Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed inclined on Wednesday to again limit the Biden administration’s ability to protect the environment by temporarily stopping an effort by the Environmental Protection Agency to curtail air pollution that drifts across state lines.

Such a decision, expected by June, would be in keeping with recent rulings by the court, which has chipped away at the agency’s authority to address climate change and water pollution.

The new cases concerned the administration’s “good neighbor” plan. Under the proposal, which initially applied to 23 states, factories and power plants in Western and Midwestern states must cut ozone pollution that drifts into Eastern states.

The justices appeared to be divided along familiar lines on whether to block the plan, which directs states to take measures meant to reduce emissions that cause smog and are linked to asthma, lung disease and premature death.

A ruling halting the plan would be provisional, as a challenge to it will continue to be litigated in an appeals court and could then return to the Supreme Court. The question for the justices was what should happen in the meantime. Even a temporary loss for the administration could suspend the plan for many months and maybe longer.

The Clean Air Act gives states an opportunity to devise their own plans, subject to approval by the E.P.A. Last February, the agency concluded that 23 states had failed to produce adequate plans to comply with its revised ozone standards. The agency then issued its own plan.

A wave of litigation followed, and seven federal appeals courts blocked the agency’s disapproval of plans submitted by a dozen states, leaving 11 states subject to the federal rule.

Three states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, along with energy companies and trade groups — challenged the federal plan directly in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. When a divided three-judge panel of that court refused to put the rule on hold while the litigation moved forward, the challengers asked the Supreme Court to step in.

The application from the three states urged the justices to block the new rule in light of the appeals courts’ rulings, saying that “the federal plan is already a failed experiment” and “is but a shell of its original self.”

The E.P.A. responded that the provisional rulings on the state plans should not affect the national rule and that blocking it would have severe consequences.

“It would delay efforts to control pollution that contributes to unhealthy air in downwind states, which is contrary to Congress’s express directive that sources in upwind states must assume responsibility for their contributions to emissions levels in downwind states,” the agency’s brief said.

Judith N. Vale, a lawyer for states supporting the plan, described its practical impact at Wednesday’s argument.

“In the good neighbor provision, Congress protected downwind states from pollution emitted in upwind states,” she said. “A stay of the good neighbor rule would undermine that statutory goal and the public interest by sending ozone pollution into downwind states, including Connecticut, Wisconsin and New York, that receive substantial pollution from the particular upwind states that are currently in the rule, including Ohio and Indiana.”

Much of the argument on Wednesday revolved around the question of whether the states that remained subject to the federal plan had been harmed by its shrinking geographical scope.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the remaining states were not made worse off by the exclusion of the others from the federal plan. “Nothing is changing in your costs,” she told Mathura J. Sridharan, Ohio’s deputy solicitor general.

But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the agency had not explained why the plan still made sense given its more limited scope, calling its justification a “goose egg.”

“They don’t have an explanation there,” he said.

Catherine E. Stetson, a lawyer for industry groups challenging the federal plan, said it would subject them to “billions of dollars in compliance over the next 12 months.”

The four consolidated cases, including Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 23A349, reached the court by way of emergency applications, which are typically disposed of in summary fashion. The court’s decision to hear arguments in such a setting — about whether to grant a stay — was quite rare.

“This is an unusual posture for us to be in,” said Justice Elena Kagan, suggesting that it was also an unwelcome one.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also expressed doubts about whether the court should render a consequential decision based on emergency applications. “I’m trying to understand what the emergency is that warrants Supreme Court intervention at this point,” she said.

“I mean, surely,” she added, “the Supreme Court’s emergency docket is not a viable alternative for every party that believes they have a meritorious claim against the government and doesn’t want to have to comply with a rule while they’re challenging it.”

But Justice Kavanaugh said the court’s ordinary criteria for whether to put a regulation on hold were enough to decide the matter, adding that most of them presented close questions.

“Both sides have irreparable harm, so that’s a wash,” he said. “The public interest, both sides have a strong public interest in my view.” That left, he said, an evaluation of the how likely the challengers were to succeed on their underlying arguments.

Quote:

You need to step away from the BlueAnons & their leader Blatham.

Ironically, the above statement is an actual response to this one:

Quote:

You need to spend less time in these conspiracy chatrooms, you're becoming divorced from reality.

