The Pittsburgh synagogue killings, Franklin Foer argued last week, show that dormant hatreds have reawakened. In the wake of the massacre, he wrote, “any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers.”
I am a former congregant of Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. I have lived in New York for almost 30 years. I see many former Squirrel Hillers on Facebook mourning over the loss in our community, and realize that we grew up in such a special place that most of us, no matter how long ago we left, continue to feel like members of this community. We are collectively heartbroken at our loss of innocence.
Foer’s article resonated because since the 2016 election, I have gone through a metamorphosis as a Jew. My people is no longer an inclusive term. I am ashamed by people such as Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin who seem to put money and power before basic human decency. I am just as embarrassed by Jewish people who put their blind loyalty to Israel before any intelligent thoughts of the United States’s future, as indicated by their votes for the current president. I am no longer as strong a supporter of Israel as I was for reasons that originate both here in the U.S. and in the Netanyahu administration and my perception of the abuses wrought on the Palestinian people by “our” country, Israel.
This past year and a half has seen a painful transformation of my identity. I wonder why some lack the Jewish values I was raised with, such as the consciousness to support those less fortunate that Foer mentioned. I am guessing they did not grow up in communities that teach their members to give back, like Squirrel Hill.
The brothers killed in the shooting were both developmentally disabled and in their 50s. My mother and many others knew them; they used to work in their parents’ store and were always out and about around the business district. The brothers were, according to one of my family friends who was married at Tree of Life, “fixtures” in the synagogue, where one of them manned the doors on Shabbat. The way they lived independently there is indicative of our community.
Thank you for the article, Mr. Foer. It is a comfort at this most difficult time.
Stefanie Weiss
New York, N.Y.
My wife and I had a similar experience to Foer’s at a Dutch Synagogue in 1997. I thought about that experience this afternoon and posted the following on Facebook:
This is America today.
Traveled to Amsterdam 20 years ago. Went to temple for Friday night services. Was met by armed guards. They wanted to know why were there and how we found out about services before they let us in. We thought that would never happen at home.
Little did we know...
The doors to my Synagogue are locked all the time. You need a key card to get in the building. At Friday night and Saturday mornings we usually have two armed police officers at the doors. We used to worry about foreign terrorists. Now we worry about home grown terrorists as well.
The tragedy in Pittsburgh shows why we take these precautions.
Michael K. Ferry Sr.
Charlotte, N.C.
I am a native of Pittsburgh now residing in the D.C. Metro area. Foer focuses on and highlights in this piece the tragedy and idealism of Jewish history, and as an African American, I can relate to the struggles, strife, and strides made throughout time. Pittsburgh, however, has a complexion of its own. The city still reeks of a great racial and economic divide. The disenfranchised white and black communities have only one difference: the “white privilege” that does little to elevate the former still consumes the latter with misplaced perceptions that stir the pot of anger, despair, and frustration. Perhaps that is what Robert Bowers was feeling when he allegedly committed this unspeakable crime. Unfortunately, the willingness of HIAS to extend its benevolence to a wider demographic sparked the anger, frustration, and despair that remains a vivid stain on the fabric of American culture.
Rhonda Pierce
Alexandria, Va.
The title of Franklin Foer’s excellently crafted article caught my attention, because I’m a strong supporter of Israel and the Jewish people.
I mourn with Foer over the tragedy in Pittsburgh, but I was dismayed that he found it necessary to build the article up so he could tear down our president, without legitimate cause. Trump has stood with and done more for Israel than any president since Truman. Does the fact that his daughter is a convert to Judaism mean nothing? And just who are “Trump’s Jewish enablers?” Why not bash those on the opposite side of Trump who feel it appropriate and even virtuous to stir up “rage”? How is that not an ingredient in our current, vicious climate?
It feels to me that Mr. Foer wrote this article to advance a political purpose. Knowing how raw and deep Jewish wounds go, I wouldn’t fault him for getting caught up in the moment of a tragedy. But isn’t the best way to rid the world of hate to expel it in any form, including hatred for those we disagree with?
Nancy Freund
Cleveland, Ohio
The relationship between politics and religion requires a treatise, so I won’t do justice to the critiques of my article here. But I would like to correct a misunderstanding. My argument didn’t call for expelling Trump supporters or voters from the religion. I would never argue that, or anything remotely like it. I do, however, think that there are leaders of the Jewish community who have influence with the president; they fund the president and they serve in his administration. They provide Trump with political cover while he foments racism and anti-Semitism. This complicity is abhorrent. Jewish communities, now under serious threat because of the president’s rhetoric, shouldn’t celebrate the likes of Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, and Sheldon Adelson. They shouldn’t accept their money or invite them into their buildings to speak. This a time-honored method for pressing political change. When we damage the status or prestige of a regime’s elite, they are then incentivized to distance themselves from their leader. I know this a controversial argument; I have my own doubts about its efficacy. But morally, at this moment, I don’t see an alternative.
Three years ago, then Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter attributed Iran’s growing dominance to its being “in the game, on the ground.” He urged its regional rivals to do the same, thus expressing a widely shared sentiment in policy circles at the time: Arab Gulf states need to rely less on the U.S. and play a greater role in their neighborhood.
In many ways, that is exactly what these countries have been attempting to do since 2015; and now Carter and others have reason to revisit their advice.
In the absence of strong American leadership, now spanning two administrations, the future of the region hinges on what local powers define as priorities, and how they go about trying to achieve them. Even if Washington decides to wake up, it will now find it far more difficult than in the past to assert itself.
[Danielle Pletka: The U.S. needs to put its values back at the center of its foreign policy]
What’s happening in the Middle East today can be traced back to the 2011 Arab Spring, which sparked a desire for democratic change among ordinary people, and, among governments, a countervailing desire for stability based on the status quo ante.
To go back in time, as it were, the counter-revolutionary bloc—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and their allies in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere—believes the future must be more authoritarian than ever. Based on extensive conversations with senior Arab officials, I’ve found that the dominant outlook could be summed up as follows: a heavy-handed domestic and regional approach may well carry risks, but the alternative is worse.
If the autocrats lost control over the masses in 2011, the thinking goes, that was because they did not go far enough in their repression. Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak gave some space to the Muslim Brotherhood, political activists, and critical media. Look what happened to him.
As unrest generated by the Arab Spring shifted power away from Arab republics to richer, more stable Gulf monarchies, leaders throughout the region dropped the pretense that they would ever bow, or bend, to the popular will—whether in the direction of more democracy or more extreme religiosity.
Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for example, declared in 2017: “We will not waste 30 years trying to deal with extremist ideas; we will eradicate them here and now.” In defense of moderation, he proposed simply stomping out religious radicals. (In American terms: Shock and awe rather than hearts and minds.) And MbS was probably using the term “extremist” conveniently; the Saudis have since designated as terrorist organizations certain religious groups, such as the International Union of Muslim Scholars, broadly perceived as mainstream.
Generally speaking, authoritarian countries seem more willing than ever before to disregard the desires of the Arab street. It is now an open secret that Gulf states have developed ties with Israel, in the absence of formal relations, including trade partnerships and security deals. Just last week, an Israeli minister toured Abu Dhabi, the national Israeli anthem was reportedly sung in Doha, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a historic visit to Muscat. Such reports along with continued support for President Trump’s “deal of the century,” despite his administration’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, have enraged Arab populations.
[Read: Progress without peace in the Middle East]
Of course there is a constituency for such high-handedness. Elites, secular nationalists, and ordinary people exhausted by or fearful of wars were euphoric following the rise of leaders such as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt and MbS. They are now banking on their success, convinced that any compromise will undo the “gains” made so far.
In Egypt, the campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood and any form of dissent is the fieriest in nearly 50 years. Most Islamists and critics are either languishing in jail or living in exile. The regime also consolidated control of media, once seen as among the most vibrant in the region. To Sisi and his supporters, harsh measures are acceptable because they have stabilized the country. Even Muslim Brotherhood leaders acknowledge that the campaign against it has been effective in the sense that it has been devastating, breaking the organization into multiple pieces. Precisely because crackdowns have worked, the regime and its supporters also back their continuation. Now that a final victory against the Muslim Brotherhood is within reach, why let up?
For counter-revolutionary regimes, the top priority is to prevent a repeat of the 2011 uprisings, and they believe the best way to do that is to stay the repressive course. Which is why recent talk that MbS was doomed, or that he could be replaced after the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was out of touch with the broad reality of the region. MbS is seen as a key member of the pack of new leaders remaking the Middle East, and the pack will stand by him. This dynamic also informs the continuing blockade of Qatar as well as the war in Yemen; humanitarian concerns simply don’t matter next to the perceived efficacy of aggression.
[Richard Fontaine: Jamal Khashoggi’s murder hurt American interests, not just American values]
Amid revolutionary fatigue, authoritarians have the support of broad segments of their societies and a window to consolidate their power. But a diverse group that includes liberal democrats as well as radical Islamists believes that window won’t stay open forever—or even very long—since the economic, political and social causes of the Arab uprisings in 2011 have largely worsened.
In their quest to consolidate power, authoritarian governments are vesting it in fewer and fewer hands—which might expose them to internal challengers. Political repression, which might crush opposition in the short term, also gives Islamists a legitimate grievance to exploit. And if authoritarians can’t improve the economic lot of their people—as so far they have not—that too hurts their ability to restore stability, and thus to remain in control. Iraq and Jordan, for example, recently saw a wave of uprisings over unpopular economic policies.
No space for reconciliation or compromise exists between authoritarian governments and their democratic or Islamist opponents. If the strongmen win—and they have a real chance—then the West will have to abandon its dream of a more politically open Middle East (the vision sparked by the Arab Spring). If they fail—and there is a compelling argument that they could—their countries could experience a period of turmoil on the scale of the Syrian civil war. In this volatile environment, the United States is ominously absent.
Iran’s rivals are “in the game, on the ground,” just as Carter advised three years ago. Missing from the scene is an umpire to manage conflicts and halt the autocrats’ worst instincts. The United States seems not to care what’s happening in the region at this moment, but the real risk of apathy is that it will bring forth a future that’s even less stable than the past.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when Bob Menendez’s name first became synonymous with ethical lapses. Perhaps it was in 2006, when federal prosecutors suspected that the New Jersey senator had steered federal funds to a nonprofit group that was paying him rent. Or perhaps it was in 2014, when the FBI suspected that he’d intervened on behalf of two accused Ecuadorian criminals in exchange for campaign donations. Or perhaps it was in 2017, when he stood accused in federal court of helping Salomon Melgen, an affluent eye doctor, in exchange for gifts that were valued at nearly $1 million.
Menendez has never been found guilty of anything, and last year’s federal trial ended with a hung jury. There were even rumors, on the eve of his 2012 reelection, that he had partied with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, but after conservative media outlets wrote dozens of stories, the FBI concluded that the rumors had no basis in fact. Thus far, the harshest verdict against Menendez has been rendered by the Senate Ethics Committee, which earlier this year “severely admonished” him for his relationship with the affluent eye doctor. It would appear that Menendez has escaped more scrapes than Houdini.
The downside for Democrats, however, is that they’re sweating his 2018 reelection bid. The Senate map for Democrats is bad enough this year—their long-shot bid to capture the Senate next Tuesday hinges on defending and winning seats in southern and western red states—and the last thing they needed was a toss-up race in blue New Jersey. But they’re stuck with Menendez, and in recent weeks their Senate PAC has been compelled to pump $6 million into the contest.
In a normal year, Menendez might well be doomed. Voters in the so-called Sopranos State aren’t totally numb regarding corruption; in the latest poll conducted by Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, only 28 percent of New Jerseyans view Menendez favorably. They’ve long been reluctant to send Republicans to the Senate—that hasn’t happened since 1972—but if this were a normal year, they’d likely be tempted. Indeed, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report says that this race is a toss-up. Even the Jersey editorial writers who have endorsed Menendez say that he’s “slippery” and “awful.”
But if Menendez survives election night, he should probably pen a thank-you note to Donald Trump—with perhaps a separate note to his Republican opponent, the pharmaceutical mogul Bob Hugin, who in 2016 raised money for Trump, donated $200,000 to Trump, and served as a convention delegate for Trump. Menendez has lucked out because in New Jersey, the president’s baggage is far weightier than his.
Trump’s share of the Jersey vote in 2016 was 41 percent, and his summer approval rating was 33 percent. Trump has been a drag on Republicans campaigning for the House; at least two of the GOP’s five New Jersey seats seem poised to go blue, and voters statewide, by double-digit margins, reportedly favor a Democratic Congress. Trump has staged numerous rallies in the closing weeks of the midterm campaign, but it’s telling that none have been in swing Jersey districts. Menendez has duly taken advantage, airing TV ads that link his foe to the president (“To stop Trump, stop Hugin”). Hugin, mindful of the statewide polls, has been compelled to insist that he’s not a toady for Trump (“I’ve been independent my whole life”), which doesn’t square with his lavish praise of Trump, most notably on Fox News, where he called the president “constructive and engaged.”
Hugin, who has pumped his own wealth into the campaign, has hammered Menendez with references to last year’s federal trial—Menendez was hit with 18 corruption charges—but that hasn’t trumped his own baggage. Hugin also swung for the fences by resurrecting the long-debunked rumors of underage prostitutes, but that move merely underscored the ugliness of the race that editorialists call “the most depressing choice for New Jersey voters in a generation.”
A Democratic candidate without a checkered reputation would most likely have left Hugin in the dust months ago; Menendez reportedly leads by only single digits. He could’ve eased his party’s burden by stepping aside and clearing the way for a better candidate—which is what happened in the autumn of 2002, when the Democrat incumbent Bob Torricelli, who’d also been admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for taking gifts from a donor, dropped out and was hastily replaced by Frank Lautenberg—but Menendez wanted political redemption. He declared outside the courthouse last November, after his federal trial ended with a hung jury: “To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat: I know who you are, and I won’t forget you.” (There was talk that day, especially among fans of The Sopranos, that Menendez sounded stereotypically Jersey.)
The prosecutors had contended that Menendez “sold his soul for a lifestyle he couldn’t afford,” but the jury couldn’t agree on whether his behavior—taking free flights, free vacations, and big donations, in exchange for helping to promote Melgen’s personal and business interests (including the settlement of an $8.9 million Medicare dispute)—was criminally corrupt or politics as usual. Federal prosecutors failed to prove a direct bribery-for-favors connection. In fact, the bar for proving such a connection had been raised by the Republican-led U.S. Supreme Court. It was ironic that Menendez, the scandal-tainted Democrat, would ultimately benefit.
John Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees—worried about prosecutorial overreach, worried about the criminalization of political behavior—had decreed in several rulings that federal prosecutors needed to have slam-dunk evidence of a direct, specific connection between a donor’s gift and a politician’s favor. In 2016, they overturned the corruption conviction of former Virginia Republican governor Robert McDonnell, ruling that even though he’d made calls to help a benefactor who’d given him gifts, he hadn’t formally used gubernatorial power to benefit the benefactor. The court said that “arranging a meeting, contacting another public official, or hosting an event” was not sufficient proof of a gift-for-favors link. That was a break for Menendez, who had arranged meetings for Melgen but had never flexed legislative muscle.
They’ve long said in New Jersey that Bob Menendez has a gift for escaping unscathed, but his biggest break is running for a third term on turf that is virulently anti-Trump. And he’ll likely limp to victory, keeping that Senate seat blue, confident in the knowledge that voters will typically make the least unpalatable choice.
The question is not whether Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker will win reelection. It’s whether he can beat Bill Weld’s 1994 showing, when he took 71 percent of the vote. There’s been no sea change in Massachusetts politics—the state remains a Democratic bastion. But Baker, an overwhelmingly popular Republican, is in the tradition of Weld and a slew of other GOP governors in New England who have thrived even as their party edges further and further right on the national level.
Baker and Vermont’s Phil Scott are oddities in the Republican Party of Donald Trump. Both are moderate, even liberal. Both have taken positions against Republican orthodoxy, with Scott pushing gun control legislation in Vermont and Baker backing environmental and social-welfare legislation that would be out of place in most GOP platforms. Both governors are clearly cruising to reelection—what’s less clear is whether the pair can translate their personal popularity into newfound electoral success for their party in a region that was once the Republicans’ most redoubtable stronghold.
For a century, the Republican Party was the natural governing force in New England. Its brand of moderate liberalism, anchored in the Protestant middle classes and morally founded upon its origins in the abolition movement, received broad popular support. Though Republican rule was challenged from time to time, particularly in more urban southern New England, the party’s ascendancy was never truly in doubt until its national arm began drifting rightward under Richard Nixon. But when the GOP became a predominantly southern and western party, its grip on its traditional northeastern base eroded rapidly. “For a state like Vermont, when the Republican Party starts talking with a more southern accent, it’s a little bit of a problem,” says Nicol C. Rae, the dean of Montana State University and author of The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans.
[David Frum: The Republican Party needs to embrace liberalism]
Baker is likely the truest avatar of liberal Republicanism still standing. His tenure as governor has seen a comprehensive plan to combat climate change developed alongside the announcement that the commonwealth would reach its 2020 emissions targets. He has enacted legislation to reduce gender pay gaps, pledged to make up federal funding cuts to Planned Parenthood with state money, said that he supports the settlement of Syrian refugees in Massachusetts, and been vocal in his support for LGBT rights. And he’s one of a few in a cycle: Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, and—more arguably—Mitt Romney all governed from either a centrist or a moderate liberal position when they occupied the corner office on Beacon Hill. Baker’s approach is one of “constructive friction” with the Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature, Billy Pitman, his deputy campaign manager, says.
The strategy seems to be working. A poll for the public-radio station WBUR in Boston found that Baker leads his Democratic opponent, Jay Gonzalez, by 19 points—among Democrats. Gonzalez has never polled above 27 percent. In Vermont, even an internal poll for the state’s Democratic Party showed Scott winning by a comfortable margin. In New Hampshire, Governor Chris Sununu—a less moderate figure whose attempts to curtail the franchise for college students have met a negative reaction from many Democrats—faces less certain reelection, though he is also favored.
Maine is an outlier. Though both parties in the state have historically been known for their moderation, the state elected Paul LePage, a right-wing populist, in the 2010 Tea Party wave. Shawn Moody, the Republican nominee to succeed LePage, who is term-limited this year, is akin to the outgoing governor, though without his history of controversy and racism. Although the race between Moody and Attorney General Janet T. Mills is competitive, the Democrat is favored and Moody has never led in a publicly released poll.
Whether that indicates a repudiation of LePage’s record is less clear. In early October, the state’s senior senator, Susan Collins, was variously castigated and lauded for her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Collins has often been viewed as a moderate, but she has lately seemed less willing to break with her Republican colleagues on key votes. “My sense of Senator Collins is that she’s never been a moderate—she just plays one on TV,” says Janann Sherman, an emeritus professor at the University of Memphis and a biographer of Margaret Chase Smith, the Maine senator famed for her political independence. Collins may fear a primary challenge if she seeks a fifth term in 2020, driving her to the right.
Sherman argues that Collins attempts to cultivate an image as a successor to Smith, but has struck a vastly divergent course in practice. Smith was the first woman elected to the Senate in her own right after first following her husband, the progressive, pro-union Republican Clyde Smith, into a Skowhegan-based House seat. Her most famed moment in the legislature came in 1950, when she gave her “Declaration of Conscience” speech against fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crackdown, in which she declared “fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear” the “four horsemen of calumny.”
But Maine may be more fertile ground for a Trump-inspired GOP today than it has been in the past. “There’s something of a base in Maine for populist social conservatism that there isn’t in other states” in New England, according to Rae. Collins is certainly more conservative than her former partner in the Senate, Olympia Snowe, or Snowe’s husband, the former governor and congressman Jock McKernan. Still, even in Maine, taking positions on issues such as marriage equality and abortion—which national Republicans typically oppose but are overwhelmingly popular in New England—can doom GOP candidates, either with their own base or with independents and Democrats.
In a 1966 poem published in The Atlantic, the Bostonian poet Robert Lowell wrote of “the scions of the good old strain, / the poor who always must remain / poor and Republicans in Maine.” Lowell seems to have sought to invoke a New England puritanism, one that mixed with the later religious themes of transcendentalism into a coherent ideology of individualism collectively understood that took particular root in rural communities and small towns across the region.
In April, Scott stood on the steps of Vermont’s golden-domed statehouse while protestors in orange hunting gear screamed at him: “Traitor!” He had just upended the state’s political scene, signing extensive gun control legislation that raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm from 16 to 21, mandated background checks, introduced a system to remove guns from those deemed threats to public safety, and banned bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. Scott, who had previously held an A rating from the National Rifle Association, executed a brisk about-face following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shootings in Florida and rammed through the extensive legislation in the historically gun-friendly state.
It was an act of extreme political daring—Scott later drew a surprisingly strong primary challenger who campaigned on a pro-gun platform and ultimately garnered 32 percent of the vote—but it was not unprecedented. In 1990, a socialist former mayor of Burlington named Bernie Sanders took advantage of the NRA’s opposition to Republican Representative Peter Smith to seize the seat. The result was not close. Smith had come out in favor of an assault-weapons ban, an unpopular position in the state, and Sanders promised to back no federal gun legislation. Conservative Republicans opposed to Smith’s liberal views joined with the state’s left wing to send Sanders to Congress, where his long-standing pro-gun stances would trouble him decades later during his 2016 run for the presidency.
Smith chuckles when he talks about Scott’s effort on gun control. The governor “showed great courage,” he says. But, as Smith sees it, Scott could be the last of a dying breed. A former stock-car driver who later represented central Vermont in the state senate, Scott’s personal brand is stronger than that of his party, which—despite its small size—has embraced Trumpism more than its counterpart in Massachusetts, Smith believes. There is “just something decent and basic” about Scott, he says, but “if you take those things away Republicans have a very hard time … getting elected to statewide office.”
Indeed, the state’s Republican Party has rarely been at a lower point. It has been reduced to a rump force in the legislature despite holding majorities barely more than a dozen years ago, and its candidates for federal office have been regularly trounced since former Senator Jim Jeffords left the party to become an independent in 2001. The lack of a “farm team of moderates,” as Rae puts it, is a serious detriment. Scott may be a natural successor to figures such as Jim Douglas, the state’s Republican governor from 2003 to 2011, but there are fewer clear heirs to Scott.
Still, candidates can make personal appeals in a small state such as Vermont in ways they cannot in more populous areas. “It’s harder to demonize people when we know them. It’s harder to play to the extremes here,” says Richard Watts, the director of the Center for Research on Vermont. Vermont politics are noted for a relative dearth of negative advertising and a somewhat collegial atmosphere. After one debate between candidates for state representative in rural Lamoille County, the contenders brought out instruments and played a duet, local paper Seven Days reported.
That’s not to say that things don’t get heated in the state’s politics, but it isn’t personal, Smith says. Smith was labeled “Peter Preppy” during his first run for the House. An educator by trade, he founded the Community College of Vermont after earning his doctorate from Harvard and his undergraduate degree from Princeton. Coupled with his family’s banking background, it created a veneer of privilege, he says. “I was a very privileged person, and I never felt that was something I could or should deny,” he says. But he never believed that the language was incendiary, he says, and it was not repeated or hostile in the same way that Trump has used monikers like “Lyin’ Ted” and “Low-Energy Jeb.”
Watts says he once met a woman in Bethel—a small erstwhile mill town deep in the Green Mountains—who refused to put a sign up for a candidate unless the candidate joined her for tea at her home. Her yard was packed with signs—and the next week, the lieutenant governor showed up for tea.
Writing about a municipal election in 1983, the conservative stalwart George Will noted that being “an extremely liberal Republican … is like being a High-Church Unitarian: It is possible, but why bother?” In New England, the two go hand in hand. The Republican Party in the region had its genesis in intellectual circles where Unitarianism ran deep, partly in this magazine’s pages, where Unitarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell pushed Republican candidates and ideas before, during, and after the Civil War.
Smith and his ideological allies advocate a vision not dissimilar to the Republicans who came a century earlier. “Liberty can’t just be an icon of individualism telling everybody else to make their own sense and take what they can get,” he says. “We’re really at a major crossroads, and the abundance of information is contributing to a redefinition of how liberty and justice might work together for the greater good of the many.” It’s not the message coming out of Republican headquarters in Washington.
Claudine Schneider—a representative from Rhode Island from 1981 until her defeat in a Senate election a decade later—wrote in an email that New England is “well-read, well-educated, [and] made up of immigrants, and inherently prefers what have been Republican values.” Schneider proudly wears the label of gypsy moth, a term pejoratively applied to liberal Republicans from the north during the 1980s who provided a key swing vote in the House during that period. Schneider said that she now typically votes for Democrats, though she has co-founded a group, called Republicans for Integrity, that seeks to oppose Trump’s influence within the GOP.
[Read: The 2018 midterms could kill the American moderate for good]
Rhode Island produced what may have been the last major election in which a Republican nominee was to the left of the Democratic candidate. In 2006, Lincoln Chafee, the incumbent, was defeated by Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. The candidates’ positions were markedly similar, often differing only on small points. Ultimately, Chafee’s loss likely came down to national factors rather than his own standing in the state. Asked later if Whitehouse’s victory had been good for the country because it took Senate control away from the GOP, Chafee answered, “To be honest, yes.” (Chafee later became an independent, won the state’s governorship in 2010, then became a Democrat, declined to run for reelection, and sought the presidency in 2016 on a platform that called for the United States to adopt the metric system. He dropped out of the Democratic primary before the Iowa caucus.)
The Massachusetts Republicans are, perhaps, in a stronger position for the future than their peers in northern New England. Their “uncanny ability to find local moderates” who work with, but provide a check on, the Democratic-dominated state legislature has been a boon to the party, Rae says. Smith largely agrees. The Massachusetts branch of the party features more of the “old-style moderate-to-liberal” politics, he says, reminiscent of figures such as Edward Brooke and Leverett Saltonstall.
Demographic changes have struck New England in recent decades, but even as views shift, it’s hard to shake the impression that it is the Republican Party that has changed, not the voters. Scott and Baker paint a clear picture: A Republican who embodies old-school party principles can still win elections. One embroiled in Trump-esque populism, hard-right politics, and race-baiting? Not so much. The party emerged, in part, out of the Free Soil movement that fought slavery expansion in the mid-19th century. For figures like today’s moderate governors, the movement’s slogan needs only one change—to make it gender neutral, of course—to apply today: Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, Free People.
Shortly into his flight from Karachi to Peshawar, Pakistan, hijackers took over Fred Hubbell’s plane.
It was March of 1981 and Fred and his wife, Charlotte, had just set off for a trip through North Africa and Southeast Asia. They were on the second leg of their journey when members of the terrorist organization Al-Zulfiqar rerouted their Boeing 720 and landed in Kabul, holding all 132 passengers hostage. The hijackers stalked the plane aisles, wielding pistols and hand grenades. They shot a man sitting near the Hubbells, a Pakistani diplomat, and left him to bleed out on the tarmac.
To pass the time, a 29-year-old Hubbell read a book about the partition of India—the only book he’d packed. He thumbed through an issue of Time magazine over and over again. He lingered on a single thought: Why me?
Hubbell was recounting the experience to me on a recent October morning while we bumped along on his campaign bus through southeast Iowa. The hijackers eventually released him in Damascus, Syria, after he’d spent 13 days on board the aircraft. But the event stayed with him through the decades. It helped him get his priorities straight, he said. It’s why he got more involved in his Iowa community—volunteering and joining boards and donating money. And it’s part of the reason that now, at age 67, he’s running for governor against the Republican incumbent Kim Reynolds. “When your life is threatened every day, you see somebody shot and killed a few feet away from you,” Hubbell explained, “you really start to think, What am I gonna do differently?”
It’s a bit of a stretch—a local man gets kidnapped by terrorists and then, 40 years later, feels compelled by the experience to rescue his state from the clutches of the GOP. But this year, many Iowans don’t seem to mind his idiosyncratic explanation for why he’s running. They want change, and their support for Hubbell is part of a broader backlash against Republican leadership at both the state and national levels.
Hubbell’s home state is traditionally a purple one, but it’s recently taken a sharp rightward turn. After backing Democrats in six of seven previous presidential elections—including Barack Obama twice in 2008 and 2012—the state swung to Donald Trump by 10 points in 2016. A Republican has been in the governor’s mansion since 2011, and the state legislature in recent years has passed some of the most conservative reforms Iowa has seen in decades, from defunding Planned Parenthood to privatizing Medicaid.
This year’s gubernatorial election, then, will help gauge Iowans’ support for Republican policies and leadership across the board—from the White House to Des Moines. It will also offer a useful temperature test in the state with the first-in-the-nation caucuses, through which a steady stream of potential 2020 candidates has already begun to flow.
An avenging wave of indignation could turn Iowa blue again—very blue—in 2018. And Fred Hubbell is riding it.
To win, Hubbell needs to wrangle a coalition of Democrats and independents, the state’s elusive middle voters.
The proportion of Democrats and Republicans in Iowa is roughly the same, but nearly 40 percent of voters are unaffiliated with any political party. They’re the people who, sick and tired of the status quo, pulled the lever for Trump in 2016 and have largely been credited for his huge win there. Now both candidates are vying for independents’ allegiance: Reynolds is betting that they’re happy with the state’s growing economy and will cast their votes to maintain it, while Hubbell believes that they’ll find the state’s current political direction too extreme.
So far, Hubbell seems to have the edge. The two candidates have been neck and neck in recent polls, with Hubbell taking a slight lead over Reynolds in two recent surveys. In a September Iowa Poll conducted by the Des Moines Register, Hubbell had a lead of 6 percent among unaffiliated voters. On the campaign bus, I asked him why he thinks he’s beating Reynolds among that subset: “I just think it’s kind of natural for my campaign to appeal to independents,” Hubbell told me. “Democrats like the social side, independents like the business side.”
Most Iowans are familiar with the name Hubbell. Fred’s great-great-grandfather, F. M. Hubbell, co-founded Equitable of Iowa, a life-insurance company, in Des Moines in 1867. Fred served as the chairman of the company’s department-store chain, Younkers, for two years before becoming the president of Equitable in 1987, where he stayed for a decade. More recently, Hubbell served as acting director of Iowa’s Department of Economic Development in 2009.
On his campaign bus, driving from Clinton to Davenport, Hubbell was soft-spoken and attentive to our interview. He didn’t break eye contact, and he asked me a lot of questions. It was a dramatic shift from his public persona, especially during debates, where he often comes off as stiff, even awkward.
Reynolds, on the other hand—always sporting a brightly colored blazer and a sunny smile—exudes enthusiasm. And she has a compelling backstory: A former alcoholic and college dropout, the 59-year-old Reynolds entered politics later in life, serving as a little-known state senator before being yanked into the spotlight when Terry Branstad, the longest-serving governor in American history, chose her as his running mate. She became Iowa’s first female governor in May 2017, after Branstad was named the ambassador to China.
Under both Branstad’s and Reynolds’s leadership, the Iowa GOP has had some of its most fruitful legislative sessions, passing a bill to roll back collective-bargaining rights for tens of thousands of government workers, expanding gun rights, defunding Planned Parenthood, and enacting the most restrictive abortion law in the country. In 2016, the administration privatized the state’s Medicaid program, and in May, Reynolds approved the largest tax cut in Iowa’s history.
[Read: What it means to defund Planned Parenthood]
For Democrats, these actions added insult to the injury of the 2016 election, and prompted an enormous backlash. This year, Democrats have more candidates running for the state legislature than at any point in the past three decades, and two of Iowa’s three Republican representatives are being given a serious run for their money. Twenty-nine-year-old Abby Finkenauer is locked in a tight race with the Tea Party Republican Rod Blum in northeast Iowa, and Cindy Axne is challenging the Republican David Young for his seat in the southwest. Even Representative Steve King, who defeated his most recent Democratic opponent by more than 20 points, is being out-raised in a closer-than-expected race with challenger J. D. Scholten.
And the whole thing made calm, quiet Fred Hubbell angry enough, he says, to run for office for the first time. If Reynolds is governor for another four years, Hubbell told me on the bus, “we [won’t] be able to really recognize Iowa.”
The gubernatorial race has evolved to mirror the political debates at the national level: Reynolds, like Trump, has presented herself as the shepherd of Iowa’s economic success, just as the president asserts that his leadership has led to a booming economy and a surging stock market. Hubbell, meanwhile, has zeroed in on health care in the same way that Democrats campaigning across the country are framing it as one of the GOP’s greatest weaknesses.
[Annie Lowrey: The one issue that’s really driving the midterm elections]
Under Reynolds’s leadership, Iowa has amassed a surplus of $127 million and boasts a historically low unemployment rate of 2.5 percent—data points the governor often mentions in her ads and stump speeches. She also highlights the fact that Iowa was this year ranked at the top of U.S. News & World Report’s Best States list: “We’ve been recognized as the No. 1 state in the country,” she said, grinning, during a recent debate, before asking all the Iowans watching at home to help “build on the success.” (Reynolds’s staff did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.)
But Hubbell argues that voters don’t care about a budget surplus. “That doesn’t mean anything to an individual, family, or business out there,” he told me on the bus. Instead, people are more concerned about paying their doctor bills and having access to medical treatment—issues for which he believes he has the solutions.
“It boils down to different priorities,” Hubbell told a small crowd of supporters at a campaign stop in Muscatine, a small town on the western banks of the Mississippi River. The health-care situation in Iowa, he said, is a “complete disaster.” As governor, he would redirect state funds to comprehensive mental-health services, a policy that’s been a priority for Democrats after the Branstad-Reynolds administration eliminated funding for two of Iowa’s four mental hospitals in 2015.
Hubbell has also pledged to begin the process of reversing Medicaid privatization. The Branstad-Reynolds administration transferred control of its $5 billion program—and the care of nearly 600,000 Iowans—to managed-care organizations two years ago. Since then, the new system has faced rising costs and numerous complaints from patients and providers who have been denied medical care or reimbursement.
Reynolds has acknowledged that the transition wasn’t as smooth as it could have been, but she contends that her administration has brought in analysts and renegotiated contracts to address major problems. Iowans, though, still don’t seem satisfied: Support for Medicaid privatization was at a mere 28 percent in September, according to that month’s Iowa Poll, and almost half of likely voters who support Reynolds thought her handling of the issue was a problem.
Hubbell wants to return the program to state control. He warns that if things keep going the way they’re going, “we’re gonna be Kansas,” a state that privatized its Medicaid system in 2012. It’s since been chastised by the federal government for failing to meet health-care standards.
Hubbell’s supporters see him as a soothing balm for a state that’s been burned by Republican administrations’ policies. Lynda Murray, a dietician and Burlington city-council member, told me at a campaign stop that the Reynolds administration “has set us back 50 years.
“I see him as trying to reverse some of that stuff on day one,” she added.
Republicans, however, are confident that Iowans will see the state’s economic progress and trust in its current leadership. Iowa State Senator Tom Greene, who represents three counties in southeast Iowa, told me that people “generally vote with their pocketbooks.” That means, he said, “if the economy is doing well, they’re gonna say, ‘Hey, let’s keep riding this thing.’”
Greene said he believes that the Medicaid privatization should have been handled differently, but he’s confident that the system’s problems aren’t a voting issue for most Iowans. And he could be right: “It’s a work in progress,” said Rich Gophner, an 87-year-old retired newspaper publisher in Burlington, when I asked him about Medicaid. “Democrats never have any patience,” he said. Plus, “they’re totally irresponsible when it comes to money.”
[Read: The fight for Iowa’s white working-class soul]
In another eerie parallel to the controversies of national politics, Hubbell’s success could be stymied by his choice not to release his full tax returns—and the sheer fact of his wealth. The Democrat released a three-page summary of his returns in August, but several forms pertaining to his income and the properties he owns have not been released. Reynolds, who divulged 10 years of her own tax documents, has repeatedly hammered Hubbell for withholding, and suggested that he might have something to hide. A majority of independents—and even his own supporters—say they’re troubled by his unwillingness to release the tax information.
Hubbell, who has contributed more than $6 million to his own campaign, has also been framed as out-of-touch by Republicans. But he doesn’t seem worried about any of it: “You know as well as I do that whatever information we put out, it’s never gonna be enough,” Hubbell told me. And when it comes to funds, he says, “I think Democrats realize they’d rather have my money there than a bunch of corporations’ money.”
Tuesday’s election comes at a particularly tumultuous time in Iowa: The backlash against Republicans is coinciding with a nonstop parade of out-of-state visitors traveling to Iowa to make their presidential intentions known. More than a dozen potential 2020 candidates have visited the state this year, according to a list from the Register. They’ve ranged from big-name candidates such as former Vice President Joe Biden and California Senator Kamala Harris, to relative B-listers like Michael Avenatti. Their presence could be useful for Hubbell: “Those people are absolutely drumming up support” for Democrats, says David Oman, a former chief of staff to Branstad and the former co-chair of the Iowa GOP.
For Democrats in the state, the shock from Trump’s election hasn’t really worn off. And the shocks kept coming: Democrats saw their state transform, almost overnight, into a conservative utopia, where the policy matters that they cared about most—health care, labor rights, abortion access—suddenly seemed at risk.
There’s clearly “a Trump reaction,” Oman says. “He seems to be consolidating much of the Republican base, and further aggravating activist Democrats.” This could have significant implications for the kinds of appeals that prospective presidential candidates will make to Iowans ahead of the 2020 primary season—and how they are ultimately received.
And Democrats are not the only ones fueling the GOP backlash. Farmers, for example, could face losses of up to $2.2 billion as a result of Trump’s trade disputes with China and Canada. Some of them are staying loyal to Trump, and by association, Reynolds—but others aren’t. Trump’s approval rating is low in the state: Only 39 percent of adults say that they approve of the job he’s doing as president, including 35 percent of independents and 4 percent of Democrats.
At an event at the Democratic Party headquarters in Burlington, I asked 36-year-old Ryan Rogers what he saw as the source of the energy bubbling up on the left. “It’s national more than anything,” he told me, after pointing out a Bernie Sanders pin stuck to the bill of his hat. “People are just sick and tired of the way things have been going … With any luck, we can just halt some of the damage that’s been going on in Iowa, starting with Fred.”
In other words, Democrats’ fury over Iowa’s Republican leadership has combined in more or less equal measure with the frustration they feel over national politics. And it’s all congealed into something that just might translate to a win for Hubbell.
When 71-year-old Pam Abdo caught sight of Fred Hubbell doing a television interview in the sparse, shiny lobby of the Genesis Medical Center in Davenport, she shrieked with excitement and ran to shake his hand.
Abdo, an independent, told me she’s supporting Hubbell because she believes that he can repair Iowa’s health-care system. But the retired schoolteacher became animated when I asked her how she felt about the country’s current leadership. “I’m ashamed of our president,” Abdo said, shaking her head. “He doesn’t bring people together; he separates people; he gets by with lying.”
Despite having voted for members of both parties in the past, Abdo hopes Iowans turn out to vote for Democrats this year—“from the top to the bottom.”
She spoke with Hubbell for a few minutes, before reaching into the pocket of her coat and offering him a fun-size Snickers candy bar.
“You should think about going to Washington,” Abdo told Hubbell, making him chuckle. “Well,” he replied, “we have to fix Iowa first.”
Roger Stone can’t seem to get his story straight. In 2017, the political world’s most well-known “dirty trickster” denied ever having a direct line to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as he repeatedly boasted during the 2016 election. Now, in light of new emails that show he communicated WikiLeaks’ pre-Election Day plans to at least one senior Trump campaign official in the weeks before the election, his recollection is changing yet again.
Even before the latest email revelation, Stone, a longtime friend and confidant of President Donald Trump, was in hot water with the House Intelligence Committee. Since his September 2017 hearing before the panel, he’s amended his testimony three times as new reports have emerged about his contacts with Russian nationals, the extent of his interactions with WikiLeaks, and his conversations with Trump campaign officials. Despite those changes, the question of whether he perjured himself before the committee still stands—and is reportedly being examined by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“Roger Stone had a chance, under oath, to tell the House Intel Committee about his contacts with Russians and WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign,” Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who sits on the panel, told me. “He misled us and has repeatedly—three times now—amended his testimony to fit new press reporting.” Swalwell noted that the committee’s Democrats voted to send transcripts related to its Russia investigation to Mueller, but Republicans resisted. “The special counsel should see Stone’s transcripts and the accounts of all witnesses,” he added.
[Read: Mueller wants the FBI to look at a scheme to discredit him.]
Mueller, who is investigating whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election, has been interviewing Stone associates and senior campaign officials in recent weeks—including campaign CEO Steve Bannon and the former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. He’s reportedly trying to determine whether Stone coordinated the release of hacked emails from a senior Clinton campaign official, John Podesta, to distract from the damaging Access Hollywood tape, which showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. The tape was released just minutes before the email dump. Stone has long denied that he discussed WikiLeaks’s plans with Bannon or any other campaign official. “There are no such communications, and if Bannon says there are he would be dissembling,” Stone told The Washington Post as recently as Tuesday.
But emails from Stone made public Thursday belie that claim. On October 4, 2016, three days before the Podesta emails were published, Stone emailed Bannon predicting “a load” of new WikiLeaks disclosures “every week going forward.” According to Swalwell, Stone “had an opportunity” to tell the committee about his WikiLeaks-related conversations with Bannon, but “he didn’t.” (Stone told the Post on Thursday that he ‘was unaware of this email exchange until it was leaked,” adding that it “had not turned it up in our search.”)
It isn’t clear whether the panel’s Democrats plan to bring Stone back in for further questioning if they retake the House majority and assume subpoena power. But, like Swalwell, a Democratic aide on the committee emphasized the importance of getting Stone’s full transcript to Mueller to determine whether he committed perjury. “We’ve repeatedly urged the Majority to provide the Special Counsel with access to Roger Stone’s transcript among others, both for the evidence they offer and to determine whether witnesses have committed perjury,” said the aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “This is a particular concern with Roger Stone, especially after the publication of these emails.” Stone didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Former federal prosecutors told me that inconsistencies between Stone’s testimony and what Mueller has learned could hypothetically lead to federal charges. If Mueller were to determine that Stone lied to the panel, “I think he would just charge Stone with perjury” rather than refer the matter to the committee for further review, said Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who specialized in organized crime. “If, for some reason, he didn’t think he had a perjury case but believes Stone misled the committee,” Mueller may notify lawmakers anyway, he said.
Stone’s conflicting statements have been material to both federal and congressional investigators, who want to know whether Stone served as a conduit between the campaign, WikiLeaks, and Russia. Despite telling the committee that he never “had any communication with any Russians or individuals fronting for Russians, in connection with the 2016 presidential election,” Stone later acknowledged meeting with a Russian man named Henry Greenberg in May 2016 to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton. With regard to Assange, Stone told the House Intelligence Committee that they only ever spoke through an intermediary, but Twitter direct messages show Stone communicating with the WikiLeaks Twitter account in October 2016. It’s widely understood that Assange is the primary administrator of that account.
Elie Honig, who was also a federal prosecutor in the Southern District, largely agreed with Goldman’s assessment. “If Stone lied to the House committee, that certainly could give rise to criminal charges for false statements and obstruction of justice,” said Honig, who prosecuted mob cases. “Mueller could charge simply on the basis of Stone’s testimony and the evidence proving that testimony to be knowingly false.”
The content of the newly revealed email with Bannon doesn’t prove that Stone had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ roll-out plan for the Podesta emails; Assange had already told reporters that morning that there would be a disclosure every week until the election. And WikiLeaks could easily have decided on its own, without the urging of anyone associated with the Trump campaign, that the best way to deflect attention away from the Access Hollywood tape was to give the world some stolen emails to sift through. But Stone seemed to know well in advance that WikiLeaks was planning something big—and that it concerned Podesta.
"It will soon [be] Podesta's time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary” Stone wrote in a now-famous tweet on August 21, 2016. (Stone told the House Intelligence Committee that the tweet was prompted by the resignation of his “boyhood friend and colleague, Paul Manafort” over his ties to Ukraine. He said he “thought it manifestly unfair” that Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, “not be held to the same standard” due to his own foreign business dealings.)
[Read: DOJ says Russian trolls are interfering online with the midterms.]
On October 2, 2016, Stone told the far-right talk-radio host Alex Jones that he had been “assured that the mother lode” was coming. The next day, he tweeted that he had “total confidence that @wikileaks” and his “hero Julian Assange” would come through.
On October 7, WikiLeaks began publishing the contents of Podesta’s inbox, which had been infiltrated by Russian hackers seven months earlier. Stone told The Daily Caller on October 12 that Assange had delayed the email dump on purpose: “I was led to believe that there would be a major release on a previous Wednesday,” October 5, he said. Despite his public statement in August that he’d been speaking directly to Assange, he denied that he had been given “advance knowledge of the details” of WikiLeaks’ release and maintained that he was only in touch with Assange indirectly.
WikiLeaks has downplayed its relationship with Stone, and asked him in private messages that I obtained to stop making “false claims of association” with the organization. That was in October 2016. But it re-opened its line of communication with Stone in November. “Happy?” WikiLeaks wrote to Stone, the day after Trump won the election. “We are now more free to communicate.” Fourteen months later, Stone visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has been holed up for more than five years.
“There is no doubt that WikiLeaks, controlled by known foreign citizens, tried to influence the election,” Goldman said. “But the question for Mueller is whether Stone knew about it or whether he assisted it in any way. If he encouraged Assange to release the emails, or advised him on the timing or strategy of doing so, that would be enough [to charge him with a crime]. But the emails released in [The New York Times] only shows knowledge, not coordination.”
“It is very difficult—not impossible, but difficult—for Stone to walk the fine line between ‘intermediary’ and ‘co-conspirator,’” Honig said. But given what is known about how Russian intelligence illegally hacked the emails of both Podesta and the Democratic National Committee; how those hackers used both WikiLeaks and a Russian intelligence officer with the nom de guerre Guccifer 2.0 to disseminate the stolen materials; and how Stone had direct contact with WikiLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, and Bannon, that line seems to be blurring rapidly.
“If Stone knew or should have known that the emails were illegally obtained ... and took some step either to disseminate those stolen emails, or to encourage the hackers to continue their illegal work, or to assist in the overall effort to steal and disseminate the stolen emails,” Honig said, “then he likely crosses over into criminal co-conspirator or accomplice territory.”
Homecoming, Amazon’s new dramatic series starring Julia Roberts, is pure Hitchcock. In one scene, a Department of Defense investigator, Thomas Carrasco (Shea Whigham), runs down a staircase that’s shot from above, shown from a skewed, helter-skelter perspective that makes it seem like Carrasco is a human ball bearing tilting his way into the center of a labyrinth. The scene plays out over a swooping score of strings and brass so redolent of mid-20th century thrillers that you half expect Tippi Hedren to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
But Homecoming is also Steven Soderbergh, between its tendency to introduce episodes with sound first, its jarring use of alternating aspect ratios and splitscreens, and its heady, brittle state of paranoia. It’s Vince Gilligan, too: A bravura sequence at the beginning of the fourth episode showing how a pharmaceutical substance goes from raw plant material to sterile, packaged product feels ripped right out of Breaking Bad. Sam Esmail, who actually directed Homecoming in its entirety, loads it up with all these visual elements and more of his own idiosyncratic flourishes—characters placed in the corner of a frame, flattened color palettes, and overhead shots that make characters look like pieces in a puzzle while also leading viewers to feel like they’re surveilling something.
The result is a television series that’s frequently breathtaking. Each frame of Homecoming feels meaningful, and most feel at least vaguely familiar. But it’s a curious way to approach telling a story that was first told in podcast form, without any visuals at all. As Homecoming unfurls its mystery through 10 half-hour installments, the stylistic choices can seem more like aesthetic over-decoration than vital components of something fully cohesive. At the end of each episode, the credits play out over scenes that continue to roll, blocking the characters still in shot with names overlaying them in bold type. It starts to feel like a larger metaphor for the show: There’s so much happening that you can’t actually see it clearly.
If this feels like sniping—complaining that a television show is too striking—it’s only because Homecoming is otherwise terrific. It’s a stylish, cinematic mystery that’s unlike anything else on TV, streaming series or otherwise. Esmail (the creator of Mr. Robot) takes what was essentially an old-fashioned radio play about intrigue in the military-industrial complex and turns it into a suspense story that’s both old and entirely new. Not to mention that Homecoming has Julia Roberts, a pharmaceutical-grade movie star, at its center, making her starring television debut with a performance that’s so interior it feels almost intrusive to watch.
When Homecoming debuted as a podcast (written by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, who also wrote the show), it starred Catherine Keener as Heidi, a caseworker, and Oscar Isaac as Walter, a serviceman coming off his third tour. Roberts now plays Heidi, the lead administrator of a program called Homecoming Transitional Support Center, which she tells Walter (Stephan James) is a “safe space” for him to process his military experiences and refamiliarize himself with civilian life. Heidi’s job includes weekly sessions with the Homecoming residents and sporadic phone calls with her boss, Colin (Bobby Cannavale), a buffoonish shark of a corporate middle manager who praises Heidi by saying “fist bump” out loud.
The series jumps back and forth in time between the Homecoming scenes, set in 2018, and scenes set a few years later, when Heidi is working as a waitress at a waterside diner, and is visited by Whigham’s investigator, Carrasco. The podcast signaled leaps in chronology with a whooshing kind of jet-engine sound; Esmail employs the same device, but he also renders the future scenes in a square 1:1 ratio, making them feel tense and claustrophobic. It hardly seems necessary, because it’s so clear from Roberts’s performance that these two Heidis are totally different. 2018 Heidi is girlish, earnest, motivated, and compulsively organized. Future Heidi is pallid, lifeless, hollow, and claims not to remember anything about her old job. The question of what’s happened to her becomes the show’s defining mystery.
Mr. Robot was a show that forced the audience into an intensely paranoid state via an unreliable narrator, and Homecoming does the same, but in a sunnier, more amnesiac way. Heidi’s early conversations with Colin include vague references to “medication” and background checks for busboys that prickle with menace. Walter’s friend Shrier (Jeremy Allen White) expresses distrust for the Homecoming center, having learned long ago to believe in his own instincts and to question why private corporations might invest substantial amounts of money in veteran welfare. Early episodes encourage viewers to go along with Shrier’s suspicions, simply because everything seems so strange. Esmail trains his cameras on tiny details in one shot (the bubbles in a fishtank, the angle of a pencil on a desk) and on vast tableaus in another, reducing the characters to mere details. Or data points.
These are aesthetic choices that could easily make Homecoming unbearable, but the series is balanced by moments of humor and strong performances from the supporting players. James is emotive and persuasive as Walter. Dermot Mulroney pops up as Heidi’s ex-boyfriend, the kind of guy who’s developed a new career around a workout regime that’s “Crossfit-based, but not Crossfit per se.” Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies) is remarkable as Walter’s acerbic, protective mother. Alex Karpovsky (Girls) plays Craig, a slightly robotic Homecoming employee who helps retrain the soldiers for civilian job-seeking in cringeworthy role-playing exercises. Sissy Spacek plays Heidi’s mother, although she’s underserved in a role that mostly requires showing visitors the door.
As Carrasco, Whigham (Boardwalk Empire) is the kind of G-man who’s usually the bad guy, with a starchy ironed short-sleeved shirt, short haircut, and spectacles that clip together at the front. But he’s one of the most compelling characters in the series, fully aware of his paper-pushing irrelevance but fiercely committed to doing the right thing anyway. Carrasco’s scenes also feel the most explicitly nostalgic, anchoring the character in a Twilight Zone aesthetic with his 1960s haircut and his increasingly surreal experiences. His antithesis is Cannavale’s Colin, a sharklike Glengarry Glen Ross extrovert whose best scene has him furiously chasing chickens through a coop while ranting at Heidi on the phone.
Roberts gives the most striking performance, flattening her natural charisma and absorbing her character’s feelings until she’s almost unrecognizable. Past Heidi is poised but clearly introverted; Future Heidi is totally deflated, biting her inner lip so intently that her mouth forms a permanent line. In one scene, Heidi gets a makeover at the mall, giving viewers a glimpse of Julia Roberts, megastar and Lancôme spokesmodel—and the contrast is so disconcerting that it’s a relief when Heidi awkwardly wipes the makeup off. Roberts almost never utilizes her infamous smile, and in the fleeting moments when she does, it’s to signal that Heidi is putting on an act.
It’s clear by the end of Homecoming that the show is setting up pieces for a second season (particularly with a post-credits sequence that asks more questions than it answers). If so, it has the potential to expand its story in a way that melds the narrative organically with Esmail’s stylistic flourishes, rather than layering one on top of the other. The series’s jangly throwback visual cues go surprisingly well with Horowitz and Bloomberg’s tight contemporary conspiracy. It’s an old tale of corporate intrigue, gaslighting, and manipulation with new possibilities, splitscreens and all.
Este texto foi publicado originalmente na newsletter do Intercept Brasil. Assine. É de graça, todos os sábados, na sua caixa de e-mails.
Bolsonaro nomeou Moro, e Moro até pode ser um bom ministro (calma), mas isso é assunto para outra news. Hoje quero falar sobre a armadilha das narrativas.
Bolsonaro já sabia que Moro diria sim. A cena do juiz viajando ao Rio foi apenas um show para a imprensa. Naquele dia, todas as redes de zap (elas não foram desmontadas depois da eleição, e nem serão) e todos os tuiteiros bolsonaristas amanheceram vacinados. Sem argumentos melhores para rebater a tese de que o juiz agiu com parcialidade evidente no caso Lula – e que por isso foi nomeado ministro da Justiça –, os cabos eleitorais pagos ou voluntários espalharam na praça uma tese quase infantil: “Moro só condenou o Lula na 1º instância” então “tudo bem” ele aceitar o convite do Bolsonaro pra ser ministro, “nenhum conflito de interesse” já que a “ficha suja se define a partir da 2º instância”.
Milagrosamente, de tuiteiros assessores de políticos do PSL até aquele cara com 2 seguidores brotaram com a mesma tese ao mesmo tempo, redondinha, empacotada, pronta pra ser vendida na feira livre das obviedades. “Quem delimita a ficha suja é o TRF4!”, eles escreveram, como se até as portas dos banheiros das rodoviárias não soubessem disso.
Acontece que o argumento jurídico é totalmente irrelevante nesse caso, e só se escora nele quem quer fugir do debate real.
O que importa aqui é o papel que o juiz teve na Lava Jato em relação a Lula nos últimos tempos, e o cheiro grande de “prêmio” que esse cargo tem para alguém que já havia sido convidado para ser ministro ainda durante a campanha. Vocês leram bem: o vice Mourão disse que já tinham convidado Sérgio Moro antes mesmo de vencerem as eleições, no meio da campanha.
Campanha na qual ele soltou publicamente uma delação do Palocci que nem o MPF quis e que, na prática, não deve servir juridicamente pra nada. Sabem quem disse isso? Um dos principais procuradores da… Lava Jato. Leia o que declarou Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima em uma entrevista:
“Não tinha provas suficientes. Não tinha bons caminhos investigativos. Fora isso, qual era a expectativa? De algo, como diz a mídia, do fim do mundo. Está mais para o acordo do fim da picada. Essas expectativas não vão se revelar verdadeiras.”
O ex-procurador da Lava Jato em Curitiba Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima: “Não recusamos porque não gosto do cidadão, mas porque vamos ter dificuldade para explicar por que fizemos.”
Foto: Rodolfo Buhrer/Folhapress
Acha pouco? Tem mais: a mulher do juiz, Rosangela Moro, comemorou a eleição do Bolsonaro. No Instagram:
Reprodução Instagram @rosangelawmoro
Ou seja: a mulher comemorou a eleição do cara que já tinha prometido um cargo ao marido.
Não ver nesse enredo todo um enorme conflito de interesses, imoral e antiético, é apenas ridículo e sequer digno de debate. E, de fato, as pessoas da feira de obviedades não estão dispostas a conversar. Para parte delas, é uma questão de fé; para outra parte, se o prejudicado foi o PT, vale tudo; outras são pagas para defender o chefe.
Acostumem-se com isso: veremos com frequência um pacote de argumentos prontinhos entregue todas as manhãs na nossa mesa. Quando nos espantarmos com o novo espanto que substituiu o espanto anterior, eles virão repetindo a mesma ladainha, saindo pela tangente, encobrindo as cenas reais.
A Lava Jato fez um trabalho longo, complexo e que tem muitos pontos positivos. Não sou da turma que acha que ela foi concebida para destruir o PT, salvo melhor juízo. A operação colocou na cadeia gente que sequer sabia onde ficavam os presídios das cidades onde moravam e trouxe técnicas usadas em outros países para bater de frente com ladrões históricos do Brasil. Há um legado nisso, se bem usado. Mas seus integrantes estão longe de serem esses santos imaculados que parte da população bajula. O anti-petismo tem dessas: ele santifica por osmose quem fere o PT.
Moro, depois do episódio do grampo ilegal entre Dilma e Lula (o juiz divulgou um trecho que não tinha autorização para ser gravado), meteu os pés pelas mãos outras vezes, sem o menor pudor em esconder sua fixação por Lula. Virou caso pessoal, briga de rua. Eu lamento por quem aplaude isso e acha que em qualquer país decente do mundo a Justiça se comporta dessa maneira. Isso é coisa de republiqueta.
O juiz “herói” e anti-establishment que “jamais entraria para a política”, como declarou várias vezes, agora se alinha à parte política que (ainda) está em pé e que se beneficiou diretamente de seus atos e furadas de sinal. Deveria ter sido punido, foi premiado. Virou ministro da Justiça de quem defende tortura e morte.
No auge da euforia da vitória eleitoral de Bolsonaro, criticar isso tudo é apenas mau humor. A gente conversa mais tarde.
The post Você também comprou essa narrativa enlatada? appeared first on The Intercept.
To find Honorata Defender’s home on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, mention her name to whoever you can find walking down the main street of her tiny town. They’ll tell you to turn when you get to the powwow grounds and to take the paved road, rather than the gravel one. Drive until you see a hill, and look for her car. Her house has no number on it, and mail is not delivered there; it goes to a P.O. box instead.
As Defender put it, “We’ve never believed that a person can own land; it’s the land that owns us.” She added, “The concept of an address wasn’t a big deal.”
Defender was working at her job as a reporter for the Corson/Sioux County News-Messenger — the local paper that covers Standing Rock, including one of the key North Dakota counties that voted Democrat in 2012’s Senate election — when she learned that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld North Dakota’s voter ID law. The law will require each voter to present identification that displays a residential address, a major barrier for tribal members, since thousands of Native voters don’t use a home address. Defender’s home is on the South Dakota side of Standing Rock, but it is typical of the communities throughout the reservation.
The law is widely understood as the result of Republican state Congress members’ cynical mathematics. Six years ago, North Dakota Native Americans helped swing Democrat Heidi Heitkamp narrowly into the U.S. Senate by less than 3,000 votes. The next year, state Republicans introduced the new law. Tribes fought it in court up until October 9, when the Supreme Court declined to support their appeal.
“To have this happen is a slap in the face,” Defender said. “The U.S. government has been breaking their promises to us for over a century now.” The timing of the court’s decision left the state’s five federally recognized tribes with only a few short weeks to make sure that members who do not have home addresses — or do not know them — are able to participate in a highly contested election that will help decide which party controls Congress.
Horonata Defender at the voter drive headquarters.
Still: Jihan Hafiz
Tribal leaders contend that the state government has provided no meaningful support in ensuring that eligible Native voters will be able to overcome the new hurdle. On Thursday, North Dakota District Court Chief Judge Daniel Hovland denied a last-minute request for an emergency halt to enforcement of the new law in advance of the midterm elections. The suit, brought by the Spirit Lake tribe and six Native voters across the state, described the law’s implementation as “unplanned, untested, and broken.” Hovland contended that halting the law’s implementation so close to the election would sow even more confusion and chaos.
In response, a tenacious voter drive has emerged on Standing Rock, led by some of the key figures in the tribe’s 2016 fight against Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline, which drew thousands of pipeline opponents to resistance camps on the edge of the reservation. Ultimately, the pipeline was completed, and oil now flows under the Missouri River, long the primary drinking water source for the reservation.
The drive’s organizers see their efforts to counteract the new law as yet another demonstration of what Indigenous people are capable of when their right to exist is challenged. But it is not a campaign for Heitkamp, who remains a controversial figure on Standing Rock. “She did not support us on DAPL; she blindsided us,” explained Phyllis Young, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and get-out-the-vote organizer.
During the pipeline fight, Heitkamp issued statements in support of law enforcement, calling some of the protesters “violent and unlawful” less than two weeks after police hosed them down with icy water in below-freezing weather. Before that, she was a key supporter of ending the crude oil export ban, which helped fuel demand for a pipeline, and she has declined to stand up to the oil, gas, and coal industries in the face of the climate crisis. Notably, she was one of only two Democratic senators to vote in favor of confirming Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
But the stakes of having Native voices represented in the U.S. government are high. And in many ways, Heitkamp has been a rare advocate in Congress for Native Americans, spearheading efforts to address human trafficking and violence against women, and pushing for the creation of a commission to address issues facing Indigenous children.
“We abandoned her” after DAPL, said Young. “She is redeeming herself.”
The issue that has obsessed Defender as a reporter is the looming expiration in December of the Violence Against Women Act, which, among other things, offers a means for tribes to prosecute cases of domestic violence committed by non-Native people on the reservation, and includes funding to address an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. To Defender, VAWA’s future is inherently linked to the voter ID issue and an example of why it’s so important for tribal members to vote this election. It’s an issue Heitkamp has championed.
Defender was one of the earliest participants in the Dakota Access pipeline resistance, but she understands Heitkamp’s pipeline silence as a compromise to be expected from a Democrat in such an oil-soaked, Republican state. For Defender, the potential consequences for Native women of losing an advocate in the Senate are too great to place the weight of her political position on DAPL. But the even greater threat is that the new law will affirm a perception that Native people can remain invisible.
“My biggest fear is that this won’t work,” she said of the voter drive. “And that’ll push us back to feeling like we don’t matter, our voice doesn’t matter. We’re going back to when we weren’t citizens of this place even though we were here first.”
“My greatest hope is that we have the biggest Native American voting drive that we’ve ever had,” she said. “I’m hoping that, whoever wins, that Native Americans will be able to vote.”
Volunteers moving furniture at the voter drive headquarters.
Still: Jihan Hafiz
On a crisp October day, a week and a half after the Supreme Court decision, Young directed activities as a small house typically rented out by the tribe for birthday parties was transformed into a voter drive headquarters. Furniture that had been used by the Water Protectors Legal Collective, which provided representation to those arrested during the pipeline fight, was being pulled out of storage and repurposed. A staffer from the Lakota People’s Law Project, which also provided DAPL-related legal support, volunteered to field phone calls from the media. Posting the house’s address outside was on the agenda. It wasn’t that no address had ever been assigned to the building; the numbers had simply blown off on one of the prairie region’s windy days.
Long before she became involved in attempting to stop construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, Young co-founded the Women of All Red Nations arm of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, where she fought for the fulfillment of treaty rights and an end to forced sterilization of Indigenous women. When she ran communications during AIM’s occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, residents of the community were still not allowed to vote in county elections. In a community where people have always had to fight for survival under harmful U.S. government policies, one movement can quickly bleed into another, and nothing kicks people into gear like a U.S. government-induced crisis.
“It’s innate in us to defend our people,” said Jenn Ghost Bear, Young’s niece.
Young’s granddaughter, 27-year-old Danielle Ta’Sheena Finn, the tribe’s external affairs director, said the get-out-the-vote effort was accelerated by the challenge to Native people’s right to participate. “Before, we were more hesitant on this election because the two Senate candidates, we have had issues with in the past,” she said. As Standing Rock’s first Miss Indian World in 2016, Finn used her platform to speak out against DAPL.
But although Heitkamp’s silence on the pipeline is a black mark on her record, her opponent’s reputation is worse. Republican Kevin Cramer, currently a U.S. representative, is notorious for a 2013 tirade against the tribal provisions of the Violence Against Women Act during a meeting with a Native advocate for survivors of domestic abuse. According to the account of attendee Melissa Merrick, Cramer claimed that tribal governments were dysfunctional and that a non-Native man would not be able to get a fair trial on a reservation, adding that he wanted to “wring the tribal council’s neck and slam them against the wall,” in reference to a scandal related to the Spirit Lake tribe’s child welfare program. Since then, he’s become a co-sponsor of a House bill that would strengthen some provisions of VAWA, but he has failed to earn many Native people’s trust.
“Due to this law being placed on us, people now realized that if we don’t stand up, we will be oppressed further,” said Finn.
Many of the eligible voters the drive is targeting face challenges beyond just having the right address. According to the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey, 38 percent of Sioux County’s population lives below the poverty line. Many people lack vehicles or cellphones.
Young and her team have been spreading word that the tribe has waived the fee for issuing tribal IDs, offering them for free. But to pick up the ID, residents have to go all the way to Fort Yates, nearly 100 miles away from Standing Rock’s western border. As a result, one of the voter drive’s key tasks has been to make it as easy as possible for people to get to the polls. Young has been busy tracking down drivers willing to take voters to Fort Yates to pick up the ID and, while they’re in town, submit an absentee ballot.
Also taking direction from Young were OJ and Barb Semans, founders of the Native voter rights group Four Directions. The organization is working with students at Claremont Graduate University to help the tribe set up a “fail-safe” system so that even voters who show up to polls without the right ID will be able to vote.
North Dakota Secretary of State Al Jaeger has encouraged eligible voters who lack a residential address to request one through the 911 system. Years ago, in an attempt to manage the challenges of providing emergency services to homes that lack addresses, the 911 system mapped residences on the state’s reservations. Yet Spirit Lake’s lawsuit underlines that the system is unreliable, “characterized by disarray, errors, confusion, and missing or conflicting addresses.” According to the suit, at least one individual submitted an absentee ballot using their 911-assigned address only to have it rejected. In some cases, coordinators, who are often law enforcement officers, have simply been unavailable to respond to requests. The state has argued in the past that an ID is necessary because other methods of proving voter eligibility are “self-authenticating.” Yet, to obtain a 911 address, callers simply describe where they live without providing any verification.
The case of 69-year-old plaintiff and Standing Rock member Terry Yellow Fat is an example of the chaotic situation facing reservation residents. According to the suit, a few years ago a sign reading “Buffalo Avenue” mysteriously showed up near his home. He figured Buffalo was his street. Still, he decided to request an address from the 911 coordinator, who happens to also be the county sheriff. To his surprise, the sheriff gave him an address on 92nd Street. Yet when he attempted to have UPS deliver a package there, the parcel never arrived. A delivery driver let him know that the address actually belongs to a nearby liquor store. The error has been perceived by some as a racist jab by the county’s lead law enforcement officer. Meanwhile, Yellow Fat’s ID lists his P.O. box, and his assigned 911 address is incorrect. How he’ll vote remains unclear.
Four Directions’ system would allow voters to identify where they live on a map and then be assigned an address on the spot. Jaeger has declined to endorse it.
OJ and Barb Semans at the voter drive headquarters.
Still: Jihan Hafiz
For the Semans, none of what’s happening in North Dakota is new. “Any time we’ve won an election, when there’s an election and their candidate loses, the first one they say committed fraud are Indians,” said OJ Semans.
Democrats haven’t consistently stood up for Native voters either. “They all looked down on us until they found out they could use our vote,” said Barb Semans.
American Indians were only made full citizens of the U.S. in 1924, but states have continued to find creative ways to deny Native people access to the ballot ever since. Until 1975 in South Dakota, for example, residents of counties considered unorganized under state law could not vote in county elections. Of course, the only counties that fit that description were Todd, Oglala (at the time known as Shannon), and Washabaugh, which are located within the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations.
That legacy is another barrier to getting Native voters to the polls. Defender said family members have told her stories of being turned away. “It put this feeling, this thought, into their heads that they shouldn’t even try to vote,” she said. “And that carried on into the next generation because they sit there and tell their kids, why bother?”
Four Directions started after another election in which Native voters tipped the scale. At the close of voting day in 2002, polls indicated that the Democratic Senate incumbent Tim Johnson had lost to his Republican opponent Jim Thune. But by morning, the scales had tipped by a meager 528 votes.
Barb Semans and her effort to get out the Native vote on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota was credited for the narrow win. At first, when Semans started working on the campaign, she said, “They insisted we do it the white way.” The campaign flew in door-knockers from out of town to ask for Native people’s vote. “They didn’t get one registered voter.”
Barb Semans told them that if a strange white guy knocks at your door on the reservation, “it’s either a church person trying to convert you or an FBI agent. I knew it wouldn’t work,” she said. “We had the white guys drive the van and the Indians knocked.”
“We were able to really get people excited,” said OJ Semans. “Why not elect someone that understood our treaties and got along with us? When you start talking about actually doing this to protect your treaties, people understood that and were willing to participate.”
The voter drive was effective, yet unexpected barriers continued to arise. The Semans said that on voting day, the auditor opened Rosebud’s poll in Central time, even though the reservation operated in Mountain time. The campaign demanded an extra hour and got it. Based on polls campaign workers took on the reservation, the couple estimates that the final hour may have tipped the scales. Altogether, hundreds of voters participated who had previously sat out the elections.
Since then, Four Directions has sued officials in South Dakota, Montana, and Nevada to open new and accessible offices where tribal members can obtain and submit absentee ballots without traveling exceedingly long distances. OJ Semans said they’ve developed a reputation. “If we say you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, and you disagree with us, we will sue you; we will take you to court until we win.”
A key factor has been relying on the communities where they’re working. “We don’t operate outside what the council wants us to do, and we don’t come here with a bunch of people to take over,” he said. “We look at the people here, and we utilize them as the leaders.”
The urgency to make sure that Native voices are included in the North Dakota election has been heightened by recent actions by the Trump administration and others. The administration recently announced that it would take the lands of the Mashpee Wampanoag in Massachusetts out of trust — something that has not been done since the termination era when the federal government systematically ended its relationships with numerous tribes in an attempt at forced assimilation. Meanwhile, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which protects Native children from being easily removed from their families, was recently declared unconstitutional by a Bush-appointed judge in Texas. And Native people have not forgotten that Trump advisers advocated privatizing reservation land.
Representation of Native interests has long been thin in Congress. There are currently only two Native members of Congress, both Republican representatives from Oklahoma. And, according to a Senate website, there have been only three Native senators, none of whom are in office.
But Native people are increasingly throwing around their electoral weight. In fact, 2018 is already a historic year for Native candidates, especially women. In New Mexico, Democrat Deb Haaland is expected to become the first Native woman ever to serve in Congress as a U.S. representative, and in Idaho, Democrat Paulette Jordan is vying to be the nation’s first Native American governor. South Dakota, too, has an array of Native candidates running for state offices.
But none of that suggests that the Semans’s work will get easier. As OJ Semans put it, “The more we fight, the more laws they come up with.” And in South Dakota, a court order requiring the state to maintain accessible offices for absentee voting on the Pine Ridge reservation expires this year. “We’ll probably have to start all over again.”
Floris White Bull, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe speaks with Sen. Heidi Heitkamp at a rally.
Still: Jihan Hafiz
At the Prairie Knights Casino on the northeastern edge of the reservation, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp stood before a banquet hall filled with tribal members, asking for their vote on November 6. The quiet in the room deepened as Heitkamp named two young mothers who disappeared and were later found dead in the past two years, Savanna Greywind, a member of the Spirit Lake tribe, and Olivia Lone Bear, of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. She described her work on the Violence Against Women Act and her efforts to pass Savanna’s Law, written to improve efforts in the criminal justice system to deal with the epidemic of disappearances of Indigenous women. Audience members applauded when she noted her vote against Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment as a Supreme Court justice.
But there was one issue — the Dakota Access Pipeline — that she referenced only cryptically. “I’m humbled by the turnout because I know there’s been disappointment,” said Heitkamp. “Indian people are forgiving people.”
As the Heitkamp event ended, the senator shook hands with various constituents as she exited. Fifty-nine-year-old Charlotte Ramsey broke down as she asked the senator to do something about the meth epidemic. And Floris White Bull’s voice cracked as she described being locked in a dog kennel for protesting the pipeline. “I want to be able to support you, and I know that a lot of people of my community want to support you, but I feel let down,” she said. “You talk about giving us a voice, and you talk about our children, but respect our water was ignored.”
“What amends can be made?” she asked.
“We can’t go back to where we were, but we can move forward. That’s why I said I was grateful and humbled,” Heitkamp replied. “Unfortunately you don’t have the choice between someone who’s perfect or someone who isn’t. From your perspective, I’m not perfect, so you’ll have to decide whether I’m someone that you can support.”
White Bull listened intently, lips pursed, as Heitkamp continued, “I intend to do everything I can to improve housing, to improve education, to improve access to justice for women. I think the question is, How do you move forward?”
Asked by The Intercept what she would do in the future when called to stand up to the oil and gas industry, Heitkamp refused to respond. When The Intercept asked her to describe her plans to address the climate crisis, an aide rapidly ushered her out of the building.
Ladonna Allard, on whose land the first DAPL resistance camp was built, observed the exchange. She was unsurprised, she said. “I was really undecided about even coming, but when Heidi voted against Kavanaugh, I said OK.” She added, “Even though she did not support us when we needed her the most, right now she is the only choice at this moment. We must vote. We must show our power.”
The post Standing Rock Pitches Last-Ditch Fight for the Right to Vote in North Dakota appeared first on The Intercept.
Stefanie Anglin is a grandmother, business owner, and convicted felon, though when she’s out on the streets of Orlando, Florida, knocking on prospective voters’ doors, she introduces herself by the latter.
Then, she usually tells people that she can’t vote — along with 1.68 million other Florida residents who have felony convictions, 10 percent of the state’s adult population, and 1 in 5 African-Americans. Across the country, over 6 million people can’t vote because of felony convictions. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote; most restore voting rights at some point between release and the end of probation; only Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky disenfranchise for life all felons who have completed their sentences.
Felon disenfranchisement has a long history in the United States. Because the right to vote is not enshrined in the Constitution — and in fact, the 14th Amendment allows for it to be “abridged” in certain cases — felon disenfranchisement has remained one of the most effective ways to keep people, particularly African-Americans, from voting, and it was widespread across the country between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Where it remains in place today, felon disenfranchisement joins a number of other measures — such as voter ID laws and voter purging — that effectively keep hundreds of thousands of people from exercising their right to vote.
But in Florida, a major swing state where the 2000 presidential election was infamously decided by 537 votes, that could soon change, as voters heading to the polls on Tuesday decide whether to pass Amendment 4 to the state’s constitution, restoring voting rights to 1.4 million of the state’s 1.68 million felons — all those who have completed their sentences, with the exception of people convicted of murder or sex offenses. In the 1970s, Florida legislators tried and failed to restore voting rights to convicted felons. They tried and failed again after the 2000 Bush-Gore recount, and after it emerged that more than 12,000 people had been purged from the voter rolls that year, many because they were wrongly identified as felons. Next week, at last, that decision will be directly in the hands of Florida voters themselves. If the amendment passes, it will enfranchise the largest number of people at once since American women won the right to vote in 1920.
Not Real CitizensTwenty-six years ago, Anglin, now 49, got into a fight with another woman and was charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon. She paid the consequences of that fight long past her three-year sentence: For years, she struggled to get jobs and housing, and she was prevented from accompanying her four children on school field trips. Today, her three sons all have felony convictions as well.
Anglin wasn’t particularly political before her sentence, but she always voted because her parents raised her to believe that voting was important. Then, two years after her sentence ended, a mail-in ballot was returned to her and she learned she could no longer vote. “You finish your jail sentence, your prison sentence, your probation, you paid all your fines. But at the end of the day there’s something to hold you back,” Anglin told The Intercept during a recent interview. “It was 26 years ago. I’ve done my time. I’ve done everything that was required of me, and I’m still not supposed to be able to vote? I pay taxes, I do everything else.”
For years, Anglin tried to make up for her inability to vote by getting everyone in her family to do so — at least, those who were still eligible. “I’m like, y’all go. Y’all need to go and vote,” she said. Today, with Amendment 4 finally on the ballot after years of campaigning and raising signatures, Anglin is taking that message further, knocking on strangers’ doors in between jobs with her cleaning business. With the exception of the many people she meets who are themselves felons or have felons in their families, most of those she speaks to don’t even realize felons can’t vote in Florida. Almost nobody objects to restoring their voting rights. If they do, “I just ask them, ‘You realize you’re talking to a convicted felon?’” Anglin said. “My sentence was 26 years ago. How long do I have to suffer for that? And then they’re just like, ‘No, no, okay, not you.’”
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Intercept
This week, with days to go before the vote, Anglin canvassed the Parramore neighborhood in central Orlando, a nearly all-black neighborhood, and the city’s poorest. Anglin volunteers with a number of groups supporting Amendment 4, including the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which was instrumental in getting the proposal on the ballot. But this week, she was representing Color of Change PAC, the political action wing of the national racial justice group Color of Change. The group, which focuses on building black political power and electing candidates who are accountable to black communities, got behind a number of races, including some already successful efforts, from Philadelphia to Ferguson, to elect progressive prosecutors. In Florida, in addition to supporting Amendment 4, the group is endorsing the campaigns of Andrew Gillum, who could become the state’s first black governor, and Bill Nelson, who is challenging exiting Gov. Rick Scott for a Senate seat.
Anglin mostly likes to talk about the voting rights of “returning citizens” like herself. On a hot morning, even by Orlando standards, she knocked on door after door, keeping away only from dogs and “no trespassing” signs and taking notes on an app used for election canvassing, through a neighborhood where she says incarceration is all too familiar. Of half a dozen people she spoke to in the neighborhood, half said they couldn’t vote because of a felony.
On a battered porch where a handful of middle-aged men and a woman were hanging out, Anglin’s arrival prompted discussions about whether voting served any purpose. “In Jamaica, they pay you to vote,” a man laughed before saying he can’t vote and declining to explain why. “He doesn’t want to stand in line,” a friend joked. “You can do an absentee ballot,” Anglin quickly chipped in. “Can you vote, Mike?” the man then shouted at another friend.
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Intercept
“I’ve been to prison three times, I can’t even get a passport,” the friend, Michael Bennett, replied. Bennett, 48, later told The Intercept that the last time he voted was for Bill Clinton, in 1992. He was serving in the military at the time. As he got older, he said, he became more interested in politics and the news, but as he got in trouble with the law, he couldn’t do much to exercise his newfound awareness. “We’re not real citizens like everyone else,” he said.
A few blocks down the road, another man, who identified himself only as Frank and declined to discuss his criminal history beyond saying he had a felony, pointed out the lack of election signs in Parramore that were ubiquitous elsewhere in the city. He met Anglin’s efforts to get out the vote with passionate skepticism. “This is Orange County; most African-American males like me can’t vote,” he said. “We got people with a DUI in ’97 who still can’t vote.”
“None of these politicians will ever get elected if they allow black people to vote. None of these people come around here; there is no vote here,” he added. “Me voting is just a dream, it’s just like me praying to hit the Powerball. It’s a big difference for this skin color. We don’t have dreams anymore.”
Anglin was undeterred. “We believe we can fix it,” she insisted. “We have got to be hopeful.”
“I’m going to come back and see you,” she told Frank resolutely. “Once it passes, I’ll come back to you and tell you, ‘Can I register you to vote?’ and I want you to come out with that same enthusiasm!” Frank pledged that he would vote if the amendment passed. “Watch this pass, we’ll see politicians here, walking up and down, kissing babies.”
For most of the morning, Anglin ended up in conversations about the broken justice system with others who, like herself, could not vote, but a couple of people told her they had already cast their ballots early — prompting high fives and hugs.
Willie McDonald said he voted for Amendment 4 because he had relatives with felonies. “But they did their time, they did what they had to do,” he added. If the amendment passed, he promised, he would register them himself. “I’ll get them to vote.”
Stefanie Anglin hugs Willie McDonald after he told her that he already voted in Orlando, Fla.
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Intercept
Of course re-enfranchising 1.4 million people doesn’t mean that they will automatically turn into voters — but those getting behind the effort hope that many will, and that the move could drastically transform both Florida’s politics and the country’s. “If we get 50 percent, that’s 50 percent that we didn’t have,” said Anglin.
Before Amendment 4 got on the ballot, after supporters collected the required 766,200 signatures and the state Supreme Court approved the measure, the only way for convicted felons to regain their voting rights was to individually petition Florida’s governor for clemency. But the process remained arbitrary and political. Former Gov. Charlie Crist, who was then a Republican, re-enfranchised about 155,000 people during his tenure, in part by allowing those convicted of certain crimes to automatically become eligible for clemency without having to personally appeal. But Scott rolled back those measures, and only about 3,200 people saw their voting rights restored under his administration.
Those hoping to have their rights restored would have to wait years to gain a personal appearance before the governor and three cabinet members, and could then be subjected to lectures and arbitrary decisions.
Gillum, who is running for governor on a progressive platform, has endorsed Amendment 4, while his opponent, Ron DeSantis, after skirting questions about the amendment for months, has indicated he opposes it. Neither campaign responded to The Intercept’s questions about how they would approach the clemency process should Amendment 4 fail, and whether they would consider extending voting rights to former felons currently excluded from Amendment 4 if it does.
But for the man who, years ago, started the campaign that ended up on the ballot as Amendment 4, the issue was less one of politics than of humanity. Desmond Meade, the president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, stresses that the group is nonpartisan and that the issue affects people across political and racial lines. He resists connecting felon disenfranchisement to other sustained efforts to exclude millions of voters across the country — mostly people of color and the poor.
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Intercept
“What drives this campaign is not about voting, and it’s not about voter suppression,” Meade told The Intercept during a short break from the campaign’s hectic final stretch. “There are so many people who have made mistakes in their lives, but those mistakes and going through those mistakes have made us much better people.”
“We’ve been giving back forever and a day, but in the past we’ve been forced to live in the shadows because of this scarlet letter,” he added. “This movement has really helped to humanize, to pull back the curtain and demystify who a felon is. It’s no longer the scary black guy anymore.”
While a disproportionately high number of Floridians with felonies are black, the majority are not, and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition is careful not to frame the issue in terms of race, or as others have suggested, in terms of the potential to turn Florida solidly Democratic. To pass, Amendment 4 must receive 60 percent of the vote, and so far, polls have indicated that support for the measure is widespread across the political spectrum. The measure has earned broad support, including from the American Civil Liberties Union, faith groups, and the Koch Brothers. There is no organized effort to oppose it.
The ACLU has spent $5 million in support of the initiative, and a political action committee supporting the measure and chaired by Meade has raised at least $14.5 million. Meade and Neil Volz, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition’s political director, say that growing support for the amendment is a sign of felon disenfranchisement’s wide impact across Florida.
“It’s rural Florida, urban Florida, suburban Florida, the whole deal,” said Volz, who is white and a former Republican operative. “There is a universal value of ‘when a debt is paid, it’s paid’ that people support. I think it’s something really cool in this divisive moment that there’s something that unifies people.”
“I’m a 25-plus year conservative,” Volz added. “Desmond created a space where my story fit into the bigger story.”
“When I share my story, I don’t share my story and then ask, ‘Are you are Republican or are you a Democrat?’ I just share my story,” added Susanne Manning, who joined the coalition after serving 19 years of a 30-year sentence for embezzlement. Then, pointing at herself, Volz, and Meade, an unusual trio, she added, “This right here demonstrates that it can affect anybody.”
Manning, 57, lost her only son while she was incarcerated. “When I first came home, and until this day, I’m very embarrassed of my story, but I see the power of sharing it because it moves people,” she said. “I met a woman the other day and shared my story with her; she had never heard of Amendment 4, and she just hugged me and kissed me and told me, ‘You’re going to vote again.’”
Limited CompassionBut for all the barrier-breaking the campaign to pass Amendment 4 has achieved, and for all the inclusiveness it touts, its loudest critics have come not from the ranks of those who are conservative on crime, but from the felons Amendment 4 excludes.
“The problem with Amendment 4 is that it perpetuates discrimination and bigotry against a sub-class of former prisoners and convicted felons, namely those convicted of murder and sex offenses,” the Human Rights Defense Center, a Florida-based prisoners’ rights group that distributes the monthly Prison Legal News, wrote in opposition to the ballot proposal. “All the talk of Amendment 4 supporters about second chances, redemption, reintegration into the community, etc. rings hollow and opportunistic when they made the decision to exclude murderers and sex offenders from the franchise and to enshrine this form of discrimination into the state constitution.”
Political signs outside of Marks Street Senior Recreation Complex in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 29, 2018.
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Intercept
The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition ran focus groups that concluded that people wouldn’t support the amendment without certain “carve-outs,” Volz said. “There’s a practical side to this,” added Meade. “We spoke to people and found out what people wanted, what people are able to tolerate. … Exactly what they drew the line at was exactly what we wrote.”
But Paul Wright, the founder and director of the Human Rights Defense Center, who is himself a convicted felon and spent 17 years in prison in Washington state for a murder conviction, said the campaign around the amendment reinforced misconceptions about who is redeemable and drew unfair divisions between people who had equally paid their debt to society.
“From an activist and a political perspective, I think there’s a lot of problems with that, because basically, you are just saying the lowest common denominator is all you can aspire to,” Wright told The Intercept. “That just means as an activist, you don’t think you have the ability to change people’s minds, to sway them or convince them of anything.”
He noted that the exclusion of certain felons mirrored tendencies within the broader criminal justice reform movement to limit compassion to certain offenders. “A lot of people that have been pushing for sentencing reform, for example, have created this artificial divide between so-called violent offenders and nonviolent offenders,” he said. “What I can say, having been imprisoned myself, the prison officials certainly don’t treat people differently based on what the offense was.”
Wright believes that growing support, including significant financial backing, for the restoration of certain felons’ voting rights in Florida is driven by the desire to push the state’s political scales rather than a genuine commitment to the formerly incarcerated. “I think they’re just looking at a crass thing of, ‘If we re-enfranchise a bunch of people, we think enough of them are going to vote Democratic that Florida will cease to be a swing state.’”
“There is no plan for afterwards. This isn’t a case where people are getting into the lifeboat and saying, ‘We’re going to come back for you,’” he added. “If Amendment 4 passes, that’s pretty much the end of the road for everyone else.”
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Intercept
Following canvassers as they knocked on doors in Orlando, The Intercept found that people were quickly on board with restoring felons’ voting rights — whether they had heard of Amendment 4 before or were learning about it for the first time.
In Pine Hills, a low-income, majority black suburb west of Orlando decked out in Halloween decorations, Travis Hailes, a volunteer with Color of Change PAC, mostly talked to people who had already cast their ballot. Mony Dorce, an elderly Haitian-American man, held a piece of paper where he had written down all of his votes, to check them against those Hailes was recommending.
“There are a lot of people who are locked up who shouldn’t be there,” said Janice Sessler, a few doors down. She had voted for Amendment 4 and after some hesitation said it should apply to those with murder and sex offense convictions as well. “Once they do their time, for whatever reason, they should get their rights back.”
“Everyone deserves a second chance.”
Hailes and Sessler traded stories of excessive punishment; someone he had recently met, he said, was caught “relieving himself in public” and ended up with a class 3 felony for indecent exposure. “It all started in the Jim Crow days,” Hailes added. “You were busted for a petty crime, and you’d lose your right to vote.”
Hailes, a 39-year-old business consultant, said he hadn’t realized until recently that felons couldn’t vote in Florida — even though his own mother had a felony. Hailes first joined Color of Change at a protest over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, just north of Orlando. For years, he remained what he called a “paper warrior,” signing the group’s many online petitions but keeping his activism limited to the internet. “I was the least political person you could think of, I didn’t care for much,” he told The Intercept. “But then Trump happened.”
“A lot of people feel like this current administration doesn’t care about brown-skinned people or people that are living in underprivileged areas,” he said. “Trump is giving people motivation, but they need direction. I’m just a regular person like them, no different, and I get a chance to tell them, ‘Six months ago, I knew nothing about this either.’”
Candice Fortin, a field organizer with Color of Change, photographed in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 29, 2018.
Photo: Eve Edelheit for The Intercept
That’s the Color of Change PAC’s model. “We’ve been doing a lot of work to move folks from online to offline engagement; we’re doing a lot more in-person events, and in-person voter contact versus digital outreach,” said Arisha Hatch, the PAC’s director. “We’re really trying to build community. People are hungry for community in this political climate, so we’re trying to create a space for black people to come together.”
In Orlando, across Florida, and in the other states where Color of Change PAC has focused its efforts this election cycle — Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia — the group has held brunches and cookouts with more than 12,000 participants nationwide. They also knocked on over 50,000 doors in black neighborhoods, but they want to make sure they don’t just show up when an election is around the corner to ask for people’s vote.
“We believe that we shouldn’t be treating our members just as voters, but also as leaders in their communities,” Candice Fortin, a field organizer in Orlando, told The Intercept, describing a new model for sustained political engagement. “Money is really not the thing anymore. Now it’s just about getting people.”
The post Florida’s Amendment 4 Would Restore Voting Rights to 1.4 Million People appeared first on The Intercept.
Ronald Sylvain was feeling confident as he approached the U.S.-Canada border crossing in Champlain, New York in a taxi with his wife and their 9-month-old son last July. The 36-year-old Haitian national had been assured that it was best to “do it legally.” After all, they are professionals: Ronald is an economist and his wife Pamela is a nurse. While other refugees opted to roll their suitcases into Canada over a narrow dirt path five miles to the west at Roxham Road, border agents would surely understand Ronald’s asylum request, based on the fact that gangs in Haiti had threatened him.
Instead, an agent directed his family to wait overnight. They slept uncomfortably on hard benches at the Lacolle Inspection Station next to a public restroom. The next morning, they were turned back to the United States. Under the Safe Third Country Agreement, a 2004 treaty between the United States and Canada, most refugees who approach Canada at an official border crossing are rejected, on the grounds that they should have tried for asylum in the United States first.
Two weeks later, Ronald and his family decided to try to enter Canada again, this time over Roxham Road. (“Given the current situation in the U.S., we were really afraid to stay there,” Ronald later testified.) The process was smooth, eerily so. Yet migrants who attempt to cross the border at land ports only have one chance to make a refugee claim. Without realizing it, they had already blown their shot. Ronald and Pamela are now fighting a deportation order from Canada.
The theory behind the Safe Third Country Agreement, or STCA, is that the United States and Canada are interchangeable options for refugees. Not everyone agrees. Three major organizations fighting for immigrant rights in Canada — the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Canadian Council of Churches, and Amnesty International Canada — filed a challenge in federal court last year to the “safe third country” designation. For the second time in a decade, they’re arguing that the United States is not, in fact, safe.
“Canada is bearing one part of the responsibility for those people who end up being sent back to their country of origin and persecuted.”Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, can quickly tick off conditions in the United States that make the country hostile to refugees. Asylum claimants often don’t have access to counsel and are often kept in detention while their claims are assessed. The Trump administration has launched an aggressive crackdown on asylum-seekers, through policy changes that Amnesty International recently said “appear to be aimed at the full dismantling of the U.S. asylum system.” (Most recently, President Donald Trump has threatened to hold asylum-seekers along the southern border in tent cities.) Whereas in Canada, detention is rare (less than 1 percent of all foreign entries annually, according to government data) and many claimants, depending on which province they entered through, can have access to a free lawyer.
This is “a story about whether Canada wants to take responsibility for its human rights obligations,” explained Dench. When asylum claims fail in the United States, she said, “Canada is bearing one part of the responsibility for those people who end up being sent back to their country of origin and persecuted.”
Photo: Geoff Robins/AFP/Getty Images
For thousands of refugees, crossing between land ports has proven a viable alternative. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 50,469 refugees asked for asylum in Canada last year, a 10-year high and more than twice 2016 levels. About 40 percent of those claimants crossed from the United States on foot between official points of entry, where the STCA doesn’t apply.
The surge has had logistical consequences. Stéphanie Valois, a refugee lawyer of 25 years based in Montreal, told The Intercept that she’s never had a summer quite like 2017. “I felt like a doctor in the emergency room but without the pay,” she said. Unofficial border crossings have slowed this year: There were 15,726 between January and September. Still, on June 25, the city manager of Toronto issued a report stating that the city has “exhausted all facilities, personnel, and financial resources” attempting to shelter refugees who have traveled from Quebec.
But Dench challenges the notion that suspending the STCA would open the floodgates to migration across the U.S. border, which has been increasing since Obama’s second term as the global refugee crisis has intensified. As it stands, she says, the agreement is “not really working anymore as a break from letting people into Canada.” Instead, it is pushing people to unofficial crossings.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has positioned himself as a great defender of refugees, in contrast to Trump. But Canadian academics and immigrant advocates told The Intercept that the STCA has given Conservative politicians in Canada a powerful political tool that Trudeau’s Liberal government has failed to adequately challenge. Both Canadian and international law protects refugees seeking asylum across the Canadian border, but in the last year, the technical term for crossing outside of land ports, “irregular,” is becoming interchangeable with the more loaded “illegal.” Rather than suspend the STCA — and allow asylum-seekers to come through legal ports of entry — Trudeau’s administration is fighting to maintain it. The next hearing in the rights groups’ challenge will take place in May 2019. Meanwhile, Dench says, “the situation in the U.S. has been getting worse.”
“The spectacle of [irregular] border crossings incites people because of this obsession with loss of control,” says Audrey Macklin, chair of human rights law at the University of Toronto. Remove the STCA, she says, and the spectacle would evaporate. “Why not do that?”
Photo: Andre Malerba for the Washington Post via Getty Images
In the late 1990s, Canada hoped to emulate the European Union, where several countries had signed on to the now-defunct Dublin Regulation requiring refugees to apply for asylum in whichever participating country they entered first. The United States dismissed Canada’s request for a similar agreement, though, until September 11, 2001, when border security became a central issue. “The United States demanded and secured a series of border management concessions from Canada,” Macklin explained. “And in exchange for that, Canada said, ‘Now it’s your turn to do something for us.’” The STCA took effect in December 2004.
Efrat Arbel, an assistant law professor at the University of British Columbia, has been studying the impacts of the STCA since 2005. She says she’s been most troubled to see refugee flows shifting into more treacherous territory. In the eight years before the STCA took effect, between 6,000 and 14,000 refugee claims were being made annually at land ports on the border. The average number between 2005 and 2012 was just 5,600. “The Safe Third blocks the safest, most organized mode through which asylum-seekers can enter,” Arbel said.
“The Safe Third blocks the safest, most organized mode through which asylum-seekers can enter.”Roxham Road is by far the most popular alternative. Wendy Ayotte, 66, is part of a Canadian neighborhood group called Bridges Not Borders that has been crossing into the United States on Sundays since November to offer encouragement to refugees. She said that Roxham Road has become more orderly lately, and that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had responded to her group’s concerns about officers they’d observed telling refugees to turn back or go to an official border crossing.
Still, smaller numbers of refugees continue to cross at less organized irregular points. This year to date, more than 700 people have crossed at Manitoba and in British Columbia, representing about 4 percent of the total crossers. There were multiple reports of frostbite at Manitoba during the winter of 2016 and last May, the body of 57-year-old Mavis Otuteye, a Ghanaian woman, was found just south of the Canadian border at Manitoba in Noyes, Minnesota.
Refugees like the Sylvains, who choose to cross at an official point of entry, are taking a different gamble. The number of refugee claimants turned back annually from the Canadian border because they do not qualify for an exception to the STCA more than doubled in 2017 over the previous year, to 1,949 claimants. In all of 2015, before Donald Trump’s election, 418 people were turned back.
It is Canada Border Services Agency policy to notify U.S. Customs and Border Protection whenever a claimant is turned back from the border, which can result in detention for refugees without valid U.S. visas. Immigration detention centers in the U.S. are rife with reports of abuses, including sexual assault, inadequate food, lack of medical care, and racism. The Intercept spoke with a 22-year-old Haitian woman who was arrested with an expired visa before she made it to Canada last year. During her 100-day stint in Clinton County Jail in New York, she said, “They treated us like criminals. … The food was bad. I didn’t eat it. It’s cold, no heat, and they didn’t give us jackets.” (The Intercept is withholding her name because her U.S. immigration case is pending.)
Nadege Jean-Mardy volunteered last year as a translator for refugee claimants arrested by CBP and detained in Clinton County Jail. “People are definitely confused by the law,” she told The Intercept. “In their head, it doesn’t make sense because … the way they see it: ‘OK, I’m going to ask for asylum, but I’m going to do it the right way.’”
Inside the jail, she recalled, refugees “were sleeping on benches and they were treated as prisoners, [when] their only fault was asking for help.”
Photo: Christinne Muschi/Reuters
In 2007, Canadian Federal Court Judge Michael Phelan upheld the first legal challenge to the STCA. “The U.S. does not meet the Refugee Convention requirements nor the Convention Against Torture,” Phelan ruled. But a Canadian appeals court granted a stay of Phelan’s order one day before it was set to go into effect and ultimately overturned his ruling — not on the grounds that the United States was safe, but that this was not the court’s decision to make.
Advocates’ current legal strategy is similar to the first. They’re highlighting the story of a woman who fled gang violence in El Salvador with her two young daughters: first to Texas in November 2016 and then to the official Canadian border crossing at Fort Erie, where she was denied asylum because of the STCA. They’ve also collected testimony from a man who came to the United States on a student visa last year and was placed in immigration detention in March after attempting to join his aunt in Canada, and another man who spent 10 days in solitary confinement after Canadian officials turned him away.
Meanwhile, a fresh wave of anger is cresting among refugee advocates and attorneys in Canada. Sean Rehaag, a law professor at York University, described the STCA as “dead” in the face of the Trump administration’s particular hostility to asylum-seekers. Canada’s minority New Democratic Party called for its suspension last year, wondering in a statement, “What will it take for the Liberals to finally take this situation seriously and act?” In addition to Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that has separated thousands of children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued new guidelines in June ordering judges to block asylum claims for victims of domestic abuse and gang violence. The Trump administration has also been trying to arrange a Safe Third Country Agreement with Mexico, which would allow the United States to turn back refugees along the southern border (rights groups have loudly protested the idea.)
Lobat Sadrehashemi, president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, called her country’s ongoing commitment to the STCA “appalling” in a statement to The Intercept. “We are watching the images of children being ripped apart from their parents in horror,” she said. “Refugee law has been turned on its head in the United States.”
At the same time, conservative anxiety about irregular border crossings in Canada continues to escalate. Alberta Conservative Member of Parliament Michelle Rempel proposed this spring to turn the entire length of the Canadian border into a formal point of entry – which would mean that anyone could be turned back under STCA. Parti Québécois leader Jean-François Lisée called for a fence to be built at Roxham Road, quipping that “the Mexicans” should pay for it. And as news of Trump’s harsh southern border policies spread in June, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer made a publicity trip to Roxham Road, which he described as the “epicenter of the crisis at our borders.”
During an Immigration Committee hearing in March, Conservative members of parliament pressed Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen to use “illegal” to describe refugees crossing the border irregularly. “I have used the word ‘illegal’ and I have used the word ‘irregular,’ and I think both are accurate,” Hussen acquiesced.
More recently, the Trudeau administration has criticized anti-refugee rhetoric. For example, when Ontario Premier Doug Ford called on Liberals to address the “mess” of “illegal border crossers” in July, Hussen, a refugee himself, bemoaned that “Ontario sadly has chosen the language of fear. They’ve chosen to intentionally use language that could potentially criminalize asylum-seekers in the minds of Canadians.” That month, his department quietly replaced the word “illegal” with “irregular” on its website.
But Hussen also maintains that the United States is safe for refugees. His office declined to comment to The Intercept on the STCA legal challenge, on the grounds that it is an open matter before the court. However, spokesperson Mathieu Genest said in a statement that “in general, we can say that Canada has carefully analyzed recent developments in the United States, including the Executive Orders related to immigration and refugee matters, and determined that the United States remains a safe country for asylum claimants to seek protection there.”
In late May, more than 100 members of the Canadian far-right group Storm Alliance, an offshoot of the more openly fascist Soldiers of Odin, drove to the U.S. border at Lacolle. Many of them waved middle fingers and Quebec flags and carried hand-painted signs in French: “No Illegality! Enough!” Attendee Sebastien Cormier, a 38-year-old single father and nursing assistant from Sherbrooke, Quebec, said that he decided to join Storm Alliance because the situation at Roxham Road is “anarchy.”
“The response of the Trudeau government has been pretty horrible. They continue to maintain this fiction that the United States is a safe third country, when people are being thrown out and when Trump is quite actively slandering entire groups of people.”Storm Alliance has gathered near the Quebec border three times since 2017, and each time, anti-racist activists have organized a counterprotest. It’s a delicate balance, they say, since they don’t want to draw attention to the far right but still want to be sure that refugees aren’t met with intimidation. Messages scrawled in white and pink chalk near temporary refugee processing trailers this spring read “Bienvenue Refugies!”
Speaking to The Intercept at the May border demonstration, anti-fascist activist Jaggi Singh said that the Trudeau administration has failed asylum-seekers.
“[When] you have far-right people and some of the politicians that pander to them talking about shutting down the border, it kind of gives the Trudeaus of the world a pass,” Singh said. “But the response of the Trudeau government has been pretty horrible. They continue to maintain this fiction that the United States is a safe third country, when people are being thrown out and when Trump is quite actively slandering entire groups of people.”
Historically, hard-line immigration policies have gained traction in Canada when refugees arrive in highly visible ways. For example, in August 2010, 492 Sri Lankan refugees arrived by ship on Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada. The passengers on the Sun Sea were the second such group in less than a year and were met with public skepticism verging on alarm. At the time, the Conservative government managed to pass legislation imposing mandatory detention and multiyear delays on permanent residency applications for certain refugee claimants.
Now, beyond simply maintaining the STCA, Canada’s Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship office has announced plans to enhance border security. Hussen is in “continuous discussions on improving all aspects of managing the border, including through potential modernization of the STCA,” according to Genest, his spokesperson. This summer Hussen told CBC News that “modernization” of the STCA could entail the use of biometrics, such as fingerprints and photographs, though privacy watchdogs and refugee lawyers told The Intercept that they are awaiting clarity on the new policy.
And in mid-July, Trudeau created a new government office, appointing Liberal Member of Parliament Bill Blair as Canada’s first minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction. In a press release, Trudeau’s office stated that Blair will “ensure Canada’s borders are managed in a way that promotes legitimate travel and trade while keeping Canadians safe.” Blair sent a letter to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in September with “a request to begin negotiations as soon as possible to enhance and modernize the Safe Third Country Agreement to the mutual benefit of both countries,” spokesperson Marie-Emmanuelle Cadieux told The Intercept. (Homeland Security declined to comment.)
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulates Bill Blair after he was sworn in as minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on July 18, 2018.
Photo: Chris Wattie/Reuters
Brenda McPhail, director of the Privacy, Surveillance and Technology Project at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said she worries that the Liberal government’s talk of biometrics will further enforce the perception of refugees as criminals. “We fingerprint criminals,” she said. “So I think there’s some sort of implicit message to Canadians that if we’re taking fingerprints from people … we’re treating them in a criminal manner.”
She added that it’s “no coincidence” that Blair is a former police chief. “The government seems to want to position the appointment as a way to counter and assuage fears for public safety,” she said. “But it also validates those fears in the process.”
Macklin, the human rights lawyer, said that Trudeau’s government has its priorities wrong. For Canada, she said, “the problem is irregular entry, so the solution has to be preventing irregular entry. No. The problem is that the United States is not a safe country.”
The post “The United States Is Not a Safe Country”: Canadian Advocates Want to End a Policy That Turns Asylum-Seekers Back to U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.
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