US Politics

After defending the integrity of US elections from an onslaught of threats over the last several years, secretaries of state across the US are now turning to a new high-stakes question: is Donald Trump eligible to run for president?Several secretaries are already working with attorneys general in their states and studying whether Trump is disqualified under a provision of the 14th amendment that bars anyone from holding public office if they have previously taken an oath to the United States and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”. That language clearly disqualifies Trump from running in 2024, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two prominent conservative scholars, concluded in a lengthy forthcoming law review article. “If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so,” they write in the article.A flurry of challenges to Trump’s candidacy are expected – one was filed in Colorado on Wednesday – but the legal issues at play are largely untested. Never before has the provision been used to try to disqualify a presidential candidate from office and the issue is likely to quickly come to a head as soon as officials make their official certifications about who can appear on primary ballots. Secretaries are studying who has the authority to remove Trump from the ballot and what process needs to occur before they do so. They also recognize that the issue is likely to be ultimately settled by the courts, including the US supreme court.Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat in her second term as Michigan’s secretary of state, said she had spoken with another secretary of state about the 14th amendment issue “nearly every day”.“The north star for me is always: ‘What is the law? What does the constitution require?’ To keep politics and partisan considerations out of it. And simply just look at this from a sense of ‘what does the 14th amendment say?’ We’re in unprecedented, uncharted territory,” she said.Among the uncertain questions is the proper timing for the challenges. It’s theoretically possible that a challenge to Trump’s ability to hold office could continue even if he were to win the 2024 election.“There are a lot of ambiguities and unknowns still yet to play out,” Benson added. “Even if the former president does get elected in the fall of ’24, it could re-emerge then after an election. So we’re also preparing for a lack of finality of this and for it to be an issue throughout the cycle.”Several secretaries are studying how state law might intersect with the disqualification language in the 14th amendment. In Arizona, for example, the state supreme court ruled against disqualifying three candidates for their involvement in efforts to overturn the election, saying state law did not allow for the use of the 14th amendment as the basis for a challenge. Unlike Trump, however, none of those three officials were charged with a crime.“The state of the law in Arizona leans in one direction; the plain language of the constitution, including the supremacy clause, leans in a different direction,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who was elected Arizona’s secretary of state last year.“Regardless of whether or not the Arizona supreme court is correct – and I don’t think they are, I think they are dead flat wrong – but if I go against a standing rule in Arizona, is that something I can do? Or that I should do? So really these are the kinds of questions that we’re trying to answer and we’re being very deliberate and we’re being very judicious in our approach.”Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said she had been studying the issue, but said her office wouldn’t address it before a candidate officially filed for the ballot. “While people outside of the business of running elections are free to speculate and inquire, debate, that is not our job. Our job is to follow the law and the constitution and not to make premature conclusions or speculation about what might or might not happen,” she said.One left-leaning group, Free Speech for People, has urged several secretaries of state to unilaterally say Trump is ineligible from being listed on the ballot. But such an idea may be a non-starter for officials who know that they’re likely to face intense backlash over such a decision.“For a secretary of state to remove a candidate would only reinforce the grievances of those who see the system as rigged and corrupt,” Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “I Can’t Keep Trump Off the Ballot”. Raffensperger acknowledged there was a legal process to remove candidates from the ballot in Georgia – an effort to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene failed last year – but said voters should decide the issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an alarming signal of the minefield that secretaries are stepping into, many offices have started receiving threatening and harassing phone calls and emails about Trump’s eligibility. In New Hampshire, the office of the secretary of state, Dave Scanlan, a Republican, was flooded with phone calls after the conservative personality Charlie Kirk falsely said Scanlan was planning to remove Trump from the ballot. (Scanlan had merely said he was studying the issue.)“We’ve been getting a lot of input, literally hundreds of inquiries, not all of it friendly. I’ll leave it at that,” Arizona’s Fontes said.“We all have been buried in an uptick of visceral vitriol and threats from people on both sides – people who want us to remove him from the ballot, people who don’t,” Benson said. “We’re also seeing this as the beginning of the rancor that we expect to go through the next 19 months.”Regardless of the pressures elections officials face, Fontes said he wouldn’t shy away from making an uncomfortable decision.“We live in a land where the rule of law is the rule of law. And when a determination gets made, a determination gets made,” he said. “If people are dissatisfied with their decisions, if I choose to run for re-election, they’ll be able to speak their voices in a free and fair election to decide whether I should stay in office or not.”Questions about Trump’s eligibility need to be resolved not just for this election, but for future ones as well, Fontes said.“This is a question that I think needs to be answered broadly and certainly. I’m looking at this as far more than just about one person and one office,” he added. “This is a systemic sort of thing and it is as big as the constitution itself.” More

