of the Supreme Court, all of our justices, and all of our officials. We can’t have that. We are fighting within the system we have,” she said, adding “I haven’t personally taken a dime of a super PAC and I’m not planning to do so.”

But Tammy Murphy could not legally accept a super PAC contribution if she wanted to, as they’re barred from giving directly to candidates. And a close ally and former staffer in Gov. Murphy’s administration is running a super PAC to benefit Tammy Murphy that has so far raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and is conducting opposition research, presumably to hurt Kim.

501(C)(4) organizations are supposed to spend half of their expenses on “social welfare” causes but are notoriously opaque and have taken on the widely-used moniker of “dark money groups” because they are not required to publicly disclose donors. Some information is available about the organizations, including how much money they took in, on forms filed with the IRS, but it typically takes over a year for it to become available to the public, and it still only gives a vague look at how the organization operates.

However, there’s nothing in the law preventing 501(C)(4) organizations like Stronger Fairer Forward from publicly disclosing their donors. And the organization under Murphy repeatedly refused POLITICO’s requests to do so.

Working backwards from federal labor filings, The Record was able to trace the source about $2 million of the $3 million raised by Stronger Fairer Forward’s nonprofit as of 2022, the bulk of which came from the New Jersey Education Association — a key ally of the Murphys. But the source of the remaining money, and any potential money raised since 2022, remains shrouded in secrecy.

On Nov. 15, the same day that Murphy announced her candidacy, Garden State Integrity — a super PAC based in Red Bank, just across the Navesink River from the Murphys’ home, and headed by former Murphy administration Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Kelley — formally launched.

Kelley was until recently business partners with Murphy’s chief campaign strategist, Dan Bryan. As of the end of January Garden State Integrity had raised $331,000 from 10 donors and spent tens of thousands of dollars on opposition research, including $20,000 to Steve Ayscue, the chief political operative of South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross, whose operation is backing Murphy’s candidacy.

Democratic Senate candidate Patricia Campos-Medina, a former labor leader who didn’t qualify for the debate, said Murphy’s position on money in politics after her involvement in a dark money group is “just hypocrisy,” and said Kim hadn’t done enough in six years in Congress to reform the system (he did, along with at one point all other House Democrats, co-sponsor the “For the People Act,” which would among many other things increase campaign finance disclosure requirements).

“That they’re going to be the ones to reform a system that’s getting them into power? To me that’s just hypocrisy,” Campos-Medina said.

In a statement, Murphy’s campaign accused Kim of misleading voters by talking up his refusal to take corporate PAC contributions while still accepting them from trade associations, which are not technically corporate PACs but are often funded by corporations.

“There is only one candidate in this race being dishonest about campaign finance: Andy Kim just said he ‘won’t be funded by corporations,’ while he has taken over $300,000 from trade groups like American Hospital Association that are funded by — you guessed it — massive corporations,” the statement read. “Tammy won’t be bought or paid for by anyone, and she will be able to actually get things done in the Senate as a result.”

Since Kim’s first House campaign in 2018, he’s accepted $21,500 from the American Hospital Association, whose donors include for-profit hospital operators, $21,000 from the National Association of Realtors and $20,000 from the American Crystal Sugar Company PAC, according to Open Secrets.

End Citizens United, which is enthusiastically backing Kim, included the American Hospital Association in a 2019 list of 43 trades groups that could be problematic for Democrats who took the group’s pledge.

Jonas Edwards-Jenks, End Citizens United’s communications director, said that the list “is not something we’re currently pushing” and that the important thing is that Kim took the group’s pledge.

“There’s always ways for candidates and campaigns to go above and beyond, whether it’s rejecting money from lobbyists, trade associations and others. But the clearest steps candidate can take to send a message is the corporate PAC pledge,” Edwards-Jenks said. “We think those who take that step should be applauded for that and not criticized.”

Edwards-Jenks didn’t buy Murphy’s explanation of working within the current campaign finance system to eventually change it. “She’s not just worked within the system. She’s thrived in this dark money ecosystem,” he said.

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, said that participating in a dark money group while calling to overturn Citizens United reflects the campaign finance reality.

“On its face, there really isn't anything inconsistent about saying ‘I'm playing by the rules that are currently there, but I'd like to change them,’” he said. “But I think it is one of those things where you have to wait and see if they actually stick with that. There are people who once they're elected to public office, we're all familiar with politicians who go back on their campaign promises.”

Daniel Han contributed to this report.

The Top Muslim State Lawmaker in Michigan Wants You to Turn on Joe Biden

Sophie Gardner — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:22:30 -0500

In late October, the Democratic floor leader of the Michigan House of Representatives, Abraham Aiyash, stood in front of thousands gathered in downtown Detroit to denounce a man who is vying to win another four years in the oval office.

He spoke with the same urgency he had in 2020, when he addressed another crowd in Detroit to condemn then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to halt the vote count in the critical swing state. But now, he had a different target in mind.

“We’re talking about Joe Biden,” Aiyash bellowed from a raised platform into a sea of red, white, green and black flags rippling in the wind — the colors of the Palestinian flag. “He stood with no spine and did not demand peace for the Palestinians, did not demand peace for the Israelis — but instead, continues to fund a genocide.”

At just 28 years old, Aiyash rocketed into political prominence last year, becoming the first Arab American House majority leader in history. Now 30, he's emerged as one of Biden’s fiercest Democratic critics over the administration’s support for Israel. He’s shot down bipartisan legislation regarding Israel, ruffled feathers on both sides of the aisle and drawn national headlines for taking part in high-profile protests of the war. Now, he is planning to use Tuesday’s presidential primary as a warning: If Biden continues to financially support Israel’s offensive in Gaza and fails to call for a permanent cease-fire, Michigan’s Arab American voters could bring their animosity to the polls — or stay home. Aiyash has signed onto a “Listen to Michigan” campaign, pledging to vote “uncommitted” on Tuesday and urging other Democrats to do the same. As for the general election, if Biden doesn’t budge, Aiyash said he’s genuinely conflicted about how to vote. He’s considering leaving the top of his ticket blank.

While Biden continues to push for more military aid and weapons for Israel, his rhetoric on Gaza has begun to shift: This month, he sought to restrain Israel from expanding the war into Southern Gaza and called its military response, which has resulted in roughly 30,000 Palestinian deaths, “over the top.” But for Aiyash, it’s not nearly far enough.

“I’ve encouraged folks to remain uncommitted in the presidential primary to remind every candidate that they have to earn the votes of their constituency,” Aiyash said. “When I run for office, I don't tell people vote for me because the other guy is worse.”

Michigan, a state with one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, has become a nexus of outrage over Biden’s handling of the war. It’s a stark contrast to 2020, when Biden secured a roughly 3-to-1 advantage in Dearborn and 5-1 advantage in Hamtramck — two of the state’s most heavily Arab American towns. The demographic, which tends to vote Democratic, has real political power in the state. There are roughly 200,000 registered voters who are Muslim in Michigan, a state Biden won by just 154,000 votes. Aiyash has played a big part in organizing that anger, and Tuesday will be a test of both his influence and the size of the problem looming for the Biden campaign.

Aiyash “is a respected leader in the community. He’s influential, and people will listen,” said Nasser Beydoun, a Dearborn businessperson and Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) “The numbers will show come Feb. 27.”

Aiyash’s uncompromising opposition to Biden and to Israel has drawn criticism from both the right and the left.

He blocked a resolution that had garnered support from a handful of Democrats to condemn the Hamas attack because it made no mention of the Palestinians. “It was just a political stunt,” he said of the resolution. “You cannot talk about Oct. 7 without talking about the conditions the people of Gaza live in.”

The incident sparked conservative outrage, angered at least one Democratic state representative and ended up on Fox News. “The Michigan State House was one of very few legislative bodies across the entire country that refused to condemn the horrific acts of violence committed by Hamas,” said state Republican Rep. Bill Schuette, who sponsored the resolution. “I sensed a lot of anger and frustration on both sides of the aisle.”

The turn away from Biden in Michigan has also spurred exasperation and anxiety from some on the left, who already have their hands full trying to mitigate concerns about the president’s age.

“So they want Donald Trump?” a frustrated Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) asked in December. “This is a man who’s called them vermin and has said that he would ban them.”

On Sunday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer addressed the issue, saying “It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” on CNN’s State of the Union.

But Aiyash rejected the idea that Arab Americans will be at fault for handing Trump the state, even if they don’t vote for Biden. “I think it is very insulting when folks come to Arab and Muslim communities and say, ‘if you don’t support Biden, you are effectively supporting Trump,’” he said. “It’s disrespectful to communities that were impacted.”

He believes that the Biden campaign isn’t as worried as they should be because, eventually, they assume that Arab Americans will fall in line against Trump — who has promised to reinstate and expand his Muslim travel ban in a second term.

“We cannot default every time to a state of fear as a way to motivate people,” he said.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Biden: If he loses Michigan, he could lose the White House, and Trump is already ahead in both national and state polls. That’s the message Aiyash wants the president to receive when primary results roll in Tuesday night: Muslims and Arab Americans in Michigan have the power to upend his reelection if he doesn’t call for a cease-fire.

“You get a sense that [the administration] just can’t believe that people wouldn’t support President Biden over a Trump candidacy,” Aiyash said. “But to see our country be complicit in this genocide — that is far worse than Donald Trump.”

In 2016, when Aiyash was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he made a bet with a friend: If Trump won the election, he would drink a Heineken and eat prosciutto.

Eating pork and drinking alcohol would be “like a cardinal sin,” Aiyash said. But he was deeply convinced that Trump’s rhetoric, especially around the Muslim ban, would make him terminally unelectable.

That Nov. 8, Trump was elected, and Aiyash backed out of his bet.

A few months later, his uncle, whom Aiyash’s family had spent years trying to move to the U.S., was killed in an airstrike in Yemen. Aiyash blamed it on the “broken immigration system.”

Just days after that, Trump signed the Muslim ban.

“For him to die days before Trump banned people like my parents, who were immigrants from Yemen, from coming into the United States — I felt a need to get back into the arena,” Aiyash said.

The anger rekindled a fire in him. When he was a teenager, he knocked on over 13,000 doors for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign but had since fallen out of the political sphere; he planned to become a nurse after graduation.

Then Trump’s ascension pulled him back into politics, and he started giving speeches on campus condemning Trump’s policies. In 2018, he ran in an 11-way Democratic primary for a state Senate seat but came in second. Two years later, he won a seat in the state House of Representatives. He quickly climbed the ranks and became the first Arab American to be elected majority leader.

In the 2020 primary, he first supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) But when Biden became the nominee, he stumped for him, “busting his ass” to rally support.

“I thought Biden was going to be a president that would listen to our community’s concerns, that would give us a seat at the table,” Aiyash said.

Initially, Aiyash was impressed with Biden’s agenda — especially with the environmental policy that he was able to push through. But in his eyes, Biden’s actions after Oct. 7 dissolved any good will he had vested in the administration.

After he blocked the anti-Hamas resolution last fall, Aiyash again drew national headlines in late November, when he joined a week-long hunger strike — only drinking water and black coffee — with other state lawmakers and activists to pressure Biden into calling for a cease-fire. He flew to Washington for two days to camp out outside the White House, where he and the other protesters rolled out a white scroll of paper and painted red droplets on it — symbolizing the Palestinians killed in the war.

Now, Aiyash is wrangling with his deep-seated hatred for Trump and his disgust with Biden’s unwavering support of Israel as a shocking number of Palestinians lose their lives.

On Jan. 10, the day that the Michigan legislature returned from the holidays, Aiyash sat in his office in Lansing. A photo of Abraham Lincoln hung high on the wall. His desk was chaotic — there was a plastic spoon, a lint roller, the Keffiyeh-print mask he’d worn on the House floor earlier and a paper sign that read, “HUNGER STRIKE TO SAY: PERMANENT CEASEFIRE NOW.” “I’ve been meaning to get that framed,” he said.

