Pence allies say he is covered by the constitutional provision that protects congressional officials from legal proceedings related to their work — language known as the “speech or debate” clause. The clause, Pence allies say, legally binds federal prosecutors from compelling Pence to testify about the central components of Smith’s investigation. If Pence testifies, they say, it could jeopardize the separation of powers that the Constitution seeks to safeguard.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: February 14, 2023 Filed under: just because 10 CommentsHappy Valentine’s Day!!
I’m not a big fan of this holiday, but if you celebrate it, I hope you enjoy the day. Meanwhile, today’s news is the same old same old unloving mess.
I mostly ignored the news yesterday; I’m trying to relax because I’m still recovering from my cold. Finally, at 10PM, I turned on MSNBC only to learn about another school shooting, this time at Michigan State University.
CBS News: 3 students killed, 5 critically wounded in shooting at Michigan State University, authorities say.
Three Michigan State University students were killed and five others were critically wounded in a shooting at the university Monday night, authorities said. The gunman was later found dead in Lansing of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
Law enforcement officials at the university identified the shooter as Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old man with no obvious affiliation to the school. McRae was neither a current nor former student or faculty member at Michigan State, said Chris Rozman, the university’s interim deputy chief of police and public safety.
The suspect was previously sentenced to 18 months in state prison on a weapons charge, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections. Arrest records show he was convicted and ultimately sentenced in November 2019 for possessing a loaded firearm inside a vehicle, which is illegal in Michigan without a concealed carry license. He was discharged in May 2021.
Michigan State Police initially confirmed the death toll on Monday night, announcing that five people were hospitalized with injuries and noting that all were in critical condition. Four of the five students transported to Sparrow Hospital in Lansing underwent surgeries for their injuries overnight, a hospital representative said. The fifth student was immediately admitted to the medical center’s critical care unit, and all five remained in critical condition on Tuesday morning, according to the representative.
Police located McRae’s body in the city of Lansing at around 11:30 p.m. Monday, Rozman said, thanking a caller whose tip led authorities to the suspect.
The shooter left a note that reportedly made a threat against a school in New Jersey. CBS Philadelphia: NJ school closure linked to Michigan State University shooting.
EWING TOWNSHIP, N.J. (CBS) — Ewing Township police say all public and private schools are closed Tuesday due to a threat that was connected to the suspect involved in the mass shooting at Michigan State University.
An investigation into the East Lansing, Michigan shooting led to a possible connection between 43-year-old Anthony McRae and Ewing, New Jersey.
Police say a note was found in McRae’s pocket “indicating a threat to two Ewing Public Schools.”
All five Ewing Township public schools closed Tuesday morning “out of an abundance of caution,” according to police.
There are additional officers from Ewing police and other agencies at public and private schools.
They plan to open the schools again tomorrow.
It’s difficult to know how to react to these shootings that have become almost routine in the U.S. The GOP and the gun lobby are wholly responsible for these tragic events. I can’t imagine why any young person today would vote for a Republican. Here’s a reaction from Detroit Free Press columnist (and mother of a young boy) Nancy Kaffer.
In seven hours, I have to tell my son.
He went to bed at 9 p.m., because he’s 12 and it’s a school night, before I saw the news alerts rolling in: A shooting on Michigan State University’s campus. The shooter still on the loose. One person, reportedly, slain; five at Sparrow Hospital. It’s 11:30 p.m., and I’m watching the news. The dead now number three, and there’s a blurry picture of the shooter on my screen. I hope at least they catch the guy before my son wakes up. At least then I can say it’s over.
I can’t not tell him, not anymore. He has a phone. He has a laptop, required for school. He has friends with phones and laptops and older siblings. I had to tell him about Oxford, in November of 2021; he listened, quietly — he is not, by nature, quiet — and asked: “Are you sending me to school tomorrow?”
His first active shooter drill was kindergarten. I didn’t know. They didn’t have active shooter drills when I was his age. There had been a substitute teacher, clearly as blindsided by the drill as any of her young charges. Administrators used a code name to communicate the actions of the fictional shooter. It made the drill seem real. He came home that day earnestly explaining to me that his class had to hide in the bathroom, because a bad guy had been in the school….
This isn’t the first time; it won’t be the last. I know what I’m supposed to say. I’m meant to be empathetic but matter of fact, to validate his feelings, but make him feel safe. I’m told to watch him for signs of trauma. I have to keep my cool. If I lose it, he will, too.
The children at MSU are older than he is, six or 10 or 12 years; a gulf to him, to me, the blink of an eye. Wasn’t it just yesterday that he took his first steps?
