Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: the VA must end homelessness among disabled vets, by providing housing: that’s what the 9th circuit court of appeals ordered in a historic ruling.  Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel will explain.  But first: Trump, Venezuela, and American politics: John Nichols has our analysis – in a minute.
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We’ve been saying for months that, as Trump’s support shrinks, and his mental state deteriorates, he would become more dangerous. We saw the first fruits of that over the weekend when he sent 150 planes to attack Venezuela, killing something like 80 people, with the goal, he says, of taking over Venezuela’s oil fields and “running the country.” For comment, we turn to John Nichols, he’s executive editor of The Nation. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: It’s great to be with you, Jon. Thanks for having me.

JW: Trump called the operation, “An assault like people have not seen since World War II,” and he said it was, “One of the most stunning, effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”
Democrats would of course love to spend all of their time talking about the high cost of groceries, energy, housing, healthcare, Trump’s tariffs, but that probably won’t be possible for the next few weeks. Affordability will almost certainly be the big issue this fall during the midterms, but for now, Democrats need a message on Venezuela. What do you think that message should be?

JN: That the American people are right, and we ought to trust them. The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was done in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but certainly with enough days passed so that people knew what had happened and had heard all of the President’s spin. The reaction by the American people was only about one third supported, believed that it was a good idea to go in and do what was done.
So the bottom line is Americans don’t like this idea. For Democrats, that’s a pretty good base from which to build. And the only ask I would have is that they’d be as bold and courageous in their language as Republicans Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Now, I want to emphasize Massie and Greene are not heart and soul of the current Republican Party. They are on its fringe for a variety of reasons. But I think especially with Greene, and I think also to an extent with Massie, they have substantial support and alliances with portions of that MAGA base. And if they are comfortable saying, “This is a war for oil,” which is basically what Massie is saying flat out. Democrats ought to be just as comfortable. And in fact, I would argue, bolder.

JW: This is a war for oil. It’s a war to make the oil companies rich. It’s not hard to make that argument. This is basically what the President said in his speech. He mentioned oil 25 times in his press conference on Saturday. He did not talk about bringing democracy or freedom to Venezuela. He said, “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure and start making money.” This is kind of the opposite of Iraq and Afghanistan where the whole point was “we’re going to bring democracy and freedom to the world.” He is not saying that now. And in fact, he’s keeping in power the entire regime with the exception of the leader of that regime. It’s not a war for regime change, and he’s made that very clear.

JN: Yeah. I mean, look, there’s a complex debate going on now around the term “regime change.” I would argue, call me naïve, when you remove the sitting president, that may be regime change, even if some of the people who are around that president remain. And even if it isn’t regime change in a full sense that some of the same people will remain around, the pressures on them to operate in a very different way, I think kind of move us a bit into that category. With that said, the thing we have to focus on, the thing we have to absolutely recognize is that this is about oil. Venezuela sits on the largest quantified reserve of oil in the world and it’s underdeveloped. And I think for somebody like Donald Trump and many of his allies, they look at a place like that and it gets them excited in ways you can barely describe because—

JW: Paul Krugman has a slightly different view. He wrote, “You know who doesn’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in Venezuela? The oil companies.” And that’s because the world price of oil right now is low. Those of us who watched landman on TV know that when the price of oil reaches around $60 a barrel, you stop drilling, you’ve lay off your cruise, you break your leases. And that’s where we are right now. It’s not profitable to drill new wells even in West Texas, much less in a faraway country where the infrastructure needs billions of dollars of restructuring and where the political future is, let us say, uncertain.

JN: Yeah. But here’s a little something about oil company executives. At the end of the day, if you show them a place and you say, “There’s a whole lot of oil there and it might take some effort to get to it, but the United States government is going to back you up.” My sense is that they will find somebody who wants to, at the very least, tell Donald Trump that they’re going to get the oil. Also, oil prices fluctuate, my friend. At the end of the day, it’s always about oil. It was in Iraq. It appears to be here. And I don’t think we serve ourselves well by denying it. I think we should recognize that even if it’s stupid, it’s reality, because remember, Iraq was pretty stupid as well in a lot of ways. But then here’s the other thing that I would put in the mix here, and I think this is a big deal. Do we not run the risk if we go down this road of having that President or other figures around the world look at countries and say, “You know what? There’s somebody there on the ground who’s in the way of us getting the resources we want.” And if you enter a “new world order” in which violent interactions with countries, up to and including regime change, might be “justified” by the search for resources in the minds of those in power, that’s a very dangerous new place to go.
What happens if a handful of really powerful countries around the world decide that’s how they’re going to operate? There ought to be at least some deep discussion about whether this is how you want to organize the world going forward.

