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17 July 21
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s protestors take to the streets in Cuba, defying a violent government crackdown, Americans across the political spectrum have a chance to break with old canards about the country. Progressives should understand that there is nothing remotely “progressive” about the thuggish, oppressive, neo-Stalinist government of Cuba. And conservatives should understand that six decades of embargoes, sanctions and unrelenting animosity have been an utter, dismal, counterproductive failure.
It is long past time to try something different: We need to tear down the metaphorical wall that bisects the Florida Straits and permit all manner of sustained engagement. Standing in solidarity with the Cuban people and supporting their aspirations would be much more terrifying to Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel than any new punitive measures we might impose.
The protests that erupted Sunday in cities and towns across the island have no antecedent in the communist era. The nearest comparison was a violent demonstration that took place in central Havana in 1994, during what the regime calls the “special period” — the years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when generous subsidies from Moscow ended and Cuba suffered crippling shortages of just about everything, especially food.
Today, once again, there is widespread and desperate privation, due to the effects of the covid-19 pandemic and a set of gratuitously cruel new sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. But Sunday’s protests were more numerous, more geographically dispersed and, most notably, were overtly political. One group of demonstrators even stood outside the headquarters of the Communist Party of Cuba and chanted: “Cuba is not yours!”
It is hard to overstate how much courage it took to challenge the regime so brazenly. The protesters knew they would surely face consequences that could include loss of employment, denial of housing, even years in prison. We should do what we can to ensure their sacrifice is not in vain.
I got to know Cuba in the early 2000s while making 10 extended trips there to research a book. Every time I went to the island, I felt more affection and admiration for the Cuban people — and a deeper loathing for the government that stunts and deforms their lives.
Yes, the regime under founding dictator Fidel Castro produced impressive gains in education, resulting in near-universal literacy. And the country trained a surplus of doctors and developed a health system that produces first-world results on indices such as infant mortality — though some of those statistics may be manipulated.
But with a few exceptions, the schools and hospitals I visited were crumbling. Much of the housing stock was crumbling, too, and horribly overcrowded. I admired the egalitarian ethos — the pride people felt in the fact that a highly trained medical doctor could live in a grim Soviet-style apartment complex next door to a garbage collector. But the elite “heroes of the revolution” I got to know, the famous athletes and musicians, lived in nice suburban-style houses and had permits allowing them to privately own cars, saving them the trouble of waiting hours for overcrowded buses that might or might not ever arrive. As George Orwell would have observed, some Cubans are more equal than others.
There is no freedom of expression in Cuba. There is no freedom of the press. There is no freedom of assembly. There are no competing political parties. The Cuban system has no resemblance to democratic socialism, because there is nothing remotely democratic about it. And Afro-Cubans showed me that racism, while diminished from the pre-revolution era, still warps Cuban society.
So how should the Biden administration proceed at this pivotal moment? First, it should do no harm. Like the Castro brothers before him, Díaz-Canel blames all of Cuba’s woes — and the “need” for censorship and other repressions — on the trade embargo and other hostile actions by the United States. Most of the anti-regime Cubans I know oppose the embargo, too. I fear that ratcheting up the pressure right now, as hard-liners advocate, would be more likely to inflame pro-government nationalist sentiment than to topple the regime.
Biden should make clear that the United States stands with the Cuban people, supports their yearning for freedom, and is ready to help with the coronavirus vaccines and food assistance. He should rescind the absurd Trump-era designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, which it is not. And if pro-democracy groups in Cuba believe it is a good idea, he should look into providing the island with Internet access, which the regime limits — and this week cut off — as an instrument of control.
Longer-term, U.S. policy should be to end the travel and trade embargoes and flood Cuba with American tourists, entrepreneurs and ideas. Trying to starve the Cuban regime into submission hasn’t worked. Flooding it with freedom just might.
Trump supporters stand on the U.S. Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol. (photo: Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/ZUMA)
“America, this is our Reichstag moment,” the column said, citing the eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder on the lessons of 20th-century authoritarianism. Snyder argued that President Donald Trump had “an authoritarian’s instinct” and was surrounding the election in “the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat.” Predicted Snyder: “It’s going to be messy.”
Trump enablers such as Sen. Lindsey Graham scoffed. “With all due respect to @Milbank, he’s in the bat$hit crazy phase of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the South Carolina Republican tweeted, with a link to my column.
But now we know that 1933 was very much on the mind of the nation’s top soldier, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides of Trump’s “stomach-churning” lies about election fraud. “The gospel of the Führer,” Milley labeled Trump’s claims.
Milley, as reported in a forthcoming book by The Post’s Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, feared that people around Trump were seeking to “overturn the government,” saw that pro-Trump protesters would serve as “brownshirts in the streets” — and was determined that “the Nazis aren’t getting in” to block Joe Biden’s inauguration.
American democracy survived that coup attempt on Jan. 6. But the danger has not subsided. I called Snyder, who accurately predicted the insurrection, to ask how the history of European authoritarianism informs our current state.
“We’re looking almost certainly at an attempt in 2024 to take power without winning election,” he told me Thursday. Recent moves in Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress the votes of people of color and to give the legislatures control over casting electoral votes “are all working toward the scenario in 2024 where they lose by 10 million votes but they still appoint their guy.”
