Reclaim Democracy!

Voting Rights: We Need Immediate Action AND Long-Term Strategy

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Last updated February 11, 2023

Pro-democracy groups are urging people to support at least three essential bills in Congress:

  • The Freedom to Vote Act (slated for reintroduction by May of 2023)
  • The John Lewis Voting Rights Act
  • The Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would grant voting rights to D.C. residents by making the District a state (the Supreme Court has shut down every other option). 

Each bill is truly necessary and urgent. We urge you to lobby your Senators for their immediate passage and do all you can to make your voice heard through other channels. Yet we are deeply concerned that the approach of focusing on legislative fixes alone does not capture the imagination of Americans and engage them to the degree we need. So, while we wholeheartedly urge passage of the three bills noted above, we also continue building support for a Right to Vote Amendment for three reasons:

  • We need one, clear, compelling message that overwhelming numbers of Americans can support and convey concisely: every citizen must have a right to vote and have their votes count equally.
  • While bills in Congress may change language, names, and even bill numbers, getting commitments from our legislators to support an affirmative right to vote will help hold them accountable to support all voting rights bills.
  • Crucially, advances made solely through legislation can be undone by Congress and by courts. If a neutral person were to look at our 1965 Voting Rights Act, they would conclude we have strong protections that would make many provisions of current legislation unnecessary. Yet the Supreme Court stripped the Voting Rights Act of meaning in 2013 and has become more anti-democratic in subsequent years. A constitutional Amendment expanding civil rights has never been revoked.

If you have not yet contacted both of your U.S. Senators on these bills, please do so today. Let them know the anti-democratic filibuster cannot be used as an excuse to enable the denial of voting rights. You can always reach any U.S. Senator or Representative’s D.C. office via the Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121. #NoMoreExcuses 

See the links above to great bill summaries by the Campaign Legal Center and Brennan Center. For more on the Washington, D.C. Admission Act and all current Senate sponsors, see D.C. Statehood Coalition.

Additional Resources

50+ Ways to Disenfranchise and Suppress Voters

Landmarks in Voting History & Law

Key Elements of a Right to Vote Amendment

Voter Suppression: It’s Not Just for Swing States Anymore

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By Jeff Milchen
First published by Writers on the Range, March 2021

Colorado’s elections are a bipartisan success story, so when Major League baseball responded to Georgia’s new voting restrictions by moving the All-Star Game to Denver, it made a fine choice.

More than 76% of eligible Coloradans voted in 2020 — second only to Minnesota in statewide turnout. Every registered voter gets a mail-in ballot weeks ahead of election day, there are convenient and safe drop boxes, and in-person voting is also available. People seem to love the choices.

Yet other Rocky Mountain states seem locked in competition to pass the most brazenly anti-democratic election laws.

Montana bills would eliminate Election Day voter registration (now passed) and impose new restrictions on absentee voting. In Wyoming, many lawmakers seek to abolish voting by mail entirely.

Hold my beer, says Arizona. Following Democrats’ success in federal races last fall, GOP legislators unleashed a barrage of bills restricting voting, of which seven are advancing through the legislature. Those measures include requiring absentee voters to get their ballots notarized and banning practices that don’t even exist in Arizona, such as automatic voter registration and Election Day registration.

And in Idaho, GOP state House Majority Leader Mike Moyle said, “Voting shouldn’t be easy,” when introducing a bill to make it a felony to collect and return multiple ballots on behalf of others.

While the most extreme measures may fail, still harmful bills remain, showing the need for federal protection of political rights. U.S. election overseers called November’s contests the most secure in history, yet “stolen election” claims still get pushed to justify rules changes. The first three months of 2021 saw legislators across 47 states introduce more than 360 restrictive bills encompassing dozens of voter suppression tactics.

Obstacles to voting impact people of color most heavily, and in the Interior West, Native Americans are the primary casualty. The 65,000-plus votes cast in the Arizona portion of Navajo Nation overwhelmingly favored President Joe Biden in 2020 and easily exceeded his statewide victory margin. In Tohono O’odham Nation, bordering Mexico, about 90% of ballots went for Biden.

It’s no accident that indigenous voters would be most inconvenienced or deterred by the four Arizona bills that would create new obstacles for absentee voters. The sheer size of the Navajo Reservation — 27,000 square miles spanning three states — makes in-person voting difficult.

Multiple studies have found that mail-in voting has been politically neutral. And despite being dragged down in federal elections last year by a historically unpopular candidate atop the ticket, Republicans dominated state elections and made a net gain in Congressional seats.

