The Morning Dispatch: Biden Warns Putin Against Ukraine Invasion

Happy Wednesday! A big thanks to everyone who responded to yesterday’s Let Us Know about TMD occasionally getting cut off in your email inbox. Today’s edition is likely going to get truncated, too.

The issue seems to primarily affect Gmail users, because Google automatically clips any email that includes more than 102 KB worth of words and images. Thanks for bearing with us while we work on a solution—and remember, you can always read the newsletter online here! 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• An early, non-peer-reviewed study out of South Africa published yesterday found that the Omicron variant is able to partially escape the immunity conferred by the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, but—because the variant still relies on cells’ ACE2 receptor—prior infection and vaccination/boosters are likely to continue protecting against severe disease and death. “I thought this news was very positive,” Alex Sigal—the study’s leader—told CNN. “My impression is if you get a booster you are protected, especially against severe disease.”

• The House voted 363-70 on Tuesday to advance the approximately $770 billion National Defense Authorization Act that funds the military and other national security programs for the year. The package—which still needs to pass the Senate—reforms how sexual assault in the military is addressed, creates an independent commission to investigate the Afghanistan war and the United States’ withdrawal, raises military pay by 2.7 percent, and boosts aid to Ukrainian security forces. Lawmakers scrapped a proposal earlier this week that would have required women to register for the military draft.

• The House also voted 222-212 Tuesday to advance a measure that will allow congressional Democrats to raise the debt ceiling on their own, provided at least 10 Senate Republicans agree not to filibuster the move. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday he’s “confident” the plan will succeed and stave off a potential default.

• The White House’s bipartisan Supreme Court Commission voted unanimously on Tuesday to send its final report—which “takes no position” on court packing due to “profound disagreement among Commissioners”—to President Joe Biden.

• Australia on Tuesday joined the U.S.’s’ diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party condemned the United States’ boycott yesterday, with spokesman Zhao Lijian telling reporters America will “pay a price” for its decision to violate the Olympics’ “principle of political neutrality.”

• Instagram announced a suite of new features yesterday aimed at improving teen safety and mental health. The company said it will begin nudging young users to “Take A Break” when they’ve been scrolling for too long, allow users to bulk delete their data, adjust the app’s recommendation algorithm, and allow parents to see and limit how much time their children spend on the platform. Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri is slated to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee later today.

• The Senate voted 68-31 on Tuesday to confirm Jessica Rosenworcel—acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission—to lead the regulatory body permanently. Gigi Sohn, President Biden’s second nominee to the FCC, faces a steeper path to confirmation.

• The White House formally withdrew Saule Omarova’s nomination to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Tuesday as it became clear she did not have enough support to be confirmed in the Senate.

• In a reversal from last week, Mark Meadows—Donald Trump’s former chief of staff—told the January 6 Select Committee he will not cooperate any further with the body’s investigation. Reps. Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney—the chair and vice chair of the committee—said yesterday Meadows’ decision leaves them no choice but to advance criminal contempt proceedings against the former representative.

• U.S. District Judge R. Stan Baker granted a preliminary injunction on Tuesday temporarily blocking enforcement of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors across the country.

Biden Speaks With Putin Amid Rising Tension Over Ukraine

Last Friday, we provided an update on the unfolding crisis along Russia and Ukraine’s shared borders, with one question in mind: Will the Biden administration prove able to deter Moscow’s aggression?

In the days since Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Stockholm, the U.S. intelligence community leaked that it believes Russia is planning a “multi-front offensive” against Ukraine as soon as early 2022, and Ukrainian officials have reported the deployment of Russian snipers and tanks to the eastern frontlines in an alleged attempt to “provoke return fire” and justify an eventual offensive by the Kremlin.

Tuesday may have been the West’s last, best chance to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from pursuing what Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said would be a “really bloody massacre.”

In a two-hour video call with Putin on Tuesday morning, according to a White House readout, President Biden voiced “deep concerns” about Russia’s military buildup along the Ukrainian border, pledged to respond to any invasion with “strong economic and other measures,” and expressed his support for Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan offered a bit more clarity on the contents of the call in a subsequent White House press briefing, but he stopped short of providing specific details regarding a potential U.S. response.

