CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 1 Why weren’t officials at the Capitol more prepared for this insurrection? David Ignatius | | Jan 6, 2021 As Justice and Defense department officials planned for the turmoil that was coming Wednesday, they knew that pro-Trump protesters — including some violent extremists — might try to storm the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers prepared to certify the election of . So why weren’t they better prepared for the catastrophic assault that took place? That’s the riddle at the center of Wednesday’s spasm of violent anarchy: Officials saw the mob coming but weren’t ready or able to stop it — and they allowed hundreds to invade the Capitol, threaten lawmakers and, for a time, foment a coup inside the most precious symbol of U.S. democracy. The answer is surprisingly simple, if unsatisfying: Senior officials believed that the force they were assembling of 6,000 to 8,000 police and law enforcement officers — drawn from the D.C. police, the Capitol Police, the FBI and various federal agencies — would be sufficient to contain the protests. For backup, the D.C. National Guard would be available, but those troops are useful for assisting with crowd control; they’re not a SWAT team. To deal with the expected march from the Ellipse to the Capitol, the Capitol Police planned to expand the normal perimeter around the building and arrest anyone who tried to breach it. As it turned out, they were utterly unprepared for the assault that came. When asked why the Capitol Police hadn’t taken more aggressive action or called in backup more quickly, one senior official responded only: “That’s a good question.” Defense and Justice officials crafted their plans with one primary but unstated goal: They wanted to rely on law enforcement and avoid any use of active-duty military. In that, at least, they appear to have been successful. But in their effort to avoid giving President Trump a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act, they allowed what looked to all the world like an insurrection. The command posts for Wednesday’s operations were the Justice Department and the mayor’s office, not the Pentagon. Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, monitored the situation. But the Pentagon’s representative at the Justice Department was Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who was responsible for overseeing the National Guard. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 2 The hard fight — clearing the inside of the Capitol of the insurgents who had invaded — was led by SWAT teams from the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives; and other agencies, one official said. The Pentagon brass were insistent that the regular-duty military shouldn’t be used in quelling a civilian protest inside the — even one as violent as Wednesday’s. These shattering events may turn out to have some benefits in quelling the pro- Trump insurgency that had been gaining strength. The “protesters” were seen for what they were: a lawless mob bent on breaking windows, trashing the Capitol and threatening the integrity of the government. The pictures of smug, would-be freedom fighters luxuriating in House Speaker ’s (D-Calif.) office and in the Senate chamber disgusted even hard-core Trump supporters. The law enforcement approach may have looked timid and allowed the horrifying invasion of the Capitol. But the low-key response avoided any Tiananmen Square scenes of armed military or paramilitary forces attacking citizens. The mob must have been hoping for such a propaganda moment. At this writing, they don’t have it. Instead, they have public revulsion. Although the insurgents managed to delay the final certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory, they did so at a cost of shattering their movement to challenge the election result. Even the most craven Trump supporters, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), seemed embarrassed that their challenge to Biden had produced this alarming spectacle. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was speaking for GOP self- preservation when he rejected the attempt to derail Biden’s election Wednesday afternoon, shortly before the invasion began. How fitting that he will soon become minority leader, as triumphs in the Georgia Senate runoffs give the Democrats control of the Senate. The public repudiation of Trump’s reckless, seditious actions has been growing, month by month, and McConnell knows it. One lesson from this debacle is that right-wing militia groups pose a serious threat to the country’s stability. They surely harmed their cause with most Americans, but they probably boosted their image among the millions of self- styled patriots who share their conspiracy theories and dreams of a new 1776 revolution. The mob at the Capitol is part of a global movement of white extremists; it recruits and operates through social media; it’s armed and dangerous; it seeks the overthrow of our constitutional government. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 3 Planning a strategy to contain this movement without giving it the martyrdoms it seeks should be a top priority for the Biden administration. ▪

