McConnell to Trump: I too like the wall
By BURGESS EVERETT
Mitch McConnell wants Donald Trump to know this: He’s got the president’s back on funding the border wall, even if it might have to wait until after the election.
As Trump said Tuesday that he doesn’t “care what the political ramifications are” of forcing a government shutdown over border wall funding, the Senate majority leader continued to try and impress upon Trump that Senate Republicans are willing to fight for the border wall. But he made clear that the Senate is going to continue its work on less controversial spending bills in the hopes of passing as many of the 12 annual funding bills as possible before the Sept. 30 deadline.
“I support what the president is trying to do on the wall. Most of my members do as well,” McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters. “We’re going to continue to discuss it with him and hope that this process can achieve what he would like to achieve on the wall and also get these appropriations bills signed into law which is quite different than what’s happened in the past.”
Trump, of course, loathed the massive omnibus spending bill passed earlier in the year that delivered just a small amount of border security funding. But though Congress is working to avoid a catch-all bill at the end of the year, McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) are aiming to leave the border fight until after the November midterms.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is waging an uphill battle to take back the Senate majority, suggested that Republicans could be punished in the midterms by voters if they fail to fund the government and don’t overrule Trump's border wall push.
“Usually the person that loses the shutdown is the person who caused it. And Donald Trump is making no bones about it, that he might think of causing it,” said Schumer, whose own party forced a brief shutdown over immigration earlier this year. “I would hope my Republican colleagues have the strength to resist the president’s interference,”
Last week, Trump, Ryan and McConnell met privately and discussed the House and Senate’s approach. People briefed on the meeting said that Trump seemed to agree that putting off the border fight until next year makes sense.
But on Tuesday he lashed out at the idea that he’s willing to wait for the wall.
“I don’t care what the political ramifications are, our immigration laws and border security have been a complete and total disaster for decades, and there is no way that the Democrats will allow it to be fixed without a Government Shutdown,” Trump tweeted. “A Government Shutdown is a very small price to pay for a safe and Prosperous America!”
Asked directly about Trump’s tweet, McConnell demurred: “I’m hoping we’re going to be able to resolve this issue. We know it’s important to him.”
Under the current plan of congressional leaders, Republicans would work to fund the majority of the government through spending bill packages in September. Whatever is not completed by Sept. 30 would then be funded through the election via a stopgap spending bill.
Funding the Department of Homeland Security would likely not come to the Senate floor and instead be patched into late November or December due to intractable partisan differences over wall funding. The House is planning to provide $5 billion for Trump’s wall, but the Senate is angling to give Trump $1.6 billion. In the Senate, spending bills will require the support of at least nine Democrats this fall.
July 31, 2018
Don't like the truth....
Don't blame Sacha Baron Cohen because you don't like the truth
By Dean Obeidallah
Comedians, at their best, expose the truth while making you laugh. But sometimes that truth can make people uncomfortable. In fact, some have been so outraged by the truth exposed it has led to angry backlashes and even the criminal prosecution of comedians.
We are currently seeing another example of that with comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and his new Showtime series, "Who is America?" The first three episodes of the show have sparked outrage by some who Cohen "duped" into sharing their bigoted views or in which he reminded us of their past misconduct. True, Cohen was disguised as different characters when he spoke to these people. But by hiding his identity, he simply made them feel comfortable to express their true feelings.
For example, in the show's second episode, a disguised Cohen presented a faux plan to build a mega-mosque to a group of people in Kingman, a small town in Arizona. The attendees responded with comments such as: "I'm racist toward Muslims" and "He's saying there's black people in Kingman that aren't welcome there, either, but we tolerate them."
Did Cohen take advantage of them? Nope, Cohen, through his comedy, simply allowed them to show us who they are.
Kingman Mayor Monica Gates told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Friday those comments don't represent the residents of her town. "We are a diverse, welcoming and embracing community," Gates said. "And to the extent that prejudice and racism does exist in every community, we will take strides to ensure that we educate and bring our community together."
On Sunday's episode, Alabama's Roy Moore, who lost his bid for the US Senate last December in part because of allegations of improper sexual misconduct with teenage girls, was outraged that an undercover Cohen highlighted those claims in a comedic segment. Moore, who stormed out mid-interview, slammed the comedian in a statement afterward, "As for Mr. Cohen, whose art is trickery, deception and dishonesty, Alabama does not respect cowards who exhibit such traits!" If Moore was so concerned about having those allegations being raised again, maybe he shouldn't be doing on-camera interviews — especially with people he doesn't know!
Comedians under fire
The reality is that the truth can hurt, even when wrapped in a punchline. There's no better example of that today than Donald J. Trump. Just a few weeks ago, the 45th President of the United States was so triggered by late-night comedians mocking him that he lashed out at three of them by name, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, at a campaign rally.
But Trump has done more than whine about comedians treating him "unfairly." He even took to Twitter just a month before the 2016 election demanding that "Saturday Night Live" be canceled because, as he put it, the show did a "hit job on me." In reality, the iconic late-night show had comedically (and accurately) depicted Trump's hypocrisy concerning the rash of sexual assault claims that had been leveled against him at the time. Alec Baldwin, as Trump, demanded the victims of Bill Clinton's alleged sexual misconduct "need to be respected and their voices need to be heard." But when asked about the women accusing him of sexual misconduct, "Trump" shot back: "They need to shut the hell up."
But Trump lashing out at comedians is nothing compared to what happened to comedy legend Lenny Bruce. Incredibly, Bruce was arrested not once but eight times for "obscene" jokes he told at nightclubs. Bruce's lawyer at the time argued rightly that the comedian was actually being prosecuted for his jokes mocking those in power, as well as ridiculing religion. But that didn't stop Bruce from being convicted in 1964 for violating New York's obscenity laws and being sentenced to hard labor.
Think about that for a moment: A comedian was sentenced to hard labor for telling jokes that upset those in power. As one of the New York district attorneys who prosecuted Bruce's case later candidly revealed, "We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him." Bruce tragically died of a morphine overdose while the appeal to this conviction was pending.
The 'Jon Stewart of Egypt'
And the fear that some in power have about comedians revealing the truth is not limited to the United States. Bassem Youssef, who is referred to as the "Jon Stewart of Egypt," found that out the hard way. In 2013, Youssef's jokes mocking then-President Mohamed Morsi led to his arrest. (I bet Trump wishes he could do that to American comedians!) Fortunately, Youssef was freed the same day and was able to continue to host his wildly popular "Daily Show"-esque comedy show on Egyptian television.
But after Morsi was replaced by current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2014, it became clear that Youssef's brand of comedic truth-telling would no longer be permitted in Egypt. Consequently, Youssef was forced to flee his homeland for the safety of himself and his family and he now lives in exile in the United States. (Youssef recently joked to me that living in the United States under Trump is easy for him because he was raised in a dictatorship.)
Comedy is inherently subversive. It can reveal bigotry and challenge people in power. And comedy can reveal truths that some don't like. For those upset by the jokes, change the channel, or don't click on the videos.
Or better yet, stop whining and start laughing.
The reality is that they'll never be able to silence these rebels with a comedic cause who are armed to the teeth with punchlines — so they might as well enjoy a few laughs.
By Dean Obeidallah
Comedians, at their best, expose the truth while making you laugh. But sometimes that truth can make people uncomfortable. In fact, some have been so outraged by the truth exposed it has led to angry backlashes and even the criminal prosecution of comedians.
We are currently seeing another example of that with comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and his new Showtime series, "Who is America?" The first three episodes of the show have sparked outrage by some who Cohen "duped" into sharing their bigoted views or in which he reminded us of their past misconduct. True, Cohen was disguised as different characters when he spoke to these people. But by hiding his identity, he simply made them feel comfortable to express their true feelings.
For example, in the show's second episode, a disguised Cohen presented a faux plan to build a mega-mosque to a group of people in Kingman, a small town in Arizona. The attendees responded with comments such as: "I'm racist toward Muslims" and "He's saying there's black people in Kingman that aren't welcome there, either, but we tolerate them."
Did Cohen take advantage of them? Nope, Cohen, through his comedy, simply allowed them to show us who they are.
Kingman Mayor Monica Gates told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Friday those comments don't represent the residents of her town. "We are a diverse, welcoming and embracing community," Gates said. "And to the extent that prejudice and racism does exist in every community, we will take strides to ensure that we educate and bring our community together."
On Sunday's episode, Alabama's Roy Moore, who lost his bid for the US Senate last December in part because of allegations of improper sexual misconduct with teenage girls, was outraged that an undercover Cohen highlighted those claims in a comedic segment. Moore, who stormed out mid-interview, slammed the comedian in a statement afterward, "As for Mr. Cohen, whose art is trickery, deception and dishonesty, Alabama does not respect cowards who exhibit such traits!" If Moore was so concerned about having those allegations being raised again, maybe he shouldn't be doing on-camera interviews — especially with people he doesn't know!
Comedians under fire
The reality is that the truth can hurt, even when wrapped in a punchline. There's no better example of that today than Donald J. Trump. Just a few weeks ago, the 45th President of the United States was so triggered by late-night comedians mocking him that he lashed out at three of them by name, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, at a campaign rally.
But Trump has done more than whine about comedians treating him "unfairly." He even took to Twitter just a month before the 2016 election demanding that "Saturday Night Live" be canceled because, as he put it, the show did a "hit job on me." In reality, the iconic late-night show had comedically (and accurately) depicted Trump's hypocrisy concerning the rash of sexual assault claims that had been leveled against him at the time. Alec Baldwin, as Trump, demanded the victims of Bill Clinton's alleged sexual misconduct "need to be respected and their voices need to be heard." But when asked about the women accusing him of sexual misconduct, "Trump" shot back: "They need to shut the hell up."
But Trump lashing out at comedians is nothing compared to what happened to comedy legend Lenny Bruce. Incredibly, Bruce was arrested not once but eight times for "obscene" jokes he told at nightclubs. Bruce's lawyer at the time argued rightly that the comedian was actually being prosecuted for his jokes mocking those in power, as well as ridiculing religion. But that didn't stop Bruce from being convicted in 1964 for violating New York's obscenity laws and being sentenced to hard labor.
Think about that for a moment: A comedian was sentenced to hard labor for telling jokes that upset those in power. As one of the New York district attorneys who prosecuted Bruce's case later candidly revealed, "We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him." Bruce tragically died of a morphine overdose while the appeal to this conviction was pending.
The 'Jon Stewart of Egypt'
And the fear that some in power have about comedians revealing the truth is not limited to the United States. Bassem Youssef, who is referred to as the "Jon Stewart of Egypt," found that out the hard way. In 2013, Youssef's jokes mocking then-President Mohamed Morsi led to his arrest. (I bet Trump wishes he could do that to American comedians!) Fortunately, Youssef was freed the same day and was able to continue to host his wildly popular "Daily Show"-esque comedy show on Egyptian television.
But after Morsi was replaced by current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2014, it became clear that Youssef's brand of comedic truth-telling would no longer be permitted in Egypt. Consequently, Youssef was forced to flee his homeland for the safety of himself and his family and he now lives in exile in the United States. (Youssef recently joked to me that living in the United States under Trump is easy for him because he was raised in a dictatorship.)
Comedy is inherently subversive. It can reveal bigotry and challenge people in power. And comedy can reveal truths that some don't like. For those upset by the jokes, change the channel, or don't click on the videos.
Or better yet, stop whining and start laughing.
The reality is that they'll never be able to silence these rebels with a comedic cause who are armed to the teeth with punchlines — so they might as well enjoy a few laughs.
Climate crisis
Clearly, the climate crisis is upon us
By Paul Hockenos
This summer's sizzling temperatures, savage droughts, raging wildfires, floods and acute water shortages -- from Japan to the Arctic Circle, California to Greece -- are surely evidence beyond any reasonable doubt that the climate crisis is upon us now.
This is the new normal -- until it gets worse.
We, the entire global community, the residents of this planet, must finally grasp the urgency at hand and undertake dramatic, meaningful measures -- initiatives beyond the modest goals of 2015 Paris climate accord -- to stave off nothing less than the destruction of civilization as we know it.
This may sound hyperbolic, but it's mainstream opinion among serious scientists worldwide: Climate change, unchecked, will eventually wipe out our race -- and man-made greenhouse gas emissions are still rising.
An open letter signed by 15,000 international scientists last year read in part: "Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home," the letter warns.
"Since 1992, carbon emissions have increased 62 percent," said William Ripple of Oregon State University's College of Forestry, who initiated the letter. "And the global average temperature change has paralleled that. Also since 1992, we have two billion more people on Earth, which is a 35 percent increase."
In his epic tome "Collapse," the American physicist Jared Diamond attributes the decline and extinction of several historical civilizations, among them the Maya and the Inca, to climate change, overpopulation and incompetent resource management.
The book's telling subtitle is "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." It was resolute stubbornness and bad management that killed off the great Latin American peoples, Diamond argued.
Today, though, an entire world civilization, not just a regional people, has neglected and defiled the very resource base from which it sustains itself.
Yet the headlines still read "When The Weather Is Extreme, Is Climate Change To Blame?"
We've got to move past the false, stubborn debate about whether global warming is happening or not. Obviously it is, plentiful research has underscored this for years, and with the natural disasters everywhere we're feeling it now. Those who still don't get it may have stuck their heads in the sand -- or perhaps they're lying to themselves.
But either way we can't lose more time trying to convince them. And those who are slowly coming around -- including US Republicans, notorious former skeptics -- have to catch up on the learning curve very quickly.
Resignation or fatalism -- that it's a tragedy, the destruction of life as we know it, but alas we can't affect it -- is as self-defeating as denial, and lazy too. I've seen one too many dystopian, post-apocalyptic thrillers recently based on worst-case, extreme-weather scenarios, but too few about saving mankind from these fates.
In the 1980s, the international community's response to the ozone's thinning and the scourge of acid rain illustrate what mankind can do when it puts its mind to changing human and above all industrial behavior. In the form of the 1987 Montreal Protocol and 1985 Helsinki Protocol respectively, treaties were put in place that halted the destructive menace of the pollutants responsible for those blights. They're success stories.
Admittedly, these afflictions were more contained than the entire planet's warming, but they show that human beings can at least constrain the folly that they've set in motion.
So the battle against climate change is in our hands. Despite the meager political action to date, we're not starting at square one.
Our scientists, in a feat of global cooperation orchestrated through the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have enabled us to understand climate change as the consequence of two centuries' intensive burning of petroleum-based fuel, and what it portends -- namely a future in which human beings and other inhabitants of the planet will find it increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, to live as we have.
Another product of science is the technology that can replace fossil fuels. It's already there, and in use in small quantities almost everywhere in the world. The clean tech that we have today -- solar power, wind energy, battery-propelled transportation, smart grids, and more -- is enough for us to go completely green in the near future.
Advances are made and costs come down on this technology every six months, but we don't have to wait. Germany, for example, turned 40% of its electricity renewable in just 15 years. Today that could happen twice as fast.
A number of diverse, evidence-based studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable electricity, or close to that, isn't utopian dreaming at all but feasible, and in the near future. A massive roll out of renewables, not including nuclear energy, could cover the globe's energy needs by 2050, even with the world's population growing. All investment in fossil fuel production would have to be switched to renewables.
One recent study, the product of a Finnish university and German think tank, envisions a global renewable energy mix comprising 69% solar power, 18% wind energy, 8% hydropower, and 2% bioenergy.
A full decarbonization of the electricity system by 2050 is possible based on available technology, according to Christian Breyer, a renewable energy expert and lead author of the study. "Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will," says Breyer -- and he's not alone in asserting this. A 2017 study from Stanford University came to similar conclusions.
But just as global warming today is something we can feel, so too can we see renewable energy at work.
In Europe, Germany is the most commonly cited example because it is home to one of the world's most advanced industrial economies, which has prospered with the renewables surge. Yet Norway and Iceland already run almost completely on renewable energy, namely hydroelectric and geothermal power respectively.
Denmark plans to convert fully to renewable energy by 2050 by scaling back on energy use and exploiting wind power to meet demand. By 2020, extensive reductions in energy consumption will make it possible for wind power to cover half of the country's electricity consumption.
Danish power plants relying on coal will be phased out by 2030. And by 2035, all electricity and heating will be generated using renewable sources.
As individuals, of course we can curb our consumption and make our lifestyles as sustainable as possible. But as citizens we have to mobilize too and force our elected leaders (and unelected leaders in China and elsewhere) to tackle the industrial giants whose fortunes are tied up in petrochemical generation.
Until this summer, many in the developed world probably assumed that global warming would only affect the undeveloped and the far-away. But global warming has hit home for all of us in 2018.
If empathy for others or future generations can't inspire concern, then let pure self-interest dictate action.
Whatever the motive, the time for half measures is past.
