In recent weeks the US supreme court ended affirmative action, ruled in favour of a web designer who does not want to serve gay clients and blocked Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan.
Michael Safi speaks with Sam Levine, a voting rights reporter with Guardian US, to learn the stories behind these decisions, and what president Biden can do about them
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George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds, stoked outrage by comparing himself to the great civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks.“Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the back, and neither am I gonna sit in the back,” Santos told Mike Crispi Unafraid, a rightwing podcast.Santos also said he will run for re-election in his New York seat, which covers parts of Long Island and Queens.A prospective opponent, the Democratic former state senator Anna M Kaplan, said: “George Santos is an absolute disgrace who continues to embarrass New Yorkers.”Now honoured by a statue in the US Capitol, Parks was a seamstress and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People secretary who carved her place in history when on a bus in Alabama in 1955 she refused to move to make way for a white passenger and was arrested and jailed.According to the Architect of the Capitol, Parks “remained an icon of the civil rights movement to the end of her life. In 1999, the United States Congress honored her with a Congressional Gold Medal. Following her death on 24 October 2005, she was accorded the rare tribute of having her remains lie in honor in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in recognition of her contribution to advancing civil and human rights.”The Parks statue is the first full-length representation of an African American person in the US Capitol. Made of bronze and granite, it is close to 9ft tall and, according to its official description, “suggests inner strength, dignity, resolve and determination, all characteristic of her long-time commitment to working for civil rights”.Santos, 34, compared himself to Parks while sitting in what appeared to be a parked car, wearing a powder blue zip-up hoodie.Since being elected last year, he has consistently attracted controversy over reports of behavior ranging from the bizarre to the picaresque and allegedly criminal. Charged in New York, his bail was guaranteed by relatives. No trial date has been set.Republican House leaders, governing with a small majority, have not seriously moved against him. A motion to expel, and make Santos only the sixth House member ever ejected, failed after Republicans refused to back it.Speaking to Crispi, a former Republican congressional candidate in New Jersey, Santos said of critics in his own party: “They come for me, I go right back for them … So, you know, it’s not gonna stay that way any more. I’m gonna call them out. You want to call me a liar? I’ll call you a sellout.”In February, at Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Santos was confronted by Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee.Romney called Santos a “sick puppy”. Among Santos’s many controversies is a dropped charge of theft in Pennsylvania in 2017, over a purchase of puppies.Santos told Crispi: “The man goes to the State of the Union of the United States wearing the Ukraine lapel pin and tells me, a Latino gay man, that I shouldn’t sit in the front, that I should be in the back. Well, guess what, Rosa Parks but didn’t sit in the back and neither am I gonna sit in the back.“That’s just the reality of our work. Mitt Romney lives in a very different world. And he needs to buckle up because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride for him.” More
Ron DeSantis has made “very large, critical errors” in the Republican presidential primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, the biggest of which is the Florida governor’s attempt to “out-Trump Trump” and appeal to the hard-right GOP base.“The dynamics of these races change from day to day,” the New York progressive congresswoman told MSNBC. “I think that Governor DeSantis has made some very large, critical errors.“You can’t out-Trump Trump, right? And that’s what he’s really been trying to do. His attacks on teachers, on schools, on LGBTQ+ Americans, I think, go way too far in the state of Florida. And I think that they are a profound political miscalculation and an overcompensation.”DeSantis is a clear second in polling regarding the Republican nomination but lags as much as 30 points behind Donald Trump.The former president is the clear frontrunner despite an unprecedented 71 criminal indictments, a $5m civil penalty after being held liable for sexual assault and defamation, and the prospect of more charges to come regarding attempted election subversion.DeSantis, a former US congressman, won a landslide re-election in Florida last year. He has pursued a hard-right agenda, including signing a six-week abortion ban, loosening gun controls and attacking the teaching of race and LGBTQ+ issues in public schools.But he has struggled to make an impact on the campaign trail, observers suggesting he lacks the skills to truly connect with voters, even in a Republican primary, let alone in a general election.On Sunday, DeSantis told Fox News: “The media does not want me to be the nominee. I think that’s very, very clear. Why? Because they know I will beat [Joe] Biden. But, even more importantly, they know I will actually deliver on all these things.”Head-to-head polling shows Biden and DeSantis in a tight race. Recent surveys from Emerson and Yahoo News gave Biden leads of six and three points respectively. NBC News found the two men in a tie.DeSantis listed hard-right priorities he said he would pursue in power: “We will stop the invasion at the border. We will take on the drug cartels. We will curtail the administrative state. We will get spending under control.“We will do all the things that they don’t want to see done, and so they’re going to continue doing the type of narrative.”Ocasio-Cortez was not convinced.Speaking on Sunday to the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, she said: “He may be trying to win a base, but that base belongs to Donald Trump.“And he has sacrificed, I think, the one thing that others may have thought would make him competitive, which is this idea that he would somehow be more rational than Donald Trump, which he isn’t.” More
