It was the latest step of a growing military partnership with the Philippines, just across the South China Sea.

The U.S. has been steadily expanding its military footprint in the Philippines as part of its broader strategy against China, a nuclear-armed rival. With little public scrutiny or accountability, Washington is now preparing to deploy a second Typhon missile system to the Philippines. Experts and U.S. officials have widely acknowledged that the confrontational policy could bring the U.S. into direct conflict with China.

“The United States has been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the Philippines since World War II,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a joint press conference in Manila earlier this year. “Our partnership not only continues today, but we are doubling down on that partnership, and our ironclad alliance has never been stronger.”

Filipino activists, for their part, want the U.S. military out.

“We are being used as a training ground, as an experiment ground for the U.S. missile system.”

“We are being used as a training ground, as an experiment ground for the U.S. missile system,” Mong Palatino, the secretary-general of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, a progressive civil society coalition, told The Intercept. “It endangers our population, it undermines our security. The lesson here is that we will not be able to be self-reliant as long as we are dependent on a former colonial master like the U.S. in protecting our sovereignty.”

The U.S. and Philippine governments spread misleading narratives to hype the threat posed by China threat as a means of justifying the U.S. military presence, he said.

The deployment of the offensive weapons system has already triggered a forceful response from China, which now publicly warns that these systems risk “self-inflicted destruction” for the Philippines and could upend fragile regional stability. Without naming Washington directly, China’s most recent national security white paper condemns the regional buildup of “intermediate-range missile systems” and the return of a “Cold War mentality.”

With the Philippines already embroiled in a maritime dispute over China’s claim to the entire South China Sea, the document warns that deploying missiles in the Philippines would lead to “aggravated regional tensions,” making maritime disputes “more difficult and complicated” to resolve.

Last year, China’s defense ministry spokesperson noted a pattern: “wherever US weapons are deployed, the risk of war and conflicts will rise, and the local people will suffer undeserved suffering from war.”

It’s difficult to imagine an American official accepting the deployment of Chinese or Russian missile systems in Mexico or Cuba; in one of those cases, obviously, not much of an imagination is needed. Yet Washington expects Beijing to tolerate precisely this scenario on its own doorstep.

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The vast majority of Americans have little or no awareness of the U.S. expanding military posture in the Philippines, or what it could trigger. The American public has barely been informed that it may soon be underwriting another confrontation with a nuclear peer.

Once committed to confrontation, Manila’s leaders may gamble on indefinite U.S. support. If that support wavers, whether due to domestic politics, a loss of public appetite, or economic factors, the consequences could be ruinous for a country that will bear the brunt of any direct clash between the two giants.

The war in Ukraine serves as a cautionary tale. After years of war and staggering losses, Ukraine’s bargaining position is arguably worse than it was before the invasion, a tragic outcome that might have been avoided with early diplomacy.

The danger in the South China Sea is that Washington is encouraging a similar trajectory: backing increasingly aggressive stances from regional partners without fully grappling with the risks or leveling with the public about where this path could lead.

Once again, escalation is all happening in the absence of serious public debate.

“We’re Back With Them”

The first Typhon missile launcher, which can fire missiles as far as 1,200 miles, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, was stationed in the Philippines last year as part of annual joint military exercises between American and Filipino troops.

Washington has had a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines since 1951. In recent years, the U.S. military has expanded its presence, adding new bases and committing $82 million to build out infrastructure at those sites. The U.S. and the Philippines have also quietly approved a new ammunition manufacturing hub — funded by the U.S. and set to be built beside Subic Bay, which was once home to the largest U.S. naval base in Asia.

“They’re a very important nation militarily and we’ve had some great drills lately.”

The expansion of the security partnership accelerated under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who has embraced Manila’s historic ties with Washington after a period of drift under his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte.

After meeting with Marcos last week, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will lower its tariff rate for the Philippines from 20 percent to 19 percent.

“They’re a very important nation militarily and we’ve had some great drills lately,” Trump said after the meeting. “We’re back with them. I think I can say that the last administration was not getting along with them too well.”

“And Pete, I would say that you were — you couldn’t be happier, right, with the relationship,” Trump added, nodding to the defense secretary.

At the helm of this growing security relationship is Hegseth, a controversial appointment with little background in Southeast Asia. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, has even gone viral for his lack of familiarity with the region. During his confirmation hearing, he couldn’t name a single member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Meanwhile, activists in the Philippines — from fisherfolk and environmentalists to labor leaders — have been speaking out against the growing U.S. military presence. When 18,000 troops from the U.S., Philippines, and Australia took part in a military exercise in the South China Sea in 2023, protesters marched outside the U.S. Embassy in Manila, warning that the Philippines would be the most devastated if conflict broke out between the U.S. and China.

The U.S. military presence in the Philippines has long been resisted by the Filipino public, with mass movements successfully pressuring the government to expel American bases in the early 1990s. That victory came after decades of struggle under a U.S.-backed dictatorship and, today, with a Marcos back in power, the U.S. is strengthening its alliance even as authoritarianism tightens its grip.

As Washington turns the Philippines into a potential battleground for great-power conflict, Filipino activists hope Americans will also confront the long-buried history of how the U.S. first came to occupy the archipelago — through invasion, colonization, and the mass killing of Filipinos in the name of empire.

Most of all, though, they want those lessons to be transposed to the present, to stop the looming threat that their country could be sacrificed to war with China in the name of that same empire.

“Of course, we have a maritime dispute with China, but that maritime dispute should not be used as a justification to allow a country like the U.S. to use the Philippines as its forward military base,” Palatino said. “We should resolve our maritime dispute with China diplomatically and peacefully.”

The post The Philippine Missile Crisis: U.S. Deployed Arms to the Philippines and No One Noticed But China appeared first on The Intercept.

President Donald Trump launched massive airstrikes on Yemen over the weekend, with a reported toll of 53 people killed and around 100 injured. The salvo marked a revival of a full-fledged unauthorized war by the U.S. against one of the poorest countries in the world.

Framed by the U.S. as a move to protect crucial Red Sea shipping lanes, the illegal escalation is a shift from the retaliatory strikes of the Biden administration to what appears to be the return to a full-scale regime change war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was unequivocal in declaring that the U.S. would be playing policeman to the world.

Trump is barreling toward more bloodshed in the Middle East.

“We’re doing the world a favor by getting rid of these guys and their ability to strike global shipping,” he said.

The escalation makes for awkward politics in America. Trump ran on ending wars, emphasizing his desire to avoid new wars in his inaugural address. In turn, his “America First” loyalists — whatever their motives — are cheering his deal-making with the aim of ending the war in Ukraine.

Yet the administration now barreling toward more bloodshed in the Middle East, where both Trump and Joe Biden have let brutal allies run amok while trying to extricate the U.S. itself from regional conflicts. Now the Trump administration is pushing an explicitly deeper and more involved intervention in Yemen.

In an interview on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Rubio said the airstrikes are not “a message” or a “one-off” and will continue until the U.S. has gotten rid of the Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group that took control of large swaths of the country a decade ago.

“That’s the mission here, and it will continue until that’s carried out,” Rubio said. “That never happened before, the Biden administration didn’t do that. All the Biden administration would do is they would respond to an attack.”

Risking a Regional War

Escalating the Yemen war could set off precisely the kind of regional Middle East conflict that Trump has long said he wants to avoid. And the Yemen war seems likely to escalate further. Experts are saying that it is expected that the U.S.-backed proxy forces in Yemen are likely to restart their ground operations against the Houthis — proxies that will almost certainly be receiving U.S. intelligence and other support.

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That risk of a full-blown regional conflict too is growing, as Trump himself threatens Iran, a major backer of the Houthi movement and a prime enemy of the U.S.’s top allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The Yemen war has in various iterations been part of that larger proxy war. The Houthis’ opposition in early phases of the civil war were forces from and backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That conflict slowed down precipitously only when U.S. neglect turned into a Chinese-brokered peace deal.

Today, the Houthis’ attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes were set off by Israel’s brutal attack on Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. When there was a ceasefire and humanitarian aid coming into Gaza, the Houthis followed through with their commitment to stop attacking commercial ships.

In Washington, the revived Yemen war could also create an awkward situation for Democrats. Previously, Democratic opposition to the U.S. involvement in the war hadn’t swept the party but was a growing force. During Trump’s first term, Democrats were vocally against the U.S. supporting the Saudi-led coalition that was bombing Yemen and passed the Yemen war powers resolution in both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support.

Once Biden started his tit-for-tat retaliations against the Houthis amid Israel’s war on Gaza, however, many Democrats backed off their opposition to the Yemen war. Now, Democrats have a choice: They can rally their caucus against Trump’s reckless escalation and take a stance for more restrained foreign policy, or they can back the president’s reinvigoration of the idea of being the world’s policeman.

The post Trump Reasserts U.S. as the World’s Policeman With Massive Yemen Escalation appeared first on The Intercept.

The Republican Party is obsessed with sex trafficking, grooming, and pedophilia.

For years, the GOP has built its brand on a bizarre, often conspiratorial fixation with sex trafficking, invoking this trafficking panic to justify border militarization and its assault on LGBTQ+ adults and children.

And yet, when an actual accused rapist and alleged human trafficker comes along, Republicans rush to his defense — and lobby to bring him back to the United States.

When an actual accused rapist and alleged human trafficker comes along, Republicans rush to his defense.

President Donald Trump’s administration has successfully lobbied to bring Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan back to the U.S. from Romania, where Tate faces charges of human trafficking, sexual misconduct, and money laundering.

American officials first brought up Tate’s case in a call with the Romanian government last week. At an international conference, Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell pressed Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on the self-described misogynist influencer, the Financial Times reported.

Tate, a former professional kickboxer and avid Trump supporter, has used his massive social media following to spread his reactionary politics and violent hatred of women, influencing a generation of boys and young men by preying on their insecurities and promising quick riches through affiliate marketing schemes.

Prosecutors in Romania allege that Tate and his brother set up a criminal enterprise and used it to sexually exploit multiple people.

Despite these serious allegations, Republican figures and influencers have repeatedly defended Tate.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who has been investigated for sex trafficking himself, previously offered support to Tate, saying that the charges always seemed “suspect.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson traveled to Romania for a softball interview with Tate, allowing the influencer to portray himself as a family man who is merely a victim of “the matrix” and the mainstream media.

Allegations of sexual harassment and assault are no longer a line that can’t be crossed in conservative politics. Trump himself has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault and harassment, found liable by a jury of sexual abuse, and notoriously had a close friendship with the serial sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Despite a sex trafficking probe that closed without charges, Gaetz took the stage for a speech at the Republican National Convention.

And when former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert pleaded guilty to trying to pay off men he had sexually abused as a high school wrestling coach, prominent Republicans, including three former congressmen, supported him enough to write letters in defense of his character to a federal judge. (To be clear, the Democratic Party is also guilty of downplaying or defending abusers within its own ranks; this is not a partisan problem.)

But the GOP’s embrace of Tate, and other sex criminals on the right, reveals the hollowness of the Republican Party’s anti-trafficking campaign. Trafficking is not a real issue for Republican lawmakers — it’s a rhetorical weapon used to advance draconian crackdowns, delegitimize political opponents, and launch broader attacks on progressive and feminist movements.

If they were serious about fighting trafficking, then they would focus instead on labor protections and expanding social safety net services for the most vulnerable populations.

They will lobby for Andrew Tate before they ever lift a finger for an actual victim.

Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to distance himself from the Tate brothers, saying that Florida is not a place where they’re welcome.

“I don’t know how it came to this,” DeSantis said. “We were not involved, we were not notified. I found out through the media.”

As Republican politicians continue their fixation on the supposed trafficking epidemic, demanding border crackdowns and pretending to be champions for exploited children, remember where their loyalties lie. They will lobby for Andrew Tate before they ever lift a finger for an actual victim.

For the Trump administration, trafficking is not a crisis to solve. It’s a crisis to exploit.  