I hope you’ll go read the whole column. What a time to be a child–or a parent. How much longer will we tolerate this horrendous, meaningless violence in this country?
Mike Pence plans to fight the subpoena he received from Jack Smith’s January 6 Grand Jury.
From Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein:
Mike Pence is preparing to resist a grand jury subpoena for testimony about former President Donald Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the former vice president’s thinking.
Pence’s decision to challenge Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request has little to do with executive privilege, the people said. Rather, Pence is set to argue that his former role as president of the Senate — therefore a member of the legislative branch — shields him from certain Justice Department demands.
“He thinks that the ‘speech or debate’ clause is a core protection for Article I, for the legislature,” said one of the two people familiar with Pence’s thinking, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his legal strategy. “He feels it really goes to the heart of some separation of powers issues. He feels duty-bound to maintain that protection, even if it means litigating it.”
Pence’s planned argument comes after an FBI search that followed his attorney’s voluntary report of classified material in his possession last month — drawing him into a thicket of document-handling drama that’s also ensnared Trump and President Joe Biden. While Pence aides say he’s taking this position to defend a separation of powers principle, it will allow him to avoid being seen as cooperating with a probe that is politically damaging to Trump, who remains the leading figure in the Republican Party.
Pence is preparing to launch a presidential campaign against his onetime boss. Aides expect the former vice president to address the subpoena — and his plans to respond it — during a visit to Iowa on Wednesday.
Pence is as delusional as Trump if he thinks he has any chance to win the Republican nomination, much less become president. But he’s not the only delusional Republican hopeful.
From the Washington Post article:
Nikki Haley, who served as U.N. ambassador and governor of South Carolina, announced Tuesday that she is running for president, becoming thefirst major rival to officially challenge Donald Trump for the GOP nomination in 2024.
To say that Haley has “shifted” her position on Trump is a vast understatement. She has been all over the map. She’s a wishy-washy flip flopper. I can’t imagine the GOP base will support her for the nomination.
A tiny bit of news about the mysterious balloons:
Richard Luscombe at The Guardian: ‘Significant’ debris from China spy balloon retrieved, says US military.
The US military has recovered “significant debris” from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down this month, the Pentagon has said, after the White House claimed China had been operating a high-altitude balloon program spying on the US and its allies for many years.
The US Northern Command said in a statement: “Crews have been able to recover significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified as well as large sections of the structure.”
The balloon, shot down off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February, was the first of a series of mysterious objects shot down by the US military over an eight-day period in North American airspace.
However, China’s surveillance program, according to John Kirby, the US national security council spokesperson, dated back to at least the administration of Donald Trump, which he said was oblivious to it….
“We detected it, we tracked it. And we have been carefully studying to learn as much as we can. We know that these PRC [People’s Republic of China] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”
There will be an all-senators classified briefing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning, the office of the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said, and the White House’s office of national intelligence will brief John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, on Wednesday, CNN reported.
Separately in Japan, the Fuji News Network reported on Tuesday that Tokyo had concluded that the object that flew over Japanese waters near the south-western region of Kyushu in January last year was mostly likely a Chinese spy balloon.
I’m going to end with two opinion pieces, one on the GOP and Social Security and the other on the GOP book-banning craze.
Krugman begins by noting the Republicans’ noisy fake outrage when Biden accused them of wanting to “sunset” Social Security and Medicare during his State of the Union speech. Of course “sunset” was exactly the word Rick Scott used in his plan for a future Republican majority in the Senate. Fortunately, they didn’t get one in 2022.
But, of course, many Republicans do want to eviscerate these programs. To believe otherwise requires both willful naïveté and amnesia about 40 years of political history.
First of all, if Republicans had absolutely no desire to make major cuts to America’s main social insurance programs, why would they sunset them — and thus create the risk that they wouldn’t be renewed? As Biden might say, c’mon, man.
And then there’s that historical record. Two things have been true ever since 1980. First, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare every time they thought there might be a political window of opportunity. Second, on each occasion they’ve done exactly what they’re doing now: claiming that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe G.O.P. plans using exactly the same words Republicans themselves used.
So, about that history. It has been widely forgotten, but soon after taking office Ronald Reagan proposed major cuts to Social Security. But he backed down in the face of a political backlash, leading analysts at the Cato Institute to call for a “Leninist” strategy — their word — creating a coalition ready to exploit a future crisis if and when one arrived.
