“Moderate” Democrats gathered in Columbus, Ohio, to express their concerns that left-wing Democrats will lead the party to disaster in the mid-term elections and the 2020 presidential contest, Alex Seitz-Wald reported for NBC News (7/22). The first-ever “Opportunity 2020” convention, organized by Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, gave middle-of-the-road party members a safe space to come together and voice their concerns.
“Oh, lord save us, not these people again,” Charles P. Pierce wrote at Esquire.com (7/23). “I have admitted that I have problems with Bernie Sanders wandering into Democratic primaries generally, since he’s not a Democrat, and that I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ought not to be gratuitously involving herself in primary races in Kansas. But these are small-change complaints, and they certainly are not an appeal for this undead agenda to come staggering out of the crypt.”
“The only narrative that has been articulated in the Democratic Party over the past two years is the one from the left,” former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell told NBC News.”I think we need a debate within the party,” he added. “Frankly, it would have been better to start the conversation earlier.”
“No offense to the good people of Delaware, but who the hell is this guy when he’s at home, and why should I give a damn about anything he says?” Pierce wondered.
“Pragmatism may be a tougher sell in the Donald Trump era, but with the 2020 presidential race just around the corner, moderate Democrats know they are running out of time to reassert themselves,” Seitz-Wald wrote.
“If we’re going to do this, it’s incumbent upon us to get our terms right,” Pierce answered. “These are not moderate Democrats. These are conservative Democrats. You know who’s a moderate Democrat these days? It’s a Democrat who wants to get to universal healthcare by degrees, and someone who wants to get to free college a couple of years at a time.
“It’s certainly not a person who thinks it impolite to point out that the creeping oligarchy in this country is a threat to its most basic values.”
Seitz-Wald continued: “The gathering here was just that — an effort to offer an attractive alternative to the rising Sanders-style populist left in the upcoming presidential race. Where progressives see a rare opportunity to capitalize on an energized Democratic base, moderates see a better chance to win over Republicans turned off by Trump. The fact that a billionaire real estate developer, Winston Fisher, co-hosted the event and addressed attendees twice underscored that this group is not interested in the class warfare vilifying the ‘millionaires and billionaires’ found in Sanders’ stump speech.”
Fisher announced that his conference was dedicated to “big, bold ideas” suited to the 21st century. What might those be, you ask?
“Some of the key initiatives are a massive apprenticeship program to train workers, a privatized employer-funded universal pension that would supplement Social Security and an overhaul of unemployment insurance to include skills training. Other proposals included a ‘small business bill of rights’ and the creation of a ‘BoomerCorps’ — like the volunteer AmericaCorps for seniors,” Seitz-Wald noted.
“Big. Bold. Warmed-over Clintonism with a touch of delicately spiced Kempism, a lovely little time trip back to 1990, and almost perfectly designed political chickens**t at a time of national crisis. And absolutely nothing that will do anything about massive income inequality and the concomitant control that the corporate class has assumed over every institution of government,” Pierce translated.
Meanwhile, [the moderates] say the progressive agenda is out of date. They dismiss, for instance, a federal jobs guarantee as a rehash of the New Deal. “Our ideas must be bold, but they must also fit the age we are in,” Third Way President Jon Cowan said. “Big isn’t enough. If it’s bold and old — it’s simply old.”
Pierce noted, “I realize that as long as there are wealthy people who are not the Koch Brothers, and as long as there are television green rooms and newspaper editorial boards, this kind of don’t-disturb-the-horses politics always will have a constituency. But, while it may have had a place 20 years ago, it is utterly inadequate to the political circumstances of the day. There are no small-scale solutions to the gigantic structural problems that have grown in our economics and in our politics.
“And, if there are answers to these, they won’t be found in yet another paean to the imaginary heartland voters who are just dying to join the BoomerCorps.”
The proposed moderate agenda does not take issue with the party’s broad consensus in favor of abortion rights, LGBT equality, stricter gun control and support for immigrants and a path to citizenship for the undocumented. In a twist, the agenda is based largely on geography, rather than class or race, which are more popular on the left. It focuses on trying to address the fact that cities are thriving as rural areas fall behind. Clinton was pilloried earlier this year for bragging that she “won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” but Democratic losses in the rest of America have been politically disastrous for the party, Seitz-Wald noted.
