With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: Last year, in an interview on Super Bowl Sunday, Bill O’Reilly challenged President Trump over his desire to improve relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin’s a killer,” said the then-Fox News host.

“There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent? Take a look at what we’ve done, too. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. . . . So, a lot of killers around, believe me.”

There was strong and vocal pushback at the time from most elected Republicans.

-- Over the past several days, as Trump again engaged in a spree of whataboutism and moral relativism ahead of today’s summit in Helsinki with Putin, far fewer GOP lawmakers have called him out.

Piers Morgan, the former CNN host and a one-time contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice,” interviewed Trump aboard Air Force One for the Daily Mail as he visited the United Kingdom. As the president discussed his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Morgan interrupted: “He’s a ruthless dictator.”

“Sure he is,” Trump said. “He’s ruthless, but so are others. I mean, I could name plenty of others that we deal with that you don’t say the same thing about. I mean plenty of the people that I deal with are pretty ruthless people.”

Asked if Putin would be in that group, Trump replied: “I can’t tell you that. I assume he probably is. But I could name others also. Look, if we can get along with Russia, that’s a good thing.”

Then, in an interview that aired Sunday, CBS’s Jeff Glor asked Trump at his golf course in Scotland to identify the “biggest foe globally right now.” Trump named the European Union, which includes many of America’s closest historic allies. “Well, I think we have a lot of foes,” the president said. “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn't think of the European Union, but they're a foe. Russia is foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically … But that doesn't mean they are bad. It doesn't mean anything. It means that they are competitive.”

Trump also continued his pattern of blaming the American victim, not the foreign attacker. The president attacked the Democratic National Committee for allowing itself to get hacked and Barack Obama for not more forcefully responding, rather than the Russian government for conducting the hacks. “We had much better defenses. I’ve been told that by a number of people. We had much better defenses, so they couldn’t,” Trump said on CBS, referring to his campaign and the Republican National Committee. “I think the DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked. They had bad defenses and they were able to be hacked.”

-- Trump hasn’t changed, but the Republican Party has.CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday how Trump should hold Putin accountable after a dozen Russian officials were indicted last week for orchestrating a massive hacking campaign to interfere with American democracy. Paul replied that it is unrealistic to hold Moscow accountable.

“They are going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same,” said Paul, citing a study that he said shows the United States interfered in the elections of other countries 81 times during a 50-year period in the last century. “So, we all do it. What we need to do is make sure our electoral process is protected.”

Paul, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, has always been a libertarian, but he often tried to downplay this side of his worldviewwhen he sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Now that Trump is in control, he’s talking much more like his father again.

-- Even traditional hawks are now minimizing what the Russians did in 2016. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who chairs the Europe subcommittee on Foreign Relations, said after returning from a July Fourth visit to Moscow that Congress overreacted to Russia’s interference in our elections. “I've been pretty upfront that the election interference — as serious as that was and unacceptable — is not the greatest threat to our democracy,” he told the conservative Washington Examiner. “We've blown it way out of proportion — [as if it's] the greatest threat to democracy . . . We need to really honestly assess what actually happened, what effect did it have, and what effect are our sanctions actually having, positively and negatively.”

Would he feel the same way if Russia interfered in his 2016 reelection campaign to help Russ Feingold, his Democratic opponent?

“Johnson’s remarks to the Examiner were highlighted by Russian state media,” Roll Call reported. “The Russian news agency TASS reported on Johnson’s comments, as did Sputnik International.”

Pressed on his comments last week during an appearance on WOSH, an AM talk radio station in Oshkosh, Johnson doubled down on his position that the U.S. faces more serious threats than election hacking. “It’s very difficult to really meddle in our elections,” the senator said. “It just is. These are locally run. It’s almost impossible to change the vote tally. My concern would be violating the voter files, but we have those issues anyway and there are plenty of controls on that. … From a standpoint of using social media, we spent a couple of billion dollars on the last election. They, maybe, spent a couple hundred thousand.”

-- “Most countries would meddle and play in our domestic elections if they could, and some of them have,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said recently. “We have to be realistic [that] nations are going to do what is in their [national] interest. We’ve done a lot of things, too.”

Shelby, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, made that comment to the Examiner as he prepared to lead a delegation of Senate Republicans on a CODEL to Russia. The group was in Moscow when the Senate Intelligence Committee published a bipartisan report that validated the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in 2016 election on the personal orders of Putin.

“I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth,” Shelby told the speaker of the Duma in Moscow during the controversial trip.

Shelby later sought to clarify that he was not saying Russia and the U.S. are the same, and that he is not excusing everything Moscow has done. “I was just stating the reality of it,” he told the Daily Beast.

-- It’s hard to be surprised anymore, but it is nonetheless surreal to read quotes from Republican senators that sound like they might have been uttered instead by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn or Chalmers Johnson. Conservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick hammered peacenik liberals for this sort of relativism during the Cold War. Republicans used to be the ones who not only espoused American exceptionalism but accused Democrats of acting like the United States was just another name on the United Nations roster, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.

As Ronald Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, “I urge you to beware the temptation of … blithely declaring yourselves above it all and to label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”

-- Trump, who took out full-page newspaper ads to attack Reagan’s foreign policy during the 1980s (even as it was winning the Cold War), has remade the Republican Party in his image over the past three years. The president has shown a consistent impulse to blame “both sides.” After the violence in Charlottesville last August, Trump said there are “two sides to a story.” He attacked counterprotesters for acting “very, very violently” as they came “with clubs in their hand” at the neo-Nazis and KKK members who were protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that,” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt? Do they have any problem? I think they do!”

-- To be sure, there are notable holdouts. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), battling brain cancer, put out a rare statement calling on Trump to cancel today’s meeting — if he is “not prepared to hold Putin accountable.”

“Putin is a murderer,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) tweetedSunday night. “He has ordered the assassinations of political adversaries and used outlawed chemical weapons to do it. He oversees Russian military units that shot down Malaysian flight 17 and murdered almost 300 civilians. … Putin is a crook and a liar. He has broken almost every agreement he has signed with the United States, including on Syria and Ukraine. He has become one of the world's richest men through embezzlement and stealing from his own people.”

-- Paul’s comments on the Sunday shows were deeply revealing. The senator was adamant that he was not engaging in moral equivalency, but he suggested multiple times that the Kremlin was reacting to U.S. policy. Among the supposed provocations: Hillary Clinton calling for free and fair elections in Russia when she was secretary of state. “One of the reasons they really didn't like Hillary Clinton,” he told Tapper on CNN, “is they found her responsible for some of the activity by the U.S. in their elections under the Obama administration.”

Explaining his decision to vote against a resolution expressing support for NATO last week, Paul reached back even further: “The provocation of pushing NATO forward after … James Baker promised [Mikhail] Gorbachev in 1990 when Germany unified that we would not go, the West would not go, one inch beyond Germany, and yet, a couple years later, under the Clinton administration, we kept pushing, pushing, pushing. … From Russia's perspective, they see NATO expansion as a threat. … Part of their militarism and part of their nationalism problem may be inherent to the tides of the current century there, but it's also in reaction to policy from the West as well.”

-- This view is squarely outside the mainstream among foreign policy experts in both parties. Col. James McDonough, the U.S. Army’s attache to Poland, highlighted “Russia’s Moral Hypocrisy” in a piece for Task and Purpose magazine this spring: “Russian soldiers occupy Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine in violation of all international norms. Through these occupations Moscow enables the pirate state of Transnistria, enables the backwards ‘independence’ of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, strips Crimea from its internationally recognized sovereign, and feeds the Russian separatist movement in the Donbass. After supporting Libyan leader Mommar Khadafi for years, the Kremlin now backs one of his henchmen, warlord Khalifa Hafter, instead of the Western-backed, and UN-recognized, Government of National Accord, reportedly in exchange for military basing rights in eastern Libya. Further east in Sudan, Russia is exporting arms to the government of Omar al-Bashir whose abysmal record on human rights has left him shunned by more civilized countries. Most alarmingly, Russia has cozied up to Iran, the most significant exporter of terrorism in the Middle East, and Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, whose atrocities against his own people are now well known to the world. Russia’s bedfellows reek, and yet Moscow does not mind the smell. And where on the globe has Russian foreign policy been a force for justice and decency? Nothing comes to mind.”

If you want to go deeper, here are two recent pieces that capture what was until recently a bipartisan consensus:

“Russia and America Aren't Morally Equivalent. There is no comparison between Russian efforts to undermine elections and American efforts to strengthen them,” by Princeton professor Thomas Melia in the Atlantic.

“Russia’s nefarious meddling is nothing like democracy assistance,” by Daniel Twining, president of the International Republican Institute, and Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute, in The Washington Post.

-- Paul announced during a separate appearance Sunday on Fox News that he’s planning a trip to Russia next month with members of the libertarian Cato Institute. “We’ll be talking to the president after Helsinki and asking him if there’s something we can follow up on,” the Kentucky senator told Ed Henry. “I think there are a lot of simplistic people out there on both sides of the aisle that are criticizing President Trump. Engagement is a good idea. Even during the height of the Cuban missile crisis, there was a direct line of communication between [John] Kennedy and [Nikita] Khrushchev. … We don’t want to mistakenly amble into a war because we were in close proximity and didn’t know it.”

-- In March, the Russian Embassy in Washington tweeted a picture of Paul meeting with Ambassador Anatoly Antonov. It said that the two men had discussed “improving” and “restoring” relations. A few minutes later, the embassy deleted that tweet. The picture was later reposted with a more anodyne caption that used neither of those words, according to Business Insider.

-- Asked on CBS if he’ll demand Putin to extradite the dozen Russians who have been indicted by the Justice Department, Trump said: “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, I might,” he added. “But, again, this was during the Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration.”

“It’s pretty silly for the president to demand something that he can’t get legally,” national security adviser John Bolton said on ABC. “The Russians take the position — you can like it or not like it — that their constitution forbids them to extradite Russian citizens.”

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman added on NBC that the FBI will “no doubt” work with the embassy to submit the request, but he noted that this “doesn’t necessarily mean that the Russians are going to follow through.”

Paul said on CNN that making such a request would “be a moot point”: “I don't think Russia is sending anyone back over here for trial, the same way we wouldn't send anybody over there for trial. No country with any sovereignty or sense of sovereignty is sending anybody to another country for trial.”

BLINKING RED LIGHTS:

-- It was overshadowed by the indictments, but the nation’s top intelligence official gave a very significant speech on Friday afternoon at the Hudson Institute think tank in D.C. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, likened the cyber threat today to the climate before Sept. 11, 2001, when intelligence channels were “blinking red” with warning signs that a terrorist attack was imminent.

“Here we are nearly two decades later, and I’m here to say the warning lights are blinking red again,” Coats said, according to the Associated Press. “The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, in coordination with international partners, have detected Russian government actors targeting government and businesses in the energy, nuclear, water, aviation and critical manufacturing sectors. … We are seeing aggressive attempts to manipulate social media and to spread propaganda focused on hot-button issues that are intended to exacerbate socio-political divisions.”

Coats added that intelligence analysts are not seeing the identical sort of electoral interference as two years ago. “However, we fully realize that we are just one click on a keyboard away from a similar situation repeating itself,” he said. “These actions are persistent. They’re pervasive and they are meant to undermine America’s democracy on a daily basis, regardless of whether it is election time or not.”

-- Here are three other sobering stories that should be on your radar:

1. The same Russian military intelligence service accused of disrupting our 2016 election is also believed to be responsible for the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England, earlier this year. Ellen Barry, Michael Schwirtz and Eric Schmitt report in today’s New York Times: “British investigators believe the March 4 attack … was most probably carried out by current or former agents of the service, known as the G.R.U., who were sent to his home in southern England … British officials are now closing in on identifying the individuals they believe carried out the operation[.] [The Justice Department’s Friday indictment] detailed a sophisticated operation … carried out by a Russian military intelligence service few Americans know about. But analysts and government officials say the G.R.U. [serves] as an undercover strike force for the Kremlin in conflicts around the world. The agency has been linked to Russia’s hybrid war in Ukraine, as well as the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It has been involved in the seizing of Syrian cities on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad. In more peaceful regions, the G.R.U. is accused of creating political turmoil, mobilizing Slavic nationalists in Montenegro and funding protests to try to prevent Macedonia’s recent name change.”

2. “Russia Hawk Axed From National Security Council Right Before Trump-Putin Summit,” by the Daily Beast’s Kate Brannen and Spencer Ackerman: “The circumstances of retired Army Colonel Richard Hooker’s departure from the National Security Council on June 29 are in dispute. It’s not clear whether Hooker was forced out or if his detail on the NSC came to its natural end. But what’s not in doubt is that for the past 15 months, Hooker was senior director for Russia, Europe and NATO. … Hooker ended his tour on the National Security Council early after he discussed information pertinent to Russia with foreign officials without proper authorization, according to two government officials. … A former NSC official strongly denied [that] account.”

3. “A senior FBI official overseeing a government task force that addresses Russian attempts to meddle in U.S. elections has left the government for a job in the private sector,” the Wall Street Journal’s Dustin Volz reported Saturday. “Jeffrey Tricoli had been coleading the FBI foreign influence task force until June, when he left government work for a senior vice president job at Charles Schwab Corp. … Mr. Tricoli, an 18-year veteran of the FBI who became a section chief of the bureau’s cyber division in December 2016, didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to his personal email and LinkedIn account.

“The reason for Mr. Tricoli’s departure wasn’t clear. But it adds to questions among some tech companies and lawmakers about how much the administration, and the task force in particular, are doing to protect future elections from Russian meddling.

“Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and author of a book about information wars on social media, said the Trump administration has shown little interest in addressing Russian meddling, leaving the FBI’s efforts to tackle foreign influence ‘reactive’ instead of anticipatory.”

-- Hard feelings watch: Jeb Bush named “The Manchurian Candidate” as the greatest political novel of all time. “It is a good read and shows that the Russians have always tried to get involved in our elections,” the former Florida governor told Steve Israel for a feature that ran this weekend.

Learn more at Washington Post

In a sign of how modest expectations have become of Californians actually casting ballots, elections officials and advocates alike found relief Monday in the final tally showing 37% of voters cast ballots in June — small compared with total registration but the highest for a nonpresidential primary since 1998.

Slightly more than 7.1 million voters participated in last month’s statewide election. Although it’s the third-highest number of ballots ever cast in a California primary — the record was set in 2000 — last month’s turnout was roughly equal to the average from similar elections since 1982.

Just hitting the historic benchmark, though, is notable. Four years ago, statewide primary turnout dropped to a record low 25%. The tone of that election season was far more tepid; this time, pockets of the Golden State heard the call to arms in a national partisan battle that energized at least some number of voters.

Also different than years past were new state laws designed to lower the barriers to participation. For whatever reason, be it frenzied politics or sober reforms, advocates said they hope June’s results are more trend than transitory.

“We’re making progress — slowly, but it’s progress,” said Helen Hutchison, president of the League of Women Voters of California.

Forty-seven counties reported voter turnout on June 5 higher than the statewide average, though many of the localities are rural regions with relatively few voters. Only 15 counties saw a majority of registered voters cast ballots.

Los Angeles County reported voter turnout of 28%, the second lowest in California but a high water mark compared with previous primaries in off-year elections. Four years ago, the total was fewer than 1 in 7.

“Increases in voter participation likely depend on the extent to which we can make voting relevant to a broader population of the electorate,” said Dean Logan, county registrar of voters.

Six of the 10 largest counties by population beat the statewide 37% average, most of those in Northern California. That follows one of the state’s well-known political axioms: Southern California may have more voters, but they are less likely to show up on election day.

That phenomenon often helps north-state candidates, a truism reinforced by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s strong showing in June’s race for governor compared with his closest Democratic rival, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Final numbers, with a formal certification of the results expected on Friday, show some 239,000 more ballots were cast across the Bay Area’s nine counties than in Los Angeles County — even though it’s home to 1.2 million more registered voters than the northern counties combined. Newsom’s home territory accounted for almost 4 of every 10 votes he received.

For Republicans, who feared a shutout of the state’s top races that could lead party voters to skip the November election, saw strength in their base communities. That could have been helped by President Trump’s decision to endorse a GOP candidate, John Cox, in the race for governor. The nine counties with the largest Republican registration advantage, though smaller than those dominated by Democrats, all beat the statewide turnout average.

In some cases, intense local races appear to have helped boost turnout. In San Francisco, where voters weighed in on a heated race for mayor, elections officials reported 52% turnout — higher than the city has seen, according to state election records, for any nonpresidential primary in at least the last quarter-century.

In Orange County, home to four closely watched congressional races drawing national attention, 42% of voters cast ballots. A review by Political Data Inc., a private election analysis firm, found an average boost of 21 percentage points in the districts compared with 2014.

But here, too, the conclusion drawn depends on the way the numbers are viewed. Although voters in those congressional districts were more energized than four years ago, there was either no uptick compared with 2016 or, in some cases, it appears overall turnout actually shrunk.

The numbers are especially striking in some subgroups: Latino voters make up 20% of Orange County’s registered electorate but only 14% of the votes cast last month.

“Voter participation is a complex issue and influenced by a number of factors,” Hutchison said.

Of particular interest to voting rights groups were the impact of a handful of voting changes, some more wide-ranging than others, enacted by lawmakers since 2014. Ballots received in county offices three days after an election are now required to be counted, as long as they were postmarked no later than election day. Last month’s primary was also the first to allow voter registration on election day, an effort designed to encourage those who get interested late in the campaign season. It will probably take weeks or months to fully sift through data to assess the effect of those changes.

One key question in June’s primary was whether more voters would show up in five California counties — the first proving grounds for the most sweeping change made to state elections. Those communities were the first to enact the “California Voter’s Choice Act,” a 2016 law allowing counties to discontinue the use of neighborhood polling places and exchange them with all-mail ballots and a handful of vote centers with a variety of election services.

Of the five counties that used the new system — Sacramento, Napa, Nevada, Madera and San Mateo — only one, Nevada County, saw turnout above 50%. In general, the numbers represented only modest improvements in turnout from past gubernatorial primaries.

“Most of the new innovations are focused on removing impediments – making it more convenient to register and to vote, opening up early voting, improving access for language minorities and people with disabilities,” said Dora Rose, deputy director of the League of Women Voters of California.

California’s terms of office for statewide officials — from governor to attorney general and beyond — are staggered with each presidential term, thus occurring at the midway point of the national campaign cycle. The practical effect has almost always been lower voter turnout for the state contests, even though those officials hold far greater power over everyday life for Californians than does the president.

The highest turnout for a gubernatorial primary in the state’s modern era was in 1978, when almost 69% of registered voters showed up. From there, the numbers steadily fell until 1998, when an open race for governor sparked a spirited campaign between three Democrats. Forty-two percent of voters cast ballots in that primary, and the numbers have dropped ever since.