A federal judge in Louisiana ruled last week that a wide range of Biden administration officials could not communicate with social media companies about content moderation issues, and in a lengthy opinion described the White House’s outreach to platforms as “almost dystopian” and reminiscent of “an Orwellian ministry of truth”.The ruling, which was delivered by the Trump-appointed judge Terry Doughty, was a significant milestone in a case that Republicans have pushed as proof that the Biden administration is attempting to silence conservative voices. It is also the latest in a wider rightwing campaign to weaken attempts at stopping false information and conspiracy theories from proliferating online, one that has included framing disinformation researchers and their efforts as part of a wide-reaching censorship regime.Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana have sued Biden administration officials, the GOP-controlled House judiciary committee has demanded extensive documents from researchers studying disinformation, and rightwing media has attacked academics and officials who monitor social media platforms. Many of the researchers involved have faced significant harassment, leading to fears of a chilling effect on speaking out against disinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election.The Republican pushback against anti-disinformation campaigns has existed for years, alleging that content moderation on major platforms has unfairly targeted conservative voices. Many tech platforms have instituted policies against misinformation or hateful speech that have resulted in content such as election denial, anti-vaccine falsehoods and far-right conspiracy theories being removed – all which tend to skew Republican. But research has found that allegations of anti-conservative bias at social media companies have little empirical evidence, with a 2021 New York University study showing that these platforms’ algorithms instead often work to amplify rightwing content.The rightwing narrative of tech platform censorship persisted, however, intensifying as companies prohibited medical misinformation about Covid-19. It gained additional momentum last year after the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a disinformation governance board aimed at researching ways to stop malicious online influence campaigns and harmful misinformation. Republican politicians and rightwing media immediately seized on the board as proof of a leftist authoritarian plot.Fox News hosts specifically singled out researcher Nina Jankowicz, who was tapped to be the board’s executive director, and ran numerous segments viciously mocking her. A year-long harassment campaign followed, leading to Jankowicz receiving death threats, having deepfake pornography made of her and seeing her personal information released online against her will.The disinformation governance board suspended its operations only a month after its debut, in what Jankowicz told the Guardian earlier this week was the start of a larger rightwing campaign aimed at rolling back checks on disinformation. “They got a win in shutting us down, so why would they stop there?” said Jankowicz, who was originally named in the Louisiana lawsuit but removed on account of no longer being a government official.The GOP takes aim at researchersIn addition to the lawsuit in Louisiana, Republicans have put pressure on researchers through a House select subcommittee investigation that launched in January and claims it will look into the “weaponization of the federal government”. The House judiciary committee chair, Jim Jordan, earlier this year issued a wide-ranging request for information and documents to multiple universities with programs aimed at researching disinformation, and has so far sent dozens of subpoenas.Among the institutions and officials that Jordan requested emails and documents from were the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the non-profit Election Integrity Partnership. Jordan last month threatened Stanford University with legal action if it did not turn over additional records. (Stanford released communications with government officials but did not send some internal records, including ones that involved students, the university told the Washington Post.)The Stanford Internet Observatory, the Center for an Informed Public and the Election Integrity Partnership did not return requests for comment.Democratic representatives decried the committee’s activities as an attempt to harangue researchers and institutions that its members viewed as political enemies, likening it to McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.“This committee is nothing more than a deranged ploy by the Maga extremists who have hijacked the Republican party and now want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense,” Jim McGovern, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, said during the formation of the committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe committee has struggled to be seen as legitimate, with a Washington Post-ABC News poll released in February showing that a majority of Americans view it as a partisan attempt to score political points. But it has nonetheless put pressure on academic institutions and emboldened attacks against researchers, including the University of Washington disinformation expert Kate Starbird, who told the Washington Post that she has faced political intimidation and cut back on public engagement.Starbird and other researchers are directly named in the Louisiana lawsuit for their role as advisers to a now-disbanded Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency subcommittee on disinformation. Starbird, who did not return a request for comment, has previously stated that the Republican-led lawsuit egregiously misrepresents her work.The Louisiana lawsuitRepublicans filed the lawsuit against Biden last year, and were joined by other plaintiffs that included the conspiracy site the Gateway Pundit and