How Extreme Is Speaking In Tongues Handmaid Amy Coney Island? She Belongs On The Bench As Much As Trump Belongs In The Oval Office

Before dawn on Wednesday, Frank Schaeffer, the world's leading expert on the sociology (and pathology) of evangelism, was up and tweeting. "It wasn't enough for Trump to nominate a pro-life Catholic to the Court," he wrote. "He had to pick a Catholic who is also a part of and leader in, an extremist protestant-style Pentecostal cult of domination and control that even most evangelicals find crazy. Amy Coney Barrett: Nutcase." Yep... a nut case who is better suited to be a minister in a fringe religious cult than a judge on any kind of a court of law, let alone the U.S. Supreme Court. It makes sense that the worst president in history would pick the worst judicial nominees in history. And Coney Island is the worst yet.

On Tuesday, the Christian Science Monitor published a deep dive into Coney Island by Henry Glass, who began by explaining the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, an arm of the ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which aims to train Christian lawyers to "foster legal systems that fully protect our God-given rights." Glass noted that "The program’s student and teacher alumni now include dozens of law clerks, a U.S. senator, and at least six federal judges-- most notably Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who could soon become the youngest member of the U.S Supreme Court. The reach of the ADF and other conservative Christian legal organizations is further still. If Judge Barrett is confirmed, it would represent a culmination of decades-long efforts by the conservative Christian legal movement to move from the periphery of the legal world into the mainstream. And it is coming at the same time that fewer Americans-- just 65%-- identify themselves as Christian."

The ADF is one of several richly funded conservative Christian legal organizations (CCLOs) that constitute that movement, training lawyers, arguing-- and winning-- high-profile religious liberty cases in the courts, and increasing their influence on policy and politics. That movement is now reaching maturity, and law in the U.S. is thus poised to shift-- starting perhaps as soon as the Supreme Court term that began this week-- substantially toward favoring religious liberty over all other rights, legal experts say.

Indeed, among the movement’s stated goals is the protection of free exercise of religion as a fundamental right above all others. Such a shift in the law could prompt the diminishment of other rights, such as abortion access and same-sex marriage. CCLO attorneys, for their part, say that they just want to ensure that courts give religious beliefs the respect and protection they deserve.

“True tolerance, where people of different views and faiths can peacefully coexist-- that is ultimately what we’re advocating for,” says Matt Sharp, senior counsel for the ADF.

Judge Barrett, a former professor at Notre Dame Law School whom President Donald Trump appointed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, is expected to begin her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court next week. A devout Roman Catholic, she has no direct affiliations with any CCLOs, and in her brief time on the 7th Circuit she has not developed a deep record on religious liberty or other rights, like abortion and same-sex marriage, with which it has often conflicted.

If confirmed, she would join a conservative high court that has been incrementally expanding free exercise protections along with other rights that conservative Christians see as limiting their religious freedom.

CCLOs began to form around this issue decades ago, says Jordan Sekulow, executive director of another leading Christian legal organization, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). The establishment clause in the First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment of religion by Congress, “had basically eaten the free exercise of religion away.”

“It shouldn’t be more important than any other First Amendment right, but it was trampled on,” he adds. “And I wouldn’t say it’s come back.”

...The conservative religious movement began in the late 1970s and ’80s as a reaction to what it saw as an erosion of traditional family values and government intrusion on religion-- most notably to end racial segregation in Christian schools. But groups like Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority still struggled to break into Washington’s elite circles.

“They’ve been outsiders to the mainstream of the conservative legal movement,” says Joshua Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver who studies the Christian conservative movement.

So, he adds, “they developed their own institutions and resources to make a parallel conservative Christian movement.”

Conservative legal groups like the ADF, ACLJ, the Becket Fund, the First Liberty Institute, and the Thomas More Society were all formed in the 1990s.

Most of these groups are tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofits, and thus not required to publicly identify donors. But they are well funded, with the ADF raising almost $61 million, the ACLJ almost $23 million, and the Becket Fund almost $7 million, according to their most recent 12-month tax-filing period. (For comparison, Lambda Legal, a national nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ rights, raised just over $17 million in the 12 months of its most recent tax filing.)

And unlike their common opponents on the left, conservative Christian legal groups have always focused entirely on religious liberty issues.

“They have a longing for what religious liberty protections were before 1990,” says Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School and founder-director of the school’s Law, Rights and Religion Project.

“They’re trying to have the courts reread the Constitution in a way that elevates religious liberty rights over all other individual rights, as well as the public interest.”

“Positive change”

Some of the Supreme Court’s more conservative justices agree. This week, in a short opinion declining to hear a case related to same-sex marriage, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito criticized Obergefell v. Hodges, the court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, as having “ruinous consequences for religious liberty” by “choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right.”

The court’s recent grappling with religious liberty claims has focused primarily on two issues: religious institutions’ ability to access state funding, and religious individuals’ ability to exercise their beliefs around sexual norms in public life and in their private business.

For the most part, the court has narrowly favored religious liberty. Religious institutions and businesses have been granted exemptions from contraception mandates. Religious schools have been given access to state funding. A state has been rebuked for punishing a Christian cake shop owner for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Many of these cases have been pushed by CCLOs.

Of the 11 cases it has been lead counsel for at the Supreme Court, the Becket Fund has won nine. The ADF had more Supreme Court wins in First Amendment cases than any other litigant between 2013 and 2017, according to Empirical SCOTUS. In every religious liberty case the court hears, there are usually friend-of-the-court briefs filed by CCLOs.

The hundreds of mostly young, conservative federal judges appointed by President Trump-- not least Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh-- have certainly helped in that regard, say lawyers for conservative Christian groups.

“We’ve seen a lot of positive change on the courts,” says Michael Berry, general counsel for the First Liberty Institute. “By and large the president [has a strong] record of nominating originalist, constitutionalist judges.”

And among the more than 200 judges the Senate has confirmed are six who are alumni of conservative Christian legal organizations. Those six include Kyle Duncan, a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was general counsel for the Becket Fund, and  Lawrence VanDyke, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was a Blackstone fellow and listed by the ADF as an “allied attorney.”

Judge Barrett’s short tenure on the 7th Circuit hasn’t brought any rulings from her on issues like abortion, marriage equality, or free exercise rights. But she is a popular nominee for social conservatives, and if confirmed would likely align with the court’s most conservative justices.

...If you ask CCLO attorneys what the “end” is, most say it’s for the free exercise of religion to have the protection and deference of a fundamental right.





In a landmark 1990 opinion, the late Justice Antonin Scalia explained why courts have chosen to not do that.

The case, Employment Division v. Smith, concerned whether it was unconstitutional to deny state unemployment benefits to two Native American men for ingesting peyote, a controlled substance, as part of their religious ceremonies.

But obligating someone to obey a law only when it coincides with their religious beliefs, wrote Justice Scalia, “permit[s] him, by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’”

The case this term concerns a Catholic agency being banned from the city of Philadelphia’s foster program because it refuses to license same-sex couples. The court-- which by the scheduled Nov. 4 oral argument may include a newly appointed Justice Barrett-- could overturn Scalia’s opinion in Smith. As a result, it could be much easier for religious objectors to gain exemptions from laws.

