This is Isaac Saul from Tangle.

I’m just writing with an important note to let you know that we are no longer on Substack. In the last few months, we’ve seen a number of people sign up for our content here on Substack (presumably, because you Google’d us and found a link to our Substack there).

But we actually moved off of Substack a few years ago. That’s nothing against Substack: We love this platform, the founders, and the network. It was a pure business decision.

Still, if you want to keep up with our work, you need to go to readtangle.com to find us.

I’ve tried exporting as many subscribers as possible from Substack over to our Tangle website — so you may already be getting our emails from there. But if not, this is just a courtesy heads up that you’ll find our content over on that website now.

Thank you!

Best,

Isaac & the Tangle team

This is Isaac Saul, the founder of Tangle.

I just wanted to let you know that we are no longer on Substack. It’s nothing personal: We love Substack. But we wanted to give our own website a try and see if we could improve our business in some small ways.

If you want to find out new website, we’re at https://www.readtangle.com/

To be honest: we have no idea how this is going to work, so we may be back on Substack one day. But for now, if you want to find us, that’s where we are!

Best,

Isaac & the Tangle team

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.” Today’s issue is a special Friday edition.

First time reading? Sign up here.

A month ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom looked like he might be in trouble. Today, Newsom looks less like a political survivor and more like someone who easily flexed his political muscle to stay in office.

When I first covered the recall election, FiveThirtyEight had California voters leaning to keep Newsom as governor by a mere percentage point. Folks on the left were already writing his obituary while criticizing the Democratic party for overlooking the recall and not taking the threat seriously enough. Meanwhile, the right had coalesced not just around removing Newsom, but around replacing him with Larry Elder, the most popular conservative on the ballot, a talk radio host whose following appeared to be boosting him in the polls.

In the end, 6.1 million Californians voted to keep Newsom, and 3.4 million voted to remove him, a 63.7 percent to 36.3 percent margin.

The question now is: What to make of it? No matter how much Democrats want this to be a sign of strength, I’m not sure it is.

Yes, Newsom over-performed most of the polling. And yes, despite all the hype, he held off the recall effort rather easily. But Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 2 to 1 in California, and it took a visit from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris; it took a media frenzy; it took a rotating cast of Democratic celebrities encouraging people to turn out and vote. It was clear, based both on how Newsom campaigned in the final weeks and how the Democratic party addressed this, that team blue broke a sweat.

And in California, the momentum this recall had is not a great sign. This is a state Donald Trump lost by nearly 30 points and Newsom won handily three years ago. It’s also a state where Newsom wants to be spending his time pursuing pace-setting progressive politics, not fighting off recall elections. If you’re trying to zoom out to the midterms or take the temperature on 2024, though, I would quit while you’re ahead. Californians had unique motivations for the recall effort, were operating in a unique and flawed recall system, and ultimately the state is facing a smorgasbord of animating issues — immigration, a housing crisis, wildfires — aside from Covid-19.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to learn here, either.

For one, it’s worth looking at the election that put Newsom in office in 2018: In that race, he won 61.9 percent of the vote and earned 7.7 million ballots. That’s a slightly smaller percentage of the vote share than he got this time, but about 1.6 million more votes were cast. In other words, Newsom turned out fewer voters (which one would expect) but won a higher share of the vote in the recall election. If you’re a Republican in California, that is not a good sign either. A race that many speculated could unseat Newsom ended up seeing him out-perform his 2018 gubernatorial campaign.

One likely reason for that difference was his opponent. As much as Republicans wanted to make this a “yes” or “no” vote on retaining Newsom, Democrats wanted to make it a decision about Larry Elder. The talk radio host has a long history of statements that range from controversial to absurd, and Democrats made sure everyone knew Elder’s record going into the vote. Newsom, for instance, spent far more time in his stump speeches reciting lines from Elder’s past than he did hyping his own record.

That dynamic could actually be quite telling. With 2022 approaching, Republicans are going to have to run on more than just Biden’s record in Afghanistan, on Covid-19, inflation, or critical race theory. They’re going to have to bring forward strong candidates in some swing districts and they’re going to have to take care in the type of candidate they bring forward.

Elder, as I wrote a month ago, is not someone who has the qualifications to be California’s governor. A long-time talk radio host, he is — more than anything else — a personality candidate in the mold of Donald Trump: someone with a loyal following, a penchant for working the media, and no concerns about pushing the boundaries of “acceptable” political rhetoric. But the more people who try to be Donald Trump, the clearer it gets that there really is only one person who can pull that off. A few weeks ago it was unclear how Elder’s style was going to play. Today, that’s much less so. Democrats made this race about Elder more than they made it about any other issue, and that strategy clearly had an impact in California.

The other worthwhile thread to examine here is the allegations of election fraud. Elder had previously said that Joe Biden won the 2020 race fair and square, only to ask for a mulligan and then insist there were shenanigans and that the race was not won fairly. Elder even went as far as to create a website alleging fraud before the results of the recall race even came in, which should tell you everything you need to know about the veracity of those allegations.

I’ve said since 2020 that this talking point seems completely self-defeating to me: Why would voters turn out for an election they believe is rigged? It doesn’t make any sense.

In this case, it’s tough to quantify the impact that kind of talk may have had in California. Perhaps it was negligible or zero. But I feel confident in two things: 1) Democrats seeing that Newsom’s potential replacement is someone claiming the 2020 election was stolen is probably a strong motivator for them to show up and vote. 2) Republicans seeing their candidate say elections are rigged is probably not. If you’re a Republican strategist, I think you have now seen this approach fail in the 2020 election, then in the Georgia runoffs, and now in California. And I think it’s clear from a purely strategic perspective that running on election fraud is not a winning path.

The other obvious thread here is Covid-19.

One of the principal events that drove this recall was Newsom’s maskless indoor dinner during the pandemic, and his subsequent lying about it, all while imposing a lockdown on the state. A lot of pundits posited that Newsom’s record on coronavirus was a driving factor in the recall, and that the statewide lockdowns, mask mandates, economic damage and other policies he’d pushed would hurt him.

But it’s tough to see how that’s true now. While Newsom was laser-focused on framing Elder as an extremist (so much so that he actually promised to run more on his record in the future), the one thing he repeatedly came back to was his stance on vaccines, masking, and other Covid-related mitigation policies, where he differs markedly from Elder. Clearly, the Newsom campaign had data to make them believe that would benefit him, and it’s hard to argue with the result.

Finally — and this is a point I hate to make, but it’s probably true — Democrats might be wise to keep it negative on the campaign trail. There has been a lot of discussion in lefty circles about how to approach boosting the party’s record: Do you run on the child tax credit, vaccines, enhanced unemployment and climate change? Or do you run on anti-Trump rhetoric and outrage over whatever the Texas legislature is up to this week? In other words, do you boost the liberal policy record or stoke the fears of Democrats across the country?

Newsom and the Democratic party clearly decided to focus on the latter. He talked more about the new abortion law in Texas than he did about his own policies in California, and there’s no doubt in my mind Democrats nationally are seeing these results and wondering if they should follow suit. As someone who perpetually wishes politics would become less negative and more policy-focused, this reality is a bit soul-crushing. But it’s also impossible to ignore.

With all this in mind, it’s again worth restating that there were cracks in the armor here.

Much like Democrats in 2020, Newsom struggled to rally Latino voters to his side. 40 percent of Latino-identifying voters cast a ballot to recall him, according to early exit polls, and among voters who said the economy was their top concern, 65 percent supported the recall. In California, that may not be enough to unseat a Democratic governor in a snap recall election, but in swing states, those kinds of trends could be a death knell for Democrats operating with thin margins.

For now, the left can breathe a sigh of relief and hope for more candidates like Elder to pop up in races they need to win. Long-term, though, the details in California do not spell strength for the party nationally — and Democrats would be wise not to tell themselves anything different.

Feel free…

This is a subscribers-only edition, but feel free to forward this email to friends or share it on social media. Just ask people to subscribe!

Share

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here. You can also listen to Tangle. We release audio versions of the newsletter every day here.

Today’s read: 13 minutes.

The dramatic details of Trump’s last days in office. Plus, an anonymous reader asks about the great reset.

Hello.

First, wishing an easy fast to everyone participating in today’s Yom Kippur holiday. In tomorrow’s subscribers-only Friday edition, I’ll be writing about what we can and can’t learn from Gavin Newsom winning the recall election in California — and what it does and doesn’t mean for Democrats nationally. I’ll also be revisiting what I wrote a month ago about the recall election and examining how it has held up since. Reminder: These editions are for members only, so you have to sign up to receive it!

Subscribe now

Reader feedback.

A reader named Julie replied to yesterday’s newsletter, specifically addressing my line that few people will weep for Americans who are taxed more on their inheritances. She said:

“The problem with this statement is that it's not just the wealthy that would be impacted by a major change to this particular piece of tax law…  First, people (rich and poor) can and do own property for very long periods of time. As we've seen recently, property values can rise dramatically in short periods of time and much more dramatically over long periods of time. I currently live in Montana, and there are TONS of people living in trailer houses on small, medium, and large parcels of land that weren't worth $25,000 50 years ago but are now worth millions. 

“If the federal government changes the laws around inheritance you won't just be impacting the rich. You'll also be impacting those who are cash poor but rich in land or property. For many, they simply won't be able to afford the taxes on it and will have to sell property that they otherwise would have kept, kept in the family.  And when they do sell, they get measurably less. Because selling will be what happens, you'll see fewer and fewer large tracts of land available as they are all carved up into tiny parcels. Inheriting property is one of the few ways for many middle and lower class families to claw their way out of poverty and for one generation to provide for the next.”

Quick hits.

1. Simone Biles and a group of U.S. gymnasts testified before the Senate yesterday about how the Olympic committee and the FBI failed them and allowed years of sexual abuse by Dr. Larry Nassar. (The testimony)

2. Covid-19 cases are beginning to fall nationally, but deaths are continuing to rise. (The data)

3. Yesterday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched the first crew of amateurs into orbit without a professional astronaut on board. (The launch)

4. Pennsylvania Republicans have approved subpoenas for the personal data of millions of voters, advancing a probe of the 2020 election in a key battleground state. (The probe)

5. U.S retail sales rebounded in August, a sign of economic resilience despite the spread of the Delta variant. (The numbers)

Today’s topic.

General Mark Milley. In a forthcoming book, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa allege that Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the armed forces, was single-handedly taking action to prevent President Donald Trump from ordering a dangerous military strike or launching a nuclear strike. Details of the book were initially reported by The Washington Post (where Costa works) and CNN (which saw an excerpt of the book).

In the book, titled Peril, Milley was apparently so shaken by the attacks on the U.S. Capitol that he “was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline” shortly after the election. He responded to this fear by calling a secret meeting in his Pentagon office and instructing top senior military officers to ensure that he was involved in and notified of any orders for a military strike or to launch a nuclear weapon.

At one point, before the election and after receiving intelligence that China believed the U.S. was about to attack, Milley even contacted his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the U.S. was not considering a strike. There were 15 people on the conference call, including a representative from the State Department, and readouts of the call were turned over to the intelligence community, according to Peril.

“General Li, you and I have known each other now for five years,” Milley said, according to the book. “If we're going to attack, I'm going to call you ahead of time. It's not going to be a surprise. It's not going to be a bolt out of the blue.”

Milley, who is now serving in the same role under President Biden, immediately came under criticism after excerpts of the book were released. It wasn’t just Trump allies, either: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump in his impeachment trial, said Milley should step down if the book’s details are accurate.

In their writing, Woodward and Costa also claim Trump turned on several close allies, including Vice President Mike Pence, when they refused to help him in his effort to remain in office despite losing the November election. The book also quotes Trump telling former aides in July that he is strongly considering running for president again in 2024.

Below, we’ll take a look at the reactions to excerpts from Peril, and some assessments from the left and right.

One important note: Typically, I just alternate between who goes first every day (right or left), but today, I am going to keep “What the right is saying” first because I think it will make more sense for the purposes of this story (so you can hear the criticism of Milley before the defense of his actions). Then I’ll share my take.

What the right is saying.

The right says Milley should resign, or at least be investigated.

In USA Today, David Mastio said Milley should resign after going “too far” in preparing to resist Donald Trump’s orders in the closing days of an unstable presidency.

“Milley prepared his senior officers to slow walk any orders from Trump to use nuclear weapons or start a military confrontation with China, according to a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post. That's an appalling step toward shredding civilian control over the military, a bedrock constitutional value, the chairman is sworn to uphold. However, it is an understandable step given that Trump was living in a fantasy world as he whipped his followers into a frenzy that led to terrorism at the U.S. Capitol in a crazed attempt to overturn an election.

“But Milley went even further,” Mastios wrote. “In reassuring his Chinese counterpart that no attack was coming from the United States, Milley promised to call and warn of an impending U.S. attack if Trump ordered one. Such a call would have inevitably cost the lives of American troops tasked with following the orders of the lawful commander in chief. Milley's effort to thwart the potential demands of an unhinged president became a betrayal of the men and women he commands. No leader can make such a promise and retain the support of the military personnel he oversees... Suggesting that the nation's highest ranking military officer resign is not something I take lightly. The man deserves respect… He has more military medals than I have merit badges. Even so, one thing a soldier can never betray and retain command is his fellow service members. Milley promised a communist dictatorship just that. He must go. If he doesn't resign on his own, President Joe Biden should show him the door.”

In The Federalist, Jenna Stocker said Milley disgraced the U.S. military.

“The authors did not disclose the source of the phone calls, but if true, this is an egregious case of dereliction of duty and in line with the modern military’s turn from a machine of war to an institution infatuated with its elitism and filled with disdain for the Americans who make up its ranks,” Stocker wrote. “This is the natural end of what has been a steady march toward a politicized woke-force that covers for the ineptitude of leaders obsessed with their own power. It’s a dangerous turn away from what has been the mission of our military since its inception: to fight and win wars. Now it is a vessel for an elite class to rise through the ranks of power and influence in Washington, D.C., without having to be accountable for the feckless behavior that leads to endless wars, disgraceful exits, and disregard for an institution that should project power, not fold under it.

“But as is the rule of the elites, they are never held to the same standards as those to which they incessantly preach,” Stocker concluded. “His actions to join the political fray as a one-man envoy between the United States and China prove it. The alleged calls to the Chinese reveal he thinks his own freelance diplomacy better serves American interests than the civilian leadership elected through democratic means.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said Milley has “more explaining to do.”

“Congress needs to find out how much is true—not because of partisan demands for retribution against the general, but because even the appearance of attenuating civilian control of the military is damaging to democracy,” the board said. “Mr. Woodward’s opaque method makes it impossible to judge the accuracy of his reporting. He relates conversations he didn’t hear based on sources whose motives aren’t explained. Those on the right now demanding Gen. Milley’s head based on Mr. Woodward’s book were rightly cautious of the journalist’s insider accounts of GOP presidencies.

“Yet the statement from Gen. Milley’s spokesman released Wednesday contains no denials,” the board added. “Gen. Milley should be asked to clarify, under oath, the context of his communications with China and nuclear launch procedure when he testifies before the Senate on Sept. 28. America’s military brass rightly has deconfliction channels open with adversaries when their forces are in proximity, but promising a tip off before the President ordered an attack would be an outrageous usurpation.”

What the left is saying.

The left is split on the story, with some celebrating Milley and others saying he should have to explain his actions.

The Washington Post editorial board called for an investigation by Congress.

“It’s important to draw distinctions — and to be clear about what we do and do not yet know,” the board said. “Gen. Milley feared both what an out-of-control Mr. Trump might do and how, on the other hand, China might misinterpret U.S. intentions amid U.S. political turbulence. Through back channels, before and after the election, the general tried to reassure his military counterpart in Beijing of the United States’ peaceful intentions. Two days after the attack on the Capitol, having spoken with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and agreed with her that Mr. Trump was unstable, Gen. Milley arranged for a delay in military exercises the People’s Republic might have seen as provocative.

“No doubt, Gen. Milley explored the limits of his constitutional authority,” the board wrote. “This could be quite benign if he was simply telling China’s top general, Li Zuocheng, as ‘Peril’ reports he did on Jan. 8, ‘We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine.’ … What could be considerably less benign is the pledge Gen. Milley reportedly made to alert Gen. Li ahead of any U.S. strike: ‘If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.’ According to ‘Peril,’ this came in the Oct. 30 call — before the insurrection and, indeed, before the election. We struggle to understand what circumstances — absent clear authorization from civilian policymakers — could justify offering a foreign adversary such a pledge.”

In Bloomberg, Timothy O’Brien took issue with the idea that Trump was in some kind of “mental decline” that Gen. Milley was worried about after the election.

“Did Trump suddenly go into a psychological slide in 2020 that made him more dangerous than before?” O’Brien asked. “No. It was obvious to anyone watching closely that he would rather burn down the house after the 2020 presidential election than acknowledge defeat. He warned of electoral fraud before the 2016 election, too, and he continues peddling the same myth today. It’s utterly predictable, because he doesn’t change. People supporting him or advising him who may have thought otherwise were kidding themselves.

“The risks that the country, the rule of law and our institutions still confront stems from that reality,” O’Brien said. “The Republican Party continues to embrace and foment Trumpism. Much could still go wrong. And we can’t rely on military leaders going rogue to protect us from rogue presidents… I’m glad Milley took the steps he did, and I honor his military service. But the fact that he had to maneuver around Trump demonstrates how broken things are. Milley is a sophisticated and dedicated public servant, and he was well aware how his actions would appear.”

Max Boot cheered Milley’s decision in a Washington Post column.

“The two books paint a consistent picture of a president who was judged a clear and present danger to U.S. national security by his own top general,” Boot wrote. “Milley should be commended for acting to limit an unhinged commander in chief’s ability to overthrow the government or start a war… Milley had no choice but to do what he did, but his actions will further enrage the right and widen the divide between the military and the Republican Party. If Trump or a Trump loyalist comes into power in 2024 or 2028, expect a purge of officers who are deemed loyal to the Constitution rather than to the president and the Republican Party.

“There is no obvious legislative fix that would stop the president from ordering the military to launch a coup — we are dependent on the devotion of the armed forces to the Constitution to forestall that nightmare — but it is possible to prevent the president from starting a nuclear war for political purposes,” Boot added. “Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) have introduced legislation to prohibit the president from a first use of nuclear weapons unless Congress has declared war… It is imperative for Congress to pass some such limitations on the president’s nuclear-use authority before another unhinged president takes office. We suffered badly enough under Trump; 400,000 Americans died of covid-19 while he was in office and insurrectionists invaded the U.S. Capitol. Yet it could have been far worse — and could still be in the future if we don’t act today.”

My take.

I’ll show my cards first and then add some color: Gen. Milley should resign (or be replaced).

First, I’m not sure it actually matters what the finer details are that come out here. Milley had a chance to deny the allegations and he did not. Nothing in all of this reporting is even remotely in the same stratosphere as the allegation that he told a Chinese military general he would give them a heads up about an impending strike, something that is so over-the-top and out of this world I was struggling to believe it until Milley declined to deny it. That alone is enough for him to go.

But zoom out here and look at the larger picture: This account, which is so damaging to Milley’s reputation, comes on the heels of the last few weeks in Afghanistan, which was an operation he bears some responsibility for as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Those failures and the debacle of the withdrawal already had him in the hot seat. A gossip-laden book like this from two famous reporters detailing Milley undermining the Commander in Chief… that’s not going to sit well in military ranks, even among those who loathe Trump (Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman being a prime example).

I also want to note, though, a few other things not being talked about enough. One is that, believe it or not, Milley is not in the chain of command for a nuclear launch. As Fred Kaplan correctly detailed, he is supposed to be consulted. Milley, if the book’s details are to be believed, in the dramatic meeting with his top military brass, was simply reminding them he’s supposed to get a heads up. Milley could have advised Trump against it and Trump could have ignored him and that’s just how it works. From the looks of it, it seemed that he just wanted to know what was going on — which is not nearly as wild an event as some accounts make it seem.

The other important thing here is Trump. If we’re going to take the details of this book at face value — and I’m not saying we should, but if we are — they’re more damaging for Trump than they are for Milley. I’m not sure it’s even particularly close. Costa and Woodward describe a White House where top aides, top generals, the vice president, longtime loyalists and basically every single person who knew Trump well believed that he was totally off his rocker, out of control and liable to start a nuclear war because he was pissed off about his election loss. He spent his final days in office telling Pence that he no longer wanted to be friends if Pence didn’t try to obstruct the election results from being certified. Let that soak in for a minute.

Now: Should we take this stuff at face value? I’m skeptical. We don’t need off-the-record accounts about Trump’s actions in the wake of the election, we saw so much of it publicly. But a lot of people have come out of the Trump White House eager to make a mint off book sales or restore their reputations with off-the-record comments. Delineating who the good or bad guys are is tough to do, precisely because the chaos of the Trump administration produced so many backstabbers and fibbers. Stephanie Grisham, the long-time aide to Melania Trump, is the latest: She just wrote a whole book about how hard she tried to stop the absurdities in the Trump White House, only for former aides to share text messages with Politico showing that Grisham was a willing and enthusiastic participant in that absurdity until she wanted to write a book about what a saint she was.

Could this be more of the same? Could Milley himself be the source for the stories we’re reading? I wouldn’t doubt any of it for a second. 

I’d welcome an investigation into the details and as a curious reporter I would love to hear more about the final days of the Trump presidency from a military general under oath in front of Congress. But I doubt anything there would change my feeling: Milley should resign. Not just because of this story, but because his credibility is shot and because he’s part of a military class that rarely faces repercussions for its mistakes. We have an opportunity for accountability now — not just for the allegations in this book, but for his entire body of work — and it’d be good for the country if he stepped down.

Not many people have news sources they trust. If you’ve been enjoying Tangle, please consider helping solve this problem by spreading the word. You can email Tangle to friends by clicking here.

Your questions, answered.

Q: What exactly *is* the Great Reset? I've heard some conservative outlets talk about this as a very serious thing, but it honestly sounds like a conspiracy theory. What's your take?

— Anonymous, Rochester, NY

Tangle: The Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory, though it has spurred a lot of them. It is a real concept from the World Economic Forum that essentially frames the Covid-19 pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remake capitalism and address many of the things that ail our planet. Honestly, if you read the “building blocks” of the Great Reset and the ideas that are publicly driving it, it doesn’t seem all that scary. In fact, there are some things I really like: not using GDP as a measure of economic health, for instance, is something I’ve advocated for. Corporations being accountable to workers, rather than only to shareholders, is also something I appreciate.

But there are real dangers to this stuff, and it’s not hard to see why it has drawn so much fear. For instance, one oddly fundamental thing about the Great Reset seems to be building stronger ties between corporations and government. In a lot of ways, though, the Great Reset looks like it would actually make corporations more powerful and make democracy less influential. This is extremely dangerous. I don’t want the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world having a larger say (especially than they already do) in something like how our food is processed and distributed. Government regulation — by leaders chosen by us — is a better mechanism for that.

Anyway, it’s hard to be specific about the theories around the Great Reset without addressing them individually. But yes, it is real. No, it is not all some scary global conglomerate elite takeover. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t real dangers in the fundamental idea.

A story that matters.

Afghan refugees are headed to 46 states across the U.S. About 37,000 Afghans are set to be relocated to many states, with California (5,255) and Texas (4,481) receiving the highest number. Hawaii, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming are the only states not to receive any refugees, as well as Washington D.C. The 37,000 refugees on their way will be the first group to immigrate to the U.S., and because they are not coming through a typical refugee process they are going to face major logistical and legal hurdles. The Biden administration is depending on Congress to help provide more resources for these people, and to help pave the way for Green Cards for many of them. Axios has the story. 

Numbers.

• -8%. The drop in the daily average of new Covid-19 cases over the last 14 days.

• 22 million. The number of teenagers who log into Instagram each day.

• 3,335,779. The number of Californians who voted to remove Gavin Newsom.

• 5,887,471. The number of Californians who voted to keep Gavin Newsom.

• 1.1%. The percentage of the California recall vote that went to Caitlyn Jenner.

• 90%. The percentage of atheists in the U.S. who say they are vaccinated, the highest of any “religious group,” according to Pew.

• 57%. The percentage of white Evangelical protestants who say they are vaccinated, according to Pew.

See you tomorrow?

Don’t forget: tomorrow, we’re going to be diving into the California recall election and what we can learn from it. But it’s for subscribers only. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so by clicking here. 

Have a nice day.

Frozen foods are increasingly popular across the globe and are an incredibly important part of our food chain. But they are also costly: not just in dollars, but in the amount of carbon emissions they release and the energy they use. However, researchers say they have come up with a new way to freeze foods that could cut global energy consumption by 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours a year (that’s a lot, apparently), and reduce carbon emissions equal to taking one million cars off the road. This change could be achieved quickly and inexpensively “without requiring any significant changes in current frozen food manufacturing equipment and infrastructure,” according to Cristina Bilbao-Sainz, a researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Read more about their idea.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here. You can also listen to Tangle. We release audio versions of the newsletter every day here.

Today’s read: 12 minutes.

Democrats tax bill. Plus, a question about Larry Elder and some fascinating numbers on money in America.

We need you.

Most news organizations rely on ads or investors to make money. That means that in order to be profitable, they have to drive traffic; which means there are incentives to be sensational, use clickbait, and add unnecessary drama to the news. Our newsletter is solely supported by subscribers, which means we only make money if we deliver on our promise to you — the reader. It also means we need your support to keep running. If you’re not yet, please consider becoming a subscriber. It’s easy! (And cheap!)

Subscribe now

Quick hits.

