Evelyn Reynolds

The convergence on 28 February of Mitch McConnell’s retirement announcement as the Republican Senate leader with the supreme court’s order to accept Donald Trump’s appeal to consider his immunity from prosecution was a bitter irony for McConnell and triumph for Trump. It is a telltale subplot in Trump’s theater of humiliation in which the supreme court is playing a starring role as his best supporting actor.On 4 March came another supreme court-delivered victory for Trump. “A big win for America,” tweeted Trump. In a spray of divided opinion the court’s overturning of the state of Colorado’s ruling that Trump was disqualified from the ballot for being an insurrectionist under the 14th amendment section 3 enhanced his impunity and encouraged his grasp for absolute power.McConnell, the partisan architect of the partisan supreme court majority, could, if he wished to boast, rightly claim credit for those justices staging the timely rescue of his nemesis. Putting in place justice after justice, breaking precedent after precedent, he is the father of this court’s majority. He considers it his greatest accomplishment.McConnell’s cold arrangement with Trump was strictly business: McConnell protected Trump in exchange for Trump packing the court. While few truly deeply loathe Trump more than McConnell, nobody has been a more consequential enabler or fatally miscalculated the spread of his stain. But their unholy alliance cannot be mistaken for a Faustian bargain; neither was selling his soul.McConnell made plain the purely transactional basis of the relationship when he endorsed Trump after Super Tuesday, citing how “we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people … a generational change of our federal judiciary – most importantly, the supreme court”.In the Trump disqualification case, a conservative majority of five on the supreme court effectively engaged in a nullification of the 14th amendment. The court ignored or warped the history of the 14th amendment, which was conceived and enacted to prevent insurrectionists from holding federal offices. To defend Trump, the conservative majority threw overboard originalism and textualism, the alpha and omega of its contrived legal ideology, as an obstacle to the desired result. Through a bizarre concatenation of historical falsehoods and legal contrivances, they refused to define whether Trump is an insurrectionist, or mention the word, which is the essence of the relevant section 3.Instead they went to an extreme edge to justify maintaining Trump’s place on the ballot, inventing a remedy that will never be applied, that only congressional legislation can determine disqualification of a person for federal office. In short, they granted Trump immunity from disqualification for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States.Unanimity was a thin illusion of consensus. Justice Amy Coney Barrett uncomfortably filed her own opinion to dissent from the other conservatives’ overreaching. The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in their separate concurrence, systematically knocked down every specious claim in the majority opinion – the false precedents cited, the false notion that disqualification is not self-executing, the bowdlerized quotes to achieve a false conclusion – yet signed on to avoid “a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles”, though that supposition is both narrow and vague.Then they flayed the majority for straying from the “fundamental principle of judicial restraint [that] is practically as old as our Republic”.They stated that by resolving “many unsettled questions about Section 3 the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President”. But their opinion did not stop there. They charged that “the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office”. The category of “all alleged insurrectionists” encompasses the Republican members of the Congress who were involved in Trump’s coup attempt. The reference to “future challenges” applies first and foremost to Donald Trump. The liberal concurrence is a fierce dissent from the majority’s manufacture of an insurrectionist protection act. The decision has exposed a splintered court and left to the immunity case the outstanding issue of “an oathbreaking insurrectionist … becoming President”.In the immunity case the court has declined to let it go forward after a three federal judge panel ruled on all the questions at its heart and special counsel Jack Smith urged deliberate speed. Instead, the court scheduled to hold a hearing during the week of 22 April, in the full knowledge that every delay makes Trump’s escape from justice more possible and that postponement serves Trump’s strategy.View image in fullscreenThe immunity case will not reach trial, if there is one, until months after the court’s eventual ruling on whether a president is an absolute dictator. Given the calendar, it appears highly unlikely the trial will be concluded by election day. The court’s charade of taking on the decision as a matter of prudence is a transparent stalling tactic to deny the voters the test of the evidence in a court of law so they could make a fully informed decision of their own. Slow-walking the January 6 prosecution of Trump, the court has granted him de facto immunity for the course of the campaign. Tick, tock.With its aid and comfort to Trump in both the disqualification and immunity cases, the Roberts court (or, if one prefers, the Thomas court) has shown itself to be the most politically driven since the Taney court that decided the Dred Scott case (or, if one prefers, the Rehnquist/Scalia court that brutally decided Bush v Gore).On the disqualification case, Trump skates scot-free. On the immunity case, the court kicks the can as far into the future as it benefits him. For these gifts from this court, Trump owes a debt of ultimate gratitude to Mitch McConnell.McConnell had many reasons for declaring he has reached the twilight of his career, even though the Republicans may gain control of the Senate after the election and he would be leader again. His health, after all, is fragile. He froze speechless twice in press conferences. He has suffered a terrible personal tragedy, the accidental drowning of his wife’s sister. But approaching the promised land once more, which might be his culmination, he restrained himself from entering. He announced he would relinquish the enormous power he has accumulated over a lifetime because he could see it ebbing away to his worst enemy. That very worst enemy is not Joe Biden, who he likes and would destroy out of cold partisanship, but Trump, who he hates with a white-hot passion, but whom he has safeguarded and would help become “dictator for a day”.