There will be no Eid-al-Fitr in Sangiote village. A pale of gloom engulfed the village after news of the Poonch terror attack reached its villagers.
“We have not celebrated Eid with any pomp and show. We just offered prayers. The people are grieved over the martyrdom of jawans, who were bringing material for our Iftar on Thursday evening,” Sangiote Sarpanch Mukhtiar Khan told PTI over the phone from his home.
Expressing solidarity with the Indian Army and the families of the jawans, he said an Iftar was scheduled in the village on Thursday evening and the jawans were ferrying vegetables, fruits and other materials in the truck from Bhimber Gali camp when they came under attack at Bhata Dhurian.
The soldiers were from a Rashtriya Rifles unit deployed for counter-terror operations.
The whole village stands with the Army, Khan said.
“After Eid prayers, we are staying back at our homes and there will be no celebrations like visiting relatives, distributing sweets, wearing new clothes or taking children outside as is the practice on the first day of the festival,” he said.
Amir Khan, another villager, said after the terrorist attack they had convened a condolence meeting. “The participants were unanimous in condemning the terrorist attack and decided to restrict Eid celebrations to namaz’ only,” he said.
Saddam Hussain said a company of the Rashtriya Rifles is deployed in the village and enjoys cordial ties with the villagers. “The soldiers usually distribute fresh fruits, including watermelons, to the residents for Iftar’ and nobody had imagined such an attack on them just two days ahead of Eid,” he said.
The Bhata Dhurian forest area has for long remained a preferred infiltration route for terrorists from across the Line of Control because of its topography, dense forest cover and natural caves.
In October 2021, nine soldiers were killed in two major gunfights with terrorists within four days in the forest area during a search operation, which continued for over three weeks with no trace of terrorists.
Islamabad: Cash-starved Pakistan is likely to ink a deal for additional deposits of USD 2 billion from Saudi Arabia after Eid, authorities said on Saturday, a move that will help the country secure the much-required bailout from the IMF.
In March, Pakistan sought Saudi Arabia’s confirmation for funds to ink an IMF deal. Earlier this month Pakistan got Riyadh’s nod for additional funding.
The assistance from Saudi Arabia comes at a crucial time as the IMF programme, signed in 2019, will expire on June 30, 2023, and under the set guidelines, the programme cannot be extended beyond the deadline.
The Washington-based crisis lender has imposed the condition on Pakistan that it should secure USD 3 billion from other countries for the revival of its USD 7 billion bailout package.
A top government official told The News International that the State Bank of Pakistan would sign a deal with the Saudi Fund for Development (SFD) soon after Eid for an additional USD 2 billion deposit.
The official added that Saudi Arabia has confirmed the bilateral assistance support to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was also acknowledged by the lender’s staff, the report said.
This agreement is the follow-up on the confirmation of additional financial support of USD 2 billion and USD 1 billion from the Kingdom and the UAE, the official added.
Official sources clarified that Pakistan neither made any fresh request for more support from Saudi Arabia nor the UAE, except for the already confirmed USD 2 billion and USD 1 billion by these countries, respectively.
Saudi Arabia had already rolled over USD 3 billion in deposits for one year, which matured on December 5, 2022. This USD 3 billion deposit is part of foreign exchange reserves of USD 4.43 billion, lying with the State Bank of Pakistan.
In March, Pakistan received a rollover of USD 2 billion in deposits for a period of one year from its all-weather ally China.
Pakistan, currently in the throes of a major economic crisis, is grappling with high external debt, a weak local currency and dwindling foreign exchange reserves.
Last October, as women filled the streets of Iranian cities to protest the Islamic Republic’s violent repression, Sherry Hakimi accepted an invitation to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In an ornate State Department reception room, Hakimi and a handful of other Iranian-American women sat across a table from Blinken and discussed Iran’s antigovernment protests, the regime’s brutal response and how the United States should handle the events.
Three of the participants — Hakimi included — appeared in a photo with the secretary, which he posted on Twitter. “We continue to find ways to respond to the Iranian government’s state-sponsored violence against women,” Blinken wrote. “Today, I met with civil society partners to discuss what more the U.S. can do.”
Hakimi didn’t think too much about the photo. She is founder and executive director of a nonprofit that promotes gender equality around the world. She supported the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015 and led roundtables with Mohammad Zarif, Iran’s then-foreign minister, during and after the negotiations. But Hakimi generally eschews the spotlight. She has a modest social media presence and does not receive much publicity.
Yet in the hours after the Blinken photo appeared, that changed. “Why the FUCK,” one tweet asked, was Hakimi at the meeting? The account went on to call her an agent “of the Mullahs and Butcher regime.” Other posts referred to her as an apologist for the Iranian government. She found the comments upsetting — and baffling. She was born in the United States and hadn’t been in Iran since 2006, when government officials threatened to arrest her for delivering a talk on sexually transmitted diseases. There is no love lost between her and the regime.
Hakimi went to bed that night hoping the attacks would subside. Instead, they got worse. The next day, Kaveh Shahrooz, a Canadian lawyer and think tank fellow with more than 30,000 followers, posted a 2015 video of Hakimi speaking excitedly about taking a photo with Zarif. Shahrooz tweeted the photo and said that she lobbied for the regime. His accusations gained traction: Over the course of just two days, she was mentioned on Twitter nearly 35,000 times. Many of those posts called Hakimi an Islamic Republic supporter. Others said she was a regime puppet. One suggested that Hakimi had her hands “up Zarif’s ass.”
Twitter was tame compared to Instagram, where she was inundated with violent messages, almost all in Persian. Some threatened to rape her. Others threatened to kill her. “I’ll find you and I’ll burn you alive,” one declared. Some of the people who messaged her said they knew where she lived.
Hakimi didn’t sleep at home for the next week. She had security systems installed in her apartment. She downloaded the “DeleteMe” app to help get her personal information offline. She laid low. But the threats kept coming. People began trolling her nonprofit.
“It was a wild time,” Hakimi told me. “People have tried to take me out, essentially, as an organizer.”
For Iranians, the last seven months have been extraordinarily turbulent. Since last September, when Mahsa Amini — a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman — died in police custody after being arrested for “improperly” wearing her hijab, people across Iran have taken to the streets to protest the regime. They have been staunchly supported by the diaspora, which has held demonstrations around the world in solidarity.
But the government’s horrifying suppression of the protests has stirred up the diaspora’s emotions, and many Iranian expats have been smeared, harassed and threatened by their angry peers. The attacks overwhelmingly target women, most notably in North America and Europe. The victims include gender equality activists, journalists, foreign policy analysts and a historian, each of whom has been accused of colluding with the authoritarian Islamist regime in Tehran.
It is unclear who many of the assailants are, because many of the attacks are anonymous, often using social media accounts without clear provenance. Some of the harassment may be orchestrated by institutions, rather than actual people. But there are plenty of humans launching the attacks, too. Some are well-known figures in the Iranian expat community, others are less-known, but all of them are hardliners with a commitment to aggressively isolating Iran. As for their targets, what they share is a history of either supporting Western-Iranian diplomacy or reporting information that adds subtlety to the debate over how the United States and its allies should handle the Islamic Republic.
