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Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America's Shadow Wars |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45434"><span class="small">Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Tuesday, 27 November 2018 09:14 |
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Ackerman writes: "The U.S. president inherited a remotely piloted weapon of death from his predecessor."
An unmanned U.S. Predator drone. (photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America's Shadow Wars
By Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast
27 November 18
In his first two years in office, Donald Trump launched 238 drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia—way beyond what the ‘Drone President’ Barack Obama did.
 he U.S. president inherited a remotely piloted weapon of death from his predecessor. In his earliest period in office, he used this lethal robot force promiscuously, sharply escalating attacks on suspected terrorists away from his declared wars. As time went on, his use of drone strikes in those places diminished.
Barack Obama? Well, yes. But a look at available statistics for drone strikes on America’s undeclared battlefield shows that this description also applies to Donald Trump.
In 2009 and 2010, Obama launched 186 drone strikes on Yemen, Somalia, and especially Pakistan. Donald Trump’s drone strikes during his own first two years on the three pivotal undeclared battlefields, however, eclipse Obama’s—but without a corresponding reputation for robot-delivered bloodshed, or even anyone taking much notice. In 2017 and 2018 to date, Trump has launched 238 drone strikes there, according to data provided to The Daily Beast by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and the drone-watchers at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.
Those numbers come with a slew of asterisks. The number of drone strikes on the full-fledged acknowledged battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have, ironically, proven far more difficult to track than those in shadow war zones—and knowledgeable observers like Chris Woods of the UK’s Airwars organization believe that the true center of the drone strikes is found there. Additionally, the death toll from those strikes in shadow war zones, especially of civilians, is at best a rough estimate.
A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined comment. Pentagon officials did not respond to The Daily Beast’s inquiries. But several former U.S. counterterrorism officials and practitioners point to Trump relaxing the standards Obama put in place to authorize a lethal attack in Somalia and likely elsewhere as the wellspring of an explanation.
“The burden of proof on the target was changed to a lesser burden of proof, and so that automatically opens up the aperture when you’re looking at intelligence and you have a probability factor, or a reasonable one, that your target is there,” explained retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who commanded U.S. special operations forces in Africa from April 2015 to June 2017.
Under the Trump administration, the Air Force is spending more on the Hellfire missiles used by armed drones. Hellfire spending in the latter years of Obama administration briefly spiked as the Defense Department stocked up on ammunition to counter the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But even as the wars in Iraq and Syria wind down, the Trump administration has sought to purchase more drone missiles. Air Force budget documents show a 63 percent increase in Hellfire purchases in Trump’s 2017 budget and an another 20 percent increase in the most recent budget request.
A second trend also appears to be at work. The biggest escalation of the drone wars on those three battlefields under Trump came in 2017, his first year in office, followed by a substantial drop in 2018 thus far.
In 2017, Trump presided over an unprecedented 130 drone strikes in Yemen – there were 131, but one of those predated Trump’s inauguration – more than three times that of the previous year, CENTCOM told The Daily Beast. Many of those, according to the Bureau, are attributable to a substantial spike in March and April. With little over a month to go in 2018, the U.S. has launched 36 drone strikes in Yemen, CENTCOM said, nearly as many as the 38 Obama launched in his final year and the first 20 days of 2017.
“We're not able to talk about the frequency or trends of our strikes because of its potential impact on current operations,” a CENTCOM spokesman, Maj. Josh Jacques, told The Daily Beast.
Yemen-watchers offer various explanations. Relaxed strike rules at the beginning of the administration likely ensured the military in Yemen had a wider array of strike-and-raid options. The spring 2017 drone spree coincided with a targeting focus on al Qaeda by the Saudis and Emiratis, who with U.S. support are waging a devastating war on Yemen. Afterward, neither Saudi Arabia nor the United Arab Emirates has prioritized al Qaeda—and their coalition has reportedly cut deals with those fighters against mutual foes in Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement.
In Pakistan, drone strikes against suspected al Qaeda targets declined every year since Obama’s 2010 high-water mark of 128, dropping to three in 2016. Trump launched five in 2017, and only one in 2018, which killed the head of the Pakistani Taliban. But the global influence of al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based old leadership, and their allies, has declined. Pakistan’s leading politician criticizing drone strikes and U.S. counterterrorist efforts, Imran Khan, is now prime minister, and this week Khan forcefully rebuked dismissive remarks from Trump about his country. All of this raises fundamental questions about the future of drone strikes in Pakistan.
