The man had doused himself with hand sanitizer before the confrontation at the Catskill Police Department.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-man-burst-flames-after-taser-used-him-police-n1283394
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: The Associated Press
After New York City taxi taxi drivers staged a hunger strike demanding the city gaurantee their loans, officials announced an expanded deal Wednesday to help drivers crippled by debt.The deal involved the Taxi Work…
Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/580013-new-york-city-aiding-taxi-drivers-after-hunger-strike
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Monique Beals
In March 2020, as Covid-19 was beginning its assault on America, Jason Elliott found himself huddled in a windowless conference room late one night with about 15 other California state officials, advisers and epidemiologists who were using their phone calculators to tally up potential death rates.
The group — which included national guardsmen, emergency responders and academics who’d studied homelessness — had been banished by Gov. Gavin Newsom from an emergency Covid meeting in the state’s situation room and directed to come back when they had a plan to address the catastrophe Covid posed for the state’s massive homeless population.
“The early projection was that we would lose 25,000 homeless lives,” Elliot, a senior counselor in Newsom’s office and his top adviser on homelessness, said in an interview. “It’s enough to make you go numb, to make your stomach turn — ‘Oh my God, we got to get going.’”
Of the 580,000 Americans estimated to be homeless in January 2020, over 226,000 had no shelter at all. That meant they had little access to basic hygiene just as public health officials were directing everyone to wash their hands and wipe down surfaces. In overburdened homeless shelters, meanwhile, people were piled on top of each other with cots placed a couple feet apart, just as officials were urging Americans to socially distance and maintain six feet of separation from others.
In California, home to 28 percent of the nation’s homeless population and 51 percent of the unsheltered population, the outlook was particularly dire. Based on sketchy early case and fatality estimates cobbled together from the data coming out of China in the pandemic’s early days, epidemiologists told California officials to expect the homeless to be a major vector for spread of the virus and to die by the thousands.
As the group met into the pre-dawn hours, they batted around potential solutions. Maybe the state could use big wedding tents to shelter homeless people, someone suggested. No, they decided, amassing a bunch of people in tents would present the same contagion problems as crowded homeless shelters. How about using trailers to provide private spaces? No, they didn’t have the time or the money to procure enough trailers.
It was then that someone — Elliott can’t remember who — suggested hotel rooms.
Prior to the pandemic, homelessness experts including Elliott had considered using vacant hotel rooms to house homeless people in mostly theoretical terms — it was a wish-list idea, one that would require some real money to implement, especially at any kind of scale. Newsom had given hotel conversions the briefest of mentions in his “State of the State” address dedicated to homelessness the previous month, as one of a few potential “innovative approaches” to the homelessness problem, like building tiny homes.
But the more the group discussed the prospect over vending machine chips that night in March, the more sense it made to shelter the state’s homeless in hotels during the pandemic. They knew travel was about to plunge — state officials were already weighing a stay-at-home order — so plenty of hotels would have vacant rooms they’d be eager to lease on the cheap. And while FEMA had previously only reimbursed states for congregate, or group, shelter in the wake of past natural disasters, a former FEMA employee on staff in the room that night thought they had a shot of convincing the agency that non-congregate shelter was necessary in the face of a highly contagious virus.
“The pandemic provided us with a confluence of factors that allowed us to do things that a lot of us daydreamed about for years,” Elliott said. Those factors included the urgency caused by the public health emergency, relief money from the federal government and the timing of the crisis, which Elliott said coincided with rising political will to do something about out-of-control homelessness in the state.
“That was kind of the magic recipe,” he said.
So as travel came to a standstill and hotel occupancy rates plunged, California began moving thousands of homeless people into private hotel rooms in an effort dubbed “Project Roomkey,” which would eventually provide temporary shelter to over 48,000 people in hotel rooms leased by the state.
Within months, the state went all in on the strategy, launching an effort to convert hotel rooms into permanent housing. Between July and December 2020, the rebranded “Project Homekey“ would use $846 million — $700 million of it from federal coronavirus relief funds — to create more than 6,000 housing units, 5,000 of them permanent, in 94 properties throughout the state, mostly hotels. The average cost per unit came in at about $148,000. Normally the state spends years and about $500,000 per unit to develop new affordable housing.
David Grunwald, senior vice president for the Los Angeles region at National Community Renaissance, said he “went nuts” when he saw a request for proposals from the city of Los Angeles to turn hotels into housing for homeless people last summer. Grunwald’s team applied for, and won, contracts to develop housing at two old hotels under the first round of the program, including a 49-unit motel in the El Sereno neighborhood of LA now called Casa Luna.
He’s only grown more optimistic about the hotel conversion model since seeing it in action.
“I’ve been doing housing and homeless work since 1989, and it’s the first strategy I’ve seen that has promise to scale up in a way that makes a difference,” Grunwald said.
When people think of homelessness, they often picture the visibly and chronically homeless — many of whom suffer from mental illness, behavioral disorders and substance abuse issues that keep them from holding down jobs. But chronic cases actually comprise a minority of the population. In California, only 30 percent of the people experiencing homelessness in January 2020 had been homeless for at least 12 months of the previous three years, according to a HUD count, which means about 70 percent were newly homeless — often low-income people who’d fallen on hard times and found themselves without a home for the first time in their lives.
“What you don’t see are that many, many of those folks who are out there are getting out of their tents and going to jobs,” said Margot Kushel, head of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative in San Francisco. Kushel, a physician who has studied homelessness’ impact on health, was one of the experts in the room when Newsom’s staff came up with the hotel conversion plan.
In part because of the temperate weather, most homeless people in California — about 70 percent, including about 84 percent of chronically homeless people — are unsheltered, sleeping in tents or cars or on sidewalks and park benches. By contrast in New York, just 7 percent of the homeless population is chronically homeless, and just 5 percent is unsheltered.
Both states have seen their homeless populations rise in recent years. One in four homeless people in the United States last year was in either Los Angeles or New York City.
It’s no coincidence that New York and California are also two of the states with the most severe shortages of affordable housing and the biggest obstacles to the construction of new units — from costly permitting processes to lengthy environmental reviews to strict zoning rules, often fiercely supported by property owners in the community. New York, Hawaii and California — all states with pricey real estate — have the highest rates of homelessness per capita.
“Rezoning is a political process, and most people — even if in the abstract they’re incredibly supportive of affordable housing — they don’t want to change the character of their neighborhood,” said Eric Rosenbaum, president and CEO of Project Renewal, a New York homeless services nonprofit.
That kind of “not in my backyard” mindset is prevalent in California, which has seen an explosion in population growth and property values as the tech revolution took hold, but little corresponding growth in wages for low-income laborers and service workers.
“The homelessness crisis is the affordable housing crisis. They are so deeply linked that it is almost impossible to separate them,” Elliott said.
Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, agrees: While a combination of factors has contributed to the rise in homelessness over the last 40 years, the affordability crisis is the primary cause, she said.
“In the ’70s there was an adequate supply of affordable housing for the number of low-income people,” Roman said. “By the late ’70s and early ’80s that equation had changed, and that’s what started homelessness and continues to be the major driver.”
According to the most recent HUD data, there are 7.8 million renter households who do not receive government assistance and live in inadequate conditions or pay more than half of their income on rent, above the economist-recommended 30 percent. The U.S. has a shortage of 6.8 million rental homes affordable for people whose incomes fall at or below the poverty line or 30 percent of their area median income, according to a National Low Income Housing Coalition analysis of Census Bureau data.
