PENCE’S FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF APPEARED BEFORE FEDERAL GRAND JURY INVESTIGATING JAN. 6. Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, was caught by an ABC News camera leaving the D.C. District Court (7/22) with his attorney, Emmet Flood, beside him. Short reportedly appeared before a federal grand jury investigating the insurrection on the US Capitol on Jan. 6. Sources told ABC News that Short appeared under subpoena.

Short would be the highest-ranking official from the White House under former President Donald Trump to appear before the grand jury, and Charles Pierce noted at Esquire.com (7/25) that it was “an indication that the potential prosecution of the upper levels of the insurrectionary braintrust is moving along, however glacially.”

Pierce added, “Short knows where a lot of the bodies are buried, and he knows where most of the shovels are hidden, too. If he’s cooperating, then cracks may begin to appear in Pence’s curious reluctance to turn on a president* who would’ve been perfectly content to see him dangling from a lamp post on Constitution Ave. on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Grand jury subpoenas were sent to those who assisted in the organizing and planning of former President Donald Trump’s “Save America” rally on the Ellipse near the White House, the sources said, with prosecutors seeking multiple records and documents related to the rally, including text messages and emails, as well as potential communications with other individuals regarding the logistics of the event, ABC reported.

The week before, “Short was quite vocal in ginning up excuses for Pence not to appear before the House select committee ...” Pierce noted. “At the very least, Short’s appearance before the grand jury suggests that he believes that the judicial branch has some purchase on executive misdeeds.

“Whatever Mike Pence knew before, during, and after the insurrection, Marc Short knew. And whatever Mike Pence felt before, during, and after the insurrection, Marc Short felt, too. The mills of the gods, etc.

TRUMP’S SECRET SERVICE AGENTS WHO DISPUTED HUTCHINSON TESTIMONY LAWYER UP, REFUSE TO TESTIFY. Top Secret Service agents who tried to undermine former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the Jan. 6 committee have hired private lawyers and are refusing to cooperate with the investigation, members of the panel said, Igor Derysh reported at Salon (7/25).

Hutchinson, who worked as a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified in June that she was told by deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato that former President Donald Trump was so irate that his security detail would not take him to the Capitol with his supporters on Jan. 6 that he lunged at Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, the head of his detail. Hutchinson said Ornato, who made the unusual leap from working at the Secret Service to working for Trump before returning as a senior Secret Service official, described the incident with Engel present and he did not dispute it.

After her testimony, journalists citing anonymous sources reported that Engel and the driver of Trump’s vehicle were “prepared to testify under oath” to dispute Hutchinson’s account and that Ornato denied telling Hutchinson that Trump “grabbed the steering wheel or an agent.”

Hutchinson’s lawyer, Jody Hunt, a former aide to Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said that she stood by her account and urged the Secret Service agents to testify under oath. Several witnesses, including a D.C. police officer assigned to Trump’s motorcade, testified that Trump got into a “heated” confrontation with his security detail when he was told he could not go to the Capitol.

Ornato, Engel, and the unidentified driver of Trump’s vehicle have since hired private counsel, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., told reporters.

“Some of the officers said that they would be coming and talking under oath,” said Lofgren, a member of the committee. “They have not come in, and they recently retained private counsel, which is unusual but they have a right to do that.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., one of the two Republicans on the panel, told ABC News on Sunday, July 24, that “it is not our decision that they have not [testified] so far.”

Asked if the Secret Service is refusing to cooperate, Kinzinger replied, “that’s a question you have to ask the Secret Service, you have to ask those particular people.”

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the committee’s vice-chair, told Fox News Sunday that “we have not had the kind of cooperation that we really need to have” from the Secret Service.

Questions have swirled about Ornato and Engel’s credibility since Hutchinson’s testimony. Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, who wrote the book “Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service” during the Trump administration, told MSNBC that both men were “very, very close to President Trump.”

Committee members also called out the Secret Service over missing text messages from around the time of the Capitol attack. The Secret Service said agents’ text messages were deleted during a system migration in January 2021. The agency turned over just one text message thread in response to a subpoena from the committee. Joseph Cuffari, the top watchdog at the Department of Homeland Security, was aware of the deleted texts since February but did not inform Congress, according to the Washington Post. Cuffari’s office has since opened a criminal investigation into the destruction of the text messages, NBC News reported, after the committee accused the agency of potentially violating federal record-keeping laws.

