I want to draw your attention to a column from the Seattle Times entitled “COVID herd immunity? Parts of Washington state appear in no mood to join this herd.” Re-posting of Danny Westneat’s article was inspired by Betsy Brown, MD’s, April 19 post about vaccine hesitancy and how to address it. Statistically, more Republicans than independents and more independents than Democrats are vaccine hesitant, but each person is different. For example, my elderly, very Trumpian, Evangelical Christian former neighbor whom I’ve sometimes quoted in these posts, the one who now extolls the “honest journalism” of the The Epoch Times…She is already vaccinated. After reading Westneat’s article below I encourage you to check out Betsy Brown’s hints for talking with the vaccine hesitant, a group that might include your very Democratic neighbor.
One caveat: Should someone who has survived a bout with Covid-19 still get vaccinated? Yes. Evidence is accumulating to suggest that at least the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines induce a more durable and effective immunity than most infections.
Ever since early February, when some software volunteers debuted a website to help the public find COVID-19 vaccine appointments, they’ve had a unique window into the ebb and flow of what one engineer there dubbed “the spice.”
Who wants the vaccines, and who doesn’t? Where in the state are the shots snapped right up, and where are they left wanting?
They noticed one major trend right from the start.
“Once you start driving east from Seattle, for a few hours, you can find vaccine easily and readily available,” says Jessica Chong, a University of Washington assistant professor of genetics who is volunteering as a data scientist for the WA COVID Vaccine Finder, at covidwa.com.
This regional disparity in vaccine thirst was a curiosity at first, but now has become cause for concern.
“There seems to have been some reluctancy in a lot of citizens to be vaccinated,” the Pasco mayor said in that story.
State data spells it out. The 10 counties with the lowest vaccination rates have all seen 22% or fewer of their residents get the first shot so far — with nine of those 10 being red counties east of the Cascades.
That compares to 31% of the entire state starting the vaccination shots. One county — Jefferson, home of Port Townsend, on Puget Sound — has crossed over the 50% vaccinated threshold. King County sits slightly above the state average at 34%, according to state data as of April 3.
Why does this matter? Because public health officials say to reach herd immunity, to the point that life could return to a semblance of normal, 70% to 80% of state residents need to be immune. Unless you live in Jefferson County or the San Juan Islands (where 47% have gotten at least one shot), we are a looong way from reaching the herd goal.
In Eastern Washington in particular, segments of society appear to be in no mood to be a part of any herd.
“Government can kiss my ass,” posted the Franklin County Republican Central Committee, on the topic of getting vaccinated. This was on the official Facebook page of the county’s GOP organization! Franklin is in the Tri-Cities area; it’s probably not coincidental that it has the third worst vaccination rate in the state, at 18.7% (lower are Garfield County, at 18.5%, and Stevens County north of Spokane, at 17.3%).
Chelan County, in Central Washington, has a 39.5% vaccination rate, defying the general east-west trend.
Chong, the covidwa.com data scientist, said there are many reasons counties could have varied vaccination rates, such as age demographics, language barriers and driving distance to vaccination sites. But with appointments going unused in more rural counties, it can’t be vaccine scarcity anymore.
“This has been studied, though,” she added. “The No. 1 correlating factor for whether you’ll get the vaccine is whether you voted for Trump.”
Recent polls have indeed shown that nearly half of Republican men don’t intend to get the vaccine (GOP-voting women were more open to it). That could be simply resistance to a government program, or it could be part of a sentiment among many Republicans that the coronavirus was exaggerated, or even hyped to bring down former President Donald Trump.
A new survey for the Economist found that among these “vaccine rejecters,” more continue to trust Trump for sound medical advice than trust the CDC or Dr. Anthony Fauci. Trump did get vaccinated himself in January, but a majority of GOP voters told pollsters they hadn’t heard about that (nearly twice as many had heard the news about the Dr. Seuss books being pulled).
