03 February 22
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Clear, brief, and to the point, this collection of short essays was authored by three of America’s “founding fathers:” James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Indeed, they were quite a trio. Madison helped organize the Constitutional Convention, served as the 5th Secretary of State (1801-9), and played a crucial role in the “Louisiana Purchase” of territories from France that added 23 million acres to the nation, and doubled its original size, before becoming the 4th President of the United States, serving from 1808-1816. As for Alexander Hamilton, who wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, he envisioned the United States as an industrial power, and proved instrumental in creating the nation’s first two central banks. A general in the military, who Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of President George Washington, he was famously killed in 1804 in a dual with the notorious former Vice President, Aaron Burr. Unlike Madison and Washington, who owned slaves, Hamilton was a proponent of ending the legality of the international slave trade, and like John Jay, an abolitionist. The least known of the Federalist Papers’ three authors was John Jay, who served as Ambassador to Spain and Secretary of Foreign Affairs, before becoming America’s first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1789-1795).
Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were authentic intellectual and political revolutionaries who turned the logic of governance upside down. No less than Machiavelli or Hobbes, admittedly, they believed that men were self-interested and egoistic. Madison was clear: if men were angels there would be no need for government. But what kind of government? Europeans thought that hierarchical and centralized states were necessary to keep the masses in line. America’s founding fathers, however, viewed the matter differently. They envisioned a decentralized government with checks and balances. Combining this with explicitly anti-democratic institutions, they believed, it would produce the same result while protecting individual liberty.
Madison, Jay, and Hamilton were propertied bourgeois and landowners, children of the Enlightenment, and nobody’s fools. Their views on personal liberty, representative democracy, and an independent judiciary set the stage for genuine advances in democratic governance. But their goals were all pursued with an eye for their interests, and within “prudent” limits. As portrayed in the magisterial cycle of American historical novels by Gore Vidal, which begins with Burr (1973), these federalists, above all, feared the “great beast,” the poor and the property-less, as much as any European aristocrat. They allowed for slavery in order to gain support for the Constitution from Southern states. African and Native Americans could not vote; women could not vote; those without property could not vote; and everyone had to be 21. Individual states were left to decide the details. This later led to poll taxes, literacy tests, and flat-out coercion, especially against Blacks in the South following the Civil War and Reconstruction, and well into the 1960s. Today, indeed, eighteen states have already passed legislation with the same intent, under pressure from a resurgent white supremacist constituency, and with solid support from the Republican Party.
Even severe voting restrictions, however, did not make elites feel secure. They wanted more protection, and they got it: governors and senators were initially elected indirectly by state assemblies; an electoral college would indirectly determine the president; and Supreme Court justices, nominated by the president and ratified by the Senate, would sit on the bench for life. Some changes were made: governors and senators are now elected directly by popular vote, and members of the electoral college generally vote in accordance with their state’s popular vote. In spite of these changes, however, the original institutional hindrances to democracy remain a serious matter. Senators are still granted enormous latitude, the electoral college still serves reactionary interests, and due to unforeseen circumstances, supported by a unified Republican majority in the Senate, three highly conservative justices were confirmed for the Supreme Court.
The Federalist Papers split the exercise of national sovereignty between the Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency (as well as the federal government and the states). With each institution seeking to expand its turf at the expense of the others, coupled with complex and confusing laws, their domains of control became increasingly fluid. Congress is supposedly in control of the budget, for example, yet the president and the senate can both intercede. Institutional accountability also suffers. Thus, the embarrassing presentation of the Mueller Report, which dealt with Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Trump’s two impeachment hearings, and the seemingly endless inquiry into the January 6th insurrection.
But the most important problem involves elections. Their framework was provided by The Federalist Papers. Organized through single member districts, where the “winner takes all,” the electoral process is the real source of “American exceptionalism.” Should a candidate garner 51% of the popular vote, for example, 49% of the district’s citizens might find themselves completely disempowered. Unlike European forms of proportional representation, where 49% of the vote won by a national party will probably result in 49% of the seats in parliament, the American system is black and white. The power of political parties is reducible to the number of individual candidates who emerge triumphant in each district or state. It is a matter of win or lose—everything. This electoral structure harbors disincentives for the birth of third parties if only because they cannot grow over time, say, from 5% to 10% to 20% etc. It’s always now or never – all or nothing.
The only way for citizens not to “waste” their votes is to choose between the “lesser of the two evils,” namely, Democrats and Republicans. In spite of the current polarized political atmosphere, the founding fathers surely intuited that single-member winner-take-all districts would also produce disincentives for ideological parties (i.e. communist, socialist, fascist). That is because candidates will need support from different and often mutually exclusive interests, or “factions.” Politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties are thus pressured by the system to “balance” the concerns of, say, unions, capital, environmentalists, and other factions, in a “pragmatic” agenda that usually lacks any ideological consistency whatsoever.
These factions have different degrees of power, and elites can organize a faction more easily than others, such as immigrants, whose interests remain under-represented or ignored entirely. That this impacts the character of a given coalition of factions, however, was never relevant for the founding fathers. Compromise of principle and interest was the aim of their electoral framework, which extended from the local to the highest (presidential) level. A particularly grotesque attempt to grapple with the structure of American elections was the unprincipled “triangulation” strategy of President Bill Clinton, which sought to place the Democratic Party ever so slightly to the left of Republicans on any given issue; it sounds good, but the ultimate result was a supposedly progressive president’s promising “to end welfare as we know it.” Triangulation was also undertaken by Senator Al Gore (D-Tennessee) in his unsuccessful presidential contest with Governor George W. Bush in 2000, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s run against Donald Trump in 2016. Both won the popular vote, Hillary Clinton by more than 3 million ballots, but miscalculated with regard to the impact of the electoral college. Both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were defeated.
Genuinely progressive reformers have always had a hard time dealing with these various electoral constraints on democracy. Aware of events in Ancient Greece, and the Roman Republic, the federalists worried about the property-less majority electing a people’s tribune and the prospect of this majority forcing taxes on the rich. They purposely made it difficult to implement national policies. There is hardly a single major piece of welfare legislation from social security to healthcare in which the United States has historically taken the lead. The introduction of such legislation usually lags 50 years behind countries with socialist parties, parliamentary regimes, and national unions. Different candidates in the United States swing a bit to the left or to the right depending upon the coalitions that they form. Even though the last 50 years has seen the ideological mainstream shifting to the right, which is barely recognized by the average voter, the standard claim is that power in America rests on what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the vital center.”
Privileging the power of local factions as against national political parties further complicates the labyrinthine structure of American institutions. Professional politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties seek to keep these factional interests in the non-governmental realm of civil society where much of the pre-electoral bargaining takes place. But that doesn’t always work. When an ideological vacuum sucks the life out of a political party and its identifiable policies have palpably failed, it is the more extreme factions that can become dominant. Such was the case with the racist “Dixiecrats” and white councils” in the South that had a huge impact on national parties, and their policies, during the decades after World War II. It was the same with the Tea Party, which began its assault on the vapid “center” occupied by supporters of President George W. Bush. Currently, it is the same with the neo-fascist Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the conspiracy fetishists of Q-Anon, whose local activities have been inspired and supported by President Trump.
