05 November 21
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The conclusion: nothing good.
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, at the trial of tourist vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, the judge seems to be auditioning for an Arrested Development reboot. In Brunswick, Georgia, jury selection in the trial of the three men accused of murdering Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery took a severe turn into 1957. In neither case are these developments auspicious with regard to justice for the dead people.
In Kenosha, Judge Bruce Schroeder is four days into the Rittenhouse trial and he’s already drawn national attention to his eccentric manner of running it. It began when he forbade the prosecution from calling the dead people “victims,” but allowed the defense to refer to them as “rioters” and “looters” if they can prove the people shot were committing those offenses that night. He enlivened voir dire by playing Jeopardy! with prospective jurors, assuring them that he was COVID-free, and engaging in jolly banter that not only was ill-suited to a courtroom, but was ill-suited to last call at the 19th hole at any public golf course. From the AP:
One potential juror told Schroeder he had nasal surgery scheduled in 10 days. The judge asked him, “What would you rather do, be here with me or have your nose operated on?” The man responded: “I’ll be honest with you, I’m not looking forward to it.” The judge laughed and said he would take it under consideration.
On Tuesday, he defended his conduct with a howling rant against “the media” out of the presence of the jury. He went to great lengths in defending his decisions in a 13-year-old case in which a murder conviction was tossed because, according to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Schroeder had allowed tainted evidence to be admitted during trial. Quoth Schroeder:
There are people on the media, on reputable sites, that are saying things that are totally bizarre.
To be fair, he had us there.
Finally, Schroeder explained the hearsay rule to the jury with a lengthy disquisition on the trial of St. Paul in a Roman courtroom. This is a guy who likes being live-streamed.
On Wednesday, as the trial actually began, the action centered on a number of videos taken of the events in Kenosha the night that Rittenhouse killed two people and wounded a third in the middle of the disturbances touched off by the police shooting of Jacob Blake. (The events seem to have been well-covered by dozens of amateur videographers.) But the real lawyering occurred as the two sides clashed over the official FBI video taken from a helicopter above the scene. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Howard also introduced an enhanced clip of infrared aerial surveillance footage from the FBI. The clip was enhanced with markings to highlight Rittenhouse and Rosenbaum's moments before the shooting. It's meant to support the prosecution theory that Rittenhouse was chasing Rosenbaum, before they swapped roles and Rittenhouse ran from Rosenbaum. On cross-examination, defense attorney Mark Richards revealed the same video with the defense's own enhancements, in different colors, that he says shows Rosenbaum lying in wait.
The defense threw long on the FBI video, arguing that the Bureau had not shown all the footage taken from the helicopter that night, and intimating that there was a cover-up underway.
Binger argued the plane's tail number was irrelevant. Richards said the defense needs it to refine its records request from FBI, which has so far rebuffed its attempts to [get] "the rest" of the video, at one point telling them it no longer exists. "I can't believe the FBI is doing surveillance of multiple homicides and gets rid of the video. That's preposterous," Richards said. Assistant District Attorney James Kraus called Richards concerns "faux outrage," and that two video discs the office turned over to the defense is hours of surveillance video, and everything prosecutors got from the FBI.
Meanwhile, down in Georgia, a jury was empaneled in the trial of Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging through their neighborhood. The case will be tried before a jury of one Black citizen and 11 white ones. This was so obvious a development that even the trial judge took notice, not that he thought himself capable of doing anything about it. From the Guardian:
Prosecutors had urged Judge Timothy Walmsley, who is overseeing the trial in south Georgia, to reverse the strikes of eight Black potential jurors, whom they said had been intentionally targeted over race. A landmark 1986 US supreme court decision in Batson v Kentucky ruled it unconstitutional for potential jurors to be struck solely based on race or ethnicity. But Walmsley, while acknowledging the apparent “intentional discrimination”, cited limitations spelled out in the supreme court precedent and pointed to defense lawyers’ justifications, which did not mention race or ethnicity.
The law, in these specific cases, is being more of an ass than usual.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, holds her weekly news conference in the Capitol on Oct. 28. The House is set to vote on the latest version of Democrats' social spending package. (photo: Samuel Corum/Getty)
Democrats believe they can move the package along with a related infrastructure measure on Friday after a day of marathon meetings
The new burst of activity played out in private meetings that stretched late into the night, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) embarked on an all-out campaign to finalize the legislation, wrangle sufficient support in the narrowly divided chamber and bring the debate over the long-stalled tax-and-spending measure to a close.
Democrats ultimately did not achieve the Thursday vote that they had initially hoped to hold. But they still ended the long day on track to bring the $1.75 trillion bill to the House floor as soon as Friday. The timetable would allow them to turn next to a separate, parallel bill to improve the nation’s infrastructure, which they also hope to adopt before the end of the week.
