US Politics

More than three-quarters of respondents in a new US poll said Joe Biden would be too old to be effective if re-elected president next year.But as many people in the survey said the 80-year-old Biden was “old” and “confused”, so a similar number saw his 77-year-old likely challenger, Donald Trump, as “corrupt” and “dishonest”.The poll from the Associated Press and Norc Center for Public Affairs said 77% of Americans – 89% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats – thought age would be a problem if Biden won the White House again. Significantly fewer said Trump’s age would be a problem: 51%, with only 29% of Republicans concerned.Trump skipped the first Republican debate last week. On Monday another national survey showed his whopping primary lead slipping only slightly thereafter.Emerson College Polling showed Trump at 50% support, a six-point drop from a pre-debate poll. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor widely held not to have performed strongly in Milwaukee, was second with a two-point bump to 12%.The investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who barged into the spotlight with an angry debate display, dropped one point to 9%. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador who confronted Ramaswamy, climbed five to 7%.Trump faces 14 more criminal charges than he has years on the calendar, but those 91 counts under four indictments, and other legal problems including being adjudicated a rapist, have not dented his popularity with Republicans or opened him to significant attacks from his main rivals.Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, did note an apparent “softening of support for Trump since last week’s survey, where 82% of Trump voters said they would definitely support him, compared to 71% after the debate”. But on that score there was also worrying news for DeSantis, whose support “softened from 32% who would definitely support to 25%”.Biden won a US Senate seat in 1972, ran for president in 1988 and 2008, and is already the oldest president ever elected. If re-elected, he would be 86 by the end of his second term.Haley has repeatedly said Biden will probably die in office, claiming to warn voters of the dangers of Kamala Harris, the vice-president, rising to power herself.The AP/Norc poll said: “When asked about the first word that comes to mind when they think of each candidate, 26% of all adults cited Biden’s age and 15% mentioned words associated with being slow and confused, while only 1% and 3% did so for Trump.”There was a less welcome sign for Republicans, particularly those threatening to impeach Biden over alleged corruption involving his son Hunter.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“For Trump, nearly a quarter mentioned words associated with corruption, crime, lying, or untrustworthiness, while only 8% mentioned those traits for Biden.”Two-thirds of respondents supported age limits for presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices.On Sunday, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was asked about Biden’s age.“When people look at a candidate, whether he’s Joe Biden, or Trump, or Bernie Sanders, anybody else, they have to evaluate a whole lot of factors,” the 81-year-old told NBC, adding that when he met Biden recently, “he seemed fine to me”.“But I think at the end of the day, what we have to ask ourselves is, ‘What do people stand for?’ Do you believe that women have a right to control their own bodies? Well, the president has been strong on that.” More

President Joe Biden was “fine,” according to White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt, after tripping over a sandbag at a U.S. Air Force graduation ceremony on June 1, 2023.

But his fall was caught on live camera – and people on social media speculated about what was behind it.

Biden, approaching his 81st birthday in November 2023, is the oldest serving U.S. president. He shares the distinction of old age with a growing number of politicians, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who, at age 90, is the oldest person in the Senate and has served as senator since 1992.

Some people – from fellow Democrats to The New York Times editorial board – have questioned whether Feinstein can fulfill the duties of her job, citing incidents in which she stumbled over words. Feinstein began reading prepared remarks during a Senate appropriations hearing vote on July 27, 2023, until her democratic colleague, Sen. Patty Murray, whispered to her, “Just say aye.”’

Feinstein was also absent for prolonged periods with various illnesses, including shingles and encephalitis from February through May 2023. She later told journalists that she “hasn’t been gone” and simply worked from home during her illness.

In July 2023, 81-year-old Sen. Mitch McConnell trailed off and froze mid-sentence while speaking at a lectern to the press. Aides ushered him off camera. McConnell later said, “I’m fine,” when journalists questioned him about the incident.

Such incidents prompt the question: Can politicians be too old to serve in office? Should society make retiring at a certain age mandatory for elected officials who run the country – like presidents and senators?

I am a philosopher and bioethicist who studies ethics related to individual and societal aging, and these questions are at the forefront of what I think about. Whatever view one takes on the ethics of age limits for politicians, voting remains the primary way to put one’s views into practice.

Sen. John Barrasso helps Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after he froze at the microphone on July 26, 2023.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Minuimum age requirements

Requirements for U.S. presidential candidates haven’t changed since 1789, when the Constitution was written. In that era, the average life expectancy was about 34 years – but varied greatly for people who were slaves or free.

Today, the life span for the average American is 79 years. But it tends to be much higher for people like politicians, who are relatively wealthy and receive good health care.

In the U.S., a person needs to be 35 years old or older in order to be president. A person must be at least 25 years old in order to serve in the House of Representatives, while the minimum age rises slightly to 30 years old for serving in the Senate.

A question of maximum age limits

The U.S. banned age discrimination in workplaces in 1967.

Should politicians who lead the country be an exception to this law?

A 2022 YouGov poll reported that 58% of Americans want a maximum age for politicians. Those who support age limits usually say that politicians holding office should be no more than 70 years old. That would make 71% of current U.S. senators ineligible to hold office. It is unclear how age limits like that could be implemented.

Increasingly, people everywhere will be forced to confront questions about whether a person can be too old to hold public office. People are living longer lives in the U.S., but the same is true across the world.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, center, is assisted by two Democratic senators after a photo session on June 8, 2023, in Washington, D.C.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ethical arguments for age limits

Considering age limits for high-ranking politicians poses certain ethical questions that do not have a clear answer.