1. California Gov. Gavin Newsom beat back a recall attempt by a decisive margin. With 68 percent of the vote reported, 63.9 percent of voters had chosen to keep Newsom while 36.1 percent wanted to replace him. (The results)

2. The share of Americans living in poverty dropped in 2020 when government benefit programs and stimulus payments were taken into account, despite the Covid-19 pandemic. But household incomes still fell by 2.9 percent. (The surprise)

3. Nearly three million Americans used a special six-month period created during the pandemic to sign up for subsidized health insurance, according to the White House. However, the percentage of Americans without health insurance still rose last year. (The enrollment)

4. A new book alleges that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley had backchannel calls with his Chinese counterpart days after the Jan. 6 riots to assure him he would prevent President Trump from ordering a military attack. (The claims)

5. Former Presidents Bush, Clinton and Obama are banding together behind a new group aimed at supporting Afghan refugee resettlement in America. (The coalition)

Today’s topic.

Taxes. On Monday, Democrats released a new tax plan that would raise rates on corporations and the wealthiest Americans in order to offset some of the spending in their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package aimed at expanding the social safety net and addressing climate change.

The plan, released by the Ways and Means Committee, calls for the top tax rate to revert from 37 percent to 39.6 percent for individuals earning more than $400,000 per year, or $450,000 for couples. There would be an additional 3 percent tax on Americans with adjusted income higher than $5 million a year. The corporate tax rate would rise from 21 percent to 26.5 percent on incomes beyond $5 million (President Biden had pushed for 28 percent). President Biden has promised not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. These increases are generally in line with his campaign proposals.

On top of the tax increase, which largely reverses the 2017 tax reform passed by President Donald Trump and Republicans, the plan would invest $79 billion in IRS tax enforcement, increase taxes on certain tobacco products, and close a loophole in the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies that allows investors to claim a deduction when selling at a loss. The proposal would also scale back certain deductions for high-income individuals and corporations, but it does not address the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions (SALT cap) that Democrats from New Jersey and New York say must be changed to earn their votes.

The proposed tax changes come as Democrats try to unite their caucus in the Senate and the House around concurrent bills: a $1 trillion infrastructure proposal and another $3.5 trillion spending bill that would touch nearly every part of American life. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a critical member of a Senate where Democrats cannot afford to lose any votes, has said he wants the latter bill to be cut to $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion and also said he opposed raising the corporate tax rate above 25 percent.

Over a 10-year-period, the proposal is estimated to raise about $2.1 trillion more in taxes, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the right and left, then my take.

What the right is saying.

The right believes the plan will hurt the economy and ultimately hurt middle-class Americans, though some acknowledge that it is marginally better than what the White House initially proposed.

The Wall Street Journal warned that Nancy Pelosi was “marching Democrats to the political gallows.”

“If Americans are successful, Democrats want to tax more of their income. The top individual tax rate will rise to 39.6% from 37%, as Mr. Biden promised. But wait: The higher tax rate will kick in at a mere $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for married couples. That’s down from $523,600 and $628,300 under current law. This is a steep rate increase on two-earner upper-middle-class families,” the board wrote. “They may reach these income levels after a long career, and only for a couple of years, but Democrats want more than 40% if you include the 1.45% Medicare payroll tax and the 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge on investment income.

“If you make more than $5 million, there will also be a three-percentage-point income-tax surcharge,” the board added. “That would take the top tax rate to something like 46.4%. Add California or New York taxes, and government will take about 60%. Hilariously, the committee figures the surtax will raise $127 billion in revenue, as if the rich will be dumb enough not to find tax shelters… The political myth behind all this is that no one making less than $400,000 a year will pay more. But the economic literature is clear that corporations don’t pay taxes. They are merely the collection vessels for levies that are passed along to some combination of employees, consumers and shareholders. Much of the $900 billion will be paid in smaller wage gains for workers who are already paying a Biden tax from higher inflation.”

In The Washington Post, Henry Olsen said the bill was “slightly better” but would still hurt the economy.

“The tax plan that Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee released on Monday did one good thing by removing President Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains upon death, saving many owners of farms and small businesses,” Olsen wrote. “But the plan would still hurt the U.S. economy by making large corporations and the rich pay among the highest marginal tax rates in the world… Many people would surely find this acceptable… At a superficial level, taking more from people and entities that can afford it and giving it to people who need it sounds like an obvious win-win.

“But this ignores the role state and local taxes play in our system, as data from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a group comprising the world’s richest nations, shows,” he added. “Combined state and federal corporate tax rates already put the average U.S. tax burden on businesses in the middle among OECD nations, at 25.75 percent. The House Democratic tax hike would raise that to more than 30 percent. That combined rate would give the United States the third-highest combined corporate rate in the OECD, behind only Portugal and Colombia. On the margin, this pushes companies deciding whether to locate in the United States or in other countries to take their investment and jobs elsewhere.”

The National Review editorial board called it a “worst-of-both-worlds” proposal that will do real damage to the economy but not raise the money Democrats need for their proposals.

“Democrats here are pulling their usual stunt of assuring lower-income people that higher taxes won’t fall on them, but only on their employers, their landlords, and their grocers, as though their finances were unconnected,” the editors wrote. “In the past, that has been good politics, but it is bad economics… Conservatives are not alone in observing that businesses and other taxpayers respond to these incentives in ways that politicians do not intend. The so-called FACT Coalition (‘Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency’), which supports higher worldwide corporate taxes and complains about ‘tax havens,’ argues that the Democratic plan ‘may actually worsen’ tax-driven offshoring.

“The House Democrats’ plan is not quite as rapacious as what the White House would like to see and is in some ways more modest in its ambitions than what Senate Democrats would prefer,” the board concluded. “In that sense, it is the better proposal, or, more precisely, the least-bad one.”

What the left is saying.

The left supports the tax increases, though some believe there are missed opportunities.

The Washington Post editorial board said Democrats still have far to go to fund their plans. 

“Unsurprisingly, special interests such as the Chamber of Commerce and the American Farm Bureau are lobbying against practically every one of these ideas. Meanwhile, some Democrats would make the price tag even harder to cover. Republicans imposed in 2017 a $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, a regressive benefit for wealthy tax-filers. Democrats from states with high state income tax rates insist that they would kill any bill that fails to roll back the cap, and [Rep. Richard] Neal (D-MA) signaled Monday that the Democrats’ legislation will include some kind of state and local tax ‘relief.’

“If anything, Democrats should be reexamining some obvious pay-fors that Mr. Neal failed to propose, such as closing the carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund managers to avoid income taxes,” the board wrote. “A carbon tax would help fight climate change, and it would not impact most taxpayers if a chunk of its revenue were recycled back to the public.”

In Bloomberg, Alexis Leondis said Democrats made two big mistakes.

“The first is a failure to close a long-standing loophole in the tax code, which will sabotage a key tax increase Democrats were relying on to deliver enough revenue to finance their programs. The loophole involves the special treatment of investment gains when taxpayers die, a boon to wealthy families when they pass these gains along from generation to generation,” Leondis wrote. “Here’s a hypothetical example: Let's say an investor had bought $200,000 worth of Apple shares that appreciated to $2 million. She wouldn't owe capital gains tax on the $1.8 million of appreciation when she died. In turn, her heir would inherit the $2 million of Apple shares and only owe capital gains tax on the difference between the $2 million and any subsequent appreciation of the Apple stock if and when she sells.

“In another misstep, the Democrats suggested a superficial fix for the special tax treatment enjoyed by fund managers,” Leondis wrote. “Under the current tax code, hedge fund and private equity managers are eligible for a much lower tax rate than most other earners. Their compensation is called carried interest and is considered to be a capital gain, qualifying for a top rate of 20% instead of the current top ordinary income tax rate of 37% paid by most wage earners. In 2017, the tax law enacted by President Donald Trump and a Republican Congress took a swipe at carried interest and said managers had to hold assets they were earning compensation on for at least three years (instead of one year) to qualify for the 20% rate. In Monday's proposal, Democrats moved the goalpost slightly by extending the holding period to five years. Since the average holding period for assets in private equity funds is more than six years, what Democrats are proposing seems highly ineffectual.”

In American Prospect, David Dayen cursed the “artificial scarcity” caused by tying spending and revenue together.

“Democrats, who all seem to regard themselves as tax experts, cannot even agree to simply return to the 2017 status quo, before the Trump tax cuts, which could yield as much as $3 trillion,” Dayen said. “If the issues were being decided separately, you could just move on with designing the optimal spending and borrow for the rest. That’s what centrists like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) did on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, after all. But Manchin, sensing that Democrats would try to delink spending and revenue, counterattacked by disclaiming the very maneuver he endorsed to get the infrastructure bill passed. He raised skepticism to Axios that you could count on long-term economic growth to finance ‘human or soft infrastructure proposals.’ (This is preposterous; academic research routinely shows that public investments of all kinds pay off; every dollar invested in early-childhood education yields $7.30 in societal benefits, per one account.)

“The taxes have already been eroded, and now we’re seeing the inevitable chipping away of the spending,” Dayen wrote. “Manchin told Axios he would only be comfortable with $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in spending, and really that’s an expression of what taxes he would be willing to support. The artificial scarcity created by linking spending and revenue is killing this bill.”

My take.

I’m not a tax expert, and as far as I can tell the academia on how corporate and individual tax changes impact the economy is one of the most convoluted debates on the planet. If the “experts” can’t even agree, I’m not going to pretend that I can tell you what this bill’s impact will be. There are too many moving parts right now, too much speculation, and too many outside factors (like Covid-19 still being a serious problem). Those arguments are sufficiently fleshed out above. But there are a few things I see worth pointing out, both from a nuts and bolts perspective and from a political one.

First, it’s important to zoom out and look at where our country is: corporate profits and stock prices are hitting all-time highs while inflation-adjusted wages for workers have barely budged in the last 50 years. I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but we have millions of full-time workers who are struggling to pay rent and eat while some of the nation’s wealthiest CEOs shoot themselves into space. That’s not some Bernie Bro talking point anymore — Republican populist and Democratic progressive politicians are both fond of hammering the “elite” and promising to remember the forgotten working class. Obviously, they differ on how to do it, but my view is that corporate America has had 50 years to prove it will support its workers and provide a strong quality of life, and so far it’s done a pretty piss-poor job.

Second, the corporate tax rate was 35 percent when Trump became president. It’s 21 percent now. Bringing it somewhere between those two numbers is not going to spell the apocalypse for a corporate America that primarily used those tax cuts to buy back their own stocks, hand out one-time bonuses and blow up their profits (rather than long-term investment in their workers). Don’t take it from me. The Wall Street Journal examined the impact of those tax cuts on corporate America in January of 2020 (before the pandemic) and came to the same conclusion: the bill did not pay for itself, and the benefits were modest, brief or non-existent in nearly all of the intended areas. 

What Trump’s tax bill did do that helped many of those workers was reduce the amount a lot of us paid in taxes. When the bill was passed, I was making about $60,000 a year in New York City. My take-home pay went up by about $200 a month, which was a huge boon for me at the time and gave me some breathing room on my monthly expenses. I’m sure many Americans experienced something similar. The good news about this bill is that it shouldn’t impact those savings for a huge swathe of the country, an implicit acknowledgement that reversing course there would either be disastrous politically or bad for the economy (I’m not going to suppose why Biden isn’t touching that).

Politically, what I am surprised by in this bill is that it does so little to address wealth disparity, which seems like an even easier political calculation. Very few people are going to shed tears for Americans making more than $5 million a year — or even more than $400,000 a year — who have to give up a few more percentage points of their income to Uncle Sam. Even fewer probably would have wept for the wealthiest Americans if their inheritances were docked, as there’s very little sympathy in this country for the silver spoon-fed class. Yet Democrats seem to have left those vast fortunes “unscathed,” as Jonathan Weisman and Jim Tankersley put it. Their assessment, that the bill goes after the rich rather than the “fabulously rich,” strikes me as accurate.

Now we wait. How this bill animates certain elements of the Republican and Democratic base will be interesting to see — so will the inevitable concessions and changes as critical Democratic moderates throw their weight around. Whatever your politics, though, this bill is the latest chapter in addressing the widening American class divide and appears to be one element of the Democratic version of how to approach that fracture.

Your questions, answered.

Q: What do you make of the Larry Elder egg incident not getting widespread coverage on the more liberal-leaning news outlets? It's a heinous act and I find it hard to disagree with his "If I were a Democrat” assertion...

— Kyle, New York, New York

Tangle: I wish I had seen this question before the recall election had ended, but I only caught it today. For those who missed it: Elder, who is Black, was touring a homeless encampment in California when a woman in a gorilla mask threw an egg at him. An aide to Elder confronted the woman and she slapped him in the face. Police also said Elder was shot at with a pellet gun earlier in the day.

Frankly, I’m with you. I think if this had been a prominent Black Democrat the story would have been all over the news for days — and it got considerably less coverage from CNN, MSNBC, and other mainstream news outlets than I expected (it made Tangle’s quick hits section). That being said, there is a little bit of working the refs here: True, the story wasn’t covered nonstop for 24 hours, but it wasn’t ignored either. CNN did a couple of brief segments on it; as did MSNBC. Local news outlets covered it, and it got at least a write-up in every single major newspaper I searched.

As for the gorilla mask: Tough to say what that means. A lot of far-left protesters wear masks and it’s totally possible it was just a coincidence. It’s also possible she’s a racist cretin. I really don’t know. Regardless, the attack was extremely ugly and there’s no doubt in my mind that if someone wearing a Trump shirt had thrown an egg at a Black Democratic candidate for governor while they toured a homeless encampment, we would have heard about it non-stop for days.

A story that matters.

Internal documents from Facebook reveal that the company knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls. 32 percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse, according to a document that circulated inside Facebook in 2020. Facebook has been studying how its photo-sharing app impacts millions of young users, and the company’s researchers have repeatedly found it is harmful to a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” one presentation from 2019 read. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” another piece of research concluded. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The Wall Street Journal has the story.

Numbers.

• 1 in 500. The number of U.S. residents who have now died of Covid-19, according to a new Johns Hopkins estimate.

• $67,521. The median inflation-adjusted household income in the United States last year.

• 37.2 million. The number of people living in poverty in the U.S. in 2020.

• $26,246. How much money a two-parent, two-child household needs to make in order to be considered above the poverty line.

• 20 million. The approximate number of millionaires in the United States.

Spread the word.

1. Forward this email to friends.

2. You can email Tangle to friends by clicking here.

3. You can share Tangle on Twitter by clicking here.

4. You can share Tangle on Facebook by clicking here.

Have a nice day.

After about six months of simulator, flight and physical training, a crew of four civilians is set to launch into space tonight. The Inspiration4 crew is participating in a concept drawn from Elon Musk’s SpaceX which wants to send more civilian crew members into space in the coming decades. The launch will be aired live on Wednesday night with liftoff at 8:02 p.m. The crew will spend three days in orbit, flying above the International Space Station. Billionaire Jared Isaacman is the brainchild of this mission and the commander of the flight. (The launch)

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

Today’s newsletter is a special edition that deviates from our normal Tangle format. First time reading? Sign up here. You can also listen to Tangle. We release audio versions of the newsletter every day here.

Today’s read: 7 minutes.

On August 29th, just a few days after a devastating ISIS-K suicide bombing killed more than a hundred people in Afghanistan, the American press began reporting a successful retaliatory strike.

Here is the lede from a Reuters article that day:

American forces launched a drone strike in Kabul on Sunday that killed a suicide car bomber suspected of preparing to attack the airport, U.S. officials said, as the United States nears the end of its military presence in the Afghan capital. 

The strike, first reported by Reuters, was the second carried out by U.S. forces in Afghanistan since an Islamic State suicide bomber struck the airport on Thursday, killing 13 U.S. troops and scores of Afghan civilians trying to flee the country.

One U.S. official said Sunday's strike was carried out by an unmanned aircraft and that secondary explosions following the strike showed the vehicle had been carrying a “substantial amount of explosive material.”

The official U.S. military story, which was repeated dutifully by much of the press in the ensuing hours after the strike, described a potential ISIS-K threat who had been seen loading explosives into his car, and had even stopped at an ISIS-K safehouse.

We are now fairly certain, however, that this entire story is fiction.

Instead, it appears the Reaper drone that leveled an imminent ISIS-K threat planning to bomb the Kabul airport actually killed Zemari Ahmadi, a 43-year-old veteran aid worker for a U.S.-based company who was, in all likelihood, one of the many Afghans attempting to flee to the United States. Along with Ahmadi, nine other civilians were killed, including seven children.

We know this not because the Pentagon has acknowledged its “mistake” — to use a word that does not fit the crime — but because of the dogged reporting of journalists on the ground and the Afghan civilians who have spoken out.

Two reports, one from The Washington Post and another from The New York Times, paint a much different picture than the one we got from the U.S. military. The Post story managed to get an anonymous “senior U.S. military official” to admit the strike had killed at least three children; it also took images of the damage to a physicist and bomb technicians who examined the physical evidence and concluded the car was not carrying explosives, as the initial reports had claimed.

A few days later, a 10-minute long video investigation by The New York Times, accompanied by interviews with more than a dozen coworkers and family of Ahmadi, painted an even darker picture.

Rather than visiting ISIS-K safehouses in Kabul, Ahmadi was actually giving his colleagues rides to work. Rather than loading explosives into his vehicle, Ahmadi was actually loading canisters of water into his trunk for his neighbors and family. And rather than being an ISIS-K militant, Ahmadi had been working since 2006 as an electrical engineer for Nutrition and Education International (NEI), a California-based aid group. At 8:45 am that morning, Ahmadi’s boss had called him and told him to pick up his laptop from work, so Ahmadi left in his 1996 Toyota Corolla, which belonged to NEI, and which would be incinerated in front of his home a few hours later by a U.S. military drone.

As the latest reports on this drone strike make their way to the people still paying attention to Afghanistan, it’s tough not to see it as a microcosm of the entire war: botched intelligence, dead civilians, an attempt to respond to terrorism with force that instead harms more innocent people, and Afghan allies being forgotten, feared, or — in this case — killed.

And, of course, there is the sequence we’ve now seen so many times. The reports of an explosion. The Pentagon story, to the letter, being the first thing many news outlets reported. Contradictory details slowly emerging. Then equivocation, hedging, promises of investigations and — the part we haven’t gotten to yet but almost surely will — a lack of any semblance of accountability for such a disastrous and deadly error.

I don’t intend to pretend this is easy. I’ve never been to war; I’ve never been on the ground, never commanded troops, never piloted a drone, never had to decide which intelligence was accurate and which was misleading under the shadow of dead U.S. Marines and dozens of dead innocent Afghans with a global populace demanding retribution.

The fuller picture we now have makes it even easier to see how such a mistake could happen. On Ahmadi’s way to work, he stopped at the home of the NEI’s country director. That house was not far from the location of a rocket attack that would come the following day and be claimed by ISIS; an attack that was sent from a rocket launcher concealed inside the trunk of a Toyota Corolla not unlike the very one Ahmadi was driving.

Perhaps, and this is speculation based on the available information we have, the story here is that the U.S. military was aware of an imminent threat — a rocket launcher inside a Toyota Corolla — coming from a known meeting spot for militants. Perhaps Ahmadi drove his own Toyota Corolla within a few blocks of that meeting spot, and then — as the MQ-9 Reaper drone shadowed him for the remainder of the day — he performed just the right number of “suspicious” movements and stops to get the lethal attention of the U.S. military. Perhaps the officers tracking him felt, say, 75 percent confident he was who they thought he was, and on the heels of a suicide bombing that had just killed so many — with a chance to prevent another mass casualty event — they decided that was a high enough confidence rate to pull the trigger.

Very few people ever have to make those decisions.

But here is the story we now have, based on the reports from The Times and The Washington Post: Ahmadi went to work that day. He got his laptop from the NEI director’s office, then he got breakfast. He arrived at the NEI office around 9:30 in the morning, and then he drove co-workers down to a Taliban-occupied police station where he asked permission to distribute food to refugees at a nearby park. Around 2pm, he got back to his office, where he and a security guard used a hose to fill up canisters in his trunk with water. He was doing this because water deliveries had stopped in his neighborhood after the collapse of the Afghan government, so Ahmadi had been bringing water home from the office to people in his neighborhood.

When he got to the courtyard of his home, Ahmadi was in a densely populated residential area. Seeing only another adult male greeting Ahmadi, a tactical commander made the decision to strike his vehicle with a Hellfire missile, assessing “reasonable certainty” that no women, children or non-combatants would be killed. This next part is still unclear, but — again — if we are to believe the narrative from the anonymous military officials, in the time between when the strike was ordered and when the missile hit, which may have been about 30 seconds, several of Ahmadi’s children and his brother’s children came out to greet him. Some even got inside the car. And then the rocket hit.

As of this writing, the U.S. military has continued to insist that a second blast caused by explosives that were inside the car is what caused “collateral damage.” But the journalists and experts who have examined the scene have found evidence of one single, targeted explosion — and no signs of what you’d expect if a second blast had taken place. Only three civilian casualties have been acknowledged, but Ahmadi’s relatives say 10 members of their family — including seven children — were killed. Neighbors and Afghan health officials confirmed they removed bodies of children from the blast sites, but because “fragments of human remains” were strewn across the compound, it has been hard to identify them in any way other than by who is missing. According to The Times, the dead include:

Mr. Ahmadi and three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Mr. Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three of Romal’s children, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.

I’ve been relieved to see the reports about this strike draw bipartisan condemnation. From stalwart antiwar columnists like Will Bunch to The Wall Street Journal editorial board, demands for answers have been far-reaching and bipartisan.

But no columns or official condemnations seem sufficient. The Pentagon had the gall to call this a “righteous strike” in the hours after it was executed. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has committed himself to “over the horizon” anti-terrorism, the kind of strategy that involves carrying out these very kinds of strikes on this very kind of intelligence. 

This screw-up, of course, is far from novel: the most infamous drone disaster of the war was when a U.S. airstrike on an Afghan wedding party killed 47 innocent people, including the bride, in 2008. Some estimates put the total number of dead civilians thanks to the War on Terror at 22,000 since 9/11. One of the darkest stains on President Barack Obama’s time in office is just how many innocents were killed by his administration’s drone program, and how hard they tried to conceal those numbers. Daniel Hale, the whistleblower who is now sitting in prison, revealed the true extent of the failures and the cover ups of our drone program.  

Biden, who was in the White House while Obama tarnished his own anti-war legacy, appears to have learned little from those mistakes.

Along with illuminating the laundry list of American errors during the war in Afghanistan, though, the strike should also remind us of the consequences of our brazen attempts at toughness. In the days after the ISIS-K suicide bombing, much as with the days and weeks and months and years after 9/11, many of us wanted revenge. Not justice, but final judgment. It’s worth evaluating how well or badly that attitude has served us, and how President Biden’s tough talk and chest-puffing promises that he would “hunt down” those responsible for the attack have played out, now that we appear to have killed 10 more innocent civilians.

It’s also worth asking what this strike does for our own safety. I’m far from the first to say it, but I’ve come to believe that every U.S. bomb dropped creates dozens more anti-American radicals. And why wouldn’t it? If a foreign nation fired a rocket at your brother’s car as he brought home water to your family, managing to kill some of your children and your nieces and nephews along the way, would you not spend your remaining days on this earth seeking vengeance? Or justice in your own eyes? I imagine I would.

I had a typical Tangle newsletter ready to go today but I decided it should wait — because I don’t think this story can go unacknowledged, and because I didn’t want to try to stuff it into our normal Tangle format.

There are too many important threads: the injustice of war, the military-sourced reporting, the persistent reporting from journalists on the ground in Afghanistan to find the truth, the bipartisan exacerbation of our failed military strategies abroad, and last but certainly not least, the devastating consequences of the War on Terrorism for so many innocent civilians.

The only question now — the one lingering in the air — is if we’ll learn anything from this. What will happen the next time there is a suicide bombing or an unprovoked attack or an ambush or one other of the horrific endings so many people in harm’s way have faced? Will we stick our chests out and level everything in sight, then pat each other on the back for bringing justice to an unjust world, or will we finally think of something better?

Thanks for reading.

This is it for today’s newsletter. We’ll be back tomorrow with the normal Tangle format. In the meantime, feel free to forward this email to friends or share this edition on social media. If you appreciated this piece, and aren’t yet, please consider becoming a subscriber:

Subscribe now

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 12 minutes.

We’re covering the Biden administration’s new vaccine rules and answering a reader question about a potential Covid-19 treatment.

Podcast launch!

Today is the first day that you can listen to the Tangle newsletter in podcast form (I’ll be recording it every morning). The podcast audio will come out around the same time as the newsletter. You can find it, and all our other audio content, by clicking here. Please go give us a 5-star rating in the Apple store, or wherever you rate podcasts, if you want to support this launch! 

Quick hits.

1. House Democrats are expected to propose raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 26.5 percent, and a 3-percentage point surtax on individual income above $5 million. (The plan)

2. The FBI released a newly declassified document on its investigation into the 9/11 attacks detailing contacts between the hijackers and several Saudi officials. (The release)

3. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) once again said he won’t vote for Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan in its current form, proposing the cost be slashed by $2 trillion. (The nix)

4. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will testify twice before Congress this week on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. (The grilling)

5. North Korea said it fired new long-range cruise missiles in a test over the weekend. (The test)

Our “Quick hits” section is presented in partnership with Ground News, an app and website that rates the political bias in news coverage.

Today’s topic.

