Evelyn Reynolds

Since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade a year ago, reproductive rights have become an even more contentious issue in an already polarized landscape. With more than 1,500 politicians – mostly men – helping ban abortions since Roe fell, Catholic and pro-choice organizations are increasingly trying to carve out space for themselves in the nationwide dialogue to center their own messaging: that being Catholic and pro-choice are not mutually exclusive.One organization trying to dismantle religious stigma surrounding abortions is Catholics For Choice, a Washington-DC based Catholic abortion rights advocacy group. For CFC, the belief in individual reproductive rights comes as a result of the Catholic faith, not in spite of.Speaking to the Guardian shortly after president Joe Biden – a Catholic – said at a recent fundraiser in Maryland that although he is “not big on abortion, he believes that Roe v Wade “got it right”, CFC president Jamie Manson said that despite Biden’s “good model of not imposing one’s religious beliefs on civil law”, his message echoed rightwing sentiments.“President Biden is playing into a narrative that says, in spite of my faith, I support this. It’s a rightwing narrative that we should not give any energy to. It also creates shame and stigma around abortion,” said Manson.In the US, 63% of Catholic adults say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Additionally, 68% say that Roe v Wade should have been left as is. In a separate survey conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, 24% of abortion patients identified as Catholic.“Catholics overwhelmingly support abortion is because their faith taught them the values of social justice, of the power of individual conscience and of religious freedom… Catholic women who participate richly in the life of the church are having abortions and they have to hear from an all-male hierarchy that when they choose abortion, they’re participating in homicide,” said Manson.“That message is profoundly spiritually violent,” she said, adding, “This is a real pastoral crisis in the church that Catholics don’t want to look at. Every time a high-profile Catholic says, ‘Even though in spite of my faith I support abortion,’ it reinforces that stigma… We need to dismantle this narrative.”To Manson, there are three important ideas deeply embedded in the Catholic tradition which help fuel her organization’s pro-choice beliefs.“The first one is this notion of individual conscience. The catechism says explicitly in all that we say and do, our individual conscience is what tells us what is just and right, not the church. So even if what our conscience tells us to be just and right conflicts with church teaching, we have to go with our conscience,” she said.The next idea is the tradition of social justice, said Manson, which contradicts with the profoundly negative impacts that abortion bans have on already marginalized communities.“Abortion bans and restrictions disproportionately harm people who are already suffering injustices like racism, poverty, immigration laws and domestic violence. The very people that we as Catholics are supposed to prioritize – the marginalized – are the ones who have their suffering exacerbated by abortion bans and restrictions. So there is a deep conflict with our social justice tradition,” Manson said.The third and perhaps the most oft-repeated idea to Manson and other pro-choice faith leaders is religious pluralism.“Catholic teaching supports and respects religious pluralism. And what rightwing Catholics are trying to do is have their theological ideas codified into civil law. By doing that, they’re infringing on the religious freedom of everyone else. Our religious freedom guarantees not only our right to practice our beliefs, but our right to be free of the beliefs of others and so abortion bans and restrictions take away religious freedom,” she said.With far-right Catholic lawmakers continuing to double down on their anti-abortion stances and conservative Christian legal nonprofits funding anti-abortion organizations, the communities that CFC tries to focus on are those that are silent about their support for abortion.“We focus on that population because the majority already are there with us. They’re just afraid to speak about it publicly and that’s because again, of the shame, stigma and punishment that comes from the church when you dare to question this teaching,” Manson explained.“We prefer to cater to that population and we give them information that they need to strengthen their own arguments from a place of faith,” she added.The other focus group of CFC is what Manson calls the “movable middle”, which consists of people who do not know how they feel about abortion and do not feel welcome in the two polarized populations within the abortion debate.“There’s a lot of disinformation that the right wing has put out about abortion over the last 50 years and so we provide them with actual facts. We give them a space to discern how they feel about abortion and make a safe place for people for whom it is a complex issue,” Manson said.Another challenge for organizations like CFC is dismantling certain narratives that automatically enmesh the Catholic faith with anti-abortion stances.“We have to have progressive pro-choice, faithful voices speaking back and centered in the movement now… We really need to counter religious narratives and people who can do that best are religious people. People have to bear in mind the five justices that struck down Roe last year were all Catholic,” said Manson. “We really are fighting a religious force so we have to center religious voices…and take back the narrative that we’ve ceded to this Christian right wing and say, ‘No, because of my faith, I support abortion’ and welcome people who feel conflicted about it rather than making them feel like they’re creating stigma.”Manson added that she doesn’t think the pro-choice movement has done this well “and really needs to if we’re going to transform hearts and minds around this issue”.“I think that they have to center faith voices [because] right now, faith voices are marginalized,” she said. “We need to widen our circle in the pro-choice movement and not create these absolutes and gate-keep each other on messaging.” More

