Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in US Politics

    Wilmington: how a once-red district is a window on North Carolina politics

    The area around Wilmington, North Carolina, was once rock-ribbed Republican red. No longer. It’s contested territory in what may be the most contested state in the country this year.Donald Trump had planned a rally in Wilmington earlier this month but was rained out at the last moment. Trump promised to return with a bigger and better rally later. Joe Biden visited Wilmington on Thursday, after a detour to Charlotte to meet with the families of four law enforcement officers killed on Monday while serving an arrest warrant. It was his second visit to North Carolina this year and is unlikely to be his last.“I want to get Joe Biden to Wilmington,” the state senator Natalie Murdock of Durham said last week, before Biden announced the trip. Murdock is helping coordinate the Biden-Harris campaign in North Carolina. She noted that Biden won New Hanover county in 2020 after Hillary Clinton lost it four years earlier. “We’re going to have a field office out there,” she added, explaining plans for “boots on the ground” to get out the vote.The outsized political attention on Wilmington reflects a granular effort to win voters in the persuadable places, the swing districts in swing states. Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by a margin of 1.3%, his narrowest state victory. The most recent Emerson College poll shows Biden running behind Trump by five points, with 10% undecided.But North Carolina’s political map is a pointillist portrait of post-pandemic population change, with cities such as Charlotte, Durham and Wilmington booming from domestic migration while other communities bleed residents to places with economic vibrancy. Two-thirds of North Carolina’s population growth between 2010 and 2020 was non-white. About 400,000 people have moved to North Carolina since 2020. Trump’s margin in 2020 was less than 75,000 votes.Growth is the story of Wilmington. The beach town vacation spot has expanded beyond Saturday farmers’ markets and upscale restaurants on the river for tourists, attracting pharmaceutical research, banking and logistics today.“I moved to Wilmington 22 years ago. And when I moved here, I didn’t even realize you were allowed to live here all year,” said David Hill, a pediatrician and the Democratic nominee for the North Carolina state senate. “I can say that if you drive down the street, you will see acres and acres of what was forest when we moved here just five years ago, that is now in part sand and in part foundations and newly built homes.”Many census tracts around Wilmington in Pender, Brunswick and New Hanover counties doubled in population between 2010 and 2020. During the pandemic, growth accelerated, with both Pender and Brunswick county’s population increasing by 15% since 2020.The seventh district is held by Michael Lee, a real estate attorney and a relative moderate in the Republican-led senate. The district, covering most of New Hanover county, has been targeted by national campaigners as one of North Carolina’s few legislative seats that can be flipped, despite a ruthless redistricting that moved much of downtown Wilmington into a neighboring district last year.“One of those precincts was the highest-turnout precinct for Black voters, and it has now been put into deep-red Brunswick county,” Murdock said. “It is one of those races that was still going to be competitive, but they did not do us any favors with that map. I mean, it is one of the most gerrymandered of this cycle.”Republicans have a 30 to 20 advantage over Democrats in the state senate and a 72 to 48 advantage in the state house; precisely the 60% margin needed in each chamber to override a veto by North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Cooper has blocked legislation restricting abortion access and expanding gun rights, but Republican lawmakers have overridden dozens of vetoes, from bills banning transgender hormone therapy for minors to changes in election laws.Cooper is term-limited and will be out of office in January. Republicans cannot afford to lose one seat in either chamber if they also lose the governor’s race, and the fate of the gubernatorial race is an open question given North Carolina’s history of ticket splitting and the nomination of the lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, who has a record of extreme, racist and homophobic comments and faces unpleasant revelations about his financial and business history.National Democratic campaigners are hoping that a backlash against restrictive abortion laws will fuel turnout statewide. But local contenders in closely divided districts have largely avoided the culture war rancor and are focusing on community concerns.Lee, for example, published a column this week taking issue with the New Hanover school system’s $20m shortfall, describing it as evidence of poor financial decisions made with short-term pandemic funding. Though the population around Wilmington has been exploding, public school enrollment has not: the local system has fewer students now than before the pandemic.Lee chairs the senate’s education committee, and has been leading the state senate’s efforts to expand North Carolina’s private school voucher program. The committee approved a bill on Wednesday to add $248m to the program next school year, on top of the $191m the program received this year. Applications for the vouchers, worth up to $7,468, outstripped funding after a surge of interest. (Lee did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)Newcomers chasing Wilmington’s burgeoning film industry or simply looking for a better climate while working from home are wrestling with crowded roads, rising housing costs, access to healthcare and the other downsides of rapid growth, Hill said. Their interests do not easily map on to a highly partisan political framework.“Characterizing North Carolina in the same sentence as some of the more extremist states in the south fails to give the population of the state credit for really being quite centrist,” Hill said. “I think when you look at what our rightwing extremist supermajority has done, it would be easy to lump our state and with some states that are more extremist, but I don’t feel – and I think we have good evidence to tell us – that they don’t really represent the state as a whole.” More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in US Politics

