Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,088]

41 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Greek socialist income tax is hideous,
More hideous than China.
The biggest percentage is applied to the poor, then the percentage graph flattens out, then goes up again for the very rich.
But percentagewise it is the poor who pay more and the percentage graph looks like a convex parabola where the x-axis goes from poor to rich.

The lowest 40 to 45 per cent of the US population pays no federal income tax.

Many get rebates back (Eearned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credits, etc)

The Republicans blocked the re-upping of the Expanded Child Tax Credit when it ran out recently.

The Republicans are the champions of regressive (meaning it hits the poor the most as a percentage of their income) tax schemes.

They always try (and often succeed, see the massive Trump tax cuts that went overwhelming to the richest Americans and the massive corporations at the expense of the core middle class and the poor) and to enact 'reverse-Robinhood' initiatives (steal form the poor and give to the rich).

Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio

Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.

Report
Mar 27, 2023

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/

Introduction and summary

The need to increase the debt limit¹ has focused attention on the size and trajectory of the federal debt. Long-term projections show² that federal debt as a percentage of the U.S. economy is on a path to grow indefinitely, with increased noninterest spending due to demographic changes such as increasing life expectancy, declining fertility, and decreased immigration and rising health care costs permanently outstripping revenues under projections based on current law. House Republican leaders have used this fact to call for spending cuts,³ but it does not address the true cause of rising debt: Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. In fact, relative to earlier projections, spending is down, not up. But revenues are down significantly more. If not for the Bush tax cuts⁴ and their extensions⁵—as well as the Trump tax cuts⁶—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.

•  

Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues.

 

Fiscal policy in the postwar era

In the 34 years after 1946, the federal debt declined from 106 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to just 25 percent, despite the federal government’s running deficits in 26 of those years. The debt ratio declined for two reasons. First, the government ran a “primary,” or noninterest, surplus in a large majority of those years. This means that, not counting interest payments, the budget was in surplus. Second, the economic growth rate exceeded the Treasury interest rate in a large majority of those years. These two factors—along with the starting debt ratio—are the levers that control debt ratio sustainability.⁷ With a primary balance, the growth rate need only match the Treasury interest rate for the debt ratio to be stable. The presence of both primary surpluses and growth rates that exceeded the Treasury interest rate created significant downward pressure on the debt ratio.⁸

The nation’s fiscal pictured changed in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan enacted the largest tax cut in U.S. history,⁹ reducing revenues by the equivalent of $19 trillion over a decade in today’s terms. Although Congress raised taxes¹⁰ in many of the subsequent years of the Reagan administration to claw back close to half the revenue loss,¹¹ the equivalent of $10 trillion of the president’s 1981 tax cut remained.

These massive tax cuts set off more than a decade of bipartisan efforts to reduce spending and increase revenues, which, along with a booming economy, resulted in budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration.

Debt ratio stabilization and its drivers

In the past few decades,¹² there has been considerable discussion and rethinking of what constitutes an appropriate level of national debt. At this point, many experts argue¹³ that the focus should be on whether debt as a percentage of the economy is increasing or is stable over the long run, not on the amount of debt per se. Understanding the drivers of the increase in the debt as a percentage of the economy is critical to this analysis. While one-time costs, such as those made in response to an economic or public health emergency, increase the level of debt, sometimes by large amounts, they do not increase the rate of growth in the debt ratio over the long run. Debt ratio stability is driven by four components: 1) the size of the primary deficit—the deficit exclusive of interest costs—as a percentage of GDP; 2) the starting ratio of debt to GDP (the debt ratio); 3) the rate of economic growth; and 4) the prevailing interest rate on new Treasury securities.¹⁴ The cause of the upward trajectory of the debt ratio—a series of massive tax cuts that have been extended with bipartisan support—are largely responsible for recent budget shortfalls.

The underlying fiscal result of Clinton-era policy—having, at the very least, a primary surplus and a declining debt ratio—was projected to persist indefinitely until the Bush tax cuts were made permanent. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) last long-term budget outlook before those tax cuts were largely permanently extended¹⁵ projected that revenues would be higher than noninterest spending for each of the 65 years that its extended baseline covered.¹⁶ In other words, right up until before the Bush tax cuts were made permanent, the CBO was projecting that, even with an aging population and ever-growing health care costs, revenues were nonetheless expected to keep up with program costs. However, in the next year, that was no longer the case.¹⁷ As a result of the massive tax cut, the CBO projected that revenues would no longer keep up due to being cut so drastically and, as a result, the debt ratio would rise indefinitely.

Tax cuts changed the fiscal outlook

As shown in recent analysis, this new change has further cemented itself;¹⁸ revenues are now projected to lag significantly behind noninterest spending.¹⁹ Of particular interest is that projected levels of both revenues and noninterest spending have decreased: Both are projected to be lower than in the CBO’s projections issued before the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts. This decrease in noninterest spending is the equivalent of more than $4.5 trillion in lower spending over a decade. But the drop in revenue was three-and-a-half times as large, the equivalent of more than $16 trillion in lower revenues over a decade. Despite the rhetoric of runaway spending, projections of long-term primary spending have decreased, but projections of long-term revenues have decreased vastly more. The United States does not have a high-spending problem; it has a low-tax problem.

The United States is a low-tax country

Compared with other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 32^nd out of 38 in revenue as a percentage of GDP.²⁰ But it’s not just that the United States is near the bottom end of revenue; it is nowhere close even to the average. Over the CBO’s 10-year budget window, the United States will collect $26 trillion less in revenues than it would if its revenue as a percentage of GDP were as high as the average OECD nation. When compared to EU nations, that number rises to $36 trillion. (see Figure 2) In contrast, the $289 billion projected revenue increase in the Inflation Reduction Act²¹ still leaves the United States ranking 32nd out of 38 OECD countries.

• 
•  

Recent large tax cuts

Analytically, the best way to measure why current projections show what they do is to assess what changed relative to older projections. This means looking at what new laws have been enacted. Increases above current levels that were already on track to happen under current law (and thus were already assumed in the baseline) are, by definition, not responsible for the CBO changing its estimate of long-term projections. This means that rising health care and Social Security costs are not responsible for the increased federal debt; the CBO already assumed them, but the CBO also projected sufficient revenue to keep up with rising health care and Social Security costs.²² In fact, the CBO has dramatically lowered the expected growth in health care costs. As this report has already shown, projections of long-term spending, relative to older projections, have significantly decreased and thus have been responsible for decreased, not increased, debt in the CBO’s outlook. It is tax cuts that have caused the dramatic increase in primary deficit projections.

The Bush tax cuts

The George W. Bush administration, empowered by a trifecta in 2001, enacted sweeping tax cuts that will have cost more than $8 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. The tax cuts lowered personal income tax rates across the board, both for labor income and for capital gains, and they significantly increased the untaxed portion of estates and lowered the estate tax rate. These changes were enormously tilted toward the rich and wealthy.²³ While these increases were paired with an expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, the total package gave significantly greater savings to the wealthy and also made the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁴ In 2013, a significant majority of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent with bipartisan support, locking in lower tax rates and deep cuts to the estate tax.²⁵ These changes led to a significantly more regressive tax code than existed before the Bush tax cuts were enacted, and one that brought in vastly less revenue.

The Trump tax cuts

President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill,²⁶ enacted when Republicans gained control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2017, will have cost roughly $1.7 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. These tax cuts reduced personal income tax rates and permanently lowered the corporate tax rate, among other changes. Despite being paired with a further expansion of the child tax credit, the 2017 changes also largely benefited the wealthy, once again making the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁷

Taken together, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and the Trump tax cuts, have cost $10 trillion since their creation and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since then. They are responsible for more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if you exclude the one-time costs for responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession. While these one-time costs increased the level of debt, they did nothing to affect the trajectory of the debt ratio. With or without them, the United States would currently have stable debt, albeit potentially at a higher level, despite rising spending.²⁸ In other words, these legislative changes—the Bush and Trump tax cuts—are responsible for more than 90 percent of the change in the trajectory of the debt ratio to date (see Figure 3) and will grow to be responsible for more than 100 percent of the debt ratio increase in the future. They are thus entirely responsible for the fiscal gap—the magnitude of the reduction in the primary deficit needed to stabilize the debt ratio over the long run.²⁹ The current fiscal gap is roughly 2.4 percent of GDP. Thus, maintaining a stable debt-to-GDP ratio over the long run would require the primary deficit as a percentage of GDP to average 2.4 percent less over the period. Because the costs of the Bush tax cuts, their extensions, and the Trump tax cuts—on average, roughly 3.8 percent of GDP over the period³⁰—exceeds the fiscal gap, without them, all else being equal, debt as a percentage of the economy would decline indefinitely.³¹

Republican plans for future tax cuts

Recent proposals by some Republicans, whose party now controls the House majority, would further reduce revenues. In fact, the first bill passed in the 118th Congress, which was introduced by Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) and passed with only Republican votes,³² would rescind all unobligated portions of the $80 billion in funding for the IRS that was provided in the Inflation Reduction Act.³³ The Inflation Reduction Act funding for the IRS is projected to pay for itself several times over through increased enforcement of taxes already owed by the wealthy and by large corporations; the Office of Management and Budget estimated that this funding would raise more than $440 billion over the decade.³⁴

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) has also introduced legislation to make permanent President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts,³⁵ at a cost of roughly $2.6 trillion over the next decade.

