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Democrats Can Get Witnesses With 50 Votes - If Roberts Does His Job |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52992"><span class="small">Harry Litman, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Friday, 17 January 2020 09:33 |
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Litman writes: "Will it take four Republican senators to buck Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and force the Senate to consider additional testimony and documents?"
Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at the Capitol, Feb. 5, 2019. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Democrats Can Get Witnesses With 50 Votes - If Roberts Does His Job
By Harry Litman, The Washington Post
17 January 20
 hree or four?
It’s a question being hotly debated as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) prepares to transmit the articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate for trial.
Will it take four Republican senators to buck Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and force the Senate to consider additional testimony and documents? Or could the votes of just three Republicans — bolstered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — do the trick?
The answer to the question hinges on the role of the chief justice, who the Constitution specifies shall “preside” over the trial.
The practical stakes of the debate are huge. McConnell, who seeks the quickest possible exoneration of Trump, has done an impressive job of corralling his caucus. But at least three Republican senators — Mitt Romney (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) — have expressed reservations about stiff-arming testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton and others that would be plainly relevant to the allegations in the articles of impeachment.
Collins on Friday revealed that she is working with a “fairly small group” of senators to ensure that the trial rules allow for witnesses on both sides.
Were these three — or any three — to hold firm to the common-sensical position that the Senate and the American people need to hear the evidence before deciding the case (and were no Democrat to defect, which itself is uncertain), the count would stand at 50-50.
In any other setting besides the trial of the president, a 50-50 Senate tie would be broken by the vice president, who under Senate rules occupies the position of “presiding officer” in an impeachment trial. But the chief justice fills that role in the case of a presidential impeachment, which raises questions about whether he should behave any differently.
Many have argued that the chief justice will play a strictly honorary role at the trial, with no substantive input whatsoever. Under this view, the 50-50 tie would equate to a “no” vote, since the motion failed to gain a majority. Therefore, any effort to add to the evidence would require four maverick Republicans to succeed.
Perhaps no actor in Washington is more eager for Roberts’s role to be strictly honorary than Roberts himself. The trial promises to be an unruly political free-for-all governed by demagoguery and raw will, the polar opposite of the decorous world of reason and precedent that prevails across the street at the Supreme Court.
But Roberts might not have the luxury of that choice. Acknowledging that the sparseness of precedent and the primacy of politics inject an element of uncertainty into all predictions of how the trial will unfold, the idea that he will be a robed dignitary with no substantive role to play is tenuous.
In fact, text, structure and history — all the legal tools of the trade — point strongly toward a substantive role at trial for the chief justice.
The Constitution speaks sparingly to the contours of an impeachment trial but specifies unambiguously that the chief justice must “preside.” The Senate rules, which incorporate this command, make no distinction between the chief justice’s role as presiding officer in this context and the vice president’s in all others. There is no apparent reason the presiding officer’s responsibility would include breaking 50-50 ties in one context but not the others.
A presiding officer presides; that means keeping order and moving proceedings along, at least somewhat analogous to the role of a district court judge. The reason the chief justice and not the vice president plays this role in an impeachment of the president alone is that the vice president would have an automatic conflict of interest. If the presiding officer had no substantive role to play, there would be no conflict. It’s precisely because the presiding officer might make substantive decisions that the chief justice must step in.
Finally, the chief justice played a substantive role in both previous impeachment trials of the president. Most notably, Chief Justice Salmon Chase twice broke ties in the Andrew Johnson trial.
For all these reasons, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told me he “agree[s] strongly that the role is not solely honorific or purely decorative.”
There is one glaring way in which Roberts’s duties will be different from his accustomed judicial role: His rulings are not final. In the Wild West world of the Senate as trier, a majority of the body can always impose its will. And all political precedent indicates McConnell would do exactly that if he felt it served the president’s purposes.
But by the same token, if Roberts casts the 51st vote in favor of, for example, the issuance of a subpoena to Bolton, there is no judicial recourse. (Trump could always try, of course, but the courts would swiftly rebuff him.) And in that event, it’s hard to see where and how the McConnell camp would secure 51 votes to overrule Roberts, whose vote carries an extra measure of stature and authority.
So as the trial looms, we should all be counting to three and in particular keeping eyes (and pressure) on Collins, Murkowski and Romney. They have it in their power to serve up important decisions to Roberts, which as things are developing may be the best the Democrats can hope for.
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While Bernie Sanders Has Always Stood Up for African Americans, Joe Biden Has Repeatedly Let Us Down |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52984"><span class="small">Nina Turner, The State</span></a>
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Thursday, 16 January 2020 14:07 |
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Turner writes: "In choosing between the two Democratic Party candidates atop the polls, African American voters have a consequential decision to make."
