US Politics

A respected conservative judge who advised the former Republican vice-president Mike Pence not to attempt to overturn the 2020 election believes Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican party.“American democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties,” J Michael Luttig told CNN on Wednesday. “So today, in my view, there is no Republican party to counter the Democratic party in the country.“And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.”American democracy has by most measures been in grave peril since 6 January 2021, the day Pence, as vice-president, took Luttig’s advice and refused to attempt to block congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win.A mob Trump told to “fight like hell” attacked the Capitol, some chanting for Pence to be hanged. The effort failed but nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. More than a thousand people have been charged and hundreds convicted, some with seditious conspiracy.Last week, the special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump on four counts relating to election subversion. Trump, 77, pleaded not guilty, as he has to 74 other criminal counts, in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star and federally regarding his retention of classified information.Trump also faces cases concerning his business affairs and his treatment of women. In New York this week, regarding a civil suit in which Trump was found liable for defamation and sexual assault, a judge said it was not defamatory to call the former president a rapist.Trial dates are piling up, most during the Republican primary next year. Nonetheless, Trump leads Ron DeSantis of Florida, Pence and the rest of the field by more than 30 points, firmly on course to face Biden again. In Congress, his far-right supporters maintain a grip on the House as they seek to impeach Biden.Luttig told CNN: “A political party is a collection and assemblage of individuals who share a set of beliefs and principles and policy views about the United States of America. Today, there is no such shared set of beliefs and values and principles or even policy views as within the Republican party for America.”Trump, he said, was a danger “more so today” than last year, when Luttig testified to the House January 6 committee.A respected conservative judge who was considered for the supreme court under George W Bush, Luttig made a tremendous impact with his January 6 testimony.Speaking on primetime television, Luttig said: “I believe that had Vice-President Pence obeyed the orders from his president … and declared Donald Trump the next president of the United States … [he] would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution, within a constitutional crisis.”On Wednesday, Luttig also told CNN he did not think Trump could avoid conviction for election subversion.“The evidence is overwhelming that the former president knew full well that he had lost the election,” he said. More

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, suspended the top prosecutor in Orlando on Wednesday, claiming “dereliction of duty” on crime. In return, the prosecutor said DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was a “weak dictator” acting undemocratically and for political reasons.Monique Worrell, the ninth judicial circuit state attorney, is the second Democratic prosecutor DeSantis has removed.Last year, the governor suspended Andrew Warren of Tampa over his supposedly “woke” agenda, including pledging not to enforce a 15-week abortion ban and supporting gender transition for minors. A legal battle over that decision continues.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Worrell said: “Elected officials are being taken out of office solely for political purposes … Under this tyranny, elected officials can be removed simply for political purposes and by a whim of the governor and no matter how you feel about me, you should not be OK with that.“This is simply a smoke screen for Ron DeSantis’ failing and disastrous presidential campaign. He needed to get back in the media in some positive way. That would be red meat for his base. And he will have accomplished that today.”Trailing Donald Trump in the Republican primary, and having recently replaced his campaign manager amid reports of a campaign in free-fall, DeSantis made his announcement about Worrell on a break from the presidential trail.“Worrell’s practices and policies have too often allowed violent criminals to escape the full consequences of their criminal conduct, thereby endangering the innocent civilians of Orange and Osceola counties,” DeSantis’s office said in a statement.In an executive order, DeSantis accused the second African American elected state attorney of “neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction”.The 15-page order accused Worrell of allowing practices and policies that “systematically permitted violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious-juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade incarceration”.It alleged such practices and policies included “non-filing or dropping meritorious charges or declining to allege otherwise provable facts to avoid triggering applicable lengthy sentences, minimum mandatory sentences, or other sentencing enhancements, especially for offenders under 25 years old”.Worrell was also accused of overseeing low prison admission rates “for crimes involving lewd and lascivious behavior, which includes possession of child pornography and other sex crimes against children”.In his own news conference, DeSantis said that while prosecutors “do have a certain amount of discretion about which cases to bring and which not”, Worrell “abused that discretion”.DeSantis said he was nominating a former judge, Andrew Bain, to serve during Worrell’s suspension.Worrell told reporters: “If we are mourning anything this morning, it is the loss of democracy. I am your duly-elected state attorney for the ninth judicial circuit. Nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.