US Politics

Tropical Storm Ophelia formed off the mid-Atlantic coast and was expected to bring heavy rain, storm surge and windy conditions over the weekend, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Friday.Ophelia had maximum sustained winds of 60mph (95km/h), according to a 2pm advisory from the Miami-based center. The storm was centered 150 miles (240km) south-east of Cape Fear, North Carolina, and was forecast to make landfall on Saturday morning.The governors of North Carolina and Virginia declared a state of emergency on Friday, and the intensifying weather system forced schools to close early and prompted organizers of weekend events to cancel.Rain was already moving inland across North Carolina by midday Friday with some areas expected to get up to seven inches (17.7cm) across eastern parts of the state and into south-east Virginia, forecasters said. Storm surge warning was in effect for some areas, with surges between three and five feet (0.9 to 1.5 meters) forecast for parts of North Carolina, the NHC reported.The system’s center is expected to move inland over eastern North Carolina and south-eastern Virginia and near the Chesapeake Bay through Sunday, the hurricane center’s director, Mike Brennan, said in a livestreamed briefing on Friday.A storm surge warning was in effect from Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, to Chincoteague, Virginia, and a tropical storm warning was issued from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to Fenwick Island, Delaware.Meanwhile, Hurricane Nigel was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone centered about 640 miles north-west of the Azores with maximum sustained winds of 70mph. There were no associated coastal watches or warnings as the storm moved north-east at 37mph, the NHC said in its final update on the system on Friday morning. More

From 2h agoBiden urged that “it’s time to ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines”, and for Congress to do more.He said the new federal Office of Gun Violence will be overseen by Kamala Harris, who has been “on the frontlines” her entire career as a prosecutor and as a attorney general.Listing the four primarily responsibilities of the newly formed office, he said none of those steps would alone “solve the entirety of the gun violence epidemic”. “Together, they will save lives,” he said.
I never thought even remotely say this in my whole career: guns are the number one killer of children in America. Guns are the number one killer of children in America.
In 2023, more than 500 mass shootings have taken place and “well over 30,000” deaths as a result of gun violence, he said, describing it as “totally unacceptable”.Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
The Republican-led House all but disappeared for the long weekend after abruptly wrapping up its work on Thursday when the embattled speaker, Kevin McCarthy, failed to advance a stopgap government spending bill.
The White House planned to begin telling federal agencies to prepare for a shutdown. If Congress does not pass a spending bill before 1 October, the lapse in funding is expected to force hundreds of thousands of federal workers to go without pay and bring a halt to some crucial government services.
The historic US autoworkers’ strike as the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, called on 38 additional plants across 20 states to join the strike. During a livestream update, Fain announced the additional strikes at automaker plants as contract negotiations with the big three automakers remain far apart on economic issues. He invited Joe Biden to the picket line.
Joe Biden pledged to fight for gun safety laws while unveiling a new White House office of gun violence prevention. Kamala Harris will oversee the office. “On this issue, we do not have a moment to spare nor a life to spare,” she said in remarks on Friday.
Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, and his wife have been charged with bribery offenses in connection with accepting gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz, among other gifts, in exchange for protecting three businessmen and influencing the government of Egypt.
The conservative justice Clarence Thomas has attended at least two donor events organized by the Koch network, the ultra-right political organization founded by the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which has brought multiple cases before the supreme court, according to a new report.
The third Republican presidential primary debate will be held on 8 November in Miami. Donald Trump, the clear frontrunner of the party’s race, skipped the first debate and recently announced he’ll also forego the second.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson announced he is leaving the Democratic party and becoming a Republican.
That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, and the US politics live blog today. Have a good weekend.The third Republican presidential primary debate will be held on 8 November in Miami.The date, first reported by CNN, is more than a month after the second debate which is scheduled to take place on 27 September at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. The first took place on 23 August in Milwaukee.Donald Trump, the clear frontrunner of the party’s race, skipped the first debate and recently announced he’ll also forego the second.Maxwell Frost, the 26-year-old congressman from Florida, described Joe Biden as “one of the fiercest champions of gun violence protection” as he stood beside the president and vice president at the Rose Garden.Frost said that as the first member of Gen Z to be voted into Congress last year, he is often asked what got him involved in politics and his answer is:
I didn’t want to get shot in school. I was 15 years old when a shooter walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 20 children and six teachers. Like millions of kids, I went to school the next day with anxiety and fear that my life would be taken, my friends’ lives would be taken, and my family’s lives would be taken by senseless gun violence.
He said that he had served as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives before being elected to Congress, and that he learned the “brutal truth” that the time people pay the most attention is usually “coupled with carnage and death”.
