Two competing values are at work in a coming primary challenge against oil-and-gas-backed Democrat Henry Cuellar, announced last week by Justice Democrats, the group that recruited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to run for office. On the one hand, a new report concluded that if the U.S. proceeds on its current course of drilling — which Cuellar has emphatically supported — humanity will crash through its remaining climate guardrails and risk lurching into apocalyptic warming scenarios.
On the other hand, Cuellar is a really nice guy, and primaries are awfully divisive.
Cuellar’s extreme popularity among his House colleagues is widely known. But the role U.S. reserves of oil and gas could play in future warming scenarios has been less well-established. A new report from Oil Change International, or OCI, however, alters the equation. Examining projections developed by Rystad Energy, an independent oil and gas consultancy, the new report looks at projected oil and gas development in the United States over the next several decades, and what consequences it holds for the planet.
The authors find that, if allowed to continue with projected new fossil fuel projects, U.S. oil and gas production could account for 60 percent of all new oil and gas production through 2030, making the U.S. the world’s largest new source of oil and gas and outpacing expected growth in the next largest producer, Canada, 4 to 1. All of this would happen during the period when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that countries should begin stripping fossil fuels out of the global economy as rapidly as possible.
The climate costs of such development are massive, with new drilling set to unleash 120 billion tons of Earth-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2050, the equivalent of what nearly 1,000 coal-fired power plants would burn throughout the lifespan of their operations. It would be the single largest burst of new carbon dioxide emissions to enter the Earth’s atmosphere over that period.
The report’s main takeaway isn’t complicated: The United States can either stop digging up new troves of fossil fuels, or take a sledgehammer to the world’s chances at a livable future.
“At exactly the time scientists say we need to begin reducing fossil fuel emissions, the U.S. oil and gas industry is gearing up to expand rapidly,” says Kelly Trout, a lead author on the report and a senior research analyst at OCI.
The majority of new development is slated to come in the form of new fracking in the Permian Basin, spanning Texas and New Mexico, and the Appalachian Basin, with most of its reserves in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. By 2029, OCI found, companies operating in the Permian Basin alone could be extracting nearly as much oil as Saudi Arabia does today, much of it for export. Other new extraction sites include the Western Gulf, Anadarko Basin, and Alaska’s North Slope.
Meanwhile, burning through just existing reserves of oil and gas around the world would be enough to make limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius impossible, OCI finds. Add coal reserves to that, and we very nearly miss our chance at staying below 2 degrees. Staying below either, in other words, means not only stopping any new production, but also closing down some portion of existing coal, oil, and gas production early.
Graphic: Oil Change International
“Every decision around a new fossil fuel lease, permit, subsidy, or setback,” report authors write, “is an opportunity for U.S. politicians to stop fossil fuel expansion and champion a just transition to an economy powered by clean energy.” The U.S. spends some $20 billion a year propping up the fossil fuel industry through generous tax breaks and below-market leases. A study in Nature from researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute has found that as much as half of all new crude oil development through 2050 could be unprofitable without such giveaways.
The OCI report concludes that there are three paths in front of us, two in which we manage to restrict emissions in line with the targets set out in the Paris Agreement, and one in which we don’t. The first is a managed decline of fossil fuel production starting as soon as possible, and investment in a just transition for the workers and communities that stand to be most affected by industry closures. The second — in which warming is also kept below 2 degrees Celsius — sees a “sudden and chaotic shutdown of fossil fuel production” a short time from now that includes “stranding assets, damaging economies, and harming workers and communities reliant on the energy sector.” In the third and worst scenario, we fail to restrict fossil fuel production in line with either a 1.5 or 2 degree target, locking in not just ecological disaster but also, as economists have warned recently, “worldwide economic collapse.”
Graphic: Oil Change International
To prevent the last two scenarios and encourage the first, Trout says, “we can’t just leave this to the markets.” Report authors recommend a managed decline in fossil fuel production, including an end to new leases and permits for fossil fuel projects, phase-outs of existing mines and drill sites, an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and a Green New Deal, to ensure a just transition to 100 percent renewable energy, particularly for communities that would be hardest-hit by industry closures. The report further underlines that the U.S. needs to phase out coal production by 2030 at the latest in order to meet the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement.
Emissions, of course, know no borders, and there’s only so much greenhouse gas that can be spewed into the atmosphere before catastrophic outcomes become a certainty. Scientists describe this as a global carbon budget, and every new drill site or power plant takes a bite out of it, no matter where it’s built. New production in just the Permian and Appalachian basins through 2050 would burn through nearly 10 percent of the world’s carbon budget to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The longer the U.S. waits to scale back emissions, the bigger risk we run blowing past that mark, and the greater the burden that will fall to countries with fewer resources to fund such a transition and less responsibility for the crisis writ large.
“The United States would be pushing the burden of phasing out oil and gas onto other countries, forcing them into a potentially impossible choice: shut down their production at a pace that could cause domestic economic or social chaos, or allow the United States to push the world over the brink of climate chaos,” the report details. “If other countries are not able or willing to compensate for U.S. ‘energy dominance,’ U.S. communities would pay the price in terms of climate devastation and economic chaos.”
The report, Trout says, calls for a “new definition of what real climate leadership means in the U.S. Real climate leadership means rejecting permits for new pipelines, saying no to more leasing or fossil fuel extraction, and putting policies in place to wind down this industry and encourage a just transition.”
So long as Donald Trump remains in office and Republicans control the Senate, there’s not much hope for passing the kinds of policies OCI recommends at the federal level or doing emissions reductions at any scale. Should Democrats retake one or both come 2020, Republicans will of course continue putting up a fight, although it could ultimately get overridden. In such a context, resistance is also likely to come from within the party — and no less so than from Democrats who’ve take hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry.
That’s where Henry Cuellar, the ever-likable Democratic congressman from Texas, comes in.
Dubbed “Big Oil’s Favorite Democrat,” Cuellar is the first who Justice Democrats will be recruiting a primary challenger for ahead of the 2020 election. When he voted to lift the ban on crude oil exports in 2015, Cuellar said in a press statement that “with the Eagle Ford Shale in my district and the Permian Basin nearby, I recognize the great potential for our domestic oil industry, and I also understand the way in which it is being suppressed by this outdated export ban.” Lifting that ban helped clear the way for the rash of new fossil fuel development over the last few years and will continue to fuel the development analyzed in OCI’s report. In the summer of 2017, he was among the first to join the Congressional Oil and Gas Caucus intended, per inaugural chair Vicente González, D-Texas, to “assure that there is support on this side of the aisle for the oil and gas industry.”
Cuellar has voted 69 percent of the time with Trump. In the 2018 cycle, he accepted $145,000 from PACs linked to oil and gas corporations and has taken $711,627 from the industry over the course of his career.
“Taking on someone like Henry Cuellar, who is one of the largest recipients of big oil and gas money in the Democratic caucus, is a way to drive the Green New Deal conversation forward in the Democratic Party and begin to drive home that climate can be an issue that you can lose your seat over if you’re a Democrat,” says Waleed Shahid, Justice Democrats’ communications director. “He does not have a plan to tackle climate change. He has a plan to continue receiving money from his wealthy donors. … You can’t take money from [the fossil fuel industry] and then try to hold them accountable. It just doesn’t work.” The select committee for a Green New Deal proposed by Ocasio-Cortez would have barred House members who accept donations from fossil fuel companies from participating. That provision, along with several others, was left out of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ended up creating.
To date, conversations around a Green New Deal have focused largely around investments to build out new renewable infrastructure toward the goal of having the U.S. run on 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. As the report makes clear, a key part of reaching that goal would also mean actively phasing out fossil fuel production as new energy sources are made both more accessible and affordable. Absent complementary, redistributive policies like those embedded in proposals for a Green New Deal, such a phase-out could place the burden of decarbonization on communities whose livelihoods revolve around it, from Texas to Appalachia. It might even spark political unrest not unlike France’s gilet jaunes (“yellow vests”) protests, prompted by a tax on diesel fuel. That’s also why OCI stresses a “managed and just decline of extraction” that provides “adequate social protection, including wage insurance, health benefits, and pensions, to support workers and their families as they transition to new sectors.”
Advocates for a Green New Deal recognize how tricky decarbonization could be politically. Both they and the OCI report are adamant about the need to ensure that workers in the fossil fuel industry enjoy a higher quality of life as a result of transitioning away from fossil fuels, and receive work that’s just as well-paid. “We should not be expanding fossil fuel infrastructure in Texas or anywhere else,” Shahid says. “But if you’re not offering solutions to workers in oil states, you’re going to start to see the increasing development of the kinds of reactionary policies that lead to Donald Trump winning.”