Meanwhile, more than 500 state bills were introduced this year to improve voter protections and strengthen procedures, including every West Coast and Plains state but Kansas. Kentucky just proved it possible to pass a bipartisan law that both improves election security and protects voters.

But stopping disenfranchisement of vulnerable groups requires federal reform. For decades, our Voting Rights Act required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval for new voting laws, ensuring they had no discriminatory purpose or effect. In practice, the law protected citizens in every state.

In 2006, an overwhelming Congressional majority (and a unanimous Senate) extended the Voting Rights Act for 25 years. But in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts — who worked to restrict ballot access prior to his judicial career — joined the 5-4 Supreme Court majority to gut key protections of the law.

The ruling enabled states to resume voter suppression tactics, which Texas did within hours.

In response, the House of Representatives recently passed the “For the People Act,” potentially the most important voting rights advance since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Now in the Senate, the bill would expand and secure ballot access, increase election security and reduce the power of money over elections.

With not a single Republican supporting the House bill, however, the bill is doomed unless the filibuster is ended. Even if the Act passed, one more task remains: passing a constitutional Amendment that embeds an affirmative right to vote and ensures our votes count equally.

For as long as our ability to vote depends on the state we live in, and the political party controlling it, voting is merely a vulnerable privilege, not a right.

Jeff Milchen (@JMilchen) founded Reclaim Democracy!, which works to expand voting rights and democracy nationwide. This commentary appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune, Las Vegas Sun, Anchorage Press, Grand Junction Sentinel, Aspen Daily News, Logan Herald-Journal, Twin Falls Times, Casper Star Tribune, Rock Springs Rocket Miner, Explore Big Sky, Vail Daily, Montrose Daily Press, Delta County Independent, Craig Daily Press, Big Horn County News, St. George Spectrum, Curry Coastal Pilot, Wyofile, Moab Times Independent, Del Norte Triplicate, and Bandon Western World.

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Montana GOP’s Annulment of Voters Shows the Urgent Need for Federal Protections

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If Montana’s legislature sought to prove the need for Congress to enact federal voting rights protections, mission: accomplished. 

Just six years after Montanans voted overwhelmingly to keep Election Day registration, Republican legislators rendered citizens’ votes meaningless and revoked the opportunity 12,000 voters used to register in 2016, comprising 2.3% of the statewide vote.

The GOP also attacked the freedom of citizens to have someone else deliver or mail their ballot. The people most impacted are Montana’s 78,000 Native Americans, most of whom live on rural reservations. Many residents lack home mail service and travel to distant polling locations is costly in both time and money, so requiring a special trip just to register is a sure tactic to prevent some people from registering. 

The new restrictions on ballot collection reprise a law already struck down in Montana last year. The Western Native Voice v Stapleton ruling declared obstacles for Indigenous voters, “…are simply too high and too burdensome to remain the law.” Disability Rights Montana also denounced the law’s harm to their constituents.

Governor Gianforte and Republicans know their attacks on voters will generate more lawsuits and cost Montana taxpayers, but like local control, fiscal responsibility is just a talking point, not a real principle.

In a separate bill, Republicans manipulated our voter ID law for partisan advantage, so a secure student ID from the University of Montana is no longer sufficient, but a handgun license, whose owners skew Republican, is just fine. 

Montana GOP elephant dung

More anti-democracy bills were crammed in with no chance for meaningful citizen input, including laws that would turn Montana judges into partisan politicians, invite the Attorney General to inject political bias into ballot initiative wording, and interfere with independent redistricting.

Many Democrats claim the GOP can’t win without suppressing voters, but Montana disproves that theory. Republicans dominated the state in free and fair elections last year — they simply reject the core democratic principles of our republic.

Montana is one of many states where Republicans obstruct voting by people of color, students, and any demographic group they fear. For decades, our Voting Rights Act (VRA) required federal approval for election law changes in states with records of disenfranchisement tactics, dissuading abuses nationwide.

In 2006, almost all Congressional Republicans, and every U.S. Senator, joined Democrats to extend the VRA by 25 years. But in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts — who led campaigns attacking the VRA prior to becoming a judge — led a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court in gutting the law.

Now, Republicans are exploiting their own seditious lies to introduce more than 360 voter suppression bills, encompassing at least 49 distinct tactics!

Defending our votes from these attacks again requires federal action. While the John Lewis Voting Rights Act protects against many disenfranchisement tactics, the For the People Act (FPA) creates standards for fair election processes. The FPA, already passed by the House of Representatives, would expand and secure ballot access, increase election security, and reduce the power of money over elections. An overwhelming majority of Americans support these reforms, yet Congressional GOP members remain loyal to conspiracy theories, rather than their own constituents.  