Staying in office despite health problems can threaten public safety. An American president holds immense power – including the ability to launch nuclear weapons. Members of Congress are responsible for making laws, declaring war and controlling taxes and spending.

Defenders of mandatory retirement say older people have had their turn.

Yet, if giving everyone a fair turn is the goal, why not cap the number of years worked? Like age limits, however, capping years would disproportionately affect older workers – and some say that’s unjustly discriminatory.

Even without age cutoffs, age could still be a way to flag other relevant factors, like health.

As people age, they face heightened risk of chronic disease and of having multiple chronic conditions. Chronic health problems can interfere with daily functioning and put older politicians at higher risk of performing poorly on the job –- for example, falling.

Testing health – or, even better, job performance – is another option. Testing workers of all ages at regular intervals avoids ageist stereotypes.

Biden undergoes an annual health screening and has been deemed “fit for duty.” Should Feinstein and McConnell be held to the same standard? That raises the thorny question, what if physicians disagree about a politician’s health and ability to remain in office?

Ethical arguments against age limits

Health checks differ from compulsory retirement.

In rich Western countries, people do not retire because they can no longer work –retirement is not correlated with an actual reduction in physical or intellectual capabilities.

Instead, people’s health tends to decline after retiring.

Those who oppose compulsory retirement, myself included, say that mandating retirement generates ageism, or negative stereotypes based on age.

Experts have shown that older people are diverse, and they separate biological aging – like physical wear and tear on the body – from chronological aging.

In addition to stereotyping older people, forced retirement violates principles of equality. People equally able to perform a job deserve equal chances to continue to work, independent of factors unrelated to job performance, such as age, race or gender identity.

Supporters of age-based retirement, meanwhile, say that this policy treats people equally over time, since all young people eventually become old. Yet others disagree, insisting that the point of equality is creating a community of equals, and discriminating against older adults falls short.

The people decide

People supporting a maximum age limit for the president and members of Congress have launched online signature campaigns on Change.org. But these efforts would require a constitutional amendment and have not gained major traction.

Two Republican senators also introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 2023 that would allow senators to serve only two six-year terms and Congress members to serve three two-year terms. Congress has voted down previous proposals to set term limits.

At the state level, 16 states limit terms for legislators – but not necessarily because of age concerns. Direct age limits are under consideration in South Dakota, which will vote in 2024 on a ballot measure to amend the state’s constitution and establish an upper age limit of 80 years for congressional candidates.

Since the government sets age minimums for Congress and the presidency, should there be maximum limits, too? This question remains open. In a democracy, we the people decide by voting. More