History also warns of greater violence. “If people are excluded from voting rights, then naturally they’re going to start to think about other options, on the one side,” Snyder said. “But, on the other side, the people who are benefiting because their vote counts for more think of themselves as entitled — and when things don’t go their way, they’re also more likely to be violent.”
The extinguishing of our Reichstag fire on Jan. 6 made Trump’s failed coup less like 1933 Germany than 1923 Germany, when Hitler’s clownish Beer Hall Putsch failed. Historically, most coup attempts fail. “But a failed coup is practice for a successful coup,” Snyder said. This is what’s ominous about the Republicans’ determination to sabotage investigations that could help us learn from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Also ominous is the move in many Republican-controlled states to ban schools from teaching about systemic racism — “memory laws,” Snyder calls them — which “feeds into this authoritarian turn” by providing cover for the new attempts to disenfranchise more non-White voters. “They’re trying to ban the discussion of things like voter suppression, and it’s precisely the history of voter suppression which allows us to see it for what it is,” Snyder said.
It all boils down to this: “One of our two political parties is currently on an undemocratic track. That’s just the way it is, I think, for the 2022 and 2024 cycles.”
Many others are sounding similar alarms. A survey of 327 political scientists released this week by Bright Line Watch, a project by scholars at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, found widespread concern: The experts collectively estimated a 55 percent likelihood that at least some local officials will refuse to certify vote counts in 2024, a 46 percent likelihood that one or more state legislatures will pick electors contrary to the popular vote, and a 39 percent likelihood that Congress will refuse to certify the election.
This is why I write column after column not on the Biden administration, which is governing in conventional ways, but on the totalitarian lurch of the Republican Party. Admittedly, I’m partisan — not for Democrats but for democrats. At the moment, they are one and the same. Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy.
This is also why the attempt in Washington to protect voting rights must have primacy if we are to arrest the slide into political violence. “Voting rights is critical,” Snyder explained, because “it makes violence less likely” and it “will make the Republicans become a party that competes again instead of a party which just tries to rig the game at every stage.”
At the moment, Republicans are “digging themselves ever deeper into becoming a party which only wins by keeping other people from voting, and that’s a downward spiral,” he argued. The way to extinguish the next Reichstag fire is to demand — and require — that Republicans honor the right of all Americans to vote.
Soldiers. (photo: PA)
Almost 20 years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, as the Taliban takes district after district, withdrawing American troops are discarding vast piles of junk on bases they are now abandoning. In the process, the war on terror has become a retreat of terror, leaving behind horrified Afghans in a wrecked land. Now, as some of those troops actually return to the U.S. (minus the 650 still “guarding the embassy” in Kabul and another few hundred on call at that city’s airport), what exactly are they coming home to?
After all, Afghanistan didn’t get its nickname, “the graveyard of empires,” for nothing. In 1989, if you remember, when the Red Army finally limped home after its Afghan fiasco — from what its leader had by then begun calling its “bleeding wound” — it was returning to a Soviet Union only two years from implosion. For the American troops now “coming home” (that’s in quotes because some of them will undoubtedly be reshuffled elsewhere in the Greater Middle East), they probably won’t come back to a total implosion two years from now. After all, the U.S. remains richer and more powerful than the Soviets ever were. Still, they’ll certainly return to a land of staggering inequality whose political system seems to be cratering. And don’t think that our never-ending wars of this century and the untold trillions of taxpayer dollars poured into them didn’t play a role in the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House or the creation of an ever less functional political system seemingly at war with itself.
Today, TomDispatch regular, military spouse, and co-founder of the Costs of War Project Andrea Mazzarino offers an up-close-and-personal look at this country’s “bleeding wounds” — I make that phrase plural because, unlike the Soviets, in these years we’ve been fighting from Iraq to Somalia, Yemen to Libya. When you think about it, it’s quite a remarkable record of failed war. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Who Authorized America’s Wars?
And Why They Never End
ometimes, as I consider America’s never-ending wars of this century, I can’t help thinking of those lyrics from the Edwin Starr song, “(War, huh) Yeah! (What is it good for?) Absolutely nothing!” I mean, remind me, what good have those disastrous, failed, still largely ongoing conflicts done for this country? Or for you? Or for me?
For years and years, what came to be known as America’s “war on terror” (and later just its “forever wars”) enjoyed remarkable bipartisan support in Congress, not to say the country at large. Over nearly two decades, four presidents from both parties haven’t hesitated to exercise their power to involve our military in all sorts of ways in at least 85 countries around the world in the name of defeating “terrorism” or “violent extremism.” Such interventions have included air strikes against armed groups in seven countries, direct combat against such groups in 12 countries, military exercises in 41 countries, and training or assistance to local military, police, or border patrol units in 79 countries. And that’s not even to mention the staggering number of U.S. military bases around the world where counterterrorism operations can be conducted, the massive arms sales to foreign governments, or all the additional deployments of this country’s Special Operations forces.
Providing the thinnest of legal foundations for all of this have been two ancient acts of Congress. The first was the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that allowed the president to act against “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” It led, of course, to the disastrous war in Afghanistan. It was passed in the week after those attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. That bill’s lone opponent in the House, Representative Barbara Lee (D–CA), faced death threats from the public for her vote, though she stood by it, fearing all too correctly that such a law would sanction endless wars abroad (as, of course, it did).
