16 October 21
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The drug in question only costs $17.74 to produce. Unfortunately, this type of behaviour is widespread in US pharma
Fact one: Americans are facing not merely expensive drugs but prices that are examples of outright profiteering.
Fact two: in many cases, the medicines we are being gouged on are those that we the public already paid for.
These facts show us that pharma-bankrolled Democrats trying to kill drug pricing measures aren’t just bought and paid for in this particular skirmish – they are foot soldiers in the pharmaceutical industry’s larger multi-decade campaign to seal off and rig America’s alleged “free market”.
First, there’s the price point of drugs. It’s not merely that Americans are paying the world’s highest prices for pharmaceuticals, it’s that in many cases, we are paying prices that aren’t even close to what consumers in other countries pay.
A new Public Citizen analysis shows that the 20 top-selling medicines generated almost twice as much pharmaceutical industry revenue in the United States as in every other country combined. Sure, compared with others, Americans may buy a lot of prescription drugs, but this study reflects something much bigger at play: pharma-sculpted public policies that allow drug price levels to go beyond profits and into profiteering.
That term “profiteering” is important here because drugmakers aren’t losing lots of money in other countries where they sell medicines at lower prices.
Let’s remember: pharmaceutical companies aren’t altruistic charities that offer their products abroad at a loss. On the contrary, they are still making healthy profits at lower world-market prices – and as the Intercept’s Lee Fang notes, they are making those healthy profits while boasting of innovation and job growth in countries that have allowed their governments to use bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prices.
The same arrangement could happen in the United States. We could significantly reduce medicine prices, which would save Medicare and individual consumers hundreds of billions of dollars, and in the process we would do little to significantly reduce pharmaceutical innovation. Indeed, a recent Congressional Budget Office study projected that even if profits on top drugs decreased by a whopping 25%, it would only result in a 0.5% average annual reduction in the number of new drugs entering the market over the next decade.
The reason that reduction in new drugs would be so small gets to the other inconvenient fact being left out of the conversation in Congress right now: for all the pharmaceutical industry’s self-congratulatory rhetoric about its own innovations, the federal government uses your tax dollars to fund a lot of that innovation, research and development.
A study from the National Academy of Sciences tells that story: the federal government spent $100bn to subsidize the research on every single one of the 200-plus drugs approved for sale in the United States between 2010 and 2016.
Because we the public invested early in these medicines, we reduced the R&D costs for pharmaceutical companies. Therefore, on the back end, the public should have received some sort of return in the form of affordable prices. After all, we took the initial risk, and we lowered the overhead costs that the drug companies might need to recoup through higher prices. In business terms, the public is the early venture investor in these products, and we deserve a share of the returns when the product proves valuable.
However, in the mid-1990s, that business axiom was tossed out when drug lobbyists persuaded the Clinton administration to repeal rules that allowed federal officials to require government-subsidized drugs to be offered to Americans at a “reasonable price”.
A few years later, Congress – with then-Senator Joe Biden’s help – voted down legislation to reinstate these rules, and later the Obama administration rejected House Democrats’ request that federal officials at least provide guidelines to government agencies about how they can exercise their remaining powers to combat drug price gouging.
The result: we now routinely face immoral situations like last week’s news that pharmaceutical giant Merck is planning to charge Americans $712 for a Covid drug that cost only $17.74 to produce and whose development was subsidized by the American government.
That’s just the latest example of the absurd paradigm: we take the risk of investing early in the product, but instead of that investment reaping us something valuable like affordable prices, we are rewarded with price gouging by the drugmakers that bankroll the lawmakers who’ve rigged the rules – and aim to keep them rigged.
All of this underscores how corrupt and insane the current conversation in Congress really is – and in truth, it’s way more corrupt than it even seems on the surface.
We aren’t merely watching pharma-bankrolled lawmakers try to stop Medicare from negotiating lower prices for drugs – they are trying to stop the government from negotiating lower prices for medicines that the government already paid for, and that we are being charged the world’s highest prices for.
This opposition is just the latest crusade to keep the American market walled off for maximum manipulation. Laws written by drug lobbyists prohibit wholesalers from importing lower-priced medicines from other countries, give drug companies 20-year patents on government-subsidized medicine, prevent the government from requiring reasonable prices for drugs the government pays for and block Medicare from using its bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prices.
That’s not a “free market”. It is a top-down command economy perfectly calibrated for price gouging, and the pharmaceutical industry and its puppet politicians want to keep it that way.
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
Corporate interest groups linked to the Koch brothers and the Trump administration seek to turn the public against the Build Back Better plan.
The ad was put out last month by the 60 Plus Association, a Koch–funded 501(c)(4) group founded in 1992 by a Republican Senate staffer as a conservative alternative to AARP. Contrary to the ad’s claims, the spending package Democrats are now trying to push through Congress — using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process — would expand Medicare benefits to cover dental, vision, and hearing and allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. AARP has described the group, which does not disclose its donors, as one of several “front groups that purport to represent older Americans but instead push industry friendly political messages.” It is one of five dark-money groups that recently joined a coalition asking members of Congress to vote against the historic social spending package known as the Build Back Better plan, the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s agenda.
As right-wing Democrats in Congress have obstructed the Build Back Better plan, conservative dark-money and corporate interest groups representing the fossil fuel and pharmaceutical industries have recognized an opportunity to thwart Biden’s agenda. Major trade associations like Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, and the American Petroleum Institute, along with a web of conservative and dark-money groups tied to former President Donald Trump, congressional Republicans, and the Koch network, are funding ads and lobbying against the package. According to new research from the nonpartisan watchdog group Accountable.US, at least 13 conservative and dark-money groups have spent millions on ads and lobbying efforts since April.
On Wednesday, One Nation, a dark-money group with ties to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Pfizer, launched a $10 million ad campaign against the package. One Nation President Steven Law, McConnell’s top lieutenant outside the Senate, said “infighting” over the package “has created opportunities to weaken or stop it.”
Five other groups are part of the Save America Coalition, a $10 million campaign to kill the package launched September 17 by the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit run by former Trump administration officials seeking to preserve the former president’s policy agenda. The coalition tends to claim that the spending package would increase taxes, utility bills, and prescription drug prices for working people. But all of the groups or their backers have supported past Republican efforts to bolster the fossil fuel industry, privatize social security, end Medicare, and cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy.
