Category Archives: Federalist

The Senate launched its second impeachment trial targeting ex-President Donald Trump Tuesday, the same week one year ago that the upper chamber exonerated the president of impeachment the first time.

This years trial, expected to last around two weeks, shares remarkable similarities to last years, when the coronavirus brewing overseas threatened to wreak havoc on the world while Congress distracted itself with a pointless impeachment. Only this time, the coronavirus is here, with new variants well on their way to becoming the dominant strains in the United States and a struggling vaccination campaign impeding efforts to combat the virus.

Meanwhile, the United States finds itself fending off far more problems this year than it did last. Draconian lockdowns have strangled the economy, provoked a housing crisis, kept kids out of school, traumatized the nations psyche, and exacerbated divisions. Yet Democrats remain laser-focused on impeaching a man already out of office for a made-up crime their own standards would indict themselves for having committed. Once again, Trump Derangement Syndrome controls Democratic priorities.

House Democrats passed the snap impeachment last month within one week of the Capitol riot Democrats charged Trump for inciting. Trump, goes the Democratic tale, rallied his horde of supporters at the White House and ordered them to march down to the Capitol building to storm each chamber certifying the results of the presidential election.

An honest reading of the transcript that day, however, shows no such incitement. However irresponsibly, Trump simply encouraged supporters to demonstrate peacefully in opposition of congressional certification of the Electoral College vote.

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard, Trump said. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections.

A timeline of the events compiled by The New York Times further shows rioters launched their assault on the Capitol a full 20 minutes before the president had even finished speaking. Its hard to incite whats already started.

Many who stormed the Capitol that day had also already come to Washington prepared to riot, apparently determined to engage in the Antifa-style destruction to make their voices heard. After months of Democrats normalizing political violence when it came from the left, a scattered few felt this was now also their only option.

Some came armed for battle and planning for war,' Reuters reported of the rioters in January, chronicling those who carried weapons and explosives to the riot.

Over the course of the impeachment trial this week and next, no Democrat will read remarks from the president demanding his supporters bring firearms to the Capitol to stop the steal, because they dont exist. Yet one year after their first pointless impeachment, Democrats are once again distracting a nation facing serious problems on multiple fronts to take out a man already out of the Oval Office.

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Democrats Distract Government With 'Groundhog Day' Impeachment - The Federalist

Once upon a time, way back in 2019, it was considered virtuous for pregnant women to obsessively Google or ask their doctors about every behavior that might conceivably affect their baby. Is it okay to go swimming? To eat lunch meat? To use hairspray?

Over the course of mere months, however, one behavior has become taboo to question as safe for pregnancy: mask-wearing.

The TV screen in my OB-GYNs waiting room says its safe, after all. The World Health Organization recommends pregnant women wear a non-medical, fabric mask where physical distancing isnt possible, while the Centers for Disease control unequivocally states that pregnant women can and should wear cloth masks.

If the CDC and WHO abided by their own standards of evidence in use before the pandemic, however, they wouldnt have jumped to recommend masks without so much as a caveat about the unknown level of safety of long-term mask use in pregnancy. The CDC comments in a page last reviewed in October 2019 that some masks make it harder to breathe, and this can sometimes cause difficulties (particularly late in pregnancy).

Summarized on a linked CDC page is a one-hour study of N95 masks during rest and exercise, which found the effects were mild and there was no difference in effect between pregnant and non-pregnant women. The CDC noted that more studies are needed to find out if there are any additional effects from wearing an N95 FFR for longer periods of time.

That page did not mention another study conducted in 2015 of 20 pregnant health-care workers in mid-pregnancy, which showed a decrease [in] oxygen uptake and increase [in] carbon dioxide production as a result of the increased workload on breathing imposed by mask use, both at rest and low work intensity.

In researching this topic, I could find only a handful of studies on mask use in pregnant women, and none on the cloth face masks recommended to this group. Neither could I find any studies with observation periods longer than an hour, much less studies of the long-term impacts of maternal mask use on child development (like the scores we have for drug and alcohol use).

Even if those studies exist, neither the CDC nor the WHO have cited any robust study that says, Yes, long-term mask use during pregnancy is safe for mother and baby. Millions of pregnant women are now guinea pigs for mask use, without health organizations or government agencies even having the decency to be honest about it.

Indeed, the claim that frequent mask use for extended periods of time is completely harmless to the general public has already broken down: Mask mouth puts frequent mask wearers on the path to gum disease, which in other contexts has been found to be connected to other serious health problems, like heart disease, diabetes, and premature birth.

The contention that COVID is so dangerous its worth engaging in an untested behavior in an attempt to avoid it doesnt hold water, either. The CDC has been tracking pregnancy and birth outcomes for women and babies with COVID, including birth defects and pregnancy loss. The most its November report could conclude is that pregnant women with COVID might be at risk for preterm birth. A July 2020 systematic review of published studies found insufficient good-quality data to draw unbiased conclusions on COVID-related health outcomes for mothers and infants.

Neither the WHO nor CDC recommended face coverings for pregnant women (except health-care workers) with the H1N1 outbreak despite the fact that the H1N1 fatality rate among pregnant women was far higher than from other influenza types, and the favorable results for mask-wearing from the first randomized controlled trial of mask use in households came out in 2008. In addition, numerous transmission studies of mask use over the last decade (see this compilation of studies with moderate to high quality of evidence by the WHO) have found against mask efficacy.

For mask use, there should be high demand for clear evidence of safety for pregnant women and their babiesthe same level of evidence the CDC demands of virtually every other health-related behavior in pregnancy. Just compare the CDC and WHOs unflinching support for something so poorly studied to their abstinence-only approach to alcohol use, despite studies of thousands of pregnancies showing no significant effect of minimal drinking on babies health.

If the CDC and WHO were consistent, they would treat long-term mask use by pregnant women more like they treat alcohol use: theres no definitive evidence that its safe, and therefore it cannot be endorsed.

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CDC, WHO Push Masks On Pregnant Women Without Evidence Of Safety - The Federalist

New York Times TikTok reporter Taylor Lorenz has veered from her usual reporting on the activities of online teenagers to the activities of Silicon Valley tech bros in the hopes of catching them in the act of something problematic, but her latest self-own suggests she should stick to her TikTok beat instead.

In her eagerness to slander venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on Saturday night, Lorenz fired off a tweet falsely claiming he said the word retarded in an online audio chatroom on the social media app Clubhouse, which Andreessen is himself an investor in.

A moderator of the chat and several others pointed out Andreessen never used the reported slur.

Instead of issuing a correction or an apology for the inaccurate reporting fired off to her 210,000 followers, Lorenz doubled down with an insufficient excuse for the slander, deleted the tweets, then took her Twitter account private. Her clarifying tweets also condescendingly shamed everyone to think more carefully about using the r-word without explaining any context of how the word was actually used.

For months, Lorenz has obsessed over Andreessen and conversations on Clubhouse. Last fall, Lorenz alleged that several men on the platform were perpetrating malicious sexual behavior on the app, tweeting that it was rife with sexism and misogyny. She quickly blocked other Clubhouse users who challenged her allegations.