The marathon stretch of legislating began with Pelosi striking a positive note, stressing to reporters that Democrats had made significant progress in resolving some of the thorny policy battles that have long divided them. Months of internecine bickering among the party’s liberal and moderate ranks had produced a newly retooled $1.75 trillion measure, which Pelosi and her top aides believed could come soon to the House floor.
To bring it closer to that vote, however, Pelosi and her fellow Democratic leaders still had to navigate a slew of unresolved issues, some of which have plagued the party for months. Some lawmakers remained uncomfortable with the bill over the way it handles certain policy issues, including immigration, and they huddled privately with the speaker on the House floor and in her office try to hammer out a resolution.
A handful of moderates, meanwhile, requested more time to study its budgetary impact and address potential roadblocks that the bill might later encounter in the Senate. With some suggesting they were not yet ready to vote for the measure, Pelosi presented them with data showing the bill would not add to the deficit.
By late Thursday, the sum total of Democrats’ efforts appeared to put them on the verge of a breakthrough. Writing her caucus, Pelosi said that they were nearing a final version of the bill with the imminent goal of taking a critical, first procedural step toward bringing it to the floor. The developments came not a moment too soon for some Democrats, who had grown exasperated by the slog of the debate in recent days.
“I’m ready to go — most people are ready to go,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.). “If we wait until absolutely everybody is in agreement at precisely the same moment, I worry that we’re going to be waiting forever.”
The renewed legislative frenzy reflected Democrats’ new vigor for adopting Biden’s agenda in the wake of an adverse gubernatorial election in Virginia and a too-close-for-comfort victory in New Jersey. Some say Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe might have prevailed in Virginia’s race if only he could have pointed to his party’s accomplishments in Washington, especially the passage of infrastructure legislation.
Speaking to reporters earlier in the day, Pelosi said she could not assess whether inaction on Capitol Hill had soured the party in the eyes of voters. But, she stressed: “Getting the job done, producing results for the American people, is always very positive.”
The Senate on Thursday also pledged to accelerate its efforts. Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) opened debate on the chamber floor by noting his hope that lawmakers can complete work on Biden’s spending agenda “before Thanksgiving.”
“We are going to keep pushing to get these great policies over the finish line,” he said.
First, however, the House needed to finalize its work on the $1.75 trillion bill, sorting through a wide array of simmering policy disputes, including unease among Democrats over how to handle immigration. The newly revised bill would allow the government to “parole” undocumented immigrants by giving them five-year work permits that shield them from deportation.
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus mounted a late attempt to secure a pathway for those immigrants to obtain citizenship, much as Democrats had proposed in their original spending legislation. Lawmakers including Reps. Jesús “Chuy” García, Lou Correa and Adriano Espaillat huddled late Thursday night for more than an hour with Pelosi, after which Garcia said they would not seek to rewrite the immigration section.
House leaders earlier had told the bloc of lawmakers that there would be no more changes to that portion of the bill, as the debate prepares to shift to the Senate, where the future of its immigration provisions remains at the mercy of the chamber’s parliamentarian. Because Democrats are trying to pass the bill under a special budget process that prevents the legislation from being filibustered, it can only contain provisions that primarily affect government spending or tax policy. The parliamentarian has already said an earlier immigration proposal did not comply with these rules.
“This is just the battle. This isn’t the end of the war when it comes to immigration,” said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) on Thursday. “There are so many things in this bill that will benefit immigrant families that we just can’t lose it all because of this one issue.”
A separate skirmish arose over a plan to lift a cap on the state and local tax deduction. Democrats representing high-costs cities and states, including California and New Jersey, have pushed most for the policy — troubling other party lawmakers who see it as a tax cut that chiefly would benefit the wealthy.
By Thursday night, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and others pushing to rethink the policy known as SALT had not yet resolved the dispute in a way that might satisfy critics across the Capitol, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who this week put forward a more limited proposal. But Gottheimer and other advocates, including Rep. Tom Suozzi, did agree to a new proposal that would raise the SALT deduction cap to $80,000 until 2031, after which it would be reimposed at $10,000, according to two people familiar with the plan who requested anonymity to describe the private talks.
And Democrats further agreed to tweaks to satisfy moderates including Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) on the contentious issue of drug pricing reform. The new agreement essentially delayed the ability of Medicare to negotiate prices on some category of drugs by another year, the two sources said.
