MICHELLE SINGLETARY COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020, and thereafter

(For Singletary clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

WRITETHRU: In penultimate graf, changes first sentence to reflect Trump's demand for larger stimulus checks

By MICHELLE SINGLETARY

WASHINGTON -- The $900 billion pandemic-relief bill Congress passed Monday night provides a second stimulus payment of up to $600 to individuals earning $75,000 or less and up to $1,200 for couples filing jointly earning $150,000 or less. Families are also eligible for $600 per dependent child under 17.

But, based on glitches from the last distribution of stimulus payments, I need to manage your expectations - and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin should have done that, too.

"People are going to begin seeing this money next week," Mnuchin said during a CNBC interview Monday.

This sets up the IRS for a herculean task.

The already-beleaguered agency is still trying to address backlogs from coronavirus shutdowns that sent its staff home. There are 2019 tax tax returns and refunds to process from the delayed 2020 tax season, which shifted its deadline to July 15 this year.

Dale Raby, 64, of Rockland, Wisconsin, is caring for his severely autistic 24-year-old son. He received his $1,200 stimulus payment under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or Cares Act, which passed in March, but he's still waiting on a refund from his 2019 federal return, which he said he filed electronically in February.

"It's very frustrating," he said. "The IRS is sitting on more than $4,000 of money I could really use about now. You call and wait for hours, and when you finally get somebody, they say, 'We are way behind.'"

Payments for this second round of stimulus aid are based on people's 2019 return.

Under the Cares Act, the Treasury Department has until Dec. 31 to finish issuing the first economic-impact payments.

It's possible people will see the second stimulus payment by direct deposit by year's end, but the reality is many others probably won't get any money before mid-January or even later next year. This all has to happen, I might add, while the IRS is preparing for the 2021 tax season, which is already going to be a hot mess because of the pandemic.

The relief bill says the Treasury Department has until Jan. 15 to get out the $600 payments. If payments can't be direct-deposited or mailed by then, people will have to wait to get their money when they file their 2020 tax return next year. Even those who file just as the tax season opens may not see a payment until February. If you file your return electronically and elect direct deposit, it can still take about three weeks to get a refund.

The first stimulus rollout had some major glitches. Deceased people got checks. Foreign nationals received stimulus money even though they were not living or working in the United States. People in prison who received stimulus payments were told to send the money back to the IRS. Then a lawsuit filed against the IRS and Treasury Department reversed that policy decision, so payments to incarcerated individuals had to be reissued. By the way, the most recent bill does not exclude prison inmates from receiving stimulus payments.

The IRS lost stimulus payment information for hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans. Parents receiving certain government benefits - such as Supplemental Security Income - didn't get the $500 payments for their eligible children, prompting another lawsuit. As a result, the IRS set and extended and then pushed out again deadlines for these parents and others to get their stimulus money.

The Treasury Department mailed prepaid debit cards to millions of Americans. But many people thought the cards were a scam and threw them away, prompting the department to send a letter that the debit card was in fact not fake.

This brings me to the optimistic proclamation from Mnuchin that the $600 payments would go out as soon as next week.

The IRS has worked out a lot of the glitches troubling the first stimulus distribution, said Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, which has a good summary of the new aid package.

"Yet, I think it's always good to set reasonable expectations," Watson said. "It's better to underpromise and overdeliver when it comes to delivering these payments."

The IRS could not address many questions, because the legislation had not been signed into law by President Donald Trump - who on Tuesday night demanded larger stimulus checks in the bill and criticized it for "wasteful spending." At this point, it's best to check irs.gov for updates. Search for "Economic Impact Payment Information Center."

My holiday hope is that the IRS and Treasury Department post answers to the questions I know people will have, as soon as possible. The administration was too slow to do this after the passage of the Cares Act. The need is as great, if not greater, this time around to provide people struggling to make ends meet a realistic time frame for when they may see the second stimulus payment.

