Numa das tardes mais quentes do ano, em uma cafeteria da Asa Norte, em Brasília, Dom Werneck pediu a segunda dose de vodka com muito gelo. Ele é um dos líderes do movimento intervencionista, que quer a volta da ditadura militar no Brasil. Em quase três horas de conversa, ele explicou os motivos que fizeram com que boa parte dos militaristas decidisse apoiar um candidato – Jair Bolsonaro – e depois passasse a conspirar abertamente contra ele.
Em uma incursão a grupos e canais militaristas pela internet, vi que o que ele falava é endossado por outros representantes, e que o grupo intervencionista tem mais poder de fogo do que se supunha quando começou a aparecer, a partir de 2013.
Ele tinha carisma, boa lábia e nenhum pudor em defender o regime militar.
Foi também a partir desse ano que os intervencionistas passaram a ver em Bolsonaro a solução para os seus anseios, uma vez que um golpe militar nos moldes tradicionais, como o de 1964, estava longe de acontecer. A saída seria alçar alguém pelas vias democráticas, e o ex-capitão parecia se encaixar perfeitamente no papel. Ele tinha carisma, boa lábia e nenhum pudor em defender o regime militar.
O agora presidente, inclusive, falava abertamente sobre “acionar o artigo 142″ quando chegasse ao poder. O artigo em questão é sempre evocado por intervencionistas como a prerrogativa constitucional para um golpe militar, ao apontar que caberia às Forças Armadas a garantia da “lei e da ordem” no país.
Werneck tinha isso em mente quando, a partir de 2013, se aproximou do ex-capitão. Ele reivindica a autoria de atos que ajudaram a tornar Bolsonaro conhecido pelo grande público e alega ter sido o autor da ideia de levar militantes para recepcionar o ex-deputado federal no aeroporto de Brasília semanalmente e publicar vídeos de Bolsonaro nos braços do povo – o que se tornou uma das marcas da sua caminhada até o Planalto. Também criou o grupo “Bolsonarianistas” no WhatsApp, que teve mais de 80 subgrupos pelo país – um embrião do que viria a ocorrer na campanha eleitoral.
“Gosto de quebrar estereótipos”, diz Werneck ao comentar que usa barba comprida e camisa jeans “como um comunista”.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Como uma espécie de “assessor informal”, Werneck seguia Bolsonaro pela Câmara dos Deputados, fazendo entrevistas “exclusivas” e transmitindo os discursos do parlamentar em lives em suas páginas – hoje ele tem duas no YouTube, uma com 76 mil assinantes e, a outra, 47 mil; além de 55 mil fãs no Facebook. Em setembro de 2016, ele teria avisado o então deputado sobre uma comissão com Maria do Rosário, pouco após o incidente em que ele disse que “não a estupraria porque ela não merece”. Bolsonaro foi ao local, bateu boca com meio mundo e virou notícia. Werneck registrou ao vivo.
Os intervencionistas se incomodam com a receptividade de Bolsonaro à ideologia liberal e a subserviência a países como EUA e Israel.
A estratégia com as ações era dar visibilidade para o ex-deputado. Até então o ex-capitão reformado era um parlamentar apagado, que nunca relatou projetos relevantes, presidiu comissões ou liderou bancadas, e que somente ganhava a luz dos holofotes por causa das polêmicas em que se envolvia.
Werneck se apresenta em vídeos como um dos organizadores das greves de caminhoneiros, categoria que se aproxima cada vez mais dos intervencionistas. Nos atos, principalmente na paralisação de 2018, não foi raro ver caminhões com faixas pedindo socorro das Forças Armadas e manifestando apoio a Bolsonaro – que chegou a apoiar a greve e depois recuou – como de praxe.
Fotos: Reprodução/Facebook
Mesmo agindo como cabo eleitoral, Werneck diz que sempre teve um pé atrás com Bolsonaro. “Todo mundo sabia que ele era um mau militar, e isso pega mal no meio”, afirma. Ele diz que dava “apoio crítico” ao deputado apenas para alçar ao poder uma pessoa minimamente ligada ao militarismo.
Os intervencionistas também se incomodavam com a receptividade de Bolsonaro à ideologia liberal, com a aproximação com o atual ministro da Economia, Paulo Guedes, e a frequente subserviência a outros países, principalmente Estados Unidos e Israel. Essas características, segundo Werneck, demonstravam uma aproximação com o “establishment” e conflitavam com o nacionalismo pregado pelo meio militar. Aos poucos, ficou difícil não enxergar o ex-deputado como um “traidor da causa”.
‘A gente não concorda com nada do que a Maria do Rosário prega, mas pelo menos ela é fiel à sua ideologia.’
“Na época, Bolsonaro tinha um discurso mais nacionalista e reconhecia que no atual modelo republicano seria impossível colocar o Brasil nos trilhos. Depois, ele foi para o lado liberal. Isso me irritou profundamente. Eu e muitos intervencionistas rompemos com ele e voltamos nossos esforços para uma insurgência militar”, afirma Ricardo Dex, intervencionista que fez parte de um dos grupos que costumava recepcionar o ex-deputado no aeroporto de São Paulo.
A falta de coerência no discurso de Bolsonaro é o ponto mais criticado. Nessa lógica, até uma das inimigas do ex-deputado teria mais valor que ele. “A gente não concorda com nada do que a Maria do Rosário prega, mas pelo menos ela é fiel à sua ideologia, e isso a gente respeita”, alfinetou Priscila Azevedo, esposa de Werneck, também youtuber da causa militar.
Werneck era dono de restaurantes, Azevedo trabalhava em um banco privado. Os dois deixaram os empregos há cerca de seis anos. Hoje, pagam as contas com a venda de produtos militaristas e doações dos seguidores.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Ainda durante a campanha eleitoral, diz Werneck, a estratégia mudou: se distanciar de Bolsonaro e transformar seu vice, general Hamilton Mourão, em candidato a presidente. O general acabou se tornando vice na chapa bolsonarista e tudo foi por água abaixo.
Os militaristas se dividiram. Werneck e Azevedo passaram a fazer campanha pelo boicote às eleições e para pressionar a Mourão a dar um golpe. Outros grupos continuaram apoiando Bolsonaro, contando que a presença de Mourão na chapa era decisiva.
Como as eleições aconteceram, a esperança se tornou a de que “algo” eventualmente impedisse o cabeça de chapa de se manter na Presidência, de modo que o vice assumisse. Na visão deles, Bolsonaro estaria sendo usado pelo grupo militar apenas para vencer a eleição, por ter bons resultados nas pesquisas eleitorais. O grupo militar que encabeça o governo, formado pela maior presença de militares no primeiro escalão desde a redemocratização, é quem estaria dando as cartas de verdade.
“Pode ver todas as vezes que o Bolsonaro teve que recuar em tão poucos dias de governo [a nossa conversa ocorre no dia 15 de janeiro]. Ele fala uma coisa e, se o grupo militar não gostar, é obrigado a voltar atrás”, comentou Priscila. Um dos exemplos foi a permissão para os Estados Unidos abrirem uma base militar no país, que foi defendida por Bolsonaro, sofreu grave resistência dos militares do alto escalão e em seguida foi descartada.
“Não vai ter golpe interno. Não precisa. O próprio Bolsonaro vai se destruir”, comentou Werneck. “Ele [Bolsonaro] sabe que as pessoas da Presidência estão usando ele protocolarmente, institucionalmente, para ser o presidente. Ele era o cara que deu arranque, pegou popularidade. Não tinha como colocar outra pessoa pra disputar. Os militares usaram o que tinham. Usaram ele”, disse.
Apesar de se apresentar como Dom Werneck na internet, seu nome verdadeiro é Reginaldo Florêncio Verneque. Ele é autor de transmissões ao vivo pelo Facebook e YouTube com centenas de milhares de visualizações, em que defende qualquer coisa relacionada às Forças Armadas. Tem barba comprida e usa camisa jeans, “como um comunista”, segundo o próprio. “Gosto de quebrar estereótipos”, disse. Sua esposa, Priscila, nos acompanhava no café. Vestia camiseta verde-oliva com adereços que imitavam insígnias militares.
Agora o “grupo de malucos” intervencionistas tem trânsito na Esplanada. E tem como maior representante o vice Mourão.
Werneck admite que, há até pouco tempo, os intervencionistas eram tratados como um balaio de malucos, em que alguns poucos gatos pingados protestavam nas ruas e basicamente ninguém dava bola. O movimento cresceu nos últimos anos, amparado pelos escândalos de corrupção e o sentimento de ódio à política tradicional. O ponto alto veio em 2015, durante os atos pelo impeachment da ex-presidente Dilma Rousseff, em que até 48% das pessoas disseram apoiar um novo golpe militar, segundo pesquisa da Universidade de Vanderbilt, dos Estados Unidos, em parceria com a Universidade de Brasília e apoio da Capes.
O casal coleciona milhares de seguidores e haters pela causa que defende. Apesar de serem os intervencionistas mais conhecidos, e talvez os mais influentes, também são alvos de acusações de se apropriarem do dinheiro de viúvas de militares que sonham com a intervenção. Werneck era dono de restaurantes, Azevedo trabalhava em um banco privado. Os dois deixaram os empregos há cerca de seis anos. Hoje, pagam as contas com a venda de produtos militaristas e doações dos seguidores.
Agora o “grupo de malucos” intervencionistas tem trânsito na Esplanada. E tem como maior representante o vice-presidente, general Hamilton Mourão.
Em vídeos de outros intervencionistas, é flagrante o incômodo com o escândalo de corrupção que envolve Flávio Bolsonaro.
Mourão já defendeu a intervenção militar para “salvar o país” da corrupção – ele perdeu um cargo no Exército e se aposentou por causa dessas declarações. Durante a campanha eleitoral, no ano passado, despertou comichões prazerosos nos militaristas quando falou da possibilidade de um “autogolpe” do presidente, junto às Forças Armadas, na hipótese de anarquia. Hoje, seu discurso é bem mais moderado. Ainda assim, é visto como herói por militares e simpatizantes. Intervencionistas juram de pé junto que são próximos a ele. Werneck foi o único civil convidado para a cerimônia interna que homenageou o general quando passou à reserva.
Apesar de o movimento ser heterogêneo, as opiniões do casal parecem ter respaldo no universo militarista. Em vídeos de outros intervencionistas, é flagrante o incômodo com relação ao possível escândalo de corrupção que envolve o senador Flávio Bolsonaro, filho de Jair, e o motorista Fabrício Queiroz.
“Essa história do Queiroz está me cheirando cabide de emprego (…) Eu não boto a minha mão no fogo”, disse Plaucio Pucci, um militarista que poucas semanas antes pedia voto para Bolsonaro. “Meu filho, passa logo um antivirus nessa máquina. Caso contrário ela apagará rapidamente”, ameaçou outro, Alexandre Bellei. “Qual é a diferença de um corrupto de R$ 90 milhões e um de R$ 90 mil? (…) Agora fica esse nhenhenhé. Não tem nhenhenhé, é corrupto igual”, afirmou mais um youtuber, José Márcio.
Após Mourão defender a intervenção militar em uma palestra, Werneck mandou fazer um banner com 10 metros de altura em homenagem ao general.
Quando Mourão apareceu no noticiário nacional, em setembro de 2017, após dizer em uma palestra que poderia haver intervenção militar no caso de o Judiciário “não solucionar o problema político”, Werneck viu a notícia e foi para uma gráfica do Gama, cidade do Distrito Federal onde mora, mandar fazer um banner com 10 metros de altura com uma foto de Mourão e a frase “Obrigado militares por nos salvar. Obrigado General Mourão”. Levou o banner para a frente do Congresso e o içou.
Passou a acompanhar de perto o general e por isso foi chamado para a despedida dele, que registrou em um vídeo de 25 minutos em seu canal. Por causa dessa proximidade, Werneck foi procurado no começo do ano passado por Levy Fidélix, que queria levar o general para a política, filiando-o ao PRTB.
O intervencionista gravou dois vídeos com Fidélix. Em um deles, o presidente do PRTB aparece comicamente vestido com roupas militares em uma loja de produtos militares dizendo que está “pronto para a guerra” e que é “intervencionista de coração”.
Werneck e Priscila são amigos do general Paulo Assis, que foi comandante de Mourão nas Forças Armadas e já contou ao Intercept como o aconselhou a entrar no mundo da política. O casal estava presente no dia em que o general assinou sua filiação ao partido. Os dois também se filiaram. Depois, tomaram um chope gigante para comemorar.
O casal é próximo de Mourão e esteve presente no dia em que o general assinou sua filiação ao PRTB.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Werneck reclama que Fidélix usou Mourão como ferramenta para garantir ao seu partido a continuidade no mundo político, já que não elegeu nenhum parlamentar este ano – nem ele próprio, que concorreu à Câmara – e, por isso, seria impactado pelas limitações da cláusula de barreira, que impede que partidos sem representantes no Congresso tenham acesso a recursos do fundo partidário e tempo de televisão.
Uma frase que Werneck disse me chamou a atenção. Era que Bolsonaro não sabia lidar com a oposição dos intervencionistas, já que eles não podem ser considerados comunistas ou esquerdistas, como costuma atacar seus inimigos políticos. “Somos de direita, somos conservadores. Somos até mais radicais do que os próprios militares, porque nós queremos que se feche Congresso e Supremo e tenha uma junta militar governando o país”, disse.
“É a tal da mão amiga e braço forte. Nós somos a mão amiga. Eles são o braço forte”.
The post Como os intervencionistas criaram o ‘mito’ Bolsonaro e depois pularam do barco appeared first on The Intercept.
Pressure for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to resign is mounting after a medical school yearbook page surfaced showing a photo of a man in blackface, initially understood to be Northam, standing next to a man in Ku Klux Klan robes. Over the weekend, Northam denied being in the photo, but apologized for wearing blackface while impersonating Michael Jackson on another occasion. Reports also revealed that Northam’s Virginia Military Institute yearbook page listed him with the nickname “Coonman.”
Northam has not yet decided whether he’ll resign, but patience among members of his cabinet is wearing thin.
Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni posted a statement on the progressive political blog Blue Virginia in which he called his state to reflect on its “ugly history.” He argued that “change is taking too long” and denounced statewide political leadership for its lack of racial and ethnic representation. He went on to express empathy for the disparate treatment that Black Americans face at the hands of police.
“Experiences of several marginalized communities pale in comparison to the Black experience in America,” Qarni wrote. “I have had a few unpleasant experiences with law enforcement; however, I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be slammed to the ground and handcuffed without cause. Or even worse, shot dead.”
The secretary compared anti-black racism to the experiences of him and his wife, Fatima. “My wife wears a hijab and when she and I travel by air, I feel like all eyes are on us; however, I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have your actions be monitored and scrutinized every day of your life, even while running basic errands.”
“I feel anger that my ancestors were colonized by white people; however, I can’t imagine living in a country where my ancestors were trafficked, shackled, beaten, raped, lynched, and enslaved,” Qarni’s statement continues. “White and other people of color can empathize and try to relate to the Black experience in our nation; however, no one can truly grasp the depth of the pain, trauma, humiliation and anguish felt by Black Americans over the last 400 years in this country.”
The governor called an all-staff meeting Monday morning, but made no decision on how to respond to an increasing number of requests from state and national political leaders for him to step down.
In an email to The Intercept, state Finance Secretary Aubrey Layne said that while he serves “at the pleasure of the Governor, I work for the people of Virginia. I just plan to keep doing my job.” Other members of Northam’s cabinet did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe; Virginia Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner; Rep. Bobby Scott; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass; former Attorney General Eric Holder; and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton are among Democrats who’ve called for the governor to resign. Democratic presidential hopefuls Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro have also called for Northam to resign.
Virginia’s Democratic leader in the state Senate defended Northam in an interview with the Washington Post on Friday, saying there is no need to examine “something that occurred 30 years ago.” Sen. Dick Saslaw, who’s facing his first primary challenge as a state senator in June, has a controversial history of questioning whether racial or religious minorities could win in the majority-white, majority-Christian state and of defending the state’s Confederate history. Qarni, in 2015, wrote an op-ed detailing challenges he faced while running as a Muslim candidate for the state House of Delegates, and in a comment on a Facebook post criticizing the op-ed, he named Saslaw as part of the problem.
The post “Change Is Taking Too Long” — Cabinet Member Speaks Out Amid Gov. Ralph Northam’s Blackface Fallout appeared first on The Intercept.
“Uma guia que trabalha na Casa Dom Inácio de Loyola marcou vários dos matadores profissionais de João de Deus, pedindo para me localizarem”, escreveu Sabrina Bittencourt. A mensagem de WhatsApp chegou às 14h50 de sábado. Menos de seis horas depois, a mulher que ajudou a denunciar os estupros cometidos por Prem Baba e João de Deus publicou sua carta de suicídio.
“Sou imparável até o fim dos meus dias”, ela havia postado dois dias antes. A notícia de seu suicídio foi aterradora. E a cobertura da imprensa sobre o caso, revoltante. No domingo, seu suicídio foi anunciado por diversos veículos da imprensa. Na manhã seguinte, a história já era outra. A incerteza sobre o local exato da morte, a falta de provas do suicídio e a ausência de detalhes sobre seu velório fizeram a imprensa dar um passo atrás: teria a ativista realmente tirado a própria vida? Começava ali a caçada pelo corpo de Sabrina Bittencourt.
Uma notícia do jornal O Globo, que destacava as “informações desencontradas” sobre a morte, apresentou a hipótese de que Sabrina teria forjado seu suicídio e assumido uma nova identidade. Já textos da revista Carta Capital e do Hypeness citavam a opinião de pessoas próximas a ela sobre a possibilidade de uma “morte simbólica”, inventada para que as ameaças contra ela e sua família cessassem.
Trabalhar para provar que essa mulher forjou sua morte para poder continuar viva é colocar sua cabeça de volta numa guilhotina.Nada poderia ser mais irresponsável. Se a morte for real, a falta de respeito da imprensa pela dor dessa família é, para dizer o mínimo, insensível. Se não for, trabalhar para provar que essa mulher forjou sua morte para poder continuar viva é colocar sua cabeça de volta numa guilhotina com a lâmina pronta para despencar.
Como eu, todas as jornalistas que mantinham contato com ela – que costumava nos enviar mensagens diariamente no WhatsApp por uma lista de transmissão – sabiam o quanto ela temia por sua vida. Ainda assim, de alguma forma, a hipótese de ela ter mentido sobre a própria morte parece soar muito mais plausível do que a possibilidade de essa mulher, alvo de ameaças há meses e que havia tocado no assunto naquele mesmo dia, ter sido assassinada.
Print de mensagens enviadas por Sabrina Bittencourt a jornalistas horas antes de publicar uma carta de suicídio no Facebook.
Imagem: Reprodução/WhatsApp
A notícia da morte de Sabrina veio cerca de três semanas depois de conversarmos por uma chamada de vídeo. Nunca tinha visto ou ouvido uma pessoa tão exausta. Isolada em algum canto do mundo, ela contava, abatida, as denúncias que vinha recebendo; sua dedicação em tempo integral ao acolhimento das vítimas; as ameaças incessantes contra ela e sua família; e a mudança constante para evitar ser localizada por quem a ameaçava.
Seu suicídio não deixa de ser uma espécie de assassinato. Os responsáveis são aqueles que ameaçavam matá-la.Nessas condições, seu suicídio não deixa de ser uma espécie de assassinato. Os responsáveis são aqueles que ameaçavam matá-la. Conseguiram. Mas, ao embarcar na hipótese de uma morte forjada sem que isso represente qualquer benefício para a sociedade, a imprensa constrói não apenas um crime sem autores, mas também, como me disse um amigo, um crime sem vítimas.
Em vídeo de 13 de dezembro de 2018, Sabrina desmente notícia de que teria cometido suicídio na época e diz que está “no seu limite” e não irá tolerar “jornalista urubu”.
Qual é o propósito? Qual é a finalidade de ligar para consulados, embaixadas e importunar o único familiar de Sabrina a ter se pronunciado sobre o caso – um menino de 16 anos – sabendo que arriscar a vida de Sabrina (se ela ainda tiver uma) é o único resultado possível da busca por seu corpo?
Esse jornalismo que lava as mãos de suas consequências, cegado pela busca utópica de uma (inexistente) objetividade inabalável, não me interessa. É irresponsável e umbiguista. Seus defensores podem dizer: “É nosso trabalho ir atrás dos fatos, sejam eles quais forem, e reportá-los ao público”. Eu rebato: mesmo quando o único impacto possível de seu trabalho for facilitar o assassinato de uma mulher?
The post A caçada ao corpo de Sabrina Bittencourt appeared first on The Intercept.
House Republican lawmakers are being encouraged by their party’s leadership to play up gruesome murders, rapes, and other crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in the United States.
In a newsletter sent on Friday, House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., provided the caucus and staff with a messaging update that compiled immigrant crimes by date and congressional district. The newsletter is used by the GOP caucus to provide talking points and messaging guidance. The edition of the newsletter dealing with immigrant crimes, which was obtained by The Intercept, offered a messaging opportunity to leverage the government shutdown against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
“Speaker Pelosi made one thing clear during the government shutdown: she doesn’t care about the tragic consequences of illegal immigration on American families,” the newsletter says.
Under the header “The Democrats’ far-left immigration agenda has tragic real-world consequences,” the newsletter goes on to list crimes committed over the last two decades.
The list includes alleged crimes and points out which Republican House members’ districts the events took place in. In one case, “an illegal immigrant from El Salvador was charged with murdering four people” in Rep. Mark Amodei’s Nevada district, the newsletter says. In another, it recounts “the story of a 16-year-old, who was killed in 2000 by an illegal immigrant in a car crash on Father’s Day” in Rep. Barry Loudermilk’s Georgia district. Yet another bullet point describes “an illegal immigrant who previously had been deported in 2015 for a felony drug trafficking conviction [who] was charged with first degree rape” in Rep. Gary Palmer’s Alabama district.
The congressional document mirrors recent tweets by President Donald Trump linking crimes committed by immigrants to the need to expand the wall along the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
Just before the midterm election last year, Trump tweeted a 53-second video featuring Luis Bracamontes boasting about murdering two sheriff’s deputies in 2014. After the clip of Bracamontes, the video flashes text that claims, “Democrats let him into our country … Democrats let him stay.” As independent fact-checkers noted, the message was highly misleading. Bracamontes was deported under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The House Republican Conference messaging document includes several stories that were simply shared by Republican lawmakers without any names or news stories attached. The House Republican Conference spokesperson declined to comment on the newsletter.
