Women can say no to sex if Roe falls, says architect of Texas abortion ban – The Guardian
Women can say no to sex if Roe falls, says architect of Texas abortion ban – The Guardian

The legal architect of the Texas abortion ban has argued in a supreme court brief that overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark decision which guarantees a right to abortion in the US, could cause women to practice abstinence from sexual intercourse as a way to “control their reproductive lives”.

Former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, who played a pivotal role in designing the legal framework of the state’s near-total abortion ban, also argued on behalf of anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life that women would still be able to terminate pregnancies if Roe was overturned by traveling to “wealthy pro-abortion” states like California and New York with the help of “taxpayer subsidies”.

“Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion; they can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse,” Mitchell wrote in the brief. “One can imagine a scenario in which a woman has chosen to engage in unprotected (or insufficiently protected) sexual intercourse on the assumption that an abortion will be available to her later. But when this court announces the overruling of Roe, that individual can simply change their behavior in response to the court’s decision if she no longer wants to take the risk of an unwanted pregnancy.”

The supreme court is due to hear a Mississippi case this term that experts say could lead to the reversal of the Roe decision by the court’s conservative majority. The argument was made in an amicus, or “friend of the court”, brief in which outside parties can present arguments on cases before the court. The brief was filed on 29 July, about four weeks before Texas’s abortion ban went into effect.

In the same brief, which calls for Roe to be overturned, Mitchell and co-counsel Adam Mortara, an anti-abortion activist and lawyer who clerked for the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, said such a decision could open the door for other “lawless” rights and protections to be reversed, including the right to have gay sex and the right to same-sex marriage.

The lawyers argued that while it was not necessary for the high court to immediately overrule the legal cases that enshrine those rights, “neither should the court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread”.

Those cases (Lawrence, which outlawed criminal sanctions against people who engaged in gay sex, and Obergefell, which legalized same-sex marriage) were “far less hazardous to human life”, they said, but just “as lawless as Roe”.

It is common for high-profile cases such as the Mississippi abortion case to elicit amicus briefs by activists and lawyers who are seeking to weigh in on the legal debate.

But Mitchell and Mortara’s brief is significant because conservatives on the high court recently ruled in a controversial 5-4 decision to allow a Texas law to stand that was designed by Mitchell and in effect bans abortions after about six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant.

While the majority of the justices stressed that they had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Texas law itself, the ruling showed that the majority was receptive to Mitchell’s legal strategy.

The abortion case the supreme court will hear this term centers on the legality of a Mississippi law that can ban abortion at 15 weeks gestation. Roe gives pregnant women the right to an abortion up to roughly 24 weeks, or the point at which a fetus can live outside the womb.

The court’s decision to hear the case has alarmed reproductive rights advocates because it blatantly violates the standard set by Roe. Now, in the wake of Texas’s near-total abortion ban, the possibility that the court could overturn the constitutional right to abortion has come into sharp focus. Such a ruling could come in spite of polls that show most Americans believe abortion should be legal in most circumstances.

At the heart of Mitchell and Mortara’s argument in the Mississippi case lies the view that overturning Roe would not outlaw all abortion in the US, but would “merely” return the issue to individual states, which could individually decide whether to ban or restrict terminations. More than half of US states are hostile to abortion rights.

“But women who reside in those states can travel to pro-abortion states to get their abortions – and there is no shortage of ‘abortion funds’ throughout the country that are eager to pay the travel costs and abortion-related costs for indigent women who are seeking to abort their pregnancies,” they said.

Mitchell has been the subject of media attention since it became clear that he had helped devise the Texas law, which allows private citizens to sue anyone “aiding or abetting” a pregnant woman in obtaining an abortion past roughly six weeks.

This structure, which one legal expert called a “fig leaf” for the state, led to the supreme court’s refusal to block the law, with a 6-3 majority describing the law as presenting “complex antecedent procedural questions” that needed to be litigated.

Mitchell has been portrayed in some media accounts as an outsider in the conservative judicial network that has led the drive to seat anti-abortion judges and justices in the past decades. But an examination of Mitchell’s record has found that the former clerk for Antonin Scalia, the late conservative supreme court justice, has ties to groups and organizations that are at the heart of the conservative movement. Those organizations, in turn, have direct links to conservative members of the court.

In 2016, in emails that were released after a Freedom of Information Act request, Mitchell’s name was raised by Henry Butler, the then dean of the George Mason Law School, as a person that he and Leonard Leo, the head of the conservative Federalist Society, would consider hiring.

Leo, who is known to have selected a short list of potential supreme court nominees for Donald Trump when he entered office, has been credited by conservatives for building a court that would – someday – overturn Roe.

Friends and colleagues of Mitchell say that Mitchell and Leo do not have an especially close relationship.

In 2019 the powerful, conservative religious law group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) began paying Mitchell’s private law firm for services listed as “religious freedom”. The more than $36,517 payment came as Mitchell was simultaneously building case law on his unusual legal theory, the very same provision that would come to define Texas’s six-week abortion ban called SB8.

In an email, Mitchell declined to respond to the Guardian’s questions about the nature of his work for ADF.

ADF was in the spotlight in 2020 after it emerged that Trump’s final nominee to serve on the court, Amy Coney Barrett, was a paid speaker for a program run by ADF, which was established to inspire a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law”. The head of the organization, Michael Farris, attended the infamous Rose Garden event in which Barrett was nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The event would later emerge as a super spreader event in which multiple individuals, including possibly Trump, contracted Covid-19.

Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/17/texas-abortion-ban-jonathan-mitchell-supreme-court-brief

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Saving Sequoias During Climate Change – NPR
Saving Sequoias During Climate Change – NPR

The 2020 Castle Fire burned the Alder Creek sequoia grove with extreme intensity, killing many of the 1,000-year-old trees there. Without any green foliage, the trees can’t survive or resprout.

Lauren Sommer/NPR


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On a hot afternoon in California’s Sequoia National Park, Alexis Bernal squints up at the top of a 200-foot-tall tree.

“That is what we would call a real giant sequoia monarch,” she says. “It’s massive.”

At 40 feet in diameter, the tree easily meets the definition of a monarch, the name given to the largest sequoias. It’s likely more than 1,500 years old.

Still, that’s as old as this tree will get. The trunk is pitch black, the char reaching almost all the way to the top. Not a single green branch is visible.

“It’s 100% dead,” Bernal says. “There’s no living foliage on it all.”

The scorched carcasses of eight other giants surround this one in the Alder Creek grove. A fire science research assistant at UC Berkeley, Bernal is here with a team cataloguing the destruction.

It’s not easy to kill a giant sequoia. They can live more than 3,000 years and withstand repeated wildfires and droughts over the centuries.

Alexis Bernal of UC Berkeley is with a team of researchers measuring the burned sequoias and trying to understand how so many died.

Lauren Sommer/NPR


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Now, with humans changing both the climate and the landscape surrounding the trees, these giants face dangers they might not survive.

Last year, the Castle Fire burned through the Sierra Nevada, fueled by hot, dry conditions and overgrown forests. Based on early estimates, as many as 10,600 large sequoias were killed — up to 14% of the entire population.

“This is unprecedented to see so many of these large old-growth trees dead, and I think it’s a travesty,” says Scott Stephens, fire scientist at UC Berkeley, as he surveys the damage. “This is pure disaster.”

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With extreme fires increasing on a hotter planet, scientists are urgently trying to save the sequoias that remain. Researchers from federal agencies and universities are teaming up to find the sequoia groves at highest risk. The hope is to make them more fire-resistant by reducing the dense, overgrown vegetation around them, before the next wildfire hits.

But one year later, the sequoia groves are again under threat. At the time of publication, wildfires burning in Sequoia National Park are within a mile of a grove with thousands of sequoias. Firefighters are battling to contain the blazes.

“It’s hard to see these trees that have lived hundreds to potentially thousands of years just die,” Bernal says, “because it’s just not a normal thing for them.”

Living more than 3,000 years, giant sequoias normally survive dozens of low-grade wildfires in their lifetimes by towering over the rest of the forest. These barely escaped the Castle Fire in 2020.

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Sequoias need fire, but fires are changing

Giant sequoias only grow in isolated pockets, tucked in the mountains of California. Losing even a few groves spells significant loss to the entire population.

Sequoias are one of the most fire-adapted trees on the planet. With tough, foot-thick bark, they’re insulated from the heat. They tower above the rest of the forest and the bottom of the tree is bare, without low branches that might be ignited by trees burning around it.

Old-growth sequoias weathered the low-intensity wildfires that were once the norm in the Sierra Nevada. Fires regularly spread along the forest floor, either ignited by lightning or set by Native American tribes who used burns to shape the landscape and cultivate food and materials.

With the arrival of white settlers, fire began to disappear from these forests. Tribes were forcibly removed from lands they once maintained, and federal firefighting agencies mounted a campaign of fire suppression, extinguishing blazes as quickly as possible.

That meant forests grew denser over the last century. Now, the built-up vegetation has become a tinder box, fueling hotter, more extreme fires, like the Castle Fire, that kill vast swaths of trees.

“These trees have been here 1500 years, so how many fires have they withstood: 80?” Stephens says. “And then one fire comes in 2020 and suddenly they’re gone.”

Over many decades studying sequoias, Nate Stephenson had never seen old-growth sequoias die in large numbers until recently. “That’s just unheard of,” he says.

Lauren Sommer/NPR


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The Castle Fire’s fierce heat was also fueled by the changing climate. In 2012, when a drought hit California, hotter temperatures amplified the toll it took on Sierra Nevada forests. While the largest sequoias could handle it, other kinds of conifers around them succumbed. Millions of trees were killed.

