Archive for category: VOX

Donald Trump with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. | Getty Images

The Supreme Court is serious about exempting religious conservatives from the law — even when their rulings could kill people.

For 30 years, the Supreme Court applied a simple rule when someone with a religious objection to a state law sought an exemption from that law. So long as the law applied equally to everyone, regardless of whether someone is religious or not, then everyone had to comply with the law.

As the Court held in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), religious objectors must follow “neutral law[s] of general applicability.”

Ever since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court last fall, however, the Supreme Court has been rapidly dismantling Smith. On Friday night, the Court fired a bullet into Smith’s heart. It ruled that people of faith who want to gather in relatively large groups in someone’s home must be allowed to do so, despite the fact that California limits all in-home gatherings to just three households.

Although the Court’s new 5-4 decision in Tandon v. Newsom doesn’t explicitly overrule Smith, the decision makes it so easy for many religious objectors to refuse to comply with the law that Smith is basically a dead letter.

The Court’s new majority has accomplished what amounts to a revolution in its approach to religion and the law, entirely through cases brought by churches and other religious actors seeking exemptions from public health rules intended to slow the spread of Covid-19.

The Court is serious about giving religious conservatives broad immunity from the law — so serious, in fact, that it is literally willing to endanger people’s lives in order to achieve this goal.

What happened in Tandon v. Newsom?

Tandon is the latest in a series of decisions brought by houses of worship — or, in this case, specific worshipers — who wish to defy public health rules limiting the number of people who can gather for religious activity.

California limits gatherings in people’s homes to members of just three households. This is a blanket rule, applying to people who gather in a home for any reason, regardless of whether they do so to pray, to quilt blankets that they plan to sell on Etsy, or just to socialize with friends. So, under Smith, this rule would be lawful because it treats religious and secular actors exactly the same.

Nevertheless, a majority of the Court concluded that people who wish to gather in someone’s home for religious activity must be exempted from California’s public health rule. And, although the Tandon opinion does not explicitly repudiate Smith, it defines what qualifies as a “neutral law of general applicability” so narrowly that the term is basically meaningless.

“Government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable,” the five most conservative justices write in an unsigned opinion “whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.” But the Court also defines what qualifies as “comparable secular activity” very broadly. (Although no justice signed their name to the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented. So we know that the remaining five justices formed the majority.)

“California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise,” the majority opinion in Tandon claims, “permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.”

As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, there are three very good reasons why a state might treat these secular activities differently than a gathering in people’s homes. First of all, “when people gather in social settings, their interactions are likely to be longer than they would be in a commercial setting,” and the people at social gatherings are “more likely to be involved in prolonged conversations.”

Additionally, “private houses are typically smaller and less ventilated than commercial establishments,” and “social distancing and mask-wearing are less likely in private settings and enforcement is more difficult.”

But, ultimately, none of these distinctions mattered to the Court’s majority. The practical impact of Tandon is that, so long as many religious objectors can cite any secular activity that is treated differently than a religious activity — no matter how distinct those two activities may be — this Supreme Court is very likely to grant the objector an exemption.

Tandon is not an especially surprising decision — the Court reached a similar conclusion last November in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, a decision that I described at the time as a “revolutionary victory” for religious conservatives.

Even after Roman Catholic Diocese, two Republican-appointed judges — Judge Milan Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, and Judge Bridget Shelton Bade, a Trump appointee — concluded that California’s across-the-board restriction on in-home gatherings should remain in effect.

The Tandon decision, in other words, is a signal that even conservative lower court judges need to be more protective of religious objectors — even when those objectors seek legal exemptions that could help spread a deadly disease.

It’s not clear how Tandon will apply to faiths the Court’s majority disapproves

In theory, the decision in Tandon should apply to all religious objectors, regardless of which faith motivates such objections. In practice, however, the Supreme Court has not always been protective of people of faith who are unpopular in the Republican Party.

In Dunn v. Ray (2019), for example, the Court rejected a request from a Muslim inmate on Alabama’s death row to have an imam comfort him during his final moments. At the time, Alabama permitted Christians to have a pastor present during their execution, but not Muslims. So Dunn involved a straightforward case of religious discrimination.

In fairness, the Court recently backed away from its decision in Dunn, after the decision triggered a widespread backlash even from many conservative commentators (the National Review’s David French labeled it a “grave violation of the First Amendment”). But, at the very least, Dunn shows that this Court is instinctively less protective of Muslims’ religious liberty than it is of Christians.

The clearest example of this kind of religious preference is Trump v. Hawaii (2018), which upheld a Trump-era policy prohibiting nationals from several majority Muslim nations from entering the United States. The Court did so despite the fact that Trump and his inner circle repeatedly bragged about their plans to target Muslims, in violation of the Constitution’s ban on policies “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.

In fairness, the Court based its decision in Hawaii largely on concerns that courts should be reluctant to interfere with a president’s decisions relating to national security. But it’s hard to imagine how the risk of allowing an immigrant from Yemen to enter the United States poses more of a danger to Americans than Covid-19 — and, indeed, before Justice Barrett joined the Court, a majority of the justices tended to defer to public health officials for much the same reason they defer to elected officials on matters relating to national security.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), a case decided before Barrett joined the Court, public health decisions typically “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

As the Court’s about-face in the Dunn case suggests, there is some nuance to the Court’s approach to Muslim civil rights. The Court does sometimes rule in favor of Islamic plaintiffs in religious liberty cases. In Holt v. Hobbs (2015), for example, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed that Muslim prison inmates should be allowed to grow a half-inch beard if their faith requires them to do so.

But decisions like Dunn and Hawaii also suggest that the Court is more reluctant to grant relief to Muslims than they are to grant such relief to Christians. It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the hyper-protective rule laid out in Tandon will apply equally to all people of faith — or whether certain favored religions will receive special treatment.

Attendees at the “March to Stop Police Brutality” support each other in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, on April 1. | Chris Tuite/ImageSPACE/Getty Images

The Derek Chauvin trial is retraumatizing Black Americans.

It’s been more than 300 days since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned down George Floyd’s neck — but time hasn’t dampened the mental anguish of seeing a Black man die under the weight of a white man sworn to protect the public.

Instead, Chauvin’s criminal trial, which began on March 29 and is expected to continue for weeks, has only heightened the emotional toll of the disturbing event.

Chauvin faces charges of manslaughter and murder, and to make their case — that Floyd died because Chauvin used excessive force — prosecutors have been relying heavily on the 9-minute, 29-second video that captured Floyd’s final moments. They’ve replayed it over and over to the courtroom, and to all those watching the proceedings live on television. The video’s been slowed down, it’s been rewound, and witnesses have been repeatedly asked to identify themselves in the footage.

Jerry Blackwell, a lawyer for the prosecution and founder of the Minnesota Association of Black Lawyers, issued a warning before he played the video for the first time: “I need to tell you, the video is graphic and can be difficult to watch. It’s simply the nature of what we’re dealing with in this trial.”

But the warning was too late, a futile attempt to preserve decency. Floyd’s death and the impending trial against Chauvin loomed over the country for almost a year, amid a pandemic that’s only magnified injustice. The palpable effects of this trauma have been visible in the mental health of Black Americans, and in the witnesses taking the stand.

