02 July 21
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2021. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty)
The speaker is trying to regain the upper hand from Senate moderates. Will it work?
resident Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of 10 senators were all smiles Thursday when they announced they’d struck a deal on a framework for an infrastructure bill.
But since then, leaders and ideological factions in both parties have engaged in intense political gamesmanship, with everyone trying to get the upper hand to shape the legislative agenda to their liking — or to scuttle it altogether.
It’s weird to say a trillion-dollar infrastructure deal is basically a sideshow, but in political terms, this one more or less is. Key players have been much more focused on what such a deal means for a separate, much larger spending bill that Democrats are trying to put together and pass through the budget reconciliation process. (Budget reconciliation bills can pass the Senate with a simple majority, unlike ordinary bills, which require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.)
Democrats had grand ambitions for that next big reconciliation bill. This is where progressives hoped to go for broke, spending several trillion more on health care, climate change, and other issues. And, importantly, if the bipartisan infrastructure deal does fall apart, Democrats could incorporate their preferred parts of that deal in reconciliation as a fallback.
So, to the extent the fate of the bipartisan deal matters, it’s in how it will impact the decision-making of pivotal Senate moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) on reconciliation. They are, after all, the reason the infrastructure talks with Republicans happened in the first place: They insisted on a bipartisan effort. Their votes would also be necessary to pass any reconciliation bill.
And when the bipartisan deal was announced, progressives were stricken with fear that their moderate colleagues couldn’t be relied on.
Hostage-taking or bluff?
The main reason progressives reacted so negatively to the infrastructure deal is that they had dreamed of doing so much more, and worried they wouldn’t be able to. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), for instance, called it “way too small,” “paltry,” and “pathetic.”
They fear that, with a bipartisan deal in hand on a major topic that demonstrates Congress can work, Manchin and other moderates may well be inclined to call it a day. They might not choose to pass a reconciliation bill at all, or could severely scale one back.
Moderate Republicans involved in the deal indeed hope this will happen — or at least that Manchin’s ilk will be less likely to support filibuster reform if they get something done. But their conservative colleagues fear they’re being played. They are cynical about Manchin and company, believing they’ll happily pocket whatever concessions Republicans offer on infrastructure, bask in the good bipartisan vibes, and then proceed to reconciliation, where they’ll do whatever Democratic leaders want.
Democratic leaders are indeed trying their best to make sure that happens. In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would link the two bills together, to prevent the party’s left from losing heart. “There ain’t going to be an infrastructure bill unless we have the reconciliation bill passed by the United States Senate,” Pelosi said Thursday.
This is an attempt to put the moderate Democrats in a box. It’s a promise from Pelosi to hold their cherished bipartisan deal hostage unless they fall in line with Biden’s reconciliation plan. It’s not clear whether this was necessary, since Manchin had already started speaking positively about the reconciliation effort. It also may be a bluff — if the reconciliation effort does fall apart, would Pelosi and House Democrats really choose doing nothing over settling for whatever got through the Senate? But Democrats hope the moderates will simply fall in line, so they don’t have to find out.
Unexpectedly, President Biden made a similar threat moments after the happy announcement of the bipartisan deal last week. “If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” he declared. The fact that Biden hoped to pass a reconciliation bill was not new; the pledge to make the bipartisan bill contingent on the reconciliation bill was. But as Republicans reacted with outrage and there was chatter that the deal could be in jeopardy, Biden seems to have realized this was a mistake and walked it back.
After that, some Republicans have taken the opportunity to try and push things further. McConnell said in a Monday statement that Biden had appropriately “de-linked” the two bills, and that Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should follow his lead. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) went further, suggesting he wanted Manchin and Sinema to pledge to oppose any reconciliation bill.
So it remains unclear whether the bipartisan deal will result in a bill passing the Senate. The agreement was on a framework, and it still needs to be turned into an actual bill. Even more importantly, there were only five Republican senators at the White House celebrating the deal — and 10 would be needed to overcome a filibuster.
But, again, if Republicans ditch the deal, the substantive stakes are low; Democrats have reconciliation as a fallback. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) even suggested Republicans’ “good ideas” would be included in the reconciliation bill as well if the bipartisan deal collapses.
The real drama is yet to come: just what else Senate Democrats’ reconciliation bill will include. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has floated an up to $6 trillion package that would allow 60- to 64-year-olds to enroll in Medicare. Manchin said Sunday that he could go as high as $2 trillion and wants it all to be paid for.
Somehow, they will have to agree on the same bill — or Democrats will get nothing through reconciliation at all.