Not today. Today the country sees us here, at the White House, with a president who is taking action.
Biden said that for every member of Congress who refuses to act on gun violence, we will “need to elect new members of Congress”.
There comes a point where our voices are so loud, our determination is so clear, that we can longer be stopped. We’re reaching that point. We’ve reached that point today, in my view, where the safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot.
He said the “deadly and traumatic price” of inaction on gun control “can no longer be the lives of our children and the people of our country”.Biden urged that “it’s time to ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines”, and for Congress to do more.He said the new federal Office of Gun Violence will be overseen by Kamala Harris, who has been “on the frontlines” her entire career as a prosecutor and as a attorney general.Listing the four primarily responsibilities of the newly formed office, he said none of those steps would alone “solve the entirety of the gun violence epidemic”. “Together, they will save lives,” he said.
I never thought even remotely say this in my whole career: guns are the number one killer of children in America. Guns are the number one killer of children in America.
In 2023, more than 500 mass shootings have taken place and “well over 30,000” deaths as a result of gun violence, he said, describing it as “totally unacceptable”.Joe Biden, who was introduced by Florida congressman Maxwell Frost, announced the creation of the first ever federal office of gun violence prevention and said he was “determined to send a clear message about how important this issue is to me and to the country”.He said that after every mass shooting, he has heard the same message all over the country: “Please do something. Do something to prevent a tragedy.” He said his administration has been working “relentlessly to do something”.He said that last year, he signed into law the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which he descried as “the most significant gun safety law” and an “important first step”.
For the first time in three decades, we came together to overcome the relentless opposition from a gun lobby, gun manufacturers and so many politicians opposing common sense gun legislation.
“We’re not stopping here,” Biden added.Harris said she “owed” it to the parents and children she has comforted who has been traumatized by losing a family member to gun violence.
On this issue, we do not have a moment to spare nor a life to spare.
The vice president said the administration will “use the full power of the federal government” to “strengthen the coalition of survivors, and advocates, and students, and teachers, and elected leaders, to save lives and fight for the rights of all people to be safe from fear”.Kamala Harris, speaking at the Rose Garden, said Americans “should be able to shop in a grocery store, walk down the street, or sit peacefully in a classroom” and be safe from gun violence.The US has been “torn apart by the fear and trauma that results from gun violence”, the vice president said, standing besides Joe Biden and Florida congressman Maxwell Frost.
In our country today, one in five people has lost a family member to gun violence. Across our nation every day, about 120 Americans are killed by a gun.
The impact of gun violence is not equal across all communities, she said.
Black Americans are 10 times more likely to be victims of gun violence and homicide. Latino Americans twice as likely.
Harris said that, as a former courtroom prosecutor, she had seen “with my own eyes what a bullet does to the human body”.
We cannot normalise any of this. These are not simply statistics. These are our children.
My colleague David Smith is at the Rose Garden event and has tweeted this picture of Biden and Harris emerging from the White House:Tennessee state representative Justin Jones has been spotted heading to the Rose Garden ahead of Joe Biden’s speech announcing the formation of the nation’s first federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention, according to a White House pool report.Jones is one of the “Tennessee Three”, along with Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson, who was expelled earlier this year for his role in a pro-gun control protest inside the Tennessee Capitol.Throughout his presidency, Joe Biden has used executive actions to regulate homemade firearms – known as ghost guns – in the same way as traditional firearms, and to clarify who counts as a gun seller and thus is required by law to conduct background checks.Last year he also signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that, among other things, tightens background checks and bolsters mental health programs.Biden has advocated for re-instating the national assault weapons ban and expanding background checks since he was vice-president. A historic increase in gun homicides in 2020 pushed community-based violence prevention further up the administration’s agenda.Joe Biden is expected to announce the nation’s first federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention during a Rose Garden event at 2.45pm Eastern time.The office will be overseen by the office of the vice president, Kamala Harris, who will also be speaking at the event.In a statement released on Thursday, Biden said:
In the absence of that sorely-needed action, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention along with the rest of my Administration will continue to do everything it can to combat the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing our families, our communities, and our country apart.