Factional minorities can rule America. That possibility favors elites, and it is strengthened by an anachronistic Electoral College that essentially rejects the idea of “one person, one vote.” Other marginalized constituencies bear the costs. Expelling their egalitarian demands from the political discourse is among the most obvious ways in which inequality has been maintained. The United States still lacks an equal rights amendment for women. Institutional racism became a subject of crucial concern only in the aftermath of the protests associated with Black Lives Matter! – and it has produced a powerful backlash. Intolerance toward the LGBTQ community remains, and the plight of Native Americans is barely recognized. The source of these problems, it is worth noting, is not primarily the federal government but the states –and particularly those with non-urban, agricultural, and provincial small-town constituencies. That remains the case today.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) idealized the national culture of individualism and the town meeting. His canonical work was wrong on both counts. American individualism has always been conformist, provincial, and intertwined with laissez-faire capitalist ideology, “getting the government off our backs” and fear of those who would “take away our guns.” Contemptuous of big business, and always suspicious of “socialist” and “communist” reforms, American individualism is petty bourgeois to the core. There is the insistence that one opinion is as good as another, which Herbert Marcuse correctly labeled “repressive tolerance,” and there is only contempt for any scientific “expert” or intellectual who denies that. Indeed, the American obsession with personal liberty has never been reciprocal. It has rarely extended to the genuine non-conformist. Personal liberty has always been there for me, but not for you, and its pursuit has come at the expense of social responsibility.
Regarding the “town meeting,” meanwhile, local cliques are usually in control, and turnout in local elections is sometimes as low as 10% of the voting public. Because the issues discussed are usually minor, such as putting up a traffic light, little publicity is generated and less oversight, which best serves the interests of highly organized and coordinated elites. Local politics thus becomes the arena in which corruption and organized extremism thrive. Populism veils reaction. Electing the president through rewarding less populated conservative rural states and disempowering urban constituencies that usually vote Democratic, such as people of color, skews the political arrangement.
No wonder that Republicans seek to keep the vote low, and that they have been the primary beneficiaries of this situation. Leaving the determination of most electoral rules in the hands of individual states, furthermore, has made possible new forms of suppressing the popular vote by placing obstacles on absentee voting, hard to reach voting places, purposefully creating long lines, lack of accountability in counting ballots, and seemingly insignificant yet effective strategies. Voting rights along with domestic spending bills are stalled in the Senate due to the obstinance of conservative, or what are known as “blue dog” Democrats. As usual, they are from reactionary states with large right-wing constituencies that are suspicious of the federal government and contemptuous of non-white citizens who would benefit from such legislation.
Is there democracy in America? The appropriate response is: compared to what? When juxtaposed against the utterly impractical vision of participatory democracy, certainly not. When measured against parliamentary regimes with proportional representation, which privilege party over faction, questionably. When compared to existing dictatorships and “illiberal” democracies now existing in Poland or Hungary, however, there is no doubt about it.
Today, this electoral framework is being manipulated in ways that endanger democratic governance. Between the veiled “gerrymandering,” or reorganizing of districts and authoritarian attempts to suppress the vote, a Republican attempt to “stop the steal” of another presidential election is underway. It is possible for Democrats to overcome such obstacles, but it will take resources and determination. They will need to prioritize democratic empowerment even at the short-term expense of economic equality and, in the long run, they must work to abolish the
Electoral College, demand term limits for Supreme Court justices, eradicate anti-democratic bureaucratic procedures, participate at the state and local levels, reject sectarianism, and get out the vote! This will all demand the careful targeting of resources. Unless that is done, the prospects for democratic governance will grow weaker, and we may even experience yet another authoritarian minority winner in the presidential race of 2024.
Stephen Eric Bronner is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers University and Co-Director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue. His most recent work is The Sovereign (Routledge).
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Troops transport trucks on a pontoon bridge across a river during joint military exercises held by Russia and Belarus in September. (photo: Reuters)
The statement warned that the current crisis “could easily spiral out of control to the point of pushing the world to the precipice of nuclear war.”
Release of the statement came with an announcement of a virtual news conference set for Wednesday -- with speakers including a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Jack F. Matlock Jr.; The Nation editorial director Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is president of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord; and Martin Fleck, representing Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Organizations signing the statement included Physicians for Social Responsibility, RootsAction.org, Code Pink, Just Foreign Policy, Peace Action, Veterans For Peace, Our Revolution, MADRE, Progressive Democrats of America, American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord, Pax Christi USA, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Center for Citizen Initiatives, and the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security.
Outreach for the statement was coordinated by Code Pink and RootsAction.org. Below is the statement’s full text.
_____________________
A Statement from U.S. Organizations on the Ukraine Crisis
[ February 1, 2022 ]
As organizations representing millions of people in the United States, we call upon President Biden to end the U.S. role in escalating the extremely dangerous tensions with Russia over Ukraine. It is gravely irresponsible for the president to participate in brinkmanship between two nations that possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
For the United States and Russia, the only sane course of action now is a commitment to genuine diplomacy with serious negotiations, not military escalation – which could easily spiral out of control to the point of pushing the world to the precipice of nuclear war.
While both sides are to blame for causing this crisis, its roots are entangled in the failure of the U.S. government to live up to its promise made in 1990 by then-Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would expand not “one inch to the East.” Since 1999, NATO has expanded to include numerous countries, including some that border Russia. Rather than dismissing out of hand the Russian government’s current insistence on a written guarantee that Ukraine will not become part of NATO, the U.S. government should agree to a long-term moratorium on any NATO expansion.
Signing organizations
Physicians for Social Responsibility
RootsAction.org
CODEPINK
Just Foreign Policy
Peace Action
Veterans For Peace
Our Revolution
MADRE
Progressive Democrats of America
American Committee for US-Russia Accord
Pax Christi USA
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security
Alaska Peace Center
Arise for Social Justice
Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests
Backbone Campaign
Baltimore Nonviolence Center
Baltimore Peace Action
BDSA Internationalism Committee
Benedictines for Peace
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists
Beyond Nuclear
Campaign Nonviolence
Casa Baltimore Limay
Chapter 9 Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade
Chicago Area Peace Action
Cleveland Peace Action
Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach
Community Peacemaker Teams
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety
Continuing the Peace Dialogue
Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, Washington DC
Eisenhower Media Project
End the Wars Coalition, Milwaukee
Environmentalists Against War
Extinction Rebellion PDX
First Unitarian Society - Madison Justice Ministries
Food Not Bombs
Foreign Policy In Focus
Frack Free Four Corners
Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution
Global Exchange
Global Network Against Weapons … Nuclear Power in Space
Grassroots International
Hawaii Peace and Justice
Historians for Peace and Democracy
Interfaith Peace Working Group
International Tribunal of Conscience
Just World Educational
Kalamazoo Nonviolent Opponents of War
Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
Maryland Peace Action
Massachusetts Peace Action
Metta Center for Nonviolence
Monroe County Democrats
MPower Change Fund
Muslim Delegates and Allies
National Lawyers Guild (NLG) International
New Hampshire Veterans for Peace
New Jersey State Industrial Union Council
North Texas Peace Advocates
Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility
Other98
Pace e Bene
Parallax Perspectives
Partners for Peace Fort Collins
Peace Action of San Mateo County
Peace Action WI
Peace Education Center
PeaceWorkers
People for Bernie Sanders
Phil Berrigan Memorial Chapter, Baltimore, Veterans For Peace
Physicians for Social Responsibility, AZ Chapter
Prevent Nuclear War/ Maryland
Progressive Democrats of America, Tucson
Proposition One Campaign for a Nuclear Free Future
Reader Supported News
Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center
Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin
San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility
San Jose Peace and Justice Center
Sisters of Mercy of the Americas - Justice Team
SolidarityINFOService
Traprock Center for Peace … Justice
United for Peace and Justice
United Nations Association, Milwaukee
Veterans For Peace, Russia Working Group
Veterans for Peace, Chapter 102
Veterans For Peace Chapter 111, Bellingham, WA
Veterans For Peace Chapter 113-Hawai’i
Veterans For Peace Linus Pauling Chapter 132
Veterans For Peace - NYC Chapter 34
Veterans For Peace - Santa Fe Chapter
Veterans Peace Team
Western North Carolina Physicians for Social Responsibility
Western States Legal Foundation
Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice
Women Cross DMZ
Women Against Military Madness
Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER)
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom US
Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy
World BEYOND War
350 Milwaukee
David Crosby (from left), Graham Nash and Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash onstage in Los Angeles in 2010. (photo: Kevin Winter/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Graham Nash Pulls Music From Spotify: "I Completely
Agree With and Support My Friend Neil"
In a written statement sent to NPR on Wednesday afternoon, the musicians said: "David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills have requested that their labels remove their collective recordings from Spotify. In solidarity with their bandmate, Neil Young, and in support of stopping harmful misinformation about COVID, they have decided to remove their records from the streaming platform including the recordings of CSNY, CSN, and CN, as well as Crosby's and Stills' solo projects. Nash has already begun the process to take down his solo recordings."
