Media Mentions

Are Americans witnessing a coup? Before the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the case was arguable, but not a slam dunk. After the Capitol was breached, the case became more clear cut, experts say. The questions stem from President Donald Trump’s reaction to losing the 2020 presidential election. Trump and his supporters have filed a string of lawsuits rejected by the courts, sought to strong-arm local officials into changing the results, and suggested incorrectly that Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the will of the electoral college as he presided over the counting of the ballots. Whether the U.S. was witnessing a coup seemed speculative until the violent overrun of the House and Senate on the day the Electoral College votes were supposed to be counted, officially certifying Biden’s victory...All this seems to fit the category of a "sudden and irregular (i.e., illegal or extra-legal) removal, or displacement, of the executive authority of an independent government." It was sudden, laws were broken, and official functions of the government were displaced. (For this to apply, one has to envision President-elect Joe Biden as the "executive authority," rather than Trump, the incumbent but lame duck president.) "Invading the national legislature through force sounds like a coup; peaceful protest is obviously not," said Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor.

Harvard Law School Distinguished Fellow Vivek Wadhwa says he 'wouldn't be surprised' if President Trump's social media accounts will be suspended for a week at a time as 'more clamping down' is expected.

Noah Feldman is a guest on this episode of Axios Today, discussing what to watch for as members of Congress officially count the electoral votes for the presidential election.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Judge Merrick Garland is the right person at the right time to bePresident Joe Biden’s attorney general. If the AP and Politico are correct that he’s Biden’s pick, it isn’t just well-deserved vindication for a dedicated public servant who deserved to be confirmed to the Supreme Court when nominated by President Barack Obama. Garland’s years of experience in the Department of Justice, coupled with his distinguished service on the federal bench, position him to accomplish the historic mission now demanded of him: nothing less than restoring the legitimacy and credibility of federal law enforcement after the disastrous last four years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Garland is an insider’s insider when it comes to understanding how the Department of Justice works — and what its proper function should be. Since 1978, when he clerked for Justice William Brennan at the Supreme Court, he has spent his entire career within the gravitational field of the building known as “main Justice,” located at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was a special assistant to President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general Benjamin Civiletti; a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C.; a deputy assistant attorney general; and principal deputy associate attorney general. In between, he spent short stints at the venerable D.C. law firm Arnold and Porter. President Bill Clinton put him on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1995. The court is just a few blocks away from main Justice, and it hears many, many cases involving the federal government.

Talk of removing a president is easy. But getting rid of one is hard ... HLS Professor Jack Goldsmith and David Priess of the Lawfare Institute review the basic law governing the questions about taking a president’s powers away.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: For President-elect Joe Biden, Santa Claus came a few weeks late, but he certainly delivered. Georgia’s Senate races appear likely to give Democrats control of both houses of Congress — a spectacular gift. I worked in the Barack Obama administration from 2009 to 2012, and I was able to see, close up, the staggering difference it makes when the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by the same party as the president. That was the case in 2009 and 2010, when Congress enacted not only the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the economic stimulus made necessary by the 2008 financial crisis), the Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd-Frank banking reforms — but also the Family Smoking Prevention and Control Act, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which strengthened the available tools to combat employment discrimination in court. This was one of the most consequential periods of lawmaking in the nation’s entire history. Everything changed in 2011, when Republicans won a majority in the House. That meant that in 2011 and 2012, Congress wasn’t going to do much, especially if Obama favored it. For many issues, executive actions became the only game in town.

An op-ed by David Priess and Jack Goldsmith: The hours since Wednesday afternoon have seen a tidal wave of calls for Donald Trump to lose the powers and duties of the office for his role in the historic storming of the U.S. Capitol. There is a new push for impeachment. And news reports suggest that members of Trump’s Cabinet are considering invoking the 25th Amendment to take from Trump, in the words of the Amendment, “the powers and duties of the office” he holds. (We should note that this reporting is thinly sourced; Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported last night that a source merely says “the 25th Amendment discussions are staff-based within the administration and with some Republicans on the Hill, and that they're not particularly focused.”) This comes on the heels of a very strange series of events from inside the executive branch, including a statement on Wednesday afternoon by the Secretary of Defense that after consulting with Vice President Pence and top congressional leaders—but seemingly not President Trump—he was “activating D.C. National Guard to assist federal and local law enforcement as they work to peacefully address the situation.” Shortly before 4 a.m. this morning, a reconvened Congress finally confirmedPresident-elect Biden’s presidential victory. And then President Trump issued this statement: “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th.” But it is far from clear that Trump will stick by, or do what it takes to carry out, this pledge.

