Evelyn Reynolds

The Republican US House of Representatives speaker, Kevin McCarthy, faces an attempt by members of his own party to oust him because he passed a stopgap funding measure with Democratic support to avoid a government shutdown. Representative Matt Gaetz, a hardline Republican lawmaker, said he would file what’s called the “motion to vacate”.What is the motion to vacate?The motion to vacate is the House’s procedure to remove its speaker. The chamber’s current rules allow any one member, Democrat or Republican, to introduce the motion. If it is introduced as a “privileged” resolution, the House must consider it at some point, although it could be delayed with procedural votes.If the motion to vacate comes to the House floor for a vote, it would only need a simple majority to pass. Republicans currently control the House with 221 seats to 212 Democrats, meaning if McCarthy wants to keep his speaker’s gavel, he cannot afford to lose more than four votes.How can one member do this?McCarthy endured a brutal 15 rounds of voting in January before being elected as speaker, during which he agreed to multiple concessions increasing the power of Republican hardliners.One was the decision to allow just one member to put forward a motion to vacate, which meant that hardliners could threaten McCarthy’s speakership at any time.This was a change from the rules in place under his Democratic predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, when a majority of one party needed to support a motion to vacate to bring it to the floor.Who is behind the push to oust McCarthy?Republican Representative Gaetz, a firebrand from Florida and perpetual thorn in McCarthy’s side, has repeatedly threatened to file a motion to vacate. The speaker has been unfazed. In a 14 September closed-door meeting of House Republicans, McCarthy dared Gaetz to bring a motion to the floor.Others including Representatives Dan Bishop and Eli Crane have also suggested they would support a motion to vacate.Has the motion to vacate been used before?The motion was first used in 1910, when Republican speaker Joseph Cannon put forward the motion himself to force detractors in his own party to decide whether they supported him or not, according to the House Archives. The motion failed.In 1997 Republican speaker Newt Gingrich was threatened with a motion to vacate. Although he managed to tamp down resistance and avoid an actual resolution being filed, he resigned in 1998 after disappointing results in the midterm elections that year.In 2015 Republican Representative Mark Meadows filed a motion to vacate against Republican speaker John Boehner. It did not come to a vote, but Boehner resigned a few months later, citing the challenges of managing a burgeoning hardline conservative faction of his party. More

Simmering hostility between Republicans over the bipartisan deal that averted a government shutdown descended into open political warfare on Sunday, a rightwing congressman saying he would move to oust Kevin McCarthy and the embattled House speaker insisting he would survive.“We need to rip off the Bandaid. We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” the Florida representative Matt Gaetz told CNN’s State of the Union, saying he would file a “motion to vacate” in the next few days.McCarthy, Gaetz said, lied about “a secret deal” struck with Democrats to later pass money for Ukraine that was left out of the compromise agreement, and misled Republicans about working with the opposition at all.The bill keeping the government funded for 47 days passed the House on Saturday night 335-91, 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in support. It cleared the Senate 88-9 and was signed by Joe Biden.In remarks at the White House on Sunday, Biden said the measure extending funding until 17 November, and including $16bn in disaster aid, prevented “a needless crisis”.But, Biden said: “The truth is we shouldn’t be here in the first place. It’s time to end governing by crisis and keep your word when you give it in the Congress. I fully expect the speaker to keep his commitment to secure the passage of support needed to help Ukraine as they defend themselves against aggression.”Asked if he expected McCarthy to stand up to extremists, Biden replied: “I hope this experience for the speaker has been one of personal revelation.”McCarthy hit back at Gaetz, branding him a showman “more interested in securing TV interviews” than keeping government functioning.“I’ll survive,” McCarthy told CBS’s Face the Nation. “You know, this is personal with Matt. He wanted to push us into a shutdown, even threatening his own district with all the military people there who would not be paid.“… So be it. Bring it on. Let’s get it over with it, and let’s start governing. If he’s upset because he tried to push us into shutdown and I made sure the government didn’t shut down, then let’s have that fight.”Gaetz said he would no longer hold to an agreement made in January to support McCarthy in exchange for concessions including a hard position on federal funding. That deal included a loosening of rules to allow a single member to file a motion to vacate, the beginning of the process to remove a speaker.“The only way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if Democrats bail him out, and they probably will,” said Gaetz.