13 January 22
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And of course, Tailgunner Ted Cruz has wormed his way to the center of the plot.
Now the court's 6-3 big-donor chosen supermajority is delivering massive wins for those donor interests. And the American people can smell what Justice Sotomayor aptly characterized as the stench of a captured court.
But Whitehouse’s way into his argument was a new one. In his remarks, he targeted the laughably toothless commission the administration put together, purportedly to study the problems with the federal judiciary. These problems, of course, have been caused in great measure by the deluge of dark money into the confirmation process, most of it coming from economic and ideological sources that have extensive business before the court. However, the late commission chose to deal out, in Whitehouse’s words, “faculty-lounge pablum.”
Yes, they gestured toward the need for a code of ethics for the justices which makes sense because Supreme Court justices have the lowest ethics standard of any top federal official, but pointing that out is a little bit like pointing out a flat tire on a totaled car. Consider the facts the commission ignored. A private, partisan, anonymously funded organization, the Federalist Society, handpicked the last three Supreme Court justices. President Trump and his White House counsel admitted they had outsourced, their word, the Federalist Society to the White House.
Senator Hatch, our former colleague, former chairman of the Judiciary, was asked if this role was outsourced to the Federalist Society and he said damned right. No other democracy in the world has had such a ridiculous system for selecting judges. That's bad. It gets worse. Anonymous donations helped right-wing front groups mount a $400-million push to capture and control the Court, with zero transparency into who gave the money. Or more importantly, what matters they had before the Court whose justices they were installing. That's disgraceful. And trust me, nobody spends $400 million without a motive.
Whitehouse’s case is so plain as to almost beggar argument. As he noted, the previous administration* was not shy about admitting flat-out the truth of what Whitehouse said. The most recent former president* didn’t know enough about the law and jurisprudence to throw to a cat, as the great Sean O’Faolain once put it in another context. He was more than happy to grin and slap his nominees on the back while Mitch McConnell blew up the Senate confirmation process to install the Federalist Society Triple-A ballclub where it could do the most good for conservative donors and the least good for the country. After all, the foul flood of money that has rotted the foundations of our institutions began while the former president* was still “firing” people on his TV show.
The Court handed down its decision in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, in the dim times before this blog was even born. In fact, along with shredding voting rights, demolishing campaign finance laws has been one of Chief Justice John Roberts’ primary enthusiasms since he first made his bones in conservative legal circles. (Two sides of the same coin, if you think about it.) And, a week from now, Senator Whitehouse and the rest of us may get another object lesson in this phenomenon.
Next Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the case of FEC v. Ted Cruz For Senate. At issue is the procedure by which candidates can loan money to their campaigns, and then finagle the repayment process in such a way that a successful candidate makes a profit while his donors buy influence. Ian Millhiser at Vox explains how it works:
When a campaign receives a pre-election donation, that donation is typically subject to strict rules preventing it from being spent to enrich the candidate. After the election has occurred, however, donors who give money to help pay off a loan from the candidate effectively funnel that money straight to the candidate — who by that point could be a powerful elected official.
A lawmaker with sufficiently clever accountants, moreover, could effectively structure such a loan to allow lobbyists and other donors to help the lawmaker directly profit from it. According to the Los Angeles Times, for example, in 1998, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) made a $150,000 loan to her campaign at 18 percent interest (though she later reduced that interest rate to 10 percent). As of 2009, Napolitano reportedly raised $221,780 to repay that loan — $158,000 of which was classified as “interest.” So in 11 years, the loan reportedly earned Napolitano nearly $72,000 in profits.
Sweet!
Comes now Tailgunner Ted Cruz, who wants to do away with those rules and limitations on loan repayments to candidates for federal offices. I trust I need not hang pink neon around the loophole for personal enrichment and influence peddling that a decision in favor of Cruz’s campaign would open in our already moth-eaten campaign-finance regulations. And one would have to have been on Mars over the past decade not to make Cruz the favorite whenever the Court’s decision comes down. Which is good, because, as Millhiser reports, the Tailgunner brought this case specifically to blow up this particular regulatory device.