“I am a fighter and I intend to fight. I will not be quiet. I will not sit down … I will continue to stand for democracy. I will continue to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. I am proud to tell you that this will not stop me from running for re-election. My re-election will continue.”Earlier this year, DeSantis and Worrell exchanged barbs over the case of Keith Moses, a 19-year-old believed responsible for the killings of three people, including a journalist and a nine-year old girl, in shootings in Orange county in March.According to reports, Moses’s criminal history includes eight felonies and 11 misdemeanor cases, all bar one having occurred while he was a juvenile. His only crime as an adult was possession of drug paraphernalia and cannabis, in 2021. Worrell’s office did not prosecute, due to the amount found.Following the shootings, DeSantis said Worrell’s office, which announced in May that it would seek the death penalty against Moses, “may have permitted this dangerous individual to remain on the street”.“You have to hold people accountable,” DeSantis said, adding: “[The] state attorney in Orlando thinks that you don’t prosecute people and that’s the way that you somehow have better communities. That does not work.”Worrell fired back, saying: “For this tragedy to be politicized, it’s shameful and we should all feel that way about it.“Painting a narrative that there’s something that prosecutors could have done to keep this individual off the streets is just not true.” More

The California US senator Dianne Feinstein, 90, was hospitalized on Tuesday evening after suffering a fall in her home, a spokesperson said.“Senator Feinstein briefly went to the hospital yesterday afternoon as a precaution after a minor fall in her home,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “All of her scans were clear and she returned home.”TMZ first reported the news. The Feinstein spokesperson, Adam Russell, then told the San Francisco Chronicle the senator was only in hospital for “an hour or two”.At 90, Feinstein is the oldest serving US senator. She has said she will retire at the end of her term next year. Three Democratic House colleagues are competing in the race to succeed her. Former Trump impeachment manager Adam Schiff is facing off against the longtime progressive, anti-war congresswoman Barbara Lee and the rising star and consumer protection crusader Katie Porter.But continued health problems have stoked calls for Feinstein to step aside sooner.Earlier this year, Feinstein was absent from Congress for nearly three months while recovering from shingles. During her hospitalization, some progressive House Democrats publicly called on her to resign, saying she had grounded the push to confirm Joe Biden’s judicial nominees. Leading Democrats, including Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, publicly stood beside her.Since her return, Feinstein has at times appeared frail and confused. The Chronicle said Feinstein had been due to attend an event celebrating San Francisco’s cable cars on 2 August, but had missed it after developing a cough.The first woman to be mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein was elected to the US Senate in 1992. As a senator, she led the effort to pass a landmark 1994 assault weapons ban. Between 2017 and 2021, she led Democrats on the judiciary committee, where she helmed a landmark investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.Feinstein’s health challenges have renewed attention on the age and health concerns of some of the US’s most prominent politicians and fueled debates about age limits for members of Congress.The 81-year-old Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has suffered a number of falls and last month froze during remarks to reporters, prompting both expressions of concern and calls for him to step down.At an event in Kentucky on Saturday, McConnell was heckled with calls of “Retire!”The two candidates expected to contest the presidential election next year, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, and the former Republican president Donald Trump, are 80 and 77 respectively.But Feinstein’s age and health problems – side effects of shingles include encephalitis, or swelling of the brain – came into sharp focus when she was absent from Congress, given the need for her vote on judicial nominations.Some observers said calls for her to retire were ageist and sexist, and would not have been aimed at the likes of Chuck Grassley, the 89-year-old Iowa Republican who also sits on the judiciary