“I’m done owning Kevin McCarthy. We made a deal in January to allow him to assume the speakership and I’m not owning him any more because he doesn’t tell the truth. And so if Democrats want to own Kevin McCarthy by bailing him out I can’t stop them. But then he’ll be their speaker, not mine.”McCarthy would need 218 votes to keep his job. Some senior Democrats said they would not vote to save him and would back the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, instead.“Kevin McCarthy is very weak speaker,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told CNN, saying she would support Gaetz’s motion.McCarthy “has clearly has lost control of his caucus. He has brought the US and millions of Americans to the brink, waiting until the final hour to keep the government open and even then only issuing a 4[7]-day extension. We’re going to be right back in this place in November.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to reporters on Saturday, Jeffries said the deal represented a “total surrender by rightwing extremists”.Republicans loyal to McCarthy also attacked Gaetz and the rightwing House Freedom Caucus for their “destructive” pledge to oust the speaker.“What I just heard was a diatribe of delusional thinking,” Mike Lawler of New York told ABC’s This Week. “They are the reason we had to work together with House Democrats. That is not the fault of Kevin McCarthy, that’s the fault of Matt Gaetz. He’s mealy mouthed and, frankly, duplicitous.”Relations between the speaker and Gaetz reached a new low with a testy confrontation in a meeting on Thursday. Gaetz accused McCarthy of orchestrating a social media campaign against him, the speaker saying he did not rate the congressman highly enough to do so.On Sunday, Gaetz insisted “this is about keeping Kevin McCarthy to his word, it’s not about any personal animosity”.Gaetz claimed McCarthy reached a “secret deal”, promising to introduce a standalone bill to continue funding Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russian invaders.A growing number of Republicans object to the US helping pay for the war. Gaetz said: “However you think about [Ukraine funding], it should be subject to open review [and] analysis, and not backroom deals, so I have to file a motion to vacate against speaker McCarthy this week.”On ABC, Gaetz said he did not expect to have enough votes to remove McCarthy immediately, “but I might have them before the 15th ballot”, an allusion to the time it took to elect the speaker in January.“I am relentless, and I will continue to pursue this objective,” Gaetz said. “And if all the American people see is that it is a uni-party that governs them, always the Biden, McCarthy, Jeffries government that makes dispositive decisions on spending, then I am seeding the fields of future primary contests to get better Republicans in Washington.”Shalanda Young, Biden’s budget director, blamed Republicans for bringing the government to the verge of a shutdown, and urged Congress to take a longer-term view.“We need to start today to make sure that we do not have this brinkmanship, last-minute anxiousness of the American people,” she told ABC. “Let’s do our jobs to not have this happen again. Let’s have full-year funding bills at the end of these 47 days.” More

The US senator Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, was long cherished by the CIA and others in the defence and intelligence community as someone whose staunch support they could rely on. Until one day they could not: on 11 March 2009 she launched an investigation into the CIA’s torture of detainees post-9/11.That investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, which she chaired, turned into a bitter struggle with the agency and it tried to block it. She did not buckle and finally, in December 2014, she published her report, revealing the scale and brutality of what the CIA had done and its repeated attempts to mislead Congress and the White House. On top of all that, the report found the torture had proved counter-productive in obtaining valuable intelligence.On the day of publication, she told the Senate: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say ‘see what Americans did’, and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence. We cannot prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again’.”Her fight was dramatic enough to interest Hollywood, and the film The Report was released in 2019, with Feinstein played by Annette Bening.What made her fight with the CIA so surprising was that it was out of kilter with her career before and after, as a Senate hawk. She voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though she later expressed regret over the former – supported Republicans in defence procurement projects and defended the spy agencies in controversies such as illegal mass surveillance in 2013.Her reputation as a hawk frequently put her at odds with the Democratic left and this disillusionment with her grew rapidly in the latter part of her career.In February this year, facing calls to stand down as her physical and mental health declined, she said she would not seek re-election in 2024.There was much in her life she could look back on with pride: a trailblazer for women in politics; the calm leadership she displayed as mayor in San Francisco after the killings of her predecessor, George Moscone, and