The White House just skirted around a question from the press about whether Joe Biden believes the New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez should resign.The senator, who has an influential position as chair of the US Senate committee on foreign relations, was indicted earlier today on bribery charges.“I’m going to be really careful here and not comment because it is an active matter,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.Jean-Pierre said the matter was the US Senate’s to deal with and that “discussions are happening” there about the “next steps.”Congresswoman Lucy McBath is addressing the press in the west wing at the daily briefing, which today is headlining on the new national gun violence prevention office. The new project will be officially launched just under an hour from now.Georgia representative McBath told how her young son was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2012 and she was “robbed of every dream that a mother holds,” she said, and noted that she would never see her son graduate high school, go to college or get married.“Every single day, over 100 people are shot and killed in the United States. Gun violence has no boundaries,” she said, whether people become victims in suburbs, cities or rural areas.McBath will join Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the rose garden shortly for the formal launch of the new office to prevent gun violence.Joe Biden and Kamala Harris plan to speak in the rose garden at the White House in about an hour on the creation of the nation’s first federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention, to be led by the US vice president.In a few moments, the White House press briefing will begin, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre accompanied at the podium by Georgia representative Lucy McBath, who campaigns on gun safety. She lost her son to gun violence.This is what she posted yesterday:Joe Biden has told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy that the US will provide a small number of long-range missiles to help in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, three US officials and a congressional official told NBC News on Friday.The officials did not confirm when the missiles would be delivered and remain anonymous as they have not been authorised to speak on the subject publicly.A congressional official told NBC News that there was still a debate about the type of missile that would be sent and how many would be delivered to Ukraine.The news comes after the White House rejected Zelenskiy’s request for Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to be sent to Ukraine as part of a new military aid package to bolster the country’s counteroffensive.For all the developments in the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion and related geopolitics, follow our Ukraine live blog here.Zelenskiy was given the red carpet treatment at the White House yesterday, after two days in New York at the United Nations General Assembly. Before visiting Biden he was on Capitol Hill meeting with US Senators. More

The Republican-led US House of Representatives has all but disappeared for the long weekend after abruptly wrapping up its work on Thursday when the embattled speaker, Kevin McCarthy, failed to advance a stopgap government spending bill, as members continued to clash with just days left to avert a federal shutdown.The White House on Friday planned to begin telling federal agencies to prepare for a shutdown, AP reported, citing a government official.If Congress does not pass a spending bill before 1 October, the lapse in funding is expected to force hundreds of thousands of federal workers to go without pay and bring a halt to some crucial government services.McCarthy, who had projected optimism at the start of Thursday, now faces a reality in which his speakership hangs by a thread.The California Republican was dealt his second humiliating defeat of the week, after a proposal to take up House Republicans’ defense spending bill failed in a vote of 216 to 212, after five hard-right members – Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Eli Crane of Arizona, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Rosendale of Montana – joined Democrats in opposing the motion.The Thursday vote marked the second time this week that the motion had failed, after members of the extreme rightwing House Freedom caucus first blocked the bill on Tuesday.Given that the defense spending bill is usually one of the least contentious spending measures in the House, the second failed vote spelled major trouble for the spending talks. Leaving the floor on Thursday, McCarthy voiced exasperation with his critics within the Republican conference.“I don’t understand why anybody votes against bringing the idea and having the debate,” McCarthy told reporters, adding: “This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down. That doesn’t work.”Donald Trump, the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 despite four criminal indictments, has made a point of interfering from the sidelines, urging Republicans to use government funding as leverage to oppose his prosecution, as two of the criminal cases are federal.Emphasizing the serious threat posed by a shutdown, the White House implored Republicans to “stop playing political games with people’s lives”. “Extreme House Republicans showed yet again that their chaos is marching us toward a reckless and damaging government shutdown,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Thursday.The White House telling the government to prepare for the possibility of a shutdown is standard practice seven days out from a federal disruption, even one as rare as a government shutdown. As of Friday there was no endgame in sight in the House.McCarthy has repeatedly tried to appease his hard-right flank by agreeing to the steep spending cuts they are demanding to keep government open. But cheered on by Trump, the conservatives have all but seized control in dramatic fashion.On Thursday even a stopgap bill – called a continuing resolution or CR – to keep government funding past the 30 September deadline