Conclusion

A series of massive, permanent tax cuts have created large federal budget primary shortfalls and continue to exert upward pressure on the debt ratio. In other words, the current fiscal gap—the growing debt as a percentage of the economy—stems from legislation that cut taxes, disproportionately for the very rich. While it is true that the Great Recession and legislation to fight it, along with the costs of responding to the health and economic effects of COVID-19, pushed the level of debt higher, these costs were temporary and did not change the trajectory of the debt ratio. If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

[Vesper 30,088]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-30-what-will-you-do-trump-wins/

Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign event at Nassau Coliseum, September 18, 2024, in Uniondale, New York.

 

 

What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?

Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?

What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?

Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.

What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?

LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.

They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.

Do you let them in or do you refuse? Do you tell them they can arrest you if they want?

What if you work in the North Carolina legislature, and your boss hands you a document to shred? It shows him to have broken the law. Given that the same budget provision lets any legislator unilaterally decide whether to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of” any public record, what is your choice?

A BREWPUB IN A WISCONSIN NORTHWOODS TOWN falls afoul of the local right-wing power structure. The owner is an outspoken progressive with a political action committee committed to electing Democrats. He called the publisher of the town newspaper names, so the publisher sues him, in a state without a statute to protect the innocent against nuisance lawsuits, because the far-right-controlled state legislature values such suits as a weapon to preserve the state’s authoritarian power structure.

An elected judge, a member of that Republican power structure, refuses to dismiss the case, even though it is plainly meritless. A slick out-of-town lawyer being groomed by that power structure for higher office deposes the restaurateur, asking him to name the mother of his child born 15 years ago out of wedlock, a question he has no legal option but to answer. They are upping the stakes, forcing him to reveal embarrassing information about his private life that the newspaper can use to humiliate him, because their first tactic, bleeding him dry financially with frivolous lawsuits, is thwarted when they learn his insurance company is paying for his defense.

Also, in apparent coordination with this legal harassment campaign, county zoning officials demand the man pave his driveway before the opening weekend of the tourist season, though there is no time to get a permit, and no law requiring paved driveways. They ban his beer garden from allowing outdoor seating. They are determined to make him understand that they will never give up until their ideological enemy is drummed out of town.

That’s what is happening in Oneida County, Wisconsin. If something like it happens in the town where your family’s weekend cabin is: What would you do?

WHAT IF YOU ARE IN THE ARMY, and are ordered to the border to transport children to deportation camps? Or shoot peaceful protesters?

What if you are a law enforcement officer ordered to arrest more Black people by a city administration that fears federal intervention should the police fall below a certain quota of minority arrests? After all, Project 2025 recommends that local officials face “legal action” if they “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions,” and refuse to arrest “those who … actually commit crimes.”

What will you do if you are a federal prison guard shipped from Texas to police a protest in some faraway city, and are ordered not to identify yourself, nor wear any identifying badge?

Or if you are a federal bureaucrat, and ordered not to authorize spending for a highway that Congress requires by law that you spend, because the president wants to punish the local congressman, the better to “crush the deep state”?

Or if you are a university administrator, ordered to bulldoze a religious structure: What will you do?

HOW ABOUT IF YOU’RE A WORKER BEE in the office of a Republican prosecutor who follows the call of Stephen Miller after Donald Trump’s criminal conviction to use “[e]very facet of Republican Party politics and power” to “go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat those Communists”? Your boss presents you his draft of a frivolous indictment of a Democratic officeholder, say for some fantastical accusation of supposed “electoral fraud.” He asks you to draft the indictment. What do you do?

Or maybe you are an IRS auditor, ordered to pick through the tax returns of a White House critic; a State Department bureaucrat ordered to cancel the passport of a White House critic; an NSA technician ordered to listen in on the conversations of a White House critic; a CIA officer harboring suspicions that evidence smearing a family member of a prominent Democrat may be the product of a foreign disinformation campaign that has not been investigated for political reasons.

In all of these cases, your civil service job classification has been moved to “Schedule F.” You serve at the pleasure of the president now.

What will you do?

DONALD TRUMP SAID, BEFORE A JEWISH AUDIENCE this past September 19, that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with his loss, if he loses. Let’s say Donald Trump loses. You are a rabbi leading a congregation with prominent Trump supporters among its members. Now, for the Sabbath after the election, you have a sermon to write, which some of those members will be present to hear. Meanwhile, strange, scary men have been seen lurking about the grounds.

What do you say?

You work in the National Security Agency and hear the president offer a quid pro quo to a foreign leader in exchange for crushing a political rival. Do you go public with what you know? And if you do, and the death threats get hairy, do you accede to the pleading of your spouse to leave the country for your family’s safety, or do you defiantly stay put?

You are walking down the street when people assault a trans person only hours after the president of the United States explains matter-of-factly that “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” Or you see attacks on a couple speaking Spanish, or on a passerby who calls out someone’s MAGA hat. In each case, there are more of them than there are of you, and no cops in sight—or the cops are on the side of the thugs. What do you do?

You are a magazine publisher, and federal agents raid your office. Acting on the orders of CIA director Kash Patel, who has promised, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” and that “we will go out and find the conspirator not just in government, but in the media” who abetted the crime of letting Biden be inaugurated. What do you do?

You are a columnist at a newspaper owned by a billionaire with many government contracts who chooses not to endorse the candidate for president who is not a fascist. You have made your reputation, ever since the 1970s, as a scourge against “tyranny” and “appeasement.” What do you do?

Your professor, on a temporary work visa, is seized for deportation as a “Marxist.” What do you do?

Your kid’s high school history teacher is fired for teaching students about slavery. What do you do?

Your pacifist son is forced to take the military entrance exam. What do you do?

You see someone set fire to a ballot drop box. You have just enough time, maybe, to pull out the contents, though perhaps at the risk of third-degree burns. What do you do?

You’re in the National Guard, and you hear someone in your unit fantasize about gunning down kids at the Jewish religious school where he works as a security guard, and another reply that he’d like to pilot a plane into the factory where they make the beer that featured a trans spokesperson. Do you drop the dime?

By the way, your unit is about to be federalized to move in on a New Jersey sanctuary city and bust down doors in Baghdad-style house-to-house raids because the migrants living there are “not civilians.” Do you follow orders, or do you risk the stockade?

Or you are a National Guardsman in Texas, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, draws the line against your governor’s interpretation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, claiming that because refugees from Venezuela “actually invaded” that state, literal war can be waged against these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But your heart sinks when the governor acts anyway, replying with a piece of apocrypha credited to President Andrew Jackson: The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it. What’s your decision?

Or the Supreme Court goes a different way: You are a clerk for a right-wing federal judge, an uncontroversial stepping stone for young lawyers on the make whatever their own ideology. You’re asked to draft an opinion that generals can no more be disallowed from mowing down women and children wading across the Rio Grande with machine guns than they could prevent a baby’s testicles being crushed, should the president of the United States wish it so. Do you write it?

Your wife is a teacher, and her heart sinks too when the governor says the same thing in the face of a Supreme Court ruling upholding a 1982 precedent that states cannot deny students free public education on account of immigration status. Let migrants in her kindergarten classroom, she’s told, and she’ll be fired. How do you advise her?

Or, hell, you just drive a bus for a living, and your company has been hired to fill a bus with those selfsame “invaders,” drive them across the country, then dump them out in a parking lot—right next to the contents of the vehicle’s septic tank. Do you start the engine?

Or consider the scenario related to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent by a senior Department of Labor official: evaluating a proposed regulation for a federal safety standard protecting workers in outdoor jobs from the increasingly prevalent risk of fatalities from heatstroke; “loyalists installed in key positions could easily ensure that quality science on the impact of heat on workers is ignored or downplayed during later stages of the rulemaking process. Meanwhile, career government officials—suddenly more vulnerable to firing—would surely hesitate to challenge or expose political appointees who are manipulating the process.”

Say that career official is you. Do you risk your job? Or do you choose complicity?

Donald Trump is elected president.

What are you prepared to do?

[cosmicway 1,333]

47 minutes ago, Vesper said:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-30-what-will-you-do-trump-wins/

Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign event at Nassau Coliseum, September 18, 2024, in Uniondale, New York.

 

 

What will you do if men in uniforms arrive in your neighborhood, and an immigrant neighbor gets a knock on the door and is led away in handcuffs?