Vaccine mandates. On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced a new slate of federal vaccine requirements that could impact as many as 100 million Americans. The new rules impose different mandates for both private and federal employees. All employers with more than 100 workers (which covers roughly 80 million Americans) will be required to either test their employees for the virus weekly or mandate vaccination. Employers violating the new rules could face penalties of up to $14,000 per violation. Employers must provide paid time off to employees to be vaccinated.

Meanwhile, with limited exceptions, all federal employees and contractors must be fully vaccinated, with no option to opt into weekly testing instead, which will impact about four million workers. Another 17 million health care workers in hospitals and clinics that receive Medicare or Medicaid funds reimbursements will also need to be vaccinated. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will be tasked with implementing and enforcing the mandate, operating under a broad authority it was granted in the 1970s to create an emergency temporary standard to protect employees from “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.” 

Biden also announced he would double federal fines for airline passengers who refuse to wear masks, send additional federal support to schools trying to reopen, and call on large entertainment venues to require vaccinations or proof of negative test for entry. The Department of Health and Human Services will also require vaccinations in head start programs and schools run by the Department of Defense and Bureau of Indian Education, impacting another 300,000 employees.

“What more is there to wait for? What more is there to see?” Biden said on Thursday. “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.”

Two months ago, Biden declared the United States’ “independence” from Covid-19. He also said he would not issue vaccine mandates, and his administration said it was not the role of the federal government to do so. Instead, the administration spent weeks trying to compel Americans to go get the shot. But as those efforts have stalled, the rapid spread of the Delta variant has torn through the country, overwhelming some hospitals in areas with low vaccination rates. While about 75 percent — or 208 million Americans — have at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose, we’re still averaging about 1,500 Covid-19 deaths a day, the most since last winter. The CDC says 99 percent of hospital admissions are among those who are not fully vaccinated.

About 62 percent of Americans support vaccine mandates in the workplace, according to a USA Today and Ipsos poll. 83 percent of unvaccinated Americans say they do not plan to get the vaccine shots. More than 39 million Americans have been infected with Covid-19, and over 660,000 have died.

Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the right and left, then my take.

What the left is saying.

The left supports the mandate, arguing that this moment justifies it.

The Washington Post editorial board said the plan will “almost certainly run into logistical and legal hurdles” but is justifiable “at a time of national emergency.”

“The delta variant is running rampant, every single day, on average, taking more than 1,000 lives, putting more than 11,000 people in hospital beds and causing more than 130,000 new infections,” the board wrote. “The death toll from this pandemic now exceeds all the U.S. military combat deaths in all wars in the 20th century. It just makes no sense to go on being savaged by a virus when an effective tool to fight it is widely available and free. Every possible method should be used to reach the estimated 80 million unvaccinated eligible Americans: persuasion, incentives and, yes, coercion. The summer surge in infections may be easing, and it may take the government weeks to implement Mr. Biden’s plan. But any progress toward getting an additional 20 or 40 million Americans vaccinated will be worth the effort, as will a rollout of boosters that could substantially add to vaccine immunity.

“In his more muscular approach, Mr. Biden plans to have the Occupational Safety and Health Administration compel employers to impose the vaccine mandate on their employees,” the board added. “It is the same logic as government mandating construction workers to wear a hard hat. It is the same reasoning as public schools requiring students to be vaccinated against measles and other contagious diseases. Legally, Mr. Biden’s expansive use of executive power is sure to be challenged in the courts. In normal times, we would not want to see such power used for less pressing needs. But the emergency is real.”

In The New York Times, two ACLU lawyers argued that vaccine mandates do not violate civil liberties.

“While the permissibility of requiring vaccines for particular diseases depends on several factors, when it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction,” they wrote. “The disease is highly transmissible, serious and often lethal; the vaccines are safe and effective; and crucially there is no equally effective alternative available to protect public health. In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated and communities of color hit hard by the disease.

“While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19,” they said. “Although this disease is novel, vaccine mandates are not. Schools, health care facilities, the U.S. military and many other institutions have long required vaccination for contagious diseases like mumps and measles that pose far less risk than the coronavirus does today. (And just to be clear, no one is proposing forcible injections or criminal penalties.)… While limited exceptions are necessary, most people can be required to be vaccinated. Any vaccination mandate should have exceptions for those for whom the vaccine is medically contraindicated, such as people who have allergies to it.”

In Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley said Biden was “going nuclear.”

“If you’re going to have to put up with the political opposition calling you the Hitler of vaccines regardless, President Joe Biden appears to have reasoned, you might as well also get the benefit of curtailing the pandemic by putting vaccine requirements in place,” Mathis-Lilley said. “The public health rationale for these requirements is strong: Only 64 percent of American adults are fully vaccinated, which has manifestly not been enough to stop COVID-19 from spreading. Biden may also have concluded, like more and more state-level Democrats, that the delta variant has made the U.S. public as a whole less interested in tolerating the danger presented by unvaccinated individuals—and that a crucial portion of that public blames Democrats for delta, despite the party’s pro-vaccine position, simply because it’s in power at the national level.”

What the right is saying.

The right opposes the mandate, saying it’s federal overreach.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the mandate was “overkill in a free country.”

“Many large businesses already require vaccinations or regular testing, and some have offered workers financial incentives to get inoculated. A few have been more forceful. Yet many businesses have been reluctant to mandate shots because they respect individual conscience or worry some employees will quit. Workers have been hard to hire amid the incentives Democrats have created not to work. Mr. Biden thinks that’s not his problem. Employers understandably have concerns about compliance and enforcement. Are they supposed to pay for unvaccinated workers’ weekly testing, and what kind of proof of testing or vaccination must they require? Will franchisees and corporations be liable as joint employers? Nobody knows.

“Mr. Biden may be reading polls that show vaccine mandates are popular, at least among Democrats. He promised last fall to ‘kill the virus,’ and declared victory too soon in June,” the board added. “He’s now trying to blame the virus surge on everyone else in angry, accusatory rhetoric.” 

In The New York Times, Robby Soave said the mandate was a “big mistake.”

“The president’s plan is certainly well intentioned,” Soave wrote. “The vaccines are the only tried-and-true strategy for defeating Covid; government officials should both encourage vaccination and make it easier to get vaccinated,” Soave wrote in The New York Times. But forcing vaccines on a minority contingent of unwilling people is a huge error that risks shredding the social fabric of a country already being pulled apart by political tribalism.

“The president should not — and most likely does not — have the power to unilaterally compel millions of private-sector workers to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs: Mr. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power,” Soave said. “Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency.”

In The New York Post, John Podhoretz said Biden’s announcement was “bizarrely incoherent.”

“He told the American people without qualification that fully vaccinated people are at incredibly low risk: ‘Only 1 out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for COVID per day.’ Then he promised to shield them against the evil people who are threatening their very lives: ‘We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.’ But Joe, you just said the vaccinated were already protected!” Podhoretz wrote. “The danger in what Biden himself called an ‘epidemic of the unvaccinated’ is to the unvaccinated. That is what all the data show. Ninety-nine percent of the hospitalizations and more than 99 percent of the deaths from the Delta variant are among the unvaccinated.

“What’s happening with the Delta variant is terrible, and Biden spent a lot of the speech importuning the unvaccinated to get the shot,” Podhoretz added. “They should. If they don’t, they’re incredibly stupid, and yes, this means you. But it’s not a crime to be stupid, or to be a foolish parent. People do self-destructive things all the time.”

My take.

At the end of July, I wrote about vaccine mandates and conceded that I wasn’t really sure where I landed. I also said that a vaccine mandate “will not (and shouldn’t) come from the federal government.” That presumption, based largely on the Biden administration’s own professed belief that a mandate from the government wouldn’t be that helpful, was apparently wrong.

There are two separate questions here that I think should be addressed. The first is whether the vaccine mandate will be “good” for the public at large. The second is whether the federal government does or should have the authority to do what Biden is doing.

To the first question, my answer is yes. The data on vaccination protecting Americans from serious illness is by now incontrovertible. While Biden’s convoluted argument that vaccines keep us safe and that the unvaccinated are endangering the vaccinated might spin heads, it’s also ridiculous to presume that people remaining unvaccinated only impacts them. Even if outbreaks of Covid-19 aren’t going to kill the vaccinated, they can overwhelm hospitals, shut down schools, cost the public massive amounts of money, endanger people who (for whatever reason) can’t get vaccinated, and impose all sorts of other serious burdens on the public at large.

At the very least, Biden’s announcement is probably going to spur some employers to move swiftly to avoid punishment, and hopefully we’ll see a bump in vaccination rates — which is a win. I would have preferred the Biden administration to also address the millions of Americans who have already had Covid-19, and thus have natural immunity, but the more we understand this virus the more it looks like vaccination plus natural immunity is about the best protection you can have. So, even for the millions who have gotten Covid-19, getting vaccinated is still a very good idea that is going to make you and the people around you safer.

The second question is a lot more complicated. A lot of people magically became experts in the 1905 Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts overnight, in which the court ruled against a man named Henning Jacobson who wanted to refuse vaccination for smallpox. Effectively, the court told Jacobson that one man’s liberty cannot deprive his neighbors of their liberties, too.

But the legal terms of that debate were different. For starters, Jacobson was fighting a law, while Biden has enacted an executive order without any Congressional authority. The real question is whether OSHA has the authority to punish private businesses using its emergency temporary standard powers, a prospect that looks much less certain. Under the same authority, OSHA has struggled to regulate even asbestos or Benzene, which makes me skeptical it will be able to collect $14,000 fines from companies for dodging a vaccine mandate. This order will also be coming before a federal court system — including SCOTUS — that has a clear ideological lean and may be much less receptive than the courts we had over 100 years ago.

It’s also true, though, that describing this simply as a “vaccine mandate” or some kind of authoritarian takeover is overkill of its own. For the vast majority of Americans, there is still going to be a choice, though it’s binary: get tested regularly and repeatedly, or get vaccinated. Rapid and frequent testing seems like it could be a less burdensome and better mitigation strategy to me than mask mandates and social distancing, and I’m glad to see that as an option here. Getting tested won’t prevent you from getting Covid-19, though, so if you’re refusing the vaccine it’s the least you can do. Simply put, a lot of people seem to be refusing to get tested regularly, won’t get vaccinated, won’t wear masks and won’t social distance, at which point I really don’t know where to meet you. 

The real burden of all this will fall onto the employers who, while now being able to say that it’s not their mandate, will still have to navigate a giant logistical hurdle, but until OSHA writes and releases its rule we won’t have clarity on what exactly that burden is. For now, I’m both hopeful that this encourages more vaccination and skeptical that the Biden administration can enforce this mandate without overstepping its authority.

Your questions, answered.

Q: What is going on with Ivermectin? How did this become such a thing on the right? And is it actually a thing? Or is the left media blowing it out of proportion?

— Greg D, Boston, Massachusetts

Tangle: For those of you who don’t know, Ivermectin is the latest drug to be heralded as a miracle treatment (and perhaps even preventative measure) for Covid-19. It’s mostly been in the headlines because the animal version of the drug, which is an anti-parasitic, can be bought over-the-counter and some people actually appear to be taking it to treat themselves (or in an attempt to prevent Covid-19 without getting the vaccine).

The CDC and FDA have both advised against using the drug for Covid-19. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has said there is not enough evidence for or against it yet.

So, a few things: no, I don’t think that many people are using Ivermectin, though it’s impossible to know for sure. It’s also unfair to pretend the drug is only a horse medication. It is, yes. But the human version won a Nobel Prize in 2015 for success in treating parasitic diseases. It’s very safe if it’s prescribed by your doctor, and it is being used experimentally in Latin America and some places in Europe to treat Covid-19.

That being said, we need more info. One of the most popular studies touting Ivermectin was retracted for glaring discrepancies in the data and ethical concerns regarding plagiarism. We have very little in the way of peer-reviewed medical research on its efficacy against Covid-19. Long story short: Ivermectin hasn’t aced a trial in humans, so if your hesitancy about the vaccine is that it’s “unproven”, it’d be a bizarre contradiction to go take a drug that is literally unproven. That being said, it looks like some better data is on the way, and I’m hopeful the results are promising. The more cheap, widely available and safe drugs to treat Covid-19 the better. Just don’t take advice from a politics newsletter — ask your doctor.

Want to ask a question? Simply reply to this email and write in or fill out this form.

A story that matters.

College students are using a lot more cannabis and a lot less booze, according to a new study. The “Monitoring the Future” study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), has been tracking drug and alcohol use among 19-22 year olds since 1980. 44 percent of college students reported using cannabis in 2020, an increase from 28 percent in 2015. Daily or near daily use rose from 5 percent to 8 percent. At the same time, alcohol use dropped from 62 percent in 2019 to 56 percent, with the percentage reporting that they had been drunk in the last month dropping from 35 percent to 28 percent. Binge drinking also dropped markedly. The Washington Post has the story.

Numbers.

• 64%. The estimated percentage of hospital staff who have been vaccinated at facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement.

• 75 days. The amount of time federal workers have to get themselves vaccinated.

• 97,666. The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 on Saturday.

• 11 times. How much more likely people unvaccinated from Covid-19 are to die from the virus than those who are vaccinated.

• 10,000. The number of pharmacies in America that will offer free testing under Biden’s new Covid-19 plan.

Thank you.

Today’s podcast launch was only possible because of the support from Tangle subscribers. We keep our newsletter ad-free, we have no investors, and we only make money when you — our readers — subscribe. If you’d like to support independent journalism and restore some faith in political news, please consider helping us out by becoming a paying member (in return, you’ll get all those special benefits). If you’re already a subscriber, please continue spread the word!

Subscribe now

Have a nice day.

Researchers in Arkansas believe they have found the cause of long-haul Covid-19 symptoms. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) team believes an antibody that appears weeks after the initial infection “attacks and disrupts a key regulator of the immune system.” Around 30 percent of patients with the virus deal with lingering symptoms like fatigue and shortness of breath, and if their hypothesis is correct the researchers believe they can develop effective treatments for so-called long-haulers. “If our next steps confirm that this antibody is the cause of long COVID symptoms, there are medications that should work to treat them,” John Arthur, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chief of the Division of Nephrology at UAMS said. “If we get to that phase of research, the next step would be to test these drugs and hopefully relieve people of the symptoms they're having.” (The good news)

For the last few months, I’ve been in the lab working on some “upgrades” to Tangle. First and foremost, I want you to know that the heart of this newsletter — the mission to deliver informative opinions from across the political spectrum — is not changing. The Tangle newsletter is going to keep coming out as you expect it to. Our goal is to…

Read more

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 10 minutes.

We’re covering the debt ceiling, what it is, and what it means if we hit it.

Quick hits.

1. The U.S. is averaging 1,500 deaths a day from Covid-19 for the first time since March. (The toll)

2. Yesterday, Virginia removed a famous Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond that was erected in 1890. (The removal)

3. The Taliban is allowing 200 foreign citizens, including Americans, to leave on the first international flights out of Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal ended. (The release)

4. President Biden is expected to announce that all federal workers must be vaccinated, with no option for testing as an out. (The announcement)

5. Around 310,000 Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, the fewest since the pandemic began and an encouraging sign in the economic recovery. (The new low)

What D.C. is talking about.

The debt ceiling. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a warning to Congress: the United States’ debt ceiling is quickly approaching, and the U.S. could default on its debt as soon as October if action isn’t taken to raise or suspend it.

The what? The debt ceiling is the maximum amount of money the United States can borrow. Our government borrows money when the Treasury Department issues government securities, or treasury bonds, that other countries and institutions buy. That infuses the government with cash, and it means our debt is owned by U.S. institutions, the U.S. public, and other nations.

The debt ceiling was created in 1917 under the Liberty Bond Act as a way to rein in government spending and increase the efficiency of our borrowing. In essence, the goal was to allow the U.S. Treasury to borrow money without Congressional approval and within the bounds of the debt ceiling framework. If the national debt hits the debt ceiling, the Treasury Department is supposed to take “extraordinary” measures to pay off our debt and expenditures until the ceiling is raised again. The larger issue is that if we hit our debt limit or fail to pay interest to the bondholders holding our debt, we could go into default, which would lower our credit rating and increase the cost of the debt. That cycle could set off a global financial crisis and send the economy into ruin. In theory, this creates the incentive to avoid hitting the debt ceiling, and produces a more fiscally responsible government.

Historically speaking, though, the debt ceiling has become a notorious moving target because rather than reining in spending, we opt to raise or suspend the debt limit every time we get close to hitting it. The debt ceiling has been raised 78 times since 1960, including 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents. In August of 2019, it was suspended by former President Donald Trump until July of 2021, which recently passed.

Now, Treasury Secretary Yellen is warning that as the debt ceiling once again approaches, Congress must act. In recent history, these moments have often been used by Congress as leverage against the other party’s administration. In 2011, for example, Republicans pressured former President Barack Obama to reduce the deficit (cut spending) in return for them increasing the debt ceiling. The U.S. Treasury debt actually lost its triple-A rating at that time.

Once again, with the debt ceiling here, Congress is being told it must act. Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the left and right, then my take.

What the left is saying.

The left supports a debt-limit increase, and believes it’s necessary to prevent an economic catastrophe. They say the debt ceiling is not the mechanism we should use to reduce spending. 

The Washington Post editorial board said “Democrats must do the right thing” if the GOP won’t.

“In an ideal world, the United States might not have run up a debt of more than $28 trillion; in the real world, it has,” the board wrote. “Another less-than-ideal reality is the 104-year-old law that periodically bars the Treasury Department from borrowing more funds to cover previously approved outlays without a new act of Congress… Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), however, has announced that his caucus will not back a debt-limit increase this fall, in response, he says, to the Democrats’ party-line enactment of a $1.9 trillion debt-funded covid relief package in March, and to their plans for a $3.5 trillion ‘human infrastructure’ plan via the same procedure in the near future… No matter that the debt ceiling enables the government to service the entire U.S. debt, including the amount that was run up because of tax cuts and spending increases when the Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House under President Donald Trump.

“Democrats could, and maybe should, have gotten the debt-limit business over with in March, as part of their covid package. Faced with Mr. McConnell’s partisan trolling now, however, they are responding in kind, leaving the debt ceiling out of their $3.5 trillion party-line anti-poverty and climate blueprint, as well as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package… All of the above makes perfect sense, under the passive-aggressive rules of the Washington game. On a substantive level, though, it’s somewhere between embarrassing and dangerous.” 

In an MSNBC column, Hayes Brown wrote incredulously about the GOP’s refusal to raise the debt limit now.

“During the Obama presidency, Republicans used the threat of the U.S. defaulting on its loans to force sharp budget cuts to nonmilitary spending,” Brown wrote. “And now they’re set to do the same to President Joe Biden as Congress prepares to pass the cornerstone of his economic agenda. However, when Donald Trump was in the White House, and the GOP controlled Congress, the debt ceiling apparently was less of a concern. The cap on government debt was boosted under Trump first in late 2017 for three months in a deal with the Democrats. That had to be raised again — thanks to the GOP’s huge tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses — as part of a broader spending bill he signed in 2018. Then, after Democrats took control of the House in 2019, Trump signed a budget that suspended the debt ceiling, then $22 trillion, entirely until this July.

“We’ve clearly passed that point on the calendar by now — and Republicans have suddenly started warning that they won’t support another boost to the debt ceiling,” Brown added. “Bear in mind that raising the debt ceiling doesn’t approve more spending or even endorse old spending — it just allows the U.S. to keep paying the debts that have already been incurred and raise more money to pay for federal appropriations.”

The Los Angeles Times editorial board said this “isn’t a fight over spending.”

“Let’s be clear right up front that the debate over increasing the debt limit is not about fiscal responsibility,” the board said. “In fact, failing to raise the debt limit would be the most irresponsible thing lawmakers could do. Instead, it’s all about who will get the blame for, well, being fiscally responsible, and how much damage will be inflicted on the economy in the process. Congress established the debt limit more than a century ago, but the current version of the mechanism makes no sense. How much Washington spends is dictated by the annual appropriations measures and existing entitlement programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The only thing the debt limit does is impede the Treasury’s ability to pay the bills run up by Congress.

“In other words, raising the debt limit isn’t like upping the credit limit on your Visa card. Congress has already committed to spending the money, and the Treasury has already borrowed much of it,” the board wrote. “The way to rein in spending is to amend entitlement programs and tighten appropriations bills — two things Republicans had the opportunity to do when they held complete control of Congress and the White House in 2017 and 2018. Instead, they pushed the deficit ever higher by ramping up the Defense budget and cutting taxes.”

What the right is saying.

The right is mixed on the debt limit, with some critical of how Democrats are handling spending under Biden and others who believe both parties bear responsibility.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board asked why Democrats are “ducking responsibility for raising the U.S. debt limit.”

“The obvious step is for Democrats to include a debt-limit increase as part of the budget resolution they plan to pass in the Senate this week, following Tuesday’s passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill,” the board said. “They can pass the budget with 50 Democrats, plus Vice President Kamala Harris, and Republicans can’t stop them… Yet the $3.5 trillion resolution includes everything except the debt-limit increase. Democrats plan instead to pair the debt limit with a short-term spending bill after Labor Day designed to keep the government open after Sept. 30. This means that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will have to deliver at least 10 GOP votes to overcome a Senate filibuster.

“Speaker Nancy Pelosi is down to a three-vote majority, and she’s facing pressure from unhappy Members on the left and from swing districts,” they added. “Eleven House Democrats voted against the 2019 debt-limit increase and would be more reluctant this time. The combination of spending $3.5 trillion, raising taxes by $2 trillion or so, and raising the debt limit is a television ad trifecta for GOP challengers in 2022. This is why Democrats are trying to jam the Senate GOP. Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer are betting the twin threat of a government shutdown and default on U.S. debt will force Mr. McConnell to blink, and give Democrats the votes to get GOP fingerprints on the debt limit and solve their autumn problems.”

In RealClearPolitics, Steve Cortes said he always wondered when the borrowing binge would become too painful — and that time is now.

“Instead of settling for the worst outcome, there is an alternative — if Senate Republicans can find some backbone,” Cortes wrote. “The debt ceiling deadline approaches this weekend, on Aug. 1. The U.S. Treasury can use bookkeeping and accounting gimmicks to continue to service our debt for a while, perhaps into October. Nonetheless… there is an opening for the GOP to finally take a stand for working-class people who are being harmed by inflation. There has not been a real debt ceiling showdown in 10 years, and the last one resulted in a historic first-ever downgrade of America’s credit rating by rating agency Standard & Poor’s. So there are risks to forcing this issue, but there are much greater risks to allowing Democrats to plunge America further into an inflationary spiral of misery.

“If the 50 Republicans stay united and refuse to raise the debt ceiling, they can compel the White House and Hill Democrats to get real about both stopping the insane level of borrowing and simultaneously promising a nervous America that there will be no more lockdowns, period,” Cortes wrote. “If we apply a fiscal tourniquet to the borrow-and-spend madness, and if we empower Main Street to fully, permanently reopen, we can eventually grow our way out of the massive debt debacle that we have established. But the clock is ticking. The window is closing. Will the GOP show the wisdom and the huevos to use the debt ceiling as a lever to stop the madness?”

In The National Review, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) pointed the finger at everyone, including members of his own party.

“For too long Republicans have played a complicated game of supporting popular appropriation bills while opposing the debt-limit increases made necessary by excessive spending,” he wrote. “Republicans spend like Democrats in Washington, D.C., during the week. But when they return home for the weekend, they boast to their constituents of voting against another debt-limit increase, in an effort to bolster their conservative bona fides. This is hypocrisy of the highest order on the part of those elected to represent the American people.

“We Republicans have had great success over the years running on promises to bring fiscal responsibility to Washington. It’s a noble goal,” he added. “Saddling future generations with crushing taxes, rapidly rising interest rates, and diminished chances of paying off our irresponsible spending violates our sworn duty as lawmakers, and it’s also flat-out immoral. Yet we are the party that routinely caves when big-spending bills come to the floor. As the bloated infrastructure bill makes its way to the House next week for a vote, Republicans shouldn’t confuse posture with principle. Voting against a debt-limit increase is posturing, plain and simple; saying no to the unprecedented levels of deficit spending the infrastructure package would necessitate is principled. Accordingly, I strongly urge my fellow Republicans to join me in voting against appropriations bills and debt-ceiling increases until we return to budget caps and the sequester.”

My take.

I appreciate Rep. Buck’s candidness. If Republicans wanted to stop the spending they were seeing in Congress, they should have stopped the spending they were seeing in Congress. The rising debt is one of the few bipartisan efforts remaining in D.C., and the idea that Republicans are less responsible than Democrats (or not responsible at all) for the current debt crisis is absurd. Historically speaking, one could easily argue — and many have — that Democrats are the actual party of fiscal responsibility despite talking about it a lot less.

At the same time, The Wall Street Journal editorial board is also right that the Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the White House. If they want to raise the debt limit, they can raise it. They didn’t need to keep it out of the budget resolution they used to pass the $1 trillion infrastructure bill. They did that to keep their caucus together and because they expect Republicans to fold — and then vote — when the prospect of upending the U.S. and global economy becomes apparent. Nancy Pelosi would call that outmaneuvering Republicans, and there’s no doubt an operator like Mitch McConnell would do the same thing if the roles were reversed (we don’t have to guess — it has already happened). 

Welcome to Washington, D.C.

All of this begs the question: What is the debt ceiling actually doing, and is it even worth having anymore? To me, it seems clear that all it does is create a huge amount of risk, oscillating leverage for whichever political party decides to use it, and an untenable pattern of lifting or suspending it every time we spend too much money. There aresome other good ideas about how to rein in spending, but none as simple as just spending less and balancing the budget. Until Congress does that, the debt ceiling is little more than a mirage — and a tool to screw over the other party — the kind of political gimmick we should consider abandoning altogether.