of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to an official position in the US; her success, albeit limited, in getting gun control through the US senate in 1994. But it was the torture report she cited as the achievement she was most proud.The first she heard of the torture was in September 2006, when Feinstein and other members of the intelligence committee were privately briefed by the then head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. Although Hayden played down what the CIA euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, Feinstein was troubled by what she heard.When she became chair of the intelligence committee in 2009 – its first female head – she launched the investigation. The final 6,700-page report remains classified, but she got around this by publishing a 500-page executive summary and that was damning enough.Between 2002 and 2008 the CIA had detained 119 men at “black sites” – secret locations around the world – and of these 39 had been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and “rectal rehydration”.In 2015, Feinstein worked with the Republican senator John McCain in steering through the Senate an amendment that reinforced a ban on torture. The McCain-Feinstein amendment was the kind of bipartisan consensus that Feinstein, a centrist, valued. But, as US politics became more polarised, her attempts to work with Republicans increasingly grated with fellow Democrats.When Donald Trump, as president, began to pack the supreme court with rightwingers, Democrats complained that Feinstein, who was the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, did not put up enough of a fight. After the 2020 confirmation hearings of a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein left Democrats seething when she hugged the chair, Republican Lindsey Graham.Born in San Francisco, Dianne was the daughter of Betty (nee Rosenburg), a model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Her family was affluent but she had a traumatic childhood: her mother was unstable and given to sudden rages due to an undiagnosed brain disorder. According to David Talbot, in his history of San Francisco in the 1960s through to the 80s, Season of the Witch (2012), Betty once chased her daughter with a knife around a dining table.Dianne attended a convent school before going to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. She went on to secure a job on the state parole board. Although politics was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she was elected in 1969 on to the 11-member San Francisco board of supervisors, basically the city and county council. Runs for mayor in 1971 and 1975 proved unsuccessful.In 1976, she was the target of a bomb attack on her home claimed by a California-based leftwing terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front. The bomb was planted in a window flower box but failed to go off. A few months later, another group, the Environmental Life Force, claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of her holiday home with a BB gun.She began to carry a concealed handgun for protection. In 1978, dispirited by the combination of the mayoral defeats and being targeted, she told a reporter she was on the verge of quitting politics.Only hours after this exchange, the mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, and Milk, a fellow supervisor, were shot dead in City Hall by a former supervisor. Feinstein was the first into Milk’s office. She told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “It was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.” Checking Milk for a pulse, one of her fingers slipped into a bullet hole.As president of the board of supervisors at the time, she was well placed to take over as mayor, which she duly did, becoming the first female to occupy the post.She served until 1988. With Aids rampant, she supported many initiatives to help the gay community. She secured federal funding for an overhaul of the cable car network, which proved popular with residents and tourists.Influenced by seeing the damage to Milk’s body, she introduced in 1982 a local ordinance banning most residents from owning handguns. She had her own gun and 14 others that had been handed over in a buy-back scheme melted down and turned into a cross and given to Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican.After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1990, she was elected as a US senator from California in 1992. She quickly made an impact, guiding through in 1994 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, outlawing civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms, though with a proviso that it would expire in 2004 if not renewed, which it was not.She was ranked in 2018 as the second wealthiest senator, with her fortune estimated at about $88m (about £74m).Feinstein married three times: Jack Berman in 1956, with whom she had a daughter, Katherine, divorcing in 1959; Bertram Feinstein in 1962 until his death in 1978; and Richard Blum from 1980 to his death in 2022.She is survived by Katherine, three stepdaughters, and a granddaughter, Eileen. More