Studies have consistently shown that crime rates are actually lower among foreign immigrants than among native-born Americans. But the strategy does not appear to be a fair-minded discussion of immigration policy — or crime, for that matter.
Across the world, demagogues have deftly exploited bigotry to whip up anger using incidents of murder and rape. Increasingly, social media has become an effective way to weaponize tragic acts and use them for partisan political goals. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party has singularly focused on several cases of murders committed by refugees to intensify hatred of Middle Eastern immigrants. In Myanmar, lurid stories posted on Facebook detailing purported acts of rape and murder by the Muslim Rohingya minority against the Buddhist majority were used to justify a brutal ethnic cleaning in the northwest Rakhine State. In some cases, the stories were false. Viral stories that focus on the identity of killers to stoke ethnic tension can also be found in India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and beyond.
In the U.S., there is a long history of racist violence following politicians’ focus on crimes — real or imagined — by particular minority groups. Across the ideological spectrum, many on social media continue to fixate on the racial or ethnic identity of criminals. Trump’s embrace of the strategy now appears to have reverberated across the Republican Party, with GOP lawmakers now openly encouraged to stoke fear over immigrant crime.
The post GOP Leadership Instructs Lawmakers to Play Up Gruesome Murders and Rapes by Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.
The Supreme Court will decide this week whether to intervene in a case that could lead to the closure of all but one abortion clinic in Louisiana, potentially leaving tens of thousands of women without meaningful access to care. It is the first of more than a dozen abortion-related cases that are moving through the system and toward the high court. Unless the court takes action, two of Louisiana’s three remaining clinics would likely shutter operations.
At issue is a state law passed in 2014 that requires abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinics where they practice. It is identical to a law passed a year earlier in Texas — a law that was stuck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 2016 decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
The admitting privileges law is what is known as a targeted restriction on abortion providers, or TRAP law. Theoretically, it is designed to ensure a continuum of care in the exceedingly rare event that serious complications arise from an abortion procedure. The problem, however, is that it can be nearly impossible for abortionists to obtain admitting privileges — for example, some hospitals require a certain number of admissions as a requisite for granting privileges, but because abortion is so safe, doctors are unable to meet that threshold. (Serious complications requiring hospitalization occur in just .05 percent of first-trimester abortions.) The requirements for obtaining admitting privileges vary from hospital to hospital and can be decided based on politics alone. In Louisiana, two doctors were denied privileges precisely because they provide abortion care, according to court documents filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is challenging the state law.
In Texas, the admitting privileges law in part led to the closure of roughly half of the state’s clinics. CRR challenged that law, and in 2016 the Supreme Court ruled that it could not stand. While the alleged purpose of the regulation was to protect the health and safety of women seeking care, the law did not do that. The court ruled that in order to survive a legal challenge, the actual medical benefit of such a restriction must outweigh the burden it places on abortion access.
While both the Texas and Louisiana laws were making their way through the legal system, a federal district judge in Louisiana blocked that state’s law in a meticulous 112-page ruling. “Without an injunction, Louisiana women will suffer significantly reduced access to constitutionally protected abortion services, which will likely have serious health consequences,” Judge John W. deGravelles concluded in January 2016, roughly five months before the Supreme Court would rule in the Texas case. “The substantial injury threatened by enforcement of the Act — namely irreparable harm to women and the violation of their constitutional rights — clearly outweighs the impact of an injunction” on the state.
Louisiana appealed the ruling to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the intermediate court that handles appeals coming out of Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana — the same court that ultimately concluded that Texas’s restriction passed legal muster before being slapped down by the Supreme Court. The Texas law, the high court ruled in the Whole Woman’s Health case, “provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so.”
Theoretically at least, that should have signaled the fate of the Louisiana law. Instead, in a confounding opinion, the majority of a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit in late September 2018 upheld the Louisiana law. In invalidating the measure, the district court had “overlooked that the facts in the instant case are remarkably different from those that occasioned the invalidation of the Texas statute,” the 5th Circuit Court wrote, and placed the blame for whatever clinics might close squarely on the abortion doctors who the court decided simply had not worked hard enough to secure privileges.
In a strenuous dissent, Senior Circuit Judge Patrick Higginbotham called out his colleagues, writing that the “divergence between the findings of the district court and the majority is striking — a dissonance in findings of fact inexplicable to these eyes.” The ruling, he wrote “ought not stand.” The Center for Reproductive Rights asked the full court to reconsider the panel’s decision, but on a 9-6 vote, the court declined. All four of President Donald Trump’s appointees to the 5th Circuit voted against rehearing the case.
On January 25, CRR took its case to the Supreme Court, asking it to intervene and reverse the appellate court decision. Without action from the court, the law would have taken effect on February 4, leaving a single clinic and doctor left in the state to provide care for the roughly 10,000 women who annually seek abortion in the state, a clearly impossible situation. There are nearly 1 million women of reproductive age in the state.
Late on Friday, February 1, Justice Samuel Alito filed a brief order, staying the case until February 7 to allow the court time to review the court filings. The order, he wrote, does not reflect “any view” on the merits of the case.
The case is the first of nearly 30 involving reproductive rights that are making their way through the court system and will likely signal what direction the new court — now with two Trump appointees — will take in deciding challenges to women’s reproductive autonomy. Indeed, Trump long ago promised that he would appoint only “pro-life” judges to the bench who would be willing to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide. While the Louisiana case is unlikely to upset Roe, it could reveal the court’s willingness to chip away at the right to abortion by upholding medically unnecessary restrictions that have been passed by dozens of states across the country.
In a stinging op-ed published last week in the New York Times, Nancy Northup, head of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called out the 5th Circuit for going “rogue,” and warned of dire consequences if the high court fails to follow precedent and allows the Louisiana law to stand. “Anti-abortion politicians are hoping that the Supreme Court will stand by and let them legislate abortion out of reach — without the court ever having to reverse Roe v. Wade and related cases assuring access to abortion. That would be death to Roe by a thousand cuts,” she wrote. “The rule of law is on the line, and so is the ability of women in Louisiana and beyond to make their own health decisions and control their own fate.”
The post Louisiana Tests the New Supreme Court on Abortion appeared first on The Intercept.
Less than a month after Democrats — many of them running on “Medicare for All” — won back control of the House of Representatives in November, the top health policy aide to then-prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Blue Cross Blue Shield executives and assured them that party leadership had strong reservations about single-payer health care and was more focused on lowering drug prices, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
Pelosi adviser Wendell Primus detailed five objections to Medicare for All and said that Democrats would be allies to the insurance industry in the fight against single-payer health care. Primus pitched the insurers on supporting Democrats on efforts to shrink drug prices, specifically by backing a number of measures that the pharmaceutical lobby is opposing.
Primus, in a slide presentation obtained by The Intercept, criticized single payer on the basis of cost (“Monies are needed for other priorities”), opposition (“Stakeholders are against; Creates winners and losers”), and “implementation challenges.” We have recreated the slides for source protection purposes.
Slide: Recreated by The Intercept
Democrats, Primus said, are united around the concept of universal coverage, but see strengthening the Affordable Care Act as the means to that end. He made his presentation to the Blue Cross executives on December 4. “We don’t discuss private meetings, if there was such a meeting,” said a BCBS spokesperson. Primus said that he did not discuss any kind of deal with the insurers. Henry Connelly, a spokesperson for Pelosi, said that the assessment of single payer was not related to any dealmaking with the industry. “We’re not going to barter lower prescription drug costs for inaction in the rest of the health care industry. The presentation was a broad look at the health care environment and some of House Democrats’ legislative priorities over the next two years in a period of GOP control of the Senate and White House,” Connelly said.
The debate over Medicare for All is playing out on a number of different levels, with no clear consensus over how the government-run, single-payer health plan ought to take shape. Presidential candidates are arguing over whose plan is stronger and gets to full Medicare for All faster, with a debate raging over whether private insurance should be banned outright or operate in addition to universal Medicare coverage.
In the House, even as the idea has picked up momentum with voters and members of the Democratic caucus, Democratic leadership has remained deeply skeptical. Pelosi’s consistent messaging, instead, has been around protecting the Affordable Care Act and lowering prescription drug prices.
“Speaker Pelosi has ensured that Medicare for All will have hearings in the House and tapped Congressman Brian Higgins to take the lead on Medicare buy-in legislation. For the first time, House committees will be seriously examining and tackling some of the questions and possible solutions raised by Medicare for All legislation,” said Connelly.
“The biggest obstacles facing Medicare for All right now are Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump,” he added. “But in the near term, there is a window for Democrats to press Trump to help pass aggressive legislation to negotiate down the skyrocketing price of prescription drugs.”
Primus concluded his presentation with a bullet point that summarized Pelosi’s mission on health care: “Lower your health care costs and prescription drug prices.”
Slide: Recreated by The Intercept
The “your” refers to insurers, who bear costs for medical expenses covered under their plans. That puts insurers and Pelosi, at least in one sense, in alignment, as both have an interest in lower costs. Indeed, insurers regularly negotiate to lower their health care costs, but in practice their efforts have had little effect on the general trend in costs. Drug company patents give pharmaceutical giants outsized power to set prices, and hospital consolidation has also given providers more power in those negotiations. Even where insurers have been able to negotiate lower prices for their own customers, that has done little to shrink the list price of drugs for the public.
At the briefing, Primus mentioned three avenues that Pelosi, a California Democrat, sees toward lower drug prices, sources said. The first, the CREATES Act, is bipartisan legislation, strongly opposed by Big Pharma, that would make it easier for generic drug companies to get access to a sufficient quantity of medications needed to produce generics.
The second measure addresses what’s known as “pay for delay,” in which a drug company pays a generic manufacturer to not produce a generic version of an expensive drug. Democratic leadership wants to ban that practice. The third revolves around the issue of “evergreening,” which is a pharmaceutical industry practice of extending patent protection for a particular drug through a variety of practices. Democrats want to restrict evergreening to encourage cheaper generics make it to the market faster.
Primus’s approach has a strong political logic to it, as taking on every health care stakeholder at once is arguably more difficult than singling out one industry and hammering away, even if the effort is out of step with where progressive energy is at the moment.
Primus is known in Congress as one of the staunchest foes of Big Pharma, while Pelosi’s posture toward Medicare for All is more complicated. Publicly, she has long said that she supports it aspirationally. “I was carrying around single-payer signs probably before you were born, so I, you know, I understand that aspiration,” she said in 2017 during an interview with TV host Joy Reid.
“This is an idea that if we had a tabula rasa, if we were just starting clean, would be the most cost-effective way to go forward. We don’t have that,” she said. “Over 120 or 150 million people in our country have employer-based access to their health coverage and insurance.”
At the time, her objection to Medicare for All was that it distracted from the fight to defend the ACA, which Republicans were trying to gut. “So right now, I’m going to be crude. Now we’re in my living room, so I can be crude. It isn’t helpful to tinkle all over the ACA right now,” Pelosi said. “Right now, we need to support the Affordable Care Act and defeat what the Republicans are doing.”
At other moments, she has said that single payer isn’t popular, arguing, also in 2017, that “the comfort level with a broader base of the American people is not there yet.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which operates under Pelosi, in 2017 presented House Democrats with survey data, claiming that it showed that single-payer was a political loser, and that Democrats should focus their messaging on lowering drug prices and protecting the ACA.
Yet a significant number of Democrats who flipped Republican districts blue in 2018 were publicly supportive of Medicare for All, suggesting that it isn’t necessarily the albatross Pelosi and the DCCC believe it to be. A poll from October found that more than half of Republicans support the concept.
Pelosi’s agreement to hold House hearings on Medicare for All came after pressure from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Yet the hearings will be held by the Budget Committee, which, unlike the powerful Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees, would not have final jurisdiction over Medicare for All in the event of a genuine attempt to pass it.
Primus, like Pelosi, is well-known to be a deficit hawk, and both subscribe to the argument put forward by the late Pete Peterson that the debt and deficit are among the gravest threats facing the country. When Peterson, a billionaire who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to push Washington policymakers toward austerity, died in 2018, Pelosi delivered a floor speech that praised him and his vision effusively, speaking of the man as if he’d dedicated his life to eradicating child malnutrition or curing cancer, rather than as a Wall Street tycoon who spent millions pushing for major cuts to Social Security and Medicare. “Pete was a clarion voice for fiscal responsibility, and a strong moral conscience in Washington,” Pelosi said in her House floor eulogy of Peterson, who, by 2012, had already spent half a billion dollars targeting Social Security, Medicare, and other spending programs.
“Pete’s prophetic voice on the importance of fiscal sustainability brought together generations of policymakers, no matter their political background,” Pelosi said. “His legacy will endure in many ways, but especially through the work of the Peterson Foundation, which continues to focus on solutions to America’s fiscal and economic challenges.”
Slide: Recreated by The Intercept
Two of Primus’s five objections to single payer before the Blue Cross audience related to such alleged fiscal challenges. That argument, though, runs headlong into a surge of new interest among Democrats in Modern Monetary Theory, the idea that policymakers are still constrained by a mindset that was justifiable when the U.S. was on the gold standard, but is no longer defensible. Now that the U.S. issues a currency independent of its gold reserves, the obstacle to government spending is inflation, not the debt or deficit, proponents of MMT say. “This zero-sum mentality has no place in a post-Bretton Woods world,” said economist Stephanie Kelton in reaction to Primus’s argument that spending on Medicare for All would foreclose other priorities. (Post-Bretton refers to the global agreement that the dollar will be the global economy’s reserve currency, ultimately decoupled from gold.)
“The U.S. dollar is no longer tethered to gold, which means the federal government is not constrained in its spending by the need to raise revenue. The federal government cannot run out of dollars. This should be painfully obvious, but the gold-standard mentality continues to grip many lawmakers,” Kelton said.
As long as inflation remains low, the government can continue to authorize additional spending. That’s not so much an argument as it is simply an observation of the post-gold-standard reality that austerity advocates like Peterson have spent billions to distort. “The government can afford any new program it chooses to fund. The limits are in the real economy — if producers can’t keep up with the additional demand, inflation will result,” said Kelton, a former adviser to the Senate Budget Committee when it was chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The federal government — as the issuer of the U.S. dollar — can create all the money that is needed to guarantee health care for all of its people. It’s the rest of us — who merely use the dollar — who have to worry about costs and where to come up with the money to pay a huge medical bill when our private insurer refuses to cover the cost of care.”
This reality has been recognized by former Federal Reserve Chairs Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, as well. “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So, there is zero probability of default,” Greenspan once said.
Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book “We’ve Got People: The End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.” Sign up here to get an email when it’s released.
The post Top Nancy Pelosi Aide Privately Tells Insurance Executives Not to Worry About Democrats Pushing “Medicare for All” appeared first on The Intercept.
President Trump embraced contradiction in his second State of the Union address Tuesday night, offering a rhetorical olive branch to his political opponents while also standing strong on some of his most controversial policies.
In a long and sometimes strange speech—punctuated by a spontaneous outbreak of song and occasional chants of “USA!”—Trump acknowledged the newly claimed Democratic control of the U.S. House and called for “cooperation, compromise, and the common good.” Yet the president also gave no indication he would compromise on his demand for billions of dollars for a wall on the Mexican border; delivered a strong riposte to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has called that project “immoral”; and lashed out at investigations into his administration, claiming they imperil American prosperity. The result was a speech that exalted bipartisanship without displaying a strategy, or even an appetite, for achieving it.
The tension in the president’s message was made clear early in his remarks. “The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda—it is the agenda of the American people,” he said, reaching out yet unable to resist the snide habit of refusing to call the Democratic Party by its name.
[Read: The state of the president]
Trump’s implicit response to both House Democratic investigations into his administration and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was one of the more striking moments of the night. In last year’s speech, he avoided any mention of the Mueller inquiry.
“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States—and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations,” Trump said. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn't work that way!”
That remark echoes Trump’s habit of labeling the investigations a “witch hunt” in other forums, but doing so in the State of the Union is an acknowledgement that they pose an existential threat to his presidency. If Trump hoped to convince listeners that his own fate and that of the nation are inextricable, it did not seem to work. The line fell flat in the House chamber.
As is often the case, Trump seemed most comfortable and expansive when discussing immigration. He has recently failed to gain much purchase on the issue. Despite embarking on the longest government shutdown in history, he was unable to break Democratic will or convince voters he was making the right call. Instead, Pelosi stared him down and eventually forced him to concede on a short-term funding measure. With funding set to expire again on February 15, Trump on Tuesday tried once more to gain the upper hand, playing on Pelosi’s labeling of the wall as “immoral” without mentioning her name.
“This is a moral issue,” Trump said. “The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security, and financial well‑being of all Americans. We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens. This includes our obligation to the millions of immigrants living here today, who followed the rules and respected our laws.”
Noting that both parties have voted for some form of border barrier in the past, he insisted that the U.S. must build “a smart, strategic, see-through steel barrier—not just a simple concrete wall.”
Yet the president also seemed to stumble into what would be a major policy announcement. While his administration has worked to limit not just illegal but also legal immigration, Trump said Tuesday, “Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways. I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” That diverged from his prepared remarks, which said only, “I want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally.”
Turning to foreign policy, Trump announced plans to hold a second round of meetings with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Vietnam on February 27 and 28. But he punctuated that point with a strange, unverifiable, and self-aggrandizing claim: “If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.”
He noted the recent American recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, but used the moment largely as a bludgeon against the newly resurgent American left. “We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” Although his plans to withdraw American troops from Syria and Afghanistan have raised hackles among many members of Congress, especially in the GOP, he won bipartisan applause when he said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”
As expected, Trump also boasted at length about positive economic indicators, including strong job growth. But he was unable to resist the temptation to exaggerate and dissemble, saying the U.S. had the hottest economy in the world (it doesn’t) and that his administration has cut more regulations than any in history (it hasn’t).
The two most striking takeaways from the speech weren’t things that Trump said. One came when the president recognized Judah Samet, a Holocaust survivor who also survived the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October. After Trump noted that Tuesday was Samet’s 81st birthday, the chamber broke into an impromptu rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
The second was a visual: the sight of the women of the House Democratic caucus, sitting together in a bloc and clad in white, both a nod to the women’s suffrage movement and a statement of the new political power of women in the party. Many of these lawmakers were elected in November and ran strongly against Trump. For the most part, they sat, often stone-faced, as Trump spoke—yet at one point, they did jubilantly cheer.
“No one has benefited more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58 percent of the new jobs created in the last year. All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before,” Trump said. A few of the women rose to applaud.
The president spotted them and quipped, “You weren’t supposed to do that,” then added with a grin, “Don’t sit yet, you’re going to like this.” The next line—“And exactly one century after the Congress passed the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in the Congress than at any time before”—had the bloc of women in white on their feet chanting “USA,” an unexpected moment of bipartisanship.
But that warm and fuzzy moment was notable because it was an outlier. Though Trump spoke the language of compromise early in the speech, there is no indication that he has the will or a strategy to actually govern that way.
“We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution—and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good,” Trump said. “Together, we can break decades of political stalemate. We can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions, and unlock the extraordinary promise of America's future. The decision is ours to make.”
[John Dickerson: Trump’s hollow call for unity]
Though he would surely object, this passage sounded strikingly like his predecessor in the Oval Office. Trump sounded even more like Obama when he proclaimed his proposals neither Republican nor Democratic but American, paraphrasing Obama’s famous 2004 line that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.”
Both Obama and Trump campaigned promising to change the way Washington worked, and both found the reality of governing much harder, though Obama was able to achieve far more in his first two years. And if Trump struggled to find a way to enact his agenda with unified Republican control of Congress, the next two years will be far more challenging for him. Trump won some of his heartiest applause Tuesday night when he discussed the successful passage of criminal-justice reform, a bipartisan priority. But that bill seems like an anomaly—a rare case, in a polarized nation, where both parties actually agreed on substance.
“Many of us have campaigned on the same core promises to defend American jobs and demand fair trade for American workers to rebuild and revitalize our nation's infrastructure, to reduce the price of health care and prescription drugs, to create an immigration system that is safe, lawful, modern, and secure, and to pursue a foreign policy that puts America's interests first,” Trump said. “There is a new opportunity in American politics if only we have the courage, together, to seize it.”
The president is right that members of both parties share some of the same goals. But they have real and deep disagreements about the best ways to achieve them, and even about what success looks like. The problem is not a lack of courage, and if Trump realizes that and has a plan to overcome it, he offered no hint in his speech.
In the midst of a lengthy and mostly familiar discussion of the lawless state of America’s southern border during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Trump said, rather unexpectedly, “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” It’s a line that immediately attracted the ire of restrictionists, many of whom noted that the “in the largest numbers ever” part was not in Trump’s prepared remarks. Given his propensity towards hyperbole, this could be dismissed as little more than a rhetorical flourish. One wonders, though, if it’s a sign of things to come.
For one thing, it’s in keeping with Trump’s apparent openness to high-skill admissions, as evidenced by his stated desire to revamp the H-1B visa program“to encourage talented and highly skilled people to pursue career options in the U.S.” Embracing high-skill immigration could give Trump something to talk about other than his polarizing border wall.
And the president could use a dose of immigration centrism. Trump’s fixation on a border wall has done little to boost his political fortunes, let alone the restrictionist cause. There is considerable evidencethat his vocal opposition to immigration has made voters more inclined to support it rather than less, and though this effect is most pronounced among Democrats, as one might expect, Republicans haven’t been entirely immune. The net effect of Trump’s rise seems to be that while a shrinking GOP coalition has embraced restrictionism, the country as a whole is moving firmly in the opposite direction. Though jettisoning the cause of immigration control would be a mistake, railing against immigration per se has proven a dead end.
What could the Trump administration do to change the conversation? The White House has already called for a small tweak to the H-1B visa lottery that would significantly boost the chances that foreigners with advanced degrees from U.S. universities would be able to remain in the country as guest-workers. Trump could go further by expanding the number of H-1B visas, an idea that restrictionists tend to oppose, while increasing the H-1B minimum wage, an idea they generally support. Taken together, these policies might help Trump woo high-wage employers eager to hire talented foreign workers, or at least make them less hostile to his broader agenda.