The statement continued: "We support Neil and we agree with him that there is dangerous disinformation being aired on Spotify's Joe Rogan podcast. While we always value alternate points of view, knowingly spreading disinformation during this global pandemic has deadly consequences. Until real action is taken to show that a concern for humanity must be balanced with commerce, we don't want our music — or the music we made together — to be on the same platform."
Other artists and creators are requesting to pull or have suspended their content from Spotify as well. First to follow Young was singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who wrote on her website: "Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue."
On Saturday, guitarist Nils Lofgren, a longtime member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and the Crazy Horse band with Neil Young, announced that he has also asked for his music to be removed from Spotify, accusing the streaming service of "promoting lies and misinformation that are hurting and killing people."
On Tuesday, vocalist India.Arie wrote on Instagram: "Neil Young opened a door that I MUST walk through. ... I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons OTHER than his Covid interviews... FOR ME ITS ALSO HIS his language around race."
Last week, Rogan made comments about race during an interview with Jordan Peterson, a climate change skeptic and psychologist. Rogan said that he found it odd to classify people as Black based on skin tone, saying: "Unless you're talking to someone who is like 100% African, from the darkest place, where they're not wearing any clothes all day and they've developed all that melanin to protect themselves from the sun, you know, even the term 'Black' is weird."
As of Wednesday afternoon, however, India.Arie's albums remained available on Spotify.
Psychologist and author Mary Trump, who is the niece of former President Donald Trump, announced Tuesday that she is pulling her podcast from Spotify as well, writing: "I know it's not a big deal but hope it will be part of a growing avalanche." On Wednesday, in a separate tweet, she wrote: "Spotify should get rid of Joe Rogan's show not just because he spreads COVID disinformation but because he is a racist. It's yet another reason for us to #DeleteSpotify."
Some podcast hosts who, like Rogan, have exclusive deals with Spotify have also spoken up. In a statement over the weekend from their production company, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, expressed "concerns" to Spotify about the "all too real consequences of COVID-19 misinformation on its platform."
Another prominent host, researcher and author Brené Brown, who has two exclusive podcasts on Spotify, said last week that she was suspending providing any new content to the platform.
In a lengthy statement posted Tuesday, Brown said that she had paused delivering new episodes until she understood the situation better. "I wanted to talk to the Spotify leadership about their position, their policies, and the application of those policies," she wrote. "I met with them twice last week and once again this week. I've listened, they've listened, and my assessment is that everyone is open and learning—including me."
Brown added that since her initial announcement, she has faced an onslaught of reactions online, "driven by unfounded accusations of censorship."
She continued: "Comments like 'I'm canceling you for canceling people' and 'I hate censors so you shut up' and 'I'm burning your books because I don't agree with you' would be ironic and funny if they didn't demonstrate a complete lack of critical thinking."
Members of the Texas National Guard stand during a news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott, right, in Mission, Texas, on Oct. 6, 2021. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty)
National Guard troops have decried the Texas governor for their hasty deployment, while migrants are being thrown into a constitutionally dubious legal process.
When asked last month about the deaths of soldiers like Pfc. Joshua Cortez and Sgt. John Crutcher — two of the four deaths by suicide linked to Operation Lone Star in recent months — Abbott said his critics were “just playing politics” and that the focus should be on military suicides under President Joe Biden.
For Jason Featherston, who joined the Guard straight out of high school and spent the next two decades rising to the upper ranks of the Texas Military Department, the governor’s comments were not only insulting, they were wrong. The focus, Featherston argues, is exactly where it needs to be. As the highest-ranking enlisted officer in the Texas National Guard, Featherston had a front row seat to the creation and implementation of Operation Lone Star before retiring in November. He has since become an outspoken critic of Abbott’s operation, which he describes as a “rush to failure” that is taking an unconscionable toll on soldiers and their families.
“I expect my 9- and 10-year-old kids to deflect blame to the other. I don’t expect a governor, who is the commander in chief of the Texas military, to deflect blame to a president,” Featherston told The Intercept. “I voted for Abbott in the last election, but he will never get another vote of mine.”
Concerns surrounding the deployment of National Guard soldiers have grown exponentially since early December, as a string of investigative news reports from Army Times, the Texas Tribune, USA Today, and others have documented arrests of soldiers assigned to the border mission, patterns of DUIs, alcohol and drug use, missing pay, and soldiers losing money that they could be making in their civilian lives.
Just this week, a joint Army Times-Texas Tribune investigation detailed the chaotic and disastrously hasty way that Operation Lone Star was cobbled together. Abbott’s rush to put troops on the ground threw volunteer soldiers accustomed to missions with clear end dates and plenty of lead time for preparation into an obligatory mission with no end in sight and little to no time to put their lives in order prior to deployment. The report found that 1 in 5 troops in the 6,500-strong “operational force” of Operation Lone Star “reported problems with their pay, including being paid late, too little or not at all for months” and “living in cramped trailers with dozens of troops.” The Texas Military Department disputed the reporting, which was based on internal documents and interviews with nearly 40 current and former guard soldiers.
“If you’re going to send soldiers to the border, you need to pay them,” Featherston said. “You need to give them the right equipment. If they have hardships, those things need to be considered, because life gets a vote in anything that we do. There were hardship packets that were denied that should have been approved, and unfortunately, if it wasn’t for Operation Lone Star, there’d be another four families that would have loved ones still here with us.”
Launched in March and expanded from 500 to 10,000 troops in under a year, Operation Lone Star is among the largest deployments of soldiers in the 186-year history of the Texas Military Department. The mission is funded by state taxpayers as part of a $3 billion border security package that the Texas Legislature approved last summer.
