No Waves: Champions of these lower-profile causes were swept out of office in Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections: The next Congress will lose several Republican fans of space exploration, including one who’s helped grow NASA’s budget over the years, including for its climate-science programs. Also of note: Climate moderates were already a minority among House Republicans, and this midterm swept away almost 20 more of them.
Anywhere: A gunman opened fire inside a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, hosting “college country night” on Wednesday, killing 12. The city is one of the lowest-crime cities in America. So was Parkland, where a gunman killed 17 at a high school. Mass shootings have come to every corner of American public life, from schools to malls, churches to synagogues, concerts to movie theaters, spreading like an actual disease, and leaving unceasing trauma in its wake.
An American in ISIS?: The U.S. military has quietly released anonymous American citizen “John Doe,” accused of joining ISIS, after holding him in Iraq for 13 months with no charges. The legal saga is over, but now a bigger drama is brewing.
We Asked The Atlantic Daily Readers: The evening of the U.S. midterm elections, we asked those who voted to tell us about their experiences. Many of you told us about lines, inaccessible polling locations, and your persistence in voting rain or shine, but also about mail-in ballots and good experiences. We published here what some of you shared.
Snapshot
“’Blue wave’ began as a faith-based idea—Democratic activists’ hope that voters’ resentment of Trumpism would ripple and grow into a crashing, crushing eventuality,” Megan Garber writes of the favored but battered phrase. “As November 6 gave way to November 7, ‘blue wave’ became another kind of metaphor: not necessarily for a Democratic surge, but for the profound challenges of describing a country that itself holds so many opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.“ And here, images of people navigating the largest of blue waves (literally). (Gregory Boissy / Getty)Evening ReadThe young black women leaving Christianity in favor of the spiritual traditions of African witchcraft sometimes find a sense of power in that process. Sigal Samuel reports on this shift of the digital age:
Many black witches, nervous about practicing witchcraft openly, feel more comfortable meeting online than in person. Some fear they’ll be shamed by devout Christian parents, according to Margarita Guillory, a Boston University professor who studies Africana religion in the digital age.
“The internet is almost becoming like a hush harbor for these witches of color,” Guillory said, referring to places where slaves gathered in secret to practice their religions in antebellum America. Online, an avatar or a handle allows women to speak freely. A popular Tumblr promotes inspirational images of black witches and Facebook groups for the women have thousands of members each, while some have even developed smartphone apps.
Some young women at the Baltimore convention told me their parents had long hid their grandmothers’ or great-grandmothers’ involvement with witchcraft—a decision the Millennials resented, until they realized their parents may have felt the need to suppress any talk of magic because their ancestors were harshly punished for their rituals. New Orleans, for example, saw sweeping arrests of voodooists in the 19th century.
What Do You Know … About Global Affairs?1. Sunday, November 11 will mark 100 years since the end of ___________________________.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. This German investment bank was recently fined for a multi-billion-dollar Russian money-laundering scheme.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. U.S. sanctions against Iran have gone into effect, reinstating those lifted under the 2015 Obama-era agreement, known formally by this name.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: World WAR I / Deutsche Bank / Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares today’s top stories:
There’s a big win for Democrats buried in Beto O’Rourke’s loss in Texas, Kriston Capps writes: The Senate candidate conquered the state’s last major conservative urban area. And, while a “blue wave” may not have overwhelmingly swept Congress, there was undoubtedly a progressive surge across ballot initiatives, even in conservative states and cities.
It’s rumored that Amazon will split its new HQ2 between the Washington, D.C. metro area’s Crystal City and Long Island City in New York. While the specific locations may come as a surprise, the decision would make sense, Richard Florida writes. (Here’s what choosing two locations might mean for the incentive packages).
Meanwhile, in Canada, two cities have opened impressive public infrastructure projects: You’ll want to see the photos of Calgary’s new $245-million, Snøhetta-designed central library, and Montreal's Projet Bonaventure, which reimagines a former eyesore expressway.
For more updates like these from the urban world, subscribe to CityLab’s Daily newsletter.
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Written by Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2), Olivia Paschal (@oliviacpaschal), and Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey)
Today in 5 LinesA gunman killed 12 people at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, Wednesday night. Authorities identified the shooter, who was also found dead at the scene, possibly from a self-inflicted wound, as 28-year-old Ian David Long.
The Florida Senate and governor’s races are headed to recounts after returns from Broward County tightened Republican leads in both contests.
The Trump administration introduced new measures that would prohibit immigrants entering the country illegally from claiming asylum. Experts are expecting legal challenges to the restrictions.
President Donald Trump is reportedly considering former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, both longtime supporters of his, to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Sessions resigned on Wednesday at Trump’s request.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized after falling in her office and breaking three ribs.
Today on The Atlantic‘Put Down the Mic’: These were the 10 most dumbfounding moments from Trump’s post-election press conference on Wednesday. (Maddie Carlisle and Olivia Paschal)
The Shame Game: Celebrities like Oprah often invoke “the specter of ancestral trauma” to get black Americans to the polls, writes Hannah Giorgis. But that ignores the continuing reality of voter suppression.
The South Moves Left: Even though many progressive darlings, including Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Gillum, lost their races, progressive policy issues won the Deep South in a big way. (Vann R. Newkirk II)
The Times, They Are a-Changin’: Democrats and Republicans were both losers in the Texas Senate race. Here’s why. (Elaina Plott)
‘Their Best Choice Is Nancy’: Nancy Pelosi knows how to whip votes in Congress, but more importantly, she knows how to fundraise, argues Steve Israel.
Snapshot
People cry as a law-enforcement motorcade escorts the body of Ventura County Sheriff's Department Sergeant Ron Helus from the Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California, after a gunman opened fire Wednesday evening inside a country music bar, killing multiple people including Helus. (Mark J. Terrill / AP)What We’re ReadingBuckle Up: Both Republicans and Democrats saw major political victories on Tuesday—which means Americans should prepare for an even more divided country. (Molly Ball, Time)
Wanted: Senate Leadership: Now that Trump has ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Republicans in the Senate must take concrete steps to ensure that Trump’s efforts to “hobble” the Mueller investigation don’t succeed, argues John Cassidy. (The New Yorker)
How Trump Could Win Again: While Republicans lost ground in the American suburbs on Tuesday night, these are four signs that suggest Trump could still win reelection in 2020. (W. James Antle III, Washington Examiner)
Master of Silence: Mattathias Schwartz talked to the people closest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller to figure out what might come next in the Russia investigation—and what it would mean for the president. (GQ)
More Than a Hobby: Follow the NRA’s evolution from apolitical sporting group to pro-gun political powerhouse. (Sahil Chinoy, Nicholas Kristof, and Jessia Ma, The New York Times)
VisualizedHow Big Was the Blue Wave?: The New York Times lays out which districts flipped, and which stayed red.
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
President Donald Trump has been saying for 18 months that he wanted to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He’s been saying for 18 months that he thought Sessions was disloyal for having recused himself from the Russia investigation and for having given day-to-day control over the investigation to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. And, of course, Trump has been saying for 18 months that he wanted an attorney general who was personally loyal to him, in the say way the late Roy Cohn was a loyal legal pit bull.
Why is anyone surprised that he’s now done what he said he was going to do? Yesterday, less than 24 hours after the midterm polls closed, Trump requested and received the attorney general’s resignation and appointed Matthew Whitaker, the chief of staff in the Department of Justice, as his interim replacement, pending the nomination and confirmation of Sessions’s successor. The only surprise is the timing—Trump moved far more rapidly than anyone might have anticipated. But the end result was, by any measure, a foregone conclusion.
What does this all mean for the investigation being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and what can we expect going forward?
[Adam Serwer: Trump will only get more dangerous.]
First, and perhaps counterintuitively, we can expect a period of calm. Whitaker’s first move as acting attorney general is unlikely to be firing the special counsel. Indeed, we might actually hope that Whitaker proceeds cautiously and with some sense of history—loyalist though he may be, he likely does not want to be remembered as the second coming of Robert Bork, who is known for his role as the executioner in Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. And given that there are doubts as to the constitutionality of his appointment, Whitaker will be wise to act with prudence.
More importantly, as a matter of strategy, Mueller has no reason to precipitate a crisis. As in all matters of high political moment, the ultimate battle will play out in the court of public opinion and in the halls of Congress—and Mueller knows he will be better positioned if Whitaker fires, in effect, the first shot.
Second, when and if Whitaker acts, he is unlikely to do so in an overt or politically aggressive way. There are many steps far short of shutting down the investigation that he can take to hamper Mueller’s efforts. Imagine, if you will, that Whitaker simply transfers some of the assigned FBI agents to other, “more important” tasks, or if he rejects a request from Mueller to investigate a particular area of inquiry. Those concerned with the integrity of the investigation need to be on guard for these types of more subtle obstructions, which are far more plausible than grosser efforts.
[Read: What Sessions’s resignation means for Robert Mueller]
Third, we should pay close attention to congressional reaction, especially in the Republican Senate. Trump was no doubt emboldened by his belief that the Republican gains in the Senate insulate him from scrutiny. We will see if that is so.
Recall that Senator Lindsey Graham once said there would be “hell to pay” if Sessions were fired. And he also pledged solemnly that he would do everything in his power to ensure that the Mueller investigation is not interfered with. Now is the time when Graham’s bona fides, and those of his colleagues, will be tested. If congressional Republicans are truly serious, they should, for example, take up the bipartisan proposal to limit the president’s removal powers for a special counsel.
And finally, we should remember that the Mueller investigation is not the be-all and end-all of the criminal-investigative universe. By now, it is well known that large fractions of the investigation have been hived off to traditional offices of the Department of Justice—places like the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia. Whatever bureaucratic games Whitaker might be able to play with the special-purpose Mueller investigation are much less effective when applied to preexisting federal offices.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Republicans must choose between Trump and the rule of law.]
So, there is every reason to think that many (if not all) of the aspects of the Mueller investigation either have been or would be transferred to other parts of the Department of Justice. It seems clear, for example, that the Southern District of New York is already investigating the president’s finances, and it would be a bold act indeed for the acting attorney general to try to shut down that investigation as well.
Nor could he be confident that his actions would succeed. As has also been reported, the state authorities in New York are likewise conducting their own investigation, and the course of their efforts is beyond any influence of Whitaker.
The president’s actions were a bold and aggressive move that smacks both of confidence and of concern. While it will not go down in history as the “Wednesday Afternoon Hissy Fit,” there are some real grounds for hoping that it was not a “massacre” and that the ultimate course of the presidential investigation will not be significantly altered.
The first words of the Fourteenth Amendment, argues legal scholar and Atlantic contributor Garrett Epps, are the key to its meaning: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the newest Atlantic Argument, Epps details the history of the citizenship clause and explains why Donald Trump’s proposed executive order to end birthright citizenship cannot alter its meaning—unless the president intends to challenge “the very fabric of the American republic.”
“Bright and High Circle,” the fifth episode of Matthew Weiner’s Amazon series, The Romanoffs, takes its title from a line in a poem by Alexander Pushkin, one that the character Katherine (Diane Lane) teaches in her Russian-literature class:
When your so young and fairy years
Are smeared by the gossip’s noise,
And by the high word’s trial, fierce,
Your public honor’s fully lost;
Alone midst indifferent crowds,
I share with you your soul’s pains
The poem expresses solidarity with someone whose reputation is being slandered; Pushkin (a notorious womanizer, for what it’s worth) seems to rage against “cruel” accusations and “hypocritical damnation,” and advises the subject to rise above them. This sets the theme of “Bright and High Circle,” which is about vague and gossipy accusations leveled at a piano teacher, David Patton (Andrew Rannells), in a wealthy community in Los Angeles.
“Bright and High Circle,” for all its dull plotting and impossibly ponderous pacing, is hard to interpret as anything other than Weiner’s response to #MeToo, a movement sparked by accusations of misconduct against men in the entertainment industry, including Weiner himself. It’s notably the first piece of art to emerge from someone implicated by #MeToo that directly addresses the movement, and so it presents an intriguing opportunity. There’s room within fiction for nuance—for wrestling with the dynamics of power and performance that make the entertainment industry’s problems with harassment so tangled. And yet this episode of television isn’t much more than a 70-minute extended cut of the words witch hunt. (That specific metaphor even features in the episode, in case the message wasn’t clear enough already.)
[Read: “The Romanoffs” is a self-indulgent, intriguing muddle.]
Over the course of the story, Lane’s Katherine learns that the beloved piano teacher of her three sons, Rannells’s David, has been accused of misconduct with a minor. The exact nature of what happened isn’t specified; Katherine is contacted by a detective in the Special Victims Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department who mentions vaguely that accusations have been leveled against David and asks if Katherine has any knowledge of him behaving inappropriately with her children, while telling her not to share what she’s learned with anyone. Katherine panics, contacts her friends to see what they’ve heard, and sets off a chain reaction of wealthy women agonizing over whether they’ve opened up their home to a child molester.
It’s Kafka, by way of The Real Housewives of Occidental College. The women gossip and chatter and take sides: One mother, Cheryl (Nicole Ari Parker), immediately defends David, while another, Debbie (Cara Buono), condemns him, in part—it’s hinted—because David once criticized her French-themed kitchen (“It’s like Versailles threw up in here,” he says in flashback). Katherine is less certain. Her children love David and are adamant that he’s never done anything worse than tell off-color jokes. David, though, is also revealed to be a liar and a fantasist who’s co-opted Katherine’s Romanov heritage for himself in conversations with other women.
In the end, the episode declines to specifically categorize what actually happened. Weiner and his co-writer, Kriss Turner Towner, don’t seem to think it matters. Katherine learns that David was accused of buying alcohol for a 15-year-old boy but not whether David actually did so, or under what circumstances. Her husband, Alex (Ron Livingston), is furious, regardless. “A good person doesn’t ruin somebody’s life over some random accusation,” he rages. Later, Alex tells his sons that they have to continue their piano lessons, because what’s happened to David is simply unconscionable.
“When you accuse somebody of something, whether they did it or not, you make everybody look at them differently,” he says. “Bearing false witness is the worst crime that you can commit. Otherwise, anyone can say anything about anybody, and just saying it ruins their life. No matter what they did. Does that seem fair? It’s not fair.”
There’s a lot to process here. Is bearing false witness really the worst crime a person can commit? Is it worse than physical assault? Sexual assault? Murder? Is David’s life ruined? “Bright and High Circle,” in fact, ends with nothing happening to David at all, despite the fact that he apparently broke the law and crossed a whole host of squishier ethical lines. He goes on teaching piano as he always has, even if the episode ends with Katherine shutting the door on her son’s lesson because the accusations against David have permanently lodged in her mind in a way that makes her anxious. David seems not to have suffered any serious ramifications in the wake of the clumsy and ineffectual police inquiry. But his reputation, Weiner seems to say: It’s been irredeemably smeared by the gossip’s noise.
This is the place where it feels unavoidable not to mention the specifics of what Weiner was accused of, perpetuating the same cycle he’s critiquing in this very story. In November 2017, Weiner’s former writing assistant Kater Gordon—a woman who won an Emmy for an episode of Mad Men she wrote with him before being fired under hazy circumstances—stated that Weiner once told her she owed it to him to let him see her naked. Weiner denied at the time that the interaction had ever happened. In a September interview with Vanity Fair’s Joy Press to promote The Romanoffs, Weiner went into slightly more detail. “I really don’t remember saying that,” he told Press. “I’m not hedging to say it’s not impossible that I said that, but I really don’t remember saying it.”
If “Bright and High Circle” is an allegory within which Weiner works through some feelings about what happened to him (and it’s truly hard not to read it that way), then it’s markedly similar to the other first-person defenses that emerged around the first anniversary of #MeToo. From John Hockenberry’s Harper’s essay to Jian Ghomeshi’s New York Review of Books piece, these reflections tend to have a common theme. They focus at length on the damage done to the man who’s been accused of misconduct, paying no heed to the feelings of the accuser. They express terror and dismay at what is perceived as a larger phenomenon of mob justice, wherein any man can have his reputation sullied in an instant. They convey some disdain for the modern world, a place where gossip and hypersensitivity fail to make space for the complicated genius of brilliant men.
David, “Bright and High Circle” suggests, is a gifted teacher. “You are the key that has unlocked the mystery of talent,” one mother tells him, fawningly. David himself says he takes altruistic pleasure in teaching. “I get to be the good thing in someone’s life when everything else is bad,” he tells Katherine. The accusations against him threaten that. Katherine, despite her best intentions, sees him differently. So do her sons. Similarly, we as viewers can no longer immerse ourselves in an episode of television written and directed by Matthew Weiner without thinking about what he, too, has been accused of doing.
This is actually a reasonable point, and it’s one that doesn’t summon an easy answer. For men who feel they’ve been unjustly accused of harassment or assault in a public forum, what is the best way to answer the charges? There is no perfect response. But there has to be a better way than simply trying to manifest sympathy for the men whose reputations have been ruined. For one thing, that sympathy already exists, despite the fact that it’s so conspicuously not being returned. “I feel sorry for a lot of these men [implicated in the #MeToo movement],” The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg wrote in September, “but I don’t think they feel sorry for women, or think about women’s experience much at all. And maybe that’s why the discussion about #MeToo and forgiveness never seems to go anywhere, because men aren’t proposing paths for restitution. They’re asking why women won’t give them absolution.”
“Bright and High Circle,” which minimizes David’s accuser to the point where he exists only in theory and is said to have “behavioral problems,” doesn’t seem compelled to imagine what it’s like to be on the receiving end of unwanted advances. All it really wants to do is assert that if calling out instances of abuse and harassment in society means ruining the reputations of men—whether they’re guilty or otherwise—then the cost is too high. It’s an argument so clumsy and lacking in imagination that it’s hard to imagine it coming from a writer of Weiner’s caliber. And it suggests that nuanced explorations of #MeToo from artists who’ve been personally caught up in it are, at least at this point, too much to expect.
I’ve been hearing a lot about a “blue wave” in the news lately, so it occurred to me that I should do my best to cover this tidal force with news photos. The images below capture some spectacular rides and wipeouts, as people try their hardest to navigate these massive waves and avoid washing out.
When I said that Corey Lewandowski, then Trump’s campaign manager, had grabbed and bruised me at a rally in 2016, Trump World called me a liar.
“It’s a hoax,” pro-Trump voices on Twitter and in parts of right-wing media claimed. They reasoned that I, a Breitbart reporter sent to cover the rally, had teamed up with The Washington Post’s Ben Terris, who witnessed the incident and wrote about it, to bring down the Trump campaign. I had faked the bruises on my arm and manufactured the audio recording of the incident.
It was all a crazy conspiracy theory. At the time, I assumed that many Trump supporters didn’t actually believe it; they just latched onto it because of partisan zealotry. But I’m starting to think that I was wrong. Perhaps they really did believe that I made up the story, because they themselves were capable of such a thing.
On Wednesday, the White House revoked the press pass of the CNN reporter Jim Acosta for “placing his hands on a young woman,” according to a tweet by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
[Read: The 10 most dumbfounding moments from Trump’s post-election press conference]
Sanders was referring to an incident at the post–midterm election White House press conference. An intern went to take a microphone away from Acosta during a testy exchange he was having with the president, and Acosta refused to give up the mic.