Or if the uniforms are not police uniforms, and there is not even a knock?

What if the knock is for your daughter, and they’re coming for her because of a pill that she took? Will you open the door?

Or if your teenage granddaughter, alone and afraid, calls you and begs you to drive her to a state where abortion is legal? Your governor has signed a bill making such “abortion trafficking” illegal, stipulating a penalty of 15 years.

What will you do if you’re called to serve on the jury hearing the grandmother’s case? She is guilty beyond a hint of a reasonable doubt; no way around that. Do you vote to convict her, or do you hold out against 11 of your peers?

LET’S SAY YOU ARE AN ATTORNEY in North Carolina, working out of your home. You sometimes serve as a court-appointed lawyer. Mysterious figures from something called “Gov Ops” appear at your door and claim power to rifle through your files without a warrant or any deference to attorney-client privilege.

They do not say what they are looking for. It could be public records proving government malfeasance, or private medical records of a client seeking an abortion, or communications involving legislative redistricting, or anything else they want to take. This is all because of a provision snuck into the state budget by the Republican legislative leadership that authorizes this new secret police force to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who does work for the state. You are also advised that if you say anything about this raid to anyone, you will be breaking the law.

Do you let them in or do you refuse? Do you tell them they can arrest you if they want?

What if you work in the North Carolina legislature, and your boss hands you a document to shred? It shows him to have broken the law. Given that the same budget provision lets any legislator unilaterally decide whether to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of” any public record, what is your choice?

A BREWPUB IN A WISCONSIN NORTHWOODS TOWN falls afoul of the local right-wing power structure. The owner is an outspoken progressive with a political action committee committed to electing Democrats. He called the publisher of the town newspaper names, so the publisher sues him, in a state without a statute to protect the innocent against nuisance lawsuits, because the far-right-controlled state legislature values such suits as a weapon to preserve the state’s authoritarian power structure.

An elected judge, a member of that Republican power structure, refuses to dismiss the case, even though it is plainly meritless. A slick out-of-town lawyer being groomed by that power structure for higher office deposes the restaurateur, asking him to name the mother of his child born 15 years ago out of wedlock, a question he has no legal option but to answer. They are upping the stakes, forcing him to reveal embarrassing information about his private life that the newspaper can use to humiliate him, because their first tactic, bleeding him dry financially with frivolous lawsuits, is thwarted when they learn his insurance company is paying for his defense.

Also, in apparent coordination with this legal harassment campaign, county zoning officials demand the man pave his driveway before the opening weekend of the tourist season, though there is no time to get a permit, and no law requiring paved driveways. They ban his beer garden from allowing outdoor seating. They are determined to make him understand that they will never give up until their ideological enemy is drummed out of town.

That’s what is happening in Oneida County, Wisconsin. If something like it happens in the town where your family’s weekend cabin is: What would you do?

WHAT IF YOU ARE IN THE ARMY, and are ordered to the border to transport children to deportation camps? Or shoot peaceful protesters?

What if you are a law enforcement officer ordered to arrest more Black people by a city administration that fears federal intervention should the police fall below a certain quota of minority arrests? After all, Project 2025 recommends that local officials face “legal action” if they “deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions,” and refuse to arrest “those who … actually commit crimes.”

What will you do if you are a federal prison guard shipped from Texas to police a protest in some faraway city, and are ordered not to identify yourself, nor wear any identifying badge?

Or if you are a federal bureaucrat, and ordered not to authorize spending for a highway that Congress requires by law that you spend, because the president wants to punish the local congressman, the better to “crush the deep state”?

Or if you are a university administrator, ordered to bulldoze a religious structure: What will you do?

HOW ABOUT IF YOU’RE A WORKER BEE in the office of a Republican prosecutor who follows the call of Stephen Miller after Donald Trump’s criminal conviction to use “[e]very facet of Republican Party politics and power” to “go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat those Communists”? Your boss presents you his draft of a frivolous indictment of a Democratic officeholder, say for some fantastical accusation of supposed “electoral fraud.” He asks you to draft the indictment. What do you do?

Or maybe you are an IRS auditor, ordered to pick through the tax returns of a White House critic; a State Department bureaucrat ordered to cancel the passport of a White House critic; an NSA technician ordered to listen in on the conversations of a White House critic; a CIA officer harboring suspicions that evidence smearing a family member of a prominent Democrat may be the product of a foreign disinformation campaign that has not been investigated for political reasons.

In all of these cases, your civil service job classification has been moved to “Schedule F.” You serve at the pleasure of the president now.

What will you do?

DONALD TRUMP SAID, BEFORE A JEWISH AUDIENCE this past September 19, that “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with his loss, if he loses. Let’s say Donald Trump loses. You are a rabbi leading a congregation with prominent Trump supporters among its members. Now, for the Sabbath after the election, you have a sermon to write, which some of those members will be present to hear. Meanwhile, strange, scary men have been seen lurking about the grounds.

What do you say?

You work in the National Security Agency and hear the president offer a quid pro quo to a foreign leader in exchange for crushing a political rival. Do you go public with what you know? And if you do, and the death threats get hairy, do you accede to the pleading of your spouse to leave the country for your family’s safety, or do you defiantly stay put?

You are walking down the street when people assault a trans person only hours after the president of the United States explains matter-of-factly that “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” Or you see attacks on a couple speaking Spanish, or on a passerby who calls out someone’s MAGA hat. In each case, there are more of them than there are of you, and no cops in sight—or the cops are on the side of the thugs. What do you do?

You are a magazine publisher, and federal agents raid your office. Acting on the orders of CIA director Kash Patel, who has promised, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” and that “we will go out and find the conspirator not just in government, but in the media” who abetted the crime of letting Biden be inaugurated. What do you do?

You are a columnist at a newspaper owned by a billionaire with many government contracts who chooses not to endorse the candidate for president who is not a fascist. You have made your reputation, ever since the 1970s, as a scourge against “tyranny” and “appeasement.” What do you do?

Your professor, on a temporary work visa, is seized for deportation as a “Marxist.” What do you do?

Your kid’s high school history teacher is fired for teaching students about slavery. What do you do?

Your pacifist son is forced to take the military entrance exam. What do you do?

You see someone set fire to a ballot drop box. You have just enough time, maybe, to pull out the contents, though perhaps at the risk of third-degree burns. What do you do?

You’re in the National Guard, and you hear someone in your unit fantasize about gunning down kids at the Jewish religious school where he works as a security guard, and another reply that he’d like to pilot a plane into the factory where they make the beer that featured a trans spokesperson. Do you drop the dime?

By the way, your unit is about to be federalized to move in on a New Jersey sanctuary city and bust down doors in Baghdad-style house-to-house raids because the migrants living there are “not civilians.” Do you follow orders, or do you risk the stockade?

Or you are a National Guardsman in Texas, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, draws the line against your governor’s interpretation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, claiming that because refugees from Venezuela “actually invaded” that state, literal war can be waged against these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But your heart sinks when the governor acts anyway, replying with a piece of apocrypha credited to President Andrew Jackson: The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it. What’s your decision?

Or the Supreme Court goes a different way: You are a clerk for a right-wing federal judge, an uncontroversial stepping stone for young lawyers on the make whatever their own ideology. You’re asked to draft an opinion that generals can no more be disallowed from mowing down women and children wading across the Rio Grande with machine guns than they could prevent a baby’s testicles being crushed, should the president of the United States wish it so. Do you write it?

Your wife is a teacher, and her heart sinks too when the governor says the same thing in the face of a Supreme Court ruling upholding a 1982 precedent that states cannot deny students free public education on account of immigration status. Let migrants in her kindergarten classroom, she’s told, and she’ll be fired. How do you advise her?

Or, hell, you just drive a bus for a living, and your company has been hired to fill a bus with those selfsame “invaders,” drive them across the country, then dump them out in a parking lot—right next to the contents of the vehicle’s septic tank. Do you start the engine?

Or consider the scenario related to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent by a senior Department of Labor official: evaluating a proposed regulation for a federal safety standard protecting workers in outdoor jobs from the increasingly prevalent risk of fatalities from heatstroke; “loyalists installed in key positions could easily ensure that quality science on the impact of heat on workers is ignored or downplayed during later stages of the rulemaking process. Meanwhile, career government officials—suddenly more vulnerable to firing—would surely hesitate to challenge or expose political appointees who are manipulating the process.”

Say that career official is you. Do you risk your job? Or do you choose complicity?

Donald Trump is elected president.

What are you prepared to do?

USA has never been that socialist.

 

56 minutes ago, Vesper said:

The lowest 40 to 45 per cent of the US population pays no federal income tax.

Many get rebates back (Eearned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credits, etc)

The Republicans blocked the re-upping of the Expanded Child Tax Credit when it ran out recently.