“The extra warmth that came with the drought pushed it into a whole new terrain,” says Nate Stephenson, an emeritus scientist with the US Geological Survey. “That’s what really helped kill a lot of trees, and they became fuel for fires.”

During his four decades of studying sequoias, Stephenson had rarely seen an old-growth sequoia die. When the first images emerged after the Castle Fire hit, he wasn’t prepared.

“That’s when I couldn’t help it,” he says. “I don’t cry often, but I cried when I saw the photos. Because I love these trees.”

In some sequoia groves, few seedlings are being found in the aftermath of the Castle Fire. Those that have sprouted face surviving a summer of extreme drought.

Lauren Sommer/NPR


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Few seedlings sprout from the ash

The soil is still powdery black in the Alder Creek sequoia grove a year later. The UC Berkeley team is scanning it for signs of hope: a spot of green.

“Two tiny sequoias here growing from the regeneration from the fire,” Stephens says, finding 2-inch-tall seedlings, impossibly tiny compared to what they could become.

The lifecycle of a sequoia hinges on wildfire, which is the trigger for releasing its seeds. The blast of heat opens the cones, sending a shower of seeds to the forest floor, which get established quickly on the newly cleared ground.

In some groves, researchers are finding hundreds of seedlings where the Castle Fire burned with low-intensity, the kind of fire sequoias are accustomed to.

But in the Alder Creek grove, where the fire burned with ferocious heat, the team only finds a dozen seedlings the entire afternoon. Other groves look similarly bare.

UC Berkeley’s Holden Payne gathers data about the density of trees in the Alder Creek sequoia grove. Sequoia cones only release their seeds during wildfires.

Lauren Sommer/NPR


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Even under normal conditions, around 98% of sequoia seedlings die in their first year. This year could be even tougher with extreme drought gripping the landscape.

“I am very concerned that some areas will not have sequoias,” says Christy Brigham, head of resource management and science for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “All the adults are killed and there will not be enough seedlings to repopulate.”

That’s leading land managers to consider planting new sequoias, so the scorched groves don’t disappear entirely. But in a changing climate, it’s not a simple question. As temperatures rise, young trees planted today face surviving in a vastly different future. The most suitable habitat for sequoias could move somewhere else.

“That is one of the gifts of giant sequoias — is that they force us to think in deep time,” says Brigham. “It forces us to confront the challenge of climate change.”

Researchers, including Scott Stephens (left), hope to identify which sequoia groves are most at risk from extreme fires in the hope of making them more fire-resistant.

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Rush to save remaining sequoias

Federal land managers say that given the millennia-length timeframe, planting new sequoias is a back-up plan at this point. The more pressing need is saving the trees that are left.

A coalition of the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, universities, tribes and nonprofits is banding together to identify the groves most at risk. This summer, the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition has been rapidly assessing conditions on the ground.

“We just saw what one wildfire did,” Brigham says. “Can we find the places, do the plans, and get the funding and put the people on the ground fast enough to prevent loss like this in the future?”

Brigham estimates around 40% of the sequoia groves on national park land alone are at risk of severe wildfires, because the surrounding forests haven’t burned in decades. Other groves at risk are found on Forest Service or private land.

Many of the conifers within the sequoia groves were killed by California’s previous drought, making them primed to burn in wildfires.

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Sequoia National Park has used controlled burns, also known as prescribed fire, since the 1960s to prevent forests from becoming overgrown. But Brigham says burning continues to be a challenge.

In the spring, when cooler conditions are better for controlled burning, projects are limited because of the threatened pacific fisher. The slender, mink-like animal was listed as endangered in 2020, and its habitat is protected during the spring denning season.

But burning in the summer can be tough because of air quality concerns, extremely dry vegetation or lack of personnel, since they’re generally fighting wildfires.

“There are all these constraints on prescribed fire that we can’t control,” Brigham says. “As it gets hotter and drier, that window is smaller and smaller.”

Brigham says she’s hopeful that land managers can move quickly over the next year to prioritize the sequoia groves that need help the most. With extreme fires increasingly common, time is running short.

“It is not too late,” says Brigham. “We can do better. People love these trees. So I just hope we can take that love and translate it into immediate action to protect the groves and long term action to limit climate change and its impacts.”

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1037914390/giant-sequoia-national-park-wildfire-climate-change

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General Milley cannot undermine civilian authority. The US is not a military junta – The Guardian
General Milley cannot undermine civilian authority. The US is not a military junta – The Guardian

On Tuesday, the Washington Post published a bombshell drawn from a forthcoming book by the journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: during the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the US’s highest-ranking military officer, called the senior ranking general of the Chinese military and offered to warn him in advance of any American military action against China.

Milley, who reportedly believed that Trump was unstable and might launch a politically motivated military operation, contacted the Chinese without the knowledge of the White House. He no doubt thought that his decision was for the greater good. But if he did indeed negotiate with a foreign military rival without authorization, he violated the longstanding American political tradition that the military is subordinate to elected civilian leaders.

A spokesman for Milley released a statement on Wednesday acknowledging the substance of Woodward and Costa’s reporting, and defending Milley’s actions as “in keeping with [his] duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability”.

So far President Biden has declined to discipline Milley. On Wednesday, he told reporters that he had “great confidence” in the general. But he shouldn’t. If anything, Biden should demand Milley’s immediate resignation.

Milley called the Chinese general Li Zuocheng in October and January. On one call, he reportedly said, “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

That alone should be grounds for immediate dismissal. No US military officer can seize authority from the president and call the commanding general of our greatest global rival and tell that general that he’ll be given advance warning of military action ordered by the president. Such an act is dangerously close to treason, as Senator Marco Rubio and others have noted. But Milley deserves to be relieved of duty for far more than this one act of insubordination.

Milley has a troubling, years-long record of poor military judgment and a tendency to subvert his civilian leaders. This is particularly evident in his rosy assessments of the war in Afghanistan and the capabilities of the Afghan military.

In 2013, when Milley was the commander of the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Afghanistan, he praised the Afghan forces at a Pentagon press briefing. “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Milley gushed. “And I think that’s an important story to be told across the board.”

Yet analysts and observers of the war already knew it was going poorly. Around the time that Milley was praising them, the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown, for example, argued that Afghan troops “continue to suffer from deeply inadequate logistical, sustainment, and other support capabilities and are also deeply pervaded by corruption, nepotism, and ethnic and patronage fissures.”

It is difficult to say whether Milley knew that the Afghan forces were woefully inadequate, or simply had a glaringly poor ability to assess the progress of a war that he was prosecuting. Either way, he consistently, for years, failed to accurately convey the situation to senior US leaders. But that’s not the worst of it.

In November 2020, according to an investigation by Axios, Trump signed a directive to complete the military withdrawal from Afghanistan by 15 January 2021, five days before the end of his term as president. Milley was “appalled” at the idea of a full withdrawal, according to Axios, and worked behind the scenes to derail the effort. Trump was forced to revise the planned withdrawal deadline to 1 May 2021.

When Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said that the president was going to reduce the troop levels from 4,500 to 2,500 before leaving office, Milley publicly challenged the words of the president’s senior adviser, saying, “I think that Robert O’Brien or anyone else can speculate as they see fit.”

On 21 July 2021, Milley told the Pentagon press corps that despite reports that the Taliban had been capturing scores of districts from government forces, the Afghan forces had “the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country”. Less than a month later and mere days after the Taliban had seized Kabul, Milley claimed, “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

But Milley’s revisionist claim that neither he “nor anyone else” could have foreseen the collapse of the Afghan military is laughable. Just two days earlier, John Sopko, the long-time Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), told NPR that the collapse was not in the least surprising:

I mean, we’ve been warning – my little agency – for the last almost 10 years about issues with the … Afghan security forces’ capabilities and sustainment. All the signs have been there. I mean, we’ve been shining a light on it in multiple reports going back to when I started [in] 2012 about changing metrics, about … ghost soldiers who didn’t exist, about poor logistics, about the fact that the Afghans couldn’t sustain what we were giving them. … I think the speed maybe is a little bit of a surprise. But the fact that the [Afghan forces] could not fight on their own should not have been a surprise to anyone.

Moreover, had Milley continued the process of withdrawal that Trump committed to completing by 1 May, the US would almost certainly have been able to finish the mission on time and in relative order – and 13 US service members might still be alive.

The US is not a military junta; it is a republic led by elected civilian leaders, and it cannot allow the creation of any precedent, large or small, of military insubordination.

In 1951, after Gen Douglas MacArthur repeatedly publicly clashed with President Harry Truman’s direction of the Korean war, Truman fired MacArthur. The American public widely considered MacArthur a war hero, and Truman’s decision was bitterly unpopular, but he believed MacArthur had given him no choice. Similarly, in 2010, after a Rolling Stone article depicted Gen Stanley McChrystal and his staff badmouthing President Barack Obama and undermining his command of the war in Afghanistan, Obama summoned McChrystal to Washington and accepted his resignation.

Both decisions were controversial – but they were the right ones, and arguably the only ones, that those presidents could take.

Milley cannot continue serving as the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. For the good of the nation, Biden must relieve him of duty.

  • Daniel L Davis is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a former lieutenant colonel in the US army who deployed in combat zones four times. He is the author of The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America

Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/17/general-milley-cannot-undermine-civilian-authority-the-us-is-not-a-military-junta

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Gabby Petito disappearance: Protesters carry signs to home of Brian Laundrie urging him to speak with police – Fox News
Gabby Petito disappearance: Protesters carry signs to home of Brian Laundrie urging him to speak with police – Fox News
Video

Gabby Petito’s stepfather: Fiancé’s silence is ‘absolutely mind-boggling’

Gabby Petito’s stepfather Jim Schmidt pleads for his missing stepdaughter’s fiancé to ‘come clean’ on her disappearance as he assists search efforts in Wyoming.