The post Trump Helps Alleged Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate Cross Border Into U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

As part of his proposed peace plan in Eastern Europe, President Donald Trump is demanding the full-scale economic colonization of Ukraine.

The terms of Trump’s initial proposal, detailed in a leaked document obtained by The Telegraph, call for U.S. control of Ukraine’s natural resources, ports, and infrastructure, including $500 billion of Ukraine’s mineral wealth as “payback” for the military aid. After years of military aid, Trump has decided now is the time to cash in.

Trump’s proposal asks Ukraine for exclusive rights “in perpetuity” over its natural resources and infrastructure. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” the contract specifies. And revenues would have to be paid to the U.S. before any other party. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children,’” a source close to the negotiations told The Telegraph.

Trump’s staggering claim to Ukraine’s mineral wealth is not new. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself proposed giving up Ukraine’s natural resources to secure Western aid. And, in Washington, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., previously floated the idea. “They’re sitting on trillion dollars of minerals that could be good for our economy,” Graham said, standing beside Zelenskyy during a visit to Ukraine last year. “So I want to keep helping our friends in Ukraine.”

The $500 billion figure equates to nearly three times the size of Ukraine’s gross domestic product. And, as observers have pointed out, the extent of Ukraine’s mineral wealth may be overstated. Still, it’s undeniable that Trump aims to use the tragedy of the Ukraine war to fatten the coffers of America’s military-industrial complex and capitalist classes.

It’s what he does everywhere. The news of Trump’s initial Ukraine proposal follows closely on the heels of his extreme bid to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza to turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” a plot that could potentially be used to enrich the real estate developer’s friends.

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As with Palestinians in Gaza, Trump’s vision for enriching his friends in the American ruling class will come at the expense of Ukrainians. And, as in Gaza, Ukraine has no good options, and any deal it accepts with Russia or the U.S. will include painful concessions.

It didn’t have to be this way.

There were several points at which a negotiated end to the conflict could have been reached. In the fall of 2022, when Ukraine had more leverage, a group of congressional progressives urged the Biden administration to pair support for Ukraine’s successes with a “proactive diplomatic push” to seek a ceasefire.

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The lawmakers, and the pro-diplomacy camp in general, were relentlessly attacked and smeared for taking the position. Hawks and the so-called pro-Ukrainian side accused anyone who called for a diplomatic path of not caring about Ukrainian lives or sovereignty. They cheered on aggressive military assistance, arguing that even the meekest calls for negotiations were a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The reality is that Ukraine’s war effort was never as stable as its Western supporters claimed.

From the start, American lawmakers repeated the mantra that they would support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” This was a deeply misleading promise. Wars are expensive, and America’s ability to finance them is determined by economic conditions, domestic politics, and shifting public sentiment. The political will to continue the war indefinitely was never sustainable, yet Ukrainian soldiers were sent into battle under the illusion that the U.S. would remain unwavering in its commitment.

The Biden administration’s Ukraine policy reflects a similar, if less explicit, mindset to Trump’s. Before Putin waged this war, there were offramps. A senior Biden official admitted the U.S. made no effort to negotiate on one of Putin’s top concerns before his invasion — Ukraine’s potential inclusion in NATO. When Kyiv and Moscow engaged in direct talks during the early weeks of the conflict, the U.S. and U.K. governments worked to undermine the negotiations, according to multiple reports.

The Biden administration also pressured Ukraine to lower its draft age from 25 to 18 to increase troop numbers and to deal “more aggressively” with the issue of having tens of thousands of soldiers who do not want to fight. Trump allies like Graham and national security adviser Mike Waltz have also pushed Ukraine to lower its draft age — calls that Zelensky has rejected and are politically unpopular among Ukrainians.

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Policymakers in Washington never seriously reckoned with the immense human, economic, and social toll of the Ukraine war because they never had to. For them, it has always been a distant conflict, a tool to weaken Russia while positioning American interests in the region.

Trump’s demand for “payback” from Ukraine — treating the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II as if it’s some unappreciated favor — presents U.S. foreign policy in its most naked form.

As a result of the West’s refusal to seriously consider diplomacy, Ukraine is left with impossible choices: fight a losing war without U.S. support, or submit to economic vassalage under the very powers that prolonged its suffering.

The post Trump Doesn’t Care About Ukraine or Russia — Just Money appeared first on The Intercept.

Rebuilding Syria from the ashes of the devastating civil war is sure to be a long road. For Syrians looking to offer their compatriots relief and begin to reconstruct a new Syria, however, cash is in short supply.

There’s one way, however, that the West can help Syrians get access to the funds necessary for a shot at a stable and prosperous future: end U.S. sanctions.

The sanctions were born of a decadeslong effort to isolate the Syrian regime — an effort that began to crescendo when Assad launched a brutal crackdown against the revolution that erupted 13 years ago.

“Not considering sanctions relief right now is like pulling the rug out from under Syria just when it’s trying to stand.”

Today, with Assad gone, a growing number of humanitarian advocates, experts, and lawmakers are calling on the U.S. to immediately end sanctions on Syria as a necessary step both to usher in reconstruction and allow aid to reach the country’s immiserated population.

“Not considering sanctions relief right now is like pulling the rug out from under Syria just when it’s trying to stand,” said Delaney Simon, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “I can’t overemphasize the intensity of the effect of the sanctions on the Syrian economy.”

Congress had a chance this month to end the harshest sanctions against Syria simply by letting them expire. The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 is supposed to sunset on December 20, but Congress is committed to keeping it in force.

A recent proposal for next year’s U.S. defense budget included a provision that would extend the Caesar sanctions; the text was released just hours before Assad’s fall. Because the defense budget is a must-pass legislative behemoth, that text is unlikely to change. Because Assad’s fall meets certain conditions in the law, though, the president can waive many of the sanctions.

Terror designations for the Syrian state and rebels effectively leading the country, however, create huge obstacles for trade.

Proscribed Terrorists

Much of the trepidation over Syria’s future direction stems from the central faction behind Assad’s ouster, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.

An Al Qaeda offshoot, HTS is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and U.K. governments, so doing business with the group is prohibited. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the HTS leader, also has a $10 million bounty on his head, thanks to his role in both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

HTS and al-Jolani are now trying to distance themselves from their past affiliations — sparking what Politico recently reported was a “furious debate” in Washington over whether the U.S. should delist the group.

The HTS terror listing, however, is only one of the barriers to opening Syria.

Decades of U.S. economic pressure, spurred mostly by hawkish lawmakers, made Syria one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. Under this economic warfare — along with the pressures of a brutal civil war waged by Assad’s despotic regime, the vicious rebels of the Islamic State, and various other militant groups — Syrian civilians have suffered untold deprivations.

With the end of a half-century of rule by the Assad family dynasty, analysts and lawmakers say, ending sanctions can begin to offer Syrians relief and buoy their economy. The road to that relief, though, runs through Washington.

“We don’t know exactly what the future of Syria is going to be,” said Robert Ford, who served as the ambassador to Syria under President Barack Obama, on Thursday. “We don’t know if it’s going to be a state that respects the rights of minorities, which was one of the conditions laid out by the Department of State yesterday for restoring relations.”

“But it’s still early in the game,” he went on. “It seems to me that a gesture now of eliminating some sanctions, and in particular those targeting the construction sector would be, I think, a very good gesture.”

Washington’s Role

The Syrian government itself has been designated as a “state sponsor of terrorism” since 1979, but the economic warfare intensified in 2011, when the civil war broke out. A series of executive orders restricted most remaining trade between Syria and the U.S. Then, in 2019, Congress passed the bipartisan Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which dramatically expanded the U.S.’s ability to sanction individuals, businesses, and governments for doing business with Assad’s regime.

At the time it was passed, proponents argued that the law was designed to mitigate potential harm to Syrian civilians — “to avoid penalizing humanitarian assistance, including medical and food supplies intended for civilian use,” as the establishment Brookings Institution put it. A U.N. special rapporteur, however, found in a 2023 report that the “growing overcompliance” to sanctions, and in particular the Caesar law, had “serious adverse effects on a broad spectrum of human rights.”

As a result of the U.S. sanctions — which target entire sectors of the economy and all of Syria’s major banks — the currency plummeted and inflation skyrocketed, exacerbating already dire humanitarian and economic conditions on the ground. Secretary of State Antony Blinken himself has said that the U.S.’s policy is to oppose reconstruction in Syria until there was “irreversible progress toward a political solution.”

That moment seems to have arrived — and a few lawmakers, at least, appear ready to seize on it.

This week, two lawmakers, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., wrote a letter urging that the Biden administration ease some of the sanctions on Syria. The lawmakers called on the administration to keep sanctions on former officials with the Assad government, but to suspend other parts of the Caesar Act — specifically those that blacklisted whole sectors of the economy and blocked reconstruction.

“A deliberate and phased approach is required to unwind sanctions and export controls against Syria,” the letter said.

For Wilson and Boyle, it was a turnaround. As members of the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, the lawmakers had previously supported legislation to strengthen the Caesar sanctions and repeatedly claimed that the exemptions built into the U.S. sanctions were sufficient.

Aid Not Enough

For many observers of Syria, the calls to end broad-based sanctions will be welcome, especially because of the impact the economic blockade had on the Syrian population.

“The argument that the secondary sanctions had no impact on Syrian civilians is not proven,” Ford, the former ambassador. “If the sanctions did delay construction projects, then there is less housing as a result and that means less housing for the Syrian public. It also means there were fewer jobs and lower wages. Certainly, our efforts to block deliveries of energy products, and especially oil, gasoline, for sure, helped raise energy prices in Syria, and that too hit the public.”

Between 2019 and 2021, the price of basic foods in Syria increased by 800 percent, according to the U.N. World Food Program. The United Nations estimates that 16.7 million people in Syria need humanitarian assistance, more than 70 percent of the population. Nearly half of those in need are children.

“The argument that the secondary sanctions had no impact on Syrian civilians is not proven.”

Despite licenses and carveouts for humanitarian aid, the restrictive economic measures have made it difficult for organizations to deliver aid. Because Syria is so heavily sanctioned, said Simon, the Crisis Group expert, there is a “chilling effect” where most entities are reluctant to do business in Syria due to the potential legal and reputational risks.

Even if firms and international organizations were willing to avail themselves of the exemptions for humanitarian aid, however, Simon said more was needed.

“Humanitarian aid can’t generate an entire economy on itself,” Simon said. “We saw this in Afghanistan, where there were humanitarian licenses and their humanitarians present on the ground. But you can’t sustain an entire country’s GDP on some aid shipments, even if donors were willing to give all the aid that would be required for that. That’s no way to set up an independent country that’s like eventually able to stand on its own two feet.”

Simon believes the U.S. and other sanctioning governments should develop a plan for the eventual repeal of the measures. Now, though, the U.S. could take the immediate step of issuing a general license that allows for commercial activity, not just humanitarian aid, in Syria.

The post Keeping Sanctions in Force Would “Pull the Rug Out From Under Syria” appeared first on The Intercept.

Just six weeks after Joe Biden’s inauguration, 80 House Democrats urged the newly sworn-in president to immediately renew diplomatic engagement with Cuba and end the “cruel” sanctions imposed by the Trump administration.

The letter encouraged Biden to end the blockade and take executive action to reverse Trump’s policies.

Biden ignored the plea. Not long after the letter was sent, a White House official told Reuters that a quick Cuba policy shift was not a top priority.

Harris embraced Trump’s narrative, if not the rhetoric, and yet had nothing to show for it on Wednesday morning.

The decadeslong U.S. embargo against Cuba rolled on, hitting the Cuban people first and foremost. During the pandemic, this sanctions regime led to severe food and medical shortages on the island. People left in droves.

Since 2020, Cuba has seen the largest exodus in its entire history. Over 1 million people left between 2022 and 2023 alone as a result of the economic crisis. 

And they came to the U.S. 

Cuba became one facet of an immigration debate in the U.S. that took a central role in the presidential election. 

