In 2021, US on Pace for Most Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters Since Records Began

"What we are seeing now with these increasing disasters is with just one degree of warming on our planet," said one scientist. "We have to choose now between bad or terrible outcomes."

Flames rip across a hillside behind a building donning a U.S. flag as the Caldor Fire pushes into South Lake Tahoe, California on August 30, 2021.

 (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)


KENNY STANCIL

COMMON DREAMS

October 12, 2021

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday in its latest monthly report that the United States endured 18 "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" through the first nine months of 2021, putting this year on pace to be among the worst for such catastrophes.

For decades, scientists have sounded the alarm that extreme weather would become more frequent and intense amid the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency. With 18 calamities costing at least $1 billion already on the books and three months to go, 2021 is second only to 2020, when there were 22 such events.

Before it was surpassed last year, the previous annual record for billion-dollar disasters was 16—reached in 2011 and matched in 2017. While last year saw a greater number of billion-dollar disasters, 2021 is outpacing 2020 through September

.


Furthermore, although not all of the destruction has been calculated, this year's events have already proven more expensive, causing $104.8 billion in damages compared with $100.4 billion in 2020. The costliest years to date are 2017 and 2005, when Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina devastated Houston and New Orleans, respectively.

Communities across the nation have been ravaged by a variety of extreme weather events in 2021, which have resulted in the deaths of 538 people.

Some of the most notable billion-dollar disasters that occurred between January and September include the winter storm that wrecked Texas' isolated, deregulated, and fossil fuel-dependent power grid, causing dozens to freeze to death; relentless Western drought, heatwaves, and wildfires that have burned nearly 6.5 million acres to date and killed over two hundred people; and the highly destructive Hurricane Ida, which barreled into the Gulf Coast's extensive petrochemical infrastructure, leaving dozens of oil spills in its wake, and also pummeled the Northeast, adding more casualties.

Just as climate scientists have warned it would, unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution is producing higher temperatures and more extreme weather—leading to more and more catastrophic events.

Since NOAA started keeping such records in 1980, the U.S. has been hammered by 308 billion-dollar disasters, claiming 15,030 lives and costing roughly $2.1 trillion—with annual averages of just over seven events, 358 deaths, and approximately $50 billion in damages.

The average number of annual billion-dollar disasters has skyrocketed from about three events nationwide per year in the 1980s to more than 12 events per year in the 2010s. The average number of annual deaths has also increased over the decades, from 287 per year in the 1980s to 522 per year in the 2010s.

From 2016 to 2020—the five hottest years on record—there were more than 16 separate billion-dollar disasters per year, on average. Combined, the 81 events killed nearly 4,000 people, or more than a quarter of the death toll since 1980, and cost $640.3 billion, accounting for over 30% of the 40-year financial toll.

Researchers at Climate Central recently pointed out that the growing frequency of calamitous events "can strain the resources available for communities to recover quickly and manage future risks."

According to their new analysis, the average time between billion-dollar disasters has declined from 82 days in the 1980s to just 18 days on average in the past five years (2016-2020).

Climate Central argued that NOAA's "staggering figures primarily reflect direct impacts on assets (including damage to homes, crops, and critical infrastructure) and therefore don't reflect the full toll of disasters—including on human health and well-being, displacement, food and water supplies, as well as loss of cultural heritage, biodiversity, and habitats."

"Nor do these figures convey the disproportionate impacts of disasters on people in poverty or the need for equitable allocation of federal disaster assistance in accordance with social vulnerability," the group added.

And the U.S. is far from alone in experiencing an uptick in extreme weather events, which are also decimating impoverished nations around the globe.

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Brett Wilkins

Last year, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction reported a "staggering" increase in climate-related disasters worldwide, which nearly doubled from 3,656 between 1980 and 1999 to 6,681 between 2000 and 2019.

Camilo Mora, a professor of geography at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, told the Washington Post on Tuesday that "the poorest countries in the world are the ones that we know the least about."

"If it is already bad in the countries that have the money to study," he continued, "you can just imagine what is happening in the developing countries."

"What we are seeing now with these increasing disasters is with just one degree of warming on our planet," Mora added. "Looking into the future, our best-case scenario is 1.5 degrees [Celsius] of warming, and the worst case is 5 degrees. We have to choose now between bad or terrible outcomes."

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Our Health Depends on Indigenous Botanical Knowledge and Plants That Are Rapidly Being Destroyed

The decline is one of the effects of the industrial modernization that is supposed to have brought increasing comfort, health, and advanced knowledge into our lives.

A farmer tries to pour water on an area close to an illegally lit fire in the Amazon rainforest, south of Novo Progresso in the Brazilian state of Pará on August 15, 2020. (Photo: Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images)


JOHN BUELL

October 12, 2021

 by Informed Comment

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – While mainstream media celebrate the remarkable development in record time of vaccines spectacularly effective against the Covid virus, knowledge that might contribute to other medical breakthroughs is being steadily undermined. This decline is not the result of some dramatic lawsuit or corporate takeover. It is one of the effects of the industrial modernization that is supposed to have brought increasing comfort, health and advanced knowledge into our lives. Economic growth has produced not only a climate emergency but a less publicized decline in the many efficacious forms of traditional knowledge and the biodiversity they sustain and are sustained by. In an email exchange I had with ethnobotanist Kirsten Tripplett, Ph.D., she pointed out:

“the generally accepted understanding is that 12-25% of “Western” medicine is derived or based on plant molecules/chemical backbones…It depends who’s talking and what their agenda is. And that is JUST in Western medicine. There are other, much older and empirically-based medicinal systems out there that are incredibly effective, but most U.S. citizens are unaware or only dimly, of them. Not only is the loss of language directly linked to knowledge loss and potential medical/economic loss, but think of all of the practical and useful things that get lost, too.”

When Brazil President Bolsanaro encouraged more forestry development in the Amazon, global climate advocates worried about the lungs of the planet and the contribution to global warming. They might equally have been concerned with the indigenous knowledge going up in smoke.

Sibélia Zanon writing at nature site Mongabay reports:


“A study at the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that a large proportion of existing medicinal plant knowledge is linked to threatened Indigenous languages. In a regional study on the Amazon, New Guinea and North America, researchers concluded that 75% of medicinal plant uses are known in only one language.” She reports that 91% of medicinal knowledge exists in a single language, so the loss of linguistic diversity diminished the former as well.

Nor are medicines all that is lost. She adds,

“Every time a language disappears, a speaking voice also disappears, a way to make sense of reality disappears, a way to interact with nature disappears, a way to describe and name animals and plants disappears,” says Jordi Bascompte, researcher in the Department of Evolutional Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich.”

