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U.S. Supreme Court Blocks Latest Biden Plan to Forgive Student Debt

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2024 //
31

Most people are aware that the cost of higher education has dramatically escalated in recent years, for a variety of reasons. Some students do not enroll in college because they can’t afford it. Others graduate with crushing debt, based on student loans. It’s hard to believe that some European nations have made college either free or affordable.

President Biden has tried repeatedly to find ways to help students pay off their college debt. His most ambitious plan was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2023.

Biden devised a new plan, and yesterday the Supreme Court temporarily blocked that one today.

Adam Lipton and Abby VanSickle of The New York Times told the story:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily blocked a new effort by President Biden to wipe out tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt.

The plan was part of the president’s piecemeal approach to forgiving debt after the Supreme Court rejected a more ambitious proposal last year that would have canceled more than $400 billion in loans. Mr. Biden has instead pursued more limited measures directed at certain types of borrowers, including people on disability and public service workers, and refined existing programs.

The decision leaves in limbo millions of borrowers enrolled in a new plan, called Saving on a Valuable Education, which ties monthly payments to household size and earnings.

The emergency application was one of two related to the program that the justices decided on Wednesday. The brief order did not give reasons, which is typical, and no public dissents were noted.

Republican-led states had filed a number of challenges to the plan, including a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, which earlier this summer issued a broad hold on the loan plan while it considers the merits of the case.

That case could soon make its way back to the justices, who indicated that they expected the lower court to act swiftly on the matter.

The Biden administration had argued the new program was authorized by a 1993 law that allowed the secretary of education to fashion “income contingent repayment” plans. The law authorizes the secretary to determine repayment schedules based on “the appropriate portion of the annual income of the borrower.”

Over the years, the secretary has invoked that law several times to relax repayment requirements. The latest plan, the subject of the Supreme Court’s order, was the most generous one.

It reduced the required payments for undergraduate loans to 5 percent from 10 percent of the borrower’s discretionary income, and it redefined discretionary income to be above 225 percent of the poverty line. People making less than that pay nothing. Loans of $12,000 or less are canceled after 10 years — down from 20 or 25 years — so long as the borrower made payments if required to do so.

The SAVE program, issued in June 2023, was challenged nine months later by the attorneys general of 11 Republican-led states, who said it was flawed in ways similar to the one the justices rejected last year. The 1993 law, they said, contemplates repayment rather than actual or effective forgiveness.

In the administration’s Supreme Court brief in response to one of the challenges, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that the new plan “relies on a different statute with different language to provide a different set of borrowers with different assistance from the one-time loan forgiveness the court held invalid.”

The old plan invoked the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, often called the HEROES Act. That law, initially enacted after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to protect borrowers affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

In its decision last year, the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-to-3 vote that the 2003 law did not authorize forgiving the loans at issue there. That same day, President Biden vowed to find other ways to provide debt relief.

“Today’s decision has closed one path,” Mr. Biden said. “Now we’re going to pursue another.”

The new program was based on a federal law that contemplated reduced payments based on income.

In the Eighth Circuit lawsuit, filed in Missouri, the appeals court temporarily blocked the entire SAVE plan. The Biden administration had asked the justices earlier this month to clear the way for the plan to take effect.

The administration initially estimated that the SAVE plan would cost $156 billion over 10 years, but that amount assumed that the Supreme Court would uphold the earlier plan. The real cost of the new plan, the states challenging it said, is $475 billion over 10 years. The administration says the real number is smaller, particularly as parts of the SAVE plan have not been blocked.

Categories Biden, Education Industry, Funding, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Michael Tomasky: Trump is Going Into a Meltdown Phase

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2024 //
42

Michael Tomasky is a respected political journalist and the editor of The New Republic. In this post, he describes Trump’s inability to cope with running against Kamala, not Joe. He has spent nearly four years prearing for a rematch with Biden, and the change of candidate seems to have confused him. At times like this, im remindedthat Trump’s had severe dementia at the end if his life.