You can watch the video for yourself. If you do, I’m sure you’ll agree that if there was any contact, it was purely incidental and Acosta didn’t initiate it. You can accuse Acosta of grandstanding, but he didn’t come close to assaulting a young female intern.
But observable reality doesn’t seem to be causing any concern in the White House press shop. On Thursday, Sanders doubled down, tweeting out a new video, which appears to have been doctored, to try to prove that Acosta karate-chopped the young intern. Later still, she again tried to justify the administration’s decision: “The question is: Did the reporter make contact or not? The video is clear; he did. We stand by our statement.”
And now the same people who claimed I was lying about what happened to me in 2016 are standing behind these ludicrous White House accusations.
[Read: Jim Acosta’s dangerous brand of performance journalism]
In fact, it’s some of the exact same people. The seemingly doctored video was first shared by Paul Joseph Watson, a contributor to the far-right site Infowars who in 2016 repeatedly claimed that I was nothing more than a hoaxer.
I’m not a psychologist, but I’m pretty sure that the term used for this phenomenon is projection. I was accused of doing something I would never even think of doing by people who thought I might have done it precisely because they themselves were capable of doing it. Acosta-gate is the perfect example of this.
But it isn’t the only example. The president labels the media “fake news” but is happy to promote fake news for political purposes. Just look at his Twitter feed.
Even if the president’s team really believed that Acosta had assaulted a White House intern, their outrage would be hypocritical at best; just weeks ago at a rally in Montana, the president joked about the time the state’s congressman had body slammed a reporter.
If you go to the White House press shop expecting sincerity, you haven’t been paying attention.
The president has been wanting to escalate his war with the media for some time by revoking a journalist’s press pass, according to news reports. This was a political move by a president who sees the press as a useful political foil.
[Adam Serwer: Trump will only get more dangerous. ]
But it is also a dangerous move. It’s dangerous because it is a further assault on objective truth. It’s dangerous because we live in a time when political radicals on all sides seem willing to act violently, whether it is by sending pipe bombs to the president’s perceived enemies, including CNN, or threatening to break into Tucker Carlson’s house.
What’s more, it’s unfair to the young female intern who is being thrust into this political maelstrom. As far as we know, she hasn’t accused anybody of anything. It appears that the White House is using her for its own political ends.
Like I said, I’m no psychologist. But it seems to me that none of this leads anywhere healthy.
Tens of thousands of years ago, two gigantic ice sheets smothered the northernmost parts of what has since been named North America. They towered more than two kilometers high and contained 1.5 times as much water as Antarctica does today. They were daunting, impassable barriers to the early humans who had started moving east from Asia, walking across a land bridge that once connected the regions now known as Russia and Alaska. But once the ice started to melt, these peoples—the ancestors of the Americas’ Indigenous groups—spread southward into new lands.
What happened next?
Genetic studies, based on ancient remains, had already suggested that once the first American Indians got south of the ice, 14,600 to 17,500 years ago, they split into two main branches. One stayed north, giving rise to the Algonquian-speaking peoples of Canada. The other headed south, giving rise to the widespread Clovis culture, and to Central and South Americans. That’s a very rough outline, but a new study from J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar and his colleagues fleshes it out. They showed that whatever happened south of the ice, it happened fast.
They sequenced the genomes of 15 ancient humans, who came from sites ranging all the way from Alaska to Patagonia. One person from Spirit Cave in Nevada and five from Lagoa Santa in Brazil were especially instructive. They were all just over 10,000 years old, and though they lived 6,300 miles apart, they were strikingly similar in their DNA. Genetically, they were also closely matched to Anzick-1—a famous Clovis infant from Montana, who was about 2,000 years older.
All this suggests that, about 14,000 years ago, the southern lineage of early American Indians spread through the continent with blinding speed. To picture their movements, don’t think of a slowly growing tree, incrementally sending out new branches and twigs. Instead, imagine a starburst, with many rays zooming out simultaneously and rapidly.
In a matter of centuries, these people had gone down both sides of the Rockies, across the Great Basin, and into Mexico’s highlands. Within a couple more millennia, they had zipped down the Andes, through the Amazon, and as far south as the continent allowed. “Once they were south of the ice, they found a territory that was open, vast, and full of resources,” says Moreno-Mayar, who is based at the University of Copenhagen. “They were adept hunter-gatherers, so they expanded very quickly.”
This pattern confirms the suspicions of archaeologists, whose finds had long suggested that humans suddenly appeared throughout the Americas, from about 13,000 years ago onward. “You can now see that in the genetics,” Moreno-Mayar says.
Coincidentally, a second group of researchers, fronted by Cosimo Posth of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, independently found the same pattern. They studied the DNA of 49 ancient humans from Central and South America and found similar evidence for a rapid starburst expansion, and a southward migration that connects the Clovis culture of the north to early peoples in Belize, Brazil, and Chile.
These studies show that the histories of the Americas are more complicated than earlier genetic studies suggested, says Deborah Bolnick, an anthropologist from the University of Connecticut. But that’s more because those studies were overly simplistic to begin with rather than because the new results are surprising. “Many lines of evidence, including archaeological research, linguistic data, and Indigenous histories, have suggested that multiple groups of people—related, descended from shared ancestors, but still distinct—have lived, moved, and interacted in the Americas over the millennia,” she says. “Broadly, that is what these [new] studies show.”
They’re not just reinventing the wheel, though. For example, the tools of the Clovis people were so different from those found at Spirit Cave (which lies on the other side of the Rockies) that some researchers took them as evidence that the Americas were peopled by two genetically distinct founding groups. Moreno-Mayar and his colleagues have disproved that idea: They showed that the two groups were genetically similar, if culturally distinct.
Both teams also found evidence of later waves of migration that took place long after the Americas had been initially peopled—although the details differ between the two studies. Posth’s data point to a second wave of people who entered South America about 9,000 years ago, whose genes displaced those of the earlier Clovis-related people, and who had a direct connection to Indigenous groups today. By contrast, Moreno-Mayar’s data speak to a gentler process, in which relatively small groups slowly spread both north and south from Mexico from 8,000 years ago, adding their genes to the local populations without swamping them. Either way, they “challenge the idea that present-day native peoples all descend from a single, homogenous ancestral population,” says Maria Nieves-Colón, a geneticist based in Mexico’s LANGEBIO institute.
The two studies also differ on a particularly puzzling and controversial result. Back in 2015, the leaders of both Posth’s and Moreno-Mayar’s teams found that today’s Indigenous Amazonians share small hints of ancestry with people from Australia and Papua New Guinea—places on the other side of the Pacific. In their new study, Moreno-Mayar’s team found that same tantalizing smidgen of Australasian ancestry in the 10,400-year-old remains from Lagoa Santa in Brazil, but in none of the other remains they tested. “Every explanation that we can come up with for that is less plausible than the last,” says Moreno-Mayar.
If people with Australasian ancestry somehow entered the Americas before the early American Indians, how did they get into Brazil without leaving any trace in North America, either genetically or archaeologically? If they entered after the first American Indians did, how did they get from Alaska to Brazil seemingly without interacting with anyone else? If they sailed across the entire Pacific, after hypothetically inventing seafaring technology millennia before the Polynesians, how did they cross the Andes and traverse the Amazon?
It doesn’t help that Posth’s team didn’t find any Australasian DNA among their ancient remains, including ones from the same region of Brazil. It could be that people from that area were very diverse—or that the Australasian signal is a mistake. “The only way to get a better answer is to do more studies on other ancient samples,” adds Moreno-Mayar.
Those studies are surely coming. The analysis of DNA from ancient bones is a booming field of science, with splashy new discoveries emerging on a monthly basis. But such studies can harm Indigenous communities with ties to ancestral remains, by undermining repatriation claims and other legal disputes, damaging their identities by contradicting their histories, or increasing stigma by revealing susceptibility to disease. Despite these risks, Indigenous communities have been repeatedly shut out of research that involves their ancient relatives. The genome of the Ancient One, an 8,500-year-old skeleton found in Kennewick, Washington, was studied against the wishes of Columbia Plateau tribes, who wanted his remains repatriated and reburied. Just last year, remains were removed from Chaco Canyon without consulting any native peoples.
Many Indigenous scientists and their allies have now begun pressuring their peers to seek permission from tribes before any work is done, to involve them in research, and to share results. Just this year, two manifestos outlining these practices were published in major journals. And researchers are listening. In 2015, I attended a discussion on this topic at a major genetics conference, in a mostly empty room with a few dozen people. This year, a similar session was so popular that it spilled into an overflow room—and packed that, too.
That change is becoming apparent in new published work. Posth’s paper, for example, includes an ethics statement before describing the study’s results. “More than any other project I’ve been involved in, we paid a lot of attention to interacting with communities, curators, and local organizations,” he tells me.
Moreno-Mayar’s team also took the criticisms over past missteps to heart. Before studying the 10,600-year-old mummy from Spirit Cave, Eske Willerslev, the team leader, sought permission from the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, which had cultural affiliation with the remains. The tribe members initially refused, and Willerslev accepted their decision. But they changed their minds because they realized that a genetic study could solve the long-running legal debate regarding the remains.
The Spirit Cave mummy—a 40-something man—was found by two archaeologists in the 1940s and had been kept in a Nevada museum. The tribe wanted him repatriated; the federal government refused after some academics argued, based on the shape of his skull, that he wasn’t related to contemporary American Indians. After Willerslev’s analysis disproved that, the skeleton was returned to the tribe in 2016 and privately reburied. Throughout the process, members of the tribe flew to Copenhagen, oversaw the work, and—most important for Moreno-Mayar—taught the geneticists about their culture. Such steps aren’t just about ticking an ethical checklist, he says, but “about trying to understand other ways of seeing the world.”
The team also joined forces with members of other Indigenous communities to study different sets of remains. The supplement that accompanies its paper contains letters of support. Two tribal leaders are co-authors on the paper, which represents their status as partners-in-research rather than just gatekeepers of permission. “[The team has] made a sincere effort to connect with Indigenous communities,” says Nieves-Colón. “We still have a long way to go, but it’s great to see the trend shifting toward ethical consultations being the norm, not the exception.”
Agustín Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, is particularly impressed with Moreno-Mayar’s study, which he says shows a deeper attempt to rectify the problematic practices of the past. “It front-ends Indigenous participation and centers it on the peoples of the Americas rather than the peopling of the Americas,” he says. He means that the paper gives agency to the ancient individuals it describes instead of simply distilling them into abstract concepts of “gene flow.” It’s the kind of subtle difference that reflects genuine engagement with Indigenous groups—as does the styling of the word Indigenous. “Any object can be indigenous, but people or groups of people should be capitalized,” says Krystal Tsosie, an American Indian geneticist at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. “It’s a small but important detail.”
The ethical situation is harder to parse in South America, where there are often no tribal communities who claim kinship with a given set of remains; in such cases, the two teams contacted local government officials. “This can be problematic when government agencies are unmotivated to provide good stewardship over ancient remains, especially if their own policies toward present-day Indigenous communities are questionable,” says Tsosie. Those communities “don’t have the same protections as the sovereign tribal nations of the United States, [and] it is up to scientists to not exploit lax policies in other countries as a means of circumventing ethical practices.”
Keolu Fox, a Native Hawaiian at the University of California, San Diego, would also prefer Indigenous scientists to take charge of this field themselves. “We want to create some kind of infrastructure where our communities benefit from this work,” he says. “The new standard should be letting Indigenous people tell their own stories.”
Jeff Sessions lasted in his post as attorney general for 18 hours after the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives on Election Day. His ouster, anticipated for months, may finally allow the president to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller without consequence. Even for a country now accustomed to whiplash, it was a head-spinning day: the promise of national civic renewal followed by yet another potentially catastrophic threat to the health of American democracy.
The juxtaposition revealed the central challenge of this political moment. Despite the Democrats’ victory on Tuesday, the midterms showed that Trumpism has a real political constituency—and that the geographic distribution of that constituency combines with the structure of American government to provide the president with protection from a friendly Senate. The struggle to uphold the rule of law and to call Trump to account is ultimately a political fight with no easy shortcuts. It’s a hard, bitter slog, with a long way yet to travel.
Continued Republican control of the Senate was widely expected going into Election Day, but for the GOP to keep its hold on the House would have risked plunging the United States further into a crisis of democracy, emboldening a president already given relatively free rein by a friendly Congress. Trump would have no need to worry about being held in check, and a unified Republican legislature could have attacked the ongoing investigations into the president and his associates even more aggressively than it already has. The Democrats avoided this disaster on Election Day, and more: The party picked up 29 House seats and counting, with a wide margin in the popular vote.
[Adam Serwer: Trump will only get more dangerous.]
This may fit the criteria for a “blue wave,” but the air of deflation and disappointment among opponents of the president in the hours after the Democrats clinched control of the House points to something real. Trumpism was not resoundingly rejected on Tuesday night. If some candidates affiliated with the president lost their races—like Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and former head of the Trump administration’s voter-fraud commission, who failed to win his state’s governor’s seat—others who adopted his tactics were successful. Whatever defines Trump’s political movement, it has a constituency in the voters who turned out to vote for Florida Republican Ron DeSantis, who emphasized his support for Trump and whose gubernatorial campaign against Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum was consistently tinged with racism. And though Trump’s particular flavor of authoritarianism is something new, Tuesday night also showed that older, all-American threats to democracy are alive and well in this country: Georgia Republican Brian Kemp may well have eked out a victory the state governor’s race over his Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams, who would have been the nation’s first black female governor, through a systematic program of voter suppression enabled by Kemp’s role as Georgia’s secretary of state.
That said, a Democratic victory in the House matters. The incoming Democratic leadership of various committees has already promised investigations into any number of scandals left relatively untouched by a Republican-led Congress. It says a great deal about how this administration has conducted itself that the list of possible inquiries is extremely long—ranging from the appalling handling of disaster relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, to the various scandals that have roiled the rotating cast of Cabinet members over the course of the president’s 21 months in office, to Trump’s refusal to hand over his tax returns—and any and all of these investigations will play an important constitutional role in reestablishing Congress as a check against the executive branch.
As chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Representatives Devin Nunes and Bob Goodlatte have made it their business not just to avoid oversight of the president but to affirmatively clog up the works of the ongoing investigations into Trump, harassing Justice Department officials in a seeming quest to provide ever more grist for the pro-Trump conspiracy-theory mill. That will end under Democratic leadership: Adam Schiff, the likely incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has already promised to dig into a number of ongoing questions about the president’s conduct and the Trump campaign’s relationship to Russia. And when soon-to-be House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler quickly indicated his intention to investigate the circumstances of Sessions’s firing come January, Schiff hinted the same.
[Read: The Democrats’ Deep South strategy was a winner after all]
Writing on Twitter in the wake of Sessions’s departure, the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted that “Trump allies are deeply perplexed by his move against Sessions, given that it all but guarantees an investigation by House judiciary.” Further reporting later in the evening fleshed out the story. According to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, Trump’s decision to finally remove his embattled attorney general was likely precipitated by Republican gains in the Senate on Tuesday night. Consolidation of GOP control in Congress’s upper chamber, along with the absence of Trump critics like John McCain and Jeff Flake from the Republican caucus, will make it much easier for the president to confirm a permanent replacement for Sessions. And this appears to have been at the forefront of Trump’s mind on election night.
This is the threat to the rule of law posed by the country’s failure to resoundingly reject Trumpism, posed as starkly as possible. A Democratic House can investigate Trump. A Democratic House Judiciary Committee can even initiate impeachment proceedings against him—and would likely be the recipient of any report prepared by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. (During Watergate, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski delivered an impeachment “road map” to the House Judiciary Committee, which helped guide the committee in developing articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon.)
But the Republican hold on the Senate means that Trump is still emboldened. The strengthening of that grip reportedly gave him the push he needed to finally fire Sessions. The morning after the Democrats clinched control of the House, he threatened on Twitter to instigate investigations in the Senate of Democratic activity in the House if the Democrats were to push for inquiries. (It is far from clear whether any Senate Republican committee chairs would comply.) And while impeachment is a long way away, it is hard to imagine a Republican Senate under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell convicting a president whose presence in office enables the party to speedily confirm round after round of judges, strengthening a conservative hold on the federal judiciary that will last for decades.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Republicans must choose between Trump and the rule of law]
Despite what Trump tweeted in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Tuesday night was not a “Big Victory” for the president. But neither was it a symbolic toppling of the would-be autocrat’s statue.
Speculation has ramped up in recent days over what to expect post-midterms from a special counsel’s office freed from the ostensible constraints of Justice Department guidance against investigative activity that could influence an election. Mueller has been quiet so far, even after authority over his investigation shifted from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker in the wake of Sessions’s dismissal. It’s impossible to know what’s coming next in the Russia investigation and what the special counsel might have planned in the event that Trump pushes Whitaker to fire Mueller or curtail his probe—the unstated motive behind Sessions’s ouster.
Citizens and commentators tended in the early days of the Mueller investigation to hail the special counsel as some kind of mythic hero or silver bullet. Mueller had only to release his next indictment, his latest evidence of obstruction or of the Trump campaign’s coordination with the Russian government, and the nightmare would be over. This has not, obviously, turned out to be the case. As court documents have slowly trickled out of the special counsel’s office over the course of the year and a half since Mueller’s appointment, the president’s approval has remained remarkably steady and his hold over congressional Republicans has gone nowhere.
The question has always been not only what Mueller might discover but also how Americans will react to that discovery—whether Trump has sufficiently primed his supporters to reject uncomfortable information as “fake news” so as to insulate him from any political consequences of potential scandal. That question is more important than ever in light of Tuesday’s election returns. Finding a way out of this extended national catastrophe requires defeating Trumpism as a political project, an even harder task given the weight of gerrymandering and voter suppression on the shoulders of the most likely anti-Trump voters. This is the work of politics—what the philosopher Max Weber referred to as the “slow and strong boring of hard boards.” It will be a long grind forward.
In the Trump era, when every day brings fresh insanity, looking back is hard. But it’s worth remembering what Donald Trump did in the final days before Tuesday’s midterm elections. It’s worth remembering because it’s a template for what he may do in 2020. And for how mainstream conservatives will respond.
According to CNN, Republican officials wanted to close the campaign with an upbeat “Morning in America”–style commercial touting the country’s strong economy. Trump disagreed. He demanded that Republicans end by demonizing immigrants. On October 31—six days before the midterms and four days after a man enraged by Jewish support for the immigrant caravan murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh—Trump tweeted out an ad about the caravan. When Paul Ryan called him the Sunday before Election Day to implore him to talk about the economy, Trump instead boasted that his focus on immigration was rousing the GOP base.
He was probably right. Trump does appear to have incited Republican fury over immigration, which likely helped the GOP match the Democrats’ high turnout. His strategy worked, in part, because he understood something about the respectable people in his party: They wouldn’t challenge his bigotry, no matter how blatant it was.
[Adam Serwer: Trump will only get more dangerous.]
Bigotry involves ascribing negative characteristics to an entire racial, religious, or ethnic group. Trump’s caravan ad does that emphatically. It’s built around the stereotype—which has been repeatedly debunked—that undocumented Latino immigrants are disproportionately violent. As William Saletan has noted in Slate, it begins with a man declaring, in a heavy Spanish accent, that he wants to kill police. If his ethnicity isn’t clear enough, the ad gives his name—Luis Bracamontes—and says he “killed our people!” It later features an interview with a man who says in Spanish, according to an interpreter, that he wants to come to the United States to seek a pardon for attempted murder. The ad also shows what appears to be a Nicaraguan flag, and a mass of people violently pushing against a fence.
