We begin today with Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, reporting on Number 45’s totalitarian plans for ruling the United States should he win the 2024 presidential election.
[Trump et al’s] plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
There have been a few stories prior to this Times story about Trump’s plans for the country should he win in 2024 (including a previous one by Jonathan Swan).
I guess that Mitt Romney’s “quiet rooms” have gone the way of dogwhistles in the MAGA Party.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times declares that yes, let’s politicize the weather.
But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all.
First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight.
Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub.
Carolyn Kousky, Karina French, Carlos Martin, and Manann Donoghoe of the Brookings Institution propose changes to the process of federally declaring disasters—and distributing aid to those who need it.
A formal trigger for federal involvement in a regional hazard event is reasonable and warranted. But the declaration process created decades ago has produced several unintended consequences, detailed below:
The number of federally declared disasters has increased significantly since the Stafford Act’s passage in 1988, driven by several trends beyond objectively measured damages. Figure 2 shows the number of declarations going back to 1998. The largest number of declarations was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the president issued declarations across the country. There was also an outsized number of declarations in 2011—a year with a string of catastrophes including wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding.
The rising number of declarations is driven not only by changing hazard frequency and continued development in high-risk areas, but also shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery. This includes different forms of political bias driving governors and presidential administrations’ decisionmaking process, and differences in state governments’ capacity and experience navigating the declaration process. While there are a few examples of declarations being denied for political ends, the overall trend has been in favor of more declarations.
Clara Hendrickson of the Detroit Free Press explains how the Michigan state House might lose its very slim Democratic majority without elections for those House seats taking place.
Two Democratic state representatives are running for mayor in their respective cities: Kevin Coleman in Westland and Lori Stone in Warren. If they win, they'll vacate their seats in the Legislature early before finishing their terms.
Their mayoral bids come after they were both reelected to the state House with historic victories for their party: Democrats secured control of both chambers of the Legislature for the first time since 1983. Democrats used their new − but narrow − majorities to undo GOP labor laws, enact new gun safety measures and remove abortion restrictions.
City elections this fall could usher in another shift in state politics, one that hasn't occurred in nearly 30 years. If both Coleman and Stone win mayoral elections, they would leave behind a split state House with 54 Democrats and 54 Republicans. The last time the chamber was evenly divided along partisan lines was in 1994.
Piper French of Bolts Magazine reports on efforts to get Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards to commute all death sentences.
Clemency is often conceived of as a discrete and individual mercy—as an exception, the opposite of policy. On death row, we picture it as an eleventh-hour decision to spare a person’s life following efforts by advocates to highlight the tragic or unjust circumstances of their case. But here, the petitioners say that in highlighting people’s stories, they’re not trying to persuade public officials to handpick which of the 57 is most deserving of mercy.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has declared that executing someone with an intellectual disability is unconstitutional, a criterion that fits 40 percent of the people on Louisiana’s death row. Thirty-nine of the 57 have been diagnosed with brain damage or serious mental illness. Three quarters are people of color, the vast majority of them Black. Many allege prosecutorial misconduct and sorely deficient legal support. “We are executing the most vulnerable people in our population,” said Calvin Duncan, an exoneree who served as a jailhouse lawyer to many on death row for about 19 of the 28 years he spent wrongfully locked up.
Time is running out. Edwards leaves office in early January, and the frontrunner to succeed him staunchly supports the death penalty. The next few months will determine whether Edwards translates his philosophical opposition to capital punishment into action by trying to speed up the process and by commuting every death sentence he can before his term is up.
Emily Rauhala of The Washington Post reports on a heightening of U.S./Russia/China tensions in the Arctic region.
For several years now, European and U.S. security and intelligence officials have been keeping a closer eye on the world above the Arctic Circle, knowing that melting polar ice will open new trade routes, propel a race for natural resources and reshape global security. Western officials watched as Russia revived Soviet-era military sites and while China planned a “Polar Silk Road.”
