The farmers argue the new laws will aid big business, and take away their livelihoods.
Tens of thousands of farmers blockaded main roads across India on Saturday in a continuation of a months-long protest movement against new agricultural policies they say will empower corporations and devastate them financially.
The continued demonstrations indicate that protest energy remains strong, as the government and farmers remain locked in a stalemate after several rounds of talks between them failed to produce any major breakthroughs.
Protestors used tractors, trucks, tents, and boulders to block roads during a three-hour “chakka jam,” or road blockade, across the country, according to Reuters.
Blockades were set up at over 10,000 sites across India on Saturday, according to Avik Saha, a secretary of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee, a federation of farmer groups.
“We will keep fighting till our last breath,” Jhajjan Singh, an 80-year-old farmer at a protest site in Ghazipur, told the Guardian. He said that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, “should know that either he will remain or we will.”
Tens of thousands of police were deployed across the country to deal with the protests. While the farmer demonstrations have been largely peaceful, on January 26, a group of protesters peeled off from a demonstration route and fought with police officers in Delhi, an incident which resulted in hundreds of injuries and the death of a protester.
Farmer leaders condemned the violence, but security has ramped up since then. According to the Guardian, police have added iron spikes and steel barricades around protest sites to prevent farmers from entering the capital.
Why the protesters are mobilizing
Protesters have been mobilizing against three agriculture reform laws passed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in September; together, the laws aim to deregulate India’s agricultural industry.
As Vox’s Jariel Arvin explained in December, while the government says this is necessary to modernize the economy, protesters argue that it will only intensify their economic precarity:
Under the new policies, farmers will now sell goods and make contracts with independent buyers outside of government-sanctioned marketplaces, which have long served as the primary locations for farmers to do business. Modi and members of his party believe these reforms will help India modernize and improve its farming industry, which will mean greater freedom and prosperity for farmers.
But the protesting farmers aren’t convinced. Although the government has said it will not drop minimum support prices for essential crops like grain, which the Indian government has set and guaranteed for decades, the farmers are concerned they will disappear. Without them, the farmers believe they will be at the mercy of large corporations that will pay extremely low prices for essential crops, plunging them into debt and financial ruin.
“Farmers have so much passion because they know that these three laws are like death warrants for them,” Abhimanyu Kohar, coordinator of the National Farmer’s Alliance, a federation of more than 180 nonpolitical farm organizations across India, told me in an interview. “Our farmers are doing this movement for our future, for our very survival.”
The protests have garnered sustained international attention, in part because of their sheer size. As Reuters notes, although farming accounts for only about 15 parent of India’s GDP, about 50 percent of the country’s workers are farmers — and hundreds of millions of farmers have taken part in street demonstrations and strikes since last fall.
Farmers have had a powerful voice in Indian politics — and don’t want to lose it
Experts say that the government’s attempt to change farming policy has touched a third rail in Indian politics, revealing tensions created by modernization while threatening to unravel market norms for farmers that have been in place for decades.
Since the 1970s, an elaborate system of agricultural subsidies and price guarantees, organized through a system of marketplaces known as mandis, has been a central feature of agricultural policy in India, and, as Arvin noted, have essentially helped provide farmers with a kind of safety net.
Aditya Dasgupta, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced specializing in the politics of India, says those policies are the product of large-scale mobilization by farmers, agrarian unions, movements, and parties which became politically powerful during the Green Revolution, the country’s enormous leap in agricultural productivity, which took place in the 1970s and ’80s.
“The farmers’ protests today hark back to that tradition of protest and display of agrarian power, but the context is very different,” Dasgupta told me. “India is urbanizing, agriculture accounts for a shrinking share of GDP, and the main source of political-economic support for the ruling BJP party comes from urban big business.”
“So, in a sense, this is not just a conflict about specific policies, but also a larger flashpoint about the sectoral basis of political power, and whether or not farmers remain a politically powerful interest group as India urbanizes,” he said.
While it’s unclear what kind of compromise or concession might dial down tensions regarding the current reforms, experts like Dasgupta point out that the underlying dynamics that gave rise to them — questions over who should hold power in India’s evolving economy — are likely to remain in the long term.
Former presidents are usually allowed access to sensitive intelligence, but Trump might not be.
President Joe Biden said in a CBS interview released Friday that he believes former President Donald Trump cannot be trusted with the classified intelligence briefings that are traditionally offered to former presidents, and suggested that he might bar Trump from receiving a briefing if he requested one, due to the former president’s “erratic behavior.”
If Biden were to deny Trump access to a requested intelligence briefing — which Biden has unilateral authority to do — it would be a stark break from the convention of allowing former presidents to request and receive the briefings. They’re a perk of the post-presidency that allows former presidents to advise sitting presidents on pressing national security matters and, when needed, engage in unofficial diplomacy.
When CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Biden if he believed Trump should still receive intelligence briefings, Biden responded, “I think not.”
Asked to explain his position, Biden said, “Because of his erratic behavior unrelated to the insurrection.”
And when asked what he feared could happen if Trump did receive briefings, Biden said, “I’d rather not speculate out loud.”
“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings. What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?” Biden said.
Biden’s language suggested an inclination to block any requests from Trump, but his comments were not definitive.
On Saturday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki released a statement clarifying Biden’s remarks, suggesting that the administration will not necessarily completely bar Trump from intelligence, and that any request from the former president for a briefing would be subject to assessment.
“The president was expressing his concern about former President Trump receiving access to sensitive intelligence, but he also has deep trust in his own intelligence team to make a determination about how to provide intelligence information if at any point the former President Trump requests a briefing,” the statement said.
So far, Trump has reportedly not submitted any intelligence briefing requests. But that he could be prevented from receiving one is remarkable. And should Biden face a request and deny it, he’d have the support of some top House Democrats and national security experts like Trump’s principal deputy director of national intelligence Susan Gordon, who have stated that they believe Trump’s access to such information poses a threat to national security.
Overall, much like his upcoming Senate impeachment trial and his removal from social media platforms, Trump’s national security role post-presidency is shaping up to be as norm-shattering as his presidency.
Former presidents are allowed access to intelligence briefings to advance national interests. Critics say Trump will do the opposite.
As the New York Times’s David Sanger notes, access to classified intelligence briefings — which contain the country’s most sensitive intelligence reporting and analysis on national security issues — is partially about extending a courtesy to former presidents and partially about equipping them to assist a sitting president, should he or she need their counsel on a complicated policy decision.
“Traditionally, these briefings have kept former presidents informed enough to serve as confidential advisers to the current president if needed, to offer perspective during an international crisis or before high-level negotiations with a foreign leader, for example,” David Priess, a CIA officer who briefed George H.W. Bush for years after he left the White House, told the Washington Post.
Currently these briefings are given on a regular basis to Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, Sanger reports.
Biden’s language suggests that Trump might become an exception to the long-standing tradition. And that’s because many Democrats and national security experts lack trust in his judgment and believe he could use the information inappropriately.
Trump demonstrated a disinterest in intelligence briefings while he was still in office. He reportedly did not read the presidential daily briefing, and instead preferred to be briefed orally two to three times a week, a style of presentation that decreased the nuance of the information. He resisted being briefed on negative information about Russia. And more broadly speaking, he spent much of his presidency railing against the the intelligence community, often describing them as part of a conspiracy against his presidency. In other words, there are questions about how Trump would handle information from institutions that he not only doesn’t respect, but considers political adversaries.
There are also questions of competence. As Sanger explains, Trump played fast and loose with critical pieces of confidential information:
Shortly after he fired the F.B.I. director James B. Comey in 2017, Mr. Trump told the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador about a highly classified piece of intelligence about the Islamic State that came from Israel. The Israelis were outraged.
Later in his presidency, Mr. Trump took a photograph with his phone of a classified satellite image showing an explosion at a missile launchpad in Iran. Some of the markings were blacked out first, but the revelation gave adversaries information — which they may have had, anyway — about the abilities of American surveillance satellites.
A number of national security experts have expressed concerns about the danger Trump could pose to the US’s most prized national security secrets.
For example, Gordon — who resigned as Trump’s principal deputy director of national intelligence in 2019 — wrote in a January op-ed in the Washington Post that Trump should not receive any briefings as a private citizen because of his interest in remaining active in politics, his vulnerability to international surveillance, pressure due to his international business holdings, and questions about his general judgment.
“It is not clear that he understands the tradecraft to which he has been exposed, the reasons the knowledge he has acquired must be protected from disclosure, or the intentions and capabilities of adversaries and competitors who will use any means to advance their interests at the expense of ours,” she wrote.
Before Biden was inaugurated, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, also recommended cutting off Trump.
“There were, I think, any number of intelligence partners around the world who probably started withholding information from us because they didn’t trust the president would safeguard that information, and protect their sources and methods,” Schiff said. “And that makes us less safe. We’ve seen this president politicize intelligence, and that’s another risk to the country.”
Douglas Wise, a former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has pointed to Trump’s debt as a unique point of vulnerability. Much of the former’s president’s debt is held by financial institutions, but as Vox’s Andrew Prokop has explained, Trump also made hundreds of millions of dollars in purchases using money from unknown sources.
“A frightening scenario is where the owners of Trump’s debt or actors like Putin who have the massive capacity to make him debt free pressure Trump into making decisions that are beneficial to Russia in the final days of his administration, serving as a conduit of Russian disinformation once out of office, or sharing intelligence information after he leaves,” Wise wrote at Just Security in November.