Whether they intend to be or not, third-party groups such as No Labels and the Green party are in effect front groups for Trump in 2024.No Labels has pledged to spend $70m to support a third-party candidate in 2024 who could easily draw enough votes from President Biden to tip the presidential election to Trump.No Labels has already qualified as a presidential party that can run candidates on the ballot in 10 states, including in both Arizona and Florida.It claims to be a centrist organization seeking a new bipartisanship, but it will not reveal its donors, one of whom is reportedly the conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow. Politico reports that No Labels has brought on a major Trump donor as an adviser in the pivotal battleground state of Florida.If you believe that No Labels exists in order to encourage bipartisanship, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.No Labels will only help elect Trump.So will every other third party claiming to be in the “center” or on the “left” – including the Green party, which is already on the ballot in the two key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin and whose most likely candidate for president is Cornel West.And the People’s party, especially if Robert F Kennedy Jr becomes its nominee.The reason they’re all front groups for Donald Trump is that the upcoming 2024 election is likely to be nail-bitingly close even as a two-way race between Trump and Biden.The good news is that Trump loyalists don’t represent a majority of the electorate – which is why Trump has lost the popular vote in both his presidential runs and did not top 47% in either.So, as long as the anti-Trump vote is unified behind Biden, Trump cannot win, as Biden demonstrated in 2020.But if a third-party candidate takes even a small part of the anti-Trump vote away from Biden, Trump is likely to be returned to the White House.Consider the five states most likely to decide the 2024 election in the electoral college – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In 2016, Trump narrowly won each of them, giving him the presidency. In 2020, these five states narrowly tipped in the other direction, giving Biden the presidency.Biden’s razor-thin margins in these five states in 2020 came from a massive anti-Trump vote.In all of these states, at least 1 in 3 Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump.In Wisconsin (where the Green party has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot), 38% of Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump.In Arizona (where No Labels has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot), 45% of Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump.Biden has no margin for error. Even a small drop-off from his 2020 anti-Trump vote would make him vulnerable.Just 44,000 votes out of more than 10m cast in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin – less than half of 1% – were the difference between the Biden presidency and a tie in the electoral college that would have thrown the election to the House of Representatives, and hence to Trump.If candidates from No Labels, the Green party and the People’s party peel off just 15% of the anti-Trump vote from Biden, and Trump’s base stays with him, Trump would win all five swing states comfortably and return to the Oval Office.These third parties are urging people to “vote your conscience”, “give the people a real choice” and “not settle for the lesser of two evils”.If the upcoming election were an ordinary one – pitting a conservative Republican against a liberal Democrat – I’d say the more the merrier. If people want to vote for a third-party candidate, fine.But the upcoming election isn’t an ordinary one. We’ve already witnessed what Trump has tried to do to remain in power. If he’s re-elected, 2024 could mark America’s last democratic election.The reality is that any anti-Trump votes these third parties pull away from Biden will only help ensure a Trump victory.The risk to the future of American democracy is enormous. If No Labels were a legitimate third party rather than a Trump front, it would withdraw from all ballots for the 2024 election, and try again in 2028. If Cornel West and the Green party had positive intentions, they would do the same.The rest of us must spread the word about what’s at stake.If Trump wins the Republican nomination for president, as seems highly likely despite (or because of) his coming trials, all Americans who believe in democracy must unite behind Joe Biden – to ensure that Trump, in the words of then representative Liz Cheney, “never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office”.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

A pro-gun group is suing the New Mexico governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, in an effort to block a 30-day emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo county issued last week after a spate of shootings.The governor announced open and concealed carry restrictions on Friday in a public health order relating to gun violence after the fatal shootings of an 11-year-old boy on his way home from a minor league baseball game last week, as well as the fatal shooting of a four-year-old girl in her bed in a motor home and a 13-year-old girl in Taos county in August.Lujan Grisham said she expected someone to legally challenge her executive order, adding that she welcomed “the debate and the fight about making New Mexicans safer”.That challenge arrived on Saturday when the National Association for Gun Rights said it would file a lawsuit in federal court against the governor, citing 2021’s BruenUS supreme court ruling easing gun restrictions.The president of the pro-gun group, Dudley Brown, accused the governor of “throwing up a middle finger to the constitution and the supreme court”.