Vaccine skepticism is also one of those issues where the far right sometimes meets the far left, over on the back side. So getting all the way to 80% could be a stretch for any part of Washington state, red or blue.
“Without vaccine hesitancy, we’d be in really good shape,” Carl Bergstrom, a UW evolutionary biologist, said in a commentary the other day on herd immunity. “With vaccine hesitancy, it could be close here in the U.S. I’m hoping that much of the hesitancy we see is really more like … vaccine deliberation.”
Hope so, too. It’s perfectly understandable that people would be leery, or in “wait and see” mode. The data cited above suggests something else may be going on, though — something familiar and cultural that’s plagued us with the coronavirus from the start. Which is that America may just be too tribal and rebellious to get to where 80% of us ever agree to do anything.
It was nearly a year ago — and about 500,000 national deaths ago — that Clint Didier, Franklin County commissioner and local GOP chairman, suggested we go for herd immunity the old-fashioned way. “We can take care of this virus by letting the people catch it,” he said.
Even with a medicine now available, it seems like in some quarters that’s still the plan.
Danny Westneat:dwestneat@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region’s news, people and politics.
A couple of months ago I underwent a complex surgical procedure in a Spokane hospital. The care was exemplary, but, as the bills and Explanations of Benefits (EOBs) roll in, I am reminded that the healthcare system in this country is the most expensive in the world, bears no resemblance to a “free” market, and is unnecessarily deceptive and complex.
The summary on the front page of my bill from the hospital was meant to impress. It says I received $73,837.81 of hospital goods and services. (This does not include the surgeon’s and anesthesiologist’s fees.) All I was going to have to pay was $780. I’m led to believe my Medicare Advantage carrier, at great expense to itself, has saved me from an enormous expense, exactly what insurance is supposed to do.
Well, not quite. The second page of my bill tells me my Plan’s “Medicare Adjustments” were $62,229.85 and the Plan’s “Medicare Payments” were $10,827.96. That is, the hospital accepted, by contract with Medicare and with my Medicare Advantage Plan, $10,827.96 (most or all of it paid by Medicare, not actually from my Medicare Advantage carrier) plus my $780 as total payment for the bill. $62,229.85 simply vanished.
At first, being relatively naive about these things, even as a retired physician, I thought, “Hmmm, I suppose that $10,827.96 is the “Medicare Allowable” for my diagnosis and if I didn’t have a Medicare Advantage I would be liable for 20% or $2165. But I had forgotten one of the many obscure rules of this insane game. This was a hospital bill, not a doctor’s or outpatient surgery bill. As a hospital bill under Medicare Part A this 20% does not apply. I would have been liable only for the Medicare Part A hospital deductible of around $1408 (that was the deductible in 2020).
In what system will a business entity routinely contract to provide goods and services at a discount of 85%? Only in the American healthcare. Medicare says what it will pay the hospital for a particular diagnosis and then pays that amount (minus my deductible). My Medicare Advantage Plan carries none of this risk even as I’m led to believe (by subtle omission) that my Plan’s heroic contract battle with the hospital has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills. By signing up with my Plan I agree to a restricted provider list, a restricted geographical area and list of hospitals in which I am covered, and a restricted list of medications they will pay for. Dealing with my Plan is as byzantine as anything I’ve ever encountered.
It not really my insurance carrier that is responsible for my good fortune. It is Medicare, the government program, the program I paid into my entire working carreer, not private insurance, that is responsible for the relatively small payment I owe. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
For those covered by Medicare a reasonable case can be made to sign up and pay for Medicare Part A and Part B (and maybe Part D), but forget about buying a pricey Medicare “Supplement.” This is among the reasoned arguments found in “The Great American Healthcare Scam” by David Belk, M.D. and Paul Belk, PhD. I’ve been following David Belk for years. I respect his analyses. I found his new book a fascinating read, even more so as I pore over my own medical bills.