Even Fox eventually rejected the ad. But that didn’t significantly undermine conservative unity because respectable conservatives—the kind who initially shunned Trump—bent themselves into pretzels trying to deny the obvious. The day after Trump released the commercial, Robert VerBruggen, a deputy managing editor of National Review, noted that it had “produced comparisons to the Willie Horton ad and accusations of racism … despite the fact that the criminal featured is, uh, rather pale.” VerBruggen’s claim was that the ad couldn’t be racist because Latinos are sometimes described as white. This is semantic nonsense. Whether or not Latinos constitute a “race,” they’re a distinct group. Their distinctiveness is highlighted in Trump’s ad, which emphasizes Bracamontes’s accent and name. So whether or not Trump’s ad is “racist” toward Latinos, it is clearly bigoted.
On November 2, the National Review editor Rich Lowry weighed in. “I looked up Luis Bracamonte [sic], who is featured in the Trump ad that Robert mentioned. His case doesn’t implicate Democrats in particular the way the video says. But he is the worst of the worst, a vicious and unrepentant killer.” The implication is that because Bracamontes really is a remorseless murderer, there’s nothing wrong with targeting him in an ad. This is staggeringly naive. Does Lowry think that Trump—who during his 2016 campaign called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and said that a Mexican American judge couldn’t be impartial—chose a Mexican murderer by accident?
[Adam Serwer: America’s problem isn’t tribalism—it’s racism.]
Finally, on that same day, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru gently took issue with VerBruggen. “What I think he overlooks,” Ponnuru wrote, “is that the controversy over the ad isn’t coming out of a clear blue sky. The president has a history on race, and the ad can reasonably be viewed in the context of it.” Even Ponnuru, however, wouldn’t come out and call Trump’s ad bigoted.
But if National Review’s response to Trump’s ad was tepid and evasive, it was nothing compared with the response of Erick Erickson, another formerly anti-Trump conservative respectable enough to be invited on Meet the Press. “I don’t actually think it is racist,” Erickson tweeted. “I think it is a terrible ad, but calling it racist doesn’t make it so. It’s just a really bad and poorly executed ad. Yes, it plays on fear, but I don’t think it plays to racist sentiments per se.”
Erickson, you’ll notice, makes no argument and cites no evidence. He just says again and again that the ad isn’t racist. The Washington-based former news anchor Derek McGinty then tweeted a question: “Reminds me very much of Willie Horton. Do you think that was racist?” Erickson answered: “No I didn’t, but then I was 12. I think it stoked people’s fears about crime at the time, not so much about Horton’s race.” McGinty probed further: “Would the ad have been as effective if Horton wasn’t a ‘scary Black’ man?” At which point Erickson conceded: “That’s a fair point.” And then claimed that the first person to use Willie Horton was Al Gore.
Let’s summarize the exchange. First, Erickson insists, with no evidence, that the caravan ad isn’t racist. Then he insists, again with no evidence, that the Willie Horton ad isn’t racist either. Then, when gently challenged, he acknowledges that maybe the Horton ad is racist, but still doesn’t acknowledge that the caravan ad is. Why not? Who knows?
[Adam Serwer: Just say it’s racist.]
What makes all this so depressing is that National Review and Erick Erickson once actually did challenge Trump. In January 2016, with Trump already the GOP presidential front-runner, National Review’s editors called him a “philosophically unmoored political opportunist” with “strong-man overtones” who was “not deserving of conservative support.” In August 2015, Erickson disinvited Trump from a conference he had organized because of Trump’s sexist and insulting comments about Megyn Kelly. It was easier back then; Trump hadn’t yet taken over the Republican Party. But their actions also reflected the fact that Erickson and National Review take conservatism seriously. At times in the past, they’ve tried to remain true to their vision of it, even when doing so put them at odds with the GOP.
In the final days before the midterm, however, they weren’t willing to challenge their readers. They couldn’t clearly admit that Trump was peddling racism because that would have required them to repudiate him. But neither could they muster serious arguments for why the ad wasn’t racist. So they half-heartedly waved the whole thing away.
Which is just what Trump expects. Bullies can sense cowardice. The lesson he’ll take away is that next time he can go even further—secure in the knowledge that respectable conservatives will avert their eyes and go along for the ride.
The implosion of Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign is, by itself, a fascinating tale worth adapting for the big screen. Retelling bits of political history in movie form, as though they’re sensational true-crime yarns, has seemingly only become more popular. In the past two years alone, audiences have gotten potted accounts of Watergate (Mark Felt), Stanley McChrystal’s resignation (War Machine), and Ted Kennedy’s biggest scandal (Chappaquiddick). Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner joins the list by telling the story of Hart (played by Hugh Jackman), a Colorado senator and stump-speech superstar who’s brought down by a sex-scandal maelstrom.
The dramatization itself, based on Matt Bai’s book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, is solid (Bai co-wrote the film with Reitman and Jay Carson). The story line is finessed and some characters are fictional composites, but the general idea is there: Hart’s status as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination was derailed by reports about his womanizing past and a rumored affair with a woman named Donna Rice (Sara Paxton). But with that premise comes a grander thesis statement—that the end of Hart’s career helped bring about a general end to civility in politics, and to the norm of serious journalists overlooking tabloid-friendly stories about their subjects. But The Front Runner doesn’t seem confident enough in that theory.
Ironically, what gets in the way of Reitman’s central argument is one of the movie’s biggest strengths: Jackman’s performance. Playing Hart requires serious star power without the bombast. The candidate was telegenic and good pals with Hollywood celebrities like Warren Beatty, but he was also regarded as a bit of a wonk. Jackman plays Hart with a cagey sort of gracefulness. The senator is happy to take part in an axe-throwing competition at the county fair, but any time someone references his reputation as a ladies’ man, he tries to divert the discussion to tax brackets or geopolitics.
Hart feels like an intentionally obscure figure, always at arm’s length from the audience and even from his own devoted staff members (played by a talented ensemble, including J. K. Simmons, Molly Ephraim, Alex Karpovsky, and Tommy Dewey). As Hart’s refusal to address questions about his relationship with Rice and other women begins to consume his campaign, The Front Runner’s plot becomes more about the candidate’s inability to be honest and less about the salaciousness of the rumors themselves. In fact, this is a decidedly unsexy movie, one that’s more interested in process than scandal. Probably the film’s most flirtatious moment involves Hart calmly talking the reporter A. J. Parker (a fictional character played by Mamoudou Athie) through his fear of flying during a bad bit of turbulence.
The Front Runner is so process-oriented that the scandal in question never feels lewd, but instead rooted in Hart’s remoteness. As a result, it’s hard to buy Reitman’s argument that Hart’s downfall marked the exact moment American politics hit the gutter. The revelation of Hart’s possible affair with Rice came as two Miami Herald journalists (played by Bill Burr and Steve Zissis) staked out the politician’s home in Capitol Hill and saw Hart leaving with Rice. Hart railed against the reporters’ invasive tactic as unprecedented, but they also caught him in an unmistakable lie. Somewhat confusingly, Reitman can’t seem to decide between portraying the Herald journalists as tenacious and gutsy or as irritating pests.
More often than not, the director leaves it to the viewers to decide. The entire film is presented à la Robert Altman, told with overlapping dialogue by an ensemble of characters who often go unnamed. Whether the audience is in the thicket of Hart’s staff or amid a swarm of reporters, the movie’s emphasis is on exposition rather than character. The first half of The Front Runner sets out the stakes of Hart’s campaign, and the second half questions the significance of its destruction. Was the media coverage inappropriate? Should Hart’s private life have been off-limits? Was Donna Rice mistreated? Reitman’s answer too often comes off as a shrug.
Scenes at the Washington Post office (which feel largely pointless) function as little bits of Socratic debate, with Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina), Ann Devroy (Ari Graynor), and others pondering the necessity of exposing a senator’s sexual exploits. The effect of the reporting on the Hart family is depicted with a little more juice, and Vera Farmiga does great work playing Hart’s furious but pragmatic wife, Lee. But so much of The Front Runner feels like stenography, giving audiences the basics and then letting Hart or Bradlee monologue to the camera about how the norms of yesteryear are slipping away, perhaps forever.
Reitman’s career started strong with the punchy satire Thank You for Smoking, the acidic family comedies Juno and Young Adult, and Up in the Air, a melancholy ballad about the Great Recession. But the director’s work nose-dived with flops like Men, Women & Children and Labor Day; I thought Tully, released in May, was a sensitively done comeback that worked because it was told on such a human scale. I would’ve said the same of The Front Runner had it taken a similar approach, but Reitman is tripped up in his attempts to spin Hart’s story into something more symbolic. There’s a compelling personal portrait at the heart of this movie, but the film isn’t bold enough to coax it out.
After eight years in power, Republicans in the House of Representatives will soon hand over the gavel to Democrats. When the new Congress convenes in January, the chamber will contain dozens fewer Republicans—and fewer Republican supporters of space exploration.
The outcome of Tuesday’s elections will sweep several longtime champions of NASA out of the House. Some have held office for many years, and their interest in space exploration has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for ambitious projects. Plenty of ardent NASA advocates remain in the chamber, but the departure of these well-known faces could lead to a shift in legislative priorities.
Perhaps the most significant loss occurred in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District, home to thousands of the employees at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. A political newcomer, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, defeated the incumbent John Culberson, who has served in the House since 2001. Culberson, an attorney, doesn’t have a science background. But he grew up in the 1960s building telescopes, toying with model rockets, and reading popular science magazines. For the past four years, Culberson has pushed his colleagues in the House and the Senate to steadily grow NASA’s budget, for projects including its climate-science programs—which may come as a surprise, given the congressman’s party line on climate change.
Culberson has fiercely supported one mission in particular: a journey to one of Jupiter’s moons, the icy Europa.
As chair of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science, Culberson more than doubled the amount of money the space agency requested from Congress for an orbiter around Europa, from $265 million to $545 million. He also threw in $195 million to support a lander to the moon, which NASA hadn’t even planned for, but would of course accept. Scientists suspect that Europa’s frozen crust covers a liquid ocean that may sustain microbial life. Culberson was intent on sending something there to find it. “This will be tremendously expensive, but worth every penny,” he said last year, during a visit to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to check its progress.
[Read: Europa is the solar system’s icy secret keeper].
With Culberson out of the House, the funding portfolio for the Europa mission could change. “I don’t see any obvious members of Congress, Republican or Democratic, who’d be taking up that mantle of leading the Europa efforts, so I imagine that those are likely to start to wane,” said Casey Dreier, a senior space-policy adviser at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space-advocacy group.
Dreier said the development of the Europa orbiter, known as Clipper, will certainly continue. Since NASA formally approved the mission in 2015, engineers and scientists have made significant progress on the design of the spacecraft. But without a steady flow of funding, its launch date could slip, he said.
The lander is on shakier ground. “I don’t think you’re going to see money for the Europa lander to continue showing up, because that’s money that NASA has not been requesting,” Dreier said.
Culberson is also a supporter of the Space Launch System, a rocket and capsule currently under construction at NASA. The launch system, intended to someday send astronauts to the moon and beyond, enjoys tremendous support in the House and the Senate, particularly from lawmakers whose states are home to NASA field centers where the work is being done. The SLS is designed to be the world’s most powerful rocket, but it has many hurdles to clear before it gets off the ground. The program has been plagued with schedule delays and cost overruns.
[Read: “We choose to go to the moon” again—but when?]
“It’s just critical that we get it up and flying as quickly as possible,” Culberson told reporters in April, in an attempt to both reassure taxpayers and galvanize engineers. “Every delay is a concern and a worry.” With Culberson gone, the SLS loses a supporter to defend the program from criticism, both in Congress and the broader space community, that it is too costly.
Culberson is likely to be replaced as chair by José Serrano of New York, the current ranking member of the committee. Asked on Wednesday whether he would continue Culberson’s efforts to keep the Europa mission well funded, the congressman said, “My priority right now is getting a final fiscal year 2019 [appropriations bill] that achieves good outcomes on an array of important priorities both inside and outside NASA.”
Culberson is joined in his ouster by Dana Rohrabacher of California and Randy Hultgren of Illinois. Rohrabacher and Hultgren both serve on the House Space Subcommittee, and Hultgren is a member of the Planetary Science Caucus, a bipartisan group established in February to “unite members of both parties who are passionate about the scientific exploration of space.” Neither Rohrabacher nor Hultgren wields the kind of power Culberson does in his role on the House Appropriations Committee, but they have long-standing interest in space exploration and proven support for it. In 2004, long before SpaceX became a household name, Rohrabacher, well known for his provocative political stances, introduced legislation that called for the government to invest in commercial space companies. In 2015, Hultgren proposed a bill aimed at boosting support for human-exploration efforts, including the SLS.
Rohrabacher and Hultgren also sit on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, which will experience a shake-up of its own. Its chair, Lamar Smith of Texas, announced months ago that he would retire at the end of this Congress, after more than 30 years. Smith, another NASA supporter, is a polarizing figure in the science community; he is a huge astronomy fan, particularly of the search for extraterrestrial life, but he’s also one of Capitol Hill’s staunchest deniers of climate science.
[Read: Congress is quietly nudging NASA to look for aliens].
Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, the ranking member of the House Science committee, said on Wednesday that she would seek the chairmanship. Under her direction, the committee would, among other things, defend “the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks” and “address the challenge of climate change, starting with acknowledging it is real,” Johnson said.
Johnson previously criticized Smith’s intense focus on space exploration at what she described as the expense of Earth science. “The majority slashes funding for programs that help humans here on Earth and instead prioritizes spending money to find space aliens,” she said at a hearing in April. “Let me be clear: I think the search for life in the universe is a fascinating quest, and I’m also a strong supporter of exploration. But I think melting ice caps, rising sea levels, the increases in extreme weather events and drought, and the other serious manifestations of climate change here on Earth are also things we should be concerned about and studying.”
Regardless of which party controls the House, NASA is stuck in a holding pattern until lawmakers in both chambers successfully negotiate a spending bill for the next fiscal year. In September, Congress reached agreements to fund some programs, like defense, labor, health, and education, all the way through fall 2019. But others, like NASA, received funding extensions only until December of this year. Under these circumstances, the space agency can’t formally begin new projects or inject growing ones with more money. These include many of the proposals put forth by the Trump administration in the past two years, like the construction of an orbital platform around the moon, which officials want to begin in 2022.
“A lot of those [programs] may be up for reexamination now that you have a Democratic-controlled House that can run its own committees and pursue its own interests and inquiries and investigations,” Dreier said.
NASA must wait for its own decisive appropriations process in the coming months. “It’ll be very interesting to see if they end up compromising and passing spending legislation now, or if the Democrats would like to push it into the next Congress and wait until they actually have a majority to represent their interests,” Dreier said. “I think it’s too early to tell at the moment.”
A gunman entered Borderline Bar and Grill, in Thousand Oaks, California, late Wednesday night and opened fire. By the time the rampage was over, at least 13 people were dead, including one police officer and the gunman.
Thousand Oaks, California, is routinely named one of America’s safest cities for its relatively low number of crimes reported in FBI statistics. But such day-to-day statistics can’t neatly forecast mass shootings, which are seemingly random and can happen anywhere. The sites of mass shootings over the past few years have touched so many corners of American public life: churches, malls, synagogues, bars, concerts, schools, movie theaters, office buildings, even a yoga studio.
[Read: Mass shootings in America are spreading like a disease]
The bar, located near Pepperdine University and California Lutheran University, was frequented by college students, and it was hosting a “college country night” for students on Wednesday, according to Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean. Pepperdine confirmed on Twitter that multiple students were among the hundreds of people inside the crowded bar at the time of the shooting. Law-enforcement officials have not yet determined a motive. Southern California had another mass shooting on a similar scale just three years ago, in 2015, when 14 people were killed in San Bernardino.
Earlier this year, a spate of school shootings—in Parkland, Florida; Marshall County, Kentucky; and Santa Fe, Texas—ignited a new wave of activism around gun-control laws. Parkland, too, was rated one of the safest cities in the country before a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February. The Parkland students made passionate calls for action, moving lawmakers in Florida, one of the country’s most gun-friendly states, to pass an array of gun-control regulations.
But efforts to weaken the influence of the National Rifle Association, the leading gun-rights advocacy group, in the state seem to have hit a wall. In Tuesday’s midterm elections, a candidate for governor who was backed by the NRA claimed victory, and the state may have two NRA-supported senators. The reporter Lois Beckett, who was with Parkland students Tuesday night, wrote that one student, Jaclyn Corin, said that she was “shaking with anger” over the election results. “It’s like the same feeling I was getting the night of February 14, so angry that I don’t know what to do with that anger,” Corin told those gathered. “We’re not going to stop fighting, I can tell you.”
During a press briefing after the Thousand Oaks shooting, Dean expressed an all-too-common sentiment. “I never thought I would see the things around the country that would happen, but I’ve learned it doesn’t matter what community you’re in,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how safe your community is; it can happen anywhere.”
BARNEGAT, New Jersey—Health care was supposed to be the biggest issue on voters’ minds on Election Day, and in New Jersey’s Third Congressional District, it was supposed to be the issue.
Incumbent Representative Tom MacArthur, a Republican, had not only previously voted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, but authored an amendment that would have let states charge more for preexisting conditions and opt out of certain types of coverage, such as maternity care.
His opponent, Andy Kim, a counterterrorism official under Obama, hammered the health-care point in a campaign ad, saying that MacArthur “wrote the bill” and took money from drug and insurance companies. (MacArthur has denied that he tried to take away preexisting-condition protections.) Though the race still hasn’t been officially called, on Wednesday night, Kim declared victory with a lead of just a few thousand votes.
The race was seen as, potentially, an example of Republicans nationwide paying the price for attempting to gut Obamacare last year. But whether voters remembered the repeal effort, and punished Republicans for it, is a more difficult question to answer.
MacArthur clearly did face a more uphill battle this year than in the past. He won reelection in 2016 by 20 percentage points. On Tuesday, I interviewed two dozen voters in Barnegat, a small town near the coast, and Democrats indeed tended to cite health care as a reason to vote for Kim.
[Read: The fate of Obamacare’s most popular provision]
Leslie S. said that she has special-needs kids and grandkids and “cannot vote for anyone who would take away Medicaid.”(Most of the voters I spoke with asked me not to use their full names.) She supported the Democrats, as did Katlyn M., a woman with a chronic illness that could be considered a preexisting condition.
The Republicans I interviewed, meanwhile, were more focused on the economy and immigration. In fact, several MacArthur voters told me that they had no issue at all with their own health insurance. They want Republicans to stay in power so that President Trump can complete his plans for a border wall and continue to grow the economy.
“Border security is important to me,” said Tim K. “I’m concerned that the asylum process allows for too porous of a border.”
Other Republicans supported MacArthur’s move to repeal Obamacare; they regretted that it had failed. “We’re in favor of Obamacare repeal,” said Jane L. “I had to be on it for a year, and we were paying $1,000 a month for my premium.”