“The Green New Deal debate is playing a really critical role in envisioning the scale of economic mobilization that is needed to build up the renewable energy economy,” Trout says. “This report shows that we need to be scaling down fossil fuel production at the same rate that we’re planning to scale up our investment to transform the economy.”
While renewables have become cheaper and more widespread over the last several years, fossil fuel usage has continued to grow. So have emissions. If massive investments in scaling up zero-carbon energy are one part of the equation, phasing out dirty energy is another.
The post Henry Cuellar’s Policy Preferences Could Destroy the World. But Then Again, He’s a Really Nice Guy. appeared first on The Intercept.
PARIS—This past week, President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated a vast national debate, a kind of ongoing town hall and airing of grievances that will unfold across France for the next two months. The grand débat, as it’s called, is the government’s response to the “yellow vest” protest movement that began in November with citizens protesting a fuel-tax hike and has grown exponentially into a massive groundswell of popular discontent, peppered with occasional flare-ups of violence.
By organizing these discussions, which will be mediated by mayors, the government is essentially acknowledging that frustrations now run so deep that they can’t be ignored. Much of the anger has been aimed at Macron, who was elected on a platform of change but has come to be seen as arrogant, imperious, and tone-deaf to the concerns of the less fortunate. The French leader didn’t exactly dispel that perception when he sent an open letter to the nation outlining the themes of the debate—the environment, taxes and public spending, political representation and public services—essentially saying, “We can talk about anything you want, as long as it’s what I want.”
[Read: France’s fuel-tax protests expose the limits of Macron’s mandate]
That’s one reason this national conversation may quell tensions for a while but probably won’t end the yellow-vest movement for good. The gilets jaunes, so named for the roadside safety vests that drivers must keep in their vehicles at all times, are here to stay precisely because the movement is so inchoate in form, so leaderless in organization, and so diffuse in its demands. And also so successful in driving the debate. Political parties across the spectrum and labor unions have been trying to channel the movement’s momentum, but so far to no avail. That puts France in uncharted political territory.
That is what makes this grand débat all the more complex. Normally, elections are held to gauge political sentiment. But how do you harness the concerns of citizens without undermining the government’s own mandate, at a time when the government’s only significant political opposition comes from the far right and the far left?
Some political scientists are calling Macron’s approach an unprecedented step in representative democracy, a step toward greater citizen engagement and more direct democracy while still keeping France’s august hierarchical structures in place. It’s the country’s attempt to capture some of the anger of the moment without forcing an array of issues into a Brexit-like referendum, a yes/no question whose answer doesn’t solve any of the underlying problems.
The philosopher Bruno Latour this week compared France today to Britain ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote, when vague questions of national identity coalesced around membership in the European Union. The French situation has had its own elements of strange political theater, though, and Latour sees the grand débat as more of a kind of poll than a means of changing the government’s program. We have “the yellow vests who don’t know exactly what they want and a government that’s completely incapable of listening,” Latour told French radio.
As part of the national debate, citizens can register their concerns in cahiers de doléances, or grievance logs, a practice first put into use during the French Revolution. An online forum that polled citizens’ concerns showed a vast range of issues: Some wanted to change unemployment compensation, or increase taxes for the rich and on second homes, or proposed the elimination of bank fees; others were upset that the government had reduced the speed limit to 80 km an hour. For his part, Macron asked his constituents to consider which public services they wouldn’t mind reducing. That’s something of a taboo in France, where citizens of every political persuasion rely on the state for all manner of support—the exact opposite of American-style mistrust of government.
“This grand debate is a kind of reality test,” Étienne Balibar, a Marxist philosopher and scholar, said at a debate last week in Paris, where he expressed his enthusiasm about the yellow-vest movement. If the discussion unfolds the way the government hopes it will—peacefully, leading to constructive proposals that don’t contradict the ones on which the government was elected—it will raise a tricky new question: What should the government do? “In what circumstances can a political power decide to choose not only to use chaos as blackmail, but to choose chaos as a political strategy?” Balibar asked.
Balibar’s enthusiasm for the movement is indicative of how some on the left see in the yellow vests the potential for revolutionary promise, a chance to bring about more social equality and to increase awareness of regional inequalities—some of the same factors that led to the Brexit vote in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. But the yellow vests also seem to be anything and everything. Socialists see them as a way to claw back the terrain they lost to Macron’s centrist La République En Marche party. The far right wants to harness the anti-government sentiment into an electoral victory in the European parliamentary elections in May. So, for that matter, does Macron’s party.
Much like the Occupy movement in the United States, the yellow vests haven’t transformed party politics, but they’re certainly driving the conversation. And they’re driving it all over the place. There’s a strong social element. Demonstrators have enjoyed the conviviality of their gatherings at traffic circles and don’t want the party to end. Catholic-inflected social conservatives are piling on and want to use the national debate to defend the traditional family. While some want more social justice and greater openness to migrants, others have made anti-Semitic gestures that have gone viral, entertained wild conspiracy theories in online forums, or shown disgust and even outright physical violence toward journalists from the mainstream media, raising fears that the movement is essentially veering to the far right.
There has been an undeniable current of violence, with some demonstrators smashing the windows of shops and banks, and setting fire to cars and scooters in central Paris. French police have brought more than 5,300 people in for questioning across the country since the protests began, and have sent more than 150 to jail, according to Le Monde. More than 1,700 demonstrators have been wounded since November, the paper reported, and authorities have opened 71 investigations into police violence. In Le Monde, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, a political scientist, criticized the government for “criminalizing” dissent in ways she compared to the police crackdown during the student uprisings of May 1968.
[Read: Emmanuel Macron and the ghosts of 1968]
Macron, the first French president whose political life wasn’t in some way shaped by 1968, kicked off the debate this week by meeting with 600 mayors in a gathering outside Paris, and has since been traveling the country meeting with other mayors. For hours he listened as they described problems that had been building up over decades, and he often responded with an impressive command of public-policy details. One mayor, Dominique Chauvel—a former Socialist and the mayor of Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, a town of about 300 people in Normandy—told the president she was deeply disappointed in his government and afraid France was abandoning the safety net that has been an essential part of the French social contract here for decades. “My country has men and women, young people and old people, people of all colors, all beliefs, and it leaves no one by the side of the road,” she said, adding that mayors, of which France has a plethora, were the “social backstop.”
Macron watched Chauvel intensely. He sat with his legs spread wide, his hands on his thighs and elbows out, as if he were huddling for a fight. He seemed at times glacial, or tired, with occasional flashes of what might have been empathy. He seemed aware that the stakes were very high. He was elected to change France, to make it easier for companies to hire employees whose taxes will prop up the system. His majority is strong, but he is surrounded by critics, and enemies. How the grand debate unfolds will define his presidency.
I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.
His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.
That man’s name matters. It is Nathan Phillips.
The crowd members’ names don’t matter, any more than the names of their counterparts you see in the photo below, from Little Rock’s Central High School in the 1950s. The young men from Covington Catholic High School should know that they will be immortalized, the way the angry young white people you see below were: as a group, a movement, a problem, beyond their identities as individuals.
If one of the priests or teachers with the Covington group today had stepped in to stop them—if even one of the students had said, “Come on, back off!”—that person would be remembered, too. But there is no sign that anyone, student or teacher or parent or priest, did.
Black students integrating Little Rock Central High School, 1957. (AP)Teenagers do stupid things, especially teenaged boys. I was once a teenaged boy, and my wife and I raised two sons.
But stupidity doesn’t have to mean hatred and bigotry. Someone taught these young people—those in Arkansas in the 1950s, those from Kentucky today—to behave the way they did.
Parents, priests, teachers, neighbors—someone taught these young men.
Here is another person who should be remembered: the mayor of Covington, Kentucky, Joe Meyer, who within hours of the Mall incident released a statement saying that the actions of the young people on the video were the opposite of his city’s values.
His statement is worth reading in full. A sample:
Because of the actions of people who live in Northern Kentucky, our region is being challenged again to examine our core identities, values, and beliefs. Regardless of what exact town we live in, we need to ask ourselves whether behavior like this DOES represent who we are and strive to be. Is this what our schools teach? Are these the beliefs that we as parents model and condone?
Is this the way we want the rest of the nation and the world to see us?
In answer, let me—as Covington’s mayor—be absolutely clear: No. The videos being shared across the nation do NOT represent the core beliefs and values of this City.
Covington is a diverse community, in areas of race, national origin, ethnicity, religious preference, sexual orientation, and income…
We’re not perfect. More progress needs to be made, and we will continue to work diligently on making it.
In the meantime, Covington is proud of being a welcoming City where bigotry, discrimination, and hatred will not be tolerated.