“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular time,” said McConnell in his Senate speech announcing his retirement. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.” Believe him, he can count.On 13 February, two weeks earlier, he helped engineer Senate passage of a compromise bill wrapping a package of policies on the border and immigration with funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. He was particularly intent on providing aid to beleaguered Ukraine, where he has traveled to express his support directly to President Zelensky. The bill passed with 71 votes, clearing the hurdle of an obstructionist filibuster, McConnell’s blunt instrument of choice. Yet he could muster only 22 Republican votes. It was his Pyrrhic victory. He lost a majority of his conference, nearly all those elected since 2018 and under 55 years old. His iron grip faltered from Trump’s pressure.McConnell’s bleak persona had no popular appeal. His influence has always been achieved through cash. As party boss, like party bosses of the past, he rewarded regularity from his members. He was shocked to discover the cult of personality that altered the base of the party. “Things are changing just not fast enough,” tweeted Senator Eric Schmitt, a Trump zealot explaining his and others’ vote against the omnibus bill as a vote of no confidence in McConnell’s leadership. He had always assumed that dark money talks and senators walk. But he now encountered a greater motivating fear.McConnell’s enforcement of the party line made him appear like Senate leaders before him. His acolytes praise him as an “institutionalist”. He basks in presenting himself as a “constitutionalist”. But to build his power McConnell has subverted constitutional norms and standards, corroded and corrupted checks and balances, and drastically weakened the Senate through his explosive abuse of filibusters to transfer power to the federal courts, which he stuffed with Federalist Society cadres. He has been more than a great anti-institutionalist; he has been an anti-constitutionalist.McConnell’s great crusade was to tear down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (the so-called McCain-Feingold bill) and open the sluice gates for dark money. The year after its passage he filed his opposition in a case that made its way to the supreme court, McConnell v Federal Election Commission, which he lost in a 5-4 ruling upholding the bill. Still, he persisted.In 2006, far-right Samuel Alito was nominated to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the court. She was a moderate Republican of the old school, who upheld abortion rights and campaign finance reform. When 25 Democrats attempted a symbolic filibuster against Alito, McConnell took the floor to denounce the effort as unconstitutional: “Mr President, we stand today on the brink of a new and reckless effort by a few to deny the rights of many to exercise our constitutional duty to advise and consent, to give this man the simple up or down vote he deserves. The Senate should repudiate this tactic.”In 2010, with Alito on the court, it ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v FEC that restrictions on independent campaign funds – dark money – were violated free speech. “So, all Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech,” said McConnell. It was his emancipation proclamation; he freed the dark money.In 2014, McConnell filed an amicus brief in McCutcheon, et al v FEC, a case he inspired that was backed by the Republican National Committee, challenging aggregate limits on campaign contributions as “a severe infringement on the rights of speech.” The supreme court ruled for McCutcheon in a 5-4 decision.With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, McConnell laid down the Republican line. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he ordered. His tactic was the filibuster that he had decried. During the Obama presidency, McConnell held up 517 Senate debates through filibusters. The Senate Republicans successfully filibustered 79 Obama federal judicial nominees during his first five years, compared to 68 in entire previous history. After the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 2015, they blocked 50 of 70 nominations to federal judgeships.Through dark money and filibusters, servicing corporate interests, McConnell built a new political machine at the expense of paralyzing and diminishing the Senate. He capped his obstructions after the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. If Obama were to succeed in seating his appointment on the supreme court the majority would tilt 5-4 against the conservatives.McConnell refused to allow even a single committee hearing for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a highly regarded judge of the most moderate temperament on the DC district court. McConnell asserted a novel doctrine that a nomination to the supreme court could not be considered in a president’s last year and that the vacancy must be filled by the next president. He dubbed his gambit “a constitutional right”. “One of my proudest moments,” he said after killing the Garland nomination, “was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr President, you will not fill the supreme court vacancy.’” When Sean Hannity later asked McConnell wondered why Obama left so many vacancies on the federal courts, McConnell replied: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”In the 2016 campaign, McConnell backed Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, an acolyte, in the primaries. After Trump bulldozed his way to the nomination, McConnell expected him to be a dead weight on Republican Senate candidates. He suggested that they could separate themselves by running negatives ads against him. “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” he said.McConnell remained complacent that he was the enduring Republican standard and Trump the blip. “My view is that Trump will not change the Republican party,” he said. “If he brings in new followers, that’s great, and well worth the effort, but he will not change the Republican party … I think he’d be fine.” He added as an additional note of reassurance that the constitution “constrains all of us, members of Congress and the president as well”.Watching Trump’s win on election night, McConnell said: “The first thing that came to my mind was the supreme court.” He was soon in touch with Leonard Leo, chairman of the Federalist Society, who described McConnell as his “vigilant and irrepressible” partner in gaining control of the federal courts. Leo was an octopus of dark money operations, his tentacles reaching far and wide. After Citizens United, he sat atop hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars to promote his causes and McConnell’s candidates.A week after the election, Leo carried a list of court nominees into a meeting with Trump at Trump Tower. Trump’s first supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, was on the list. His second and third nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, were on Leo’s next list. Leo sent more lists to the White House, rubber-stamped by White House counsel Don McGahn, a Federalist Society stalwart, and McConnell would process them through the Senate. Eighty-five per cent of Trump’s court appointees were Federalist Society members. He was entrenching conservative power in the courts for a generation to come. Trump remarked privately, “Mitch McConnell. Judges. Judges. Judges. The only thing he wants is judges.” McConnell told Trump: “MrPresident, when are you going to thank me for that?”Six weeks before election day, on 18 September 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. As soon as McConnell heard the news he called Trump: “First, I’m going to put out a statement that says we’re going to fill the vacancy. Second, you’ve got to nominate Amy Coney Barrett.” McConnell’s doctrine that a president could not fill a supreme court vacancy in an election year suddenly evaporated. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Barrett was sworn in on 26 October. McConnell’s relationship with Trump got him what he wanted. The conservative majority on the court was now seven to three.Then, on January 6, McConnell hid in a corner of the Capitol, fearing for his life and quaking with rage. He recovered his equanimity within hours when he thought the event would destroy Trump. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell told Jonathan Martin, then a reporter at the New York Times. “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have happened at a better time.” Trump was a “despicable person” whose influence he would finally end by defeating his candidates in the 2022 midterms. “We crushed the sons of bitches,” he told Martin, “and that’s what we’re going to do in the primary in 22.”McConnell had shielded Trump from removal in the Senate during his first impeachment for seeking to blackmail the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in exchange for fabricated political dirt on Joe Biden. In Trump’s second impeachment for the insurrection, McConnell protected him again. In his floor speech explaining why he voted against Trump’s removal, he made the case that Trump’s actions properly belonged to the criminal justice system: “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run, still liable for everything he did while in office, didn’t get away with anything yet – yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”After Trump left office, he blamed McConnell from not protecting him enough. “The old crow is a piece of shit,” he told Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. He was especially angry that McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who had been Trump’s secretary of transportation, quit in protest after January 6. In 2022, Trump tweeted a thinly disguised death threat against McConnell and a racist slur against Chao. “He has a DEATH WISH. Must immediately seek help and advise [sic] from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!”The conservative Wall Street Journal editorialized: “Mr. Trump’s apologists claim he merely meant Mr McConnell has a political death wish, but that isn’t what he wrote. It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr McConnell. Many supporters took Mr Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice-President Mike Pence all too seriously on Jan 6.”McConnell has a decades-long history in the Senate from intern to dinosaur, from minion to overlord, but his overweening pride in his shrewdness, his inner hackery, has prevented him from learning any larger lessons of history that explain his fall. He cannot dispense with his ingrained belief that he remains the true Republican and that there is an invisible Republican party that belongs to him, not Trump.Like so many presumptive adults in the room, he has operated on the logic of Franz von Papen, the former German chancellor, who convinced President Paul von Hindenburg in January 1933 to appoint Hitler chancellor, with himself as vice-chancellor, on the assumption that he would control him. “We’ve hired him,” said Von Papen. After the Night of the Long Knives, the Junker aristocrat was shipped off to Vienna as ambassador. Not that Trump is Hitler, of course, just that the book of Hitler’s table conversation is the only book Trump is known to have kept on his nightstand.Even as McConnell announced his retirement, his aides were negotiating his endorsement of Trump. McConnell could justify the hypocrisy of supporting a figure he considers an enemy of constitutional government as a last act of selfless sacrifice to help elect a Republican majority in the Senate. It would be his final performance as Trump’s enabler for which, like everyone else who enables Trump, he would inevitably receive ashes. In their mutual contempt, the psychopath has the advantage over the cynic.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

As Americans pushed their clocks forward an hour Sunday to implement daylight savings, US senator James Lankford doubled down on his commitment to eliminating seasonal time changes, saying he wanted to abandon what he described as an antiquated first world war convention.The Republican lawmaker from Oklahoma said he was devoted to proverbially locking the clock through his Sunshine Act, which unanimously passed in the Senate but was not taken up by the House. Speaking with CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper on Sunday, Lankford said he wanted to “start the dialogue” back up partly because of an encounter with a military veteran who seemed to view ending daylight savings time as a dying wish.“As funny as this sounds, several years ago, I was walking in a Veterans Day parade, and a veteran … that was watching the parade, an older gentleman, gets up from his lawn chair – he actually walks into the parade route, shook my hand and said: ‘Before I die, would you end daylight savings time?’” Lankford recounted.“Of all the things I thought you would say to me today, that is not what I thought you would say,” Lankford recalled telling the veteran. “He said: ‘I hate it. I’m in my 80s. I want you to get rid of daylight savings time before I die.’”The politician said he assured the veteran he had a bill with fellow Republican US senator Marco Rubio to eliminate a time change that he said was “a relic” of the first world war, when the government wanted to add daylight hours to conserve energy.