Evelyn Reynolds

Crooked Joe or Sleepy Joe? Donald Trump wanted to know which nickname his supporters prefer. “That’s the first time Sleepy Joe has ever beaten Crooked Joe!” he said with surprise, after asking the crowd to make noise for each contender.That, however, is not the branding exercise the former US president cares about most right now. On Saturday night he wanted his followers to go home with three words: Biden. Migrant. Crime.A month after his audacious campaign stop in the Bronx, New York, Trump held his first ever campaign rally in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy and another Democratic stronghold where Joe Biden won 81.4% of the vote in 2020.He had come with a sledgehammer message: Biden’s open borders have allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to pour into America, leading to a surge of violent crime in its major cities, hurting Black and Hispanic populations the most. And in the grand tradition of “law and order” Republicans, only Trump could fix it.“Few communities have suffered more under the Biden regime than Philadelphia,” he told thousands of supporters, many wearing “Make America great again” caps, at the event in a sports arena. “Under Crooked Joe, the City of Brotherly Love is being ravaged by bloodshed and crime.”The rally was staged at Temple University, in a historically Black area. Trump won just 5% of the vote in precincts within a half-mile radius of Temple’s main campus in the last election, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper.But encouraged by opinion polls, his campaign has made wooing Black and Hispanic voters, who make up more than half of Philadelphia’s population, a priority this cycle. Even small gains could make all the difference in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.Several African American supporters were positioned behind Trump’s lectern in the Liacouras Center, against the backdrop of a gigantic Stars and Stripes. Attendees brandished signs with Trump’s police mug shot and the words “Never surrender”. An electronic sign flashed optimistically: “Philadelphia is Trump country.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenTrump painted a dystopian, often dishonest picture of “bedlam and death and terror”, a likely preview of his strategy for Thursday’s debate against Biden in Atlanta and the rest of his scorched earth campaign until November.“Murders in Philadelphia reached their highest level in six decades,” he said “Retail theft in Philly is up 135% since I left office. The convenience stores are closing down left and right. The pharmacies have to lock up the soap … You can’t buy toothpaste, you can’t buy a toothbrush, it takes you 45 minutes.” The crowd roared with laugher.In April the Pew Charitable Trusts’ annual “State of the City” report found that violent crime in Philadelphia is at its lowest level in a decade. The city’s homicide rate dropped six percentage points in 2023, in line with other cities of similar scale. But the number of property crimes did rise sharply over the same period.Crucial to Trump’s fear and fury election strategy is joining dots between crime and illegal immigration. It is a hot button issue after Republican governors in Texas and Florida chartered buses and planes to send thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities. Mayors have felt a strain on their resources and growing backlash from voters.Trump said: “Unbelievably Crooked Joe Biden is going around trying to claim that crime is down. Crime is so much up. First of all, we have a new form of crime. It’s called the Biden Migrant Crime, right? And all these millions of people that have come in, they’re just getting warmed up.”In fact last year violent crime fell to one of its lowest levels in more than half a century. FBI statistics show steep drops in every category of violent crime in every region in the first three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier.But at Saturday’s rally Trump, himself a convicted criminal, sought to turn reality on its head.View image in fullscreen“The FBI crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake,” he said without evidence. “They’re fake just like everything else in this administration.”The former president went on to use lurid, apocalyptic language to describe the alleged threat posed by undocumented immigrants. Many studies have found that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than US-born citizens.“Day after day, week after week, Joe Biden is releasing illegal criminals into our communities to rape, pillage, plunder and to kill,” he said. “Just this week, a 12-year-old girl in Houston, Jocelyn Nungaray, was tied up, stripped, and strangled to death after walking to a 7-Eleven.”“… Charged with Jocelyn’s heinous murder are two illegal alien savages that Joe Biden recently set loose into our country. They came across our border claiming they feared for their lives in Venezuela.”At that a man in the crowd shouted: “Fuck Joe Biden!” – an ominous sign of how Trump’s rhetoric fires up his crowds. During his 85-minute speech, they shouted and shrieked and chanted “Build the wall!” and “USA! USA!”The Republican National Committee recently launched a website called “Biden Bloodbath” that highlights anecdotal incidents involving migrants in eight US states, including electoral battlegrounds such as Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.Trump went on to cite the case of Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother from Maryland allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant, and thanked members of her family for attending the rally. Telling another grim crime story in unsparing detail, he commented: “Like a scene from a horror movie.”Trump deployed a similar tactic in 2016 and believes it could resonate again. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March found that only about three in 10 Americans approve of Biden’s handling of immigration. A similar share approved of his handling of border security.View image in fullscreenSix people interviewed by the Guardian inside the arena in Philadelphia – all of whom were attending a Trump rally for the first time – expressed support for his proposed crackdown on border security and illegal immigration.Jim Leedom, wearing a T-shirt bearing the words “We the people are pissed off”, said: “He’s definitely going to clean that up good. The atrocities that are going on down there, the little girls being raped, the women being raped, the drug cartel has control of the whole area – Biden doesn’t seem to give a shit.”“None of that shit went on when Trump was in..”Leedom, 55, who owns a small manufacturing shop, voiced support for Trump’s plan to carry out the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in history.In recent weeks Biden has imposed significant restrictions on immigrants seeking asylum in the US while also offering potential citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people without legal status already living in the country. But the measures cut little ice here.Leedom, accompanied by his son Joseph, a 21-year-old engineering student voting in his first presidential election (he too will vote for Trump), commented: “He’s playing games. That doesn’t surprise me. He’s evil. There’s not enough water for a shower to wash the filth of Biden off.”Michael Krug, 53, was sporting a red T-shirt that said “Keep America great” and “Trump” but had attached a piece of blue sticky tape to hide the word “Pence”. He also wore a badge that said, “God, guns and Trump”.Krug, who works for a paint company, endorsed the “great replacement” theory that describes a supposed elite conspiracy to change the demographics of America, replacing and disempowering white people in favour of people of color, immigrants and Muslims.“Why is it that we don’t have a border any more and people can come just right in and they can get benefits and they can take money and they can take social services away from our poor people or our people that maybe need it?” he asked. “They’re doing it for the Great Replacement. They’re doing it for voters. They’re also doing it to change our culture.”Krug cited the false notion that undocumented immigrants are given voter registration cards, adding: “They’re prosecuting people for walking into the Capitol on January 6th, but they won’t prosecute people coming across the border, which is illegal. There’s a two tiered system of justice, which is not the American way it’s supposed to be. It’s got to change.”Jair Moly, 27, an African American man wearing a Maga cap, said: “You ain’t from here, don’t come here. You ain’t allowed here, don’t come here. Make America great again ‘24. Let’s go!”Asked why he intends to vote for Trump, Moly replied: “He’s real, he keeps it real. He’s not fake. There’s nothing fake about him. He keep it real and he pull no no punches and that’s what we need, America, punch you right in the face.”But Erwin Bieber, 71, a retired car salesman, suggested that a Trump defeat could lead to at least one case of reverse migration. “Initially I didn’t like the way he spoke years ago but I voted for him in 2016. I feel that the country is completely gone if we don’t put him into office. I think I’m going to leave America. If we get stuck with Biden, I’ll go to Mexico.”Democrats set up posters, billboards and kiosks in Philadelphia and on the Temple campus to promote Biden’s policies, including his efforts to forgive student debt, as well as to criticise Trump’s record with the Black community.State representative Malcolm Kenyatta said: “I represent the community in Philly where Trump is currently ranting and raving. I can authoritatively say, my neighbors aren’t in that arena listening to his lies. But a bunch did show up to protest him, so I guess there’s that.” More

Voters in Temecula, California, have ousted the local school board president who thrust the political body to the forefront of rightwing culture wars seeking to eliminate discussions of race and gender identity from the classroom.Joseph Komrosky on Thursday lost a recall vote with 51% of voters favoring his removal.Temecula – a predominantly white city of 100,000 residents – was a hotbed of the culture wars that conservative Americans have mounted in an attempt to censure how schools teach racism, gender and American history.In June of 2023, Komrosky presided over the Temecula school board’s banning of critical race theory – which examines how racism was embedded into American law – as well as attempts to purge elementary school textbooks of any reference to Harvey Milk, the openly gay politician from San Francisco who supported LGBTQ+ rights before his 1978 assassination.Komrosky first joined the board in November 2022. Since then, the school board has forced out the district superintendent and passed a parent notification policy requiring schools to tell parents if students go by a different gender than what they were assigned at birth.Komrosky has called critical race theory a “racist ideology” that uses “division and hate as an instructional framework in our schools”. Komrosky and fellow school board members then voted to reject California’s social studies curriculum over its inclusion of references to Milk, whom Komrosky described as a “pedophile”.