As indigenous peoples rely on the spoken word for intergenerational knowledge transfer, the disappearance of these languages will take with them a universe of information. The possible losses include fundamental neurological facts about the human brain. Jairus Grove, author of Savage Ecology, cites work by neurologists showing that each language contains a different cognitive map of the human brain. Sometimes the differences are very significant and open up important research potential. Grove cites work by linguist David Harrison on the Uririna people of Peru showing that some, though very few, languages place the object of the sentence at the beginning. Were it not for the continued existence of this people, neuroscientists would not even suspect or know that the human brain could be wired in such a way to make O-V-S sentences possible.

Grove points out that most Indo European languages have an active subject, verb, passive object form, but there are minority cultures that do not express that format. In a world beset by the dangerous exploitation of the natural world these minority cultures may teach us more about how to survive and thrive in this world. In this context Tripplett points out that agency is not confined to the human world. The unwillingness to recognize and accept this fact could have increasingly dire consequences.

Dr. Kirsten Tripplett writes, “It’s a long leap conceptually to make, but if one accepts a premise that “language” isn’t just spoken, and that knowledge is transmitted through actions and lifeways, then loss of biological species and their exploitation to serve human interests, is a critical loss, too, for the same reasons as those cited above . . .”

Grove has similar worries: “Irreversible catastrophic changes are certain but extinction is unlikely. What we stand to lose as a species in this current apocalypse of homogenization is unimaginable, not because of the loss of life but because of the loss of difference. Who and what will be left on Earth to inspire and ally with us in our creative advance is uncertain. If the future is dominated by those who seek to establish the survival of the human species at all costs through technological mastery then whatever “we” manages to persist will likely live on or near a mean and lonely planet.” (Savage Ecology, p. 209)

Why this loss of cultural diversity? There is first the reductionist tendency to treat cultural diversity and biodiversity as separate issues rather than as continuously interacting. Zanon further quotes Jordi Bascompte: “We can’t ignore this network now and think only about the plants or only about the culture . . . We humans are very good at homogenizing culture and nature so that nature seems to be more or less the same everywhere.”

This homogenization process includes reduction of human labor to cogs in a corporate machine, to cookie cutter development to the planned obsolescence and corporate-dominated consumer culture. Most important is a neoliberal financial system fostering increasing wealth gaps within and among nations. In this context it is especially important to preserve alternative ways of being in the world and their origins and history. Despite efforts to homogenize many indigenous cultures some retain their vitality. But their survival will depend on bottom-up activism and rules, laws, and practices negotiated across race, ethnicity, religion, and class.

As Subhankar Banerjee argues, saving elephants in different states presents complex problems. More broadly biodiversity conservation is contextual. What works for one place and in a particular culture may not work for another place and in another culture. This is not, however, cultural relativism. Biodiversity advocates value most those cultures that seek space for difference and for a politics that celebrates that end.

Banerjee again: “What makes biodiversity conservation so beautiful is that it is a pluriverse—so many ideas, so many practices, so many forms of human-nonhuman kinship that exist around the world, which in a different context, a quarter-century ago, Indian historian Ramachandra Guha and Spanish ecological-economist Juan Martinez-Alier called Varieties of Environmentalism.”

To help indigenous peoples worldwide preserve, revitalize and promote their languages, UNESCO has launched its Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages from 2022 to 203. This is a principle worthy of much more attention than it receives. For that situation to change more than proclamations of rights will be necessary, including political movements celebrating and willing to fight for economic justice and biological and cultural diversity.

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John Buell has a PhD in political science, taught for 10 years at College of the Atlantic, and was an Associate Editor of The Progressive for ten years. He lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine and writes on labor and environmental issues. His most recent book, published by Palgrave in August 2011, is "Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age."

AOC Warns Pelosi and Schumer: 'We Can't Negotiate Reconciliation Bill Down to Nothing'

"The Build Back Better reconciliation package is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a sustainable and prosperous future for our country."



Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a rally in New York City on June 5, 2021.

 (Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

COMMON DREAMS

October 12, 2021

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined seven of her fellow New York Democrats on Tuesday in issuing a warning to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Don't cut funding for housing, transportation, or immigration reform from the emerging reconciliation bill in an attempt to appease right-wing lawmakers.

"We can't let corporate interests, Big Pharma, and a few conservative Democrats stand in our way of delivering."

"We can't negotiate the reconciliation bill down to nothing," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

In their letter, the New York Democrats argued that "the Build Back Better reconciliation package is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a sustainable and prosperous future for our country—affordable housing; quality, sustainable, and accessible public transportation; and sound immigration reform must remain priorities in the debate."

Specifically, the House Democrats urged Pelosi and Schumer to ensure that the final reconciliation package includes $80 billion in funding for public housing, a $10 billion investment in public transportation, and $107 billion to "expand safety-net protections and create a pathway to citizenship for millions of DACA recipients, people with temporary protected status, essential workers, and farm workers."

"It is vital that we preserve the entirety of this funding allocation, not only because these communities have been the backbone of our national economy throughout this pandemic and beyond, but also because the U.S. is their only home and refuge from the political, economic, and climate disasters they are fleeing," the lawmakers wrote.


The message from Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the New York congressional delegation was made public hours after Pelosi circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter indicating that the Democratic leadership could be considering cutting programs from the reconciliation bill in order to lower its $3.5 trillion price tag—an effort aimed at securing the votes of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), and other corporate-backed holdouts.

"Overwhelmingly," Pelosi wrote, "the guidance I am receiving from members is to do fewer things well so that we can still have a transformative impact on families in the workplace and responsibly address the climate crisis."

That approach could spark backlash from progressive lawmakers such as Ocasio-Cortez, who has argued that Democrats should shorten the duration of programs to reduce costs, not cut out key priorities. Pelosi did not specify which programs are at risk of being removed from the reconciliation package, which is a centerpiece of President Joe Biden's domestic policy agenda.

"One of the ideas that's out there is: fully fund what we can fully fund, but maybe instead of doing it for 10 years, we fully fund it for five years," Ocasio-Cortez said during an interview with CBS earlier this month. "I think it's unfortunate that we have to even, as Democrats, have a discussion about not having a child tax credit. I think it's unfortunate that we have to compromise with ourselves for an ambitious agenda for working people."

Speaking to the press Tuesday morning, Pelosi suggested that Democrats could go the route suggested by Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives—a message that conflicts with the sentiment of her "Dear Colleague" letter. The House Speaker voiced "hope" that Democrats ultimately won't have to drop any programs from the reconciliation measure.