DEMS GAIN, REPUBS FALTER AS MONTHS TICK TOWARD NOVEMBER. The fundamentals of the 2022 midterms increasingly reveal a cycle that is departing from the historic norms most pundits have relied on as touch points for their analysis, Kelly Eleveld noted at DailyKos (7/22).

In particular, the generic ballot trend lines appear to be decoupling from President Joe Biden’s job approvals by the day. FiveThirtyEight’s generic ballot aggregate, for instance, had tightened (7/21) to a mere 1-point advantage for Republicans, 44.3%-43.2%, even as Biden’s approvals keep sinking, hitting 37.6%.

In even better news for Democrats, FiveThirtyEight’s generic ballot likely overstates the case for Republicans by including the GOP-leaning Rasmussen Reports, which gives Republicans an 8-point advantage, while every other survey shows either a solid Democratic advantage or a very competitive race.

Democratic strategist and New Democratic Network President Simon Rosenberg went to the trouble of averaging the latest 17 independent polls with an A/B rating from FiveThirtyEight (while excluding partisan polls like Rasmussen) and found Democrats leading the generic ballot by +2.4 points, 44.1% D-41.7% R.

“That’s a 4-5 point shift from where the election was a month ago,” writes Rosenberg.

Democrats also have better candidates to work with, while Republicans are saddled with a slew of Trump-endorsed MAGA extremists, particularly in key Senate races.

Add to that a huge cash advantage for Democratic candidates and the outlook continues to improve.

Rosenberg also notes another interesting data point: Key GOP incumbents are struggling to break 50% in horse race polling.

He writes that Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are all under 50% in recent polls, while Republican Senate nominees Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and JD Vance in Ohio are closer to 40 than 50, all of which signals weakness in what are currently GOP-held Senate seats.

“If this was such a good GOP year, why aren’t we seeing better GOP numbers? Why are their candidates struggling to raise money?” posits Rosenberg.

In short, early reports of Democrats’ cataclysmic demise this November have been greatly exaggerated. While keeping the House will still be a very tough nut to crack, Democrats’ prospects for keeping the Senate and even picking up a seat or maybe more continue to improve.

Additionally, the Democratic strategy of shining a spotlight on GOP extremism should continue to yield fruit straight into November. Republicans don’t recognize Joe Biden’s win as legitimate, they don’t want Jan. 6 investigated, they don’t want women to be able to access abortion or birth control, and most don’t want Americans to be able to marry the person they love if they are of the same sex or a different color. Republicans, the so-called small government party, are now actively advocating for government control of what Americans do in their bedrooms and private lives.

PROGRESSIVES WIN SMALL VICTORIES AT USPS. In February 2021 the US Postal Service announced its plans for an $11.3 billion contract with a military contractor called Oshkosh Defense for a new generation of mail trucks—powered by gasoline, Robert Kuttner noted at Prospect.org (7/22). The 150,000 new vehicles would have gotten 8.3 miles per gallon, about the same as the three-decade-old ones they were replacing, and would have produced pollution equal to that of 4.3 million passenger cars.

On July 20, succumbing to pressure from Congress, the White House, and lawsuits from 16 states and four leading environmental groups, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a notorious Trump holdover, backed down and revised the contract so the Postal Service’s new trucks will be mostly electric.

By 2023, the fleet of 217,000 vehicles, the civilian government’s largest, will be about 40% electric. The two leading Democrats in the House who have pressed for this reversal, Jared Huffman of California and Carolyn Maloney of New York, want the fleet to be close to 100% electric.

It’s the kind of incremental progress that progressives are occasionally winning. Meanwhile, President Biden’s larger climate and social investment agenda remains totally blocked, and the future of democracy itself hangs by a thread.

By coincidence, the Postal Service on July 22, released a stamp honoring Pete Seeger. Despite the reign of DeJoy, postage stamps have continued to feature occasional lefties. Other progressives recently featured on stamps include James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Woody Guthrie, Yip Harburg, Harvey Milk, Paul Robeson, and even Malcolm X, Kuttner noted.