Of course, this would do little to ease the path of H-1B visas who’d like to permanently settle in the U.S. As it happens, Trump has tweeted that “H1-B holders in the United States can rest assured that changes are soon coming which will bring both simplicity and certainty to your stay, including a potential path to citizenship.” One path to citizenship could be adjusting the allocation of green cards so that aspiring immigrants who’ve already secured remunerative employment in the U.S.—H-1B holders tend to fit the bill—are given higher priority over those who apply purely on the basis of extended family ties. Last year, then-Senator Jeff Flake proposedshifting family-preference visas for the siblings and adult children of U.S. citizens to employment-preference categories that grant green cards on the basis of skills. If Trump really wants “to encourage talented and highly skilled people to pursue career options in the U.S.,” this would be a surefire way to do it.
This doesn’t sound like a terribly Trumpy approach. But the president has charged Jared Kushner with brokering a bipartisan deal on immigration(and for that he deserves our sympathy). No one is especially confident Democrats and Republicans in Congress will devise a border-security compromise over the coming days that President Trump will deem worthy of support, including the president himself. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump pegged the chances that a satisfactory deal would be struck at “less than 50-50,” which is to say he’s not quite convinced of his son-in-law’s negotiating prowess.
But if the White House looks beyond the current impasse, to the larger question of how Trump and his allies might reorient the immigration debate, Kushner’s effort could still bear fruit. Although Jared has sometimes been derided as an ingenuous junior plutocrat who makes Howard Schultz look like a centrist Machiavelli, no less an authority than Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a Trump confidant, has said, “there is simply no one more influential in the White House on the president than Jared Kushner.” And Tuesday night’s speech may reflect his influence.
It’s worth at least considering the possibility that the president has been touting the virtues of H-1B holders for a reason, and that his praise for legal immigrants in the State of the Union was more than a mental lapse.
Stacey Abrams delivered the Democratic Party’s official rebuttal to the State of the Union on Tuesday night. Considered a rising star in the party, Abrams ran for governor in Georgia last year, before losing to Republican Brian Kemp, and is currently weighing another bid for higher office.
Below, the full text of her remarks as delivered.
Good evening, my fellow Americans, and happy Lunar New Year. I’m Stacey Abrams and I'm honored to join the conversation about the state of our union.
Growing up, my family went back and forth between lower middle class and working class, yet even when they came home weary and bone-tired, my parents found a way to show us all who we could be. My librarian mother taught us to love learning. My father, a shipyard worker, put in overtime and extra shifts, and they made sure we volunteered to help others. Later, they both became United Methodist ministers, an expression of the faith that guides us. These were our family values: faith, service, education, and responsibility.
Now, we only had one car, so sometimes my dad had to hitchhike and walk long stretches during the 30-mile trip home from the shipyards. One rainy night, my mom got worried. We piled in the car and went out looking for him, and we eventually found my dad making his way along the road, soaked and shivering in his shirt sleeves. When he got in the car, my mom asked if he had left his coat at work. He explained that he'd given it to a homeless man he'd met on the highway. When we asked why he'd given away his only jacket, my dad turned to us and said, “I knew when I left that man, he'd still be alone, but I could give him my coat, because I knew you were coming for me.”
Our power and strength as Americans lives in our hard work and our belief in more. My family understood firsthand that while success is not guaranteed, we live in a nation where opportunity is possible. But we do not succeed alone. In these United States, when times are tough, we can persevere because our friends and neighbors will come for us. Our first responders will come for us. It is this mantra, this uncommon grace of community that has driven me to become an attorney, a small-business owner, a writer, and most recently, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia.
My reason for running was simple. I love our country and its promise of opportunity for all. And I stand here tonight because I hold fast to my father's credo. Together, we are coming for America, for a better America.
[Read: Stacey Abrams’s prescription for a maternal-health crisis]
Just a few weeks ago, I joined volunteers to distribute meals to furloughed federal workers. They waited in line for a box of food and a sliver of hope, since they hadn't received paychecks in weeks. Making livelihoods of our federal workers a pawn for political games is a disgrace. The shutdown was a stunt, engineered by the president of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness, and abandoned not just our people, but our values.
For seven years, I led the Democratic Party in the Georgia House of Representatives. I didn't always agree with the Republican speaker or governor, but I understood that our constituents didn't care about our political parties. They cared about their lives. So when we had to negotiate criminal-justice reform or transportation or foster-care improvements, the leaders of our state didn't shut down—we came together and we kept our word. It should be no different in our nation's capital. We may come from different sides of the political aisle, but our joint commitment to the ideals of this nation cannot be negotiable.
Our most urgent work is to realize Americans' dreams of today and tomorrow, to carve a path to independence and prosperity that can last a lifetime. Children deserve an excellent education from cradle to career. We owe them safe schools and the highest standards, regardless of ZIP code. Yet this White House responds timidly, while first graders practice active-shooter drills and the price of higher education grows ever steeper. From now on, our leaders must be willing to tackle gun-safety measures and face the crippling effect of educational loans, to support educators and invest what is necessary to unleash the power of America's greatest minds.
In Georgia and around the country, people are striving for a middle class where a salary truly equals economic security. But instead, families' hopes are being crushed by Republican leadership that ignores real life or just doesn't understand it. Under the current administration, far too many hard-working Americans are falling behind, living paycheck to paycheck, most without labor unions to protect them from even worse harm.
[Read: Why unpaid federal workers can’t strike during a shutdown]
The Republican tax bill rigged the system against working people. Rather than bringing back jobs, plants are closing, layoffs are looming, and wages struggle to keep pace with the actual cost of living. We owe more to the millions of everyday folks who keep our economy running, like truck drivers forced to buy their own rigs, farmers caught in a trade war, small-business owners in search of capital, and domestic workers serving without labor protections—women and men who could thrive if only they had the support and freedom to do so.
We know bipartisanship could craft a 21st century immigration plan, but this administration chooses to cage children and tear families apart. Compassionate treatment at the border is not the same as open borders. President Reagan understood this. President Obama understood this. Americans understand this and the Democrats stand ready to effectively secure our ports and borders. But we must all embrace that from agriculture to health care to entrepreneurship, America is made stronger by the presence of immigrants, not walls.
And rather than suing to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, as Republican attorneys general have, our leaders must protect the progress we've made and commit to expanding health care and lowering cost for everyone. My father has battled prostate cancer for years. To help cover the cost, I found myself sinking deeper into debt, because while you can defer some payments, you can't defer cancer treatment. In this great nation, Americans are skipping blood-pressure pills, forced to choose between buying medicine or paying rent. Maternal mortality rates show that mothers, especially black mothers, risk death to give birth. And in 14 states, including my home state, where a majority want it, our leaders refuse to expand Medicaid, which could save rural hospitals, save economies, and save lives.
We can do so much more: take action on climate change, defend individual liberties with fair-minded judges.
But none of these ambitions are possible without the bedrock guarantee of our right to vote. Let's be clear. Voter suppression is real. From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls, to moving and closing polling places, to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy. While I acknowledge the results of the 2018 election here in Georgia, I did not, and we cannot, accept efforts to undermine our right to vote. That's why I started a nonpartisan organization called Fair Fight, to advocate for voting rights. This is the next battle for our democracy, one where all eligible citizens can have their say about the vision we want for our country. We must reject the cynicism that says allowing every eligible vote to be cast and counted is a power grab.
[Read: The Georgia governor’s race brought voter suppression into full view]
Americans understand that these are the values our brave men and women in uniform and our veterans risk their lives to defend. The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections, where voters pick their leaders, not where politicians pick their voters.
In this time of division and crisis, we must come together and stand for and with one another. America has stumbled time and again on its quest towards justice and equality. But with each generation, we have revisited our fundamental truths, and where we falter, we make amends. We fought Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Yet we continue to confront racism from our past and in our present, which is why we must hold everyone, from the highest offices to our own families, accountable for racist words and deeds and call racism what it is: wrong.
America achieved a measure of reproductive justice in Roe v. Wade, but we must never forget: It is immoral to allow politicians to harm women and families, to advance a political agenda. We affirmed marriage equality, and yet the LGBTQ community remains under attack.
So even as I am very disappointed by the president's approach to our problems, I still don't want him to fail. But we need him to tell the truth, and to respect his duties, and respect the extraordinary diversity that defines America. Our progress has always been found in the refuge, in the basic instinct of the American experiment, to do right by our people. And with a renewed commitment to social and economic justice, we will create a stronger America, together. Because America wins by fighting for our shared values against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That is who we are, and when we do so, never wavering, the state of our union will always be strong.
Thank you, and may God bless the United States of America.
President Donald Trump delivered his second State of the Union address Tuesday night before a joint session of Congress. The speech comes as lawmakers are negotiating a deal over border security in an effort to prevent a second government shutdown. The president’s remarks were originally planned for last week, but were postponed after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disinvited Trump from giving the address while the government was closed.
Below, the full text of Trump’s speech as delivered.
Thank you very much. Madam Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, the First Lady of the United States.
And my fellow Americans. We meet tonight at a moment of unlimited potential. As we begin a new Congress, I stand here ready to work with you to achieve historic breakthroughs for all Americans. Millions of our fellow citizens are watching us now gathered in this great chamber hoping that we will govern not as two parties but as one nation.
The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda, it's the agenda of the American people. Many of us have campaigned on the same core promises to defend American jobs and demand fair trade for American workers to rebuild and revitalize our nation's infrastructure, to reduce the price of health care and prescription drugs, to create an immigration system that is safe, lawful, modern, and secure, and to pursue a foreign policy that puts America's interests first. There is a new opportunity in American politics if only we have the courage, together, to seize it.
Victory is not winning for our party. Victory is winning for our country.
This year, America will recognize two important anniversaries that show us the majesty of America's mission and the power of American pride. In June, we mark 75 years since the start of what General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the Great Crusade, the Allied Liberation of Europe in World War II. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, 15,000 young American men jumped from the sky and 60,000 more stormed in from the sea to save our civilization from tyranny. Here with us tonight are three of those incredible heroes. Private First Class Joseph Reilly, Staff Sergeant Irving Locker, and Sergeant Herman Zeitchik.
Gentlemen, we salute you. In 2019, we also celebrate 50 years since brave young pilots flew a quarter of a million miles through space to plant the American flag on the face of the moon. Half a century later, we are joined by one of the Apollo 11 astronauts who planted that flag, Buzz Aldrin. Thank you, Buzz.
This year, American astronauts will go back to space on American rockets. In the 20th century, America saved freedom, transformed science, redefined the middle class, and, when you get down to it, there's nothing anywhere in the world that can compete with America.
[Read: Trump’s call for unity was never going to be real]
Now we must step boldly and bravely into the next chapter of this great American adventure, and we must create a new standard of living for the 21st century. An amazing quality of life for all of our citizens is within reach. We can make our community safer, our families stronger, our culture richer, our faith deeper, and our middle class bigger and more prosperous than ever before.
But we must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good. Together we can break decades of political stalemate. We can bridge divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions, and unlock the extraordinary promise of America's future. The decision is ours to make. We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance, incredible progress or pointless destruction. Tonight, I ask you to choose greatness.
Over the last two years, my administration has moved with urgency and historic speed to confront problems neglected by leaders of both parties over many decades. In just over two years, since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom, a boom that has rarely been seen before. There's been nothing like it. We have created 5.3 million new jobs, and, importantly, added 600,000 new manufacturing jobs, something which almost everyone said was impossible to do, but the fact is we are just getting started.
Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades, and growing for blue-collar workers who I promised to fight for. They're growing faster than anyone else thought possible. Nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps.
The U.S. economy is growing almost twice as fast today as when I took office and we are considered far and away the hottest economy anywhere in the world, not even close. Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in over half a century.
African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded. Unemployment for Americans with disabilities has also reached an all-time low. More people are working now than at any time in the history of our country, 157 million people at work.
We passed a massive tax cut for working families and doubled the child tax credit. We virtually ended the estate tax, or death tax, as it is often called, on small businesses, for ranches, and also for family farms. We eliminated the very unpopular Obamacare individual-mandate penalty. And to give clinically ill patients access to life-saving cures, we passed, very importantly, right to try.
[Read: The GOP is suddenly playing defense on health care]
My administration has cut more regulations in a short period of time than any other administration during its entire tenure. Companies are coming back to our country in large numbers thanks to our historic reductions in taxes and regulations.
And we have unleashed a revolution in American energy. The United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world.
And now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy. After 24 months of rapid progress, our economy is the envy of the world. Our military is the most powerful on Earth, by far, and America—America is again winning, each and every day.
Members of Congress, the state of our Union is strong. [Some in the House chamber break into “USA” chants.]
That sounds so good. Our country is vibrant, and our economy is thriving like never before. On Friday, it was announced that we added another 304,000 jobs last month alone, almost double the number expected.
An economic miracle is taking place in the United States and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations. If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn't work that way. We must be united at home to defeat our adversaries abroad. This new era of cooperation can start with finally confirming the more than 300 highly qualified nominees who are still stuck in the Senate, in some cases years and years waiting, not right.
[Read: Trump’s most lasting legacy could be his judges]
The Senate has failed to act on these nominations, which is unfair to the nominees and very unfair to our country. Now is the time for a bipartisan action. Believe it or not, we have already proven that that's possible. In the last Congress, both parties came together to pass unprecedented legislation to confront the opioid crisis, a sweeping new farm bill, historic VA reforms, and after four decades of rejection, we passed VA accountability so that we can finally terminate those who mistreat our wonderful veterans.
And just weeks ago, both parties united for groundbreaking criminal-justice reform. They said it couldn't be done.
Last year, I heard through friends the story of Alice Johnson. I was deeply moved. In 1997, Alice was sentenced to life in prison as a first-time, non-violent drug offender. Over the next 22 years, she became a prison minister, inspiring others to choose a better path. She had a big impact on that prison population and far beyond. Alice's story underscores the disparities and unfairness that can exist in criminal sentencing and the need to remedy this total injustice. She served almost that 22 years, and had expected to be in prison for the remainder of her life. In June, I commuted Alice's sentence. When I saw Alice's beautiful family greet her at the prison gates hugging and kissing and crying and laughing, I knew I did something right. Alice is with us tonight, and she is a terrific woman, terrific. Alice, please.
Alice, thank you for reminding us that we always have the power to shape our own destiny. Thank you very much, Alice, thank you very much.
Inspired by stories like Alice's, my administration worked closely with members of both parties to sign the First Step Act into law. Big deal, big deal.
This legislation reformed sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African American community. The First Step Act gives non-violent offenders the chance to reenter society as productive, law-abiding citizens. Now states across the country are following our lead. America is a nation that believes in redemption.
We are also joined tonight by Matthew Charles from Tennessee. In 1996, at the age of 30, Matthew was sentenced to 35 years for selling drugs and related offenses. Over the next two decades, he completed more than 30 Bible studies, became a law clerk, and mentored many of his fellow inmates. Now, Matthew is the very first person to be released from prison under the First Step Act. Matthew, please.
Thank you, Matthew. Welcome home.
Now, Republicans and and Democrats must join forces again to confront an urgent national crisis. Congress has 10 days left to pass a bill that will fund our government, protect our homeland, and secure our very dangerous southern border. Now is the time for Congress to show the world that America is committed to ending illegal immigration and putting the ruthless coyotes, cartels, drug dealers, and human traffickers out of business.
As we speak, large organized caravans are on the march to the United States. We have just heard that Mexican cities, in order to remove the illegal immigrants from their communities, are getting trucks and buses to bring them up to our country in areas where there is little border protection. I have ordered another 3,750 troops to our southern border to prepare for this tremendous onslaught. This is a moral issue. The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security, and financial well-being of all Americans. We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens. This includes our obligation to the millions of immigrants living here today who followed the rules and respected our laws. Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways.
[Read: A border is not a wall]
I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally. Tonight I am asking you to defend our very dangerous southern border out of love and devotion to our fellow citizens and to our country. No issue better illustrates the divide between America's working class and America's political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.
Meanwhile, working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal immigration, reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools, hospitals that are so crowded you can't get in, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net. Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate, it is actually very cruel.
One in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north. Smugglers use migrant children as human pawns to exploit our laws and gain access to our country. Human traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery. Tens of thousands of innocent Americans are killed by lethal drugs that cross our border and flood into our cities including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. The savage gang MS-13 now operates in at least 20 different American states, and they almost all come through our southern border. Just yesterday, an MS-13 gang member was taken into custody for a fatal shooting on a subway platform in New York City. We are removing these gang members by the thousands, but until we secure our border, they're going to keep streaming right back in.
Year after year, countless Americans are murdered by criminal illegal aliens. I have gotten to know many wonderful angel moms and dads and families. No one should ever have to suffer the horrible heartache that they have had to endure. Here tonight is Debra Bissell. Just three weeks ago, Debra's parents Gerald and Sharon were burglarized and shot to death in their Reno, Nevada, home by an illegal alien. They were in their eighties, and they're survived by four children, 11 grandchildren, and 20 great-grandchildren. Also here tonight are Gerald and Sharon's granddaughter Heather, and great-granddaughter Madison. To Debra, Heather, Madison, please stand. Few can understand your pain. Thank you, and thank you for being here. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
I will never forget, and I will fight for the memory of Gerald and Sharon, that it should never happen again. Not one more American life should be lost because our nation failed to control its very dangerous border. In the last two years, our brave ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of criminal aliens, including those charged or convicted of nearly 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 killings or murders. We are joined tonight by one of those law-enforcement heroes, ICE Special Agent Elvin Hernandez.
When Elvin was a boy, he and his family legally immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic. At the age of 8, Elvin told his dad he wanted to become a special agent. Today he leads investigations into international sex trafficking. Elvin says that “if I can make sure these young girls get their justice, I’ve done my job.” Thanks to his work and that of his incredible colleagues, more than 300 women and girls have been rescued from the horror of this terrible situation, and more than 1,500 traffickers have been put behind bars.
We will always support the brave men and women of law enforcement, and I pledge to you tonight that I will never abolish our heroes from ICE. Thank you.
My administration has sent to the Congress a common-sense proposal to end the crisis on our southern border.
It includes humanitarian assistance, more law enforcement, drug detection at our ports, closing loopholes that enable child smuggling, and plans for a new physical barrier, or wall, to secure the vast areas between our ports of entry. In the past, most of the people in this room voted for a wall—but the proper wall never got built. I'll get it built.
This is a smart, strategic, see-through steel barrier—not just a simple concrete wall. It will be deployed in the areas identified by border agents as having the greatest need, and as these agents will tell you, where walls go up, illegal crossings go way down.
San Diego used to have the most illegal border crossings in our country. In response, a strong security wall was put in place. This powerful barrier almost completely ended illegal crossings.
The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime—one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities. Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country. Simply put, walls work and walls save lives. So let's work together, compromise, and reach a deal that will truly make America safe.
As we work to defend our people's safety, we must also ensure our economic resurgence continues at a rapid pace.
No one has benefited more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58 percent of the new jobs created in the last year. All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before. [Some lawmakers in the chamber stand and cheer.]
Don’t sit yet, you’re going to like this.
And exactly one century after the Congress passed the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in the Congress than at any time before. [Some in the House chamber break into “USA” chants.]
That’s great. Very, very good. I congratulate you. That’s great.
As part of our commitment to improving opportunity for women everywhere, this Thursday we are launching the first-ever government-wide initiative focused on economic empowerment for women in developing countries.
To build on—thank you. To build on our incredible economic success, one priority is paramount: reversing decades of calamitous trade policies. So bad.
We are now making it clear to China that after years of targeting our industries, and stealing our intellectual property, the theft of American jobs and wealth has come to an end.
Therefore, we recently imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods, and now our Treasury is receiving billions and billions of dollars. But I don't blame China for taking advantage of us—I blame our leaders and representatives for allowing this travesty to happen. I have great respect for President Xi, and we are now working on a new trade deal with China. But it must include real, structural change to end unfair trade practices, reduce our chronic trade deficit, and protect American jobs.
[Annie Lowrey: The fog of Trump’s trade war]
Another historic trade blunder was the catastrophe known as NAFTA.
I have met the men and women of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Hampshire, and many other states whose dreams were shattered by the signing of NAFTA. For years, politicians promised them they would renegotiate for a better deal. But no one ever tried until now.
Our new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the USMCA, will replace NAFTA and deliver for American workers like they haven’t had delivered to for a long time. I hope you can pass the USMCA into law so that we can bring back our manufacturing jobs in even greater numbers, expand American agriculture, protect intellectual property, and ensure that more cars are proudly stamped with our four beautiful words: Made in the USA.
Tonight, I am also asking you to pass the United States Reciprocal Trade Act, so that if another country places an unfair tariff on an American product, we can charge them the exact same tariff on the exact same product that they sell to us.
Both parties should be able to unite for a great rebuilding of America's crumbling infrastructure.
I know that the Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill, and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future. This is not an option. This is a necessity.
The next major priority for me, and for all of us, should be to lower the cost of health care and prescription drugs—and to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.
Already, as a result of my administration's efforts, in 2018 drug prices experienced their single largest decline in 46 years.
But we must do more. It is unacceptable that Americans pay vastly more than people in other countries for the exact same drugs, often made in the exact same place. This is wrong, this is unfair, and together we will stop it. And we’ll stop it fast.
I am asking Congress to pass legislation that finally takes on the problem of global freeloading and delivers fairness and price transparency for American patients, finally. We should also require drug companies, insurance companies, and hospitals to disclose real prices to foster competition and bring costs way down.
No force in history has done more to advance the human condition than American freedom. In recent years—in recent years we have made remarkable progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach. My budget will ask Democrats and Republicans to make the needed commitment to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the United States within 10 years. We have made incredible strides. Incredible. Together, we will defeat AIDS in America and beyond.
Tonight, I am also asking you to join me in another fight that all Americans can get behind: the fight against childhood cancer.
Joining Melania in the gallery this evening is a very brave 10-year-old girl, Grace Eline. Every birthday—hi Grace—every birthday since she was 4, Grace asked her friends to donate to St. Jude’s Children's Hospital. She did not know that one day she might be a patient herself. That’s what happened. Last year, Grace was diagnosed with brain cancer. Immediately, she began radiation treatment. At the same time, she rallied her community and raised more than $40,000 for the fight against cancer. When Grace completed treatment last fall, her doctors and nurses cheered—they loved her, they still love her—with tears in their eyes as she hung up a poster that read: "Last Day of Chemo." Thank you very much, Grace, you are a great inspiration to everyone in this room, thank you very much.