Tomasky writes:

It continues. Six days ago, The New York Times ran a story under the headline “Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign.” Usually, when the country’s most important newspaper runs a story like that, the candidate pays a little attention and the ship begins to right itself. But in this case, it’s just gotten worse. The ship is capsizing, and the captain is losing his marbles.

Right after that story ran, Trump came out with his wild accusation that Kamala Harris’s crowd of thousands at a Detroit airplane hangar was fake. The next night, he did that weird, to borrow an au courant word, interview with Elon Musk, where he made more WTF comments than I can recount, capped by his vow to move to Venezuela (a country ruled by a corrupt autocrat who just cheated massively in this month’s election) if he loses. On Wednesday, he gave a rambling speech at a North Carolina rally.

Then, on Thursday, we had a little taste of some peak Trump crazy. He claimed Harris is responsible for a law in California that says it’s OK to steal from a grocery store as long as your take is under $950. (This is not what the law says.) He made strange comments about Cheerios. He lectured Jews (at a later event) about how if the Democrats win, Jewish people “don’t have a chance” in America, saying of Harris—whose husband is Jewish—that “she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, and everybody knows it, and nobody wants to say it.” And we can’t forget the assertion that more than 100 percent of recent U.S. jobs have gone to migrants.

But wait. These are just the appetizers! Then he called Harris a “Communist” and said the country under her leadership would devolve into a commie dystopia in which “everyone gets health care” (the horror!). And then, the pièce de résistance: At the Jewish event, he praised Miriam Adelson, the huge Trump donor and widow of Sheldon Adelson, mentioning that he’d given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he noted was the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor (given to military veterans) but was “actually much better” because people who receive the latter medal are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

You know how they say in sports that an opponent has gotten inside the other team’s head? Well, Harris and Tim Walz have certainly gotten inside Trump’s head. Walz’s “weird” comment, which Trump has also responded to in a, well, sort of weird way, was just the start. Harris has also smartly refused to take the GOP campaign’s bait, like when Trump attacked her race and J.D. Vance tried to make her childlessness an issue. Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign trolls Trump in its press releases with snarky language I don’t recall Joe Biden’s or Hillary Clinton’s campaigns using. It sends the message, which must drive him nuts, that they don’t fear him at all.

Meanwhile, what else is Harris doing? Starting to unveil an economic package that, so far anyway, looks pretty great. It’s aimed straight at middle-class voters and focused on housing and grocery prices. You can’t get more kitchen table than that. And the bit about going after corporate price gougers is great. It sends a nice populist signal that she’s willing to make some enemies.

We’re coming up on a month now of Harris being the candidate. That isn’t much time, granted, and of course the race is still in margin-of-error territory and at some point, Trump is bound to find his footing and quit flailing as desperately as he has been.

But all that said, the Harris campaign has been as shrewd as any presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. Her stump speech is excellent. The choice of Walz was great—their personal chemistry is so evident in that video they just released of the two of them chatting about spicy food and whatnot (the right is trying to gin up outrage over Walz saying he eats “white-guy tacos”). The focus on family economics recognizes a potential Harris weak spot and establishes the campaign as not being out of touch. They just haven’t done one thing wrong yet…

And Trump is a hot mess. He’s facing a problem he’s never faced. In 2016, he was running against a very known quantity whom the right had been instructing Americans to hate for 25 years. In 2020, he was running against someone who’d been around for nearly 50 years. He’s spent his time since losing that 2020 race sitting around thinking about his rematch with that opponent.

And now suddenly he’s running against someone else, and to his shock, the more America sees of her (so far), the more America kinda likes her. He can’t understand this, and he simply can’t stand it. Trump’s like a predatory animal in a literal sense. Since he has no conscience, he’s all instinct, and his instinct is to find his prey’s weakness and go after it over and over.

He hasn’t come close to finding Harris’s. She is not a lunatic Communist, she’s not stupid, she’s not any of things Trump is saying she is. The America of 2024 is ready for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump is not and can’t accept that fact. No amount of staff shakeups or focusing on “the issues” can fix that.  