With more than 340 victories at Starbucks stores across the US, the campaign to organize the coffee chain’s workers is one of the most successful union drives in a generation. But Starbucks’ fierce union-busting campaign has badly slowed its momentum and exposed deep flaws in US labor law that threaten other promising unionization efforts.Two years on since workers at a Buffalo Starbucks started the first successful campaign to form a union at a company-run store, labor experts say the coffee chain’s aggressive union-busting is shining a harsh light on the shortcomings of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and how that 88-year-old law which governs unionization campaigns is proving far too weak to stop a powerful, multibillion corporation from using an arsenal of illegal tactics to stifle a highly promising union drive.Many labor experts say the unionization campaign at Starbucks has done more than any other effort to inspire union drives, whether at Trader Joe’s, Apple or elsewhere, but if Starbucks succeeds in quashing its baristas’ organizing efforts and prevents them from ever getting a first contract, that would be a major symbolic and substantive blow to the hopes for a union rebirth in the US.Even strong union supporters admit that Starbucks’ “union avoidance” tactics have severely cut into the union’s momentum and win rate.“Starbucks has figured out an ingenious plan to get around labor law, which is: break so many labor laws so fast that the National Labor Relations Board simply can’t keep up in enforcing the law,” said Jaz Brisack, a fired barista who worked at the first company-run Starbucks – the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo – where workers voted in favor of unionizing.The regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have brought 100 separate cases against Starbucks – an extraordinarily high number – which together allege more than 1,000 illegal actions, many of them in retaliation against workers for unionizing: from closing stores because they had unionized to reducing workers’ hours after their stores unionized. The NLRB has also filed an unusual nationwide complaint accusing Starbucks of refusing to bargain at 163 unionized stores across 28 states.All told, rulings by various judges and the five-person labor board have ordered reinstatement of 28 Starbucks workers they found to have been illegally fired in retaliation for union activity. Dozens more pro-union baristas are awaiting rulings about whether they, too, were fired illegally – the NLRA prohibits employers from retaliating against workers for backing a union. Their union, Starbucks Workers United, asserts that nearly 200 workers have been fired in retaliation for union activity.“If Starbucks had not engaged in this ferocious, unlawful campaign, they would have 3,000 unionized stores by now, not 300,” said John Logan, a professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University and an expert on corporations’ anti-union strategies. The number of unionization petitions filed by Starbucks workers has plummeted from 71 a month in March 2022 to around a dozen a month today.Logan said the NLRA aims to let workers freely choose whether they want a union to represent them. “The problem,” he said, “is companies like Starbucks have turned it into a choice by the companies, not by the workers.”When Starbucks’ former CEO, Howard Schultz, testified before a Senate committee in March, he asserted that the company had not broken the law even once in battling against the union. Starbucks continues to maintain that position, asserting that any pro-union worker who was fired was not dismissed for union activity, but for violating company rules, such as arriving late to work.Labor leaders often complain that the NLRA’s weaknesses give a bright green light to anti-union companies to break the law. The NLRA doesn’t allow for any fines, not even one dollar, if a company is found to have, for instance, illegally fired the four workers leading a union drive. Nor can a company be fined for closing a store or operation in retaliation for its workers unionizing. When the NLRB rules that a company broke the law by refusing to bargain, it can’t order the company to reach a first contract. All it can do is order the company to return to the bargaining table, but when that happens, many companies resume doing everything they can to avoid ever reaching a first contract. Even though the first Starbucks store unionized 20 months ago, the company hasn’t reached a contract with workers at any of its 340-plus unionized stores.“The remedy that’s ordered for a failure to bargain in good faith is an order to bargain more. That just doesn’t work,” said Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard.In response to the Guardian’s questions, Starbucks said it “is committed to progress negotiations towards a first contract”. The company accused the union of dragging its feet in bargaining, saying the union “has only responded to 25% of the more than 465 bargaining sessions that Starbucks has proposed for individual stores”.The union responded that Starbucks is the one under scrutiny for refusing to bargain. The union added that it hasn’t responded to many of Starbucks’ requests to bargain because the company has sought to “impose illegal conditions” intended “to prevent us from designating members of our own bargaining teams”. The union says Starbucks has failed to make even one counterproposal to its many bargaining proposals.“Starbucks is proof that a concerted effort by a corporation to delay and violate the law too easily succeeds under the rules of the game we have today,” Sachs said. “We need new rules of the game.“Starbucks isn’t the only one to blame,” he added. “The legal system bears responsibility for enabling corporations to act this way.”Criticizing the system’s delays, Sachs noted that after a fired worker asks the NLRB for reinstatement, it can take up to five years of litigation – including a decision by an NLRB administrative law judge, then an appeal to the five-person labor board, then an appeal to a federal circuit court of appeals – before a worker wins reinstatement, and by then the union drive has often fallen apart because workers were frightened off or discouraged from joining.“You can have all the labor protections in the world, but if you don’t have an effective enforcement and remedies scheme, then it’s virtually worthless,” said Wilma Liebman, who served as chair of the NLRB under Barack Obama.Schultz and his company continue to assert that Starbucks has not violated the law even though judges have ruled that Starbucks illegally closed a store in Ithaca in retaliation for unionizing; illegally threatened workers in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Buffalo with loss in pay and benefits because of union activity; illegally reduced the hours of Wichita baristas; illegally spied on workers in Pittsburgh; and illegally called police because baristas in Kansas City had congregated outside their store.“Howard Schultz will say to the grave that Starbucks hasn’t broken the law, but that’s factually inaccurate,” San Francisco State’s Logan said, pointing to the many rulings that Starbucks has violated the law.Starbucks has appealed ruling after ruling that found it has acted unlawfully. Schultz maintained that just because a trial judge had found illegalities doesn’t mean Starbucks did anything wrong – that finding might be overturned on appeal.Acknowledging that appeals can last years, Starbucks said: “The process for reviewing the merits of these allegations is multi-step, includes several layers of review by the NLRB and the federal court system, and usually takes years to complete. Where claims have been filed against Starbucks that we believe are unfounded, we continue to defend the company.”Starbucks workers see a clear objective behind Starbucks’ retaliatory moves: to frighten and even terrorize workers – to make workers too scared to support or work for unionization. Pro-union workers further assert that what they see as Starbucks’ refusal to bargain aims to deter workers at additional stores from unionizing by sending a loud message that if they unionize, there’s no guarantee their store will negotiate a first contract anytime soon to deliver better wages and benefits. Workers at many stores allege that after their stores voted to unionize, management cut back on their weekly hours (and weekly pay) and cut their store’s staffing to make their jobs more stressful and to show that unpleasant things happen if they unionize.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Starbucks has taken a scorched-earth policy to target union leaders and union stores for retaliation,” said Richard Bensinger, an adviser to the Starbucks’ unionization drive. “Starbucks is starving out union supporters. They’re cutting their hours and starving the stores by cutting staff. They’re starving the unionized workers by not giving them credit card tips. They’re doing everything they can at union stores to be as nasty as they can to undermine the union, to say to non-union workers, ‘‘Look what’s happening there.’ In some cases, they’re even closing unionized stores, like in Ithaca.”Starbucks closed all three of its stores in Ithaca, New York, the first city in the US where every Starbucks was unionized. The company said the closings were for business reasons and had nothing to do with the union. But Kolya Vitek, a barista who worked at two of the Ithaca stores, said: “The closures are very blatantly union-busting. There is no reason they needed to close those stores.” Stephanie Heslop, another barista in Ithaca, added: “They wanted to burn the union to the ground here.”After nearly four years as a barista, Quinn Craig led the effort to unionize a Starbucks in San Antonio, Texas. “As soon as we filed our petition, I started preparing to get fired. I knew that it was coming,” said Craig, who often wore a cap saying “Scary Union Organizer”. “I saw that Starbucks was firing lead organizers in stores all across the country. By the time we won our election, we saw 30 or 40 worker-organizers fired across the country.”The San Antonio organizing drive was fueled by dismay with constantly changing work schedules and what workers said was systematic understaffing, which made their jobs far more stressful. “We also wanted to advocate for a better benefits system,” Craig said. “More than half the people at our store didn’t qualify for all the benefits that Starbucks is bragging about.”On 23 June 2022, the San Antonio workers voted 10 to 6 to unionize. Soon after, workers said, Starbucks began reducing their weekly hours and pay – a move many saw as punishment for unionizing and a stratagem to get them to quit.On the first anniversary of their union victory, the store’s workers walked out, protesting what they said was understaffing. That same day, Craig was fired. “They fired me on the one-year anniversary of our store winning a union election,” Craig said. “They fired the lead organizer on the day we were celebrating. That’s villainous. They’re not sneaky about their retaliatory actions.”To explain the firing, Starbucks said Craig had failed to secure the store’s cash or set the security alarm before the walkout. “I called the manager to say we were walking out,” Craig said. “Her response was ‘OK’ and [she] hung up” – without giving any instructions.Alleging unlawful retaliation, Craig has asked the NLRB for reinstatement. Craig says Starbucks’ tactics – the firings, closings and reduced hours – “have really had a chilling effect. I personally saw several stores in my region lose interest in unionizing. Without all the union-busting, we could have had double the number of stores in my region organized.”Many baristas say one Starbucks strategy in particular has discouraged workers from unionizing. In May 2022, Schultz announced that Starbucks would give certain raises and benefits to workers at its more than 9,000 non-union stores, but not offer those raises and benefits to its unionized workers. Starbucks insists it would be illegal to impose any raises or benefits on its unionized stores without first negotiating about them, but the NLRB’s general counsel asserts that this policy constitutes unlawful discrimination against Starbucks’ unionized workers. Under this policy, Starbucks has given its non-union workers, but not its unionized ones, a more relaxed dress code, increased training, faster sick leave accrual and, most important, credit card tipping. (Workers at the first few Starbucks stores to unionize had asked early on for credit card tipping.)Baristas say credit card tipping can boost pay by $5 an hour, often meaning a 30% pay increase. Starbucks’ refusal to give many raises and benefits, including credit card tipping, to workers at its unionized stores has fueled decertification efforts at more than a dozen stores. Decertification is a process to vote out the union. Pointing to the denial of credit card tipping, San Francisco State’s Logan said: “Starbucks is offering the workers a $5-an-hour bribe to vote out the union.”Federal law prohibits companies from aiding decertification efforts. Starbucks has referred workers interested in decertification to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a group long funded by rightwing billionaires, including the Koch brothers. But the coffee company says it hasn’t joined in that foundation’s efforts to assist decertification petitions. The NLRB has blocked several of the decertification petitions because it says Starbucks had failed to bargain in good faith, preventing workers from getting a fair shot at reaching a first contract. Starbucks has criticized the labor board for not giving its workers a free choice to decertify the union – a claim many workers ridicule, saying that Starbucks, with its aggressive union-busting, hasn’t given its workers a free choice on whether to unionize.Labor experts have long proposed ways to revamp the NLRA so that it truly discourages illegal actions by anti-union employers. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (Pro Act), which President Biden backs, but Senate Republicans have blocked, calls for substantial fines against companies that fire pro-union workers or commit other illegal actions.“Unless Starbucks is made to pay a real price for its illegal conduct, there will be no reason for it not to violate the law,” Logan said. “I would like to see a discussion of having criminal penalties for CEOs whose companies engage in egregious unlawful practices.”Many labor leaders say that to prevent years of delay before negotiating a first contract – that is, if one is ever negotiated – the NLRA should provide for compulsory arbitration if the two sides fail to reach a first contract within a few months. The Pro Act calls for mandatory arbitration. Some labor experts look to Alberta, Canada, as a model; there, if the two sides fail to reach a first contract within 90 days after bargaining begins, the dispute goes to a neutral arbitrator who determines the contract’s provisions.But every time Democrats have pushed to amend the NLRA to make it easier to unionize, Republicans have used filibusters to block the legislation. That happened under presidents Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden.Short of overhauling the NLRA, union supporters say the NLRB should obtain a nationwide injunction to order Starbucks to cease and desist from firing pro-union baristas. The NLRB’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, has repeatedly sought such an injunction, but judges have thus far failed to grant it, evidently not convinced that Starbucks is systematically taking illegal actions.Starbucks baristas applauded a NLRB decision from last Friday that some labor experts say could go far to discourage companies like Starbucks from violating the law when battling against unionization. Under the board’s decision, if a majority of workers sign cards saying they want to unionize and the employer insists on holding a union vote and then is found by the NLRB to have broken the law in fighting unionization, the labor board will order the company to grant union recognition based on the signed cards.But labor experts fear that conservative, corporate-friendly federal judges may overturn the NLRB’s decision.With labor leaders complaining that Starbucks’ illegalities continue unabated, many pro-union workers are pushing for more militant action to get Starbucks to stop the firings and negotiate a first contract. Some have called for more strikes or civil disobedience outside Starbucks cafes or a nationwide consumer boycott – or a combination of all three strategies.Despite Starbucks’ aggressive tactics, many workers remain optimistic. “They’re doing everything they can to crush our organizing effort. What they’re doing is terrible, closing stories and firings,” said Casey Moore, a union spokesperson and fired Buffalo barista. “But every day we still have stores filing for elections and workers emerging with new energy.” More