The US supreme court’s decision to strike down Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan late last week “usurped the authority of Congress”, Democratic House representative Ro Khanna said on Sunday.Khanna, of California, argued that if anyone thought Biden was unduly empowered by the legislation which the president used to issue the debt relief program, “then the solution is Congress can repeal the … act”.Chief justice John Roberts and his colleagues on the supreme court “shouldn’t be overturning the will of Congress just because they think Congress gave too much power to the president,” Khanna said on Sunday on ABC’s This Week.The show’s host, Jonathan Karl, pushed back on Khanna’s stance. Karl played a clip in which former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi – Khanna’s fellow California Democrat – asserted that a president could delay debt repayment but not entirely, single-handedly forgive it.In fact, Karl said, the supreme court quoted Pelosi’s words in the decision that doomed the student debt relief program put forth by Biden.Khanna countered by saying that, after Pelosi’s remarks, the Biden administration solicited a legal analysis of the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (Heroes) Act on which the president based his debt forgiveness program.After that analysis, Biden’s staff concluded that the Heroes Act – which enables the government to provide relief to student borrowers amid a national emergency – gave the president authority to cancel or amend the loans in question, Khanna said.The progressive congressman added that he could understand arguments that the Heroes Act – which was passed about two years after the September 11 terrorist attacks – “was way too broad”. But that argument should be advanced in Congress – “it is not for unelected justices to override” federal lawmakers who were chosen by voters, Khanna said.“That’s what this court is doing,” Khanna continued. “It’s very dangerous. They are basically reinterpreting congressional statute to fit their ideological preconceptions.”Khanna’s remarks came days after he spoke to the Guardian about his wish for an extension to an October deadline to resume payments for 40 million students affected by the debt forgiveness program’s defeat.During that interview, he also said the court’s decision to invalidate Biden’s debt forgiveness program proved the institution was “regressive” and in need of reform. Additionally, he pledged to accelerate efforts to pass a bill which would establish term limits for supreme court justices, who currently enjoy lifetime appointments.Three far-right justices on the supreme court – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed during Donald Trump’s presidency.Last week, the conservative supermajority which Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett help form also struck down affirmative action in college admission as well as a Colorado law that compelled entities to afford same-sex couples equal treatment, all about a year after the court eliminated the federal abortion rights established by the landmark Roe v Wade ruling in 1973.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA poll released on Sunday by This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that supreme court justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”. That marked a significant increase from January 2022, when only 38% felt that way.However, the poll did show that a majority – 52% – of Americans approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.Khanna said in the short term he would support Biden’s recently announced efforts to implement a new student debt relief plan through the Higher Education Act. That law was unaffected by the supreme court’s ruling involving the Heroes Act.Khanna also called on the president to block student loan interest from accruing beginning in the fall as well.“You have all of these students who have relied on a promise that they are going to have their student loans forgiven,” Khanna said on This Week. “This is a real hardship.”Khanna made clear that past personal experience partly explained his efforts.“I had to take out $150,000 of student loans,” Khanna said. “I’m fortunate now and been able to pay them off.” More

An escalating feud between the two main rivals for the Republican presidential nomination is akin to a “teenage food fight”, another challenger, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, said on Sunday.He made the comment after the campaign of Ron DeSantis, the rightwing Florida governor who has slipped in the polls to Donald Trump, released a “homophobic” video attacking the former president for his previous support of the LGBTQ+ community.It shows DeSantis, whose barrage of attacks on minorities in his own state has drawn praise from his extremist base and condemnation from trans and gay rights advocates, celebrating his signing of “the most extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history” and a “draconian anti-trans bathroom bill”.The video, and Trump’s attacks on DeSantis using “juvenile” nicknames such as Ron Sanctimonious and Meatball Ron, failed to impress Christie, who told CNN’s State of the Union he would prefer the candidates to focus on “real issues” rather than each other.“I’m not comfortable with it. And I’m not comfortable with the way both Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump are moving our debate in this country,” he said.