The Republicans are the champions of regressive (meaning it hits the poor the most as a percentage of their income) tax schemes.

They always try (and often succeed, see the massive Trump tax cuts that went overwhelming to the richest Americans and the massive corporations at the expense of the core middle class and the poor) and to enact 'reverse-Robinhood' initiatives (steal form the poor and give to the rich).

Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio

Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.

Report
Mar 27, 2023

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-responsible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/

Introduction and summary

The need to increase the debt limit¹ has focused attention on the size and trajectory of the federal debt. Long-term projections show² that federal debt as a percentage of the U.S. economy is on a path to grow indefinitely, with increased noninterest spending due to demographic changes such as increasing life expectancy, declining fertility, and decreased immigration and rising health care costs permanently outstripping revenues under projections based on current law. House Republican leaders have used this fact to call for spending cuts,³ but it does not address the true cause of rising debt: Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. In fact, relative to earlier projections, spending is down, not up. But revenues are down significantly more. If not for the Bush tax cuts⁴ and their extensions⁵—as well as the Trump tax cuts⁶—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.

•  

Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues.

 

Fiscal policy in the postwar era

In the 34 years after 1946, the federal debt declined from 106 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to just 25 percent, despite the federal government’s running deficits in 26 of those years. The debt ratio declined for two reasons. First, the government ran a “primary,” or noninterest, surplus in a large majority of those years. This means that, not counting interest payments, the budget was in surplus. Second, the economic growth rate exceeded the Treasury interest rate in a large majority of those years. These two factors—along with the starting debt ratio—are the levers that control debt ratio sustainability.⁷ With a primary balance, the growth rate need only match the Treasury interest rate for the debt ratio to be stable. The presence of both primary surpluses and growth rates that exceeded the Treasury interest rate created significant downward pressure on the debt ratio.⁸

The nation’s fiscal pictured changed in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan enacted the largest tax cut in U.S. history,⁹ reducing revenues by the equivalent of $19 trillion over a decade in today’s terms. Although Congress raised taxes¹⁰ in many of the subsequent years of the Reagan administration to claw back close to half the revenue loss,¹¹ the equivalent of $10 trillion of the president’s 1981 tax cut remained.

These massive tax cuts set off more than a decade of bipartisan efforts to reduce spending and increase revenues, which, along with a booming economy, resulted in budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration.

Debt ratio stabilization and its drivers

In the past few decades,¹² there has been considerable discussion and rethinking of what constitutes an appropriate level of national debt. At this point, many experts argue¹³ that the focus should be on whether debt as a percentage of the economy is increasing or is stable over the long run, not on the amount of debt per se. Understanding the drivers of the increase in the debt as a percentage of the economy is critical to this analysis. While one-time costs, such as those made in response to an economic or public health emergency, increase the level of debt, sometimes by large amounts, they do not increase the rate of growth in the debt ratio over the long run. Debt ratio stability is driven by four components: 1) the size of the primary deficit—the deficit exclusive of interest costs—as a percentage of GDP; 2) the starting ratio of debt to GDP (the debt ratio); 3) the rate of economic growth; and 4) the prevailing interest rate on new Treasury securities.¹⁴ The cause of the upward trajectory of the debt ratio—a series of massive tax cuts that have been extended with bipartisan support—are largely responsible for recent budget shortfalls.

The underlying fiscal result of Clinton-era policy—having, at the very least, a primary surplus and a declining debt ratio—was projected to persist indefinitely until the Bush tax cuts were made permanent. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) last long-term budget outlook before those tax cuts were largely permanently extended¹⁵ projected that revenues would be higher than noninterest spending for each of the 65 years that its extended baseline covered.¹⁶ In other words, right up until before the Bush tax cuts were made permanent, the CBO was projecting that, even with an aging population and ever-growing health care costs, revenues were nonetheless expected to keep up with program costs. However, in the next year, that was no longer the case.¹⁷ As a result of the massive tax cut, the CBO projected that revenues would no longer keep up due to being cut so drastically and, as a result, the debt ratio would rise indefinitely.

Tax cuts changed the fiscal outlook

As shown in recent analysis, this new change has further cemented itself;¹⁸ revenues are now projected to lag significantly behind noninterest spending.¹⁹ Of particular interest is that projected levels of both revenues and noninterest spending have decreased: Both are projected to be lower than in the CBO’s projections issued before the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts. This decrease in noninterest spending is the equivalent of more than $4.5 trillion in lower spending over a decade. But the drop in revenue was three-and-a-half times as large, the equivalent of more than $16 trillion in lower revenues over a decade. Despite the rhetoric of runaway spending, projections of long-term primary spending have decreased, but projections of long-term revenues have decreased vastly more. The United States does not have a high-spending problem; it has a low-tax problem.

The United States is a low-tax country

Compared with other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 32^nd out of 38 in revenue as a percentage of GDP.²⁰ But it’s not just that the United States is near the bottom end of revenue; it is nowhere close even to the average. Over the CBO’s 10-year budget window, the United States will collect $26 trillion less in revenues than it would if its revenue as a percentage of GDP were as high as the average OECD nation. When compared to EU nations, that number rises to $36 trillion. (see Figure 2) In contrast, the $289 billion projected revenue increase in the Inflation Reduction Act²¹ still leaves the United States ranking 32nd out of 38 OECD countries.

• 
•  

Recent large tax cuts

Analytically, the best way to measure why current projections show what they do is to assess what changed relative to older projections. This means looking at what new laws have been enacted. Increases above current levels that were already on track to happen under current law (and thus were already assumed in the baseline) are, by definition, not responsible for the CBO changing its estimate of long-term projections. This means that rising health care and Social Security costs are not responsible for the increased federal debt; the CBO already assumed them, but the CBO also projected sufficient revenue to keep up with rising health care and Social Security costs.²² In fact, the CBO has dramatically lowered the expected growth in health care costs. As this report has already shown, projections of long-term spending, relative to older projections, have significantly decreased and thus have been responsible for decreased, not increased, debt in the CBO’s outlook. It is tax cuts that have caused the dramatic increase in primary deficit projections.

The Bush tax cuts

The George W. Bush administration, empowered by a trifecta in 2001, enacted sweeping tax cuts that will have cost more than $8 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. The tax cuts lowered personal income tax rates across the board, both for labor income and for capital gains, and they significantly increased the untaxed portion of estates and lowered the estate tax rate. These changes were enormously tilted toward the rich and wealthy.²³ While these increases were paired with an expansion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, the total package gave significantly greater savings to the wealthy and also made the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁴ In 2013, a significant majority of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent with bipartisan support, locking in lower tax rates and deep cuts to the estate tax.²⁵ These changes led to a significantly more regressive tax code than existed before the Bush tax cuts were enacted, and one that brought in vastly less revenue.

The Trump tax cuts

President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill,²⁶ enacted when Republicans gained control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2017, will have cost roughly $1.7 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2023. These tax cuts reduced personal income tax rates and permanently lowered the corporate tax rate, among other changes. Despite being paired with a further expansion of the child tax credit, the 2017 changes also largely benefited the wealthy, once again making the U.S. tax code significantly more regressive.²⁷

Taken together, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and the Trump tax cuts, have cost $10 trillion since their creation and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since then. They are responsible for more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if you exclude the one-time costs for responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession. While these one-time costs increased the level of debt, they did nothing to affect the trajectory of the debt ratio. With or without them, the United States would currently have stable debt, albeit potentially at a higher level, despite rising spending.²⁸ In other words, these legislative changes—the Bush and Trump tax cuts—are responsible for more than 90 percent of the change in the trajectory of the debt ratio to date (see Figure 3) and will grow to be responsible for more than 100 percent of the debt ratio increase in the future. They are thus entirely responsible for the fiscal gap—the magnitude of the reduction in the primary deficit needed to stabilize the debt ratio over the long run.²⁹ The current fiscal gap is roughly 2.4 percent of GDP. Thus, maintaining a stable debt-to-GDP ratio over the long run would require the primary deficit as a percentage of GDP to average 2.4 percent less over the period. Because the costs of the Bush tax cuts, their extensions, and the Trump tax cuts—on average, roughly 3.8 percent of GDP over the period³⁰—exceeds the fiscal gap, without them, all else being equal, debt as a percentage of the economy would decline indefinitely.³¹

Republican plans for future tax cuts

Recent proposals by some Republicans, whose party now controls the House majority, would further reduce revenues. In fact, the first bill passed in the 118th Congress, which was introduced by Rep. Adrian Smith (R-NE) and passed with only Republican votes,³² would rescind all unobligated portions of the $80 billion in funding for the IRS that was provided in the Inflation Reduction Act.³³ The Inflation Reduction Act funding for the IRS is projected to pay for itself several times over through increased enforcement of taxes already owed by the wealthy and by large corporations; the Office of Management and Budget estimated that this funding would raise more than $440 billion over the decade.³⁴

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) has also introduced legislation to make permanent President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts,³⁵ at a cost of roughly $2.6 trillion over the next decade.