Resolving these and other policy fights is critical, since any delay in bringing the measure before the House would further stall a second, separate effort to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections. The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill has been stuck in the House since it passed the Senate in August, as liberals have held up its adoption while they seek to negotiate the rest of Biden’s spending priorities with centrists including Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). The left-leaning bloc has said both bills must move in tandem to win their critical support, a position Pelosi appeared to affirm Thursday.
Asked if she would move infrastructure alone, she replied: “No.”
But the speaker’s approach also rankled some moderates within her own caucus. Roughly a dozen centrists told party leaders in recent days they needed more time to study the revised $1.75 trillion bill, evaluate its budgetary impact, address policy issues including immigration and ensure the full package actually can pass the Senate, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of requested anonymity to describe private talks.
The sources cautioned the situation is rapidly changing, and moderates’ reasons for concern appear to vary. Many members do not appear opposed to the spending initiative, people familiar with their thinking said, they just want more time to process its implications.
Some of the data that may assuage centrists arrived Thursday: An official score released by the Joint Committee on Taxation, which analyzes the revenue effects of legislation on Capitol Hill, found that the bill would raise about $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
The tally reflects Democrats’ plans to impose a new minimum tax on corporations and a new surtax on millionaires to pay for a wide array of new spending. It does not factor in other provisions, including Democrats’ aim to negotiate drug costs under Medicare and empower the Internal Revenue Service to pursue unpaid taxes. Party lawmakers say the tax-enforcement provisions alone could capture another $400 billion, which, combined with the rest of the revenue raisers, offer an “objective view that it is solidly paid for,” Pelosi said.
“I’m comfortable that we will eventually have a CBO score,” Rep. Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.), a member of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, referring to a second analysis of additional spending in the package that is expected soon from the Congressional Budget Office. “So far, the indications are that the pay-fors are there for what we want to accomplish.”
But other moderates said they are still waiting for that second analysis. By Thursday night, CBO had not yet furnished its numbers, though Pelosi shared additional data from the White House that she said showed the bill did not add to the deficit.
Some moderates earlier this week also pointed to Pelosi’s prior promise, that she would only call the bill for a vote once it had been hashed out with the Senate. Manchin repeatedly has sought to whittle down Democrats’ spending proposal, which once carried a price tag that is roughly twice its current amount.
Pelosi, however, appeared ready to defy that commitment in recent days. In one prominent example, the speaker said Wednesday that Democrats would include in their $1.75 trillion bill a proposal to provide paid family and medical leave to millions of Americans who otherwise do not have it. The proposal is one Manchin has sought to remove from the package, putting the House on a collision course with the Senate.
Pelosi appeared circumspect in addressing the matter Thursday, telling reporters, “I think this is appropriate legislation.”
Rep. Jody Hice, R-GA, is running to become Georgia secretary of state and has the endorsement of former president Donald Trump. The current secretary, Brad Raffensperger, notably refused Trump's entreaties to overturn the state's 2020 election. (photo: Sean Ray/Getty)
At a recent rally held by former President Donald Trump in Perry, Ga., Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., stumped for his campaign to unseat Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
"It is my deep conviction that Brad Raffensperger has massively compromised the right of the people at the ballot box," he said. "He has opened wide the door for all sorts of irregularities and fraud to march into our election system, and it is time that we take charge of this."
Hice, who objected to Georgia's Electoral College votes after the insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol in January, is running on a platform that promises to "aggressively pursue voter fraud," "renew integrity" and replace the state's $100 million ballot-marking system that was rolled out just last year.
He is one of several pro-Trump Republican candidates in secretary of state races in swing states like Georgia, Arizona and Michigan who have embraced falsehoods about the systems they now want to oversee — attacking the 2020 election results and spreading misleading claims about voting machines and absentee ballots.
Many elections officials who currently run things have faced the wrath of Trump for defending last November's election — none more so than Raffensperger, who notably refused Trump's request to "find" enough votes for him to win Georgia.
Georgia's narrow margins were counted three separate times, including once by hand in a risk-limiting audit. But more than a year later, baseless claims of fraud and wrongdoing persist.
Raffensperger said his job isn't to pick "winners and losers" but to accurately report the results — and his office looked into every claim of wrongdoing and couldn't find any evidence to support them.
"Every allegation that was made, we checked it out," he said in an interview. "If someone said there was 10,000 dead people, we went back and we burned the midnight oil, we were checking it out."
Raffensperger has been a notable exception within the GOP for defending election processes and standing up to the former president's claims. But Democratic state lawmaker Bee Nguyen, who's also running for Georgia secretary of state, said there is a safer option for overseeing elections that leaves no question about integrity.
"It is not a choice between Brad [Raffensperger] and Jody [Hice]," she said. "It is electing a Democratic secretary of state like myself who will be on the side of voters, who will uphold the law and use truth and facts."
