“The Biden administration plans to remove Yemen’s Houthi rebels from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list as soon as Friday, reversing a last-minute move by the Trump administration and reinforcing President Joe Biden’s new approach to the conflict in Yemen.
In mid-January, just days before Biden would be sworn into office, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced President Trump’s intent to designate the Iran-backed Houthi movement in Yemen as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, are an armed rebel group of Zaydi Shia (a minority sect within Shia Islam) who have been fighting a civil war against Yemen’s Saudi-backed government since 2014. That civil war morphed into an international one in March 2015, when Saudi Arabia and several of its allies in the Gulf decided to intervene militarily in the civil war, waging war against the Houthis. Meanwhile, Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional foe, has backed the Houthis.
Critics said the move was an attempt by Pompeo to both hurt Iran by punishing one of its proxies and box in the incoming Biden administration as he headed out the door, but Pompeo seems to truly believe the decision was the right one.”
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“President Joe Biden said the US would seek an elusive diplomatic settlement to the conflict, which would require the Houthis to strike a deal with Saudi Arabia, regional players, and possibly the US.
The Biden administration then moved quickly to revoke the FTO label: It’d be bad politics for the US to negotiate with a terrorist group.
But there’s another reason to do so, too: It could help Yemen’s most vulnerable. The war has killed about 233,000 people, mostly from indirect causes such as lack of food, water, and health services, while another roughly 24 million Yemenis require assistance to stay alive and fend off diseases like cholera.
Trump’s labeling of the Houthi rebels as terrorists made providing that assistance harder. Simply put, for aid groups to deliver assistance, they would have to negotiate with Houthi members who control a lot of Yemen’s territory. But US law essentially says no aid organization can do deals with terrorists, even if it’s to provide life-saving support to those in need
There’s a workaround if the US provides waivers to certain aid teams, but the Trump administration rushed its decision before working on and implementing an effective plan.”
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““This decision has nothing to do with our view of the Houthis and their reprehensible conduct, including attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens,” a State Department official told me on the condition of anonymity.
“Our action is due entirely to the humanitarian consequences of this last-minute designation from the prior administration, which the United Nations and humanitarian organizations have since made clear would accelerate the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” the official said, adding that the US remains committed to protecting Saudi Arabia from further Houthi attacks.
Activist and humanitarian groups praised the administration’s decision.”
“A new poll hints at one potential reason so many Republican lawmakers remain wary of distancing themselves from former President Donald Trump and seem reluctant to convict him in the Senate’s impeachment trial: There’s a real possibility they’d endanger their electoral prospects.
In a new survey from Vox and Data for Progress, 69 percent of Republicans said they’d be less likely to vote for a political candidate in their state if that person found Trump guilty in the trial, with 56 percent of Republicans saying they’d be much less likely to do so, and 13 percent saying they’d be somewhat less likely to do so.
Many Republicans, too, indicate that they don’t see Trump as being at fault for the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Broadly, only 22 percent of Republicans surveyed blame Trump for the insurrection, compared to 91 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents. Support for the impeachment trial is similarly split along partisan lines, with 12 percent of Republicans agreeing that the Senate should find Trump guilty; 82 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of independents feel the same. Overall, 48 percent of likely voters believe Trump should be found guilty.”
“The central fact of American politics today is that one of the country’s two major political parties is broken. Not merely wrong, but broken in a fundamental way, hostile to democracy and incapable of serving as a good-faith partner in governing.
Trump repeatedly attempted to overturn a legitimate election, an effort that culminated in inciting a mob that threatened the lives of members of Congress. Yet Republicans in that body cannot bring themselves to inflict the appropriate constitutional punishment for this kind of offense even after he has left office and is no longer needed to get judges confirmed and tax cuts passed.
Democracies require accountability to function. Political elites must be held responsible for grievous errors and punished accordingly. The GOP’s decay has destroyed this possibility — but the Senate trial is a necessary step toward fighting back.”
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“It will show that, even in the dramatic case of outright insurrection against the US government, the country’s political system is incapable of holding elites accountable largely due to one party’s extreme partisanship. Demonstrating this will serve as a justification for people, Democrats and civil society alike, to take more dramatic steps to repair American democracy down the line — including pushing for significant reforms of the political system.”
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“To really fix America, Democrats need to engage in a kind of partisan warfare: They need to inflict costs for past misbehavior not only on Trump, but on the Republican Party that enabled him. Most fundamentally, they need to roll back the anti-democratic practices — like extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics — that permit Republicans to remain competitive while appealing primarily to the most reactionary elements of the American public.
There are no costs that politicians pay attention to more than electoral ones. And if Republicans can’t win in the future by embracing leaders like Trump, they won’t be so comfortable excusing anti-democratic abuses down the line.
The tactics Democrats will need to employ in doing this — most notably, radically revising the filibuster to allow the passage of pro-democracy legislation along party lines — will seem extreme. But they will be more justifiable, including to moderate Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) — in a world where it’s clear that the normal levers of political accountability are broken. It is a way of showing that radical procedural reforms really are a “last resort.”
So failing to convict Trump again will further underscore that impeachment is a paper tiger, at least for Republican presidents. But that horse is already out of the barn. Trying and failing once again, when the anti-democratic offense is much greater and the cost to Republicans for convicting is much lower, will help underscore just how deeply complicit they are in the events of January 6 — and build the case for others, Democrats and non-politicians alike, to punish them accordingly.”
“President Joe Biden has announced that the United States is imposing sanctions on Myanmar’s military following its overthrow of the country’s civilian leadership in a coup last week.