After Five Centuries, a Native American with Real Power The expected nomination of . Timothy Egan | | Jan 1, 2021 | Opinion In the American West, a ration of reverence is usually given to the grizzled Anglo rancher who rises at a public hearing and announces that his people have been on the land for five generations. So what are we to make of Representative Deb Haaland, a citizen of the , who says that her people have been in the Rio Grande Valley of for 35 generations — dating to the 13th century? “Native history is American history,” she told me. “Regardless of where you are in this country now, you’re on ancestral Indian land, and that land has a history.” As Joe Biden’s choice for interior secretary, Ms. Haaland is poised to make a rare positive mark in the history of how a nation of immigrants treated the country’s original inhabitants. She would be the first Native American cabinet secretary — a distinction that has prompted celebration throughout Indian Country. “I haven’t been the one making policy,” she said. “But I’ve been the one on the receiving end of it.” There will be plenty of sniping, second-guessing and disappointment among the tribes by people who expect much of Haaland having a seat at the big table. But for now, we should let this moment breathe. I spoke to her on the anniversary of a day of infamy. On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army slaughtered men, women and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Government policy was to strip Indians of their language, culture and religion, with children sent off to boarding schools where they were taught that the old ways were wrong. At the end of the 19th century, the popular view was that Indigenous people would soon disappear. And yet here is Haaland, one of more than five million Native Americans, ready to knock down some of the last barriers of time and terrain in this country. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 4 Her personal story alone makes Haaland an anomaly in the parlors of power. Soon after graduating from college, she became a single mother. She was sometimes dependent on food stamps, and she once ran a small business selling homemade salsa to make a living and support her child. As a freshman representative in 2019, she was still paying off her student loans. When she ran for office, her slogan was “Congress has never heard a voice like mine.” Now the person with that voice could soon be overseeing one-fifth of the land in the United States. As interior secretary, her portfolio would include national parks, wildlife refuges, the United States Geological Survey and the vast acreage of the Bureau of Land Management. Interior, for good reason, is known as the Department of Everything Else. As such, she would also be overseeing millions of acres taken from Indians in treaties broken over the past several centuries, and would be the top government liaison with 574 federally recognized tribes — the nations within a nation. This is quite the compass — from a deep slot in the earth near the Grand Canyon, wherein dwell the Havasupai, to the rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula, home of the Makah Nation, to urban neighborhoods that house Indians struggling with health care access. “I wish we could right some wrongs,” she said of the centuries-old saga of sorrow. But going into the new year, she seems content to try to right the many wrongs that ’s administration has inflicted on the land. Trump’s first interior secretary, , literally rode into office on a horse named Tonto, and then promptly launched a campaign to make it easier to drill on public land. The current secretary, David L. Bernhardt, was an oil and gas lobbyist whose public service on behalf of his former clients was warmly received by his old friends. Biden has pledged to end all new oil and gas drilling on these rangelands, forests and plains — an enormous change that will be fought fiercely by those who profit from land owned by all Americans. He has also promised to restore Bears Ears National Monument, a marvel of sandstone, mountains and Native sacred sites in the Southwest that was gutted by Trump, who reduced the size of the protected area by 85 percent. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 5 Haaland is eager for the opportunity to do something lasting. “I’ll be fierce for all of us, for our planet and all of our protected land,” she said in December. But it’s the weight of Native history that makes the choice of Haaland so extraordinary, as she acknowledged. “This moment is profound when we consider the fact that a former secretary of the interior once proclaimed it his goal to, quote, ‘civilize or exterminate’ us.” She was referring to Alexander H.H. Stuart, the secretary of the interior in the early 1850s in the Fillmore administration. “Exterminate” was no exaggeration. The census of 1900 counted over 237,000 Native Americans, a population collapse of nearly 90 percent, in the estimate of many ethnohistorians, from the time of first European contact. Some of the atrocities are well known. But less well known is how the government made it a crime for Natives to practice their religion. It was a violation of the First Amendment to lock people up for enacting the rituals of faith — unless they worshiped Native gods through certain dances and ceremonies deemed criminal by the government. A consistent plea from Indian Country today is a request that fellow Americans consider Native people as much more than living relics locked in a tragic past. Haaland aims to ensure that. “I’ll never forget where I came from,” she said. But, she added, “I love this opportunity.” Even if she can’t reverse history, she is poised to make some. ▪