Congratulations to Meyer, who I hope more fully represents the values of his community than today’s mob did.
12:30am EST update: Roughly twelve hours after the original incident and widely spread video, some right-wing sources have argued that the “real” story is the opposite of what has been reported, and that Nathan Phillips was in fact aggressively approaching the young men.
I wasn’t there, and so I can’t say first-hand. But watch the widely available long videos of the events, complete with students doing “tomahawk-chop” chants while Nathan Phillips is singing, and in other ways behaving as if they are mocking him. Anything is possible, but see if this looks as if he is taking advantage of them.
The 29th day of the partial government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history, has been virtually indistinguishable from the first.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump entered the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House to reveal the “major announcement concerning the Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border” he had teased on Twitter on Friday. In some respects, it could be viewed as a major step toward ending the shutdown, with Trump outlining a new proposal to break a logjam that has left hundreds of thousands of federal workers without pay. And yet in other ways—with Democratic leaders roundly rejecting the plan before it was even aired—it may as well have never happened.
The White House proposed three years of protection for two categories of immigrants. The first group comprises about 700,000 young adults, known as “Dreamers,” who were brought to the United States as children without authorization; they had been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Obama-era policy that Trump sought to end before federal courts intervened. The second category, temporary protected status, covers people who were allowed to move to the United States after disasters hit their home country; Trump has similarly sought to cut back these protections, only to see his actions stopped in court.
In addition to three years of protection for Dreamers and TPS recipients, Trump also proposed $800 million for humanitarian assistance, presumably to the Central American countries where poverty and violence push migrants to leave for the United States; $805 million for drug-detection technology at the border; an additional 2,750 Border Patrol and law-enforcement agents; 75 new immigration-judge teams to reduce the backlog of nearly 1 million cases; and a system for Central American minors to apply for asylum from their home country.
And perhaps most important, the White House’s offer includes $5.7 billion for the “strategic deployment of physical barriers, or a wall”—the price tag that in many ways catalyzed the current impasse.
“This is not a 2,000-mile concrete structure from sea to sea,” Trump said. “These are steel barriers in high-priority locations,” covering about another 230 miles of the southern border.
Trump cast his proposal as a medium-term stopgap that buys time for Congress to negotiate a full-scale immigration-reform package, the sort of compromise that has eluded lawmakers for more than a decade. (In February, Democrats offered $25 billion for wall funding in return for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, but the deal crumbled when Trump insisted upon further cuts to legal immigration.) A source familiar with the ongoing negotiations said that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have the latest White House proposal ready for a floor vote by next week.
But a proposal that offers only temporary protections for DACA and TPS recipients—without a path to citizenship—has historically been viewed as a nonstarter by most Democrats, in part because it was Trump himself who has tried to revoke protections for both groups. And sure enough, as details of the president’s offer leaked out ahead of his address on Saturday, Democrats were quick to pour cold water on it. “Initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement before Trump’s remarks. “For one thing, this proposal does not include the permanent solution for the Dreamers and TPS recipients that our country needs and supports.”
“It’s clear the President realizes that by closing the government and hurting so many American workers and their families, he has put himself and the country in an untenable position,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement following the president’s address. “Unfortunately, he keeps putting forward one-sided and ineffective remedies. There’s only way out: open up the government, Mr. President, and then Democrats and Republicans can have a civil discussion and come up with bipartisan solutions.”
Trump’s offer changes nothing, Democrats concluded. They remained firm in their demand that the president first reopen the government before entertaining further talks on immigration policy. “His ‘major announcement’ was just the exact same racist demand for a wall,” said one House aide, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. “Let his legacy be two more years of closed government if he won’t be reasonable.”
But Republicans were nonplussed by Democrats’ swift refusal. According to multiple GOP lawmakers and aides, party leaders are newly confident that blame for the shutdown—which polling thus far has shown sits mostly with the president—will shift to Democratic leaders. The way Republicans see it, the White House is attempting to engage in good-faith negotiations with a party whose members still refuse to come to the table (quite literally, they point out, reiterating that moderate House Democrats all rebuffed Trump’s lunch invitation to discuss the shutdown last week). The onus, they said, is now on Democrats either to advance Trump’s proposal or to counter it with their own—simply rebuking it, they feel, is no longer politically viable.
“The question they never answer is: What is their offer, and when will they come back to the table to deliver it?” Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, a moderate Republican who engaged in talks with the White House last week, told The Atlantic.
And even conservative lawmakers, who’ve traditionally been a hard sell on legislative deals that include protections for DACA recipients, praised the president for attempting to move negotiations forward. “This is the latest and most significant step yet of POTUS showing his willingness to negotiate and compromise with Democrats on the issue of wall funding,” the House Freedom Caucus member Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a close ally of Trump’s, tweeted. “At this point, if Democrats refuse to come to the table, it will show they are not at all serious about solving this impasse.”
The source familiar with the negotiations told The Atlantic that the White House’s offer began to come together shortly after Pelosi proposed postponing Trump’s State of the Union address, originally scheduled to take place on January 29. It was then that McConnell, the source said, urged Trump to announce a comprehensive offer to end the shutdown—and quickly. “The leader said to POTUS, ‘Start thinking about what you want to do to shake things up.’ Because it was clear to him then that Democrats just weren’t going to move.”
So on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence and the senior adviser Jared Kushner met with McConnell in his Capitol Hill office to begin ironing out the proposal. The source said the meeting was publicized intentionally, as a way to showcase the White House’s continued efforts to reach a solution in the midst of the standstill.
But even in the lead-up to Saturday’s remarks, Democrats felt that the administration’s efforts were disingenuous, as they’d rejected similar offers from the administration in the past. And several took issue with the president framing the proposal as a bipartisan solution, when Democrats hadn’t been consulted on it beforehand.
“We’re bad at negotiating, but we’re not that bad,” said one House Democratic staffer. If the president had instead offered a more permanent solution—say, a pledge to sign the DREAM Act, a measure first introduced in 2001 that would allow undocumented immigrants who attend college or serve in the military to eventually gain legal status—Democrats might have been on board, the source said.
Saturday concluded as yet another day in which several things happened—a televised address, a flurry of statements from lawmakers and aides—but nothing changed. Ultimately, for all the dressings of a shiny new proposal, the White House’s request for $5.7 billion for a border wall stayed firm. And it’s unclear whether Democrats plan to respond to Trump’s offer with a proposal of their own, or whether their demand that the White House reopen the government sans a new immigration policy remains absolute, like their opposition to the wall.
Early signs indicate that it will.
“Democrats,” as one senior House Democratic aide told The Atlantic, “are not willing to negotiate at gunpoint.”
President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.
Now he is desperately seeking an exit.
Trump attempted Exit One on January 8. He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.
Having failed to convince the public, Trump is now trying Exit Two. This idea is even more harebrained than the last, if that is even possible. Instead of appealing in prime time to the whole nation, Trump on Saturday afternoon advanced a detailed set of proposals intended to shift a critical mass of backbench Democrats to break with their leadership and deal directly with him. You don’t need to do much more than articulate the idea out loud to appreciate its utter unrealism.
The Democratic majority is newly elected and highly cohesive. Why on earth would any appreciable number of Democrats break away from their leadership to do business as individuals with a president none of them trusts about an issue none of them thinks should be negotiable, reopening the government? They will not do it, and it should have been obviously predictable from the start that they would not do it. Trump could not even get moderate Democrats to come have lunch with him at the White House this week. How could he imagine that a TV talk would entice them to break ranks and destroy their own political future within their party?
The president will gain some immediate validation from his closed information system. Fox News, and talk radio, and MAGA Twitter will rant enjoyably about how mean it is for Democrats to reject Trump’s latest self-help scheme. That will be nice for the president to hear. But Fox News, and talk radio, and MAGA Twitter cannot protect him from the real-world consequences of the shutdown he forced. They cannot erase the video showing Trump proudly talking about how he would be the one to do it. They cannot sustain his poll numbers among the large majority of America that is non-Fox, non-MAGA.
The sometimes Trump ally Senator Marco Rubio tweeted Saturday afternoon that it is not reasonable for Democrats to demand unconditional surrender by the president. But it was Trump who rejected the path of compromise when he shut down the government.