At first, Featherston thought that the governor’s plans seemed consistent with past border missions he had participated in. That started to change in September, when the nation’s attention turned to thousands of Haitian asylum-seekers gathered under a bridge in Del Rio, in West Texas, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson began calling Abbott out for failing to lock down the border. “This country is being invaded,” Carlson said at the time.
According to state records, Abbott requested 2,500 troops — in addition to the 1,500 troops he had already called up for Operation Lone Star — following Carlson’s public criticism. Soon after, the governor announced that 6,500 soldiers and troopers were participating in the border mission. By November, that number had mushroomed to 10,000. “Putting 500 people or 1,000 down there, it’s not a big thing. We’ve been doing that for years,” Featherston said, referring to previous iterations of Texas border operations. “Putting 10,000 people on the border is not even sustainable.” He added: “That’s when the talk really kind of started of, ‘Hey, yeah, this is just a political stunt.’”
The sentiment was widespread, Featherston said, and ran from units on the ground to the upper ranks of the Texas Military Department. Since the expansion took off, Featherston’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Every day, he said, he receives calls from soldiers on the border mission who are navigating one unnecessary difficulty or another.
More than 150 hardship requests from Texas National Guard soldiers on the border mission reviewed by The Intercept revealed the wide range of ways that Operation Lone Star has disrupted soldiers’ lives, from a recently single mother trying to raise two kids in the middle of pandemic, to a lab technician trying to keep her rural Texas hospital’s Covid-19 testing running, to a small town police chief imploring the Texas Military Department not to take one of his few remaining officers away. All of those requests and scores of others like them were denied to fulfill Abbott’s demand for boots on the ground.
In a statement to USA Today late last month, Col. Rita Holton, a spokesperson for the Texas Military Department, said Guard officials have granted around 75 percent of the more than 900 hardship requests received by the department and that 75 percent of pay discrepancies for troops in Operation Lone Star had been resolved. Holton added that field commanders were working to resolve issues associated with soldiers’ living conditions.
“Soldiers deserve better than what they’re getting,” Featherston said. “Guardsmen are the people you run into at the grocery store in your local community. They have families. They have lives. They do everything that every other normal person does, except for they leave home to go help someone or have to deploy overseas.”
Abbott’s protestations aside, there is no question that the governor’s border operation is steeped in politics.
For much of the last year, conservative and rural counties in West Texas, particularly Val Verde and Kinney, have seen a considerable rise in undocumented border crossings on the vast private ranches that blanket the region. At a rally in Kinney County in May, speakers aired a range of concerns about the issue, from ranchers worried about undocumented men wandering onto their properties while their wives and children were home alone, to baseless rumors of Hondurans engaged in organ trafficking, to Goliad County Sheriff Roy Boyd warning that a “Marxist invasion” was underway.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s general counsel, Austin Kinghorn, was on hand for the event and assured the audience that the state was mobilizing a response. “You are not alone. General Paxton is going to fight like hell for you,” he said. “This is our top priority.”
The following week, Abbott issued a formal declaration of disaster on the border and ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to begin arresting migrants on state offenses — overwhelmingly trespassing charges made possible by private landowners who agreed to allow DPS to conduct operations on their property — and transferring them to state jails.
In July, Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to begin providing support to the Operation Lone Star state troopers. In an email to The Intercept last week, DPS said that since the operation began, state troopers have made more than 10,400 criminal arrests, including 2,572 arrests for criminal trespassing. “There have also been 8,287 felony charges filed,” the agency said. Additionally, DPS reported that state troopers had “made more than 87,800 migrant apprehensions and referrals.” DPS did not respond when asked how it distinguishes Lone Star arrests from other arrests. The Texas National Guard said in email that Guard soldiers had “apprehended or referred more than 100,000 illegal migrants to partner law enforcement agencies” but similarly did not respond to questions about when those apprehensions and referrals took place and whether they were part of Operation Lone Star alone or included other border missions.
Under Operation Lone Star, the majority of the state’s cases have been dismissed. The flood of low-level prosecutions has thoroughly overwhelmed the rural and resource-strapped counties where most of the operation’s arrests are taking place. Hundreds of undocumented immigrants have languished in Texas state jail cells for days, weeks, and even months on end, in some cases without access to a lawyer and in others after their bail has been paid. Attorneys who have represented immigrants arrested under the program have documented state law enforcement luring individuals onto private property and then arresting them for trespassing.
Last month a state judge in Travis County, home to the Texas capital, Austin, ruled in favor of an Ecuadorian man who argued that his treatment in Operation Lone Star constituted a violation of his rights under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which holds that the federal government, not the states, is responsible for enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Less than 24 hours later, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid filed a writ before the same court on behalf of more than 400 clients making a similar claim. These challenges follow similar concerns raised by civil rights organizations and Democratic lawmakers, who called for a federal investigation into Abbott’s operation late last year.
By putting Operation Lone Star at the center of his argument for reelection, Abbott’s border messaging reflects a broader effort led by Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, to deploy a narrative of chaos going into the midterm elections. “I’m very open about the fact that I believe the Republican Party needs to really dig in starting now, and work and put in the work to elevate this issue to the center of our national dialogue,” Miller told CNN last month. Miller, who as a congressional aide circulated white nationalist literature for immigration talking points, used the same strategy in Trump’s run for the White House in 2015 and 2016, linking the would-be president up with the National Border Patrol Council, the Border Patrol’s union. In 2016, the NBPC, a member of the much-larger AFL-CIO federation of unions, made its first-ever presidential endorsement, backing Trump after he and Miller separately went on the union’s Breitbart-sponsored podcast, and after Trump made a visit to agents in South Texas and met with union officials.
Abbott has clearly embraced the Trump model heading into 2022. In a video released announcing his run for reelection in November, the first two items Abbott listed on his agenda were border security and showing support for police. To kick off his campaign, the governor traveled to the Rio Grande Valley, where he held a press conference at the Border Patrol union’s headquarters.
At the event, Abbott touted the “unprecedented” $3 billion that he has funneled into “border security,” the 15 laws he passed to crack down on human trafficking, and the progress Texas is making on building a wall along the U.S-Mexico divide. Thanks to Biden’s “open border” policies, he said, agents were doing their jobs with “one hand tied behind their back.” The governor added that if any agents happened to lose their jobs for failing to comply with a vaccine mandate, he would hire them to continue their work for the state of Texas.
The message was tailor-made for the Border Patrol union’s right-wing politics. Brandon Judd, the president of the NBPC, announced at the event last month that Abbott, like Trump, had the council’s official backing. “He’s doing what the federal government refuses to do, and for that we’re extremely grateful,” Judd said. Without the governor’s efforts, he added, “thousands of more people undoubtedly would be dead today.” Though Judd, a frequent Fox News contributor, offered no evidence to support the extraordinary claim, Abbott expressed his appreciation all the same.
“To have the support of the men and women who are at the tip of the spear of securing our border means everything to me and my campaign,” the governor said. Within hours, Abbott shared a pre-produced video of Judd explaining the endorsement.
The Republicans’ border strategy goes beyond Texas. In Arizona, state Attorney General Mark Brnovich is also in election mode, and he too takes a Miller-esque view of the border. Running for U.S. Senate against Democrat Mark Kelly, Brnovich has argued in court that Biden’s immigration policies are in fact “population augmentation programs.” Like Abbott in Texas, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has also embraced high-profile deployments of the state Department of Public Safety and National Guard to the border. Ducey’s Republican colleagues have urged the governor to go even further and use an unconventional interpretation of the war powers of the U.S. Constitution to declare that Arizona is under “invasion,” thus allowing for a wide-ranging state-led military response.
