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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
n a new plan designed to combat vaccine hesitancy, President Biden said that he was considering an executive order banning all COVID vaccines.
The order would make it illegal to obtain a vaccine except in certain cases and, even then, only after a thorough background check and waiting period.
“We must eliminate the scourge of vaccination once and for all,” Biden said. “Enough is enough.”
News of an impending vaccine ban sent lines at previously deserted vaccination centers snaking around the block, according to reports.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took to the floor of the House to excoriate the ban, calling it a “classic case of government overreach that shows the fingerprints of George Soros and the Rothschilds.”
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
fter George Floyd was killed while in the custody of Minneapolis police in May 2020, millions of Americans poured into the streets to protest his death and call attention to racial injustice.
In the immediate aftermath of Floyd's death, Trump summoned Gen. Mark Milley, Defense secretary Mark Esper, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and other advisors to find a way to end the protests.
The president was incensed by a New York Times report that he had been taken to a bunker as protests near the White House turned violent, thinking the news "made him appear scared and weak," according to a newly-released book by the Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker.
To blunt the continued protests, Trump insisted that active-duty troops be used, which Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Esper sought to eliminate as an option.
When Trump mentioned the 1960s race riots to justify the use of troops to restore order, Milley threw cold water on the suggestion, part of a longer discussion that resulted in the president cursing out his top military advisors, which Leonnig and Rucker detailed in "I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year."
"Mr. President, it doesn't compare anywhere to the summer of sixty-eight," Milley said, according to the book. "It's not even close."
After senior advisor Stephen Miller chimed in to declare the protests as "an insurrection," Milley pointed to a portrait of former President Abraham Lincoln, who led the country through the American Civil War.
"Mr. President, that guy had an insurrection," Milley said, according to the book. "You don't have an insurrection. When guys show up in gray and start bombing Fort Sumter, you'll have an insurrection."
Trump entertained the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would let him deploy troops across the country to quell any civil disorder or insurrection, but Milley and Esper continued to fight against the idea.
On June 1, Trump had grown angrier over the press coverage of the protests, urging governors and law enforcement to "dominate" the nationwide unrest.
"How do you think this looks to hostile countries?" Trump said, according to the book. "They see we can't even control our own capital city and the space around the White House!"
After once again calling for troops, Esper said that the National Guard remained the best option to stop any unrest, but the president proceeded to slam on the Resolute Desk and told the Defense secretary that he wasn't done enough to solve the problem, according to the book.
Trump sought to make Milley the leader of an operation to restore order, but after the general reiterated that he wasn't in an operational role, the president lost it.
"You're all f—ed up," Trump said, according to the book. "Every one of you is f—ed up."
Trump then looked at Vice President Mike Pence, who had been a quiet observer, and directed his ire toward his No. 2.
"Including you!" the president said, according to the book.
Later that day, Trump, along with Milley, Esper, and several other advisors, walked from the White House complex to nearby St. John's Episcopal Church.
The now-infamous photo op, which showed the president holding a bible in front of the church after protestors were violently cleared from Lafayette Park, immediately attracted criticism. However, the inspector general for the Interior Department determined in June 2021 that the US Park Police and Secret Service did not clear the park for Trump's photoshoot, but to install anti-scale fencing.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images)
Biden is the president liberal court watchers have been waiting for, but he may be five years too late.
A longtime member and former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden oversaw hundreds of judicial confirmations. He chaired the 1987 hearing that successfully convinced the Senate to reject Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court; then presided over a far less successful hearing that preceded Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation in 1991.
As president, he’s approached judicial selection with a seriousness of purpose that hasn’t been seen in a Democratic White House since at least the Carter administration. With eight Biden judges currently sitting on the federal bench, including three court of appeals judges, Biden’s appointed more judges at this point in his presidency than any newly elected president since Richard Nixon.
Biden’s nominated 22 more, and he has the potential to shape much of the federal bench very rapidly. Currently, there are 82 vacancies throughout the federal judiciary, nearly 10 percent of the bench, although most of these vacancies are on relatively low-ranking district courts.
When I speak with liberal advocates jaded by years of failed efforts to get Democrats — including the Obama White House — to take judicial appointments as seriously as Republicans, their attitudes toward Biden range from measured enthusiasm to something approaching ecstasy. Though Biden received some criticism from his left for nominating two management-side employment lawyers to vacant seats in New Jersey, nearly all of the advocates that I spoke with were thrilled with Biden’s overall record on judicial nominations.
Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, who now leads the liberal American Constitution Society, told me that Biden’s judicial confirmation efforts are off to a “tremendous start.” Daniel Goldberg of the Alliance for Justice, an organization that spent the Trump years producing research memos warning about the former president’s nominees, summarized his opinion of Biden’s approach to judges in a single word: “outstanding.”