“We have nine and a half million children in this country every night who go to bed hungry, we have 21% of our students in 10th grade saying they’re using hard illegal drugs. And this is the kind of stuff that we’re talking about?“It’s a teenage food fight between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump and I don’t think that’s what leaders should be doing. It doesn’t make me feel inspired as an American, on the Fourth of July weekend, to have this back-and-forth going on.“It’s narrowing our country and making it smaller. I want a country that’s going to be bigger, and going after the big issues that will make every American feel better about themselves, their families and their country.”Christie wasn’t the only politician with thoughts about DeSantis’s video on Sunday.In his own appearance on State of the Union, Democrat Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, who is openly gay, referenced some of the imagery featured in it, specifically masked, shirtless men, including a clip of actor Brad Pitt from the movie Troy.“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled up shirtless bodybuilders, and get to the bigger issue, which is who are you trying to help?” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Who are you trying to make better off, and what public policy problems can you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?”Meanwhile Caitlyn Jenner, a prominent trans activist and Trump supporter, said DeSantis had reached “a new low” with the video.“He’s so desperate he’ll do anything to get ahead. That’s been the theme of his campaign. You can’t win a general [election], let alone 2028 by going after people that are integral parts of the conservative movement!” she tweeted.Christina Pushaw, the registered “foreign agent” who is DeSantis’s director of rapid response, denied the campaign was being anti-gay for, among other things, opposing Pride month.“We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation, either … It’s unnecessary, divisive, pandering,” she wrote, also on Twitter. More

Another bus carrying asylum seekers arrived in downtown Los Angeles from a Texas border city early on Saturday, the second such transport in less than three weeks.The bus, which arrived at about 12.40pm at Los Angeles’s Union Station from Brownsville, Texas, held 41 people including 11 children who were with their families, according to a statement from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (Chirla).The busload of people were welcomed by a collective of faith and immigrants’ rights groups and transported to St Anthony’s Croatian Catholic church, where they were given water, food, clothing, medical checkups and initial legal immigration assistance.The office of Los Angeles’ mayor, Karen Bass, was not formally notified but became aware of the bus on Friday, said Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for Bass, in a statement.The asylum seekers came from Cuba, Belize, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela. According to a statement from Chirla, most of those on the bus are seeking to reunify with family members or sponsors. Six of them need to fly to Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesperson for Chirla.Cabrera said the group “was less stressed and less chaotic than the previous time”, referring to the busload of people who arrived at the same major transit hub on 14 June. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, claimed responsibility for that move in a tweet that read: “Small Texas border towns remain overrun & overwhelmed because Biden refuses to secure the border”.Abbott has not mentioned the latest bus – and an attempt to contact him was not immediately returned – but posted figures in a tweet on Saturday that claimed the Texas national guard and state troopers have “apprehended more than 386,000” asylum seekers. “While Biden ignores the border crisis, Texas is stepping up to fill the gaps he created,” Abbott said.Bass tweeted: “Los Angeles believes in treating everyone with respect and dignity and will continue to do so.”Bass said that after she took office last year, she directed city agencies to begin planning for a possible scenario in which LA “was on the receiving end of a despicable stunt that Republican governors have grown so fond of”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Chirla and our partners in Los Angeles are organized and ready to receive these asylum seekers when they get here,” said Angélica Salas, Chirla’s executive director, in a statement. “If Los Angeles is their last destination, we will ensure this is the place where they get a genuine and humane reception.”Earlier in June, the state of Florida picked up three dozen migrants in Texas and sent them by private jet to California’s capital, catching shelters and aid workers in Sacramento by surprise. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, held Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, responsible for the flights of asylum seekers, which came in two waves, and appeared to threaten to file kidnapping charges after the first incident in which a group of migrants was dumped at a Sacramento church. More