On Saturday afternoon, roughly 70 people gathered on folding chairs in a sweltering church meeting room in the small town of Douglas, about 200 miles (322km) south-east of Atlanta, Georgia. Less than a week earlier, Donald Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in Fulton county for efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including allegedly entering the Coffee county elections office less than a mile away and copying the state’s voter software and other data.County residents at the town hall raised concerns about the lack of accountability for those who played a role in copying software and other data, and said they felt insecure about the safety and integrity of future elections.“People think, ‘He’s been indicted in Atlanta, so it’s over,’” 80-year-old county resident Jim Hudson said to the room, referring to Trump. “[But] how do we regroup? How do we become a county not referred to as ‘Crooked Coffee’?”The Rev Bruce Francis read a message from Bishop Reginald T Jackson, who oversees 500 Black churches in Georgia, referring to “troubling improprieties” that had brought this town of about 12,000 residents to the world’s attention.“The nation is now aware of the travesty that happened in 2020,” he read. “What do we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”The “travesty” was what Marilyn Marks, the town hall’s main speaker, called “the largest voting system breach in US history”. It happened in January 2021, when multiple people working on behalf of Donald Trump allegedly entered the Coffee county elections office and copied software and other digital information from the agency’s computers, gaining access to the entire elections system of the state of Georgia, home to about 7.9 million registered voters.The digital information obtained is now in an unknown number of hands, meaning that future elections could be affected in Georgia and in other states that use Dominion Voting Systems and other equipment made by partner companies. The breach has been publicly reported for more than a year, but was launched into a global spotlight on 14 August, when the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, issued indictments to Trump and 18 others. Several people were indicted for their direct role in the Coffee county breach, and nearly half the group had some kind of involvement in the incident, according to Marks.It wasn’t federal, state or local investigators who turned up evidence of the incidents, but Marks’ nonprofit organization, the Coalition for Good Governance. The group obtained video, text messages and other information about what happened in Douglas as part of a lawsuit against Georgia, now in its sixth year, that seeks to force the state to switch from computers to hand-marked paper ballots in elections, due to vulnerabilities in digital voting systems. Seventy percent of US voters mark ballots by hand.The town hall was the first occasion for residents of Douglas to hear a detailed explanation of how events that took place in their own back yard had become headlines, what those events mean for future elections and, perhaps most important, who among their neighbors had not been held accountable, what can be done to change that and how to prevent such a breach from happening again.Local residents wanted to know whether their personal information was “floating around in cyberspace”, if poll workers in Coffee county would be safe in future elections, and whether “money was exchanged for favors” during any of the visits to the local elections office by Trump’s associates.Hanging over the room were not just the challenges members of small communities face when their own neighbors are implicated in serious wrongdoing, but, also, the issue of race.Coffee county is about 68% white, but most of the attendees at the town hall were Black. One white woman said she had urged other white locals to attend, but was met with indifference.Many were also aware that one of the more prominent locals present – city commissioner of 24 years and voting rights activist Olivia Coley-Pearson – was persecuted for years by the state for helping disabled and illiterate voters, while state election officials have shown little interest in investigating the breach, according to Marks. Coley-Pearson is Black; Trump’s associates involved in the breach here have all been white.Before Marks began her talk, titled, “What the hack happened in Coffee Co?”, Hudson, a retired lawyer, addressed the room. A thin, soft-spoken man, Hudson told those gathered how, as a seventh-generation Georgian and county resident, he felt had “skin in the game” when it came to the breach. “That’s why, when I discovered what happened, I was so disappointed,” he said.He lamented there had been “no independent investigation by our officials … [and] almost no local press coverage”.Hudson suggested there needs to be an independent, local investigation and a plan for the future – “So this never occurs again in our county,” he said. The first reform, he said, should be that “the elections department office should never be used for a partisan meeting again”. The crowd applauded.Marks took the stage. “Coffee county is the central foundation for this incredible indictment that the world is watching,” she said. The nonprofit director recounted how Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall called her on 7 March 2021 and told her that he and others had been to Douglas and “scanned all the equipment … imaged all the hard drives, scanned every ballot … all the poll pads – everything”.On Tuesday morning, Hall became the first defendant named in last week’s indictments to surrender to authorities in Fulton county. He was shortly thereafter released on $10,000 bond.Marks went on to detail how local elections director Misty Hampton – also indicted last week – communicated with people in Trump’s orbit, including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who has repeatedly backed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Later, Hampton’s replacement found the business card of Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the group that performed a discredited audit of Arizona’s votes, in the county elections office, according to information Marks uncovered. Lindell and Logan remain unindicted.She pointed the room to “unanswered questions”: what happened to Hampton’s emails and laptop, which state investigators say they haven’t been able to obtain, and when did local election board members and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, learn of the breach? Also, why did local elections board member Eric Chaney, seen on video obtained by Marks welcoming Scott Hall and others into the elections office, remain on the board until September of last year? Chaney is also unnamed in Willis’s indictments.“You can’t wait on the state,” Marks told the room. “It’s up to local people to demand accountability.”Cliff Albright, co-founder of the national group Black Voters Matter, took the stage and told the audience that he knew what it was like to be dealing with political controversy in a small town in the south, “where everybody knows what car you drive, and whether you’ve been at a meeting”.Albright also reminded the audience what was at stake, pointing to Coley-Pearson, who faced multiple felony charges for allegedly breaking election laws. Coley-Pearson was never found guilty, but has suffered greatly from years of legal battles, she told the Guardian.“They put all this money and time into investigating one woman?” Albright asked the room, again bringing applause. “And then you’re talking about the largest breach in US history? My message to the secretary of state and the county … is ‘Act like you care about it!’”Then Coley-Pearson addressed her neighbors. “This is so important,” she said. “This is a threat to our democracy.” She noted that she had invited local elected officials from the county commission, the city commission and the board of elections – and only two came.Referring to the breach, she said: “They felt like they could come to Coffee county because ain’t nobody gonna get involved except for Olivia and her few folks … [but] we’ve worked too hard … to let them take our rights away!”Afterward, 70-year-old Alphermease Moore, who is Black and a Coffee county resident, noted that she was part of the local high school’s first integrated graduating class, in 1971.“I was in Coffee high school’s first integrated group and was hoping, 50 years later, that things would be different. But the same things happening then are happening now,” she said, referring to Coley-Pearson’s prosecution on the one hand, and the lack of accountability for local white officials on the other. “It’s a constant climb.”Standing outside the church, Hudson was emotional. He had learned about the breach months ago, after reading about it in the national press. “I was stunned. I could not believe it.”Hudson, a well-known, longtime white resident of Coffee county, has been writing the county commission and board of elections, seeking an independent investigation. He attended an elections board meeting this spring and remarked, “If this was Olivia Coley-Pearson [who breached the elections system], she’d be in jail already.”Douglas resident Larry Nesmith has been active in local Democratic party politics for 14 years. He said he would have been at the board of elections office on 7 January 2021, when the first visit by Trump’s associates occurred, but Hampton “told me not to come”.Months later, he said, “I found out what happened on TV. I was shocked to find out. I feel our board of elections tried to cover [it] up. There’s no way they didn’t know.”“Those responsible need to be held accountable,” he added. “These are people I know. Those who haven’t been indicted need to be. Bring them to justice. Don’t let them walk away!” More

