◼ POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek March 1, 202130
Big Donors
Flee
Election Denier
Mo Brooks
● Brooks and other GOP objectors to the
electoral vote have seen giving dry up—for nowAlabama Representative Mo Brooks won national
notoriety on Jan. 6 when he told a restless crowd to
“start taking down names and kicking ass,” shortly
before some listeners besieged the U.S. Capitol as
lawmakers planned to certify the 2020 election.
Since then, two House Democrats have intro-
duced a resolution to censure him. Alabama
Governor Kay Ivey, a fellow Republican, suggested
that Brooks should be challenged in a primary.
Voters protested at his Huntsville office, and a
Baptist preacher excoriated him on social media.
Previous benefactors backed away.
Brooks’s office did not respond to requests for
comment. He has condemned the violence of Jan. 6
and in a statement released by his office said of his
speech at the rally that day, “I was not encourag-
ing anyone to engage in violence. I was encourag-
ing people to begin a 2022 and 2024 election fight.”
Long before Jan. 6, Brooks had made extreme
statements, such as his claim in 2014 that Democrats
were starting a “war on whites.” Even so, his career
was enabled by some of the nation’s largest defense
contractors and businesses that have dominated
Alabama for decades. His six House runs attracted
a total of $5 million in donations, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics.
The case of Brooks shows how members of
Congress who abetted Trump’s false narrative of
electoral fraud were supported by prominent cor-
porations until, suddenly, they weren’t.
A 66-year-old former commercial litigator,
Brooks worked his way up the government lad-
der. He’d been a prosecutor, a state legislator, and
a county commissioner before he won his con-
gressional seat in 2010, thanks to support from the
newly powerful Tea Party movement and White
evangelical Christians.THE BOTTOM LINE Experts and advocates have welcomed
Biden’s opioid plan, with caveats. They say what’s needed is not just
more funding but also more of it shifted to treatment.or exclusively on overprescribing also ignore
the root causes of drug crises,” Jennifer Oliva, a
lawyer and public-health policy professor at Seton
Hall Law School in New Jersey, said in an email,
“such as economic deprivation, social isolation,
and failure of the health-care system to effectively
address complex pain and substance use disor-
ders.” All of those problems have worsened with
Covid, Oliva added.
Biden called on Congress in January to set aside
$4 billion for the Department of Health and Human
Services to expand drug treatment access during
the pandemic. And within his first 30 days, he hired
six senior staffers for the ONDCP, which Trump had
gutted. Advocates want to see the office funded at
least at pre-Trump levels. Just as critical is how that
money will be spent. The drug czar, whom Biden
is expected to appoint soon, has budgetary author-
ity over more than a dozen federal agencies in the
National Drug Control Program.
“Less than 50% of ONDCP’s annual $25 billion
budget is allocated to treatment and prevention,”
Oliva said. “The majority of that budget is spent on
law enforcement and interdiction. I would urge the
new drug czar to reverse these priorities.”
Treatment will be an emphasis, but enforce-
ment will not go away, says LaBelle, the acting
drug czar. “Drug interdiction, international drug
trafficking and precursor chemicals, and the future
of drug trafficking and the shift toward synthetics is
another issue that has to be taken on.”
Front-line workers across the country say they
need funding for less visible long-term recovery
support systems—such things as housing, therapy,
job placement, and peer support. For any of it to
work, mental health care and addiction treatment
will need to be widely available and cheap or free.
“If we can get someone on the recovery journey
and they can sustain that for five years, they have
an 85% chance of sustaining that recovery for the
rest of their lives,” says Hampton, the Biden cam-
paign adviser, citing findings from a 2016 surgeon
general’s report.
In the days after his overdose, Florida’s Mullen
says, robust support was “very critical.” He lost his
apartment when his landlord found out about the
relapse, but the nonprofit Volunteers of America
helped him find new housing, therapy, and a
regular source of food. Now he’s turning his life
around—again.
“Thanks to Narcan, praise the Lord, I woke up,”
he says. �Valerie Bauman and Ian Lopez“Obviously,
we do not
agree with the
incitement of
a mob”▲ Brooks speaking at
the “Save America” rally
Jan. 6 in Washington