“Some religious exemptions are appropriate and necessary,” says Professor Franke, the Columbia Law School scholar. But “they need to be given sparingly, or else we really undermine democracy itself.”

Special protection for religious liberty is especially needed now “to ensure that those viewed as ‘out of step’ [with social and cultural change] are not effectively expelled from society,” writes Catholic Archbishop Jerome Listecki of Milwaukee in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the case.

“That anticipated time is already here,” he adds, quoting Justice Alito’s dissent in Obergefell that those with “out of step” views “will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

Persecution of Christians is a major concern for CCLOs and jurists like Justice Alito. In one concurrence last term, he compared the anti-Catholic animus that motivated 18th-century laws banning public funding for religious schools to the racial animus that motivated Jim Crow laws. He illustrated the point with a political cartoon from the time depicting Catholic priests as crocodiles slithering toward schoolchildren.

The court struck down that state ban, continuing a trend of slowly but steadily strengthening free exercise protections. This term that pace of change could accelerate-- especially if Judge Barrett is confirmed.

Washington Post reporters Emma Brown, Jon Swaine and Michelle Boorstein wrote that while Trump's Coney Island Baby "has faced questions about how her Catholic faith might influence her jurisprudence, she has not spoken publicly about her involvement in People of Praise, a small Christian group founded in the 1970s and based in South Bend, Indiana." She admits she has served on the board of a network of private Christian schools affiliated with the group. "The organization, however, has declined to confirm that she is a member. In recent years, it removed from its website editions of a People of Praise magazine-- first those that included her name and photograph and then all archives of the magazine itself." Her role in the super-secretive, extremist organization, for all her efforts to hide it, is starting to seep out now that Trump is trying to push her onto the Supreme Court. In 2010 "she held the title of handmaid,' a leadership position for women in the community."

She comes from a territory where reigious bigots feel they are being persecuted if they can't use their "religious beliefs" to justify breaking the law and persecuting and oppressing minorities. Amy Coney Bigot is the very definition of someone who doesn't belong on the bench.

[W]hile in law school, Barrett lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles. The group was one of many to grow out of the charismatic Christian movement, which sought a more intense and communal religious experience by embracing such practices as shared living, faith healing and speaking in tongues.

Barrett’s ties to the group, which has conservative stances on the role of women in society and other social issues, did not come to light until after she was questioned by senators considering her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 2017. Senators are preparing to question her next week over her nomination to the high court.

...People of Praise was established in 1971 by Ranaghan and Paul DeCelles, then young academics at the University of Notre Dame. It was formed as a “covenant community,” in which members looking for close community promise to abide by a common agreement.

While People of Praise is open to all Christians, the vast majority are Catholic, like Barrett. At the time the group was founded, many denominations-- including the Catholic Church-- looked warily at groups that adopted different practices and created insular, separate communities. That wariness has largely subsided.

...The community was led by men, who taught members to run their families according to their interpretation of biblical views of gender roles, according to former members and group documents.

“Women were homemakers; they were there to support their husbands,” one former member said in an interview. “My dad was the head of the household and the decision-maker.”

A person who was raised in the community said she was instructed by elders not to “emasculate” her male peers by getting the better of them in conversation. “I was made aware of the difference from a young age,” the person said. “I was aware that it would have been better if I had been born a boy.”

...A 1986 community handbook obtained by The Post said each member is “personally accountable to God for his or her decisions,” but also emphasized “obedience to authority and submission to headship.”

Members are typically assigned a “head” to give them spiritual leadership and guidance on life matters such as buying a car or finding a romantic partner. Younger men and women are led by older members of the same sex, according to former members, but husbands typically take over as “heads” for their wives following marriage.

Men’s “headship” of their wives, and the male-dominated governance of the community, has been the basis of accusations from some critics of Barrett that People of Praise is built on the sexist expectation that women defer to men.

The summer 2015 issue of People of Praise’s magazine, Vine & Branches, featured an article titled “Holiness in Marriage,” which it said was based on a talk given to women in the community in the 1980s by Jeanne DeCelles, wife of co-founder Paul DeCelles.

“Make it a joy for him to head you,” Jeanne DeCelles said, according to the article. “It is important for you to verbalize your commitment to submission... Tell him what you think about things, make your input, but let him make the decisions, and support them once they are made.”

Connolly said every People of Praise member is responsible for his or her own decisions. “In the People of Praise we live by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which recognizes that men and women share a fundamental equality as bearers of God’s image and sons and daughters of God,” he said. “We value independent thinking, and teach it in our schools.”

...John Fea, a prominent historian of U.S. religion at Messiah University, said Barrett would be the first Supreme Court justice to come from a charismatic Christian background.

Fea said he believes it is fair for senators to ask Barrett how she views the blending of her small, insular community and a job judging for a nation. But he said People of Praise’s belief in distinct gender roles is similar to what is lived and preached across much of America today, in faiths as different as Catholicism, the Southern Baptist Convention and orthodox Islam and Judaism.

He said that believing men should be the spiritual leaders of the family does not mean that women cannot be professionally ambitious. “Everything about Amy Coney Barrett’s career contradicts the idea that women in People of Praise can’t have careers or be successful,” he said.

...Since its earliest days, some People of Praise members have lived in communal homes or lodged with elders before marrying. Former members said this was a way for older members to show a model of family life. Over the years, multiple members stayed at the Ranaghans’ nine-bedroom house in South Bend, often while studying at Notre Dame and after graduating, former members said.

Barrett lived with the Ranaghans when she was a Notre Dame law student, according to a person who knew her at the time.

“Let’s just say it was one of the better experiences of our life. She is just a gem. But I don’t feel comfortable talking right now,” Dorothy Ranaghan told The Guardian, which first reported the fact that Barrett lived with the Ranaghans on Tuesday.

Kevin Ranaghan, a theology scholar and teacher, was already a major figure in charismatic Catholicism, speaking internationally and hosting prayer events at Notre Dame that drew hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in the movement’s early years.

Dorothy Ranaghan, a former high school religion teacher, co-wrote two books on charismatic Christianity with her husband in the years around People of Praise’s founding.

She lamented the impact of modern feminism in a 1991 essay that said “the basic differences between men and women should be respected and given cultural expression” and promoted the traditional roles of husbands as decision-makers and wives as homemakers, even as women pursue professional ambitions.

“The wife for her part is called to submit to her husband, not as a slave, but as a companion,” Ranaghan wrote, while stressing that there was “no room here for domination, oppression or of thinking of her as less than a full and free human person.” The Post obtained a copy of the essay from a former People of Praise member.

The essay also criticized a magazine for Girl Scout leaders as presenting an “overly aggressive idealization of girls and women.”

After Barrett graduated from law school in 1997, she worked in D.C. as an intern and then as a judicial clerk, according to biographical details she has submitted to the Senate.