The death of the California senator Dianne Feinstein may have helped inspire US lawmakers to avoid a federal government shutdown, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said.Speaking on Sunday, to CNN’s State of the Union, the California Democrat mourned the loss of Feinstein and said: “Some of the senators said that maybe her departure and the sadness that went with us focused people more on, ‘Let’s get the job done to keep government open for the people.’”The deal to avoid the shutdown was done late on Saturday, the Senate following the House in backing the deal before Joe Biden signed it.Feinstein, who at 90 was the oldest serving senator, died in Washington on Thursday. Tributes came from both sides of the aisle. On Saturday, a plane from the presidential fleet carried her body to her home city, San Francisco.Pelosi, who accompanied Feinstein’s body with the senator’s daughter, said: “She was my neighbor, my friend. My family loved her personally, politically, in every way.“We used to always say, if Dianne and I ran against each other, my daughter Nancy would probably vote for Dianne. That was the love that existed. But love is a good word for her, because she loved people. She loved California. She loved America.”Pelosi also thanked Joe Biden for arranging the transfer “in the grand way that we did … draped in the flag – she was such a patriot – [to] be welcomed by men and women in uniform as she came off the plane”.Although she and Feinstein “were not always on the same place on the spectrum of politics”, Pelosi said, Feinstein “reached across the aisle all the time”.The former speaker, 83, also recalled a memory from the early 1980s, when Pelosi was chair of the California Democratic party and Feinstein mayor of San Francisco.“When we were moving for the Democratic convention in San Francisco … we went to see her … to say, what about this?” said Pelosi.Feinstein said: “Well, will it cost money?”“And we said: ‘Well, we have to raise money.’”Feinstein said: “Well, my first concern are people at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.”“This is where many lower-income people … who need medical care,” Pelosi said, adding: “She was always about people and meeting their needs with her responsibility.”Pelosi also hailed Feinstein’s efforts to pass the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, calling her a “great legislator”.“Then it was reinstated and then it went away but while it was there, it saved lives,” Pelosi said of the ban. “How many people can make that claim?”Pelosi spoke hours after Biden signed a bill to extend government funding for 45 days. On Sunday, in response to the House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s deal with Democrats, the Florida Republican Matt Gaetz announced that he would try to oust McCarthy. Asked what advice she would give to her colleagues about Gaetz’s plan, Pelosi urged Democrats to follow their leader.“Hakeem Jeffries has done a great job,” she said, of the New Yorker who succeeded Pelosi atop the House Democratic caucus and is now minority leader. “Yesterday, we had a victory in the continuing resolution. It was a victory for Democrats, a defeat for the Magas,” a reference to far-right supporters of Donald Trump.Of Gaetz, Pelosi said: “You’re wasting your time on that guy, because he has no sway in the House of Representatives except to get on TV and to raise money on the internet. But, anyway, forgetting that … my advice [is] follow the leader.” More

When federal prosecutors raided Bob Menendez’s home in the summer of 2022, they found a staggering haul.The US senator for New Jersey, one of the most influential and powerful Democrats in the country, had almost $500,000 in cash stuffed into jacket pockets, closets and a safe, along with 13 gold bars, two of them marked as 1kg in weight.In the garage was a gleaming Mercedes-Benz, allegedly bought for Menendez and his wife, who has been charged along with her husband with accepting bribes in return for political favors.“Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes,” Nadine Mendendez texted her husband on taking possession of the black convertible in April 2019. A day earlier, prosecutors say, a New Jersey businessman, who has a previous conviction for fraud, gave her $15,000 in cash towards the car, and would eventually pay for its entire cost.Menendez was last week accused, with his wife and three Jersey-based businessmen, of a staggering range of offenses. The story has struck a blow to the heart of Democratic politics, especially when the party is busy trying to convince an increasingly cynical electorate it is a safe pair of hands for honest American governance.According to the charging document, Menendez used his position as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee to benefit Egypt in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes.Menendez also used his “power and influence”, according to the indictment, to secure and maintain a lucrative contract with Egypt for a business associate. Closer to home, Menendez allegedly attempted to disrupt a New Jersey criminal prosecution on behalf of another businessman friend.Menendez, 69, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right.Wednesday’s appearance at a federal courtroom in Manhattan marked an ignominious moment for Menendez, who said he will not step down and is still planning to run for re-election next year. But it was far from the first.In 2015, he was charged in connection with a bribery scheme, after allegedly accepting gifts from a businessman friend, in exchange for intervening