In Texas, Abbott’s Operation Lone Star is the latest in a long line of Republican governors attempting to use a combination of the National Guard and state law enforcement as de facto immigration agents, said Timothy Dunn, a professor of sociology at Salisbury University who has researched and written extensively on the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico divide.
“This is part of the really rather lengthy history of Texas moving into border enforcement in a big way,” Dunn told The Intercept. “Over the years it’s kept getting bigger and bigger.”
Among the qualities that set Lone Star apart from its predecessors is the fact that because it is a state-funded operation, National Guard soldiers theoretically could make an arrest of a migrant as part of the mission. Exactly how many of those arrests — as opposed to apprehensions or referrals, in which a soldier hands a migrant off to another agency — are actually happening is unclear; the Texas National Guard did not respond when asked that question. Army Times and the Texas Tribune reported this week that at least one specialized unit of two dozen soldiers who work as police officers in their civilian lives are making arrests in Kinney County. “I’ve yet to meet a soldier that’s actually making an arrest,” Featherston said. Instead, he said, the vast majority of troops spend hours on end every day staring out into the expanse of the Texas borderlands.
Exercised or not, the authority is “historically unusual,” Dunn said. “That takes militarization to a whole new level.”
Dunn cautions against letting the hardships endured by National Guard soldiers deployed to Operation Lone Star, important as they are, overshadow the dubious parallel legal system that the entire mission rests upon. “Don’t forget about all the immigrants, too, who are being held without charge or who are having their constitutional rights just absolutely taken away,” he said. “The Constitution applies to everybody in the U.S. It doesn’t just apply to citizens.”
The combination of a mass constitutional threat and the billions of dollars being spent to support it are, for Dunn, the most galling facets of Abbott’s operation. “Just think what we could do with those resources other than spending on this performative bullshit that really has very little impact,” he said. A more humane, dignified, and functional system could be built, Dunn argued. “It wouldn’t take a huge amount of money, and certainly something like $3 billion would go a hell of a long way in the state of Texas towards doing that — and yet that’s not going to win you enough votes.”
“It’s just a tremendous waste of resources, and it’s not really going to have much of an effect except to boost somebody’s political campaign,” Dunn said. “At least they hope it will.”
Syrian civil defense inspect damaged home, near Idlib Syria following US operation on February 3, 2022. (photo: Ghaith Alsayed)
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the current leader of ISIS, was "taken off the battlefield" in the operation, Mr. Biden said, confirming that all U.S. forces who took part had returned safely.
A senior Biden administration official told CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O'Keefe on Thursday that al-Qurayshi "exploded a bomb that killed him and members of his own family" as the raid got underway."
Speaking later Thursday morning at the White House, Mr. Biden said the choice was made to go after the ISIS leader with a special forces raid rather than a missile strike in an effort to avoid civilian casualties. He said al-Qurayshi "chose to blow up" both himself and the entire third floor of the home he was holed up in, which led to the death of his own family members.
The president lauded the U.S. forces who carried out the raid, and called it "testament to America's reach and capability to take out terrorists anywhere they hide in the world."
"We will come after you and find you," Mr. Biden warned other terror leaders.
Several residents told The Associated Press they saw body parts scattered around a house in the village of Atmeh, near the border with Turkey. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals following the raid, which they say involved helicopters, explosions and machine-gun fire.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of sources on the ground in Syria and has been a largely reliable source of information during the grinding civil war in the country, said the strike left at least 13 people dead, including four children and three women. The "White Helmets," a volunteer rescue agency, said four women and six children were killed.
The senior administration official who spoke to O'Keefe on Thursday also said al-Qurayshi's own bomb had killed women and children in his family.
"While we are still assessing the results of this operation, this appears to be the same cowardly terrorist tactic we saw in the 2019 operation that eliminated" al-Qurayshi's predecessor, the official said.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin said it was the biggest U.S. military operation in Syria since the October 2019 killing of then-ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It had been planned for months, since at least December, when U.S. commanders became certain that they knew al-Qurayshi was staying at the home in Atmeh.
In his remarks at the White House, President Biden said al-Qurayshi had been "responsible for the recent brutal attack on a prison in northeast Syria," and that he was "the driving force behind the genocide of the Yazidi people in northwestern Iraq in 2014."
The U.S. forces landed in the area of the house using helicopters and attacked it. One of the American aircraft suffered mechanical problems and had to be destroyed not far from the raid, but the U.S. forces were able to evacuate aboard the other helicopters.
Taher al-Omar, an Idlib-based activist, said clashes broke out between fighters in the area and the special ops forces.
Residents and activists in the area described seeing a large ground assault, with U.S. forces using loudspeakers asking women and children to leave the area.
The military operation got attention on social media, with tweets from the region describing helicopters firing around a building near Atmeh. Flight-tracking data also suggested that multiple drones were circling the city of Sarmada and the village of Salwah, just north of there in Idlib province.
The clandestine operation came amid efforts by ISIS to stage a comeback after its bid to establish a caliphate failed in 2019, following several years of fighting in Syria and Iraq. In recent weeks and months, the group has launched a series of attacks in the region, including the 10-day assault late last month to seize a prison in northeast Syria.
The attempted prison break was the biggest military operation by the extremist group since ISIS was defeated and members scattered to havens in 2019. The U.S.-led coalition carried out airstrikes and deployed American personnel in Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the prison area to help the Kurdish forces.
The 74 Media photographers covering the protests in Myitkyina last February. (photo: 74 Media)
To avoid arrest, the staff of the 74 Media left their home city, only to face shellfire in their border refuge. The editor describes the risks faced by his media outlet
It was five months after the military takeover in Myanmar and three months since we had been forced to relocate from the Kachin state capital, Myitkyina, to territory held by a group known in Myanmar as an ethnic armed organisation (EAO), fighting for self-determination for an ethnic minority state near Myanmar’s border with China. Now this territory was being bombed. We were all terrified; some of my staff were crying as they looked to me for guidance and comfort.
This was neither our first nor last brush with danger. Since the military seized power on 1 February 2021, small local media outlets such as mine have faced immense risks and hardships just to survive.
Just two weeks after the coup, I was one of the first journalists that the military arrested as it attempted to cover up its violent suppression of the pro-democracy movement.
We were taking live-stream footage of the military’s violent suppression of a demonstration in Myitkyina, when soldiers fired rubber bullets to disperse protesters. Police and soldiers arrested me and four other local reporters. Just moments before they confiscated our camera gear and mobile phones, we filmed a soldier giving the order: “Arrest everyone filming.”
We were lucky. After being held for the night we were released without charge. Yet since then the military has arrested at least 110 more journalists, of whom 44 remained in detention as of 10 January.
Recently, three journalists were killed. One of them, Soe Naing, died during interrogation by the military after he was arrested on 10 December while filming a protest in Yangon.
After our arrest, we immediately resumed reporting, but our space to work as journalists was rapidly narrowing. I was constantly followed by investigative police, and after they tracked down our office address, my whole team was put under surveillance.
On 28 February, another of our journalists was arrested. He says he was strip-searched before being released eight hours later. On 7 March, we locked up our offices and went into hiding.
