One of the few questions that Democrats and Republicans can agree upon is the school board controversy’s outsized role in the Republican victory in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial election. Although much of the press coverage suggested that the protests involved a “grassroots” movement, they have actually included an elaborately orchestrated operation to exploit parents who are stressed by school disruption and Covid-19 fatigue. Virginia may have served as the laboratory for the project, but similar efforts will be visible all over the electoral map in the period leading up to the 2022 midterms.

For many, the project first came to light last April, when a parent named Asra Nomani published a scathing critique of her child’s school, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. The article was published in The Federalist (a right-wing platform that has been suspended from Twitter in the past for publishing harmful Covid disinformation). Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, directed her rage at a classroom screening of Ava du Vernay’s award-winning Netflix documentary, 13th, and the lesson’s caution, “Racism is not a concept of the past.” Two days later, Nomani’s story made Fox News, where the reporter added that the Jefferson students were being “indoctrinated with critical race theory.”

The situation quickly mushroomed. In June, a Jefferson parent (name withheld for security concerns), told the Spectator, “Our PTA is collapsing under pressure of having two internal, highly political groups trying to do a hostile takeover.” The parents association in their formerly polite suburb was unprepared for the tactics employed by the two linked educational “advocacy” groups, Coalition for TJ, a group of Thomas Jefferson parents, and DefendingEd, a group with a national presence. “They call parents’ employers and harass the employers and parents. There are incidents where people who seem to have been radicalized are doing bizarre things.” In suburban Virginia, these actions include the vandalization of people’s homes and property.

But the activism of agitated parents has transcended the PTA boardroom. On November 5, Asra Nomani, billed as the “vice president of strategy and investigations” for DefendingEd, took credit in the Fairfax Times for her organization’s role in Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race. “Little did Youngkin know but the groundwork for his victory was actually laid on June 7, 2020, months before he even decided to run for office, with a mother who would become one of the many ‘hopping mad’ parents in a mama and papa bear movement that would bring him to office.”

This may have been an exaggeration — but given the 64,000-vote margin in the race, the PTA and school board battles in the Washington suburbs made a difference. Fairfax, with over a million residents, is the most populous county in Virginia, while adjacent Loudoun County, at 420,000, is the fourth-most populous. Not coincidentally, they are also the homes of many of the conservative political strategists and operatives involved in leveraging the campaign.

PTA and school board protests have erupted across the country. In Jefferson County, Colorado, longtime school board members are suddenly being called Nazis and child abusers. An Illinois school board member resigned after receiving death threats and deposits of dead rodents on her doorstep. The local events are publicized as protests against mask requirements and school curricula. But they also have a clear political agenda: They are playing an expanding role in electoral politics, leading into next year’s crucial midterm elections.

The website for DefendingEd (shorthand for Parents Defending Education) states, “Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom.” Despite DefendingEd’s self-description as a “national grassroots organization,” it is more accurately described as an astroturf operation, orchestrated and coordinated through a web of donors and strategists, many of them partners, via the religious right, in the Council for National Policy (see Nelson, Holding Democracy in the U. S. Hostage) and associated operations of the Koch brothers’ empire.

These efforts have been woven through the right-wing ecosphere. As noted, Asra Nomani generated the Federalist and Fox News stories, as well as the story claiming credit for the Youngkin victory. DefendingEd’s founding president, Nicole Neily, came to her office with a long career in Koch-funded operations, including the Cato Institute, the Independent Women’s Forum, Speech First, and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.

Many parents and educators have tried in vain to contest the premise of these attacks by pointing out that critical race theory — a core complaint of the movement — doesn’t even exist at the grade-school level; it has been used as a framework for discussions about structural racism in law school over the past four decades. But the attacks are often rooted in a time-worn playbook that the radical right has used to generate useful controversies for decades. The technique involves identifying — and in some cases, inventing — an inflammatory term that touches a nerve among the target population, and provoking conflict through coordinated local organizing with media amplification.

The anti-abortion campaign offers one example of this. Abortion was not a particularly fraught topic among American Protestants in the 1970s, but a network of religious right organizations connected to the CNP discovered that coining and promoting misleading terms about abortion could activate their intended audiences. “Partial-birth abortion” and “birth-day abortion on demand” were manufactured terms that had no meaning in medicine or in law but became successful “brands” for persuasion and mobilization.

As they absorbed the loss of the 2020 elections, the leadership of the religious right saw signs they had begun to exhaust the available supply of new conservative evangelical voters in critical districts. Polls also indicated that a crucial bloc of swing voters, college-educated white suburban women, were increasingly disaffected with Trump and were often unmoved by the anti-abortion message. But polling also showed that as the Covid-19 epidemic wore on, these voters were increasingly anxious about their children, their public schools, and conflicting public health policies.

It was time for a new initiative. The question was, what triggering concept or term could channel these anxieties into a political response?

Parents Defending Education (or DefendingEd) was incorporated in Virginia on January 21, 2021. Unusual for a grassroots organization, it was born fully equipped with a Twitter account (December 2020) and a Facebook account (January 2020) and rapidly acquired a public relations firm and a polling firm.

Around the same time, a new offensive around critical race theory started to gain traction. On March 15, Christopher Rufo, a young political operative with the conservative Manhattan Institute, posted two tweets aligned with previous initiatives that explained the strategy to harness new votes through misleading terminology.

Asra Nomani’s Federalist and Fox News “exposés” followed a month later. By midsummer, the combined critical race theory and school board campaigns were not only underway, they were embraced by multiple leaders and media platforms throughout the CNP network. A June 15 investigation by NBC News described state-level school board initiatives, quoting Karen England, a member of the CNP’s board of governors.

“This is an opportunity for what I feel like I’ve been screaming from the rooftops about,” England told NBC, speaking as executive director for Nevada Family Alliance, known for its efforts to end Drag Queen Story Hour at local libraries; the group recently proposed placing body cameras on teachers suspected of teaching critical race theory.

On June 24, Pat Robertson, a past president of the CNP, followed suit on his Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club, describing critical race theory as “a monstrous evil” used by “Communists” to “destroy children.”

The short-term impact of these initiatives was easy to discern. They attacked the school boards, disrupting a foundation of local democratic practice, and they derailed educators’ efforts to address issues of inequality and racism that gained prominence in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But they also served to organize parents into a new political cohort, as evidenced on June 29 with the staging of a “boot camp” to train parents for school board takeovers, held by Family Research Council Action. The program was led by FRC president Tony Perkins, a standard-bearer of the religious right and longtime president of the CNP. The training session featured Elizabeth Schultz — a “senior fellow” for DefendingEd from Fairfax County who worked under Betsy DeVos, the former secretary of education in the Trump administration.

On June 30, the FRC website posted:

Other CNP affiliates stepped in. In October, Judicial Watch, headed by Tom Fitton, another member of the CNP executive committee, posted an attack against a Rhode Island school district’s teacher training materials. Judicial Watch objected to teaching the concepts of “anti-racism” and “equity” (while acknowledging that critical race theory doesn’t appear in grade-school curricula).

(Editor’s note: Rhode Island was a major center of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and dispatched some 2,000 voyages to enslave Africans.)

Yet another partner in the campaign is Turning Point USA, headed by CNP member Charlie Kirk. In partnership with the Leadership Institute, TPUSA has created a “School Board Watchlist,” a companion site to its McCarthyite “Professor Watchlist.” There it posts critiques of school boards linked to their support for LGBT-friendly policies and requirements for vaccines and masking. Notably, TPUSA posts the names and pictures of school board members in districts where threats and harassment are mounting. Fairfax County is prominently listed; so are Norman, Oklahoma; Lincoln, Nebraska; and scores of other communities. Like the Leadership Institute and the Family Research Council initiatives, TPUSA’s school board campaign includes a fundraising function on its website.

Hardwired into the school board campaigns are the standard elements of the strategy: money, media, and a secret hub to coordinate efforts to disrupt American politics on both a national and a local level. To be sure, Parents Defending Education is only one of several major organizations in the field, and the CNP is only one of the coordinating bodies. Defining the broader field won’t be easy; given the role of dark money and the snail’s pace of tax and federal election filings, the threads connecting their financing, data, and political engagement will take months, if not years, to trace. But all indications are that these efforts are directed at the 2022 midterms, and they are well underway now.

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Money, Media, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Nelson is the recipient of the Livingston Award for journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for historical research.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 November 2021
Word Count: 2,302
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The cause of General Colin Powell’s passing will be recorded on his death certificate as complications from Covid-19. But his vulnerability to a rare breakthrough infection was the result of two underlying conditions, Parkinson’s disease and multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood that destroys the bone marrow cells that strengthen the immune system. Those diseases, both incurable, shine a light on an often forgotten period in Powell’s long and distinguished career. Both are now on the Veterans’ Administration’s list of diseases presumptively associated with service in Vietnam and exposure to the chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange.

Every veteran who served in Vietnam between 1961 and 1975 is entitled to benefits if he or she subsequently suffers from one of a list of eight types of cancer and nine other diseases, regardless of proof of direct exposure to the chemical. But Powell’s case is unusual. He was not only exposed to the defoliants; he directly accompanied the unit of South Vietnamese soldiers who were spraying them, in one of the earliest and most controversial missions of the war. Not only that, but the chemical used by the troops he was advising was not Agent Orange, but its little-known precursor, Agent Purple. This substance was composed of the same 50-50 mix of two chemical ingredients, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, but was roughly three times as contaminated by TCDD-dioxin, generally considered to be one of the most toxic substances ever created. The use of Agent Purple was phased out in 1965 after the introduction of Agent Orange, which was less expensive to produce.