Sen. Nina Turner. (photo: Glamour)
While Bernie Sanders Has Always Stood Up for African Americans, Joe Biden Has Repeatedly Let Us Down
By Nina Turner, The State
16 January 20
 n choosing between the two Democratic Party candidates atop the polls, African American voters have a consequential decision to make:
Will our community side with former Vice President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly betrayed black voters to side with Republican lawmakers and undermine our progress? Or will we stand with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and a movement that has been fighting for racial and economic justice since the civil rights era?
This critical choice is illustrated by the key differences between Biden and Sanders – which began at the beginning of their respective careers.
As a recent NBC News headline said of Biden’s time in the Senate: “Biden didn’t just compromise with segregationists. He fought for their cause.” The NBC report quoted the NAACP’s legal director saying that one Biden-backed measure “heaves a brick through the window of school integration.”
And Biden didn’t just vote for bills designed to prevent black students from accessing white schools: in a series of personal letters he actively courted pro-segregation senators to support the legislation
Sanders, by contrast, began his work in politics by organizing civil rights protests. As a college student, he helped lead a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in its push to desegregate housing. Sanders participated in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington and was arrested for protesting rampant school segregation in Chicago. In addition, Sanders has been pushing an education plan that supports local efforts to combat racial segregation.
As a local elected official, Sanders also defied the political establishment by proudly endorsing Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign; Sanders said that Jackson was a candidate “who has done more than any other candidate in living memory to bring together the disenfranchised.”
And the contrast between Biden and Sanders continued during the early 1990s.
Biden facilitated the public degradation of Anita Hill, an esteemed professor already victimized by a powerful man.
Biden also fought alongside right-wing Republicans to pass so-called “welfare reform” that reduced financial support for low-income families. Biden echoed former President Ronald Reagan’s dishonest “welfare queen” language and wrote a column conjuring an ugly stereotype of “welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous.”
In contrast, Sanders vigorously opposed these punitive cuts. “What welfare reform did, in my view,” Sanders said, “was to go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country.”
Similarly Biden worked with segregationist Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond to pass “tough on crime” legislation that targeted black communities with punitive criminal justice policies while promoting mass incarceration and harsh punishment for nonviolent crimes. At one point Biden declared that every “major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the state of Delaware — Joe Biden.”
One of the leading dissenters to Biden’s “tough on crime” agenda was Sanders, who Vox noted was “an early critic of mass incarceration and punitive criminal justice policies.”
The contrast between Biden and Sanders also extends to economic policies.
Biden has repeatedly worked with Republicans to try to slash Social Security even though “almost three-fourths of African American beneficiaries rely on Social Security for at least half their income,” according to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. Sanders, on the other hand, has fought to block those cuts and has proposed expanding Social Security.
Biden did the bidding of his credit card industry donors by helping Republican lawmakers make it more difficult for Americans to reduce their debts in bankruptcy court. At one point, Biden split with then-Sen. Barack Obama and almost every other Senate Democrat to help Republicans kill an amendment to protect medical debtors from predatory lenders.
Biden’s bankruptcy legislation passed in 2005 over the objection of Sanders; 12 years later ProPublica reported that “black people struggling with debts are far less likely than their white peers to gain lasting relief from bankruptcy.”
And today the differences between Biden and Sanders remain stark.
Biden opposes Democratic efforts to legalize marijuana. Sanders, on the other hand, is campaigning not only to legalize marijuana but also to root out institutional racism in our criminal justice system, outlaw private prisons, slash the prison population in half, end cash bail and hold police departments accountable.
Biden is opposing the Democrats’ push for Medicare for All, which would guarantee health care to all Americans and help address the disproportionately high maternal, infant and cancer mortality rates among African Americans. Sanders, on the other hand, is the longtime champion and author of that Medicare for All legislation.
Biden has refused to support Sanders’ bill to make public colleges and universities tuition free and cancel all student debt; this act alone would shrink the racial wealth gap between blacks and whites from 12-to-1 to 5-to-1. Sanders, meanwhile, is committed to closing that gap — and he believes as I do that this is one of the most pressing moral issues of our time.
All of these contrasts underscore the high stakes in this primary election.
By supporting a racial justice champion like Sanders — and his popular progressive agenda — black Americans will forge a multiracial, multigenerational working-class alliance that will generate the high turnout necessary to beat President Donald Trump.
In standing with Sanders over Biden, we will declare that we are not going backward — we are going forward into a future of empowerment and equality for all.
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To Help Australia, Look to Aboriginal Fire Management |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52981"><span class="small">Abaki Beck, YES! Magazine</span></a>
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Thursday, 16 January 2020 14:06 |
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Beck writes: "Since September 2019, Australia has been ravaged by bushfires. You know the statistics: about 18 million acres burned, around 2,000 homes destroyed, and nearly 1 billion animals affected."