Deciding to block Trump’s access to top intelligence — assuming Trump ever requests it — is the prerogative of the Biden administration. It’s not necessary for any former president to access it, and given that Biden is unlikely to turn to Trump for counsel on many national security and foreign policy questions, it would not be a big loss for him to not have Trump among his advisers.
But in addition to weighing national security concerns, Biden must also weigh the pros and cons of the potential political blowback of choosing to break this norm. In the wake of the Trump presidency, however, it seems unlikely such a decision will cause the shock it might have in another era.
Amy Coney Barrett just handed down her first Supreme Court opinion, and it’s surprisingly revealing
The Supreme Court handed down an unusually messy order Friday night, in a case brought by a church claiming that it should be exempted from several rules California put in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The justices split four ways in the case, South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, with members of the Court’s Republican majority divided into three different camps.
Interestingly, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote her first signed opinion since joining the Supreme Court, and her opinion takes a position that is slightly to the left of her most conservative colleagues. Though Barrett’s opinion is still quite conservative, it suggests that there may be some daylight between her views and those of her most reactionary colleagues.
South Bay involves a bevy of limits that California imposes on houses of worship, and on other places where people ordinarily congregate in large groups for extended periods of time. In the parts of the state with the most severe Covid-19 outbreaks, California mandated worship services be conducted outside to minimize the risk of infection. In areas where Covid-19 is less prevalent, the state has said services may be conducted indoors, but only at limited capacity — with stricter capacity limits in areas where the disease is more common.
Additionally, the state bans indoor singing and chanting because, in the words of one of the state’s expert witnesses, “most scientists believe that group singing, particularly when engaged in while in close proximity to others in an enclosed space, carries a high risk of spreading the COVID-19 virus through the emission of infected droplets.”
Significantly, these restrictions apply equally to houses of worship and to similar secular activities. Theaters, lecture halls, and other places where people gather in auditorium-like settings are subject to the same restrictions that apply to places of worship in their area. The ban on indoor singing applies to political rallies, school music recitals, and other secular activities, just as it applies to religious services. (Although there is one possible exception to the singing ban, which will be explained below.)
Because the justices split four different ways in South Bay, it’s not at all clear what legal rule judges should apply in future, similar cases. But the Court’s order blocks the ban on indoor worship. It leaves the capacity limits and the indoor singing ban in place, for now, but the Court’s order also permits the plaintiffs to gather additional evidence and try to convince a lower court to strike down those limits as well.
The Court’s four different opinions in South Bay, briefly explained
Until last November, the Court’s religion cases drew a line between religious discrimination cases, where religious institutions were treated worse than comparable secular institutions, and cases involving a “neutral law of general applicability,” meaning that the law applies with equal force against religious and secular institutions.
Religious liberty plaintiffs who could prove discrimination typically prevailed, while plaintiffs who challenged a state law that applies equally to religious and secular behavior typically lost their case. (A federal statute applies a stricter rule to federal laws that burden religious exercise, so religious liberty plaintiffs are much more likely to prevail in suits against the federal government than they are in suits against a state.)
The night before last Thanksgiving, however, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, which vastly expanded the Court’s definition of what constitutes “discrimination” against religion. Prior to Roman Catholic Diocese, the Court’s decisions indicated that states were only required to treat religious activity the same as they do “analogous non-religious conduct.” So a state could impose restrictions on a church so long as the same restrictions applied to secular institutions that are similar in character to that church, such as lecture halls, movie theaters, and other places where people sit together for extended periods of time.
Roman Catholic Diocese, however, blocked New York’s strict occupancy limits on places of worship because the same restrictions didn’t apply to secular businesses that are quite unlike houses of worship, such as “acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, [and] garages.” The Court’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese suggested, in other words, that religious discrimination exists if a state treats any secular institution differently than a religious institution, no matter how dissimilar those two institutions might be.
With this background in mind, let’s take a quick look at each of the four opinions in the South Bay case.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, took the most expansive view of what constitutes religious discrimination. They would have blocked California’s public health limits on worship services in their entirety — although Alito would have stayed that decision for 30 days to give the state an opportunity to show that it absolutely must leave some restrictions in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Notably, these three justices were the only three who would have ended California’s ban on indoor singing, which they claim is discriminatory even though it applies equally to non-religious gatherings such as political rallies.
California, Gorsuch notes, might permit indoor singing to occur on Hollywood film sets (although he admits that there is “some confusion over what rules actually apply to Hollywood”). Thus, by allegedly treating worship services differently than Hollywood film sets, Gorsuch claims that California discriminates against religion.
It’s worth noting that there is a significant distinction between religious services and the film industry. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in her dissenting opinion, “film production studios in California … must test their employees as many as three times a week,” and it would be extraordinarily difficult to apply a similar testing regime to houses of worship. But, under Gorsuch’s approach, this important distinction between film studios and places of worship is largely irrelevant.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion, which was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is slightly to the left of Gorsuch’s view. Though Barrett agrees with Gorsuch that “if a chorister can sing in a Hollywood studio but not in her church, California’s regulations cannot be viewed as neutral,” she concedes that the “record is uncertain” regarding what rules apply to film studios. Accordingly, her opinion allows the indoor singing ban to remain in effect, for now, while additional litigation takes place to figure out how the state treats Hollywood.
Significantly, Barrett’s opinion also suggests that she does not want to tear down completely the distinction between cases involving religious discrimination and cases involving universally applicable laws. “It remains unclear whether the singing ban applies across the board (and thus constitutes a neutral and generally applicable law) or else favors certain sectors (and thus triggers more searching review),” Barrett writes.
The Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith established the rule that neutral state laws of general applicability may be applied to religious institutions, but this decision has been under fire almost since the day it was decided. It is particularly loathed by religious conservatives, and there is a case pending before the Supreme Court right now which seeks to overrule Smith.
Barrett’s opinion in South Bay, however, suggests that she may not be willing to go quite that far. And her decision to break with Gorsuch may be an early sign that she is a somewhat more moderate justice than the Court’s most conservative members.
The four remaining justices all called for the Court to be more deferential to public health officials who are struggling to contain a pandemic. Writing only for himself, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasizes his view that “the ‘Constitution principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States.’” That said, Roberts also concludes that an outright ban on indoor services, even in areas with severe Covid-19 outbreaks, goes too far.
Finally, Justice Kagan, in an opinion joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, scolds her colleagues for displacing “the judgments of experts about how to respond to a raging pandemic.” She concludes her opinion with a rhetorical flourish:
[I]f this decision causes suffering, we will not pay. Our marble halls are now closed to the public, and our life tenure forever insulates us from responsibility for our errors. That would seem good reason to avoid disrupting a State’s pandemic response. But the Court forges ahead regardless, insisting that science-based policy yield to judicial edict.
Kagan has historically avoided using harsh language, and she’s been quite open about her desire to broker compromises with her conservative colleagues that prevent radical changes to the law. That Kagan is now using such bleak terms to criticize her colleagues suggests that she may no longer believe such compromises are possible, now that the Court has a 6-3 Republican majority.
What Barrett’s opinion could say about the future
Amy Coney Barrett is only 49 years old, which means that she could serve on the Supreme Court for three decades or more. And, while she is known to be quite conservative, it’s not yet clear whether she shares some of the most extreme views held by her more conservative colleagues. Her opinion in South Bay is the first sign since she joined the Court that she may be more moderate than, say, Justice Thomas.
Like Thomas and Gorsuch, Barrett identifies as an originalist, meaning she believes that the Constitution’s words must be read as they were understood when they were ratified. Some originalists, such as Thomas, argue that courts must follow what they believe to be the original meaning of the Constitution even when such a decision would do considerable violence to the law. Thomas, for example, has suggested that federal child labor laws are unconstitutional.
As a law professor, Barrett seemed to reject this extreme position, writing that there are some past decisions that “no serious person would propose to undo even if they are wrong.” In a 2016 article Barrett co-authored, she acknowledged that “adherence to originalism arguably requires, for example, the dismantling of the administrative state, the invalidation of paper money, and the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education,” but Barrett appears to recognize that it would be irresponsible for her to declare the dollar itself unconstitutional.
It’s important not to overread these nods toward moderation in Barrett’s record. She is a very conservative judge. And it’s hardly an act of heroic restraint to declare that public school segregation should remain illegal, or that federal child labor laws should continue to exist.
But if Barrett does tend to vote more like Kavanaugh — and less like Thomas, Alito, or Gorsuch — that could matter a great deal in future cases.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, for example, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh all called for fairly radical changes to American election law — changes that are likely to disenfranchise countless voters if a fifth justice signs onto them. But Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all signaled that they would apply such changes retroactively, meaning that voters who complied with the rules in place when they cast their ballots would be disenfranchised, if those voters failed to comply with new rules that were invented after they had already voted.
Kavanaugh, at the least, was unwilling to go that far in a South Carolina case — a case that would have disenfranchised as many as 20,000 voters if Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch had gotten their way. Under Kavanaugh’s approach in that case, voters who followed the rules that were in place when they cast their ballots were not punished for failing to predict the future.
Like Barrett, in other words, Kavanaugh is a rather conservative judge. But there is a significant difference between his approach to judging, and the often nihilistic approach taken by Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch.
And, if Barrett proves to be more like Kavanaugh than like the three most conservative justices, that means that she might put the brakes on some of the most extreme ideas — such as retroactively disenfranchising voters — supported by Thomas, Alito, or Gorsuch.