    The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington

    Donald Trump decries the proverbial Washington swamp. Congress does next to nothing. The band plays on: lobbying remains big business. In 2023, the industry hit a $4.3bn payday. This year shows no end in sight to the trend. As the US gallops toward another election, The Wolves of K Street befits the season.Brody Mullins, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins, a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.“This is a book about men – for they were almost exclusively men – who built K Street,” Brody and Luke Mullins write.They have produced a tightly stitched, 600-plus-page tome that begins as a true-crime story. The suicide of Evan Morris, a lobbyist for big pharma, takes center stage. In the opening scene of the book, at a posh Virginia golf club on a balmy evening in July 2015, Morris, 38, turns a gun on himself.The seemingly almost idyllic backdrop to his death is actually a tableau of excess, complete with $150,000 initiation fees, an abandoned Porsche, an emptied bottle of $1,500 bordeaux and a scenic sunset.Millions of corporate dollars were missing and untaxed. An anonymous letter and an FBI investigation helped ignite Morris’s untimely and violent end.“The allegations would touch off a years-long case,” the brothers Mullins write.Morris’s wife and estate settled with Genentech, his employer, the Internal Revenue Service and the commonwealth of Virginia. The government never charged anyone with a crime. Death had taken its toll.The Wolves of K Street is about way more than just one man. It is an engrossing lesson in how lunch-bucket sensibilities and the accommodation between big business and the New Deal gave way to neoliberalism, corporate activism and the decline of industrial unions.The Democratic party, to name just one major part of American life, would never be the same again. The Mullins brothers are keenly aware of the social forces that buffet and drive US politics. They recall how Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 left the party of FDR, Truman and JFK to wonder how it was no longer the political home of working-class America. Democrats wonder to this day.The Wolves of K Street traces how the US reached this point, and lobbying attained its present stature, by following “three lobbying dynasties – one Republican, two Democratic – over the critical period from the 1970s to today, when the modern lobbying industry was created, corporate interests came to power in Washington, and the nature of our economy was fundamentally changed”.The late Tommy Boggs, son of Hale Boggs, once a Democratic House majority leader, stands out as the patriarch and pioneer of Democratic lobbying. His name came to grace Patton, Boggs and Blow, a storied DC law firm now subsumed in Squire Patton Boggs, a sprawling global entity nominally based in Ohio. Evan Morris stood out as Boggs’s “prized pupil” – or apostle.Next came the Republicans: Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and the late Lee Atwater, who would manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush.“[They] used their links to the Reagan revolution to erect Washington’s signature GOP house of lobbying,” the Mullins write. “Each member of the partnership had his own distinct role.”Together, they bridged the gap between corner offices and the universe of conservative activists. Furthermore, Donald Trump was a client of Black, Manafort and Stone. Stone helped boost Maryanne Trump Barry, the property magnate’s late sister, on to the federal bench.That history is why Manafort and Stone emerged as part of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016; why the pair were caught in the special counsel’s net when it came time to investigate Russia’s attempts to help Trump; why they received presidential pardons before Trump left office; and why they stand to be back for one more rodeo as Trump runs for the White House again.Tony Podesta, brother of the Democratic White House veteran John Podesta, is the keystone of the third lobbying dynasty examined by Brody and Luke Mullins, an “avant-garde political fixer [who] used his experience as a brass-knuckled liberal activist to advance the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley”.The paths taken by Manafort and Podesta would eventually entwine. Out of the limelight, Manafort came to represent the interests of Ukraine’s anti-Nato Party of Regions and its head, Viktor Yanukovych. In 2012, seeking to stave off sanctions, Manafort enlisted Podesta to his cause.“I used to call them the dynamic duo,” Rick Gates, Manafort’s convicted acolyte, tells the Mullins brothers.The Wolves of K Street is also newsy, disclosing for the first time Manafort’s attempt to have Yanukovych congratulate Joe Biden in summer 2012.“I am thinking of recommending a call from VY to Biden to congratulate Biden on his [re-]nomination” as vice-president to Barack Obama, Manafort emailed Gates, who forwarded the note to Podesta. The brother of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff cum Obama counselor approved.“‘Only downside is [if] biden [sic] presses him personally on politics of criminal prosecutions of his political’ opponents, Podesta responded. ‘I would say worth the risk.’”The Wolves of K Street ends on a weary note: “No matter what new obstacles have emerged, K Street has always managed to invent new ways to exercise its power over Washington,” the Mullins brothers conclude. “New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.”One might well reach for Ecclesiastes, son of David: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
    The Wolves of K Street is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

