Turmoil At The ICC As Fears Rise Over Israel And The U.S. Interference

The delay in issuing ICC warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, followed by the replacement of the presiding judge, has raised serious concerns about the court's functioning and possible machinations behind the scenes.

By Craig Mokhiber

November 7, 2024

Source: Mondoweiss
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Karim Khan (centre) announces ICC arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu.

 (Photo: Screengrab / ICC)

On May 20, 2024, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, submitted a request to the ICC for warrants to arrest Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination.

In the same statement, he included an extraordinary warning, saying “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this Court must cease immediately. My Office will not hesitate to act pursuant to article 70 of the Rome Statute if such conduct continues.”

The Prosecutor did not elaborate on the source of the threats against the ICC officials.

The Court, in accordance with its established procedures, then assigned the case to a three-judge, pre-trial chamber, presided over by Judge Iulia Motoc.

Only eight days after the Prosecutor announced the warrant requests and his warning about intimidation of Court officials, the Guardian and +972 Magazine published an exposé revealing a decade of interference, pressure, and threats by notorious Israeli intelligence agencies against personnel of the International Criminal Court in order to derail investigations of Israeli crimes.

But by then the Court had gone silent on the Palestine file- a silence that would last for five months. Court watchers were left to wonder, and worry, about the unprecedented delay in the issuance of the warrants.

And then, as if on cue, sometime around early October, pro-Israel publications began circulating anonymous allegations accusing the ICC Prosecutor of harassing a female staff member.

Just days later, on October 20, 2024, the ICC announced that Motoc, the Presiding Judge of the three-judge pre-trial chamber assigned to decide whether to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister, had suddenly stepped down.

Citing unspecified “health reasons,” the Court provided no further information. Motoc was replaced by Slovenian Judge Beti Hohler, with French Judge Nicolas Guillou now Presiding over the chamber.

In ordinary times, these developments might hardly be noticed. But these are not ordinary times, and this is no ordinary case.

Israel, a state that had enjoyed 75 years of Western-backed impunity, was finally, it seemed, being called to account for its crimes. Already on trial for genocide in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the subject of a series of provisional orders there, Israeli leaders received notice in May from across town in The Hague that the net was continuing to close.

The request submitted in May by the prosecutor to the ICC for warrants to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant brought a predictable response from Israel, which launched angry recriminations, invective, and the usual tactical smears against the Court.

It was instantly joined by its Western government allies in attacking the Prosecutor’s request, with U.S. officials going so far as to threaten the Court itself.

Now, the delay in issuing the warrants, followed by the announcement of the replacement of the presiding judge, has raised serious concerns about the functioning of the Court, and about possible machinations behind the scenes.
Interference and delays

The situation of this five-month delay coming within almost a full decade of stalling since the first preliminary investigation of Israel’s crimes in Palestine was opened has only exacerbated those fears.

By comparison, a request for a warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin was fulfilled by the ICC in three weeks. And in its other cases, the Court has on average taken about eight weeks to issue warrants.

The coming of these latest developments on the heels of revelations of years of threats and harassment of judges and court officials by Israeli intelligence operatives and Western government officials has put the followers of the Court and opponents of Israeli impunity on heightened alert.

In one case, the head of the Mossad himself threatened the previous ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and her family. (To her credit, Bensouda resisted the attacks and, acting with exemplary courage and principle, proceeded to open an investigation on Israeli crimes).

The change in Judges in this case is expected to further prolong the decision on the warrants in an already inordinately delayed process. And the unprecedented (and now compounded) delays have raised questions about whether there are “behind the scenes” factors at play.

But Israel is not the only state interfering with the work of the ICC. Acting on Israel’s behalf, U.S. legislators, the State Department, and U.S. National Security Council officials have joined forces to pressure, threaten and try to derail the case against Israeli officials, even threatening sanctions against the Court.
Substantive risks

While it is impossible to know how these judges will ultimately rule, and there is nothing in the public record that would call into question their judicial integrity, changes in the chamber’s composition could also have important substantive implications.

For example, new Judge Hohler published an article in 2015 (long before joining the ICC) in which she suggested that complementarity may bar scrutiny of Israel because “Israel in general has a well-functioning legal system headed by a respected Supreme Court.”

Leaving aside the broad international criticism of the Israeli Supreme Court (already evident in 2015) for its long record of approving apartheid policies and state crimes against Palestinians, and for its long record of tolerance of Israeli war crimes, it has since become clear that Israel has no intention of investigating or prosecuting Netanyahu or Gallant for the crimes alleged in the ICC Prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants.

We must hope that Judge Hohler will by now realize that any complementarity objections (i.e., that Israel will investigate itself) are entirely without merit, as the ICJ has already found. But her earlier deeply distorted assessment of the Israeli justice system is nevertheless cause for concern.

And, in the same article, Judge Hohler also implied that external political considerations may influence Court decisions because “the ICC is heavily dependent on the support of its states parties, including for any type of enforcement as well as for actually ensuring the attendance of suspected perpetrators at The Hague.”

While that may be true, and many parties to the (Rome) statute of the ICC are Western allies of Israel, concerns about implementation should play no role in decisions of the Judges on the merits.

For his part, new Presiding Judge Guillou of France came to the Court with a strong “counterterrorism” profile. He served previously as the Chef de Cabinet for the President of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which convicted a member of Hezbollah in the 2005 assassination of Rafik Harri, and as a former Liaison to the U.S. Justice Department where he worked with the U.S. on (inter alia) counterterrorism prosecutions in the height of the highly abusive U.S. “war on terrorism.”

Judge Guillou has also (before joining the Court) argued publicly for the prosecution of non-state “terrorism” in international tribunals (which has only ever happened in the Lebanon Tribunal which he served), despite the lack of a definition of terrorism in international law and over the objections of human rights defenders and others concerned about the corrosive legal effect of “War on Terror” framings in criminal matters and in situations of armed conflict.

None of this proves any irregularities in the change of composition of the chamber, nor suggests any evidence of anything unethical on the part of the judges. But neither is the law a machine in which decisions are reached based on the neutral application of law to the facts. The opinions, experiences, predispositions, and biases of judges matter. Anyone seeking to influence the court will know this.

And this fact does not even factor in the corrupting influence of the Israeli threats and the U.S. pressure campaigns against ICC personnel.