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, threatened to impose a $1.5m fine on the district for not adopting the curriculum, though Komrosky and the school board vowed to find a way to circumvent doing so while adhering to state mandates. The board also initiated another controversial vote to limit what flags can be displayed on school grounds.The unflattering public attention drawn by the controversies Komrosky’s actions ignited incited the recall election against him.The recall vote was conducted on 4 June with final results released on Thursday. Among 9,722 ballots tallied, 4,963 supported the recall. The recall election turned out 45.1% of registered voters in Temecula.Komrosky told the LA Times he is inclined to run for the school board again given his slim margin of defeat in the recall.“Given the narrow margin, I will likely run again in the November 2024 general election,” Komrosky said. “If not, it has been an honor to serve the Temecula community, and I am proud to have fulfilled all of my campaign promises as an elected official.“My commitment to protecting the innocence of our children remains unwavering.” More

God’s army is on the march. And many of its foot soldiers are wearing “Make America great again” regalia, sensing that their unlikely standard-bearer, former US president Donald Trump, is once again close to the promised land.“I do not believe that America can survive another four years of Joe Biden,” Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, told a gathering of the religious right in Washington on Friday. “I haven’t felt this way since Jimmy Carter was president.” The audience burst into knowing laughter.Reed promised they would knock on 10m doors of Christian and conservative voters in every battleground state, make 10m phone calls, send 25m text messages and put 30m voter guides in 113,000 churches, producing “the biggest turnout of Christian voters in American history”.The election result will be clear, he added. “This time there aren’t gonna need to be any lawsuits. We’re not going to have to go to court and we’re not going to have to wait until 2.30 in the morning for Donald Trump to declare victory. He’s going to do it at 9 o’clock at night!”With Trump running ahead of Biden in many swing state polls, religious right voters scent a historic opportunity to impose a radical agenda that could ban abortion nationwide, curb LGBTQ+ rights and blur the separation of church and state. At Friday’s conference, speaker after speaker framed it as righteous crusade and the only way to resist a tide of liberal secularism sweeping America.Ben Carson, a former housing secretary in Trump’s first term, praised Republican-dominated Louisiana for becoming the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every government school classroom.“Aren’t you glad that yesterday the governor of Louisiana signed into law – put the Ten Commandments back in the schools?” he said to cheers and applause before warning of a 60-year communist project to change America by taking over schools, churches and Hollywood and removing God from the public square.Josh Hawley, a Republican senator for Missouri, warned of a “radical anti-faith agenda” gripping the country. He said: “Who’s dividing America is the radical left and that’s why I say to you we don’t need less Christian influence in our society, we don’t need less Christian witness in our society; we need more in every part of government, in every part of society.”To approving roars from the audience, Hawley added: “We ought to take the Pride flag out of schools and put the Bible back in. You know what? We ought to take the trans flag down from all of our federal buildings and over every federal building in America write the words: ‘In God we trust.’ In God we trust. Amen.”The couching of an Armageddon election, in which religious truth itself is at stake, with victory representing divine providence and defeat spelling total catastrophe, was crystallised by Monica Crowley, a rightwing political commentator and former assistant secretary of the treasury.She described the election as a “hinge moment” comparable to the American revolution, American civil war, second world war and September 11 terrorist attacks. She spoke of a “war” against “the enemy within” that has spent nearly half a century “infiltrating, undermining and destroying” America with “godless philosophies”.Crowley lamented that Hollywood no longer produces “patriotic films” like those of John Wayne and, extraordinarily, defended the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. “Senator Joe McCarthy was right, and he was trying to ring the bell in the 1950s about communist infiltration in our government and the same deep state that is now going after Donald Trump,” he said.“The same deep state that removed Richard Nixon, the same deep state that went after Ronald Reagan and anybody else who stood up to them. That deep state became very insidious and in the 1950s smeared and attacked Joe McCarthy for speaking the truth about godless communism in very halls of our government.”Notably, little was said by the dozen main stage speakers about abortion, a live political grenade for which Republicans have struggled find a coherent message since the supreme court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade precedent two years ago.Religious conservatives’ pact with Trump appears to be holding. Some were sceptical about the thrice-married reality TV star when he first ran for president in 2016 but the concerns were assuaged by his running mate, born-again evangelical Christian Mike Pence, and by a first term that saw him shift the judiciary to the right.Not even Trump’s conviction in New York last month on 34 felony counts in a trial involving hush-money payments to an adult film star has shaken his grip on this constituency. Many who complain that their faith is under siege regard him as a blunt instrument with which to fight back against the radical left.They often rationalise their vote by saying they are choosing a president, not a pastor. Some evangelicals have likened him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who, according to the Bible, enabled Jews to return to Israel from their exile in Babylon.View image in fullscreenRobert P Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, wrote on Substack recently: “The transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the Maga movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of a convicted felon.