Protesters gathered on Thursday at the Florida home of Brian Laundrie, who has retained a lawyer and refused to cooperate with authorities after Gabby Petito disappeared on the couple’s cross-country road trip late last month, according to police. 

Golf carts drove by on the street as protesters carried signs, such as, “TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT! #Justiceforgabby,” “North Port Loves Gabby,” and “WOULD SHE BRING YOU HOME?”

Some protesters carried signs in golf carts urging Brian Laundrie to speak up about his fianceé’s disappearance. 

“We’re standing up for somebody who’s lost that’s in our city, and we’re a big family in our city, in North Port. And we are definitely going to do whatever we can to help the family find this missing daughter,” one protester said Thursday. 

“We all have children. If it were our child, we would want everyone to gather up and help us find our child too. So we’re going to do whatever it takes.”

Other protesters chanted outside the home, “Where’s Gabby?”

Another protest is being planned at the home, which belongs to Laundrie’s parents, on Friday evening. 

PETITO STEPFATHER PLEADS FOR SILENT FIANCE TO HELP POLICE AMID UNSPEAKABLE SITUATION

Laundrie returned to the home in North Port, Florida on Sept. 1 with the white van that the couple was traveling in, but without Petito.

He was named a person of interest in Petito’s late-August disappearance on Wednesday, four days after Petito was reported missing and the van was taken by authorities from the family’s home. 

  • Protesters carried signs urging Brian Laundrie to speak with authorities to his Florida home on Thursday. 

Petito’s family and investigators have pleaded with Laundrie to provide information about the 22-year-old’s disappearance. 

“We believe you know the location where Brian left Gabby. We beg you to tell us,” a letter from the Petito family to the Laundries released on Thursday said. 

“Gabby lived with you for over a year. She was going to be your daughter in law. How can you keep her location hidden? Please, if you or your family have any decency left, please tell us where Gabby is located. Tell us if we are even looking in the right place.”

CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

The Laundries have remained almost completely silent, except for Brian’s sister, Cassie Laundrie, who told ABC News on Thursday that she hopes the whole thing is a “big misunderstanding” and Petito comes home safe.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/us/gabby-petito-disappearance-protesters-carry-signs-to-home-of-brian-laundrie-urging-him-to-speak-with-authroti

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What are nuclear-powered submarines and how do they work? Australia’s firepower ambitions explained – CNN
What are nuclear-powered submarines and how do they work? Australia’s firepower ambitions explained – CNN

By Brad Lendon, CNN

Updated 3:32 AM ET, Fri September 17, 2021

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/australia/nuclear-submarines-aukus-explainer-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

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Yes, We’re Calling It Hispanic Heritage Month And We Know It Makes Some Of You Cringe – NPR
Yes, We’re Calling It Hispanic Heritage Month And We Know It Makes Some Of You Cringe – NPR

As the nation begins its annual celebration of Latino history, culture and other achievements, it’s not too late to ask why we lump together roughly 62 million people with complex identities under a single umbrella.

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As the nation begins its annual celebration of Latino history, culture and other achievements, it’s not too late to ask why we lump together roughly 62 million people with complex identities under a single umbrella.

Peter Pencil/Getty Images

As the headline unambiguously states, here at NPR we’ve kicked off Hispanic Heritage Month.

Not Latino Heritage Month. Not Latinx Heritage Month. Not even a compromise or a combination of the three: Hispanic/Latino/Latinx Heritage Month.

To be honest, as far as this team goes, NPR began to participate in the national event that is called Hispanic Heritage Month with no discussion about existing tensions within Latino communities regarding the use of the word Hispanic, its origins and whether it may be time to swap out the catchall label for something different.

Perhaps that has something to do with the rapid pace of the news recently regarding the end of a 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, another terrifying spike in the COVID-19 pandemic or this week’s recall election in California. Or, in full transparency, it could have something to do with the fact that as of 2020 only 6% of the NPR’s newsroom and on-air journalists identify as Hispanic or Latino.

But it’s not too late to pose the following thorny questions: What’s the harm in lumping together roughly 62 million people with complex identities under a single umbrella? Is a blanket pan-ethnic term necessary to unite and reflect a shared culture that is still largely (infuriatingly) excluded from mainstream popular culture? Or the more basic question: ¿Porque Hispanic?

How Latinos/Latinas/Latinx people became Hispanic

Hispanic Heritage Month initially began as a weeklong celebration in 1968 under President Lyndon Johnson who, at the time said, “The people of Hispanic descent are the heirs of missionaries, captains, soldiers, and farmers who were motivated by a young spirit of adventure, and a desire to settle freely in a free land.”

“This heritage is ours,” he proclaimed.

It wasn’t until 1988 that President Ronald Reagan extended the week to a full 31 days — through Oct. 15 — keeping the Sept. 15 start date because it coincides with national independence day of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Similarly, Mexico celebrates on the 16th, Chile on the 18th and Belize on the 21st.

But even before Johnson landed on the term Hispanic, there was a lot of debate within government entities on how to refer to Latinos in the United States, Cristina Mora, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, tells NPR.

Mora, who wrote about the adoption of the term Hispanic in Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Created a New American, found that use of the umbrella categorization is inextricably linked to the U.S. Census and its attempts to identify and quantify different groups of people.

The Pew Research Center reports that in the 1930s Latinos living in the U.S., regardless of their place of birth or family origin, were all noted as “Mexican” by door-to-door U.S. Census Bureau counters. It wasn’t until 1970 that the agency began asking Latinos living in the U.S. to self-identify as either “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, Other Spanish” or “No, none of these.” This, however, led to a bizarre and unexpected underrepresentation of white Americans who misunderstood the classifications. Apparently, hundreds of thousands of confused people living in the South or central regions of the U.S. mistakenly identified as Central or South American, according to Pew.

But even with the added Latino subgroups, Mora says the 1970 Census once again resulted in a severe undercount of the minority but growing population, which in turn led to a national backlash from activists, academics and civic leaders who demanded fair representation.

Latinos could have been called ‘Brown’

New groups were formed to tackle the problem, including the Census Bureau’s Spanish Origin Advisory Committee and a group of Spanish-speaking federal employees called the Ad Hoc Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions. Mora recalls several of the options being floated at the time included “Brown,” “Latin American,” “Latino” and Hispanic.

“One of the problems is that Latinos were seen as foreigners, invaders and not inherently American. And one of the jobs of the advisory board was to really show that Latinos were an American minority group, like African-Americans — a minority that stretched from coast to coast and that were patriotic, that fought in wars, that contributed to American history, that built American cities. So when a term like Latin American was used, right away, it seemed to strike discord because it was seen as too foreign,” Mora explains.

She adds: “Hispanic was never a term that everybody loved, but it was a term that got a lot of support from within Latinos in the Nixon [administration] and, later, the Ford administration.” It was eventually added to the 1980 census.

Many Latinos had an immediate disdain for the term

“We hated the term Hispanic because it was a term that we felt was forced upon us by the U.S. government,” Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, tells NPR.

“It wasn’t a natural fit for anyone that I knew. I didn’t know anyone growing up who said, ‘Oh, hey, I’m Hispanic.’ It was always either, I’m Mexican, Mexican-American, Chicano or Chicana,” says Ortiz, who is also a history professor at the University of Florida.

A large part of that, he says, is based on the origins of the word Hispanic, which is the English translation of the Spanish “Hispano,” meaning a person whose cultural traditions originate from Spain.

When that is the starting point, he says, “That immediately erases all of the centuries of pre-Columbian history, culture and civilizations that existed before the European conquest and colonization of the Americas … and that’s understandably upsetting to people who are not white.” It alienates indigenous and Afro-Latino communities whose history includes deep resistance to the Spanish invasion and is not necessarily tied to Spain, Ortiz says.

The rise in Latinx popularity

The recent popularity of the word Latinx in the U.S. presents another alternative to the contentious Hispanic label that proponents say also offers gender inclusivity. Ortiz marvels at the way it has so quickly been adapted by young people, academic institutions and corporations alike, though it is not without its own critics.

When naming his book, it was his students who suggested using Latinx in the title. “Originally it was going to be African-American and Latino History in the United States. But my students really impressed upon me the themes of inclusivity and diversity, [saying] we have to be open.”

He’s also noticed that in the past two years or so, many of the speaking requests he’s received from corporations are for Latino or Latinx Heritage Month not Hispanic Heritage Month — that includes an invitation to speak at a Deutsche Bank event later this week.

Ortiz suggests that one theory for the shift is that it is being driven by diverse employee organizations within the companies. “Almost all of them — the ones that have reached out — have taken on the term Latinx.”

“I find this fascinating because the stereotype is that the term Latinx is being foisted upon us by academics but that’s just not true,” he says.

What type of stories get told during Hispanic Heritage Month?

Beyond the dispute over what to name the month-long celebration, there is another concern: that in an effort to make it more palatable or commercially viable, stories of oppression, prejudice and injustice are whitewashed or ignored.

“Too often the focus is on the musical contributions or dancing or other happy artforms,” Mario T. Garcia, professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells NPR.

“But we also need programming that reflects historical problems … because you can’t assume that Latinos already know about the lynchings in South Texas in the 1910s,” the Zoot Suit Riots, the segregation of Mexican kids in schools, or the Chicano-led high school walkouts of the 1960s that permanently changed higher education enrollment for Latinx students.