Biden’s spending package would expand Medicare, extend the child tax credit, and pay utility companies to switch to renewable energy sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases. The plan, which would reverse corporate tax cuts implemented under Trump, would fund itself through tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. The package includes a provision that would allow the federal government to negotiate with manufacturers on the price of some prescription drugs and save $456 billion over the next decade, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The provision mirrors a drug pricing reform bill — much despised by the GOP, right-wing Democrats, and the pharmaceutical industry — that House Democrats passed in 2019 and is named for the late Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md. The bill stalled in the Senate.
Other provisions in the package would cut tax breaks to fossil fuel companies and increase the costs of drilling on federal land. Fossil fuel companies are lobbying against the corporate tax increase and claim that the package could result in job cuts.
“Congress is trying to place further restrictions on U.S. development and impose new taxes on American energy while advancing misguided power sector proposals that fail to recognize the critical role of natural gas in driving further emissions reductions,” said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of Policy, Economics, and Regulatory Affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement to The Intercept. “This import-more-oil strategy is a backward approach to addressing our shared climate goals and will only serve to stifle job creation, weaken U.S. energy security and undermine the nation’s economic recovery.”
When the Save America Coalition launched last month, it pledged “to defeat Biden’s reconciliation efforts.” It is led by the America First Policy Institute and includes several dark-money and corporate interest groups like FreedomWorks and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group funded by the Koch brothers. Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, well known for his close relationship with the oil and gas industry as governor of Texas, run the institute’s policy areas on national security and “energy independence.”
Not long after he resigned from the White House, Perry was appointed in January 2020 to rejoin the board of the general partner of Energy Transfer, the major Dallas oil pipeline firm behind the Dakota Access pipeline. Current America First Policy Institute president and CEO Brooke Rollins was formerly Perry’s general counsel and policy director, and her husband is the president and a board member of HKN Energy Ltd., an oil firm that operates in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Rollins went on to become president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which reportedly helped draft Perry’s policy proposals as governor. At least eight former Texas Public Policy Foundation staff members, including Rollins, went on to work in the Trump White House.
In a response to questions about the group’s lobbying against the Biden agenda sent to Texas Public Policy Foundation spokesperson Adam Burnett, Vance Ginn, the group’s chief economist, wrote: “I don’t know the answer to the first few questions. I’d recommend not responding,” in an email that appeared to accidentally include this reporter. Burnett declined to comment.
Another member of the Save America Coalition is FreedomWorks, a Koch-aligned dark-money group that helped start the tea party and organize protests last year to oppose Covid-19 lockdowns and “count legal votes” after Biden won the presidential election. In a statement to the Intercept, FreedomWorks spokesperson Peter Vicenzi denied reporting that the group had helped organize “Stop the Steal” protests, writing that “FreedomWorks organized rallies urging officials to abide by the laws on the books and ensure that every legal ballot was accurately counted.”
FreedomWorks claims that the reconciliation package is “flooded with Green New Deal policies, cradle-to-grave welfare programs, and an unsustainable expansion of entitlement programs like Medicare.” The group criticized the bill’s provision to raise taxes on tobacco, saying the goal was “not to discourage tobacco consumption, but to pay for their socialist plan,” and claimed that the package’s Medicare negotiation provisions would raise drug costs. The group has previously pushed theories denying the existence of climate change.
Another conservative coalition group formed to fight Biden’s agenda in March. Led by former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, the Coalition to Protect American Workers is planning a seven-figure ad buy targeting congressional Democrats’ stances on provisions in the reconciliation package. Short, a Koch operative whose wife worked for the Koch Foundation and other Koch-funded groups, was the subject of a complaint to the FBI from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics and Washington that claimed Short held stock in companies that were impacted by the federal Covid-19 pandemic response. Last month, CREW filed an ethics complaint against Short because he did not file a required financial disclosure report when he left the White House in January.
A third coalition is Conservatives for Property Rights, a group that includes the 60 Plus Association, which released the anti-drug pricing reform ad last month. Despite its televised claims to want to defend Medicare, the 60 Plus Association backed former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s 2011 plan to end the program and turn it into a capped voucher system, as well as former President George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security.
Also targeting the drug pricing reform attempts is PhRMA, which launched a seven-figure ad buy in September opposing reconciliation proposals. PhRMA is also a top donor to American Action Network, a 501(c)(4) dark-money group that launched a $5 million ad campaign in August and is lobbying in 39 districts, many of them represented by moderate Democrats. The group claims that the reconciliation package would increase taxes on small businesses and working families and released a poll last month from seven congressional districts showing general opposition to the $3.5 trillion plan for “new social welfare spending.” American Action Network shares a communications director with the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC.
PhRMA spokesperson Sarah Sutton said the group’s lobbying efforts have focused only on the bill’s provisions related to drug pricing and that “it is misleading to suggest we are lobbying against the broader bill when our focus is on policies that impact patient access to medicines and future innovation.” American Action Network did not respond to a request for comment.
The Common Sense Leadership Fund, a 501(c)(4) group with deep ties to congressional leadership that started in March, launched ads targeting Democratic senators in swing states like Mark Kelly of Arizona and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. The group, which claims that the reconciliation package would increase the cost of living for working-class families, is led by President Kevin McLaughlin, a GOP political strategist and former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; Lester Williamson, former NRSC finance director; and Kevin Golden, who was McConnell’s 2020 campaign manager and was on McConnell’s payroll as recently as February. In 2017, McLaughlin lobbied on tax policy for corporations and related interest groups that have strongly opposed the reconciliation package and corporate tax increases, including Business Roundtable and Walmart.
Industry groups fighting the package are “masquerading as advocates for everyday families while they’re really fighting to keep billion-dollar corporations from paying their fair share,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. “Any lawmaker that is a target of this smear campaign need only look at the mountain of polling to know the American people are fully behind Biden’s plan to finally make corporations contribute to investments that will lower costs and build a stronger economy for all.”
Corporate executives want to avoid taxes, shirk responsibility for the climate crisis, and maintain their profits, Congressional Progressive Caucus Whip Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said in a statement to The Intercept. “It is shameful, but not surprising, that some of the most well-funded and criminal corporate lobbyists in the world are doing everything in their power to kill the President’s agenda.”
Business Roundtable, a corporate lobbying group that represents the country’s top CEOs including Apple and Walmart, launched a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign in recent months to fight corporate tax increases in the package. A Business Roundtable spokesperson said the group has not announced a position on the package itself but opposes its corporate tax increases. Asked about the Congressional Budget Office estimate of federal savings resulting from the bill’s drug pricing provisions, the group’s president and CEO Joshua Bolten pointed to an August analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation that found that in the short term, the corporate tax “is borne entirely by owners of capital” and that “only in the longer run” did its methodology assign “some of the burden of the corporate tax to those taxpayers who earn labor income in addition to owners of capital.”