  • 138 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    Star Wars’ Mark Hamill hails ‘Joe-B-Wan Kenobi’ after White House meeting

    “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” But enough about Washington. The Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, who once saw off gangsters at a fictional spaceport, came to the US capital on Friday for a meeting with Joe Biden.Quite why he was in the Oval Office, and what was talked about, remained something of a mystery. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Biden was riding high in the opinion polls but now, perhaps, he is in need of added star power.The surprise appearance by the man who played Luke Skywalker thrilled Star Wars geeks among the White House press corps while leaving non-fans somewhat bemused or baffled.“How many of you had ‘Mark Hamill will lead the press briefing’ on your bingo card – hands?” the actor, wearing dark suit, blue tie and sunglasses, asked reporters at the start of a media briefing. “Yeah, me neither. I just got to meet the president and he gave me these aviator glasses.”Hamill, 72, then put the glasses in his pocket, quipping: “I love the merch.”Hamill, who has more than 5 million followers on X, where he is a trenchant critic of Biden’s election rival Donald Trump, said he was “honoured” to be invited to meet “the most legislatively successful president in my lifetime”, and reeled off a list of Biden’s accomplishments.The actor told reporters that “it just shows you that just one person can be so influential and so positive in our lives” and said he would take questions, “although no Star Wars questions, please”.Asked about the Oval Office meeting, Hamill said: “I only expected to be there for five minutes. He showed us all his photographs.“It was really amazing to me because I was invited to the Carter White House and I came. And then I came to the Obama White House but I never was invited into the Oval Office, and it was a large gathering. So this one was really extra special.”In the original blockbuster Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), Hamill played farm boy Luke learning Jedi mind tricks from Obi-Wan Kenobi, an elderly Jedi master who has seen better days. On Friday, it seems, he again took the role of young apprentice to the 81-year-old Biden.“I called him ‘Mr President’. He said, ‘You can call me Joe.’ I said, ‘Can I call you Joe-B-Wan Kenobi?’ He liked that.”Hamill left the podium to whoops and applause from a few starstruck reporters. The first question to the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, began: “May the Force be with you.” She replied: “May the Force be with you or, tomorrow, the 4th be with you, however you want to look at it.”A journalist said: “Let’s hope we’ve killed off the Star Wars jokes for the rest of the briefing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJean-Pierre: “I doubt it. I feel like there’s more coming.”And later she was challenged as to why Hamill, who has never held elected office, was in the Oval Office at all. Weijia Jiang of CBS News asked pointedly: “What was Mark Hamill doing here today?”Laughing, Jean-Pierre replied: “Did you not like having him here? … Mark Hamill was in town. They met. I think it was important as someone – you all know Mark Hamill. He is someone who is very much invested in our country, very much invested in the direction of this country.”As Jiang confessed a lack of familiarity with the films, Jean-Pierre wondered: “Do you not like Star Wars? You’ve not seen Star Wars?”Jiang promised “I will now!” as some in the room groaned.Hamill is one of numerous Hollywood stars that the Biden campaign may seek to deploy ahead of a presidential election now six months away. On Thursday, the actor and director Robert De Niro spoke out against Trump, urging Biden to “keep up the fight” against him and “go at him hard”.Interviewed by Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, De Niro warned: “The guy’s a monster. He is beyond wrong. It’s almost like he wants to do the most horrible things that he can think of in order to get a rise out of us. I don’t know what it is but he’s been doing it and doing it, and it’s fucking scary.” More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in US Politics