Charles McMillian, 61, sobbed as he listened to himself tell Floyd, “You can’t win!” as Floyd struggled under Chauvin’s knee. Donald Williams II, a 33-year-old mixed martial artist with a background in security, eventually broke down as he testified about the “blood choke” that he saw Chauvin use on Floyd. Firefighter Genevieve Hansen, 27, fought back tears as she described feeling helpless at being unable to act in her capacity as an EMT to save Floyd’s life.

Darnella Frazier, 18, who recorded the viral video while accompanied by her 9-year-old cousin — who also testified — explained how the incident has irreparably changed her life, from the way she sees Floyd in the Black men in her life to her repeated, prayer-like apologies to Floyd for not doing more.

Court TV/AP
Charles McMillian, 61, sobbed as he listened to himself tell Floyd, “You can’t win!”

Court TV/AP
Donald Williams II, 33, broke down as he testified about the “blood choke” that he saw Chauvin use on Floyd.

Court TV/AP
Firefighter Genevieve Hansen, 27, fought back tears as she described feeling helpless to save Floyd’s life.

For the public who watched Floyd’s death on their screens, the trial has been similarly retraumatizing, particularly for the Black Americans who have grown familiar with how casually America handles Black death, and who are well aware of the country’s long history of brutalizing Black people. On Twitter, some users have resorted to muting any news about the trial, in an effort to shut out more pain.

I’ve watched some of the most upsetting footage from stories around the world for years, but every time the George Floyd video is played during the Chauvin trial, I now mute my computer. The cries of a dying man can be too much to bear sometimes and it’s ok to admit that.

— Hala Gorani (@HalaGorani) March 31, 2021

“This wasn’t the first time people saw a Black man being killed by the police so there’s historical trauma here,” Howard Stevenson, a clinical psychologist who studies racial stress and racial trauma and a professor of Africana studies and urban education at the University of Pennsylvania, told Vox. “Memories of other Black men being killed by the police play in our emotional movie and we depend on those memories to make sense of traumas.”

How the trauma of Black death compounds

In 2018, researchers at Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital found that police killings of unarmed Black people have adverse mental health effects on Black adults who were not directly affected by the incident itself: stress, depression, and difficulties with emotions that manifested in “poor mental health days.”

Black Americans have a greater and more personal understanding of systemic racism — they understand a lack of fairness, a loss of social status, diminished trust in social institutions, and prior related traumas, researchers found.

“We already knew this was happening based on how people talked about it on social media,” Jacob Bor, a professor of global health at Boston University and one of the report’s authors, told Vox. “But we wanted to contribute population-level data to a phenomenon that we were already seeing. We sometimes just assume that racism causes health disparities, but when you’re not explicit, people make other interpretations like maybe it’s genetics, behavior, or culture, which is pretty wrongheaded.”

For those already carrying the trauma of systemic racism, it doesn’t take much to trigger a physical and emotional response: Just hearing about Floyd or Chauvin’s trial can be enough to trigger memories of the other Black men who died at the hands of the police. And seeing video of the incident or even just listening to audio, particularly hearing Floyd’s voice and how he pleaded for his life, adds to that existing trauma.

It is a kind of trauma that builds over time, increasing with other moments of violence, from the beating of Rodney King in 1991 to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and compounds with Floyd and the police killing of Walter Wallace in October 2020 or the police shooting of Adam Toledo just last month.

“This is a part of our generation’s collective and ongoing trauma that was also a part of the experience that our ancestors had to undergo, only in a different iteration,” says trauma psychologist Mariel Buqué. “It’s new age terror and what happens to a person when they are terrorized to the point that they fear for their lives, and when this happens in an ongoing way by way of racist acts, is that it leaves profound fear planted in the person. And that fear, if impactful enough, can lead to the development of trauma.

This trauma manifests in psychological symptoms like numbing, dissociation, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, flashbacks, agitation, self-destructive behaviors, and other common symptoms like nightmares, lack of sleep, emotional detachment, and mistrust, Buqué said.

Online, countless people have explained their need to turn away from the trial when possible, so as not re-experience the pain they felt when first watching the video of Floyd’s death. “I had to mute it,” one Twitter user wrote. “But even without sound it’s the stuff of nightmares.”

When people experience racial trauma or even vicarious trauma — indirect trauma that is a result of witnessing or hearing about someone’s suffering — the effects aren’t only mental: They can present a whole host of challenges that affect the body.

“When people experience a racial encounter, something that puts so much stress on them, it always involves their bodies, but that’s rarely discussed,” Stevenson said. “Trauma is like an inability to manage stress and any healing approach that doesn’t take into account how it has changed our bodies is missing out. Understanding how our bodies react when we’re triggered by the video can help us gain control and feel less helpless.”

People should keep talking about Floyd’s life and his family

During the trial, the prosecution released footage and audio that wasn’t previously widely seen by the public, like how bystanders pleaded with officers to loosen the pressure they placed on Floyd. Even if someone has seen the video of Floyd multiple times, they haven’t captured all the information about it because it’s so overwhelming, Stevenson said. “The more times you see it, the more new information you pick, only adding to the trauma.”

And the weight of this feeling isn’t just personal — for example, parents have an added layer of trauma to navigate. Children are also seeing the video, hearing about Floyd’s death or even witnessing it themselves firsthand. Adults are tasked with explaining the case to children. “Many choose to look away and don’t want to talk about it to kids, or to anyone, but the fact is that it’s repeated through media,” Stevenson said. “You can go a lot of places trying to avoid it and still not be able to.”

No matter the verdict, the trauma could remain

Part of working through trauma is talking about it — and recognizing that it will take time to overcome. There’s also room to bring humanity to the situation, to promote healing, according to Stevenson.

“We need messages to counter the inhumanity of how Floyd died,” he said. This could involve thinking about how courageous Floyd was in his final moments. “Him calling out for his mother, as sad and tragic as it was, can be seen as a spiritual practice,” Stevenson said. People should keep talking about Floyd’s life and his family.

Chris Tuite/ImageSPACE/MediaPunch/Getty Images
For the public, who watched Floyd’s death on their screens, the trial has been similarly retraumatizing, particularly for the Black Americans who have grown familiar with how casually America handles Black death.

The eyewitnesses have already brought humanity to the stand — from the way Frazier testified to seeing her family in Floyd, to how McMillian, while testifying, still wanted to chastise Chauvin for his actions. And after holding onto the pain of these stories for nearly a year, witnesses fought back against defense lawyers who sought to categorize them as unknowledgeable, rowdy, angry, or belligerent. “You can’t paint me out to be angry,” Williams told the defense during cross-examination.

Though the video is a major source of trauma, Stevenson doesn’t believe we should stop sharing it, because the video represents accountability. Floyd’s loved ones originally wanted people to watch the footage to have the world see how Floyd was killed: “For so many Black families who experience this, the hardest part is about getting people to believe it happened and care,” Stevenson said.

Going forward, there’s also room for warning labels, particularly labels that speak to how these videos affect our emotions. “When you pick up a pack of cigarettes, they warn us that we can get lung cancer from smoking them. In this same way, we need to help people make the connection between watching these videos and how trauma shows up in our lives,” Stevenson said.”

Warning labels suggest an acknowledgement that harm was done, that our country cares enough to help people heal. A warning label could also signify the recognition that there’s an urgent search for accountability that the video helps to serve.

Additionally, working through trauma on the societal level means not giving up on the search for truth and seeking justice.

“Retribution cannot address the horror of an inhumane tragedy,” Stevenson told Vox. “But part of the reason we need accountability and justice is for our safety from here on out.” The fear that there will be no justice is one that looks to the future — Black people watching this case are concerned about what happened to Floyd, but are also concerned about whether they’re safe in a world that doesn’t see Black people as worthy of justice.

