Evelyn Reynolds

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    Fani Willis confirms relationship with prosecutor on 2020 Trump election case

    The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor working on the case against Donald Trump and 14 other defendants, confirmed for the first time on Friday they had a romantic relationship. But they denied any wrongdoing and Willis said she should not be disqualified from the case.“In 2022, District Attorney Willis and I developed a personal relationship in addition to our professional association and friendship,” Wade wrote in an affidavit attached to a 176-page motion Willis filed in court on Friday. Notably, Wade said the relationship developed after he was hired to work on the Trump case in 2021.Willis wrote in the filing she had no personal or financial conflict of interest that “constitutes a legal basis for disqualification”. She urged Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, to dismiss a request to disqualify her without a hearing, currently set for 15 February.“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” she wrote.Michael Roman, a seasoned Republican operative and one of the defendants in the wide-ranging racketeering case against Trump and associates for trying to overturn the election, is seeking Willis’s disqualification. He alleges that Wade used money he earned from his work in Willis’s office on the case to pay for vacations for the two of them. Trump and Robert Cheeley, another defendant, have also joined Roman’s request to dismiss the case.Legal experts are largely dubious of Roman’s request to disqualify Willis.“The filing effectively ended any question I had about what Judge McAfee should and will do. The motion to dismiss and disqualify will be roundly and easily rejected. My only question now is whether other defendants will slowly back away from the Roman motion given how effectively the DA dispatched with the allegations of serious wrongdoing,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.But the confirmation of a relationship with Wade could still do serious harm to Willis in terms of the politics of the case, undermining the credibility of her judgment in the public’s view. The fact that Willis did not disclose the relationship publicly before Roman’s filing, and did not respond to the allegation for weeks, could also leave the impression she was trying to conceal it from public view. Trump, who has already taunted Willis over the relationship, is also likely to dig in.Meanwhile, even though he may not have done anything wrong legally, some experts have called for Wade to step aside in order to protect the public perception of the case.There is no evidence that the relationship resulted in any financial gain for Willis, the district attorney wrote in her filing. She noted they had no joint bank accounts or shared expenses and were not financially dependent on each other. While Wade has purchased travel for Willis with his personal funds, she also noted that she had done the same for him.“Financial responsibility for personal travel taken is divided roughly evenly between the two, with neither being primarily responsible for expenses of the other, and all expenses paid for with individual personal funds,” Willis wrote in the filing.A personal relationship between two lawyers also is not enough to disqualify a prosecutor, Willis wrote. She noted that some of the lawyers for various defendants in the case were either married or in a personal relationship. She noted Roman had offered no evidence their relationship affected prosecuting the case in any way.“The existence of a relationship between members of a prosecution team, in and of itself, is simply not a status that entitles a criminal defendant any remedy,” she wrote.Willis also rebuffed an additional argument by Trump’s attorneys that she should be disqualified because of comments she made at a Black church saying attacks on her were racist. Trump had used those comments to suggest the prosecution against him was racially motivated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The motion makes no serious legal argument, establishes no violation of any ethical rule, and makes no real effort to link the public statements to the legal standard for disqualification,” she wrote. “Instead, much like the motion advanced by … Defendant Roman, Defendant Trump’s motion appears designed to generate media attention rather than accomplish some form of legitimate legal practice. It should be dismissed out of hand.”Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead attorney in Fulton county, dismissed Willis’s filing.“While the DA admits to an intimate relationship with her employee Special Asst DA Wade, she fails to provide full transparency and necessary financial details. Indeed, she says absolutely nothing about the so-called ‘coincidence’ of Wade filing for divorce the day after the DA hired him!” he said in a statement.“Most significantly, and disingenuously, the DA attempts to explain and downplay her ‘church speech’, by preposterously claiming that her racially charged extra-judicial comments were somehow not about the case or the defendants, and that her intentional injection of racial animus in violation of her ethical responsibilities as a prosecutor should simply be ignored,” he added.“Apparently, the DA believes she can make public out-of-court statements about race, this case, and the defendants whenever she wants, and the court is powerless to punish her by disqualification.”Shortly after the filing, Trump distorted what Willis had said into falsehoods and used it to attack her. In a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, he said: “By going after the most high level person, and the Republican Nominee, she was able to get her ‘lover’ much more money, almost a Million Dollars, than she would be able to get for the prosecution of any other person or individual. THAT MEANS THAT THIS SCAM IS TOTALLY DISCREDITED & OVER!”Willis’s filing on Friday details how Wade stepped away from lucrative other legal work to handle the case and took on a reduced governmental rate to work on the case. More

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    Fani Willis: what does relationship with Trump prosecutor mean for Georgia case?