Categories Biden, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: A Tribute to the Old Man Who Saved Democracy Twice

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2024 //
11

Jonathan V. Last is editor of The Bulwark, a site for Republican Never-Trumpers. I enjoy reading articles on this site because it is not part of a liberal Democratic echo chamber. He was a strong supporter of President Biden. He here refers to him as “the old man who saved democracy. Twice.” He published this article the day after Biden gave his moving speech to the Democratic National Convention.

He writes:

I hope you drank it in last night. It was one of the most human moments I’ve ever seen in politics, from the second the president stepped on stage and embraced his daughter.

But it was more than that. It was America saying goodbye to this ordinary man who has become an extraordinary president. A president who saved our democracy.

This is one of those cases where the transcript doesn’t give you enough context. You need the video. You need to see Biden’s face and feel the vibrations from the crowd. And you absolutely need to watch his final section, when he transitions from a campaign speech to a valediction.

This is the story of a nation grateful to a president not just for his accomplishments, but for his sacrifice. For his ability to understand that he was dispensable.

It was this extraordinary willingness, when American democracy was threatened from within, that made Joe Biden the indispensable man.

I know I’ve said this before but I want to say it again: Biden is our greatest living president. 

Seven years ago Joe Biden was an old man happy in retirement. Then he watched a group of neo-Nazis—emboldened by the election of Donald Trump—take to the streets of a college town in Virginia.

Biden looked around the political landscape and realized that he was the only person capable of defeating Trump in that moment. So he came out of retirement to run not a political campaign, but a fight for the soul of the nation.

And he won.

Biden’s victory set off a new crisis. As president-elect he watched the sitting president attempt a coup d’état—first through legal means, then through extralegal means, and finally through physical violence.

Lost in the analysis of January 6th and the post-election chaos is the critical role Biden played.

He was utterly and completely calm. He spent the post-election period preparing for the transition, even though Trump’s administration refused to cooperate with his team. And here are some of the things Biden did not do:

  • Publicly attack Trump.
  • Attempt to circumscribe Trump’s legal challenges.
  • Spread disinformation.
  • Antagonize Republican voters.
  • Seek to tie “normal” elected Republicans to Trump’s authoritarian designs.

Any of those actions might have helped Biden politically. All of them would have added gasoline to a raging fire.

President-elect Biden chose unity and calm over hysteria and division even as President Trump was attempting to end our democratic experiment. Reflect on that for a moment: Can you think of a single thing Biden said or did during that period?

No, you can’t. And that’s because Biden knew that in order to preserve the legitimacy of our system, the conflict had to be between Donald Trump and the rule of law, not between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. 

As president, Biden passed a large amount of meaningful legislation, but those accomplishments were secondary to his two larger projects, one foreign and one domestic.

On foreign policy, Biden’s big project was re-energizing internationalism. Where Trump had attempted to turn America into an isolated superpower that curried favor with dictators so that it could distance itself from alliances, Biden steeled—and expanded—NATO in the face of Russian aggression and took a hard line against China.

Domestically, Biden created a mechanism for the Republican party to heal itself. Instead of pushing a divisive agenda, Biden focused mostly on popular items with broad bipartisan support, many of which directly benefited Republican constituencies: infrastructure spending, the creation of manufacturing jobs, immigration reform, reducing medical costs for seniors.

Republicans could have supported these policies (which many of them did) while trying to guide their voters away from Trumpism (which almost none of them did).

Over and over Biden tried to make space on the right for a Republican party independent of fascist overtones.

That Republican voters affirmatively chose another run with Trump is no fault of Biden’s. He did everything he could. But his big domestic project failed because the base fact is that a political party can only be as healthy as its voters let it be.

And these days the GOP is a party where voters wear t-shirts bragging about how their nominee wants to be a “dictator.”

Faced with this failure and the resurgence of the authoritarian movement, Biden saved our democracy again—this time by walking away from power. When he realized that he could not win the battle a second time, Biden anointed Kamala Harris—shutting down any contest and giving her the space to establish herself as a force.

Categories Biden, Courage, Democracy, Discipline, Elections, Ethics, Freedom, Republicans, Trump

Dean Baker: The Little-Known Biden-Harris Success Story

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
6

Dean Baker published a terrific article in The New Republic, called “The Biggest Success Story the Country Doesn’t Know About.” Baker is a  macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR) with Mark Weisbrot.