A firefighter sprays foam retardant on a back burn ahead of a fire front in the New South Wales town of Jerrawangala on Jan. 1, 2020. (photo: Getty)
To Help Australia, Look to Aboriginal Fire Management
By Abaki Beck, YES! Magazine
16 January 20
 ince September 2019, Australia has been ravaged by bushfires. You know the statistics: about 18 million acres burned, around 2,000 homes destroyed, and nearly 1 billion animals affected. The fires have also affected Aboriginal communities and lands.
On January 3, the small Aboriginal community of Mogo, New South Wales, was destroyed, including the homes of five members of the local Aboriginal Land Council and the Land Council building. In Victoria, the Aboriginal community of Lake Tyer has been on high alert, as the East Gippsland bushfires burn just 20 kilometers away. Indigenous Protected Areas—reserved areas of land managed by local Indigenous people—have been devastated as well. Russell Irving, project coordinator at the Minyumai Indigenous Protected Area in New South Wales, noted in a November statement that, “We and many of our small-scale farmer neighbours are at threat of becoming members of the rapidly growing number of climate refugees in our own country.”
Historically, bushfires in Australia were a lot less common than they are today. Climate change is partially to blame. Temperatures have risen dramatically in Australia over the last century, causing more extreme droughts and unpredictable fire seasons. But the ongoing impacts of colonialism—including poor land management—is also part of the puzzle. For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians managed their environment through controlled burns. These fires continue to shape Australia’s landscape. In the Central Arnhem region in northern Australia, for example, a study found kangaroos were more abundant in areas that had been burned by Aboriginal people, because the grass in burned areas was more nitrogen-rich than grass in non-burned areas.
This intimate relationship with the land was violently interrupted by colonization. When colonizers first arrived in Australia, they took note of the Indigenous peoples’ use of fire. In 1889, British explorer Ernest Giles wrote: “The natives were about, burning, burning, ever burning; one would think they…lived on fire instead of water.”
Knowledge of cultural burning was suppressed through displacement from their homelands, forced assimilation, banning of Indigenous languages, and other practices over centuries. Until 1992, Aboriginal people had extremely limited rights to their own land: Australia had previously operated under the idea that the land was “unowned” before colonization and Indigenous people were not legally recognized as traditional stewards. Today, thanks to decades of activism and lawsuits, Aboriginal Australians control 6.1 million hectares of land. The land reclamation movement has in part focused on revitalizing traditional fire management.
Contemporary revitalization of traditional fire practices began in the 1990s in Cape York, Queensland, with elders Dr. Tomin George and Dr. George Musgrave. In an interview with the podcast Right Country, Right Fire, Tagalaka filmmaker and traditional fire practitioner Victor Steffensen reflected on the beginning of the movement: “Those old people are walking encyclopaedias and you know, they knew how to look after our own country. Yet no one was listening to them, the authorities weren’t listening…and the young people weren’t picking that knowledge up.” So he started to record Dr. George and Dr. Musgrave’s knowledge and educate others. In 2008, they hosted the first national Indigenous fire workshop based on the elders’ knowledge. Though Dr. George and Dr. Musgrave have passed away, activists such as Steffensen continue to hold the fire workshop, educating hundreds of Indigenous Australians and allies through national workshops, community-based trainings, podcasts, and partnering with universities.
Aboriginal fire management, also called cultural burning, involves an intimate relationship to the land. It is not one specific technique, but a localized understanding of what is needed for the environment at the time. If the fire is too hot, it may harm seeds and nutrients in the soil. Cultural burners often avoid burning logs or trees where animals and insects live. While the Aboriginal fire management is proactive, Western-style controlled burning, also called hazard reduction burning, is reactive.
Hazard reduction burning is often done by dropping incendiaries from planes, making it more cost effective, but less controlled. There is growing evidence that this style of burning may not even reduce bushfires, especially in times of extreme drought. A 2015 study in 30 bioregions in Australia found that controlled burns only reduced the amount of land damaged by bushfires in four of the bioregions, but overall, the study concluded, Western-style controlled burning had very little impact.
Cultural burning, on the other hand, strengthens ecosystems. The Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council in New South Wales implemented cultural burning in 2017. In 2018, intense bushfires were in the region, destroying nearly 100 homes and leaving the forest black and bare. Yet six months later, in areas where cultural burning had taken place both before and after the fire, regrowth had already begun. By burning after the fire, traditional fire practitioners were able to prevent invasive species from growing.
As bushfires in Australia continue to increase in intensity, Aboriginal land management—like cultural burning—may be a crucial part of the solution. “All these government departments, environmentalists, national parks, farmers and pastoralists have the best intentions but they all have their different interests,” said Steffensen in a December 17, 2019, interview with Insurance Journal. “Doing it our way on a continent-wide scale would be costly and take up a lot of working hours, but in the long run it could save billions.”