Your questions, answered.

We’re skipping today’s reader question, but if you want to submit a question (or reach us anytime) you can always reply to this email and write in. Alternatively, you can submit a question by clicking the button below:

Ask a question

A story that matters.

In a surprising alliance, the Biden administration has begun receiving a boost on its foreign policy from the Kochs — one of the largest networks of Republican donors in the world. Not long ago, the billionaire Koch brothers were public enemy No. 1 of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Now, though, foreign policy experts at the top think tanks and organizations funded by the Koch network are championing U.S. isolationist policy and throwing their support behind Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. “The durability of this strange alliance is unclear,” Politico reported. “But it has implications for the future of American foreign policy.” (The story) 

Numbers.

• $28,740,196,432.The total U.S. national debt as of this writing ($28.7 trillion dollars).

• $21 trillion. The amount of that debt owned by the U.S. public, according to a February estimate.

• $7.07 trillion. The amount of that debt owned by foreign governments and institutions, according to a February estimate.

• $1.06 trillion. The amount of that debt owned by China, according to a September 2020 estimate.

• 17 times. How much more likely unvaccinated adults were to be hospitalized by Covid-19 than vaccinated adults, according to a new study of government data.

Have a nice day.

Paleontologists in Canada have dug up a new species from the Cambrian era (more than 500 million years ago) that they’re calling a “floating head.” The species is about a half meter long, which for that time is considered gigantic, given that most living species we know of then were about the size of your pinky finger. “The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling,” Jean-Bernard Caron, from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Canada, said. “This is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found.” The creature belongs to an early group of arthropods called radiodonts, had compound eyes, a tooth-filled mouth, “flaps” for swimming, and spiny claws it used to capture prey. They’re calling it Titanokorys gainesi. Cosmos has the story.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 11 minutes.

The fight over Jerome Powell. Plus, a question about the left and right’s biggest blindspots.

Welcome…

We have a bunch of new readers today. Remember: The Tangle newsletter has no advertisers and no investors behind our news. That’s part of how we stay independent. It also means that, in order to survive, we need support from readers. In order to create an incentive for that support, there are a few things that only subscribers get:

• Friday editions, which take the form of reader-requested stories, original content, interviews, personal essays and more.

• The comments section, which is only available to subscribers.

• First-look at new products, which are always tested and sent to subscribers for feedback.

If you want to get that level of access and support independent journalism, please consider subscribing below. It’s cheap!

Subscribe now

Quick hits.

1. The Taliban announced a new interim government in Afghanistan on Tuesday, including hardliner Mohammad Hassan Akhund as the head of the government. (The details)

2. President Biden is planning to outline a new six-pronged plan to contain the Delta variant of Covid-19. (The plan)

3. First Lady Jill Biden returned to the classroom to teach her English class at Northern Virginia Community College, becoming the first first lady to work a full-time job while in the White House. (The job)

4. Former President Donald Trump will back Harriet Hageman as she prepares to mount a primary challenge to Trump critic and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney in Wyoming. (The report)

5. The Biden administration released a plan to produce almost half of all U.S. electricity from solar energy by 2050. (The goal)

What D.C. is talking about.

Jerome Powell. Powell is the chairman of the federal reserve, a post he was nominated to by former President Donald Trump. The Federal Reserve is the United States’ central bank; it develops monetary policy in an effort to stabilize our markets and maximize things like employment. Part of Powell’s responsibility is overseeing the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), a group of seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board and five Federal Reserve Bank presidents that sets short-term economic policy (think: things like interest rates on loans for buying a home).

In other words, it’s an extremely important and powerful position. I know it sounds boring, but consider this: many in D.C. have long called the fed chair “the second most powerful person in the world.” Federal reserve chairs serve four-year terms but can be nominated to serve multiple terms. Powell’s first term will come to an end in 2022, and there is now a concerted political effort to pressure Biden into picking someone else.

More specifically, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) are calling on President Biden to replace Powell with someone who is more focused on addressing climate change and racial and economic justice. “Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve has taken very little action to mitigate the risk climate change poses to our financial system,” the lawmakers said in a statement at the end of last month. “At a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning of the potential catastrophic and irreversible damage inflicted by a changing climate, we need a leader at the helm that will take bold and decisive action to eliminate climate risk.”

Other representatives, including Chuy García (D-IL) and Mondaire Jones (D-NY), also signed the statement, and Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have both criticized Powell for deregulatory efforts related to the banks that the federal reserve oversees.

Below, we’ll take a look at some commentary about Powell from the left and right, then my take. 

What the right is saying.

The right has mixed feelings about Jerome Powell, but does not believe the progressive criticisms are cause for replacement.

The Wall Street Journal criticized a recent speech Powell gave, saying he sounded more like a politician than a fed chairman.

“Mr. Powell justified the Fed’s continued and historic policy ease on grounds that while the outlook for the job market is excellent, the labor market recovery has been uneven,” the board wrote. “But then it always is after a recession. Mr. Powell’s case is that the 5.4% unemployment rate ‘understates the amount of labor market slack.’ He could be right, though one reason for any slack is that the government welfare and jobless benefits that Mr. Powell cheered on earlier this year are paying people more not to work than if they take a job. No mention of that in his remarks.

“The chairman also had a rosy view of inflation even as it soars above the Fed’s 2% target and has been stickier than the central bank’s legion of economists predicted,” it added. “Mr. Powell couldn’t, and didn’t, deny that fact… Mr. Powell offered the usual concern about the struggles of ‘lower-wage workers,’ but we wish he or someone at the Fed would acknowledge the central bank’s contribution to income inequality. The Fed's quantitative-easing bond purchases are intended to lift asset prices, which helps the relatively well off who own assets, while renewed inflation robs low- and middle-income workers of real wage gains. The resulting increase in inequality then becomes another political excuse for higher taxes and more income redistribution.”

In Project Syndicate, John Cochrane argued that it was “absurd” to say climate risk posed a danger to the financial system.

“Financial regulation is being used to smuggle in climate policies that otherwise would be rejected as unpopular or ineffective,” he wrote. “Such an event lies outside any climate science. Hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and fires have never come close to causing systemic financial crises, and there is no scientifically validated possibility that their frequency and severity will change so drastically to alter this fact in the next ten years. Our modern, diversified, industrialized, service-oriented economy is not that affected by weather – even by headline-making events. Businesses and people are still moving from the cold Rust Belt to hot and hurricane-prone Texas and Florida.

“If regulators are worried even-handedly about out-of-the-box risks that endanger the financial system, the list should include wars, pandemics, cyberattacks, sovereign-debt crises, political meltdowns, and even asteroid strikes,” he wrote. “All but the latter are more likely than climate risk. And if we are worried about flood and fire costs, perhaps we should stop subsidizing building and rebuilding in flood and fire-prone areas… To be sure, it is not impossible that some terrible climate-related event in the next ten years can provoke a systemic run, though nothing in current science or economics describes such an event. But if that is the fear, the only logical way to protect the financial system is by dramatically raising the amount of equity capital, which protects the financial system against any kind of risk.”

In Bloomberg, Ramesh Ponnuru argued that replacing Powell for someone more progressive would be an “unforced error.”

“That’s not to say that Powell’s tenure has been perfect,” Ponnuru said. “He raised interest rates too far too fast in his first years as chairman, part of a cycle in which the Fed overestimated the neutral interest rate and underestimated how high employment could go without causing inflation. (Former President Donald Trump, who had appointed Powell chairman, started calling him an enemy of America as a result.)

“Powell’s performance looks very strong, however, when set against that of other central bankers,” he wrote. “Under his three predecessors, the Fed first helped spawn a credit boom with easy monetary policy, then helped usher in the financial crash and a deep recession with tight monetary policy, and finally made decisions that weakened the recovery. Conversely, in 2020, when dealing with a crisis that was not of the Fed’s making — the pandemic and the economic shutdown — Powell provided the support the economy needed… The optimistic case is that the trends will look better toward the end of the year as supply chains strengthen and the lockdown is further behind us. The pessimistic case is that the current turmoil is unsettling expectations of future inflation in a way that will become self-fulfilling. If Biden nominates a replacement for Powell this summer, he'll be adding uncertainty about monetary policy at the moment when it's already likely to be at a peak of controversy and danger.”

What the left is saying.

The left largely continues to support a second term for Powell, though some progressives are calling for a more climate-focused fed chair.

In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell said firing Jerome Powell would sabotage Biden’s own agenda.

“Powell was originally nominated to a Fed Board seat by President Barack Obama in 2011, and elevated to chair by President Donald Trump in 2018. Since then he’s done an extraordinary job,” she wrote. “Among the highlights: He safeguarded the Fed’s political independence when Trump tried to bully him into pursuing partisan policies. He took aggressive, early action to shepherd the economy through a pandemic. Perhaps most significantly, he reoriented the Fed’s mission toward creating more job opportunities for the most vulnerable Americans. This last issue is one championed primarily by progressive activists, including some of the same people now fighting Powell’s reappointment."

“Last year, the bank announced a new framework that allows for moderately higher inflation and redefines maximum employment as a ‘broad-based and inclusive goal.’ Powell and other Fed colleagues have advocated paying more attention to unemployment rates for Black people, workers with less education and other populations often left behind even in supposedly ‘good’ economies,” Rampell said. “The shift is all the more striking because Powell is a Republican. Republicans have typically been more ‘hawkish’ on inflation and have cared less about the prospects of lower-wage workers. Yet somehow, thanks to Powell’s formidable interpersonal skills, he’s managed to maintain Republican support.”

In The American Prospect, David Dayen said “the planet depends on the next federal reserve chair.”

“It’s not like the Fed has nothing to do on this score,” Dayen argued. “U.S. banks have provided far more fossil fuel finance than any other nation’s, over $1.2 trillion from 2016 to 2020. These investments have increased even as the science of climate change became more undeniable… Powell’s defenders make it seem like climate hawks want the Fed to go on a spree of direct green lending, favoring certain businesses over others in ways that would not fit with its legal mandate. The truth is that there are many other options available to the central bank, not just to encourage a transition to renewable energy, but more importantly, to manage that transition so financial institutions don’t get stuck with useless assets, threatening their overall balance sheets.

“For one, the Fed can incorporate climate risk into stress tests of large financial institutions, as France and Japan have already done,” he wrote. “The Fed can also ‘risk-weight’ carbon-sensitive assets, establishing higher capital requirements for holdings in coal plants, for example. Financial supervision can make climate preparedness a major component, and force that information to be made public. The Fed can also use monetary tools to target climate, including with its asset purchases. Many have criticized the central bank for its pandemic-era lending and bond-buying operations, which disproportionately helped to bail out the oil sector. The Fed even changed the terms of one key lending program to benefit the industry. This did not appear to honor any principle of sectoral neutrality; if anything, it weighted more toward oil and gas.”

In his newsletter, Bloomberg’s Noah Smith asked why The Squad is attacking Jerome Powell.

“The Squad’s first beef with the Fed Chair is that he’s not trying to eliminate climate risk,” Smith wrote. “But the fact is that the Fed simply has very little to do with regards to climate change. The Fed’s primary function is to balance inflation and unemployment, by setting interest rates and doing other financial market manipulation like quantitative easing and such. Essentially, if the Fed thinks too many people are out of a job and we need to speed up growth so that they get jobs, they pump money into the economy, and if they think prices are rising too fast they take money out of the economy. Yes, it’s more complicated than that, but not much more complicated.

“So how does this interact with the climate?” Smith asked. “Well, if you’re a degrowther, then you think faster growth is bad for climate change, and you might generally want hard-money policies to slow things down (even at the inevitable cost of jobs). But if you’re a green-growther, maybe you might think that a hotter-running economy would stimulate investment in things like solar electricity. So you might want easy-money policies to speed growth. But then you’d also have to think that the private sector will do the right thing with those dollars — that they’ll invest in solar and wind and energy storage rather than new natural gas plants and gas-consuming factories. Since AOC’s Green New Deal is based on the idea of government taking over the reins of climate-related investment from the private sector, it’s a safe bet that the Squad does not think that simply handing cheap money to businesses will direct investment in the right direction.”

My take.

If you’re in Biden’s shoes, the decision to keep Powell seems like a no-brainer.

Not only is he a Trump-appointed Republican fed chair who has managed to garner support from people across the political spectrum, he’s also managed to execute and support a fiscal policy that fits the mold of the Biden presidency with very little hiccup. And he’s done it at a time when the federal reserve wields more power than it ever has in American history.

But it’s not just that. As Rampell wrote, Powell is arguably the most worker-friendly fed chair we’ve ever seen. Given the populist trends in the U.S. from the Bernie Sanders left and Donald Trump right, paired with the economic hardship of the pandemic, it isn’t hard to see why — from a political perspective — a fed chair like Powell is a major win for Biden.

Some of the writers above (on the left and right) have scoffed a little too blithely at the notion that the fed chair can impact climate policy. There are knobs the federal reserve can turn — like weighing climate change when it creates stress tests for banks, or holding more capital from fossil-fuel companies when banks lend to them, given that the price of something like an oil field could collapse rapidly with green initiatives.

But I do think the crux of their argument — “this isn’t his job” — is mostly true. And it seems patently obvious to me that removing Powell at a time when the economy is already on uneven ground and Biden is slowly moving toward accomplishing some of his largest political goals would be idiotic for the president. Silly enough that, honestly, I’m surprised to see these representatives pressuring Biden to do it, and wondering if there aren’t unseen motives at play. Is this just a simple media play from The Squad? Is it actually a ploy to help Biden keep Powell and appear as a centrist at the same time? These are good questions other people have also asked.

The truth is Powell represents what amounts to a royal flush for Biden. Not only is he a Republican appointed by Biden’s predecessor (which plays into the bipartisan image Biden likes to cultivate), but he’s well-liked across the political spectrum. He has abandoned the idea that the fed needs to be hyper-concerned about inflation, instead aiming its resources at maximum employment. He’s even used his Republican credentials to support massive spending like the American Rescue Plan and tamp down fears about the deficit.

I’ve been scratching at it, but now I’ll just pass the mic to Robinson Meyer, who made the simplest argument for why Biden (and Democrats) should want to keep Powell, in The Atlantic: “Biden wants to do a lot of hard things to combat climate change, including passing an infrastructure bill, regulating car and truck pollution, revitalizing American industry, and attaining full employment. Powell is a Republican who wants to reach full employment. By keeping him, the president can spend more political capital on his other goals. That’s really it.”

Your questions, answered.

Q: What are issues that you feel are the biggest blindspots to the right and the left? An issue that the right or the left just always overlooks or doesn't have a handle on as a party. Obviously bias plays a role in our perceptions of whether a side understands an issue or not but I wonder from a more objective viewpoint what are the most overlooked issues on each side.

— Joseph, Montgomery County, PA

Tangle: This is a fantastic question. 

On the left, I’d say the number one blindspot issue is immigration. That may sound silly given that immigration is such a huge topic in America, and there are several major immigration issues the left cares deeply about (like DACA and the so-called dreamers). But if you ask most liberals what the top issues for Republicans are, I suspect they’d say something like: the economy, guns and abortion. In my experience, though, immigration is the thing that probably animates Republicans the most. Trump brought this reality front and center in 2016, but part of why the left was so blindsided by his victory is because they underestimated the power of his rhetoric on immigration. 

I think in some ways that blindspot is slowly returning now. Look no further than the disparity in coverage on the left and right around the situation on the border, and you can see what a big issue it is to half the country and how little attention it gets from the other half.  

On the right, it is health care. This also became most clear during the Trump presidency, when he tried to repeal and replace Obamacare without having any replacement plan and the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) sunk the effort with his thumbs down vote. Again: sounds kind of silly, health care is a huge issue, etc. But think about it this way: Trump had four years in office and never actually developed a health care plan. Over and over he promised a new, cheaper and better health care proposal from Republicans, but it never came. It’s astonishing to me that the Republican party still doesn’t have a clear, cogent healthcare alternative to Obamacare or to expanding Medicare for All, especially given that it’s probably the number one issue Americans care about.

To put it another way, try to answer this question: what is the Republican position on health care? I am a politics reporter and I’m not sure. Is it free markets? Is it what we have now? Is it to privatize everything? Is it expanding Medicaid as some red states have done? Is it to fix Obamacare or abolish it? Is it the AHCA they introduced in 2019 after the same plan cost them in 2018? What’s the message? The fact that this answer isn’t clear is a sign the party either hasn’t coalesced around anything or doesn’t have many great legislative proposals to address it. It kills them politically, and it’s something Democrats have feasted on for a decade.

A story that matters.

Decades after 9/11, police in New York City are using counterterrorism tools and tactics to fight routine street crime. New York’s powerful facial recognition software is drawing increased scrutiny as the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches. “New Yorkers simply going about their daily lives routinely encounter post-9/11 digital surveillance tools like facial recognition software, license plate readers or mobile X-ray vans that can see through car doors,” The New York Times reports. “The department’s Intelligence Division, redesigned in 2002 to confront Al Qaeda operatives, now uses anti-terror tactics to fight gang violence and street crime.” It’s not just New York City, either: enhanced surveillance among American police nationally is being put under a microscope. The New York Times has the story. 

Numbers.

• Less than 2%. The percentage of fully-vaccinated adults in most low-income countries.

• ~50%. The percentage of fully-vaccinated adults in most high-income countries.

• 46%. The percentage of Americans who say 9/11 changed the U.S. for the worse.

• 33%. The percentage of Americans who say 9/11 changed the U.S. for the better.

• 49%. The percentage of Americans who say we are safer from terrorism now than we were before 9/11.

• 36%. The percentage of Americans who say the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting.

3 ways to help.

If you want to support this newsletter, there are three ways to do it.

1. Forward this email to friends.

2. You can email Tangle to friends by clicking here.

3. Become a subscriber by clicking here.

4. BONUS: Go buy something from our merch store!

Have a nice day.

Hurricane Ida tore through New Orleans last week, leaving more than a million people without power. But one group of veterans is living in an apartment complex that has had the lights on, thanks to its solar power roof panels and battery storage capabilities. St. Peter Residential was built one month before the pandemic began. It’s the first net-zero emissions apartment building in the state, and more than half the affordable apartment units in the building are reserved for low-income veterans. Good News Network has the story.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 11 minutes.

We’re covering Biden’s approval ratings, plus a question about who is really “in control.”

Did you know…

You can reply to any newsletter and it goes straight to my inbox, where I’ll try and write you back as soon as I can. Also, you can email Tangle to friends by clicking here.

Shanah tovah.

Happy New Year to all my Jewish readers out there! Rosh Hashanah, or the “head of the year” in Hebrew, began last night and runs until sundown tomorrow. For Jews, this time of year ushers in a couple of weeks of repentance and reflection that end with the much more somber and holy day of Yom Kippur. For now, you can wish people “happy new year,” say “Shanah Tovah” or “chag sameach” (which literally translates to “happy festival”). I’ll be celebrating tonight with a fish dinner and some apples and honey. May it be a sweet, joyful year! 

Quick hits.

1. The Taliban has been preventing at least four planes from departing Kabul that have several hundred people aboard seeking to escape. Yesterday, the group also said it had taken control of the Panjshir Valley, the last pocket of resistance in Afghanistan. (The takeover)

2. Six Palestinian prisoners escaped one of Israel’s most secure prisons by digging a tunnel through the floor and out beyond the prison’s wall. They are still at large as a manhunt is underway. (The escape)

3. The death toll from Hurricane Ida rose to 60 over the holiday weekend, with more than half of the victims coming from the northeast. (The toll)

4. The U.S. added just 235,000 new jobs last month, falling well short of economists’ predictions and marking a slowdown of the economic recovery. (The bad news)

5. The Justice Department vowed to protect women seeking abortions in Texas after the Supreme Court allowed a new ban after six weeks to go into effect. (The statement)

What D.C. is talking about

Biden’s approval rating. Over the last two weeks, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has taken a nosedive for the first time in his presidency. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll has his overall approval rating at 44 percent, down six points from June. His handling of the economy is at 45 percent, down seven points from April. His handling of the pandemic is at 52 percent, down 10 points from June. Today, 47 percent of Americans say their risk of getting sick from the coronavirus is “moderate” or “high,” an increase of 18 percentage points from late June.

According to the RealClearPolitics’ average of several major pollsters, President Biden’s average approval rating is 45.6 percent vs. 49.1 percent who disapprove. FiveThirtyEight has it at 46.1 percent approve and 48.3 disapprove. In April, Biden’s approval ratings were as high as 55.2 percent with a 39.6 percent disapproval rating, according to the RCP average. Here is how the trend lines have looked, according to RCP:

Below, we’ll take a look at some commentary about these changing numbers from the left and right, then my take.

What the left is saying.

The left is worried about the dip, but still supports Biden’s agenda.

“There is a laundry list of reasons for this,” Jamelle Bouie wrote. “Not only is the United States still in the grip of a pandemic, but also the Delta variant of the coronavirus has led to record infections and deaths in Florida, Texas and other states with relatively low vaccination rates (and where officials have taken a stand against mitigation efforts). At the same time that Delta took hold, Biden also faced a huge backlash from the press and his partisan opponents over the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which began in chaotic fashion with the collapse of the Afghan National Army, the subsequent advance of the Taliban and of course the suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members… And as seen in the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy is growing at a slower rate than it did at the start of the summer.

“With that said, there’s another dynamic at work, one that should guide our expectations for how popular Biden is and how popular he could become. Put simply, we’re still quite polarized,” Bouie wrote. One of the most consistent findings from the past 20 years of public opinion research is that each new president is more divisive than the last… Some of this reflects circumstances, some of it reflects the individuals, but most of it is a function of partisan and ideological polarization. Modern presidents have a high floor for public opinion but a low ceiling.”

In The Washington Post, Paul Waldman said Biden is learning good policy is not good politics.

“For instance, before Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan in March — with zero Republican votes in either house of Congress — polls showed it to be almost absurdly popular, with approval reaching into the 70s,” Waldman wrote. “Not only that, it gave direct, visible benefits to people, in the form of stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit. How much did the public reward Biden for it? Not at all. There was no surge of good will and appreciation; his approval rating before it passed was around 53 percent, and his approval rating after it passed was about 53 percent.

“We’ll almost certainly wind up telling a similar story about the infrastructure bill and the Democrats’ reconciliation bill if and when those are signed into law: The public will like the spending, but it won’t convince them that the president who forced it through is doing a good job,” he added. “The same will probably be true of his entire agenda. Democrats are often advised that because their policy agenda is widely popular with the public — majorities of whom would like to see a higher minimum wage, action on climate change, higher taxes on the wealthy, legalized marijuana, universal background checks and so on — they should move aggressively forward on all those issues without fear. Which they should. But the seemingly logical conclusion — that if they do those popular things, the public will reward them for it — has little if any evidence to support it.”

In New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore said it’s not at all clear how much this dip will matter in the 2022 midterms or 2024 election.

“As I noted in an earlier post, reaction to adverse overseas developments can fade pretty quickly, as occurred soon after the Fall of Saigon in 1975, when Gerald Ford’s approval rating rose significantly as soon as the Mayaguez incident (in which the U.S. freed merchant sailors captured by the Khmer Rouge off the Cambodian coast) replaced the Vietnam collapse in the news,” Kilgore said. “Whatever it portends, Biden’s plunge underwater is hardly unique. According to a UC Santa Barbara analysis of Gallup data, every president dating back to Lyndon Johnson had net-negative approval ratings at some point.

“The most relevant points of comparison to Biden should comfort him,” Kilgore added. “Barack Obama was regularly underwater in weekly Gallup surveys nearly all of 2010, in the first half of 2011, and throughout 2014. But he managed to serve two full terms. And Donald Trump didn’t achieve his first net-positive Gallup approval rating until the spring of 2020, and came close to getting re-elected despite a 46-52 Gallup rating on the eve of the 2020 election.”

What the right is saying.

The right believes the dip shows Biden is losing trust from voters.

In The Hill, Keith Naughton said the poll numbers are both “better” and “worse” than you think.

“This collapse in support spells trouble for the Democrats in the midterm elections,” Naughton said. “Already likely to lose seats, their House majority is looking ever more ephemeral. As the midterm elections are generally a referendum on the president, any slide in his approval and public confidence is a severe problem. The recent experience of Presidents Clinton and Obama is particularly ominous for Democrats. Both Clinton and Obama saw initial strong approval ratings after 100 days, Clinton at 55 percent positive and Obama at 65 percent positive. Yet both saw their approvals fall into the low 40 percent range by mid-term election day… Both Clinton and Obama saw their House majorities collapse, losing 54 and 63 seats, respectively.

“There is good news for Biden,” Naughton added. “Most Americans don’t blame him for the Afghanistan war in general (Bush is mostly blamed, at 62 percent in the Suffolk poll) and they approve getting out. Americans also still don’t put foreign policy at the top of their concerns. In the most recent YouGov benchmark, respondents put health care, the economy and the environment at the top. National security comes in fourth on the list, with just 9 percent ranking it as a top issue — and that is boosted by Republicans who place it on top (for now) at 16 percent.”

In The Washington Post, Henry Olsen said Democrats should be nervous.

“As the pandemic faded into the background with the rise in vaccinations, many American voters started to think about other things,” Olsen wrote. “They saw high inflation and an administration focused more on pushing an unprecedented expansion of federal government power than on economic recovery. The gross incompetence on display now will only add to the sense that the administration is out of touch and out of control.