And yet, while liberal veterans of the judicial wars now have the president many of them have hoped for their entire career, Biden may have arrived five years too late. The sad reality for the new president is that he’s likely to need every ounce of political skill and institutional knowledge that he gained after decades of confirming judges to pull the judiciary back from where his predecessor left it. And he may still fail to do so.
Biden had been president less than a week when the first Trump judge handed down a decision sabotaging one of his policies. The judge was Drew Tipton, a federal judge in Texas with only a few months of experience on the bench, and the sabotaged policy was a 100-day pause on deportations that the administration announced on Biden’s first day in office.
Tipton’s opinion explaining why he blocked the deportation moratorium flouted decades of precedent. And Tipton has hardly been the only judge to behave this way during Biden’s still-young presidency.
J. Campbell Barker, another Trump judge in Texas, handed down a decision in February that, if taken seriously, could strip the federal government of its power to regulate the national housing market. In July, Judge Andrew Hanen, a judge whose nativist inclinations are so widely known that anti-immigrant plaintiffs seek out his courtroom to ensure they will receive a sympathetic hearing, struck down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that allows hundreds of thousands of immigrants to remain in the country.
The Supreme Court spent the first days of summer busting unions, protecting conservative political donors, and gutting the Voting Rights Act. The Court also spent the last couple of years laying the groundwork to strip the Biden administration of much of its power to regulate the workplace, expand access to health care, and protect the environment.
President Biden, in other words, began his presidency deep in a hole. He faces a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, and dozens of Trump’s lower court judges eager to make a name for themselves (and potentially score a promotion in a future Republican administration) by undercutting Democratic policies. He is the heir to an Obama administration that, at least early on, treated judicial confirmations as an annoying distraction from other business, and to a Trump administration that treated the judiciary as its most lasting legacy.
And that legacy could include disrupting Biden’s entire presidency.
The Obama White House dropped the ball
President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees faced several structural obstacles that do not hinder Biden’s. When Obama took office, the filibuster enabled Republicans to block any nominee who didn’t have supermajority support in the Senate, and it enabled the GOP to slow the Senate’s business to an excruciating crawl even when Democrats did have the 60 votes necessary to break a filibuster.
The Senate changed these rules to allow judges to be confirmed by a simple majority, and to limit the minority party’s power to delay most confirmation votes.
Then-Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) — like so many other Democrats who cling to their own idiosyncratic notions of how institutions should function at the expense of governance — insisted on giving Republican senators veto power over anyone nominated to a federal judicial vacancy in their state by taking an unusually expansive view of a Senate tradition known as the “blue slip.” The current chair, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), will not allow Republicans to veto at least some of Biden’s nominees, especially his nominees to powerful appellate courts.
Obama also had to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in his first year, which made it difficult for the White House or the Senate to pay as much attention to lower court nominees.
But even if Obama was dealt a more difficult hand on judicial confirmations than Biden, he played that hand terribly.
At least in the first year of his presidency, Obama staffed his White House with senior officials who either treated the process of shepherding judges to confirmation as a chore, or who lacked experience with judicial politics.
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, reportedly told a room full of activists that he didn’t “give a fuck about judicial appointments.” Greg Craig, Obama’s first White House counsel, was a former State Department official who showed more interest in Obama’s worthy, but failed, effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay than in choosing judges.
Obama, meanwhile, prevailed on Craig to hire Cassandra Butts, a personal friend and law school classmate of Obama’s with a distinguished career on Capitol Hill and in left-of-center politics. (Disclosure: In 2015, I interned on the Center for American Progress’s domestic policy team, which Butts led.) Craig made her his deputy overseeing judicial nominations.
Yet, while Butts was undoubtedly qualified to work in the White House, she had limited experience working in judicial politics. And her legislative background also fit in poorly in a White House counsel’s office that placed credentials such as a Supreme Court clerkship or practice at a white-shoe law firm on a pedestal. That appears to have diminished her influence.
The result of this mix of inexperience and indifference is that the early Obama White House was often slow to nominate judges. And it stumbled into traps that aides more familiar with judicial politics might have avoided.
Here’s an example: About two months into Obama’s presidency, the White House announced that it would nominate Indiana federal trial Judge David Hamilton to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Hamilton was Obama’s first judicial nominee, and the president intended to use Hamilton’s nomination to extend an olive branch to Republicans.
The New York Times described Hamilton as someone “who is said by lawyers to represent some of his state’s traditionally moderate strain.” And Hamilton enjoyed the support of his home-state Republican Sen. Richard Lugar.
But, if the Obama White House had paid more attention to Hamilton’s record as a federal district judge, they would have known that he was not the sort of judge who could be sold to Republicans as a peace offering.
Among other things, Hamilton blocked an Indiana law that effectively required most abortion patients to make two trips to a clinic before they could have an abortion. And he handed down a pair of religious freedom decisions that seemed designed to enrage Republican culture warriors. The first held that a state legislature could not open its session with a prayer to “Jesus,” because such a prayer preferences Christianity over other faiths. The second opinion explained that a prayer to “Allah” could be a permissible non-sectarian prayer, because “Allah” is merely the Arabic word for “God.”
