What Happened Today: May 3, 2022
Supreme Court leak; CDC tracking phone data; Disinformation
The Big Story
Shock waves from the leak of a draft decision, which shows the Supreme Court poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the right to abortion nationwide, has galvanized liberal activists while triggering a crisis over the rare, high-profile breach of the court’s confidentiality. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” writes Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the decision, which was originally published on Monday night by Politico and confirmed as authentic on Tuesday by Chief Justice John Roberts. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito continues. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” The statements come from the 98-page leaked document, an “opinion of the Court” in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, according to the SCOTUS blog, “in which Mississippi and its supporters have asked the justices to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion that was first established by Roe in 1973 and re-affirmed by Casey in 1992.” Votes could still change between now and when the court rules publicly on the case, currently scheduled for the end of June. But at present, Alito’s Dobbs opinion, which calls for striking down Roe, has a five-person majority on the nine member court with support from Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
While the court has had leaks before, including on matters related to Roe v. Wade (look for the short history of Supreme Court leaks in The Rest), this was particularly egregious. The question is who leaked it and why. The leak could have come from a supporter of legal abortion who hoped to galvanize liberal opposition and block the ruling either by swaying votes or through legislation. But there is also speculation that the leak could have come from a conservative opponent of abortion who released the draft ruling in order to put public pressure on the conservative justices who are currently aligned with Alito and dissuade them from changing their position ahead of the official vote.
Read it here: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473
In The Back Pages: How Russia’s Active Measures Came Home to the United States
The Rest
→ The price of diesel hit $5.32 per gallon—an all-time high—this weekend. While the financial impact of gasoline prices has been widely covered, with newscasters interviewing “Average Americans” at the gas pump, the effects of diesel are less immediately visible but far more impactful on the cost of everyday goods. While gasoline gets most American drivers around, diesel moves everything else: Diesel is used in 97% of the United States’ largest freight trucks, almost all of our freight trains, and 80% of container ships. With prices continuing to rise—largely due to the war in Ukraine and growing government restrictions—analysts are predicting that the increasing price of diesel today will translate to pricier groceries and goods this coming summer.
→ President Biden visited a Lockheed Martin factory in Alabama Tuesday as he lobbied Congress to approve another $33 billion in military aid and equipment for Ukraine. Much of that aid money would go toward sending Ukraine more Lockheed Martin Javelin missiles, an anti-tank weapon that has been critical to Ukraine’s surprisingly forceful resistance to the Russian invasion. “To modernize Teddy Roosevelt’s famous advice,” Biden said last month, “sometimes we will speak softly and carry a large Javelin.” The United States has provided Ukraine with roughly 7,000 of these missiles to date, depleting the United States’ stockpile of Javelins by a third and leading some members of the security establishment to question whether we can continue providing them to Ukraine without ramping up production to refill our own supply. Greg Hayes, the CEO of Raytheon Technologies, a defense contractor that partners with Lockheed on the Javelins, suggested it was facing “significant inventory issues.” Biden’s presence at the Lockheed Martin factory underscores both the significance of the Javelin for the war in Ukraine as well as the war’s significance for U.S. military contractors. Analysts predict a 50% increase in revenue for weapons manufacturers in 2022 compared to 2021, and just last Tuesday, Lockheed Martin saw its stock hit an all-time high.
→ Using location data purchased from a third-party broker, the CDC tracked tens of millions of cell phones in the United States to see if Americans were complying with COVID-19 lockdowns. The CDC had intended to buy the data before the COVID-19 pandemic but sped up the acquisition when the pandemic began and generated a list of 21 use cases, which gave the agency considerable leeway for employing the data, including tracking visits to schools and churches. Another stated use was “Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.”
Read more: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vymn/cdc-tracked-phones-location-data-curfews
→ India’s Prime Minister Narenda Modi headed to Europe on Monday, where he will be performing some diplomatic acrobatics while discussing his country’s stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since Russia first invaded Ukraine in February, Modi has refused to condemn the war and alienate Russia—a key ally and arms supplier to India for decades, going back to a relationship forged during the Cold War. More recently, Modi signed a cooperative agreement (despite Western protests) late last year with Vladimir Putin. Modi has been making the most of the crisis in Europe, deepening his relationship with Russia while signaling India’s centrality in a moment of geopolitical upheaval. In Berlin on Monday, Modi maintained his balancing act, declaring that there will be no winners in the Ukrainian war before signing a series of agreements with Germany, including one that awards India $10 billion to bolster its green economy. The $10 billion boost from Germany comes at a time when India is also scooping up cheap oil from Russia, which has a surplus supply due to the international embargo that India has refused to join.