Aiyash fretted out loud to POLITICO Magazine about his conflicted emotions. “I’m not trying to b

Justices hint Florida and Texas social media laws may be unconstitutional

Josh Gerstein and Rebecca Kern — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 16:18:33 -0500

The Supreme Court grappled with competing views of free speech on social media as it heard nearly four hours of arguments Monday on a pair of state laws that regulate how large tech companies control what content can appear on their sites.

Most justices seemed to think that, in some contexts, the Florida and Texas laws likely violate the First Amendment rights of the social media firms. But the justices also expressed concern that blocking the laws in their entirety might go too far.

The laws, which have not yet taken effect, would force the companies to carry all users’ viewpoints and prevent them from deplatforming political candidates.

Republican legislators in the two states passed the laws to try to battle what they contend are efforts to squelch conservative voices on platforms like Facebook, YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. The laws were inspired in part by platforms banning Donald Trump for violating their rules against inciting violence in his posts related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Monday’s cases — Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton — stem from challenges by key tech lobbying groups, NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Information Association, which say the laws violate their First Amendment rights to make editorial choices about what content to allow or ban.

If the laws are allowed to take effect, the trade groups say, it will be virtually impossible for platforms to police hate speech, pro-terrorism advocacy or various types of content that could harm children.

Potentially pivotal justices in the cases — including conservative Amy Coney Barrett and, unexpectedly, liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson — said that the correct course for the court was murky because large social media platforms play many different roles. While they primarily curate speech crafted by users and enjoy broad First Amendment protection for doing so, the sites also provide services, like private messaging, that don’t involve much, if any, editorial supervision by the sites. The services, those justices suggested, are similar to telephone or internet providers and can be subject to more government regulation.

The other justices seemed to sort themselves into camps aligned with the platforms or the states’ efforts to control them.

The court’s most conservative members — Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch — appeared deeply skeptical of the platforms’ conduct, painting the social media sites as trying to rebrand as content moderation what amounted to efforts to silence or smother views they disagree with.

“Is it anything more than a euphemism for censorship?” Alito asked. “Some may want to resist the Orwellian temptation to recategorize offensive conduct in seemingly bland terms.”

However, other justices of different ideological stripes — namely Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — pushed back against the idea that a social media platform’s decision to block users or ban certain content is akin to traditional notions of censorship. The First Amendment is designed to guard against censorship by the government, not by private actors, they suggested.

“The First Amendment doesn’t apply to them,” Roberts said flatly. “The First Amendment restricts what the government can do.”

“You said the design of the First Amendment is to prevent ‘suppression of speech,’” Kavanaugh said to Florida Solicitor General Henry Whitaker. “You left out what I understand to be three key words in the First Amendment … by the government.”

Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson warned that interpreting the First Amendment broadly enough to protect social media platforms’ policies related to arranging and organizing content had the potential to upend all sorts of laws, including consumer protection and anti-discrimination laws.

“At some point the First Amendment has to end or everything is covered by the First Amendment,” Nielson said.

The lawyer who represented the trade groups, Paul Clement, warned that the big social media platforms would face stark choices if the laws went into effect and they were required to treat all viewpoints neutrally, as the government typically is.

“That means that if you have materials that are involved in suicide prevention, you also have to have materials that advocate suicide promotion. Or if you have those on your site that are pro-Semitic, then you have to let materials onto your site that are anti-semitic,” Clement said.

One point of contention that drew attention from the justices was whether the social media platforms should be considered common carriers — like telephone companies — which typically can’t discriminate against customers or messages based on the content they host.

Gorsuch claimed that, because the tech platforms have liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, they should be considered common carriers.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who argued for the Biden administration in support of the tech trade groups, disputed that interpretation of Section 230, a key federal law that insulates online platforms from many lawsuits based on content posted by their users. Section 230, Prelogar said, shows that Congress wanted the platforms to have legal protections for their editorial role, not to be thought of as passive common carriers.

Barrett and Thomas also appeared confused as to how Section 230 impacts the two state laws being challenged — which specifically say they do not conflict with existing Section 230 protections.

Barrett said that Section 230 could pose challenges for future rulings. “If what we say about this is that this is speech that’s entitled to First Amendment protection, I do think then that has Section 230 implications for another case,” she said. “So, it’s always tricky to write an opinion when you know there might be landmines that would affect things later.”

Both lawsuits challenged the underlying laws on their face before they were to take effect. To get an injunction under those circumstances, challengers usually need to show that the legislation lacks any “plainly legitimate sweep.”

But Jackson repeatedly expressed concern that some provisions in the laws might be constitutional, yet could be put on ice if the Supreme Court blocks the statutes completely.

“The law on its face is really broad,” Jackson said of the Florida measure. “To the extent the entire law goes, other lawful applications would go, too.”

Similarly, Barrett expressed trepidation with a wholesale takedown of potentially constitutional provisions. “We have to look at the statute as a whole,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of briefing on this. And this is a sprawling statute and it makes me a little bit nervous.”

Multiple justices suggested it might be best to send the cases back to the lower courts to have them parse through the various provisions.

“Suppose we think it’s pretty obvious that this covers a lot of stuff that does not look like Facebook feed, suppose we can take notice of that, then what?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Prelogar.

Prelogar said the court should make clear that the major social companies have First Amendment protections over editorial decisions, but then send the cases back to the lower courts to get clarity on how the laws affect smaller platforms.

The two challenges came to the Supreme Court after two federal circuit courts reached opposite conclusions on the laws’ constitutionality: The 11th Circuit largely struck down Florida’s law, and the 5th Circuit sided with Texas.

‘I’m Not Trying to Cause a Scene. I Just Want to Get Off This Plane.’

Oriana Pawlyk — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

In 2018, Ed Pierson decided that he could no longer work as a senior manager for Boeing’s 737 MAX program.

At the company’s production facility in Renton, Washington, he had watched as employee morale plummeted and oversight and assembly procedures faltered. He told his superiors but retired soon after. But then fatal MAX 8 crashes occurred in 2018 and 2019. He decided to speak up publicly and was then called to testify before Congress on the problems he says he saw up close.

Five years later, after a door plug blew off of a 737 MAX 9 in the middle of an Alaska Airlines flight last month, Pierson is again trying to sound the alarm. Regulators ultimately approved the plane to return to the air nearly two years after the 2019 crash, but Pierson still doesn’t trust the MAX line — the modernized, more fuel-efficient version of Boeing’s predecessor planes.

“The Boeing Company is capable of building quality airplanes,” says Pierson, now the executive director for the nonprofit Foundation for Aviation Safety. “The problem is leadership, or lack thereof, and the pressure to get airplanes out the door is greater than doing the job right.”

In a statement in response to this interview, Boeing said it’s made substantial changes to its organization following the pair of earlier disasters, including investing in more engineers and manufacturers, establishing an official designee for employees to raise work-related concerns and increasing its aerospace and safety expertise on its board of directors. “Over the last several years, we’ve taken close care not to push the system too fast, and we have never hesitated to slow down, to halt production, or to stop deliveries to take the time we need to get things right,” Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal said.

Last week, in a further bid for a fresh start, Boeing replaced the head of its 737 Max program.

Pierson, meanwhile, still refuses to fly in a MAX.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Video clips below were conducted in a separate interview by Pawlyk and POLITICO senior video producer Jackie Padilla.

Are Boeing planes safe to fly today and would you put your family in one?

I'm not saying that all Boeing planes are unsafe. Part of the problem is that people don’t know how to differentiate between the MAX and other planes.

Last year, I was flying from Seattle to New York, and I purposely scheduled myself on a non-MAX airplane. I went to the gate. I walked in, sat down and looked straight ahead, and lo and behold, there was a 737-8/737-9 safety card. So I got up and I walked off. The flight attendant didn't want me to get off the plane. And I'm not trying to cause a scene. I just want to get off this plane, and I just don't think it's safe. I said I purposely scheduled myself not to fly [on a MAX].

Our recommendation from the foundation is that these planes get grounded — period. Get grounded and inspected and then, depending on what they find, get fixed.

Why do you prefer legacy Boeing aircraft over the MAX? What changed between these models from what you observed?

I have always had the greatest respect for the airplane products that The Boeing Company makes. My family was involved in it and my relatives. I had no reason ever to doubt it. And then I started working in the factory. I had been around airplanes my whole career. I flew airplanes in the Navy. You go into the production environment, and you're like, “Oh, my God, I had no idea it was this complex.” It's stunning how complex it is. At first, I didn't understand how all that came together. And it gave me a great respect for the people that were building the plane — it's incredibly impressive to see. And then everything started to change in 2017 and into 2018.

What changed that year?

We started having problems in our supply chainwith the engines. And then the next thing you know, we started having problems with all kinds of parts. We were having hundreds of people doing out of sequence work [where parts from previous stages still needed to be fixed]. And we had tests that were being performed that were not being passed properly; one shift would try to get it done and they couldn't get it done, so they'd leave notes for the next shift to come in.

This is not how planes should be built. It was so bad in 2018 — we didn't have engines on many of the planes and so they put these big concrete blocks on the engine pylons so the plane wouldn't tip. Kind of an important part of the plane, right? A major warning bell that something's not right. But they kept increasing production rate and so we kept getting further and further behind. So all of 2018 was just a chaotic disarray type of environment.

And by the way, where the hell is the FAA? FAA had no presence in the factory. And it really irritates you because right down the road, literally 20 minutes down the road, is the Northwest headquarters for the FAA. There's over 2,000 employees that work at that site and yet, in the busiest factory in the world 20 minutes down the road, there's four or five employees. That's not enough to monitor the restaurant operations at the site.

What made you decide to work with lawmakers and others to shine a light on these problems at Boeing?

I realized how the leadership was treating employees — very disrespectfully, very embarrassing. Standing up in front of teams and just calling them out, and it was horrendous. I thought, this is not a healthy environment to build airplanes. I can't support this as a senior manager. I just felt this was really wrong. So I made a decision to retire early. Just before I retired, I shared with my other colleagues all the kind of communication I had with a senior person at the company, the general manager, telling him that he needs to shut down. And then the [first] crash happened.

Ever since then, I've been trying to alert the authorities and trying to get them to look at manufacturing. FAA didn't want to talk to me. NTSB didn't want to talk to me. Finally I got a meeting with the NTSB. Then Congress asked me to testify. Ever since, I and a team of people have been monitoring all this.

I’ve become very close to [families of the victims of the Ethiopian and Indonesian airlines’ crashes] in the last couple years. And we've worked on Capitol Hill to try to lobby Congress to make changes. We've worked to try to point out issues with the FAA. And what they want is for this not to happen to anybody else, and number two, what they want is justice.

It's only been a few years since those fatal crashes — so what is still going wrong considering we've just seen another mishap with the Alaska Airlines flight?

What's going wrong is that nothing changed. They made very superficial changes that they made a big deal of. They made a giant deal of hiring a safety officer. Big whoop. They wanted to deflect attention away.

That's all Boeing does is talk. The leadership doesn't get down there and get involved with the people that are building the products. They don't value the engineers, they think the engineers are replaceable. You can't take a 20- or 30-year employee and just dump them off to the side and think that you're going to find somebody off the street that's going to be able to do what that person does. Then they don't have the support mechanisms and they're tired and they're fatigued and they're working like dogs — they can make mistakes.

Are you at all surprised that so little has been done to fix things only five years after you blew the whistle on the MAX issues?

I'm horrified and I'm not surprised. It's horrifying to think that the company did such a minimal effort. They spent 90 percent of their energy telling the media things [like] “renewed quality” and using language in their press releases and their financial statements like “a renewed safety focus.” And then meanwhile, I'm hearing from people, “No, it's actually just as bad or worse in the factory now than it was before.”

In some of our discussions, you mentioned that airlines also aren't completely blameless in this situation. What did you mean by that?

There's obviously a tremendous demand for more planes. What we're seeing is evidence that the airlines are aware that there's issues with these planes. Four airlines in the U.S. fly MAX planes: Alaska, American, United and Southwest. And it's not like all the MAX airplanes are built in a bundle and go out at the same time.You'll have an American plane, you'll have a Southwest plane, you'll have the United plane, you might have a China Southern, a Ryanair. They're all intermixed, so they all have defects.

[I’ve seen that some planes] have less than 100 hours on it and have [some sort of] failure. You can't blame maintenance because they haven't been there long enough to have any real serious maintenance. Last April, I wrote a letter to the Alaska Airlines CEO because we're looking at his data and his planes and I don't think they should be flying right now. Alaska had been submitting on average 95 [service] reports every month throughout 2023. Then in December, it dropped steeply. What happened?

[In response, Alaska Airlines — which did not address whether its CEO responded to Pierson — said it recently implemented changes to align its service data reporting “to reduce the number of discrepancies” that the airline reports to the main national database. “A lot of thoughtful planning went into aligning our reporting requirements with the regulations and industry while maintaining the integrity of Alaska Airlines’ reporting,” Alaska said in a statement.]

After The Seattle Times reported that errors at Boeing’s plant in Renton, where you used to work, ultimately led to the Alaska Airlines door blowout, you mentioned it’s likely more severe revelations are coming. What leads you to believe that?

This is not just a problem with somebody maybe making a mistake with some bolts. It's not just that. It's the fact that you have processes that are not being followed. Breakdowns in manufacturing. Employees being pushed. [Fewer] quality control inspections.

There were whistleblowers [during the 2018-2019 episode] that were reporting that they were removing quality control inspections. And the union has been fighting like hellto claw back these inspections. They've been successful in reinstating thousands of these inspections, but not all of them. And so you have planes that have left Boeing factories without [some type of] inspections that had historically been done.

[In a statement, Boeing said, “Since 2019, we have increased the number of commercial airplanes quality inspectors by 20 percent” and increased the number of inspections per airplane “significantly” since that time.]

What needs to be done to get things moving in the right direction? Is it going to take legislation from Congress? Is it going to have to come from Boeing independently?

Boeing’s board of directors — they have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that their products are safe, and they're not in touch. They're not engaged. They don't visit the sites. They don't talk to the employees. They're not on the ground floor. Look, these individuals are making millions of dollars, right? And there's others between the C-suite and the people on the factory line. There's hundreds of executives who are also very well compensated and managers that should be doing a lot more. But their leadership is a mess. The leadership sets the whole tone for any organization. Public pressure needs to continue.

The government can apply pressure, and they absolutely should apply pressure. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, when it was under Congressman [Peter] DeFazio, he was all over this. He was digging and asking questions because he understood.

David Calhoun, CEO of Boeing said in a recent earnings call that Boeing is glad that the FAA paused its production expansion, which gives the company time to fix things and do right. Is that just too little too late?

There's a bunch of planes out there that are, in my opinion, defective. He's doing what he can to try to salvage the failures that have occurred under his leadership. And by the way, if people forget, he's been the CEO for a couple of years, but he was on the board of directors for 10 years, so he's been a part of this thing all along.

[In a statement, Boeing pointed to Calhoun’s previous commentary following the Alaska incident. “Whatever final conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened,” Calhoun said on Feb. 6 following the release of the NTSB’s preliminary report. “An event like this must not happen on an airplane that leaves our factory. … It will take significant, demonstrated action and transparency at every turn — and that is where we are squarely focused.”]

What would it take for you to feel safe enough to fly back on a MAX again?

The foundation [sent] out a press release saying MAX airplanes should be grounded immediately, inspected and modified to ensure safety.

But one thing's for sure: Continuing to fly them, completely disregarding the root causes of these problems, not admitting that these problems exist on other planes — none of that's going to make anybody safe.

They’re Fawning All Over Trump. In Private, They’re Seeking Out Mike Pence.

Adam Wren — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 07:00:00 -0500

With the GOP presidential primary over in all but name, a huge group of GOP politicians are already vying to be Donald Trump’s running mate. And as they begin jockeying behind the scenes, they’re turning to a surprising source for advice: former Vice President Mike Pence’s team.

Following Trump’s win in Iowa, intermediaries for Rep. Elise Stefanik, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Sen. Tim Scott have all sought out meetings with a former adviser to Pence this year, asking for intel on how to survive the gantlet of being vetted in a Trump veepstakes. Pence may be roadkill in the Trump universe after their acrimonious breakup at the end of 2020 — and Pence’s ill fated, short-lived presidential campaign last year — but other Republicans hoping to win over Trump are happy to feast on his carrion.

“After everybody started getting out, everybody slowly saw the handwriting on the wall, I started getting phone calls from people who were thinking about, ‘How do we position ourselves?’” said a member of Pence’s political team who has worked to keep a foot planted in Trump world, granted anonymity to speak freely about the conversations.

The talks have been, this person said, preliminary. But that they’re even happening — and that the principals and key staffers involved don’t want anyone to know they’re happening — signal just how politicians are competing but don’t want to be too obvious about their aspirations.

“For the most part, it’s been like ‘Hey, we aren’t really having this conversation,’ and then like, ‘Walk us through it,’” said this person. (A Pence spokesperson declined to comment). Less thirsty but still in the mix is Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary. “I don’t get the sense she’s actively pursuing anything,” the Pence world insider said. She’s in touch with the insider but hasn’t explicitly brought up the vice presidency.

The early advice the Pence insider gives them: “Look at ways to add value,” this person said. “Find ways to be helpful, whether that’s raising money, being a surrogate on the ground or on TV. Be visible to Trump world so they see that you’re helping the cause. And then I think it’s figuring out who you can build relationships within Trump’s orbit — because that’s an ever-shifting orbit.” Some of the questions have been pretty open ended: How does this all work? How many years of taxes should the principal be gathering?

The behind the scenes maneuvering comes as public posturing against Pence has become an early litmus test in the veepstakes. Given Trump’s continued baseless complaints about the outcome of the 2020 election, Pence has been attacked for refusing to use his ceremonial role in the Senate to interfere with the election results and try to block Joe Biden from being certified as president on Jan 6. 2021. “I would not have done what Mike Pence did,” Stefanik said earlier this month on CNN. “I don’t think that was the right approach.”

Openly campaigning for the job of vice president is considered poor form. But that hasn’t stopped many of these candidates from doing so this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Coalition confab at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. The event featured Stefanik, Noem, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and Vivek Ramaswamy, and the Pence world insider confirmed he expected to meet directly with at least Noem during her time in D.C.

A spokesperson for Stefanik did not respond to a request for comment. A person close to Scott said there had been no such outreach or communications. A Noem spokesman said “No such conversations have taken place. There is no truth to these claims.” A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about whether backchanneling with Pence allies would hurt a candidate’s prospects.

There’s a reason they’re coming to a Pence consigliere, of course. Sure, M-i-k-e is now a four-letter word in Trump’s circles, but not long before Jan. 6, and the “hang Mike Pence” chants, Pence was still considered something of a Trump whisperer. Pence and his advisers expertly navigated an Apprentice-like final competition to win a spot on Trump’s ticket. In the summer of 2016, Newt Gingrich flew to Indianapolis on Sean Hannity’s plane to square off against Pence in dueling final interviews with Trump. Meanwhile, Pence and his wife ordered a breakfast quiche from a local grocer and picked flowers from the Indiana governor’s residence at midnight to charm Trump, Ivanka and Don Jr. over brunch later that morning. “It apparently made an impression,” Pence wrote in his memoir So Help Me God.

Though Pence himself is radioactive to large portions of Trump’s base, his close circle of advisers — particularly those who have maintained ties to both camps in the divorce — are a valuable resource to potential vice presidential picks. They know what it’s like to navigate the topsy-turvy Trump orbit.

Chasing a spot on the ballot beneath Trump is like participating in a greased pig contest, with a lot of mud and missed opportunities. It will be filled with mercurial and capricious twists and turns, the Pence insider acknowledged.

“Look, things can change in 100 different ways,” this person said. “Some of that's beyond your control, you can't control this, can you be helpful? And can you help him win? And I think that if you can showcase that in some form or fashion, then I think people are going to take notice.”

Nancy Mace Lets Loose on Kevin McCarthy, Abortion and Trump

Ryan Lizza — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 07:00:00 -0500

Rep. Nancy Mace claims she doesn’t seek out the spotlight. But it certainly keeps finding her — whether by standing up to Donald Trump after Jan. 6, helping overthrow Speaker Kevin McCarthy or warning Republicans that they’re getting the politics wrong on abortion.

But she rejects the notion she’s doing it purely to raise her profile.

“Anybody that says I would do this for celebrity isn’t paying attention or is just choosing to tell a lie,” the South Carolina Republican told POLITICO.

Still, she doesn’t have any problem throwing the kind of barbs at McCarthy that are catnip for the press. He’s “a complete loser,” she said, who “didn’t have the courage or the manhood to call me” to try to win her over before his ouster.

Some of that drama is catching up with Mace back home in South Carolina where she faces not one but two challengers at least partly motivated by revenge: a candidate backed by McCarthy and Mace’s own former chief of staff. (Indeed a large staff exodus from her office has raised eyebrows in Washington.)

On Saturday, South Carolina will be the center of the political world as voters head to the polls for the GOP presidential primary. Mace is now back in Trump’s corner, and even mentioned occasionally as a possible running mate. She endorsed Trump over her two homestate Republican candidates, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley. As she campaigns around South Carolina for the former president, she’s hoping her Trump endorsement will pay dividends this spring in her own primary.

On this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive, I chatted with Mace about her on-again off-again alliance with Trump, McCarthy’s attempts at revenge, her predictions for Trump’s victory margin in the South Carolina primary and the backstory to that time she wore a giant scarlet A on the House floor.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, with help from Deep Dive Senior Producer Alex Keeney.

You have a way of being at the center of things. As a congresswoman, why is that important? What’s your thinking here?

For me, it's not intentional. Most of the time it's by accident because I just have something I need to get off my chest, and I wear my heart on my sleeve.

I've been criticized for oversharing. Yeah, I overshare, I tell you too much. But I come from a very honest place and I want people to know why I do what I do. So if it gives us a platform to get across responsible spending measures, women's-related issues that we care deeply about, cyber security, whatever it is, then that's a great opportunity for our district, for our constituencies, and for the state of South Carolina.

The national fallout from getting rid of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy continues. It’s also continuing in South Carolina. McCarthy seems to be spending his retirement going after you and the rest of the so-called “Gaetz Eight.” What’s it like being a target of the former speaker’s?

The former speaker needs to get a job. I think that's the problem. He’s bored and doesn't know what to do with himself. And you know what? He's a loser. He couldn't keep his job as speaker, and he quit the Republican Party.

He's a loser?

He's a complete loser. He couldn't keep his job as speaker and he quit on the Republican Party. He quit his job. He put our majority at risk. And you know, I pride myself on being a caucus of one. I don't do anything that somebody else has told me to do. And I actually told Kevin, coming into Congress, “You're probably not going to like me. I'm not going to be with you on every single issue, particularly spending and fiscal policy.”

That debt ceiling deal he did was a horrible bill. That's $50 trillion of debt we're saddling with our kids and grandkids over the next ten years. That's a bad deal. And I've taken on Republicans and Democrats for out of control spending. I see that they are both equally at fault here.

But also, you couldn't trust him. The very minimum we need is someone who's going to tell the truth and be honest. Democrats couldn't trust him. Republicans couldn't trust him. I come from the South. When I shake your hand, I say I'm going to do something, you better damn well do it.

And I don't agree with Mike Johnson on everything, particularly social issues, but he's a trustworthy guy. When he says he's going to do something, I believe he's going to do it, and he's honest and he'll talk to you. He'll have a conversation with you and he's not going to lie to you. That is something that I crave and I think the American people crave, and I'm not going to believe in a leader or support a leader that's going to lie to the American people.

Do you have any regrets about the change in leadership? It's not like Mike Johnson is having an easier time.

No. Mike Johnson inherited every bad deal Kevin negotiated.

But there's a little bit of warm feelings for McCarthy now among some of your Republican colleagues, given how chaotic things have been in the House recently.

Well, it was chaotic before Kevin was ousted as speaker. That's the thing. It was more behind closed doors, but it was equally chaotic. There was yelling, there was cursing, you know, damn-near fights happening. There was a lot of chaos.

Have you ever had a moment since that vote where you thought, “You know what, maybe this wasn't the best idea?”

Look, 75 percent of the country agreed with me on that vote, and I've got the American people on my side. And again, it's not my fault that there are members of my own party that have tried to sabotage us on different issues. I've sat in meetings where we're talking about spending and trying to get border security; and certain factions of our own party have threatened to kill the bill if we attach border security to it. In the former speaker's tenure, it would have been a lot easier to get away with that. But now it's sort of, “sunlight's the best medicine,” and I'm seeing a whole other side that I didn't see before.

When I agree with my party, I'm going to say so. And when I do disagree with them, I'm going to speak out as I always have. But I try not to live with regret. Life is tough enough and I have to live with the decisions that I make and the votes that I take.

I've made some really tough votes. I mean, I voted to hold members of my own party in contempt, just like I did Hunter Biden. I hold both sides accountable and try to be consistent in that endeavor and be a constitutional conservative, a fiscal conservative, and do the right thing no matter the consequences, because I have to represent the people of my district and my state.

So tell us about the political fallout in South Carolina. What is McCarthy doing to try and oust you now?

He’s going to sink several million dollars into my opponent's campaign.

Just let me pause there. He spent $4 million to support you last time or in 2020, right?

Right. He's going to spend the same amount to oust me in the primary or more. But he wouldn't have had the majority without me.

Tell us a little bit about the primary. Your opponent, Catherine Templeton, when she entered the race, her line on you was that the district needs someone “committed to service over celebrity and someone who isn't going to flip flop for fame.” So she's trying to argue that you are out there trying to get media attention and not serving the district.

The irony is men can do it, but the minute I, a fiscally conservative woman, does it, somehow it's not the same.

I do media interviews like a lot of my male colleagues, but they're not getting attacked. I don't see Tim Scott or Lindsey Graham getting attacked the way that I do and they're on TV more than I am. I actually turn down more TV interviews than I accept. And the irony is that I have far more legislative staff than I have communications staff.

Anybody that says I would do this for celebrity isn't paying attention or is just choosing to tell a lie. And if you look at the bills that we pass — we pass bills out of committee, we pass bills out of the floor of the House — Biden has signed bills that I've worked on into law, especially in the cybersecurity space. In fact, the last bill that passed on the floor of the House with Kevin McCarthy as speaker was the MACE Act. I actually do a lot of legislative work.

That's why McCarthy was so surprised by your vote, right?

Well, I mean, the guy didn't even call me.

He knew where I stood. He knew I was frustrated. He knew that he had lied to me. And rather than call me directly — he didn't have the balls to call me — he called my staff. I'm a member of Congress. I am a colleague. I am an equal. I was elected for this job. And you didn't have the courage or the manhood to call me and talk to me about it and see what we could do to make what was wrong right? That, to me, is the character of someone who's not willing to lead our conference, not willing to lead our country.

Am I an outspoken woman? Yes, but I'm also a dealmaker. I understand how this place works. But if you lie to me, we're going to have problems.

The person he called was your chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, who is now also primarying you. What's going on with Dan and you?

I'm not sure he is. I know he filed but I'm not sure he actually runs, and he doesn't live in the district. As far as we can tell, he's not ever voted here, at least not since 2010, and when he registered with the FEC, he registered at the address of a Mellow Mushroom.

Should I know what that is?

It's a pizza parlor in Hilton Head. He doesn’t live in the district. I respect my former staff, but I do have a few that are disgruntled.

Why is that? When I was reviewing clips about you, high staff turnover in your office came up as a thing. What’s behind that?

A lot of offices have high staff turnover, it's not just me. And the lie that the media told was that I got rid of my entire staff, and I didn't. Actually, all the staff in two of my three offices remained with me. All my South Carolina staff are still with me. It was just the D.C. office.

I got a new chief [of staff]. So new coach, new team. And I have really high standards. I want to measure all the work that we do. I want to see the work product. I want to have measurable objectives. I treat my office like I would my business. And there are some people that don't want to be held accountable for their work product and you know, that's unfortunate, but I respect all of them. I supported all of them and I'm not going to denigrate their frustration with my office. But I have very high standards. I try to be as supportive as possible. And that's been the hardest thing for me as a mom —

You are a single mom with two teenagers, right?

Yeah. Two teenagers, 17 and almost 15.

The same age as my two boys. You were kind of a rebellious teen, right?

I'd moved out at 16, I dropped out of school at 17. I had emotions that I was dealing with because of the trauma I had experienced. I was a Waffle House waitress at 17. I finished school eventually that year, but I had my own share [of traumas]. But even with my challenges growing up as a teenager, I eventually came back.

What got you back on track?

The Citadel.

But before that. Obviously, you had this very awful trauma when you were 16. How did your mindset change? What got your life back on track?

When I was at the Waffle House, I learned a couple of things: I learned about the value of hard work, and I learned that I wanted to get my high school diploma. I did that a couple of months later. I was able to get my high school diploma by taking college classes, because I wasn't going to go back to high school because the man who raped me was my classmate. There was no choice. I wasn't going back to school. Like, that was not a thing, it was not going to happen. But I was able to take college classes and get my high school diploma equivalent, and I would eventually go to the Citadel.

I started the Citadel at 18. I was too young at the time to really articulate why I was doing it. But years later, having unpacked some of my trauma — and when you're a rape survivor, it's not like you get over it in a week or a year — it's lifelong trauma that you have to deal with.

But I will tell you, for The Citadel, looking back on it now, I had something to prove to myself. And I wanted to prove that I could go to a challenging environment, I could face an obstacle and adversity unlike anything I had ever faced before and I wouldn't quit. Because when I was raped, I quit. I quit school, I was too afraid to report this to the police because of the shame that I felt, the judgment I knew that would come with it, and I stayed quiet for years. I didn't just talk about it freely until South Carolina was doing the heartbeat [bill].

This was when you were in the South Carolina state legislature and an abortion ban was going through, and you gave a speech on the floor where you spoke publicly about what had happened when you were a teenager.

Right. We were doing the heartbeat bill and there were no exceptions for rape or incest. I was appalled by that. And of course, all the consultants tell me, “You can't do that. You're going to have a primary and you can't be talking about rape and incest, etc..”

I said, “To hell with it. Watch me.”

I drafted an amendment to the bill, and I believe we were the first state in the country, followed shortly by Georgia — either right before or right after — to have exceptions for rape and incest in a heartbeat bill. And I gave the speech. I told the world what had happened. I had no notes, I didn't know what I was going to say, but I knew that I was angered as a woman and as a rape survivor that we weren't thinking about women who'd been raped.

I wanted to impress upon my colleagues that one, we need to hear the voices of women because at that point, no women were speaking up here.

You've had your ups and downs with Trump. What was the lowest point of the relationship with him, and how did you sort of dig yourself out of it?

I said this in my endorsement and I say this a lot: I'm a fiscal conservative, I'm socially sensible, I am not going to agree with everyone in my party on everything. Of course he and I have had our ups and downs over the years, like many other people. But I represent a different portion of the electorate, a different portion of the party that are more independent minded, more independent thinking. And for me, supporting him this go-round was not a difficult choice. Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, this was a very easy choice.

Let's talk about the Republican primary. Nancy, break down South Carolina politics and what to look for on Saturday, Trump versus Haley.

Number one, every Republican congressional district except for mine [is] die-hard conservative. Mine is very purple.

So for the political junkie that's tracking the data, there will be a closer race in my district, the First Congressional District, for two reasons:

One, Nikki Haley is doing everything she can to turn out Democrats. We have open primaries, so anybody can vote in our Republican primaries. It's still not going to make a difference with Trump. Even in my district, I believe he'll win by double-digits, 10 or 11. Maybe it's nine, but he's still going to win by a significant margin.

The second thing I would say is that my district is a bellwether for the rest of the country. And so the question that reporters, media journalists, [and] data analysis consultants should be looking at is how do independent voters break? And I believe that they are breaking significantly for Donald Trump. So in my district, we have more independent voters than either of the two parties. From my perspective, seeing how independent voters and undecideds break is going to be a bellwether, potentially for the general election. There are a lot of people that say, “Hey, this is a hard-R district.”

It is not. This district was a D+10 45 days after Roe v. Wade [was overturned].

But it changed a little bit between your first and second election after redistricting?

In ‘20, I won by one point. And then in ‘22 it got better by one point. Technically under the Supreme Court case, when there was the hearing in October, the Supreme Court acknowledged my district got 1.36 points better politically.

You mean more Republican?

By one point.

And in 2022, you won by almost 14 points in a district that had only changed a little bit?

Correct. I was probably the only Republican in history to run an ad about abortion. It was about rape. I am a sexual assault survivor. I was raped at the age of 16 by a classmate of mine in high school. And that moment changed my life. Ever since then, because of the trauma I experienced at a very young age, I have been fighting for women and women's rights for almost my entire lifetime.

I'm also the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. And I'm a suburban mom. You know, when Alabama rules against IVF, it's a problem, right?

Well, that was my next question. Tell us what your reaction to the Alabama Supreme Court ruling was.

One, I think most people will agree, science says life begins at conception. However, that doesn't mean that we just turn away women who can't have children and need IVF to get pregnant. We need to make sure we protect IVF for every woman across the country.

I am really passionate about women's issues. I think that sometimes our side gets it wrong. We don't show compassion to women. In fact, we attack women like myself when I talk about rape or when I talk about access to birth control, those kinds of things. And this is going to be an issue in ‘24. Immigration will be the number one issue but it's going to be followed very closely behind by women's issues and abortion, etc. We need to do everything we can to protect all forms of birth control and contraceptives, including IUDs and IVF and everything. And, it's really important that we get it right.

If you were advising Trump in the general election, what would your advice be for the Republican ticket on this issue?

Number one, we shouldn't be afraid to talk about it. People need to know where you stand. But also not to be afraid to say that you support birth control. If you want to reduce the number of abortions in this country, you have to increase women's access to birth control.

Republicans are afraid to say that. And the other thing is that we shouldn't be afraid to say “second trimester.” Like most people — and I know people who are pro-choice — their gestational limitation is 14 weeks. Mine's 15 to 20. And I consider myself pro-life. And I think how we talk about it matters. We should not be demonizing women. As someone who talks a lot about being a survivor, who talks a lot about women's rights — we cannot demonize other women. Having that mentality is going to hurt us at the ballot box.

Trump is reportedly for a 16-week ban. Do you think in the general election against Biden that he should affirmatively come out with a specific position? 15 or 16 weeks, or whatever it is?

I think anywhere in the second trimester is fine to say in the general election. Because what Joe Biden is not going to do — Joe Biden is not going to give you his limits — because Joe Biden has no limits. Even pro-choice people don't want to see abortion in the third trimester. So having some kind of reasonable, common sense, common ground position in the second trimester is a very reasonable position.

Should it be a national ban?

I mean, he has said in his town halls in the past, “If we can build consensus.”

