The Morning Dispatch: Bye Bye, Bibi?

Happy Thursday! The FDA announced yesterday that Americans shouldn’t eat cicadas if they’re allergic to seafood. We probably would have ended the press release after “Americans shouldn’t eat cicadas.” (No offense, Alec and Ryan.)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid told President Reuven Rivlin yesterday that he had successfully brokered an agreement among an ideologically diverse group of lawmakers to form a governing coalition and oust longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Isaac Herzog, a former chairman of Israel’s center-left Labour Party, was elected Tuesday to succeed Rivlin next month and become the 11th President of Israel.

• Punchbowl News reported yesterday that Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled late last week that Democrats can use the budget reconciliation process—which permits the Senate to bypass the filibuster and pass legislation via simple majority vote—more than once in any given year, but only in specific circumstances. They cannot use it as a shortcut “simply to avoid the regular legislative process,” MacDonough reportedly said, and “there have to be reasons beyond political expediency for triggering the majority threshold, such as an economic downturn.”

• Iran’s largest warship and one of its major oil refineries both caught on fire Wednesday, with the former sinking in the Gulf of Oman. It is unclear at this point how the fires started or if they are connected.

• The company that publishes the National Enquirer tabloid agreed to pay a $187,500 fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission. The Commission found American Media Inc.’s (AMI) efforts to suppress a story of an actress’ alleged sexual relationship with Donald Trump in 2016 constituted an illegal contribution to the Trump campaign. AMI paid Karen McDougal $150,000 to give up the rights to her story about the Republican nominee.

• Belarusian opposition activist Stepan Latypov stabbed himself with a pen during a court hearing on Tuesday in an apparent suicide attempt, saying he would be tortured and his friends and neighbors prosecuted if he refused to plead guilty to trumped-up charges. The Viasna human rights center in Belarus says Latypov was hospitalized and put in a medically induced coma.

• The United States confirmed 19,800 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 2.1 percent of the 935,108 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 615 deaths were attributed to the virus on Wednesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 595,822. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 19,674 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Meanwhile, 508,652 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, with 168,734,435 Americans having now received at least one dose.

Israel to Form Netanyahu-less Government

After 12 consecutive years at Israel’s helm, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could be on his way out as early as mid-June. A shaky alliance in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, made up of right-wing nationalist parties, centrist and leftist lawmakers, and members of the United Arab List finalized an agreement Wednesday night, tentatively securing the 61 seats necessary to create a new government and unseat Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

Yair Lapid—leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party and the parliament’s anti-Netanyahu bloc—announced that he had formally notified outgoing President Reuven Rivlin of the deal in the waning hours of his Wednesday deadline. The new government, Lapid said, “will work in the service of all Israeli citizens,” including both the supporters and detractors of the coalition.  

Lapid’s “unity” messaging will be important in the next 11 days, as he attempts to hold together clashing groups with diverging agendas long enough to formally remove Netanyahu. The coalition—guided more by a common adversary than common interests—narrowly came to an agreement yesterday after lawmakers made a series of eleventh-hour demands in exchange for their cooperation.

Because Israel’s system of government allocates seats in the Knesset to parties based on their share of the vote, forming a 61-seat majority requires large and small parties to team up, which in turn forces concessions and political bargaining. As a result, the Israeli parliament is mired in gridlock and has undergone four inconclusive elections over the course of two years. To succeed in his bid, Lapid had to offer Naftali Bennett—leader of the small right-wing Yamina party—the first rotation as prime minister in a power-sharing agreement. Lapid will take the reins in 2023.

Bennett, a former Netanyahu aide and tech millionaire, breathed new life into the parliament’s opposition bloc Sunday when he announced plans to join forces with Lapid to form the unity coalition. “It’s my intention to do my utmost in order to form a national unity government along with my friend Yair Lapid, so that, God willing, together we can save the country from a tailspin and return Israel to its course,” Bennett said in a televised address after meeting with his seven-seat party.

“No one will be asked to give up their ideology, but everyone will have to postpone the realization of some of their dreams,” he added. “We will focus on what can be done, instead of arguing over what is impossible.”

“This is certainly a dramatic moment in Israeli politics, and it all stems from Yair Lapid’s tenacity in his desire to unseat Netanyahu,” Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Dispatch. “He allowed Naftali Bennett, who is as close as one can be to the polar opposite of Lapid, to take the first rotation as prime minister. He made many compromises all with one goal: to unseat Netanyahu.”

The prime minister, for his part, isn’t going down without a fight. Despite his ongoing trial on corruption charges and the Likud party’s losses in a March election, Netanyahu could hold his office by attracting defectors from the coalition in an attempt to trigger another election.