“Her executive order is in blatant disregard for Bruen. She needs to be held accountable for stripping the God-given rights of millions away with the stroke of a pen,” Brown said in a statement.Lujan Graham said she issued the order to open up more resources to help New Mexico get the gun violence issue under control and called on the federal government for help.“These are disgusting acts of violence that have no place in our communities,” Lujan Grisham said on Thursday, adding that Bernalillo county needed a “cooling off period” during an epidemic of gun violence.After announcing the order, she said the state needed “to use the power of a public health [order] in a state of emergency to access different levels, different resources and different opportunities to keep New Mexicans safe”.The order calls for monthly inspections of firearms dealers statewide to ensure compliance with gun laws and for the state health department to compile a report on gunshot victims at hospitals that includes age, race, gender and ethnicity, along with the brand and caliber of firearm involved, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.Lujan Grisham has acknowledged that a violation of a public health order is the lowest level of violation. “The point is this – we better have the debate about what’s necessary to reduce the number of particularly illegal firearms and our ability to go after bad actors,” she said.The National Association for Gun Rights said the June 2022 Bruen ruling “held that any gun regulation that does not fall into the text, history, and tradition of the second amendment is unconstitutional”, the NM Political Report wrote. The US constitution’s second amendment guarantees Americans the right to bear arms.New Mexico’s Republican state senate minority leader, Greg Baca, described Lujan Grisham’s order as “egregiously unconstitutional” and said he was preparing a legal challenge.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Sadly, this governor would rather use our state police to stop and frisk law-abiding citizens than have them fully focused on finding and bringing the child killer to justice,” Baca said.The New Mexico house minority leader, T Ryan Lane, also a Republican, dismissed the governor’s order as “a political stunt”.But the 30-day gun ban for everyone but law enforcement or licensed security officers may lack adequate enforcement. Bernalillo county sheriff John Allen, a Democrat, said he was “wary of placing … deputies in positions that could lead to civil liability conflicts, as well as the potential risks posed by prohibiting law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense”.Allen indicated that sheriff’s deputies would not enforce the ban. Similarly, Albuquerque’s mayor, Tim Keller, said the governor had made it clear that state law enforcement – not Albuquerque police – would “ be responsible for enforcement of civil violations of that order”.Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, told the Associated Press that if the order “makes it so that people think twice about using a gun to solve a personal dispute, it makes them think twice that they don’t want to go to jail, then it will work”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

Joe Biden’s national security tour of south-east Asia reached Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, where the president called for stability in the US-China relationship against an increasingly complex diplomatic picture in the region for his country.“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden said. “I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”Biden also said that China’s recent economic downturn may limit any inclination to invade Taiwan.“I don’t think it’s going to cause China to invade Taiwan – matter of fact the opposite, probably doesn’t have the same capacity as it had before,” he said on Sunday during a press conference in Hanoi.He added that the country’s economic woes had left President Xi Jinping with “his hands full right now”.The president’s remarks came after a meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist party, in the nation’s capital designed to secure global supply chains of semiconductors and critical minerals, which would offer a strategic alternative to China.“I think we have an enormous opportunity,” Biden said of the visit. “Vietnam and the United States are critical partners at what I would argue is a very critical time.”The meeting came during a multi-front diplomatic push to shore up international support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and enunciate a policy toward China that both encourages trade and reduces the potential for US-Chinese conflict.The complexities of the administration’s approach were illustrated on Saturday, a day before Biden landed in Hanoi, when the New York Times reported that Vietnam is in talks with Russia over a new arms supply deal that could trigger US sanctions.Reuters said it had seen – but could not authenticate – documents describing talks for a credit facility that Russia would extend to Vietnam to buy heavy weaponry, including anti-ship missiles, anti-submarine aircraft and helicopters, anti-aircraft missile systems and fighter jets.Earlier, at the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, western leaders failed to reiterate an explicit condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The summit declaration referred only to the “war in Ukraine” and lamented the “suffering” of the Ukrainian people – an equivocation that indicates a growing lack of international consensus.Less than a year ago, G20 leaders still issued a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion and called on Moscow to withdraw its forces.Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, attempted to smooth over the disparity, telling ABC’s This Week that world leaders meeting in New Delhi had “stood up very clearly, including in the statement, for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.Blinken said that virtually every meeting participant “is intent on making sure there is a just and durable end to this Russian aggression”.It was clear in the room, he said, that “countries are feeling the consequences and want the Russian aggression to stop”.