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Readers can write to Michelle Singletary c/o The Washington Post, 1301 K St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071. Her email address is michelle.singletary@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter (@SingletaryM) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/MichelleSingletary). Comments and questions are welcome, but due to the volume of mail, personal responses may not be possible. Please also note comments or questions may be used in a future column, with the writer's name, unless a specific request to do otherwise is indicated.

KATHLEEN PARKER COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020, and thereafter

(For Parker clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

WRITETHRU: In 5th graf, fixes name to Lopez-Zuniga (sted Lopez-Aguirre)

By Kathleen Parker

WASHINGTON -- It was the nearly forgotten mid-century novelist Nelson Algren who said: "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

To this catalogue of sagacity, Algren today might add, "Never trust a group that claims to work for God, country or liberty, as any or all three are unlikely to be well-represented." Just ask David Lopez-Zuniga, the 39-year-old air conditioning repairman who was run off a Texas road in October by a private investigator for the Liberty Center for God and Country.

See what I mean?

Lopez-Zuniga was, as they say, minding his own business, "driving like I normally do, and I see a car behind me" shortly after leaving his mobile home at 5:15 a.m., he explained to The Washington Post. "He was swerving. I thought he was drunk."

When Lopez-Zuniga slowed down to let the other vehicle pass, the driver of the SUV -- a former Houston police captain named Mark A. Aguirre -- rammed Lopez-Zuniga's truck, forcing him off the road. Aguirre then got out of his SUV with one hand in his jacket, causing Lopez-Zuniga to believe the man was hurt. When Lopez-Zuniga got close to Aguirre to try to help him, Aguirre pulled a gun from his pocket, released the safety and pinned Lopez-Zuniga to the ground with a knee to his back.

A few minutes later, two other men arrived on the scene, searched the truck, then drove it away and dumped it. Lopez-Zuniga, meanwhile, was terrified, he said. Imagine: He has no idea who this man is, it's early morning, and suddenly he's on the ground at gunpoint.

As extremely good luck would have it, a Houston police officer happened to be driving past and witnessed these events unfolding. Under questioning, Aguirre explained that he had been surveilling Lopez-Zuniga for possible voter fraud and, ultimately, led the officer to his surveillance spot, saying, "I just hope you're a patriot."

Algren Addendum No. 2: Beware conceal-and-carry people calling themselves patriots.

Aguirre has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon, which his lawyer claims is a political plot. (What isn't these days?)

Lopez-Zuniga's imaginary crime, for which of course no evidence exists, was supposedly transporting 750,000 ballots fraudulently signed by Hispanic children.

If you've been picturing a vigilante state lately or, as recently discussed in the White House, a declaration of martial law, your imagination is not running wild. It is wrong to say such things couldn't happen here; they do, and they are. Algren would certainly agree, since he was under constant surveillance himself during the 1950s for suspicion of being a communist.

But yesterday's communists are today's Democrats, if you subscribe to the ideas behind the Liberty Center for God and Country, which was formed in August and funded primarily by well-known GOP megadonor Steven F. Hotze, who serves as the group's president. According to The Post, the group has "paid 20 private investigators close to $300,000 to conduct a six-week probe of alleged illegal ballot retrievals in Houston leading up to the election."

This and other similar projects around the country were prompted by President Donald Trump's preemptive claims that voter fraud would be rampant when the vote counting began. As all but his most die-hard fans now accept, Trump was paving the way for his post-election legal challenges -- and apparently for loyal goons to run innocent people off the road, too.

Hotze himself sponsored several of the lawsuits that have been dismissed by state and federal courts since the election. Aguirre not only conducted "24 hour surveillance" of Lopez-Zuniga's mobile home, where he lived with his wife and daughter, but also wrote an affidavit used in one of Hotze's lawsuits.

Aguirre won't say why the repairman was considered a suspect, and Hotze claims, without evidence, that Aguirre's team stopped a Democratic fraud operation that would have flipped Texas to Biden. But Hotze maintains that no GOP group was directly involved in funding or organizing Aguirre's surveillance operation.