Like some Republicans, some Democrats voted based on party loyalty and had little sense of MacArthur’s health-care amendment when I asked. But others had, in fact, weighed MacArthur’s health-care history and voted for his opponent. “They need to provide comprehensive coverage for everybody,” said Luis M., who voted for MacArthur in a past election but went for Kim this time. “[MacArthur] has sold his soul to the devil.”
The repudiation of the repeal effort is a bit surprising, since only about 9 million Americans are on Obamacare plans, and they would feel changes such as the end of preexisting-condition protections most acutely. After the repeal effort failed, the Trump administration opted to dismantle Obamacare through small, administrative maneuvers, leaving the future of the law largely out of congressional hands. Finally, both Obamacare and the repeal effort were so convoluted that most voters likely forgot what the MacArthur amendment was. In Michigan, for example, voters reelected Representative Fred Upton, a Republican who was also considered vulnerable because of his role in the Obamacare repeal effort.
[Read: Who coined ‘Obamacare’?]
It’s possible, then, that Kim and other Democrats simply succeeded at branding themselves as more “pro” health care, whatever that might mean. Several of the Kim voters I spoke with didn’t know the specifics of the Republicans’ repeal attempt, but they had the vague sense that Democrats would give them access to health care, while Republicans would not. With the name Obamacare, President Barack Obama tried to convince people that he cares. Republicans, rightly or wrongly, might have come off seeming as if they don’t.
Then again, most people said that health care was just one of the issues that brought them out to vote. An even more electrifying motivator drove some Democrats to the polls: President Donald Trump. “Health care is expensive, and even though you pay for it, you go, and nothing is covered,” said Faith D. But she also wanted a check on the president. “He’s an embarrassment to the United States of America,” she said.
Voter turnout for midterm elections is traditionally mediocre, though there are signs of a swell this year. While some eligible voters sit out because they’ve become disillusioned with the political process, others become excluded from the process through what is tantamount to voter suppression. If you voted—or tried to—on Tuesday, tell us about your experience.
Here’s how readers responded.
I didn’t vote on Tuesday because I mailed my ballot in more than two weeks ago.
What prevents every state from having this option for voters?
The messes with which voters had to cope today once again provide strong evidence that the USPS still provides an important option for supporting our democracy.
Michael O’Meara
Covington, Wash.
In Colorado, every registered voter in the state receives a ballot in the mail. You then have the option to mail your ballot or drop it at conveniently located collection points. On Election Day, there are election centers where people who need to vote in person may vote, and we allow same-day voter registration.
As a result, Colorado has some of the highest voter turnout in the country, and our elections are very secure. Why can’t this be the national norm? Voter suppression is a disgrace to our country.
Barbara Briggs
Denver, Colo.
Washington State has mail-in ballots with postage-free returns. Voters received their ballots around the 20th of October, giving them plenty of time to research the candidates, mail in the ballots, or put them in conveniently located ballot boxes. There are also some polling places. It is easy to register in Washington, with the objective to make voting as easy as possible. It is unfortunate that so many states put up barriers to make it hard to vote. Why we continue to see long lines at polling sites is a mystery when a statewide system of mail-in ballots is so easy and fair.
Joni Henry
Seattle, Wash.
My son lives in a heavily blue neighborhood in Omaha, in a heavily red state. He showed up to vote at his polling place, a church, when it opened and got in a long line with signs pointing to a door. The door, as it turns out, was locked. He went around to the other side of the church and found the open door leading to the polling place. He returned to the line leading to the locked door and found people telling those waiting in line that if they were concerned about being late to work, they could vote on their phones or online. He directed those in the fake line to the actual polling place.
Name Withheld Upon Request
In NYC, voters were asked to line up for long periods in heavy rain in front of empty schools. Some were seniors and parents with babies and toddlers. I asked if we could go inside, and was told no. Previously, I’ve been at crowded school voting sites during presidential elections, and voters were respectfully allowed inside, in the auditorium and other sections. Some potential voters left because they could not keep standing in the rain that long.
Miriam Fisher
New York, N.Y.
Mr. and Mrs., in our 90s, voted in Los Angeles County, while our invalid neighbor could not because the election board changed locations to a high-school auditorium. There was no parking, double steps to an entrance approximately 40 feet above street level, plus six blocks (round trip) walking uphill from the street parking spot.
We complained at the voting location, and most workers agreed with us. They had all arrived at 6 a.m. and had to lug heavy voting equipment up the double steps. Mrs. reported the issue to the local congressman’s office.
Other than our personal voting problem, the day was sunny, and we continued our 70-year-long unbroken string of voting; always.
Ben Silva
I live in Massachusetts, and I have never experienced anything but help and respect at the polls—and never any long lines. I have been voting here for more than 40 years. While I agree that any attempt to suppress voting rights is wrong, I would like to see some emphasis placed on the positive experiences most of us have.
Donald Fatzinger
Rockland, Mass.
On Tuesday, Texas voters did as Texas voters historically do: They sent the full slate of Republican statewide candidates back to office. Those candidates faced varying degrees of difficulty—Senator Ted Cruz crawled his way to victory; Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton enjoyed more of a brisk sail—but the result was the same. The Republican Party maintained its grip on the state that so many believed would, at long last, go blue.
After two years of being barraged by books and articles forecasting a shift in Texas’s political alignment, Republicans might view Tuesday’s elections as a satisfying rebuke to that narrative. And in some ways they’d be right to: The national media’s coverage of Cruz’s Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, who represents the state’s 16th Congressional District in the House, seemed to verge, in some cases, on the sycophantic, and I talked to no shortage of Republicans who delighted in O’Rourke’s loss not so much for Cruz’s victory but for the image of reporters and pundits tucking their tails. Yet another election, their thinking went, in which the gulf between coastal elites and real Americans was laid bare.
As I wrote last night, O’Rourke’s loss stemmed in part from his inability to package his progressive vision in a way that proved palatable to the majority of Texas voters. Earlier this year, a Democratic representative up for reelection in a very liberal district, who requested anonymity for fear of backlash, told me he didn’t dare touch impeachment on the stump—it was too volatile a topic, he said, especially with low-hanging fruit such as health care and immigration up for grabs (this person won handily on Tuesday). It was curious, then, to see O’Rourke, in a state as red as Texas, tackle impeachment and other far-left proposals, such as the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, head on.
But in critiques of O’Rourke’s strategy, the deficiencies of his challenger—and the GOP as a whole—become just as clear. Texas may play host to mostly conservative voters, yes. But massive early-voting numbers and record turnout among minority demographics reveal that the state is shifting not so much in how its citizens decide to vote, but in who decides to show up. “A lot of the patterns last night were predictable,” the Republican strategist Liam Donovan told me. “It was the volume that caught everyone by surprise.” For Cruz, the blind spot was telling: His campaign based its electoral models on 6 million voters, far shy of the 8 million who ultimately turned up to vote. It’s the kind of miscalculation that, if replicated, could spell doom in the future for Republican candidates in Texas and beyond.
All of which is to say that in Texas last night, both parties lost in their own way: one by not recognizing the significant ways in which the state is changing, and one by not taking seriously just how far it still has to go.
Perhaps the best way to understand O’Rourke’s and Cruz’s missteps is to study the Democratic upset in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District. The seventh, which includes the Houston suburbs, has long been one of the most reliable Republican districts in the country. Before last night, it hadn’t gone blue since before 1966, when George H. W. Bush won the seat. John Culberson has represented the seventh for the last 18 years. He was never a familiar face nationally, but as a senior member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, he had an institutional cachet that was tough to challenge.
But as anti-Trump resentment grew in the aftermath of the 2016 election, a lawyer named Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, then 41 years old, decided to do just that. She was unabashedly liberal, once serving on the board of Planned Parenthood. She was young and inexperienced and felt a high-minded calling to try to check the “culture of cronyism, corruption, and incompetence” that she told me she saw unfolding in Washington.
In other words, she was a lot like Beto O’Rourke. And after Fletcher won the Democratic primary, the race for the Seventh Congressional District began to bear resemblances to the Senate contest. Nationally popular Democrats such as former Vice President Joe Biden started to take notice, and Democratic strategists in Washington began to view the historically deep-red district as one of the key pickups in their path to taking control of the House.
As the interest in Fletcher’s campaign grew, it was as though Culberson had been jolted from a long sleep. “We’ve been trying to tell him all summer, ‘You know, this isn’t a joke. It’s not like all the other times. We need to actually get moving,’” a source close to Culberson, who asked that his name not be used so as not to jeopardize their relationship, told me in August. Suddenly this institutional presence who’d long ago absconded with the need to seriously campaign had to, well, campaign.
That’s not a perfect parallel to Ted Cruz, necessarily, whose team early on readied for the national fanfare around O’Rourke. But it reveals how the competitiveness and hype that were building ahead of the 2018 elections seemed to sneak up on Texas Republicans—how the popular mood of discontent with Washington could actually motivate new and more voters to turn out. As Politico first reported, the Cruz team’s prediction of total turnout never strayed from 6 million to 6.5 million. All told, the number of voters in the Texas Senate race easily broke 8 million.
How was Fletcher able to spin groundbreaking turnout to her benefit while O’Rourke wasn’t? There are dozens of answers to that question, including the coattail effect, in which the popularity of one candidate helps boost another down-ballot: Most strategists I’ve spoken to believe that having O’Rourke at the top of the ticket helped usher Fletcher over the finish line, whereas O’Rourke, with popular Republican Governor Greg Abbott at the top of ticket, enjoyed no such luxury.
But the coattail effect alone cannot explain how Fletcher managed to trounce Culberson by a massive five percentage points. The answer may be that, unlike O’Rourke, Fletcher politely eschewed a surplus of the national spotlight in favor of a hyperlocal campaign. When I interviewed Fletcher in August, she repeatedly dodged questions about whether she’d support Nancy Pelosi for speaker, for example, or whether she would move to impeach the president once she was in Washington. Rather than indulging such questions, she consistently attempted to reroute the conversation back to district-specific issues, such as the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Likewise, she hardly mentioned Donald Trump, clarifying that she was running against Culberson—not the president.
Compared with House races, of course, Senate races will always generate more buzz, will always attract more glossy magazine profiles. It’s not O’Rourke’s fault that the national party adored him and that untold millions of dollars flooded in from across the country. Rather, it’s a testament to his strength as a politician—one can see why, after listening to O’Rourke’s speech about his support of NFL players who were kneeling during the national anthem, party leaders saw a star in the making.
But it’s one thing to be a good politician; it’s another to run a smart campaign. Perhaps Fletcher’s greatest strength was campaigning on the assumption that while demographic trends in the majority-minority district favored her platform, those voters were unlikely to turn out. In order for Fletcher to win, she’d have to pick off as many of the district’s budding population of independents as possible, as well as any Republicans disenchanted by Culberson. Which is to say that when the turnout of young voters and nonwhite voters vastly exceeded expectations, it was a nice bonus for Fletcher rather than a godsend. By rooting her campaign in crossover appeal, she was able to reach not only the district’s Democrats—whose turnout was historically unreliable—but also, more important, voters in the center and even just to the right, whose turnout was a given.
One of the biggest pitfalls of O’Rourke’s campaign was that there appeared to be no sincere effort to reach such voters. “Despite all of Cruz’s problems—and there are plenty—here’s a guy who’s running around talking about Medicare for all, and impeaching Trump, and abolishing ICE. And it’s killing him,” Karl Rove, the former senior adviser to George W. Bush, told Politico. “Even for people who dislike Cruz, impeaching Trump strikes many of them as terrible for the country. I’ve got friends and family members who may not vote for Cruz. They don’t like Cruz. But Beto isn’t contesting [Cruz for] them. I mean, it’s just weird.”
But this is the rub for Republicans: Ultimately, O’Rourke lost by just a two-point margin, making the race far closer than expected. It’s tough not to wonder, then, what this race might have looked like had O’Rourke courted the center. Would it have looked like Lizzie Fletcher’s, another talented progressive besting a conservative name brand? Would the presidential-year-like turnout of new voters, young voters, and minority voters have merely sweetened a victory rather than ensured a less painful beating?
These are the questions Texas Republicans must ask moving forward. In vastly underestimating turnout across the state, Republicans hadn’t just laid the groundwork for a potentially humiliating loss. Much more crucially, they’d revealed, perhaps, how little they understand the state itself. Because while Texas is far from blue today, Tuesday showed that there are plenty of voters—millions, in fact—who are eager to make it so tomorrow.
It would be easy to look at what the Democrats tried to do in the Deep South and forget about the incredible degree of difficulty. In Florida, Andrew Gillum aimed to become the state’s first Democratic governor in 20 years, and the first black governor in the state’s history. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams attempted to break the GOP’s monopolistic hold on power, and sought to become her state’s first black governor and the country’s first black woman governor. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke vied to unseat a sitting senator, Ted Cruz, who’d once been a strong GOP presidential candidate, and to become his state’s first Democratic senator since 1993. In 2017, Gillum was considered a “rising star,” though he was still mostly unknown; The Washington Post’s Ben Terris suggested Texans might be suffering from “mass delusions” when O’Rourke considered the idea of running; and Abrams was, at best, a long shot.
None of these three candidates won Tuesday night, though Abrams is still fighting against her opponent Brian Kemp, pledging to wait until every vote is counted, as she holds out hope for a recount and a runoff. Barring a miracle for Abrams, Democrats will lose all three elections.
But the losses aren’t necessarily evidence of a failed strategy. A deeper look at the results from Tuesday shows that the presence of three rock-star candidates with progressive bona fides had real effects beyond their Election Night outcome, and that the payoff came not at the top of the ballot but at the bottom.
[Read: The Democrats’ most radical election victory was in the states.]
For starters, there’s little reason to think that running more moderate candidates would have provided Democrats with better results. In Gillum’s own state of Florida, incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson is currently in serious danger of losing his seat to the state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott. On Wednesday morning, Nelson’s campaign announced that the race, which Scott leads by only 35,000 votes, would meet the threshold required for a recount. Unlike Gillum, Nelson is a thoroughly moderate politician. He’s a 76-year-old white veteran who has opposed “Medicare for all,” has been rated as a centrist by the political monitor GovTrack.us, is known for “reaching across the aisle,” and is respected by members of both parties nationally and within the state. Assuming the recount doesn’t uncover anything substantial, he’ll still lose to the GOP.
Nationally, the story is the same: Moderate Democratic candidates in statewide races underperformed. The group of moderate Democrats in the Senate—West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, and Montana’s Jon Tester—was all but obliterated on Tuesday, with only Tester and Manchin emerging victorious. These candidates are not from swing states—and indeed may have fallen victim to deepening Republican partisanship in very-red states—so the lessons they provide for thinking about 2020 and other major elections are limited. But all told, there is little evidence in the 2018 results that moderate candidates are the key to the Democratic Party’s future.
Beyond the failure of moderates, the most compelling evidence for the viability of a progressive strategy comes from farther down the ballot. Across the country, progressive ballot initiatives fared surprisingly well. Indeed, measures against gerrymandering, in favor of medical marijuana, in favor of higher minimum wages, in favor of Medicaid expansion, and in favor of criminal-justice reform received broad bipartisan support in several states, and actually outperformed Democrats running for statewide office. In Florida, even as Gillum conceded early, Amendment 4—a ballot initiative restoring the right to vote to more than 1 million people in Florida who were previously disenfranchised due to felony convictions—passed a 60 percent vote threshold and will become law. Gillum championed that amendment.
[Read: Florida felons want their voting rights restored.]
Medicaid expansion, the main policy foundation of Abrams’s campaign, passed on ballot initiatives in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah; minimum-wage hikes—part of all three of the Democratic darlings’ platforms—won in Missouri and Arkansas. Voters in Colorado, Michigan, and Missouri moved to take gerrymandering out of the hands of politicians. Other significant criminal-justice reforms passed in Florida and Louisiana.
What this means is that though Gillum and O’Rourke may have lost—and Abrams may be on her way—voters across the country, even some in deep-red states, are amenable to the kinds of policies that the Democratic trio championed. And support for these policies is likely even stronger than Tuesday’s results show. Medicaid expansion polls well nationally and in states that haven’t adopted it, as do minimum-wage increases. The mechanisms needed to fund those programs aren’t quite so beloved, but as Tuesday showed, voters are voluntarily choosing to implement progressive reforms and to pay for them.
Abrams, Gillum, and O’Rourke are likely directly responsible for these down-ballot wins. In Florida, Amendment 4’s popularity was clearly boosted by the unprecedented grassroots effort to elect Gillum. In Texas, O’Rourke’s momentum was cited as a key factor in major Democratic gains in the state and local judiciary, including the victories of 19 black women judges around the Houston area. In Georgia, Lucy McBath, a black activist whose son, Jordan Davis, was murdered in 2012 in Florida, declared victory in the state’s Sixth Congressional District over the Republican Karen Handel, a result—still unconfirmed by some major news outlets—delivered by overlapping circles of activists who’d also helped Abrams.
[Adam Serwer: America’s problem isn’t tribalism—it’s racism.]
But perhaps the biggest takeaway is that these three campaigns are going to improve the landscape for Democrats in these states for the years ahead. The turnout strategy for each campaign involved mobilizing low-propensity voters who’d not previously been engaged by politics in this way. There’s good evidence that this kind of outreach, when successful, results in increased voter turnout among these groups over the long term. Coupled with the mobilization of voters to enact and protect progressive ballot initiatives, the expansion of political and organizing leadership, and the development of fund-raising acumen, that means the Abramses, Gillums, and O’Rourkes of the future might find it easier to win.
And Gillum, Abrams, and O’Rourke themselves will still be there. Even assuming Abrams doesn’t manage to win the election, she’s built a strong organizing base in her state, as have Gillum and O’Rourke. They’ll be in place to affect state politics in three of the most demographically important states in the country, and can still be expected to whittle away at the vast structural advantages held by the GOP in those states. This is a start, not an end.
It’s hard to tell how large they are exactly, because Twitter is not the real world, but it does seem safe to say there are significant factions in the country that believe we are living in a revolutionary moment. I don’t mean to evoke here lurid fantasies of a hot civil war. I have in mind instead the Jacksonian revolution, or the many revolutions of the New Deal—punctuations in our punctuated equilibrium, when faith is lost in our institutional armature and there appears both the opportunity and the impudence to fundamentally reshape it.
From the left, we hear that whole articles of the Constitution are now illegitimate, encounter bizarre locutions like “the Senate national popular vote” (shades of the Rousseauvian “general will”), and receive casual assurances that full-throated commitment to court packing will be a litmus test for all 2020 candidates.
From the right, we hear—well, you know. Take your pick. There are umpteen conspiracies against the public supposed, and just as many quasi-authoritarian solutions on offer.
[Read: Beto’s loss was a blessing in disguise for Democrats.]
There’s a kind of Leninist glee taken in heightening the contradictions, in the belief that conditions must be made worse before they can get better. It proceeds mostly by troll tweet and podcast, but occasionally by actual violence. The consensus is that the status quo is crisis, and the collective desire seems to be to get on with whatever it is that is surely coming next, however rough the beast.
If you are one of the people who thinks this way, you were no doubt greatly frustrated by the midterm results, by their woolly indeterminacy, by their abject failure to live up to their billing as “the most consequential election of our lifetime.” Your side didn’t really win big enough, and what’s worse, the other side didn’t lose painfully and definitively enough.