Donald Trump railed against immigrants, presenting them as a threat to a supposed American way of life. Kamala Harris, for her part, embraced this same narrative, if not the rhetoric, and yet had nothing to show for it on Wednesday morning.

It was an unsupportable, immoral, and unpopular position. And Harris gained nothing. 

It was a typical Democratic folly: the wrong position that is also bad politics. There was a way out of the race to the bottom in the immigration debate — and there still is. If Harris and the Democratic Party are to have any hope, they must learn on this issue, like so many others, to address it by examining its root causes.

Creating Chaos Abroad

It’s a pattern seen all over Latin America: U.S. policies foist hardships on those abroad, who then migrate to the U.S. in search of better lives. 

Take Venezuela, which has sent record numbers of immigrants to the U.S. following the imposition of of devastating American sanctions in recent years.

In Honduras and El Salvador too, hawkish U.S. foreign policies built on everything from anti-communism to the drug war have propelled droves of immigrants to U.S. shores. 

And yet, within the 2024 presidential race, these root causes of these crises — the push factors — never came up. 

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Instead, Trump railed against immigrants in general. And, rather than pledging to enact a humane border policy and working internationally to slow emigration, Harris chose to ignore the issue altogether — or to run to Trump’s right. 

It did not need to be this way. Harris could have simply listened to the American people, who understand aspects of the immigration conundrum better than politicians seems to understand.

About 71 percent of Americans, including majorities across the political spectrum, believe economic factors are largely behind the recent influx of migrants, whether it’s better opportunities in the U.S. or poor conditions in their home countries, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. Sixty-five percent pointed to violence in migrants’ home countries as a major reason for driving so many people to the U.S. 

About 71 percent of Americans believe economic factors are largely behind the recent influx of migrants.

Notably, the report also found that a sizable majority of Americans consider the influx of migrants a crisis or at least a major problem. Though Republicans were more likely to view it as a crisis, Democrats still mostly viewed the situation as a major problem. Only 7 percent of Democrats surveyed said it’s not a problem at all. 

Harris touted herself as a former border-state prosecutor who would be tougher on the Southern frontier than Trump. During the presidential debate, Harris bragged about supporting a border bill that would have “put 1,500 more border agents on the border.”

Warning From Inside

It’s increasingly clear that the economic warfare the U.S. unleashes on the world comes with a steep political cost. With Republicans leading the charge, Democrats have little to show for going along with it.

Not every Democrat, however, has acquiesced to right-wing narratives on immigration.

Last year, border state Reps. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, and Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., tried warning Biden again. 

“Rather than re-imposing Trump-era deterrence policies,” they wrote, “we must demonstrate a sharp contrast with these approaches by showing compassion towards migrants and upholding our asylum obligations, while simultaneously seeking to curb the broad-based sanctions that contribute to widespread suffering and spur increased migration.”

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“You have a historic opportunity to help mitigate economic push-factors driving migration and affecting our border and many of our cities, while reorienting U.S. policy in the hemisphere towards a more holistic approach that eschews destructive sanctions policies to focus on peace, stability, and prosperity for all inhabitants of the Americas,” the letter continued.

That opportunity was available for Harris to seize during the presidential race. She could have offered an alternative vision for how the U.S. treats the world and the people who arrive at our borders from abroad.

Instead, she tried — and failed — to co-opt Trump’s talking points. Despite her best efforts, Trump’s immigration attacks on Harris contributed to her election loss.

Now everyone, immigrants and non-immigrants alike, must suffer the consequences.

The post Harris Ran to Trump’s Right on Immigration — and Gained Absolutely Nothing For It appeared first on The Intercept.

Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attacks, was a top target for Israel. After months of Israel claiming that Sinwar was hiding in tunnels behind “human shields,” the Hamas leader was gravely wounded by tank fire when he was above ground and alone, as he sat on a chair covered in dust in a ruined apartment, according to drone footage released by the Israeli military. 

U.S. officials and members of Congress from both parties seized on Sinwar’s demise to push a much wider agenda.

Sinwar had been described before his killing as a major obstacle to a ceasefire in Gaza. Instead of focusing on that aim, however, senior U.S. officials and members of Congress from both parties seized on Sinwar’s demise to push a much wider agenda — including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions. 

Following the news of Sinwar’s death, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a post on X: “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.”

Just beneath the surface of Blumenthal’s remarks is a widely discussed mega-deal that would effectively create a U.S.-Gulf regime neo-colony in Gaza, commit the U.S. to going to war for Saudi Arabia, and plunge us deeper into a new cold war with China. 

Lawmakers are aiming to link these far-reaching policies to the reconstruction of Gaza to make the deal more difficult to oppose. The pact would be imposed on the Palestinian people. 

Members of Congress have been blunt about their vision for the future of Palestine and the region.

“An independent sovereign nation called ‘Palestine’ with security guarantees for Israel to make sure there’s no future October 7ths,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a recent interview. “It will be more like an emirate than it will be a democracy. MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza … create an enclave in the Palestine” — referring to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Graham, one of the biggest hawks in Congress, also praised Blumenthal for being “a Democrat trying to get the votes” for a deal requiring the U.S. to “go to war for Saudi Arabia.”

Despite claims of wanting justice for Palestinians or supporting a two-state solution, American officials make little mention of Palestinian self-determination. None of the post-war plans offered have involved an election or process that would allow Palestinians to have a say in their future after enduring the humanitarian emergency of the Israeli war against them.

Biden’s Legacy

While some members, like Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., focused their response to Sinwar’s death more narrowly on an end to the Gaza war, many influential figures on Capitol Hill linked it to the wider regional vision.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin, D-Md., put out a statement that called for the U.S. to “chart a path that refuses to accept a region in perpetual conflict” and instead embraces “a future that fulfills the aspirations of peace, security, prosperity, dignity, and mutual recognition for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and for all the people of the region.”

On Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, as well as Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan, about “work to bring home the hostages, end the war in Gaza, and chart a path forward that will enable the people of Gaza to rebuild their lives and realize their aspirations free from war and the grip of Hamas,” according to a tweet from the State Department.

President Joe Biden’s team has been pushing for a deal with Saudi Arabia throughout his term, considering it crucial to the president’s legacy. U.S. officials were on the verge of finalizing an agreement before it was thwarted by the Hamas attacks. Just a month after October 7, a former senior adviser to Biden’s top Middle East hand Brett McGurk outlined the strategy in an Atlantic Council blog. 

According to Bob Woodward’s new book “War,” in a meeting some time before the October 7 attack, Graham told Biden that only a Democrat could secure a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty. 

“It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia,” Graham reportedly said.

Biden responded: “Let’s do it.” 

The post After Israel Killed Hamas Leader, D.C. Pushes to Hand Palestine to Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.

The Iraq war — sold on lies and bungled in its prosecution — has become the embodiment of American hubris in the 21st century. Hundreds of thousands died, allies were alienated, and the U.S. became mired in a decadeslong boondoggle that is still unfolding. By 2007, a few years after the war was launched, all but its most diehard proponents had come to see it as the mistake it was.

Today, those same diehard war hawks — the very people who planned and carried out the Iraq invasion — are proudly throwing their full support behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the November presidential election.

Chief among them is former Vice President Dick Cheney. Not far behind are a clutch of other Bush-era figures aligned with the neoconservative movement, like Bill Kristol; former officials like former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; and staffers for the late former Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Harris is, in turn, embracing her new right-wing fan club, touting endorsements from more than 200 Republican staffers who worked for George W. Bush, McCain, and another former Republican presidential nominee, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.

Harris is embracing her new right-wing fan club.

“Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the GOP staffers wrote in a letter. “That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

These hawks say they’re endorsing Harris largely to stop Donald Trump — citing his conduct and “chaotic leadership” — but these prominent conservatives are backing the Democratic nominee because their visions for U.S. foreign policy increasingly appear to be aligned. The Democratic and Republican parties are more unified than ever in their commitment to preserving American hegemony and preventing the multipolar world from emerging.

As vice president, Cheney was one of the principal architects not only of the Iraq War, which left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, but also the U.S.’s worldwide torture regime. The aftershocks of America’s eight-year occupation are still being felt in the region and in our domestic politics to this day. Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy., who inherited her father’s hawkish views, has also pledged to do whatever she can to elect Harris, including launching a PAC that has raised millions of dollars to boost the Democrat’s campaign.

This marks a departure from the past 20 years of Democratic presidential campaigns, which were built on a repudiation of the Bush administration and its disastrous war in Iraq.

Just 18 months after American troops went into Baghdad, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, said that the invasion created “a crisis of historic proportions.” He charged Bush with “stubborn incompetence” over his handling of the war. In 2008, Barack Obama’s opposition to the unpopular war was a major source of his success at the ballot box.

Even in 2016, the repercussions of the Iraq War were a major issue in the Democratic primary. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., made his opposition to the war a cornerstone of his platform and repeatedly referenced Hillary Clinton’s vote in favor of it. “I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq,” Sanders said of Clinton.

Now, however, an endorsement from one of the biggest war criminals in recent history is seen as an asset, not a liability.

Harris for Hawks

The Harris campaign isn’t just courting moderates and conservatives as part of a short-term strategy to win the election. Rather, Democrats are actively supporting and spouting neoconservative ideas.

During her keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, Harris vowed: “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” — as her party blocked any Palestinian Americans from appearing on the convention stage to speak about Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

The party’s 2024 platform also reflects this rightward shift. A section from the 2020 platform on ending forever wars and opposing regime change was completely removed in 2024. The Democratic Party went from calling for an end to U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen to championing the Biden administration’s plan for a normalization deal between Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchy — a plan that could also put American lives on the line to protect the Saudi dictatorship for decades to come.

Some of the most glaring neocon-coded changes in the platform have to do with Iran policy. This year’s platform attempted to portray Trump as being too soft on Iran, while including no mention of the Trump administration’s assassination of a top Iranian military commander. Though Harris’s national security adviser, Phil Gordon, helped negotiate the 2015 Iran deal, others in her circle have predicted that a Harris administration would not seek to return to the Iran nuclear deal.

It’s not like Trump offers a viable alternative. As recently as the debate this week, Harris and Trump tried to outflank each other on issues like China, immigration, and crime. Trump called Biden a “very bad Palestinian” who doesn’t want to help Israel “finish the job” in Gaza. Both parties are guilty of China-bashing and casting China as an existential threat to the U.S. As president, Trump declared economic war on China, which was then escalated by Biden.

The American people don’t support any of these bloodthirsty policies, but it appears that circles of power in the U.S. are increasingly disconnected from the will of the people. The vast majority of Americans who want the U.S. to pull back and focus on domestic issues are going to be left without any serious option in November. The country, and the world, will pay the price.

The post Do Kamala Harris’s Neocon Supporters Just Hate Trump, or Is There Something More to Her Appeal? appeared first on The Intercept.

The successes were so rousing that President Joe Biden began to worry about Russia getting desperate and the potential risk of a nuclear escalation. In private remarks at a fundraiser, Biden reportedly said that the risk of nuclear “armageddon” was the highest it had been since the Cuban missile crisis.

After news of the comments broke, 30 progressive Democrats issued a letter echoing Biden’s concerns and urging the administration to pair support for Ukraine’s successes with a “proactive diplomatic push” to seek a ceasefire. The signatories were unequivocal that they supported Biden’s commitment to Ukraine. A draft of the letter had even come in for criticism from the grassroots supports of diplomacy for its staunch support of sending billions in arms to Ukraine.

It all seemed very reasonable, especially amid talk of nuclear war.

The lawmakers were torn to shreds.

The mild-mannered letter from the Congressional Progressive Caucus provoked wild political attacks, recriminations, and resignations. Factions of progressives, liberals, and Democrats feuded on Twitter. Headlines and talk shows took up the issue. The anti-diplomacy voices won the day: The letter would eventually be retracted, with its supporters taking a huge political hit.

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Today, however, the war is stuck. The momentum has shifted. And tens of thousands more Ukrainians and Russians have lost their lives. And even members of the foreign policy establishment are coming to realize it.