“They are trying to claim that anyone who brings nuance or a degree of complexity into the conversation is a regime apologist,” said Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, the founder of a feminist organization that works with women-led peace initiatives in conflict-ridden countries.
The debate around Iran has assumed newfound urgency. Since former President Donald Trump walked away from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, Tehran has worked hard to bring itself within striking distance of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and today, it is closer than it has ever been. A senior U.S. official estimated that Iran can now produce a bomb’s worth of fissile material in roughly 12 days. Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has told Congress that Iran would need only a few months to build a working weapon.
President Joe Biden, like his predecessors, has pledged to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It is an issue that he must contend with alongside Tehran’s arms sales to Russia, its support for regional militias, its attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, and, of course, its domestic repression. Individually, each of these problems is hard to address. Collectively, they pose an extraordinary challenge, and one that Biden is struggling to solve. It is no surprise, then, that plenty of diplomacy proponents and opponents alike agree that addressing Iran will require great creativity, especially from the diaspora.
The United States and Europe’s leading Iran hands are often of Iranian origin, making them more vulnerable to harassment. And the threats and harassment appear to be hitting their mark: At arguably the most critical juncture in relations with Iran since the two countries agreed to the nuclear deal in 2015, many pro-diplomacy analysts have shut up.
“The goal of this campaign is to intimidate and silence people,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the pro-diplomacy International Crisis Group. He expressed deep concern that Iran will become much more dangerous if experts and observers cannot openly discuss and figure out a new policy for the country. “There is literally a ticking bomb,” Vaez said. “The risk is that Iran will become another North Korea. The authoritarian system will survive, and the threat to the world will grow.”
Among diasporas, political infighting is nothing new. Cuban Americans have been arguing about whether and just how vigorously the United States should oppose the island’s government since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Venezuelans living abroad have had similarly intense debates about President Nicolás Maduro. And American Jews have formed a variety of powerful advocacy groups that spar over Washington’s support for Israel. In an especially incendiary moment, David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, declared that his liberal Jewish critics were “far worse than kapos” — the Jews who helped Nazis run concentration camps.
For Iranian Americans, accusations of collaboration are widespread. But the attacks go beyond occasional smears. Farnaz Fassihi, a New York Times reporter who frequently writes about Iran, has received death threats, rape threats and had her home address doxed. Naraghi-Anderlini was once sent a Twitter message with an image of a noose. Elahé Sharifpour-Hicks, a former Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch and a nuclear deal proponent, said she has come across graphic imagery of herself, including a cartoon depicting her naked in the arms of Iran’s supreme leader. Sharifpour-Hicks’ son, who is not involved in politics or diplomacy, has received death threats as well.
The harassment has not been limited to the internet. In mid-October, the University of Chicago received a bomb threat after it invited Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian-American freelance journalist, to participate in an event. In response, the university beefed up security. The harassment has also targeted members of the diaspora in countries other than the United States. When Rouzbeh Parsi — an academic and sanctions skeptic — joined a panel on Iran’s protests at a Stockholm museum, demonstrators outside tried to storm the building. In Berlin, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Foundation, a German think tank associated with the country’s governing party, canceled a December event on Iran after panelists and employees were threatened. The British Parliament postponed a hearing on Iran after one of the experts scheduled to testify was bombarded with attacks in apparent retaliation for publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a revived nuclear deal between the West and Iran.
The cancellations are just one of the ways the harassment has made it harder for diplomacy proponents to make their case. Iranian foreign policy experts have turned down invitations to write articles for policy magazines like the one I work for. Others have told me they are avoiding media altogether. Vaez, a former adviser to current U.S. Iran envoy Robert Malley, said the attacks have made the entire subject of diplomacy “toxic.”
Although Iranians have received most of the harassment, the attacks are not limited to the diaspora community.
“The harassment has made me think twice about tweeting and publishing,” said Kelsey Davenport, the director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. It was a fact she was “not proud to admit,” but one that’s easy to understand. After writing an article proposing a new path for Iranian-U.S. nuclear diplomacy, Davenport was inundated with threats, including against her children. She received four consecutive phone calls in which the caller said she was “whoring for the ayatollahs.”
In addition to frustrating the work of diplomacy proponents, the harassment has exacted an intense personal cost on the recipients. Naraghi-Anderlini said her family has come across accusations that she is a regime apologist, a painful smear for most Iranian expats. Mortazavi told me she is careful when she goes outside. Hakimi said that many of her friends would not defend her, and that some no longer wanted to be associated with her at all. The campaign has made her and others worry that, even if the Islamic Republic were to fall tomorrow, the diaspora would make it challenging for Iranians to build a liberal replacement.
“This is autocratic behavior,” Hakimi said. “This is not how you build a democracy.”
The Iranian expats launching the attacks, of course, see matters differently. To them, and to many other hawks, the best way to stop Tehran is by aggressively isolating it from the rest of the world. But unlike other hardliners, this group sees supporting diplomacy not just as counterproductive; they see it as tantamount to supporting the regime.
Shahrooz, the lawyer who is a senior fellow at Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute, tweeted that his ideological rivals “should be ridiculed and treated as the dictator-coddling clowns they are.” He has insinuated, without providing evidence, that many dovish analysts are on the regime’s payroll. “Collaborators and Vichyites hate it when their patron collapses,” he posted.
It is not the only time that Shahrooz, one of the most bombastic voices in the West’s Iran debate, whose posts can be retweeted hundreds of times and attract hundreds of comments, has drawn Nazi parallels. He tweeted that one analyst critical of the online attacks was akin to Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust. He posted that Fassihi, the Times reporter, was “mouthing talking points she’s not herself bright enough to understand.” In a particularly graphic comment, Shahrooz tweeted that Mortazavi and people like her had just one critique of Tehran: “that it doesn’t send Zarif to the U.S. more often so that they can fellate him more thoroughly.”
To better understand what was driving the harassment, I called Shahrooz in late February. Over the phone, he was less pugnacious. During the first part of our conversation, he instead came off more like the prominent analyst he is, one who has written for the Wall Street Journal and the Globe and Mail and who makes appearances on Canada’s national broadcaster. “I think the West should do everything short of military action to help Iranian people overthrow this regime,” he said. He outlined a theory of change that entailed sweeping transatlantic sanctions and an end by Europe to diplomatic relations with Tehran.
Shahrooz was born in Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution. He moved abroad when he was 10, and he said his family’s experience inspired him to become an Iran analyst. “I lost many family members in Iran’s prisons because of their activism,” he said. “I knew and my family knew [the regime] could not be trusted.”
Among Iranian expats, personal pain was a commonly cited reason for condemning peers. I also called Sana Ebrahimi, a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who frequently launches attacks against dovish analysts. She told me her father had once been arrested and tortured by the Iranian regime for his activism. She said that, as a student in Iran, the system had fed her immense amounts of propaganda. Ebrahimi cited such experiences as the reason she often alleges her opponents are working with the Islamic Republic. “As someone who lived there,” Ebrahimi told me, “it doesn’t make sense” how they could support diplomacy otherwise.