JW: Especially since running Venezuela for the oil companies is not going to help Trump win back the millions of people who turned against him after voting for him because he promised the lower prices and didn’t. This isn’t going to work to help him with the electorate and he’ll be dragging down other Republicans as we get closer to the midterms. So the obvious thing for Trump to do, he likes to feel strong, is invade someplace else. How about Greenland?

JN: People at Greenland are pretty scared right now. Look, we should be looking all over the world at places where not just the United States, but other countries may want territory. And so you look at China and Taiwan, obviously you look at Russia and Ukraine, but also in the recent commentary about Venezuela, you heard some very startling statements from Donald Trump and others about Columbia and about Mexico.
And I’m not suggesting what comes next because I don’t know. But what I am suggesting is that once you kind of break that barrier and say, “We can fly in, grab the sitting president of a place, fly him out to try in our country on charges that we’ve developed” — where does that end?”
And if you’re willing to go to that extent, are you willing to blow up NATO with a move on Greenland? Do we run the risk of entering one of those 21st century versions of the old great power negotiations where they’re like, “Well, we’ll let you have this if you give us that”?
We have seen possibilities that we don’t like, directions that we don’t want to go in and it falls to Congress to speak up in very, very blunt ways in defense of international law and also domestic law that you don’t invade and move into launch major military actions and certainly the removal of the city president of a sovereign country is a major military action without approval from Congress, without at least some consultation with Congress.
What we know at this point is before the attack, there was no consultation with Congress, not even with friendly Republicans. And what we also know is that there was consultation with billionaires, oil company people, and others. We have an administration that consults with wealth and power but doesn’t consult with the small democratically elected representatives of the people. This is a place where at our best we pull the breaks and we say, “Hold it. We have to talk about this. “
And you look for bipartisan alliances with that handful of principled Republicans who actually get that this is a very bad idea, and you speak to the American people who frankly get it. They are saying, again, roughly 33, 34% think that what we did in Venezuela was fine and good, but that means that vast majority of Americans have some discomfort with it and that discomfort is the basis from which to open up a real dialogue about American foreign policy, how we operate in the world. And you can couple it with domestic policy because we literally are in a situation where we’re saying we don’t have enough money to feed hungry people, but we do have enough money to go flying around the world upending governments.
Here’s the bottom line, the arrogance of Trump and the people around him is sort of startling. You might be able to make cases on Maduro, certainly, I mean, I think plenty of people have, but at the same token, they never did what Bush and Cheney did. And I’m no defender of Bush and Cheney, but at least they spent a lot of time trying to make the case.
Now they lied a lot, but at least they actually went to the meticulous work of lying to The New York Times and The Washington Post in great detail. I think in this case, there is an amazing arrogance in simply deciding, “Okay, we’re just going to do this. And the weather’s good today.” Which again, remember, in the run up to the Iraq war, even though I felt that that war was wrongly launched and that it failed to meet the standards of the Constitution with a clear declaration of war, there were at least those debates about authorization to use a military force. And again, based on lies, understand all that, but at least there was time and the American people heard something about it. In this case, Trump basically said, “I’m making my move today.” Here’s where the problem comes. If you do that and it works, unless Congress pushes back on you in a fundamental way and a very, very clear language from Democrats and Republicans, what’s to stop you from doing it the next time?

JW: Yeah. One last thing before we let you go. Your Minnesota Moment, news from my hometown of St. Paul. On Monday, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz, former vice-presidential candidate, announced he was withdrawing from his own reelection race after a massive scandal involving more than a billion dollars in fraudulent payments from Medicaid.
Republicans thought for a little while they had a good chance of electing a Governor for the first time in Minnesota since 2006. And so there’s a huge primary, more than half a dozen people are running for the Republican nomination. Looks like Amy Klobuchar may be the Democratic candidate. The Republican primary has won only one candidate who’s really well known, the Pillow Guy. And Trump himself says Michael Lindell, the pillow guy, deserves to be Governor. Who do you think would win an election in Minnesota between Amy Klobuchar and the Pillow Guy?