According to the Justice Department, on the day before the 2018 election, Cruz lent his campaign $260,000, or $10,000 more than the amount that can legally be repaid from post-election funds. Moreover, while a federal regulation permits Cruz’s campaign to pay back all of that money using funds raised before the election, so long as it did so no later than 20 days after the election, the campaign waited until after this deadline had passed to pay back $250,000 of the $260,000 loan.
And, just in case there’s any doubt why Cruz and his campaign entered into this unusual arrangement, Cruz and his campaign do not contest that “the sole and exclusive motivation behind Senator Cruz’ actions in making the 2018 loan and the committee’s actions in waiting to repay them was to establish the factual basis for this challenge.” Cruz was essentially willing to risk $10,000 of his own money for an opportunity to knock down a federal anti-corruption law.
And, in a couple of years, if he’s still in office, and if rising seas haven’t taken Rhode Island off toward Labrador, Sheldon Whitehouse will get up on the Senate floor and demonstrate again the corrupting influence of money on the process of appointing a Supreme Court that then will be tasked with passing judgment on the corrupting influence of money. And the water-wheel of sewage goes ‘round and ‘round.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) arrives for a Senate Democrat caucus luncheon with President Biden in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Jan. 13, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Sinema’s position, outlined in a midday floor speech, echoed her previous public statements where she defended the filibuster, the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority rule, as a tool to facilitate bipartisan cooperation and guard against wild swings in federal policy.
But the circumstances in which she reiterated it — as Senate Democratic leaders prepared to launch a decisive floor debate and less than an hour before President Biden was scheduled to arrive on Capitol Hill to deliver a final, forceful appeal for action — put an exclamation point on her party’s long and fruitless effort to counter restrictive Republican-passed state voting laws.
“While I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” Sinema said.
She later added: “We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy, and it cannot be achieved by one party alone. It cannot be achieved solely by the federal government. The response requires something greater and, yes, more difficult than what the Senate is discussing today.”
Biden, a former six-term senator, is delivering his closed-door pitch two days after he made his most pointed public case yet for the modification or elimination of the filibuster to pass voting rights bills. He chose to come and make a final push even as Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) had shown no indication that they are prepared to move off their long-standing public opposition to weakening minority rights in the Senate.
Still, Democrats are prepared to move forward with a floor confrontation in the coming days that could bring their year-long quest to counter Republican-passed state voting restrictions to a futile and frustrating end.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who called the struggle to persuade Manchin and Sinema “an uphill fight” in interviews this week, laid out a plan Wednesday to bring two key voting rights bills to the Senate floor in the coming days, setting up a final showdown over the rules early next week.
Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday morning, Schumer said Democrats had no choice but to move forward unilaterally after trying to secure Republican cooperation on voting rights for months.
“Every step of the way, we’ve been met with near total resistance,” he said. “Members of this chamber were elected to debate and to vote — particularly on an issue as vital to the beating heart of our democracy as this. I have said for months that just because Republicans have refused to work with us to protect voting rights does not mean Democrats would stop working to move forward on our own. The matter is simply too important.”
The House attached the voting legislation to a bill previously passed by the Senate in a Thursday-morning vote and sent it back across the Capitol, a maneuver that will allow Senate Democrats to skip procedural hurdles and quickly start debate on the Senate floor.
“Nothing less than our democracy is at stake,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to fellow House Democrats on Wednesday. With Thursday’s vote, she said, “the Democratic House will make clear: we stand with the President — and with the people — to #FightForVotingRights.”
As the House debated Thursday morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) accused Democrats of focusing on the divisive and distracting issue of voting rights and Senate rules instead of more pressing challenges to the nation’s economy and security.
“Nobody in this country is buying the fake hysteria that democracy will die unless Democrats get total control,” he said. “There’s a path forward for my Democratic colleagues to respond to the country they have so badly disappointed, but it isn’t to try to break the Senate and rewrite election laws, it’s to actually start tackling the issues that American families need tackled.”