Conclusion

A series of massive, permanent tax cuts have created large federal budget primary shortfalls and continue to exert upward pressure on the debt ratio. In other words, the current fiscal gap—the growing debt as a percentage of the economy—stems from legislation that cut taxes, disproportionately for the very rich. While it is true that the Great Recession and legislation to fight it, along with the costs of responding to the health and economic effects of COVID-19, pushed the level of debt higher, these costs were temporary and did not change the trajectory of the debt ratio. If Congress wants to decrease deficits, it should look first toward reversing tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy, which were responsible for the United States’ current fiscal outlook.

USA has never been that socialist.

[Vesper 30,088]

19 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

USA has never been that socialist.

 

USA has never been that socialist.

that?

it has never been socialist

it has some social democratic programmes (always under attack by the Republicans)

but it is hyper-capitalist

the wealth transfers, are on balance, ( especially starting in the 60s and 70s, and then exploding 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s), taken from the broad base of low net wealth citizens and pushed up to a a very small number of ultra rich people.

 

the minimum net worth (so what it takes to qualify) of the top 1% of US households is roughly $13.7 million (from data released over a year ago by the US Federal Reserve, it is very likely higher now)

in the top 0.1 percent, the average household had wealth of more than $1.52 billion (as of 18 months ago, Q2 2023, so it is higher now, likely close to or even over $2 billion)

 

[robsblubot 3,595]

🤦‍♂️Biden had one job: shut the fuck up. And then he goes and repeats the disastrous remark from Hilary Clinton.

BTW, "reluctant Trump voters" for me were always Trump voters, however article or polls want to paint them.

[cosmicway 1,333]

19 minutes ago, Vesper said:

that?

it has never been socialist

it has some social democratic programmes (always under attack by the Republicans)

but it is hyper-capitalist

the wealth transfers, are on balance, ( especially starting in the 60s and 70s, and then exploding 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s), taken from the broad base of low net wealth citizens and pushed up to a a very small number of ultra rich people.

 

the minimum net worth (so what it takes to qualify) of the top 1% of US households is roughly $13.7 million (from data released over a year ago by the US Federal Reserve, it is very likely higher now)

in the top 0.1 percent, the average household had wealth of more than $1.52 billion (as of 18 months ago, Q2 2023, so it is higher now, likely close to or even over $2 billion)

 

Anyway.
Greek socialism is represented by Eva Kailis (the crib girl).
I went to a private hospital few years ago. Looked like a three star hotel. The doctor while taking my blood sample noticed I was wearing a Chelsea covidmask so to make me feel happy he asked about Chelsea's prospects to win the CL under Tuchel.
I said "we may just snatch it".
Last year in state hospital half of them stuff were rude and suspicious the other half were suspicious and rude.
They did n't even tell me what to do for the blood testing to be conducted properly.
That's why Americans don't like.
 

[Vesper 30,088]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Anyway.
Greek socialism is represented by Eva Kailis (the crib girl).

your socialist rants about decades old dross have so little to do with current events

they simply are not germane to the discussions

[cosmicway 1,333]

32 minutes ago, Vesper said:

your socialist rants about decades old dross have so little to do with current events

they simply are not germane to the discussions

Socialism has earned a bad name.
There are the commies who say what they do is socialism (the 49%) and the fake socialists (the other 49%)..
 

[Vesper 30,088]

2 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Socialism has earned a bad name.
There are the commies who say what they do is socialism (the 49%) and the fake socialists (the other 49%)..
 

for fucks sake and for the umpteenth time

there are NO socialist nor communist nation states in Europe or North America 

your seemingly never-ending obsession about things that do not exist anymore, or never did (in many nations' cases), is just bizarre, and of no real value in re present day political discussions about these nations

 

[Vesper 30,088]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-10-30-why-so-much-hate/

I get a lot of hate mail, especially in response to columns or posts critical of Donald Trump. My post the other day on Trump and fascism brought in some beauties.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the more printable ones:

I guess to a LIBTARD FOOL such as yourself, it’s only fascism if conservatives/Republicans/Trump are in power, even though they don’t even attempt to do such things. On the other hand, to a LIBTARD, Democrats actually BEING Fascists somehow equates to “protecting democracy” (which we don’t even live in, nor have been set up to ever be in). You fucking communist sack of disgusting, lying shit!

Some of these hate letters make a half-hearted effort to engage in arguments, but most are pure venom. Where does this hate come from, and what might damp it down so that we can return to a slightly more civil democracy?

The short answer, I think, is that the haters fomented by Donald Trump especially hate liberals. And if you bother to review the history of the past century, you can see why.

Since at least the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have become the party of educated, cosmopolitan bicoastal professionals, and have paid too little attention to the plight of ordinary working people, in small towns, rural areas, and once-thriving communities deserted by footloose factories. Along with this economic neglect has come cultural condescension. The phrase “flyover states” says it all.

If the Democratic Party were doing its job, some of the hatred would be directed at the billionaire bankers and monopolists who are raising costs, destroying jobs, and capturing income that should be going to regular Americans. But the haters don’t hate the billionaires. This would be a weird inversion of class interest, if the Democrats were a more credible populist party. But they aren’t.

Compare today’s form of hate with FDR’s day. There was hate in that era, but it was not the hate of ordinary people directed at Democrats. FDR neatly defined it when he said of bankers and economic royalists, “They are unanimous in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred.”

FDR, by delivering for ordinary Americans and constraining abusive capitalists, had earned their hatred. There were also elements of racial hatred during the New Deal era, which increased as Roosevelt became more of a racial liberal. At the 1936 Democratic National Convention, when a Black minister had been invited to deliver the invocation, Sen. “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, a leader of the racist Dixiecrats, loudly walked out in protest. Yet FDR carried all of the South.

Even in 1948, when Harry Truman had become far more of an explicit racial liberal than Roosevelt, Truman carried most of the white South because voters remembered with gratitude how the New Deal had saved their livelihoods.

This brings me to the tricky question of the connection between today’s anti-liberal hatred and the inevitable backlash against the post-LBJ Democrats as the party of racial and gender equality. White males suffered some relative loss of status in the household and the community, as Blacks, women, and later sexual minorities gained rights, so Democrats were guaranteed to suffer some losses.

But the losses—and the sheer hatred—would have been far less if this were not also an era of economic neglect of working people generally, combined with Clinton-style New Democrats getting in bed with bankers. Compared with two generations ago, it’s far harder to get a payroll job that supports a family, buy a home, finance college, get reliable health care, or look forward to a decent retirement. President Biden has taken some good first steps and Kamala Harris promises more, but not nearly enough to reverse the deeper trends.

And this brings me to the TV ad that the Trump campaign has been running on broadcasts of football and baseball games. The ad shows Harris with two transgender people, includes an edited clip of an old interview in which Harris appears to be saying she supports the right of prison inmates to get gender-altering surgery, and ends with the sly tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Granted, it would be a heavy lift for Democrats to go all out to support trans rights, even with more attention to what’s happened to the working class. But in the absence of a credible class politics that delivers, the Democrats are waving red flags at the proverbial bull.

If Kamala does win, it will be a long road back to damp down the hate and win back working-class support. Maybe in the next generation.

[cosmicway 1,333]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

for fucks sake and for the umpteenth time

there are NO socialist nor communist nation states in Europe or North America 

your seemingly never-ending obsession about things that do not exist anymore, or never did (in many nations' cases), is just bizarre, and of no real value in re present day political discussions about these nations

 

By "state" you mean when change of government is not allowed.
There are n't any such in Europe or North America at the moment.
But I talked about parties that do exist. I did n't say states.

[Vesper 30,088]

A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital

Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-miscarriage-texas-abortion-ban

Josseli Barnica and her daughter in 2020 Credit:Courtesy of the Barnica family

 

 

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.

ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

Like all states, Texas has a committee of maternal health experts who review such deaths to recommend ways to prevent them, but the committee’s reports on individual cases are not public and members said they have not finished examining cases from 2021, the year Barnica died.

ProPublica is working to fill gaps in knowledge about the consequences of abortion bans. Reporters scoured death data, flagging Barnica’s case for its concerning cause of death: “sepsis” involving “products of conception.” We tracked down her family, obtained autopsy and hospital records and enlisted a range of experts to review a summary of her care that ProPublica created in consultation with two doctors.

Barnica’s autopsy report lists her cause of death as sepsis with “retained products of conception,” meaning tissue that grew during her pregnancy but remained after her miscarriage. Credit:Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica

Among those experts were more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations.

After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.

“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.

Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

Last month, ProPublica told the stories of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, whose deaths were deemed “preventable” by the state’s maternal mortality review committee after they were unable to access legal abortions and timely medical care amid an abortion ban.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called the reporting “fear mongering.” Former President Donald Trump has not weighed in — except to joke that his Fox News town hall on women’s issues would get “better ratings” than a press call where Thurman’s family spoke about their pain.

Leaders in Texas, which has the nation’s oldest abortion ban, have witnessed the consequences of such restrictions longer than those in any other state.

In lawsuits, court petitions and news stories, dozens of women have said they faced dangers when they were denied abortions starting in 2021. One suffered sepsis like Barnica, but survived after three days in intensive care. She lost part of her fallopian tube. Lawmakers have made small concessions to clarify two exceptions for medical emergencies, but even in those cases, doctors risk up to 99 years in prison and fines of $100,000; they can argue in court that their actions were not a crime, much like defendants can claim self-defense after being charged with murder.

Amid the deluge of evidence of the harm, including research suggesting Texas’ legislation has increased infant and maternal deaths, some of the ban’s most prominent supporters have muted their public enthusiasm for it. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who once championed the fall of Roe v. Wade and said, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” is now avoiding the topic amid a battle to keep his seat. And Gov. Greg Abbott, who said early last year that “we promised we would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat, and we did,” has not made similar statements since.

Both declined to comment to ProPublica, as did state Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose commitment to the ban remains steadfast as he fights for access to the out-of-state medical records of women who travel for abortions. Earlier this month, as the nation grappled with the first reported, preventable deaths related to abortion access, Paxton celebrated a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed Texas to ignore federal guidance requiring doctors to provide abortions that are needed to stabilize emergency patients.

“This is a major victory,” Paxton said.

“They Had to Wait Until There Was No Heartbeat”

To Barnica, an immigrant from Honduras, the American dream seemed within reach in her corner of Houston, a neighborhood filled with restaurants selling El Salvadoran pupusas and bakeries specializing in Mexican conchas. She found work installing drywall, saved money to support her mother back home and met her husband in 2019 at a community soccer game.

A year later, they welcomed a big-eyed baby girl whose every milestone they celebrated. “God bless my family,” Barnica wrote on social media, alongside a photo of the trio in matching red-and-black plaid. “Our first Christmas with our Princess. I love them.”

Barnica and her daughter days after she was born. Barnica loved dressing the family in matching clothing. Credit:Courtesy of the Barnica family

Barnica longed for a large family and was thrilled when she conceived again in 2021.

Trouble struck in the second trimester.

On Sept. 2, 2021, at 17 weeks and four days pregnant, she went to the hospital with cramps, according to her records. The next day, when the bleeding worsened, she returned. Within two hours of her arrival on Sept. 3, an ultrasound confirmed “bulging membranes in the vagina with the fetal head in the open cervix,” dilated at 8.9 cm, and that she had low amniotic fluid. The miscarriage was “in progress,” the radiologist wrote.

When Barnica’s husband arrived, she told him doctors couldn’t intervene until there was no heartbeat.

The next day, Dr. Shirley Lima, an OB on duty, diagnosed an “inevitable” miscarriage.

In Barnica’s chart, she noted that the fetal heartbeat was detected and wrote that she was providing Barnica with pain medication and “emotional support.”

In a state that hadn’t banned abortion, Barnica could have immediately been offered the options that major medical organizations, including international ones, say is the standard of evidence-based care: speeding up labor with medication or a dilation and evacuation procedure to empty the uterus.

“We know that the sooner you intervene in these situations, the better outcomes are,” said Dr. Steven Porter, an OB-GYN in Cleveland.

But Texas’ new abortion ban had just gone into effect. It required physicians to confirm the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening unless there was a “medical emergency,” which the law did not define. It required doctors to make written notes on the patient’s condition and the reason abortion was necessary.

The law did not account for the possibility of a future emergency, one that could develop in hours or days without intervention, doctors told ProPublica.

Barnica was technically still stable. But lying in the hospital with her cervix open wider than a baseball left her uterus exposed to bacteria and placed her at high risk of developing sepsis, experts told ProPublica. Infections can move fast and be hard to control once they take hold.

The scenario felt all too familiar for Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who used to work in Tennessee and reviewed a summary of Barnica’s records at ProPublica’s request.

Abortion bans put doctors in an impossible position, she said, forcing them to decide whether to risk malpractice or a felony charge. After her state enacted one of the strictest bans in the country, she also waited to offer interventions in cases like Barnica’s until the fetal heartbeat stopped or patients showed signs of infection, praying every time that nothing would go wrong. It’s why she ultimately moved to Colorado.

The doctors treating Barnica “absolutely didn’t do the right thing,” she said. But she understood why they would have felt “totally stuck,” especially if they worked at a hospital that hadn’t promised to defend them.

Even three years after Barnica’s death, HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain that treated Barnica, will not disclose whether it has a policy on how to treat miscarriages.

Some HCA shareholders have asked the company to prepare a report on the risks to the company related to the bans in states that restrict abortion, so patients would understand what services they could expect and doctors would know under what circumstances they would be protected. But the board of directors opposed the proposal, partly because it would create an “unnecessary expense and burdens with limited benefits to our stockholders.” The proposal was supported by 8% of shareholders who voted.

The company’s decision to abstain has repercussions far beyond Texas; the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain has said it delivers more babies than any other health care provider in America, and 70% of its hospitals are in states where abortion is restricted.

As the hours passed in the Houston hospital, Barnica couldn’t find relief. On the phone with her aunt Rosa Elda Calix Barnica, she complained that doctors kept performing ultrasounds to check the fetal heartbeat but were not helping her end the miscarriage.

Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 5, 40 hours after Barnica had arrived, doctors could no longer detect any heart activity. Soon after, Lima delivered Barnica’s fetus, giving her medication to help speed up the labor.

Dr. Joel Ross, the OB-GYN who oversaw her care, discharged her after about eight more hours.

The bleeding continued, but when Barnica called the hospital, she was told that was expected. Her aunt grew alarmed two days later when the bleeding grew heavier.

Go back, she told her niece.

On the evening of Sept. 7, Barnica’s husband rushed her to the hospital as soon as he got off from work. But COVID-19 protocols meant only one visitor could be in the room with her, and they didn’t have a babysitter for their 1-year-old daughter.

So he left and tried to get some sleep.

“I fully expected her to come home,” he said.

But she never did. Her family planned two funerals, one in Houston and another in Honduras.

Nine days after her death, Barnica’s husband was processing his shock, learning how to be a single dad and struggling to raise funds to bury his wife and the son he had hoped to raise.

Meanwhile, Lima was pulling up Barnica’s medical chart to make an addition to her records.

The notes she added made one point abundantly clear: “When I was called for delivery,” she wrote, “the fetus no longer had detectable heart tones.”

“They Should Vote With Their Feet”

Texas has been on the forefront of fighting abortion access.

At the time of Barnica’s miscarriage in 2021, the Supreme Court had not yet overturned the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But Texas lawmakers, intent on being the first to enact a ban with teeth, had already passed a harsh civil law using a novel legal strategy that circumvented Roe v. Wade: It prohibited doctors from performing an abortion after six weeks by giving members of the public incentives to sue doctors for $10,000 judgments. The bounty also applied to anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion.

A year later, after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down, an even stricter criminal law went into effect, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison and $100,000 in fines.

Soon after the ruling, the Biden administration issued federal guidance reminding doctors in hospital emergency rooms they have a duty to treat pregnant patients who need to be stabilized, including by providing abortions for miscarriages.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fought against that, arguing that following the guidance would force doctors to “commit crimes” under state law and make every hospital a “walk-in abortion clinic.” When a Dallas woman asked a court for approval to end her pregnancy because her fetus was not viable and she faced health risks if she carried it to term, Paxton fought to keep her pregnant. He argued her doctor hadn’t proved it was an emergency and threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her. “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result,” he wrote to the court.

No doctor in Texas, or the 20 other states that criminalize abortion, has been prosecuted for violating a state ban. But the possibility looms over their every decision, dozens of doctors in those states told ProPublica, forcing them to consider their own legal risks as they navigate their patient’s health emergencies. The lack of clarity has resulted in many patients being denied care.

In 2023, Texas lawmakers made a small concession to the outcry over the uncertainty the ban was creating in hospitals. They created a new exception for ectopic pregnancies, a potentially fatal condition where the embryo attaches outside the uterine cavity, and for cases where a patient’s membranes rupture prematurely before viability, which introduces a high risk of infection. Doctors can still face prosecution, but are allowed to make the case to a judge or jury that their actions were protected, not unlike self-defense arguments after homicides. Barnica’s condition would not have clearly fit this exception.

This year, after being directed to do so by the state Supreme Court, the Texas Medical Board released new guidance telling doctors that an emergency didn’t need to be “imminent” in order to intervene and advising them to provide extra documentation regarding risks.