Concerns of election experts
It's not just Georgia. The battle over who gets to count the votes has taken hold in places across the country, like Arizona.
Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who's now running for governor, testified to Congress last week about threats her family faced after certifying the election.
"My son's phone number was doxed, and my husband's workplace, a children's hospital, faced calls with horrible accusations and urging that he be fired because of me," she said. "No one should have to face this kind of behavior because of their work as an election official."
GOP secretary of state hopefuls in Arizona have pushed laws limiting voting access and supported a widely discredited, partisan election review in Arizona's largest county. Other candidates in states like Nevada and Michigan are also running campaigns centered around baseless claims of fraud.
As a growing number of politicians have gained prominence by openly questioning results and processes, election observers are concerned about the impact on the 2024 presidential race.
One of them is Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey who's now co-chair of States United Action, a bipartisan think tank aimed at supporting pro-democracy leaders.
"When you have people who spread those lies trying to get in the position of secretary of state who oversees and administers elections, you've got to be very nervous that they're going to apply that kind of bias to counting results," she said.
While these Republican secretary of state candidates say their platforms are about upholding "election integrity," Todd Whitman said what she calls these "hyper-partisan" politicians could have a more nefarious goal if allowed into office.
"Some of the most troubling pieces of legislation that have passed in various states are those that take away the oversight of the secretary of state in administering and counting ballots and putting them in the hands of the partisan legislatures," she said. "What you're seeing in these laws and the secretary of state's office elections now are Republicans trying to ensure that it's their side that wins always."
It's not immediately clear how much of an appetite primary voters will have for these types of Trumpist candidates: Some who have pushed election conspiracies are long shots, while others appear to have a chance to win.
In Georgia, voters will decide in May who will be their Republican nominee. Even if Raffensperger loses his primary, his term will not end until January, and so he would oversee the vote-counting process one final time.
Demonstrators protested changes in voting nationwide at the Texas Capitol in Austin in July. (photo: Bob Daemmrich/Zuma Press)
The department's lawsuit takes aim at Texas Senate Bill 1, which was signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott in September, saying it violates voters' rights.
The Texas law makes it tougher to cast ballots through the mail by preventing officials from sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications.
It also adds new identification requirements for mail-in voting, prohibits drive-through and 24-hour voting locations, limits early voting, and restricts who can help voters requiring assistance because of disabilities or language barriers.
The Justice Department complaint alleges that the Texas law improperly restricts disabled voters or voters who cannot read or write from being able to receive adequate assistance at voting locations.
"The challenged provisions will disenfranchise eligible Texas citizens who seek to exercise their right to vote, including voters with limited English proficiency, voters with disabilities, elderly voters, members of the military deployed away from home, and American citizens residing outside of the country," the complaint says.
Abbott has previously defended the law, saying it is aimed at clamping down on voter fraud. Texas officials have previously cited Trump's unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in their opposition to expanding voting access.
On Thursday afternoon, Abbott responded to lawsuit in a tweet, saying "Bring it. The Texas election integrity law is legal. It INCREASES hours to vote. It does restrict illegal mail ballot voting. Only those who qualify can vote by mail. It also makes ballot harvesting a felony. In Texas it is easier to vote but harder to cheat."
BIDEN JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
This is now the second time that the Biden Justice Department has sued a state over voting rights.
Earlier this year, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the department was filing a lawsuit against the state of Georgia after it enacted a new election law that the Justice Department said infringes on the rights of Black voters.
Georgia has asked a judge to dismiss that lawsuit, saying in a court filing that it was "not a serious legal challenge but a politically motivated effort to usurp the constitutional authority of Georgia’s elected officials to regulate elections."
This marks the third legal challenge by the Justice Department to Texas state laws and executive orders since Biden took office in January.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court heard oralarguments after the department sued Texas over its near-total ban on abortions.
In the summer, the department also sued Texas to block an executive order aimed at curbing the travel into the state of undocumented immigrants who may pose a risk of transmitting COVID-19.
In August, a judge issued a preliminary ruling in favor of the Biden administration, saying Abbott's executive order "conflicts with, and poses an obstacle to, federal immigration law."
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema walks to the chamber after a Senate Democratic Caucus meeting at the Capitol on Tuesday. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
In 2010, far-right Arizona state senator Russell Pearce ignited a firestorm with his anti-immigrant SB 1070 law. Kyrsten Sinema worked to help squash a grassroots effort to recall him from office.