After Sinema spoke Wednesday, McConnell said he “couldn’t agree more with her decision,” while other Republicans marveled that Democrats brought the issue to a head knowing Sinema’s long-standing views on the filibuster.
“She’s just expressing a frustration that they don’t appear to be listening to her,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). “She’s been clear. She’s been public from the beginning about this, and they seem to continue to think that somehow they’re going to switch her, and the more they do that, I think the more dug in she’s gotten.”
More than a half-dozen Republicans, including top leaders McConnell and Thune, watched Sinema’s speech inside the Senate chamber, while only two Democrats opted to attend in person.
Delivering the speech wearing purple, a symbol of Washington bipartisanship, Sinema said she wished there had been “a more serious effort on the part of Democratic Party leaders to sit down with the other party and genuinely discuss how to reforge common ground” on voting rights issues. But she also said Republicans “have a duty to meet their shared responsibility to protect access to voting and the integrity of our electoral process.”
“Eliminating the 60-vote threshold on a party line with the thinnest of possible majorities to pass these bills that I support will not guarantee that we prevent demagogues from winning office. Indeed, some who undermine the principles of democracy have already been elected,” she said. “Rather, eliminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come.”
The confrontation has been nearly a year in the making, initially spurred by new voting laws passed by Republican state legislatures starting early last year that sought to scale back voting by mail, early voting, ballot drop boxes and other provisions that have made voting more convenient and accessible but which became a central focus of former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Civil rights groups with close ties to Democratic Party leaders have been especially forceful in calling for action, warning that the GOP state laws threaten to depress minority turnout and swing future elections.
Republican leaders in Washington have aggressively countered the push, arguing that the state laws are justified to restore faltering public confidence in elections and that the federal government has no role in dictating how states run their elections.
In fact, the Constitution gives Congress wide latitude to regulate the conduct of federal elections, and the Senate has tried four times over the past year to pass voting rights bills. Each time, with one exception, Republicans banded together to block their advancement. (Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted to advance one bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, in November.)
The failed efforts have spurred rising interest among Democrats in changing the Senate rules to prevent future GOP blockades, and several senators who defended the filibuster under previous Republican Senate majorities have publicly said they favor creating an exception to pass a voting rights bill. Some have argued for even more thoroughgoing reforms that would change the nature of the filibuster entirely by forcing the objecting minority actually hold the floor and speak rather than simply register a silent blockade.
Biden, in a voting rights speech delivered Tuesday in Atlanta, referred to his 36 years of Senate service, describing himself as an “institutionalist” who has seen the institution wither under the stresses of political polarization, leading to an increasingly routine deployment of filibusters and to an increasingly sclerotic legislative process.
“Sadly, the United States Senate — designed to be the world’s greatest deliberative body — has been rendered a shell of its former self,” he said, calling the filibuster “weaponized and abused.”
Biden received fresh backing Wednesday from former president Barack Obama, who has previously questioned the filibuster but made his most forceful call for action in a USA Today op-ed published Wednesday night that called on the Senate to change its rules and pass the voting rights legislation over GOP objections.
“In recent years, the filibuster has become a routine way for the Senate minority to block important progress on issues supported by the majority of voters. But we can’t allow it to be used to block efforts to protect our democracy,” Obama wrote. “That’s why I fully support President Joe Biden’s call to modify Senate rules as necessary to make sure pending voting rights legislation gets called for a vote. And every American who cares about the survival of our most cherished institutions should support the President’s call as well.”
While Manchin and Sinema have been closely involved in discussions with their colleagues about the Senate rules, they have shown little appetite for breaching the 60-vote rule, which has been eroded over the years for executive nominations, budget legislation and other limited circumstances.
Manchin this week told reporters that he was not willing to change the rules without GOP buy-in, and he again defended the importance of the supermajority threshold, saying senators “need to be very cautious [about] what we do.”