The mission on which Powell’s men used Agent Purple took place in February 1963, when he was a young Army captain assigned to the Special Forces base at A Shau, in a remote mountain valley on the border with Laos. The most important North Vietnamese bastion inside South Vietnam, the valley was one of its most fearsome battlefields, best remembered for the carnage in May 1969 at Dong Ap Bia, the Mountain of the Crouching Beast. Americans called it Hamburger Hill for the hundred or more Americans who died there, along with perhaps ten times as many North Vietnamese fighters.

Among the generals and civilian politicians who debated the use of toxic chemicals in warfare, the most controversial element was not the defoliation of the forest cover that concealed enemy troops, but the destruction of the crops that might feed them. When scientists proposed the destruction of the Japanese rice crop in 1944, FDR’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, vetoed the idea, saying that it “would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all known laws of war.” JFK felt much the same way, and when the first targets for defoliation were proposed in 1962 he strongly opposed all missions aimed at enemy crop fields, for fear they would harm and antagonize the peasant farmers that the United States was ostensibly there to protect and defend.

But JFK’s military commanders overcame his well-documented resistance by stressing the strategic importance of the A Shau Valley, a terminus for the Ho Chi Minh Trail just below the Demilitarized Zone that divided North and South Vietnam. Helicopters delivered 55-gallon barrels of Agent Purple to the A Shau base, and after decanting the chemical into backpack sprayers, Powell’s men used it on eight separate occasions, destroying 29 acres of manioc and sweet potatoes. By the time the herbicide campaign, Operation Ranch Hand, ended in 1971, some 500,000 acres — about 780 square miles — of crop fields had been destroyed. This was accomplished with the use of several of the so-called rainbow chemicals — Agents Purple, Orange, White, and Blue (a powerful arsenical compound). In all, more than 19 million gallons of toxic herbicides were sprayed on South Vietnam in the course of the war.

Powell was invalided out of his first tour of duty after just six months, when a punji stick — a sharpened stake of bamboo that was probably contaminated with excrement — went clean through his foot. But he returned for a second tour in July 1968, by this time promoted to major. His assignment took him initially to Duc Pho, a small base in Quang Ngai province, a longtime stronghold of the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong. Here he almost certainly encountered a second element of the herbicide campaign that was separate from Operation Ranch Hand and overseen not by the Air Force but the Army Chemical Corps. The perimeter of bases like Duc Pho, and the surrounding helicopter landing zones and fire support bases that Powell visited while he was there, were routinely sprayed by ground crews and helicopters to keep down vegetation for protection against enemy attack.

After two months he was transferred to nearby Chu Lai to serve as chief of operations for the Americal Division, a company of which had carried out the worst known massacre of the war in the village of My Lai six months before his arrival. Again, herbicides were used frequently at the Chu Lai base and the surrounding support facilities while Powell was there, and the whole of Quang Ngai province was heavily sprayed. Declassified Air Force records make it possible to reconstruct these operations with considerable precision. Some 220,000 gallons were sprayed on Quang Ngai in 1968 and 1969. About 80 percent were Agent Orange; the remainder were Agents White and Blue.

After the war ended, Vietnam veterans fought a bitter battle for recognition that their postwar cancers and other diseases, as well as the birth defects suffered by their children, might be attributable to their exposure to the toxic defoliants. It was not until 1991, with the Agent Orange Act, that their plight was fully acknowledged. Although it was, and remains, impossible to show cause-and-effect in individual cases, the Act gave vets the benefit of the doubt, in a kind of moral atonement for the years of ostracism they had suffered in the wake of the first foreign war the United States had ever lost. It mandated the Institute of Medicine and the V.A. to continue studying the effects of dioxin on veterans’ health, and over the years more diseases were added to the original list. These included the two from which Powell was suffering: multiple myeloma and, most recently, Parkinson’s disease.

Like Powell, the Vietnam generation is now aging, growing sicker, and dying, and the V.A., too often an orphan stepchild among government agencies, continues to review their requests for compensation. Still, many applications are rejected. In the decades after the war, the Air Force’s chief toxicologist, Alvin “Dr. Orange” Young, consistently denied that the defoliants had any demonstrated impact on human health and made, in his own words, “a few million dollars” by consulting for the Defense Department and the V.A., which often relied on his advice to deny benefits to sick veterans he dismissed as “freeloaders” trying to “cash in” on the compensation program.

For decades, the conditions in our V.A. hospitals have been a national disgrace, and no facility has been more notorious than the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Just ten miles away, at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Colin Powell received the superb care that he richly deserved for his long years of service. But thousands of others have been less fortunate, and it would be a fine addition to Powell’s legacy if his death served to dramatize not only the continued scourge of Covid-19, but the enduring pain of so many of his fellow Vietnam veterans.

George Black is working on a book on the legacies of the war in Vietnam, to be published by Knopf.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 November 2021
Word Count: 1,251
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The United States began taxing corporate income in 1909, with a 1 percent tax on profits exceeding $5,000 ($150,000 in today’s dollars). The top tax rate peaked at around 50 percent between World War II and 1978. It then declined slowly, reaching 35 percent in 1998. President Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act cut the rate sharply — to 21percent starting in 2018. The Brookings Institution, an economic think tank, estimated that this last change reduced corporate tax revenues in the United States by 40 percent, or $135 billion.

These are legislated rates; the rates companies actually pay are much lower. Last year, 55 highly profitable U.S. companies paid nothing in federal income taxes. Some firms, including Amazon, Facebook, and Nike, have paid few or no taxes to the federal government for many years.

One reason for this is that corporations book their profits in subsidiaries located in international tax havens, such as Bermuda and Ireland, as well as in corporate-friendly states like South Dakota and Delaware (as revealed in the recently disclosed Pandora Papers), where corporate profits are taxed lightly, if at all, and related information is closely guarded.

This is easy to do, in part, because firms do business with their subsidiaries. They buy things from their subsidiaries and sell things to their subsidiaries. The price they pay is not set by the market; it is not the going price. Rather, firms set these prices in order to distort the amount and source of their profits. When companies pay high prices to their tax-haven subsidiaries, the subsidiary makes a great deal of money; the rest of the firm (located outside the tax haven) earns little. One famous example of this is Nike’s trademarked “swoosh,” owned by a Bermuda subsidiary responsible for most of Nike’s profits. Bermuda doesn’t tax corporate profits, and the United States doesn’t tax profits that are booked abroad and remain abroad.

The result is a race to the bottom. Nations compete for corporate tax revenue by lowering their corporate tax rate. Lowest rate wins. The consequences are just what one would expect. In the 1950s, corporate income taxes provided around 30 percent of U.S. federal government tax revenues. By the 1980s, the figure was 10 percent. The 2017 tax bill cut this to under 7 percent. As corporations pay less in taxes, governments accumulate more debt to finance their expenditures and come under increasing pressure to cut their spending.

A standard objection to taxing corporate income is that it involves “unfair” double taxation — after corporations get taxed, their shareholders are taxed again when reporting dividends and capital gains on individual income tax returns. Other critics claim the tax is regressive, paid by workers and consumers, because firms pass taxes along via higher prices and lower wages. Neither claim is true.

Corporate income taxes are paid mainly by firm shareholders. If workers did pay the tax via lower wages, cutting the corporate income tax should lead to large wage gains (as President Trump promised when promoting his 2017 tax bill). But this hasn’t happened. As corporate tax rates have fallen since 1978, wages have stagnated, increasing by not much more than inflation. Firms have had greater incentives to squeeze workers because the firm gets to keep most of the gains from cutting wages and benefits since it pays very little in corporate income taxes.

The double-taxation objection is also fatuous. Our income gets taxed many times. It is taxed by the federal government, state governments, and local governments. Then people pay sales taxes when buying things and property taxes on their home.

The real problem, though, is not double taxation but untaxed corporate income. Jeff Bezos provides a good example. Most of his wealth consists of Amazon stock. His pay as CEO was a bit more than $1 million annually. Amazon pays no dividends. Profits remain within the firm to help boost stock prices. Bezos’s capital gains are not taxed unless he sells his Amazon stock; and these gains can be passed tax-free to heirs because of estate tax loopholes. Unless Amazon’s profits are taxed, the majority of Bezos’s income remains untaxed, making it easier for him to accumulate vast wealth.

Of course, the filthy rich who want to avoid taxes as much as possible generally borrow at low interest rates to meet immediate spending needs above their annual salary. This lets them avoid taxes on stock gains and to continue earning high returns on their stock holdings.

Taxing corporate profits is an important step toward getting the rich to pay for expenditures required to run the country. It would also provide revenue to fund essential government spending. And both the rich and large multinational corporations benefit significantly from these social expenditures.

Companies are protected by national laws and courts, and by defense spending. They make money using government-educated workers, and transporting goods over government-funded roads and bridges. Firms make profits when hired to participate in government infrastructure and building projects. Further, if companies are people with rights, and can make unlimited political expenditures (as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), they should be taxed like people so that they contribute toward protecting these rights.

Even Adam Smith favored high taxes on monopoly profits. For Smith, taxing the profits of large companies facing little competition was desirable because it reduced monopoly profits. Monopoly power has risen substantially over the past several decades. Monopolistic firms have developed enormous political power on top of great economic power. Taxing corporate income would help reverse this undemocratic trend and discourage the rise of large monopolistic firms.

Corporate income taxation is in such disarray because our corporate tax laws were written more than 100 years ago. A century ago, international trade involved parts and goods produced in one country and sold to a firm in another country. There were no foreign subsidiaries muddying the water. Nor was there a problem with trade in services. Today, one-quarter of international trade involves services — advertising, call centers, streaming, intellectual property (Nike’s swoosh), and legal services. Complicating things further, when customer likes and searches are sold to advertisers (e.g., Facebook), it is unclear where “production” takes place and where profits are made. Companies get to decide this, and of course choose tax havens as the place of production.