One hundred years after the civil war, the treatment of African Americans persisted as a gaping wound in the purported land of the free. Then, suddenly in the 1960s, the bleeding from lynchings, bombings, beatings and shootings finally had a seismic effect. It galvanized the noble group who made the 60s so electric: the nimble, passionate and utterly fearless Black and white citizens who banded together to rescue America’s soul.By 1963, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr had become the leader of the first generation since the abolitionists who truly believed they had the power to heal the nation. Since founding his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King had worked tirelessly to fulfill its mission: “To save the soul of America.”King turned 28 the week after he founded the SCLC. More successfully than anyone since Abraham Lincoln, this Baptist preacher united millions of Black and white Americans in a cause of moral righteousness. They were drawn to his brain, to his soul, to his deep baritone and to his bearing. The novelist Jose Yglesias noted that “King laughed with his whole body, like a man who trusts his feelings”.His Gandhi-inspired choice of weapons put him on an unassailable moral plane. In a nation drenched in violence, he ordered his foot soldiers to fight with nothing but courage, intelligence and decency. In spring 1963, the world recoiled at the cost of that bravery, when the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than 1,000 non-violent protesters.When the white establishment of Birmingham gave in and agreed to remove “whites only” signs on restrooms and drinking fountains and to desegregate lunch counters, white terrorists bombed the hotel room where King and his aides had been staying and the house of his brother, Alfred. Miraculously, none were injured.A few weeks later, civil rights leaders were meeting John Kennedy at the White House when he said, “Bull has probably done more for civil rights than anyone else.” At first they were shocked. Then they thought it was joke. Then they realized it was true. Nearly universal revulsion to Connor’s tactics was a big factor in finally pushing Kennedy go on television, in June, to propose a civil rights act, and to deliver probably the greatest speech of his life.Echoing King, Kennedy declared: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free … Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.”King was exhilarated. He told the president he had given “one of the most eloquent profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and the freedom of all men ever made by any president”. And yet even after that speech, Kennedy was so nervous that Congress would respond the wrong way to a massive demonstration in the capital, it took another five weeks before he publicly endorsed the March on Washington, whose 60th anniversary we celebrate today.Courtland Cox, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a key organizer of the March, recalled a day now remembered almost exclusively for the soaring words of King’s “I have a dream” speech but also a peak moment for the collaborative power of music and politics.A month before, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter registration rally.“It wasn’t just a concert,” said Cox. “It was a community event.”Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers just a few weeks earlier. That was also one of the songs Dylan sang before 250,000 people in Washington. When Lena Horne was introduced, she uttered a single word: “Freedom.”Seeger had performed the most important musical pollination of all, when in 1957 King visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training camp for civil rights workers. When Seeger sang We Shall Overcome, it was the first time King heard it. He fell in love with it. In Washington, it was sung by the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Theodore Bikel – and nearly everyone in the audience.Cox had spent years registering voters in places where “if we got caught we would be shot. Alabama was the most dangerous. In Mississippi I always thought I could get away from a bullet, compared to Alabama where they used bombs and dynamite. I thought your chances were better with a bullet than dynamite.“I’m not sure how you can really express it. During the most stressful things the music would be the wind beneath your wings. It’s one thing singing We Shall Overcome when the police were out there with tear gas. It’s sung in a way that maintains your determination. The music had advocacy.”Peter Goldman wrote all the most important Newsweek stories about civil rights. So he traveled to Washington for the march.He said: “During the mid day break between the mostly entertainment morning sessions and the afternoon speechifying session, some of the musicians were hanging out in the rotunda of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m standing there and Joan Baez walks up behind Bob Dylan and pats him on the butt. ‘Let’s sing, Bobby,’ she said. So the two of them start on a Dylan song. They were joined by Peter and Mary – Paul was elsewhere. They went on for about an hour. Folk songs, freedom songs. Dylan songs.”How big was the audience?“Me. It was one of my luckier days.”In his superb memoir, Chasing History, the great reporter Carl Bernstein writes that the Washington Star deployed more than 60 reporters, installed 10 special telephones up and down the mall, and even commandeered a helicopter to fly film to the newsroom. And yet, somehow, the lead stories in both the Star and the Washington Post failed to mention the main event: King’s extraordinary speech.James Reston, the celebrated New York Times Washington bureau chief, did not make the same mistake. In a front-page analysis, he wrote that King “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else.“He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”Bernstein felt the same way.“For me, listening to Dr King’s speech, with its emotive power, and witnessing the sheer numbers of Black and white people marching together, I was certain I had experienced the most powerful moment of my lifetime – the ‘someday’ from We Shall Overcome was drawing nearer.” More