No progress can occur unless the filibuster is eliminated or at least one GOP Senator decides democracy is more important than partisanship. Senator Daines has yet to renounce his “stolen election” claims, but we should persist in demanding he serve Montanans, rather than the extremists dragging the Republican Party into the sewer.

Finally, we must recognize a hard truth: as long as our ability to vote depends on who controls the state we live in, voting is merely a vulnerable privilege and not a right. Ultimately, we must amend our Constitution to embed an affirmative right to vote and ensure our votes count equally. 

The writer, Jeff Milchen, founded the Montana-based Reclaim Democracy!, which works to secure voting rights and empower citizens. Follow him on Twitter: @JMilchen

More Voting Rights Resources

How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners

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By Dana Mattioli
First published in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 23, 2020

Jeff Bezos built Amazon.com Inc. from his garage with an underdog’s ambition to take on the establishment. He imbued staff with an obsession to grow fast by grabbing customers using the biggest selection and lowest prices. Today, he has more than 1.1 million employees and a market valuation around $1.6 trillion.

But Amazon never really grew up. Mr. Bezos still runs it with the drive of a startup trying to survive.

That ethos helps keep Amazon booming. Aggressive competition—including wresting market share from rivals—is often a hallmark of a successful business. It’s also why the tech-and-retail giant is the target of rivals, regulators and politicians who say its tactics are unfair for a company its size, and potentially illegal. As the company has grown, so has its capacity to take on an ever-growing array of competitors.

Bull Market
To keep customers happy, which Mr. Bezos has long said is Amazon’s fixation and growth strategy, executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike—an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear.

No competitor is too small to draw Amazon’s sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon’s site, hurting the vendor’s sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm’s owner said. Amazon said it didn’t violate the company’s intellectual-property rights.

When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair Inc., Mr. Bezos’s deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter.

Amazon set its sights on Allbirds Inc., the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds’ bestseller—without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price.

“You can’t help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you’ve put your career against,” said Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger. “You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us.”

An Amazon spokesman said the company’s shoe didn’t infringe on Allbirds’ design, adding that the company has previously said: “Offering products inspired by the trends to which customers are responding is a common practice across the retail industry.”

This year, Amazon has zeroed in on Shopify Inc., a fast-growing Canadian company that helps small merchants create online shops. Amazon has established a secret team, “Project Santos,” to replicate parts of Shopify’s business model, said people familiar with the project.

Amazon executives often initiated efforts like these on their own, though in some cases examined by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bezos himself was involved, according to former Amazon executives and internal emails.

From its start as an online bookstore 26 years ago, Amazon has expanded into an online retailer with a presence in nearly every major category. It is also the leading provider of cloud-computing services, a gadget maker, a major entertainment player and a rival to United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. Mr. Bezos is the world’s richest man, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $187 billion.

He still exhorts employees to consider Amazon a startup. “It is always day one,” he likes to say. Day two is “stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death.” Mr. Bezos originally considered calling his company Relentless, and www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon’s site.

Mr. Bezos declined to be interviewed. Amazon declined to provide an overall comment on the topic of this article and responded only to specific examples.

Some rivals and partners say Amazon’s competitive zeal looks like unfair practices. The Journal this year reported that Amazon employees used data about independent sellers on its platform to develop competing products and that it has used the investment and deal-making process in ways that entrepreneurs and others said helped it develop products that competed with its would-be partners. Journal reporting showed how Amazon has limited some competitors’ ability to promote rival streaming devices and other gadgets on its dominant e-commerce platform.

Mr. Bezos in July testimony to the House Antitrust Subcommittee about the Journal’s private-label article, said: “I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.” The Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it in the mergers-and-acquisitions and venture-capital processes to build competing products. Amazon didn’t directly address the question of whether it hobbles rivals’ marketing, saying it is common practice among retailers to choose which products they promote.

The Justice Department last year launched a broad investigation of the market power of large technology companies including Amazon, and the Federal Trade Commission has oversight of Amazon as part of a broader look into the business practices of big tech. Europe’s antitrust regulators last month charged Amazon with violating competition law. Amazon said it disagreed with the allegations and would continue to engage with the commission.

In October, the House Antitrust Subcommittee concluded a 16-month investigation into tech companies with a report accusing Amazon of exerting “monopoly power” over sellers on its website. “It’s very clear that they use the enormous market power that they have to maintain dominance,” Rep. David Cicilline (D., R.I.), chairman of the subcommittee, said in an interview.