The point is not that Hamilton was wrong in any of these decisions, or that he should not have been confirmed to the Seventh Circuit. Hamilton is an excellent judge, and the rule of law depends on judges who are willing to hand down decisions that may make them unpopular. But a White House staffed with veterans of past judicial confirmation fights would have understood that a judge with Hamilton’s record on abortion and religion would trigger significant opposition from Republicans.
And trigger it he did. Republicans filibustered his nomination. When Hamilton was eventually confirmed, every Republican senator except for Lugar opposed him.
Though Obama’s judicial confirmations effort grew more sophisticated later in his presidency, it never fully recovered from its early missteps. In eight years as president, Obama appointed only 55 federal appellate judges — just one more than Trump appointed in only four years in the White House.
Biden learned from Obama’s mistakes
The charitable interpretation of the Obama White House’s early missteps is that it had a lot on its plate. It was trying to dig the nation out of a catastrophic recession, and didn’t want to get bogged down in fights over judges. As Feingold told me, judicial nominations “got put on the back burner” during much of Obama’s presidency.
But President Biden faces at least as many challenges as Obama did during his first term in office. Biden also is trying to revive a stalled economy, and he’s doing so as the world seeks to curb what is hopefully a once-in-a-century pandemic. Plus, Biden faces an opposition party that increasingly views Democrats as illegitimate. Republicans worked hard to undermine Obama’s policy agenda, but even the Obama-era Republican Party didn’t try to sabotage an investigation into a violent attempt to overthrow the United States government and install Donald Trump as president.
And yet, with so many crises to confront at once, Biden has still confirmed more judges this early in his presidency than any other chief executive in the past half-century. He’s hired senior staff who understand judicial politics and take confirming judges very seriously. It is “clear that the White House counsel’s office and the Oval Office consider this a high priority,” said Feingold.
“Having [White House Chief of Staff] Ron Klain in the White House has been about the best thing we could have hoped for when it comes to judicial nominations,” according to Molly Coleman of the People’s Parity Project, a group that organizes law students and young lawyers to “unrig the legal system and build a justice system that values people over profits.”
Klain oversaw President Bill Clinton’s judicial nominations efforts, including the confirmation of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Coleman told me that, when she took a course from Klain as a law student, it was clear that the future chief of staff “took pride” in the time he spent ushering Clinton’s nominees onto the bench.
He’s a far cry, in other words, from Rahm Emanuel. Klain has been one of the White House’s biggest cheerleaders for judicial confirmations.
White House counsel Dana Remus reached out to Democratic senators a month before Biden was president to enlist their local expertise in the often-arduous process of identifying judicial nominees from individual states. And the Biden White House also hired Paige Herwig, a former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer who also worked for the liberal judicial group Demand Justice, to oversee judicial nominations.
This is a team that knows what it is doing in picking and confirming judges.
Why liberal groups are so pleased with Biden’s judges
When I spoke to liberal legal groups in 2020, I consistently heard that they had two requests from a Democratic White House regarding judges. They wanted nominees who were demographically diverse, but they also wanted nominees who had a diversity of experience working to benefit the least fortunate. A frequent complaint about President Obama was that he nominated too many partners at corporate law firms, and that he nominated too many prosecutors and not enough civil rights lawyers or public defenders.
Biden’s transition team signaled that he would meet these requests a month before he took office. In a December 2020 letter to Democratic senators, Remus told those lawmakers that “with respect to U.S. District Court positions, we are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.”
Thus far, the Biden White House has delivered on its goal of appointing judges from diverse backgrounds. One of Biden’s first judicial appointments was Judge Zahid Quraishi, the first Muslim American to serve on the federal bench. In all of American history, only 11 Black women have served on a United States Court of Appeals. Three of them — Judges Ketanji Brown Jackson, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, and Tiffany Cunningham — were appointed by Biden in the last six months.
Both Judges Jackson and Jackson-Akiwumi, moreover, are former public defenders, as is Eunice Lee, a Biden nominee to the Second Circuit. Myrna Pérez, another Biden nominee to that court, directs the voting rights project at the Brennan Center for Justice. Jennifer Sung, a Biden nominee to the Ninth Circuit, is a former union organizer and union-side litigator.
“People who in the past couldn’t even contemplate being judges” are now being nominated, Goldberg from the Alliance for Justice told me. In many cases (though not in every case), Biden is passing over the sort of high-dollar lawyers who are most likely to be politically connected in favor of more service-focused attorneys.
At least at the appellate level, moreover, the typical Biden nominee is someone who chose to spend much of their pre-judicial career in public service, despite having the sort of credentials that could have set them up for a much more lucrative career. Jackson, Jackson-Akiwumi, Lee, Pérez, and Sung all clerked for a federal appellate judge — an elite credential that is normally reserved for the most high-performing young lawyers — and Jackson also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
And yet, for all of his early successes, it remains to be seen whether Biden can keep up the pace.