Meanwhile, her future husband, Jesse Barrett-- whose family also had long ties to People of Praise, according to an obituary he wrote for his grandfather-- remained in South Bend to finish law school. In a court record for a February 1998 speeding offense, Jesse Barrett’s address is listed as the Ranaghans’ home.

Jesse graduated in 1999 and married Amy later that year.

...Barrett did not mention her membership in People of Praise in response to questions from the Senate about groups with which she has been affiliated, either that year or in conjunction with her current nomination.

Numerous references to Barrett and her family that previously appeared on People of Praise’s official website have since disappeared from the site, according to a Post review of versions of the site that are hosted by the Internet Archive.

Links to at least 10 issues of Vine & Branches that included mentions of Barrett or members of her family were removed from the site during the first half of 2017, the review found. On May 8, 2017, Barrett was nominated by Trump to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

In one of the removed issues, from May 2006, Barrett was pictured at the group’s 2006 Leaders Conference for Women in South Bend. An accompanying article described the gathering as “three days of talks, sharings and conversations, all of which revealed the explosive power of love.”

Other issues of the magazine that disappeared from the site included announcements of the births of some of Barrett’s children and articles that mentioned relatives of Barrett and her husband, Jesse.

The section of the People of Praise website that for years featured a gallery of links to full issues of the magazine dating back 14 years was removed from the site altogether soon after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last month, the archives show.

Connolly said the changes to the website were made “after discussions with members and nonmembers raised privacy concerns with the heightened media attention.”

The Time To Stick A Fork In Biden Is Rapidly Approaching

Biden had some more terrible news at dawn yesterday, or whenever he woke up. His numbers in California have collapsed. California, the state with 494 delegates. The only states with hauls anywhere near California are New York (320), Texas (261), Florida (248), Pennsylvania (210) and Illinois (184). Iowa only has 49 and prospects for win a significant number of them has dimmed considerably for Biden. And New Hampshire has even fewer-- 33, but Status Quo Joe had basically shut down his New Hampshire campaign and written the state off. He's pinning his hopes on the Southern Strategy: low info voters in the Southern states who aren't familiar with the racism that has fueled his career. South Carolina has 63 delegates and Biden feels he can win big there. Change Research put out yet another poll of Iowa likely Democratic caucus goers that shows Status Quo Joe's support dissolving. This one shows Bernie with 27%, Mayo with 19%, Biden with 18%, Elizabeth Warren with 15% and Klobuchar with 10%. Only the "kids" (literally voters under 65) back Bernie. He's winning every age group except 65 and older. Imagine what's going to happen when those voters-- who largely back Biden-- find out that he's spent his entire political career trying to cut Social Security and Medicare!

California has always been strong for Bernie. A private poll this week of San Fernando Valley Democratic primary voters shows Bernie running three times ahead of Biden! The L.A. Times report yesterday is clear: Bernie is "consolidating support from voters on the left, [and] has taken a clear lead in the race for California’s huge trove of Democratic convention delegates... propelled to the top in California by growing support from voters who label themselves 'very liberal'-- a shift that has come largely at the expense of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. That very liberal group makes up about 1 in 3 Democratic primary voters in the state. Along with strong support among Latinos and young voters, backing on the left is enough to give the Vermont senator support from 26% of voters likely to take part in the state’s March 3 Democratic primary."

• Bernie- 26%
• Elizabeth- 20%
• Status Quo Joe- 15%
• Mayo Pete- 7%
• Bloomberg- 6%
• Klobuchar- 5%
• Yang- 4%
• Steyer- 2%

Under state Democratic Party’s rules, the only candidates who can win any delegates are the ones who win 15% statewide or 15% in a congressional district. That eliminates Mayo, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Yang and Steyer and possibly Biden. He doesn't have to slide much to be out of the running. And, as we've seen in Iowa and New Hampshire, as voters get to know him, his numbers just keep going down-- never up.

Politico's Marc Caputo reported that Biden is now saying he doesn't need New Hampshire and his campaign "has been dark on New Hampshire television since the New Year. He has a smaller presence on the ground compared to his rivals, barely takes questions from voters, and he’s trailing in the polls here." Biden is counting on endorsements from conservative establishment politicians, not seeming to understand that no one cares about what they say. An old Florida amigo of Caputo's Biden SuperPAC head Steve Schale claims Biden is going to lose New Hampshire because the state "is home court for two top-tier candidates-- plus Gov. Patrick-- and the last three times a neighboring state candidate has competed in New Hampshire, they won." All sour grapes, he also whined that New Hampshire is "also a very expensive and inefficient state for communicating, given 80% of state is in the Boston media market." Schale is going to spend the sewer money he's collected from corporations and the very wealthy to try to save Biden in Nevada, which is a state that, if lost, could doom his campaign.

Biden’s fortress, however, is South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary, where he leads big because of strong black support. Schale summed it up this way: “Go to Nevada and South Carolina, play Moneyball on Super Tuesday-- lean in hard on the delegate map. If Bernie can’t start winning African-American voters, it looks a lot like 2016.”

...Sanders’s campaign, however, says Biden’s team is discounting the effect of Sanders picking up momentum if he starts winning early.

“If Biden comes in second in Iowa and second in New Hampshire, and it’s us against him, then he’s still viable,” a Sanders campaign adviser said. “But if he’s third or fourth in Iowa and third or fourth in New Hampshire, no one has ever, ever won the nomination coming out that weak in both those states. And then we go into Nevada and win the first three [early states]. Then what’s his argument? Sure, he’ll win South Carolina. But it’s the Saturday before Super Tuesday so it doesn’t impact things as much. Then you’ll see how weak he is. And he has no money.”

Biden’s campaign has, relative to the other top-tier candidates, struggled with fundraising. Campaign advisers say the campaign has to make tough choices about where to deploy limited resources and constantly assesses where to spend and how much-- suggesting he could shift gears to focus more on New Hampshire going forward.



...The energy level was low on Sunday when former Secretary of State John Kerry held a Biden event in the state’s biggest city, Manchester. Kerry won the city when he carried New Hampshire in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary but only two dozen people showed up, giving the former secretary of state a polite golf clap that lasted about four seconds following his 20-minute speech. One attendee, who said he was not yet a Biden supporter, joked afterward that he had just come for the free coffee.

Even some of Biden's biggest local backers admit he isn't their first choice. Instead, they are looking ahead at South Carolina to see who has both the best chance of winning the nomination and beating President Donald Trump.

Just before endorsing Biden earlier this month, Bill Shaheen, [a clueless, conservative douche bag and] a state party official who is married to Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, lamented that Michael Bennet wasn't doing better in the polls.

"I'm very strongly Michael Bennet-- there's a part of me that believes he's the person that America should choose," Shaheen said in an interview at a Bennet event. "But I also have to rule with my head, not my heart. You know, Bennet's got my heart."

Time For A Velvet Revolution In Arizona?