→ A covert meeting was held last month between Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the CIA’s director, Will Burns, according to officials from both countries. Convening in Jeddah, a coastal city in Saudi Arabia where the prince was spending Ramadan, the two men addressed the strains in the U.S.-Saudi relationship that began during the Obama administration as the former president made the conclusion of a nuclear deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s chief strategic rival, the centerpiece of its foreign policy. While the Biden administration is looking to ease tensions and reopen oil spigots, and at the same time revive the nuclear deal with Iran, the Saudis have so far refused to play ball. As Mohammed Khalid Alyahya, a visiting fellow at Hudson Institute and the former editor-in-chief of Al Arabiya English recently wrote in The National Interest, “[A]n America that seeks to stigmatize Saudi Arabia” while “reward[ing] Iran for decades of terrorism, warfare, and destruction [...] is not behaving like a friend, but rather like an enemy.”
→ A short instructive history of Supreme Court leaks.
→ A new report from UnusualWhales.com, an investment news site, documents the outsized influence of the $2.5 billion spent lobbying Congress every year. Using quarterly disclosures that lobbyists are required to publish, the report shows where the most lobbying funds were spent and illuminates how lobbying affects not only our public policies but also the private investment decisions of elected officials. “As we know, Congress is known to invest in the industries they legislate. Pair this reality with the insane amount of money (and non-public info) flowing through the lobbying system, there could be many opportunities for personal gain on either side. This also means there could be many opportunities for conflicts of interest.” The report documented many cases of congressional leaders trading the stocks of companies who lobbied them directly, concluding that there is “an unusual overlap between Congressional trading and companies lobbying Congress.” Analyzing where most of the lobbying funds were going, Unusual Whales discovered that the topic of utmost concern to lobbyists is the topic of utmost concern to their employers: keeping taxes low and full of loopholes. Almost $1.5 billion was spent in 2021 lobbying lawmakers about taxation policy.
→ While the Major League Baseball Players Association just delayed the start of its season to negotiate a $700,000 contract floor for all pro players, minor league players face “brutal conditions and squalor,” making far less than minimum wage ($8,000 to $14,000 for full time work) while being forced into binding seven-year contracts that bar them from seeking employment on a different team. A recent piece in The American Prospect, a progressive magazine that covers labor and antitrust issues that wrote about the working conditions of minor league baseball players, cited baseball’s inexplicable exemption from federal antitrust laws as the cause. Without antitrust regulations, team owners are able to collude on wages, contracts, and their workers’ ability to change jobs. While the MLB’s “farm system,” as the minor league is often called, forces its young players into “indentured servitude,” it reports more than $10 billion a year in revenue.
Read More: https://prospect.org/power/poverty-wages-indentured-servitude-baseballs-minor-leaguers/
Scroll columnist James Kirchick recalls seeing Russian Disinformation tactics absorbed into the American political system during the Trump era.
In 1984, still fuming over the American-led boycott of the Moscow Olympics four years earlier, the Soviet Union attempted revenge. Under the heading, “The Olympics—For Whites Only,” a team of forgers from the KGB’s Directorate A penned a viciously racist tirade, signed it “Ku Klux Klan,” and sent copies postmarked from Maryland and northern Virginia to the Olympic organizing committees of African countries. “The highest award for a true American patriot would be the lynching of an African monkey,” the missive warned. “Blacks, welcome to the Olympic games in Los Angeles!”
The task of exposing this particularly crude “active measure,” a form of political warfare practiced by the Soviet Union since the days of the Bolshevik Revolution, was left to a U.S. government body known as the Interagency Active Measures Working Group. Behind the bureaucratic-sounding name was a scrappy collection of determined cold warriors committed to exposing and rebutting the avalanche of lies the Soviets and their satraps excreted as a matter of routine. Perhaps the most infamous of these deceits was “Operation Infektion,” which began with a story, planted in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper, claiming that the United States had invented HIV/AIDS as part of a biological weapons program at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Like the disease whose origins it lied about, belief in this conspiracy theory spread all over the world before the working group’s “truth squads” could catch up to it.
Interest in the work of the Interagency Active Measures Working Group, which was housed within the State Department and comprised representatives from an alphabet soup of federal agencies—including the CIA, FBI, DOD, and DOJ—rekindled in the early 2010s as the primary successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia, amplified its information warfare operations abroad. I was working for one of the great Cold War-era legacy institutions, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and was a daily witness to Kremlin lies and propaganda. Indeed, rebutting them was a large part of my job. After Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the first armed seizure of territory on the European continent since the Second World War, the subject of “disinformation” became ubiquitous at the European security conferences I regularly attended, and rightly so.
Unfortunately, like so many aspects of American life (e.g., the mainstream media, pop culture, professional sports) whose value once derived in part from their eschewal of partisan politics, the discourse surrounding disinformation began to change dramatically for the worse in 2016 …
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James Kirchick is a Tablet columnist and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt, 2022). He tweets @jkirchick.