FOCUS: Donald Trump Might Want to Think Twice Before Trying to Pardon Himself
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=49703"><span class="small">Frank Bowman, Slate</span></a>
Wednesday, 25 November 2020 13:29
Bowman writes: "Self-pardons are plainly unconstitutional."
President Donald Trump. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty)
Donald Trump Might Want to Think Twice Before Trying to Pardon Himself
By Frank Bowman, Slate
25 November 20
Self-pardons are plainly unconstitutional.
he 2020 election results are in. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is the President-Elect of the United States of America. Sometime before January 20, 2021, Donald Trump will recognize the inevitable (even if he may never publicly admit it) and prepare to leave the White House. Given that his tenure in office has been plagued by numerous allegations of private and official misconduct, close observers anticipate that he might try to shield himself, his family, and associates from federal prosecution by liberal use of the pardon power, possibly including issuing a pardon to himself. In anticipation that this moment might arrive, I spent the last few months conducting a comprehensive historical, legal, and political examination of the president’s pardon power. In the forthcoming scholarly article laying out my findings, I conclude (among other things) that, although the question has never been tested, a president may not constitutionally pardon himself. Here’s why.
The idea that President Trump would try to pardon himself is hardly fanciful. Back in 2018, when the Mueller investigation was nearing its end, an apprehensive Trump declared, “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have an absolute right to pardon myself….” The claim of scholarly support was not a complete invention. A few respectable figures have concluded that such an act would be constitutionally permissible. I think they are wrong. Indeed, a presidential self-pardon is antithetical to the language and structure of the Constitution, contrary to the evident intentions of the Founders, and a very real danger to republican government.
All of the arguments favoring a self-pardon rest heavily on the apparently open-ended text of the Constitution’s pardon clause, which reads: “The President … shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Regardless of any attendant bells and whistles, the pro-self-pardon arguments boil down to the assertion that the words of the clause grant power without limit, and because the words do not expressly say that the President can’t pardon himself, then the opposite must be true — he can.
But even if we were forced to interpret the pardon clause using only the words in the text, those words contain multiple limits. Linguistically, the word “offenses” in the phrase “offenses against the United States” might mean any sort of injury to the country, or at least any sort of violation of the laws of the country, whether civil or criminal. But the Anglo-American history and practice of executive clemency were understood from the beginning to limit “offenses” in this context to crimes. Similarly, the phrase “against the United States” could be read to refer to the country as a whole or any of its constituent states. But from the outset, the pardon clause has been interpreted to cover only federal and not state crimes.
The phrase “grant pardons” contains the same sort of implicit, but well-understood, limitation. Both the etymology of the word “pardon” and our ordinary usage of it necessarily imply two persons. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the English word “pardon” as both a noun and a verb is a borrowing from the French language and derives from two Latin roots: per, meaning “by,” and donum, a gift, or d?n?re, meaning to make a donation or gift. Thus, a pardon is a type of gift, and to pardon is to give such a gift. The act of gift-giving requires both a giver and a recipient. Although we sometimes loosely speak of giving ourselves a gift, in the sense of permitting ourselves an indulgence of some sort, the ordinary sense of the word gift, and thus of the act of pardon, requires two parties.
We scarcely need this etymological excavation to understand the point. In ordinary English, now and for centuries past, if I walk round a corner too quickly and collide with you, I say, “Pardon me,” or, if I am feeling a bit more formal, “I beg your pardon.” This formula (which is very old) acknowledges my fault, to be sure, but so would, “I’m sorry.” To beg the other party’s pardon goes further and asks both for her recognition of my acknowledgement of fault and for the gift of her forgiveness. Asking for pardon necessarily implies two parties and the judgment of one about the conduct of the other.
The word “grant” also implies two persons. In dictionaries known to be owned by the Framers, the verb form of grant is defined as, “To bestow something which cannot be claimed of right,” or “to … give, bestow.” The transactional, two-party character of the noun form of grant is emphasized by the existence of two derivative words—grantor (the person who makes a grant) and grantee (the person who receives it)—which were in common usage at the time of the founding. (All other instances of the word “grant” in the Constitution confirm this understanding.)