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe presumptive Republican nominee has exploited this totemic status. Earlier this year, he launched his own brand of Bible, selling for $59.99 each. During the trial, he shared social media posts comparing himself to Jesus Christ.At Friday’s Road to Majority policy conference, it was not uncommon to hear of the Almighty and Trump spoken in the same breath. Crowley said: “We do have a fearless leader in Donald Trump, where they have thrown the kitchen sink at this man over nine years and they cannot believe that he is still standing. Hand of God!”Kari Lake, a senate candidate in Arizona, said: “We gotta bring Him back into our culture, into our lives, into our hearts and souls – and then also let’s work to bring Donald J Trump back on November 5.”Inside the upmarket Washington hotel hosting the conference, there were vendors selling Maga merchandise, lifesize cardboard cutouts of Trump and an area where attendees could pose with head shots of their choice for his running mate.Stephen Sandrelli, 60, posed with a picture of the US representative Elise Stefanik against an Oval Office backdrop. “First of all, we’ve got to deport millions – at least 15 million people,” he said of a second Trump term. “The Democrats are terrorists. They hate our nation. They hate humankind.“They’re trying to replace us – replacement theory, whatever you want to call it – and Trump cares about us. I believe he’s a man that God has touched and he’s doing the right thing. He’s only blessed our country. He’s only helped people.”Sandrelli, a former Democrat and federal government officer from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, added: “Anybody who supports abortion is supporting murder.”But sensing political danger, Trump has refused to endorse a national abortion ban. Some here felt let down. Wearing a red Maga cap, Thomas Dinkel, 16, who goes to a school in Morgantown, West Virginia, said: “I’m going to be honest with you: as a pro-life Christian, it hurts. I see why he and a lot of other national Republicans are doing it. They’re slowly backing away from the issue. It’s ruffled some feathers.“I do back an abortion ban. For right now, it’s at the state level, and I respect that, but if it ever went as a federal ban, I would back that. I understand why Trump is having a stance on that, just like some other stances he’s been taking lately. I pray that when he gets in, the least he can do for the pro-life communities is continue to back and appoint pro-life justices.”But Dinkel is supporting Trump and is willing to overlook his moral shortcomings, saying: “Listen, I’m a Christian. I mess up, you mess up. Everyone in this room messes up. We sin, we fall short, we turn away from God, and Trump has admitted to that. He’s not the best person. He’s not a perfect person. None of us are. He says that he’s repented of his sins, and I’m called to forgive Trump.”Dorothy Harpe, an African American woman who is retired from a church in Atlanta, Georgia, was wearing a Maga cap and badge that said: “Trump was right!” The 74-year-old said: “He tells the truth. People don’t want to believe him, they think he always doing something wrong, but he’s not. He’s innocent of all the bogus charges they brought against him. God knows every man’s heart, and I believe he is a Christian.” More

Anti-gun-control groups and gun-safety advocates are launching hefty voter-mobilization drives this year with the stakes high in the fall elections given the stark differences on gun violence policy between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.But the long-powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been beset with financial and legal headaches for several years, is not expected to be nearly as active as in 2016, when it spent more than $31m to back Trump’s victorious campaign by boosting his political fortunes in key states, say gun experts and ex-NRA insiders.Now, though, other anti-gun-control groups are trying to take up the slack.For instance, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), an influential firearms industry lobbying group, has begun an eight-figure voter-mobilization drive to help pro-gun interests defeat President Biden, whose strong support for gun-control measures it finds anathema.The NSSF’s general counsel, Larry Keane, said that the organization’s “GunVote” campaign will focus on seven to nine battleground states, where it will mount voter-registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Trump win the presidency again.On the other side of this year’s election brawl over gun control, Everytown for Gun Safety is planning a large effort to get its millions of supporters to help re-elect Biden and defeat Trump, who has a record of siding firmly with pro-gun priorities.