“We are laying out for the Russians in some detail the types of measures that we have in mind,” he told reporters when asked why the White House believes it will have more success deterring Putin than the Obama administration did in Crimea nearly a decade ago. “I will look you in the eye and tell you, as President Biden looked President Putin in the eye and told him today, that things we did not do in 2014 we are prepared to do now.”

Sullivan added that the United States is coordinating “very closely” with its European allies as tensions mount. Biden joined a call with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom Monday in advance of his conversation with Putin, and the group reconvened Tuesday afternoon to debrief. “[The leaders] agreed their teams will stay in close touch, including in consultation with NATO allies and EU partners, on a coordinated and comprehensive approach,” the White House said.

Measures targeting the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline connecting Russia to Europe are among the potential penalties for further Russian belligerence. Reuters reported Tuesday that Germany and the United States reached an agreement to prevent the pipeline—which holds immense strategic and economic significance to Putin—from becoming operational if Moscow invades Ukraine.

Sullivan didn’t directly confirm the report’s legitimacy Tuesday, but strongly hinted the administration had been coordinating with Germany on the subject. “Gas is not currently flowing through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,” he said. “If Vladimir Putin wants to see gas flow through that pipeline, he may not want to take the risk of invading Ukraine.”

The U.S. is also reportedly considering sanctions against Russia’s largest financial institutions that would hinder the country’s ability to exchange rubles for foreign currencies or prevent speculators from purchasing Russian debt. As two “people familiar with the matter” told Bloomberg, the U.S. could theoretically seek to bar Russia’s access to the SWIFT System that facilitates international money transfers, but the Biden administration is leaning against it because of the hardship it would incur on the Russian people.

“The problem on sanctions is that the Russians tend to view them as inevitable and have not yet backed down from any malign actions based on sanctions that have been imposed,” Matthew Rojansky, director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, told The Dispatch. “However, what is now being threatened is really very serious, clearly communicated in advance, and credible in that European allies are aligned. It does have a chance of delivering the right message at the right time to underscore for Putin that an invasion will cost Russia too much.”

Noting that the United States already maintains “rotational” deployments in the Baltics, Sullivan also discussed plans to support NATO allies on the eastern front such as Poland and Romania. 

“They will be seeking, we expect, additional capabilities and potentially additional deployments and the United States will be looking to respond positively to those things in the event that there is a further incursion into Ukraine,” Sullivan said. “The question here is not about whether or not the United States is going to send American service members to the territory of our NATO allies; we do that as a matter of course. The question is: What additional capabilities can we provide to ensure that they feel strong and confident in their own sovereignty and territorial integrity?”

According to a rough translation of the Kremlin’s readout of Tuesday’s call, Putin disputed Biden’s assertion that Russia is the aggressor in this situation, arguing that NATO’s outreach to Ukraine constitutes a “dangerous” military situation for Moscow. “Russia is seriously interested in obtaining reliable, legally fixed guarantees that exclude NATO expansion in the easterly direction and the deployment of strike offensive weapons systems in [countries] neighboring Russia,” the readout said.

Rojansky, however, believes any firm assurances from U.S. officials are unlikely at this point. “I don’t think the White House will make any commitments regarding NATO enlargement,” he said. “But Putin also knows that the more he interferes in Ukraine, the more Ukraine will seek Western support to defend itself. So, in that sense, the choice is with Moscow to make its perceived NATO problem less bad by dialing down the hostility toward Ukraine.”

Asked if a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a foregone conclusion at this point, Sullivan said it’s likely the Kremlin hasn’t yet made a decision. 

“What President Biden did today was lay out very clearly the consequences if [Putin] chooses to move,” he told reporters. “He also laid out an alternative path—an alternative path that is fundamentally in keeping with the basic principles and propositions that have guided America in the Euro-Atlantic area for the past 70 years. And ultimately we will see in the days ahead—through actions, not through words—what course of action Russia chooses to take.”

Is It Time to Update the Electoral Count Act of 1887?