Human rights defenders remember well how a similar pressure campaign launched by Israel against Judge Richard Goldstone, who headed the UN Fact Finding Mission on Gaza in 2009, compelled Goldstone to essentially recant the findings of the Mission, effectively destroying his reputation in international legal and human rights circles after a decades-long and storied career in the law.
Accusing the Prosecutor

Adding to worries about attacks on the Court’s independence, in October a small, anonymous X account tweeted unsubstantiated third-party allegations that ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan had harassed a female staff member.

Somehow, the Daily Mail, a right-wing, pro-Israel English tabloid (that had become notorious for publishing Israeli disinformation, and that has been banned by English Wikipedia for its unreliability and fabrications) found this small X account and reprinted the allegations. From there, the story was repeated by pro-Israel news sites across the West.

While it is impossible to know if there is any truth to the allegations, Khan has denied them and said they are part of the campaign of threats and harassment against he and the Court for their work.

For her part, the alleged victim filed no complaint, and neither she nor the Court’s Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM) saw fit to proceed with any investigations or charges.

What is clear, however, is that this anonymous accusation quickly became fodder for a campaign of delegitimization against the Prosecutor and, by extension, the ICC.

Pro-Israel media and proxy groups, seeing the propaganda value of linking the allegations to the case against Netanyahu and Gallant, reported them with headlines like “War Crimes Prosecutor Who Charged Netanyahu Accused of Sexual Misconduct”, in a clear attempt to discredit the charges against the Israeli defendants.
Hustling the Hague

What we do know is that (1) the Court, either out of fear or favor, has long been reticent to move forward on cases against Israelis, (2) Israeli and Western intelligence agencies and government actors have been working to pressure ICC judges and court officials, and (3) the delays on the Palestine file are already unprecedented.

With this knowledge, we must at least ask three questions:

First, whether Judge Motoc’s “health grounds” were contributed to or were cover for something more sinister.

Secondly, whether the subsequent replacement appointments were at all influenced by the substantive positions of the judges, presumed or real.

And third, whether the changes were designed to justify further delays in the proceedings, thereby benefitting Israeli defendants and providing more time for backroom manipulation.

Barring further leaks or revelations from the ICC, we may not know the answer to these questions until the gavel has banged, if at all.

But knowing the fact that the judicial delays continue to grow even as extermination in Palestine continues unabated, coupled with the knowledge that nefarious actors have been targeting the Court to obstruct justice, public vigilance is imperative.

Both the ICC and those who would seek to corrupt it should be on notice that the world is watching.
Reputational risk

Indeed, the reputations of the ICC, its judges, and its current prosecutor are already badly tattered, owing not only to a decade of delays on the Palestine file but also to a dramatic imbalance in action globally.

The Court has focused almost entirely on the global South, and on presumed adversaries of the West. To date, perpetrators from Israel and all other Western countries have enjoyed complete impunity under the Rome Statute of the ICC.

For States in the Global South, and justice advocates around the World, the ICC is increasingly suspect. A failure to deliver justice in the current case, and any perception of bias on behalf of Israel, any concession to U.S. pressure, or to the Court’s Western sponsors, will almost certainly represent the beginning of the end of the ICC.
Prosecuting offenses against the administration of justice

But Israel and the U.S. should take particular note. The risk they face goes beyond mere reputational risk. The kind of interference in which they have been involved is not only a moral outrage but also a breach of international law.

And some of the acts revealed could be subject to criminal prosecution by the Court itself.

Article 70 of the Rome Statute of the ICC codifies crimes against the administration of justice, and, importantly, grants the Court jurisdiction to prosecute these crimes.

These include “impeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the Court for the purpose of forcing or persuading the official not to perform, or to perform improperly, his or her duties”, and “retaliating against an official of the Court on account of duties performed by that or another official” (among other offenses).

Those convicted of these offenses can be imprisoned by the ICC for up to five years.

Additionally, every State Party to the Rome Statute would be legally obliged to prosecute any such offenses if they are committed by its nationals or on its territory. While the US and Israel are not parties to the ICC, most of its closest Western allies are and would be compelled to cooperate.

And the Netherlands, in which the ICC is situated, is obliged under a host country agreement with the Court to ensure the safety and security of Court personnel and to protect the ICC from interference.

Indeed, Dutch prosecutors are now considering legal action against senior Israeli intelligence officials for their pressure and threats against ICC officials in the Palestine cases.
Last chance for justice

The risks to the ICC are real.

Both Israel and the U.S. have demonstrated that they have no respect for the rule of law, and no qualms about threatening or otherwise corrupting the Court.

And the ICC itself has a long way to go to prove to the world that it is committed to its mandated role of universal justice rather than serving as a mere selective arm of Western power.

But the strength of the case against Netanyahu, Gallant, and other Israeli leaders, in the world’s first live-streamed genocide, and under the glare of unprecedented public attention, gives reason for hope.

Today, Israel is on trial, its leaders are on trial, and the system of international justice itself is on trial.

Nefarious actors are working both publicly and in the shadows to obstruct the course of justice.

If justice is to prevail, we must all remain vigilant.


Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. He left the UN in October of 2023, penning a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law.

Israel's targeting of UNIFIL, Lebanese forces ‘war crimes’: Lebanon

At least 3 civilians killed, 5 UNIFIL peacekeepers and 3 Lebanese soldiers injured in Israeli drone attack in Sidon in southern Lebanon

Wassim Seifeddine |08.11.2024 - TRT/AA



BEIRUT

Lebanon condemned an Israeli drone strike Thursday in the southern city of Sidon that killed three civilians and injured several Lebanese soldiers and UN peacekeepers, labeling it a "war crime."

Five peacekeepers were injured in the drone strike near a military checkpoint in Sidon in southern Lebanon, the UN mission said.

In a statement, the mission said the injuries occurred as a convoy from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) bringing newly arrived peacekeepers to the southern part of the country was passing Sidon when a drone strike hit nearby.

The Lebanese army confirmed that the attack was carried out by an Israeli drone targeting a vehicle which killed three people inside and injured three of its soldiers stationed at a military checkpoint nearby.

In response, Lebanon's Foreign Ministry said it strongly condemns the Israeli assault and called on the international community to denounce such attacks and hold Israel accountable.

The ministry described the attack as "an escalation in Israel's targeting of UNIFIL forces, Lebanese soldiers and civilians constituting war crimes and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law."

It reiterated Lebanon's commitment to the essential role of UNIFIL in coordination with the Lebanese Army in maintaining security and stability along Lebanon's internationally recognized borders, especially amid continued Israeli escalations threatening regional peace.