The good news is that things may soon change for the better. In July, the finance ministers of the G20 countries agreed to a U.S. proposal to change corporate taxation worldwide. The plan has two key provisions. First, a 15 percent minimum corporate tax rate on companies with more than $890 billion in revenue worldwide. Second, multinationals with more than $23.8 billion in revenue will pay 20 percent to 30 percent of their profits (above 10 percent of their revenue) to countries where they sell goods rather than to the countries where they claim to earn their profits. More than 130 nations and jurisdictions have agreed to this plan.

The 15 percent floor would end the race to the bottom. If Ireland retains its 12.5 percent tax rate, other nations can tax 2.5 percent of each corporation’s worldwide profits. Just as important, taxing profits based on company sales rather than a company’s decisions about where it wants to declare profits will reduce tax-haven shopping.

There is a danger that the 15 percent rate will become a ceiling, as all nations cut their corporate tax rates to 15 percent. On the other hand, once countries agree on a floor, they may see the benefits to a higher minimum rate. A global minimum tax rate, once institutionalized, can easily be raised.

And it should be raised. A 15 percent rate is not nearly sufficient; it is the tax rate paid by an average U.S. worker. Large, profitable firms can certainly afford to pay a higher tax rate. Even a 25 percent rate is less than half the rate that prevailed during the post-WWII era, a time of rapid economic growth in the United States and throughout the developed world. So a higher corporate income tax rate should not slow economic growth; firms will forgo a larger fraction of their profits rather than shun those profits.

Key technical and political issues remain. There are questions about how to divide up additional tax revenues (somewhere between $100 billion and $240 billion annually). Here, the United States provides a good model. Many U.S. states use the location of sales and employment to determine the fraction of corporate profits that each state gets to tax. This prevents companies from reporting their profits in low-tax states. States participating in this agreement then have free rein to tax the corporate profits allocated to them.

The key political issue concerns how to get all nations to sign on to new international tax rules. Without approval by all European Commission members, the accord cannot pass. Ireland and Hungary are two of the biggest problems because their corporate income tax rate is currently below 15 percent. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called the minimum corporate tax an “absurd” idea. However, in early October both countries agreed to support the new corporate tax legislation, after considerable pressure from the United States and other developed nations.

The new international corporate tax rules must still be officially approved by all nations. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block, moving forward, is whether President Biden can get the Senate to approve new corporate tax laws, when 67 senators (at least 17 Republicans) must approve any tax treaty.

An international agreement on taxing corporate income would be a huge step forward, after decades of government spending cutbacks and rising government debt in the face of reduced revenues from corporations. It would also be a big win for the Biden administration because solving the world’s problems, such as climate change, requires the cooperation of other nations and it would show that the Biden administration has the ability to work with other countries to achieve such ends.

Steven Pressman is professor emeritus of economics and finance at Monmouth University and author of Fifty Major Economists, 3^rd edition (Routledge, 2013).

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2021
Word Count: 1,657
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It has now become clear that the efforts of Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the 2020 elections were a multi-front attack.

The newest revelations have further detailed the scheme devised by conservative lawyer John Eastman to convince Vice President Pence to overturn the election results on January 6, 2021, the day the House and Senate were scheduled to convene a joint session to certify the election results.

As revealed in Bob Woodward and Bob Costa’s new book Peril, and more recently confirmed by Eastman himself, Eastman met with Trump and Pence on January 4 and laid out a roadmap for Pence to subvert the Constitution and declare Trump the winner. Eastman urged Pence to exclude the electoral votes of any states in which there were disputes over electors Pence refused to take that path advocated by Trump and Eastman, and consistent with the Constitution, presided over the counting of the electoral votes of every state and declared Joe Biden the President.

Eastman’s efforts ultimately led nowhere. But another plot, discussed by the senior officials of the Department of Justice in the same period, while also never implemented, provided a step-by-step blueprint not only for 2020 but for future constitutional coups by legislatures in states under full partisan Republican control, enabling them to change the results of the popular vote.

That plan, drafted by the then-number three at Justice, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, amounts to a road map for the current and future efforts by Trump and his Republican allies to ensure that he, or another Republican, secures the presidency in 2024 regardless of who wins the popular vote or the true Electoral College vote.

In a December 27 phone call to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Trump demanded that the Acting Attorney General and the Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue overturn the results of the 2020 election — or risk losing their jobs. “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Trump said on the call, according to handwritten notes taken by Donoghue. The next day, December 28, Clark laid out his step-by-step plan to overturn the election results in a draft five-page letter along with an email he sent to Donoghue and Rosen. Clark asked them to sign the letter in order to send to the legislatures and governors of Georgia and “other relevant states,” requesting that they convene immediately, declare the results of the election void, and appoint presidential electors supporting Trump before the January 6 certification deadline.

The unprecedented Clark letter is more than an important historical document. It is the smoking gun evidence of Trump’s effort to force the Justice Department to overturn the election in 2020. Even more dangerously, it is a guide to how state legislatures can set aside the will of the people in 2024, and substitute their own choice for President, if voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering prove insufficient to get the result they seek.

Clark’s writings rely on a radical interpretation of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent to effect a Constitutional coup. His ideas are based on language in Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution, which gives state legislatures sole authority to set the terms for how presidential electors are chosen, and thus determine the winner.

This concept is known as the Independent State Legislature Doctrine, established in an 1892 Supreme Court case, McPherson v. Blacker, which decided that even after a legislature has granted voters the ability to choose Presidential electors in that state on the basis of who has received the most votes, legislatures remain free to take back that power for themselves at any time.

This position was expressly reiterated by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, the five-to-four decision in 2000 in which the conservative bloc on the Court handed George W. Bush the presidency, a ruling the Clark letter cites, though with important caveats that Clark ignores. Clark cites McPherson to justify the unlimited and unreviewable exercise by state legislatures of their right to decide on their states electoral votes at any time — even after the popular vote has taken place, regardless of the state’s constitution, courts, and voters.

If taken to its logical conclusion, this doctrine would remove the authority of Governors and Secretaries of State to certify Presidential elections based on the popular vote. It would enable state legislatures to ignore those officials, even when existing state law gives them the specific authority to make such certifications. The popular vote could be ignored so long as the legislature avoided violating the “equal protection” concerns articulated in Bush v. Gore.

Under the Clark interpretation of the Independent State Legislature doctrine, decisions by a state legislature to appoint Presidential electors are non-reviewable by judges. They could not be overturned by the finding of the state’s judiciary that the legislature has behaved improperly, possibly not even by the Supreme Court, since the state legislature’s authority under Article II to do this is “plenary,” or unlimited. This interpretation of the Constitution would allow for no check against any legislature’s determination to award its electoral votes to whichever candidate it wished, so long as it is careful to avoid creating a record that it was doing so in derogation of the rights of any particular voting group, such as on the basis of race or color, as precluded by the 15^th Amendment. Instead, a legislature can simply make a finding that it has the authority to decide the winner on the grounds that, for example, purported fraud has made it impossible to determine the true popular winner selected by the state’s voters.

Clark’s email and draft letter described each step needed to apply this doctrine to award the electoral votes of Georgia and other swing states to Trump. First, the Justice Department would cite the reports by Republican legislators that found the state’s November elections to be “untrustworthy.” Second, the Justice Department would recommend that the legislature be called back into session “to determine the proper Electors to be certified to the Electoral College in the 2020 presidential race.” Third, the legislature would provide an alternative slate of electors — left unstated but assumed by Clark is that these would each be for Trump — to be signed, sealed and certified, and sent to the U.S. Senate and the Vice President by January 6 as required by the 12^th Amendment.

A few state legislatures undertook halting steps in this direction in 2020 but none were completed, though Georgia went the furthest in an effort stopped in its tracks by the decision of Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger to re-certify the vote for Biden December 7, 2020 and to refuse to allow it to be reopened further.

According to a six-page memo written by Eastman on January 3, the day before he met with Trump and Pence, Republican electors for Trump did in fact secretly meet on December 14 to conduct a “trial run” of a variation on the Clark scheme in seven states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) and actually sent Pence alternative slates of Trump electors.

Since none of the state legislatures actually completed the steps to throw out the Presidential results based on the choices made by the state’s voters, any electoral votes such rogue electors might have sought to cast would have had no Constitutional basis. Republican-controlled state legislatures could overcome this defect in 2024 by acting promptly to shout “fraud” right after the elections, and then act to invalidate the popular vote and legislate their own partisan alternative.

Clark did not specify which states he meant when he stipulated that the legislatures of “each relevant state” should convene to determine which candidate should be awarded those states’ electoral votes. But the answer is apparent. In 2020, Republicans controlled both chambers of the state legislatures in Arizona (11 Electoral Votes), Georgia (16 EVs), Michigan (16 EVs), Pennsylvania (20 EVs), and Wisconsin (10 EVs). Had those legislatures awarded electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden and those legislative certifications been determined to be the only valid ones by the Supreme Court under the Independent State Legislature doctrine, the results of the 2020 election would have been neatly reversed. Instead of 306 EVs for Biden, and 232 EVs for Trump, the result would magically have become 305 EVs for Trump, and 233 EVs for Biden, thereby giving Trump the numerical “landslide” he demanded.

Here we should recall the concurrence in Bush v. Gore of a minority of the members of the Supreme Court (Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas), emphasizing the importance of the language in McPherson on the powers of the state legislators over the selection of Presidential electors. In this concurrence, Rehnquist stated that the language of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 “’convey[s] the broadest power of determination’ and ‘leaves it to the legislature exclusively to define the method’ of appointment” of electoral votes for President. For that reason, these three Justices found that state legislators, not state courts, were ultimately the decisionmakers on the award of the electoral votes in any state.

Notably, McPherson dealt with the authority of state legislatures to set rules governing electoral vote choices in laws enacted before the election took place, addressing whether a state could choose ahead of the voting to have electoral votes selected by the legislature itself, by popular vote state-wide, or by congressional district. McPherson did not cover a situation in which a legislature decided to change the rules after an election was concluded because those controlling the legislature did not like the result.