Joe Biden declared on Sunday that “white supremacy has no place in America” after three people were killed in a racist shooting in Florida and it emerged that the gunman had been turned away from a historically Black college or university (HBCU) campus moments before opening fire at a discount store.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, on Sunday called the gunman in the attack a “hateful lunatic” and said “we will not allow HBCUs to be targeted”.The FBI is investigating Saturday’s shooting as a hate crime after officials said the attack at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, was racially motivated, and community leaders also expressed horror.A white man, armed with a high-powered rifle and a handgun and wearing a tactical vest and mask, entered the store just before 2pm on Saturday and shot and killed two men and one woman, before fatally shooting himself. All three victims were Black.Waters on Sunday afternoon named the victims, saying that the gunman was caught on video shooting Angela Michelle Carr, a 52-year-old woman, in her car outside the Dollar General. He then entered the store where he shot and killed 19-year-old Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr and Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29.Sherri Onks, special agent in charge of the Jacksonville FBI office, said federal officials had opened a civil rights investigation and would pursue the incident as a hate crime.“Hate crimes are always and will always remain a top priority for the FBI because they are not only an attack on a victim, they’re also meant to threaten and intimidate an entire community,” Onks said.Waters, also on Sunday, named the gunman as Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, who bought his guns legally and had no criminal history. He lived with his parents in a suburb of Jacksonville and left a suicide note.Palmeter legally purchased his guns despite having been involuntarily committed for a mental health examination in 2017, the Associated Press reported.According to Waters, Palmeter purchased the weapons in April and June, and the dealer had followed all necessary laws and procedures including background checks.Because Palmeter was released after his mental health examination, it would not have appeared on his background check.Waters had already stated on Saturday that the shooter “hated Black people” and left behind “several manifestos” detailing such hatred.“The manifesto is, quite frankly, the diary of a mad man,” Waters said. “He was just completely irrational. But with irrational thoughts, he knew what he was doing. He was 100% lucid.”It emerged that Palmeter had been noticed on Saturday at a private, historically Black college, Edward Waters University (EWU), in Jacksonville, near the library. He was questioned by security there after refusing to identify himself, and turned away, EWU said in a public release. The man drove away and the university said the encounter was then reported to the Jacksonville sheriff’s office.“He had an opportunity to do violence at [Edward Waters] and did not. There were people in very close proximity,” the Associated Press reports Waters saying.EWU announced it would hold a prayer vigil on Sunday evening for the college community “particularly our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and all those impacted by yesterday’s heinous act of racial violence”.The US president, who is a moderate Democrat, issued a statement from the White House on Sunday saying that while many details about the crime were still unknown: “Even as we continue searching for answers, we must say clearly and forcefully that white supremacy has no place in America.”It continued: “We must refuse to live in a country where Black families going to the store or Black students going to school live in fear of being gunned down because of the color of their skin. Hate must have no safe harbor. Silence is complicity and we must not remain silent.”Biden also noted that the shooting had occurred on the same day as a huge demonstration in Washington DC that marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have A Dream speech, which the president called “a seminal moment in our history and in our work towards equal opportunity for all Americans”.He added of Saturday: “But this day of remembrance and commemoration ended with yet another American community wounded by an act of gun violence, reportedly fueled by hate-filled animus and carried out with two firearms.”DeSantis, a candidate for president in the 2024 election on Saturday, called the shooter a “scumbag” and denounced his racist motivation, also calling him a coward for killing himself “rather than face the music”.Speaking at a press conference in Tallahassee on Sunday, DeSantis also said that he promised EWU’s president that the the state will ensure that the school has adequate security.“Perpetrating violence of this kind is unacceptable, and targeting people due to their race has no place in the state of Florida,” DeSantis added.On Sunday, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said that the justice department is “investigating this attack as a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism”.Speaking to CNN on Sunday morning, Arndrea Waters King, president of the progressive thinktank Drum Major Institute and the wife of Martin Luther King III, said: “Yesterday, the same day when we had almost 200,000 people gathering together to stand for democracy in our country, we saw what happens with hate.”She added: “And for a lot of people that question of why are we coming back together and how different are things from 1963, it unfortunately gave the demonstration of the work and why we are, and where we are, in 2023 compared to 1963, which is not far at all.” More