But if you’re like me, a friend of Ed Burke and one of the last seven Buckleyite conservatives not bred in captivity, then you’re probably experiencing the closest thing to contentment that events have allowed for in some time.
That’s because the midterms were a victory neither for revolutionaries nor reactionaries, but for muddlers-along who hope that our present troubles are not prelude but interlude, just another thing that too shall pass. For us, Tuesday could scarcely have gone better.
The Democrats have taken the House. They’ll no doubt spend a great deal of time with their newfound subpoena power investigating the real-estate huckster and brand ambassador who leads the executive branch. That suits me fine. If the president is crooked in additional ways beyond those that are already matters of public record, then the public should probably know. But the ground will not buckle in the near term. It isn’t that a third of Americans would shrug if the president were to shoot a man on Fifth Avenue; it’s that they’ve priced in the likelihood that he already did so at some point in the 1980s and aggressively wrote off the depreciation on the pistol.
[Read: The latest drama in Trump’s slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre]
The new House majority will also no doubt audition policies for the 2020 election. Universal basic income, say. These dead letters, which will likely go directly to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s spam folder, might even prompt something approximating earnest public debate about the future of entitlements (even muddlers-along can dream), but they will not become law in the 116th Congress. Indeed, the greatest likelihood is that there will be no new major legislation for the next two years.
Sure, there will be whisperers in the president’s ear urging him to reach across the aisle with a big infrastructure package. Democratic leadership might even go for it. But even if they do, any new fellow feeling will be quickly metabolized. Ours is a machine that runs on negative partisanship now, and that won’t change just because a few bridge abutments get fixed. On Monday, lawmakers may be all grins and backslaps at a bipartisan bill-signing ceremony. On Tuesday, their opponents will go back to being not just wrong, but evil.
Far likelier is that the effort at bipartisanship will never get off the ground. And that while House Democrats spend all their time worrying at the president’s flanks, McConnell will continue to remake the federal judiciary. His majority expanded by pliant freshmen, he’ll no longer have to run his offense through Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a waking nightmare for vast swaths of the progressive left, becomes a live possibility. More broadly, the Federalist Society, the last functioning limb of conservative intellectualism and the one least dependent on a personality cult, will through a combination of design and accident have control over a kind of constitutional Khyber Pass. In other words, the only things that will move with any speed through our institutional order—judges—will do so under the guidance and at the direction of just about the last people left who care about the same things I do.
The Resistance will holler, and the Deplorables will rah-rah, but the action will have almost nothing to do with either of them, and will outlast their present sorry squabbles.
Another salutary effect of the midterms is that they have produced morality tales that with any luck will deeply shame great numbers of people. Republican voters reelected frauds under criminal indictment and a white nationalist who isn’t even bothering to hide it at this point. (Though, gladly, voters dropped Representative Steve King’s bosom-buddy-slash-Kremlin-stooge, Representative Dana Rohrabacher). Democrats, who count Robert Mueller and Christine Blasey Ford as beatified saints, couldn’t be bothered to stop Senator Bob Menendez, whose alleged corruptions run both pecuniary and carnal, in a safe seat.
[Read: The Republican party goes all-in on Trumpism.]
And, of course, the skateboard. I still believe enough in the possibility of redemption to think that years from now, a whole host of progressives will be embarrassed that “in 2018” they invested their hopes and dreams in the prep-school-jock son of an eminent-domain real-estate billionaire who failed all the way upward from a felony DUI, riding an appropriated Latin identity and a record-breaking fund-raising haul to a pedestrian Senate loss. As the kids say on the internet, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.
Beto, mononym and whatnot, has rightly been upheld as an example of the “rock star” politics that afflicts the major parties. But it’s the Beto lawn signs in California and Northern Virginia that so perfectly encapsulate a more salient and troubling trend: the extent to which our politics has been decoupled from place. Indeed “the Senate national popular vote” can only be rendered coherent under a psychology in which political communities aren’t places like Cincinnati or Waukesha County or Pennsylvania, but the circle of friends who “liked” your “I voted” pic on Insta. To the extent that Beto O’Rourke’s loss and the exposure of his far-flung supporters’ naïveté undermine this new frontier in carpetbaggery, the muddlers-along can only stand to benefit.
Of course, it’s not all bad news for the revolutionaries. As has been noted by many, the Republicans who survived the night are as a group MAGA-ier than those who were ousted. The smaller GOP caucus is thus more hard-core. The same can be said for the Democratic members-elect. Though the left’s “progressive superstars” fared less well in Senate and gubernatorial races, plenty of them made it into the House. And this group of young, diverse firebrands will be led by the fresh voice of … once and future Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Wait until the people who hate the Electoral College realize that an aspiring octogenarian elected by almost all of San Francisco is second in line to the presidency).
Or, it’s possible Pelosi will lack the votes and so will Representative Kevin McCarthy on the Republican side, and one or both leadership races will turn into a bloodbath, with hard-liners emerging as winners. And it’s entirely plausible that the progressive presidential hopefuls in the Senate will ramp up their performative arms race, unchecked and indeed encouraged by a younger, more radical caucus, with stunts that make the Brett Kavanaugh hearings look like the proceedings of the municipal water commission.
Last, the ultimate agent of chaos, who sleeps less than rust, has as I write this forced the resignation of his attorney general. So long as the president is the president, then what comes tomorrow, much less January 21, is far from assured. The worse could still very much get the better of us. But the midterms did not.
After Wednesday, elected officials in the Republican Party should have no doubt that Donald Trump will force them to choose in coming days, weeks, and months between loyalty to him and loyalty to the rule of law, between the public’s right to the truth and Trump’s efforts to hide it.
The president began the day with an extraordinary threat on Twitter: “If the Democrats think they are going to waste Taxpayer Money investigating us at the House level,” he wrote, “then we will likewise be forced to consider investigating them for all of the leaks of Classified Information, and much else, at the Senate level. Two can play that game!”
It would be nakedly corrupt to hinge a Senate investigation on partisan game theory or retaliation rather than on the substance of the law and the public interest. Yet the tweet was quickly overshadowed by even bigger news—Trump’s ouster of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
[Read: The latest drama in Trump’s slow-motion Saturday night massacre]
There’s little question that the resignation was forced for the most illegitimate reason: Trump’s repeatedly, explicitly expressed desire to undermine Robert Mueller’s incomplete investigation, and his open frustration at Sessions’s refusal to help. “We all know this, but it’s worth restating,” the law professor Orin Kerr commented. “The President fired the Attorney General for following ethics rules that required the Attorney General to recuse himself from overseeing an investigation into the President’s campaign and ultimately the President himself.”
Why is there so little doubt about the motive? Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest supporters, continues to share his views on everything from immigration to refugee policy to voting rights to police shootings, and differed significantly only on whether he should’ve recused himself from the probe into foreign election interference.
Trump has obsessed about that recusal for months, behind the scenes and in public, stating in August, “Even my enemies say that Jeff Sessions should have told you that he was going to recuse himself and then you wouldn’t have put him in.” More generally, Trump has suggested that an attorney general ought to loyally protect even a lawbreaking president from the legal consequences of his unlawful actions—and Politico reports that his own son now expects to be indicted.
Wednesday’s ouster will put the Mueller probe under the control of new Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, the author of a 2017 CNN article arguing that Mueller “has come to a red line in the Russia 2016 election-meddling investigation that he is dangerously close to crossing.”
Whitaker reasoned in the article that investigating Trump’s finances “falls completely outside of the realm of his 2016 campaign and allegations that the campaign coordinated with the Russian government or anyone else,” even though Trump Organization finances and business relationships could be relevant if they gave the Russian government leverage over the president, his children, or his associates—or if Trump sought to coordinate with Russia in the realm of politics with the expectation that doing so would benefit his businesses.
[Adam Serwer: Trump will only get more dangerous.]
In another article, Whitaker argued that Trump was correct to fire James Comey, that “calls for an independent counsel or commission to investigate allegations that Russia tried to interfere with our elections ring hollow when similar calls for special counsels during the scandals of the Obama administration were dismissed,” and that “hollow calls for independent prosecutors are just craven attempts to score cheap political points and serve the public in no measurable way.”
And he has tweeted about the probe, criticizing the raid of Paul Manafort’s house and sharing an article that referred to “the Mueller lynch mob.”
Trump “told advisers that Whitaker is loyal and would not have recused himself from the investigation,” according to The Washington Post. But analysts at Lawfare say Whitaker is obligated to seek the advice of Justice Department bureaucrats about the necessity of recusal:
The relevant Justice Department guideline is Section 45.2 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which states that “no employee shall participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with” either “any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution” or “any person or organization which he knows has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome of the investigation or prosecution.”
Although the regulations do not indicate that Whitaker’s public statements alone necessarily require recusal, Whitaker has other connections to people whose conduct is at issue in the matter. For instance, the regulations define a political relationship as “a close identification with an elected official, a candidate (whether or not successful) for elective, public office, a political party, or a campaign organization, arising from service as a principal adviser thereto or a principal official thereof.”
Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reports that Whitaker chaired the 2014 Iowa state treasurer campaign of Sam Clovis, who went on to serve in the Trump campaign and administration and who, Ballhaus notes, is now a grand jury witness in the Mueller investigation. The Des Moines Register reported Whitaker’s chairmanship of Clovis’s campaign during the campaign itself. What’s more, in a text message to Ballhaus after Whitaker’s appointment, Clovis wrote that he was “proud of my friend,” referring to Whitaker, raising the question of whether there is a personal relationship as well.
There is an important process point here: Under the same Justice Department regulation mentioned above, Whitaker is obligated to seek guidance from career ethics attorneys regarding whether he should recuse. This is the process Jeff Sessions used in determining that the rules required that he recuse, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also sought guidance regarding his obligations, though Justice officials determined that his recusal was not required. If Whitaker either does not obtain an ethics opinion from career officials or if he departs from that guidance, that would be a serious red flag.
Will Republicans protect the Mueller investigation as Trump gains new visibility into what the special counsel has been up to all this time?
Mitt Romney, now the senator-elect from Utah, stopped short of calling for Whitaker to recuse himself, but said it is “imperative that the important work of the Justice Department continues” and the Mueller probe “proceeds to its conclusion unimpeded.”
The Maine Republican Susan Collins also stated that “it is imperative that the administration not impede the Mueller investigation,” adding that she is concerned that “Rod Rosenstein will no longer be overseeing the probe,” and that “Special Counsel Mueller must be allowed to complete his work without interference—regardless of who is AG.”
And GOP Senator Lamar Alexander said the Mueller investigation will continue.
[Read: Trump repeatedly threatens retaliation against Russia investigators]
Most other Republicans have kept quiet. Who wants to make an enemy of the White House, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and those in the GOP base who believe Trump can do no wrong?
But if Trump or Whitaker takes steps to impede the Mueller investigation or fights to prevent House Democrats, with their new subpoena power, from delving into matters Trump would like to keep secret, elected Republicans won’t be able to avoid taking a position forever.
They will have to choose between angering the president and his populist backers and becoming complicit in whatever Trump is hiding, knowing that the president seldom stays loyal to anyone for very long, and that if and when the truth comes out, the public will rightfully hold them accountable if they helped conceal illegal or flagrantly immoral behavior.
Would you want to publicly help Trump fight to keep his closet doors shuttered, not knowing what skeletons lurk inside to one day be revealed?
After a months-long, high-stakes, razzle-dazzle, headline-grabbing beauty pageant, Amazon is reportedly planning not to create a second headquarters in a hard-up or overlooked region, as many had hoped, but instead to put large offices in two places along the prosperous northeast corridor: Long Island City in Queens, New York, and Crystal City in Arlington County, Virginia.
If made, it is a decision that reflects the winner-take-all nature of the American economy. It is not just that the richest people have pulled away from the 99 percent, but that the richest places have pulled away from the rest of the country, too. In the past few decades, a handful of urban areas—D.C., New York, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle, and Boston among them—have contributed more and more to growth and absorbed more and more wealth. Just five metro regions, out of the nearly 400 across the country, produce more than a quarter of all economic output; allowing more Americans to move to high-productivity cities would increase economic activity by more than $1 trillion, economists estimate.
Amazon’s decision would also highlight the way that, since the Reagan years, Washington has been transformed from a sleepy, starchy, and staid company town into a vibrant economic powerhouse—less like Canberra and Brasília, more like London and Lagos. The D.C. region is one of the richest in the country, by some measures at least. The city has undergone a dramatic urban revitalization and a wrenching period of gentrification. And that is in no small part thanks to the American taxpayer.
[Read: Denver says not so fast, Amazon].
Thirty or 40 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine why Amazon would want to plunk down a second headquarters, or part of one, on the Potomac. Washington was economically important, of course, and strategically important for many industries. But where there are now McMansions, there were cows and chickens. The city itself was wracked by blight and mismanagement.
A shift took place in the 1980s, Stephen Fuller of George Mason University, an economist and expert on the region, told me. The government stopped adding bureaucrats while still increasing its spending, particularly through contracting. Procurement spending went from $4.2 billion in 1980 to $81.5 billion in 2010, with legions of contractors showing up in glass-box offices in and around the Beltway. At that point, he said, “the region started to over-perform.”
As the local quip goes, suburban Maryland got the life sciences, and Northern Virginia got the death sciences. Medicare, Medicaid, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration, among other parts of government, drew scientists, doctors, and drug experts to Bethesda and Silver Spring. When President George W. Bush kicked off the global war on terrorism, hundreds of billions of additional military dollars started flowing not just to defense installations but also to the contractors amassed just south of Washington.
At the same time, companies started spending more and more on lobbying; politicians started spending more and more on campaigns; businesses started investing more and more in the soft work of government relationship management, through lawyers and consultants and think tanks and ideas summits. In the 1970s, one in 30 retiring members of Congress headed to K Street. Now it is more like one in two.
[Derek Thompson: Amazon’s $15 minimum wage is a brilliant business strategy].
As a result of all these trends, Washington’s wages rose faster than the country’s wages, and Washington grew faster than other metro regions around the country did. In the city itself, the change was and is visible. Of late, downtown has boomed, with Gen Xers and Millennials choosing to remain in Washington to raise families rather than decamping to the suburbs. The indicia of gentrification—condo buildings, yoga studios, juice bars, and so on—have sprouted up everywhere. Rent has gotten astronomically expensive, and many of the city’s longtime residents have been priced out. The gap between the college-educated and those without college degrees—and between white and black—has become a chasm.
Washington turned into the kind of city that could attract an Amazon. And in recent years, a number of companies have plunked down offices or moved their corporate headquarters to the region to take advantage of the highly educated workforce, excellent transportation infrastructure, and proximity to power. Hilton Hotels pulled its headquarters from Beverly Hills to set up in McLean, Virginia. Nestlé USA announced its decision to relocate its headquarters to Northern Virginia just last year.
Perhaps there’s some political economy to those kinds of decisions, too. “Japanese car companies, when they wanted to make inroads into the United States, one of their clear strategies was to locate their factories in places where they thought that there could be politically helpful representation,” said Marshall Steinbaum, the research director at the Roosevelt Institute. “If that is happening, but the way in which it’s happening is that companies are locating in D.C. as opposed to in the congressional districts of people who are powerful in D.C., maybe that says something about how to manipulate the levers of power.”
Washington’s rise tracks with the consolidation of American wealth in a small number of metro regions. Inequality has not just separated out the Jeff Bezoses of the world from the 99 percent; it has separated out the places that Jeff Bezos might want a house or a business headquarters from 99 percent of the American landmass. Corporate inequality has increased as income inequality has increased as regional inequality has increased. Lately, for instance, the wealthiest 20 percent of zip codes have generated more new businesses than the bottom 80 percent combined.
[Read: The problem with courting Amazon]
When Amazon announced its Bachelor-like pageant, the hope was that it might revitalize one of those less-well-off places with thousands of new, high-paying jobs. The retailing and web services and digital media and logistics behemoth put out a broad request for proposals, specifying what it was looking for in HQ2. It would need a corporate campus close to a city center and a major airport, it said. Mass transit was a must, as well as ample office space. The company also cited some softer requirements, including “a stable and business-friendly environment,” “urban or suburban locations with the potential to attract and retain strong technical talent,” and “communities that think big and creatively.” Metro regions with more than 1 million people were encouraged to apply.
Apply they did—238 of them, located in 54 states, provinces, and territories across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The cross-continental competition fast became flashy and garish. Calgary put up a billboard offering to fight a bear for Amazon. Tucson attempted to gift the company a cactus more than 20 feet high. Flashy and garish and spendthrift. Cities put up packages of tax breaks worth billions and billions of dollars, despite economists’ findings that such offerings are often not a great deal.
It now seems that Queens and Crystal City are the likely winners. Amazon itself certainly is, by spurring cities to cough up such generous financial packages along with a host of data on their tax bases and development plans. Of the many places that offered themselves on a platter, only a dozen or so truly made sense for Amazon to consider. The rest would have needed far more development for the company to justify heading there—development that would excite existing businesses, would-be entrepreneurs, and companies quietly looking for a new corporate site. But Amazon seemed like a quick fix.
“Amazon relocations do not constitute a strategy, or a realistic way forward for dealing with what are becoming colossal regional imbalances in this country,” said Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution. “Looking at the fundamental dynamics at work here, Amazon could stabilize and stimulate growth and save one place. We have hundreds of places struggling.”
And it might have chosen to save none. Winners are taking all in this economy, with places like Washington and New York only becoming more important and more powerful. With its decision getting close, Amazon seems unlikely to change those dynamics.
Chicago is 800 miles from the nearest ocean, so when the world’s largest aquarium opened there in 1930, its director decided, logically, that the ocean must come to Chicago. The Shedd Aquarium sent a series of railway tank cars down to Key West, Florida. There, they siphoned up a million gallons of ocean water for Chicago’s “magnificent marble home for fish.” Visitors in the 1930s were greeted by seahorses, sawfish, baby sharks, and a 585-pound manatee.
Archival photo of saltwater from Florida being brought to the Shedd Aquarium (Shedd Aquarium)When the Georgia Aquarium opened in Atlanta in 2005, it too was, for a time, the largest aquarium in the world. (The title now belongs to an aquarium in China.) And it too is an inconvenient distance from the ocean. But in the 75 years since the Shedd opened, aquariums have perfected the science of re-creating ocean water. The Georgia Aquarium didn’t ship any saltwater in from the sea; to this day, it makes its own synthetic version in 80,000-gallon basins.
Today, both the Shedd and Georgia Aquariums use a salt blend called Instant Ocean. You can buy it at the pet store. “We buy one-ton bags, or what we call ‘super-sacks,’” says Eric Hall, the senior director of life-support systems and water quality at the Georgia Aquarium. Instant Ocean is mostly sodium and chloride, the same stuff that makes up table salt. It also contains smaller amounts of other chemicals such as sulfate, magnesium, potassium, calcium, bromide, and strontium.
At the Georgia Aquarium, Hall says that they mix 10 super-sacks at a time in 80,000-gallon mixing basins. They add it to Atlanta’s city tap water, which is first passed through activated carbon to eliminate the chlorine that keeps the water free of dangerous pathogens, but can be deadly to fish. At the bottom of the mixing basins, compressed air shoots out, agitating the mixture as if the water had come to a boil. The Georgia Aquarium mixes up an 80,000-gallon batch about every two weeks.