Additional changes in the election process could help. Two bills, passed by the California Legislature, could reduce the number of voters who fail to get their ballot counted. One would require postage-paid envelopes be sent with ballots in the mail, while the second would require county officials to contact a voter whose ballot signatures don’t match.

“Both of these bills cost money to enact, but spending resources now to support voters would demonstrate that California’s leaders believe democracy is a worthwhile investment,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.

Others suggest looking at the problem of participation beyond those who are already registered. When including all eligible Californians — not just those who are currently registered to vote — the effective participation in the June 5 primary drops to only 28% of the state’s citizens.

Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote after the primary that “voter apathy is nothing new in California,” an opinion that generated hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of social media interactions.

“We need to make sure election information is in plain language and available in multiple languages, provide clear explanations of ballot measures, shed light on campaign finance, and make it easier for voters to hear directly from candidates,” Rose said.

“Not only do we want to see voter participation increased, we want to see California’s electorate be more representative,” she said.

Learn more at LA Times

The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling racist heist. Activists hoped that the Ferguson report—which was prompted by the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager and found that police conduct had “severely damaged the relationship between African Americans and the Ferguson Police Department”—would not only change the city, but would signal that the United States was finally willing to confront the legacy of white supremacy. The Ferguson City Council reluctantly agreed to a consent decree with the DOJ that would overhaul city policing. Federal courts rejected voter-suppression schemes and reaffirmed affirmative action. Movements from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ advocacy saw an opportunity to broaden the national civil-rights agenda.

Then Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III took over.

More than a year has elapsed since Sessions, formerly a senator from Alabama, was appointed U.S. attorney general by President Donald Trump. For the Trump administration, much of the last 18 months has been spent fighting the fires of one scandal after the next, and watching as the sprawling investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—led by Sessions’s own department—has threatened to consume Washington. In that particular drama, the president and his attorney general have clashed. Trump has openly insulted Sessions, claiming that Sessions took a “weak position” on investigating intelligence leaks, and saying that he “would have quickly picked someone else” had he known how Sessions would handle the Russia investigation.

But behind the scenes, even as the president has agitated in public about firing his attorney general, Sessions is the true architect of much of what people believe to be Trump’s domestic-policy agenda. As implemented in recent decisions to curtail asylum grants, ramp up immigration enforcement, and dial back criminal-justice reform and voting-rights protections, this agenda is more than just the reversal of policies enacted during the Barack Obama era, which Trump promised during his campaign. Rather, from the Black Belt in Alabama in the 1980s to the farthest reaches of the border fence today, the Sessions Doctrine is the endgame of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights.

The Sessions Doctrine has moved somewhat suddenly to the forefront of the national conversation in the wake of aggressive moves by the Justice Department against immigration. Sessions has recently pushed for changes in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration-court system embedded within the DOJ. He’s considering ways to force judges to process more deportation cases, changes that several experts say will undoubtedly mean that fewer people receive due process or fair hearings.

The attorney general has also moved to firmly limit asylum grants, and last week announced that he could effectively eliminate the ability of immigrants who face domestic or gang violence back home to successfully apply for asylum. That decision risks sending more vulnerable women and targets of gang violence back to dangerous situations.

The asylum announcement came after a Mother Jones investigation found that a Salvadoran woman pressed into slavery by a gang that had killed her husband had been denied an asylum request under the Obama-era Board of Immigration Appeals in 2016 because her slave labor had constituted “material support” for a terrorist group. In a 2018 decision upholding the denial, the Board of Immigration Appeals reasoned that her denial was justified on the grounds that “any contributions to terrorist organizations further their terrorism.”

That justification—like several other pieces of immigration and asylum policy—is merely a continuance of Obama-era decisions, but the request from the current board to reconsider her protection from deportation is another sign of a shift toward a stark black-and-white view of immigration, and a much more powerful deportation engine. Sessions successfully pushed Trump to end the Obama “catch and release” policy, under which unverified immigrants arrested in the immigration dragnet were let go before trial, and has enforced the “zero tolerance” policyin its place, one detaining all arrested immigrants pending trial. He’s instructed U.S. Attorneys to prioritize prosecuting first-time offenders among undocumented immigrants, and last week cited the Bible in defending the decision to separate mothers and children at the border, telling critics “to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

When reached by email, a DOJ spokesperson said of the department’s immigration efforts: “In an effort to combat years of neglect and a lack of leadership in the immigration court system, the Justice Department has implemented a number of common-sense reforms designed to reduce the backlog without compromising due process.”

For Paul W. Schmidt, former chairman of EOIR’s Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2001 and a former EOIR immigration judge, the immigration system has always been vulnerable to naked political plays by the attorney general, but Sessions has so far been the boldest in making such plays. EOIR is “a division of the Justice Department, which is ridiculous,” he says. “You have a biased attorney general who’s jamming more cases into the system, and he reaches down and pulls out individual decisions he doesn’t like—a lot of them relating to asylum-seekers, women, and vulnerable groups—so he can rewrite the law to fit his white-nationalist agenda. It’s basically a kangaroo court.”

Sessions’s immigration agenda extends well beyond his tightening grip over immigration courts and asylum boards. Even in the framework of the Justice Department’s new opioid policy, Sessions made clear he believed that so-called sanctuary cities and unverified immigrants had essentially imported the opioid problem into the U.S. In retaliation for such cities’ continued refusal to enforce strict federal immigration detentions and referrals, Sessions has fought to strip them of certain avenues of federal-grant funding. Under his guidance, the DOJ’s current top civil-rights lawyer has fought to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census, a change that many immigration advocates and researchers believe will make unverified immigrants more vulnerable to raids and reduce response rates among all immigrants, and in the process punish population centers where immigrants are heavily represented.

According to Schmidt, the recent moves on immigration reflect a broader set of priorities that share several common threads. “He’s abandoned prison reform,” Schmidt says. “He’s favoring gerrymandering and other ways of cutting down minority voters. He’s cut protections for LGBT people. Foreign nationals are at the top of his hit list, but basically all vulnerable minorities and people of color are somewhere on his hit list.”

The attorney general didn’t waste any time in making his priorities clear. Upon taking up his office in the Robert F. Kennedy building, just 12 days after his confirmation and swearing in, Sessions issued the first of many memos that would roll back the Obama administration’s criminal-justice priorities. On February 21, 2017, the DOJ rescinded a memo from the previous fall that had pledged to wind down the federal government’s contracts with private prisons. Following years of pressure from criminal-justice advocates, and reporting that outlined massive racial disparities, rampant abuse—especially of immigrants—and administrative inefficiencies in federal private prisons, the 2016 decision rested on a review from the Office of the Inspector General, which found that “contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable [Federal Bureau of Prisons] institutions.”

In rescinding former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’s private-prison memo, Sessions did not mention the OIG’s report, or any of the allegations of brutality and misconduct in private prisons. He merely stated that the policy “impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.” With that, the DOJ set the course for an approach to law-and-order that relied more heavily on incarceration, one that pays little attention to data and statistics, and even less attention to the voices of the communities most in need.

In one of his first prepared remarks as attorney general, Sessions outlined his doctrine as such:

Rather than dictating to local police how to do their jobs – or spending scarce federal resources to sue them in court – we should use our money, research and expertise to help them figure out what is happening and determine the best ways to fight crime.

[...]

We need to resist the temptation to ignore or downplay this crisis and instead tackle it head-on, to ensure justice and safety for all Americans. We need to enforce our laws and put bad men behind bars. And we need to support the brave men and women of law enforcement as they work day and night to protect us.

But Sessions “has definitely been a force for a regressive approach to criminal justice,” says Inimai Chettiar, the director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Since the day he set foot in office, he has one by one repealed the vast majority of items put forward by the Obama administration to advance reforms, not only in policing but with prosecutors and private prisons.”

According to Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017, the pace and extent of retrenchment under the first year of Sessions’s tenure have been extraordinary. “This DOJ and Jeff Sessions are rolling back civil-rights progress and undermining fundamental American values of equality and justice in a fairly unprecedented manner,” Gupta told me. “Across every issue, from criminal-justice reform to voting rights to LGBTQ rights, the attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow, and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all.”

T

he Trump administration sees the Trump Doctrine as a negation of the Obama presidency, as Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, reported, or perhaps more crassly, as “the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine.” This portrayal of the current executive line as a hindbrain-level reaction to even the slightest whiff of the White House’s previous occupant makes sense, and is probably the only way to consistently interpret Trump’s wildly impulsive policy gesticulation. But just as Obama himself is tied to a deeper tradition of racial discourse and civil rights in this country, so is his backlash.

The history of voting rights and desegregation in America over the past 50 years—from the civil-rights movement through the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which to gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—might be told well by the story of Alabama alone. It is a story in which Sessions’s own career is rooted, and one in which he’s played a central role over the past few decades.

Sessions was only a teenager in 1963, when Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama. To keep his promise to resist the integration of schools in the state, Wallace took things into his own hands, personally obstructing the federally mandated enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. With his largely symbolic action, Wallace firmly cemented himself as a champion of “massive resistance,” a scorched-earth policy of state and local pushback against federally enforced civil-rights protections. Massive resistance had begun in Virginia after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and spread through the South. Through Wallace, it became the official policy platform of the entire state of Alabama.

Arrayed against Wallace’s resistance was the Justice Department, including its relatively new Civil Rights Division. President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach engaged in an intricate dance with Wallace, including the famed confrontation between Katzenbach and Wallace outside the door frame of the university, after which—facing an intervention by the National Guard—Wallace stood down.

The crucial role of the Civil Rights Division in defusing the situation in Alabama, and the growing and changing mandate of the department as a whole, is often overlooked. The 1963 incident came after years of similar resistance from southern states to integration. Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall oversaw much of the federal response, and developed a standard doctrine for dealing with education-related intransigence to integration. The approach had been solidified a year before Wallace’s big stand, during a lethal series of riots at Ole Miss over the attempt by James Meredith, a black student and activist, to integrate. Meredith was successfully able to attend the school with the help of an armed intervention by the National Guard, a moment made possible by black activists, the White House, white state officials, and, most notably, Marshall and the Civil Rights Division.

These incidents changed the nature of the modern relationship between state and federal governments, and established the role of the Justice Department in securing civil rights. The theory of massive resistance was based in provocation, forcing the federal government to flex muscles—such as the potential mobilization of troops—that it had been loathe to use against state governments for almost a century. In Mississippi and Alabama, however, the Kennedys, Katzenbach, and Marshall put that option back on the table to defend the civil rights of former second-class citizens, and in doing so, recast the DOJ as a powerful ally for the aggrieved. In a sense, the biggest new advantage of the 1960s civil-rights movement compared with previous eras was the presence of federal leadership in the form of the DOJ, and a willingness by the attorney general and other top officials to use the full extent of the department’s power. As Marshall said in a 1985 interview, “The use of federal force is a last resort was our policy and I still think it was a proper policy.”

As the federal government’s role in civil rights evolved, state obstruction grew more sophisticated. Faced with automatic scrutiny of new voting laws from the DOJ and courts, southern leaders nevertheless pushed ahead with schemes such as at-large voting plans, integration-busting private schools, and school-district secessions that in the aggregate helped maintain de facto segregation. Alabama was once again on the front line.

The state that had served as ground zero for much of the struggle over black voting rights during the civil-rights movement was also—predictably—the theater for the long guerrilla war against the Voting Rights Act after its passage, so much so that many of the cases cited most often as precedent on VRA enforcement come from Alabama. As detailed in a report from some of Alabama’s most iconic civil-rights litigators, “Between the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act and the 1982 reauthorization … the Department of Justice objected fifty-nine times,” to new elections laws that the state had to submit to federal scrutiny.. “In addition,” the litigators wrote, “the Department of Justice sent observers to Alabama jurisdictions 107 times during the same period.”

Into that fray stepped Jeff Sessions, a lawyer from Selma who rose through the ranks in the Southern District of Alabama. In 1985, as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Sessions chose to pursue a voter-fraud investigation against three black organizers in Alabama’s Black Belt, including one former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., Al Turner. The case, built on allegations of tampering with absentee ballots, didn’t net any convictions, but inflamed the still-raw wounds left after Jim Crow. Sessions faced accusations that his investigation was racist, that he ignored similarly clever absentee schemes that had been used by whites for decades, and that federal attorneys used intimidating tactics that could easily chill black political participation over what seemed to be minor discrepancies.

Sessions and the DOJ defended his prosecution with the charge that he’d actually protected the voting rights of black belt citizens against three potential fraudsters. Sessions always maintained that he should’ve won the case. “I guarantee you there was sufficient evidence for a conviction," he said after the trial.

Still, the prosecution that Turner described as a “witch hunt” made enemies of none other than Coretta Scott King, the civil-rights activist and widow of Martin Luther King Jr., who submitted a letter opposing Sessions’s 1986 nomination to the judgeship of the court for which he served as attorney. Scott King wrote:

I urge you to consider carefully Mr. Sessions’ conduct in these matters. Such a review, I believe, raises serious questions about his commitment to the protection of the voting rights of all American citizens and consequently his fair and unbiased judgment regarding this fundamental right. When the circumstances and facts surrounding the indictments of Al Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue are analyzed, it becomes clear that the motivation was political, and the result frightening—the wide-scale chill of the exercise of the ballot for blacks, who suffered so much to receive that right in the first place.

The nomination failed. But Sessions’s career continued apace. As the state’s attorney general, he pushed an expansive capital-punishment agenda, fighting to execute some intellectually disabled people. In an appeals court, he successfully argued in favor of the death penalty for a black defendant whose conviction had come after a trial during which a prosecutor rebutted the defense’s insanity case by arguing that “this is not another case of niggeritous.” Sessions supported a failed bill to execute people who received two or more serious drug offenses. And as a ProPublica investigation chronicles, while the state attorney general, Sessions also fought a long legal battle against a court order seeking to equalize funding for Alabama’s still-segregated schools.

Sessions has professed a long career of ameliorating the injustices of Alabama’s herrenvolk regime. “I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters. I have witnessed it,” he told the Senate last January.

But the historical record often places his work in conflict with those of civil-rights activists and federal watchdogs. As he told the Montgomery Advertiser in 1995 after becoming Alabama Attorney General, his agenda was to “defend the state aggressively” in what the paper calls “certain types of lawsuits”—namely federal civil-rights cases. After 12 years as the main federal prosecutor in the state, two years as the state’s attorney general, and 20 years as a senator, the abysmal racial disparities in Alabama persist, and racially disparate disenfranchisement laws remained on the books even in 2017.

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hile Barack Obama’s civil-rights and civil-liberties legacy is more than complicated as a result of his foreign-policy and domestic-surveillance records, his Justice Department was built with the heritage of aggressive civil-rights enforcement in mind. Notably, Obama’s first assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, Tom Perez, had worked for years as a federal prosecutor of hate crimes. Perez’s boss at the time, Attorney General Eric Holder, testified twice in favor of anti-hate-crime legislation passed in memory of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., two men killed in separate hate-related incidents in 1998.

Under Holder and then his successor, Loretta Lynch, the department moved to address some racial disparities and the most punitive federally enforced crime policies. In addition to rolling back private prisons; moving toward more systemic civil-rights enforcement of police departments and brutality; and leveraging that move for arranging consent decrees, court-enforced agreements between a municipality and the DOJ to implement recommendations for improvement; one of the most consequential policies of Holder’s DOJ was the Smart on Crime initiative, which began in early 2013. That initiative was intended to give federal prosecutors more discretion to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses. Additionally, DOJ memos dialed back federal marijuana prosecutions where state law had decriminalized or legalized the drug, and the department ended a federal-asset-forfeiture program that in its final year of operation had netted local, state, and federal officials $65 million in cash, homes, and other property—even from some suspects who’d never been charged with a crime.

In his tenure as attorney general, Jeff Sessions has made it a point to end each of these policies. In fact, he has expressed deep suspicion of the very idea of criminal-justice reform, and of any scrutiny of police actions. Instead of the aggressive “patterns and practice” investigations of whole police departments, the DOJ has emphasized “local control and accountability” in its collaborative initiatives. The department has ramped up the surveillance of black activists—even as the ranks of white-supremacist extremism and hate crimes surge—and brought to bear a narrative that crime in America increased under previous reforms. Sessions has led the DOJ away from some of its most expansive voting-rights enforcement, and reinvigorated the War on Drugs. And he has placed undocumented immigration as a major part of the problem in all phases of his criminal-justice, drug, and voting-rights changes.

“The attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all,” Vanita Gupta said.

The DOJ declined to comment on “ongoing matters” related to criminal-justice reforms and consent decrees.

In a sense, the narrow vision of America bellowed from Trump’s bully pulpit and advanced more incisively through Sessions’s canon of memos is a fulfillment of a promise first made by President Richard Nixon and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, when they married the “southern strategy” with an urban War on Drugs. The union of those platforms creates a paradigm that favors expanding federal enforcement when it comes to crimes in which minorities are often considered perpetrators, but pushes against federal enforcement when civil rights are involved.

Consider one of the FBI’s newest domestic-terrorism classifications, the “black identity extremist,” a designation first created in an August 2017 report from the FBI Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, and first made public by Foreign Policy in October. According to The New York Times, the report asserts that “black activists’ grievances about racialized police violence and inequities in the criminal justice system have spurred retaliatory violence against law enforcement officers,” citing sparse incidents of violence against police officers as proof that the Black Lives Matter movement engenders violence.

In his testimony to the Congressional Black Caucus, Brennan Center fellow and former FBI agent Mike German said, “The [black identity extremist] assessment is of such poor analytic quality that it raises serious questions about the FBI’s purpose in producing it.” With no clear, evidence-driven purpose, the report and surveillance had the “potential to incite irrational police fear of black political activists.”

The black-identity-extremist designation was an abstract idea—until it wasn’t. In January, Foreign Policy reported that the home of the Dallas activist Christopher Daniels, known to many as “Rakem Balogun,” had been raided in December by FBI agents, who seized two firearms and a copy of Robert F. Williams’s Negroes With Guns, and arrested him in front of his teenage son. The Guardian has speculated and Balogun himself has stated that he was the first target to be prosecuted using the aforementioned FBI designation. After two years of investigation and five months in FBI custody, Rakem Balogun was let go, the case built on his Facebook posts and protests apparently insufficient to establish that anything he did had actually endangered police.

Even in the realm of voting rights, where the DOJ has most consistently acted as a watchdog against the remnants of Jim Crow, the Sessions Doctrine manages to target people of color instead of protecting them.

The department under Sessions has reversed its position on the gerrymandering and voter-ID cases in which it was an active litigant until 2017. In July 2017, the DOJ shifted its position in the middle of a marathon series of lawsuits over a voter-ID law passed in Texas, which faced a federal lawsuit on the grounds that it discriminates based on race. The department originally served as a plaintiff against the law, but under Sessions submitted a brief supporting a modified form that allowed more kinds of acceptable identification and created an affidavit process for people who don’t have identification because of reasonable impediments.