And then there's poor Lopez-Zuniga. Minding one's own business used to mean staying out of trouble and leaving others alone -- a round-trip ticket to work and home without fear of menace. But in today's conspiratorial climate of denial, deceit -- and a troubling tolerance for vigilantism -- the forces of extremism have been allowed to surface and flower.

Trump didn't create these developments, but he has provided fertilizer and water to impulses previously buried. A by-product of cultivating such impulses is that ordinary citizens are no longer inoculated against zealots imbued with self-righteousness. When people like Hotze can buy prime political real estate and fund personal missions of vindication or vindictiveness under the flag of liberty, God and country, we are living in a country not our own.

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Kathleen Parker's email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

DAVID IGNATIUS COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020, and thereafter

(For Ignatius clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

By David Ignatius

WASHINGTON -- One simple way to think about the threat posed by Russian intelligence in its "SolarWinds" hack is that it exposed the vulnerability of the vast store of supposedly secure personal and corporate data known as the "cloud."

This wasn't an attack on classified systems or a sabotage mission, from what we know. Loose talk by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., calling it "virtually a declaration of war" is misplaced. This appears to have been an especially intrusive version of cyberespionage, which governments conduct routinely around the world.

But make no mistake: The SolarWinds hack, named for the company whose widely used network software was manipulated to plant malware, was a scary snapshot of today's Internet -- a world where personal privacy has all but vanished and nation states or private actors can penetrate systems and steal data almost at will. If you're used to thinking of the United States as a fortress, forget it. Our information space has become the terrain where people fight their cyberwars: We're the Internet version of Belgium or Lebanon, trampled by so many armies of manipulation.

An interesting fact about this hack is that private companies seem more agitated about it than do the cyberwarriors at the Pentagon. Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, called the SolarWinds hack "an act of recklessness" and a "moment of reckoning." A more cautious assessment came from an official familiar with the thinking of U.S. Cyber Command, who was reluctant even to call it an attack, describing it instead as "espionage" and "below the level of conflict." The official cautioned in an interview: "To respond to espionage as an act of war might be disproportionate."

Was this a failure of the U.S. approach to cyberwar, a strategy described as "persistent engagement" by Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of both Cyber Command and the code-breaking National Security Agency? I think not. Instead, I believe it underlines the reality of Nakasone's premise in framing that doctrine two years ago -- that the world is in a constant state of low-level cyber conflict, and the United States needs to "defend forward" so it can deter real acts of war, like disabling the power grid, by threatening similar actions.

Why wasn't the SolarWinds hack discovered sooner, so preventive action could have been taken? That's the real question, and it involves whether government and the private sector can cooperate better in cyber counterespionage.

What's really happening here, I suspect, is a problem very familiar for the United States -- a failure to "connect the dots" and share information between silos. Glenn Gerstell, a former NSA general counsel, noted in an interview that the Department of Homeland Security was apparently aware last summer that the Russians were probing the "Einstein" system that supposedly protects unclassified "dot-gov" systems. But that information didn't trigger action by the FBI, NSA or Cyber Command or other agencies that might have identified and stopped the hack. Answer: That's not their turf, but DHS'. As Gerstell told me: "There's no one place in the U.S. government where all the foreign intelligence gets merged with the domestic cyber hints and turned into action."

Connecting the dots should also involve private companies. Smith put it bluntly in his blog post last week: Cybersecurity threats "require a unique level of collaboration between the public and private sectors." Private companies may be the first to spot malware breaches, and, as Smith argues, "effective cyber-defense requires not just a coalition of the world's democracies, but a coalition with leading tech companies."

To understand why tech companies are so concerned, check out the Cybersecurity Advisory issued by the NSA last week warning that attackers are "abusing trust" by using forged credentials "to access protected data" in the cloud. The NSA warned that these hacking tools "subvert the mechanisms that the organization uses to grant access to cloud and on-premises resources and/or to compromise administrator credentials with the ability to manage cloud resources." Yikes!