    The case brought against Donald Trump in Georgia is a powerful, sprawling indictment that charges the former US president and his top allies with violating the state’s racketeering statute over their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.In January, the case was roiled by an explosive complaint filed by Trump’s co-defendant Michael Roman, who alleged that a secret personal relationship between the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, and her deputy Nathan Wade, amounted to a conflict of interest that warranted their disqualification.The latest twist in the weeks-long saga came on Friday, when Willis acknowledged in a court filing that she had a relationship with Wade, but that it began after he had been retained to work on the Trump case.Here’s what you need to know.What has just happened?Willis and Wade, a special prosecutor working on the case against Trump and 14 other defendants, confirmed for the first time on Friday they had a romantic relationship. Previously, evidence had emerged in Wade’s divorce proceedings that he had used some of the more than $650,000 he earned from his work for her to pay for vacations for the two of them. Bank records showed Wade had paid for tickets for the pair to go to California in 2023 and Miami in 2022.What do the Trump team argue?Trump’s allies and lawyers allege that the relationship between the district attorney and one of her top prosecutors on the team is an improper one that affects the investigation. That is important as the Georgia case was seen as a powerful blow to the former US president, with a strong chance of finding him guilty for his actions in 2020. Because the case is in Georgia state court, it is also immune from Trump’s interference should he win the 2024 election.What could that mean for the case?There is little doubt that Trump’s lawyers will now seek to exploit this situation and use it to undermine the credibility of the case and delay the proceedings. But experts have generally been skeptical the relationship will result in disqualification or getting the case removed.Even if nothing were to happen legally because of the scandal, it offers huge political ammunition to Trump to argue that the case is flawed and motivated by politics and personal ambition. In an election year, that could be crucial.What does Willis say?Willis wrote in the Friday filing that she had no personal or financial conflict of interest that “constitutes a legal basis for disqualification” and urged McAfee to dismiss the request to disqualify her without a hearing.She noted that Roman had failed to offer any evidence that the relationship affected any decisions of the case. The mere existence of a relationship, she wrote, was not grounds for disqualification. She noted that some of the defense lawyers in the case were married or had personal relationships.She also noted that neither she nor Wade benefited financially from the prosecution. The two do not have a joint bank account or other shared expenses. And when they travel together for personal reasons, they split the costs and bear their own expenses, her office wrote.“While the allegations raised in the various motions are salacious and garnered the media attention they were designed to obtain, none provide this Court with any basis upon which to order the relief they seek,” she wrote.What happens next?A hearing has been set for 15 February by the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case. McAfee is expected to decide based on the evidence presented then whether Willis should be disqualified, either because he finds there is an actual conflict of interest, or because he finds an appearance of impropriety, a lower standard that has been previously used in some cases.If McAfee decides to reject Roman’s motion to disqualify Willis, Roman could challenge his ruling at the Georgia state court of appeals, a move that would almost certainly delay the case by weeks or months, setting back the start of a potential trial. A trial date has not been set for Trump and his co-defendants.If McAfee decides to grant Roman’s motion and relieves Willis and her office from prosecuting the case, it would be handed to the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, which would then appoint a replacement prosecutor. More

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    A message to Starmer from the US: ditching your £28bn climate plan isn’t just cowardly – it’s bad politics | Kate Aronoff