The numbers can be explained by a broader shortage of housing supply. New-home construction over the last two decades has fallen short of historical levels by 5.5 million to 6.8 million units, according to a report released over the summer by the National Association of Realtors. Construction has particularly lagged since the housing meltdown that sparked the Great Recession, and many of the workers who left the industry then haven’t returned. Total housing stock grew at an average annual rate of 1.7 percent from 1968 through 2000. That rate fell to 1 percent over the last 20 years, dipping to 0.7 percent over the last decade alone.
Housing is also a sector where trickle-down economics applies, to the detriment of lower-income renters. Home prices soared about 15 percent over the last year as white-collar Americans whose finances weren’t hurt by the pandemic crisis competed for a limited supply of housing, spurred on by historically low mortgage rates. The booming market has in turn priced other people out of buying their first home, so more people are renting: There are 1 million more renter households today than there were at the end of the second quarter of 2020, according to NAR data.
When more people compete for rental units, costs go up. They’re already rising at an alarming pace: In 2020, 22.7 percent of multifamily rental units rented for over $2,000, compared with just 12.3 percent in 2017, according to an NAR analysis of Census data.
In the past, low-wage workers had more affordable options. Single-room occupancy housing — essentially rented rooms with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities — used to be somewhat common in American cities.
Those units “started disappearing in the early ’70s and then the ’80s,” Roman said. “And it was largely gotten rid of by affordable housing advocates, who thought it was substandard and we should do better for people. Which I agree with, but we didn’t do better — we just lost all that housing.”
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, about 1 million SRO units were destroyed in different cities around the country, leaving about 200,000 today, Roman noted.
The general lack of supply, meanwhile, has aggravated the NIMBY problem. It’s not just wealthy people worried that a high-density affordable development would tank their increasing property values: low-income communities often oppose the construction of new developments in their neighborhoods, fearing the new buildings would accelerate gentrification and price them out.
California has been throwing ever-larger sums of money at homelessness for years, only to see the homeless population continue to surge, increasing by 40 percent in just the last five years. What made Homekey different was the way it streamlined regulations in a state notorious for erecting some of the most onerous and costly barriers to the development of affordable housing.
The Homekey project — and others like it — gets around those hurdles by focusing on existing buildings handpicked by the communities themselves.
The statute establishing Homekey included a provision deeming any project developed under the program to be exempt from discretionary permits and in line with applicable local standards and zoning rules. The law also exempted certain Homekey properties from a state environmental review requirement, reasoning that because the program relied on existing buildings there was little risk that the buildings would fail to pass the review.
“Because we had land-use conformance and environmental streamlining in place, our partners knew they could get to an occupied site,” said Geoffrey Ross, deputy director of the division of federal financial assistance at the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Normally, “the risk of a project being killed and the time it takes to get approvals increases the cost.”
The result was a much quicker process that for the most part sidestepped neighborhood pushback.
“It’s been a game changer, being able to say, ‘Hey, we have this underutilized building, we can use it to meet an immediate need, we don’t have to go through all the hurdles’,” said Vivian Wan, chief operating officer at Abode Services, one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest homeless services providers.
Crucially, the state also required that applicants for program funding be local public entities, which were in a better position to select potential sites based on community needs.
“The local jurisdiction has to go in with the developer, so it creates all this buy-in from the beginning,” Wan said.
The privacy provided by converted hotels is also a draw for some homeless people who would otherwise resist coming indoors, according to advocates, and getting people housed with supportive services like job training, medical services, healthy meals and on-call social workers reduces the strain on other community services like hospitals and jails.
“The dignity, the stability, the safety that comes with that leads to measurably better outcomes than congregate shelters,” Elliott said.
A resident named Ernie Guereca, for instance, has been able to live at Casa Luna while waiting for a voucher to move into permanent supportive housing. Guereca, a 53-year-old El Sereno native, had experienced homelessness for two years, living in an encampment on the center strip of the street on which Casa Luna is located.
The development is currently operated as interim housing for 49 formerly homeless people like Guereca; it will be redeveloped into permanent housing for up to 100 residents in early 2024, with plans for new construction on an adjacent property.
The idea of converting hotels and motels to housing isn’t new. But the pandemic – which sent hotel occupancy rates plunging to 37 percent and interest rates to rock-bottom lows – proved an opportunity.
“The price points were really high when we looked at this four or five years ago for previously homeless veterans,” said Douglas Guthrie, president and CEO of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. “When Covid-19 struck, a lot of these mom-and-pop ownership places had serious financial problems, so the price points came down and became much more reasonable.”
Plenty of hotels were already struggling before the pandemic struck, thanks to the rise of AirBnb. And the American Hotel and Lodging Association doesn’t expect the industry to recover from the pandemic until 2024.
So the hotel conversion trend is taking off. And it’s not just high-cost cities eyeing vacant hotels as a potential solution to housing shortages: A community land trust converted a Baymont Inn and Suites in Essex Junction, Vermont, into housing using federal coronavirus relief funds, and hotels in cities as far flung as Branson, Missouri, and Kissimmee, Florida, have been redeveloped into workforce housing using private funding.
“The economic drivers are there for this trend to continue — the unaffordability of housing, which is pushing up demand for rental housing, and the lack of housing in general,” said Gay Cororaton, senior economist and director of housing and commercial research at NAR, which published a report on the conversion of vacant hotels into multifamily housing earlier this year.
Those factors are also continuing to drive up homelessness, including in California. The annual government count to gauge how many people are homeless on a given night was canceled this year because of the pandemic, so it’s hard to know precisely how the crisis affected homelessness rates.
But encampments have grown in major cities around California and the country, although it’s hard to know how much of that comes down to new visibility in the wake of CDC guidance urging officials not to clear encampments during the pandemic.
Homekey’s boosters readily admit the program was never going to solve the state’s homelessness issue: The program is an “arrow in the quiver of arrows that are necessary to tackle homelessness,” Grunwald said, calling it “one of the most intractable problems of our times.”
Washington was impressed enough with the approach to establish a new $5 billion homelessness program at HUD in the March relief package that includes money for the “purchase and development of non-congregate shelter.”
Ross, who oversaw the Homekey project before he was named to his current post overseeing California’s use of funding under the new HUD program, conceded that the economics of conversions may change in the future — interest rates are already rising, many hotels will return to regular occupancy, the political focus on homelessness may fade — but said “we really can deploy these tools in a wide variety of ways and still have very meaningful outcomes.”
“Just because we’re not in the same level of pandemic and lockdown we were in last year does not mean we can’t still be successful,” Ross added.
Grunwald, who used Homekey to develop Casa Luna, is now managing three Homekey projects, as the program enters a second phase with $5.8 billion in new state and federal funds. Grunwald himself was so excited about the concept that he wanted to apply to acquire every project in the L.A. area, before his boss talked him down.
“Once I saw what it was, I was absolutely convinced it was one of the best programs I’d ever seen,” he said.
In fact, with enough financial support, Grunwald sees a national hotel conversion plan as the key to turning the homelessness problem around. Now that the pandemic has created a path forward that works, Grunwald says the question is now, “Do we want to end homelessness or not?”
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/main-recoverylab-cities-la-sros-518602
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Katy O’Donnell
Case brought by NRA affiliate in New York seeks to overturn law that largely prohibits concealed weapons being carried in public
The supreme court will hear arguments on Wednesday in a gun rights case that could lead to more guns on the streets of New York and California, and affect restrictions on carrying firearms in airports, bars, churches and schools.