committee.Rejecting such claims, the Vanity Fair columnist and politics podcaster Molly Jong-Fast said Feinstein was “fundamentally … a public servant, there to serve the public. And this idea that somehow because she’s a woman or because she’s older that she should be immune from [calls to quit] is really ridiculous”.Feinstein has defended her ability to perform her job, though her office said in May that she was still experiencing vision and balance impairments from the shingles virus.If Feinstein resigns before the 2024 election, Gavin Newsom, the California governor, would name her replacement, potentially reordering the race to succeed her. The governor said in 2021 that he would nominate a Black woman to fill the seat if Feinstein were to step aside.Reuters contributed reporting More

It seems a long time ago, but there was a brief period, after Joe Biden’s inauguration and before the 6 January hearings and the start of campaigning for next year’s presidential election, when it was possible to avoid Donald Trump for days at a time. He was still there, obviously, wandering the corridors at Mar-a-Lago, Gloria Swanson-style, and posting screeds to Truth Social. But there was no real reason to think about him and, for that short period, he was returned to his essential state: just another person posting unhinged rants online.This is not where Trump is now – in the US, at least. Thanks to a raft of legal actions, culminating earlier this month in the justice department’s arraignment of the former president for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election result, Trump is not only front and centre every day, but in danger of ascending to a new position in the news cycle: political martyr and victim of a witch-hunt. Given the preposterousness of the events leading up to this moment – only recently, a jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse – it seems inevitable we should find ourselves here.Trump, of course, is keenly aware of the potential in his superficially dire situation and has already leaned fully into it. In campaign stops across the US, and with the threat of jail hanging over him, he is doing the thing we know from experience to be the man’s absolute forte: siphoning the heat and energy from any given charge against him and refracting it back on his enemies. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire on Tuesday. As the New York Times pointed out this week, his new campaign message for the 2024 election is: “I’m being indicted for you”. (A woman at the New Hampshire event told the reporter, nonsensically but with heart: “What, am I next?”)It is an exceedingly weird and insoluble problem. From experience we know that the only blows that land on Trump are either ridicule – recall his face when Obama mocked him, all those years ago, during the White House correspondents’ dinner – or ignoring him. Of the two, only the latter really promises results. In the shocked days after Trump’s election in 2016, I recall that Obama’s moment of mockery was singled out as an example of precisely the kind of leftwing self-indulgence that dislodged the first pebble in Trump’s psychology, and ended in his run for the White House. It is a mistake to take the man seriously; indicting him on four criminal counts of allegedly attempting to overturn a democratic election is the very definition of taking someone seriously. And yet, in a functioning democracy, how on earth might one let this pass?As such, the unfolding of the latest and most serious legal action against Trump highlights a stark divide between the political and judicial rationales for pursuing him. As has already been observed, Trump is on exceedingly thin ice with Moxila A Upadhyaya, the judge who set the terms of his conditions for release pending trial. In the last week, Trump posted what might be construed as vague threats in the direction of any prospective juror (“If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”), raising the possibility of a scenario in which he is yanked to jail and campaigns for the presidency from his cell.There is, in the current climate in the US, nothing pleasing about this image. In fact, with every passing day, and with a perversity no amount of exposure to Trump can ever quite normalise, Trump in jail seems like the worst possible outcome. Campaigning from a prison cell would lend Trump a righteousness exceeding even his present grandiose narrative, and widen the sweep of his supporters by offering them a wildly romantic and dramatic cause to join.What remains so hard to grapple with is that in spite of the deadly seriousness of the events that got us here – it is easy to forget, sometimes, that people died on 6 January – as ever with Trump, one senses the wink behind every gesture. When he tells supporters, as he did in March, “I am your retribution”, his language is like a biblical script with Mel Gibson behind it, a hokey narrative that serves two purposes: it offers a genuine cause for aggrieved supporters to latch on to and, simultaneously, it extends an invitation to join him in a cosmic joke against everyone else. One imagines Trump in jail, his demeanour unchanged, which is to say that of an after-dinner host, smirking and shrugging and rolling his eyes as he says: “I’m like Jesus Christ at this point.”