U.S. Supreme Court. (photo: NBC)
n a pair of major rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has gutted more of the Voting Rights Act while making it easier for billionaires to secretly bankroll political campaigns. In a 6-3 vote, the conservative justices upheld two Arizona election laws that have been widely criticized for their impact on minority voters, sending a signal that other voting restrictions in Republican-led states are also likely to be ruled constitutional if challenges are brought to the high court. In a separate case, the court’s conservative majority struck down a California law that required charities to privately disclose their top donors to the state attorney general, which could open the door to more “dark money” spending in campaigns. Ben Jealous, president of People for the American Way and former president of the NAACP, says the Supreme Court’s actions reflect the conservative takeover of the federal judiciary. “They are hijacking our democracy from the top to aid and abet these Republican governors who have sought to hijack it from the bottom,” he says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: In a 6-to-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has further gutted the Voting Rights Act by upholding two racially discriminatory voter laws in Arizona. The ruling is a major setback for voting rights and comes at a time when Republican state lawmakers are pushing sweeping voter suppression bills across the United States.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote, quote, “What is tragic here is that the Court has yet again rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about 'the end of discrimination in voting,'” she wrote.
In a statement, President Biden criticized the ruling, saying, quote, “In a span of just eight years, the Court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” unquote.
Legal experts say the ruling will make it harder to challenge new voter suppression laws in court. Just last week, the Justice Department sued the state of Georgia, saying its new voter laws discriminate against Black voters.
In a second major ruling Thursday, also a 6-to-3 decision, the court struck down a California law requiring nonprofit organizations reveal the names of large donors to the state. The case was brought by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a right-wing group founded by the Koch brothers. Election law experts predict the ruling could lead to challenges of campaign finance disclosure laws and a surge in dark money spending on elections.
CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair summarized the court’s rulings by writing, quote, “In two decisions today, the Supreme Court restricted the ability to regulate the influence of dark money in politics and gutted voting rights. In other words, it made it easier to buy an election and harder to actually vote in one,” he said.
To talk more about these cases, we’re joined by Ben Jealous, the president of People for the American Way. He’s the former president of the NAACP and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Ben. Let us start with the first 6-to-3 decision, because they both were, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Can you explain exactly what the laws were in Arizona that the Supreme Court upheld?
BEN JEALOUS: Well, the most important part here is what this completes. The Shelby decision gutted Section 5. Section 5 made it possible for the U.S. Department of Justice to stop discriminatory voter laws before they went into effect. This decision guts Section 2. Section 2 makes it possible to stop a discriminatory law after it’s been proven to be discriminatory. And so, what this completes is the gutting of the most important piece of democracy legislation created in our country.
And what we should all be concerned about is that what this also sends a signal — both of these decisions together — is really that the true legacy of the Trump administration is not so much the insurrection on January 6th as it was the takeover of our courts. We now have six very conservative justices. They are stealing our democracy. They are hijacking our democracy from the top to aid and abet these Republican governors who have sought to hijack it from the bottom. And that’s where we find ourselves.
So, what’s most important here is that Section 2 has been gutted. Section 2 was, if you will, the last chance we had to really use the federal courts to stop discriminatory voting laws.
Now, the good news is that we have the For the People Act, we have the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Both are moving, and there’s reason to be hopeful that both will be passed in this Congress. It does mean that Joe Manchin, it does mean that Kyrsten Sinema will have to find the courage to stand up and join their party in doing the right thing.
AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times describes one of the measures that the Supreme Court upheld “requires election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other makes it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice [that] critics call 'ballot harvesting,'” but is often used in places like on Native American reservations. Ben, can you elaborate?
BEN JEALOUS: Yeah, and it’s also used with — most commonly, with senior citizens who are shut in. And, you know, this is a kind of old tradition in our democracy. It is very safe. The Republican Party has, for decades now, been trying to make a specious argument about voter fraud. Every time there’s an investigation, it’s found that statistically there is zero. There is like one case here, two cases there, out of millions of votes cast, but the impact on any election is zero.
And so, why are they doing that? Well, when you look throughout U.S. history, those who are pushing voter suppression have always talked about vote security to push vote suppression. They said that, for example, women should not be voting. This is back in the 18th century, the 19th century, the early part of the 20th century. Why? Because that would give a man with a wife two votes. Honestly, try that at home. Like, it was BS then, and they knew it, but they made that argument because they wanted to keep women from voting. Going way back, they said that white men who did not own land should not be able to vote, because they were not tied to a place and they could steal elections wherever they went. Again, they are making these specious arguments to push voter suppression.
The good news is that the majority of the people in this country — and I’m talking about by a level of about 80% — are opposed to voter suppression and are in support of the For the People Act, in support also of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And so, the hope, our prayer has to be that Congress and the Senate will do the right thing. It seems like Joe Manchin is heading that direction. Kyrsten Sinema is a co-sponsor of the bill. Now she just has to have the courage to actually make it possible for her to vote for the bill that she supports.
AMY GOODMAN: And, very quickly, the whole issue of dark money in politics in California, nonprofits not having to reveal who their funders are, why this could so grievously affect elections?