When is the next leadership meeting? Or did I forget my dues

When is the next leadership meeting? Or did I forget my dues

Are they fascists, too—or just the right wingers?

Trump is a fascist, and he would love to do away with elections.

...the right wingnuts had decided that the rest of us were all a part of some brainwashed mini-cult...

The centerpiece of Republicans’ case for impeaching Democratic president Joe Biden is the allegation that he and his son Hunter each accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma when Biden Sr. was vice president. But in the last week, that accusation has revealed quite a different problem, one that implicates Republicans.

The accusation that the Bidens accepted bribes broke into public channels on May 3, 2023, when Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray saying they had received “highly credible…whistleblower disclosures” that said the Department of Justice and the FBI appeared to have “valuable, verifiable information that you have failed to disclose to the American people.”

Grassley and Comer claimed there was “growing concern about the DOJ and the FBI’s track record of allowing political bias to infect their decision-making process,” and so Congress would be conducting its own “independent and objective review of this matter.”

Comer then issued a subpoena for the document containing the information, a so-called FD-1023, which is the form used by FBI agents to record “raw, unverified” information from confidential informants. In it, informant Alexander Smirnov made a number of allegations about the Bidens, including that they had accepted bribes.

In July, Grassley and Comer got the document and showed it to others in a secure facility. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) saw it there, took pictures of it, and posted them on social media. She claimed that “Joe Biden is a criminal and is compromised” and that he was backing Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion because Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky “has proof of more Biden crimes.” “IMPEACH BIDEN,” she wrote.

Grassley also released it, suggesting that the Justice Department and the FBI were trying to cover up a “criminal bribery scheme” implicating the Bidens. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) jumped in, saying: “Every day, the evidence keeps mounting and the evidence that is coming in is number one, of a widespread bribery scheme of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family, to extract bribes from foreign nationals.”

The idea that Biden had accepted bribes was central to the House impeachment effort that then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (D-CA) announced in September 2023.

That story fell apart a week ago, on February 14, 2024, when a federal grand jury indicted Smirnov for lying and “creating a false and fictitious record.”

And the story became even more troubling yesterday, when Trump-appointed Special Counsel David Weiss of the Justice Department filed a document establishing that the informant, Alexander Smirnov, has “extensive and extremely recent” ties with “Russian intelligence agencies.”

The filing revealed other, more recent, false allegations Smirnov had made, and concluded that “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues…. What this shows is that the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, told reporters today that “the impeachment investigation essentially ended yesterday, in substance if not in form, with the explosive revelation that Mr. Smirnov’s allegations about Ukrainian Burisma payments to Joe Biden were concocted along with Russian intelligence agents. And it appears like the whole thing was not only obviously false and fraudulent but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda. And that’s been the motor force behind this investigation for more than a year.”

The Republican release of Smirnov’s allegations in July 2023 did not happen in a vacuum: they came right after the Republican-led House censured Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) for “misleading the American public and for conduct unbecoming of an elected Member of the House of Representatives,” including “spread[ing] false accusations that the [2016] Trump campaign colluded with Russia.”

But the Mueller Report concluded that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” and that “the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” The Senate Intelligence Committee Report found that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence…the outcome of the 2016 presidential election” and that Trump campaign advisor Paul Manafort worked directly with Konstantin Kilimnik, “a Russian intelligence officer.”

That effort continued in 2020, with the U.S. intelligence community assessing in March 2021 that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”

That foreign countries try to influence elections is far less a surprise than that one of the two major U.S. political parties now appears to be, wittingly or not, working on their behalf.

That willingness to do anything to win—even working with a foreign dictator—seems a logical outgrowth of the process begun during the administration of President Richard Nixon, when his people deliberately appealed to voters’ emotions with a picture of traditional America under siege by antiwar student activists, people of color, and feminist women.

To rally voters to their party in the 1970s midterms, Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew engaged in what they called “positive polarization.” Nixon’s speechwriter Pat Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon warning: “We are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise…. It will be their kind of society or ours.”

The theme that the Republicans' opponents were dangerous socialists out to destroy the country became the centerpiece of Republican rhetoric. From President Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, who was scamming the system and thus taxpayers, through talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazis,” to Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the party has defined itself as “true America” standing against enemies.