And though the current trauma subsides over time, there is a broader context to consider. Historical traumas remain, and the Chauvin trial won’t mean police violence will end forever. “Even if this justice happens, we won’t fully get over all of the other injustices,” Stevenson said.

Chris Tuite/ImageSPACE/MediaPunch/Getty Images
The George Floyd Memorial at the site where he died outside Cup Foods in Minneapolis.

Overcoming trauma — and limiting future traumatic experiences — will require telling the truth about these tragedies, recognizing and acknowledging trauma’s role, and understanding that the killing of Floyd is connected to the discrimination that people of color face in hiring, or in accessing health care, for example.

In the meantime, Black and brown communities must draw strength from their cultures and communities, because with historical trauma comes historical survival, or rather, transcendence.

“No other people have faced these kinds of horrors, so if this country wants to heal, it’s got to go through the cultural practices of Black and brown people,” Stevenson said. “In our cultures and practices, we can learn a lot about navigating white supremacy and dealing with trauma. We have to recognize our culture as a healing force.”

Aerial view of an industrial park in the Vaca Muerta oil reserves of Argentina on November 28, 2019. | Emiliano Lasalvia/AFP via Getty Images

The four biggest offenders were all American banks.

As the world careens toward a climate catastrophe, the biggest banks in the world are still financing fossil fuels in the trillions of dollars.

That’s according to a recently released report by a cohort of environmental groups including the Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club, titled “Banking on Climate Chaos.” The report found that the 60 biggest private banks in the world have financed $3.8 trillion in fossil fuels in the five years since the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2016.

Although 2020 saw a global drop in demand and production due to the coronavirus pandemic, and fossil fuel financing fell 9 percent, the amount spent on fossil fuel extraction projects last year was still more than in 2016 — which means that the practices of the world’s largest banks are fundamentally at odds with the 2016 Paris target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Fossil fuel companies have a couple of avenues for generating capital for their projects. The most common one is to go to a bank for a loan; the other is to sell stock or offer a chunk of future profits — but either way, they need a bank’s help.

Which means that banks have a major role to play in moving the world away from dirty fossil fuels and toward less polluting forms of energy — but only if they choose to do so. And based on the findings of the “Banking on Climate Chaos” report, most are very clearly not choosing to do so.

And though America led the charge in negotiating the Paris agreement more than five years ago, the report found that the four worst banks in the world for fossil fuel financing were all based in the United States.

JPMorgan Chase was the world’s worst “fossil bank,” contributing $51.3 billion in fossil fuel financing last year alone, and a total of $317 billion from 2016 to 2020.

That’s 33 percent more than the second-worst, Citibank, which spent $48.4 billion last year and a total of $237 billion since 2016. Wells Fargo came in third, with $26 billion in 2020, though the report notes that the bank’s fossil fuel financing actually fell by 42 percent in 2020. Bank of America ranked fourth, spending nearly $200 billion in the past five years.

If you add Morgan Stanley at No. 12 in the world and Goodman Sachs at No. 15, “that’s almost a third of bank financing for fossil fuels” coming from the United States, Jason Disterhoft, fossil finance expert at the Rainforest Action Network and one of the report’s author’s, told me.

Because US banks are an outsize part of the fossil fuel funding problem, they must be an outsize part of the solution to address climate change. “The US cannot credibly call itself a global climate leader so long as its banks are driving climate change to this extent, with no plans to phase out that activity,” Disterhoft added.

As a part of its all-of-government approach to attacking the climate crisis, the Biden administration plans to involve the Treasury Department in efforts to end international financing of fossil-fuel-based energy sources.

“It’s the first time we’re seeing an administration sketch out what an agenda in this space looks like,” Disterhoft said.

But banks in other countries have work to do, too.

France’s BNP Paribas was the worst in the European Union. It spent $41 billion to finance fossil fuels in 2020 — a 41 percent increase from 2019. Japan’s MUFG was the worst in Asia, and sixth-worst overall.

No South American or African banks made the list of the world’s 60 biggest banks.

Where’s the money’s going?

The report includes several case studies that show the impact big banks financing fossil fuels has on communities around the world that are disproportionately impacted by a climate crisis they largely didn’t create.

Citibank was named the worst bank for “funding the expanders” — that is, for funding the top 100 companies that are expanding their use of fossil fuels. One of those companies is the Canada-based energy transportation company Enbridge, whose Line 3 oil pipeline expansion is facing fierce opposition from Indigenous groups in Minnesota.

China’s CNOOC Limited and France’s Total — two of the world’s largest oil and gas companies — have been financing the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which would carry 216,000 barrels of crude oil per day from Uganda to Tanzania.

If completed, it would become the world’s longest heated pipeline and would blast over 33 million tons of planet-warming CO2 into the air — more emissions than are currently produced by the two countries combined.

And in yet another case, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Equinor are supporting fracking in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta oil and gas reserves in Patagonia. Although Indigenous communities are opposed to the project, big banks have been providing millions in subsidies to oil and gas companies interested in developing the region, which would have catastrophic impacts on global warming.

Ahead of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, the pressure on the world’s largest banks is now twofold: stop funding companies that are expanding their use of fossil fuels, and agree to phase out financing for fossil fuel projects in alignment with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C.

Supporters of US President Donald Trump, including QAnon conspiracy theorist Jake Angeli, enter the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

More sweeping domestic terrorism laws could be used against marginalized communities.

As lawmakers consider how to prevent future violence in the vein of January’s attack on the US Capitol, the debate has largely turned on one point: whether the US should create a new criminal law penalizing acts of domestic terrorism.

There are existing federal laws that criminalize domestic terrorism. The Patriot Act, which was enacted in the wake of 9/11, defined domestic terrorism as criminal acts that are “dangerous to human life” and are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” or “to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” Experts say that the storming of the Capitol fits that definition.

But no existing laws make domestic terrorism a “chargeable offense on its own” with attached criminal penalties, as the Congressional Research Service recently noted. It can, however, be an element of other federal crimes, such as assault and firearms offenses, and result in an enhanced sentence.

Some have argued that’s not enough to effectively prosecute domestic terrorism. Richard Zabel, a former deputy US attorney overseeing terrorism prosecutions in New York, wrote in the Washington Post that current law “limits our societal condemnation of the defendants and their dangerous ideologies.” The threat of domestic terrorism — which was not prioritized by former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly refused to denounce white nationalists and told those who stormed the Capitol, “We love you” — would be taken more seriously if it were easier for prosecutors to charge people as domestic terrorists, Zabel and others have argued.

But civil rights groups, including the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, are raising concerns that the harms of enacting those legal authorities outweigh the benefits: They argue it would enable law enforcement to target political dissidents, and those in marginalized communities who are frequently the victims of domestic terrorism, in violation of their constitutional rights.

“Such a law is not needed given the broad reach of existing criminal statutes,” Mara Rudman, executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement. “It will not solve the problem of domestic extremism and is likely to lead to unintended harms. … As lawmakers explore options for cracking down on these lawless and hateful acts, they should take care to ensure that the solutions do not create new risks for the communities they are trying to protect.”

At this point, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act — which passed the House with a bipartisan, two-thirds voice vote last September and was reintroduced this year — is the most viable proposal to improve the federal government’s response to domestic terrorism currently being considered in Congress. Rather than creating new legal authorities to prosecute domestic terrorism, it would instead aim to better employ existing tools, ensure that the issue is being prioritized at the agency level, and improve law enforcement accountability.