To that end, Cato created the Project on Social Security Privatization, calling for replacing Social Security with individual accounts — which George W. Bush tried to do in 2005. By then, however, Cato had quietly renamed its project; “privatization” polled badly, and Bush insisted that it was a “trick word” used to “scare people.”
So there’s a history here, and there’s a similar history for Medicare. Many people probably recall that Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in 1995. I don’t know how many people realize that Gingrich’s key demand was that President Bill Clinton agree to large cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
After Republicans gained control of the House in 2010, Paul Ryan began pushing for major cuts in spending. One key element was converting Medicare from a system that pays medical bills to a system offering people fixed sums of money to be applied to the purchase of private insurance — that is, vouchers.
Read the rest at the NYT link.
From The Guardian:
A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States. Forty-four states have proposed bans on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, and 18 states have passed them.
Florida’s Stop Woke Act bans the teaching of eight categories of concepts, including concepts that suggest that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex”. Many of the laws also target Nikole Hannah-Jones’s influential 1619 Project.
These laws have already started to take effect. Administrators and teachers have been forced out of their positions on the suspicion of violating these laws, and what has started as a trickle may soon become a flood.
In January, Florida’s board of education banned AP African American studies, on the grounds that it included concepts forbidden by Governor Ron DeSantis’s law, including critical race theory and intersectionality, as well as authors such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Roderick Ferguson, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The College Board chose to remove these authors and subjects from its curriculum, claiming, as it turns out dubiously, that it did so independently of Florida’s pressure.
These laws have been represented by many as a “culture war”. This framing is a dangerous falsification of reality. A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators’ speech are no such thing – unlike a culture war, the GOP’s recent turn has no place in a democracy.
What are the consequences of these laws?
The concepts these laws centrally target include addressing structural racism, intersectionality and critical race theory….
The laws are manifestly incoherent. The failure to teach about structural racism will make Black children born into poverty feel that their parents and grandparents are responsible for their own impoverished position relative to white children, and so will make Black children feel “anguish or other forms of psychological distress” because of “actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race”. The “anguish” and “psychological distress” these laws forbid are only anguish felt by the dominant racial group, white Americans.
In other national contexts, everyone would clearly recognize the problematic nature of laws of this sort. Germany’s teaching of its Nazi past creates clear anguish and guilt in German children (and perhaps for this reason, Germany is the world’s most stable liberal democracy). If the German far right passed laws forbidding schools from teaching about the sins of Nazism, on the grounds that such teaching does in fact quite obviously cause anguish and guilt in German children, the world would not stand for it for one moment. Even Israel’s far-right government strenuously objected when Poland drafted a law that would make it illegal to suggest that Poland had any responsibility for Nazi atrocities on its soil. Why isn’t there greater outcry when such laws are passed to protect the innocence of white Americans?
It is frequently claimed by proponents of such laws that banning discussion of structural racism and intersectionality is freeing schools of indoctrination. And yet indoctrination rarely takes place by allowing the free flow of ideas. Indoctrination instead rather takes places by banning ideas. Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as “freedom from indoctrination” is as Orwellian as politics gets.
Head over to The Guardian to read the whole piece.
That’s it for me today. What are your thoughts? What other stories are you following?
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I want to highlight this story by Michael Kranish about Trump and Kushner profiting after leaving the White House. It came out over the weekend.
There ought to be a law prohibiting this.
We have a crime family with a stench going back to the 1980s.
When they’re planted in the White House, those who know say it’s very likely they have more in debts than fungible assets.
Within a couple of years, they’re getting billions from the likes of the Saudis and GodKnowsWhoElse.
By the Dump’s third year in office, the CIA is having way more unexpected deaths and disappearances of sources.
Once he’s out, it turns out he’s stolen hundreds of classified docs, plenty of whose folders are now empty, and which extend all the way to nuclear secrets.
And yet the entire media and legal establishment keeps trying to pretend that somehow those papers just accidentally got stuck to the bottom of his shoe and it means nothing and none of the other glaring red fire alarms have anything to do with anything.
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
It seems as if the media is having as much difficulty laying down long-term memories as Diane Feinstein.
Honestly. More trouble. Actually a complete inability!
Say what? That’s handy immunity for them.
Sen Feinstein announced she won’t run for re-election in 2024.
One hour later, Feinstein said she hasn’t announced anything and is still thinking about whether to run. She sent a tweet; maybe someone should show it to her.
Oh for…. This is getting beyond embarrassing.
Huh. The WaPo article updated as of 8 pm EST doesn’t add that she’s still considering. Her tweet announcing that she won’t run is still up. BB, where did you see her walk it back?