“They’re coming down to crunchtime and understand the position they’re in and what they’re doing,” he said of his fellow Democrats. “But I think I’ve been very clear where I am, you know, so I hope they respect that, too.”
Sinema has made clear she supports federal legislation on voting rights but has consistently expressed reservations about changing Senate rules to pass it — a position that only solidified after she led a group that negotiated a bipartisan infrastructure bill this summer.
Last month, her office issued a statement confirming that she “continues to support the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, to protect the country from repeated radical reversals in federal policy which would cement uncertainty, deepen divisions, and further erode Americans’ confidence in our government.” She has warned publicly about the prospect that Republicans could pass severe national voting restrictions should they win the congressional majorities that Democrats enjoy now.
As the debate among Democrats has intensified in recent weeks, the tensions between Democrats and Republicans have risen as well. GOP senators have accused Democrats of hypocrisy for reneging on their previous defenses of the filibuster, and they have warned that any party-line changes to the rules will backfire — prompting hardball floor tactics and an eventual turning of the tables once Republicans regain power.
In his speech Tuesday, Biden compared the GOP opponents of the Democratic voting rights bills to those who stood against civil rights for African Americans in earlier, more violent moments in U.S. history.
“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?” he said. “Do you want to be the side of Doctor [Martin Luther] King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
'Facing a lawsuit for his Jan. 6 attack speech, Rep. Mo Brooks has put himself in a bind of his own creation.' (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
Facing a lawsuit for his Jan. 6 attack speech, Rep. Mo Brooks has put himself in a bind of his own creation: He potentially violated his oath—or misused congressional resources.
The Republican congressman from Alabama keeps defending himself in court against accusations that he helped incite the Jan. 6, 2021 riot—and it’s not helping the former prosecutor in the slightest.
The particular defense Brooks has chosen seems aimed at having Justice Department lawyers mount a legal defense for him. He is arguing that his incendiary speech on Jan. 6 was part of his official duties as a congressman, a crusade he continued in federal court on Monday.
If that is the case, Brooks may have opened himself up to potential removal from office. And if it’s not the case—as prosecutors are trying to prove—then Brooks has handed prosecutors all the ammunition they’d need to charge him with misusing congressional resources.
In his shaky attempt to prove that his Jan. 6 speech was part of his official duties, Brooks has introduced evidence that his staff spent taxpayer time preparing and helping him with his Jan. 6 speech. So now, if Brooks falls back and admits his speech was a form of campaigning—as prosecutors are arguing—then he may have a whole new set of legal problems.
Brooks has created a classic ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ legal conundrum.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a visiting professor at American University Washington College of Law, told The Daily Beast that part of the problem was Brooks’ decision to be his own lawyer. “There’s an old phrase that ‘a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.’ That seems apt,” Torres-Spelliscy said.
Brooks, a Trump loyalist who perpetuated unfounded voter fraud claims, spoke to protesters near the White House on Jan. 6. And during his 10-minute speech—while wearing a bulletproof vest—Brooks said Jan. 6 was a day for “kicking ass,” repeatedly mentioning how the ancestors of the protesters had “sacrificed their blood… and sometimes their lives.”
“Are you willing to do the same? Are you willing to do the same to fight for America?” Brooks said. “Louder! Will you fight for America?”
The crowd later surrounded the Capitol, savagely beat police officers, smashed their way into the building, tore through offices, stole furniture and electronics, searched for politicians with kidnapping tools, threatened to kill them, and erected gallows outside.
After the attack, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) sued Brooks and other speakers at the political rally, including former President Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., and hero mayor-turned-election conspiracy theorist Rudy Giuliani.
In federal court on Monday, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta listened to Brooks argue his defense—one designed specifically to give him immunity by shielding him behind the government and forcing the Justice Department to fight the legal battle for him.
“Every act I took, every speech I gave... was within the scope of my employment. They are all a part of my job duty,” he told the judge, referring to his responsibilities as a member of Congress.
Brooks asserted that would include the part when he yelled to protesters, “Today is a time of choosing, and tomorrow is a time for fighting!”