Fortunately, this is the rare crisis where the needed reforms have just been enacted into law -- too late to stop the SolarWinds hack, obviously, but perhaps in time to prevent the next one. The National Defense Authorization Act passed last week contained 26 amendments from the blue-ribbon Cyberspace Solarium Commission's report last March, including a new White House cyber director and a new threat-hunting team at the Department of Homeland Security.

"We can't patch our way out of the risk," argued Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, one of the co-chairs of the commission, in an interview Tuesday. New laws will encourage the "layered deterrence" the commission recommended. And if other tech companies follow the lead of Microsoft and find ways to work with democratic governments, we might have a better chance of protecting the security of our data -- which was so ravaged in the latest assault.

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Contact David Ignatius on Twitter @IgnatiusPost

RUBEN NAVARRETTE COLUMN

FOR IMMEDIATE PRINT AND WEB RELEASE. Normally would advance for release Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2020, and thereafter

(For Navarrette clients)

Repeats to change headline

By RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.

SAN DIEGO - Well, (BEG ITAL)Feliz Navidad(END ITAL) to you, too, California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

What a thoughtful Christmas gift. You shouldn't have. Scratch that. Of course you should have. And a lot of Latinos in the Golden State are glad you did. This present is appreciated. But let's not invert the narrative: It's also well-deserved and long overdue.

Newsom announced on Tuesday that he will appoint California Secretary of State Alex Padilla to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

That's history, baby. And it's about time. The 47-year-old Padilla - who is Mexican American and grew up near Los Angeles before graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an engineering degree - will be the first Latino U.S. senator from California. Ever.

Think about that for a second. Ever since military officer John Fremont and medical doctor William Gwin swore their oaths and began serving as the state's first U.S. senators in the mid-1800s, there's been a parade of mostly White men occupying those seats. At different points in history, Asians and African Americans have had the chance to represent California in the U.S. Senate. But never Latinos, a group that now makes up an astounding 40% of the state population.

Plus, in 2020, we can have history and diversity without giving up on quality. The person who will break the color line - the son of Mexican immigrants, Santos and Lupe Padilla - is the real deal. To say that Alex Padilla has political experience would be an understatement. Padilla has been in politics since 1995, when he served as an assistant to the person he'll now serve alongside: California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. In the ensuing quarter century, Padilla has been a member of the Los Angeles City Council, president of the Los Angeles City Council, president of the California League of Cities, California state senator, and California secretary of state.

This was always going to be Newsom's decision to make. And sure, the Padilla choice makes sense six ways from Sunday. The governor - who needed a win in 2020 almost as much as Latinos did, since COVID-19 has been brutal to both - gets to make history, and add some diversity to the Senate with a respectable choice who has already run, and won, statewide.

Even so, I confess, as a cynical journalist who has been toiling away at my trade even longer than Padilla has been hammering away at his, I didn't think this day would come. Once African Americans made it clear a few weeks ago that they believed the seat was their private property and that a Black woman should only be replaced by a Black woman, I thought Latinos were going to get a lump of coal in their stocking. After all, that's what we usually get from a Democratic Party whose dominant color scheme resembles a television set in the 1950s - Black and White. Once the quest to fill the Senate seat became about racial politics, and the Black-brown competition flared up, I was sure we were going to get passed over. Again.

As I've said before, Latinos are good at many things, but the list doesn't include politics. It's a game we just don't play well. We're loyal to a fault, even to those who betray us, which only encourages more acts of betrayal. We don't push, complain, pressure or demand. We take what we're given, humbly, with head bowed and hat in hand. After all, for the most part, we're Catholic. Whatever we don't get in this world, we tell ourselves, we'll get in the next. At least that's how it has always been.

The generations of Latinos who are running the game now - X, Y and Z (which basically covers anyone from 18 to 54) -- see things differently. For them, this open seat - this (BEG ITAL)California(END ITAL) seat - had to go to a Latino. It was non-negotiable. Anything else would have been a travesty.

When you reach the point where you make up nearly half of the state's population, and you can look back on 60 years of electing Democrats to every office in the state, you hold a big marker with the party. The only question is when you work up the nerve to cash it in.