The problem, of course, is that much of the dreaded progressive agenda is as popular in the rural areas as it is in the cities, Pierce replied. But there’s that undertone of all those issues—race, class, The Other—that this particular group of Democrats would rather not believe drive voters. Even “Abolish ICE,” while more problematic as an issue, is only problematic as an issue because rural voters in Iowa have been convinced that MS-13 is going to murder them in their beds. Nothing in these proposals addresses that serious problem in the electorate, except to tell those same voters not to think about why they perseverate on those dark fantasies.
“The way you know this, and the way these people apparently don’t, is that even the unremarkable and sensible position that ICE should be reformed so that it doesn’t brutalize children and old women anymore is cast as opening the floodgates to an invasion of South Dakota by Central American prison gangs,” Pierce wrote.
Seitz-Wald noted that Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the chair of the New Democrat Coalition, said members of his side are not “naturally arbiters of emotion and anger.” “How we tell our story and put forward our polices in a way that makes people want to mount the barricades is one of the biggest challenges we have,” said Himes, a former Goldman Sachs banker who represents Fairfield, Conn. He pointed to calls to “Abolish ICE,” for instance, which he characterized as emotionally understandable but politically illogical. “It hurts us in areas where we need to win,” Himes warned of “Abolish ICE” in the midterms. “You have now made life harder for the 60 or 70 Democrats fighting in districts where we need to win if we ever want to be in the majority.”
Pierce concluded, “Yes, because when I look for Democratic solutions to the nation’s rural problems, I look for leadership to a guy from a luxurious Connecticut zip code who used to work at Goldman Sachs. Yes, it’s a big tent, but somebody has to sit in the back. It’s these people’s turn now.”
TRUMP WHITE HOUSE CONSIDERS STRIPPING SECURITY CLEARANCES OF TRUMP CRITICS. JUST ONE PROBLEM. Three of the most consistent hallmarks of Donald Trump’s administration were on display at a press briefing (7/23) where Sarah Sanders said the administration was considering a suggestion by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to revoke security clearances for former CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, former FBI director James Comey, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Their reasoning: this bipartisan group of former appointees has been critical of Trump. “In a single announcement,” Josh Israel noted at ThinkProgress (7/23), “the administration demonstrated wild hypocrisy, pettiness toward critics, and total incompetence.”
“The President is exploring the mechanisms to remove security clearances because they’ve politicized, and in some cases monetized, their public service and security clearances,” Huckabee Sanders announced. “Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia — or being influenced by Russia — against the President is extremely inappropriate, and the fact that people with security clearances are making baseless these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.”
Trump and his administration, of course, have broken all precedent to ignore the constitutional prohibition on foreign emoluments and have made millions in personal profits thanks to the power of the presidency. Minutes after her press conference, Trump himself was hawking his own campaign merchandise at an event down the hall.
But beyond the pettiness and hypocrisy, the announcement was notable for the lack of preparation and research that preceded it. A spokesperson for McCabe responded via Twitter that — thanks to the Trump administration’s decision to fire him back in March, he already had his security clearance deactivated.
Gen. Hayden also tweeted that he does not even receive classified briefings, meaning that he is not monetizing or politicizing classified information.
“A competent administration might have better examined whether such a petty and hypocritical move would have any effect before announcing that it was under consideration,” Israel noted. “The Trump administration did not.”
WHAT IF TRUMP THREATENED A WAR AND NOBODY CARED? Sunday night (7/22), something got minority President Trump agitated and he hurled this tweet out into the ether:
“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” 10:24 PM - Jul 22, 2018
“So this is where we’re at,” Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones.com. “The president of the United States threatens to annihilate a country he doesn’t like and … it’s mostly treated like playground bluster from a 10-year-old. Nearly everyone seems to be acting like this is just a stupid joke to make fun of, as if it came from a parody of a James Bond movie or something.”
Daniel W. Drezner tweeted: “I’m going to bed. Someone DM me if Trump starts a war with Iran.” 11:22 PM - Jul 22, 2018
Orin Kerr tweeted: “Loosely translated, ‘Manafort’s trial starts this week.’”