“We want to be able to lock this clock,” Lankford said to Tapper. “A lot of people are annoyed by it … Let’s actually flick our lights on, and we can do this.”Lankford alluded to how Arizona had chosen to stop moving its clocks up an hour in the spring and then back an hour in the fall. “They have done this for years, and, somehow, their kids are still getting to school on time, commerce is still happening,” Lankford said. “And today, in Arizona, they’re not – they’re not waking up with a clock that’s messed up.”Lankford’s comments come amid renewed discussion of daylight savings time and health. The American Heart Association recently said that there’s a “marked increase” in strokes and heart attacks in the days after clocks are set one hour ahead of standard time.The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has also called for abolishing seasonal time-changes due to its impact on circadian rhythms. “Mounting evidence shows the dangers of seasonal time changes, which have been linked to increased medical errors, motor vehicle accidents, increased hospital admissions and other problems,” the academy’s president, license clinical pscyhologist Jennifer Martin, said in a statement.Lankford’s criticism of the time-change came as he faced scrutiny from his own party over his efforts to secure passage of a failed bipartisan border security agreement. The Oklahoma county’s Republican party censured him Saturday, the Oklahoman reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe proposed measure would have meant the hiring of 1,500 more border security officers and agents, along with 100 more immigration judges as well as 4,300 more asylum officers to address a backlog of about 2m cases, the newspaper explained.When Joe Biden mentioned the proposed legislation during the State of the Union address on Thursday, Republicans booed. But Lankford appeared to mouth “that’s true” as the US president recounted what the bill would have accomplished. More

Top Democrats came to Joe Biden’s defense on Sunday, emphasizing the president’s viability for re-election amid his colleagues’ worries that voters see him as too old – concerns compounded by Donald Trump’s lead over him in recent polls.On ABC This Week, host George Stephanopoulos pointedly asked Biden’s transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg: “How can an 81-year-old incumbent be the candidate of change? It’s so critical in presidential elections.”Buttigieg replied that Biden’s administration had focused on “issues that matter most to newer generations”, including addressing the climate crisis, supporting LGBTQ+ rights and pushing to restore the federal abortion rights that Roe v Wade had established before the conservative-dominated US supreme court eliminated them in 2022.“What matters most is the age of a leaders’ ideas,” Buttigieg said.Buttigieg’s comments came as voters’ views on Biden’s age continue being a growing liability for his re-election campaign. A recent ABC/Ipsos poll found that 86% of Americans thought him too old to serve another term. Sixty-two percent thought the same about Trump, who is 77 – and 59% of voters think both are too old.Those numbers prompted Biden’s camp to kick off a $30m ad campaign in swing states with a spot directly addressing the president’s age. “Look, I’m not a young guy,” he says in the spot. “But I understand how to get things done for the American people.”Georgia’s Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock also defended Biden’s chances in the swing state despite signs that many voters there have turned away from him, saying, “It’s still early in this election season.”Warnock’s comments on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union referred to a Fox News poll showing Trump leading by eight percentage points in Georgia. The poll also showed that a quarter of Black voters there now favor the former president.“I can tell you, as somebody whose name has been on the ballot five times in three years, I know a little something about Georgia voters,” Warnock said. “We’ve seen both of these men serve in the White House. Their choice is clearly Joe Biden and Georgians get it right for Joe Biden, just as they got it right for me.”CNN host Jake Tapper suggested third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr could be a spoiler after he claims to have gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot in Georgia in November. Tapper said Biden defeated Trump in Georgia in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes. But Warnock argued there was still time for Biden to secure the state again.The Democratic House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, also addressed Black voters’ seemingly fading support of Biden. During Jeffries’s appearance on Face The Nation, host Margaret Brennan noted that Biden’s support among Black voters had fallen from 90% in 2020 to 76%.Nonetheless, Jeffries said Black voters would understand that Biden “has delivered over and over and over again on issues of concern”, including by helping bring on the lowest Black unemployment rate in decades as well as making historic investments in Black colleges and universities.“I’m confident at the end of the day … the overwhelming majority of African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Black voters throughout the country, will support president Biden,” Jeffries said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBrennan separately asked Senator Bernie Sanders whether he could good “in good conscience” ask fellow progressives who oppose Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Gaza to support the president.The US has provided billions of dollars in financial aid to Israel’s military as Biden has exalted the country’s right to defend itself after the 7 October attack by Hamas that reportedly killed more than 1,200 Israelis. But the president has condemned the humanitarian crisis set off by Israel’s subsequent military strikes in Gaza, which have reportedly killed more than 30,000.Sanders said the US “cannot be complicit in this mass slaughter” and called on Biden to withhold funds from Israel’s military if the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, continued exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But Sanders said voters must pick Biden if they favored protecting the climate, preserving bodily autonomy and eliminating income inequality.“So you’re asking voters to put [Gaza] aside?” Brennan said.Sanders responded: “Not put this aside – but fight continuously to change Biden’s policy on Gaza.” More