Biden has mostly nominated people to the easiest judicial vacancies to fill
One other thing that unites Biden’s nominees is that they largely hail from blue states with two Democratic senators. These are the easiest vacancies for a Democratic president to fill because allied lawmakers are more likely to cooperate with Biden in identifying potential nominees. But it’s also because of the legacy of an old patronage system that still gives senators outsized influence over nominees from their state.
Before the Jimmy Carter administration, the White House typically gave enormous deference to home-state senators when choosing federal judges — indeed, the Senate Judiciary Committee would often refuse to hold a hearing on a nominee if the president tried to appoint someone other than the choice of the nominee’s home-state senator. President Carter weakened senators’ roles by setting up a now-defunct merit selection commission to select court of appeals judges, but senators continue to play an outsized role in choosing trial judges even to this day.
The primary mechanism for maintaining this patronage system is the “blue slip,” named after the blue pieces of paper home-state senators use to indicate whether they approve of a nominee. Under Sen. Leahy, home-state senators were allowed to veto any nominee to a federal judgeship in their state. But the committee’s current practice is to only allow senators to veto district judges, the lowest rank of federal judges who receive lifetime appointments.
But even a limited blue slip rule presents problems for Biden. It’s hard to imagine that senators like Josh Hawley (R-MO), who threw a fist up in solidarity with the protesters that later attacked the US Capitol in a failed effort to overturn Biden’s election, would consent to anyone nominated by Biden. And even many Republican senators who accept the results of the 2020 election are likely to prefer leaving an open judicial seat vacant to filling it with a Biden nominee.
Currently, there are vacant seats in Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Florida, all of which have at least one Republican senator. Ultimately, it will be up to Senate Judiciary Chair Durbin to decide whether Republican senators should be allowed to veto nominees when they have no intention of letting Biden confirm anyone to a vacant seat.
A potentially even more difficult political problem for Biden is what he should do about Democratic senators who drag their feet when the White House seeks their input on potential nominees in their state. Or if they offer recommendations that do not comport with Biden’s values. Biden could simply go around such senators, but doing so carries its own risks. Especially in a Senate where Democrats enjoy the narrowest possible majority, there are obvious reasons why the White House may be reluctant to anger a Democratic senator.
There’s also a final, more pragmatic reason why the White House may prefer to work with home-state senators if they can. Senators are more likely to be familiar with the lawyers in their state than the president and his aides, and thus may be able to suggest outstanding candidates who would otherwise be overlooked.
There are potential workarounds if a senator refuses to provide such input — Zahra Mion with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund told me that “in Florida we’ve already seen some state legislative members set up commissions” to identify potential nominees, for example. But, because senators have historically advised presidents on judicial nominations, a senator is more likely to have already set up such a commission and established the relationships with their state bar that would allow them to provide good advice.
What if Biden does everything right, and it isn’t enough?
The elephant looming over Biden’s effort to shape the bench is that there’s always a degree of randomness to judicial selection. Biden — and liberal democracy more broadly — would stand on much stronger footing if Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg had lived just a few months longer, allowing Biden to choose her successor. And Justice Stephen Breyer’s decision to hold onto his seat, during what could be a very brief window in which Democrats control the Senate, could easily end in disaster for both the Democratic Party and democracy itself.
“The conventional wisdom,” Coleman, with the People’s Parity Project, told me, “is that we don’t have the full four years to get nominees confirmed. We have until the midterms.” And even that might be optimistic. If Republicans regain control of the Senate — either through an election or through the death or departure of a Democratic senator — GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is likely to impose the same near-total blockade on Biden’s Supreme Court and appellate nominees that he imposed on Obama when McConnell had the power to do so.
McConnell has already suggested that no Biden Supreme Court nominee will be confirmed if Republicans take control of the Senate.
The other potential catastrophe looming over the Biden White House is what happens if the Supreme Court goes rogue, invalidating Biden’s policies on the flimsiest legal arguments, or even permitting Republican state lawmakers to rig elections outright? Biden’s signaled that he’s not willing to add seats to the Supreme Court to ward off this problem, and it’s unlikely that Biden could get such a bill through Congress if he changes his mind. So his influence over the judiciary will ultimately be shaped by which judges leave the bench during his time in office.
Biden will need more than just a lifetime of experience confirming judges if he hopes to reverse Trump’s impact on the judiciary. He’s also going to need a lot of luck.
Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin)
This is the second whistleblower complaint about conditions for unaccompanied immigrant children at the Fort Bliss shelter in less than a month.
The complaint filed by two government employees is the second to come out of Fort Bliss, an army base near El Paso, Texas, which housed thousands of unaccompanied immigrant minors. Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Project filed its initial complaint about conditions at Fort Bliss that included lack of clean underwear and described contractors with no experience in working with children.