Our challenges were compounded when the military blocked mobile data across the country on 15 March, leaving us dependent on finding places with wifi to carry out our work.
On 29 March a female journalist from my team was arrested while covering a protest. She says that during her six-month detention she spent a week in an interrogation centre where she was subjected to psychological torture. Arrest warrants were also issued for several other members of my staff in April.
That same month, as the military continued to crack down on the press, we realised that we were likely to become more of a target and we finally decided to relocate to the Chinese border. A month after we left, the military revoked our media licence.
Since then we have been staying in the territory of one of more than a dozen EAOs that line Myanmar’s borders. Some of them have been fighting for self-determination for decades; since the coup, some have at times joined forces with new armed pro-democracy groups against the military.
In our new location, we no longer fear being tailed incessantly by the military or the constant threat of arrest, but we face a new set of worries.
Since our arrival, conflict has been escalating between the military and armed revolutionary groups across the country, and at times attacks near our location seem imminent.
We have heard artillery fire several times, and have bags ready in case we need to flee in an emergency. But there are few places we could seek shelter. We cannot safely go back to the city, but a three-metre-high fence, topped with barbed wire and CCTV cameras, stops us from being able to cross the border into China.
Although we are grateful to the EAO for allowing us to stay in its territory, we also have limited media freedom. Journalists and editors have received verbal warnings that action will be taken against us if we report on issues in a way they do not like.
Nonetheless, we continue to report on the serious human rights violations and lawless behaviour of the Myanmar military in Kachin state and neighbouring areas.
A year after the coup, the military continues to egregiously restrict media freedoms across the country and attempts to terrorise journalists into silence. Nearly all the journalists who were working in Myitkyina before the coup have fled. Many are unable to continue reporting at all.
My team has made it this far, and we remain committed to keeping our newsroom alive whatever risks lie ahead.
Hidden recorders, dirty politicians, and the corrupt companies that financed the 'worst energy policy in the country.' (photo: Getty)
Hidden recorders, dirty politicians, and the corrupt companies that financed it all.
Federal prosecutors brought Householder before a judge and laid out their findings. Their investigation suggested the politician had orchestrated a grand conspiracy in which three electric utilities — FirstEnergy, its former subsidiary Energy Harbor, and American Electric Power — gave Householder a $60 million slush fund to help get like-minded politicians into the Ohio legislature. In exchange, Householder helped steer billions of dollars in subsidies their way.
As Householder left the courthouse, his head bowed, the yellow straps of an N95 mask cutting into the back of his neck, a gaggle of reporters thrust microphones toward his face.
“Do you have anything to say to the people?” one journalist asked.
“Not at this time,” Householder mumbled.
It was a rare moment of silence for Householder. He was known as a talker, when knocking on doors in a camouflage hat and bulky sweatshirt while campaigning, or presiding in a tailored blue suit from the speaker’s thronelike marble dais in the Ohio House Chamber. You couldn’t shut the guy up.
Over the course of three years, Householder had taken money from energy companies and transformed it into power. (Most of it, anyway. He kept some for himself, including $100,000 to pay for his house in Florida, according to an indictment filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.) The money built an army of state representatives that elevated him to speaker of the statehouse and supported his legislative agenda. It also paved the way for the passage of a law in 2019, House Bill 6, “widely recognized as the worst energy policy in the country,” according to Leah Stokes, an environmental political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
House Bill 6 nearly halved the renewable power that utilities were required to buy, eliminated energy efficiency laws, handed a billion dollars to the state’s two nuclear power plants, and spent even more money to keep coal plants burning. A recent report from Gabel Associates, an energy consulting firm, suggests the law will cost Ohioans $2 billion in excess utility bills and $7 billion in health care costs stemming from pollution over nine years.
When both opponents and backers of House Bill 6 are asked about this scandal, they tend to talk about nuclear power. To opponents, it was a “nuclear bailout.” To backers, it was a sort of state-level “Clean Air Act,” meant to keep Ohio’s two nuclear plants from closing, thereby preserving the state’s largest source of zero-emissions energy. But nuclear power was mostly a red herring that utilities used to distract from the real thrust of the law: keeping obsolete coal plants and coal mines profitable.
“House Bill 6 was really a coal bailout wrapped in a clean energy and nuclear argument,” said Stokes, who wrote about the episode in her book, Short Circuiting Energy Policy.
Over the course of four years, FBI investigators tapped phones, recruited informants, and traced the movement of money between Householder and utilities. Grist obtained the FBI’s findings in court documents. Along with interviews and accounts published by Ohio newspapers, we’ve used this information ahead of the start of Householder’s trial to build out a narrative of the brazen attempt by utilities to buy legislation. The story has all the details of a potboiler — hidden recorders, damning conversations, a suicide, bribes, dirty politicians, and corrupt companies that financed it all. But it also presents an unusually vivid picture of the larger trend of fossil fuel companies using every trick they can to keep milking money from their investments in dirty energy — tiptoeing right up to legal boundaries and sometimes stepping over them.
Ever since the 1870s, when Standard Oil monopolized the petroleum industry, big companies dealing in fossil fuels have tried to bend the political process to their will. Now, there’s more temptation than ever: State legislatures are increasing regulation of dirty fuels in the interest of taking on climate change, while falling prices for wind and solar undercut their market. The pressure is greatest on utilities that have recently sunk millions into dirty power plants. “For regulated utilities, profits are determined by how much political influence you wield,” said Dave Anderson, communications and policy manager of the nonprofit watchdog organization Energy and Policy Institute, which has been digging up the details of this case for years. “It’s really just all about the money and driving as much profit as they can for their shareholders.”
As it becomes clear that clean energy poses an existential threat to fossil fuels, utilities that bet on the insignificance of renewables are launching counterattacks to maintain their dwindling turf.
“There’s a clear pattern,” Stokes said. “Utilities are rolling back climate policy, and they are charging ratepayers to do it.”
In 2008, Ohio passed its first renewable energy law, mandating the construction of wind turbines and solar panels while creating programs to help residents and businesses insulate their homes and upgrade their appliances. Few saw any reason to oppose the measure — it came after a parade of states passed their own renewable electricity standards, beginning in the late 1990s. And both conservatives and liberals liked the idea of homegrown clean energy creating jobs and protecting the environment. In Ohio, the bill passed both houses with nearly unanimous support. But then the legislation started working. Turbines and solar panels sprouted, producing electricity that crowded out the energy from old power plants, cutting into utility profits.
“You saw the utilities and the fossil fuel industry catching wind of how quickly they could lose their stranglehold on the energy system,” said Anderson.
So Ohio’s fossil fuel industry, represented by utilities like Akron-based FirstEnergy and coal giant Murray Energy, began flooding the statehouse with money. Bill Seitz, a Republican state senator, voted for the clean energy bill in 2008. But around the same time, energy corporations donated $120,000 to his reelection campaign. He began working closely with them to roll back the law — and he wasn’t the only one. In 2014, the Ohio legislature passed a bill, sponsored by Seitz, gutting the renewable mandate. It threw red tape at wind energy projects, with a budget rider requiring bigger buffer zones around turbines than the state requires for fracking or coal mining.
Two years later, the utility FirstEnergy, one of the largest investor-owned utilities in America, took it a step further, emboldened by its recent legislative victory.
