We begin today with David Firestone of The New York Times writing that Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis's indictment of former president Donald Trump and 19 conspirators for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia is truly an effort for the history books.
Jennifer Rodgers of CNN talks more about DA Willis's use of the RICO statute in the Georgia 2020 presidential election case.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe asserts that with regards to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the legislative branch Congress needs to step up.
Well...elected Republicans in Congress need to "step up", in any event.
Daniel Nichanian of Bolts magazine interviews activists/organizers in three states about how they are utilizing direct democracy to defend progressive causes.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe writes about the trauma of Black people that live through police mistakes.
Nina Lakhani of the Guardian looks at a study showing that people of color are bearing the brunt of excess deaths totals due to progressively deadlier Atlantic storms.
Paul Waldman of The Washington Post points out that the election of Barack Obama also inaugurated Republican fantasies of a true American apocalypse.
OK, if one must point out where Hillary Clinton said that she stood during the 2016 presidential campaign, one must also point out who dominates the news and why in 2022.
Hillary Clinton's statement in 2016 that she was the one standing between America and the apocalypse has not been refuted yet.
Susan J. Demas of Michigan Advance looks at why the pundits got the politics of abortion wrong
Finally today, Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review looks at the journalistic career of assassinated candidate for the president of Ecuador Fernando Villavicencio.
Everyone have the best possible day!
History needs a story line to be fully understood. Jack Smith, the federal special counsel, told only a few pieces of the story in an indictment limited to Mr. Trump, focusing mainly on the groups of fake state electors that Mr. Trump and his circle tried to pass off as real, and the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to certify them. But in Georgia, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, was unencumbered by the narrower confines of federal law and was able to use the more expansive state RICO statute to draw the clearest, most detailed picture yet of Mr. Trump’s plot.
As a result, her story is a much broader and more detailed arc of treachery and deceit, naming 19 conspirators and told in 161 increments, each one an “overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy,” forming the predicate necessary to prove a violation of the RICO act. (Neither of the indictments, unfortunately, hold Mr. Trump directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot, a tale best told in the archives of the House Jan. 6 committee.)
Not each of the acts is a crime, but together they add up to the most daring and high-ranking criminal plot in U.S. history to overturn an election and steal the presidency — and a plot that appears to have violated Georgia law, leaving no question about the importance of prosecuting Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators. Ms. Willis has risen to the occasion by documenting a lucid timeline, starting with Mr. Trump’s brazenly false declaration of victory on Nov. 4, 2020, and continuing with scores of conversations between the president and his lawyers and aides as they try to persuade a number of states to decertify the vote.
Jennifer Rodgers of CNN talks more about DA Willis's use of the RICO statute in the Georgia 2020 presidential election case.
The use of RICO carries various benefits for prosecutors, including the ability to bring in evidence that otherwise might not be admissible in terms of geographic scope and timeframe, and the ability to tell a coherent and comprehensive story about the actions of all members of the enterprise, even if defendants exit the case before trial. For example, Willis charged dozens of overt acts that were committed in Washington, DC, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and elsewhere. Importantly, even if the defendants to whom these and other acts are linked drop out of the case, Willis will be entitled to put in evidence of these incidents as part of the racketeering activity.
RICO also carries sentencing benefits. A conviction under Georgia’s RICO law would carry a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years, and most of the other 40 charges in the indictment likewise involve mandatory minimum sentences of one year.
None of the other charged cases include a mandatory minimum, upping the stakes for a Georgia conviction not only for Trump, but his co-conspirators, who will be deciding in the coming weeks and months whether they want to take a plea deal that might help them avoid this consequence by allowing them to plead to a count without mandatory minimum penalties.
But charging a RICO case isn’t the only benefit afforded to Willis. Since these charges have been brought in Georgia state court — and not federal court — neither Trump, should he win in 2024, nor any another Republican president can issue a pardon. Under Georgia law, a state pardon can only be given by a state pardon board — not the governor — and only after five years have passed following completion of the sentence.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe asserts that with regards to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the legislative branch Congress needs to step up.
The federal and state indictments of Trump and those who aided his alleged dictatorial bid to illegally and unconstitutionally hold power will work their way through the courts. That process — the thorough investigation by prosecutors’ offices and the deliberative, fair adjudication by the courts — stands as a sterling example of the vital role the executive and judicial branches of our governmental system play in protecting democracy.