In addition to COVID concerns, the two federal employees — Arthur Pearlstein, director of arbitration and of the office of shared neutrals at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and Lauren Reinhold, an attorney-adviser at the Social Security Administration — who filed the Wednesday complaint said mismanagement resulted in significant mental health issues among the children, as well as delays in being released to family or friends. Both Pearlstein and Reinhold were represented by the Government Accountability Project.
"Gross mismanagement, waste, and abuse of authority by those at the top who insisted on utmost secrecy led to conditions for thousands of children at Fort Bliss that can only be described as constituting mistreatment,” Pearlstein said in a statement.
The children were housed by contractors for the Department of Health and Human Services, Chenega Corporation, and Rapid Deployment Inc. Neither company responded to a request for comment.
“The care and well-being of children in our custody continues to be a top priority for HHS," said an agency spokesperson. "Currently, children at the Emergency Intake Site at Fort Bliss meet with a case manager weekly and we have close to 60 mental health and behavioral counselors on site working with the children. It remains our policy to swiftly report any alleged instances of wrongdoing to the appropriate authorities.”
The complaint said hundreds of children under the government's care contracted COVID and every effort was made to downplay the number of infections. At a town hall for federal workers detailed to Fort Bliss, a senior US Public Health Service manager refused to say how many were infected because “if that graph [of infections] is going to the Washington Post every day, it's the only thing we'll be dealing with and politics will take over, perception will take over, and we're about reality, not perception.”
Reason previously reported that it was Dr. Joseph Hutter, a commander in the US Public Health Service, who made the comment.
Pearlstein, who performed clinical assessments and worked with children as part of the mental health team at Fort Bliss, said major depression and depressive episodes were common. Some children expressed suicidal thoughts. In many cases, these children were sent to "counselors" or federal employees, some of whom had no experience or proper training, Pearlstein said.
The report states mental health clinicians hired by the private contractors to help the children "appeared" to lack appropriate training. Some children told federal employees that requests to see a counselor were ignored or denied.
"In one case, a clinician’s primary response to a boy – who had complained of feeling very depressed and sad – was to tell him that he had nothing to complain about and that, in fact, he should feel grateful for all he was being given," the report adds.
On multiple occasions, groups of children who were told they were going home and had been taken to the airport were suddenly told it was a mistake and returned to Fort Bliss. The children returned shocked and distressed.
The two whistleblowers said they spoke to dozens of children who had been at Fort Bliss for more than 30 days, some approaching or even exceeding 60 days. Many of the children said they hadn't spoken to their case managers in over a month. Others said they had not been assigned to one.
"The Fort Bliss children did not and could not trust that they were safe, that their basic needs would be met, or that their sponsorship/placement cases were being timely processed," the report states. "The most frequent complaint heard from children was that they were in a state of total uncertainty and anxiety, with no idea of what to expect next."
Federal employees said that when they tried to express concerns about waste, fraud, and abuse at Fort Bliss, they were told by their managers that the contractors were in charge. By mid-May, nearly 800 federal employees were sent to Fort Bliss, but the two whistleblowers said there was virtually no effort to assign detainees based on their skills and experience.
Reinhold said people hired by contractors said they did nothing more than submit employment applications, with no vetting, interviews, or phone calls before being offered jobs. Reinhold said near the end of May she learned that staff at Chenega and Servpro, one of the contractors named in the previous complaint, who were already working with children were undergoing background checks on a mass scale.
"It is my hope that ORR will develop a long-term humanitarian plan with adequate contractor oversight to house children in better conditions, and to place them with U.S. sponsors more expeditiously,” Reinhold said in a statement.
Simone Biles. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
here’s always something weird about the Olympics. Not the often-obscure sports themselves (this year there’s the addition of three-on-three basketball, with break dancing coming in 2024), but the contradictory pageantry of it.
On the one hand, the Olympics are a fierce national competition, where great power conflicts play out in a softer version of warfare (though sometimes no less bloody). On the other, they are, in the tradition of its ancient Greek forbear, a celebration of individual athletic prowess — the power of the human mind and body to challenge the laws of speed, strength, and endurance. These two ideals — individual athleticism and nationalist competition — typically coexist quite well, with countries’ Olympic committees offering training and sponsorship resources to athletes in exchange for their participation in literal flag-waving parades of national pride.
But this year, something broke. Simone Biles, the star of the US women’s gymnastics team — and the most decorated gymnast in world championship history — announced this week that she would be withdrawing from the final of the team gymnastics competition and the individual all-around final, the marquee event of Olympic gymnastics. In a press conference, Biles cited mental-health concerns — which she feared could also lead to physical injury in the demanding competitions where intense mental focus is a must:
It’s been really stressful, this Olympic Games. I think just as a whole, not having an audience, there are a lot of different variables going into it. It’s been a long week, it’s been a long Olympic process, it’s been a long year. So just a lot of different variables, and I think we’re just a little bit too stressed out. But we should be out here having fun, and sometimes that’s not the case.