According to Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—and an active litigant in several voting-rights cases—the Sessions era, while brief, is unprecedented. “Let's start with voting,” Ifill told me. “The Department of Justice has essentially abandoned that area of civil-rights enforcement, even in the cases in which they were present, such as the Texas voter-ID case, in which we were co-counsel.” Among a civil-rights enforcement ecosystem that has already had to adjust on the fly to the loss of judicial and DOJ preclearance of state- and local-elections laws after the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Justice Department’s withdrawal from its voting-rights docket basically creates a massive vacuum, one ripe for exploitation in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

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hether Sessions himself will make it to the 2020 or even the 2018 elections is still anyone’s guess. The Russia investigation is ongoing, and every day it chafes a president who could fire Sessions. But the core irony in the acrimony between Trump and his attorney general is that Sessions—more so than just about anyone else in the Trump administration—has faithfully and skillfully executed the president’s policy agenda. He’s doubled down on “tough on crime” policies, sought to punish drug dealers, surveilled fierce critics of police, deflated the bipartisan movement for meaningful criminal-justice reform, supported voter-ID requirements, and used law enforcement and policy to build his own impediments at the border when Trump’s wall couldn’t find support.

Each of those policies, however, doesn’t originate merely in the craw of Trump’s id. They are all seedlings from a well-tended garden of legal and intellectual resistance to the post-civil-rights era in the United States. If Trump’s promise is a return to status quo ante—a land before Black Lives Matter protests and Ferguson reports, one where police are unquestioned heroes and a black presidency is nothing more than a line in a Tupac song—then Jeff Sessions’s doctrine suggests that he represents a return to status quo ante ante, a regime more plainly constructed on the hierarchies and divisions that have for centuries defined America.

The sense among several longtime civil-rights advocates and even former DOJ officials is that many of the signature victories of the civil-rights movement are now more precarious than ever.

“I don't know that there’s been a time quite like this,” Ifill told me. “Certainly in the modern era, since 1957 when the Civil Rights Division was created, I don’t think that there has been a relationship like this.”

There has never really been a golden age for civil-rights protections. Each of the previous presidential administrations has failed in protecting some group’s rights, or actively violated others’. “But that’s completely different than an abdication of leadership in the civil-rights base entirely, and that's what we're facing,” Ifill continued.

Still, the current turn can’t be too surprising for people plugged into the system. Aftershocks from the Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County, continue to disrupt civil-rights enforcement efforts. A class of crusaders against desegregation, in favor of the War on Drugs, and skeptical of an expansive, federally enforced voter-protection agenda has made the conservative movement its home, awaiting leaders at the highest levels of power who could continue on its behalf. This pathway always existed for Sessions, a man who has inherited much, and intends to bequeath more.

Or, as Gupta put it, “it wasn't a mystery about who Jeff Sessions is and was and what he stood for."

Learn more at The Atlantic

Americans overwhelmingly oppose the Trump administration’s now-rescinded policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, and smaller majorities also disagree with the president’s call to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and to restrict legal immigration by limiting citizens from bringing parents and siblings to this country, according to a new Washington Post-Schar School poll.

On other aspects of the immigration debate, however, a more mixed picture emerges. Americans are more closely divided on the question of whether enough is being done to prevent illegal immigration and whether the country has gone too far in welcoming immigrants. Also, more people say they trust President Trump than congressional Democrats to deal with the issue of border security. The support for Trump on the border security issue is especially evident in congressional districts considered key battlegrounds in this fall’s midterm elections.

Democrats appear more energized than Republicans about the fall elections, especially in battleground districts. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters in those districts, 59 percent say the midterms are extremely important, compared with 46 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Overall, registered voters say they prefer to vote for a Democrat over a Republican for the House, 47 percent to 37 percent. The margin on that question is not statistically larger in battleground districts, standing at 12 percentage points.

The nation remains deeply divided along party lines, as it has throughout and before Trump’s presidency. Two other divisions define the political environment of 2018. On issues of immigration, as well as questions about Trump’s presidency, the gaps between men and women and between white voters with and without college degrees are sizable. Women and white college-educated voters are far more dissatisfied with the president and his policies than are men and white voters without college educations. However, gaps based on education are less significant in battleground districts.

Trump’s overall approval stands at 43 percent, while his disapproval is 55 percent. Among men, 54 percent approve; among women, 32 percent approve.

His handling of immigration draws slightly higher disapproval, with 39 percent approving and 59 percent disapproving. More than twice as many say they strongly disapprove as say they strongly approve. Among men, 51 percent disapprove, but among women, 67 percent disapprove. Among whites with college educations, 68 percent disapprove, but among non-college whites, 56 percent approve.

Trump’s best numbers come on the economy: 50 percent approve, while 48 percent disapprove. Majorities nationally and in both battleground and non-battleground districts rate the economy as excellent or good. Men are far more positive than women — 26 points more likely to approve of his handling of the economy and 13 points more likely to rate the economy positively.

On trade issues, the public sides with the president on one key question: whether America’s long-term trading partners have taken advantage of this country. By 52 percent to 43 percent, Americans agree with Trump rather than saying the nation’s partners trade fairly. In battleground districts, the margin is slightly larger. But even in agreeing with the president on that question, Americans show little support for his aggressive trade policies, such as his calls for tariffs on a variety of products that have rattled financial markets and angered U.S. allies.

Barely 4 in 10 Americans, 41 percent, approve overall of Trump’s handling of the trade issue. On two other questions — how his trade policies will affect jobs in the United States and the cost of products here — majorities of Americans say the impact will be bad rather than good. Nearly 3 in 4 say the impact on the cost of products will be bad.

The survey, sponsored by The Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago between June 27 and July 2 online and by phone. The survey drew from the firm’s probability-design AmeriSpeak panel, interviewing a total of 1,473 adults, including 865 who live in one of 58 congressional districts classified by the Cook Political Report as “toss-up” or “leaning” toward one party.

The survey looked at a variety of aspects of the immigration debate, which has been front and center since the outcry over the separation of immigrant children from parents who were detained after coming across the border.

On immigration, almost 7 in 10 (69 percent) say they opposed the policy that separated immigrant children from their parents, compared with 29 percent who supported the policy. About 6 in 10 Republicans supported it.

Trump’s decision to reverse the policy drew widespread support, with three-quarters of Americans backing that decision. Asked about what to do now, a majority of Americans say they want families detained together rather than temporarily released until their court appearances and possible deportation.

The vivid imagery of the children contributed to the backlash that forced Trump to reverse course. About 3 in 4 say they were bothered by the photos and stories about children being held separately from their parents, and nearly half of all Americans — including 6 in 10 women — said they were bothered a lot.

But as to who is to blame for families being separated, the public is more divided, with 37 percent saying the Trump administration bears responsibility, 35 percent saying the blame goes to migrant families trying to enter the United States, and 25 percent saying both are equally to blame. A 41 percent plurality of women blame the Trump administration, while a 43 percent plurality of men blame migrants.

Trump’s suggestion that U.S. immigration policy has become a magnet for criminals and gang members is rejected by most Americans. Roughly 4 in 10 say the biggest reason most people enter illegally is to flee danger in their own countries, with another 4 in 10 saying they are drawn because of economic opportunities. Just 6 percent nationally say most people enter as part of the drug trade or gangs.

A plurality of Americans (48 percent) say that this country’s history of welcoming immigrants has been mainly good, while 4 in 10 say it has been both good and bad and 11 percent say its been mainly bad. As to whether immigration has gone too far, Americans are divided into three almost equal groups, with about a third saying it has gone too far, a third saying it has not gone far enough, and almost a third saying the right balance has been struck.

A bare majority (51 percent) say the United States is doing enough to keep illegal immigrants from coming into the country, compared with 46 percent who do not. But that bare majority who feel enough is being done is considerably higher than it was during the first decade of this century. The overall results mask deep differences between the parties, with 2 in 3 Democrats saying enough is being done, while just 1 in 3 Republicans agree.

Of the different policies measured in this poll, large majorities of Americans support allowing young immigrants who arrived as children and met certain requirements to remain (84 percent); a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants living here if they pass a background check (81 percent); requiring employers to verify their hires are in the United States legally (78 percent); and more funding for border security (65 percent). Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agree with those policies.

On the policies that Americans oppose — the child separation policy, building the border wall and restricting legal immigration — majorities of Republicans favor them, in contrast to majorities of Democrats and independents who oppose them.

More broadly, Democrats in Congress lead Trump when it comes to whom voters trust to handle immigration by a 38 percent to 30 percent margin, with 24 percent trusting neither. But on border security, Trump holds a 10-point edge over Democrats, which balloons to 17 points in congressional battleground districts.

Immigration is seen by voters as one of the three most important issues in this fall’s congressional elections, along with jobs and the economy and health care. Immigration is cited by 19 percent of voters, jobs and the economy by 24 percent, and health care by 20 percent. Republicans hold a narrow 47 percent to 40 percent advantage in support among immigration-focused voters; that finding suggests this could be an issue that motivates the GOP base in November.

Gun laws, which some Democrats hope will motivate their voters in November, rank fourth at 14 percent, while taxes, an issue the GOP is counting on, along with the economy, to prevent substantial losses rank fifth at 8 percent.

As with immigration policy, there were clear partisan differences: Among Democrats, the top three issues are health care, guns and the economy. Republicans rank immigration and the economy in a virtual tie at the top, with health care, taxes and guns bunched together but far behind the top two.

The survey also asked about other aspects of the Trump presidency. More people say they will vote in November to show opposition to Trump (37 percent) than say they will be trying to show support for him (25 percent), while 36 percent say he will not be a factor.

Asked whether Republican candidates in general are too supportive or too critical of the president, voters say, 51 percent to 21 percent, that the GOP candidates have been too supportive, with the remainder saying the candidates are striking the right balance. Almost half say Democrats running for Congress are too critical of Trump — and that rises to a slight majority in battleground districts.

Two in 3 Americans say the president tells the truth only some of the time or hardly ever, a finding consistent across battleground and non-battleground districts. More than one third of all Americans say he hardly ever tells the truth.

Nearly half of all Americans (48 percent) say that, regardless of their personal feelings about the president, they think he is doing more to damage important values. Not quite 4 in 10 (37 percent) say he is doing more to protect those values.

The nation is closely divided in its view of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties between Trump campaign officials and the Russian government. Currently, 49 percent approve of the way special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is handling the investigation, while 45 percent disapprove.

Those divisions extend to the question of whether Trump officials colluded with the Russians. The percentages saying that this is a serious issue and that it is more of a distraction are identical — 48 percent apiece. But the responses on all of the Mueller questions were highly partisan, with strong majorities of Democrats supporting the special counsel and the investigation and equally strong percentages of Republicans opposing them.

The margin of sampling error for overall survey results is plus or minus five percentage points.

Learn more at Washington Post

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Barack Obama’s message to Democrats: Stop dreaming of him.

Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday here in the lush backyard of two party megadonors, Obama warned of a country and world on the brink — “you are right to be concerned,” he told the crowd — but said they’d flub their chance to change that if they kept pining for a magical savior.

“Do not wait for the perfect message, don’t wait to feel a tingle in your spine because you’re expecting politicians to be so inspiring and poetic and moving that somehow, ‘OK, I’ll get off my couch after all and go spend the 15-20 minutes it takes for me to vote,’” Obama said in his first public comments in months, which only a few reporters and no cameras were allowed in for. “Because that’s part of what happened in the last election. I heard that too much.”

“Boil it down,” Obama said, reiterating an argument he made on the campaign trail for Ralph Northam in 2017 about the existential challenge Trump poses to America. “If we don’t vote, then this democracy doesn’t work.”

He almost accepted some of the blame for the state of the party, though he framed it less as the DNC atrophying from years of benign neglect while he was in the White House and being saddled with his reelection campaign debt and more as people making the mistake of falling too much in love with him.

“I’ll be honest with you, if I have a regret during my presidency, it is that people were so focused on me and the battles we were having, particularly after we lost the House, that folks stopped paying attention up and down the ballot,” Obama said.

Obama stuck to his routine of never saying President Donald Trump’s name in public, but he spoke at length about what his problems are with the Trump presidency — and why he thinks Democrats would be foolish to believe that they’re in good shape to beat him just because they’ve been doing well in winning recent elections.

“Fear is powerful,” Obama said. “Telling people that somebody’s out to get you, or somebody took your job, or somebody has it out for you, or is going to change you, or your community, or your way of life — that’s an old story and it has shown itself to be powerful in societies all around the world. It is a deliberate, systematic effort to tap into that part of our brain that carries fear in it.”

He did not specifically discuss immigrant families being separated at detention centers. He did not discuss the travel ban or other rulings from the Supreme Court this week. Teed up gently but directly by DNC chairman Tom Perez, who was seated next to him on a small stage asking questions to prompt the discussion, he dodged a question about Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. Merrick Garland’s name wasn’t mentioned, and neither was the current push by most Senate Democrats — and supported by Obama’s former vice president Joe Biden — to say that Trump’s nominee should also not be given a hearing until after the next election. No one mentioned Joe Crowley’s shocker primary loss, or the burst of youthful optimism and talk of socialism that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win has injected into Democratic politics. He spoke only obliquely about the “Me Too” movement, saying that the current Republican leadership believes in “women staying in their place in all kinds of ways.”

His only direct comments on current events were about the newspaper office shooting in Maryland earlier Thursday, which he said left him heartbroken but hopeful that people would see this one as the turning point to take action on gun laws.

Instead, he talked mostly in general terms about how the Republicans and Democrats tell “different stories.”

“There’s a fundamental contrast of how we view the world,” Obama said. “We are seeing the consequences of when one vision is realized, or in charge.”

The event was the first of three fundraisers Obama is doing in California this week, with two scheduled Friday in San Francisco for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Thursday night’s event was to boost a DNC that is still struggling to reassert and refinance itself a year and a half into the chairmanship of Perez and with the massive undertaking of the 2020 election looming just behind the midterms. On that front, Obama said, Democrats could learn from Republicans, who have continued rapidly building out their infrastructure and fundraising despite Trump’s daily pummeling of the GOP to reshape it in his image.

“They don’t worry about inspiration,” Obama said. “They worry about winning the seat and they are very systematic about work not just at the presidential level but at the congressional and state legislative levels.”

But the tension between the desperation among many Democrats that Obama needs to lead the charge against Trump and the shift away that the former president and Democratic officials are pushing played out in Perez himself: He called Obama out onto the stage by saying, “Let’s give it up for the real president of the United States,” then 20 minutes later, downplayed what he called “political venture capitalists — they want to find the next Barack Obama” — who aren’t focused on the nuts and bolts of party building.

Opinions were divided within the audience, too.

“You only have a few super candidates,” said former California Gov. Gray Davis, applauding the focus on mechanics.

“Notwithstanding his post-partisan rhetoric, Democrats need him, his inspiration, his energy and his memory to get through these dark days,” said Eric Bauman, the California Democratic chairman who is helping lead efforts for his party to flip several key nearby House seats.

The event stuck to the focus-on-the-midterms message, with Christina Aguilera performing Aretha Franklin’s “Freedom” (“You better think / Think about what you’re trying to do to me”) and the hosts handing out gift bags in the end with a big red bag of Intelligentsia coffee beans inside and a “Stay Energized for November” sticker on front.

A new national message will come, Obama argued, as the 2020 field of presidential candidates emerges. The people who are looking for one now are being ridiculous, he said, but if they needed something to hold them over, he said his own old slogan still works.

“All these people that are out here kvetching and wringing their hands and stressed and anxious and constantly watching cable TV and howling at the moon, ‘What are we going to do?,’ their hair’s falling out, they can’t sleep,” Obama said. “The majority of the American people prefer a story of hope. A majority of the American people prefer a country that comes together rather than being divided. The majority of the country doesn’t want to see a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is angry all the time.”

Obama mocked Trump and others for being among the angry: “They’re mad even when they win.”

Trump’s executive actions and legal maneuvers to cut down Obamacare after failing to repeal it in Congress are a perfect example of what he means, Obama said.

“I am not surprised that instead of replacing what we had done with something better, they just have done their best to undermine and erode what’s already in place,” he said. “Of course people are going to be angry about that, because if you had health care and suddenly somebody who says they’re going to make it better comes in and makes it worse, you’ll be pissed. You should go out and vote.”

Obama called that an opportunity for Democrats.

“Reality has an interesting way of coming up and biting you, and the other side has been peddling a lot of stuff that is so patently untrue that you can get away with it for a while, but at a certain point, you confront reality,” he said. “The Democrats’ job is not to exaggerate; the Democrats’ job is not to simply mimic the tactics of the other side. All we have to do is work hard on behalf of that truth. And if we do, we’ll get better outcomes.”

Learn more at Politico

Without once mentioning the president by name, former President Obama on Thursday drew sharp contrast between his eight years in office and the Trump administration.

“To a large degree, we are seeing a competition between two stories,” the former president told about 200 people at a high-dollar fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Beverly Hills.

“There’s the story that is based largely on fear, and there is a story based largely in hope. There’s the story that says we’re in it together, and there’s the story that says there’s an us and a them,” Obama told DNC Chairman Tom Perez during a conversation at the event. Reporters were allowed in to listen to the 48-minute discussion. The rest of the event was closed to the press.

“There’s a fundamental contrast of how we view the world,” the former president said, “and I think we are seeing the consequences of when one vision is realized, or at least in charge.”

But, drawing on what Perez called his role as “optimist in chief,” Obama added: “The good news is that it is entirely within our power to solve it. The simple message right now is that if people participate and they vote, then this democracy works.”

Obama used his remarks to outline the stakes of the midterm elections and the competing visions on the ballot. He praised what he called the “extraordinarily powerful” phenomenon of women stepping up to run for office.

Obama warned against taking anything for granted as pundits predict a blue wave could sweep Republicans from power in the U.S. House.

“I would caution us from extrapolating too much from a bunch of special elections and starting to think that, ‘OK, this will take care of itself.’ Because it won’t,” he said. “Fear is powerful.” It would be a mistake, he added, to “go back to business as usual” or assume momentum from those races will carry Democrats through November.

The former president said he believes most Americans don’t want “a dog-eat-dog world where everybody is angry all the time.” He said that while observing “the other side,” he finds it striking that “They’re mad even when they win. Have you noticed that? They don’t look happy at all.”

He said Democrats should not get caught up in the kind of cult of personality his own candidacy inspired in some circles.

“I’m giving you the executive summary: Vote. Participate. Get involved,” he said as the crowd applauded. “And do not wait for the perfect message, and don’t want to feel a tingle in your spine because you’re expecting politicians to be so inspiring and poetic and moving. Politics, like life, is imperfect. But there is better and there is worse.”

And he defended Obamacare, his signature domestic accomplishment. “I said to the incoming president, just change the name. And claim that you have made these wonderful changes. And I'd be like, ‘You go!’ Because I didn't have pride of authorship, I just wanted people to have healthcare.”

Criticizing Republicans for trying to “undermine and erode” the Affordable Care Act, he said they had been “peddling a lot of stuff that is so patently untrue.” He added, “Reality has an interesting way of coming up and biting you.”