BEN JEALOUS: Yeah, so, you know, this is really pushed by the Koch brothers. They are the ones who are — Charles Koch is leading the charge to attack the For the People Act, that would require disclosure. He founded AFP, that brought this lawsuit. They manufacture things that most of the country buys. And what they don’t want you to know is that the Kochs stand directly behind efforts to suppress the vote, and so they’re trying to keep that quiet.
What’s also concerning is that many of these groups train judges. And so you see the kind of boldness of their corruption, because, frankly, when you go back in kind of any right-wing judge’s history, they typically have been to one of these trainings. So you very likely had Supreme Court justices rule to keep quiet the list, ultimately, of the donors who paid for them to be trained to assist those donors and their companies, like Koch Industries.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Ben Jealous, you have been a longtime anti-death penalty activist, as head of the NAACP and more. I want to ask you about the news that the Justice Department is pausing federal executions while it reviews its policies. In a memo dated Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland cites, quote, “arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases.” Garland also ordered a review of the lethal injection drugs used to kill condemned prisoners. Can you comment on this?
BEN JEALOUS: Look, it’s good news. It gets us in line with every other Western democracy and most countries on planet Earth.
The other thing is that we really have to really be concerned about poor people of all colors. When you visit death row — and I’ve been to many death rows — yes, they tend to be disproportionately people of color. They are almost exclusively people who were too poor to afford their own lawyer. When you go down the list of people who were likely innocent when they were executed in this country, virtually all of them were too poor to afford their own lawyer.
This is good news for everybody who believes that whether you are rich or poor, Black or white, male or female, or simply no matter what ZIP code you were born in, because there’s great discrimination there, too, that you deserve equal justice in this country and that we should lead the world in human rights. It’s an embarrassment that we still have the death penalty in this country. Every other Western democracy has long since dispensed with it.
AMY GOODMAN: Ben Jealous, I want to thank you so much for being with us, president of People for the American Way, former president of the NAACP.
Next up, the family business of Donald Trump faces criminal charges for operating a 15-year tax fraud scheme. Could this lead to charges against the former president? We’ll speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston. Stay with us.
'Donald Rumsfeld was not a very good man. He was the polar opposite, even on his own terms.' (photo: Mannie Garcia/Reuters)
t is customary, at times like these, to gloss over the failures and foibles of recently deceased officials: to paint a portrait in broad brush strokes about their achievements and qualities and public service.
In the case of the newly departed Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary who led the catastrophic war in Iraq, this would be a monumental dereliction of duty. And the old war criminal was a stickler for duty.
So let’s cast aside the nuanced but respectful formulations of the Washington Post (“one of history’s most consequential as well as controversial Pentagon leaders”) and the New York Times (“a combative infighter who seemed to relish conflicts”).
Somehow those quibbles didn’t make it into the overwrought words of Rumsfeld’s former boss and enabler, President George W Bush, who praised his “steady service as a wartime secretary of defense – a duty he carried out with strength, skill and honor”.
“We mourn an exemplary public servant and a very good man,” he added.
Donald Rumsfeld was not a very good man. He was the polar opposite, even on his own terms.
One of his famously pithy Rumsfeld rules, collected over a career of power in government and business, included this advice for people in the White House: “Remember the public trust. Strive to preserve and enhance the integrity of the office of the Presidency. Pledge to leave it stronger than when you came.”
By Rumsfeld’s own standards, he failed. He destroyed the public trust, the integrity of the presidency, and left America’s reputation far weaker than when he came.
How did he do all that in the fevered five years between the 9/11 attacks of 2001 and his resignation in 2006?
We could start with his disastrous decision to turn away from the hunt from Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to pursue Saddam Hussein in Iraq: one of the most baffling, harebrained and ultimately bloody choices in the history of American national security.
We now know that Rumsfeld was contemplating this bizarre plan within days, if not hours, of the attacks. He pursued an illegal aggressive war with no link to al-Qaida but with all the dogged skills he had learned from a career inside Washington, concocting a case for war that destroyed international trust and the integrity of anyone who touched it.
He wasn’t the only one, for sure, and the buck stops with President Bush himself. But he was central to the cabal, alongside his old friend Dick Cheney, who dragged the United States and its allies – especially the UK – into an entirely avoidable quagmire that left tens and probably hundreds of thousands dead and maimed.
We are still living with the catastrophic consequences of Rumsfeld and his gang. There’s a direct line from the Iraq invasion to Syria’s civil war, along with the immense suffering of millions of civilians, and the political strain and instability caused by so many refugees to this day.
It’s not as if this chain of events was unimaginable at the time.
Rumsfeld himself was just about smart enough to flick at the lid of the Pandora’s box he was about to detonate. In one of his classically cryptic memos to his inner circle of warmongers in late 2001, Rumsfeld casually raised an eyebrow over the chaos he was unleashing on the world.