The ministry also reaffirmed Lebanon's commitment to UN Resolution 1701, stressing the need for its full and balanced implementation to protect UNIFIL forces, Lebanese soldiers and civilians and to achieve sustainable security in the area.

A massive Israeli air campaign in Lebanon has been ongoing since late September against what it claims are Hezbollah targets, an escalation in year-long cross-border warfare since the start of the Gaza war.

More than 3,100 people have been killed and over 13,800 injured in Israeli attacks since October 2023, according to Lebanese health authorities.

Israel launched a ground assault into southern Lebanon on Oct. 1.

*Writing by Rania Abu Shamala

 

Israeli Forces Declare Plan for Ethnic Cleansing of Northernmost Part of Gaza

By Sharon Zhang

November 7, 2024

Source: Truthout

Israeli forces reportedly announced a plan this week for the total ethnic cleansing of a section of northern Gaza they have designated as a target, declaring, without evidence, that any Palestinians left there are not civilians.

According to Israeli media sources, the Israeli military announced Tuesday that they have completed their “division of the northern Gaza Strip into two parts,” and that they are prepared to clear the northernmost part of all Palestinians.

“This time there is no intention to allow the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes and that humanitarian aid will regularly enter the southern Gaza Strip — since there are no more civilians left north of Gaza City,” the Israeli military said, according to Israel’s broadcasting corporation’s Amichai Stein.

The announcement appears to be the next step of the “Generals’ Plan,” an Israeli roadmap to empty north Gaza of all Palestinians through mass killing, starvation and forced displacement in order to potentially annex the besieged territory.

As many advocates for Palestinian rights have pointed out, blocking residents from returning to their homes is ethnic cleansing and a violation of international law regarding forcible mass transfers. Analysts have said that infrastructure created by Israeli forces amid the genocide has also projected the intention to carry out this plan.

The announcement serves as a threat toward families who are still in north Gaza, many of whom have been effectively trapped by Israel’s ceaseless bombardments and attacks in the region. The UN has estimated that roughly 100,000 people remain in north Gaza. In declaring, with absolutely zero evidence, that there are no civilians left, the army is effectively saying that all Palestinians are a legitimate target.

Israel has already intensified its horrific attacks on north Gaza in the past month, killing at least 1,300 people in the small region over the course of the last few weeks. It has repeatedly sieged Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last partially operational hospital in the region, imprisoning some of the only medical workers left to treat those injured in attacks and killing patients, including newborn babies, in bombings.

Many attacks are going unreported because the Israeli military has also relentlessly targeted journalists in the region, killing anyone broadcasting Israel’s atrocities to the world.

Meanwhile, the UN reports that Israeli forces have blocked all food and nearly all other aid from entering north Gaza amid the raid, creating a famine that threatens to kill every Palestinian not directly targeted by Israeli soldiers.

The military’s announcement came on election day in the U.S., the primary foreign sponsor of the genocide.

“While people are watching the U.S. elections, we in North Gaza can hear heavy shelling and U.S.-sponsored bombs being dropped on us,” wrote Al Jazeera’s Hossam Shabat, one of the only journalists left in north Gaza. “Remember, whoever wins, they are all war criminals.”

It’s Not Just About the President
It’s About the Presidency

By Karen J. Greenberg

November 7, 2024

Source: TomDispatch


Ted - Presidential seal. Flikr.



As the dust settles over election day, it’s worth reflecting that it’s not only the election results that have been at stake, but the future of the presidency and its powers. Over the course of the first quarter of this century, the American presidency has accumulated ever more power, rendering the office increasingly less constrained by either Congress or the courts. With Donald Trump’s reelection, the slide toward a dangerously empowered president has reached a moment of reckoning, particularly when it comes to foreign affairs and warfare.

Presidential Powers

Throughout American history, presidents have repeatedly sought to increase their powers, nowhere more so than in the context of war. As historian James Patterson has pointed out, “War and the threat of war were major sources of presidential power from the beginning.” Whether it was George Washington’s insistence that he was the one to formulate foreign policy when it came to diplomacy, treaties, and more; Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of complete control over whether or not to attack the Barbary Pirates; James Polk’s decision to take actions which risked war with Mexico; or Abraham Lincoln’s “sweeping assertions of authority” in the Civil War era, executive claims to authority when it comes to matters of foreign relations and warfare have been a persistent feature of American history.

The twentieth century saw a continued rise in the powers of the presidency. As historian Jeremi Suri noted in his book The Impossible Presidency, the four terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt were a transformative moment, essentially multiplying the responsibilities of the president with the ultimate goal of “mak[ing] the national executive the dominant actor in all parts of American life.” The presidents who followed Roosevelt continued to display such enhanced powers, especially when it came to foreign affairs.

As legal scholar Matt Waxman has reminded us, FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, went to war in Korea without congressional authorization. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did consult with Congress over the need to protect U.S.-allied Pacific coastal islands from possible Chinese aggression and, in his farewell address, warned against “the military-industrial complex,” still believed “that the president had broad powers to engage in covert warfare without specific congressional approval.” In fact, his successor, John F. Kennedy, exercised those powers in a major way in the Bay of Pigs incident. Richard Nixon unilaterally and secretly launched the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and Ronald Reagan created a secret Central American foreign policy, while arranging the unauthorized transfer of funds and weaponry to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras, from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran, despite the fact that such funding was prohibited by an act of Congress, the Boland Amendment.

The Twenty-First Century

Even within the context of repeated presidential acts taken without congressional assent (or often even knowledge) and in defiance of the constitutional checks on the powers of the presidency, the twenty-first century witnessed a major uptick in claims of executive power. In the name of war, this century has seen an astonishing erosion of constraints on that very power, as Yale law professor Harold Hongju Koh details in his illuminating new book, The National Security Constitution in the Twenty-First Century.

At the dawn of this century, the attacks of September 11, 2001, led to an instant escalation of presidential power and executive unilateralism. In the name of national security, President George W. Bush issued an order that authorized the indefinite detention of prisoners in what quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror. He also set up an offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and authorized military commissions instead of federal court trials for terrorism suspects captured abroad.

Meanwhile, Congress and the courts consistently deferred to the will of the president when it came to actions taken in the name of that war on terror. One week after the attacks of 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which undermined its own power in Article I of the Constitution to declare war and weakened its powers of restraint on presidential actions carefully articulated in the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR), passed to guard against the very kind of secretive engagement in war that Nixon had unilaterally authorized in the Vietnam era.