In her first interview since delivering her widely ridiculed rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, Republican senator Katie Britt refused to apologize for invoking a story about child rape that she implied resulted from the president’s handling of the ongoing crisis at the southern US border – even though the abuse occurred years earlier in Mexico while her party controlled the White House.Britt, 42, appeared on Fox News Sunday and denied hiding the fact that the rape and sex trafficking case to which she referred had actually occurred during the presidency of George W Bush. She also made it a point to criticize what she called “the liberal media” for how they have covered her rebuttal to Biden’s speech on Thursday, which earned being parodied on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live.“I very specifically said … I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12. So I didn’t say a teenager – I didn’t say a young woman,” Britt replied after being asked whether she intended to give the impression that the abuse occurred under the Biden administration’s watch. “[It was] a grown woman … trafficked when she was 12.”Britt also said: “To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked.”The junior Alabama senator’s remarks to Fox News Sunday came after even her fellow Republicans pronounced her rejoinder on Thursday to Biden’s State of the Union speech – from the setting of a kitchen – “one of our biggest disasters”.During that rebuttal, as she oscillated between smiling and seeming to fight back tears, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and speaking to a woman whom the senator said had relayed horrific experiences.“She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” Britt said. “She told me not just that she was raped every day – but how many times a day she was raped.”Britt avoided saying when or where the abuse took place. But she strongly implied that it had stemmed from the Biden administration’s management of immigration issues at the southern border.“We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America. And it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace,” Britt said. “It’s despicable, and it’s almost entirely preventable.”On Friday, in a seven-minute video on TikTok, author and former Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz established that Britt was describing events that unfolded in Mexico in between 2004 and 2008, when Bush was president.The tale centered on Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who in May 2015 testified to Congress about her experiences at the hands of sex traffickers who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16 in her native Mexico. Britt met Jacinto Romero on a visit to the border with other Republican senators in January 2023.But while the meeting with Jacinto Romero, now 31, occurred shortly after Britt took office, her abuse occurred as many as two decades earlier and not in the US.Katz lambasted Britt as dishonest and misleading, and many others have since done the same. A Biden White House spokesperson on Sunday issued a statment which said Britt had peddled “debunked lies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spokesperson for Britt confirmed to the Washington Post that the senator was referring to Jacinto Romero in her speech Thursday. Yet that spokesperson also insisted Britt’s presentation of Jacinto Romero’s story was “100% correct”. And Britt doubled down on that position Sunday.“This is a story of what is happening,” Britt said. “We have to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, and then there are victims all throughout the country.”Britt’s guest spot on Fox News Sunday came hours after the actor Scarlett Johansson stood in a kitchen portraying the Alabama senator and satirized the latter’s State of the Union rebuttal on Saturday Night Live’s cold open.Among other things, Johansson said sarcastically: “I’ve invited you into this empty kitchen because Republicans want me to appeal to women voters and women love kitchens.”Britt went out of her way Sunday to explain “exactly why [she] was sitting at a kitchen table” when she rebutted Biden.“Republicans care about kitchen table issues,” Britt said. “We care about faith, family. We care about freedom.” More

Joe Biden said Saturday that he regretted using the term “illegal” during his State of the Union address to describe the suspected killer of University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.Meanwhile, the Democratic president’s all-but-certain 2024 Republican rival, Donald Trump, blasted Biden’s immigration policies and blamed them for Riley’s death while at a rally attended by her family and friends.Biden expressed remorse after facing frustration from some in his party for the use of the term to describe people who arrived or are living in the US illegally.“I shouldn’t have used illegal – it’s undocumented,” Biden said in an interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart taped in Atlanta, where he was meeting with small business owners and holding a campaign rally.Trump, campaigning in Rome, Georgia, at the same time, assailed Biden for the comments.“Joe Biden went on television and apologized for calling Laken’s murderer an illegal,” he said to loud jeers and boos. “Biden should be apologizing for apologizing to this killer.”The back-and-forth underscored how Riley’s murder has become a flashpoint in the 2024 campaign and a rallying cry for Republicans who have seized on frustrations over the Biden administration’s handling of the US-Mexico border during a record surge of migrants entering the country. A person from Venezuela who entered the US illegally has been arrested and charged with her murder.The former president was joined at his rally by Riley’s parents, her sister and friends and met with them before he took the stage.In a speech that lasted nearly two hours, Trump hammered Biden on the border and for mispronouncing Riley’s name during his State of the Union address this past week.Trump alleged that Riley “would be alive today if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country”.Trump, who had made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign, has repeatedly vowed to mount the largest deportation in the nation’s history if he wins.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe contrasted his rhetoric with Biden’s, remarking: “I say he was an illegal alien. He was an illegal immigrant. He was an illegal migrant.”He also accused Biden of having “no intention of stopping the deadly invasion that stole precious Laken’s beautiful American life”.Yet Biden earlier this year bucked activists within his party by agreeing to make changes to US immigration law that would have limited some migration. The deal that emerged would have overhauled the asylum system to provide faster and tougher enforcement, as well as given presidents new powers to immediately expel migrants if authorities become overwhelmed. It also would have added $20bn in funding, a huge influx of cash.The changes became part of a short-lived bipartisan compromise that Republican lawmakers quickly killed after Trump made his opposition known.After the deal’s collapse, Biden has been considering taking executive action to try to curtail migration. But he’s expressed frustration that his lawyers have yet to devise options that they believe can pass muster with federal courts. Biden, instead, has insisted that Congress take up the measure again, trying to flip the script on Republicans and arguing they are more interested in being able to talk about the issue in an election year than taking action to fix it. More