By Paul Hockenos
This summer's sizzling temperatures, savage droughts, raging wildfires, floods and acute water shortages -- from Japan to the Arctic Circle, California to Greece -- are surely evidence beyond any reasonable doubt that the climate crisis is upon us now.
This is the new normal -- until it gets worse.
We, the entire global community, the residents of this planet, must finally grasp the urgency at hand and undertake dramatic, meaningful measures -- initiatives beyond the modest goals of 2015 Paris climate accord -- to stave off nothing less than the destruction of civilization as we know it.
This may sound hyperbolic, but it's mainstream opinion among serious scientists worldwide: Climate change, unchecked, will eventually wipe out our race -- and man-made greenhouse gas emissions are still rising.
An open letter signed by 15,000 international scientists last year read in part: "Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home," the letter warns.
"Since 1992, carbon emissions have increased 62 percent," said William Ripple of Oregon State University's College of Forestry, who initiated the letter. "And the global average temperature change has paralleled that. Also since 1992, we have two billion more people on Earth, which is a 35 percent increase."
In his epic tome "Collapse," the American physicist Jared Diamond attributes the decline and extinction of several historical civilizations, among them the Maya and the Inca, to climate change, overpopulation and incompetent resource management.
The book's telling subtitle is "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." It was resolute stubbornness and bad management that killed off the great Latin American peoples, Diamond argued.
Today, though, an entire world civilization, not just a regional people, has neglected and defiled the very resource base from which it sustains itself.
Yet the headlines still read "When The Weather Is Extreme, Is Climate Change To Blame?"
We've got to move past the false, stubborn debate about whether global warming is happening or not. Obviously it is, plentiful research has underscored this for years, and with the natural disasters everywhere we're feeling it now. Those who still don't get it may have stuck their heads in the sand -- or perhaps they're lying to themselves.
But either way we can't lose more time trying to convince them. And those who are slowly coming around -- including US Republicans, notorious former skeptics -- have to catch up on the learning curve very quickly.
Resignation or fatalism -- that it's a tragedy, the destruction of life as we know it, but alas we can't affect it -- is as self-defeating as denial, and lazy too. I've seen one too many dystopian, post-apocalyptic thrillers recently based on worst-case, extreme-weather scenarios, but too few about saving mankind from these fates.
In the 1980s, the international community's response to the ozone's thinning and the scourge of acid rain illustrate what mankind can do when it puts its mind to changing human and above all industrial behavior. In the form of the 1987 Montreal Protocol and 1985 Helsinki Protocol respectively, treaties were put in place that halted the destructive menace of the pollutants responsible for those blights. They're success stories.
Admittedly, these afflictions were more contained than the entire planet's warming, but they show that human beings can at least constrain the folly that they've set in motion.
So the battle against climate change is in our hands. Despite the meager political action to date, we're not starting at square one.
Our scientists, in a feat of global cooperation orchestrated through the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have enabled us to understand climate change as the consequence of two centuries' intensive burning of petroleum-based fuel, and what it portends -- namely a future in which human beings and other inhabitants of the planet will find it increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, to live as we have.
Another product of science is the technology that can replace fossil fuels. It's already there, and in use in small quantities almost everywhere in the world. The clean tech that we have today -- solar power, wind energy, battery-propelled transportation, smart grids, and more -- is enough for us to go completely green in the near future.
Advances are made and costs come down on this technology every six months, but we don't have to wait. Germany, for example, turned 40% of its electricity renewable in just 15 years. Today that could happen twice as fast.
A number of diverse, evidence-based studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable electricity, or close to that, isn't utopian dreaming at all but feasible, and in the near future. A massive roll out of renewables, not including nuclear energy, could cover the globe's energy needs by 2050, even with the world's population growing. All investment in fossil fuel production would have to be switched to renewables.
One recent study, the product of a Finnish university and German think tank, envisions a global renewable energy mix comprising 69% solar power, 18% wind energy, 8% hydropower, and 2% bioenergy.
A full decarbonization of the electricity system by 2050 is possible based on available technology, according to Christian Breyer, a renewable energy expert and lead author of the study. "Energy transition is no longer a question of technical feasibility or economic viability, but of political will," says Breyer -- and he's not alone in asserting this. A 2017 study from Stanford University came to similar conclusions.
But just as global warming today is something we can feel, so too can we see renewable energy at work.
In Europe, Germany is the most commonly cited example because it is home to one of the world's most advanced industrial economies, which has prospered with the renewables surge. Yet Norway and Iceland already run almost completely on renewable energy, namely hydroelectric and geothermal power respectively.
Denmark plans to convert fully to renewable energy by 2050 by scaling back on energy use and exploiting wind power to meet demand. By 2020, extensive reductions in energy consumption will make it possible for wind power to cover half of the country's electricity consumption.
Danish power plants relying on coal will be phased out by 2030. And by 2035, all electricity and heating will be generated using renewable sources.
As individuals, of course we can curb our consumption and make our lifestyles as sustainable as possible. But as citizens we have to mobilize too and force our elected leaders (and unelected leaders in China and elsewhere) to tackle the industrial giants whose fortunes are tied up in petrochemical generation.
Until this summer, many in the developed world probably assumed that global warming would only affect the undeveloped and the far-away. But global warming has hit home for all of us in 2018.
If empathy for others or future generations can't inspire concern, then let pure self-interest dictate action.
Whatever the motive, the time for half measures is past.
Yet Another Tax Cut!!! $102 billion, with 86 percent of the benefits going to the top 1 percent!
Are You Rich? Trump Wants to Give You Yet Another Tax Cut!
KEVIN DRUM
Let’s say that ten years ago you bought $1,000 in shares of DrumCo stock. Naturally it’s a well-managed company and today those shares are worth $1,300. You sell them for a $300 profit, and pay a nice, low 20 percent capital gains tax of $60.
But then you start to think. What about inflation? That $1,000 in 2008 is the equivalent of $1,150 today. Your real profit is only $150, and $60 represents a capital gains tax of 40 percent. What a rip off! Part of your “profit” is really just keeping up with inflation. Why do you have to pay any taxes on that?
This is an ancient question, and I’m not here to answer it. You can make a good case for various ways of handling capital gains taxes. However, there’s one question I can answer: what does the law say you have to pay? The answer is that the law doesn’t care about inflation. The base price of the stock is whatever you paid for it in dollars at the time, and the selling price is whatever you sold it for later. The difference is your profit, full stop. Congress has had dozens of chances to change this, but it gets complicated once you dive into it. So they’ve always left it alone and made up for the implicit inflation penalty it by making the capital gains rate pretty low.
But wait. What if you could have both an inflation adjustment and a low capital gains rate? That would be awesome! Let’s check in with the New York Times:
The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.
So who gets all this extra money? The upper middle class? The affluent? The prosperous? The well-off? No, no, and no. Almost all of it would go to the straight-up super rich:
Independent analyses suggest that more than 97 percent of the benefits of indexing capital gains for inflation would go to the top 10 percent of income earners in America. Nearly two-thirds of the benefits would go to the super wealthy — the top 0.1 percent of American income earners.
….According to the budget model used by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, indexing capital gains to inflation would reduce government revenues by $102 billion over a decade, with 86 percent of the benefits going to the top 1 percent.
The good news is that Trump and his wealthy real-estate pals almost certainly can’t do this. The law is simply too clear on this point. Still, at least it shows that their hearts are in the right place, doesn’t it?
And if they do somehow get away with it, there’s still a silver lining. Now that they’ve gotten religion on inflation, it means that in the interests of fairness they’ll surely be in favor of indexing things like the minimum wage to inflation too. Right? I mean, what possible reason could there be for indexing the wages of the rich to inflation but not the wages of the poor?
KEVIN DRUM
Let’s say that ten years ago you bought $1,000 in shares of DrumCo stock. Naturally it’s a well-managed company and today those shares are worth $1,300. You sell them for a $300 profit, and pay a nice, low 20 percent capital gains tax of $60.
But then you start to think. What about inflation? That $1,000 in 2008 is the equivalent of $1,150 today. Your real profit is only $150, and $60 represents a capital gains tax of 40 percent. What a rip off! Part of your “profit” is really just keeping up with inflation. Why do you have to pay any taxes on that?
This is an ancient question, and I’m not here to answer it. You can make a good case for various ways of handling capital gains taxes. However, there’s one question I can answer: what does the law say you have to pay? The answer is that the law doesn’t care about inflation. The base price of the stock is whatever you paid for it in dollars at the time, and the selling price is whatever you sold it for later. The difference is your profit, full stop. Congress has had dozens of chances to change this, but it gets complicated once you dive into it. So they’ve always left it alone and made up for the implicit inflation penalty it by making the capital gains rate pretty low.
But wait. What if you could have both an inflation adjustment and a low capital gains rate? That would be awesome! Let’s check in with the New York Times:
The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.
So who gets all this extra money? The upper middle class? The affluent? The prosperous? The well-off? No, no, and no. Almost all of it would go to the straight-up super rich:
Independent analyses suggest that more than 97 percent of the benefits of indexing capital gains for inflation would go to the top 10 percent of income earners in America. Nearly two-thirds of the benefits would go to the super wealthy — the top 0.1 percent of American income earners.
….According to the budget model used by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, indexing capital gains to inflation would reduce government revenues by $102 billion over a decade, with 86 percent of the benefits going to the top 1 percent.
The good news is that Trump and his wealthy real-estate pals almost certainly can’t do this. The law is simply too clear on this point. Still, at least it shows that their hearts are in the right place, doesn’t it?
And if they do somehow get away with it, there’s still a silver lining. Now that they’ve gotten religion on inflation, it means that in the interests of fairness they’ll surely be in favor of indexing things like the minimum wage to inflation too. Right? I mean, what possible reason could there be for indexing the wages of the rich to inflation but not the wages of the poor?
Save $2 Trillion
Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion
KEVIN DRUM
Here’s some good news. The libertarians at the Mercatus Center did a cost breakdown of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan and concluded that it would save $2 trillion during its first ten years:
Now, as you might guess, this was not the spin the Mercatus folks put on their study. Their headline is “M4A Would Place Unprecedented Strain on the Federal Budget.” This isn’t really true, of course, since M4A would absorb all the costs of our current health care system but would also absorb all the payments we make to support it. That includes current taxes (for Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare), premiums paid by employers, premiums paid by individuals, and out-of-pocket costs from individuals. Instead of going straight to doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, it would go instead to the federal government, which would then pay everyone else. It’s a lot of money, but it’s no particular “strain” on anything.
And overall we’d save at least $2 trillion over ten years. Blahous thinks the number would be be less because lots of people would flock to use free health care that they hadn’t used before, but most health economists disagree. Demand for health care would probably stay about the same, while costs would be more strongly contained because everything would be paid for out of tax dollars—and voters are strongly motivated to keep taxes low.
KEVIN DRUM
Here’s some good news. The libertarians at the Mercatus Center did a cost breakdown of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan and concluded that it would save $2 trillion during its first ten years:
Now, as you might guess, this was not the spin the Mercatus folks put on their study. Their headline is “M4A Would Place Unprecedented Strain on the Federal Budget.” This isn’t really true, of course, since M4A would absorb all the costs of our current health care system but would also absorb all the payments we make to support it. That includes current taxes (for Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare), premiums paid by employers, premiums paid by individuals, and out-of-pocket costs from individuals. Instead of going straight to doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, it would go instead to the federal government, which would then pay everyone else. It’s a lot of money, but it’s no particular “strain” on anything.
And overall we’d save at least $2 trillion over ten years. Blahous thinks the number would be be less because lots of people would flock to use free health care that they hadn’t used before, but most health economists disagree. Demand for health care would probably stay about the same, while costs would be more strongly contained because everything would be paid for out of tax dollars—and voters are strongly motivated to keep taxes low.
Eating More Meat..
The Chinese Are Eating More Meat Than Ever Before and the Planet Can’t Keep Up
“In the end, per capita meat consumption in China is still half that of the United States.”
MARCELLO ROSSI
At the center of the table in a modest, high-rise apartment in the teeming city of Shenzhen, China, a simmering pot of soup stock was surrounded by large platters featuring mushrooms, different kinds of thinly shaved meat, lettuce, potato, cauliflower, eggs, and shrimp. Folding his hands together, Jian Zhang, a onetime rural farmer who now works as an employee for a small consulting firm in the city, asked his fellow diners to give thanks for the meal—the likes of which he could have only dreamed of when growing up in a remote village in the Jiangxi province.
The reason was simple: His family was so poor that they had to make do with barely sufficient food supplies. “I often went hungry when I was a kid,” said Zhang, his voice betraying the painful memories of a hard childhood. Until the late 1980s, when the state-imposed food rationing system was phased out from people’s daily lives, food supplies were in serious shortage across China. Coupons for buying basic foodstuffs like grain, flour, rice, oil, and eggs were issued based on monthly rations.
Meat, recalled Zhang as he dipped a piece of beef into the bubbly broth, was a rare luxury that his family could afford “two or three times a month.”
Things have changed remarkably since then. In the past three decades, breakneck industrial development and economic growth have driven millions of Chinese from rural areas to cities, altering much about the Chinese way of life, especially in terms of their day-to-day eating habits —an evolution perhaps most pointedly crystallized in the average Chinese consumer’s access to meat. Once a rare luxury, it has now become a commonplace. “I still remember when beef was nicknamed the millionaire’s meat,” said Zhang, who reckoned that he spends around 600 yuan, or $88, each week on food, and half of that on meat. “Now I can eat it every day if I want.”
Fueled by rising incomes rather than urbanization, meat consumption in China grew sevenfold over the last three decades and a half. In the early 1980s, when the population was still under one billion, the average Chinese person ate around 30 pounds of meat per year. Today, with an additional 380 million people, it’s nearly 140 pounds. On the whole, the country consumes 28 percent of the world’s meat—twice as much as the United States. And the figure is only set to increase.
But as the Chinese appetite for meat expands, the booming nation is faced with a quandary: How to satisfy the surging demand for meat without undermining the country’s commitment to curbing greenhouse gas emissions and combating global warming—goals that have been expressly incorporated into national economic, social development, and long-term planning under the Xi Jinping administration.
Raising animals for human consumption, after all, generates climate-changing emissions at every stage of production. For one thing, it requires vast amounts of land, water, and food to raise livestock. For another, cattle are themselves a source of huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. Finally, cattle-raising is a major contributor to deforestation, another cause of increases in carbon emissions. Overall, emissions from the livestock industry account for 14.5 percent of total carbon emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and these emissions are likely to increase in the near future as the production of meat is predicted to nearly double in the next 30 years.
With the world’s largest population and a rising craving for meat, China will be one of the biggest sources of increased demand. Experts at the advocacy group WildAid say that average annual meat consumption in China is on track to increase by another 60 pounds by 2030.
“One could argue that Chinese just want to enjoy the kind of life Westerners have for years. In the end, per capita meat consumption in China is still half that of the United States,” said Pan Genxing, director of the Institute of Resources, Environment, and Ecosystem of Agriculture at Nanjing Agricultural University. But, he added, “given the sheer population size, even small increases in individual meat intake will lead to outsized climate and environmental consequences worldwide.”
China is already the world’s largest emitter of carbon emissions, accounting for 27 percent of global carbon emissions. Its livestock industry is responsible for producing half the world’s pork, one-fourth of the world’s poultry and 10 percent of the world’s beef. No one knows exactly how much livestock contributes to the country’s mammoth carbon emissions. The last time Beijing produced official figures in 2005, it said that the national livestock sector accounted for more than half of the emissions from its overall agricultural activities. But one thing is for sure: how China will deal with soaring demand for meat is of paramount importance to both the nation and the rest of the world.
A 2014 study published in Nature by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Aberdeen stated that to keep up with the demand for meat, agricultural emissions worldwide will likely need to increase by up to 80 percent by 2050—a figure that alone could jeopardize the ambitious plan to keep planetary warming below the 2-degrees Celsius benchmark set under the Paris climate accord.
China would contribute significantly to that growth. Marco Springmann, a sustainability researcher at Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, said that if meat consumption in the Asian country keeps growing as predicted, the nation would produce “an additional gigaton of carbon dioxide equivalents in greenhouse gas emissions, more than the current emissions of the global aviation industry” alone, and an increase of about one-tenth above China’s current level of emissions. According to a WildAid report, China alone could account for a growth in greenhouse gas emissions from 1.2 gigatons in 2015 to 1.8 gigatons by 2030.
“These calculations do not include land-use change,” Richard Waite, an associate at the World Resources Institute’s Food Program, told me by telephone from Washington, “but since meat production—especially beef production—takes up a significant amount of land, growing demand for meat in China would make for more forests converted to agriculture or pasture and also increase pressure on forests elsewhere.”