Obama’s remarks came in the midst of an ongoing border crisis in which thousands of children have been separated from parents arrested for attempting to enter the country illegally. It also comes as President Trump and Congress are grappling with the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. He did not mention either storyline Thursday.

Obama did, however, open his remarks by saying he was “heartbroken” about the shooting in Annapolis earlier in the day.

“I am hopeful that each time one of these tragedies strikes we remind ourselves that this is preventable. It’s not inevitable,” he said. “That America is not the only nation on Earth that has people who are troubled or violent, but we are unique in the weapons that those people can deploy. And it’s costly.”

The event was held at the home of Allan Mutchnik, an executive of Harbor Freight Tools, and his wife, Nicole. They have been major donors to Democratic candidates and causes, and gave tens of thousands of dollars to a committee benefiting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Tickets started at $2,700 to attend the discussion and see a musical performance by Christina Aguilera. Top donors who paid $100,000 received five dinner tickets, a photo with Obama, membership to the DNC finance committee and other perks.

The former president referenced Aguilera’s song, which was off the record, in urging people to stay involved.

“Governance is work,” Obama said, “and we shouldn’t expect it to be entertaining all the time. Christina Aguilera was wonderful but you don't need to have an amazing singer at every event. Sometimes you’re just in a church basement making phone calls and eating cold pizza.”

It was a rare post-presidency appearance for Obama, who has kept a low profile and made few public appearances since leaving the White House. In March, he came to the Golden State to raise money for Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

He will continue his California fundraising swing Friday, where he will appear at a $10,000-per-person fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the Bay Area suburb of Atherton.

Learn more at LA Times

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a sweeping new consumer privacy law on Thursday that gives Californians new authority over their personal data, a framework that backers say could be adopted throughout the country.

The legislation sailed through the Senate and Assembly earlier in the day, but the vote count belied the frenzied behind-the-scenes negotiations to craft a last-minute bill to stave off a similar ballot initiative.

“Today we have a chance to make a difference by giving California consumers control of their own data,” said Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Arcadia), the author of the measure, AB 375.

Under the new rules, Californians would have a right to know what information a business has about them, and have the ability to prohibit companies from selling that information and to ask businesses to delete information they provided.

Consumers would be able to sue companies if a data breach leads to their unencrypted information being exposed or stolen.

“This will serve as an inspiration across the country,” said Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys), a coauthor of the bill.

The bill is intended to avert a showdown on the November ballot over an initiative backed by Alastair Mactaggart, a San Francisco real estate developer. Mactaggart said he would pull his measure, which has qualified for the ballot, once the bill was passed and signed by the governor.

Shortly after the bill was signed, Secretary of State Alex Padilla confirmed the initiative was withdrawn.

“I genuinely think the Legislature should be the place that does this,” Mactaggart said. “The reason that they don’t get it done in the first place is because business is so powerful.”

Opponents to the initiative bemoaned the bill as well, but said it was slightly preferable to the proposal slated for the ballot, in part because it narrowed the circumstances under which consumers could sue companies.

“Data regulation policy is complex and impacts every sector of the economy, including the internet industry,” said Robert Callahan, vice president of state government affairs of the Internet Assn. “That makes the lack of public discussion and process surrounding this far-reaching bill even more concerning.”

In a message to other states considering similar action, Callahan said “the circumstances of this bill are specific to California.”

Privacy groups generally hailed the measure as a major expansion of privacy rights, but signaled they wanted to further refine the policy in the coming year. Businesses will also seek changes next year — in advance of the bill’s implementation date of Jan. 1, 2020 — setting the stage for a major lobbying fight next year.

"While the California Consumer Privacy Act is a strong first step in protecting consumers, especially kids, we have a lot more work to do,” said James Steyer, founder of Common Sense, which advocates privacy measures for children. “For starters, we need to ensure the attorney general or any data protection authority is well-resourced, well-informed and empowered to robustly enforce this and future laws. We also need companies to limit the information they collect to the data they need, and only use it in fair and expected ways. Finally, we need to ensure our most sensitive information is not sold without our opt-in consent."

Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell), whose Silicon Valley district includes some of the largest tech companies, said he hoped next year would lead to substantive discussions about the policy.

“We have to get this right. That’s what it’s about — ensuring there’s hearings and a process in place to best understand this,” Low said. “I can guarantee you this: The Legislature did not fundamentally understand what they were voting for in this privacy bill.”

Learn more at LA Times

With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: Half of Americans think the United States is in “real danger of becoming a nondemocratic, authoritarian country.” A majority, 55 percent, see democracy as “weak” — and 68 percent believe it is “getting weaker.” Eight in 10 Americans say they are either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the condition of democracy here.

These are among the sobering results of a major bipartisan pollpublished Tuesday that was commissioned by the George W. Bush Institute, the University of Pennsylvania’s Biden Center and Freedom House, which tracks the vitality of democracies around the world. The three groups have partnered to create the Democracy Project, with the goal of monitoring the health of the American system.

“We hope this work can be a step toward restoring faith in democracy and democratic institutions,” Bush said in a statement.

The concern about the condition of democracy inside the United States transcends the tribal divide between Republicans and Democrats, with majorities across races, genders, age groups, levels of education and income brackets expressing fear.

“Americans are deeply worried about the health of their democracy and want to make it stronger,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House. “There appears to be a crisis in confidence in the functioning of our democracy, and it is not a party-line issue.”

The report comes against the backdrop of a raging debate over civility and Donald Trump’s polarizing approach to the presidency.

Former vice president Joe Biden, who oversees the Biden Center, said the results show “we can’t take our freedoms for granted — we have to work for them, and we have to defend them.”

The good news is that Americans overwhelmingly still support the concept of democracy and believe it’s important to keep the system we’ve inherited. That’s in contrast to the years before World War II, when many people got caught under the spell of communism and fascism. Asked to rank the importance of living in a democracy on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being “absolutely important,” 60 percent picked 10 in the new poll. Overall, 84 percent picked a number between six and 10. Among Democrats, it was 92 percent. Among Republicans, it was 81 percent.

There was a partisan divide when people were asked to pick whether America is in “real danger of becoming a nondemocratic, authoritarian country” or “there is no real danger.” Overall, 50 percent said there’s a real danger and 43 percent said there’s not. But 57 percent of self-identified Democrats said the danger is real, while only 37 percent of Republicans did.

Racial minorities, women and young people who have missed out on the full bounty of American greatness also tend to perceive fewer benefits from democracy and are thus less convinced of the system’s value. Only 42 percent of nonwhite respondents said they are satisfied with “the way democracy is working in our country,” compared with 51 percent of white respondents. Spotlighting a generational gap in attitudes, only 39 percent of respondents under 35 picked 10 on the scale of one to 10 when asked to rate the importance of democracy.

-- Racial discrimination and money’s corrosive impact on politics are two major factors driving this crisis of confidence. Participants in the survey were presented a list of 11 issues and asked to pick the two that most concern them when it comes to democracy in America. Almost 3 in 10 picked “big money in politics” and “racism and discrimination,” a statistical tie for the top issue.

Overall, 8 in 10 Americans think “the influence of money in politics” is getting worse, rather than better.

Three in 4 Americans think that “the laws enacted by our national government these days mostly reflect what powerful special interests and their lobbyists want.” This includes 81 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans. Just 17 percent of Americans agreed with the alternative statement: “The laws enacted by our national government these days mostly reflect what the people want.”

Even when controlling for other factors, there is a direct link between people being concerned about the power of money in politics and their level of confidence in democracy.

The survey was designed and conducted by North Star, a Republican firm, and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a Democratic firm. The nationwide telephone survey of 1,400 adults, conducted between April 28 and May 8, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percent. The coalition also conducted 10 focus groups across five states with different segments of the public to figure out how to most effectively make the case for democracy.

Money in politics was a top concern that came up in each focus group. “Greed and power are so dangerous,” said one participant in Pittsburgh. “It’s so rampant right now. Whoever has the most money is going to be the most powerful.”

Learn more at Washington Post

Politics can create strange bedfellows, and political scandals can create unexpected celebrities.

After a 55-year career deep inside U.S. intelligence, James Clapper has recently found something akin to notoriety, first as co-author of the famous Oct. 7, 2016, declaration that Russia was trying to tip the scales of the 2016 presidential election, and now as one of a handful of top former intelligence officials who have taken their criticisms of President Trump and concerns over a possible conspiracy with Russia to the public.

The son of a U.S. Army signals intelligence officer in World War II, Clapper carried on that service tradition by joining the Air Force in 1963, rising to lieutenant general and becoming director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1992 until his retirement from uniformed service in 1995.

But Clapper’s vast expertise and respected leadership prompted both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to press him back into government service long after many of his peers had retired to work on their golf swings.

As Director of National Intelligence (DNI) from 2010 to 2017, Clapper served as Obama’s most senior intelligence adviser, facing complex and contentious intelligence and national security issues such as the Edward Snowden revelations, the U.S. embassy bombing in Libya, the raid that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, and the ongoing investigation into how Russia intruded on the last U.S. presidential election. Clapper retired as DNI early last year.

Now nearly 80, Clapper is a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. At a time when the intelligence community’s credibility is regularly questioned, Clapper’s frank new memoir, “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence,” delves into his vast experience on the front lines of his field.

In an interview, Clapper talked about his candid new book, about what he learned during the Russia investigation, about why he speaks out about intelligence issues, and about how the nation might best defend itself against attacks from external and internal sources.

Q&A

James Clapper

GAZETTE: You served in the U.S. government in intelligence for 55 years under every president since John F. Kennedy, but you’ve said that “hearing Donald Trump ask Russian intelligence to attack his political opponent — in a very specific, direct way — made me fear for our nation.” You don’t seem like someone who is easily rattled. What did you mean?

CLAPPER: In all that time in intelligence, in one capacity or another, I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff, but never anything to disturb me as much as what I came to understand, comprehend, what the Russians were doing to meddle in the fundamental pillars of our political system. So when [candidate Trump] was exhorting an adversary of ours — which, in my mind, is the primary threat these days — to help him by going and finding allegedly 30,000 missing emails of Hillary Clinton, that to me is unconscionable and inappropriate and unheard of. There’s no time in our history where a president has exhorted an enemy, an adversary, to help him win an election and disparage a political opponent.

GAZETTE: He later claimed he was joking.

CLAPPER: He wasn’t joking any more than he was joking that he wants American citizens to behave like North Koreans do for leader Kim Jong-un. He wasn’t joking about that either.

GAZETTE: You discuss in the book how you and other intelligence agency heads under President Obama, including FBI Director James Comey, briefed then President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Pence, incoming national security adviser Mike Flynn, chief of staff Reince Priebus, and press secretary Sean Spicer in early January 2017 on why the intelligence community had high confidence that Putin directly ordered the hacking and election interference. Since you provided Trump the same classified assessment that President Obama received …

CLAPPER: Yes. And he had access to the very same highly classified hard-copy report, as well.

GAZETTE: So, what did you think when you first heard him publicly question that conclusion, and why do you think he continues to deny or cast doubt on those findings?

CLAPPER: What it showed me was, and he’s consistent to this day, that he could not then or now accept any information that casts doubt on the legitimacy of his election. And clearly the intelligence community assessment on the magnitude of the Russian meddling on our election — and I go ahead and make the call; I think they actually influenced the outcome — that’s just something he couldn’t accept. He was that way then, and he’s still that way. There’s all kinds of reasons speculated on why there’s deference to the Russians by him personally and to Putin personally, but I don’t know the answer to that.

GAZETTE: In hindsight, was it a mistake to provide him with detailed intelligence on what the U.S. knew about Russian interference?

CLAPPER: Absolutely not. The intelligence community should never, ever hold back any information from the president of the United States, no matter who it is.

“[Trump] wasn’t joking [about asking the Russians for Hillary Clinton’s emails] any more than he was joking that he wants American citizens to behave like North Koreans do for leader Kim Jong-un.”

GAZETTE: What was your reaction when you saw the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office and learned the president had revealed classified information to them about an Israeli source?

CLAPPER: I thought it was dreadful; that was unconscionable.

GAZETTE: In a recent PBS interview, you said you now believe the Russians actually “turned” the election. What did you mean, and do you think it’s possible that they could have pulled it off without help from any U.S. persons or without the knowledge of any social media platforms?

CLAPPER: I think that because of the slim victory margin, 80,000 votes in three states, and the magnitude of what they did — the massive effort they made where they touched 126,000,000 voters, and you see examples of what they did where Americans were not aware and even denied the reality of the Russians having convened meetings in Florida, for example. I think they got people out to vote who wouldn’t otherwise have voted, and certainly reinforced votes. They appealed to every group in this country, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, white supremacists, pro-Muslims, anti-Muslims, pro-gun control, anti-gun control, and they deliberately tailored compelling messages in a very sophisticated way, in a multidimensional way. That is unprecedented. It’s only an informed opinion, that’s all it is, because in the intelligence community assessment, we did not make any call on the impact of Russian meddling on the election outcome. The intelligence community is not chartered and has no resources to do that. But as a private citizen, knowing what I know now since I left the government, and knowing what I knew before I left, that’s a conclusion I came to.

GAZETTE: By December 2015, you write that it was clear to U.S. intelligence that Russia had shifted from attempting to damage Hillary Clinton’s chances and undermine faith in the U.S. electoral process to supporting Trump’s candidacy. You point to a number of examples during the 2016 campaign where Russia initiated and pushed certain themes and messages about Clinton and Trump, and then the Trump camp almost immediately echoed the language and messaging. … I know you’ve said you saw “no evidence of collusion,” but does behavior that appears coordinated suggest anything to you?

CLAPPER: There’s a striking parallelism between what the Russians were doing and saying and what the campaign was doing and saying, particularly when it came to Hillary Clinton, both from the standpoint of her alleged scandals and her alleged maladies, both physical and mental. Now, do I have direct evidence that someone in the campaign was coordinating messaging with the Russians? No, I don’t. But the outward symptoms are curious. Some would argue that Trump exhorting the Russians to go find Clinton emails to help him is a form of collusion.

GAZETTE: You say you were “not surprised” that Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan refused in late summer 2016 to issue a bipartisan public statement on Russia’s election interference. “It seemed they had decided by then that they didn’t care who their nominee was, how he got elected, or what effect having a foreign power influence our election would have on the nation, as long as they won,” you write. As someone who regularly studies people’s actions and motivations, did you or anyone look into why that was?

CLAPPER: What they cared about was their almighty agenda, which is still the case. And you have to ask, when will Republicans, particularly the Republican leadership, say in response to some additional Trump excess like separating kids from their parents at the border, when will they say, “Enough”? That’s really the issue here. I don’t know. What’s more important to them is their agenda: getting judges appointed, tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, etc., etc.

GAZETTE: Has it been tough for you, knowing what you know, to be sitting on the sidelines?

CLAPPER: Actually, I’m in a better position to do something about it now than I was then — writing the book, speaking out on television, and having far more public impact than anything I did as DNI. And I have far more notoriety now than I did as DNI. It’s liberating because when you’re in the government there are lots of constraints on what you can say and where you can say it.

“There’s a striking parallelism between what the Russians were doing and saying and what the [Trump] campaign was doing and saying, particularly when it came to Hillary Clinton.”

GAZETTE: We know from public reporting that the FBI had been concerned that Russian intelligence officers were attempting to infiltrate the Trump campaign and made numerous contacts with various campaign figures, including advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, the president’s son and son-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Last December, you called Putin “a great [KGB] case officer” who “knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president.” You clarified that to say you meant that figuratively, but could you elaborate on what led you to make that comparison?

CLAPPER: He’s a [former] KGB officer, that’s what they do. It’s in their genes. … So, what he tries to do is, when he approaches Trump or anybody else, he’s going to approach it the same way he approached it for his professional career. How do I exploit this person? How do I gain leverage? How do I gain influence? How do I co-opt them? That’s the way they do business, and have since the Soviet era. And what Putin figured out was the way to get to him was through his ego.

GAZETTE: If there were evidence that members of the Trump campaign aided Russia’s efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy or accepted help from Russia or China or Israel or all of the above to swing the election in Trump’s favor, where would that rank in the history of threats to the U.S.? That would seem to be a pretty major threat to our country.

CLAPPER: It would be, absolutely.

GAZETTE: How concerned are you that we don’t appear to be doing anything as a country to protect ourselves from further election interference from Russia and others? What do the trendlines look like?

CLAPPER: Very [concerned]. Lots of things are going on, I’m sure, at the local, organization-by-organization level, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI. They’re all doing their thing. State and local officials are doing what they can to secure the voting apparatus to include registration rolls and all of that. I suspect, not knowing inside baseball, it’s uneven from state to state. So things are going on. But what’s missing is the galvanizing effect of a clear stalwart statement from the president of the United States that the Russians are messing with us and it’s got to stop. And this needs to be done not just for the government, but for the society.

GAZETTE: Russian intelligence has a long, well-known history of infiltrating and attacking its adversaries, including the U.S., using and reusing many of the same tactics: disinformation, provocation, compromise, honeypots, etc. Why hasn’t the U.S. done a better job shutting these methods down?

CLAPPER: They work at it very hard, and we don’t do what we should do to counter it. For example, the U.S. Information Agency, which is an organization that was up and running during the heyday of the Cold War to counter-message Russian propaganda, we need something like that, but on steroids, to do the counter-messaging and, if nothing else, to point out what the Russians are doing and saying, and how they’re doing it, and to get the message across that people shouldn’t believe everything they hear and see.

Ex-CIA officer discusses how Trump Jr. emails, meeting might affect Mueller investigation

GAZETTE: The DNI as an organization is better today than it was in 1963 when you started as a signals intelligence officer, you say. But are we safer as a country, especially with regard to intelligence threats from Russia and China? What are the things going on over the next few years, and are you concerned at all?

CLAPPER: We’re safer, from an intelligence standpoint, particularly from the external threats. I think there’s excellent insight into what the Russians and the Chinese are doing. I view the Russians as short-term. At least for the next six years, as long as Putin’s in office, we’re going to be in a bad place with Russia and it will continue to be our primary adversary, an existential threat to this country. Long-term, it’s China because of its economic power and its prowess in science and technical matters.

“Lots of things are going on [to protect against further election interference]. But what’s missing is the galvanizing effect of a clear stalwart statement from the president of the United States that the Russians are messing with us and it’s got to stop. And this needs to be done not just for the government, but for the society.”

GAZETTE: Sir David Omand, a former head of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, was at the Kennedy School last spring talking about how democratic societies in the digital era are more vulnerable than ever before to manipulation through the classic tools of subversion, things like propaganda, intimidation, and dirty tricks. Through social media, foreign actors are able to engage in subversive and seditious activities today with unprecedented scale and ease. He said one strategy intelligence communities will need to adopt to counter these efforts is to give up the desire for total secrecy and be more open to educating the media and the public about the nature of existing threats. After 2016, do U.S. intelligence agencies need to become more outward-facing than they’ve been, and what can they realistically do without jeopardizing valuable sources and methods?