Ebrahimi arrived in the United States in 2019, a moment she described as liberating. She began using Twitter, where she now has roughly 55,000 followers, to aggressively blast both Iran’s brutality and analysts with whom she doesn’t agree. Her pinned tweet — which has been retweeted more than 8,000 times — accuses Mortazavi of fabricating the bomb threat at the University of Chicago. (In a call, a university spokesperson confirmed that there was a threat but declined to specify its nature. The college’s newspaper reported that it was a bomb threat, and the spokesperson did not dispute the report.) In another tweet, she accused Naraghi-Anderlini of “promoting the IRGC’s propaganda” and warned that “the day the truth comes out” would be “a sad and scary day in your life.”
On the phone, Ebrahimi said she thought the pro-diplomacy camp was blowing the attacks out of proportion. Ebrahimi also told me that she had received anonymous online threats, and that the harassment was not one sided. She sent over screenshots in which a volunteer then-affiliated with the National Iranian American Council — a dovish and controversial activist group — made fun of her English. The poster also accused Ebrahimi of being a “bootlicker” and a “bottom feeder.”
Shahrooz also said he had received threats, and he objected to his treatment by analysts he disagrees with. He told me that he had been labeled a “warmonger” and a “child killer” for supporting strong sanctions. The comments, he protested, were a bad-faith debate designed to “close the Overton window” — a social theory that posits people can shift the publicly acceptable range of policy options through aggressive and repetitive communication. The value of open debate and free speech is a theme of Shahrooz’s Twitter posts, one that exists alongside his invectives. In one tweet, for example, Shahrooz wrote that “the real test of your commitment to liberal democracy is the willingness to defend speech you hate. To stand up for the rights of your enemies.”
In our call, I asked Shahrooz if his commitment to free speech was in tension with his surrounding posts, and in particular his invocation of the Third Reich. He bristled. “Let’s dig into it, Daniel,” he said. “You’ve got a swastika-wearing Nazi. If I actually point out, ‘Oh hey, this person is actually a goddamn Nazi,’ is that somehow illiberal because it brings shame and anger upon the person? Or is that just a statement of fact?” His subjects, he argued, were being labeled accurately. “I think they’re the moral equivalent of Nazis,” he said. Shahrooz had a similar response when I asked him whether he felt responsible for some of the threats his opponents have faced, given his large social media following.
“I condemn any sort of threat,” he said. But he argued that it was not irresponsible for him to “point out the truth.” On Twitter and again during our call, Shahrooz even said he wanted his opponents to “tremble.”
But the menace isn’t solely driven by individuals like him and Ebrahimi — in fact, the scale of harassment suggests plenty of the attacks do not come from people at all. Mortazavi, for example, was at one point being tagged by more than 55,000 accounts per day on Twitter, an astounding figure for a freelance journalist. Of those 55,000 accounts, at least 16,000 had little to no followers and were tweeting more than 100 times per day. One account was tweeting 1,600 times per day.
“There is artificial amplification,” said Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Hamad bin Khalifa University and the author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East. Jones told me there is ample evidence that organized actors are using the internet to shape debates over Iran. In this case, it’s possible that at least some of these actors are funded directly by Tehran; U.S. intelligence officials have told Time Magazine that the Iranian government runs troll farms. Some of the attacks are likely funded by Iran’s enemies, too. In April 2021, for example, Facebook removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a controversial, belligerent Iranian opposition group based in Albania. And during the Trump administration, the U.S. State Department funded the Iran Disinformation Project: an opaque digital initiative that routinely called diplomacy supporters and journalists Iranian lobbyists.
The initiative lost its grant after its Western targets complained it was using its platform to harass them, rather than sticking to criticizing Iran. The project’s Twitter handle has been inactive since 2019. But Mariam Memarsadeghi, the initiative’s reported founder, has been active online during the current protests, and she has not been shy about lambasting people she disagrees with. In October, she accused Mortazavi of fabricating the bomb threat.
Plenty of the diaspora’s hardline attacks appear to be crafted by professionals and pushed out by bots. But there is a reason why large numbers of ordinary expats are also retweeting and sending out threats. Within the diaspora, trauma runs deep, and many members who have suffered because of the Iranian regime are understandably furious at the idea of Washington loosening its sanctions.
But the community’s journalists and more dovish members have also suffered at the hands of Tehran. Hakimi’s uncle was executed by the Iranian government. Several of Naraghi-Anderlini’s aunts and uncles were jailed. Mortazavi’s family has been harassed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp. Fassihi was accused of being a U.S. spy by Iranian state media and cannot go back. The last time Sharifpour-Hicks went to Iran, she received an anonymous message in her hotel saying she was a CIA agent and would be killed. Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post journalist who has written about the value of diplomacy, spent more than 500 days in Iran’s notorious Evin prison. Shahrooz nonetheless tweeted that Rezaian had developed “intense Stockholm syndrome.”
After talking to people who had been harassed, as well as to Shahrooz and Ebrahami, I came to the conclusion that the victims’ real offense is not that they support the Iranian government. It is not that they blame all of Iran’s problems on the West. It is certainly not that they oppose the protests. It is, instead, that they do not back maximalist positions over how the West should handle Tehran.
What the West should do is, of course, a very difficult question. And made without rancor, the case against diplomacy is quite strong. Between the protests, Iran’s weapons shipments to Russia, and how close the country is to obtaining nuclear weapons, restoring the nuclear agreement that offered Iran money in exchange for a pause in the program may ultimately do more harm than good. Tehran may also not be interested in diplomacy of any kind with Washington. In Iran, “the ultra-hardline of the ultra-hardline are at the helm,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
But the case for diplomacy is compelling, too. The 2015 nuclear deal, after all, did halt Iran’s nuclear development until Washington withdrew. A new agreement could not roll back Iran’s program to 2015, but any pause would still have benefits. If U.S. government analysts are correct, the country could create weapons-grade uranium and figure out how to fit it inside a missile with just several months of time. The result — a workable nuclear bomb — might make Iran feel secure enough to send conventional weapons it keeps at home to its overseas proxies. It could also embolden the regime, allowing it to become even more violent in responding to domestic protests.
And ultimately, there may be no alternative to diplomacy that does not involve military force. Some analysts even fear that the harassment campaign is designed to pave the way for an attack.
“In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Iraqi exile community was either not well-positioned to try to add nuance to the policy debate or was in favor of U.S. military intervention,” Vaez said. The same is not yet true among diaspora Iranians. But with all the threats, Vaez worried it might be soon.
Hakimi, for her part, feels the tension between these two positions. “I don’t want them to have money to continue their bad activities, but I also don’t want them to get a nuclear weapon,” she said. “You’re kind of between a rock and a hard place.”
Hakimi has shifted her position in recent months. The government’s cruel crackdown on the protests eventually led her to oppose diplomacy altogether. But she does not expect to join the hawks’ push for maximalist pressure anytime soon. In fact, she’s not sure how much she can push for anything. The trolling, harassment and bombardment may have proven too much.