Now, turning their backs on the power given them by the Constitution and the WPR, Congress, with that AUMF, acceded to the expansion of presidential powers and opened the door to the disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere early in this century. The president, it stated, was “authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.”

In October 2001, Congress also passed the USA Patriot Act. It included an expansion of presidential power at home in the name of protecting the nation in the war on terror, including authorizing greatly expanded surveillance policies that would come to include, among other things, secret surveillance and searches that took place without evidence of wrongdoing, notably in Muslim communities in this country that were considered inherently suspect in the name of the war on terror.

As a result, when, in January 2009, Barack Obama entered the White House, his administration found itself with a strikingly expanded definition of the powers of the presidency on the table.

Obama’s Presidency

A former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama pledged to overturn some of the Bush administration’s most egregious, extralegal breaches, including the very existence of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the use of torture (or what the Bush administration had politely termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”) authorized by executive unilateralism as part of the war on terror. In what became known as “trust me” government, Obama also pledged to reform the excessive surveillance policies implemented in the war on terror. In 2013, David Cole, a civil rights attorney and currently the National Legal Director of the ACLU, credited Obama with making substantial “shifts” toward restraint by formally declaring an end to many of the Bush administration’s “most aggressive assertions of executive power.”

But while Obama did indeed trim some of the most striking excesses of the Bush era, his record of presidential reform fell significantly short. Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, for instance, disputed Cole’s claims, citing the Obama administration’s continued reliance on illegal and extralegal policies that Bush’s aggressive actions had already put in play — among them, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, and the military commissions to try prisoners at Guantánamo. In addition, as Jaffer pointed out, the Obama administration frequently relied on the powers granted the presidency in that 2001 AUMF to authorize targeted lethal drone strikes globally, as in the case of the drone-killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, without further congressional authorization, by expanding the definition of “imminence” in order to appear to be complying with the international rule of law.

When it came to such targeted killings — a military tactic introduced under President Bush but greatly expanded during the Obama years for strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen — the president reserved for himself the right to have the final say in authorizing such strikes. As the New York Times reported at the time, “Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary, and the president’s own deep reserve.”

Although he served as legal adviser to the Department of State in the Obama administration, in his warnings about the perils posed by the slide towards unilateral presidential powers, Harold Hongju Kou concedes that the president could have done more to curtail the Bush era enhancement of the powers of the president. “[T]he cautious Obama administration,” he writes, “succeeded in swinging the national security pendulum only part of the way back” to restraint on executive power via the courts and Congress. While the “cascade of illegality” that defined the Bush era’s war on terror was indeed somewhat addressed by Obama, it remained, Koh reminds us, “undercorrected” — including not seeking “stronger accountability for past acts of CIA torture, and the stubborn continuation of a Guantanamo detention policy.”

While President Obama adhered more closely to restraints on presidential power than his predecessor, his administration did not make the kinds of structural and procedural changes necessary to deter future presidents from following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, as we were soon to learn, since, as Koh points out, enhanced unilateral presidential and executive powers would be “sharply re-intensified” under Donald Trump.

The Trump Years

Indeed, the first Trump presidency vastly accelerated the claims of expanded presidential power. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, lawyers who worked in the Bush and Obama administrations, respectively, served, as they put it, “very different presidents” and hold “different political outlooks.” Yet they agree that the Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level. In their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, they contended that “Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability.”

And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high. “The often-feckless Trump,” they wrote, “also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump — but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect.” And with the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the immunity of Donald Trump for acts taken while in the Oval Office, the shackles that once tied presidential acts in wartime to Congressional authorization are arguably now fully off the table, should a president be determined to act on his or her own say-so. (As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the ruling “will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and for our democracy,” arguing that it will, in essence, “let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends.”)

The Biden Years

When it comes to recognizing limits on presidential powers, President Biden has had a distinctly mixed record. He immediately withdrew Trump’s executive order known as “the Muslim ban,” set out to close Guantánamo (but has not yet succeeded in doing so), rejoined the Paris climate accord, and revived international ties around the world that had been disrupted by Trump. And yet, that quintessential institutionalist, who prided himself on his ability to work with Congress, nonetheless veered in the direction of presidential unilateralism in the conduct of foreign affairs.

As Professor Koh put it: “In foreign affairs, even the longtime senator Joe Biden — who widely proclaims his love of the Senate — now operates almost entirely by executive fiat,” including a reliance on “classified policy memoranda, with minimal congressional oversight.” Overall, in fact, Biden issued more executive orders than any president since Richard Nixon. Though Biden wisely relied upon an interagency group of lawyers to advise him on national security decisions, following their advice, he issued “nonbinding political agreements, memoranda of understanding, joint communiques, and occasionally ‘executive agreements plus,’” just as Obama had done on the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal, relying on “preexisting legislative frameworks” rather than new Congressional authorizations. When it came to the war in Ukraine, Biden leaned heavily on “the coordinated use of sanctions, enhanced almost weekly post-invasion.” Most of those sanctions were set, as Koh also points out, “by executive orders and regulatory decrees,” rather than in consultation with Congress.

Our Future

A second Trump presidency will undoubtedly take unilateral presidential powers to a new level. After all, he already indicated that he might withdraw the U.S. from NATO and end support for Ukraine. Nor is Trump likely to be deterred by Congress. Reporting on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page prescription for a second Trump presidency, written primarily by former office holders in the first Trump administration, New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman reported that Trump “and his associates” plan to “increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

In particular, Project 2025’s stance on nuclear weapons is a reminder of just how dangerous a president who refused to be restrained by law or precedent will be. After all, in his first term in office, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on that country, leading its leaders to increase its nuclear capacity. Meanwhile, the march toward nuclear confrontation has accelerated worldwide. In response, Project 2025 argues for ramping up America’s nuclear arsenal yet more. “[T]he United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal,” the treatise declared, in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously,” adding that the U.S. needs to “develop a nuclear arsenal with the size, sophistication, and tailoring — including new capabilities at the theater level — to ensure that there is no circumstance in which America is exposed to serious nuclear coercion.”

Consider all of that a frightening vision of our now all-too-imminent future: a president freed from the restraints of the constitution, unchecked by Congress or the courts — or by his cabinet advisors. In the words of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Project 2025 has set the stage for Donald Trump to be the very opposite of what this country’s founders intended, “a king,” surrounded not by “groups of qualified experts” but by “unblinking yes-men.”