Amazon has denied exerting monopoly power. In response to the investigation, it published a blog post saying that “large companies are not dominant by definition, and the presumption that success can only be the result of anti-competitive behavior is simply wrong.”

Amazon’s version
At its height about a decade ago, Pirate Trading LLC was selling more than $3.5 million a year of its Ravelli-brand camera tripods—one of its bestselling products—on Amazon, said owner Dalen Thomas.

In 2011, Amazon began launching its own versions of six of Pirate Trading’s top-selling tripods under its AmazonBasics label, he said. Mr. Thomas ordered one of the Amazon tripods and found it had the same components and shared Pirate Trading’s design. For its AmazonBasics products, Amazon used the same manufacturer that Pirate Trading had used.

Amazon priced one of its clone tripods below what Mr. Thomas paid his manufacturer to have Pirate Trading’s version made, he said. He determined it would be cheaper to buy Amazon’s versions, repackage and resell them than to buy and sell them on the terms he had been getting; he decided not to do that.

Amazon suspended Pirate Trading camera tripod models that competed with the AmazonBasics versions repeatedly, Mr. Thomas said, alleging his tripods had authenticity issues. Amazon rarely suspended the tripod models that didn’t compete with AmazonBasics versions, he said. In 2015, Amazon suspended all Ravelli products, he said, and even though the suspension ended, his company’s tripod business is now a fraction of the size it was. Mr. Thomas said he found being a seller on Amazon too risky and has largely pivoted to real-estate investing.

Several Amazon sellers said they have received notifications from Amazon, which has been battling fraud and fake goods on its platform, that say their products are used or counterfeit. Amazon suspends their selling accounts until they can prove that the products are legitimate, which can cause big sellers to lose tens of thousands of dollars each day, they said.

To turn their accounts back on, Amazon often requests that the sellers provide details on who manufactures their product along with invoices from the manufacturer so that Amazon can verify authenticity. Several sellers told the Journal they provided those details to Amazon to get their accounts reinstated, only for Amazon to introduce its own version of their products using the same manufacturer.

The Amazon spokesman said the company requests invoices when there is a counterfeit claim and doesn’t use information it requests about a seller’s manufacturer to procure private-label products.

CJ Rosenbaum, a lawyer who works on behalf of Amazon sellers, said some of them use intermediary “black box” factories to hide suppliers’ identities from Amazon: “They get the finished goods and ship them to a black-box factory who will ship their products to Amazon.”

‘Held as a prisoner’
More than half of all product searches start on Amazon’s search bar, according to some estimates, making it the de facto place for product discovery. For many sellers, Amazon represents the majority of their revenues.

“It’s literally like being held as a prisoner with Amazon,” said Billy Carmen, a Holly, Mich., seller of patio products, “and because of that there’s no place else companies like us can go to sell our products. Amazon uses that against us.”

The 62-year-old in late April sent Amazon invoices from his manufacturer because his account was under threat of suspension for counterfeit claims, even though he makes the product in question. He worries about the level of information Amazon has about his supply chain, though so far he hasn’t seen any Amazon-branded imitations on the site.

Mr. Bezos set out to make Amazon a destination where consumers can find everything they want and continues that push. “If a company is offering something that Amazon thinks they can do better, or can do less expensively, then they will try to do it,” said Patrick Winters, an Amazon Prime Video manager who left this summer to work for Albertsons Cos. after more than a decade at Amazon.

“That was Amazon’s philosophy from the start,” Mr. Winters said, “to basically have everything a customer wants even if it’s something only a few customers want.”

Quidsi, parent of Diapers.com and Soap.com, became a target a decade ago, when Amazon set up a team to focus on it, according to emails released as part of congressional hearings. Amazon wanted to know how the New Jersey e-commerce company could deliver bulky packages of diapers so quickly, said people familiar with the matter.

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Amazon in 2009 developed a 12-step plan to take on Quidsi, according to the emails released by Congress. Action items in emails included “Beat or meet Diapers.com’s delivery speed” and “Beat or meet Diapers.com’s 6PM order time cutoff.” An internal email that year from a top Amazon retail executive called Quidsi “our #1 short term competitor,” and said: “we need to match pricing on these guys no matter what the cost.”

In a June 2010 email chain that included Mr. Bezos, a senior executive laid out tactics, saying “We have already initiated a more aggressive ‘plan to win’ against diapers.com in the diaper/baby space,” a plan that included doubling Amazon’s discounts on diapers and baby wipes to 30% off, and a free Prime program for new moms.