“I’ve never been one looking for attention. I’ve never tried to build my personal brand,” she told me. “But I have always wanted to have an impact and to bring people together. I’ve always wanted to create change. And now I feel like I can’t.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Republicans, led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, can point to polls showing only tepid backing for raising the debt ceiling and preference for spending cuts over tax increases to bring down the budget deficit. On President Joe Biden and the Democrats’ side: overwhelming support for lifting the cap once poll respondents are told breaching it could lead to a default.
That’s a mixed bag of public opinion: 54 percent of Americans opposed raising the debt ceiling in a new CBS News/YouGov poll this week, but that number dropped to only 30 percent when respondents were asked if they would let the U.S. default. But in Washington, polling uncertainty about the political fallout can have serious consequences. In the debt limit fight, it’s emboldening both sides.
Biden is in an especially precarious position, as he reportedly prepares to roll out his reelection campaign as soon as next week. He’s entering this fight with lower approval ratings than Obama’s ahead of the 2011 crisis, and voters remain worried about inflation and the economy — which, along with government dysfunction, could supplant more Democratic-friendly issues like abortion in the news in the coming weeks.
A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll from late February underscored the volatility of the situation — and the current disincentive for either party to cave: Asked whom they would blame if the U.S. defaulted, a plurality of voters, 37 percent, said they’d hold both parties equally responsible. Another 30 percent said Democrats would be most to blame, while 24 percent said the GOP would be.
It’s a different climate from 12 years ago. A Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll from mid-June of 2011 — about six weeks before the crisis was ultimately resolved — found more Americans said they would blame Republicans (42 percent) than Obama (33 percent) if the debt limit wasn’t raised.
In that debate, Obama and Democrats were generally seen as more in line with public opinion, backing a combination of spending reductions and tax increases on the wealthy — a generally popular plank — in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, compared with Republicans’ more drastic budget cuts.
That combination hasn’t been floated this year, given Republicans’ aversion to new taxes and Biden’s lack of engagement with McCarthy so far. Broadly, Americans are split when asked to choose between the two: tax hikes or spending cuts, with a slight preference to trimming spending.
A NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College poll in February found that half of voters, 50 percent, thought in order to close the national debt the government should “mostly cut programs and services,” while 47 percent said it should “mostly increase taxes and fees.”
In that poll, 52 percent of voters favored raising the debt ceiling “to deal with the federal budget deficit” — slightly different wording than the CBS News poll that yielded slightly stronger support. But only 26 percent of Republicans supported raising the debt ceiling, even as McCarthy seeks support for his plan in the House next week among a bloc of members who even opposed hiking it under then-President Donald Trump.
What could make 2023 different from 2011, Republicans say, is inflation.
“There is one really important change that’s occurred,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster and adviser to former House Speakers Newt Gingrich and John Boehner. “When you go back to prior discussions [about the debt ceiling], the national debt is still an abstraction.”
But now, Winston said, “There is a clear connection that the electorate has between spending and inflation.”
The GOP catered much of its 2022 midterm economic message around trying to connect government spending with the rapid increase in prices over the past few years.
There’s some evidence that’s worked, to a degree: A YouGov poll from last October, just weeks before the midterms, found that 53 percent of Americans assigned “a lot” of blame for inflation to “spending from the federal government” — though that was fewer than blamed “the price of foreign oil” (60 percent) and roughly equal to those who held “large corporations trying to maximize profits” (52 percent).
For Biden and Democrats searching for the upper hand, there are some encouraging signals in the polling. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from late January and early February asked Americans if Congress should only raise the debt ceiling if Biden agrees to spending cuts, or if “the issues of debt payment and federal spending” should “be handled separately?”
The public took Biden’s side on the strategic question: Only 26 percent said Congress should only raise the debt limit if Biden cut spending, while 65 percent said the debt payments and spending should be separate.
Moreover, while reducing spending might be broadly popular, there’s the issue of what to cut. In this week’s CBS News/YouGov poll, not only do seven-in-10 respondents want the country to avoid a default, but majorities actually support increasing spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as part of the budget notifications. Even on defense spending, more Americans want to see it increased (41 percent) than decreased (26 percent). A third, 33 percent, want it to remain the same.
But Biden is also less popular than Obama — who was still enjoying a bounce in his poll numbers after the killing of Osama bin Laden entering the final three months of the 2011 debt crisis — at this point in the process. Biden’s average approval rating is 42 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, while Obama in May 2011 was sitting on majority approval. And even Obama’s approval rating slipped as the country approached the debt ceiling that summer — a potential preview of what’s to come.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The endgame is still hard to see, weeks or even months away depending on how quickly the nation approaches default. But the political battle entered a new phase this week when McCarthy finally put forth a legislative proposal in his speech Monday, laying out the spending cuts Republicans wanted in exchange for a one-year debt ceiling increase — and giving the White House officials something specific to attack.
And attack they have. Biden’s speech Wednesday at a Maryland union hall served as a summation of his team’s theory of the case. And White House aides have made it clear they’re eager to continue talking about this, whether through emails from the press shop, Cabinet officials describing the specific impacts of proposed cuts or at the briefing room podium.
On Friday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called McCarthy’s proposal a “ransom note” and emphasized a new VA analysis on the impact of proposed GOP cuts on veterans healthcare. The president’s economic agenda, the White House believes, is popular. Repealing laws that have helped the middle class and created jobs, cutting taxes for corporations and the rich, and risking default are not.
Republicans, Biden asserted Wednesday, “say they’re going to default unless I agree to all these wacko notions they have. Default. It would be worse than totally irresponsible.”
He reminded McCarthy of the GOP’s hypocrisy — they had no problem raising the debt ceiling three times during the Trump presidency — and of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump’s own comments decrying debt limit brinkmanship as reckless. Biden also urged the speaker to “take default off the table, and let’s have a real, serious, detailed conversation about how to grow the economy, lower costs and reduce the deficit.”
According to two people familiar with the administration’s strategy, it’s not clear to anyone inside the White House if McCarthy has the votes from his own caucus to pass his bill, and it may not yet be clear to the speaker himself, who has what one person familiar with the White House’s thinking termed a “principal-agent problem.”
The bill would be dead on arrival in a Democrat-controlled Senate. But the White House is signaling clearly to GOP moderates in the House: Vote to cut popular programs, including Social Security and Medicare, at your own risk.
“If they pass this, we are going to hang it around their moderates’ necks,” said one person familiar with the administration’s thinking.
Chad Gilmartin, a McCarthy spokesperson, said “the White House is clearly having trouble defending President Biden’s reckless spending and irresponsible refusal to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy on the debt limit.”
He added: “It’s no surprise that the administration now has to fall back on crazy accusations against the only plan in Congress that would avoid default.”
But Biden, his aides say, learned from the Obama administration’s 2011 standoff with Republicans that it’s imperative not to allow the debt ceiling to become part of negotiations. But with McCarthy’s tenuous speakership constantly hanging by a thread, and dependent in large part on his ability to placate his most extreme members, the White House knows that talking him off the ledge on risking default — giving up what he sees as his main point of leverage — won’t be easy.
And as much as White House officials like the politics of the negotiations’ current phase, they know they, too, will face pressure to negotiate the closer they get to D-Day.