Climate change is a key factor in why these fires are so abrasive. Australia is hotter and drier than it once was. But Western-style land management—and the history of colonization and suppression of Aboriginal land management—has played a role as well.
“It’s our cultural obligation to do these sorts of things,” said Peter Dixon, a cultural burn crew member for the Bega Local Aboriginal Land Council, in an interview with ABC Australia. “And it has been for thousands of years.”
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RSN: Not Bernie, Us. Not Warren, Us. Their Clash Underscores the Need for Grassroots Wisdom. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 16 January 2020 12:57 |
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Solomon writes: "The dismal conflict that erupted this week between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren should never have happened. But now that it has, supporters must provide grassroots leadership to mitigate the dangerous mess."
This week's Democratic debate in Iowa. (photo: AP)
Not Bernie, Us. Not Warren, Us. Their Clash Underscores the Need for Grassroots Wisdom.
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
16 January 20
he dismal conflict that erupted this week between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren should never have happened. But now that it has, supporters must provide grassroots leadership to mitigate the dangerous mess.
The argument that broke out between Warren and Sanders last weekend and escalated in recent days is already history that threatens to foreshadow tragedy. Progressives cannot afford to give any more aid and comfort to the forces behind corporate contenders Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, or the plutocratic $54-billion-man Michael Bloomberg waiting in the wings.
In a sense, this moment calls for Sanders and Warren supporters to be better than their candidates, who’ve descended into an avoidably harsh conflict that hugely benefits corporate power and corporate Democrats — and will do so even more to the extent that it doesn’t subside.
So much is at stake that Sanders and Warren must be called upon to look beyond their own anger, no matter how justified. A demolition derby between the two — or their supporters — won’t resolve who’s right. But it will help the right wing.
No matter how decent, candidates and their campaigns make mistakes, for a range of reasons. The Sanders campaign made one when its talking points for volunteers in Iowa included saying that Warren “is bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.” It was a breach of a de facto nonaggression pact between the two campaigns — a tactical and political error, setting off retaliation from Warren that quickly became asymmetrical.
Warren responded by publicly saying on Sunday: “I was disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his volunteers out to trash me.”
On the same day, Sanders responded: “We have hundreds of employees. Elizabeth Warren has hundreds of employees. And people sometimes say things that they shouldn’t.” And: “Elizabeth Warren is a very good friend of mine. No one is going to trash Elizabeth Warren.”
The clash could have de-escalated at that point, and for a short time it seemed that it might. But then came the anonymously sourced CNN story that Sanders had told Warren at a December 2018 private meeting that a woman couldn’t be elected president. Sanders quickly and categorically denied saying that.
It should have ended there. Warren could have simply said that it was a private meeting and there may have been a misunderstanding. Instead she threw a political grenade at Sanders, stating that he had said a woman could not be elected president.
And then, whether or not she knew that microphones would pick up her words, Warren further escalated the conflict after the debate Tuesday night by walking over to Sanders, refusing to shake his hand (moments after shaking Biden’s hand) and saying: “I think you called me a liar on national TV.”
When CNN, predictably, released the audio on Wednesday night, the situation blew up worse than ever.
As an active Sanders supporter, I had been heartened by the nonaggression pact and frequent mutual support on many substantive issues between Warren and Sanders. While I’m much more aligned with Bernie’s political worldview, I have held Warren in high regard. Not so high now.
But here’s the overarching point: Whatever Sanders and Warren supporters think of each other’s candidate now, there is no plausible pathway forward to the 2020 presidential nomination for either if the conflict festers.
Lost in a volcano of anger from many Bernie supporters is the reality that a tactical coalition with Warren is vital for blocking the nomination of the likes of Biden, Buttigieg and Bloomberg. That’s why BBB are surely elated at what has happened between Warren and Sanders in recent days — and why BBB surely hope that a lot of Sanders supporters declare political war on Warren and vice versa. The sounds of that clash in the weeks ahead would be music to the ears of corporate Democrats.
It’s easier — and maybe more emotionally satisfying — for anger to spin out of control. But this is a tactical situation. If you want Bernie to win, it makes no sense to try to escalate the conflict with Warren.
As the strong Bernie supporter Ilhan Omar wisely tweeted on Wednesday, “Trump wants progressives pitted against each other. Corporate media want progressives pitted against each other. Billionaires want progressives pitted against each other. Pitting progressives against each other weeks before the Iowa Caucus hurts ALL of us.”
And, from Justice Democrats, Waleed Shahid tweeted: “Both a Sanders or Warren presidency would be historic. Progressives should focus on making a case against Biden and Buttigieg in the coming weeks.”
For the sake of humanity and the planet, we need a tactical alliance between the Sanders and Warren campaigns. Defeating corporate Democrats and Donald Trump will require no less.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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