But the war in Ukraine and the dramatic deterioration of Western relations with Moscow have put the frostbitten borderlands between Norway and Russia on heightened alert, while increasing the geostrategic importance of the Arctic.
The result is an uptick in military, diplomatic and intelligence interest that could usher in an iteration of the “Great Game,” the 19th-century rivalry between the British and Russian empires for influence in Asia.
For Russia, because the war in Ukraine has diminished Moscow’s conventional military forces and hobbled the Russian economy, its Arctic assets have become more critical. “The Arctic has become more important because the nukes are more important,” said Maj. Gen. Lars Sivert Lervik, the chief of the Norwegian army.
Wolfgang Münchau writes for The New Statesman that the European Union “is structurally not equipped” to admit Ukraine.
For the past ten years the EU has been trying to increase its powers through the back door. It has been using novel legal instruments to make up for the lack of a right to raise taxes and issue debt. My favourite example was a €300bn-plus investment plan, first proposed in 2014 by Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission. It ended up mostly as a reclassification of existing investments, with an EU label stuck on them.
A more recent example of the gulf between lofty ambitions and financial reality was the recovery fund, agreed in 2020 after the start of the pandemic. This time it was real money – again, well over €300bn in grants. I can’t count the number of commentators who rushed to declare that this was the EU’s Hamiltonian moment – the beginnings of an EU fiscal union. But it was not to be.
The EU still relied on its members to guarantee the debt. The financial markets saw right through it. EU debt now trades at a premium interest rate compared with that of its member states. This was not supposed to happen.
You cannot fudge your way into geopolitical leadership in this manner. For that you need real money. It would also require a constitutional treaty to establish a fiscal union – the EU as it is constituted today cannot act as a global power, or even deliver economic stimulus. It can still run a successful single market or customs union. It can regulate markets. But it cannot do what it really wants to do – become a geopolitical actor, a force for freedom, and a leader in green energy.
Or, for that matter, accept Ukraine as a member state.
Sylvia Chang and Kelly Ng of BBC News have an interesting story on Chinese Gen Zers who have opted to return to their parents’ homes because of burnout.
Gruelling work hours and a dismal job market are forcing young Chinese to make unusual choices.
Julie is part of a growing cohort that call themselves "full-time children" who are driven back to the comfort of home either because they are craving a break from their exhausting work lives, or they simply cannot find a job.
Young Chinese, who had always been told that the hard work they put in studying and chasing degrees would pay off, are now feeling defeated and trapped.
Finally today, Ana María Sanhueza of El País in English writes that after 50 years, the Criminal Chamber of Chile’s Supreme Court will review the case of ex-military personnel believed to be responsible for the death of Chilean singer-songwriter and political activist Victor Jara.
Víctor Jara was arrested on September 12, one day after the coup led by Army General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), together with the Armed Forces, which overthrew Socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and ushered in a 17-year dictatorship. He had gone to the Universidad Técnica del Estado (UTE), where he worked, after hearing a call from the president to defend the government of the Unidad Popular (UP).
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It is a legal case that began in 1978 when Jara’s widow, with the help of the criminal lawyer Luis Ortiz Quiroga, filed the first lawsuit for the murder of the singer-songwriter in the Fifth Criminal Court of Santiago. It happened in the middle of the dictatorship, with all the odds stacked against her, “at a time when nothing at all was being investigated,” Nelson Caucoto, the lawyer who took up the case 24 years ago and who will argue before the Supreme Court, told EL PAÍS. But, he adds, some progress was made.
For example, starting in 1979, the Chilean justice system sent dozens of requests internationally to interrogate Chileans in exile who had been detained in the Chile Stadium, today named the Víctor Jara Stadium. It was a complex search, because there, in the center of Santiago, thousands of people were imprisoned by order of the dictatorship. The lawyer recalls that it was Joan Jara who managed to locate the witnesses.
Have the best possible day, everyone!