Earlier today, in the post about expanding The Squad, Flagstaff progressive Eva Putzova noted that "the future of this planet depends on this country getting a bigger squad." That was about the boldest comment any candidate I asked ventured. But boldness comes naturally to Eva, more so than most other congressional candidates. After all, she's been working on the front lines for a very long time-- and for real.

I have a long story about how Bill Clinton once came to call me and mix up Lou Rawls and Lou Reed and why that led to my first state banquet. If you just want the photos: here. I've only been to one state banquet at the White House in my life. It was for Czech President Vaclav Havel and the only reason I was invited was because it was pre-Google and I was the only one in President Clinton's rolodex who knew the difference between Lou Rawls and Lou Reed. It was the first time I got to meet so many people I was writing about here at DWT so often: from arch-villains like Charles Koch, Henry Kissinger, Jane Harman, Erskine Bowles, and Tipper Gore to some passing political figures of the day like Pat Danner (D-MO), Vic Fazio (D-CA), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Norman Dicks (D-WA), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Samuel Gejdenson (D-CT) and William Roth, the Roth IRA guy (R-DE) to a handful of more interesting, if extraneous, figures like Kurt Vonnegut, Mia Farrow, Eric Holder, Stevie Wonder, chess grand master Lubomir Kavalek-- and my old friend Ric Ocasek who I hadn't seen in years and who had originally helped launch my career as a record mogul by producing one of my bands, Romeo Void, on a whim. The whole guest list was geared to President Havel. (I don't think he was a Cars fan but Ocasek was married to Czech model Paulina Porizkova.) Lou Reed was the entertainment that night and Havel had long credited Lou's band, the Velvet Underground, with being the inspiration for Havel's own fortitude in breaking free from the Soviet Union. That was what Havel dubbed the Velvet Revolution-- and what Eva wrote about this week for the Arizona Daily Star: Remembering, and learning, from the Velvet Revolution.

In 1989, nearly a million people in the former Czechoslovakia-- where I was born and raised-- took to the streets to peacefully overthrow the totalitarian dictatorship of the Communist Party.

That euphoric fall changed everything for me. I would not be here today, having served on the Flagstaff City Council for four years and now running for Congress in Arizona’s first district, if the young people had not believed in the power and righteousness of their demands for sweeping reform and freedom.

Everyone was on board with taking power away from what we called the old structures-- Individuals connected to the ruling party, which lacked the moral authority to govern after failing us and betraying us for 40 years.

I was 12 years old; just old enough for my observations to inform my permanent politics. Life before the Velvet Revolution was not unbearable, but it was grim. Our air and our rivers were polluted. Common areas were littered with trash. Everybody owned everything; therefore, nobody owned anything. Our environment was colorless, gray and uninspiring.

As a child, I didn’t know what we were missing under our state-run economy, where 99.9% of the population was equally disadvantaged. My parents were loving. They didn’t worry about losing their jobs, paying medical bills or rent, or how they’d pay for my college education. As a teacher, my mom never had to buy supplies for her students.

They didn’t have some of the concerns millions of Americans do, like paying for health care. But, under that state-run economy, my parents were part of a lost generation: an entire generation whose potential and dreams were never quite realized.

A very small portion of the population had it better. The Communist Party elites were the equivalent of today’s American billionaires-- living in extreme wealth made on the backs of the working class.

Growing up in a state-run economy, experiencing the transition to a political democracy and living my adult life in a developed country with a high per-capita GDP but also some of the most egregious incidents of inequality, I became a fierce fighter for progressive policies and against political oppression. I realized corruption can come from the left or the right. I realized having one party in control of all branches of government is oppressive, and that while a two-party system is better, it’s still not enough for a true democracy.

In his book Disturbing the Peace, Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s first democratically elected president, wrote something I subscribe to more and more: “Parties should not take direct part in elections, nor should they be allowed to give anyone, a priori, the crutches of power, since when they do they inevitably become bureaucratic, corrupt, and undemocratic. They should instead provide those who participate in power-- having been elected-- with an intellectual base, with opportunities to hone their own opinions.”

Today’s big corporations are not dissimilar to state-run economies. Their employees and small shareholders are not personally invested. They see little meaning in their work. Meanwhile, our dreams as humans are universal. Whether it’s 1989 in Eastern Europe or 2019 in the United States, we need more than just the consumption that drives our everyday lives-- we need meaning, peace, fairness and the ability to negotiate our differences without the interference of powerful interests that silence us.

In our current system, I regularly remind myself what we really wanted in 1989: freedom, equality, fairness, access to opportunities and an end to oppression. We wanted the beauty we’d been deprived of; not in a trivial sense, but in the sense defined by writer Sandra Lubarsky-- “sustaining and flourishing of life-in-relationship with life.”

As we head into 2020, I hope young people in this country will find the courage to demand transformation, and, like they did in 1989 Czechoslovakia, the older generations will allow them to lead. We must do the same thing here that we did there-- remove old structures from power-- in order to get out of the climate, health care and housing crises while re-envisioning a new democracy-- equal, inclusive, just and generous.

Birth Tourism... Lots Of Little Manchurian Candidates?

I encouraged Lou Reed to play this song at a state banquet at the White House. I sat next to Orrin Hatch or Richard Lugar-- who remembers?... and whichever it was loved it and swayed to it in his seat.

I travel a lot. All over the world. I started when I was just a kid, hitchhiking first to Montreal and then to Mexico City. I loved it. That was many decades ago and I've been to every continent and to scores of countries. Some countries I go to again and again and some... some once is enough. I just got back from Thailand. I've been there over 20 times. I like Thailand. Others that I can't get enough of and have been to multiple times, sometimes for extended stays, include Morocco, Holland, France, India, Spain, Italy, the U.K., Mexico, Nepal, Turkey... Once is enough countries for me? Hong Kong, Israel, Switzerland, Myanmar, Russia. Why? The people and the food are two easily discernible factors in each group.

Last year I was in Russia for the first time. It has its moments for me for sure but, overall, I wasn't crazy about it. I didn't like the people much, especially not in Moscow, where I found the people cold and suspicious and unfriendly. St. Petersburg was better, at least on the surface. I had an affair there and that was nice, but he was very anti-American. He had been brainwashed in school to hate America, although he was eager to live in Miami and his favorite music was rap and he was very open and attentive to this particular American. I never heard from him again though. Russia's weird. Trump didn't include them in his long list of "shithole countries." He loves Russia.

Ever hear of birth tourism? It's big in Russia now, as NBC explained last week. Cynthia McFadden wrote that pregnant Russian women are lured to Miami to get citizenship for their newborn children. "In Moscow, it's a status symbol to have a Miami-born baby, and social media is full of Russian women boasting of their little americantsy. It isn't just the warm weather and the good doctors. Like for the wealthy Chinese mothers-to-be who flock to L.A., it's the American passport for the baby. And Trump and other right-wing xenophobes haven't said a word about it, at least not in regard to Russians. For him chain migration is about people of color-- not white people.