Walmart, which has avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes, has also lobbied against corporate tax increases in both the reconciliation and infrastructure packages.
“For far too long, the wealthiest taxpayers and big corporations – those who can afford lobbyists – have been able to write a special set of rules for themselves while everyone else, despite working harder than ever, is left further and further behind,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates in a statement to The Intercept. “The President is dead-set on changing that, and these efforts by big money interests make our case for us in the most compelling way possible.”
“Big corporations are using their inside games to lobby against popular provisions in the Build Back Better plan and keep the tax system rigged for the wealthy and rich corporations,” said Senate Committee on Finance member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “It’s time to stand against corporate interests and stand up for hardworking Americans so we can get this done.”
“Fossil fuel executives would like to escape any responsibility for the climate catastrophe that they created and to sink any bill that would cut into their bottom line. Billionaires would like to do anything they can to oppose a bill that would force them to actually pay their taxes. And drug executives would like to keep drug prices high so that they continue to profit off Americans’ suffering,” said Omar. “This is what we’re up against. But we know that organized people will always defeat organized money.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images)
The left flank of the Democratic Party is demanding that Congress add justices to restore “balance” to a court that now has six conservatives and three liberals — in part because of Republican maneuvering during the last year of President Barack Obama’s term. Critics say increasing the number of justices would be court-packing, and would set off a tit-for-tat response by whichever political party is in charge.
Draft materials released Thursday by the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States indicated a consensus that expanding the court was a legal option, but would bring a host of problems. At a public meeting of the commission on Friday, some said the evaluation went too far.
“Dismissing the most salient and most viable intervention on the table cannot help but send a message that the underlying problem the intervention is trying to address is neither urgent nor serious,” said Harvard law professor Andrew Manuel Crespo. “Suffice to say there are a great many people who disagree with that conclusion, including multiple elected leaders at the federal level, multiple leading scholars, numerous witnesses to our commission, and millions of our fellow citizens.”
Expanding the court would be dramatic, said constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe. At the same time, he added: “Many people, and I include myself in this, believe we are indeed in a ‘break-the-glass’ moment.”
Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the report’s discussion dwelt too much on the partisan considerations of adding seats and not enough on the value that could come with additional justices.
“There are reasons that relate to diversity of background and of profession, of race and gender, of geography, of law school,” Ifill said. “There are many reasons why one might support the idea of expanding the court that don’t have to do with your being beholden to a particular partisan agenda or another.”
The commission is not supposed to make recommendations to Biden, but to provide “analysis and appraisal” of the current debate over the Supreme Court, according to co-chair Cristina M. RodrÃguez, a constitutional law professor at Yale Law School. She and co-leader Bob Bauer, who was White House counsel under Obama, said the commission’s work was to be driven by concepts such as protecting the court’s legitimacy and independence.
But consensus can be difficult. Two conservatives on the 38-member body — Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and Caleb Nelson of the University of Virginia School of Law — have resigned, the White House acknowledged Friday. “We respect their decision and very much appreciate the significant contributions that they made during the last 5 months in terms of preparing for these deliberations,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.
Other conservative members of the group worried that a lengthy discussion of court expansion gave “too much oxygen” to an idea that would upset established norms, in the words of University of Chicago law professor Will Baude. The number of justices changed during the first century of U.S. history, but has been at nine since 1869.
Another topic proved difficult as well. The commission’s preliminary report said term limits for justices, who now have life tenure, “appear to enjoy the most widespread and bipartisan support.”
“The United States is the only major constitutional democracy in the world that has neither a retirement age nor a fixed term of years for its high court justices,” the report said. It said a term of 18 years seemed most popular with those who presented testimony. But there is a big obstacle: Many of those who testified believe the Constitution must be amended to make such a change, a difficult undertaking.
The Constitution holds that justices and federal judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” a phrase interpreted to mean for life, as a way to ensure the judiciary’s independence.
But some members said the more they studied the issue, the less they were inclined toward term limits.
Adam White, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an assistant professor of law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, said he had joined the commission thinking term limits might be a good idea.
But he said he now thinks it could present “profound risks.” A system that would ensure each president gets to make at least two Supreme Court justices could further “expand and entrench” presidential power, he said.
Tribe, too, said he now had a dim view of limits. But he worried that finding fault with each proposal could be “dispiriting in the extreme” to those who think the court needs serious reform.
Biden named the commission in response to liberal demands that something be done to “balance” the court. Liberals were particularly angry that a Republican-controlled Senate refused to hold a hearing on Obama’s nominee to fill the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016.
Four years later, the Senate rushed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to take the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg even as votes were being cast to deny President Donald Trump a second term.
“Unmistakably, the overall trend over the last three decades has been toward more partisan conflict, which has affected nominations to the lower courts, as well as the Supreme Court,” the draft material says.
The commission is looking at other issues as well.
Unlike other federal judges, Supreme Court justices are not bound by a formal code of conduct. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has said that all justices consult with the code for lower-court judges in assessing their own ethical obligations. But the report notes that a voluntary system may not be the best approach. “It is not obvious why the court is best served by an exemption from what so many consider best practice.”
A written code of conduct that applies to justices, the report says, “would bring the court into line with lower federal courts and demonstrate its dedication to an ethical culture.”
In several areas, the report suggests ways to enhance transparency and public understanding of the court. When justices decide to sit out certain cases because of personal conflicts, the report says, “statements from the justices explaining their reasons for recusal could enhance transparency of the recusals process,” and those decisions could help guide other justices.
When it comes to potential conflicts, the commission also notes the consensus among court observers that no justices or their spouses or children should own individual publicly traded stocks. On the current court, Roberts and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. hold stocks.
"There is not so much a U.S. border crisis as a global crisis: climate change and extreme inequality will increasingly displace millions of people from the global South." (photo: Deborah Chasman/Intelligencer)
The smuggler left them hidden by rocks and brush on the side of the road just over the border on the U.S. side. He promised to return soon with a car. Three days passed. Out of food and supplies, with only dirty water from a well at the side of the road, they began walking again. From El Centro my husband took a bus to Los Angeles and headed to the airport. He paid cash for a cheap flight to Boston on a puddle jumper that made four stops. At an airport bookstore, he bought a paperback copy of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.