The pastor of a church near the site of the racist fatal shooting of three Black people in Florida told congregants Sunday to follow Jesus Christ’s example and keep their sadness from turning to rage.Jacksonville’s mayor wept. Others at the service focused on Florida’s political rhetoric and said it has fueled such racist attacks.The shooting traumatized an historically Black neighborhood in Jacksonville on Saturday as thousands visited Washington DC, to attend the Rev Al Sharpton’s 60th anniversary commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where the Rev Martin Luther King Jr delivered his historic I Have A Dream speech.The latest in a long history of American racist killings was at the forefront of Sunday services at St Paul AME church, about 3 miles from the crime scene.“Our hearts are broken,” the Rev Willie Barnes told about 100 congregants Sunday morning. “If any of you are like me, I’m fighting trying to not be angry.”The attorney general, Merrick Garland, said Sunday that the justice department was “investigating this attack as a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism”.“No person in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence and no family should have to grieve the loss of a loved one to bigotry and hate,” he said.The Jacksonville mayor, Donna Deegan, cried as she addressed the congregation.“It feels some days like we’re going backward,” she said.“I’ve heard some people say that some of the rhetoric that we hear doesn’t really represent what’s in people’s hearts, it’s just the game. It’s just the political game,” Deegan said. “Those three people who lost their lives, that’s not a game.”The choir sang Amazing Grace before ministers said prayers for the victims’ families and the broader community. From the pews, congregants with heads bowed answered with “amen”.A masked white man carried out the shooting with at least one weapon bearing a swastika inside a Dollar General store, leaving two men and one woman dead.The shooting happened just before 2pm within a mile of Edward Waters University, a small, historically Black university. In addition to carrying a firearm painted with a symbol of Germany’s Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s, the shooter issued racist statements before the shooting. He killed himself at the scene.“He hated Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters said.At the St Paul AME church service, elected officials said racist attacks like Saturday’s have been encouraged by political rhetoric targeting “wokeness” and policies from the Republican-led state government headed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, including one taking aim at the teaching of Black history in Florida.“We must be clear, it was not just racially motivated, it was racist violence that has been perpetuated by rhetoric and policies designed to attack Black people, period,” said state representative Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat and one of several elected officials to speak during the church service.“We cannot sit idly by as our history is being erased, as our lives are being devalued, as wokeness is being attacked,” Nixon said. “Because let’s be clear – that is red meat to a base of voters.”Professor David Jamison, who teaches history at Edward Waters, attended St Paul AME Church on Sunday morning with four students from the university. The Rev Barnes acknowledged them from the pulpit.“These young men, they were within feet of their lives being taken,” Barnes told the congregation. “And we’re grateful God spared their lives.”The four students declined to speak with reporters after church. The pastor didn’t elaborate on what happened to them, and Jamison said he didn’t know details.“They’re overwhelmed,” the professor said, “and thankful to be alive.”Rudolph McKissick, a national board member of the Rev Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Baptist bishop, and senior pastor of the Bethel church in Jacksonville, was in Jacksonville on Saturday when the shooting occurred in the historically Black New Town neighborhood.“Nobody is having honest, candid conversations about the presence of racism,” McKissick said.DeSantis, who spoke with the sheriff by phone from Iowa while campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, called the shooter a “scumbag”.“This guy killed himself rather than face the music and accept responsibility for his actions. He took the coward’s way out,” DeSantis said.McKissick, the Jacksonville pastor, was one of those saying that DeSantis’s politics were contributing to racial tensions in Florida.“This divide exists because of the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black people and a governor, who is really propelling himself forward through bigoted, racially motivated, misogynistic, xenophobic actions to throw red meat to a Republican base,” McKissick said.Past shootings targeting Black Americans include one at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022 and a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.The Buffalo shooting, which killed 10 people, stands apart as one of the deadliest targeted attacks on Black people by a lone white gunman in US history. The shooter was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. More