Working with such big volumes means the aquariums can’t take it for granted that everything will be mixed evenly. When the Shedd first switched over to making synthetic saltwater in the 1970s, it would sometimes find a big lump of undissolved salt in the tank. “We would have to send a diver in there to pull the lump apart,” a curator told the Chicago Tribune. In Chicago, water temperature makes a big difference, too. The city gets its drinking water from Lake Michigan, which can be close to freezing in the wintertime. “It could take a whole 24 hours for it to mix properly and to be nice and crystal clear. In the summertime, it might only take a matter of hours,” says Allen LaPointe, the Shedd’s vice president of environmental quality.
The National Aquarium in Baltimore sits right on the harbor, but it too makes synthetic saltwater for its marine mammals and fish. For one, the harbor water is brackish and not salty enough on its own. And even if the aquarium wanted to add salt to that water, the harbor is pretty polluted. Instead, the National Aquarium makes use of Baltimore tap water and a salt blend called Omega. The aquarium used to make its own salt blend from food-grade individual components. Making it in-house was cheaper, but more labor-intensive, according to Andy Aiken, the National Aquarium’s director of life support. “It also introduced the opportunity to make mistakes,” he says. For instance, forgetting the potassium (just 0.04 percent of seawater) could be disastrous for the fish that depend on it.
Aquariums that can pipe saltwater directly from the ocean do, and Monterey Bay Aquarium, in California, is the prime and enviable example. “Monterey is in this fantastic location,” Aiken gushed to me. “It’s everybody’s dream.” The bay is ringed by protected marine areas, so its water is exceptionally clean. At the back of the aquarium are two intake pipes that supply all the building’s saltwater tanks. “We’re literally physically connected to the bay,” says Kasie Regnier, the director of applied research at Monterey Bay Aquarium. The pipes can bring in almost 2,000 gallons of water a minute.
Giant pipes beneath the Monterey Bay Aquarium carry seawater from the ocean to the aquarium’s exhibits. (Monterey Bay Aquarium)It works out great, except for the jellyfish problem. In certain years when the conditions are right, big swarms of jellyfish will appear in the bay. “They get sucked onto the screen. They’ll crush our screens,” says Regnier. The aquarium actually has to send divers down to unclog the intake pipes’ screens of jellyfish. (The divers, for their part, have gotten stung in the face.)
The bay water is clean, but it’s not clear like tap water. “The ocean isn’t crystal clear,” Regnier points out. It’s full of organic material and living creatures such as plankton. But cloudy water also makes it hard to see inside tanks. So running an aquarium means finding a balance between satisfying visitors coming to see creatures and the health of the creatures they’re coming to see. Monterey strikes this balance by running raw seawater with all its organic material at night, and then switching over to clear, filtered seawater in the morning. “Clear doesn’t mean healthy and clean doesn’t mean healthy,” says Regnier.
The aquariums that make synthetic seawater are also paying attention to microbes in their water. In 2008, the Shedd Aquarium started piping reclaimed water from marine fish tanks into its marine-mammal habitats, and its scientists noticed a trend: Microbial diversity went up in the mammal habitats, and infection rates actually went down.
Historically, aquariums thought the fewer microbes, the better. Bacteria counts in marine-mammal pools are strictly regulated by the USDA, says Chrissy Cabay, the director of the Shedd Aquarium Microbiome Project. But maybe there is such a thing as too clean for dolphins. Maybe a healthy microbial community can prevent nasty pathogens from taking hold—as we’re seeing in human health. This research is still in its early days for marine animals, says Cabay, but the aquariums are getting interested in the microbiomes of their habitats.
In 1930, as the Shedd was using railroad cars to bring saltwater to Chicago from Florida, The New York Times explained to its readers why the undertaking was necessary: “Synthetic seawater, it is said, would not do at all; for what is needed to keep the fish in condition is such organic matter as is available only in their natural environment.” Nearly a century later, aquariums have figured out how to keep fish alive in synthetic seawater. But analyzing all that “organic matter” is still a work in progress.
It is difficult to imagine a more remarkable story of self-determination and advancement than the life of Frederick Douglass. Emblematic of the depths from which he rose is the pall of uncertainty that shrouded his origins. For a long time he believed that he had been born in 1817. Then, in 1877, during a visit to a former master in Maryland, Douglass was told that he had actually been born in 1818. Douglass could barely recall his mother, who had been consigned to different households from the one where her baby lived. And he never discovered the identity of his father, who was likely a white man. “Genealogical trees,” Douglass mordantly observed, “do not flourish among slaves.”
Arsh RaziuddinDouglass fled enslavement in 1838, and with the assistance of abolitionists, he cultivated his prodigious talents as an orator and a writer. He produced a score of extraordinary speeches. The widely anthologized “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” delivered in 1852, is the most damning critique of American hypocrisy ever uttered:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? … a day that reveals to him … the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”He wrote analyses of court opinions that deservedly appear in constitutional-law casebooks. He published many arresting columns in magazines and newspapers, including several that he started. He also wrote three exceptional memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). The most celebrated black man of his era, Douglass became the most photographed American of any race in the 19th century. He was the first black person appointed to an office requiring senatorial confirmation; in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated him to be the marshal of the District of Columbia.
Throughout his life, however, Douglass repeatedly fell victim to the brutalizations and insults commonly experienced by African Americans of his time. As a slave, he suffered at the hands of a vicious “nigger breaker” to whom he was rented. He fled to the “free” North, only to have his work as a maritime caulker thwarted by racist white competitors. As a traveling evangelist for abolitionism, he was repeatedly ejected from whites-only railroad cars, restaurants, and lodgings. When he died, an admiring obituary in The New York Times suggested that Douglass’s “white blood” accounted for his “superior intelligence.” After his death, his reputation declined precipitously alongside the general standing of African Americans in the age of Jim Crow.
Now everyone wants a piece of Frederick Douglass. When a statue memorializing him was unveiled at the United States Capitol in 2013, members of the party of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell sported buttons that read frederick douglass was a republican. More recently, the Republican National Committee issued a statement joining President Donald Trump “in honoring Douglass’ lifelong dedication to the principles that define [the Republican] Party and enrich our nation.” Across the ideological divide, former President Barack Obama has lauded Douglass, as has the leftist intellectual Cornel West. New books about Douglass have appeared with regularity of late, and are now joined by David W. Blight’s magnificently expansive and detailed Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Simon & SchusterA history professor at Yale who has long been a major contributor to scholarship on Douglass, slavery, and the Civil War, Blight portrays Douglass unequivocally as a hero while also revealing his weaknesses. Blight illuminates important facets of 19th-century political, social, and cultural life in America, including the often overlooked burdens borne by black women. At the same time, he speaks to urgent, contemporary concerns such as Black Lives Matter. Given the salience of charges of cultural misappropriation, griping about his achievement would be unsurprising: Blight is a white man who has written the leading biography of the most outstanding African American of the 19th century. His sensitive, careful, learned, creative, soulful exploration of Douglass’s grand life, however, transcends his own identity.
In the wake of Douglass’s death in 1895, it was African Americans who kept his memory alive. Booker T. Washington wrote a biography in 1906. The historian Benjamin Quarles wrote an excellent study in 1948. White historians on the left also played a key role in protecting Douglass from oblivion, none more usefully than Philip Foner, a blacklisted Marxist scholar (and uncle of the great historian Eric Foner), whose carefully edited collection of Douglass’s writings remains essential reading. But in “mainstream”—white, socially and politically conventional—circles, Douglass was widely overlooked. In 1962, the esteemed literary critic Edmund Wilson published Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, a sprawling (and lavishly praised) commentary on writings famous and obscure that omitted Douglass, and virtually all the other black literary figures of the period.
Keenly attuned to the politics of public memory, Blight shows that the current profusion of claims on Douglass’s legacy bears close scrutiny: Claimants have a way of overlooking features of his complex persona that would be embarrassing for them to acknowledge. Conservatives praise his individualism, which sometimes verged on social Darwinism. They also herald Douglass’s stress on black communal self-help, his antagonism toward labor unions, and his strident defense of men’s right to bear arms. They tiptoe past his revolutionary rage against the United States during his early years as an abolitionist. “I have no patriotism,” he thundered in 1847. “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution. I desire to see it overthrown as speedily as possible.” Radical as to ends, he was also radical as to means. He justified the violence deployed when a group of abolitionists tried to liberate a fugitive slave from a Boston jail and killed a deputy U.S. marshal in the process. Similarly, he assisted and praised John Brown, the insurrectionist executed for murder and treason in Virginia in 1859.
Many conservatives who claim posthumous alliance with Douglass would abandon him if they faced the prospect of being publicly associated with the central features of his ideology. After all, he championed the creation of a strong post–Civil War federal government that would extend civil and political rights to the formerly enslaved; protect those rights judicially and, if necessary, militarily; and undergird the former slaves’ new status with education, employment, land, and other resources, to be supplied by experimental government agencies. Douglass objected to what he considered an unseemly willingness to reconcile with former Confederates who failed to sincerely repudiate secession and slavery. He expressed disgust, for example, at the “bombastic laudation” accorded to Robert E. Lee upon the general’s death in 1870. Blight calls attention to a speech resonant with current controversies:
We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of [the Civil War], and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty … May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that … bloody conflict.The progressive tradition of championing Douglass runs deeper, not surprisingly, than the conservative adoption of him. As an abolitionist, a militant antislavery Republican, and an advocate for women’s rights, he allied himself with three of the greatest dissident progressive formations in American history. Activists on the left should feel comfortable seeking to appropriate the luster of his authority for many of their projects—solicitude for refugees, the elevation of women, the advancement of unfairly marginalized racial minorities. No dictum has been more ardently repeated by progressive dissidents than his assertion that “if there is no struggle there is no progress … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
But certain aspects of Douglass’s life would, if more widely known, cause problems for many of his contemporary admirers on the left, a point nicely made in Blight’s biography as well as in Waldo E. Martin Jr.’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass. A Republican intra-party contest in an 1888 congressional election in Virginia pitted John Mercer Langston, a progressive black jurist (who had served as the first dean of Howard University Law School), against R. W. Arnold, a white conservative sponsored by a white party boss (who was a former Confederate general). Douglass supported Arnold, and portrayed his decision as high-minded. “The question of color,” he said, “should be entirely subordinated to the greater questions of principles and party expediency.” In fact, what had mainly moved Douglass was personal animosity; he and Langston had long been bitter rivals. Langston was hardly a paragon, but neither was Douglass. Sometimes he could be a vain, selfish, opportunistic jerk, capable of subordinating political good to personal pique.
Douglass promised that he would never permit his desire for a government post to mute his anti-racism. He broke that promise. When Hayes nominated him to be D.C. marshal, the duties of the job were trimmed. Previously the marshal had introduced dignitaries on state occasions. Douglass was relieved of that responsibility. Racism was the obvious reason for the change, but Douglass disregarded the slight and raised no objection. Some observers derided him for his acquiescence. He seemed to think that the benefit to the public of seeing a black man occupy the post outweighed the benefit that might be derived from staging yet another protest. But especially as he aged, Douglass lapsed into the unattractive habit of conflating what would be good for him with what would be good for blacks, the nation, or humanity. In this instance, his detractors were correct: He had permitted himself to be gagged by the prospect of obtaining a sinecure.
Douglass was also something of an imperialist. He accepted diplomatic positions under Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, in 1871, and Benjamin Harrison, in 1889, that entailed assisting the United States in pressuring Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) to allow itself to become annexed and Haiti to cede territory. Douglass acted with good intentions, aiming to stabilize and elevate these black Caribbean countries by tying them to the United States in its slavery-free, post–Civil War incarnation. He liked the idea of Santo Domingo becoming a new state, thereby adding to the political muscle in America of people of African descent, a prospect that frightened or disgusted some white supremacists. When Douglass felt that his solicitude for people of color in the Caribbean was being decisively subordinated to exploitative business and militaristic imperatives, he resigned. But here again, Douglass demonstrated (along with a sometimes condescending attitude toward his Caribbean hosts) a yearning for power, prestige, and recognition from high political authorities that confused and diluted his more characteristic ideological impulses.
Douglass is entitled to and typically receives an honored place in any pantheon dedicated to heroes of black liberation. He also poses problems, however, for devotees of certain brands of black solidarity. White abolitionists were key figures in his remarkable journey to national and international prominence. Without their assistance, he would not have become the symbol of oppressed blackness in the minds of antislavery whites, and without the prestige he received from his white following, he would not have become black America’s preeminent spokesman. That whites were so instrumental in furthering Douglass’s career bothers black nationalists who are haunted by the specter of white folks controlling or unduly influencing putative black leaders.
Douglass’s romantic life has stirred related unease, a subject Blight touches on delicately, exhibiting notable interest in and sympathy for his hero’s first wife. A freeborn black woman, Anna Murray helped her future husband escape enslavement and, after they married, raised five children with him and dutifully maintained households that offered respite between his frequent, exhausting bouts of travel. Their marriage seemed to nourish them both in certain respects, but was profoundly lacking in others. Anna never learned to read or write, which severely limited the range of experience that the two of them could share. Two years after Anna died in 1882, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a Mount Holyoke College–educated white former abolitionist 20 years his junior. They tried to keep the marriage quiet; even his children were unaware of it until the union was a done deal. But soon news of it emerged and controversy ensued. The marriage scandalized many whites, including Helen’s father, who rejected his daughter completely. But the marriage outraged many blacks as well. The journalist T. Thomas Fortune noted that “the colored ladies take [Douglass’s marriage] as a slight, if not an insult, to their race and their beauty.” Many black men were angered, too. As one put it, “We have no further use for [Douglass] as a leader. His picture hangs in our parlor, we will hang it in the stable.” For knowledgeable black nationalists, Douglass’s second marriage continues to vex his legacy. Some give him a pass for what they perceive as an instance of apostasy, while others remain unforgiving.
That Douglass is celebrated so widely is a tribute most of all to the caliber and courage of his work as an activist, a journalist, a memoirist, and an orator. It is a testament as well to those, like Blight, who have labored diligently to preserve the memory of his extraordinary accomplishments. Ironically, his popularity is also due to ignorance. Some who commend him would probably cease doing so if they knew more about him. Frederick Douglass was a whirlwind of eloquence, imagination, and desperate striving as he sought to expose injustice and remedy its harms. All who praise him should know that part of what made him so distinctive are the tensions—indeed the contradictions—that he embraced.
This article appears in the December 2018 print edition with the headline “The Confounding Truth About Frederick Douglass.”
In Nancy Pelosi’s office, steps away from the House floor, there’s a mahogany cabinet that encloses four separate television screens. They’re tuned to the cable-news networks and C-SPAN at all times.
Leaning against that cabinet is a stack of baseball bats. It’s the bats, not the screens, that tell the story of Pelosi’s approach to leadership, including maintaining her own in the Democratic caucus.
I frequently sat in Pelosi’s office when I was the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in 2012 and again in 2014. I watched her negotiate legislation, manage disparate factions of her caucus, and contemplate her future. There was always an amply filled bowl of Ghirardelli chocolates on an end table. And off to the side, in my peripheral vision, were those bats. The message was clear: We can achieve our goals pleasantly or unpleasantly, but we will achieve our goals.
[David Frum: Beto’s loss was a blessing in disguise for Democrats.]
The bats are not entirely symbolic. Most people don’t know that Pelosi is an avid sports fan, particularly of the San Francisco Giants. In fact, the only argument I ever saw her lose was over sports. I sat next to her at the final game of the 2013 World Series at Boston’s Fenway Park. In the seventh inning, on the verge of victory, Red Sox fans became so raucous that Pelosi’s security detail wanted to move us out. Pelosi insisted on remaining until the game ended. The Red Sox won the game, but she lost the argument. We left early.
In sports and in politics, Pelosi enjoys winning. This week, she guided her caucus to the ultimate victory: a House Democratic majority and an end to Donald Trump’s rubber-stamp Congress. The path included navigating around a dozen or so incumbents and first-time candidates who indicated they wouldn’t support her for speaker and millions of dollars’ worth of Republican ads that cast her as an immigrant-caravan-loving, gun-confiscating, tax-hiking San Francisco socialist.
Over the next several days, House Democrats, including some of those incumbents and first-timers who spoke out against Pelosi, will find themselves sitting in her office, enjoying those chocolates while warily eyeing the bats.
[Carol Anderson: Brian Kemp’s lead in Georgia needs an asterisk.]
Here’s why, whatever they said on the campaign trail, Democrats should vote to keep Pelosi as the leader of their new majority.
First, she’s already demonstrated the ability to stand up to a Republican White House and Republican Senate while also negotiating agreements that advance Democratic values. In September 2017, Pelosi outsmarted congressional Republicans and averted a fiscal crisis by building a bipartisan coalition with Trump that increased the debt ceiling, funded Hurricane Harvey relief, and kept the government running. Republicans went into negotiations expecting maximum leverage, but suddenly found the rug pulled out from under them.
The question for Pelosi’s critics is: Who else can do that?
Second, a demotion for Pelosi would make for a rather odd coda to what David Wasserman of “The Cook Political Report” called “the year of the fired-up woman.” The day following Trump’s inauguration, women took to the streets. Then they ran for office—with Pelosi’s explicit encouragement—reclaiming suburban districts from pro-Trump voters. They’re a big part of why Democrats did as well as they did on Tuesday. In January, the House will have more women members than ever before.
The question for Pelosi’s critics is: Why fire the top woman? Critics should also keep in mind that much of the venom directed at Pelosi—all those Republican ads about the horrors of a House led by her—are sexist, born of an anti-feminist fear of women in positions of power.
[Read: Trump is about to get a rude awakening.]
Third, there’s the fact that money matters immensely in the American election system, and Pelosi knows how to get it. In the 2018 cycle, the DCCC raised approximately $270 million. Pelosi personally raised nearly half of that total: $129 million. Much of that money came from donors who believe in Pelosi and in her ability to lead. Heading into 2020, when House Democrats will need to protect their gains, they’ll want a proven rainmaker. Conversely, Pelosi has the strategic and tactical legislative skills necessary to pass some version of campaign-finance reform, which would reduce the role of money in politics.
The question for Pelosi’s critics is: Does anyone else even have a shot at bringing money in and stanching the need for money at the same time?
Sometime between Thanksgiving and early December, newly elected and reelected House Democrats will gather in the harshly lit Democratic-caucus room, several floors beneath the Capitol building. They’ll sit on uncomfortable mesh chairs, balancing on their lap paper plates with pizza or salad dispensed from serving trays in the rear of the room. Candidates for speaker, majority leader, majority whip, DCCC chair, and other positions will make their pitch. Members and members-elect will receive paper ballots, check their preferences, and deposit their ballots in cardboard boxes. After tally counters inspect each ballot, the caucus will learn the identity of the probable next speaker, before an official vote is taken by the full House on January 3. Some members will be influenced by those grainy attack ads on Pelosi, funded by the National Republican Congressional Committee or by Paul Ryan’s Congressional Leadership Fund.
But it’s not up to Republicans to choose the Democrats’ leader. It’s up to Democrats.
Their best choice is Nancy Pelosi, bats and all.