On Feb. 2, she bragged on Twitter about circumventing the apps feature blocking journalists from chatrooms by establishing a burner account.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, Lorenz is acting as an online hall monitor, deputized by the New York Times, to tattle on and ultimately silence those who they dislike. Journalists are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them, Greenwald wrote.

Greenwald called out CNNs Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy for similar behavior, but it is Lorenz who has dominated the citizen surveillance beat for years.

In 2018 at the Daily Beast, Lorenz doxed Instagram-famous teenagers for the crime of having parents with conservative political beliefs. The Daily Beast proudly announced it was Lorenzs reporting that got the teens show on Oath canceled.

In 2020, Lorenz lashed out at female entrepreneur Steph Korey for her thoughts on the media. After making factual errors and mischaracterizing Koreys statements, Lorenz played the victim of those calling her out.

When the Times published an op-ed by Sen.Tom Cotton last summer, titled Send in the Troops,Lorenz was one of the outspoken Times employees calling the opinion pages decision one that put black staff in danger.

Time and again, Lorenz shows to be on the side of canceling or shutting down anyone or any speech she dislikes or finds dangerous. She even admitted as much in an interview with Katie Herzog on cancel culture in 2019.

I think the way people use cancel culture is this shorthand way of dismissing whatever accusations are against them, Lorenz told Herzog. My general take on it is that its very toxic but also necessary. We are in the correction phase right now and everyone is indiscriminately calling each other out, and thats because were working to set new standards and norms as a society.

The correction phase is a phrase that comes out of the mouth of a communist dictator or a Gestapo officer, not an American journalist. Lorenz is not committed to the First Amendment or free speech of any kind. Instead, she spends her time trolling social media and online chat rooms looking for fireable offenses, and when she cant find them, she fabricates and falsely attributes instead.

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New York Times TikTok Reporter Is So Committed To Thought Policing She Makes Up Crimes - The Federalist

The war on the rich is escalating on both coasts. While Democrats argue theyre righteously demanding the wealthy pay their fair share, its the middle class who will pay the biggest price.

Legislation labeled a wealth tax targets the wealthy. In Washington state, billionaires would be hit with a 1 percent tax on intangible assets. New Yorks legislation includes tax hikes on income, capital gains, inheritance, and even stock trades.

Seattle state Rep. Noel Frame introduced the legislation to target Washingtons roughly 100 billionaires a list that includes Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Ballmer hitting them with a 1 percent tax on intangible assets including publicly traded options, futures contracts, stocks, and bonds, and cash without taxing their income.

In an interview with ABC News, Frame claims this isnt really about the billionaires whose bank accounts shell plunder. It actually really isnt about them, its about the working people of Washington who right now are disproportionally paying for community investments like public education, public health, you name it, she said. This is about equity in the tax code.

The argument is that Washington has the most regressive tax code in the United States due to high sales and property taxes but no income tax. Thus, in terms of the share of their earnings, low-income Washingtonians pay more than the wealthy do. Its a noble attempt to sound like Democrats care about the little guy. Its also an argument easy to reject.

The wealth tax doesnt lower sales or property taxes with the estimated $2.5 billion new dollars it brings to the state coffers. In fact, Democrats are currently trying to raise the gas tax to what would become the highest in the country. It would mean Washingtonians could pay nearly $1 per gallon in gas taxes something that seems awfully regressive, indeed.

Frame argues the gas tax is meant to discourage driving because its bad for the environment. Tell that to a single mother who needs to drive to two jobs across town so she can afford the high property tax rates untouched by Frames wealth tax.

While Frame believes a gas tax would push drivers to stop driving, shes convinced a wealth tax wouldnt push billionaires to do anything different like moving. Once again, it would benefit her to talk to some billionaires. While a handful of outspoken wealthy liberals seem content on paying more though for some reason dont just write over checks to the government on their own others understand the dangers of these taxes.

Orion Hindawi, a billionaire CEO of a cybersecurity company, moved to Washington to escape Californias anti-business tax structure. He knows Silicon Valley billionaires looking to move will see it as an unwelcome sign. People can argue that its right or its wrong, but its somewhat irrelevant, he said. The question is actually do you want these people moving to your state or not?

Perhaps Hindawi could ask his wealthy, liberal Silicon Valley friends, reading the writing on the wall in Washington or New York, to realize that theyre likely headed to a tax-friendly, conservative state. The kind of state their tech companies are seeking to destroy, run by politicians their platforms are trying to silence.

Unconvinced the wealthy will flee? Turn your gaze towards New York City, where the wealthiest residents left the city when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It devastated the city, crushing the housing market.

As they decide what to do next, a report in Bloomberg says the wealthy are looking favorably at Florida due to the states lack of income tax. Indeed, if they return to New York, they may get hit with a series of new taxes considerably more aggressive than whats happening in Washington.

Democratic Party politicians, along with a coalition of socialists and modern leftists like U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and New York state Rep. Jamaal Bowman, are pushing the Invest in Our New York Act that would smack the wealthy with $50 billion in new taxes, including raised income tax rates as well as increased capital gains and estate and inheritance taxes.

Unfortunately, it doesnt end there. Brooklyn state Sen. Julia Salazar is pushing in a Wall Street Tax, which collects 0.5 percent of the value of stock trades, 0.1 percent of bond trades, and .005 percent of derivative trades.

A letter signed by the states most powerful economic groups, including the New York Stock Exchange, warned New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that the tax could lead financial firms to move their back-office operations and related jobs outside of New York.

Its hard to envision where such burdensome tax proposals will end and if todays radical leftists would ever be satisfied. What is for sure, however, is that itll ultimately be the middle class that pays the biggest price.

As the wealthy flee the oppressive taxes of places like California (and hopefully reevaluate their politics), their flight places heavier burdens on those who cant afford to leave: the middle class in blue states. Even though these folks have so much to give, it wont matter to a radical base pushing these tax policies.

Socialist and leftist activists view anyone approaching a six-figure salary as wealthy, regardless of where they live. If the wild tax proposals in Washington and New York pass, the momentum may well be hard to stop. And, when that happens, say prayers your state wont be next.

Jason Rantz is a Seattle-based talk show host on KTTH Radio and a frequent guest on FOX News. Follow him on Twitter @JasonRantz and subscribe to his podcast.

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The Middle Class Will End Up Paying For The Left's War On The Rich - The Federalist

Dolly Parton is an American icon whos hard to hate, but the corporate media still managed to find fault with her Super Bowl ad on Sunday. Partnering with Squarespace, Parton resurrected a song from her 1980 musical 9 to 5 and redubbed it 5 to 9, celebrating the dreams and side hustles that many Americans pursue outside business hours.

Working five to nine, youve got passion and a vision, Parton sings in the colorful and delightfully choreographed ad. Its hustlin time, a whole new way to make a livin. Gonna change your life, do something that gives it meaning.

