Garland pauses federal executions as DOJ reviews policies

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday paused federal executions as the Department of Justice reviews its death penalty policies and procedures.

“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” Garland said in a statement. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.”

Legal battles over the traditional three-drug protocol for carrying out execution by legal injection, and a shortage of sodium thiopental — one of the drugs — led to a two-decade lapse in federal executions. But then-Attorney General Bill Barr ordered federal prisons to resume executions in 2019, after making changes to the federal execution protocols.

Under Barr’s orders, federal prison officials were authorized to execute prisoners with a single drug, pentobarbital, a powerful sedative. Thirteen people on federal death row were executed using the single-drug method between July 2020 and January 2021. Garland on Thursday ordered an assessment of the risk of pain and suffering associated with the drug.

Garland is also calling for a review of adjustments made to the Justice Department regulations in November 2020 that expanded the methods of execution, as well as later changes that allowed for expedited execution of capital sentences.

New York Assembly OKs subpoenas in Cuomo impeachment probe

ALBANY, N.Y. — A state Assembly committee looking into a possible impeachment of Gov. Andrew Cuomo will begin issuing subpoenas as part of its investigation.

Assemblymember Charles Lavine (D-Nassau), who chairs the chamber's Judiciary Committee, made the announcement at the end of a meeting in Albany on Wednesday.

The subpoenas will likely be sent to “a whole wide range of categories of people,” Assemblymember Tom Abinanti (D-Greenburgh) said after the meeting. “This is the next step in the process, it’s a normal step, we all expected this was going to happen.”

Additionally, members have taken the technical step of issuing a commission to the law firm of Davis Polk, which the Assembly has retained to handle much of the probe. That step “allows our independent counsel to take testimony under oath,” Lavine said.

The Assembly launched its investigation of Cuomo in March. It is probing a litany of allegations made against Cuomo on subjects ranging from sexual harassment to the governor’s $5.1 million book deal.

State Attorney General Tish James is examining several similar issues. She started issuing subpoenas in March.

James said last week that she does not “share information” with the Assembly investigators. But Abinanti said on Wednesday that the granting of a commission to Davis Polk opens up that possibility, “because now they are authorized to subpoena the same information the attorney general’s office is subpoenaing … so I would assume the attorney general’s office would feel more comfortable cooperating with our counsel.”

Wednesday’s meeting was notable as the Assembly’s first mostly in-person committee meeting since state government shut down in March 2020. Since Cuomo ended New York’s state of emergency last week, the Legislature is now fully subjected to the Open Meetings Law, and the public was allowed into the room in the state Capitol for five minutes. The remainder of the roughly two-hour gathering took place in executive session.

Does the issuing of subpoenas mean that the investigation of Cuomo is nearing an end?

“Oh no, not yet, no no,” Abinanti said. “Let’s face it, we’ve given [Davis Polk] a huge task. There’s a lot of issues for them to look at.”

Team Trump quietly launches new social media platform

Former President Donald Trump’s team quietly launched a new social media platform on Thursday, billing it as an alternative to Big Tech sites.

The platform, called GETTR, advertised its mission statement as “fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas.”

Trump’s former spokesman, Jason Miller, is leading the platform. A person familiar described the site as similar to Twitter.

Trump’s involvement with the project is unclear as is whether or not he will set up an account on GETTR and use it, though his proximity to Miller suggests that this may be the latest attempt to get him back in the churn of social media

The former president has been looking for alternative ways to engage with his base online after having been booted off Twitter and suspended from Facebook after encouraging the Capitol rioters on January 6. And his prior effort to engage online—through the launch of a professional blog—ended quickly amid widespread ridicule and poor readership.

GETTR is one of the highest-profile projects in a larger ecosystem of pro-MAGA tech and social media platforms that have blossomed on the right, largely fueled by a sense that Big Tech is attempting to silence conservative and pro-Trump ideology from being disseminated online. In recent months, it was widely reported that the Trump team was searching for a platform on which to re-establish his online presence, either by buying a company outright and rebranding it as his exclusive platform, or becoming a featured draw.

The app first went live on the Google and Apple app stores in mid-June and was most recently updated Wednesday. It’s been downloaded over one thousand times on each, drawing positive reviews from users.

A description for GETTR on the app stores calls it a “non-bias social network for people all over the world.” The app is rated “M” for mature, meaning it is recommended for users 17 and older.