William Bullock Pittard, a private attorney representing Swalwell, pointed out that Brooks wants the government he harmed to now represent him. Meanwhile, a DOJ prosecutor argued that Brooks was actually delivering a campaign speech at a Trump campaign rally.
Hilariously, the evidence was clear because it came from Brooks’ own court filings, in which he tried to explain away incendiary language by claiming that “choosing” in his speech meant “which senators and congressmen to support, and oppose, in future elections.” His speech’s “tomorrow… fighting” referred to “future elections.”
As for the part in his speech where he said, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!” the congressman’s own court filings described it as purely electioneering.
“My kicking ass comment referred to what patriotic Republicans needed to do in 2022 and 2024 elections,” he wrote back in July.
The DOJ prosecutor, Brian M. Boynton, used those assertions to ask that Judge Mehta block Brooks from gifting himself a government defense and immunity.
“It’s a bedrock principle in our democracy that the government must remain strictly neutral when it comes to elections,” Boynton said on Monday.
“I think it’s very clear on the capacity with which he was acting,” Pittard said, citing the documents as well.
By reaching for government protection, the congressman may have exposed himself to even more legal trouble—maybe even expulsion from Congress, said Jessica A. Levinson, a law school professor at Loyola Marymount University.
“Members of Congress are allowed to have very broad latitude when they use this protection. Having said that, what happened was an insurrection… and if we consider that to be the business of Congress, then we’ve really strained that definition to its breaking point,” she told The Daily Beast.
“It’s fair to say, ‘OK well, if this is how you conduct yourself officially, then you should no longer be a member of Congress. Helping someone incite an insurrection is an impeachable offense,’” she said.
Judge Mehta has not yet ruled on whether Brooks can have the Justice Department come to his rescue. But during the five-hour hearing, the judge showed little patience for the clumsy attempts by attorneys for ex-President Trump and Giuliani to whitewash or minimize the insurrection. Mehta has already presided over several criminal cases involving rioters.
If Brooks fails to convince the judge he was acting officially as a congressman and falls back on the concept that he was campaigning, he could face charges for misusing congressional resources. That’s because, once again, Brooks himself laid out in court documents how he directed his office to be involved in every aspect of the speech, starting with the plans made with the White House.
“I then delegated to my congressional staff the task to work out the details” of the speech, then typed it up “in my office at the Rayburn House office building on my congressional office computer,” he previously wrote. “I also timed, reviewed, revised, and practiced my Ellipse speech in my office.”
During his presentation before the judge on Monday, Brooks claimed there was nothing in the House rules of ethics that he violated in his speech. To make his argument, Brooks pointed to the failed Ethics Committee complaint against him by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) last March. Although, it was clear to all those in the virtual hearing that the process merely failed on party lines.
Brooks’ congressional office did not respond to The Daily Beast’s questions about the congressman’s solo legal strategy. While he did graduate from University of Alabama’s law school in 1978, he entered politics as a state-level representative just four years later—and the state bar association currently lists him as “not authorized to practice law in Alabama.”
Legal scholars have noted that Brooks has placed himself out in the cold, alone. The House of Representatives would normally have a strong self-interest in preserving immunity for its members, regardless of party. The fact that the legislative institution refuses to come to his aid shows how egregious his conduct was, legal scholars told The Daily Beast.
“We’re in pretty uncharted legal waters here so I don’t have a prediction of what a court will do with a congressman v. congressman suit where there was life at peril at the Capitol because of an unprecedented insurrection,” Torres-Spelliscy said.
The Virginia Beach Police Department used forged DNA evidence in at least five interrogations, the state's Attorney General announced this week. (photo: Eric Baradat/Getty)
The police used forged documents from the Virginia Department of Forensic Science (DFS) at least five times from March 2016 to February 2020. A false report was presented in court as evidence at least once.
The documents, which were sealed with DFS information and twice signed by a fictitious DFS employee, claimed that suspects’ DNA were connected to crimes in order to coax them to confess.