“We’re going to knock on doors, make calls, rally and campaign for President Biden,” said Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at Everytown, which claims nearly 10 million supporters including mayors, students, gun owners, teachers and others.The stakes seem higher than usual given Biden’s successes as president backing new gun-control measures such as the first new law in three decades boosting gun safety, and Biden’s talk of doing more if he’s re-elected, including fighting for an assault weapons ban, which would probably need Democratic control of Congress to enact.By contrast, Trump has often reiterated his fealty to the pro-gun lobby, which characterized his presidency. At last month’s NRA annual meeting, Trump earned a ringing endorsement and pledged that if he wins, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms”.But the once deep-pocketed and five-million-member NRA remains mired in internal and financial headaches: its annual revenues have dropped for several years while its legal expenses have risen.The NRA’s problems were underscored when its longtime top executive, Wayne LaPierre, resigned in January as he was about to go on trial in New York, where he was convicted of looting the organization to enjoy lavish personal perks including fancy vacations and expensive clothes.“The NRA is going to again be a peripheral player for lack of funding this election cycle, and that could hurt Trump in several battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” a former NRA board member said.“It’s a vacuum compared to 2016 when the NRA was robustly engaged,” the ex-board member added.Longtime observers of gun-control fights agree.Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on gun issues and an emeritus political science professor at Suny Cortland in New York, said the NRA was “as strongly behind [Trump] as they have been before”.“However, the organization simply does not possess the money or personnel to be as influential as they were in 2016, when they spent over $31m on his campaign, and over $70m on Republican efforts around the country. Still, the gun issue will continue to be salient to an important segment of the Trump base.”Spitzer added: “Other gun groups, such as the NSSF and state gun groups, will be working to supplant the NRA’s traditional dominance in national politics. They do not possess the degree of organization, experience and reach as the NRA of old, but they will ratchet up their efforts.”That’s what the NSSF, whose members include such gun giants as Sturm, Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson, plus other anti-gun-control groups say they intend to do. “There’s a stark difference between Trump and Biden,” Keane said in explaining the NSSF’s hefty effort this year. “It’s clear there are ongoing challenges at the NRA.”Some ex-NRA leaders credit NSSF with trying to fill the NRA’s vacuum. “NSSF has attempted, and continues, to fill the gap left by a weakened NRA,” Jim Baker, the NRA’s former top lobbyist, said.The NRA did not respond to a call seeking comments.Further, the Trump campaign in tandem with the Republican National Committee has launched Gun Owners for Trump including firearms makers and gun-rights advocates such as Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation; Women for Gun Rights; and some NRA officials.To spur more pro-gun votes at the polls, Trump has spoken twice this year at NRA events. At their May meeting, Trump employed some incendiary conspiracy-mongering, telling the crowd that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGun-control advocates and the Biden campaign are using Trump’s own pro-gun pledges and cavalier attitude towards gun violence to rev up their backers, including younger voters and women.After an Iowa school shooting in January, for instance, Trump callously opined that “we have to get over it”, a clip of which is being circulated by Democrats and pro-gun-control advocates.Likewise, another clip in circulation shows Trump boasting to NRA members in May that he “did nothing” as president on guns. Actually, Trump signed a “bump stock” ban after the country’s largest gun massacre ever in Las Vegas, but the supreme court overturned it this month.Biden cemented his gun-control credentials in 2022 when, after the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, he pushed hard for a gun-safety bill that passed on a bipartisan basis, becoming the first new gun-control law in almost three decades.To energize his supporters, Biden spoke to an Everytown training event for about 1,000 gun-safety volunteers including students on 12 June, where he cited several major achievements, including setting up a White House office focused on curbing gun violence and beefing up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms.Biden urged a ban on assault-style weapons and universal background checks for purchases of firearms, both goals he has stressed before.“We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby,” Biden said.Suplina said Everytown’s plans for targeting states to help Biden and how much they intend to spend overall this election cycle were not ready to be announced, but he did reveal that Everytown intends to support 465 of its volunteers who are running for office this year. The majority of these races are state and local.Further, Everytown will be backing Senate and House candidates who support gun-safety measures, Suplina said.Overall, Everytown spent about $55m on 2020 election efforts.Other gun-control advocates have broad election plans“This cycle, GIiffords will use its unique identity as a gun owner and survivor-led organization to reach a broad gun safety coalition in battlegrounds – including Democrats, Republicans, young voters, gun owners, and people of color,” Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, said in a statementThe group plans on “supporting gun safety champions in key House and Senate races, [and] communicating the Biden-Harris administration’s historic gun safety accomplishments in states across the map,” she added.Looking ahead, Spitzer stressed that Biden “has continued to speak out on gun safety, and gun-safety groups will surely redouble their efforts on his behalf, not only to help him get re-elected, but to advance the cause of down-ballot Democrats running for Congress and state offices, where the fate of many gun laws lie”. More

In the late 18th century, when the constitution was ratified, men’s abuse of women was penalized by neither custom nor by the law. Men were allowed to beat their wives, their children and any women they held authority over in their personal lives: such beatings were not generally illegal, nor especially frowned upon, but understood as a private prerogative that all men held over the women in their lives.Many men still treat such beatings this way: as an entitlement of manhood. The supreme court’s 2022 Bruen decision, authored by Clarence Thomas – a ruling that drastically expanded gun rights and restricted government ability to regulate guns to a sphere no greater than that which was practiced at the time of the constitution’s ratification – would have largely agreed with them. At least, until this Friday.In the wake of the 2022 ruling, lower courts have ruled that, under Bruen, no gun restriction is permissible unless it has an exact historical analogue from the founding era. In the fifth circuit, this interpretation would have restored gun rights to Zackey Rahimi, a brutal and prolific domestic abuser, according to police and court records, who challenged the federal government’s right to take his guns away. In an 8-1 ruling on Friday, the supreme court narrowed its Bruen decision to keep guns out of Rahimi’s hands.The decision is likely to save lives. Two-thirds of women who are murdered by their current or former intimate partners are killed with a gun; a woman whose abuser has access to a gun is five times more likely to die at his hands. That a circuit court would have restored gun rights to men who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders reflects just how extreme the federal judiciary’s gun jurisprudence has become – and, as in their abortion jurisprudence, how casual and careless many federal judges are with women’s lives.But the supreme court’s decision in United States v Rahimi also reveals the logical inconsistencies in the foundation of so-called “originalist” legal interpretation, the unworkability of the court’s insistence on historical precedent for every government regulation and the growing divisions among the conservative justices about just what “history and tradition” should mean.The court’s ultimate ruling was lopsided, with eight of the justices joining John Roberts’s majority opinion and only Thomas, Bruen’s original author, dissenting. But the decision in Rahimi seems to have been an unusually contentious one, animating and dividing the court. In addition to Roberts’s majority opinion and Thomas’s dissent, Rahimi yielded no fewer than five concurrences – with Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh each chiming in to explain their vote against abusers’ rights individually, and Jackson and Sotomayor also writing independently to express their concern about Bruen’s methodology.Roberts stressed that the historical test in Bruen was loose enough to allow for some gun restrictions, including those on domestic abusers. It was a mistake, he said, to read Bruen “to require a ‘historical twin’ rather than a ‘historical analogue’.” His reasoning was echoed by Barrett, who advocated for a historical test of what she called “original contours”, one that “looks at historical gun regulations to identify the contours of the [second amendment] right”.Gorsuch, meanwhile, was much more sympathetic to the Thomas dissent, suggesting that an abuser like Rahimi might have prevailed in securing access to guns again if he had challenged the federal law on narrower grounds. Kavanaugh, as usual, said nothing of importance. Only Thomas insisted that Bruen’s originalism created a demand for an exact historical precedent for government regulation; he would have rearmed Rahimi, the man who was only exercising what, in the late 18th century, would have been understood as his private right.The case is another signal of infighting among the court’s conservatives: they cannot decide what they think “originalism” demands, or what they mean when they say “history and tradition”. The court’s appeal to history has always been selective and pretextual, deployed with little consistency, intellectual honesty or concern for historical accuracy, in order to achieve the preferred policy outcomes of Republican justices.That so many of the justices who voted for Thomas’s interpretation of Bruen just two years ago voted against that same interpretation today just goes to show how hollow an approach “originalism” really is – it is a doctrine that can expand or contract based on the justices’ political preferences in whichever case happens to be before them. Similarly, that this “originalism” remains the guiding force of a majority of the justices goes to show how unaccountable the supreme court’s vast policymaking power has become: they have so much control over the law, and so much indifference to precedent and consistency in how they wield it, that they can call upon virtually any interpretive scheme they choose, label it “originalism”, and claim to have exercised a principled interpretive strategy.Perhaps the justices don’t care about being consistent: perhaps the capaciousness and mutability of “originalism” is precisely its appeal: it works well as a cover for their actual project, which is the exercise of raw power. But it has never been a workable or acceptable reality that “originalism” and its selective, often fact-free fantasies of the past, has been called upon to determine policy outcomes in the present.The lives of women who have survived domestic abuse should never have depended on what nine unaccountable jurists imagine the founding era to have been like; that they did is an insult to citizenship itself.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

“Will you shut up, man?” It was hardly oratory worthy of Abraham Lincoln, but Joe Biden’s primal plea in the face of relentless interruptions and heckling from Donald Trump provided a defining soundbite of the 2020 presidential debates.The two will face each other again on Thursday for the first of two head-to-head debates for the 2024 campaign, under new rules designed to prevent matters degenerating as they did four years ago. The US president and the former president will meet in a TV studio without the presence of a partisan audience, which some saw as an essential ingredient of Trump’s rabble-rousing approach. And to counteract the repeated butting-in that so irked Biden, the candidates will have their microphones muted when they are not speaking.But the debates are also the first in decades to be held entirely by commercial TV networks – including two advertising breaks – and without the oversight of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the long-established, independent, non-partisan body that has long governed the debate rules. Some critics say they fear that commercialising the process could lead to less substantive, shorter answers, geared more to generating conflict and soundbites than enlightening voters.The verbal volleys in 2020 between Biden and Trump, under the Fox News moderator Chris Wallace, became so vitriolic that the CNN presenter Dana Bash was prompted, live on air, to describe the event as “a shitshow”. Earlier this year, both campaigns chose to circumvent the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had overseen presidential debates since 1988, and on 27 June, Bash and her CNN co-presenter, Jake Tapper, will have a chance to improve on Fox’s effort when they preside over the first debate in Atlanta. A second debate will take place on 10 September, to be hosted by ABC.No props or prewritten notes will be allowed on stage. Candidates will be given a pen, a notepad and a bottle of water.The decisions to switch off a candidate’s microphone when it is the opponent’s turn to speak, and to exclude a partisan audience, have been taken in an effort to reduce the theatrical gladiatorial bloodsport element that has threatened to overwhelm recent debates.Some critics said the lack of oversight from the CPD, as well as the inclusion of two commercial breaks during the 90-minute event, undermined the nature of the debate.“The introduction of commercial breaks will fundamentally change what makes a debate a debate, since the candidates will constantly be able to stop and regroup,” Clea Conner, chief executive of Open to Debate, a research group that has tracked presidential debates over recent decades, told Politico.“Even though there will be only two commercial breaks this time, once we deem them acceptable it’s a classic slippery slope; how many will there be next time, and the time after that?“[Candidates’] arguments will have to be shorter, truncated for the commercial clock, and will result in more outrageous interactions to bump ratings.” Without the presence of an independent broker such as the CPD, she argued, it would lead to “pure political theatre”.Open to Debate’s report into the deterioration of debate quality attested to the need for drastic format changes from 2020, in order to arrest a decline in moderator control and candidate decorum.While there were just three interruptions across three debates in the 2004 election between George W Bush and John Kerry – administered by the CPD – the first 2020 Trump-Biden encounter witnessed 76, the group noted. However, the second debate saw just four interruptions, after non-speakers’ microphones were muted following criticism of the chaos three weeks earlier.Steven Fein, a professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts, who has studied the psychological dimension of presidential debates, said excluding a loudly cheering live audience was “rational” and “good for democracy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[It] will reduce significantly the chances that the focus of the debate will be not on what is actually said, but on all this stuff around it – the reaction of the audience and playing to the audience,” he said. “I think that changes what the candidates are likely to do.“It also changes what the audience at home takes away from the debate, what they remember, what plays the news the next day – all based on the audience reaction. Because the audience reaction may or may not be valid.”He warned, however, that the commercial TV networks may jettison the new approach “because it makes for less exciting television”.The candidate with more to lose in the controlled, low-key environment is probably Trump, according to Tammy Vigil, associate professor of communications at Boston University.“He tends to feed off of the energy of a crowd,” she said. “He’ll lose some of his energy by not having a crowd to feed off. The other part that’ll probably change is that the candidates will be more apt to speak to the cameras directly.“I think that will improve the overall feel of the debate for television viewers because it’ll feel like the candidates are speaking more directly to them.” More

Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, will speak at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee next month, a move that could spell trouble for Joe Biden’s support among blue-collar workers ahead of the November election.Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, announced on Friday on his Truth Social platform that O’Brien had accepted his invitation to speak at the convention and that he was looking forward to seeing him represent the Teamsters.“Our GREAT convention will unify Americans and demonstrate to the nation’s working families they come first,” Trump wrote. “When I am back in the White House, the hard-working Teamsters, and all working Americans, will once again have a country they can afford to live in and be respected around the world.”A Teamsters spokesperson confirmed the news, saying it was “truly unprecedented since it will be the very first time a Teamsters general president has addressed the RNC”. The powerful union represents more than a million members across sectors such as trucking, packaging, manufacturing and logistics.“Our 1.3 million members represent every political background, and their message needs to be heard by as wide an audience as possible, and that includes all political candidates running for elected office,” the spokesperson said. “We appreciate former President Trump’s openness to inviting a labor leader to speak on behalf of working families.”The Republican national convention will kick off on 15 July, where Trump will once again be nominated as the GOP presidential candidate. The Teamsters spokesperson said O’Brien had made an identical request to appear at the Democratic national convention in Chicago the following month.The Teamsters endorsed Biden over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. But O’Brien, who took over in March 2022, has yet to publicly back a candidate in this election cycle.O’Brien has invited Biden, Trump and the independent presidential candidates Robert F Kennedy Jr and Cornel West to speak to his group. O’Brien drew anger from the union’s progressive members after he held a private meeting with Trump earlier this year. O’Brien later met Biden, who he described as having been “great” for workers. But he stressed there was “still a lot of work to be done” to bolster unions.O’Brien’s appearance at the Republican national convention would challenge Biden’s historic alliance with organized labor and threatens to undercut his claim that he is the most pro-union president in US history.Biden kicked off his re-election campaign last June at a union-backed rally, and has since been endorsed by the United Auto Workers (UAW) after he walked the picket line with union president Shawn Fain during its strike against America’s three biggest car manufacturers. More

A Nevada state court judge dismissed a criminal indictment on Friday against six Republicans accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, potentially killing the case with a ruling that state prosecutors chose the wrong venue to file the case.Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, stood in a Las Vegas courtroom a moment after the Clark county district court judge Mary Kay Holthus delivered her ruling, declaring that he would take the case directly to the state supreme court.“The judge got it wrong and we’ll be appealing immediately,” Ford told reporters afterwards. He declined any additional comment.Defense attorneys bluntly declared the case dead, saying that to bring the case now to another grand jury in another venue such as Nevada’s capital, Carson City, would violate a three-year statute of limitations on filing charges that expired in December.“They’re done,” said Margaret McLetchie, attorney for the Clark county Republican party chairman, Jesse Law, one of the defendants in the case.The judge called off the trial, which had been scheduled for next January, for defendants that included the state GOP chairman, Michael McDonald; national party committee member Jim DeGraffenreid; national and Douglas county committee member Shawn Meehan; and Eileen Rice, a party member from the Lake Tahoe area. Each was charged with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, felonies that carry penalties of up to four or five years in prison.Defense attorneys contended that Ford improperly brought the case in Las Vegas instead of Carson City or Reno, northern Nevada cities closer to where the alleged crime occurred. They also accused prosecutors of failing to present to the grand jury evidence that would have exonerated their clients, and said their clients had no intent to commit a crime.All but Meehan have been named by the state party as Nevada delegates to the 2024 Republican national convention next month in Milwaukee.Meehan’s defense attorney, Sigal Chattah, said her client “chose not to” seek the position. Chattah ran as a Republican in 2022 for state attorney general and lost to Ford, a Democrat, by just under 8% of the vote.After the court hearing, Hindle’s attorney, Brian Hardy, declined to comment on calls that his client has faced from advocacy groups that say he should resign from his elected position as overseer of elections in northern Nevada’s Story county, a jurisdiction with a few more than 4,100 residents. Those calls included ones at a news conference on Friday outside the courthouse by leaders of three organizations.Nevada is one of seven presidential battleground states where slates of fake electors falsely certified that Trump had won in 2020, not Democrat Joe Biden.Others are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Criminal charges have been brought in Michigan, Georgia and Arizona.Trump lost Nevada in 2020 by more than 30,000 votes to Biden and the state’s Democratic electors certified the results in the presence of Nevada’s secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, a Republican. Her defense of the results as reliable and accurate led the state GOP to censure her, but Cegavske later conducted an investigation that found no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state. More