The case centers on a New York law that prohibits people from carrying a concealed handgun in public unless they can demonstrate a need to carry the weapon.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/03/supreme-court-gun-rights-case-new-york-law
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Adam Gabbatt and agencies
New York and New Jersey both issued a state of emergency on Monday ahead of a nor’easter that descended on the region Tuesday morning.”I am proactively declaring a State of Emergency to ensure we can provide the ne…
Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/578439-ny-nj-issue-states-of-emergency-ahead-of-noreaster
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Joseph Choi
Surgeons in New York successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human subject, reports The Economist. The kidney, experimentally attached for three days ito a brain-dead patient, marks substantial advances in the science of xenotransplantation.
In 2014, a firm called Synthetic Genomics in La Jolla, California, began work on a unique and radical project.
Source: https://boingboing.net/2021/10/21/pig-kidney-successfully-transplanted-to-human-body.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pig-kidney-successfully-transplanted-to-human-body
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Rob Beschizza
The world has seen a power struggle between nuclear powers before, and has seen those countries inch closer to military conflict. But it’s never before seen a cold war between two countries as interconnected — with each other and with the rest of the globe — as the U.S. and China.
Why it matters: Escalating antagonism between the world’s two superpowers is likely to hinder global cooperation to fight climate change, divert resources to costly arms and tech races, complicate diplomacy for U.S. allies, and victimize Chinese and American citizens living in each other’s countries.
The big picture: Experts have long debated whether a “cold war” is the right way to think about the rivalry between the U.S. and China.
Driving the news: A report this weekend that China had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile immediately drew comparisons to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite, which raised alarms that the U.S. was falling behind in a technology race.
Yes, but: “This is not a Sputnik moment,” Joshua Pollack, a leading expert on nuclear and missile proliferation, told Axios. “The point about Sputnik is that the Soviets had beaten us to the punch, they put the first satellite up. … Weapons payload aside, this is old hat for the United States.”
Context: The missile launch is only the latest in a series of major headlines shaking the foundations of the U.S.-China status quo.
Between the lines: Although the parallels to the Cold War are easy to draw, the world is a very different place now than it was in the 1950s — in ways that have direct implications for the nature of this competition and the people caught in the middle.
There’s one point of broad agreement, though — just about nobody wants another cold war.
The bottom line: The U.S.-China relationship has deteriorated significantly over the past five years, but we’re not yet doomed to repeat the past.
Go deeper: The “new Cold War” started in Beijing
Source: https://www.axios.com/us-china-cold-war-missile-taiwain-submarines-475e719b-60b1-48aa-9281-d0d38442c39f.html
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
Voting-rights advocates are seething over the near-total stagnation in Washington. But they see a new opening with the filibuster.
When President Joe Biden recently floated the possibility for a filibuster carveout for raising the debt limit, supporters leapt at the chance to bypass the supermajority threshold for efforts to expand access to the ballot.
“Once you make an exception for something as existential as raising the debt ceiling, it makes it much easier to do the same for something as existential as democracy itself,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), who has long called for Biden to support liberals’ efforts to eliminate the filibuster.
But Jones and other backers of Democrats’ voting bills may be in for another round of disappointment. When Democrats accepted the short-term, debt-limit deal offered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to punt the deadline until December, it also postponed any discussion about changes to the filibuster — which advocates see as blocking any real chance of sending legislation to Biden’s desk.
“Quite frankly, we know that the likelihood of legislation getting passed without that [change] is very slim at this point,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the CEO of the League of Women Voters.
Desperate to generate momentum with the debate focused elsewhere, some voting-rights groups are now trying to crank up the heat on the White House, urging Biden to call for the same exception for Democrats’ stalled voting bills.
On Tuesday, a group of about 100 protesters picketed outside the White House, led by the League of Women Voters and the People For the American Way. They have promised to repeatedly demonstrate outside the White House, in an effort to get Biden’s attention.
“This was one of his priorities. This was part of the platform that he ran on to help strengthen and fix our democracy,” said Solomón. “We’ve heard a lot of words coming from the White House. But we haven’t seen a lot of action.”
Five of the protestors — including Ben Jealous, the president of the People For the American Way and former NAACP head — were arrested after refusing to leave Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House. They were all held overnight, before ultimately being released without any charges.
“I think about Kamala, and I think about Joe. I know them as friends,” Jealous told the crowd, minutes before he was arrested on Tuesday. “We need our friends to stand up and be friends to the people of this country, have the courage that it takes to actually move voting rights forward.”
Cedric Richmond, the Biden senior adviser and former Louisiana congressman, argued the White House had taken action on its own — including an executive order to government agencies to find ways to increase voter participation, along with movement out of the Justice Department, including appointing well-regarded civil rights lawyers to top positions and growing the civil rights division.
He also said the White House remained engaged with Capitol Hill over voting rights.
“We are pushing Congress to act in terms of legislation, and we’re using our political capital to get it done. Doesn’t always have to be in public and seeking the attention for doing it,” Richmond said in an interview.
“I think the activists missed the fact that this is the first time we had all of the Democratic senators in favor of a bill. And now that we have that, we’re pushing that and so we’ll have a vote and then we’ll go from there,” he continued.
And even if Biden was to publicly pressure the Senate on the filibuster, there are still barriers in the way: Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), both who have ardently supported the existing rules, which they say will prevent both parties from passing extreme legislation.
On Wednesday, before the agreement with McConnell was announced, Manchin once again shot down a change for the debt ceiling. “Nothing’s changing” on the filibuster, he told reporters.
Yet even with the reanimated filibuster conversation, what has been particularly grating to some advocates is that voting rights has repeatedly played second fiddle to other legislative priorities in Congress.
“We can’t even have a conversation about voting rights, because infrastructure, once again, is kind of blocking the way,” said Texas state Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a liberal Democratic lawmaker who was part of the group of Texans who fled the state over the summer in order to block a Republican-led bill that added new restrictions to voting in the state.
For those Texas Democrats, it is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. “Everything that we foreshadowed,” has come to pass in their state, Crockett said. The bill that they temporarily blocked is now law in Texas, after enough Democrats returned to the state House after weeks away to provide a quorum. And early proposals for the state’s new congressional map lock in Republican seats across the state.
“When it comes to voting rights, you see the remedy coming after the harm. And sometimes when the harm is already done, the remedy is really inconsequential,” said Texas state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democrat.
In Congress, Democrats have been unable to send any voting-rights legislation to the president’s desk because of both filibusters, or the threat thereof, from Republicans and some intra-party squabbling. Their first attempt — the For the People Act, which got the symbolic H.R. 1 (117) and S. 1 (117) designations as the party’s top priority — died in the Senate because Manchin did not support it, and was also later filibustered by Republicans after Manchin agreed to a procedural vote.
Senate Democrats have now turned their attention to two other pieces of election legislation: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and was introduced in the Senate this week, and the Freedom to Vote Act, a pared down version of H.R. 1 that Manchin brokered with his Democratic colleagues.
The West Virginian has been in conversations with Republican colleagues to try to find any sort of compromise, POLITICO has reported, but the odds of securing 10 Republican senators who would sign on to break a filibuster for any sort of election legislation is very low. That looming failure is one of the last things advocates pin their hopes on for Manchin to change his mind on the filibuster.
“A reasonable person in Joe Manchin’s position would, upon discovering that there are not 10 Republican senators of good conscience … will vote to make an exception to the filibuster,” Jones, the freshman New York congressman, said.
It will be tested soon. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter on Monday that senators should be prepared to consider both pieces of legislation “this work period or immediately at the start of the next.”
