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Historic Black churches in D.C. targeted during pro-Trump rallies (nationthailand.com)

Historic Black churches in D.C. targeted during pro-Trump rallies

InternationalDec 14. 2020Proud Boys march in Washington, D.C., Saturday night. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post) 

By The Washington Post · Allison Klein

WASHINGTON – A Black Lives Matter banner and sign were torn from historic Black churches downtown and destroyed during pro-Trump protests Saturday night.

In one of the incidents, a series of videos posted on Twitter shows a group of people identified as Proud Boys marching with a Black Lives Matter banner held above their heads, then cheering as it is set on fire while chanting “f— antifa.”

The banner was taken from Asbury United Methodist Church, one of the oldest Black churches in the city. Ashbury United has stood at the corner of 11th and K streets NW since 1863.

“Last night demonstrators who were part of the MAGA gatherings tore down our Black Lives Matter sign and literally burned it in the street,” senior pastor Rev. Ianther Mills said in a statement. “It pained me especially to see our name, Asbury, in flames. For me it was reminiscent of cross burnings.”

Another video, posted by @BGOnTheScene, shows a Black Lives Matter sign being torn down from in front of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The demonstrators are heard chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” as they destroy the sign in front of the church where worshipers have included historic leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, and presidents, including Obama, Clinton and Taft.

District of Columbia police on Sunday declined to say whether any arrests were made in the cases, but said they were investigating the incidents as possible hate crimes.

“We take these offenses seriously and we are currently investigating them as a possible hate crimes,” police spokeswoman Alaina Gertz said.

Nearly three dozen people were arrested during the protests and overnight, including 10 who police said were charged with misdemeanor assault, six with assaulting police officers and four with rioting.

The protesters were in the District of Columbia on Saturday to demonstrate their refusal to accept the results of the presidential election, before the electoral college meets Monday to make President Donald Trump’s loss official.

Mills’s statement, which was sent Sunday morning, emphasized the history of her church.

“We are a resilient people who have trusted in God through slavery and the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and now as we face an apparent rise in white supremacy,” it said.

The videos of the banner burning shows someone squirting what appears to be an accelerant on the sign as flames consume it. One video was tweeted by a Daily Caller reporter, and it is stamped with the logo of the right-wing media website.

The tweet says the people burning the banner are Proud Boys. “The Proud Boys and Trump supporters burn the BLM banner while chanting and cheering in downtown DC.”

D.C. Council member-elect Janeese Lewis George, D-Ward 4, tweeted the video, saying it showed “there are two justice systems in this country.”

“Tonight, violent white supremacists stole and burned a Black Lives Matter banner from Asbury United Methodist, the oldest Black Methodist church in DC,” she tweeted. “But yet no militarized police force used against them. There are two justice systems in this country, separate and unequal.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, responded to the incidents by saying the Mayor’s Office of Religious Affairs and D.C. police had been in contact with the churches Sunday.

“D.C.’s faith-based organizations are at the very heart of our community, giving us hope in the face of darkness,” Bowser tweeted. “They embody our DC values of love and inclusivity. An attack on them is an attack on all of us.”

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, said the church incidents warrant a federal probe.

“We call on the U.S. Department of Justice to immediately open a federal civil rights investigation under the Church Arson Prevention Act to hold accountable those responsible for these racist and violent acts,” Kristen Clarke, the group’s president and executive director, said in a statement.

Mills’s statement pointed out that the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist organization with ties to white nationalism, have not been denounced by the White House. The group received recognition from Trump at the first presidential debate this September, when he refused to specifically condemn white supremacists and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

“Sadly, we must point out that if this was a marauding group of men of color going through the city, and destroying property, they would have been followed and arrested,” Mills said in her statement. “We are especially alarmed that this violence is not being denounced at the highest levels of our nation.”

But Mills also struck an optimistic tone to fight hate.

“We are a people of faith. As horrible and disturbing as this is for us now – it doesn’t compare with the challenges and fears the men and women who started Asbury, 184 years ago, faced. So, we will move forward, undaunted in our assurance that Black Lives Matter and we are obligated to continue to shout that truth without ceasing. We are assured that our church is surrounded by God’s grace and mercy.”