    Congressman Henry Cuellar in court accused of receiving $600,000 in bribes

    The US justice department on Friday accused the Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, of accepting about $600,000 in bribes in exchange for influencing policy in favor of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.The Cuellars had made their first appearance before a federal magistrate judge in Houston by the afternoon, but it was not clear how they pleaded. Earlier, the congressman, who has represented a swath of Texas’s border with Mexico in the US House since 2005, issued a statement denying unspecified “allegations” against him.“I want to be clear that both my wife and I are innocent of these allegations. Everything I have done in Congress has been to serve the people of South Texas,” Cuellar said.He added that “I’m running for re-election and will win this November,” when Democrats are hoping to regain the majority in the House of Representatives.The justice department said that between December 2014 and November 2021, the Cuellars received bribes from an unspecified bank headquartered in Mexico City as well as an oil and gas company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan.Imelda Cuellar then allegedly used “sham consulting contracts”, front companies and intermediaries to launder the money.In return, the congressman influenced US foreign policy to Azerbaijan’s advantage and pressured unnamed “high-ranking” officials in the executive branch to take actions in favor of the bank.A statement from the House Democratic minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said that under the party’s rules in the chamber, Cuellar would step down as the ranking member of a homeland security subcommittee while he faces these charges.Jeffries added that Cuellar “admirably devoted his career to public service … is a valued member of the House Democratic caucus” and was “entitled to his day in court and the presumption of innocence throughout the legal process”.Two years ago, the FBI raided Cuellar’s Laredo, Texas, home and campaign office as part of an investigation into US businessmen and their links with Azerbaijan. Cuellar said he was cooperating with their inquiry, and months later, an attorney for the lawmaker told Fox News that he was not a target of the investigation that led to the raid.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn his statement on Friday, the congressman said that “before I took any action, I proactively sought legal advice from the House Ethics Committee, who gave me more than one written opinion, along with an additional opinion from a national law firm. The actions I took in Congress were consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues and in the interest of the American people.”Cuellar added that he had requested to meet with “the Washington DC prosecutors to explain the facts and they refused to discuss the case with us or to hear our side”.Federal charges could complicate the re-election of 68-year-old Cuellar, who is seeking an 11th term in office. A moderate Democrat, he supported a bipartisan Senate bill that would have tightened immigration policy, and is the party’s sole House lawmaker opposed to passing federal legislation to guarantee abortion access.After the 2022 raid on his home and office, Cuellar narrowly won the Democratic primary against his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, then easily beat the Republican Cassy Garcia in the general election. More

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in US Politics

    Experts dismiss Kristi Noem’s ‘dubious’ claim to have met Kim Jong-un

    The South Dakota governor, Republican vice-presidential hopeful and self-confessed dog-killer Kristi Noem’s bizarre claim in a new book to have met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has been dismissed by experts as “dubious” and not “conceivable”.The Dakota Scout first reported Noem’s claim, which is in her forthcoming book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.The book will be published next week. Last week, the Guardian obtained a copy and reported how Noem describes killing Cricket – a 14-month-old dog she said she “hated” – after deeming her uncontrollable and a danger to people, and a goat she said was “nasty and mean”, smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid”, and bothered her children.Noem has repeatedly defended the story as illustrative of the harsh realities of farm life. But it set off a political firestorm, by most assessments dynamiting the governor’s chance of being named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.The Scout reported that Noem’s book also contains “at least two instances in which she recounts meetings with world leaders that are in dispute”.In one, Noem writes: “Through my tenure on the House armed services committee, I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders.“I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”But the Scout quoted one “longtime, high-level Capitol Hill staffer” who worked on the armed services committee when Noem was on it, between 2013 and 2015, as saying: “It’s bullshit.”“That staffer was among a dozen staffers … who said they had no knowledge of the meeting, or who said Noem had never mentioned it before,” the paper said.It quoted experts saying Noem’s claim to have met with Kim, the autocratic leader of a pariah state who did not even meet with Barack Obama – the US president for the first five years of Noem’s time in the US House – was unlikely.“I don’t see any conceivable way that a single junior member of Congress without explicit escort from the US state department and military would be meeting with a leader from North Korea,” George Lopez of Notre Dame University, an expert on North Korea, told the Scout.“What would have been so critical in his bag of tricks that he would have met with an American lawmaker, this one distinctively?”Another North Korea expert, Benjamin Young of Virginia Commonwealth University, called Noem’s account of meeting Kim “dubious”.“There’s no way,” Young told the Scout. “There’s no way.”Noem also claims to have canceled a meeting with Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. She writes of being in Paris, “slated to meet” the French president.“However, the day before we were to meet he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So, I decided to cancel. There is no place for pro-Hamas rhetoric.”Macron’s office told the Scout no direct invitation to Noem was issued, though it did say Noem and Macron might have been scheduled to attend the same event last 10 November.Noem spoke at a conference in Paris that day, the same day Macron called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.Noem’s spokesperson did not comment to the Scout before it published its story.After the story went live, the paper said, it was told: “The publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.”Trump did meet Kim: in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019, and in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea later the same year. No lasting diplomatic progress was made.
    This article was amended on 3 May 2024 to correct the title of the newspaper cited. It is the Dakota Scout, not the South Dakota Scout as first reported. More