And if you believe you are fighting for the right, it only makes sense to do whatever it takes to win.

Meanwhile, that belief has now overlapped with the evangelical base that supports what it considers traditional values so that, as Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla outlined in Politico yesterday, the party is now advancing plans to impose Christian nationalism on the country. Leaders of the Christian nationalist movement incorrectly believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, so they intend to rest the government and public life on what they consider to be Christian values.

In December, Trump promised: “Upon taking office, I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice.”

What that might look like became clear this week when the Alabama Supreme Court decided in a wrongful death suit resulting from the accidental destruction of embryos that were part of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, in which doctors artificially fertilize eggs outside the womb and then transfer them into a person, that fertilized human eggs have the same status as children. Chief Justice Tom Parker declared in a concurring opinion that the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

About 2% of U.S. births are a product of IVF. Today the largest healthcare system in Alabama has announced it is halting its IVF program out of fear of prosecution.

Reworking the nation to impose Christian nationalism requires minority rule, which aligns with the ideology of authoritarianism, enabling Trump and those who share his views to praise someone like Vladimir Putin. And, it seems, to accept his help winning elections.

I know that’s a big headline that promises a lot. But I think it’s true. David has a good rundown of the events in the Morning Memo. But I want to do my best to set them out on a larger canvas that goes back to the “Hunter Biden laptop” and really all the way back to 2015, a continuing Russian information operation that has been ongoing for almost a decade.

Let’s review recent events. First came the news that prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office had decided that the confidential FBI informant who had been one of Biden’s top accusers had been lying and that they were charging him for lying to the FBI. That next step is critical. Informants lie to prosecutors all the time. They seldom get charged. It’s one standard to decide your informant isn’t telling the truth and/or won’t hold up at trial. It’s an entirely different one to think that you can prove they knowingly lied beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly investigators felt they had caught Alexander Smirnov dead to rights. Yesterday came news that Smirnov has admitted that he got his false stories from Russian intelligence officers. Smirnov isn’t just at the center of the DOJ investigation, he’s at the center of what we have to generously call James Comer’s House inquiry, the premise for Joe Biden’s increasingly wobbly impeachment.

And on top of that, Hunter Biden’s lawyers are now claiming, as part of their effort to force new disclosures by Weiss’s office, that it was new or newly specific accusations from Smirnov which scuttled the plea deal which blew up as it was being agreed to in a federal court room. That point about the plea deal remains an accusation and obviously an interested one from Biden’s attorneys. But given what we’ve learned over the last week from the prosecution side — the folks who were repeatedly duped and took actions on the basis of disinformation directly from Russian intelligence — it seems to me highly likely that it’s true.

A semi-side note here is that I can’t see how Weiss’s office can manage its two cases at once. It’s prosecuting Smirnov for knowingly injecting Russian disinformation into U.S. law enforcement. He’s also prosecuting Hunter Biden for charges that appear to stem from the dissolution of the plea deal, which was itself quite likely tainted by Smirnov’s manipulation. How can you possibly do those two things credibly at once? Is Weiss going to take the stand at Smirnov’s trial as one of Smirnov’s marks and explain how he tricked him into blowing up Biden’s plea deal? While he’s also prosecuting the cases that stem from blowing up that plea deal? That seems absurd.

But let’s go back to the main line of significance.

We were told that Russia’s effort to meddle in the 2016 election was obviously bad. And Rudy Giuliani’s dumpster diving in Ukraine and other parts of the former USSR in 2018 and 2019, which led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment, was probably hoovering up Russian disinformation too. But that was then. Now we’re on to Hunter Biden, obviously the troubled son of a powerful politician whose life skidded into a longterm fugue of drugs and alcohol. That wasn’t real. This is. That was then. This is now. Stop bringing up Russia every time you don’t like a story! This Hunter Biden story is real. But really what we see now, which many of us long suspected, is that this is one ongoing influence operation now going back almost a decade.

For years I’ve continued saying, against what seems like the unified thinking of every reporter, editorialist and credentialed smart person, that the fabled “Hunter Biden Laptop” was obviously the product of a Russian influence operation. The story was absurd on its face. Somehow Hunter Biden decided in a drugged-up fugue that he needed to take his laptop to a computer repair shop. He then forgot about it. The legally blind owner of the repair shop decided to crack it open and look at the files (as one does, of course) and then somehow managed to get the contents to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

Sounds totally legit, as they say!