More importantly, throughout Anglo-American history from Magna Carta to the time of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, a pardon in law always involved two parties—an executive (or sometimes legislative) grantor and an individual grantee. I have been unable to discover a single instance in which a king, royal governor, or any similar official purported to pardon himself. That is important because both the ordinary usage of the words “grant” and “pardon,” and the universal, invariable, and centuries-old bilateral understanding of the concept of “granting a pardon,” would have informed the way the Framers understood the words they wrote into the Pardon Clause and rendered an exclusion for self-pardon superfluous.
To illustrate the point, imagine the Constitution said, “The President shall have the power to act as a kidney donor.” Those words empower the president to donate a kidney to anyone. Grammatically, they could be construed to permit the president to donate a kidney to himself. But no one would read them that way because that’s not the way kidney donation works. It requires two people—a donor and a recipient. That being so, no sensible person would write the Kidney Donation Clause to say: “The President shall have the power to act as a kidney donor, but may not donate his kidney to himself.” For the Framers, to speak of granting a pardon was necessarily to speak of one person judging and remitting the punishment of another. No explicit exclusion of self-pardon was required because the universal understanding of what it meant to grant a pardon self-evidently excluded such a possibility.
Even more importantly, it is not the language of the Pardon Clause alone, but how the pardon power fits into the Framers’ design of the presidency and the Constitution’s structural limitations on presidential power that should conclusively rule out a self-pardon.
Pardons are not an American invention. Rather, the Framers inherited an English legal tradition of executive clemency rooted in the ancient idea that the will of the king was the source of law, and thus, with a pardon, the king could release a subject from the law’s rigors as an act of royal grace. A corollary of this principle was that the king, as the source of law, was not personally subordinate to law, and thus was immune from either civil or criminal judgments by the courts.
The Framers considered, but explicitly rejected, proposals for an American king. The American constitutional structure was purpose-built with no monarch, and constructed on a theory of separation of powers between an elected executive, elected legislature, and appointed judiciary, combined with interbranch checks and balances. In the Framers’ system, the elected president has no ancestral claim that law is rooted in his will, and thus has neither an inherent right to issue pardons to others nor an inborn personal immunity from the ordinary operation of the law. In the American constitutional order, the presidency is a creation of law, its powers are specified by law, and each temporary occupant of the office is subject to the law. If we knew nothing more about the Constitution and the presidency than this, it would be sufficient to reject the idea of a self-pardon. If a president can pardon himself, he can, by an unreviewable exercise of his own will, render himself effectively immune from the operation of national law. That kind of immunity was a critical attribute of kingship, and it is quite plain that the Framers intended no American king.
Precisely because they were determined that the office of president not be a kingship, the Framers rejected the idea of a president-for-life and opted instead for a president elected to set terms of four years. They also worried that even an elected president could become corrupt or tyrannical, and they rejected the argument that elections alone would be a sufficient remedy in such a case. Therefore, they added two other protections against an egregious presidential malefactor.
First, the Framers provided for removal by impeachment. Impeachment was another inheritance from Great Britain, but American impeachment differs in critical ways from its British ancestor. Parliament could not impeach the monarch, only royal ministers, judges, and lesser fry. American impeachment was consciously designed for removal of a misbehaving chief executive. And to make sure that a president cannot nullify an impeachment threat with a pardon, the Constitution expressly excludes impeachment cases from the pardon power.
Second, the Framers were well aware that British impeachment was a hybrid political and criminal action in which Parliament could impose characteristically criminal penalties, including imprisonment and death. The Framers wrote our impeachment mechanism to be exclusively political by limiting the consequences of conviction to removal and disqualification. But—and this is critical—they expressly provided that additional penalties might be exacted in separate proceeding before ordinary courts. Article I, Section 3, declares:
Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgement and Punishment, according to Law.
In short, the Constitution says that Congress may not impose criminal penalties on a president, but the president is nonetheless subject to federal criminal prosecution through the ordinary courts. To my mind, this provision alone is dispositive of the self-pardon question. As a matter of original intention, the implicit threat in Article I of criminal court action against a crooked or tyrannical president would be a nullity if the Framers entertained any notion that a president could pardon himself. Indeed, we have very good evidence that they saw the threat of prosecution as an important constraint on presidential misconduct and never imagined a president could pardon himself out of that threat.