But when it comes to ensuring this never happens again, the nation’s legislators need to step up.
At the heart of the despotic attack Trump and his acolytes stand charged with is the right of Americans to vote and to have their vote be counted. That is sacrosanct. The need for lawmakers to protect the right to vote is more important than ever, as there are far too many legal loopholes for the next, and perhaps not-so-motley, crew of would-be despots to exploit. [...]
This is where Raffensperger and I part ways, because despite his rebuke of Trump’s Big Lie, he’s always enabled and supported this type of voter subversion. Voting rights shouldn’t be partisan, but the fact is we currently have one party limiting them to hold power and another not doing enough to boost them to save our nation. Every member of Congress needs to reread the indictments against Trump, see the disastrous effect of their actions (or inactions, as the case may be), and step up.
Well...elected Republicans in Congress need to "step up", in any event.
Daniel Nichanian of Bolts magazine interviews activists/organizers in three states about how they are utilizing direct democracy to defend progressive causes.
South Dakotans last year defeated an amendment similar to Ohio’s, which came on the heels of initiatives to increase the minimum wage and legalize cannabis and would have kneecapped a measure to expand Medicaid. In Arkansas, the GOP repeatedly asked voters to limit the initiative process but lost repeatedly at the polls; this year, they adopted new restrictions anyway. Idaho organizers in 2018 expanded Medicaid through a ballot measure, and the GOP keeps trying to make initiatives harder ever since.
Anti-initiative proposals just keep popping up in many other places, including Arizona, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah. Even after defeats, these proposals keep reemerging year after year, forcing proponents of direct democracy to dedicate capacity and resources to protecting the rules of engagement—and to constantly look over their shoulder.
Bolts this week gathered three organizers who have fought this dynamic in each of three states that are undergoing this dynamic: Ohio, Arkansas, and Idaho. Their meeting sparked a wide-ranging conversation about their shared frustrations and strategies.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe writes about the trauma of Black people that live through police mistakes.
Tashawn Bernard, 12, went outside last week to toss garbage in a dumpster behind his family’s Lansing, Mich., apartment complex. When the boy did not return promptly, his father, Michael, looked out the window only to see his son handcuffed and being taken to a police cruiser. It was all captured by a neighbor in a now-viral TikTok video. [...]
Lansing police later apologized for what it called an “unfortunate case of ‘wrong place, wrong time.’ ” It takes a staggering degree of victim-blaming to say that a child taking out the trash behind his family’s apartment was in the “wrong place” at the “wrong time.”
But that’s the same absurd story behind how a Black family driving from Arkansas to a basketball tournament in Texas got pulled over at gunpoint by police. It’s why in February Porcha Woodruff, then eight months pregnant, was arrested in front of her children and accused of being a robbery and carjacking suspect. Falsely identified by an automated facial recognition search by the Detroit Police Department, she was held for 11 hours. (She was also the sixth person — all of them Black — erroneously identified by the department’s questionable technology.) [...]
Mostly due to cellphone cameras, these are known cases of mistaken identity. Certainly, there are far more that will never garner notice. Even the publicized stories will eventually fade from public attention — at least until the next one, and there’s always a next one. But the distress and fear these incidents inflict on those targeted burrows under the skin, inflamed and ever-present.
Nina Lakhani of the Guardian looks at a study showing that people of color are bearing the brunt of excess deaths totals due to progressively deadlier Atlantic storms.
About 20,000 excess deaths – the numbers of observed rather than expected deaths – occurred in the immediate aftermath of 179 named storms and hurricanes which struck the US mainland between 1988 and 2019.
More than two thirds of the total excess death toll – and 17 of the 20 deadliest storms – have occurred during the past 15 years, as ocean-heating fossil-fuel emissions have driven increasingly intense hurricanes.
The highest death counts were in counties with majority Black, brown and Indigenous residents, suggesting historical government neglect plays a role in the loss of life in the aftermath of tropical storms, according to the study published in Science Advances.
Tropical storms and hurricanes wreak billions of dollars of damage every year especially on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Yet this is the first study to quantify the storm-related excess death toll over time nationwide – data which could save lives.
“Cyclones don’t hit the whole country. They tend to hit places which have more Black, Indigenous and Latin people who’ve been historically underserved and overburdened through racism, and it’s these socially vulnerable communities who are bearing the brunt of post-cyclone excess deaths,” said Robbie Parks, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s public health school and lead author.