One report announced the results of the 2018 midterms like this: “Democratic ‘Blue Wave’ Washes Over House as Republicans Keep Senate.” Another shared the results like this: “Democrats Take Control of House as ‘Blue Wave’ Wipes Out Republicans.” But then there was this: “Democrats Seize U.S. House But Trump Averts ‘Blue Wave.’” And also this: “The Blue Wave Ran Into Trump’s Red Wall.” And also this: “Blue wave? What blue wave?”
The mixed messaging, and the mixed metaphors, were appropriate: “Blue wave” began, in this election cycle, as a faith-based idea—Democratic activists’ hope that voters’ resentment of Trumpism would ripple and grow into a crashing, crushing eventuality—and that is in some ways what it remained, in the long year leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterms. It became a shorthand for the notion that a surge of blue would wash over the national political landscape: a widespread repudiation of the current political regime that would be, depending on your point of view, either made inevitable or made to collide vainly against the stubborn solidity of a Republican “red wall.”
Prior to the election itself, the blue wave was a metaphor that, even in its semantic elasticity, had a fairly well-defined, and commonly understood, meaning. A Democratic surge: It was an idea whose assumptions could be argued for or against, according to that common understanding. Analysts and pundits and citizens alike could marshall the evidence and debate about whether a “blue wave” was indeed on its way. That is, it turned out, what they did. And then the election happened, and the long-running speculation was, overnight, replaced with hard data. And then something else happened in response: The talk of the “blue wave”—the thing that had been debated, with escalating urgency, for more than a year—itself receded. The aquatic disturbance in question, journalists decided with the bluntness of the ballot, was really more like a puddle. Or a ripple. Or a “feeble rivulet.” Or a splash. (But, one outlet conceded, “an important splash.”) Regardless, it was “not a tsunami.”
As the returns came in on Tuesday night, the “blue wave,” in an act of postmodern alchemy, also shifted its shade: No longer was it assured to be azure. Maybe, instead, it was red. Or purple. Or green. Or pink. Maybe a single color was too simplistic (“The ‘Pink Wave’ Was Always Blue”). Maybe it was best to think about the wave, in all its complexity, as rainbow-colored. Maybe it was best not to think about it at all. “Forget the blue wave,” a USA Today column had it on Wednesday, “and behold the purple puddle.”
Metaphors are extremely useful things. They provide a common language—an agreed-upon shorthand—for truths that can be difficult to discuss in terms that are simultaneously broad and precise. It doesn’t take a Lakoff or a Luntz to appreciate the power of shared metonyms, particularly as the country grapples with the results of an election that was a political embodiment of that well-worn Fitzgerald line: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
And this election, in particular, featured many more than two oppositional ideas. The 2018 midterms were about voter suppression, which is also to say about robbing swaths of Americans of their constitutional rights, which is also to say about structuralized inequality. They were about enfranchisement and its opposite. They were about progress. They were about backlash. They were about women winning. They were about women losing. They were about compassion empowered, and racism rewarded, and hard work realized, and cruelty weaponized, and corruption unpunished. They were about hatred. They were about love. They were about history made. They were about history ignored. They were about American exceptionalism in the best sense and—at the same time—in the worst.
How do you sum that up in a headline or a news article? How do you talk about it in neatly cable-newsed sound bites? The true answer is that you can’t, and the even truer answer is that this is why it is necessary to have a flourishing and extremely diverse media ecosystem, so that a broadly coherent picture might emerge from the individual efforts—but the more practical and immediate answer is that you can try to use metaphors to summarize the situation. You can talk about waves, with their familiarity and their liquidity and their visual power, and you can talk about the color of your notional water, and the size and shape of the swell, and you can take refuge in the fact that waves—enormous and/or puny, dangerous and/or exhilarating, beautiful and/or terrible—can be meaningful and meaningless at the same time.
As November 6 gave way to November 7, then, “blue wave” became another kind of metaphor: not necessarily for a Democratic surge, but for the profound challenges of describing a country that itself holds so many opposed ideas in the mind at the same time. The phrase, evolved and dissolved, doubled as a distillation of how much trouble Americans can have—in the age of filter bubbles and alternative facts and widespread institutional mistrust—when they try to talk among, and about, themselves. (Slate: “Did we just witness a blue wave? There is no definitive answer because there is no clear-cut question. There is simply no agreed-upon definition of what, exactly, constitutes a wave election in the first place. The term is typically used to describe an election when one party posts major gains nationally, but the lines are blurry. It’s shorthand, not science.”)
A “blue wave” that is widely decided, in the course of a day, to be neither blue nor a wave: Here is one challenge of reporting in metaphor. And here is a reminder as well that, at this particular moment in American life, metaphor might be all we have. The elections of 2016 were a chastening experience for journalists and other analysts, as polls failed and predictions flailed and a president who has found it politically expedient to attack the press as the enemy was voted into office. The elections of 2018, it would turn out, were chastening for a related reason: Polls failed once more. Conventional wisdoms were reversed. And one of the dominant organizing questions of the election itself—Would there be a blue wave?—dissolved overnight in the chaos of political reality. The blue wave gave way to a purple puddle and a rouge rivulet and a green eddy and an orange undertow, and the dissolution was a small thing that was a reminder of a big one: When it comes to understanding the national reality as it exists in 2018, Americans, in many ways, are still at sea.
The 2018 midterm election dramatically shrank the small group of House Republicans who have painted themselves as moderates on climate change.
At most, only about two dozen Republicans in the next House of Representatives will have expressed any interest in taking federal action to stop climate change. (Votes are still being tallied in several close races as of this writing.) At least 18 districts formerly controlled by climate-concerned Republicans will be held by Democrats.
Many of the most vocal advocates of climate action in the GOP were defeated on Tuesday. Carlos Curbelo, a moderate who represents the Florida Keys and who introduced a symbolic carbon-tax bill earlier this year, lost a close election to a Democrat, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.
[Dean Kuipers: Three ways to combat climate change through the courts]
The members who remain more closely resemble Matt Gaetz, who triumphed by almost 35 points Tuesday in his Florida Panhandle district. While Gaetz has affirmed that climate change is real, one of his first actions as a congressman was to introduce a symbolic bill to “terminate the EPA.”
Many of the ousted members were part of the Climate Solutions Caucus, a bipartisan group of House members who explore “our changing climate” but commit to no specific policy to address it. The caucus was co-founded by Curbelo and Ted Deutch, a Democrat who represents another South Florida district. The caucus required one Democrat and one Republican to join at the same time, so that it maintained partisan parity; within the last few months, its membership swelled to include 44 voting Democrats and 43 voting Republicans. Next year, at least 19 of those Republicans will be out of Congress, either because they are retiring or because they lost on Tuesday.
Climate moderates were already a minority among House Republicans. In July, Representative Steve Scalise, who could soon become House minority leader, introduced a symbolic resolution denouncing a carbon tax. A carbon tax is a type of climate policy that charges polluters for every ton of carbon pollution they emit into the atmosphere. Several surviving leaders of the Reagan White House have called for Republicans to endorse such a policy as a conservative answer to climate change. And yet, all but six House Republicans voted for Scalise’s symbolic measure. Half of those six dissenters could be gone from the next Congress: Two of them lost their election Tuesday; and a third trails in current results.
Some 222 GOP members supported Scalise’s symbolic resolution. Thirty-eight of them are also members of the Climate Solutions Caucus. Seven Democrats also voted for the measure.
[Read: Climate change is already damaging American democracy]
The defeats seem to point to problems with the bipartisan approach to fighting climate change, which has been championed by the Climate Solutions Caucus and its associated political organization, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. If the House Republicans most likely to support climate policy also represent the most moderate districts in the country, what’s to keep them from getting slowly knocked out of Congress and replaced by Democrats? As my colleague McKay Coppins writes, the House Republicans who remain are getting only more Trumpian. They’re unlikely to react to Tuesday’s defeats by moderating on climate change.
On Wednesday morning, the Citizens’ Climate Lobby said the group would continue pressing ahead with its bipartisan approach. “Curbelo’s defeat … does not signal the end of the [Climate Solutions Caucus],” Mark Reynolds, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. “We’re confident other Republicans will step up to lead, and the existing and potential members are invested in continuing bipartisan work on climate. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the Climate Solutions Caucus are greatly exaggerated.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is confident she will return as speaker when the new Democratic majority takes over in the House, but the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are not yet saying whether they will support her leadership bid.
When asked if the caucus supports Pelosi’s leadership bid in a press call on Wednesday, November 7, and if leaders will try to convince the incoming members who promised not to support her throughout the midterms to back her anyway, caucus co-chair Mark Pocan said he’s going to keep his options open and make sure he’s leveraging his power to assure progressives are well represented in leadership.
Dozens of Democratic candidates running in tight midterm races voiced their opposition to a Pelosi speakership. Though many of the candidates lost, a handful of incoming members, including Jason Crow of Colorado, Jahana Hayes of Connecticut and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have called for a new generation of leadership. And Pelosi has little room for error: She needs a majority of the full House, or 218 votes, to win the speakership. On Thursday night, Politico reported that at least 10 Democrats had promised to oppose her on the floor, meaning that as final ballots are counted, Pelosi needs the majority to hold at least 228 members.
“And I would say ditto to that,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who serves as vice chair of the caucus. “I’m looking to run to be the next co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, and so I think it’s very important that we talk to our members and that we really make sure that our progressive priorities are going to be represented by our leadership on all levels.”
Pocan said that the caucus may have some sense of direction by next week. “I know this is the story you’ve all been waiting to write, but I’m going to wait until I get back and talk to members and have an idea of who’s running for what and what spots are open. And hopefully, by next week, we’ll be able to give you better, more specific answers,” he said.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus demurring on Pelosi is a turnabout from her first election as party leader, when she was the clear progressive favorite in a much more conservative caucus. The lack of vocal support comes as competing factions within the incoming caucus are jockeying for position.
Democratic leaders are hoping that the calls on the campaign trail for “new leadership” won’t be renewed on the House now that campaign season is over. On election night, Rep. Steny Hoyer, the minority whip and Pelosi’s No. 2, told The Intercept that he met just last week with incoming Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, and that he is comfortable that she will fit in well with the caucus.
“I had the opportunity to sit down with Alex, as she calls herself, last week, and I found her to be very reasonable, very bright, very able, and very willing to work together to accomplish objectives. And the democratic socialists party or group in New York” — referring to the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America — “endorsed her one month before the campaign — before the election. It wasn’t as if she started with that. She says she’s a Democrat. That’s what she told me, and that’s what I believe: She’s a Democrat,” he told Nicholas Ballasy, who was on location for The Intercept. (DSA NYC endorsed Ocasio-Cortez two months before the primary.)
Pelosi, who has been a top House Democrat since 2003, including four years as speaker, has expressed her willingness to work with President Donald Trump when possible, saying in a press briefing on Wednesday that the party “will strive for bipartisanship” where it can. She has waved off questions about a potential leadership shakeup, saying she considers herself the best person to unify the party.
So far, no one has stepped up to challenge Pelosi, despite a growing frustration within the Democratic Caucus with the trio of septuagenarian leaders. Rep. Cedric Richmond, the outgoing chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, recently insisted in a letter to his House Democratic colleagues that one of the CBC’s members should be in one of the top two leadership positions if there is a shakeup. (The letter was reported as coming from the Congressional Black Caucus itself, but it was a solo letter signed only by Richmond and not on behalf of the caucus as a whole.)
No one has yet challenged Pelosi or Hoyer. The caucus’s No. 3, Rep. Jim Clyburn, is facing a challenge from Rep. Diana Degette, D-Colo.
Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., has said she is making a bid for Crowley’s vacated No. 4 position. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries announced on Thursday that he will run for that same position. Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., had also launched a bid, but dropped out Thursday after her husband was indicted.
As the Congressional Progressive Caucus expands, so too does its influence on the party. The 116th Congress will be the most diverse one yet, and the caucus expects to welcome around a dozen new members. But there’s still the possibility that incoming progressives build their own coalition. In July, during a podcast interview, Ocasio-Cortez floated the idea of a “sub-caucus” of Democrats who would as a united bloc, like a progressive version of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus.
The post Progressive Caucus Won’t Say Whether It Supports Nancy Pelosi for Speaker appeared first on The Intercept.
Em seu discurso da vitória, Jair Bolsonaro afirmou que iria libertar “o Brasil e o Itamaraty das relações internacionais com viés ideológico”.
Pois bem.
“Ideologia” é dessas categorias difíceis de definir. De modo simplificado, podemos dizer que uma ideologia é uma espécie de lente através da qual o indivíduo enxerga e explica o funcionamento e as transformações do mundo social, político e econômico.
O contrário de “ideologia”, portanto, deveria ser o “pragmatismo”, ou seja, uma ausência de compromisso com quaisquer crenças ancestrais ou simpatias políticas.
O fato é que as declarações de Bolsonaro quanto às relações exteriores do Brasil passam longe de qualquer pragmatismo.
O fato é que as declarações de Bolsonaro quanto às relações exteriores do Brasil passam longe de qualquer pragmatismo.
Por exemplo. Bolsonaro cogita romper relações diplomáticas com Cuba. Que pragmatismo há nisso? Que ganho político ou econômico pode haver nessa decisão?
Na gestão Dilma Rousseff, o Brasil financiou via BNDES a modernização do porto de Mariel, através de empresas nacionais, ao custo de mais de US$ 680 milhões.
Essa foi uma decisão “ideológica” dos governos petistas, aparentemente contrárias às recomendações dos técnicos.
Inês, todavia, é morta. É do interesse do Brasil, no mínimo, reaver o dinheiro de tais empréstimos.
Cuba, por conta de suas dificuldades econômicas perenes e de gastos extraordinários realizados após a destruição provocada por um furacão em 2017, encontra-se com parcelas em atraso com o Brasil.
Romper relações não ajudaria em nada nesse processo.
Vale lembrar que Donald Trump, com quase dois anos de mandato e reversões no processo de aproximação com Cuba, iniciado por Obama, não rompeu relações diplomáticas com aquele país. A embaixada americana em Havana segue funcionando normalmente.
Argumentos similares podem ser usados no caso da Venezuela.
O BNDES também liberou, a partir de 2004, créditos para exportação através da Odebrecht, para obras como a de expansão do metrô de Caracas.
Ainda que o país fosse politicamente instável, o preço do barril do petróleo – que responde por 95% das exportações venezuelanas – passou de US$ 53 em 2005 para mais de US$ 100 em 2014. Como petróleo é quase tão bom quanto dólar, o negócio parecia viável.
Parecia.
Com o caos político e econômico instalado naquele país e a queda vertiginosa do preço do petróleo nos últimos anos, a Venezuela também está inadimplente com o Brasil.
As cifras aqui são bilionárias. Logo, se não por razões humanitárias, as razões econômicas do mais amargo pragmatismo recomendam o permanente diálogo com esses dois países.
Além desses créditos, o comércio bilateral com a Venezuela sugere pragmatismo por parte do Brasil. Ainda que em 2017, por conta do colapso econômico daquele país, as nossas exportações para lá tenham sido de apenas US$ 470 milhões, em 2012 elas foram de quase US$ 5 bilhões.
O Brasil não tem legitimidade, tampouco capacidade para derrubar o regime de Maduro. Qualquer proposta de intervenção militar naquele país seria vetada no Conselho de Segurança da ONU por China e Rússia.
Se Bolsonaro se inspira tanto nos EUA, poderia aprender que os americanos seguem fazendo comércio com Caracas.
Caberia ao Brasil tentar contribuir para amenizar o sofrimento do povo venezuelano, bem como uma solução pacífica da tragédia econômica, social e política que se desenrola por lá. Uma Venezuela de volta aos trilhos interessa à economia brasileira. Se o tom de Bolsonaro é de fato o pragmatismo, é para isso que ele precisa olhar. Se ele se inspira tanto nos EUA, poderia aprender que os americanos seguem fazendo comércio com Caracas porque, afinal, isso é pragmatismo. Outro exemplo: mesmo sob bloqueio, mais de 100 país fazem comércio com a Coreia do Norte. Pragmatismo.
Essa retórica agressiva e infantil contra Cuba e Venezuela só serve para agradar os elementos transtornados de uma certa direita anticomunista paranoica nacional.
Já Paulo “Posto Ipiranga” Guedes, em um momento de fúria despropositada, querendo replicar o comportamento “machão” de seu chefe, afirmou a uma jornalista argentina que “o Mercosul não é prioridade”.
O bloco econômico originalmente formado por Brasil, Argentina, Uruguai e Paraguai (a Venezuela faz parte, mas está suspensa), é abrigo de mais de 260 milhões de pessoas, tem PIB da ordem de US$ 2,78 trilhões, o que o coloca como a 5ª maior economia do mundo.
Isso já mostra a ignorância de Paulo Guedes.
Em 12 meses, o Brasil exportou US$ 22 bilhões para os países do Mercosul, tendo um superávit comercial de U$ 10,7 bilhões.
Isso representa quase 16% do superávit comercial do Brasil naquele ano.
Isso representa quase 16% do superávit comercial do Brasil naquele ano.
Para se ter uma ideia, em 2017 o Brasil exportou US$ 26,8 bilhões para os Estados Unidos, importando US$ 24,8 bilhões, o que torna nosso comércio bilateral deficitário com aquele país.
Para Israel as exportações em 2017 foram de apenas US$ 466 milhões.
Renegar ou desprezar o Mercosul é, sim, um viés ideológico, e dos mais estúpidos.
Nenhum indivíduo pragmático diria que tais parceiros não são prioritários.
E mais: ao longo de 2017, o Brasil exportou US$ 20 bilhões em produtos manufaturados para o bloco,e US$ 1,8 bilhão em produtos primários. Ao contrário do padrão das nossas exportações – somos conhecidos mundialmente como vendedores de bens primários tipo soja ou carne, cujo valor é muito menor do que vender automóveis, por exemplo – o Mercosul é um cliente das nossas fábricas.
Só na rubrica “automóveis de passageiros”, o Brasil vendeu US$ 4,7 bilhões para a Argentina. Em “veículos de carga” a cifra foi de US$ 1,82 bilhão.
O mercado argentino é crucial para a indústria nacional. A Argentina foi a terceira colocada no ranking das origem das importações e do destino das exportações brasileiras em 2017. Renegar ou desprezar o Mercosul é, sim, um viés ideológico, e dos mais estúpidos.
Exportações do Brasil para o Mercosul – 2017.
Fonte: Ministério do Comércio Exterior
Mas talvez a mais despropositada das medidas anunciadas por Bolsonaro seja a de transferir a embaixada brasileira de Tel Aviv para Jerusalém.
De acordo com o plano de partilha da Palestina de 1947, Jerusalém deveria ter um status especial, graças à sua importância para cristãos, judeus e muçulmanos.
Já em 1948, após uma guerra, Israel apropriou-se de uma parte da cidade. Em 1967, após novo conflito, as tropas israelenses ocuparam o resto da “cidade sagrada”. De maneira unilateral, o estado de Israel declara Jerusalém como sua capital.
O Direito Internacional não reconhece essa declaração, porque não reconhece o direito de um país expandir seu território através de conquistas militares. Assim, apesar de estar sob o controle de fato de Israel, Jerusalém não é reconhecida pela comunidade internacional como capital legítima daquele Estado.
Os países liderados por pessoas com um pingo de juízo preferem ficar de fora desse imbróglio, mantendo suas representações diplomáticas em Tel Aviv, o que deixa o enorme mercado do oriente médio e de muçulmanos em geral aberto. Estamos falando de um bilhão de pessoas.