Compounding the stresses of a COVID Olympics, the past five years have seen revelations of sexual abuse and cover-ups at USA Gymnastics, in some cases going back decades. More than 360 gymnasts — who train for the Olympics as teenagers — have alleged some form of sexual abuse at the hands of coaches, gym owners, and other adults working in the sport. This includes Biles herself, who was one of hundreds of gymnasts to say they were sexually abused by former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. (Nassar was convicted in 2018 of sexual abuse and child pornography charges.)
All in all, it seems more shocking that Biles was willing to compete at all given these excruciating circumstances. Indeed, many people have expressed sympathy with the star gymnast, praising her courage for speaking out about mental-health issues that are often stigmatized.
But the positive response has not been universal. Conservative commentators have decried Biles, with Charlie Kirk calling her a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country” and Piers Morgan writing that “there’s nothing heroic or brave about quitting because you’re not having ‘fun’ — you let down your team-mates, your fans and your country.” Even some liberals, while acknowledging the physical dangers posed by a gymnast not being in the right headspace, have framed that as an excuse (albeit a legitimate one) for abdicating an implied responsibility to fans and the nation to persevere in the face of adversity.
This logic is not just limited to the clear nationalism of the Olympics, where an individual athlete is inevitably an avatar for a nation. Just a few weeks ago, Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open after refusing to hold a required press conference due to mental-health concerns. Conservative sports writer Joe Kinsey derided Osaka for continuing to do select media appearances, including a photo shoot for the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, while still refusing mandatory post-match interviews.
Implicit in the hate for, or at least skepticism of, Osaka and Biles is the idea that athletes owe “us” — fans, viewers, a nation — something. Society has long projected onto athletes an aspirational view of the human spirit, able to transcend the very laws of physics and achieve greatness. Like Prometheus, their task is to capture something of the divine and let us mere mortals bask in it. In watching a world-class gymnast like Simone Biles, we are taught to believe, we are inspired to reach for the exceptional in our own lives.
As powerful as this narrative is, it treats athletes as some fusion of gods, symbols, and soldiers, rather than what they are: real people with their own human needs and flaws. At a fundamental level, an athlete — even a GOAT like Simone Biles — is an entertainment worker. A highly talented and appropriately compensated entertainment worker, no doubt, but should the god-athlete ever fall short of the impossible expectations hurled at them, they are treated little better than a waiter whose tip has been revoked by a mercurial patron. Just like service and entertainment work more generally, this relationship is also heavily racialized: it is no coincidence to see the ire some white fans hold for women of color like Biles and Osaka, or the black players for England’s soccer team, who were pelted with abuse following their side’s loss in this year’s Euro 2020 finals.
It is perhaps inevitable that in a service economy — where human relationships are divided into the serving and the served — there is an intense, unearned sense of entitlement about athletes. Their lives don’t fully belong to them, but rather to a fan base that demands validation for their own erroneous narratives about national greatness, perseverance, and the enterprising human spirit. This feeling can be just as powerful for fans whose jobs also entail serving a wealthier other: when you feel that gaining power in your own life is remote, you can place that hope — and feeling of disappointment — onto someone else.
No one person — no matter how talented, no matter their level of physical, mental, and psychological discipline — can be expected to carry the massive weight of a whole society demanding hope, purpose, and satisfaction. Athletes may receive plenty of monetary compensation for fame, but they don’t owe their physical and mental health to fans. It may cost her sponsorship revenue in the long run (though so far, not yet), but Biles should absolutely be free to take some time off, just as any worker should be entitled to stay home recovering while sick instead of pouring their life force into serving someone else.
Simone Biles, in asserting her fundamental humanity by prioritizing her health over working, is a valuable reminder for us to see athletes not as symbols for our collective ambitions but as real people doing a very difficult job. Health and well-being are human needs, and they should never be held hostage to a “paying customer” — whether a boss, a nation, or a gymnastics fan.
A Mayan indigenous man waves a Guatemalan flag during a protest to demand the resignation of Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei and Attorney General Maria Porras, in San Cristobal Totonicapan, Guatemala, July 29, 2021. (photo: Luis Echeverria/Reuters)
Guatemala’s attorney general fired a top prosecutor of corruption last week. Now, Indigenous peoples and social movements are calling for both her and the president to resign.
he highway was still enveloped in fog as thousands gathered in Guatemala’s western highlands Thursday morning. Paulina González was one of the first to arrive in Los Encuentros, a key juncture along the Pan-American Highway. The local Indigenous Maya Kaqchikel mobilization, which she and a few of her fellow Indigenous Maya Tz’utujil ancestral authorities attended, was one of dozens of protests taking place across the country.
“People can’t take it anymore,” said González. “We have united today to shut things down all over.”