    It’s hard, from the US, to feel all that confident about the state of our climate policies. The Inflation Reduction Act – the Biden White House’s trademark legislative achievement, which revolved around green investments – was a major accomplishment. Still, the US is breaking new records for its production and export of fossil fuels, last year extracting more oil and gas than ever before. Even more worrying is just how tenuous the country’s modest progress on the climate feels in advance of November’s presidential election: Donald Trump continues to lead Joe Biden in just about every poll.However, at the very least, the Biden administration has set a bar for the scale of green investment that centre-left parties should undertake. The same can’t be said of the Labour party, which has reportedly now scrapped its laudable £28bn green spending pledge in favour of some bizarre fealty to its leadership’s own strange idea of fiscal responsibility. So what can Labour learn from the Democratic president’s approach?To his great credit, Biden took seriously the need to win over progressive supporters of his main opponent in the Democratic primary in 2020. Bernie Sanders was an early adopter of the climate movement’s calls for a “green new deal”, laying out an expansive $16tn plan to tackle global heating and inequality. Biden’s $3.5tn Build Back Better agenda, produced with Sanders and his supporters in consultative roles, was decidedly not a green new deal. It did, however, reflect that platform’s most valuable components, positing climate action as a job creator and driver of 21st-century economic dynamism. Inherent in that was a willingness to spend lots of money, fast, on the things that matter.Almost as soon as Biden took office, however, climate advocates in the US watched the White House’s already too modest jobs and climate agenda get whittled down to what eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act’s roughly $400bn in new spending on climate and environmental priorities. It’s a shamefully slender programme, given how wealthy the US is, and its outsized historical responsibility for the climate crisis. But it’s also the best we might have hoped for, given the political influence of a fossil fuel industry that’s captured the Republican party virtually wholesale, along with key Democrats such as the West Virginia senator, Joe Manchin.Without the idiosyncrasies that weakened US climate policy, why do some members of the Labour party seem so keen to negotiate against themselves? The party’s £28bn a year green prosperity plan has now been dropped, thanks to the political cowardice of people such as the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who was already distancing herself from the policy in an interview with LBC earlier this week. The Labour veteran and podcast host Ed Balls suggested the problem with the plan was the number attached to it – urging Starmer and Reeves to “U-turn” away from it, so as to project fiscal responsibility and deflect repeated attacks from the right that Starmer would raise taxes to fund it. The party establishment is clearly spooked by the spectre of rightwing attacks, as Labour’s latest move so clearly shows.If the US can offer any lessons about how to deal with a right wing yammering on about how green policies allegedly hurt “ordinary people” while preaching painful austerity, it’s that it won’t give you a lick of credit for giving in to its ideas. Neither, moreover, will voters. The planet is even less forgiving. The costs of the climate crisis far outweigh the costs of acting on it. Under present policies, the climate crisis could cost the UK 3.3% of GDP a year by 2050. By 2100, that jumps to 7.4% of GDP a year; in today’s terms, that would be about £168bn.Labour needn’t look to the future, though, to make a straightforward case for going big on green spending. The Conservatives’ long-running war on good climate policy has already made life more expensive for working-class Britons. David Cameron’s bid to cut the “green crap” entailed doing away with a successful home insulation programme in 2013. And the average household could be paying gas bills of up to £400 lower if the Tories hadn’t axed the energy price guarantee scheme.While Labour’s green prosperity plan was designed with the Inflation Reduction Act in mind, there was an opportunity for Starmer to improve on it by emphasising the short-term benefits, such as the money households could save from national home insulation projects. Though it’s a hot topic among wonkish types in the US, UK and other parts of Europe, very few people here could tell you what the Inflation Reduction Act actually is. As of last August – a year on from the act’s passage – 71% of US residents said they knew “little or nothing” about it. Why is the White House’s high-profile accomplishment so far from most Americans’ minds? For one, the consultancy McKinsey has found that $216bn of the act’s $394bn in climate and energy-related tax credits will flow to corporations. Meanwhile, many benefits, such as incentives for pricey items such as electric vehicles and solar panels, are completely inaccessible to lower-income people and renters, who account for about 36% of US households.Driving investment in low-carbon energy and technologies makes a lot of sense: green industries grew four times faster than the rest of the British economy in 2020-21. But courting private-sector investment in green industries above all else – a sadly salient critique of the Inflation Reduction Act – threatens to leave voters in the dark about the benefits of climate action to their pockets. An active green industrial strategy should go hand in hand with an expansion of the public goods, services and planning capacities it will need to succeed. Upgrading public transit infrastructure and ensuring an abundant, affordable supply of low-carbon energy will be key to the success of the emerging green industries. More important, though, is that these can be the foundation on which Labour – should it ever choose to – builds both a broadly shared green prosperity and its electoral mandate for ever-stronger climate policies.The last few years of climate policymaking in the US point to at least one clear conclusion: Reeves and those who pushed to kill Labour’s green spending pledge are dead wrong. Labour should be sparing no expense on reducing emissions and improving livelihoods; if anything, £28bn a year is much too little. If party top brass can summon even an ounce of political courage they’ll make another U-turn away from disastrous, outdated economic orthodoxy and revive their more ambitious climate plans. Should that happen, the party can make voters acutely aware of the choice before them – to live a good, green life under Labour, or to let another Tory government take away more of their hard-earned money. Otherwise, the differences between Tory and Labour rule will keep getting harder and harder to spot.
    Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back More