The federal law governing the process for the counting of electoral votes, the Electoral Count Act, limits the period for state legislative action on controversies over electors to six days before the electors are supposed to cast their votes. That date in 2020 was December 8. But under the Clark/Eastman reasoning, any provision in the Electoral Count Act purporting to limit what state legislatures can do is unconstitutional, and has no legal effect. Thus, regardless of the procedural requirements of the Electoral Count Act, a state legislature, according to Clark/Eastman, could make its choice on Presidential electors whenever and however it pleases, any time up to the counting of the votes specified under the 12^th Amendment.

One basis for the Supreme Court to disallow any post-election action by a legislature to change the Presidential outcome chosen by the state’s voters would be Equal Protection, an issue that was at the core of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore that halted the vote counting in Florida’s Broward County and thereby determined the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore. There the Supreme Court found that once a state legislature had vested the right to vote for President in its people, it must give “equal weight accorded to each vote” and “equal dignity owed to each voter.” The decision further stated that “[h]aving once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another,” citing the proposition that “once the franchise is granted to the electorate, lines may not be drawn which are inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

That language would seem to preclude a legislature from changing a state’s law to make its own ruling on electoral vote after the election has taken, because it would not be giving equal weight to each vote, but selecting the results on the basis of raw power.

But there is other language in the Bush v. Gore  decision that counters this principle: “The State, of course, after granting the franchise [to its voters] in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors. . . there is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time, for it can neither be taken away nor abdicated.” This language could be twisted to support the proposition that Equal Protection would not apply if the legislature takes the franchise for Presidential votes away from all of its voters and asserts its right to appoint Presidential Electors directly, even if the result would be to choose as electors those favoring the candidate who had already lost the popular vote in the state, thereby not giving equal weight or dignity to each vote in practice.

Given the stakes and the further politicization of the judiciary, it is entirely possible the Supreme Court would choose to stay out of the role of deciding which electoral votes should be deemed valid in a Presidential election. It could find that decisions on the recognition of electoral votes must be solely determined by Congress under the 12^th Amendment.

In 2020, this outcome would  have provided a cover for handing the Presidency to Trump. In a contested-vote scenario, the Senate would likely have failed to agree on whether to respect either these states’ earlier certifications for Biden, or the later ones for Trump submitted by those states’ legislatures.

Under the 12th Amendment, if there is a disagreement between the House and Senate, the certification process goes to the House, where states vote on a state-by-state basis, one vote per state delegation. Whichever party controls a state’s Congressional delegation, controls the state’s vote. This arithmetic currently gives the advantage to Republicans, who control a majority of the 50 states House delegations due to gerrymandering and their dominance in states with smaller populations. In 2020, if the House had held a state-by-state canvass, voting based on the partisan tilt would have selected Donald Trump.

Seventy minutes after Clark sent his draft letter to Acting Attorney General Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue, Donoghue replied to reject every aspect of what Clark had recommended. He cited former Attorney General William Barr as having already expressly found there was no basis for believing that fraud had affected the outcome of the Presidential election. On January 2, Rosen sent a brief concurring cover note, stating that he was again confirming he would not sign on to Clark’s coup plan.

But there was even more in Clark’s plans. As he provided a road-map for overturning the results of the election, he also laid out an agenda to deploy Presidential emergency powers against anyone and everyone who might be accused by any conspiracy monger that they were somehow “complicit” with foreign governments to engage in election fraud. This was the perverse revenge part of the coup plan for the investigations into the Russian influence in the 2016 campaign to assist Trump’s election.

In his December 28 cover note to Rosen and Donoghue, claiming information from online “white hat hackers,” Clark called for a classified briefing from then Director of National Intelligence John Radcliffe, a far right Trump appointee, on “foreign election interference issues.” His purpose was to establish a basis, even a secret one, for Trump to activate Presidential Emergency Powers under the International Emergency Powers Act and Executive Order 13848, which authorizes the President to freeze and seize the assets of anyone who “directly or indirectly” engages in, sponsors, conceals, or otherwise is “complicit” in foreign interference in a United States election, or provides technological support for such activities.

Clark’s email stated that these unnamed hackers had put “evidence (in the public domain)” that a machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems accessed the Internet through a “smart thermostat with a net connection trail leading back to China.” The Chinese-thermostat theory which was among a host of false claims launched about Dominion’s voting machines was one being pushed by conspiracy-theorist and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, the ultra-right wing news agencies NewsMax and the One America News Network, both of whom have since been sued by Dominion for promoting lies about the company.

If the White House had acted under this conspiracy-based part of the Clark plan, the President could have made unilateral findings of “fact” designating, for instance, Dominion, the Government of China, or depending on the day and conspiracy theorist, Venezuela and Cuba, mysterious entities supposedly based in Germany or Spain, and anyone else allegedly involved in foreign interference in the elections as the subjects of sanctions.

Such an order could have stipulated the freezing of all of their assets — in the case of Dominion, for example, any voting equipment and software owned by the company. By executive order, President Trump could have prohibited any U.S. person, including Dominion’s own U.S. employees, from engaging in any transactions with the company, including receiving their paychecks, in the same way they would be prohibited from transactions involving terrorists. One can hope that even courts packed with conservative judges would have found any such use of emergency powers to be a gross case of Presidential overreach. But in such a situation, one can imagine millions of Americans assuming the worst of the other side, and civil conflict spreading far beyond the insurrection that took place in the Capitol on January 6.

The coup doctrine enunciated by Clark remains alive. To date, there has been no reporting on whom he was working with in the Trump campaign, the Trump White House or beyond to develop it. Nor has any Congressional committee yet secured Clark’s testimony to gather those facts. Similar gaps remain regarding the coordination of Eastman’s activities, and how Eastman got connected to Trump. Since the elections, we have seen a coordinated nationwide strategy by which Republican-controlled state legislatures have been enacting election laws to give themselves greater control over the outcomes.

These new laws begin with voter suppression provisions to make it difficult for Democratic-leaning constituencies to vote. They also introduce new controls to allow partisan state legislatures to maintain control over elections to give Republicans greater control of vote-counting processes; reduce the authority of governors and secretaries of state to exercise independent judgment about who has won the popular vote in the state; and potentially even move certification dates to enable the legislature to invalidate a governor’s certification after the fact.

The Republicans pushing this scheme on a national basis characterize their actions as entirely proper under the Independent State Legislature doctrine. But what the country now faces looking forward to in 2024 is a highly partisan Supreme Court that could accept the plan laid out by Clark, enabling partisan state legislatures to decide Presidential elections in what should rightly be called “Legislative Nullification.” Nullification has a long and disgraced historical lineage, from nullification of federal tariffs (South Carolina in the 1830s), to federal desegregation orders (Arkansas in the 1950s), to health care policy (Texas in 2020). This latest nullification scheme aims at nullifying democracy itself.

Jonathan Winer is a Washington lawyer who previously served as the State Department’s senior official for international law enforcement, and a member of Keep Our Republic, a group focused on protecting American democracy.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 October 2021
Word Count: 3,116
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It’s high time to declare nuclear weapons obsolete.

The U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — entering into force January 22, 2021 — underscores the most perilous environmental threat to humankind, a threat that cannot be ignored by the Biden administration.

Eighty-six nations, not including the United States and other nuclear weapons states, have signed the treaty that provides a diplomatic groundwork toward banning possession and use of these weapons. Yet militarily, the United States is moving rapidly in the opposite direction.

Biden inherits the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which showcases a costly, across-the-board nuclear weapons modernization highlighted by a perilous war-fighting capability. This destabilizing strategy, explicitly laid out in the NPR, once more raises the life-or-death issues of the utility of nuclear weapons and the horrific dangers that the United States risks in concentrating its defense around the nuclear deterrence option.

The modernization package, with a price tag estimated by the Congressional Budget Office of at least $1.2 trillion over 30 years, seeks extensive upgrades to the lethal triad of ground-based, submarine-based, and bomber-based systems. This entire conceptual house of cards rests on the specious assumption that if deterrence fails, the United States will be able to achieve its political objectives (read “fight a nuclear war”).

In addition, the NPR proposes deployment of new tactical (dubbed “nonstrategic”) nuclear weapons whose deterrent rationale is shaky and whose war-fighting capabilities make them inherently destabilizing.

The proposed nuclear buildup offers a critical opportunity for the Biden administration to rethink national defense policy and cure this nuclear addiction. The extension of the New START Treaty simply maintains a ceiling on U.S. and Russian arsenals.

This paradigm shift cannot be achieved overnight. Both President Reagan at Reykjavik in 1986 and President Obama at Prague in 2009 emphasized that the goal of nuclear arms negotiations should be the elimination of all nuclear weapons, but both admitted that this was a distant goal.

However, the reality today is that existing U.S. strategic nuclear weapons systems provide sufficient deterrence well past the year 2040. The last OHIO-class ballistic missile submarine is scheduled to retire in 2042. The Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile can be extended past 2030, while the B-52H bomber, armed with cruise missiles, can be deployed into the 2040s. While the safety and security of these systems should be maintained, the modernization program is mindless and destabilizing.

In its place, the United States now has the option of adopting a declarative policy of nuclear weapons obsolescence. As weapons reach operational obsolescence, they can be taken out of the inventory, dismantled, and destroyed. Concurrently, over the next 20 years, the United States can invite Russia, China, and other nuclear weapons states to negotiate on a modernization freeze and build-down that can be effectively verified and enforced.

The flip side of the coin is that, if this process does not achieve comparable reductions in nuclear forces by these other states over a specified period of years, the United States will reluctantly take steps once more to assure a sufficient nuclear force.