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “The vast majority of G20 countries have supported multiple UN resolutions that call out Russia’s illegal aggression.”Jean-Pierre said the New Delhi communique “builds on that, to send an unprecedented, unified statement on the imperative that Russia refrain from using force for territorial acquisition, abide by its obligations in the UN charter, and cease attacks on civilians and infrastructure”.The comments came as a CBS News poll found only 1 in 4 Americans think Biden is improving the US’s global position. According to the survey, 24% thought Biden was making the US stronger, 50% said weaker and 26% that he was not having much effect.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust 29% said they were optimistic for the prospects of world peace and stability in the world, and 71% said they were increasingly pessimistic. Asked if the Biden administration was being “too easy” on China, 57% agreed.On CNN, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley slammed the Biden administration’s policy toward China, describing the country as an “enemy”.“China has practically been preparing for war with us for years,” Haley said. “Yes, I view China as an enemy.”Haley said China had bought 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) of US soil and the largest pork producer in the country, and continues to steal $600bn a year in intellectual property while spreading propaganda. She pointed to Chinese drones used by US law enforcement and to the crisis caused by Chinese-sourced fentanyl that “had killed more Americans than the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam war combined”.“How much more has to happen for Biden to realize you don’t send cabinet members over to China to appease them?” she said, referring to the recent visit of the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, to Beijing.The administration’s effort to present a coherent picture of US foreign policy toward its two most vexing issues – China and Russia – continued Sunday with vice-president Kamala Harris telling CBS News that a planned meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “would be a huge mistake”.“When you look at Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, and the idea that they would supply ammunition to Russia – well, it’s predictable where that ends up,” Harris said. “I also believe very strongly that for both Russia and North Korea, this will further isolate them.”Harris also spoke to an emerging concern that China’s president, Xi Jinping, who skipped the G20, may decline to attend the Asia-Pacific economic cooperation leaders’ meeting in San Francisco, California, in November.Last week, China’s security agency hinted that a meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in San Francisco will depend on the US “showing sufficient sincerity”.China’s ministry of state security said that the country “will never let its guard down”.The comments came after Raimondo said the US did not want to decouple from China but that American companies had complained to her that China had become “uninvestible”.Asked how important it is for Xi Jinping to come to America, Harris remarked that “it is important to the … stability of things that we keep open lines of communication”. 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Kamala Harris on Sunday declared herself ready to assume the presidency if it ever behooved her to do so – but she also made it a point to dismiss opponents’ political attacks that Joe Biden is too old to seek out a second term in the Oval Office.Asked on CBS’s Face the Nation whether she was prepared to serve as commander-in-chief in case Biden became unable to carry out his duties, Harris said: “Yes, I am, if necessary.”“But Joe Biden is going to be fine,” Harris said. “And let me tell you something: I work with Joe Biden every day.”Harris, who would become the first woman to serve as US president if Biden could not complete an elected term, went on to tell Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan that it would not be a novel experience for her to make history in such a fashion.She alluded to how she was the first woman elected as district attorney of San Francisco and as attorney general of California. As a US senator for California, “I represented one in eight Americans,” before becoming the country’s first ever female vice-president.“Listen, this is not new,” Harris said. “There’s nothing new about that.”Harris’s defense of her qualifications and of Biden’s vitality come as Republicans attack the incumbent 80-year-old Democratic president’s age. If he wins another term during the 2024 election, Biden – already the oldest president ever – would be 86 upon leaving office.Public opinion polling shows that more than two-thirds of the American public think Biden is too old to effectively serve a second term. And, seizing on those findings, Republicans have sought to portray the prospect of Harris being one heartbeat away from the presidency as a scary prospect.“I pray every night for Joe Biden’s good health – not only because he’s our president, but because of who our vice-president is,” Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie said on a clip played by Brennan on Sunday.Brennan played another clip in which Christie’s fellow Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis insulted Harris as Biden’s “impeachment insurance”.“People know if she were president – Katy, bar the door,” DeSantis said on the clip, invoking an American colloquialism meaning that there’s trouble incoming. “As bad as Biden did, it would get worse.”Both Christie and DeSantis substantially trail the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination: Biden’s White House predecessor, Donald Trump. Trump maintains his polling edge over his Republican competition despite facing 91 pending criminal charges across four separate indictments for his 2020 election subversion, his retention of classified documents after his defeat to Biden forced him out of the Oval Office and hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.Harris on Sunday parried the Republican verbal volleys against the Biden administration by referring to lower crime rates, falling inflation and relatively quieter times at the US-Mexico border more than halfway through the Democratic incumbents’ third year in office.“They feel the need to attack because they’re scared that we will win based on the merit of the work that Joe Biden and I, and our administration, has done,” Harris said.In her interview with Brennan, Harris also said that Congress needed to strive to restore the federal abortion rights which had been established by Roe v Wade but then repealed last year by the US supreme court’s conservatives. Most Americans believe abortion should be legal to some degree, particularly in the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling.Harris dismissed Republican claims that Democrats support abortion up until birth as “ridiculous” and a “mischaracterization”. More