FirstEnergy was struggling. The utility’s power plant-owning subsidiary — FirstEnergy Solutions (later renamed Energy Harbor) — was deep in debt, and its old coal and nuclear plants were no longer providing reliable profits as renewables and cheap natural gas brought down the price of electricity. Executives needed cash to restructure that debt, and if they could get the public to provide it, they would be legends. But every bailout they’d tried to engineer had died in the legislature, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had shot down an agreement that would have subsidized its nuclear and coal plants.
So FirstEnergy shifted its pitch, claiming its two nuclear plants were in danger of closing permanently. Other states were starting to pay nuclear plants extra for producing carbon-free electricity, and if Ohio failed to do the same, or provide some other sort of “legislative solution,” the company warned, the plants would close. Ohioans risked losing their $10 billion investment in nuclear power, the utility argued, along with thousands of jobs and 15 percent of the state’s electricity generation.
Around this same time, back in the small town of Glenford, Larry Householder was formulating his own comeback story. He represented central Ohio, what used to be coal country before the mines closed. A decade earlier, Householder had stepped down from his position as Ohio Speaker of the House and left politics after the media reported that the FBI was investigating corruption allegations against him. But nothing came of those charges, and in October 2016 he and his aide, Jeff Longstreth, mapped out an ambitious strategy: Not only would Householder run for office again, but he would also recruit candidates all over the state and provide the money to help them win their campaigns. That way he could walk into the House not as a single representative, but as the leader of a gang.
The timing was perfect. FirstEnergy and its subsidiaries needed a rainmaker in the legislature to secure a bailout, and Larry Householder needed a deep-pocketed patron.
Householder made a triumphant return to the statehouse, winning his assembly race in November 2016. A few months later, FirstEnergy began wiring hundreds of thousands of dollars to a “dark money” organization called Generation Now that Householder’s team set up in Delaware. It was just one of a constellation of front groups that sprung up to lobby for a utility bailout. The technical term for a dark money group is a 501(c)(4), a form of nonprofit that can spend money in politics without revealing anything about where that money comes from. As another member of Householder’s team, Neil Clark, a lobbyist who liked to call himself the “Prince of Darkness,” said in a conversation that investigators covertly recorded: “It’s a secret, a (c)(4) is secret. Nobody knows the money goes into the speaker’s account — it is controlled by his people, one of his people, and it’s not recorded.”
In the lead-up to the 2018 elections, FirstEnergy wired about $2 million to Householder’s dark money accounts, which then went to pay anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars for approximately 21 campaigns around the state. Most of these candidates won their elections. Every single one of them voted to make Householder the Ohio Speaker of the House. After a decade away, he was back in power — and this time he had a band of loyal supporters behind him.
Householder took possession of the speaker’s podium in January 2019. A majority of House Democrats backed him after he offered them a big increase in public transit funding, a say in the budget process, and a promise that he would protect union rights and health care for the poor. On April 12, Householder unveiled the legislation he’d crafted to uphold his end of the deal with the utilities: House Bill 6. It would clean the air, he said. It would do away with the mandates for solar and wind, while giving “incentives” to existing zero-carbon power sources — that is, nuclear. It would etherize what was left of the 2008 renewable portfolio standard, eliminate the energy efficiency rules, and bind wind energy in red tape. At the same time, it would provide funding for a few token solar farms while handing over a billion dollars to energy companies, ostensibly for nuclear power. “We are trying to go from the hammer of the mandates, do away with the mandates, and instead provide a carrot,” Householder told reporters in a government conference room as he gestured at a whiteboard full of talking points.
Next Householder began gathering votes. Clark, the self-styled “Prince of Darkness” lobbyist, warned lawmakers that Householder had gone “to war” for the utilities with House Bill 6, twisting arms and calling in favors. “I have never experienced such pressure for any other bill,” one member of the Ohio House of Representatives wrote to another in a text that the FBI turned over to journalists after a public records request.
Householder’s team and the utilities also channeled a firehose of money at the issue. Generation Now and the other dark money groups spent over $16 million on mailers and television ads urging Ohioans to call their senators and representatives and ask them to vote for House Bill 6. One ad, featuring a power station worker, aired so frequently that even Householder complained in a text message that he was getting tired of seeing “that poor sumbitch drive that pickup truck down the road and cry about losing his job.” Less than two months after Householder introduced the bill, HB6 cleared in the Ohio House in late May. All but two of the candidates from team Householder ended up voting for the bill. It passed the Senate July 23 and Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed it into law the same day.
Citizens groups promptly organized a ballot campaign to repeal the law. “None of the arguments for House Bill 6 hold water except that this is policy driven entirely by a single larger donor,” Kent Smith, a Democratic state representative from east Cleveland, said.
In a memoir recounting his version of events, Clark wrote that the polling showed just a third of the public supported the new law. If petitioners gathered enough signatures to allow the public to vote on it, Householder and his team knew there was a solid chance that residents would reject House Bill 6. It was at this point they began to resort to more heavy-handed measures.
Householder’s crew approached signature gatherers across the state and offered them $2,500 and a one-way ticket home if they’d stop doing their work. (Many came from out of state, hired by Ohio activists to do the legwork to repeal HB6.) In a recording made by an FBI informant wearing a wire at a dinner party with Householder, Clark describes the plan: “We have to go out on the corners and buy out their people every day … If we knock off 25 people collecting signatures, it virtually wipes them out in the next 20 days; this ends the whole fucking thing.”
“Really the dirtiest thing was the effort to kill the petition drive,” said David DeVillers, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio who oversaw the case for the FBI. “They were actually buying off companies that do petitions, to do nothing. And they were offering money and plane tickets to people on the ground who were getting petitions signed.”
To take it a step further, Householder’s team paid over $23 million for an advertising campaign warning that “the Chinese government is quietly invading our American electrical grid” and “coming for our energy jobs.” They followed up with a mailer telling residents that if they signed the petition, they’d be giving their “personal information to the Chinese government.” Of course, China had nothing to do with the effort to stop House Bill 6: The editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted that the claims were spurious and called it “the sleaziest scare ad in recent memory.”
Federal investigators claim that Householder and his team went so far as to try to infiltrate the citizen campaign seeking to overturn House Bill 6 by bribing one of its employees, Tyler Fehrman.
In 2019, Fehrman, a Republican consultant, was in debt and out of work. That’s when citizens groups approached him, interested in tapping his GOP knowledge to help overturn HB6. In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Fehrman said he asked his friend Matt Borges, a former state chairman of the Republican Party who had begun helping Householder with House Bill 6, for advice. Borges told him to take the job, Fehrman said.
Borges then asked Fehrman to meet him at Starbucks in Columbus. When they sat down outside, Fehrman said Borges attempted to bribe him to become a mole.
“‘Dude, I don’t have a mortgage anymore,’” Fehrman recalled Borges saying, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “‘Like, I’m so taken care of. And we could do the same for you.’” At another meeting a few days later, Borges handed Fehrman a check for $15,000, according to FBI investigators.
Fehrman, who became an FBI informant, declined to talk to Grist, explaining that he needed to wait until he appears in court to tell his full story.
When Grist asked Borges for his account of the interaction, he didn’t equivocate: “Absolutely not. A hundred percent no. No, that’s not even — no! No,” he said.
Borges, a salt-and-pepper-stubbled lobbyist, acknowledged that he’d asked Fehrman how many signatures the campaign had gathered. But there’s nothing wrong with asking, he said.