“The intent here is the prevention of terrorism, and the aspect of prosecution is left to current statutes,” Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), one of the co-sponsors of the legislation in the House, told Vox.

Law enforcement has a history of targeting marginalized communities

New legal authorities to prosecute domestic terrorism would endanger racial or ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ community, who have been disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and have also been most likely to be targeted in terrorist attacks because of their identity, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“History is replete with examples of such laws being weaponized and used against vulnerable citizens, especially Black Americans, and against individuals who criticize the government,” Rudman said.

That history goes back to at least the era of J. Edgar Hoover, who targeted “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey in 1919 because of his alleged association with “radical elements” that were “agitating the Negro movement.”

But even in recent history, the FBI’s counterterrorism division identified “black identity extremists” — a category that emerged in a leaked 2017 agency report and for which terrorism experts see no legitimate basis — as a growing threat. The report argued that opposition to racially-motivated police brutality and inequities in the criminal justice system could lead such a group of people to commit premeditated violence against law enforcement. It was dated just nine days before white supremacists held the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, where James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring another 19.

Despite the growing threat of white supremacist violence, the FBI prioritized investigations of “black identity extremists” under an intelligence collection operation it called “Iron Fist,” and used its most sophisticated surveillance aircraft to monitor Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore in 2018 and again in Washington, DC, last June.

If the US were to enact a new criminal statute to prosecute domestic terrorism, there is a “tremendous amount of danger that you’re going to see people suddenly being charged with terrorism at the next Black Lives Matter protests,” Katrina Mulligan, the Center for American Progress’s acting vice president of national security and international policy, said.

Law enforcement agencies have also targeted faith communities in violation of their religious liberties. In 2006, for example, the FBI monitored and infiltrated a Muslim community in Orange County, California, with the aim of gathering information on hundreds of people, including names, telephone numbers, emails, political and religious views, and travel plans, focusing particularly on people who were devout. The agency never brought terrorism charges or obtained criminal convictions against community members and was accused of unlawfully targeting people based on their religious beliefs, breaching their First Amendment rights.

The federal government can combat domestic terrorism using existing legal authorities

Rather than creating a new criminal law for domestic terrorism, law enforcement could put more resources toward using existing legal authorities to prevent terrorist attacks and prosecute those responsible.

Law enforcement has been operating in a post-9/11 paradigm where “radical Islamic terrorism” was considered the biggest threat and demanded the most resources. After the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Trump ignored his advisers’ pleas to reevaluate his administration’s response to the domestic terrorism — and was reluctant to even use the phrase “domestic terrorism” to describe the threats the US was facing. He later redirected resources away from combating domestic terrorism and toward addressing “radical Islamic terrorism” instead.

As a result, less than a quarter of the FBI’s counterterrorism field agents were investigating domestic plots in 2019. By October 2020, DHS had identified white supremacists as the deadliest terror threat facing the country.

With the Biden administration receptive to prioritizing the threat posed by right-wing extremists, law enforcement agencies are no longer fighting an uphill battle. They can fully implement existing criminal laws and financial tools to combat domestic terrorism, make prosecuting hate crimes a higher priority for law enforcement and national security officials, and improve research, data collection, and reporting.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which has been introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and endorsed by the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League among other groups, would help advance those goals.

It would create new offices focused on domestic terrorism within the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI — agencies where efforts to cooperate on prosecuting domestic terrorism have fallen short in the past. It would provide training and resources to state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies to identify, prevent, and investigate acts of domestic terrorism and white supremacy, as well as establish an interagency task force to address white supremacist infiltration of the military and federal law enforcement.

The bill would also require law enforcement agencies to jointly report on the state of domestic terrorism threats twice a year to Congress, which will inform how they can focus their limited resources on the most pressing threats facing the US.

“I think the transparency should result in better outcomes,” Rep. Schneider said.

Two National Guards in camouflage and carrying guns stand on a street line with concrete barricades and orange traffic cones.

Members of the National Guard watch a checkpoint outside the Capitol on Thursday. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

March 4 was supposed to be a big day for QAnon. It didn’t happen.

A threat against the Capitol that prompted House of Representatives leadership to cancel Thursday’s session thankfully amounted to nothing.

Capitol Police warned on Wednesday that they “obtained intelligence that shows a possible plot to breach the Capitol by an unidentified militia group on Thursday, March 4.” That finding was echoed by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the leading Republican on the homeland security committee, who said on CNN on Wednesday that “President Trump has a responsibility to tell them to stand down. This threat is credible. It’s real. It’s a right-wing militia group.”

Rep. Michael McCaul says fmr. Pres. Trump has a responsibility to tell extremists, who believe Trump will be inaugurated on March 4, and who the FBI say are plotting a possible attack on the US Capitol, to stand down. “This threat is credible. It’s real.” https://t.co/txZq2tbwMH pic.twitter.com/n4X4WbwTIo

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) March 3, 2021

Trump did not tell anybody to stand down, but thankfully all was quiet anyway around the Capitol on Thursday, where the Senate began debate on the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill despite the House’s decision to shut down for the day.

March 4 is a significant date in QAnon — a cultish, deranged conspiracy theory whose adherents believe Donald Trump is secretly fighting a global child sex trafficking cabal led by prominent Democrats. Vox’s Nicole Narea explains the theory’s fixation with March 4 in all its convoluted detail, but in brief: Some believers held that March 4, which was the date presidents were inaugurated until the 20th Amendment was adopted in 1933, would be when Trump would be inaugurated for another term of office. The Trump International Hotel located just blocks away from the White House even tried to capitalize on the conspiracy theory by raising room rates for the date.

But Jared Holt told Vox that he “did not find any of the usual tells we tend to see when online extremism is about to translate into real-world mobilization prior to March 4.” Holt is a resident fellow at DFRLab focused on domestic extremism; he correctly warned in the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection about internet chatter indicating pro-Trump demonstrations that day could spiral out of control.

“In recent days, even, many extremist influencers and communities actively discouraged participation in any would-be action on that date,” continued Holt in a Twitter direct message. “Although large mobilization was incredibly unlikely by standard measures, there continued to exist an ever-present risk posed by small groups or individuals who may feel compelled to act on their extremist beliefs.”

Holt noted that while the House’s decision to shut down for the day and all the security precautions around the Capitol “may seem like overkill,” the January 6 insurrection that left five dead “is still incredibly fresh on the minds of law enforcement and I’m not surprised that officials are acting with an abundance of caution.”

Indeed, law enforcement officials seemed to be trying to avoid a repeat of what happened on January 6, when numerous intelligence memos warning about the threat of violence from Trump supporters who gathered in Washington, DC, to protest the election on the day weren’t sufficient to prevent law enforcement from being overwhelmed by the MAGA mob.

While law enforcement officials are being extra careful these days, Republicans who egged on the insurrection by spreading lies about the 2020 election are not. On Thursday, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) — both of whom supported Trump’s efforts to overthrow the election — went on Fox & Friends and argued that despite the active threat at the Capitol, they saw no need for the National Guard’s continued presence.

“I think the idea of keeping [the National Guard] there indefinitely, and keeping a barbed wire fence around the Capitol indefinitely is crazy,” Hawley said.