Paul Waldman of The Washington Post points out that the election of Barack Obama also inaugurated Republican fantasies of a true American apocalypse.
Rhetorical excess is nothing new, and can be found in both parties, if not always in the same form. But the hardening of the idea on the right that if a Democrat reached the White House he must be carrying out a scheme to bring about America’s end happened with the election of Barack Obama. Republicans might have loathed Bill Clinton with a burning fire, but even if they thought he was so corrupt that he would murder his enemies, they didn’t think he had a secret plan to destroy the country in such a way it would literally cease to exist.
That was, however, precisely what they said about Obama. Most of the rank-and-file believed he was a foreigner, and even many who accepted that he was born in Hawaii claimed he was carrying out a nefarious planto bring the country to its knees. Even at the end of his presidency, when it was undeniably clear that he was an ordinary center-left Democrat, Rubio could insist during a 2016 primary debate that “all this damage that he’s done to America is deliberate.”
Republicans transitioned seamlessly into making the same charge about Biden. While by any reasonable measure he, too, is a regular Democrat, and one who wants the United States to be prosperous and safe even if his ideas about how to achieve those goals differ from those of Republicans, conservative media outlets are filled with headlines such as “Biden’s Destroying the Economy. Is It Intentional?” and “If Biden Were Trying To Destroy America On Purpose, He’d Do Nothing Differently.”
OK, if one must point out where Hillary Clinton said that she stood during the 2016 presidential campaign, one must also point out who dominates the news and why in 2022.
Hillary Clinton's statement in 2016 that she was the one standing between America and the apocalypse has not been refuted yet.
Susan J. Demas of Michigan Advance looks at why the pundits got the politics of abortion wrong
By only viewing abortion as a political or religious debate, most news outlets willingly adopted the frame of the so-called “pro-life” movement. There was little discussion that it was a human rights issue (the term “women’s rights” often became shorthand for selfishness). Abortion also was rarely covered as a health issue, as part of a continuum of reproductive care that encompasses everything from contraception to fertility treatments to postpartum care.
At the same time, liberals, particularly women, were regarded by pundits as hysterical for worrying their pretty little heads about courts nullifying their right to bodily autonomy.
By the time that the 2016 election rolled around, there was the usual beltway brain about abortion politics, which meant mocking Hillary Clinton for running on the fate of the Supreme Court. The horseshoe theory coalition of disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters and edgy alt-right activists (who would soon become standard Trumpers) went even further and accused Clinton of trying to blackmail people into voting for her to ensure Roe survived.
Finally today, Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review looks at the journalistic career of assassinated candidate for the president of Ecuador Fernando Villavicencio.
Last week, Villavicencio...was assassinated while leaving a campaign rally in Quito, the capital. He ran on an anti-corruption platform and had recently been outspoken about the growing strength of cartels and other criminal groups in Ecuador, to the point, he said, where one imprisoned gang boss had warned him to shut his mouth. The full circumstances of Villavicencio’s assassination aren’t yet clear, though officials have stated that suspects in the killing are nationals of neighboring Colombia and have ties to organized crime. And the incident has drawn global attention to a once relatively secure country that is rapidly spiraling into violence.
The killing also drew attention to the rich, unorthodox career of Villavicencio himself, who rose to prominence as an outspoken challenger to other corrupt interests in his country, especially those close to Correa. He defined himself—according to people who knew or crossed paths with him—through his tenacious ability to find information. “No one could accuse him of being corrupt,” Pallares says. “The whole of Correa’s intelligence apparatus searched his life and never found any wrongdoing.” From the start of his career, “we could not say that he was a normal journalist,” Dagmar Thiel, who also met Villavicencio while working as a journalist in Ecuador and now leads the US office of the Latin American press-freedom watchdog Fundamedios, told me. But he was “a tireless investigator.”
Villavicencio took up journalism while still a teenager, on the radio and in print; at eighteen, he founded a newspaper focused on workers’ rights that got him in trouble with the military dictatorship that then ruled Ecuador. Later, he worked in communications and was a union leader at Ecuador’s state oil company, where he helped bring to light environmental abuses that the fossil-fuel industry committed in the Amazon region of the country. “All the information he got was actually against the company,” Thiel, for whom Villavicencio was a source at the time, recalls. “So he eventually was fired.”
Everyone have the best possible day!