The second AUMF passed on October 15, 2002, by a 77-23 vote in the Senate. Under the false rationale that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction (it didn’t), that AUMF gave President George W. Bush and his crew a green light to invade Iraq and topple its regime. Last month, the House finally voted 268-161 (including 49 Republican yes votes) to repeal the second of those authorizations.
Thinking back to when America’s “forever wars” first began, it’s hard to imagine how we could still be fighting in Iraq and Syria under the same loose justification of a war on terror almost two decades later or that the 2001 AUMF, untouched by Congress, still stands, providing the fourth president since the war on terror began with an excuse for actions of all sorts.
I remember watching in March 2003 from my home in northern California as news stations broadcast bombs going off over Baghdad. I’d previously attended protests around San Francisco, shouting my lungs out about the potentially disastrous consequences of invading a country based on what, even then, seemed like an obvious lie. Meanwhile, little did I know that the Afghan War authorization I had indeed supported, as a way to liberate the women of that country and create a democracy from an abusive state, would still be disastrously ongoing nearly 20 years later.
Nor did I imagine that, in 2011, having grasped my mistake when it came to the Afghan War, I would co-found Brown University’s Costs of War Project; nor that, about a decade into that war, I would be treating war-traumatized veterans and their families as a psychotherapist, even as I became the spouse of a Navy submariner. I would spend the second decade of the war on terror shepherding my husband and our two young children through four military moves and countless deployments, our lives breathless and harried by the outlandish pace of the disastrous forever (and increasingly wherever) wars that had come to define America’s global presence in the twenty-first century.
Amid all the talk about Joe Biden’s Afghan withdrawal decision which came “from the gut,” according to an official close to the president, it’s easy to forget that this country continues to fight some of those very same wars.
What Keeps Us Safe?
Take, for example, late last month when President Biden ordered “defensive” airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against reportedly Iran-backed Iraqi militia groups. Those groups were thought to be responsible for a series of at least five drone attacks on weapons storage and operational bases used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. The June American air strikes supposedly killed four militia members, though there have been reports that one hit a housing complex, killing a child and wounding three other civilians (something that has yet to be verified). An unnamed “senior administration official” explained: “We have a responsibility to demonstrate that attacking Americans carries consequences, and that is true whether or not those attacks inflict casualties.” He did not, however, explain what those American troops were doing in the first place at bases in Iraq and Syria.
Note that such an act was taken on presidential authority alone, with Congress thoroughly sidelined as it has been since it passed those AUMFs so long ago. To be sure, some Americans still argue that such preemptive attacks — and really, any military buildups whatsoever — are precisely what keep Americans safe.
My husband, a Navy officer, has served on three nuclear and ballistic submarines and one battleship. He’s also built a nearly 20-year career on the philosophy that the best instrument of peace, should either of the other two great powers on this planet step out of line, is the concept of mutually-assured destruction — the possibility, that is, that a president would order not air strikes in Syria, but nuclear strikes somewhere.
He and I argue about this regularly. How, I ask him, can any weapons, no less nuclear ones, ever be seen as instruments of safety? (Though living in the country with the most armed citizens on the planet, I know that this isn’t exactly a winning argument domestically.) I mean, consider the four years we’ve just lived through! Consider the hands our nuclear arsenal was in from 2017 to 2020!
My husband always simply looks at me as if he knows so much more than I do about this. Yet the mere hint of a plan for “peace” based on a world-ending possibility doesn’t exactly put me at ease, nor does a world in which an American president can order air strikes more or less anywhere on the planet without the backing of anyone else, Congress included.
Every time my husband leaves home to go to some bunker or office where he would be among the first to be sheltered from a nuclear attack, my gut clenches. I feel the hopelessness of what would happen if we ever reached that point of no return where the only option might be to strike back because we ourselves were about to die. It would be a “solution” in which just those in power might remain safe. Meanwhile, our more modest preemptive attacks against other militaries and armed groups in distant lands exact a seldom-recognized toll in blood and treasure.
Every time I hear about preemptive strikes like those President Biden ordered last month in countries we’re not even officially at war with, attacks that were then sanctioned across most of the political spectrum in Washington from Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, I wonder: How many people died in those attacks? Whose lives in those target areas were destroyed by uncertainty, fear, and the prospect of long-term anxiety?
In addition, given my work as a therapist with vets, I always wonder how the people who carried out such strikes are feeling right now. I know from experience that just following such life-ending orders can create a sense of internal distress that changes you in ways almost as consequential as losing a limb or taking a bullet.
How Our Wars Kill at Home
For years now, my colleagues and I at the Costs of War Project have struggled to describe and quantify the human costs of America’s never-ending twenty-first-century wars. All told, we’ve estimated that more than 801,000 people died in fighting among U.S., allied, and opposing troops and police forces. And that doesn’t include indirect deaths due to wrecked healthcare systems, malnutrition, the uprooting of populations, and the violence that continues to plague traumatized families in those war zones (and here at home as well).