Veteran organizer and former Democratic US Senate candidate Randy Parraz writes about Sinema’s skullduggery in his recent book Dignity by Fire: Dismantling Arizona’s Anti-Immigrant Machine, an account of how, in 2011, Parraz pulled together an unlikely coalition of progressives, Latinos, centrist Republicans, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to topple Pearce in a ruby-red legislative district in Pearce’s hometown of Mesa, located some twenty miles east of Phoenix.
In less than a year, Pearce went from being the most powerful politician in the state — referred to by some as Arizona’s “de facto governor,” with immense power over the state’s budget and legislative agenda — to a racist has-been, bested by 12 points in an unprecedented recall election by a moderate, pro-immigration Republican.
The recall put an end to state-sponsored anti-immigration legislation in Arizona, though nativism remained a potent force in state politics, one kept alive first by Donald Trump’s ascension nationally and more recently by the rhetoric of Republican candidates milking the surge in migrants at the US-Mexico border for political gain.
But ten years ago, if it had been up to Sinema and other elected Democrats in Arizona, the Pearce recall might never have happened.
Defying Sinema
In January 2011, Sinema had just been elected to the state senate after a stint in the Arizona House of Representatives and was trying to put her days as a self-described “Prada socialist” behind her. She had opposed Pearce’s SB 1070 the year before, but when she caught wind that Parraz was planning a recall of Pearce and would announce the formation of a new group, Citizens for a Better Arizona (CBA), on January 10, the legislature’s opening day, Sinema sprang into action to try to stop it.
Ostensibly, Parraz and his group were merely holding a press conference to give Pearce a formal “twenty-one day notice.” If Pearce refused their call to focus on issues like education, health care, and job creation — rather than Pearce’s favorite subject, immigration — CBA would be back to “take appropriate action”; the possibility of a recall drive was left unsaid.
Arizona Democrats had been shell-shocked by a disastrous 2010. Republicans used SB 1070 as a blunderbuss to scatter the Dems, painting them as “soft” on immigration. Though the law inspired legal challenges, massive demonstrations, and a devastating economic boycott, it was a winning issue for the Arizona GOP, which swept all statewide offices that year and increased its legislative advantage into a supermajority. Subsequently, Republicans rewarded Pearce by making him their head in the Senate.
According to Parraz’s book — released to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Pearce’s defeat on November 8, 2011 — the Arizona Democratic Party’s leadership held a conference call the day of Parraz’s presser to discuss offing the infant recall movement in its crib.
Parraz describes a call he received from Sinema after this meeting in which she told him it had been decided that Democrats would hold no events on the legislature’s opening day, supposedly out of respect for Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who had just survived an assassination attempt in Tucson.
Parraz informed Sinema that he did not work for the Democratic Party or for her, and as the Tea Party would be out in force on January 10, CBA intended to be there to counter them.
“Randy, I am not asking you, I am telling you to cancel your event,” Sinema ordered, raising her voice.
The conversation ended with Sinema screaming and Parraz hanging up on her. Parraz then received two more calls — one from a local labor leader, another from a Democratic Party official — asking him to delay, not cancel the event. He believes both were put up to it by Sinema. (Sinema’s office did not respond to emails and phone calls asking for comment on Parraz’s book.)
But Parraz, a former AFL-CIO organizer, was not one to be easily dissuaded. The press conference went on as planned, and twenty-one days later, the recall campaign was on in earnest.
Sinema’s “Boss”
Parraz had studied the issue. The recall had 120 days to collect 7,756 valid signatures, or 25 percent of the voter turnout from the last election in Pearce’s Legislative District 18. Though Republicans were dominant in LD 18, about forty thousand voters were either registered Democrat or independent.
A recall of Pearce was doable, concluded the charismatic and impassioned strategist. Parraz would also soon learn that, though Mesa was an LDS stronghold, and though Pearce was LDS, there were many Mormons who opposed SB 1070 and Pearce’s harsh immigration stance, as it was adversely affecting Latino families in their congregations.
More important for Parraz personally, he had reached an emotional tipping point upon Pearce becoming senate president — a moment Parraz calls his “threshold for injustice,” a phrase borrowed from the civil rights movement. For years, Pearce had been an Energizer Bunny of xenophobia, targeting the Latino community with laws and propositions that made English the state’s official language, denied the undocumented driver’s licenses, and refused them access to social programs and in-state tuition.
One law, known as “employer sanctions,” became the basis for raids by Arizona’s sheriff, Joe Arpaio, on businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants, with the immigrants being arrested and held non-bondable under another Pearce initiative. Arpaio soon branched out to broad sweeps of Latino neighborhoods, terrorizing nonwhite communities en masse.
SB 1070 was Pearce’s pièce de résistance. As stated in its preamble, its purpose was “attrition through enforcement.” But Pearce also had a wish list of additional legislative cruelties he longed to inflict on Latinos and the poor in general.