“Republicans are surely salivating over what might happen next,” Olsen addd. “If Biden placates his party’s vocal progressive base, he will double down on pushing as much of his liberal agenda through as possible. The more he gives them, the likelier a 2010-style GOP tsunami reappears. If he plays for the general election, however, he angers that base. That will increase intraparty strife, which will become a major issue in 2022 as progressives challenge less-leftist incumbents and push for more left-wing policies to motivate the party’s base to vote… Biden’s coalition was always more anti-Trump than pro-Democratic. His declining job approval ratings are a sign of that. The Democratic dilemma won’t go away soon no matter what happens in Afghanistan.”

In The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove said Biden could sink his party in 2022 and 2024.

“Even in our highly polarized atmosphere, where partisans stubbornly cling to their team colors, Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have plummeted,” Rove wrote. “These losses aren’t only because of Afghanistan. The president’s ratings are dropping on his handling of Covid, the economy, immigration and crime, too. I bet they get worse in the months ahead, despite attempted P.R. resets. “Mr. Biden’s shaky and listless performance has demolished the idea that he’ll be a credible contender in 2024. Also wrecked is any sense that Vice President Kamala Harris is an acceptable heir. The president’s failures and shortcomings are hers as well, while she’s failed to produce success in virtually every responsibility she has been given to handle.

“But who could emerge to replace them?” Rove asked. “Both the White House and the aging apparatchiks of the Democratic Congressional leadership will discourage new faces from making their ambitions known. And Mr. Biden’s actions and Tuesday’s speech diminished what little good will he has among swing voters, which will also hurt Democrats if Republicans make 2022 about checks-and-balances. It ain’t a pretty picture.”

My take.

\We’re a long way from the 2022 midterms.

November 8, 2022, is 427 days away. For context, 427 days ago was July 7, 2020. Around that time, President Donald Trump was commuting Roger Stone’s prison sentence, discussing the prospect of withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and we were just beginning to learn about how Covid-19 spread through the air. In other words: it was a few million headlines ago.

Similarly, talking about this latest poll dip as it relates to the 2022 midterms seems a bit ridiculous to me — and I certainly don’t think it’ll have much bearing on the 2024 elections. Americans have a short memory on issues that impact them in acute ways; they have extraordinarily short memories on foreign policy issues. A year from now, I’m sure Afghanistan will still be something people think about and remember — but it’ll almost certainly have little impact on the election. The state of Covid-19, another return to school, the economy, climate events like wildfires or hurricanes, the situation on the border, a slew of Supreme Court rulings that will come between this October and next — those are the things that will likely animate the 2022 election. And, of course, the things we can’t see or predict now: whatever the next Covid-19 variant or foreign policy blunder or storming of the Capitol events are.

That’s not to say there isn’t anything to learn here, though. In fact, I think there is something critical at work that is good for Biden and his team to recognize now — and important for Republicans and Democrats to know: the middle can still move.

Almost everyone is well aware of the partisan polarization in our country that makes the floor and ceiling for most presidents fixed. And, as Paul Waldman said, those floors and ceilings are becoming more fixed and more polarized with every president. But it’s not very often that we are reminded of the great big middle — a middle that can move and determine the future of the country. Right now, that middle is flexing, and as a result, Biden’s poll numbers are dropping.

The takeaway, regardless of your politics, is that there is still a mobile, moderate, independent, center-ish or incongruent voter whom presidents and political parties need to win over — and one who is genuinely responsive to the news and the results they are seeing in their day-to-day lives. In many ways, it’s a warning shot. Not just for Biden but for Republicans too, who will have to decide on their challenger to coalesce around, and for Democrats more generally, who will need to thread the needle of satisfying their progressive base while also winning over independents in 2022 and 2024. In short: there is no easy, simple path forward to either party winning majorities in 2022 and 2024.

Your questions, answered.

Q: What is your take on the current administration? It is being reported that President Biden had been briefed on the high probability that a quick withdrawal would lead to the chaos that we are witnessing in Afghanistan. There is also the recent SCOTUS ruling that the President's extension of the eviction ban was unconstitutional. The President said that he had gone against the advice of his general counsel and all of the lawyers in the White House. The video of the President stating that he is told what reporters to call on, and comments about I was told to not take questions about Afghanistan. What is going on? Who is controlling the President? If he cannot call on whoever he pleases, there must be a person or persons that are calling the shots. Who is really running this country?

— Alan, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Tangle: As someone who has openly questioned Biden’s capacities, I’m not at all allergic to the idea that he is being puppeteered or railroaded by his team. But there really is not much evidence for it. I’d argue, actually, that there was a lotmore evidence that President Trump was “not in control” of his administration — neverending leaks, backstabbing, policies pushed he clearly didn’t support, bills being written without his input, high-ranking administration officials he chose only to have public falling outs with later, etc. — than there is evidence Biden is not in control of his administration. And frankly, few things have been blown out of proportion by the right-wing media more than this story.

For those of you who missed it: in the midst of the Afghanistan withdrawal, President Biden began taking questions after his remarks at a press conference by saying, “The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O'Donnell from NBC.” He was clearly reading off of a list of reporters to pick for questions.

Basically: Biden said the quiet part out loud. I watched the presser live and literally laughed when he did it, only because I found it so incredibly stupid and knew it would immediately be used against him. But it is not new, it’s certainly not unique, and it is definitely not a sign he is being controlled or instructed by anyone. Every single president — including Trump, who was famous for sparring with the media and riffing at pressers — got a list of reporters to call on. It’s part of the business. It’s not just to play the room in a way that makes the president look good, it’s also a result of the insidery ecosystem of D.C. media. Reporters and press teams have relationships, and some reporters will work those press teams to get on the “list” that Biden clumsily announced to the room at the press conference.

Shortly after, headlines popped up all over conservative websites about Biden being “controlled” and “instructed,” and a slew of right-wing pundits began asking “who is really in charge?” It all struck me as exceedingly silly, though. Not only is it normal for presidents and press people to have those lists, it also ignores the fact that Biden took some very difficult questions, and even called on Fox News’ Peter Doocy — one of his most outspoken critics in the press room.

All that’s to say: I think Biden is in control. This is even revealed in part of your question — the fact Biden ignored his general counsel and pushed forward with renewing the eviction moratorium lends credence to the idea that he is throwing his own weight around just as much as it does that he was pressured or being controlled by progressives. Given today’s topic and the current state of play, though, I’m not sure Biden being seen as firmly in control is a major win for him politically.

A story that matters.

2021 was a banner year for Republican policies, despite Democrats having wide-reaching control of the federal government, according to Michael Scherer. “This year alone, 12 states have passed income tax reductions, 17 states have increased voting restrictions that are expected to hit Democratic constituencies more critically, and 18 states have enacted new or expanded school choice programs, according to the tallies kept by interest groups,” Scherer wrote. Despite Democrats controlling the levers in Washington, Republicans are winning many local policy battles with state and judicial control. The Washington Post has the story.

Numbers.

• 85%. Joe Biden’s approval rating among Democrats, according to the latest NPR/Marist poll.

• 36%. Joe Biden’s approval rating among independents, according to the latest NPR/Marist poll.

• 5%. Joe Biden’s approval rating among Republicans, according to the latest NPR/Marist poll.

• 1 in 3. The number of Americans who experienced a weather disaster this summer.

• 1 in 5,000. The risk of a breakthrough Covid-19 infection on any given day, according to a new analysis.

• 1 in 10,000. The risk of a breakthrough Covid-19 infection on any given day if you’re living in an area with high vaccination rates.

• 59%. The percentage of parents with school-age children who support mask mandates in schools.

Get access.

The Tangle newsletter has no advertisers and no investors behind our news. That’s part of how we stay independent. It also means that, in order to survive, we need support from subscribers. In order to create an incentive for that support, there are a few things that only subscribers get:

• Friday editions, which take the form of reader-requested stories, original content, interviews, personal essays and more.

• The comments section, which is only available to subscribers.

• First-look at new products, which are always tested and sent to subscribers for feedback.

If you want to get that level of access and support independent journalism, please consider subscribing below:

Subscribe now

Have a nice day.

A plumber in Leicestershire, England, was offered a record deal after the owner of a music label heard him singing while he fixed his bathroom. Kev Crane spent six weeks working on the bathroom of New Reality Records’ owner Paul Conneally. Throughout his time at the house, Conneally kept hearing Crane singing, and then discovered Crane had actually made an album in his free time. When Conneally heard it, he decided to offer him a deal. The album, Why Can’t I Be You?, has since been released by New Reality Records. (BBC) 

Labor Day became an official federal holiday in 1894. For many, it ushers in the end of the summer and serves as a nice day off from work to enter the fall season. But its origin story is as a celebration of workers, and it was born out of the 19th-century labor movement at a time when the average American worked 12-hour days and seven-day weeks just to feed their families and survive (and, in many homes, children were working in mills and factories, too).

Whether you’re working or not, today is a great day to recognize the laborers of 2021. After a year where Americans became much more aware of the “essential” worker, the role each of us plays in making society function and how foundational employment is to so many of our day-to-day lives, it isn’t hard to imagine this being a particularly special Labor Day.

With that in mind, I’ve given the Tangle team (and myself) the day off today to recognize this national holiday. We’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow!

In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to read, check out our Friday (subscribers-only) edition from Afghan-American author Tamim Ansary, who published a piece with us sharing his perspective on the war and the rural-urban divide in Afghanistan. You can read it here.

All the best,

Isaac & the Tangle team

Subscribe now

Peppered throughout these newsletters, I’ve done my best to share the views of Afghans …

Read more

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 13 minutes.

The Texas abortion law. Plus, a question about decriminalizing drugs.

Tomorrow.

You’ve been hearing a lot from me about Afghanistan. Tomorrow, in a subscribers only edition, we’ll be publishing a piece from Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American author who submitted a really compelling piece to us about the last few weeks in Afghanistan. To receive it, you need to be a subscriber. You can do that here:

Subscribe now

Quick hits.

1. Tropical storm Ida battered the northeast, and at least 9 people died in flooding in the New York region. (The floods)

2. A Colorado grand jury has indicted three police officers and two paramedics who were involved in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was placed in a carotid hold and then injected with ketamine while in police custody. (The story)

3. Covid-19-era federal jobless benefits are set to expire on September 6, and the Biden administration has told states to use emergency coronavirus funds if they want to provide additional benefits to their unemployed. (The end)

4. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has been appointed vice chair of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the capitol. (The announcement)

5. A bankruptcy judge has approved a settlement to dissolve OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma. (The ruling)

What D.C. is talking about.

Texas. Yesterday, a divided Supreme Court allowed a new Texas law that bans abortions after six weeks to remain in place. It is the most restrictive abortion law passed in America since abortions became legal nearly 50 years ago. The bill prohibits abortions once medical professionals can say there is “a detectable fetal heartbeat,” but this detection includes embryonic cardiac activity that happens around six weeks — often before a woman knows she is pregnant (these bills are colloquially referred to as “heartbeat bills,” however, opponents of the bill have argued this language is misleading because an embryo isn’t deemed a fetus until the 11th week of pregnancy, and the detectable activity is not always an actual heartbeat). There are exemptions in the bill for medical emergencies but no exemption for rape or incest.

The court’s ruling is not a final order on the bill’s constitutionality, but it will at least temporarily allow the law to go into effect — marking a major turning point in the battle over abortion rights. At least 12 other states have enacted bans on abortion in early stages of pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect. Previously, the high court has not allowed states to ban abortions until after a fetus is able to live outside the womb, which is usually around 22-24 weeks. The unsigned order came down on a 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the three liberal justices in dissent.

The Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB 8, is particularly unique — and appears to have been successful in avoiding the same fate as other bills — because it calls for a novel enforcement scheme. In an effort to avoid being struck down by the court, the crafters of the law delegated enforcement to private parties instead of state officials. Under the law, any person in Texas can sue someone in the state who is alleged to have performed or aided in an abortion, and a successful suit can earn the plaintiff $10,000 in damages per abortion (the woman getting the abortion cannot be sued).

Critics described this mechanism as a bounty for private groups to sue abortion providers, but because state officials are banned from enforcing the law, their lawyers have argued that abortion providers weren’t entitled to an emergency order blocking it. That defense, along with the fact abortion providers are asking the court to rule on issues lower courts have not yet addressed, seems to have favored the state of Texas — at least for the moment. In the court’s majority opinion, it said abortion providers “raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue,” but that continuing litigation raised “complex and novel” questions about legal procedure that undercut the providers’ request to halt the ban.

Writing for the minority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the bill “is a breathtaking act of defiance — of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas.” The Supreme Court is set to hear a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade in the coming term, which begins in October.

We have covered abortion in previous issues here and here.

Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the right and left. Then my take.

What the right is saying.

The right is supportive of this bill, though some are concerned about how long it will be until it’s struck down by a judge.

In his Substack newsletter, Erick-Woods Erickson tried to summarize how we got here.

“The abortion providers in Texas sued a Texas judge and county court clerk and others in an attempt to cast as wide of a net as possible to challenge the Texas Fetal Heartbeat Law that bans abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected,” Woods wrote. “The defendants filed a motion to dismiss the case. It was denied. They appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Fifth Circuit denied the abortion providers' request to hold a quick hearing on the law before it could take effect. The result is that they had to file an emergency application with Sam Alito. Sam Alito chose to do nothing. The result is that the Texas law goes into effect. There will be court hearings. I'm sure a progressive judge will issue an injunction of some kind. But right now in Texas, abortions must cease when a child's heart develops in utero.

“I did not expect the Supreme Court to allow the Texas pro-life law to proceed, but they’ve done just that,” he said in a follow-up shortly after the court’s decision. “In a 5-4 decision overnight, the Supreme Court is allowing the Texas law to proceed pending current litigation. Just as notable, while John Roberts would have stopped the law from proceeding for now given the novel and new type of enforcement mechanism, Roberts patently refused to join the four liberal justices in saying the law is unconstitutional because it violated Roe and Casey… For now, the Supreme Court is allowing Texas’s law to proceed in large part because it allows private rights of action, none of which have actually been taken yet so there is nothing to deal with.”

In The National Review, Alexandra DeSanctis said the outcome was the “product of the legal strategy” pursued by the abortion providers: “waiting to challenge the Texas statute and then rushing to the Supreme Court at the eleventh hour.”

“But the outraged reaction from abortion supporters to the Texas law’s being allowed to take effect is a helpful insight into what we might expect to witness if the Court does its job and reverses the decades of legal inanity propping up the shambles of Roe,” she said, before citing some reactions from the left. “Planned Parenthood described the present situation like this: ‘Because starting today, the majority of people in Texas seeking an abortion will be denied the care they need because of politicians trying to control their bodies and their personal decisions.’

“Of course, the ‘care they need’ here refers to a procedure that intentionally ends the life of an unborn child,” DeSanctis wrote. “And rather than controlling people’s bodies and decisions, politicians are seeking to regulate a procedure that, again, intentionally ends the life of an unborn child. That Planned Parenthood disguises this reality in euphemisms is, as ever, especially telling… Contrary to this rhetoric, it’s important to note that the law in Texas imposes no criminal penalties, and none of its civil provisions apply to a woman who seeks or obtains an abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. But that fact is impossible to locate among nearly any media coverage, let alone in the rhetoric of abortion-rights groups.”

In The Washington Examiner, Tiana Lowe celebrated the news.

“In Texas, the feminist Left is freaking out over a ban on abortions after six weeks of gestation taking effect,” she wrote. “Despite the fact that pregnancies can be ascertained with home tests before a missed period, and even though that six-week embryo has a detectable heartbeat and functional brain stem, Woko Haram would have you believe that this is oppression tantamount to the Taliban. So here's a piece of advice for all of them: If you plan to have sex and you wish not to become pregnant, get some birth control. For most women in the United States, it is free.

“Even if you refuse the pill, the patch, the shot, the IUD, an over-the-counter condom, or any other pregnancy prophylactic, most pharmacies, and even some delivery apps, sell emergency contraceptives without a prescription,” Lowe wrote. “Women in America seeking family planning resources have it better than any of their counterparts on the planet today or in human history. The state either funds or mandates dozens of varieties of free contraception. Even if those fail, hospitals provide Plan B for free… You are not oppressed, and Texas's new law is not an excuse to start pretending you are.”

What the left is saying.

The left is vehemently opposed to the legislation, saying it violates Supreme Court precedent and opens the door for abortion providers to be harassed.

“There’s a sinister brilliance to the way this whole thing has gone down,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times. “Texas fashioned an abortion prohibition whose bizarre, crowdsourced enforcement mechanism gave conservative courts a pretext not to enjoin it despite its conflict with Roe… Pregnant women themselves are exempt, but anyone who helps them, including clinic staff, friends and family, nonprofits that help fund abortions, and even taxi drivers can be held liable. If the people who file lawsuits win, they’re entitled to attorney’s fees and at least $10,000. If they lose, they’re out nothing but whatever it cost to bring the suits, because defendants can’t recoup their attorney’s fees.

“It is also an outgrowth of a Republican Party that increasingly encourages vigilantism,” she wrote. “Today’s G.O.P. made a hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man charged with killing two people during protests against police violence in Kenosha, Wis. Leading Republicans speak of the Jan. 6 insurgents, who tried to stop the certification of an election, as martyrs and political prisoners… The Texas law should be seen in this context. It deputizes abortion opponents to harass their enemies. Texas Right to Life has already launched a ‘whistle-blower’ website where people can submit anonymous tips.”

In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern said the court just “overturned” Roe v. Wade “in the most cowardly manner imaginable.”

“The decision renders almost all abortions in Texas illegal for the first time since 1973.” he wrote. “Although the majority did not say these words exactly, the upshot of Wednesday’s decision is undeniable: The Supreme Court has abandoned the constitutional right to abortion. Roe is no longer good law… Random strangers can sue any ‘abettor’ to an abortion anywhere in Texas and collect a minimum of $10,000, plus attorneys’ fees. The act’s language is incredibly broad, encompassing any friend, family member, clergy member, or counselor who facilitates the abortion in any way. Every employee of an abortion clinic, from front-desk staff to doctors, is liable as well. And when an individual successfully sues an abortion provider, the court must permanently shut it down.

“Texas Republicans devised this convoluted scheme to avoid judicial review of their ban, which blatantly violates binding Supreme Court precedent protecting the right to abortion before viability (around 23 weeks),” Stern wrote. “Abortion providers tried to work around Republicans’ scheme by suing the judges and clerks tasked with executing the ban, as well as an individual who indicated that he would sue an abortion ‘abettor.’ Nonetheless, the majority claimed that these providers failed to make a ‘strong showing’ that their legal arguments against SB 8 would be ‘likely to succeed on the merits,’ complaining about the ‘complex and novel antecedent procedural questions’ of the case. After months spent rewriting the court’s own rules by awarding themselves the power to intervene in cases that present all manner of ‘novel’ legal questions—including COVID restrictions and the eviction moratorium—the conservative majority decided it was powerless to halt a direct attack on Roe. And it did so with a thinly reasoned one-paragraph order handed down in the dead of night.”

In The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri criticized the hypocrisy of “freedom” in Texas.

“Let me explain!” she wrote. “Here in Texas, your body is your own, and the government is not going to interfere. We respect you as an individual much too much. We believe you should have total bodily freedom — to carry a firearm (basically a body part; has ‘arm’ in it) or breathe infectiously on a stranger. That’s why there are no mask mandates, just this new six-week abortion ban: because we don’t want the government to interfere with people’s lives, ever, except the minor degree to which someone’s life is interfered with by having to carry a fetus to term inside themself. Which is barely an inconvenience at all.

“We believe in freedom,” Petri wrote. “Your fist must stop where my nose starts, the Alamo, pew pew, etc. Except this one minor thing that is obviously not a big deal, where you have to use your body to build another body from whole cloth, give it eyeballs and a circulatory system, undergo months and months of creeping bodily horror as your torso becomes unrecognizable to you, familiar smells become off-putting, and the recently fired ‘Jeopardy!’ man threatens your livelihood, and then at the end of this process you have a human being for whom you have to arrange a life. Compare that minor, barely palpable discomfort with the shocking, invasive horror of placing a damp strip of fabric across your nose when you enter a business establishment for three to five minutes. I shudder just imagining it.”

My take.

Newsflash: we’re not going to solve the abortion debate here, however magical this newsletter is. I’m also not just going to punt for fear of upsetting people, either. There is obviously a debate about the ethical nature of abortion. As a reader put it to me recently, even the most die-hard, pro-choice advocate would agree that once a child is born, it has a right to live. And if you draw a line to the moment before conception, there is obviously no life whose rights need to be considered. So somewhere between those two points, things change for many people. But I actually don’t think that is a debate we need to resolve for this issue (there’s my partial punt: you can read past coverage here and here).

When examining Supreme Court rulings in Tangle — or the law in general — I usually go through a few different stages. The first is the standard sniff test: does this law feel right? And I’ll be honest with you, few pieces of legislation have failed the sniff test for me as badly as this one does. A bill that allows a random person in Texas to sue a doctor in Texas for providing an abortion to a woman at six weeks? Or a cab driver for taking her there? And to have a potential financial incentive of at least $10,000 of damages if they manage to win that lawsuit? Even if the woman was raped? Any one of these things on its own would be enough to set off my alarms — together they’re horrifying.

The second thing I do is try to put away my feelings and examine the process. In this case, it looks like the abortion providers just got bulldozed by the state. In the legal sense, they appear to have been outmaneuvered: the crafting of the law was cunning in achieving its end, and the providers waited weeks to act on it, then clearly got caught flat-footed. Because of how the law was crafted, and because no provider has been sued, the court can’t yet declare it unconstitutional. However you want to cut it, it appears the abortion providers expected a different outcome from the court and were not prepared for this moment.

The third thing I try to do is cut through the legal jargon and complexity of these rulings — of which, in this case, there is a lot — and just try to simplify what’s happening. In that regard, the bill again looks pretty absurd. The precedent in this country, right now, is Roe. Roe makes it clear abortion is, at minimum, legal until a fetus is viable, usually at about 23 weeks. Yet in our second most populous state, most abortions — perhaps more than 85 percent — and many well before viability, are now illegal. Anyone who “abets” in that abortion could face financial ruin, and any citizen can make thousands of dollars by successfully suing one of those abettors. Worse, it appears they can do so with impunity, as the sued have little legal recourse to recover lost earnings or legal fees. As Stern wrote, precedent is only precedent if the court enforces it, and in this case, they haven’t. It’s head spinning.

Now, I know what many pro-lifers are thinking: Roe v. Wade is a ridiculous judicial overreach in the first place, and if you want abortion to be legal you should go and pass a Constitutional amendment or law to make it so. But that argument is actually irrelevant here. The fact is Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, is the precedent, and should be enforced. Legally. Until it no longer is the precedent, this bill is just as ridiculous as it looks.

This brings me to my final point: this all looks bad to me in a vacuum, but it’s made even worse by the fact there is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade coming in the next term this October — one that will include oral arguments, a full robust debate, and opinions from the justices on how and why they are making their rulings. If the court is going to strike down Roe v. Wade and allow states to craft their own abortion laws, that’s how they should do it. Given the stakes of this topic, it’s the minimum we deserve from our Supreme Court. Instead, we essentially have them throwing their hands up and saying they don’t know what to do, so they’ll allow a law that clearly violates constitutional precedent to go into effect by default.

I understand that for the millions of Americans who view abortion as murder, this is a day to celebrate, because who cares if ending the systematic killing of babies requires some quirky judicial maneuvering? I also know that many of those Americans have genuine, well-intentioned and empathetic motivations for that position. But this is a truly dangerous, litigious bill that is going to create chaos in Texas and, worse, create financial incentives for frivolous lawsuits, to say nothing of the impact on women and healthcare providers across the state. For me, something like this doesn’t — and shouldn’t — pass that basic sniff test.

Your questions, answered.

Q: There's a growing wave of drug decriminalization efforts in the United States, as well as some more fringe pushes for full legalization. You've written before about how you don't believe in the efficacy of prohibition, but what sort of system do you think we should move to going forward?

— Bryan, Chicago, IL

Tangle: Generally speaking, I would say basically everything I can think of should be decriminalized. I don’t say that because I want more people using drugs — just the opposite. I’m not talking about legal opioids like heroin or percocet that someone can buy at a dispensary as you can now buy cannabis in Colorado. But it seems clear to me that imprisoning people for drug use and possession is counterproductive.

Drug dealing is a different conversation, and I’m not totally sure my opinion is fully formed there. Do I want the dealers who sold my high school friends heroin to go to jail after seeing so many of them ruin their lives or die? Yes. I do. Am I certain that putting those people in prison would make the world safer? No. I’m not.

It’s also true, though, that decriminalization can lead to legalization and then make many dangerous drugs easier to access. Alcohol and tobacco, for instance, destroy lives and ruin public health every day. Making them legal has made them more accessible, and the cost to public health has been tremendous. Our society is attached to alcohol and tobacco, but they are objectively horrible for us and are great financial and health burdens on the country as a whole (they’re also, of course, big profit centers).

That’s why decriminalizing a drug — as a starting point — seems wise to me. We know that keeping something illegal, or threatening a prison sentence for using it, does not reduce its use. We know that legalizing a drug, and allowing the sale and regulation and taxation of it, can increase its use. So as a baseline, decriminalizing something so people aren’t being thrown in jail for what they put in their bodies seems good. Legalizing something is a larger conversation that requires a drug-specific debate.

Not many people have news sources they trust. If you’ve been enjoying Tangle, please consider helping solve this problem by spreading the word. You can email Tangle to friends by clicking here.

A story that matters.