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    When Mark Zuckerberg can face US senators and claim the moral high ground, we’re through the looking glass | Marina Hyde

    Did you catch a clip of the tech CEOs in Washington this week? The Senate judiciary committee had summoned five CEOs to a hearing titled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. There was Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, Discord’s Jason Citron and X’s Linda Yaccarino – and a predictable vibe of “Senator, I’m a parent myself …” Listen, these moguls simply want to provide the tools to help families and friends connect with each other. Why must human misery and untold, tax-avoidant billions attend them at every turn?If you did see footage from the hearing, it was probably one of two moments of deliberately clippable news content. Ranking committee member Lindsey Graham addressed Zuckerberg with the words: “I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands.” Well, ditto, Senator. “You have a product that is killing people,” continued Graham, who strangely has yet to make the same point to the makers of whichever brand of AR-15 he proudly owns, or indeed to the makers of the assault rifles responsible for another record high of US school shootings last year. Firearms fatalities are the number one cause of death among US children and teenagers, a fact the tech CEOs at this hearing politely declined to mention, because no one likes a whatabouterist. And after all, the point of these things is to just get through the posturing of politicians infinitely less powerful than you, then scoot back to behaving precisely as you were before. Zuckerberg was out of there in time to report bumper results and announce Meta’s first ever dividend on Thursday. At time of writing, its shares were soaring.Anyhow, if it wasn’t that clip, maybe it was the one of Zuckerberg being goaded by sedition fist-pumper Josh Hawley into apologising to those in the committee room audience who had lost children to suicide following exploitation on his platform. Thanks to some stagey prodding by Senator Hawley, who famously encouraged the mob on 6 January 2020 (before later being filmed running away from them after they stormed the Capitol), Zuckerberg turned round, stood up, and faced his audience of the bereaved. “I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” he began. Helpfully, a transcribed version of this off-the-cuff moment found its way into a Meta press release minutes after the event.View image in fullscreenSo I guess that was the hearing. “Tense”, “heated”, “stunning” – listen, if adjectival cliches were legislation, this exercise would have been something more than pointless. And yet, they’re not and it wasn’t. There really ought to be a genre name for this kind of performative busywork – the theatre of failure, perhaps.Other outcomes were once available. Back in 1994, the CEOs of seven big tobacco firms took their oaths before a Senate committee, then spouted a communal line that nicotine wasn’t addictive. Within two years, all seven had quit the tobacco industry – a development not unrelated to the fact that all seven were under investigation by the justice department for perjury. Those were different times, and not just because we probably wouldn’t slap them with the “seven dwarfs” moniker now. These days, you can’t escape the sense that old guys were shouting at Zuckerberg at a hearing six years ago, while he offered 2018’s variation on his favourite blandishment: “We know we have more work to do”. And you suspect they’ll be shouting at him again in five years’ time, when he will still know they have more work to do. “If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem,” sniffed Graham of the tech CEOs, “we’re gonna die waiting.” Again, the senator speaks of what he knows. There is always talk of legislation, but there is never really much legislation.There’s a line near the start of the movie version of Ready Player One, the cult dystopian book about a VR world that weirdly feels like the lodestar for Zuckerberg’s pivot towards the metaverse: “I was born in 2027,” explains the teenage protagonist, “after the corn syrup droughts, after the bandwidth riots … after people stopped trying to fix problems, and just tried to outlive them.” It was hard to watch any amount of Wednesday’s hearing – it’s hard to watch a lot of news about the intersection of politics and mega-business these days, in fact – and not feel we are in a very similar place. Few of the politicians giving it the hero act could be said to have left the world in a better place than the one in which they found it when they took office. A necrotic form of politics has gripped the Republican party in particular, and this is the vacuum in which they have been downgraded by corporations they don’t even understand, let alone have the will, foresight, or political skill to control.“Companies over countries,” as Mark Zuckerberg said a long time ago. This once-unformed thought becomes more realised all the time, with the Meta boss last year explaining that, “Increasingly, the real world is a combination of the physical world we inhabit and the digital world we are building.” The added irony is that the more the Lindsey Grahams fail the real world, the more people retreat further into the unregulated embrace of the worlds that the Mark Zuckerbergs run. It’s going to take so much more than the theatre of failure to solve it – but bad actors currently dominate the bill.
    Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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    Biden is betting on South Carolina’s Black voters. But does he still have their support?