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/07/voting-rights-advocates-senate-filibuster-515630
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Zach Montellaro
The country found out just how important governors are over the past 20 months. Next year, the vast majority of Americans will decide whether those leaders should keep their jobs after the once-in-a-generation pandemic.
While the midterms have often been cast as a referendum on which party should control Washington, voters in 36 states will also elect governors in 2022, ranging from the nation’s largest state — California, fresh off a gubernatorial recall election — to the least populated state of Wyoming. And if the last year-and-a-half has shown anything, these governors’ races shouldn’t be playing second fiddle to Congress, either for voters’ attention or donors’ dollars.
“I think the pandemic, over the last year and a half, has been a really good time for people to realize how important their governors are,” said Marshall Cohen, the political director of the Democratic Governors Association. “These governors races are not national the way that federal races are, and each state is its own unique set of circumstances.”
POLITICO spoke with two dozen operatives deeply involved in the nation’s gubernatorial landscape — ranging from party leaders in Washington, D.C., to state party chairs and top aides to candidates in some of the most competitive states on the map — to define the 2022 map with a year to go.
The broad national environment still plays a role: Republicans are confident that, with the wind at their backs, they can flip governors’ mansions in battleground states. But gubernatorial races are also fought with more state-specific motivations in mind — on everything from the pandemic to education to local taxes — that allow for scenarios like Democrats defending a seat in the traditionally deep red Kansas, and for Republicans holding and fighting for several seats in the blue Northeast.
Both parties have pickup opportunities next year, though there are only a handful of open seats, with just three right now — Arizona, Maryland and Pennsylvania — expected to be battlegrounds. Incumbents on both sides of the aisle have spent the last few years building sizable political operations and deep war chests, allowing the parties to spend on a more core battleground of states.
“I think the good thing for us is — if you look at our map — I don’t expect the vast majority of our incumbents are going to need our engagement next year,” said Dave Rexrode, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association, which is confident about defending sitting governors in large, pricey states like Texas and Ohio.
That means dumping tens of millions of dollars into just a handful of states instead of the 28 states Republicans were worried about in 2018. Democrats find themselves in the same situation.
“I think one of the things that puts us in a stronger position going into an incumbent cycle is that we’ve had such a long runway,” DGA executive director Noam Lee said. “These are teams we’re familiar with. These are operations we’ve helped build.”
The two parties largely agree on the scope of the core battlefield. Democrats’ top defensive targets will likely be the usual presidential battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, along with Kansas, where Gov. Laura Kelly is the only Democrat seeking reelection in a state then-President Donald Trump carried last year.
Republicans, meanwhile, are on defense in Arizona and Georgia, with big question marks in a quartet of traditionally blue states that have nevertheless elected and reelected Republican governors recently.
“What are the top three states for them? Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan,” Rexrode said. “What are our big three states? Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan.”
An early test of the landscape is just a month away in Virginia. The state has long been considered a political bellwether ahead of midterm elections, where the off-year race has almost always historically swung against the party in power across the Potomac River.
But with more than a year to go until the midterms, these races aren’t completely set. More candidates are expected to jump into marquee races during the last quarter of this year and in early 2022, and some incumbent governors still need to decide if they will seek reelection.
Arizona will likely be the most competitive open seat race in the nation next November, with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey term-limited. Trump recently endorsed Kari Lake, a former local TV anchor. But thus far, that endorsement has not been a field clearer for Republicans. Former Rep. Matt Salmon remains in the race with the backing of Club for Growth, the anti-tax group that has typically aligned itself with Trump in primaries.
Other GOP candidates include state Board of Regents member Karrin Taylor Robson, who is expected to be able to bring significant resources to bear for the race; state Treasurer Kimberly Yee; Steve Gaynor, the party’s 2018 nominee for secretary of state; and Daniel McCarthy, who now-former Sen. Martha McSally handily beat in a 2020 primary.
Looming over the race: the enduring, Trump-driven effort to reverse Republicans’ 2020 election losses in the state. That’s reinforced by the leading Democratic candidate, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, whose opposition to a flawed GOP-led review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County has boosted her national profile.
Democrats’ best pick-up opportunity is likely in Maryland, where Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is barred from running again. Before the general election, the GOP will signal the direction it is going in the blue state: Kelly Schulz, who serves as Hogan’s commerce secretary, and state Del. Daniel Cox, who has recently modeled himself as a Trump-style Republican and said he attended the rally that preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, are both running. Other Republicans may soon get in — including Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor and Republican National Committee chair who has ardently opposed Trump.
The Democratic primary is expected to be a crowded one, with many candidates already in the race. The field includes two former Obama cabinet secretaries: Tom Perez, who was labor secretary and a former Democratic National Committee chair, and former Education Secretary John King. Other candidates include longtime state Comptroller Peter Franchot, former Prince George’s County executive Rushern Baker, former state attorney general Doug Gansler and well-known author Wes Moore.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats are waiting for the all-but-certain announcement from state Attorney General Josh Shapiro that he’s running to replace term-limited Gov. Tom Wolf. Shapiro’s entrance is expected imminently, and he will be backed by a wave of institutional support.
A messy and uncertain primary awaits the GOP, one that could leave any potential nominee bruised up against an unscathed Shapiro. The already-crowded field includes former Rep. Lou Barletta, Montgomery County commissioner Joe Gale, former U.S. Attorney William McSwain, former Chester County Chamber official Guy Ciarrocchi, activist Charlie Gerow and others. Some have formed exploratory committees, including state Sens. Scott Martin and Dan Laughlin, who is looking to run as a post-Trump moderate in a field that has largely embraced the former president.
And Republicans — including state Sen. Doug Mastriano, state Senate President Jake Corman and members of Congress like Rep. Mike Kelly — have all publicly toyed with the idea of running, meaning the field could get more crowded still.
One party in Georgia is trying to keep itself together. The other is waiting for one woman’s decision.
Gov. Brian Kemp is besieged on both sides. Trump’s enmity for the first-term GOP governor is so strong that he told rallygoers in Georgia last month he’d rather have Kemp’s 2018 Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, in charge in Atlanta. But Trump has not gone so far as to back the campaign of Democrat-turned-Republican Vernon Jones, a former state representative, despite some members of his orbit backing Jones. Instead, Trump’s operation has tried to nudge former Sen. David Perdue into the race, and Kemp has been working to get the rank-and-file back into his corner even as the former president continues to attack him for not assisting him in overturning the 2020 election.
Abrams has been widely expected to run after her narrow loss to Kemp in 2018. She has yet to announce a decision, while she has kicked off a nationwide tour that does not visit her home state. No other Democrat in the state has dared to float a run while everyone awaits Abrams’ decision.
Republicans see Kansas as their best pick-up opportunity anywhere on the map. Nevertheless, Democrats are expected to fight hard for Gov. Laura Kelly, and outside groups like EMILY’s List have already signaled that they will be in her corner for the election, circulating early internal polling that has her above water in the state.
Republicans are largely united around state Attorney General Derek Schmidt. The party will likely avoid a competitive, drawn out primary after former Gov. Jeff Colyer abruptly announced he was ending his campaign to seek treatment for a cancer diagnosis.
One issue to watch in Kansas is abortion. During the August 2022 primary, Kansans will vote for an amendment to the state constitution that would add that it “does not create or secure a right to abortion,” after the state Supreme Court found as much in 2019. This could supercharge the issue during a summer where the Supreme Court in Washington is already expected to revisit Roe v. Wade.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is among Republicans’ top targets in 2022, but the first-term governor has built a national profile since her election and has a formidable fundraising operation.