What they are doing is completely legal, as long as they don't lie on any immigration or insurance paperwork. In fact, it's protected by the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says anyone born on American soil is automatically a citizen.

The child gets a lifelong right to live and work and collect benefits in the U.S. And when they turn 21 they can sponsor their parents' application for an American green card.

As president, Donald Trump has indicated he is opposed to so-called chain migration, which gives U.S. citizens the right to sponsor relatives, because of recent terror attacks. And as a candidate, he called for an end to birthright citizenship, declaring it in one of his first policy papers the "biggest magnet for illegal immigration."

"You have to get rid of it," he said on Meet the Press on NBC. "They're having a baby and all of a sudden-- nobody knows-- the baby is here. You have no choice."

In a twist, as the Daily Beast first reported, condo buildings that bear the Trump name are the most popular for the out-of-town obstetric patients, although the units are subleased from the individual owners and it's not clear if building management is aware.

There is no indication that Trump or the Trump Organization is profiting directly from birth tourism; the company and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Roman Bokeria, the state director of the Florida Association of Realtors told NBC News that Trump-branded buildings in the Sunny Isles Beach area north of Miami are particularly popular with the Russian birth tourists and Russian immigrants.

"Sunny Isles beach has a nickname-- Little Russia-- because people who are moving from Russian-speaking countries to America, they want … a familiar environment."

"They go across the street, they have Russian market, Russian doctor, Russian lawyer," he added. "It's very comfortable for them."

Reshetova came to Miami to have her first child, hiring an agency to help arrange her trip. The services-- which can include finding apartments and doctors and obtaining visas-- don't come cheap. She expects to pay close to $50,000, and some packages run as high as $100,000. Bokeria says some landlords ask for six months rent up front.

My great-grandparents came to the U.S. from Russia, penniless, feeling for their lives, to escape virulent Tsarist persecution. Trump would call them names. These Russians are a very different set of people. And he wants them here, the same way Republicans like Nixon went out of their way to lure Eastern European Nazi collaborators to New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania...

American Elites Need To Feel The Fear The British Elites Feel Today

It’s nice-- very nice-- that Macron pulverized Le Pen and her fascist party. In Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Macron’s party won 350 seats, an absolute-- and unassailable-- majority in the 577 member National Assembly. Le Pen’s fascists won just 8 seats. That, though, is different from having reason to celebrate a great progressive victory. Ultimately, the fact that Macron detests and reviles Señor Trumpanzee is just funny and admirable, not governance. Neither Macron, a centrist former banker, nor his prime minister, conservative Édouard Philippe, is remotely progressive. They literally define conservatism: preservation of the status quo. The turnout, its worth noting, was the lowest in living memory. I was in France for the election. People seemed motivated primarily to stamp out fascism, not to embrace Macron and Philippe. As the French used to say-- or at least the French Jews-- “feh!”

Now across the Channel, on the other had, there really is a reason for progressives to celebrate. Though Jeremy Corbyn isn’t Prime Minister yet, he smashed the Conservatives and sent waves of fear through the British elites. Last week, The Nation carried an interview with veteran British journalist Paul Mason, which you can listen to here:



The point that Mason wanted to get across though, is that Corbyn’s moral victory was something of beauty and something that shouldn’t be underestimated-- and something that can be imported into America. “What happened,” he explained, “has no parallel in modern British politics since 1945. Labour didn’t win a majority, but they won a moral victory because the government had called the election to get a bigger majority of its own. It was predicted on the night before that it would get a majority of 100 seats. In the end it got no majority. There is now what we call in Britain a hung Parliament, which would be as if Congress was controlled by nobody. Theresa May, the Conservative prime minister, is clinging on, but what happened was that really massive numbers of young people voted for Labour-- not just under-24-year-olds, but under-35-year-olds. Something like half of all under-35-year-olds voted for a party that was vilified by the media as a kind of terrorist-supporting threat to national security… [Corbyn] started out far behind, polling 25 percent. The first thing he did was claw back to about 35 percent by publishing the most left-wing manifesto of any Social Democratic Party in the world. It called for renationalization of the railroads, the postal service, and some energy firms. It called for what we call ‘Robin Hood taxes,’ taxing not just the incomes of companies and rich people, but also taxing the wealth of rich people. Taxing the unearned wealth, the property speculation, the stock-market speculation. This would bring in billions, which he said we would spend on free college education for everybody who wants it. That is revolutionary-- and it’s not surprising so many students came out to campaign for the Labour Party in the last few nights of the election. On some urban streets, people were opening their windows and saying, What’s going on? Is there some kind of disturbance? Why are 100 young people coming down my street and knocking on my door? It felt like a sort of velvet revolution in parts of Britain.”

Key figures on the right of British politics are now saying that, to stop Jeremy Corbyn, they have to be prepared to ditch everything. They have to be prepared to ditch what is called “hard Brexit,” which is walking away from Europe without a deal. They have to be prepared to ditch austerity. We’ve had seven years of spending cuts and attacks on the welfare state, and they’ve got to be prepared to ditch that. They’re in full panic mode. As a reporter on British politics and economics, I haven’t seen the ruling class of England in a panic like this for a long time. They realize that their defense lines are falling away. The normal defense lines for British capitalism run not just through the Conservative Party, but also through the Labour Party. But once Corbyn took control of Labour and decisively moved its political programs to the left, the only thing standing between the working class and young people on one side, and the minority and the elite on the other, is the Conservative government. And that just effectively fell apart. It’s a minority government, with no power to legislate.

…[I]t’s not enough to have the combination of a strong leader and a well-worked-out program. The left also needs a ground game. We have this movement called Momentum, a movement to get support within the party. That movement was able to have a million conversations with voters in the space of six weeks, talking to people on their doorsteps, just the way the Sanders people did. Then Jeremy Corbyn in the last days of the election campaign stepped out of the role of party leader and started to speak on behalf of the nation. He’d absorbed so much pressure, so much vitriol, and so many attacks—he assured people that it was possible to go beyond the pain barrier. I think the Sanders movement, or whatever comes after it, has to do popular politics. It’s not the same as populism. It’s like gaming. You go into the dungeon and you kill the boss. You need someone who can do that. And Corbyn proved he could do it.

Help Randy Bryce battle the elites of both wretchedly corrupt DC parties and get down into that basement and end the political career of Paul Ryan next year. No DCCC handler is going to talk Randy into "going centrist," the way they did with Ossoff in the final stages of the GA-06 campaign. Randy stands for deeply held values and beliefs, rooted in his life's experiences. After he wins in 2018, by campaigning on those beliefs-- not on a DCCC-dictated GOP-lite platform-- we’ll see if progressives have the strength to smash the conservative Dems and their donors and beat Trump with a Corbyn, not with a Macron.

Should Reckless, Greed-Driven Banks Be Public Utilities— Rather Than Swords Of Damocles Hanging Over the Heads Of Society?