“Could this be the work of some lefty mole buried deep in the administrative state?

“When Joe McCarthy was at the peak of his power, he went after an obscure army dentist named Irving Peress, who served as a captain during the Korean War. Peress had leftist leanings. In October 1953, he was routinely promoted to major.

“One of McCarthy’s lunatic raves became, ‘Who promoted Peress?’ If we ever become a full-blown Republican police state, one can imagine a future Congressional investigation demanding to know, ‘Who honored Pete Seeger?’

“I’m reminded of one of Todd Gitlin’s most witty and prescient lines, recoiling against the political energy that went into arcane cultural battles in academia. He wrote, “While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department.”

“The right is now on the verge of destroying American democracy. We get some EVs at the Postal Service, and Pete Seeger on a stamp.

“May Pete’s memory inspire us to larger struggles, bolder visions, and political coherence,” Kuttner concluded.

EXTREMIST SUPREME COURT MAJORITY UNIFIES MOST AMERICANS AGAINST IT IN ONE TERM. Most Americans don’t trust the Supreme Court; most Americans now favor terms limits; most Americans now support requiring justices to retire by a specific age; and most Americans reported that the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade made them “angry” or “sad,” an AP-NORC poll conducted July 14-17 found.

Effectively, the court’s right-wing justices have gone 4-for-4 in turning the American public against them in a single term, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (7/25).

Toplines from the AP-NORC survey:

• 67% of Americans support setting a specific number of years that justices serve instead of life terms, including 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans

• 64% favor requiring Supreme Court justices to retire by a specific age, including 75% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans

• 43% of Americans say they have hardly any confidence in the court—up from 27% three months ago—including 64% of Democrats and 45% of independents. (Just 17% of Americans expressed a great deal of confidence in the court)

• 55% say they feel at least somewhat angry or sad about the decision, including about 4 in 10 who feel so strongly (just 32% said they’re excited by the ruling)

Nearly every poll taken since the abortion ruling was leaked or released has found plummeting confidence in the court.

The progressive group Navigator Research found the high court’s job approvals plummeting 29 points, from +23 points in February to -6 in July at 43% approve, 49% disapprove.

In the wake of the ruling, Reuters Ipsos found the court’s favorability rating had fallen 14 points underwater (43% favorable, 57% unfavorable), whereas in early June, it was still 4 points above water (52% favorable, 48% unfavorable).

Gallup found just 25% of Americans expressed confidence in the Supreme Court, a historic low in nearly 50 years of polling the issue—and that was in June before the abortion ruling had been handed down.

“All in all, it’s a pretty impressive streak for the radicalized 6-3 Supreme Court majority. The extremist justices have really turned things around in short order,” Eleveld noted.

BIG OIL QUICK TO BOOST GAS PRICES, BUT SLOW TO DROP THEM. Over the past four months, Big Oil has rushed to raise gasoline prices—sometimes charging far more at the pump than the increased cost of oil would warrant—and dawdled to lower them when crude’s valuation declined, according to a new analysis released by the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US, Kenny Stancil noted at CommonDreams (7/25).

Accountable.US acknowledges that the cost of oil plays an important role in determining the price of retail gas. But to understand why prices at the pump have outpaced the escalating cost of crude and why, when the cost of crude has fallen temporarily during the last 12 weeks, savings have very slowly—and only partially—been passed on to consumers, the group says look no further than fossil fuel corporations’ desire to maximize profit margins.

In March, congressional Democrats led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax.

According to polling data released soon after the legislation was unveiled, 80% of US voters—including 73% of Republicans—support the measure, which would hit large fossil fuel companies with a per-barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019. An estimated $45 billion in annual revenue would be redistributed to US households in the form of quarterly rebates.

But Khanna and Whitehouse’s proposal faces long odds given the GOP’s desire to capitalize on voters’ mounting anger at the state of the economy. Not only is it unlikely that 10 Senate Republicans would support the bill past an expected filibuster; it remains unclear whether conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) would vote for the bill is submitted in the budget reconciliation process.