Such a wholesale transformation of strategic thinking will attract critics. Much like their Cold War predecessors who inflated Soviet aggressive intentions, NPR apologists emphasize emerging Russian and Chinese menaces and their own nuclear modernization programs, but it is unimaginable that Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping would risk annihilation of their homeland and destruction of their regime by engaging in nuclear saber-rattling. Even Kim Jong Un has an existential appreciation of the present U.S. nuclear force.

Yet nuclear weapons did not deter the 9/11 attacks or the anthrax attacks on the U.S. Capitol. Any contention that the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal prevents proliferation and terrorism is a fallacious argument with no empirical grounding. The extended nuclear deterrence theory only operated in a bipolar, Cold War environment, yet following the near-disaster of the Cuban missile crisis, the value of nuclear weapons coercion by the United States has been more than offset by the inherent risks.

The United States can move away from the NPR’s “other-directed” nuclear planning fixation, where we strive to match our potential adversaries system by system. At this point, Americans should cease obsessing over the Cold War riddle of “How much is enough?” and affirm, “Enough is enough.” Mutual assured destruction no longer has rhyme or reason.

The NPR states that “if deterrence fails, the United States will strive to end any conflict at the lowest level of damage possible.” This commitment to postnuclear damage limitation is absurd. Keeping a nuclear conflict limited to the lowest possible level flies in the face of military history. To paraphrase Talleyrand, “You can do anything you like with nuclear weapons except fight a war with them.”

Dr. Robert Rudney is a retired senior adviser in the Department of the Air Force. He was also chief consultant to the ABA Task Force on the Nonproliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and a fellow in Senator Bernie Sanders’s office, working on defense issues. As a strategic analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy (1988–1999), he authored studies on the deterrence value of the multi-warhead MX Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile and other nuclear weapons systems.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 July 2021

Word Count: 780

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Raising children is expensive. A typical middle-class, two-child family spends $13,000 annually on each child, or nearly a quarter-million dollars per child in total through age 17. This tally includes neither college costs nor the cost to a family of putting money aside to help the children attend college, which itself can easily run another quarter of a million dollars or more for each child. The challenge is even greater for poor families that have little income and need to spend a large fraction of it supporting their children. Most families with children in the United States today are struggling financially.

Fortunately, there is a remedy—child allowances. These are regular payments from the government to families for the sake of their children. Think of it as universal basic income, but for children only. The aim is to help families support their children and keep families from being penalized because they have children and more mouths to feed. This pro-child policy is necessary because firms won’t pay workers more money if they have children. Any firm that did this would find itself at a competitive disadvantage. For this reason, virtually every country in the world has a child allowance program.

Nations benefit from helping low-income families with children. Children growing up in poverty get less education, earn less income, and pay less in taxes. They are a bigger burden on society throughout their life. They experience more health problems, raising insurance costs for everyone, and receive more social insurance benefits. Finally, there is considerable evidence that poverty has noneconomic costs—it creates anxiety and behavioral problems in children and leads to greater instances of depression compared with non-poor children.

Support for child allowances comes from across the political spectrum. Conservatives like that they encourage parents to stay at home and care for their kids and that they don’t require the government to make decisions about people’s lives. As the Niskanen Center, a conservative think tank, put it, child allowances “leave paternalism to the parents.” Liberals like the fact that child allowances don’t stigmatize the poor by providing means-tested benefits (such as SNAP or Food Stamps) and because they are an effective way to reduce child poverty.  

Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow estimated the annual cost to the nation due to child poverty at 3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, or approximately $630 billion today. The Center for American Progress estimated the annual cost at 4 percent of GDP, or $840 billion. The cost comes from reduced employment and taxes plus higher crime rates and health care expenditures.

Providing child allowances is a highly effective way to reduce child poverty and decrease these societal costs. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 14.4 percent of U.S. children (one in seven) were poor in 2019. The Luxembourg Income Study, a cross-national database with comparable information on household income, estimates that in the mid-2010s the child poverty rate in the United States for two-parent families was 13 percent. By comparison, the child poverty rate for two-parent families was 7.9 percent in Germany, 7.7 percent in the U.K., and 1.6 percent in Finland. My research traces these international differences directly to government policies aiding families with children, particularly child allowances.

Given the benefits of reducing child poverty, why has the United States failed to adopt a child allowance program? Partly, the reason is that the United States has used other policies to help families with children.

The main source of support for families with children has been a tax exemption for each child. In 2017, the last year that this tax benefit was available, each dependent child provided an exemption that reduced taxable income by around $4,000. The tax saving for a family then would depend on its tax bracket. Those in the top tax bracket (40 percent) got back $1,600 per child; a family in the 10 percent bracket gained only $400 from a $4,000 child exemption. Those in the 0 percent bracket, owing no taxes, got no help. This was an upside-down subsidy. It helped the affluent raise their children, but it did nothing to help poor families and little to help middle-class families.  

A push for change began in the 1990s. The National Commission on Children recommended a universal $1,000 child tax credit (the equivalent of $2,000 today) in a 1991 report. With a tax credit, every household receives the same monetary benefit. It is very nearly a child allowance. The United States first instituted a $400 child tax credit in the 1997 Taxpayer Relief Act. But the credit was not refundable. Families owing no taxes got nothing; and families owing less than the full amount of the credit only got back the taxes they owed to the Federal government. Low-income families, needing the most help to raise their children, were helped the least.

When George W. Bush increased the tax credit to $1,000, as part of his 2001 tax cut, Democrats pushed to have it be partially refundable. The credit has been increased several times since then. In 2020, the credit was $2,000; $1,400 was refundable to those with at least $2,500 of earned income. Still, families with children in the greatest need received no aid or very little. The Brookings Institution has calculated that 40 percent of the $118 billion spent on this program in 2020 went to households with incomes above $100,000. In contrast, most children living in households in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution got nothing.  

Child poverty experts in Congress, including Democratic Senators Michael Bennet of Colorado, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, have pushed long and hard to make the tax credit fully refundable. They succeeded when President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan on March 11. This $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill increased the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,000, with an extra $600 for children under age 6, and made the credit fully refundable.

Finally, the American Rescue Plan stipulated that payments be made monthly to families with children, rather than annually through a tax refund. Beginning July 2021 and continuing through June 2022, most families will get monthly payments from the IRS of $300 for each young child and $250 for children over the age of 5. Providing money sooner helps the many families with variable income. Monthly payments will also reduce child hunger and homelessness, as well as the high-interest debt that families incur (e.g., payday loans) to put food on the table and pay utility bills. As a full child allowance policy, these payments will make a huge difference in the lives of children whose families live paycheck to paycheck.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the changes in the child tax credit will lift 4.1 million children above the poverty line. The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University estimates that nearly five million children will escape poverty due to these changes, reducing the U.S. child poverty rate to 7.9 percent. It will cost $109 billion, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Given the costs of child poverty, as estimated by Solow and the Center for American Progress, the American Rescue Plan should pay for itself quickly by cutting the U.S. child poverty rate nearly in half. Virtually no private investment has such a large rate of return. Furthermore, the government can borrow money for this investment at the rate of around 1.5 percent (the interest rate on 10-year government bonds).

Like Cinderella at midnight, after June 2022, the fully refundable child tax credit will return to what it was during 2020. A number of Democrats hope to make the refundable tax credit permanent. If they succeed, it would be a major step forward in reducing child poverty in the United States.  

A permanent child tax credit, or child allowance program, would be of significant help to low- and middle-income families with children. The reduction in child poverty will benefit the entire nation in demonstrable ways. It is time to follow the rest of the world and make this a permanent feature of the U.S. tax code.

Steven Pressman is professor of economics at Colorado State University, author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013), and president of the Association for Social Economics.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 July 2021

Word Count: 1,353

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In an April 27 article for The Washington Spectator, “All Enemies Foreign and Domestic,” I set out to trace the enduring influence of conspiracy theories that took root among military officers on the far right after the disaster in Vietnam, then morphed into present-day extremist and paramilitary movements, and inspired many of those who led the failed Capitol insurrection on January 6.

It’s easy, and entirely justified, to denounce congressional Republicans for blocking an independent bipartisan investigation into those events. Who incited whom to do what and when? What did they do on the day of the attack? What degree of shared belief and active collusion was there between elected Republican officials, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and the cutting edge of the assault — the organized groups of military veterans like the Oath Keepers, who led the disciplined “stack” that led the charge up the Capitol steps? The role of these groups, and the degree of far-right and white supremacist activity within the military, would have been a central focus of any investigation, and is already a priority for the Defense Department.

But if the commission had been limited to the events of January 6, it would have missed much of the point. The biggest risk here is not that we fail to understand what happened in the past and breathe a sigh of relief that American democracy dodged a bullet. It’s that we don’t recognize what some have called a process of “ongoing incitement.” The main significance of January 6 is that it failed. But failure is a learning experience, and those who propelled the insurrection are determined not to fail again. In that sense, the storming of the Capitol was not a culmination: it was one event in a sequence, even a dress rehearsal, just as the invasion of the Michigan State Capitol by armed militants last April can be seen as a dry run for January 6.

When Republicans in Congress twice opposed the impeachment of Donald Trump, they gave reasons that were at least superficially plausible. But their excuses this time are either laughable — like Mitch McConnell’s argument that a commission with subpoena powers wouldn’t find anything that won’t be uncovered by ongoing criminal proceedings — or transparently self-protective, like the assertion by Senator John Thune of South Dakota that the commission’s findings would be politically weaponized before the 2022 midterm elections. So by all means call them cynics, hypocrites, and, above all, cowards. But that is also how the increasingly powerful forces on the far right that have seized control of much of the Republican Party see them — their cowardice being their refusal to overturn the results of the election.