From a drab office, the camera pans to young men and women dancing across a landscaping business, a carpentry shop, a beauty salon (in which Parton makes a cameo on a magazine cover), and a cakeshop. You got dreams, and you know they matter, Parton continues. Be your own boss and climb your own ladder.

Its an ad for Squarespaces website platform, but its also a peppy tribute to creativity, passion, and work ethic. The reaction from most corporate media, however, largely slammed the song as off-key.

The Washington Post accused Parton of advocating for overworking yourself in a time when people barely have the energy to take care of themselves. Slate called the song off-key, noting that the rise of the gig economy often replaces full-time opportunities with freelance or part-time ones while presenting it as a hustletocracy fueled by passion.

NBC News published a piece titled Dolly Partons 2021 Super Bowl commercial is playing a rich mans game, which called the commercial a perfect storm of gig economy propaganda that downplay[s] how hard it is for so many gig workers to make ends meet. New York Times editor Jessica Bennett lamented, As American women deal with ongoing job losses, economic challenges and just plain fatigue, they could use a more accurate anthem.

Newsweek called the ad a ballad extolling an economy that requires too many to endlessly work just to survive, saying, Previous generations fought for humane laws governing work and they fought to build unions that would negotiate better pay so that there was less necessity to try to piece together more money on the side just to make ends meet. Newsweeks David Sirota continued, That used to be the American Dream.

While Sirota is certainly right that hard work should ideally be enough to make ends meet, Dolly Parton seems to have a better grasp on the American Dream than he does. Born in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, Parton is no stranger to poverty. Her parents paid the doctor who delivered her with a bag of cornmeal. Reminiscent of the entrepreneurs Parton cheers in the video, her father was a sharecropper who was eventually able to own his own tobacco farm.

Partons own career is a testament to the American Dream, as she went from singing about corncob dolls as a young girl and playing on a hand-me-down guitar from her uncle to now being an icon who needs no introduction. More than attaining commercial success, however, the American Dream is about the freedom to work hard at something you believe in. The entrepreneurial spirit captured in the Super Bowl commercial celebrates the courageous Americans who do just that.

Many of the criticisms leveled at the ad warn that making a living as an Airbnb host or an Uber driver isnt sustainable, and Parton shouldnt be encouraging people to leave their reliable jobs for these gigs. Of course, no one disagrees that its tragic the coronavirus lockdowns have cost jobs and forced many Americans into financial hardship. But these criticisms miss the commercials message.

Dolly Parton isnt necessarily advocating for people to make a little extra money as delivery drivers in addition to their 9-to-5 jobs (though Im sure she would applaud the work ethic of people who do). The careers exemplified in the commercial look like full-on small businesses, launched not as permanent side hustles but as potential full-time passions. In fact, the Super Bowl commercial explicitly encourages, Make your 5 to 9 full time, and Parton sings, Be your own boss and climb your own ladder. That moments getting closer by the day.

In its announcement of its partnership with Parton, Squarespace described the song as a modern rallying cry for all the dreamers working to turn an after-hours passion or project into a career with Squarespace. The ad isnt just celebrating people who work their 9-to-5 jobs and work a side gig. Its also encouraging those who, discontent with working for big national corporations, choose to start their own businesses in their local communities.

My advice to entrepreneurs during this challenging time is dont give up, said Parton in an interview with Squarespace. Dont stop working and dont ever stop dreaming.

Theres nothing un-American or wrong with working for a corporation, but there is something uniquely American about the innovation, creativity, and hard work that Dolly Parton represents and celebrates. Far from out-of-place in the middle of a pandemic, a message of innovation and hard work has enabled Americans to overcome adversity with resilience and hope.

Elle Reynolds is an intern at the Federalist, and a senior at Patrick Henry College studying government and journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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Dolly Parton's Super Bowl Ad Celebrates The American Dream - The Federalist

On Feb. 9, 2021, the first day of former President Donald J. Trumps second impeachment trial, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) joined 43 other Republican senators in declaring the proceedings unconstitutional. His vote ran counter to the legal opinion of many leaders in the Federalist Society the massively influential, behind-the-scenes conservative legal network with roots at Harvard that helped Cruz rise to power.

Steven Calabresi, one of the Societys co-founders, even signed a bipartisan letter affirming the constitutionality of Trumps second impeachment.

This was among the first visible fissures in an organization that reached its peak of power during the Trump administration. During his presidency, Trump appointed three judges to the Supreme Court and 54 to the federal Courts of Appeals. All but eight of them have close ties to the Federalist Society, almost double of those appointed under President George W. Bush.

Another signatory of the letter, Charles Fried the faculty advisor to the Harvard Federalist Society attributes this rise to a devils bargain in which the legal network traded its intellectual honesty for influence.

But other critics of the organization say this is closer to a natural alliance: that the Federalist Society has never been intellectually consistent, and that the legal theories it advocates have all along been cover for the naked pursuit of partisan policy goals.

Regardless, the Federalist Societys rise from little more than an alternative conservative journal started by students who felt picked on at Harvard Law in the 1970s the same journal with which Ted Cruz got his start has been meteoric.

In the four decades since its founding, the Federalist Societys network has radically altered the shape of the American legal system. Beyond placing judges in the nations highest courts and influencing presidential administrations, it has remade the very way judges write opinions, pushing once-fringe interpretive theories of originalism and textualism into the foreground of American law and offering judges the language to justify previously unthinkable decisions, which favor conservative and libertarian political aims. Harvard Law School was the cradle for and has been, in many ways, a driving force behind the organizations success.

A month before Trumps second trial, when Cruz objected to the certification of the presidential election just hours after the insurrection those objections had helped incite, Harvard Law School professor Duncan Kennedy thought back to the grievances he believed gave rise to the Federalist Society.

The rage of some Harvard law students [in the 1980s] at being bullied and ostracized translates directly into the vote of Ted Cruz in the Senate last week, he said.

Indeed, Cruzs frustration from those days when conservatives were laughed out of classrooms has followed him past the gates of Harvard Law. It may have been a strain of that same frustration which led him to falsely claim, before an audience of conservative activists at a 2010 Americans for Prosperity luncheon in Austin, Texas, There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty [at Harvard Law School] when we were there than Communists!

The senators false conviction, according to his press office, traces back to a struggle at Harvard in the 1980s over Critical Legal Studies: a left-wing academic movement so threatening to the conservative establishment that the backlash it faced helped fuel the Federalist Societys staggering ascent.

Cruz continued, There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.

In 1985, within the mahogany-paneled walls of the Harvard Club of New York City, the Federalist Society held a debate that helped turn the tides of power in their favor. For if the battle that had given rise to the conservative legal movement centered on the future of legal education, then Harvard was the first theater of the war.

Alumni across New York had received provocative letters inviting them to learn more about the intellectual crisis confronting Harvard Law School and legal education in general. The crisis in question was the rise of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) which, as Duncan Kennedy explained to the audience, asked students to examine how the system by which the rich and powerful, white and male, stay rich and powerful, generation after generation, has a very strong legal component.