Both during and after the Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and others complained that the pardon language was too broad because it permitted a pardon even for treason, and therefore, as Mason said, it “may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom [the President] had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt.” James Iredell, one of the first justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, responded to Mason, saying, “The probability of the President of the United States committing an act of treason against his country is very slight …. Such a thing is however possible, and accordingly he is not exempt from a trial if he should be guilty or supposed guilty, of that or any other offense.” Notice that both Mason’s complaint and Iredell’s response assume no self-pardon is possible. If it were, the president would not need to pardon others to prevent either his own detection or any subsequent prosecution. He could simply pardon himself out of liability for any crime alleged by others.
But far more important than what the Framers thought is how the availability of self-pardon would affect our contemporary constitutional regime for deterring and redressing presidential crime. Remember, there are only three constitutional mechanisms for dealing with grave presidential misconduct: quadrennial elections, impeachment, and criminal prosecution. In 1788, the Constitution placed no limit on the number of presidential terms. The Founders may have imagined that presidents would keep running indefinitely and would continue to be constrained by fear of the offending the electorate. But at least since 1951, when the Twenty-Second Amendment limiting presidents to two terms was ratified, all second-term presidents have known they will never face voters again. So, for them at least, that constraint is gone. And, as our current circumstances illustrate, a first-term incumbent president who loses a bid for re-election retains the pardon power for two-and-one-half months during which the fear of electoral backlash has been rendered meaningless.
I suspect the Framers imagined impeachment would prove a more meaningful check on presidents than history has shown it to be. In over 230 years, one president, Richard Nixon, left office due to the near-certainty that he would be both impeached and convicted. Only three presidents—Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump—have actually been impeached. All were acquitted. The acquittals of both Presidents Clinton and Trump demonstrate that so long as a president can hold the loyalty of a mere thirty-four senators of his own party, conviction is impossible. And Senator Mitt Romney, by casting the only impeachment vote in American history against a president of his own party, reminded us of how easy it is in an era of extreme two-party polarization for a president to hold that line. To put it in terms the Founders might have used, the power of “faction” has all but erased the legislative weapon of impeachment.
Which leaves the criminal law. So long as the Justice Department maintains the position expressed in memoranda of the Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president may not be criminally prosecuted, a president will be, practically if perhaps not constitutionally, immune from federal prosecution while in office. If a departing president can issue himself a pardon for all he has done before, then a president really is a creature above the national law, or at least the most important and most powerfully deterrent portions of that law. He could loot the Treasury, bribe judges, steal elections, commit treason itself, and be at no legal risk for any of it. Such a creature would no longer be the president of a free republic, but a dictator in all but name.
So far as I know, in all of Anglo-American history, no monarch, royal governor, president, or other executive officer has tried to pardon himself. The reason, I think, is that the idea of a self-pardon is so antithetical to the constitutional structures of England and the United States, and to the purpose that executive pardon power serves in those structures, that no one has ever had the effrontery to try it. A president who tried to pardon himself would not be relying on some deep, if heretofore unappreciated, reservoir of constitutional authority. He would instead be trying to slither through a heretofore untried loophole. In the case of an ordinary criminal defendant, one might merely shrug at the audacity of the dodge. But a miscreant president is no ordinary malefactor. And permitting presidential self-pardons would not merely allow individual miscarriages of justice, but would erase a structural barrier to tyranny. I do not believe the Supreme Court would countenance that result.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52246"><span class="small">Ed Yong, The Atlantic</span></a>
Wednesday, 25 November 2020 12:29
Yong writes: "'We are on an absolutely catastrophic path,' said a COVID-19 doctor at America's best-prepared hospital."
'A full hospital means that everyone waits.' (photo: Christopher Lee/NYT/Redux)
Hospitals Know What's Coming
By Ed Yong, The Atlantic
25 November 20
“We are on an absolutely catastrophic path,” said a COVID-19 doctor at America’s best-prepared hospital.
erhaps no hospital in the United States was better prepared for a pandemic than the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. The people on staff had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Barack Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases. There’s a reason many of the Americans who were airlifted from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February were sent to UNMC.
In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”
To hear such talk from someone at UNMC, the best-prepared of America’s hospitals, should shake the entire nation. In mid-March, when just 18 Nebraskans had tested positive for COVID-19, Shelly Schwedhelm, the head of the hospital’s emergency-preparedness program, sounded gently confident. Or, at least, she told me: “I’m confident in having a plan.” She hoped the hospital wouldn’t hit capacity, “because people will have done the right thing by staying home,” she said. And people did: For a while, the U.S. flattened the curve.
