< china watch|242||>China is undergoing “the largest military buildup in history since World War II… across all domains, maritime, air, land, space, cyberspace.” So warns Adm. John Aquilino, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which comprises China’s navy and air forces as well,
China’s sailors and their ship on review.
has expanded more rapidly in the past 30 years than any armed force in history. “When I look at the military China is building, it is not a general-purpose military,” said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall III. “It is designed around the goal of being able to take Taiwan and keep the U.S. out.”
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has set a deadline of 2027 for the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan, according to Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns. The unification of Taiwan
The United States faces no greater threat than China, which Donald Trump would have to face come 2027. Let’s Fix This Country put together this series to show how vastly unprepared the U.S. is to confront China militarily compared to our leadership’s blind assumption of U.S. invincibility. Click the titles to read each of the subsequent installments:
II. What Would War With China Look Like?
III. War with China: Could America Survive the Trauma?
with mainland China “must be achieved”, says Xi. In December, the Chinese foreign ministry said, “China will realize reunification, and this is unstoppable.” Matt Pottinger, who speaks Chinese and was deputy national security adviser under Trump, says Xi has shown urgency about “recovering” Taiwan, viewing the absorption of the island nation into mainland China to be his signature legacy. Actually, China’s and Xi’s ambitions extend well beyond Taiwan. The “nine-dash line” on Chinese maps that embraces the South China Sea as Chinese territory is only the first dash line. Successive semi-circular dash lines extending eastward into the Pacific show China’s intentions to make the Western Pacific a Chinese lake and carve out a vast economic empire across the global south — all part of the “national rejuvenation” that will return China to its former place as the most powerful country on Earth. We covered this in “What China Wants: Today, the South China Sea. Tomorrow, Everything Under Heaven“. China’s navy makes no secret of its aim to be able to operate in what former naval chief Adm. Wu Shengli called “the far seas”—the Arctic, Indian and wider Pacific.
the new great wall
When China attacks Taiwan, should our military intervene it will come up against China’s formidable ability to control their near seas from land. China has developed a surfeit of weapons to defend its coastline. Land-based rocket installations are in place to clear the region of our ships and air assets. Longer-range missiles can target ships more than a thousand miles at sea. It would be a priority for us to take out those coastal defenses. But a year ago, the top U.S. Air Force officer in Japan warned that China’s air defenses were becoming impenetrable to all but the most sophisticated U.S. jet fighters, as reported in The Wall Street Journal.
China’s military is the world’s largest, with 2.2 million in uniform. Its annual military spending is second only to the U.S. Its military budget for the coming year has been increased by 7.2%. The budget that President Biden has just proposed raises defense spending by 1% — a reduction when inflation is factored in. Yet Biden has said four times that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China attacks – not just aid, defend.
China has joined in an increasing number of joint naval exercises with Russia, exhibiting “increasing complexity and sophistication”, Oriana Skylar Mastro, who researches the Chinese military at Stanford University, told the Journal a year ago.
By 2021, China had surpassed the United States in shipbuilding, conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, and integrated air defense systems. A year ago the Pentagon said that Beijing’s air force is “rapidly catching up” to the West’s. Its air force has built some 200 advanced J-16 fighter jets and J-20 stealth jets in the past six years.
China has produced a huge parallel air force of drones and the manufacturing capability for their uninterrupted production, whereas the U.S. has neither a vast fleet nor is there an industry for building drones under development.
In what Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said was “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the U.S. was taken by surprise in mid-2021 that China had successfully 
The Dongfeng-17 is a Chinese solid-fuelled road-mobile medium-range ballistic missile designed to carry the DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle.
fired a hypersonic missile, a weapon that the U.S. has still not been able to develop. The nuclear-capable missile, rides on a rocket that can orbit the Earth at multiples of the speed of sound at a low trajectory, then to be released at will, and can then maneuver to evade defenses. “We just don’t know how we can defend against that technology, neither does China, neither does Russia,” said Ambassador Robert A. Wood, then the U.S. representative at arms control sessions in Geneva.
Last April, a hacker leaked what the Pentagon didn’t want us to know about, a high-altitude supersonic drone developed by China that at three times the speed of sound will markedly strengthen their surveillance capability.
down to the sea in ships
China’s wars have been on land, and it still has an enormous army, but the expected coming war will fundamentally be fought at sea. It could begin slowly, with their ships or planes contesting ours in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Straits, or rapidly when China attacks Taiwan and the U.S. decides to engage.
China now has the world’s largest navy with 370 ships, as estimated in October by the Pentagon’s China Military Power Report. That is 30 ships more than the year before. Naval old hands are quick to point out that much of China’s navy consists of small patrol boats, no match for the U.S. Navy’s fire power. But at this pace they are on course to have 415 surface vessels by 2030.