The invitation letter, sent by the Harvard Federalist Society (then still called the Harvard Society for Law and Public Policy) and the national Federalist Society, was so derisive of CLS that one left-wing speaker withdrew from the event, and panelists who did participate condemned the letter in their opening remarks.

The panel featured four Harvard professors. Paul M. Bator and Robert C. Clark spoke for the conservative position, while Kennedy represented CLS, and Abram Chayes, as he referred to himself, the muddy middle.

At stake was the political rights ability to gain control of the American law school, and thus over the future of American lawyers and the law. The rise of CLS also seemed to reinforce the narrative of institutional bias against conservatives, a resentment parallel to that which, 35 years later, animated the belief that the 2020 election had been stolen.

As Clark told the audience in New York, Harvard Law Schools atmosphere appeared to be: Let a thousand flowers bloom, so long as theyre all leaning sharply to the left.

Since its emergence at Harvard in the early 1970s, the CLS movement had, by 1985, turned the school into the stage for what Clark deemed at the New York event to be a prolonged, intense, bitter conflict among different groups of faculty members. The rivalry came as close to a civil war as faculty lounge bickering can get the Law School was sometimes referred to as Beirut on the Charles.

CLS existed at other schools, but as Bator told that room of over 250 alumni in 1985, the movements strongest presence is at Harvard Law School, where its founding trinity teach.

Though the battle began at Harvard, the Federalist Societys campus triumphs came to be nearly synonymous with those of the nationwide conservative movement. During his keynote address at the 1988 Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, then-President Ronald Reagan reveled in the victories he shared with the network: how far they had come in changing the terms of national debate.

Nowhere is that change more evident than in the rise of the Federalist Society on the campuses of Americas law schools, he continued. To think of it, in schools where, just a few years ago, the Critical Legal Studies movement stood virtually unchallenged like some misplaced monster of prehistoric radicalism.

One of the first seeds of the Federalist Society had grown at Harvard eight years before the panel, in 1977, when two students named E. Spencer Abraham and Steven J. Eberhard, feeling frustrated by the domination of liberal and left ideas on campus, started a conservative and libertarian law journal.

They called it the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and declared its mission to be the countering of the liberal orthodoxy on campus. Lawrence J. Siskind 74, one of the Harvard JLPPs first editors, recalls that he felt the problem went deeper than a mere lack of an outlet for conservative ideas: We felt that there was definite discrimination.

The preface to the first issue of the JLPP, published in 1977, concludes with a telling Latin phrase: Vox clamantis in deserto, a biblical reference which translates to the voice of one crying in the wilderness, or a wise person whose counsel or warnings are ignored.

This journal went on to become the official publication of the national Federalist Society and the top journal of conservative legal thought; it is, to this day, among the five most circulated legal journals in the country, according to its website. The Harvard JLPP published the proceedings of the 1982 conference at Yale that formally founded the Federalist Society, distributing its ideas to a wider audience at a time before the internet. The Journal has continued this practice for every annual symposium since.

In bringing the front of the fight beyond the gates of Harvard Yard and to New York City in 1985, the Harvard Federalist Society mobilized the might of alumni pressure, warning of a communist takeover of their school.

The conservative professors on the panel cast CLS as an existential threat. At risk for the crowd was the prestige of their alma mater, which the professors warned could descend into mediocrity should Critical Legal Studies continue to grow unchecked.

Bator and Clark equated the silencing of conservatives with the decline of the school: The Harvard Law School is the only educational institution I know where it is considered a symptom of right-wing extremism to be in favor of rigorous standards of scholarly excellence, Bator lamented. Clark claimed that hiring had been paralyzed; no longer was Harvard the desired perch of the nations top legal scholars. Professors at other schools, he said, had confided in him that they did not want to enter the trenches of such a bitter conflict.

The Harvard Society of Law and Public Policy, which put on the 1985 panel and later renamed itself the Harvard Federalist Society, was first formed as a nonprofit shell for the Harvard JLPP in 1977. And the group would send a transcript of the panel to every HLS alumnus in the NYC area, to far-reaching effect.

When the last question had been asked, Duncan Kennedy stepped out of the Harvard Club into the summer air and walked toward Fifth Avenue, looking for a taxi to the airport. But the events that the panel set in motion had just begun.

From these early stirrings, the Society rose to hold such sway that its credentials sometimes appear all but the prerequisite for obtaining a judgeship on the federal bench.

October 30, 2019 was perhaps the biggest day in Lawrence J.C. VanDykes career the day of his Senate confirmation hearing for the seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to which Donald Trump had nominated him. But things werent going exactly as planned. The night before, the American Bar Association had sent out a withering letter concerning his qualifications for the job. The group had interviewed 43 lawyers, 16 judges, and one other person who had worked with VanDyke, and come to the conclusion that he was, in the end, Not Qualified.

When VanDyke was a student at Harvard Law School and an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, he penned an op-ed in the Harvard Law Record expressing his worries about same-sex marriage. He wrote in the 2004 article that there is ample reason for concern that same-sex marriage will hurt families, and consequentially children and society, and insisted that it isnt absurd to be concerned about threats to religious freedom given the chimera of tolerance affiliated with homosexual rights.

It perhaps should not have come as a surprise, then, when Senator Joshua D. Hawley (R-Mo.) a leading voice behind calls to overturn the 2020 presidential election gently asked VanDyke, The [ABA] letter also says that you would not commit to being fair to litigants before you, notably, members of the LGBTQ community. Can you speak to that? Did you say that you wouldnt be fair to members of the LGBT community?

But VanDyke appeared to feel as though he were an innocent man, tired of constantly being accused of this, the same old crime.

Senator, that was the part of the letter

He could not go on; the question had hit a nerve. Tears filled VanDykes eyes and his face turned a deep red. He began to cry.

Lawyer and journalist Dahlia Lithwick co-wrote in Slate following the hearing, Despite his years of anti-LGBTQ writings and advocacy, VanDyke was the one who felt persecuted.

The ABA letter stated that interviewees had described VanDyke as arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice including procedural rules.

Lithwick continued, What, exactly, does VanDyke have to cry about? That someone hurt his feelings? That after a career spent maligning and excluding gay Americans from everyday civic life, he feels entitled to glide onto an Article III court without answering for any of it?

When confirmed, VanDyke became the 50th judge to reach the federal Courts of Appeals, the last stop for a case before the Supreme Court, during the Trump administration; the president would name four more before the end of his term. Having appointed 30 percent of the judges across the circuits, Trump can claim to have effectively reshaped the American judiciary. Or rather, the Federalist Society can.

Forty years after its founding, the Society claims some 70,000 acolytes. However, those who study it, including some leaders of the group themselves, have explained that while many people do pay membership dues, to limit ones sense of the Federalist Society to its card-carrying members would be to misunderstand its shape. These scholars propose, instead, that we think of it as a network, or as a movement, rather than a static organization.

While this movements power has swollen under Trump, its momentum has been building since the controversy that roiled Harvard Law School in the 1970s and 1980s, and in particular, in the aftermath of the Harvard Club panel of May, 1985.