In his experience, Garcia notes, the U.S. public education system does such a poor job of teaching the history of Latinx people in this country, that often Hispanic Heritage Month is the only opportunity for any students to learn about it. “It is a real shame,” he says.

But approached in the right way, he adds, even these stories can be ultimately seen as happy. “Because the historic struggles of Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, other Latinos are happy stories … because only through those struggles have we been able to achieve more social justice in this country, more education.”

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1037741009/yes-were-calling-it-hispanic-heritage-month-and-we-know-it-makes-some-of-you-cri

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Larry Elder Speaks to Newsweek on Why He Lost to Gavin Newsom and What He May Do Next – Newsweek
Larry Elder Speaks to Newsweek on Why He Lost to Gavin Newsom and What He May Do Next – Newsweek

It was a landslide victory for Governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday when a large majority of Californians voted against his recall. Had that not been the case, conservative talk-show host Larry Elder would have been elected the first Black governor in the state’s history, as he easily beat the more than three dozen others on the ballot seeking to replace Newsom.

In a 32-minute post-election interview, Newsweek got Elder’s thoughts on what went wrong, what went right and what comes next, and the media-savvy former candidate didn’t pull any punches.

Newsweek: Are you still a Libertarian or are you now a Republican?

Larry Elder: I was always both. I was always a small “L” libertarian and registered Republican, just like Milton Friedman.

Newsweek: Has the Republican party made you an offer to head the RNC in California or nationally?

Elder: Has anybody called me and said, ‘Hey, do you want a job?’ No. But have I gotten support from Republicans up and down the state and nationally? Yes. I haven’t gotten an offer to head the RNC, nor would I expect one.

Newsweek: So you’ll be getting your own TV show?

Elder: I have no idea. I was not running to get a TV show. I’ve been on television many, many times. By the way, I started out in television, even though people call me a radio host. When offers come, I’ll consider them. But right now, I’m just chilling, figuring out what to do with my new-found footprint that I didn’t have before.

Newsweek: But you said you’re not going back to your radio show.

Elder: I didn’t say that.

Newsweek: At your election party you referred to yourself as a ‘former radio host.’

Elder: That was tongue in cheek. My goodness. I wasn’t hosting radio during my campaign, but I didn’t mean I’d never go back to radio. Really, Paul, look into my baby brown libertarian eyeballs — I honestly don’t know what I’ll do next.

Newsweek: Why did you lose to Gavin Newsom?

Elder: Because he outspent me five to one and we’re outnumbered two-to-one Democrat compared to Republican. Even independents outnumber Republicans in California, and Newsom was successfully able to scare people into thinking I’d do everything but reenact slavery. The only actual issue he discussed was that I am anti-vax, which I’m not. I would have had a very different approach to coronavirus, and that’s accurate. He never defended his record on crime, homelessness, how he shut down the economy or how he shut down schools while his kids were enjoying in-person private education and he was yucking it up at the French Laundry while incurring a $12,000 wine tab. I don’t know what he was drinking, but it sure wasn’t Mad Dog 2020. He didn’t mention wildfires and how he mismanaged forests, or a water shortage, or rolling brownouts, or how people are leaving California for the first time. All he did was say “Republican takeover” over and over and show Larry Elder and Donald Trump side-by-side, and it worked, because 83 percent of Democrats believe Trump is a racist, and 61 percent believe all Republicans are racist slash sexist slash bigoted.

Newsweek: The ad with you and Trump was funded by Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and it claimed it was a matter of life and death that you be defeated. Did that surprise you?

Elder: Nothing surprised me. I’ve been critical of the media for a long time. When I decided to run, I knew that the wrath of God was going to come down on me. The flat-out lies didn’t surprise me, like “Larry Elder is anti-vax.” I’m vaccinated and I encourage people to get vaccinated, but I also encourage freedom.

Newsweek: I spoke to celebrities who supported you and they told me that the ad from Hastings sent a chill through conservative Hollywood, as if to say, ‘if you want a relationship with Netflix, you’d better not support Elder.’ Does that make sense to you?

Elder: Of course it does. Two high-profile Hollywood people who support me, Clint Eastwood and Jon Voight, said that I could say they support me but that they wouldn’t put out a statement. Voight later allowed me to post a picture of me and him. And I’m not mad about them not giving a statement, I’m just telling you that this is how it rolls in this state and in this open-minded, tolerant industry.

Newsweek: So you’re saying the media didn’t cover you fairly?

Elder: I put a tweet out, Paul, saying that only in America could a Black man become president and be called the Black face of white supremacy. And not one reporter has said to me, ‘well, Larry, you got smoked on the recall, but, my God, you smoked all these Republicans. You got 47 percent and the next Republican got nine or 10, and you were only campaigning for seven weeks!’ Paul, it is stunning what I have done. I am actually stunned by the margin of my victory.

Newsweek: So then you have further political aspirations, perhaps nationally?

Elder: Stay tuned.

Gubernatorial recall candidate Larry Elder speaks to supporters at an election night event on September 14, 2021 in Costa Mesa, California.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

Newsweek: What’s the biggest problem in California and how should Newsom solve it?

Elder: Crime, the fact that people are leaving because they can’t afford a house, and homelessness. I have no idea what he’ll do about those because if he did, he would have mentioned it in his commercials. He didn’t. He’s clueless. He lives in a $5 million house in a gated community. He got attacked during his campaign by a mentally ill homeless person and his security crew took care of it. The things that working-class people have to deal with don’t affect him at all. I believe it will take California hitting rock bottom, like an alcoholic, before we turn this around, because all he had to say was ‘Trump’ and ‘Republican takeover,’ and people got scared and pulled the lever for him. They hate Republicans more than the rise in crime, rise in cost of living, rise of homelessness, rolling brownouts and wildfires. It’s a remarkable achievement by the left and they did it with the complicity of the media.

Newsweek: Was it a fair election with no irregularities?

Elder: We know that a bunch of people in Republican districts tried to vote and were told they already voted. It was investigated, and they eventually were able to vote, but if that’s not an irregularity, I don’t know what is. When all is said and done, with the margin of victory, whatever shenanigans there may or may not have been won’t matter, but we all should have an interest in making sure the election was handled with integrity. I’ll tell you one thing more, Paul; I was asked repeatedly by reporters if I thought Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. I told several reporters, and none of them did anything with it, that just once I’d like them to ask Newsom if Trump won the 2016 election fair and square, because for four years Hilary Clinton said the election was stolen from her and that Trump was illegitimate, and the result is that 66 percent of Democrats, according to a YouGov poll, believe that Russians changed vote tallies. Never mind a 1,000-page report that said the Russians did not change a single vote tally … a greater percentage of Democrats believe the 2016 election was stolen than Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. Even if Newsom said he believed Trump won in 2016, the next question should be whether Hillary Clinton should have her social media platform shut down for pushing the big lie the way Trump has had his shut down. Nobody ever asked him. Nobody. One reporter said, ‘well, that’s what-aboutism.’ I said, ‘no, it’s called consistency and being fair.’

Newsweek: Do you regret your decision to run?

Elder: Not for one moment. Nor am I surprised about anything. I complained about being called ‘the Black face of white supremacy and ‘the Black David Duke,’ but I certainly anticipated it, because I have zero respect for the media. They are the public relations bureau for the Democrats. They long stopped even trying to be objective. I just hope that now people are seeing what I’ve been seeing for decades. I know that even people at the L.A. Times were embarrassed about a columnist calling me ‘the Black face of white supremacy,’ because they told me they were. But not only was she not fired, she was on PBS, so our taxpayer dollars were hosting a woman who said that about me. Scottie, beam me the hell up.

Newsweek: So at your election night party, your handlers told you not to talk to me. Did you like having handlers?

Elder: Every candidate has handlers. It didn’t bother me. But ultimately the candidate decides what to do. I got advice I didn’t follow, and was happy I didn’t. I also got advice I didn’t follow and later regretted it. Most candidates have been at it for years and have relationships, but I had to do it on the fly with people I didn’t know. I went through a few campaign managers before finding the right one.

Newsweek: What’s an example of you not taking advice, or taking it and regretting you did?

Elder: I did an interview with the L.A. Times where I jumped all over them for calling me ‘the Black face of white supremacy,’ and my communications manager was not happy with how combative I was. But she soon learned that that’s why people like me, because I’m authentic and I fight back, so she began to tailor her advice to my personality. Another time, the Today Show asked me if I’d appoint a Republican to replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein. I knew it was a question designed to upset Democrats, so I didn’t answer it directly. Afterwards, one of my handlers told me I should have just said, ‘yes,’ and I should have. I regret fumbling around and not being myself.

Newsweek: You did sound a little more stifled on the campaign trail than on radio, no?

Elder: Oh come on. It’s a different thing. On the radio I’m taking calls and giving my opinion on events of that day; on the campaign trail I was discussing issues.

Newsweek: At your party, there was a guy dancing around with a giant cutout of your head. Is that sort of adulation giving you a big head?

Elder: No, but there definitely was adulation. There’s no question. I was treated like a rock star; like a Beatle. Experienced people told me they’ve never seen anything like it. I thought I’d have a connection, but, my goodness, middle-age men, forget about women, came up to me crying because they were thinking of leaving California until I entered the race. I did not expect that.

Newsweek: Well, you’ve painted a grim picture of California. Are people right to be moving out?

Elder: Do you think things are going to get better? I don’t see any evidence of that. Just recently at a restaurant on Melrose that I’ve eaten at, people in masks held up diners at gunpoint and took their purses and watches, and Newsom has released 20,000 convicted felons early, even though studies say the majority of them are likely to re-offend. We have a law that allows people to steal up to $950, not just a day, but at multiple stores in a day, without any fear of going to prison because they’re not a felon, and we have district attorneys who are soft on crime and support cashless bail, and there’s no consequences if they simply don’t show up to court. You tell me if people should leave. It’s bleak in California. I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s got great resources — where else can you go surfing in the ocean and skiing in the mountains in one day? — but it’s being ruined by horrible leadership.