According to a stunning new report by Boston University’s Ben Suitt, the big killer of Americans engaged in the war on terror has not, in fact, been combat, but suicide, which has so far claimed the lives of 30,177 veterans and active servicemembers. Suicide rates among post-9/11 war veterans are higher than for any cohort of veterans since before World War II. Among those aged 18 to 35 (the oldest of whom weren’t even of voting age when we first started those never-ending wars and the youngest of whom weren’t yet born), the rate has increased by a whopping 76% since 2005.
And if you think that those most injured from their service are the ones coming home after Iraq and Afghanistan, consider this: over the past two decades, suicide rates have increased most sharply among those who have never even been deployed to a combat zone or have been deployed just once.
It’s hard to say why even those who don’t fight are killing themselves so far from America’s distant battlefields. As a psychotherapist who has seen my share of veterans who attempted to kill or — later — succeeded in killing themselves, I can say that two key predictors of that final, desperate act are hopelessness and a sense that you have no legitimate contribution to make to others.
As Suitt points out, about 42% of Americans are now either unaware of the fact that their country is still fighting wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa or think that the war on terror is over. Consider that for a moment. What does it mean to be fighting wars for a country in which a near majority of the population is unaware that you’re even doing so?
As a military spouse whose partner has not been deployed to a combat zone, the burdens of America’s forever wars are still shared by us in concrete ways: more frequent and longer deployments with shorter breaks, more abusive and all-encompassing command structures, and very little clear sense of what it is this country could possibly be fighting for anymore or what the end game might be.
If strikes like the ones President Biden authorized last month reflect anything, it’s that there are few ways — certainly not Congress — of reining in our commander in chief from sending Americans to harm and be harmed.
“Are Soldiers Killers?”
I recall lying awake in 1991, at age 12, my stomach in knots, thinking about the first display of pyrotechnics I can remember, when President George H.W. Bush authorized strikes against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in what became known as the First Gulf War. I told my father then, “I can’t sleep because I think that something bad is going to happen!” I didn’t know what, but those balls of fire falling on Baghdad on my New Jersey TV screen seemed consequential indeed.
Where were they landing? On whom? What was going to happen to our country? My father, who used a minor college football injury to dodge the Vietnam draft and has supported every war since then, shrugged, patted me on the back, and said he didn’t know, but that I shouldn’t worry too much about it.
As a parent myself now, I can still remember what it was like to first consider that people might kill others. As a result, I try to keep a conversation going with my own children as they start to grapple with the existence of evil.
Recently, our six-year-old son, excited to practice his newfound reading skills, came across a World War II military history book in my husband’s office and found photos of both Nazi soldiers and Jewish concentration camp prisoners. He stared at the gaunt bodies and haunted eyes of those prisoners. After a first-grade-level conversation about war and hatred, he suddenly pointed at Nazi soldiers in one photo and asked, “Are soldiers killers?” My husband and I flinched. And then he asked: “Why do people kill?”
Over and over, as such questions arise, I tell my son that people die in wars because so many of us turn our backs on what’s going on in the world we live in. I’m all too aware that we stop paying attention to what elected officials do because we’ve decided we like them (or hate them but can’t be bothered by them). I tell him that we’re going to keep reading the news and talking about it, because my little family, whatever our arguments, agrees that Americans don’t care enough about what war does to the bodies and minds of those who live through it.
Here’s the truth of it: we shouldn’t be spending this much time, money, and blood on conflicts whose end games are left to the discretion of whoever our increasingly shaky electoral system places in this country’s highest office. Until we pressure lawmakers to repeal that 2001 AUMF and end the forever conflicts that have gone with it, America’s wars will ensure that our democracy and the rule of law as we know it will make any promises of peace, self-defense, and justice ring hollow.
Don’t doubt it for a second. War is a cancer on our democracy.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
The Michigan GOP has an aggressive plan to suppress the vote — and to bypass the governor’s veto.
State lawmakers proposed 39 different bills targeting elections, including ones that restrict absentee voting, a bill that could prevent the state from certifying elections, and a pair of bills that would give ordinary poll workers a simply extraordinary amount of power to restrict voting.
Until recently, Michigan seemed safe from the kind of anti-voting legislation that has proliferated in GOP-controlled states like Georgia and Texas. The state has a Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who could veto bills that seek to skew future elections toward the Republican Party, and the GOP’s majorities in the state legislature are too small to override a veto.
But, early this month, the state’s Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R) announced that Republicans plan to invoke a process that could allow them to bypass the governor’s veto and pass a package of “half a dozen” election-related bills. Under the state constitution, a relatively small group of voters can propose legislation through a petition and then this legislation can be enacted by the state legislature. Using this process, the GOP-controlled legislature could enact this package by a simple majority vote in both houses, and Whitmer would be powerless to veto it — although Democrats could potentially force a voter referendum on the GOP package.
Moreover, while it is not yet clear which proposals will be included in Shirkey’s half-dozen bills, some of the dozens of proposals from GOP lawmakers appear to serve no purpose other than to make voting onerous enough that it disenfranchises voters. A pair of bills that passed the state House, for example, could force at least some voters to show ID twice on two separate occasions — once at their polling place and again to a county clerk located at a central government office — or else their ballot will be tossed out.
The stakes in this fight are quite high, not just for Michiganders and their state politics but for national politics as well. Michigan had one of the closest US Senate races in the country in 2020 — a race that would have thrown control of the Senate to the GOP if Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) had performed slightly worse. It’s also a key battleground state that former President Donald Trump won in 2016, and President Joe Biden won in 2020. If Biden does not win Michigan in 2024, his path to reelection looks grim.