Don't look now. But Latinos have cashed in their marker. And California will be better off for it.

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Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, "Navarrette Nation," is available through every podcast app.

MARC A. THIESSEN COLUMN

Advance for release Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020, and thereafter

(For Thiessen clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

By Marc A. Thiessen

WASHINGTON -- Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr say Russia was behind the massive cyberattack that compromised 18,000 U.S. companies and government agencies, but President Donald Trump isn't buying it. "Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens" Trump tweeted, adding "it may" be China or "a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big."

No, it wasn't either of these things. And by tweeting this nonsense, Trump is not only failing to respond forcefully and restore deterrence in cyberspace -- he is missing an opportunity to claim vindication concerning Washington's obsession with Russian electoral interference.

Were U.S. intelligence officials so focused on detecting and deterring Moscow's election interference that they missed the Kremlin's real target -- a massive cyber penetration of U.S. businesses and government agencies? That's the case Trump should be making. Undetected, Russian hackers penetrated SolarWinds, a company that produces network management software used by many Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, in October 2019, and began attaching a computer virus to the software updates the company pushed out to its clients.

SolarWinds updates acted like a superspreader, allowing Russia to create "back doors" in targeted networks that, according to the New York Times, gave Moscow the ability "to come and go, steal data and -- though it apparently has not happened yet -- alter data or conduct destructive attacks." Russia penetrated not only thousands of businesses but also the U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury, Commerce and Energy -- including the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. We still do not know the full extent of the damage. Some national security experts have suggested that this attack could actually be a subset of a much larger operation.

The Russian hack was discovered by accident, when an employee at a compromised company saw their credentials had been used to log into the company's network from an unrecognized device. In other words, our intelligence community was overly focused on the wrong target. Rather than deny what took place, Trump should be arguing that Washington's four-year fixation with Russian interference in our elections provided the perfect cover for this unprecedented Russian cyberattack.

The lesson is that cyberattackers are like terrorists -- they take advantage of our free and open society to infiltrate and attack America. And the lesson we learned after Sept. 11, 2001, is that we cannot defend perfectly in every place and at all times against every possible technique. The only way to stop or deter them is to go on offense. "What's our response to the Russians?" asks retired four-star Army Gen. Jack Keane. He points out that the United States has the most powerful offensive cyber-capabilities in the world. "We cannot let this stand. We have the capability to attack back and we should. . . . When you impose costs . . . your adversary is going to think twice before doing something."

Based on what is now in the public sphere, Trump appears to have used America's offensive cyber capabilities more than any previous president. In August 2019, the New York Times reported that he ordered "a secret cyberattack against Iran in June [that] wiped out a critical database used by Iran's paramilitary arm to plot attacks against oil tankers." In an interview with me last fall, Trump acknowledged for the first time that he had launched a cyberattack on Russia to prevent its interference in the 2018 midterm elections. But he has clearly not used them nearly enough to deter attacks like this one. If an adversary had launched a kinetic attack on us this massive, we would take out whatever weapon was used to harm us. But too often, we allow adversaries to get away with attacks in the cyber domain that would not be tolerated in any other domain.

If we want to restore cyber deterrence, that has to change. The primary reason we have gone almost two decades without another 9/11-style attack on the homeland is because America has been on offense across the world, taking out terrorists with targeted drone strikes, denying them sanctuary. We need to do the same in cyberspace. Our adversaries need to know that attacks on America in cyberspace will not be tolerated, and will be met with a swift and disproportionate response -- and that the United States will preemptively take out cyber capabilities of state or non-state actors we believe threatens us.

Trump has pulled the trigger in cyberspace before. He can do it again. But to do so, he must stop denying Russia's complicity, stop obsessing with overturning the election, defend our country and restore deterrence in cyberspace.

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Follow Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen.