in a dispute with the government of the Dominican Republic. The case went to court in 2017, but ended in a mistrial after the jury was deadlocked.Menendez grew up in a tenement building in Union City, New Jersey, the bilingual son of Cuban immigrants. His was the “quintessential American story”, according to his website: elected to the Union City board of education when he was 19, he then graduated from St Peter’s University in New Jersey with a law degree.He became mayor of Jersey City in 1986, aged 32, and was a congressman by the time he was 39. In 2006, Menendez was elected to the Senate, where he became a key figure on the foreign relations committee.The latest charges are likely to bring an end to that illustrious career. At least 18 Senate Democrats have called for Menendez to resign, along with New Jersey’s governor and most of the state’s congressmen and women.But Menendez is fighting and says he has been “falsely accused” because he is Latino. He insists he will not step down.Menendez told reporters he had saved the nearly $500,000 found at his home over the course of 30 years, and kept it in cash “because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba”. But he has not addressed questions about why some of the money bore the fingerprints and DNA of Fred Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer accused of paying Menendez bribes.The story of Menendez’s alleged corruption cannot be separated from the story of his marriage.Menendez met Nadine Arslanian in late 2017, at an iHop – a popular chain of pancake restaurants – in Jersey City.Menendez, a diminutive gray-haired man, was in his mid-60s at the time. That February, he and Arslanian were dating, and Menendez proposed in October 2019 at the Taj Mahal.A video of the proposal, posted to a YouTube account called Robert&Nadine, showed Menendez singing a snippet from the song Never Enough, from the movie The Greatest Showman, before asking Arslanian to marry him. She said yes, and they married in October 2020.At the time they met, Nadine Menendez had been friends with Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessman, for many years – exchanging “thousands of text messages” – according to the indictment. Born in Egypt, Hana “maintained close connections with Egyptian officials”, prosecutors said.In early 2018, Nadine told Hana she was dating Menendez, and by March 2018, Hana was organizing meetings between Menendez and Egyptian military officials.Those meetings, at Menendez’s Senate office and at upscale restaurants, came as Egypt was anxious to secure American cash.For several years prior to 2018, Egypt “had often faced resistance in obtaining foreign military financing and foreign military sales” from the US, according to the indictment, and in August 2017 the US state department said it was withholding $195m from Egypt until it could “demonstrate improvements on human rights and democracy”.For Egypt, Menendez’s position as chair of the foreign relations committee made him a lucrative contact. A longstanding convention in the US government held that the state department would not proceed with a transfer of money to Egypt, or with the sale of military equipment, without sign-off from the chairman or ranking member of the committee.As such, according to the indictment, “Robert Mendendez […] possessed substantial influence over the foreign military sales and foreign military financing to Egypt.”At the meetings, organized by Hana, Egyptian officials repeatedly raised the issue of foreign military sales and foreign financing, prosecutors say. Menendez promised to “use his power and authority to facilitate such sales and financing to Egypt”, according to the indictment, in exchange for Hana putting Nadine Menendez on his company’s payroll.Reading the indictment, one of most striking themes is how the Menendezes failed to cover their tracks. Prosecutors found a flood of text messages and emails between the pair, some of which seem to directly reference actions and payments.On 6 May 2018, according to the indictment, Bob and Nadine Menendez met with Hana. That afternoon, Menendez asked the state department for staffing information regarding the US embassy in Cairo. The information was not formally classified, but was “deemed highly sensitive”, the indictment says, because it could pose “significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government”.Having obtained the information, Menendez texted Nadine a full breakdown of the people who worked in the embassy, including the number of US diplomats, and the number of locally employed Egyptian staff. Nadine Menendez forwarded the message to Hana, who forwarded it to an Egyptian government official, according to the indictment.Later that month, Menendez was again asked for his services, prosecutors say. An Egyptian official requested help in editing and drafting an email lobbying US senators to release a hold on $300m of US aid to Egypt.Menendez “edited and ghost-wrote” the requested letter, according to the indictment, and sent the letter to Nadine Menendez from his personal email account. She sent the letter to Hana, who gave the draft to Egyptian officials.The money did not immediately flow.The plan, according to prosecutors, was that Hana pay money to Nadine Menendez through his company, IS EG Halal. But several months after Bob Menendez had met, and allegedly worked on behalf of, the Egyptian officials, no money had emerged.