Many childhood cancers have not seen new therapies in decades. My budget will ask the Congress for $500 million over the next 10 years to fund this critical life-saving research.
To help support working parents, the time has come to pass school choice for America's children. I am also proud to be the first president to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave, so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child.
There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our nation saw in recent days. Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother's womb moments from birth. These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and their dreams with the world. And then, we had the case of the governor of Virginia where he stated he would execute a baby after birth.
To defend the dignity of every person, I am asking Congress to pass legislation to prohibit the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother's womb.
Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: all children—born and unborn—are made in the holy image of God.
The final part of my agenda is to protect America’s national security.
Over the last 2 years, we have begun to fully rebuild the United States military, with $700 billion last year and $716 billion this year. We are also getting other nations to pay their fair share. Finally. For years, the United States was treated very unfairly by friends of ours, members of NATO—but now we have secured over the last couple of years more than $100 billion increase in defense spending from our NATO allies. They said it couldn’t be done.
As part of our military build-up, the United States is developing a state-of-the-art missile-defense system. Under my administration, we will never apologize for advancing America's interests.
For example, decades ago the United States entered into a treaty with Russia in which we agreed to limit and reduce our missile capability. While we followed the agreement and the rules to the letter, Russia repeatedly violated its terms. It’s been going on for many years. That is why I announced that the United States is officially withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF Treaty. Perhaps—we really have no choice.
Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement, adding China and others, or perhaps we can't, in which case, we will outspend and out-innovate all others by far.
As part of a bold new diplomacy, we continue our historic push for peace on the Korean Peninsula. Our hostages have come home, nuclear testing has stopped, and there has not been a missile launch in more than 15 months. If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea. Much work remains to be done, but my relationship with Kim Jong Un is a good one. Chairman Kim and I will meet again on February 27 and 28 in Vietnam.
Two weeks ago, the United States officially recognized the legitimate government of Venezuela, and its new president, Juan Guaidó.
We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair.
Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.
One of the most complex set of challenges we face, and have for many years, is in the Middle East.
Our approach is based on principled realism, not discredited theories that have failed for decades to yield progress. For this reason, my administration recognized the true capital of Israel and proudly opened the American Embassy in Jerusalem.
Our brave troops have now been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years. In Afghanistan and Iraq, nearly 7,000 American heroes have given their lives. More than 52,000 Americans have been badly wounded. We have spent more than $7 trillion in fighting wars in the Middle East. As a candidate for president, I loudly pledged a new approach: Great nations do not fight endless wars.
When I took office, ISIS controlled more than 20,000 square miles in Iraq and Syria. Just two years ago. Today, we have liberated virtually all of the territory from the grip of these bloodthirsty monsters.
Now, as we work with our allies to destroy the remnants of ISIS, it is time to give our brave warriors in Syria a warm welcome home.
I have also accelerated our negotiations to reach, if possible, a political settlement in Afghanistan. The opposing side is also very happy to be negotiating. Our troops have fought with unmatched valor—and thanks to their bravery, we are now able to pursue a possible political solution to this long and bloody conflict.
In Afghanistan, my administration is holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban. As we make progress in these negotiations, we will be able to reduce our troops presence and focus on counter-terrorism. And we will indeed focus on counter-terrorism. We do not know whether we’ll achieve an agreement, but we do know that after two decades of war, the hour has come to at least try for peace. And the other side would like to do the same thing. It’s time.
Above all, friend and foe alike must never doubt this nation's power and will to defend our people. Eighteen years ago, violent terrorists attacked the USS Cole, and last month American forces killed one of the leaders of that attack.
We are honored to be joined tonight by Tom Wibberley, whose son, Navy Seaman Craig Wibberley, was one of the 17 sailors we tragically lost. Tom, we vow to always remember the heroes of the USS Cole. Thank you very much.
My administration has acted decisively to confront the world's leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran. It is a radical regime. They do bad, bad things.
To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed by us on a country.
We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants “death to America” and threatens genocide against the Jewish people. We must never ignore the vile poison of anti-Semitism, or those who spread its venomous creed. With one voice, we must confront this hatred anywhere and everywhere it occurs.
Just months ago, 11 Jewish Americans were viciously murdered in an anti-Semitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. SWAT Officer Timothy Matson raced into the gunfire and was shot seven times chasing down the killer. And he was very successful. Timothy has just had his 12th surgery, and he’s going in for many more, but he made the trip to be here with us tonight. Officer Matson, please. Thank you, we are forever grateful, thank you very much.
Tonight, we are also joined by Pittsburgh survivor Judah Samet. He arrived at the synagogue as the massacre began. But not only did Judah narrowly escape death last fall—more than seven decades ago, he narrowly survived the Nazi concentration camps. Today is Judah's 81st birthday. [The crowd begins to sing “Happy Birthday”]
They wouldn’t do that for me, Judah.
Judah says he can still remember the exact moment, nearly 75 years ago, after 10 months in a concentration camp, when he and his family were put on a train, and told they were going to another camp. Suddenly the train screeched to a very strong halt. A soldier appeared. Judah's family braced for the absolute worst. Then, his father cried out with joy, "It's the Americans, it’s the Americans."
Thank you.
A second Holocaust survivor who is here tonight, Joshua Kaufman, was a prisoner at Dachau. He remembers watching through a hole in the wall of a cattle car as American soldiers rolled in with tanks. "To me," Joshua recalls, "the American soldiers were proof that God exists, and they came down from the sky." They came down from heaven.
I began this evening by honoring three soldiers who fought on D-Day in the Second World War. One of them was Herman Zeitchik. But there is more to Herman's story. A year after he stormed the beaches of Normandy, Herman was one of the American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau. He was one of the Americans who helped rescue Joshua from that hell on earth. Almost 75 years later, Herman and Joshua are both together in the gallery tonight, seated side by side, here in the home of American freedom. Herman and Joshua, your presence this evening is very much appreciated, thank you very much. Thank you.
When American soldiers set out beneath the dark skies over the English Channel in the early hours of D-Day, 1944, they were just young men of 18 and 19, hurtling on fragile landing craft toward the most momentous battle in the history of war.
They did not know if they would survive the hour. They did not know if they would grow old. But they knew that America had to prevail. Their cause was this nation, and generations yet unborn. Why did they do it? They did it for America—they did it for us.
Everything that has come since—our triumph over communism, our giant leaps of science and discovery, our unrivaled progress toward equality and justice—all of it is possible thanks to the blood and tears and courage and vision of the Americans who came before.
Think of this Capitol, think of this very chamber, where lawmakers before you voted to end slavery, to build the railroads and the highways, and defeat fascism, to secure civil rights, and to face down evil empires.
Here tonight, we have legislators from across this magnificent republic. You have come from the rocky shores of Maine and the volcanic peaks of Hawaii; from the snowy woods of Wisconsin and the red deserts of Arizona; from the green farms of Kentucky and the golden beaches of California. Together, we represent the most extraordinary nation in all of history.
What will we do with this moment? How will we be remembered?
I ask the men and women of this Congress—look at the opportunities before us. Our most thrilling achievements are still ahead. Our most exciting journeys still await. Our biggest victories are still to come. We have not yet begun to dream.
We must choose whether we are defined by our differences or whether we dare to transcend them. We must choose whether we squander our inheritance or whether we proudly declare that we are Americans. We do the incredible. We defy the impossible. We conquer the unknown.
This is the time to reignite the American imagination. This is the time to search for the tallest summit, and set our sights on the brightest star. This is the time to rekindle the bonds of love and loyalty and memory that link us together as citizens, as neighbors, as patriots.
This is our future, our fate, and our choice to make. I am asking you to choose greatness. No matter the trials we face, no matter the challenges to come, we must go forward together. And we must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America's destiny—that one nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world!
Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America. Thank you very much.
One argument President Trump set forth Tuesday in his State of the Union address concerned the many ongoing investigations he faces.
“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States,” he said, “and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous, partisan investigations. If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just does not work that way. We must be united at home to defeat our adversaries abroad.”
The clear implication: America cannot prosper so long as the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, or federal prosecutors in New York, or congressional committees, have Trump and his associates in their crosshairs. And therefore, these investigations should end.
But the rest of Trump’s speech blatantly contradicted that logic.
Various investigations have been going on for his entire presidency. And in his telling, his tenure has been characterized by an “economic miracle” and multiple pieces of important bipartisan legislation.
“In the last Congress, both parties came together to pass unprecedented legislation to confront the opioid crisis, a sweeping new farm bill, and historic V.A. Reforms,” he said. “After four decades of rejection, we passed V.A. accountability, so we can finally terminate those who mistreat our wonderful veterans.”
Weeks ago, Trump added, “all parties united for groundbreaking criminal-justice reform. They said it couldn’t be done.” And, he argued, “We passed a massive tax cut for working families and double the child tax credit. We have virtually ended the estate tax, or death tax as it is called, for small businesses, ranches and family farms. We eliminated the very unpopular Obamacare individual mandate penalty. And to give critically ill patients access to life-saving cures, we passed very importantly, right to try.”
Trump can’t have it both ways. If even a fraction of the bygone achievements that he claims are valid, it follows that the Mueller probe and other investigations do not, in fact, preclude legislative progress. The investigations need not end for the sake of American prosperity. Even bipartisan compromises can be reached amid what Trump calls “a ridiculous, partisan investigation.” It might be better for Trump if the Mueller probe ends, but there is no evidence that would be better for the people. His weak argument should be summarily and universally rejected.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers his second official State of the Union at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday, following a border-wall-funding standoff and a record-long government shutdown that led to a week’s delay for the speech. Sure, he may talk about investing in policy with bipartisan support—infrastructure, lowering prescription-drug prices—and all under the umbrella theme “Choosing Greatness,” but what other political achievements might Trump have to show off? (Here’s why any gesture at unity won’t work tonight, John Dickerson argues.)
San Francisco is hoping to ban local-government use of facial-recognition technology. If lawmakers pass the ordinance, it would make the California city the first in the nation with such an outright ban. But San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s bill hones in on face-recognition as used in policing. So what about, say, that infamous face-unlock feature on Apple’s latest iPhone model?
The Oscars is demonstrating its inferiority complex, as the Academy prepares for the 91st iteration of its awards ceremony later this month. First it tried to add a (short-lived) new prize to recognize “outstanding achievement in popular film.” It’s trimmed its broadcast of award categories without much celebrity (including, reportedly, cinematography). It remains host-less. Is there a solution for the institution that’s trying to balance maintaining its stature and broadening its appeal as a supposed purveyor of the best in film?
Evening Reads
(Image: Jeff Brown)
Why do people have the political opinions they have? How, and why, do stances change?
“On rare occasions, we learn of a new one—a key factor that seems to have been overlooked. To a surprising degree, a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical disgust.”
(Courtesy of Atlantic reader Katrina Weinig)
Last week, we asked you what your childhood physical-education experience was like, in light of recent research that backs up what many of you experienced: that gym class was a no good, very bad time. One reader dug deep into primary sources and found her third-grade report card (printed above).
→ Here’s more of what readers had to say about their time in gym
(Kevin Frayer / Getty)
In the above image, Chinese workers make traditional red lanterns at a local factory in Tuntou, China last month. The village is responsible for millions of these red decorations.
Today marks the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year 2019, the Year of which animal, the last of the 12 animals included in the Chinese Zodiac?
→ For the answer, see this gallery of images from several countries ushering in the arrival of a new lunar year
Urban Developments
(London Transport Museum)
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares today’s top stories:
Despite perceived fears of added costs and crime, refugees resettled in the United States bring population gains and economic benefits, new research shows—they open up businesses, hire locals, buy homes, and pay taxes.
Does upzoning boost the housing supply and lower prices, like many claim? Maybe not, Richard Florida writes—but that shouldn’t make zoning reform any less of a priority, Alex Baca and Hannah Lebovits argue.
A rich and wonderfully nerdy archive commemorates an aspect of London that has long been both omnipresent and scarcely noticed: Its colorful transit seat design.
Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Subscribe to the CityLab Daily newsletter.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com.
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It’s Tuesday, February 5. President Donald Trump will deliver his second State of the Union address tonight at 9 p.m. ET.
What to Expect: Americans don’t need anyone to explain how the country is doing, argues David A. Graham. Instead, tonight’s speech will serve more as a kind of checkup on the president himself, an assessment of his own position after he’s had his first taste of divided government, in the aftermath of the 35-day government shutdown and with another one potentially on the horizon.
During the address, Trump will almost certainly tout the country’s recent economic gains, including the growing manufacturing-jobs numbers. But the president’s record in this area is complex: While manufacturing jobs have increased by 473,000 since his inauguration, they’re still 1.4 million below their pre-recession high, in 2006.
Looking Back: In his 2018 State of the Union address, Trump offered a four-part plan for immigration reform that included securing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and building a wall along the southern border.
Other People to Watch:
— Senator Kamala Harris of California will be giving pre-SOTU remarks on Facebook Live,
— the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams will deliver the party’s official response
— California Attorney General Xavier Becerra will give the Spanish-language response,
— and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will offer his own response to the address for the third year in a row.
The Yuck Factor: A new strand of experimental psychology suggests that our propensity to feel physical disgust might be correlated with our political ideology. “In short, this research may help illuminate one factor—among many—that underlies why those on the left and the right can so vehemently disagree.”
Judge Rao: Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Neomi Rao, Trump’s choice to replace Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals, about her past writings, including some about victims of date rape.
Seeking Counsel: The California woman who has accused Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax of sexual assault has obtained the services of the same law firm that represented Christine Blasey Ford in her allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Fairfax, who has denied the allegations, would replace Governor Ralph Northam if Northam resigns over a scandal involving a photo from his medical-school yearbook.
Snapshot
Lights are set up for television crews in Statuary Hall in the Capitol on Tuesday ahead of President Trump's delivery of the State of the Union. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticTrump’s Hollow Call for Unity (John Dickerson)
“Unity can’t simply be asserted, and it can’t be a veiled demand that the other guy cry uncle. It has to be shown through its component parts: reconciliation, empathy, not immediately questioning your opponent’s motives, and restraining your own impulses.” → Read on.
Martha McSally Should Not Be in the Senate (Garrett Epps)
“The Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act … failed in 2017 by one vote—John McCain’s. Now the very seat that McCain vacated has been handed unilaterally to a lawmaker who owes the seat not to the voters who rejected her but to a Republican governor and his party.” → Read on.
Policy Makers Need a New Path to Education Reform (Rahm Emanuel)
“For most of my career, I preached the old gospel of education reform. But now research and experience suggest that policy makers need to embrace a new path forward and leave the old gospel behind.” → Read on.
◆Top Nancy Pelosi Aide Privately Tells Insurance Executives Not to Worry About Democrats Pushing ‘Medicare for All’ (Ryan Grim, The Intercept)
◆Trump’s Early Trips to Mar-a-Lago Cost Nearly $14 Million (Benjamin Siegel, ABC News)
◆Former White House Staffer Cliff Sims on Trump’s Emotional Life and the Fine Points of Leaking (Olivia Nuzzi, New York)
◆Murkowski Bucks GOP as Trump Seizes Party (Burgess Everett, Politico)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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Nearly 30 years ago, when just 15 percent of Americans had a computer, and even fewer had internet access, Thomas Parkinson set up a rack of modems on a Crate and Barrel wine rack and started accepting orders for the internet’s first grocery-delivery company, Peapod, which he founded with his brother Andrew.
Back then, ordering groceries online was complicated—most customers had dial-up, and Peapod’s web graphics were so rudimentary that customers couldn’t see images of what they were buying. Delivery was complicated, too: The Parkinsons drove to grocery stores in the Chicago area, bought what customers had ordered, and then delivered the goods from the backseat of their beat-up Honda Civic. When people wanted to stock up on certain goods—strawberry yogurt or bottles of Diet Coke—the Parkinsons would deplete whole sections of local grocery stores.
Peapod is still around today. But convincing customers to order groceries online is still nearly as difficult now as it was in 1989. Twenty-two percent of apparel sales and 30 percent of computer and electronics sales happen online today, but the same can be said for only 3 percent of grocery sales, according to a report from Deutsche Bank Securities. “My dream was for it to be ubiquitous, but getting that first order can be a bit of a hurdle,” Parkinson told me from Peapod’s headquarters in downtown Chicago. (He is now Peapod’s chief technology officer; his brother has since left the company.)
Until online grocery-delivery companies are delivering to hundreds of homes in the same neighborhood, it will be very hard for them to make a profit. Though it is an $800 billion business, grocery is famously low-margin; most grocery stores are barely profitable as it is. Add on the labor, equipment, and gas costs of bringing food to people’s doors quickly and cheaply, and you have a business that seems all but guaranteed to fail. “No one has made any great amount of money selling groceries online,” Sucharita Kodali, an analyst with Forrester Research, told me. “In fact, there have been a lot more people losing money.”
This is not true in every country. In South Korea, 20 percent of consumers buy groceries online, and both in the United Kingdom and Japan, 7.5 percent of consumers do, according to Kantar Consulting. But those are countries with just a few large population centers, which makes it easier for delivery companies to set up shop in just a few big cities and access a huge amount of purchasing power. In the United States, by contrast, people are spread out around rural, urban, and suburban areas, making it hard to reach a majority of shoppers from just a few physical locations. In South Korea and Japan, customers are also more comfortable with shopping on their phones than consumers are in countries like the United States.
Still, companies are still trying to make online grocery delivery work in the United States. Today, Peapod is one of dozens of companies offering grocery delivery to customers in certain metro areas. In June 2017, Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.4 billion and started rolling out grocery delivery for Prime members in cities across the country; analysts predicted at the time that the company’s logistics know-how would allow it to leverage Whole Foods stores to dominate grocery delivery. Also in 2017, Walmart acquired Parcel, a same-day, last-mile delivery company. Two months after that, Target said it was buying Shipt, a same-day delivery service. Kroger announced last May that it was partnering with Ocado, a British online grocer, to speed up delivery with robotically operated warehouses. Companies like ALDI, Food Lion, and Publix have started working with Instacart to deliver groceries from their stores. FreshDirect recently opened a highly automated 400,000-square-foot delivery center and says it plans to expand to regions beyond New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., in the coming year.
[Read: Why Walmart still hasn’t crushed the regional grocery store]
The story of Peapod, which has had 30 years to perfect the art of online grocery delivery, suggests that making money will be a challenge for even deep-pocketed retailers like Amazon. Peapod has more experience than any other online grocery-delivery company. It outlasted Webvan, which raised $800 million before crashing in 2001, and beat out other big bets of the dot-com boom such as Kozmo, Home Grocer, and ShopLink.
Peapod itself nearly failed in 2000 before being rescued by the Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold NV, which bought first a controlling interest and then the entire company. (After a recent merger, Peapod’s parent company is now called Ahold Delhaize—it owns supermarket chains like Food Lion, Hannaford, and Stop & Shop.) In 2016, Peapod was only in the black in three markets, a Peapod executive told The Wall Street Journal that year. The company has not been able to get enough people to buy groceries online to lower the costs of delivering them. If a company with 30 years of experience in grocery delivery can’t make it work, can anyone?
Compared to groceries, clothes and electronics and dog food are incredibly simple to deliver. A company like Amazon keeps those products stored in a warehouse, packs them in a box, and sends them on their way through the mail or through its delivery contractors.
Groceries, though, can’t just be packed in a box and entrusted to mail carriers. Imagine fulfilling an order that includes popsicles, avocados, a case of Coke, and tortilla chips. The popsicles have to be kept cold; the avocados have to be chosen carefully, the Coke is heavy, and the tortilla chips can’t be crushed. Now consider that the average Peapod order has 52 items.
Because of these factors, it will always be cheaper for grocery stores to have customers come to them, and do all the work of shopping themselves, than it will be for the stores to bring the groceries to the customers, said Kodali, the Forrester analyst. “In the best case, you only make the same as what you would make in stores,” Kodali said. “It’s not like it’s a more profitable distribution channel.” One of Amazon’s big innovations in delivering packages was that it could cut out the middleman (the store) and sell things directly to consumers, saving the cost of overhead. But consumer packaged-goods companies can’t cut out the stores, since they don’t have the infrastructure in place to get their products, whether it be ice cream or avocados, directly to consumers.
Peapod has tried to lower its overhead in a few ways. In some markets, it keeps groceries in vast warehouses outside of town, which saves money because the company doesn’t have to buy or rent retail space in city centers. Peapod has figured out how to make the shopping part of online grocery delivery relatively fast, which means one employee can process dozens of orders in just a few hours. In “warerooms,” which are essentially smaller stores on top of grocery stores, aisles are much narrower than they are in regular grocery stores. Employees wear devices on their wrists that tell them on what aisle and shelf a product is located, and they load food into baskets efficiently, scanning bar codes. Workers get intimately familiar with where various items are located, allowing them to shop quickly.
Despite Peapod’s innovations, the whole process is very labor-intensive. Peapod’s workers still have to scan the groceries packed into orders with a temperature gun to make sure meat hasn’t gotten too warm; they also have to audit the totes to make sure that items aren’t broken and that nothing is missing. (Ahold, Peapod’s parent company, is already using robots to speed some parts of packing customers’ orders.)
Delivery can be slow-going, too. I tagged along with one Peapod driver, Ricardo Bernard, on a Friday afternoon as he brought groceries to consumers’ doorsteps in a wealthy neighborhood of Chicago. We were assigned 19 stops in Chicago’s South Loop, which was heavily congested and included a number of apartment buildings; Bernard kept having to park the truck in narrow spots, get out, unload the totes of groceries onto a dolly, call the tenant from an intercom (or get let in by a doorman), wait for an elevator, ride the elevator, and then wait for tenants to open their door so he could unpack the totes onto their kitchen counter, a process than can take more than 10 minutes for each delivery.
Ricardo Bernard unloads groceries in Chicago. (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)The most efficient grocery-delivery companies are really logistics companies. Employees at Peapod’s headquarters tinker with routes and monitor weather and traffic in real time so they can make changes if a storm is coming or a concert is causing congestion, all to shave seconds or minutes off delivery routes. The company times how long drivers are sitting in traffic; how long they go between deliveries; how much time they spend with customers. It rewards drivers who get deliveries completed faster than average but who maintain high scores from customers.
Grocery companies may have to spend more money opening more brick-and-mortar stores to make logistics easier and to lessen the amount of time delivery drivers have to be on the road. A D.A. Davidson analyst, Tom Forte, recently wrote that he thought Amazon should acquire thousands of gas stations to “advance its delivery efforts.” (Amazon declined to comment on the specifics of its grocery-delivery business, but said that it has expanded to deliver groceries in 60 metros since it bought Whole Foods last February.)
Even though it’s spent years shaving seconds off deliveries, Peapod struggles to make the financials work. The company charges a delivery fee that ranges from $6.95 to $9.95 per order. That might seem steep to people accustomed to getting everything delivered for free, but it does not come close to covering the costs associated with bringing groceries to customers’ doors. “Getting costs down is a work in progress,” Ken Fanaro, Peapod’s senior director of transportation planning and development, told me. Online grocery delivery is really only cost-efficient when companies can spend the bulk of their time bringing groceries into homes from trucks, rather than driving miles and then bringing groceries into homes. “In a perfect world, we’d be like a mailman, going down the street, delivering at every home,” he told me.
[Read: Why Amazon is such a threat to the grocery industry ]
Peapod pays handsomely for workers’ time. Bernard, like all Peapod workers, is a full-time employee, who receives health care and other benefits; the company has thus far eschewed the contractor model employed by delivery services like Instacart and Uber Eats.
Today, the markets where Peapod is profitable are the densest ones, like New York City. Even Amazon struggles in suburban markets, announcing last year that it was suspending its Amazon Fresh delivery service in regions of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, while maintaining service in cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston.
Grocery stores are stuck in a tough place right now. They’re facing challenges from big retailers like Walmart and Target, which have started offering produce and fresh food, and from discount chains like Aldi and Lidl, which recently started adding stores in the United States. Now, as Amazon enters more markets, it’s forcing grocery stores to offer delivery, too, even though they’ll lose money on it. If they don’t, customers may go somewhere else. Amazon is using its deep pockets to undercut its competitors on price, taking a page from other tech start-ups like Uber who tried to corner the market first and then make money after.
Some supermarkets have experimented with offering ways that are not as expensive as grocery delivery to make shopping easier for consumers. Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, and a number of other stores offer “click and collect,” for example, which allows consumers to order their groceries online and then drive to the store and pick them up. Click-and-collect represents nearly half of online grocery sales, according to Nielsen data, up from 18 percent in 2016. Amazon is covering both of these bases: In addition to its delivery options, the company has launched Go stores in Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco that allow customers to walk in, select items, and walk out without waiting in line to pay.
But ubiquity remains the holy grail of grocery delivery, and all the stores know it. So they’re offering discounts and deals to get customers to sign up for delivery services, making thin margins even thinner. Most online grocery delivery services offer free delivery on a customer’s first order, for example. According to Elley Symmes, a senior analyst on Kantar Consulting’s grocery team, the number-one reason many customers got groceries delivered was that they received an incentive to do so. But when those promotions go away, so do the customers. “Delivery costs continue to be a barrier to entry,” Symmes told me.
To be able to offer those incentives without going bankrupt, some supermarkets are partnering with brands to get the cost of delivery subsidized. Colgate may offer free delivery if a customer buys a certain number of Colgate products, for instance.
Cost might not be the only reason customers aren’t flocking to grocery delivery. I asked a few shoppers in a Massachusetts Stop & Shop why they weren’t getting their groceries delivered; they were pushing carts through aisles as Peapod workers packed crates upstairs for delivery. Most said they liked picking out their own meat and produce, and that they don’t like planning their shopping ahead of time. Mike Kolodziej, 37, told me he actually likes going to the grocery store. “It’s my quiet time,” he said. He has five kids at home.
And besides, unlike being a customer in other industries tech has disrupted—going to the post office, taking cabs in certain cities—going grocery shopping isn’t all that unpleasant. In the suburbs, people get in their cars and drive to spacious stores where they can pick out the produce they like and also find out about new products on the shelves, said David J. Livingston, a supermarket analyst for DJL Research. Some stores offer other services, like prescription pick-up or wine bars, that make them an experience people enjoy—they’re faced with the daunting task of making stores more appealing to people while also making delivery appealing too.
Still, analysts say that now is the time to convert more customers to online grocery delivery. About 41 percent of consumers neither like nor dislike shopping for products like beverages and perishable goods in grocery stores, according to a Deloitte survey. Deloitte argues that there are many consumers “who are not emotionally attached to the physical shopping process and might consider online-shopping options if they were offered.” They include Jim Winnfield, who recently got his first online grocery-delivery order; he used to live in the Chicago suburbs, but recently moved downtown, and decided to give Peapod a try. “I’m lazy enough that I want people to do as much for me as possible,” he told me. Winnfield’s first delivery was free.
However they get customers to sign up, supermarkets are likely going to have to spend a lot of money in promotions and deals as they try to make delivery more popular among consumers. This, of course, advantages Amazon, which has deep pockets and has long been able to convince shareholders that spending upfront on getting customers in the door has long-term dividends. This has never been Peapod’s strategy—it outlasted competitors like Webvan because it never spent a lot of money it didn’t have, Parkinson told me.
But even Peapod is now getting into the battle for customer share. In January 2019 alone, Ahold Delhaize said it was launching self-driving grocery-delivery vehicles in Boston and acquired a Long Island chain of supermarkets, expanding the company’s reach. Peapod is currently offering $20 off groceries and no delivery fees for the first 60 days a customer uses the service. It outlasted its competitors over the past few decades by being careful with money, Parkinson told me. Today, though, even Peapod is coming around to the fact that customers are cheap, and whichever company makes its services the cheapest just might win.
No president in American history has been so deft at capturing public attention as Donald Trump, and yet, paradoxically, he has few tangible political achievements to show for it. In the State of the Union, the president will once more attempt to convert public attention, in the form of his most high-profile speech of the year, into political capital. But he’s likely to find that task harder than ever before.
The American people hardly need Trump, or anyone else, to tell them what the state of the union is: The union is a bit of a mess. It has just emerged from the longest government shutdown in history, with a reprise possible next week. It is polarized, angry, and, according to many Americans, on the wrong track. The economy is strong, at least, though there are some rumblings of trouble.
So Tuesday’s address will serve instead as a checkup on Trump himself—just as everything else in American politics seems to be these days. Trump’s omnipresence is inextricable from the chaotic state of the union. The speech comes at a pivotal time in Trump’s presidency. He has gotten his first taste of divided government and found it bitter. His legislative agenda seems moribund. Investigations by both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and House Democrats continue to dog him. And his 2020 reelection campaign will soon begin in earnest. State of the Union addresses seldom have much real impact, but this one should offer some indication of how Trump assesses his own position.
[Read: The State of the Union is unrecognizable]
It is already clear that Trump’s bully pulpit does not stand as tall as it did one year ago, when he delivered his first State of the Union. Watching the speech—over Trump’s left shoulder, fittingly—will be Speaker Nancy Pelosi. After helping lead Democrats to a big victory in the midterm elections, recapturing control of the House, Pelosi quickly moved to show Trump her strength, forcing Trump to reopen the government (temporarily) without getting money for his border wall, and postponing this very speech, over Trump’s objections, in the midst of the shutdown.
Trump never really seemed to find a rhythm to working with Congress when both chambers were controlled by Republicans, ending up with little more than a scaled-back tax cut over two years, and he now faces a far more complicated task with a Democratic House. Yet as Trump’s dogged pursuit of a shutdown in December showed, he feels pressure to execute on his central campaign promise of building a border wall as the 2020 presidential election approaches.
Ahead of the speech, the White House has telegraphed a mixed strategy. On the one hand, Trump has said he wants to offer a conciliatory, unifying speech. On the other, he also wants to speak at length about immigration, the topic so divisive that it produced the lengthy government closures. It’s not clear how, or whether, Trump and his speechwriters can square this circle.
“I really think it’s going to be a speech that’s going to cover a lot of territory, but part of it’s going to be unity,” the president said last week. A Republican source told Politico that Trump would even offer an olive branch to Pelosi. It’s not unusual for a president to strive for a warm and fuzzy tone in the State of the Union, but it’s unusual for Trump to do so in any forum. And any attempts at unity would seem to be at odds with his plans to focus on immigration. Trump has thus far not managed to find a way to lure House Democrats away from their implacable opposition to spending $5.7 billion on the wall, a figure that would fund only a fraction of the barrier. The State of the Union gives Trump an opening to reset his relationship with Congress, but a tentative rapprochement could blow up next week. In recent days, he has said that congressional negotiations to fund the government after a February 15 deadline are a waste of time if he doesn’t get the wall money.
Last year’s State of the Union was not especially memorable, but it’s worth recalling that immigration was one of its central themes. The president described “four pillars” for immigration policy: a path to citizenship for “Dreamers”; the end of the visa lottery; the end of chain migration; and $25 billion for the wall. So far, Trump hasn’t gotten any of those things, and while his natural gifts as a campaigner have been discussed unto boredom, there’s no indication that he’s learning how to marshal his power more effectively. (This year, aides are promising a five-pillared speech, so that’s one form of growth.)
Trump might have better luck on grasping for unity when he discusses infrastructure investment and lowering prescription-drug prices, both of which have substantial Democratic support. But Trump has not managed to deliver on either in his first two years as president, and most of his other ideas on health care are likely to elicit nearly unanimous Democratic opposition.
The president will be on more solid ground praising the economy, which remains the brightest spot of his administration, even though White House policy is not the greatest cause of growth, and even though his trade war may be taking a bite out of it. There’s been increasing pessimism about the economy, with some experts predicting a recession within the next couple of years, but Trump got a boost on Friday with the release of the most recent jobs numbers, which showed that the economy added 304,000 new positions in January.
By contrast, don’t expect to hear much about the Russia investigations. Though the Mueller probe drives Trump to fury on Twitter and in interviews, he avoided it during last year’s speech, and he will likely do so again, just as former President Bill Clinton avoided any mention of the Monica Lewinsky affair in the 1998 State of the Union.
[John Dickerson: Trump’s hollow call for unity]
That assumes Trump stays on message during the speech, sticking to what’s on the teleprompter, which aides have suggested he will do. Last year, there was still a strangeness to watching Trump, an improvisatory speaker, deliver an address straight. By now, the novelty has worn off, as Trump has shown repeatedly he is able to do it—most recently in his first Oval Office address, which was focused on the shutdown. Yet he remains a stilted, somewhat awkward orator in formal settings. “I’m saying listen closely to the State of the Union. I think you’ll find it very exciting,” he said last week. But that seems unlikely. Trump is more comfortable on a MAGA rally stage, but the spree of events he held before the midterm elections, and the election results, demonstrated how ineffective those speeches are at reaching beyond his core supporters. Worse for him, there are signs of shakiness among those voters post-shutdown.
The State of the Union is a rare forum for Trump to speak to a wider audience, outside his base and beyond the Fox News airwaves. Yet given his oversaturation in public life, the meandering quality of his speeches, and the already-declining ratings he drew last year, it’s hard to imagine Trump keeping his numbers up. There’s a danger that even as Trump struggles to put the power of the presidency to use, his grip on attention might be eroding, too.
Twelve-year-old Vilde lives in Telemark, Norway, a lush rural region famous for its folk music and dance traditions. She is one of the few young women in the country who performs the halling, a Norwegian solo dance traditionally practiced by young men as a show of virility. It is a physically demanding undertaking, with various challenging acrobatic moves that require strength and agility in equal measure. Although Vilde is the only girl competing in her age group, she is determined to become the national champion. She often practices on wooden beams and riverbanks, springing from rock to rock and running across the fields of her family’s farm.
Vilde’s commitment to the halling is not simply fueled by passion. She believes that if she wins the national championship, she will prolong her ailing grandfather’s life. Erlend E. Mo’s poignant documentary, Dancing for You, observes Vilde’s tender relationship with her grandfather, who was once a halling champion himself. In between vigorous training sessions with her coach, Vilde spends quality time with her grandfather, who helps her come to terms with the nature of loss.
“So much in her story was compelling for me,” Mo told The Atlantic. “It is unique, about a girl doing a male macho dance, and universal, about love and sorrow.”
To capture authentic moments between Vilde and her grandfather, Mo said he often filmed alone, taking up the mantle of director, cinematographer, and sound recordist. “I often do that in my films,” he said. “Scenes that demand special needs from the characters, I always do alone.” That’s because he has fully earned the trust of his subjects, Mo said. “I build a relationship of trust that is holy from our first meeting all the way to a finished film, with all the screenings and publicity. That is the only way I can be given the great gift of magic moments between characters, or with the characters alone.”
“Sometimes you are just very lucky to find people that are radiant, expressive, deeply sympathetic, and moving, both with and without the camera present,” Mo added.
According to Mo, before Vilde participated in Dancing for You, she was bullied for being “a foolish girl doing this silly old-fashioned dance.” After the film was shown nationally—including on Norway’s most popular public TV station—Mo said that the harassment ceased. “She became a hero.”
Today marks the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year 2019, the Year of the Pig. The last of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac, the pig is thought of as easygoing and fortunate. In the larger Chinese astrological cycle, this year is also associated with the element of earth, which makes 2019 the Year of the Earth Pig, exemplified by the traits of sociability, kindness, and thoughtfulness. People around the world ushered in the new year with displays of fireworks, family get-togethers, temple visits, and street festivals. Collected here are images from several countries where revelers have been welcoming the arrival of the earth pig.
Updated 4:31 p.m. ET on February 5, 2019.
Four years after he first came across an unidentified dinosaur in southern Argentina, the paleontologist Pablo Gallina uncovered one of its neck bones and got a surprise.
In 2010, he had found a set of dinosaur teeth in Bajada Colorada. This area is rich in fossils, but because many of them are in fragile condition, Gallina had decided not to expose the teeth any further. Instead, he and his colleagues from CONICET, the Argentine government’s science agency, excavated a large chunk of surrounding earth, packed it in a plaster jacket, and took it back to their lab to carefully extract whatever bones lay within.
Gradually, the team exposed more teeth, a jawbone, and most of the creature’s skull. Then, finally, the neck bone. The six-inch-long vertebra had a pair of huge spines protruding from it, each almost two feet long.
Each spine was probably like the horn of a modern-day antelope, with a thick sheath of keratin (the material in your hair and nails) covering a core of bone. But Gallina thinks that unlike antelope horns, which grow as a single pair from their owner’s head, these spines ran all the way down the dinosaur’s long neck, with one pair per vertebra. It’s as if the animal had a sharp, horny mohawk growing where a mullet should be.
[Read: Meet Patagotitan, the biggest dinosaur ever found]
The team named the dinosaur Bajadasaurus pronuspinax—an etymological chimera of Spanish, Greek, and Latin that means “lizard from Bajada with forward-bending spines.” It lived in the very dawn of the Cretaceous period, around 140 million years ago. And Gallina thinks that it likely used its outrageous spines to defend itself from predators.
Bajadasaurus is one of the sauropods—a group of large-bodied, long-necked dinosaurs that include such celebrity species as Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, and Brachiosaurus. More specifically, it’s one of the dicraeosaurs—a family of little-known sauropods distinguished by their neck spines.
The first of these, Dicraeosaurus, was discovered in Tanzania in 1914. Its spines were relatively short, but prominent enough to give the creature its name, which means “two-forked lizard.” For almost eight decades, it was the only known member of its group. Argentine scientists finally described a second species, Amargasaurus, in 1991. And more recently, for whatever reason, dicraeosaurs have been popping up all over the place. Three more were described in the 2000s. Lingwulong, from China, was revealed last July. Pilmatueia, also from Argentina, was announced to the world just last month. That’s seven species, and Bajadasaurus makes eight.
There are almost as many hypotheses about what dicraeosaur neck spines were for as there are dicraeosaur species. Some scientists suggested that they supported a camel-like hump, or that they held aloft a pair of sails, which served to regulate body temperature or signal to mates and rivals. Other researchers reckoned that the spines might have clattered together to make sounds, or supported air sacs connected to the dinosaur’s lungs.
Gallina isn’t discounting any of these ideas, but he argues that “the most logical explanation” is that each spine was its own separate horn, and together, they were used in defense. As dicraeosaurs bent down to graze, their spines would have flared out to provide cover for the vulnerable necks. The forward-pointing spines of Bajadasaurus might have been especially intimidating: They “would represent a disturbing fence for a loitering carnivore,” the team writes in a paper on the discovery.
Admittedly, that’s a lot to infer from just a single set of spines, on a single vertebra. Without the rest of the skeleton, the team can’t say for certain whether such spines really adorned the rest of Bajadasaurus’s neck. They’re basing their reasonable reconstruction on the closely related Amargasaurus—an animal that’s known from a full skeleton, and whose neck spines were just as long and dramatic as Bajadasaurus’s. They differ only in their direction, sloping backwards instead of forward.
Given the similarity between the two animals, Gallina thinks it’s unlikely that Bajadasaurus had only one set of spines, which just happened to be on the one neck bone the team found. It’s also unlikely that the other spines bent in different directions, because that would have stopped the beast from raising or dipping its neck. And it’s equally improbable that the spines Gallina found had become distorted in the fossilization process, because none of Bajadasaurus’s other bones were warped. “We think we’ve done an accurate restoration,” Gallina says.
[Read: How a fossil can reveal the color of a dinosaur]
Bajadasaurus does have a modern equivalent—the potto, a small African primate that also has long, forward-pointing vertebral spines at the base of its neck. “The spines don’t protrude through the skin, but they do make a series of bumps that have been inferred to serve a defensive function,” says Matt Wedel of the Western University of Health Sciences, who runs a blog about sauropod vertebra. “The existence of such a similar defensive adaptation in a living animal is probably the strongest argument for a defensive function in Bajadasaurus.”
“In modern animals that exhibit these types of bizarre structures, they often serve multiple roles, sometimes functioning in display for mates and species recognition, as well as defense,” says Kristina Curry Rogers, a paleontologist at Macalester College. Given that the spines of different dicraeosaurs were so different, “display may have been just as important, if not more important, than defense, but we’ll have to wait for more discoveries to test these ideas more thoroughly.”
Gallina says that the rest of Bajadasaurus’s skeleton is probably still sitting in Bajada Colorada, but the area is such a mess of fossils that “it’s very difficult to recognize what is from this specimen and what is from another.”
But “even if we had the entire skeleton,” Wedel says, “it’s hard to find smoking-gun evidence of a defensive function in a fossil animal. In horned dinosaurs like Triceratops, we can go look for healed injuries on the frill, but short of finding a broken-off Bajadasaurus spine embedded in the face of a meat-eating dinosaur, we will probably not know for certain. Still, that’s part of the lure of paleontology: trying to see how much we can reasonably infer about the lives of these vanished creatures.”
In 2014, Gallina’s team unveiled another new dinosaur from Bajada Colorada. They named it Leikupal after the words for “vanishing family” in the language of the indigenous Mapuche people. It is also a sauropod, and at 30 feet, a relative pip-squeak in a lineage of giants.
At the opposite end of the size spectrum is what other Argentine paleontologists recently discovered, possibly the largest dinosaur of all time—the 130-foot, 69-ton Patagotitan. Other recent discoveries also include: Yi, a small, feathered predator with batlike wings; Kosmoceratops, with its row of comb-over horns; Concavenator, a predator with a small, pyramidal hump over its hips; and Halszkaraptor, an implausible murder-swan with a long, elegant neck; flipper-like arms; and Velociraptor-style sickle claws.
“We are still finding new dinosaurs, and the diversity is increasing year by year,” Gallina says. Which means that we’ll need to make room in the pantheon of exalted dinosaurs for more newcomers as metal as Bajadasaurus.
A San Francisco lawmaker is proposing what would be a nationwide first: a complete moratorium on local government use of facial-recognition technology. Introduced by San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance would ban all city departments from using facial-recognition technology and require board approval before departments purchase new surveillance devices. The bill regulates only local use, not use by private companies: The face-unlock feature included on the latest iPhone model, for example, would still be legal.
Neighboring cities Berkeley and Oakland have passed similar rules, requiring public input and a privacy policy before officials implement new tech, but nowhere in the United States is facial recognition outright banned. Texas and Illinois require consent before collecting facial data, but don’t ban the practice. Bans have been proposed in Washington State and Massachusetts, but are still in the earliest stages of ratification. San Francisco’s ban could land as early as April.
In addition to banning facial-recognition technology, the ordinance stipulates that any department that wants to purchase new surveillance equipment—from CCTV cameras to social-media scanners and license-plate readers—must submit to the board of supervisors a “surveillance technology policy” laying out what information will be collected with the technology, how long it will be retained, with whom it can be shared, how members of the public can register complaints, and specified authorized and forbidden uses.
The proposal also bars city officials from using any data sourced from facial recognition. If police in a neighboring city wanted to share a list of suspects sourced from facial recognition, the San Francisco Police Department would be prohibited from using it, explains Lee Hepner, a legislative aide who helped draft the bill. He says this is only the first of many steps changing how the city balances policy and technology.
Regulating surveillance technology is difficult because data collected for one purpose can be used for another. That’s not always a bad thing. In New York, for example, city data tracking asbestos complaints were used to predict tenant harassment. In Sacramento, city officials tracked welfare recipients suspected of fraud by using license-plate data employed by police to find stolen vehicles. Peskin’s proposal is something of a “good faith” ordinance: Departments must explain how they plan to use the technology, but aren’t forbidden from using data in other ways.
This flexibility in how departments use data is balanced by the second part of the ordinance, which requires annual reviews. Yearly, departments must submit a “surveillance impact report” for board review and public discussion, explaining how technology was used and why. These impact reports include all uses of the data, costs (including personnel, maintenance, and equipment), and crucially, where the technology was used and crime statistics for those locations.
If city officials want to keep using surveillance cameras in a park to prevent car break-ins, for example, each year they would have to submit evidence that the cameras reduced crime.
“We want there to be a justification for use of the technology in the location,” Hepner says. “If the ostensible benefits of any of these surveillance technologies is the prevention of crime, then it’s helpful for the board to be able to track that. Over time, is this technology having a positive impact?”
The ordinance applies retroactively to all the surveillance systems and technologies already in use. Officials will have to submit impact reports annually and disclose the costs of surveillance tech already in operation, hopefully revealing to the public how deeply embedded surveillance already is in their daily lives. Even after approval, technologies can be rescinded at a later date pending the annual reviews.
But Peskin’s bill regulates face recognition as a tool for policing, not for commerce. Consumers use facial recognition to unlock phones, board flights, tag friends in wedding photos and children in summer-camp pictures, and even buy beer at baseball games.