    Jonathan Fields and Taj McClary, two college freshmen, were chatting on Monday after class at a South Carolina State University snack shop. Both are young Black men from rough neighborhoods in North Charleston. They’ve made it out. But only so far.Fields is a mechanical engineering major with a 3.2 GPA, which isn’t enough to keep his state scholarship, he said. He’s looking at getting a job, but not just so he can afford a basket of chicken tenders after class.“I have an interview tomorrow at Wendy’s, just so I can send money back home and still get stuff,” Fields said. He’s not sure who he’s voting for in the Democratic primary on Saturday.“You don’t just succeed. You actually work for everything. Nothing is never handed to you. So when you come down here and you look at politics, you actually have to watch it.”On Saturday, South Carolina voters will head to the polls in a Democratic primary contest that is as much a coronation of Joe Biden as the Republican race here two weeks later appears to be of Donald Trump. But the common anxieties of Black voters lie beneath the placid surface of Biden’s re-election campaign, even after he chose to eschew tradition and launch his primary season in the state.There’s a contrast between Biden’s rhetoric and the lived reality of many Black voters in South Carolina who propelled him to the White House four years ago. That leaves some pointing to signs of improvement, but many people keenly aware of how far away equality remains, and how easily these gains can be reversed.Four years ago, Biden recovered from stumbles in Iowa and New Hampshire to win a resounding victory in this state – his first primary victory in his third run for the White House.Two Black senators – Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey – were on the ballot in 2020, hoping to capture the magic of Barack Obama’s victorious run of 2008. It didn’t matter. An early endorsement by James Clyburn, dean of the Black congressional caucus and the state’s only Democratic congressman, galvanized the Black vote for Biden, who went on to win nearly half of South Carolina’s Democratic voters and a first-place finish in every county in the state.Biden has been plain in acknowledging his political debt to South Carolina, and specifically to South Carolina’s Black electorate. According to 2020 exit polling, about 60% of Democratic voters in South Carolina are Black and about 90% of Black voters here cast ballots for Democrats.“I wouldn’t be here without the Democratic voters of South Carolina, and that’s a fact,” Biden said on Saturday at a celebratory dinner in Columbia. “You’re the reason I am president.”Democrats are celebrating South Carolina’s new status as the first Democratic primary in the nation, both a political gift by Biden and an acknowledgment by the Democratic party that something had to change, said Marlon Kimpson, a former state senator.“There was a large push by the party leadership to hold the first-in-the-nation primary in South Carolina, because the South Carolina Democratic party electorate mirrors the rest of the country,” he said. “The challenge with that is that the president doesn’t have any meaningful opposition. It’s a double-edged sword. While we are very excited about hosting the first primary, we’ve had to start early and work extremely hard to generate enthusiasm.”View image in fullscreenIndeed, neither Congressman Dean Phillips nor author Marianne Williamson have generated much enthusiasm for their primary challenge of a sitting president. A poll conducted by Emerson College on 5 January indicated that 69% of Democratic primary voters in South Carolina intend to vote for the incumbent. About 5% support Phillips and 3% support Williamson in the poll. Twenty-two per cent were undecided.“As I drive down Highway 17, there are no campaign signs,” Kimpson said. “In 2020, not only were there campaign signs, this close to the election there were people holding handheld signs. Radio ads. Bumper stickers. Social media posts 24/7.”This is also the first presidential primary contest in South Carolina which has had early voting. So far, fewer than 30,000 voters have cast Democratic primary ballots.“Turnout is going to be low. We know that,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the Black Voters Matter activist organization based in Atlanta. Albright led a series of town halls and voter education events in South Carolina last week. “If your benchmark is what happened in a previous primary, you’re going to be confused. Certainly, you can’t compare it to four years ago. The primary turnout is not going to tell us a whole lot.”Albright said he sees tension between the local concerns of Black voters and a state government dominated by white Republicans. For example, a recent cross burning in Conway, a gentrifying suburb of Myrtle Beach, has heightened interest in passing a hate crimes law at the state level. Activists have been pressing with increasing vigor for this political goal since the 2015 murders of nine people, including a state senator, at a historic Black church in Charleston.