THE MORNING DISPATCH

The Morning Dispatch: Democrats Make Their Case

Plus: A worrying water system hack in Florida.

The Dispatch Staff 17 min ago
(Photo by congress.gov via Getty Images)

Happy Thursday! As those of you who’ve listened to any of our recent podcast offerings will know, we’re having lots of discussions internally about how to best cover President Trump now that he is no longer in office.

There’s plenty of clickbait nonsense we’ve kept out of the pages of TMD in recent weeks. The impeachment trial—even though the eventual outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion—is not that. There have been four of these in American history. The trial this week will set not only the direction of the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, but also a precedent about whether what happened January 6—and in the weeks leading up to that day—is acceptable. It’s important, and we’re going to continue to cover it until it ends, likely next week.

Now, to the news.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • Rank and file members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted two-to-one in favor of a deal with Chicago Public Schools that would have students back in classrooms on a staggered basis as early as today. Pre-K and special education programs are set to return to in-person learning Thursday, while elementary, middle, and high school students will be allowed to return over the next three weeks.
  • A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control yesterday found that wearing a more tight-fitting surgical mask—or a second cloth mask over a surgical mask—can dramatically reduce transmission of COVID-19, protecting both the wearer and those around them.
  • President Joe Biden said Wednesday his administration will impose new sanctions on the military leaders who led Myanmar’s coup earlier this month, freezing the generals out of $1 billion in U.S.-based assets.
  • Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said yesterday the Fed will continue to maintain low interest rates in an effort to shore up the economy.
  • The United States confirmed 91,587 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 7.2 percent of the 1,268,089 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 3,274 deaths were attributed to the virus on Wednesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 471,377. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 76,979 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1,563,780 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, bringing the nationwide total to 44,769,970.

Impeachment Managers Make Their Case

If the House impeachment managers’ goal on Tuesday was to make the case for the constitutionality of the impeachment trial, the goal of their presentation yesterday was to make the case for conviction.

Unlike President Trump’s first impeachment trial, the jurors didn’t really need to be brought up to speed on the broad contours of the case before them: They all lived it. The impeachment managers showcased some new material on Wednesday, but the bulk of the day focused on laying out a clear and concise timeline of exactly what took place on January 6—and the former president’s role in it.

Arguments lasted nearly eight hours, wrapping up just before 8 p.m. ET, but the managers’ case boiled down to three relatively simple points:

  1. President Trump’s lies about the election—both on January 6 and in the weeks leading up to it—inspired the mob that attacked the Capitol last month;
  2. That attack on the Capitol was very nearly even more deadly than it ended up being; and
  3. President Trump abdicated his responsibility as commander in chief by not doing everything he could to stop the violence once it began.

We’ve detailed extensively the false statements and claims Trump and his allies in right-wing media made following the former president’s loss to Joe Biden. “In the months as the president made these statements,” Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat from Colorado, argued yesterday, “people listened.”

“Armed supporters surrounded election officials’ homes. The secretary of state for Georgia got death threats. Officials warned the president that his rhetoric was dangerous and it was going to result in deadly violence,” he continued. “When he saw firsthand the violence that his conduct was creating, he didn’t stop it. He didn’t condemn the violence. He incited it further and he got more specific. He didn’t just tell them to fight like hell. He told them how, where, and when.”

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted on December 19. “Be there, will be wild!”

Once the crowd was assembled, Trump did nothing but raise the temperature, the managers argued. “If you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he shouted, instructing his fans to walk down to the Capitol and “show strength.”

There’s Something in the Water

Early last Friday, an operator at the Oldsmar, Florida water treatment plant watched as someone else took control of his computer virtually and manipulated the cursor around his screen. When the mysterious force moved to increase the water supply’s levels of sodium hydroxide—commonly known as lye, the primary ingredient in liquid drain cleaner—from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, the employee quickly reversed the adjustment and notified authorities of a breach.

Using infiltrated TeamViewer software, which allows treatment facility personnel and IT professionals to access operational technology systems remotely, a hacker of unknown origins had attempted to poison the water supply of 15,000 Oldsmar residents located in Pinellas County.

“This is somebody that is trying, it appears on the surface, to do something bad,” said Bob Gualtieri, the county’s sheriff, during a press conference Monday. “We don’t know right now whether the breach originated from within the United States or outside the country. We also do not know why the Oldsmar system was targeted and we have no knowledge of any other systems being unlawfully accessed.”

In small amounts, lye can be used in the treatment process to remove metals from the water supply and reduce its acidity. But Friday’s breach constituted a “significant and potentially dangerous increase,” according to Gualtieri. The county assured that, even if the employee had not observed the hack, additional safeguards were in place to prevent unsafe drinking water from reaching the city’s population.