In June of that year, Harvard Law School alumni across the greater New York City area opened their mailboxes to another letter from the Federalist Society. This time, what they found was not an invitation, but a transcript.

In a letter addressed Dear Harvard Law School Alumnus, David M. Bader 81, then-president of the Harvard Federalist Society, and Eugene B. Meyer 64, who has held the top position in the national organization since his appointment in 1983, announced that they had decided to send the attached transcript to all the Harvard Law School alumni in the greater New York City area. Even if they had not attended the panel themselves, they would be able to experience the event as if firsthand.

Duncan Kennedy remembers a later conversation with one of the conservative architects of the 1985 panel. It was then that Kennedy realized how much the event had helped turn the tides in favor of the Federalist Society at Harvard and beyond. The man told him, Well boy, did you screw up!

Kennedys comments, flattened into printed form, seemed to confirm all the stereotypes about a leftist takeover of the symbolic heart of meritocracy that anyone could harbor. The event had turned the private battle of campus conservatives into a national cause for concern.

The ensuing alumni pressure on HLS was so intense that Harvard had to establish a special temporary communications office. Clarks appointment to the deanship in 1989 a surprise which, given his championship of the Federalist Society and outspoken stance against CLS, was seen as a victory for conservatism at Harvard can arguably be traced in part back to the event. So can the founding of the Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard, endowed by conservative philanthropist John M. Olin, whose foundation hoped to realize an explicit political agenda at HLS with its donation.

The Harvard chapter and JLPP have not only helped build an impressive conservative legal network and roster of judges. The journal has been the vanguard in the Federalist Societys long-term project of reshaping legal thought, in particular in helping to legitimize and widen the discourse on originalism and textualism, conservative modes of judicial interpretation once considered fringe. Before the Harvard Law Review would publish originalist scholarship, the Harvard JLPP would.

"In the early stages of the Federalist Society, having a publication that could take the proceedings of the conferences and put them into a format where they could be read by many people who couldn't attend helped to get us, to get the Federalist Society, and its activities, better known, says Spencer Abraham, the Harvard JLPPs co-founder.

John O. McGinnis 79, who was among the founding members of the Harvard JLPP and is now a law professor at Northwestern, says there is no doubt that the Federalist Society has had far more effect than any law school, or law schools collectively, on the nation.

He explains that originalism was probably not discussed at all in my Harvard Law School class, and now its not only an important theory on the court, I would say, but four of the justices are probably originalists in one way or the other, and two others have a lot of sympathy with originalism.

Originalism says judges should interpret laws, and in particular the Constitution, to have the meaning they would have had at the time of writing. Meanwhile textualism, at least on paper, holds that laws should be interpreted only according to the actual words in the text of the statute, and nothing more.

Both originalism and textualism have been subjects of widespread critique on from the right and left since their inception. Critics say they are a way of working backward from policy goals, such as dismantling the Affordable Care Act, rather than a bona fide philosophy of jurisprudence. I think textualism and originalism are a fake. Its a propaganda tool; its a slogan, says Fried, who served as solicitor general under Ronald Reagan.

Asked how he reconciles the support hes provided the Federalist Society which is largely responsible for the rise of originalism with the fact that he finds the legal theory to be propaganda, Fried replied, debate and discussion.

Abraham described a positive-feedback loop between the two organizations: The Harvard JLPP helped the Federalist Society reach a broader audience and bring conservative legal ideas into the mainstream; meanwhile, as the Federalist Society has grown, so, too, has the Journals readership, and thus its influence over legal thought.

As Kennedy remembers the Federalist Society event planner confiding in him later, That [panel] was the turning point for the Federalist Society after the debate, our membership at Harvard went up. But it wasn't just at Harvard. All over the country, we got new members as a result of the debate. What were you thinking?

When Ted Cruz entered Harvard Law School, in 1992, the Federalist Society was ascendant and CLS mostly on the other side of its prime. Nonetheless, speaking at the Americans for Prosperity luncheon in Austin nearly two decades later, he seem to harbor bitter feelings from a conflict that had all but subsided by the time he arrived.

Cruz had the power he had been looking for: A U.S. senator, he was presenting at an elite conservative summit sponsored by the Koch brothers, the oil refinery magnates known for bankrolling many of the nations most influential right-wing and libertarian enterprises, including the Federalist Society.

But he was still sounding the alarm over a leftist insurrection, and although that claim was false, Cruzs rage was real a decade before his calls to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and reinstate a president who gave the conservative legal movement unprecedented power. Cruzs press office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration marked another inflection point in the Federalist Societys rise. The group held enormous behind-the-scenes sway in crafting Trumps list of nominees, its executive vice-president Leonard Leo serving as advisor to Trumps administration.

But as Fried, the current advisor to the Harvard Federalist Society, explains, to some this power came at cost. The rupture which has become clear within the network since the Jan. 6 insurrection between support for Trump through his senate trial and a feeling that such support goes beyond the realm of conscionability may have been bubbling below the surface before then, even as their power reached new heights.

Well, [the Federalist Society] seems to have been very influential in the Trump administration, because there was a kind of devils bargain, Fried says. They supported Trump if Trump allowed them to pick the judges, who were overwhelmingly members of the Federalist Society."

The national Federalist Society did not respond to multiple emails with questions about their work with the Trump administration.

The appeals court judges appointed by Trump bring more open support for conservative causes, and are whiter and younger, than the judges appointed by the last three presidents. They are also more likely to have gone to an elite law school.

Sixty-nine percent of Trumps federal appeals court judges attended a top-ten law school, compared to 51 percent under Obama and 44 percent under Bush. Harvard Law School, long central to the Federalist Societys ascent, is no exception. Its alumni now hold an inordinate share of seats on the nations appeals courts. Because federal judges have lifetime tenure, that influence will persist long after the end of the Trump era.

Eleven of the appellate court judges appointed by Trump more than 20 percent attended Harvard Law School. All 11 of those have strong ties to the Federalist Society, with at least nine beginning their paths to the federal bench at the Harvard Federalist Society or the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Fried insists that national organizations support of Trump did not apply to Federalist Society members at Harvard, that no Faustian deals were made in Cambridge. I dont think that is at all the disposition of our students at Harvard, he says. They are, as I say, courteous, generous, good, people friendly, and they have none of the repelling qualities members of the Trump administration demonstrated.

The Harvard Federalist Society also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

VanDyke was among this group, having graduated from HLS in 2005; his confirmation in December 2019, despite the ABAs rating of Not Qualified, was one of many boons to the Harvard Federalist Society under the Trump administration.

In March 2019, crowds of HLS alumni squeezed into the dimly lit rooms of Russell House Tavern as Donald F. McGahn II, who helped oversee Trumps judicial selections and spearheaded his deregulation agenda, gave the opening address at the Federalist Societys annual Harvard Alumni Symposium. Other festivities, beginning the following morning, included an Abigail Adams Breakfast and a Lawyering in the Trump Administration panel.

After lunch, alumni headed to the first floor of Pound Hall for a Judicial Nominations Panel.