Newsweek: The accusation I have heard that hurt you most were reports saying you wanted former slaveholders to get reparations. Is that the case?

Elder: Oh good grief. No one on the campaign trail ever asked me about that, just members of the media. I was being interviewed by Candace Owens, and I said that reparations is the extraction of money from people who were never slaveholders to people who were never slaves. If you really want to play this game, the Dred Scott decision called slaves property. It was vulgar, but that’s what the Supreme Court said. But people always leave this part out; the slave trade could have never existed without African chieftains selling people to Arab and European slavers. Should we get reparations from them? It was a long conversation that was boiled down to, ‘Elder believes white slave owners should get reparations.’ It’s totally unfair.

Source Article from https://www.newsweek.com/larry-elder-speaks-newsweek-why-he-lost-gavin-newsom-what-he-may-do-next-1630009

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Pandemic politics fuel long-shot Republican challenges to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott – NBC News
Pandemic politics fuel long-shot Republican challenges to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott – NBC News
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Utah law enforcement experts believe finding Gabby Petito will be ‘extremely difficult’ – fox13now.com
Utah law enforcement experts believe finding Gabby Petito will be ‘extremely difficult’ – fox13now.com

SALT LAKE CITY — Finding Gabby Petito without fiancé Brian Laundrie’s cooperation will be extremely difficult according to law enforcement experts in Utah.

Gabby wasn’t reported missing until two weeks after the 22-year-old was last seen in Salt Lake City. The man who might know where she is, isn’t talking.

“Let’s just be clear. He looks guilty as hell,” said former Salt Lake Co. Sheriff and Moab Police Chief Jim Winder.

Read – Moab police body cam video shows Petito upset during fight with boyfriend before she disappeared

While Brian Laundrie is within his legal rights to stay quiet, Winder tells FOX 13 it is detrimental to the investigation.

“This situation where Mr. Laundrie is essentially clammed up poses a problem of significance for law enforcement. If he continues to take the path that he does, they are going to be in a real tough position,” said Winder.

“It’s good advice. But again, depending which side you’re on, it’s frustrating,” said retired Unified Police deputy chief Chris Bertram.

With Brian refusing to talk, physical evidence becomes critical. Winder believes investigators are heavily focused on the digital footprint the couple left behind, especially cell phones.

Read – Gabby Petitio’s family release emotional open letter to Laundrie’s parents begging for information

“Until there is some physical evidence, to point in that direction, this thing can linger for a long time,” Winder said.

As the case generates national attention, Bertram believes the spotlight is helping investigators make up for lost time.

“I think people who were in the area, in the Tetons from say the 25th to the 30th, they are going to go back and search their minds, search their videos and they will be looking at their pictures to see if there is anything there that helps them,” said Bertram.

The FBI said no piece of information is too small or inconsequential. They’re asking anyone with pictures, video or information about Gabby to let them know.

Authorities are asking anyone with information about the case to contact the FBI’s tip line at 1-800-CALLFBI (225-5324).

Source Article from https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/utah-law-enforcement-experts-believe-finding-gabby-petito-will-be-extremely-difficult-without-boyfriends-help

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What are nuclear-powered submarines and how do they work? Australia’s firepower ambitions explained – CNN
What are nuclear-powered submarines and how do they work? Australia’s firepower ambitions explained – CNN

By Brad Lendon, CNN

Updated 1:46 AM ET, Fri September 17, 2021

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/australia/nuclear-submarines-aukus-explainer-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

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Gavin Newsom weighs in on Trumpism and the stakes of the California recall election – CBS News
Gavin Newsom weighs in on Trumpism and the stakes of the California recall election – CBS News

Less than 24 hours after California voters overwhelmingly rejected a recall effort against him, Governor Gavin Newsom was gratified by his big victory but doesn’t think it dealt a mortal blow to Trumpism. Newsom told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett in an exclusive interview that the stakes of the recall effort were defined before conservative radio host Larry Elder emerged as the frontrunner against him. 

Newsom, a Democrat, said Elder had “extreme points of view that make even Donald Trump blush,” and President Biden referred to him this week as a “Trump clone.”  

He suggested that the recall highlighted a contrast between conservative and liberal views on issues emerging across the country. There was, Newsom said, a “connection issue” between Texas’ sweeping new abortion law and the California recall election, in that voters had a preview of what it would be like to live in a state with an extremely conservative governor. The idea that California might have a governor who would sign on with other governors to support Mississippi’s law to ban abortions after 15 weeks — “I couldn’t let that happen.”

For Newsom, the recall campaign was an unnecessary distraction, and he believes reforming the process should garner bipartisan support in the state legislature. While he recognizes his is not the most objective voice when it comes to whether California’s recall law should change, he says Democrats and Republicans agree: “This doesn’t work for any of us.”

The recall effort has not discouraged Newsom from his plans to run for another term in 2022: he didn’t go through a recall election just to bow out in 14 months, he told Garrett.

CBS News chief Washignton correspondent Major Garrett interviews California Governor Gavin Newsom.

CBS News


But Newsom said running for president has never been on his radar. He has no ambitions to seek the highest office, he said. “None.”

Although the COVID restrictions Newsom imposed galvanized the recall effort against him, ultimately, he defended his and even campaigned on his response to the pandemic, while Elder made his opposition to vaccine and mask mandates a cornerstone of his campaign. Several other Republicans vying to replace Newsom also voiced their opposition to COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates. 

The recall effort really gained momentum after Newsom was photographed dining inside of the upscale Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry with a maskless group of people while his indoor dining shutdowns were still in effect.  

Newsom told Garrett that the dinner was a “mistake” — he was too close to maskless people and should have gotten up from the table. “I own it,” he said.

Garrett asked whether that photo cost California taxpayers $200 million, the price of administering the recall election. No, Newsom replied, it was broader and more complicated than that. It was about the pandemic and following the science. 

Californians backed him on the pandemic. CBS News exit polling showed 55% of Californians approved of the job Newsom is doing as governor and those who said that the coronavirus was their top issue were overwhelmingly against the recall.

Newsom’s Latino support lagged behind Democrats’ previous statewide shares. He said there’s more work to do and theorized that COVID-19 hit the Latino community harder than most and Latino voters felt left out of the recovery.

Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gavin-newsom-california-recall-election-trump/

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Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump, Won’t Run in 2022 – The New York Times
Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump, Won’t Run in 2022 – The New York Times

In accordance with the advice House officials gave to all members, Mr. Gonzalez had a security consultant walk through his home to ensure it was well protected.

“It’s a reflection of where our politics looked like it was headed post-Jan. 6,” he said.

Neither Mr. Trump nor any of his intermediaries have sought to push him out of the race, Mr. Gonzalez said.

Asked about Mr. Trump’s inevitable crowing over his exit from the primary, Mr. Gonzalez dismissed the former president.

“I haven’t cared what he says or thinks since Jan. 6, outside when he continues to lie about the election, which I have a problem with,” he said.

What clearly does bother him, though, are the Republicans who continue to abet Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods, acts of appeasement that he said were morally wrong and politically foolhardy after the party lost both chambers of Congress and the White House under the former president’s leadership.

“We’ve learned the wrong lesson as a party,” Mr. Gonzalez said, “but beyond that, and more importantly, it’s horribly irresponsible and destructive for the country.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/us/politics/anthony-gonzalez-ohio-trump.html

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Minnesota Supreme Court Allows The Ballot Question On Changing The Minneapolis Police – NPR
Minnesota Supreme Court Allows The Ballot Question On Changing The Minneapolis Police – NPR

City Council member Alondra Cano speaks in June 2020 about defunding the Minneapolis Police Department.

Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via AP


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toggle caption

Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via AP

City Council member Alondra Cano speaks in June 2020 about defunding the Minneapolis Police Department.

Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via AP

MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday evening for voters in Minneapolis to decide on the future of policing in the city where George Floyd was killed, just ahead of the start of early and absentee voting.

The state’s highest court overturned a lower court ruling that rejected ballot language approved by the City Council. A district judge said the wording failed to adequately describe the effects of a proposed charter amendment that would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety that “could include” police officers “if necessary.”

But Chief Justice Lorie Gildea said in a three-page order that the justices concluded that the challenge to the ballot language did not meet the “high standard” that the court set in earlier cases. She said the court will issue a full opinion laying out its legal reasoning sometime later to avoid impeding the start of voting.

The Supreme Court was under pressure to rule quickly because early and absentee voting opens at 8 a.m. Friday in the Minneapolis municipal elections. The ballots were already being printed when Hennepin County District Judge Jamie Anderson ruled against the language Tuesday. It was the second time she had struck down the council’s wording. Chief Justice Lorie Gildea put the case on the fast track Wednesday.

Lawyers on both sides said beforehand that they expect the high court ruling allowing the ballot language to be the final word, given the late hour. Leaders of the pro-amendment Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign were pressing ahead with a rally set for Friday afternoon.

The proposal has its roots in the “defund the police” movement, which gained steam after Floyd’s death last summer sparked protests, civil unrest and a national reckoning on racial justice. The amendment does not use the term “defund.” But it would remove the city charter’s requirement that Minneapolis have a police department with a minimum staffing level. Many details of how the new agency would work would be left up to the the City Council and mayor to decide later.

