US Politics

In more normal political times, the successful prevention of a government shutdown might be cause for celebration. For Kevin McCarthy, it may instead mark the beginning of the end of his speakership.After failing to pass a more conservative stopgap spending bill on Friday, the House Republican speaker introduced a different proposal extending government funding for 45 days and allocating $16bn for disaster relief aid. That bill the House on Saturday in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the legislation.In a worrisome sign for McCarthy, 90 House Republicans opposed the bill. The speaker still managed to secure the support of most of his conference, but he expressed exasperation with the hard-right holdouts who blocked his initial stopgap proposal, which included severe spending cuts for most federal agencies.“It is very clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the conference,” McCarthy told reporters on Saturday. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”Indeed, McCarthy spent the weeks leading up to the 1 October shutdown deadline attempting to appease his hard-right colleagues. On Thursday night, House Republicans approved three longer-term appropriations bills that included some of the steep cuts demanded by the hard-right Freedom Caucus.McCarthy had hoped that the House’s ongoing work to pass appropriations bills would diffuse the concerns of Freedom Caucus members, many of whom said they would not back a stopgap bill in any form. But those holdout members were true to their word, opposing every proposal that would extend government funding and prevent a shutdown.When McCarthy’s original stopgap bill came up for a vote on Friday, 21 Republicans opposed the measure. The hard-right blockade easily sunk the bill because of House Republicans’ extremely narrow majority.In the end, McCarthy was forced to take a course of action he had avoided for weeks: passing a short-term funding bill with the help of House Democrats. Although Democrats expressed disappointment that McCarthy’s proposal did not include additional funding to support Ukraine’s war efforts, they ultimately provided the speaker with the support he needed to get the bill across the finish line.The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, celebrated the bill’s passage as a complete surrender by McCarthy and his allies, given that the legislation did not include the severe funding cuts outlined in the speaker’s original proposal.“We went from devastating cuts that would have impacted the health, the safety and the economic wellbeing of the American people, in 24 hours, to a spending agreement that meets the needs of the American people across the board,” Jeffries said on Saturday. “The American people have won. The extreme [‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans have lost. It was a victory for the American people and a complete and total surrender by right-wing extremists, who throughout the year have tried to hijack the Congress.”Hard-right Republicans had warned that they would move to oust McCarthy as speaker if he collaborated with Democrats on a funding bill, and they have the means to do so. Under the current House rules, it only takes one member to bring a motion to vacate, which forces a vote on removing the sitting speaker. McCarthy’s detractors would only need a simple majority to unseat him.Hard-right Republicans appeared ready to make good on their threat after the stopgap proposal passed the House. As the House moved to adjourn on Saturday, congressman Matt Gaetz, a hard-right Republican of Florida, was seen trying to get the attention of the presiding member for another matter of business. The House adjourned before Gaetz could be recognised, but the chamber will be back in session on Monday, when hard-right lawmakers will have another opportunity to take action against McCarthy.Gaetz previewed a potential effort to oust McCarthy on Tuesday, saying in a floor speech, “The one thing I agree with my Democrat colleagues on is that for the last eight months, this House has been poorly led, and we own that, and we have to do something about it. And you know what? My Democrat colleagues will have an opportunity to do something about that, too, and we will see if they bail out our failed speaker.”If McCarthy is banking on Democratic support to keep his gavel, he may be sorely disappointed. Politico reported Saturday that Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker, was instructing her colleagues not to come to McCarthy’s aid in the event of a vote on vacating the chair.Despite the grim state of affairs, McCarthy appeared ready for battle on Saturday. After withstanding 15 rounds of voting to win the speakership in January, McCarthy said he wouldn’t go down without a fight.“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it. There has to be an adult in the room,” McCarthy told reporters. “I’m going to be a conservative that gets things done for the American public, and whatever that holds, so be it because I believe in not giving up on America.”The coming days will determine what the future holds for McCarthy, but if Gaetz and his allies are successful, the House could soon be looking for a new leader. More

Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm on Saturday in a Capitol office building before a House vote on a stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown.The alarm prompted the Cannon House office building to be evacuated and triggered outcry from Republicans including the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who compared the New York congressman’s actions with those of the January 6 rioters.“I was really appalled watching Democrats’ actions today, to delay it, to get a shutdown,” said McCarthy amid Democrats’ complaints that they did not have sufficient time to review the bill Republicans released last-minute in an attempt to avoid a government shutdown.“That’s a new low,” he said, adding, “We watched how people have been treated if they’ve done something wrong in this Capitol. It would be interesting to see how he is treated and what he was trying to obstruct when it came to the American public.”Brian Steil, a Republican Wisconsin representative and chair of the House administration committee, announced that an investigation into the incident is underway.Georgia’s Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she is calling on the justice department to prosecute Bowman “using the same law they used to prosecute J6 defendants for interfering with an official proceeding”.Meanwhile, the Republican representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said that she is drafting a resolution to expel Bowman, tweeting, “This is the United States Congress, not a New York City high school. This action warrants expulsion & I’m introducing a resolution to do just that.”Malliotakis’s fellow Republican representative Elise Stefanik echoed similar sentiments, tweeting, “A Democrat member of Congress just committed a felony by pulling the fire alarm to try to delay and stop a Congressional vote to fund the government.”In DC, falsely pulling a fire alarm is considered a misdemeanor.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement to The Hill, a spokesperson for Bowman said, “Congressman Bowman did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote,” adding, “The congressman regrets any confusion.”Speaking to reporters, Bowman said, “I thought the alarm would open the door.”It remains unclear whether Bowman will be prosecuted.The 45-day funding resolution, which Bowman and a majority of Democrats ultimately voted in favor of, passed with a 335-91 vote in the House. The bill is now with the Democrat-majority Senate, and lawmakers have until midnight on Sunday to pass it and send it to president Joe Biden to sign into law before a government shutdown. More

The House passed a bill Saturday to extend government funding for 45 days, sending the legislation to the Senate with just hours left to avert a federal shutdown. Unless Joe Biden signs a funding bill before midnight, the government will shut down.The bill passed the House in an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 335 to 91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting the legislation. Ninety Republicans opposed the bill.The bill – unveiled by the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, just hours before the final vote – would extend funding through 17 November and allocate $16bn for disaster aid. The House bill does not include additional funding for Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.McCarthy introduced the bill under suspension of the rules, meaning he needed the support of two-thirds of House members to advance the proposal. Although Democrats criticized the bill’s lack of Ukraine funding, they ultimately provided McCarthy with the support needed to get the legislation across the finish line.Speaking after the vote, McCarthy expressed disappointment that a large share of his conference opposed the bill, but he said the intransigence displayed by hard-right Republicans left him with no other option.“It is very clear that I tried every possible way, listening to every single person in the conference,” McCarthy told reporters. “If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, [don’t] want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops: I don’t want to be a part of that team.”The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, celebrated the bill’s passage, saying: “[‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans have surrendered. All extreme rightwing policies have been removed from the House spending bill. The American people have won.”Prior to the House vote, the Senate had planned to hold a vote at 1pm ET on a separate stopgap spending bill, which would also keep the government open until 17 November and provide some funding for Ukraine’s war efforts as well as disaster relief aid.But the Senate vote was stalled after Republicans said they wanted to wait to see whether the House would be able to pass McCarthy’s proposal before the midnight deadline. In light of the movement in the House, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said he would not support advancing the Senate bill for the time being.“It looks like there may be a bipartisan agreement coming from the House,” McConnell told reporters at the Capitol. “Under these circumstances, I’m recommending a no vote, even though I very much want to avoid a government shutdown.”Now that the House has passed McCarthy’s bill, all attention turns to the Senate. Although Senate Democrats have voiced displeasure about approving a bill that does not include Ukraine funding, the House bill currently represents their only option to prevent a shutdown. Because of procedural hurdles, the Senate cannot hold a final vote on its own bill until Sunday at the earliest, when a shutdown would have already started.The rare weekend session came one day after the House failed to pass McCarthy’s initial stopgap bill, which would have extended government funding for another month while enacting steep spending cuts on most federal agencies.McCarthy’s proposal was rejected by 21 House Republicans, as hard-right members continued to insist they would not support a continuing resolution. Hard-right Republicans threatened to oust the speaker if he teamed up with Democrats to keep the government open, a viable threat when it only takes one member to introduce a motion to vacate the chair. Despite the criticism from his hard-right colleagues, McCarthy downplayed threats to his speakership on Saturday.