Three judges spoke on the panel Andrew S. Oldham, Jonathan A. Kobes, and John K. Bush; each graduated from HLS in 05, 00, and 89, respectively. All sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals, and all had been appointed in the past three years, under the Trump administration.

Just four short years before, reunion organizers would have had to scour for panelists who fit the bill: federal appeals court judge, HLS alumnus, Federalist Society devotee since law school. But this time, options abounded, a testament to just how much Trumps presidency meant to the Harvard Federalist Society network.

Before they were judges, these men were clerks the Federalist Societys pipeline begins in law schools and runs quietly below the careers of its members, from cocktail hours to the Supreme Court. The past three HLS graduates to obtain clerkships with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, held editorial positions on the Harvard JLPP while in law school.

As Charles Fried says of his Harvard student advisees, Theres no doubt that if you put Federalist Society on your resume, particularly officers and so on, that will help getting placed with some judges. Some judges will respond to that.

Of the 11 Harvard Law School alumni that Trump nominated to the appeals court, nine joined the Federalist Society or served as editors of the Harvard JLPP while in law school. Another, Kevin Newsom, joined the Society in 1999, two years after graduating. Thomas Kirsch, the only other one of the Harvard Trump judges who did not become tied to the Federalist Society in law school, lists his official membership as lasting from 2006 to 2007, seven years after he graduated.

The Federalist Society is not the sort of college club you shed like an old coat once youve outgrown it and moved on to bigger and better things. It is, rather, the fur cowl that helps you fit in at the party and gets you invited to the next one, and then, with a little bit of effort, youre the partys host and the guest will be arriving soon.

Oldham, among the 2019 reunion speakers, took one of many paths along the Harvard Federalist Society pipeline before becoming a part of it himself.

While a student at Harvard Law, Oldham was an editor on the JLPP. After graduation, he obtained a prestigious clerkship on the D.C. Circuit Court for Judge David B. Sentelle. That served as a stepping stone for him to advance to a clerkship on the Supreme Court, with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has close ties to the Federalist Society. He then served as general counsel to the governor of Texas. Finally, Oldham became a judge himself, nominated by Donald Trump on February 15, 2018.

Soon after Oldham was confirmed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, he accepted an application for a clerkship from Stanford Law student Trevor Ezell. Ezell was co-president of the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society. After finishing his clerkship with Oldham, Ezell went on to be accepted for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated by Donald Trump in 2017 and has been a member of the Federalist Society since 1989, when he was a student at Harvard Law School.

Meanwhile, Alitos roster of law clerks illustrates the clerkship and judgeship network that Harvard Federalist Society members can access.

Fifteen of 68, or 22 percent, of Alitos clerks are graduates of Harvard Law School. Eleven of those 15 have Federalist Society affiliations.

Three of the Alito clerks ascended from previous clerkships for Judge Diarmuid F. OScannlain, who was appointed to the Ninth Circuit of Appeals by Reagan. OScannlain went to Harvard Law School and has deep connections to the Federalist Society, including speaking at more than 18 network events since 2003. One of those three clerks, Jose J. Alicea, graduated from Harvard Law School in 2013. While he was there, he served as president of the Harvard chapter of the Federalist Society.

And the system is circular: as the Federalist Society uses its growing influence to appoint more loyal judges, law students have more justices they can count among the some who will respond to a Federalist Society credential, as Fried puts it. Some of those students are on track to become judges themselves, thus expanding the spiral.

An email sent out at the start of the spring 2021 semester by the Harvard Federalist Society provides insight into the pipelines twists and turns, with students who have benefited from the infrastructure becoming a part of it themselves. The email asks those alumni who have had a clerkship in the past 12 months to contribute to The Clerkship Guide, which collects advice from Federalists over the years and is distributed in hard copy towards the end of the academic year.

Please consider passing on any tips you learned from your application process to help future Federalists, the email reads. Entries generally describe the applicants general strategy, the timeline on which they applied/interviewed, what their application looked like, how the interviews were conducted, and any general advice or advice specific to your judge.

The Harvard chapter has, in the past, tried to disentangle itself from the tethers cinching its national organization to Trump. Annika M. Boone, then-president of the Harvard Federalist Society, told the Crimson in 2018, Its not very fair. We certainly dont have anything to do with the Trump administration.

But the bargain the national Federalist Society made with Trump is a done deal. When considering their careers, Fried explains, students must be pragmatic. They take account of what that world is, he says. And if their disposition is of a conservative sort, thats going to mean you go with where the bodies are.

Trumps time in office has concluded, but, as Fried suggests, for conservative students who want to rise high in the legal world, his legacy may be impossible to avoid.

Students are much more alive to the existing situation than are faculty because were there, we have tenure, Fried explains. Theyve got to go into this world. So, they are to be forgiven.

Magazine staff writer Malaika K. Tapper can be reached at malaika.tapper@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @malaika_tapper.

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Voices in the Wilderness | Magazine - Harvard Crimson

The New York Times employed Donald McNeil from 1976 until last Friday.

The Daily Beast reported Jan. 28 that on a 2019 student excursion to Peru, which was sponsored by the Times, McNeilrepeatedly made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip including, according to two complaints, using the n-word.'

Here are more details from the report:

[A]t least six students or their parents told the tour company that partnered with the Times that McNeil used racially insensitive or outright racist language while accompanying the participants on the trip, which according to the Times website typically costs nearly $5,500. Two students specifically alleged that the science reporter used the n-word and suggested he did not believe in the concept of white privilege; three other participants alleged that McNeil made racist comments and used stereotypes about Black teenagers.

The Beast quoted from student reviews of the trip:

Not only did Donald say various racist comments on numerous occasions, but he was also disrespectful to many students during mealtimes and in other settings, another wrote in their review.

I would change the journalist. He was a racist, a third person wrote. He used the N word, said horrible things about black teenagers, and said white supremacy doesnt exist.

The Times told the Beast their investigation into McNeil found he had used bad judgment by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language. As NPR put it, McNeil said he was responding to a students query about the appropriateness of the word in a young friends video. The paper launched an investigation at the time and reprimanded McNeil, according to the Beast.

Dean Baquet, the Times first black executive editor, initially reacted to the allegations by defending McNeils intentions, telling staff,I authorized an investigation and concluded his remarks were offensive and that he showed extremely poor judgment, but that it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.

McNeil lost his job after staff fought Baquets decision. We have given a prominent platform a critical beat covering a pandemic disproportionately affecting people of color to someone who chose to use language that is offensive and unacceptable by any newsrooms standards, they wrote in a letter. That push successfully expunged McNeil from his employer of 45 years, which reportedly included his recent pandemic coverage among its submissions for a Pulitzer Prize.

We know nothing about McNeils alleged racist and sexist comments, beyond the claim that he repeated the n-word in a discussion about appropriate uses of the word, not in an attempt to slur another race. We know even Baquet, the papers first black executive editor, did not consider that a fireable offense, nor did the decision-makers who chose to reprimand McNeil after the incident in 2019.

