11:30 a.m. - DWC luncheon meeting HOLIDAY CELEBRATION at Bent Pine.
Thursday, December 15, 2022
6 p.m. - Democratic Club Holiday Party Potluck Dinner at the Irish-American Club
Friday, December 16, 2022
11:30 a.m. - Taxpayer’s Association Awards and Holiday Banquet at the Vero Beach Yacht Club. Reservations for lunch are required and can be made via their website.
Democrats of Indian River
Democratic Women’s Club
Friday, December 2, 2022
2:00-4:00 p.m. - DWC Book Group will meet at the Indian River County Brackett Library at 6155 College Lane. “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” by Jane Goodall will be reviewed. Any questions about the book group can be addressed to Maryann and Rita at [email protected]
Saturday, December 10, 2022
11:30 a.m. - DWC luncheon meeting HOLIDAY CELEBRATION at Bent Pine. There will be a raffle of gift prizes & a musical performance by Linn Kezer and Margretta Fosse. Please RSVP with your meal choice of entree to [email protected]. The cost is $25, payable at the door by check or cash. Buttermilk Fried Chicken Breast, Grilled Mahi Mahi, or Vegetarian. Non-members may attend as a guest. Questions to Julie Barone at (718) 916-0682.
Democratic Club of Indian River
Thursday, December 15, 2022
6 p.m. - Democratic Club Holiday Party Potluck Dinner at the Irish-American Club at 1314 at 20th St, Vero Beach 32960. Please contact Caryl Zook, Democratic Club Secretary at [email protected] for more info and to add your dish to the list.
Toys for Tots
The Democrats of Indian River are now collecting toys to donate to Toys for Tots Vero Beach. We collect toys every year at our office at
2345 14th Ave in Vero Beach and at our annual Holiday Party on December 15th.
The developer promised other upgrades to infrastructure further away from the site “at no cost to the county," according to Development Chief Ryan Sweeney. "So those will be straight donations."
No cost?
These upgrades will do nothing to ease the traffic congestion, especially while they are under construction. The water table, the river, the schools and the roads, which are already overburdened, can’t handle all this new development.
More high-income housing without any new low-income housing in sight.
So, all the new services that these people require, will also require people to provide them and they most likely will have a hard time finding a local place to buy or rent.
I had to run a two-mile errand last week and it took 45 minutes. Good thing there’s no cost.
Dave Habel, Vero Beach
LOCAL
Property taxes will go up this year; How are local governments spending your money?
Treasure Coast municipalities are benefitting from a hot real estate market that’s boosted taxable-property values in the last year, and along with them, the amount of money available for public operations and services.
The new budget year for Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin counties started Oct. 1, and all three governments approved budgets with a combined total of $1.7 billion, a 6.3% increase from last year. As a result, officials voted to slightly decrease property-tax rates in two out of the three unincorporated areas of the Treasure Coast despite inflation still impacting budgets.
Still, no county chopped its tax rate to the "roll-back rate," a move which would have kept most tax bills the same as last year.
Keeping the same tax rate as last year almost guarantees tax increases for those whose properties increased in value.
Among most of the municipalities across the region, only Vero Beach raised its property-tax rate for 2022-23 — and with it, the community's taxes — in the face of financial obstacles Floridians face such as high prices for gas, groceries and homeowners insurance.
Here’s how city and county governments are spending their tax dollars in the 2022-23 fiscal year:
Indian River County
Indian River County kept its tax rate unchanged this year after seeing a 13.5% increase in its tax roll, records show. That means about a 3.7% increase in property taxes for property owners — or an increase of about $47 for the owner of a $274,300 home.
That's expected to generate an additional $9.4 million this year for the county, which will pay for significant increases in several areas.
“The main priority, it was public safety this year,” said county Budget Director Kristin Daniels.
The Sheriff’s Office is getting $7.25 million more than last year, or a 12% increase, records show. Sheriff Eric Flowers had asked for an additional $11 million.
The increase is typical for the Sheriff’s Office, Daniels said, but providing more than 12% would have meant raising property taxes.
With the larger budget, Flowers will give salary increases, hire 29 new employees and pay for school resource officers.
Conservation was another priority, Daniels said. The county is opening four new conservation areas this year: Jones Pier Conservation Area, Oyster Bar Marsh Conservation Area, Kroegel Homestead and Hallstrom Farmstead.
It’s putting about $116,000 toward two new positions in the Conservations Land division, partly to help manage the new parks.
Vero Beach stood out by increasing its tax rate by 20 cents per $1,000 of taxable property value - to $2.70 from last year's $2.50.