“We ought to think through what are the bad things that could happen, and what are the good things that can happen that we need to be ready for in both respects. Please give me a list of each,” he wrote. “Thanks.”
Rumsfeld might have been talking about Afghanistan, where Kabul was about to fall and Bin Laden was ready to run for the mountains at Tora Bora. Or he might have been talking about Iraq, where Rumsfeld was already planning his war. Either way, he botched them both by failing to give a damn about the messy business of rebuilding nations after war.
Nation-building was scorned by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the gang because it was all so soft and cuddly and liberal. You don’t have to be a professor at the National War College to realize that macho ignorance might just be why their record in Afghanistan and Iraq was so utterly disastrous after the initial, apparently successful, military action. We are now exiting Afghanistan after two decades of failure rooted in Rumsfeld’s original plans.
It was this mixture of extreme arrogance and incompetence, along with a cavalier disregard for human suffering and integrity, that was the hallmark of Rumsfeld’s short and bloody reign. His policy chief, Doug Feith, bragged about how going to Baghdad was just a milestone on the road to Tehran.
But when Iraq fell apart, their hawkish allies in the White House turned on Rumsfeld’s team for failing to have any kind of credible plan to run a country ravaged by decades of sanctions, airstrikes and corrupt government.
Rumsfeld did have a credible plan for torture, however. It’s not the stuff of polite conversation or political debate to concede that the charismatic and quippy Washington man was, in fact, entirely comfortable with torture. But he was very comfortable with it, and couldn’t understand why anyone could feel any different.
When his team wrote up detailed torture plans for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay – including being forced to stand for hours on end – Rumsfeld made it clear they weren’t being tough enough. “I stand for eight to 10 hours a day,” he scribbled on one memo authorizing torture in 2002. “Why is standing limited to four hours?”
When he wasn’t mimicking Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, Rumsfeld was blaming everyone else for a few war crimes here and there. It was Rumsfeld who presided over the grotesque abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At the time, he offered to resign and expressed some regret, but mostly argued that he was very busy, the war was quite a big undertaking, and that bad stuff happens in prisons.
Far from growing more reflective or responsible after leaving office, Rumsfeld regretted nothing, apologized for nothing and learned nothing. In his 2011 book, he claimed that the Abu Ghraib photos were the result of “a small group of prison guards who ran amok”, and that the whole torture thing was just some political hot air.
Rumsfeld, like many hawks in those years after 9/11, liked to quote Winston Churchill. One of his famous Rumsfeld rules cites Churchill as saying: “Victory is never final. Defeat is never final. It is courage that counts.”
Rumsfeld’s victories were illusions. His defeats will outlive him. And his much-vaunted courage was a smokescreen for lies, crimes and deaths. If he was an exemplary public servant, we need to reimagine what public service actually means.
Photo illustration of a U.S. prison. (photo: Getty)
hen Floyd Wilson first learned of the term “prison gerrymandering,” he’d already been incarcerated for more than 35 years. He was taking a college seminar in a prison in Graterford, Pennsylvania—the fourth of five correctional facilities he’s lived in over the decades.
Wilson grew up in Southwest Philadelphia and was sentenced to life in prison in 1976 as a juvenile for first degree murder. In every U.S. census that’s taken place since his conviction, he learned that day in class, he’s been counted not as a Philadelphian but as a resident of the county where he was then imprisoned, nearly all of which have been in rural areas hours away from his family. The practice, known as prison gerrymandering, boosts the population of regions hosting large prisons and impacts the drawing of states’ district lines. That in turn distorts political representation by redirecting power from more diverse, urban areas towards whiter, rural ones.
The impact can be drastic. Currently, Wilson is incarcerated in SCI-Phoenix in Pennsylvania’s District 150, which also includes Montgomery County’s jail. If incarcerated people were not counted as part of District 150’s population, it would lose more than roughly 5,000 people and likely be too small to meet the federal minimum requirements for a state representative, a 2019 study by Villanova University sociologists Brianna Remster and Rory Kramer found. (Democratic State Rep. Joe Webster, who represents District 150 and supports banning prison gerrymandering, tells TIME in an email that “mass incarceration is already bad policy—it shouldn’t be used to undermine the fairness of elections, too.”)
Three other districts would also be too small, Remster and Kramer’s research found; if all the prisoners in the state originally from Philadelphia—roughly a quarter of the state’s prison population as of 2019—were counted as residents of that city, it would likely gain an additional one or two majority-minority state house districts.
Wilson was incarcerated at 17; in the decades he’s spent in prison, he’s never been able to vote. His body is being counted towards a constituency he cannot actually participate in. “My reaction was, this is more of the same… the system being just crooked,” Wilson, now 64, tells TIME. “People capitalizing off of other people’s mistakes or errors.”