If you’ve been to Europe recently or if you look at European media sources you’re probably aware of the enormity of the Italian banking crisis and of the fears that the contagion from the crisis will have world-wide repercussions. Trump hasn’t tweeted about it yet so it isn’t really being covered by US mass media. We asked an old friend, Ellen Brown, author of, among other books, Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution, to give us an overview of the crisis so that DWT readers won’t be blindsided if the crash comes. I know many of our readers listen to her twice-monthly radio show, It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown on PRN.FM and are aware she is advocating-- or at least offering-- a solution. Here’s her guest post:

The Italian Banking Crisis: No Free Lunch – Or Is There?
-by Ellen Brown

It has been called “a bigger risk than Brexit”– the Italian banking crisis that could take down the eurozone. Handwringing officials say “there is no free lunch” and “no magic bullet.” But UK Prof. Richard Werner says the magic bullet is just being ignored.

On December 4, 2016, Italian voters rejected a referendum to amend their constitution to give the government more power, and the Italian prime minister resigned. The resulting chaos has pushed Italy’s already-troubled banks into bankruptcy. First on the chopping block is the 500 year old Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA (BMP), the oldest surviving bank in the world and the third largest bank in Italy. The concern is that its loss could trigger the collapse of other banks and even of the eurozone itself.

There seems little doubt that BMP and other insolvent banks will be rescued. The biggest banks are always rescued, no matter how negligent or corrupt, because in our existing system, banks create the money we use in trade. Virtually the entire money supply is now created by banks when they make loans, as the Bank of England has acknowledged. When the banks collapse, economies collapse, because bank-created money is the grease that oils the wheels of production.

So the Italian banks will no doubt be rescued. The question is, how? Normally, distressed banks can raise cash by selling their non-performing loans (NPLs) to other investors at a discount; but recovery on the mountain of Italian bad debts is so doubtful that foreign investors are unlikely to bite. In the past, bankrupt too-big-to-fail banks have sometimes been nationalized. That discourages “moral hazard” – rewarding banks for bad behavior – but it’s at the cost of imposing the bad debts on the government. Further, new EU rules require a “bail in” before a government bailout, something the Italian government is desperate to avoid. As explained on a European website called Social Europe:

The EU’s banking union, which came into force in January 2016, prescribes that when a bank runs into trouble, existing stakeholders – namely, shareholders, junior creditors and, sometimes, even senior creditors and depositors with deposits in excess of the guaranteed amount of €100,000 – are required to take a loss before public funds can be used . . .

[The problem is that] the subordinated bonds that would take a hit are not simply owned by well-off families and other banks: as much as half of the €60 billion of subordinated bonds are estimated to be owned by around 600,000 small savers, who in many cases were fraudulently mis-sold these bonds by the banks as being risk-free (as good as deposits basically).

The government got a taste of the potential backlash a year ago, when it forced losses onto the bondholders of four small banks. One victim made headlines when he hung himself and left a note blaming his bank, which had taken his entire €100,000 savings.

Goldman Sachs Weighs In

It is not just the small savers that are at risk. According to a July 2016 article titled “Look Who’s Frantically Demanding That Taxpayers Stop Italy’s Bank Meltdown”:

The total exposure of French banks and private investors alone to Italian government debt exceeds €250 billion. Germany holds €83.2 billion worth of Italian bonds. Deutsche bank alone has nearly €12 billion worth of Italian bonds on its books. The other banking sectors most at risk of contagion are Spain (€44.6 billion), the U.S. (€42.3 billion) the UK (€29.8 billion) and Japan (€27.6 billion).

. . . All of which helps to explain why banks and their representatives at the IMF and the ECB are frantically demanding a no-expenses-spared taxpayer-funded rescue of Italy’s banking system.

It could also explain why Goldman Sachs took it upon itself to propose a way out of this dilemma: instead of buying Italian government bonds in their quantitative easing program, the ECB and the central bank of Italy could buy the insolvent banks’ nonperforming loans.

As observed in a July 2016 article in the Financial Times titled “Goldman: Italy’s Bank Saga – Not Such a Big Deal,” Italy’s NPLs then stood at €210bn, and the ECB was buying €120bn per year of outstanding Italian government bonds as part of its quantitative easing (QE) scheme. The author quoted Goldman’s Francesco Garzarelli, who said, “by the time QE is over – not sooner than end 2017, on our baseline scenario – around a fifth of Italy’s public debt will be sitting on the Bank of Italy’s balance sheet.” Bringing the entire net stock of bad loans onto the government’s balance sheet, he said, would be equivalent to just nine months’ worth of Italian government bond purchases by the ECB.

Buying bank debt with money generated by the central bank would rescue the banks without cost to the taxpayers, the bondholders or the government. So why hasn’t this option been pursued?

The Inflation Objection

Perhaps the concern is that it would be inflationary. But UK Prof. Richard Werner, who invented the term “quantitative easing” when he was advising the Japanese in the 1990s, says inflation would not result. In 2012, he proposed a similar solution to the European banking crisis, citing three successful historical precedents.

One was the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program, in which it bought $1.7 trillion in mortgage-backed securities from the banks. These securities were widely understood to be “toxic” – Wall Street’s own burden of NPLs. The move was highly controversial, but it worked for its intended purpose: the banks did not collapse, the economy got back on its feet, and the much-feared inflation did not result. Werner says this was because no new money entered the non-bank economy. The QE was just an accounting maneuver, an asset swap in the reserve accounts of the banks themselves.

His second example was in Britain in 1914, when the British banking sector collapsed after the government declared war on Germany. This was not a good time for a banking crisis, so the Bank of England simply bought the banks’ NPLs. “There was no credit crunch,” wrote Werner, “and no recession. The problem was solved at zero cost to the tax payer.”

For a third example, he cited the Japanese banking crisis of 1945. The banks had totally collapsed, with NPLs that amounted to virtually 100 percent of their assets:

But in 1945 the Bank of Japan had no interest in creating a banking crisis and a credit crunch recession. Instead it wanted to ensure that bank credit would flow again, delivering economic growth. So the Bank of Japan bought the non-performing assets from the banks – not at market value (close to zero), but significantly above market value.

In each of these cases, Werner wrote:

The operations were a complete success. No inflation resulted. The currency did not weaken. Despite massive non-performing assets wiping out the solvency and equity of the banking sector, the banks’ health was quickly restored. In the UK and Japanese case, bank credit started to recover quickly, so that there was virtually no recession at all as a result.

For Italy and other “peripheral” eurozone countries, Werner suggests a two-pronged approach: (1) the central bank should buy the distressed banks’ NPLs with QE, and (2) the government should borrow from the banks rather than from bondholders. Borrowing in the bond market fattens the underwriters but creates no new money in the form of bank credit for the economy. Borrowing from banks does create new money as bank credit. (See my earlier article here.)

Clearly, when central banks want to save the banking system without cost to the government or the people, they know how to do it. So the question remains, why hasn’t the ECB followed the Federal Reserve’s lead and pursued this option?