The City Council's approval will fund 5% salary increases for city employees and will help compensate for the end of money the city received from the 2018 sale of its electric utility.
A portion of the $185 million received from Florida Power & Light Co. for the utility helped offset losing the money the city received from utility customers' bills, said city Finance Director Cindy Lawson.
Vero Beach set aside $500,000 initially for this year’s lost revenue, but now it will need closer to $1 million, she said.
Oath Keepers Leaders Convicted of Sedition in Landmark Jan. 6 Case
A jury in federal court in Washington convicted Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia, and Kelly Meggs, who ran the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers at the time the Capitol was stormed in a plot to keep Donald Trump in power. Rhodes and Meggs were convicted of sedition.
Three other defendants who played lesser roles in the planning for Jan. 6 — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — were found not guilty of sedition. The jury in Federal District Court in Washington found three other defendants in the case not guilty of sedition and acquitted Rhodes of two separate conspiracy charges. The split verdicts, coming after three days of deliberations, were a landmark — if not total — victory for the Justice Department, which poured enormous effort into prosecuting Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants.
The sedition convictions marked the first time in nearly 20 trials related to the Capitol attack that a jury had decided that the violence that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, was the product of an organized conspiracy.
Seditious conspiracy is the most serious charge brought so far in any of the 900 criminal cases stemming from the vast investigation of the Capitol attack, an inquiry that could still result in scores, if not hundreds, of additional arrests. Rhodes, 57, was also found guilty of obstructing the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 and of destroying evidence in the case. On those three counts, he faces a maximum of 60 years in prison.
Nearly two years after the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 and what led up to them remain at the center of American politics and the subject of multiple investigations, including an inquiry by the Justice Department into any criminal culpability that Trump and some of his allies might face and an exhaustive account being assembled by a House select committee.
The conviction of Rhodes underscored the seriousness and intensity of the effort by pro-Trump forces to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, and was the highest-profile legal reckoning yet from a case related to Jan. 6.
Meggs, who led a group of Oath Keepers into the Capitol, and Watkins, who went in separately and was recorded on a digital walkie-talkie app, were both convicted of conspiracy to stop the election certification. Along with Harrelson, they were also found guilty of the count of conspiracy to interfere with members of Congress during the attack. All five were convicted of obstructing an official proceeding and destroying evidence in the case.
Taken as a whole, the verdicts suggested that the jury rejected the centerpiece of Rhodes’s defense: that he had no concrete plan on Jan. 6 to disrupt the transfer of presidential power and to keep Joseph R. Biden Jr. from entering the White House.
But the jury also made the confusing decision to acquit Rhodes of planning in advance to disrupt the certification of the election yet convict him of actually disrupting the certification process. That suggested that the jurors may have believed that the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 erupted more or less spontaneously, as Rhodes has claimed.
“The government did a good job - they took us to task,” said James Lee Bright, one of Rhodes’s lawyers. Bright added that he intended to appeal the convictions. No sentencing date was set.
In a statement on Tuesday night, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland noted the convictions against all five defendants.
“The Justice Department is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” he said.
A charge that traces back to efforts to protect the federal government against Southern rebels during the Civil War, seditious conspiracy has been used over the years against a wide array of defendants - among them, far-right militias, radical trade unions and Puerto Rican nationalists. The last successful sedition prosecution was in 1995 when a group of Islamic militants was found guilty of plotting to bomb several New York City landmarks.
The Oath Keepers sedition trial began in Federal District Court in Washington in early October. In his opening statement, Jeffrey S. Nestler, one of the lead prosecutors, told the jury that in the weeks after Mr. Biden won the election, Rhodes and his subordinates “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy”: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Nestler also closed the government’s case last week, declaring that the Oath Keepers had plotted against Mr. Biden, ignoring both the law and the will of the voters, because they hated the results of the election.
“They claimed to be saving the Republic,” he said, “but they fractured it instead.”
In between those remarks, prosecutors showed the jury hundreds of encrypted text messages swapped by Oath Keepers members, demonstrating that Rhodes and some of his followers were in thrall to outlandish fears that Chinese agents had infiltrated the United States government and that Mr. Biden - a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party - might cede control of the country to the United Nations.
The messages also showed that Rhodes was obsessed with the leftist movement known as antifa, which he believed was in league with Mr. Biden’s incoming administration. At one point during the trial, Rhodes, who took the stand in his own defense, told the jury he was convinced that antifa activists would storm the White House, overpower the Secret Service and forcibly drag Mr. Trump from the building if he failed to admit his defeat to Mr. Biden.