We met almost a year and half later, in November 2002, in a yoga class at a Boston-area gym. When we decided to marry the next spring, we consulted a lawyer to find out what we would have to do to normalize his status. I will never forget that day. It was a Friday afternoon, and we were excited about heading to New York after the appointment for the weekend. My husband had never been to New York City. But to our surprise, the lawyer said he could not help us. He declined our case.
It was the beginning of my education in immigration law, which I knew nothing about when I fell in love with an immigrant. Like most Americans, I believed that marriage guarantees an alien spouse legal status. I would learn over the next few years that the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), signed into law by Bill Clinton, ended that practice for people who had crossed the border or overstayed visas. It made family separation routinely acceptable more than two decades before the Trump administration began separating children and parents at the border.
Discretionary leniency characterized the law’s enforcement in its first years. Indeed, in the late 1990s, broad immigration reform seemed possible, as even business leaders and Republican elites called for open borders on the grounds that the U.S. needed immigrant workers. September 11 changed all that, as immigrants were recast as national security threats. My husband and I learned firsthand that the crackdown in enforcement would be swift and brutal.
This is a story about how we came to understand and experience immigration law — what it’s like to feel the awful weight of the state in your daily life, pressing suddenly on the most intimate of choices. Though the details are personal, this is not really a story about me or my husband. Untold numbers with fewer means and in tighter straits have suffered more than we did, and they often ended up with permanent family separations. But our decade-long experience under this law, with its absurd hoops and cruel trials and capricious bureaucracy, was enough to make plain the morality of the law itself. Stories about immigrants so often invite judgment, offering a sympathetic character who in the end is deemed worthy of entry to this country. Indeed, as we learned, the law is based on this premise, that some families “deserve” to stay together, as if others do not. So it is the law, not immigrants’ lives, that demands our scrutiny.
The 1996 law was a radical departure from long-standing norms in this democracy that gave undocumented immigrants (including those without U.S. spouses) a path to citizenship. It made “inadmissible” many immigrants who in the past would have over time been eligible for green cards. Like the other “reform” bills of that era, especially the 1994 crime bill, it created new norms of scrutiny, punishment, and coercive violence. It is a central component of an immigration regime whose reach is tyrannically invasive, whose authority is all-powerful, and whose harm has been incalculable.
After that first meeting with a lawyer, we drove to New York in near silence. When we got to our hotel room, I cried. We had expected consequences for my husband’s immigration violation — fees, waiting periods, paperwork, lawyers — and were prepared to accept them, but we never imagined that our case would be impossible. He offered to return to Brazil so I didn’t have to live with the burden of his status. I said no.
In 2003, we married in a sanctuary city that grants marriage licenses regardless of status. We had a daughter the next year. Anyone I dared tell about our situation expressed disbelief: But you’re married! they’d say. We consulted several more lawyers; they all felt that our case was too hard. That year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had released a ten-year strategy document, Endgame, with the goal of 100 percent “removal of all removable aliens.”
In the following years, the effects of immigration enforcement increasingly intruded on our life: We could not get a joint bank account (I had to beg a teller I knew at my local branch to make an exception); we could not get car insurance; we could not get on an airplane, even for domestic travel; and in spite of the fact that my husband paid taxes through an international taxpayer-ID number, the crackdown on employers of undocumented immigrants cost him his job.
In 2005, at the suggestion of my husband’s friend, we consulted with another lawyer, Rachel Tadmor. Her office was in Worcester, an hour’s drive from us. Our daughter crawled around the office while Rachel explained in more detail what we already knew: that there was virtually no chance of changing my husband’s status. But she thought she could help us if we were willing to wait.
She explained that the 1996 law had created three- and ten-year bars to reentry for immigration violations. The longer bar applied to anyone in the country for more than 180 days without a visa: i.e., someone like my husband. And the clock only started after the violator left the country. The only way for mixed-status couples to overcome that bar was to obtain a waiver. Under the law, waivers would be granted if the family — or “qualifying” U.S.-citizen family members — would experience “extreme hardship” in separation or in relocating to another country.
The catch was that the definition of extreme hardship specifically precludes the obvious: that family separation, or leaving the life you’ve always known, creates hardship.
“What does count for extreme hardship?” I asked.
“If you had a terminal illness, you might have a chance,” she said.
She addressed me directly because any hardship experienced by my husband — the undocumented person — was irrelevant to the state. Years later, it’s hard to explain the fleeting feeling of hope that her explanation gave me. But it quickly gave way to nausea. At the time, I was about the age that my mother had been when she died of cancer. I turned Rachel’s answer over and over in my head to try to make sense of it: the state would consider my family’s hardship, but only in the face of an imminent death that would dissolve my family anyway.
We also learned from Rachel that waivers for Latin American nationals were then being processed only by the consulate in Peru; that the processing could take years; and that there was little hope that ours would be approved. Nonetheless, she encouraged us to come forward, file the initial paperwork for a marriage petition, and wait. She said that we’d be invited to an interview, but that we were not to go. He would likely be detained and deported.
We filed the marriage petition even though we understood that it increased the possibility of deportation. Coming forward seemed the right thing to do, and, as Rachel argued, it would give us a place “in line” if the rules changed. She also told us that we had the right to refuse Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents entry into the house. (Would I be able to close the door in their face? Or would they push through anyway?)
Meanwhile, in 2005, President George W. Bush was pushing hard for comprehensive immigration reform. He supported a bipartisan bill, the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, sponsored by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy, that would have given millions of immigrants, my husband included, a path to citizenship. Later that year, hard-line Republicans in Congress responded with the so-called Sensenbrenner Bill, which would have required local law enforcement to turn over undocumented immigrants to ICE and criminalized undocumented immigrants as well anyone who helped or “housed” them.
Pro-immigrant rallies broke out across the country in March 2006. We had just celebrated our daughter’s second birthday with a small group of children and their families. She’d been delighted and amazed by the flurry of activity in the house. As we emerged from the subway for a rally, she saw the crowds of people chanting. “For me?” she asked, with eyes wide. Within months, the reform bills in Congress were dead.
We were hopeful that things might get easier with President Barack Obama’s 2008 election. But that hope quickly faded. Presumably in an effort to lay the groundwork for reform, he ramped up ICE’s budget and escalated deportations to unprecedented levels. That effort earned him the title “Deporter-in-Chief.” Despite the administration’s repeated claims that only criminal immigrants were being targeted, it turned out that it was much easier to find those whose only offense was to violate immigration rules.