In contrast, the U.S. has 299 combat ships. The administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton slashed troops, ships, aircraft, and shore-based infrastructure. During the Obama administration, the Navy’s battle force bottomed out at 271 ships.
The Navy has said for years that to be capable of defeating peer adversaries like China, it must have 350 ships and another 150 unmanned or lightly manned vessels for a total of 500. Former President Trump promised a 355-ship navy when campaigning in 2016, a promise quickly forgotten. Instead, procurement averaged eight ships a year during his term, which is only the replacement rate for the 30-35 year expected life of the Navy’s ships.
Prospects under Biden so far appear to be worse. His administration projects that it will take 20 years to reach the required battle force inventory of 355 ships.
China has three aircraft carriers, with a fourth, possibly nuclear powered, said to be in the works. The U.S. has 11. China’s first, with a curved “ski jump” deck to lift planes into the air, was bought from Russia and completely rebuilt. But China has since learned the level-deck electromagnetic catapult system that launches heavier munitions payloads and fuel, matching what previously only U.S. carriers had.
America’s submarine fleet of 53 attack submarines, 14 ballistic-missile submarines and four guided-missile submarines is the world’s most powerful. Of the total, the U.S. Navy hopes to have 66 nuclear attack submarines against the 49 in the fleet today. Working against that goal, the Navy retires two submarines per year while adding three every two years, for a net loss of one submarine every other year. Moreover, “America’s submarine fleet is in disrepair”, writes naval expert Seth Cropsey in National Review.
“At any given time, around 40 percent of attack submarines are not deployable because of repairs, maintenance, refueling, and ageing, which shrinks the fleet to around 30 boats.”
China plans to have 99 manned and unmanned submarines by 2030. The Chinese earlier opted for the quantitative advantage of cheaper diesel-powered boats but now has six nuclear-powered attack submarines carrying nuclear missiles with a range of 4,500 miles that reach Alaska or Hawaii and the continental United States, if launched from out in the Pacific.
China can build ships at quintuple the rate of America. As with many U.S. industries, shipbuilding began moving offshore to lower-cost nations such as South Korea decades ago. The downsizing of the Navy after the end of the Cold War eviscerated the industry.
In a recent Journal op-ed, retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix, who often writes candid appraisals of the Navy’s status, says that…
“The Navy’s budget, size and force architecture all need urgent attention from Congress if the U.S. is to preserve its ability to deter its enemies.”
This is Part I. In coming weeks, we’ll explore what war with China would be like.
Mar 29 2024 | Posted in
China |
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China has shown escalating belligerence in its surroundings seas, confident that it has no rivals in strength among what it calls the “small countries” such as Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines. It has built up reefs and outcroppings in the South China Sea into military bases from which it can force those nations off the fishing grounds that they rely on to feed their populations.
These invasions are in violation of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to which 168 countries are signatories that prescribes for each coastal nation an “economic zone” extending 200 nautical miles from its shores for its exclusive use. But China sweeps aside Western-inspired precepts of national sovereignty that conflict with its intended global dominance where it will set the rules. And so, on a boat sailing out of the Philippines at night near Mischief Reef, militarized by China in an area of the South China Sea that an international tribunal has said belongs to the Philippines, a New York Times reporter said that cell phones on board pinged with the message “Welcome to China”, notwithstanding that they were 900 miles from the nearest China landfall. They were not in fact welcome and were assaulted with sound that shook their bodies, blinding searchlights, and threats of ramming.
years of harassment
In April of 2020, Vietnam accused a Chinese patrol ship of ramming and sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat near the Paracel islands in the South China Sea, leaving 22 survivors in the water for hours clinging to the wreckage. That June, another was rammed in the same zone by a Chinese ship. During the same period a Malaysian drillship was harassed near Borneo. American and Australian warships came to its relief.
Harassing and violence has been the norm ever since. Beijing has adopted a policy that treats the economic zones of other nations as its own, 
Philippine boat blasted with Chinese water cannon.
that feeding its own people at cost to those nations is the new rule. Chinese boats fish in Indonesian waters. To drive off Philippine boats and deprive them of their catch, swarms of Chinese fishing vessels band together as “maritime militias”. This past October, a Chinese coast guard ship collided with a Philippine boat that was trying to re-supply military personnel on the Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands. The ramming followed bombardment with a military-grade laser and a water cannon.
To escort fishing vessels, China has floated a vast armada of boats bigger than U.S. Navy destroyers with 76-millimeter cannons mounted on deck and equipped for anti-ship missiles — but they are painted white, with “China Coast Guard” on their hulls.