This Wednesday, April 14, at 7PM Dr. David Belk is the featured guest at a Zoom meeting sponsored by Health Care for All-WA. Here’s the link to sign up for the Zoom:
One caveat: I have read a lot of Dr. Belk’s work, but I do not know how he is as a speaker. You can visit his website, True Cost of Healthcare, for the flavor of his work.
“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Over decades I have had much “discomfort of thought” over the origin and meaning of the Second Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Who is “well-regulat[ing]”? Does security of “a free State” refer to the “state” of an individual, one of the states of the union, or the whole country?
Recently, I became aware of a scholarly article published in the Winter 1998 edition of the U.C. Davis Law Review that definitively answers these questions. The article sets the Second Amendment in the tumultuous politics swirling at the time the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written and ratified. The article, written by Carl T. Bogus is entitled “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.” It an engaging read (even without the many footnotes), but quite long. You can download it here.
Professor Bogus makes a convincing argument that the Second Amendment was written to counter anti-Federalist attempts to scuttle ratification of the Constitution by pumping up slave state fears of federal government. The Constitution, as presented for ratification (and as eventually ratified), gave the U.S. President and U.S. Congress control over the “Militia.” Anti-federalist (i.e. anti-ratification), southern state slaveholders like Patrick Henry (of “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” fame) drummed up fear that federal control of the Militia could result in southerners losing control over the slave patrols that kept them safe from slave rebellion. James Madison who wrote and assembled what we now recognize as The Bill of Rights offered the Second Amendment as yet another compromise with slavers. In this light the “State” in the amendment refers to the southern slave states, the “Militia” refers to the state-regulated slave patrols, and the Second Amendment becomes one more of the twisted compromises necessary to bind states together as the United States under the just-drafted Constitution.
Professor Bogus’s detailed historical analysis offers a window on the messiness of the founding of our country that we are not taught in school. It torpedos the myth we are taught of the origins and necessity of the Second Amendment.
I became aware of Carl Bogus’s work by reading a provocative March 23 blog post by Thom Hartmann. Hartmann’s post owes much to Bogus’s article and lays out much of the professor’s argument in a shorter form.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Thom Hartmann’s Blog Post:
Another mass gun murder just happened in America, the seventh in 7 days, and already “Second Amendment legislators” are offering the 2021 version of thoughts and prayers. Lauren Boebert just tweeted, “May God be with them.” Standing in front of her wall of assault weapons, most likely.
And, of course, today on rightwing talk radio and Fox News they’ve already begun lengthy bloviation about the Second Amendment. So, let’s just clear a few things up.
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, an action necessary to get Virginia’s vote to ratify the Constitution.
It had nothing whatsoever to do with making sure mass murderers could shoot up public venues and schools. Founders including Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that, and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South they were called “slave patrols,” and were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”
It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?” It was a largely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the answer: Well-regulated militias kept enslaved people in chains.
Sally E. Haden, in her brilliant and essential book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, “Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller.” There were exemptions so “men in critical professions” like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 — including physicians and ministers — had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down uprisings by enslaved men and women. As I detail in my book The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, slavery can only exist in a police state, which the South had become by the early 1700s, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
Southerners worried that if the anti-slavery folks in the North could figure out a way to disband — or even move out of the state — those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service enslaved men from the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, along with the southern economic and social “ways of life.”
These two possibilities worried southerners like slaveholder James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 enslaved humans) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death” Henry (Virginia’s largest slaveholder).
Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise an army, could also allow that federal army to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free their enslaved men, women and children.
This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. “Liberty to Slaves” was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington’s army.
Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through the newly-forming United States offering them military service.
At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:
“Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . . .
“By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither … this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory.”
George Mason expressed a similar fear:
“The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution]…”
Henry then bluntly laid it out:
“If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia.”
And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?
“In this state,” he said, “there are 236,000 Blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. … May Congress not say, that every Black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free.”
Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he worried they’d use the new Constitution they were then debating ratifying to free the South’s slaves (a process then called “Manumission”).