a Louisiana group opposed to vaccine mandates.The case was notably filed in a Louisiana district court where Judge Terry Doughty presides. Doughty, who was appointed by Trump and previously ruled against Biden administration mask and vaccine mandates, is a jurist Republicans specifically seek out when shopping for a favorable forum. He has overseen more multi-state challenges to the Biden administration than any other judge, Bloomberg Law reported, despite previously being a little-known justice based in a small city of less than 50,000 people.Legal experts questioned Doughty’s injunction against the Biden administration this week, the Associated Press reported, saying that the wide scope of the ruling meant that public health officials could be prevented from sharing their expertise. Meanwhile, disinformation researchers have stated that Republican efforts to push back against content moderation and safeguards against misinformation threaten to open the floodgates for conspiracy theories and falsehoods ahead of the 2024 presidential election.Amid the rightwing campaign against content moderation and disinformation researchers, numerous social media platforms have also been peeling back restrictions. Twitter under Elon Musk, who last year engineered the release of some internal communications between Twitter and government officials, has hollowed out its content moderation teams. Meanwhile, YouTube has reversed a policy banning election denialism and Instagram allowed the prominent anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr back on the platform.The Biden administration stated this week that it objected to Doughty’s injunction in the Louisiana case, and would be considering its options. The justice department is seeking to appeal the ruling. More
The US chief justice should testify before Congress about ethics scandals besetting his supreme court “for the good of democracy”, a leading Californian progressive said.The justices are “so cloistered, they’re so out of touch”, the congressman Ro Khanna told MSNBC on Sunday. “They don’t have a sense of what life is like, so my plea to him would be for the good of democracy come testify. What are you afraid of?”The Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee has requested that Roberts testify about reports regarding relations between justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch and rightwing donors or, in Gorsuch’s case, the chief of a prominent law firm involved in a property purchase.Thomas’s extensive gifts from the billionaire donor Harlan Crow have been exhaustively reported by ProPublica, which also reported an Alaska fishing trip Alito took with the billionaire Paul Singer.The justices failed to disclose such links. All deny wrongdoing. Singer, Crow and the law firm executive also deny wrongdoing and say they and the justices did not discuss politics or business before the court.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as other federal judges but in practice govern themselves.Questions have also been raised about the career of Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, who, according to the New York Times, “has made millions recruiting lawyers to prominent law firms, some of which have business before the court”.In April, turning down the invitation to testify before the Senate judiciary committee, John Roberts cited concerns about the separation of powers.Amid progressive anger over decisions on abortion, affirmative action, student debt relief and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, calls for reform to a court controlled 6-3 by conservatives after Donald Trump appointed three justices in four years have grown ever louder.Public trust in the court is at all-time lows.Speaking to the former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Khanna told MSNBC: “The court is moving us backwards and young people in particular are outraged that the court is taking away the relief of student loans. They’re moving to a time where colleges used to be just for the wealthy and largely white, so I do think this can energise young people, in particular working-class voters.”Calls for structural reform seem to have as little chance of success as calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached – calls perhaps likely to increase after the publication by the Times on Sunday of an investigation of the justice’s membership of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionised him and all that he had achieved”.Republicans control the House and trail Democrats by two seats in the Senate, all but ensuring a block on any such move. Furthermore, Joe Biden is against major reform, such as changing the size of the court or imposing term limits.Khanna said: “Voters know that the court is just out of touch with their lives, that the court is taking away their rights, taking away women’s rights to control their own body, taking away students’ relief in terms of the student loans. The president forgave the loans. The supreme court took that money away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[Voters] see these justices, they see all the ethical conflicts, and they’re saying, ‘Enough with it. Let’s have a clean slate and term limits.’“I’ve said everything should be on the table, but … it’s not an easy thing to do. Often people see that it is polarising or partisan. I guess term limits is an easier first step … and a judicial code of conduct of ethics.”The Senate judiciary chair, Dick Durbin, has promised a vote on ethics reform. Any measure would be highly unlikely to pass the Republican House.Khanna said: “Even Republicans in Congress, if we go out and have someone buy us lunch, the vast majority of us would have to disclose it and have all these ethics rules. I’m just flabbergasted that the supreme court doesn’t have any of those. The limits are so low for members of Congress, anybody who works in the federal government, and this is just a different set of rules.”Khanna did not support an attempt to force the chief justice to testify, via a subpoena, a move called for by another prominent House progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.“I would support hearings,” he said. “I think that the chief justice should testify.“Look, I’ve met the chief justice. I met him a couple of years ago and he said he cared about the legitimacy of the court. The legitimacy of democracy. Well, if he cares about the legitimacy of democracy, he should come testify.” More