But the problem is neither side wants to negotiate. Both sides want to dig their heels in and they want to use it as a fundraising wedge, or they're afraid of being primaried, and they're afraid to find

Meet The Only Member of Congress Who’s Backing Nikki Haley

Ben Jacobs — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Few Republican politicians who have bucked Donald Trump have lived to tell the tale. Candidates who have expressed mere skepticism of the former president have faced fierce primary challenges. Of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, eight did not return to Congress in 2023.

Perhaps nowhere have these harsh reprisals been clearer than in South Carolina,where former Republican Gov. Mark Sanford lost a House bid in 2018 after criticizing Trump and where Trump-backed challenger Russell Fry unseated Republican Rep. Tom Rice after Rice voted to impeach the former president for the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol.

But there is one man who, seemingly, has managed to defy these new laws of political gravity: South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, the lone member of Congress to endorse Nikki Haley.

So far, in advance of the Feb. 24 South Carolina primary, he’s faced little blowback from Trump and his allies. There have been no angry Truth Social posts about Norman, nor have any ornate conspiracy theories been woven about him by MAGA influencers. As one plugged-in Trump ally granted anonymity to speak frankly put it, “people don’t give a fuck” about Norman’s support for Haley.

How did Norman manage to pull off the impossible? A combination of his own impeccable MAGA credentials, transparency and the fact that the Trump campaign is just not all that threatened by Haley — not only because of her lower polling numbers, but because she isn’t pursuing the America First mantle claimed by Trump.

Norman has long been a loyal MAGA ally. A successful septuagenarian real estate developer like Trump, Norman is a Freedom Caucus member who stood by the former president in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, even urging Trump to declare “Marshall Law” in a text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in 2021. The South Carolina Republican has since told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the only thing he regrets in the text message was the typo.

Norman spoke to POLITICO Magazine about the primary and his support for Haley in the Washington office of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trumpist organization that has become a Capitol Hill headquarters for the MAGA movement in recent years. There, he rhapsodized about the former president.

“Trump did the right things. That’s why I can't criticize [him],” he said before traveling back to South Carolina to campaign for Haley. “I will always be grateful for what he did on the Supreme Court. I will always be grateful for what he did for Eddie Gallagher [a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes on whose behalf Trump intervened after a conviction by a court martial]. I will always thank him for … keeping gas prices low.”

Norman endorsed Haley in February 2023 just after she announced she was running, tweeting that “It’s time for a reset and a new chapter in national Republican politics, and there’s no better person to help write that new chapter than our former governor and my good friend, Nikki Haley!”

His relationship with Haley goes back decades. They were elected to the South Carolina state legislature together in 2004, and he was one of the few elected officials to endorse her in the 2010 gubernatorial primary where she bested three better-known candidates to win the Republican nomination.

Their relationship is especially notable given that Haley has rankled many former allies over the years — and nearly the entire state GOP establishment is supporting Trump.

Norman based his case for Haley around the fact that she can serve two terms, whereas Trump can only serve one. “We’re in trouble. We’re in serious jeopardy of losing a democracy [if Biden wins a second term],” he told me. “I know it. It’s going to take eight years. She can do it; she’s got the youth.”

Norman dismissed Haley’s recent criticism of Trump as “unstable and unhinged” as mere political rhetoric. “She’s selling herself,” he said. “She’s selling why she should be the leader of the free world.” It’s the same with Trump’s comments about her, Norman continued: “He calls her Birdbrain, he makes comments. She doesn’t take it personally.” He added that he personally finds Trump’s use of disparaging nicknames for political rivals to be funny.

The closest Norman came to offering any criticism of Trump was mildly echoing the critique that Haley has repeatedly offered of the former president as too old for the job. “Can I do things at 70 that I could do at 50 or 40?” he asked rhetorically. “No, much less lead the free world with where we are now.”

“Biden has train-wrecked this country,” he said, describing the enormity of the task that he thought faced the next president.

Norman was relaxed as he talked about his status as Haley’s sole supporter in the House or Senate. “I know who I believe in,” he said. “And I don’t care, to be honest with you, if there were 40 people who endorsed her or none, I’ve always made my own decisions. And if I’m the only one, it’s not lonesome to me. That’s what democracy is all about.”

The South Carolina Republican's otherwise unblemished record of support for Trump seems to be an effective shield back home against the blowback his endorsement might otherwise trigger.

Rob Godfrey, a longtime South Carolina political operative, said that “for all of the people in Washington who have tortured relationships with Donald Trump, Ralph is not one. … He’s been consistently conservative on principle, and on message.”

Norman simply “just happens to have … a personal relationship with [Haley] that dates back 20 years [who] has decided to jump into the presidential race. I don’t think anybody who is reasonable would fault Ralph for having taken that position.”

Among Norman’s MAGA colleagues on Capitol Hill, most consider him a stalwart ally regardless. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of Trump’s most loyal allies on Capitol Hill, said “I consider Ralph a brother in arms. … I consider him someone who’s with me, not on most things, but almost all things.” Rep. Troy Nehls, a Texas Republican, who went so far as to publicly suggest Trump as a potential speaker during weeks of dissension after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster in the fall of 2023, enthused, “Ralph Norman’s a hell of a nice guy. I think he’s great.”

Nehls added that he thought Haley should get out of the race. “She served our country but she’s not Donald Trump. Get out of the race.”

There was one note of discord from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “I really can’t understand why anyone would beg for President Trump’s endorsement and walk around claiming they support him and then go support Nikki Haley,” she said. “People make stupid decisions.”

Greene, though, was the exception. Even in South Carolina, where two of Norman’s colleagues are facing primary challenges this year, the incumbent Republican doesn’t have a single primary challenger himself to date.

Godfrey noted Norman’s endorsement “hasn’t raised any questions in South Carolina,” where Norman represents a staunchly conservative district in suburban Charlotte. Instead, Godfrey said, it’s answered one about Norman’s loyalty — in this case, to Haley. “If you need someone who’s a loyal soldier to fight with you, there’s nobody better to be in the trenches with,” Godfrey said.

It helps that Norman has always been personally well-liked in South Carolina — one operative who worked in the state said “everyone adores him” despite his reputation as a maverick. Another Republican in the state described Norman as “a fairly quirky person … who’s always been known as a loner type,” and compared him to Mike Leach, the legendarily brilliant but eccentric college football coach.

Norman’s loyalty and likeability has served him well in preserving his relationship with Trump, too.

Norman said Trump was surprised when Norman called him last year to say that he would be backing Haley. As the congressman recalled, Trump said it was “kind of surprising.” But Trump seemed to make clear that there were no hard feelings, telling the South Carolina Republican that he “had a great family” and was “very nice” during their conversation.

Besides, Trump told Norman, Haley — who was polling at 2 percent at the time — was “not going to be competition.”

Norman said he thought he “owed him” the call and the heads up. Trump “values loyalty, and I’m loyal. … If he ends up getting the nomination, I will be loyal to him. He knows that.”

Norman contrasted his stance with other unnamed Republicans who backed Trump simply because they were scared the former president would make a mean comment or back a primary challenge against them if they opposed him.

But the South Carolina Republican looked askance at the idea that Trump was particularly prone to holding grudges. He reflected on when Trump lobbied him when he was one of the remaining holdouts who refused to back McCarthy as speaker throughout the course of repeated ballots in January 2023. “He called me and he said, ‘You’re doing the wrong thing.’ I said ‘Mr. President, look, I’m doing the right thing. And if you look at somebody who wanted to censure you, that was wrong of Kevin.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

In Norman’s view, Trump “doesn’t hold grudges. He and Kevin are still buddies to this day. And he could have blown up with me. But he didn’t.”

There was a caveat, however — that Trump does and should hold grudges for his legal issues. “The Biden administration has weaponized every part of this government,” Norman reasoned.

While Norman’s loyalty and his transparency have apparently helped him pull off this difficult balancing act, there’s another reason Trump world has been complacent about Norman’s single act of heresy. One plugged-in Trump world operative noted that the former U.N. ambassador was viewed differently than former Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another primary rival until he left the race in January.

“DeSantis wasn’t just trying to defeat Trump and displace him as the Republican nominee,” the operative said. “He was attempting to displace him as the leader of the America First movement.”

There may be limits to how long Norman remains unscathed for his support of Haley. Recent polling suggests that Haley is running far behind Trump in her and Norman’s home state, but if that should change, or if she continues to sharpen her attacks on Trump, Norman could quickly find himself caught in the crossfire.

“What’s true today isn't necessarily true tomorrow,” said the Trump operative. “The longer Nikki stays in the race, even if she’s just an annoying little gnat, which is basically what she is, that could change real quick.”

Norman said he has not spoken to Trump since backing Haley, but indicated he would call the former president regardless of the result when the primary was over. “I'll call him either way. … I’ll call him to tell him if he wins. I’m 100 percent behind him.”

Donald Trump Wrecked the South Carolina Primary

Jonathan Martin — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 06:00:00 -0500

CAMDEN, South Carolina — To the list of proud American political traditions to which Donald Trump has laid waste, add that of the South Carolina primary.

Over its colorful history, South Carolina presidential plebiscite has been many things — dirty, decisive and, most recently for Joe Biden, rejuvenating. But it had never been sleepy. Until now.

Nikki Haley has run a conventional campaign against the most thoroughly unconventional candidate of our times. Trump has done, and even this may be charitable, the bare minimum of campaigning in the state this month. And the national press corps has largely checked out of the race, concluding after two Trump victories that the outcome is pre-ordained so why bother building a pricey set and deploying anchors as they did for past showdowns here.

At a glance, the somnolence is remarkable. Here’s the long-anticipated, two-person race for the GOP nomination, with traditional Republicans finally landing on their sole alternative to Trump. And she happens to be a she whose make or break moment will take place in her home state. Seems like a hell of a story.

What’s more, it would have once been hard to conceive of a more favorable turn of events than what has fallen into Haley’s lap in recent weeks.

In one of his few trips to South Carolina ahead of Saturday’s primary, Trump used the same rally to wonder out loud where Haley’s combat-deployed husband was and to invite Russia to invade a NATO ally that was not spending enough on defense. The former president quickly returned to the golf course, but soon afterwards Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken domestic critic died in an arctic prison, a stark reminder of who the man in the Kremlin is that Trump boasts of getting along with.

Haley sought to capitalize on the turn of events — it’s not every day an opponent taunts a military family about their service and invites a foe to invade America’s allies — but Trump’s eruption appears to have impacted his standing with Republicans like his outbursts have for nearly nine years. Which is to say only at the margins.

And that is the overarching reason why this South Carolina race seems so anticlimactic. In this Republican race demography is destiny, to borrow a phrase.

It’s less of a primary than a modern general election in which the opposing sides are as predictable as they are calcified. Haley performs best with the most educated and wealthy Republicans, as well as independents and Democrats eager to block Trump’s return, while the former president has majority support thanks to his grip on the working-class base that now dominates the GOP coalition.

External events, gaffes, a home-state advantage and issue differences matter little. Cold, unchanging math is the determinative factor, not the old standbys. And in South Carolina there are fewer college-educated and unaffiliated voters than there were in New Hampshire so the pool available to Haley is reduced.

She’s tried to overcome this challenge by expanding the electorate, appealing directly to voters in the political center who are unenthused about Trump and Biden. “We either have a senile or a crazy running for president,” said Sandy Claeys, a retiree who came to Haley’s rally in Sumter and said she voted for Trump in 2020 but has concluded “he’s nuts.”

In addition to targeting non-Republicans via text, Haley has added a line to her stump speech explicitly targeting general election voters in which she says in the fall “you are given a choice” but in the primary “you make your choice.”

To talk to South Carolinians, though, there’s an obvious reason why there’s such little drama here: They already know the ending.

“You know why, you know why!” Bob Ziembicki said when I prodded him to explain how South Carolina could manage to hold a boring primary.

A transplant originally from, as he put it, “the Bronx, baby,” Ziembicki heads the Republican Club at the sprawling Sun City community in Fort Mill, not far across the border from Charlotte. He warmly introduced Haley at her rally there Sunday night. Yet after her bus rolled out, Ziembicki tried to convince me to accept a leftover ice cream sandwich and got to the heart of the matter.