The shutdown was a demand for unconditional surrender. Unfortunately for him, the president lacks the political realism to recognize that he doesn’t have the clout to impose that surrender. He’s the one who will now have to climb down, and very soon, probably within days. The end of a hostage taking is not a surrender. But it will surely feel that way to the hostage taker—and deservedly, too.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—On Friday morning, a few hours before the start of the March for Life—the 46th-annual event held to commemorate the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and to call for its repeal—banners waved above the heads of some 60 people gathered on the wet, slushy grounds of the National Mall. Consistent Life Network: … End Abortion, End Poverty, End Racism, End War, read one. Secular Pro-Life: For the embryology textbook tells me so, read another—a sly riff on the “for the Bible tells me so” refrain of the Christian hymn “Jesus Loves Me.” Protesters carrying signs (Destroy the patriarchy, not the preborn) and wearing buttons (War is not pro-life) stood in the cold listening as a teal-haired atheist with a nose ring addressed the crowd that had gathered: Why, she asked, if it is wrong to kill a person who’d been born already, would it be okay to kill a person who hadn’t yet?
The #ProScienceProLife meet-up, this year’s title for the gathering held annually ahead of the March for Life, served as a summit of sorts for groups such as Rehumanize International, the Consistent Life Network, Secular Pro-life, and Democrats for Life of America. These groups espouse something called the “consistent life” or “whole life” ethic—the belief that human life should be protected from violence and killing from the moment of conception onwards. So while these groups often protest abortion, they also protest police brutality, torture, war, human trafficking, and the separation of immigrant families.
The meet-up brings together some of the nontraditional pro-life groups at the march—that is, the nonconservative and nonreligious organizations—to hear a slate of speeches, many of them from nonreligious or left-leaning pro-life leaders. But Rehumanize International’s communications director, Herb Geraghty, takes care to explain that these aren’t meant to be counterprogramming efforts: “When we host these meet-ups, we’re not protesting the March for Life,” he says. He describes these events and the presentations given at them as supplementary to the main rally.
At the March for Life, and in the pro-life movement generally, Christianity is abundant; at this year’s March for Life Expo, for example, held the day before the march, a majority of the tables set up at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C., belonged to churches or Christian groups. Conservatism, too, runs strong in the pro-life movement, and in recent years, so has support for Donald Trump’s administration: In 2017, Vice President Mike Pence became the first sitting vice president to address the March for Life rally (held annually just before the march begins), and last year President Trump became the first sitting president to do so when he appeared at the event via live-stream. (This year, Pence spoke at a dinner following the march.)
[Read more: Abortion in American history]
But despite what the popular narrative might suggest—that the pro-life side of the abortion debate is conservative and the pro-choice side is liberal, and the two sides don’t like each other—secular and left-leaning pro-lifers I spoke with said they felt welcome at the March for Life, and that most of the time they feel welcome in the pro-life movement in general, too.
They do, of course, know they’re outnumbered. While I spoke with one marcher with a Democrats for Life of America (DFLA) sign, a stranger bedecked in pro-life memorabilia approached him, exclaimed, “You’re a Democrat? Hallelujah!” and demanded a photo of him holding his sign.
“We’re kind of like the counterculture within the movement,” laughed Jongeun Lee, 32, another protester with the DFLA.
But as Aimee Murphy, the executive director of Rehumanize International, explained to me, groups that espouse the consistent-life ethic are the black sheep at just about any rally or protest they attend—and they’re used to it. “We go to anti-war marches, to immigrant- and refugee-rights events like the ones this past summer, and we’re like, ‘Okay, we’re here in support of the mission of this march,’” she says. “There’ll be a group [nearby] that advocates for abortion, or advocates for the right to suicide, and we’re just like, ‘Eh, well. We have common ground on this issue.’”
“Movements are going to be fought with people coming together on one issue and having differences in other places,” Murphy added. “We come together where we can.”
Secular pro-life groups tend to put special emphasis on scientific evidence to support the idea that a human life begins at conception. When I spoke with Murphy last week, she told me she was heartened by the theme chosen for this year’s March for Life, “Unique From Day One: Pro-life Is Pro-science.” At the time, the March for Life had not yet unveiled its full slate of speakers for the pre-march rally, and Murphy was hopeful “that maybe one of our atheist pro-life friends will have the chance to speak from the stage, or at least be up there.” In recent years, the lineup of speakers at the March for Life rally has mostly consisted of politicians (largely Republican), faith leaders, and sports and entertainment personalities. (Ultimately, no speakers on the March for Life stage on Friday publicly professed themselves to be atheists, but Murphy said she was at least pleased to see that a doctor, Kathi Aultman of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, had made it into the mix.)
[Read: Science is giving the pro-life movement a boost]
The lineup of speakers did, however, include an equal number of Republican politicians and Democratic politicians this year (two each)—which Bill Samuel, the former president of the Consistent Life Network, sees as a positive development. Samuel, 71, has been attending the March for Life for more than 15 years, and he credits the march’s current leadership with making nonconservative and nonreligious pro-life groups feel welcome at the event. There was a time, Samuel says, when pro-life Democrats and pro-life feminists were made to feel unwelcome at the march, but that’s changed since 2012, when Jeanne Mancini became its president. “The march is still relatively conservative,” Samuel says, but he believes the organizers “see the need for broadening.” (The march’s official policy, according to Mancini, is that it “unites pro-life groups who wish to stand up for the unborn. We are nonsectarian and nonpartisan, and welcome anyone who peacefully advocates for this cause. We only exclude groups who advocate for violence of any kind, including abortion, which is violence in the womb.”)
The inclusion of Ben Shapiro, the founder of the conservative website The Daily Wire and the host of the podcast The Ben Shapiro Show, on the rally’s lineup angered some left-leaning supporters of the pro-life cause; Shapiro is a popular figure among far-right conservatives, and a recent op-ed in The Washington Post warned that Shapiro’s invitation to the main stage of the March for Life would alienate nonconservatives from the event. (Shapiro also made headlines Friday morning when he proclaimed that if he were given the chance to go back in time and kill baby Hitler, because of his pro-life beliefs, he would not.)
Some secular pro-lifers I spoke with could see the logic of inviting a popular figure with passionate pro-life views to speak at the rally. But others were less than thrilled about Shapiro’s presence. For one thing, they didn’t love that Shapiro, who recorded an episode of his podcast from the main stage, often referred to supporters of abortion rights as “the left.” Geraghty, Rehumanize’s communications director, referred to himself in conversation as a “leftist”; other pro-life protesters I spoke with described themselves as left-leaning or progressive. But as Josh Stanton, a 23-year-old attending the march who also supports causes such as Black Lives Matter, pointed out, derogatorily conflating “the right” and “the left” with “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” respectively, is pretty common now, “on both sides.”
Xavier Bisits, 24, who attended the march with the DFLA, said he had “a problem” with Shapiro’s involvement. “I think we would say that his claim to be pro-life is not consistent with the other things that we support,” Bisits said. For instance, he doesn’t believe Shapiro supports “what I think is necessary intervention to support human life in other contexts. Things like government support for women who are struggling to find housing, which is obviously one of the biggest issues that women in crisis pregnancies are facing.” (Shapiro did not respond to a request for comment.)
Still, most of the secular, left-leaning pro-lifers I spoke with agreed that they felt included and welcome at the March for Life event on Friday. Genevieve Aucoin, a 23-year-old hospice music therapist, especially appreciated the march’s—and the movement’s—recent pivot to science. “I don’t think that abortion will be ended by religious proselytization. I think that it will be ended by making arguments that appeal to everyone,” she said. “If my argument is based on what God says, okay. But not everyone believes in God, and not everyone believes God wants the same things I think God wants. I just think that going back to basic science, to human dignity, that’s what can appeal to everyone—that every human has dignity.”
[Read more: Personal stories of abortion made public]
And Cecilia Cervantes, a 26-year-old wearing two adjacent buttons reading Overturn Roe and Feminism: Equality for All, told me she’s always felt welcome at both the March for Life and the Women’s March—which in recent years she’s attended back-to-back—and believes it’s important to go to both, even though she doesn’t feel her beliefs are perfectly represented by either’s platform. “At the end of the day, you’re trying to build solidarity with other people and put your message out there. Hopefully one day someone with a secular perspective or feminist perspective will be on the [March for Life] stage,” she says. “You have to be at the table to be part of the conversation.”
Cervantes also hopes that if she and other pro-life feminists attend enough Women’s Marches, eventually women who represent pro-life groups might be invited to speak as part of the event. (The official page for the Women’s March lists “open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people, regardless of income, location or education” as one of its foundational principles.)
Around half past 1 p.m. on Friday afternoon, Rehumanize’s Murphy—in purple lipstick and a denim jacket adorned with a cartoon uterus and the words WEAPON-FREE ZONE—led her fellow secular pro-lifers down Constitution Avenue toward the Supreme Court. Cheery pop songs blared from the speaker that she and her fellow organizers rolled behind them on a cart, competing cacophonously with the singing of the black-robed men of the Polish Seminary, who were marching just a few feet away. At any moment their small, colorful crew risked losing one another in the throng. But should they drift apart, no big deal: There were long-standing plans in place to meet up later for karaoke.