The push by right-wing Democrats to slash the reconciliation bill's price tag has set off a scramble among lawmakers to ensure that programs they support—from Medicare expansion to the expanded child tax credit to paid family leave—aren't left on the cutting room floor. Progressive lawmakers in the House and Senate have argued that there is no need to pit priorities against one another in the name of fiscal restraint.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters Tuesday that "$3.5 trillion is already a major compromise."

"The time is now long overdue for Sen. Manchin and Sen. Sinema to tell us… where do they want to cut?" Sanders added.

Referring to progressives' effort to expand Medicare benefits to cover dental, hearing, and vision, the Vermont senator said: "This to me is not negotiable. This is what the American people want."



During a recent closed-door Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) meeting, according to the Washington Post, "members stood up one by one to vouch for establishing universal pre-K, making the child tax credit permanent, and guaranteeing 12 weeks of paid family leave."

"Others mentioned the need to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision, which would get them one step closer to the progressive goal of Medicare for All," the Post noted.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—chair of the 96-member CPC—declared that "the agenda that Progressives are fighting for IS the president's agenda."

"We must pass the full Build Back Better Act—and we can't let corporate interests, Big Pharma, and a few conservative Democrats stand in our way of delivering," Jayapal added.

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Sanders, Jayapal Say Medicare Expansion in Reconciliation Package 'Not Negotiable'

"This is what the American people want," the socialist senator from Vermont insisted.


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) appear at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 24, 2019. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

BRETT WILKINS

COMMON DREAMS

October 12, 2021

As congressional progressives push back against right-wing Democrats seeking to shrink the size and scope of the Build Back Better Act, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Tuesday insisted that expanded Medicare benefits must remain part of the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package.

"I do understand that the healthcare industry does not like this idea, but maybe, just maybe, we stand with the American people."

In a call with journalists reported by The Hill, Sanders (I-Vt.), who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, adamantly declared that dental, hearing, and vision benefits must be added to Medicare as part of the Democrats' flagship package.

"This to me is not negotiable," he said. "This is what the American people want."

Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, backed Sanders—the group's only Senate member—saying his stance is also "the position of the House Progressive Caucus."

Sanders, in recent tweets, has pointed to polling showing that expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision is overwhelmingly popular, with 84% of U.S. voters supporting the proposal. A new survey published Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation also found that 83% of respondents favor empowering Medicare to leverage its prodigious purchasing power to secure lower prescription drug prices.

Sanders noted industry opposition to Medicare expansion during Tuesday's call.

"I do understand that the healthcare industry does not like this idea, but maybe, just maybe, we stand with the American people," he said. "There are millions of seniors who have rotting teeth in their mouths or are unable to hear what their grandchildren are saying."

Echoing her progressive colleagues, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted: "We are fighting for roads and bridges, universal child care, Medicare expansion, and climate investments. We know what we need and progressives in Congress will continue to hold strong."

Earlier Tuesday, Common Dreams reported that eight House Democrats representing New York City—including progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman—sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) warning them against slashing funding for public housing, transportation, and immigration reform from the Build Back Better Act.

"We can't negotiate the reconciliation bill down to nothing," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

However, Pelosi indicated in a Monday letter to House colleagues that Democratic leaders are open to considering scaling back the proposed legislation to reduce its $3.5 trillion cost in a bid to win the support of right-wing Democrats including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who have balked at the bill's price tag.

Responding to the letter, Sanders said that "$3.5 trillion is already a major compromise."

Tweeting Tuesday against potential cuts in the bill, Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) said that "we cannot pit child care against Medicare expansion, or pre-K against free community college."

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The Media Keeps Getting It Wrong: The Democrats Are Not Divided

Just a few members out of the hundreds of Democrats elected to the House and Senate are stalling the President's agenda.

(L-R) Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and other Congressional Democrats hold a rally and news conference ahead of a House vote on health care and prescription drug legislation in the Rayburn Room at the U.S. Capitol May 15, 2019 in Washington, D.C. 

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

PETER DREIER

October 12, 2021

 by Talking Points Memo (TPM)

Historians describe Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 presidential victory (with 60.8% of the popular vote), Lyndon Johnson's 1964 triumph (61.1%), and Ronald Reagan's 1984 win (58.8%) as "landslide" elections. Likewise, in 2018, the San Diego Union-Tribune and many other news outlets described Democrat Gavin Newsom's defeat of Republican John Cox for the California governorship by a 62% to 32% margin as a "landslide." When a recent poll found that 65% of Americans support vote-by-mail during the COVID pandemic, a USA Today headline proclaimed that the support was "overwhelming." Reporting on a survey showing that 73% of American voters supported President Biden's plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, another news outlet, The Hill, described it as an "overwhelming majority." A news story reporting that 94% of American voters embrace universal background checks for gun-buyers called that support "near unanimous." A few years ago, another news story used the same phrase—"near unanimous"—when 61 of 64 coaches (95.3%) ranked the University of Alabama football team as the best in the country.

Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, typically described as "moderates" or "centrists," are the only hold-outs.

Currently, 96% of Democrats in Congress support President Biden's social safety net and clean energy reconciliation package, but the the media have consistently described the Democrats as "deeply divided," "fractious," "feuding," and even "in disarray" over the plan. "The Democrats are at war with each other," said Washington Post reporter Robert Costa on a recent episode of the Bill Maher show.

In the Senate, 48 of the 50 Democrats (96%) embrace the Biden legislation. Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, typically described as "moderates" or "centrists," are the only hold-outs.

In the House, 210 out of 220 Democrats (again, 96%) have indicated that they will vote for Biden's plan, which would invest $3.5 trillion over ten years in child care, education, health care, and climate change. Only 10 House Democrats (also described as "moderates" or "centrists")—Carolyn Bourdeaux (Georgia), Ed Case (Hawaii), Scott Peters and Jim Costa (California), Henry Cuellar, Filemon Vela, and Victor Gonzalez (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), and Kurt Schrader (Oregon)—are not yet on board the Biden plan.

The 95-member House Progressive Caucus initially embraced Senator Bernie Sanders' plan for a $6 trillion (over ten years) package, but agreed to support Biden's much trimmed-down $3.5 trillion alternative. As a result, almost every Democrat in Congress—all the progressives and liberals and even most of the so-called moderates—agree on the Biden plan.