Around 15 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been thrown away in the U.S. since March, according to a new NBC investigation. The 15.1 million doses wasted is likely an undercount, according to government data obtained by NBC News. “Four national pharmacy chains reported more than 1 million wasted doses each,” according to the report. “Walgreens reported the most waste of any pharmacy, state or other vaccine provider, with nearly 2.6 million wasted doses. CVS reported 2.3 million wasted doses, while Walmart reported 1.6 million and Rite Aid reported 1.1 million.” While the reasons for discarding the doses are not listed, common issues have included cracked vials, malfunctioning freezers, and more doses in a vial than people who want to take them. NBC has the story.

Numbers.

• 85%. The estimated number of abortions that happen after 6 weeks of pregnancy in Texas.

• 54,741. The number of abortions that took place in Texas in 2020, according to Texas Health and Human Services.

• 40. The number of abortion clinics in Texas in 2013.

• 24. The number of abortion clinics in Texas today.

• 166,080. The average number of new Covid-19 cases in America every day for the last week.

• 210, 816. The number of new Covid-19 cases recorded in America yesterday.

From a reader…

Sometimes I ask readers to tell me how they would pitch subscribing to Tangle to other people. Here is what one reader said:

I used to get stressed out reading the news and trying to stay "informed" and up-to-date on everything. Now I read this one informative newsletter every day and get a good grasp of what is top in the news, as well as a smattering of smaller updates, special interest stories/links, and stats. Each day they take the top story and explain what each side is saying about it, as well as a little summary/editorial on it. Tangle is FREE Monday-Thursday, but you should send them your $5/month for the Friday editions anyway. We need to support efforts to keep the news balanced, informative, and stress-free.

Subscribe now

Have a nice day.

Video of a cow outside New Orleans is going viral after it was found in a tree in the wake of Hurricane Ida. The cow was discovered in a tree in Florissant, Louisiana, east of New Orleans, in the Louisiana bayou. Rescue workers rushed to the unusual scene and successfully got the cow down, who presumably ended up in the tree thanks to the winds of Hurricane Ida — which were the fifth fastest ever recorded for a hurricane as it made landfall in the U.S. (USA Today) 

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 13 minutes.

The mask mandate lawsuit and a question about that trip two Congressmen took to Afghanistan.

Tangle audio…

Many of you have asked about “readings” or audio versions of Tangle. I wanted to give you an update: we are officially practicing recordings now. I have been doing trial runs reading Tangle, improvising a bit, and turning each newsletter into a daily podcast. We are eyeing September 13 for our launch, when you’ll be able to listen to the newsletter each day in podcast form. We are super, super excited to roll this out. But we also want to make sure we do it right. Of course, the newsletter won’t change and we’ll keep producing these as usual every day. The podcast will just be an add-on.

So stay tuned!

Quick hits.

1. A law that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of rape and incest, went into effect in Texas at midnight last night (The new law). Meanwhile, the state also voted to advance a wave of changes to their elections that Democrats had fled the state to prevent from becoming law. (The bill)

2. Heavy clashes are taking place in Panjshir Valley, the last province in Afghanistan that the Taliban has yet to control. (The fighting)

3. Southern Louisiana residents are growing desperate for food, power and clean water in the sweltering aftermath of Hurricane Ida. (The aftermath)

4. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has threatened any companies who comply with the House’s Jan. 6 investigators asking for phone records of members of Congress. (The investigation)

5. An Afghan interpreter who helped rescue then-Vice President Biden in Afghanistan 13 years ago said he has been left behind during the evacuation. (The plea)

What D.C. is talking about.

Mask mandates. On Monday, the Education Department opened civil rights investigations into five Republican-led states that banned mask requirements in schools, or limited those that were already in place. The Education Department said the policies could discriminate against students with disabilities or those who have health conditions that would prevent them from safely attending school in districts that were not able to mandate mask-wearing. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights announced the investigations into Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.

President Joe Biden said he would use the power of the federal government to ensure schools could implement Covid-19 safety measures, and the decision to investigate these states marks a major escalation in that battle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal mask wearing for both students and teachers in the classroom, guidance that was issued in response to the more contagious Delta variant of Covid-19.

But some states have responded by passing their own laws limiting or fully banning mask mandates. In Iowa, for example, a state law forbids school boards from imposing mask mandates. In Tennessee, an executive order from Gov. Bill Lee allows families to opt out of mask mandates. Other states, like Florida, Texas, Arkansas and Arizona, have also tried to ban mask requirements, but those prohibitions have been thrown out by courts or simply ignored by school districts. In some cases, like South Carolina, the top education officials at the state level are clashing with the government and siding with the Biden administration. In Florida, the state is now attempting to withhold funds from two school districts requiring masks, despite the fact a court ruled that the state did not have the power to ban mandates or withhold salaries.

About 6 in 10 Americans say students and teachers should be required to wear face masks while in school, according to an Associated Press poll. An Axios/Ipsos poll put the number closer to 7 in 10. Parents were slightly more likely than all adults to say students and teachers in K-12 schools should be required to wear masks.

Below, we’ll take a look at some of the commentary over the clashes between states and the federal government, states and their school boards, and the arguments over mask mandates in schools.

Then my take.

What the left is saying.

The left argues that school districts should be able to keep their kids safe, and banning mask mandates is a violation of civil rights.

In The Atlantic, Wendy Parmet said we have entered a new phase of Covid-19 legal battles where people are suing their states in an effort to get protection from the virus.

“The most interesting cases to date, however, have been brought on behalf of children with disabilities who claim that the anti-mask measures violate federal laws prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities,” Parmet wrote. “The theory is that by failing to allow schools to take reasonable steps such as mandating masks to make schools safe for children who are at high risk of complications from COVID-19, the states have violated students’ civil rights… By focusing on students’ rights to be safe at school, this new round of litigation seeks a very different type of freedom than plaintiffs sought in the earlier round. Now, instead of demanding the freedom from health measures, plaintiffs are seeking the freedom that, in a pandemic, only health measures can provide.

“These new cases offer the courts an important opportunity to correct the simplistic view of freedom evident in the initial round of litigation,” Parmet said. “Still, in a well-functioning polity, we would not need litigation to ensure that children can remain healthy at school. Public-health measures would be less contentious and less often litigated. Although courts have a crucial role to play, especially in protecting the rights of the most vulnerable individuals, judges generally lack training or experience in public health. They are not well equipped to make public-health policy, which is what they have been doing, far too frequently, throughout the pandemic.”

The Washington Post editorial board criticized two Virginia legislators who sent a letter to school boards telling them they can ignore mask mandates without fear of legal repercussions, despite the fact the legislators helped pass the mask mandates in the first place.

“Encouraging citizens and local authorities to ignore the law is a cynical and dangerous game, especially when it’s played by lawmakers themselves,” the board wrote. “In this case, the cynicism comes with a helping of hypocrisy: Ms. [Siobhan] Dunnavant, the bill’s chief sponsor, is an obstetrician in Richmond whose own medical practice, HCA Virginia Physicians, requires patients, staff and visitors to wear masks ‘to ensure the safety of all,’ according to its website.

“A small handful of Virginia school districts initially balked at the CDC guidance on mask-wearing,” the board said. “All but one or two then complied when the state’s health commissioner announced an indoor mask mandate for state schools on Aug. 12. The senators’ letter might not prompt open defiance, but it could prompt some systems to encourage parents to opt their children out on lax pretexts. That’s what happened in Fauquier County, west of D.C. Then, barely two weeks after opening, the 11,000-student system reported 117 covid-19 cases, with more than 570 students and staff in quarantine. There’s a cost to ignoring public health advice in a pandemic. Elected officials have a responsibility to warn their constituents about that cost, not goad them into gratuitous risk-taking.”

In The Nation, David Perry wrote about being the father of a 14-year-old boy who is autistic and has Down syndrome.

“These laws promise him a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment adapted, within reason, to his needs,” Perry said. “Notice the different components: One type of law focuses on the content of the education itself and provides the supports and adaptations to ensure he’s learning. Another makes sure the education is safe and accessible to him, including the school building itself… I asked Matthew Dietz, litigation director at Disability Independence Group Inc, whether this lawsuit represented a new legal strategy. Laughing, he told me, ‘I try not to do new arguments because new arguments usually lose. This is the oldest ADA argument that there is. Kids need to go to school. They are entitled to a reasonable accommodation. It’s not an undue burden at all for somebody else to wear a mask. This is an argument that’s 40 years old.’

“Meanwhile,” Perry said, “kids are going back to school, case counts are rising, and pediatric hospitals are filling. At one Houston hospital, hospitalizations for kids soared from single digits to more than 30 in less than a week. In Hillsborough County, Fla., about 13,000 staff and students—over 5 percent of the total staff and public school student population—are currently Covid positive or in quarantine due to exposure.”

What the right is saying.

The right argues that the science of the effectiveness of masking children is inconclusive and the Department of Education is overstepping its boundaries with this lawsuit.

Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Dr. H. Cody Meissner, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Children’s Hospital, said they weren’t sure if masks would even help.

“Do masks reduce Covid transmission in children? Believe it or not, we could find only a single retrospective study on the question, and its results were inconclusive,” they wrote in early August. “Yet two weeks ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sternly decreed that 56 million U.S. children and adolescents, vaccinated or not, should cover their faces regardless of the prevalence of infection in their community. Authorities in many places took the cue to impose mandates in schools and elsewhere, on the theory that masks can’t do any harm.

“That isn’t true,” they wrote. “Some children are fine wearing a mask, but others struggle. Those who have myopia can have difficulty seeing because the mask fogs their glasses. (This has long been a problem for medical students in the operating room.) Masks can cause severe acne and other skin problems. The discomfort of a mask distracts some children from learning. By increasing airway resistance during exhalation, masks can lead to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. And masks can be vectors for pathogens if they become moist or are used for too long.”

Corey DeAngelis wrote that masks are turning Democrats “in favor of school choice.”

“The good news is that we might find some unity amid such division,” DeAngelis wrote. “A nationwide poll by Echelon Insights in August found that 79% of respondents with an opinion support allowing families to take their children’s taxpayer-provided education money to a private or home school if their public school doesn’t mandate masks. Surprisingly, Democrats favored this school-choice proposal more than Republicans, with support at 82% and 78%, respectively.

“We’ve all learned a lot over the past 18 months,” he added. “The battles over school reopenings, masking and curriculum have revealed the main problem with the one-size-fits-all public school system. Many Republicans supported school choice well before 2020. But Democratic voters are now also realizing that uniform school systems won’t always work in their favor… Some policy makers are beginning to figure out that choice is the best solution. In Arizona, a new program allows families access to federal relief funding to pay for private education if their children’s public school mandates masks, suspends in-person instruction, or subjects students to other Covid-19 constraints. The Florida Board of Education recently unanimously approved allowing all families to take their children’s state-funded education dollars to a private school if they disagree with their public school’s masking rules. Funding students directly and empowering all families—and not forcing one-size-fits-all mandates—is the way forward.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights lawsuit was “a contortion of law.”

“Far from being a question of civil rights, the wisdom of mask mandates, like all Covid mitigation measures, is an empirical and policy debate,” they said. “Certainly no one would suggest that anti-mask policies are based on animus toward students with disabilities. Most data suggests the danger of coronavirus in children is comparable to that of the influenza virus, though the jury is still out on children and the more contagious Delta variant.

“The OCR’s letter to the states notes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends masking for students ‘age 2 and older,’” the board noted. “Yet that measure is not cost-free: Last year Susan Hopkins, a top U.K. public-health official, recommended against masking young children because ‘it’s really important that they can see facial expressions in order to develop their communications and language skills.’ Presumably seeing facial expressions is as important for children with certain disabilities, yet it would also be wrong for the federal government to try to ban mask mandates under the guise of civil rights. Our view is that school districts are best situated to decide school masking policies for themselves. Some governors may even have exceeded their statutory authority by dictating school masking policies, as judges recently ruled in Texas and Florida. Yet the OCR’s effort to federalize the issue is an abuse of its power.”

My take.

There are so many interesting threads here it’s hard to know where to start. But the science of masking children is probably the best.

The plain reality is that we don’t have a lot of great studies on this and I do not see nearly enough to tell you affirmatively that mandating masks on kids will make schools much safer. What we do know is that in schools where the smorgasbord of prevention methods — regular testing, masking and good ventilation, for instance — are put in place, we often see success in limiting Covid-19 spread. But it’s hard to pull apart the threads and know which measure is doing what.

It’s also true that the people claiming masks are harmless are wrong. No, you’re not going to get carbon dioxide poisoning (and suggesting as much makes you sound ridiculous), but masks do increase anxiety, impede socialization, and will almost certainly cause breathing difficulties for some children. Little annoyances, like acne or not being able to see through your glasses, may seem minor to us adults — but for kids they can be much bigger stressors.

And, as I’ve said repeatedly in this newsletter: the relative threat of Covid-19 to children is still on par with things like the flu, and most cloth masks you’re wearing are far less effective than an N95 mask. But it’s also not just about the kids! Every school has adults — and not just teachers. Administrators, low-wage cafeteria workers, custodial staff, and so on. Many of them are elderly or at-risk, and they deserve protection, too. The teachers I’ve spoken to in New York City schools that are trying to reopen have said unanimously that Covid-19 is spreading, is a huge distraction, and is forcing kids and teachers into isolation. They support basically any measure that will reduce the spread and presence of the virus even a little bit.

For real-world examples, we can also look abroad. In the United Kingdom, students under 12 and teachers are not mandated to wear masks in the classroom. During their own Delta surge, schools stayed open and they were not a higher site of transmission than the community at large. The Delta wave in England did not turn schools into a driver of the surge. But — and this is a big “but” — the kids there were also being rapid tested by their parents on a weekly basis. This is a good example of something Americans could be doing as an alternative to masking.

The politics of all this are fascinating, too. Covid-19 has exposed some flexible ideologies on both sides. Conservatives who often harp on local and states rights are now attempting to take away the choice for millions of people by banning mask mandates in their states. Meanwhile, liberals who have often leaned into federal or state regulations over schools are now championing the power of school boards to buck the government. It turns out commitment to these kinds of freedoms is often issue-dependent.

Finally, the actual lawsuit: it seems to me that the Biden administration is in a fairly powerful position. A lot of disability lawyers seem to think they are on very solid legal footing. One told The Nation’s David Perry that “a mask is a ramp,” essentially making the point that the same legal authority that requires schools to have ramps for accessibility will also compel them to make sure all students are masked so that the most vulnerable stay safe. What seems clear to me in this very messy issue is that states should not be allowed to unilaterally ban mask mandates, as many have, and I’m proud to say that’s a consistent throughline in my ideology. Removing the choice from school districts to use masks or other Covid-19 mitigation measures shouldn’t be legal, probably isn’t legal, and may very well get steamrolled by the federal government soon.

Your questions, answered.

Q: Can you talk more about Reps. Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Peter Meijer (R-MI)’s trip to Afghanistan? With the findings from “the Afghanistan Papers” we know that the Pentagon has intentionally misled Congress and the Executive Branch. I feel that this trip is warranted under those circumstances yet they are catching flack from their party leaders. Why not support this effort of oversight? Isn't that the role Congress is supposed to play?

— Addison, Asheboro, North Carolina

Tangle: Just in case you missed this: Reps. Moulton and Meijer took an unauthorized trip to Afghanistan last week to see what was happening on the ground. Then they were criticized harshly and accused of distracting security and government resources from the clearly urgent evacuation efforts.

Personally, I found the trip pretty annoying as well. You are right about the Afghanistan papers and the lies that were told to all of us for years. But Congress has a pretty clear process for “fact-finding” missions like this, and given everything we were hearing from the ground it seems ludicrous that two Congressmen would drop themselves in the middle of it with no notice, organizational approval or planning. Even if they only took away one State Department official, two soldiers and one van for transportation for three hours… how many people could have been evacuated who were there at that time? One? Five? 10? Whatever that number is would have been far preferable.

So, to me, it felt like a political stunt. Both are military veterans who have been in war zones before and I’m certain they were equipped to handle the situation. But what did they tangibly gain? They came back and told us it was chaos on the ground. Great. We knew that. I get the allure of it, and I get the message they were trying to get out (“we went and saw it and now we know we need to do x, y and z”), but it struck me as very self-involved and poorly thought out, all to bring home what was information we already had from multiple sources like diplomats, soldiers, journalists and civilians on the ground.

A story that matters.

Social security will have to cut benefits by 2034 if Congress does nothing to address the program’s long-term funding shortfall, according to a new report from the Spcial Security and Medicare trustees. That so one year earlier than last year, at which point the program will only be able to pay 78 percent in promised benefits to retirees and disabled beneficiaries. The Covid-19 pandemic and economic recession are being blamed for the updated timeline. At the end of 2020, around 65 million people were receiving Social Security benefits and nearly 63 million were covered under Medicare. CNN has the story.

Numbers.

• 15. The number of states that require wearing masks in school.

• 9. The number of states that have attempted to ban mask mandates for schools.

• 92%. The percentage of Democrats who support mandatory masking in schools.

• 67%. The percentage of independents who support mandatory masking in schools.

• 44%. The percentage of Republicans who support mandatory masking in schools.

Don’t forget.

If you’ve been reading Tangle for free, you’re missing out: subscribers to this newsletter get an extra edition every week on Fridays, and they’re often the most popular editions in the newsletter. While the Monday through Thursday newsletters keep you up to date and informed of the daily news, Friday editions include interviews, guest essays, personal pieces, reader-requested content, deep dives and more.

Join the party!

Have a nice day.

A wealthy tourist in Turkey has changed the life of a hotel bellboy for the good. Charles George Courtney was a regular at Korur De Lux Hotel in Kusadasi, Turkey. The British man struck up a friendship with Taskin Dasdan, who worked at the hotel as a bellboy for 31 years. When Courtney died earlier this year, Dasdan got a phone call from the United Kingdom and was informed that he had been left the majority of Courtney’s inheritance — as well as smaller amounts bequeathed to other staff -- enough money so that the bellboy would never have to work again. Irish Mirror has the story.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 11 minutes.

The war in Afghanistan comes to an end.

Clarification.

In the last few days, several news outlets — including this one — have referred to some $80 billion worth of American military equipment left to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Further reporting on this claim has clarified that the $83 billion is a sum from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) which includes money spent on rebuilding the government and training. The sum of the weaponry is still mind-boggling. But we gave the Afghan government something more like $24 billion in weaponry and equipment over 20 years, and it’s not clear how much of what has been left with the Taliban is still operational. So it’s not close to $83 billion worth.

Quick hits

1. The Education Department said Monday it has launched investigations into five GOP-led states that banned mask mandates in schools. (The investigation)

2. China announced a new restriction on young gamers, saying they could only play online video games for a maximum of three hours per week. (The ban)

3. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) falsely claimed that elections in the U.S. are “rigged” and warned that there would be “bloodshed” if the electoral system wasn’t fixed. (The video)

4. Trapped citizens in New Orleans have resorted to posting their addresses on social media and asking rescue teams to come help them. The death toll is now up to four, with more than 1 million people still without power. (The pleas)

5. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) called on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to be replaced. (The demand)

What D.C. is talking about.

Afghanistan. Yesterday, the longest war in U.S. history — 7,267 days, or nearly 20 years — officially came to an end. The final U.S. military forces left Afghanistan with Taliban fighters firing their weapons into the air in celebration. Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division who was leading the evacuation, boarded a cargo plane that left Kabul at 3:29pm EST.

Approximately 66,000 Afghan military and police, 47,245 Afghan civilians and 51,191 Taliban fighters died in the war. 2,461 U.S. troops and 3,846 U.S. contractors were also killed, and 20,000 more were wounded. 13 Americans and dozens of Afghans died in the final days of the withdrawal when a pair of suicide bombings took place outside the airport being used for evacuations.

The war began after the September 11 attacks in 2001, which U.S. officials say were coordinated by al-Qaeda, who had been welcomed and protected by the Taliban in Afghanistan. When the Taliban leaders refused to turn over members of al-Qaeda, the U.S. invaded in an effort to kill Osama bin Laden and wipe out al-Qaeda, thus beginning the “war on terror.” The war in Afghanistan is estimated to have cost about $2 trillion. 

In the final weeks of the war, as the Taliban re-took the country from the Afghan government and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, more than 123,000 people were evacuated, including about 6,000 Americans. But not everyone made it out: U.S. officials say between 100 and 200 Americans who want to leave remain in Afghanistan, as well as at least 100,000 Afghan allies who are attempting to flee the Taliban rule. But the threat of another attack on U.S. troops, a commitment to the August 31 deadline and concerns about inclement weather forced the final planes out.

For the fifth time since 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, a new political order is rising in a country often called the “Graveyard of Empires.” Supporters of the war will point to many accomplishments: the death of Osama bin Laden, the spread of girls’ education, the weakening of the al-Qaeda and two (relatively) democratic elections. Detractors argue the war brought more violence, cost an exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars, did not stop the proliferation of terrorism and has left the country just as corrupt and fractured as it was when we arrived.

Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the right and left to the war’s final days. Then my take.

What the right is saying.

The right’s opinions vary, with some focusing on Biden’s “failed withdrawal,” others concerned about U.S. standing globally, and some saying it’s just good the war is over.

The New York Post editorial board called it a “dishonorable end” to the war, and blamed President Biden.

“He decided early on that troops would be gone by Aug. 31 no matter what, even while claiming there’d be no ‘hasty rush to the exit.’ The withdrawal would happen ‘responsibly, deliberately and safely.’ It was ‘highly unlikely’ the Taliban would take over soon, and there was ‘no circumstance’ where helicopters would be needed to evacuate people from the US embassy,” the board wrote. “That was all fantasy, of course… It also explains why Biden was vacationing at Camp David and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Hamptons as Kabul fell. They actually believed their own PR.

“And despite all the chaos and bloodshed since — and the dark days ahead — they’re still indulging their delusions: Asked by ABC’s Martha Raddatz on Sunday what he’d tell Americans and Afghans about leaving the country after the airport closes, Blinken cited a ‘senior Taliban spokesman’ who’s ‘repeatedly reassured the Afghan people’ they’d be free to travel after Aug. 31,” the board wrote. “Oh, and ‘the international community intends to hold the Taliban’ to their commitments. Real-world translation: You’re on your own, folks. Good luck getting out!”

In The New York Times, Ross Douthat said the final days of the war made him even more cynical “about America’s capacities as a superpower, our mission in Afghanistan and the class of generals, officials, experts and politicos who sustained its generational extension.”

“First the withdrawal’s shambolic quality, culminating in yesterday’s acknowledgment that between 100 and 200 Americans had not made the final flights from Kabul, displayed an incompetence in departing a country that matched our impotence at pacifying it. There were aspects of the chaos that were probably inevitable, but the Biden White House was clearly caught flat-footed by the speed of the Taliban advance, with key personnel disappearing on vacation just before the Kabul government dissolved. And the president himself has appeared exhausted, aged, overmatched — making basic promises about getting every American safely home and then seeing them overtaken by events.

“At the same time, the circumstances under which the Biden withdrawal had to happen doubled as a devastating indictment of the policies pursued by his three predecessors, which together cost roughly $2,000,000,000,000 (it’s worth writing out all those zeros) and managed to build nothing in the political or military spheres that could survive for even a season without further American cash and military supervision,” Douthat said. “Before this summer, in other words, it was possible to read all the grim inspector general reports and document dumps on Afghanistan, count yourself a cynic about the war effort and still imagine that America got something for all that spending, no matter how much was spent on Potemkin installations or siphoned off by pederast warlords or recirculated to Northern Virginia contractors. Now, though, we know that in terms of actual staying power, all our nation-building efforts couldn’t even match what the Soviet Union managed in its dotage.”

In The Wall Street Journal, John Bolton argued that China and Russia were “eyeing” a retreating U.S.

“One major misjudgment underlying the ‘ending endless war’ mantra was that withdrawing affected only Afghanistan,” Bolton wrote. “To the contrary, the departure constitutes a major, and deeply regrettable, U.S. strategic realignment. China and Russia, our main global adversaries, are already seeking to reap advantages… In the near term, responding to both menaces and opportunities emanating from Afghanistan, China will seek to increase its already considerable influence in Pakistan; Russia will do the same in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics; and both will expand their Middle East initiatives, often along with Iran. There is little evidence that the White House is ready to respond to any of these threats.

“Over the longer term, Beijing and Moscow enjoy a natural division of labor in threatening America and its allies, in three distinct theaters: China on its periphery’s long arc from Japan across Southeast Asia out to India and Pakistan; Russia in Eastern and Central Europe; and the Russian-Iranian-Chinese entente cordiale in the Middle East,” Bolton said. “U.S. planning must contemplate many threats arising simultaneously across these and other theaters. This underscores how strained our defense capabilities are to protect our far-flung interests, especially given the unprecedented domestic spending demands President Biden is now making. Washington’s most important task, therefore, is somehow to secure significant increases in defense budgets across the full threat spectrum, from terrorism to cyberwar. Diplomacy alone is no substitute.”

What the left is saying.

The left’s opinions are also mixed, with some arguing the war is a reminder of wasted money, others saying America is not in retreat, and still others saying the situation on the ground is a disaster.

Katrina vanden Heuvel argued that we can afford Biden’s investments at home based on the money we spend on war.

“Here’s the price tag: $5.48 trillion. No, that’s not the cost of what President Biden is calling a ‘generational investment’ to rebuild America. That’s the price of the so-called War on Terror since 2001, as detailed by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs — the cost to U.S. taxpayers of sending forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries in a continuing war that, as Biden implied last week, has metastasized more than it has succeeded,” vanden Heuvel wrote. “Roughly half of that total — $2.3 trillion — went into Afghanistan. That total doesn’t include the priceless human cost of nearly 6,300 American lives lost, thousands more wounded, and the vast losses suffered by the Afghan people.