“I have been so upset all morning,” Nadine Menendez texted her husband one day, complaining that Hana was yet to pay her any money.In the spring of 2019, things began to look up for the Menendezes. Egypt granted Hana’s company, IS EG Halal, an “exclusive monopoly” on the certification of US food exports to Egypt over halal standards.IS EG Halal had no experience in halal certification, but the deal provided a revenue stream from which, prosecutors allege, bribes were paid to the Menendezes – through a “consultant” company set up by Nadine Menendez in June 2019.“Seems like halal went through. It might be a fantastic 2019 all the way around,” Nadine Menendez texted her husband on 8 April 2019, the day after IS EG Halal was awarded the Egypt deal.With IS EG Halal now in business, money started flowing to the Menendezes.In July of that year, IS EG Halal paid about $23,000 to Nadine Menendez’s mortgage, according to the indictment. Menendez received further checks for $10,000 in August, September and November of the same year – which Daibes allegedly helped to facilitate.The relationship continued, according to the indictment, and the Menendezes continued to benefit, to the tune of “hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks, cash and gold”, prosecutors say.Along the way, the Mercedes-Benz was purchased for the delighted Nadine Menendez with money allegedly provided by Hana and Jose Uribe, one of the co-defendants and a businessman who has a previous conviction for fraud.The Mercedes was acquired after Menendez allegedly promised to intervene to disrupt the New Jersey prosecution of a friend of Uribe, in an example of how Menendez’s services were available both home and abroad.Sometimes the alleged bribes were more prosaic – expensive furniture, two exercise machines and an air purifier were bought for the couple by IS EG Halal – but still amounted to thousands of dollars.In the indictment, prosecutors have asked that the couple be required to forfeit to the government their home, the Mercedes, and the $480,000 in cash, plus $79,760 found in a safe deposit box, and all their gold bars.As for Menendez’s political career, it may now be forever associated with the photos released by investigators from his home: the almost parody-of-corruption images showing money stuffed into pockets, and gold bars laid out on paper towels.One of the jackets Menendez used to store his cash had his political title emblazoned on the chest: Senator Menendez. If prosecutors – and many of his colleagues – have their way, the New Jerseyite will be called that no more. More

The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.
Diane McWhorter is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama – The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution More

In more normal political times, the successful prevention of a government shutdown might be cause for celebration. For Kevin McCarthy, it may instead mark the beginning of the end of his speakership.After failing to pass a more conservative stopgap spending bill on Friday, the House Republican speaker introduced a different proposal extending government funding for 45 days and allocating $16bn for disaster relief aid. That bill the House on Saturday in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the legislation.In a worrisome sign for McCarthy, 90 House Republicans opposed the bill. The speaker still managed to secure the support of most of his conference, but he expressed exasperation with the hard-right holdouts who blocked his initial stopgap proposal, which included severe spending cuts for most federal agencies.“It is very clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the conference,” McCarthy told reporters on Saturday. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”Indeed, McCarthy spent the weeks leading up to the 1 October shutdown deadline attempting to appease his hard-right colleagues. On Thursday night, House Republicans approved three longer-term appropriations bills that included some of the steep cuts demanded by the hard-right Freedom Caucus.McCarthy had hoped that the House’s ongoing work to pass appropriations bills would diffuse the concerns of Freedom Caucus members, many of whom said they would not back a stopgap bill in any form. But those holdout members were true to their word, opposing every proposal that would extend government funding and prevent a shutdown.When McCarthy’s original stopgap bill came up for a vote on Friday, 21 Republicans opposed the measure. The hard-right blockade easily sunk the bill because of House Republicans’ extremely narrow majority.In the end, McCarthy was forced to take a course of action he had avoided for weeks: passing a short-term funding bill with the help of House Democrats. Although Democrats expressed disappointment that McCarthy’s proposal did not include additional funding to support Ukraine’s war efforts, they ultimately provided the speaker with the support he needed to get the bill across the finish line.The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, celebrated the bill’s passage as a complete surrender by McCarthy and his allies, given that the legislation did not include the severe funding cuts outlined in the speaker’s original proposal.