He wrote:

Over the last few weeks, an extraordinary series of events has altered the course of an election that previously seemed to have few surprises in store. Eight days after Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, President Joe Biden announced his historic decision to withdraw from the presidential race and cast his support for Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his stead. It will be some time before we know all the political ramifications of these events, but whatever they may be, they will not change the past.

What can the past tell us about what’s to come? Perhaps the most critical element of a candidate’s platform is their approach to the economy. In assessing Harris as a presidential candidate, people will want to look at the economic track record of the Biden-Harris administration. As always, the president takes the lead role in setting the economic course for the administration, but throughout Biden’s term in office, Harris was standing alongside him. The Republicans will surely blame her for everything that went wrong and many things that didn’t. On the other hand, Harris can take credit for what went right, and there is much here to boast about. Indeed, she can (and should) run on the outstanding—and criminally underappreciated—economic record of the Biden administration.

Under Biden, the United States made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic recession. We have seenthe longest run of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than 70 years, even surpassing the long stretch during the 1960s boom. This period of low unemployment has led to rapid real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution, reversing much of the rise in wage inequality we have seen in the last four decades. It has been especially beneficial to the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

The burst of inflation that accompanied this growth was mostly an outcome of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. All other wealthy countries saw comparable rises in inflation. As of summer 2024, the rate of inflation in the United States has fallen back almost to the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. Meanwhile, our growth has far surpassed that of our peers.

Furthermore, the Biden administration really does deserve credit for this extraordinary boom. Much of what happens under a president’s watch is beyond their control. However, the economic turnaround following the pandemic can be directly traced to Biden’s recovery package, along with his infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which have sustained growtheven as the impact of the initial recovery package faded. While the CARES Act, pushed through when Trump was in office, provided essential support during the shutdown period, it was not sufficient to push through the recovery.

Finally, the negative assessment that voters routinely give the Biden administration on the economy seems more based on what they hear from the media or elsewhere. They generally rate their own financial situation positively and say that the economy in their city or state is doing well. It is only the national economy, of which they have no direct knowledge, that they rate poorly.

Let the Good Times Roll!

Before going through what is positive about the Biden economy, I’ll just state the obvious. Tens of millions of people are struggling to get by, or not getting by at all. This is a horrible situation, which we should be trying to change every way we can. However, this has always been the case. We have a badly underdeveloped system of social supports, so that people cannot count on getting the food, health care, and shelter they need.

It’s also the case that the spurt of inflation in 2021 and 2022 was a shock after a long period of low inflation. People found themselves paying considerably more for food, gas, shelter, and other essentials, and in many cases their pay did not keep up, especially at the time these prices were soaring.

But the Biden administration has taken important steps to directly improve the situation for low- and moderate-income people, notably by making the subsidies in the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, more generous and expanding the Child Tax Credit, or CTC. He increased the benefitsin the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by 21 percent. Unfortunately, the expansion of the CTC, which was included in the initial recovery package, was only temporary. It expired at the end of 2021, and Biden has been unable to get the support needed in Congress to extend it.

While we should always recognize the enormous work left to be done, we need as well to acknowledge when we are making progress, and we have made an enormous amount of progress in improving living standards during Biden’s presidency. Also, the suffering of tens of millions of people at the lower end of the income distribution can’t possibly be the explanation for negative views of the economy. People at the bottom were suffering at least as much in 2019, when most people gave the economy high marks.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Higher Education

Lawrence O’Donnell: Wake Up, Reporters! Do Your Job

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
24

Lawrence O’Donnell appears nightly on MSNBC at 10 pm EST. I love his show because he is so smart.

This episode is a must-watch.

As a bonus, here is Robert Reich wondering why the media doesn’t report honestly about Trump’s dementia.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Media, Trump

Politico: Why NC Governor Did Not Want to Be Vetted for Kamala’s VP

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2024 //
7

Politico interviewed Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina about his decision to withdraw from consideration as Kamala Harris’s Veep. It’s a fascinating interview and well worth reading. Both parties consider North Carolina to be a key swing state.