After 17 years on parole in Massachusetts, Wayne Lane completed his parole in March of last year — at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. While on parole, Lane, 59, bought a house and began working to help others seeking release from prison on parole...Lane works with the group Families for Justice as Healing, which is among the more than 70 organizations that sent a letter to the Baker administration and legislative leaders Tuesday calling for reforms to the state's parole board to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus behind bars. The letter says while COVID-19 has affected 5% of the state's population, 21% of those incarcerated have tested positive. The signed groups recommend several steps state lawmakers could take, because, the letter says, the board will not act on its own... "The letter lays out policy proposals that should be low-hanging fruit: diversify and expand the parole board; eliminate technical revocations; track comprehensive data on race and ethnicity; above all release more people, release people on time, hold timely hearings, and issue timely decisions," said Katy Naples-Mitchell, with Harvard's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. "The proposed reforms are common-sense, evidence-based proposals, and the bare minimum the commonwealth must do to create a functioning parole system."

An op-ed by Bruce Schneier: The information that is emerging about Russia's extensive cyberintelligence operation against the United States and other countries should be increasingly alarming to the public. The magnitude of the hacking, now believed to have affected more than 250 federal agencies and businesses -- primarily through a malicious update of the SolarWinds network management software -- may have slipped under most people's radar during the holiday season, but its implications are stunning. According to a Washington Post report, this is a massive intelligence coup by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). And a massive security failure on the part of the United States is also to blame. Our insecure internet infrastructure has become a critical national security risk -- one that we need to take seriously and spend money to reduce. President-elect Joe Biden's initial response spoke of retaliation, but there really isn't much the United States can do beyond what it already does. Cyberespionage is business as usual among countries and governments, and the United States is aggressively offensive in this regard. We benefit from the lack of norms in this area and are unlikely to push back too hard because we don't want to limit our own offensive actions.

Vice President Mike Pence is being put to the ultimate Trump test. The Republican president falsely claimed Tuesday that Pence can single-handedly toss out election results when Congress convenes on Wednesday for the final bureaucratic step before Joe Biden’s inauguration, putting pressure on the VP to decide what’s more important: The boss or the Constitution...Despite Trump’s claim, Pence cannot indiscriminately refuse to accept Biden’s 306-to-232 vote victory in the Electoral College. “The vice president is essentially powerless tomorrow. The Constitution gives him a merely ceremonial role, and there’s no way he can turn that into anything more,” Laurence Tribe, a longtime constitutional law professor at Harvard University, told the Daily News. In serving as the presiding officer over Wednesday’s session, Pence’s duties are essentially limited to presenting the 538 electoral votes certified by all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for a formal count, as spelled out by the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. He’s also tasked with overseeing any challenges to the results requested by members of Congress. If a challenge is made and supported by at least one representative and one senator, Pence should order the House and Senate to retreat to their respective chambers for a debate and vote on the objection. For a challenge to be successful, majorities of both chambers have to vote to sustain it — which is virtually impossible since the House is controlled by Democrats and Senate GOP leaders have instructed their members to not entertain objections to Biden’s certified victory.

Amid mounting cases of COVID-19 in the state’s prisons and jails, a group of community organizations are calling on Gov. Charlie Baker and top lawmakers to push the Parole Board to expedite releases of eligible parolees. More than 70 organizations on Tuesday sent a 10-page letter alerting state officials to what they call “serious concerns” about the parole system, including what they allege are low release rates, long delays for decisions and unnecessary re-incarceration of parolees who haven’t committed new crimes...The Massachusetts parole system is the oldest in the country and has been the focus of calls for reform for years — but it was largely left out of the state’s criminal justice overhaul in 2018. The length of time between hearings and decisions for inmates with life sentences rose from an average of three months in 2015 to more than nine months in 2018, according to an investigation published last year by the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting and The Boston Globe. Parolees had been returned to prison for violating conditions of their parole like drinking a glass of wine and talking to a former prisoner, the investigation showed. The parole board has also faced criticism for its treatment of mentally ill patients. This week’s letter listed a series of community groups, including the Justice Resource Institute in Needham, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute of Race and Justice at Harvard Law School and the Prisoners’ Assistance Project at Northeastern University.