“We went from devastating cuts that would have impacted the health, the safety and the economic wellbeing of the American people, in 24 hours, to a spending agreement that meets the needs of the American people across the board,” Jeffries said on Saturday. “The American people have won. The extreme [‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans have lost. It was a victory for the American people and a complete and total surrender by right-wing extremists, who throughout the year have tried to hijack the Congress.”Hard-right Republicans had warned that they would move to oust McCarthy as speaker if he collaborated with Democrats on a funding bill, and they have the means to do so. Under the current House rules, it only takes one member to bring a motion to vacate, which forces a vote on removing the sitting speaker. McCarthy’s detractors would only need a simple majority to unseat him.Hard-right Republicans appeared ready to make good on their threat after the stopgap proposal passed the House. As the House moved to adjourn on Saturday, congressman Matt Gaetz, a hard-right Republican of Florida, was seen trying to get the attention of the presiding member for another matter of business. The House adjourned before Gaetz could be recognised, but the chamber will be back in session on Monday, when hard-right lawmakers will have another opportunity to take action against McCarthy.Gaetz previewed a potential effort to oust McCarthy on Tuesday, saying in a floor speech, “The one thing I agree with my Democrat colleagues on is that for the last eight months, this House has been poorly led, and we own that, and we have to do something about it. And you know what? My Democrat colleagues will have an opportunity to do something about that, too, and we will see if they bail out our failed speaker.”If McCarthy is banking on Democratic support to keep his gavel, he may be sorely disappointed. Politico reported Saturday that Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker, was instructing her colleagues not to come to McCarthy’s aid in the event of a vote on vacating the chair.Despite the grim state of affairs, McCarthy appeared ready for battle on Saturday. After withstanding 15 rounds of voting to win the speakership in January, McCarthy said he wouldn’t go down without a fight.“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it. There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy told reporters. “I’m going to be a conservative that gets things done for the American public, and whatever that holds, so be it because I believe in not giving up on America.”The coming days will determine what the future holds for McCarthy, but if Gaetz and his allies are successful, the House could soon be looking for a new leader. More

Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm on Saturday in a Capitol office building before a House vote on a stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown.The alarm prompted the Cannon House office building to be evacuated and triggered outcry from Republicans including the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who compared the New York congressman’s actions with those of the January 6 rioters.“I was really appalled watching Democrats’ actions today, to delay it, to get a shutdown,” said McCarthy amid Democrats’ complaints that they did not have sufficient time to review the bill Republicans released last-minute in an attempt to avoid a government shutdown.“That’s a new low,” he said, adding, “We watched how people have been treated if they’ve done something wrong in this Capitol. It would be interesting to see how he is treated and what he was trying to obstruct when it came to the American public.”Brian Steil, a Republican Wisconsin representative and chair of the House administration committee, announced that an investigation into the incident is underway.Georgia’s Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she is calling on the justice department to prosecute Bowman “using the same law they used to prosecute J6 defendants for interfering with an official proceeding”.Meanwhile, the Republican representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said that she is drafting a resolution to expel Bowman, tweeting, “This is the United States Congress, not a New York City high school. This action warrants expulsion & I’m introducing a resolution to do just that.”Malliotakis’s fellow Republican representative Elise Stefanik echoed similar sentiments, tweeting, “A Democrat member of Congress just committed a felony by pulling the fire alarm to try to delay and stop a Congressional vote to fund the government.”In DC, falsely pulling a fire alarm is considered a misdemeanor.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement to The Hill, a spokesperson for Bowman said, “Congressman Bowman did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote,” adding, “The congressman regrets any confusion.”Speaking to reporters, Bowman said, “I thought the alarm would open the door.”It remains unclear whether Bowman will be prosecuted.The 45-day funding resolution, which Bowman and a majority of Democrats ultimately voted in favor of, passed with a 335-91 vote in the House. The bill is now with the Democrat-majority Senate, and lawmakers have until midnight on Sunday to pass it and send it to president Joe Biden to sign into law before a government shutdown. More