The Moral Hazard Objection

Perhaps it is because banks that know they will be rescued from their bad loans will keep making bad loans. But the same moral hazard would ensue from a bailout or a bail-in, which virtually all interested parties seem to be advocating. And as was observed in an article titled “Italy: Banking Crisis or Euro Crisis?”, the cause of the banks’ insolvency in this case was actually something beyond the banks’ control – the longest and deepest recession in Italy’s history.

Werner argues that the moral hazard argument should instead be applied to the central bank, which actually was responsible for the recession due to the massive credit bubbles its policies allowed and encouraged. Rather than being punished for these policies, however, the ECB has been rewarded with even more power and control. Werner writes:

There is thus a form of regulatory moral hazard in place: regulators that obtain more powers after crises may not have sufficient incentives to avoid such crises.

What May Really Be Going On

Werner and other observers suspect that saving the economies of the peripheral eurozone countries is not the real goal of ECB policy. Rather, the ECB and the European Commission are working to force a political union on the eurozone countries, one controlled by unelected bureaucrats in the service of a few very large corporations and banks. Werner quotes David Shipley on Bloomberg:

Central bank officials may be hoping that by keeping the threat of financial Armageddon alive, they can coerce the region’s people and governments into moving toward the deeper union that the euro’s creators envisioned.

ECB and EC officials claim that “there is no free lunch” and “no alternative,” says Werner. But there is an alternative, one that is cost-free to the people and the government. The European banks could be rescued by the central bank, just as US banks were rescued by the Federal Reserve.

To avoid the moral hazard of bank malfeasance in the future, the banks could then be regulated so that they were harnessed to serve the public interest, or they could be nationalized. This could be done without cost to the government, since the NPLs would have been erased from the books.

For a long-term solution, the money that is now created by banks in pursuit of their own profit either needs to be issued by governments (as has been done quite successfully in the past, going back to the American colonies) or it needs to be created by banks that are required to serve the public interest. And for that to happen, the banks need to be made public utilities.

Lou Reed: "Give me your hungry, your tired your poor; I'll piss on 'em"

Scaremongering xenphobia rarely hurts the scaremongers and xenophobes

There's been plenty of talk, including on this blog, about how the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees in the late 1930s-- sending many to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps-- but nothing was going to slow down conservative fear-mongering. Today the House passed this deranged, idiot anti-immigrant bill 289-137 with 47 of the House's worst Democrats crossing the aisle and joining the GOP. Mostly the aisle crossers were the right-wing fake Dems who are always the aisle crossers, like Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL), Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ), Ami Bera (New Dem-CA), Cheri Bustos (Blue Dog-IL), Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA), John Delaney (New Dem-MD), Gwen Graham (Blue Dog-FL), Jim Himes (New Dem-CT), Ann Kuster (New Dem-NH), Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY), Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)... all the congressional garbage. In fact, speaking of garbage, corrupt Long Island Islamophobe and all around bigot Steve Israel, in charge of DCCC messaging, voted with the GOP today too... of course. And so did Israel's doggie, Long Island New Dem Kathleen Rice.

Earlier today Chris Christie called for some kind of human wall to keep these refugees out of New Jersey, I wonder how much that's related to the political consequences of a lack of a human wall after World War II to keep Nazis out of New Jersey. Republicans actually recruited Nazis to come to New Jersey. In fact the Dulles brothers flooded New Jersey, Ohio and Michigan with Nazi war criminals and terrorists from, among other countries, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.

The Dulles Brothers, at the nexus of Wall Street, the intelligence community, the Republican Party and dangerously inept Cold War jingoism, overrode President Truman's and Congress' ban on allowing Nazi war criminals into the country, let alone employing them-- purging their records and getting them U.S. citizenship. John Foster Dulles, who now shamefully has an airport named after him near our nation's capital, was complicit steeped in Wall Street backing for prewar Hitler and was at all times looking out for the interests of the wealthy Republican investors who invested in him, particularly the Rockefellers and the Bushes. They had decided to bring their Nazi cronies to the U.S. once Truman was defeated by Dewey.

When Truman didn't play his assigned role, they did it anyway, and then when the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was elected, the floodgates opened, and New Jersey, among a few other states, became a sanctuary for Nazi collaborators and war criminals from Eastern Europe. Nixon saw them as a counterbalance to the hated Jews, who always voted for the Democrats, and Eisenhower gave him supervisory powers over the operations to bring them to America. Ironically, many of them had been infiltrated by the Russian Communists and the entire program was an absolute disaster, bringing the U.S. no Cold War benefits whatsoever and costing the country hundreds of millions of dollars, but, eventually, helping elect Republican rightists from Nixon to Christie.

When the 47 Democrats joined the Republicans to target Syrian refugees fleeing from the murderous ISIS monsters that atrocious conservative policies in the Middle East helped create, only oneNew Jersey Democrat went right along with the circus, the worst one, of course, South Jersey conservative Donald Norcross, brother of corrupt Jersey Democratic machine boss George Norcross. I asked Alex Law, the progressive Democrat running against Donald Norcross and the Norcross Machine how he felt about the refugee situation.

What truly makes us Americans, what makes us who we are, are two things: our Constitution and the fact that as a people we are committed to doing the right thing. Speaking to the latter, what separates us, the thing that gives us our sense of exceptionalism is that we do the right thing even when it is hard. America is the home of the brave, and I have never once seen my country shy away from a challenge because of fear. We always rally and rise to the occasion. Right now, we are faced with that question of whether to rally or whether to close our doors to the thousands of human beings who are fleeing a war that we had a hand in creating. This is a war that shows no mercy to women and children, a war that has seen the use of poison gas and untold civilian casualty. As the greatest country on Earth, it isn't good enough to say we should only worry about our own people and forget about the pain of others, especially others that we have plenty of capacity to help. Yes, I think we should take every precaution when allowing these refugees to come to America, but we absolutely must help these people. Our strength is in our ability as a nation to be inspired past fear and do the right thing. I hope our government remembers that when considering helping these refugees. My opponent, Donald Norcross elected to join the party of those controlled by fear in becoming the only Democrat from New Jersey to vote with Republicans against allowing refugees into the country. I am incredibly disappointed by this, as I have been disappointed when he voted with Republicans on nearly every controversial vote during this Congressional term. When I am elected, I look forward to standing with fellow progressives on votes like this.

Watch Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on the floor this morning explaining why he conservatives were making a terrible mistake (and why he said he's ashamed of his colleagues)



Seattle's progressive Democrat, Jim McDermott made a similar powerful statement. "I stand in strong support of Governor Inslee’s recent announcement that Washington State would welcome refugees escaping the violence and devastation in Iraq and Syria. The Governor’s courageous stand is not only morally the right thing to do as Americans, but it also follows a tradition of past Washington State governors who saw through the fear, racist rhetoric and political gamesmanship and opened Washington State’s doors to those escaping hardship and despair.