Floyd’s 61-year-old sister, Roxanne Wilson, has long wanted to take action. “These inmates are being counted as part of a population that is not true. Period,” she says. “They lived in Philadelphia. They got sentenced in Philadelphia. And then they get shipped to a coal town, and are counted as part of [its] population… We feel this is disproportionate representation.” Wilson has spent the past 40 years advocating for criminal justice reform in Pennsylvania, raising awareness of prison gerrymandering in her community and in the state legislature.
Voting districts are drawn every ten years by state legislators or other appointed commissions based on the results of the U.S. census. As the 2020 redistricting process approaches—deadline varies per state, but some begin this summer—advocates have called for legislators across the U.S. to change how they count prisoners this cycle, arguing that if they don’t take action now, they’ll have to wait another ten years to address the long-running injustice. “Barring unusual circumstances, the districts that are drawn now will determine representation for the next decade,” says Ginger Jackson-Gleich, policy counsel with the Prison Policy Institute (PPI). “It’s absolutely imperative that we take advantage of this moment.”
Because it’s the result of a federal policy, prison gerrymandering is the default. In a 2020 report, PPI pointed out that the 2010 census counted more than 2 million people in the wrong place as a result of the practice. But in the absence of a policy change from the Census Bureau, it falls largely to states to to change their processes. Only 11 have done so, including Connecticut just last month. Those states now require redistricting officials to count incarcerated people where they lived before their conviction; Connecticut’s change that goes into effect this redistricting cycle. (A 2014 report from PPI found that after 2011 redistricting, nine Connecticut state house districts only met the federal minimum population numbers by counting prison populations.)
One common misconception about prison gerrymandering is that it impacts districts’ funding; this largely isn’t true. Most federal funding is allocated to states via block grants—and so, for these purposes, it does not make a significant difference which district an incarcerated person is counted in. Other funding programs largely “ignore prison populations,” per PPI. However, advocates still argue it unfairly shifts political power balances.
Pennsylvania’s State House Democratic Leader Joanna McClinton, who has for years been pushing the state to abolish prison gerrymandering, has put a resolution proposing to end the practice before the state’s Legislative Reapportionment Commission, which creates districts. McClinton, who is a part of the five-member commission, says she is “cautiously optimistic” that this year’s attempt will be successful, given the commission only meets once a decade and wields significant power.
Prison gerrymandering particularly distorts political representation along racial lines, and compounds the political disenfranchisement minority communities already face due to partisan gerrymandering and census undercounts. Not only do rural communities gain power as a result, but urban majority Black and brown communities lose it. Entire communities are impacted if they are in areas with a high incarceration rate, because they’re underrepresented.
Remster and Kramer’s research found that about 264,000 people in Pennsylvania—and more than 100,000 Black Philadelphia residents alone—are now underrepresented because they live in districts from where a large number of people are incarcerated in state or county prison and jail facilities. Such warping of political power is often built upon the disproportionate number of Black and brown people housed in America’s prisons, who have to navigate a system infamous for its racism, neglect and abuse—all without the ability to elect a representative. (Only Maine and Vermont allow all prisoners to cast a ballot.)
Joaquin Gonzalez, voting rights attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which published a prison gerrymandering report in April, describes its impact as “taking these individuals that cannot vote in most states and [amplifying] other people’s political power on their backs.”
Miscounting prisoners
Prison gerrymandering grew into an issue in the U.S. with the onset of mass incarceration starting in the 1970s, driven in part by the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing. Between 1980 and 2013 the incarceration rate more than quadrupled, exacerbating the political distortion of power.
In Pennsylvania, in the over four decades Floyd Wilson has been in prison, the state’s prison population—like those across the country—has ballooned. In 1980, the state had under 10,000 state prisoners. Today, there are around 45,000.
Dozens of state legislative districts nationwide similarly possess inflated political power because of prison gerrymandering.
For example, In two different North Carolina districts—located in Granville and Lumberton Counties—more than 40% of the population is made up of incarcerated people. In Illinois, nearly half of the state’s prisoners come from the Chicago area but close to 90% are counted as residents of downstate prisons, according to PPI. (Illinois banned prison gerrymandering in a bill approved by the governor earlier this year but the legislation will not have an effect until the next census in 2030.)
And in rural East Texas, if House District 8 did not count its prison population, it would lose more than 21,000 residents—which indicates that the total remaining population would fall well below the proportion legally required for a state district, per the Texas Civil Rights Project report. Both Harris County (home to Houston) and Dallas County would also likely have at least one extra state House seat if they counted incarcerated people at home, says Gonzalez, who authored the report—seats that’d be more likely to lean Democratic given their voting trends in recent elections.