Cooper talks about his conversations with both Biden and Harris and his reaction to the President’s decision to step aside.

But he swiftly concluded he could not run as Vice-President with Harris because of the danger that the Lt. Governor Mark Robinson would be Acting Governor in his absence and do something crazy.

Gov. Cooper said:

In North Carolina, we have in our constitution — back from the wagon wheel days — a provision that says when the governor leaves the state, the lieutenant governor becomes the acting governor. Many states across the country have this provision. You had no way to communicate. Back then, it made sense.

There have been a few cases across the country that have said, “Look, now with text and phone and email and Zoom and ways to communicate, this doesn’t make sense for this to be the case.” And courts have ruled that it doesn’t literally mean that. North Carolina courts have not ruled that, however, and fairly recently, Republicans have taken over the North Carolina Supreme Court. They have made some extremely partisan decisions here lately, particularly regarding voting and redistricting.

Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is the most extreme statewide candidate in the country right now. I was on a recruiting trip to Japan. He did claim he was acting governor. He did a big proclamation and press conference while I was gone. It was something about support for the state of Israel. It was obviously to make up for all of his antisemitic comments that he’d made, his denial of the Holocaust that he’d made over the years. But it was a big distraction. We analyzed this….

We also know that with our big statewide races, Josh Stein — our attorney general whom I’ve endorsed — running against Mark Robinson, his extremism; his disrespect for women, saying that men should lead and not women; saying that when you get pregnant, it’s not your body anymore; extreme abortion ban with no exceptions; saying that he has an AR-15 and that he would shoot government officials who got too big for their britches. It is on and on and on and on.

Categories Biden, Elections, Harris, Kamala, North Carolina

Trump Congratulates Putin—Yes, Putin—on Prisoner Exchange

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2024 //
6

It was a thrilling moment when three Americans who had been held hostage in Russia emerged from their airplane about midnight, to be greeted in American soil by President Biden and Vice-President Harris. Almost all of their fellow citizens were thrilled, except for one: Donald Sourpuss Trump.

Trump was jealous that Biden got credit for negotiating the complicated deal involved multiple nations and hostages. It was really stung Trump when the Chancellor of Germany, who held the assassin that Putin wanted most, said that he agreed to the deal but “only for Biden.”

Trump congratulated Putin.

Josh Dawsey reported in The Washington Post:

ATLANTA — Former president Donald Trump congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin over a prisoner swap that took place this week, saying the Russian strongman had outsmarted U.S. officials as part of the largest such deal since the end of the Cold War.

At a rally here on Saturday, Trump did not mention any of the American prisoners who were released in the deal — including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was imprisoned for more than a year on charges the U.S. government has denounced as fabricated. In his previous comments on the deal, Trump has not mentioned any of the prisoners by name either, only criticized the U.S. government.

“I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal. … We have 59 hostages; I never paid anything. … Boy, we make some horrible, horrible deals. It’s nice to say we got ’em back, but does that set a bad precedent?” Trump said…

In fact, Trump authorized an agreement to pay $2 million to North Korea for medical bills in the release of Otto Warmbier, the comatose University of Virginia student sent home from Pyongyang in 2017, The Washington Post reported. Trump claimed the bill was never paid. Warmbier died soon after his return.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said this week that no money changed hands in the latest prisoner swap.

Trump had been reluctant to speak about Gershkovich for about the first year of the reporter’s detention but finally called for his release in May. The former president has repeatedly bragged about his close relationship with Putin, but also says that Putin respects him and would have never invaded Ukraine if Trump was president.

On several public occasions in recent months, Trump has said he would get Gershkovich released as soon as he was elected in November, and Putin would do it “for me, but not anyone else.”

The key to the swap was Germany, which held in prison a Russian agent who murdered a dissident in a park in broad daylight. Putin wanted him more than any other, to prove he could bring his killers home. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said publicly that he agreed because Biden asked him, and he said, “Yes, only for you.”

Biden said, “it’s good to have friends.”