The DFS discovered the police’s tactics when an assistant commonwealth’s attorney requested a certified copy of one of the false documents from the department.
“This was an extremely troubling and potentially unconstitutional tactic that abused the name of the Commonwealth to try to coerce confessions,” Herring said. “It also abused the good name and reputation of the Commonwealth’s hard-working forensic scientists and professionals who work hard to provide accurate, solid evidence in support of our law enforcement agencies. While I appreciate that Virginia Beach Police put an end to this practice and cooperated with our investigation, this is clearly a tactic that should never have been used.”
The attorney general's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) proposed a conciliation agreement to the Virginia Beach City Council after investigating the law enforcement practices. The City Council agreed to the OCR’s changes Tuesday.
The agreement included a requirement that the Virginia Beach Police Department discontinue its use of false documents and that detective bureau personnel sign a commitment to abide by the order.
The OCR notified those who were interrogated using forged documents and is requiring the department to release any further evidence of false reports to the OCR in a timely manner.
Prince Andrew is facing a civil sex case trial in the U.S. later this year. (photo: BBC)
Andrew will also no longer use the style "His Royal Highness" in any official capacity, a royal source told CNN on Thursday. The source said the decision was "widely discussed" among the royal family.
"With The Queen's approval and agreement, the Duke of York's military affiliations and Royal patronages have been returned to The Queen. The Duke of York will continue not to undertake any public duties and is defending this case as a private citizen," the palace said in a statement.
The royal source also told CNN that "all of the Duke's roles have been handed back to the Queen with immediate effect for redistribution to other members of the Royal Family. For clarity, they will not return to The Duke of York."
On Wednesday, a New York judged ruled against a motion by Andrew's legal team to dismiss a civil lawsuit brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, who alleges that she was trafficked by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and forced to perform sex acts with the prince at the age of 17. Andrew has vigorously denied those claims.
The allegations against Andrew -- along with his relationship with the late convicted sex offender Epstein -- had already tarnished the prince's reputation. But the prospect of a public trial that would attract global attention could put Andrew -- the third child (and reportedly the favorite son) of Queen Elizabeth II -- in an unprecedented situation for a senior British royal.
Andrew had, in 2019, stepped away from his public duties as a result of allegations and the backlash over his initial response.
Aside from the days following the death of his father, Prince Philip, in early 2021, he has rarely appeared in public since. He was even absent from publicly released photographs of his elder daughter Beatrice's wedding in 2020.
The scandal has wider implications for the royal family, which was simultaneously forced to weather criticism over Andrew's case and claims of racism from Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex over the past year. Buckingham Palace later described the claims as "concerning."
The case against Andrew
Giuffre brought her case against Andrew under New York's Child Victims Act, a state law enacted in 2019 which expanded the statute of limitations in child sex abuse cases to give survivors more opportunities to seek justice. An attorney for Giuffre told CNN in August that filing the civil case was to show "all perpetrators of abuse should be held accountable."
Giuffre says she was trafficked by Epstein and forced to have sex with his friends -- including the prince -- at a time when she was underage (17) in the US. She said the assaults happened in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands; that Andrew was aware she was a minor at the time; and that she had been trafficked by Epstein.
She is seeking damages "in an amount to be determined at trial," as well as attorneys' fees and other further relief "as the Court may deem just and proper," according to the lawsuit.
Andrew's attorneys filed a motion to dismiss late last year, but that effort failed on Wednesday and they must now prepare the prince to face a New York court. He could still try to negotiate a settlement with Giuffre to avoid the case going into a trial.
'Let's see the Beijing Games for what they are: a stage for a rising global hegemony with serious human-rights problem.' (photo: AP)
Let’s see the Beijing Games for what they are: a stage for a rising global hegemony with serious human-rights problems and a democracy on a ventilator
When the Biden administration announced its diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games, a spokesperson from China’s foreign ministry responded that the Olympics were “not a stage for political posturing and manipulation”, adding that the boycott was “a grave travesty of the spirit of the Olympic charter” and “a blatant political provocation”.