The Republican field to challenge her is already crowded. James Craig, who retired as head of the Detroit Police Department to challenge Whitmer, is seen as an early leader for the nomination, but not a field clearer. Other candidates include Tudor Dixon, a conservative media personality; Garrett Soldano, a chiropractor who led early protests opposing coronavirus measures from Whitmer; and Kevin Rinke, a businessman who launched an “exploratory committee” and has the capacity to self-fund. Some Republicans would like to see John James, who lost Senate races in 2018 and 2020, take a shot at Whitmer, too.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s battle for reelection in Nevada will likely fall into the top tier of competitive races in November, but first Republicans will need to pick their nominee. Former Sen. Dean Heller recently launched his campaign, which could resurface his sometimes contentious relationship with Trump. He is joining a field that includes Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo; the party-switching North Vegas Mayor John Lee; Joey Gilbert, a former boxer and an attorney who was at the Jan. 6 insurrection, and others. A recent poll from the Nevada Independent found Heller and Lombardo in the top two spots, but neither has the nomination locked down. And the field might yet grow: GOP Rep. Mark Amodei recently said he was “torn” about running for governor or sticking around for the potential of serving in the House majority in 2022.
It is also worth watching for any intraparty squabbles among Democrats in the state. Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) won control of the state party, widening a fissure between progressives and the remnants of the Reid Machine, which former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid corralled to make one of the most effective operations in the country. A splinter coordinated campaign is now being run out of Washoe County with the blessing of both Sisolak and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto —who also has a hyper-competitive election next year — while the state party has sprouted its own.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers will have one of the most contested reelection fights in the nation, but the Democrat has already posted strong fundraising numbers in the off year and does not have any primary challengers standing in his way.
On the Republican side, the field remains unsettled: Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch is considered a strong candidate, but GOP Sen. Ron Johnson’s public indecision on whether he’ll seek reelection has left the field murky. Johnson at one point flirted with a gubernatorial run before ruling it out, but his indecision has frozen other could-be candidates including Kevin Nicholson, a businessman who finished second in the 2018 Senate primary. Should Johnson run for reelection, Nicholson would likely jump into the gubernatorial race.
The nation’s four largest states are less competitive — and possibly prohibitively expensive for the challenging party to try to compete.
In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom could face many of the same names he just vanquished in the state’s recall election last month. Some of the Republican candidates, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and right-wing radio host Larry Elder, are either already running or are considering bids — but the GOP has admitted that its potential statewide in the Golden State is basically non-existent for the foreseeable future.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has built a campaign machine that functionally never turns off, with tens-of-millions in the bank and Trump’s endorsement locked up. Even still, he has drawn primary challengers from former state party chair Allen West (who was a member of Congress representing Florida) and former state Sen. Don Huffines, among others. His allies expect him to easily blow by the primary field, but Democrats hope that the primary’s existence — and Trump needling the governor about the 2020 election — could expose Abbott.
On the Democratic side, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke is widely expected to get into the race. Democrats view him as their best chance to take on Abbott during the cycle, citing his narrow loss to Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 and a fundraising apparatus that could rival Abbott’s. But Republicans welcome his challenge, arguing that O’Rourke’s failed presidential bid damaged his brand, and that Abbott is not nearly as vulnerable as Cruz was in a Democratic wave year. Actor Matthew McConaughey has also said he’s weighing a run. He’s made calls to influential people in Texas politics, including some moderate Republicans.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is widely believed to be positioning himself for a potential 2024 presidential run. But first, he’ll need to win reelection. Republicans argue that he is well positioned, despite drawing widespread attention for his handling of the pandemic — which includes withering criticism from many public health experts and Democrats. He has not formally announced his bid, but already has more than $50 million in the bank, with aspirations to raise scores of millions more for his campaign.
The Democratic race is a faceoff between state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Rep. Charlie Crist, who last won the governorship over a decade-and-a-half ago as a Republican before leaving the party for a failed Senate bid and a losing 2014 gubernatorial bid as a Democrat. Republicans hope that the late-August primary will leave the eventual nominee damaged and cash-poor — making it an even tougher proposition to go against DeSantis without outside help, which could pull resources from elsewhere on the map.
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul took over the reins in New York after now-former Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned amid a myriad of allegations of inappropriate behavior — but some very prominent Democrats are considering challenging her for the nomination, in what could be an immensely expensive primary contest in the Empire State. That list is long, but it includes potential candidates like state Attorney General Tish James, outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Rep. Tom Suozzi, state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi and many more.
Republicans, too, will have a crowded field: Rep. Lee Zeldin has worked to coalesce support among Republicans in the state. Andrew Giuliani — the son of the now-controversial former mayor — and former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino are also in the mix. But with a Cuomo-less election on the horizon in 2022, the state is favored to remain in Democratic hands.
There is considerable uncertainty in Alaska, where Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy is seeking a second term, because of the state’s new elections system. All candidates will run in the same primary, and the top four will advance to a ranked-choice November election. Already in the race is former Republican-turned-independent Gov. Bill Walker, whom Dunleavy ousted in 2018. Former Democratic state Rep. Les Gara is also running, and other would-be candidates are considering bids, including Al Gross, an independent who unsuccessfully challenged GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in 2020 with the blessing of Democrats.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has not yet declared he’ll seek another term, but the Democrat is expected to do so. Republicans haven’t totally written off the state, despite its general blue lean, after Lamont only won by 3 points in 2018. The GOP does not have a candidate yet, but Bob Stefanowski, whom Lamont defeated last time, and former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides are both considering runs. Complicating any bid to oust Lamont is that most of Connecticut’s voters live in the incredibly expensive New York media market.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is a favorite to win reelection in the state and has already started deploying his considerable fortune on early internet ads to kickstart his reelection bid. Even still, Republicans could turn this into an expensive and competitive race. Businessperson Jesse Sullivan recently entered the race with $10 million in the bank, and a new congressional map from Democrats that’s expected to try to gerrymander some of the Republicans in the delegation out of office could nudge someone like Reps. Rodney Davis or Adam Kinzinger into the gubernatorial race. And Chicago billionaire Ken Griffin’s potential support of a Republican candidate — Pritzker’s self-funding has nullified the state’s contribution limits for other candidates — could also make it difficult for Pritzker to coast to victory.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is likely in a stronger position to win reelection than in 2018 — when she squeaked out a narrow victory — as the often swingy Iowa has moved further to Republicans over the last several years. The Democratic primary could still be competitive, and the state isn’t a lock depending on the nominee: State Rep. Ras Smith and Deidre DeJear — who was the party’s 2018 secretary of state nominee — are already in the race, and prominent Iowans including state Auditor Rob Sand, Rep. Cindy Axne and state Sen. Pam Jochum have publicly floated bids.
It will likely be a battle of known commodities in Maine: Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is primed to square up against former Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who has a clear shot to his party’s nomination. Mills won her first term in 2018 — when LePage was term-limited — by a fairly comfortable margin, but the role of a third-party candidate will be a big question. Even in Mills’ 2018 win, an independent candidate drew 6 percent of the vote — and LePage first won the office in 2010 with just 38 percent of the vote. The state’s recent shift to ranked choice voting does not apply to the gubernatorial general election.
In Massachusetts, everything rides on whether Gov. Charlie Baker will run for a third term. Baker won reelection in a landslide in 2018 after a close 2014 victory (and a narrow 2010 loss). If he were to be the nominee again, Republicans would be in strong position to hold the state, even as some Democrats are hopeful his support has softened over the last four years. But he is also facing a primary challenge from former state Rep. Geoff Diehl, whom Trump endorsed this week. Should Baker not run, state Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito could be a leading candidate.