The fight to abolish prison gerrymandering
In the last decade, lawmakers have started to take notice of the direct impact the practice can have on political power and take action.
In the long term, advocates say the most effective way to address the issue is at the federal level, and for the U.S. Census Bureau to count incarcerated people as living at their last known residence before incarceration. The current version of the For The People Act, the sweeping voting rights bill stalled in Congress, would do just that for the next redistricting cycle. (The Census Bureau has already been made aware of widespread criticism, accepting 77,000 comments in support of a more equal redistribution of counting prisoners in 2020.) But even if the census does change its process, it would be too late to impact the 2020 redistricting process on a national level.
So the issue falls to the states, where advocates are racing to ensure prisoners are counted according to their last residence as redistricting begins. In some states it’s too late to change this redistricting cycle through the legislative process. Jackson-Gleich of PPI argues that one of the only remaining solutions is to ensure redistricting officials “don’t dump all the prisons in one district.” Until prisoners are counted at their last known residence, she says, the best thing that city, county and other local authorities can do is remove prisoners from tallies that are determining legislative districts. These entities could remove correctional populations from the redistricting data before drawing up their districts.
“[That] sounds a little scary to people,” says Jackson-Gleich. “But because those people in those prisons have no constituent relationship with those elected officials, the best thing for them to do is just to take the prison population out and redistrict among the people who really are constituents.”
Critics point out that even if incarcerated people lack the right to vote, that does not mean they and their communities deserve lesser representation. “Representation is about having someone in government to whom you can address your problems, your concerns, and your hopes for the future. You don’t give those away when you are incarcerated,” says Rory Kramer, the Villanova University sociologist.
Roxanne Wilson tells TIME that she thinks another solution could be allowing incarcerated people to vote, including for the representatives of the district where they’re currently being counted. “If you’re going to elect representatives based on the population of inmates, then they should be allowed to have a say,” she argues.
Floyd Wilson also supports the idea, but is doubtful incarcerated people will ever get access to the ballot. He says a more feasible fix could be to have state representatives visit and listen to the incarcerated people in their district. He sits on the Board of Lifers, a collection of five men who aim to represent the roughly 5,000 prisoners currently serving life sentences in Pennsylvania. He’s been on the board for years, and says that while he’s repeatedly tried to have their state representatives come and speak, he’s had little success. “If we’re going to be your constituents, come in and talk to us,” he says.
In addition, he thinks it must fall to people outside of prison to learn about the issue and take action. “People have to be aware of this kind of thing, he says. “And like anything else, vote on it.”
An Afghan soldier standing guard on Friday at the gate of the Bagram Air Base. (photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters)
The transfer to Afghan forces was completed with no ceremony or fanfare, in a remarkably quiet end at a base that was for years the nerve center in its counterterrorism campaign across Afghanistan. Fighter jets, drones and cargo planes took off from Bagram’s twin runways day and night as U.S. Special Operations troops based there hunted al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other militant groups in raids in Afghanistan’s rugged mountains to the east. Each of the previous three U.S. presidents visited the airfield during visits to Afghanistan.
The departure follows President Biden’s decision in April to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, ending what he and other critics have called a “forever war.” As the Taliban launched a bloody offensive and encircled numerous provincial capitals, defense leaders briefly considered slowing the military’s departure from Bagram last month, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The Biden administration decided to continue.
Biden said in Washington on Friday that “we are on track, exactly where we expected to be.”
“Look, we were in Afghanistan for 20 years,” Biden added, asked about the risks of the withdrawal. “Twenty years.”
For weeks, Bagram, some 45 miles north of Kabul, has been used as a launchpad for the military to leave Afghanistan. Hundreds of C-17 flights have removed U.S. equipment and weapons, many of them flying from the air base. Other equipment was destroyed there.
Army Col. Sonny Leggett, a U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, said in a statement that the transfer of Bagram to the Afghan government “was an extensive process spanning several weeks,” beginning soon after Biden directed the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in April.
“All handovers of Resolute Support bases and facilities, to include Bagram Airfield, have been closely coordinated, both with senior leaders from the government and with our Afghan partners in the security forces, including leadership of the locally based units respective to each base,” Leggett said.
The Bagram district governor, Darwish Raufi, expressed irritation with not being included in the process. He said in a statement that the U.S. military left “without coordinating with security and defense forces and in general without coordinating” with the Afghan government and officials in Bagram district.
“Some looters went in, some of them were arrested and some others escaped,” the governor said. “They were in for equipment that they could carry.”
Fawad Aman, an Afghan defense ministry spokesman, said in a tweet that Bagram was handed over to the “ANDSF,” an acronym for Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.
“ANDSF will protect base and use it to combat terrorism,” he said.
A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan for nearly three years, remains in charge and retains the ability to protect U.S. troops if required as the withdrawal continues.