But now about 2,400 Nebraskans are testing positive for COVID-19 every day—a rate five times higher than in the spring. More than 20 percent of tests are coming back positive, and up to 70 percent in some rural counties—signs that many infections aren’t being detected. The number of people who’ve been hospitalized with the disease has tripled in just six weeks. UNMC is fuller with COVID-19 patients—and patients, full stop—than it has ever been. “We’re watching a system breaking in front of us and we’re helpless to stop it,” says Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician.
Cawcutt knows what’s coming. Throughout the pandemic, hospitalizations have lagged behind cases by about 12 days. Over the past 12 days, the total number of confirmed cases in Nebraska has risen from 82,400 to 109,280. That rise represents a wave of patients that will slam into already beleaguered hospitals between now and Thanksgiving. “I don’t see how we avoid becoming overwhelmed,” says Dan Johnson, a critical-care doctor. People need to know that “the assumption we will always have a hospital bed for them is a false one.”
What makes this “nightmare” worse, he adds, “is that it was preventable.” The coronavirus is not unstoppable, as some have suggested and as New Zealand, Iceland, Australia, and Hong Kong have resoundingly disproved—twice. Instead, the Trump administration never mounted a serious effort to stop it. Whether through gross incompetence or deliberate strategy, the president and his advisers left the virus to run amok, allowed Americans to get sick, and punted the consequences to the health-care system. And they did so repeatedly, even after the ordeal of the spring, after the playbook for controlling the virus became clear, and despite months of warnings about a fall surge.
Not even the best-prepared hospital can compensate for an unchecked pandemic. UNMC’s preparations didn’t fail so much as the U.S. created a situation in which hospitals could not possibly succeed. “We can prepare over and over for a wave of patients,” says Cawcutt, “but we can’t prepare for a tsunami.”
A full hospital means that everyone waits. COVID-19 patients who are going downhill must wait to enter a packed intensive-care unit. Patients who cannot breathe must wait for the many minutes it takes for a nurse elsewhere in the hospital to remove cumbersome protective gear, run over, and don the gear again. On Tuesday, one rapidly deteriorating patient needed to be intubated, but the assembled doctors had to wait, because the anesthesiologists were all busy intubating four other patients in an ICU and a few more in an emergency room.
None of the people I spoke with would predict when UNMC will finally hit its capacity ceiling, partly because they’re doing everything to avoid that scenario, and partly because it’s so grim as to be almost unthinkable. But “we’re rapidly approaching that point,” Hewlett said.
When it arrives, people with COVID-19 will die not just because of the virus, but because the hospital will have nowhere to put them and no one to help them. Doctors will have to decide who to put on a ventilator or a dialysis machine. They’ll have to choose whether to abandon entire groups of patients who can’t get help elsewhere. While cities like New York and Boston have many big hospitals that can care for advanced strokes, failing hearts that need mechanical support, and transplanted organs, “in this region, we’re it,” Johnson says. “We provide care that can’t be provided at any other hospital for a 200-mile radius. We’re going to need to decide if we continue to offer that care, or if we admit every single COVID-19 patient who comes through our door.”
During the spring, most of UNMC’s COVID-19 patients were either elderly people from nursing homes or workers in meatpacking plants and factories. But with the third national surge, “all the trends have gone out the window,” Sarah Swistak, a staff nurse, told me. “From the 90-year-old with every comorbidity listed to the 30-year-old who is the picture of perfect health, they’re all requiring oxygen because they’re so short of breath.”
This lack of pattern is a pattern in itself, and suggests that there’s no single explanation for the current surge. Nebraska reopened too early, “when we didn’t have enough control, and in the absence of a mask mandate,” Cawcutt says. Pandemic fatigue set in. Weddings that were postponed from the spring took place in the fall. Customers packed into indoor spaces, like bars and restaurants, where the virus most easily finds new hosts. Colleges resumed in-person classes. UNMC is struggling not because of any one super-spreading event, but because of the cumulative toll of millions of bad decisions.
When the hospital first faced the pandemic in the spring, “I was buoyed by the realization that everyone in America was doing their part to slow down the spread,” Johnson says. “Now I know friends of mine are going about their normal lives, having parties and dinners, and playing sports indoors. It’s very difficult to do this work when we know so many people are not doing their part.” The drive home from the packed hospital takes him past rows of packed restaurants, sporting venues, and parking lots.