Legacy newsrooms are more likely to be dominated by overzealous Oberlin College graduates drunk on critical theory than other workplaces, but thats increasingly less true. This doesnt stop at Donald McNeil. Thats why suburban voters worry about their own loved ones. The threat is mounting, the crimes can be minor to nonexistent, and the punishments are unjustly harsh.

If McNeil is indeed a bigot, the possibility that he chose to reveal that bigotry on a student trip, rather than sometime over the rest of his 35 years in the newsroom, is very hard to believe. Counterpoint: perhaps McNeils previous transgressions were deemed unremarkable by outdated standards.

First, we know close to nothing about his other alleged racist and sexist comments on the trip, so its entirely possible the extent of his wrongdoing was repeating the n-word. Second, if those standards involve axing employees of good faith for a snap decision to repeat a slur rather than use an abbreviation, they are not fair.

The Times, of course, sponsors what Glenn Greenwald referred to as the hall-monitor reporters by employing journalists like Taylor Lorenz. Greenwald connected her case with McNeils in a sharp Substack post this weekend. Lorenz falsely accused someone of using the word retard in a discussion on the Clubhouse app. The term had actually been used by someone else who was quoting Reddit users.

Its like the hall-monitor reporters are trolling kids coming from a doctors appointment for tardiness while the school is on fire.

Murky as the term is, dont cry for the journalists felled by cancel culture. Cry for the cultural precedents their firings strengthen and symbolize. If institutions like the Times continue endorsing these standards, they will put more and more people out of work and smear more and more people as bigots. Most of them wont have the power of a celebrated legacy reporter.

But whats a man like Baquet to do? Keep one reporter at the expense of his credibility with staff, his reputation in the industry, and peace in the workplace? The genie is out of the bottle. The patients are running the asylum, and were giving them the keys.

All we can do is hope the financial incentives shift so the fourth estate stops whistling past the graveyard, watching the country burn while silencing the fire alarms. The cultural fragmentation brought about technology is challenging the power of legacy media, but the trends arent headed in the right direction.

Originally posted here:

Woke Firing Squad Takes Down NYT Reporter After Year Of Accusations - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Western Correspondent Tristan Justice joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to break down the second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump and how it compares to the Democrats first attempt to impeach and remove him just one year ago.

Unfortunately, this impeachment is going to be even more divisive, Justice said. Because if they are successful, they make a martyr of Donald Trump. They reinforce the convictions of all of his followers, and he does have a grip on the Republican Party whether beltway Republicans like to admit it or not. Donald Trump is the one-man show fighting against the establishment, and even Republicans who are supporting the impeachment effort are culprits in this establishment hostility to the rest of the country.

Democrats are using this second impeachment trial, much like the first one, Justice said, to push a progressive agenda and wreak havoc on the Republican Party.

Its a trend that weve seen this year, by the way. Democratscreate new standards in the aftermath of an event, a very sad event, to implement this progressive purge and silence their opposition, Justice said, later adding that this whole charade has really nothing to do with impeachment and all has to do with political circumstance.

Read more of Justices reporting on impeachment 2.0 here.

Read the original:

Impeachment 2.0 Will Be A Divisive Sideshow - The Federalist

DO NOT underestimate the scale of the democratic crisis facing Britain.

Dont kid yourselves either that it isnt going to get a lot, lot worse.

Brexit opened up wounds that will not easily heal. Mythical claims, wrapped up in sovereignty and identity politics, looked a lot different when viewed from the rotting mounds of fish that could not be exported from our sovereign lands.

They looked no better from the lorry queues, hard borders and paperwork mountains that have all come with Britains new notional independence.

And after that, the disappearance of unrestricted rights to move, study, drive and access healthcare in Europe seem to have taken many by surprise What are they thinking of, for Gods sake, dont they know were British?!?

But if Brexit opened up awkward wounds, Covid-19 and climate change could prevent them healing.

We are on an existential roller coaster like no other. Surviving it requires a new politics a new democratic settlement that goes well beyond the fanciful claims of micronationalism and identity politics.

Thats what makes the radical federalist We, the People pamphlet such an interesting starting point (it can be found at http://www.radicalfederalism.com).

Any post-Covid economics able to survive the coming climate upheavals cannot look remotely like the economics that took us into them.

And a new democratic settlement cannot replicate the old one. This presents huge challenges to both left and right.

It requires a complete rethink of what tomorrows meaningful democracy and sustainable economics must look like.

One without the other would become another unstable illusion.

Jihadi libertarians

If such a rethink is difficult, it will be made all the more complicated if George Monbiot is correct.

Monbiots contention is that we now have a Conservative Party at war with itself.

Like the Republicans in the United States, Britains Tories are locked in a civil war between old-style patricians (happy with the benevolent dictatorship that limited democracy offers) and jihadist libertarians who would dump democracy in favour of a corporately dominated free-for-all.

Britains tidal wave of patronage contracts handed out during the pandemic suggests that the jihadists are winning.

If so, then expect the Tories to play division and fragmentation cards in much the same way that Donald Trump did.

Instead of a radical recasting of democratic rights and accountability, libertarians will fan the tides of resentment and hostility.

One obvious ploy would be to use the LSE study claiming that independence would cost Scottish taxpayers an extra 2,000-3,000 a year.

The right wont care how this goes down in Scotland. Their target would be English resentment.

Why pay for Scottish freeloaders? If the Scots want to go, let them pay their own way.

Scotland may say fair enough, but Englands drift into corporate feudalism will insist on writing all the rules about Scottish participation in the UK economy. It is how their Uncommon-wealth works.

Those who see Scotland rejoining the EU, with a wider/fairer market to play in, should look carefully at the Irish debacle over the North Sea border and the fish fiasco.

Dont think that a Trump wall is beyond the dreams ofjihadist Conservatives.

Stoking the fires of northern English resentment and hostility might be their ploy for holding onto English seats taken at the last election. It worked well enough for Brexit. Why not Scotland?

Jihadist libertarianism would happily run with English jobs for the English, English healthcare for the English, English vaccines for the English, etc.

Anything that avoids structural transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor would suit them fine.

And setting the poor against the poor is so much easier, especially when helped by your enemies.

Before the first cheers of a new democracy debate had died down, a host of charlatan claims sought to narrow the choices on offer. Nationalists want to chase nationalism.

Yesterdays Establishment calls for a royal commission on the constitution to overhaul and oversee change; a long, slow process in which the great and the good would review centralised power without letting go of it.

Both are remote from the radical federalist proposals advocated by the We, the People pamphleteers.

Picking the wrong fights

Labour lost the Brexit debate because it allowed the Tories to set the terms.

Arguments that should have been about austerity got dressed up as issues of sovereignty.

Naive nationalism won because corporate capitalism went unchallenged.

The chasms dividing Britains richest and poorest barely figured. As rooted in New Labour legacies as in David Camerons platitudes, short-term, deregulated capital effectively owned both.

Casino economics in the south (systematically pricing the young and poor out of decent housing) never even bothered to get on a train up north.

There, people whose lives looked out on hardship, abandoned shops, empty factories, crumbling schools and underfunded hospitals just wanted someone to blame.