Categories Biden, Elections, Trump

Keep Smiling and Laughing, Vice President Harris

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2024 //
21

Republicans were blindsided when President Biden announced that he was stepping down, and he endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris. All of their planning and strategy was targeted on Biden, who—they said—was too old, senile, sleepy, confused, and unable to lead the country. They had ads and video clips ready to roll. They were not at all happy to learn that Biden was taking himself out of the race. They had to redirect their slime machine to Harris, not Biden.

Sad, very sad, as Trump might say.

They quickly recalibrated their attack ads. First, they insisted that Biden could not leave the ticket. It wasn’t fair, they said. Then they said Harris could not have access to the money raised for the Biden-Harris ticket; they threatened to sue. Then they said it was undemocratic to put Harris at the top of the ticket because primary voters didn’t choose her. But of course they did vote for her. They voted for Biden and Harris.

They said that Kamala Harris was “a radical Communist.” They said she was the “worst Vice President in American history.”

None of these claims caught fire, so they settled on attacking Harris because she laughed too much. Really. They called her “a cackling hyena.”

It’s true, Kamala smiles a lot and flashes her joyous smile at crowds. And she laughs often. Her laugh is genuine and it is contagious. She makes people happy.

So the Republicans thought they could diminish her by denouncing her expressions of happiness.

They must have thought that people would recoil at the sight of Kamala Harris laughing.

But they haven’t, they didn’t, and they won’t.

People see Trump and they see him scowling and angry. He likes to look angry. When he had his mug shot taken in Atlanta, he posed with a dark scowl.

Have you ever seen him laugh or smile? I haven’t. Does he have a sense of humor. I think not.

Imagine if you were offered an hour with either Trump or Harris. Which would you choose? The angry one or the happy one? The one who was embittered by his grievances or the one who would take an interest in you? The one who was angry or the one who was joyful?

The Harris campaign made an ad that begins with Trump saying that he hates it when people laugh at him. Then there is about 60 seconds of clips showing Kamala laughing uproariously.

They cleverly took Trump’s sneering at her laugh and made a cartoon ad featuring her laugh.

Keep laughing, Kamala.

Categories Biden, Democrats, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Robert Hubbell: The Gifts That Joe Biden Has Given Us

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2024 //
19

As I watched the arrival of the three hostages last night, I saw Joe Biden do two quiet deeds, both revealing his character. After he had finished welcoming the hostages and their families, he ascended the steps of the airplane with no fanfare. The rightwing attack machine would no doubt create a video about Biden “wandering away” mindlessly, as they did at the G7 summit, when he walked away from the global leaders to talk to a parachutist (the attack video showed him wandering away and clipped off his conversation with the parachutist—presenting him as a deluded old man). Last night, he entered the hostages’ airplane to thank the flight crew and the security officials who had accompanied the hostages from the moment of their release in Turkey to Andrews Air Base in Maryland.

After he returned to the hostages and their families, he sought out Paul Whelan, who had spent almost six years in Russian captivity. Biden chatted for a minute, then took off his American flag pin and pinned it on Whelan’s jacket. The quiet gestures of a decent man. Could you imagine Trump being quiet and decent? I can’t.

Robert Hubbell writes about Joe Biden’s gifts to his country:

Over his half-century of public service, Joe Biden bestowed many gifts on America. True, like every politician with a fifty-year record, he has made his share of mistakes. But when it mattered most, Joe Biden stepped into the breach to defend democracy and provide hope to America when it flagged.

He stepped up to challenge Trump in 2020 because he believed he could save America from the horrors of a second Trump term. He was right. That was a gift.

Over the next four years, he restored decency, compassion, and fairness to the governance of a great nation. That was a gift.

He proposed and passed sweeping legislation that made historic investments in fighting climate change, protecting the environment, ending child poverty, rebuilding our infrastructure, and bringing chip manufacturing back to America’s shores. That was a gift.

He restored the broken relationships between America and its allies. He was able to do so because our allies recognized that he was a good and decent man whose word could be trusted. That was a gift.