“I think it’s safe to say that Ukraine is unable to generate the combat capability needed to achieve military victory, and right now the momentum on the battlefield, despite Ukraine’s push into the Kursk region of Russia, favors Russia,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and international affairs professor at Georgetown University. “Because of that reality, I think that the Ukrainians themselves and Ukraine’s supporters in the West need to have truthful, even if painful, conversations about how to end this war sooner rather than later.”

In 2022, the progressives had been pilloried and cowed. Today, they look more prescient than ever.

The Backlash

At the time of its release, the CPC’s letter provoked a furious backlash. Washington’s foreign policy establishment, and even members of the progressives’ own party, melted down.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., went as far as to accuse his fellow House Democrats of offering an “olive branch to a war criminal who’s losing his war.”

Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration official, said that progressives had just given “Republicans, the Kremlin and Russian propaganda networks an absolute gift with this letter.”

Joe Cirincione, a Washington national security analyst and figure in the progressive foreign policy world, called the letter an “incoherent mishmash of contradictory positions based on an outdated analysis of the war.”

“It was written when the war was stalemated, released when Ukraine is winning,” said Cirincione, who resigned from the Quincy Institute over the think tank’s call for diplomatic talks. “Of course the positions don’t make sense.”

Within 24 hours, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the caucus chair, withdrew the letter and issued a “clarification statement.” Other signatories acted like they were walking the letter back, though they were merely reiterating the unequivocal support for Ukraine’s defense that the letter itself had made clear. (Many of the lawmakers involved did not respond to my requests for comment.)

In a nearly 900-word statement, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., blamed “unfortunate timing” and doubled down on the idea that the U.S. should help Ukraine fight until the end. “All champions of democracy over autocracy — whether they call themselves progressives, conservatives or liberals — should be doing whatever we can to ensure that Ukraine wins this just war as quickly as possible,” he said.

A few voices of reason emerged, as a few members of Congress held fast. Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, were among the few who publicly defended their call for diplomacy. “History shows that silencing debate in Congress about matters of war and peace never ends well,” Khanna said at the time.

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Even some former Obama officials were shocked by the response. Ben Rhodes criticized the “circular firing squad” against pro-diplomacy advocates on the left, saying there was “nothing objectionable in this letter whatsoever.”

Far from being an “outdated analysis,” as critics like Cirincione claimed, the letter’s strategy of using war successes to get a ceasefire seems today like it was far-sighted.

“Cycle of Persistent Violence”

Since the ill-fated letter, the war has ground on — with devastating results for the people of Ukraine. Ukraine is not in a position to win the war, nor does it have a stronger bargaining position in talks than it did in late 2022 when the CPC letter came out.

A New York Times report in August cited U.S. officials estimating the Ukrainian death toll at close to 70,000, with 100,000 to 120,000 wounded. Ukraine has lost a fifth of its population to migration, and many able-bodied men have been killed, severely injured, or are currently fighting and out of the workforce. CNN reported this week that desertion is a major problem for Ukraine.

Despite the heavy toll, Ukraine lost territory to Russia over the course of 2023, and Russian advances have only gained steam since then.

Former CIA Russia analyst George Beebe said that the conflict has become a war of attrition, so Ukrainians are losing bargaining leverage by the day. “They’re going to need Western help” to strike a compromise settlement with Russia, he said, adding that it would take robust U.S. involvement.

Has it benefited Ukraine to keep fighting? “No, I don’t think so,” Beebe told me. “Actually, Ukraine has lost a lot more people. It is on a path toward becoming a failed state.”

Despite the criticisms, despite many of its members caving, the CPC letter had been on to something. Now, Washington is playing catch-up, with Ukraine bearing the brunt of the lack of U.S. foresight and no one standing to gain as much as empowered Vladimir Putin.

Though the controversy around the CPC letter was almost immediately memory-holed, it would only be a few weeks before it started to look like pro-diplomacy advocates would eventually be vindicated.

A Washington Post report revealed that the Biden administration was privately encouraging Ukraine to show that it’s open to negotiations. Gen. Mark Milley, the since-retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the growing group of people advocating for diplomacy to end the war. Citing the lesson of World War I, where the failure to negotiate led to millions of unnecessary deaths, Milley called on Russia and Ukraine to “seize the moment” and consider peace talks that winter.

For all the purportedly pro-Ukraine motivations behind the meltdown over the ceasefire letter, it is Ukrainians themselves who have most acutely felt the pain of continued war.

Many Ukrainians seem to understand this better than backers in Washington: Ukraine’s government reportedly charged nearly 19,000 soldiers with abandoning their positions in just the first four months of 2024. The same could be said for conscripted Russians forced to serve under Putin’s authoritarian drive to win the war.

“There are no protections for conscientious objectors in Ukraine or in Russia through this war,” said Bridget Moix, the general secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a progressive group that supports diplomacy. “We have to look at how we can support other ways to end this war, other ways to protect civilians, other ways to find a solution out of the violence now. We’re in a cycle of persistent violence that’s costing tremendous lives on both sides.”

Reduced Leverage

Though Ukrainian and American leaders have come to terms with Ukraine’s reduced negotiating leverage, Washington national security elites have not reckoned with the stances they took earlier in the war. After experiencing what former State Department official-turned-commentator Tommy Vietor called a “strangely vicious controversy,” former proponents of diplomacy are now steering clear of the topic.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., one of the CPC members who signed the initial 2022 letter, disavowed it in October of that year.

“Timing in diplomacy is everything. I signed this letter on June 30, but a lot has changed since then. I wouldn’t sign it today,” Jacobs wrote on X. “We have to continue supporting Ukraine economically and militarily to give them the leverage they need to end this war.”

Today, asked if Jacobs stands by her decision to withdraw support for the letter, her office replied, “Decisions about if and when to negotiate an end to this war are up to Ukraine. I have and will continue to support Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.”

For some experts, there was a missed opportunity to stand firm behind the letter.

“We always say that it’s for the Ukrainians to decide, but really we make Ukrainian decisions possible by our support.”

“That was the moment to just sort of say, ‘OK, let’s split the baby here, and you’re going to be able to get this, and we’re going to be able to walk away and not have our infrastructure destroyed,’” said Keith Darden, a comparative politics professor at American University and Russia–Ukraine expert. “If you think about the destruction that’s been visited on Ukraine, both just sheer death toll and in the destruction of the power grid and infrastructure since that time, the fall of 2022, it’s just really tragic that there wasn’t more of a push made then.”

The negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow in the early weeks of the Russian invasion — which were held predominantly in Turkey — were another chance to end the war, Darden said. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine had agreed on the outlines of a tentative agreement to halt the conflict. The U.S. and U.K. governments, however, worked to sabotage the deal and prolong the war, according to multiple reports.

By May 2022, Ukrainska Pravda, a pro-Western Ukrainian outlet, reported that former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the West would not support a peace deal even if Ukraine was ready to sign one. The West, Johnson said, preferred to fight Putin because he was less powerful than they thought.

“We always say that it’s for the Ukrainians to decide, but really we make Ukrainian decisions possible by our support,” Darden said. “Without our support, Ukrainians wouldn’t be in a position to make decisions — these things would be forced on them by Russian victory.”

The post Progressives Were Pilloried for Wanting to End the Ukraine War in 2022. Things Have Only Gotten Worse. appeared first on The Intercept.

As pro-Palestine protesters gathered in Chicago to disrupt the DNC, however, Ocasio-Cortez also used her speech to push a talking point that Harris and the Biden administration are working to end Israel’s war in Gaza. Hers was the first mention of Gaza on the DNC stage.

“She is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing the hostages home,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd, of Harris.

“Frankly, it’s a somewhat puzzling claim, given that Vice President Harris’s responsibilities don’t include U.S. foreign policy.”

The Harris campaign quickly clipped and posted a video of the moment to TikTok.

“Frankly, it’s a somewhat puzzling claim, given that Vice President Harris’s responsibilities don’t include U.S. foreign policy,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “Ultimately, the only thing we can judge by is the factual evidence. And the factual evidence is that almost a year now into the war, or 10 months into the war, there has been no ceasefire.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s speech and its embrace by the Democratic mainstream exposed rifts on the left — from the Democratic Socialists of America, the group that propelled the New York representative’s meteoric rise, to fellow Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

“It’s been unconscionable for me the last 10 months to witness my colleagues in this administration refusing to recognize the genocidal war that is taking place in Gaza,” Omar said on Wednesday.

The Minnesota representative, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, directly attacked the administration, but used Ocasio-Cortez’s turn of phrase in a thinly veiled admonishment: “To not understand that ‘working tirelessly’ for a ceasefire is really not a thing, and they should be ashamed of themselves.”

DSA Disillusionment

The convention speech raised the ire of some. The Democratic Socialists of America, for instance, counted Ocasio-Cortez as a member and led the ground campaign operation that put her in the U.S. House. Now, however, the group is at odds with its most prominent national success story.

In July, the DSA pulled its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez over Gaza. In a statement about the decision, DSA’s national political committee acknowledged her strong positions on the war — she was among the first members of Congress to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, leading House Democrats in a November letter — but said the group expected her to “demonstrate a higher level of commitment to Palestinian liberation.”

“Her inability to say it’s a genocide for months, her inability to take the oppositional role that Rashida Tlaib” — a Palestinian American representative from Michigan — “is taking in this moment, is a betrayal,” said Ahmed Husain, a member of DSA’s national political committee.

The rifts speaks to an age-old question of politics: What compromises must be made to gain power and the political capital necessary to effect change?

“For people who struggle letting go of the notion of AOC as this upstart insurgent against the establishment, I think it is uncomfortable to reckon with her absorption into the establishment because it reinforces despair,” Husain said. “It reinforces this disillusionment, that we can’t do anything at all to change things in America. But that is not true. We can always change things. We can always build an alternative.”

With two members of the Squad — Reps. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., and Cori Bush, D-Mo. — losing their primaries after being targeted by the pro-Israel group AIPAC, some progressives argued that Ocasio-Cortez and others like Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., are acting pragmatically and deserve credit for the positions they’ve taken on U.S.–Israel policy.

“It is notable that calls for a Gaza ceasefire by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Warnock received such strong applause at the DNC in Chicago this week,” said Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

Watered Down Ceasefire Calls

Ocasio-Cortez’s claim came as Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli onslaught — a tally that experts believe is “vastly underestimated.”

Since then, Democrats have effectively co-opted and watered down the term “ceasefire” to quell outrage over the Biden administration’s role in enabling the genocide. While human rights advocates are calling for an end to Israeli bombings, some Democrats redefined “ceasefire” to effectively refer to a hostage exchange. For the Biden administration and its allies, the ultimate goal is to secure a deal with Saudi Arabia that legitimizes Israel and to oversee an Arab proxy force to run Gaza, a force to be armed and trained by the U.S.

For human rights advocates, the celebrations of the administration’s mealy-mouthed approach to a ceasefire don’t pass muster. 

“Apparently it passes as an act of great courage for the Democratic Party to have allowed a conversation about the human rights situation in Gaza to take place,” Whitson said. “I’m very happy that that conversation took place, but I am deeply embarrassed that this is something that is seen as a great measure of progress. Ultimately, we are beyond conversations. Everybody knows what needs to happen. What needs to happen is an immediate ceasefire and an immediate arms embargo.”

The response to Ocasio-Cortez’s mention of Gaza at the convention reflects polling indicating that a significant majority of Democrats nationwide support an end to the violence, said El-Tayyab, a ceasefire advocate himself.

“Policymakers must move beyond rhetoric,” he said, “and work to leverage U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel to compel [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government to protect civilians and finally reach a ceasefire deal.”

The post Ilhan Omar Takes Swipe at AOC for Praising Kamala Harris’s Gaza Ceasefire Push appeared first on The Intercept.

Walz stood outside the store and asked everybody that came out whether they supported bombing Syria. Every single person said no.