On the day that the House is shut down because of a threat of violence, pro-insurrection Sen. Josh Hawley rails against National Guard troops being stationed at the Capitol pic.twitter.com/LIjTKmzbFU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 4, 2021

But if Trump-supporting Republicans really wanted to reopen the Capitol, the best thing they could do is denounce the lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that continue to inspire deranged Trump supporters to try and take matters into their own hands. Instead of doing that, however, the Republican Party remains largely unified behind the false notion that Joe Biden’s victory was tainted.

While Republicans like Hawley and Waltz see no need for the continued National Guard presence at the Capitol, Capitol Police disagree. On Thursday, the force reportedly requested that the National Guard stay at the Capitol for at least two more months, citing ongoing security concerns. That request came a day after a House hearing where Capitol Police acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told lawmakers that threats against lawmakers have increased nearly 100 percent year over year.

Then-candidate Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention on August 20, 2020. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

The proposal isn’t just about boosting the economy — it’s about helping people.

There’s been a lot written over the past few weeks about whether President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic “rescue” package is too small or too big. But an equally important question — and one that underpins the size debate — is what the package should do: Should it be targeted as efficiently as possible to stimulate an economic recovery, or provide quick relief to as many people as possible?

Economists on the stimulus side argue the package should focus on filling the giant hole Covid-19 has left in the US economy. Under this view, a boost in federal spending should maximally and efficiently make up for decreases in other spending as jobs, incomes, and tax revenues fall.

Those on the relief side say the package should be seen more as a relief bill — what economist Noah Smith described as “retroactive social insurance.” Consider the difference between how the government typically responds to a recession versus a hurricane: While the goal with a recession is typically to target spending as efficiently as possible to maximize the recovery, the goal with a hurricane is to make people whole again — even if the spending involved isn’t maximizing, say, economic multipliers. Smith and others argue the package should be more like a hurricane response.

Both sides have good arguments. Covid-19 has obviously battered the economy, with 10 million fewer jobs compared to the year before, shrinking GDP last year, and downward trends in various other metrics. But there’s a good chance much of this will bounce back once the pandemic ends — so what’s needed isn’t so much getting the economy back to “normal” (only the end of Covid-19 can fully do that), but broad economic relief to Americans who are suffering now.

Biden’s response to all of this: Why not both? As he put it last week, “It’s not just the macroeconomic impact on the economy and our ability to compete internationally; it’s people’s lives. Real, live people are hurting, and we can fix it.”

Understanding Biden’s overall proposal in this light makes sense of what can seem like a grab bag of progressive priorities. Some ideas might seem inefficient or excessive for stimulus but make a lot of sense for relief, and vice versa.

For example: Some economists have argued the $1,400 checks should be cut off for Americans with incomes above $75,000 because they’re less likely to spend the money — so they’re less likely to truly stimulate the economy. Some other economists, like Claudia Sahm, disagree, pointing to empirical evidence that the money likely will be spent within months.

But even if the checks-are-inefficient-stimulus crowd is right, the $1,400 checks still can provide another value: peace of mind. The higher-income beneficiaries (who still aren’t exactly rich) may not spend the money as quickly or efficiently as their lower-income counterparts, but the checks still offer support and a safeguard after a year of uncertainty.

Similarly, the bill’s full cost of $1.9 trillion might seem too large for an output gap — the difference between the economy’s current state and potential — estimated at $600 billion or less. Setting aside very reasonable questions about how the output gap is calculated (it seems BS-y to me, as a non-expert), the overspending could be justified if it’s partly for relief, not just stimulus meant to fill the exact hole of the output gap.

On the flip side, the $350 billion in aid to state and local governments may not offer immediate, direct relief to Americans. But it could help stimulate the economy by letting states and localities avoid cuts and even increase their own spending.

Providing both federal stimulus and relief during a recession isn’t new. Past stimulus bills have done both to some degree. But the unique contours of the coronavirus recession have made the need for both even clearer.

Sign up for the Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

A MAGA hat was set on fire prior to clashes between Black Lives Matter protesters and a group of Proud Boys following the “Million MAGA March” in Washington, DC. | Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images

His presidency is over, but the trauma isn’t.

Four years ago, Americans were gathering at airports to protest then-President Donald Trump’s newly enacted ban on travel from primarily Muslim-majority countries. A year ago, they were watching his trial in the Senate after he was impeached on charges of obstruction and abuse of power. Three months ago, some were gathering emergency kits and making safety plans with their neighbors to prepare for potential election violence from his supporters.

And three weeks ago, they were watching those supporters storm the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election and keep Trump in power.

Now, Trump has finally left office, despite his constant threats that he wouldn’t. But the impact on the American psyche of four years of racist rhetoric, incitements of violence, and out-and-out chaos remains.

Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Trump supporters broke windows and breached the Capitol building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.

For many, the past year has been especially difficult, bringing with it a pandemic; the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans; and the Trump administration’s violent response to the racial justice protests that ensued. “It created an environment where you are constantly in a state of fight or flight,” Lauren Carson, founder and executive director of the mental health nonprofit Black Girls Smile, told Vox.

Among the Black girls and women it serves, as well as among its own staff, the group saw a lot of stress, anxiety, and feelings of being overwhelmed, Carson said. “You are working on 2 percent every day, day in, day out — or negative percent.”

Some of those feelings have also been reflected in nationwide surveys, with a significant increase in stress about the country’s future and political climate after the 2016 election. And in 2020, 68 percent of Americans said the election was a significant source of stress in their lives, up from 52 percent in 2016.

Like the impact of Trump’s policies, that stress doesn’t go away overnight, especially when the conditions that led to his election — systemic racism, anti-immigrant paranoia, and the rampant spread of misinformation — are still very much a reality.

But Carson and others are working to help people care for themselves and address the trauma of the past four years, even as some of their biggest stressors — if not Trump’s presidency itself — continue. These days, “a lot is coming to light that I think is forcing us as a society to work on making some real changes,” she said. There’s “a lot of real pain and real hurt there, but hopefully it creates an opportunity for healing.”

Trump’s presidency was traumatic for a lot of Americans

The problems Trump brought to light — racism, xenophobia, and transphobia, to name just a few — certainly didn’t start with him. But from the moment he announced his campaign in a speech maligning Mexican people as rapists, he made such attitudes more explicit than ever before within the bounds of traditional party politics.

His rhetoric helped embolden a wave of hate crimes across the country targeting Muslim Americans, immigrants, and a number of other groups he had demonized. Meanwhile, his constant all-caps tweeting, his preference for staff who enabled rather than checked his worst impulses, and his return to campaign-style rallies shortly after his election all led to a relentless news environment that subjected Americans to the president’s disjointed and frequently abusive thoughts multiple times per day. In the first three years of his presidency, Trump tweeted more than 11,000 times — 5,889 of those tweets, according to the New York Times, “attacked someone or something.”

While Trump was able to energize a core of supporters with his mix of bravado, defiance, and racism, for many others, his presidency was, quite simply, scary. In the American Psychological Association’s 2016 “Stress in America” survey, 63 percent of Americans said the future of the country was a “significant source of stress,” and 56 percent said they were stressed out by the current political climate. In the 2018 version of the survey, those numbers went up to 69 percent and 62 percent, respectively.

Clinical psychologist Jennifer Panning even coined the term “Trump anxiety disorder” to describe the stress many people were feeling in the weeks and months following the 2016 election. “People tended to experience things like ruminations, like worries of what’s going to be next” as they awaited each new tweet or action by the president, Panning told Vox.

Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images
A protest against President Trump’s planned ban on Muslim travel in New York City on January 25, 2017.