In other words, the Democrats are quite unified. But they are being held hostage by a handful of corporate-friendly Democrats. The problem is that the Democrats' margins in both chambers are so slim that they can't afford defections. The Democrats are clinging to an eight-seat majority in the House. The Senate is split between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, requiring Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties votes. As a result, even a small number of defectors can derail the Democrats' agenda—forcing Biden to make huge cuts or killing the plan altogether—which gives the tiny handful of hold-outs undue influence.

This doesn't mean that 96% of elected Democrats who support the Biden plan agree on every policy issue, from abortion to bank regulation to military spending. Some disagree with parts of the president's plans, but are willing to swallow their concerns for the sake of unity. By embracing Biden's Build Back Better plan, they recognize the importance of restoring Americans' faith in the ability of the federal government to address fundamental problems and to help the country recover from the existential crisis we faced, and that still persists, because of Trump and Trumpism.

Soon after Biden took office in January, he, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to draft two bills that reflected key parts of the president's campaign promises. One involved a $1 trillion (over ten years) public-works infrastructure plan, about $550 billion of which would be new spending not previously allocated by Congress. The other focused on expanding the nation's social safety net and addressing climate change, and would cost $3.5 trillion over ten years—though that figure is misleadingly high, as explained below.

In August, the Senate approved a $1 trillion physical infrastructure plan to rebuild roads, replace water pipes that have toxic lead, expand broadband internet, shore up coastlines against climate change, modernize the electric grid, protect public utility systems from cyber attacks, pay for new public transportation, and upgrade airports and railroads. Speaker Pelosi has postponed a vote on that bill; Biden, Schumer and Pelosi have all insisted that both bills should move in unison.

The safety net and climate change plan is stuck primarily because Manchin and Sinema won't go along. Manchin has demanded that at least $2 trillion be lopped off Biden's plan, which would result in a $1.5 trillion bill—an amount that Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) dismissed as "crumbs." Sinema won't even say what her ideal figure is.

The Build Back Better plan would expand Medicare and, for the first time, provide dental, vision, and hearing coverage to the 60 million elderly and disabled Americans who rely on it. It would expand health care for roughly four million low-income people in the states (most of which are run by Republicans) that have refused to expand Medicaid on their own. The provision to expand the Child Tax Credit to $300 a month per child under six and $250 a month per child age 6 to 17 would cut child poverty by half, according to some estimates. The Biden plan would also offer free public pre-kindergarten and two years of free community college and provides 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, which would guarantee that all Americans have the time to care for themselves and their families and loved ones.

The plan also includes provisions to deal with climate change and cut greenhouse gas emissions, including a clean-electricity program designed to significantly reduce fossil fuel emissions from U.S. power plants by 2035. It would invest billions of dollars to build 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations and update the electrical grid to make it more effective during extreme weather events.

The Republicans and the handful of Democratic dissenters typically describe the plan as "massive," "big government," and "unprecedented."

In fact, the plan would only amount to roughly 1.5% of the country's gross domestic product. This is a smaller increase than that of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (which included Social Security and unemployment insurance) and President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (which included Medicare and Medicaid).

Even the $3.5 trillion figure is misleading. It would stretch over ten years, a fact that many news reports ignore or downplay. One expert estimated that the total cost is less than three dollars (actually $2.88) a day.

Moreover, the $3.5 trillion would be offset by $2.9 trillion in new revenue, according to recent estimates. So the actual cost is just $0.6 trillion.

To pay for the plan, Biden proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 26.5 percent on companies' annual income over $5 million. He's also proposed restoring the top tax rate to 39.6 percent on individuals earning more than $400,000—or $450,000 for couples—plus a 3 percent surtax on wealthier Americans with adjusted income over $5 million a year. As such, the plan would partially reverse the trillions that the Trump administration and the Republican Congress gave away to the wealthy and big business in tax cuts through their signature legislative achievement of the Trump era. Moreover, Biden's plan would reduce federal taxes for eight out of 10 households.

One thing is certain. Those Democratic dissenters are out of sync with what Americans—and not just Democratic voters—think.

The Democrats' plan is very popular among Americans.

A Quinnipiac poll conducted July 27-Aug. 2 asked, "Do you support or oppose a $3.5 trillion spending bill on social programs such as child care, education, family tax breaks and expanding Medicare for seniors?" and found 62% support, 32% opposition.

Support is even higher for some key provisions of the plan. For example, over two-thirds of voters (69%) support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. A whopping 84 percent of likely voters (including 74 percent of Republicans) support paid family leave programs. According to recent polls, 84% of voters want to expand Medicare coverage to include dental, vision and hearing; 88% want Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to reduced prescription drug prices. Data for Progress polling earlier this year found that nearly two thirds of likely voters support government action moving the country away from fossil fuels to a fully clean energy grid by 2035, including 86% of Democrats, 60% of independents, and 40% of Republicans.

So why are those two Democratic senators and 10 Democratic House members trying to subvert legislation that most Americans and 96% of their own colleagues support?

Most of the 10 House Democrats who are still waffling over the Biden plan are from swing congressional districts that they won by small margins, although other Democrats from battleground districts are on board with the plan. But in each of their districts, the Build Back Better plan would significantly improve the lives of their constituents as well as lower their taxes.

The opposition of the handful of Democrats can be explained in part by their close ties to big business and wealthy donors. They are doing the bidding of corporate America, which wants the physical infrastructure projects that is part of the separate $1 trillion bill, but doesn't want the higher taxes or stiffer regulations to reign in corporate greed that is part of the $3.5 trillion safety net and clean energy bill.

For example, Rep. Scott Peters of California is leading the opposition to the drug pricing provisions. Last month, he voted to block it from advancing out of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Since he was elected from his San Diego area district in 2012, the pharmaceutical industry has showered him with $860,465 in campaign donations. So far this year alone, he's received $88,550 from the drug lobby—the most of any member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending on the website OpenSecrets.org.

Manchin and Sinema insist that their stances reflect the concerns of voters in their home states. Last November, 68 percent of West Virginians voted for Trump, though Arizona narrowly went to Biden by a 49.4% to 49.1% margin.

But both West Virginia and Arizona are states with high levels of poverty and poorly funded schools and health centers, so there's no question that their residents would benefit from the plan's key provisions regarding health care, education, and other programs—indeed, more than residents of most other states. Manchin's insistence that the bill incorporate means tests and eligibility caps, and Sinema's fierce opposition to allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies to lower the price of medicine, will only hurt their constituents.