The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing):
“[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission,” said Henry. “And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the ‘general defence and welfare’? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?
“This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper [the Constitution] speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”
He added: “This is a local [Southern] matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress.”
James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid.
“I was struck with surprise,” Madison said, “when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not.”
But the southern slavemasters’ fears wouldn’t go away.
Patrick Henry even argued that southerner’s “property” (enslaved humans) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil:
“In this situation,” Henry said to Madison, “I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone.”
So Madison, who had (at Jefferson’s insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias.
His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
But Henry, Mason and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word “country” to the word “state,” and redrafted the Second Amendment into today’s form:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations would use his slave patrol militia amendment to protect their “right” to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder people in schools, theaters and stores, and use the profits to own their own political party.
In today’s America, you have the “right” to a gun, but no “right” to healthcare or education. In every other developed country in the world, the reality is the exact opposite.
Pointing out how ludicrous this has become, David Sirota (and colleagues) writes in his Daily Poster newsletter today: “Last week, the National Rifle Association publicly celebrated its success in striking down an assault weapons ban in Boulder, Colorado. Five days later, Boulder was the scene of a mass shooting, reportedly with the same kind of weapon that the city tried to ban.”
The Second Amendment was never meant to make it easier for mass shooters to get assault weapons, and America needs rational gun policy to join the other civilized nations of this planet who aren’t the victims of daily mass killings.
Various Republican defenders of Georgia’s new voting law have the audacity to claim, with a straight face, that the law “expands” voting rights. They must not have read the plain words of the 98 page law. If they have read it, they must be assuming their listeners will not.
On Friday April 2nd Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein of the New York Times went to the trouble of actually reading and analyzing the law that has resulted, among other things, in Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest. The article itself is a scathing point by point layout of the meaning of the words of the law. If you have access to the NYTimes (or haven’t used up your free articles) here’s the link: What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does. I’ve pasted the article’s summary below. (Note that clicking any one of the bullet points will take you to the NYTimes article.)
Here are the most significant changes to voting in the state, as written into the new law:
The no food and water clause has gotten quite a bit of press, simply because it is so blatantly inhumane, but it is actually one of the least of the sweeping efforts to differentially strangle voting rights that are contained in this law. The words of the law result in cutting the number of drop boxes in most of metropolitan Atlanta (a predominantly Democratic area) from 94 to 23 while at the same time limiting access to them to government hours only. As a Washington State voter who often drops his ballot in a drop box in that late evening or early morning at an outdoor drop box at the local library, that restriction hits home. Still more chilling is the partisan legislature’s takeover of election control from the Georgia Secretary of State and county election officials. Recall that Brad Raffensperger, the current SOS, stood up to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn Georgia’s election result—and recorded the conference call as evidence. Raffensperger succeeded Brian Kemp as Secretary of State. Kemp became the current governor (and signer of this law) by purging the voter roles and then overseeing his own election to the governorship.
For a close look at Brian Kemp and the history of voter suppression in Georgia (and elsewhere) watch All In: The Fight for Democracy available on Amazon Prime.
There are several ways to fight this egregious attempt to breathe new life into Jim Crow. Support the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Georgia NAACP, and other groups that have filed legal challenges to the law. Support the growing chorus of corporations that have issued statements condemning this anti-democratic power grab—and urge them to quit funding the political campaigns of those who voted for the law. (See Judd Legum, Popular Information.) But most importantly, learn about H.R.1/S1, the For the People Act, currently under consideration in the U.S. Senate, a bill that would supersede not only Georgia’s voter suppression but that of other states as well. (Of course, that also means encouraging Senators to scrap the filibuster.)
You will hear the howl of “states’ rights!!” a howl that arose from the South in response 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to our Constitution enacted following the Civil War. These are Amendments that for some years (under federal oversight) expanded the right to vote against the will of many white Southerners. The descendants those Southerns are the ones seen tear-gassing and beating voting rights marchers, including John Lewis, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in film clips from the 1960s. Having made that connection, and having traveled a little in the South in that decade, the words “states’ rights” are forever tainted.