But in a recent interview, the board’s president, Dr. Sherif Zaafran, acknowledged that these efforts only go so far and the group has no power over criminal law: “There’s nothing we can do to stop a prosecutor from filing charges against the physicians.”

Asked what he would tell Texas patients who are miscarrying and unable to get treatment, he said they should get a second opinion: “They should vote with their feet and go and seek guidance from somebody else.”

An immigrant from El Salvador who works 12-hour shifts, Barnica’s husband doesn’t follow American politics or the news. He had no inkling of the contentious national debate over how abortion bans are affecting maternal health care when ProPublica contacted him.

Now he is raising a 4-year-old daughter with the help of Barnica’s younger brother; every weekend, they take her to see her grandmother, who knows how to braid her hair in pigtails.

All around their home, he keeps photos of Barnica so that the little girl grows up knowing how much her mother loved her. He sees flashes of his wife when his daughter dances. She radiates the same delight.

When asked about Barnica, he can’t get out many words; his leg is restless, his eyes fixed on the floor. Barnica’s family calls him a model father.

He says he’s just doing his best.

[Vesper 30,088]

Private videos reveal Trump adviser Russ Vought’s “shadow” plans for using the military on protesters, defunding the EPA and villainizing civil servants.

https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-vought-center-renewing-america-maga

Russell Vought speaks during an event on federal guidance and enforcement in 2019. Credit:Evan Vucci/AP Photo

 

A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.

In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.

He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”

ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of the two speeches Vought delivered during events for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought. The think tank’s employees or fellows include Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department lawyer who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result; Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Mark Paoletta, a former senior budget official in the Trump administration. Other Trump allies such as former White House adviser Steve Bannon and U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Scott Perry either spoke at the conferences or appeared on promotional materials for the events.

Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements. As OMB director, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers. But he has never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs. He has spoken in broad terms about undercutting independent agencies but never spelled out sweeping plans to defund the EPA and other federal agencies.

Vought’s plans track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters or what Trump has called the “enemy within.” Trump’s desire to use the military on U.S. soil recently prompted his longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, to speak out, saying Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Other policies mentioned by Vought dovetail with Trump’s plans, such as embracing a wartime footing on the southern border and rolling back transgender rights. Agenda 47, the campaign’s policy blueprint, calls for revoking President Joe Biden’s order expanding gender-affirming care for transgender people; Vought uses even more extreme language, decrying the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and referring to gender-affirming care as “chemical castration.”

Since leaving government, Vought has reportedly remained a close ally of the former president. Speaking in July to undercover journalists posing as relatives of a potential donor, Vought said Trump had “blessed” the Center for Renewing America and was “very supportive of what we do,” CNN reported.

Vought did not respond to requests for comment.

"Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement. She did not directly address Vought’s statements.

Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, added there have been no discussions on who would serve in a second Trump administration.

In addition to running his think tank, Vought was the policy director of the Republican National Committee’s official platform committee ahead of the nominating convention. He’s also an architect of Project 2025, the controversial coalition effort mapping out how a second Trump administration can quickly eliminate obstacles to rolling out a hard-right policy agenda.

As ProPublica and Documented reported, Project 2025 has launched a massive program to recruit, vet and train thousands of people to “be ready on day one” to serve in a future conservative administration. (Trump has repeatedly criticized Project 2025, and his top aides have said the effort has no connection to the official campaign despite the dozens of former Trump aides and advisers who contributed to Project 2025.)

Vought is widely expected to take a high-level government role if Trump wins a second term. His name has even been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff. The videos obtained by ProPublica and Documented offer an unfiltered look at Vought’s worldview, his plans for a Trump administration and his fusing of MAGA ideology and Christian nationalism.

A Shadow Government in Waiting

In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.

“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.

Vought’s preparations for a future Trump administration involve building a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel, he told the gathered supporters in May 2023. That office, part of the Justice Department, advises the president on the scope of their powers. Vought made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term.

Historically, the OLC has operated with a degree of independence. “If, all of a sudden, the office is full of a bunch of loyalists whose only job is to rubber-stamp the White House’s latest policy directive, whose only goal is to justify the ends by whatever means, that would be quite dangerous,” said an attorney who worked in the office under a previous Republican administration and requested anonymity to speak freely.

Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

Vought also revealed the extent of the Center for Renewing America’s role in whipping up right-wing panic ahead of the 2022 midterms over an increase in asylum-seekers crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In February 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich released a legal opinion claiming the state was under “invasion” by violent cartels and could invoke war powers to deploy National Guard troops to its southern border. The legally dubious “invasion” theory became a potent Republican talking point.

Vought said in the 2023 speech that he and Cuccinelli, the former top Homeland Security official for Trump, personally lobbied Brnovich on the effort. “We said, ‘Look, you can write your own opinion, but here’s a draft opinion of what this should look like,’” Vought said.

The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight later obtained an email in which Vought pitched the “invasion” framework to Brnovich.

Brnovich wrote in an email to ProPublica that he recalled multiple discussions with Cuccinelli about border security. But he added that “the invasion opinion was the result of a formal request from a member of the Arizona legislature. And I can assure you it was drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

In the event Trump loses, Vought called for Republican leaders of states such as Florida and Texas to “create red-state sanctuaries” by “kicking out all the feds as much as they possibly can.”

“Nothing Short of a Quiet Revolution”

The two speeches delivered by Vought, taken together, offer an unvarnished look at the animating ideology and political worldview of a key figure in the MAGA movement.

Over the last century, Vought said, the U.S. has “experienced nothing short of a quiet revolution” and abandoned what he saw as the true meaning and force of the Constitution. The country today, he argued, was a “post-constitutional regime,” one that no longer adhered to the separation of powers among the three branches of government as laid out by the framers.

He lamented that the conservative right and the nation writ large had become “too secular” and “too globalist.” He urged his allies to join his mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”

And in one of his most dramatic flourishes, he likened the 2024 election to moments in America’s history when the country was facing all-out war.

“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought told his audience, referring to years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election. “God put us here for such a time as this.”

Vought said that independent agencies and unelected bureaucrats and experts wield far too much power while the traditional legislative process is a sham. He extended that critique to agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve, whose independence from the White House had long been protected by both political parties.

“The left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to motivate the executive branch to the will of the American people consistent with the laws of the country,” he said in the 2024 speech. “They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored backbenchers.”

He added, “The all-empowered career expert like Tony Fauci is their model, wielding power behind the curtains.” Fauci was one of the top public health experts under Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and a key figure in coordinating the national response.

What sets Vought apart from most of his fellow conservative activists is that he accuses powerful organizations on the right of being complicit in the current system of government, singling out the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the conservative and libertarian legal network co-chaired by activist Leonard Leo. The society is widely seen as an instrumental force in cultivating young conservative lawyers and building a bench of future judges whose embrace of legal theories like originalism and textualism have led to decisions overturning abortion rights, environmental protections and social welfare policies.

Yet in his 2024 speech, Vought accused the Federalist Society and “originalist judges” of being a part of the problem, perpetuating the “post-constitutional structure” that Vought lamented by not ruling more aggressively to weaken or dismantle independent regulatory agencies that Vought and his allies view as illegitimate or unconstitutional.

It was “like being in a contract quietly revoked two decades ago, in which one party didn’t tell the other,” he said. “At some point, reality needs to set in. Instead, we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”

Echoing Trump’s rhetoric, Vought implicitly endorsed the false claim of a stolen 2020 election and likened the media’s debunkings of that claim to Chinese Communist propaganda.

“In the aftermath of the election, we had all these people going around saying, ‘Well, I don’t see any evidence of voter fraud. The media’s not giving enough [of] a compelling case,’” he said. “Well, that compelling case has emerged. But does a Christian in China ask and come away saying, ‘You know, there’s no persecution, because I haven’t read about it in the state regime press?’ No, they don’t.”

Vought referred to the people detained for alleged crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political prisoners” and defended the lawyers Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, who have both faced criminal charges for their role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Federal law enforcement agencies, he added, “are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that.”

The left, Vought continued, has the ultimate goal of ending representative democracy altogether. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said, “in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”

When Democrats called Trump an “existential threat to democracy,” they were not merely calling for his defeat at the ballot box, he said, but were using “coded language the national security state uses overseas when they are overthrowing other governments” to discourage the military from putting down anti-Trump protests should he win.

“They’re making Trump out to be a would-be dictator or an authoritarian,” he said. “So they’re actively working now to ensure, on a number of levels, that the military will perceive this as dictatorial and therefore not respond to any orders to quell any violence.”

Trump, Vought insisted, has the credibility and the track record to defeat the “Marxist” left and bring about the changes that Vought and his MAGA allies seek. In his view, the Democratic Party’s agenda and its “quiet revolution” could be stopped only by a “radical constitutionalist,” someone in the mold of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. For Vought, no one was in a better position to fill that role than Trump.

“We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country.