“Without a hate crimes law, who’s the president and who’s the attorney general and who’s running the Department of Justice matters,” Albright said.As the president formally begins his re-election campaign push, his message to Black voters has been to look at the promises he has made and kept to communities of color. Biden has elevated Black women to positions of authority, choosing Harris as his vice-president, appointing Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court and a record number of Black women to the federal bench.Capping insulin costs for consumers has been one of those signature accomplishments, Kimpson said. According to the American Diabetes Association, about 11.6% of Americans are diabetic, with a disproportionate disease burden affecting Black people. One out of eight South Carolinians is diabetic, according to data from the Medical University of South Carolina. For Black South Carolinians, it’s one in six. For those over 65, it’s one in four.Betty Owens of Orangeburg is 67. She receives insulin free of charge through Medicare, she said. On a Wednesday afternoon, she picked through the crust of some fried gas-station chicken breasts. “I don’t eat the outside,” she said. “It’s not that bad if you control it.”Owens, who had to pay for insulin out of pocket before the law changed, said the new policy was an important reason she’s voting for Biden in the primary and in November. She believes her health depends on it.Owens’ son and daughter got jobs paying more than they had been earning in the Trump years, one at an automotive company, another at a bakery. Biden “put out a lot of jobs out there, and more money with the jobs. When I was working, we weren’t making $19 or $20 an hour,” she said.The problem, she said, was inflation. While the rate of inflation in the United States has been lower than in other industrialized countries, and falling now, prices are still much higher than before the pandemic. “You run through that money like it isn’t even there,” she said. “You go into a store and you buy a few items, and it’s too much money.”The Black unemployment rate in April briefly dipped below 5% for the first time in history and remains lower over the last year than any previous period in American history. With remarkable historical consistency, the Black unemployment has usually moved in lockstep at double the white unemployment rate. Labor data over the past year suggests this is starting to uncouple: Black and white unemployment rates are inching closer together, perhaps a sign that endemic discrimination is receding.In absolute terms, economic outcomes for Black voters are improving. In relative terms, however, they’re falling behind. The wealth gap between Black and white households has increased in Biden’s term. Black households remain about 30% less likely to own a home than white households, driving this gap. The average Black worker earns 76¢ to a dollar earned by the average white worker.In South Carolina, it’s 73¢ to the dollar.View image in fullscreenSolving these problems requires a programmatic response, Kimpson said. “People are looking for immediate results in their mailbox, in their zip code. When you look at the American Rescue Plan, people actually got checks.”Student loan relief – $130bn and counting – has also been a signature chicken-in-the-pot item in Biden’s re-election campaign. Black students have borne a larger burden from those loans. While student loan relief unburdens people who have previously taken out loans, it’s not doing much for people in school today such as Fields, the freshman engineering student.“In order for me to get into the profession that I want to get into, I have to go to college,” Fields said. “But it’s like: I have to struggle just to get to where I want to be. Because nobody wants to help you. They tell everybody without college you won’t be anything, but how can I get there? There’s no help.”The return of Donald Trump to the White House remains a potent, motivating threat for Democrats, regardless of anemic turnout in a primary campaign, and Biden appears to know that.“I want you to imagine the future nightmare if Trump is back in office,” Biden told South Carolina Democrats last week. “Given the nightmare when he was in office, you know what is likely to come.” His stump speech conjures threats of a national abortion ban, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, cuts to social security and an amplification of divisive politics.Biden’s rhetoric looks beyond the primary, fixated on his expected opponent in November and on repudiating Trump’s election claims. On Saturday, South Carolina voters will signal just how well that message is working.“The second Lost Cause is Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen,” Biden said. We cannot allow that lie to live either, because it threatens our very democracy. Folks, there are truth, and there are lies – lies told for power, lies told for profit. We must call out these lies with a voice that is clear and unyielding.” More