The coast guard has become an alternate navy, part of China’s objective of becoming a “maritime great power”. China sees its growing coast 
guard fleet as instrumental in controlling near sea waterways for fishing and mining, able to use force but without triggering a response from its flummoxed neighbors that an attack by a military ship would. A year ago, a coast guard squadron circled for over 80 hours the eight, small, uninhabited Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, islands long contested between Japan and China. China’s threat signals its intention to force its claim and militarize these eastward outposts just as they’ve done with the atolls in the South China Sea.
China has made clear that it intends to resolve sovereignty disputes in its near seas — the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas — on its own terms
confronting the U.S.
The U.S. has for decades acted to enforce the freedom of navigation of the world’s oceans establish by traversing global waterways with its ships and military aircraft. China has notoriously ignored the 1982 Law of the Sea protocols by claiming its nearby seas as its own and challenging interlopers.
The Pentagon reported a “sharp increase in coercive” behavior in the East and South China Seas. The Pentagon cited 180 dangerous incidents since autumn 2021—“more in the past two years than in the decade before that.” One PLA jet fighter harassed an American aircraft for more than 15 minutes, “clearly armed and closing to just 30 feet away.” Last year, a Chinese naval ship sailed within 150 yards of a U.S. missile destroyer plying the Taiwan Strait. Last October, the crew of a U.S. Air Force B-52 said a Chinese fighter jet risked a collision when it flew with “uncontrolled excessive speed” within 10 feet of the giant bomber over the South China Sea in a nighttime maneuver.
A video showed what the U.S. called an “unsafe” Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait last June, when a Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of an American destroyer, forcing the U.S. ship to slow to avoid a collision.
Last May, a Chinese fighter jet came within 400 yards of a U.S. reconnaissance plane flying in international air space above the South China Sea. The unprofessional intercept forced the U.S. plane to fly through the jet’s wake and was a clear attempt to intimidate.
The list is longer but these are representative of increasing provocative actions Xi has greenlighted. Any one of them might ignite an incident that could escalate into war.
Mar 29 2024 | Posted in
China |
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October’s $106 billion supplemental funding request may be dead in the water in the House, but should $60 billion in assistance for Ukraine go forward, there is a threat which does not get the attention needed to spur outcry.
In a continuation of their decades-long practice of beggaring the Internal Revenue Service, House Republicans passed a bill last fall with $14.3 billion aid to Israel that they would pay for out of the $80 billion allotted to the IRS in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. On its own, without Ukraine aid, it went nowhere, but it’s clear that Republicans view the $80 billion as a slush fund to be dipped into for their own purposes. “I love cutting the IRS. I’m here for that,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.). “And if we can cut the IRS and fund Israel doing it, then I think that’s great.”
Last summer, to get Republicans in the House to raise the debt ceiling, President Biden had to agree with House Speaker McCarthy to cut $21.4 billion from the IRS funding: $1.4 billion in the debt ceiling bill itself, and $20 billion repurposed for 2024 and 2025. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the $20 billion, applied to going after tax cheats, would bring in $44 billion. Thus, by taking the money from the IRS in a move to spare their wealthy donors from having to pay that amount of concealed tax obligations, Republicans will add a net of $24 billion to the national debt. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t seem to fathom the concept:
“Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit. We don’t put much credence in what the CBO says.”
It’s also doubtful that the rube from Louisiana’s backwater is aware that the Internal Revenue Service is the one government agency that makes money.
The intent of House Republicans to take still more from the IRS is stunning on its face: hobbling the Service from bringing in a cascade of money to lower the annual deficit, raising the debt instead as the CBO ratio tells us, and sending the money to Israel for them to buy munitions to flatten Gaza and kill thousands more Palestinians. Biden is already in trouble among younger voters who in the primaries opted for “uncommitted” rather than voting for him. Paying still more to Israel – we already, year after year, inexplicably give $3.3 billion to that well-developed economy — might well cost Biden re-election.
thorough overhaul
The $80 billion to the IRS is spread across ten years with the objective of providing them a stable flow of funding to count on that is being used to improve seriously degraded service to taxpayers such as phone support owing to an acute shortage of personnel; to upgrade ancient computer systems; and to go after the wealthiest in search of tax evasion. It’s the last of these goals that Republicans want most to prevent with the threat to mega-dollar election campaign contributions in mind.
From what audit data it has been able to conduct, the IRS estimates that there is a “tax gap” – money owed but dubiously hidden or unreported — that runs to the staggering total of… $600 billion uncollected every year. Before the $20 billion was cut, the White House estimated that the enhanced IRS audit program would bring in $700 billion over the coming decade. The agency, which calculates that every $1 spent on enforcement brings in $6, is more optimistic; it recently estimated that the funding will lead to $851 billion in enforcement collection by 2034.