Yes 4 Minneapolis, which spearheaded the initiative, insists that the city would continue to have police if voters approve the amendment, but that the new department would be free to take a fresh approach to public safety that could reduce excessive policing against communities of color.

Opponents of the amendment, including former council member Don Samuels and his wife, Sondra, said the ballot language leaves too many important questions unexplained for voters about how the new department would be implemented, led, staffed and funded.

Yes 4 Minneapolis argued in its filing with the Supreme Court that the Minneapolis Police Department would not automatically disappear if the amendment passed. The group said the department would continue to exist under current city ordinances until the City Council passed new laws to establish the new agency, and that the council could keep the force in place as long as necessary for an orderly transition.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/09/16/1038124610/minnesota-police-ballot-question

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Texas Gov. Abbott closing entry as 8,000 gather at border – New York Post
Texas Gov. Abbott closing entry as 8,000 gather at border – New York Post

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is closing entry points at the Mexican border so the state won’t be overrun as reports show thousands of illegal immigrants amassing under a bridge ​waiting to be arrested by Border Patrol agents. 

The number of migrants waiting under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas, doubled overnight to more than 8,200 people, Fox News reported, showing drone footage of the massive gathering.

​​”The sheer negligence of the Biden Administration to do their job and secure the border is appalling. I have directed the Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to surge personnel and vehicles to shut down six points of entry along the southern border to stop these caravans from overrunning the state​,” Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement on Thursday.

​”The border crisis is so dire that the US Customs and Border Protection is requesting our help as their agents are overwhelmed by the chaos. Unlike President Biden, the State of Texas remains committed to securing our border and protecting Americans,” the statement said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says his orders will stop “caravans from overrunning the state​.”
REUTERS

The report said a law enforcement official said the crowd is mainly made up of Haitians and more are joining the army of migrants every minute.

The new development comes as Fox News reported on Wednesday that for two straight months – July and August – encounters with illegal immigrants surpassed 200,000. ​

Drone footage shows more than 8,000 migrants gathering at the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
FOX NEWS

The 208,887 encounters in August are a drop from July’s more than 212,000 encounters, but it still amounts to a 317 percent increase over August 2020, when there were 50,014 apprehensions and a 233 percent jump from August 2019, which recorded 62,707 apprehensions.

A​bbott​, frustrated with the Biden administration’s inability to solve the crisis at the border, has implemented a number of measures in Texas to curb illegal immigration.

Border Patrol Agent Carols Rivera patrols along the US-Mexico border in Ysleta, Texas on September 2, 2021.
Joel Angel Juarez
The Paso del Norte international bridge that connects Ciudad Juárez, Mexico to El Paso, Texas.
AP

He has authorized the National Guard to arrest people who illegally cross into the US and has begun raising funds to complete construction of the border wall that Biden stopped.​

The White House said they are focused on the “root causes” of immigration, including​ poverty, corruption, violence and natural disasters, but Republicans have blasted Biden for ending many of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies since taking office in January.

Source Article from https://nypost.com/2021/09/16/texas-gov-abbott-closing-entry-as-8k-migrants-gather-at-border/

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Kudlow: With Biden’s spending plan, ‘only Colombia and Portugal’ will have higher tax rates – Fox News
Kudlow: With Biden’s spending plan, ‘only Colombia and Portugal’ will have higher tax rates – Fox News
Video

Kudlow: Biden tax assessment a ‘terrible, factual misstatement’

‘Kudlow’ host slams the president for saying the top 1% pay almost no income tax on ‘America Reports’

“Kudlow” host Larry Kudlow blasted Biden for stating the top 1% get away with paying almost no income tax telling “America Reports” the president’s mantra of asking the wealthy to “pay their fair share” is a “Democrat talking point” they think polls well. He also noted that with Biden’s new tax plan, “only Colombia and Portugal” will have higher tax rates.

LARRY KUDLOW: With this Ways and Means proposal, which will come if you add in the states, this will come to 26.5% plus 4.1%. Just call it 31%. Only Colombia and Portugal, two small countries, have higher tax rates. We will now have the highest of all the big major industrial countries, including China. Is that what we want? In terms of the capital gains tax, we will have a higher capital gains tax for investment than China. Is that what we want? And will somebody look at these profit numbers and tax revenue numbers? This is phony, and they should ashamed of themselves for putting this stuff out there.

…

It is a terrible, factual misstatement. It goes beyond cognitive dissonance. The numbers are very clear. First of all, the top 1% pay 40% of the income taxes. The bottom 50% or more don’t pay income taxes. He [Biden] doesn’t talk about that. If you do the numbers right, over a 10-year period, the spending will be roughly $5.5 trillion, plus a trillion for the so-called infrastructure, which only a third is for infrastructure. Nobody in their right mind believes that a strong economy with excessive inflation requires $6 trillion in new federal spending. I don’t care what side you are on, Democrat or Republican, supply-side or Keynesian. No one believes that. He [Biden] just said corporations don’t pay taxes. We are seeing record tax revenues from record profits. The Trump tax cuts not only succeeded in record-low unemployment, low poverty and helped minority groups, but they [tax cuts] paid for themselves. It was a $350 million corporate tax cut and added profits and revenues within 18 months. Biden’s economists and his own Treasury department will be happy to supply him with the numbers if he ever wants to look. If you go after these company that are so profitable, you will lose $100 billion in profits next year. Roughly half of S&P 500 profits will go down from higher taxes.

WATCH FULL INTERVIEW HERE:

Video

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/media/kudlow-bidens-economic-agenda-americans-president-phony-tax-facts

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Moab bodycam captures Gabby Petito, fiance after reported ‘domestic problem’ – Salt Lake Tribune
Moab bodycam captures Gabby Petito, fiance after reported ‘domestic problem’ – Salt Lake Tribune

Moab police released body camera footage Thursday that shows an interaction between Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, her fiance Brian Laundrie and officers there in August, about a month before she was reported missing.

The couple had traveling on a monthslong, cross-country road trip when they were pulled over near Arches National Park on Aug. 12. The traffic stop came after a witness reported a “domestic problem” to Moab police that day involving the couple that was later categorized as a disorderly conduct incident, records show.

Petito was reported missing Saturday. She was last seen at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming after checking out of a Salt Lake City hotel on Aug. 24. Laundrie has been named a person of interest in her disappearance, according to authorities in North Port, Florida, where the couple lived before embarking on their trip.

The Moab footage captures an officer pulling over the couple’s camper van near Arches. The vehicle was going 45mph in a 15mph zone, the officer notes.

The footage shows Petito crying as Moab officer Daniel Robbins approaches the van. When asked why she was crying, Petito responded, “I’m crying because we’ve been fighting — some personal issues.”

Laundrie interrupted her from the driver’s seat, telling Robbins that they had had a long day camping the day prior. Robbins asks Petito to step out of the van, then asks why the two had been fighting.

“Some days I have really bad [obsessive-compulsive disorder],” Petito told Robbins through tears. “I was just cleaning and straightening up the back of the van before, and I was apologizing to him and saying ‘I’m sorry I’m so mean.’”

‘He really stresses me out’

According to a report that Moab police released Wednesday, the “domestic problem” reported between the couple Aug. 12 unfolded near Moonflower Community Cooperative, a food cooperative in Moab. A witness told police that it appeared that the couple had an argument over a phone and altercation near their van.

Petito and Laundrie had left the scene by the time police arrived. Laundrie later told Robbins that the argument had started over small things, noting that the van was disorganized and that they were leaving later than expected. Petito said Laundrie locked her out of the van because she “needed to calm down.”

“He really stresses me out,” she told officers.

Petito told the officer that she also was stressed that morning because she “was doing a lot of work on her computer.” She had started a blog and YouTube channel called Nomadic Statik after quitting her job as a nutritionist to embark on their trip, she told police.

“Building my website has been really stressful, and he doesn’t believe that I can do any of it, so that’s kind of been like a… He’s just kind of a downer,” Petito said, speaking of Laundrie.

Robbins then asked Petito to sit in the back of a patrol car while he spoke with Laundrie separately. Officers quickly noted scratches on Laundrie’s face and arm. Laundrie told police that Petito had tried to slap him during their argument at Moonflower and that he pushed her away. Laundrie then locked himself in the car to try and “take a breather,” he said, but Petito attempted to climb into the driver’s seat of the van, according to the report Moab police released.

“She gets worked up sometimes,” Laundrie said in the body camera footage, “and I try and really distance myself from her, so I locked the car and I walked away from her.”

Petito told police that Laundrie had grabbed her face during their argument. Another officer asked Petito if Laundrie is usually patient with her. She said that he gets frustrated a lot.

‘Relax their emotions’

Officers concluded that Petito was the primary aggressor in the situation and informed her that she could face domestic violence charges. Instead, police decided to separate the couple for the night, driving Laundrie to a hotel and leaving Petito with the camper van so they could “relax their emotions,” records state.

Robbins later wrote in a report that he did not believe the situation “escalated to the level of a domestic assault as much as that of a mental health crisis,” records show.

“I want you guys both to be away from each other,” Robbins told Petito in the body camera footage. “Relax, breathe… I understand this can feel like it’s a nightmare, but you’re coming out as the golden flower on top of it all.”

As Robbins took Laundrie to a hotel in town, Laundrie told him about their plans to visit one of Petito’s grandmother’s friends in Oregon after they left Moab.

Laundrie returned to Florida alone on Sept. 1 in the same van that Petito and him had been traveling in, according to North Port police. Police there said he has refused to speak with investigators about Petito’s disappearance.

When Robbins dropped Laundrie off at the Moab hotel Aug. 12, he told Laundrie that the time apart would “make a big difference in your guys’ next couple weeks at the very least,” the footage shows.