You will also hear that H.R.1/S1 is “unconstitutional.” Those people need to read the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 4 Elections reads [the bold is mine]:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
H.R.1/S1, the For the People Act, polls well among both Democrats and Republicans for the simple reason that it defends what most Americans feel is important: bolstering the voice of the people and shining light on big money influence in politics. The Act is so popular that wordmeisters hired by wealthy Republican cannot find an argument that sways voters against it. They conclude that to block the Act they will have resort to “under the Dome” strategies—a scathing indictment of their intent.¹
There is no issue that is more fundamental to the preservation and furtherance of our democracy than the passage of the For the People Act. Pay attention. Add your voice. Write to your Senators. Talk with people—this should not be a partisan issue. Donate your support.
When Grover Norquist’s research showed that HR1, the For The People Act, was popular even with conservatives because it “prevents billionaires from buying elections,” the Republicans on the phone call decided they’d have to double down on their “under the dome strategy.”
“Under the dome” is GOP-speak for political obstruction in the state and federal capitols. Buying off legislators and twisting arms. Threatening the political futures of people who may do what’s best for the country but doesn’t enrich the billionaires. The sort of thing they’ve been all about for 40 years now, instead of the people’s business.
Amid the rollout of the Biden Infrastructure Plan and the trial of Derek Chauvin one might have missed an exposé published in The New Yorker on March 29, 2021. Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money (and my favorite investigative journalist) reported on a presentation of conservative billionaire-funded messaging research intended to generate methods to swing public opinion against H.R.1/S.1, the For the People Act. The conclusion? The bill is too popular. The only way to stop it is to resort to “under-the-dome-type strategies” political maneuvering, calling in political chits from purchased Republican senators.
Along with expanding access to voting, the For the People Act would require exposure of the sources of funding of “independent” groups bankrolling political influence campaigns. The law would roll back some of the widely-hated effects of the infamous 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC. Citizens United applied First Amendment speech protections to corporations, setting up “corporate personhood” and fueling a vast increase in untraceable money invested in political speech.
The corporate billionaires funding the messaging research learned that the general public, including a majority of Republicans, are very much in favor of more transparency—and there is no effective argument against this public opinion. Jane Mayer’s article, copied below, is a must-read.
Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century
On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation—even among Republican voters.
In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.
A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.
Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”
As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”
McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”
Gretchen Reiter, the senior vice-president of communications for Stand Together, declined to respond to questions about the conference call or the Koch group’s research showing the robust popularity of the proposed election reforms. In an e-mailed statement, she said, “Defending civil liberties requires more than a sound bite,” and added that the group opposes the bill because “a third of it restricts First Amendment rights.” She included a link to an op-ed written by a member of Americans for Prosperity, another Koch-affiliated advocacy group, which argues that the legislation violates donors’ freedom of expression by requiring the disclosure of the names of those who contribute ten thousand dollars or more to nonprofit groups involved in election spending. Such transparency, the op-ed suggests, could subject donors who prefer to remain anonymous to retaliation or harassment.
The State Policy Network, a confederation of right-wing think tanks with affiliates in every state, convened the conference call days after the Democrats’ twin victories in the Senate runoffs in Georgia, which meant that the Party had won the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, making it likely that the For the People Act would move forward. Participants included Heather Lauer, the executive director of People United for Privacy, a conservative group fighting to keep nonprofit donors’ identities secret, and Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, who expressed alarm at the damage that the disclosure provisions could do. “The left is not stupid, they’re evil,” he warned. “They know what they’re doing. They have correctly decided that this is the way to disable the freedom movement.”