CLAPPER: That’s exactly the point. There’s always going to be an aura of mystery and suspicion about the intelligence community because internally what it does has to be secret to protect sources and methods and tradecraft. I did a lot of things while I was DNI after Snowden to be more transparent, particularly about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But when you talk about intelligence, adversaries go to school on that very same transparency, so there’s a double-edged sword there, and you have to engage the risk-vs.-gain thing. And it could be not just nation-states, but non-nation-states as well.

GAZETTE: How have the public attacks on the intelligence agencies by the president and his supporters over the last two years affected morale in them? Are the attacks doing long-term damage?

CLAPPER: I don’t know about long term, I can’t say. I think right now the intelligence community is not in the crosshairs. The criticism is focused more on the FBI, regrettably, and the Department of Justice. So I think the intelligence community, as long as it has leadership that will provide the top cover, will be OK and will keep serving up the truth to power whether they’re powerless in the truth or not.

Learn more at The Harvard Gazette

(CNN) Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg intends to spend an eye-popping $80 million on the midterm elections, throwing most of his financial weight behind Democrats in their effort take control of the House of Representatives this fall.

Bloomberg's 2018 plan, which was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed to CNN by his adviser Howard Wolfson, positions him as one of the largest donors to Democrats this cycle.

The cash infusion will be a major boon for Democrats in what promises to be an expensive election year, even as party leaders have been optimistic about their odds. House Republicans and their allies have been raising money at an impressive clip, but Bloomberg's commitment is poised to swamp those of even the wealthiest Republican donors. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, for example, recently pledged $30 million to re-elect House Republicans.

In a statement, Bloomberg said Republicans had "failed" in their control of Congress.

"And so this fall, I'm going to support Democrats in their efforts to win control of the House," Bloomberg said.

The decision marks a departure for Bloomberg, who has previously divided his political spending between candidates for both parties and with a focus surrounding his priority issues, which include gun control.

"To be clear: I have plenty of disagreements with some Democrats, especially those who seek to make this election about impeachment," Bloomberg added in his statement. "Nothing could be more irresponsible. But I believe that 'We the People' cannot afford to elect another Congress that lacks the courage to reach across the aisle and the independence to assert its constitutional authority. And so I will support Democratic candidates who are committed to doing both."

In his statement, Bloomberg said he would support Republican and Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2018.

Wolfson, a senior adviser to Bloomberg, will help steer the billionaire's political efforts.

Wolfson said Bloomberg will focus his efforts on winning the House for Democrats because "he believes the House has been most dysfunctional and has failed most dramatically in its responsibilities."

Bloomberg plans to spend the money through his own super PAC, rather than donating to Democratic Party committees or aligned groups, said Wolfson.

Learn more at CNN

In 2011, Kansas passed a law that Republicans said was aimed at ending voter fraud by requiring people to show proof of citizenship to register to vote.

But opponents argued that it was really an attempt to reduce registration by blacks and Latinos — who tend to vote Democratic — and challenged the law with a barrage of lawsuits.

On Monday, a federal judge agreed and struck it down.

The decision is a victory for civil rights groups and a rebuke of the law’s architect, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who oversaw President Trump’s now defunct voter fraud commission and is running for governor as a Republican.

In a 188-page ruling, Judge Julie Robinson said the law “disproportionately impacts … qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing noncitizen voter registration.”

Here’s some background on the law and the recent ruling:

How did the law come about?

In the months after Kobach became secretary of state in 2011, he called on the state’s Republican-led Legislature to pass a measure to stop perceived voter fraud. The Kansas Secure and Fair Elections Act mandated that Kansans must produce government-issued identification, such as a driver’s license, a military ID or a passport, to register to vote.

Lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the measure and sent it to the desk of then-Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, who signed it into law.

The stated motive of the law was questionable from the start. Studies have consistently shown that voter fraud is almost nonexistent — in Kansas and nationwide. Kansas secretary of state records showed that between 2005 and 2009 — a period when millions of people cast ballots — only seven cases of alleged fraud were referred to authorities in local, state and federal races.

Even so, Kobach and the Legislature lauded passage of the bill as a victory for Kansans.

“Every effort must be made to protect each legitimate vote from being canceled by fraudulent voter activity,” Kobach said at the time. “Voter fraud is a national problem, and Kansas has offered a solution that will protect every state that adopts it.”

What happened next?

It got ugly — fast.

Since the law took effect in 2013, dozens of groups, including the local chapters of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and American Civil Liberties Union, along with voting rights groups, filed lawsuits that alleged the new measure would suppress voter turnout by making it difficult to register and vote.

The measure saw several back-and-forth battles in lower courts. Monday’s ruling, however, is the most significant to date.

What did the ruling say?

Robinson was ruling on a 2016 lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of the League of Women Voters and individual Kansans. The suit argued that the law disenfranchised people who were attempting to register legally but did not have access to the required identification. The ACLU estimated that that more than 35,000 citizens were blocked from registering to vote between 2013 and 2016.

Kobach countered that the law was working. He said that 129 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote since 2000, and that the law was blocking such attempts.

In her decision, the judge said the law violated both the Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that requires states to offer people the opportunity to register to vote when renewing a driver’s license or public assistance.

“The Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections,” she wrote.

In addition, Robinson said that Kobach would not be allowed to renew his law license until he took six hours of legal education.

Hours after the ruling, Kobach said he would appeal.

“Judge Robinson is the first judge in the country to come to the extreme conclusion that requiring a voter to prove his citizenship is unconstitutional. Her conclusion is incorrect, and it is inconsistent with precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court,” Kobach’s office said in a statement.

What have voting rights groups said about the Kansas ruling?

It was their clearest victory to date against Kobach.

Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said the ruling “is a stinging rebuke of Kris Kobach and the centerpiece of his voter-suppression efforts: a show-me-your papers law that has disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans.”

“That law was based on a xenophobic lie that noncitizens are engaged in rampant election fraud,” Ho said.

Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, said the ruling confirms that “noncitizen voter fraud is very rare” and that the law was never needed.

“Fortunately Kansas voters will no longer be saddled with this unjustified burden on their voting rights, imposed as part of Mr. Kobach’s agenda,” she said.

The ruling could also give pause to other states considering such laws. Alabama and Georgia have passed measures requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote, but the laws are not being enforced.

Where does Kobach go from here?

Kobach is facing a competitive Republican primary in August. It’s unclear how much the federal ruling this week will matter to Kansas voters.

It was Kobach’s second major setback of the year.

The first involved the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which Trump created by executive order in May 2017 with the mission of restoring confidence and integrity in the electoral process. He made Kobach, a staunch ally during the 2016 election, the vice chairman.

The commission soon faced a flurry of lawsuits over privacy concerns for seeking personal data on voters across the country.

In January, Trump issued an executive order to disband the commission. He did so “rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the time.

Learn more at L.A. Times

Is California's housing crisis a result of political inaction or economic forces? What role do communities and democratic processes play in the shortage of units that policymakers state are needed to match population changes? At a recent UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate event, former Los Angeles Councilmember Michael Woo provided an overview that covered the numerous factors contributing to Southern California's current status. Woo, currently the Dean of College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, discussed how government and the private sector have failed to address fundamental changes in urbanization, population shifts, and local political coalitions. TPR is pleased to present an excerpt of Woo's remarks.

Michael Woo: Don’t blame democracy for the high cost of housing in Los Angeles. While our political system gives a loud and powerful voice to local neighborhood groups whose members already have a place to live, democracy itself shouldn’t be blamed for the powerlessness of those who are victimized by the housing shortage. I’d argue that our current housing debacle is both a political problem and an economic problem for the most vulnerable people in the community. Unless we address both the political system that disproportionately represents people with money and the housing market that fails to deliver for people who don’t have money, we’ll miss the big picture.

In Los Angeles County, an estimated 568,000 new rental units are needed to serve the needs of low-income renters. An estimated 567,000 low-income renters cannot access government assistance and are at risk of becoming homeless. Overall in California, an estimated 3.5 million new homes are needed by 2025—seven years from now—to address pent-up demand and population growth.

These numbers are really daunting, and we are falling further and further behind. Between 2005 and 2014, California built 308 housing units for every 1,000 new residents coming into the state. This is resulting in a widening gap between supply and demand.

In the city of LA, keeping up with housing demand will require building approximately 5,300 affordable units annually—but only about 1,100 new units are being built every year. Furthermore, apartment owners have removed 20,000 rent-controlled units since 2001—many of them demolished and replaced with market-rate units at higher cost.

This produces a real predicament: We have too many people who are spending too much of their incomes on housing. In the city of LA, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $2,556 a month. In order to afford that without spending more than 30 percent of your income on housing, your household income needs to be $109,000.

It gets a little better as you get further away from the center of the region. In Riverside, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is about $1,431. To afford that at 30 percent of your income, your household income needs to be about $61,000. That’s a big difference—but the desperate search for affordable housing also can lead to hardship in the form of the cost and the time involved in long daily commuting between home and work .

In LA, 58 percent of renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Nearly one-third of LA renters spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. The fact that that a lot of people are spending such an astronomical percentage of their income on housing means that they are not spending on household essentials like food, education, and healthcare.

To me, this points to a potential political coalition with the business owners and industry leaders affected by such a large percentage of our population not spending money on other necessities. They are potential allies in the effort to produce more housing. We need a crash program—a crusade, a campaign, a mobilization—to build more housing.

But what will that take? If you think that a crash program for housing is politically or economically impossible, history shows that it’s a matter of commitment. For example, after World War II, Singapore built about 21,000 new housing units during a 12-year period. Those new units were equivalent to about 8.8 percent of the overall population.

In Hong Kong, there was also a tremendous increase in the number of units. At its peak, the culmination of the public sector and the private sector built 61,000 housing units during a single fiscal year (1964-1965). At that time, the overall population was about 3.6 million.

Then there’s the rapid urbanization of China. The movement of people from China’s countryside to its cities represents the largest migration in the history of the world. In 1949, 10 percent of China’s population was urban; by 2014, that increased to 50 percent. By 2017, China’s urban population had grown to 690 million people.

Why did this happen?

It was a conscious, deliberate decision. Urbanization—and the building of housing to accommodate the population—was a national strategy for economic development and poverty reduction.

Of course, from an American’s point of view, China’s rapid urbanization and housing boom also produced many side-effects that would be unacceptable in this country.

Creating so many housing units in such a short time caused a lot of chaos and pain, and a lot of people lost their homes and property. The traditional urban fabric of many Chinese cities was destroyed, and there were huge environmental impacts. But they did build a lot of housing.

The United Kingdom’s New Towns movement suggests an alternative strategy for building housing but deliberately avoiding urban congestion. As an urban planning student, I studied Ebenezer Howard’s idea of garden cities—ways of accommodating population growth without replicating the urban scale of London, but by creating new, more livable, human-scale communities outside of the UK’s existing urban centers . The UK was able to develop 32 New Towns after World War II, housing 2.8 million people.

An example of a housing mobilization closer to home may be found in David Brinkley’s book about Washington in World War II, Washington Goes to War. Brinkley tells the story of the Herculean effort in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack to plan ahead for the anticipated massive increase in federal employees involved in the war effort. By 1942, Washington, DC built 400,000 new units of temporary housing and 18,000 units of permanent housing.

What are lessons from these other parts of the world for a California’s mobilization for housing? First: If there is a common vision anticipating a massive increase in job growth, population growth, or migration, this could motivate government and the private sector to do something about it.

In some of the places I described, the push to build a massive amount of new housing was accelerated by centralized political authority, a financial commitment to build housing, political tools such as the power to confiscate private property, and weak opposition. It doesn’t hurt if you have a Communist system, or some kind of centralized or authoritarian system. It’s hard for a Not In My Backyard movement to thrive in an authoritarian system.

But the Washington example shows that an authoritarian system is not required for a crash program to build housing. In the case of DC, the crisis atmosphere at the beginning of the war brought together the resources and the players needed to create so many housing units in such a short period of time.

The UK New Towns movement shows that it is possible to build a lot of units at human scale, and not necessarily replicate London or destroy the urban fabric.

Even closer to us, California—especially in Southern California after World War II—yields certain lessons about doing things right. We had success in normalizing the production of affordable units—perhaps not for the very lowest incomes, but at least for middle- and working-class residents who wanted to enter the housing market.

From 1945 to 1975, 6 million homes, including 3.5 million single-family homes, were built in California. The large number of returning veterans and the need for a regional economy that would build upon the defense industries made it easier to justify a combination of policies that resulted in a dramatic expansion of housing opportunities. The GI Bill had an enormous impact on boosting homeownership in the United States. The Veterans Emergency Housing Program, in three years, from 1946-1949, produced 2.5 million homes nationally. California was one of the places where the savings and loan industry grew up, making it easier for people who had never owned a home to get their first mortgages.

There were also factors in Southern California that didn’t apply in other parts of the country: the cost of land, the relatively low cost of building, and the development of new methods of creating housing, like tract housing.

This leads back to the subject of this address: Is democracy really the problem? To me, the real question is this: Why don’t the people who need affordable housing—those most affected by this crisis—have more power in the political system?

I’ll give you an example from my own experience. In 1986, I was a new member of the Los Angeles City Council. Knowing that I was interested in housing and architecture, the Museum of Contemporary Art asked me to support an exhibit paying tribute to the Case Study Houses (the now iconic series of single-family homes in Los Angeles, using new building materials and designed by leading mid-century modern architects) by commissioning an affordable multifamily apartment building in my City Council district.

The redevelopment agency found us an empty lot in Hollywood that belonged to the city of LA that would be suitable for 40 units of very-low-income family housing (the category of affordable housing in shortest supply in Hollywood). The museum organized a design competition that was won by the architect Adéle Naudé Santos. The city donated the land for the project, and the redevelopment agency provided housing subsidies that would make it possible for the rents to be afforded by very low-income households.

But getting buy-in from the The neighbors was not so easy. Some said that they were concerned about density, even though the project was lower density than many market-rate housing units in the area. Frankly, another concern was a palpable fear of poor people moving into the neighborhood. I distinctly recall an extremely contentious neighborhood meeting that, in my eight years on the City Council, was the closest to a lynch mob I’ve ever experienced.

It took 10 years to get the La Brea Franklin project built. And contrary to the complaints of the project’s opponents, it did not become a center of drug-dealing, gangs, prostitution, or dirty laundry hanging from balconies. In fact, you wouldn’t be able to tell driving by that it was a project for very low-income families. It worked, but it was torturous to get it to happen.

Several years later, I ran for reelection and won with 70 percent. But poring over the election results on a map, I saw that this precinct was one of a few in the district that I lost—and I suspect it was because of this project. The lesson I learned is that if you want your elected officials to take chances, it helps if the districts are large and the terms are long enough for people to forgive and forget. But if political leaders think that serving the demand for affordable housing results in alienating voters, we may need to invent ways to enable affordable housing to be built through a more normalized process, without requiring a demonstration of political courage.

In Southern California, political power is very fragmented and decentralized. This system works well for many people, on many issues. But when it comes to problems that don’t respect political boundaries—like housing, economic development, or transportation— our system doesn’t work well.

The supply of available land for developing housing is not growing, but we can use existing land more efficiently. One solution is more density around transit hubs. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, if we were to maximize the development potential around high-frequency transit stations in the county of Los Angeles, we could get as many as 903,000 more housing units. That’s a lot of housing.

We also need to make more efficient use of vacant land—in other words, infill development. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that there are between 5,600 to 8,900 vacant parcels around LA County that are zoned for multifamily housing.

There are also granny flats or accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Individually, these don’t have a lot of impact. But if there were more of them around the city, the county, and the region, they could make a significant impact.

In the most recent issue of our college magazine, I wrote an open letter to the faculty of my college challenging them to do more to address housing. For example, designers could come up with ideas about how to use more prefab or modular materials, like recycled shipping containers. Or designers could be creative about “micro-units.” In San Francisco, some developers are experimenting with dormitories for urban professionals to use space efficiently and to bring costs down.

Another idea is reusing buildings that may be becoming obsolete. In some U.S. cities, above-ground parking structures are being redesigned as living units. If we anticipate that the Uber and Lyft generation won’t need to own as many cars, and perhaps parking structures won’t be as common or as large as they are now, then we could convert parking structures or shopping centers that are no longer economically feasible into housing.

For the politically adventurous, I have a number third-rail ideas—dangerous ideas that are guaranteed to lose elected officials votes!—that could create incentives for a mobilization for housing at the state and local levels.

At the state level, the Regional Housing Needs Assessment has no teeth. In many cases, local governments disregard it because there isn’t a downside to not meeting their targets. One possibility would be to link state tax revenue allocations to local performance producing affordable housing.

In 2011, a major tool for financing affordable housing in the state went away when the redevelopment agencies were eliminated. I’m not suggesting that we bring back redevelopment. But if the state is serious about using its power to generate revenues for affordable housing, the Legislature and the governor could set aside more money from the state general fund, authorize general obligation funds, or expand the existing Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program.

The next idea is to reform CEQA. I’m not suggesting eliminating CEQA entirely, but making it harder for CEQA to be used for nuisance lawsuits against affordable housing projects.

Proposition 13 bailed out a lot of homeowners in the late 1970s who were threatened by the gradual increase in property taxes. But it has baked in a system that is inherently unfair to those entering the housing market after 1978. It has also created perverse incentives for local government to not encourage housing development and instead promote commercial development such as car dealerships and big-box retail that generates sales-tax revenue, in order to replace the revenue lost as a result of Prop 13. One way to make a difference is to rewrite Prop 13 to enable local government to generate revenue without becoming reliant on special fees, which can increase the cost of building housing.

Another option is the initiative route. This sometimes backfires, but it is a method that is available in California. Take Measure R, which generated tax revenues to support expansion of the L.A. County transit system. People thought it was never going to happen, and yet it got the votes to pass. Maybe something like that could be done for housing.

Another way to bring ideas into the political process is to go around the process, using something like a Blue Ribbon Commission.

H.L. Mencken once said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” If anybody comes to you with a menu of solutions for housing that are clear and simple, they’re probably wrong. Let’s face up to the hard choices needed to replace our current political and economic malaise with housing choices that give people hope.

Learn more at The Planning Report

After a hard-fought, history-making campaign, San Francisco’s Mayor-elect London Breed took a four-day vacation in Cabo San Lucas. Now ready to assume office, the city’s first African American woman mayor talked to The Times this week about how she’ll tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the Bay Area city. Breed, who was raised by her grandmother in public housing, said homelessness and affordable housing will be among her top priorities. (This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.)

Your campaign was sort of defined by the adversity you faced as a kid growing up in the city. How do you reconnect people who are natives of a city that in recent years has become a very different place?

I think so many people are not in the city anymore that I grew up with. I think what’s important is to make sure that people who are either natives of San Francisco, or live there now, especially those who are struggling, feel like they are part of our city — feel like it’s their city too and also feel like there are opportunities that exist in this city for them. Especially the future generations and kids who are growing up now in poverty. I also want to make sure we make better decisions and incorporate everyone into the prosperity that exists in our city.