The conservative supreme court is “creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism”, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions.Her comments came just days after the nation’s highest court released a batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings striking down affirmative action in colleges, LBGTQ+ rights and Joe Biden’s student loan relief program.“These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.“In fact, we have members of the court themselves, with justice Elena Kagan, saying that the court is beginning to assume the power of a legislature right now.“They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself. And that, I believe, is an expansion of power that we really must be focusing on, the danger of this court and the abuse of power.”Referring to ethics scandals that have involved two of the conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Ocasio-Cortez repeated previous calls for Congress to look at removing them, a proposal that would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.Senate Democrats and independents who caucus with them, meanwhile, hold only a slim majority.Alito is accused of not disclosing gifts from a rightwing billionaire who lobbied for the court to end Biden’s loan relief program. Thomas is also alleged to have taken undeclared gifts, among other alleged transgressions, prompting an ethics watchdog last month to urge him to resign.“We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines, where we see members of the supreme court potentially breaking the law,” she said.“There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.“And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”Ocasio-Cortez also called on Biden to expand the court to 13 justices, something the president has said he is unwilling to attempt.Her comments reflect a wave of Democratic outrage at the decisions, which came after Donald Trump’s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the supreme court.Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow progressive Ayanna Pressley, Democratic congresswoman for Massachusetts, was equally scathing on MSNBC’s Katie Phang show, calling the conservative majority “far-right extremists”.“They continue to overturn the will of the majority of the people and to make history for all the wrong reasons, legislating from the bench and being political from the bench,” she said.The panel’s most controversial ruling last year, written by Alito, reversed its 1973 decision on Roe v Wade and ended almost half a century of federal abortion protections in the US.As Biden put it after an address at the White House on Friday: “This is not a normal court.”A poll released Sunday by ABC’s This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”, a significant rise from January 2022 when only 38% felt that way.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe poll, however, did show that a majority, 52%, approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.Condemning the ruling that allowed a Colorado website designer to refuse business from a same-sex couple, transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, noted the court addressed a situation “that may have never happened in the first place”.“We’re seeing more of these cases, of these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and [are] designed to chip away at rights,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.“You look at the supreme court taking away a woman’s right to choose, Friday’s decision diminishing … same sex couples’ [quality of life], you look at a number of the decisions, they pose the question, ‘Did we just live to see the high-water mark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away?’“Because up until now, not uniformly, but overall, each generation was able to say they enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before.”In other interviews on Sunday, two prominent Republican presidential candidates said they supported the supreme court’s recent rulings, with one, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.“For decades the Democratic party cheered a supreme court that went outside the constitution and made extra-constitutional decisions, in my opinion, because the decisions went in a philosophical direction that they liked,” Christie said on State of the Union.“Now, when the court makes decisions they don’t like, all of a sudden the court is ‘not normal’. This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at, is the way they analyze the law.”Former vice-president Mike Pence, speaking on CBS, praised the website ruling. He said: “I’m a Bible believing Christian, I believe marriage is between one man and one woman, and I believe every American is entitled to live, to work, to worship, according to the dictates of their conscience.“The supreme court drew a clear line and said yes to religious liberty.” More

This past week Joe Biden gave a speech in which he touted his economic policies and, rather than deflecting, he leaned into what many of his opponents called “Bidenomics”.Bidenomics is the opposite of “trickle-down” theory, which holds that tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporations ultimately find their way to the rest of the population through more spending and investment. For the president and his supporters, Bidenomics means government spending and investment in infrastructure and services that create jobs and growth.“I didn’t come up with the name, I really didn’t,” he said in his remarks. “I now claim it.”If you’re a small business owner or an entrepreneur a president’s economic policies – assuming they can get congressional support – really do matter. This is not to claim that Biden’s economic agenda will be any more or less successful than his predecessors’: for many the trickle-down v spending debate will never be resolved. But when a president sets an agenda it reveals where money will be spent. And my smartest, most experienced clients are watching closely. Why? Because regardless of where they stand politically, what’s best for their business is always, always, always to follow the money.They know that when you own a business your job is to create value and build an organization that provides a livelihood for all the people that rely on you. This includes your customers, your suppliers, your partners and of course your employee and their families, as well as your family. Which means that you