When Amazon cut diaper prices by 30%, Quidsi executives were shocked and ran an analysis that determined Amazon was losing $7 for every box of diapers, former Quidsi board members said. Senior Quidsi executives were even more surprised when, the day of the price cuts, Jeff Blackburn, a top lieutenant to Mr. Bezos, approached a Quidsi board member saying the company should sell itself to Amazon, said a person familiar with the matter. At that point, Quidsi wasn’t for sale and had big growth plans.

Editor’s Note: What’s described here — selling at a loss to eliminate a competitor is illegal, but. Like most corporate crime, has been ignored by Democratic and Republican administration’s alike. (Individual prosecution decisions theoretically are made by non-partisan civil servants.) Remarkably, the website of the Federal Trade Commision claims “Instances of a large firm using low prices to drive smaller competitors out of the market in hopes of raising prices after they leave are rare.” And racism no longer exists, either.

While the reporting here is excellent overall, we should ask why the media almost never seeks statements from those whose job it is to prosecute such crimes and ask their reasons for not enforcing the law).

Quidsi started to unravel after Amazon’s price cuts, said Leonard Lodish, a Quidsi board member at the time, missing its internal monthly projections for the first time since 2005. The company felt it had no choice but to sell itself because it couldn’t compete with what Amazon was doing and survive. Amazon bought Quidsi in 2010 for about $500 million. It shut down Diapers.com in 2017, saying it was unprofitable.

“What Amazon did was against the law. They were selling diapers for below cost,” said Mr. Lodish. “But what were we going to do? Sue Amazon for antitrust? It would take years and tens of millions of dollars and we’d be bankrupt by then.”

The Amazon spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of the Quidsi acquisition, saying Diapers.com wasn’t profitable when Amazon acquired it. Mr. Blackburn declined to comment.

Wayfair Parity Team
In 2016, Wayfair was an online retailer of furniture such as coffee tables and nightstands with $3.4 billion in revenue that year, compared with Amazon’s $136 billion. Amazon had less furniture selection than Wayfair, and its so-called S-team of senior vice presidents—some directly under Mr. Bezos—made the market a priority, said the people who worked on the team.

That year, Amazon launched its Wayfair Parity Team, which analyzed Wayfair’s business with the goal of eventually selling on Amazon 90% of furniture Wayfair offered, the people said. The team grew to around 100 people. It struggled to find Wayfair’s suppliers. Wary of competitors, Wayfair was buying items from manufacturers and rebranding them to mask their identity, said the people.

The team eventually identified the manufacturers by ordering Wayfair products to check manufacturing information and by going to trade shows to find Wayfair’s suppliers, they said.

Images from court documents show the West Elm Orb chair listing, left, and the Amazon Orb

In March 2018, Amazon began selling an “Upholstered Orb Office Chair” under its Rivet brand. 

Amazon didn’t stop Wayfair’s growth. The smaller company increased its share of online furniture sales in the U.S. to 25% last year from under 18% in 2016, according to market-research company 1010data—although Wayfair’s net loss also widened during the period. Amazon’s market share stayed steady, at just over half of online furniture sales, including its direct sales and those of outside vendors on its platform.

In the most recent quarter, Wayfair’s revenue grew 66.5% and the company posted its second consecutive quarterly profit after straight quarterly losses since its 2014 market debut.

The Amazon spokesman, while declining to comment on the Wayfair Parity Team, said part of earning customer loyalty is making selection and pricing as good or better than competitors’.

Williams-Sonoma Inc. successfully fought back against Amazon, which it claimed had copied a chair sold by its West Elm brand, known for its midcentury-modern furniture style. West Elm’s distinctive-looking orb dining chair was a particular hit, with more than $2 million in sales in the first 10 months of 2018, according to a complaint Williams-Sonoma filed in a lawsuit against Amazon over the incident, alleging patent infringement. In 2017, West Elm had filed a patent for the design of the chair.

The “Amazon Orb Chair is so highly similar that the ordinary observer would be confused by the imitation,” said the complaint. Williams-Sonoma’s complaint identified other furniture items that Amazon’s private-label team launched that looked nearly identical to designs it began selling earlier, including a coffee table and a few lamps.

Amazon removed the items from its website and settled the lawsuit in October, with a favorable outcome for West Elm, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon and Williams-Sonoma declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Powerful tool
In targeting competitors, Amazon’s private-label team has access to a powerful tool: Amazon’s database of search terms customers frequently use. The team can add those terms to their product descriptions and detail pages to gain a boost on Amazon’s search engine, some former Amazon private-label employees said.