“That dude was going to the next level,” Parraz told me recently, referring to Pearce. “For people like Sinema, 1070 did not affect her. No one pulled her over. No one did anything to her.”
Throughout 2011, Sinema continued to denigrate the recall privately and publicly. On one local political TV talk show, not long after the effort was announced, she declared, “I love Russell,” adding, “We get along very well, not always on policy matters, but on personal matters, we do.”
Pearce was responsible for draconian cuts in education, and he opposed expanding Medicaid, despite the lingering effects of the Great Recession. The pugnacious ex-sheriff’s deputy distributed antisemitic propaganda to his supporters and befriended J. T. Ready, a notorious Arizona neo-Nazi and future murderer. And Pearce had called for the return of the Eisenhower-era migrant roundup “Operation Wetback,” with Pearce unapologetically using that precise language. What’s not to love?
In one particularly egregious moment, Sinema declared that she could not have supported the recall because Pearce, as Senate president, was “her boss.”
For many years, I was a political columnist with the Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly, and in 2012, as Sinema was aiming to run for Congress, I asked her about this. She told me she was trying to explain what it was really like at the state legislature.
“It’s like . . . [Pearce] can stop my bills. He can stop me from getting a hearing in committee if he wants to,” she explained at the time.
Defeating Goliath
To be fair, Sinema was not the only Arizona Democrat to distance herself from the recall. Actually, most did. I know because I talked to many of them. Off the record, they thought Parraz was “crazy” and that the recall would backfire, leaving Pearce more powerful than ever.
In the book, Parraz describes how one Democratic bigwig told him that Pearce was more useful to the party in office than out, because the Dems could use Pearce as a rhetorical bugbear to raise money.
Certainly, there were many party faithful who worked for the recall, including some elected officials, like Democratic firebrand and then state senator Steve Gallardo.
Now a member of the Board of Supervisors for Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state, Gallardo recalls the reticence of his fellow Democrats and how Sinema was “adamantly opposed” to the recall. In his opinion, she was already looking to move up the political food chain. And her only way to do so in then firetruck-red (now purplish) Arizona was to be a conservative Democrat, what used to be called a “Pinto Democrat” in this state.
Other Dems were outright afraid of Pearce or thought they needed to placate Republicans in the legislature. Though Gallardo wasn’t sure if the recall would work, he thought many in the state senate were naive to think they could collaborate with Pearce.
“This guy was evil,” Gallardo says of Pearce. “He did not care who he was hurting . . . It was a litmus test. What side are you on? Are you going to be on the side of the people, or on the side of Russell Pearce?”
Indeed, Pearce had a second round of immigration bills in his pocket that he tried to pass in 2011, including one that would have denied birth certificates to US citizen children born to undocumented parents, a proposal that would have been a clear violation of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Thankfully, Arizona’s businesses (for their own reasons) opposed the measure. This gave the few moderate Republicans left in the state senate cover to join the Democrats and vote against the package.
Parraz claims in his book that Pearce pushed these draconian bills knowing he didn’t have the votes. Why? To smoke out moderate Republicans, the ones who would not bend to his will, so he could primary them in the future, defeat them, and gain a true “Tea Party” majority in the Senate.
Gallardo agrees that this was Pearce’s game plan. I do as well. Pearce was an abomination. He had to be removed, and the recall was the best chance for doing so.
In the end, Parraz was probably better off without the overt embrace of the Democratic Party. Once the CBA scored the necessary signatures and survived a legal challenge, only a Republican could take on Pearce in this deeply conservative district and win.
The man who did was straight from central casting, with Gary Cooper good looks and impeccable Mormon credentials, not to mention a memorable name: Jerry Lewis. Lewis endured the slanders of the Pearce stalwarts as well as a physical attack, when an unknown assailant threw a padlock at him as he was jogging one day, striking him in the groin. Pearce’s followers also ran a sham candidate against Lewis, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, in an attempt to siphon off votes. After a legal action exposed her true purpose, she returned to obscurity.
Lewis bested Pearce by double digits, and his first official act was to vote in the Republican caucus for a relatively moderate replacement for Senate president. The following year, he was redistricted into a new, Democratic district and did not return to the Senate.
Pearce attempted to revive his career in 2012 with a run in a new, red legislative district in Mesa. But moderate Republicans recruited another ringer, a genteel Mormon millionaire named Bob Worsley, who sent Pearce packing, again by 12 points, with the help of Parraz’s crew, who had refined the collection of mail-in ballots from voters into an art form.
Republicans in the legislature later retaliated against this practice, passing a law in 2016 to outlaw what they called “ballot harvesting,” or picking up a nonrelative’s ballot to turn in to a county’s elections office.