Democrats already have three candidates in the race — state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, former state Sen. Benjamin Downing and Harvard professor Danielle Allen — and others could be waiting for a clearer sign for what Baker will do. State Attorney General Maura Healey has been publicly mulling a run for governor herself, also freezing the field.
Minnesota has voted for Democrats reliably over the last decade, but it is one that Democrats argue they can’t sleep on, given the sometimes sneaky competitiveness of the state in some recent races. Republicans have attracted several candidates thus far to face Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — including state Sens. Michelle Benson and Paul Gazelka and former state Sen. Scott Jensen. Jennifer Carnahan, who recently resigned as GOP state party chair over her ties to a top donor charged with sex crimes (she denies any knowledge) and allegations of a hostile work environment, has floated a run.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu has not yet announced if he will seek another term or run against Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, freezing much of the field on both sides for now in the perennial swing state. Should Sununu not run for his current job, Republicans consider former Sen. Kelly Ayotte a strong potential candidate.
Republicans are bullish about their chances in New Mexico against Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Mark Ronchetti, a TV weatherman who unsuccessfully ran for the state’s open Senate seat last year, is considering another statewide run for governor. If he runs, he’d join a GOP field that includes some local Republican candidates, including state Rep. Rebecca Dow and Jay Block, a Sandoval County commissioner.
Ohio has become decidedly less competitive since former President Barack Obama left office, with Republicans dominating most recent statewide elections. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is running for reelection. Trump has shown he is no fan of the Ohio incumbent, and former Rep. Jim Renacci — the only Republican to lose a statewide race since 2016 — is already primarying him. But DeWine has amassed a significant war chest that his backers believe will leave him in a strong position, in both the primary and general election.
Democrats will have a tall task in front of them to recapture their past success in this Rust Belt state. Battling to try to do so is a pair of mayors: Nan Whaley from Dayton and John Cranley from Cincinnati.
Now-former Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was already term-limited, so her departure for Washington, D.C., to be Biden’s commerce secretary only sped up what is going to be a competitive Democratic primary in the state. Gov. Dan McKee is running for a full term after taking over the office from Raimondo, but he is not a field-clearer. Already in the race is state Treasurer Seth Magaziner, current state Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea and former state Secretary of State Matt Brown, with others waiting in the wings. (Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza recently ruled out a run.)
Republicans are not totally writing the state off, but it’s not among their top targets. Former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung — who narrowly lost in 2014 to Raimondo when a third party candidate got 20 percent of the vote and was blown out of the water by her in 2018 — recently took a job with the McKee administration, likely closing the door on another bid for the governor’s mansion.
No prominent candidate has gotten in the race on either side of the ticket in Vermont. Republicans are hopeful that Gov. Phil Scott will run again, as he has won comfortably every two years since 2016 and would likely take this otherwise blue state almost entirely off the map.
In safer states, the real action is in the primaries. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey could face a stiff intraparty challenge in her bid for a second full term. Lynda Blanchard, who was the American ambassador to Slovenia during the Trump administration, is currently running for the state’s open Senate seat — but has been spinning her wheels since Trump endorsed Rep. Mo Brooks in that primary. And state Auditor Jim Zeigler has been critical of Ivey and has said he is exploring a run.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary and the daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee, is thought to be the favorite in Arkansas to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson. Trump endorsed his former spokesperson, which drove some potential candidates away from the race — though not state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge.
Once-purple Colorado has turned an increasingly darker shade of blue, with Democratic Gov. Jared Polis in a very strong position to win reelection next year. Even so, Heidi Ganahl, a member of the state board of regents and the only elected Republican serving statewide, recently launched a bid to challenge Polis in a crowded field.
Democrats are expected to retain the governorship in Hawaii, even with current Gov. David Ige term-limited. A busy primary could pop up on the islands, with candidates including Lt. Gov. Josh Green, former first lady Vicky Cayetano and former Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell in the race.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little has not declared his reelection bid in the dark red state, but has been fundraising and is expected to do so. But he may have to navigate through a tricky primary from the right that would include his own lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, and a regional GOP chair, Ed Humphreys.
The primary to replace term-limited Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts could turn into a dragdown fight between two megadoners: Charles Herbster, who allied himself with the former president and has drawn attacks from Ricketts’ team, and board of regents member Jim Pillen.
Republicans believe that Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is on a glide path to another term, even as he faces what could be nominal primary challengers in a state with a low barrier to get on the ballot.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is term-limited, and already, several high-profile Democrats have gotten in the race, including state House Speaker Tina Kotek and state Treasurer Tobias Read. Other big candidates could still be around the corner, including state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster is favored to win another term in office, and the Republican faces no serious primary challengers. But Democrats could have a competitive primary nevertheless, with former Rep. Joe Cunningham and state Sen. Mia McLeod both running for what will be an uphill general election.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has a clear path to reelection, as she eyes a potential launching pad to even higher office.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is the odds-on favorite to win another term in a state Democrats have struggled mightily in since former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen last held the governor’s mansion a decade ago.
Wyoming is the nation’s most Republican state — and if GOP Gov. Mark Gordon seeks a second term, it’s his for the taking.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/06/the-fifty-governors-2022-515211
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Zach Montellaro
The FBI raided the headquarters of the New York Police Department’s sergeant’s union on Tuesday.A spokesman for the FBI’s New York office told The Hill that the agency is “carrying out a law enforcement action in c…
Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/575354-fbi-raids-nypds-sergeant-union-headquarters
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Jordan Williams
A number of states have proposed or finalized new congressional district maps in the past week. The recurrent theme: protecting incumbents rather than expanding majorities.
Why it matters: The flurry of activity is just the start of the high-stakes process that has the potential to affect congressional power for a decade. The biggest states are still to come — as well as deadlines, lawsuits and the potential for lots of court-drawn midterm maps.
The details: Six states only have one district, so they don’t have to go through redistricting. Three states have already completed new maps for the next decade, including in Oregon — where Democrats have the advantage to win the state’s newly gained seat. The other two are Maine and Nebraska.
By the numbers: Princeton University and RepresentUs have launched an in-depth grading system for proposed and enacted maps — scoring them on partisan fairness, competitiveness and geographic features.
What we’re watching: A major, unanswered question is whether Democrats try to hold on to their majority through gerrymandering in New York and Illinois.
Source: https://www.axios.com/redistricting-gerrymandering-midterm-congress-56c493ba-ac11-493f-bc8f-361e1688ad34.html
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Stef W. Kight
The sculpture was unveiled Thursday, along with a statue of Rep. John Lewis and Breonna Taylor.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/george-floyd-statue-nyc-defaced-second-time-n1280664
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Ben Kesslen and The Associated Press
It said they also exchanged other racist messages, including one about the use of fire hoses on protesters.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nine-new-york-firefighters-suspended-racist-messages-n1280642
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: The Associated Press
Last May, rocks and rubber bullets flew as Palestinian protesters battled Israeli security forces in Jerusalem, leaving nearly 100 people hospitalized. The conflict quickly spread as Hamas in the Gaza Strip launched a barrage of rockets into Israel while Israeli Jews and Arabs rioted in the streets of other cities. The proximate cause of the sudden turmoil was an Israeli plan to evict Arab residents in a neighborhood close to the walled Old City, and Jerusalem today remains on edge.