Congressional Democrats have spent much of the past year pushing—unsuccessfully, thus far—federal legislation that would massively overhaul states’ election administration nationwide. Although H.R. 1 was first introduced in 2019, lawmakers have since argued that former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election render its passage all the more urgent.

“Republicans across the country continue to repeat Donald Trump’s ‘Big Lie,’” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said in March. “They continue to attack voting rights wherever they can—especially in communities of color. The Senate should take up and pass H.R. 1 ASAP. We must ensure equal access to the ballot box for every American.”

People can debate whether the voting laws enacted in red states this year are necessary—research tends to show voting restrictions generally have a marginal effect on turnout, if any—but Trump’s attempt to steal an election had nothing to do with voter suppression. If anything, the Republican nominee suppressed his own support by repeatedly railing against absentee ballots in the leadup to November.

Trump’s last-ditch plan to cling to power relied on persuading then-Vice President Mike Pence to “reject fraudulently chosen electors” from seven states when Congress convened to certify the election results on January 6. “The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter,” Trump lawyer John Eastman wrote in a memo describing the gambit.

In an effort to prevent something similar from happening again, the January 6 Select Committee has in recent days begun advocating for an update to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, upon which many of Eastman’s dubious assertions relied. “We think there are serious ambiguities and issues with the Electoral Count Act,” Rep. Adam Schiff told The Dispatch Tuesday. “Fortunately, nothing came to a head in the last presidential election. Should the next one be closer and it comes down to the application of an ambiguous provision, it could be a real constitutional crisis. We’re trying to avoid that.”

Schiff, a partisan Democrat, is unlikely to persuade many Republicans to support such a reform. But longtime GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg argued in a piece for National Review over the weekend that it’s actually in the Republican Party’s best interest as well as the country’s to clarify the legislation.

“There’s no real political reason for either party not to update the act, because you never know the situation you’ll be in should this be invoked again,” Ginsberg told The Dispatch yesterday. “So you would then, just for the good of the country, want a law that was understandable and not subject to manipulation because of its vagueness.”

The act was initially passed more than 130 years ago in response to the disputed 1876 election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden in which multiple states submitted dual slates of electors to Congress, allowing both the Republican and the Democrat to declare victory.

“For what it was—namely an attempt 10 years after one of the worst electoral crises in American history to draw lessons and have some sort of consensus to make it less likely that would happen again—it wasn’t bad,” Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told The Dispatch. “But now having just had this near-miss experience … it should serve as a huge reminder to the rest of us that these issues are not just 19th-century history—they could potentially come up again.”

“With that in mind,” he continued, “you want to go back and say, ‘Alright, does the language do the best job of reducing uncertainty, making clear who has which responsibility, who has which duty?’ Most people who look at it, I think, conclude that, yeah, it could use some tightening up, it can use some removal of ambiguity.”

What could such a reform actually entail? Ginsberg proposes further clarifying a variety of the act’s statutes, ranging from whether a “majority” of the Electoral College is determined based on all 538 electors or only those present and voting, to the acceptable grounds upon which to object to slates of electors, to whether the vice president’s role in the process is substantive or merely symbolic. Olson—and Schiff—floated raising the threshold necessary to launch an objection, which currently stands at just one senator and one member of the House.

“We’ve seen, even before this last election, that that was an invitation for people to use this important ceremonial—and potentially more than ceremonial—day as a soap box to make points against presidents and administrations they didn’t like,” Olson said, referring to Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer’s 2005 objection to Ohio’s electoral votes, among others.

Both Ginsberg and Olson predicted that—unlike most electoral reform discussions—something will likely come of this debate. “One of the key things that often helps reform be bipartisan is when you’re not really sure which side it’s going to help,” Olson said. Many congressional Democrats have already signaled they are on board with updating the act, and several Senate Republicans expressed similar sentiments on Tuesday. 

“I’d support anything that provides a little more clarity and certainty and transparency,” Sen. John Cornyn told The Dispatch. “For a long time now, we’ve been able to do this without much controversy. But now that we’ve seen the confusion that can be caused, maybe that’s something we should look at.”