Kevin McCarthy will return from his August recess on Tuesday facing the latest in a long series of conundrums for the Republican House leader: should he force a government shutdown, leaving hundreds of thousands of government workers without a paycheck, or burn more bridges with the hard-right flank of his conference, risking his speakership in the process?With just 12 legislative days left before the end of the fiscal year, the Republican-controlled House must quickly pass some kind of spending package to keep the federal government open after 30 September. If the chamber does not approve a spending bill, the government will shut down for the first time in nearly five years, furloughing federal employees and stalling many crucial programs.McCarthy has indicated his preference to pass a continuing resolution, which would keep the government funded at its current levels for a short period of time as lawmakers continue to negotiate over a longer-term deal. But members of the hard-right House freedom caucus, who are still furious over the deal that McCarthy and President Joe Biden struck to suspend the debt ceiling earlier this year, insist they will not back a continuing resolution unless the speaker agrees to several significant policy concessions, such as increased border security and an impeachment inquiry into Biden.Given House Republicans’ narrow majority and a new rule allowing any single member of the chamber to force a vote on removing the speaker, McCarthy’s handling of this fraught situation could determine whether he loses his gavel after just eight months in power.The trouble for McCarthy started in the spring, after the House passed the compromise debt ceiling bill, known as the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Seventy-one members of the House Republican conference opposed the legislation over concerns that it did not go far enough to reduce government spending, and they sharply criticized McCarthy for agreeing to the inadequate deal.Gordon Gray, vice-president for economic policy at the center-right thinktank American Action Forum, said he had been bracing for a potential shutdown ever since the debt ceiling showdown concluded.“Since the debt limit grenade was diffused, there’s a big chunk of House Republicans who just want to break something,” Gray said. “That’s just how some of these folks define governing. It’s how their constituents define success.”Now House Republicans have reneged on the debt ceiling deal, instead choosing to advance appropriations bills with spending levels below those agreed to in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Democrats warn that the proposed cuts could deal a devastating financial blow to early education programs, climate initiatives and housing assistance.“The deal in the Fiscal Responsibility Act was roughly a freeze. It could be worse, but a freeze effectively is a cut in purchasing power because costs go up every year,” said David Reich, senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “So what was agreed to was a reasonably tight level, and now come the House Republicans marking up their bills.”House Republicans’ strategy in the spending talks has been met with exasperation in the Senate, which returned from its recess on Tuesday. Before the upper chamber adjourned at the end of July, the Senate appropriations committee advanced all 12 spending bills for fiscal year 2024 with bipartisan support. The Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has implored the House to take a similar approach to the budget process.“Both parties, in both chambers, will have to work together if we are to avoid a shutdown,” Schumer said on Wednesday in a floor speech. “When the House returns next week, I implore – I implore – my Republican colleagues in the House to recognize that time is short to keep the government open, and the only way to avoid a shutdown is through bipartisanship.”Even the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, offered a mild rebuke of his colleagues in the House when asked about the spending fight last week.“Speaker McCarthy agreed to certain spending levels in the debt limit deal he reached with President Biden earlier this year,” McConnell said. “The House then turned around and passed spending levels that were below that level. Without saying an opinion about that, that’s not going to be replicated in the Senate.”McConnell indicated that the most likely outcome at this point would be the approval of a short-term continuing resolution to buy more time in the budget talks. But members of the House freedom caucus, who abhor the idea of extending funding at levels previously approved by a Democratic Congress, have already outlined a litany of demands in exchange for their support on a continuing resolution.In a statement released late last month, the caucus said its members would only back a continuing resolution if it included a Republican proposal on border security and addressed “the unprecedented weaponization of the justice department and FBI”, an implicit reference to the four criminal cases against Donald Trump. The caucus also demanded an end to the so-called “woke” policies at the department of defense, which has faced rightwing criticism for providing funding to servicemembers and their family members who need to travel to access abortion care.Hard-right Republicans have now added another item to their list of demands: the launch of an impeachment inquiry against Biden.