It would be a relief not to see or hear anything more from Donald Trump for a while. Unfortunately, that is unlikely. When he was finally brought to book last week at Fulton County Jail, Georgia, on multiple charges of racketeering and conspiracy, the former president should have been refused bail. That might have shut him up for a while. But showing an undeserved leniency characteristic of the legal proceedings against him to date, prosecutors allowed inmate P01135809 to walk away with a $200,000 bond – despite his recent, blatant attempts to intimidate witnesses and judges.It’s far from clear, in any case, that the American people want Trump to be silenced or an end to the gripping, often surreal, dark-sided reality show in which he stars. With typical chutzpah, Trump timed his surrender at the jail to maximise live cable news coverage. The result was nationwide publicity for his bogus claim to be the victim of a vendetta by President Biden, the Democrats and the “deep state”. Turning the tables with customary brazenness, he said they were guilty of 2024 election interference – exactly what he himself stands accused of after 2020.America’s fascinated TV news channels, radio show hosts, newspapers and social media platforms are enjoying all this hugely, whatever their politics. Trump’s supporters laud him as a modern hero – a reborn Paul Revere, warning the republic of the enemy’s approach. Trump made sure his prison mugshot was instantly disseminated, using it to solicit campaign donations. His son, Donald Trump Jr, described it as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics”. Hardly.Some American progressives and liberals seem to be relishing the spectacle, too. The squeals of shock and anger that greet each atrocious Trump lie and twist are delicious in their way. But Trump and his Maga followers, by making a mockery of the justice system and treating the courts with contempt, do their country a great disservice.Quite what Republicans (and Democrats) would do if Trump were locked away is an intriguing question. Joe Biden is assured of his party’s nomination, despite a noisy challenge from Robert Kennedy Jr. But his national approval rating of minus 11% remains unusually low. Recent polls suggest many Democratic voters are unenthusiastic about a second Biden term. They would support him if push came to shove. Majorities in both parties would prefer a younger president to Biden, 80, or Trump, 77.But who might that be? Last week’s first televised debate between Republican presidential hopefuls, boycotted by Trump, failed to produce a likely or convincing alternative – and certainly not one capable of overturning Trump’s 40-point internal party lead. The more sensible candidates, such as Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, struggled to make an impression. More attention was paid to Vivek Ramaswamy, a ranting, egotistical younger version of Trump, who seemed to be there largely for kicks (which he received in plenty).The entertainment value of these legal high jinks, courtroom dramas, poll battles and pugilistic TV showdowns is undeniable. It’s politics as theatre. Like one of the more evil Roman emperors, Trump gives good circus. Yet the proper conduct of the first-ever criminal prosecutions of a president and next year’s pivotal election are matters of enormous importance for the US and the world. Americans may need to take their democracy more seriously as a decisive juncture approaches – or risk losing it. More