It’s a Goldilocks economy – not too hot to spur inflation, not too cool to invite recession.On Friday, the labor department announced that the US economy added 209,000 jobs in June.It was the 30th consecutive month of job gains. The unemployment rate dipped to 3.6%Last Thursday we learned that the US economy grew at an annualized 2% rate in the first quarter of this year. That’s well above economists’ expectations of around 1.4%.But if you haven’t received this news, you’re not alone. Good economic news doesn’t make it through the negative sludge of Fox News or Newsmax. It barely gets through the mainstream media.You want some additional good news? In the four years of Donald Trump’s administration, total investment on manufacturing facilities grew by 5%. During the first two years of Biden’s administration, manufacturing investment more than doubled.This has created about 800,000 manufacturing jobs.These remarkable results are the outcome of Biden policies – the Inflation Reduction Act and its green technology provisions, the infrastructure bill and the Chips Act.What about inflation? Yes, Biden’s stimulative spending did boost prices. But the big news that’s not getting through to most Americans is that inflation has been dropping. It has declined significantly from its mid-2022 highs above 9%.Consumer prices are now rising by about 4.9% annually – still a problem but not nearly the problem it was.Much of the remaining inflation is due to outsized corporate profit margins. The IMF recently found that almost half the increase in Europe’s inflation over the past two years is due to rising corporate profits.I wish Biden would make an issue of those profit margins. They’re enriching those at the top while imposing a big penalty on everyone else.And wages? For a while, real (adjusted for inflation) wages were falling, but now that inflation is subsiding, real wages are picking up again.So why do so many Americans continue to think the economy is awful?According to the Gallup economic confidence index, Americans haven’t felt this bad about the economy since the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index is similarly downbeat.In an NBC News survey conducted a few weeks ago, at least 74% of Americans said the country is on the wrong track.Given all this, it’s not surprising that Joe Biden’s approval numbers have been stuck at around 43%.History shows that incumbent presidents tend not to be re-elected when about 70% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. (They tend to win when fewer than half of Americans think that.)So, the obvious question is, why are Americans feeling so bad about an economy that’s actually damned good?One reason, I think, is a general sense of dread – centering on Trump, DeSantis and Republican lawmakers in general – that seems to affect everything else. (I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have difficulty getting to sleep, worried about the rise of authoritarian fascism in America.)Add in the effects of the climate crisis, and you get more gloom. (This week, the earth’s average temperature reached the highest on record.) A recent study found that headlines have grown starkly more negative.Then, too, many of us are still suffering from pandemic-related PTSD.But I think the deeper reason Americans don’t feel very good about the economy is that is that the vast number of working non-college grads – some two-thirds of the adult US population – are still bogged down in dead-end jobs lacking any economic security, while struggling with many costs (such as housing, childcare and education) that continue to soar.In other words, the economy is getting better overall – but overall has become a less useful gauge of wellbeing as the rich get richer, the poor grow poorer, and the working middle is under worsening siege.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More
The decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine risks costing the US its “moral leadership” in world affairs, the influential California Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee said.“We know what takes place in terms of cluster bombs being very dangerous to civilians,” Lee said. “They don’t always immediately explode. Children can step on them. That’s a line we should not cross.”In 2001, Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan. She is running to replace the retiring Dianne Feinstein in the Senate next year.Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, she added: “I think [Joe Biden] has been doing a good job managing … [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s aggressive war against Ukraine, but I think that this should not happen. [Biden] had to ask for a waiver under the Foreign Assistance Act just to do it because we have been preventing the use of cluster bombs since I believe 2010.”Biden also spoke to CNN, an interview released as he traveled to the UK, then to the Nato summit in Lithuania.His host, Fareed Zakaria, said: “These are weapons that a hundred nations ban, including some of our closest Nato allies. When there was news that the Russians might be using it, admittedly against civilians, your then press secretary said this might … constitute war crimes. What made you change your mind?”Biden said: “Two things … and it was a very difficult decision on my part. And I discussed this with our allies, discussed this with our friends up on [Capitol] Hill. And we’re in a situation where Ukraine continues to be brutally attacked across the board by … these cluster munitions that have dud rates that are … very high, that are a danger to civilians, number one.”