JN: I’m suspecting that Amy Klobuchar would do pretty well. Look, I’ve covered Minnesota politics for a long time. I come from Wisconsin, but they’re both upper Midwest states with historic progressive traditions and have historically have leaned a little bit to the Democrats, not all the way. And look, Minnesota’s a purple state. It’s not a deep blue Democratic state, but in that context, Amy Klobuchar is super popular. I’ve been up there. I’ve seen her campaigns. She wins big. There’s a lot of controversy around walls. I think much of it very unfair, which he’s going to, I think, work in this last year of his governorship to address, but Klobuchar hasn’t been there. She’s been in Washington. And so there is a political calculus here to bring someone from outside back home who is very popular. And my sense is that it is unlikely that Minnesota ends up with a Republican Governor.
By the same token, there’s a lot of churn in Minnesota right now. Klobuchar is a very much of a centrist Democrat. There are some progressives who would have liked to have seen an open primary. There’s going to be the question of who gets her Senate seat if she is elected as Governor. So we’ll be paying a lot of attention to Minnesota for a whole bunch of reasons. And why that makes me happy, Jon, is that I will be able to do “Your Minnesota Moment” on a regular basis through the coming year. 

JW: [LAUGHTER] Thank you very much!
I want you to tell us what’s on the cover of the new issue of The Nation magazine.

JN: A fabulous illustration by Edward Sorel of the White House with wild dogs roaring out of it.

JW: Ah, “Trump lets loose the dogs of war.” John Nichols – read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today. 

JN: Appreciate it, my friend.
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Jon Wiener: Los Angeles is well known for the tens of thousands of homeless people sleeping on the streets. And according to the city’s most recent official count, about 3,000 of them are veterans, many of whom have disabilities, including traumatic brain injury and PTSD.
LA is also the home of a huge body of land officially dedicated to housing disabled veterans. It’s a beautiful 400-acre gated campus in Brentwood, west of UCLA. And yet the VA refused to settle a class action suit by disabled homeless vets seeking housing there. The VA demanded a trial, which they then lost; and then the VA had the chutzpah to appeal to the Ninth Circuit. And finally at the end of December, they lost that appeal. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in LA ordered the VA to build more than 2,500 units of housing on its West LA campus.
The lead attorney for the disabled homeless vets in their class action suit is Mark Rosenbaum. He’s senior special counsel at the organization Public Counsel. He’s argued landmark cases before the Supreme Court four times, and more than two dozen before federal courts of appeal and the California State Supreme Court. And a few decades ago, he also represented me in a Freedom of Information lawsuit for the John Lennon FBI files. He joins us now: Mark Rosenbaum, welcome back — and congratulations on this huge victory for vets.

Mark Rosenbaum: Well, thank you. I’m very proud of what Public Counsel did in this case. We had assistance from three major law firms, Sidley Austin, Robins Kaplan, Brown Goldstein in DC. And truthfully, this case was won not by lawyers, but by those disabled veterans, combat warriors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, who stepped forward when the VA refused to acquiesce with respect to this, told their stories, painful, difficult stories of courage, and that’s really what won the case.

JW: What has been the official policy of the VA towards providing housing for homeless vets, especially the disabled vets?

MR: Well, that’s easy: the official policy has been to state that they are committed to that — in master plans, in official documents. Every president, regardless of political party, comes forward and says, “We’re going to end veteran homelessness.” And the reality is none have. And the reality is that, absent litigation in Los Angeles, there would be no housing whatsoever. You’re right when you say LA is the homeless capital for veterans in the United States, always has been. The number’s actually closer to 3,400, and it’s not going down. But the official position of VA in terms of homeless veterans is markedly different from its actual position, and that is to, as you said, fight, fight, fight the veterans who served this country in its time of need, and now have been deserted by the VA in their time of need.

JW: And this LA land is special because it was donated to the people of the United States in 1888, and the deed requires that these 388 acres be used to provide housing for disabled vets.

MR: Correct. And as you said, that was supposed to be a soldier’s home. That was a specific intent in providing this property, which even back in 1888 was prime real estate. And it worked that way. It worked that way through the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. For 80 years, there were as many as 4,000 vets on this land. They had a village, they had places of worship, they had recreation centers. There was a community there. But with Vietnam, that all changed. And the VA did an about face and began leasing this property intended for veterans to rent-a-car places, a private school, to UCLA for its baseball diamond, a dog park, oil drilling. The VA itself in its official reports has said that millions and millions of dollars went for these leases, none of which actually benefit veterans themselves.

JW: I understand the VA argued in 1971 that the earthquake that year created a safety issue in the buildings that housed vets. And so they evicted everybody at that point, but they never repaired those buildings.