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York
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Earlier this summer, Gallup published some surprising numbers: more Americans identified as “socially conservative” than at any time in about a decade. Thirty-eight per cent said they were “conservative” or “very conservative” when it came to social issues, as opposed to 29% who said they were “liberal” or “very liberal”. A year earlier, 33% were on the conservative side, and 30% liberal.What accounts for the rightward shift?While these numbers tell us something interesting about personal identification, they don’t actually tell us all that much about policy. “Social issues” wasn’t defined by the Gallup pollsters, leaving respondents to interpret the term for themselves. But the line between “social issues” and “economic issues” isn’t all that clear. Is income inequality a social issue, an economic issue, or both? What about abortion, which has long been defined as a social issue, but has huge economic impacts for women and their families?What primarily seems to be driving the change is the Biden era.The last time we saw a similar peak in self-described social conservatism was in 2009, the year Barack Obama took office. Social conservatism hit a low in 2021, when Biden was inaugurated after a horrific and deadly pro-Trump insurrection brought national shame to the country and to the Republican party in particular.But it has steadily ticked up since then. And the shift has been driven largely by Republicans, whose conservative/very conservative identification on social issues has grown by 14 points since 2021. Independents have shifted rightward on social issues by five points. Democrats have stayed steady.Republicans, in other words, have doubled down on conservative identity now that their party is out of the White House. And that makes sense: being in the political opposition is often more motivating than being in charge, and feeling like your policy preferences are being sidelined can make you dig in harder than when you feel like you’re winning.There’s also been an age-related shift. While most age groups, aside from those over 65 who stayed more or less even, shifted rightward, the biggest shift – 13 points – was among those aged 30 to 49 (50-to-64-year-olds shifted by 11 points, while adults under 30 moved to the right by six points). This, too, may not be all that surprising: one’s 30s and 40s are the years when many adults find themselves turning inwards, toward nuclear family and home life, which can be a conservatizing force (for women, marriage tends to create a shift to the right; having children, for both sexes, may do the same).There’s actually not much evidence that Americans are growing more conservative when you break it down issue by issue. Support for abortion rights is at record highs, with even many Republicans wanting the government out of women’s uteruses. And Americans aren’t just more pro-choice broadly; they are now more likely to support abortion without restriction.Support for LGBTQ rights is also widespread. Seventy-one per cent of Americans support same-sex marriage rights. Sixty-six per cent favor allowing trans people to serve in the military. And 93% say gay people and lesbians should have the same job opportunities and protections as straight people.When it comes to guns, most Americans want stricter laws. And most Americans also say that more needs to be done to make racial equality a reality.It’s clear that Americans are a more liberal bunch than can be captured by amorphous self-identity questions. One issue, though, is different: crime.According to Gallup data from last year, 56% of Americans said there was more crime in their area than in the previous year – the highest percentage since Gallup began asking the question in 1972. And 78% said they believed crime was up nationwide. Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to believe crime was up, but 42% of Democrats believed crime in their area had risen. And most Democrats also believe that crime is up nationwide.Perception, of course, is not reality. “Crime” is also one of those amorphous terms – are we talking about murders or porch pirates or wage theft, or all of the above? The numbers generally show that, while there was a spike in violent crime during Covid, crime remains lower than it was at its peak in the 1990s. But crime statistics are notoriously poorly tracked, which leaves us with limited data. And “things aren’t as bad as they were at the height of violent crime in modern America” isn’t exactly comforting.People also tend to vote on perception, not data. If the general perception is that crime is rising, that can push voters to the right, as the Republican party has pretty firmly entrenched itself as the party of law and order. This is ironic, given that Republicans’ anything-goes stance on gun control fuels America’s endemic violence problem, but Republicans’ rhetoric on crime is much more aggressive than Democrats’. Republicans also tend to promote more policing and punitive measures in response to crime, while Democrats are more likely to push broader social investments, including in education and poverty alleviation.When many Americans think about rising crime, what they’re really considering is the general sense of things being safe and orderly or not. A big part of what’s driving the perception of rapidly rising crime, I suspect, is the reality of increasingly visible social dysfunction: homelessness, addiction and anti-social behavior.Since the pandemic, homelessness has surged, and