Dispatches

BIDEN FIRES TRUMP’S SOCIAL SECURITY BOSS.

President Biden fired Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, after Saul refused a request to resign (4/9). Saul’s deputy, David Black, who was also appointed by former president Donald Trump, resigned upon request, CommonDreams reported (4/10).

Saul, 74, a wealthy businessman who owned the now-bankrupt women’s apparel company Caché, is a major Republican donor and Trump supporter.

House Democrats and progressive activists have been calling on President Biden to fire Saul for months, accusing Saul of slow-walking the Biden administration’s effort to distribute direct coronavirus relief payments to tens of millions of seniors and people with disabilities.

Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works said it was “a great day for every current and future Social Security beneficiary.

“Andrew Saul and David Black were appointed by former President Donald Trump to undermine Social Security. They’ve done their very best to carry out that despicable mission. That includes waging a war on people with disabilities, demoralizing the agency’s workforce, and delaying President Biden’s stimulus checks.”

Biden named Kilolo Kijakazi, the current deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy, to serve as acting commissioner until a permanent nominee is selected.

The White House said: “Since taking office, Commissioner Saul has undermined and politicized Social Security disability benefits, terminated the agency’s telework policy that was utilized by up to 25% of the agency’s workforce, not repaired SSA’s relationships with relevant Federal employee unions including in the context of COVID-19 workplace safety planning, reduced due process protections for benefits appeals hearings, and taken other actions that run contrary to the mission of the agency and the President’s policy agenda.”

Saul told the Washington Post he would not leave his post, challenging the legality of the White House move to oust him. “I consider myself the term-protected Commissioner of Social Security,” he said, adding that he planned to be back at work on Monday morning. He called his ouster a “Friday Night Massacre.”

The following Monday, he found his access to agency computers cut off. “I’m here to do the job,” he told the Post from his home in Katonah, N.Y., where he had led the agency since March 2020, “but I can’t do anything with the communications shut down.”

Acting Director Kilolo Kijakazi, took the reins (7/12) and was briefed by her staff on the agency’s top priorities, advocates in touch with her office told the Post, including much anticipated planning for the safe reopening of Social Security’s national network of 1,200 field offices. The agency has been under pressure for months from lawmakers in both parties to return to serving the public in person after complaints from constituents who do not have access to the Internet.

Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans said in a late Friday statement:

“Andrew Saul was a disaster for seniors and all Social Security beneficiaries. From day one he was on a mission to gut the Social Security system from the inside. Thank you President Biden for taking decisive action.

“The millions of Americans of all ages who rely or will rely on earned Social Security benefits deserve a Social Security Commissioner who understands and supports the agency’s mission.”

Experts in federal personnel law, said it was doubtful that Saul could successfully sue the administration to get his job back, following two rulings by the Supreme Court that affirmed the authority of the president to fire the head of an independent agency with a single leader, the Post reported.

“I think he can make a lot of noise and get the Republicans to make noise,” said Nancy Altman, an attorney and president of Social Security Works, “but in terms of the law, I would be shocked if a court found the president didn’t have the power to fire him.” At the very least, Altman and others said, a court may find him eligible for financial compensation — but not return him to his job.

CPAC HAS BECOME THE PLACE REPUBLICANS GO TO SCARE THEMSELVES SILLIER. How can we be sure that we’ve drifted into the Worst Possible Timeline? Because it’s always CPAC, Mark Sumner wrote at DailyKos (7/10). Not content with one event in 2021, the Conservative Political Action Conference had a second round, with Eclectic Bugaboos in Dallas. 

Republicans used to act as if the CPAC meetings involved a serious transfer of conservative philosophy. Way back when the conferences started in 1974, it was at CPAC that Ronald Reagan gave the first draft of the “shining city on a hill” speech that would later become his signature party trick. There was even the time CPAC organizers ran Richard Spencer out of the building, with the head of the American Conservative Union complaining that the alt-right was everything that conservatives despise.

That was (checks notes) 2017. Though, just to be clear, that same ACU invited Milo Yiannopoulos a year before Spencer was scolded, so the idea that they were actually against racism, misogyny, or xenophobia always seemed like a stunt for the cameras. In any case, they’re certainly not hiding any of those sterling qualities at this year’s CPAC, an event that must leave guys like Spencer and Yiannopoulos happy to say they’re not associated with those extremists.