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in US Politics

    Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the street: Trump spells out migrant plan

    Donald Trump is planning to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history should he win re-election in November, involving legally questionable deployments of military and police units and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border.Trump has laid out his vision for a “record-setting deportation operation” in a series of rally speeches, newspaper articles and social media posts. He intends to move swiftly after inauguration day next January to stage mass roundups of immigrants across the country, conducting raids inside big cities where he would face certain Democratic opposition.“On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday. He told his adoring supporters that immigrants were coming in by the millions from foreign prisons and “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns”.Immigration experts say that the deportation plans for a Trump White House 2.0 dwarf anything previously seen – both in scale and in the intensity of the former president’s determination to run roughshod over legal guardrails. He attempted workplace raids during his 2016 presidential term, but they were largely stymied in the courts.“This time we need to take Trump at his word,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When he talks about mass deportation – in boxcars, or bus loads, or planes, or whatever – that’s what he’s going to do.”Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior White House policy adviser and hardline immigration guru who is likely to be central in a second term, told the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in a podcast interview that the plans were going to be pushed through. “I want everybody to understand this is going to happen. If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately.”In an interview with Time magazine this week, Trump emphasized that speed was critical to his strategy for removing many of the at least 11 million people without legal status living in the US today.“We’re going to be moving them out as soon as we get to it,” he said.To skirt around due process laws protecting asylum seekers,Trump has said he will invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act which allows for summary deportation of any non-citizen from a foreign enemy country. He says he will apply the provision in the first instance against “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members”.Immigration experts fear that such summary removals could ensnare US citizens in the dragnet.“Trump will have his agents remove people, then ask questions later. If somebody looks like they’re undocumented, meaning they have brown or black skin, or speak with an accent, they could be included irrespective of their citizenship,” Leopold warned.Mass deportation would form the centerpiece of a Trump second term. It aligns with other aspects of his vision for the 47th presidency, which promises to be more ruthless, radical and revenge-laden than any administration in modern times.The former president will be counting on the rightward shift in the federal judiciary, which he effected when he was last in the White House. Over the four years of his presidential term, he placed more than 200 judges on the bench, and succeeded in transforming the US supreme court into a rightwing bastion.View image in fullscreenWith Trump and his team setting their sights on deporting more than a million people each year, the operation would inevitably require major infrastructure including new detention camps. Miller said that “large-scale staging grounds” would be constructed near the border, probably in Texas.“You create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft,” Miller told Kirk.Flesh has been placed on the bones of Trump’s immigration plans by Project 2025, a presidential transition operation spearheaded by the rightwing Heritage Foundation that has compiled a 920-page policy review aiming to “institutionalize Trumpism”. By its calculations, the daily number of beds in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centers would need to rise from the current 34,000 to more than 100,000.Ice itself should be given free rein to carry out “civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate”, Project 2025 says (emphasis in the original). The Trump campaign has stressed that outside groups like Heritage do not speak for the former president, but the policies contained in the review hew closely to his intentions and are likely to provide foundations for administration policy.Even with its 21,000 employees, Ice would be overwhelmed by the task of rounding up millions of people without the involvement of other entities. Trump told Time magazine that he would turn initially to the national guard, and then to the US military.“If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military,” he said.When Time pointed out that under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited in most circumstances from acting domestically against civilians, Trump replied: “Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”In fact, undocumented immigrants are civilians (though not citizens). As such, they enjoy equal protection rights under the US constitution.Trump likens his immigration plans to the mass deportation of some 300,000 Mexicans by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955. Though Trump is contemplating massively greater numbers, the two plans bear striking similarities.Both schemes were justified using racist stereotypes of immigrants. Eisenhower’s was called “Operation Wetback” and portrayed Mexicans as dirty and dangerous.Trump repeatedly talks about “migrant crime” at his rallies, telling Wednesday’s crowd in Michigan that prisons and mental institutions all around the world were being “emptied into the United States like we are a dumping ground”. Notably, criminologists report that immigrants – whether they have legal status or not – are more law-abiding than US-born citizens.Mass roundups are likely to threaten the “Dreamers”, the more than half a million immigrants who came to the US as undocumented children and who have been granted partial rights to remain under the deferred action program known as Daca. Trump has indicated he intends to tear up the Daca scheme, which he tried and failed to do in his first term.View image in fullscreenTrump also plans to use state and local police forces to assist Ice in roundups. That would be embraced with alacrity by Republican-controlled states like Texas where the governor, Greg Abbott, is already striving to give state police the power to arrest undocumented migrants.But it would be fiercely opposed in Democratic states which have tended to place a firewall between their law enforcement officers and federal immigration activities. Undocumented people are concentrated in big cities under Democratic control, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, raising the specter under Trump’s plans of open confrontation between law enforcement agencies receiving conflicting orders from authorities led by the two main parties.Miller said that Republican governors would be encouraged to deploy their national guard over the border into Democratic-controlled states where undocumented migrants enjoy so-called “sanctuary city” protections. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, could send troops into Maryland which has a Democratic governor, Wes Moore.“If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close,” he told Kirk’s podcast.Leopold predicted that pitching one state against another would quickly deteriorate into a “police state mentality”.“Are we going to see a complete breakdown of the unity of the American state?” he said. “It’s possible.” More