The roots of this unrest, however, can be traced to a largely forgotten incident that took place 25 years ago last month, when a new Israeli prime minister named Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the removal of a few inches of rock in a tunnel beneath Jerusalem, opening up a convenient exit for tourists exploring the city’s subterranean history. What might sound like a minor decision instead sparked a bloody uprising, precipitated an international crisis, and ultimately unraveled talks designed to secure Israel, create a Palestinian state and end decades of violence. The story behind the tunnel’s opening sheds important light on the periodic upheavals in Jerusalem, as well as the difficulty of resolving one of the world’s most intractable political challenges.
The trouble began hours after the Jewish fast of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, ended at sunset on Monday, Sept. 23, 1996. At midnight, a group of workers, led by an Israeli archaeologist and protected by armed Israeli soldiers, gathered in the silent alley of Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa, deep in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. Standing on the path that Christians believe Jesus trod on his way to execution, the men hammered away at a rock wall opposite a Franciscan monastery. Working quickly, they created an opening large enough to walk through.
Beyond them lay a 1,000-foot-long underground tunnel hugging the base of the famous Western Wall. This structure of mammoth stones enclosed one side of the sacred acropolis known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary — Haram al-Sharif or al-Aqsa in Arabic. Islamic tradition holds that from here Muhammad embarked on a mystical night journey into heaven. Jews call it the Temple Mount, and they honor it as the site of the ancient Jewish temples destroyed in antiquity. The revered real estate is one of the most contested sites in the world, and now a tunnel, previously only accessible from its southern end in the Jewish Quarter, was opened on its northern end in the heart of the Muslim Quarter.
The next morning, senior Israeli politicians and Jewish religious leaders gathered at the same spot along with television crews. Mayor Ehud Olmert, who later would serve as Israel’s prime minister, told the crowd that the opening in the wall marked a new era for Israeli tourism, as well as an answer to Palestinians who questioned the Jewish claim to the Holy City.
With cameras whirring, the mayor hefted a sledgehammer, breaking open a faux wall the workers had added after making the opening the night before. The assembled dignitaries then chanted psalms in Hebrew in praise of Jerusalem.
One prominent spectator of the proceedings was the city’s Grand Mufti, Ekrima Said Sabir. “He pulled out his phone and called Arafat,” recalled Yisrael Hasson, then the Jerusalem chief of Israel’s security agency, Shin Bet, who later would direct the Israeli Antiquities Authority, referring to Yasser Arafat, the new president of the Palestinian Authority. “I heard it with my own ears. He told Arafat that the Jews were digging under the Temple Mount.” When Sabir hung up, Hasson said, Hasson himself quickly dialed Arafat, whom he knew well. “I said the tunnel does not go under the Temple Mount. But there was no talking to him.”
Less than an hour later, hundreds of Arab residents were marching through the streets of the Old City. Israeli police fired rubber bullets to prevent them from reaching the new exit. After the noon Muslim prayers, the crowds thickened.
“They started to shout from the minarets that Jews were penetrating the Temple Mount,” said Dan Bahat, the Israeli archaeologist who had overseen the work the night before. “That was enough.” While the tunnel paralleled the ancient acropolis, rather than running directly beneath it, its precise location was less important to Palestinians than the fact that Israelis had opened an exit to a Jewish sacred site in the heart of the Muslim Quarter. Now locals faced the prospect of Jewish tourists spilling out into the heart of their neighborhood, close to an important entrance into the Haram al-Sharif.
A truck and a car were set ablaze outside the Old City, sending a column of smoke into the early autumn sky. Dozens of young Muslim demonstrators began to throw rocks from the top of the acropolis onto Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall Plaza, more than sixty feet below. Police briefly sealed off the plaza that marked the southern end of the tunnel, as well as the Haram itself. The closure, however brief, of two of the world’s most sacred sites shocked people around the world.
“Why did they put it in their minds to open it now?” a distraught Muslim cleric said to a Los Angeles Times reporter of the controversial exit. “It means the peace is over.”
Work on the tunnel that would turn into a flashpoint in Israeli-Palestinian politics began in 1867, when an intrepid British officer named Charles Warren used an army of men and kegs of gunpowder to expose an underground labyrinth he called “a chaos of ruin upon ruin.” News of ancient chambers and passages deep beneath Jerusalem was greeted with excitement in the Christian West, which was hungry for material evidence of biblical times.
Locals felt differently. The rumble of Warren’s explosives, next to the platform that supported the Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa Mosque, two of the world’s oldest Islamic shrines, unsettled residents of all faiths in the Holy City. Directly above the dig was the city’s courthouse.
Rumors swirled that the British officer was part of a Christian plot to destroy Islam’s third holiest site, which was also revered by Jews. Warren soothed Jewish anxieties by taking leading rabbis on an underground tour. They emerged enthusiastic after seeing remains from the era of Herod the Great, who began renovations of the Jewish temple complex shortly before the birth of Jesus. The city council, made up of Arab Christians and Muslims, sent their own delegation. They were horrified by what they found: In its tunneling, Warren’s team had replaced sturdy stone arches with rotting timber.
“There is danger of great injury occurring there to the places above, which neither the Almighty nor his Majesty the Sultan would sanction,” the team concluded in an 1868 letter to the Ottoman governor, Nazif Pasha. The men feared the Western Wall might collapse, and with it, some of Islam’s most sacred places of worship. “We recommend that your Excellency be pleased to take measures to prevent them from doing this.”
The governor, wary of offending either the British or leading Arab notables, waited until Warren was away on a surveying expedition before having the entrance sealed with heavy stones.
For precisely a century, this subterranean world lay in darkness, slowly filling with sewage from the densely populated neighborhood that lay above. Ottoman control of Jerusalem eventually yielded to the British, who withdrew in 1948. The subsequent war between the nascent Jewish state and its Arab neighbors left the Old City, an area of less than a square mile and surrounded by Ottoman walls, in Jordanian hands.
All the while, the passage remained sealed. In 1965, one American archaeologist noted, the “wall is still there, waiting to be removed by a yet greater diplomat than Charles Warren.”
But it would be rabbis rather than diplomats who removed the governor’s stones. In June 1967, Israeli forces seized the historic core of Jerusalem. Many religious Jews were furious when General Moshe Dayan agreed to leave the Noble Sanctuary in Muslim hands (though under the watchful eye of Israeli security). To defuse Jewish resentment, Israel’s religions minister approved a secret plan, known only to a few senior officials, in the summer of 1968: They would reopen and extend Warren’s tunnel.
The project was as technically ambitious as it was diplomatically fraught. The goal was to expose the entire length of the buried base of the Western Wall. This would provide a vast new prayer space for Jewish worship beyond the relatively small section of exposed Western Wall at the plaza, and thereby reduce pressure on the rabbis — and Israeli politicians — to expand Jewish access to the Temple Mount itself.
Longer than the Empire State Building is tall, most of the 2,000-year-old rampart lay hidden beneath some of Jerusalem’s oldest and most revered Islamic buildings, as well as the dwellings of Muslim residents. The result would be a massive underground Jewish prayer space safely removed from the volatile Temple Mount.
But in Jerusalem, a city that has been rebuilt atop its own ruins for 5,000 years, attempting to solve one problem can create an altogether new one.
Yehuda Getz, appointed to the new post of rabbi of the Western Wall, led the clandestine effort. Soon homeowners and shopkeepers above began to complain about cracks in their walls. In 1970, the Jordanian government claimed that the digging — now an open secret — had damaged an important medieval Islamic school.
The Israeli government shrugged off the complaints, claiming the problems were the result of work on a desperately needed new sewage system. Workers, meanwhile, continued to bore through thick foundations and past cisterns filled with reeking wastewater. So long as they didn’t penetrate beyond the wall, and therefore under the acropolis itself, Muslim opposition would remain muted.