As the protesters began to move forward, the marchers from the #ProScienceProLife meet-up stood out within the crowd, certainly, but they also stood squarely within it.
The best improvised music destabilizes expectations. That could happen when a taut groove suddenly dissolves into a free-jazz breakdown, a trick the band Science Fair pulled in a set Saturday night at Winter Jazzfest in New York City. It could happen via the surfeit of groups at the festival, such as Science Fair, that are led by women in a genre that has long been male-dominated. Or it could happen when confronted with the scene a few blocks away at the Bowery Ballroom, where there were two unusual sights in the jazz world: long lines to get in, and patrons unable to resist the impulse to dance inside.
As I have written in the past, Winter Jazzfest is a good opportunity to take the temperature of jazz and improvised music each year. The festival, which is now in its 15th year, featured nearly 150 acts across 12 venues over more than a week this year, and while the stars may not be household names, they are among the brightest in the genre, including artists such as the pianist Vijay Iyer, the bassist Christian McBride, the saxophonist Gary Bartz, and the jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood. Because of the festival’s sprawling size, neatly summarizing it is futile. But two big themes emerged from my own listening at this year’s edition. First, while the relationship between jazz and hip-hop is decades old, there’s an exciting moment today as musicians fluent in both genres produce newly mature hybrids. Second, the present and future of jazz are female. While women have been part of this music scene since the start, they’ve often been marginalized. Not this year, and not at this festival.
A sad milestone of 2018 was the premature death of Roy Hargrove, the trumpeter who cracked the code to melding hip-hop and jazz before any of his colleagues. Miles Davis had tried, gamely but ineffectively; Branford Marsalis got closer with Buckshot LeFonque. Hargrove rose to prominence as an avatar of orthodoxy, but he found a way to combine the genres that didn’t cheapen either through his membership in the Soulquarians, the collective that played on records by the Roots, Erykah Badu, and D’Angelo around the turn of the century. (A festival event joined a Lincoln Center concert the same week in paying tribute to Hargrove.) His passing in November tacked a sad coda onto a year of noteworthy hip-hop inflected jazz, from the saxophonist and Kendrick Lamar associate Kamasi Washington’s eagerly awaited, underwhelming Heaven and Earth to stronger outings including the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s Origami Harvest and the drummer Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings, both among 2018’s best jazz albums. To me, these records feel more coherent and fully formed than prior excursions by musicians such as Robert Glasper—there’s more grit, more grease, more groove.
McCraven played an outstanding (and oversubscribed) set at Jazzfest. On record, he takes extended jams and then edits the tape later. Live, that’s not an option, but the extended jams suit the band just as well. The music is built on riffs and vamps rather than on melodies or chord structures—a concept that connects not only to hip-hop but also to Davis’s oft-maligned ’70s records. The result sometimes echoes sample-based music, but without sounding forced.
A series of broadly like-minded bands played the same stage over the course of a couple of nights. The Ezra Collective, a quintet of young Britons, represented London’s thriving scene with a blazing set. (Nubya Garcia, a British saxophonist who has recorded with them, appeared elsewhere at the festival.) Sporting tracksuits and dropping “innits,” the band mixed the same ’70s Davis sound with influences from Sun Ra and the grime icon Skepta. It’s not the most innovative music, but it was some of the most infectious. The drummer Chris Dave closed the festival out with guests including Pharoahe Monch and Thundercat. Another stickman, Justin Brown, played with his band Nyeusi and Georgia Anne Muldrow, an electric soul and R&B singer. Guitar and bass held down a riff while Brown gradually changed the beat underneath, tugging the music in different directions.
Something similar happened at another show later that evening in a different setting, and at a lower volume. In the packed basement at SubCulture, the saxophonist Dayna Stephens and the trumpeter Jason Palmer carried a relaxed melody, while below them the rhythm section of Science Fair worked up a frenzy. The band was one of two acts to feature the pianist Carmen Staaf and Allison Miller, a fidgety, funky drummer with a playful sense of humor and an ear for catchy tunes and band names. (Miller and Staaf co-lead Science Fair, which produced another of 2018’s best; Miller and the violinist Jenny Scheinman front Parlour Game, which also appeared at the festival, while another Miller project is called Boom Tic Boom.)
Across the street at the Sheen Center, the venerable keyboardist and singer Amina Claudine Myers performed a set of classic gospel songs with a trio of vocalists. Mary Halvorson, who has solidified her position as the dominant guitarist of her generation, performed on the same stage. If last year’s album Code Girl is at times more interesting than it is strictly enjoyable, its surprises make the effort worthwhile. Live, however, it became clear just how hard Halvorson’s quintet—which includes the omnipresent, omnivorous young trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and the drummer Tomas Fujiwara—can swing.
Even more uncompromising than Halvorson’s set was the saxophonist Lea Bertucci’s. Her latest album is titled Metal Aether, and it’s hard to summon a better description than that. Performing alone, with an alto saxophone, a laptop, and some effects pedals, Bertucci performed a series of minimalist drones and overtones. A horn note would emerge, warp slightly, crescendo dissonantly, then fade. The effect was awesome, in the biblical sense: transfixing, impressive, and at times nearly unbearable.
Nothing about shows featuring Miller, Myers, Halvorson, or Bertucci felt especially unusual per se. Together, they show the wide spectrum of types of improvised music that are thriving today. But they were also all led by women. Although women have long distinguished themselves musically and criticized sexism in the genre—Science Fair paid tribute to one pioneer, Mary Lou Williams, with a tune called “MLW”—the jazz world has recently grappled more openly with these problems. As many of the festival’s acts showed, female composers, bandleaders, and players are at the center of the music. And this was only a sampling of the festival’s bill. In addition to Garcia, the bassist and singer Meshell Ndegeocello was an artist in residence. Jaimie Branch, an offbeat trumpeter from Chicago, performed in her duo, Anteloper, and also led a late-night jam spotlighting the current efflorescence of jazz in the Windy City.
I saw at least a half-dozen other shows that deserve notice, including the innovative big band Big Heart Machine; a piano duet of Iyer and Craig Taborn; and back-to-back sets of the oddball Chicago composer Ben LaMar Gay and the Gnawa-inflected jams of Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society. On the festival’s last night, J. D. Allen welcomed his fellow tenor saxophonist David Murray for a high-energy blowout. As the set wrapped up, Allen shouted, “I had fun. I hope y’all had fun!” It would have been hard to do anything else.
“How many of you think we should do liver transplants for alcoholics?”
About half the hands were slowly raised, while the other members of the class looked around nervously. These were third-year medical students, and I was giving my monthly lecture on organ transplantation.
“How many of you think the potential recipient should have six months of absolute sobriety before being offered a transplant?”
This time, the majority raised their hands, and a look of confidence could be seen on most of the students’ faces.
This post is adapted from Mezrich’s new book.“But what if they won’t live six months? What if the patient is a 37-year-old mother of three, or a 26-year-old college graduate who didn’t realize the damage he was doing to his liver? Would you stand over the young man, with his parents watching, and tell him you could save him but you’ve decided he doesn’t deserve it?”
I continued: “How many of you think alcoholism is a disease?” Almost everyone raised his hand.
“What do you think the recurrence rate of this disease is after liver transplantation?”
A few people guessed about 20 percent, which is roughly accurate.
“How many of you think hepatitis C is a disease?”
Everyone.
“And the recurrence rate of that after transplant?”
One hundred percent.
In the early days of liver transplantation, saving patients with alcoholic liver disease was generally considered an inappropriate use of such a limited resource. Yet now that the practice has been supported by data showing that outcomes for these transplants are as good as or better than outcomes for other diagnoses, the policy has changed.
Many programs require candidates to have been abstinent for at least six months. The rule, which has been widely adopted at transplant centers around the country, came from a retrospective study of 43 patients who underwent transplant for alcoholic liver disease. In this analysis, abstinence for less than six months prior to transplant was considered a risk factor for recurrence.
[Read: A landmark study in the origins of alcoholism]
Multiple further studies have been equivocal on the specific length of abstinence required to reduce recidivism, or return to alcohol use post-transplant. To add to the confusion, a recent study from France showed that well-selected patients with a diagnosis of severe acute alcoholic hepatitis did just as well with transplant and had a similar recurrence rate as those who had abstained for six months.
Before he found out he needed a new liver, Herbert Heneman was not your typical corner-of-the-dive-bar alcoholic. Heneman, the Dickson-Bascom professor emeritus of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He had a happy childhood and a very supportive family. He describes his parents as somewhat heavy drinkers, particularly his father, but he remembers no health issues, legal problems, or family crises related to alcohol.