Authorities in North Port are investigating a possible link between missing woman Petito’s disappearance and the deaths of two women killed in Moab last month. There is no evidence as of Thursday that the cases are connected. But North Port Police Chief Todd Garrison said during a news conference early Thursday that investigators there “have communication going back and forth with the Grand County Sheriff’s Office.”

“We provided them with whatever information we could,” Garrison said. “They don’t have any [murder] suspect information right now. … They told us that they’re looking at everything at this point.”

Source Article from https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/09/16/moab-bodycam-captures/

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France is so mad about the Australia submarine deal that it canceled a big party in D.C. – CNBC
France is so mad about the Australia submarine deal that it canceled a big party in D.C. – CNBC

WASHINGTON – French officials in Washington canceled a Friday evening gala at their sprawling compound over frustration with the new security partnership between the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

A French official confirmed to CNBC that the event, which was slated to commemorate the 240th anniversary of the Battle of the Capes, will no longer take place at the embassy in Washington.

“Other parts of the celebration are still ongoing,” including a wreath-laying ceremony in Annapolis, Maryland, the official said. Two other events involving a French destroyer in Baltimore and a French submarine in Norfolk’s harbor have not been canceled.

The development comes after France expressed outrage over a newly minted trilateral partnership that, in part, ends a long-standing submarine contract between Australia and France and replaces it with a deal between the U.S. and U.K.

The U.S. and U.K. agreed Wednesday to assist Canberra in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, which will allow Australia’s navy to help counter Chinese nuclear-powered vessels in the region.

“It was a stab in the back. We had established a relationship of trust with Australia. This trust has been betrayed,” France minister of foreign affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian told radio station Franceinfo Thursday morning.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Thursday that he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had spoken to their French counterparts about the new security pact ahead of its unveiling.

“I’ll leave it to our Australian partners to describe why they sought this new technology. But as the president said and I want to emphasize again, we cooperate incredibly closely with France on many shared priorities in the Indo-Pacific but also around the world,” Blinken said.

“We’re going to continue to do so, we place fundamental value on that relationship, on that partnership and we will carry forward in the days ahead,” the nation’s top diplomat added.

Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/16/france-cancels-gala-in-dc-over-australia-submarine-deal.html

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John Durham Probe Charges Washington Lawyer With Lying To FBI – NPR
John Durham Probe Charges Washington Lawyer With Lying To FBI – NPR

Special counsel John Durham, here in 2018, was tapped by former Attorney General William Barr to look into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Department of Justice via AP


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Department of Justice via AP

Special counsel John Durham, here in 2018, was tapped by former Attorney General William Barr to look into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Department of Justice via AP

A Washington attorney who specializes in cybersecurity issues has been indicted over allegedly lying to the FBI ahead of the 2016 election in a conversation about possible ties between Donald Trump and Russia.

Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who works at a law firm with longstanding links to the Democratic Party, is the second individual to be charged in special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.

Sussmann is facing a single false statements count in connection with a conversation he had with then-FBI general counsel Jim Baker on Sept. 19, 2016. In that meeting, Sussmann shared information about possible ties between a Kremlin-linked Russian lender, Alfa Bank, and a computer server at the Trump Organization.

The indictment alleges that Sussmann “lied about the capacity in which he was providing the allegations to the FBI.”

Sussmann told Baker that he wasn’t passing the information along at the behest of any client. But prosecutors allege he was providing the materials on behalf of a technology industry executive and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

That lie mattered, the indictment says, because it misled the FBI and deprived it of “information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann’s clients.”

Sussmann works on cybersecurity and privacy issues at Perkins Coie. The law firm’s political law group represented Clinton’s presidential campaign and has long provided counsel to the Democratic National Committee.

The indictment says the DNC retained Sussmann in April 2016 to represent it in connection with Russia’s hacking of DNC servers, and Sussmann also advised the Clinton campaign on cybersecurity issues.

It also details meetings that Sussmann had with a partner at his law firm who was general counsel to the Clinton campaign as well as a tech executive who was a client of Sussmann’s and researchers about purported links between Trump Organization computer systems and a Russian bank.

Sussman billed these meetings to the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment. He also billed the Clinton campaign for meetings with journalists about the same materials.

Congressional investigators asked Sussmann in 2017 about this episode with Baker.

Sussmann testified he passed the information along on behalf of a client, who is a cybersecurity expert. Sussmann said he didn’t have a specific request for the FBI; he just wanted the bureau to be aware of the information.

In separate congressional testimony, Baker told lawmakers that Sussmann told him “that he had cyber experts that had obtained some information that they thought they should get into the hands of the FBI.”

The mysterious computer communications became the subject of several news articles in the fall of 2016. The FBI and congressional investigators both examined the pings between the computer systems and determined they were innocuous.

According to the indictment, Sussmann provided Baker with two thumb drives and hard copies of the materials, including a document Sussmann had helped write, one written by a researcher and another written by the political research firm working for the Clinton campaign to dig up opposition research about Trump.

Durham was tapped in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr to look into the genesis of the FBI’s investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. So far, only one other individual — a former low-level FBI attorney named Kevin Clinesmith — has been charged in the investigation.

Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to doctoring an email that was used to get surveillance on a former Trump campaign adviser, was sentenced to one year of probation.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/09/16/1038035231/the-trump-russia-probe-special-counsel-has-charged-a-lawyer-with-lying-to-the-fb

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Police compare notes on Gabby Petito’s disappearance, couple killed in Moab – Salt Lake Tribune
Police compare notes on Gabby Petito’s disappearance, couple killed in Moab – Salt Lake Tribune

Authorities in a Florida city are investigating a possible link between missing woman Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito’s disappearance and the deaths of two women killed in Moab last month.

There is no evidence as of Thursday that the cases are connected. But North Port Police Chief Todd Garrison said during a news conference in Florida early Thursday that investigators there “have communication going back and forth with the Grand County Sheriff’s Office.”

“We provided them with whatever information we could,” Garrison said. “They don’t have any [murder] suspect information right now. … They told us that they’re looking at everything at this point.”

Petito and her fiance lived in North Port, Florida, before embarking on a monthslong road trip this year. Her fiance, Brian Laundrie, is considered a person of interest in her disappearance, North Port police in Florida said this week. Petito was reported missing Saturday. She last contacted her family around the end of August and was last seen at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming after checking out of a Salt Lake City hotel on Aug. 24.

Before the couple apparently headed to Salt Lake City, they were in Moab around the time of Aug. 12, the same day Petito posted images to Instagram of herself in Arches National Park. Moab police also responded to a “domestic problem” that day involving the couple that was later categorized as a disorderly conduct incident, records show.

No one was charged in relation to the incident, but an officer separated the couple for the night, driving Laundrie to a hotel and leaving Petito with the camper van so they could “relax their emotions,” records state.

“I do not believe the situation escalated to the level of a domestic assault as much as that of a mental health crisis,” an officer wrote of the incident.

Couple killed in Moab

(Bridget Calvert) Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner fell in love after bonding over their passion for the outdoors. Just four months after their marriage, their bodies were found in the South Mesa area of the La Sal Mountains near Moab.

Kylen Schulte, 24, and Crystal Turner, 38, were found shot to death in a creek near their campsite on Aug. 18, police have said. The couple were last seen Aug. 13 at Woody’s Tavern in Moab. They were reported missing on Aug. 16.

Before they went missing, Schulte had told her friends that there was a “creepy man” around their camp, located in the South Mesa area of the La Sal Mountains near La Sal Loop Road, and that they had been intimidated by him, court filings in the case state.

She also told her friends that “if something happened to them, that they were murdered,” the records state.

Schulte worked at the Moonflower Community Cooperative in Moab, the same place where a witness reported seeing a nearby argument and apparent physical altercation between Petito and her fiance, which prompted the “domestic problem” investigation on Aug. 12.

“We’re looking at everything. … We’re not ruling anything out at this time,” a spokesman for the Grand County Sheriff’s Office told Fox News, speaking about a possible link between the two cases.

Grand County Sheriff Steven White did not reply to requests Thursday to clarify that statement. However, North Port police confirmed that they are working with the Grand County Sheriff’s Office in their search for Petito.

Person of interest

(Moab Police Department) Brian Laundrie talks to a police officer after police pulled over the van he was traveling in with his girlfriend, Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, near the entrance to Arches National Park on Aug. 12, 2021. The couple was pulled over while they were having an emotional fight. Petito was reported missing by her family a month later and is now the subject of a nationwide search.

Laundrie returned to Florida on Sept. 1 — 10 days before Petito was reported missing — and has refused to speak with investigators.

“Right now, all we have is the missing person investigation,” Garrison said of the Petito case.

The police chief said investigators are focusing on Wyoming, where Petito was last seen. Although there are no search teams on the ground, local police there are “following up tips and leads.”

During their cross-country trip, the couple also visited Canyonlands National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park in Utah before making their way to Arches, according to Petito’s Instagram account, @gabspetito.

Garrison acknowledged that Laundrie is “exercising his constitutional rights” by not speaking to investigators, “and I have to respect that.” But he also expressed his frustration.

“Two people went on a trip, and one person returned. And that person that returned isn’t providing us any information,” he said Thursday.

At the same news conference, Gabby’s father, Joe Petito, expressed the same frustration. He asked for help from Laundrie’s parents, family members and friends.

“Whatever you can do to make sure my daughter comes home, I’m asking for that help,” Joe Petito said. “There is nothing else that matters to me now.”