Brexit copped it. Now that it has resolved nothing, someone else must be blamed.

Democracy was always going to be next in line and with good reason. Britain is the most centralised state in Europe. Its illegitimacy needed to be thrown into question.

Politicians who sheltered behind the facade democracy claims of the Westminster wonderland now face tidal waves of public scepticism.

But unless wealth redistribution comes hand in hand with power redistribution, all reforms would end in tears.

Restructuring the House of Lords, the Privy Council, constituency boundaries, the Bank of England and the judiciary are all important at some stage.

But right now, the more pressing question around the nations dinner tables be they in Blackburn, Bannockburn, Bangor, Barnsley or Barry is do we have any dinner?

This isnt a question that troubles the rich. Those who profited most before the pandemic have profited most from it.

In October 2020, Forbes magazine reported that, in three months, US billionaire wealth had increased by 27 per cent(!), largely thanks to government stimulus packages.

It was much the same in Britain. Not once has Britains Chancellor suggested that the richest often banking offshore and paying zero British taxes should pay for the chasms dividing the rich from the rest in our disunited kingdom.

A democracy that sustains such divisions cannot survive. Patronage contracts handed out for public services are a path from democracy to kleptocracy.

Were it not for the pandemic, and the death of Parliament, we would have been comparing Boris Johnsons Britain with Boris Yeltsins Russia.

An era of the oligarchs unfolds before our eyes. Fresh fish no longer make it out of British ports but dirty money and patronage slosh in and out of the economy (tax-free) as they choose. No wonder democracy itself is being challenged.

Synthetic solidarities: the community of communities

Those seeking a more meaningful and inclusive democracy, however, need to start from somewhere else.

It is here that the elements of a serious reset can be found. In reality, all states are synthetic constructs. Our vulnerabilities and shared interdependencies are what hold us together.

Cultural separatism chases these into divisive cul-de-sacs. Climate emergencies demand the opposite. Mutuality and inclusion become the glue that matters.

You could see this when Covid-19 first struck; in the ways people shopped for each other, phoned to check the neighbours were OK, and (indirectly) when people volunteered for vaccine trials that might (eventually) keep others alive.

You could see it too when Germany sent a planeload of doctors to help Portugals hospitals cope.

And in Oxfords insistence that, in developing nations, their vaccine cannot be sold for a profit. It is also the social solidarity that has underpinned our NHS and Blood Transfusion Service for over 70 years.

The next set of climate crises will force us to build on these lessons, rather than on the mess preceding them.

Politicians have already been told that centralised policies alone cannot deliver the scale of carbon reductions needed to meet Britains climate targets.

Environmental stability demands far greater decentralised powers, duties and resources.

The localisation of our interdependencies must then be turned from a crisis measure to a source of strength.

Such solidarities will matter far more than national boundaries. Westminster, Holyrood and the Senedd can hold the gates open to this process, but they cannot be allowed to own it. Maybe Wales grasps this better than Scotland or England.

In a thoughtful piece in Planet Digital, Selwyn Williams argues that we should follow the lead of Community Movement Cymru, thinking of ourselves more as a community of communities than a set of divided nations.

Internationally, the model he draws on is of the Swedish Rural Parliament. This biennial gathering of 1,000 representatives from towns, villages and communities makes its own representations directly to the Swedish government and parliament.

It offers a more coherent framework (of both accountability and continuity) than the ad-hoc citizens conventions Britain has dabbled in.

The bloody English

Such a parliament of the communities would also help us get past the English problem.

In truth, only the far right really hankers after an English parliament. Englands divisions run much deeper.

North-south hostilities are everywhere. So too are tensions between metro mayors and elected leaders of the councils within their domain.

Then theres the resentment of major cities excluded from the metro club and the angst of rural areas excluded by everyone.

And, if were being brutally frank, most elected authorities have lived in austerity bunkers for so long that the idea of opening the door to their own communities counts as more of a threat than an invitation.

Yet it is within such limitations that the building of a new democracy must begin.

The climate emergency will force us to live within rapidly reducing carbon budgets.

Localising (and cutting) our carbon footprint will become the new security norm.

Covid-19 forced us to live within a contagion-reducing economy. Climate will do so in a carbon-reducing one.

The difference is that community involvement will become part of the answer, not the problem.

Of course, grassroots democracy will get things wrong. Communities will do things differently. Some will work, some wont. The best lessons will be shared, the worst abandoned.

European examples of such federalism display it as a strength, not a weakness. So, in the words of Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack, a crack in everythingThats how the light gets in.

This is the challenge facing those wanting a new democratic settlement. Put communities before capital, climate restoration before exploitation. Forget your perfect offerings. Just be the way the light gets in.

Alan Simpson is a former Labour Party politician who was the MP for Nottingham South from 1992 to 2010.

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The Disunited Kingdom Radical federalism and the search for a new common-wealth - Morning Star Online

A petition to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom following a year of his strict COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions is gaining traction throughout the state, leading many to believe the Democrat has reason to worry.

By more than one month before its March 17, 2021, due date, an official petition to remove the governor from office had garnered more than 1.4 million signatures from California residents seeking to trigger a special election and vote Newsom out of office. Although some of those signatures will almost certainly be disqualified, Californians leading the recall effort need to secure only 1,495,709 total legitimate signatures in order to successfully trigger a recall vote.

Governor Gavin Newsom continues to destroy the lives and businesses of hardworking Californians. Help stop this tyrant before its too late, the official Recall Gavin Newsom website states.

The stakes of this petition, proponents of the campaign say, are high because Newsom has wronged his state in more ways than one. In addition to plunging an economy into hardship through a year of tyrannical coronavirus lockdowns that Newsom himself violated, dining maskless and indoors at a three-star Michelin restaurant, the petition notes that the governor continually fails to address unaffordable housing, record homelessness, rising crime, failing schools, independent contractors thrown out of work, and exploding pension debt problems that face his constituents daily.

Newsom also continues to struggle with the states vaccine rollout and prioritization, a confusing process that he admits is not going as well as he had hoped. On vaccines, we cant move fast enough, Newsom announced on Monday. We need to see more doses coming into the state to keep these sites up and running.

The Democrat, once heralded and popularized by his party as a model governor, currently has 46 percent of the states voters approval, down nearly 20 points since just September. Earlier last year, polls indicated that two-thirds of the states voters were frustrated with the governor and his decisions. Now, with just tens of thousands more signatures needed from angry, frustrated Californians, Newsom could potentially face the consequences of his mishandlings and be forced to run against his Republican challengers, including businessman John Cox, whom Newsom beat in a previous election, and former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, to keep his elected position.

The California delegation as we sit today is in favor of it, California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes tolda local radio host last week.

While the corporate media remain skeptical of the recall efforts prospects, some have acknowledged that the movement, with the support and endorsements of well-known Republican officials such as Nunes, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and the California Republican Party, will most likely continue to grow.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

Read more from the original source:

Petition To Recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom Nears Its Goal - The Federalist