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Trump’s election goal posts keep shifting (nationthailand.com)

Trump’s election goal posts keep shifting

InternationalDec 14. 2020File Photo: President Trump 

By The Washington Post · David Weigel

Until early Friday evening, a lawsuit brought by Texas against four swing states was the last, best hope of President Donald Trump and his supporters. “This is the big one,” the president tweeted Wednesday. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who had previously promised to argue another suit if it got to the Supreme Court, promised to argue his home state’s. One hundred and twenty-six House Republicans, few of whom had backed other lawsuits, signed an amicus brief asking the court to “restore the confidence of all Americans” and toss out enough state election results to defeat President-elect Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court dismissed that case, and Trump barely changed his tune. The president flew Marine One over Saturday’s “MAGA March,” hours before some demonstrations turned violent. He told Fox News that there were “numerous local cases” that could still overturn the election, arguing that he “won big” in states that he actually lost. And he suggested that his defeats were not about merit, but about legal standing, a talking point adopted by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., in a separate Fox News interview Sunday.

“The Supreme Court said they weren’t going to take the case,” Scalise told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “They said Texas didn’t have standing. They didn’t say they were going to address the merits. Look, the Supreme Court, I think a lot of people know, didn’t want to be anywhere near this.”

With the president’s permission, the goal posts had shifted again. As Biden prepares to take office, he has already rejected some demands from the left, approaching the presidency as a consensus-building job rather than a windfall for his base. The outgoing president has raced in the other direction, continuing to indulge his most devoted supporters, even though he cannot deliver what they are demanding – four more years in power.

Politically, there’s not much evidence that this approach is hurting Trump. Polling has found that about 80% of the president’s voters are willing to believe that the election was rigged against him. Donations to the president’s campaign and political action committee, as well as the GOP’s recount efforts and the Senate runoffs in Georgia, have been pouring in amid the effort to overturn the election, even though the race is functionally over. (The Trump campaign is waiting for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court to rule on an appeal that would retroactively disqualify most absentee ballots cast in the state’s two biggest Democratic counties.)

Twin defeats at the Supreme Court – the Texas case and a case brought by a Pennsylvania congressman who argued that the GOP legislature violated the state’s constitution by allowing more absentee voting – have moved a few Republican officials off the bench. Of the 18 Republican state attorneys general who supported the Texas case, three had said by Sunday afternoon that Biden won the election. Republicans still facing voters have not dared.

“The Supreme Court won’t hear it, so that’s terrible,” said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., at a rally after the court’s decision. “All I know is, the evidence they demonstrated in that case was that in Fulton County, not one absentee ballot was turned down because of an invalid signature. Not one. Now, y’all, that’s physically impossible.”

That was not true, either, but there has been no penalty for denying the election results, apart from condemnation by news outlets that Republicans do not take seriously anymore. At a Saturday hearing in the outstanding Wisconsin case, Trump campaign attorney Jim Troupis argued that even his ballot, cast using the looser pandemic rules approved by election officials, should be tossed as part of a mass disqualification of votes. At the same time, at Saturday’s overlapping marches in downtown Washington, Trump supporters repeatedly said a second term had been ordained by God. MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who is expected to run for Minnesota governor in 2022, told his audience that they were living in the biblical “end times.”

The response of Biden and most Democrats has been to shrug and wait, in Barack Obama’s old phrase, for “the fever to break.” On CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” incoming Biden adviser Cedric Richmond handled a question about a majority of House Republicans rejecting Biden’s win by suggesting that they did not believe it.

“They recognize Joe Biden’s victory. All of America recognizes Joe Biden’s victory,” said Richmond, who is leaving a House seat in Louisiana to join the administration. “This is just a small portion of the Republican conference that are appeasing and patronizing the president on his way out because they are scared of his Twitter power and other things.”