Source Article from https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/09/16/police-compare-notes/

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K Street counting on Senate to pare back Democrats’ tax plan – POLITICO
K Street counting on Senate to pare back Democrats’ tax plan – POLITICO

House Democrats have proposed just over $2 trillion worth of tax increases in legislation unveiled Monday, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, roughly split between corporate tax provisions despised by powerful Washington business groups and individual rate hikes aimed at the country’s biggest earners. The increases, along with money for increased IRS enforcement and drug pricing reforms fiercely opposed by the deep-pocketed pharmaceutical lobby, are meant to offset what could be a once-in-a-generation investment in climate change mitigation and expansion of the social safety net.

The draft text released by House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) this week included milder tax hits in most circumstances than the White House proposed earlier this year. And his Senate counterpart, Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), has proposed his own tax plans, despite efforts by Democrats in each chamber to “pre-conference” their bills to minimize differences and speed the process wherever possible.

President Joe Biden warned earlier this month that Democrats’ plans to hike taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans earlier would face well-funded opposition.

“Some big corporations are spending millions of dollars in — legitimately, I mean, they’re lobbying — to try to escape their obligation to pay the taxes they owe, leaving working families to pay a larger share of the burden,” he said at the White House in remarks on the August jobs report. As he predicted, business groups and industries impacted by the tax increases slammed the House bill this week, with Neil Bradley, the top lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, calling it an “existential threat to America’s fragile economic recovery and future prosperity.”

A number of interest groups have launched six and seven-figure ad buys in vulnerable members’ districts targeting parts of the Democrats’ bill, including the drug, manufacturing and fossil fuel lobbies.

In an open letter Wednesday morning signed by every member of PhRMA, the trade association representing drug makers contended that Democrats’ plan to allow the government to directly negotiate the cost of some drugs amounted to an “attack” on an industry that’s built up an enormous amount of goodwill during the pandemic.

The plan, which was projected to generate close to $700 billion in government savings over the next decade, hit a major stumbling block Wednesday afternoon when a trio of centrists blocked it from advancing out of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Democrats hope to pass the bill using a procedure known as reconciliation, which would allow them to sidestep a Senate GOP filibuster. But with some Democratic lawmakers like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin calling for as much as $2.5 trillion to be knocked off the measure’s price tag and the cadre of House centrists opposed to leadership’s drug pricing proposal, K Street is feeling good about their prospects of successfully slimming down the tax proposal.

“The question is the size and scope of what ultimately passes Congress,” said Siddiqui. She predicted “a fierce competition not only on which provisions survive, as well as ensuring that some of the revenue offsets strike the right balance on policy and politics,” leading into next year’s midterms.

One former Democratic Senate staffer who’s now a lobbyist was more blunt. “It’s not passing at all like this in the Senate,” they said of Neal’s tax plans, calling it “laughable” that House Democrats are “even thinking about this.”

The lobbyist expressed surprise that Democrats would put vulnerable House moderates in the position of voting on a corporate tax rate higher than what Manchin, who could single handedly sink the bill in the Senate, previously said he would support.

House Democrats’ draft would raise the rate large corporations pay to 26.5 percent, up from the 21 percent Republicans lowered the rate to in their 2017 tax bill. But that’s still less than the top rate prior to that bill (35 percent), and lower than Biden’s preferred top rate of 28 percent.

In interviews this week, lobbyists were also bewildered by House Democrats’ plans to enact nearly $100 billion in new taxes on tobacco and nicotine products, calling the proposal hard to square with Biden’s campaign vow that no taxpayer earning less than $400,000 a year would see their taxes increase as a result of the reconciliation bill.

“That’s absolutely going to affect people that are making less than $400,000,” said Mark Williams, a principal at Ferox Strategies and a former House GOP aide.

While K Street was largely in agreement that Democrats’ lofty tax and spending plans will be scaled back, there is less consensus around the final price tag, if the bill even makes it to Biden’s desk at all.

Williams said there’s a sentiment that Democrats can’t fail to pass the bill, which is being loaded up with as many of the party’s priorities as possible ahead of the midterms. But “they’ve got to figure out how to get it done,” he said. “I just don’t know that anyone has any clarity on how to get it across the finish line.”

Others downtown were more confident in the political prowess of Democratic leadership, including Pelosi, who has shown time and again the ability to keep her fractious party in line and navigate delicate political dynamics to pass major legislation. Biden has begun to personally intervene, too. He hosted two of Senate Democrats’ biggest wild cards — Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — at the White House on Wednesday to discuss the reconciliation package.

The president and top administration officials have also been combing the country as they try to sell the reconciliation bill, along with a separate trillion-dollar bipartisan bill investing in roads, bridges and other more traditional infrastructure items. In the last month, Biden has visited hurricane-ravaged states in the South and Northeast as well as wildfire-scorched Western states, where he’s framed the reconciliation bill’s climate investments as a matter of dire economic importance.

House Democratic leaders are looking to tie passage of the bipartisan measure, which is enthusiastically supported by the business community, to passage of the reconciliation bill in order to retain leverage.

With House committees finally finishing marking up their portions of the package, lobbyists now must scramble to figure out where they can begin chipping away at provisions their corporate clients despise or how to preserve those their clients have fought to have inserted.

It’s a process that’s “been like drinking out of a firehose,” Siddiqui said. She added that this bill is particularly unique because of how drastically it’s likely to change from the time each piece is approved by committees to the time it actually hits the floor.

One key challenge for K Street has been determining who to target for the changes they seek, given all of the moving parts. That can also work in their favor, as it only takes one senator or a few House members to throw a wrench in the process.

And cutting at least a trillion dollars from the bill will be a painful experience for both clients and lawmakers, said one veteran K Street hand who has worked on every major tax bill for the last four decades.

Typically, “whoever gets burned in the House runs to the Senate [and] screams the loudest,” the veteran tax lobbyist said. “And the Senate historically listens to those screams. So you’ll see the Senate probably showing where they see political pain is coming from and trying to start making adjustments accordingly.”

But lobbyists also need to be wary of focusing their efforts on one chamber of Congress at the expense of the other.

“As you get later and later in these negotiations, it’ll be harder to impact the process,” Siddiqui said. “So time is of the essence. Obviously, those who laid the groundwork for their strategies earlier in the process are better situated. But, ultimately it is one of those things where it isn’t over till it’s over, and you cannot take anything for granted.”

There’s still a “narrow window” for securing revisions, said David Skillman, a former Ways and Means staffer now at the law and lobbying firm Arnold & Porter. “People are working and working fast on closing these issues out.”

Even the Biden administration is lobbying the House on favored provisions. In a letter to Neal on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen dinged the panel for failing to include a provision requiring financial institutions to disclose certain bank account activity to the IRS. Supporters say that would help the IRS reduce tax evasion among the wealthy, who Yellen wrote are responsible for 30 percent of unpaid taxes.

“We are in conversations with the administration on reporting proposals that target sophisticated tax avoidance and evasion without impacting middle class and working Americans,” Neal said at the Ways and Means markup.

Another factor that could play into what stays in the bill and what gets stripped at this point is the complexity of the provision.

“Things that are less well understood, from a policy perspective, are easier to drop out of consideration, and the things that are more well understood are harder to dislodge,” he noted. One example he offered was a border-adjusted carbon tax, which would be applied to imports from high polluting countries, but was left out of the bill.

On the revenue-raiser side, it may be less politically painful to tweak corporate taxes than individual ones. Neal’s bill already doesn’t eliminate loopholes targeting the so-called step-up basis — the ability of the rich to pass assets on to heirs tax-free — or the lower tax rate capital gains on a form of compensation called carried interest championed by the private equity and hedge fund industries. And it steers clear of taxing wealthy Americans’ vast assets, in favor of taxing their income.

On some of these fronts, opposition there came from friendly faces.

Former red state Democratic Senators Heidi Heitkamp and Max Baucus and former congressman Collin Peterson have all warned that taking away the step-up basis break that could crush family farms, an assertion Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has sought to counter.

On the corporate side, former Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln is leading Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably Coalition, whose members include AT&T, CVS Health, FedEx, Lockheed Martin, the National Retail Federation, Toyota and Verizon and which has lobbied against raising corporate tax rate.

Opponents of the plan are likely to cling to every poor economic indicator possible as the country grapples with a resurgent coronavirus, supply chain issues and increasing consumer prices to try and pick off votes.

“I’ve seen 16 state polls where the number one issue is the price of items,” the Democratic lobbyist said. The White House “can trot out Austan Goolsbee,” the Obama administration’s top economist and a frequent cable news presence, “to make them feel good about themselves and come up with numbers that show that inflation isn’t real, but it doesn’t matter, people think inflation’s real.”

And even as much of corporate America howls at Democrats’ tax plans, the response from the left has been tepid, underscoring the treacherous path ahead for the party. Patriotic Millionaires, a group of hundreds of wealthy investors and businesspeople that lobby lawmakers to raise their taxes, is so incensed that it’s prepping an ad blitz attacking Neal back home in his Massachusetts district, accusing him and fellow Democrats of letting the ultra-wealthy off the hook.

“Richie Neal and his friends in Washington are rewriting the tax code, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos are popping champagne,” the ad’s narrator says, alongside a photo of the laughing Amazon founder. The spot closes with a photo of Bezos in a space suit. “This isn’t rocket science, Richie,” the narrator says. “Tax the rich, save America.”

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/16/k-street-tax-democrats-senate-512172

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Texas governor orders six points of entry along the southern border to be shut down – CNN
Texas governor orders six points of entry along the southern border to be shut down – CNN

By Rosa Flores, Kacey Cherry, Rosalina Nieves and Melissa Alonso, CNN

Updated 4:37 PM ET, Thu September 16, 2021

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/16/politics/greg-abbott-six-points-of-entry-shut-down-mexico-border/index.html

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