“It’s because 75 percent are for Trump, that’s the only explanation,” he said. He was talking about his view of the vote split in Sun City, which is filled with northern retirees who fled cold weather and high taxes, and are happy to rationalize Trump’s conduct because they all knew that mouthy type back in the old neighborhood.

The race will be more competitive statewide. Yet even Haley diehards like Katon Dawson, a former state GOP chair, acknowledge her band of support ranges from the mid-30s to mid-40s.

Invoking Bob Dole’s memorable, what-is-wrong-with-you-people line about Bill Clinton’s transgressions in 1996, Dawson vented: “Where’s the outrage?” before matter-of-factly answering his own question. “Well, there wasn’t any.”

To party stalwarts like Dawson, it wasn’t supposed to be this way — at least not a year ago when the contest got going and the party appeared open to moving past Trump.

Of course, that was when some Republicans were still indulging in the fantasy that elected GOP leaders would rally to a Trump alternative and the non-Trump candidates themselves may even coordinate to thwart the former president. That didn’t happen.

For all their enmity toward the other in the last few months, Ron DeSantis and Haley are strikingly similar in their failures. Both made scant effort to develop relationships, whether with the media or with fellow Republicans. Neither was widely accessible to the press until their fate was likely sealed and neither had much goodwill with other GOP lawmakers. So when Haley, as recently as this month, sought out endorsements from some of the most prominent figures in the party it was too late. Those horrified by Trump stayed quiet and everybody else in the party gave in and endorsed the frontrunner.

To be fair to Haley, it’s eminently reasonable to wonder if a male, twice-elected Southern governor turned United Nations ambassador would have been similarly dismissed and disregarded by, well, most every major GOP office-holder other than New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.

Further, the degree to which the media collectively moved on from the Republican race after New Hampshire, as though she had lost by 40 points rather than 11 is remarkable. I recognize, and have written about, Trump’s structural advantage. And when nearly every senior elected Republican is bowing to Trump, well, it can drain the suspense.

Yet the decision to stop covering the campaign as a real race can be self-reinforcing and to see only cameras from network embeds at her rallies earlier this week was to feel some sympathy for Haley.

Haley, though, has taken few risks. Where was the appeal to independents and Democrats in New Hampshire? She was unable to capitalize on DeSantis dropping out the weekend before the primary there. Instead, she talked about how all “the fellas” had fallen by the wayside and that was about it.

Would that have changed the course of the campaign? Not entirely. She would have faced the same demographic challenges today. However, losing New Hampshire by a few points less, say seven instead of 11, may have at least helped her sustain more media attention in South Carolina.

And speaking of, where’s the imagination? Her approach to prevailing over a candidate who sprawls over the media landscape like kudzu has been to stage a bus tour of South Carolina and then, when she was at risk of being ignored entirely, teasing a major speech in which the only news was no news at all — she was staying in the race.

I get it, it’s hard to stage a knife fight in a phone booth, as the old cliché of South Carolina races goes, when you’re the only one in the phone booth. So leave the state, go show up near Mar-a-Lago or at the 19th hole of the links Trump is on. Or, why not, have a news conference outside whatever courthouse he was in on a given day.

And on the topic of taking risks, why not have asked John Kelly, the Marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, to come join you near Parris Island to talk about the sacrifices of military families. Could Kelly make it any more clear that he’s repulsed by Trump?

It all may seem gimmicky or give off the air of desperation a la Ted Cruz’s fantasy league politics pick of Carly Fiorina as his running mate shortly before the crucial Indiana primary in 2016. But, again, what did Haley have to lose?

She said in her I’m-staying-in speech earlier this week that her “own political future is of zero concern.” Well, she hasn’t acted like it.

For all Haley’s talk about hard truths, a staple of her stump speech, the one she hasn’t come to terms with is that Trump represents the bright line of our times. It’s a which-side-are-you-on moment. And, as she made clear in her remarks, she doesn’t want to pick one.

Instead, she’s contorting herself, and blurring the history we’ve all lived through, to argue Trump has changed. It's a way to rationalize her own capitulation to him in 2016 and accommodate a party rank-and-file that just maybe can be convinced that the person who called for a Muslim ban, mocked Mitt Romney for walking like a penguin and belittled John McCain’s war record and gold star families was a bigger person when he first ran for president.

I know why she’s doing it — she doesn’t want to be seen as Liz Cheney, as donning the blue jersey by saying Trump is unfit for office. Haley wants to retain her viability with Republicans, which is why she made clear again in that speech she’s no Never Trumper.

There are many others like Haley. There’s actually a word for them in the Trump era: homeless. Or to use a more modern phrase: the politically unhoused.

They dot her rallies, those who say they’ll reluctantly vote for Trump as the nominee this fall, those who will sit it out, and some, including the fellow who yelled “lock him up” about Trump at Haley’s Camden rally, who will back Biden.

It's not a small coalition. Depending on the state, Haley’s sympathizers constitute a third or more of the party. But it’s hardly enough to win a nomination.

The question now is how much of this primary was a matter of Trump being sui generis, a celebrity strongman figure like the country has never seen, or whether the party and politics broadly has irrevocably changed.

I wouldn’t expect a political Martin Luther to be showing up at that GOP’s door anytime soon. There has to be a market for a reformation.

Losing the presidency once more may create the beginnings of one, but recall how badly the Democrats had to lose in three consecutive elections in the 1980s before Bill Clinton tugged them to the center. In a polarized era, and with a nominee who will never admit defeat anyway, there’s no such landslide repudiation in the offing. And, knowing Trump, does anybody think he’d immediately take running again in 2028 off the table?

So we beat on, pulled by the currents — even if millions of voters don’t want to be borne back ceaselessly into the past.

In Camden, the heart of South Carolina’s horse country, the crowd for Haley’s rally looked the part. Arriving in a Barbour coat and bow tie was retired Major General Julian Burns, a West Pointer, and his wife, Ruth Ann, who was the first female company commander at Texas A&M and had the Aggie ring to prove it.

The retired general was quick to explain why he liked Haley. “Integrity, youth, she understands the international piece,” he said.

But the Burnses couldn’t as easily grasp why the former president faces no penalty for his conduct.

Ruth Ann ventured that party leaders are “afraid of Trump.”

Julian changed the topic to Biden’s infirmities before grouping them with Trump’s behavior to speak for his fellow ranks of the homeless.

“I can’t believe what’s going on,” he said.

‘Josh Is a Show Pony. Erin Is a Workhorse.’

Kathy Gilsinan — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

The woman who has helped secure two of the religious right’s biggest recent Supreme Court victories doesn’t get a lot of respect from certain headline writers. Behold:

The Independent: “Josh Hawley congratulates his wife for her work on Dobbs case overturning Roe.”

Salon: “Ayanna Pressley publicly schools Josh Hawley’s wife on abortion…”

Washington Examiner: “Georgetown receives backlash for hosting Sen. Hawley’s wife on post-Roe litigation”

The wife in question is Erin Morrow Hawley, Yale Law grad, former Supreme Court clerk, and for the past three years a senior counsel at the conservative advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. There, in 2022, she was part of the team that got Roe v. Wade overturned, in the most consequential Supreme Court abortion case in the 50-odd years since Roe itself was decided. She is now a lead attorney on the next-most important abortion case: an effort to restrict mifepristone — a drug now used in more than half the abortions in the United States — at the federal level, including for the remaining states with laws protecting abortion access. She has already argued and won at least partial victories in two lower courts; the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month. And whether or not Erin herself does the arguments (ADF has not confirmed who will), she will be a key part of the team trying to persuade a conservative-majority Supreme Court that a drug used by millions of women, over two-plus decades, with a rate of serious complications of less than 1 percent, is too risky to be so accessible.

Still, despite her resume and the stakes of her work, Erin Hawley, 44, is still best known to many as the spouse of the senior senator from Missouri. Democrat Lucas Kunce, who is challenging Josh in November, regularly refers to the fight against abortion as the “Hawley family business,” and has tweeted many times about the work of “Hawley’s wife” (never “Erin Hawley”) on the mifepristone case. Even Google supplies as its thumbnail summary of her: “Josh Hawley’s wife.”

To be fair, Erin Hawley does at times in her writing identify herself first as a wife and mother. This is true of her byline on the Christian website World.com, to which she is a regular contributor, and of the author bio for her first book, a Christian guide to parenting, in which she describes herself as a “wife, mom … and some-time lawyer.” She has advised wives and mothers to “make sure you focus on your husband.”

But what those headline writers miss is the simple fact that in terms of her effect on America, Erin Hawley’s status as a senator’s wife is perhaps the least interesting thing about her. By some accounts, she’s having a greater impact on the law in this country than her lawmaker husband is.

There’s a structural reason for this, of course: Congress is not currently famed for its productivity, and even within that context Josh Hawley isn’t known as a powerhouse legislator, though he has been a reliable vote for conservative justices. Otherwise, however, it’s hard to imagine Congress doing much on abortion policy. Today’s driver of sweeping social policy change is the courts — Erin Hawley’s realm. As she herself wrote in 2020, advocating for the confirmation of her role model Amy Coney Barrett: “Today’s Supreme Court ultimately decides nearly every political, social and economic issue of consequence.”

Hawley went on to write that “it shouldn’t.” Still it does, and she is helping get generationally significant results there for conservatives, particularly religious ones. “Erin is a person who’s going and moving the ball in different ways for the conservative movement,” said a conservative lawyer and longstanding acquaintance of the Hawleys who declined to be named, for reasons evident in the next remark: “Josh is a show pony. Erin is a workhorse.”

Erin Hawley declined to be interviewed for this article. But her many public appearances, writings and interviews with former classmates, colleagues and even critics help illuminate the thinking of a leading figure inside the most important organization battling for religious conservative causes in the courts. “You can’t really distinguish her influence and reputation from ADF’s influence and reputation,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor and historian of abortion policy in the U.S. That influence has grown with the growing conservatism of the Supreme Court. (ADF has notched 15 victories there since 2011.)

Hawley, who joined in 2021, has been a “critical part” of recent wins, per a statement from ADF president and CEO Kristen Waggoner, as a “brilliant, fearless, and devoted attorney” whose “appellate experience working for Kirkland and Ellis LLP, where she litigated extensively before the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as her time serving as counsel to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and clerking for Chief Justice Roberts, make her an invaluable asset to not only ADF’s appellate advocacy, but to our litigation practice generally.” That advocacy, in turn, is poised to keep shaping law for abortion and major questions of civil liberties.

And, yes, being married to a senator does attract media coverage. (This isn’t a profile of Waggoner, after all.) But Hawley “sort of embodies a particular vision of what pro-life feminism looks like,” said Ziegler. “She certainly isn’t just cowering in Josh Hawley’s shadow. … She’s, I think, arguably more of a change-maker than he’s been.”

Hawley has said she never wanted to get into politics.

Her original idea, having grown up in the sixth generation of her family’s beef cattle ranch in northeast New Mexico (“in a rural county where cows outnumber people 40 to one,” as she described it), was to be a veterinarian. “And it turns out I’m squeamish,” she’s said. But while pursuing her animal science degree at Texas A&M, in the summer of 2001, she scored a spot in the university’s Agricultural and Natural Resources Policy Internship Program and wound up on Capitol Hill working for then-Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas). A plausible Plan B began to take shape. She’d long been interested in the way the law affected the farmers and ranchers she’d known growing up. And there in Washington, she said later, she “observed lawmakers debating statutes that would profoundly impact the lives of individual people.” The “connection between law and people,” she went on, “inspired me to go to law school.”