A thing I notice in L.A., and I see this in San Francisco too. There’s this influx of young people and wealth, and it’s disconnected from the civic energy of the place. Do you see that as a problem? What can a mayor do to fix that?

I do see that as a problem that there’s a disconnect. I think part of it is really trying to hold people accountable differently than we’re doing now. I don’t want San Francisco to be just a place where people just move for opportunities. I want to create the future of San Francisco with the young people here. One of the programs that I am proposing is paid internship opportunities for high school students. What that does is provide a way for young people — especially those in our public school system — to work and be a part of these companies at an early age. For the individuals in the tech world, this is how the door can be opened to mentorship opportunities, relationship building and to a real connection to people who are growing up now in San Francisco.

The campaign became quite nasty and defined by race in a somewhat surprising way. Now that it’s over, what did you think of the tone and tenor of the race as it occurred?

I wasn’t happy with the negativity — the divisiveness, just some of the things that came out. But I can’t control that. I can only control what I did throughout the campaign and I tried to stay focused on the issues. I was hoping and I believe this occurred — that voters saw through all the noise and made what they thought was the right decision.

When you were acting mayor and then later ousted by the Board of Supervisors, it seemed to be a galvanizing force for your constituents. Did you see that as something that may have helped you?

People were so upset. I think that definitely played a role in more people getting active and engaged in the campaign. I think it inspired a lot of people, because when you think about it, a lot of people know what it feels like to be treated like that. When you see it happen in such a public way, it does something to you. I think people were really hurt and frustrated by the decision. Now here we are. The race is over, and it’s time for us to come together and think about moving San Francisco forward.

You will be sworn in on July 11. What do you see as the three or four biggest challenges that you face?

First of all, my goal is to get as much rest as I can and to take care of myself first. The thing that is of course going to be my top, top priority is addressing homelessness and cleaning up our streets and housing production.

On the housing question, you were a big supporter of SB 827, legislation sponsored by Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) that would make it easier for developers to build residential housing near transit centers. Are you going to push a similar type of policy in the city?

It doesn’t have to be necessarily a blanket policy. It could be based on specific corridors that make sense — like transit-rich corridors. I think there are ways to improve our policies for the purposes of increasing housing production. So there are things that can be done. We are going to be building on the McDonald’s site at Haight and Visalia. Sites like that, that are not being used in the most effective ways are sites that we should be identifying for housing production where we’re not displacing anyone and where we’re not bulldozing people’s homes for redevelopment. There’s a better way to do it if you work with the private sector to accomplish the goal as well. The city is not going to be able to do it on its own. The cavalry is not coming with a boatload of money to build housing. We have got to get creative.

What do you make of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s struggles to build housing in Los Angeles? Are there any lessons for you here? Have you spoken to him?

He actually reached out to me. We haven’t had a chance to talk.

Given all the fights taking place across the state over homelessness, what do you see as the quickest and most sustainable way of providing more housing?

I have been talking to people who own a number of buildings throughout the city. I think there’s existing vacant properties we can move forward with sooner rather than later.

As far as housing production, I think what we’re going to have to do is completely revamp our existing system and look at ways to get the board to remove certain things that are in our polices and, if necessary, take our case to the voters. We have to analyze what the holdup is and explain the process and why it’s taking so long and then inform the voters this is what we need to do, and this will cut the time maybe in half. So my goal is to go that route.

I have to push these projects through that are being stalled and also the 423 accessory dwelling units that are on hold in the Department of Building Inspection. I got to get that stuff through. There are number of things that I can continue to push for that would put more units on the market in the process of doing what we need to do to reform the entire system.

You are the first African American woman mayor of San Francisco. I wonder if you could just put me in your shoes for a moment. Where were you when that ‘wow’ moment hit you?

I don’t know if it has really sunk in yet. Everyday I’m waking up like “wow.” I don’t even know what to say or how to describe it. It’s very hard to describe. I have definitely been thinking about my grandmother a lot — just thinking about the challenges. I have been thinking about the struggles in my life.

Just thinking about things that I wish didn’t happen and that’s been really at the top of my mind. But also there’s excitement about how I will have the ability to prevent — not stop everything — but help prevent some of the things that happened to me in my life from happening to other people, with the decisions we’re able to make. That’s really something I have been thinking about. I can’t wait to go to the neighborhood I grew up in where I know some of my young folks are maybe not working and not doing the right thing. Opening the door of opportunity is really what I’m most excited about and what I keep thinking about and how being in this role will help achieve that goal.

Learn more at L.A. Times

When leaders of a powerful congressional committee turned their attention this month to the scourge of foreign agents plotting to weaken American democracy, they didn’t target Eastern European hackers or shadowy international political operatives.

They instead took off after the even-tempered environmental lawyers at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he suspects the group has become an agent of China’s Communist Party. Why else, Bishop and a colleague wrote in a letter to the group demanding documents, would NRDC spend so much effort fawning over our adversary’s imperfect environmental record while attacking the Trump administration’s stewardship?

The committee’s interrogation of one of the country’s leading environmental groups came as part of a larger trend: Last year, Robert S. Mueller III’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election breathed new life into the federal law requiring registration of foreign agents. Since then, the 80-year-old statute has started to become weaponized by political interests to go after their opponents.

A broad spectrum of civil society groups that work internationally fear they could face a new legal threat — being pressured to register as foreign agents, a designation that could severely damage an organization.

“It is not at all clear where this is headed,” said Sam Worthington, CEO of InterAction, a large coalition of U.S.-based nonprofits that work internationally. He warns that thousands of American nonprofits could find themselves in the same predicament as the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Like several other baleful developments in U.S. public life, the potential misuse of the foreign agent registration law parallels developments in Russia. Advocates for nonprofit groups worry that a legal tool meant to protect American institutions could be used to strike at those out of favor in Washington, much as the Kremlin has used similar rules to intimidate and shut down civil society groups.

America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act has been around since 1938, when it was passed to flush out Nazi agents in the prelude to World War II. By the 1950s it had become a staple of the so-called Red scare, used to attack perceived communist sympathizers.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent black sociologist and writer, was indicted in 1951 on charges of being an unregistered Soviet agent, with prosecutors citing his role as chair of the Peace Information Center, a group that advocated nuclear disarmament. He was acquitted, but the State Department banned him from traveling for eight more years because Du Bois would not sign an affidavit renouncing communism.

In recent years, the act was laxly enforced and routinely ignored by Washington lobbyists who did work for foreign governments but claimed that they did not meet the law’s requirements to register. That changed last year when Mueller indicted President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, on, among other charges, failure to register. That was followed in November, by the Justice Department forcing the Russian-funded television network RT America to register.

Suddenly, attorneys and lobbyists in Washington with foreign governments on their client lists began to register in significantly larger numbers.

As is often the case in Washington’s highly polarized political environment, it didn’t take long for people to begin worrying about unintended consequences. In April, a group of 43 nonprofits urged lawmakers seeking to bolster enforcement of the registration law to proceed cautiously, warning their proposals could open nonprofits to “politicized enforcement actions and attack.”

“The act is so vaguely and broadly written that it lends itself to being politicized,” said Nick Robinson, legal advisor for the International Center for Nonprofit Law. “That might be by politicians or the Department of Justice or others who can use this to target nonprofits.”

“We have seen this before,” Robinson said, pointing to the Du Bois case. “We and a whole bunch of other nonprofits are concerned about this,” he added.

The coalition’s letter was sent only weeks after Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee issued a report suggesting environmental groups protesting fracking and natural gas pipelines had become unwitting agents of the Russian government.

The same committee last year accused the Sea Change Foundation, a major funder of large U.S. environmental groups, of getting money from Russian energy interests eager to curb gas extraction in the U.S. The committee seized on reports in right-wing media about the group’s opaque financial documents in making its accusations, but it admitted that there was “little to no paper trail.” The members of Congress demanded the Trump administration investigate if Sea Change was a foreign agent.

Roderick Forrest, an attorney for the Bermuda-based firm through which much of the money to Sea Change was channeled, said in an email that allegations are “completely false and irresponsible” and that there is “no Russian connection whatsoever.”

But Sea Change and others may now find themselves targeted by the Natural Resources Committee. “We are looking into groups beyond NRDC,” said a committee aide who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Committee officials denied Bishop and the co-author of the letter, oversight subcommittee chairman Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), are using the registration act to target groups that oppose their push to expand oil and gas drilling. They say they merely seek clarity about their foreign affiliations.

“There is some question about to what degree a foreign entity drives NRDC’s mission,” the aide said. “Have they crossed the line from just being sycophants to Chinese leadership to actively or indirectly carrying out their information campaign in some capacity?”

In their letter, Bishop and Westerman challenged NRDC’s praise of China’s environmental efforts and questioned whether the group was “aiding China’s perception management efforts with respect to pollution control and its international standing on environmental issues in ways that may be detrimental to the United States.”

The letter cites NRDC’s praise of fisheries protections by China at the same time Greenpeace was sharply critical of the nation for subsidizing commercial fleets that are depleting fisheries around the world. “The Committee is concerned that the NRDC’s need to maintain access to Chinese officials has influenced its political activities in the United States,” the congressmen wrote.

A spokeswoman for Greenpeace called NRDC an ally that it fully supports.

NRDC did not respond to interview requests. In a statement, Bob Deans, the organization’s director of strategic engagement, said the group’s work combating pollution worldwide is in America’s national interest.

“We’re proud of our work, in China and elsewhere, helping to create a more sustainable future for everyone, and we look forward to discussing that work with Chairman Bishop and the committee,” the statement said.

The committee’s investigation has alarmed even some of those who have urged Congress to do more to inoculate American institutions against Chinese government interference. Among them is Glenn Tiffert, a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who recently testified to Congress about the methods the Chinese use to project influence.

He pointed to organizations, including the Confucius Institutes present at hundreds of American schools and universities. Their mission is to teach Chinese language and culture, but critics worry they have become a subtle tool the Chinese Communist Party uses to indoctrinate students.

Educators have been debating whether the institutes should be compelled to register as foreign agents. Branding them as such would likely prompt schools to sever their relationships, depriving students of the language training and other coursework they provide.

Tiffert says that’s a debate the nation needs to have as it contemplates the nuanced ways in which foreign governments exert influence inside America. But he calls the congressional insinuations about the NRDC deeply concerning.

“This should not be about American civil society organizations, like NRDC,” he said. “We need to be cautious about recklessly crossing that line.”

The committee’s letter “brings to mind some dark chapters in history when loose innuendo and association with foreign government were hurled for political purposes,” he said in an interview.

Learn more at L.A. Times

There are two key things to understand about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Husted vs APRI decision yesterday, which allows the state to punish infrequent voters by purging them from voter lists.

This ruling will further erode the voting power of people who live in cities because the areas most affected by purges in Ohio are its largest metropolises: Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.

The stakes just heightened for people who get evicted or are displaced from their homes, adding possible disenfranchisement to their list of problems.

At question in this case is the state’s Supplemental Process for purging voters, which goes like this: If you live in Ohio and you decide to, for whatever reason, skip voting in one federal election, this can trigger the state to send a document to your listed residence asking you to confirm that you still live there. If you do not send this document back and don’t vote for another few elections, the state assumes you no longer live at this address and will remove your name from your local voter list. This means that the next time you decide to vote, you will likely not be able to—or at best, you can vote provisionally. This is what happened to Navy veteran Larry Harmon when he tried to vote in 2015 but was denied because he failed to vote in 2009 and 2010 and didn’t respond to the address confirmation mailer that was sent to him.

Harmon and the A. Philip Randolph Institute sued the state with the backing of several other civil rights and social justice organizations, such as the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH), Demos, and the ACLU. The U.S. Department of Justice also filed a legal brief in 2016 on their behalf stating that Ohio’s purging process violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The Justice Department has held and defended the position that a person can’t be purged for not voting dating back to NVRA’s passage in 1993, through both Democrat and Republican administrations. But states have resorted to all sorts of questionable voter purging schemes, often disproportionately affecting voters of color. The NVRA’s anti-purging provisions were further strengthened by HAVA in response to the 2000 Bush-Gore election, which was bungled in large part because of the reckless voter purging that happened in Florida.

A district court sided with Harmon in 2016, but that decision was overturned by a federal appeals court later that same year. Harmon’s defenders appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but this time the Justice Department, under a leadership that is unfriendly to civil rights, decided to reverse the position it previously held for two decades. In a new brief, it posited that Ohio’s Supplemental Policy actually does not violate NVRA or HAVA. Yesterday, SCOTUS agreed. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, pointed to a clause in the NVRA that said a person could be purged if he has “failed to respond to a notice” and “has not voted” for a certain period of time.

But what Harmon’s advocates were contesting was how Ohio was going about this: The purge process can begin when a person misses voting once, after which they are sent the address confirmation notice. Meanwhile, even HAVA states that a person can’t be purged solely for a failure to vote. Ohio is the only state that has a purging policy like this, but thanks to yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, it likely won’t be the last. The ruling opens the door to other states to employ the same kind of purging process. If the current test case is any indication, that would be devastating for major cities because in Ohio, those are the jurisdictions that have been most heavily impacted. According to a Reuters study from 2016:

Voters of all stripes in Ohio are affected, but the policy appears to be helping Republicans in the state’s largest metropolitan areas, according to a Reuters survey of voter lists. In the state’s three largest counties that include Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods.

That’s because residents of relatively affluent Republican-leaning neighborhoods are more likely to vote in both congressional elections and presidential contests, historical turnouts show. Democrats are less likely to vote in mid-term elections and thus are more at risk of falling off the rolls.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted as much in her dissent, and also explained that people of color have been disproportionately impacted as well:

It is unsurprising in light of the history of such purge programs that numerous amici report that the Supplemental Process has disproportionately affected minority, low-income, disabled, and veteran voters. As one example, amici point to an investigation that revealed that in Hamilton County, “African-American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati had 10% of their voters removed due to inactivity” since 2012, as “compared to only 4% of voters in a suburban, majority-white neighborhood.”

Harmon’s defense argued that Ohio is incorrect to assume a person has moved just because they dodged an election or two—indeed, Harmon had been living in the same place for 16 years when his name was scrubbed from voter lists. There are myriad reasons for not voting, not least of which is because you just might not want to. Perhaps there is no candidate who best encapsulates your interests. This might often be the case for Democrats living in cities when considering participating in statewide elections, given the way cities are gerrymandered out of power and trapped by Republican-dominated state legislatures and governors that cater to suburban districts.

However, people of color, of low-income, and people who live in cities will always be vulnerable to residency-based purging schemes because they are the people most likely to change addresses. Cities have larger populations of people who rent (in many cities, renters are upwards of half the total population). Cities are also staging grounds for frequent neighborhood change—public housing gets razed for mixed-income complexes, new urban development plans kick off, gentrification kicks in—all of which lead to higher rates of displacement of families than are found in suburbs.

Even homeowners of color were more likely to not only get foreclosed upon during the recent housing crash, but also most likely to not have recovered. Many are living in transitional and temporary housing. Not to mention, cities are at the heart of the long-running eviction crisis in the United States. Cincinnati figures among the top ten metros for this, with an eviction rate that is 2.36 times the national average, according to Eviction Lab. Cleveland’s and Columbus’s eviction rates are not far behind.

With this ruling, the displaced can now add disenfranchisement to their list of worries while seeking resettlement. People of color can add this to the lately growing list of voting rights setbacks and obstacles experienced of late. Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent that the majority’s ruling neglects to acknowledge the history of voter discrimination and suppression that led to voter protection laws like NVRA and HAVA to begin with. Justice Alito replied that racial discrimination at the polls was not relevant to this case.

“The only question before us is whether [Ohio’s Supplemental Process] violates federal law,” said Alito. “We have no authority to second-guess Congress.”

And yet second-guessing Congress is exactly what SCOTUS did in 2013 when it ruled to strip away key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that Congress had almost unanimously reauthorized and did not ask SCOTUS to correct. Those provisions mostly protected people of color living in southern states with long histories of racial discrimination. If those same southern states decide to launch purging schemes like the one now rendered constitutional in Ohio (Florida has tried similar), then voters of color there will have even less protection.

Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted said these purges are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but study after study has pointed to the fact that this happens at such a vanishing rate that it’s not worth mentioning. Donald Trump disbanded his voter fraud commissionearlier this year because it was unable to unearth such fraudulent activity. There’s little reward or incentive for illegal voting in Ohio, where the penalty for this is a felony that could land one in jail for five years.

There is a solution, though, if Ohio is truly worried about keeping accurate voter registration files. It’s called automatic voter registration, which, as its name suggests, automatically updates a voter’s registration information whenever they get a new driver’s license, state ID, or apply for state benefits. It’s been adopted in roughly a dozen states so far and can be effective in reducing the chances of losing track of voters whether they move or not. A bill was introduced in Ohio in February 2017 to initiate automatic voter registration, and is still pending. Ohio Secretary of State Husted opposes it.

Learn more at CityLab

LOS ANGELES — The Democratic National Committee and members of Congress are turning to Hollywood for help with voter turnout and messaging ahead of the midterm elections and 2020 presidential campaign, quietly consulting with a group of actors, writers and producers here.

DNC Chairman Tom Perez, several House members and other top elected officials have already met with the group, formed by members of the entertainment industry in the wake of the 2016 election, that participants liken to a TV writers’ room, complete with producers of such programs as “Veep.” The existence of the group and details of the meetings have not been previously reported.

The group has discussed targeted voter-registration programs with visiting Democrats, as well as the party’s framing of issues ranging from abortion rights to gun control. In one recent meeting, a Midwestern senator sought advice about how to discuss gun control with conservative-leaning voters in his or her state, multiple participants said.

Participants declined to identify the senator or other elected officials who have visited.

“We’re a messaging strike force, mostly around voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts,” said Mathew Littman, a former Joe Biden speechwriter who helped to organize the group with Stephanie Daily Smith, a political consultant based in Los Angeles.

The group is primarily focused on programs to increase voter registration, and the DNC’s involvement is limited to that effort. Participants say they are developing programs targeting young people, black voters and Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria — a potentially significant voting bloc for the Democratic Party in Florida and other key states.

But the meetings have also served as an opportunity to address broader messaging issues, with several House members explicitly requesting help on speechwriting and overall messaging, participants said. In meetings with candidates and DNC officials, group members have urged the party to adopt a more aggressive communications strategy than the party mustered in a demoralizing 2016 presidential campaign.

“One of the first things we were at least talking about in the beginning meetings was how to improve upon the message as to what does the Democratic Party stand for, what does that represent,” said Andrew Marcus, who owns the television and film company Apiary Entertainment. “When the Republican Party or [President Donald] Trump is able to say ‘Make America great again’ and nobody that I know can tell you what the DNC or any of the leading candidates’ slogans [are], I think that’s a marketing problem.”