When employees on Amazon’s private-label team in 2017 launched its Goodthreads line of apparel such as military jackets and chino pants, they sought to create an aesthetic similar to that of J.Crew, one of the former employees said. Parent company J.Crew Group for years avoided selling on Amazon. J.Crew’s then-Chairman Mickey Drexler in a 2017 conference said he wouldn’t sell on Amazon because: “No. 1, they own the customer” and would “take every bestseller and put it into their private label collection.”

So the Goodthreads managers took steps to help searches for “J.Crew” show results that included Goodthreads, according to the person. Goodthreads is now one of Amazon’s top 10 private-label brands, according to e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

The Amazon spokesman said Goodthreads targets an aesthetic common among multiple brands and isn’t unique to J.Crew. J.Crew declined to comment.

Shoe seller Allbirds, too, refused persistent Amazon efforts to get it to sell on the tech giant’s site, said Mr. Zwillinger, the co-CEO. The San Francisco startup launched its first shoe, “Wool Runner,” in 2016. It was the product of three years of research and development, using fabric from an Italian mill and a sole that was “carbon neutral,” produced with a Brazilian chemical company.

The lightweight shoe became an instant success. Amazon consistently contacted Allbirds between 2017 and 2019 to sell on its site, said Mr. Zwillinger. Allbirds always declined.

Allbirds’ team in mid-2017 began noticing that, on Google’s search engine, the top results for “Wool Runner” were knockoffs from outside vendors on Amazon, Mr. Zwillinger said. Allbirds believed Amazon was buying advertisements on Google to siphon demand for the shoes to itself, he said.

Mr. Zwillinger said it isn’t possible to track the damage to his company, but that “to see a company with the deep pockets of Amazon try to siphon off demand and give it to copycats is really frustrating.”

Then came the Galen shoe. Mr. Zwillinger said he believes search data guided Amazon’s decision to clone his hit product, which he said looks “eerily similar” to his shoe.

“I’m not saying whether they did or didn’t infringe. We didn’t get a lawyer involved,” he said. Because of Amazon’s size, he said, “it seems like that’s going to be an uphill battle that’s not worth fighting.”

Amazon’s Galen shoe.
The Amazon spokesman said that the company didn’t target Allbirds on Google advertising and that it was obvious wool shoes were trending.

Now, Amazon is targeting one of the biggest pandemic beneficiaries, Shopify, a platform that helps bricks-and-mortar stores set up online shops. With the coronavirus causing store shutdowns, many smaller retailers have invested in creating online stores using Shopify’s technology.

Small retailers on Shopify had aggregate sales of $5.1 billion over Black Friday weekend, topping Amazon’s $4.8 billion from its third-party sellers. Amazon won’t disclose how much it made in sales from its first-party business where it buys inventory and resells it. The 14-year-old Shopify’s share price has roughly tripled over the past year.

Amazon had largely dismissed the Canadian company internally, said employees on and off the project, but that has changed over the past year now that it looks like a significant threat. “It’s super high on our radar,” said one of the people.

At roundtables with its sellers, the people said, Amazon has learned that many had been defecting to Shopify because of increasing fees from Amazon, which on average collects 30% of each sale on its platform from outside vendors, up from 19% five years ago, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Shopify collects 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction.

Earlier this year, Amazon created a top-secret task force dedicated to studying the Canadian company and copying parts of it, said the employees. To lead the team, Amazon tapped Peter Larsen, a longtime executive and vice president, consumer. Mr. Larsen recruited dozens of executives, who have signed nondisclosure agreements to work on the project. Internal chat boards are filled with other Amazon employees digging for information on “Project Santos,” the employees said.

Amazon and Mr. Larsen declined to comment on Project Santos. Shopify didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In October, the team presented its work to Mr. Bezos, who was enthusiastic that the project could help stem the defection of sellers to its Canadian rival, said the employees. Amazon hasn’t launched the project yet, they said.

Mr. Larsen’s direct reports have cryptic descriptions in their LinkedIn profiles about what they are working on. One lists “new things on the horizon,” while another writes “Good things are happening.”

Sebastian Herrera contributed to this article. Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

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Ohio’s Chief Justice Rips Republican Attempts to Undermine Judiciary

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Statement by Justice Maureen O’Connor (Republican), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, on September 16, 2020

I condemn in the strongest possible terms both the statement released by the Ohio Republican Party on September 15, 2020, and its unsigned authors. The statement disparages the integrity of Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Richard Frye. The publication accuses Judge Frye of colluding with the Ohio Democratic Party and labels him a “partisan judge.”