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    Texas’s ‘states’ rights’ argument in the border dispute sets a dangerous precedent

    Over the past few weeks, a quiet legal crisis has been unfolding on the US-Mexico border. Texas has seized control of part of the border and claimed the right to prevent federal authorities from exercising jurisdiction there. After the US supreme court ruled that the federal government could tear down razor wire erected by Texas authorities, the state vowed to erect more – and Governor Greg Abbott claimed that because the federal government had failed to protect his state from an “invasion” of refugees, it has “broken the compact between the United States and the States” and lost the right to exercise authority over the border altogether.To understand why this is so alarming, you need to see it in two historical contexts. The first is the notion of a “compact” between the states. This idea holds that the constitution is not the supreme law of the land but rather a mere agreement between independently sovereign states. Those states hence retain the right to decide when certain actions by the federal government break the compact – and to reclaim their independence accordingly.This idea – sometimes known as “compact theory” – was key to the quasi-legal arguments deployed by the Confederate states in the 19th century to justify first secession, and then civil war. As well as being rejected by the framers of the constitution, it was also explicitly ruled incorrect by the supreme court once the civil war was over. Nowadays, there is really no such thing as “compact theory” outside of the imagination of neo-Confederates and other far-right groups – there’s just federal law, and actions that break that law.Secondly, the erroneous idea of the compact and the broader agenda of “states’ rights” of which it is a part have often been deployed in order to advance a white supremacist agenda. Slavery is the most notable example. But the southern states – including Texas – also invoked these ideas to defend the system of Jim Crow, which within living memory denied full rights to generations of African Americans. Only the civil rights movement forced a change.Another part of this tradition is the inversion of the realities of power and violence which lie at its heart. Slavery was justified in part by arguments that the slaves, if freed, would threaten and even exterminate the white race. Jim Crow was reinforced by the related idea that free Black people would, if not physically eradicate white people, destroy the white body politic by contaminating it with unfit citizens. In each case the reality of who was really a threat to whom – the slavedriver to the slave, the Klansman to the free Black citizen – was hidden by an elaborate ideology of fear which in reality was used to justify the continuation of white supremacy.By claiming the right to nullify federal authority in order to wield lethal force against non-white migrants, Abbott is placing himself squarely in the center of these two traditions. His actions have already contributed to the death of two children and a mother who drowned in the Rio Grande as Texas authorities prevented federal agents from coming to their aid. Refugees are among the most powerless people in the world, but to Abbott they are elements of an “invading” force which threatens the security of Texas and the United States. Like his predecessors, he believes that even the constitution shouldn’t stand in the way of his ability to harm them.But just because Abbott is invoking some of the most sordid chapters in American history to justify his actions doesn’t mean we should have confidence that he will fail.One of the most disturbing aspects of this whole affair is that despite Abbott’s arguments having no legal merit, four supreme court justices were willing to endorse Texas blocking federal authorities from removing the razor wire at the border. The fact that this case was so narrowly decided is a five-alarm fire that suggests we are only one new court decision or one new Republican supreme court appointment away from a radical restructuring of America’s constitutional order. Future historians may look back on the 2020s as a turning point as profound as the civil rights movement of the 1960s – and one in which the pendulum swung back the other way.What Texas is doing also dramatically raises the stakes of this year’s presidential election – and not just because the next president may be able to pick another supreme court justice. With so many Republicans endorsing the idea that the situation at the border can be characterized as an invasion, the road seems to be open for a Republican president to make a federal invasion declaration.This would not only pave the way for an even more militarized treatment of refugees, but also allow the federal government to suspend the rights of millions of Americans living in border areas if it deems such a step necessary to repel the supposed attack.Luckily, there are legal and institutional barriers to such a step – many constitutional scholars believe that a federal invasion declaration requires an act of Congress. But in this case as in others, all roads lead to the supreme court, and it has already signaled its openness to many extreme ideas. America is in a time of great constitutional danger, and the border may be both an early warning sign – and the place where the country ultimately comes unstuck.
    Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University. He writes a newsletter called America Explained More