Alex Gregory, a writer and producer, said he has lobbied Democrats in their meetings to tie in vitro fertilization to abortion rights debates, while generally encouraging Democrats to adopt “more emotional content” in their messaging.

“It really is focused on … what do we stand for? In some ways, how did we lose?” Gregory said. “It is a moment of soul searching right now, in that we lost to an insane person … and that was more appealing than what we had to offer.”

The group conducts conference calls, shares an email list and has met about five times since September, Littman said. It involves about 35 members, including producers, show-runners, executives, directors, an animator and actors such as Rosemarie DeWitt, Ron Livingston, Jason George, Alyssa Milano and Helen Hunt.

They hold midday meetings, typically at the Century City headquarters of the public relations giant PMK-BNC, seated around a long table in a 14th-floor conference room overlooking the Los Angeles skyline. Littman, who ran government affairs for Broadcom Inc. and runs the meetings, said the elected officials are promised anonymity in order to speak freely.

In one of the group’s first projects, members are working to find young celebrities who might post videos of themselves registering to vote. Targets include stars of the TV comedy “Black-ish” and celebrities with ties to Puerto Rico. The group is also discussing a college campus voter registration drive that would include some kind of VIP concert or other experience for students who register large numbers of voters.

David Mandel, executive producer of “Veep,” said “it’s disgusting what happened” with the government response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico and that if Democrats can drive up registration in Florida and Texas, “those numbers can make a difference.”

Of the group’s long-term goals, the producer Cindy Cowan said, “We’re looking at November. But our bigger end game, like most people’s end game, is the presidential.”

Though Hollywood professionals and celebrities have long maintained ties to the Democratic Party, their significance has largely been limited to their ability to raise money for candidates and causes. The group meeting is unusual for the lack of a direct fundraising tie.

“I was looking for something to do that didn’t involve giving money,” Gregory said. “What I like about this thing is it’s not transactional.”

For the DNC and Democratic politicians who participate, the group’s meetings provide an opportunity to deepen relationships with a significant donor pool. But participants said they do not sense a soft pedal for contributions, and fundraising is explicitly prohibited.

“Right now, this is a lot of connecting us to talent and other influencers who have a large social media following or are well known in various communities in order to help us engage voters and highlight the importance of voting,” said DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa. “These are creative influencers that are bringing to the table their creative minds in order to best reach out to these voters.”

The arrangement draws not only on Hollywood’s stable of liberal-leaning celebrities — who have been used in voter registration efforts and political campaigns for years — but also on the industry’s creative expertise, which Democrats have traditionally been slower to exploit.

Daily Smith said entertainment industry professionals “wanted to give their intellectual capital” and that after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, “The one thing we learned is that we can’t take anything for granted, and we should be asking everyone for help right now.”

“One of our strengths is an incredibly creative community that knows how to message and knows how to reach people and can come up with hopefully some kind of messaging for the DNC and others that can help going forward,” said Craig Zisk, a director and producer involved in the group. “We do it for movie posters, we do it for TV Guide slug-lines, and we want to be able to do that for the DNC.”

The group is only beginning to emerge from its infancy, and the significance of its efforts is unclear. In addition, participants are acutely aware of the backlash the Democratic Party has long endured for its ties to Hollywood — exacerbated by sexual harassment scandals that have tarnished the industry. Republicans frequently have made a cudgel of “Hollywood values,” and out-of-state Democrats who raise money here have routinely been pilloried for the association at home.

“Look, the world knows they don’t necessarily need Hollywood telling people what to do,” Mandel said. “I have no desire to tell people what to do.”

However, Mandel said, “One thing I think we are pretty good at is getting the word out on something.”

Livingston, of “Office Space” and “Boardwalk Empire” fame, suggested the group may also help celebrities hone their approach to political campaigning “in a way that’s helpful, and not just self-congratulatory,” describing the meetings as “really more a chance for politicians to educate me about politics.”

Livingston, who grew up in Iowa, said he thought he could be helpful in the Midwest.

“I’m a little more familiar with who the Trump voters are, because I have some Trump voters in my family,” he said. “We’re going to need some people who voted for Trump to vote for some Democrats this time around.”

He added, “If they think that’s helpful, I’m offering it.”

Learn more at Politico

The public water boards in the southern San Joaquin Valley are only nominally public. Of 565 water board seats in Fresno, Kern, Kings and Tulare counties, 491 — a stunning 87% — went uncontested in elections over the last four years, according to the Visalia-based Community Water Center. Candidates ran unopposed so often that three-quarters of the boards didn’t even bother to hold elections.

These boards are the closest thing to local government in more than 300 unincorporated communities in the water-scarce San Joaquin Valley. They manage delivery of drinking water to residents and water to farms and dairies. They fund investments in pumps and pipes, set water rates and collect fees, and in some cases manage groundwater consumption.

Most pertinently, they are responsible for water quality in agricultural communities where chemical runoff and naturally occurring contaminants such as arsenic have poisoned wells. As a result, a million or more Californians, most of them living in poor farmworker communities, can’t safely drink the water that comes out of their taps.

As Laurel Firestone, the Community Water Center’s co-executive director, explained to me, local water boards have the potential to change that, particularly if board members are drawn from the communities that are directly affected by the boards’ decisions.

Unfortunately, as the San Joaquin Valley study showed, few boards meet that criterion. Instead, power gets concentrated in the same set of hands over time, often district “good old boys” — older white males who may not even live where water quality is the worst.

The story of West Goshen, an unincorporated town of 500 or so mostly Latino farmworkers and their families in Tulare County, shows both the harm that unrepresentative boards can do and the benefits of invigorating them.

Until 2007, most West Goshen residents didn’t even know that an elected local water board existed. Then the board, in the form of the West Goshen Mutual Water Co., quadrupled their water rates.

It turned out that a single family had run the board and the company for more than a decade, according to Lucy Hernandez, a West Goshen resident who led opposition to the incumbents. West Goshen homeowners should have been voting regularly for those who oversee their water, but partly because of the board’s obscurity, the members never faced opposition; they skipped elections. The board held “public” meetings that community members didn’t know about. “Father, wife, son, niece — it was like a family business,” Hernandez told me.

The rate increase, which was triggered by the need to repair a broken pump, provoked a community revolt. When new board members took over, West Goshen applied for state grants and received money to fix the pump.

But the system’s problems weren’t over. A few years later, tests showed West Goshen’s water was contaminated with nitrate from agricultural runoff. Residents could use their tap water, risking health problems from diarrhea to cancer to death, or they could spend a sizeable portion of their scant incomes on bottled water.

Again the board applied for state grants, this time $3 million, so that its constituents could be hooked up to the robust water system in the neighboring city of Visalia. Not only was West Goshen’s drinking water made safe, but the town’s rates dropped by half or more because it was sharing costs with Visalia.

West Goshen’s success story stands for the crucial work water boards do at the local level. But Firestone believes such grassroots water activism will also have an impact on statewide water policy. Not least because their members often move on to seats on regional water boards, where their power multiplies.

Here’s an example of what’s at stake. Gov. Jerry Brown’s current budget includes provisions for a Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, which would provide money to fix tainted drinking water systems throughout the state — its approval would constitute one of Brown’s most important accomplishments. Payments for the fund would come from farmers, as a way of resolving their legal responsibility for the water contamination caused by agricultural chemicals, and from a 95-cent monthly fee on municipal utility users’ water bills (with low-income residents exempted).

Farmers, environmentalists and water-stressed communities support the fund. The primary opponent is the Assn. of California Water Agencies, a statewide coalition of 448 public water agencies. Timothy Quinn, ACWA’s executive director, told the Sacramento Bee last week that a problem caused largely by farming shouldn’t be solved “by putting a charge on somebody’s bill in Los Angeles or San Diego or San Francisco.” Given that approval requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature, ACWA’s opposition could prevent passage of the measure.

ACWA’s position “shows how disconnected many water agencies are from the communities within their own jurisdictions,” Firestone said. With more local representation on the water boards, the agency’s stance could change.

The Community Water Center has held workshops in unincorporated communities to explain the water boards’ significance and the opportunity to run for seats. Some residents have felt too intimidated to run, so the center has established a “water leaders” network for current and newly elected board members to share information and support.

The benefits are obvious. Sham democracy gets replaced with the real thing, and we get that much closer to making good on the human right to clean water for hundreds of thousands of Californians.

Learn more at L.A. Times

The first declared candidate for president in 2020 has made 19 trips to Iowa or New Hampshire since last summer. He has published a book on how to “unify our divided nation.” He is “having a blast.” And he does not seem troubled that you may have no idea that he is in the race, or possibly even who he is.

It will be up to the good Democrats of Iowa and New Hampshire to fix that, says Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.).

It’s worth sitting down with Delaney, as I did recently over breakfast, not because he’s necessarily going to be the next president — though, after 2016, you’d be foolish to count anyone out at this stage — but because he has thought carefully and intelligently about what kind of leadership the next president should provide, whoever he or she turns out to be.

As a moderate, wealthy, self- ­described “pragmatic idealist” committed to bipartisanship and compromise in the service of accomplishment, Delaney might not seem the likeliest standard-­bearer for the Democrats in 2020. The party, after all, is often depicted as galloping toward angry resistance and full-blown socialism, promising free tuition, single-payer health care and a government job for anyone who wants one.

But Delaney said his meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire over the past year have convinced him that many voters are no longer all that captivated by the old Bernie vs. Hillary dynamic. He is finding them receptive to the argument that an appeal to bipartisanship may be not only good for the country but, when the Republicans under President Trump have become so meanly partisan, a winning strategy to boot.

“The more I’m in it, the less it seems to be about policy choices and the more about a values approach to the presidency,” he said. “How can we restore some sense of respect to the presidency? How do we restore civility and competence in government? How do we start feeling good again about what’s happening in Washington?”

Delaney recalled a recent meeting with about 15 Democrats at a Pizza Ranch in Winterset, Iowa, where the head of the local party, a union electrician, said he had been a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — but opposed single-payer health insurance and free college tuition.

“So I asked him, why was he a Bernie supporter?” Delaney recalled. “And he said, ‘He was honest, he was genuine, he was actually talking about priorities that were important to my family.’ ”

Delaney champions plenty of specific policy measures in his book, “The Right Answer: How We Can Unify Our Divided Nation”: universal prekindergarten to broaden opportunity, an expanded earned-income tax credit to boost low-wage workers, universally available (but not mandatory) national service for high school graduates, and more.

But his broader message is that one party alone isn’t going to accomplish any of these — and that even the most sensible and broadly supported reforms aren’t happening because of the hyperpartisanship that is “destroying our country.”

“Imagine that you’re trying to do business with someone and the first words out of your mouth are ‘You’re stupid and everything you think is wrong. Now let’s work out a deal,’ ” he writes in his book. “That would never fly in the business world, and it obviously doesn’t work so well in politics, either.”

For Delaney, Trump’s depredations only strengthen the argument. The nation isn’t preparing for the future, in education, infrastructure, research or technology, because the government can’t get anything done, he said. A lot of Democrats share that concern — but so do a lot of independents and a growing number of Republican voters.

“Democrats should be the party that brings people together,” he argued. “It’s not only the right thing, it’s what people are looking for.”

In his first 100 days in office, Delaney says he would champion only measures with bipartisan support, such as criminal-justice reform, infrastructure development and dealing with the opioid crisis. He would go to Congress once a quarter and take questions, unscripted, from members on both sides of the aisle.

Other Democratic candidates likely will be making this kind of argument for pragmatic leadership — former mayors and governors, maybe former business executives, too. Given that field, Delaney knows pundits aren’t going to take a little-known three-term congressman from Maryland all that seriously unless he surprises in the early contests.

But if he falls short, it won’t be for lack of a theory of the case.

“I tell voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, this is your job,” he said. “If you don’t find unknown candidates, you have no reason to exist in this process.”

In 1976, he said, the question was how to restore trust to a corrupt government, and the process produced Jimmy Carter.

“Today the central question is, ‘How do you bring the country back together?’ ” Delaney said. “If that’s not the question, then I’m not the winner.”

Learn more at the Washington Post

Two mayors deliver their annual state of the city addresses. They both acknowledge imperfect crime records and tout their hiring of police officers. They both prioritize revitalizing their streets. And they both talk about increasing the density of core neighborhoods. Put them in a room together, and they agree about most things.

But there’s one topic they frame very differently: Their relationship with their colleagues in state and federal government.

“We are living in interesting times,” said Lawrence, Massachusetts, Mayor Dan Rivera in his city address. He contextualized the challenges for the city by pointing to the Trump administration’s “struggles to keep its doors open” and “men and women taking to the streets to protest” in cities across the country.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s address struck a very different political tone. “We don’t get involved in the partisan politics of the day,” he said. “Our team shuts up, rolls up its sleeves, and takes action.”

The relationship between cities and other governments is one of the top issues that U.S. mayors increasingly talked about in setting their priorities this year, according to an analysis of 160 State of the City addresses by the National League of Cities (NLC). Other popular topics that emerged more than in previous years include infrastructure and public parks.

“Cities big and small are contending with a tall order: Do more with less, help more people, expand more programs, but do it with less money, and less support from the federal government,” said Brooks Rainwater, the executive director of NLC’s Center for City Solutions. “In some ways, it’s the same old story. But when we have crises like the opioid epidemic and climate change on our plates, it starts to feel more dire, and in some ways more absurd.”

Talking about the report during a panel discussion, Rivera said he chose to lead his speech by addressing these political issues because he wanted his constituents to understand that “even though we balanced our books and we’re addressing issues that for a long time people wanted us to address, the circumstances surrounding that have changed.”

“Federal grants to police officers [are] no more,” Rivera said. “A full response to what the national conversation is naming as a crisis around the opioid epidemic, no response. A shared financing of public education and transportation, that’s not coming either.”

Political context aside, most of the top priorities for mayors haven’t changed, according to NLC’s analysis of the 160 speeches that were available online. The most commonly discussed priority for mayors remains economic development, with a recent focus on downtown revitalization. Streets and signs ranked highly across geographic regions, and in all but the biggest cities. Public safety remains a top concern, particularly this year, talking about the police.

Even mayors like Rivera know that these are the issues his constituents will ask him about first.

“It doesn’t matter what people are talking about at the national and at the state level,” he said. “When you go grocery shopping, people are talking about their park, their sidewalk, their street. And you could be at this thing were you’re celebrating something very big, and you just did this great thing, and inevitably somebody will walk up to you and say, ‘hey you know my trash didn’t get picked up today.’ And so you can’t run from that.”

The biggest cities, those with more than 300,000 people, were most likely to talk about “intergovernmental relations,” the third-ranked discrete topic after police and public transit. This concern manifested itself in pledges for new priorities like climate change that fill gaps in national regulation: “We understand clearly we have to protect our own people from global warming when our national government fails to do so,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in this year’s speech.

It also manifested itself in escalating battles with state governments, which are increasingly blocking cities from acting on issues like property tax and rent control, while expecting significant contributions from cities for state pension funds.

“It is hard to believe that the governor is even talking about trying to limit city, county, and school district tax increases to 2.5 percent per year (without a vote), when the state property tax has increased by 288 percent in just five years,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler in his address.

“This year I warn of another concern and ask for your assistance,” said Mayor Steve Leary of Winter Park, Florida. “Our leaders in Tallahassee have lost their way. Members of the Florida House and Senate have chosen leadership, party, lobbyists, and their own selfish interests over the constituents that elected them. Their overt attempts to preempt home rule and create one-size-fits-all legislation is beyond dangerous, it is borderline unconstitutional.”

Big cities were also most likely to elevate homelessness and affordable housing as top issues. For smaller cities, these issues did not crack the top 10.

Opioids were only coded in 11 percent of speeches, and substance abuse in 7 percent. Infrastructure, by contrast, was talked about in 56 percent of speeches.

But the issue of opioids was one of several identified as emerging based on its appearance in a subset of speeches. Others were climate change and broadband internet access.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, touted his initiative to expand public WiFi, saying: “To thrive tomorrow, we must also pay attention to a new category of infrastructure. Residents need to know they can rely on good digital infrastructure.”

A small and relatively unchanged proportion of mayors, 14 percent, talked about government data and technology, despite an increasing public focus on the notion of “smart cities.” Other topics at the intersection of technology and infrastructure like dockless bikes were increasingly mentioned this year, including by Buttigieg, in what he called a merging of “digital and transportation infrastructure.”

Many local priorities are, of course, harder to quantify. Mayor Strickland of Memphis cited population loss as the number one issue for his city, a contrast from the narrative in many of the largest U.S. cities where new residents are associated with rising costs and displacement.

To address that issue, Strickland said, he’s following a trend common to most cities: building up density in core areas, instead of “building out.”

But he’s also looking to several of the other primary issues on NLC’s list, particularly crime and schools, which he says are driving people out of the city. Strickland ran for office on a campaign to improve public safety, and has touted advances in 911 response times and police hiring in his address. But police hiring alone may not solve everything, as Memphis is a majority-black city with a history of racially charged policing. Just prior to Strickland’s election, the police department was reviewed by the Department of Justice over the shooting of a black teen by police, and the ACLU is suing Memphis over alleged police surveillance.

Asked how he confronts racial tensions in approaching the issue of “public safety,” Strickland noted that the police department is diverse—majority African-American—and that his public safety strategy includes not just policing but other intersectional issues like education and community planning.

“Memphians all over the city, black and white, Democrat and Republican, no matter where you live, are really sick of crime,” he told me. “There are certain neighborhoods that hear a gunshot every single night.”

Rivera’s city of Lawrence also considers crime among its most significant and intractable problems. His city had the worst homicide rate in 15 years last year, he said. He, too, has been focused on police hiring, as well as community policing.

But unlike Strickland, he cited gun trafficking and police staffing as issues that should be addressed at the national level. Anita Yadavalli, program director of city fiscal policy at NLC, said several mayors brought up guns in their annual addresses this year, particularly school shootings. The study only tracked speeches between January and April, but she predicted that if she were to keep tracking addresses that occur through the summer, guns would continue to emerge as an issue for mayors. “That’s something that especially I find that mayors are calling on federal action. You know it’s basically in the vein of, ‘Hey we’re struggling in these cities, what can you do about it?’” She added that some cities are also touting moves to pass legislation like banning bump stocks.

“I think that mayors are just trying to take action into their own hands through on-the-ground programs and trying to implement gun violence policies wherever they can,” she said.

Learn more at CityLab

The Post reports:

The [Virginia] state Senate approved expanding Medicaid to cover 400,000 low-income residents, putting an end to years of Republican intransigence and opposition. As health-care advocate Topher Spiro put it: “This is a major victory that will transform the lives of thousands of families.”

Wednesday’s decision is a tribute to the power of voting and the resistance to President Trump, which flipped 15 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates from Republican to Democrat in last fall’s state elections. The expansion is attached to the state budget, which Gov. Ralph Northam (D) — who campaigned for office last fall on a promise to expand Medicaid in Virginia — is expected to sign as soon as it reaches his desk.