She was a high achiever from childhood, a feature Hawley has attributed to growing up the child of an alcoholic and trying to manage the chaos around her through hard work and high performance. Her grandmother’s house was a place of happy stability in contrast to her home life before her parents’ divorce and her father’s suicide when she was in high school. She feared being “found out” by her extended family members as not belonging, frantically washing dishes as if to earn her spot. Working harder to relieve her fear had results: She was an all-state livestock judge in college, for instance, and an A&M professor once recalled her — when she received an outstanding young alumna award — as being in his top two or three students, among thousands he’d taught over decades, “in her understanding of what is really important in beef cattle breeding.” She spent a year at University of Texas Law School; was encouraged by a professor to transfer; got into Harvard, Yale and Stanford; and picked Yale. She racked up achievements there, too: a prestigious teaching fellowship working for the constitutional law professor Paul Kahn, a spot on the law review.

She also met Josh Hawley there, though they didn’t know one another well. “Josh likes to tell the story that it’s because he was a year behind me,” she told Focus on the Family’s Pray Vote Stand Summit last year, “and then I always have to point out: ‘But I am not older.’” Yale contemporaries I spoke to remember her, pretty much to a person, as “nice” or “sweet”. One contemporary recalled Hawley as a woman of strong opinions who did not express them in off-putting ways. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say a bad word about anybody else,” this person said. “She does not have a hard edge to her at all.”

“I think occasionally about the virtues and vices of elite law students,” says Joshua Kleinfeld, who was a year behind Erin Hawley at Yale and is now a law professor. “They tend to be very smart, extremely hardworking, and dedicat

Bewildered Conservatives Greet a Fallen British Prime Minister

Ben Jacobs — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 19:00:39 -0500

On Thursday, an ousted world leader went to a far-right political conference in the United States to rage about how they and the conservative movement were betrayed by enemies within.

No, it wasn’t Donald Trump. It was Liz Truss.

The former British prime minister who lasted just seven weeks in office spoke in a hotel conference room that was less than half full, sandwiched between a social conservative activist who insisted “there is no such thing" as transgendered children and a far-right author who insists that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was “the biggest instance of police brutality” in the United States since the Civil Rights movement.

Needless to say, she was a long way from South West Norfolk.

Truss’s appearance was perhaps the most incongruous part of the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual event held in a resort hotel just outside Washington, D.C. The event had once been perhaps the premier conference for American conservatives. But its stature has gradually declined in recent years as it has come to be seen as a mere adjunct of Trumpism and, as its head, Matt Schlapp, has fended off allegations of sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement.

The result has been a gathering with an increasingly shabby and low rent vibe. An exhibition hall that once featured major corporate sponsors now has a January 6 themed electronic pinball game and sells vibrating boards that promise that users can lose weight simply by standing on them. A hotel once packed with attendees seemed half vacant as other conferences were held simultaneously — including one for an outsourcing company, a fitting companion for a conference that has increasingly outsourced its speakers from abroad.

Some of the other foreign speakers were already well known on the populist right. Newly elected president Javier Milei of Argentina was considered a major get for the event — and it’s almost impossible to hold a conservative gathering in the United States without former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Truss was an entirely different creature.

Many had simply not heard of her. “Who is Liz Truss?” asked R. Gregg Keller, the former executive director of the group that hosts CPAC and a veteran Republican political operative. Mike Lindell, the pillow magnate turned election conspiracy theorist, was just as befuddled when asked about her appearance. “I didn’t know. ...I’m focused on machines,” he said, as he continued on a diatribe about election fraud in the United States.

Matt Whitaker, the former acting U.S. attorney general under Trump, when asked to put Truss’s appearance at the event in perspective, said “the conservative movement is finding its role and organization worldwide. Donald Trump has motivated a lot of people to be attracted to his movement and translate into their own unique thing.”

When asked how Truss fits into that movement, he said “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Even Clegg Ivey, who ran a King George III themed booth in the exhibition hall that compared Biden officials to the monarch overthrown by the American Revolution, couldn’t quite muster an opinion. “It's not really for us to have a position on executives from other countries and other systems.”

When asked about the incongruity of his booth criticizing a deceased British monarch, he caveated, “that’s a very specific instance.”

There was some Truss skepticism, however. Attendees were widely circulating a piece by Raheem Kassam, an Anglo-American Steve Bannon ally that trashed her as too leftist for the venue. Joe Proenza, the political director for the socially conservative group American Principles Project, was befuddled at her attendance.

“Why are you here?” he asked rhetorically. “There's literally nothing you share with conservatives in America, besides some vague tax policy agreements we might have. What are you doing here?” Proenza disdainfully added that Truss will likely be at the conference longer than she was in 10 Downing Street.

Truss spent her 15 minutes on stage warning that there were only 10 years left to save the West (which is incidentally the name of her upcoming book), while also deriding “wokenomics,” Joe Biden and “the usual suspects” in the media and the corporate world who undermined her during her brief stint as prime minister.

She ended with a call for Americans to elect Republicans “who aren't going to cave into the establishment” and are willing to be unpopular with elites, even if it means “they don’t get invited to any dinner parties.”

Attendees seemed to appreciate her remarks. The room slowly grew more full as she talked and her ovation upon leaving the stage was louder than when she entered. Bryan Betancur, a Marylander wearing a QAnon shirt, said that the speech was “educational.”

“You get to learn a lot of things. For me as a conservative, it’s pretty inspirational,” he said. Betancur said he hadn’t heard of Truss before, although did know of several other former British prime ministers.

Gerri Poplin of New Jersey, who was wearing an American flag scarf and multiple pro-Trump buttons, thought Truss’s speech was “on the same parallel” and shared many of the same frustrations that she had with American politics. Poplin, who thought the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, found similarities between what the former president experienced then and the struggles that Truss described on stage as she dealt with being undermined by the administrative state as well as what she called “CHINOS, conservatives in name only” — a nod to the American nomenclature of RINO, Republican in Name Only.

After her speech, Truss wandered up and down the hall of the event with a gaggle half composed of British reporters trying to ask her questions and half of American security guards trying to block them from doing so. Only a handful of attendees stopped her for selfies on her journey, which included a brief video interview with a conservative activist group that long pushed false claims of election fraud.

One request for a selfie came from Barbara Coward, a suburban Baltimore woman whose husband was British and thought it would be a good memento for her half-British children. Coward came away pleasantly impressed with the speech, although she was well aware both that Truss was “not prime minister for very long” and the British politician was hawking a book.

The other selfie request came from Sami Gold, a George Washington University student, who insisted to Truss that “I’m your biggest fan” as she walked by. He wasn’t, he later revealed. Instead, Gold just thought it would be neat to take a photo with a world leader and seeing her was part of the charm of showing up at CPAC.

“It's 50 bucks for meeting some of the most insane people on Earth,” said Gold. “It's great.”

Opinion | Why Republicans Are Making a Big Mistake on Biden’s Age

Alex Conant — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Many Republicans seem to think zeroing in on President Joe Biden’s age is the easy path to victory in November. House GOP lawmakers quickly announced a hearing with Special Counsel Robert Hur, where they are sure to highlight his report characterizing the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” But Republicans are making a big mistake if they think voters will not reelect a geriatric politician.

As a Republican strategist who has bluntly tried to make the case for generational change against an opposing presidential candidate, I can tell you it doesn’t really work.

Democrats are concerned about fallout from the Hur report, but as I learned the hard way, there is very little evidence that voters actually care about political leaders’ ages. The record is clear, albeit depressing: One is hard pressed to identify a single president, governor or senator who lost reelection because voters thought they were too old. And that’s despite many younger challengers leveling that attack.

In the last midterm elections, voters on both sides of the aisle put little stake in mental acuity: An 89-year-old Republican senator was reelected in Iowa, while a Democratic Senate candidate with serious cognitive health concerns was elected in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, both our current and previous presidents set age records after beating younger opponents in the primary and general elections.

The truth is that octogenarians and nonagenarians are far more likely to die in office than lose reelection.

Why? Because a politician’s personal traits — including age, honesty and fidelity — only become salient campaign issues when they are tied to real-world matters that directly impact voters. In most cases, if elected leaders are advancing policies popular with their constituents, voters are willing to look past personal shortcomings and give them another term.

Republicans’ attacks on Biden’s age are not novel: Elderly candidates frequently face attacks on their age, often couched as a broader pitch for generational change. President Bill Clinton (who won despite his own personal flaws) evoked Bob Dole’s age in 1996 when he promised to build “a bridge to the 21st Century.” But Clinton’s campaign packaged the generational pitch as part of an agenda touting his successful economic record, while also painting Dole as too extreme. (A message that Biden is likely to replicate this year against Donald Trump.)

More often, direct appeals for generational change fall on deaf ears — as I personally discovered working on Marco Rubio’s campaign in 2016. Embracing Rubio’s young age and charisma, our campaign argued that “outdated” politicians could not tackle modern problems. But voters disagreed: Rubio’s youthful appearance ended up being one of his biggest liabilities, which Trump successfully exploited by labeling him “little Marco.”

Nikki Haley, who endorsed Rubio’s 2016 bid, is similarly finding out how hard it is to run against an aging Trump, even one who mixes her up with Nancy Pelosi on the campaign trail.

Despite many Gen X candidates’ eagerness to ascend to power, voters keep rehiring Boomer politicians. President Ronald Reagan’s quip in 1984 about his opponent’s “youth and inexperience” is still effective today.

While conservative media takes delight in tracking Biden’s senior moments, the 77-year-old Trump seems to instinctively understand that it’s not his best line of attack. For example, following the Hur report on the handling of classified documents, Trump’s reaction focused not on Biden’s memory but on the appearance of a double standard in the justice system. While Trump makes light of Biden’s gaffes, his main message focuses on his own personal grievances and issues voters care about, including immigration.

It’s true that voters tell pollsters Biden’s age is a concern, but his fitness for office will only be a major issue if one of two things happen: First, Republicans would have to make a persuasive argument that Biden’s age is hurting average Americans. It’s possible the high number of voters who describe Biden as a “weak leader” could blame his advancing age on mishandling issues they care about. But conservatives’ argument that Biden is too old to effectively implement his own dangerous left-wing policies is an obvious contradiction.

A more likely scenario for how age would keep Biden from a second term would be a high-stakes senior moment that legitimately alarmed voters about Biden’s capacity to fulfill his basic duties as commander-in-chief. This concern explains why Biden’s staff is doing everything they can to shield him from big, unscripted moments like a pregame Super Bowl interview. An existential stumble could indeed come, but Republicans are not in control of their own destiny if they’re relying on that.

The 2024 election will offer voters clear choices on issues that directly impact every American, including tax rates, foreign policy, immigration and abortion. Voters will choose the candidate who best shares their values on those issues — regardless of age.

4 Myths About Ukraine that Might Sound Right But Are Actually Wrong

Eric Edelman and David J. Kramer — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Two years ago, Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked, premeditated, full-scale invasion of Ukraine based on several myths, including that Ukraine was not a “real” country and was militarily weak, and that the West was in disarray and would do little to stop him.

Ukrainians quickly destroyed some of these myths, along with much of Russia’s invading forces. Ukrainians preserved their capital, their leadership and regained much of the territory seized by Russian forces in the early days of 2022, albeit at terrible cost. And the West responded by imposing serious (if insufficient) economic sanctions on Russia and providing significant (if somewhat delayed) military assistance to Ukraine.

Other myths, however, linger to this day and new ones have popped up more recently, particularly in the debate in Congress over whether to continue U.S. aid to Ukraine. As Republicans who served in top national security positions, we’re particularly concerned when we hear some of these myths repeated by Republicans.

So here are four myths about Ukraine that you might have heard, and some of the reasons they are untrue.

Myth One: Ukraine Cannot Win

Let’s start with the big one, the myth that U.S. support will feed an endless war with no possibility of Ukrainian victory.