After Heneman finished college, he began graduate school and married his high-school sweetheart. Everything was falling into place.
Heneman doesn’t remember a specific time when he suddenly increased his drinking. He doesn’t remember a dramatic liftoff. Alcohol just slowly started to permeate everything he did. He started hiding his drinking from his wife and kids, and drinking alone. He found himself getting sick more often, episodes he described as the flu, or exhaustion, or general weakness. Eventually, his physician told him it was his drinking that was causing his health problems, but Heneman didn’t buy it. He knew he could stop if he wanted to.
On Labor Day 1990, Heneman was hammered at a party—stumbling, sweating, and generally not looking well. A nurse who happened to be there thought he was having a heart attack, and an ambulance was called. En route to the hospital, a blood-alcohol level was taken, and it came back at 0.375. Heneman was placed in detox, and from there he went to a 28-day inpatient rehab program. He was sober for the entire four weeks and told everyone there he was committed to sobriety. He relapsed the first day out.
About two weeks later, Heneman went to detox again. Once he was sober, he agreed to be committed as an inpatient to the McBride Center for the Professional, a branch of the Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital where patients with successful careers can be treated for their addictions. In a regular rehab facility, it is too easy for people of Heneman’s social status to look at the people around them who are also struggling with addiction, especially if they are from a different walk of life, and say, “I’m not like them. I can control this.”
[Read: How helicopter parenting can cause binge drinking]
Even so, at McBride, Heneman resisted. He didn’t really want to participate in the group sessions; he just wanted to read about alcoholism and beat this thing using his own brain.
“On a Sunday morning,” he told me, “I went to a little interdenominational church service that was being held in the hospital. And as I walked in the door, this woman began playing ‘Amazing Grace’ on the piano. And that was my true turning point.” Heneman owned up to his alcoholism and spent three months as an inpatient.
At the same time, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis. After Heneman was released from the psychiatric hospital, he found himself in the office of Münci Kalayoğlu, a transplant specialist. Münci told Heneman that if he was able to stay sober for a year, he would perform the transplant. But there was a catch: “If you ever, after your transplant, go out and drink again,” Münci said, “I’m going to come over to your house with my pocketknife and take back the liver.”
Heneman has grasped the fact that his alcoholism will never be “cured.” It is always lurking, ready to come back with a vengeance. “The other thing that really helps keep me sober is that I was so fortunate to receive a transplant, particularly back then. It would be an absolute dishonor to my donor family for me to go out and drink again and somehow do any damage to my liver.”
After his transplant, Heneman had one brief readmission for a rejection episode. Otherwise, he has had no problems with his transplanted liver for more than 25 years. I asked him how the transplant changed his outlook on life. “I think it changed it much for the better,” he said. “I’ve led a much fuller life than I otherwise would have.”
I asked for Heneman’s thoughts on transplanting patients with acute alcoholic hepatitis, patients who clearly can’t survive a waiting period of sobriety prior to transplant. He said, “My own experience was very much that recovery needs to be a very serious, lifelong commitment, one day at a time, and that people who try to go it alone are not very likely to succeed.”
This post is adapted from Mezrich’s new book, When Death Becomes Life: Notes From a Transplant Surgeon.
Moments before setting the novel’s central journey into motion, the protagonist of An Orchestra of Minorities makes a simple declaration about the woman he loves. “I’m ready to do anything to marry her,” the beleaguered Nigerian poultry farmer Chinonso Solomon Olisa tells Jamike, an erstwhile childhood friend. It is an earnest mission statement, at once brave and straightforward. But the lovesick young man has no grasp of the terrors that await him on the path ahead.
The second novel from the Man Booker Prize finalist Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities is a wrenching study of the sacrifices made for love. The arc of the chicken farmer’s attachment to the pharmacist-in-training Ndali Obialor begins not with a first date, but with near-tragedy, when Chinonso prevents her from jumping off a bridge. Their chance meeting months later births a desperate romance troubled by Ndali’s well-educated family, who won’t accept the humble farmer as her future spouse. Chinonso is in despair until the visiting Jamike offers him a slippery pathway to acceptance: traveling to Cyprus to receive more schooling, then returning as a man of stature—the kind of man Ndali deserves to marry.
In rendering his protagonist’s journey to Cyprus, and the scene that greets the unknowing Chinonso when he arrives, Obioma recasts Homer’s Odyssey. For both tales’ heroes, “mere survival is the most amazing feat of all.” But where Odysseus thrashed “under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea,” Chinonso is betrayed by his fellow man. The experience never plunges him into the underworld, but in a letter to Ndali, he writes that he “went to hell” in Cyprus. Obioma conveys Chinonso’s trials with an eye toward the quotidian horrors that many African migrant farmers face in real life.
Though Chinonso is driven by love—the most human of pursuits—neither his classed countrymen nor most of the Europeans he encounters are willing to extend him compassion. Obioma emphasizes that many of these obstacles stem from Chinonso’s visible Africanness—Europeans mock the man’s hair, deny him work, and scoff at his inability to speak Turkish. In Cyprus, he is “a wayfarer in a foreign land”: maligned, mistreated, even jailed for a grievous crime he didn’t commit.
Obioma depicts the indignities the farmer faces with rich details, at times even appearing to revel in the contours of his protagonist’s suffering. Describing Chinonso at one point, he writes: “All the world becomes dead to a man like him in such a time as this, and therefore all the pleasant memories, all the images that would have brought him pleasure, mean nothing in this moment. Even if they had been gathered in his mind in their multitudes, they would merely accumulate in abysmal futility, like a stack of gold in the mouth of a dead man.”
The novel exalts the mouth as a site of power, benevolent or otherwise. Obioma homes in on words unsaid, covenants broken, and kisses tendered. For the author, this attention isn’t new. His prior work was also preoccupied with the mouth as a locus of communion between spirits and flesh. Obioma’s debut, The Fishermen, told the story of four brothers whose lives are forever changed by a prophecy that one of them will kill the eldest among them: An eccentric homeless man, whom some of the town’s residents believe to be possessed by spirits, effectively speaks the galling betrayal into existence when he shouts it at the boys.
Though that novel bore the marks of a Greek tragedy, it unfolded entirely via the recollections of the youngest brother. An Orchestra of Minorities, by contrast, has no human narrator. If The Fishermen detailed the downfall of prideful men with earthly gravity, then Obioma’s latest meditates on the psychic turmoil of the downtrodden. It begins with a reflection from Chinonso’s chi, or guardian spirit, which narrates the story and refers to the farmer as his “host.” The being watches over Chinonso as his journey unfolds, and advocates to celestial judges on his behalf when the farmer transgresses.
Drawing from local spiritual traditions, Obioma sketches a topography of Igbo spirits through the chi’s incantations, which also serve to structure the novel. The author deftly weaves ancestral knowledge into the contemporary tale of Chinonso even as he gestures toward the country’s younger religious conventions. (He’s careful to attribute Christianity, and images of “Jisos Kraist,” to the white man.) An Orchestra brings to mind the more brazen boundary transgression of another recent novel, the Igbo and Tamil author Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, which explored the dissonance of multiple spiritual beings inhabiting one human body. Obioma, though, sticks with Chinonso’s chi and hews closely to classical conventions even when invoking the Igbo spirit. Both his tautology and his prose hint at a fascination with Aristotelian philosophy. Consider this reflection from Chinonso’s chi, recalling Ndali’s first visit to the young man’s farm:
Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in a human being? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? … Have we contemplated the physiognomy of love—how some relationships are stillborn, some are retarded and do not grow, and some fledge into adults and last through the lifetime of the lovers?
These questions, unanswered and perhaps also unanswerable, function partly to foreshadow the duress Chinonso will endure in pursuit of marriageable status. Even with his chi watching over him, Chinonso is changed by the external hostility he encounters. His journey is not only a physical one, Obioma suggests, but also a spiritual one. Where a less skillful author’s descriptions of inner tumult might register as clichés, Obioma manages to elevate his characters’ transformations: In one scene, he writes that Chinonso “spoke with great care, as if his tongue was a wet priest in the sanctuary of his mouth.” Of the first blossoming of the central pair’s love, the farmer’s chi marvels:
It seemed that by some mysterious means, she had been able to read the intents of his heart, which had all along cast themselves upon his face like a presence. And she had come to understand, by some alchemy, that the smile he’d carried on his face all along was his body’s struggle to manage the solemn intransigence of its volcanic desire.