The gutting and takeover of the party has progressed in plain sight since January 6, embodied in the state-level drive to curtail voting rights and driven by the zeal of the two-thirds of Republican voters who have embraced Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election. The advance of the “cutting edge” — the military veterans of the Vietnam era and their present-day acolytes, however, has been less visible, though no less real. Perhaps the most important, though scantly reported, manifestation of this has been the emergence of a new group of retired officers called Flag Officers 4 America — “flag officers” meaning generals and admirals.

The origins of the group go back to 2015. As I wrote in April, the leading post-Vietnam conspiracy theorists came from units that considered themselves the military elite, like the Special Forces, the fighter pilots, and the airborne divisions. One such officer was retired Maj. Gen. Sid Schachnow, who had led a 12-man team of Green Berets on the Cambodian border, later moved on to the 101st Airborne, and eventually became commander of the U.S. Special Forces Command. Schachnow organized a letter, signed by 88 retired flag officers, in support of Trump’s candidacy. Although it was strongly worded, the issues they focused on were the kind you might conventionally expect from military conservatives: unacceptable cuts in the military budget; insecure borders; and the threat from foreign adversaries, especially radical Islamists.

There’s nothing inherently unusual about retired military officers and national security officials endorsing a presidential candidate — more than 500 did so for Joe Biden. But Schachnow’s initiative morphed into something entirely different. By the time the 2020 election came around, Schachnow himself had died, and the baton was passed to retired Army Maj. Gen. Joe Arbuckle, who organized another open letter endorsing Trump’s reelection. The list of signatories had swelled from 88 to 317, and the language was sweeping and apocalyptic: “As senior leaders of America’s military, we took an oath to defend the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. . . . [T]his is the most important election since our country was founded. With the Democratic Party welcoming to socialists and Marxists, our historic way of life is at stake.” Steve Bannon, on his War Room show, praised the letter as “a called shot.”

Arbuckle waited until the end of Biden’s first 100 days in office before issuing his next broadside and formally launching the new organization, Flag Officers 4 America. All of his worst fears had been realized, he told Bannon. “We’re speeding, running down the road to socialism and Marxism.”

The new letter, issued on May 10, opened with the Big Lie that the election had been stolen and the theft ignored by the FBI and the Supreme Court. “Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect ‘the will of the people’ our Constitutional Republic is lost,” it read. “H.R.1 and S.1 (if passed) would destroy election fairness and allow Democrats to forever remain in power.”

The list of signatories this time contained many familiar names. They included two of the principal figures in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration: former national security adviser Vice-Admiral John Poindexter and retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord, former head of clandestine air operations in Southeast Asia (the Vietnam-era Air Force is in fact disproportionately represented, especially among the higher ranks of three-star generals in the group). There are two of the best-known fringe conspiracy theorists, both of that same rank, Lt. Gens. William “Jerry” Boykin, executive vice president of the Family Research Council and a member of the Council for National Policy, and Thomas McInerney, who told One America News that Trump should have invoked the Insurrection Act and declared a state of emergency to prevent Biden’s theft of the election. There are also present-day elected officials and aspirants, such as retired Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who plans to run for the Senate in New Hampshire in 2022 (and already has the endorsements of  Boykin, as well as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas),  and Trump’s former chief medical adviser, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, who was forced from his post after allegations of misconduct but then went on to win a landslide victory in Texas’s 13th congressional district last November, and has vowed that “every Deep State traitor deserves to be brought to justice for their heinous actions.”

While the language of the May 10 letter was unprecedented for a group of former military officers, there was still another shoe to drop, which took the Flag Officers 4 America deeper into uncharted territory by allying them explicitly with the far-right effort to take control of the Republican Party at the grassroots level. On June 1, the group issued a Citizen’s Action Plan for America, “to put constitutional government back in the hands of ‘We the People.’” The laundry list of actions focuses on elections, education, law enforcement and organizing “within church groups, among church groups, and outside church groups.” It urges supporters to volunteer as poll workers and watchers and to work for the election of “those with traditional values” at all levels of the party apparatus: county commissioners and county clerks; mayors and city council members; and party precinct officers, as well as “electing sheriffs and DA’s who will constitutionally enforce the rule of law and will resist state and federal mandates infringing on Constitutional Rights of citizens.” In the educational sphere, it demands that parents wrest power away from school boards and teachers’ unions to “remove critical race theory and 1619 project teaching” and “insist on fact-based teaching of climate change and our national history.”

As Arbuckle’s long interview with Steve Bannon progressed, the underlying logic of the flag officers’ argument became clearer and more chilling. The foundational principle of the American armed forces is that they are obedient to the elected commander-in-chief and civilian authority. But what if the election was stolen, and the commander-in-chief is illegitimate? Soldiers are then left with two options: to accept this or to resign. Furthermore, Arbuckle went on, “cultural Marxism” was now eating away at the military itself, symbolized by the appointment of Bishop Garrison, an African American former human rights advocate, as senior adviser to the secretary of defense for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“You’re the tip of the spear,” Bannon told Arbuckle, wrapping up the interview. “And we’re a platform and an apparatus for you heroes and patriots.”

Left unspoken was the third option: neither accept nor resign but disobey and resist. Some radical veterans will say this openly. “If you vote your way into socialism,” says one former Special Forces officer in a recently formed paramilitary group, “you have to shoot your way out.”

This new organization, 1st Amendment Praetorian, represents a further stage in the continuing evolution of veteran-centered far-right groups. It has much in common with the Oath Keepers — the invocation of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam as the starting-point of the global anti-American conspiracy incarnated in the Democratic Party and the Deep State, the vow to defend the Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic,” and the special role of elite units of the military. The group’s leader, Robert Patrick Lewis, a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the group was founded last October and provided security and intelligence, including the high-tech surveillance of protesters, to a string of Stop the Steal, MAGA, and other “patriot” rallies in the weeks following the election. By January, it had organized a security detachment for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — who helped raise funds for the group — and Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell. It performed this function at a Memorial Day weekend rally in Dallas where Flynn mooted the idea of a Myanmar-style military coup in the United States. What comes next, according to the group’s website, is a “Coalition to Defend America” event in Palm Beach, Florida, on July 4 and the formation, together with “constitutional sheriffs,” of grassroots “resilience groups, training them to free the oppressed.”

Like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, 1st Amendment Praetorian is wedded to the idea that small numbers of highly trained individuals can move mountains. The key, Lewis says, is the unique organizational structure of the Special Forces, the 12-man Operational Detachment Alpha, which is “trained and equipped and operates under the knowledge that one ODA of 12 Green Berets can take down an entire nation.”

Outside of Bannon’s War Room and the other usual suspects — Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and the Epoch Times, the Falun Gong-affiliated paper that serves as an increasingly influential platform for extreme right-wing misinformation — the May letter from the Flag Officers 4 America attracted little media attention, and the Citizen’s Action Plan, despite its more far-reaching implications, got none. A May 11 piece in Politico — the only substantial reporting on the letter — elicited a few pro forma comments from experts on civilian-military relations and other military officers, both active and retired: “disturbing and reckless” . . . “outrageous” . . . “shocking” . . . “an appalling breach of military professionalism.” But that was it.

Extremism in the military, and among veterans, would obviously have been a central focus of a January 6 commission. But its terms of reference would have reached none of this ongoing convergence between the base of the Republican Party, the most extreme conspiracy theorists, and those prepared to use violence to ward off what this constantly metastasizing far-right movement sees as an existential threat to the survival of the nation.

But voting on a commission is not the only way for elected officials to make their voices heard. Ninety-one veterans currently serve in Congress: 63 Republicans and 28 Democrats. Of the 53 Republican vets in the House of Representatives, five voted in favor of the bill to establish a January 6 commission. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of Trump’s most outspoken Republican critics, was an Air Force pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Michigan’s Peter Meijer and Tony Gonzales of Texas also served in both campaigns. Van Taylor of Texas was a platoon leader in Iraq, a hero of the rescue of 33 wounded Marines during the 2003 battle of Al Nasiriyah. The fifth member of this group is Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, who retired as a lieutenant colonel after serving for 24 years in the Army and is now also a member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, which famously regards itself as the most bipartisan institution on Capitol Hill.

So, commission or no commission, there’s a place to start, for other Republican veterans to stand up and be counted, to be asked what they think of the Flag Officers 4 America, their Citizen’s Action Plan for taking over the party, and the militancy and violence they inspire in other, younger veterans. Mitch McConnell, who briefly served in the Army in 1967 before being invalided out, is proud of his service as a veteran. So ask him, too. And if they decline to comment, well, if there is one quality the military despises above all others, it is cowardice.

George Black’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. His forthcoming book, The Long Shadow: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam, will be published by Knopf.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 June 2021

Word Count: 2,282

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Rampant economic inequality in the United States demands structural solutions centered on racial justice. Income inequality and unequal access to jobs, health care, and benefits disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Racial inequity in wages already costs the U.S. economy about $2.3 trillion per year.

President Biden has stated his administration will prioritize closing racial, gender, and wage gaps. Biden and the Democrats in the House have advanced the demand to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and plan to collect and publicize data on wage inequality. These minimal steps, while necessary, will only help those at the margins with their immediate survival.

We need to eliminate systemic racial and economic inequity from the root. This starts with expanding access to benefits like Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps), ending the vicious cycles of debt that trap people in poverty, and designing economic reforms with low-wage workers in mind.

Now in their first 100 days, the Biden-Harris team can prioritize four key economic justice solutions:

Expand access to Medicaid, SNAP, and other benefits The millions of low-income Americans struggling financially amidst the pandemic deserve a meaningful social safety net. Yet benefits systems are rife with technical roadblocks that prevent people from accessing assistance. The Biden administration can reduce racial disparities in health care access by rapidly approving the pending Medicaid waivers that expand post-partum care to one full year following the end of the pregnancy to curb increases in maternal mortality, particularly in communities of color.

Currently, 38 million people rely on SNAP (food stamps) to survive. The pandemic and economic crisis has more than doubled food insecurity since 2019, with one out of four households not knowing where their next meal will come from. The Trump administration’s restrictions on SNAP eligibility exacerbated food insecurity, and in much of the country, social services offices remain closed. The Biden administration can rollback restrictions to make SNAP available to more families nation-wide, change guidelines to make emergency SNAP benefits available to all SNAP recipients, and work to ensure that the local offices experiencing pandemic related changes do not create new barriers to accessing SNAP benefits. The 15% boost to SNAP benefits through September 2021 included in the President’s COVID rescue package will only help people who are able to apply and have their SNAP eligibility determined. And, the White House must push Congress to make food stamps available to all regardless of their immigration status.

Protect the rights of low-wage workers Who these days are mostly Black and Latinx women and “essential” workers. Democrats in the Senate should immediately increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour and eliminate all exemptions, including exemptions for farmworkers, domestic workers, and tipped workers. These exemptions are historically rooted in slavery and continue to leave low-wage workers out of wage reform.

The Biden administration should pursue new legislation to extend health and safety protections to low-income workers. For example, giving low-wage workers emergency paid sick days — at 100% of wages for any qualifying reason — and emergency paid family and medical leave. The administration should also get rid of exemptions that allow employers to deny these benefits to millions of working people. Biden can also ensure working people have permanent access to paid sick and paid family medical leave.

Cancel debt Student debt forgiveness would relieve low-income borrowers who simply can’t afford the ever-soaring cost of education. Low-income borrowers are typically Black and Brown single parents. That’s why my organization NCLEJ is one of over 325 organizations demanding the Biden-Harris administration cancel student debt immediately.

In our case work at NCLEJ, my staff and I see the predatory nature of debt. Low-income Black and Latinx communities struggle with high debt loads, often from medical bills and court fines. Debt collectors and state agencies can empty people’s bank accounts, leaving families without money to eat, and take away driver’s licenses, depriving some people of their only viable and pandemic-safe mode of transportation. Along with putting a temporary moratorium on garnishing income and funds during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration should work with Congress to eliminate debt-based driver’s license suspension, stop subsistence income from being garnished, and protect a baseline amount of money in people’s bank accounts so they have money available for housing, food, and other essentials. Unfortunately, the recently passed American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 fails even to protect stimulus funds from garnishment. Inadequate consumer protections like this helped make 2020 one of the most profitable years ever for debt collectors. Congress should act immediately to pass standalone legislation to protect stimulus funds from garnishment so that they benefit families, not debt collectors.

Center disabled people COVID-19 has taken away disabled peoples’ access to medical equipment and adequate healthcare, and put them at greater risk of infection in congregate care settings. NCLEJ is currently fighting to change New York State medical rationing policies that could allow hospitals to take personal ventilators away from chronic ventilator users to give them to patients deemed more likely to survive.

While the COVID-19 Pandemic has made clear that nursing homes are incredibly dangerous settings for people with disabilities, underfunded Medicaid programs have forced too many aging adults and people with disabilities into congregate settings. One essential solution to ensuring that disabled people and aging adults can stay safely in their homes during the pandemic is to fund competitive salaries for home care workers through Medicaid. The provision in the Rescue Bill to raise Medicaid funding for home and community-based services by 10% for one year is an encouraging start.

Justice for low-income working people means solving every problem they face. It means economic policy change for families not to survive, but to thrive. In 2020, the pandemic revealed how stark economic inequity is today. Job loss, Covid-19 related deaths, and food scarcity hit low-income Black families and communities of color the hardest. We all rely on underpaid essential workers who are feeling economic strain and risk exposure every day. The Biden administration must take much bolder steps to restructure racial-economic inequity.

Dennis Parker is the executive director of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2021

Word Count: 1,006

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After the impeachment and acquittal of Donald Trump, we now confront the Republican party we have — not the one the nation needs, not the one we grew up with, and certainly not the one moored to conservative principles or moral judgment or even shame. Once Republicans stopped competing for votes through policy, once they resorted to rigging elections though voter suppression, trying to win by ensuring that fewer citizens could vote, they were ripe and ready for Trump.

Still, by refusing to hold Trump accountable for his “Big Lie” about election fraud, aligning with anti-democratic forces, and gaslighting the nation about January 6th and the takeover of the U.S. Capitol, they’ve made it easier for those still tethered to reality to support the prompt passage of two major pro-democracy bills. The For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Amendment Act are both worthy of ending the filibuster’s reign over the Senate.

The For the People Act would make it easier for citizens to register to vote and guarantee early-voting days. It would ban partisan gerrymandering, taking a step toward eliminating the election of insurrectionists to Congress. The John Lewis Act, aptly named for one of the heroes of the long struggle for voting rights, responds at last to the calamitous Supreme Court 2013 ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act by removing remedies intended to prevent voter discrimination. And both bills strengthen democracy at a time when its very premise is under siege.

Senate Democrats should exercise their newly acquired majority for the sake of the Republic. The partisanship that protects a lawless president or manipulates the makeup of the Supreme Court has led us to the authoritarian brink; partisanship on behalf of these popular measures will help steer the country back to first principles. It’s past time for both parties to acknowledge the American people consistently support election reform and voting rights.

Broad pro-democracy reforms will help insulate the nation from the sort of shady tactics that marked the run-up to the November election and the baseless conspiracy theories that emerged in the wake of the vote. We also need to fix voting rights and election systems in 2021 because things will likely only get worse in 2022. Researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice have established that lawmakers in 43 states have endorsed more than 250 bills that would make it harder for citizens to vote — over seven times the number of voter suppression bills introduced around this time last year.

Some Republicans want to restrict mail-in voting. Others want to reduce the number of polling stations. In Arizona, which Trump lost, there is a proposed bill to give legislators the power to overrule state election officials and the popular vote. In Pennsylvania, another state Trump lost, Republican lawmakers have introduced 14 voter suppression measures.

These measures send the same signal local GOP officials send when they censure or otherwise punish the few Republican members of Congress brave enough to stand up to the Trumpists. If anything, state and local GOP officials are even more in thrall to Trumpists’ authoritarian agenda than most Republican senators, and they are more committed to suppressing votes and undermining nonpartisan election rules. Given this harsh reality, it is unlikely that Biden will find the ten votes among the GOP caucus in the Senate needed to pass the For the People Act or the John Lewis Act over a Republican filibuster.

And the president should say so. If a divided nation can unify around one thing, he should say, it is that our elections need to be safer and more secure. If the 2020 election taught us anything, he should say, it is that every person who has a right to vote should be able to do so and have confidence that vote will be counted accurately. If the failed insurrection and its coddling by congressional Republicans has taught us anything, he should add, it is that we must restore and reinvigorate democracy so that those who would destroy it will be held accountable.

The White House and congressional Democrats should move forward knowing the risk that their opponents will dredge up all the tired, (often racist) lies about voter fraud. They should move forward knowing that the constitutionality of the reform measures may ultimately be decided by a Supreme Court that has moved hard to the right. But the bigger risk is doing nothing, and having Democratic majorities swept away in 2022 because of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Abolish the filibuster. Convince reluctant Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that the path to a vigorous democracy lies in protecting voting rights and election systems right now.

Let these two landmark bills be the response to Trump and his enablers on Capitol Hill. When they turned to political violence and threats, others turned to the ballot box. When they moved to overthrow an election, and the Constitution, others moved to protect the vote and give to more citizens the right to choose those who would govern them.

Andrew Cohen is the legal affairs correspondent for The Washington Spectator. An earlier version of this piece appeared in New York Magazine.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 March 2021

Word Count: 838

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Police officers in the United States use deadly force far more often than police in Europe, in many cases 10 to 20 times more often. American police departments also have much shorter initial training periods than European police departments; focus less on “soft skills” such as problem-solving, community relations, and de-escalation; and also require far less formal education for newly hired recruits.

In fact, law enforcement training in the United States tends to stress taking charge of every situation with an immediate show of force, making demands for unquestioned compliance, and relying on arrests and even the use of deadly force to solve encounters with people perceived as being noncompliant. This dramatic difference in police training undoubtedly plays a major role in the lopsided numbers of fatal police shootings and arrests in the United States when compared with those on the other side of the Atlantic. These grim statistics can no longer be accepted as the normal cost of doing business for American law enforcement agencies.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “The U.S. approach to policing differs from those of other advanced democracies, in areas including organization, funding, training, relations with minority communities, use of force, and accountability.” The short training requirements of American police departments make it difficult to cover more than just the basic fundamentals of police work needed to function on the streets. More complex and, many observers say, critical topics, such as dealing with mentally challenged individuals and people suffering from substance abuse are not adequately taught in the vast majority of American police academies, if they are taught at all. There is just no time.

I served as a police officer, a street cop, with the Yuma, Arizona, Police Department from 1982 to 1987. I attended the Arizona Law Enforcement Training Academy in Tucson, where I received my initial 400 hours of law enforcement training and state peace officer certification. Although the training was rigorous, the courses in-depth, and the instructors excellent, the total training I received only amounted to 10 weeks of academy instruction before I was released to my law enforcement agency for assignment and follow-on training in department-specific policies and procedures.

At the time, I believed my police academy training was first-rate and more than sufficient. It did, in fact, prepare me for most of the routine situations I would later encounter on the job. However, I soon learned that I was only taught one way of dealing with aggressive or uncooperative people on the street: employ immediate threats of violence and overwhelming force, including deadly force if necessary for noncompliance. To be sure, my instructors did suggest that we try to de-escalate the situation if possible but not to hesitate to take charge and even to “draw down” on the subject (point your weapon) if need be. In conversations I have had with many police officers over the years, I’ve learned that my academy training on responding to uncooperative people was virtually the same training given to officers everywhere.