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“Biden detailed a three-pronged response his administration would be pursuing. The first is an executive order that imposes sanctions on the military leaders who organized and launched the coup, as well as their business interests and close family members.”
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“The Biden administration will also block the regime from accessing its roughly $1 billion held in the US, though American funding for civil society groups and the most vulnerable will continue. And it will impose new export controls and freeze unnamed assets that could benefit Myanmar’s military-led government.”
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“For Biden to end these reprimands, he said the military should relinquish the power it seized and allow Myanmar to go back to the more democratic government it overthrew.”
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“Myanmar has toggled between military and civilian leadership since 1948, though the Tatmadaw, as the country’s armed forces are formally known, has remained the most powerful institution the entire time. The US and other nations thus placed sanctions on Myanmar for decades, hoping those punishments would compel the generals to enact pro-democracy reforms and stop abusing human rights.
They worked, at least for a time. Suu Kyi, under house arrest since 1989 for leading a pro-democracy movement against the military, was finally released in 2010. Then the junta gave up some of its control in 2011 and governed alongside Suu Kyi’s NLD.
That arrangement was quasi-democratic at best”
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“the NLD grew popular, trouncing the military’s political arm during the 2015 legislative election — leading the US to lift sanctions the following year — and then again in 2020. It proved Suu Kyi and her pro-democracy party were not only popular, but also had a mandate to strip the military of its autocratic authorities. It helped that the US and other countries lifted the sanctions due to Suu Kyi’s leadership.
That in part led her to seek bolder reforms. In March 2020, for example, Suu Kyi proposed reducing the number of allocated seats for military officers in Parliament. She received majority support for the measure in the legislature — but the Tatmadaw vetoed the move.
Ultimately, Suu Kyi’s growing influence and threat to the military’s hold on power led the Tatmadaw to launch a coup, hours before a new NLD-led Parliament was scheduled to sit for the first time.”
“Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) detailed how Trump laid the groundwork for trying to overthrow the election even before November 3 by creating a “no lose” situation in which he repeatedly insisted he could only lose if the election was stolen from him. At the same time, Trump glorified the harassment of his opponents — including, in an October 31 tweet that received attention on Wednesday from Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), by lauding fans of his in Texas who tried to run a Biden-Harris bus off the road.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) detailed how, as it became clear in the days following November 3 that Biden had won, Trump encouraged unruly “Stop the Steal” protests that presaged the January 6 insurrection.
Instead of trying to tamp down tensions, the Trump campaign instead spent millions on “Stop the Steal” ads that ran until January 5, recounted Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).
At the same time, Trump repeatedly urged his supporters to turn out in DC on January 6 for a “wild” protest. As Plaskett explained, his team even got directly involved in the permitting process for the January 6 event, helping organizers get permission to march to the Capitol.
“The truth is President Trump spent months calling his supporters to a march on a specific day, in a specific time, in a specific place, to stop the certification,” Plaskett said. “That is why he must be convicted and disqualified.”
Once his followers were gathered in DC, Trump delivered a speech to them in which he mentioned “fighting” more than 20 times, only once in passing urging them to remain peaceful. Videos that impeachment managers played to senators on Wednesday showed how Trump followers reacted to Trump’s speech by chanting things like “Take the Capitol!” and “Storm the Capitol!””
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“Alluding to Republican arguments trying to absolve Trump, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) said, “The truth is, this attack never would have happened but for Donald Trump. And so they came, draped in Trump’s flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and bludgeon.””
“Zam, 47, was convicted in Iran of stirring up dissent during anti-government protests in 2017 and was hanged..after Iran’s supreme court upheld a death sentence against him. In June, he was found guilty of “corruption on earth.” The journalist had been living in exile in France and was reportedly kidnapped after traveling to Iraq last year.”
“Based upon available exit polling, Democrats won Georgia with a combination of white college-educated, Black and Latino voters. Black voters led the way with a whopping 88 percent of those voters supporting Biden; they make up 29 percent of all voters in Georgia. Latinos and white college-educated voters made up the rest of this winning coalition of voters with 62 percent and 57 percent of these voters turning out for Biden, respectively. Combined, these voters make up a large subsection of all voters in Georgia. Based on data currently available on the final vote counts, we are tracking an increase of about 200,000 more Black voters in 2020 than in 2016.
Add in increased Asian American and Latino Democratic participation, and a true Obama-era coalition emerges. This is thanks to the work of Black Voters Matter, New Georgia Project founded by Stacey Abrams, and other state-based organizers who turned out what we call high-potential voters — voters who don’t have vote histories, but if you talk to them, are likely to engage and lean Democratic.”
“President Joe Biden’s first major trade policy move will be disappointing for anyone who hoped his inauguration would put an end to the presidential practice of unilaterally imposing expensive, unnecessary tariffs for vacuous national security reasons.
Biden’s decision last week to reimpose 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imports from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) contains all the major hallmarks of former President Donald Trump’s misguided trade policies. Biden even sounded downright Trumpian as he announced the renewed tariffs—which Trump had lifted during his final days in office. “The available evidence indicates that imports from the UAE may still displace domestic production, and thereby threaten to impair our national security,” says Biden’s executive order announcing the policy.
The idea that aluminum imports are a threat to national security was a bunch of nonsense when Trump did it, and it’s still bunk when Biden says it. It was, and is, nothing more than a cheap excuse for a trade barrier that ultimately inflates costs for businesses that buy and consume aluminum. Since 97 percent of American jobs in the aluminum industry are downstream of production, these tariffs create far more losers than winners.”