While ballots were still being counted in the 2020 election, hundreds of Trump supporters — some of them carrying firearms — protested the count in the Democratic stronghold of Detroit. Republican officials in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, briefly tried to block certification of the vote tallies in that county, although they eventually backed down. After Aaron Van Langevelde, a state-level official on Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, voted to certify Biden’s victory in the state as a whole, Republicans removed him from the board.
According to the Associated Press, Trump personally lobbied Republican officials in Michigan in an attempt to block Biden’s victory, even summoning members of the state legislature to the White House.
The new round of election legislation, in other words, might only disenfranchise small numbers of people, depending on which bills make it into law and how they’re applied. But they appear to be part of a broader effort to discredit elections won by Democrats, to place a thumb on the electoral scales in favor of Republicans, and to vindicate Trump’s lie that he, not Biden, won the 2020 election. And, in this closely divided state, even a small number of disenfranchised voters could swing an election.
So what is in the Michigan GOP’s package of bills?
It’s not yet clear which of the 39 bills proposed by state lawmakers Republicans plan to push. These bills include a wide range of proposals to make it harder to vote, including limiting the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots, imposing stricter ID requirements on voters, empowering partisan election observers, and requiring a supermajority on county election boards to agree to certify election results.
In a July 1 interview, however, Shirkey signaled that a voter ID requirement is likely to be part of the package, describing an ID requirement as “rock solid.” Voter ID laws require voters to show identification in order to vote. Republicans often defend these laws as necessary to prevent voter impersonation at the polls, but numerous studies and investigations show that such fraud is virtually nonexistent.
Still, generally they’re popular proposals, across the political spectrum — one recent poll shows 80 percent of American registered voters support voter ID.
The Michigan GOP’s leading voter ID proposal, however, goes far beyond simply requiring voters to show ID at the polls. Two bills, labeled SB 303 and SB 304, have already passed the state House, and they would effectively require an unknown number of voters to show ID twice, at two separate locations, in order to vote.
Under current law, Michigan voters who do not have identification may still vote if they sign an affidavit testifying that they lack such ID. SB 303 eliminates voters’ ability to sign such an affidavit, effectively requiring all voters to show ID. That’s fairly in line with other voter ID laws already adopted or under consideration in other states.
But SB 303 also requires every voter to sign a form before they can vote. The signature on this form must be examined by a poll worker and compared to “the elector’s digitized signature contained in the electronic poll book.” If, in the poll worker’s subjective determination, the signatures do not match, then the voter will be given a provisional ballot.
SB 304, meanwhile, lays out what happens to these provisional ballots. Essentially, a voter given such a ballot has six days to prove their identity and residency to the county or township clerk — something that they can do by showing many of the same forms of ID that they are already required to show at the polls.
Read together, the two bills create an absurd situation where some voters could be disenfranchised unless they make a special trip to the clerk’s office to show the same ID card that they already provided to the poll worker. Imagine, for example, that a voter shows their valid driver’s license at the polls, but a poll worker, for whatever reason, declares that the voter’s signature does not match. The voter then has less than a week to make a special trip to the clerk’s office to show the clerk the exact same driver’s license.
It’s not hard to see how such a system could be abused. A Republican poll worker might randomly force voters in a Democratic-leaning area to make the special trip to the clerk’s office. Or this poll worker might use race as a proxy to identify voters who are likely to be Democrats — perhaps only giving provisional ballots to Black voters.
Meanwhile, a third bill (this third bill has not passed either house), requires local election officials to appoint one Republican poll worker for every two Democrats in these roles. That could mean that, in a Democratic stronghold like Detroit, up to one-third of all voters could be subjected to an arbitrary signature-matching test administered by a GOP partisan.
Most of the voting restrictions circulating in the state legislature are more modest than SB 303 and 304. Many of them make relatively marginal incursions on voting, such as requiring ballot drop boxes to have video surveillance or prohibiting the secretary of state from sending unsolicited absentee ballot applications to voters. Other proposals are potentially more troubling, such as a bill that would give partisan poll watchers greater authority to challenge whether an individual voter is allowed to cast a ballot.
And it’s worth repeating that two bills that would give extraordinarily open-ended authority to poll workers acting in bad faith have already passed one house of the Michigan legislature. Should SB 303 and 304 become law in their current forms, they would immediately rank among the most troubling election laws in the country — potentially rivaled only by a Georgia law that allows the state GOP to effectively takeover local election boards that have the power to shut down polling places and disqualify voters.
Again, it’s still unclear what, exactly, will be in the GOP’s final package of changes to the state’s election law. In his July 1 interview, Shirkey said that “we could have used a few handwriting experts in this last election” to screen voters and that he does not oppose the House’s proposal “in principle.” But he also said that he is “not sure” if the signature requirement will be included in the GOP’s final package, and Republicans will have to “do what is possible.”
At the very least, however, much of the Michigan GOP appears to be setting its sights high as they pull this package together.
So why can’t the governor veto all of this?
The most significant announcement Shirkey made in his interview early this month was that voters should “keep their eyes and ears open for the potential for a citizen initiative” that will be “driven by” the state Republican Party. That opens the door to a Rube Goldberg-like process that Republicans may use to bypass Gov. Whitmer’s veto.