To a degree, Johnson sympathizes. “I don’t think people in Omaha thought we could ever have something that resembles New York,” he told me. “To be honest, in the spring, I would have thought it extremely unlikely.” But he adds that the Midwest has taken entirely the wrong lesson from the Northeast’s ordeal. Instead of learning that the pandemic is controllable, and that physical distancing works, people instead internalized “a mistaken belief that every curve that goes up must come down,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that if we don’t change anything about how we’re conducting ourselves, the curve can go up and up.”
Speaking on Tuesday afternoon, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts once again refused to issue a statewide mask mandate. He promised to tighten restrictions once a quarter of the state’s beds are filled with COVID-19 patients, but even then, some restaurants will still offer indoor dining; gyms and churches will remain open; and groups of 10 people will still be able to gather in enclosed spaces. Ricketts urged Nebraskans to avoid close contact, confined areas, and crowds, but his policies nullify his pleas. “People have the mistaken belief that if the government allows them to do something, it is safe to do,” Johnson said.
There are signs that citizens and businesses are acting ahead of policy makers. Some restaurants are ceasing indoor dining even without a prohibition. Parents are pulling their children out of schools and sports leagues. “I have heard from more friends and family about COVID-19 in the last two weeks than I have in the previous six months, expressing support and a change in attitudes,” Johnson said.
But COVID-19 works slowly. It takes several days for infected people to show symptoms, a dozen more for newly diagnosed cases to wend their way to hospitals, and even more for the sickest of patients to die. These lags mean that the pandemic’s near-term future is always set, baked in by the choices of the past. It means that Ricketts is already too late to stop whatever UNMC will face in the coming weeks (but not too late to spare the hospital further grief next month). It means that some of the people who get infected over Thanksgiving will struggle to enter packed hospitals by the middle of December, and be in the ground by Christmas.
Officially, Nebraska has 4,223 hospital beds, of which 1,165—27 percent—are still available. But that figure is deceptive. It includes beds for labor and deliveries, as well as pediatric beds that cannot be repurposed. It also says nothing about how stretched hospitals have already become in their efforts to create capacity. UNMC has postponed elective surgeries—those which could be deferred for four to 12 weeks. Patients with strokes and other urgent traumas aren’t getting the normal level of attention, because the pandemic is so all-consuming. Clinical research has stopped because research nurses are now COVID-19 nurses. The hospital is forced to turn down many requests to take in patients from rural hospitals and neighboring states that are themselves almost out of beds.
Empty hospital beds might as well be hotel beds without doctors and nurses to staff them. And though health-care workers are resilient, “many of us feel like we haven’t had a day off since this thing began,” Hewlett says. The current surge is pushing them to the limit because people with COVID-19 are far sicker than the average patient. In an ICU, they need twice as much attention for three times the usual stay. To care for them, UNMC’s nurses and respiratory therapists are now doing mandatory overtime. The hospital has tried to hire travel nurses, but with the entire country calling for help, the pool of reinforcements is dry. “Even before COVID-19 hit, we were short-staffed,” says Becky Long, a lead nurse on a COVID ICU floor. Of late, there have been days when the hospital had 45 to 60 fewer nurses than it needed. “Every time I’ve been at work, I’ve thought: This is going to be the final straw. But somehow we continue to make it work, and I truly have no idea how.”
Before COVID-19, Long worked in oncology. Death is no stranger to her, but she tells me she can barely comprehend the amount she has seen in recent weeks. “I used to be able to leave work at work, but with the pandemic, it follows me everywhere I go,” she said. “It’s all I see when I come home, when I look at my kids.”
Long and other nurses have told many families that they can’t see their dying loved ones, and then sat with those patients so they didn’t have to die alone. Lindsay Ivener, a staff nurse, told me that COVID-19 had recently killed an elderly woman whom she was caring for, the woman’s husband, and one of her grandchildren. A second grandchild had just been admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. “It just tore this whole family apart in a month,” Ivener said. “I couldn’t even cry. I didn’t have the energy.”
Until recently, Ivener worked in corporate America as a retail buyer and inventory manager. Wanting to help people, she retrained as a nurse and graduated this May. “I’ve only worked as a nurse during a pandemic,” she told me. “It’s got to get better, right?”
Did Israeli PM Netanyahu Meet Saudi Bin Salman in Bid to Thwart Biden Plan to Restore Iran Deal?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51519"><span class="small">Juan Cole, Informed Comment</span></a>
Wednesday, 25 November 2020 09:16
Cole writes: "Netanyahu and Bin Salman have a lot to talk about."