Because Obioma pays such remarkable attention to the power of language, it’s particularly striking how rarely the author brings that focus to bear on Ndali and the other women whose affections have buttressed Chinonso’s life. Depictions of Ndali veer between hagiography and dismissal; Obioma mostly portrays Ndali’s interior conflicts through her lover’s questions about her loyalty. An Orchestra of Minorities, which echoes the name Chinonso’s late father gave to singing birds, concerns itself chiefly with the actions and psychic rumblings of men. In this familiar formula, women all too often serve as either motivation or collateral damage. This is also notably, if also regrettably, classical.
Still, Obioma writes with an exigent precision that makes An Orchestra of Minorities feel at once timely and speculative. The novel aches with Chinonso. His triumphs are rare and hard-won. Obioma compels the reader to root for him, to see the poor chicken farmer’s story as an epic.
It’s not clear if the story is really true. The previous sentence applies to so many things these days, but in this case refers to BuzzFeed News’s Thursday night report that President Donald Trump allegedly directed his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower project in Moscow.
BuzzFeed News had just two sources, both anonymous law-enforcement officials. Nobody, including Cohen, has corroborated the story. And on Friday night the special counsel’s spokesman issued a statement calling parts of the story inaccurate, without specifying what exactly was amiss.
But let’s indulge the speculative assumption that the basic premise of the report is true. What does that mean for the investigation of the president? In short, that it just got a lot easier to pin him down.
Obstruction of justice is often a difficult crime to prove, because it requires the prosecutor to show that the defendant had “corrupt” intent. That is, the prosecutor must demonstrate that the defendant not only intentionally committed the crime, but also did so specifically to prevent the criminal-justice system from functioning.
Most crimes (like, say, robbery) don’t need that second showing. They only require a defendant to have acted intentionally—and since almost nobody robs a house or a bank by accident, showing that the robber is the person who committed the crime also proves intentionality.
Obstruction is different—especially when a defendant might have acted with mixed motives. If, say, the president fired FBI Director James Comey because he believed he was a bad manager, but with some thought to the collateral benefit of harming the Russia investigation, that mixed purpose on his part would make it very hard to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he had the requisite criminal intent. He could respond that his real motive was good governance, and it would be a challenge to convince the jury that this wasn’t at least partially true.
BuzzFeed News’s story about Cohen changes the equation. When someone attempts to suborn perjury—which is what lawyers call it when you ask a friend to lie on your behalf—there cannot be any reasonable scenario in which mixed motives might apply. There’s only one reason you ask a person to lie—to conceal guilt—and that, by itself, proves a corrupt motive.
Even the president’s attorney-general nominee, William Barr, would agree with that statement. As he wrote in a memorandum long before these allegations came to light: “If a President knowingly … suborns perjury, or induces a witness to change testimony, or commits any act deliberately impairing the integrity or availability of evidence, then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction.”
So the Cohen allegations, if true, are a legal game changer. And yet perhaps the story will not make that much of a difference in the legal world, because as I’ve written before, Justice Department policy prohibits the special counsel from indicting a sitting president, and Robert Mueller is exceedingly unlikely to violate that policy.
Thus, the real question is whether the Cohen blockbuster also has political salience—might it change the equation in the House and Senate regarding impeachment? It seems as though it should. Remember that in 1998–99, during the investigation of President Bill Clinton, the most significant charges against him involved very similar allegations about suborning perjury.
Specifically, in the articles of impeachment adopted by the House of Representatives, Clinton was accused of obstruction for having attempted to persuade Monica Lewinsky and Betty Currie to lie about his conduct. He was charged with asking Lewinsky to lie in the civil suit brought by Paula Jones, and with coaching Currie to give false testimony in the criminal grand-jury investigation being conducted by the independent counsel. Fourteen currently serving Republican senators were in Congress back then, and all thought that obstruction of justice was an impeachable and removable offense—voting for either impeachment in the House or conviction on the obstruction charge in the Senate.
Indeed, as then-Representative, now-Senator Lindsey Graham put it: “If you believe he obstructed justice in a civil rights lawsuit, don’t move the bar any more … You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role … Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”
Those senators must feel deeply politically uncomfortable right now. Many of them (most notably Graham) built their careers on the proposition that Clinton had obstructed justice and was unfit for office; today, they are faced with the possibility that Trump might have done nearly the same thing. How will they react now?
In a world in which the U.S. government is functioning somewhat normally, the president right now would be preparing for his delegation’s trip to the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, next week. Once there, he would mingle with foreign leaders. He would likely endure a series of speeches on the promises of globalization and the perils of climate change. As he did last year, he might deliver his own remarks extolling the progress of America under his leadership.
But this is not the world in which we live. And in at least one respect, Donald Trump couldn’t be happier about it.
Friday marked day 28 of the partial government shutdown. In the past month, many Americans have missed paychecks, navigated long lines at airports, and watched as Republicans and Democrats advance a cold war of sorts over federal funding that shows no signs of ending. Polling indicates that most voters blame the president for the standoff. But according to a half dozen of his associates, Trump is taking comfort in one consequence of the chaos: He doesn’t have to go to Davos.
“The shutdown gave him the easiest out ever,” said one former senior White House official who, like the other associates I talked to, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to share their conversations with and impressions of the president. “That’s the bright spot for him in all this.”
[Read: Waiting for a shutdown to end in disaster]
Perhaps the most relatable thing about Donald Trump is that he revels in canceled plans, and specifically those that require him to leave his home and television set behind. On January 10, the president announced that he would no longer be making the journey overseas. “Because of the Democrats intransigence on Border Security and the great importance of Safety for our Nation, I am respectfully cancelling my very important trip to Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. My warmest regards and apologies to the @WEF!” he tweeted. On Thursday, the White House announced that the rest of the U.S. delegation, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, wouldn’t be attending either.
Despite the conciliatory tone in Trump’s statement, those close to him say they weren’t fooled. “Getting him ready for overseas trips was always a struggle. He’s always like, Why do we have to do this shit?” another former senior White House official told me. “He likes control and being around his own people, and in Davos he didn’t feel like he had either of those things.”
The president’s apparent giddiness about skipping Davos reflects his broader disdain for travel. Trump has lived in a tighter bubble than most American presidents. He prefers to leave the White House for one of two destinations: Mar-a-Lago—his Palm Beach, Florida, resort—or a campaign rally, where he can feed off the energy from his supporters and enjoy playing the part of master of ceremonies.
That’s why his decision on Davos, to the officials, was so unsurprising. At rallies and at his homes, surrounded largely by people who support him, Trump can be himself, touting the same lines and arguments from the campaign trail to little criticism. On the world stage, however, Trump is forced to contend with leaders who have ideas and styles drastically different from his own. That’s been true for every president, but rather than embrace it, Trump seems to actively look for opportunities to avoid it—a proclivity that likely impedes his ability to champion the country around the globe.
“The president hates traveling, but when he does, he’d much rather travel to a rally where he’s surrounded by regular people than something where he has to rub elbows with global elites,” a third former White House official said. “It makes him uncomfortable.”
Trump’s performance at last year’s Davos summit illustrated his lack of awareness of, or perhaps indifference to, the protocol for international junkets. In his speech, he omitted any mention of geopolitics or the international issues that thread through most WEF addresses. Instead, he lauded himself as America’s first “businessman” to become president, and predicted that his overhaul of the tax code would spur billions of dollars in new jobs and investments in the U.S. In a question-and-answer session following his speech, he decried the press as “nasty, vicious, and fake.” (And, ironically in light of the current gridlock, he said he believed that bipartisan immigration reform was just around the corner.)
[Read: Donald disappoints Davos]
Often, the president’s gripes are less about the travel itself than they are about the accommodations. Staffers said their first priority in scheduling political trips is to avoid overnight stays, because Trump dislikes hotels that aren’t his—he thinks they’re “dirty,” three of the sources said.
For that reason, in 2016 aides tried to get Trump back to his own bed in Manhattan as regularly as possible. (Trump did, however, grow somewhat fond of Holiday Inn Express hotels, the first former senior official told me, noting that he liked their TV setup. Even now, as president, Trump deeply misses his own television in the White House residence when he’s away, another official said—the president refers to it as his “super TiVo.”) Whereas most other candidates bookended rallies with stays at motels or in RVs, after his events Trump used one of his private planes or his helicopter to head back to his gilded Trump Tower apartment. At the time, American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp, now one of the president’s most outspoken supporters, criticized the habit, arguing that Trump’s lack of personal, one-on-one interactions with voters could cost the then-candidate.
Leaving his home, his routine, his super TiVo—the prospect has even caused some trips to be dramatically shortened or scrapped altogether, as the Associated Press reported in November. The outlet pointed to a planned trip to Colombia earlier that month, which the White House canceled after “citing unspecified scheduling concerns.” The AP noted that Trump’s public schedule at the time didn’t “reveal any significant conflicts.” Earlier in 2018, the AP added, the White House canceled another South America trip, citing Trump’s “need to focus on the crisis in Syria.” Now he can add Davos to that list of would-be destinations.