“I’ve already decided I will not vote to fund the government unless we have passed an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican congresswoman from Georgia, said last week.Another hard-right House member, Matt Gaetz of Florida, has warned that McCarthy’s failure to act on impeaching Biden could cost him his speakership.“I worked very hard in January to develop a toolkit for House Republicans to use in a productive and positive way. I don’t believe we’ve used those tools as effectively as we should have,” Gaetz said on Tuesday. “We’ve got to seize the initiative. That means forcing votes on impeachment. And if Speaker McCarthy stands in our way, he may not have the job long.”But the possibility of an impeachment inquiry has failed to gain widespread favor among Senate Republicans, several of whom have acknowledged that Greene and her allies have presented no valid evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors on Biden’s part.With the likelihood of a shutdown increasing by the day, the White House has attacked hard-right Republicans’ demands as a political stunt that could reap devastating consequences for millions of Americans.“Lives are at stake across a wide range of urgent, bipartisan priorities for the American people,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said on Thursday. “Like Senate Republicans, Speaker McCarthy should keep his word about government funding. And he should do so in a way that acts on these pressing issues – including fentanyl, national security and disaster response – rather than break his promise and cave to the most extreme members of his conference agitating for a baseless impeachment stunt and shutdown.”Past shutdowns prove the widespread upheaval caused by lapses in government funding. During the last partial shutdown, which ended in January 2019, roughly 800,000 federal workers went without a paycheck. The Trump administration tried to keep national parks open with limited staff, resulting in damage to the grounds. Loan programs overseen by the Small Business Administration and federally funded research projects were also halted or delayed.“It’s very disruptive. Federal agencies spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out what they’re allowed to do and not allowed to do,” Reich said. “It’s a total waste of effort and energy.”Even though history shows the fallout of government shutdowns, Gray still anticipates a lapse in funding – if not in October then later this year.“I could envision a brief [continuing resolution] – like two weeks – with some disaster supplemental funding in it,” Gray said. “My expectation is that we’ll still have a shutdown this fall.” More

Ron DeSantis is “fundamentally authoritarian”, but Donald Trump’s quest for “vengeance” poses an even greater threat to democracy, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom said on Sunday.Newsom took aim at the leading two candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination during a hard-hitting and wide-ranging interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, the final episode with its long-time host Chuck Todd.“I worry about democracy,” he said. “I worry about the fetishness for autocracy that we’re seeing not just from Trump, but around the world, and notably across this country.“I’ve made the point about DeSantis that I think he’s functionally authoritarian. I’m worried more, in many respects, about Trumpism, which transcends well beyond his term and time in tenure.”Newsom added: “The vengeance in Donald Trump’s heart right now is more of a threat.”The governor, seen as a rising star in the Democratic party and a likely future presidential candidate, was referring to the former president’s often-voiced promises to gain “revenge” – if he wins back the White House – over political rivals he blames for the multiple criminal indictments against him.If Trump does win the 2024 general election, Newsom said, he would work with his administration for the sake of California residents, as he said he did during the Covid-19 pandemic.“At the end of the day, these are the cards that are dealt. And I want to do the best for the people that I represent, 40 million Americans that happen to live in California,” he told Todd, who is standing down as host of Meet the Press after almost a decade.“Many support him. I’m not going to oppose someone just to oppose them – I don’t come into a relationship with closed fists, but an open hand. I call balls and strikes, and few people were more aggressive at calling balls and strikes against Donald Trump. I called California the most un-Trump state in America, and I hold to that.”Newsom saved his harshest criticism, however, for DeSantis, the rightwing Republican governor of Florida, with whom he has frequently clashed. He disagreed with DeSantis’s strategy of lifting lockdowns and banning mask mandates, and attacked the Florida leader’s “partisanship” – most recently on display when he snubbed Joe Biden’s visit to the state in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia.“I don’t like the partisanship. And I thought it was demonstrably displayed by what I thought was a very weak exercise by governor DeSantis,” Newsom said regarding the Floridian’s snub of the president.Newsom and DeSantis have agreed to a televised debate on Fox TV this fall. An impasse over logistics might soon clear, Newsom said.The California governor said he was fine with the rightwing Fox personality Sean Hannity as moderator, making it effectively a “two-on-one” debate in Newsom’s words. But Newsom said he was still not happy with the proposed venue and sizable public audience.“They wanted thousands of people and [to] make it a performance. I wasn’t interested in that. We were pretty clear on that. [But] we’re getting closer,” he said.Other subjects covered during the interview included who might run as the Democratic party’s candidate in the 2024 presidential election if Biden – who will be 81 on polling day – drops out.Newsom said he doesn’t expect that to happen, but if it does, the candidate will not be him.