Manchin also has opposed many of the plan's provisions to deal with the climate crisis—provisions that could hurt both his political fundraising and his pocketbook. He's pocketed more contributions from coal, oil, and gas companies this campaign cycle than any senator, according to OpenSecrets. And his ties run deeper than the campaign donations he's received from these corporate interests. Last year, Manchin made half a million dollars in stock dividends from a coal company that is now controlled by his son, according to the New York Times. The Intercept reported that since joining the Senate, he has earned more than $4.5 million from that coal company and another, both of which he founded in the 1980s.

For her part, Sinema promised to push to lower prescription drug prices when she ran for the Senate in 2018. Now she's changed her tune, having taken in over $750, 000 from the pharmaceutical and medical device lobbies since then. In late September, Sinema held a fund-raiser with five business lobby groups that oppose the Biden bill.

Since Biden took office, America's corporations have significantly ramped up their campaign donations and lobbying efforts. According to OpenSecrets, corporations have deployed more than 4,000 lobbyists to scuttle core provisions of the Biden bill. During the first six months of this year, business groups spent $1.5 billion lobbying Congress, much of it directed at undermining the Build Back Better legislation. In addition, business lobby groups have significantly increased their campaign contributions to key members of Congress, including Manchin and Sinema.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, and other business lobby groups are investing big bucks to kill the proposed tax increases on big corporations and the rich. The oil and coal companies don't want to wean the country off fossil fuels and are working overtime to kill Biden's clean energy provisions. During just one week last month, oil giant Exxon Mobil spent $275,000 on Facebook ads against the Biden plan.

Prescription drug prices in the U.S. are about three times higher than in other affluent democratic countries, according to a RAND Corporation study. But the pharmaceutical companies don't want to negotiate with Medicare to lower drug prices and are swarming Congress with big donations and lobbying efforts. The industry spent $171 million and deployed almost 1,500 lobbyists through the first half of the year, more than any other industry. Even the American Dental Association is mobilizing its 162,000 members to fight a proposal to include dental coverage for all Medicare recipients

On behalf of their corporate benefactors, Manchin and Sinema may be sabotaging the potential success of Biden's presidency and the odds that the Democrats will have legislation to tout as they seek to maintain even their slim hold on Congress in next year's midterm elections. They may also be undermining the last best chance to address America's most pressing problems.

Democrats' support for the Biden plan is—pick your adjective—overwhelming or near unanimous.

If Biden's bill doesn't make it through Congress, don't blame "the Democrats." Blame every Republican, and the tiny faction of Democrats, who have put their personal ambitions over the public good.


Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College. He is the author of "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame" (2012) and an editor (with Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin) of "We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style" (2020). He is co-author of the forthcoming "Baseball Rebels: The Reformers and Radicals Who Shook Up the Game and Changed America" (2021).

Bolsonaro Accused of Crimes Against Humanity at ICC Over Amazon Destruction 

"Crimes against nature are crimes against humanity."

A climate change activist holds a sign depicting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro with the slogan "Exterminator of the Future" during a protest against the Brazilian leader over the fires in the Amazon rainforest on August 23, 2019. 

(Photo: Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images)


JULIA CONLEY

October 12, 2021

An Austrian environmental law group on Tuesday filed an official complaint at the International Criminal Court accusing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro of crimes against humanity for his administration's role in pushing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

"They are knowingly aiding and abetting the perpetrators on the ground committing crimes such as murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts."

The complaint by the organization, AllRise, highlights Bolsonaro's alleged actions since taking office in 2019 and their direct link to the heating of the planet, affecting not just Indigenous environmental defenders in the Amazon, but the global population as well.

"Crimes against nature are crimes against humanity," Johannes Wesemann, the founder of AllRise and its new project titled The Planet vs. Bolsonaro, said in a statement. "Jair Bolsonaro is fueling the mass destruction of the Amazon with eyes wide open and in full knowledge of the consequences. The ICC has a clear duty to investigate environmental crimes of such global gravity."

"With the power of the law and the support of the public, the ICC will need to act," the new initiative states. "Bolsonaro will be brought to justice."

Since Bolsonaro took office, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has risen by as much as 88% as the extreme right-wing president has attempted to open up the forest to more economic development.

In July 2019, the number of fires set in the Amazon—a frequent occurrence driven by ranching, agricultural, and mining interests—jumped 28% compared to the year prior, with the country's National Institute for Space Research recording 6,803 blazes in a month.

In the first year of Bolsonaro's presidency, more than 3,700 square miles of the Amazon were burned—a portion of the jungle equal to the size of Lebanon.

The president has also gutted regulations protecting the Amazon, with his administration reducing fines for illegal logging by 42%.

Environmental defenders, including many members of Indigenous tribes, have come under attack for trying to defend the forest, which serves as a crucial carbon sink for the planet as well as a habitat for more than three million species including 2,500 tree species.

"Bolsonaro will be brought to justice."

As Common Dreams reported last month, 20 environmental defenders in Brazil were killed in 2020, with several of the murders linked to the logging sector.

"We're saying as a result of the state policy that they are pursuing they are knowingly aiding and abetting the perpetrators on the ground committing crimes such as murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts," lawyer Nigel Povoas, who has prosecuted international crimes, told AFP.

Previously, Indigenous leaders in Brazil have issued formal complaints regarding Bolsonaro's alleged crimes against humanity at the ICC; in January, Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapo people and Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui of the Paiter Surui tribe accused the president fueling the "the assassination of Indigenous leaders," which was at an 11-year high, as well as deforestation.

AllRise said the complaint filed on Tuesday was the first to underscore the effects that Bolsonaro's attacks on the Amazon are having on the planet as a whole.

According to the organization, the emissions caused by Bolsonaro's policies will cause over 180,000 deaths related to excess heat this century.

"What's happening in Brazil—mass deforestation—we want to understand the causal link to the global climate," Wesemann told AFP Tuesday. "It is exactly what the Rome Statute defines as a crime against humanity: the intentional destruction of the environment and environmental defenders."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Brazil's Bolsonaro accused of 'crimes against humanity' at ICC
Agence France-Presse
October 12, 2021

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro AFP

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was accused Tuesday of "crimes against humanity" at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his alleged role in the destruction of the Amazon, the first case seeking to explicitly link deforestation to loss of life.

Planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from burning and industrial-scale agriculture in the Amazon are higher than the total annual emissions of Italy or Spain. Deforestation in the region already releases more CO2 than the rest of the Amazon can absorb.

Austrian environmental justice campaigners Allrise filed the official complaint at The Hague-based court Tuesday morning. They asked for legal proceedings against Bolsonaro and his administration for actions "directly connected to the negative impacts of climate change around the world".

The complaint accuses the Brazilian leader of waging a widespread campaign resulting in the murder of environmental defenders and of endangering the global population through emissions caused by deforestation.