was a non-starter for some on the right flank.The Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said House Republicans continue to be held captive by the most extreme element of their conference.Many US government services would be disrupted and hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed without pay if federal funding stops on 1 October. Workers deemed “essential” would remain on the job, but without pay.Many government functions would be affected. Among those, the 2 million US military personnel would remain at their posts, but roughly half of the Pentagon’s 800,000 civilian employees would be furloughed. However, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration would continue maintaining nuclear weapons.Agents at the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service and other federal law enforcement agencies would remain on the job. Prison staffers likewise would continue to work.Criminal prosecutions, including the two federal cases against former Trump, would continue. Most civil litigation would be postponed and aid to local police departments and other grants could be delayed.Border patrol and immigration enforcement agents would continue to work, as would customs officers. The Coast Guard would continue operations.Most of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer-protection workers would be furloughed, as would half of its antitrust employees.Airport security screeners and air-traffic control workers would be required to work and US embassies and consulates would remain open.It is not clear how the 63 US national parks would be affected. They remained open during the 2018-2019 shutdown, through restrooms and information desks were closed and waste disposal was halted. They were closed during a 2013 shutdown.Scientific research at government institutions would be disrupted. The Securities and Exchange Commission would furlough roughly 90% of its 4,600 employees. More

The US senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, and his wife have been charged with bribery offenses in connection with accepting gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz, among other gifts, in exchange for protecting three businessmen and influencing the government of Egypt.FBI special agents discovered “a lot of gold” provided by Fred Daibes – a builder, and one of the three businessmen – during a search of the Menendez couple’s home in New Jersey, according to Damian Williams, US attorney for the southern district of New York.In a press conference on Friday, he said agents discovered approximately $500,000 of cash “stuffed into envelopes and closets”, some of which was “stuffed in the senator’s jacket pockets”.The FBI also found the Mercedes-Benz car that Jose Uribe, another of the three businessmen and a former insurance agent, had provided the couple, he said.“We are not done,” said Williams. “And I want to encourage anyone with information to come forward and to come forward quickly.”Menendez, who has been in the Senate since 2006, and his wife face three criminal counts each, including: conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. The senator’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Menendez, the chair of the US Senate committee on foreign relations, had previously been charged in New Jersey with accepting private flights, campaign contributions and other bribes from a wealthy patron in exchange for official favors, but a 2017 trial ended in a jury deadlock.The federal government now seeks the forfeiture of assets including the Menendezes’ New Jersey home, a 2019 Mercedez-Benz vehicle, about $566,000 in cash, gold bars and funds from a bank account.The businessmen in the case – Wael Hana, Uribe and Daibes – were also charged in the scheme.Prosecutors said Hana, who is originally from Egypt, arranged dinners and meetings between Menendez and Egyptian officials in 2018 at which the officials pressed Menendez on the status of US military aid. In exchange, Hana put Nadine Menendez on his company’s payroll, prosecutors said.The New Jersey senator is also alleged to have “improperly pressured” a senior official at the Department of Agriculture to “protect a lucrative monopoly that the government of Egypt had awarded to [Wael] Hana” and that Hana used to “fund certain bribe payments”, Williams said.The indictment also alleges that Menendez used his power and influence to try to disrupt a criminal investigation and prosecution undertaken by the New Jersey attorney general’s office related to “an associate and relative of [Jose] Uribe”.Egypt at the time was one of the largest recipients of US military aid, but the state department had withheld $195m in 2017 and canceled an additional $65.7m until the country could demonstrate improvements on human rights and democracy.Menendez at a meeting in 2018 told Hana non-public information about the status of the aid, prosecutors said. Hana then texted an Egyptian official: “The ban on small arms and ammunition to Egypt has been lifted,” according to an indictment made public on Friday.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

The Chicago police department is under investigation for allegations of sexual misconduct with recently arrived asylum seekers who are living in several police precincts across the city.One case features an officer who allegedly impregnated an 18-year-old.The investigation follows a report that a police officer had “sexual contact with an unidentified underage female migrant, and indicated [that] several other unidentified officers … may also have engaged in similar misconduct”, Andrea Kersten, chief administrator of civilian office of police accountability (Copa), the city agency that investigates police misconduct, said at a summer press conference.Chicago has received 14,000 asylum seekers since August 2022. More than 7,000 are currently being accommodated in citywide shelters but almost 2,000 are living on the floors of police precincts in almost every law enforcement district of the city.People are also sleeping rough at Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports, and more arrive daily, some bussed there by Texas authorities who refused to liaise with the Democratic-led cities where they dispatch people who have crossed the US-Mexico border and have applied for asylum.Investigations are ongoing and began in July after claims from a city employee working at one police precinct prompted city officials to quickly move asylum seekers to another location, but then things got murky when Copa announced that officials had not identified any asylum seekers claiming to be victims of sexual misconduct by police officers. The agency said the investigation would continue and, since then, there have been no public updates.The Guardian requested comment from the mayor’s office and Copa but received no response.The Illinois Democratic congressman Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, who has joined calls for the Biden administration to expand work permits and provide more federal resources, said in a statement: “Our migrant neighbors came to Chicago seeking safety and stability. Police officers are sworn to protect our communities, not engage in illegal sexual conduct with teenagers and others in their care. This alleged behavior is completely unacceptable. I expect the city’s investigation to be timely, thorough, transparent, and lead to accountability for all who are found guilty.”As Chicago has struggled to quickly find temporary housing for thousands, asylum seekers have been obliged to bed down in police precinct lobbies, where reports vary from station to station on the quality of living conditions and what reception families have had from the cops working there.One single mother, Nelli Reina, arrived in Chicago from Colombia in early September, after being bussed from the southern border with her 14-month-old-son.“More than anything, I’m worried about the cold, because we sleep on the cold floor,” she told the Guardian in Spanish last week at precinct 12 on the Near West Side, while she waits for a shelter place.At many precincts, bedding and belongings are stacked up by the windows during the day to clear walkways, and often piled outside.As winter beckons, the new mayor, Brandon Johnson, a progressive, had talked about about erecting heated tents and shortly after that signed a $29m contract with a private security firm to install them, particularly for asylum seekers staying at police precincts and the airports, Crain’s Chicago Business and the Chicago Tribune reported.The company, GardaWorld Federal Services, already has a state contract with Illinois but is a highly controversial choice because of its role in heavily criticized migrant detention and relocations programs in other states, the Tribune further reported.Reina said: “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. It’s the first time I’m in this country and I don’t know the matter of the cold and all that, of the snow. So we are praying and asking God to get us out of here soon.”As she spoke, she and others opened up a trash bag filled with children’s clothes that a community volunteer had just dropped off.Reina told the Guardian that just a few days ago, her son ended up at the hospital.“He hadn’t eaten and he started to asphyxiate and cough a lot,” she said. “When we arrived at the hospital, they put him on a machine for asphyxiation, and they put me outside for dehydration.” Reina is diabetic and her blood sugar levels frequently drop due to lack of proper nutrition. She has been asking city employees if she can be transferred to a shelter, where she thought at least her son would have a warm bed to sleep in and could eat better, she said.Chicago’s response to the increase in arriving migrants is shared by various city departments and partner organizations, the office of emergency management said. The office did not give details about how and why migrants end up at police precincts and what protocols and procedures are in place.Diana Alpizar, director of career pathways at the Instituto del Progreso Latino, a non-profit organization in Chicago that provides education opportunities to immigrants, has been coordinating volunteer efforts at one police station, with some city funding.She was sorting socks, towels, diapers and other basics at her office for newly arrived families, which she put in bags ready for distribution.For asylum seekers staying at the precinct, Alpizar said: “The rule is to stay outside after 10am while the inside is cleaned and disinfected and people can come back inside when it’s time for bed.”In her opinion, the staff is “indifferent” and not “sympathizing”, she said. Police officers declined to talk to the Guardian.Precinct 12 is currently housing 10 to 15 families. There is one bathroom with a single toilet, sink and mirror, which the migrants are not supposed to use. Some started going to a splash pad for kids in a nearby public park to clean themselves, but Maria Bolivar, another woman sleeping at the precinct, said that the water playground was then closed and she believes the water supply was “locked” to stop migrants using it. Bolivar came to the US with her children aged nine and 11 from Venezuela.She said she fills up cups with water to pour on herself and her children to clean them. Then she dries off with a towel and said she also dries the floor and cleans thoroughly so that the staff doesn’t notice any mess.Another Venezuelan, Yannis Soto, said: “We are in a place that we have to keep clean so that people don’t speak ill of us.”A volunteer at another precinct said the asylum seekers she helps are desperate to work and fend for themselves while their applications go through the legal system, and one told her she meticulously cleans the police bathroom to “make sure it’s neat so they don’t close the doors on us”.On Wednesday, the Biden administration, under pressure from some senior Democrats in Washington, state governors and city mayors, said it would grant temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan asylum seekers already in the US, quickly making them eligible to work.A local church provides food most days. City shelters, meanwhile, provide three meals a day, and Alpizar said the situation is more stable as asylum seekers are connected to a case manager to assist them with their immigration applications, and also to social services and possible housing.But people have reported problems at shelters too, however, including two women who told local news outlet Block Club Chicago that they were not given enough food and some of it was moldy. They also reported cold showers and strict rules preventing volunteers bringing supplies to them.Alpizar said that once at a shelter, asylum seekers begin working with a case manager who takes on their immigration cases. But not everyone will qualify for asylum. Some get permission to stay and work, some will get deported or end up living a precarious, undocumented life. “They get lost in the shadows,” she said.Meanwhile, Reina received blankets for her son and clothes from the volunteers. She’s waiting for news about a shelter. “They took my name down and gave me and my baby a number: 214. I don’t really know what my luck will be,” she said. More

Almost immediately after I was sent to prison, I was assigned to a “program”, the term American prison officials use for a job. I was to sweep the prison hallways, alongside roughly 30 other men. Together we pushed brooms across gray corridors hour after hour, day after day.No matter how many hours I worked, I couldn’t afford toilet paper, soap or toothpaste. We had to pay for basic hygiene products at exploitative markups, way more than they cost in free society, and I was paid 10 cents an hour. To survive in prison, even with a full-time job, I was forced to rely on family, who struggled to support me financially.There’s a misleading narrative pushed by officials about prison labor, one that falsely frames prison jobs as rehabilitative. Nothing could be further from the truth.In prison, my work was meaningless and dehumanizing. It conveyed no new skills, taught me no life lessons and earned me next to nothing. It did not build my résumé, prepare me to navigate workplace relationships or teach me how to budget. It served only to devalue my labor and person. Prisons are about punishment, not rehabilitation.I had no choice in whether I went to work or not – and there were no sick days. If I didn’t go, I would be locked in my cell for 23 hours a day. And as little as it was, I needed the pay.About halfway through my sentence, I had the chance to apply to the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most renowned and rigorous college-in-prison programs in the US. The opportunity changed the trajectory of my life. Graduating from Bard College with my bachelor’s degree gave me something that no one could take away: an education. It was a hard-won prize, especially given the system’s intent to let me languish.Sitting in those classrooms better prepared me for work outside. Engaging with other students prepared me to later engage with co-workers; interacting with professors prepared me to deal with supervisors. Alongside classes in philosophy, political economy and differential equations, I was learning valuable social and professional skills that were radically at odds with the reality of prison.It costs New York around $70,000 a year in taxpayer money to imprison someone. It costs the BPI about $10,000 a year to educate an incarcerated student. New York’s recidivism rate is 40%, while graduates of the BPI and similar programs recidivate at only 4%, a tenfold decrease. Yet, despite its clear positive record, only 300 of New York’s 30,000 incarcerated people are enrolled at the BPI in any given semester. I was one of a lucky few.Prisons are designed to warehouse, traumatize and exploit people, then send them back home in worse shape than when they entered the system. Despite having worked every day, the vast majority of people are released with no job experience, no references and no hope. Some would take this to mean that the system is failing. And it is with regard to public safety, rehabilitation and justice, but it’s horrifyingly successful at two things: guaranteeing jobs for some and perpetuating slavery for others.Over the years, I learned that prison officials were not interested in giving us fruitful educational and job opportunities that allowed us to go home and stay home. The reality is much more sinister. Prisons are a job program for officers that requires us to keep coming back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYou may be familiar with company towns and coal towns; in the US, we have prison towns, too. In New York, all state prisons were built upstate as economic stimuli in rural districts and failing farm communities. The facilities imprison predominantly Black and brown inner-city residents who toil under a class of white overseers. I remember a guard bending over to shackle me one day and saying, “I just want to thank you for being here because I’m too old to be digging ditches.” My body and my labor made him an easy living. The parallels to slavery are stark and visceral.Prison officials ignore these critiques and justify their practices by pointing to the exception in the 13th amendment of the US constitution – negotiated as a concession to slave states – that allows slavery “as a punishment for crime”. This exception enables states like Texas to force incarcerated people, mostly Black men, to pick cotton – even at a net loss to the state, because cruelty is the point.Thankfully, a new abolition movement is working to end this exception, and I hope for its success. Over the past few years, seven states – from Tennessee and Alabama to Oregon and Vermont – have voted to end the exception in their state constitutions. And earlier this year, just ahead of Juneteenth, Senators Jeff Merkley and Cory Booker and Congresswoman Nikema Williams introduced the abolition amendment in Congress to end the exception in the US constitution and outlaw the enslavement of incarcerated people. Today it has bipartisan support.After 12 years, I was released with $40 and a bus ticket. The state did not even give me an ID. But I was one of the lucky ones who went home with a college degree. Without it, I would probably be back in prison today. I understand the value of giving incarcerated people real opportunities. Enslaving people is diametrically opposed to it. Nothing good can come from it.
Dyjuan Tatro is the senior government affairs officer at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he focuses on expanding college access for incarcerated people, and an #EndTheException ambassador More

Kevin McCarthy ended the week in the same predicament that he started it with: teetering on the edge of a government shutdown as his House speakership hangs by a thread.The House wrapped up its work on Thursday with no clear path forward on advancing a stopgap government spending bill – a grim sign with just nine days left to avert a federal shutdown. In an advisory to members, the House Republican whip, Tom Emmer, said spending negotiations were “ongoing”, but he did not specify any plans for a vote on Friday.The announcement came hours after a procedural motion to advance House Republicans’ defense spending bill was defeated by far-right members for the second time this week. McCarthy and his team spent the week trying to appease and cajole the handful of holdouts within their conference who blocked the bill and also oppose a stopgap measure, but those efforts failed to sway enough members to advance the defense bill.The two failed votes on Tuesday and Thursday were particularly worrisome for McCarthy considering the defense spending bill is generally viewed as the least contentious of the funding bills that Congress must pass.“I don’t understand why anybody votes against bringing the idea and having the debate,” McCarthy told reporters on Thursday. “This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down. That doesn’t work.”If the House and the Senate do not pass a spending bill before 1 October, the lapse in funding will probably force hundreds of thousands of federal workers to go without pay and bring a halt to crucial government services. Emphasizing the serious threat posed by a shutdown, the White House implored Republicans to “stop playing political games with people’s lives”.“Extreme House Republicans showed yet again that their chaos is marching us toward a reckless and damaging government shutdown,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Thursday. “Extreme House Republicans can’t even get an agreement among themselves to keep the government running or to fund the military.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWith the odds of a shutdown rising, the White House again called on McCarthy to honor the funding deal outlined in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which passed the House and the Senate with bipartisan support earlier this year. That agreement, brokered between President Joe Biden and McCarthy, suspended the debt ceiling and outlined modest spending cuts for fiscal year 2024, but those cuts were deemed insufficient by members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.Capitalizing on House Republicans’ narrow majority, those hard-right members are now demanding steeper cuts in exchange for their support of a stopgap spending bill. McCarthy’s previous concessions to the holdout members, including the launch of an impeachment inquiry against Biden last week, have so far failed to swing enough Republican votes to keep the government open.It also remains unclear whether the Freedom Caucus’s proposed budget – which the White House has warned would include severe funding cuts for border security, education and food safety – can even pass muster with some of the more centrist members of the House Republican conference. Those suggested cuts will certainly fail to win widespread support in the Senate, which has taken a more bipartisan approach to the funding negotiations.In short, House Republicans continue to squabble over a budget plan that has no chance of ever becoming law, and some of them appear willing to shut down the government over the issue.Hanging over the spending fight is the very real question of whether McCarthy will be able to hold on to his speakership. Hard-right Republicans have made clear that, if McCarthy attempts to cut a deal with Democrats to fund the government, they will move to oust the speaker – a viable possibility when it only takes one member to call a vote to vacate the chair. But if hard-right Republicans do not drop their opposition to a stopgap bill, McCarthy may ultimately need Democrats’ support if he wants to avoid a shutdown.Depending on whether McCarthy can strike a deal with his critics, the speaker may soon have to choose between keeping the government open and keeping his gavel. More

Laurie Bertram Roberts never expected Americans to keep forking over money to pay for other people’s abortions. But the abortion fund director didn’t think it would get this dire.When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, people donated tens of thousands of dollars to Roberts’ organization, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, which is dedicated to helping people afford abortions and the many costs that come with it. But, in August, Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund had to stop funding abortions. It’s now closed until January 2024.“We just don’t have the money,” said Roberts, who co-founded the fund a decade ago. “It’s a strategic decision, to focus on fundraising for the next couple months, so that when we reopen, we’ll have money.”For now, the fund – which has historically also helped people with other costs of living and parenting – is only offering access to its pantry of food and household supplies. This will be the longest the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund has ever been shut down.“I didn’t think the emergency funding was gonna stay the same,” Roberts said in reference to the post-Roe donation spike. “But I didn’t expect for our funding to dip by 35 to 40% from last year.”When the US supreme court overturned Roe, Americans rushed to rage-donate millions to abortion funds and clinics scattered across the United States.Now, with the first year of post-Roe life in the rearview mirror, much of that money has been spent and the flow of donations has dried up for many organizations. And yet, as states continue to enact new bans and restrictions, the demand for help – and the cost of providing that help – has only grown.The Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund isn’t the only abortion fund that’s had to turn its lights off recently. In mid-June, just three days before the anniversary of Roe’s overturning, Indigenous Women Rising announced that its abortion fund had hit its monthly budget and would cease operations until July. The Mountain Access Brigade, which serves people in Appalachia, closed its support hotline for 10 days in July to save money. By mid-July, the Utah Abortion Fund announced that it had already exceeded its monthly budget and would close until late August.“You have increasing costs and decreasing donations,” said Hayley McMahon, who sits on the board of the Appalachian abortion fund Holler Health Justice and studies barriers to abortion at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “Those two things combined are a perfect storm for just absolutely wiping out abortion funds.”Much of the south and midwest have now banned or significantly limited abortion, forcing people in those states who want abortions to travel farther. Over the summer, Indiana, North Carolina and South Carolina all implemented significant new restrictions, which put even more pressure on abortion funds. In July, the Abortion Fund of Ohio helped 355 people. In August, the same month that neighboring Indiana outlawed almost all abortions, that number surged to 562.Lexi Dotson-Dufault, the Abortion Fund of Ohio’s patient navigation program manager, said that the money trickling into the fund is simply not enough to meet the demand. With three months left to go in 2023, the Abortion Fund of Ohio has already offered assistance to roughly 2,400 people. That’s 700 more than it helped in 2022, and almost three times as many people as it helped in 2021.“We don’t want to have to set limits as to what we can give people,” Dotson-Dufault said. “I think if the money doesn’t come in the way we need to, we will start to have to.”Three-quarters of US abortion patients have incomes below the federal poverty line. The cost of an abortion, meanwhile, has perhaps never been higher: more and more people have to travel for the procedure, buying flights and gas, booking hotel rooms, taking time off work. More than 60% of people who have had abortions have already given birth before, so they may also need to secure childcare.Although the vast majority of US abortions take place in the first trimester of pregnancy, abortion fund callers are more often in their second trimester, according to a study of callers to the National Network of Abortion Funds between 2010 and 2015. Post-Roe, people who work at abortion funds told the Guardian that they are now seeing even more people who are later on in their pregnancies – which becomes a problem both for abortion seekers and the funds, because abortion becomes more expensive later in pregnancy. It also becomes harder to find – not every clinic will perform abortions into the second trimester – so people often have to travel even further.From July 2021 through June 2022, the Missouri Abortion Fund spent about $235,000 helping people get abortions. Between July 2022 and June 2023, they spent over $1m – but they only helped 300 more people than the previous year, said Jess Lambrecht, the fund’s executive director. The typical client used to cost less than $1,000; now, they frequently cost multiple thousands of dollars.“Basically, our budget tripled, but so has our cost,” Lambrecht said.The Nevada-based Silver State Hope Fund has already been forced to become “very, very frugal” when giving out money, said Erin Bilbray-Kohn, the fund’s vice-president and acting executive. Within three days of Roe’s demise, Bilbray-Kohn raised $50,000 for the fund. But now, the fund’s finances have become so strained that it’s using the money it had once set aside to pay for next spring.Before Roe’s demise, the fund spent about $10,000 each year. Now, it’s spending $16,000 each month. So many people are desperate for help: the woman who got pregnant by her abusive partner, the woman with Type I diabetes whose pregnancy threatened her life, the girl whose college scholarship would have been jeopardized if she had a baby.“I wake up in the morning worried we’re not going to have enough funds,” said Bilbray-Kohn, who started to cry as she shared her clients’ stories. “I’m working really aggressively to try to raise that money so that we can fill up those coffers and be OK in the spring.”The Silver State Hope Fund is also currently suing, aided by the ACLU, to abolish a Nevada law that blocks people from using Medicaid to pay for abortions. Roughly 80% of the people calling the Silver State Hope Fund are Medicaid-eligible, Bilbray-Kohn estimated. If the fund wins its lawsuit, many of its current callers could rely on Medicaid instead and the fund could free up money to pay for other callers.Abortion funds aren’t the only abortion rights organizations that are now scrambling for money. The clinics left behind in states that have now banned the procedure are also struggling to stay open, as they pivot to offering more broad reproductive healthcare services.When the supreme court overturned Roe, the West Alabama Women’s Center had to stop performing abortions and send its patients out of state. Within 48 hours, it raised $180,000 for patients’ travel, recalled Robin Marty, the clinic’s executive director. “Now I go and I try to ask for any sort of funding online, and we can get maybe $50 to $100 every time I do it,” Marty said.As of late August, though, Marty estimated that she had enough money in the bank to pay her staff’s salaries through October.For now, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund’s phone line is still open; the organization is redirecting people towards other, open abortion funds. But the phone line will be shut down entirely for the month of December.“I know we are making the right decision, but it feels horrible to tell people no,” Roberts said. But, Roberts added, “If we’re not making strategic plans to make sure that we’re sustaining ourselves and sustaining fundraising, we’re not gonna make it. We won’t be here next year and we won’t be here the year after that and I want to make sure we’re still here. There’s not less of a fight to fight. It’s just getting more intense.” More