Initial law enforcement training for American police officers in the more than 18,000 police departments in the country ranges from as little as eight weeks at a police academy for newly hired officers in Mississippi to six months for basic law enforcement education for new recruits of the Los Angeles and New York Police Departments.

The second and perhaps most important difference between European and American police agencies is in the focus of both the training received by new police officers and their jobs once they complete their training and join their respective agencies. In America, virtually all police departments stress a “take charge and dominate the situation” attitude that is taught and routinely reinforced from the first day a recruit arrives at the police academy. This is in stark contrast to the European focus on de-escalation and community-building. I can personally attest to being told to “kick ass and take names” at several points during my initial police training, both while attending the police academy and afterward, while a probationary officer. The phrase “we own the streets” was also drilled into my head during my academy training. That sentiment often sets the stage for an “us against them” philosophy that only seems to harden as police officers gain more experience.

An American police officer is expected to project an aura of strength and of being in total control of their assigned beat while on patrol. Total obedience to an officer’s commands is required of the public. When that demand for total obedience is threatened or challenged, arrests and use of force, sometimes deadly force, are authorized. This officially sanctioned use of deadly force has reached unprecedented and even criminal levels of violent police behavior in the past several years.

In large urban areas like Los Angeles, for example, some police units have taken that demand for total obedience to an extreme. There are deputies and units within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office that operate just like the criminal gangs they are sworn to protect the citizens against, with officers behaving like gang warlords, demanding strict obedience and employing “executioners,” including fellow deputies, when their “subjects” do not toe the line.

I believe that the emergence of criminal police gangs is very possibly an unintended and disturbing outgrowth of several factors prevalent in police departments throughout the United States, including: an institutionally sanctioned attitude of “take charge of the situation at all costs” (including the use of lethal force); poor background vetting of new officers (including violent and racist social media posts); loosening recruitment standards (waiving minor crimes and drug use, allowing violent and racist tattoos, etc.); and insufficient training of new police officers, including little to no training in critical areas involving de-escalation and dealing with the mentally ill and substance abusers.

Those factors are a perfect recipe not only for producing chronic disciplinary problems among individual officers but also for allowing large-scale criminal activity to flourish by the very officers hired to protect the American public from just such activities. New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, and other large urban areas in the United States have also experienced recent incidents of rogue police gangs and individual officers involved in committing serious crimes, often involving firearms, resulting in serious injuries and death.

Although the national population of African Americans is around 13 percent and has held steady at that figure for many years, Black people account for about 24 percent of all fatal police shootings in the United States and are killed by police at a rate that is almost 2.5 times higher than police shooting fatalities involving white victims. It is not difficult to appreciate the level of distrust that many African Americans have for the police, and why the Black Lives Matter movement has found such traction in light of the increasing number of videotaped killings of Black men by (usually white) police officers in the United States. I would be less than truthful if I said that I had not personally observed situations where a double standard applied when police dealt with a call involving a Black suspect versus a white suspect. I believe that if they were also being truthful, most white police officers would admit to the same thing.

The values in Europe governing the use of lethal force by the police are different in the extreme. In the United States, police officers can use deadly force if they “reasonably perceive imminent threat and grave harm.” The difference in the attitudes of the American and European police cultures is evidenced in an important phrase contained in the European Convention on Human Rights. That foundational document states that police can only use deadly force when “absolutely necessary.” The European law enforcement agencies and nations subject to that convention take that phrase and its meaning very seriously.

To prevent situations where the use of deadly force might become “absolutely necessary,” the institutions responsible for training newly hired police officers in Europe make a concerted effort to stress the use of nonlethal methods in dealing with potentially violent situations, including dealing with people who are intoxicated, mentally ill, suicidal, violent, armed, and posing other life-and-death situations. They not only stress nonlethal solutions, they provide the officer trainees with sufficient blocks of training in nonlethal methods of problem-solving so the officers do not usually even consider drawing their weapons in such situations.

By comparison with American police training, initial law enforcement education in Europe is much longer. For example, initial police training lasts two years for recruits in Austria and two and a half years in Germany. In Finland and Norway, prior to becoming sworn police officers, trainees must first complete a bachelor’s degree while simultaneously doing an internship with a police department. This training is significantly longer and more comprehensive than that given to any American police officers.

Although all European police training involves substantial practice and qualification with firearms, as stated earlier, law enforcement training also integrates a large block of defensive tactics not involving the use of deadly force, i.e., nonlethal defensive tactics. For example, “By law, police officers in Germany are required to receive two hours of defensive tactics instruction every week while they participate in basic training.” That training involves various forms of the martial arts, such as jujitsu, judo, and kung fu. Spread out over the required two-and-a-half-year curriculum, that amounts to hundreds of hours of training in the use of nonlethal force, leading to a formidable amount of training in defensive tactics not requiring the use of a firearm. With this extensive emphasis on defensive tactics and the confidence-building that results, police in Europe are able to deal more often with potentially life-threatening situations without resorting to the use of lethal force — situations that, in the American context, often end up with the use of a firearm.

Our country is going through a deep soul-searching, as perhaps never before, on issues of police abuse and systemic racism. Many Americans who never gave any thought to the concept of police violence or the unjust treatment of Blacks by law enforcement have been forced to confront these realities. The sheer number of police encounters ending in death or serious injury to the public, in particular to African Americans and other people of color, cries out for fundamental reforms — we need to fix our system of pre-employment vetting, increase basic educational requirements, and require both a substantial increase in the length of law enforcement training and a drastic overhaul of its curriculum.

I have read many statements from across the country calling for “defunding the police,” and I have also read (although to a lesser degree) calls to “abolish the police.” I realize that both the calls for defunding the police and abolishing the police come from a place of acute pain and are usually meant more as a call to drastically reorder the priorities for the budgeting of police departments, to draft new policies and procedures for police behavior, and to implement new and transparent disciplinary procedures. I understand these demands and mostly agree.

However, to this writer, it’s important that we as a nation do not react to the tragic cases of intolerable police violence with poorly conceived plans for both taking a scalpel to police budgets and restructuring police departments from the ground up. Neither is a simple task. Abolishing a given police department entirely can have catastrophic consequences, and I hope all jurisdictions contemplating such a move will thoroughly review the long-term consequences for public safety beforehand. When a well-intentioned small-scale version of abolishing police presence was attempted for only a few blocks in downtown Seattle last summer during the George Floyd riots — the creation of the so-called “Capitol Hill” district—chaos ensued, along with two murders and several serious assaults. It was soon dismantled.

A community cannot function without a working police department; to do so would place the lives of everyone in the community at risk. Social workers, psychologists, and drug rehabilitation counselors are not trained, nor do they have the legal authority, to confront an armed assailant, a gang fight, a burglary or bank robbery in progress, or any number of other serious and potentially violent law enforcement situations. As much as well-meaning critics of the police and other thoughtful individuals would like to think that there is a quick fix and a viable alternative to police misconduct by doing away with most police officers and replacing them with human service workers and community activists, in reality that would result in placing the human services workers, community activists, and victims of crime in unnecessary danger. That is not the answer.

The answer to unacceptable levels of police violence and misconduct, officer-involved shooting fatalities, systemic police racism, and criminal activities of all kinds committed by the police is to hire better-educated police officers who have no criminal convictions; no history of untreated substance abuse; no violent behavior of any kind; no chronic credit problems, dishonorable military discharge or evidence of racial, ethnic, gender, or religious hatred.

It’s also now essential that we identify potential white supremacist police recruits and root out current police officers with affiliations to white supremacist and other violent, radical anti-government groups, including militias. Police recruits should be required to have a minimum of a four-year college degree. Police academies must substantially increase their course length to at least one year and add blocks of training on nonlethal tactics, de-escalation, dealing with substance abusers and the mentally ill, community policing, race relations, anger management, stress reduction, availability of social services for victims, and more. The use of lethal force must truly be taught as a last alternative. Most importantly, the “us versus them” attitude must become: “We are all in this together.”

Rewriting police department policies to require that community services workers respond to nonviolent calls for services that can reasonably be handled by professionals other than police officers would also be a huge step in decreasing violent encounters with the police and would build trust between the community and its police department. Every call for service does not have to have a sworn police officer respond. In fact, having a police officer respond to certain calls for service can, and often does, make the situation worse. A social worker, drug rehabilitation counselor, or housing specialist might be far more appropriate. Familiarizing themselves with the curriculum of a representative European police academy would give American law enforcement agencies all the examples necessary to revamp their own training curriculum to better meet the needs of their community. It can be just that simple.

I want to close by briefly mentioning a critical issue that, unless addressed on a national level, will inhibit the effectiveness of all the recommendations I have just cited. That is the issue of the American gun culture. One of the main reasons European police officers are able to use nonlethal force and feel confident in their ability to control situations is the fact that the officer can be almost certain that even the most violent, noncompliant subject will be unarmed. That one fact gives the officer a huge psychological (and physical) edge in such encounters and substantially lowers the chances of a fatality.

That same scenario in America is altered simply because of the prevalence of weapons the officer might encounter on any given day. We live in a country where the public is fiercely protective of the right to bear arms, to the point where many now feel justified in shooting a police officer to defend that right. Recent incidents where several heavily armed militias stormed state capitols to voice their displeasure with mask mandates during the coronavirus pandemic illustrate the potential for deadly encounters that American police officers must deal with every day.

All the police recruitment vetting, training, and policy rewriting will struggle with the task of emulating the European example and lowering the number of police involved in shooting fatalities until the out-of-control gun culture in this nation is addressed by both lawmakers and the American public. That is also a goal we must address in earnest.

David DeBatto is a retired U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent and Iraq War veteran and former police officer. He is an author, analyst, and consultant.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 March 2021

Word Count: 2,678

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