Last week, the ouster of a Guatemalan prosecutor leading embattled efforts against high-level corruption sparked an explosive new chapter in the country’s long-simmering political crisis. The move provoked widespread condemnation, suspension of some U.S. aid, and protests. Heeding calls by Indigenous leaders for a “paro nacional,” or nationwide shutdown, on Thursday, communities and social movements marched, rallied, and blocked roads around the country to demand the president and attorney general resign.
The tipping point came on July 23, when Attorney General MarÃa Consuelo Porras fired prosecutor Juan Francisco Sandoval, head of the Special Anti-Impunity Prosecutor’s Bureau, or FECI by its Spanish acronym. In a somewhat ambiguous public statement announcing Sandoval’s termination, Porras’s office referred to bias and disrespect. Sandoval responded with a press conference and laid out detailed allegations that Porras obstructed FECI’s work in order to protect high-level officials, particularly those in the president’s circle, from prosecution for corruption. Porras and President Alejandro Giammattei have both refuted the allegations.
“Today I am the latest in a string of prosecutors who have suffered consequences for seeking truth and justice,” Sandoval said at his press conference last Friday. “History will judge us. The results are there.” Fearing for his safety, he fled the country later that night.
During his three years at the helm of FECI, Sandoval took on presidents, legislators, judges, business leaders, and other powerful figures. FECI worked in tandem with the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, to identify, investigate, prosecute, and dismantle complex criminal networks entrenched in state institutions. In 2015, the two entities brought down sitting President Otto Pérez Molina and most of his administration for graft. Two years later, their investigations into then-President Jimmy Morales, who took office in 2016 and replaced Pérez Molina’s interim successor, prompted fierce backlash from the Guatemalan government. Morales deemed CICIG commissioner Iván Velásquez a threat to national security, barred him from the country, and opted not to renew CICIG’s mandate. The commission shut down in 2019, and FECI took over CICIG’s cases. Ever since, Sandoval has been the main target of animosity from current and potential subjects of corruption investigations.
“As Indigenous authorities we are very concerned about corruption,” said Lorenzo Castro, Sololá’s Indigenous mayor, in charge not of the official municipal government but of the area’s autonomous traditional Indigenous governance system. Kaqchikel authorities in Sololá have powerful convening capacity, as do autonomous K’iche authorities in the neighboring department of Totonicapán. Mobilizations along the Pan-American Highway in the two predominantly Indigenous regions were the largest actions in Guatemala on Thursday.
First it was Iván Velásquez and CICIG, and now it is Juan Francisco Sandoval, Castro told The Intercept at the protest in La Cuchilla, a village two miles from Los Encuentros at another key turn-off of the Pan-American Highway. Throughout the day, he and other Sololá Indigenous authorities moved between the various protest points in their territory to monitor conditions and coordinate with community-level mayors. The removal of Sandoval was the removal of a remaining hope, they said. “The situation is critical,” said Indigenous vice mayor Pedro Vásquez.
“Who would not be angry? They took our last defender away,” Tomás Saloj, a former Indigenous mayor of Sololá, told The Intercept in La Cuchilla, where protesters were taking cover under plastic sheets, umbrellas, and trees as the rain picked up. “We need to understand the situation we are facing. Now there is nothing. And if we leave things as they are, if we ignore it, imagine what they could do. What would become of Guatemala?”
Sandoval’s ouster sparked not only national outrage but also international condemnation. The most concrete response to date has been that of the U.S. government, which announced the temporary suspension of cooperation with the Guatemalan Public Prosecutor’s Office while it conducts a review. The removal of Sandoval “fits a pattern of behavior that indicates a lack of commitment to the rule of law and independent judicial and prosecutorial processes,” State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter told reporters at a press briefing Tuesday. “As a result, we have lost confidence in the attorney general and their decision — and intention to cooperate with the U.S. Government and fight corruption in good faith.”
“I think the [Guatemalan] government is worried about what will happen,” said Edie Cux, a lawyer and president of the Guatemalan anti-corruption group Acción Ciudadana, noting that on Thursday Porras and Giammattei both attempted to minimize the fallout in written responses to the suspension. The Biden administration had pledged to prioritize anti-corruption efforts in northern Central America as a driver of U.S.-bound migration, as Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted during her first official foreign trip to Guatemala last month.
“On that trip, the United States announced that we will launch an Anticorruption Task Force which will include U.S. prosecutors and law enforcement experts who will investigate corruption cases,” Harris wrote Thursday in a letter concerning U.S. strategy for addressing root causes of migration. Task force plans previously announced by the White House included capacity-building and mentorship for Guatemalan prosecutors from the Departments of Justice, Treasury, and State, with FECI as a key counterpart. The suspension of cooperation puts that work on hold before it even began.