One evening during Obama’s first term, my husband told me that “something funny” happened when he was home alone. He’d answered a knock at the door to find an ICE agent on our front steps, his badge out. The agent asked for someone whose name my husband didn’t recognize. So my husband asked the agent what address he wanted. It turned out the agent was on the wrong street, and he went his way. For weeks, I would look out the window, checking for parked black cars, before stepping out.
We lived with the threat of deportation hanging over our heads for ten years. It never came. The state denied us any path forward but apparently felt no urgency to remove my husband. But I felt its presence all around us. It was impossible to experience family life without that stigma.
In August of 2012, when we could no longer stand it, my husband self-deported to his hometown in central Brazil. He hadn’t seen his parents or siblings in more than twelve years. He left with Rachel’s assent, if not her blessing. She was seeing more waivers getting approved, and they were being processed more quickly and in more locations. She thought we had a fifty percent chance of getting ours approved and would have preferred to wait for better odds. That year, parents of some 150,000 U.S.-citizen children were deported. In some cases, they were handcuffed and removed in front of their children, who were left home alone.
After his departure, we requested an interview at the U.S. consulate in Rio. It took four months. We knew that our marriage petition would be denied and that we would be told we needed to apply for the waiver. In the meantime, I prepared our “proof of marriage” dossier and started working on the waiver materials.
I dragged a binder with hundreds of pages of documents and photos on the plane to Rio. During our interview the next morning, the agent told me to put it away.
“I believe you’re married,” he said.
He then apologized: He would have to deny our request for a green card. His courtesy surprised me. If the authorities were not skeptical of our case, what did concern them?
Meanwhile, across the room, another agent was raising his voice. “Your lawyer lied to you,” he shouted. A young Brazilian woman wept while her American husband tried to comfort her. Unscrupulous lawyers can take your fees and let you exit the country with the belief that everything will be okay, all while knowing that it’s unlikely you’ll be back to complain. As we left, the couple sat crumpled in the corner of the waiting room.
We were lucky. We were prepared for what would happen in Rio. And we had a good lawyer. In fact, by the time of our interview, our waiver application, with the extreme-hardship narrative at its heart, was almost ready to go. I’d been working furiously on it all fall after I got home from work. It was a huge task on top of the hard experience of single-parenting.
Its purpose was difficult to grasp. Because families cannot write about the simple fact that their loved one’s absence is harmful, every narrative is different and depends on family history, finances, medical issues, and anything else that the petitioner might deem relevant.
The narrative I wrote details generations of family in diaspora, parental loss and illness, and a deep wish to avoid repeating the pattern. Everything I wrote had to be supported with verifying documents. When I wrote that my mother was born in Berlin in 1932, I needed to provide her birth certificate. When I wrote that her family fled the Nazis to Sweden in 1937 and that her father died when she was twelve, I needed evidence. When I said that she died of melanoma in 1977, I needed to provide her death certificate. I hated asking my father to look in his old files for proof of her illness. He’d held onto one document, a letter from a doctor who wrote how much he’d enjoyed meeting my mother at a consultation. He sent it to me along with a letter of support for our file that said that he did not want me to be a single parent like he was.
I had to request my own medical records and our daughter’s school records. I asked for letters from college friends, colleagues, employers, and therapists. We included family photographs and drawings by our daughter. The private details of our lives, especially the worst moments of mine, were packaged up for a file that would last forever at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). But I couldn’t stop digging up more. Because “extreme hardship” had no precise standard, I did not know how much was enough. I stopped when I simply could not do any more, and Rachel was satisfied.
On our daughter’s ninth birthday in 2013, I learned that my husband’s green card had been approved. I called him in Brazil. It sounded like he was crying.
It turned out that in early 2013, while we were still waiting for the waiver approval, Obama had granted some relief to families like ours with an executive order. Families could file for a waiver while the undocumented family member was still in the United States and, assuming the waiver was approved, they would then leave the country for the interview and return in a matter of weeks. The process enormously reduced two burdens for families: the length of family separation and the expenses involved in having their loved one outside the country for an indefinite amount of time. And it kept them from being stuck outside the country if the waiver was denied. Even so, many families simply could not afford the process or didn’t meet its income requirement.
The provisional waiver was a welcome relief. But it was an administrative change, not a change in the law. Enforcement can fluctuate with different administrations. The deportation of immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens with no criminal records spiked again during the first years of the Trump administration.
The fact remains that even within more lenient processing guidelines, the fates of families depend on whether their particular story satisfies the whims of the state (not to mention whether they can find and afford trustworthy and competent lawyers). As the most recent USCIS guidelines explain, extreme hardship is “not expressly defined” and is subject to change:
As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in INS v. Jong Ha Wang, “[t]hese words are not self-explanatory, and reasonable men could easily differ as to their construction. But the [INA] commits their definition in the first instance to the Attorney General [and the Secretary of Homeland Security] and [their] delegates.” Therefore, “[t]he Attorney General [and the Secretary of Homeland Security] and [their] delegates have the authority to construe ‘extreme hardship’ narrowly should they deem it wise to do so.”
In recent years, Rachel says, USCIS has been more generous in approving waivers. But she has had cases that look very similar in which one family is denied and the other is approved. In one, a family was told that they did not meet the extreme hardship standard because they did not have children.
In some situations, meeting the hardship standard set by the state is virtually impossible. If an undocumented immigrant is already in removal proceedings, U.S. relatives must meet the more severe standard of “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to stop deportation. Consider the 2019 case of a Guatemalan immigrant who lived with his five U.S. citizen children, his partner, and his mother (a legal permanent resident). His appeal details, among other things, his mother’s medical conditions, his child’s anxieties, and his fear of returning to Guatemala, where his life had been threatened by criminal gangs. The more reasons he puts forward to stay, the more the judge picks them apart: His mother can get adequate if not comparable medical treatment in Guatemala; his child’s anxiety about separating would disappear if he left the country with his father; the fear of criminal violence is not relevant to the appeal (only the threat of political violence is).
If an undocumented immigrant has left their U.S. family to see a sick family member and then returns across the border, no arguments about hardship will be considered. Not even a remote path for legal status exists.
The murkiness of the hardship standard is not unique to USCIS waivers. Amnesty cases use a similar logic. “The humanitarian assessment,” as Paul Linden-Retek writes, “is shot through at each stage with judgments about the seriousness of harm and the deservingness of protection.” As a result, what counts as harm remains elusive, even as the law insists that “moral and legal recognition remains an empirical characteristic to be demonstrated and verified.”