“Contrast that sum — and those lives — with the $3.5 trillion that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) correctly dubs the ‘most consequential piece of legislation’ since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal,” vanden Heuvel added. “It would begin to address the existential threat posed by climate change, reduce childhood poverty by half, expand public education from pre-K to free community college, extend health care through Medicare while making drugs more affordable, support families with help for day care, paid family leave and a child allowance and more… Trillions of dollars for debacles abroad versus trillions of dollars for investments at home. Yet, appropriations for the former zip through the Congress while the Biden domestic investments must overcome a filibuster by a unified Republican opposition and posturing by a handful of centrist Democrats demanding cuts.”

In The New York Times, Dennis Ross said to “stop the doomsaying.”

“Vietnam, cited so often in recent days, was undoubtedly a debacle,” Ross wrote. “But it did not spell the end of American leadership on the world stage, nor did it lead others to believe they could not depend on the United States. And since then, there have been many other geopolitical challenges and top-level decisions (or lack thereof) that have cast doubt on American credibility. They did not, however, lead to a waning of American influence.

“Despite the messy exit from Kabul and the devastating bombings at the Kabul Airport, Afghanistan will be no different,” Ross added. “Partners and allies will publicly decry American decisions for some time, as they continue to rely on the U.S. economy and military. The reality will remain: America is the most powerful country in the world, and its allies will need its help to combat direct threats and an array of new, growing national security dangers, including cyberwar and climate change. That does not mean that the United States can dismiss the costs of its mistakes in Afghanistan. But it does show that America can recover.”

The Washington Post editorial board said it was a “disaster” that Americans were being left behind.

“Enormous as it is, the number of people evacuated by air from Kabul since the end of July — about 122,000 — is not large enough,” the board wrote. “Thankfully, many thousands of American citizens, third-country nationals and Afghans who worked directly for U.S. and allied military forces or embassies made it out. But many thousands of people did not, including former U.S. interpreters and their families, and Afghans classified by President Biden and his administration as ‘vulnerable’ — such as staff for U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations and women’s rights activists… This is a moral disaster, one attributable not to the actions of military and diplomatic personnel in Kabul — who have been courageous and professional, in the face of deadly dangers — but to mistakes, strategic and tactical, by Mr. Biden and his administration.

“Those left behind appear to include many local journalists who worked for U.S.-supported media such as the Afghan service of RFE/RL,” the board wrote. “Painfully emblematic, too, is the experience of the American University of Afghanistan, all but a few of whose roughly 4,000 students, faculty, alumni and employees remain in Kabul. AUAF was the signature U.S.-funded civilian institution in Kabul. The school symbolized not just the U.S.-Afghan relationship, but modernity itself. Therefore, it came under repeated and deadly attack from the Taliban, yet brave and determined women and men continued to teach and study there — until Kabul fell and the Taliban raised its flag over the campus. A last-ditch attempt to bus several hundred members of the university community to the airport ended in frustration Sunday, when it became clear that civilian rescue flights were ending. Now, university officials tell us, these — mostly young — Afghans are back in Kabul, feeling abandoned and afraid.”

My take.

The case the Biden administration can make to defend itself is dwindling. But if I were on their communications team this is what I’d say: the State Department issued warnings to Americans to leave the country as early as April. We could not force people to go. We did not expect the Afghan army to fall as quickly as it did, and we largely succeeded in retrieving more than 100,000 people in a matter of weeks. We had one mass casualty event, but one that was practically unavoidable unless we totally refused to search or welcome Afghans to the airport. All of this — the infrastructure present in Afghanistan, the state of the war, the state of the Afghan government, the presence of ISIS-K, the deal with the Taliban, was inherited from previous administrations.

That’s about the best defense you could mount.

And it’s not a very good one.

I support President Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan. Like Ross Douthat, my big-picture takeaway from the last few weeks is more cynicism about our inability to nation-build, the colossal waste of money that could have been spent here at home, the disastrous mistakes made by the Bush administration, and the decades of lies from the U.S. government about what was actually taking place on the ground. Biden, too, recognized these things, and has consistently been critical of the war and promised to end it. He’s fulfilling that promise now, something neither Obama nor Trump could do, despite similar rhetoric.

But how can this be described as anything but a disaster? We were told the Taliban couldn’t take over for months or years, yet they’re already in control. We were told no Americans would be left behind, but at least one hundred who want to leave are still there. We were told none of our allies would be abandoned, but tens of thousands have been. The president we propped up fled. We had one of the deadliest attacks in the history of the entire war take place on our way out. Desperate Afghan teenagers fell from the wheel wells of American planes as they took off. Diplomatic systems to process and vet Afghans were overwhelmed. Nearly everything we built crumbled in weeks — we lost lives along the way and we ultimately stuck to an arbitrary deadline because we could not confidently control the threats on the ground.

When this started a few months ago, it would have been hard to imagine it going much worse.

The last few weeks are one of those formidable events that expose the partisan hacks on both sides: Trump loyalists who dutifully agreed with Trump that we should withdraw, supported an early deadline to leave, and spent about 12 hours being upset when we abandoned our Kurdish allies in Syria are now calling for Biden to resign or be impeached. Meanwhile, Biden loyalists continue to move the goalposts on withdrawal, first celebrating the promise nobody would be left behind, then the assurances no American lives had been lost, and then — when it became apparent those things weren’t going to happen — the last thing they’re standing on is that Biden stuck to a deadline we could have extended.

Biden, like Trump and Obama, inherited a disastrous war brought to you by the George W. Bush administration. Unlike Trump and Obama, he actually pulled the final troops out in the face of unwavering pressure from the interventionist punditry, members Congress, and some allies. Hopefully, it’s really over (reports of continuing CIA operations and potential forthcoming airstrikes are not encouraging). But the withdrawal seemed hasty, rushed, chaotic and unsafe, and the only assurances we’re getting now are that the Taliban will grant safe passage to Americans or our allies left behind, with some wishful thinking they won’t learn how to fly Blackhawk helicopters.

The last American soldier is gone and the longest war is finally over. But Biden’s name now joins the list of presidents forever marred by Afghanistan, and his administration’s competence — especially the arm dealing with foreign policy — will rightly be questioned for the remainder of his presidency. 

A story that matters.

Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. is showing its first signs of crumbling. Fewer adults than ever now say they won’t take the shot, and vaccine rates have been increasing steadily over the last month. Polls indicate there has also been a sharp increase in the percentage of parents who plan to get their kids vaccinated as soon as it’s allowed. While many expressed that full FDA approval would make them more likely to take the vaccine, it appears the single biggest driver has been vaccine mandates at work: 43% said their boss requiring vaccines would make them get one, up from 33% a month ago. Axios has the story.

Numbers.

• 800,000. The number of U.S. troops who rotated through Afghanistan at least once.

• 30,000.The number of U.S. troops who saw at least five deployments.

• 75,000. The estimated size of the current Taliban militant force.

• 51%. The percentage of Americans who disapproved of how President Biden conducted the withdrawal in Afghanistan.

• 38%. The percentage of Americans who approve of how President Biden conducted the withdrawal in Afghanistan.

• 49%. The percentage of Americans who said that the U.S. military should stay in Afghanistan “until all American citizens and Afghan allies have been evacuated.”

Don’t forget.

Becoming a Tangle subscriber is easy. Really easy. All you have to do is click the button below, take 30 seconds, and subscribe. At the annual rate, it costs just $4.16 a month, or 96 cents a week, or 13 cents a day. But your subscription does a ton to help us grow the team, build out new features and continue to invest in our journalism.

Subscribe now

Have a nice day.

A team of workmen digging a well in Sri Lanka have unearthed a cluster of 2.5 million carats of star sapphires. The pale blue rocks could be worth as much as $140 million on the international market, pending inspections and certification. It’s believed to be the largest star sapphire cluster ever found, and the men who discovered it were, amazingly, digging the well in a gem trader’s backyard, the exact location of which remains a secret. Named the Serendipity Sapphire, the cluster weighs over 1,100 pounds. “I have never seen such a large specimen before. This was probably formed around 400 million years ago,” Dr Gamini Zoysa, a gemologist, told the BBC.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 11 minutes.

The Supreme Court rules on the eviction ban. Plus, a question about Trump’s role in the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Monday. I just wanted to say thank you to all the readers out there who continue to rely on Tangle through these sometimes tumultuous, wild times. Your support means the world. If you’ve been enjoying our newsletter, please spread the word: you can email Tangle to friends by clicking here.

Quick hits

1. A U.S. drone strike targeting a car carrying suspected ISIS-K suicide bombers in Kabul may have killed ten members of one family, including several children. (The details)

2. About 250 Americans are still in Afghanistan awaiting evacuation, according to the State Department. (The remaining)

3. The European Union is expected to prohibit non-essential travel from the U.S., citing the spread of the Delta variant in the United States. (The announcement)

4. Hurricane Ida, one of the strongest storms to ever hit the United States, has left more than one million people without power — including all of New Orleans. (The storm)

5. Sirhan B. Sirhan, the man who assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, has been recommended for parole. (The decision)

What D.C. is talking about.

Evictions. On Thursday, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to block President Joe Biden’s most recent eviction moratorium extension. Earlier this year, the court had ruled that the administration couldn’t extend the ban on evictions, which was put in place last March by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to address the Covid-19 pandemic without congressional authorization (we covered that here). Then, after protests from progressive Democrats, the CDC issued a new ban despite Biden conceding that he did not believe it could withstand scrutiny from the courts (we covered that here). Now, the Supreme Court has indeed blocked the latest renewal of the moratorium.

The CDC issued its initial eviction ban by citing the 1944 Public Health Service Act, which states the following:

The [CDC], with the approval of the Secretary, is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.

In an 8-page opinion, the court said the CDC had exceeded its authority with the latest ban, which did not apply to the entire country but only to counties where Covid-19 was the most widespread (because of rising cases in so many places, that ended up being some 90 percent of U.S. counties).

“The C.D.C. has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion said. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the C.D.C. the sweeping authority that it asserts.”

Approximately 3.5 million people say they will face eviction in the next two months, according to the Census Bureau. Congress has allocated $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance, 89 percent of which has yet to be distributed.

In response to the ruling, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who slept on the steps of the Capitol building to protest the expiration of the ban earlier this month, said “the Supreme Court failed to protect the 11 million households across our country from violent eviction in the middle of a deadly global pandemic.”

Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the left and right. Then my take.

What the left is saying.

The left is worried about the court’s ruling, saying it is putting millions at risk of eviction and is the latest in a slew of ideologically driven rulings by the court.

The Washington Post editorial board said it’s not too late to avoid a wave of evictions.

“Congress allocated $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance for people impacted by the pandemic. Lawmakers approved $25 billion of that as far back as December,” the board said. “Yet the Treasury Department reported Wednesday that states still had distributed only $5.1 billion of that $25 billion by the end of July, seven months after Congress okayed it. Treasury tried to put a positive spin on that news, pointing out that the number of households the program helped increased 15 percent last month, to 340,000, and that money was flowing to needy people: More than 60 percent of those receiving aid had incomes at or below 30 percent of their area’s median. Yet states still handed out only $1.7 billion, a tiny uptick from June.

“The problem is not the Treasury Department; it is the states and localities that are supposed to be distributing the aid,” they added. “Some states have had to set up distribution systems from scratch. Others have been overwhelmed with applicants. Technical glitches have plagued application websites. Tenants and landlords lacking Internet access have had a harder time applying. And questions about documenting income and other qualifications for aid have slowed applications. Treasury emphasized once again Wednesday that states need not delay aid while applicants gather all their documents. It also threatened laggard states, saying that those failing to distribute rental aid quickly may lose their funding next month. It should not come to that. States should commit to helping desperate renters, their lives upended by forces far beyond their control, and helping landlords, too, many of whom depend on the rent for their own livelihood.”

In The Nation, John Nichols said Cori Bush is once again trying to save the eviction moratorium.

“While others debated over who should take responsibility for extending the moratorium as it expired in late July, Bush demanded action. She brought a sense of urgency to the fight, recalling her own experience with evictions. And she won headline-grabbing support from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In so doing, Bush gave voice to a national outcry over the prospect that as many as 3.6 million households could face eviction orders within two months. They are among the 11 million Americans who have fallen behind on rent payments during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an analysis of US Census Bureau data by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.”

Now, Bush has “presented ‘immediate options’ to avert an eviction crisis,” Nichols said. “They include proposals for the House to reconvene for an emergency vote on HR 4791, a bill, introduced by House Financial Services Committee chair Maxine Waters, to extend the moratorium through December 31, as well as a plan to have the House amend the Public Health Service Act to provide the Department of Health and Human Services with the legal authority to mandate that evictions stop until the pandemic is officially over.”

In Jacobin Magazine, Branko Marcetic said it was a lawless power grab.

“The text is pretty clear. The law says the CDC can put in place and enforce regulations that prevent infectious diseases from spreading from state to state, examples of which include inspection, pest extermination, and other measures the CDC decides are necessary — a broad mandate that gives the agency wide latitude to act to contain a killer pandemic,” Marcetic wrote.

“The court’s ‘textualists’ and ‘originalists’ didn’t bother to determine the original spirit behind the language they ruled on, and they didn’t take a plain, commonsense reading of the unambiguous text,” Marcetic added. “They made a brazenly ideological argument with the sole objective of defending property rights, whether that means landlords being able to kick people out of their houses or companies being free from legal mandates forcing them to make deliveries in a pandemic, public health be damned. Though some have tried to paint this Supreme Court as surprisingly moderate, this is yet another major ruling from what’s already proving to be an extremely right-wing court.”

What the right is saying.

The right supports the decision, arguing the court followed the obvious interpretation of the law and that it’s time for the moratorium to end.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said “President Biden told Democrats that the Supreme Court was likely to shoot down his two-month extension of a ban on rental evictions, and he was right.”

“Mr. Biden knew this but used the extension to buy time to deflect criticism from the left after a previous CDC extension expired July 31. While the Justices didn’t quote Mr. Biden, the forceful opinion makes clear they noticed how he abused their forbearance. ‘The CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,’ the Court explains. ‘It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.’ Under the government’s argument, there’s no limiting principle to CDC authority.

“No regulation premised on the 1944 law ‘has even begun to approach the size or scope of the eviction moratorium,’ the Court adds. And even if the text were ambiguous, the government’s interpretation would violate the principle that Congress must ‘speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of ‘vast economic and political significance,’” the board concluded. “The CDC power grab is so obvious that the decision should have been 9-0. But the three liberal Justices dissented in part on grounds that the Court should have required a full briefing and argument before lifting the stay. This would have made the Justices accomplices to Mr. Biden’s legal gamesmanship.”

In Fox News, Jonathan Turley wrote that the Biden administration “has racked up a long line of losses in federal courts in what is one of the worst records in the first six months of any modern presidency.”

“Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to strike down President Biden's renewal of the controversial eviction moratorium,” Turley wrote. “It was the second time that a majority of justices declared the moratorium as unconstitutional but, as in other areas, the Biden Administration has become openly and chillingly dismissive of such legal considerations. The unconstitutionality of the moratorium was never in serious doubt but Biden admitted that he ignored the advice of his own White House counsel and virtually all of [the] legal experts consulted by the White House. 

“Biden expressly discarded with the constitutional considerations in favor of political expediency, even though it meant spending massive federal funds without legal authority,” he added. “It is a lawless attitude that’s becoming a signature for this administration, which has continued to unilaterally end policies without complying with federal laws despite equally clear authority from the Supreme Court.”

In Reason Magazine, Josh Blackman said “the Biden Administration suffered two significant losses in the span of 48 hours.”

“The Roberts Court does not seem to be going easy on the new President. So far, Biden has received a remarkably rough reception. And these rulings do not bode well for the many other cases trickling up [from] the lower courts,” Blackman wrote. “This case doesn't immediately end the eviction moratorium. District Courts throughout the country will have to enter final judgments barring the enforcement of the eviction moratorium. They should do so promptly, though some may drag their feet. A few may even resist. (I said it.)… the Biden Administration's gamble backfired, big league. Indeed, the Court provides a very narrow construction of 42 U.S.C. § 264, an essential public health law. In future disasters unknown, the federal government will have its hands tied by this decision.”

My take.

Like most Supreme Court decisions, this one is a fascinating look at how the law can be interpreted for one’s own benefit. This entire case essentially rests on this language (emphasis mine) in the 1944 Public Health Act: “For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the [Secretary] may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.”

The court has essentially made the case that “other measures” can only be interpreted here, but a ban on evictions that impacts millions of people is not even relatively in the scope of the other examples stated in the policy (fumigation or pest extermination, for example). And if it were intending to grant such broad authority to a federal agency, Congress would have to say so explicitly. Opponents of the ruling have said “other measures” encompass just that — any other measures the CDC sees fit. And during this once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, those “other measures” should rise in significance to meet the moment.

But to me, the ruling seems right. I’ve already made my case that it was time for the eviction ban to end, but even with the Delta variant spreading rapidly, I don’t see the legal justification — or how it is tenable — for millions of people to continue to not face any threat of eviction if they aren’t paying rent. Even if we’re to view the moratorium as a Covid-19 stopper, it’s clear the virus is spreading easily now via family gatherings, bars, restaurants, etc. — I’m not even sure to what degree the moratorium is helping. Regardless, it seems well beyond the scope of what the CDC should legally be allowed to do. As the justices asked, “Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable? Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work from home? Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed Internet service to facilitate remote work?” 

The actual debate here should be about what action Congress should take.

Which brings me to the point: this is about a failure of government more than whether this court ruling is “right” or not. Congress passed billions of dollars in aid to address renters, along with stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits for those who lost their jobs. The federal government’s response to the pandemic, frankly, has been remarkable and appropriate. But as The Washington Post editorial board points out, there has been an utter failure at the state level to get tenants — or even landlords, for that matter — the assistance they need.

If progressive Democrats want to have a federal eviction moratorium, they need to draft legislation — which they basically have already — and then whip up the votes to pass it. If the CDC wants to prevent homelessness and evictions that lead to more Delta variant spread and overrun hospitals, they could focus their attention on getting at-risk renters vaccinated and continue to push their contacts at the state level to distribute funds already allocated. At the end of the day, though, it’s going to be up to local governments to get their acts together and eviction judges to navigate situations where a tenant who has been failed by the government deserves leniency. 

Your questions, answered.

Q: When history books are written about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, will Trump be viewed as a non-factor, a visionary whose plans were badly executed, or Neville Chamberlain who made a deal with the devil and got played?

— Eric, Orlando, Florida

Tangle: It’s an excellent question. I think the one thing he won’t be viewed as is a “non-factor.” I don’t mean to reply in a way that comes off as a copout, but I think it could be a mix of “visionary” and “made a deal with the devil.” History, much like the news, is seldom as unbiased as people want it to be.

To me, the answer to your question lies almost entirely with what the next 10 to 20 years look like in Afghanistan. The Taliban is clearly trying to sell itself as some more modern, new, less brutal regime than it was in the 1990s. A lot of people aren’t buying that, and neither am I. If their rule turns barbaric the moment U.S. soldiers leave, and Afghanistan is besieged by another 20 years of civil war and human rights atrocities, I think the deal Trump made with the Taliban will look pretty terrible and short-sighted in the historical context — a deal that boxed out the Afghan government and essentially set up the Afghan army to fold.

If, on the other hand, the Taliban eventually move toward a shared power arrangement with the Afghan resistance, continue to allow things like girls’ schools, manage to solicit financial aid from global powers and oversee at least spates of peace (most importantly by reducing terrorist attacks), then Trump could be seen as a visionary. Basically, the question is whether Afghanistan descends further into chaos or if the Taliban actually manage to govern and oversee relative peace among the fractured groups they now rule.

To me, the odds of the latter happening are slim. But, to your point, history will be the judge.

If you want to submit a question to Tangle, though, you can simply reply to this email and write in. You can also fill out this form.

A story that matters.

In a Chicago custody hearing, a judge’s decision is shaking up the debate about Covid-19 vaccine mandates and how far they can go. Rebecca Firlit joined a virtual hearing with her ex-husband expecting the proceedings to focus on child support. Instead, Cook County Judge James Shapiro asked Firlit about her vaccination status. Firlit told the judge she had not been vaccinated because of past adverse reactions to vaccines, and because her doctor had advised her against it. The judge then made an unprecedented decision: he told her she couldn’t see her son until she was vaccinated. “Judges in other states have granted lesser sentences to defendants who opt to get vaccines, or mandated the vaccine as a condition of release from prison for some inmates,” The Washington Post reported. But this appears to be a first. (The story) 

Numbers.

• 11.4 million. The number of people living in households behind on rent, according to a recent Census Bureau survey.

• 27%. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they had trouble paying for usual household expenses in the last 7 days.

• 1 in 106. Your odds of dying from a fall.

• 1 in 8,571. Your odds of dying from the accidental discharge of a gun.

• 1 in 31,030. Your odds of being hospitalized with Covid-19 if you are fully vaccinated.

• 1 in 137,698. Your odds of dying of Covid-19 if you are fully vaccinated.

• 1 in 138,849. Your odds of dying of a lightning strike.

Support our work.

Did you know: we try to keep 80 to 90 percent of all Tangle content free, because we believe reliable news shouldn't be behind a paywall. We also have no advertisements in the newsletter and no investors, so we can remain entirely independent. As a result, we are subscriber-supported: that means we rely on you all to pay a small monthly or yearly fee so our business can grow and thrive. If you’re not yet, please consider subscribing:

Subscribe now

Have a nice day.

The number of people in the world without electricity has dropped from 1.2 billion to 759 million worldwide, and much of that gap was closed by “installing small solar systems designed to power a village, farm or even a single home.” Across the developing world, farmers, homeowners and businesses are using the cheap secondhand solar market to help cover gaps in power that are left by government and utility companies. The thriving market has some believing that reuse and resale — not recycling — is the best way to manage the growing waste issue in the renewable energy markets. (Bloomberg, subscription)

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.” Today is a special Friday edition.

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 7 minutes.

Yesterday was a horrible day in Afghanistan.

Today probably will be, too.

In case you somehow haven’t heard by now, Thursday started with warnings from U.S., British and Australian intelligence that there was a “high threat” of a terrorist attack at Kabul airport. “Because of security threats outside the gates of Kabul airport, we are advising U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport,” the U.S. embassy said.

The details of what happened next are still becoming clear, but here’s what we think we know: a few hours later, one suicide bomber approached Abbey Gate on the outskirts of Hamid Karzai International Airport. Abbey Gate is the central entry point for U.S. soldiers and has been for years, as well as a secure entry point for visitors to Afghanistan. Early reporting suggests the bomber approached the gate’s security checkpoint for entry and then detonated, presumably as they were being searched, surrounded by U.S. Marines and other Afghan civilians trying to get into the airport.

A few blocks away, at The Baron Hotel, another suicide bomber made their way to the crowded area — this one a favorite of defense contractors, journalists, businessmen and other Westerners — and then set off another explosion. Shortly after the blasts, gunmen opened fire on troops and civilians. Words like “complex” and “sophisticated” were floated to describe the bombings. The reported number of dead still varies, but most are in the ballpark of 100 Afghans killed, along with 12 U.S. service members (11 Marines and a Navy medic). At least another 150 Afghans and Americans were injured. It was one of the deadliest days in the history of the war in Afghanistan — not just in the last few months or the last year, but in the last 20 years.

In an afternoon press briefing, General Kenneth F. McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters that he believes ISIS-K was responsible for the attack. If you just said to yourself, “ISIS who?” then you’re probably like most Americans. ISIS-Khorasan is an offshoot of the Islamic State terrorist organization ISIS that spread throughout Iraq and Syria and became infamous in the last few years — except their militants identify with “Khorasan,” an ancient historical region of Central Asia. Many of the fighters are in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you’re now asking yourself, “I thought we destroyed ISIS?” Well, welcome back to earth.

ISIS-K considers the Taliban — yes, the group who cuts off people’s hands for petty crimes and helped popularize suicide bombings — to have become insufficiently committed to Islamic law and far too understated in the way they do business. In May of this year a member of ISIS-K drove a bomb-laden vehicle into a girls’ school in Kabul, detonated it, then other militants detonated more bombs as the children fled. 68 people died and 165 were wounded — most were young girls. The Taliban and ISIS-K are, in regional terms, sometimes enemies, and have attacked each other several times in the last few years.

That might be why yesterday, during the same press briefing, Gen. McKenzie also told reporters that the Taliban is helping the U.S. secure Hamid Karzai International Airport, that the two were sharing intelligence with each other, and that he believed the Taliban had already helped thwart potential terrorist attacks in the area.

If that paragraph didn’t stop you in your tracks, let me re-frame that: the Taliban, who we were carpet bombing just a few years ago in hopes of wiping them off the face of the planet, are now so sufficiently in control of Afghanistan that our military is sharing intelligence with them to thwart a mutual enemy. It turns out we have “shared interests” now. According to a Politico report, the intelligence sharing went as far as U.S. officials providing the Taliban with a list of Americans and Afghan allies they wanted to be granted safe passage into the airport for evacuation, a decision that left my jaw on the floor and brought what I think were appropriately gobsmacked reactions from “anonymous defense officials.”

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” one said to Politico. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

In the evening, around 5 p.m. Eastern time, President Biden addressed the media. He remained steadfast in his decision to withdraw troops, while simultaneously promising to “get” (I presume he means “kill”) whoever organized the attacks at the airport.