“Won’t happen,” he replied when Todd asked him if he would ever run against the vice-president, Kamala Harris, a former California senator with whom he said he has “a very good relationship”.“It’s the Biden-Harris administration. Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned about presidents and vice-presidents. We need to move past this notion that he’s not going to run. President Biden is going to run, and [I’m] looking forward to getting him re-elected,” Newsom said.Newsom was also questioned on the future of the veteran California senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, whose recent health issues have led to long absences from the chamber and prompted calls for her to stand down.He refused to be drawn on whether he would appoint a replacement, as he did when elevating Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, to the senate when Harris became Biden’s running mate in 2020.“Her staff is still extraordinarily active and we wish her only the best,” he said, insisting that Feinstein could still represent the state until next year.“Her term expires – she’s not running for re-election. So this time next year we’ll be in a very different place. I don’t want to make another appointment, and I don’t think the people of California want me to make another appointment.“That said, [if] we have to do it, we’ll do it.” More

David Cox is trying to persuade his members that Joe Biden has done more for working-class Americans than any US president in his decades as a construction worker and union organiser in eastern Ohio.But Cox is not sure they really want to hear it in a state where the Democratic brand was in decline long before Donald Trump snatched victory in Ohio in 2016 and then increased his support four years later.“Biden’s been great. He’s done so much for labour like we haven’t never seen in my lifetime,” he said, ticking off legislation to revitalise manufacturing and invest in technology that created many new construction jobs, as well as labour department decisions in favour of workers.“But whether it brings back those we lost to Trump remains to be seen. I think even if they aren’t inclined to go out and vote for Biden, maybe they’ll just stay home and not vote at all. That’s half a win.”Cox, an ironworker and director of the Dayton Building and Construction Trades Council, a union umbrella group representing thousands of construction workers in eastern Ohio, has good reason for scepticism.Ohio was once a swing state so crucial that presidential candidates repeatedly piled in to win over voters. But by 2020, the Democratic national funders decided it wasn’t even worth throwing serious money into the fight and left Ohio off their list of targets, essentially conceding the state to Trump and the Republicans.The only Democrat to win statewide office in more than a decade is the US senator Sherrod Brown who is expected to face a tough fight for re-election next year.Cox’s union is based in Dayton, a part of Montgomery county where the Democratic vote was once strong enough to help offset losses elsewhere in the state. Trump won the county in 2016, albeit by a whisker. Biden took it back four years later by just 2%.Party officials, nationally and locally, appear to have recognised the mistake in letting Ohio slip away. But there is disagreement on the causes and how to respond even if they see reasons for optimism.Ohio Democrats have been energised by the size of the victory and turnout in last month’s referendum on a Republican attempt to make it more difficult to amend the state constitution. The move was aimed at making it harder for voters to enshrine access to abortion in the constitution in another ballot in November. But it was defeated by 57% to 43% on an exceptionally high turnout for a ballot vote in August, reflecting what Democrats see as a major electoral issue in their favor after the US supreme court struck down constitutional protections last year.For all that, veteran Democrats say there is a long road to travel in Ohio for a party that is the architect of some of its own misfortunes.On paper, Biden should be in a relatively strong position. The economy and job numbers are growing even if inflation has hit hard. But a CNN national survey released on Thursday found Biden neck and neck with Trump and every other Republican candidate with the exception of the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who was six points ahead of the president.There are good reasons to be cautious about those numbers more than a year before the election, but they are another reminder to the Democrats of the difficulties of persuading voters in regions like eastern Ohio that Biden has been good for them. The economy may look stronger on paper but even if voters are not struggling financially many do not feel good about their deeply fractured country or the Democrats.Kim McCarthy, the Democratic chair in Greene county which includes part of eastern Dayton, said her party struggles to shake the perception that, at a national level, it is not interested in working people.“It’s not a secret that our country is run by corporate USA Inc. I feel that limitation stops Democrats from fighting for things that would bring people over to their side, like universal healthcare,” she said.McCarthy said that remained a good part of the reason for Trump’s continuing support in her county.“The appeal of Trump ultimately is that people recognise that our federal government is failing us as a society, as a nation. I’m from Australia and I think one of the most profound things that I’ve realised over my 25-odd years of living here is that the US government doesn’t care about me and my life,” she said.“When I moved here, I gave up a government that was prepared to support me to ensure that I had the tools to live my best life. I think Americans, even without having lived in another country, ultimately understand that difference. Trump, of course, is not the answer to that problem.”Cox said the Democratic party nationally and locally bears a good deal of the responsibility for losing Ohio. “Labour feels it has been left out of the picture,” he said.He added that the Democrats had been damaged goods in Dayton since Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and thousands of factory jobs were shipped to Mexico after 1994.