But that amount over ten years compared to the $600 tax gap every year speaks loudly for how disastrous is a tax code that makes possible such evasion. It is why thousands of accountants sophisticated in the intricacies of global tax havens, interlocking partnerships, and subchapter S corporations had to be hired and others trained by the IRS to revitalize the shrunken agency.
These charts succinctly show why the service has not been able 
to go after this stash of taxable income. Across the decade ending in 2021, the IRS budget was cut 19% and body count 
consequentially by 22% while the population grew and tax returns along with it. The second chart shows that same staffing drop-off and the up-tick that began with Biden’s Inflation Act funding. A year after the cash infusion, the headcount was at a level not seen in more than a decade.
overload
Congress thinks nothing of burdening the IRS with work extraneous to collecting taxes, and then finds fault with the agency’s inability to do its basic job. With the pandemic raging, the IRS was called upon to mail checks to just about everyone in America — and three times over, two under Trump and once under Biden — a colossal job accomplished despite staff reduced by the virus’s ravages.
But that doesn’t compare to what the employee retention credit (ERC) has foisted upon the agency. In 2020 Congress passed a program of funding businesses to keep paying their employees during the months the pandemic had driven away customers. It was a smart move that, among others, miraculously headed off what could have been a calamitous economic plunge.
But in return, American businesses, having no interest in the ethics called for in a national health crisis, responded with staggering fraud, scrambling for government handouts whether needed or not, whether they did continue paying their employees or not. Outfits sprung up to find businesses and, for fee, encourage them to apply and show them how, not necessarily with scrupulous honesty. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that the federal government made $528 billion in improper payments in 2021 and 2022.
What was intended to be a temporary lifeline of $55 billion has so far cost over four times that amount – with far more to come. Astonishingly, Congress left the window wide open for receiving claims years after the pandemic subsided; submission for 2020 ERC finally ends April 15 of this year, but claims for 2021 ERC are still accepted until April 15 of next year.
It has fallen to the IRS to determine who is truly eligible and who is cheating. This is slow going, and the agency is faced with appraising over a million claims, with 3.6 million already processed. New claims keep pouring in while the service works to recover the fraudulent old payouts.
In July the IRS slowed and halted processing of Employee Retention Credit applications received after mid-September due to their complexity and…
“the aggressive and misleading marketing campaigns luring small businesses and organizations that are not eligible into into claiming the ERC.”
In December, the agency offered a deal: ERC recipients in doubt of their eligibility could avoid audit if they repaid 80% of the monies they received.
There are hundreds of criminal investigations in the works and thousands of audits to recover money that should not have been awarded. This will take years and for the moment is impacting the fielding of 2023 tax returns and impeding refunds due to taxpayers — all thanks to loosely crafted and irresponsible law writing without a thought to the burden it loads onto the IRS’s plate. A bill that cleared the House would at least change the cutoff of application to the January 31st just passed and places a number of restraints on application promoters, but of course the bill has not yet been taken up by the Senate as applications continue to flow in.
ancient systems
So many of the additions to staff were for handling taxpayer phone inquiries that owes to the grotesquely tangled tax code dumped on the IRS (and us) by Congress. That makes the $21.4 theft from the $80 billion especially damaging as it crimps the vast need for upgraded computer systems and software. The IRS is audited by the GAO. Some findings (to the surprise of no one at the IRS) that the GAO came up with as reported in The Wall Street Journal:
• There is no single point of access to all the data about your account. “There are 60 different case-management systems throughout the IRS,” said Nina Olson, 
the former national taxpayer advocate, “and they don’t all talk to one another.”
• Hundreds of IRS applications have been around for at least 25 years. Dozens are older than 50. There were also pieces of software running 15 updates behind the current version as shown in the illustration that counts the number of instances each version is put to use (timespan not mentioned).
• Even the most important application used by the IRS is written in COBOL, a programming language no longer taught in schools that was created half a century ago.
progress nevertheless
• With the added staff afforded by the funding, at taxtime the IRS answered 2.4 million more phone calls with live assistance in 2023 than the year before. Wait time dropped from 27 minutes to 4.
• From forms such as W-2s and 1099s, the agency has identified some 125,000 individuals who appear to be earning more than $400,000 a year, yet did not file tax returns from 2017 and 2021. They are receiving letters telling them to pay up what is expected to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, interest, and penalties. The Biden administration’s 2022 funding has added the staff needed to deal with these people.
• Democrats want to see tax cheats outed; Republicans want them protected and for smokescreen claim the IRS will just use the money to go after small businesses, which IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel says is “a myth”. So, welcome in the Biden camp was the announcement last September that the service began audits of 75 large hedge funds and real estate firms averaging $10 billion in assets. The IRS used AI to identify them. As the Journal put it, “the tax agency tries to build its case for keeping what is left of a pot of money Congress gave it last year”. Werfel said in a briefing with reporters,
“These are complex cases for IRS teams to unpack. The IRS has simply not had enough resources or staffing to address partnerships. In a real sense, we’ve been overwhelmed in this area for years.”