No just law allows bureaucrats to deny the humanity of the petitioners by creating two types of families: those that deserve recognition and those that don’t. Trump’s border separation policy exposed this logic to a shocked public, but it was not a fundamental break from a policy that has separated hundreds of thousands of families in recent decades. What is especially sinister about the IIRIRA’s demand for extreme-hardship narratives is that it cruelly exposes individual vulnerabilities to scrutiny while making the coercive violence of the state and its policies invisible. It hides a simple truth: The state does enormous, lasting harm when it separates families.
As the Center for Migration Studies describes it in a 2018 report, the IIRIRA normalized cruelty. It has “punished U.S. citizens and noncitizens of all statuses,” “curtail[ed] equitable relief from removal,” and created “insurmountable, technical roadblocks to asylum.” It has created “the concept of ‘criminal alienhood,’” over time conflating “criminality and lack of immigration status,” and “divided mixed-status families.” It has enlisted state and local law in immigration enforcement, “driv[ing] a wedge between police and immigrant communities.”
While Clinton’s crime bill is now widely seen as having been hugely damaging to individuals and communities of color, the IIRIRA hasn’t undergone a similar reassessment. We can start by acknowledging that people who have made this country their home for years develop deep attachments to our communities. “Unlawful presence” is not, as the IIRIRA would have us believe, an eternal condition. We should follow the logic of the political philosopher Joseph H. Carens, who has forcefully argued that time erodes the right to deport a person. Most Americans agree, including conservative Republicans. A 2017 survey found that “there is no state in the country — whether red, purple, or blue — in which a majority prefers deportation as the means of solving the country’s illegal immigration problem.”
We need a simple entry bar to the process with less individual scrutiny. The three- and ten-year bars need to be repealed. For families, ruling out marriage fraud (which is rare), conducting a basic background check, and requiring a fixed number of years of residence (say, three to five) should be enough. We need to return to periodic amnesties, which served as a statute of limitations even for those without qualifying U.S. relatives, or, as Carens suggests, to a kind of rolling amnesty that kicks in after a certain period.
Some will argue that granting relief will only exacerbate the border “crisis.” But as Harsha Walia and others have argued, there is not so much a U.S. border crisis as a global crisis: climate change and extreme inequality will increasingly displace millions of people from the global South. Many of them will land at our border with Mexico. No amount of policing and enforcement will stop the flow. No matter how large DHS grows (it is already the largest immigration-law-enforcement agency in the country), it cannot impose order on that chaos. Our obsession with enforcement has only given birth to a machinery of cruelty.
As Joe Biden’s efforts for immigration reform falter, we need to change the way we talk about immigration. The public debate is focused on the immigrants who have already been deemed “deserving”: DACA immigrants (innocent), farm workers (necessary), and perhaps now essential workers (heroic). Labeling them worthy only further dehumanizes the millions of people who have lived here in limbo, some for decades. After 20 years of failed immigration-reform efforts, their numbers are unprecedented. Moving forward is not a task for enforcement, but for our collective political will and moral imagination.
A predator drone. (photo: General Atomics)
A wrongly targeted Afghan aid worker and his family are among the latest casualties.
When a surviving member of Ahmadi’s family complained publicly about the errant strike that slaughtered so many members of his family, the Pentagon did what it has been doing for 20 years in Afghanistan. It lied.
According to the New York Times, the Pentagon claimed that Ahmadi was a facilitator for the Islamic State, and that his car was packed with explosives, posing an imminent threat to U.S. troops guarding the evacuation at the Kabul airport. General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., commander of the U.S. Central Command, said the drone strike dealt ISIS Khorasan a crushing blow. General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a “righteous strike.”
When it was confirmed that children as young as two had died in the strike, the Pentagon suggested that any civilian deaths resulted from the detonation of explosives inside the vehicle that was targeted. The military produced an assessment that the occupants of the vehicle were wearing suicide vests and that the car itself was packed with explosives.
Most of our drone strikes take place in remote areas and no follow-up investigation is ever conducted. However, the slaughter of Ahmadi’s family took place 2 miles from the Kabul airport, at which American reporters were stationed covering the chaotic evacuation of U.S. troops and allies. In the days following the deadly drone strike, reporters from the New York Times conducted a thorough investigation, visiting Ahmadi’s home and place of work, viewing video footage from security cameras, and consulting with weapons experts.
This investigation quickly confirmed that every official statement of the Pentagon was false. Ahmadi did not visit an Islamic State safe house on the day of his death; he visited his office. His car was not loaded with explosives; it was loaded with water canisters he was bringing home to his family because there was a water shortage in his neighborhood.
After the publication of the New York Times investigation, the Pentagon conceded that it had made a tragic, but “honest” mistake when it assassinated Ahmadi and his family by drone. No one has been held accountable for the deadly mistake.
Targeted drone killing is an innovation of the war on terror. It facilitates continuous war by making it appear less costly and more humane. Indeed, President Biden has already announced that the U.S. will continue launching drone strikes from afar after its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Similar language was used when Biden announced an end to American support “for offensive operations in the war in Yemen,” while reserving the right to continue killing Yemenis if it believes they are linked to ISIS or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And of course don’t expect any peace dividend from the end of the Afghan war. In September, the House approved, in bipartisan fashion, $778 billion in military spending for 2022, a $37 billion increase over our 2021 military budget. More than half the funds we’ve sent to the Pentagon since 9⁄11 — or about $8 trillion — has ended up in the pockets of private corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. These companies then use some of those taxpayer dollars to lobby Congress and the president to keep the wars going and the money flowing into their pockets.
President Eisenhower warned of the danger that a profit-seeking “military-industrial complex” will produce a state where wars are not fought with an intention of winning them but to ensure that they never end. The author George Orwell articulated these dangers in his classic novel 1984 (published in 1949) wherein he described continuous war as an opaque, low-intensity conflict whose primary purpose was to siphon off resources and perpetuate itself.
Begun under President George W. Bush, the drone program was fully embraced and escalated under the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. President Obama assured Americans that our drones are so “exceptionally surgical and precise,” “narrowly target[ed]… against those who want to kill us” while not putting “innocent men, women and children in danger.”
The claim that drones are humane and effective has always been a lie. But by classifying the program as top secret and by aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers, the U.S. has been able to hide the truth about drones from most Americans. Ironically, of course, the people targeted by our drones know the truth about who is being killed. Thus the classification of all information about drones does nothing to protect national security; rather it protects government officials from any accountability.