Trump also subjected people in America and around the world to language and tactics used by abusers, Farrah Khan, a gender justice advocate and manager of the Office of Sexual Violence Support and Education at Ryerson University in Canada, told Vox. That includes gaslighting (like when he claimed that the official Covid-19 death tolls were fraudulent, or that the virus would “go away on its own”), lashing out in anger (his perennial rage-tweets about “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT”), and seeking revenge on people for perceived wrongs (his attacks on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after she criticized his administration’s Covid-19 response). In a relationship with an abuser, “you’re constantly hypervigilant to what he’s going to do next,” Khan said. Under Trump’s presidency, that hypervigilance extended to the millions of Americans affected by him and his policies.

Of course, those effects were not evenly distributed. While all of America had to put up with Trump’s tweets, many immigrants, LGBTQ people, and Black, Indigenous, and other people of color experienced real threats to their families, their well-being, and their lives. Thousands of children were separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border, with attorneys still unable to locate the families of more than 600 children. Trans people faced an onslaught of regulations stripping away their protections from discrimination in health care, housing, education, and more. In at least 41 criminal cases — including an assault on a Latinx man in Florida and threats against a Syrian-born man in Washington state — Trump’s name was invoked in connection with violence or threats, according to an ABC News analysis. The network found no criminal cases with such direct connections to presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush.

And over the past year, with the country facing a pandemic (that Trump called by a racist name) and a long-overdue reckoning with racism and police violence (to which the Trump administration responded by tear-gassing protesters), the administration’s impact on Americans’ mental health and physical well-being has only grown more acute. That’s especially true for Black Americans, who have had to contend with the deaths of Floyd and others, and what ongoing police violence — as well as the pandemic and economic crisis — means for them and their families, Carson said. “During this time we were definitely seeing just a lot of overwhelm, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety,” Carson said.

“Trump subjected people in America and around the world to language and tactics used by abusers”

Those feelings came to a head, for some, with the Capitol riot on January 6. That day, Trump urged his supporters to “walk down to the Capitol” and “show strength” against “bad people.” He then praised rioters as they occupied the Capitol, some holding Confederate flags and other racist symbols, calling them “very special.” The riot and the way it was covered just added to the trauma Black Americans were feeling, according to Carson. “Even the way that we’ve seen ‘protests’ versus ‘insurrection,’” she said. “Those depictions really weigh on the mental health and well-being especially of Black women and girls, because it’s a clear sign that we don’t matter.”

President Joe Biden has begun reversing some of the administration’s policies targeting marginalized groups, like the travel ban and the ban on trans people serving in the military. But just as undoing the impact of Trump’s presidency will take longer than a few weeks, healing from the trauma of the past four years will take time.

For some, it hasn’t even sunk in that Trump isn’t president. “People still talk about, ‘I can’t believe we actually did it, we actually got him out,’” Panning said. And for many people, especially in communities Trump targeted, his presidency “had a direct impact on the ways we felt safe,” Khan said. Rebuilding a feeling of safety will take time, and right now, “people are not okay.”

Rest, treatment, and action can help people recover from trauma

For some, the first step toward rebuilding that feeling will be simply acknowledging that the past four years — and especially the last year — have been traumatic. “We need to expect that there’s going to be a lot of emotional upheaval,” Panning said, and those emotions will “take some time to work through.” People are experiencing trauma symptoms from muscle tension to panic attacks to intrusive thoughts to simply deep sadness, Khan said.

For Black girls and women in particular, depression and anxiety have been “running rampant during this time,” Carson said. They’ve been experiencing fear not just for their own health and safety, but also for “our brothers, our fathers, our children.” Amid that, “it is very difficult to see the sunshine, it’s very difficult to see joy, it’s very difficult to be happy,” Carson said.

To combat that, Carson and others are stressing the importance of self-care, which can take many forms. Black Girls Smile, for example, offers online storytelling, journaling, and crafting workshops aimed at helping Black girls and young women “recharge, refresh, and renew,” Carson said. The group has also begun offering therapy scholarships to help Black girls and women afford professional mental health care. Groups like the Audre Lorde Project, Trans Lifeline, the Okra Project, and the Anti-Violence Project also offer support and resources specifically for trans and queer people and communities.

Anyone concerned about their mental health can also take an online assessment like those at Mental Health America to see if they have symptoms of depression, anxiety, or another condition that might benefit from treatment, Carson said. People should also keep in mind that for communities of color, “a lot of symptoms look a lot different in our communities compared to the white cis male community,” she added. For example, Black women can experience social anxiety as a result of experiences in predominantly white schools or workplaces, as well as PTSD and other effects of the trauma of racism. “We have to take a real hard look at the things we may be experiencing,” Carson said.

As individuals take steps toward healing, it’s also a time when we can look at bigger changes to the country’s mental health system. That includes providing child care, flexible hours, and other supports to make therapy more accessible to all Americans, Carson said. It also includes a greater focus on community mental health: “Too often we focus on just an individual, and in many instances, their whole family is impacted, or the whole community.”

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
Supporters of President-elect Joe Biden celebrate at Black Lives Matter Plaza across from the White House in Washington, DC, on November 7, 2020.

And part of recovery, as a society, is addressing the forces that led to Trump’s election in the first place. “The issues that were uncovered during Trump’s presidency have not magically gone away now that Biden is president,” Panning said. “What Trump did do is energize a lot of people politically to pay attention and to understand how our government works and who it tends to benefit.”

Today, “there’s a lot of anger and frustration and resentment that is still lingering,” she added. And one healthy way to deal with it is to “channel that into action.”

Activism can be one way to heal, Khan said. For example, artists around the country have created street art to memorialize George Floyd and protest against police violence and racism, and activists Kenda Zellner-Smith and Leesa Kelly have collected some of the art from around Minneapolis and St. Paul to preserve and hopefully display it. “There has to be a space for Black people, by Black people, where this art can be available for healing and reflection, a reminder of what happened in a way to continue the movement,” Kelly told ABC.

But in addition to action, Khan cautioned, people need to make time for rest. “As activists, sometimes we’re taught to kind of just push through,” she said. “What I’m asking people is to slow down and take care of ourselves and our communities.”

A man wearing a mask dragging a suitcase.

A man in a face mask walks past closed shops in downtown Los Angeles on April 22, 2020. | Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

The week before Biden took office, 1.4 million Americans filed for unemployment.

The day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, America’s unemployment situation looks bleak.

On Thursday, the United States Labor Department released its latest weekly jobless claims numbers, which showed that 900,000 people filed new unemployment claims the week ending January 16 — President Trump’s final full week in office. Additionally, 423,000 people filed new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), expanded unemployment insurance for freelancers, gig workers, contractors, and the self-employed.

It’s a stark indication of the economic hill the new administration has to climb when it comes to getting desperately needed help to millions of workers. Overall, 16 million people were on unemployment as of January 2 — a tough start for the year and a big hole to dig out of.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the record for weekly jobless claims was 695,000, set in 1982. Since the outbreak hit the US, however, claims have consistently remained above that, topping 6 million in the spring. While during much of last year, the situation was modestly improving, it’s begun to worsen again, with new claims rising in recent weeks.

The December unemployment report also reflects that trend: The US actually lost 140,000 jobs in the last month of the year for the first time in months. Given the current jobs deficit, the country needs to be adding jobs to speed up the recovery, not losing them. People with low-income jobs in areas such as leisure and hospitality, and women — particularly women of color — were hard hit.