  • 163 Shares159 Views

    in US Politics

    Boxing, tacos and TV: Democratic Senate contender aims to win back Latino voters

    When one of the most celebrated Mexican boxers in history, Canelo Álvarez, steps into the ring against the undefeated Mexican fighter Jaime Munguía on Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, excitement will be through the roof at a campaign event just 280 miles away.That’s because the Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego, caught in one of the most critical US Senate races in the country against the former TV anchor Kari Lake, will be holding a watch party for the fight at JL Boxing Academy in Glendale, Arizona, complete with big screens inside, and a truck serving birria tacos and Mexican Cokes outside.The event on Cinco de Mayo weekend, expected to bring more than 100 largely Latino residents and families, is not just happening because Gallego is a boxing fan, but rather serves as evidence of how the campaign from the former US marine and Iraq combat veteran aims to reach Latino voters and Hispanic men who have eroded from the Democratic party in recent election cycles.“I remember leaving work sites with my cousins to gather with friends and family to watch epic boxing matches,” Gallego told the Guardian, citing famous boxing legends like Julio César Chávez, Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya. “Far too often, politicians treat Latino voters as a box to check. Our campaign is different: we’re focused on community events – food tours, town halls in Spanish, and this weekend: boxing watch parties.”Latino voter support for Democrats nationally slipped 8 percentage points from 2016 to 2020, according to the firm Catalist. A 2022 survey of 3,600 exit-poll interviews with voters in battleground states, conducted by the progressive donor network Way to Win, found that 58% of Hispanic men supported Democratic candidates, compared with 66% of Latinas. Meanwhile, the Democratic political action committee Nuestro Pac found after the 2022 midterms that Hispanic men consistently lagged Latinas in Democratic support in battlegrounds by 8 to 12 points.Chuck Rocha, an adviser to Gallego’s campaign, said Gallego himself texted senior staffers in the fall with the idea for the event, recalling his message was that with the Canelo bout coming in 2024 it would be good to have a presence around the fight for boys and their fathers and families who love boxing.“We all know Latino men have been trending away from [Democrats], and Ruben Gallego is reflective of those men,” Rocha said, noting that Gallego had to sleep on a couch in his living room until he went away for college because his sisters shared a room together and he didn’t have a bedroom.“Ruben went off to war and served with men and women who are true blue-collar, working-class kids like him. We both know the reason Latino men are slipping from Democrats is because we’re not showing up in the places we need to, and not having conversations about things Latino men care about.”For its part, Lake’s campaign said Gallego’s events, and ads focused on Harvard and being a marine would not ultimately reach voters who are focused on inflation and border issues.“Broadly every group is facing problems with inflation and the border and our plan all along is as voters learn about Gallego’s record, they will like him less, no matter what events he does and no matter his biography,” said Alex Nichol, a Lake campaign spokesperson, noting Gallego’s votes with Joe Biden’s “deeply unpopular” policies on illegal immigration and the economy.A FiveThirtyEight analysis of Gallego’s votes in the 117th Congress found the Phoenix congressman was aligned with Biden 100% of the time.Reaching voters where they areStill, Gallego’s event is being lauded by veteran political organizers and operatives of both parties who stress that while most Latinos don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo, with the holiday often viewed as an excuse to drink margaritas and eat Mexican food, Hispanics who enjoy sports often look forward to the holiday as part of a major boxing weekend, when star Mexican prizefighters have high-profile bouts.