Richmond’s dismissal underscored how little Biden and Democrats are doing to goad or punish Republicans who will not go along with the results. The biggest threat levied against the GOP came this week from Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., a 12-year incumbent with some gadfly tendencies, who urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., not to seat any Republican who signed the amicus brief. Pelosi ignored him, as did the Biden campaign.

The rest of the party has generally adopted Biden’s tone, which has not changed since his campaign began, and presumes that fighting for everything his base demands is a rotten way to run the country. That came into sharper view this week when The Intercept obtained a recording of Biden talking to Black civil rights leaders, defending his decision to return Tom Vilsack to the Agriculture Department and laying out why he would not jump when his party’s left demanded him to use executive power.

“Where I have executive authority, I will use it to undo every single damn thing this guy has done by executive authority, but I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question,” Biden said. As an example, he floated the idea of an executive order to ban assault weapons. “There’s no executive authority to do away with that. And no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me, but you can’t do it by executive order. We do that, next guy comes along and says, ‘Well, guess what? By executive order, I guess everybody can have machine guns again.’ “

Throughout his career, Biden has bristled at his party’s left-wing activists, bucking them in ways that he would sometimes come to regret. On the Intercept tape, Biden emphasized a trait that flashed frequently in the election: When challenged on his fealty to civil rights, or his political instincts, he pushes back hard, sometimes leaving bruised egos on the other side of the table.

That’s not how Trump has operated, and the results have been both disastrous – he is the first incumbent president to lose reelection this century – and effective at enforcing party loyalty. In an open letter this week, conservative Trump allies ranging from the former president of the Heritage Foundation to the president of the Council for National Policy signed a letter declaring Trump the “lawful winner of the presidential election” and urging six state legislatures to void Biden’s wins. The idea that the election was so fatally flawed that rules in each state must be rewritten, with new restrictions, is already catching on in those states. The Democrats’ hope is that this becomes either too embarrassing to continue or that it fades – just as soon as the goal posts stop moving.

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Biden’s Obama-era Cabinet picks frustrate liberals, civil rights leaders (nationthailand.com)

Biden’s Obama-era Cabinet picks frustrate liberals, civil rights leaders

InternationalDec 14. 2020President-elect Joe Biden introduces Cabinet nominees at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Seung Min Kim, Annie Linskey

WILMINGTON, Del. – President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to fill his White House and Cabinet with longtime colleagues has led to frustration from liberals, civil rights leaders and younger activists, who worry he’s relegating racial minorities to lower-status jobs while leaning on Obama-era appointees for key positions.

Biden’s Cabinet process has also discomforted some allies on the Hill, who say senators from his own party have not been sufficiently consulted about picks, even though Biden will need influential Senate Democrats to help steer nominees through the confirmation gauntlet. Senior Democratic senators have gotten little or no advance warning about the president-elect’s selections, according to a half-dozen senior congressional officials and others familiar with the process.

Taken together, these concerns bring into focus the challenges Biden confronts as he tries to unite the party around his ambitious agenda and immediately staff his administration. Dissatisfaction from the party’s grass roots, and lawmakers not read into the president-elect’s decisions, could hobble Biden’s ability to quickly move his nominees into position so he can execute on pressing priorities like the coronavirus pandemic response.

On the campaign trail, Biden promised to appoint a Cabinet that elevated up-and-coming leaders in the party and reflected the diversity of America.

Of the 14 Cabinet-level picks announced so far, seven are women and nine are people of color. But Biden has also mostly selected people he’s known for years, or even decades. The average age of Biden’s department heads so far is 63 years old, according to a Washington Post analysis. About 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word “Obama” on their resume from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs, the analysis found.

Some of them will be in similar roles as they held in the last administration.

Tom Vilsack – secretary of Agriculture for all eight years of President Barack Obama’s term – will take up that role again under Biden, if confirmed. Vivek Murthy, who was Obama’s surgeon general, will have the same job for Biden. The incoming White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, worked for Biden in the same capacity when he was vice president.

“We cannot move forward in a new direction with just the same people, including some of the people who are responsible for the mess we are in,” said Evan Weber, the political director of the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on climate issues. “We would like to see more young progressives in roles in the Biden administration.”