Goodbye virus-ridden 2020, hello Roaring Twenties There are good reasons to believe that a decade of strong growth and social ebullience lies ahead Martin Sandbu | Financial Times | Jan 1, 2021 A century ago, the world finally put the 1918-20 influenza behind it. One of history's deadliest epidemics, following one of its deadliest armed conflicts, gave way to a decade that would be named for its economic abandon and social revolution — a decade of consumerism and frothy financial markets, of new music, art and fashion, of individual self-gratification and an embrace of freedom. As the year turns, can we expect our century, too, to produce a Roaring Twenties? And, keeping in mind that the last iteration came crashing down with CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 6 the Depression, is there anything we can do to ensure we enjoy the party without suffering the hangover? The breakthrough development of several effective vaccines dangles the promise that we can indeed bring the coronavirus pandemic to an end in 2021. If that happens — and it is a big if, depending as it does not just on vaccine science but on governments' rapid rollout of large-scale vaccination programmes — then it is not far-fetched to think that the economic equivalent of a hundred-year wave could be followed by a once-in-a-century boom. It is easy to find economic reasons why 2021 may be a year of bumper growth. The pandemic shutdown has been that rarest of economic depressions: one caused by intentionally curtailing productive capacity. Expect governments to remove these constraints the moment it is safe to do so. (Indeed many will be keen to remove them even sooner, judging by their previous premature relaxations.) As long as the demand is there, a quick rebound from today’s subdued activity is likely. And the demand will be there. While many people have lost their jobs, more have kept theirs, and have been unable to spend as much as they used to, with shops and restaurants closed and entertainment and holidays cancelled. The flip side of the unplanned rise in household savings is a frustrated desire to spend. With the end of the pandemic, much of this pent-up demand will be released. Moreover, the policy support for strong demand growth — government deficits and ultra- loose monetary policy — is likely to stay in place for some time. This is not just a quantitative matter of activity rebooting and purchases picking up. What people will spend money on, too, is likely to carry echoes of the Roaring Twenties. Public health restrictions have disproportionately hit the more hedonistic end of the consumption spectrum: what we have stopped doing is eating together, drinking together, entertaining one another and going on holiday together. Vaccine-induced herd immunity will, quite literally, make it OK to party again. And my goodness will we have reason to party. It is not just the numbers that point to a consumer boom; behind them lies something less tangible but yet more convincing. You do not have to be an economist, only human, to understand the desire to let loose, get together, and take risks after a year of cautiously locking down at home and distancing ourselves from one another. CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 7 Such upbeat confidence is the most elusive ingredient of economic growth, but it is no less fundamental for that. The belief in good times can spur consumers to make bigger purchases, businesses to invest in greater capacity, workers to train for better jobs — and even families to have more children. All these would contribute to a durable pick-up in growth. That is the optimistic scenario. So what might go wrong? Many things could — of which the most immediate is that policymakers panic and clamp down on the recovery before it has time to turn into a boom. In the UK, the 1920s fell well short of roaring because of disastrous monetary policy: the decision to restore the prewar sterling peg to gold. Today, too, the hard money obsession is far from eradicated. Premature monetary tightening is the surest threat to a new Roaring Twenties. An abrupt fiscal consolidation comes a close second. Another risk is that confidence, let alone ebullience, never shows up. The vaccination rollouts may run into problems, or take too long, or new mutations may mean that the virus stays with us as enough of a lurking danger to make people behave cautiously in their social and economic lives. Even if the pandemic is defeated, the psychological scarring from the unprecedented events of the past year may make people permanently more cautious. In the original Roaring Twenties, abandon and liberalism of all sorts — from finance to sexual mores — was countered with a strengthened conservatism, such as Prohibition movement. The biggest concern, however, must be that much of the economy — and of society too — is too broken to come to the party. Today’s high saving rates are not universal: even as those restricted in spending are building up cash piles, those unable to work are running down what meagre savings they may have. Temporary policy measures have managed to stave off bankruptcies. But many companies will still be too deep under water to come back up alive. Again, beyond the economics lies psychology. Many people will be grieving the losses of loved ones and smarting from the shock of isolation for many years to come. What all this calls for are measures which ensure that everyone feels the economic and social system has their back. A dark underbelly was, of course, CL&L | 2021 Winter | Goldman | What Do You Think? | for Jan 13, 2021 | Page 8 also as much a feature of the previous Roaring Twenties as the glitz of its Great Gatsby surface. A century ago, the decade ended badly. We can do better this time — not by reining in the hedonistic release but to make it inclusive. When it is finally time to celebrate, let everyone come to the party. ▪