GETTR’s user interface appears similar to that of Twitter. Initial promotional materials for GETTR on the app stores displayed posts of users celebrating the House of Representatives no longer requiring masks on the floor of the chamber.

Initial trending topics on the app included the hashtags “#trump,” “#virusorigin,” “#nra” and “#unrestrictedbioweapon.” Those tags refer to the newfound and still unproven refrain from Republicans that China created the Covid-19 virus in a lab as a bioweapon.

Whether GETTR will succeed is dubious at best. Their last attempt to replicate his twitter feed, a site called “From The Desk of Donald Trump”, was widely derided as nothing more than a blog, barely received any web traffic, and shut down less than a month later.

Opinion | Republicans Shouldn’t Sign on to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal

So far, the bipartisan infrastructure deal is going through the normal life cycle of such proposals—alive, dead, revived, uncertain.

For Republicans, the best answer should be dead.

They have nothing to gain by blessing a portion of President Joe Biden’s spending plans, when an ungodly amount of money is going to go out the door regardless of whether they vote for a chunk of it or not.

The conventional wisdom is that the Senate has to prove that it can work, and the test of its functioning is how much of Biden’s spending Republicans endorse.

This is a distorted view of the Senate’s role, which shouldn’t be to get on board a historic spending spree for which Biden won no mandate and which isn’t justified by conditions in the country (it’s not true, for instance, that the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling).

Besides, if bipartisan spending is the test, the Senate just a few weeks ago passed a $200 billion China competition bill by a 68-32 vote. It used to be that $200 billion constituted a lot of money, but now it doesn’t rate, not when there’s $6 trillion on the table.

The infrastructure deal lurched from gloriously alive to dead when Biden explicitly linked its passage to the simultaneous passage of a reconciliation bill with the rest of the Democratic Party’s spending priorities in it.

Then, it revived again when Biden walked this back, and promised a dual track for the two bills.

The fierce Republican insistence on these two tracks doesn’t make much sense and amounts to asking Democrats to allow a decent interval before going ahead with the rest of their spending—Democrats are going to try to pass a reconciliation whether the bipartisan deal passes or not.

At the end of the day, then, there’s only one track: Democrats are going to spend as much money as they possibly can. The bipartisan deal might shave some money off the hard infrastructure priorities (according to Playbook, the White House says it doesn’t want to double dip, on say, electric cars or broadband by getting some money for them in the deal and then getting yet more in the reconciliation bill). But the emphasis is going to blow out spending across the board.

The calculation of Republicans supporting the bill is that a significant bipartisan package can take some of the heat off of Sen. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in their resistance to the filibuster.

A deal that passes and is signed into law will certainly be a feather in their caps, but it’s hard to believe they’d change their minds on the filibuster if the deal fell apart.

They are both so extensively and adamantly on the record in favor of the filibuster that a climb-down would be politically embarrassing and perilous. They may be sincere in believing that the filibuster is important institutionally to the Senate. But the politics also work by allowing them to brand themselves as a different breed of Democrat.

If they flip-flip on the filibuster, they release the brake on the left-most parts of the Democratic agenda and find themselves taking a lot of tough votes on priorities dear to the Democratic base.

Republicans supporting the deal also think that it will make passing the subsequent reconciliation bill harder. First, the parts of infrastructure that have the widest support—roads and bridges—will be in the deal and not in the reconciliation bill. Second, the unwelcome tax increases excluded from the bipartisan deal will be in the reconciliation bill.

This isn’t a crazy calculation, although it’s not clearly correct, either. The higher the top-line number is for the reconciliation bill, the harder it is to pass. By allowing Democrats to cleave off some of their spending into a bipartisan deal, the overall number for the reconciliation bill gets smaller. In other words, the bipartisan deal could make the partisan reconciliation easier rather than harder to pass.

If this is true, the deal is bipartisanship in the service of a partisan end.

It not as though Biden is fiscally prudent on all other fronts, except in this one area which he considers a particularly important national investment with unmistakable returns. No, he’s universally profligate. His reckless spending on all fronts (except defense) makes it more imperative for Republicans to stake out a position in four-square opposition.

It’s not as though the bipartisan bill is exemplary legislation, by the way. It resorts to all the usual Beltway gimmicks to create the pretense that it’s paid for, when it’s basically as irresponsible as the rest of the Biden spending.

Bipartisanship has its uses, but so does partisanship. Joe Biden wants to be known for his FDR- and LBJ-like government spending, believing that it’s the key to political success and to an enduring legacy. Fine. Let him and his party own it.