This introduces some ironies: For example, if the bill passes, the SFPD will be barred from using Amazon’s Rekognition software to scan video footage for suspects after a shooting—but a grocery store will be permitted to do the same thing to analyze shopper behavior. Curtailing this kind of retail surveillance—especially given how plainly convenient it often feels—will require an entirely different approach.
The ordinance is currently in a 30-day hold, during which the public can submit comments and concerns. Afterward, it will go in front of the city’s Rules Committee, where Hepner expects it will be ratified quickly.
The heart at the heart of the room
Hasn’t stopped. When it does,
The room will go on
Being a room, without heart.
The room has a life of its own
Apart from breath, a breath apart.
The first sign of the Oscars’ growing inferiority complex came last August, when the Academy announced a series of changes intended to keep the ceremony “relevant in a changing world.” A new prize would be established to recognize “outstanding achievement in popular film,” though the parameters went undefined. The ceremony, which airs on ABC, would stick to a three-hour run time (it usually lasts for about four). And several technical categories would be handed out during commercial breaks, to keep the pace lively for audiences at home. The outcry in response to the patronizing-sounding blockbuster-movie award was loud enough for the Academy to indefinitely postpone that plan. But other major changes meant to bolster viewership are still in place.
Now, with the 91st Academy Awards less than three weeks away, little is definitively known about what will be part of the broadcast. After cutting televised recognition for categories light on celebrities (including, it seems, cinematography), the show’s producers are working to enlist huge stars as presenters and downplay less splashy segments that might drag out the ceremony. Who cares if the show ignores crucial, behind-the-scenes work in moviemaking? At least East Coast viewers will be able to go to bed by 11 p.m.
It’s hard not to get that message from recent news reports about the upcoming Oscars. Left with no host following the disastrous hiring and resignation of Kevin Hart, producers are instead looking to recruit the biggest celebrities possible to dole out specific accolades. (The first round of presenters was announced Monday.) While it’s traditional for the previous year’s acting winners to give awards to new honorees, Deadline reported that the Oscars hadn’t yet asked the 2018 victors (Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney) to present. The show also supposedly balked at featuring live performances of all five nominated original songs—including one from the megahit Mary Poppins Returns and another from the documentary RBG sung by the Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson—but producers later relented.
Collectively, these decisions suggest a desperate play for a bigger audience that no longer exists in the current, fragmented TV landscape. The Oscars’ ratings have indeed declined in recent years, but so have ABC’s total ratings in general, which dipped by 8 percent in 2016, another 11 percent in 2017, and 3 percent in 2018. Overall, traditional TV ratings are falling simply because people are consuming television differently.
Oscar ratings have always fluctuated. But audiences seem to care more about the popularity of the movies being considered, and perhaps the star wattage of the host, than about the precise format of the show. (The most-watched Oscars ever remains the edition that Titanic won.) The 2019 ceremony producers, Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss, tried to pick a popular host in Hart. But the resurfacing of the comedian’s past homophobic jokes and tweets—and Hart’s messy handling of the fallout—led to him backing out of the job. Now, the show is set to go host-less for the first time since 1989 (a legendary fiasco of a ceremony that opened with a famously baffling musical fantasia involving Snow White, Merv Griffin, and Rob Lowe).
[Read: Kevin Hart is not a martyr]
To offset the lack of an emcee, Gigliotti and Weiss may be trying to buttonhole a cavalcade of stars, but it’s much harder to use individual presenters to entice would-be viewers. Luckily for the show, many of the nominated films this year are gigantic hits—there’s Black Panther, the first superhero film to be shortlisted for Best Picture, and other box-office sensations like A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody. (No “popular film” Oscar was required after all, it seems.)
Backlash to the bowdlerizing of the ceremony is already beginning to build within the Academy. Prominent members have begun tweeting out their dismay that “below the line” categories will be announced during commercial breaks, with most viewers likely finding out about winners on social media as journalists in the Dolby Theatre share updates. “I’m offended by the proposed changes to the telecast,” the director and writer Gina Prince-Bythewood (Beyond the Lights) tweeted last week. “Filmmaking is a collection of crafts and The Academy is the only awards show that honors and amplifies all. As it should be.”
[Read: Breaking down the 2019 Oscar nominations]
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a trade group with 17 branches—actors, directors, writers, and producers, yes, but also makeup artists, cinematographers, editors, short-film makers, costume designers, and so on. While other televised ceremonies like the Golden Globes ignore those technical contributions, the Academy celebrates them every year, giving winners a massive global audience so that, for at least one night, they’re honored alongside the more prominent actors and directors they collaborate with.
The Academy’s thinking is that awards for Sound Editing and Documentary Short eat up minutes and help push the show’s barnstorming conclusion—winners in the lead acting, directing, and Best Picture categories—later into the night. But that was also the case when the Oscars’ ratings were high. The Academy Awards are meant to be about more than giving airtime to famous people; they’re fundamentally about recognizing the hard work and magic that goes into every level of filmmaking, from development to postproduction. Instead, the 2019 show is being optimized for a more casual viewing audience that’s been slowly diminishing anyway. If ratings go up, the various cuts could be deemed successful and incorporated into future ceremonies. If that happens, the Oscars as we know it may be over for good.
The Cape honeybee of South Africa seems at first like an ordinary bee. Like many bees, it lives in a colony where the only fertile individual is the queen, who returns from mating flights to lay eggs containing more workers, each pairing the genes of the queen and her mates. But in certain situations, in which the queen is absent or a worker happens upon another bee subspecies’ hive, a worker bee can rise up. Freed from the hormonal stranglehold that the queen usually maintains over the rest of the colony, she begins to lay eggs.
Each new bee is a perfect clone of herself. When they hatch, the rapidly reproducing clones can take wing and raven through the countryside in search of other subspecies’ hives, where they invade hapless victims’ nests, lay their own eggs, and act as parasites until the host colony collapses. But by then, other copies of the insubordinate worker have been born and flown over the horizon in search of new queens to dethrone.
In a bee, this is monstrously strange. Generally, colonies of bees and other social insects function like a single superorganism, with the many supporting the reproduction of the few. They are all so closely related that this amounts to helping themselves. When a Cape honeybee transforms from a placid social insect into a parasite, it’s doing something that appears outside the natural order. Ever since people discovered parasitic Cape honeybees inside collapsing colonies in South Africa, about a hundred years ago, beekeepers and biologists have considered: How does this happen? In a new paper out in Molecular Biology and Evolution, biologists provide the beginnings of an explanation, revealing that a single blip in the genetic code is the only difference between these bees and their peaceful siblings.
[Read: This little-known parasite is killing America’s honeybees]
From a colony of wild Cape honeybees, the researchers sequenced the genomes of a number of individuals, half of whom were the parasites’ clones and half of whom were not. “We compared these two groups,” says Denise Aumer of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, in Germany, a biologist and a lead author of the paper. “We found only a single locus in the whole genome where they differed significantly.” After decades of mystery, seeing this difference was striking, says Eckart Stolle, Aumer’s colleague and co–lead author: “It was super cool to find a strong signal like this, because you wouldn’t necessarily expect it.”
At that place, they found a one-letter difference between the bees’ genetic codes. Looking closer at the gene, the researchers determined that it codes for a little-studied protein lodged in the membrane of cells, which may be involved in trafficking substances in and out. They also discovered that for bees to switch into this parasitic mode, they must carry a certain version of a second gene. On its own, this gene is innocent of any wrongdoing, unless it winds up in a bee with the one-letter change. Other factors in the bee’s environment, like a weakening of the queen’s hormonal control or the changed bee’s arrival in a fresh host colony, must also align. But with these two genes, a bee is capable of the switch.
[Read: The White House has a plan to save America’s dying honeybees]
Intriguingly, the study explains an odd fact that beekeepers and scientists had independently noticed. It is not possible to breed a Cape honeybee with a closely related bee subspecies and wind up with parasitic offspring—they are always determinedly normal. The reason, it turns out, is quite simple. In Cape honeybees, that second, complementary gene originally comes from the father of the initial worker bee, while the one-letter difference comes originally from the queen, her mother. Thus, any Cape honeybee queen mated with a male from another subspecies will never yield children with both the pieces necessary for the transformation. And it’s probably not a bad thing—it means that no other bee species can pick up this exact behavior. But parasitic Cape honeybees are still a real pest in some parts of South Africa, with campaigns to eradicate them, Stolle notes.
Perhaps this ability, odd as it seems, has been beneficial for Cape honeybees in the evolutionary past. The researchers observed that the bees’ natural habitat is quite windy, and the ability of a worker to transform herself into a kind of queen might save colonies when their queens are blown off course and lost during mating flights. That single genetic change and the hormonal storm it must unleash might have meant the difference between total obliteration and bouncing back from a loss. Rather than a perversion, it might represent a kind of awe-inspiring, if slightly terrifying, flexibility in the face of disaster.
Why do we have the political opinions we have? Why do we embrace one outlook toward the world and not another? How and why do our stances change? The answers to questions such as these are of course complex. Most people aren’t reading policy memos to inform every decision. Differences of opinion are shaped by contrasting life experiences: where you live; how you were raised; whether you’re rich or poor, young or old. Emotion comes into the picture, and emotion has a biological basis, at least in part. All of this and more combines into a stew without a fixed recipe, even if many of the ingredients are known.
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On rare occasions, we learn of a new one—a key factor that seems to have been overlooked. To a surprising degree, a recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical disgust.
In the mid-2000s, a political scientist approached the neuroscientist Read Montague with a radical proposal. He and his colleagues had evidence, he said, that political orientation might be partly inherited, and might be revealed by our physiological reactivity to threats. To test their theory, they wanted Montague, who heads the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech, to scan the brains of subjects as they looked at a variety of images—including ones displaying potential contaminants such as mutilated animals, filthy toilets, and faces covered with sores—to see whether neural responses showed any correlation with political ideology. Was he interested?
Montague initially laughed at the idea—for one thing, MRI research requires considerable time and resources—but the team returned with studies to argue their case, and eventually he signed on. When the data began rolling in, any skepticism about the project quickly dissolved. The subjects, 83 in total, were first shown a randomized mixture of neutral and emotionally evocative pictures—this second category contained both positive and negative images—while undergoing brain scans. Then they filled out a questionnaire seeking their views on hot-button political and social issues, in order to classify their general outlook on a spectrum from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. As Montague mapped the neuroimaging data against ideology, he recalls, “my jaw dropped.” The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted, but different brain networks were stimulated. Just by looking at the subjects’ neural responses, in fact, Montague could predict with more than 95 percent accuracy whether they were liberal or conservative.
The subjects in the trial were also shown violent imagery (men pointing revolvers directly at the camera, battle scenes, car wrecks) and pleasant pictures (smiling babies, beautiful sunsets, cute bunnies). But it was only the reaction to repulsive things that correlated with ideology. “I was completely flabbergasted by the predictability of the results,” Montague says.
His collaborators—John Hibbing and Kevin Smith at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and John Alford at Rice University, in Houston—were just as surprised, though less by the broad conclusion than by the specificity of the findings and the startling degree of predictability. Their own earlier research had already yielded a suggestive finding, indicating that conservatives tend to have more pronounced bodily responses than liberals when shown stomach-churning imagery. However, the investigators had expected that brain reactions to violent imagery would also be predictive of ideology. Compared with liberals, they’d previously found, conservatives generally pay more attention—and react more strongly—to a broad array of threats. For example, they have a more pronounced startle response to loud noises, and they gaze longer at photos of people displaying angry expressions. And yet even in this research, Hibbing says, “we almost always get clearer results with stimuli that are disgusting than with those that suggest a threat from humans, animals, or violent events. We have an ongoing discussion in our lab about whether this is because disgust is simply a more powerful and more politically relevant emotion or because it is an emotion that is easier to evoke with still images in a lab setting.”
Findings so dramatic, especially in the social sciences, should be viewed with caution until replicated. The axiom that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof clearly applies here. That said, Hibbing, Montague, and their colleagues are scarcely alone in linking disgust and ideology.
Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust—basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat—numerous studies have found that high levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.” That ethos is defined by characteristics such as traditionalism, religiosity, support for authority and hierarchy, sexual conservatism, and distrust of outsiders. According to a 2013 meta-analysis of 24 studies—pretty much all the scientific literature on the topic at that time—the association between a conservative ethos and sensitivity to disgust is modest: Disgust sensitivity explains 4 to 13 percent of the variation in a population’s ideology. That may sound unimpressive, but it is in fact noteworthy, says David Pizarro, a psychology professor at Cornell who specializes in disgust. “These are robust, reliable findings. No matter where we look, we see this relationship”—a rarity in the fuzzy field of psychology. The trend stands out even more, he adds, when you consider all the other things that potentially impinge on “why you might have a particular political view.”
II. The Behavioral Immune SystemBroadly speaking, studies of possible connections between ideology and susceptibility to disgust fall into two categories. The first involves measuring subjects’ sensitivity to disgust as well as their social or political ideologies and then calculating the correlation between the two. The second category explores whether exposure to disgusting subject matter can actually influence people’s views in the moment. But whatever the type of study, the same general finding keeps turning up. “We are at the point where there is very solid evidence for the association,” says Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University, in Denmark. His own research finds that “disgust influences our political views as much as or even more than long-recognized factors such as education and income bracket.”
So many scientists have thrown themselves into this line of research in recent years that it has become an accepted discipline, sometimes jokingly given the aptly unappetizing name “disgustology.” Their conclusions raise a lot of questions, chief among them: Why in the world would your reaction to mutilated animals, vomit, and other unwelcome things somehow be associated with your views on transgender rights, immigration, or anything else stirring debate in the news?
Jeff BrownResearchers have theories rather than answers. At a deep, symbolic level, some speculate, disgust may be bound up with ideas about “them” versus “us,” about whom we instinctively trust and don’t trust. In short, this research may help illuminate one factor—among many—that underlies why those on the left and the right can so vehemently disagree.
There is nothing inherently political about disgust. It evolved not to guide us at the ballot box but rather, it is widely theorized, to protect us from infection. As we move about in the world, a sizable volume of research shows, our minds are constantly searching our surroundings for contaminants—moldy leftovers, garbage spilling out of trash cans, a leaky sewage pipe—and when the brain detects them, it triggers sudden feelings of revulsion. Confronted, we withdraw from the threat. The mechanism is part of what’s known as the “behavioral immune system,” and it is as vital for survival as the fight-or-flight response. Our pathogen-tracking system does its job largely beneath our conscious awareness—and pays close attention to those walking germ bags we call human beings.
This dynamic was highlighted in a pioneering series of experiments launched in the early 2000s by the psychologist Mark Schaller, of the University of British Columbia. Like a smoke detector, Schaller discovered, our germ radar operates on a better-safe-than-sorry principle. It is error-prone in flagging danger—it produces a lot of false positives. Any physical oddity displayed by the people around us—contagious or not—can set off an alarm. Just as a pink eye, a hacking cough, or an open wound may activate our behavioral immune system, so too can a birthmark, obesity, deformity, disability, or even liver spots. Furthermore, having germs on our mind can affect how we feel about people we perceive to be of a different race or ethnicity from ourselves.
In one notable experiment, Schaller showed subjects pictures of people coughing, cartoonish-looking germs sprouting from sponges, and other images designed to raise disease concerns. A control group was shown pictures highlighting threats unrelated to germs—for instance, an automobile accident. Both groups were then given a questionnaire that asked them to assess the level of resources the Canadian government should provide to entice people from various parts of the world to settle in Canada. Compared with the control group, the subjects who had seen pictures related to germs wanted to allocate a greater share of a hypothetical government advertising budget to attract people from Poland and Taiwan—familiar immigrant groups in Vancouver, where the study was conducted—rather than people from less familiar countries, such as Nigeria, Mongolia, and Brazil. Familiarity does make a difference. Schaller, whose landmark studies are credited with sparking the initial interest in the relationship between disgust sensitivity and prejudice, says: “If I grow up in an environment where everybody looks pretty much the same, then someone from China, for example, might trigger my behavioral immune system. But if I grow up in New York City, then a person who comes from China is not going to trigger this response.”
If pathogen cues of this kind can indeed intensify prejudice, the explanation could be biological adaptation. Some scientists—notably the psychologist Corey Fincher, at the University of Warwick, in England, and the biologist Randy Thornhill, at the University of New Mexico—theorize that foreigners, at least in the past, would have been more likely to expose local populations to pathogens against which they had no acquired defenses. Other scientists think germ fears piggyback on negative stereotypes about foreigners common throughout history—the notion that they’re dirty, eat bizarre foods, and have looser sexual mores.
Whatever the explanation, an online study launched by Petersen and Lene Aarøe, also at Aarhus University, and Kevin Arceneaux of Temple University suggests that a dread of contagion is not just a personal matter. It can have an impact on society. The investigators began by evaluating the disgust sensitivity of nationally representative samples of 2,000 Danes and 1,300 Americans. The participants were then asked to fill out a questionnaire that assessed their views about foreigners settling in their respective countries. As the researchers reported in 2017, opposition to immigration in both the Danish and American samples increased in direct proportion to a participant’s sensitivity to disgust—an association that held up even after taking into account education level, socioeconomic status, religious background, and numerous other factors.
The team expanded the part of the study that focused on the U.S. It got state-by-state breakdowns of the prevalence of infections, and also analyzed statistics compiled by Google Trends, which tracks internet searches related to contagious illnesses in an effort to spot early signs of outbreaks. Crunching the numbers (the results are as yet unpublished), the researchers found that resistance to immigration is greatest in states with the highest incidence of infectious disease and where worry about this, as reflected by internet activity, has also been high.
More recent investigations by Petersen and Aarøe suggest that those with high disgust sensitivity tend to be leery of any stranger, not just foreigners. They view casual social acquaintances with a certain amount of suspicion—a robust finding replicated across three studies with a total of 4,400 participants. The implication is clear: Disgust and distrust are somehow linked. And maybe, again, the link is defensive in origin: If you shrink your social circle, you’ll reduce your exposure to potential carriers of disease.
III. The Smell TestInterest in disgust sensitivity extends beyond its potential role in fostering xenophobia and prejudice. As the social psychologists Simone Schnall, at the University of Cambridge, and Jonathan Haidt, at NYU, have shown, disgust sensitivity may also help shape beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil. In one experiment, Schnall, Haidt, and other collaborators sat subjects at either a clean desk or one with sticky stains on it as they filled out a form that asked them to judge the offensiveness of various acts, such as lying on a résumé, not returning a wallet found on the street, and resorting to cannibalism in the aftermath of a plane crash. One subgroup of participants seated at the filthy desk—those with high “private body consciousness,” meaning they were particularly sensitive to their own visceral reactions—judged the transgressions more severely than those seated at the pristine desk.
Foul odors can be just as effective as a sticky desk. Another experiment involved two groups of subjects with similar political ideologies. One group was exposed to a vomitlike scent as the subjects filled out an inventory of their social values; the other group filled out the inventory in an odorless setting. Those in the first group expressed more opposition to gay rights, pornography, and premarital sex than those in the second group. The putrid scent even inspired “significantly more agreement with biblical truth.” Variations on these studies using fart spray, foul tastes, and other creative disgust elicitors reveal a consistent pattern: When we experience disgust, we tend to make harsher moral judgments.
Jeff BrownIn thinking about why disgust sensitivity may be associated with conservative moral values, researchers have considered the potential connection between the behavioral immune system and religion. Religious strictures and other traditions may have the hidden function of protecting us from disease, some theorize. Our urge to respect certain culinary practices, sexual prohibitions, and injunctions about washing and hygiene may not be just about achieving spiritual or symbolic purity, but may be the result of an evolutionary drive to avoid contamination.
Could a predilection toward revulsion indicate how we vote? A team led by Cornell’s David Pizarro and Yoel Inbar, at the University of Toronto, set out to answer that question by conducting an online study during the 2008 U.S. presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. In the run-up to the election, the researchers assessed the contagion anxiety of 25,000 “demographically and geographically diverse” Americans and then surveyed the attitudes toward the candidates held by a random subset of the larger group. Those with the highest germ fear reported that they were more likely to vote for McCain, the Republican nominee and the more conservative candidate. Further, the actual proportion of votes that went to him in each state directly scaled with that state’s level of contagion anxiety. The researchers eventually extended studies of this kind to 121 countries and found that disgust sensitivity correlated with a conservative ethos basically everywhere there were sufficient data for analysis. As Pizarro, Inbar, and the other authors of the study write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, this result suggests that disgust sensitivity “is related to conservatism across a wide variety of cultures, geographic regions and political systems.”
IV. “It’s a Little Hack”Disgustology is a young endeavor. Not all the pieces fit together neatly, and some suppositions (as always) may turn out to be wrong. But a few clues have recently surfaced that suggest a useful framework for interpreting this sprawling mass of findings. One of them, in hindsight, is obvious: the etymology of disgust. The English word is derived from the Middle French desgoust, which literally means “distaste.” As it turns out, what tastes foul to us is typically a sour or bitter substance—which can be a marker of contaminants (think of spoiled milk). Several years ago, Pizarro learned that people vary tremendously in the number of bitter receptors they possess on their tongue, and thus in their taste sensitivity. What’s more, the trait is genetically determined. This got him wondering: If conservatives have a greater disgust sensitivity, are they also better at detecting bitter compounds? “It seemed like a really long shot,” Pizarro says. But he, Inbar, and Benjamin Ruisch, a grad student at Cornell, decided to put the idea to the test. They recruited 1,601 subjects from shopping malls and from the Cornell campus and gave them paper strips containing a chemical called Prop and another chemical called PTC, both of which taste bitter to some people. Sure enough, those who had self-identified as being conservative were more sensitive to both compounds; many described them as unpleasant or downright repugnant. Liberals, on the other hand, tended not to be bothered as much by the chemicals or didn’t notice them at all.
The researchers went a step further. Taste receptors, they knew, are concentrated in fungiform papillae—those spongy little bumps on your tongue. The greater the density of papillae, the more acute your taste. So they dyed subjects’ tongues blue (which allows the papillae to be more easily observed), pasted a paper ring on them like those used to prevent pages from tearing out of a metal binder (to create a standard area to be evaluated), and recorded the number of circumscribed papillae. The degree to which subjects’ views tilted to the right was, they found, in direct proportion to the density of papillae on their tongue. This result may have bearing on a puzzling partisan split in food preferences. A 2009 survey of 64,000 Americans revealed that liberals chose bitter-tasting arugula as their favorite salad green more than twice as often as conservatives did. It may also have a bearing on conservative President George H. W. Bush’s famous hatred of broccoli—an unusually bitter vegetable. Of course, sometimes a stalk of broccoli is just a stalk of broccoli.