(Dis)Trust in the Presidency

The growing power of the presidency has been taking place in plain view, as unilateral powers have accumulated decade after decade in the Oval Office, while the recent choice of president has also become a grim choice about the nature and powers of the presidency itself. Notably, the rise in executive powers has coincided with a creeping distrust of government in this country. Since the early 1960s, when nearly 80% of Americans said they trusted government “most of the time,” the public’s faith in this country’s federal government hovers at just over 20%, according to the Pew Research Center. And no wonder. When the office of the president refuses to accept the checks and balances that underlie the democratic system, the country’s trust in negotiated, reasonable, and restrained outcomes understandably falls away.

Sadly, in this era, the benefits of restoring the very notion of checks and balances that birthed the nation have come to seem ever more like a quaint dream.

PRESCIENT WARNING

Trump and Trumpism Are the Violent Threat—And They Must Be Stopped

We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us.

By Jeffrey C. Isaac

November 3, 2024

Source: Common Dreams


Copyright: CC BY-SA 4.0
William Jacob Parsons was arrested recently in North Carolina on charges of appearing at a FEMA office carrying a semi-automatic handgun and making threats against employees.
According to the Washington Post:

Parsons said he was motivated by social media reports claiming that FEMA was withholding supplies from hurricane victims in western North Carolina. Such false claims are part of a wave of misinformation that has hampered hurricane recovery efforts across the Southeast. ‘I viewed it as if our people are sitting here on American soil, and they’re refusing to aid our people,’ Parsons told FOX8.

A ”wave.” The phenomenon sounds beyond human control, like the waves caused by the hurricane itself.

Only a few paragraphs down does the story mention that there is a politics here: “As the country digs out, false claims about the storms have divided the Republican Party. While Donald Trump and his allies have spread the falsehoods, other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” It turns out that it was Trump and his allies who caused this “wave.” Even here, the reporter needs to emphasize that “other GOP lawmakers and officials have sought to counter these rumors without directly criticizing the former president.” What is not said: these officials, like Republican office holders throughout the country, continue to support Donald Trump as he runs a campaign centered on lies, threats, and promises to use coercive force to deal with immigrants, suspected criminals, and various “enemies from within”—the same types he described only a few months ago as “the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Focusing on the lone wolf rather than the rabid wolf pack led and incited by Trump, and exaggerating the extent to which anyone in the GOP is constraining him in any way, this piece exemplifies the widespread tendency of so many journalists and commentators to downplay the threat that Trump’s rhetoric and his promises poses to so many people—federal workers, election workers, Haitians, anyone suspected of a crime, and pretty much all people on the left.

Robert Pape is a highly respected political scientist at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats that he founded and directs is a major source of data on political violence. In recent weeks he has weighed in on the current U.S. political situation, in a Foreign Affairs essay entitled “Our Own Worst Enemies: The Violent Style in American Politics,” and in a New York Times op-ed entitled “I Study Political Violence. I’m Worried About the Election.” Unfortunately, Pape furnishes the downplaying of Trumpist violence with a patina of “scientific” credibility.

Pape begins by noting that “As we approach the presidential election next month, our election sites and officials may be in considerable physical danger.” He proceeds to note the most obvious source of concern: “Over the past four years, an alarming number of election officials and workers nationwide have been intimidated or threatened by people who appear to believe the widespread lies about voter fraud and rigged voting machines that supposedly helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.”

But as the empirical scientist of politics that he is, he seeks to go beyond the obvious. And the point of his interventions is to share the “worrisome evidence” of his center’s survey research: “we found disturbingly high levels of support for political violence. Notably, this attitude was bipartisan. Nearly 6 percent of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the ‘use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.’ A little over 8 percent agreed or strongly agreed that ‘the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.’ These results reflect a relatively stable pattern over the past year.”

The upshot is clear: both sides of the political divide display troubling support for violence, and we are, as his essay says, “our own worst enemies.” His recommendation: Republican and Democratic Governors, especially in swing states, should make a joint public statement condemning violence, and dedicate resources to election security, so that both election officials and the broad public can feel safe and confident about the election.

The closing words of Pape’s op-ed underscore that the source of his urgent worry is even-handed and not partisan:


If we had not recently witnessed some of the worst election-related violence in modern American history — the Jan. 6 riot, the attempted kidnapping of Speaker Nancy Pelosi before the 2022 midterms and the two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump — it might make sense to take more modest precautions. But the past four years have shown that we live in a dangerous new world.

Unfortunately Pape, the prisoner of his data, downplays the Trumpist danger no less egregiously than the many journalists who lack his scientific authority. And the problem is not in his data. It is in the lack of political judgment that he brings to it.

For it is quite obvious that not a single instance of violence that he references has anything to do with the left.

The January 6 insurrection, the attacks on Pelosi (and violent threats against many others, from AOC to General Mark Milley and Georgia Republican Brad Raffensperger), the threats to election officials—all of these things, like the threat to FEMA, come from the right and are indeed directly promoted and incited by Donald Trump. Even the two assassination attempts on Trump had nothing to do with the left—though Trump and Vance continue to lie about this. The first accused assassin was a registered Republican with obvious mental problems. The second was a disgruntled former Trump supporter who actually wrote a book explaining his disillusionment and calling for Trump’s assassination. Both assailants were products of the cult of violence produced by Trump (in a recent Atlantic piece, “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator,” David Frum points out that Trump was the victim of his own rhetoric).

There is no obvious reason to doubt Pape’s survey results. There are people on the left who hate Trump as much as people on the right hate Democrats, and many of those on the left might be as willing to say “yes” to a survey question about violence as those on the right.

But all of the threats and the actual violence that Pape notes, and that are so obviously so very dangerous right now, have come from the right.

Not a single Democratic leader has done anything to justify or incite violence or question the legitimacy of the electoral system or describe J-6 insurrectionists as “us” and police as the “they” who had weapons at the Capitol. Only one of the two major parties has unreservedly supported a candidate whose entire campaign has centered on vindicating the insurrection and promising to “eradicate” an opposition that he describes as “vermin,” going so far as to propose using federal troops to repress them. Retired Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly—both former Trump appointees, and neither a member of Democratic Socialist of America– have publicly declared that Donald Trump is a fascist. A fascist. Has any serious military official outside of the deranged Michael Flynn said anything like this about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or any Democrat? No. Because no Democrat is a fascist.