put politics aside (until it’s time to cast your vote) and instead you follow the money. Get it?So where is the Bidenomics money going?For starters, there’s almost $300bn going towards building chip manufacturing plants under the 2022 Chips Act. There’s also another $391bn that’s being spent on companies that are improving their energy efficiency and making greener products under the Inflation Reduction Act. A trillion dollars is being expended on roads, buildings and other infrastructure projects thanks to the 2021 Infrastructure Act. That’s about $1.7tn, which is a lot of money. The president is also telling us that more will be spent on affordable healthcare, social services and education.That’s where the money’s going over the next few years and even more will be spent if he wins re-election in 2024. When it comes to your business, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with these policies. What matters is that you take advantage of them for the benefit of your business. So how are my clients doing this?If you want to sell products and services to the chip manufacturers and other players in the industry (and the most active ones – like Intel, Samsung, GlobalFoundries and Skywater Technologies – are already in line for the funding) then target these companies and their projects and consider what products and services of yours can be sold to them. Or you can do your research, identify opportunities and start filling out applications at places like the Department of Commerce’s Chips.gov, or at Chips Act which is a private organization that provides support for businesses looking for help writing grants and submitting proposals. Or you can go directly to the Semiconductor Industry Association or read the excellent guidance provided by Semi, an organization that supports companies in the electronic manufacturing and supply chain industries.If you want to get funding for energy-efficient projects or to help develop energy efficient products you should start with the White House Inflation Reduction Act Guidebook which lists dozens of government agencies that are doling out money to organizations of all sizes for just that purpose. The Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains has $6bn available for projects and, wow, you can’t get any more government-sounding than that, right? Or if you merely want to maximize your use of the expanded tax credits under the legislation visit the IRS’s Inflation Reduction Act web area.Maybe you want to get in on the $1tn infrastructure spending? The White House, Federal Highway Administration, Department of Energy and Department of Commerce all have funding opportunities related to the 2021 legislation.Follow the money. Start at any of the places I’ve mentioned above and get ready to go down the Federal Rabbit Hole.Finding this money, let alone applying, isn’t easy. Which is why many of my clients don’t do this. They’re lazy. My best clients – and I have a handful – have already hired summer interns whose jobs are to peruse the maze of government bureaucracy, identify opportunities and start filling out forms. Doing this takes time, effort, tenacity. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.Even if you’re not in the construction industry you can still leverage Bidenomics. That’s because all of the companies that are getting funding will need your products or services. Chip manufacturing plants will have employees that eat pizza. Highways have buildings that need to be cleaned. “Green” products need to be transported. People in these industries getting all that money will need accountants, lawyers, architects, marketing professionals and workplace consultants.Bidenomics. Obamacare. Supply side. Trickle down. These are just words. Political phrases to create headlines and catch the attention of voters. Smart business owners know this. They don’t get distracted by these terms. And they don’t let their politics muddle their strategies. What they do is follow the money. And my best clients have taught me that whether you’re a fan of Biden’s – or any president’s economic policies – there’s always plenty of money and opportunities to pursue if you just follow the money. More

Among the books still available in Florida despite Ron DeSantis’s ongoing purge of “unsuitable” material is one the Republican governor might want to peruse.Dale Carnegie’s 1936 bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People would appear to be the antithesis of DeSantis’s stuttering push for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, as Donald Trump’s closest challenger traverses the country turning off voters to his dull personality and extremist policies.By almost every measure, the rightwinger has had another lackluster week on the campaign trail, with “clumsy” missteps in New Hampshire, Texas, California and New York. Now, barely one month after his glitch-ridden launch on Twitter, DeSantis finds himself sinking in the polls, closer to the large field of optimists below him than the twice-indicted, twice-impeached former president who retains a stranglehold over the Republican party.“The more voters learn about him, the less they can stomach the idea of him running the country,” the online magazine Jezebel concluded.There are competing theories over the reasons for DeSantis’s decline. Analysts caution that with seven months still until primary season, and with Trump mired in legal troubles, it’s far too soon to write him off.