It works like this: Under Michigan’s constitution, a small minority of the electorate may propose laws, and these proposals will ordinarily be placed before voters as a ballot initiative. Other states, like California, also allow ballot initiatives. In Michigan, however, the state legislature may intervene midway through the process to turn a proposed ballot initiative into law. A small percentage of voters can propose something, and just over half of the statehouse can make it law. Moreover, the state constitution also provides that “no law initiated or adopted by the people shall be subject to the veto power of the governor.”
To begin this process, Republicans have to collect a number of signatures from Michigan voters totaling “not less than eight percent . . . of the total vote cast for all candidates for governor at the last preceding general election at which a governor was elected.” That works out to about 333,000 signatures in 2021. Once the petition process is complete, the state legislature has 40 session days to approve the law proposed by a petition drive, and the governor cannot veto.
Democrats can deploy a countermeasure against this maneuver. The state constitution also allows voters to implement a “referendum” against most laws passed by the legislature, including one that was originally proposed through the initiative process. To trigger a referendum, Democrats would have to collect signatures totaling 5 percent of the total votes cast in the last governor’s race — or a little more than 200,000 signatures.
Significantly, if Democrats trigger a referendum, the law is suspended until the entire electorate has an opportunity to weigh in on it during an election, and if a majority of the electorate rejects the law, it will never take effect.
Republicans, in other words, won’t be able to do whatever they want. But Democrats also cannot rest assured that Whitmer’s veto will prevent anti-democratic bills from becoming law. At the very least, it seems likely that fate of future elections in a crucial battleground state will rest on the outcome of a referendum.
And the outcome of that referendum could hinge on whether voters understand what exactly is in the GOP’s package of new election laws. If Michigan voters think this fight is primarily a referendum on voter ID, Republicans have a good chance of prevailing — a recent Monmouth University poll found that 80 percent of registered voters in the United States support requiring photo identification to vote.
If, on the other hand, voters believe that they are voting on a highly partisan set of proposals that could allow random poll workers to disenfranchise voters, then Republicans are probably less likely to succeed.
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
Texas federal judge’s ruling prevents government from approving new applications but doesn’t affect current recipients
oe Biden has said the US Department of Justice intends on appealing a new court decision that effectively halts an Obama-era program aimed at protecting young immigrants from deportation.
Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen on Friday deemed illegal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program. This program prevents the deportation of immigrants who were brought to the US unlawfully as children, known as “Dreamers”.
This ruling bars the government from approving any new applications – in other words, suspending Daca. For now, Daca is preserved for the more than 616,000 people enrolled in the program until other courts weigh in. Hanen’s decision is also in favor of the eight other conservative states suing to thwart Daca.
“Yesterday’s federal court ruling is deeply disappointing. While the court’s order does not now affect current Daca recipients, this decision nonetheless relegates hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to an uncertain future,” the president’s statement said.
“The Department of Justice intends to appeal this decision in order to preserve and fortify Daca. And, as the court recognized, the Department of Homeland Security plans to issue a proposed rule concerning Daca in the near future.”
Daca has come under fire from conservatives since its creation in 2012. Texas in 2018 requested to halt the program through a preliminary injunction.
While Hanen denied this request, his ruling then appears to have presaged. Hanen stated that he believed Daca, as instituted, was probably unconstitutional without Congress’s approval.
Hanen also decided in 2015 that Barack Obama could not broaden Daca protections or implement a program that protected Dreamers’ parents.
In September 2017, the Trump administration announced that it planned to end Daca, throwing recipients into turmoil. Following extensive legal battles, the US supreme court blocked Donald Trump’s efforts.
Biden has pushed for Daca to become permanent, and vowed on the campaign trail that he would make the program permanent. While the US House green-lit legislation in March that created a path toward citizenship for Dreamers, the measure has languished in the Senate.
“In 2012, the Obama-Biden administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) policy, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to remain in the United States, to live, study and work in our communities. Nine years later, Congress has not acted to provide a path to citizenship for Dreamers,” Biden’s statement also said.
“But only Congress can ensure a permanent solution by granting a path to citizenship for Dreamers that will provide the certainty and stability that these young people need and deserve. I have repeatedly called on Congress to pass the American Dream and Promise Act, and I now renew that call with the greatest urgency.
“It is my fervent hope that through reconciliation or other means, Congress will finally provide security to all Dreamers, who have lived too long in fear,” Biden said.
American and Colombian soldiers stand during multinational military exercises at the Tolemaida Air Base in Tolemaida, Colombia, Jan. 26, 2020. (photo: Ivan Valencia/Getty Images)
Trainings for the Colombian mercenaries accused of killing Haitian President Jovenel Moïse were conducted in both the U.S. and Colombia, some as recently as 2015.
ore than a quarter of the ex-Colombian soldiers currently suspected in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse received U.S. military training, The Intercept confirmed Friday, with some of the alleged attackers participating in programs as recently as 2015 that ranged from vehicle maintenance and professional development to counterterrorism and drug war operations. Courses were held in both Colombia and the United States.