“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” McCarthy told reporters. “There has to be an adult in the room. I am going to govern with what is best for this country.”As lawmakers made progress in their efforts to extend funding, the federal government was bracing for the possibility of the first shutdown in nearly five years. The White House has warned that a shutdown would force hundreds of thousands of government workers to go without pay, jeopardize access to vital nutritional programs and delay disaster relief projects.“Extreme House Republicans are solely – solely – to blame for marching us toward a shutdown. That is what we’re seeing right now,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Friday.Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, similarly blamed Republicans for a potential shutdown – although he used more colorful language to describe his congressional colleagues.“The damage to our nation’s reputation and critical programming, and chaos for America’s families is because of a small group of [Republican] peckerheads in the House,” Fetterman said on Saturday. “This national upheaval is inflicted by choice over nothing except Fox News face time and tributes to the lunatic fringe from their district.” More

The budget deal Republicans and Democrats reached in the House on Saturday included a 45-day funding extension for disaster relief funds. Lawmakers had been warning that without that provision, a government shutdown would hamper responses to any new weather disasters, leave hazardous waste sites uninspected, and stop work at federal Superfund clean-up sites.“Federal emergency management agency (Fema) staff will still respond to emergencies, but all long-term projects will be delayed due to a lack of funding in the disaster relief fund,” warned the Illinois Democrat Lauren Underwood on Friday.Underwood warned that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would stop inspecting drinking water and chemical facilities too. Also affected, she said, would be efforts to contain polyfluoroalkyl substances – “forever” chemicals, or PFAS – and cleanup activities at Superfund sites.The warnings came a day after New York was hit by torrential rains that shut down parts of the city’s mass-transit system, flooded parts of Brooklyn and triggered the state governor, Kathy Hochul, to declare a state of emergency.Wide-ranging impacts of a federal freeze come amid warnings that there is little left in the primary government relief fund, after 23 confirmed US weather events related to the climate disaster so far in 2023 have cost at least $1bn each.The events included two flooding events, 18 severe storms, one tropical cyclone, one wildfire and one winter storm, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. For comparison, the 1980–2022 annual average was roughly eight events.According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US has seen more billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 than in any previously recorded year.Fema spent an average of $4bn annually between 1992 and 1999 on disaster aid. Since 2000, excluding years that saw disasters like 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and the response to Covid-19, the emergency management agency’s spending has jumped to around $10bn annually.With three months of the year to go and disaster costs running at $23bn, the Fema administrator Deanne Criswell testified before the House transportation and infrastructure subcommittee on emergency management last week that the agency would have difficulties responding to any natural disaster in the event of a shutdown.Criswell pointed to decreasing funding levels for the disaster relief fund, climate change and the need for its mitigation, the costs of flood insurance and border security as among the agency’s concerns. She also said in her testimony that the agency’s mission had become “more challenging”.“We can no longer really speak of a disaster season. With atmospheric rivers in January to tornadoes and wildfires in December, we now face intensified natural disasters throughout the year, often in places not used to experiencing them,” she said.Citing the Maui wildfires and the California tropical cyclone, she warned that disasters required outsized funding.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We are in such a moment today,” Criswell added and said she had instituted an “immediate needs funding” mandate of $16bn.The agency had already cut off more than $1bn in funding to 1,000 public assistance projects, Criswell said.The warnings come as the Biden administration directs more funds toward disaster relief and away from reconstruction grants. Fema has already delayed around $2.8bn, including $555m for long-term recovery projects in Florida, $101m in Louisiana and another $74m in California, as its disaster fund dropped to just over $2.4bn, the Washington Post reported last week.While it is likely the fund will be boosted – disasters affect both red and blue states – Criswell warned that any failure to restock agency disaster relief coffers would leave Fema unable to fund a response to new emergencies.“It is vital that Fema – and the American people – be able to tap into an adequately funded Disaster Relief Fund so that we can continue to respond as soon as disaster strikes, rebuild in their aftermath and prepare for future disasters,” she said. More

With 1 October 2023 looming, a US government shutdown appears imminent, and the farm bill is set to expire. Members of both the House and Senate have been drafting proposals for its renewal, which happens every five years. The bill is responsible for financing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that many Americans rely on to feed their families.Though hunger prevention advocates are calling for Congress to renew the bill before its expiration, the likelihood of a freshly revised iteration being near completion by the end of the day is low. Yet, food insecurity continues to rise in America.More than 34 million people, including nine million children, are struggling to put food on the table.In a recent household survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, more than 26 million Americans said they did not have enough to eat during the 12-day period of the study that concluded this month. That sample represents nearly a 50 percentage increase during a similar window from 2021. This upsurge is due to a number of factors, including the end of pandemic-era aid.Another study released this month by Feeding America reflected a similar finding, emphasizing the far-reaching consequences of hunger.That report underscored how the pandemic reshaped the landscape of food insecurity and its lingering effects, signaling one of America’s gravest growing crises. Approximately 80% of Americans experiencing hunger believe that inflation and rising food costs have worsened the issue of hunger nationwide and 93% of those surveyed expressed concern that the situation will deteriorate even more. They highlighted factors such as rising housing costs, job loss, unemployment, the presence of chronic health conditions or disabilities, and an abundance of low-paying jobs as significant contributors and interconnected root causes of their food vulnerability.“The pandemic not only put hunger in the spotlight, it also revealed just how many Americans were put in a situation that kept them from accessing the food they needed,” a spokesperson for Feeding America, a network of over 200 food banks nationwide, said. “And now, food prices and supply chain disruptions are affecting food banks, and households’ budgets for millions of families are tightening.”Another element of the rise in food insecurity, which saw almost 50 million Americans turning to food pantries and soup kitchens in 2022, is cuts to social assistance and fixed-income programs like food stamps, the child tax credit and pensions.“When someone is on a fixed income, it’s usually due to a disability, or that they are seniors,” said Marian Hutchins, executive director of the Father’s Heart Ministries. “Someone on disability is not allowed to work if they are receiving money for social security disability. So unless they can work and have it be off the books, they cannot get resources to match the rising cost of food.”Many who work on the front lines, like Hutchins, say the pandemic exacerbated this epidemic and exposed deep-seated vulnerabilities in our food systems and economic structures.At the non-profit Hutchins runs on the Lower East Side of New York, she said many keep returning because they tell her they simply can’t afford basic necessities, including food, on their own. And that number continues to be staggering, compounded by the end of the extra pandemic-era Snap – formerly the Food Stamp Program, which is still commonly referred to as just food stamps – benefits.Among their other food programs and services, the Father’s Heart Ministries, founded in 1997, hands out roughly 1,100 food pantry bags in a two-and-a-half hour window on Saturdays. Pre-pandemic, they averaged 560 guests in that same window. That’s a 96% increase. They’ve also seen a rise in new guest registration. Before the pandemic, they averaged 13 per Saturday – (during the pandemic, it was 43 per Saturday) – now, it’s closer to 20. That’s a 53% increase.Many reports and similar organizations echo this stark and steady increase, correlating it to the nearly 60% historic increase in poverty.“The Feeding America network of food banks distributed 5.3bn meals in fiscal year 2023,” the organization’s spokesperson said. “The latest Feeding America food bank pulse survey data shows that around 70% of responding food banks report seeing demand for food assistance increase or stay the same in July 2023 compared to June.”The CEO of City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, Jilly Stephens, resonated those sentiments.“Average monthly visits to New York City food pantries and soup kitchens this year are up more than 60% compared to 2019,” she said. “City Harvest programs alone are seeing nearly 1m more visits each month than in 2019. In fact, the number of visits is nearly as high as at any point over the last three years. We know from previous crises that it can take years for food security levels to recover, and we expect the need to remain high for several years.”The pandemic has also particularly aggravated food insecurity among families with children and communities of color, who were already disproportionately affected by hunger before the outbreak. Many of these households don’t meet the eligibility criteria for federal nutrition programs, forcing them to turn to local food banks and other community food assistance programs for additional support. Research shows that there is a higher prevalence of hunger in African American, Latino and Native American communities that can be attributed to systemic racial injustices.Hutchins said food poverty is not as recognized of an issue as it once was because the glaring exigency of the pandemic has dwindled, so many Americans assume things are back to normal. But for many families struggling to feed their families, that’s far from the reality.“There was a lot of public awareness during the pandemic,” Hutchins said, “where media showed lines of people at soup kitchens and food pantries. People think it’s over now, but the same crazy food prices that we are all facing are being faced by those who have no alternatives but community food pantries. No one is talking about seniors or single-parent homes. Ignoring the problem could create more problems not only for our guests but for communities in general as people become desperate to survive.”That desperation to survive fueled by rising food costs is palpable. According to the Feeding America report, nearly 70% of Americans believe that the primary causes of hunger and food insecurity are inflation and increasing food prices.Food prices have been inflating in recent months due to factors such as supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index for food increased by 7.1% in July 2023 compared to the previous year.According to the recent food price outlook report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), it is expected that food prices will see a 5.9% increase this year.Specifically, prices for food at home – groceries from supermarkets – rose by 0.4% from June to July 2023 and were 3.6% higher compared to July 2022.The report also highlights expectations of continued price hikes across 10 food-at-home categories: beef and veal (4.2% increase), other meats (4.8%), poultry (3%), dairy products (4.1%), fats and oils (9.6%), processed fruits and vegetables (9.2%), sugar and sweets (9.3%), cereals and bakery products (9%), nonalcoholic beverages (7.6%) and other foods (7.4%).With no immediate end in sight, hunger prevention programs like the Father’s Heart Ministries have stepped in to fill the gap, turning to food organizations like City Harvest for ongoing support.Stephens said City Harvest supports grants and programs that provide funding and support for food access and justice solutions “led or informed by people with lived expertise, like the people that operate or participate in pantry services”.“Local food initiatives are critical to fighting food insecurity,” she continued, “because no one knows their neighborhood’s assets and challenges better than the people who live and work there.”Though many on the frontlines acknowledge there is no quick fix to food insecurity, they note that awareness is essential, and concerted efforts are needed to create lasting change and ensure that no one goes hungry. To address the widening gap of food deserts and overall insecurity in America, many advocates like Stephens and Hutchins are calling for increased Snap benefits, investing in workforce development and job training programs and initiatives, tackling the root causes of poverty and inequality through policy changes, and expanded access to food banks and other community-based food assistance programs.“One of the best ways to reduce food insecurity is a stronger farm bill,” Stephens said, “which is being reauthorized by Congress this year. The vast majority of the farm bill’s budget is devoted to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.”While emphasizing the importance of transformative policy, Hutchins added that food insecurity is also a community-level issue.“Contributing and volunteering at places that are already providing food is the best way to start,” Hutchins said. “We can talk about the problem, but showing up to help is what our volunteers do.” More

Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to join a picket line when he stopped at a General Motors facility just outside Detroit to show support for striking United Auto Workers last week. “Stick with it. You deserve a significant raise,” Biden told the crowd.A day later, Donald Trump told raucous blue-collar supporters at a speech north of Detroit: “Just get your union guys, your leaders, to endorse me and I will take care of the rest.”The tug-of-war remarks represented the unofficial opening salvoes of the 2024 election season as the parties’ likely candidates set out to woo blue-collar voters in Michigan, a critical bloc in a state that’s a must-win in any White House bid.“Politically, Michigan is ground zero right now because of the auto strike,” said Bill Ballenger, a conservative state political analyst. Biden, he said, was seeking to shore up his slipping support among unions, while Trump had spotted a “weakness in Bidenomics” that the former president was set on exploiting as the strike pushes into its third week.Trump won Michigan, an upper midwest swing state, by about 12,000 votes in 2016. Biden took the state by nearly 150,000 votes in the next election. Michigan is a heavily unionized state, and Biden won with 64% support among union members. But August polling found support among Michigan union members hangs at 49%, and Biden and Trump are in effect tied.“Clearly there’s division among the rank and file,” said pollster Bernie Porn, president of Epic MRA, a Michigan-based survey research firm. Political observers say Michigan is very much in play in the 2024 election.The dueling visits showcased two very different visions for America’s future. Trump criticized the Biden administration’s support for the auto industry’s shift to electric vehicles, which unions fear because they require fewer workers to make. “You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics,” Trump told the crowd in a meandering, hour-long speech. (Later he insisted he would make “sex changes for children” illegal.)Biden’s minutes’ long pitch zeroed in on the unions: “The fact of the matter is that you guys, the UAW – you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 … You made a lot of sacrifices. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too.”The visits also put on display two competing styles. Despite the historic nature of Biden’s visit, the daytime visit was a low-key, invite-only event among a small crowd of UAW members. The tone was supportive, good-natured. At the nearby Ford Michigan Assembly plant, Biden’s supporters viewed it as a morale boost.Trump, by contrast, set up at night in a non-union shop in Macomb county, an Obama-to-Trump blue-collar swing county. Hundreds of boisterous supporters lined the streets, banging on drums and shouting “Freedom!” and breaking into chants of “USA! USA!” and “Back the blue!” The Trump campaign dismissed Biden’s visit as a “cheap photo op”, and said the rank and file support him, not Biden. Some of his supporters echoed that.“We’ve always known that the blue-collar workers are behind Trump, but the party heads and elites have such a command of the microphone that the floor worker is really underrepresented,” said Trump supporter James Anthony Minnick Jr after attending the former president’s Wednesday speech.Biden’s visit seems to convey an understanding of that, political observers say, but despite that the UAW leadership has been very clear in who it supports.“I see no point in meeting with [Trump] because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” the UAW president, Shawn Fain, said before Trump’s visit. “He serves a billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”Biden had attended the UAW picket at Fain’s invitation, but the union has yet to officially endorse anyone, which could signal an understanding of rank-and-file divisions, or could be read as leverage to gain continuing White House support.Scott Malenfant, 47, an Obama-to-Ted Cruz-to-Trump supporter and union rep, was among those on the picket line outside Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant on Tuesday who split from UAW leadership. After Biden’s speech, the 23-year line veteran said Democrats lost him and other union members over the EV transition and their support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Democrats are “on the record saying those jobs are never coming back”, Malenfant noted.“Trump is the first one who said ‘We’re going to bring these jobs back,’” he added while acknowledging that Republicans are typically anti-union. But Trump was different, he said: “All he cares about is whether the country does well … and at least he’s the one pushing for workers.”Biden’s Tuesday message that auto companies need to reward workers did resonate with some who are undecided, or describe themselves as “not political”, like Lisa Carter, 53, who works in the plant’s stamping department. She has two jobs despite 17 years on the line, and she cannot afford to buy a new Ford.“If you’re for the people, then I’m for you,” Carter said. “And Trump can stay where he’s at because when he was president he said we make too much money.”Biden needs to address the EV concerns, Porn said, and talk to union members about how batteries and chips could be produced by autoworkers in the state. The visit also comes in the wake of another Trump indictment, and Porn said the former president’s mounting legal numbers appear to be a drag on his favorability numbers, which are down to 37%.Some of that may be down to Trump’s ever mounting legal troubles. But those cases are unlikely to shake his diehard supporters “because they see him as he likes to see himself – a victim, a martyr being crucified by the deep state”, said Ballenger.For now, with more than a year to go before the election, Porn and Ballenger each say Biden has the edge in the state despite his concerning poll numbers. But Ballenger warned the race was far from decided. Just like in 2016: “It could be deja vu all over again,” Ballenger said. More

Pro-Nazi propaganda, courtesy of the US post office? This unlikely scheme was hatched by George Sylvester Viereck, a German-born American who between 1937 and 1941 sought to marshal US sentiment against intervention in Europe. Those who heeded him included prominent members of Congress, such as Burton Wheeler of Montana and Rush Holt Sr of West Virginia, anti-interventionist Democratic senators known for speeches that prompted accusations of antisemitism. Viereck’s contacts on Capitol Hill allowed him to place anti-interventionist speeches in the appendix to the congressional record. Thanks to friends in high places, he could order inexpensive reprints and have German-American groups mail them out on government postage.If this sounds out of place in the land of the free, it shouldn’t – according to an illuminating new anthology, Fascism in America: Past and Present, edited by Gavriel D Rosenfeld and Janet Ward. In 12 chapters plus an introduction and epilogue, the co-editors and their contributors make the case that fascism has existed on US soil for well past a century and remains disturbingly present today.“We don’t sufficiently teach civics or democratic awareness [in high schools], how fascism and far-right extremist movements have a long history in the US,” Rosenfeld said. “We think we’re an exception, that America fought ‘the good war’ to defeat fascism and Nazism. We patted ourselves on the back for many decades as ‘the greatest generation’ – a useful myth for American public life that blinded us to darker undercurrents in our society.”Ward mentions history from even further back, “eugenics-based scientific standards” that “informed opinions and policies on what it meant to be included not just as fully American, but as fully human” in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, subsequently influencing Nazi laws regarding race.Rosenfeld is president of the Center for Jewish History in New York and a professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut. From the UK, Ward is a history professor at the University of Oklahoma; she is a past president of the German Studies Association and was an American Council on Education fellow at Yale. Both are scholars of Germany, including the second world war and the Holocaust. (Rosenfeld authored a chapter in the anthology, on alternate histories of the war, from The Plot Against America to Watchmen.) Both editors became alarmed by developments during the Trump administration that suggested parallels with the rise of Nazism and hinted at a reawakening of homegrown fascist sentiments lying dormant for decades.“We redirected attention on our own backyard and applied the same kind of lens to a place that had not been subject to the same kind of scrutiny, the vulnerabilities in our own kind of democratic institutions,” Rosenfeld said. “We reached out to scholars in related fields – American studies, Black studies – to see what we could learn from the American experience … We were equally concerned about the present-day democratic backsliding.”Ward said: “More than one country has turned toward populism and the extreme right. It began to worry a lot of us, not just academics but cultural commentators.” The resulting volume is “very much part of a new awareness of the way in which traditional academics circulate to a broader public”.Collaborators include the New York University history professor Linda Gordon, who incorporated findings from a forthcoming project and The Second Coming of the KKK, her 2017 book about the years after the first world war. Ousmane K Power-Greene, an African American scholar at Clark University in Massachusetts, examined Black antifascist activism from the 1960s to the 1980s, by activists such as Angela Davis and H Rap Brown.Trump comes up repeatedly. Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, compares “Anarchy and the State of Nature in Donald Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany”. Marla Stone of Occidental College researched Trump-era detention facilities for migrant children. Her chapter title: “Concentration Camps in Trump’s America?”“It’s not just that we wanted to determine for ourselves, is Trump a fascist or not, is Trumpism fascist or not, is Maga-ism fascist or not,” Rosenfeld said, noting that such questions are frequently posed by scholars, journalists and readers. “We try to trace the evolving debate, the historical shift over time – of course, after the Charlottesville Unite the Right march in 2017 … [Trump’s] defending the Proud Boys at the 2020 debate, obviously after January 6 … it’s been a moving target.”Yet, Rosenfeld said, “ever since January 6, more people are inclined to believe that even if Trump is not a dogmatic fascist, so many of his followers are willing to use violence to overturn the rule of law, the constitution, to make it very concerning for people. At a certain point, you want to be safe rather than sorry, err on the side of caution, to believe we’re in a potential fascist moment.”The book suggests fascism in America might date back as far as the late 19th century, amid Jim Crow laws in the south and nativist fears over immigration from Europe. In the early 20th century, the US enacted infamously high immigration quotas, while domestic white supremacist groups thrived: the Ku Klux Klan during its 1920s resurgence, followed by Depression-era proto-fascist militant groups such as the Silver Legion, under William Dudley Pelley. While the interwar years witnessed clandestine German-backed attempts to mobilize Americans against intervention, the book makes it clear fascism needed no foreign encouragement.“Ultimately, this is an American story,” Ward said. “You can’t – you shouldn’t – look at fascism solely as an outside influence into the US … it needs to be looked at from within, as well as something coming in from without.”She noted that she received her doctorate from the University of Virginia, the campus on which the Charlottesville riots occurred six years ago.“The August 2017 events of Charlottesville pinpointed it for a lot of people,” Ward said. “The open demonstration of violence, the coming together of racism, antisemitism and white supremacy all at once through that ugly moment.”As to whether America is on the precipice of another such ugly moment, the co-editors are hoping democracy holds firm, just as it did in the second world war.“I’m going to be an optimist,” Ward said, “with education, with informed voices like the contributors to our book, with discourse and engagement [to prevent] a doomsday scenario with the new presidential election coming up.”Rosenfeld agreed, but could not help recalling a sobering lesson.“We know now that Franklin Roosevelt was still dealing with a nearly 20% unemployment rate on the eve of world war two,” he said. “Only billions and billions of dollars in military spending got us out of debt. All the isolationists got on board against the Nazis and Japan. Rightwingers were forced into silence.“It’s clear in retrospect,” he added, “that world war two did make the US a great power on the world stage. It also spared us the kind of fascism that Vichy France and Germany experienced, that many other countries experienced. We were spared the same thing – but it was a close call. We shouldn’t be complacent.”
Fascism in America is published in the US by Cambridge University Press More

An Indigenous justice activist is fighting for his life after a man wearing a hat with the Donald Trump slogan “Make America great again” allegedly shot him during a protest against the reinstallation of a statue honoring a Spanish conquistador in New Mexico.Jacob Johns was shot on Thursday morning in the northern New Mexico city of Española while demonstrating against plans to again erect a Juan de Oñate statue that previously had been taken down and put in storage. First responders flew Johns to a hospital in Albuquerque by helicopter after he was wounded.By Friday, he was recovering from emergency surgery, said a message on an online GoFundMe campaign set up in his support.The suspected shooter – 23-year-old Ryan Martinez – was arrested on charges of attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. On Friday, a judge ordered Martinez held without bond through at least the weekend.Johns was part of a crowd who had gathered at the Rio Arriba county annex building to celebrate officials’ postponement of plans to re-erect a statue of Oñate there. The conquistador and his Spanish compatriots carried out a 1599 massacre of hundreds of members of a pueblo tribe in what is now New Mexico.Crews had torn down Oñate’s statue from a spot in the community of Alcalde and had taken it into storage in 2020 amid racial justice protests ignited by a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd weeks earlier. But there were plans to stand the statue back up near the county annex, though protests forced officials to delay the monument’s reintroduction.A cellphone video posted on social media showed that a fight broke out near where a crowd was celebrating the postponement. At one point, the video showed the man identified as Martinez jump over a waist-high barrier and try to grab another man.Two more men then grappled with Martinez, who is seen leaping back over the barrier, grabbing a pistol from his waistband and aiming the weapon at those with whom he was tussling as voices yell, “Let him go!”Martinez, clad in a turquoise hooded sweatshirt, appeared to fire once. A voice shouted in pain, and Martinez ran toward a parking lot, according to the video. The recording then showed the driver of a white car speed away, honking the horn.In the moments before the shooting, the video in question captured a red hat getting knocked off Martinez’s head as he struggled with other men during the confrontation.Still images of Martinez taken earlier in the day showed that hat bore the “Make America great again” slogan.Additionally, according to the Daily Beast, a social media profile matching Martinez’s details featured the phrase “Fuck Joe Biden”. The profile also declared “Trump won”, echoing the false conspiracy theory that the former president was denied re-election by fraudsters.Police in Española later arrested Martinez and booked him into jail.Martinez’s arrest came after the second shooting surrounding a face-off of protesters and counter-protesters near the Oñate statue. In June 2020, during a rally calling for the statue’s removal, Steven Baca shot Scott Williams and was arrested on a count of aggravated battery with great bodily harm.Baca pleaded guilty to unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon as well as aggravated battery for pulling a protester down by her hair. Prosecutors dismissed the charge pertaining to the shooting, the Albuquerque Journal reported.The GoFundMe for Johns, the victim of Thursday’s shooting, described him as being a Hopi Native American.A photo from the Albuquerque Journal showed Johns – of Spokane, Washington – holding up a sign that read “Do Not Resurrect Oñate” next to a speaker before the shooting that wounded him in the upper torso. In that photo, Johns and the speaker stood before another pair of signs that read: “Not today Oñate.”Johns’s GoFundMe campaign described him as a climate activist, artist, musician and father to a teenage daughter. As of Friday, the campaign had raised more than $31,000 that organizers said were meant to help cover his medical bills as well as other family needs during what would “likely be a very lengthy recovery period”. More