The standard response has always been: but the emails are real! Hunter’s attorneys don’t deny it. But this is silly. The DNC emails were real too. That’s always how these things work. I don’t know whether some bogus documents were added into the trove that eventually made it to news organizations and the FBI. But very clearly some party either hacked into Biden’s computers or physically stole the laptop and then devised this cover story to launder it into the public realm.

And yet basically everybody and I mean everybody ended up falling for this. Indeed, the very brief efforts to remain wary of the laptop story in the final days of the 2020 election have evolved into an object case of the dangers of censorship and even liberal media election meddling. It’s a decision — albeit one lasting only a few days — that everyone now agrees “we got wrong.” It was the centerpiece of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” nonsense. But Elon Musk going in for it isn’t the point. He’s a clown. All the serious people ended up doing exactly the same. This has always been bullshit. Media organizations at first wouldn’t touch the story because they’d spent the previous four years kicking themselves for allowing themselves to become the promoters of a Russian election interference and disinformation campaign with the purloined DNC emails back in 2016. Since the Hunter Biden laptop stories had all the hallmarks of exactly the same thing somehow happening to pop up in the final days of the 2020, of course they were suspicious.

At worst, that initial resistance was very reasonable, given the record for 2016, even if it had been the case that the story was entirely legitimate. But it wasn’t. Even though the Smirnov revelations themselves don’t speak directly to the laptop story, they tell us very clearly that Russian intelligence operations have continued to drive stories at the center of the American political debate right up until today. Their work likely engineered the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal which was one of the biggest bad news stories for the President last year.

Are we really supposed to believe that these Russian operations, which kicked off in 2015 and continued into 2017, were going full force through 2018 and 2019 with Rudy Giuliani and continue right up until today somehow played no role in the unbelievable story of Hunter Biden’s laptop? Of course they did.

In talking with David Kurtz before I started writing this David noted that we can’t really say Republicans and MAGA Republicans were duped. And that’s 100% right. The evolution of U.S. politics, egged along, skid-greased by helpful Russians, created a context in U.S. politics where these folks didn’t really have to be duped. The Russians under Putin are the good guys. If they’re making sure we have the most current information where’s the harm in that?

The real issue, as I note above, is the reporters, editorialists and commentators, who vouched for and credited this whole edifice of lies and bullshit. Yes, they guffawed when James Comer came forward yet again with more revelations that never quite panned out. But they didn’t give up hope. They were always waiting for the next revelation. Comer and his Republican colleagues hadn’t provided “hard evidence” yet but there sure was a lot of smoke.

This entire thing has been based on Russian plants and intelligence operations from the start. Every bit of it. It’s been obvious. And yet, well … they’re all dupes. Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.

Members of House Republican leadership expressed frustration at Speaker Mike Johnson after a GOP leadership retreat over the weekend, organized to outline plans for keeping the majority, quickly turned into a religious service.

"I'm not at church," an anonymous attendee said in response to Johnson leading the group in prayers and Christian sermonizing. According to two people in the room the sermon was not well received, with one Rep. calling the session "horrible."

Johnson was reportedly railing against government, saying that without God in their lives people will turn to the government for guidance. The sermon lasted for a full third of the meeting according to the anonymous members.

"I think what he was trying to do, but failed on the execution of it, was try to bring us together,” the anonymous source said. “The sermon was so long he couldn't bring it back to make the point."

The GOP House majority shrank to two seats after Democrat Tom Suozzi won the special election to fill the seat left by disgraced former Republican Congressman George Santos. Worried House Republicans are looking to Johnson for plans for keeping their majority after record-low productivity for this Congress. Instead, he is offering thoughts and prayers.

While Johnson is delivering sermons instead of results, the clock is ticking on a government shutdown in a week. Johnson inexplicably called a two-week House recess with supplemental aid for Ukraine and Israel waiting for House consideration, and a looming shutdown on March 1st. Johnson's first item of business for his time off was a Presidents' Day visit to Donald Trump. source

Lash even accused me of being blatham's "sock puppet" at least once.

The sermon lasted for a full third of the meeting according to the anonymous members.