More meat on tables means more land given over to growing livestock feed—especially soybean, a crucial ingredient used to fatten up hogs and cattle quickly. Agricultural land, however, is in short supply in China. With around 20 percent of the world’s population, the country has only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, which is barely enough to keep up with the government’s goal of being self-sufficient for strategic commodities such as rice, corn, and wheat—a goal that has been at the heart of the national food security agenda for decades. Moreover, farmland in the country has been shrinking since the 1970s due to urbanization.
The increasing mismatch between available resources and surging demand has pushed China abroad in search of grain to feed livestock. The country now imports more than 100 million tons of soybeans per year, a figure corresponding to more than 60 percent of the global trade. In countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, this has led to the clearing away of vast swaths of forests to make way for huge soybean monocultures, further driving up greenhouse gas emissions since forests typically store carbon in living biomasses, soil, dead wood, and litter, while plants sequester vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis.
Importing grains to feed livestock at home isn’t the only strategy China is adopting to bridge the gap. Under the auspices of the government, Chinese companies have been taking over foreign ones like Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest producer of pork. Meanwhile, the Chinese have also been importing meat from Australia, Brazil, Uruguay, Russia, and other countries, making China the world’s single largest market for meat.
“For decades, developed nations have relocated their factories to China, outsourcing their climate pollution and emissions,” said Waite. “Now China seems to have adopted the same paradigm.”
Sure enough, mitigating emissions from one the world’s largest, and most fragmented, livestock industries isn’t an easy task. It also doesn’t seem to be a priority for Beijing. “Some measures like subsidizing livestock farmers to turn animal waste—a major source of methane and nitrous oxide, two greenhouse gases much more potent than carbon dioxide—into organic fertilizers, encouraging them to take advantage of international carbon trading, or providing financial aid to install biogas plants to produce clean energy from manure have been implemented,” said Genxing of Nanjing Agricultural University. “But no specific low-carbon animal production policies exist in the country today.”
“For now, all the efforts are directed toward cutting emissions from sectors such as power generation and transportation,” he added, “and in the absence of major change, livestock emissions will continue to increase in China in the future.”
Programs aimed at curbing consumer demand for meat have begun to circulate. Two years ago, the Chinese Nutrition Society issued new dietary guidelines, which recommend cutting meat consumption in half, for example. The government also teamed up with WildAid to run celebrity-driven, high-impact media campaigns to promote the benefits of eating less meat. Should these campaigns prove effective, food-related emissions in China could be reduced by a billion metric tons compared to projected levels in 2050, Springmann suggested.
But accomplishing that is no easy feat. While the growth rate of animal protein consumption in the country has slowed somewhat in the past few years due to a number of factors—including new public health measures, better alternatives, contaminated meat, and a slowing economy—there are substantial cultural challenges that make it difficult to stem the tide. According Steve Blake, WildAid’s acting chief in China, most Chinese consumers fail to appreciate the link between higher meat intake to global warming. “While the issue of climate change is accepted in China much more so than in the U.S., the awareness about the impact of diet on climate change is very low,” he said. For a country where older generations “still vividly remember not even being able to afford meat a few decades ago,” he said, “meals featuring high amounts of meat are seen as a very good thing.”
Mixed messages from the government are also a hindrance.
“As is typical with Chinese governmental policy, the right and left hand are fighting against each other,” said Jeremy Haft, author of Unmade in China: The Hidden Truth about China’s Economic Miracle, in an email message. For example, Haft said, as the government encourages people to eat less meat, it is at the same time shifting the adverse environmental effects of cattle-rearing to the United States and other countries, where China continues to invest in agriculture.
But Haft pointed out that China has a rare opportunity to counteract the effects of this surge in meat-eating. “China’s remarkable development is regarded by many developing countries to be a model for lifting their own population out of poverty,” he noted. Given its centralized system, it has already proved it can be nimble in response to environmental risks — as happened with the transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy, which has caused national carbon dioxide emissions to decline or stay flat in the last few years, or with its subsidies for electrical vehicles, which has caused sales to skyrocket.
Now, Haft said, China needs to mount a similar effort to reduce meat consumption.
“If the country wants to become the world’s undisputed leading green superpower, it has to pave the way for a sustainable, low-carbon development [path] for low- and middle-income countries, inspiring them to follow suit,” Haft said. “And reducing emissions from the livestock sector should be part of the path.”
“In the end, per capita meat consumption in China is still half that of the United States.”
MARCELLO ROSSI
At the center of the table in a modest, high-rise apartment in the teeming city of Shenzhen, China, a simmering pot of soup stock was surrounded by large platters featuring mushrooms, different kinds of thinly shaved meat, lettuce, potato, cauliflower, eggs, and shrimp. Folding his hands together, Jian Zhang, a onetime rural farmer who now works as an employee for a small consulting firm in the city, asked his fellow diners to give thanks for the meal—the likes of which he could have only dreamed of when growing up in a remote village in the Jiangxi province.
The reason was simple: His family was so poor that they had to make do with barely sufficient food supplies. “I often went hungry when I was a kid,” said Zhang, his voice betraying the painful memories of a hard childhood. Until the late 1980s, when the state-imposed food rationing system was phased out from people’s daily lives, food supplies were in serious shortage across China. Coupons for buying basic foodstuffs like grain, flour, rice, oil, and eggs were issued based on monthly rations.
Meat, recalled Zhang as he dipped a piece of beef into the bubbly broth, was a rare luxury that his family could afford “two or three times a month.”
Things have changed remarkably since then. In the past three decades, breakneck industrial development and economic growth have driven millions of Chinese from rural areas to cities, altering much about the Chinese way of life, especially in terms of their day-to-day eating habits —an evolution perhaps most pointedly crystallized in the average Chinese consumer’s access to meat. Once a rare luxury, it has now become a commonplace. “I still remember when beef was nicknamed the millionaire’s meat,” said Zhang, who reckoned that he spends around 600 yuan, or $88, each week on food, and half of that on meat. “Now I can eat it every day if I want.”
Fueled by rising incomes rather than urbanization, meat consumption in China grew sevenfold over the last three decades and a half. In the early 1980s, when the population was still under one billion, the average Chinese person ate around 30 pounds of meat per year. Today, with an additional 380 million people, it’s nearly 140 pounds. On the whole, the country consumes 28 percent of the world’s meat—twice as much as the United States. And the figure is only set to increase.
But as the Chinese appetite for meat expands, the booming nation is faced with a quandary: How to satisfy the surging demand for meat without undermining the country’s commitment to curbing greenhouse gas emissions and combating global warming—goals that have been expressly incorporated into national economic, social development, and long-term planning under the Xi Jinping administration.
Raising animals for human consumption, after all, generates climate-changing emissions at every stage of production. For one thing, it requires vast amounts of land, water, and food to raise livestock. For another, cattle are themselves a source of huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. Finally, cattle-raising is a major contributor to deforestation, another cause of increases in carbon emissions. Overall, emissions from the livestock industry account for 14.5 percent of total carbon emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and these emissions are likely to increase in the near future as the production of meat is predicted to nearly double in the next 30 years.
With the world’s largest population and a rising craving for meat, China will be one of the biggest sources of increased demand. Experts at the advocacy group WildAid say that average annual meat consumption in China is on track to increase by another 60 pounds by 2030.
“One could argue that Chinese just want to enjoy the kind of life Westerners have for years. In the end, per capita meat consumption in China is still half that of the United States,” said Pan Genxing, director of the Institute of Resources, Environment, and Ecosystem of Agriculture at Nanjing Agricultural University. But, he added, “given the sheer population size, even small increases in individual meat intake will lead to outsized climate and environmental consequences worldwide.”
China is already the world’s largest emitter of carbon emissions, accounting for 27 percent of global carbon emissions. Its livestock industry is responsible for producing half the world’s pork, one-fourth of the world’s poultry and 10 percent of the world’s beef. No one knows exactly how much livestock contributes to the country’s mammoth carbon emissions. The last time Beijing produced official figures in 2005, it said that the national livestock sector accounted for more than half of the emissions from its overall agricultural activities. But one thing is for sure: how China will deal with soaring demand for meat is of paramount importance to both the nation and the rest of the world.
A 2014 study published in Nature by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Aberdeen stated that to keep up with the demand for meat, agricultural emissions worldwide will likely need to increase by up to 80 percent by 2050—a figure that alone could jeopardize the ambitious plan to keep planetary warming below the 2-degrees Celsius benchmark set under the Paris climate accord.
China would contribute significantly to that growth. Marco Springmann, a sustainability researcher at Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, said that if meat consumption in the Asian country keeps growing as predicted, the nation would produce “an additional gigaton of carbon dioxide equivalents in greenhouse gas emissions, more than the current emissions of the global aviation industry” alone, and an increase of about one-tenth above China’s current level of emissions. According to a WildAid report, China alone could account for a growth in greenhouse gas emissions from 1.2 gigatons in 2015 to 1.8 gigatons by 2030.
“These calculations do not include land-use change,” Richard Waite, an associate at the World Resources Institute’s Food Program, told me by telephone from Washington, “but since meat production—especially beef production—takes up a significant amount of land, growing demand for meat in China would make for more forests converted to agriculture or pasture and also increase pressure on forests elsewhere.”
More meat on tables means more land given over to growing livestock feed—especially soybean, a crucial ingredient used to fatten up hogs and cattle quickly. Agricultural land, however, is in short supply in China. With around 20 percent of the world’s population, the country has only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, which is barely enough to keep up with the government’s goal of being self-sufficient for strategic commodities such as rice, corn, and wheat—a goal that has been at the heart of the national food security agenda for decades. Moreover, farmland in the country has been shrinking since the 1970s due to urbanization.
The increasing mismatch between available resources and surging demand has pushed China abroad in search of grain to feed livestock. The country now imports more than 100 million tons of soybeans per year, a figure corresponding to more than 60 percent of the global trade. In countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, this has led to the clearing away of vast swaths of forests to make way for huge soybean monocultures, further driving up greenhouse gas emissions since forests typically store carbon in living biomasses, soil, dead wood, and litter, while plants sequester vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis.
Importing grains to feed livestock at home isn’t the only strategy China is adopting to bridge the gap. Under the auspices of the government, Chinese companies have been taking over foreign ones like Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest producer of pork. Meanwhile, the Chinese have also been importing meat from Australia, Brazil, Uruguay, Russia, and other countries, making China the world’s single largest market for meat.
“For decades, developed nations have relocated their factories to China, outsourcing their climate pollution and emissions,” said Waite. “Now China seems to have adopted the same paradigm.”
Sure enough, mitigating emissions from one the world’s largest, and most fragmented, livestock industries isn’t an easy task. It also doesn’t seem to be a priority for Beijing. “Some measures like subsidizing livestock farmers to turn animal waste—a major source of methane and nitrous oxide, two greenhouse gases much more potent than carbon dioxide—into organic fertilizers, encouraging them to take advantage of international carbon trading, or providing financial aid to install biogas plants to produce clean energy from manure have been implemented,” said Genxing of Nanjing Agricultural University. “But no specific low-carbon animal production policies exist in the country today.”
“For now, all the efforts are directed toward cutting emissions from sectors such as power generation and transportation,” he added, “and in the absence of major change, livestock emissions will continue to increase in China in the future.”
Programs aimed at curbing consumer demand for meat have begun to circulate. Two years ago, the Chinese Nutrition Society issued new dietary guidelines, which recommend cutting meat consumption in half, for example. The government also teamed up with WildAid to run celebrity-driven, high-impact media campaigns to promote the benefits of eating less meat. Should these campaigns prove effective, food-related emissions in China could be reduced by a billion metric tons compared to projected levels in 2050, Springmann suggested.
But accomplishing that is no easy feat. While the growth rate of animal protein consumption in the country has slowed somewhat in the past few years due to a number of factors—including new public health measures, better alternatives, contaminated meat, and a slowing economy—there are substantial cultural challenges that make it difficult to stem the tide. According Steve Blake, WildAid’s acting chief in China, most Chinese consumers fail to appreciate the link between higher meat intake to global warming. “While the issue of climate change is accepted in China much more so than in the U.S., the awareness about the impact of diet on climate change is very low,” he said. For a country where older generations “still vividly remember not even being able to afford meat a few decades ago,” he said, “meals featuring high amounts of meat are seen as a very good thing.”
Mixed messages from the government are also a hindrance.
“As is typical with Chinese governmental policy, the right and left hand are fighting against each other,” said Jeremy Haft, author of Unmade in China: The Hidden Truth about China’s Economic Miracle, in an email message. For example, Haft said, as the government encourages people to eat less meat, it is at the same time shifting the adverse environmental effects of cattle-rearing to the United States and other countries, where China continues to invest in agriculture.
But Haft pointed out that China has a rare opportunity to counteract the effects of this surge in meat-eating. “China’s remarkable development is regarded by many developing countries to be a model for lifting their own population out of poverty,” he noted. Given its centralized system, it has already proved it can be nimble in response to environmental risks — as happened with the transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy, which has caused national carbon dioxide emissions to decline or stay flat in the last few years, or with its subsidies for electrical vehicles, which has caused sales to skyrocket.
Now, Haft said, China needs to mount a similar effort to reduce meat consumption.
“If the country wants to become the world’s undisputed leading green superpower, it has to pave the way for a sustainable, low-carbon development [path] for low- and middle-income countries, inspiring them to follow suit,” Haft said. “And reducing emissions from the livestock sector should be part of the path.”
Serious Danger of Being Hacked
The Midterm Elections Are in Serious Danger of Being Hacked, Thanks to Trump
Why has the White House and its GOP allies in Congress done so little to combat the threat?
AJ VICENS AND PEMA LEVY
On July 12, 2016, Matthew Emmons, an IT technician, was settling into a quiet workday when a colleague approached his cubicle in the Springfield strip-mall office of the Illinois State Board of Elections. Servers holding the personal information of more than 7.5 million voters had ground to a halt, and there was something he had to see.
Within minutes, a handful of techs had anxiously gathered around a monitor showing the registration database servers hitting total capacity. “We knew we were under attack,” Emmons, now the IT director, recalls. “These are very powerful servers, and it had locked those things up.”
Emmons and his colleagues took the servers offline and started to investigate. What they discovered was mysterious and terrifying. The site’s online voter database had been overloaded by repeated queries. At peak, five requests arrived every second, and though now blocked by a new firewall, they continued to bombard the site for a month. These queries, known as SQL (pronounced “sequel”) injections, are among the most common types of computer attacks, allowing the hacker to send commands to a database to extract, modify, or erase what’s inside.
But what shocked the techs most was when the attack had begun. Activity logs showed that whoever had penetrated the database had been snooping inside for almost three weeks, learning about the system’s structure, figuring out what they could and could not do, and pilfering personal information on half a million voters. If the attackers hadn’t overloaded the servers, Emmons and his colleagues might have never known they were there.
Only later would the Illinois team officially learn, from a Senate hearing nearly a year after the incident, that they’d suffered the first known shot in a Russian campaign that would target every state. “It was a little scary, knowing that it’s a nation,” Emmons says. “This is a part of running elections in the United States now.”
To this day, it’s unclear why, after weeks of quietly poking around, the intruders shut down the servers with a blast of queries. Were they hoping to draw attention and trigger public panic? Or did someone sitting behind a keyboard in Moscow or Minsk botch a more sophisticated project?
“I have to be a little careful because of how we were briefed on that,” says Rep. Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat who serves on the House Intelligence Committee and is one of his caucus’ strongest advocates for election security funding. Seated in his Capitol Hill office, Quigley paused, tapping his fingers on his leg. “All I can say on the record is I don’t believe they wanted to be found.”
As President Barack Obama prepared to leave office, his administration had no doubt that Russia had mounted a devastating disinformation campaign and hacked our electoral systems—and would likely do it again. But President-elect Donald Trump was notably uninterested in the threat. When FBI Director James Comey and other leaders of the intelligence community visited Trump Tower in January 2017 to explain how the country had been attacked, Comey recalled in his memoir, Trump’s team had “no questions about what the future Russian threat might be.” Instead, Comey wrote, they launched “immediately into a strategy session…about how they could spin what we’d just told them.”
The meeting set the tone for the administration. After four months as attorney general, Jeff Sessions told the Senate he had not once been briefed on Russian election interference, even though his department oversees the FBI, which investigates Russia’s disinformation campaigns and hacks like the one in Illinois. When John Bolton took over as national security adviser in April, he promptly pushed out two top White House cybersecurity experts. In May, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whose department also plays a leading role in election security, told reporters she wasn’t aware of US intelligence agencies having found that Russia aimed to help Trump; she made similar remarks at a July security conference. The White House has acknowledged just one Cabinet-level meeting on election security, and it didn’t come until May.