“Primary elections are volatile and unpredictable. Don’t believe anyone who says they know how this is going to turn out,” said Stephen Craig, professor of political science and campaign expert at the University of Florida.But it is clear that many of DeSantis’s wounds are self-inflicted. In New Hampshire on Tuesday, he angered grassroots Republican women by scheduling a campaign event clashing with Trump’s appearance at their flagship lunch, a “stupid” and “rookie” mistake in the eyes of Republican strategists.In a similar breach of protocol in New York, he vexed local Republicans by arranging a fundraising event without the courtesy of a heads-up that he was in town, Politico reported.Another dollar-raising trip, to California, with whose Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, he is openly feuding over his controversial migrant flights to Sacramento, also provided an opportunity for mockery. After DeSantis railed against homelessness, and claimed in a campaign ad to have witnessed people “defecating in the streets” during a “comically short” 20-minute trip to San Francisco, pictures of squalor in large Florida cities began appearing on Twitter.And in perhaps the highest-profile “miss” of the week, DeSantis’s big immigration policy reveal, made during a visit to the Texas-Mexico border on Monday, fell largely flat. Aggressive proposals such as deadly force against drug traffickers, separating migrant families, building a border wall and pledging to end birthright citizenship, enraged immigration advocates and failed to offer more to the Republican base than Trump’s own agenda.“I used to characterize DeSantis as an awful lot like Trump, but smarter, and I’m not sure that applies any more,” Craig, the UF professor, said. “He just seems to be doing things that are not all that smart, his war with Disney for example, and some of the other things he does show a clumsiness that wasn’t so much apparent before he began being a national figure.“I think he’s still a credible threat. But he’s going to have to get his act together. He’s showing some weakness and you can’t really do that if you want to knock off the big guy.”Craig said DeSantis was in an awkward spot as Trump’s main challenger, targeted both by him and the field below.“He is vulnerable to his actions [and] if the other candidates all ganged up on him, hoping that one of them might replace him as the alternative to Trump, then I see the potential for him to sink well in advance of the primaries,” he said.“I’m not predicting that’s what’s going to happen. I’m saying that primaries are by their nature so volatile that I don’t think we should take any poll now as definitive evidence as to what is likely.”Some senior Republicans are even less convinced. Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, said DeSantis had underperformed. “[His] campaign is one of the worst I’ve seen so far, and he’s dropped like a rock. I think it’s getting close to being over,” he told CBS’s The Takeout.The veteran Republican strategist Rick Wilson told the Guardian last month that the anti-woke governor was “all hat, no cattle”.The DeSantis campaign continues to project an air of confidence. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” he told reporters in Texas, according to NBC, after the network’s poll showed him with only 22% support from Republican primary voters, down from 31% in April.“[Joe] Biden beats Trump in the swing states and I beat Biden handily in the swing states. That’s ultimately the election right there. If you don’t have a path to do that, then nominating [Trump] doesn’t make sense.”Despite the defiance, there is evidence to suggest DeSantis is becoming more aware that some of his extreme actions in Florida might not be popular on the national stage.He has largely avoided the debate over abortion after signing a six-week ban in his home state; and, significantly, made a legal move this week seeking to postpone the trial in Disney’s lawsuit against him until after the 2024 election. A wave of Republicans, including the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a presidential nomination rival, have accused DeSantis of betraying conservative values by retaliating against a private company for disagreeing with him.One national issue DeSantis believes will be a winner for him is his stance on immigration. He has made several trips to the border, where he has committed Florida law enforcement resources to combat what he calls “Biden’s border crisis”.But immigration advocates think DeSantis’s agenda and proposals will put off even more voters.“He wants to overturn the 14th amendment, indefinitely detain children, and create a mass-deportation regime that would uproot families and destabilize communities across the country. It’s as ugly as it is unworkable,” said Zachary Mueller, political director of America’s Voice.“It encapsulates the Republican party’s ongoing descent into dangerous extremism on immigration, all politics and red meat for the base and no real solutions or efforts to move beyond perpetual chaos, fearmongering, and bigoted extremes.”Craig, meanwhile, believes DeSantis is running short on both time and personality.“I used to view him as fairly charismatic, but his recent performance seems to belie that,” he said.“Maybe he can smooth it out. Richard Nixon wasn’t Mr Charisma and he got elected, so it’s certainly not impossible.“But DeSantis is facing the big guy and I don’t think he’s got a lot of room left. He needs to gain momentum somehow in the next month or two or some of the people who would like to move on from Trump may also decide it’s time to move on from DeSantis.” More