“[Pence] never had the power to do what they said he could do,” Sen. Lindsey Graham added. “But if you need to clarify it, that’d be fine with me.”

Even Sen. Josh Hawley—whose initial decision to object to certain electors on January 6 in many ways sparked this entire conversation—expressed openness to the idea. “It would all depend on what it says,” he told The Dispatch. “It could be useful, maybe. But I’d need to see it.”

Because Pence was steadfast in defying Trump’s wishes nearly a year ago, the United States’ democratic process was able to withstand the stress test in spite of the Electoral Count Act’s ambiguity. But if Congress doesn’t act, Ginsberg foresees plenty of instances where it may not. “Suppose Republicans in a state ignored the popular vote and sent, basically, a false set of electors to Congress, [and] then the Democrats went and used the 2020 Trump tactics to vote against that slate,” he said. “Seems to me that is a real nightmare scenario.”

Worth Your Time

• We’re going to put just about anything Tim Alberta publishes in the Worth Your Time section, and his latest profile of Rep. Peter Meijer for The Atlantic is no exception. “Meijer described to me the psychological forces at work in his party, the reasons so many Republicans have refused to confront the tragedy of January 6 and the nature of the ongoing threat,” Alberta writes. “Some people are motivated by raw power, he said. Others have acted out of partisan spite, or ignorance, or warped perceptions of truth and lies. But the chief explanation, he said, is fear. People are afraid for their safety. They are afraid for their careers. Above all, they are afraid of fighting a losing battle in an empty foxhole. Meijer can’t blame them. ‘I just feel lonely,’ he told me, sighing with exasperation. Most of his colleagues, Meijer believes, want to be with him. They pat him on the back and whisper encouragement into his ear. They say they’re rooting for his side. But they don’t think his side can win. So they do nothing, convincing themselves that the problem will take care of itself, while guaranteeing that it will only get worse.”

• White House press secretary Jen Psaki earned some criticism on Monday when she snarkily dismissed a reporter’s question about the availability of rapid COVID-19 tests, and Reason’s Eric Boehm explains why her response was so vexing. “If the FDA cannot accelerate its evaluations to match what’s being done in Germany, Britain, and elsewhere, it should at least offer an emergency use authorization so tests approved by public health officials in other countries can be legally sold here,” he writes. “President Joe Biden should have asked the FDA to do that months ago. The availability of rapid, at-home testing could make a huge difference for Americans who are trying to navigate another holiday season during the pandemic. Even though I’m vaccinated and probably quite safe from COVID, I’d like to be able to take an at-home test before and after any visit with relatives or other social engagement this winter. But, as I learned after a visit to a local pharmacy before Thanksgiving, that means shelling out about $25 for a two-pack of tests.”

Presented Without Comment

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Toeing the Company Line

• In yesterday’s Uphill, Haley and Ryan provide an update on Congress’ efforts to raise the debt ceiling and continue diving into Democrats’ Build Back Better Act. On the docket this week: The legislation’s physical infrastructure components.

• American Enterprise Institute economist Michael Strain joined Jonah on yesterday’s Remnant for a conversation about supply chains, inflation, and labor shortages. Is it time for conservatives to embrace common good capitalism, or does zombie Reaganism still have plenty to offer? Which industries have been most changed by the pandemic? And have our lives actually improved since March 2020?

• David’s Tuesday French Press (🔒) focuses on David Perdue’s gubernatorial bid in Georgia, a defamation lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit, and what these events say about the fate of the American right. “Will [the GOP] recover from its Trumpist spasm of authoritarianism and corruption, or will it double down?” he writes. “Was January 6 the nadir of a low American age, or was it a preview of worse things to come?”

• On the site today, Paul Miller previews this week’s coming Summit of Democracy and warns that the West is suffering a crisis of confidence.

• Also, Behnam Ben Taleblu and Andrea Stricker warn that Joe Biden is running out of time to change his Iran policy, which, they argue, has served only to embolden the Islamic Republic.

Let Us Know

Do you think electoral objections during the certification process are going to become a routine part of American presidential elections moving forward? How concerned are you about another January 6?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).