But in Somalia, where the administration in 2017 loosened restrictions on drone usage, there doesn’t appear to be much of a drop-off at all in 2018. The Trump administration is still waging a more aggressive drone campaign in the East African country than his predecessor, to minimal attention.
Trump presided over 35 strikes in Somalia in 2017. That’s two and a half times Obama’s 14 in 2016—and it eclipsed, in that single year, the 33 strikes undertaken during Obama’s entire tenure.
Thus far in 2018, the U.S. has launched 32 strikes with a month and a half to go, a U.S. Africa Command spokesperson, John Manley, told The Daily Beast. The most recent “precision strike” occurred on Monday, the command announced Tuesday; Bolduc said the term was “95 percent” likely to be a euphemism for a drone strike.
Manley offered no explanation for the strike figures. “U.S. Africa Command airstrikes conducted in support of the Federal Government of Somalia generally are opportunistic in nature, so it would be difficult to speculate on the rise and fall of the number of strikes conducted over the last two years,” he said.
But a May 2013-era Obama instruction instituted a standard of “near certainty” that a suspected senior terrorist would be present at the site of a proposed strike. Under Trump, at least for Somalia, it dropped to “reasonable certainty,” Bolduc said.
“Near certainty was a higher burden of proof. It required more platforms, different types of intelligence, HUMINT [human informants], SIGINT [surveillance intercepts], FMV [full-motion video], a lot more detail and pattern-of-life” information, Bolduc said. But he added that the Trump administration retained the Obama administration’s standards for ensuring an absence of civilians or undue damage on infrastructure—though human rights advocates have long questioned how robust a protection those standards actually provided.
“If you can say we’re not gonna have any civilian casualties, then the senior leader, a senior general officer, can say ‘OK, take the shot’,” Bolduc said. “And he’s not going to be questioned by the Pentagon or anybody else if later in the assessment the target wasn’t there but we ended up killing 8-10 al Shabaab fighters and lower level leadership.”
By and large, the military presumes that those it kills are fighters. It only investigates claims of civilian casualties after non-government organizations, partner governments, journalists or others raise concerns, Bolduc said: “The only assessment we have is we continue to fly over the objective post-strike to get a sense of the environment from the air.”
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But the drone strikes occur beyond these undeclared battlefields. Chris Woods of Airwars, a leading drone-tracking organization, considers those “undeclared” battlefields to be outliers. The real epicenter of contemporary drone strikes during both the end of the Obama era and the dawn of the Trump era is the acknowledged battlefields of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, where the drones are a component of Trump’s stepped-up airstrike campaigns.
Woods assesses that drone strikes have held at a steady rate from the end of the Obama era and migrated to different—and largely declared—battlefields. “Overall, the U.S. is capable only of a finite number of drone strikes a year, and I've seen no evidence of an overall increase under Trump—only regional variations in strike numbers year on year, as Washington pursues its conflict and counterterrorism goals,” Woods said.
Woods pointed to an astonishingly high, if largely ignored, concentration of drone strikes at the end of Obama’s tenure during a months-long campaign to wrest Sirte, in Libya, from the so-called Islamic State. An Air Force press release last year gave a rare quantification for drone strikes: about 60 percent of the 495 total airstrikes during the campaign, or roughly 297, vastly more than have ever been on offer in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia. At the eleventh hour of his administration, in a little-noticed December 2016 document, Obama elevated Libya to a full-fledged war, more like Iraq or Afghanistan, rather than holding Libya to his own 2013-era drone-strike restrictions.
In comparison, the U.S. launched only seven anti-ISIS strikes in Libya in 2017, Samantha Reho, another spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command, told The Daily Beast. Another five have been fired against ISIS and al Qaeda targets in 2018 thus far.
In other words, when there’s a larger military campaign, the drones join the fight. That happened in the 2011 war that ousted Moammar Gadhafi. Many analysts have argued that Obama’s big drone spike in 2010 in Pakistan had a lot to do with protecting troops in his escalated war in neighboring Afghanistan. And it suggests that Trump’s escalation of general airstrikes on the acknowledged battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are the real focus for the drones.
“In my view, it’s not an issue of strikes intensifying under Trump. It’s about the ever-changing tempo and needs of America’s counterterrorism focus. Where America’s current counterterrorism preoccupations are, that’s where you see concentrations of drone strikes,” said Woods.