Miller met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Friday to discuss how the United States and Afghan governments will cooperate after the withdrawal is complete, according to a statement released by the Afghan presidential palace. Miller is expected to depart Afghanistan soon.
A one-star Navy SEAL officer, Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, is expected to become the senior U.S. military officer in Kabul, overseeing a smaller security mission and reporting to Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command, the defense official said. About 650 U.S. troops are expected to be stationed around the U.S. Embassy, with another few hundred possible temporarily to protect Hamid Karzai International Airport, the main commercial and military airfield in Kabul.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said in a statement that the group considers the “evacuation” of all U.S. troops from Bagram to be a positive step, and that Taliban leaders still “seek withdrawal of foreign forces from all parts of the country.”
“Such is in the interest of both them & Afghans,” he added. “Afghans can move closer to peace & security with complete withdrawal of foreign forces.”
Bagram initially was built as an airport in the 1950s, as the United States and the Soviet Union poured money into the country during the Cold War. It was seized by the Soviet Union in 1979 after that country invaded Afghanistan, built up as a military base during the nearly 10-year Soviet occupation of the country, and then was taken over by the United States after the September 2001 terrorist attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that followed.
Bagram, overlooked by the rugged, snow-tipped Hindu Kush mountains, was where many U.S. troops killed in combat were sent home from. “Ramp ceremonies,” in which fellow service members drape a deceased service member’s remains in a U.S. flag, were a common sight there at the height of the U.S. war. A camp at Bagram was named after Senior Airman Jason Cunningham, who died in a battle in March 2002 and is credited with saving the lives of 10 other people.
The air base departure has renewed concerns among lawmakers, veterans and analysts who think the U.S. military should not leave Afghanistan completely.
Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a retired Special Forces officer, called the base “by far the biggest symbol of our 20 years of blood and treasure we have expended for all veterans that have served there.”
“As our only base sandwiched between China, Russia and Iran it’s a huge strategic asset,” Waltz said. “Why are we just giving it away?”
Mick Mulroy, a former CIA paramilitary officer and Pentagon official early in the Trump administration, said that the speed of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan “may be a testament to the logistical capabilities of our force, but it also is not allowing for a buffer to see if the Afghan security forces will hold against the Taliban without our direct support.”
Close air support and casualty evacuation from Bagram were critical enablers in the war, said Mulroy, now an ABC News analyst.
“These enablers are often the deciding factor in engagements between our Afghan military and security partners and the Taliban. Engagements that will inevitably become more frequent once a complete U.S. withdrawal happens,” Mulroy said.
Lawmakers asked senior Pentagon officials during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week whether it would be possible to keep control of Bagram. Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded that “it is not necessary for the United States to stay at Bagram for what we’re going to try to do here with Afghanistan.”
Eighty-one of about 419 district centers in Afghanistan have fallen under Taliban control, Milley said; others are contested by the militants. Sixty percent of the districts under Taliban control fell to the insurgents last year, and the rest fell in the past few months, the general added.
Miller, speaking to reporters in Kabul this week, raised concerns that Afghanistan could slide into a prolonged civil war after the U.S. military withdrawal.
“The security situation is not good,” Miller said.
More than 2,400 U.S. troops have been killed in 20 years of fighting, and 20,000 more have been wounded. About 47,245 civilians have been killed, along with tens of thousands of members of Afghan security forces, according to United Nations assessments.
Biden administration officials have said that the United States will launch strikes in Afghanistan if there is evidence of a threat against the United States. Such an arrangement would focus on terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, which are believed to pose a threat outside Afghanistan, rather than the Taliban, which is focused on taking over the country.
The remains of a burned home from the Bobcat Fire in Juniper Hills, California, Sept. 20, 2020. (photo: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
alifornia's 2020 wildfires set a record: the most acres burned in a single year. Thousands of people lost their homes, and the smoke from the fires up and down the West Coast stretched all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
But another record was set that hardly anyone talked about: The disaster declared for the wildfires in the fall had the lowest eligibility rate for FEMA aid of any U.S. wildfire disaster on record. Just 5% of those who applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help received any financial assistance, according to an NPR analysis.
FEMA payouts weren't quite as low after the wildfires that blazed during the summer, but they were still lower than average: 17% received aid for those fires.
When we first saw those figures, it looked like lots and lots of disaster survivors were being denied financial help by FEMA. And that may be the case.
But there's a twist:
The number of people who told FEMA their homes were damaged or otherwise inaccessible was much, much higher than the number of people whose homes were burned, data from FEMA and Cal Fire, the state's fire agency, show. During a fire, the main kinds of damage you'd expect to see would be from burns, smoke and wind.
In San Bernardino County, for example, nine homes burned, according to the county's damage inspection report. But there were nearly 650 applications from people who indicated their homes were damaged.
In San Mateo County, there were 1,486 housing assistance applications for 18 burned homes. That's 83 people asking for help for each home that burned.