No doubt your own political allegiances will heavily influence what you extract from the bulk of this research. If you’re liberal, you may be thinking, So this explains some of the other side’s nativism and hostility to immigration. But it’s just as easy to flip the science on its head and conclude, as conservatives might, that the left is composed of clueless naïfs whose rosy-eyed optimism about human nature—and obliviousness to various dangers—will only lead to trouble.
The research itself does not speak to the relative merits of a conservative or liberal ethos—how could it? Conservatism and liberalism are not monolithic, and they rest on deep intellectual traditions. In terms of gut reactions, the relative appeal of each philosophy can depend significantly on context—for instance, on whether times are kind or cruel. When tensions are high and groups split into factions, as they inevitably do, we can depend on our family and friends to defend our interests—but the outsider is an unknown quantity and, from an evolutionary perspective, may be seen as a source of contamination or, more generally, a threat.
One defining characteristic of disgust, though, is that it occupies a blind spot in our psyche. As Pizarro notes, “It’s such a low-level, almost noncognitive emotion that you really aren’t thinking that much about it.” Compared with anger, happiness, and sadness, he says, disgust is also “less open to change based on your judgment, your thoughts, your reasoning.” Chocolate in the shape of dog poop, he points out, is still gross. The emotion is more reflexive than reflective. “That is the rhetorical strength of disgust,” Pizarro says. “It’s a little hack. You hack into brains pretty quickly and easily by making them feel disgust,” bypassing logic and reason to sway judgment.
Aristotle may not have found this idea surprising. As he intuited millennia ago, a human being “is by nature a political animal”—uniquely endowed with the capacity for deliberation and speech, but at the same time governed by instincts we share with other living creatures. Like bees, he noted, we have a desire to congregate—to form societies. Aristotle could not have anticipated the germ theory of disease, or the role infection avoidance might unconsciously play, but his fundamental insight about the animal side of our politics remains prescient. Even the most rational among us might not always be as rational as we’d like to think.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “The Yuck Factor.”
During my first campaign to be Chicago’s mayor, in 2011, I promised to put education reform at the forefront of my agenda. Having participated in Washington policy debates for the better part of two decades, I felt confident that I knew what to do. Then, as now, education reformers preached a certain gospel: Hold teachers solely accountable for educational gains. Expand charter schools. Focus relentlessly on high-school graduation rates. This was the recipe for success.
Three years before that, when President-elect Barack Obama tapped me to be his White House chief of staff, I argued that leaders should never let a good crisis go to waste. I was now determined to take my own advice. At the moment of my inauguration, Chicago’s schools were unquestionably in crisis. Our students had the shortest school day in America. Nearly half of Chicago’s kids were not being offered full-day kindergarten, let alone pre-k. Teacher evaluations had not been updated in nearly 40 years. During my first months in office, I hit the ground running, determined to change all that. Then, much to my surprise, roughly a year into my reform crusade, circumstance prompted me to begin questioning the wisdom of the gospel itself.
My initial doubts emerged four days into what turned out to be the first Chicago teachers’ strike in three decades. After a series of arduous negotiations with Karen Lewis, the union president, we’d arrived at the basic contours of an agreement. In return for higher salaries, Lewis accepted my demands to extend the school day by an hour and 15 minutes, tack two weeks onto the school year, establish universal full-day kindergarten, and rewrite the outdated evaluations used to keep the city’s educators accountable.
[Read: The charter-school crusader]
One key issue remained: the autonomy of principals. The question was whether individual principals would have the ability to hire faculty of their own choosing, or whether, as Lewis preferred, principals would have to select from a limited pool maintained downtown with the union’s strong input. Honestly, because I’d gotten everything I really wanted, I was tempted to fold. The reform gospel doesn’t pay much mind to principals. Moreover, the new accountability standards promised to rid the schools of bad teachers.
But while I was preparing to brief reporters assembled at Tarkington Elementary on Chicago’s South Side, Mahalia Ann Hines, a former school principal (who happens to be the artist Common’s mother) pulled me aside. Hines, who holds a doctorate from the University of Illinois, had spent 15 years as a principal, at grade levels from elementary through high school. If we were going to make lasting improvements to Chicago’s schools, she argued, principals needed that flexibility. Without it, they would not be able to establish the right culture or create a team atmosphere. And, at least as important, principals would not have the leverage to coach teachers struggling to help their pupils succeed.
Thinking about it now, years after I decided to abandon the gospel of teacher-focused reform for an approach centered on empowering principals, Hines’s advice sounds almost like common sense. But at the time, it was a momentous decision. Parents are rarely surprised when I note that even the best teachers can be rendered ineffective in a dysfunctional school, or that a great principal can turn a good teacher into an extraordinary educator. But even today, reformers rarely take the impact of principals into account.
The union was loath to give in, and the strike dragged on for two additional days. But eventually they agreed, and I then decided to go all in on principal-centered reform. We raised principals’ salaries, particularly for those working in hard-to-staff schools. Chicago established a new program explicitly designed to recruit and train new school leaders. We collaborated with Northwestern University to improve professional development for principals. And we gave the best-performing principals additional autonomy by establishing a system of independent schools, subject to less oversight from the central office.
[Read: How to recruit black principals]
Today, the Chicago Schools CEO, its chief education officer, and two of the seven members of the board of education, including Hines, are former Chicago public-school principals.
That evolution in thinking prompted me to also question other elements of the reform gospel, including the movement’s unbending support for charter schools. No one disputes that some charter schools, like the Noble Network here in Chicago, are terrific. But what many reformers fail to acknowledge is that a lot of more traditional alternatives—places such as Poe Elementary, an award-winning neighborhood school on the South Side—are great as well. That reality has profound implications. I closed both neighborhood and charter schools as mayor, because mediocre schools of any type fail their students. The 20-year debate between charter and neighborhood is totally misguided, and should be replaced with a focus on quality versus mediocrity. It’s high time we stop fighting about brands, because the only thing that really matters is whether a school is providing a top-notch education.
The reform gospel’s focus on graduation rates obfuscates what’s really important for students in grades nine through 12. Sure, every kid should earn a high-school diploma, and in Chicago we’ve gone from a 59.3 percent graduation rate in 2012 to a 78.2 percent graduation rate in 2018. But we spend too much time talking about graduation like it’s the end of the line. If students don’t know where they’re headed after they finish 12th grade, they lose interest in their education well before the 12th grade. High school needs to be seen as a bridge to the next thing, no matter whether it’s college, military or civilian service, or a specific job. That’s why we’ve grown Chicago’s dual-credit/dual-enrollment program into one of the largest in the country, equipping half our high-school kids with college credits before they receive their diploma. Between 2010 and 2017, the percentage of CPS students enrolling in college grew from 53.7 to 68.2. That says something profound.
Finally, before I became mayor, I largely ignored conservative complaints about government subsidies for the wraparound services that complement what happens in the classroom. Elitists love to argue that education dollars should be focused exclusively on improving classroom instruction. Today, however, I realize just how profoundly asinine those arguments are. It’s unconscionable for anyone who underwrites their own kids’ private tutors, music lessons, after-school activities, summer camps, and summer jobs to argue that children from less-advantaged backgrounds should not have the same privileges and support.
[Read: Inside an after-school program for refugee children]
Kids today spend 80 percent of their time outside the classroom, and most well-off parents have the resources to augment what happens at school. As mayor, I decided to extend those same sorts of interventions to everyone. Our after-school program has grown to serve 125,000 students. We hired teachers to staff libraries in order to help kids with their homework every school-day afternoon, and we created a summer reading program, Rahm’s Readers, to combat the so-called summer slide. Moreover, we implemented a new standard: To be eligible to land one of the now 33,000 summer jobs that the city sponsors, you have to sign a pledge to go to college. Closing the achievement gap inside the classroom requires investments outside the classroom.
Three decades ago, the Republican Education Secretary Bill Bennett disparaged Chicago’s schools, blithely asking reporters, “Is there a worse case? You tell me.” Today, I’d invite him to come back, order a deep-dish pizza, and eat his words.
Our students now make more progress between the third and eighth grades than their peers in 96 percent of the nation’s other districts. Taken together, my administration’s reforms ensure that children beginning their public education will get more than four years’ worth of additional classroom time before their high-school graduation. The percentage of students meeting or exceeding grade-level norms for reading grew from 45.6 percent to more than 61 percent between 2013 and 2018. And college enrollment has grown 20 percent since 2011.
Few things irritate progressives more than when conservatives deny the fact of climate change. That’s for good reason—the science is irrefutable. Well, the evidence on education reform is irrefutable as well. After studying what’s happened in Chicago, the Stanford education professor Sean Reardon declared: “These trends are important not only for students in Chicago, but for those in other large districts, because they provide an existence proof that it is possible for large urban districts to produce rapid and substantial learning gains, and to do so in ways that benefit students of all racial and ethnic groups equally.” The nation needs to take notice.
For most of my career, I preached the old gospel of education reform. But now research and experience suggest that policy makers need to embrace a new path forward and leave the old gospel behind. Principals, not just teachers, drive educational gains. The brain-dead debate between charter and neighborhood schools should be replaced with a focus on quality over mediocrity. To get kids to finish high school, the student experience should center on preparing them for what’s next in life. Finally, classroom success hinges on the support that students get outside school. If other cities follow Chicago’s lead in embracing those ideas, they’re likely to also replicate its results.
On Monday, the Senate voted that U.S. troops should stay in Syria, a country where it has never authorized military force, and Afghanistan. There are “continuing threats from terrorist groups operating in Syria and Afghanistan,” 70 senators affirmed, adding that “the precipitous withdrawal of United States forces from either country could put at risk hard-won gains and United States national security.”
The nonbinding vote was a rebuke to President Donald Trump, who has urged drawdowns over objections from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
And it highlighted Trump’s allies on the issue. Voting against the rebuke were the Tea Party–affiliated Republicans Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz––and the entire field of Democratic presidential hopefuls who serve in the Senate: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.
[Peter Beinart: What the Yemen vote reveals about the Democratic party]
The vote is thus a portent of how the 2020 election may differ from its predecessor. In 2016, Trump defeated a large field of Republicans in part by differentiating himself as an opponent of expensive wars of choice. Like Barack Obama before him, he cast support for the Iraq War as stupid, and promised to redirect money from open-ended occupations of foreign countries toward jobs and infrastructure at home.
Democrats gave Trump a gift by pitting him against a hawk who not only voted for the Iraq War but also favored an ill-fated intervention in Libya. Hillary Clinton seemed likely to favor still more interventions if elected.
Monday’s vote suggests some recognition of that political error. In 2020, Democratic candidates who tout opposition to indefinite deployments to multiple Middle Eastern countries won’t merely better reflect a majority faction in their party; they’ll be in sync on that issue with many Americans who cast ballots for Trump.
How Trump will position himself remains to be seen. If he pulls troops out of Afghanistan and Syria, drawing a noninterventionist contrast will be harder. But if he runs for reelection with U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan—and with the United States aiding Saudi Arabia’s dirty war in Yemen—opponents may argue that ongoing U.S. wars are exhausting resources that could be used to build marvels at home, while also convincingly casting themselves as more skeptical of interventions than Trump.
[Richard Fontaine: Four ways foreign policy could change, it one way it won’t]
The obvious exception is Joe Biden, who has favored U.S. interventions in Serbia, Darfur, Afghanistan, and Iraq (though he reportedly opposed a later troop surge into Afghanistan, the unlawful U.S. intervention in Libya, and the unlawful deployment of U.S. troops to Syria).
In 2000, 2008, 2012, and 2016, the presidency was won by the candidate who touted the greater aversion to being the world’s policeman, despite critics who warned that America must not abdicate its leadership role in the world. In 2020, Democrats are very likely to simultaneously argue that Trump is intervening too much abroad and that he is undermining America’s leadership role in the world.
Nanette Senters has worked in the body-shop division of General Motors’ Lordstown assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, for 20 years. She helps build the shell of what becomes the Chevy Cruze. “Nice little American car, well built, runs very good,” she said.
Back in 2016, Donald Trump visited near her community, Trumbull County, on the campaign trail. “[He] told everybody, ‘Don’t sell your houses. Manufacturing’s going to come back to your area,’” she said to me. At a campaign rally that summer in Columbus, Trump promised to make Ohio a “manufacturing behemoth.” And at a rally a few months later in Detroit, Trump announced, “My plan includes a pledge to restore manufacturing in the United States.”
But the day after Trump was inaugurated, General Motors announced the end of one of the shifts at Senters’s plant. Six months later, another shift ended. And last November, GM announced plans to fully close five plants in the United States and Canada, cutting about 14,700 jobs. Senters’s plant will close in March. “It was like a kick in the stomach and a slap in the face,” she said. So she joined the advocacy organization Good Jobs Nation, which demands that President Trump sign an executive order to deny federal contracts to companies when they outsource jobs. The organization launched a letter-writing campaign to get Trump’s attention. “Never heard a word,” she told me. “He lied. He doesn’t care.”
[Read: Why Democrats’ response to GM matters]
While the commitment Trump made to Senters and her co-workers might have been simplistic, the president’s broader efforts to bolster manufacturing, renegotiate trade agreements, and address trade imbalances have been complex and, in some cases, successful, according to half a dozen economists and experts, liberal and conservative. The most recent jobs report showed that 304,000 jobs were added in January, 13,000 in manufacturing. Since Trump’s inauguration, the total number of Americans working in manufacturing has risen by at least 473,000. The unemployment rate has fallen to 4 percent. Trump will almost certainly tout these numbers in Tuesday’s State of the Union. The White House did not respond to a request to comment on Senters’s claims.
On one level, manufacturing is growing because the economy is strong. Economists disagree why: Stephen Moore, an economist for the Heritage Foundation and a former Trump-campaign adviser, pointed to the “pro-business environment” that Trump’s election sparked; Robert E. Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, pointed to the Obama-era stimulus package and years of low interest rates. Regardless, the United States still has 1.4 million fewer manufacturing jobs than it had during its prerecession high in 2006, despite the efforts of both presidents.
Ever since he declared his candidacy, Trump has made sweeping claims about his ability to bring back manufacturing jobs. In 2016, speaking at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis, then-President-elect Trump declared, “These companies aren’t going to be leaving anymore,” touting a deal he had struck with Carrier to keep nearly 1,000 jobs from moving to Mexico. But in the end, Carrier still laid off 632 Indianapolis-based workers in exchange for a cheaper labor force in Mexico.
A new campaign by the action fund of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, asserts that Trump failed to follow through not only on his pledge to Carrier’s workers, but also on his pledge to factory workers across America. The campaign—which launched in anticipation of Tuesday’s State of the Union—centers on what CAP describes as “Trump’s false promises.” CAP argues that while Trump campaigned on issues important to middle- and working-class people, his presidential policy record suggests he instead prioritizes big business and the wealthy. One of the “false promises,” according to CAP, centers on Trump’s pledge to keep U.S. companies from moving overseas.
Manufacturing jobs are undeniably being created in today’s economy. But some companies are still moving overseas. A study of Department of Labor data by ThinkProgress, a left-leaning website, found that in just the four months following Trump’s swearing-in in January 2017, at least 11,934 American jobs were moved abroad or were in the process of leaving the country. On top of GM’s layoffs, Ford recently announced it would be restructuring and firing workers. An estimated 12 percent, or 24,000 of Ford’s 202,000 workers, may lose their jobs.
“To some extent, he was doomed,” said Joshua Drucker, an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “There’s only so much you can do at the federal level” to stop the closure of manufacturing plants. Matt Bruenig, a progressive economist and the founder of the think tank the People’s Policy Project, echoed this sentiment. “Every economy in the developed world has become a service-sector economy,” he said. No policy can remake the United States into a manufacturing power like China or India.
[Read: The false promises of worker retraining]
Manufacturing is affected by the rest of the economy, and to think Trump has significant enough influence to keep entire factories in the United States is too simplistic, said Timothy J. Bartik, a senior economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Bartik calculated that manufacturing has been growing roughly at the same rate since 2010 under Barack Obama, and said there are lots of other factors, both internal and external, that might drive layoffs and hiring stateside. New technologies such as electric and self-driving cars put pressure on automakers, and to impute management decisions to the actions of one president misses the larger picture of the industry, argued David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University.
But the fact remains that Trump promised to stop factory jobs from moving overseas. What, if anything, can he do policy-wise? When I asked Swenson about Good Jobs Nation’s demand for an executive order, he told me he thinks the president does not have the authority to deny federal contracts to companies that outsource jobs. George Faraday, legal and policy director at Good Jobs Nation, disagreed.
Drucker pointed out that while the president has very little to do with state-level economic development, he can use the power of the presidency to intervene with individual companies. He tried that with Carrier, and it appears he successfully did so last Friday after the Taiwan-based manufacturer Foxconn said it might back out of a deal to build a plant in Wisconsin. Foxconn announced that, after speaking with President Trump, the plant would move forward after all. But, as Bartik put it, “how many cases like this can a president intervene in, really?”
According to Swenson, Trump has pursued three particular avenues to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States: deregulation, tax cuts, and trade negotiations. He described these policies are “one step forward and two steps back.” Low labor costs and looser environmental regulations encourage companies to move factories overseas. Trump’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement—which has yet to pass Congress—would expand protections for capital and investors, but, according to Andy Green, the managing director of economic policy at CAP, would do little to lift labor or environmental standards overseas. In Green’s opinion, such trade negotiations only strengthen the pull of globalization.
But some left-leaning economists, such as Susan Helper at Case Western Reserve University and Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, said the “new NAFTA,” now titled the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, includes provisions to increase wages and collective bargaining in Mexico, particularly in the auto industry. This could make American manufacturing more competitive. While it’s not clear whether those provisions are enforceable, Bernstein said, “I’ll give Trump credit for it because you wouldn’t have had that under most presidents.”
Yet Bernstein argued that Trump has accentuated the United States’ trade deficit because he “doesn’t understand” the importance of the U.S. dollar. Between tax cuts and big spending, America’s deficit has increased under his administration, which strengthens the dollar and makes U.S. exports less competitive. Scott called the strength of the U.S. dollar the “fundamental failure” of Trump’s manufacturing policy, estimating the dollar is about 25 percent overvalued. “It’s tending to depress the growth of manufacturing employment,” he explained. And a report from the International Monetary Fund last October predicted the U.S. trade deficit will nearly double in the next five years.
Perhaps the more obvious aspect of Trump’s impact on manufacturing has been his tariffs. In March 2018, Trump enacted a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent duties on aluminum imports. These tariffs were intended to save the steel and aluminum industries in the United States and, in Scott’s opinion, were “badly needed” to help save jobs in those industries. “There were half a dozen steel plants that were going to close, and they haven’t,” he explained. “Same is true with aluminum, which was in even worse shape.” However, Scott argued that the tariffs didn’t address the root cause of the plants’ closures: global excess capacity in both industries. The sheer volume of metal produced in China is lowering prices and causing a trade imbalance even under a tariff regime. He said that if Trump had tried to fight that excess capacity with tariffs, he could have addressed some of the larger global pressures. “[But] he did not. He just put up a wall and wiped his hands and said, ‘Okay, job done.’” Scott said. “That’s been his style.”
[Read: Trump’s ‘smart’ tariffs don’t make economic sense]
Jeffrey H. Dorfman, an economist at the University of Georgia, believes the “single worst” thing Trump has done for manufacturing jobs has been his tariffs on steel and aluminum. Dorfman said that while those tariffs may have saved a few thousand jobs in steel manufacturing, they’ve hurt a much larger number of manufacturing companies that used those metals for production. “Steel and aluminum are used to make autos, to make tractors, to make skyscrapers,” he said. “We’re losing jobs in all those industries in the U.S. now.” A study at Iowa State University calculated that the ratio of losses to gains in Iowa manufacturing was 2.7 jobs lost to every one job gained. And Roy Cortado, a senior economist at the conservative think tank the John Locke Foundation, told me he thinks Trump’s steel tariffs “do nothing for manufacturing and capital-intensive industries in this country.”
The famed American brand Harley-Davidson announced last summer that it was moving some of its production to Europe, leading President Trump to call for a boycott of the motorcycle company. In regulatory filings, Harley-Davidson revealed that retaliatory tariffs from the European Union cost the company an average of $2,200 per motorcycle exported to the EU. Though Harley-Davidson never specified whether its relocation was related to Trump’s trade war, critics have pointed to the move as an unintended casualty of Trump’s tariffs. Ford Motor’s CEO, James Hackett, also announced last September that the metal tariffs had cost the car company $1 billion in profits. Ford announced layoffs a few weeks later. Bernstein said he believes these plant closures exemplify how Trump’s manufacturing policies haven’t worked. “He’s basically trying to re-create the 1950s, and that’s not going to happen,” he said. In Bernstein’s opinion, Trump needs to prepare the manufacturing sector for the future by focusing on clean energy.
On the other hand, while he disagrees with Trump on tariffs, Dorfman of the University of Georgia pointed to the administration’s deregulation—rolling back environmental, industry-safety, and Obamacare standards—as definite policy attempts to boost manufacturing stateside. The conservative economists I spoke to cited this deregulation as effective policy. However, when I raised this point to Bernstein, he said, “Show me the factories that have returned to America,” and argued that the United States still has roughly the same share of factories currently moving abroad as before Trump’s inauguration. Scott also pointed out that, down the road, global warming will likely hurt both the U.S. and the global economy, so there’s an economic incentive for the federal government to regulate emissions. Scott said the Democrat’s Green New Deal would actually create jobs in the domestic economy because it would transition America off oil and onto energy created by capital investment (building wind turbines, solar panels, etc.).
Conservative economists also point to Trump’s tax bill, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, to exemplify how he has revitalized American manufacturing. “The whole purpose of the pro-business tax cut was to help revive the kind of blue-collar industries in the Midwest,” said Moore. Moore also pointed to the immediate expensing provision of the tax bill, which allows businesses to write off a large expense, such as the purchase of a factory or a truck, in the first year. He believes capital-intensive industries such as manufacturing will benefit the most.