It harnesses the growing field of climate attribution science, which allows researchers to prove a link between extreme weather events, on the one hand, and global heating and environmental degradation, on the other.

The team behind it said that Bolsonaro's administration had sought to "systematically remove, neuter, and eviscerate laws, agencies and individuals that serve to protect the Amazon".

It said that Bolsonaro was responsible for approximately 4,000 square kilometers (400,000 hectares) of lost rainforest each year, and that he had presided over monthly deforestation rates that had accelerated by up to 88 percent since taking office on January 1, 2019.


Bolsonaro's office did not respond to a request for comment from AFP.

- 'Intentional destruction' -

The team of experts estimated that emissions attributable to the Bolsonaro administration due to rampant deforestation will cause over 180,000 excess heat-related deaths globally this century.

"In the last few years, climate science has come a long way in being able to provide evidence of specific causal relationships between emissions of greenhouse gases and the consequences that arrive globally as a result," Rupert Stuart Smith, from the University of Oxford's Sustainable Law Programme, told AFP.

While there have been at least three other complaints by indigenous groups against Bolsonaro at the ICC since 2016, organisers say this one is the first to highlight the clear link between forest loss and global human health.

The Bolsonaro administration's actions 'are directly connected to the negative impacts of climate change around the world', says the complaint 

EVARISTO SA AFP/File

"What's happening in Brazil -- mass deforestation -- we want to understand the causal link to the global climate," AllRise founder Johannes Wesemann told AFP.

"It is exactly what the Rome Statute defines as a crime against humanity: the intentional destruction of the environment and environmental defenders."

The point of the complaint was "not to speak on behalf of any Brazilian, but rather to show the global gravity of mass deforestation", said Wesemann.


- 'Aiding, abetting murder' -

Lawyer Nigel Povoas, who has led prosecution of some of the most notorious international criminals, said the complaint was leveled against several individuals within Bolsonaro's administration.

"We're focusing on the most senior actors responsible," he told AFP.

"We're saying as a result of the state policy that they are pursuing they are knowingly aiding and abetting the perpetrators on the ground committing crimes such as murder, persecution and other inhumane acts."

The ICC has no obligation to consider complaints filed to the prosecutor by individuals or groups, and does not comment on them until the prosecutor announces that it has started a preliminary examination into a specific matter.

Maud Sarlieve, a human rights and international criminal lawyer said that were the Bolsonaro complaint to be pursued, it would send a clear message to individuals such as CEOs of fossil fuel companies: "Beware."

"The law is now allowing us to go after those who are ruthlessly and knowingly pursuing policies which clearly result in environmental destruction and an impact on civilian population," she said.

© 2021 AFP

What necessitates a new approach to urban planning subsequent to the coronavirus pandemic?

Zohreh A. Daneshpour, 

Shahid Beheshti University  

Purpose

This paper is about the lessons that can be learned from the Coronavirus pandemic 2020 for the Post-pandemic urban and regional planning. It discusses the essence of urban and regional planning during the post pandemic era and the necessity that a new approach to urban planning must be devised out of the coronavirus crisis. This is important as “recovery from the coronavirus crisis must lead to a better world” (due to the UN secretary general), i.e., a plea for a just and devoid of greed and war world and to radically change the political economy of societies to embrace an adapted and“ public welfare-orientated” urban and reginal planning system and rewrite urban regulations to promote sustainability and equity. Lessons that can be learned from this pandemic in terms of urban planning is that ‘urban problems are not only  related to climate change and natural disasters, but also to viral viruses. Thus, is that there is an urgent need to adapt planning thinking and practice in a way that is more responsive to disasters and also to the needs of all socio-economic groups and mainly the more deprived people. The immediate focus for cities is on stopping the spread of COVID-19, but next step is answering the question of: what would be the longer- term impact of a pandemic situation on urban and regional planning

https://www.academia.edu/50107649/What_necessitates_a_new_approach_to_urban_planning_subsequent_to_the_coronavirus_pandemic?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

 

The "Snipers' Massacre" on the Maidan in Ukraine and Revelations from Trials and Investigations

Ivan Katchanovski

40 Views20 Pages

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Criminology,

Eastern European Studies,

Criminal Justice,

Comparative Politics,

International Relations

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More Info: Paper presented at the “Regimes and Societies in Conflict: Eastern Europe and Russia since 1956" conference, the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, Uppsala.

Conference End Date: Sep 14, 2018

Conference Start Date: Sep 13, 2018

https://www.academia.edu/57358083/The_Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine_and_Revelations_from_Trials_and_Investigations?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Ivan Katchanovski

University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

Department Member

Ivan Katchanovski teaches at the School of Political Studies & Conflict Studies and Human Rights Program at the University of Ottawa. He was Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics at the State University of New York at Potsdam, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Kluge Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He received his Ph.D. from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Ivan Katchanovski is the author of Cleft Countries: Regional Political Divisions and Cultures in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova (Ibidem-Verlag) and co-author of Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (2d edition) (Rowman & Littlefield) and The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do, But Join Much Less (Cornell University Press). His articles were published in such refereed journals as Canadian Journal of Higher Education, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, European Politics and Society, International Journal of Public Administration, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Journal of Labor Research, Journal of Labor and Society, Journal of Public Policy, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Nationalities Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism, Relations industrielles/Industrial Relations, and Ukraina moderna. His publications, interviews, and comments appeared in numerous media outlets, such as Associated Press, BBC Ukrainian, Canadian Press, CBC News, CBC Radio, CTV News, Financial Post, Fox 9 News, France Télévisions, Daily Beast, Euronews, Global TV, Globe and Mail, Guardian, La Presse, Métro, Omni Television, National Post, Reuters, Vice, Washington Post, Washington Times, Yahoo News Canada, ABC Radio, Al-Jazeera, Annahar, Channel One, Consortium News, East & West, Expresso, Euronews, German public radio, Jyllands-Posten, La Razón, Metro World News, Moscow Times, Onet, OpenDemocracy, OstWest, Prague Post, Pravda (Slovakia), R24, Radio National, Real News, RT, Rubikon, Transitions Online (Central Europe Review), Veja, 112 Ukraine, 24 Channel, Apostrophe, Avers, First National Channel, ICTV, Holos Ukrainy, Kommentarii, Kyiv Post, NewsOne, Radio Liberty, Radio Svoboda, RBC Ukraine, Strana, STB, Volyn TV, and Ukrainska pravda.less

Researchers say fossil shows humans, dogs lived in Central America in 10,000 BC

Agence France-Presse
October 12, 2021

Researchers believe this fossil of a jaw bone found in Costa Rica belongs to a dog that lived 12,000 years ago - Proyecto Xulo/AFP

The fossil of a jaw bone could prove that domesticated dogs lived in Central America as far back as 12,000 years ago, according to a study by Latin American scientists.