Today, Joe Biden’s gift of renewed international alliances resulted in the freedom of three American citizens wrongfully detained by Russia. The exchange would not have happened except for the relationship of trust and goodwill between President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The German Chancellor agreed to release a Russian assassin held in a German prison. In agreeing to the deal, Chancellor Scholz told Biden, “For you, I will do this.” See WaPo, Inside the deal that led to a blockbuster prisoner swap between U.S., Russia. (This article is accessible to all.)

The complex deal involved 24 detainees and 7 countries—the most complicated prisoner swap between the US and Russia in history. President Biden continued to work his relationships with foreign leaders to close the deal until the very moment he announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. Joe Biden’s selfless efforts were a gift.

The complex deal could not have happened without Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or the cooperation of six US allies. Vice President Kamala Harris played an active role in the negotiations, including private meetings with the Slovenian Prime Minister and German Chancellor at the annual Munich security conference.

The complexity of the deal is beyond the comprehension or attention span of Donald Trump—who boasted that he could secure the release of US detainees from Russia without giving any concessions to Putin. After Joe Biden finished his press conference announcing the deal, a reporter shouted a question about Trump’s boast that “that he could have gotten the hostages out without giving anything in exchange.”

Biden stopped, returned to the lectern, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?” See embedded video, here.

Within an hour of completing negotiations for the swap, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Thirty-minutes later, he endorsed Kamala Harris for president. At a time when party leaders and podcast pundits were calling for “mini-primaries” and an “open convention,” Joe Biden had the wisdom and foresight to realize that Democrats needed unity and certainty.

Kamala Harris had earned Joe Biden’s endorsement, and he gave it promptly and enthusiastically. Forty-eight hours later, Kamala Harris was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. That was Joe Biden’s final gift—a seamless transition that has allowed Democrats to overtake Trump in less than two weeks. Kamala Harris deserves great credit for that result, but so, too, does Joe Biden for his selfless actions, wisdom, and political foresight.

Categories Biden, Character, Elections

Biden Administration Negotiates Historic Prisoner Swap with Russia

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2024 //
15

Good news for the families of Americans wrongfully detained in Russia: their loved ones have been released in a multi-nation deal. The deal confirmed that the U.S. was trying to include Andrei Navalny in the swap but he was killed in a Russian prison camp before the deal could be finalized. Trump, as customary, claimed that he could have gotten the prisoners released in a day, undoubtedly by a phone call to his pal Putin. But Whelan’s family complained that Trump did nothing to get him out of Russian prisons.

MSNBC News reports:

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Marine veteran Paul Whelan are among the Americans released on Thursday in a prisoner swap between the U.S., Russia and other countries.

Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmashev, U.S. permanent resident Vladimir Kara-Murza and 12 German nationals held in Russia have also been released in exchange for eight Russian nationals who were being held in the U.S., Slovenia, Germany, Norway and Poland.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called the swap, one of the largest since the Cold War, “historic.” 

“It’s the culmination of many rounds of complex, painstaking negotiations over many, many months,” Sullivan said on a call with reporters Thursday morning.

Gershkovich, 32, was detained in March 2023 while he was on assignment in Moscow. He was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison last month. Both the U.S. government and Gershkovich’s employer, The Wall Street Journal, called his trial a “sham.”

Whelan, 54, had been serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian penal colony after being convicted of espionage in 2020. He was arrested in December 2018 while in Russia for a friend’s wedding. 

Both men and the U.S. government have vehemently denied allegations of espionage.

Negotiations in prisoner swaps between the U.S. and Russia have often been colored by political tensions. Sources told NBC News earlier this year that a deal to release Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as well as Whelan and Gershkovich, had been in the works before Navalny died in a penal colony in February. At the time, President Joe Biden blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for Navalny’s death.

In 2022, while criticizing the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, former President Donald Trump said he had turned down a deal to secure Whelan’s release in exchange for Bout. Whelan’s family has said that Trump did little to move negotiations forward when he was president. 

Trump has also repeatedly claimed that he would free Gershkovich from Russian detention if he wins the November election, boasting that Putin would “do that for me, but not for anyone else.” His remarks were widely criticized, including for potentially scuttling the possibility of Gershkovich’s release prior to the U.S. election.

Categories Biden, Cruelty, International, Trump
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