However, Stan Veuger, a resident scholar at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, told me he hasn’t seen “massive upticks in business investment or in manufacturing.” He explained that manufacturing tends to grow slowly, and the results of the tax bill might not be evident yet. But, he added, “I don’t think that the early signs are extremely promising.” Green also pointed out that the tax bill actually includes some benefits to having investments abroad: Dividends paid to U.S. corporate shareholders from foreign subsidiaries are, to put it broadly, exempt from taxation in the United States.
To some economists, the major threat to manufacturing is not globalization, but automation. As factory workers are replaced with robots, job retraining and other educational programs for laid-off employees become essential. In Drucker’s opinion, the Trump administration has made little movement on this front. In 2017, Trump created the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, but it was disbanded shortly after multiple members resigned in protest of his comments on the white supremacists’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
When I asked Moore about the recent plant closures at Carrier and GM, he responded, “Capitalism is about creative destruction. So you’re going to have some industries decline.” He said the auto industry is going through a moment of change, and predicted that even more autoworkers might lose their jobs in the coming years. “But the point is that for every job that’s lost in the auto industry, we’re creating three or four in the chemical industry, in the oil and gas industry, and light manufacturing,” he said.
But that doesn’t change the fact that in 2016, Trump promised the people of Trumbull County, Ohio, that their jobs were safe. And Senters told me she’s already started to see a change in her community from the layoffs at GM—six or seven lost jobs for every one factory job that’s gone, she said. The president of her union, Dave Green, has sent President Trump two letters now, and the administration has yet to respond. But Green will be at the State of the Union on Tuesday at the invitation of Representative Tim Ryan, his Democratic congressman.
Updated at 3:10 p.m. ET on February 5, 2019.
President Donald Trump says he will stress “unity” in his State of the Union address Tuesday. This is almost unavoidable. The words union and unity spring from the same word root. And it’s expected. Presidents are entrusted with husbanding unity, so a president calling for it in a State of the Union is like a groom toasting fidelity at his wedding dinner. On the other hand, Donald Trump doesn’t go in for a lot of the rote traditions of the presidency.
When Trump calls for unity, he runs the risk of being mocked by his own words. It smacks of acting “presidential,” a label he has avoided. “Sometimes they say he doesn’t act presidential,” the president said at a rally in 2017. “It’s so easy to act presidential, but that’s not gonna get it done.” Last year, when Peggy Noonan suggested he should be more presidential, the president acted out what that would look like at a rally. He stood artificially straight, moved in staccato like a robot, and dished out inoffensive pap in monotone, thanking the troops and asking God to bless America. “I could be presidential,” he joked before launching into his Disney Hall of Presidents routine. “You’d be so bored … This got us elected. If I came like a stiff, you guys wouldn’t be here tonight.”
The president knows what thrills his crowds, but he also knows that his appeal is about more than revving the engines in a good stadium show. The president’s stylistic departures are just the most visible aspect of a presidency dismantling the old order. A traditional president would not belittle his intelligence officers as “naive,” but Trump will if he disagrees with them. Trump won’t distance himself from an autocrat, such as Vladimir Putin, who interfered in the democratic process if he thinks embracing him is a good idea. This goes for autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Philippines as well. When Chief Justice John Roberts said the American tradition of an independent judiciary meant judges should not be identified by the president who appointed them, Trump overruled him. “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’” he tweeted.
[Read: The State of the Union is unrecognizable]
For the president’s supporters, these departures illustrate the president’s essential insight: The old codes hurt the country and hurt them. They are the white-glove traditions of swamp culture. Trump operates in the world as it is, not a phony world floating on the foam of Washington politesse.
So it’s a surprise to hear Trump call for unity. The president who has peeled the membrane of Washington customs is now relying on it.
The unity bubble of the State of the Union has been durable. Even in the heat of partisan fighting, the State of the Union is a sanctuary where everyone tries to get along. In January 1999, senators tried Bill Clinton’s impeachment case in the morning, and the president delivered his State of the Union across the Capitol in the House chamber that night. In 2011, just weeks after the shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords, senators paired up across party lines to sit with each other as a gesture of togetherness befitting the unity stirred by the occasion. The norms are mighty strong in a venue where sitting on your hands is the harshest response you can offer to your opponents who applaud their man hard enough to break a walnut.
Will the call to unity work? It’s not likely. An MMA fighter cannot pause a bout to appeal to Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Trump seemed to understand this idea that old forms can’t be grafted onto his approach when he expressed skepticism that his first-ever Oval Office address would change the dynamic in the fight over border-wall funding. Polls show he was right. Public opinion didn’t change.
[Daniel Foster: Blame Democrats for the State of the Union circus]
Trump has already tested the conventional approach. Two years ago, he placed unity at the center of his address to Congress. He and his aides promoted the idea in advance of the speech, just as they are doing now. “I am here tonight to deliver a message of unity and strength,” he said on February 28, 2017, “and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart.”
In the two years since that speech, the president has accumulated mountains of tweets and developed an extensive record in office—but he has not been accused of being a unifier. He has faced the opposite charge: that he works against unity to maintain his political base. His philosophy, said former Senator Bob Corker, “is based upon division, anger and resentment, and in some cases even hate … Instead of appealing to our better angels and trying to unite us like most people would try to do, the president tries to divide us.”
Though the State of the Union address puts everyone on their best behavior, it doesn’t erase their underlying views. Republicans will remember how little they were moved by Barack Obama’s lengthy remarks about unity in his 2015 State of the Union. “Finding common ground is what the American people sent us here to do,” said Speaker John Boehner in response, “but you wouldn’t know it from the president’s speech tonight.”
Unity can’t simply be asserted, and it can’t be a veiled demand that the other guy cry uncle. It has to be shown through its component parts: reconciliation, empathy, not immediately questioning your opponent’s motives, and restraining your own impulses. It has been this way from the start of the republic. Benjamin Franklin disagreed with parts of the new Constitution, but when he asked delegates at the founding convention to unify behind it, he explained why he put aside his personal criticisms: “The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good.” To get a little, you’ve got to give a little.
[Read: The language of the State of the Union]
Teddy Roosevelt wrote an entire essay on the conditions for unity. “Fellow-feeling, sympathy in the broadest sense, is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life,” he wrote. “Neither our national nor our local civic life can be what it should be unless it is marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together for a common object.”
This all sounds quaint. These qualities are not prized in modern political combat, particularly by our realist president. This is evident in what he’s saying in real time. Even as he talks about unity, the president characterizes the Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi in the harshest terms, asserting on Face the Nation, “People [are] dying all over the country because of people like Nancy Pelosi … I think she is very bad for our country.” He also told the host, Margaret Brennan, that Pelosi “doesn’t mind human trafficking.”
Working toward unity might be a presidential norm, but President Trump has not let other norms, such as telling the truth, constrain his preferred path. You keep your unity, his supporters might argue. The GOP has unified around a strong economy, deregulation, tax cuts, dialogue with North Korea, tough talk with China, and a conservative judiciary that will influence American life well after Donald Trump has finished his second term. Why should the president bother with tending outdated modes that won’t accomplish his goals? Instead, he should focus on making progress. Calling for unity might look presidential, but as the president has so often said, acting presidential would just be an act.
On election day 2018, the voters of Arizona went to the polls to replace their retiring Republican senator, Jeff Flake. The election was so close that it took six days to reach a final result. But in the end, the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeated the Republican Martha McSally by 56,000 votes out of 2.8 million cast.
On January 3, 2019, Sinema was sworn in as a member of the Senate. Standing next to her, and taking the same oath, was McSally—appointed by the state’s Republican governor to take over the remainder of the late Senator John McCain’s term. The two will serve side by side until January 2021.
This anomalous result stems from an ambiguity in the Seventeenth Amendment that politicians have exploited for partisan advantage since the amendment was adopted in 1913. A new lawsuit, aimed at McSally’s appointment, seeks to resolve it. At stake in Tedards et al. v. Ducey et al. is nothing less than the principle that the Senate belongs to the people.
[Read: Martha McSally snags the ultimate consolation prize]
The Seventeenth Amendment specifies that U.S. senators are to be “elected by the people” instead of by state legislatures, as originally provided by the 1787 Constitution. Ratification came after more than two decades of sustained, organized mobilization by ordinary Americans outraged by the corruption of state legislators who sold Senate seats to the highest bidders. The hitch? Section 2 of the Seventeenth Amendment permits appointment by governors in the event of a vacancy: “The executive authority of each state shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: provided that the legislature of any state may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.”
The vacancy language is left over from the old legislative-appointment system, under which governors could appoint temporary senators “until the next Meeting of the Legislature.” Those “temporary appointments” were limited in time—they could not last beyond the next legislative session, which was already set by state law. But the drafters of the Seventeenth Amendment, for whatever reason, specified “temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.”
See the difference? The special Senate election has no firm deadline, and the language could even be read to allow a “temporary appointment” to substitute completely for a special election.
The amendment’s language does not require appointments; it permits them if a state legislature chooses. At present, five states require immediate special elections, nine allow a genuinely temporary appointment followed by prompt special elections, and 36 allow the appointed senator to serve until the next general election—or even for the remainder of the departing senator’s term. Six of the appointment states, including Arizona, require the appointee to belong to the same political party as the departing senator.
Ambiguities aside, long-term appointment seems contrary to both the language and the spirit of the amendment; so does the same-party requirement. Legislatures should facilitate, not impede, popular elections—and they certainly shouldn’t be deciding which party gets the seat over a long period.
[Eric W. Orts: The path to give California 12 senators, and Vermont just one]
Some politicians see things otherwise. Control of a Senate seat is, to quote former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, “a fucking valuable thing.” Blagojevich shared these musings on a federal wiretap in late 2008, when he had the chance to fill the seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Although there’s no evidence that Blagojevich was able to cash in on the appointment, the crassness with which he tried to do so was one of the reasons he was impeached by the legislature and then sent to a federal prison.
Before then, Blagojevich had appointed Roland Burris to the seat; under Illinois law as it stood, Burris was to serve until 2011—the entire remainder of Obama’s term. But two Illinois voters sued over the appointment. Their claim was that the amendment requires “temporary appointments” and a special election. A statute that gave the entire remaining term to an appointee violated that provision because it was not “temporary,” and no special election would be held.
Their legal team was headed by Tom Geoghegan, a college classmate of mine who has devoted his career to fighting for labor unions and progressive causes. Geoghegan gave me the chance to run down some historical details on the passage of the amendment and subsequent cases brought under it. Eventually, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit agreed with our theory. It ordered Illinois to hold a special election.
This was an almost completely symbolic victory—by the time the court case ended, the regular 2010 Senate election was only weeks away. Nonetheless, the state complied by holding two elections on November 2, 2010. One was for the full six-year term beginning in January 2011; the other was for the month remaining in Burris’s term. The Republican nominee Mark Kirk won both; he took office within days—which gave him a seniority bump over that cycle’s 16 other Senate newcomers.
Symbolic or not, Judge v. Quinn recognizes the important truth about the Seventeenth Amendment: Election by the people is the norm. “Temporary appointment” is there to facilitate self-government, not as a gift to the Blagojeviches of the world.
[John D. Dingell: I served in Congress longer than anyone. Here’s how to fix it.]
Geoghegan and his associates are now challenging the McSally appointment, with Judge v. Quinn on their side.
What happened in Arizona doesn’t involve financial corruption, just old-style party power-seeking. When McCain died in August of last year, Republican Governor Doug Ducey originally appointed former Senator Jon Kyl to replace him. At that time, Sinema and McSally were fighting for the other open seat. Once Sinema won that seat, Kyl resigned—and Ducey named McSally to the office that the state’s voters had just chosen to deny her. Democrats won the 2018 election in Arizona and across the nation, but the statute made McCain’s seat the exclusive property of the defeated party.
Geoghegan’s Arizona lawsuit, Tedards et al. v. Ducey et al., pits five voters (two Democrats, one Republican, one independent, and one libertarian) against Ducey in his capacity as governor. The voters argue that the 27-month delay in holding an election is “just too long” and, beyond that, violates the requirement of a special “writ of election.” Second, they say, the Seventeenth Amendment allows legislatures to “empower” governors to make appointments, but Arizona’s law “requires” an appointment, and further, limits the potential appointee by political party—neither of which, they say, the amendment allows. Third, they allege, the partisan-affiliation requirement is an attempt to add a new qualification to those spelled out in the Constitution’s article 1 (senators must be 30 years old, have been citizens for at least nine years, and be “inhabitants” of the state), which the Supreme Court has held that state legislatures cannot do.
Ducey’s lawyers argue that the 27-month delay is reasonable, that the appointment and party-requirement statute “favors no political party,” and that asking the voters to participate in a special election will upset them: “Special elections are inconvenient and confusing for voters, who must make time to participate in additional rounds of primary and general voting and deal with yet another highly politicized election year immediately after the conclusion of a contentious election cycle.”
What the federal court will make of this challenge is hard to predict. The amendment’s wording, as I’ve noted, is ambiguous. And a judge might wonder whether “just too long” is a manageable standard for deciding when special elections must be held.
The Supreme Court has been largely silent on this issue. The one exception, of sorts, was Valenti v. Rockefeller. In that case, New York voters demanded a special election to fill the seat left vacant by the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. They wanted an election in five months; the lower courts rejected that claim. The Supreme Court agreed in an opinion reading, in full, “The motion to affirm is granted and the judgment is affirmed.” Scholars have argued over the meaning of that opinion ever since.
The historical record on the amendment’s appointment provision isn’t much help, either. “What is perhaps most remarkable about deliberations over the Seventeenth Amendment in both chambers is how little was said of the vacancies clause,” Thomas Neale, a Congressional Research Service specialist, wrote in a CRS report last year. Neale quotes Senator Joseph Bristow, the amendment’s chief sponsor, who said that the language
is practically the same provision which now exists in the case of such a vacancy. The governor of the State may appoint a Senator until the legislature elects. My amendment provides that the legislature may empower the governor of the State to appoint a Senator to fill a vacancy until the election occurs, and he is directed by this amendment to “issue writs of election to fill such vacancies.”
As we have seen above, Bristow was wrong about how the language would be read. The point of the amendment was to remove corrupt legislators from Senate elections; the wording has allowed them to slither back in.
One Senate vote can be a consequential thing. The Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, for example, failed in 2017 by one vote—John McCain’s. Now the very seat that McCain vacated has been handed unilaterally to a lawmaker who owes the seat not to the voters who rejected her but to a Republican governor and his party.
If another crucial measure hangs by one vote in the next two years, voters can fairly wonder whom McSally will consult before casting hers.
The reporting for this article was supported by The Masthead, The Atlantic’s membership program. Learn more.
YANGON, Myanmar—By Kamal’s own admission, his family used to be “very rich.” His father owned a successful trading business, which sent fish and thanaka—a fragrant cosmetic paste made from tree bark—to be sold in neighboring Bangladesh. Their home in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State in western Myanmar (also known as Burma), was a two-story structure in a busy quarter, and Kamal, a Muslim, taught English at a local church.
But when I met him, he was sitting idly near his new house in a village filled with rickety homes, where the roads and footpaths had been turned to slippery mud by the heavy monsoon. His family were forced to flee Sittwe as roving mobs of Buddhists destroyed the homes of their Muslim neighbors. Violence had convulsed Rakhine State, where the Buddhist majority clashed with the Rohingya community, a minority Muslim group that has been the object of discrimination for decades here in Myanmar. The relative wealth of Kamal’s family was no factor—the violence had, in a way, served as a great equalizer, turning the Rohingya into a monolithic community, detested more than ever before.
[Read: The world isn’t prepared to deal with possible genocide in Myanmar]
Kamal and his family were among about 140,000 mainly Rohingya Muslims who were displaced in the bloodshed of 2012, three years before he and I first talked. Most were rounded up into chaotic displacement camps in Rakhine, where most still reside, while others were held in government-controlled ghettos, barred from leaving. Then in 2017, more than 700,000 others headed to neighboring Bangladesh, searching for safety from a country where they had lived their entire lives but which refused to recognize them. United Nations investigators have called the most recent exodus the result of genocidal military actions.
Kamal made plans for a different path, though—he smuggled himself within his own country. “Do you remember me,” he asked in a recent message. “Now, I am in Yangon.”
Even among the myriad tales of Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence, Kamal’s stands out. The 24-year-old, who did not want his full name published for fear of being targeted, is one of the very few Rohingya who have been able to escape a life confined to government slums or squalid camps. His is a route that many are now trying to replicate, whether by land, sea, or air.
The Rohingya have long been subjected to discrimination and communal violence. The minority could qualify for equal rights to other groups when Myanmar—then officially called Burma—won independence from Britain, but in 1982, the country passed a citizenship law that effectively rendered them stateless. Today, government officials here refer to Rohingya as “Bengalis,” asserting that they are not compatriots, but foreigners.
Things have not always been quite as hopeless for the Rohingya. When Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy Party took power in 2016, she formed a commission headed by the late former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to look at the issues in Rakhine and recommend possible solutions. Observers had a cautious hope that Suu Kyi, who until then had shown negligible regard for the plight of the Rohingya, recognized the situation as untenable and was pushing for a solution. The commission, Suu Kyi said, would help heal a “wound that hurts all of us.”
Then, in August 2017, members of a Rohingya militant group known as ARSA launched attacks on a number of police outposts in Rakhine. The Annan-led commission delivered its final report laying out 88 recommendations just hours before the ARSA attacks, dramatically dimming the prospect of implementation, and the Myanmar military quickly began what it described as “clearance operations,” a disproportionate response to the violence that then spiraled into a frenzy, with widespread reports of rape, arbitrary killings, and arson. (The Myanmar government and military have dismissed such allegations—whether from foreign media, rights groups, or international bodies—as biased and unfounded.)
[Read: How Aung San Suu Kyi lost her way]
The authorities insist that they are working tirelessly to improve conditions for the Rohingya, upgrading Rakhine’s infrastructure and touting a new variation on an identity card that would grant the group limited rights, as well as hosting an investment fair in Rakhine in February. Suu Kyi has also declared on multiple occasions that her government has implemented 81 of the Annan-led commission’s 88 recommendations.
But diplomats and aid workers have become blunter in their criticism of what they argue is the government’s persistent unwillingness to address the underlying problems plaguing the community. A report compiled in September by six international aid groups was scathing. “Despite the clear lack of will to address human rights issues, the government has nevertheless persisted in proclaiming significant progress on the recommendations,” according to the report, which has not been published but was reviewed by me. There are also concerns that any effort toward repatriation from Bangladesh—Dhaka is keen to quickly send the Rohingya back, worried that it lacks the resources to support a long-term refugee population and about the potential for domestic backlash—will merely mimic past flawed and hurried attempts. “There is very little willingness to do that so far,” a Western diplomat in Yangon, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said of efforts to solve the problems around citizenship and freedom of movement. “It is not zero, but it is pretty minimal."
Rohingya students pray at a mosque in Sittwe in 2009. (Paula Bronstein / Getty)Sitting in a hotel restaurant overlooking Kandawgyi Lake, in central Yangon, Kamal told me about his expensive escape between hurried bites of rice and beef. Using money he had stashed away from his job working for an NGO in the village he had fled to, he paid almost $2,600—a vast sum in a country with an average annual income of just over $1,400—to an immigration official in Sittwe. The cash was then doled out to others, the so-called tea money that serves as the lubrication necessary to move Myanmar’s gears of bureaucracy. Kamal did not, for example, have a national registration card, so documents were forged to show that he was traveling to study. Finally, in the summer of 2016, before the renewed bouts of violence, he took a short flight to Yangon, where he was met by his aunt and uncle who, he said, had left Rakhine more than 20 years earlier.
I asked him how he felt about having to pay such a significant sum in bribes, to which Kamal responded with laughter and indifference. What else could he do, he asked, then telling me simply, “I had no options.”
Even among those who have made it out of Rakhine, Kamal was exceptionally fortunate: His journey didn’t involve exploitative traffickers or days bobbing in the ocean. I have met Rohingya who were rescued from overcrowded boats abandoned by smugglers; others made it all the way to Chicago after slipping into Malaysia and spending years there waiting in limbo for resettlement.
The Myanmar government’s reticence to comprehend the magnitude of the problems facing the Rohingya has led it to make statements that appear grounded in an alternative reality. In a speech in mid-December, President Win Myint declared 2018 an “auspicious year” for Rakhine, pointing to a lack of natural disasters and a list of development accomplishments. The authorities are also pushing ahead with plans to accommodate repatriated refugees, building structures to house them upon their return, but the government’s track record bodes poorly on this front.
[Read: The misunderstood roots of Burma’s Rohingya crisis]
In 1978 and 1979, about 200,000 Rohingya refugees entered Bangladesh when Myanmar military forces began a sweeping citizenship-verification project. Then, from 1991 to 1994, another 250,000 Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh, an exodus spurred by military abuses. Both times, the two countries organized repatriations, in coordination with the United Nations. An unpublished 2010 report commissioned by the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, examining these exercises came to the troubling conclusion, however, that those repatriations were not voluntary. The confidential document, a copy of which I obtained, found that “at a minimum, UNHCR showed reckless disregard for its protection mandate and principles” during the repatriation carried out in the 1970s. Similarly, the fact that large-scale repatriations undertaken in 1994 “were not entirely voluntary and safe is beyond contestation.”
Complicating matters further is the intense fighting that broke out in January between government forces and another group demanding greater autonomy for Rakhine, a conflict that has displaced thousands and heavily restricted international aid to the state. Small-scale development projects announced by the UN in late December to improve conditions for possible Rohingya returnees were abruptly put on hold just weeks after they were announced because of the new clashes.
In Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city and its former capital, Kamal has taken to obsessively documenting his life with an exuberance that at times verges on comical. He was particularly happy with his new friends, which by his count stood at “over 30.” Kamal made a point of noting that many were Buddhists, but that he got along with them “like brother and sister.” He had found work tutoring high-school students after school in English, and he sent me pictures of them dressed in clothing from Myanmar’s different ethnic groups. It was his idea, he said, to teach them “respect for diversity.”
Still, his life is not without worry: He lacks legitimate identity documents; lives in a cramped apartment with his aunt, uncle, and cousins; and finds his day job at a company importing electronics unmotivating. And while he has told his students and friends that he is a Muslim, he has not revealed his ethnicity. “I prefer not to say I’m Rohingya,” he said, “because it is very dangerous here.”
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