“To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this. We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command,” Biden said.

To recap: at least 100 Afghans and 12 Americans are dead, we are now coordinating with the guys who were our enemies six months ago to fight back the other guys who are also our enemies but hate the guys who were our enemies too, we’re going to leave Afghanistan but we’re also going to stay to kill the new enemies, and we’re really hoping that in the midst of all this we can complete the mission we’ve set out to do — which is to extract another few hundred Americans and as many Afghans as we possibly can before they all get caught in the middle of the battle for Afghanistan that is about to ensue. Oh, also, ISIS-K is now another thing we have to worry about, we’re not even entirely sure if the Taliban is working with us to stop them, and we have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen in the power vacuum we leave behind. 

This is what losing a war looks like. And it’s probably not over. According to Gen. McKenzie, again, the “threat streams” in Kabul are “live” and “extremely active.” McKenzie says the military expects ISIS-K will try more suicide bombings, will attempt to drive a car into the airport and detonate it, will try to shoot planes out of the sky with rockets, or will simply open fire in the crowded areas around the airport. They believe any and all of this is possible over the next few days as we continue our evacuations.

The Biden administration, of course, will do whatever it can to keep the focus on the fact they have helped airlift more than 100,000 people out of Afghanistan in the last couple of weeks (about 66,000 of those people were actually evacuated by the U.S., the others were brought out by our allies), and will regurgitate tired lines about how dangerous this mission was, how the messiness was unavoidable, how the Afghans didn’t fight, and how it’s at least partly Trump’s fault for the deal he struck with the Taliban in Doha. There will be grains of truth in all of it but it’ll mostly be spin that you should ignore (or at least scoff at).

What President Biden has continued to say that is honest and true and real is that it was time to go — and that the events of the last few weeks should only reaffirm that reality. Yesterday, he made part of this point, albeit in his own ham-handed and vaguely offensive way:

“I have never been of the view that we should be sacrificing American lives to try to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan, a country that has never once in its entire history been a united country, and is made up — and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way — made up of different tribes that have never, ever, ever gotten along with each other.”

The other thing that Biden said that was true and honest and real is that the only reason Americans weren’t dying in the last year was that we made a deal with the Taliban. More specifically, because the Trump administration made a deal with the Taliban: we were going to leave on May 1, on the condition — among others — that the Taliban would stop attacking American troops. The Taliban broke pretty much every promise in that deal except for the one to lay off Americans. Troops aren’t dying now because we are withdrawing, they just weren’t dying before because we had promised to withdraw.

Take a step back and look at this from 40,000 feet: we went into Afghanistan 20 years ago. According to the people who led us into that war, we invaded to wipe out Osama bin Laden, prevent al-Qaeda from having a safe haven, prevent major terrorist attacks on our own soil and — whether we like it or not — to get revenge. September 11 didn’t just shatter the security so many Americans felt, the promise that these battles were in far away places, it also awoke something ugly and violent and visceral and primal in the people at the controls of the largest, most well-funded, most powerful military in the world. It woke up the desire to kill and conquer and protect and pay back the debt we felt was owed to us — the debt of lives.

20 years later, where are we? You could make the argument Afghanistan is a “better” country from a Western lens now (or was for the last 20 years) than it was in 2001. Al-Qaeda is seriously weakened. Osama bin Laden is dead. However, hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians, militants and Americans have also died. Afghanistan is seemingly just as fractured as it was before, and now back in the hands of the very group that gladly harbored and protected the terrorists we were out for in the first place. We also left the Taliban with $85 billion of American military equipment, according to Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), including 75,000 vehicles, 200 airplanes and helicopters, 600,000 small arms and light weapons, night vision goggles, body armor, and biometric devices with the fingerprints and eyescans of Afghan allies who helped us over the last 20 years.

Now, instead of al-Qaeda, we have ISIS and ISIS-K and frankly, I’m not sure any Americans or Afghan civilians give a damn what they’re called. They’ll strap bombs to their chests and walk into restaurants and press the button and it’s impossibly hard to fight a person who is excited to die.

Which, by the way, is another thing that seems to get lost in the narrative. It’s perfectly appropriate for the American press and American citizens more largely to be mourning the lives of the U.S. Marines who died yesterday — that’s the least we can do. But it’s also a bit infuriating to watch the wall-to-wall coverage of the last few days as if it’s somehow novel. It’s not as if this violence suddenly started because 12 Americans died. Take a look at this Wikipedia round-up of terrorist attacks in Kabul over the course of 2020:

Just because we haven’t been dying in attacks in Kabul doesn’t mean innocent Afghans haven’t been. The reality is just the opposite. This is the life Afghans have been living for years whether we had 2,500 or 100,000 U.S. troops on the ground who were there — ostensibly — to protect innocent Afghans and help install a democratic government. As Business Insider reporter John Haltiwanger said on Twitter last night, “It’s undeniably tragic that 13 US service members died but way too many headlines ignore the fact dozens of Afghans were killed. The hierarchy we consciously/unconsciously employ re: human lives based on nationality is largely why the US gets in these quagmires in the first place.”

So what choice is left? To me, the answer seems obvious. But to others, it apparently doesn’t. “We’re probably going to have to go back in” to Afghanistan to fight ISIS-K, former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta told CNN last night. He’s not alone: some Republican members of Congress have said the same, and there appears to be a full-court press from the familiar interventionist punditry in the media to push Biden back into Afghanistan and away from withdrawal.

Afghan allies and Americans have been at this for two decades. We spent 20 years training an Afghan army that folded in two weeks. We had some wins — women’s education, lower infant mortality rates, a population that generally began to embrace ideas like freedom and liberalism. But the violence never stopped. The Taliban never went away. We did not unite the country or bring stability or solve anything. We absolutely failed to end or reduce terrorism, even if we haven’t had “another 9/11” on American soil since. We’ve probably bred a whole new generation of extremists who will now be fighting us for decades to come.

Afghans died in unthinkable numbers when we were there and sometimes because we were there; sometimes at the hands of our own soldiers. Now that we’re leaving, the battle is ensuing, the suicide bombers are back and some of our guys are going down with them. The best way to prevent more American deaths in Afghanistan is not to send more American soldiers into Afghanistan — the idea itself is offensive and further intervention would render the loss of American lives during our withdrawal pointless. 

It’s to do what we’re doing: get the Americans who are left in Afghanistan out, and bring as many of our allies as possible with them. And probably take as long as necessary to do it. To be frank, I have no idea how to prevent more Afghan deaths in Afghanistan. But if the past 20 years are any indication, having our soldiers there with guns and tanks and dropping bombs will not do much good in the way of reducing violence.

So for all the horrific news coming out of Afghanistan and the clear failures of the Biden administration to execute a competent withdrawal, there is an obvious next step here: and it’s to stay the course. 

Get out.

Then stay out.

Thanks for reading. This is an opinion piece from Tangle, a daily newsletter that summarizes arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day. If you found this online, or someone forwarded you this email, please consider signing up for our newsletter:

Subscribe now

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Today’s read: 11 Minutes

Don’t forget.

Tangle subscribers get Friday editions. We’ve published deep dives on China, explorations of when American military intervention has worked, personal essays on God and faith, fully transcribed interviews with Biden’s economic advisors, and much more. But in order to receive the special editions, you have to be a subscriber. You can do that below:

Subscribe now

Quick hits.

1. Shortly after the U.S. government issued a “high threat” of a terrorist attack in Kabul, two explosions have been reported — one outside the airport and another a suicide bombing near a hotel — on Thursday morning. Local media are reporting 13 people have been killed and dozens more injured. This is a developing story. (The news)

2. Covid-19 cases are rising in 46 states now, with an average of 1,000 Americans dying a day. (The latest)

3. Newly sworn-in New York Gov. Kathy Hochul added nearly 12,000 Covid-19 deaths to the state’s total while pledging more transparency than her predecessor Andrew Cuomo. (The update)

4. President Biden and new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett postponed their meeting today after news of the explosions in Afghanistan. (The meeting)

5. U.S. jobless claims stayed near a pandemic low, with 353,000 new claims last week. (The numbers)

What D.C. is talking about.

The border. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration had to reinstate a Trump-era program known as the “remain in Mexico” policy, which requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while awaiting a court hearing in the U.S. The policy is formally known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). It sparked controversy not just because it left some asylum seekers waiting in dangerous border cities or unsanitary conditions, but because critics said it violated international law and migrants’ right to seek asylum protection in the U.S.

When the Trump administration announced the policy in 2018, it was immediately challenged and blocked by a judge in California — and wasn’t being regularly enforced until 2020. Then, shortly after the pandemic began, the Trump administration stopped relying on the remain in Mexico policy and began turning away nearly all migrants and asylum seekers under a public health order that is still in effect. President Biden suspended the remain in Mexico policy on his first day in office and Homeland Security ended it officially in June.

Then, Texas and Missouri took the Biden administration to federal court to challenge the termination of the policy, arguing that eliminating it violated federal law and that without the policy, the states incur the costs of a large number of migrants entering the U.S. (supplying health care, issuing driver’s licenses, etc). Earlier this year, a district-court order required the Biden administration to reinstate the policy; the Biden administration took it to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that the administration needed to reinstate the order. All three liberal justices — Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — were in the minority.

The court’s decision means that the Biden administration needs to resume the policy with a “good faith effort” while litigation continues in lower courts. It did not offer a lengthy explanation for its decision, though the court did cite the Trump administration’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, using nearly identical language, saying that the decision was “arbitrary and capricious” and violated federal law. On Tuesday, the justices said the Biden administration “failed to show a likelihood of success on the claim that the memorandum rescinding the Migrant Protection Protocols was not arbitrary and capricious.”

Below, we’ll take a look at some reactions from the right and left, then my take.

What the right is saying.

The right supports the ruling, arguing that it’s similar to rulings against Trump on DACA and that the remain in Mexico plan was good policy.

Miranda Devine celebrated the ruling as “good news.”

“If enforced, the policy would require aspiring migrants to stay in Mexico pending a court hearing of their asylum case,” she wrote. “Homeland Security says it will comply with the order but it has vowed to keep fighting it. Why? How does it serve American citizens to keep the surge over the southern border going? It is not even compassionate since it lures vulnerable people — and children — into the arms of criminal people smugglers.

“The border has become a magnet for opportunists all over the world, and the flow will never end without tough resolve and competence we don’t see in the Oval Office,” Devine added. “Why wouldn’t you try your luck if you come from one of the broken-down countries whose nationals are swelling the ranks of South Americans at the border? Remain in Mexico was effective, but only as one element of a suite of border-protection measures put in place by the Trump administration that had slowed border crossings to a trickle.”

In The Washington Post, Henry Olsensaid “reasonable people can differ” on whether the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy is a good immigration policy, but the Supreme Court’s ruling is in line with the law and was the right call.

“The Constitution clearly states that only Congress shall make laws,” Olsen wrote. “Since the Remain in Mexico policy determines the legal rights of people attempting to enter the United States, it has the effect of a law. That creates a constitutional conundrum: How can the executive branch enact such a law when the Constitution clearly grants that power to Congress? The answer to that is the result of more than a century of constitutional jurisprudence and statute. The jurisprudential answer is that the Supreme Court has allowed Congress to delegate its lawmaking powers to the executive branch or to independent agencies so long as Congress provides an intelligible principle that guides and governs those entities. No one is contesting that the power of either the Trump or the Biden administration runs afoul of that principle.

“That delegated power, however, must be exercised according to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946,” Olsen said. “The APA also requires that any resulting decision not be ‘arbitrary and capricious.’ Under this standard of review, a court can require an entity exercising delegated powers to show that its rule bears some reasonable relationship to the facts it has unearthed during its hearings and decision-making process. The point is that if an entity is going to pass a rule, it cannot be done in a manner more fitting for an absolute monarch than for a democratic republic. This, not the Remain in Mexico policy’s desirability, is what the court ruled on. Its order clearly stated this, noting that the administration had not shown a ‘likelihood of success’ on its claim that rescinding the protocols was ‘not arbitrary and capricious.’”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the “practical impact” won’t be large in the near term, but it was notable for the “legal irony of the Court’s explanation.”

“This is the same legal rationale the Court used in that Regents case to overturn the Trump Administration’s decision to rescind Barack Obama’s DACA program for young adult immigrants brought to the U.S. as children,” the board wrote. “Liberals cheered that ruling, which held that the rescission was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) because Trump officials had not sufficiently considered the effects or alternatives. Now the APA review has tripped up the immigration left.

“Remain in Mexico worked as a deterrent,” the board added. “A Homeland Security review in 2019 found that enforcement against Central American migrants declined 80% as the policy took effect from May through September. More than 70,000 asylum seekers were returned to Mexico. Remain in Mexico is also more humane than the lawless chaos that now prevails… The larger story is that U.S. immigration policy continues to be a dysfunctional mess. One solution is to reduce the incentive for illegal immigration by tightening U.S. asylum law and allowing more legal migration to meet the needs of the U.S. economy. But that would require White House leadership and a Congress willing to compromise, and we have neither. So the legal battles will continue without end.”

What the left is saying.

The left says the court is acting hypocritically, and the policy will create a humanitarian crisis.

Ruth Marcus asked if the Supreme Court is now okay with judges setting immigration policy.

“It’s easy to miss amid the flood of other news, but thanks to the Supreme Court, a big chunk of our national immigration policy is now being run by a federal trial court judge in Texas,” Marcus wrote. “Oh, yes, also our foreign relations. Not just any judge, by the way, but a Trump nominee named Matthew Kacsmaryk, who, before being named to the bench, described homosexuality as ‘disordered,’ characterized being transgender as a ‘delusion’ and ‘mental disorder,’ and, of course, criticized Roe v. Wade.

“My beef, though, isn’t with Kacsmaryk as much as with his superiors at the Supreme Court,” Marcus added. “Maybe, as the court’s order suggested, it will turn out that the Biden administration acted as sloppily in ditching Remain in Mexico as its predecessor did in dumping DACA. But the issue here was what should happen while the courts sort that out. Ordering the Biden administration to move to immediately reinstate a program that hasn’t been in operation since March 2020 (the previous administration suspended it because of the pandemic), that it doesn’t believe is good policy, that requires coordination with the Mexican government — none of this needs to be done while the litigation is proceeding and the outcome uncertain.”

In MSNBC, Hayes Brown said the order was a sign of how “Trump’s racism could linger” for a long time.

“‘Remain in Mexico’ was one of the most successful anti-immigration ploys from professional brown-person hater and all-around white supremacist ghoul Stephen Miller, who was Trump’s senior domestic policy adviser,” Brown said. “When it was implemented in 2019, the policy flouted international law, requiring tens of thousands of people seeking asylum in the U.S. to wait for their eventual immigration hearings on the southern side of the border. Given the intense backlog in the immigration court system and the growing violence at these border town chokepoints, it’s easy to see why Democrats denounced the policy as cruel.

“The return of the Remain in Mexico policy shows the lasting impact of Trump’s reshaping of the federal bench. [U.S. District Judge Matthew] Kacsmaryk was one of 170 district judges Trump appointed,” Brown wrote. “According to a tally in January from the Pew Research Center, that cohort made up 27 percent of active district judges… Biden’s immigration efforts have been far from perfect. His administration bears sole responsibility for the abominable decision to uphold a public health rule that Trump activated to turn away hundreds of thousands of migrants during the pandemic. But ending the Remain in Mexico program was the easy and right call. The rejection by the courts should cause us to question whether a major chunk of the judicial branch is truly neutral in immigration cases.”

In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern said the Supreme Court “blessed this unprecedented hostile takeover” of the executive branch’s immigration policies without explaining how or why.

“The implications of Tuesday’s decision are profoundly disturbing,” they wrote. “The conservative justices spent the bulk of the Trump years insisting that courts must defer to the president’s constitutional authority over foreign affairs. Now they have allowed a lone Trump-appointed judge, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, to force the government into sensitive diplomatic negotiations over border policy. Their decision even grants Kacsmaryk sweeping authority to oversee these negotiations so he can ensure that the Biden administration is pushing Mexican officials hard enough to revive Trump’s program, something the administration does not want to do. And they have seemingly abandoned their skepticism toward nationwide injunctions like this one—a position some held when it allowed them to undermine the federal judiciary’s check on Trump.

“In the process, the six Republican-appointed justices have injected chaos, confusion, and cruelty into the United States’ border policy, thrusting thousands of asylum-seekers into legal limbo,” they wrote. “The Supreme Court gave special immigration policy deference to Donald Trump, turning a deliberate blind eye to racist motives for the Muslim ban, under the theory that the executive branch has unique constitutional authority over immigration policy. But now, this same court, aided by a raft of conservative jurists, will refuse such deference to Biden.”

My take.

Frankly, I’m pretty stunned.

There’s no doubt that liberals used the courts to slow-roll much of Trump’s immigration policy, and it’s true that they found some success here and there. But on the whole, Trump was very, very good at instituting his immigration policies, and the Supreme Court played a major role in that success. Over and over during Trump’s presidency, district court rulings issued nationwide injunctions against Trump policies just like the one Kacsmaryk made, temporarily blocking or complicating Trump’s immigration agenda. But over and over, those injunctions were brought to the Supreme Court, the court repeatedly ruled in his favor.

When I heard this case was going before the court again, I expected a similar outcome. After all, the conservative justices made it clear that a president’s foreign policy decisions should be given wide latitude. Go read their response to similar nationwide injunctions in 2018 — it’s easy to spot how harshly they judged them: “As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions.”

But now that chaos is precisely what they’ve invited. Resurrecting this policy in a week, especially when it’s going to have a huge impact not just on our border but on Mexico as well — and forcing the federal government to enter negotiations with a foreign government to sort it out — is not something a single judge in Texas should be able to do.

It’s also true that this case bears similarities to the court’s ruling when Trump tried to end DACA, and it essentially gave the same explanation: the Biden administration “failed to show a likelihood of success on the claim that the memorandum rescinding the Migrant Protection Protocols was not arbitrary and capricious.” But the cases and ruling actually differ: First, the Biden administration did explain its argument pretty thoroughly, in a seven-page memo that you can go read. Secondly, unlike DACA, this policy was not being enforced and was essentially dormant, so leaving it that way would not have been disruptive. Finally, when Justice Roberts prevented Trump from ending DACA, he gave a lengthy explanation of why, asked for a better justification, and basically drew a map for the Trump administration to come back to the court with proper legal standing. No such explanation or request existed in this order, though.

None of this, mind you, should be viewed as an endorsement of President Biden’s border policies. It is chaotic there. I’ve written supportively about the remain in Mexico policy, insomuch as I think having a coordinated effort with Mexico and Central American nations to handle a huge influx of asylum seekers and migrants is smart — and anything that might slow down the surge we’re experiencing now is worth considering. It had enough positive elements that the Biden administration even considered reinstating it on its own. But it’s also true that the remain in Mexico policy, as it was incorporated under Trump, had horrific humanitarian costs — some 800 violent attacks were documented at the squalid pop-up camps on the Mexican side of the border, including rapes and torture. And those were just the documented incidents.

Now, though, we’re getting the worst of everything. More than 210,000 migrants were apprehended at the border last month — two hundred and ten thousand! — the most in two decades. And the conditions those migrants are now stuck in inside U.S. detention centers don’t look particularly humane either. So we’ve got a surge of immigrants and asylum seekers we can’t handle, in squalid conditions on our border, and now we have a court order demanding the administration begin sending people back to the same camps on the Mexico side that resulted in horrifying conditions, too.

It’s a mess. And, unlike in years past, tens of thousands of migrants being released into the U.S. aren’t getting a court date or aren’t showing up for the ones they have. With Afghanistan and infrastructure getting so much attention, the days of front-page stories on Biden’s “border crisis” in March have disappeared. But they’ll be back soon if the administration doesn’t get a handle on policy — especially if the Supreme Court doesn’t allow them to. All of this, naturally, is a reminder that the president and the courts shouldn’t be fighting over immigration policy in the first place. It should be Congress passing better immigration laws. But that branch of our government appears to be tripping over its own feet as well. 

Your questions, answered.

In the interest of space, we’re skipping today’s reader question. If you want to submit a question to Tangle, though, you can simply reply to this email and write in. You can also fill out this form.

A story that matters.

The $46.5 billion rental aid program designed to help tenants, renters and landlords survive the pandemic continues to disburse money at a glacial pace. Just $1.7 billion of the funds were distributed by state and local governments in July, according to the Treasury Department, leaving 89 percent of the $46.5 billion yet to be distributed and increasing the likelihood of an eviction crisis housing experts say is right around the corner. The cash was designed to be spent over three years, but White House officials have been pressuring states to disburse the money more quickly, with little success. An estimated 1.2 million households are very likely to face eviction for nonpayment of rent over the next two months. (The New York Times, subscription)

Numbers.

• 132,865. The number of migrants encountered crossing the border in May of 2019.

• 16,182. The number of migrants encountered crossing the border in April of 2020.

• 212,000. The number of migrants encountered crossing the border in July of 2021.

• 95,000. The number of those migrants who were immediately expelled under Title 42, the Trump-era public health policy that allows expulsion before claims of asylum.

• 12%. The percentage of those expelled who were families.

• 47%. The percentage of those migrants encountered who were expelled in July.

• 58%. The percentage of migrants enountered who were expelled in June.

See you tomorrow?

Remember: Tangle is free Monday through Thursday for anyone who wants it. But paying subscribers get Friday editions. Friday editions usually include original interviews, personal essays, deep dives on reader-requested content, or other stories that deviate from the standard Tangle format. The best part is subscriptions are cheap but keep us independent and ad-free: they cost just $50/year, which is $4.16 a month, or 96 cents a week, or 13 cents a day. If you’re already a subscriber, you can also support us by purchasing some swag from our merchandise store.

Subscribe now

Have a nice day.

Is this a political story we can all get behind? Yesterday, President Biden signed the PAWS Act, which allows the VA to fund the training of service dogs for veterans. The Puppies Assisting Wounded Servicemembers for Veterans Therapy Act authorizes the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to create a pilot program on dog training therapy to support veterans. The $10 million, five-year pilot program will take effect on Jan. 1, 2022, and means for the first time in American history, the VA will pay to acquire and train service dogs for veterans with PTSD. (The story)

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, ad-free, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum — then “my take.”

First time reading? Sign up here.

Your questions, answered.

In every Tangle newsletter, we answer reader questions from across the country and the globe. Every now and then, I like to pass on reader questions to people who are experts in their field. For today’s question, I turned to a friend and expert on Iraq: Ben Van Heuvelen, who is the managing editor of Iraq Oil Report.

Q: If Biden does pull out of Iraq, is it not likely that we will see the same kind of deterioration that we're witnessing right now in Afghanistan? Isn't it better to officially end active combat operations while leaving a small but visible force, to act as a deterrent against a resurgence of terrorism in the country? We can't "win" in Iraq but we can help keep the peace just by being present.

— Jack, New York, NY

Ben Van Heuvelen: To answer the question, it might be helpful to start by highlighting some differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. If you had asked a good journalist in Kabul back in April, “What's the worst-case scenario for a U.S. withdrawal?” I think the answer would have been: “The government falls to the Taliban.” If you ask a good journalist in Baghdad, “What's the worst-case scenario for a U.S. withdrawal?” nobody today would talk about the collapse of the government. Even though there are some remnants of ISIS fighting an insurgency in some rural and desert areas, they number in the low thousands and they can't control any territory. The Taliban, by contrast, have something like 75,000 fighters and already controlled parts of Afghanistan before the U.S. decided to leave. So the stakes are different. The Iraqi government would not collapse without the U.S.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the U.S. should disengage. The biggest strategic benefit of a strong U.S. presence is to serve as a bulwark against Iranian influence in Baghdad.

What does that mean, exactly? I'll give one concrete example. Among the many different types of security forces in Iraq, there are dozens of paramilitary groups that are simultaneously funded by the Iraqi government and affiliated with political parties, tribes, and/or religious identity groups. Many of these paramilitary groups have also been trained and (to varying degrees) are controlled by Iran. So it is reasonable to worry that these groups are becoming a vehicle through which Iran can control Iraq. For example, let's say the prime minister wants to make a big decision that Iran won't like — a powerful Iranian or Iran-aligned politician in Baghdad might visit his office and say something like, “I don't like that trade deal you're thinking about signing... and it would be a shame if something happened to your uncle or your sister.” What protection does the prime minister have against that kind of blackmail or extortion?

Right now, the answer is that the prime minister directly commands the Iraqi Army and state intelligence services, many parts of which have been trained by the U.S. and cooperate closely with the U.S. military. These forces are not powerful enough to eradicate the lawless paramilitary groups by force. But they are currently powerful enough to deter Iran-backed armed groups from completely compromising the sovereignty of the elected government in Baghdad. If the U.S. military were to withdraw from Iraq entirely, the U.S.-backed elements within the Iraqi security forces would probably lose capacity over time, and the balance would tilt more in the favor of the Iran-backed armed groups. It would become harder for anyone in a position of power to trust that they can defy the wishes of Iran without risking their livelihood or personal safety.

If I were President Biden, the questions I'd be asking my national security team would be: “What is the strategic benefit for the U.S. to ensure that Iraq remains balanced between us and Iran? And, do those benefits justify the costs? Can we achieve a similar benefit with a smaller footprint?” Etc. For now, their answer seems to be that it's worth keeping a military presence of a couple of thousand troops, in addition to a massive embassy.

This is an excerpt from Tangle, an independent, ad-free, non-partisan politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from the right and left. To sign-up for Tangle, and submit your questions, enter your email address below:

Subscribe now