Regardless, the Guatemalan government is probably most concerned with the response of the Guatemalan people, Cux told The Intercept. “I think they are still evaluating how long these kinds of shutdowns, protests, and citizens’ demands will last,” he said. “If the pressure keeps up, I think the government may cede to some extent.”
Along with the resignations of Porras and Giammattei, some communities and organizations are demanding Sandoval’s reinstatement. Legally that would be possible, as the dismissal did not result from the disciplinary process required by law, said Cux. Practically, however, Cux said Sandoval has been the target of powerful groups that exert significant pressure on the government and would be much more willing to sacrifice Porras as attorney general than to accept Sandoval’s reinstatement.
Some communities in remote areas of the Quiché and Alta Verapaz departments had called for two days of protests and maintained their road blockades overnight. While Indigenous authorities and social movements take stock and determine next steps following Thursday’s mass demonstrations, spontaneous local actions will likely continue to take place in several departments of Guatemala. Feliciana Macario, a Maya K’iche human rights leader, took part in a march Thursday in Santa Cruz del Quiché, 22 miles north of Los Encuentros, and she expects protests will continue.
“It is outrageous that decisions are being made just to benefit a few people involved in corruption and also in human rights violations,” said Macario, one of the coordinators of a national coalition that represents victims of Guatemala’s decadeslong internal armed conflict.
As is the case in most Central American countries, U.S. intervention in Guatemala has had far-reaching consequences. A U.S.-backed military coup in 1954 ushered in decades of dictatorships and civil war. An armed conflict between the military and leftist guerrilla forces spanned from 1960 to 1996, leaving an estimated 200,000 people dead and another 45,000 disappeared. More than 80 percent of victims were Maya civilians, and military forces were responsible for more than 90 percent of massacres and other atrocities according to a U.N.-backed truth commission, which concluded that state actors had committed acts of genocide. Domestic courts have since concurred.
Prosecution of conflict-era crimes against humanity is the responsibility of a human rights prosecutor’s bureau, which is separate from FECI. But those efforts would likely be affected by obstruction of FECI’s attempts to prosecute a corruption case involving lawmakers, judges, and defendants who have allegedly all conspired together to stack the country’s top courts. Macario sees the removal of Sandoval as the latest in a series of concerted developments intended to undermine justice. The CICIG shutdown, the closure of peace institutions last year, and the alleged conspiracy to stack courts are all also part of efforts to ensure impunity for past and present crimes, she said.
“It is all a big chain of events. That is why Guatemala is in agony right now,” Macario told The Intercept. “We can only change the course of the country if we all unite.”
Visitors walk around in the water at the Great Salt Lake. (photo: Scott G Winterton/Deseret News)
The U.S. Geological Survey announced Saturday that average daily water levels dropped by about an inch below the previous record of 4,191.4 feet above sea level, which was recorded in 1963. The agency's records of Great Salt Lake's elevations date to 1847.
Great Salt Lake's water levels have gradually been receding, but the recent declines have been aggravated by the megadrought gripping the Western U.S.
According to the latest report from the U.S. Drought Monitor, released Thursday, more than 99 percent of Utah is under "extreme" drought conditions. Almost 70 percent of the state is experiencing "exceptional" drought, the highest category.
"It's already concerning that Great Salt Lake has been on a slow decline, but the drought has accelerated that decline," said Candice Hasenyager, deputy director of the Utah Division of Water Resources. "It's really alarming."
There are still months to go in the lake's typical dry season, which generally stretches from June through the fall. It's likely that water levels will continue to drop, said Ryan Rowland, data chief at the U.S. Geological Survey's Utah Water Science Center.
"We think we could drop another foot to a foot and a half," Rowland said.
Human activity has been one of the biggest contributors to the lake's receding water levels, with increased water consumption for farming, mineral extraction and support for the municipal and industrial sectors all playing roles, Hasenyager said.
Great Salt Lake's water levels have varied throughout history, but climate change is changing how much overall water flows into it. Higher temperatures as a result of global warming are reducing the volume of snowpack and altering precipitation patterns.
"This is what climate scientists have projected, that we would see more extremes and higher temperatures," Hasenyager said. "And that's what we’re seeing."
Last month, water levels at Lake Mead in Arizona and Nevada, the country's largest reservoir, hit their lowest levels in history, another event that was worsened by the drought.
Although Great Salt Lake doesn't provide critical water supplies or electricity to the region, its declining water levels could have worrisome domino effects, she said.
"As the lake continues to dry, it could result in habitat loss, reduced snow, reduced lake access, increased dust, which could worsen our air quality, increased salinity — there are a lot of far-reaching consequences," Hasenyager said.
And because Great Salt Lake is relatively shallow, its water levels can mean considerable changes to the lake's shorelines and overall footprint.
"A drop in lake level exposes a lot of the lake bed to the atmosphere, and the circumference of the lake shrinks significantly," Rowland said. "So even small changes in the water levels can equate to fairly large changes to the lake's surface area."
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