“I can never and will never try to suggest that I wasn’t asking Tyler for information,” Borges said. “I was. I mean, it’s on tape, I couldn’t deny that. What I will never ever concede is that I was asking him for information that he was not allowed to give me.” Borges also said the check he handed Fehrman was to organize a party for former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Judi French — not for information on the repeal movement.
Fehrman never provided the numbers, but soon enough, Householder’s operatives could see that they’d won. The ballot measure effort failed to get enough signatures by October 22, 2019, the cut-off date for a referendum, and the law went into effect. If anyone at FirstEnergy popped open a bottle of champagne, however, they were celebrating too soon: FBI agents had infiltrated their inner circle.
In July 2020, law enforcement officers arrested Householder, Clark, Borges, Longstreth, and Juan Cespedes, a lobbyist for FirstEnergy. Authorities took away their passports, then released them to await trial from home. Those arrests marked the end of the undercover investigation but the beginning of a much more sweeping probe, DeVillers said. Once investigators had shown their hand, they were free to begin interviewing witnesses, cutting plea deals, and asking for documents.
The FBI then raided the Columbus townhouse of Sam Randazzo. Earlier that year, Ohio Governor DeWine had picked Randazzo, a lawyer who had earned millions as a consultant to FirstEnergy since 2010, to be the head of the state’s Public Utility Commission. (Though he hasn’t been charged, DeWine himself received more than $1.2 million dollars from utilities and their dark money groups for his election campaign in 2017.) When House Bill 6 passed, FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones, sent Randazzo a picture of Mount Rushmore with their heads, along with the faces of Wayne Boich — a coal scion who contributed money Householder’s dark money groups — and another utility executive, photoshopped over Washington, Lincoln, and the other dead presidents. The caption in capital letters: “HB 6 FUCK ANYBODY WHO AINT US.”
In a legal agreement with federal prosecutors, FirstEnergy admitted it had paid a bribe of over $4 million to Randazzo shortly before his appointment as head of the Public Utility Commission. In exchange, Randazzo worked to fix the details of the new law so that utilities like FirstEnergy could collect more money from ratepayers.
“There’s been a pretty sweeping blizzard of subpoenas in Ohio, which suggests that a lot of people could go to jail before this is over,” said Anderson of Energy Policy.
Last March, a bicyclist found Clark’s body on a lonely road near his Florida vacation home. He died of gunshot to the head, according to a medical examiner, who concluded that it was a suicide. In his memoir, published posthumously, Clark wrote of the pain his family endured because his father was a mafia gunslinger who spent most of Clark’s childhood in prison. When FBI agents told him he would have to plead guilty to a felony, he stormed out of the meeting.
“One family member in prison was enough for me,” he wrote.
The legal case, stalled by the pandemic, will pick up again soon. A judge has made February 1 the final deadline for filing motions before the trial, clearing the way for a court date.
Longstreth and Cespedes have already pleaded guilty, while Borges and Householder have maintained their innocence. In 2020, Householder won another term in office, just months after FBI agents and local sheriff’s deputies arrested him at his home in Glenford. He ran unopposed. His office did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment. But he defended himself at length last June, when Ohio state legislators finally decided the evidence of wrongdoing was overwhelming and expelled him from the House of Representatives.
Householder appeared before the committee considering his expulsion in a navy pinstripe suit and a red tie. For half an hour he read from prepared statements, frequently breaking into impromptu asides. He joked and bounced on the balls of his feet. He told the room that kicking him out of office would amount to ignoring the will of the people who voted him in.
“I come from a community that is — to say downtrodden probably is an understatement,” Householder explained, growing grave. “We are a community that was a coal mining community and farming community that lost their coal mines. And things went upside down fast, and that’s what propelled me into politics in the first place.”
“They got a lot of faith in us,” he swallowed and nodded stiffly. “They should.”
The committee asked their questions, but none revealed anything new. Householder became mildly incredulous.
“I fully intend to walk into a courtroom in Cincinnati and walk out a free man and innocent,” he said.
Near the end of the hearing, however, Rick Carfagna, a Republican representative from central Ohio, asked a question that snapped the enormity of charges against Householder into focus. What about the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Householder had taken from the dark money slush fund for personal use, Cafagna queried. Even if Householder had been on the level and planning on publicly reporting the money as a gift, he asked: “How do you justify to the people in this room, to people on this committee, and to your constituents back home, accepting a gift of that magnitude for your personal expenses?”
Before Householder could speak, his attorney, Mark Marein, slipped up behind him. “I am advising him not to respond to that question,” he said. Householder shut his mouth.
Attorneys for Randazzo and Longstreth also declined to comment for this story. In a statement, a representative of FirstEnergy wrote that it has paused all political contributions and is taking “decisive actions to address recent challenges, rebuild trust with its stakeholders, and position the Company for long-term success.”
House Bill 6 remains in effect, but it has shed the facade of being a nuclear bailout. When lawmakers were debating the law, environmental policy wonks and journalists were skeptical that the nuclear plants really needed saving. There’s evidence they were right: As lawsuits loomed, Energy Harbor opted to decline the nuclear bailout and announced that its plants would not need to close after all. Howard Learner, president of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, suggested that the utility was telling at least a partial truth about the plants: When it filed for bankruptcy in 2018, the plants were unprofitable, but it was the bankruptcy process of restructuring debt and renegotiating union contracts that led to their profitability, not a bailout.
In March, Governor DeWine signed a new law that rolled back the nuclear subsidies, while leaving its other elements in place. The bill that Housholder shepherded into law three years ago forces Ohioans to fork over $200,000 a day to buoy ailing coal plants — Stokes estimates the total coal subsidies could come to $1.7 billion. Most Ohio Republicans favor keeping those elements of the law, Anderson said, despite the clear evidence that it was created through bribery and fraud.
As outlandish as this story might seem, utility and policy experts say it’s part of a trend. After a federal investigation in Illinois, the utility Commonwealth Edison admitted in 2020 that it had bribed the state’s Speaker of the House, arranging jobs, subcontracts, and monetary payments for the politician. An executive from the former SCANA Corporation pled guilty to defrauding ratepayers in an attempt to get an expensive new nuclear plant built in South Carolina. The power company Arizona Public Service has used millions in dark money to get friendly members elected to a commission that sets electricity rates. And many other states have passed coal bailouts under pressure from utilities and dark money groups, though in most cases there’s not solid evidence that lobbying crossed legal lines.
“Unfortunately the scandal is not an isolated incident,” Learner said. The growth in renewable energy is utterly transforming the power industry, he explained, and it only makes sense that some companies might fail to adapt, in the same way that the once mighty Blockbuster failed to adapt to the innovation of streaming video. “And if Blockbuster had decided it’s going to mount a battle in the Ohio legislature to stop streaming services from coming to market, it would have had to spend its own money. It didn’t have ratepayer money sloshing around to pay for it.”
But unlike video rental stores, utilities usually don’t just fold and go out of business. As regulated monopolies, they can stay alive and cling to an obsolete energy source if they know how to massage the right politicians. “The sad reality is that utility incumbents hold off competition and technological innovation through corruption of the legislative process when their merit case is weak,” Learner said. “If we want clean renewable energy, we need clean government.”
The reality, however, is that these scandals are likely to continue, Learner said, until people start going to jail.
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