The Pentagon and the State Department are currently reviewing internal records to determine precisely how many of the alleged assassins were trained by the U.S. “To date, State and DoD have identified seven individuals among a possible 25 alleged to have been involved by Haitian authorities, that previously participated in past U.S. military training and education programs, while previously serving in the Colombian military,” a U.S. government official confirmed in an email to The Intercept. “Individuals had been approved for a variety of training activities held both in Colombia and the United States between 2001-2015.”
On Thursday, the Pentagon confirmed to the Washington Post that “a small number” of the Colombian mercenaries suspected in the July 7 assassination had received U.S. training, though the department did not say how many, nor when, nor what type of training was provided. According to the official who spoke to The Intercept, “Examples of the types of training received were various types of military leadership and professional development training, emergency medical training, helicopter maintenance, and attendance at seminars on counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism.”
From 2000, when the United States first launched the massive, multibillion drug war aid program known as Plan Colombia, to 2018, the U.S. administered more than 107,640 trainings of Colombian security personnel, noted Adam Isacson, director of the Defense Oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America, a figure that far surpasses any other military collaboration the U.S. maintains in the region. “Nothing comes close to 107,000 over the last 20 years,” Isacson told The Intercept. “Nothing.”
Eighteen former Colombian soldiers are currently being held in Haiti in connection with Moïse’s assassination, including some who previously served in elite Colombian special operations units. New details on their involvement in the assassination continue to break by the day. On Wednesday, the Colombian news magazine Semana reported that one of the former soldiers confessed that the mercenary team was responsible for the assassination and that the killing was orchestrated by an inner circle of seven mercenaries within the larger group. The magazine reported that investigators had also recovered surveillance footage of the attack.
Family members of many of the detained Colombians have said that their loved ones believed they were being hired to provide personal security for a VIP in Haiti and that they did not sign on to participate in an assassination. Speaking to reporters Thursday, Colombian President Iván Duque said that regardless of individual levels of insight into the operation’s true intent, all would be held responsible for Moïse’s killing.
To Isacson, little about the kind of training the alleged assassins experienced with the U.S. military stood out as particularly unique given the long-standing relationship between the U.S. and Colombia: In any random sample of some two dozen mid-level Colombian military veterans, it is more likely than not that some amount of U.S. training would turn up. “They’re not training every recruit or every private, but they are training a lot of people at that level,” Isacson said. “So it’s very likely they would have received us trading just through sheer statistical probability.”
Still, Isacson argued, the fact that the mercenaries’ training was not unusual does not mean there is not reason for concern. “I worry about the United States being associated with or even increasing the lethal skills of military and police units around the region that are either abusive or corrupt or undemocratic, and of course that’s always been a huge risk in Colombia, given its human rights record. So it does require a lot of scrutiny to make sure that we are not associating ourselves with or improving the lethal skills of people who end up doing what we just saw in Haiti, but also people who end up doing what we just saw in Bogotá and Cali since late April,” he said, referring to recent and violent crackdowns by Colombian security forces on protesters. “We don’t want to be associated with that.”
A gray wolf. (photo: National Geographic)
A new report shows legal and illegal killings wiped out as much as a third of the state’s gray wolf population in 2021.
olf biologists and tribal nations voiced their objections going into Wisconsin’s court-ordered gray wolf hunt last February, and they were even more dismayed with how the hunt was planned and executed — early reports showed hunters killed almost double the allotted number of wolves.
But that startling figure only represents officially documented kills. Now that researchers have had time to assess the full extent of the hunt’s damage, they’ve found the outcome was far worse than initially reported: According to a report published by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, legal and illegal killings wiped out as much as a third of the state’s gray wolf population.
After the Trump administration announced on Oct. 29, 2020 that it would remove gray wolves from the endangered species list, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) started planning a wolf hunt for fall 2021. But on Feb. 11, in response to a lawsuit from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and a Kansas hunting organization, Jefferson County Judge Bennett Brantmeier ordered the DNR to organize a hunt by the end of the month.
The hunt began less than two weeks later, on Feb. 22, and the DNR shut it down in just 39 hours given the high initial kill totals. Hunters had 24 hours after closing to finish reporting their kills, and when the final numbers came in, the death toll stood at 216 wolves, almost double the DNR’s quota of 119.
There could have been even more wolf deaths; Wisconsin’s tribal nations declined to exercise their right to kill 81 wolves in their territories.
This month, the team of wolf researchers, headed by Adrian Treves with the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at UW-Madison, published a report that estimated that the wolf population had decreased by 27%-33% from an estimated population of 1,034 in April 2020 —leaving an estimated population range of 695 – 751 wolves as of April 15, 2021.
Treves estimates an additional 98 to 105 wolves have been killed since their delisting was announced, but he cautioned the number of unreported killings “could be much higher.”
“We only made bulletproof assumptions … that were more cautious, based on peer reviewed science,” Treves said in an interview.
He continued, “What it means is that our estimates of the population are, really, plausible maximum population status. It could be quite lower.”
“It’s a novelty hunting experience...and for some people it’s truly a vengeance hunt."
Francisco Santiago-Ávila, a co-author on the study, said the additional killed wolves were likely the victims of illegal poaching, based on other research co-authored by Treves that found deslisting or downgrading wolves from their protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) leads to an increase in poaching.