After an interlude in California writing his book, Parraz says he’ll be back in Arizona next year, with a new group, the Organizing Institute for Democracy, to challenge the law with direct action, notwithstanding the fact SCOTUS upheld the statute this year after the DNC sued to stop it.
Orange Caligula
Tyler Montague, a Mesa Mormon and Republican who helped recruit Lewis to run against Pearce, remembers the recall as an LDS civil war, with church members taking sides. Many, like Montague, were pro-immigration and watched with sadness and anger as their Latino friends — fellow church members — fled the state in the wake of SB 1070. He and other Mesa LDS leaped at the opportunity to challenge Pearce once Parraz had made the recall a reality.
Montague recently confided to me that Sinema actually called him sometime after the recall election was scheduled and Lewis had been recruited. She asked if she could help. He suggested that she encourage people to donate to Lewis’s campaign, but he doesn’t know if she actually did that.
“I’m pretty sure she would have told us if she did,” Montague says.
Parraz believes Sinema was in “stage three or four of her remake” into a centrist. Any public support for Pearce’s removal would have hurt her ultimate game plan: to advance her career.
Such careerism is one reason Parraz wants people to think beyond party politics in a time when many Republican-leaning voters in Arizona do not approve of Trumpism or the state’s periodic return to nativism, though the state GOP itself remains in thrall to the Orange Caligula.
But Parraz claims the recall showed that a third path can achieve great things.
“I’m hoping this book can serve as an instruction manual for folks who are organizing in other ways,” he says.
“It shows that you can build power and have an impact in the state that doesn’t require you to go into a party — on either side.”
On October 25, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan dissolved the transitional government and detained other government officials and political leaders in a coup. (photo: Marwan Ali/AP)
US urges Sudan’s General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan to swiftly restore civilian-led governance after military takeover.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s office released a statement on Thursday after he spoke on the phone with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Al-Burhan’s office said the two parties agreed on the need to accelerate the formation of a government.
“The two parties agreed on the need to maintain the path of the democratic transition, the need to complete the structures of the transitional government and to speed up the formation of the government,” his office said.
The US State Department spokesman Ned Price said Blinken in the call urged al-Burhan to immediately release all political figures detained since the coup and “return to a dialogue that returns Prime Minister Hamdok to office and restores civilian-led governance in Sudan”.
“We are considering all internal and external initiatives to serve the national interest,” al-Burhan’s media adviser Taher Abouhaga said on Thursday. “The government formation is imminent.”
Meanwhile, mass protests are expected on Friday in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and other main cities.
Speaking to Al Jazeera’s UpFront programme, Nureldin Satti, Sudan’s ambassador to the United States, said the “coup is over”.
“[It] cannot continue with the mobilisation that we have seen and that we are going to see in the next days and weeks.”
UN emergency session
Sudan’s top generals and former civilian leaders were locked in tense negotiations for a way out of the crisis sparked by the military takeover late last month.
On October 25, al-Burhan dissolved the transitional government and detained other government officials and political leaders in a coup.
Hamdok, who was released within two days after his arrest and since kept under guarded house arrest, has been allowed to meet with UN and international diplomats as part of mediation efforts.
Meanwhile, the top UN human rights official on Friday called for Sudan’s military leaders to step back in remarks delivered at an emergency session on the situation in the country at the human rights council in Geneva.
High Commissioner of Human Rights Michelle Bachelet described the October 25 military takeover as “deeply disturbing” and called for an end to the deadly use of force by the armed forces as well as military police and intelligence elements which she said had so far killed at least 13 civilians.
“I urge Sudan’s military leaders, and their backers, to step back in order to allow the country to return to the path of progress towards institutional and legal reforms,” she said at the council.
The United Nations has been trying to mediate an end to the political crisis that followed the coup in which top civilian politicians were detained and Hamdok was placed under house arrest.
The UN special envoy for Sudan, special representative Volker Perthes, said talks had yielded the outline of a potential deal on a return to power-sharing, including the deposed premier’s reinstatement.
But he urged an agreement in “days not weeks” before both sides’ positions harden.
Ministers’ release
The SUNA news agency said on Thursday that al-Burhan had issued the decision for Hamza Baloul, minister of information and culture, Hashim Hasabel-Rasoul, minister of communications, Ali Gedou, minister of trade and international cooperation, and Youssef Adam, minister of youth and sports to be let go.
Reporting from Khartoum, Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan on Friday said that the four ministers were released. She added that several other ministers remained in detention.