Overall airstrikes—manned and unmanned—in Afghanistan during the Trump administration reached nearly 9,600 over the past two years, a total not seen since Obama’s 2010-2011 surge, and 2018 was the single most intense year for the air war ever. June to September 2017 in Iraq and Syria represent an all-time high in that war, as well.
It’s hard to disaggregate drone strikes from those totals; the military has become less and less transparent about how it conducts its operations. In 2016, reporter Oriana Pawlyk obtained Air Force figures indicating that one out of every three sorties over Iraq and Syria was flown by a drone, and a further 17 percent of those drone sorties accounted for strikes. But it’s unknown if those percentages still apply two years later.
Luke Hartig, a former Obama administration Pentagon and White House counterterrorism official, also distinguished between the so-called “hot wars” of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and the shadow wars elsewhere.
“I think the story of targeted strikes and drone warfare outside areas of active hostilities across the Obama administration and the Trump administration is more of continuity than change. You’re still seeing a relatively limited number of strikes as compared to hot war zones,” Hartig said. “The big question to me is around civilian casualties. There are some indications that civilian casualties are up, but there are limitations in the outside non-governmental reporting on those and the administration has not been particularly transparent on breaking down their civilian casualty estimates outside areas of active hostilities.”
From Bolduc’s perspective, the fluctuations in drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen over the past two years paper over a persistent strategic incoherence that risks consigning all the death and sacrifice of a generation of war to futility.
“The big problem with this is that there’s no long-term success with this,” said Bolduc. “I’m not saying it’s not necessary to kill [terrorist] leadership, but it’s necessary to be tied into a strategy that has long-term effects and is balanced with the other things SOF [special operations forces] is doing on the ground. If it’s not, you’re not going to get to peace or good governance or improve the security environment or get to a point where they can start helping the people in these areas. You’re certainly not going to degrade the ideology by doing this.”
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The Decline and Fall of the Zuckerberg Empire |
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Monday, 26 November 2018 14:49 |
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Read writes: "Mark Zuckerberg isn't the first person in human history to draw inspiration from Augustus Caesar, the founder of the Roman Empire, but he's one of a very few for whom the lessons of Augustus's reign have a concrete urgency."
Facebook's empire may be faltering. (image: Nicolas Ortega)
The Decline and Fall of the Zuckerberg Empire
By Max Read, New York Magazine
26 November 18
 ark Zuckerberg isn’t the first person in human history to draw inspiration from Augustus Caesar, the founder of the Roman Empire, but he’s one of a very few for whom the lessons of Augustus’s reign have a concrete urgency. Both men, after all, built international empires before the age of 33. “Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace,” Zuckerberg explained to a New Yorker reporter earlier this year. “What are the trade-offs in that?” Augustus, Zuckerberg explained, “had to do certain things” to ensure the stability of his empire. So too, apparently, does Facebook.
A 6,000-word report published in the New York Times last week disclosed in humiliating detail the lengths to which Facebook has gone to protect its dominance and attack its critics. As various interlocking crises concerning hate speech, misinformation, and data privacy widened, top executives ignored, and then kept secret, evidence that the platform had become a vector for misinformation campaigns by government-backed Russian trolls. The company mounted a shockingly aggressive lobbying and public-relations campaign, which included creating and circulating pro-Facebook blog posts that were functionally indistinguishable from the “coordinated inauthentic content” (that is, fake news) Facebook had pledged to eliminate from its platform. In one particularly galling example, the company hired a political consultancy that spread a conspiracy theory accusing George Soros of funding anti-Facebook protests. Zuckerberg, it seems, had taken the “really harsh approach” to establishing digital hegemony.
Augustus, at least, was a charismatic leader and confident ruler. No one at Facebook comes across in the Times piece as a similarly bold visionary. Not Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s top lobbyist, who encouraged the company to suppress and hold back findings of Russian influence campaigns for fear of alienating Republicans. Not Chuck Schumer, who confronted one of the Senate’s top Facebook critics and told him to figure out how to work with the company. (Schumer’s daughter works for Facebook.) Not Sheryl Sandberg, the adult-in-the-room COO who presided over the entire suspicious and hostile crisis response. And certainly not Zuckerberg, who seems to have been consistently absent — or plainly uninterested — during key meetings about Facebook’s handling of hate speech and misinformation. It’s hard to be a historical visionary hailed for brokering stability by making morally complex decisions if you can’t even be bothered to show up to the Morally Complex Decisions meetings.