The dogs, and their masters, potentially lived alongside giant animals, researchers say.

A 1978 dig in Nacaome, northeast Costa Rica, found bone remains from the Late Pleistocene.

Excavations began in the 1990s and produced the remains of a giant horse, Equus sp, a glyptodon (a large armadillo), a mastodon (an ancestor of the modern elephant) and a piece of jaw from what was originally thought to be a coyote skull

"We thought it was very strange to have a coyote in the Pleistocene, that is to say 12,000 years ago," Costa Rican researcher Guillermo Vargas told AFP.

"When we started looking at the bone fragments, we started to see characteristics that could have been from a dog.

"So we kept looking, we scanned it... and it showed that it was a dog living with humans 12,000 years ago in Costa Rica."

The presence of dogs is a sign that humans were also living in a place.

"We thought it was strange that a sample was classified as a coyote because they only arrived in Costa Rica in the 20th century."

- First of its kind -

The coyote is a relative of the domestic dog, although with a different jaw and more pointed teeth.

"The dog eats the leftovers from human food. Its teeth are not so determinant in its survival," said Vargas.

Costa Rican researcher Guillermo Vargas says the fossil sample could be the oldest evidence of a dog in the Americas 

Ezequiel BECERRA AFP

"It hunts large prey with its human companions. This sample reflects that difference."

Humans are believed to have emigrated to the Americas across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska during the last great ice age.

"The first domesticated dogs entered the continent about 15,000 years ago, a product of Asians migrating across the Bering Strait," said Raul Valadez, a biologist and zooarcheologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

"There have never been dogs without people," Valadez told AFP by telephone.

The presence of humans during the Pleistocene has been attested in Mexico, Chile and Patagonia, but never in Central America, until now.

"This could be the oldest dog in the Americas," said Vargas.


So far, the oldest attested dog remains were found in Alaska and are 10,150 years old.

Originally though to be that of a coyote, the jaw sample's teeth are not as pointy and thus more likely to be that of a dog

 Proyecto Xulo/AFP

Oxford University has offered to perform DNA and carbon dating tests on the sample to discover more genetic information about the animal and its age.

The fossil is currently held at Costa Rica's national museum but the sample cannot be re-identified as a dog without validation by a specialist magazine.

"This dog discovery would be the first evidence of humans in Costa Rica during a period much earlier" than currently thought, said Vargas.

"It would show us that there were societies that could keep dogs, that had food surpluses, that had dogs out of desire and that these weren't war dogs that could cause damage."


© 2021 AFP

ICYMI

Israel Foreign Minister Lapid thanks Speaker Pelosi for help with Iron Dome replenishment

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid in his Wash DC meeting with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thanked her for being a "great friend of Israel."

Arutz Sheva Staff , Oct 12 , 2021

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
Shlomi Amsalem

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi during his Washington DC trip that also includes talks with senior Biden White House officials on the matter of Iran.

"Madam Speaker, you’re such a great friend of Israel and I know how important the special relationship between our countries is to you," Lapid said.

Lapid added that Pelosi is "one of the biggest supporters" of the concept that being pro-Israel is a bipartisan position.

"We all need to unite around the idea of expanding and deepening the circle of peace," he said. "We all need to unite around the basic principle that Israel has the right to defend itself and the Palestinians deserve a better life. We all need to unite around the idea that we will never let Iran become a nuclear threshold state."

Lapid also thanked Pelosi for her help in getting Iron Dome legislation passed by Congress.

"Madam Speaker, I want to use this opportunity to thank you personally for all your great help with the replenishment of the Iron Dome. This is the defense of our children and our people. I know you cared about it and you spent sleepless nights over it, and so I’m very thankful."

Supreme Court justices’ views on abortion in their own words and votes

The justices have had a lot to say about abortion over the years — in opinions, votes, Senate confirmation testimony and elsewhere


J. Scott Applewhite, The Associated Press In this Oct. 4, 2021 photo, the Supreme Court is seen on the first day of the new term, in Washington. Abortion already is dominating the Supreme Court’s new term, months before the justices will decide whether to reverse decisions reaching back nearly 50 years. Not only is there Mississippi’s call to overrule Roe v. Wade, but the court also soon will be asked again to weigh in on the Texas law banning abortion at roughly six weeks.

By MARK SHERMAN and JESSICA GRESKO | The Associated Press
PUBLISHED: October 11, 2021 

WASHINGTON — Abortion already is dominating the Supreme Court’s new term, months before the justices will decide whether to reverse decisions reaching back nearly 50 years. Not only is there Mississippi’s call to overrule Roe v. Wade, but the court also soon will be asked again to weigh in on the Texas law banning abortion at roughly six weeks.

The justices won’t be writing on a blank state as they consider the future of abortion rights in the U.S. They have had a lot to say about abortion over the years — in opinions, votes, Senate confirmation testimony and elsewhere. Just one, Clarence Thomas, has openly called for overruling Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two cases that established and reaffirmed a woman’s right to an abortion. Here is a sampling of their comments:

Chief Justice John Roberts

Roberts voted to uphold restrictions in two major abortion cases, in the majority in 2007 to uphold a ban on a method of abortion opponents call “partial-birth abortion” and in dissent in 2016 when the court struck down Texas restrictions on abortion clinics in a case called Whole Woman’s Health. But when a virtually identical law from Louisiana came before the court in 2020, Roberts voted against it and wrote the opinion controlling the outcome of the case and striking down the Louisiana law. The chief justice said he continues to believe that the 2016 case “was wrongly decided” but that the question was “whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.”

Roberts’ views on when to break with court precedent could determine how far he is willing to go in the Mississippi case. At his 2005 confirmation hearing, he said overturning precedent “is a jolt to the legal system,” which depends in part on stability and evenhandedness. Thinking that an earlier case was wrongly decided is not enough, he said. Overturning a case requires looking “at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the Court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments,” Roberts said then.

In the same hearing, Roberts was asked to explain his presence on a legal brief filed by the George H.W. Bush administration that said Roe’s conclusion that there is a right to abortion has “no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.’ Roberts responded that the brief reflected the administration’s views.

Justice Clarence Thomas

Thomas voted to overturn Roe in 1992, in his first term on the court, when he was a dissenter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He has repeatedly called for Roe and Casey to be overturned since.