there seems to be a higher number of visibly homeless people who are struggling with mental health disorders, substance abuse disorders or both. In New York City, there has been an 18% increase in the number of people who are sleeping on the streets and in the subways, and for the first time ever the city’s homeless population passed 100,000. The San Francisco Bay Area has seen a 35% rise in homelessness since 2019. Los Angeles has seen its homeless population increase by more than 40% since 2018. Maricopa county, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, has seen its homeless population increase by 72% since 2017.Large west coast cities are plagued by tent encampments, which are often sites of gang activity, illicit drug use and deadly overdoses, sexual violence and crime more broadly. The folks sleeping rough are not the majority of people who are unhoused on any given night, but they are a group that reads as homeless, erratic, potentially dangerous and reflective of broader social malaise. That read may not be kind or fair and accurate, but perceptions rarely are.Adding to the general sense of insecurity and instability are surging drug overdoses and the more amorphous sense – backed up with some data – that people are just acting erratically and badly in all kinds of new and disturbing ways. All of this may be combined into a general sense of “things are bad and seem to be coming apart at the seams” which can manifest as “crime is getting worse” – which in turn can drive people to the right if they don’t think Democrats and liberals are responsive to their concerns.And unfortunately, while mainstream Democrats do largely recognize that crime and concern for general order and stability is a problem, a lot of liberal pundits and people in media, and even some elected officials, deny and deflect. One way to drive people who share your values away from your party and your ideology is to deny what they can see with their own eyes.Luckily, there are a long list of issues that Democrats win on, and voters may be more inclined to vote for politicians who promise to protect the environment, reproductive rights and democracy itself than those who say they’ll “do something” about homelessness (especially if more voters understand that “something” has to be housing) or “get tough” on crime (especially if voters are exhausted by a system of brutal incarceration that doesn’t actually solve the problem).It is a problem for Democrats, though – and for progressive movement-building – if more Americans consider themselves socially conservative, whether their policy preferences perfectly line up with the Republican party or not. The latest numbers may just be a blip, spurred on by conservatives who feel victimized by a Democratic administration.But liberals are already at a disadvantage in a country where only a small minority – roughly one in five – has said for the last 20 years that they are liberal on economic issues, while 40% to 50% have consistently said they’re economically conservative. Republicans don’t represent a majority on policy, but conservatism seems to have a better brand than liberalism: while 40% of Americans say they’re conservative, just 26% say they’re liberal.That doesn’t necessary mean Democrats will always lose elections. But it is bad news for the majority of us who value liberal democracy and want to build a fairer, healthier, safer society.
Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness More

A cousin of Elvis Presley is the Democratic candidate for governor in Mississippi, after winning his primary unopposed on Tuesday.The general election will be held on 7 November. The Democrat, Brandon Presley, said he would advocate for people who struggle to make ends meet.He will face the current Republican governor, Tate Reeves, who defeated two first-time candidates, John Witcher, a physician, and David Hardigree, a military veteran.“The national Democrats think Mississippi is theirs for the taking,” Reeves told supporters in Jackson. “They’ve circled our state, and they’ve hand-picked their candidate … these national Democrats think they can use him to inject their liberal ideology into Mississippi under the guise of being a moderate.”Presley said: “This race is going to come down to … which candidate, and I believe that’s me, has got guts and the backbone to stand up for the people of Mississippi and which candidate has consistently showed us that he will do whatever his lobbyist buddies want him to do and will not stand up for the people of Mississippi.”Mississippi is one of three states holding races for governor this year. Despite Republicans holding all statewide offices for 20 years, the Democratic Governors Association chair, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, has predicted a Democrat could win.In his hometown, Nettleton, Presley took the stage at his victory party to See See Rider, a song Elvis Presley often used as walk-on music. The candidate said he would not sing, though.“We’re trying to get votes,” Presley said. “We’re not trying to lose them.”Reeves, 49, became state treasurer in 2003. He had two terms as treasurer and two terms as lieutenant governor before becoming governor in 2019.“Brandon Presley and his party are happy to see people go on welfare,” Reeves said. “He campaigns on wanting more welfare. He thinks welfare is a destination. I think … a job is a destination for everyone in Mississippi – a job with benefits and healthcare and a chance to move up in the world.”Reeves often touts two laws: one in 2021 that prohibits transgender people from playing on girls’ or women’s sports teams and one this year that bans gender-affirming healthcare to people younger than 18.Reeves signed an income tax reduction into law last year and wants to eliminate state income tax. He says he has fulfilled a 2019 promise to increase teacher pay.