“This was a General Motors town and every family had somebody that worked there. When Nafta happened, General Motors virtually pulled out of this town and moved to Mexico. In the Dayton area, it’s a sore issue even today. People were selling homes, selling their boats, selling their motorcycles,” he said.The legacy is visible in abandoned industrial buildings and open spaces where factories once stood. Dayton has lost one-quarter of its population since Nafta.Cox said Nafta changed the perception of the Democrats as representing American workers. Then Trump came along and renegotiated Nafta to improve some of the terms for the US which made it look as if he was at least listening to workers in cities like Dayton.“That was one of his better moves. People here liked that,” said Cox. “That and really punching China in the nose.”There’s no shortage of Democrats to admit they got it wrong in Ohio. But the chair of Montgomery county Democrats, Mohamed Al-Hamdani, sees the mistakes differently.Al-Hamdani, the first Muslim to chair a Democratic party branch in Ohio, said that the problem went beyond overlooking industrial workers.“We’ve become a polarised country and I think some of that is because demographics are changing in the United States. In 1992, when my family came here, I don’t think there was a Muslim in Congress. People of color had a few seats in Congress, women had smaller number of seats in Congress and the Senate. And you couldn’t even say LGBTQ+,” he said.“Fast-forward 35 years and the country has rapidly changed and some of that change comes at a cost for a party like us. When you’re that party that supports all that, sometimes there is a backlash. We’re on the right side of history, for sure. But doing the right thing doesn’t always get you elected.”That divide can be seen in differing views of why the former Ohio congressman Tim Ryan lost the US Senate race last year to the Republican JD Vance, the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy – a controversial account of growing up amid poverty and drug addiction.At times Ryan appeared to be running against his own party.“You’ve seen a broken economic system where both parties have sold out to the corporate interests that shift our jobs down to the southern part of this country, then to Mexico, then to China. There is no economic freedom if there’s no jobs here in the United States,” he told a 2022 election rally.Cox, who calls Ryan “the worker’s Democrat”, thinks he lost because the national Democratic party failed to fund his campaign properly. Ryan has accused the party of writing off states like Ohio that do not have a majority of voters with a university degree.Al-Hamdani thinks Ryan was so concentrated on winning back support from those who decamped to Trump, such as some of Cox’s members, that he neglected the voters who stuck with the Democrats.“Our base is still a diverse base. In Montgomery county a majority of votes that come to Democrats still come from very diverse areas, black neighborhoods,” he said.“Ryan’s team made the calculation that they thought those folks were already in the bag and that just wasn’t true. You have to work to shore up your base, and our base just didn’t show up. They didn’t vote in the numbers we wanted them to. I think a lot of it’s because they felt, and rightfully so, that they were forgotten and taken for granted, and we can’t do that as a party.”Then there are the rural voters. While Ohio’s three largest cities – Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati – remain solidly Democrat, it’s not enough to offset the huge shift away from the party outside urban areas.Fred Strahorn, a Black member of the Ohio legislature for a Dayton district for nearly 20 years who also led the Democratic caucus for four years, said the party had not been helped by east coast liberals dismissing Trump voters as motivated by nothing more than prejudice.“I think some of those voters took that as an insult, and it made them even more entrenched in their decision. I don’t think that’s how you court voters. I don’t think that you can just say, hey, because you didn’t agree with me, there’s something wrong with you,” he said.Strahorn said that if Biden was to have any chance of winning the state he needed to return to Obama’s strategy of spending a lot of time on the ground telling people what he is going to do for them. But he said the Democrats also need to engage voters on their “litmus issues” such as guns and support for the military to explain that the party is not hostile to either.“We need to say that we do support the military. The truth is the opposition supports military contracting, not necessarily military personnel, because they often try to take stuff from the military personnel and their families. They support things that go boom. There’s ways to talk about this but you have to engage them,” he said.Strahorn said there would be no quick comeback for the party in Ohio and that ultimately winning voters’ confidence was a long game. He wants the Democrats to have the courage to embrace what he regards as one of the party’s greatest strengths, defence of government as a means to improve people’s lives.He said the party had become afraid of doing it in the face of relentless Republican attacks blaming people’s problems on “big government”, a strategy reinforced by Democrats in Congress who serve the interests of corporations.“One of the failures, multi decades long, is not telling people what government does for them and remind them on a regular basis, so they’re not so easily turned against it. We’ve not defended government, not really explained all the things that government does that you actually like, want and use,” he said.“Therefore when somebody comes along and takes a swack at it, it’s easy for people to believe because they never hear anything but that. If you don’t counter that it really makes it hard for that electorate to see you as somebody who’s trying to help them because you haven’t explained how that works. That’s your battleground.” More