“That,” he added, “is nothing more than a gift of God.”

[Vesper 30,088]

https://www.propublica.org/article/2024-election-certification-ads-georgia-wisconsin-pennsylvania

Earlier this month, subscribers to the Wisconsin Law Journal received an email with an urgent subject: “Upholding Election Integrity — A Call to Action for Attorneys.”

The letter began by talking about fairness and following the law in elections. But it then suggested that election officials do something that courts have found to be illegal for over a century: treat the certification of election results as an option, not an obligation.

The large logo at the top of the email gave the impression that it was an official correspondence from the respected legal newspaper, though smaller print said it was sent on behalf of a public relations company. The missive was an advertisement from a new group with deep ties to activists who have challenged the legitimacy of recent American elections.

The group, Follow the Law, has placed ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin news outlets serving attorneys, judges and election administrators — individuals who could be involved in election disputes. In Georgia, it ran ads supporting the State Election Board as its majority, backed by former President Donald Trump, passed a rule that experts warned could have allowed county board members to exclude enough Democratic votes to impact the presidential election. (A judge later struck down the rule as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”)

In making its arguments about certification, Follow the Law has mischaracterized election rules and directed readers to a website providing an incomplete and inaccurate description of how certification works and what the laws and rules are in various states, election experts and state officials said.

“Anyone relying on that website is being deceived, and whoever is responsible for its content is being dishonest,” said Mike Hassinger, public information officer for Georgia’s secretary of state.

Certification is the mandatory administrative process that officials undertake after they finish counting and adjudicating ballots. Official results need to be certified by tight deadlines, so they can be aggregated and certified at the state and federal levels. Other procedures like lawsuits and recounts exist to check or challenge election outcomes, but those typically cannot commence until certification occurs. If officials fail to meet those deadlines or exclude a subset of votes, courts could order them to certify, as they have done in the past. But experts have warned that, in a worst-case scenario, the transition of power could be thrown into chaos.

“These ads make it seem as if there's only one way for election officials to show that they're on the ball, and that is to delay or refuse to certify an election. And just simply put, that is not their role,” said Sarah Gonski, an Arizona elections attorney and senior policy adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, a think tank working on election issues. “What this is, is political propaganda that’s dressed up in a fancy legal costume.”

The activities of Follow the Law, which have not been previously reported, represent a broader push by those aligned with Trump to leverage the mechanics of elections to their advantage. The combination of those strategies, including recruiting poll workers and removing people from voting rolls, could matter in an election that might be determined by a small number of votes.

Since Trump lost the 2020 election, at least 35 election board members in various states, who have been overwhelmingly Republican, have unsuccessfully tried to refuse to certify election results before being compelled to certify by courts or being outvoted by Democratic members. Last week, a county supervisor in Arizona pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to perform election duties when she voted to delay certifying the 2022 election. And last month, the American Civil Liberties Union sued an election board member in Michigan after he said he might not certify the 2024 results. He ultimately signed an affidavit acknowledging his legal obligation to certify, and the ACLU dismissed its case. Experts have warned that more could refuse to certify the 2024 election if Trump loses.

Follow the Law bills itself as a “group of lawyers committed to ensuring elections are free, fair and represent the true votes of all American citizens.” It’s led by Melody Clarke, a longtime conservative activist with stints at Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy organization, and the Election Integrity Network, headed by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

This summer, Clarke left a leadership position at EIN to join the Election Transparency Initiative, a group headed by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official. The two groups work together, according to Cuccinelli and EIN’s 2024 handbook.

The banner ads that appeared in Georgia and Wisconsin outlets disclosed they were paid for by the American Principles Project Foundation. ETI is a subsidiary of a related nonprofit, the American Principles Project. Financial reports show that packaging magnate Richard Uihlein has contributed millions of dollars to the American Principles Project this year through a political action committee. Uihlein has funneled his fortune into supporting far-right candidates and election deniers, as ProPublica has reported.

Cuccinelli, Clarke and a lawyer for Uihlein did not respond to requests for comment or detailed lists of questions. Cuccinelli previously defended to ProPublica the legality of election officials exercising their discretion in certifying results. “The proposed rule will protect the foundational, one person-one vote principle underpinning our democratic elections and guard against certification of inaccurate or erroneous results,” Cuccinelli wrote in a letter to Georgia’s State Election Board.

The most recent ads appear to be an extension of a monthslong effort that started in Georgia to expand the discretion of county election officials ahead of the November contest.

In August and September, Follow the Law bought ads as Georgia’s election board passed controversial rules, including one that empowered county election board members to not certify votes they found suspicious. As ProPublica has reported, the rule was secretly pushed by the EIN, where Clarke worked as deputy director.

Certification “is not a ministerial function,” Cuccinelli said at the election board’s August meeting. The law, he argued, “clearly implies that that board is intended and expected to use its judgment to determine, on very short time frames, what is the most proper outcome of the vote count.”

However, a state judge made clear in an October ruling the dangers of giving county board members the power to conduct investigations and decide which votes are valid. If board members, who are often political appointees, were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” and refuse to certify election results, “Georgia voters would be silenced,” he wrote, finding that this would be unconstitutional. The case is on appeal and will be heard after the election.

Despite that ruling, and another from a different judge also finding both certification rules unconstitutional, Follow the Law’s website section for Georgia still asserts that a State Election Board rule “makes crystal clear” that county board members’ duty is “more than a simple ministerial task” without mentioning either ruling. The state Republican party has appealed the second ruling.

In a Telegram channel created by a Fulton County, Georgia, commissioner, someone shared what they called a “dream checklist” for election officials this week that contains extensive “suggestions” for how they should fulfill their statutory duties. The unsigned 15-page document, which bears the same three icons that appear on Follow the Law’s website, concludes, “Resolve all discrepancies prior to certification.”

On the same day the Georgia judge ruled that county board members can’t refuse to certify votes, Follow the Law began running ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin legal publications. The communications argued that certification is a discretionary step officials should take only after performing an investigation to ensure an election’s accuracy, largely continuing the line of argument that Cuccinelli pushed to Georgia’s election board and that the lawyers took before the judge. “Uphold your oath to only certify an accurate election,” said banner ads that ran in WisPolitics, a political news outlet. Another read: “No rubber stamps!” WisPolitics did not respond to requests for comment.

In Pennsylvania, the ad claimed that “simply put, the role of election officials is not ‘ministerial’” and that election officials are by law “required to ensure (and investigate if necessary) that elections are free from ‘fraud, deceit, or abuse’ and that the results are accurate prior to certification.”

Follow the Law has also directly contacted at least one county official in Eureka County, Nevada, pointing him to the group’s website, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch.

Follow the Law’s ads and website overstate officials’ roles beyond what statutes allow, state officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin said.

The group’s Wisconsin page reads: “Canvassers must first ensure that all votes are legally cast and can only certify results after verifying this.” But officials tasked with certifying elections are scorekeepers, not referees, said Edgar Lin, Wisconsin policy strategist and attorney for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections. Lin and other experts said officials ensure the accuracy of an election’s basic arithmetic, for example, by checking that the number of ballots matches the number of voters, but they are not empowered to undertake deeper investigations.

Gonski said that in addition to overstating certifiers’ responsibilities, Follow the Law’s messaging underplays the protections that already exist. “Our election system is chock-full of checks and balances,” Gonski said. “Thousands of individuals have roles to play, and all of them seamlessly work together using well-established procedures to ensure a safe, accurate and secure election. No single individual has unchecked power over any piece of the process."

Ads in the Wisconsin Law Journal and the Legal Intelligencer in Pennsylvania also presented the findings of a poll that Follow the Law said was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a company whose credibility the ad emphasizes. But Rasmussen Reports did not conduct the poll. It was conducted by Scott Rasmussen, who founded the polling company but has not worked there in over a decade.

Both the company and pollster confirmed the misattribution but did not comment further. The Wisconsin Law Journal and ALM, which owns the Legal Intelligencer, declined to comment.

Sam Liebert, a former election clerk and the Wisconsin director for All Voting is Local, said he wants the state’s attorney general to issue an unequivocal directive reminding election officials of their legal duty to certify.

“Certifying elections is a mandatory, democratic duty of our election officials,” he said. “Each refusal to certify threatens to validate the broader election denier movement, while sowing disorder in our election administration processes.”

 

Do you have any information about Follow the Law or other groups’ efforts to challenge election certification that we should know? Have you seen Follow the Law ads or outreach elsewhere? If so, please make a record of the ad and reach out to us. Phoebe Petrovic can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal at 608-571-3748. Doug Bock Clark can be reached at 678-243-0784 and [email protected].

[NikkiCFC 8,284]

6 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Socialism has earned a bad name.
There are the commies who say what they do is socialism (the 49%) and the fake socialists (the other 49%)..
 

You know older people here always say how it was all much better under communist Tito 😏