Across the state, on average, for every home that was burned, nearly four households claimed their primary residence was damaged.
NPR and the California Newsroom collaboration worked to figure out what happened — and no one seems to know or be willing to tell us. One possibility: that California was a target for widespread fraud.
"There are people that are prone to take advantage of the system," says Steven Jensen, a professor at California State University Long Beach's emergency services administration program. "Some very intentionally and maliciously, others that are just being stupid at the time and caught up in the moment and everybody else is doing it. 'Hey, they're passing out free checks — let's get some.' "
More on that later.
Possible answers
Let's start with how the FEMA system is supposed to work.
When someone's primary residence is damaged during a federally declared disaster, FEMA will reimburse that household up to $72,000. That money can go toward things such as clothing, food and temporary rent payments while they're displaced. Property owners can use the money to repair or replace their homes, though people with insurance have to meet certain criteria to be eligible.
We wanted to know: Was the record-low approval rate the result of massive fraud, or does it mean people whom the fires harmed didn't get help from FEMA?
Robert Barker, the FEMA spokesman for California and the region, wouldn't comment on the record for this story. He referred us to the headquarters in Washington, which didn't respond to follow-up questions either.
So we turned to county officials in California. They don't manage FEMA's program, but they work with the agency to help victims in their counties. We heard from officials in six counties that burned. They all could explain part of the mystery, but none of them could quite crack it. Here are some of their explanations for why people would apply even when a structure wasn't burned:
- Smoke damage: FEMA does cover damage from smoke, which Cal Fire does not count in its assessment when it lists how many structures were damaged. So smoke could account for some of the high application numbers. But a fire official told us that typically smoke damage comes from fires within a home that has burned, not smoke that has drifted from somewhere else.
- Inaccessible homes: People who can't access their homes because the fire destroyed infrastructure, like highway ramps, could be eligible for aid. Cal Fire reported in its damage assessment that it had deemed 99 homes inaccessible for the entire fire season.
- Multiple households in one residence: If roommates or other different households are sharing a single residence, they could all be eligible for separate FEMA help. This could also account for some of the discrepancy.
- Confusion: Some people mistakenly indicated on their application that they had damage, but it turned out later they didn't.
- Evacuees: Sometimes people apply before they even know whether their home was burned. These people are put into a separate bucket, a FEMA spokesman said, where they're not technically "referred" to FEMA's programs until they report there was actual damage to their home. So we're not counting those people in our data.
So what does it mean that there was an impossibly high number of people who said their homes were damaged or destroyed?
Clues in the north and south
What happened in Oregon last fall might offer a clue.
At the same time California's fires were burning, Oregon also saw record-setting destruction. Four-thousand homes, mostly in the southern part of the state, burned. But as in California, there were far more FEMA applications than that. About 21,000 people across Oregon said their homes were damaged.
Jefferson Public Radio obtained internal FEMA talking points that said nearly half the applications — 9,000 of them — were suspected of being fraudulently submitted.
Despite repeated requests, FEMA would not provide a similar count of suspected fraud for California's wildfires. Without it, there's no way to know for sure if what happened in Oregon also happened in California.
Looking at FEMA's data, though, we found suspicious examples. The El Dorado Fire last September burned within San Bernardino County in Southern California, though it was nowhere near the city of San Bernardino itself. But the largest number of people who filed claims with FEMA came from a ZIP code — inside the city — where there was no fire. Dozens of people there said their homes were either damaged or inaccessible. There was never a mandatory evacuation there. None of those people got aid.
Four people in the desert city of Victorville, 25 miles to the north, did get aid. They received a total of $28,308.73, according to FEMA's data. The city, which is also in San Bernardino County, has no record of wildfires there during the disaster declaration, said city spokeswoman Sue Jones. The closest was more than 30 miles away and on the other side of the mountains.
FEMA says it does not discuss the details of individual cases. A spokesperson said FEMA was able to verify that people in Victorville were eligible for aid but did not explain how that would be possible given that no fire was in the area.
In San Bernardino County, there were, the FEMA spokesperson said, 64 applications that had the "characteristics or indications" of fraud. None of those applications were granted.
Nationwide, over 130,000 disaster applications were flagged as fraudulent during the past year and a half, according to a letter that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee sent to FEMA in May questioning the way the agency runs the aid program.
Rising fraud doesn't hurt just taxpayers — it harms actual disaster victims too.
"Unfortunately, some people are going to have to jump through more hoops to prove they're not committing fraud," says Jason Zirkle, training director at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.
An NPR investigation found that this is what happened in Oregon. Some of the very safeguards that FEMA put in place to keep out wrongdoers ended up stopping real victims from getting help.
"It's a fine line between not ticking people off that deserve money," Zirkle says, "and still preventing fraud."
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