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April 9, 2023
Key Takeaways:
- It's still Pesach, so you can still share my Top Ten Signs You're At a Republican Seder--plague your friends with laughter!
- The greatest existential threats to Israel as a Jewish, democratic state now come from its own government: settlement expansion and judicial overhaul. The pro-Israel community should expand its definition of "Israel's security" to include these threats.
- The Biden administration is engaging with the UN Human Rights Council to support human rights across the globe and to oppose unfairly singling out Israel.
- The Republican Party is a threat to democracy and to our safety: It's time to stop fetishizing bipartisanship and start focusing on the reality of today's GOP, which is an anti-democratic party that wants to ban abortion across the country (witness the ruling by a Trump-appointed judge to ban mifepristone) and prevent bans or even restrictions on gun ownership.
- We need to ban all handguns, not just assault weapons, and we need to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.
Read to the end for corrections, what you may have missed last week, fun stuff, and upcoming events.
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Chag Sameach, Steve!
It's still Pesach, so that means you can still share my Top Ten Signs You're At a Republican Seder. If someone forwards it to you by email or posts it on social media without attribution, let them know that you saw it here first, in this newsletter, and invite them to subscribe--either by using this link or by sending their email address to me (I'm happy to add them manually if that's what they'd prefer because I'm that kind of guy).
I'm glad that people are enjoying it but the point was for people to see it and sign up for this newsletter. I don't know whether to be flattered that something I wrote went viral or frustrated that the vast majority who read and shared it didn't know that I wrote it or that it originated in my newsletter.
I never realized that my 15 minutes of fame would come anonymously. Last year's and this year's Top 10 are viral on Facebook and email but not Twitter. Where is Michael Cohen when you need him? Charlie Meyerson and Chicago Public Square featured the Top 10, thereby proving that Public Square deserved to be honored as the best Chicago blog.
Israel: Jewish, democratic or both? The State of Israel we have supported all of our lives, the State of Israel with which the U.S. has an unbreakable bond, is Jewish and democratic. For most of modern Israel's existence, the threats to the State have been from Israel's Arab neighbors and Iran. Israel is strong enough to defend itself militarily but existential threats to Israel's status as a Jewish and democratic state now come from its own government.
Israel cannot be Jewish and democratic if the occupation becomes permanent. Continued settlement expansion puts a two-state solution further out of reach and will make Israel de facto one state from the river to the sea--either democratic or Jewish but not both. The proposed judicial overhaul will limit democracy even within pre-1967 Israel and carries with it the potential to remove an institutional check on settlement expansion illegal under Israeli law.
Would or should we support a State of Israel that is not Jewish or not democratic? That is the question the pro-Israel community must ensure remains hypothetical. We should expand our definition of "Israel's security" to encompass not only military security, which remains important, but threats to Israel's democracy and actions that impair prospects for a two-state solution. If Israel continues down its current path we should view criticism of its government through that lens and judge harshly not those who speak out for Israel's security but those who claim to be pro-Israel but remain silent.
Israel remains subject to external, albeit not existential, threats, including--as recently as last week--rockets from Gaza and Lebanon. No state would tolerate such attacks and Israel, like every country, has the right to defend itself.
Israel continues to face terrorism: On April 7, the State Department strongly condemned terrorist attacks in the West Bank and Tel Aviv, saying that "the targeting of innocent civilians of any nationality is unconscionable. The United States stands with the government and people of Israel. We are in close contact with our Israeli partners and reaffirm our enduring commitment to their security."
There is no contradiction between supporting Israel's safety and security and supporting those in Israel who understand that their government is taking them down a perilous path and that Israel's safety and security includes, but is not limited to, preserving its democracy and working toward a two-state solution.
Why did the U.S. re-join the UN Human Rights Council? The UN Human Rights Council does not focus solely on Israel. By engaging with the UNHRC, the U.S. can shine a spotlight on human rights violations across the globe, which is what the Biden administration is successfully achieving. The choice is not support Israel or stick your head in the sand. The previous administration tried that approach and it did not work. The Biden administration has used its influence at the UNHRC to focus on pressing human rights issues while opposing all action under the UNHRC’s Agenda Item 7, which unfairly singles out Israel. That's what it means to be pro-Israel the smart way.