The window for scoring points, in fact, could be quite short as the danger of default grows. Goldman Sachs economists this week said that, due to weaker than expected tax season revenues, the U.S. could hit the debt ceiling in early June, earlier than expected. Within the administration, there are some differences in the level of alarm, as senior officials focused on economic matters have privately expressed more concern about the serious possibility of default than others whose purview is politics, according to one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.
Already, some Democrats are urging Biden to engage with McCarthy sooner rather than later. But at this point, Biden would be unlikely to say anything different to the speaker in private than what he’s said publicly — he’s open to a bipartisan deal on spending but only after lawmakers authorize a clean debt ceiling increase. That said, Jean-Pierre Friday wouldn’t go as far as to say that Biden would only meet with McCarthy after he puts forth a clean debt ceiling hike.
And there’s doubt inside the West Wing about whether McCarthy is ready for a meeting. Some aides believe it will take mounting pressure from the business community for the speaker to relent and that, given the difficult politics within his own caucus, he may not be able to back down. In such a scenario, the White House hopes that the House might at the very least swallow a Senate-passed bill to avoid default, if some Republicans are willing to use a discharge petition to get such a bill to the floor.
But some in the administration are less confident about that scenario coming to fruition than the White House is at the moment about the current contours of the debate. Senate Republican Leader “Mitch McConnell as the backstop is scary,” the senior administration official said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In a state where surveys show a majority of voters favor keeping abortion legal, he has compared the procedure to murder. And even some Republicans in North Carolina see him as a liability.
“Because of his comments, he will nationalize the gubernatorial race in North Carolina for the Democrats, which will open the door for them in raising tens of millions of dollars across the country,” said Paul Shumaker, a Republican consultant in the state.
But as he launches his campaign in rural Alamance County, Robinson will need to do what many high-profile, controversial Republicans failed to accomplish in last year’s midterms — overcome his past comments that could be deeply unpopular with general election voters.
It is a critical test for the GOP in the post-Trump era, after a slate of problematic nominees cost Republicans a number of winnable governor and U.S. Senate races in 2022.
The opportunity for Republicans in North Carolina is enormous. Democrats haven’t won a presidential or U.S. Senate race there since 2008. And with Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper leaving office — a candidate who won twice as Donald Trump took the state in both 2016 and 2020 — Tarheel Democrats are staring down an election without their best candidate in a generation.
Robinson will be boosted by an existing small-dollar fundraising operation and a flurry of earned media on conservative platforms, where he has raised his profile in recent years. And he’ll have the backing of fiery grassroots supporters that dominate the GOP base in North Carolina. None of the negative headlines have so far stopped his meteoric rise in state politics, riding a viral video of him giving public comment about gun rights at a city council meeting in 2018 to being elected to the state’s second-highest office a little over two years later. And even after in-state media uncovered a past comment by Robinson — a staunch abortion opponent — that he and his wife had terminated a pregnancy decades ago, his standing remained virtually unchanged, Raleigh’s WRAL found in a survey.
Still, he could face a potentially bruising challenge in the primary — largely focused on other Republicans’ concerns that he is not electable in the fall.
Mark Walker, a former Greensboro-area congressman who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for Senate last year, is publicly mulling a run, and is expected to enter the race in the coming weeks.
Walker acknowledged in an interview that most political observers in the state see Robinson as the “strong favorite” to win the GOP nomination, but he repeatedly suggested that Robinson would not be a good general election candidate because of baggage he carried. Walker, who is being advised by National Public Affairs, a political consulting group run by Bill Stepien and other Trump alumni, said he was “disappointed that [Robinson] would not be honest with the people of North Carolina about all different things,” declining to elaborate further.
Walker’s criticism carries a bit of irony since he helped launch Robinson’s political career by sharing that 2018 viral video on Facebook. He insisted there was “nothing personal” about potentially running against Robinson, only that Republicans needed to nominate a winning candidate for the fall.
Even if Walker does not get in, Robinson is facing other challengers in the Republican primary. Already in the race is Dale Folwell, the state treasurer first elected in 2016, who cast himself as an alternative to Robinson in part because he is “not a gamble on the ballot.”
But any challenger to Robinson faces a tough path. Members of North Carolina’s Republican legislative leadership are largely supportive of Robinson’s primary bid, according to four state GOP insiders. Legislative leaders gave him an unusually prominent perch earlier this year, tapping Robinson to give the response to Cooper’s state of the state address — a spot where Robinson tried to shed at least some of his usual bomb-throwing persona.
And Republican legislators are expected to be among those supporting Robinson at his announcement Saturday.
Early polling on the general election race shows it’s likely to be a dead-heat. Carolina Forward, a progressive advocacy group, released a survey this fall that showed state Attorney General Josh Stein — who Democrats have coalesced around — at 44 percent support, compared to Robinson’s 42 percent. But among independents — a key voting bloc in North Carolina — Robinson was up slightly.
“You’re going to have two absolute juggernauts from either party, with Robinson and Stein raising, I predict, more money than we’ve ever seen in a governor’s race in this state,” said Conrad Pogorzelski III, Robinson’s top political strategist.
While it remains to be seen how Robinson’s past scandals and history of heated rhetoric will play out under greater scrutiny this election cycle, those close to the lieutenant governor have advised him to proceed as if the primary is already over — and to focus more on the general electorate than dishing out more red meat to the base. Saturday’s rally could be an early sign of whether he’ll actually embrace that advice.
Robinson — the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, who worked a manufacturing job up until his recent political career launch — has sought to emphasize his relatability to average people when confronted with past news coverage about his personal financial mismanagement and other missteps.
“It’s a quasi-populist message that’s about going after the elites, and that’s what Trump was able to channel very effectively when he carried the state of North Carolina twice,” said Jonathan Felts, a Republican strategist who most recently advised Sen. Ted Budd’s midterm campaign. “It’s not just a fringe-right phenomenon — it’s something that percolates across the political spectrum and something that pollsters and the D.C. consultant class have gotten wrong since 2016.”
If he wins the primary, Robinson’s traits will be contrasted with the mild-mannered persona of Stein, a Dartmouth and Harvard-educated lawyer who has served two terms as the state’s top prosecutor. But it’s one that Democrats eagerly embrace.
“You couldn’t have a bigger contrast between these two candidates,” said Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist who advises both Cooper and Stein. “Mark Robinsion is the most far-right extreme candidate who has ever run in the history of North Carolina.”
The race comes at a dire moment for the Democratic Party in North Carolina.
The state was supposed to be the swing state of the future for Democrats, after then-candidate Barack Obama won a squeaker in 2008 and Kay Hagan won an open Senate seat by over 8 points that year. But Democrats have not won a statewide federal race since then — losing a string of close Senate and presidential contests that have thrown into question the true tossup nature of the state.
Democrats have fared far better on the statewide level. Republicans have won just one governor race in the last 30 years, and there has been a single Republican attorney general in the last century. Even so, Cooper, the most successful Democrat in North Carolina in any recent history, is term-limited out. And Republicans hold supermajorities in both state legislative chambers.
“This could be the culmination of 15 years of [Republican] work, in the sense of a consolidation of power by any means,” said Democratic state House Minority Leader Robert Reives.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
A vapor trail of broken Musk promises and failed predictions, all of which became news stories, have been documented by the elonmusk.today website. Musk vowed to build an “everything” Twitter app, but hasn’t. A full-time litigation shop? No sign of it yet. To convert atmospheric CO2 into rocket fuel? A no-show. The list continues: To create a super-fast Starlink service. Produce ventilators. Build a flying car. Distill a Tesla liquor (“Teslaquila”). Start a candy company. Sorry, not yet. When not making news by making promises, Musk enters our news diet by insulting people. He’s knocked a U.S. senator with a vulgar tweet, called a Thai cave rescuer a “pedo guy,” ridiculed Bill Gates’ beer belly and mocked a disabled Twitter employee. When predictions and insults fail to win him publicity, Musk has gained public attention by sharing conspiracy theories, signaling his support of the presidential candidacy of Ye, better known as Kanye West (and then withdrawing it), endorsing hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment and by making a poop emoji the auto-response to questions the press sends to Twitter.
This unbroken stream of Musk blarney and BS should be enough to deter the press from automatically reporting the tycoon’s publicity hounding. But as with Donald Trump, the press seems unable to resist splashing coverage on Musk’s unnewsworthy high jinks, even though the stories have now become as common as dog-bites-man. Reporters on the Musk beat have a point when they say you never know which one of Musk’s outrageous stabs at grabbing attention will actually blossom into genuine news. For instance, when he first said he was going to buy Twitter, who among us could look at his track record and think he would actually complete the deal? Few of the acorns Musk tosses out there end up sprouting into a tree, but enough of them do that maybe his every burp does justify coverage.
But that can’t be the main reason the press covers every Muskism that comes over the transom. This column suggested late last year that journalists wean themselves from the Musk habit. But instead of giving the once-over twice to his antics, the press corps has further devoted itself to his promotion. He offers reporters table scraps. They turn it into a banquet. He picks a petty fight. They report it as if it were a global war. He’s got the media machine’s number, and keeps pressing it.
Here’s how it works: Too many editors are eager to assign an easy-to-assemble story from the components of a Musk prediction, threat or stunt. And readers seem to love the copy. It’s Musk-press synergy all the way down. Musk didn’t invent the mock news event, he’s only perfected it. Con men, pranksters and publicity agents have been jamming the press for more than a century with bogus stories like him. In recent decades, hoaxers have persuaded the press to chase the story that Paul McCartney was dead. Another time, a man made worldwide news by claiming to have cured his arthritis by injecting cockroach hormones. Not that long ago, Volkswagen pranked the press with a press release to publicize its electric car by saying it was changing its name to Voltswagen. And in 2009, a Colorado family claimed a helium balloon wafted their son into the heavens.
Some of these pranks can be dismissed as good-natured fun. But most of them stand as critiques of the press, showing how credulous and easily manipulated journalists can be. When Musk engages in his kind of publicity hounding, he consciously exploits the media’s frailty and appetite for copy. His promises, his kayfabe Twitter spats, his controversy-mongering offer the press a preassembled cast of characters, an element of conflict and questions to answer. A grateful press appreciates how the wow factor of a Musk publicity stunt makes the routine coverage of quarterly reports, city council meetings and weather seem mundane. If Musk isn’t on the press corps payroll, he should be.
What’s in it for Musk? He has long disdained advertising, believing that the unearned media of a stunt (or the quality of a great product) is advertising enough. According to Ashley Vance’s book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk ordered his Tesla staff to produce at least one barnburner of a public relations announcement a week to stimulate interest in the company’s cars. But in a 2021 court appearance, Musk made transparent how he keeps playing the press. “If we are entertaining, then people will write stories about us, and then we don’t have to spend money on advertising that would increase the price of our products,” he said.
Naming one of his children X Æ A-12, as he did in 2020, or pushing a Tesla roadster into space or challenging Vladimir Putin to “single combat” or issuing a Ukraine peace plan or selling 20,000 flamethrowers are prime examples of how Musk garners notice for his brands and his products. These advertisements for himself, to pinch a phrase from Norman Mailer, create a buzz about him and his ventures, and project the image of an omnipresent, charismatic guy who makes hot copy. When the press briefly turned against him in 2018 for some of his business miscues, Musk went all meta on reporters by announcing a press-watch site called Pravduh.com. Like so many Musk projects, it arrived stillborn and was soon forgotten, but not before he got a burst of publicity out of it. Which was the point, anyway.
Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has made media stunt-work one of his prime occupations — announcing plans, ending them, releasing Twitter files to Matt Taibbi and other journalists, and even tweeting from the toilet. He’ll do anything to keep it and himself in the news, and every day the news media rewards his showboating with an avalanche of running coverage and commentary. But you’ve got to wonder. Is Elon Musk the problem here? Or is it the press, which understands how it’s being manipulated by Musk but just can’t quit him?
******
Every journalist on the Musk beat should read Edward Niedermeyer’s Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motor. Send your favorite empty Musk stunt to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is all about regenerative braking. My Mastodon and Post accounts wish Musk would buy them. My Substack Notes is less than inspired. My RSS feed says Venus, not Mars, should be our destination.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Greene is far from alone among Republicans cheering clean energy investments created by Democratic policies they all snubbed. And that’s creating some awkward dynamics for GOP lawmakers who are seeking to wipe out Biden’s clean-energy spending plans as part of any deal to avert a U.S. debt default.
The White House, and supporters of Biden’s clean energy programs, are eagerly seizing on the contradiction.
“The Biden Clean Energy Plan has helped create more than 140,000 clean energy jobs across the U.S. — the majority of which are in Republican-held districts,” said Lori Lodes, executive director of the group Climate Power, citing its own estimates of the law’s economic impact.
“Now MAGA extremists are threatening to implode our country’s economy — and the clean energy manufacturing boom that’s happening in their communities — to protect their own corporate, anti-climate interests,” she said.
According to data provided by Climate Power, which was then reviewed, vetted and confirmed by POLITICO’s E&E News, at least 37 congressional districts now represented by Republicans have welcomed expansions of new clean energy operations fostered by three major Biden-era laws — last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law or the CHIPS and Science Act.
A POLITICO analysis early this year similarly found that Republican districts were home to about two-thirds of the major renewable energy, battery and electric vehicle projects that companies had announced since Biden signed the IRA in August.
House Republicans all opposed the Inflation Reduction Act. All but 13 opposed the infrastructure law, and all but 34 voted against the CHIPS and Science Act.
Three House Republicans who are poised to see new chip manufacturing booms in their districts — Reps. Mike Simpson of Idaho, John Curtis of Utah and Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee — were among those who scorned CHIPS.
In its reporting, E&E News found that 21 projects in Republican-led districts were a result of benefits from the IRA, while 15 were made possible by the infrastructure law. Some Republicans had multiple projects in their districts due to one or both of these laws.
Eleven Republicans responded to requests for comment or made themselves available for interviews to explain how they squared their opposition to these laws with their support for the jobs in their districts. They include Greene, who denied that any contradiction exists in her stance on Biden’s programs.
“I don’t think the government should be controlling our energy sector,” Greene said in an interview Thursday on Capitol Hill.
‘Height of hypocrisy’
Greene also insisted that the climate law’s enactment was not the catalyst for the expansion of QCells, despite the company’s statements asserting as much.
“Those jobs were jobs in my district under the Trump administration,” she said. “QCells … gave all the credit to the local counties there that helped them get started, and [Republican] Gov. [Brian] Kemp and the Trump administration.”
The company announced in January that it would add to existing facilities in Greene’s Dalton district, plus add a new facility in Cartersville, the district of Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk. Qcells said at the time that the action “follow[ed] the passage of the Solar Energy Manufacturing in America Act within the Inflation Reduction Act.”
In April, Qcells further celebrated a deal that would require the Dalton plant to manufacture 2.5 million solar panels — the largest community solar order in American history — made possible by the 2022 climate spending law. Vice President Kamala Harris attended the festivities.
“It’s the height of hypocrisy for [Republicans] to be blasting the president and all he’s done to address climate change and build a clean energy economy that is directly benefiting people in their districts,” Craig Auster, vice president for political affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, said of the GOP lawmakers.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates similarly scorned the GOP position in a memo Thursday that was later provided to news outlets including POLITICO’s E&E News. “Killing newly-created American manufacturing jobs just so the super wealthy and big corporations can enjoy tax welfare would be a gut-punch to America’s competitiveness and to thousands of working families in red states,” he wrote.
In South Charleston, West Virginia, GreenPower Motor Co. has said its electric school bus facility benefited from the infrastructure law’s clean school bus program, and it has highlighted how its buses can also get tax credits worth up to $40,000 from the Inflation Reduction Act.
Republican Rep. Carol Miller, who represents that area, said in a statement that while “hardworking businesses like GreenPower Motor are responding to the rules set by the federal government to bring much needed investment to West Virginia … we should have provided them with the ability to grow without sending American tax dollars to the Chinese Communist Party.” (The administration insists its agenda is meant to provide jobs and economic security inside the U.S., not China.)
Miller added that “the jobs West Virginia is creating through the so-called ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ come nowhere close to replacing the opportunities that liberal activists destroyed in my state. The faster we can repeal these IRA tax credits and replace them with incentives that fully support American manufacturing and energy production, the better.”
Elsewhere in West Virginia, Sparkz Inc. — an energy startup producing lithium-ion batteries — is growing operations in Republican Rep. Alex Mooney’s district.
In March, Sparkz CEO Sanjiv Malhotra told an audience at the premier annual energy conference CERAWeek by S&P Global that he had Biden and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to thank for the Inflation Reduction Act, which led to the massive investment the company has made in the state.
Mooney, who is vying to unseat Manchin in 2024, issued a statement that didn’t address how he reconciled his opposition to the climate law with jobs coming to his community.
“The Inflation Enhancement Act is a $745 billion spending spree that alone adds $146 billion to the national debt,” he said. “West Virginians are paying more at the pump and the grocery store as they suffer from Biden’s regressive inflation tax.”
Justifying the disconnect
Not every Republican had an explanation ready for how they squared their positions.
In Clarksville, Tenn., for instance, which is part of Rep. Mark Green’s district, Texas-based Microvast Holdings plans to expand an existing facility with a new plant for battery components. The Department of Energy picked the plant in October for a $200 million award under an infrastructure law program meant to boost battery materials processing and battery manufacturing.
GOP lawmakers are scrutinizing that award because of Microvast’s significant presence and operations in China. DOE officials have said the money has not yet gone out while the agency continues to vet all of the award recipients.
Green said while he was concerned about the China connections, he didn’t feel prepared to talk about how the existence of the facility colors his view of the infrastructure law, which he voted against.
“I have to get some more information on it to answer the questions,” he said.
Others, however, sought to justify the disconnect.
Republican Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada has two battery manufacturing facilities in his district that received incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act — Zinc8 Energy Solutions and Redwood Materials. The district is also home to a lithium manufacturing plant from Lilac Solutions because of the infrastructure law.
Despite all this activity, he said, “when you look at the overall policy, let’s just say for Nevada, these two pieces of funding do not make up for the damage these two pieces of legislation can do or are threatening to do.”
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, the top Republican on the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, was emphatic that a grant made possible by the infrastructure law for Novonix Ltd. to produce battery components in his district did not depend on protecting that piece of legislation in the long term.
In fact, he argued, the appropriations process has been filling the coffers of this project and others like it for some time now.
The infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act “were like a false positive, if you will … the money’s there.”
Rep. Dan Newhouse, the chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, represents Moses Lake, Wash., where Sila Nanotechnologies received a $100 million award through an infrastructure law Energy Department program. Separately, REC Silicon, a solar-grade polysilicon manufacturer, said last year that the Inflation Reduction Act “underpinned” its decision to reopen its own closed plant in Moses Lake.
“Rep. Newhouse had fundamental disagreements with the massive infrastructure package that spurred a socialist spending spree and led to record-high inflation,” said spokesperson Mike Marinella.
“While he acknowledges that the bill did more harm than good for the American people, he will always recognize and applaud economic opportunity for the hardworking men and women in his district.”
Concerns for projects despite ‘no’ votes
Some Republicans also laid bare how complicated the dynamics can be.
Just outside Charleston, S.C., in Rep. Nancy Mace’s district, the battery minerals recycling company Redwood Materials is working to build a $3.5 billion manufacturing campus.
“When paired with the benefits of the recent Inflation Reduction Act, this strategic location also allows us the opportunity to invest more heavily at home while potentially exporting components in the future, allowing the U.S. to become a global leader in this manufacturing capability,” the company said in announcing its plans.
J.B. Straubel, the company’s CEO, told The Wall Street Journal that the Inflation Reduction Act “has gently shifted our priorities to really accelerate investment in the U.S. a little bit ahead of looking overseas.”
Mace, in an interview, said the Redwood plant doesn’t change her opposition to the climate law: “It doesn’t do anything for inflation,” she said. “It was really just a gift to the Green New Deal.”
On the other hand, Mace is leaning against supporting House GOP leadership’s debt limit deal because of its rollbacks to the IRA’s clean energy provisions.
“I’m concerned about some of the things that’ll hurt some green energy like solar,” she said. “Solar is huge — not only in the Lowcountry, but across the entire state of South Carolina, it’s huge. This would adversely affect solar.”
Curtis, the chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus, has a semiconductor wafer plant from Texas Instruments booming in his Utah district thanks to an investment from the CHIPS and Science Act.
In a statement this week, he intimated that he would support the GOP debt limit bill but acknowledged it “also proposes cuts to clean energy tax credits” that he supported in previous legislative iterations before they were packaged in the partisan Inflation Reduction Act.
“I … will continue to advocate for policies that lead to affordable, reliable, clean energy,” Curtis said.
‘Candy apples’ and ‘toads’
Many of the GOP’s allies in the advocacy and industry community are likewise gritting their teeth at the party’s demands in the debt standoff.
“In the last nine months, the clean energy industry has announced 46 major manufacturing facilities and scores of clean energy projects in communities across the country,” said Jason Grumet, the CEO of the American Clean Power Association — the largest clean energy trade group — in a statement. “If enacted, [the GOP bill] would jeopardize these investments and thousands of good paying American jobs.”