Coördinating directly with the right-wing policy groups, which define themselves as nonpartisan for tax purposes, were two top Republican congressional staffers: Caleb Hays, the general counsel to the Republicans on the House Administration Committee, and Steve Donaldson, a policy adviser to McConnell. “When it comes to donor privacy, I can’t stress enough how quickly things could get out of hand,” Donaldson said, indicating McConnell’s concern about the effects that disclosure requirements would have on fund-raising. Donaldson added, “We have to hold our people together,” and predicted that the fight is “going to be a long one. It’s going to be a messy one.” But he insisted that McConnell was “not going to back down.” Neither Donaldson nor Hays responded to requests for comment. David Popp, a spokesperson for McConnell, said, “We don’t comment on private meetings.”
Nick Surgey, the executive director of Documented, a progressive watchdog group that investigates corporate money in politics, told me it made sense that McConnell’s staffer was on the call, because the proposed legislation “poses a very real threat to McConnell’s source of power within the Republican Party, which has always been fund-raising.” Nonetheless, he said that the close coördination on messaging and tactics between the Republican leadership and technically nonpartisan outside-advocacy groups was “surprising to see.”
The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passghts in a half-century.” It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawing—and often gerrymandering—congressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bill’s sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights “sick” and “un-American.” He declared, “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”
But as the State Policy Network’s conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as “social welfare” organizations, which don’t publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in the 2020 federal election cycle more than a billion dollars was spent by dark-money groups that masked the identity of their donors. Of that total, more than six hundred and fifty-four million dollars came from just fifteen groups. The top spender was One Nation, a dark-money social-welfare group tied to McConnell. The For the People Act requires greater disclosure of the identities of donors who pay for election ads—including those released on digital platforms, which currently fall outside of such legal scrutiny. It also requires that donors who give ten thousand dollars or more to social-welfare groups be identified, if that donation is spent to sway elections. Donors who fund non-election-oriented activities by such groups can remain anonymous. And, notably, the legislation calls for the disclosure, for the first time, of large donors trying to exert control over the selection of judicial nominees. This provision appears to target groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network, on the right, and Demand Justice, on the left, which have mounted multimillion-dollar public-advocacy campaigns to influence the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign-finance-reform advocate in favor of the legislation, said that the conference call showed that “wealthy special interests are working hard to protect a broken status quo, where billionaires and corporations are free to secretly buy influence.” After listening to the recording, Fischer, who directs the Campaign Legal Center’s Federal Reform Program, added that it exposed “the reality that cracking down on political corruption and ending dark money is popular with voters across the political spectrum.”
On the call, McKenzie, the Koch operative, cited one “ray of hope” in the fight against the reforms, noting that his research found that the most effective message was arguing that a politically “diverse coalition of groups opposed” the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union. “In our message example that we used, we used the example of A.C.L.U., Planned Parenthood, and conservative organizations backed by Charles Koch as an example of groups that oppose H.R. 1,” he said. “I think, you know, when you put that in front of people . . . they’re, like, ‘Oh, conservatives and some liberal groups all oppose this, like, I should maybe think about this more. You know, there must be bigger implications to this if these groups are all coming together on it.’ ”
However, that test message was inaccurate. Planned Parenthood does not oppose the For the People Act. It is, in fact, on a list of organizations giving the legislation their full backing. And the A.C.L.U. supports almost all of the expansions of voting rights contained in the bill, although it has sided with the Koch groups and other conservative organizations in arguing that donors to nonprofit groups could be harassed if their names are disclosed. Advocates for greater transparency in political spending argue that there is no serious evidence of any such harassment. Asked if she could cite any examples, Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the A.C.L.U., said that the only one she knew about was atypical—the online backlash experienced by the actor Mila Kunis, after she had made a donation to a pro-abortion group in the name of Mike Pence, a staunch opponent of abortion rights.
With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”
Pressure tactics from dark-money groups may work on individual lawmakers. The legislation faces an uphill fight in the Senate. But, as the January 8th conference call shows, opponents of the legislation have resorted to “under-the-dome-type strategies” because the broad public is against them when it comes to billionaires buying elections.