Demands for the CEO to abdicate, or to at least step down from his role as chairman of the board, have increased, but Zuckerberg — who controls 60 percent of Facebook’s voting shares — is no more likely to resign than Augustus would have been. As the Wall Street Journal reports, he told company executives earlier this year that Facebook is at war. The trouble is that the war may have already been lost. Beset by stagnant growth, low employee morale, plummeting stock, public outrage, and a bipartisan group of enemies in government, the old Facebook, the ever-expanding, government-ignoring, world-conquering company of only a year or two ago, is gone.
Its own internal surveys bear this out: Facebook was once legendary for the cultish dedication of its employees — reporting on the company was nearly impossible because workers refused to leak — but employee confidence in Facebook’s future, as judged by internal surveys reported on by the Journal, is down 32 percentage points over the past year, to 52 percent. Around the same number of Facebook employees think the company is making the world a better place, down 19 points from this time last year, and employees report that they plan to leave Facebook for new jobs earlier than they had in the past. Scarier even for Facebook is the possibility, for which there is some anecdotal evidence, that it’s no longer a sought-after employer for top computer-science and engineering graduates.
There’s already ample evidence that Facebook is losing its hold on users. In the markets where Facebook is most profitable, its user base is either stagnant, as in North America, or actually shrinking, as in Europe. The company might be able to reassure itself that Instagram — which it wholly owns — is still expanding impressively, but the success of Instagram hasn’t stopped Facebook from getting punished on the stock market.
Facebook blames its attenuating European-user figures not on its faltering public image but on the European Union’s aggressive new privacy law, GDPR. But this raises a more troubling possibility for Facebook: that its continued success is dependent on a soft regulatory touch it can no longer expect from governments. What makes the Times revelations particularly dangerous to Zuckerberg’s empire is that they arrive at a moment when there is actually the political will to challenge its dominance. The fall of Facebook may not come after a long decline but through outside action — slapped with major fines and expensive investigations, chastened and disempowered by a new regulatory regime. “Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself,” Rhode Island representative David Cicilline — who will likely run the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust issues — tweeted last week.
In the Senate, skepticism regarding tech giants is enough of a bipartisan issue that there appears to be room for an agreement on data protection and user privacy. “I’m not looking to regulate [Zuckerberg] half to death,” Republican senator John Kennedy said earlier this year, “but I can tell you this: The issue isn’t going away.” It’s true that some Republican critics seem less concerned about Facebook’s overwhelming power than about the spurious claims of conservatives that their views are being suppressed on the platform, but there is genuine Republican interest in reining in Facebook. Action against big tech companies is a beloved topic of Steve Bannon and his wing of the GOP, and Trump himself, of course, has no particular affection for the company.
Trump’s Department of Justice, in fact, might represent Facebook’s biggest threat. The head of the Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, has been singing the praises of the famous DOJ Microsoft antitrust lawsuit. As Tim Wu, a former FTC adviser and the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the Gilded Age, puts it, “whoever leads the case to break up Facebook will have the political winds and the public at his back.” A new Axios poll supports this assessment. Americans have reversed their opinions about social media over the past year, and a majority of Americans across the political spectrum now believe that social media hurts democracy and that the government isn’t doing enough to regulate it.
It’s the public outrage that should be most worrying to Facebook. Other tech giants have managed to escape the opprobrium directed at Facebook because they have obviously useful services. Amazon delivers things to your house. Google helps you find things online. Apple sells actual objects. Facebook … helps you get into fights? Delivers your old classmates’ political opinions to your brain?
Over the past year, I’ve spent time trying to wean myself off tech mega-platforms, generally with little success. Google’s search, for all my complaints, is still the best way for me to navigate the internet; Amazon is still so unbelievably convenient that the thought of quitting it exhausts me. But I logged out of Facebook more than a year ago and have logged back in fewer than a dozen times since. Checking Facebook had been a daily habit, but it also hadn’t improved my life or made itself necessary. Not many Roman plebes would have said that about the Pax Romana. Some empires fall because they’re invaded from the outside or rot from within. Zuckerberg’s could be the first in history to collapse simply because its citizens logged out.
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FOCUS: Democrats Need a Bold Agenda |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39906"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Monday, 26 November 2018 11:34 |
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Sanders writes: "It is not good enough for Democrats to just be the anti-Trump party."