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    A year on from the East Palestine toxic train derailment, what’s changed? – podcast

    A year ago on 3 February a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in a small village on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania. A few days after the derailment, officials decided to vent and burn the chemicals it was carrying to prevent an explosion.
    Those still living in East Palestine and the surrounding communities have been told the air they breathe is safe, but many aren’t confident in what they’re being told.
    So what led to the derailment? What’s changed in terms of legislation to make sure this kind of accident doesn’t happen again? And how are residents coming together to advocate for their safety and that of fellow Americans in the future?
    The Guardian’s fossil fuels and climate reporter, Dharna Noor, travelled to East Palestine to see for herself what’s changed in the 12 months since the disaster

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    Biden gains union worker support but faces ceasefire protests in Michigan

    Joe Biden won a strong pledge of support on Thursday from union autoworkers crucial to his re-election bid in Michigan, while yet more protests over his backing of Israel’s actions in Gaza put pressure on the trip.The president’s travel to the battleground state was intended as a celebration after the United Auto Workers (UAW) union recently endorsed his re-election bid. But his visit was also met with protests amid the state’s sizable Arab American community, demanding Biden seek a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war, and refusing to meet his campaign.Biden visited a UAW union hall in Warren, Michigan, where UAW members plan to work a phone bank on his behalf ahead of the state’s 27 February nominating contest.He was greeted by UAW president Shawn Fain, who last week gave a full-throated endorsement of the Democratic incumbent and a sharp rebuke of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.As the crowd chanted, “Joe, Joe”, Fain promised Biden: “We’re going to fight like hell” for him to win the November presidential election.“Wall Street didn’t build the middle class. Labor built the middle class, and the middle class built the country,” Biden said. “When labor does well, everybody does well.”He later joked: “Besides, you built my ’67 Corvette.”The campaign kept specific details of Biden’s visit private in the face of expected opposition until just before his arrival.Ahead of his motorcade, about 100 protesters marched down a street toward the UAW location, chanting “Genocide Joe has got to go” and waving Palestinian flags.Before heading to Michigan, Biden attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. He said he was working to resolve the Gaza conflict, including a two-state solution for Palestinians and bringing home the hostages still held following Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel.“We are actively working for peace,” he said at the breakfast.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump on Wednesday met with the Teamsters, one of the US’s biggest unions representing truck drivers, airline pilots and others, as he competes for their backing.Ahead of Biden’s visit to the Detroit area, protesters amassed in cars and vans with blue and white “Abandon Biden” signs and Palestinian flags, planning to rush to wherever he appeared.Arab Americans account for 5% of the vote in Michigan and Biden’s margin of victory over Trump was less than 3 percentage points in 2020.Reuters contributed reporting More