MR: Well, that’s a lie. The VA continues back then and continues now to house officers, to house VA officials, to house doctors, to serve as medical facilities. It didn’t have anything to do with an earthquake. It had nothing to do with that. What it had instead to do with was one of the great land scandals in the history of this nation, and that is the use of this property to line individuals’ profits, and as I said, to serve as a rental car place or for oil drilling, nothing having to do to benefit veterans. The UCLA baseball team continues to play on that property as if it’s the home with the Bruins and not the home of the brave.

JW: So tell us about this Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruling at the end of December and its significance.

MR: It’s a landmark ruling. It’s the most important decision on behalf of veterans in the history of the nation. As you stated, the Ninth Circuit in a unanimous decision, three judge court, unanimous decision, held that Judge Carter, the district court judge who heard the trial that you were mentioning, acted properly in determining, first of all, that the case could be brought to court. The VA argued strenuously that cases to establish rights, to recognize rights by veterans had no business in a federal court.  That argument was rejected.
Judge Carter also held that the Rehabilitation Act, which as you know, is a National Disability Rights Act applied here for veterans who were homeless, that unhoused veterans could not access necessary healthcare to which they were entitled, mental healthcare, physical healthcare, that so long as they were homeless, they might as well have been on Mars, in terms of accessing that healthcare.  And the Ninth Circuit affirmed that ruling, and that is a decision that is not only precedent here in Los Angeles, it is precedent to the Ninth Circuit, which is seven states on the West, but its reasoning is applicable throughout the country. So this should be the end of veteran homelessness in the nation, and the Ninth Circuit held that.
And the Ninth Circuit held that the leases that we’re talking about violated congressional law because, and you didn’t have to be a constitutional or a legal scholar to figure this out, an oil drilling operation does not “principally benefit veterans.” And the court struck down a number of those leases.

JW: There’s a second track that’s been going. While you’ve been suing the VA on behalf of homeless disabled vets, Trump issued an executive order last May, directing the VA to house 6,000 homeless veterans at its West LA Center. And to present an action plan by January 1st, 2028.
6,000 is a lot more than the 2,500 units in your settlement, and yet it’s the Trump administration that’s been fighting you in court over building 2,500 units, and the head of the VA is a Trump appointee. So what is going on with the VA and Trump’s executive order?

MR: Well, let me say, first of all, we’re not just talking about housing. We’re talking about housing with supportive services so that individuals can get social workers and mental health consultants and others to assist them to access that healthcare.

JW: This is under the settlement that you have won, not the executive order.

MR: Yeah, not a settlement. We had to fight for that decision. Under the ruling it’s also 750 temporary units. And that’s extraordinary. That means we’re not going to have to wait years for the construction of housing. It means that there are modular units that could be brought on that campus right now.
You’re absolutely right. The Trump administration issued an executive order. The Ninth Circuit, in fact, asked the parties to brief the importance of that order. However, in the decision that was just recently issued, the executive order wasn’t mentioned. And the answer to that is pretty obvious. That executive order exists on paper. It doesn’t exist in practice. It was, as you said, supposedly a plan to construct housing, to build a community center, to really make the land, as you said earlier, carry out the intention of those who donated the land over 150 years ago. We haven’t seen anything of it, nor has Congress appropriated a single penny for the actual construction of that housing pursuant to the executive order, nor to our knowledge, has the administration gone to Congress and asked for that.  So it’s a piece of paper, but it’s an unfulfilled promise, which again, underscores the importance of this litigation to create an enforceable order, which I can tell you we and the veterans are going to vigorously enforce.

JW: I just have to say, my favorite part of Trump’s executive order on housing for vets in West LA is that, while he doesn’t say anything about asking Congress for money to do this, he does say that all federal agencies should ensure that funds that have been spent on housing “illegal aliens” be “redirected to construct, establish, and maintain housing for vets” in West LA. I didn’t know the federal government provided housing for “illegal aliens,” except at those ICE detention centers. How much money has Trump’s order on that score brought in?

MR: Less than zero. Not a penny.  It makes for good political propaganda, I suppose, but in terms of helping a single veteran, zero.

JW: I understand that this lawsuit began while Biden was president and has been continued by Trump. So you’ve been fighting both the Democrats and the Republicans now for many years. What do you make of that?