Reza H. Akbari, Iranian American and program manager for the Institute for War and Peace Relations, tweeted: “Just thought about this a few minutes ago. ALL CAPS will be lost in translation” [You can’t do CAPS in Persian].
Ilan Goldenberg tweeted: “Don’t worry. This is just step A of Trump’s standard nonproliferation strategy
“1. Scary sounding tweets threatening nuclear war
“2. Agree to summit with no plan whatsoever & then declare victory
“3 Get taken to the cleaners in follow on negotiations”
Drum concluded: “Etc. By Monday morning Sarah Sanders will have invented some absurd interpretation of what Trump meant and everyone will shrug and pretend to accept it. Trump himself, of course, will refuse to explain anything, claiming that he doesn’t want to give away his game plan. The State Department will issue some kind of tough-but-not-really statement that will explain nothing. And the rest of the Republican Party—aside from the usual lunatic fringe cheering this on—will slink away to their offices, desperately hoping that no one will ask them for comment.
“And then we’ll move on. This is how seriously people take the United States of America these days. This is what our country has come to.”
FOSSIL FUEL LOBBYISTS SPENT $2B TO KILL US CLIMATE ACTION. Legislation to address climate change has repeatedly died in Congress. But a major new study says the policy deaths were not from natural causes — they were caused by humans, just like climate change itself is.
Climate action has been repeatedly drowned by a devastating surge and flood of money from the fossil fuel industry — nearly $2 billion in lobbying since 2000 alone, Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress (7/18).
This is according to stunning new analysis in the journal Climatic Change on “The climate lobby” by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle.
The most important conclusion of Brulle’s is that spending by those in favor of climate action was dramatically overwhelmed by the big fossil fuel suppliers and users: “Environmental organizations and the renewable energy sector lobbying expenditures were dwarfed by a ratio of 10:1 by the spending of the sectors engaged in the supply and use of fossil fuels.”
The biggest surge came, unsurprisingly, during the 2009-2010 period — when Congress came the closest it ever did to passing serious climate legislation. During 2009 and 2010, total lobbying expenditures on climate change accounted for a whopping 9% of all lobbying expenditures.
The House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, often called the Waxman-Markey bill, by a slim margin in June 2009. At that point, the fossil fuel industry launched an all-out — and ultimately successful — lobbying push to undermine any effort by the Senate to pass their own version of the climate bill over the next 12 months.
Indeed, of the top nine energy companies with the biggest lobbying expenditures between January 2009 and June 2010, six were Big Oil companies (led by ExxonMobil), and the other three were a coal producer and two coal-intensive utilities.
FROM SUPREME COURT TO BALLOT, TRUMP OBAMACARE SABOTAGE IS TOXIC. If you’re hearing a lot from Democrats about health care this year, there’s a reason: Voters remain focused on it. Whether it’s rising costs or keeping access, it remains a high priority for voters, and Republicans’ Achilles heel, Joan McCarter notes at DailyKos (7/23). That’s true even when it comes to Russian asset Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, a new PPP poll finds.
Conducted on the anniversary of the Republican Congress’s failure in repealing the Affordable Care Act and enacting the disaster that was Trumpcare, the poll finds that access to health care part remains the key, especially when it comes to Kavanaugh. Nearly two-thirds of voters—64%—are opposed to the Trump administration’s intervention in a lawsuit, Texas v. United States, which could end the Affordable Care Act’s protections of health care for people with pre-existing conditions. When respondents were informed that Kavanaugh “would likely support that Trump administration lawsuit,” 56% oppose his confirmation.
More generally, voters in this poll “trust Democrats over Republicans and President Trump on health care by 13 points (55/42),” with that lead growing to 26 points (60/34) among women, and with independents trusting Democrats more by 22 points (57/35). As for the generic ballot difference between Democrats and Republican on this issue, it’s a 16-point spread, with 56% supporting a Democrat who wants to keep and improve the law to 40% supporting a Republican who wants to repeal it.