Sanders at a rally on Capitol Hill for economic and social justice. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Democrats Need a Bold Agenda
By Bernie Sanders, The Washington Post
26 November 18
 s a result of the recent midterm elections, Democrats flipped nearly 40 congressional seats and will control the House of Representatives. Impressively, nearly 6 million more Americans voted for a Democrat to represent them in the House than who did for a Republican. Further, Democrats took over seven governor’s seats and won hundreds of legislative races in statehouses across the country. To a significant degree, the American people rejected President Trump’s agenda benefiting the wealthy and the powerful, as well as his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and religious bigotry.
But let me be clear: It is not good enough for Democrats to just be the anti-Trump party. If they want to keep and expand their majority in the House, take back the Senate and win the White House, Democrats must show the American people that they will aggressively stand up and fight for the working families of this country — black, white, Latino, Asian American or Native American, men and women, gay or straight. This means addressing the crisis of a broken criminal-justice system and reforming inhumane immigration policies. But it also means fighting to expand a middle class that has been disappearing for more than 40 years, reducing inequality in both income and wealth — which has disproportionately hurt African Americans and Hispanics — and aggressively combating climate change, the most urgent threat facing our planet.
Twenty-three years ago, after the Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in four decades, House Republicans led by Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) passed a series of bills through the House that had been on their wish list for years. Their guide was the so-called Contract with America, a radical right-wing agenda full of tax breaks for the wealthy, massive cuts to programs vital to working families, and racist and cruel bills to “reform” welfare and our criminal-justice system.
While I strongly disagree with Gingrich on virtually every issue, the House Democratic leadership should take a page from his playbook by passing a bold agenda through the House. Starting on the first day of the new Congress, the Democratic leadership in the House, supported by their colleagues in the Senate, should be just as bold in passing an agenda that reflects the needs of working Americans — centered on economic, political, social, racial and environmental justice.
Specifically, during the first 100 days, Congress must pass a legislative agenda that includes:
Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour and indexing it to median wage growth thereafter. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage that must be increased to a living wage — at least $15 an hour. This would give more than 40 million Americans a raise and would generate more than $100 billion in higher wages throughout the country.
A path toward Medicare-for-all. The Medicare-for-all bill widely supported in the Senate has a four-year phase-in period on the way to guaranteeing health care for every man, woman and child. Over the first year, it would lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55, cover dental, hearing and vision care for seniors, provide health care to every young person in the United States and lower the cost of prescription drugs.
Bold action to combat climate change. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear we have just 12 years to substantially cut the amount of carbon in our atmosphere, or our planet will suffer irreversible damage. Congress must pass legislation that shifts our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and renewable energy. We can lead the planet in combating climate change and, in the process, create millions of good paying jobs.
Fixing our broken criminal-justice system. We must end the absurdity of the United States having more people in jail than any other country on Earth. We must invest in jobs and education for our young people, not more jails and incarceration.
Comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want to protect the young people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and to move toward comprehensive immigration reform for the more than 11 million people in our country who are undocumented. And that’s exactly what we should do.
Progressive tax reform. At a time of massive and growing inequality in both income and wealth, Congress must pass legislation which requires wealthy people and large corporations to begin paying their fair share of taxes. It is unacceptable that there are large, extremely profitable corporations in this country that do not pay a nickel in federal income taxes.
A $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Every day, Americans drive to work on potholed roads and crumbling bridges, and ride in overcrowded buses and subways. Children struggle to concentrate in overcrowded classrooms. Workers are unable to find affordable housing. The structures that most Americans don’t see are also in disrepair — from spotty broadband and an outdated electric grid, to toxic drinking water and dilapidated levees and dams. Congress should pass a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to address these needs while creating up to 15 million good-paying jobs in the process.
Lowering the price of prescription drugs. Americans pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because, unlike other countries, the United States doesn’t directly regulate the price of medicine. The House should pass legislation to require Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices and allow patients, pharmacists and wholesalers to purchase low-cost prescription drugs from Canada and other countries. It should also pass legislation to make sure that Americans don’t pay more for prescription drugs than citizens do in other major countries.
Making public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reducing student debt. In a highly competitive global economy, we must have the best-educated workers in the world. Every young person in America, regardless of income, must have the opportunity to receive the education they need to get a decent job and make it into the middle class. The House should pass the College for All Act to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reduce student debt.