What has been the level of Republican discourse at this CPAC event? Well, there’s Madison Cawthorn, the designated heir to Louie Gohmert’s traditional role in Congress, explaining the CPAC-truth behind President Biden’s talk of asking volunteers to go door-to-door helping to expand vaccine availability. The real plan, according to Cawthorn, is to build a “massive mechanism” that can then be used to “go door-to-door to take your guns” or “door-to-door to take your Bibles.” 

Honestly, of all the speeches given at this year’s CPAC, Cawthorn’s may be the most instructive. Because when it comes to “exchanging conservative ideas” in 2021, what that really means is collaborating on the scariest story, whether or not it makes any sense. Cawthorn is demonstrating exactly how this works, and everyone is nodding right along, because what he’s saying is absolutely core to the Republican Party — which, as a reminder, has no platform. The Republican Party exists only to hold power and spread fear. That’s it.

And if press coverage once resulted in Yiannopoulos being un-invited, and Spencer was on the waggy end of the ACU’s bony finger, that is all so 2017. At this year’s CPAC, they’re not stopping with fascist talkers, they’re all in on fascist doers. That includes bringing in Elmer Rhodes. The founder of Oath Keepers not only helped to plan the January 6 insurrection, he called on Donald Trump to make it official by using the Insurrection Act to overturn the election. Which makes Rhodes a hero of the modern party.

And rather than concentrating on candidates for 2024, or even securing the House in 2022, this year’s CPAC had a different focus — putting Donald Trump back in the White House in 2021. Where many flawed plans involve what appear to be reasonable steps right up to the point where something magic or illogical is required, this plan starts off with that magic right at step one, as the Q-cult finally reveals their evidence of underground pizza tubes and Nancy Pelosi “melts, like the Wicked Witch of the West” opening the door for Trump to step in as speaker, then impeach both Biden and Harris, then move right into the White House. Elections? What are these elections?

That’s not to say some real world topics didn’t come up. Like the discussion of the COVID-19 crisis, where the failure to get enough Americans vaccinated to stop the pandemic drew cheers.

Whatever CPAC was intended to be in 1974, this is what is today — a place for Republicans to trade dark fairy tales stewed together from output of Q-boards and cooked to overripe perfection in the Fox News kitchens. It’s absolutely ludicrous, infinitely dangerous, and completely poisonous to democracy. And no one even gets their house redesigned.

A SANCTIONS HEARING ON THE BASELESS ‘KRAKEN’ LAWSUIT WAS A DISASTER FOR TRUMP’S LAWYERS. A federal court hearing in Detroit (7/12) on sanctions for Donald Trump’s lawyers who submitted a baseless election fraud lawsuit in a last-ditch attempt to overturn the vote was just about as wild as might be expected. “In fact, it might have qualified as hysterically funny but for the fact that more than half of GOP voters now delusionally believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump due to the firehose of lies spewed by him and his so-called ‘elite strike force’ team of lawyers, Kerry Eleveld wrote at DailyKos. In fact, it might have qualified as hysterically funny but for the fact that more than half of GOP voters now delusionally believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump due to the firehose of lies spewed by him and his so-called “elite strike force” team of lawyers.

In case anyone needs a visual for the way US District Judge Linda Parker picked apart the fraud case filed last year by Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and their co-counsel—Stefanie Junttila, Scott Hagerstrom, Julia Haller, Brandon Johnson, Donald Campbell, Howard Kleinhendler, and Gregory Rohl—just flash back to Rudy Giuliani’s literal meltdown at a November press conference in which he claimed to have extensive evidence of systemic election fraud.

For starters, here’s a live tweet from the court by Daily Beast political reporter Will Sommer: “Probably not a great sign for Lin Wood and Sidney Powell in their election fraud sanctions hearing that one of their main lawyers appears to be crying.”

Eleveld continued: “In case anyone needs a visual for the way U.S. District Judge Linda Parker picked apart the fraud case filed last year by Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and their co-counsel—Stefanie Junttila, Scott Hagerstrom, Julia Haller, Brandon Johnson, Donald Campbell, Howard Kleinhendler, and Gregory Rohl—just flash back to Rudy Giuliani’s literal meltdown at a November press conference in which he claimed to have extensive evidence of systemic election fraud. For starters, here’s a live tweet Monday morning from Daily Beast political reporter Will Sommer: “Probably not a great sign for Lin Wood and Sidney Powell in their election fraud sanctions hearing that one of their main lawyers appears to be crying.”

The hearing kicked off with Wood, a staunch Trump loyalist who has spewed gobs of baseless election fraud nonsense, seeking to separate himself from other members of the pro-Trump legal squad. Wood tried to make the argument that he had no idea he had been included on the filing.

“I did not review any of the documents with respect to the complaint,” Wood said. “I just had no involvement in it whatsoever,” he added, saying he only found out his name was included after the complaint had already been filed. 

Powell then told Judge Parker she wouldn’t have added Wood’s name to the complaint without his permission.

“Might there have been a misunderstanding? That’s certainly possible,” Powell explained.

Oh, so Kraken-pot lead Sidney Powell didn’t even get the cover page of the filing right? Parker said she would allow Wood to make a supplemental argument, but it was basically all downhill from there. 

The long and the short of it is that the Team Kraken did little-to-no vetting of the 960 affidavits they filed in support of their November lawsuit challenging Michigan’s election results. 

At the hearing, Powell wielded the number as a point of pride. 

“The very fact that we filed 960 affidavits with our complaint shows extraordinary due diligence on our part,” she told the judge, according to The Independent reporter Andrew Feinberg.

Judge Parker later framed one such affidavit, that of Jessica Connarn, as based on triple-hearsay—not exactly the building blocks of a killer legal case.

“The Kraken-pot team also made a habit of interrupting and talking over the judge, flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that one might want to show respect for the judge presiding over one’s fate in a case,” Eleveld wrote.

Ultimately, Parker gave lawyers in the case 14 days to file supplemental briefs in the case. It’s pretty hard to see how most of the defendants repair the damage they did to themselves. But Wood apparently decided he had to have the last word on the day, posting a video snippet of the Zoom video of court, after the judge ‘Absolutely Prohibited’ any recordings.

BLACK TEXAN ARRESTED ON FELONY CHARGES FOR VOTING IN 2020 PRIMARY WHILE FRAUDULENT WHITE VOTERS GET WRISTS SLAPPED. In the 2020 presidential election, a handful of Republican voters deliberately cast illegal ballots on behalf of dead relatives, These voters were caught and charged, and they received sentences that can fairly be described as slaps on the wrist, Steve Benen noted at Maddow.com (7/12). These voters, incidentally, were all White guys.

It was hard not to think of Crystal Mason, a Texan who cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 cycle while on supervised release for a federal conviction. She didn’t know she was ineligible to vote, and her ballot was never counted, but Mason — a Black woman — was convicted of illegal voting and sentenced to five years in prison.

A similar case has come to the fore.

A Texas man who received widespread attention after standing more than six hours in line to vote in the March 3, 2020, Democratic presidential primary has been arrested on illegal voting charges after casting a ballot while on parole. Hervis Rogers, 62, was arrested (7/7) on two counts of illegal voting, a second-degree felony that carries a possible sentence of two to 20 years in prison. His bail has been set at $100,000.

As Rachel Maddow noted on her MSNBC show (7/9), Rogers briefly became the subject of national human-interest stories last year because he arrived at his local precinct shortly before 7 p.m. on Texas’ primary day, and he had to wait in line for more than six hours to vote. It led to stories, not only about this one man’s impressive perseverance, but also about the dramatic flaws in the balloting process in Harris County, Texas.

(Harris County corrected those problems ahead of the general election, making it far easier for voters in and around Houston to participate in their own democracy. Texas Republican legislators are now desperate to undo those reforms and place new barriers between voters and ballot boxes.)

But recently, the human-interest story took a terrible turn: Hervis Rogers committed a felony in the 1990s, but he served his time and has been out of prison for more than 15 years. What the Texan did not realize is that he couldn’t vote until his parole ended in June, and he cast a ballot in March.

And so, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought charges against Rogers. But unlike Trump voters elsewhere who received minor sentences for their premeditated schemes to cast illegal votes, Rogers faces up to 20 years in prison and was told if he wanted to get out of jail, he’d need to put up $100,000 bail.

Also of interest, though Rogers lives in Houston, which is in Harris County, and he voted in Harris County, the state attorney general’s office charged and held him in nearby Montgomery County. When MSNBC asked Paxton’s office about this, they were told Paxton has the option of prosecuting Rogers in Harris County or any of the eight counties that abut it.

According to Census data, of those eight counties, Paxton’s office appears to have chosen the one with the lowest proportion of African-American residents.