But Heather Reams, president of the right-leaning Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, said in an interview Thursday that she couldn’t fault Republicans for rejecting the one-sided political process that surrounded the drafting, and enactment, of the Inflation Reduction Act.
“I don’t think you’re seeing Republicans turn their backs entirely as a party on clean energy; I think you’re seeing conservatives turning their backs on out-of-control spending, and the IRA being ground zero for partisan spending,” she said.
Luke Bolar, who leads external relations and communications at the conservative clean energy group ClearPath, dwelled on Republicans’ complicated relationship with the IRA’s clean energy tax credits during a keynote speech in March at the Conservative Climate Leadership Conference.
He urged citizen lobbyists to press for implementation of elements of the climate law, but conceded: “That’s a tricky one, right? Zero Republicans supported that. … However, some of the tax incentives that were included in the IRA had tremendous Republican support.”
Bolar mentioned the law’s incentives for carbon capture and sequestration, which can offer fossil fuel companies payments for corralling greenhouse gases.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) put the GOP’s green jobs predicament more colorfully.
“I always refer to pieces of legislation as having either candy apples or toads,” Griffith observed. “If there’s enough candy apples, you can swallow a toad or two. Some of the renewable or biofuels tax credits, those are the toads you may have to swallow in order to set the stage and have some candy apples and try to rein in some of this government spending.”
Jeremy Dillon contributed to this report.
A version of this report first ran in E&E Daily. Get access to more comprehensive and in-depth reporting on the energy transition, natural resources, climate change and more in E&E News.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The “Stand with Su” effort is a direct counterweight to some of the forces that have been lobbying against her — including the name choice, as one of the main anti-confirmation groups is called “Stand Against Su.”
“Julie Su has been a champion for labor, and labor is mobilizing in the way only we can,” AFL-CIO spokesperson Ray Zaccaro said.
A key part of the pitch is that Su, who faces a committee vote Wednesday, is in the same mold as former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, a seasoned politician who had fans on both sides of the aisle and who has been directly involved in rounding up support for her, according to an administration official. Su served as Walsh’s deputy secretary beginning in July 2021 and has been acting head of the department for the past month, after Walsh stepped down to run the NHL Players’ Association.
“She has worked hand in hand with Marty Walsh,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told POLITICO. “If you liked the way Marty Walsh operated as the Secretary of Labor, then there’s no reason not to embrace Julie Su.”
But Republicans say Su, who was labor secretary in California before coming to Washington, would veer sharply left of Walsh and used a confirmation hearing this week to portray her as anti-business and captive to labor’s priorities. Although all five of the senators in question voted to confirm Su as deputy secretary, Manchin, Tester and Sinema are likely to face tough reelection fights next year.
“The more that people learn about her track record and just how bad she was in this role in California, we’re seeing that shifting the debate,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), a leading critic of Su, told POLITICO prior to her confirmation hearing. “It’s very different when you’re going for the top position than being under Marty Walsh.”
The battle over Su is the Biden administration’s first attempt at replacing a Cabinet secretary, and the latest test of Democratic leadership’s ability to confirm nominees after multiple high-profile misfires. Though Su is already steering the department, administrations are typically wary of issuing major policy decisions without a permanent leader, meaning that a protracted confirmation fight could bog down the agency for months.
Administration officials are holding nightly “war room” calls with Su’s backers to discuss the game plan for the following day and to track developments, according to a White House official. The administration also holds 15 to 20 check-in calls per day across labor and business groups.
Walsh has also been actively engaged in the process and advocating for Su with labor and business leaders and senators, according to an administration official.
Many Democrats on Capitol Hill are hopeful Kelly, Tester and King will support Su. If that is the case, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein remains in San Francisco recovering from shingles, Su and the White House would still need to win over Manchin and Sinema, both of whom have bucked the president in the past.
Neither senator is on the committee that will vote Wednesday on whether to advance Su’s nomination to the floor and attention will fully turn to them immediately after the vote.
Su has been ramping up her meetings with senators of both parties in recent weeks, though she has yet to meet with several key holdouts. She has spoken to Sinema, according to two sources familiar with the situation, and the White House is in touch with Manchin, an administration official said.
Su doesn’t have a traditional “sherpa,” a veteran lawmaker or some other plugged-in operative who typically leads Cabinet officials and other important nominees through the confirmation process on Capitol Hill. The lack of one has raised eyebrows among some of Su’s supporters about the White House’s level of support for the nomination.
The term “sherpa” is being phased out at the White House, however. Instead, she has a “navigator” — the senior leader of the Labor Department’s congressional affairs shop. The office has led Su through the process and accompanied her at each of her Senate meetings, according to that official.
Su is only the second Cabinet official to go through the confirmation process since the first months of the Biden administration — Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar being the other — and the agencies now lead the confirmation process, an administration official said.
With an obvious eye toward Manchin, the White House has heavily touted Su’s support from labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and, most significantly, United Mine Workers of America.
While a recent letter of support from Mine Workers President Cecil E. Roberts may pull weight with Manchin, Su supporters have been cautious to not be too heavy-handed with either him or Sinema, knowing that an overt lobbying effort may backfire.
“The White House knows what they need to do for the best outcome to get Julie Su confirmed,” said an organized labor official, who requested anonymity to discuss political strategy. “They know the relationship dynamics they have with the senators in question. And they know it’s a complicated circumstance that requires deft and delicate management.”
The White House’s light-touch strategy is not entirely reliant on unions to shoulder the lobbying load and the administration has highlighted her support from groups like the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Small Business Majority and those representing Asian American and Pacific Islanders. If confirmed, Su would be Biden’s first AAPI Cabinet secretary and his fourth AAPI Cabinet member overall.
But organized labor is at the center of the pro-Su push.
“There’s a world of Julie Su supporters out there, and we’re trying to show that,” the labor official said. “We saw these senators vote for her [to become deputy secretary] and there’s no reason to vote against her now. It remains to be seen just how uncertain they actually are.”
— Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Jammu and Kashmir National Conference Chief Farooq Abdullah.
Srinagar: National Conference president Farooq Abdullah on Saturday said security forces should not harass innocent people during their operation against the perpetrators of the Poonch terror attack that killed five Indian Army soldiers.
“They have started operation in Pooch. They should not arrest innocent people. It was their mistake, they should not harass innocent people. It is wrong and it should be avoided, ” Abdullah told reporters after offering Eid prayers at the Hazratbal shrine here.
Five Army personnel were killed and another was seriously injured after their vehicle was attacked by terrorists in Poonch district Thursday. The soldiers were from a Rashtriya Rifles unit deployed for counter-terror operations.
Abdullah also expressed surprise that Eid prayers were not allowed at the Jamia Masjid.
“It is unfortunate that Eid prayers were not allowed at Jamia Masjid. I thought they were allowing the prayers there. The government is saying that situation is peaceful. Then why are they not allowing the prayers,” he said.
The former chief minister said Hurriyat Chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, who is the chief priest of Kashmir, should have been allowed to take part in the prayers.