The first thing to remember about the damage done by the US supreme court this June and the June before is that each majority decision overturns a right that we had won. We had won a measure of student debt relief thanks to the heroic efforts of debt activists since 2011. We had won reproductive rights protection 50 years ago with Roe v Wade, and we won wetlands protection with the Clean Water Act around the same time. We had implemented affirmative action, AKA a redress of centuries of institutionalized inequality, step by step, in many ways over the past 60-plus years. We had won rights for same-sex couples and queer people in a series of laws and decisions.What this means is that the right wing of the US supreme court is part of a gang of reactionaries engaging in backlash. It also means we can win these things back. It will not be easy, but difficult is not impossible. This does not mean that the decisions are not devastating, and that we should not feel the pain. The old saying “don’t mourn, organize” has always worked better for me as “mourn, but also organize”. Defeat is no reason to stop. Neither is victory a reason to stop when victory is partial or needs to be defended. You can celebrate victories, mourn defeats and keep going.Each of those victories was hard-won, often by people who began when the rights and protections they sought seemed inconceivable, then unlikely, then remote, and so goes the road of profound change almost every time. To win environmental protections, the public had to be awakened to the interconnectedness, the vulnerability and the value of a healthy natural world and our inseparability from it. To win marriage equality for same-sex couples and equal protection for queer people involved changing beliefs, which was achieved not just by campaigns but by countless LGBTQ+ people courageously making themselves visible and audible in their communities.To recognize the power of this change requires a historical memory. A memory of rivers catching fire and toxic products being dumped freely in the 1960s. Of laws and guidelines treating queer people as criminal or mentally ill or both in ways that terrorized them and made them largely invisible to the public eye. Of women dying of or damaged by illegal abortions or leading the bleak lives to which unwanted pregnancies consigned them. Of the way the Ivy League universities in particular were virtually all white and all male into the 1970s. Of how inequality was so normalized that first people had to see and believe that women and Bipoc people should have equal rights and access to and a role in the places of power that decide the fate of each of us, the nation and the world. All that changed – not enough, of course, but a lot.Memory is a superpower, because memory of how these situations changed is a memory of our victories and our power. Each of these victories happened both through the specifics of campaigns to change legislation but also through changing the public imagination. The supreme court can dismantle the legislation but they cannot touch the beliefs and values. We still believe in these rights. We still recognize the harm and the destruction they were meant to prevent. If you didn’t believe that equal access and rights were wrong yesterday or last year, you don’t have to believe it now. Not just because those rights were denied by six justices, at least four of whom are so utterly corrupt in how they got their seats or what they’ve done while seated that they should be forced to resign.Last year’s attack on reproductive rights has produced its own backlash, with many states working to protect those rights, many elections seemingly pivoting on voter outrage about the Republican party’s brutality toward and hatred of women, and Republicans scurrying away from their own achievement and its hideous impacts. If the Republican party deserves admiration for anything, it’s for their long view, understanding of strategy and tenacity.The building up of an illicit rightwing supreme court took many years, and took fundamentalist Christians holding their noses to vote for Donald Trump because they understood that meant getting the justices to overturn Roe v Wade. It meant building power from the ground up to take state legislatures to gerrymander electoral maps and sticking vicious clowns like Jim Jordan into bizarrely tailored districts. It meant chipping away at voting rights, achieved in part by the supreme court’s attack on the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and its 2010 Citizens United decision that let a filthy tsunami of corporate dark money into electoral politics, thereby overturning two of its own earlier decisions.While each of the issues under attack need their own campaigns, voting rights and free and fair elections are crucial to all of them. Don’t forget that the only reason we have such a conservative government, including the supreme court, is voter suppression. If we truly had equal access to the ballot, American voters would choose more progressive candidates and pass more progressive legislation. That’s why what the public wants, believes and values so often differs from what the politicians chosen by dark money and voter suppression give us.One of the striking features of recent years is the baldfaced Republican effort to prevent Black people in particular, but also young, poor and other non-white demographics from voting. Baldfaced because it acknowledges that they are unpopular and that they’ve given up the goal of being in power because they represent the majority. As they become more marginalized through their own extreme and unpopular views, they have to use more extreme means – now including trying to steal and overturn elections – to hold onto power.This is as true of climate action as anything else: a new Yale 360 poll shows that “57% of registered voters support a US president declaring global warming a national emergency if Congress does not take further action” and “74% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.” The problem isn’t the people. It’s the power, and history shows us that when we come together with ferocious commitment to a shared goal we can be more powerful than institutions and governments. The right would like us to feel defeated and powerless. We can feel devastated and still feel powerful or find our power. This is not a time to quit. It’s a time to fight.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses More