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Biden Seeks to Balance Human Rights and Geopolitics in US-ASEAN Special Summit

In a bid to strengthen alliances and counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific, President Joe Biden is hosting Southeast Asian leaders in Washington in a two-day U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit. While trade, regional security and Ukraine are high on the agenda, activists are urging him to address the region’s human rights concerns and democratic backsliding, including the 2021 coup in Myanmar. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
Camera: VOA Indonesian, VOA Burmese    Producer: Bakhtiyar Zamanov
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Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenas McCarthy, 4 Other Republican Lawmakers

A House panel issued subpoenas Thursday to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other Republican lawmakers in its probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack.

The panel is investigating McCarthy’s conversations with then-President Donald Trump the day of the attack and meetings the four other lawmakers had with the White House beforehand as Trump and his aides worked to overturn his 2020 election defeat. The former president’s supporters violently pushed past police that day, broke through windows and doors of the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

The decision to issue subpoenas to McCarthy, R-Calif., and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama is a dramatic show of force by the panel, which has already interviewed nearly 1,000 witnesses and collected more than 100,000 documents as it investigates the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

The move is not without risk, as Republicans are favored to capture back the House majority in this fall’s midterm elections and have promised retribution for Democrats if they take control.

After the announcement, McCarthy, who aspires to be House speaker, told reporters “I have not seen a subpoena” and said his view on the Jan. 6 committee has not changed since the nine-lawmaker panel asked for his voluntary cooperation earlier this year.

“They’re not conducting a legitimate investigation,” McCarthy said. “Seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.”

Similarly, Perry told reporters the investigation is a “charade” and said the subpoena is “all about headlines.”

Neither man said whether he would comply.

The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, had previously asked for voluntary cooperation from the five lawmakers, along with a handful of other GOP members, but all of them refused to speak with the panel, which debated for months whether to issue the subpoenas.

“Before we hold our hearings next month, we wished to provide members the opportunity to discuss these matters with the committee voluntarily,” said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the panel. “Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused and we’re forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning January 6th.”

Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s Republican vice chair, said the step wasn’t taken lightly. The unwillingness of the lawmakers to provide relevant information about the attack, she said, is “a very serious and grave situation.”

Congressional subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, especially for a party leader, have little precedent in recent decades, and it is unclear what the consequences would be if any or all of the five men decline to comply. The House has voted to hold two other noncompliant witnesses, former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, in contempt, referring their cases to the Justice Department.

In announcing the subpoenas, the Jan. 6 panel said there is historical precedent for the move and noted that the House Ethics Committee has “issued a number of subpoenas to Members of Congress for testimony or documents,” though such actions are generally done secretly.

“We recognize this is fairly unprecedented,” said Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the other GOP member of the panel, after the committee announced the subpoenas. “But the Jan. 6 attack was very unprecedented.”

Kinzinger said it is “important for us to get every piece of information we possibly can.”

McCarthy has acknowledged he spoke with Trump on Jan. 6 as Trump’s supporters were beating police outside the Capitol and forcing their way into the building. But he has not shared many details. The committee requested information about his conversations with Trump “before, during and after” the riot.

McCarthy took to the House floor after the rioters were cleared and said in a forceful speech that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack and that it was the “saddest day I have ever had” in Congress — even as he went on to join 138 other House Republicans in voting to reject the election results.

Another member of the GOP caucus, Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, said after the attack that McCarthy had recounted that he told Trump to publicly “call off the riot” and said the violent mob was made up of Trump supporters, not far-left antifa members, as Trump had claimed.

“That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,’” Herrera Beutler said in a statement last year.

The GOP leader soon made up with Trump, though, visiting him in Florida and rallying House Republicans to vote against investigations of the attack.

The other four men were in touch with the White House for several weeks ahead of the insurrection, talking to Trump and his legal advisers about ways to stop the congressional electoral count on Jan. 6 to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

“These members include those who participated in meetings at the White House, those who had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to and during the attack on the Capitol, and those who were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities on and before January 6th,” the committee said in a release.

Brooks, who has since been critical of Trump, spoke alongside the former president at the massive rally in front of the White House the morning of Jan. 6, telling supporters to “start taking down names and kicking ass” before hundreds of them broke into the Capitol.

Perry spoke to the White House about replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with an official who was more sympathetic to Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, and Biggs was involved in plans to bring protesters to Washington and pressuring state officials to overturn the legitimate election results, according to the panel. Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6 and was also involved in strategizing how to overturn the election.

Several of their efforts were detailed in texts released to the panel by Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff at the time.

“11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration,” Perry texted Meadows on Dec. 26, 2020. “We gotta get going!”
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Four Supreme Court Rulings That Could Be Impacted by Reversal of Abortion Decision

In his draft opinion overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion, conservative U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito stressed that his ruling was limited to abortion and would not affect other rights.

“Nothing in this opinion,” Alito wrote in the leaked document, “should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

The document is an initial draft and could change before a final decision is handed down in the next several weeks. But despite Alito’s assurances, the sweeping case it makes for reversing the 1973 decision and a subsequent abortion ruling from 1992 has raised alarm among liberals that the same rationale could be used to roll back other rights.

Among them: the right of adults to use contraception, the freedom to marry outside one’s own race, and the right to same-sex marriage — freedoms known collectively as “substantive due process rights.”

“If the rationale of the decision as released were to be sustained, a whole range of rights are in question, a whole range of rights,” President Joe Biden said last week.

Central to Alito’s argument is an old conservative objection that Roe v. Wade “manufactured” a right that has no basis in the Constitution.

In affirming the right of Norma McCorvey — the Jane Roe in the court case — to end her pregnancy, the justices ruled 7-2 that abortion is part of a “fundamental right to privacy” inherent in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Adopted in 1868, the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause has been used by the Supreme Court to affirm a panoply of constitutional rights such as the right to marry and the right to use contraception.

But Alito argued that neither abortion nor privacy can be found in the Constitution.

Echoing another conservative criticism, he wrote that the 1973 ruling was “egregiously wrong” in part because the right to an abortion is “not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions.”

In fact, he noted, abortion was criminalized by many states at the time of the 14th Amendment’s ratification after the American Civil War.

But just because something was illegal in the 19th century and is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution doesn’t mean it can’t be constitutionally protected, said Sonia Suter, a law professor at The George Washington University Law School.

“When you look at the way he does the analysis to say how terribly wrongly decided Roe was, you could use that exact same analysis to determine that there are aren’t other rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution,” Suter told VOA in an interview.

Caroline Fredrickson, a law professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brennan Center, said Alito’s assurance that his ruling would have no bearing on other precedents is “misleading.”

“It just doesn’t work that way,” she said in an interview with VOA. “Anybody who is familiar with the common law system understands that precedents are based on legal reasoning, and they develop. One precedent follows another. If you strike down a law based on a fundamental disagreement with the legal reasoning that underpins it, the same exact arguments will allow the other decisions to be overturned.”

Here is a look at four Supreme Court decisions that a Roe v. Wade reversal could impact.

Griswold v. Connecticut

Widely seen as a precursor to Roe v. Wade, this 1965 ruling struck down a Connecticut law that banned the use of contraception.

In 1961, Estelle Griswold, a Planned Parenthood official, and C. Lee Buxton, a Yale University gynecologist, were arrested and fined for operating a birth control clinic in Connecticut.

The two challenged their conviction, arguing that the Connecticut law violated their rights under the 14th Amendment.

In a 7-2 ruling, the court found Connecticut’s law infringed on the constitutional “right of marital privacy.”

The decision paved the way for Roe v. Wade, according to Suter.

“Roe relied heavily on the line of reasoning (in Griswold) and the sort of substantive due process,” she said.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, many liberals fear it could use the same reasoning to invalidate Roe’s precursor.

“If Casey (the 1992 opinion that reaffirmed abortion rights) is to fall, if Roe v. Wade is to fall, then Griswold v. Connecticut presumably is to fall, as well,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, said last week on MSNBC.

But while many conservatives have raised questions about the legal reasoning behind the contraception ruling, few expect an outright ban on birth control.

Instead, Fredrickson said, overturning Roe could lead to “a chipping away (of the right to contraception) by increasingly describing forms of birth control as abortion or ‘abortion-like’ and allowing states to regulate access to them.”

Loving v. Virginia

Before this 1967 case, more than a dozen U.S. states prohibited white people from marrying African Americans.

This historic case involved Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man. Unable to marry in their own state in 1958, they traveled to Washington, D.C.

They were arrested when they returned to Virginia under the state’s laws banning interracial marriages.

Tried and convicted, they were each given a one-year jail sentence on the condition that they leave the state and not return as a married couple for 25 years.

The Supreme Court found that Virginia’s so-called anti-miscegenation statute violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides within the individual and cannot be infringed by the state,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court’s unanimous decision.

“Going after Loving would be extreme,” Fredrickson said.

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, considered the court’s most conservative member, is an African American and married to a white woman.

Lawrence v. Texas

A landmark ruling for gay rights, this 2003 decision struck down a Texas law that criminalized homosexual sex, leading to the repeal of so-called “anti-sodomy laws” around the country.

In 1998, John Lawrence and a male partner were found having sex when police entered Lawrence’s apartment in response to a disturbance call.

After being arrested and fined under Texas’ anti-sodomy law, the men challenged the statute as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

The Supreme Court agreed. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, a prominent champion of LGBTQ rights on the court, wrote the majority opinion.

“Petitioners’ right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in private conduct without government intervention,” he wrote.

For LGBTQ rights activists, the decision, which overturned a 1986 Supreme Court ruling upholding a similar anti-sodomy law in Georgia, was a major victory.

Obergefell v. Hodges

This 2015 decision established gay marriage as a constitutional right.

The case was brought by a group of same-sex couples challenging state laws that did not allow them to legally marry.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states must allow gay couples to marry and recognize such marriages performed in states where they were legal.

Again, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

Hailed as a major achievement for the LGBTQ community in America, the narrowly decided case is now in jeopardy, Fredrickson said.

“I think there is a very fervent disagreement with the Obergefell decision based on the same idea of tradition in our society,” he said.

All six conservatives currently on the bench disagree with the Obergefell ruling, according to legal scholars. But whether they’d join forces to overturn it “is another story,” Suter said.
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Justices to Meet for 1st Time Since Leak of Draft Roe Ruling

The Supreme Court’s nine justices will gather in private Thursday for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states.

The meeting in the justices’ private, wood-paneled conference room could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. No one aside from the justices attends and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is responsible for taking notes.

Thursday’s conference comes at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court’s marshal to undertake an investigation.

Roberts stressed that the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated in February, may not be the court’s final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices’ initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions.

That’s true of a major abortion ruling from 1992 that now is threatened, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Justice Anthony Kennedy initially indicated he would be part of a majority to reverse Roe but later was among five justices who affirmed the basic right of a woman to choose abortion that the court first laid out in roe in 1973.

Kennedy met privately with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter to craft a joint opinion, with no hint to the public or even to other justices about what was going on.

“I think it’s tradition and decorum that everyone corresponds in writing about things that are in circulation,” said Megan Wold, a former law clerk to Alito. “But at the same time, there’s nothing to prevent a justice from picking up the phone to call, from visiting someone else in chambers.”

A major shift in the current abortion case seems less likely, at least partly because of the leak, abortion law experts and people on both sides of the issue said.

“I think the broad contours are very unlikely to change. To the extent the leak matters, it will make broad changes unlikely,” said Mary Ziegler, a scholar of the history of abortion at the Florida State University law school.

Sherif Gergis, a University of Notre Dame law professor who once was a law clerk for Alito, agreed. “I’ll be surprised if it changes very much,” Gergis said.

At least five votes in December

It’s not clear who leaked the opinion, or for what purpose. But Alito’s writing means that there were at least five votes in December to overrule Roe and Casey, just after the court heard arguments over a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Based on their questions at arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas and former President Donald Trump’s three appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, seemed most likely to join Alito.

Roberts appeared the most inclined among the conservatives to avoid reaching a decision to overrule the landmark abortion rulings, but his questions suggested that he would at the very least vote to uphold the Mississippi law. Even that outcome would dramatically undermine abortion rights and invite states to adopt increasingly stricter limits.

If Roberts, who often prefers incremental steps in an effort to preserve the court’s legitimacy, wanted to prevent the court from overruling Roe and Casey, he’d need to pick up the vote of just one other colleague. That would be enough to deprive Alito of a majority.

The liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, are expected to dissent from either outcome. But no dissent, separate opinion from Roberts, or even a revised draft majority opinion has been circulated among the justices, Politico reported.

Majority opinions often change in response to friendly suggestions and barbed criticisms. The justices consider the internal back-and-forth a crucial part of their work.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked that pointed criticism from her friend and ideological opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia, made her opinions better. Scalia died in 2016; Ginsburg, four years later.

The lack of any other opinions surprised some former law clerks to the justices, though Wold said it’s also true that bigger, harder cases traditionally take more time.

Spring usually ‘tense’  

Several former clerks also said they expect the leak to be discussed at the weekly meeting on Thursday, at which the justices typically finalize opinions in cases they’ve heard and choose cases to hear in the coming months. The spring normally is a tense time at the court, with major decisions looming that often reveal stark divisions and sometimes produce sharp words.

“I would be shocked if it doesn’t come up,” Wold said, adding that, given what has happened, the court would probably take additional precautions with drafts circulating in the future, including limiting who has access to them.

Kent Greenfield, a Boston University law professor who spent a year as a clerk to Souter, also speculated that the leak would be on the table Thursday. “Roberts is in a complete bind. He has to address it, but it doesn’t strike me that he has many options,” Greenfield said.
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Biden Congratulates Marcos on Philippines Election Win

U.S. President Joe Biden has congratulated Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for winning the presidential election in the Philippines.

The White House said Wednesday U.S. President Joe Biden called to congratulate Ferdinando Marcos Jr. for winning the presidential election in the Philippines. 

Marcos, who is colloquially known as “Bongbong,” claimed victory Wednesday as a near-complete initial count of votes put him far ahead of his closest challenger.

“President Biden underscored that he looks forward to working with the President-elect to continue strengthening the U.S.-Philippine Alliance, while expanding bilateral cooperation on a wide range of issues, including the fight against COVID-19, addressing the climate crisis, promoting broad-based economic growth, and respect for human rights,” the White House said in a statement.

Marcos’ father, Ferdinand, ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, and governed using martial law for nearly a decade. The elder Marcos was forced into exile at the end of his rule in a “People Power” revolution.
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