The $20 billion grab hasn’t become law yet but is expected to be part of a spending bill this year. In its 2025 budget the White House wants a hoped-for Democratic majority in the House to return the $20 billion that the IRS was counting on.
Mar 15 2024 | Posted in
Taxes |
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<2020 election|150|30|>
It was little noticed but should not be overlooked: Last month, the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote admitted to a Georgia judge that it had no evidence whatsoever to back up its claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump.
True the Vote had filed complaints about the integrity of the 2020 election with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, saying it had “a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta”. But when a Superior Court judge there ordered last year that True the Vote turn over the evidence to investigators, they refused.
Who are they and why does that matter? Because it was True the Vote that filmed voters allegedly illegally stuffing drop boxes in Georgia which was made into the film “2000 Mules” by Dinesh d’Souza, himself a convicted felon for breaking campaign contribution laws. After over 60 failures to prove fraud in court cases immediately after the 2020 election, after every story of fraudulent ballots had been explained away and proven benign, right-wing election deniers thought “2000 Mules”, which even ran in theaters of red states, proved something nefarious was going on. It was proof enough for Donald Trump who, in an interview, said, “They have people stuffing the ballot boxes on tapes!”
Ironically, that the videos and the film could not by their nature serve up conclusive proof of fraud made them more powerful because they instead fed conspiracy fantasies.
drive bys
True the Vote used cell phone data to find phones that between October 1 and Election Day 2020 went near a ballot drop box — any of several in a city — more than 10 times, as well as near an election-involved “nongovernmental organization” more than five times. The conjecture was that the owner of each such phone must be a “mule”, applying the trafficking term for drug carriers to persons who must be dropping off fraudulent ballots, else why would they be in the vicinity of drop boxes? From such are unfounded conspiracy suspicions born.
The group says the data found 2,000 phone carriers who qualified. So the Democratic Party must have hired the unidentified 2,000 as mules to repeatedly “harvest” and drop off batches of phony ballots for Biden.
The cell phone approach is imaginative but cannot be called proof. Drop boxes are deliberately placed at busy locations that any number of vehicles, especially delivery drivers, postal workers, cab drivers, etc., may have passed by more than 10 times in the observed month. And proximity does not mean a stop at a drop box. And if anything was dropped off in some of those pass-bys, virtually none seen in the film, what is to say that what was dropped off was illegitimate — or only for Biden? The film never mentions where those ballots came from or who performed the copious task of filling in those ballots with voter-roll data and forged signatures. Not one of the mules has come forward to confess to the scheme.
A small army of debunkers went to work with relish tearing apart the claims, but of course the stolen election believers paid no attention.
she distrusted an election
Catherine Engelbrecht, a small business owner who, after volunteering in the 2008 election, found 
Catherine Engelbrecht
the voting process suspect, and by making her opinions known caught the eye of the Tea Party, started True the Vote in 2009 along with frequent collaborator Gregg Phillips, a seeming entrepreneur associated with several other businesses. It has since established itself as an election watchdog but entirely in support of right-wing claims of left-wing malfeasance. Engelbrecht says the surge of mail-in voting in 2020 was part of a Marxist plot aided by billionaires including George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg.
True the Vote’s complaint said its investigators “spoke with several individuals regarding personal knowledge, methods, and organizations involved in ballot trafficking in Georgia” but it had only one person, referred to in the complaint only as John Doe, who “admitted to personally participating and provided specific information about the ballot trafficking process.” When called upon last year to provide that evidence, the group backtracked and tried to withdraw its complaint. But the Georgia State Election Board refused to shelve it and took True the Vote to court.
Which led to the group’s surrender last month, its attorneys stating to the judge “TTV has no such documents in its possession, custody, or control.” A spokesman for Raffensperger stated,
“Once again, True the Vote has proven itself untrustworthy and unable to provide a shred of evidence for a single one of their fairy-tale allegations.”
That result will of course not get through to the 69% of Republicans and those leaning Republican who, according to a CNN poll of last August, still said Biden’s win was illegitimate.
Well, at least True the Vote was disgraced and is presumably out of business. Except it’s not. They are at work in Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada to remove voters from the rolls in Democratic areas en masse — a thousand from a single Detroit suburb, for example. Their mission, they say, is to assure clean voter records because Democrats use “excess registrations” such as these to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.
Mar 15 2024 | Posted in
Election |
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< healthcare|252|30|Used to produce over half of all abortions>
UPDATE: March 26: The Court looks likely to find, as we said in this article, that “Anti-abortion groups and doctors not harmed themselves, purporting to represent other unnamed doctors, hardly establishes standing to sue, not least because none of the plaintiff doctors have ever prescribed mifespristone themselves.” In other words, that the Court will discard the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue seems assured.