The question isn’t whether Democrats in Georgia will vote for President Joe Biden, either on Tuesday or in November. It’s how many.Biden swung through Georgia on Saturday to collect the endorsements of political action committees representing Asian, Black and Latino voters, another stop on the march to the Democratic nomination.Biden opened with a swing at Donald Trump, using Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as the bat, noting how he had kicked off his campaign here in her company, along with that of dictatorial Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán.“He called him a fantastic leader. Seriously,” Biden said. “He’s been sucking up to dictators all over the world.”Biden’s only meaningful competition in Georgia for the nomination is ennui and “no preference”. But Biden is likely to clinch the nomination not in Georgia, which holds its primary on Tuesday, but in states voting on 19 March. Nonetheless, the pivot to the general election has already begun.“He’s building on the momentum from the Thursday speech, which was a grand slam home run,” said David Brand, a Democratic operative and Atlanta political figure. “Republicans are in a pure panic. They can’t attack him on issues. So, they’re now making up lunacy about him being, you know, on Red Bull or something. That’s their best attack line: because he drinks a Red Bull. That puts him in line with every law school student in the country.”Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill and both of Georgia’s Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, held the rally at the trendy Pullman Yards facility on Atlanta’s east side before a crowd of about 500 people. The assembly was composed mostly of party insiders and Democratic elected officials. The location of the rally was closely held before the event, ostensibly to avoid disruptions by protesters. One man was escorted from the room as he shouted pro-Palestinian slogans.The president’s address continued themes raised in the State of the Union address, calling for reinstating Roe v Wade as the law of the land on abortion, increasing taxes on billionaires and a call for civic values.“We see a future where we define democracy and defend it, not diminish it,” Biden said. “We must remain the beacon of the world.”Biden said nothing about the war in Gaza, nor did he raise the question about funding for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia.His supporters and endorsers regularly juxtaposed the consequences of a Trump win in 2024, trying to evoke the political intensity that led to surprise wins in Georgia in 2020 and 2022.Ossoff regularly name-checked DeKalb County, the location of Pullman Yards and the locus for the political changes that swept him, Warnock and Biden into power. “The stakes could not be higher,” Ossoff said. “The future of voting rights, and civil rights and women’s rights is on the line.”Three political action committees offered their endorsement to Biden on Saturday: Collective PAC, which backs Black candidates; the Latino Victory Fund; and the AAPI Victory Fund, a political action committee for empowering Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.“They must be re-elected. Failure is not an option,” said Shekar Narasimhan, chairman and founder of the AAPI Victory Fund. “We will do everything in our power to make this happen.” More

When an opinion poll in the New York Times found that a majority of Joe Biden’s voters believe he is too old to be an effective US president, the call to action was swift. But it was not aimed at Joe Biden.“Amplifying flawed presidential polls, refusing to report on [Donald] Trump’s cognitive issues, the NYT is biased for Trump,” was a sample response on social media. “If you have a subscription to NYT, cancel it.”The irate chorus aimed at one of America’s most storied media institutions followed finger-pointing at the legal system for failing to stop Trump in his tracks. Despite much wishful thinking, primary election results this week made clear that the nation is hurtling towards a Biden v Trump rematch in November.That polling and media coverage are imperfect, and the wheels of justice of turn slowly, is beyond dispute. But whatever the merits of the arguments, critics argue that Democrats are at risk of playing a blame game that distracts them from the central mission: defeating Trump at the ballot box.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Commiseration is not a strategy and Democrats need to stop throwing political temper tantrums and do the work to unify and get Joe Biden re-elected. The courts, the media, late-night comedians are not going to save us. So this whining and complaining about these aspects being unfair is not a strategy for victory.”View image in fullscreenAmong some Democrats, there has long been a yearning for a saviour who will stop Trump in his tracks. Hopes were pinned on the special counsel Robert Mueller, but his Russia investigation lacked teeth and failed to bring the president down. Two impeachments came and went and the Senate missed a historic opportunity to bar from Trump running again.Now resentment is focused on the supreme court and the attorney general, Merrick Garland, for dragging their feet on holding Trump accountable for his role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The court issued a unanimous decision that Colorado and other states do not have the power to remove Trump from the ballot for engaging in an insurrection.A justice department case alleging that he sought to overturn the 2020 election, which had been due to begin this week, was postponed until the supreme court rules on whether he is immune from prosecution. And an election interference case in Georgia is also on hold because the prosecutor Fani Willis is dealing with allegations of a conflict of interest over a romantic relationship.In Florida, where Trump is charged over his mishandling of classified government documents, he managed to draw a friendly judge who has indicated the trial will not start soon. That means the case likely to start first is one in New York relating to Trump paying hush money to an adult film star during the 2016 election campaign, widely portrayed in the media as the weakest of the four.Yet such a case would have been devastating to any other candidate at any other moment in history. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “He’s going to be on trial for 34 felony counts in less than three weeks and the mainstream media has barely indicated the importance of this.“‘Oh, it’s just a hush money trial.’ No it’s not. He’s not on trial for hush money. He’s on trial for election fraud, not just paying the hush money but deceiving the American people by concealing it as a business expense.”Lichtman added: “If this was anybody but Trump, any other presidential candidate on trial, it would be the trial of the century and the mainstream media would be screaming that, if the candidate got convicted, he should be bounced from from the campaign. Instead they’ve misrepresented and trivialised this case.”Trump has long challenged media orthodoxies. During the 2016 campaign, the New York Times used the word “lie” in a headline – a move that would have been seen as judgmental and editorialising in the pre-Trump era. In 2019, the paper changed a headline, “Trump urges unity vs racism”, after an outcry from readers and progressive politicians.Television has also struggled to find the right approach. There was much introspection over how saturation coverage of Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies and tweets gave him $5bn in free advertising, according to the media tracking firm mediaQuant. Cable news networks have drastically reduced their live coverage of Trump’s speeches, although some commentators warn that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, contending that voters need to see his unhinged antics, verbal gaffes and extremist agenda.With Super Tuesday’s primary elections clearing the way for another Biden v Trump clash, some accuse the media of focusing too much on polls and not enough on the stakes, treating Trump as just another political candidate rather than an existential threat. They say the intense focus on Biden’s age – he is 81 – is wildly disproportionate when set against Trump’s authoritarianism and 91 criminal charges.Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “The media has clearly not learned its lesson from 2016 or 2020 on how to cover Donald Trump. This is not a conventional horse race election. There’s nothing normal about any of this so, by covering Biden and Trump equally, it minimises Trump’s considerably disturbing behaviour, comments and plans for the future.“The Democrats do have a legitimate complaint with the way the media is bothsides-ing this. The media should not be under any obligation to tell both sides of a lie or conspiracy theory or leading presidential candidate’s desire to tear up the constitution and become a dictator on day one. All things Donald Trump has said he would do.”The New York Times/Siena College poll was made up of 980 registered voters across the country and conducted on mobile and landline phones. It found that 61% of people who supported Biden in 2020 thought he was “just too old” to be an effective president. An accompanying article in the Times was headlined: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to Be Effective.”Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, thinks it was a fair question. “The media’s not in this to help any candidate and Joe Biden is the incumbent and there are legitimate questions about an 81-year-old repeatedly struggling in public. To do a poll that asks questions about that is entirely fair.”View image in fullscreenOthers take a very different view. Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the CUNY Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, said: “The choice to ask the question and the way the question is asked and who the question is asked of and then how the result is played are agenda-filled. Polls become a self-fulfilling prophecy of: we’re going to set an agenda and say it all and then we’re going to do a poll and act as if that’s news when it’s just a reaction to what we’ve already done. This is the case with the age.”Jarvis added: “The New York Times – which has been our best and which I criticise because I want it to be better – is horribly frustrating because it does not know how to cover the rise of fascism, and that’s what this story really is. Neither does it know how to cover the essence of why this is happening, which is race.”Defenders of the New York Times point out that it has done extensive reporting on Trump’s plans for a second term and what it would mean for America and the world. Some commentators warn that Democrats’ attacks on the media are likely to backfire and lead to accusations that they are shooting the messenger.Not even comedians are immune. When Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Comedy Central, and skewered Biden and Trump as the two oldest presidential candidates in history, Mary Trump, a niece and fierce critic of the former president, wrote on X: “Not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”Stewart responded on his next show: “I guess as the famous saying goes, ‘Democracy dies in discussion’ … It was never my intention to say out loud what I saw with my eyes and then brain. I can do better.”If history is any guide, there is no knight in shining armour coming to Democrats’ rescue. They have to win on the merits on 5 November. Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, observed: “The Democrats have wanted to use every trick in the book to defeat or unseat or stop Trump since 2016 and nothing has changed in that respect.“The fact is he is a leading candidate. He is supported by almost half the country. The idea that he poses a threat to democracy is not unfounded but is also wildly overblown. If the media did what many Democrats want, they would effectively be acting like media in Orbán’s Hungary, so the irony might be telling.” More

Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández watched Oppenheimer – a top winner at Sunday’s Academy Awards and Christopher Nolan’s treatment on the physicist who guided testing of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico – months ago.And soon after the scene where Cillian Murphy, as J Robert Oppenheimer, peered through safety goggles in a fortified shed at the huge mushroom cloud, the New Mexico Democrat realized “the untold story” lay on the cutting room floor.“We see nothing on the impact the bomb had on people living in northern New Mexico,” Fernández said. “There’s no way [Manhattan Project physicists] could not have been aware of the radiation’s impact on the communities downwind of the Trinity bomb site.”As a 17th-generation descendant of Mexicans who became New Mexicans, Fernández, 65, speaks of “people living off the land, hanging their clothes, coated with [radioactive] ash, chickens picking in the yard, the lingering effects of what fell onto the ground and crops and was absorbed by animals and people” – for decades to come after the testing of the bomb.Fernández was awakened to the vast reach of the radiation after winning her congressional seat in 2020, meeting constituents and befriending Tina Cordova, the leader of “downwinders” – survivors and descendants of multigenerational illnesses discovered well after the 1945 Trinity bomb.View image in fullscreenCordova, who earned a master’s degree in biology before becoming the owner of an Albuquerque roofing company, is a survivor of thyroid cancer. Her 24-year-old niece has also grappled with the same condition – and is a fifth-generation family member afflicted with one form of cancer or another.Cordova is the protagonist of Lois Lipman’s award-winning documentary, First We Bombed New Mexico, which also played a role in Fernández’s grasp of bomb-related injustices.Cordova was not yet born when radioactive ash settled across a vast area of the state’s western desert. But her father, Anastacio Cordova, was four at the time, living in Tularosa, a farming village 45 miles from the bomb site. The genetic line of cancers began with him.In sharing the details of her family’s plight, Cordova said: “I sensed a level of sadness in [Fernández]. She said she had lost family members but didn’t go into detail.”A non-smoker, Anastacio had part of his tongue removed at 61, before treatment for the spread of cancer necessitating “high levels of radiation in his head and neck”, Cordova said.“All his teeth had to be extracted,” she said. “Then he got prostate cancer. Eight years after the primary oral cancer he had a second primary lesion on his tongue. The doctor said they could remove the tumor but he couldn’t have any more radiation because in the first bout with cancer he had been treated with the maximum amount of radiation.”Cordova’s father died in 2013 after nine years of illness and repeat trips to Houston’s MD Anderson cancer center.Listening to the stories of Cordova and other downwinders indeed had resonance for Fernández, the congresswoman said. Her mother came from Colonias, a village in Guadalupe county “within the concentric circles of people exposed to radiation”.“I am not a downwinder,” Fernández said. “I will not be a claimant” – if pending legislation for survivors, which she has co-sponsored, passes Congress. “These people are part of who I am.“My maternal grandmother died of leukemia blood cancer. My mother, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer. Both were in their 70s.”Her maternal grandfather also died of cancer.She made it a point to say that there was no speculation among her relatives at the time that their illnesses stemmed from the nuclear bomb in New Mexico. But she made clear that their pasts – combined with that of people like Cordova – made her realize “we’ve never as a nation apologized to the people of New Mexico”.And Fernández, a graduate of Yale and Stanford law school who worked as a public interest attorney before Congress, is working to fix that.Her efforts come in the form of fighting for passage of a bill first filed by Ben Ray Lujan, Fernandez’s congressional predecessor who was elected to the US Senate in 2020. The now expanded legislative proposal seeks financial compensation – reparations – for downwinders, a category that also extends to Nevadans afflicted from later nuclear testing, victims of uranium pollution in Utah and Missouri, and workers from several other states exposed to radiation from the nuclear testing infrastructure, long cloaked in secrecy.View image in fullscreenFernández is quick to invoke a surreal scene from First We Bombed New Mexico to discuss the legislation: “Little girls dancing around in the ash, tasting it on their tongues, thinking it was summer snow” – in the early aftermath of the bomb testing.But it’s now more than just the film that is catalyzing support for providing downwinders with long-due compensation after losing so many loved ones to nuclear fallout disease patterns.The compensation bill championed by Lujan in the Senate and Fernández in the House has earned backing across the political aisle from Missouri’s far-right US senator Josh Hawley.Hawley joined Lujan and Fernández’s ranks last summer after an investigation by the Missouri Independent, MuckRock and the Associated Press uncovered rare cancers as well as autoimmune disorders among St Louis workers who processed uranium used in early stages of the Manhattan Project at the heart of Oppenheimer. There was radioactive waste found in lakes and creeks and groundwater pollution at sites in St Louis county yet to be cleaned.The bill co-sponsored by Hawley – who gave a clenched fist salute to supporters of former president Donald Trump before they staged the January 6 Capitol attack – is likely one of the few political issues on which the Missouri Republican is likely to agree with the Joe Biden White House.View image in fullscreenBiden, too, endorsed the compensation bill which on Thursday passed the Senate 69-31 with a broad bipartisan vote. The measure now goes to the House.Fernández stressed the coalition is “not questioning the US’s decision to pursue the bomb and nuclear power as part of national security” to end the second world war. But, she said: “We need for victims of that national priority to receive compensation for what they and their families suffered.”A sequence in First We Bombed New Mexico poignantly conveys that point.The former US senator Tom Udall tells Tina Cordova’s group how moved he was to have heard their stories. The film cuts to grainy footage of Tom’s father, Steward Udall, as the US’s secretary of the interior in the 1960s. With a catch in the throat, the elder Udall shows outrage about disease-stricken uranium miners in Utah – then says cynically: “No matter how much they have lied or what harm they may have done, you cannot sue the government.“As one Atomic Energy Commission official I knew in the [early 1960s] said, ‘Well, if we admit now that we have not told them the truth, they won’t believe anything we said.’”First We Bombed New Mexico has a private screening for members of Congress. It will be shown at 7pm on 26 March at the Environmental film festival on the American University’s campus in Washington, with Cordova and Lipman taking questions. More