“This brings politics and engagement into a place candidates often don’t think about,” said Tomas Robles, founder of Roble Fuerte Strategies, and an organizer for 14 years in Arizona who has worked to mobilize Latino voters. “So it’s doing what most politicians hope to do, which is reaching new people and communities with their message, who they haven’t been able to reach in the past.”Gallego has also put on a round table last week with Latino leaders on lowering prescription drug prices, a Maryvale, Arizona townhall last year entirely in Spanish, and a south Phoenix food tour with local influencer Señor Foodie.“The Canelo fight watch party, I would say, is smart, because he’s continuing to mine parts of the Latino vote that Lake will never even touch, so if he can get them to turn out that’s a net gain for him,” said Jaime Molera, who served as an adviser to the former Republican governor Jane Dee Hull and co-founded the Molera Alvarez consulting firm.While the Democratic party for the first time this cycle acknowledged its problem with reaching Latino men amid fear that they are gravitating to former president Donald Trump driven by his bravado and policies, Robles argues it’s an inaccurate view, and Hispanic men have instead been moved by what they perceive as “authenticity”.“He’s no doubt been to a bunch of events like the one his campaign is organizing, like the ones we went to in our 20s. He can have a 15-minute convo by the taco truck and it won’t have to be anything about politics, it will be about boxing,” he said.. “That is the connection politicians are eager to make but a lot of them don’t put themselves in the shoes of the people they’re trying to connect with.”View image in fullscreenGallego led by two points over Lake in a March Hill/Emerson poll 51% to 49% but has enjoyed larger leads in more recent polls. An average of 19 polls from the Hill finds Gallego leading by an average of 4.7%.Chuck Coughlin, who served as a campaign manager for former Republican governor Jan Brewer and is the president of HighGround which runs polls in Arizona, told the Guardian he spoke to Gallego before he ran and he shared that this was exactly the type of event he was going to do.Coughlin described a demographic divide within the Hispanic community between “older, traditional, Catholic, gun-owning, conservative-leaning” members and the more activist, immigration-focused generation that was baptized under the state’s hardline SB1070 immigration law over a dozen years ago.“For him to establish a beachhead with those people he would not be known to, coming from one of the lowest-turnout districts in the state, is smart,” he said. “His DNA – the story he tells on TV of having a hard-working single mom, going to college, being a marine in Iraq – that’s a working man’s story that they can relate to. I don’t think that story has been shared widely among those older Hispanics and this kind of event is a perfect place to allow himself to share those stories in an apolitical format with your tío and your family there.”Junior Lopez, 42, is the owner and trainer at JL Boxing Academy, who has trained fighters for more than 15 years, including current top contender David Benavidez. He said the primary thing people need to know about Latino men is that their number one priority is taking care of their families.In Lopez and men like him, Gallego has the opportunity to start a conversation on Saturday.“I’m not going to lie, I don’t follow too much of the political stuff,” he told the Guardian. “This is a good thing for me and for my people in the community to hear what he’s about and to understand what he’s fighting for.”One interesting wrinkle at the watch party: Benavidez, who Lopez trains, is ranked No 2 in ESPN’s super-middleweight ranking, behind Álvarez. Fans entering the watch party will walk by a giant poster of Benavidez, who is nicknamed the “Mexican Monster”, and has accused Álvarez of ducking a matchup with him. In some ways that makes this under-the-radar watch party in Glendale part of the orbit at the center of the boxing universe.And come November, Arizona too could be the center of the political universe, given the razor-thin margin in 2020 between Biden and Trump, and if Gallego is able to maximize his support with Latinos on his way to becoming the first Latino US senator in Arizona history.Rocha, who wrote a book called Tio Bernie about serving as the architect for Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly robust 2020 Latino outreach effort, said he was impressed by Gallego’s focus on Hispanics at this juncture in the campaign.“I’ve never seen a candidate more focused on maximizing the Latino vote than this candidate,” he said. “He’s from the community and has felt the pain they feel, and he has really good ideas.” More

