The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Monday morning in West Virginia v. EPA, where red states and coal companies are asking the Court to dramatically limit the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Legal experts were stunned that the Court took up this case in the first place, since both agency rules in question, one from the Obama administration and its replacement from the Trump EPA, are no longer operational. The Biden administration asked the Court not to take up the case over the defunct rules, saying that it’s working on a replacement that will likely inspire more litigation then anyway.
The Court didn’t listen. That struck court watchers as ominous, perhaps signaling that the conservative justices are too eager to curtail the EPA’s power to wait.
I made several mistakes in judging the conflict with Russia over Ukraine. In so far as others may have made similar errors, it may be worth saying what these are, and what I think is still valid in my earlier criticisms of the U.S. policy. These observations bear on what is valid and not in the foreign policy outlook called realism.
Amid conservatives’ ham-fisted attempts to blame Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on American “wokeness,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) apparently tried to make the same point in the form of an inscrutable rant via Twitter on Sunday.
A number of you have asked me, where’s President Biden? Why aren’t we seeing him on TV? Note that he has a State of the Union address coming up which will provide an extremely high profile setting. But the real reason is almost certainly that the U.S. administration wants to have Europeans taking the most visible role announcing new sets of sanctions. I suspect they also want to avoid taking the bait of President Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. Reports suggest that — wisely and unsurprisingly — President Biden has chosen not to match Russia’s nuclear forces alert status. First, there’s no need to. Our strategic nuclear forces are already on plenty of alert to manage the unthinkable. There’s no need for that kind of tit for tat escalation. We also don’t need competing press availabilities.
With all this said, though, there’s clearly something more happening here than just allowing Europe to take the lead in announcing measures the U.S. was trying to persuade them to take. There’s also clearly a sea change, both in the willingness to contemplate crippling economic sanctions as well as to openly arm the Ukrainian army.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was first published by The Conversation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission, a “denazification” of the country.
In his address to the Russian people on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin said the purpose was to “protect people” who had been “subjected to bullying and genocide … for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”
The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. While Ukraine’s new language laws have upset some minorities, independent news media have uncovered no evidence of genocide against Russian speakers. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin’s authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent. And while far right groups have been growing in Ukraine, their electoral power is limited.
As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.
Ukraine’s Jewish leadership
First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom “Servant of the People,” from which his party’s name was derived.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking at a news conference. AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family” was barely noted during the election. “Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it,” he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky’s election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.
For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”
The pogroms against Jews
Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.
During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.
Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.
Small stones placed on the photos of victims of the 1941 massacre where the Nazi killed tens of thousands of Jews during WWII, in Kyiv, Ukraine. AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.
A pluralistic state
Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.
One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups – Russians, Jews, and Poles – broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.
The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.
However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.
From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland’s borders.
At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.
In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.
Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Feeling It Where It Hurts
Russia was scrambling Monday to deal with the financial and economic fallout from Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
NYT: “The ruble crashes, the stock market closes and Russia’s economy staggers under sanctions”
Wall Street Journal: “Powerful Western sanctions rocked Russia’s financial system and triggered a spiral in the ruble, drawing the central bank into an emergency doubling of interest rates“
Bloomberg: “U.S. Bans Transactions With Russian Central Bank”
CNBC: “Russian ruble plunges nearly 30% against the dollar amid sanctions over Ukraine invasion”
These maps by the Washington Post and the New York Times are good resources for tracking the military clashes in Ukraine.
Climate Change Outpacing Prevention Efforts, UN Warns
The new IPCC report out this morning sounds the alarm on how humans are lagging behind rapidly accelerating climate change, and the fact that the damage caused by climate change is on the edge of becoming irreversible.
Stefan Weichert and Emil Filtenborg, two Danish war correspondents who work for the Daily Beast, were both shot on Saturday when someone opened fire on their car as they were driving in northeastern Ukraine.
One of the reporters got struck by three bullets, while the other was hit in the shoulder. They were both wearing bulletproof equipment.
The reporters still made it to the hospital, however, and both are in stable condition.
Capitol Fencing Up Again For SOTU
The U.S. Capitol Police have reinstalled the protective fencing around the Capitol building ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, which far-right trucker convoys traveling to D.C. may threaten to disrupt.
Critical Space Theory
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) posted a brain-melting rant on Sunday about something called a “woke sky,” and someone should probably make sure he isn’t smelling toast:
“You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.”
The dictionary’s having trouble making sense of it too:
We’re not entirely sure what this tweet is supposed to mean, and we’re literally the dictionary.
Arpaio Unaware Why He Was Invited To White Nationalist Jamboree
As he was giving a keynote speech at the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) on Saturday, disgraced ex-Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpiao was surprised to discover that the attendants at the racism festival really like the fact that he’s been recognized as a huge racist.
“What are you clapping for?” he asked the cheering crowd after he brought up his reputation as “the biggest racist in the country.” “I’m not!”
It got even better a minute later when Arpiao admitted that “maybe I did racially profile” when he was a sheriff, which had the audience bursting into applause once again. “Now wait a minute. Hold on-” Arpaio stammered.
Ukrainian Cat Cafe Owners Refuse To Abandon Their Cats
CNN correspondent Erin Burnett, reporting from Lviv in Ukraine, discovered that the only food establishment nearby that was still open amid all the conflict was a cat cafe that hosts 20 cats. The cafe owners told Burnett they’re never leaving Ukraine and forcing their pets to fend for themselves.
The story reminds me of Mohammad Alaa al-Jaleel, aka the Cat Man of Aleppo, who ran a cat sanctuary–and rebuilt it when it got bombed–in the middle of the Syrian Civil War where people fleeing the besieged city could entrust him with their beloved pets.
TPM’s Josh Kovensky spoke on MSNBC just now about Vladimir Putin’s cryptic decision-making, the impact of U.S. sanctions on Russia, and how to think about the possibility of a retaliatory cyber attack on the U.S.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) on Sunday called out members of the Republican Party who have defended Russian President Vladimir Putin as he wages war on Ukraine.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Sunday repeatedly refused to condemn former President Trump’s glowing praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