But the conservatives on the bench showed unusual interest in the otherwise forgotten Comstock Act of 1873 which prohibits a number of freedoms such as sending though the mails whatever contraceptives and abortifacients existed then. That suggests we will be hearing from the Court in time.
In April a year ago, a federal judge in Texas suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the “abortion pill”. The FDA had overlooked “legitimate safety concerns”, said the judge, notwithstanding that the pill has been used safely by millions of women in all the years since the agency approved the medication 24 years ago.
Immediately following, in a case brought by attorneys general of 18 Democratic states, who argued that the FDA approval was “lawful and valid” and that the drug is “far safer than continuing a pregnancy”, a Washington State federal court agreed and enjoined the FDA from reducing the availability of the drug. A stay has kept the drug available since.
In striking down Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court meant to send all matters of abortion to the states for each to decide policy and create laws, but it falls to the highest court to resolve conflicting decisions by federal courts, and so, the nine justices are once again in the thick of the abortion wars. On March 26th they will hear arguments for and against the pill and are expected to render a decision in early summer that is likely to have incendiary reactions.
the suit
The Texas lawsuit against the FDA was brought by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that works to outlaw abortion, curtail LGBTQ rights, and promote Christian practices in public schools and government. They argue that the FDA rushed the drug’s approval without properly studying its safety, which, even if true, has long since seen safety proven.
Based in Arizona, ADF went judge shopping and found Amarillo, where they were guaranteed to draw Matthew Kacsmaryk because there is only one federal judge in Amarillo and that is he. Formerly with a Christian law firm, Kacsmaryk has written that Roman Catholic doctrine on marriage, family, sexuality, abortion, and even contraception should become American law. Appointed to the federal bench by President Trump in 2019, the conservatives who proposed him knew Kacsmaryk was a sure thing to legislate their cause from the bench.
The Texas suit ordering the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone is weak. To begin with, there is a six-year statute of limitation to challenge the FDA in court; to overcome that, Judge Kacsmaryk claims the agency restarted the clock when in 2021 it eased some restrictions on the dispensing of the drugs.
Second, proof of injury is a threshold requirement to sue in federal court. The plaintiffs include a few doctors speaking on behalf of other doctors who, citing one, experienced “some of the most emotionally taxing work I have done in my career”. Kacsmaryk’s court argues that, “As a result of the FDA’s failure to regulate this potent drug, these doctors have had to devote significant time and resources to caring for” women who experienced problems after taking mifespristone and the companion drug, misoprostol, and that they could suffer malpractice suits and heightened insurance costs in additional to “enormous stress and pressure”.
Anti-abortion groups and doctors not harmed themselves, purporting to represent other unnamed doctors, hardly establishes standing to sue, not least because none of the plaintiff doctors have ever prescribed mifespristone themselves. And yet, the suit has gone forward even to the Supreme Court. Given the drugs’ overwhelming safety record, attested to by more than a hundred studies, the cited harm is speculative and absent any reality.
The suit claims that the FDA acted in haste, all those years ago, that its decisions were “arbitrary and capricious” — key words for claiming violations of the Administrative Practices Act, which requires government to move judiciously and comprehensively in developing regulations. Judge Kacsmaryk claims the FDA “entirely failed to consider…any evaluation of the psychological effects” or “long-term medical consequences” of the drugs. Women who undergo abortions “often experience shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts”, he wrote. This is a single judge attempting to decide for women universally, banning them from further use of a remedy that they have elected to use of their own volition.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs said in a statement that “the FDA put women in harm’s way”, that “the agency should be held accountable for its reckless actions”, and that “chemical abortion drugs can cause serious and life-threatening complications to the mother, in addition to ending a baby’s life” — disinformation entirely the reverse of the drug’s safety record. Pregnancy itself is more hazardous than mifepristone, which studies show is linked to five deaths in a million users. That is four times lower than penicillin, ten times lower than Viagra, for example. Moreover, calling what has developed in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy — the time the FDA authorizes for use of medication abortion — a “baby” is either ignorance or a lie.
We had a go on the subject of abortion two years ago in “Can There Be a Middle Ground to End the Abortion Debate?”. It went through the science of early weeks of pregnancy to show that there was nothing remotely suggestive of a baby or anything human until the end of the tenth week, when something begins to form. Subsequently, a year ago January, The New York Times published a series of uterine photos of those same weeks 
Pregnancy in the ninth week.
that confirmed exactly what we had written. Shown the photos by her gynecologist, the patient, identified only as Jewel, said, “I thought you were going to bring in something that was shaped by a little fetus or something, and it was not that at all”.