Matt Shea, former WA State Representative from LD4 (Spokane Valley north to Mt. Spokane) has been transformed into the pastor of the Covenant Church. In a non-denominational church like Covenant, becoming pastor requires no theological training and no vetting by a wider church organization. It only requires a congregation willing to be led, in this case a congregation groomed by Ken Peters, the former pastor who has moved on to a congregation in Knoxville, Tennessee, with time off to attend the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C. Matt Shea’s new post is located at 3506 W. Princeton Ave on the near north side of Spokane.
The general feel of the Covenant Church website is familiar to anyone who grew up in any form of Protestantism. “In authentic church community, there is true friendship, grace and a full life of learning and growing together in faith, holiness, love, community and a focus on eternity,” (from the “About” webpage) is pretty standard Protestant wording. Photos of large, smiling families abound.
I imagine most of you know what to expect at a Sunday morning 11AM Protestant church service, right? On March 14, 2021, at Matt Shea’s Covenant Church the 11AM service was, shall we say, unusual by Protestant standards. Dr. Simone Gold, M.D., was the featured guest speaker. The following link to the youtube video of the service covers the entire hour and a half. I recommend that you slide to the 37:00 mark and check out the short video introducing Dr. Gold and the first two or three minutes of her talk. She begins with a political conspiracy theory around the naming of the pandemic. She goes on to address the safety of hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) (it’s pretty safe) while failing to mention there are no reputable studies that support its utility against Covid-19. Then she tries to tie current day scientific consensus to the Nazi’s embrace of eugenics, all of this from a podium adorned with a cross.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyXQkxY0RPk
Dr. Gold is the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, composed of a small cadre of M.D.s who gained notoriety for making unsubstantiated claims about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of Covid-19 in a video taken in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. The video went viral with the help of Trump family promotion. It was later removed from Facebook for promoting misinformation. Dr. Stella Emmanuel, M.D. was briefly made infamous as the featured speaker for the group. (Notably, Dr. Emmanuel now practices in a strip mall in Texas and is the founder of Fire Power Ministries where Dr Stella is self-proclaimed, “God’s Warrior Princess.”)
Dr. Gold is also notable for her participation in the January 6 insurrection. Listen to just the first few minutes of her presentation Covenant and decide for yourself if this is a church service or a far right wing political rally promoting conspiracy theories.
Pastor Matt Shea hasn’t converted to a career of tending his Covenant flock and comforting the ill and dying. With his sidekick at Covenant, Caleb Collier (former City of Spokane Valley councilperson and current field coordinator for the John Birch Society), Shea is still pedaling conspiracy theories to the gullible all over the Inland Northwest.
Unfortunately, tiny groups of true believers like America’s Frontline Doctors can seem far bigger, more credible, far more authoritative than is reasonable. A person with an M.D. behind their name (no matter their actual expertise and credibility in the medical community), who is possessed of a true believer mentality, a yen for self promotion, a gift for posing as a victim of “cancel culture,” and the basic funds and knowhow to produce a website like AFLDScan appear far more believable than their numbers or claimed expertise can possibly justify.
The only antidote to this is sunshine and a little research. The conspiracy theories of Matt Shea, Simone Gold, and “America’s Frontline Doctors” are only believable if one is insulated from wider reality and not taken in by a flashy website or a pastor’s endorsement.
This is a big deal. Patty Murray (D-WA) has served in the U.S. Senate for twenty-nine years. She is the sixth-most senior member of the Senate and the third-most senior Democrat. Often when you see a video clip of Senate Majority Leader Charles (Chuck) Schumer speaking on the Senate floor, you see Senator Murray at her desk right behind him. When Patty Murray indicates a shift in her position on legislation, the shift is well-thought-out.
“The For the People Act is essential to making sure our democracy stays a democracy,” Murray told The Spokesman-Review in a statement, “and I will consider every legislative option, including an exemption to the filibuster, to ensure it can be signed into law.”