There may be some symmetry in the way “extremists” on both sides of our polarized politics poll as “sympathetic to violence.”

But as serious political scientists have long known, filling out questionnaires is one thing, and politics is another. Only on the Trumpist right is there an organized campaign to demonize opponents and to incite and justify violence, and only on the Trumpist right are there many thousands of armed individuals—some organized as “patriot” paramilitary groups, some as lone wolves—who have acted on the incitement to violence. Is there a single election official, anywhere, who fears that there are leftist activists who threaten them because they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, liberals, progressives and Marxists, and that “we need to take our country back” from the “lunatic communists?”

“There is violence on both sides,” or “we are our own worst enemies”—such rhetoric is stupid and grievously misleading as we approach a truly watershed election in which, to use the words of Trump critic, conservative Republican jurist J. Michael Luttig, democracy itself is “on a knife’s edge.”

There is no symmetry when it comes to the danger of political violence.

We are not our own worst enemies. Trump is the worst enemy of every one of us—from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders– who cares about constitutional democracy, and he makes no bones about saying so. He is retribution. He is vengeance.

Trumpism is the source of the violence that threatens to engulf us.

And the solution is simple: Stop Trump!

We have no time to waste.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include: "Democracy in Dark Times"(1998); "The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline" (2003), and "Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion" (1994).

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Democrats Demobilized Their Base. A Movement Is Now Needed to Oppose Trump

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Amy Goodman , John Nichols 

November 7, 2024

Source: Democracy Now

Donald Trump’s performance in the 2024 election surpassed expectations, with the candidate winning the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and picking up larger shares of more diverse segments of the electorate, including Black and Latino male voters. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, says the blame lies squarely on the Harris campaign, which refused to differentiate itself from unpopular incumbent President Joe Biden. “The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party,” adds John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation. Nichols and Taylor discuss how Democrats “demobilized” young voters and grassroots organizers, to their electoral detriment. “Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to take horrific actions,” says Nichols. For those seeking to oppose him, says Taylor, “There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris and what it means for the country and the world, we are joined by three guests. John Nichols is The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent. He’s joining us from Madison, Wisconsin. Wisconsin voted for Trump. Rami Khouri is a Palestinian journalist, a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. And in Philadelphia, we’re joined by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Taylor is contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, let’s begin with you in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which has been decided. Pennsylvania has gone to Trump. Can you share your response to what has taken place?

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I have to say that on some level it’s shocking that someone like Trump could be back in this position, but it’s not really surprising. I’ve written about, really since the Democratic National Convention, that the Democratic Party was playing a dangerous game, that — essentially downplaying the base in order to reach for new centrist voters to try to appeal to Republicans. And we can see with some of the preliminary exit polls that that was an abject failure, that Republicans voted for Republicans. Democrats voted for Democrats.

But I think, overall, the Democratic Party really underestimated the extent to which lots of people in this country are in crisis. I think that they have insisted for months, from when Biden was running throughout, that the economy is good, that they had overcome the issues with inflation and that things were looking up. And those are the voters that they appealed to. But if you look at the exit polls, the at least preliminary exit polls, there was a total washout with working-class voters. People making between $30,000 and $50,000, people making under $100,000 went to Trump. And I think that there’s a rise in homelessness, historic rise — historically high rise in homelessness from 2023 to 2024, and on pace to exceed that this year. Rent is 20% higher today than it was in 2020. Hunger, hunger insecurity on the rise compared to even just a year ago. And for even when the extent to the crisis doesn’t express itself in that way, in the first quarter of this year, Americans took on $17 trillion in personal debt. And so, this is completely unstable.

And Kamala Harris had very little to say about that. She was running as an incumbent, trying to distance herself from those aspects of the Biden administration, but really unable to do so, really unwilling to chart a different course, to articulate how things would be different under her administration. And they are really — you know, we are seeing and dealing with the consequences of that today.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Keeanga, I wanted to ask you about the —

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — the male-female divide, especially with the communities of color. There was a lot of talk early on in the preelection polls about Latino and African American men gravitating more toward Trump. We don’t know yet the turnout levels in these communities, but it does appear that there was a major shift among African American men. According to the exit polls, about 20% of them went for Trump, whereas among African American women it was over 90 — I think 93% for Harris. And among Latinos, it was even more stark. According to these exit polls, a majority of Latino men voted for Trump, whereas two-thirds of Latina women voted for Harris. So there was major, major gender gap in the Black and Latino communities. I’m wondering your thoughts about that.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: I think that in terms of the extent of crisis that we see in this country, that can be measured by employment rates, that can be measured by poverty rates, that can be measured by a sense of the quality of one’s life, all of the barometers that we use to measure the mood of the country have really been in decline. And I think for men, for Black men, in particular, they have felt — they have felt the brunt of that. And I think that it has been largely dismissed. I think, you know, President — former President Barack Obama got lots of attention when he came out weeks ago and essentially dismissed those concerns as just sexism. And so, I think — you know, I’m sure that that is part of the mix, but to reduce all of the economic anxiety of Black men and Black communities to sexism is, again, really to fail to capture. It’s a failure to capture what is actually happening on the ground, that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty. But there is historically high sense of insecurity and a sense of not knowing what is actually going to come next. And I think that the Harris candidacy, that the Biden candidacy that preceded it, have really ignored the extent to which there has been continuity, whether we go back from the Obama administrations to the Trump administration to Biden’s administration, a continuity in insecurity, a continuity in uncertainty, a continuity in just not knowing what the future is going to hold, so much so that it builds a sense of cynicism that it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter how you vote.

And then, in another sense, I think that Trump satisfies something different, because, to be honest, you know, the Republicans don’t have any answers for that, either. And Trump’s policy proposals guarantee to make the situation worse for Black men, for Latino men. But what it does offer is an opportunity to give the finger, to thumb your nose at the status quo, at the condescension of someone like Obama, who just a week ago I saw an ad that popped up on Instagram, and he’s talking to a twenty-something young Latino man and saying to this young voter, who’s trying to decide who he should vote for, that “I know it looks like nothing has changed in your community, but you have to consider some woman was able to get her prescription. Someone else was able to get a bag of groceries.” And it’s like, what are we talking about? A prescription or a bag of groceries is not actually going to get it done. And so, the low expectations that they offer of what we should hold — what we should have for elected officials is part of the problem, because the attacks on people, on people’s incomes, the rising rate of rent, all of those things [inaudible] ability to respond to that in a substantive way is part of what is driving this. And so, the lower expectations doesn’t actually instill confidence that Democrats can get — can make a difference in people’s lives. And so, that, I think, is the larger context to understand the small but significant defection to Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, there’s an interesting —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring John Nichols into the conversation. John, I wanted to ask you particularly — during the campaign, President Trump focused a lot of attention on immigration and on his threats to begin the biggest, the most massive deportation of undocumented in the country’s history. Your sense of the results and what this will mean for the immigrant community and progressives, overall, in the coming weeks and months?