“The four ministers are only some of those arrested on the morning of the coup. There were also activists and lawyers arrested. But the release comes amid talks to form a new government and as Hamdok, who remains under house arrest, insists on the release of detainees,” said Morgan.
Hamdok has also demanded the reversal of the coup as conditions for any further negotiations with the military.
Moez Hadra, a defence lawyer for the deposed officials, said the four ministers are from among the 100 government officials and political leaders who were arrested during the coup. Half of them, he said, are believed to be held in Khartoum and the others are scattered across the country’s provinces.
He said about 25 officials and politicians are facing charges for inciting troops to rebel.
Many were taken from their homes in the early morning hours and have been kept in undisclosed locations. The military leaders also raided the state news television headquarters and cut off mobile and internet communications across the country. Tens of thousands of people came out to protest. Internet services were still restricted.
Sara Abdelgalil, a spokeswoman for the Sudanese Professionals’ Association, the key force behind the 2019 uprising and anti-coup protests, estimated that hundreds of protesters and opposition figures have been rounded up in the past week. Some have disappeared and some have been interrogated and later released, she said.
Ali Agab, a prominent Sudanese human rights lawyer, said he had heard reports of security forces identifying protesters from photos taken at demonstrations and forcibly detaining them from their homes.
Abdelgalil said the near-blackout of communications has made it difficult to know just how many have gone missing, or are being held in secret prisons that were commonly used under longtime strongman Omar al-Bashir, who was toppled by the military following protests in 2019.
“We don’t know the extent of what has been happening in the last 10 days,” she said.
International pressure
Meanwhile, the international community is continuing to press for a de-escalation that can put Sudan back on the path to democracy. The United Nations Human Rights Council is set to hold an emergency session on the situation on Friday.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres encouraged General al-Burhan in a phone call on Thursday to take action towards resolving “the political crisis in Sudan and urgently restoring the constitutional order and Sudan’s transitional process,” UN associate spokeswoman Eri Kaneko said.
Alex De Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation, told Al Jazeera that the US could use economic leverage to speed up the formation of a civilian government.
“The US has quite a considerable leverage because of the very deep economic-financial hole that Sudan is,” he said.
“Other countries might have been able to get by on the bailout of the Gulf states, but in the case of Sudan, it can only actually stabilise its economy with major assistance, debt rescheduling, debt relief, assistance from the World Bank and the IMF, which requires the United States.”
ExxonMobil's Darren Woods has been accused of lying to Congress after he denied that the company covered up its own research about oil's contribution to the climate crisis. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Report into lobbying tactics names ExxonMobil and Chevron as worst, while carmaker Toyota takes third
The biggest US oil companies, as well as American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group, were found to be the worst offenders in a global report by lobbying experts at the thinktank InfluenceMap. It concluded that companies were manipulating governments to take “incredibly dangerous paths” in their approach to climate action.
Oil giants have mounted “intense resistance” to Joe Biden’s green agenda, according to the report, as the US president’s administration attempted to shift the country away from fossil fuels.
The report was published on Thursday before talks at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. It also came a week after ExxonMobil’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was accused of lying to the US Congress when he denied that the company had covered up its own research about oil’s contribution to the climate crisis.
The report said corporate lobbying tactics in part explained why regulators in some countries such as Australia have struggled to build support for more ambitious climate policy in the lead-up to Cop26 and were increasingly viewed as “a road block in global negotiations”.
Toyota was the worst-ranked carmaker and the third overall in the report, which drew from more than 50,000 of pieces of evidence, covering hundreds of the world’s most significant firms and trade groups, to analyse corporate climate lobbying activities.
The report put Toyota among some of the worst polluting companies in the world because of its opposition to phase out deadlines for fossil fuel and hybrid vehicles.
Ed Collins, a director at InfluenceMap, said it was clear that the transition to a clean energy future would remain extremely challenging until governments took meaningful action to tackle “the obstructive and anti-science lobbying of vested interests from fossil fuel value chain sectors”.
“The corporate playbook for holding back climate policy has come a long way from science denialism but it is every bit as damaging,” he said. “What we are seeing is not limited to efforts to undermine regulations directly. It also involves prolific and highly sophisticated narrative capture techniques, leading governments down incredibly dangerous paths.”
The thinktank’s report noted a strong shift among many fossil fuels companies towards pro-gas lobbying and away from coal. This includes lobbying from BP, which was ninth on the global list, the Austrian energy company OMV, which was 10th, and the Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom, which was 17th.
A spokesperson for Exxon said: “There are competing views about how best to address the risks of climate change. ExxonMobil supports certain climate policies and opposes others. But it would be a mistake to equate such policy disagreements with promotion of climate ‘disinformation.’”
Chevron and Toyota were also contacted for comment.
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