“When you’re reducing protections for wolves in any way, be it through downgrading or delisting from the ESA … you’re sending a signal to would-be poachers on the landscape that either there are too many wolves on the landscape or that they are not valued as much anymore,” Santiago-Ávila said. “That essentially may incentivize the culling and concealing of wolves that are never reported.”
Santiago-Ávila said other potential reasons for losing track of the wolves — such as tracking collar malfunctions or migration — do not adequately explain the high number of wolves that go missing when their ESA status changes.
“The policy itself wouldn’t affect those two mechanisms,” Santiago-Ávila said. “The policy affects human behavior.”
Even before the report was published, Peter David, a biologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) — which regulates hunting, fishing, and gathering on tribal lands in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota — said he had already suspected the hunt was going to have an outsized impact on the wolf population.
According to David, the quota set by the DNR was higher than what scientific models recommended for the DNR to reach its stated goal of having no impact on the wolf population. The timing of the wolf hunt was particularly problematic: February is the point when the wolf population is the lowest and the beginning of the wolf breeding season; hunts are typically held in late fall or early winter.
“[The February hunt] is really unlike any other wolf harvest anywhere, that it was completely concentrated within that window,” David said. “All the factors make me think that the impact of this harvest was very substantial.”
Holding the hunt during the breeding season affects wolves’ ability to breed and return the population to pre-hunt levels. Charlie Rasmussen, also with GLIFWC, said GLIFWC biologists who examined some of the donated carcasses from the hunt found that one was an impregnated female with nine developing wolf fetuses.
“It was a difficult examination for GLIFWC biologists to do,” Rasmussen said.
“It's important to recognize that wolves are very good at regulating their own numbers.”
Treves’ study recommended against holding a wolf hunt this November, which David and Rasmussen said is also the opinion of GLIFWC and the tribes they represent. There is precedent for this kind of policy shift: DNR announced this month that it will cancel the sharp-tailed grouse hunt for the third year in a row to protect that population. If this fall’s wolf hunt is cancelled, Treves’ study estimated it would take the wolf population one to two years to rebound to it’s April 2020 level.
More broadly, all of the researchers interviewed for this story agreed that there is no need to manage the wolf population at all.
“It’s important to recognize that wolves are very good at regulating their own numbers,” David said. “Because of their territorial behavior and other aspects, their numbers never get very high. And if you look at neighboring Minnesota or the upper peninsula of Michigan, both of those wolf populations have essentially plateaued without any hunting to drive their numbers down.”
Pro-hunt advocates argue the hunt is a way to mitigate the risk of wolves preying on livestock, other wild game, such as deer, or their risk to humans and pets. David said those arguments don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.
While livestock predation is a legitimate concern, David said, a wolf hunt is not an effective way to address the issue. Instead, he said it’s more effective to continue using the system in which farmers contact federal officials who investigate the attacks and can take a number of steps to address the situation, such as killing or relocating the wolf.
“That kind of a response is very timely and it’s very targeted to the location and to the wolves that might be involved,” David said.
By contrast, David pointed out that nine of the ten of the wolves killed during the last hunt were more than eight miles from any confirmed sites where wolves had killed livestock.
“There’s very little reason to think that any appreciable number of those wolves were actually involved in depredations,” David said.
As for the arguments about human safety, David pointed out that it’s incredibly rare for a wolf to attack a human, and in those cases, addressing that individual wolf is more effective than a statewide hunt.
In response to hunters’ concerns about wolves killing deer, Treves argued that there are benefits to wolves preying on deer. For example, one study found that counties with wolves have lower rates of vehicles colliding with deer on the road.
Furthermore, Treves said, “In a state with over a million deer that are acknowledged to do hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to crops and ornamentals and vehicles, we actually need more apex predators in this state to control the overwhelming deer population that’s acknowledged by scientists and public officials to be causing us a lot of problems.”
David also pointed to evidence that wolves help control the spread of chronic wasting disease, which is a substantial threat to the deer population and people or predators who consume infected deer. Overall, the researchers said, scientific studies have found that the benefits of having a healthy wolf population outweigh the small risks.
David doubts that ecological concerns are the true motivation for pro-hunt advocates, especially given the evidence that wolves benefit the natural environment. Instead, he believes the pro-hunt movement is motivated by novelty and revenge.
“It’s a novelty hunting experience, and it’s an opportunity to harvest something that people haven’t harvested before,” David said. “And for some people it’s truly a vengeance hunt … on occasion, [people] will lose dogs to wolves, when they’re training their dogs especially, and wolves have pups that they will defend. And this was a chance for, I think, the community to get revenge on the wolf population.”
Meanwhile, David argued, the cultural significance of the wolf to the Ojibwe “doesn’t get taken very seriously.” The tribes have told the DNR they do not support holding a wolf hunt this fall.
David and other biologists are the first to admit there’s a lot that researchers still don’t know about wolves and their ecological role. But David thinks that, given what humans do know, the DNR should seriously consider leaving wolf management to Mother Nature.
“I think oftentimes we are a bit arrogant and at what we think we understand,” David said. “Wolves are a natural part of this landscape for an incredibly long time, and ecologically, it’s reasonable to think that they have a valuable role here. And in all likelihood, we have barely scratched the understanding of that, so we need to be a little bit humble and give nature the benefit of the doubt.”
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