"In reflecting on the events of the past week in Paris and Beirut, I’m reminded of what Pope Francis said at the opening of a Joint Session of Congress: 'Each son or daughter of a given country has a mission, a personal and social responsibility.' There could be no more prescient or truer call to action as we work to resettle refugees from war-torn Syria. I will vote against H.R. 4038, which disingenuously pledges to keep Americans safe by effectively shuttering refugee resettlement programs. Over the years these programs have been the critical lifeline to millions of honest and hard-working refugee families seeking a better life on America’s shores. Syria’s refugees are fleeing arguably the worst atrocities we have seen in modern history. It is within our personal and social responsibility as Americans, and well within our means as a country, to welcome and protect them."

Mike Honda, who was actually shut up with his family in an American internment camp for Japanese-American citizens during World War II, was mortified when the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, David Bowers-- a putative Democrat and member of Hillary Clinton's Leadership Team-- made his revolting and very Republican-sounding statement this morning about internment camps.

Mayor Bowers' comments about Japanese internment do not represent the values of the Democratic Party, and his rhetoric has no place in our party. The cruel and baseless Japanese internment policies enacted during World War II are an ugly stain on our democracy, and should not be used to justify future exclusionary policies. Mayor Bowers should reflect on dark moments like these in our history when the dual crises of war abroad and the perceived threat of terror at home have emboldened dangerous xenophobia in America.

We are a nation of immigrants born out of an enduring desire to be free, but it's essential that we avoid repeating the mistakes of our predecessors. As the war against terror continues worldwide, the Democratic Party is firmly committed to recognizing the humanity of refugees and honoring and protecting the liberty, security and diversity of our great nation.

Mark Takano (D-CA) is also of Japanese heritage. This morning he told me that "Many Japanese-Americans, including my parents and grandparents, were stripped of their possessions and their freedom simply because they looked like our enemy. There is indeed a lesson from that terrible time in our history: We cannot allow fear to triumph over our principles and our compassion.”

 

So while Texas neo-fascist Brian Babin, who masquerades as a right-wing Republican, was on the radio claiming that "Mary and Jesus didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them, and these folks do" and vowing to keep refugees out, Ted Lieu (D-CA), a decorated military officer, had a very different perspective from the Republican chicken-hawks. (By the way, Ted will be on MSNBC this evening discussing the refugee crisis with Chris Hayes-- highly recommended.) "During these times of crisis, the best angels of the American character must not be overtaken by fear and xenophobia. In search of a politically expedient solution, some are calling on the government to stop admitting Syrian refugees. Others have suggested we block only Muslims-- a bigoted idea and a desecration of our nation’s foundational religious freedoms." He continued:

Saying we need to choose between our refugee program and protecting national security is a false choice. It is also intellectually dishonest.

There is not a single example of a refugee committing a terrorist act in the United States. In Paris, the attacks were actually perpetrated by French nationals and Belgians, not Syrian refugees. Should we ban travel from French citizens and Belgians to America because some of them committed terrorist acts in Paris? If that idea sounds ridiculous, then so should the idea of banning children, widows, and seniors fleeing Syria from seeking safety in the United States.

Of the approximate 2,200 Syrian refugees already admitted to the United States, half are children and a quarter are senior citizens. Refusing to help some of the most vulnerable human beings in the world is not just un-American, it is an irrational overreaction with zero policy justification.

As an Air Force officer stationed in Guam during the mid-1990s, I participated in Operation PACIFIC HAVEN where the United States extracted thousands of Kurds out of northern Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from slaughtering them. I saw first-hand the extensive screening process that the U.S. conducted of the Kurdish refugees before bringing many of them to the mainland. Our nation’s screening process has only improved since then.

As Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently testified before Congress, refugees are already “subject to the highest level of security checks” before being admitted into the United States. It is an arduous 18-to-24 month process that puts UN-registered refugees through repeated screenings and background checks involving multiple government agencies.

House Republicans have introduced hastily-written legislation that would effectively shutter our program for refugees from war-torn Syria and Iraq. This knee-jerk reaction demonizes the vulnerable human beings who are most threatened by the conflict and is strategically unwise.

No one is happier about xenophobic, anti-Muslim, reactions than the so-called Islamic State. Islamophobic hysteria is a prime recruiting tool for terrorist organizations. This is exactly the kind of overreaction that they hope to achieve: To use terrible acts of violence to horrify Western society into compromising our own humanity and way of life.

The American story has in large part been written by intrepid souls fleeing persecution in search of a better life in a nation forged in liberty's name and dedicated to the equality of all.

Anyone who would close our borders to orphans fleeing barrel bombs, when substantial security checks are in place, is simply admitting defeat. They are surrendering to the tragic idea that America cannot be both strong and value-driven, that our union cannot be made more perfect by confronting fear and hatred and violence with even greater measures of strength, compassion and virtue. We are better than that.

Several of the Blue America House candidates-- even in red districts-- have stood up against the xenophobia of the Republican anti-immigrant incumbents they are challenging. Tom Guild (D-OK): "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The golden rule applies to desperate Syrian refugees seeking asylum in the United States. Our country plans to accept a limited number of refugees who are fleeing for their lives from the dysfunctional and dangerous country of Syria. They should be properly vetted by the U.S.  The current system of vetting often takes at least two years to certify refugees suitable for relocation to America. Turning our backs on those facing death and political persecution would betray traditional American values. As Lady Liberty says on her inscription, 'Give you tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.'"

Similarly, state Senator Ruben Kihuen, who himself came to the U.S. as a child, and is now one of the progressive leaders in the Nevada legislature and a candidate for Congress, told Nevadans that his opponent, "Cresent Hardy and the Republicans in Congress want to block the U.S. from accepting any Syrian refugees out of fear and panic. Some Republican Presidential candidates even want to administer religious tests before accepting refugees.

We should be working together to strengthen our vetting process and accept refugees escaping terrorism-- not turning our backs on people in need. That's the American response, not to cower in fear to terrorists and thugs. America should continue to be a beacon of hope and freedom for the world, and that means opening our arms to those who have suffered horrific violence and been thrown out of their home country."

Minutes before the vote Nanette Barragan, running in a 70% Hispanic open district in Los Angeles told me that she is "appalled by the rhetoric coming from the right. I once represented a Guatemalan mother who fled the Maras gang that killed her son. She and her child sought safety within our borders because they knew that the values and compassion of our country would be their salvation. Yes, we should take common sense steps to keep terrorists from our borders, but it is inhumane and, frankly, un-American to close down our borders to innocent families fleeing violence."

Donna Edwards voted against the bill, of course. She told her constituents in Maryland why: "We must remember the enemy is ISIS, not the refugees who are fleeing the region. I believe strongly that as Americans we cannot deny people shelter and safety based on stereotyping and xenophobia; it runs counter to who we are as a nation. We have the ability and the resources to welcome refugees, while taking all necessary steps to ensure our own security at the same time. It is what we have done and what we will continue to do."

I brought Lou Reed to the White House for a state banquet when Clinton was president. Lou played this song. No one-- at least no one at my table-- seemed to notice the lyrics; they just liked the beat.

Give me your hungry, your tired your poor
I'll piss on 'em
that's what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses,
let's club 'em to death
and get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard