US Politics

Gavin Esler (Here’s the key question about Britain in 2023: why do we put up with this rubbish?, 25 October) makes some good points, but his implication that we should have a written constitution, as the US does, should be resisted. There’s no more pernicious element in American life than the country’s practically irreformable constitution. Made for a slave-owning gentry republic (not a modern democracy), the constitution sports an electoral college that can, and does, overturn democratically elected majorities – often in cahoots with the supreme court, one of the world’s most nakedly political courts (and we complain about Hungary and Poland).The US constitution makes it impossible to legislate for firearms control and periodically allows an irresponsible legislature to threaten the dissolution of all federal government by withholding the revenue needed for the armed forces and civil servants. The US constitution is an affliction that Americans must bear. Let’s not have one. George Baugh Much Wenlock, Shropshire Gavin Esler says that ours is an antiquated democratic system. How can it be described as democratic at all when we have an unelected head of state, an unelected second chamber, a voting system that gives huge majorities in parliament with less than 50% of the vote?In addition, we have three different sorts of devolution to the three smallest parts of the UK and no effective devolution to the much larger regions of England. Dr Ken Hughes Hale Barns, Greater Manchester Gavin Esler’s article poses the questions “why are things so … shit?” and how it is that Liz Truss, Chris Grayling and others seem to repeatedly fail upwards? Esler proposes constitutional change as the solution. There is a much swifter alternative. Don’t vote for people who don’t use public transport. Don’t vote for people who don’t send their children to local schools. Don’t vote for people who don’t use the NHS. Don’t vote for people without links to your local community. Forget constitutional change. Politics can be that simple. Peter Riddle Wirksworth, Derbyshire Gavin Esler’s excellent article identifies the first necessary step in halting our prolonged descent into dysfunction and despair. This age-old decline will not be reversed without grasping the nettle of constitutional reform. How Keir Starmer can be so blind as to claim electoral reform especially is “not a priority” beggars belief. Dr Robert HercliffeLee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire Gavin Esler has it right. Almost every democratic country in the world except the UK has a written contract between its people and their government: a constitution. No sane person would agree to buy a house or a car from a salesman who said that there was no need for a written contract and that “their word was their bond”. And yet most British citizens seem happy to accept that situation with regards to their country. While there are plenty of other challenges facing the UK right now, a written constitution, created by the people, would go some way to resolving much of the dissembling, lying and corruption that are now endemic in our political system. It’s long past time to boot the dodgy car salesmen out of Westminster. Stephen Psallidas Newcastle upon Tyne More

Donald Trump maintained his huge lead in the crucial early voting state of Iowa in a major new poll by NBC News and the Des Moines Register but Nikki Haley is now emerging as his closest challenger.The former US president has a 27-point lead in Iowa three months before the first vote of the Republican primary as he attracted 43% support. But Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, climbed 10 points to 16%, sharing second place with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose campaign has long been seen to be stalling.No other candidate scored significantly, even after second choices of supporters of Mike Pence, the former vice-president who suspended his campaign, were reapportioned.J Ann Selzer, the Iowa pollster who conducted the survey, said: “This is a good poll for Donald Trump. For all the things that happened between the last poll and now, he’s still the dominant player in the field and his standing has, in fact, improved from August.”Trump’s memory apparently hasn’t improved, though. In Sioux City on Sunday, he told supporters: “Well, thank you very much. And a very big hello to a place where we’ve done very well: Sioux Falls. Thank you very much, Sioux Falls.”A state senator, Brad Zaun, whispered: “It’s Sioux City, not Sioux Falls.”Trump said: “Oh … is that right?”To the crowd, he said: “So Sioux City, let me ask you: how many people come from Sioux City?”Trump is 77 but polling shows fewer Americans think he is too old for a second term than think so about Joe Biden, the president who turns 81 next month. Trump has made Biden’s age an anvil for his campaign to hammer but both men are closely watched for errors.In Sioux City, bragging about his relationships with authoritarian world leaders, Trump said Hungary “fronts on both Ukraine and Russia”. Hungary does not have a border with Russia.Haley has made foreign policy smarts part of her pitch to voters, strong debate performances also helping her rise.In the NBC/Register poll, she climbed 10 points from the same survey in August as DeSantis fell by three. Other candidates fell (the South Carolina senator Tim Scott from 9% to 7%, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie from 5% to 4%) or stagnated (the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy sticking at 4%).Haley was the second choice of 17% of likely caucus-goers, with 22% more saying they would consider her.Kristy Beckwith, 60 and from Ankeny, said: “I feel like she’s fresh, and I liked what she said about … the things that she did as governor of South Carolina … she’s a strong woman.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges, including for state and federal election subversion, and assorted civil trials. Nonetheless, he has increased his lead in the NBC/Register poll. In August, he led DeSantis by 23 points. He now leads by 27.Evangelical Christians remain a key Iowa voting bloc. Despite Trump facing criminal charges over hush-money payments to a porn star and a civil trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”, 65% of respondents to the NBC/Register poll said such legal problems would not stop him winning a general election.Trump enjoys bigger leads elsewhere. On Monday, the fivethirtyeight.com national polling average put Trump at 57%: 43% clear of DeSantis and 49% up on Haley. More

It didn’t take long for many evangelical Christian groups in America to show their support for Israel.Hours after Hamas attacked the country on 7 October, killing more than 1,400 people, Christians United for Israel, an evangelical lobbying group which claims to have more than 10 million members, posted a message to on X, formerly known as Twitter.“To the terrorists who have chosen this fight, hear this, what you do to Israel, god will do to you. Despite today’s weeping, joy will come because he [god] who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,” CUFI, whose founder believes the presence of Jews in Israel is a precursor to Jesus Christ returning to Earth, wrote.Soon an “Evangelical statement in support of Israel” was issued by the ethics and religion liberty commission – an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination which has 45,000 churches in the US.In the statement, 2,000 evangelical leaders – not all were named – said they “fully support Israel’s right and duty to defend itself against further attack”. Little credence was given to the Palestinians who would soon find themselves under attack: more than 8,000 people in Gaza have now been killed by Israeli bombardments, according to Gaza’s health ministry .“While our theological perspectives on Israel and the Church may vary, we are unified in calling attacks against Jewish people especially troubling as they have been often targeted by their neighbors since God called them as His people in the days of Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3),” the evangelical statement said.“In keeping with Christian Just War tradition, we also affirm the legitimacy of Israel’s right to respond against those who have initiated these attacks as Romans 13 grants governments the power to bear the sword against those who commit such evil acts against innocent life.”The more than 90 named signatories – four were women, the rest men – included the current president, and eight former presidents, of the Southern Baptist Convention, among other influential evangelicals.For people not immersed in evangelicalism – a conservative strand of Christianity which emphasises adherence to the Bible – the overt biblical references may have seemed unusual to hear in a geopolitical context.Romans 13 – the 13th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans in the New Testament – is essentially a lengthy treatise on the importance of submitting to bureaucracy, which states:“Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason.”For those more familiar with the evangelical world, the vehemence of the support has not been a surprise, given the importance to evangelicals of an Israel inhabited by Jewish people. One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.To that end, the issue of Israel and Palestine has dominated sermons at evangelical churches over the past two Sundays, said Daniel Hummel, a historian of American religion, and the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and US-Israeli Relations.“The overwhelming theme has been: this war is prophetically significant, but no one is willing to really claim exactly how,” Hummel said.“And that’s been a long tradition of sort of hedging your bets and getting whatever you can in terms of sort of interest and eyeballs, by declaring that there’s something significant here, but once you start saying specific things and you’re sort of on the hook, it doesn’t turn out that way.”The rush to respond, and the statements in support of Israel, were not surprising to those aware of the deep feeling evangelicals have for Israel.Broadly speaking, some evangelicals believe that Jewish people returning to Israel following the 1917 ​​Balfour Declaration, a British statement which called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, was key to end times, when God will purge sinners and Jesus Christ will return.John Hagee, an evangelical pastor and influential founder of Christians United for Israel, explained the prophecy to TBN Networks in December 2022.“God is getting ready to defend Israel in such a supernatural way it’s going to take the breath out of the lungs of the dictators on planet Earth but we are living on the cusp of the greatest most supernatural series of events the world has ever seen ready or not.”Hagee said when Jewish people are present in Israel “the clock starts ticking” on the rapture.“What will come soon [is] the antichrist and his seven year empire that will be destroyed in the battle of armageddon. Then Jesus Christ will set up his throne in the city of Jerusalem. He will establish a kingdom that will never end,” Hagee said.Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.Among other things, the group lobbied for the US embassy in Israel to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Donald Trump did in 2018, and is “committed to Israel’s strength, security and sovereignty”.The support of evangelical Christians – in 2015 the Pew Research Center estimated there were about 62 million in the US – for Israel can be split into different groups, Hummel said.While there are plenty of evangelicals who, like Hagee, adhere to the Israel-is-key-to-Jesus’-return theology, there are also those who believe in “blessings theology”, a less outlandish, more transactional approach to support for Israel.The blessings theology is based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis, where God told Abraham – who Hummel described as “the patriarch of the Jewish people” – that he would “bless those who bless you” and “curse those who curse you”.“For the last couple of centuries this has been interpreted on individual terms. So you can accrue personal blessings by being good to the Jewish people, or by giving money, or touring Israel or things like that,” Hummel said.That also works on a national level, he said.“And so the crude way of doing this is a pastor will say something like: ‘Look at the Roman Empire and how they persecuted the Jews and Rome fell. Look at the British Empire and how the British didn’t treat the Jews well, and how they fell. Look at the Nazis and how they persecuted the Jews, and they fell.“And we, the Americans, don’t want to be the next Empire or the next great power to fall because we didn’t sufficiently bless the Jewish people.’”There are also those whose support is “more broadly American”, Hummel said: “There’s a deep cultural affinity that’s been built over decades and decades between the US and Israel all across the board.”Evangelicals make up an influential part of the Republican party base, and have a strong number in Congress. More than 100 members of the current Congress can be broadly identified as evangelical, and that was on display in recent days.Lee Fang, a journalist, recently asked congressmen and women whether their religion was important to their support for Israel, for the documentary “Praying for Armageddon”.“This entire matter is based upon the faith of our maker, our creator, but it’s also faith of a chosen people,” Pete Sessions, a Republican congressman from Texas and a Methodist, said.Fang asked Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, about evangelical support.“They’re following the scripture, and what the scripture says about Israel: ‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed,’ they take it literal, and I’m one of those people,” Burchett said.In terms of the influence evangelicals might wield as the Israel-Hamas conflict continues, Hummel said there had been a “mixed record” on evangelicals’ political sway.Still, Trump has specifically said he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem “for the evangelicals”, while Hagee served as an adviser to the twice-impeached president.In the 2020 election, evangelical or born-again Christians made up 28% of the overall electorate, CNN reported, and three-quarters voted for Trump. Given that support for the Republican party, under GOP leadership evangelicals would have plenty of influence.“When there’s a Republican president they have a seat at the table it doesn’t mean the president’s going to do exactly what they want, but they’re the ones that the president’s listening to more than other interested parties on Israel,” Hummel said.With a presidential election looming, and with few signs that the Israeli conflict will ebb away any time soon, evangelicals could find themselves in a position of significant power in the near future. More

The United Nations has warned that there was “clear evidence” that war crimes may have been committed in “the explosion of violence in Israel and Gaza”. Meanwhile, Wall Street is hoping for an explosion in profits.During third-quarter earnings calls this month, analysts from Morgan Stanley and TD Bank took note of this potential profit-making escalation in conflict and asked unusually blunt questions about the financial benefit of the war between Israel and Hamas.The death toll – which so far includes more than 8,000 Palestinians and over 1,400 Israelis – wasn’t top of mind for TD Cowen’s Cai von Rumohr, managing director and senior research analyst specializing in the aerospace industry. His question was about the upside for General Dynamics, an aerospace and weapons company in which TD Asset Management holds over $16m in stock.Joe Biden has asked Congress for $106bn in military and humanitarian aid for Israel and Ukraine and humanitarian assistance for Gaza. The money could be a boon to the aerospace and weapons sector which enjoyed a 7-percentage point jump in value in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel and the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in response.“Hamas has created additional demand, we have this $106bn request from the president,” said Von Rumohr, during General Dynamics’ earnings call on 25 October. “Can you give us some general color in terms of areas where you think you could see incremental acceleration in demand?”“You know, the Israel situation obviously is a terrible one, frankly, and one that’s just evolving as we speak,” responded Jason Aiken, the company’s executive vice-president of technologies and chief financial officer. “But I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”That next day, Von Rumohr assigned a “buy” rating to General Dynamics’ stock.Morgan Stanley’s head of aerospace and defense equity research, Kristine Liwag, took a similar approach to the conflict during Raytheon’s 24 October earnings call.“Looking at [the White House’s $106bn supplemental funding request], you’ve got equipment for Ukraine, air and missile defense for Israel, and replenishment of stockpiles for both. And this seems to fit quite nicely with the Raytheon Defense portfolio,” said Liwag, whose employer holds over $3bn in Raytheon stock, a 2.1% ownership share of the weapons company.“So how much of this opportunity is addressable to the company and if the dollars are appropriated, when would be the earliest you could see this convert to revenue?”Greg Hayes, Raytheon’s chairman and executive director, responded: “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking … on top of what we think is going to be an increase in the [Department of Defense] top line [budget].”The comments are seemingly in contradiction of each company’s “statement on human rights” and explicit endorsements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.Aside from the callousness of casually discussing the financial benefits of far-off armed conflict, the comments raise questions about whether these major institutional shareholders of weapons stocks are abiding by their own human rights policies.“We exercise our influence by conducting our business operations in ways that seek to respect, protect and promote the full range of human rights such as those described in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” says Morgan Stanley’s “Statement on Human Rights”. “Although we believe that governments around the world bear primary responsibility for safeguarding human rights, we acknowledge the corporate responsibility to respect human rights articulated in the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”“TD’s commitment to respect human rights is made in accordance with the corporate responsibility to respect human rights as set out in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP),” says TD’s “Statement on Human Rights”. “Since 2018, we have been undertaking a review of current practices and procedures and continue working towards integrating the UNGP across the Bank.”But just three days into the Israel-Hamas war, the United Nations’ human rights council issued a warning that “there is already clear evidence that war crimes may have been committed in the latest explosion of violence in Israel and Gaza, and all those who have violated international law and targeted civilians must be held accountable for their crimes, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, said today.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The Commission has been collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes committed by all sides since 7 October 2023, when Hamas launched a complex attack on Israel and Israeli forces responded with airstrikes in Gaza,” said the Human Rights Council, assessments shared by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.“[The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human rights] are clear in their expectation of companies to respect human rights throughout their value chain,” said Cor Oudes, programme leader of humanitarian disarmament, business conflict and human rights at Pax for Peace, a Netherland based non-governmental organization advocating for the protection of civilians against acts of war.“For banks, this includes ensuring that their clients or companies they otherwise invest in do not cause or contribute to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law,” said Oudes. “If a bank invests in an arms producer that supplies weapons to states which use these in serious violations of human rights or IHL, according to the UNGPs, the bank has a responsibility to act to prevent more violations as well as to mitigate the existing impact on human rights.”But the UN won’t be the legal arbiter of whether US companies have participated in human rights violations, a key loophole for institutional investors and the weapons firms.“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is only as good as how it’s interpreted by the host government, which in this case would be the US,” Shana Marshall, an expert on finance and arms trade and associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University explained.“These analysts can feel safe in the knowledge that the US government is never going to interpret that law in such a way that they will be prevented from exporting weapons to a country that the US doesn’t have an outright embargo on, which probably won’t have anything to do with human rights law anyways.”Morgan Stanley and TD Bank did not respond to requests for comment.
Co-published with Responsible Statecraft

Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative Journalist at Large at Responsible Statecraft More

Donald Trump was once again bound by the gag order in the federal criminal case charging him with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results, after a judge on Sunday reinstated restrictions prohibiting him from attacking prosecutors, court staff and potential trial witnesses.The US district judge Tanya Chutkan also denied the former US president’s request to suspend the gag order indefinitely while his lawyers appealed.Trump had been granted a reprieve when the judge temporarily lifted the gag order while she considered that request. Prosecutors argued last week that the order should be reimposed after Trump took advantage and posted a slew of inflammatory statements.The statements included Trump’s repeated attacks on the special counsel Jack Smith, whom he called “deranged”, and Trump’s comments about the testimony that his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had provided to the grand jury during the criminal investigation.Prosecutors argued that each of Trump’s statements were exactly the sort of comments that the order was designed to prevent, including intimidating or influencing witnesses who could wind up testifying against him at trial, and weighing on the substance of their testimony.“The defendant has capitalized on the court’s administrative stay to, among other prejudicial conduct, send an unmistakable and threatening message to a foreseeable witness in this case,” prosecutors said in their brief. “Unless the court lifts the administrative stay, the defendant will not stop.”In particular, prosecutors complained about Trump’s post on Meadows that questioned the credibility of his testimony and suggested that anyone who testified against him under limited immunity from prosecution – such as Meadows – were weak or cowardly.Prosecutors also suggested that after Trump was fined $10,000 for flouting a similar gag order imposed in the civil fraud case brought by the New York state attorney general Laeticia James, Trump should also face consequences for assailing parties in the criminal case in Washington.The back and forth over the gag order, which was initially put in place less than two weeks ago at a contentious hearing in federal district court in Washington after prosecutors first sought restrictions in a series of sealed court filings in September, has been a hard-fought legal battle for both sides.Trump has angrily pushed back at attempts to constrain his public remarks about the case, calling them politically motivated. He has had his lawyers previously complain to the judge that prosecutors were infringing on his first amendment rights, especially as he campaigns for another presidential term.The arguments from Trump lawyer John Lauro have partly focused on people like former vice-president Mike Pence, saying a gag order prevented Trump from engaging about January 6 on the debate stage. But that fell by the wayside when Pence dropped out of the 2024 race on Sunday. More

It is hard to take anyone very seriously when they use the phrase “the woke mind virus” with a straight face. But, increasingly, when it comes to Elon Musk, there is no other option. Is he a visionary? A hypocrite? The last defender of the first amendment? Or simply a bullied kid who got his own back by buying the global playground and trashing it? Opinions of Musk are as volatile and wide-ranging as the man himself.“When things are calm he seeks out storms,” says his biographer, Walter Isaacson. As this exhaustive documentary shows, when Musk acquired ownership and control of Twitter (subsequently rebranded X) in 2022, he certainly found one. The film works on several fascinating levels. It is a character study, a potted history of the last decade of American politics and also a detailed and disturbing exploration of how social media became a dysfunctional forum for the world’s grievances.The pandemic and the Trump presidency were the strongest accelerants in this process. For years, Twitter had attempted to negotiate a balance between allowing free expression and refusing to tolerate hate speech and overt disinformation. But what is a company to do when the president starts spreading verifiable falsehoods on its platform, at a time when those falsehoods have the potential to cost lives? Twitter’s response was to suspend Trump. Musk was, at the time, annoyed about the compulsory closure of his Tesla factories. So, in opposition to lockdown, an uneasy alliance was born.Who decides to suspend a president? In this case, people such as Yoel Roth, working in Twitter’s Trust and Safety department and about to become a lightning rod for Trumpite wrath. Interviewed at length, he is jittery, nervous and looks extremely young. He is also, in his measured way, defiant. Who are you, Roth is asked, to make this decision? “I’m no one,” he responds. “It shouldn’t be any one person’s decision” And there’s the nub of it. These people didn’t seek this power. They are essentially nerdy kids (although Roth did once call Trump “a racist tangerine” on Twitter, which probably didn’t help). He is right though. It shouldn’t be up to him alone. And it surely follows that it also shouldn’t be up to Jack Dorsey, or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.Musk, meanwhile, was spiralling. He was becoming a high-profile example of the way in which a person’s buy-in to a conspiracy theory often wedges the door open for others. In one tweet (“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”) he managed to insult transgender people, Covid victims and the integrity of medical science in the space of five words.Here, things get unnerving. Musk’s opinionated carelessness is, in the context of his status, extremely dangerous. The list of people harassed and threatened after being the target of his tweets grows as the film proceeds. This amounts to its own form of censorship: the scariest censorship of all – self-censorship. If you suspect that a billionaire with more than 160 million followers (many of them aggressively protective of him) will disapprove of a course of action, you might decide not to take that action. This principle has subsequently applied to everyone who might oppose Musk’s worldview – from politicians to journalists. By the time Musk’s acolytes were using The Twitter Files (a leak of information claimed to show collusion between government and social media companies) as a pretext for excoriating Joe Biden’s presidency, one thing had become clear: social media had warped our discourse by ostensibly liberating it.In its quiet, diligent way, the film is a noble response to this phenomenon. Stylistically and aesthetically, PBS documentaries typically resemble elongated news reports – no frills or fripperies, just reporting. In the context of our partial, bad-faith current news environment (nurtured, ironically, by Twitter), this feels admirably spartan and bracing – old investigative techniques, such as examining multiple perspectives and asking difficult questions of people on both sides of the argument, prove refreshing. Old-fashioned broadcasting might be one antidote to social media’s poisonous hysteria.But what of Musk himself? He is hilariously grandiose at times, but also seems easily bored – which might be our salvation. Early in the film, there is a clip following him at the launch of one of his spacecraft. If you can ignore the wild extravagance of these endeavours, it is oddly charming. He looks like a little boy bubbling with excitement about having a chance to play with the biggest and best toys ever made. While the regulation of social media will be a headache for years to come, dare we hope that, one day, Elon Musk might decide to return to his rockets?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion
Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover aired on PBS America, which is available for catchup on Freeview Play and Amazon Fire TV. More

Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday he “isn’t afraid” of changing the rules governing how the speaker can be removed from the post by any one member, Democrat or Republican, who introduces a “motion to vacate” followed by a majority-wins floor vote.The rule was adopted earlier this year among a number of concessions to the Republican far right agreed by Kevin McCarthy to win the position. He was then brought down by Florida Republican Matt Gaetz who used the rule to force a vote against him after McCarthy made a budget deal with Democrats.McCarthy was forced out on 3 October, the first speaker ever to be ejected, leading to a prolonged effort by lawmakers to select a speaker before arriving at Louisiana’s Johnson, a comparative neophyte to intra-Republican party warfare. He was elected the 56th House speaker on Wednesday.“Everyone’s here in good faith … and everyone has told me that that rule has to change,” Johnson said Sunday on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures”.But he added: “I’m not afraid of it because I’m going to openly work transparently and work with every member and everyone will be … will fully understand what we’re doing and why.”He acknowledged that the motion vacate rule that led to the Gaetz-led mutiny “makes it difficult for any speaker to do their job”.Johnson has said it’s his wish to decentralize political power from the speaker to the committees in the legislative body and to lead the body in a more transparent fashion.On Sunday he said that his “highest priority is to get this work done and to do it an open and transparent way into as I said in my speech, the night when I took the oath, to decentralize the power from the speaker’s office”.“I really want to empower our chairman and the committees of jurisdiction and all the talented people in the House and make them more of a part of the big decisions and the situations and the processes here and ensure regular order,” Johnson said. “If we do that, we don’t have to worry about a motion to vacate and I’m doing that, working on that everyday.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcCarthy had agreed to the rule change reducing the number of members required to call a confidence vote from five to one as part of a package with Republican hardliners who had forced him to endure 14 rounds of voting before winning the position on the 15th.Previously, under Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the speaker could only be threatened when a majority of one party supported the motion to vacate. Until McCarthy was ousted, it had only been used once before, in 1910, when it failed.Others had unsuccessfully tried to use it, including against Newt Gingrich in 1997 and in 2015 when Republican Mark Meadows filed the motion against speaker John Boehner, but it did not reach a vote and Boehner resigned months later. More

Mike Pence’s surprise withdrawal from the Republican presidential nomination race on Saturday is part of natural winnowing of the crowded field, rivals of the former vice-president said Sunday – and one that could help their quest of candidates to wrestle the nomination from overwhelming frontrunner Donald Trump.“In the end, the race is narrowing, which everyone said it would,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics and one of four who have qualified for a third TV debate next month in Miami that may not have included Pence, who, he told CNN’s State of the Union, had run “a tough race, a good race”.The former vice-president’s decision to make an early exit may also have been influenced by fundraising difficulties he was known to be having. Announcing his departure from the field saying it had “become clear” he did not have a path to victory, he vowed to help elect “principled Republican leaders”.Christie, who is at 3.1% support in primary polling, put his finger on Pence’s fundamental misalignment – accepting Trump’s hand as his running mate in 2016, resisting his boss on January 6th, then defending his administration record while simultaneously urging his party to turn away from Trump populism and back to conservative values.“There are people who want to have it both ways,” Christie continued his comments to CNN on Sunday. “They want to support him … on the other hand they want to go after him.”But Christie also carries that burden, having sought a cabinet appointment in the Trump administration in 2016.The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is widely presumed to be the main beneficiary of Pence’s exit. In a speech on Saturday, the former US ambassador to the UN praised Pence as a “good man of faith” who had “fought for America and he has fought for Israel”.Haley’s polling is rising amid endorsements from Republican politicians and pundits prepared to break with Trump. “She’s breaking through at the right moment,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy told Politico last week. “Everything else has been ridiculous preseason coverage … I think it all starts now.”According to FiveThirtyEight, Haley is polling in third place nationally at 8% among registered Republican voters behind Florida governor Ron DeSantis, at 14%. But support for DeSantis is falling. In the key early primary state of New Hampshire Haley beats DeSantis 19% to 10%, according to a recent survey.But both DeSantis and Haley, along with Vivek Ramaswamy and Christie, still hugely trail Trump at 58% support nationally – and the Maga king’s support only seems to grow with each criminal and civil indictment he is served.Governor DeSantis also rallied behind Pence, calling him “a principled man of faith who has worked tirelessly to advance the conservative cause” in a post on X.After Pence stepped aside, Trump called on him for his endorsement: “I don’t know about Mike Pence. He should endorse me. You know why? Because I had a great, successful presidency and he was the vice-president.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the former president also took a swipe at his Christian fundamentalist vice-president, who refused to help in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election and held the confirmation vote after the Capitol building had been cleared of January 6 protesters.“People in politics can be very disloyal,” Trump said at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, according to The Hill.Pence’s exit is also a stark reminder of Trump’s hold over the party: former vice-presidents are typically seen as a formidable primary challengers. But in recent years, that assumption has weakened.Neither Al Gore, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, or now Pence, have automatically managed or sought to immediately trade in the vice-presidency for the presidency.But as ABC News political contributor Donna Brazile pointed out on Sunday, Pence did not resonate with voters – a former vice-president who was unable to get traction, raise money or distinguish himself. “He tried to change the dynamics of the Republican party but it’s not changing. It’s now behind Donald Trump come trial or tribulations.” More