In the closing days of his presidency, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he can make innumerable false claims and assertions that millions of Republican voters will believe and more than 150 Republican members of the House and Senate will embrace ... In the academic legal community, there are two competing schools of thought concerning how to go about restraining the proliferation of flagrant misstatements of fact in political speech ... Rebecca Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard, wrote by email: “Those are some big questions and I don’t think they have yes-or-no answers. These are not new arguments but they have new forms, and changes in both economic organization and technology make certain arguments more or differently salient than they used to be.” ... Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard...wrote by email, that “the First Amendment should be changed — not in the sense that the values the First Amendment protects should be changed, but the way in which it protects them needs to be translated in light of these new technologies/business models.” ... Randall Kennedy, who is also a law professor at Harvard, made the case in an email that new internet technologies demand major reform of the scope and interpretation of the First Amendment and he, too, argued that the need for change outweighs risks: “Is that dangerous? Yes. But stasis is dangerous too. There is no safe harbor from danger.” ... In one of the sharpest critiques I gathered, Laurence H. Tribe, emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an email that, “We are witnessing a reissue, if not a simple rerun, of an old movie. With each new technology, from mass printing to radio and then television, from film to broadcast TV to cable and then the internet, commentators lamented that the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly enshrined in a document ratified in 1791 were ill-adapted to the brave new world and required retooling in light of changed circumstances surrounding modes of communication.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: It’s really happening: Republicans in the House and Senate are poised to defy reality and try in vain to reverse the presidential election results. Congress will meet on January 6 to certify the election results in what is normally a predictable ritual. A dozen Republican senators and several members of the House have said they plan to object. When they do, it’s going to be a dark day for U.S. democracy. That’s true even though Joe Biden will still ultimately be recognized as the winner of the 2020 election. I wish I could say it’s only political theater by Republicans who know it won’t matter, and hence not a big deal. But I can’t. The truth is both more serious and more painful. The concerted effort by a more-than-token number of Republicans reflects a basic willingness to reject the people’s vote and with it, democracy itself. If the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, they would be in the position to carry out a constitutional coup d’état. The fact that they can’t do it this time isn’t evidence that we don’t have to worry about it the future. It’s evidence that we need to be very worried indeed.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Since the presidential election on Nov. 2, the rule of law has held. That is one of the most noteworthy, and inspiring, developments in the entire history of U.S. law. Whether they were appointed by Presidents Donald Trump or Barack Obama, by Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, federal judges have shown fidelity to the law by rejecting frivolous and evidence-free efforts by Trump to overturn former Vice President Joe Biden’s victory. Congress will meet on Wednesday to finalize that victory. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, joined by at least 10 other Republican senators or senators-elect, is mounting a challenge, seeking to delay and perhaps to reverse the result. An obvious question is the role of Vice President Mike Pence, who serves as president of the Senate and can break deadlocked senate votes on ordinary matters, now that he has “welcomed” the senators’ electoral vote challenge. What is he permitted to do on Wednesday? Under the law, the simplest answer is: Not very much. His role is largely ceremonial. He has no power to overturn the results of a presidential election. A central reason is that the drafters of the U.S. Constitution and those who followed them were acutely aware of the risk of bias and self-interest in politics. They did not want the vice president, who might well have a rooting interest, to settle the outcome of a presidential election.

President Donald Trump's desperate and conspiracy-ridden attempts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s election win went a step further this weekend when The Washington Post published a recording of him asking Georgia officials to “find” him the votes needed to win the state. The Hail Mary attempt comes as Congress prepares to officially count the Electoral College votes this Wednesday, with more than 100 Republican lawmakers planning to make a symbolic stand that day against the majority will of the American electorate. To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by Jennifer Horn, a co-founder of anti-Trump Republican organization The Lincoln Project, and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, now a professor at Harvard Law School.

This past weekend was a big one for Republicans. Here in Massachusetts, party members re-elected Jim Lyons as state party chair, in a 39-36 vote over his challenger, State Representative Shawn Dooley of Norfolk. Lyons, an ardent Trump supporter, has frequently clashed with GOP governor Charlie Baker. Meanwhile, on Saturday, at least 10 Republican US Senators announced they will object to certifying the electoral college results this Wednesday. Also, the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia released the audio of an hour-long call with President Trump and some of his lawyers in which Trump repeatedly asked Secretary Brad Raffensperger to "find" exactly enough votes to declare him the winner there. We take listener calls with Judge Nancy Gertner, retired federal judge, senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, and WBUR's Legal Analyst. We also hear from WBUR senior political reporter Anthony Brooks and Amy Carnevale, an elected member of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee.