Apart from the “who would you vote for” question, the “keeping and fixing” versus “repealing” gap is huge—25 points: 59% say keep and fix, and just 34% say repeal it. Independents have an even bigger margin on this question, with a 32-point (62/30) gap. That’s fairly consistent with Civiqs polling on the issue, where a total of 55% are in the general keep and/or expand bucket and 40% are still behind repeal.
These numbers have been remarkably consistent for the past year since the Republican debacle of Trumpcare, which probably has a lot to do with it. Republicans were finally given the chance to do what they’d been promising for eight years and failed miserably, demonstrating that they had neither the ability nor the intention to make the nation’s health care better. That hasn’t changed in a year.
In fact, McCarter wrote, in a year’s time the only thing that’s changed is more Trump sabotage and more threats. This is definitely an issue for Democrats to keep in focus, and one good reason why none of them should fear opposing Kavanaugh.
TRUMP SOLIDIFIES BASE, BUT GOP SHEDS INDY SUPPORT. New polling suggests that as Donald Trump solidifies the GOP base, he and the Republican party are also repelling independent voters. In a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters is at an all-time high for the poll—88%. But while 29% of all voters say they “strongly approve” of his performance, another 44% of all voters “strongly disapprove” of his performance, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (7/23).
That disparity is expressing itself in his drop in approvals among independent voters, writes NBC News.
“The bad news for the president is that his standing — plus the GOP’s — is now worse with independents than it was a month ago. Just 36% of independents approve of Trump’s job (down 7 points from June). What’s more, independents prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress by more than 20 points, 48% to 26%. In June, the Dem lead among indies was just 7 points, 39% to 32%.”
That 22-point gap among independents who favor Democrats over Republicans in the generic ballot also seems to track with the 30-point gap between the number of independents who “strongly disapprove” of Trump versus those who “strongly approve” of him (with 46% strongly disapproving and just 16% strongly approving).
The bottom-line takeaway appears to be, according to Eleveld: the more Trump appeals to Republicans while ignoring the rest of the country, the more independents are turning against him. That ripple effect is also spilling over onto Republican lawmakers, positioning this fall’s elections as a clear referendum on Trump’s performance more than any other single factor.
VA. GOP CANDIDATE LAUGHED AT FOR CLAIMING TRUMP IS ‘STANDING UP’ TO RUSSIA. Virginia Republican Senate nominee Corey Stewart continues to be the laughingstock of the state, Hunter of DailyKos noted (7/23). “It’s not enough for him to embrace racism and neo-Confederacy or to generally be known as the frothiest, meanest candidate in the state, it’s also important he prove his fealty to Trump on the things that few Republicans anywhere are willing to offer fealty on. Like, for example, Trump’s weird relationship to Vladimir Putin.”
Which leads to the sight of Corey Stewart, during a public debate with incumbent opponent Sen. Tim Kaine, getting laughed at by everyone in the room.
“We have a president who is standing up to the Russians,” Stewart said. He was met by loud laughter from both the audience and his opponent, according to The Hill (7/22).
COAL MINERS CONTRACT BLACK LUNG DISEASE AT RECORD RATE. Miners who work for an extended period in Appalachia have odds worse than playing Russian roulette with their lives. NPR reports that 20% of all miners who have worked in the region for 25 years or longer are now suffering from coalworker’s pneumoconiosis, better known as black lung disease.
When mining safety laws were passed in 1969, Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos (7/20), it brought an almost immediate decline in black lung cases. Miners today should be protected by a number of measures meant to ensure adequate ventilation and the reduction of coal dust in their environment. But, as Donald Trump continually attempts to boost the coal industry and the EPA under both Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler cuts regulations on coal, conditions for miners are sliding.
With coal-powered plants still closing, and projections showing that coal will continue to lose market share over coming years, mine owners are trying to squeeze every last penny out of their declining industry. That is causing some operators to cheat on measures meant to protect miners. In the past month, former supervisors and safety officials from a company in Kentucky were indicted on charges of repeatedly gaming the system by falsifying readings of dust monitors. That activity seems to be emblematic of whole swathes of the industry in Appalachia.