Every one of Ohio’s 722 judges, 800 magistrates, and numerous active-retired judges should be greatly concerned and voice their dismay at the irresponsible Republican Party allegation that politics controlled the judge’s decision. This is a blatant and unfounded attack on the independence of the Ohio judiciary. Contrary to the statements in this, disgraceful, deceitful piece, judges don’t decide cases based on partisanship. That would be easy. It is also a mistake to say that there is not a legitimate case in controversy. The only thing clear about this matter is that the law is not clear, and it remains to be seen what the ultimate interpretation of the statute will be.

To accuse a judge of deciding the matter before him on partisan politics and further accuse the judge of “obstruction of his judicial responsibility” is without merit and is meant to further the false narrative that judges have no conscience, no legal responsibilities, and no capacity to decide what the law is beyond the raw politics of the issue.

The Republican Party’s statement should be seen for what it is: part of a continuing string of attacks against any decision that doesn’t favor a political end, regardless of party, even if that decision may be legally correct and indeed legally required. I will not address the merits of the lower court’s decision. The case may very well find its way to the Supreme Court of Ohio, and I would be asked to weigh in then. I will retain my independence and sit on the Court to hear the matter if it does. Attacks on the judiciary only serve to undermine the public’s confidence in the courts. Attacks such as these, no matter the source, reflect poorly, not on the judiciary, but on the leadership of those who would perpetrate them. 

Below is the attack by the Ohio Republican Party to which Justice O’Connor responded.

Trump knew coronavirus was deadly and highly contagious while intentionally misleading Americans

by

By Robert Costa
First published September 9, 2020 in The Washington Post 

President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China.

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear, and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air.

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.

Aside from exploring Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” covers race relations, diplomacy with North Korea and a range of other issues that have arisen during the past two years.

The book also includes brutal assessments of Trump’s conduct from former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats and others.

The book is based in part on 18 on-the-record interviews Woodward conducted with the president between December and July. Woodward writes that other quotes in the book were acquired through “deep background” conversations with sources in which information is divulged and exchanges recounted without sources being named.

“Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states,” Woodward writes. “There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced.”

Woodward questioned Trump repeatedly about the national reckoning on racial injustice. On June 3, two days after federal agents forcibly removed peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square to make way for Trump to stage a photo opportunity outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, Trump called Woodward to boast about his “law and order” stance.

“We’re going to get ready to send in the military slash National Guard to some of these poor bastards that don’t know what they’re doing, these poor radical lefts,” Trump said.

In a second conversation, on June 19, Woodward asked the president about White privilege, noting that they were both White men of the same generation who had privileged upbringings. Woodward suggested that they had a responsibility to better “understand the anger and pain” felt by Black Americans.

“No,” Trump replied, his voice described by Woodward as mocking and incredulous. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

As Woodward pressed Trump to understand the plight of Black Americans after generations of discrimination, inequality and other atrocities, the president kept answering by pointing to economic numbers such as the pre-pandemic unemployment rate for Blacks and claiming, as he often has publicly, that he has done more for Blacks than any president except perhaps Abraham Lincoln.

In another conversation about race, on July 8, Trump complained about his lack of support among Black voters. “I’ve done a tremendous amount for the Black community,” he told Woodward. “And, honestly, I’m not feeling any love.”

They spoke again about race relations on June 22, when Woodward asked Trump whether he thinks there is “systemic or institutional racism in this country.”

“Well, I think there is everywhere,” Trump said. “I think probably less here than most places. Or less here than many places.”

Asked by Woodward whether racism “is here” in the United States in a way that affects people’s lives, Trump replied, “I think it is. And it’s unfortunate. But I think it is.”

Trump shared with Woodward visceral reactions to several prominent Democrats of color. Upon seeing a shot of Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, calmly and silently watching him deliver his State of the Union address, Trump remarked, “Hate! See the hate! See the hate!” Trump used the same phrase after an expressionless Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) appeared in the frame.

Trump was dismissive about former president Barack Obama and told Woodward he was inclined to refer to him by his first and middle names, “Barack Hussein,” but wouldn’t in his company to be “very nice.”

“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump told Woodward. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.” Trump added that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thought Obama was “an asshole.”

“Rage” includes the first-reported excerpts of letters Trump exchanged with Kim, and quotes Trump in his interviews with Woodward using expletives to defend their pen-pal relationship. Even as U.S. intelligence chiefs warn that North Korea is unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons and that Trump’s approach is ineffective, the president told Woodward he is determined to stay the course and dismissively says the CIA has “no idea” how to handle North Korea.