HALF OF US SENIORS CAN’T AFFORD BASIC EXPENSES. Around half of US seniors living alone can’t afford their basic necessities, underscoring calls for legislation to expand Social Security and lower prescription drug prices, Britt Wilkins noted at CommonDreams (7/25).

Elder Index, a project of the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, found 54% of older US women who live on their own and 45% of older men in the same situation are either impoverished by federal standards or cannot cover their necessary expenses. For older couples, the figure is 24%.

“The Elder Index confirms what we already knew: The cost of living is just too high for older Americans, and their earned benefits aren’t keeping pace with these costs,” the Alliance for Retired Americans tweeted in response to the report.

Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.) is sponsoring HR 5723—the Social Security 2100: A Sacred Trust—which would increase program benefits, protect against inflation, end the five-month waiting period for disability benefits, strengthen the Social Security trust funds and remove the limit on taxable income over $400,000 to make the fund solvent to 2038.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is fighting to torpedo Senate Democrats’ modest proposal to reduce prescription drug prices by requiring Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of a limited number of medications.

Surveys have shown that expanding Social Security and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices are overwhelmingly popular with voters. According to recent Data for Progress polling, 76% of all likely US voters support expanding Social Security, while 83% back Medicare negotiating for lower drug prices.

See more Dispatches at populist.com.

ONE GOOD SAMARITAN WITH A GUN DOESN’T MAKE A FOOD COURT SAFE. Just after 6 p.m. local time on Sunday, July 17, an unidentified gunman walked into the food court at Greenwood Park Mall outside of Indianapolis, Ind., and began firing with what officials believe was some form of long gun. His motive remains unknown. What is known, however, is that after killing three mallgoers and injuring several more, the gunman was shot to death by an armed 22-year-old bystander, who has been dubbed a “good Samaritan” and a “hero” by local and state officials, Rafi Schwartz noted at Mic.com (7/8).

“Textual inaccuracy aside, the plaudits for the as-of-yet unnamed ‘good Samaritan’ have been predictably effusive from right-wing gun advocates eager to latch onto this single instance of vigilante violence as proof that widespread firearm ownership is necessary in this scary, unpredictable world of Democrat-induced disarmament,” Schwartz noted.

“But take a step back from the laudatory Fox News headlines and celebratory ‘we told you so’s from the various corners of the right-wing slime culture and consider what, exactly, is being held up as the ideal here: a random 22-year-old opening fire in an already chaotic scene, and only after multiple other people were dead or injured. The police, meanwhile — the people actually paid and empowered to do something in this situation — are essentially treated as afterthoughts. Is this truly a best-case scenario? Particularly as envisioned by the same “back the blue” crowd who have spent years screaming how vital police forces are for situations just like this?

“According to Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison, the man who killed the gunman was ‘lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop that shooter almost as soon as he began’ — which is to say, only after he’d already killed or wounded several people. What’s more, while gun enthusiasts love to claim that gun-free zones invite criminal violence, and the threat of other people packing heat acts as a deterrent, none of that seemed to actually play out in this case, given Indiana’s recently enacted permit-less carry law, which seemingly did nothing to scare the mall shooter away.

“Ultimately, the Greenwood Park Mall shooting is a tragedy, and the fact that it ended the way it did does nothing to lessen the horror of living in a country where simply eating in a food court means risking finding yourself in the middle of a crossfire between two gunmen. That’s not a story of heroism. That’s just proof of just how bad things have gotten.”

The Violence Policy Center (VPC) in 2020 issued a report, “Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self-Defense Gun Use that found for every time a gun was used to justifiably kill a criminal, guns were used to claim 35 lives in criminal homicides alone, based on 2017 data (the most recent year available from the FBI.

The study found that in 2017 there were only 298 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm reported to the SHR. That year, there were 10,380 criminal firearm homicides. For the five-year period 2013 to 2017, 45,256 Americans died in gun homicides and guns were used in only 1,272 justifiable homicides, a ratio of 36 to one. Neither ratio takes into account the tens of thousands of lives lost each year in firearm suicides and unintentional gun deaths. The study also revealed that only a tiny fraction of the intended victims of violent crime or property crime employ guns for self-defense.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2022

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