The Full Belmonte, 7/20/2022
“Georgia prosecutors are moving closer to possible criminal charges against those involved in former President Donald Trump's ‘fake electors’ scheme. In an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Trump campaign officials tried to subvert the Electoral College process by installing fake GOP electors in seven swing states. The Trump backers then signed fake certificates proclaiming their votes for president and vice president. Court documents filed late Tuesday revealed all 16 of the individuals who signed the unofficial certificates may be indicted in the ongoing probe. Separately, concerns are being raised about Trump's 24 Secret Service personnel during the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. The DHS inspector general had requested a month's worth of records from the Secret Service to get a closer look at Trump's actions and behavior during the riot. But the Secret Service has only provided a single text exchange, according to a letter to the House select committee investigating the riot.” Read more at CNN
“The Jan. 6 committee hearings have produced some eye-popping moments. Ahead of its final — at least for now — hearing in prime time tomorrow, we look back at 14 standout, bombshell moments.” Read more at NPR
“Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) accepted a subpoena to testify in a Georgia probe of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.” [Vox] Read more at CNBC / Kevin Breuninger and Dan Mangan
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“The Democrat-led House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to pass a bill to protect same-sex marriage. The bill is an effort to counter the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and would enshrine protections for same-sex marriage into federal law. It also includes federal protections for interracial marriages. The bipartisan final vote was 267 to 157 -- with 47 Republicans joining with Democrats. It's not clear, however, whether the bill can pass the Senate where at least 10 Republicans would need to join with Democrats to overcome the filibuster's 60-vote threshold. The bill comes amid fears among Democrats that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court could take aim at same-sex marriage in the future after the high court overturned Roe v. Wade in a reversal of longstanding legal precedent.” Read more at CNN
“47 House Republicans joined Democrats to pass legislation last evening to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enshrine marriage equality into federal law.
Why it matters: The legislation, approved 267-157, is part of Democrats' response to the overturning of Roe and Justice Clarence Thomas' signaling that rulings on marriage equality, LGBTQ+ rights and contraception could be reconsidered.
Among the Republicans who voted yes were several members of leadership: House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and NRCC Chair Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), as well as Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus.
The bill even got support from all four members from Utah: Republican Reps. Blake Moore, Burgess Owens, Chris Stewart and John Curtis.
It wasn't supported, however, by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy or Minority Whip Steve Scalise.” Read more at Axios
“Lawmakers in the House Judiciary Committee are expected to consider a bill that would ban assault weapons during a hearing scheduled for Wednesday. The bill would forbid the ‘sale, import, manufacture or transfer of certain semi-automatic weapons,’ and would not include those who already own firearms. The move comes after multiple mass shootings in recent weeks, including at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York; an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; and a Fourth of July parade in Highland, Park, Illinois.” Read more at USA Today
Gun control activists rally near the U.S. Capitol calling for a federal ban on assault weapons on July 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.Kevin Dietsch, Getty Images
“New details have been revealed about the armed bystander who killed the shooter at an Indiana mall when the gunman opened fire on a food court Sunday evening, killing three people and wounding two others. Elisjsha Dicken, who was shopping with his girlfriend at the mall in Greenwood, Indiana, did not hesitate to use the Glock handgun he was legally carrying to ‘neutralize’ the gunman within two minutes, police said. ‘Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen that took action very quickly within the first two minutes of the shooting,’ Greenwood Police Chief James Ison said on Monday. As far as investigators know, Dicken ‘has no police training and no military training,’ Ison said, adding he was able to fire at the shooter ‘from quite a distance’ very proficiently.” Read more at CNN
“Twitter won an early victory in its lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk. A Delaware judge ruled the social media platform can fast-track its lawsuitagainst Musk over his canceled $44 billion buyout.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana doctor who provided an abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio, has threatened to sue Indiana's Republican attorney general for ‘false and misleading statements’ he made about her.” Read more at NPR
“As an oppressive heat wave spreads across the US -- and shows no sign of slowing until the weekend -- local leaders across the country are urging extreme caution. The scorching heat that has already settled across much of the south-central US and prompted numerous heat warnings and advisories in the region is now beginning to extend into the Northeast today, bringing ‘steamy temperatures into the 90s’ that will probably feel even higher, the National Weather Service said. Several states on the East Coast have declared heat emergencies or hot weather protocols today. And it's not just the US: The climate crisis has been pushing weather to the extreme all over the world, with a searing heat wave also sweeping through Europe this week.” Read more at CNN
“Big news for CHIPS fans. The Senate Tuesday evening kicked off debate on the CHIPS-Plus bill, which will green-light tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies and tax credits to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
But there’s a lot more than that in the legislation. A lot more.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer filed a bipartisan amendment Tuesday night following that 64-34 vote. That 1,054–page amendment includes tens of billions for the National Science Foundation, the Commerce Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. There are also provisions impacting NASA.