But that goes nowhere with those who espouse the figment that an actual person is created at the moment of conception. Or even earlier. Here’s what the fervidly religious Mike Pence said — and in a campaign debate, no less…
“The sanctity of life proceeds out of the belief [in] that ancient principle where God says ‘before you were formed in the womb I knew you.'”
You didn’t know it but your pregnancy was God’s plan. This is where the fanaticism of religion takes over and words such as “sacred” are invoked. It is the moment at when a cluster of cells becomes “ensouled” with no regard to what is actually happening physically in a woman’s body.
how it works
Mifepristone latches onto receptor molecules in the uterus that are meant to receive progesterone, a hormone that maintains the uterus to receive and carry an embryo. The drug is usually followed 24 to 48 hours later by a second pill, misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and expel what has so far developed. The two medications are authorized for use in up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Misoprostol, which is not included in the Texas suit and would therefore remain on the market even if mifepristone were outlawed, can cause an abortion on its own, but is 87% to 93% effective compared to the 95% to 99% score of mifepristone. The medications account for just over half of all abortions and has been used by millions of women. Its use has risen from 39% in 2017 to 53%.
aborting abortion
That presents what may be an irresistible temptation for the conservative justices on the Supreme Court. Agreement to ban mifepristone nationwide would deliver a fatal blow to abortions, and overruling the FDA’s approval of the drug would strike at the “administrative state” that those justices claim makes laws through regulation that should be the province of the legislative branch. They would get a twofer.
Nevertheless, it seems a certainty that the Court would not agree to Judge Kacsmaryk’s order that the FDA withdraw its approval, given questionable standing and claims of harm that have no concordance with facts. Reversal of the FDA would be sure to invite lawsuits to overturn other approvals, feeding the extremist elements convinced of conspiracies, and damaging the efficacy of the agency charged with safeguarding the nation’s medicines and foods. One need only think of the rightwing rebellion against COVID vaccines and the growing rejection of vaccines in general. The head of the American Medical Association warned that:
“The threat may ultimately include promising drugs and treatments built around stem cell technology to treat Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis.”
It raises the specter of religious zealots with no medical knowledge using the courts to force their anti-science ideologies on the country.
The easiest path would be for the Court to follow the Roe decision, turning it back to each state to decide what to do about mifepristone and misoprostol.
But it is hard to think that the six conservative justices — five of them Catholic and a sixth educated in Catholic schools before becoming an Episcopalian — will pass up this opportunity to severely restrict access to the abortion pills.
Where will this lead? As became evident in the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the far right justices, especially Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, believe that Americans are not free. They have no inherent rights other than those specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Alito has openly evinced his dislike of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court’s decision in 2015 that allowed same-sex marriages. They are likely enthusiastic over Alabama’s declaration of embryonic personhood that calls for the banning of in-vitro-fertilization. In their obsession with control of the female body as primarily meant to breed, like it or not, there have been intimations that outlawing contraceptives could be on the horizon. The future could get ugly.
Mar 4 2024 | Posted in
Healthcare |
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It was thought that the Supreme Court would decline to even hear the case, so comprehensive and convincing was the unanimous decision by the three judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals. That would have let stand the lower court’s finding that Trump cannot claim immunity from prosecution for acts committed while president.
The appeals court ruling was on February 6th. Delaying a decision that could have been announced a couple of days later and that should have returned the case to Judge Tanya Chutkan’s D.C. Circuit Court for the 
trial to begin, the Supreme Court ran the clock for three weeks before saying it would, after all, hear the case it had earlier declined. They put the case on the docket for the week of April 22nd, on the final days of the last week the Court will hear arguments this term.
Another two months will have passed. And it means we will not hear from the Court whether Trump is or is not immune until the end of the Court’s term, the final week of June. And, we will bet, it will even be the last decision announced.
This for a case whose trial date had been set for March 4th and which the Court has pushed so far down the calendar that the trial now will almost certainly not go forward before the election. At least four justices — the number of votes needed to decide to hear a case — have decided to put their thumbs on the scale to make sure of that. America has a justice system that permits a stream of appeals and motions meant only to delay, which the Trump legal team has exploited masterfully. The Court has awarded delay tactics with a victory and joined in with its own contributions to the technique.
helping trump
By delaying what will now become an irrelevant decision of whether or not Trump has immunity, the Court has conferred on Trump de facto immunity. Making a trial impossible before the election clears the path for the man who engaged in the most treasonous act in our history by his attempt to overthrow the government to keep himself in power. If he wins the election, he will have his Justice Department wipe the slate clean of all federal indictments. One can hardly blame attorney and political commentator Elie Mystal for saying of the justices, “They’re trying to make Trump win.”