“I met. Big fucking deal,” Trump told Woodward, waving off criticism of his three face-to-face meetings with Kim. “It takes me two days. I met. I gave up nothing.”

Foreign affairs experts say Trump gave up much — including by postponing and then scaling back the U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea that had long angered North Korea, as well as by granting Kim the international stature and legitimacy the North Korean regime has long craved.

Trump told Woodward he evaluates Kim and his nuclear arsenal like a real estate target: “It’s really like, you know, somebody that’s in love with a house and they just can’t sell it.”

Kim welcomed Trump’s overtures with over-the-top prose in letters. Kim wrote that he wanted “another historic meeting between myself and Your Excellency reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.” And he said his meetings with Trump were a “precious memory” that underscored how the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force.”

In another letter, Kim wrote to Trump, “I feel pleased to have formed good ties with such a powerful and preeminent statesman as Your Excellency.” And in yet another, Kim reflected on “that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day.”

Trump was taken with Kim’s flattery, Woodward writes, telling the author pridefully that Kim had addressed him as “Excellency.” Trump remarked that he was awestruck meeting Kim for the first time in 2018 in Singapore, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,” and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump also boasted to Woodward that Kim “tells me everything,” including a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.

Trump did not share his letters to Kim — “those are so top secret,” the president said — though Woodward writes that Trump sent Kim a copy of the New York Times featuring a picture of the two men on the front page. “Chairman, great picture of you, big time,” Trump wrote on the paper in marker. (Trump falsely boasted to Woodward, “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”)

Trump reflected on his relationships with authoritarian leaders generally, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

In the midst of reflecting upon how close the United States had come in 2017 to war with North Korea, Trump revealed, “I have built a nuclear — a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody — what we have is incredible.”

Woodward writes that anonymous sources later confirmed that the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system, but they would not provide details, and that the sources were surprised Trump had disclosed it.

The book documents private grumblings, periods of exasperation and wrestling about whether to quit among the so-called adults of the Trump orbit: Mattis, Coats and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied, “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Woodward describes Coats’s experience as especially tortured. Coats, a former senator from Indiana, was recruited into the administration by Vice President Pence, and his wife is quoted as recalling a dinner at the White House when she interacted with Pence.

“I just looked at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” Marsha Coats said, according to Woodward. “I just looked at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’ ”

Pence was the president’s one constant booster publicly and privately in Woodward’s book. When Coats considered resigning because of Trump’s handling of Russia, Pence urged him to “look on the positive side of things that he’s done. More attention on that. You can’t go.”

The loathing was mutual. “Not to mention my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals,” Trump told White House trade adviser Peter Navarro at one point, according to Woodward.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is quoted by Woodward as saying, “The most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots,” which Woodward interprets as a reference to Mattis, Tillerson and former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn.

Kushner was a frequent target of ire among Trump’s Cabinet members, who saw him as untrustworthy and weak in dealing with heads of states. Tillerson found Kushner’s warm dealings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “nauseating to watch. It was stomach churning,” according to Woodward.

Kushner is quoted extensively in the book ruminating about his father-in-law and presidential power. Woodward writes that Kushner advised people that one of the most important guiding texts to understand the Trump presidency was “Alice in Wonderland,” a novel about a young girl who falls through a rabbit hole. He singled out the Cheshire cat, whose strategy was endurance and persistence, not direction.

The book charts the Trump administration’s failings and missteps on the pandemic, including the decisions and actions of Pottinger, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci and others.

Fauci at one point tells others that the president “is on a separate channel” and unfocused in meetings, with “rudderless” leadership, according to Woodward. “His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said, according to Woodward. “His sole purpose is to get reelected.”

In one Oval Office meeting recounted by Woodward, after Trump had made false statements in a news briefing, Fauci said in front of him: “We can’t let the president be out there being vulnerable, saying something that’s going to come back and bite him.” Pence, Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller tensed up at once, Woodward writes, surprised Fauci would talk to Trump that way.

Woodward describes Fauci as particularly disappointed in Kushner for talking like a cheerleader as if everything was great. In June, as the virus was spreading wildly coast to coast and case numbers soared in Arizona, Florida, Texas and other states, Kushner said of Trump, “The goal is to get his head from governing to campaigning.”

Woodward writes that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) suggested former president George W. Bush speak personally with Trump about global vaccine efforts, but that Bush demurred.

“No. No,” Bush told Graham, according to Woodward. “He’d misconstrue anything I said.”

In their final interview, on July 21, Trump vented to Woodward, “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault.”

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