“One thing that we’re seeing is that people are losing their jobs anew,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank.

As the pandemic has worsened in many parts of the country, so have economic conditions — you can’t fix the economy without dealing with the virus first. Stettner elaborated: “It’s definitely linked to the pandemic surge and economic restrictions in big places like California that are facing some new rounds of layoffs and furloughs on top of the usual seasonal activity.”

Biden’s team is aware of the urgency of the moment. National Economic Council Director Brian Deese said in a statement regarding the claims number on Wednesday that it is “another stark reminder” that more help for the economy is needed. “We must act now to get this virus under control, stabilize the economy, and reduce the long-term scarring that will only worsen if bold action isn’t taken,” he said.

What’s actually going on with jobless claims is a little tricky to parse

The jobless claims data this year has been a little, well, funky.

Congress waited until the very last minute to pass a second stimulus package in 2020, and Trump dragged his feet on signing the $908 billion bill. The legislation entailed more relief for unemployed workers, including tacking on an additional $300 in weekly federal payments through mid-March and extending PUA and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides additional weeks of regular state unemployment insurance. The latter two programs were part of the CARES Act passed in March and were set to expire in December. Because legislation to extend them came so late in the game, they sort of expired anyway.

“Congress just waited too long, so no matter what they did that week of Christmas, there was still going to be a short period of delay for people on those federal extension programs,” said Elizabeth Pancotti, a policy adviser at the advocacy group Employ America.

That this happened isn’t a surprise — experts and advocates warned for months last year that too much procrastination on extending unemployment insurance programs had the potential to push millions of workers off a financial cliff. Some states have been able to get their ducks in a row to ensure continuity, but many have not. Systems were preprogrammed to shut down in December, and they did.

“There are probably millions of families waiting on two, three, four weeks of unemployment checks that aren’t getting them,” Pancotti said.

To put this a little more concretely, the latest jobless numbers show a drop in people on PEUC — the extended benefits after the regular ones expire. That could very well be tied to that cliff at the end of the year where the program itself lapsed.

“What we have seen is that most states were not paying out PEUC benefits in early January,” Stettner said. “Most of them were waiting on the guidance [from the federal government] and new programming, and that’s why the number really went down. Some states were probably not taking claims at all or particular individuals may have been blocked. Even though you saw today’s report that 3 million people filed PEUC claims, I can guarantee you 3 million people didn’t actually get paid.”

Millions of unemployed workers are now Biden’s problem to address

The Biden administration has signaled it plans to hit the ground running, including on the economy and delivering help to American workers. The country still has 10 million fewer jobs than it did pre-pandemic, and millions more have dropped out of the workforce altogether.

Stettner said that one starting point for the administration is to try to get the programs to work better. A federal government that is firing on all cylinders can get regulations out faster and offer clearer guidance to states on how to handle the unemployed.

Biden has already put forth a framework for Congress to pass follow-up stimulus legislation that includes support for people out of work. Last week, Biden unveiled a $1.9 trillion proposal for a follow-up Covid-19 relief bill. It includes $400 a week in expanded federal unemployment insurance and extends emergency unemployment programs, including PEUC and PUA, through September 2021. Legislation will ultimately have to be drafted and written by Congress, and this is basically Biden’s opening bid.

As a starting point, the timing of Biden’s proposal is good in that it is early: Current benefits and programs are set to expire in mid-March, so there’s time for this proposal to work its way through Capitol Hill or, at the very least, for Democrats to realize Republicans won’t play ball and pivot to a different plan. The Biden administration has signaled it wants to try to pass this package through regular order, which would require 60 votes. Many Republicans are already signaling they aren’t on board with this plan, meaning Democrats could turn to budget reconciliation, which would require only a simple majority.

Another positive sign: The framework Biden put forth nods to automatic stabilizers, which would tie social safety net mechanisms (i.e., unemployment) to certain economic conditions. If such mechanisms were put in place, that would mean expanded benefits and emergency programs would be tied to the economic situation actually being better — the unemployment rate at a certain level, and the public health emergency actually over — than a random end date picked by lawmakers. The extra $600 in unemployment benefits from the CARES Act ended on July 31 for no real reason except Congress was overly optimistic about when the pandemic would subside and chose that date.

“They probably have one shot to get this right and they should really move in that direction [of automatic stabilizers] and try to lock in assistance throughout the duration of the crisis,” Stettner said. “They should have the courage … not to put an arbitrary date on this.”

Biden’s initial stimulus proposal, the American Rescue Plan, is part of what his team says will be a two-part effort on the economy. This is the “rescue” portion, and then there will be a “recovery” one to come later. But it’s not guaranteed Democrats will get a chance to do a bunch of big packages — in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession, they only got one shot and went too small.

“When Democrats passed the recovery act in 2009, it was smaller than was necessary, and a lot of members thought there was going to be another bite at the apple. There wasn’t,” one Democratic aide recently told me. “Members who were around in that time period are very much cognizant of that lesson.”

Pancotti stressed that there are unemployment-related items not in Biden’s framework that should be — for example, funding for states to improve their unemployment insurance structures. Each state determines its own administration, and lots of systems are outdated and insufficient. Congress has provided some federal funding to help states process claims during the pandemic, and it can provide more.

“The Biden administration doesn’t call for that in the framework, but as Congress works on turning that framework into legislative text with a lot more specifics … I think that conversation will reemerge of what investments do we need to make in our systems for the things we care about to actually work,” Pancotti said. “These systems need short-term investments to make these programs work and long-term investments in reform.”

A person wearing a MAGA hat stands on a sidewalk and leans on a sign that reads, “Stop the steal. Joe Biden: Traitor! Liar! Thief!”

A Trump supporter holds a sign opposing President-elect Joe Biden in Olympia, Washington. | Ted S. Warren/AP

Some might even describe them as “low energy.”

In the days following the violent Trump-inspired insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, the FBI warned all 50 states that similar “armed protests” were being planned by right-wing extremists around their capitol buildings. But on Inauguration Day, at least, those protests turned out to be complete duds.

Not only have there been no incidents of violence at state capitols on Wednesday as of 4 pm ET, but at many of them, the number of MAGA protesters could be counted on one hand.

At the New York Capitol in Albany, Spectrum News reporter Morgan Mckay documented the presence of a single pro-Trump demonstrator.

“He says he expected a few thousand ppl here and is disappointed,” Mckay tweeted. (Thanks to Elie Mystal of the Nation for his helpful Twitter thread putting the tweets that follow in one place.)

Mark Leggiero is the one lone Trump supporter out in front of the NYS Capitol. He says he expected a few thousand ppl here and is disappointed. He said he drove 45 minutes for a peaceful protest pic.twitter.com/hDtCLYFpLq

— Morgan Mckay (@morganfmckay) January 20, 2021

A similar scene unfolded at the California Capitol in Sacramento, where one man in a Trump cap protested as President Joe Biden was sworn in, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Later in the day, more sizable protests took place around the California Capitol, but they were left-wing protests calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and for immigration reform.)

At the State Capitol in Sacramento, a lone Trump supporter wearing a red MAGA hat protested as President Biden took the oath of office Wednesday.

: @dustingardiner

Live #InaugurationDay updates >> https://t.co/WowWEMPI7l pic.twitter.com/QaSrlvomgd

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) January 20, 2021

There were three times as many pro-Trump protesters at the capitol in New Hampshire — but that still only amounted to three of them. And one-third of the group took off early, telling reporters “he was leaving to go skiing,” according to Dan Tuohy of New Hampshire Public Radio.