You can read the substitute bill here.
Here’s a backgrounder on the new CHIPS Act.” Read more at Punchbowl News
“America's CEOs made 324 times more than the workers at their companies last year, according to a new report from one of the nation's top union groups. S&P 500 CEOs on average got a roughly 18% bump in compensation -- about $18 million each -- while many of their workers struggle with wages that can barely keep up with inflation.” Read more at CNN
“One in five adults in the United States, equivalent to about 50 million people, believe that political violence is justified at least in some circumstances, a new mega-survey has found.
A team of medical and public health scientists at the University of California, Davis enlisted the opinions of almost 9,000 people across the country to explore how far willingness to engage in political violence now goes.
They discovered that mistrust and alienation from democratic institutions have reached such a peak that substantial minorities of the American people now endorse violence as a means towards political ends. ‘The prospect of large-scale violence in the near future is entirely plausible,’ the scientists warn.
A hard-core rump of the US population, the survey recorded – amounting to 3% or by extrapolation 7 million people – believe that political violence is usually or always justified. Almost one in four of the respondents – equivalent to more than 60 million Americans – could conceive of violence being justified “to preserve an American way of life based on western European traditions”.
Most alarmingly, 7.1% said that they would be willing to kill a person to advance an important political goal. The UC Davis team points out that, extrapolated to US society at large, that is the equivalent of 18 million Americans.
The study, Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence, was led by Garen Wintemute, Sonia Robinson and Andrew Crawford and has been published on the preprint server MedRxiv. Over three weeks beginning on 3 May, the UC Davis researchers gathered the views of a representative sample of 8,620 people nationwide.
The scientists set out to discover just how open individuals in America are to engaging in political violence given the pummeling US democracy has taken in recent years. Extreme political polarization, skepticism about government and democratic institutions, rising gun violence and increased firearms sales, together with the rampant spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation have combined into a toxic soup.
Its consequences were on display on 6 January 2021 when hundreds of Trump supporters and white supremacists stormed the US Capitol building, leading to the deaths of seven people and scores of injuries. Congressional hearings into January 6, which are drawing to a close on Thursday, have highlighted the violence that was unleashed that day and the extent to which the insurrection was co-ordinated by extremist militia groups.
Against this backdrop, the study uncovers disturbing signs of seething discontent and deep unease just beneath the surface of US society. More than two-thirds of the respondents said that they feared that the country was facing “a serious threat to democracy”.
Remarkably, just over half of the sample group – 50.1% – agreed with the contention that in the next few years the US would confront another civil war.
With such jitters at record levels, the survey findings point to areas of confusion within the US public realm. A robust 89% of respondents think it is very or extremely important that the US remains a democracy.
Yet the survey also recorded a seemingly contradictory result – 42% agreed that ‘having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy’.
The apparent contradiction between commitment to democracy and devotion to a strong leader is perhaps partly explained by the prevalence of baseless conspiracy theories and misinformation. More than one in five people surveyed subscribe to the QAnon fantasy that US institutions are ‘controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles’.
Almost a third signed up to the dystopian vision, also propagated by QAnon, that ‘a storm is coming soon’ to America that will ‘sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders’.
Nearly a third endorsed the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Another prominent influence on public views is the “great replacement theory” – the notion that traditional white American society is being supplanted by immigrants of color. The falsehood was invoked by the shooter who killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in May and is a regular talking point of the primetime Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Some 41% of the UC Davis poll agreed with the idea that ‘in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants’. A similar proportion believe that “our American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”.