“He was clearly stunned because he told us that story the next time we talked to him,” said Cathy Murphy, president of the Minnesota Peace Project, which has lobbied Walz on a range of foreign policy issues over the years. “It’s like, ‘The people in my area, they do not want more war.’ And that really impacted the way he voted.”

During his time in Congress, Walz, now at the top of the Democratic ticket as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, was a vocal advocate against a new war in Syria and evolved into a strong defender of congressional war powers. He ran for the House in 2006 on an anti-Iraq war platform, was active in multiple efforts to prevent the U.S. from waging a new war in Syria, and co-sponsored every war powers resolution aimed at imposing congressional authority on the U.S. role in the war on Yemen, among other pieces of legislation related to American intervention abroad.

Walz and Harris constitute the first presidential ticket in U.S. history to be unified in support of key legal interpretations that have significant implications for war powers. Since the debacle of the Iraq War, Democrats have staked out stronger positions against the Bush administration’s notion of unchecked presidential powers to make war. As Obama took power, however, the administration undertook a program of more limited adventurism but never renounced the claims of expansive powers it inherited through Bush administration precedents.

Walz and Harris, on the other hand, took on-the-record stances in favor of using legislation to limit those powers.

They were both early supporters of the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which directed the president to remove U.S. troops from hostilities “in or affecting” Yemen. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed to reassert Congress’s constitutional role in deciding whether to go to war. Under the Vietnam-era law, the president can’t send troops overseas into hostilities unless it has been authorized by Congress.

The 2019 Yemen war powers resolution went on to become the first since the advent of the law to pass both chambers of Congress. (Harris also voted for an Iran war powers resolution following President Donald Trump’s assassination of a top Iranian military commander.)

In addition to opposing various interventions, Walz has, for his part, also supported efforts to revoke and reissue more restrained versions of the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force, or AUMFs, that formed a shaky legal foundation for a worldwide “war on terror.”

Today, with Israel’s war in Gaza leading to U.S bombings of Yemen, advocates for humanitarian relief say having a presidential ticket recognize the limits of war-making powers is as important as ever.

“They need to show us, the public, that they support these issues because that’s their principle, that they do believe in the value of the War Powers Resolution,” said Dr. Aisha Jumaan, president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, “and that we need to have oversight of wars, especially now given the risk of escalation In the Middle East.”

Following Anti-War Constituents

Walz opposed war in Syria during both major pushes for a robust U.S. role in the conflict: the 2013 effort when Obama was seeking authorization, and in 2016 when hawks were pushing for more involvement.

In 2016, Walz helped lead a group of House Democrats that urged Obama, successfully, to resist the mounting pressure. After more than 50 State Department officials came out urging Obama to carry out strikes on Syria, Walz — who served 24 years in the Army National Guard and retired in 2005 — led a letter with fellow veterans Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., calling on the president to keep pursuing diplomatic negotiations.

During the national conversation about intervening in 2013, he was also one of 18 Democrats to sign on to a Republican-led letter to Obama, written by Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Va., saying that striking Syria without congressional approval would be unconstitutional.

“We have to challenge the administration,” Walz said in 2013. “If we’re being true to who we are, it is about the constitutional responsibility of the House and it should not matter who is the occupant of the White House.”

Walz told the Star Tribune that he was representing the anti-war views of his constituents, which were unanimous. “After 12 years of war, the American public has every right to weigh in and expect that their views be represented in Congress,” Walz said. 

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Like most Democrats, Walz did side with the Obama administration in voting against an abrupt end to the Libya intervention in 2011. After the civil war in Libya became mired in disaster — with even Obama agreeing that the U.S. intervention was the “worst mistake” of his presidency — Walz’s trajectory became clear. He emerged as a defender of congressional war powers. He went on to support legislation aiming to block an attack on North Korea without congressional authorization when President Donald Trump was threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

In 2017, Walz co-sponsored a bill that would have repealed the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs and replaced them with a narrower authorization with a three-year sunset. The 2001 AUMF, which was passed after the September 11 attacks and has served as the legal basis of the U.S. war on terror, was intended to authorize war against the orchestrators of the attack. The decades-old authorization, however, has been stretched to wage war in at least a dozen countries without additional authority from Congress.

A senior Democratic aide who has been involved in recent efforts to rein in presidential war powers said Walz and Harris have taken a “pretty strong and consistent position” on Congress having the sole authority over the offensive use of force. “This is a breath of fresh air,” said the aide, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “If they remain consistent with their voting records and if they respond to popular engagement on this, it could promise a much more peaceful and constitutionally sound foreign policy.”

Murphy, of the Minnesota Peace Project, said Walz was receptive to her group’s views and willing to change his position if he realized he was wrong. “I don’t think Tim Walz would have supported that but over time he basically said, ‘I want to repeal the AUMF,’” she recalled. “He supported repealing it simply because he could see this thing was being used in ways it was not supposed to be used. He really understood the constitutional requirement that Congress declares war, that Congress controls whether or not the president can just willy-nilly go into somewhere.”

War Powers Resolutions

Section 8(c) of the War Powers Resolution defines the introduction of armed forces into hostilities to include “the assignment of members of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of or accompany” the military forces of any foreign country when those military forces are engaged in hostilities or potentially engaged in hostilities.

A Senate report on the War Powers Resolution explained how the language was intended to “prevent secret, unauthorized military support activities and to prevent a repetition of many of the most controversial and regrettable actions in Indochina” — an engagement that started with “advisors” on the ground and bloomed into the full-on catastrophe of the Vietnam War and its attendant secret campaigns.

The Yemen war powers resolutions co-sponsored by both Harris and Walz harnessed this broader legal interpretation of the term “hostilities” — expansive enough to include the crucial support the U.S. was providing to the Saudi-led coalition bombing Yemen.

Though the Obama and Trump administrations argued that the U.S. was not participating in hostilities against Ansar Allah, the rebel group known as the Houthis, the U.S. role was still vital to the brutal campaign — the worst humanitarian crisis in the world before Gaza.

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At the time, the U.S. was providing ongoing maintenance and spare parts for bomber jets, intelligence for strikes, and mid-air refueling — a service Saudi Arabia has been delinquent in paying for. Its support role included U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, both in the “joint coordination planning cell” and on Saudi air bases. Walz and Harris didn’t hesitate to say that these activities constituted unauthorized “hostilities” under U.S. law.

The perspective on “hostilities” in the war powers resolutions is especially salient today. The Obama era saw a transition away from George W. Bush-style invasions, into a worldwide secret drone program. Eventually, U.S. military adventurism took the shape of proxy wars: With the war in Ukraine, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and the U.S. ramping up its militarization of the South China Sea and Taiwan, using proxies became a more convenient and inconspicuous way to wage wars that Americans would never support.

Walz and Harris aren’t destined to maintain the same positions on presidential war-making powers if they take the White House. The dynamics and entrenched power of long-serving bureaucrats in the executive branch could change the calculus and influence their approach.

Their records, however, provide a reason for advocates of restraint to be hopeful, as well as a basis for holding them accountable if they stray from their previous stances. Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Chris Coons, D-Del., also supporters of the Yemen war powers resolution, have been floated as options for secretary of state.

“As legislators, both Harris and Walz have explicitly supported Congress’s original intent of the War Powers Resolution, but we will work to ensure whoever occupies the White House acts according to the Constitution and the law,” said Cavan Kharrazian, a foreign policy adviser at Demand Progress, a left-leaning group that helped lead the coalition that passed the Yemen war powers resolution.

In contrast, Biden, as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as the Democratic staff director of the committee, suppressed dissident views related to war powers and worked to give the Bush administration broad power to go to war with Iraq.

The post A Presidential Ticket That Supports the War Powers Act? appeared first on The Intercept.

The opposition had high hopes when ex-diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia stepped in at the last minute for María Corina Machado, who was barred from running, but the Venezuelan government’s election authority announced a Maduro victory, with a 51.21 percent to 44.2 percent margin. Claiming fraudulent results, the opposition declared its own victory, bringing Venezuela to the brink of a political crisis.

Washington immediately seized on the disputed election. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the government to produce verification of the vote, then issued a statement Thursday declaring the opposition victorious and urging a “respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law and the wishes of the Venezuelan people.” Prominent members of Congress like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., are already doing the media circuit praising the Biden administration’s actions in defense of democracy in Venezuela.

In light of Maduro’s declared victory and the chaotic aftermath of the contested election, however, the case that U.S. policy worked in Venezuela is on shaky ground. Instead, Washington has embraced a policy of intense sanctions — implemented under President Donald Trump and largely continued by President Joe Biden — as a way to pressure the general population to force Maduro out of office. That aim has so far not been achieved, though it has devastated the nation’s economy, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Venezuelans and forcing millions more to flee — fueling the migration crisis at the U.S. border in the process. 

“How can we blame asylum-seekers fleeing desperation and poverty if we’re contributing to the very desperation and poverty that they’re trying to escape?” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas told The Intercept. “At the end of the day, what we have seen in practice is that we don’t usually get the freedom of press and free and fair elections and transparency that we ask for. What we wind up getting is hungrier everyday people.”

Casar added that the U.S. approach to sanctions means “we just doom ourselves to continuing to strangle other nations’ economies.” We hurt the people in those countries, he said, “it ends up hurting us too because we’re all interconnected.”

As the Washington Post recently reported, U.S. sectoral sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry contributed to one of the most severe peacetime economic contractions ever recorded, significantly more severe than the Great Depression. As a result, more than 7 million Venezuelans have been driven to flee the country, triggering the largest migration crisis in the Western Hemisphere. 

The Biden administration temporarily allowed some sanctions relief, easing restrictions to allow Venezuela to export more oil and gas, in exchange for a promise of “free and fair elections.” In April, Biden reimposed the broader sanctions, while still allowing for licenses to be granted on a case-by-case basis.

“If it had not been for sanctions, Venezuela would have experienced a large economic crisis in the last decade, but it would have been more like other large economic crises in Latin America and even in prior Venezuela history,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist and professor who previously served as the head of the economic and financial advisory of the Venezuelan National Assembly. “It wouldn’t have been like what we’ve seen.”

Related

The Venezuelan Perspective

The famously anti-migrant Trump approved the John Bolton-led sanctions on Venezuela in spite of an array of officials in both the U.S. government and other Latin American countries warning the White House that the region could not handle the ensuing migration wave. Now, Venezuelans compose one of the largest groups of migrants at the southern border and in transit through Central America (under additional sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden, on top of the longtime, infamous embargo, the number of migrants from Cuba has also grown). On Wednesday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on the Biden administration to end the “anti-human” measure, adding that the sanctions only bring more hunger and violence. 

Sanctions have become an increasingly popular tool for U.S. foreign policy because they are perceived to be less harmful than outright war or proxy war. United Nations experts have argued that these coercive measures amount to economic warfare, and civilians harmed by sanctions “deserve the same protections provided by the Geneva Conventions to people in war.”

Venezuela offers a prime example of how sanctions are key to U.S. regime change strategies. Conventional wisdom holds that citizens living under economic decline are more likely to blame their own leaders — whose failings they can see firsthand — than economic analyses showing the impact sanctions imposed by a foreign power have on GDP. This strategy was succinctly articulated in a 1960 State Department cable regarding the purpose of the embargo on Cuba:

If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

The only way of “alienating internal support” for Fidel Castro, the State Department argued, was through “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.”

This holds true for Maduro, who has campaigned against the U.S. sanctions directly but has seen the yearslong economic hardship erode overall levels of support for his government.

Venezuela’s opposition leaders, in contrast, are well aware that the economic sanctions benefit them electorally, as long as they don’t give any sound bites endorsing collective punishment of their own citizens by the U.S. In a June interview, González Urrutia falsely claimed that the U.S.-imposed sectoral sanctions on much of Venezuela’s economy “are not directed against the country” but merely are targeting government officials. Corina Machado, the conservative activist leading the opposition, has also falsely claimed that Maduro is exclusively to blame for the economic crisis.