Weber and other liberals say they do not believe that Obama, who came into office with his party in control of both chambers of Congress, took bold enough steps on issues from climate to banking rules.

And while Biden’s team is racially diverse, some observers note that Biden is leaning on older Black and Hispanic leaders, who may not understand the needs and priorities of a younger generation.

“There’s more appointments of color, but there is a lot of same old, same old,” said Sayu Bhojwani, a pro-immigration activist and president of New American Leaders, a group that pushes for more diversity among elected leaders. “Having voices of color who have kind of grown up in a system that wasn’t built for people of color means that we’re not going to get innovation and we’re going to get people who are risk averse because they know the system.”

Biden’s bias toward government veterans stems from his view that the Trump administration steered the country significantly off track, that deep expertise will be necessary to restore it and a sense that there’s not time for a learning curve, according to transition aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberation.

And the focus on Obama-era appointees could have advantages some argue, creating in Biden’s team an automatic cohesiveness. “This is the mother-of-all-alumni group,” said Reed Hundt, who worked on the Obama transition and is author of the book “A Crisis Wasted” about decisions made during that time to respond to the Great Recession.

In contrast, he noted, many members of Obama’s economic team didn’t know each other or the then-president particularly well when they started. That left key players learning to work with each other and determining how to best work with the president as they were also trying to solve a huge economic crisis.

Biden’s engagement with the Hill has also worried some allies, who say the lack of consultation has often caught top senators off guard and, with one prominent pick, left them scrambling to get on the same page with an administration nominee. The lack of notice, in particular, to the ranking Democrats on committees was notable because that senator is poised to be the nominee’s chief defender during the confirmation fight against attacks from Republicans.

For instance, the transition never reached out to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., about Biden’s decision to tap Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the lack of communication, despite Sanders’s role as the top Democrat on one of the committees that will hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings. Sanders’s office declined to comment.

And while Sen. Jack Reed. D-R.I., who in 2017 was adamant that he would never again support waiving a law meant to uphold civilian leadership at the Pentagon, was told about Biden’s decision to tap recently retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as defense secretary, one person said the discussion was rather perfunctory – a surprise, considering Reed’s definitive remarks nearly four years ago.

Biden’s decision left Reed, the Democrats’ point person on defense issues, in an uncomfortable position as he tried to reconcile his past statements on the waiver and the fact that the president-elect’s pick as defense secretary would need one, turning a policy meant to be a once-in-a-generation exception into a pattern of installing recently retired military leaders at the Pentagon.

A transition official said Biden’s team, on top of consultation with lawmakers, tries to notify Congress ahead of Cabinet announcements and brief their offices within a few hours of the news being public.

Senior congressional aides also said while they believed Biden could do a better job of reaching out to Democratic senators, they recognized transition officials were in somewhat of a bind because the Senate majority remains up in the air.

Many GOP senators won’t even acknowledge Biden is the president-elect.

Aides also said the transition’s consultations and notifications were limited because Biden’s team appeared concerned about leaks, with one congressional official saying that, “certainly, they keep things appropriately close to the vest” when it came to Biden’s decisions on nominations.

Incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the process on Friday, saying that there have been “hundreds of engagements” between transition officials and congressional staff as part of the confirmation process.

Before he chose Janet Yellen to be his treasury secretary, for example, Biden’s team sought input from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s top allies, a delicate process given that the Massachusetts Democrat and one of Biden’s opponents in the presidential primaries was hoping that she’d be the one selected for the role.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, weighed in with transition officials on his views about who should be tapped as director of national intelligence, according to a spokeswoman – a slot that ultimately went to Avril Haines.

A spokesman for Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, said she was notified in advance of the announcement that Biden planned to ask Vilsack to reprise his role.

“President-elect Biden’s team has been incredibly responsive and stayed in close contact about the process and my priorities,” said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the influential Finance Committee that manages confirmations for top Cabinet positions overseeing health care, fiscal policy and trade. “Biden is picking his team. I didn’t expect to be asked for explicit sign off.”