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (photo: EPA)
Did Israeli PM Netanyahu Meet Saudi Bin Salman in Bid to Thwart Biden Plan to Restore Iran Deal?
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
25 November 20
he Israeli news site i24 Arabic reports from the Hebrew press that Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the head of the Israeli Mossad intelligence service, Yosef “Yossi” Meir Cohen, flew to Saudi Arabia’s new planned model city, Neom, and met with crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
They are said to have had the use of a private plane owned by Israeli businessman Ehud “Udi” Angel, CEO of the Ofer Brothers Group, a close friend of Netanyahu’s. i24 says that a Saudi source confirmed the story. It says that the Hebrew news site Walla! reported that it was a five hour trip, and that Netanyahu met with Bin Salman.
Al Jazeera reports that Israeli education minister Yoav Galant confirmed that the meeting occurred.
An Israeli cabinet meeting on the government coronavirus response was postponed so that the meeting could take place.
Still, the report was denied by Saudi foreign minister Faisal Bin Farhan, though he only said that Netanyahu did not meet the crown prince.
The Israeli site i24 points out that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that two Saudi cabinet officials confirmed the meeting, which dealt with normalization and Iran, but said that no essential understandings were reached.
Netanyahu and Bin Salman have a lot to talk about. Both are frightened that president-elect Joe Biden will restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which normalized Iran’s place in the world economy and lifted the sanctions that keep the country weak. Iran has 81 million people, while the Saudi citizens population is probably on the order of 21 million, and Israel is about 8.8 million. They are thus militarily at a disadvantage with regard to demography, but have been able to count on the US financial and trade blockade to keep Iran from having a robust economy and from being able to buy the latest generation of weapons. It is actually not clear that Iran has aggressive intentions. Its small presence in Iraq and Syria came at government invitation, and its military budget is tiny, somewhere around that of Norway or Singapore. Perhaps as part of the reflection fallacy, however, Tel Aviv and Riyadh see Iran as seeking regional hegemony.
As for Neom, Bin Salman envisages it as a high tech corridor, and he may be attempting to attract Israel companies to do business there. Saudi Arabia’s primary source of income, petroleum, is a stranded asset and the electrification of global transportation will rob it of most of its value. Bin Salman, for all his faults, knows that Saudi Arabia must transform itself into a manufacturing and services economy if it is to survive. A high tech sector could be a cash cow, and a fruitful avenue of cooperation with Israel.
King Salman, 84, opposes throwing the Palestinians under the bus, as his son is inclined to, and it may be that the relationship of Saudi Arabia and Israel will have to remain clandestine until Salman passes from the scene.
Palestinian sources told Al Jazeera that if the meeting took place, it was “heart-breaking.”
Al Jazeera reports that Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UN, Abdallah Y. al-Mouallimi, said Tuesday that normalization with Israel was possible, but only if it ended the Occupation of the Palestinian territories. The United States has for decades justified its close relationship to Israel despite the latter’s Apartheid policies on the ground that it was working toward a two-state solution (which certainly has not been true for the past two decades). Saudi Arabia may be poised to take up this American piece of misdirection.
Trump Supporters Want to Boycott the Georgia Runoffs. Is Their Threat Genuine?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56941"><span class="small">George Chidi, The Intercept</span></a>
Wednesday, 25 November 2020 09:16
Chidi writes: "As a longtime observer of Georgia politics, I am at a point where I can no longer distinguish trolling from earnest madness."
An officer in riot gear stands between supporters of President Donald Trump and counterprotesters as the groups yell at each other outside of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on Nov. 21, 2020. (photo: Ben Gray/AP)
Trump Supporters Want to Boycott the Georgia Runoffs. Is Their Threat Genuine?
By George Chidi, The Intercept
25 November 20
To the degree that one can measure the sincerity of such people … probably. Sure.
s a longtime observer of Georgia politics, I am at a point where I can no longer distinguish trolling from earnest madness.
A hashtag began trending this morning on Twitter: #WriteInTrumpForGA. You could probably have seen it coming as soon as Lin Wood, a Trump attorney arguing to overturn the election results here, tweeted his support for a boycott of the U.S. Senate runoff elections.
Why are they doing little or nothing to support efforts by GA citizens to address unlawful election & need for @BrianKempGA to order special session of legislature?
But far-right protesters had been calling for it in the street even before Wood’s comment. Vincent James Foxx took to the steps of the Georgia Capitol last week to tell “Republican traitors” who are not trying to overturn the election that “we will not be willing to show up for them.”
Foxx founded Red Elephants, a media platform based in California that the Anti-Defamation League described as promoting “conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic beliefs and white supremacist mantras.”
Trump supporters in Georgia vow to destroy the Republican Party if Trump doesn't win pic.twitter.com/04dPRQFfC0
Nonetheless, video of his commentary went viral, though probably not the way he might have liked. Virtually all of the engagement has been with progressive commenters wishing him well here.
If Jon Ossoff beats Sen. David Perdue and Raphael Warnock beats Sen. Kelly Loeffler in the January runoff, Democrats take control of the Senate. So the reaction on the left both locally and nationally has been giddy, gleeful support for the proposition of a far-right boycott.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger noted in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that 24,000 Republican voters submitted absentee ballots in the June primary and refrained from voting in the general election — enough voters to have closed Biden’s margin in Georgia.
Typically, a runoff election in Georgia might draw as few as 20 percent of the voters from the general election. More important jobs draw a higher proportion of voters, as happened in 2018 when Raffensperger himself faced a runoff contest against John Barrow, where about 40 percent of voters returned. The last U.S. Senate runoff here in 2008, between Republican Saxby Chambliss and his Democratic challenger Jim Martin, drew about 60 percent of general election voters.
Chambliss won the runoff handily. But given recent election trends in Georgia, with Democrats so focused on turnout, one might hold presumptions of Republican victory less strongly. If total turnout in January is around 3 million votes, a 1 percent gap would be 30,000 voters. The question to ask is if 30,000 people who would vote for Republican candidates are open to an argument for a boycott.
Are people like Wood and Foxx sincere? To the degree that one can measure the sincerity of such people … probably. Sure. I’m guessing that Wood is trying to set up former Georgia congressman Doug Collins for a right-flank challenge to Loeffler or Warnock in two years, or perhaps against Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
Foxx’s deeper motivations might be a bit more nuanced. Set aside his stated reasons (his fallacious belief in a stolen election and a demand for Republicans to spend their political capital fighting it). And ignore for a moment their general contempt for “democracy” as a political value. Biden’s win means some Republicans will recalculate their electoral math, asking if courting white nationalists loses them more elections than they will win.
The far right has been in a crisis ever since the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, provoked a massive, world-changing backlash. White supremacist groups have been falling apart from lawsuits, the rolling identification of their leaders, social media deplatforming, and infighting. People like Foxx have had some access to power over the last four years. A call to boycott is a loyalty test, and loyalty tests are deliberately painful: Do this distasteful thing — disregard the law and voters — to prove you still listen to us, or we will show you what that will cost you.
Trump himself reiterated support for Loeffler and Perdue the week after the election. Yesterday, Donald Trump Jr. described calls to boycott as “nonsense” and asked people to ignore them. Neither Loeffler nor Perdue have addressed the idea directly.
Nonetheless, social media chatter about a boycott is continuing to grow. On the social media network Parler, the hashtag #boycottgeorgiarunoffs doubled its traffic overnight. But most of the accounts pushing it are brand new and utterly anonymous. Parler’s conservative supporters tout its unmoderated forum as an alternative to Facebook, but as a practical matter, it is completely susceptible to manipulation by political provocateurs.
Despite its supposed noninterference policy, Parler began striking the #WriteInTrumpForGA hashtag today. Perhaps that’s because under Georgia election rules, you can’t actually write in a candidate in a runoff. Even if you could, a write-in candidate has to be qualified by the secretary of state’s office for the votes to count. And Donald Trump is a legal resident of Florida, and would not be eligible regardless.
The Holidays, the Coronavirus, and the Marshmallow Test
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=19600"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, Guardian UK</span></a>
Tuesday, 24 November 2020 13:31
McKibben writes: "Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas - thanks to Pfizer (with BioNTech) and Moderna, these holidays are going to be the real marshmallow test for Americans, the chance to find out, at the end of this terrible year, what we're still made of."
Bill McKibben. (photo: Wolfgang Schmidt)
The Holidays, the Coronavirus, and the Marshmallow Test
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
24 November 20
hanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas—thanks to Pfizer (with BioNTech) and Moderna, these holidays are going to be the real marshmallow test for Americans, the chance to find out, at the end of this terrible year, what we’re still made of. The famous Stanford psychology experiment has been an irresistible analogy for pundits ever since the coronavirus crisis began. Paul Krugman, for instance, wrote in the Times, in June, that measures such as imposing social distancing were much like offering a young child a marshmallow, but telling her that if she can refrain from eating it for fifteen minutes she’ll get a second one. “You have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread,” he wrote.
But back then the analogy wasn’t quite right. Our behavior during the first wave of the pandemic—which was pretty exemplary, at least in the cities that were initially hit hardest—was less a matter of will power than of sheer terror. The marshmallow was poisoned; if you ate it, you might die. And, as the second and third waves came on, the analogy faltered in a different way: there was no fifteen-minute time limit. As the summer and then the fall ground on, it began to seem as if we were trapped in a never-ending saga, and each week one could feel oneself weakening.
Some of the choices made were baffling: did anyone really need to head to South Dakota to join with nearly half a million motorcyclists (as opposed to just riding a motorcycle, alone, which is about as covid-safe an activity as it gets)? But birthdays and weddings are parts of being human, and it’s hard to pass them up. Changing them around is possible—our family hosted a wedding with six people in attendance, all of whom had quarantined for two weeks, and, if it wasn’t what the bride and groom had imagined, it turned out to be wonderful in a whole different, intense way. (One comes, among other things, to really know and trust one’s new in-laws.) Still, the desire for things to just be normal is a powerful force.
It’s easy to place the blame for our weakening resolve on the current occupant of the White House—a man so unable to control his vanity that he arranged a series of rallies that possibly contributed to the spread of the virus during his campaign. But the same trend was under way in Belgium, too, and in Italy, Peru, and other places safely beyond his writ. Even where I live, in Vermont, which has fared far better than any state, in large part because its levels of social trust are anomalously high, coronavirus numbers have begun to climb in recent weeks, with many of the cases linked to a hockey rink near the State House. (Fortunately, the state has had just five covid-related deaths since July, and currently there are only three infected patients in the I.C.U.) Perhaps an indefinite suspension of normalcy turns out to be too much to ask: of hard-pressed restaurant owners and salon owners, and also just of people in general. Life in a high-consumer society has not, it turns out, been great preparation for delaying gratification. We want.
So the news from the pharmaceutical giants that they have vaccines in the works that seem to be more than ninety-per-cent effective, and safe to boot, represents therapy not only for our immune systems but also our flagging will power. (On Monday, Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced that their vaccine has so far proved seventy-per-cent effective on average in trials, and it is cheaper and easier to store than the Pfizer and Moderna versions.) Suddenly, the picture is different. Now it’s not having to contemplate a world without Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas: it’s having to contemplate a world without one Thanksgiving and one Hanukkah and one Christmas. Then, all signs indicate that, sometime next winter or spring, a pharmacist will stick a needle in your arm (twice), and things will start slowly returning to normal—and our job is to get through to that singular event.
That should be doable. Anyone can understand that, in the holiday season of 2020, love of extended family and friends means staying safely at a distance. Anyone can gear themselves up for wearing a mask if the duration is measured in months that you can count on your fingers. The first health-care workers may get vaccinated in mid-December—that’s two or three weekends away. Give yourself twenty or so weekends without parties—anyone can do that. With an end in sight, our job is to get everyone around us safely there: it was devastatingly sad that people died of covid-19 last March, but such deaths would be tragic in a different way this March.
We have reason to feel pride in our initial response to the virus: moved not just by fear but by the heroism of health-care and frontline workers, we did the right thing for a while. We also have reason to feel shame: as a society, we couldn’t figure out how to get everyone to take the simple measures necessary to protect the most vulnerable as the pandemic wore on. But now we have a tie-breaking opportunity to get it right. If you keep your mask on, there’s no chance you’re going to eat that marshmallow.
he 2020 election results are in. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is the President-Elect of the United States of America. Sometime before January 20, 2021, Donald Trump will recognize the inevitable (even if he may never publicly admit it) and prepare to leave the White House. Given that his tenure in office has been plagued by 
erhaps no hospital in the United States was better prepared for a pandemic than the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
s a longtime observer of Georgia politics, I am at a point where I can no longer distinguish trolling from earnest madness.