Meanwhile, companies have been dipping into the compensation meant to go to afflicted miners. Altogether, coal companies have lifted $11 billion from funds earmarked for miners with black lung, and they have their eye on another $15 billion that they hope to get with a little helpful legislative action. All of that is predicated on the idea that black lung rates are falling, meaning that the funds won’t be needed. Republicans are routinely campaigning on the idea that miners who apply for black lung benefits are lazy cheaters. Republican legislators in Kentucky have passed laws requiring miners to be certified by doctors who work for the coal companies, before they can obtain their due benefits.
But even as the companies attempt to suppress reports of black lung and limit payments, the numbers continue to rise.
In addition to the heightened rates of disease, the study found that the most severe form of disease – progressive massive fibrosis – now occurs in 5% of veteran miners in the region, the highest rate ever recorded.
While rates have gone up sharply under Trump, the increase started as the industry declined. Where black lung rates in the past seemed to correlate to the boom-bust cycle of the industry, the steep fall of coal since natural gas became more abundant has come with a matching increase in disease.
FBI’S TOP CYBERSECURITY OFFICIALS ARE JUMPING SHIP. Five senior FBI officials in charge of election protection and cybersecurity have left the agency. First the Wall Street Journal reported (7/16) that the co-leader of the agency’s task force charged with keeping Russia out of our elections, Jeff Tricoli, had departed the agency. Then the *Journal* reported (7/19) the departure of three top FBI cybersecurity officials as well as a deputy to one of those officials.
They are: Scott Smith, assistant FBI director who runs the cyber division, leaving in July; Smith’s deputy, Howard Marshall, is already gone; Smith’s supervisor, as well as David Resch, executive assistant director of the FBI’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch; and Carl Ghattas, the agency’s national security branch executive assistant director.
A US official said more people are expected to leave soon, declining to provide additional names.
Are Trump and his minions in the House driving them out? Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) suggests so. “One-and-one-half branches of our government appear to be committed to attacking the Bureau, its workforce and its mission on a near-daily basis.”
FBI Director Chris Wray downplayed this, saying “Would they (FBI agents) prefer not to get criticized? Of course … But at the end of the day, the criticism we care about is the people who know our work.” But former officials say there are high levels of frustration, particularly in cybersecurity. “There’s an internal tension in terms of how to staff cyber properly. … We constantly have new people in leadership reinventing the cyber program,” one former official told the WSJ.
This comes at a time when intelligence officials are ratcheting up their public comments about ongoing and likely increasing levels of Russian hacking and interference efforts, particularly in our elections. The White House is clearly OK with all that, as are congressional Republicans, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (7/20).
TRUMP FUMES OVER NORTH KOREA FAILING TO HONOR HANDSHAKE. Among experts on North Korea, there was near universal agreement that Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was a colossal failure and an utter waste of time, Adam Peck noted at ThinkProgress (7/22).
The joint statement signed by both leaders contained exactly zero new commitments, and in fact undercut previous negotiations by failing to provide any timeline for North Korea’s promised denuclearization efforts.
Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at New America, offered this sobering assessment: “The summit statement is big on hyperbole and short on substance – it reads like it was written by the North Korean negotiating team.”
Naturally, Donald Trump and his administration were quick to celebrate the Singapore summit as a resounding success, and dismissed the combined decades of experience telling him otherwise by pointing out he shook on it.
The Washington Post (7/22) published a lengthy story detailing some of the inner conversations within the White House about the fallout from the North Korea talks, and — surprise! — the North Korea experts were right.
Well over a month has passed since Trump handed a massive public relations victory to North Korea, and since then, officials in Pyongyang have done little else besides embarrass and humiliate their Washington, DC counterparts. Several follow-up meetings that were scheduled have been canceled or indefinitely postponed. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been stood up at least twice by North Korean officials, and when the Pentagon sent several officials to meet with representatives from North Korea last week at the demilitarized zone, they were left waiting for three hours before finally being told the meeting wouldn’t be happening at all.
Meanwhile, several of the promises Trump claimed to have extracted from North Korea have gone unfulfilled. A missile-testing facility that Trump said would be destroyed remains untouched. Not a single Korean War service member’s remains have been returned to the United States, despite Trump’s claim that 200 fallen soldiers have already been repatriated. And there is evidence that North Korea is working to conceal the true scope of its nuclear weapons program despite its purported commitment to denuclearization.