“Mississippi has momentum, and this is Mississippi’s time,” Reeves said. “To believe Brandon Presley’s campaign, you’ve got to believe that none of that is true.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPresley, 46, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission, has highlighted the challenges of working families in one of the poorest states. Born a few weeks before his famous relative died, he often talks about growing up in a home where his widowed mother had trouble paying bills with a modest paycheck.“Tate Reeves doesn’t care anything about us. He doesn’t care anything about working people,” Presley said. “If you can’t write a campaign check, or you’re not part of his little club of buddies and insiders, you’re shut out of state government.”Presley says he wants to eliminate a 7% state tax on groceries. He also says Mississippi should join 40 states that have expanded Medicaid coverage to people working low-wage jobs that do not provide private insurance.Dr Martha Morrow, an optometrist, said she supported Presley because she sees him as an honest person who wants to improve the quality of life. Morrow said it was crucial to expand Medicaid.“We’re going to have to stop the rural hospitals from closing,” Morrow said. “Tate Reeves can say all he wants to that it’s not a problem. It’s a problem. If you’re sick and you can’t get to a hospital because your hospital’s closed – people are dying already. And it’s going to continue.”Reeves and Presley will also face an independent, Gwendolyn Gray, a 68-year-old newcomer who leads a non-profit, the Southern Foundation for Homeless Children, and says one of her main concerns as governor would be alleviating poverty. More

Towards the end of July Leonard Leo, architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary, emerged from his vacation retreat in Maine to write an opinion piece for the local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, headlined: “When is free speech protected?”Leo, 58, is the low-profile, deceptively nondescript co-chair of the conservative legal group Federalist Society. That he turned his hand to this topic was in itself no surprise – he has long presented himself as a champion of the first amendment, with its guarantees of freedom of religion, speech, press and peaceable assembly.“Free speech is essential for a free society,” he wrote. “As such, it is something that I have defended and will continue to defend, and I have always accepted that there will be objections and opposition to the work I do.”But a couple of eye-catching, and seemingly incongruous, events have led to speculation that his commitment to free speech might be more complicated than he professes, and more self serving. If all American citizens are equal in front of this vital element of the US constitution, could it be that some people – notably Leo himself – are more equal than others?The first of the two events took place in the bailiwick of the Bangor Daily News, in Maine, where Leo has a $3m waterfront estate on an elite island community in Northeast Harbor. On 20 July, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported on a new lawsuit that had been brought by a 23-year-old local resident for wrongful arrest.Eli Durand-McDonnell, a landscaper, was part of a group of progressive activists who staged a series of peaceful protests outside Leo’s home. They were angry about his role in securing a rightwing supermajority on the US supreme court, and the evisceration of fundamental rights that flowed from that.Leo had proposed to Donald Trump the names of all three of the justices appointed by the former president: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. As such, he played a critical role in the court’s overturning of the right to an abortion in June 2022.Leo isn’t named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit, which accuses two local police officers of making an illegal and retaliatory arrest of Durand-McDonnell during one of the protests on 31 July 2022, a month after the devastating abortion ruling. But it does claim that the arrest was made “at the direct behest of Leo, a powerful and wealthy conservative political activist who has used millions of dollars as political speech to influence American politics and courts”.The complaint discloses that the head of Leo’s private security detail contacted the Bar Harbor police while one of the protests was occurring outside his home, singling out Durand-McDonnell for supposedly harassing the Federalist Society chief and his family. Leo told a police officer who turned up at the scene: “I think it’s time for us to press some charges,” adding, “I really feel like this is a guy who’s got to be in jail someday, and sooner rather than later.”In his Bangor Daily News op-ed, Leo said that before the protest Durand-McDonnell had yelled at his wife and daughter that they should burn in hell. “I don’t take reporting someone to the police lightly. But, as a husband and a father, neither can I take harassment of my wife and children lightly,” he wrote.Durand-McDonnell saw the event differently. He denies harassing anyone, insisting that all his actions were political protest that is protected by the first amendment.