Prosecutors sought to demonstrate how Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper with a law degree from Yale, became increasingly panicked as the election moved toward its final certification at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. Under his direction, the Oath Keepers - whose members are largely former law enforcement officers and military veterans - took part in two “Stop the Steal” rallies in Washington, providing event security and serving as bodyguards for pro-Trump dignitaries.
Throughout the postelection period, the jury was told, Rhodes was desperate to get in touch with Trump and persuade him to take extraordinary measures to maintain power. In December 2020, he posted two open letters to Trump on his website, begging the president to seize data from voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged.
In the letters, Rhodes also urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two centuries-old law that he believed would give the president the power to call up militias like his own to suppress the “coup” - purportedly led by Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris, the incoming vice president - that was seeking to unseat him.
“If you fail to act while you are still in office,” Rhodes told Trump, “We the people will have to fight a bloody war against these two illegitimate Chinese puppets.”
As part of the plot, prosecutors maintained, Rhodes placed a “quick reaction force” of heavily armed Oath Keepers at a Comfort Inn in Arlington County, Va., ready to rush their weapons into Washington if their compatriots at the Capitol needed them. Caldwell, a former Navy officer, tried at one point to secure a boat to ferry the guns across the Potomac River, concerned that streets in the city might be blocked.
Rhodes tried to persuade the jury during his testimony that he had not been involved in setting up the “quick reaction force.” But he also argued that if Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, it would have given the Oath Keepers the legal standing as a militia to use force of arms to support the president.
On Jan. 6 itself, Rhodes remained outside the Capitol, standing in the crowd like “a general surveying his troops on the battlefield,” Nestler said during the trial. While prosecutors acknowledged that he never entered the building, they claimed he was in touch with some of the Oath Keepers who did go in just minutes before they breached the Capitol’s east side.
The government is continuing to prosecute several other Oath Keepers, including four members of the group who are scheduled to go on trial on seditious conspiracy charges on Monday. A second group of Oath Keepers is facing lesser conspiracy charges at a trial now set for next year, and Kellye SoRelle, Rhodes’s onetime lawyer and girlfriend, has been charged in a separate criminal case.
Alan Feuer and Zach Montague The New York Times
FEDERAL
Same-Sex Marriage Bill Passes Senate After Bipartisan Breakthrough
The 61-to-36 vote sends the legislation back to the House, which is expected to approve it and send it to President Biden.
The push to pass the legislation began over the summer, after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested in his opinion in the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, which had established a constitutional right to abortion, that the court also “should reconsider” precedents enshrining marriage equality and access to contraception.
The Senate passed landmark legislation on Tuesday to mandate federal recognition for same-sex marriages, as a lame-duck Congress mustered a notable moment of bipartisanship before Democrats were to lose their unified control of Capitol Hill.
The 61-to-36 vote put the bill on track to become law in the final weeks before Republicans assume the majority in the House of Representatives at the start of the new Congress in January. It marked one of the final major legislative achievements for Democrats before Republicans shift the focus in the House to conducting investigations of President Biden’s administration and family members.
The bill must now win final approval by the House in a vote expected as soon as next week, which would clear it for Mr. Biden, who said he looked forward to signing it alongside the bipartisan coalition that helped shepherd it through the Senate.
In a statement, the president said the vote reaffirmed “a fundamental truth: Love is love, and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love.”
The bill would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex couples. It prohibits states from denying the validity of an out-of-state marriage based on sex, race or ethnicity. But in a condition that Republican backers insisted upon, it would guarantee that religious organizations would not be required to provide any goods or services for the celebration of any marriage, and could not lose tax-exempt status or other benefits for refusing to recognize same-sex unions.
“Because of our work together, the rights of tens of millions of Americans will be strengthened under federal law. That’s an accomplishment we should all be proud of,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader.
Mr. Schumer audibly choked back tears on the Senate floor as he described how his daughter, who is married to a woman and expecting a baby with her wife, had lived in fear that their union could be reversed.
“I want them to raise their child with all the love and security that every child deserves,” Mr. Schumer said, noting that he was wearing the same purple tie he had worn to their wedding. “The bill we are passing today will ensure their rights won’t be trampled upon simply because they are in a same-sex marriage.”
Please do not throw yard signs in the trash. You can return them to our office and we will return them to the candidates or contribute them to the IRC RECYCLES project that recycles yard signs into fuel cells.
VIDEO of the WEEK
Victor Shi on the importance of organizing now to get young people to VOTE in 2024.