Not true? Let’s rewind the clock. The Colorado Supreme Court ordered Trump’s removal from the state’s ballots on December 19th of last year. The U.S. Supreme Court heard that case within 45 days on February 8 th, which is high speed in the Court’s perception of time. As it is a sure thing they will rule against Colorado and say states don’t have the power to remove federal candidates for office or nit-pick the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, that’s a win for Trump that will get him on all ballots nationally and quickly.
But the Court’s timing for the January 6th case runs differently. Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court in December to take up Judge Chutkan’s denial of immunity directly, bypassing the appeals court. But the High Court would not oblige and deflected to the appeals court. That they would not let even that court’s well-argued unanimous opinion stand made it apparent that they intended all along to take the case they could have accepted at the outset. But we nw know that they wanted to burn time, and then choose a date for hearing arguments way down the calendar.
So, 45 days to take up and certainly quash a state court’s ruling that would have hurt Trump, versus over half a year from Smith’s plea in early December to the end of June to head off the trial that could hurt Trump.
Michael Luttig, a conservative and former federal appeals court judge, said, “There was no reason in this world for the Supreme Court to take this case”. An obviously disgusted Neal Katyal, who has argued more than fifty cases before the Court, one of them on a different matter the same day of the April 22 announcement, said,
“It’s always just a big shell game and it always adds up to the same thing: Donald Trump evades the law. Unfortunately, today, the Supreme Court [is] saying, Donald Trump, we’re going to help you evade the law.”
The case is to decide that Trump is either immune or he isn’t — the trial goes forward or it doesn’t — having no bearing on the evidence, the testimony, the substance of the case, and yet the Court has even issued a stay that requires Smith and Chutkan to do nothing to advance trial preparations in parallel while the justices ruminate, a loss of four months until the Court reaches its verdict, a corrupt move by a partisan court’s three justices nominated by Trump and three justices connected to business figures who would profit by Trump’s return.
the outer perimeter
Instead of the narrower question of whether Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for the attack on the Capitol, the question sent to the lawyers on both sides shows they want to handle the larger question of presidential immunity in general. They show no urgency, no awareness that a highly consequential election awaits us in November, no concern that the people of the United States want and deserve answers. The question the lawyers are to be prepared to answer is:
“Whether the doctrine of absolute presidential immunity includes immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s official acts, i.e, those performed within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”
The Justice Department is of course saying that Trump, in seeking through violence and legislative tampering to keep power for another four years, was acting outside the ‘outer perimeter’ and not in the least faithfully executing the Office of President of the United States. But the question posed to attorneys will see the justices raise all sorts of hypotheticals that hearken back to the Trump lawyer claiming to the appeals court that his client could not be prosecuted for ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Mason University often seen on Fox News, sees the Court veering far from the single case of Donald Trump.
“Now that they’ve accepted this case, they’re going to have to make some kind of delineation for future presidents of when they can count on immunity and I have the feeling that at least four of these justices did not feel like the lower court’s decision did that… Now that they’re going to review it, they’re going to have to lay down some new law here”
If in June the Court says presidents are immune and beyond the law, no matter their criminal acts, then we will have a monarchy, not a presidency. Otherwise, that it is preposterous in this country for anyone to be immune from prosecution for a crime, it will have been a pointless exercise with a foregone conclusion and proof enough that the real and dishonest objective was to prevent a trial before the election.
squeeze play
The logistics are dismaying. Judge Chutkan had already said that 88 days would be allowed for attorneys to prepare for trial, and Smith expects the trial to take three months. These spans are absurd. Set in motion July 1, the moment the Supreme Court rules, the trial would conclude until the end of November. Surely Jack Smith needs no time at all; he was pressing for a March 4th trial start. The 88 days accorded the Trump lawyers says January 6 must come as news to them. Smith’s three months suggests he would plod through scores of redundant witnesses and see a jury tune out — as will the public if it drags on that long. Both should trim these spans considerably.
But then there’s the Justice Department rule — it’s not a law — not to have trials within a couple of months of an election, never mind that could mean a criminal becoming president. Oh, yes, alleged, sorry — except we all watched what happened on television. Waiving that policy rests with Main Justice, not Smith, and we can easily imagine what timid, risk-averse Attorney General Merrick Garland will say to that.
Trump will have months to rant that he is immune, that this is election interference, that the indictment is a shame, that he did nothing wrong, whereas it is the practice of federal prosecutors to stay mum. Only a trial can correct that imbalance, showing the largely ignorant American public in detail what happened in the weeks leading up to and on January 6, 2021. Without it, they will go on knowing only the Big Lie of Donald Trump telling them he was simply trying to reverse a stolen election. Only a trial can rescue America from a justice system that is proving to be a fraud for never delivering justice.
Mar 4 2024 | Posted in
Investigations |
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