Achieving Medicaid coverage for 400,000 additional people is a mammoth victory for Democrats in a state that has been trending blue for years, but now seems firmly in that party’s column. The vote holds multiple lessons for both parties.

(1) Republicans have made the mistake of treating Medicaid as a budget issue — a piggy bank to be raided — not a health-care issue. They’ve had ample opportunity to reform the program but, aside from a few waivers to allow states to innovate, whenever Medicaid comes up in GOP circles the topic is usually about limiting coverage and cutting cost.

(2) This is a victory for the Affordable Care Act, no question. Obamacare made Medicaid expansion possible and, whatever you think of the efforts by the administration and Congress to chip away at the ACA, an expansion of this size suggests President Barack Obama’s health-care legacy is on firmer footing than Democrats feared when they lost the White House, as well as their majorities in the House and Senate.

(3) This will be a big issue in November when multiple states (Utah, Idaho, Nebraska) will vote on Medicaid expansion, which delights Democrats. Democrats are returning to their bread-and-butter issues (e.g., wage stagnation, lack of access to health care) as they remind voters which party defended the ACA, and which party voted to eliminate it without an adequate replacement. The Medicaid issue will help the Democratic Party turn out its base, which is already pumped up to cast a symbolic vote against Trump.

(4) The Medicaid issue affects nearly every state and federal race. Democrats will argue that Republicans “want to take away health care” while Republicans will be forced to defend their votes and take a stance on expansion. That’s a problem given how popular Medicaid expansion has become. (“A poll conducted late last year by Public Opinion Strategies and the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association found 83 percent of the state’s residents supported the expansion, including a majority of self-identified Republicans. . . . Polls show that two thirds of Utah voters support the Medicaid expansion in their state. So it’s unlikely to be close,” The Post report continued.) Meanwhile, Maine’s controversial Republican Gov. Paul LePage is being sued for failure to expand Medicaid after a state referendum approving it passed with 59 percent of the vote.

(5) Virginia will be the 33rd state (along with the District of Columbia) to approve Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion appears here to stay, and despite the best efforts of the GOP House and right-wing pundits, has widespread, bipartisan support in every geographic region, with the exception of the Southeast (which includes some of the poorest states) and the Great Plains (although Nebraska and Idaho could join Virginia). “In a nutshell, Medicaid is the absolute star of the Trump presidency despite every effort on their part,” said Andy Slavitt, the former head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who served during the Obama administration. “By the end of his term, you could see five more states expand. And there is a tipping point for the hold out states at that point. The irony of course is that this is a far more Democratic idea than exchanges, a Republican idea [originating at the Heritage Foundation].”

(6) For all the talk of democracy’s dysfunction the 2017 elections in Virginia showed how the system worked. Democrats ran on expanding Medicaid, voters overwhelmingly chose Democrats, and now Virginia voters got what they wanted. (By the way, it may surprise political watchers who focus solely on Washington to learn that a lot of state governments are responsive to and demonstrate bipartisan cooperation.)

(7) Democrats are seeking to make health care the top issue in November while Republicans want to wave the bloody shirt on immigration (which will hurt them in states with large numbers of Hispanic voters) and to tout tax reform (which has not impressed many voters). Democrats have the advantage on the issue mix — and likely should heed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who warned to talk about health care and jobs, not Russia and impeachment.

Learn more at The Washington Post

Franklin D. Roosevelt, afflicted by the disease at age 39, died in April 1945 at the polio recuperation facility he had created in Warm Springs, Ga. Before then, Mitch McConnell, living in Five Points, Ala., began going there for treatment for the polio that struck him at age 2, in 1944.

After paralysis by polio, an inner iron undergirded the ebullience of FDR, who hitherto had relied on privilege and charm. McConnell, who had none of the former and is parsimonious with the latter, acquired while overcoming polio the patience and grit that on June 12 will make him the longest-serving leader of Senate Republicans, surpassing Bob Dole.

Since McConnell and his mother, returning from two years of intermittent treatments in Warm Springs, bought his first pair of walking shoes, he has played “the long game,” which is the title of his 2016 memoir. In his 33 Senate years, he has become a major figure in the history of two of the government’s three branches — the legislative and now the judicial as he oversees the reshaping of federal courts.

If McConnell’s low emotional metabolism allowed him to become agitated, he would do so about complaints — mostly from people inattentive to events or uninformed about possibilities — that Republican control of the two political branches is not producing results. McConnell says:

The largest tax reduction in 31 years has contributed to the best economy in 18 years. Defense spending is up, many Dodd-Frank banking rules and the Obamacare individual mandate have been repealed. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, blocked for 38 years, has been approved, as has a reconfigured National Labor Relations Board, a source of much Obama administration mischief. The Congressional Review Act, under which Congress can disapprove many regulations issued by federal agencies, has been used 19 times since it was enacted in 1996 — 18 of them during this Congress.

This, says McConnell, constitutes the best 18 months of center-right governance in his Senate career, which began when Ronald Reagan’s second term did. There also are the judges.

Some conservative warriors in the bleachers — people inordinately proud of their muscular spectatorship — deny McConnell’s toughness. Bruised Democrats know better. By preventing a vote on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland — invoking a rule first suggested by Democratic Sens. Joe Biden and Charles E. Schumer: Supreme Court justices should not be confirmed in presidential election years — McConnell kept open the seat of Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. The election produced a president unburdened by jurisprudential convictions but deferential to the Federalist Societyand other conservatives who think about such things. Furthermore, the White House Counsel’s Office, which oversees judicial nominations, is an island of professionalism attached to a seedy carnival.

To reshape the circuit courts of appeal (of 179 authorized positions, 21 have been filled in 18 months, and there are 14 current or announced vacancies), McConnell ended the requirement of a supermajority to stop filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. Filibusters had always been possible but were never practiced. Not even, McConnell notes, during the ferocious fight over the nominationof now-Justice Clarence Thomas. This nomination went to the Senate floor without the Judiciary Committee’s recommendation and barely passed (52 to 48), but was not filibustered.

To prevent Republicans from reciprocating with filibusters against Obama’s packing-by-enlargement of the nation’s second-most-important court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Democrats changed Senate rules to bar filibusters of judicial nominees other than those for the Supreme Court. McConnell removed that pointless exemption to make possible the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch.

McConnell is amenable to ending filibusters of nominations to executive and judicial positions. (The Senate, he says, is “in the personnel business.”) But without filibusters of legislation, he says, the nation might have socialized medicine, guaranteed government jobs, card-check workplace unionization, a ban on right-to-work laws, and other afflictions. He notes that since popular election of senators began in 1914, Republicans have never had more than 60 senators. And in the past 100 years, Democrats have simultaneously held the presidency, the House and the Senate for 34 years, Republicans for only 20.

Almost 30 years after the end of his presidency, Reagan still shapes events because of his nomination of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who often has been 20 percent of a court majority. Three decades from now, McConnell will be shaping the nation through judges who today are in their 40s, some of whom might be destined to be Gorsuch’s colleagues. This is the long game.

Learn more at The Washington Post

Editor’s note: This is part of a package of stories marking Sunshine Week, during which the media assesses the status of the free press in the U.S. Coming this week:

TODAY: The California Legislature created one open-records law for state and local governments, the California Public Records Act, and a totally different law for themselves, the Legislative Open Records Act.

MONDAY: Journalists beware! The internet has become a burgeoning forum for phony news, shady online ads and posts, intricately coordinated smear campaigns and Russian disinformation plots.

TUESDAY: President Trump’s campaign to discredit the news media and dismiss critical reporting has spread throughout the political landscape. Officials at all levels of government are now using the term “fake news” as a weapon against unflattering stories.

WEDNESDAY: The state of press freedoms in the U.S., based on an annual survey by the Newseum’s First Amendment Center.

ocuments released in February, showing current and former California legislators had been accused of sexual misbehavior and other harassment, weren’t released under the California Public Records Act.

Instead, the Legislature has its own, more restrictive public records law: the Legislative Open Records Act.

The California Public Records Act was signed into law 50 years ago by Gov. Ronald Reagan. The law says, in theory, all government agency records are public except for specific exceptions. But the Legislature was exempt from the law. Seven years later, it passed the Legislative Open Records Act.

“The Legislature carved out a special deal for itself with LORA, and it’s a deal that leaves the public out in the cold,” said David Snyder, executive director of the San Rafael-based First Amendment Coalition. “There’s a lot of things that the Legislature is not required to disclose that every other government agency in California has to disclose.”

Communications between elected officials and staff, such as between school district officials, are public documents under the California Public Records Act. But those communications are just one of the things the Legislature has decided don’t apply in its case.

In all, the Legislative Open Records Act carves out 11 exemptions in which the Legislature doesn’t have to release records to the public, according to Nikki Moore, Legal Counsel for the California News Publishers Association. Records of complaints to the legislature and investigations by the Legislature are also among the items excluded by LORA.

“Under the CPRA, you may not be able to get everything relating to investigations of misconduct, but there’s pretty good case law that you’re entitled to records of investigations, so long as the allegations are not totally unfounded,” Snyder said. “But LORA just puts all of this in a black box. If there’s allegations of misconduct, no matter how grave, no matter how vital they are to the public interest, you’re just not entitled to them.”

California public officials having one standard, and the Legislature having a different, lesser standard, isn’t restricted to just this law.

The Ralph M. Brown Act, passed in 1953, requires government agencies to release an agenda of what will be voted on 72 hours before a meeting. The Bagley-Keene Act, passed in 1967, requires state government agencies to also make their proceedings public. But neither act covers the meetings of the legislature itself.

“If you ask (former Assemblyman Bill) Bagley, who was responsible for the act, why he didn’t include the Legislature, he’d said it’s because it wouldn’t have passed,” said Frank V. Zerunyan, a Professor of the Practice of Governance at the USC Price School of Public Policy.

It took until 2016, and Prop. 54, which nearly two-thirds of voters voted in favor of, to get the Legislature to release the text of bills it was going to vote on 72 hours before a vote.

Learn more at The Orange County Register

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Hannah Arendt called citizenship “the right to have rights.” Like any other right, it can be bestowed and withheld by those in power, but in its newer forms it can also be bought, traded, and rewritten. Virtual citizenship is a commodity that can be acquired through the purchase of real estate or financial investments, subscribed to via an online service, or assembled by peer-to-peer digital networks. And as these options become available, they’re also used, like so many technologies, to exclude those who don’t fit in.

In a world that increasingly operates online, geography and physical infrastructure still remain crucial to control and management. Undersea fiber-optic cables trace the legacy of imperial trading routes. Google and Facebook erect data centers in Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest, close to cheap hydroelectric power and natural cooling. The trade in citizenship itself often manifests locally as architecture. From luxury apartments in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean to data centers in Europe and refugee settlements in the Middle East, a scattered geography of buildings brings a different reality into focus: one in which political decisions and national laws transform physical space into virtual territory.

The sparkling seafront of Limassol, the second-largest city in Cyprus, stretches for several miles along the southwestern coast of the island. In recent years it has become particularly popular among Russian tourists and emigrants, who have settled in the area. Almost 20 percent of the population is now Russian-speaking. Along 28 October Avenue, which borders the seafront, new towers have sprung up, as well as a marina and housing complex, filled with international coffee and restaurant chains. The 19-floor Olympic Residence towers are the tallest residential buildings on the island, along with the Oval building, a 16-floor structure shaped like its name. Soon a crop of new skyscrapers will join them, including three 37- to 39-story towers called Trilogy and the 170-meter Onebuilding. Each building’s website features text in English, Russian, and in several cases, Chinese. China’s Juwai property portal lists other, cheaper options, from hillside holiday apartments to sprawling villas. Many are illustrated with computer renderings—they haven’t actually been built yet.

The appeal of Limassol isn’t limited to its excellent climate and proximity to the ocean. The real attraction, as many of the advertisements make clear, is citizenship. The properties are proxies for a far more valuable prize: a golden visa.

Visas are nothing new; they allow foreigners to travel and work within a host nation’s borders for varying lengths of time. But the golden visa is a relatively recent innovation. Pioneered in the Caribbean, golden visas trade citizenship for cash by setting a price on passports. If foreign nationals invest in property above a certain price threshold, they can buy their way into a country—and beyond, once they hold a citizenship and passport.

A luxury holiday home on Saint Kitts and Nevis or Grenada in the West Indies might be useful for those looking to take advantage of those islands’ liberal tax regimes. But a passport acquired through Cyprus’s golden-visa scheme makes the bearer a citizen of the European Union, with all the benefits that accrue therewith. Moreover, there’s no requirement to reside in or even to visit Cyprus. The whole business, including acquisition of suitably priced real estate, can be carried out without ever setting foot on the island. The real estate doesn’t even have to exist yet—it can be completely virtual, just a computer rendering on a website. All for just 2 million euros, the minimum spend for the citizenship by investment.

As a result, Cypriot real-estate websites are filled with investment guides and details on how to apply for a new passport. This is the new era of virtual citizenship, where your papers and your identity—and all the rights that flow from them—owe more to legal frameworks and investment vehicles than any particular patch of ground where you might live.

Cyprus is a compelling location for such international games. Strategically anchored in the eastern Mediterranean, the island has long been a coveted and contested territory. Through the centuries, it has been occupied by Frankish crusaders, Venetian merchants, and Ottoman raiders. Since the Turkish invasion of 1974, Cyprus has been divided into two territories: the strongly Greek-identified but independent Republic of Cyprus in the south and west, and the disputed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus to the east. Another former colonial power, Britain, maintains its own legal and independent territories on the island, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

Power has often roosted here, poised to prey upon nearby territories. At one end of the island, fields of satellite dishes at NSA/GCHQ’s Ayios Nikolaos Station keep a close watch on the Middle East; at the other end, across the bay from Limassol, U-2 spy planes and RAF Tornadoes bound for Syria and North Africa roar out over the sea. In the case of the Limassol towers, that power is wealthy Russian and Chinese investors with an eye on accessing the European Union. Meanwhile, older residents of the city find themselves cut off from the sea, their homes overshadowed, and most of the profits from the golden-visa scheme disappearing into the pockets of law firms, developers, and politicians.

Juwai, the Chinese portal, casts a wider eye than just Cyprus. Its website hosts a side-by-side comparison of various golden-visa schemes, laying out the costs and benefits of each, from the price of the investment to how long buyers must wait for a new passport to come through. Not all the schemes are created equally. Cyprus’s neighbor Greece has one of the cheapest schemes going, with residency available for just 250,000 euros. But that’s only residency—the right to stay in the country—not local, let alone EU, citizenship, which can take years to obtain and might never be granted. Sometimes the schemes have gone awry, too. Some 400,000 foreign investors in Portugal’s 500,000-euro golden-visa scheme have been left in limbo by bureaucratic collapse, waiting years for a passport which was promised within months. Chinese homeowners have been forced to fly in and out of the country every couple of months in order to maintain short-term visas, despite having paid thousands for property.

Other real-estate schemes have fallen into disrepute thanks to even murkier political arrangements. A decade ago, a Kuwait-backed company set out its stall on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros. As Atossa Araxia Abrahamian explains in her recent book, The Cosmopolites, Comoro Gulf Holdings erected billboards along the seafront of Grande Comore featuring computer renderings of business parks and luxury apartment complexes designed to appeal to wealthy foreigners in search of passports. But the buildings never got off the drawing board. Instead, Comoros found itself entangled in a much shadier deal with the Gulf states. Having agreed to open up its citizenship to investors, the islands—or at least certain members of their government—received huge payments, mostly from the United Arab Emirates. But the passports, sent over in bulk and frequently surfacing on the black market, weren’t for Emiratis. Rather, they were for the Bidoon: the more than 100,000 people across the Gulf nations who, despite residing in the region for generations, have never been included as citizens, and are effectively stateless.

For years, the Gulf states have come under international pressure to address the issue of their stateless populations. The United Nations has declared that it wants to end statelessness by 2024. The market in citizenship provided a tempting opportunity to resolve the problem. Once again, people were given the chance to acquire the passport and associated rights of a place they’d never seen and where they probably never intended to live. In this case, however, they were more coerced than willing: Few Kuwaiti and Emirati Bidoon had ever heard of, let alone visited, Comoros. Many were tricked into accepting when renewing other documents, or had travel permits and driving licenses held ransom until they signed. While most have been allowed to remain in the Gulf, the acquisition of a passport means that troublesome Bidoon—particularly those agitating for better conditions—can be quietly shipped out of the country.

The legal frameworks of virtual citizenship invert and globalize the logic of the special economic zone—a geographical space of exception, where the usual rules of state and finance don’t apply. Special economic zones are one of the key innovations of global capitalism, stretching back to the British Empire’s treaty ports in China and Japan in the 19th century, and underpinning the hyper-accelerated growth of Shenzhen and Dubai in the 21st. Historically, they’ve been used to protect commercial interests and allow for wild experiments in industry and real estate, but increasingly they are being touted as a solution to issues of migration and citizenship.

In Jordan, where most of the 650,000 Syrian refugees are barred from jobs, the King Hussein Bin Talal Development Area has been set up on the outskirts of the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp. It is mandated to employ the refugees as a percentage of its workforce. The zone is the result of the Jordan Compact: an agreement between the Hashemite Kingdom and the European Union to provide jobs for refugees in return for special trade rules and access for European companies. Among the proposed launch partners are Ikea and the supermarket giant Asda, who will get access to cheap labor, and whose produced goods can be imported tax-free into Europe. The refugees, meanwhile, are required to stay where they are. Their position is akin to the passport-trading cosmopolites in one respect: They are subjects of the globalized economic system more than citizens of a nation.

Learn more at Atlantic

This protest feels different. In the aftermath of yet another shooting rampage, the angry and organized outcry by surviving students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has fanned a flicker of hope that the latest killings might prompt some tightening of state and national gun laws.

Using the hashtag #NeverAgain, many students who survived the Feb. 14 massacre have led an impassioned campaign against Florida’s relaxed gun laws, relaying their outrage to state legislators and savvily blazing a trail through the media with their stories of loss. They have coupled those tales with unflinching demands for government accountability, forcing even the adults in Washington, D.C., to pay attention.

After facing criticism over his response to the mass shooting, President Trump met with students, teachers, parents, and their local officials at the White House on Wednesday. When visitors asked what he could do to make students feel safe again in school, he suggested that teachers be trained to carry concealed weapons in class. During a lively CNN town hall session Wednesday night, several Douglas High students asked tough questions of Florida’s U.S. senators. The students plan a national school walkout day on March 14 and a march on Washington on March 24.

Douglas Johnson is a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and a former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He teaches members of social protest campaigns, human rights non-governmental organizations, and agencies like UNICEF how to improve strategic thinking and expand their tactical knowledge. In a Q&A session, he talked with the Gazette about why the #NeverAgain protest is doing well out of the gate and what it may need to do to ensure that its efforts change gun policies and don’t fade once the media spotlight turns elsewhere.

Learn more at Harvard Gazette