The week before Christmas, President Donald Trump issued a series of pardons and commutations, many of them for his personal associates and political loyalists: his son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner; former operatives Roger Stone and Paul Manafort; and two former GOP congressmen. Hardly any of the 49 people who received clemency were vetted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s pardon office. Trump has largely wrested the clemency process from the Justice Department, turning it into a lobbying bonanza that has outraged Democrats...Trump has granted a total of 94 pardons and commutations, far fewer than Barack Obama or George W. Bush issued, and only seven of those cases appear to have been recommended by the pardon attorney, according to data compiled by Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith. More than 14,000 clemency seekers are waiting for verdicts on their applications to the Justice Department. But that backlog is hardly a new phenomenon. In 2014, the Obama administration unveiled a clemency initiative that created new criteria for commutations, with as many as 10,000 inmates expected to qualify.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: Donald Trump has regularly teased incriminating “tapes” of people whom he wanted to discredit; those have never materialized, but we are by now accustomed to tapes of his own perfidy. “Grab ’em by the pussy.” “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” And, now, in a phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty votes.” A recording of the call, from Saturday, published on Sunday by the Washington Post, shows that Trump attempted to coerce Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the results and warned of criminal consequences if the Georgia Republican did not. “I just want to find eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said. (Biden won Georgia by a margin of eleven thousand seven hundred and seventy-nine ballots.) The President suggested that “there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” On January 20th, the Justice Department’s stance that a President cannot be federally indicted while in office will no longer apply to Trump, so the question of whether he committed a crime is not merely theoretical. Federal election law makes it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” attempt to “deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process” by the “tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.” Trump appears to have done just that, by asking Raffensperger to announce a fictitious finding of just enough ballots for Trump to win the state, and backing up this demand with a veiled threat of penalty if Raffensperger doesn’t comply.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: President-elect Joe Biden has chosen Michael Regan, secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. If confirmed, Regan will have a distinctly challenging assignment. The reasons are threefold. The Donald Trump administration has scaled back so many environmental regulations; the agency has been demoralized; and Biden has an exceedingly ambitious environmental agenda. Regan will need to establish priorities for his first months. Here are five concrete ideas, the first three of which involve climate change, on which Biden himself is focusing: Greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. Transportation accounts for about 28% of greenhouse gases in the U.S., and from 1990 to 2018, emissions from transportation have grown significantly. President Barack Obama imposed aggressive regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from both light-duty and heavy-duty vehicles; Trump scaled them way back. Biden promises to issue “a new fuel economy standard that goes beyond what the Obama-Biden Administration put in place.” To do that, the EPA will have to coordinate closely with the Department of Transportation, which has authority to issue fuel economy rules. It will have to comply with the Clean Air Act, which calls for standards that “reflect the greatest degree of emission reduction achievable,” considering technological feasibility, costs of compliance and necessary lead time.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: It’s really happening: Republicans in the House and Senate are poised to defy reality and try in vain to reverse the presidential election results. Congress will meet on January 6 to certify the election results in what is normally a predictable ritual. A dozen Republican senators and several members of Congress have said they plan to object. When they do, it’s going to be a dark day for U.S. democracy. That’s true even though Joe Biden will still ultimately be recognized as the winner of the 2020 election. I wish I could say it’s only political theater by Republicans who know it won’t matter, and hence not a big deal. But I can’t. The truth is both more serious and more painful. The concerted effort by a more-than-token number of Republicans reflects a basic willingness to reject the people’s vote and with it, democracy itself. If the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, they would be in the position to carry out a constitutional coup d’état. The fact that they can’t do it this time isn’t evidence that we don’t have to worry about it the future. It’s evidence that we need to be very worried indeed. The key vulnerability here arises from the Electoral Count Act, which dates to 1887. It allows members of Congress to object to the submitted votes from the state electors, triggering debate on whether to count those votes.

An op-ed by Evelyn Douek: For years, social-media platforms had held firm: Just because a post was false didn’t mean it was their place to do anything about it. But 2020 changed their minds. At the end of May, Twitter for the first time labeled a tweet from the president of the United States as potentially misleading. After Donald Trump falsely insisted that mail-in voting would rig the November election, the platform added a message telling users to “get the facts.” Within a day, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, had appeared on Fox News to reassure viewers that Facebook had “a different policy” and believed strongly that tech companies shouldn’t be arbiters of truth of what people say online. But come November, between the time polls closed and the race was called for Biden, much of Trump’s Facebook page, as well as more than a third of Trump’s Twitter feed, was plastered with warning labels and fact-checks, a striking visual manifestation of the way that 2020 has transformed the internet. Seven months ago, that first label on a Trump tweet was a watershed event. Now it’s entirely unremarkable. Among the many facets of life transformed by the coronavirus pandemic was the internet itself. In the face of a public-health crisis unprecedented in the social-media age, platforms were unusually bold in taking down COVID-19 misinformation.