JOHN NICHOLS: Look, this is a devastating result. And I think people have to recognize it. Donald Trump won by, it looks like, a reasonably comfortable margin in the Electoral College, when all is done, although there’s still votes out, and I think we have to be a little careful about overassessing it. It is possible he’ll win the popular vote, although I still think there are a lot of West Coast votes out that will definitely make it closer. And it could even still tip it slightly against him.

But what we’ve ended up with now is a situation where Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to do — to take horrific actions, which, remember, in his first administration, he tried to do, as regards immigrants, refugees, working-class people, people who are in difficult situations across the board. And so, what we have to look at — and I think there’s two things that are really important here. First, there’s going to have to be a resistance to this. There’s no question of that. But that resistance has to have at least some, hopefully some, traction on Capitol Hill. And that’s where the results of the House and Senate races, that are still very much in play, become central to what we’re talking about.

The Senate is going to be Republican. It will have at least a 52-48 Republican majority, and that majority could well grow. There are still six seats that are undeclared. I think about four of them will go to the Democrats, maybe less. But I think there’s a good possibility two of them will go to the Republicans. If the Senate is that wide a Republican majority, Trump is going to get easy approval for a lot of what he’s doing. There may be some places where, as we talk about something like the immigration issue, there could be pushback. But to do that pushback, you would have to build a coalition, whatever Democrats are there, and to find at least some Republicans who wouldn’t vote for a Trump Cabinet pick or for a Trump initiative on, again, immigration, working-class issues in general, all sorts of things. The only way that’s going to happen is if there is tremendous organizing on the ground, beginning now, today, in states where you have Republicans who have in the past broken with Trump at least on some education and related issues, people like Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Susan Collins up in Maine.

But the real opposition, ultimately, is going to have to come in the House of Representatives. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the House. It is still very much up for grabs. There are 54 seats that are uncalled, much more than 10% of the House. If a majority of those seats, a good majority of those seats, goes to the Democrats, they’ve got the potential to be in a majority in the House of Representatives. It wouldn’t be big, but they do have that potential. And this is not, you know, a foolish prospect to entertain, because most of the undeclared seats are on the West Coast, in California, Washington, Oregon. A lot of them will go Democratic. So we don’t know where this is going to sort out, but this is the critical thing, Juan.

If you get to a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, then you have the next test, which is whether they feel beaten down and weakened, and they just don’t really want to fight, and they’re saying, “Oh, we’ll find ways to work with this new administration,” blah, blah, blah, things that they often say. Trump is going to take full advantage of that. And on the other hand, if they unite as a small but politically very powerful Democratic majority, that’s where you can stop a lot of Trump initiatives. Again, as regards the House of Representatives, you’ve got to have vital organizing on the ground beginning now, so that if Democrats take control, they know that there are going to be people pressing them to do the right thing, to effectively be the opposition.

And one final thing I’ll say is, and Jamie Raskin and others have talked about this, Donald Trump has talked during this campaign about using the presidency in incredibly aggressive ways, not working with Congress but just going on his own with executive orders and all sorts of other initiatives. This is something that has to be challenged in the courts and, to the extent possible, in Congress. I know people are deeply disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court. I certainly am. But it is absolutely vital that there be court challenges wherever possible, because there are places in the states and at the federal level where you might be able to push back on some of what’s going on. Bottom line, at this point, Republicans have a lot of power. Donald Trump has a lot of power. The only way to counter that is going to be organizing that is highly focused, that demands that those Democrats who are still in positions of some authority resist Donald Trump in a realistic and effective way. That’s possible, but that is, as we know from history, not certain.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, it’s been raised that President Trump could nominate Aileen Cannon, the judge who dismissed the case against him, to the Supreme Court. And if the Senate, as it is, goes Republican, he might succeed in making her a Supreme Court justice. But I wanted to ask you, John, when you talk about people organizing right now, about a point that was raised during the Obama years. In the last months of the Obama presidency, there was a call for him to pardon undocumented migrants before Trump was sworn in. Trump is now promising mass deportations. The question is: Could Biden preemptively pardon them? And what I mean by “pardon,” NYU Law Review, in the waning days of the Obama administration, with Trump’s crackdown promised, over a hundred advocacy organizations joined forces to urge President Obama to permanently protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation by pardoning their breaches of civilian immigration law. John Nichols?

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. Look, I am going to defer to the NYU Law Review and to legal experts who have worked on these issues for years and know much more than I do about the specifics of how you would mount such an initiative.

But what I can tell you is this, and this is the critical thing, I think, for progressives across this country to understand. The presidency is for four years. It is not for three years and 10 months or something like that. The last months of a presidency have to be used in smart and effective ways. And you have to look at all the powers of the presidency. What that means is that Joe Biden has several months left in which to do what is right morally and politically. And there has to be, again, I think, pressure there. We were just talking about, you know, organizing on the ground as regards to the Senate to put pressure on Republicans who might work with Democrats, organizing on the ground as regards to the House to put Democrats to actually be Democrats, what Paul Wellstone used to refer to as the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. But then, finally, there must be pressure on the ground and even toward Washington on Joe Biden, to make sure that he uses the last months of his presidency in a clear and effective, moral and politically smart way.

And so, what I would suggest to you is, folks who are deeply frustrated or overwhelmed by these results have a right to be so, and I won’t deny that. But I think that one important thing is to recognize that time matters in these struggles. And so, if you are going to lobby members of the Senate, members of the House and the president himself, you need to do that now, not wait months until January 20th or something like that. And again, what I would emphasize is, there’s a lot of organized groups across this country that are concerned about these issues. They have relationships with sitting members of Congress, with Republicans and Democrats. And they need to — you know, they need to open those conversations, to have those town hall meetings, to have those protests, to have those marches, to speak truth to power in a way that might yet be heard and might yet have an impact.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to bring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor back into the conversation. Keeanga, your sense of what the potential steps now are for the progressive and resistance movement to this incoming administration?