The Republican Party is a threat to democracy: It's time to stop fetishizing bipartisanship and start focusing on the reality of today's GOP. Supporting autocracy, fascism, and antisemitism--and opposition to abortion rights and gun control--strike at the heart of who we are as a country. We cannot pretend that this is normal. These are not disagreements on the level of which team to root for or whether to put ketchup on a hot dog (hint: never) but disagreements about whether the United States will remain a democracy. Bipartisanship with an anti-democratic party is a vice, not a virtue.
On Thursday, Tennessee Republicans voted to expel two of three Democratic lawmakers who protested in favor of gun control. They expelled the two Black lawmakers but not the white lawmaker. President Biden said that the "expulsion of lawmakers who engaged in peaceful protest is shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent."
Norm Ornstein notes that "by expelling a black legislator and refusing to expel a white one accused of the same set of actions, the Tennessee Republicans have made their outright racism even more clear. Fascist behavior by clearcut racists."
David Schraub called the Republican arguments for expulsion "whataboutism as fascism apologia." Watch Rep. Justin Jones, one of the expelled lawmakers, explain what he meant by "no justice no peace."
Meanwhile, as Kareem Abdul-Jabaar writes, Donald Trump--the leader of the GOP--is "a candidate who has been accused by two dozen women of rape and sexual misconduct, who has admitted walking in on fifteen-year-old girls when they were naked because he could (child abuse, pedophilia), who admitted to lying to the public about the deadliest pandemic in recent history which caused many unnecessary deaths just so his popularity ratings wouldn’t diminish, who cut taxes for the wealthiest people causing our deficit to skyrocket, to publicly proclaim that the U.S. Constitution should be torn up, and more."
Trump and his Republican supporters are again trotting out antisemitic George Soros conspiracy theories. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, reports that neither Soros nor Soros's Democracy PAC ever contributed to the campaign of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and that the repeated mentions of Soros plays into antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Trump twice won the GOP nomination for president and is the frontrunner for a third nomination. That doesn't happen by accident. Trump is not an outlier within the Republican Party. He is the Republican Party. The GOP has become the party of fascism and white supremacy. We saw it in Tennessee and we'll see more of it unless we stop pretending that the GOP is a normal political party.
When will enough be enough? On April 4, nine months after the July 4 shootings in Highland Park, Illinois, two Highland Park elementary schools, Braeside and Red Oak, went into lockdown due to heavy police presence at Highland Park High School, which was already locked down--the same day the students had planned a walkout demanding gun control.
Congress Republicans won't even ban assault weapons, and banning assault weapons is not nearly enough. We need to ban handguns and we need politicians with the guts to say so. I'm not naive. The votes aren't there to pass it. Not now. But the votes will never be there until we elect politicians willing to shift the Overton window back in the right direction.
When Abner Mikva was my Congressman, he introduced a ban on handguns. At least he tried and at least he talked about it and campaigned on it. Granted, Mikva is a high standard to aspire to, but even Richard Nixon privately knew that banning handguns was smart policy--is it too much to ask our representatives to go Nixon one better and say so publicly?
Or we can continue to argue on the NRA's turf and debate background checks, assault weapons bans that would let people who currently own assault weapons keep them (like Illinois), and other important but insufficient measures. People once thought that banning smoking on planes and in restaurants was politically impossible. People once thought that allowing same-sex marriage was politically impossible. But other people spoke up and found that there is an audience for common sense. Where are those people now? Where are you?
As of today, 99 days into 2023, we've experienced at least 141 mass shootings and 11,028 gun violence deaths.
Corrections. I'm entitled to my own opinions but not to my own facts, so I appreciate it when readers bring errors to my attention. No one brought any mistakes to my attention last week, so it looks like last week's newsletter was perfect.
In Case You Missed It:
- Following a Trump-appointed judge's ruling that mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug that's been approved for 22 years, should no longer be approved in the U.S., President Biden said that the ruling "is another unprecedented step in taking away basic freedoms from women and putting their health at risk...It is the next big step toward the national ban on abortion that Republican elected officials have vowed to make law in America."
Tweets of the Week. Oren Jacobson and Amy Spitalnick.
Twitter Threads of the Week. Holly McCall and Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL).
Video Clips of the Week. Dave Letterman's first Top 10 list (from 1985) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) gets the NY send-off she deserves.
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