As Venezuela erupted into protests in the aftermath of the vote, Rodríguez argued that the influence of U.S. sanctions may be hardening both Maduro’s stance and that of the opposition. “The government is also uncompromising, of course, but I think that it’s made finding agreement much more difficult, because the opposition sees itself as backed by the U.S,” Rodríguez said.

Policymakers may feel the urge to intensify sanctions on Venezuela in the coming weeks as Maduro digs in, hoping it will spur the change they seek. But when asked whether U.S.-led sanctions ultimately skew the democratic process in other countries, Casar acknowledged that “it ends up just getting really messy, and it’s hard to see what the mess gets us.”

The post U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela. How Does That Help Democracy? appeared first on The Intercept.

Why does Joe Biden insist on pursuing a foreign policy of blind support of Israel’s war on Gaza? In addition to the moral calamity — on full display as Israel bombed Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza — it has also exacted a political cost, damaging his relationship with his base and swing state voters. Critics have attributed Biden’s disastrous handling of the war to incompetence or his lifelong Zionism.

What is really at the center of the administration’s policy, however, is an insidious geopolitical play that will make the world a more dangerous place, advancing U.S. imperial interests under the guise of a diplomatic deal.

Biden wants to tie the U.S. to one of the most abhorrent regimes in the world for decades to come, striking a far-reaching security deal with Saudi Arabia — an agreement that would put American lives on the line to protect the Saudi dictatorship and lock us into a new cold war.

And Biden’s big plan for peace in the Middle East is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.

Biden’s big plan for peace in the Middle East is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.

After going all-in on Israel’s genocidal campaign, the Biden administration is doing everything it can to ram through the Saudi deal, hoping that solving the Gaza crisis can score a win heading into the election.

As part of the deal, the U.S. would commit to militarily defending Saudi Arabia, a repressive dictatorship that has been a destructive force in the region for years.

Biden’s team has long considered a deal with Saudi Arabia to be a cornerstone of Washington’s broader Middle East strategy. The pact would build directly on the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords — a set of Israeli normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — but offer something those deals didn’t: the security guarantee.

Last year, U.S. officials were on the verge of finalizing an agreement when the surprise October 7 attack by Hamas, and Israel’s response, changed everything. Since then, the U.S. has remained committed to supporting Israel’s regime change war, providing generous military assistance and unconditional political and diplomatic support.

This month, reports said talks were on the cusp of a breakthrough. If an agreement isn’t stopped, it will cement a hostile approach to Iran and further embolden dictators like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And it’s no secret that Biden’s push for a Saudi deal is largely about escalating its proxy war against Iran and “great power competition” with China.

With the election closing in, few influential Democrats are willing to intervene when Biden is so desperate for a win in the region. Fewer still will say what everyone knows about the Saudi pact: It’s just a bad deal.

The Deal With the Deal

The push to place American military might between Saudi Arabia and its enemies is a stark reversal. When he ran for president, Biden vowed to make the country a “pariah” for its rights violations and halt weapons sales.

Instead, the defense pact with Saudi Arabia would mean sacrificing American blood and treasure to protect a government best known in recent years for its assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its brutal war in Yemen.

The exact details of the agreement haven’t been made public, but Daniel Mouton, formerly a senior adviser to Biden’s top Middle East aide Brett McGurk, outlined the broad strokes of the plan just a month after the October 7 attacks:

“Long-term security in the Middle East will start with the ability to maintain an enduring regional deterrent order against Iran and its proxies,” he wrote, laying out a sweeping vision of coordinated maneuvering against Iran, China, and Russia, as well as a push for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“This progress will in turn allow for Israel to normalize its relationship with Saudi Arabia and more comprehensively integrate itself into the region,” Mouton wrote, alluding to the ability to “fully unlock US arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”

The specifics reportedly on the table for a Saudi deal would harden the adversarial relationships with Washington and rivals like Iran and China, while softening Israel’s isolation even as it loses international legitimacy with the Gaza war.

In addition to the security guarantee, the U.S. is reportedly considering supporting a Saudi civil nuclear program and offering access to advanced U.S. weapons that were previously off-limits.

For its part, Saudi Arabia would vow to restrict Chinese investment and move away from Chinese technology, the efficacy of which has been questioned by analysts who fear that the kingdom could turn around and use an inked deal to extract more from the U.S.

Then there is the coup de grâce: normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It might, however, be the most elusive part of the deal — and not because of Saudi Arabia.

An Israeli Partner for Peace?

Saudi Arabia has indicated that it’s preparing to normalize relations with Israel in return for the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state, with the crown prince ramping up arrests of those criticizing Israel online.

Israel, though, is widely considered the remaining obstacle to the trilateral agreement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flat-out opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and, what’s worse, is escalating tensions in the region with his all-out offensive against Gaza.

In response, top Democrats recently began to publicly criticize Netanyahu, in hopes that if Netanyahu can be pushed out, a more moderate Israeli leader would simply take the deal. When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took to the Senate floor to attack Netanyahu, mainstream media outlets declared the speech a “turning point” in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

The Biden administration, though, is making lemonade, seeing an opportunity for Israeli-Saudi diplomacy even in the ruins of the Gaza war. According to HuffPost, McGurk, the top Biden aide, is reportedly seeking to have Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf countries build on the rubble of Gaza to ease the pain of normalization.

So far, with Israeli intransigence, the American body politic has not had to fully confront a deal. However, Democrats, Republicans, and mainstream media outlets are already hyping the potential agreement as a diplomatic triumph that could achieve peace in the region.

They should be up in arms.

Even MAGA Republicans have reason to oppose a Saudi deal: It goes even further than their president’s deals in sacrificing U.S. interests. Trump’s Abraham Accords between UAE, Bahrain, and Israel may have shored up those monarchies’ dictatorship, but they did not so overtly subsume U.S. security to a foreign country’s interests.

Under Biden, the Saudi regime would be getting a security commitment along with a bunch of other rewards, and Israel would gain legitimacy with its neighbors, while the American people would see no clear benefit in return.

The post Joe Biden’s Terrible Israel Policy Is Really About Getting in Bed With Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.

“At this point, I’m at a standstill; I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place,” Burgess said. “I don’t know how, going forward, what they’re going to do about helping me, if they helped me already, or received money on my behalf — I don’t know nothing. I’m just sitting here hoping and praying to God that I don’t get an eviction notice on my door or somebody comes knocking on my door telling me I have to leave my apartment because I’m being evicted.”

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on into its second year, millions of people like Burgess are struggling to pay their rent and bills, with many placing hope in the federal relief money being sent to state and local governments for short-term rental assistance payments. These emergency rental assistance programs, which were created and expanded with funding from the CARES Act back in March, were meant to provide desperately needed financial support to households and tenants who abruptly lost income.

The first round of rental assistance used money from a $150 billion Treasury Department stream known as the Coronavirus Relief Fund, which gave local and state governments money that could be spent on a wide range of emergency programs. An extra $25 billion was approved in December, though the Treasury included guidelines that made it more difficult for renters to access the money. Some of those guidelines have now been revised, and President Joe Biden has also called on lawmakers to pass an additional $30 billion in rental and utility assistance as part of the broader $1.9 trillion stimulus package currently being negotiated.

But many rental assistance programs have been woefully underused, in part because of bureaucratic hurdles and the realities of administering funds. Implementation of the assistance programs is up to individual states and cities, and many local governments have had trouble reaching those in need. Some jurisdictions have even had to reallocate millions intended to go toward paying people’s rent. In Arizona, rental assistance has expanded, but the state has only received about 330 applications, Fox 10 Phoenix reported.

Burgess said she’s disappointed with the government’s failure to distribute aid to many of the people who lost jobs during the pandemic. “They come on the news and say, ‘We have programs that are available, we have money and funding that’s available,’ and then you try to go out and reach out to these people to get the funding and help, and then you have to qualify, you have to meet requirements, you have to have documentation,” she said. “All types of stuff they ask you before you can even get the assistance. It’s all a process, and in the process, what do I do to make sure I have the necessities I need?”

Some rental assistance programs, in cities like Chicago, paid the grants directly to tenants who could prove they had lost their job or hours at work and found themselves unable to pay rent as a result — and were effective at doing so. But many other jurisdictions struggled to spend the millions set aside for rental assistance ahead of the initial December 30 deadline and were forced to forfeit it to other programs.

As the deadline approached in Atlanta, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms proposed cutting the $22 million allocated to the city’s pandemic rental assistance program in half. In Pennsylvania, roughly $108 million of the $175 million meant for rent and mortgage relief never made it to the people pleading for it and was redistributed to the state’s Department of Corrections for coronavirus-related payroll expenses instead.

As of December 2020, nearly one in every five renters nationwide were behind on rent, according to recent Census Bureau figures. The Biden administration announced in February that it would extend the foreclosure moratorium and mortgage forbearance. The federal eviction moratorium, which was extended through the end of March, and a tangle of state and local protections have been protecting tens of millions from losing their homes.

But housing advocates are worried about those falling through the cracks, saying the current moratorium and scattered relief programs aren’t strong enough to protect tenants from displacement.

“There’s never been a comprehensive set of solutions put in place to protect tenants and keep them stably housed during the pandemic,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “There’s been a patchwork of resources and protections at the federal, state, and local level that has kept most renters stably housed but there’s been an alarming number of evictions that have proceeded despite the protections.”

Though the federal eviction ban has helped keep many tenants in their homes over the past year, Yentel noted that eviction moratoriums on their own have “never been the end solution.” These orders only postpone evictions, as the amount of unpaid rent accrues. A January report from Moody’s Analytics estimated that Americans owe about $57 billion in back rent.

One of the biggest hurdles in distributing the money so far has been landlords’ refusal to participate.

Some of the emergency rental assistance programs that struggled to distribute aid didn’t have the staff or capacity to be able to review all the applications that were coming in, while some programs were slowed down by additional layers of bureaucracy. Burdensome documentation requirements and complicated application processes — which vary place to place — are also barriers to assistance, excluding some of the households that were most in need.

But one of the biggest hurdles in distributing the money so far has been landlords’ refusal to participate. To receive the money, landlords had to agree to certain conditions and tenant protections to participate in the program, including the promise to not raise rent for a certain amount of time and to not to evict them. Some property owners outright declined, turning down payments to pay for their tenants’ rent, while others failed to respond at all.

Property owners and landlords, Burgess added, say they need to collect rent so they can continue to keep a roof over their head, but “what makes it any different from the people that live in the properties they’re renting out?”

Paul Williams, a former policy administrator with the Chicago Department of Housing, said that Chicago policymakers had already set up an emergency rental assistance program that paid out about $2 million directly into tenants’ bank accounts. When federal funds arrived, it was easy to just pump more money into their existing program.

“I think a lot of these other cities and states that were doing this, they just have inertia within their program and policy design where every time that they’ve done rental assistance, they’ve done it this way,” Williams said. “And giving money directly to tenants, people are afraid to do that for all of the reasons people are afraid of giving poor people money.”

“We heard those arguments in Chicago too. There were a couple of aldermen who were skeptical of the program because they were like, ‘What if a tenant doesn’t need 100 percent of the money for their rent and they buy a flat-screen?’” he continued. “Well, what if we give the money directly to the landlord, and they don’t use all the money on maintenance and mortgage, and they buy themselves a flat-screen?”

The latest pot of money, a $25 billion rental assistance fund Congress approved in December, came with new guidelines that effectively banned the direct-to-tenant approach of distributing aid.

A tenant could still apply for rental assistance and get the money, but only after their landlord had been contacted by the city and the city confirmed that the landlord has either declined or not responded. Many of these agencies have complicated application processes and therefore have to field questions from landlords on the phone. “Cities don’t have the staff to do this properly,” Williams said. “A lot of cities are just hiring contracting firms of like 10 staff people to do all the application process.”