Ukraine has performed heroically and successfully. It has regained huge swaths of territory seized by Russia starting in February 2022. It should not surprise us that the remaining 18 percent or so is the hardest to regain. Had the West provided Ukraine the weapons the country’s leadership had requested early on — from missile defense systems and long-range missiles to fighter jets and tanks — this war might look a lot different.

The Ukrainian military has been creative under fire, coming up with ways to counterattack that have surprised the enemy. Russia’s vaunted Black Sea Fleet has essentially been forced out of Sevastopol as Ukraine claims it has disabled a third of Russia’s ships, enabling exports to resume through the Black Sea. Ukraine has also inflicted huge losses on Russia’s military, cutting its conventional capabilities in half, according to estimates from the U.K. chief of defense and the U.S. Director of Central Intelligence. According to Estonia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia has lost 8,300 armored fighting vehicles in Ukraine; this includes 2,600 tanks, 5,100 armored personnel carriers, and 600 self-propelled artillery units. That equipment takes time to replace. In addition, Ukraine has called Russia’s nuclear bluff by launching deep strikes against key infrastructure targets inside Russia without incurring any nuclear response.

Russian personnel losses are approaching 400,000 dead and wounded. It is a mistake to assume that there is no breaking point for those Russians sent to the front lines who are essentially cannon fodder. Already there are signs that Russia will have trouble with a new round of mobilization.

Much of this was achieved thanks to assistance from the West. U.S. support for Ukraine consists of less than 4 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget and yet the return on investment for the Ukrainian people and for us has paid off handsomely. Without expending a single American soldier, we have reduced the military potential of Russia, an adversary which the National Defense Strategy of 2022 described as an “acute” threat to the United States.

Of course, it would be helpful if the Biden administration were more clear in defining the goal of a Ukrainian victory instead of the current nebulous “as long as it takes” objective. But we agree that the best strategy for the United States should be Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat — driving every Russian occupying soldier off Ukrainian territory, holding Russia accountable for the war crimes it has committed, and seizing Russian frozen assets to help cover the cost of the destruction Putin has caused.

If we learned nothing else from the initial full-scale invasion two years ago, it’s that we shouldn’t underestimate the Ukrainians’ ability, bravery and determination to win, or overstate Russian military prowess and operational virtuosity. Despite a very difficult and painful two years, Ukrainians by large majorities believe they can achieve victory. At this point, the main factor determining whether Ukraine wins or loses is assistance from the West and, in particular, the United States. If "Ukraine is left alone,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted during the Munich Security Conference, “Russia will destroy us."

Myth Two: It’s Time for a Cease-fire

The “endless war” myth feeds into another myth, which is that now is the time to reach a cease-fire or armistice.

Recent reports and Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin have suggested that Russia is interested in negotiations. These stories are belied by Russian actions on the ground, including the apparent execution of wounded Ukrainian POWs in Avdiivka and the continued bombardment and killings of Ukrainian civilians, atrocities denied by Russian officials.

Nobody wants this war to end sooner than Ukrainians do — they, after all, are the ones doing the fighting. But Ukrainians are rejecting territorial compromises and negotiations with Russia because they know that Putin has a long track record never abiding by agreements he signs. Nor do free Ukrainians want to consign millions of their fellow citizens in occupied areas to living under repressive Russian control. They and the world have seen, from Bucha to Mariupol, the war crimes and crimes against humanity, even genocide, that befall Ukrainians under Russian control.

A cease-fire would give Putin time to reconstitute his badly diminished forces so that he could threaten Ukraine, and possibly other countries, again. It would expose the United States as weak and unreliable, lacking the willpower and ability to sustain an assistance campaign that, remember, does not involve sending our troops into harm’s way. And it would embolden bad actors elsewhere in the world who would see, just as with the reckless withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a United States in retreat and open season for the targets of their aggression.

As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently wrote, “Russia’s brutal attempt to steal territory by force could serve as a blueprint for other authoritarian leaders around the globe. More countries would run the risk of falling prey to a nearby predator.” Recent assessments by Danish and Estonian intelligence believe Russia is gearing up to enable attacks on NATO members within the next five years. This is not a theoretical threat.

Myth Three: Ukraine Is Hopelessly Corrupt

Next, there’s the myth that Ukraine is a corrupt country led by neo-Nazis and therefore aiding Ukraine is throwing good money away.

In 2019, Ukrainians by a landslide elected the country’s first Jewish president, Zelenskyy, after previously having had a Jewish prime minister. Countries who elect Jews as their top leaders are most assuredly not “Nazis.” In fact, according to an Anti-Defamation League survey, Ukraine has experienced a significant drop in antisemitic attitudes in recent years.

Corruption has plagued Ukraine, like the rest of the former Soviet Union, for decades, but Zelenskyy was elected on an anti-corruption campaign. While there was dissatisfaction with his lack of progress on this front before February 2022, he and his government have cracked down significantly on allegations of corruption. Perhaps more importantly, tolerance for corruption among Ukrainians after the full-scale invasion has dropped significantly. The process of fighting corruption started 20 years ago but went through fits and starts. But Putin’s full-scale invasion changed that and spawned zero tolerance for such behavior.

Despite frequent complaints from members of Congress, there are actually more stringent monitoring mechanisms for U.S. aid for Ukraine than for almost anywhere else in the world. Oligarchs and government officials are being held accountable for corrupt behavior, reflecting significant progress. The former minister of defense, Oleksii Reznikov, was dismissed from his post, not because he personally engaged in corruption, but because he didn’t do enough to address it in his ministry. Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch who had backed Zelenskyy’s 2019 presidential campaign, has been arrested on corruption charges. When it comes to corruption, today’s Ukraine is not the same as the old Ukraine.

What’s more, unlike in Russia, Ukraine has a democratically elected president, accountable to the people. Ukraine holds free and fair elections and has experienced multiple democratic transfers of power. Among Ukraine’s greatest strengths are its vibrant civil society and media. And most Ukrainians support the country’s orientation toward the Euro-Atlantic community, including heightened backing for joining NATO and the European Union. Much of that rise in support is attributable to Putin’s invasion.

Myth Four: Ukraine Is the Wrong Priority

This brings us to the final myth that hangs over the war: namely, that supporting Ukraine distracts us from where we should really be concentrating our efforts — China and, since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, the Middle East.

China unquestionably poses a major challenge to the United States and our allies in the Asia-Pacific, especially Taiwan. But it is Russia that has invaded a neighboring state — for the third time following the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the two invasions of Ukraine, in 2014 and 2022. China hasn’t (yet). Putin’s invasion has already created the greatest security crisis on the European continent since World War II. By contrast, the military threat China poses is still prospective.

A clear Russian defeat in Ukraine will make conflict with China less likely because it will discourage Chinese leader Xi Jinping from considering military action against Taiwan. The Taiwanese know this and for that reason are among Ukraine’s biggest supporters. The support we give to Ukraine does not by and large subtract from the kinds of military readiness we need in the Asia-Pacific.

The simultaneous drawdown of support for Ukraine and Israel after Oct. 7, however, has underscored the need to address the parlous state of the U.S. defense industrial base and its ability to mobilize production of key munitions now. In fact, the supplemental request would enable us to ramp up our military industrial base to reflect the kind of world we are in right now.

Moreover, the burden for helping Ukraine is shared by our European allies more than some of the rhetoric might lead you to believe. In dollar terms, Europe is providing more economic assistance to Ukraine than we are and just recently approved an additional $54 billion in aid. As a percentage of GDP, the United States ranks 15th globally in terms of security assistance provided to Ukraine.

But U.S. military assistance is indispensable and irreplaceable. We need Europe to help us with the China challenge. Beijing’s support for Russia — which includes financing its war effort and supplying key dual-use components for its defense industrie

Where the 2024 GOP candidate field stands

Steven Shepard — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 20:34:12 -0500

We put the presidential hopefuls into categories based roughly on their chances to get the GOP nomination.

FOX News: Tucker Carlson: Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we're told crimes of the mob are our fault

Tucker Carlson — Sat, 30 May 2020 06:00:49 -0400

What you’re watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don’t, and seek to destroy it.

FOX News

Opinion | The Guardian: Music venues are where British culture is born. It's Britain's duty to keep them alive | Tony Naylor

Tony Naylor — Sat, 30 May 2020 03:00:37 -0400

It’s in no one’s interest for a billion-pound industry to fail – so why does the new culture taskforce hit all the wrong notes?

If British music has a soul, it resides in small venues. In hundreds of pub backrooms, grotty gig venues, DIY spaces and sweat-soaked basement clubs where lives are changed and, occasionally, history made. Alongside more established mid-sized venues, these places are talent incubators, providers of joy and a significant source of economic activity. More important, they also crystallise, if not trigger, profound cultural shifts – and have for almost 70 years.

From the Beatles at the Cavern or the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, to dubstep focal point FWD at London’s Plastic People (RIP), or Optimo’s legendary Sunday nights at Glasgow’s Sub Club, we live atop a thriving, ever-mutating underground that shapes how the UK looks, sounds and is. That underground influences not just what you hear on Radio 1 and high-street fashion but – certainly until 2016 – it helped fuel the slow, undeniable rise of a more socially progressive Britain. From hardcore punk gigs to LGBTQ+ all nighters, spilling out of the communion of the moshpit or dancefloor flows a more freethinking and tolerant society.

Continue reading...

Opinion | The Guardian

Opinion | The Guardian: Fit in my 40s: is cleaning as good as a fitness class? There's one way to find out | Zoe Williams

Zoe Williams — Sat, 30 May 2020 02:00:36 -0400

If you live in chaos, you can get a decent cardio workout just by tidying, moving things at speed off the floor of one room and into another

A couple of years ago, I was trying to place the entire fitness industry on the arc of feminism, with my friend who’s an aerobics teacher. What does it mean, if we’re all dropping a load of time and money trying to hone our glutes? Is it straight objectification? (Must look better to fit society’s view of female form! Must be best self to maximise market value in a neoliberal frame!) Or is it a story of emancipation and strength? (I don’t need a man – I can push over a car using only my thighs.) She said, “You’re partly looking at an aerobics class full of women who no longer do their own housework. The amount of physical activity is the same in a class, it’s just that nothing gets any cleaner.” So really it was more of a Marxist question than a feminist one, but never mind that now.

What I’ve been ruminating on recently is the question: is the amount of energy you expend cleaning the same as an aerobics class? Well, one: only if you plan it to be. Two: there will be gaps in the workout, but you can fill those with bodyweight bolt-ons. Three: cleaning demands – craves – music, because it otherwise drops to a sedate pace. I’d even suggest making some 20-minute 160BPM playlists. (I’ve got a musicals playlist, and everyone hates it: my mister because he hates musicals, the children because they say every time they hear The Greatest Showman, they know I’m going to be in a really self-righteous mood. This doesn’t deter me, as I am possessed by my own righteousness.)

Continue reading...

Opinion | The Guardian

Opinion | The Guardian: Why I quit working on Boris Johnson's ‘world-beating' test-and-tracing system | Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 30 May 2020 01:00:34 -0400

We’re not highly trained – we’ve been sitting around doing nothing. This programme is not fit to bring Britain out of lockdown

Boris Johnson tells Britain that our test-and-tracing system will be “world-beating”. Here’s what I’ve witnessed from the inside.

In March, I was furloughed by my employer. The financial impact was huge, and I decided to look for some temporary work to help with the bills. I saw an online ad for a temporary “customer service adviser”, which said: “You must have your own computer and high-speed internet to download our software and communicate with our customers … Don’t let lockdown stop you getting your dream job.”

I have some experience in customer service, so I applied, and was then telephoned by someone who asked me some basic questions about customer service. He said my answers were great, and proceeded to tell me the role was working on the government’s new track-and-trace programme. They would like to offer me a role, and I could start training the following Sunday.

Continue reading...

Opinion | The Guardian

World Socialist Web Site (en): Mass protests voice outrage over police murder of George Floyd