Hypocrisy abounds in every direction. The Chinese official was right: a diplomatic boycott is a political act, just as China’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the host country’s invasion of Afghanistan was political. While Guantánamo remains open under the Biden administration and home to ‘forever prisoner’ Abu Zubaydah – who withstood CIA waterboarding more than 60 times – the president’s finger waggling looks duplicitous. But when it comes to the hypocrisy Olympics, the International Olympic Committee takes the gold. The group that oversees the Games was the real perpetrator of “a grave travesty of the spirit of the Olympic charter” when, back in 2015, it selected Beijing to host even though it knew full well at the time that China was engaging in extreme human-rights violations that clashed mightily with the Olympic charter’s commitment to “the preservation of human dignity”.
The IOC’s hypocrisy is legendary. From behind the public-relations lectern the group eschews politics while simultaneously taking credit for convincing political leaders from North and South Korea to create “unified” hockey teams competing under one flag at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games. The IOC trumpets its high-level political negotiations with the Taliban to secure safe passage for Afghan athletes. In 2001, when Beijing was vying for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the city’s bid team pledged that hosting the Games would jump-start political and human rights in China, a claim the IOC used to justify its selection. This human-rights dreamscape never arrived. It’s telling that today, neither China nor the IOC are vowing that the Olympics will spur democracy.
The IOC’s willful gullibility reemerged when it meekly intervened in the case of Peng Shuai, the three-time Olympian in tennis who accused a high-level Chinese politician of sexual coercion. IOC president Thomas Bach held a 30-minute video call with the athlete and then issued a statement that she was “safe and well”. This was more a blatant publicity stunt designed to ensure that the Beijing Games proceeded apace than a sincere effort to appraise the athlete’s well-being. Peng later retracted her allegations under suspicious conditions.
The Beijing Olympics are about so much more than sport. The US diplomatic boycott arrives amid escalating tensions between China and numerous western nations. In the US, China has become a bi-partisan punching bag, with politicians on both sides of the aisle making evidence-free claims that would make McCarthy blush. This feeds oversimple narratives that juxtapose a freedom-loving USA against a diabolical Chinese state. In turn, this sanctimonious outlook stokes the US war machine; when Congress passed the whopping $770bn defense bill, which included $24bn more than Biden requested, analysts rationalized the uptick by citing China as a rising geopolitical threat. This saber-rattling ignores the fact that the US has around 750 military bases circling the world while China has only one, and it comes at a time when US-China cooperation is vital on climate change and other security matters.
Moreover, US politicos are swift to slam China while ignoring human-rights abuses for which they are responsible, from kids in cages at the Mexico border to unquestioning support for Israel (a country Human Rights Watch recently described as carrying out “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians) to the homelessness situation in the US, a humanitarian crisis in plain sight (in Los Angeles, the 2028 Olympic host, around 1,500 unhoused residents have died since the coronavirus pandemic began). The demonization campaign is working: in 2021, the Pew Research Center found that 67% in the US held negative feelings toward China, an increase of 21% since 2018.
In a sense, the IOC is complicit in escalating tensions between China and the US, and it has placed athletes in the middle of the imbroglio. On one hand you have an obvious human-rights abuser as host and on the other you have the IOC twiddling its thumbs as it prepares to count its money. In this ethical vacuum, pressure is building on athletes to step up and lead – some academics and activists are even calling on athletes to boycott the Games. Olympic athletes are in a vexing position, but it’s the International Olympic Committee that has placed them there. Athletes have no say where the Olympics go, and when the IOC hands the Games to a repressive host, Olympians all too often bear the brunt. The IOC has a slogan, “Putting Athletes First”. But when the IOC handed the Olympics to Beijing, it actually put athletes among the last.
The IOC continues to hide behind its thin scrim of apoliticism despite abundant evidence to the contrary. If nothing else, the 2022 Beijing Games should be the death knell of the risible myth that the Olympics are not political. Sports are never simply sports. Let’s see the Beijing Games for what they are: a stage for a rising global hegemony with serious human-rights problems and a democracy on a ventilator.