“Dud rates” refers to cluster munition “bomblets” that do not explode when fired or dropped but can do so later.Biden continued: “Number two, the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition … And so what I finally did, [I] took the recommendation of the defense department to … provide them with something that has a very low dud rate. … I think it’s one in 50, which is the least likely to be blowing [up] and it’s not used in civilian areas. They’re trying to … stop those tanks from rolling.”Biden said: “It took me a while to be convinced to do it. But the main thing is, they either have the weapons to stop the Russians now from … stopping the Ukrainian offensive … or they don’t. And I think they needed them.”Lee was asked if the US was at risk in “engaging in war crimes”.“What I think is that we would risk losing our moral leadership,” she said. “Because when you look at the fact that over 120 countries have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, saying they should never be used, they should never be used.“And in fact, many of us have urged the administration to sign on to this convention. And so I’m hoping that the administration would reconsider this because these are very dangerous bombs … and this is a line that I don’t believe we should cross.”Another influential Democrat, Tim Kaine, from Virginia and a member of the Senate armed services committee, also questioned Biden’s decision.“It could give a green light to other nations to do something different as well,” Kaine told Fox News Sunday, adding that he “appreciates the Biden administration has grappled with the risks”.A House Republican, Michael McCaul of Texas, chair of the foreign affairs committee, said he did not “see anything wrong” with supplying cluster bombs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to CNN, McCaul said: “Russia is dropping, with impunity, cluster bombs in Ukraine … all the Ukrainians and [President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy are asking for is to give them the same weapons the Russians have to use in their own country, against Russians who are in their own country … they do not want these to be used in Russia.”McCaul criticized Biden, saying: “As you look at the counter-offensive, it’s been slowed tremendously because this administration has been so slow to get the weapons.”John Kirby, the national security council spokesperson, told ABC’s This Week: “We are very mindful of the concerns about … unexploded ordnance being picked up by civilians or children and being hurt … and we’re going to focus on Ukraine with de-mining efforts. In fact, we’re doing it right now and we will when war conditions permit.”Ukraine’s push for membership of Nato is another divisive issue.“I don’t think it’s ready for membership in Nato,” Biden said. “I don’t think there is unanimity in Nato about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the family now, in the middle of a war … we’re determined to [defend] every inch of territory that is Nato territory. It’s a commitment we’ve all made, no matter what.“If the war is going on, then we’re all … at war with Russia, if that were the case. So, I think we have to lay out a rational path for … Ukraine to be able to qualify to get into Nato.”Kirby said Ukraine needed to make reforms “necessary for any Nato ally to become a member … political reforms, economic reforms, good governance. Those kinds of things.”Zelenskiy also spoke to ABC. If there was no unity on an invitation for Ukraine to join Nato, he said, “Ukraine should get clear security guarantees while it is not in Nato and that is a very important point.”Adding that Ukraine “would like to have all the decisions to be made during this summit”, he said: “It’s obvious that I’ll be there and I’ll be doing whatever I can in order to, so to speak, expedite that solution. … I don’t want to go to Vilnius for fun if the decision has been made beforehand.” More
The US military said on Sunday it conducted a strike that killed Usamah al-Muhajir, an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria.“The strike on Friday was conducted by the same MQ-9s that had, earlier in the day, been harassed by Russian aircraft in an encounter that had lasted almost two hours,” a statement from US Central Command said.It was not immediately clear how the US military confirmed that the person killed was Muhajir. Central Command did not give any more details about him.The statement said there were no indications any civilians were killed in the strike. The military was assessing reports that a civilian may have been injured.“We have made it clear that we remain committed to the defeat of Isis throughout the region,” Gen Erik Kurilla, commander of US Central Command, said in the statement.Washington has stepped up raids and operations against suspected Islamic State operatives in Syria, killing and arresting leaders who had taken shelter in areas under Turkey-backed rebel control after the group lost its last territory in Syria in 2019.The US-led campaign which killed former IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who declared himself the “caliph of all Muslims”, has since targeted surviving leaders, many of whom are thought to have planned attacks abroad.US military commanders say the IS remains a significant threat within the region, though its capabilities have been degraded and its ability to re-establish its network weakened.At its peak in 2014, the IS controlled one-third of Iraq and Syria. Though it was beaten back in both countries, its militants continue to mount insurgent attacks.The US air force earlier released video footage it said showed an encounter between the drones and Russian fighter jets on Wednesday, which forced the MQ-9 Reapers to take evasive action.US Air Forces Central said in a statement: “These events represent a new level of unprofessional and unsafe action by Russian air forces operating in Syria.”Lt Gen Alex Grynkewich, commander of Ninth Air Force in the Middle East, said one of the Russian pilots moved their aircraft in front of a drone and engaged the SU-35’s afterburner, reducing the drone operator’s ability to safely operate the aircraft.R Adm Oleg Gurinov, head of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, said the Russian and Syrian militaries had started a six-day joint training that was set to end on Monday.In comments carried by Syrian state media, Gurinov said Moscow was concerned about flights of drones by the US-led coalition over northern Syria, calling them “systematic violations of protocols” designed to avoid clashes between the two militaries. More