Last Thursday the Republican dominated legislature of the State of Georgia passed the most naked act of voter suppression since the Jim Crow laws of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp took pains to sign the bill into law that evening. Operating under the duplicitous banner of unsubstantiated “voter fraud” pushed by Donald Trump the new law:
…requires voters to submit ID information with both an absentee ballot request and the ballot itself. It limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited challenges to a voter’s qualifications, cuts the runoff election period from nine to four weeks, and significantly shortens the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot. (The Guardian)
But the most twisted and petty part of the law, a part that should catch the eye of everyone, is the piece that outlaws giving food or drink to voters, conjuring up an image of long lines of Georgia voters waiting for hours in the hot sun to cast their ballots at a restricted number of polling places. The words of the law are, of course, less obvious, but the anti-democratic effect is clear, when considered in the context of the rest of the restrictions:
“No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector,” the new law states. The law applies within 150 feet of a polling place or within 25 feet of any voter at a polling place. Violators are guilty of a misdemeanor. (CNN)
Republican operatives in Georgia were in such a rush to get this law enacted that didn’t pick their words carefully enough to adequately disguise their intent. And, in a final act of anti-democratic transparency, Governor Kemp signed the bill into law attended by six white men standing below an image of a road in a plantation in a state that is nearly a third black. Meanwhile, Black female Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon was arrested, handcuffed, and escorted away by Georgia State troopers for knocking on Governor Kemp’s office door arguing for transparency in the bill signing. (It was an all white closed-door affair.) So much for attempts at political optics.
Surely there will be court challenges to the Georgia law, but the question is whether there will be injunctive relief from the law in time to blunt its effect on the 2022 midterm elections. It should be lost on no one that the election by Georgia’s voters of Raphael Warnock, a Black pastor, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish investigative journalist, both Democrats, to the U.S. Senate in 2020 is the motivation for Georgia Republicans’ bald-faced anti-democratic power grab.
As long as the Republican minority in the U.S. Senate under Mitch McConnell can stonewall all House-passed legislation with nothing more than the email threat of a filibuster, state-level Republicans anti-voter legislation (all 253 bills) will strangle the ability of Americans to vote.
That’s where Patty Murray’s recent endorsement of “consider[ing] every legislative option, including an exemption to the filibuster” to get the For the People Act passed. The For the People Act would cut short much of these state level Republican efforts to suppress voting by populations that are statistically less likely to vote Republican.
Like every Senator and Representative, Patty Murray tries to keep her finger on the pulse of the people that keep her in public office. She senses a tidal change. As the tide turns those Senate Democrats still reluctant to tinker with the filibuster will feel the tidal pressure, especially for this particular bill.
I used to think one didn’t need to register one’s opinion with an elected official one sensed as being on one’s side. I was wrong. These people do not operate in a vacuum. There has been a concerted effort to encourage Senator Murray to make this announcement. Now is the time to contact her office and register your approval of her stance. Then call Senator Cantwell’s (D-WA) office and urge her to add her voice to the chorus.
P.S. Attributed to “@DearAuntCrabby”: “The cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal is blocking so much important and useful stuff they have decided to rename it ‘The Mitch McConnell.’”
True to form, McConnell is so uncomfortable with the legislation that might be passed if the filibuster thrown out that he threatened a “scorched earth Senate” of partisan gridlock. The best response I’ve read to McConnell’s bluster is:
…the Republican leader’s pitch is burdened by a circular, self-defeating message: McConnell’s core argument is that if Democrats try to pass legislation, he’ll make it more difficult to pass legislation, so they should simply be satisfied doing nothing, or he’ll take steps to make sure they do nothing. (MSNBC)
McConnell himself, in modifying the rules in order to take over the Supreme Court, is the personification of what the Democratic Senate majority must do now. Unless they wish to return to minority status in 2022 the Democrats need to pass the legislation they promised in 2020. First and foremost is the promise to restore voting rights.