Expanding Social Security. When 1 out of 5 seniors is trying to get by on less than $13,500 a year, we must expand Social Security so that every American can retire with dignity and security. The House should pass legislation to expand Social Security benefits and extend its solvency for the next 60 years by requiring that the wealthiest Americans — those making more than $250,000 a year — pay their fair share of Social Security taxes.
Here is the bottom line: Instead of us having a Congress that listens to wealthy campaign contributors, it is about time we had a Congress fighting to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just those on top.
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RSN: Dear John Roberts: On the Politicization of the Court |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 26 November 2018 09:43 |
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Ash writes: "It was great to see you take a stand for the independence of the court you lead and, in a broader sense, the American judiciary as a whole."
Chief Justice John Roberts stands with U.S. Supreme Court Justices in the House chamber prior to the 2016 State of the Union address. (photo: Reuters)
Dear John Roberts: On the Politicization of the Court
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
26 November 18
 t was great to see you take a stand for the independence of the court you lead and, in a broader sense, the American judiciary as a whole. You clearly care. It is a small but crucially important thing.
Further, your remarks seemed to rebut and blunt the series of attacks against judges, courts, and the judiciary that President Donald Trump has engaged in since you swore him in and he began speaking in an official capacity.
Your remarks in this regard are sure to bolster the morale of dedicated public servants, including but not limited to federal judges throughout the entire judicial branch. In addition, they should have a profound and positive effect in a material way on the public’s confidence in the independence and impartiality of the courts. You have taken meaningful and badly needed first steps. There is, however, a great deal more that needs to be done.
Donald Trump has an uncanny knack for understanding what people are feeling and repackaging those sentiments in oratory for his own personal gain. No, he is not the only one who has concerns about the appearance of politicization within the courts. His transgression is that he seeks to convert such sentiment to personal advantage.
The catalyst for many Americans’ deep concern that the Supreme Court had become fatally politicized was of course the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision. While that decision on its face did not decide the election in favor of Republican candidate George W. Bush, its subtext, intent, and effect clearly did. The impact on public confidence was magnified by the perception that U.S. Supreme Court had overridden the Supreme Court of the State of Florida’s will that every vote be counted. In addition, the court distanced itself from the decision in its opinion, declaring that it should not serve as precedent for future cases. As you are aware, the decision was 5-4, breaking down along what appeared to be clearly partisan political lines. The substantial undermining of public confidence in the court’s impartiality was as inevitable as the perception that the court had become an ardent political actor.
Eighteen years later, the court is still sharply divided politically. There is of course some consensus, and there are examples of decisions in which the justices act independently; however, on the most significant cases in recent memory, partisan polarization still largely rules the day.
How can the court not be politicized when in truth it is the product of a purely political process? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s denial of a vote for your counterpart on the DC Circuit Court, Chief Judge Merrick Garland – which opened the door to the ascension of Judge, now Justice, Neil Gorsuch – artificially and deliberately gerrymandered the political composition of the court you now lead. Arguably subverting the intent, if not the letter, of the Constitution by removing from the president his right to choose a Supreme Court justice. A right the framers clearly intended him to have.
In considering the political tides that affect the Supreme Court, it should be noted that the current president ran in part on a “guarantee” that he would appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade. He maintains that he kept that promise by appointing both Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. So political objectives are clearly a component of the court’s construct.
The political undercurrents that affect the composition of the court, of course, run deeper and often out of public view. The Federalist Society, the politically conservative judicial advocacy group, had a hand in promoting all five of the so-called conservative members of the current court, including your nomination by the man whose rise to the presidency was facilitated by Bush v. Gore, George W. Bush. To paraphrase Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, “I’m not saying the Justices promoted to the court by the Federalist Society are conservative political actors, I’m saying the Federalist Society thinks they are conservative political actors, and that’s why they worked to get them there.”
The course on which you have embarked is a hopeful and encouraging one. However, to have a lasting effect you must, through your guidance of the court, endeavor to make real the promise of impartiality and objectivity sufficient to lead a healing of the judicial branch through the example of the Supreme Court. That will require sacrifices both personal and, yes, political. Sacrifices you might not otherwise be inclined to make. Such are the demands of leadership.
The public may never see much of that work, as it will occur in the court’s internal deliberations. But actions on the public record and in the public’s view will play perhaps a greater role in restoring the confidence of the American people in the judicial branch of our government.
Take heart. I just saw President Trump on television say that he “liked and respected you.” What could go wrong?
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
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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atch your wallets. The Trump administration 