I have asked several members of the U.S. Senate about the drone program and have never received a straight answer. In the fall of 2009, I attended a fundraiser for Senator Chuck Schumer at a Chicago law firm. The United States had just suffered one of its deadliest months in Afghanistan in which more than 50 Americans were killed. Schumer assured the group that Obama was turning things around with his unmanned killer drone program. I asked Schumer about civilian deaths and whether the CIA (which then ran the drone program) had ever studied whether drones killed more terrorists than they created. The senator said he was pretty sure the CIA did reach such a conclusion.
In fact, as WikiLeaks later revealed, the CIA had conducted such a study in July 2009. But that study, called “CIA Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” reached the opposite conclusion: that the clandestine drone and assassination program was likely to produce counterproductive outcomes, including strengthening the very “extremist groups” it was allegedly designed to destroy, particularly if “non-combatants are killed in the attacks.” This report was classified as “secret,” meaning it could be read by Senator Schumer, but not by you or me, until 2014, when WikiLeaks released it to the public.
Others have come forward to expose the official lies told about our drone program. In 2014, a former signals intelligence analyst in the U.S. Air Force named Daniel Hale leaked internal documents exposing how, in one five-month period in Afghanistan, 90 percent of the people killed by our drones were not the intended target. Hale also disclosed how children in areas targeted by our drones cannot go out and play on clear days because that is when the drones fly. Hale said that drone operators reported having to kill a part of their conscience to keep doing their job. Hale was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for leaking these documents and has been sentenced to 45 months in prison.
The investigation by the New York Times into the drone assassination of Mr. Ahmadi and his family is an important step in bringing some sunlight into the clandestine world of drone warfare. Sadly, most victims of our drones still remain anonymous as the strikes take place in remote areas of faraway countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Much of the work to reveal the truth about drones still falls on independent investigative journalists and whistleblowers like Mr. Hale. They are our best hope to begin holding those responsible accountable and bringing an end to this dangerous lie.
A Mapuche indigenous woman shouts slogans during a protest in Chile. (photo: Luis Hidalgo/AP)
The Indigenous Mapuche say they are only fighting for their ancestral lands which have been taken over by wealthy landowners and logging companies.
The Mapuche, Chile's largest Indigenous group, have for years been demanding self-determination and the restoration of their ancestral lands, mostly in the south of the country. Mapuche leaders argue that their homelands, which are now owned by farmers and logging companies, should be returned to them. The dispute has led to outbreaks of violence and several deaths, especially over the past decade.
Piñera called a 15-day “state of exception” in the southern regions of Biobio and La Araucania, allowing the government to deploy soldiers to the region to support the local police and maintain the peace. In a news conference to announce the measures, he claimed that the “armed groups” in the area have engaged in “repeated acts of violence linked to drug-trafficking, terrorism and organized crime.”
It’s unclear how involved members of the Mapuche are in the drug trade and organized crime. While there have been a few isolated cases, there has not been proven evidence that it is widespread. Local Mapuche groups released a statement in January distancing themselves from organized crime in the region, and said those involved were “external agents to the communities trying to introduce drugs and bad practices.”
Piñera went on to say that the violence has not only taken innocent lives, but those of police officers and government officials.
“We are instituting this state of emergency so that we can permit the inhabitants of the affected zones to live in greater peace, so they can live with freedom, better rights, and live without fear and violence,” said Piñera. The 15-day state of emergency could potentially be extended.
Piñera did not mention the Mapuche by name in his speech, but it was clear when he referred to destruction of property and violence in the region that he was speaking about activists of the Indigenous group that accounts for around 12 percent of Chile's population of almost 20 million.
Successive Chilean governments have downplayed the Mapuche land claims, and used words like “terrorism” to describe their uprising. But the Mapuche have faced centuries of persecution and marginalization, and say they are just fighting for what was theirs to begin with. Spanish colonizers were unable to conquer the Mapuche, and it was only after Chile’s independence in the 19th century that state forces eventually took control of the Indigenous group and their land.
“We want to make it clear that we have always been available to talk, to discuss the Mapuche cause with the different people that may be necessary, but we are not going to compromise on our territorial and political demands and the transformation processes that we will carry out,” Héctor Llaitul, a prominent Mapuche leader, told EFE. “Although, that implies all the hatred and all the persecution that the state and the system are giving us.”
While members of the Mapuche have destroyed forestry equipment, set fire to pine tree plantations, burned down churches and occupied land, the group has also experienced the brunt of security forces’ violence.
In 2017, eight Mapuches, including Llaitul, were imprisoned for organizing attacks in the region, but it was later proven that a police unit fabricated evidence in the case. The next year, police killed the 24-year-old grandson of a local indigenous leader, which triggered nationwide protests. Tensions heightened again in July when hooded men allegedly invaded a logging company facility and ended up in a confrontation with police that killed another Mapuche man.
Piñera's declaration of a state of emergency came just days after Mapuche organizations held a protest march in the capital of Santiago that ended in a violent face-off with police. During the unrest, one Mapuche woman died, at least 17 people were injured and 10 others arrested, according to local news outlets, after protesters fought police water cannons with sticks and stones.
The state of emergency announcement came as Piñera faces a scandal after his name emerged as part of a global investigation into financial irregularities by the world's elite known as the Pandora Papers. On Wednesday, opposition lawmakers began an impeachment process against Piñera for his alleged connection to the sale of a family mining company, a transaction that was uncovered in the investigation.
https://www.vox.com/22709379/moderate-versus-progressive-democrats-climate
“There isn’t a middle ground between a livable and unlivable world.”
But there’s a problem with portraying these disagreements as a conflict between moderates and progressives. This picture leaves out the unarguable scientific reality that pollution is warming the planet at an unsustainable and dangerous rate. There is nothing moderate or debatable about the catastrophic changes that global emissions are wreaking on the climate. In August, a panel of United Nations climate scientists called it “unequivocal” that humans have warmed Earth’s skies, waters, and lands.
“It is possible to find middle ground in many areas of politics; I know, because I have done it,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), an advocate of swift climate action, said in a recent press conference. “But we cannot compromise on science. There isn’t a middle ground between a livable and unlivable world.”
A narrative that pits progressives against moderates runs the risk of spotlighting climate deniers and centering fossil fuel interests. It arguably distracts from the substance of climate policies that a broad swath of Americans already support.