“I would not count Benjamin Netanyahu out until the last minute. He’s nicknamed the magician for a reason,” Jason Brodsky, a senior Middle East analyst at Iran International, told The Dispatch. “Someone with twelve years as prime minister, consecutively, has tremendous power and an ability to survive. I think that you’ll see Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid try to speed up the Knesset vote of confidence to give Bibi the least amount of space to try to break apart their deal.”

Right-wing joiners to the coalition have come under incredible pressure, as Netanyahu and his supporters accuse them of making long-term sacrifices in exchange for short-term political gains. In the minutes following Bennett’s announcement Sunday, the prime minister called the move a “scam of the century” and accused his former aide of abandoning his voters to a “leftist government.”

Netanyahu’s supporters followed suit. Over the past three days, hundreds of demonstrators have surrounded the homes of Bennett and Ayelet Shaked—another Yamina MP—chanting “leftist traitors, a danger to Jews.” Both politicians were forced to obtain security details. Bennett is also unpopular among the Israeli left for his opposition to Palestinian statehood and support for the settlement and annexation of parts of the West Bank.

If the bloc is able to pull off the new government, Bennett and Shaked will be strange bedfellows with Mansour Abbas, head of the Islamist United Arab List. “It was a historic day today with the inclusion of Mansour Abbas,” Schanzer said. “He represents the first Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition. His ideology is not particularly pro-Israel though, so it will be very interesting to see how he works within the coalition.”

“[Abbas] highly understands that the improvement of the two million fellow Palestinian citizens of Israel depends on wielding political power,” added Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

This fragile cooperation unfolds against a backdrop of heightened religious and ethnic tensions in Israel, as we are less than two weeks removed from the end of the 11-day war between Hamas and the Israeli military. Coalition talks were put on hold during the conflict, as cross-border rocket fire and fighting between Israeli Jews and Arabs rocked the country and its lawmakers. To succeed in its effort, the unity government will likely steer clear of hot-button issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict altogether.

“There are a lot of different interests involved, a lot of different personalities involved, and it’s Israeli politics, which is often brutal,” Schanzer said. “It’s not at all clear that this will have staying power, but it is nevertheless historic after what appears to be the defeat of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.”

Biden Admin Pumps the Brakes on ANWR Drilling

The Biden administration on Tuesday announced it would suspend all oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the largest such refuge in the United States. Located in northeast Alaska, the ANWR is home to a variety of species—including caribou and polar bears—but it also contains up to 11 billion barrels worth of oil, per the United States Geological Survey.

While drilling rights in the ANWR have been a subject of contention since 1977, this week’s move by the Interior Department is a direct response to several Trump administration executive actions—and 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—that expanded drilling rights in the region. Trump officials auctioned off more than half a million acres worth of ANWR oil and gas leases just two weeks before President Joe Biden was sworn in.

But on his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order halting drilling in the region due to “alleged legal deficiencies” in the original leasing program, leaving the possibility open for a more extensive environmental review. Now, a secretarial order signed by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland calls for “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the program.” Environmental groups have long claimed that the Trump administration rushed its environmental assessment before auctioning off the land.

The ANWR is home to 42 fish species, 45 mammal species, and more than 200 bird species, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Indigenous people who live in the region—including the Gwich’in tribe—worry that drilling will disrupt migratory patterns and, in turn, their food supply.

Although Tuesday’s move received plaudits from such groups, environmentalists remain frustrated that the Biden administration isn’t doing more to halt oil and gas drilling. Just last week, the Justice Department filed a brief in defense of ConocoPhillips’ Trump-era Willow Project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which aims to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day for decades. The administration argued in the filing that ConocoPhillips “does have valid lease rights,” and that the Bureau of Land Management “appropriately considered Conoco’s lease rights” in its analysis.

A former senior Trump administration official told The Dispatch that Biden may have more flexibility in pushing back on the ANWR leases than on the Willow Project, whose potential greenhouse gas emissions have been repeatedly accounted for and approved.

Since some of the land in the ANWR has already been auctioned off, the decision to suspend the leases will almost certainly trigger litigation. But the auctions were not as competitive—or lucrative—as many expected, with just a handful of companies entering the bidding and rights to only two of the 11 tracts of land made available on January 6 contested. In the end, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority—a state government agency—was the highest bidder for nine of the plots, paying the minimum price of $25/acre for most of the land.

The reasons for this lack of interest were complex. In addition to the rapidly changing regulatory environment—Biden had already made clear what his administration’s position on ANWR drilling would be—all of the United States’ largest banks had pledged not to help oil and gas companies finance any projects in the region.