After the 9/11 attacks, a bipartisan commission launched an investigation into what had happened and outlined reforms to confront newly salient threats. Even though a similar probe into Russia’s 2016 attack would have put Obama’s national security team on the spot, neither Trump nor the GOP-led Congress showed interest in any investigation that might appear to delegitimize the election that gave their party undivided control of Washington. While the main election security fixes pushed by experts—paper ballots or printed backups that make it possible to reliably audit election results—are simple, Congress has passed no new laws to protect the country’s election systems during the 19 months since the intelligence community publicly concluded America was attacked by Russia.
If hackers target this November’s midterm elections, the consequences could be far more serious than the mostly quiet probing of 2016 and would fall on an electorate that has yet to receive a full reckoning of Russia’s attack. Hackers could try to create chaos by causing machines to malfunction, deleting properly registered voters, or even going so far as manipulating vote totals. Evidence of foreign-abetted fraud in just a handful of well-chosen counties could plunge the entire nation into crisis. Days after Trump prompted outrage by appearing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and backing his denial of involvement, the White House rushed a National Security Council meeting on election security as press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended her boss’ response to the assault, asserting he’s undertaking “bold action and reform to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” But an attack on this November’s midterm elections would undoubtedly be aided by what hackers learned two years ago—and by the president’s unwillingness to hold Russia accountable.
Intelligence services around the world—including America’s—have hacked parties and campaigns as part of standard intelligence gathering for many years. In 2008, China hacked both the Obama and John McCain teams, targeting staffers with simple phishing attacks. And in 2012, hackers—foreign and domestic—targeted the Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns. “We were fully expecting foreign intelligence services to heavily target the campaigns” in 2016, recalls Michael Daniel, who served as cyber czar on Obama’s National Security Council.
But as emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign were disseminated by WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence, Daniel and his colleagues were confronted with something new. These actors weren’t just snooping; they were weaponizing what they found, using a noxious brew of fake news, astroturfed social-media posts, and bots.
That part of the attack has been much discussed. Far less attention has been paid to Russia’s clandestine attacks on election systems, which were much more extensive than is generally understood. DHS officials believe every state’s voting system was cased by hackers. At least a handful, in places like Illinois, were breached, according to DHS. A classified National Security Agency report leaked to the Intercept by Reality Winner, the young intelligence contractor now serving 63 months in prison, says Russian military intelligence infiltrated an election software vendor’s systems, likely using data from the intrusion to target local election officials. Another attempt carried out by the team that targeted Illinois, according to special counsel Robert Mueller, involved emailing malware to Florida election officials that was disguised as a manual from an election software provider. There could have been other attacks that have yet to become public.
“It looks like the Russians were setting up several different lines of effort and testing out which ones they wanted to use,” says Neil Jenkins, who helped run DHS’s cybersecurity teams under Obama. They “picked and chose what was being the most successful as they went.”
At a September 2016 summit, Obama pulled Putin aside and told him to stop his interference, a meeting remembered for a photo of the men staring face-to-face. Using a never-before-deployed hotline meant to deter cyberwar—akin to the nation’s long-standing nuclear red phone—Daniel told his Kremlin counterpart to, in diplomatic terms, “knock it off.”
To the Obama security experts’ relief, Election Day seemed normal. “That there did not end up being disruption attempts beyond what they had already done I think was a result of the counterpressure that we applied,” Daniel says. “We got off easy.” But the lack of a dramatic meltdown also meant that Trump and his allies have been able to put off doing anything meaningful about election security.
Meanwhile, the Russians—and other attackers—haven’t gone away. In fact, what they did in 2016 likely gave them critical information about vulnerabilities in America’s election systems that could make another attack far more destructive. “They have been doing their planning and their homework,” says J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist and a leading expert on voting security. State election officials have testified that their systems are scanned for vulnerabilities, whether to run-of-the-mill cybercriminals or hostile nation-states, thousands of times a day.
According to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report, the Kremlin has been quietly building capacity to disrupt US elections since at least 2014 while engaging in brazen attacks elsewhere. That year, Russian hackers likely targeted Ukraine’s elections so initial vote totals would suggest the wrong winner. Officials caught the hack, but not before a Russian TV station reported the fake victor. Russia flooded British social-media feeds with anti-EU trolls in the lead-up to 2016’s Brexit referendum, and US intelligence concluded in 2017 that Russia had hacked emails associated with the party of Emmanuel Macron in France, releasing them two days before his presidential election victory.
There is a vast buffet of options for Russia or another hostile nation looking to disrupt US elections, from simple attacks on voter registration databases to more sophisticated exploits. A top concern for Halderman is the manipulation of voting software ahead of Election Day: “An attacker could spread malicious code to all the voting machines in an entire state,” he warns. Other experts worry about a Ukraine-like attack on a key state’s reporting system, prompting the Associated Press or TV networks to broadcast inaccurate information, plunging races into chaos.
Nothing, not even changing vote tallies, is off-limits. “We’re talking about state-level attackers,” says Halderman. “Quite possibly, the kinds of probing that we saw in 2016 were just part of that planning process to have the capability in place to strike in a broader and more damaging way at a time of their choosing.”
“Any disruptive or complex operation is almost always preceded by years of probing and learning,” says John Hultquist, an analyst at the private cyberintelligence firm FireEye. “Sometimes we wonder if places were merely targeted because they’re testing grounds. They are playing a long game here.”
In the late summer and fall of 2016, as Obama administration officials tried to mitigate the Russian operation, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson was struggling to engage state officials. Johnson held a contentious August call with them, during which he proposed designating election systems as “critical infrastructure,” a step that would have freed up resources and prioritized election security assessments.
But in the face of what he later recalled as a “neutral to negative” reaction, he backed off. It was only on January 6, 2017—the same day the intelligence community released its bombshell report blaming Russia—that Johnson moved forward, angering state officials who felt the designation intruded on their turf. As the Trump administration took over, the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency set up after the 2000 Florida recount, tried to smooth ruffled feathers. Its Republican chairman, Matthew Masterson, was instrumental. When it comes to “the universe of people who are beloved by the state election community but are also willing and able to do nudging on security,” one former congressional aide mused, “you’re down to like one guy.” That guy was Masterson.
So it came as a surprise in February 2018 when House Speaker Paul Ryan declined to reappoint Masterson to the four-member commission. As an official who has worked with Masterson wryly noted, “Even the idiot commissioners have gotten second terms.” A spokeswoman for Ryan declined to comment to Mother Jones but in a February statement said the speaker was considering one of his “own folks.”
Masterson was quickly hired to work on election security at DHS. But he has still not been replaced on the commission, leaving the group short of a quorum and unable to issue new security guidelines. One remaining commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, has suggested Russian meddling was a hoax.
Meanwhile, states requesting DHS assessments of their election systems under the critical infrastructure designation faced waits of up to nine months, according to a December Politico article. Under pressure from lawmakers, the department sped things up by delaying assessments of other vulnerable sectors, some of which—like nuclear plants—have also been attacked by Russia. “Demand exceeds our ability to meet all requests in a timely manner,” a department official told Mother Jones.
Rep. Jim Langevin, the Democratic co-chair of the House’s cybersecurity caucus and a former Rhode Island secretary of state, says the department’s balky response is due to a distinct lack of interest from the White House: “DHS is putting the personnel and the resources [to immigration] because the president has made it a priority. Likewise, the president isn’t making election security enough of a priority.”
In April, the White House removed two of its top cybersecurity specialists, homeland security adviser Tom Bossert and White House cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce, an elite hacker detailed from the NSA. Bolton, the pugnacious new national security adviser, eliminated Joyce’s position; Bossert was replaced by a Coast Guard rear admiral with far less cybersecurity expertise. Agencies and legislators looking to the White House for leadership were now on their own.
Michele Reagan, Arizona’s Republican secretary of state, was outside with her dogs on a June day in 2016 when her chief of staff called and suggested she sit down. The FBI had found a password to the state’s voter registration database for sale on the dark web. No records were stolen or altered, but to this day Reagan fields questions from Arizona voters who have heard about “election hacking” and are frightened their votes won’t count.
“We’re all talking about, ‘Did they get in? Did they get in?’ You know what? It doesn’t matter if they got in. They already won that round,” Reagan argues. “The intent of their whole campaign was to make us scared.”
Hultquist worries about the deeply negative and long-lasting impact on voter confidence of an attack tainting the outcome of a close, heavily watched race—with talk of fraud potentially amplified by Russian disinformation networks.
“The legitimacy problem is the nightmare,” he says. “If there was some suggestion that the outcome had been changed, how would our system even begin to deal with that? How would everyday citizens react?”
Only two states moved to paper ballots or printed backups in the wake of 2016—Virginia and Nevada. Edgardo Cortés, then Virginia’s chief elections administrator, says he decided to act after a July 2017 demonstration at DEF CON, the Las Vegas hacker convention, where organizers procured more than two dozen voting machines. Attendees with limited knowledge, tools, or resources were able to hack them all. Cortés remembers his reaction: “Oh my God, this is out there.” Virginia rushed the change just before its 2017 elections; control of the Statehouse ended up turning on recounts of a tiny number of votes in one district.
But as news of the Las Vegas demonstration traveled in election security circles, some state officials dismissed its significance. Testifying before a House technology subcommittee last November, Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler claimed his constituents trust electronic machines over paper ballots. The DEF CON demonstration wasn’t realistic “by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, adding that “absent the hype about Russian hacking, we have received no complaints from voters at all about the performance or accuracy of our voting machines.”
But DEF CON was hardly the first time electronic voting machines have been revealed as frighteningly insecure. Videos of similar demonstrations have circulated for more than a decade. In 2007, researchers testing Ohio’s voting machines found they were vulnerable to “undetectable manipulation” and unable to “guarantee a trustworthy election.” That same year, California’s secretary of state found similar holes. “There are states that still have not patched those vulnerabilities, that are still running the same versions of the software on the same voting machines from more than 10 years ago,” says Halderman, who participated in the California assessment. In 2016, Wisconsin, a swing state, was one of them.
“If we were criminals and weren’t worried about going to jail, I think my undergraduate computer security class could have probably changed the 2016 result in Michigan,” says Halderman. In April, he demonstrated to the New York Times how to hack the AccuVote-TSX—a machine used without a paper trail in 10 states—so Michigan students would select rival Ohio State as their favorite school.
Election officials have for years decried such demonstrations, knocking researchers for frightening voters about vulnerabilities yet to be exploited. But Halderman says that line of thinking prevents voters from understanding how shoddy security can be while stymieing the political resolve needed to fix it.
“When you start taking things apart, when you start looking at the details, in so many parts of the country things just are not okay,” he says, adding that open conversation is “the only way that we are going to break the pattern of chronically underinvesting in the administration of elections.”
That’s why Halderman and other experts keep insisting that every vote should leave a paper trail and be subject to postelection audits. “We’d be able to come back and say, ‘Yes, we know that something went wrong here, but this is why we know that no votes were changed,’” he explains. “The best assertion we can make right now is, ‘We have so far seen no evidence that any vote was changed’—which is, if you parse it carefully, a much, much, much weaker statement.”
According to an analysis by the group Verified Voting, 15 states still use paperless ballots for some voters, five of them statewide. In a world where even sophisticated systems are routinely penetrated, 41 states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old, and 43 states use equipment that is no longer manufactured. Only Colorado mandates the sort of postelection audit backed by most cybersecurity experts.
Election security “hasn’t changed in any material way” since 2016, Halderman says. “More resources are being thrown at the problem in a patchy way,” he adds, but “adversaries I’m sure have not been standing still. If Russia is planning to attack the 2018 election, they right now already have found their ways into the computer systems they’re going to use.”
On March 20, 2017, FBI Director Comey sat before the House Intelligence Committee and in a historic admission calmly confirmed the FBI was investigating not just Russian interference, but the possibility that Trump campaign officials had collaborated with the Kremlin. The hearing quickly devolved into a showcase for GOP attempts to downplay Russia’s assault on voting systems. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the committee, asked then-NSA Director Mike Rogers whether he had “any evidence that Russia cyber actors changed vote tallies.” Rogers replied he did not.
Republicans have chosen not to tackle the threat, congressional Democrats say, in part because the subject upsets the president and his base, a decision that looks ever more disastrous as Trump continues to downplay the attacks and refuses to confront Putin over them. Democrats have introduced a number of bills to strengthen election security—and found precious few Republicans willing to sign on. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, agreed to co-sponsor the PAPER Act alongside Langevin, to encourage the creation of nationwide cybersecurity recommendations while pushing paper ballot trails and postelection audits. But the bill, along with a similar Senate measure backed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), still awaits a hearing, and there’s no reason to expect either will move forward; while Langevin continues to push the measure, Meadows has been mum. In the Senate, a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to back legislation distributing security grants to local jurisdictions and closing a loophole allowing private election software and hardware vendors to keep attacks on their products secret. But the bill remains bottled up.
Left to go it alone, House Democrats put forth a bill in February allocating $1.7 billion to elections, including funding for paper ballots, audits, and new machines. That same month, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats came to Capitol Hill to say the threat was ongoing and likely to get worse: “Frankly, the United States is under attack.” Russia and others, Coats warned, “are likely to pursue even more aggressive cyberattacks.” Weeks later, Rogers joined the chorus, telling a congressional committee that “Putin has clearly come to the conclusion there’s little price to pay here and that therefore ‘I can continue this activity…’ What we have done hasn’t been enough.” Despite such warnings from Trump’s own intelligence advisers, the overwhelming majority of Republicans have declined to engage.
“We have over 100 co-sponsors now,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, says of the Democrats’ February bill. “To date, there’s not a single Republican.” Most Republicans won’t touch such legislation, Thompson says, because of their “absolute fear of being on the wrong side of Donald Trump.” In March, the Senate Intelligence Committee—which has been extensively briefed on Russia’s 2016 actions—encouraged states to use paper trails and urged funding to help implement postelection audits. That same month, Congress finally made $380 million available for election improvement, but lawmakers failed to require that the paltry sum actually be spent on security.
“Probably the decimal point was in the wrong spot,” Quigley, the Illinois Democrat, deadpanned during an interview with Mother Jones. “It should have been more like $3.8 billion.”
Some Republican senators, in line with the views of many secretaries of state, insist the federal government has no business getting involved in elections. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) disagrees, arguing that foreign attacks make protecting our elections a matter of national defense: “You wouldn’t say to the state of Iowa or Minnesota, ‘Well, why don’t you fund an aircraft carrier just in case someone comes into Lake Superior?’” Republicans agreed to put the $380 million toward the problem, Klobuchar says, in part because some realized election hacking could affect them too. During a March 2017 Senate hearing, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) revealed that his presidential campaign staffers had been targeted from suspected Russian IP addresses.
Quigley’s perch on the Intelligence Committee means he’s privy to classified information about election hacking, making him a bit of a Cassandra when he joins Appropriations Committee debates over money for the problem. Easing onto a couch in his office on a June afternoon, one leg draped over the other, Quigley prepared for an appropriations markup, during which he hoped to wrangle another $380 million in next year’s budget, a small but ongoing investment in upgrading election security.
Like most experts and legislators who have studied the issue, Quigley is less afraid of a Russian attack on vote tallies than of the chaos and lack of confidence that would come from unleashing suspicious activity in, say, a few key counties: “You don’t have to convince Americans about a conspiracy. America rests on a grassy knoll.”
“I don’t think the Republicans and their leadership fully understand the threat,” he says. “When history looks back at this, all they’re in effect doing is protecting the president.”
A few minutes later, he headed out the door to the Appropriations Committee. He lost on a party-line vote.
Why has the White House and its GOP allies in Congress done so little to combat the threat?
AJ VICENS AND PEMA LEVY
On July 12, 2016, Matthew Emmons, an IT technician, was settling into a quiet workday when a colleague approached his cubicle in the Springfield strip-mall office of the Illinois State Board of Elections. Servers holding the personal information of more than 7.5 million voters had ground to a halt, and there was something he had to see.
Within minutes, a handful of techs had anxiously gathered around a monitor showing the registration database servers hitting total capacity. “We knew we were under attack,” Emmons, now the IT director, recalls. “These are very powerful servers, and it had locked those things up.”
Emmons and his colleagues took the servers offline and started to investigate. What they discovered was mysterious and terrifying. The site’s online voter database had been overloaded by repeated queries. At peak, five requests arrived every second, and though now blocked by a new firewall, they continued to bombard the site for a month. These queries, known as SQL (pronounced “sequel”) injections, are among the most common types of computer attacks, allowing the hacker to send commands to a database to extract, modify, or erase what’s inside.
But what shocked the techs most was when the attack had begun. Activity logs showed that whoever had penetrated the database had been snooping inside for almost three weeks, learning about the system’s structure, figuring out what they could and could not do, and pilfering personal information on half a million voters. If the attackers hadn’t overloaded the servers, Emmons and his colleagues might have never known they were there.
Only later would the Illinois team officially learn, from a Senate hearing nearly a year after the incident, that they’d suffered the first known shot in a Russian campaign that would target every state. “It was a little scary, knowing that it’s a nation,” Emmons says. “This is a part of running elections in the United States now.”
To this day, it’s unclear why, after weeks of quietly poking around, the intruders shut down the servers with a blast of queries. Were they hoping to draw attention and trigger public panic? Or did someone sitting behind a keyboard in Moscow or Minsk botch a more sophisticated project?
“I have to be a little careful because of how we were briefed on that,” says Rep. Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat who serves on the House Intelligence Committee and is one of his caucus’ strongest advocates for election security funding. Seated in his Capitol Hill office, Quigley paused, tapping his fingers on his leg. “All I can say on the record is I don’t believe they wanted to be found.”
As President Barack Obama prepared to leave office, his administration had no doubt that Russia had mounted a devastating disinformation campaign and hacked our electoral systems—and would likely do it again. But President-elect Donald Trump was notably uninterested in the threat. When FBI Director James Comey and other leaders of the intelligence community visited Trump Tower in January 2017 to explain how the country had been attacked, Comey recalled in his memoir, Trump’s team had “no questions about what the future Russian threat might be.” Instead, Comey wrote, they launched “immediately into a strategy session…about how they could spin what we’d just told them.”
The meeting set the tone for the administration. After four months as attorney general, Jeff Sessions told the Senate he had not once been briefed on Russian election interference, even though his department oversees the FBI, which investigates Russia’s disinformation campaigns and hacks like the one in Illinois. When John Bolton took over as national security adviser in April, he promptly pushed out two top White House cybersecurity experts. In May, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whose department also plays a leading role in election security, told reporters she wasn’t aware of US intelligence agencies having found that Russia aimed to help Trump; she made similar remarks at a July security conference. The White House has acknowledged just one Cabinet-level meeting on election security, and it didn’t come until May.
After the 9/11 attacks, a bipartisan commission launched an investigation into what had happened and outlined reforms to confront newly salient threats. Even though a similar probe into Russia’s 2016 attack would have put Obama’s national security team on the spot, neither Trump nor the GOP-led Congress showed interest in any investigation that might appear to delegitimize the election that gave their party undivided control of Washington. While the main election security fixes pushed by experts—paper ballots or printed backups that make it possible to reliably audit election results—are simple, Congress has passed no new laws to protect the country’s election systems during the 19 months since the intelligence community publicly concluded America was attacked by Russia.
If hackers target this November’s midterm elections, the consequences could be far more serious than the mostly quiet probing of 2016 and would fall on an electorate that has yet to receive a full reckoning of Russia’s attack. Hackers could try to create chaos by causing machines to malfunction, deleting properly registered voters, or even going so far as manipulating vote totals. Evidence of foreign-abetted fraud in just a handful of well-chosen counties could plunge the entire nation into crisis. Days after Trump prompted outrage by appearing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and backing his denial of involvement, the White House rushed a National Security Council meeting on election security as press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended her boss’ response to the assault, asserting he’s undertaking “bold action and reform to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” But an attack on this November’s midterm elections would undoubtedly be aided by what hackers learned two years ago—and by the president’s unwillingness to hold Russia accountable.
Intelligence services around the world—including America’s—have hacked parties and campaigns as part of standard intelligence gathering for many years. In 2008, China hacked both the Obama and John McCain teams, targeting staffers with simple phishing attacks. And in 2012, hackers—foreign and domestic—targeted the Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns. “We were fully expecting foreign intelligence services to heavily target the campaigns” in 2016, recalls Michael Daniel, who served as cyber czar on Obama’s National Security Council.
But as emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign were disseminated by WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence, Daniel and his colleagues were confronted with something new. These actors weren’t just snooping; they were weaponizing what they found, using a noxious brew of fake news, astroturfed social-media posts, and bots.
That part of the attack has been much discussed. Far less attention has been paid to Russia’s clandestine attacks on election systems, which were much more extensive than is generally understood. DHS officials believe every state’s voting system was cased by hackers. At least a handful, in places like Illinois, were breached, according to DHS. A classified National Security Agency report leaked to the Intercept by Reality Winner, the young intelligence contractor now serving 63 months in prison, says Russian military intelligence infiltrated an election software vendor’s systems, likely using data from the intrusion to target local election officials. Another attempt carried out by the team that targeted Illinois, according to special counsel Robert Mueller, involved emailing malware to Florida election officials that was disguised as a manual from an election software provider. There could have been other attacks that have yet to become public.
“It looks like the Russians were setting up several different lines of effort and testing out which ones they wanted to use,” says Neil Jenkins, who helped run DHS’s cybersecurity teams under Obama. They “picked and chose what was being the most successful as they went.”
At a September 2016 summit, Obama pulled Putin aside and told him to stop his interference, a meeting remembered for a photo of the men staring face-to-face. Using a never-before-deployed hotline meant to deter cyberwar—akin to the nation’s long-standing nuclear red phone—Daniel told his Kremlin counterpart to, in diplomatic terms, “knock it off.”
To the Obama security experts’ relief, Election Day seemed normal. “That there did not end up being disruption attempts beyond what they had already done I think was a result of the counterpressure that we applied,” Daniel says. “We got off easy.” But the lack of a dramatic meltdown also meant that Trump and his allies have been able to put off doing anything meaningful about election security.
Meanwhile, the Russians—and other attackers—haven’t gone away. In fact, what they did in 2016 likely gave them critical information about vulnerabilities in America’s election systems that could make another attack far more destructive. “They have been doing their planning and their homework,” says J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist and a leading expert on voting security. State election officials have testified that their systems are scanned for vulnerabilities, whether to run-of-the-mill cybercriminals or hostile nation-states, thousands of times a day.
According to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report, the Kremlin has been quietly building capacity to disrupt US elections since at least 2014 while engaging in brazen attacks elsewhere. That year, Russian hackers likely targeted Ukraine’s elections so initial vote totals would suggest the wrong winner. Officials caught the hack, but not before a Russian TV station reported the fake victor. Russia flooded British social-media feeds with anti-EU trolls in the lead-up to 2016’s Brexit referendum, and US intelligence concluded in 2017 that Russia had hacked emails associated with the party of Emmanuel Macron in France, releasing them two days before his presidential election victory.
There is a vast buffet of options for Russia or another hostile nation looking to disrupt US elections, from simple attacks on voter registration databases to more sophisticated exploits. A top concern for Halderman is the manipulation of voting software ahead of Election Day: “An attacker could spread malicious code to all the voting machines in an entire state,” he warns. Other experts worry about a Ukraine-like attack on a key state’s reporting system, prompting the Associated Press or TV networks to broadcast inaccurate information, plunging races into chaos.
Nothing, not even changing vote tallies, is off-limits. “We’re talking about state-level attackers,” says Halderman. “Quite possibly, the kinds of probing that we saw in 2016 were just part of that planning process to have the capability in place to strike in a broader and more damaging way at a time of their choosing.”
“Any disruptive or complex operation is almost always preceded by years of probing and learning,” says John Hultquist, an analyst at the private cyberintelligence firm FireEye. “Sometimes we wonder if places were merely targeted because they’re testing grounds. They are playing a long game here.”
In the late summer and fall of 2016, as Obama administration officials tried to mitigate the Russian operation, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson was struggling to engage state officials. Johnson held a contentious August call with them, during which he proposed designating election systems as “critical infrastructure,” a step that would have freed up resources and prioritized election security assessments.
But in the face of what he later recalled as a “neutral to negative” reaction, he backed off. It was only on January 6, 2017—the same day the intelligence community released its bombshell report blaming Russia—that Johnson moved forward, angering state officials who felt the designation intruded on their turf. As the Trump administration took over, the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency set up after the 2000 Florida recount, tried to smooth ruffled feathers. Its Republican chairman, Matthew Masterson, was instrumental. When it comes to “the universe of people who are beloved by the state election community but are also willing and able to do nudging on security,” one former congressional aide mused, “you’re down to like one guy.” That guy was Masterson.
So it came as a surprise in February 2018 when House Speaker Paul Ryan declined to reappoint Masterson to the four-member commission. As an official who has worked with Masterson wryly noted, “Even the idiot commissioners have gotten second terms.” A spokeswoman for Ryan declined to comment to Mother Jones but in a February statement said the speaker was considering one of his “own folks.”
Masterson was quickly hired to work on election security at DHS. But he has still not been replaced on the commission, leaving the group short of a quorum and unable to issue new security guidelines. One remaining commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, has suggested Russian meddling was a hoax.
Meanwhile, states requesting DHS assessments of their election systems under the critical infrastructure designation faced waits of up to nine months, according to a December Politico article. Under pressure from lawmakers, the department sped things up by delaying assessments of other vulnerable sectors, some of which—like nuclear plants—have also been attacked by Russia. “Demand exceeds our ability to meet all requests in a timely manner,” a department official told Mother Jones.
Rep. Jim Langevin, the Democratic co-chair of the House’s cybersecurity caucus and a former Rhode Island secretary of state, says the department’s balky response is due to a distinct lack of interest from the White House: “DHS is putting the personnel and the resources [to immigration] because the president has made it a priority. Likewise, the president isn’t making election security enough of a priority.”
In April, the White House removed two of its top cybersecurity specialists, homeland security adviser Tom Bossert and White House cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce, an elite hacker detailed from the NSA. Bolton, the pugnacious new national security adviser, eliminated Joyce’s position; Bossert was replaced by a Coast Guard rear admiral with far less cybersecurity expertise. Agencies and legislators looking to the White House for leadership were now on their own.
Michele Reagan, Arizona’s Republican secretary of state, was outside with her dogs on a June day in 2016 when her chief of staff called and suggested she sit down. The FBI had found a password to the state’s voter registration database for sale on the dark web. No records were stolen or altered, but to this day Reagan fields questions from Arizona voters who have heard about “election hacking” and are frightened their votes won’t count.
“We’re all talking about, ‘Did they get in? Did they get in?’ You know what? It doesn’t matter if they got in. They already won that round,” Reagan argues. “The intent of their whole campaign was to make us scared.”
Hultquist worries about the deeply negative and long-lasting impact on voter confidence of an attack tainting the outcome of a close, heavily watched race—with talk of fraud potentially amplified by Russian disinformation networks.
“The legitimacy problem is the nightmare,” he says. “If there was some suggestion that the outcome had been changed, how would our system even begin to deal with that? How would everyday citizens react?”
Only two states moved to paper ballots or printed backups in the wake of 2016—Virginia and Nevada. Edgardo Cortés, then Virginia’s chief elections administrator, says he decided to act after a July 2017 demonstration at DEF CON, the Las Vegas hacker convention, where organizers procured more than two dozen voting machines. Attendees with limited knowledge, tools, or resources were able to hack them all. Cortés remembers his reaction: “Oh my God, this is out there.” Virginia rushed the change just before its 2017 elections; control of the Statehouse ended up turning on recounts of a tiny number of votes in one district.
But as news of the Las Vegas demonstration traveled in election security circles, some state officials dismissed its significance. Testifying before a House technology subcommittee last November, Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler claimed his constituents trust electronic machines over paper ballots. The DEF CON demonstration wasn’t realistic “by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, adding that “absent the hype about Russian hacking, we have received no complaints from voters at all about the performance or accuracy of our voting machines.”
But DEF CON was hardly the first time electronic voting machines have been revealed as frighteningly insecure. Videos of similar demonstrations have circulated for more than a decade. In 2007, researchers testing Ohio’s voting machines found they were vulnerable to “undetectable manipulation” and unable to “guarantee a trustworthy election.” That same year, California’s secretary of state found similar holes. “There are states that still have not patched those vulnerabilities, that are still running the same versions of the software on the same voting machines from more than 10 years ago,” says Halderman, who participated in the California assessment. In 2016, Wisconsin, a swing state, was one of them.
“If we were criminals and weren’t worried about going to jail, I think my undergraduate computer security class could have probably changed the 2016 result in Michigan,” says Halderman. In April, he demonstrated to the New York Times how to hack the AccuVote-TSX—a machine used without a paper trail in 10 states—so Michigan students would select rival Ohio State as their favorite school.
Election officials have for years decried such demonstrations, knocking researchers for frightening voters about vulnerabilities yet to be exploited. But Halderman says that line of thinking prevents voters from understanding how shoddy security can be while stymieing the political resolve needed to fix it.
“When you start taking things apart, when you start looking at the details, in so many parts of the country things just are not okay,” he says, adding that open conversation is “the only way that we are going to break the pattern of chronically underinvesting in the administration of elections.”
That’s why Halderman and other experts keep insisting that every vote should leave a paper trail and be subject to postelection audits. “We’d be able to come back and say, ‘Yes, we know that something went wrong here, but this is why we know that no votes were changed,’” he explains. “The best assertion we can make right now is, ‘We have so far seen no evidence that any vote was changed’—which is, if you parse it carefully, a much, much, much weaker statement.”
According to an analysis by the group Verified Voting, 15 states still use paperless ballots for some voters, five of them statewide. In a world where even sophisticated systems are routinely penetrated, 41 states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old, and 43 states use equipment that is no longer manufactured. Only Colorado mandates the sort of postelection audit backed by most cybersecurity experts.
Election security “hasn’t changed in any material way” since 2016, Halderman says. “More resources are being thrown at the problem in a patchy way,” he adds, but “adversaries I’m sure have not been standing still. If Russia is planning to attack the 2018 election, they right now already have found their ways into the computer systems they’re going to use.”
On March 20, 2017, FBI Director Comey sat before the House Intelligence Committee and in a historic admission calmly confirmed the FBI was investigating not just Russian interference, but the possibility that Trump campaign officials had collaborated with the Kremlin. The hearing quickly devolved into a showcase for GOP attempts to downplay Russia’s assault on voting systems. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the committee, asked then-NSA Director Mike Rogers whether he had “any evidence that Russia cyber actors changed vote tallies.” Rogers replied he did not.
Republicans have chosen not to tackle the threat, congressional Democrats say, in part because the subject upsets the president and his base, a decision that looks ever more disastrous as Trump continues to downplay the attacks and refuses to confront Putin over them. Democrats have introduced a number of bills to strengthen election security—and found precious few Republicans willing to sign on. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, agreed to co-sponsor the PAPER Act alongside Langevin, to encourage the creation of nationwide cybersecurity recommendations while pushing paper ballot trails and postelection audits. But the bill, along with a similar Senate measure backed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), still awaits a hearing, and there’s no reason to expect either will move forward; while Langevin continues to push the measure, Meadows has been mum. In the Senate, a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to back legislation distributing security grants to local jurisdictions and closing a loophole allowing private election software and hardware vendors to keep attacks on their products secret. But the bill remains bottled up.
Left to go it alone, House Democrats put forth a bill in February allocating $1.7 billion to elections, including funding for paper ballots, audits, and new machines. That same month, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats came to Capitol Hill to say the threat was ongoing and likely to get worse: “Frankly, the United States is under attack.” Russia and others, Coats warned, “are likely to pursue even more aggressive cyberattacks.” Weeks later, Rogers joined the chorus, telling a congressional committee that “Putin has clearly come to the conclusion there’s little price to pay here and that therefore ‘I can continue this activity…’ What we have done hasn’t been enough.” Despite such warnings from Trump’s own intelligence advisers, the overwhelming majority of Republicans have declined to engage.
“We have over 100 co-sponsors now,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, says of the Democrats’ February bill. “To date, there’s not a single Republican.” Most Republicans won’t touch such legislation, Thompson says, because of their “absolute fear of being on the wrong side of Donald Trump.” In March, the Senate Intelligence Committee—which has been extensively briefed on Russia’s 2016 actions—encouraged states to use paper trails and urged funding to help implement postelection audits. That same month, Congress finally made $380 million available for election improvement, but lawmakers failed to require that the paltry sum actually be spent on security.
“Probably the decimal point was in the wrong spot,” Quigley, the Illinois Democrat, deadpanned during an interview with Mother Jones. “It should have been more like $3.8 billion.”
Some Republican senators, in line with the views of many secretaries of state, insist the federal government has no business getting involved in elections. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) disagrees, arguing that foreign attacks make protecting our elections a matter of national defense: “You wouldn’t say to the state of Iowa or Minnesota, ‘Well, why don’t you fund an aircraft carrier just in case someone comes into Lake Superior?’” Republicans agreed to put the $380 million toward the problem, Klobuchar says, in part because some realized election hacking could affect them too. During a March 2017 Senate hearing, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) revealed that his presidential campaign staffers had been targeted from suspected Russian IP addresses.
Quigley’s perch on the Intelligence Committee means he’s privy to classified information about election hacking, making him a bit of a Cassandra when he joins Appropriations Committee debates over money for the problem. Easing onto a couch in his office on a June afternoon, one leg draped over the other, Quigley prepared for an appropriations markup, during which he hoped to wrangle another $380 million in next year’s budget, a small but ongoing investment in upgrading election security.
Like most experts and legislators who have studied the issue, Quigley is less afraid of a Russian attack on vote tallies than of the chaos and lack of confidence that would come from unleashing suspicious activity in, say, a few key counties: “You don’t have to convince Americans about a conspiracy. America rests on a grassy knoll.”
“I don’t think the Republicans and their leadership fully understand the threat,” he says. “When history looks back at this, all they’re in effect doing is protecting the president.”
A few minutes later, he headed out the door to the Appropriations Committee. He lost on a party-line vote.
Is Afraid...
Andrew Wheeler Is Afraid to Revoke California’s Fuel Waiver. He Should Be.
“It’s going to be a hard case for the EPA to win.”
SHANNON OSAKA
There’s trouble in Trumpland, and California is caught in the middle. According to 11 sources cited in the New York Times on Friday, acting EPA chief Andrew Wheeler has stalled plans to roll back the hallmark California fuel emissions waiver, which allows the state to place stricter limits on car and truck emissions than the rest of the country. Wheeler, the sources say, doesn’t believe the administration’s plan will hold up in court.
Experts say he’s right to have cold feet.
“It’s going to be a hard case for the EPA to win,” says Cary Coglianese, professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you had to place a bet right now, you’d probably be wise to bet on California.”
Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, California can request a waiver from the federal government to set higher emissions standards for cars and trucks. The waiver was introduced to allow the state to tackle its particularly severe air pollution. (Eight of the country’s 10 most polluted cities are in California.) The state’s most recent waiver was granted in 2013 by President Obama, and it allows California to limit carbon emissions and require automakers to sell a certain number of low-emission and zero-emission vehicles in the state.
Over the past several months, however, the Trump administration has signaled that it hopes to end this decades-old regulatory tradition—first by revoking the 2013 waiver. If the EPA does pull the plug on the state-specific standards, California will certainly sue, setting up a conflict between state and federal rights to regulate the environment. And history, in this case, supports California.
Revoking the waiver “would be unprecedented,” says Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor. “There have been dozens of waivers that California has gotten over the decades since the 1970s, and [the EPA] has never revoked one.”
So the EPA would have to buck tradition and its own previous rulings. “When the EPA grants the waiver in the first place, they build an administrative record to support the decision,” Coglianese tells Grist. “To revoke a waiver, the new administration will have to somehow put forward a case that is in direct contradiction to the administrative record under Obama.” That kind of regulatory flip-flop would look sketchy in court.
But the EPA might have one final argument up its regulatory sleeve. The 1975 Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules give the agency exclusive power to regulate fuel economy. The federal government could argue that these rules “preempt” the debate over the waiver. That means that even if California can win on the waiver question, the state might still be restricted from regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring low and zero-emission vehicle sales within its borders.
“It’s a belt-and-suspenders argument,” Freeman says. “It’s like saying, ‘We’re revoking your waiver, but even if it doesn’t work, you’re preempted.'”
That would be a strong statement of federal power for an administration—and an EPA—that has vocally supported states’ rights. “Andrew Wheeler and Scott Pruitt have said that a core principle is to return regulatory power to the states,” Ann Carlson, professor of law at UCLA, tells Grist. “And at the same time, they’re undermining California’s ability to regulate.”
So will Wheeler bend to Trump administration pressure and try to revoke the waiver? It could still easily happen. But even if the EPA does try to step on California’s authority, the length of the court battle ahead means that the standards will stay in place for some time.
Many of Pruitt’s environmental rollbacks have stalled in court, as the embattled former EPA chief rarely did his due diligence to help them withstand judicial review. Wheeler thus far seems more careful about wielding the EPA’s power so rashly. But that may also mean that the acting EPA chief is ultimately more effective at rescinding Obama-era regulations.
Still, the California waiver question won’t be decided until after the midterm elections, and perhaps (dare we hope?) until after the 2020 election.
“It’s going to be a hard case for the EPA to win.”
SHANNON OSAKA
There’s trouble in Trumpland, and California is caught in the middle. According to 11 sources cited in the New York Times on Friday, acting EPA chief Andrew Wheeler has stalled plans to roll back the hallmark California fuel emissions waiver, which allows the state to place stricter limits on car and truck emissions than the rest of the country. Wheeler, the sources say, doesn’t believe the administration’s plan will hold up in court.
Experts say he’s right to have cold feet.
“It’s going to be a hard case for the EPA to win,” says Cary Coglianese, professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you had to place a bet right now, you’d probably be wise to bet on California.”
Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, California can request a waiver from the federal government to set higher emissions standards for cars and trucks. The waiver was introduced to allow the state to tackle its particularly severe air pollution. (Eight of the country’s 10 most polluted cities are in California.) The state’s most recent waiver was granted in 2013 by President Obama, and it allows California to limit carbon emissions and require automakers to sell a certain number of low-emission and zero-emission vehicles in the state.
Over the past several months, however, the Trump administration has signaled that it hopes to end this decades-old regulatory tradition—first by revoking the 2013 waiver. If the EPA does pull the plug on the state-specific standards, California will certainly sue, setting up a conflict between state and federal rights to regulate the environment. And history, in this case, supports California.
Revoking the waiver “would be unprecedented,” says Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor. “There have been dozens of waivers that California has gotten over the decades since the 1970s, and [the EPA] has never revoked one.”
So the EPA would have to buck tradition and its own previous rulings. “When the EPA grants the waiver in the first place, they build an administrative record to support the decision,” Coglianese tells Grist. “To revoke a waiver, the new administration will have to somehow put forward a case that is in direct contradiction to the administrative record under Obama.” That kind of regulatory flip-flop would look sketchy in court.
But the EPA might have one final argument up its regulatory sleeve. The 1975 Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules give the agency exclusive power to regulate fuel economy. The federal government could argue that these rules “preempt” the debate over the waiver. That means that even if California can win on the waiver question, the state might still be restricted from regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring low and zero-emission vehicle sales within its borders.
“It’s a belt-and-suspenders argument,” Freeman says. “It’s like saying, ‘We’re revoking your waiver, but even if it doesn’t work, you’re preempted.'”
That would be a strong statement of federal power for an administration—and an EPA—that has vocally supported states’ rights. “Andrew Wheeler and Scott Pruitt have said that a core principle is to return regulatory power to the states,” Ann Carlson, professor of law at UCLA, tells Grist. “And at the same time, they’re undermining California’s ability to regulate.”
So will Wheeler bend to Trump administration pressure and try to revoke the waiver? It could still easily happen. But even if the EPA does try to step on California’s authority, the length of the court battle ahead means that the standards will stay in place for some time.
Many of Pruitt’s environmental rollbacks have stalled in court, as the embattled former EPA chief rarely did his due diligence to help them withstand judicial review. Wheeler thus far seems more careful about wielding the EPA’s power so rashly. But that may also mean that the acting EPA chief is ultimately more effective at rescinding Obama-era regulations.
Still, the California waiver question won’t be decided until after the midterm elections, and perhaps (dare we hope?) until after the 2020 election.
Says Nothing
“Russia Says Nothing Exists”: A Dozen Times Trump Has Downplayed Hacking
“It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
Despite the conclusions of US intelligence and the indictments of more than two dozen Russian nationals allegedly involved with the plot, Donald Trump has repeatedly downplayed Russia’s attack on the 2016 elections, suggesting it didn’t happen or that, if it did, someone else was responsible.
June 15, 2016: Amid early reports of the Democratic National Committee hack, Trump’s team issues a statement: “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate.”
July 27: Trump makes an infamous request: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” A later indictment discloses Russian intelligence first targeted a key Hillary Clinton email provider “on or about” the same day.
September 7-8: An Obama administration official publicly suggests Russians could be behind the hack. Trump responds on Kremlin-backed RT: “I think maybe the Democrats are putting that out,” he says. “Who knows, but I think it’s pretty unlikely.”
September 26: During the first presidential debate, Trump says, “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia…It could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”
October 9: In the second debate, Clinton accuses Trump of benefiting from Russian interference. “She doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking,” he says. “Maybe there is no hacking.”
December 9: Trump’s transition team blasts the CIA’s reported conclusion that Russia intervened to help Trump: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
December 31: Trump claims, “I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
January 13, 2017: Trump tweets, “Russia says nothing exists.”
September 22: Trump calls Facebook’s conclusion that Russian operatives bought ads on the platform a “hoax.”
November 12: After meeting Vladimir Putin, Trump says, “He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying.” Trump adds, “I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.”
July 16, 2018: In a joint appearance in Helsinki, Trump takes Putin’s side over US intelligence: “They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
July 17: Back in Washington, Trump claims he misspoke: “The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it WOULDN’T be Russia’—a double negative… I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.”
“It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”
HANNAH LEVINTOVA
Despite the conclusions of US intelligence and the indictments of more than two dozen Russian nationals allegedly involved with the plot, Donald Trump has repeatedly downplayed Russia’s attack on the 2016 elections, suggesting it didn’t happen or that, if it did, someone else was responsible.
June 15, 2016: Amid early reports of the Democratic National Committee hack, Trump’s team issues a statement: “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate.”
July 27: Trump makes an infamous request: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” A later indictment discloses Russian intelligence first targeted a key Hillary Clinton email provider “on or about” the same day.
September 7-8: An Obama administration official publicly suggests Russians could be behind the hack. Trump responds on Kremlin-backed RT: “I think maybe the Democrats are putting that out,” he says. “Who knows, but I think it’s pretty unlikely.”
September 26: During the first presidential debate, Trump says, “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia…It could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”
October 9: In the second debate, Clinton accuses Trump of benefiting from Russian interference. “She doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking,” he says. “Maybe there is no hacking.”
December 9: Trump’s transition team blasts the CIA’s reported conclusion that Russia intervened to help Trump: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
December 31: Trump claims, “I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
January 13, 2017: Trump tweets, “Russia says nothing exists.”
September 22: Trump calls Facebook’s conclusion that Russian operatives bought ads on the platform a “hoax.”
November 12: After meeting Vladimir Putin, Trump says, “He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying.” Trump adds, “I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.”
July 16, 2018: In a joint appearance in Helsinki, Trump takes Putin’s side over US intelligence: “They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
July 17: Back in Washington, Trump claims he misspoke: “The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it WOULDN’T be Russia’—a double negative… I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.”
South Pole of Mars
NGC 6744
This image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) shows a beautiful spiral galaxy called NGC 6744. At first glance, it resembles our Milky Way albeit larger, measuring more than 200,000 light-years across compared to a 100,000-light-year diameter for our home galaxy.NGC 6744 is similar to our home galaxy in more ways than one. Like the Milky Way, NGC 6744 has a prominent central region packed with old yellow stars. Moving away from the galactic core, one can see parts of the dusty spiral arms painted in shades of pink and blue; while the blue sites are full of young star clusters, the pink ones are regions of active star formation, indicating that the galaxy is still very lively.
In 2005, a supernova named 2005at (not visible in this image) was discovered within NGC 6744, adding to the argument of this galaxy’s liveliness. SN 2005at is a Type Ic supernova, formed when a massive star collapses on itself and loses its hydrogen envelope.
GOP leaders yawn
GOP leaders yawn at Trump’s shutdown threats
Republicans say the president isn’t going to close the government right before the midterms — even though he’s unlikely to get his full border wall funding by then.
By BURGESS EVERETT
President Donald Trump keeps threatening a government shutdown over his border wall. And Republican leaders keep ignoring his warnings.
The congressional GOP is intent on sending Trump a series of government spending bills over the next two months that would fund the vast majority of the federal government. And despite the president’s statement on Monday that he would have “no problem doing a shutdown,” Republicans seem sure that he’s not talking about a funding lapse right before the midterm elections.
“I’m optimistic we can avoid a government shutdown,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), twice, when asked about Trump’s latest remarks on Monday, which followed several presidential tweets hitting Democrats for being lax on border security and demanding the country "keep building, but much faster, THE WALL!"
McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) believe that Trump has bought into their plan to leave the border wall fight until after the election, a strategy first reported by POLITICO last week.
If everything goes smoothly this fall, the two Republican leaders anticipate funding all but a small slice of government through the regular appropriations process, and leaving Homeland Security funding and the border wall fight until a lame-duck session.
In a Senate Republican meeting on Monday afternoon, senators discussed the president’s renewed shutdown vows, according to two GOP sources familiar with the meeting.
Echoing his public remarks, McConnell told them that the Senate would move as many spending bills as it can to the president’s desk ahead of the Sept. 30 funding deadline and told Republicans that the budget deal passed earlier this year will finance work on border security through the election, according to one of those sources.
In other words, Trump’s outburst on Monday is not causing top Republicans to change course.
“I know he’s frustrated and I am too that we haven’t taken steps to adequately deal with border security. But we’ve got an orderly appropriations process going through here and I’m hopeful we can get most if not all the appropriations done,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). “If there is some small failure to meet deadlines, it will be for a small piece of the appropriations process.”
The Senate hopes to have as many as 9 of the 12 annual spending bills done by the end of August; the House has gone home for a 5-week recess but has passed six of its own. The two chambers must still reconcile those bills before Trump signs them into law, and then would pass stopgap spending bills to cover the rest of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, according to Republican senators.
Under that line of thinking, voters would head to the ballot boxes after the Senate confirms Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — not after a government shutdown.
Asked whether he took Trump's shutdown threats seriously, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) replied: “No.”
“He knows that would be a disaster. I think he wants to throw everything out there so everyone knows it’s an important thing,” Hatch said. “He knows the game.”
Still, there is some risk to Republicans’ strategy of avoiding a showy fight in Congress for Trump's wall right before the elections.
Trump has sounded increasingly dug in on using a shutdown threat to amplify his demands to begin building a physical wall along the border with Mexico, bringing it up unprompted on Monday during his opening remarks at a news conference alongside the Italian prime minister and demanding cuts to legal immigration that Congress has already rejected this year.
“The whole thing is ridiculous. And we have to change our laws. We do that through Congress. So I would certainly be willing to close it down, to get it done,” Trump said on Monday. “I would be certainly willing to consider a shutdown if we don't get proper border security.“
Trump notably said he did not have a “red line” where he would insist on getting the full $25 billion for the wall upfront. He told Ryan and McConnell last week that he wants a $5 billion down payment on the wall, the same amount of the House’s Homeland Security funding bill. The Senate’s bipartisan bill contains $1.6 billion, and Democrats say they won’t provide more than that.
“There’s an easy way out of this,” said a facetious Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “He said Mexico is going to pay for it. We’re going to open up the account, Mexico pays the money in, we take it out for the wall.”
The fight on immigration and border wall funding has bedeviled Congress since Trump became president. This year, Trump’s plan to build the wall, cut legal immigration and offer citizenship to 1.8 million young immigrants failed on the Senate floor, as did a bipartisan plan that focused more narrowly on protecting young immigrants and boosting border security.
Now the hope among Republicans is for the stalemate to hold past the election, and put off the border wall fight until the end of the year. But there’s no guarantee the president is any more likely to get his funding in December, particularly if Democrats take back the House or the Senate. Unless Trump is willing to cut a deal.
“The Dems are going to resist any attempt to significantly increase above what they’ve already agreed to in terms of wall funding. The president wants it all now,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D). “For Democrats to go along with that, you’d have to have some concessions on other immigration issues.”
Republicans say the president isn’t going to close the government right before the midterms — even though he’s unlikely to get his full border wall funding by then.
By BURGESS EVERETT
President Donald Trump keeps threatening a government shutdown over his border wall. And Republican leaders keep ignoring his warnings.
The congressional GOP is intent on sending Trump a series of government spending bills over the next two months that would fund the vast majority of the federal government. And despite the president’s statement on Monday that he would have “no problem doing a shutdown,” Republicans seem sure that he’s not talking about a funding lapse right before the midterm elections.
“I’m optimistic we can avoid a government shutdown,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), twice, when asked about Trump’s latest remarks on Monday, which followed several presidential tweets hitting Democrats for being lax on border security and demanding the country "keep building, but much faster, THE WALL!"
 |
| Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell |
If everything goes smoothly this fall, the two Republican leaders anticipate funding all but a small slice of government through the regular appropriations process, and leaving Homeland Security funding and the border wall fight until a lame-duck session.
In a Senate Republican meeting on Monday afternoon, senators discussed the president’s renewed shutdown vows, according to two GOP sources familiar with the meeting.
Echoing his public remarks, McConnell told them that the Senate would move as many spending bills as it can to the president’s desk ahead of the Sept. 30 funding deadline and told Republicans that the budget deal passed earlier this year will finance work on border security through the election, according to one of those sources.
In other words, Trump’s outburst on Monday is not causing top Republicans to change course.
“I know he’s frustrated and I am too that we haven’t taken steps to adequately deal with border security. But we’ve got an orderly appropriations process going through here and I’m hopeful we can get most if not all the appropriations done,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). “If there is some small failure to meet deadlines, it will be for a small piece of the appropriations process.”
The Senate hopes to have as many as 9 of the 12 annual spending bills done by the end of August; the House has gone home for a 5-week recess but has passed six of its own. The two chambers must still reconcile those bills before Trump signs them into law, and then would pass stopgap spending bills to cover the rest of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, according to Republican senators.
Under that line of thinking, voters would head to the ballot boxes after the Senate confirms Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — not after a government shutdown.
Asked whether he took Trump's shutdown threats seriously, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) replied: “No.”
“He knows that would be a disaster. I think he wants to throw everything out there so everyone knows it’s an important thing,” Hatch said. “He knows the game.”
Still, there is some risk to Republicans’ strategy of avoiding a showy fight in Congress for Trump's wall right before the elections.
Trump has sounded increasingly dug in on using a shutdown threat to amplify his demands to begin building a physical wall along the border with Mexico, bringing it up unprompted on Monday during his opening remarks at a news conference alongside the Italian prime minister and demanding cuts to legal immigration that Congress has already rejected this year.
“The whole thing is ridiculous. And we have to change our laws. We do that through Congress. So I would certainly be willing to close it down, to get it done,” Trump said on Monday. “I would be certainly willing to consider a shutdown if we don't get proper border security.“
Trump notably said he did not have a “red line” where he would insist on getting the full $25 billion for the wall upfront. He told Ryan and McConnell last week that he wants a $5 billion down payment on the wall, the same amount of the House’s Homeland Security funding bill. The Senate’s bipartisan bill contains $1.6 billion, and Democrats say they won’t provide more than that.
“There’s an easy way out of this,” said a facetious Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “He said Mexico is going to pay for it. We’re going to open up the account, Mexico pays the money in, we take it out for the wall.”
The fight on immigration and border wall funding has bedeviled Congress since Trump became president. This year, Trump’s plan to build the wall, cut legal immigration and offer citizenship to 1.8 million young immigrants failed on the Senate floor, as did a bipartisan plan that focused more narrowly on protecting young immigrants and boosting border security.
Now the hope among Republicans is for the stalemate to hold past the election, and put off the border wall fight until the end of the year. But there’s no guarantee the president is any more likely to get his funding in December, particularly if Democrats take back the House or the Senate. Unless Trump is willing to cut a deal.
“The Dems are going to resist any attempt to significantly increase above what they’ve already agreed to in terms of wall funding. The president wants it all now,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D). “For Democrats to go along with that, you’d have to have some concessions on other immigration issues.”
3D-printed guns
Trump says public availability of 3D-printed guns 'doesn't seem to make much sense'
By LOUIS NELSON
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is “looking into” the availability of plans for the 3D printing of guns, writing on Twitter that he had already been in touch with the NRA on the issue.
“I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense!” the president wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning.
After a years-long legal battle, Defense Distributed, a Texas-based group, has announced plans to release instructions on Wednesday for guns that can be created by a 3-D printer, including a handgun and parts for a semi-automatic assault rifle. Although plans were not supposed to be available until Wednesday, instructions have already begun to appear online for download, CNN reported Tuesday.
3D-printed weapons could be printed without serial numbers, spurring concern about the impact such untraceable weapons could have. Attorneys general from eight states, plus the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, according to NPR, seeking a nationwide temporary restraining order that would block Defense Distributed from publishing its 3D printing instructions for guns.
"I have a question for the Trump Administration: Why are you allowing dangerous criminals easy access to weapons?" Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson asked in a statement released on Monday. "These downloadable guns are unregistered and very difficult to detect, even with metal detectors, and will be available to anyone regardless of age, mental health or criminal history.”
Trump has long touted his credentials as a strong supporter of gun rights, addressing the NRA’s national convention and regularly reminding conservative audiences that he received the earliest ever endorsement from the gun rights advocacy group.
But the president has also, at times, shown a willingness to break with the NRA, including in the wake of a mass shooting at a Florida high school last spring, after which Trump briefly expressed support for certain gun control measures and accused lawmakers of being “afraid of the NRA.” Trump later backed away from the gun control proposals, which included tougher age restrictions for the purchase of certain guns, and has advocated for training and arming teachers in order to keep schools safe.
The NRA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
By LOUIS NELSON
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is “looking into” the availability of plans for the 3D printing of guns, writing on Twitter that he had already been in touch with the NRA on the issue.
“I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense!” the president wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning.
After a years-long legal battle, Defense Distributed, a Texas-based group, has announced plans to release instructions on Wednesday for guns that can be created by a 3-D printer, including a handgun and parts for a semi-automatic assault rifle. Although plans were not supposed to be available until Wednesday, instructions have already begun to appear online for download, CNN reported Tuesday.
3D-printed weapons could be printed without serial numbers, spurring concern about the impact such untraceable weapons could have. Attorneys general from eight states, plus the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, according to NPR, seeking a nationwide temporary restraining order that would block Defense Distributed from publishing its 3D printing instructions for guns.
"I have a question for the Trump Administration: Why are you allowing dangerous criminals easy access to weapons?" Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson asked in a statement released on Monday. "These downloadable guns are unregistered and very difficult to detect, even with metal detectors, and will be available to anyone regardless of age, mental health or criminal history.”
Trump has long touted his credentials as a strong supporter of gun rights, addressing the NRA’s national convention and regularly reminding conservative audiences that he received the earliest ever endorsement from the gun rights advocacy group.
But the president has also, at times, shown a willingness to break with the NRA, including in the wake of a mass shooting at a Florida high school last spring, after which Trump briefly expressed support for certain gun control measures and accused lawmakers of being “afraid of the NRA.” Trump later backed away from the gun control proposals, which included tougher age restrictions for the purchase of certain guns, and has advocated for training and arming teachers in order to keep schools safe.
The NRA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Just say he's fucking crazy...
‘Never happened’: Giuliani walks back confusing claim of secret Trump Tower meeting
By REBECCA MORIN
In a day of confusing statements, President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani first startled observers with a public claim of a previously unknown meeting involving top Trump associates and Kremlin-linked Russians — then recanted the claim and said the meeting "never happened."
During a nearly 45-minute interview on CNN at 8 a.m., Giuliani said Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, who appears to have turned on his former boss, claims that top Trump officials met at Trump Tower to plan for a scheduled June 9, 2016 meeting days later with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer promising dirt on Trump's campaign rival, Hillary Clinton.
In a subsequent interview four hours later — and after some Democrats said the earlier meeting amounted to new evidence of calculated collusion with Russia — Giuliani denied it ever took place, saying he was merely repeating a claim that multiple reporters had been asking him about.
It was the latest of several instances in which Giuliani — a former New York City mayor, federal prosecutor and presidential candidate — seemed to confuse or distort key facts about the Russia investigation and related legal headaches for his presidential client.
Giuliani told CNN the earlier meeting happened two days before the well-publicized June 9 Trump Tower meeting, and allegedly involved Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and another individual Giuliani could not remember. Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort all attended the undisputed June 9 meeting, which — after shifting accounts from the White House about its purpose — they have said came to nothing.
Giuliani mentioned the meeting twice during his CNN interview, first saying that Cohen leaked that this meeting took place. He then mentioned that it was Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, who had revealed the gathering had occurred.
The confused statements came days after a leaked report that Cohen is prepared to tell federal investigators that Trump, contrary to his public claims, had knowledge of and even approved the June 9 meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. That meeting was arranged between Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., and Emin Agalarov, the pop singer and son of a Russian billionaire who had joined the elder Trump in co-hosting the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
Asked by CNN how he could be sure that Trump didn't have advance knowledge about the June 9 meeting, Giuliani said, "Nobody can be sure of anything."
He then described an additional meeting to prove that Cohen and Davis could not be trusted.
"Lanny Davis added there was a meeting two days before, the meeting took place with Donald Jr., Jared, Manafort and two others, Gates and one other person."
Giuliani was then asked whether the meeting was real.
"That's a real meeting on another provable subject in which he would not (inaudible)," he replied.
Around noon, Giuliani called into Fox News' "Outnumbered" to clarify his statement, saying only that reporters had asked him about the separate meeting.
"All I have are two reporters telling me Cohen told him there was a meeting three days before with a group of people that I said, and that they discussed the meeting and that the president was not there," Giuliani said.
He added that Cohen didn't say whether the president knew about it.
"I am telling you the meeting didn't take place, never happened," Giuliani said.
More than once since he became Trump's counsel, Giuliani has raised more questions while trying to defend Trump and his personal dealings.
Giuliani said in May said that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for a sum of money he allegedly paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. But Giuliani quickly walked back that statement as well.
By REBECCA MORIN
In a day of confusing statements, President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani first startled observers with a public claim of a previously unknown meeting involving top Trump associates and Kremlin-linked Russians — then recanted the claim and said the meeting "never happened."
During a nearly 45-minute interview on CNN at 8 a.m., Giuliani said Trump's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, who appears to have turned on his former boss, claims that top Trump officials met at Trump Tower to plan for a scheduled June 9, 2016 meeting days later with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer promising dirt on Trump's campaign rival, Hillary Clinton.
In a subsequent interview four hours later — and after some Democrats said the earlier meeting amounted to new evidence of calculated collusion with Russia — Giuliani denied it ever took place, saying he was merely repeating a claim that multiple reporters had been asking him about.
It was the latest of several instances in which Giuliani — a former New York City mayor, federal prosecutor and presidential candidate — seemed to confuse or distort key facts about the Russia investigation and related legal headaches for his presidential client.
Giuliani told CNN the earlier meeting happened two days before the well-publicized June 9 Trump Tower meeting, and allegedly involved Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and another individual Giuliani could not remember. Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort all attended the undisputed June 9 meeting, which — after shifting accounts from the White House about its purpose — they have said came to nothing.
Giuliani mentioned the meeting twice during his CNN interview, first saying that Cohen leaked that this meeting took place. He then mentioned that it was Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, who had revealed the gathering had occurred.
The confused statements came days after a leaked report that Cohen is prepared to tell federal investigators that Trump, contrary to his public claims, had knowledge of and even approved the June 9 meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. That meeting was arranged between Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., and Emin Agalarov, the pop singer and son of a Russian billionaire who had joined the elder Trump in co-hosting the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
Asked by CNN how he could be sure that Trump didn't have advance knowledge about the June 9 meeting, Giuliani said, "Nobody can be sure of anything."
He then described an additional meeting to prove that Cohen and Davis could not be trusted.
"Lanny Davis added there was a meeting two days before, the meeting took place with Donald Jr., Jared, Manafort and two others, Gates and one other person."
Giuliani was then asked whether the meeting was real.
"That's a real meeting on another provable subject in which he would not (inaudible)," he replied.
Around noon, Giuliani called into Fox News' "Outnumbered" to clarify his statement, saying only that reporters had asked him about the separate meeting.
"All I have are two reporters telling me Cohen told him there was a meeting three days before with a group of people that I said, and that they discussed the meeting and that the president was not there," Giuliani said.
He added that Cohen didn't say whether the president knew about it.
"I am telling you the meeting didn't take place, never happened," Giuliani said.
More than once since he became Trump's counsel, Giuliani has raised more questions while trying to defend Trump and his personal dealings.
Giuliani said in May said that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for a sum of money he allegedly paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. But Giuliani quickly walked back that statement as well.
Needs to be Keel-hauled....
Scott Walker broke the unions. Now he says he’s the ‘education governor’
The Wisconsin governor’s reelection could hang on how well his education message plays with moderate voters.
By CAITLIN EMMA and DANIEL STRAUSS
Republican Gov. Scott Walker became a conservative icon by breaking the teachers union in Wisconsin. Seven years later, he’s facing the political fight of his life against the state schools superintendent, and trying to reinvent himself.
His likely Democratic opponent is the head of the Wisconsin school system, Tony Evers, meaning the election likely will be won or lost on how moderate voters view Walker’s turnaround on education.
Rather than run from the controversy that nearly shut down Wisconsin state government in 2011, Walker is embracing it. He insists that battling the teachers unions, giving school districts more control over their staff and balancing the state budget have made schools better.
"I am proud to be the pro-education governor because our reforms are working," Walker said in a statement to POLITICO.
It’s a highly risky strategy. The crackdown on teachers made Walker a national hero among Republicans who have long disdained the political power of teachers unions. Walker had a brief presidential run in 2016, but now he’s trailing Evers in head-to-head polls back in Wisconsin. The Democratic primary field remains divided, with eight candidates competing for the nomination, but most public polling has shown Evers in the lead.
Already the two-term governor's reelection campaign is rolling out a steady stream of education-pegged ads aimed at moderate voters. A new poll from NBC News and Marist shows Walker trailing Evers in a head-to-head matchup.
Evers, for his part, is more than happy to make the race about education policy.
One of the only statewide officials elected with Democratic support, Evers was first elected in 2009 and cruised to a third term last year. Before entering politics he was a school district superintendent, a high school principal and a teacher.
Walker is being corralled into focusing on education and defending his record, Evers told POLITICO.
"It borders on a joke," he said. "The proof is in the pudding ... I don't think many people believe him."
But Walker spokesman Brian Reisinger said the governor isn't playing defense. Walker's campaign ads tout the benefits of Act 10 — explosive legislation that he championed in 2011 that gutted the collective bargaining rights of labor unions and devastated the resources and membership rolls of the state teachers union.
Walker argues that the law reformed collective bargaining and gave school districts more control over their funding and personnel.
"Thanks to our reforms, local school leaders can staff based on merit and pay based on performance," Walker said in a statement. "That means they can put the best and the brightest in the classroom and keep them there."
His ads also tout his budget proposal, which was adopted by the state legislature last year and included a $649 million boost in state education funding. The increase was about $227 million more than what Evers had asked for — and Evers praised Walker’s budget at the time as a “pro-kid budget.” Walker is also touting increases in funding for rural schools.
Evers has gone after Walker for cutting education funding or keeping it flat during the first years of his administration — saying the cuts prompted Wisconsinites to raise property taxes — in addition to attacking teachers by essentially dismantling their collective bargaining rights.
Evers took credit for “90 percent” of Walker’s recent budget proposal and said if elected, he would seek to increase funding for public education. Evers also said he would pursue a full repeal of Act 10, or at least seek to roll back what he can with a Republican-controlled state legislature. On Monday, Evers announced that he’s seeking $600 million more in special education funding in the next biennial budget, up from $369 million.
Nathan Henry, a Democratic strategist who served as Evers’ campaign manager earlier in the 2018 cycle, said an emphasis on education puts Walker at a disadvantage.
“I'm not really sure why Scott Walker would want to talk about his education record. It's a pretty bad record,” Henry said. “If you look at the overall breadth that he's made as governor — the cuts that they've made to education far exceed any money that they've actually put into education.”
“So I guess I can't exactly explain why Walker would want to make it a focus of his campaign except for maybe to inoculate himself from future attacks,” he said. “I think it's easy to see why Tony would want to see the campaign play out on education. The guy spent his entire life in education.”
Walker has also previously sought deep cuts to higher education and weakened tenure protections for professors at public colleges and universities.
There’s an extra incentive for Walker to focus on his education record: He can talk about what he’s done while the Democratic field, once a chaotic dozen-plus candidates, is still slowly shrinking down to a more manageable group.
Brandon Scholz, a Republican strategist who served as chief of staff to then-Rep. Scott Klug, said the governor will win any fight on education against Evers because a chief executive‘s responsibilities are bigger.
Scholz predicted Evers will try to discredit Walker by saying he did little and cut education spending. “Gov. Walker will come back and say 'Look at this last budget we've done. We've done this and done this and done this,'” Scholz said.
“At some point it's a he-said he-said and Evers is neutralized,” he said. “I don't see Evers having a one-up on the governor on education just because he's had this job. The governor's pulpit and budget is a lot bigger than Tony Evers' department of public instruction.”
State Republicans have attacked Evers in ads for failing to revoke the license of middle school teacher Andrew Harris in 2014 because Harris watched porn on his work computer. But state law at the time set a high bar, stating that students must be in danger in order for a teacher to lose their license.
Walker’s relationship with the soft-spoken Evers has also devolved as Evers has eyed a run for governor. The two are locked in a legal battle over how much authority Evers has to write his own education policies.
Evers was also in charge last year of pulling together a plan for holding Wisconsin schools accountable for student learning and progress under the Every Student Succeeds Act, a federal education law that replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015.
Walker refused to sign off on that plan before it was sent to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for approval, telling Evers in a stinging letter that “it does little to challenge the status quo for the benefit of Wisconsin’s students.”
Evers contended that the race hasn’t affected his working relationship with the governor.
“We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he said.
The Wisconsin governor’s reelection could hang on how well his education message plays with moderate voters.
By CAITLIN EMMA and DANIEL STRAUSS
Republican Gov. Scott Walker became a conservative icon by breaking the teachers union in Wisconsin. Seven years later, he’s facing the political fight of his life against the state schools superintendent, and trying to reinvent himself.