MR: Every president comes to the term and says, ‘One of my first priority is going to make certain that every veteran gets what they deserve for purposes of dealing with the visible and the invisible wounds of war that they suffer.’ Every day is supposed to be Veterans Day.  In reality, there is no Veterans Day. No administration has carried through. And even prior to President Biden, and President Trump in his first term, and President Obama, no administration has actually followed through and voluntarily built any housing, and that’s why we’ve had to continue to sue them.

JW: Now, there is one exception to the pattern you’re talking about, which was in 2015, you and the ACLU won a major settlement from the VA. They agreed in 2015 to provide housing for homeless vets on that LA land. At that point, they agreed to create 1,200 units. And in fact, you and I talked about it here on this show, in 2015. It’s 10 years later. Why was this still being litigated this year? What happened to the 2015 settlement that you won?

MR: Well, Judge Carter asked me that the first day that we appeared in court in the Powers case, the current case. And I said to him what I said publicly, and that is we made an egregious error. As a lawyer, it’s the most serious error I’ve made in court. I think it is malpractice. What we did is we trusted the government. We did not obtain an enforceable order. And when it came time, when the government, years into the settlement, had not constructed a single unit of new housing for veterans, and we said to the government, “It’s time to own up to this,  the government said, “You don’t have an enforceable order.” And that’s why we had to go back into court. And I can tell you this time we made certain that the order was enforceable. And as I said earlier, if we have to enforce it, we’ll enforce it as vigorously as we have the ability to do. So this time the veterans have won and there’s going to be no retreat.

JW: Another infuriating part of the past VA practices on these grounds is that they require that the housing be built by private developers who have to obtain their own financing. Now, this is getting into the weeds a little bit, but it has been a huge obstacle to building anything there because competing for low-income housing tax credits, which is an extremely complex Reaganite idea about how to pay for this sort of thing, has been a huge obstacle and itself slows down all kinds of homeless and affordable housing in Los Angeles, for years.
The VA is now under a legal obligation to build thousands of units. They don’t have the money yet in their budget. I looked up — how much is this going to cost? 2,500 units cost something like $600,000, maybe as much as $900,000 per unit in LA. This is going to cost something like $2 billion.  Seems like a huge amount of money, but the VA budget this year is more than $400 billion. So in terms of the VA budget, it’s not a lot of money. How’s this going to be supposed to be financed now?

MR: Well, there’s several points there and you hit all of them. First of all, the Ninth Circuit correctly said that what it would take to finance the housing units that are required to get veterans off the streets is 0.02% of the VA budget. The VA and the Defense Department have the two highest budgets in all of the federal government. This is like spare change in terms of what it will actually cost the VA.
Moreover, as I asked the VA officials in court, I asked them, “How much is a veteran worth?” And they said “that number could not possibly be calculated” and on that they were exactly right. The other thing that makes it even worse before I answer your question directly is that not only did the VA refuse to pay for the housing itself, and incidentally, there’s housing for doctors on that campus, there’s housing for VA officials on that campus.
If you go out there now, there’s tons of construction for VA. So the notion that they can’t build housing, both the Court of Appeal and the district court said was absolutely without any support whatsoever.
But to make matters worse, what the VA also said was that these private developers could impose income requirements that included the compensation, the disability compensation that veterans in fact received. So we went to court to say that gets it exactly wrong. That is a facial violation, a clear violation of rehabilitation law. In other words, the more disabled you are, the more you suffered PTSD and brain trauma, loss of limbs, the less you would be eligible for the housing in the first place; 38 out of the 46 buildings on that grounds have those sorts of requirements, which makes absolutely ineligible the veterans who are most in need. If you wanted to create a system that said to veterans, “Keep out of your own land,” this is the system you would develop.
How is it going to get financed?  First of all, we didn’t ask that question recently in terms of how much it would cost to go after Venezuelan boats, or to involve the government in other adventures where men and women like those who are now on the streets are serving the country. No one asked where they’re going to get the money for that. The money isn’t going to be an issue. This is an enforceable duty. I’m not worried that we won’t get the money. And what Congressperson is publicly going to stand up and say, “I don’t vote to help homeless veterans.”

JW: Mark Rosenbaum – he’s the lead attorney in the lawsuit on behalf of homeless disabled veterans. This is a ruling that should be the end of veterans’ homelessness everywhere in the United States. Mark, thank you for all your work on this, and thanks for talking with us today.

MR: It’s great to talk to you. It’s my pleasure to be able to be involved in these cases, but I’m not being immodest when I say this wasn’t my victory, it’s the victory of these vets – and I’m pleased to be a very small part of that.