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think that we have a real problem. I mean, I appreciate the sentiment that John is expressing about the need to be mobilized and to resist now. But, you know, activism and social movements don’t often work like that. They’re not water faucets, where you just turn them off, and then, when you need them, you turn them back on. I think that the movement, movements that we have understood them to be over the previous decade, with something like the Black Lives Matter social movement, at its center, have been damaged and have been demobilized. I think in the last election, in 2020, that there was so much focus on getting Biden elected and then winning those Georgia Senate races a few months later, that the whole focus of external pressure on elected officials was dissipated, and to such an extent that Biden faced no protest, really, until the end of the twilight of his term, last spring, when the Palestinian solidarity movement exploded, in a way, because it couldn’t be coopted by the Democratic Party, in ways that these other social movements not necessarily coopted, but absorbed into the Democratic Party program, organizers convinced that they had access to the Biden administration, that they had the ear of the Biden administration. And so, I think that we actually have a lot of rebuilding to do. I don’t think we’re going to see the same initial response that we saw in 2017 with the Women’s March and the immediate reaction to Donald Trump. There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. She’s professor of African American studies there. Keeanga, I am looking at a Semafor article from May 29th, its headline, “’A dying empire led by bad people’: Poll finds young voters despairing over US politics.” And it starts off by saying, “Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor.” And I think it’s interesting that you raised the protests around Palestine. In a minute, we’re going to speak with the Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri. But the protests in the spring that, you know, the encampments across the country, and this feeling that young people have, if you could comment on it, “a dying empire led by bad people”?

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Look, there was a lot of focus on what would happen with Black voters, what would happen on other voters. Harris got wiped out on 18-to-29-year-olds relative to Biden in 2020. I think she was down 22 to 24 points among the youngest voters. These are people who really have this sense of what does the future behold, right? These are young people whose entire lives have been shaped by American wars, American empire, American occupation. Many of them are saddled with debt that they cannot repay, debt that there are no jobs available to them that would allow them to repay it. They are faced with exponentially rising rents, rents — laissez-faire housing market. And so, it’s a very dark, dystopic horizon for young people in this country.

And some of the things that provided a sense of hope, you think about the 2020 protests that brought tens of millions of especially young people into the streets, that gave them a sense of vitality, that gave them a sense that they could actually influence the direction of politics and the direction of this country through their own self-activity and organization, and the way that those protests were siphoned into the presidential campaigns of 2020 and the way that people were actively demobilized and told that the access to the Biden administration could produce the goods that they wanted. And even as that was falling apart, even as the Biden administration was unable to follow through on the promises it made, no response, no leadership, no direction. And so, that is something that is going to have to change, and that it’s going to have to come from those people, those young people, whose future looks very dark in the hands of others, but that they have the capacity to get organized, they have the capacity to be mobilized, and they have the capacity to change the direction of this country.

And so, this is a very grim, dark day. And I said before that I’m not — I am shocked that this happened, but I’m not surprised. We could see the trajectory of this happening for the last three months. But this does not have to be the final chapter. But in changing the — turning the page and changing the story, we have to rethink lots of what we are doing in terms of our relationship as progressives, as part of the left, our relationship to the Democratic Party, our inability to act independently, to be completely tied to the electoral ups and downs, the electoral cycle of the Democratic Party, when we look at the actual policies and practices that they’re pursuing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to bring John Nichols back into the conversation. John, the climate crisis, we have been faced — the entire world has been faced in recent years with constant hurricanes, floods, forest fires. And now we’re facing a Trump presidency where he is still using in his campaigns the slogan “Drill, baby, drill.” Your sense of what the climate — the movement to stem the climate crisis now faces in the United States?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, as my colleague says, this is a dystopian result. And where Donald Trump is coming from on these issues is not one of even a traditional Republican kind of tip and nod of the head to concerns about the climate, but then a decision to go where the fossil fuel companies tell you to go; this is a situation where Donald Trump has aggressively said and will make central to his agenda an effort to let fossil fuel companies do as they choose, to let the financiers who back them do as they choose. I mean, it really is devastating in this regard.

And if I can just build on this, one thing relating to what was just said about Gaza, it is very important to note that people in Congress who stood up on Gaza, who spoke out on it, and who made it through primaries where AIPAC tried to defeat them, did very, very well yesterday. Bernie Sanders won by two to one up in Vermont. Ilhan Omar won with more than 70%. Rashida Tlaib, who did not endorse Kamala Harris, won with more than 70%. Greg Casar in Texas won with almost 70%. Summer Lee, who’s in a much more competitive district than some of these other folks, she won with a percentage, you know, in the high 50s. And so, the bottom line is that taking a strong stand on Gaza in this general election, that didn’t hurt people. In fact, I think it may well have helped some candidates.

And the same thing is true with climate. It’s notable that everyone I just mentioned there who’s been outspoken on the issue of Gaza, and some other folks, too, who have been outspoken on Gaza, like AOC, have made climate very central to their service in Congress. And other people who did well also. The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party, because in this election, not only did they refuse to talk in any kind of consistent or effective way on the issue of Gaza, they also refused to talk in any consistent, effective way on climate. And, you know, they would say occasional good things, but it wasn’t as central as it needed to be.

And then, if we pause here and ask ourselves, “OK, well, when we look at polling, when we look at anecdotal evidence, what are the issues that young people care about?” Well, we hear about climate. We hear about Gaza. Certainly, we hear about racial justice. When you see that decline in support from young people, I think it’s not that hard to explain. I think an awful lot of young people in this country simply did not hear what they needed to hear from the Democratic Party. And if they continue to have that silence or that lack of outreach on those issues, then I think you’re in a situation where the Democratic Party is going to continue to struggle with what has been one of its most vital constituencies in recent years, and that’s young voters.

AMY GOODMAN: This update, just as the House is up for grabs, Republican Mike Lawler of New York — and it looks like New York and California will determine the balance of the Senate [sic]. Republican Mike Lawler has defeated Mondaire — will determine the balance of the House. The Senate has already been determined, and it is going to be a Republican majority. But in the House, Mike Lawler has defeated Mondaire Jones. I want to thank you both for being with us, John Nichols of The Nation and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Coming up, we’ll be joined by Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist. And then we’re going to look at referenda around the country and how they fared. Stay with us.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a co-founder of Hammer & Hope and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020.