  • 163 Shares129 Views

    in US Politics

    ‘We must not stop’: potential Trump VP Ben Carson touts national abortion ban

    In a new book, the retired neurosurgeon, former US housing secretary and potential Trump vice-presidential pick Ben Carson calls for a national abortion ban – a posture at odds with most Americans and even Donald Trump himself.Hailing the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson US supreme court ruling that removed the federal right to abortion, Carson writes: “We must not stop there … the battle over the lives of unborn children is not yet finished. Many states have made abortion illegal because of the Dobbs decision, yet the practice continues in many more states.“What is needed is legislation that guarantees the right to life for all American citizens, including those still in the womb. Therefore, we must be boldly vocal about saving our fellow human beings through the legislative process. They are counting on us!”Carson’s book, The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family, will be published later this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.With the book, Carson follows other potential Trump running mates in seeking to sell himself to the reading and voting public as well as the former president, among them the extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; the former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard; and the South Dakota governor and self-confessed dog- and goat-killer Kristi Noem.No 2 to Trump may be a dubious prize – his vice-president, Mike Pence, ended up running for his life from Trump supporters who wanted to hang him on January 6 – but contenders continue to jostle.Recent reporting suggests Carson has slipped from the front rank. On Thursday, Bloomberg said Trump was closely considering Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, and three senators: Marco Rubio of Florida, JD Vance of Ohio and Tim Scott of South Carolina.But Carson, 72, remains close to Trump, having challenged him for the Republican nomination in 2016 – briefly leading the race – before becoming one of the only members of Trump’s cabinet to stay throughout his term, even after Trump incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Carson’s hardline views on abortion are well known: during his 2016 run he ran into controversy when he likened abortion to slavery and said he wanted to see the end of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which safeguarded the federal right.His new book comes nearly two years after Roe was brought down by a supreme court to which Trump appointed three rightwing justices.Carson writes: “I’m grateful that in my lifetime I was able to hear these incredible words established by the supreme court of the United States: “Held, the constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”Planned Parenthood v Casey was a 1992 case that upheld Roe. Thirty years later, tilted 6-3 to the right by Trump, the court brought both rulings down.Carson continues: “The supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson was a crucial correction to the error of Roe v Wade, and I am certainly grateful for that correction. However, we must not stop there.”Many observers suggest Republicans should have stopped their attacks on abortion rights before achieving their goal with the fall of Roe.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPublic opinion remains in favour of legal abortion: according to Gallup, just 13% of Americans agree with Carson that it should be banned entirely.Since Dobbs, fueled by such voter sentiment, Democrats have enjoyed electoral victories, even in Republican-run states, when campaigning on Republican threats to women’s reproductive rights. The issue has been placed front and centre of the presidential election to come by the Biden campaign.Extreme developments among the states have included the introduction of a six-week abortion ban in Florida and in Arizona the triggering (and repeal) of a brutal ban passed in 1864, before statehood and when the age of consent there was just 10.Trump has struggled to reconcile boasts about bringing down Roe with avoiding talk of a national ban.Last month, the former president said: “States will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both. Whatever they decide must be the law of the land, or in this case the law of the state.“Many states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks, some will be more conservative than others. At the end of the day this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart, or in many cases your religion or faith.“Do what’s right for your family, and do what’s right for yourself.” More