The Treasury Department in late February revised the guidance that Steven Mnuchin’s Treasury Department put in place on the last day of the Trump administration. The revised rules allow tenants to self-certify on most eligibility requirements and give the landlord 14 days to respond before the money is sent to the tenant. Williams said the updated rules are an improvement, but it remains to be seen whether programs in different states will be able to do direct-to-tenant well.

“Congress has already provided $25 billion, which is a really substantial, historic amount of rental assistance that will go a long way,” Yentel said. “But it’s not enough, and we need more.”

The post Why the Government’s Plan to Help Out Renters Is Falling Flat appeared first on The Intercept.

Under fire, he claimed that he meant that there were higher priorities, not that he was necessarily opposed. But he sounded quite down on them. “I don’t ever remember FDR recommending sending a damn penny to a human being. We gave ’em a job and gave ’em a paycheck. Yeah. Jesus criminy, can’t we start some infrastructure program to help people, get ’em back on their feet? Do we have to keep sending checks out?” Manchin told the Post.

Despite representing one of the poorest states in the nation, Manchin has resisted calls for direct payments, needlessly pitting stimulus checks against unemployment benefits. Last month, he reportedly fought Sen. Bernie Sanders’s attempt to include robust stimulus checks in pandemic relief negotiations.

“How is the money that we invest now going to help us best to get jobs back and get people employed? And I can’t tell you that sending another check out is gonna do that to a person that’s already got a check,” he said.

Since then, Manchin has shifted rather markedly. Over the weekend, Manchin went on “Inside West Virginia Politics,” saying he would prefer that the checks are targeted to the people most impacted by the pandemic, but if there’s no way to target them, it’s more important to “get more money out.” Though he insisted infrastructure should be the priority, committing to spending as much as $4 trillion over 10 years, he did say that he would like to see bigger stimulus checks “done immediately to take care of the people that need help” and “make sure those people are getting it.”

Important policy news this weekend: @Sen_JoeManchin went on Inside West Virginia Politics and kept the door open to higher stimulus checks up to $2,000 (he prefers they be targeted but didn't draw a red line) and called for spending as much as $4 trillion (!) on infrastructure. pic.twitter.com/yG0aBBcxve

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 19, 2021

It may be no coincidence that not long after Manchin’s initial comments to the Washington Post, he was getting pounded at home by a brutal radio ad. “Joe Manchin thinks he knows better than both our president and the Democrats,” says the ad. “I guess Joe just don’t know what it’s been like to live through the pandemic. We should call his office and let him know.”

The spot was narrated by Corbin Trent, the former spokesperson for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trent, Justice Democrats co-founder Zack Exley, and former Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti had put together a new political action committee — the No Excuses PAC — to pressure Manchin to back the $2,000 checks. The ad reached an estimated quarter million people each time it aired, according to Trent. It was precisely the kind of targeted ad that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel in 2009 told progressive groups was “fucking retarded” and needed to come off the air. The progressive groups complied.

Now, with an evenly divided Senate, Democrats like Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are uniquely positioned to hold leverage over their party and block desperately needed relief. House Democrats also have little room for error in steering the nation out of a crisis, given their razor-thin margin. No Excuses PAC intends to push back against any Democratic lawmakers who try to hamper ambitious policy with similar rapid-response ad campaigns in the future, Trent told The Intercept.

“The only way we won’t do this is if Democrats just push through everything that needs to be done, keep all their promises, and do what’s right for the people who just gave them the House, the Senate, the White House,” Trent said. “But my guess is — not to be a jaded, cynical bastard — my guess is they’re going to need a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of cajoling from time to time.”

The post Joe Manchin Was Hit With Tough Ad Back Home After Going Wobbly on $2,000 Checks appeared first on The Intercept.

The right-wing organization was listed on the March to Save America website alongside groups like Stop the Steal, Turning Point Action (an affiliate of Turning Point USA), and Women for America First, according to a report last week from Documented, a watchdog group that investigates corporate influence. The March to Save America website is down, but archived versions list several participating organizations. Supporters of President Donald Trump gathered for a mass event outside the Capitol last week, aiming to coincide with challenges to Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. The rally culminated in a mob attack on the Capitol that left five people dead.

The Tea Party Patriots’ tax filing was obtained by Eli Clifton, the a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who shared it with The Intercept.

In a statement, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin said her group did not fund the rally and denounced the violence that followed it. “Neither Tea Party Patriots Foundation, Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, nor Tea Party Patriots Action spent any money on the rally,” Martin said. “We condemn the violence. We are shocked, outraged, and saddened at the turn of events on January 6. One of the reasons we revere our Constitution is that it created a framework that allows for the resolution of political conflict in a peaceful manner.”

The Intercept sought to reach out to people listed on the form. The form lists a person named Lewis Stahl and a man by that name is in prison for tax evasion. There was no available contact information for the Will Moose Fund or the John 3:16 FDN.

DonorsTrust, a little-known organization that has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into right-wing causes over the years and given wealthy contributors the ability to do so anonymously, donated to the Tea Party Patriots a total of $103,000, according to the filing. DonorsTrust has bankrolled a range of causes in the conservative movement, from climate change denial to the right’s attacks on organized labor. Wealthy conservatives use these tax-exempt charities and similar organizations — known as “donor-advised funds” — as a go-between to pump money into controversial groups and causes since they can direct their donations without legal obligations to name their donors. (DonorsTrust did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund was among the biggest donors on the Tea Party Patriots list, giving the group a total of $100,000. The Jewish Community Federation, which also functions as a donor-advised fund, previously contributed $15,000 to Turning Point USA. In a now-deleted tweet, Charlie Kirk, leader and founder of Turning Point USA, claimed that Turning Point Action would be sending more than 80 buses “full of patriots” to the Washington rally.

Of the Tea Party Patriots donation, the Federation said in a statement, “This was a grant made in 2017 by the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund to support a donor’s philanthropy. We conducted due diligence prior to approving the grant to ensure the grantee was a qualified 501(c)(3). We have not received a grant request for this organization since 2017.”

While the donations from these funds aren’t direct, donor-advised funds still have the power to vet contributions. “Donors can only make non-binding recommendations” from their fund, according to JCF’s fund policies, and “they cannot control when and how the Federation will make grants nor control decisions about which grantees will receive funding.”

The form said a person named Tad Taube donated $70,000 to the Tea Party Patriots, and a philanthropist from the San Francisco Bay area with that name did not respond to requests for comment. John Binkley is listed as giving $29,000. John Binkley from Alaska, a Republican former state senator who launched a failed gubernatorial run and served as one of the state’s three electors to the Electoral College, denied that he had made any donations to any Tea Party groups. And Sanford Diller, a billionaire Republican donor who died in February 2018, made the second-biggest contribution on the list at $150,000.

Martin, the Tea Party Patriots co-founder, tweeted late last year that she would be speaking at the “Stop the Steal” rally and promoted the event in the weeks leading up to it. She called for “peaceful” protest as the rally became violent. A few hours earlier, Martin had tweeted, “We will not allow them to steal this election!” — though the tweet did not name the perpetrators.

The Tea Party Patriots, which was formed in 2009 and describes itself as the “nation’s largest grassroots Tea Party organization,” is funded by two nonprofits and a political action committee.

Update; January 13, 2021, 11:45 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a statement from Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin that was made after the piece’s publication.

The post Here Are the Donors to Tea Party Group That Helped Organize Pre-Riot Rally appeared first on The Intercept.

Pelosi didn’t explicitly mention the possibility of expelling members, but she did thank Democrats for expressing their views on the constitutional amendment that would make it possible. Democrats have sought to punish fellow members of Congress who are found to have supported the Trump efforts that led to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

In a Sunday letter on measures being taken in the House in response to the riots, Pelosi mentioned Democrats’ efforts to remove members using the 14th Amendment. “Your views on the 25th Amendment, 14th Amendment Section 3 and impeachment are valued as we continue,” she wrote to her colleagues.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War, reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, a progressive Democratic first-term lawmaker representing St. Louis, is one of the leading voices calling for the investigation and possible expulsion of Republican lawmakers who boosted Trump’s lies about election fraud. The spreading of conspiracy theories culminated in an attack on the Capitol last week that left five people dead. In response, as The Intercept reported, Bush introduced a resolution, her first in Congress, to have the House Ethics Committee investigate members like Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., and issue a report on whether they violated their oaths of office.

“They have violated the 14th Amendment,” Bush tweeted. “We can’t have unity without accountability.”

Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also suggested on Sunday that House Democrats are considering invoking the 14th Amendment to deal with the GOP lawmakers who backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. “This is not either the 25th Amendment, or impeachment,” Ocasio-Cortez said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We are looking towards multiple avenues, and I do not believe that those avenues are mutually exclusive.”

The post Pelosi Quietly Thanks Democrats Pushing to Expel Members of Congress appeared first on The Intercept.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes the Democratic Party needs new leadership, telling The Intercept in an interview that it’s time for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to go. But the left, she said, currently has no plan on how to fill the subsequent leadership vacuum.

“If you create that vacuum, there are so many nefarious forces at play to fill that vacuum with something even worse,” she told Jeremy Scahill during an interview aired Wednesday on Intercepted this week. 

Pelosi cruised to reelection in a virtual caucus vote last month and will face a full House floor vote for the speakership in January. She’s expected to remain speaker but has almost no room for error, after a disastrous performance in the general election cost the caucus at least a dozen seats. With a single-digit majority, she can only afford to lose a handful of Democratic votes on the House floor or else she’ll be short of the required 218, which would then throw the contest back to the caucus. 

The rest of Pelosi’s octogenarian leadership team, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, has held these top positions for over a decade and won their slots without any opposition. On the Senate side, Schumer won reelection unanimously.

Ocasio-Cortez argued that there are no viable alternatives for House or Senate leadership at the moment because the caucus’s current leaders spent a number of years concentrating power without any “real grooming of a next generation of leadership.” 

“A lot of this is not just about these two personalities, but also about the structural shifts that these two personalities have led in their time in leadership,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The structural shifts of power in the House, both in process and rule, to concentrate power in party leadership of both parties, frankly, but in Democratic Party leadership to such a degree that an individual member has far less power than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago.” 

This dynamic is what pushes the “really talented members of Congress that do come along” to leave or run for statewide office instead. But Pelosi has also indicated that this upcoming term could be her last, “and the left isn’t really making a plan for that either,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “So I do think that it’s something that we really need to think about.” 

If progressives do threaten to withhold their support from Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez said, their demand shouldn’t be merely for a floor vote on Medicare for All, which is sure to fail. Instead, she believes, progressives should fight some of the bigger structural obstacles in the way of Medicare for All, like pay-go, an austerity provision that makes it difficult for Democrats to pass more ambitious policies, or replacing conservative Democratic Rep. Richie Neal as head of the Ways and Means Committee. “We are currently negotiating to get and work towards real material concessions for the left that can move things into place, to help build power for the next two years,” she said. 

The New York congresswoman shot down the possibility of running for the position any time soon. “The House is extraordinarily complex and I’m not ready,” she said. “It can’t be me. I know that I couldn’t do that job.”

Asked about President-elect Joe Biden bringing in hawkish members of the Obama administration, as well as officials from companies like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey,  Ocasio-Cortez said: “It’s horrible.”

“And I think it’s also part of a larger issue that we have right now, which is … the Biden administration is bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, which depending on where you are in the party, may sound nice, I guess,” she said. “But I think what a lot of people fail to remember is that we now have a Biden administration that’s bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, but when Obama was making appointments, he was bringing back a lot of Clinton appointees.” 

Dozens of people, including some from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Facebook, and Google, have quietly been added to the Biden transition team in recent weeks, Politico reported on Monday. 

This same cast of characters and their way of doing things, she added, is “a huge reason why we got Donald Trump in the first place. In addition to just the racism that was waiting to be reanimated in this country, [there] was just an extreme disdain for this moneyed political establishment that rules Washington.”

She also expressed frustration with congressional inaction on coronavirus relief and the failure to provide aid for those who are struggling, pointing to both the GOP’s “barbarity” and the Democrats’ strategic blunders. Ocasio-Cortez was the only Democrat in Congress to come out against the CARES Act, opposing it for both strategic and policy-related reasons. Democrats lost nearly all their leverage in pandemic relief negotiations, she argued, because the massive bailout gave Wall Street, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the Trump administration everything they wanted. It was the party’s “rage-inducing” hypocrisy on the issues, from military spending and mass surveillance to right-leaning economic stances, that led her to run for office in the first place. 

“For me personally, it was when I was waitressing and I would hear Democrats talk about why the Affordable Care Act was so amazing all the time and how this is the greatest thing ever and the economy is doing wonderfully,” she said. “Frankly, it is the same trick that Trump pulls, which is, you know, people touting the Dow as a measure of economic success when we’re all getting killed out here.”

The post AOC: Nancy Pelosi Needs to Go, but There’s Nobody to Replace Her Yet appeared first on The Intercept.

Since then, progressives have railed against the blacklist, saying the policy protects the status quo of the Democratic Party while discouraging women and people of color from running for office. The ban also had the unintended consequence of accelerating the progressive movement’s efforts to build its own political infrastructure.

Just days after the party’s disastrous performance in House races this year, Bustos stepped down from the DCCC chair position. The blacklist, it seems, will go with her. New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who won the vote this morning, says he wants to end the ban. Maloney told Axios over the weekend that the blacklist “separated ourselves from some of the most creative and diverse people working in politics, particularly in the area of digital and social media.” His opponent, Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California, had also vowed to reverse the blanket ban.

No progressive candidate ran for the position.

In a recent Twitter thread about the Democratic Party’s underperformance in 2020, Ocasio-Cortez, who easily won her first reelection, pointed to an “awful execution on digital” and “underinvestment across the board,” including some campaigns that didn’t spend a dime on digital the week before the election. “Ironically,” she continued, the DCCC banned the firms that are “the best in the country at Facebook” because they work with progressives.

In many ways, Maloney, a conservative Democrat representing a district Trump carried in 2016 and a member of the billionaire-backed Problem Solvers Caucus and New Democrat Coalition, does not represent a significant departure from Bustos. The New York Democrat has crossed party lines to back a local Republican: Last year, Maloney, the state’s first openly gay member of Congress, endorsed a Republican who had previously expressed opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

Maloney has criticized the party’s digital operations and reliance on “stuffy old traditional crappy polling.” In 2016, Maloney led an investigation into the party’s problems in the House, though made sure that the report itself never got out. In an interview with the Washington Post in 2017, however, he laid out some of the details. The competitiveness of a district could be judged, he said, by “350 unique characteristics” that indicate how it’ll vote. Three of those characteristics, he said, were the most important: the racial makeup of the district, the number of voters with college degrees, and how rural the district is. By that measure, the Post article singled out two successful candidates who fit the model going forward: Reps. Josh Gottheimer of suburban northern New Jersey and Stephanie Murphy of suburban Orlando. It’s difficult to gauge which of the two, Gottheimer or Murphy, is more openly hostile to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Gottheimer is the co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus and routinely organizes with Republicans to undermine Democrats on the House floor. Murphy, co-chair of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, calls herself the “velvet hammer” and has also bucked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly from the right.

In the interview, Maloney also singled out districts he said Democrats made a mistake thinking they could win, specifically Iowa’s 1st Congressional District and Minnesota’s 2nd. Yet in 2018, Democrat Abby Finkenauer won the Iowa race, and Angie Craig won in Minnesota. In 2020, Finkenauer lost by roughly 10,000 votes as Iowa swung Republican; Craig, meanwhile, won reelection.

DCCC’s leadership election, which Maloney won 119-107, was decided in a secret-ballot vote at a closed-door virtual meeting on Thursday. Cárdenas currently leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s campaign arm, BOLD PAC. The California lawmaker, who was favored by many progressives, withdrew from the race for assistant speaker, which is considered the No. 4 position in the House, to compete for this lower position.

“A strong Democratic majority in 2022 will be essential to our fight,” Maloney said in a statement. “I will work every day to improve our campaign operations, connect with voters across lines of difference, protect our incumbents, and expand our majority.”

Aside from seeing the blacklist policy reversed, Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive California lawmaker, told The Intercept that he would also like to see the new chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, and party as a whole, adopt a “stronger economic message” and agenda.

“A $15 minimum wage passed in Florida and yet we couldn’t win that state, paid family leave won in Colorado but we didn’t emphasize that nationally,” he said last month. “We need to have a bold economic agenda that is talking about how to improve people’s lives, that fills the void to overcome some of the sloganeering.”

Democrats managed to hold on to their majority in the chamber but got wiped out in key states, losing a dozen seats and leaving Republicans in a better position to retake control in the 2022 midterms. All the Democratic incumbents who lost were moderates, and nearly all of the Democrats vying to flip Republican-held seats, including progressive candidates, fell short. Before reality hit, Democrats were hoping to pick up competitive seats in states like Texas and California, and maybe even win the Senate. Even Bustos, the person responsible for expanding the party’s majority, nearly lost reelection, beating her Republican opponent by about 4 percentage points after winning by more than 20 percentage points in 2016 and 2018.

“I am gutted at the losses we sustained,” Bustos wrote in a letter to her colleagues last month. She added that the DCCC would conduct a “transparent after-action-review to better understand why the national polling and modeling environment failed to materialize — not just for House races, but also up and down the ballot.”

Last year, Black and Latino lawmakers privately clashed with Bustos, expressing frustration with the party committee’s efforts to retain staffers of color in top positions and hire firms run by people of color. Despite the DCCC’s diversity standards for political vendors, and other Democratic initiatives, political consultants of color say they’re still routinely overlooked. Maloney promised to make diversity a priority, and has pledged to create a program specifically to protect front-line candidates of color, The Hill reported.

But while Cárdenas bid represented the party’s slow awakening to the importance of Latino voters, Maloney also doesn’t promise any major soul-searching on the messaging of the party. “I don’t give a damn about the past. I’m not a historian,” Maloney told Roll Call in November. “My job is not to whine about it, my job is to win.”

As for the rest of the party’s leadership elections, the now-octogenarian trio that has sat atop the caucus for at least 15 years — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn — all cruised to another term uncontested last month.

The post New DCCC Chair Promises to End Controversial Blacklist Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

Biden has resisted calls to bar registered lobbyists from his administration, a looser policy than employed by former President Barack Obama. The policy is a boon to his close adviser and sometimes lobbyist Steve Ricchetti, but also to Hogan, who converted her history of helping Biden write the Violence Against Women Act into a prime lobbying gig for the NFL as it came under fire for its handling of its own domestic violence scandal, when video of Ray Rice’s assault of his wife was published by TMZ.

The 2017 Republican tax law slashed the previous 35 percent corporate tax rate and passed a range of provisions that mostly benefited the wealthiest 1 percent. Apple stock quickly hit record highs and enriched shareholders, including 43 GOP lawmakers who championed the law while holding all sorts of individual stocks, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found. At the time, Apple had stashed at least $250 billion in profits overseas, more than any other American company. The tech giant also spent more than $7.4 million on government lobbying throughout 2017, a significant jump from previous years, disclosures showed.

Lobbying disclosures show that Hogan was one of a team of Apple lobbyists who lobbied the House, Senate, and Treasury Department on “corporate tax reform,” “international tax reform and issues related to foreign regulatory actions,” as well as “issues related to state sales tax, mobile workforce, and taxation of digital goods.” The lobbying came throughout 2017, including during the third and fourth quarter of that year, as Trump’s tax cut was being finalized and passed. For all of 2017, Apple registered spending nearly $7 million lobbying Congress and the administration directly. In 2018, still under Hogan’s guidance, the company continued lobbying on “corporate tax reform” as the law’s regulations were being implemented, increasing their spending in the first quarter of that year to $2.14 million, the documents show.

Hogan has been one of Biden’s most loyal aides, serving as an adviser to the president-elect throughout his career in the Senate and the Obama administration, first joining his Senate Judiciary Committee staff in 1991. She left the public sector at the end of Obama’s first term and went on to spend several years in the corporate world. She’s one of a handful of Silicon Valley insiders, including former Facebook executives, involved in the transition.

Hogan left Apple earlier this year to join Biden’s presidential campaign and helped select his running mate, as a member of the four-person vetting panel that ultimately picked Kamala Harris. Of the vice presidential vetting team — which included former Sen. Chris Dodd, Delaware Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — Hogan was the only nonpolitician. Biden’s transition hired her to its day-to-day staff in September. According to the Biden transition team, Hogan’s current role deals with “personnel” and has nothing to do with policy.

During her time at Apple, Hogan was also involved in defending Apple’s operations in China, claiming in a 2017 letter that the company promotes “fundamental rights” and ethical labor practices by enforcing a “strict supplier code of conduct with standards for safe working conditions, fair treatment of workers, and environmentally responsible practices.” The letter, sent in response to Sens. Ted Cruz and Patrick Leahy’s concerns about Apple removing virtual private network apps — which help protect users from government surveillance — from its app store, argued that the company had actually increased free expression. At the time, there were reports of Apple’s Chinese factories, which have long been criticized for poor working conditions, employing students to illegally work overtime. “We believe that our presence in China helps promote greater openness and facilitates the free flow of ideas and information,” she wrote.

Before Apple, Hogan led the NFL’s lobbying division, where she protected the league during domestic violence and concussion scandals, and helped grow it into a political machine. The NFL hired Hogan as its senior vice president of public policy and government affairs just a few days after TMZ released the Rice assault footage. Hogan’s history with the Violence Against Women Act, and the relationship she developed with the National Domestic Violence Hotline along the way, helped her defuse the situation and rehabilitate the NFL’s image. California Rep. Jackie Speier, who’s known for her work on women’s issues, noted the irony of Hogan’s trajectory in 2015, comparing her to “the mother who founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving going to work for the spirits industry.”

But Hogan wasn’t just instrumental in this public relations victory. She successfully shielded the NFL from congressional action on a number of issues, weakening Congress’s oversight abilities by ending the NFL’s tax-exempt status and fighting calls for a zero-tolerance policy on domestic assault. At a meeting with congressional staffers, Hogan reportedly explained that the league opposed the policy because “victims would be even more reluctant to come forward knowing the accusations would end their husband’s career.” When Congress started thinking about regulating fantasy football sites like FanDuel and DraftKings, Hogan led the aggressive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill.

As chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hogan helped Biden draft and pass the now-infamous 1994 crime bill, specifically the “three strikes” provision, which devastated low-income communities and communities of color for decades. Biden even thanked her from the Senate floor, praising her dedication to passing the legislation.

“I want to start off and again pay tribute to the chief counsel of the Judiciary Committee, Cynthia Hogan. She is smart. She is tough.” Biden said, according to congressional record. “And you have no idea, Mr. President, how easy my job is when all I have to do is ask Cynthia Hogan. Right now, I bet you there are 25 senators who can tell me Cynthia’s office phone number without having to look it up because they are so accustomed to calling her and asking her her opinion or asking her for information, Republican as well as Democrat.”

“[Mark Gitenstein] put together this original bill with me, and Ron Klain, who is now with the Justice Department,” the Delaware senator continued. “But it was brought home by Cynthia Hogan.” (Gitenstein has also been a primary player in Biden’s transition.)

Notably, Hogan was also involved in one of the most controversial episodes of Biden’s career: The Judiciary Committee’s interrogation of Anita Hill at Justice Clarence Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings. She kept Angela Wright, a credible witness who could have corroborated Hill’s account of Thomas’s sexual harassment, from publicly testifying, according to a 1994 Washington Post report. After some back and forth, Hogan eventually urged Biden to enter Wright’s deposition into the written record instead of having her testify publicly — a move Biden later said could have changed history. Last year, Hogan expressed regret over the decision. “I feel I gave Senator Biden bad advice,” she said. “I told him I thought it was better than having her testify live. I have felt bad about this for years.”

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