“Trump’s desire to push through this lease sale in January was essentially an empty, meaningless, political gesture,” Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst, told the Washington Post this week. “And Biden’s decision is in its own way equally symbolic: There is simply no appetite in the industry to drill there.”

Symbolic or not, Alaskan elected officials strongly disapproved of the Biden administration’s move. “This action serves no purpose other than to obstruct Alaska’s economy and put our energy security at great risk,” said moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was a main driver of including the ANWR provision in the GOP’s 2017 tax law. “Alaskans are committed to developing our resources responsibly and have demonstrated our ability to do so safely to the world.”

“If Alaska continues to be denied its constitutional right to safely develop resources, countries with much lower environmental standards will gladly fill that void with significant environmental impacts,” Alaska’s Gov. Mike Dunleavy added. “Shutting down our lands was not what William Seward intended when Alaska was founded and we are not going to allow the Biden administration to turn Alaska into a giant national park.”

For now, the leases are merely suspended. If the Biden administration’s environmental review does not reach a different conclusion than the Trump administration’s, drilling could theoretically be allowed to continue at some point in the future. If not, the Biden administration would likely have to work with Congress to buy out the leases already issued, since its legal authority to cancel them outright is questionable.

Quill Robinson, an executive at the conservative environmental group American Conservation Coalition, advocates for more free-market solutions to issues like the ANWR. “There has been a lot of discussion of letting conservation groups bid on these sorts of things,” he told The Dispatch. “A really good way to conserve places like the ANWR would be actually opening up those bidding processes for conservationists to come in and protect that land.”

Worth Your Time

• In a personal and moving piece in Tortoise, Simon Barnes responds to claims by scientist Richard Dawkins that it would be immoral for a woman pregnant with a Down’s syndrome child not to seek an abortion. “Sometimes Eddie will tell us, ‘I love my life,’” Barnes writes of his 20-year-old son with Down’s syndrome. “In my view, that’s a good reason for letting him have it. Eddie loves and is loved: is that not a sufficient qualification for life? … He sometimes finds life difficult, incomprehensible, upsetting and dismaying. He has felt acutely the pain of loss. He sometimes feels that life is against him. He sometimes feels that the world doesn’t understand him. He sometimes wishes that things could be different. He is not always happy, no. But here’s the nub of it: such feelings are not unique to people with Down’s syndrome. Unhappiness is part of everybody’s experience, and so is happiness.”

• BuzzFeed News recently obtained more than 3,200 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era emails through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and the resulting story from Natalie Bettendorf and Jason Leopold is well worth your time. The emails “provide a rare glimpse into how Fauci approached his job during the biggest health crisis of the last century, showing him dealing directly with the public, health officials, reporters, and even celebrities,” they write. But the email set is incomplete, and filled with redactions. “The emails show Fauci received a flurry of correspondence about the theory that coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan. One such email sent to Fauci on April 16, 2020 by Francis Collins, the director of the National Institute of Health, under the subject line ‘conspiracy gains momentum’ contained a link to a news story highlighting a Fox News report that said the allegation had merit. Fauci’s response to Collins is entirely blacked out.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• On The Dispatch Podcast this week, the gang laments the United States’ dereliction of responsibility in failing to protect Afghan translators who worked with American service members. Plus: Whether President Biden should meet with Vladimir Putin, the pros and cons of ranked-choice voting, and Ezra Klein’s interview with President Obama.

• Jonah begins his Wednesday G-File (🔒) with a “historical montage” of anti-democratic thought and bigotry from the progressive movements of the distant and not-too-distant past. He then offers a response to Joshua Tait, a historian of conservative thought, who recently argued that conservatism has always been anti-democratic. “Threats to democracy, like broader threats to liberty, are always with us, because human nature is always with us,” Jonah writes. “If you are only vigilant to the threats that fit your worldview, you’re likely to miss a few.”

• In this week’s Capitolism (🔒), Scott Lincicome pushes back on the idea that China’s rise as an economic juggernaut justifies a rejection of free markets and economic openness. “We see supposed free marketers supporting protectionism and industrial policy not because they’ve seen the interventionist light but because of China’s growing economic and geopolitical power—both supposedly fueled by Chinese government industrial policy—is so serious that it demands we abandon, just this one time, the market to save it,” he writes.

• “For about five minutes after January 6 I thought the shock of seeing the Capitol overrun might shock a critical mass of the right back to its senses,” David writes in Wednesday’s French Press (🔒). “That hope died a quick death.” With alarmist rhetoric ubiquitous in our political culture, is the right going to talk itself back into political violence?

Let Us Know

As outlined above, parliamentary systems of government can result in some strange bedfellows. What do you see as the benefits of such frameworks? And drawbacks?

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