His likely Democratic opponent is the head of the Wisconsin school system, Tony Evers, meaning the election likely will be won or lost on how moderate voters view Walker’s turnaround on education.
Rather than run from the controversy that nearly shut down Wisconsin state government in 2011, Walker is embracing it. He insists that battling the teachers unions, giving school districts more control over their staff and balancing the state budget have made schools better.
"I am proud to be the pro-education governor because our reforms are working," Walker said in a statement to POLITICO.
It’s a highly risky strategy. The crackdown on teachers made Walker a national hero among Republicans who have long disdained the political power of teachers unions. Walker had a brief presidential run in 2016, but now he’s trailing Evers in head-to-head polls back in Wisconsin. The Democratic primary field remains divided, with eight candidates competing for the nomination, but most public polling has shown Evers in the lead.
Already the two-term governor's reelection campaign is rolling out a steady stream of education-pegged ads aimed at moderate voters. A new poll from NBC News and Marist shows Walker trailing Evers in a head-to-head matchup.
Evers, for his part, is more than happy to make the race about education policy.
One of the only statewide officials elected with Democratic support, Evers was first elected in 2009 and cruised to a third term last year. Before entering politics he was a school district superintendent, a high school principal and a teacher.
Walker is being corralled into focusing on education and defending his record, Evers told POLITICO.
"It borders on a joke," he said. "The proof is in the pudding ... I don't think many people believe him."
But Walker spokesman Brian Reisinger said the governor isn't playing defense. Walker's campaign ads tout the benefits of Act 10 — explosive legislation that he championed in 2011 that gutted the collective bargaining rights of labor unions and devastated the resources and membership rolls of the state teachers union.
Walker argues that the law reformed collective bargaining and gave school districts more control over their funding and personnel.
"Thanks to our reforms, local school leaders can staff based on merit and pay based on performance," Walker said in a statement. "That means they can put the best and the brightest in the classroom and keep them there."
His ads also tout his budget proposal, which was adopted by the state legislature last year and included a $649 million boost in state education funding. The increase was about $227 million more than what Evers had asked for — and Evers praised Walker’s budget at the time as a “pro-kid budget.” Walker is also touting increases in funding for rural schools.
Evers has gone after Walker for cutting education funding or keeping it flat during the first years of his administration — saying the cuts prompted Wisconsinites to raise property taxes — in addition to attacking teachers by essentially dismantling their collective bargaining rights.
Evers took credit for “90 percent” of Walker’s recent budget proposal and said if elected, he would seek to increase funding for public education. Evers also said he would pursue a full repeal of Act 10, or at least seek to roll back what he can with a Republican-controlled state legislature. On Monday, Evers announced that he’s seeking $600 million more in special education funding in the next biennial budget, up from $369 million.
Nathan Henry, a Democratic strategist who served as Evers’ campaign manager earlier in the 2018 cycle, said an emphasis on education puts Walker at a disadvantage.
“I'm not really sure why Scott Walker would want to talk about his education record. It's a pretty bad record,” Henry said. “If you look at the overall breadth that he's made as governor — the cuts that they've made to education far exceed any money that they've actually put into education.”
“So I guess I can't exactly explain why Walker would want to make it a focus of his campaign except for maybe to inoculate himself from future attacks,” he said. “I think it's easy to see why Tony would want to see the campaign play out on education. The guy spent his entire life in education.”
Walker has also previously sought deep cuts to higher education and weakened tenure protections for professors at public colleges and universities.
There’s an extra incentive for Walker to focus on his education record: He can talk about what he’s done while the Democratic field, once a chaotic dozen-plus candidates, is still slowly shrinking down to a more manageable group.
Brandon Scholz, a Republican strategist who served as chief of staff to then-Rep. Scott Klug, said the governor will win any fight on education against Evers because a chief executive‘s responsibilities are bigger.
Scholz predicted Evers will try to discredit Walker by saying he did little and cut education spending. “Gov. Walker will come back and say 'Look at this last budget we've done. We've done this and done this and done this,'” Scholz said.
“At some point it's a he-said he-said and Evers is neutralized,” he said. “I don't see Evers having a one-up on the governor on education just because he's had this job. The governor's pulpit and budget is a lot bigger than Tony Evers' department of public instruction.”
State Republicans have attacked Evers in ads for failing to revoke the license of middle school teacher Andrew Harris in 2014 because Harris watched porn on his work computer. But state law at the time set a high bar, stating that students must be in danger in order for a teacher to lose their license.
Walker’s relationship with the soft-spoken Evers has also devolved as Evers has eyed a run for governor. The two are locked in a legal battle over how much authority Evers has to write his own education policies.
Evers was also in charge last year of pulling together a plan for holding Wisconsin schools accountable for student learning and progress under the Every Student Succeeds Act, a federal education law that replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015.
Walker refused to sign off on that plan before it was sent to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for approval, telling Evers in a stinging letter that “it does little to challenge the status quo for the benefit of Wisconsin’s students.”
Evers contended that the race hasn’t affected his working relationship with the governor.
“We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he said.
Takes fresh look.....
'It’s a significant shift in our thinking': Business takes fresh look at Democrats
If businesses shift significant support away from Republicans, it could deal a blow to GOP fundraising. But some Democrats are skeptical that the talk will translate into cash for their campaigns.
By LORRAINE WOELLERT and MARIANNE LEVINE
Business groups, at war with President Donald Trump over trade and immigration, say they’re taking steps to rebuild the political center — including taking fresh looks at moderate Democrats.
The American Bankers Association this month began airing ads in support of candidates for the first time, including Democrats Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and Rep. Lou Correa of California. The International Franchise Association has more than doubled its support to Democrats this cycle, with 27 percent of its donations going to centrists in the party. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which leans heavily Republican, endorsed Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey over Republican John McCann, who has the support of former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka.
Even the powerful Koch network appears to be withholding some support for the Republican Party, if not outright supporting Democrats. Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips said at a donor retreat Monday that the political network would not help Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) in his Senate race against Democratic incumbent Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), citing inconsistencies on a range of Koch priorities.
“Republicans aren’t the only people who have great ideas for business,” International Franchise Association President Robert Cresanti said. “We really need more members of Congress that are in the middle and are willing to listen to both sides.”
“It’s a significant shift in our thinking,” Cresanti said. “Before, it was you’re either with us 100 percent of the time or you’re against us.”
Smaller players, too, said they are rethinking their midterm strategies. Aaron Lowe, senior vice president of regulatory and government affairs at the Auto Care Association, said his group will likely focus its spending on members of committees that oversee trade. The Household & Commercial Products Association re-established its PAC this cycle and will back “candidates from both parties that want to legislate in a bipartisan matter,” President Steve Caldeira said.
If businesses shift significant support away from Republicans, it could deal a blow to GOP fundraising and the party's hopes to retain control of the House and Senate in midterm elections in which Democrats are expected to be energized. But some Democrats are skeptical that the talk about boosting moderates will translate into cash for their campaigns.
Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that business still favors Republicans. About 44 percent of contributions from industry political action committees have gone to Democrats so far this year, an increase from about 41 percent in 2016 but down slightly from 2014, according to data provided to POLITICO.
“We’ve heard this story before,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the moderate New Democrat Coalition. “Until these business groups genuinely prove, through behavior as well as words, that they’ve had a conversion and they’re going to actually behave fairly instead of make an empty promise, frankly Democrats have no reason to trust those folks.”
Some of the endorsements so far aren’t game changers; Gottheimer and Correa are incumbents with comfortable leads. But support from traditionally Republican-leaning business groups carries symbolic weight, coming amid growing frustration with the Trump administration and with Republicans who opposed raising the federal debt ceiling or tried to kill the Export-Import Bank.
“As we’ve lost the middle in Congress, we have leaders like Josh Gottheimer who are willing to go and embrace the middle,” Chamber Senior Vice President Rob Engstrom told the crowd at a rally in Paramus, New Jersey, last week. “That’s really the tradition in our country, when you think about the big things that have gotten done, people who have the courage to reach across the aisle.”
The soul-searching dates back to 2010, with the rise of the tea party and a centrist rout. The New Democrat Coalition lost a third of its members that cycle, and half the Blue Dog Coalition, whose members identified themselves as conservative Democrats, was wiped out. Moderates in both parties bemoaned a shift in U.S. politics toward extremes.
That year, Connolly said, he spoke to a gathering of financial services lobbyists.
“You’re all uncorking champagne to celebrate the results of the 2010 midterm, you’re all bankers, and I don’t understand how you can feel comfortable electing a bunch of tea party people who want to shut down government,” Connolly said, recounting his remarks. “You are now responsible for having financed the election of a bunch of Neanderthals when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy.”
Eight years later, business lobbyists are thrilled with the administration’s deregulatory push, judicial appointees and tax cuts. But Trump’s disdain for a fundamental tenet of capitalism — free trade — has overshadowed everything else.
A day after the Chamber's Gottheimer event, the president doubled down on his trade war, promising to send $12 billion in aid to farmers hurt by threatened tariffs. Speaking in Kansas City, Missouri, Trump knocked free-trade lobbyists such as his neighbors at the Chamber, which faces the White House from across Lafayette Square.
“They have some of the greatest lobbying teams,” Trump said derisively of the free-trade groups.
Chamber President Tom Donohue spared no criticism of Trump on the campaign trail in 2016. When the candidate talked about slapping a 45 percent tax on imports, Donohue told Bloomberg that Americans would "probably impeach [him] when they figured out what that really meant."
With Trump in office, Donohue has launched an anti-tariff campaign, bashed the administration’s family-separation border policy, and urged senators to block the president’s first pick for the Ex-Im Bank. When the White House asked business groups to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the Chamber declined to issue an endorsement.
Now comes the latest aggravation: Trump’s threat of another government shutdown this fall, right before the election.
The American Bankers Association has been holding candidate-training schools to support business-friendly politicians and will endorse more Democrats between now and November, said Rob Nichols, the group's president and CEO. He noted that one legislative achievement this year was a revamp of the Dodd-Frank Act, which required the votes of several Democrats to get to the president’s desk.
“Bipartisan pieces of legislation are more durable and more long-lasting than things that are more partisan,” Nichols said. “If a member has taken some tough votes to support economic growth, we want to help them.”
Democrats acknowledge that this cycle’s business overtures might be little more than an admission that industry needs to make nice in case Democrats take control of the House or Senate.
“Enlightened self-interest is a great motivator,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), co-chairman of the Blue Dog PAC. “We’re seeing a big uptick in interest by the business community. Between the Freedom Caucus and the president and the chance we take the majority, all those things add up to the business community looking at Democrats.”
Still, both sides agree there’s a long way to go to before business and Democrats strike an alliance.
“When it comes to running the Congress, setting the committees, setting terms of the debate, we’re the pro-growth guys,” said Chamber senior political strategist Scott Reed, a Republican. “At the end of the day we prefer pro-growth candidates, period. If the Democrats can get themselves in a position where they’re pro-growth, we’ll take a look.”
If businesses shift significant support away from Republicans, it could deal a blow to GOP fundraising. But some Democrats are skeptical that the talk will translate into cash for their campaigns.
By LORRAINE WOELLERT and MARIANNE LEVINE
Business groups, at war with President Donald Trump over trade and immigration, say they’re taking steps to rebuild the political center — including taking fresh looks at moderate Democrats.
The American Bankers Association this month began airing ads in support of candidates for the first time, including Democrats Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and Rep. Lou Correa of California. The International Franchise Association has more than doubled its support to Democrats this cycle, with 27 percent of its donations going to centrists in the party. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which leans heavily Republican, endorsed Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey over Republican John McCann, who has the support of former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka.
Even the powerful Koch network appears to be withholding some support for the Republican Party, if not outright supporting Democrats. Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips said at a donor retreat Monday that the political network would not help Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) in his Senate race against Democratic incumbent Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), citing inconsistencies on a range of Koch priorities.
“Republicans aren’t the only people who have great ideas for business,” International Franchise Association President Robert Cresanti said. “We really need more members of Congress that are in the middle and are willing to listen to both sides.”
“It’s a significant shift in our thinking,” Cresanti said. “Before, it was you’re either with us 100 percent of the time or you’re against us.”
Smaller players, too, said they are rethinking their midterm strategies. Aaron Lowe, senior vice president of regulatory and government affairs at the Auto Care Association, said his group will likely focus its spending on members of committees that oversee trade. The Household & Commercial Products Association re-established its PAC this cycle and will back “candidates from both parties that want to legislate in a bipartisan matter,” President Steve Caldeira said.
If businesses shift significant support away from Republicans, it could deal a blow to GOP fundraising and the party's hopes to retain control of the House and Senate in midterm elections in which Democrats are expected to be energized. But some Democrats are skeptical that the talk about boosting moderates will translate into cash for their campaigns.
Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that business still favors Republicans. About 44 percent of contributions from industry political action committees have gone to Democrats so far this year, an increase from about 41 percent in 2016 but down slightly from 2014, according to data provided to POLITICO.
“We’ve heard this story before,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the moderate New Democrat Coalition. “Until these business groups genuinely prove, through behavior as well as words, that they’ve had a conversion and they’re going to actually behave fairly instead of make an empty promise, frankly Democrats have no reason to trust those folks.”
Some of the endorsements so far aren’t game changers; Gottheimer and Correa are incumbents with comfortable leads. But support from traditionally Republican-leaning business groups carries symbolic weight, coming amid growing frustration with the Trump administration and with Republicans who opposed raising the federal debt ceiling or tried to kill the Export-Import Bank.
“As we’ve lost the middle in Congress, we have leaders like Josh Gottheimer who are willing to go and embrace the middle,” Chamber Senior Vice President Rob Engstrom told the crowd at a rally in Paramus, New Jersey, last week. “That’s really the tradition in our country, when you think about the big things that have gotten done, people who have the courage to reach across the aisle.”
The soul-searching dates back to 2010, with the rise of the tea party and a centrist rout. The New Democrat Coalition lost a third of its members that cycle, and half the Blue Dog Coalition, whose members identified themselves as conservative Democrats, was wiped out. Moderates in both parties bemoaned a shift in U.S. politics toward extremes.
That year, Connolly said, he spoke to a gathering of financial services lobbyists.
“You’re all uncorking champagne to celebrate the results of the 2010 midterm, you’re all bankers, and I don’t understand how you can feel comfortable electing a bunch of tea party people who want to shut down government,” Connolly said, recounting his remarks. “You are now responsible for having financed the election of a bunch of Neanderthals when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy.”
Eight years later, business lobbyists are thrilled with the administration’s deregulatory push, judicial appointees and tax cuts. But Trump’s disdain for a fundamental tenet of capitalism — free trade — has overshadowed everything else.
A day after the Chamber's Gottheimer event, the president doubled down on his trade war, promising to send $12 billion in aid to farmers hurt by threatened tariffs. Speaking in Kansas City, Missouri, Trump knocked free-trade lobbyists such as his neighbors at the Chamber, which faces the White House from across Lafayette Square.
“They have some of the greatest lobbying teams,” Trump said derisively of the free-trade groups.
Chamber President Tom Donohue spared no criticism of Trump on the campaign trail in 2016. When the candidate talked about slapping a 45 percent tax on imports, Donohue told Bloomberg that Americans would "probably impeach [him] when they figured out what that really meant."
With Trump in office, Donohue has launched an anti-tariff campaign, bashed the administration’s family-separation border policy, and urged senators to block the president’s first pick for the Ex-Im Bank. When the White House asked business groups to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the Chamber declined to issue an endorsement.
Now comes the latest aggravation: Trump’s threat of another government shutdown this fall, right before the election.
The American Bankers Association has been holding candidate-training schools to support business-friendly politicians and will endorse more Democrats between now and November, said Rob Nichols, the group's president and CEO. He noted that one legislative achievement this year was a revamp of the Dodd-Frank Act, which required the votes of several Democrats to get to the president’s desk.
“Bipartisan pieces of legislation are more durable and more long-lasting than things that are more partisan,” Nichols said. “If a member has taken some tough votes to support economic growth, we want to help them.”
Democrats acknowledge that this cycle’s business overtures might be little more than an admission that industry needs to make nice in case Democrats take control of the House or Senate.
“Enlightened self-interest is a great motivator,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), co-chairman of the Blue Dog PAC. “We’re seeing a big uptick in interest by the business community. Between the Freedom Caucus and the president and the chance we take the majority, all those things add up to the business community looking at Democrats.”
Still, both sides agree there’s a long way to go to before business and Democrats strike an alliance.
“When it comes to running the Congress, setting the committees, setting terms of the debate, we’re the pro-growth guys,” said Chamber senior political strategist Scott Reed, a Republican. “At the end of the day we prefer pro-growth candidates, period. If the Democrats can get themselves in a position where they’re pro-growth, we’ll take a look.”
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