Worth Your Time

  • It is often said that the modern era’s fusionism between libertarians and traditionalist conservatives has its historical roots in the Cold War, when both movements decided they could overlook their differences because of their shared opposition to communism. But did the fall of the Soviet Union doom this so-called marriage of convenience between seemingly oppositional value sets? Fusionism, ReasonMagazine’s managing editor Stephanie Slade writes, “has long been running on fumes,” especially as the post-liberalism movement has gained ground within the more religious and traditionalist circles of the right. But Slade also argues that much of this shift has to do with the fact that people misunderstand what fusionism really is. “An arrangement in which traditionalists and libertarians are merely allies can easily become a game of tug of war in which each side jockeys to ensure that, on balance, its own priorities predominate. If one side finds itself too often on the losing end of that jockeying, it might reasonably move to dissolve the alliance altogether,” she notes.
  • When we reflect on the dramatic toll this past year has inflicted upon our social lives, we often do so in clinical and inhumane terms, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in his latest for National Review. “We feel we are allowed to speak of the ‘mental-health effects’ of lockdowns, closures, and the fear-driven lack of sociability on ourselves and our children,” he writes. “But when we do, we talk about ourselves like lab animals, as if we were neutral observers of our lives.”It’s been a year since many of us have seen our co-workers, our grandparents, or old friends. FaceTime and texting have made this year bearable, but they’ve also reminded us of the incomparable nature of face-to-face interaction with loved ones. “Personally, the last year has fortified my conviction that life cannot be lived via screens, and that the summer — when it comes — should be filled with big get-togethers, the opening of expensive and long-stored bottles of whisky, and many hot tears over what we’ve lost.”
  • On January 19, the Oregon GOP voted in favor of a resolution calling the Capitol insurrection a “false flag.” Allen West, Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, has expressed support for a resolution that would allow citizens to vote on whether the Lone Star state ought to secede from the union. The Illinois GOP recently censured Rep. Adam Kinzinger for voting to impeach Donald Trump. Why does it seem like so many state Republican Parties are taking crazy pills? “The GOP’s electoral failures should produce some soul searching. At the very least, we should see the voters who support Republican policies demand better representation from their respective parties,” writes Noah Rothman in Commentary. “But we haven’t seen that. Maybe Republican voters aren’t all that interested in winning elections anymore. If so, state parties are delivering.”

Presented Without Comment

Alex Seitz-Wald @aseitzwald

Was genuinely surprised by the number of people on this website who thought stripping Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committees would diminish her. She’s now more popular, especially inside GOP, as is Cheney, showing once again that cancelation can be good for business.

February 10th 2021

21 Retweets

Also Presented Without Comment

Jack Fitzpatrick ☘️ @jackfitzdc

In largely virtual House Financial Services markup of Covid bill, @RepTomEmmer is asked to suspend his comments and figure out why he is upside down.

February 10th 2021

766 Retweets

Toeing the Company Line

  • Wednesday’s episode of the Dispatch Podcast drills down on all things impeachment: Its constitutionality, the mechanics of the Senate trial, the persuasiveness of Trump’s defense team, and the political ramifications. Stick around to hear our hosts chat about what National Pizza Day means to them—and the revelation that is Goldbelly.
  • In his Wednesday G-File (🔒), Jonah walks us through the latest speech-policing fiasco at the New York Times and segues into a discussion about former President Donald Trump’s First Amendment defense strategy during his second impeachment trial. “The Times wants to criminalize language regardless of context—figuratively speaking—and Trump’s lawyers want to absolve crimes—or high crimes and misdemeanors—involving words, regardless of context,” Jonah writes. “Can’t we all just be frickin’ grown-ups and expect everyone else to behave like adults, too?”
  • Be sure to also check out Scott Lincicome’s latest Capitolism newsletter (🔒), in which he explains why “centuries of U.S. cabotage laws”—which delegate the right to operate sea, air, or other transport services within a particular territory—have “not only caused high prices and a host of unintended (occasionally ridiculous) consequences, but also presided over (if not caused) the steady decline of American shipbuilding competitiveness and the embarrassing degradation of the merchant marine fleet.”
  • On the website today, Andrew takes a long look at the unsolved mystery at the center of the coronavirus pandemic: Where and how did it start? He looks at efforts by the Chinese leadership to suppress information and the WHO’s China-friendly approach to investigating the sources of the global scourge. Dr. Peter Daszak, an American who was part of the WHO team that just released a report of its findings on the pandemic’s origins, tells Andrew: “There was no cover-up.” Daszak, who has experience in the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, says: “Working with that lab in Wuhan for 15 years, talking to technicians, having our staff embedded in that lab, you learn a lot.”

Let Us Know

Did you watch any live coverage of the impeachment hearings yesterday? Did anything you saw change your mind about whether senators should vote to convict President Trump? Do you think it’ll change any minds among the senators?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).
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