A cleanup crew works at the site of a diesel spill in this undated image, just outside New Orleans. More than 300,000 gallons of diesel spilled on Dec. 27, 2021. (photo: AP)
A 2020 inspection revealed external corrosion along a 22-foot section of pipe in the same area as the spill.
Most of the fuel drained into two artificial ponds called “borrow pits” and thousands of fish, birds and other animals were killed, state and local officials said. Most of the fuel was recovered, according to the pipeline owner.
The spill from the 16-inch-diameter line operated by Collins Pipeline Co. was discovered Dec. 27 near a levee in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, according to documents from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
An inspection of the 42-year-old Meraux Pipeline more than a year earlier, in October 2020, revealed external corrosion along a 22-foot section of pipe in the same area as the spill. But repairs were delayed and the line continued operating after a subsequent inspection indicated the corrosion was not bad enough to require work immediately under federal regulations, according to the pipeline agency.
The spilled fuel also contaminated soil in an environmentally sensitive area near the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a closed canal, according to state and federal officials. A small amount of diesel remains in the two borrow pits, said Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Gregory Langley.
The spill killed 2,300 fish and more than 100 other animals, including 39 snakes, 32 birds, a few eels and a blue crab, according to statistics provided by Robert “Trey” Iles, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
Nearly 130 animals — 72 alligators, 23 birds, 20 snakes and 12 turtles — were captured for rehabilitation, he said.
Diesel is a highly toxic petroleum product that can kill fish and plants that come into direct contact with it, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Fuel from small spills can evaporate or disperse naturally in just a couple of days but larger spills can take months to degrade.
A pipeline safety advocate said it was “maddening” that the corrosion was known about for more than a year prior to the spill yet fuel kept flowing through the 125-mile-long line from Chalmette to a storage terminal in Collins, Mississippi.
“It’s especially maddening to learn that Collins Pipeline’s initial analysis deemed the pipe in such poor condition that it warranted an immediate repair,” said Bill Caram with the Pipeline Safety Trust. The Bellingham, Washington-based organization advocates for more stringent oversight of the nation’s sprawling network of pipelines transporting oil, natural gas and other hazardous fuels.
Collins Pipeline is a subsidiary of Parsippany, New Jersey-based PBF Energy Inc., which owns six petroleum refineries in the U.S. including the Chalmette Refinery in St. Bernard Parish.
The company has repaired the line since the spill and resumed operations, PBF Vice President Michael Karlovich told The Associated Press in an email Wednesday.
Karlovich said work to recover fuel that spilled into the artificial ponds had been completed with about 323,000 gallons of diesel collected — a figure that includes both spilled fuel and diesel that was remaining inside the pipeline after the accident. He did not provide a breakdown.
“Although we continue to remediate and monitor the area, on-water recovery operations have been completed,” Karlovich said. He said the site was about 4.5 miles from the Mississippi River, not just a few hundred feet away as federal officials had said.
In an order to PBF Chairman Thomas Nimbley describing the steps the company had to take before it restarted the line, the associate administrator of the federal pipeline safety agency, Alan Mayberry, identified the probable cause of the spill as “localized corrosion and metal loss” based on preliminary reports.
More than two months before the spill, a PBF Energy representative said in an October 2021 email to federal pipeline regulators that the company had completed repairs on another flawed section of the line, but was still awaiting approval to address the corrosion found in the vicinity of the rupture site, according to federal records.
The company already had reduced pressure inside the line in November 2020, shortly after the corrosion was first found. The company reduced the pressure it slightly more in November 2021 because it had not repaired the line within a time frame required under federal regulations, according to pipeline officials.
The spill had not been previously publicly reported.
Federal regulators have initiated six enforcement cases against Collins Pipeline since 2007. They include a 2021 warning letter alleging management problems at the company’s pipeline control room in Texas and a 2011 warning for not conducting external corrosion tests frequently enough, federal records show.
No fines or other penalties were levied against the company, according to the records.
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