“I think this case sums it up perfectly,” he told the New Yorker. “The rules don’t apply to Leonard Leo … If he doesn’t agree with what someone else says, it’s no longer free speech.”The second event burst into public view five days after Mayer’s New Yorker article. On 25 July, Leo wrote a letter through his lawyer to two leading Democratic US senators on the judiciary committee, Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse.The senators wanted Leo to answer a series of questions about his ties to the supreme court justices as part of an ethics investigation they were conducting. Leo has long been a figure of interest for Congress, given his outsized influence on US politics and the courts.He is credited as being both brains and brawn behind the long campaign to steer the federal judiciary sharply to the right. He helped place at least 200 judges on the federal bench, and then went on to transform the nation’s most powerful court.“Leo has been the central driving figure of the conservative movement’s decades-long effort to reshape the supreme court’s composition and outcomes,” said Alex Aronson, a judicial accountability advocate and Whitehouse’s former chief counsel in the US senate. “He has his fingerprints on every one of the six Republican-appointed justices who are now on the court.”Leo has also become a focus of intense public scrutiny after he was handed a $1.6bn fund to spend on boosting conservative causes. He now controls a pot of money that represents possibly the largest single donation to a political non-profit in US history.Leo’s name has repeatedly popped up in the wave of ethics scandals that has washed over the supreme court this year. In April, when ProPublica published its blockbuster expose of Justice Clarence Thomas’s chummy relations with the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, there was Leo depicted in a painting that hangs at Crow’s luxury lakeside resort in upstate New York sitting alongside Crow and Thomas in amicable conversation.A month later the Washington Post revealed that Leo had arranged for Thomas’s wife, the pro-Trump extremist Ginni Thomas, to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting. “No mention of Ginni, of course,” Leo instructed the polling firm that supplied the cash.A month after that, ProPublica unleashed another blockbuster that disclosed the luxury fishing trip in Alaska that Justice Samuel Alito went on in 2008 bankrolled by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. There was Leo again, pictured with Singer and Alito holding king salmon they had caught.Leo, who assisted Alito in his 2006 confirmation to the supreme court, had a hand in arranging the trip. That included asking Singer for seats on his private jet which the justice failed to disclose as he was legally required to do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the wake of these ethically dubious bombshells, Durbin and Whitehouse decided to conduct their own inquiry as part of congressional oversight. They wanted to know from Leo further details of the Alaska fishing trip and what transportation, lodging and gifts he had provided to any of the justices.In his response, Leo turned once more to the first amendment. This time, though, he made the opposite argument: unlike the Maine protester who he said had no free speech right to harass him, Leo said he had an absolute first amendment right that protected his dealings and communications with Alito and the other justices.“Mr Leo is entitled by the First Amendment to engage in public advocacy, associate with others who share his views, and express opinions on important matters of public concern,” his lawyer wrote. Leo declined to cooperate with Congress.One of the striking aspects of Leo’s use of the first amendment in these two events is that in both instances he sets himself up as the victim of harassment. In Maine, he was “harassed” by Durand-McDonnell who in Leo’s view went beyond civil speech and therefore forfeited his first amendment protections.In the letter to Congress, Leo presents himself as being “harassed” by the senators for exercising his first amendment rights to interact with the supreme court justices in any way they liked.This glaring duality – the same harassment claim played both ways with the first amendment – has caught the attention of Leo’s critics. “He’s a free speech champion when it means forcing his radical agenda on everyday Americans and refusing to cooperate with Congress,” said Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the government corruption watchdog Accountable.US. “But he does an about-face as soon as the free speech is directed at him.”The Guardian reached out to Leo to invite his reaction to this criticism, but he did not respond.Aronson called the arguments laid out in Leo’s letter refusing to cooperate with Congress “comically absurd”. “What Leo argued here is that Congress lacks authority to investigate the supreme court. That position has no basis in the constitution or in any precedent.”Aronson said that this was nothing new: Leo and the network of dark money groups he coordinates, along with the conservative justices of the supreme court he helped into power, have long massaged the first amendment for political gain. “The first amendment has been a particular target of political manipulation by Leo and the conservative legal movement across a range of subjects,” he said.In 2010 the supreme court ruling Citizens United used free speech as a way to open the door to massive spending in elections by corporate donors. Then in 2021, in a much less noticed ruling, Americans for Prosperity v Bonta, the