Rogers, who’s 62 years old, was released on bail Saturday (7/10) — not because he had $100,000, but because private citizens learned of his case and contributed to an online fund.

Paxton also happens to be under criminal indictment, and has been free on $35,000 personal recognizance bonds since 2015 awaiting trial on state securities fraud charges. He’s also currently being investigated by the FBI on allegations by seven officials in the Texas attorney general’s office that Paxton engaged in improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential crimes.

EVICTION TSUNAMI LOOMS DESPITE $46 BILLION IN RENTAL RELIEF. The federal eviction moratorium ends July 31, and when it does, millions of people will be at risk of being thrown out of their homes, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (7/11). Congress has passed $46 billion in rental assistance, but much of that money remains unspent, while families count the days until eviction notices go out.

The December COVID-19 relief bill included $25 billion in rental assistance. As of the end of May, just $1.5 billion had been spent. There’s even $425 million from the March 2020 CARES Act that still hasn’t made it to renters.

With the states in charge of allocating the money, performance from state to state has been wildly uneven. According to data from the Treasury Department, Virginia and Texas have been bright spots, allocating $155.5 million and $139.8 million in aid between January and May. Rhode Island, by contrast, managed to pay out just $100,000, and that didn’t happen until May. In between, Georgia gave out $11 million of an available $552 million, North Dakota $3.4 million of $200 million, North Carolina $73 million of $546 million and California distributing $73 million of $1.4 billion.

Fewer than 100,000 households were helped in April, rising to almost 160,000 in May. That leaves millions of households still in danger of eviction, according to Census Bureau surveys. And eviction is life-shattering: In addition to the loss of a home and possessions, and children often having to switch schools abruptly, Princeton University’s Eviction Lab explains, “A legal eviction comes with a court record, which can prevent families from relocating to decent housing in a safe neighborhood, because many landlords screen for recent evictions.”

Studies also show that eviction causes job loss, as the stressful and drawn-out process of being forcibly expelled from a home causes people to make mistakes at work and lose their job. Eviction also has been shown to affect people’s mental health: one study found that mothers who experienced eviction reported higher rates of depression two years after their move. The evidence strongly indicates that eviction is not just a condition of poverty, it is a cause of it.”

This crushing damage will fall unevenly: Black families and single mothers are the most likely to face eviction.

The Biden administration is trying to avert this crisis by getting rental assistance money out, but the outcomes aren’t under federal control.

“The law gives the states and local governments the responsibility to get funds out without giving us hardly any sticks and carrots,” said Gene Sperling, who is in charge of implementing the American Rescue Plan. “So we are just doing everything imaginable in our power—from new guidance to new flexibilities to threats of reallocation—to push, guide, coax, and convene because we are in a race with time and the stakes are so high.”

In addition to delays at the state and local level, more than half of renters don’t even know that rental assistance should be available. Tenants who do know may face a burdensome application process—California only recently cut its application from one that could take three hours to complete to one that takes half an hour. And some landlords are refusing to accept the federal money, a situation that apparently hasn’t been fully fixed by the Biden administration directing programs to give assistance directly to tenants when landlords refuse to accept the money themselves.

Renters need policies beyond just rental assistance—though heaven knows if the rental assistance money would actually reach the people who need it, it would help a lot. One key program is mediation between tenants and landlords. The Biden administration is encouraging it, but more state and local governments need to require it, as Philadelphia is doing.

Unless the billions of dollars in unspent rental assistance start going out a lot faster, though, things are going to get very ugly in August.

TRUMP’S TARIFFS CAUSED DROP IN EXPORTS THAT HASN’T RECOVERED. Exports from the US have dropped nearly 7% in the past three years, since Donald Trump unilaterally imposed tariffs on imports from trading partners, Alan Austin reported in Independent Australia, which has tracked trade outcomes for 34 developed economies, and DailyKos (7/12).

The USA, with a 6.91% decline, has had the world’s third worst collapse in exports – just ahead of Israel and Britain, each of which also had incompetent governments mismanage trade policies, Austin noted. During the past three years, the average increase in exports for all 34 advanced economies with populations of more than one million was 8.67%.

Trump announced punitive tariffs on a range of imported goods in May 2018. Exports have now been below the May 2018 level in every single month since, Austin reported.

“It may take years to get back to the trade position Trump inherited. It may take decades to recover the losses incurred over that period. The thousands of farmer suicides during Trump’s rural recession will, of course, never be restored,” Austin reported.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2021

Populist.com