At its most extreme, a substantial minority chillingly expressed willingness to carry out specific acts of violence in the pursuit of their political objectives. More than 12% said they would be willing to ‘threaten or intimidate a person’, and 10% to ‘injure a person’.” Read more at The Guardian
“Redistricting wars | There are 22 majority-Black districts in the current US Congress, but next year there will be as few as nine. The lost seats are a casualty of highly politicized battles over redistricting, with state-by-state showdowns bringing dramatic change to electoral maps that were already being reshaped by demographic forces that include a decades-long Black migration to the suburbs.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Overdose deaths among Black and Indigenous people surged in 2020, the CDC found.” Read more at USA Today
“Dan Cox, a Maryland state delegate endorsed by former President Trump, easily won the Republican primary for governor.
Why it matters: His 16-point victory over moderate Kelly Schulz, who was backed by Gov. Larry Hogan (R), is also a win for Democrats. Thinking he'd be the easier candidate in November, they boosted him with ads highlighting his hard-right stands.
What we're watching: Mail ballots in the Democratic gubernatorial primary will be counted later this week. No winner has been projected.
Wes Moore, a bestselling author backed by Oprah Winfrey, leadsformer DNC Chair Tom Perez.” Read more at Axios
Dan Cox celebrates in Emmitsburg, Md. Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
“Democrats in the 10 closest Senate races are far out-raising Republicans among donors who give less than $200 — a historic GOP advantage, and a critical indicator of candidate strength.
Why it matters: A concerted Republican effort to build a small-dollar fundraising apparatus independent of Trump's brand is faltering. Democrats are building on the massive grassroots financial success they saw in 2020, Axios' Lachlan Markay reports.
What's happening: Inflation and Trump-induced donor fatigue are drags on the GOP's grassroots, prompting the party's candidates to rely more heavily on high-dollar donors.
One Republican seeing small-dollar fundraising success is former President Trump, whose political operation has hoovered up more than $60 million from under-$200 donors this cycle.
Zoom in: Even the GOP's best small-dollar performers are being swamped by huge grassroots backing on the other side.
Georgia's Herschel Walker raised nearly $8 million in small donations through June 30. But Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock has raked in $14 million in small-dollar money through June.
In Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio (R) has reported nearly $12.7 million in small donations. Democratic challenger Val Demings has more than doubled that small-dollar total.
The biggest gap is in Arizona, where Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly's re-election campaign has raised nearly $23 million from small-dollar donors.
His top three potential GOP challengers — Blake Masters, Jim Lamon and Mark Brnovich — have cumulatively brought in less than $2 million.
Just one Republican in the 10 most competitive contests is topping his Democratic competition in grassroots money.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has brought in nearly $5 million in unitemized donations, narrowly beating the combined total of his top three potential Democratic challengers.
Reality check: The GOP's high-dollar donors are keeping the money race competitive. And Republicans' national party committees are breaking fundraising records.
Context: Dems also dominated among small-dollar donors in 2020, contributing to record-breaking fundraising hauls among the party's top Senate recruits.
That mismatch spurred some Republicans to try to boost their side's grassroots money — partly by leveraging super PAC success to try to build up candidates' small-dollar fundraising programs.
The bottom line: Fundraising issues — in addition to the elevation of flawed or extreme candidates — are contributing to the chance of a Republican Senate debacle despite the enviable political environment.” Read more at Axios
Biden Goes It Alone On Climate
“Just days after Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin appeared to scuttle hopes of moving climate policy through Congress, U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to lay out his plans to push some measures forward through executive action in a speech today in Massachusetts.
Biden’s focus on the issue comes as the price of inaction is already apparent. The world is experiencing intense heatwaves, which climate scientists forecast becoming more frequent in a warming world: Over the past week, Britain recorded its highest ever temperature, 100 million Americans were under a heat warning or advisory, and Portugal and Spain recorded a total of 1,700 heat-related deaths.
Biden’s speech will also take place at a time when fossil fuels are seeing a resurgence, as high prices of oil and gas as well as supply chain worries prompt a return to coal.
The coal comeback isn’t just in the West. In China, currently the world’s largest carbon emitter, government approvals for new coal-powered plants have increased dramatically this year—in line with the country’s goal of ramping up emissions to peak in 2030.
For Biden and the Democratic party, time to act on climate may be running out. A victory for the Republican Party in November’s midterm elections would end any hopes of further legislative action, while a return of Donald Trump to the White House after the 2024 election (a possibility within the margin of error in a recent poll) would similarly halt any hopes of progress.
Fresh momentum is needed if the United States is to meet the goals it set alongside 195 other countries when it signed onto the Paris climate accord. According to energy research firm Rhodium Group, the status quo is nowhere close to cutting it. Current estimates put the United States on course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent (at best) by 2030, far short of its 50 percent goal.
Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, expressed optimism that the door to U.S. climate action was not yet closed. ‘President Biden can use executive authority to make significant progress on climate,’ Stokes told Foreign Policy. ‘It’s not going to be as substantive as what we would have gotten through budget reconciliation, but it’s still absolutely crucial.’
Biden’s best bet for forcing through policies to lower carbon emissions is through the Environmental Protection Agency.
Stricter emissions regulations on cars could help speed a transition to electric vehicles, (an urgent task seeing as 27 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions came from transportation in 2020), while tightening regulations around other non-carbon pollutants in the country’s power plants could help hasten a move to cleaner energy production (and stay within the limits set by the Supreme Court’s recent EPA ruling).
As climate advocacy group Evergreen Action has written, other U.S. agencies can also get involved: The Department of the Interior can shut down new fossil fuel exploration on U.S. soil, while the Treasury Department could force publicly-traded companies to more clearly disclose the emissions impact of their businesses—a move designed to give investors a better understanding of where to put their money.
What he won’t do is declare a climate emergency, a move activists and some senior Democratic senators have called for. Invoking emergency powers would allow Biden more leeway in a number of areas—from boosting renewable energy to blocking fossil fuel projects—and even reinstating a ban on crude oil exports.
‘It’s not on the table for this week,’ White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of the emergency declaration. ‘We are still considering it. I don’t have the upsides or the downsides of it.’” Read more at Foreign Policy
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attends a press conference on the 'Save gas for safe winter' package at the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium, 20 July 2022. (Stephanie Lecocq/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
“The European Union proposed a plan for countries to reduce demand for natural gas — as officials warned that Russia was ‘likely’ to cutoff the flow to Europe.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined a proposal for members to cut gas consumption by 15 percent for a few months, starting in August.
‘Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon. And therefore in any event, whether it is partial, major cut off of Russian, or total cut off of Russian gas, Europe needs to be ready,’ Von der Leyen told a news conference.
‘We have to be proactive,’ she added. ‘We have to prepare for a potential full disruption of Russian gas. And this is a likely scenario. That’s what we’ve seen in the past.’
Supplies of gas from Russia to Europe have already slowed dramatically in recent weeks as European officials accuse the Kremlin of retaliating in response to Western sanctions over Moscow’s war in Ukraine. In a summer of rising temperatures and energy prices, E.U. countries are hoping to build up supplies ahead of the winter.
Wednesday’s proposal to curb consumption from Aug. 1 2022 to March 1 2023 asks member states to switch from gas to alternative fuels, incentivizes industries to reduce consumption and outlines ways for consumers to save on heating and cooling.” Read more at Washington Post
“Sri Lankan lawmakers today elected former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as President of the crisis-hit country. He received 134 votes from a possible 223. This move will likely anger protesters who have been demanding his removal from office for weeks. The key ally of Sri Lanka's former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa won a parliamentary ballot after his predecessor fled the country amid escalating protests over an economic crisis marked by dire shortages of essentials such as fuel, medicine and food. Many demonstrators have said only a complete overhaul of the government will satisfy their demands, and some pledged they would stay on the streets until that happens.” Read more at CNN
“As sanctions continue to isolate Russia, Putin visited Tehran in his first visit outside the country since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February. Overnight, Kremlin forces continued to bombard the Odesa region and shelled other cities in the south and east in an apparent effort to resume an offensive in the Donetsk region. Meanwhile, Moscow is poised to restart gas exports via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany—at a reduced capacity.” Read more at Bloomberg
A Ukrainian woman surveys destruction near her home caused by Russian bombardments in the town of Toretske, in the Donetsk region, on July 17. Photographer: Anatolli Stepanov/AFP
Image caption, Italy's unelected prime minister said the response of Italians had been impossible to ignore
“Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has stepped back from resigning, calling for a new pact to save his unity government from collapse.
Six days after the president rejected his resignation, Mr Draghi said it was impossible to ignore the many Italians calling for the coalition to survive.
He told Italy's Senate a completely new agreement was ‘the only way, if we want to stay together’.
‘We need a new, sincere and concrete pact: are you ready?’
Mr Draghi, the unelected ex-head of the European Central Bank, has led a unity government for 18 months and was due to step down next year ahead of elections.