rightwing justices effectively created a new first amendment right to keep the identity of big donors secret.In the judicial term that ended in June, the six conservative justices again turned to the first amendment – this time to unleash open discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities in the name of protected speech. In a dissent, Sonia Sotomayor warned that business services could now be denied any vulnerable group, such as interracial couples or parents with disabled children, all in the name of “free speech”.Now, in the latest iteration of the use of the argument by the right, Trump himself is leaning on a free speech defense in response to this week’s indictment over his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.Stand back from all this, and Aronson believes we are witnessing the unfolding of Leo’s judicial revolution. “Highly influential political actors are developing incomparable sway over the judiciary after decades of coordinated investment,” he said.“The law is becoming manipulable to advance their ends. And hurt their adversaries.” More

The Australian ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, says it is up to the American people whether Donald Trump returns to the White House – an outcome he previously said would “fray” support for the US alliance in Australia.The former Australian prime minister said on Wednesday that US politics was “a complex beast” and he was focused on keeping on good terms with both sides of the aisle, including former Trump officials.Rudd said he was also focused on securing US legislation to enable tech collaboration under the Aukus pact, but likened it to “a complex process of sausage-making”.Rudd is well connected in Washington and is close to senior figures in the Biden administration and establishment Republicans, but has previously been an outspoken critic of Trump.Prior to his appointment as ambassador, which took effect earlier this year, Rudd called Trump “the most destructive president in history”.Rudd told Guardian Australia before the 2020 election that if Trump were re-elected, “the overall fabric of domestic political support in this country and among other American allies around the world will begin to more fundamentally fray”.Rudd had a more diplomatic message when he spoke to reporters outside Old Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday.Asked what preparations he was making for the possibility of another Trump administration, Rudd said both the US and Australia were “robust democracies”.
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Since taking up the diplomatic posting, Rudd said he had “worked comfortably and seamlessly” with House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell.Rudd said he had also spoken with Republican House and Senate leaders from across the US congressional system “and also with former members of the Trump administration from last time round”.“That’s our job as an embassy and that’s my job as ambassador. What the good burghers [people] of the United States choose to do in their own electoral process is a matter for them – from which, thankfully, Australian ambassadors are immune from comment.”Rudd’s comment was an adaptation of “the good burghers of Griffith” – a phrase he had previously used in reference to the voters in the electorate he previously held in the Australian parliament.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite Trump facing multiple indictments, including over the attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, the former president remains the frontrunner to secure the Republican nomination for the 2024 election.Although it remains very early in the cycle, the current general election polling suggests Joe Biden and Trump are closely matched.Rudd expressed confidence in the prospect of passing US legislation to enable both elements of the Aukus: Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines and collaboration on other advanced defence technology.After speaking with committee chairs and ranking members in the US Senate and Congress, Rudd said Aukus enjoyed “quite a remarkable level of bipartisan support” but there would always be “pretty colourful debate”.Republicans have raised concerns the US could fall short on its own needs when selling Australia at least three Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s, but Rudd said it was normal for elected members to reflect “their own industry policy concerns and their own constituency concerns”.Australia has already earmarked about $3bn over the next four years to boost the submarine sustainment and production capacity of the US and the UK.Most of this is expected to go to the US, and Rudd played down the idea Australia would be asked to tip in more funds.“No one that I’ve met in the United States has challenged what we’re proposing to do and the impact of what we ourselves will do in terms of adding to their industrial capacity,” he said.Hinting the US may make further investments in its own submarine industrial base, Rudd predicted the issue would be resolved through negotiations “between the administration and relevant senators”.Rudd said he would continue to convey the Australian government’s position that the case against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had “gone on for too long”, but likely behind the scenes “in order to maximise our prospects”.Rudd was speaking on his way into a Tech Council of Australia event, where he said Australia and the US were serious about collaborating on renewable energy and critical minerals. More