The détente lasted until the summer of 1981. Just as Americans were flocking to see the newly released Raiders of the Lost Ark, Getz decided it was time to unblock a door the team had encountered, one that would lead them beneath the sacred platform itself. Like the fictitious Indiana Jones then appearing on American screens (the movie hadn’t yet arrived in Israel), Getz sought nothing less than the Ark of the Covenant, the gilded box that the Bible said contained the Ten Commandments, and which Getz believed lay directly under the 1300-year-old Dome of the Rock.
Before the rabbi could explore extensively, however, news of his dig leaked. An underground scuffle between Arab workers and Jewish yeshiva students nearly turned into a bloodbath, and the door was quickly sealed up again.
While the Israeli government dismissed the incident as the work of a rogue rabbi, the Jordanian foreign minister decried the act as “part of the Zionist effort to seize the holy sanctuary” that threatened “world peace and security.” If parts of the Noble Sanctuary were to collapse, he warned that it “would be nothing less than a cultural, political and spiritual genocide.”
A 36-year-old Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Rodham paid their first visit to Jerusalem on a church tour a few months later, when the city was still on edge. “It was the beginning of an obsession to see all the children of Abraham reconciled on the holy ground in which our three faiths came to life,” the ex-governor of Arkansas wrote. “That trip left a lasting mark on me.” In its aftermath, Clinton decided to run for governor again and succeeded in regaining the office, before ultimately heading to the White House.
The Western Wall Tunnel, meanwhile, had quietly emerged as a latent source of contention between Jewish and Muslim people, as potentially explosive as the kegs of gunpowder used a century before by Warren.
It was only after more than two decades of digging, in 1990, that the 1,000-foot-long passage along the buried wall was opened, partially, to pilgrims and tourists. Accessible though it may have been, it wasn’t exactly convenient. At the end of a 15-minute trudge along a narrow space strung with bare bulbs, visitors were made to double back to where they began, at the Western Wall Plaza.
“There were nonstop collisions,” recalled Dan Bahat, the archaeologist and a self-proclaimed “radical secularist” who had been tasked by the Israeli government with bringing some semblance of science to what had long been primarily a religious endeavor. Bahat had a northern exit prepared to allow visitors a one-way journey ending at the tunnel’s far end in the Via Dolorosa. But he left a few judicious inches of rock between the tunnel’s terminus and the street. The decision to open the portal would have to lie with Israeli politicians, since the move was sure to spark outrage among Muslims.
The thin rock barrier remained for several more years. A succession of Israeli prime ministers refused repeated requests by the Ministry of Religious Affairs to create an exit that would benefit visitors but risked sparking unrest. That reluctance only deepened after Jan. 20, 1993, when Israelis and Palestinians held their first secret talks in Oslo aimed at resolving their decades-long territorial conflict. That was also the day that Clinton was inaugurated as president in Washington.
Three years later, everything changed. A brash, 46-year-old conservative politician campaigned to halt the peace process and to ensure that all of Jerusalem remained under Israeli control. This approach gained Netanyahu his first term as prime minister starting in June 1996. Three months later, at the urging of Mayor Olmert, a fellow Likud Party member, Netanyahu gave Western Wall Tunnel managers approval to finish the exit.
Israeli intelligence officials were alarmed. Friday sermons and Palestinian Authority rumblings suggested this move would elicit violence. “I was against the opening,” said Hasson, the Jerusalem security chief. He begged officials in the prime minister’s office to wait. “Just give me three months,” he recalled saying, “and I will find a way to open it peacefully.” His plea was refused.
One week after Netanyahu gave the green light, just hours after the end of Yom Kippur, Bahat and his workers completed the project that had begun 28 years before. They cut through the last few inches of rock to open the northern exit.
Protests and then riots broke out within hours. Arafat, who had from the first insisted the Israeli decision was endangering the Haram al-Sharif’s sanctity, called the move “a big crime against our religion and our holy places” and demanded that the United Nations Security Council intervene. Arab leaders around the world denounced the opening as a threat to Islam. Demonstrators took to the streets across the Arab world. “The violence seemed to have a life of its own,” recalled American diplomat Dennis Ross. Netanyahu came under intense criticism but staunchly defended his action as a simple courtesy to tourists.
By the end of the week, the Israeli prime minister was accusing Palestinians of giving in to religious fanaticism, while he simultaneously praised the tunnel as “the bedrock of our existence.” Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority’s leader in Jerusalem, Faisal al-Husseini, was injured when he joined protesters attempting to reach the heavily guarded exit. “I told them this tunnel would lead to this,” he said to a New York Times reporter from his hospital bed.
“Can we get Netanyahu to close the tunnel?” asked Clinton, according to Ross’s account. “Probably not,” the diplomat responded.
Netanyahu rebuffed the American president’s calls for calm and requests to at least temporarily close the tunnel exit. “I do not regret that we opened the Western Wall Tunnel, which has no effect on the Temple Mount, and expresses our sovereignty over Jerusalem,” the defiant Israeli leader said. In retaliation, Clinton ordered the United States to abstain rather than veto a United Nations Security Council vote that obliquely criticized Israel for igniting the conflict.
Four days of violence left 74 Palestinians and 16 Israeli soldiers dead, and more than 1,000 Palestinians and 58 Israelis wounded. The crisis was enough to prod Netanyahu and Arafat to take part in an emergency meeting at the White House with the president and Jordan’s King Hussein. In the short term, the talks produced an Israeli-Palestinian pact for the holy city of Hebron that optimists hoped would serve as a template for a Jerusalem agreement. But the fury stirred on both sides by the bloodshed made a final deal elusive as Clinton’s final term ticked away.
Just before Christmas in 2000, with only three weeks left in office, the American president made a final desperate effort. Clinton proposed Palestinian sovereignty over the Noble Sanctuary and Israeli sovereignty over “the Western Wall and the Holy of Holies of which it is a part.”
Ehud Barak, who had campaigned on his desire to bring peace to the region, had beaten Netanyahu to become Israel’s prime minister and the Israeli cabinet proved open to a deal, but the Palestinians were spooked by the mention of the Holy of Holies, a spot that many Jews believed — as had Rabbi Getz — was located under the Dome of the Rock. Would that mean the Western Wall Tunnel, already a sticking point in the negotiations, could be expanded to include a Jewish synagogue or even a new temple beneath their shrine? The details that mattered were missing from Clinton’s proposal. Arafat balked, saying that agreeing to any such vague arrangement would risk his own assassination at the hands of furious Muslims.
The talks collapsed, and with the inauguration of George W. Bush and the election of conservative Ariel Sharon as Israel’s prime minister soon after, the peace process ground to a halt. The Western Wall Tunnel went on to become one of Jerusalem’s most popular tourist venues, and visitors today can conveniently exit on the Via Dolorosa rather than doubling back to the entrance. The site also has emerged as a popular place for Jewish prayer second only to the Western Wall Plaza, even as archaeologists continue to explore its many passages and chambers.
Had the Ottoman governor’s wall remained sealed, Israel might have conceded the Temple Mount in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Jewish control of the plaza facing the ancient stones. But the opening of a tunnel, begun as a Christian dig to expose the remains of biblical times, has become an entrenched religious barrier to any future resolution. As writer Colin Thubron once said of the city of Jerusalem, it has become “a rock in the path of peace.”
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/02/western-wall-tunnel-opening-jerusalem-israel-palestine-peace-514531
Droolin’ Dog sniffed out this story and shared it with you.
The Article Was Written/Published By: Andrew Lawler