But he tendered his resignation last Thursday, when a key member of his broad unity coalition, the populist Five Star movement, pulled out of a confidence vote over policy disagreements and triggered a political crisis. Five Star was a key partner in a broad-based government that included left and right parties.” Read more at BBC
“Decision day | Conservative lawmakers hold their final vote today to decide which two candidates will get to make their case to the party’s grassroots members to replace Boris Johnson as their leader and the UK’s prime minister. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is now the favorite to join former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, after gaining momentum against Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt in yesterday’s round.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2019 pledge to eliminate single-use plastics in India by the end of this year was an ambitious goal to help combat one of the biggest environmental scourges on the planet. As Adrija Chatterjee and Kripa Jayaram report, the three-year lead time was meant to give India’s beverage industry that uses some 6 billion straws annually time to adapt. Instead, it’s racing to replace plastic straws with imported paper versions, leading to shortages.” Read more at Bloomberg
A woman looks for recyclable materials at a dumping site in New Delhi. Photographer: Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images
“The biggest challenge to Xi Jinping’s leadership couldn’t come at a worse time for him—or from a more unlikely source. Middle class Chinese are boycotting mortgage payments across at least 301 projects in about 91 cities. Property makes up one fifth of China’s economic activity and some 70% of household wealth in China is tied up in real estate. For months, Xi sought to rein in Chinese developers, spurring a record wave of defaults that spooked global investors, brought at least 24 leading property companies to the brink of collapse—and wiped billions of dollars out of the bond market. Together, this all spells trouble for Xi.” Read more at Bloomberg
Xi Jinping Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg
“Unions representing teachers, doctors and other public sector workers in the UK threatened a strike after the government offered below-inflation pay raises for some 2.5 million employees. The response signals growing unrest over a cost-of-living crisis as inflation continues to surge there. A rift between the Conservative government and public sector workers risks erupting into what the UK press is calling a ‘summer of discontent.’” Read more at Bloomberg
Environmental Protection Agency
“Millions of lead pipes remain in America's drinking water system 36 years after the EPA banned their installation. Experts warn that lead from these ‘underground poisonous straws’ can spike suddenly. The only permanent solution is to remove them, but no one knows how many lines exist or where they are.” Read more at NPR
“Netflix suffered two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses for the first time in its history.
The streaming giant said it dropped 970,000 paid subscribers, fewer than the 2 million it had expected to lose. Netflix estimated it would add 1 million net new subscribers in the current quarter. The company is under pressure from stepped-up competition and its own high penetration in top markets.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Reproduced from The Conference Board. Chart: Axios Visuals
“Only 10% of companies have made — or plan to make — a public statement about the Supreme Court abortion decision, Axios' Emily Peck writes from a Conference Board survey.
Why it matters: Businesses have increasingly taken stands on social issues in recent years. But abortion is proving too controversial.
The picture is different internally:
The survey found 51% of companies either have addressed reproductive rights with employees or plan to do so.
Of the companies talking about abortion internally, most are communicating information on existing health care benefits, or announcing new policies around travel expenses or paid time off.” Read more at Axios
The Numbers
“95
The number of college mergers in the past four years, compared with 78 over the prior 18 years, according to the consulting group EY Parthenon. Stronger schools are gobbling up ones suffering from declining enrollment and money problems.
40.3
The provisional reading of the temperature in the English village of Coningsby today, measured in degrees Celsius. The U.K. recorded its highest-ever temperatures, according to the national meteorological service—over 104 degrees Fahrenheit.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Lives Lived: Born in World War II-era Romania, Ritzi Jacobi played with clothes because she didn’t have toys. As an artist, her wall hangings and soft sculptures incorporated fibers in what became known as the ‘new tapestry’ movement. She died at 80.” Read more at New York Times
“A.L. takes bragging rights: The American League edged the National League 3-2 in Tuesday’s M.L.B. All-Star Game thanks to back-to-back home runs from Giancarlo Stanton, the game’s MVP, and Byron Buxton. It’s the ninth straight A.L. win.” Read more at New York Times
“Bridges charged with domestic violence: Charlotte Hornets forward Miles Bridges will appear in court today after the Los Angeles district attorney filed charges of domestic violence and child abuse against the 24-year-old budding star.” Read more at New York Times
__jodiii__/Screenshot by NPR
“Sesame Place Philadelphia apologized after a video emerged in which an employee in a Rosita costume appeared to ignore two Black girls during a parade.” Read more at NPR