In 2000, he wrote in dissent when the court struck down Nebraska’s ban on “partial-birth abortion.” Recounting the court’s decision in Roe, he wrote, “In 1973, this Court struck down an Act of the Texas Legislature that had been in effect since 1857, thereby rendering unconstitutional abortion statutes in dozens of States. As some of my colleagues on the Court, past and present, ably demonstrated, that decision was grievously wrong. Abortion is a unique act, in which a woman’s exercise of control over her own body ends, depending on one’s view, human life or potential human life. Nothing in our Federal Constitution deprives the people of this country of the right to determine whether the consequences of abortion to the fetus and to society outweigh the burden of an unwanted pregnancy on the mother. Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so.”

Justice Stephen Breyer

Breyer has been the lead author of two court majorities in defense of abortion rights, in 2000 and 2016. He has never voted to sustain an abortion restriction, but he has acknowledged the controversy over abortion.

Millions of Americans believe “that an abortion is akin to causing the death of an innocent child,” while millions of others “fear that a law that forbids abortion would condemn many American women to lives that lack dignity,” he wrote in the Nebraska case 21 years ago, calling those views “virtually irreconcilable.” Still, Breyer wrote, because the Constitution guarantees “fundamental individual liberty” and has to govern even when there are strong divisions in the country, “this Court, in the course of a generation, has determined and then redetermined that the Constitution offers basic protection to the woman’s right to choose.”

Justice Samuel Alito

Alito has a long track record of votes and writings opposing abortion rights, as a jurist and, earlier, a government lawyer.

Alito has voted to uphold every abortion law the court has considered since his 2006 confirmation, joining a majority to uphold the federal “partial-birth” abortion law and dissenting in the 2016 and 2020 cases.

As a federal appeals court judge, he voted to uphold a series of Pennsylvania abortion restrictions, including requiring a woman to notify her spouse before obtaining an abortion. The Supreme Court ultimately struck down the notification rule in Casey and reaffirmed the abortion right in 1992 by a 5-4 vote.

Working for the Reagan administration in 1985, Alito wrote in a memo that the government should say publicly in a pending abortion case “that we disagree with Roe v. Wade.” Around the same time, applying for a promotion, Alito noted he was “particularly proud” of his work arguing “that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Sotomayor joined the court in 2009 with virtually no record on abortion issues, but has voted repeatedly in favor of abortion rights since then. Recently, when the court allowed Texas’ restrictive abortion law to take effect, Sotomayor accused her colleagues of burying “their heads in the sand.” She was in the majority in the Texas and Louisiana abortion clinic cases.

Sotomayor’s displeasure with the court’s recent Texas ruling was evident at a recent virtual appearance she made. “I can’t change Texas’ law, but you can,” she said.

Justice Elena Kagan

Kagan also has repeatedly voted in favor of abortion rights in more than 11 years as a justice. She is also arguably the most consistent voice on the court arguing for the importance of adhering to precedents and can be expected to try to persuade her colleagues not to jettison constitutional protections for abortion.

Kagan was in the majority when the court struck down the Texas and Louisiana restrictions on abortion clinics. More recently, Kagan called Texas’ new abortion law “patently unconstitutional” and a “clear, and indeed undisputed, conflict with Roe and Casey.”

Kagan had already grappled with the issue of abortion before becoming a justice. While working in the Clinton White House she was the co-author of a memo that urged the president for political reasons to support a late-term abortion ban proposed by Republicans in Congress, so long as it contained an exception for the health of the woman. Ultimately, President George W. Bush signed a similar late-term abortion ban without a health exception. The Supreme Court upheld it.

Justice Neil Gorsuch

Gorsuch has perhaps the shortest record on abortion among the nine justices. He was in the majority allowing Texas’ restrictive abortion law to take effect. In dissent in 2020, he would have upheld Louisiana’s abortion clinic restrictions. As an appeals court judge before joining the Supreme Court in 2017, Gorsuch dissented when his colleagues declined to reconsider a ruling that blocked then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert from cutting off funding for the state branch of Planned Parenthood. But Gorsuch insisted at his Senate confirmation hearing that he was concerned about procedural issues, not the subject matter. “I do not care if the case is about abortion or widgets or anything else,” he said.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh

Kavanaugh’s name was added to former President Donald Trump’s shortlist of Supreme Court candidates shortly after he sided with the administration in a 2017 case involving abortion. Trump chose him for the court the following year. As a justice, Kavanaugh dissented from the Louisiana decision and voted to allow the new Texas law to take effect, though he has taken a less absolutist stance than some of his conservative colleagues. In the Louisiana case, for example, Kavanaugh wrote that more information was needed about how the state’s restrictions on clinics would affect doctors who provide abortions and seemed to suggest his vote could change knowing that information.

Kavanaugh’s most extensive writing on abortion came while he was a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington. The Trump administration had appealed a lower court ruling ordering it to allow a pregnant 17-year-old immigrant in its custody to get an abortion. The administration’s policy was to decline to help those minors get abortions while in custody.

Kavanaugh was on a three-judge panel that postponed the abortion, arguing that officials should be given a limited window to transfer the minor out of government custody to the care of a sponsor. She could then obtain an abortion without the government’s assistance. The full appeals court later reversed the decision and the teenager obtained an abortion. Kavanaugh called that decision out-of-step with the “many majority opinions of the Supreme Court that have repeatedly upheld reasonable regulations that do not impose an undue burden on the abortion right recognized by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.”

Kavanaugh was criticized by some conservatives for not going as far as a colleague, Judge Karen Henderson, who stated unambiguously that an immigrant in the U.S. illegally has no right to an abortion. At his appeals court confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh dodged questions on his own personal beliefs on Roe v. Wade.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

Barrett’s one public vote on the Supreme Court concerning abortion was to allow the Texas “fetal heartbeat” law to take effect. She also cast two votes as an appeals court judge to reconsider rulings that blocked Indiana abortion restrictions.

In 2016, shortly before the election that would put Trump in office, she commented about how she thought abortion law might change if Trump had the chance to appoint justices. “I … don’t think the core case — Roe’s core holding that, you know, women have a right to an abortion — I don’t think that would change,” said Barrett, then a Notre Dame law professor. She said limits on what she called “very late-term abortions” and restrictions on abortion clinics would be more likely to be upheld.

Barrett also has a long record of personal opposition to abortion rights, co-authoring a 1998 law review article that said abortion is “always immoral.” At her 2017 hearing to be an appeals court judge, Barrett said in written testimony, “If I am confirmed, my views on this or any other question will have no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge.”