Just because Trump is home and in his element doesn’t mean that he’s any closer to a shutdown solution, as the impact on federal workers snowballs daily. And there’s little sign he’ll use his proximity to the Hill to negotiate with his opponents, as his feud with Democratic leaders appears to grow more toxic. But at the very least, the burden of preparing for a taxpayer-funded jaunt to Switzerland to trade ideas with many of the world’s most powerful leaders won’t weigh heavily on the president’s mind.
This weekend, women will take to the streets. The third annual Women’s March will bring thousands of women to Washington, D.C., and other cities across the country to mark “two years of resistance to the Trump presidency, two years of training new activists, and two years of building power.”
From its first year, the march has highlighted the significant divisions among women’s political movements. As I reported in January 2017, pro-life feminists were kicked off the list of sponsors. Over the past year, another ugly fight has emerged: The lead organizers of the national march have been accused of condoning anti-Semitism and making disparaging comments about Jews. In recent weeks, major political and religious groups have either denounced or pulled their support for the march, largely because of these accusations.
Women have played a huge role in shaping this moment in American politics. Women voters helped Democrats dominate their congressional races in the 2018 midterm elections, and women candidates broke numerous records in running for office. But the many marches taking place this weekend are a reminder that one narrowly defined women’s movement can’t describe the fullness of women’s influence on American politics.
[Read: These pro-lifers are headed to the Women’s March on Washington]
Tamika Mallory, one of the lead organizers, is at the center of the latest controversy over the march. Nearly a year ago, she attended an event sponsored by the Nation of Islam, where the group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan, made a number of wildly anti-Semitic claims about Jews, including that they control the government and cause homosexuality in black men. She has also posted about her admiration for Farrakhan on social media, calling him “the GOAT,” or “greatest of all time.”
Instead of disavowing Farrakhan, Mallory has consistently equivocated. “I don’t agree with everything that Minister Farrakhan said about Jews or women or gay people,” she told my colleague Adam Serwer in an interview last March. But “the brothers and sisters that I work with in the Nation of Islam are people, too.” In an interview on The View this week, Meghan McCain said she thinks the Women’s March is “anti-Semitism masked in activism.” When the host pressed Mallory to condemn Farrakhan, she refused.
[Read: Why Tamika Mallory won’t condemn Farrakhan]
Jewish women involved with the founding of the march have also accused the lead organizers of making explicitly anti-Semitic statements and purposefully pushing Jewish concerns to the side. According to a report in Tablet magazine, Mallory and another organizer, Carmen Perez, claimed that “Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people” and were “leaders of the American slave trade.” The march organizers have denied making these comments.
While these allegations have created a firestorm, they have also masked deeper divisions within the Women’s March movement. Some organizers of local marches have apparently been frustrated by the top-down management style and disorganization of the national Women’s March. A competing organization, March On, will also host gatherings across the country this weekend. “Many women in red states, for example, couldn’t follow an organizing playbook crafted out of D.C. or New York City,” Vanessa Wruble, one of the organizers who split with the original march, told Tablet.
[Read: The year of the woman still leaves women with terrible representation in Congress]
Pro-life women have also been excluded from the national march. Although a number of self-described pro-life feminist groups signed up to be sponsors and march alongside the original Women’s March, they were removed from the march’s official list of supporters because of their anti-abortion views. “The Women’s March’s platform is pro-choice and that has been our stance from day one,” the organizers said in a statement at the time. Many women, from conservative Republicans to self-described progressive feminists, have found this alienating. As McCain said on The View, “You’re talking about all women being invited to that march? I’m pro-life. We were not invited.”
On Friday, thousands of pro-lifers from around the country, including many women, gathered for their own march: the March for Life. In many ways, the pro-life movement is a women’s movement, too: The March for Life is headed by a woman, Jeanne Mancini, and so are many of Washington’s most influential pro-life advocacy groups. While these female marchers likely weren’t the women who swept Democrats to power in November, they have significant political influence: President Donald Trump addressed the March for Life via video, promising to veto bills expanding abortion rights, and Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech to the rally.
Now more than ever, the national Women’s March cannot claim that it speaks for all women. Its institutional support is waning: The Democratic National Committee pulled its sponsorship of the march, and EMILY’s List, the lobbying group that supports female pro-choice candidates for office, is not supporting the march, either. Prominent female politicians, including 2020 presidential hopefuls, are staying away: Axios reported that Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar are all skipping the event. And religious institutions, including Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a prominent New York City Reform synagogue, announced that it would no longer support the Women’s March because of the claims about anti-Semitism.
In January of 2017, as Donald Trump was taking office, the Women’s March captured the rage and discontent and motivation that many American women seemed to be feeling. But as it has transitioned from a moment to a movement, the messiness of women’s diversity has made the power of the Women’s March much less clear.
The longest government shutdown in American history is making headlines around the world. It will also have global effects, none of them good. U.S. political leaders, so unable to compromise, should understand how their decisions chip away at national security.
First and most obvious are the practical consequences: the State Department employees who have spent weeks on furlough, unable to advocate for U.S. interests; the active-duty Coast Guard members who continue to perform essential functions without pay. Going into critical talks with China, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office lacks 70 percent of its staff.
These effects will end when the government reopens. Not so the increased political polarization that this process engenders, and that provides the kindling on which Russia and others are so keen to throw sparks.
Moscow believes that a divided America is weaker and more inwardly focused, less able to marshal national will or project power—or, to Moscow’s mind, threaten Russia. So Moscow continues to disrupt American democracy by empowering the most polarizing voices and amplifying them in cyberspace and beyond. Left wing, right wing—the ideological disposition matters less than the intensity of the fight.
The wisest response would be national solidarity and a demonstration that the United States can’t be fractured. The actual response, of course, has been anything but that. America’s newly divided government has kicked off 2019 by closing itself, practically doing the Kremlin’s work for it. Who needs a foreign adversary when there’s an opposing party?
The most consequential foreign-policy downside of the shutdown, however, is in the realm of ideas.
Today, Republicans and Democrats generally agree that the United States has reentered an era of great power competition, in which Beijing and Moscow wish to contest the attractiveness of democratic government and shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model. Many policy makers are newly worried that alternatives to liberal democracy will gain currency, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle concur. Senator Mitt Romney cautions that the alternative offered by China and Russia is “autocratic, corrupt, and brutal,” while Bernie Sanders has called for solidarity among democracies in the face of an “authoritarian axis.”
This competition of democracy versus dictatorship is to a degree a contest of narratives—and the government shutdown plays into the wrong one. Beijing and others peddle a seemingly attractive story: that fractious, paralyzed democracies simply can’t muster the will to deliver the goods their people want. Better, they suggest, to embrace an effective, tech-fueled autocracy that can move nimbly to pursue national interests and spread prosperity. What’s a bit of free speech and the right to choose your leaders if those leaders merely squabble while strongmen lead their populations boldly forward? Government derives its just powers, they suggest, from the convenience of the governed.
Even recently, this line of argument would have been seen by the vast majority of people as obviously wrong, and until recently polls showed that majorities in virtually every region of the world favored democracy. But liberal democracies continue to create unfortunate grist for the mill.
A year ago—and remember, the last major shutdown was only last January—China’s official news agency published a commentary saying, “What’s happening in the United States today will make more people worldwide reflect on the viability and legitimacy of such a chaotic political system.” This time around, the Global Times, Beijing’s jingoistic, English-language outlet, doubled down. “Americans boldly portray their democracy as a global model and sell its standard worldwide,” the newspaper said. But “the government shutdown has been going on for nearly three weeks and involves 800,000 government employees not being able to work normally. This is too much even for the US. Developing countries that are exploring a development path can hardly afford it.”
This latest shutdown is, of course, just one episode, and will not on its own puncture the democratic balloon. Nor will populations abroad simply forget all the drawbacks of dictatorship and illiberalism. But combine the shutdown with its previous episodes, add to it fiscal cliffs and battles over raising the debt limit, salt in the effect of sequestration and an inability to pass basic legislation, and you have the makings of a narrative that is bad for America. Brexit chaos, protests on Parisian streets, and the like don’t help.
Today’s government shutdown is unlike North Korean missiles or Iranian proxies or Russian hacking. It is a problem of America’s own making, featuring only Americans against Americans, and is thus amenable to immediate resolution. Indeed, everyone knows that the U.S. government will reopen, if not when and on what terms. Once it does, this latest demonstration of political dysfunction will begin its retreat into memory. Its national-security effects may be longer lasting.
No comments:
Post a Comment