All of which has led Trump to privately fume over being outmaneuvered and hustled by the world’s most notorious dictator, even as he continues to insist publicly that the negotiations were a resounding success. According to the Washington Post, Trump has requested daily briefings about the status of the ongoing discussions with North Korea, and is angry that the media’s assessment of his sham summit has largely come to pass. Perhaps next time he should insist upon a pinky promise.
Before agreeing to the summit, Trump spent weeks threatening Kim Jong Un with nuclear weapons. Experts now have begun to express concern that Trump’s notoriously short temper might jeopardize what little diplomacy actually exists between the two countries.
“I worry that Trump might lose patience with the length and complexities of negotiations that are common when dealing with North Korea and walk away and revert back to serious considerations of the military option,” Duyeon Kim, an expert on Korea from the Center for a New American Security, told the Washington Post.
NATIVE AMERICA PIPELINE PROTESTERS ENTER PLEA AGREEMENTS TO AVOID LONG PRISON TERMS. State and federal prosecutions of Native Americans and their allies who protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline are drawing closer to an end, as two more protesters agreed to plea deals, Mark Hand noted at ThinkProgress (7/21).
After investigations that included a review of photographs and video footage, Native Americans were the only protesters targeted by federal prosecutors. The hundreds of other protesters who were arrested faced charges in North Dakota state court.
Dion Ortiz and James “Angry Bird” White chose to enter plea deals instead of going to trial, and they face the possibility of much harsher punishment for their opposition to the pipeline project. Three other Native American protesters also have entered plea agreements in federal court, and two of them were recently sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
Ortiz on Wednesday agreed to plead guilty to the charge of committing “civil disorder” and in return, the second charge of using “fire to commit a federal felony offense” was dropped. Had he been convicted of that offense, Ortiz would have faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.
On July 12, Angry Bird entered into a plea agreement in which prosecutors will recommend time served plus 12 months of home confinement for the charge of civil disorder.
Federal prosecutors accused Ortiz and Angry Bird of setting three highway barricades on fire, which obstructed police during a highly-militarized raid of a camp set up just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.
The Water Protector Legal Collective, a group that has provided legal support for people opposed to the Dakota Access pipeline, hired an expert in late 2016 to poll potential jurors to determine the extent of local bias against the protesters.
The expert found that 77% of potential jurors in Morton County, North Dakota and 85% in neighboring Burleigh County, North Dakota had already decided the defendants were guilty and that many potential jurors have close connections to law enforcement and the oil industry.
Plea agreements, particularly for Native Americans, can reduce the opportunity for further discrimination in the legal system, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, staff attorney for the Water Protective Legal Collective, said in an email to ThinkProgress.
The $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline is now fully built, following President Trump’s January 2017 order to expedite its completion, which reversed President Obama’s block on the project.
The pipeline extends 1,168 miles from North Dakota to Illinois and is capable of transporting 570,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to a distribution hub in Illinois. From there, the oil is transported via separate pipelines to refineries along the Gulf coast.
Prosecutors agreed to recommend up to three years in prison for Ortiz, although the judge has the authority to go as high as five years. Ortiz, a member of the San Felipe Pueblo in New Mexico, is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court in Bismarck, North Dakota on Oct. 22.
Angry Bird, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was prepared to go to trial, but when the prosecutors offered a deal that required no prison time, he decided to accept the plea agreement, said Daphne Silverman, Angry Bird’s defense attorney.
Native American protester Michael “Rattler” Markus is scheduled for sentencing on Sept. 27. Similar to the others facing serious charges, Rattler also accepted a plea deal. He will likely receive a sentence of three years in prison, although the judge has the authority to sentence him to as much as five years at his sentencing next month.
On July 11, Red Fawn Fallis was sentenced to 57 months, to be followed by three years of federal supervision, the longest sentence handed so far to a Dakota Access protester.
The only other protester to receive a lengthy prison sentence is Michael “Little Feather” Giron. In late May, he was sentenced to three years in prison. He had already spent 15 months in jail, time for which he was credited. His lawyers believe he could be released to a halfway house by next spring.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2018
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