All quiet at the State House — two protestors out front. A third person was here, but he told press he was leaving to go skiing. #nhprinauguration #nhpolitics #InaugurationDay pic.twitter.com/kxyfJmbg92

— Dan Tuohy (@tuohy) January 20, 2021

A dozen or so armed protesters did show up at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix, but Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed reported that it remained peaceful.

The Trump supporters are now having a picnic. One guy is milling about reading 1984. Some have put up Confederate flags here in Arizona, the 48th state admitted to the Union. pic.twitter.com/8HODm1rzLy

— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) January 20, 2021

And a pro-Trump demonstration some 700 miles north of there at the Nevada Capitol in Carson City was similarly underwhelming, according to Colton Lochhead of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The scene just outside Nevada’s capitol complex in Carson City ~ half hour until the Biden’s inauguration kicks off. So far, just two older guys – Brandon and Matt – with signsflags who are frustrated that more people have not showed up. pic.twitter.com/rq2P0opYcs

— Colton Lochhead (@ColtonLochhead) January 20, 2021

You get the drift. Local reporters also documented how protests of Biden’s inauguration fizzled in Kansas:

Two protestors on the southeast corner of the Kansas Statehouse. One told me he was disappointed so few people showed up. #kakenews #ksleg pic.twitter.com/F2LTpozCOZ

— Pilar Pedraza TV (@PilarPedrazaTV) January 20, 2021

North Carolina:

Found a third protestor outside the NC General Assembly in Raleigh. It’s a sleepy scene overall (aside from the considerable law enforcement presence)

As his sign suggests, Gary Morgan of Greensboro doubts the 2020 election results. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/OVUS02ICDY

— Brian Gordon (@BrianSamuel92) January 20, 2021

Minnesota:

For those wondering: Calm at the MN Capitol. pic.twitter.com/XnoqLLHo3a

— Dave Orrick (@DaveOrrick) January 20, 2021

Missouri:

The demonstrations in Jefferson City are modest, at best. A handful of Trump supporters, two guys with upside down flags on the Capitol steps, a few people with a non-partisan group calling for healing. pic.twitter.com/SydjDcDi48

— Jonathan Ahl (@JonathanAhl) January 20, 2021

Texas:

Only a few people outside the Texas Capitol Building in Austin. Thomas Jones (Hawaiian shirt) said he and friends drove from Crockett to protest the Inauguration.
He expected more people to be here, but was banned from Facebook so didn’t know if anything was planned. pic.twitter.com/HuLbUbNnT3

— Kaley Johnson☀️ (@KaleyAJohnson) January 20, 2021

Kentucky:

There’s only been one protester outside Capitol in Frankfort today. His sign alludes to how well Hitler and Stalin got along. pic.twitter.com/9HOCIkIx5H

— Joe Sonka (@joesonka) January 20, 2021

Utah:

One man has an upside down U.S. flag, and on the other side a confederate flag #utpol #utleg pic.twitter.com/VxKnJio6fI

— Katie McKellar (@KatieMcKellar1) January 20, 2021

Ohio:

Only a couple of protestors but lots of security at the Ohio Statehouse on Inauguration Day pic.twitter.com/pD0L2IdalJ

— Karen Kasler (@karenkasler) January 20, 2021

Oregon:

Protests never materialized earlier today in Salem, though there was certainly a large police and media presence. pic.twitter.com/bALn4GcKZR

— Hannah Ray Lambert (@TheHannahRay) January 20, 2021

And Tennessee:

Lone man in Trump hat outside the Tennessee Capitol does not want to talk because media “can’t be trusted” pic.twitter.com/MbLFPfJQBs

— Stephen Elliott (@ElliottStephenB) January 20, 2021

Trump fans were also scarce in downtown Washington, DC, which is heavily militarized following the insurrection. In fact, Tess Owen of Vice reported that Nickelback fans were better represented on streets around the US Capitol than Trump supporters.

I saw more Nickelback fans than MAGA hats today in DC pic.twitter.com/MfXQ8fo4IC

— Tess Owen (@misstessowen) January 20, 2021

Of course, that Biden’s inauguration went off without a hitch in DC and at state capitols across the country doesn’t mean the threat posed by armed right-wing extremists has passed. But it does highlight how Trump’s months-long campaign to overthrow the election results descended from tragedy to farce in the weeks following the January 6 riot. It also hints at one way the bans from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms of Trump and right-wing conspiracists and instigators in the wake of the Capitol insurrection, which was largely organized online, are working.

For his part, Trump not only didn’t attend Biden’s inauguration, but he managed to leave DC without ever properly acknowledging the legitimacy of his loss or officially conceding. He took off for Florida on Wednesday morning following a final speech as president at Joint Base Andrews in which he told a modest crowd of his supporters “we will be back in some form … have a good life.”

Coming as it did exactly two weeks after he delivered a fiery speech that culminated in five people dying during a riot at the US Capitol in a failed bid to overthrow the election outcome, Trump’s resigned tone was notable. And, at least for one day, his followers took the hint.

Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Mark Milley, meets with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz at the Pentagon on September 22, 2020. | Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

This is a remarkable statement by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a statement sent out to the entire US military, all eight members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned the Capitol insurrection — incited by the current commander in chief — and warned service members not to do anything to impede President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Top military officials prefer to stay out of anything tinged with politics. For one to say something after last week’s event would be noteworthy and rare enough. For all eight Joint Chiefs to speak out together — in a “message to the Joint Force,” no less — shows just how perilous they deem this moment to be.

“The violent riot in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Congress the Capitol building, and our Constitutional process,” the letter signed by all the Joint Chiefs reads. “We witnessed actions inside the Capitol building that were inconsistent with the rule of law. The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection.”

While that may be a general statement about the insurrection meant more for the public, the next section was clearly meant for the troops they help lead.

“As Service Members, we must embody the values and ideals of the Nation. We support and defend the Constitution,” they wrote. “Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values, and oath; it is against the law.”

“President-elect Joe Biden,” they concluded, “will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.”

“The violent riot in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 was a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional process.” — Message to the Joint Force from Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley and the rest of the Joint Chiefs. pic.twitter.com/coIh9yqEpI

— Katie Bo Williams (@KatieBoWill) January 12, 2021

There are likely two main reasons why Joint Chiefs Chair Army Gen. Mark Milley and the seven others felt the need to pen the letter.

First, veterans and possibly even some active-duty troops were allegedly involved in the attack on the Capitol last week. That means the military community certainly contains people who wrongly believe the presidential election was stolen, subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy theory, or have far-right tendencies.

Regardless of their passions or views, military leaders aim to keep the armed services as apolitical as possible. Otherwise, some might associate the military with one party or another, and that isn’t healthy for a democracy.

Second, the Joint Chiefs tend to speak out when something really egregious has happened, and there’s no question the Capitol insurrection fits the bill. “[T]hey have developed a finely tuned ‘political’ (small p) radar on when to weigh in,” CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr tweeted on Tuesday.

For example, after President Donald Trump said some attendees at the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville were “very fine people,” all the Joint Chiefs spoke out against racism and bigotry. “The Army doesn’t tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks. It’s against our Values and everything we’ve stood for since 1775,” Milley, who was chief of staff of the Army then, said at the time.

Based on this letter, it looks as though America’s top military officials won’t tolerate another thing: the attempted overthrow of American democracy by force.