O presidente dos EUA Donald Trump aperta a mão do primeiro ministro de Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, no Salão Oval da Casa Branca, no dia 5 de março.
Foto: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images
Das 88 embaixadas em Israel, só 2 ficam em Jerusalém: a dos Estados Unidos e da Guatemala.
Um presidente brasileiro macaquear o tresloucado gesto de Trump é tragicômico.
Primeiro, existe o ônus político.
O Brasil tem historicamente ótimas relações tanto com Israel assim como com os países árabes. Reconhecemos o direito de Israel de existir como país, reconhecemos o direito da criação de um estado palestino (há inclusive uma embaixada da Palestina no Brasil), defendemos uma solução negociada para o conflito. Bolsonaro quer jogar tudo isso no lixo em troca de quê? Não é por pragmatismo, não. É por ideologia.
Agradar sua base evangélica fanática? Satisfazer o desejo de “lacração” de seus seguidores que papagueiam a direita radical americana? Receber um tapinha de “bom garoto” de Trump? Isso tudo ao custo de esgarçar nossas relações com todos os países árabes e mulçumanos, e penalizar o PIB do nosso país.
O governo do Egito já adiou uma visita oficial ao Brasil programada para este mês, gesto que no mundo diplomático sinaliza uma clara insatisfação. O motivo declarado pelo Egito foi, nominalmente, as declarações de Bolsonaro sobre Israel.
O Egito foi responsável pela compra de US$ 2,42 bilhões em produtos brasileiros em 2017.
Exportações para o Egito em 2017
Fonte: Ministério do Comércio Exterior
O quadro acima mostra que os ruralistas que apoiaram Bolsonaro têm razões para controlar os impulsos do presidente eleito. Não por ideologia, mas por pragmatismo.
Cremos ter sido o alerta dos próprios ruralistas que levaram o futuro presidente a desdizer o que havia dito que iria fazer, recuando (por enquanto?) de sua decisão de transferir a embaixada para Jerusalém
O Irã, outro país que pode ficar insatisfeito com a postura de Bolsonaro, comprou US$ 2,5 bilhões do Brasil em 2017, com a pauta dominada pelos produtos do nosso agronegócio.
Exportações para o Irã – 2017
Fonte: Ministério do Comércio Exterior
Israel, por sua vez, comprou apenas US$ 460 milhões em produtos brasileiros em 2017, e ao contrário do que ocorre com Egito e Irã, somos deficitários no comércio bilateral com esse país, ou seja: gastamos mais dinheiro comprando produtos deles do que vendendo o que produzimos. Ou seja, nem nos princípios elementares do nacionalismo econômico hoje em moda, faz sentido esse movimento.
Até este momento, as declarações de Bolsonaro sobre política externa são de um simplismo abissal. Tomara que os funcionários do Itamaraty, os ruralistas e industriais pragmáticos, sejam capazes de controlar os impulsos de nosso Trumpinho tropical e sua política externa ideológica.
The post A política externa de Bolsonaro não é só ideológica, ela pode nos fazer perder dinheiro appeared first on The Intercept.
Democratic New York Attorney General-elect Letitia James celebrates her victory during an election night party in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Nov. 6, 2018.
Photo: Andres Kudacki/AP
The past 48 hours have been a complete whirlwind. Not only did our nation just elect 435 members of the House of Representatives — including so many historic firsts — with Democrats seizing back a strong majority, but also dozens of important governorships and Senate seats were up for grabs from coast to coast. Those stories, rightly so, dominated the headlines. Then, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And then we had news of another horrific mass shooting, this time in Southern California.
Yet amid all these stories — and the controversies that surrounded them — many other very good stories of important election victories from Tuesday were overlooked.
It’s shocking to say this in 2018, but this is the first time most of these states have ever had an African-American man or woman serve as their state’s top law enforcement official.Four that immediately come to mind took place in Nevada, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, where progressive black candidates each ran for and won their races to be the attorneys general of their respective states. I dug around for hours to confirm that this had never happened before, and I don’t believe the United States has even ever had four African-Americans simultaneously serve in this position at the same time across the country. It’s shocking to say this in 2018, but this is the first time most of these states have ever had an African-American person serve as their state’s top law enforcement official.
Aaron Ford, a former high school teacher turned lawyer with a Ph.D. in education, narrowly edged out his Republican opponent in Nevada. Ford previously served as the minority leader in the Nevada state Senate and then became the majority leader after Democrats took control in 2016.
Kwame Raoul, like most Democrats running for statewide office in Illinois this year, defeated his Republican opponent by double digits. Rauol, born in the United States to Haitian immigrants, is widely known in the state for taking over the state Senate seat that was vacated by Barack Obama back in 2004, when the future president was first elected to the U.S. Senate.
Former Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., won a tough race for attorney general in Minnesota — also marking a sweep for Democrats running for statewide office there. Ellison was once considered a shoo-in for the role, but ended up being nearly overtaken by allegations of domestic violence.
Lastly, Tish James became the first black woman ever to win statewide office in New York with her blowout victory to become attorney general. Formerly serving as New York City’s public advocate, James takes on her new role after the last elected attorney general resigned in disgrace over an assault scandal.
While racial and cultural representation are absolutely important in politics, each of these newly elected leaders have also made strong pledges on criminal justice reform, protection of immigrant families, and much more. Furthermore, while each would likely deny that they are using the position as a political stepping stone to something else, such statewide offices are regularly used as a pool from which to draw candidates for higher office. In other words, these were big wins.
The post Why It’s a Big Deal That Four Black Candidates Won Their State Attorney General Races appeared first on The Intercept.
As much as the midterms were a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency, the elections this week were also a test of the Democrats’ strategy. And although Democrats took back the House of Representatives, a key component of their strategy was met with lukewarm results.
In the months after Trump was inaugurated, Democrats began to court veterans to run for Congress around the country. Politico reported last year that after hundreds of meetings with potential candidates, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee decided that ex-military candidates were the key to flipping red districts.
Democrats have always liked to run veteran candidates. It allows them to sidestep accusations that they are “weak on defense.” Public confidence in the military remains high, and as Trump attacks Democrats, the strategy allows candidates to point to a nonpartisan record of government service.
Former national security officials who are now running as Democrats have moved to do just that. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., and Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., both former CIA officers, ran ads that stressed the nonpartisan nature of their past careers. “It wasn’t about partisan politics,” Spanberger said, while Slotkin offered, “For me, service was working for two presidents — one from each party.”
Others took it even further. Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who ran in a conservative Kentucky district, raised millions of dollars off an ad that featured footage of bombings. Ads from McGrath and Slotkin displayed a disclaimer that said the use of military images or footage does not “imply endorsement by the Department of Defense.”
On Tuesday night, the strategy was met with mixed success. With Honor, a bipartisan political action committee, tracked 199 veterans from both parties running for the House. According to a review by The Intercept, 38 of those were races where single Democratic candidates were challenging Republican incumbents. In several races, multiple Democrats were on the ballot and split the vote; those are not included in The Intercept’s count.
Out of the 38 veteran candidates, only five won — Jason Crow in Colorado’s 6th District; Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s 11th District; Max Rose in New York’s 11th District; Chrissy Houlahan in Pennsylvania’s 6th District; and Elaine Luria in Virginia’s 2nd District. When including intelligence veterans like Spanberger and Slotkin, that number goes up to seven. And when including former Obama National Security Council official Andy Kim who declared victory Wednesday in a tight race in New Jersey’s 3rd District, the tally rises to eight out of 42. Put another way, out of 24 Republicans unseated by Democrats, a third were unseated by veterans and former national security officials.
Jason Crow, Democratic candidate for U.S. House seat in Colorado’s Sixth Congressional District, addresses supporters at an election night watch party in Greenwood Village, Colo., on Nov. 6, 2018.
Photo: David Zalubowski/AP
Those numbers alone don’t say much about whether the DCCC’s strategy succeeded or failed. Keep in mind that it was a strategy to flip right-leaning districts, where Republicans, and particularly Republican incumbents, have an advantage. So a high failure rate isn’t surprising. More than 15 of those 42 districts are rated by the Cook Political Report at more than R+10, meaning that an average election would swing to a Republican by 20 points. And the strategy did succeed in flipping right-leaning districts: Of the eight seats won by former national security officials, six leaned conservative.
In some races, Democrats were running against incumbents with national security experience. Luria, a former Navy commander, edged out former Navy SEAL and Republican Scott Taylor in Virginia; and in Texas, a battle between two former intelligence officers, incumbent Will Hurd and Gina Ortiz-Jones, saw Hurd appearing to beat his Democratic opponent.
In many of those races, government experience took a backseat to health care, with Democrats stressing that their plans will guarantee care to people with pre-existing conditions. And at the end of the day, it’s difficult to control for talent. In the cases of Slotkin and Spanberger, both were politically talented and well-resourced in a field often dominated by local officials. Spanberger’s viral closing argument in her debate against Republican Dave Brat likely tipped the scales in her favor.
But in some cases, the DCCC spent big on candidates who didn’t end up winning. The DCCC spent almost $1.7 million backing Dan Feehan, a former Army soldier and acting assistant defense secretary, and another $2.1 million on ads against his Republican opponent in a conservative-leaning district. Media reports project that Feehan lost by about 1,300 votes, though he has not yet conceded.
The post Democrats Encouraged Military Veterans to Run in Midterms. The Results Were Mixed. appeared first on The Intercept.
For Texas Democrats, Tuesday had some disappointing top-line news, as Republicans retained control of all statewide offices and Ted Cruz won his U.S. Senate re-election. But further down the ballot, the party saw some surprising successes.
Two congressional districts held by Republicans flipped to the Democratic side. In the state House, Texas Democrats picked up a dozen seats. In the state Senate, two more Republican incumbents fell to Democrats.
One of those Democrats was Nathan Johnson, who defeated incumbent Don Huffines in state Senate District 16.
Johnson, like many Democratic candidates who ran across the country this cycle, has an unusual background for a politician. He graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Arizona, and later received a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He co-founded a law firm dealing with business disputes, while doing pro bono legal work for the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas, which works on immigrants’ rights.
On the side, he has owned a music production business, where he composed classical music as well as music for the American dub of the popular Japanese animation series “Dragon Ball Z.”
In an interview with a fan website, he explained that he got that job because he happened to rent an office from someone who was connected to the production company. “It was one of the most bizarre collisions of circumstance I’ve ever experienced,” he said. Among other things, Johnson campaigned against state pre-emption laws, which prevent cities from enacting their own policies on things like living wages.
In Iowa, Republicans held the governor’s mansion. But down the ballot, there were some bright spots for Democrats. Zach Wahls, a prominent gay rights activist whose 2011 testimony before the Iowa state House invoking his lesbian parents in favor of marriage went viral, won a state Senate seat. He campaigned against the privatization of Medicaid, an experiment that has been costly for Iowa.
Nebraska sent Megan Hunt, a progressive atheist, to a seat in the state’s nonpartisan legislature. It is noteworthy that a state known for its religiosity would elect someone like Hunt, though she did not campaign by wearing her lack of religion on her sleeve. She’s a survivor of sexual assault who previously founded Safe Space Nebraska, a nonprofit that works with bars and nightclubs to address sexual harassment and assault. She knocked on 23,000 doors over the course of her campaign, even while her campaign manager worked two jobs and went to school while working on Hunt’s operation. She campaigned on expanding Medicaid and enacting paid leave in the state.
Out in Hawaii, social studies teacher and Democratic Socialists of America member Amy Perruso will be joining the state House after defeating Republican John E. Miller. She campaigned on raising Hawaii’s minimum wage to $15 per hour; its current minimum wage is $10.10.
In New York, a “Dreamer” named Catalina Cruz was elected to New York state Assembly. She campaigned on fixing the mismanaged New York City subway and establishing a universal health care system in New York state.
The “Panera” strategy of mobilizing swing voters in suburban counties seemed to be in full effect in Georgia, as around half a dozen Republican incumbents in metro Atlanta were either lagging behind their Democratic challengers or outright defeated, as votes are still being counted.
In North Carolina, the Republican supermajority in both the House and Senate was broken. The Michigan Senate and Pennsylvania Senate also saw GOP supermajorities broken. Meanwhile in Oregon, Democrats achieved supermajority control of both chambers. Oregon law requires a three-fifths vote to raise taxes, so this should put the party in a place where it could possibly raise revenue for its priorities.
Democrats also picked up trifectas — control of the governorship and both legislative chambers — in Colorado, Maine, New Mexico, and Illinois. The Minnesota state House flipped, as did the New Hampshire House and Senate.
Correction: November 8, 2018
A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Amy Perruso. Wahls’s viral speech was in favor of full marriage equality, not civil unions, as previously reported. It has been updated.
The post A “Dragon Ball Z” Composer Unseated a Texas Republican Senator, and Other Down-Ballot Democratic Victories You Didn’t Hear About appeared first on The Intercept.
O corpo foi encontrado cinco dias após o desaparecimento. Decapitado. Amarrado. Torturado. Em decomposição. O cadáver estava com uma camisa preta. Nas costas, escrita a palavra “imprensa”.
Ao redor, documentos espalhados: título de eleitor, RG, CPF, folhas de cheque, cartões da Caixa Econômica Federal e uma carteira funcional. Tudo em nome de Evany José Metzker, jornalista assassinado aos 67 anos, em maio de 2015, no município de Padre Paraíso, região do Vale do Jequitinhonha, em Minas Gerais.
A morte de Metzker demorou a conseguir atenção da polícia e do governo de Minas Gerais. Só após a imprensa noticiar e cobrar que as investigações começaram a caminhar. Porém, sem resultado.
Conhecido como Coruja do Vale, nome de seu blog, o jornalista vinha recebendo ameaças de morte, lembram seu colegas. Ele investigava a prostituição infantil em Padre Paraíso, onde foi assassinado.
O clima de insegurança que se instalou na cidade após o homicídio fez com que a Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura, a Unesco, emitisse uma nota oficial cobrando investigações e punições. No entanto, meses de trabalho não foram suficientes para a polícia concluir que Metzker foi assassinado por ser jornalista. Há um ano, o inquérito está parado na delegacia local.
22 mortos por serem jornalistasO caso de Evany Metzker é um dos 22 que constam no relatório “Ciclo do silêncio: impunidade em homicídios de comunicadores”, que lançado hoje pela Artigo 19, organização que atua na defesa da liberdade de expressão e no acesso à informação, obtido em primeira mão pelo Intercept.
O documento reúne mortes monitoradas pela entidade entre 2012 e 2016, em 11 estados, e pretende dar visibilidade aos assassinatos de jornalistas. Ele revela que há um padrão, tanto em relação ao histórico das vítimas quanto na dinâmica dos crimes. O objetivo do relatório é ajudar a criar condições para que haja mais segurança para os comunicadores no país.
São histórias de jornalistas, radialistas, blogueiros e outros profissionais de mídia que convivem com a perseguição de sua atividade, ameaças e ataques, chegando a assassinatos.
Dos 22 casos acompanhados, oito são blogueiros, seis radialistas, cinco jornalistas, dois donos de veículos de comunicação e um fotógrafo. Nove são do nordeste, um da região norte, cinco do centro-oeste e sete do sudeste.
Cidades menores, risco maiorÉ nas cidades pequenas, com menos de 100 mil habitantes, como a que Evany Metzker morava, que os jornalistas correm mais riscos. Isso ocorre pela maior proximidade entre quem realiza a denúncia ou crítica e os denunciados.
Nos últimos quatro anos, aponta o estudo, observou-se uma “drástica interiorização dos crimes contra a liberdade de expressão”. Ou seja, a população média das cidades em que ocorreram os crimes diminuiu de 315 mil habitantes em 2012 para 50 mil habitantes em 2016.
Mapa: Rodrigo Bento/The Intercept Brasil
Os blogueiros correm mais risco. São os que muitas vezes fazem trabalhos por conta própria, em seus sites ou redes sociais, sem proteção institucional para fazer jornalismo.
O segundo grande grupo de risco são os radialistas, tradicionalmente mais destacados nas regiões afastadas, onde o único meio de difusão economicamente viável – antes da expansão da internet – são as ondas do rádio.
Os investigados pelos jornalistas são, em geral, autoridades públicas, empresários e criminosos que atuam na cidade ou na região incomodados pelas críticas e denúncias. Mesmo que não puxem o gatilho, são eles, também, os principais suspeitos de autoria intelectual dos crimes.
Impunidade e medoComo nos crimes contra os comunicadores geralmente há o envolvimento de pessoas influentes na política e economia, a impunidade é quase garantida. E o efeito das mortes é amplo, pois o clima de medo acaba restringindo as críticas de outras pessoas aos envolvidos. Há, também, o uso de muita violência em alguns dos casos, como tortura, esquartejamento e decapitação.
Das 22 histórias analisadas, em 17 delas as vítimas sofreram ameaças anteriores ao assassinato, como foi o caso do jornalista mineiro. Embora muitas vezes seja difícil estabelecer uma relação entre ameaças e assassinato, fica claro que há pouca investigação das ameaças.
Entre os suspeitos de encomendarem as mortes, sete são políticos, três policiais, dois agentes públicos, cinco integrantes do crime organizado e dois empresários. Em três casos, não foi possível analisar a autoria.
A maioria dos casos está na fase de inquérito policial, mesmo anos após o crime. A demora ocorre, principalmente, pela lentidão da perícia ou falta de profissionais nas cidades onde os crimes ocorreram.
De acordo com o levantamento, mais crimes foram elucidados quando se privilegiou, na investigação, a atividade de comunicador da vítima como possível motivação. Também foi fundamental para a identificação dos criminosos que as provas tenham sido juntadas rapidamente. Os casos que se tornaram processos judiciais são aqueles em que testemunhas foram ouvidas, houve perícia e solicitações de quebra de sigilo telefônico foram feitos logo depois do crime.
O trabalho de investigação também teve mais êxito quando houve participação direta de órgãos especializados. E os casos que foram denunciados e cobrados pela imprensa também tiveram mais sucesso.
O relatório traz, ainda, recomendações aos governos federal e estaduais, ao Ministério Público, organizações internacionais, organizações da sociedade civil e também à mídia. O governo federal, por exemplo, deveria proteger comunicadores que sofrem ameaças, treinando empresas e fornecendo equipamentos, criar um observatório desses crimes, fortalecer organizações da sociedade civil que atuam na área e se manifestar publicamente sobre os crimes.
Crimes de ódio e ameaças na internet contra jornalistas também são um alerta para a organização. Segundo o relatório, a recomendação é que a sociedade monitore esse tipo de ocorrência, “fornecendo informações e suporte às vítimas para que busquem as autoridades e, por fim, o Judiciário”, para prevenir crimes mais graves.
Segundo a organização Repórteres sem Fronteiras, em 2018, quatro jornalistas foram assassinados no Brasil – um país que tem piorado sua colocação no ranking dos lugares mais perigosos para a imprensa trabalhar. “A ausência de um mecanismo nacional de proteção para os repórteres em perigo e o clima de impunidade – alimentado por uma corrupção onipresente – tornam a tarefa dos jornalistas ainda mais difícil”, diz a ONG.
The post Mate um jornalista e permaneça impune appeared first on The Intercept.
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