To take ambitious climate action, Senate Democrats need every single member of their party (plus two independents) to vote for a version of the Build Back Better agenda, a proposed budget that would, among other things, boost clean energy and reduce US emissions. That has put two holdouts, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, front and center in the negotiations, and gives them disproportionate power over the future of the country’s climate policy.
Policy battles like this show that Americans need a new way to talk about the politics of climate change, as a range of strategists, pollsters, and lawmakers told Vox. Instead of focusing on “centrist” or “moderate” politicians, they said, political observers should distinguish between the many Democrats who support addressing the crisis at hand and the few who support an unacceptable status quo.
“People don’t know what ‘moderate’ even means, particularly around climate change,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist, told Vox. “I mean, you’re flooded two feet instead of four?”
A traditional left-right spectrum doesn’t capture widespread consensus about climate change
Let’s consider what “middle ground” climate action might mean in practice. The planet faces rampant warming unless the entire world takes aggressive action this decade. Only if countries make big and rapid investments to help clean energy replace fossil fuels will it be possible to limit warming to less disastrous levels.
Splitting the difference between doing nothing and doing everything in our power, in other words, does not halt the crisis. This “moderate” path leads us somewhere between devastating warming and catastrophic warming.
Supporters of modest climate action are ignoring the magnitude of the problem, argued Ryan Fitzpatrick, director of the Climate and Energy Program at Third Way, a group that says it promotes center-left policies. “If you don’t publicly acknowledge the severity of the impact of climate change, then why would we expect any of your policy conditions or solutions to be based in rationality?” Fitzpatrick asked.
If you accept the findings of climate scientists, he added, “you understand the level of ambition that’s needed to solve the problem.”
Research suggests that the so-called moderates in Congress don’t represent the median US opinion about climate change. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Communication, has spent his career using polling to find out what the public actually thinks about climate. When he’s looked at the political differences between self-identifying conservative, moderate, and liberal voters, he finds there’s more agreement than you might hear in the halls of Congress.
“The pattern that really jumps out to you is that there’s one group that’s really not like the others,” Leiserowitz said, “and that’s conservative Republicans.” This group made up less than a quarter of those sampled. Most of the US voters who are doubtful or dismissive of climate change are politically conservative, and most are Republicans, his research has shown.
When he ropes off the conservative Republicans as outliers, Leiserowitz finds a surprising amount of agreement on some core principles, such as support for clean energy. In Yale’s December 2020 national sample of 1,036 Americans, a large majority of Democrats and moderate Republicans supported generating renewable energy on public land. The supporters included 94 percent of the liberal Democrats in the survey, 76 percent of the liberal and moderate Republicans, and 59 percent of conservative Democrats.
There’s also surprising agreement about the importance of transitioning off fossil fuels. The survey estimated that more than 8 in 10 Democrats across the spectrum support a transition to clean energy, and so did 59 percent of self-identified moderate and liberal Republicans.
“These are relatively minor differences,” Leiserowitz told Vox. In fact, he said, there’s more agreement than disagreement on many policies related to climate change, with the specific exception of conservative Republicans.
Climate downplayers and deniers, however, have an elevated role in politics and arguably skew the public understanding of the consensus position. While some Republicans are gradually coming around to the idea of climate action, the top GOP senator, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, led a Republican Senate majority that ignored the issue for nearly a decade. “We can debate this forever,” he said in 2014, ignoring the scientific consensus. And when Biden reentered the Paris climate agreement this year, a group of Republican senators attempted to override his order.
This helps explain how the future of US climate policy has landed in the hands of Sen. Manchin, a longtime coal businessman who continues to receive campaign funding from the fossil fuel industry and advocate for fossil fuel interests. Before he was labeled a moderate, the press called Manchin a conservative Democrat; he has very different goals than Sinema, the other senator widely called a moderate in the news these days. Sinema hails from one of the leading states in the solar industry and has publicly argued for robust climate spending in the infrastructure bill. (She has disputed reports that she wants to see $100 billion in climate funds cut from the spending bill.)
As Ezra Klein wrote about the myth of the middle in a 2015 Vox story, “The idea of the moderate middle is bullshit: it’s a rhetorical device meant to marginalize some policy positions at the expense of others.” This is what’s happening to climate policy, too.
What should replace the myth of the climate moderate?
The time to take a moderate approach to climate has passed, argued Dana Johnson, who leads federal policy office of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a climate advocacy group. “If we would have done this 20, 40, 60 years ago, perhaps we could take a moderate approach,” Johnson said. “The moment right now called for us to go big, and to be bold, if we’re going to achieve any kind of meaningful change.”
She’s not the only one. “Perhaps the most politically difficult aspect of climate change is that, after decades of denial and delay, there is no longer any coherent ‘moderate’ position to be had,” energy writer David Roberts wrote in his newsletter.
At the New Republic, Kate Aronoff has argued that lawmakers who undermine climate legislation are actually extremists: “No one should call them moderates, or even centrists. They’re extremists. If they have their way, they’re going to get a lot of people killed.”
Instead, it’s time to judge politicians on the level of their ambition, and the extent to which they prioritize the planet’s climate. Leaders who aren’t ready to accelerate a transition to clean energy, and publicly recognize that fossil fuels cannot be the dominant fuel of the future, effectively support a dangerous status quo. Politicians who block climate action are more or less on the same side as fossil fuels.
Some climate policies genuinely divide Democrats, such as investments in nuclear power and carbon-capture technology. Many progressive environmentalists are skeptical of both.
A new framing for the politics of climate change would not ignore these policy debates. It’s possible to agree about the reality and urgency of climate change while disagreeing about the best strategies to stop it.
Climate change may still become an important electoral issue, as younger voters who care more about these policies start to vote in greater numbers. “Turnout is going to impact a lot of what happens in the midterms,” said Lake, the Democratic strategist. “And in the 2024 election, the younger voters are going to be bigger than the baby boomers for the first time.”
Republicans may be reacting to these electoral pressures. “You have a lot of Republicans who have embraced a tax credit that promotes emissions reductions and clean energy sources,” Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former Congress member who introduced climate legislation in the House, told Vox. “It’s a departure from the Republican Party of just a few years ago, where the most common element ... was apathy.”
When it comes to climate change, Republicans and Democrats can be judged by the same standard. “It comes down to whether or not you acknowledge the well-established fact that climate change is going to cause severe damage, particularly if we don’t meet these emissions goals,” said Fitzpatrick of Third Way. “Whether you call yourself a progressive or a moderate, if you’re serious about climate, we all have to be aiming to accomplish the same thing. And getting that means getting to net-zero emissions by 2050.”
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