GEORGE F. WILL COLUMN

Advance for release Thursday, Dec. 24, 2020, and thereafter

(For Will clients and FOR PRINT USE ONLY)

By George F. Will

WASHINGTON -- If you believe, sensibly, that Congress' diminished -- mostly self-diminished -- role in governance is regrettable, you should regret that Sen. Pat Toomey is leaving the Senate in 2022, upon completion of his second term. Last week, the Pennsylvania Republican showed why he will be missed in an institution that has too few members concerned about its waning relevance.

In the end-of-session rush to produce more pandemic relief, Toomey forced attention to the Federal Reserve's extraordinary mission creep, which seems certain to continue, and to exacerbate the eclipse of Congress. In the process, Toomey accomplished something unusual: the termination of a "temporary" federal program.

Last March, when Toomey was one of the Republicans negotiating the Senate's version of the Cares Act's emergency lending provisions, the first large pandemic relief package, there was reasonable fear that capital markets would freeze catastrophically. So, the Fed was given unprecedented authority to make subsidized loans to states, municipalities and corporations. Toomey sought a Sept. 30 termination of this program, and settled for Dec. 31. The program's purpose was to restore normal functioning in private capital markets, not to be an ongoing, all-purpose means for the Fed to set the nation's fiscal policy.

This autumn, however, armed with a legal interpretation that the deadline was not binding, Democrats sought to exploit the pandemic as a political opportunity. By indefinitely extending the Fed's lending program, they could achieve two goals unrelated to the pandemic:

First, they could bail out Democratic-run states and municipalities that, long before the pandemic, were fiscal wrecks, largely because their alliances with government-employee unions have produced crushing pension and other obligations. Second, Democrats envisioned the Fed as an open-ended and almost unlimited source of money to achieve public-sector and private-sector goals they could not achieve through Congress. Democrats were practicing Emanuelism. (Rahm Emanuel: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Because it is an "opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.")

So, the House passed a bill commanding the Fed to make essentially interest-free loans (10 years at 0.25% interest) to municipalities without their having to demonstrate an inability to get credit elsewhere. As Toomey says, the Fed would not be, as intended in March, the "lender of last resort" but would be the lender of first resort, forever. This, even though the fiscal crisis ended many months ago.

If such a crisis recurs, the Fed can come back to Congress -- imagine: involving itself in governing -- for renewal of the lending program. Meanwhile, and in the wake of $500 billion made available to states, municipalities and corporations in March, moral hazard -- incentivizing perverse behavior -- would flourish. Toomey notes that New Jersey, which has been economically battered by pandemic-related economic shutdowns, nevertheless just increased government spending 4%. All state politicians would prefer to rely not on their states' taxing authority but on the Fed.

Corporations, too, wish the Fed's subsidized loans could flow forever. Never mind that the essence of socialism is government allocation of society's basic economic resource: capital. Which means government allocation of opportunity. Which means the bitter politics of high-stakes distributional conflict.

While Toomey was rescuing the Fed from an essentially political role, the Fed was embracing another, potentially enormous one: It joined the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System.

Until 1977, the Fed's mandate was price stability (preserving the currency as a store of value). Since then, the "dual mandate" had included promotion of maximum sustainable employment. Now, however, the Fed will somehow 1) anticipate long-term climate change (even though in 2007 it did not anticipate the 2008 financial crisis) and 2) divine how this will affect the financial system and, inevitably, 3) consider how to affect the climate by considering corporations' climate-relevant behavior before buying corporate debt.

Presumably the Fed will ponder, for example, the probability of financial institutions' asset prices changing because of severe weather events. The Fed's ability to know these things is between negligible and nonexistent. But the Fed's temptation to use its lending to dictate climate-friendly behavior to borrowers, and the political pressure from Congress to do so, will be between strong and irresistible.

The Fed will discover that it cannot remain independent of what it has waded waist-deep into: politics. And Congress will be content to slough off yet another policy responsibility.

Toomey's 2022 departure from Capitol Hill is yet another instance of a depressing phenomenon: Those who are least inclined to stay in Congress are often those who could do the most to contribute to its revival.

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George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com.