US Politics

From 5h agoA battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
“They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers.
Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president, Mike Pence, is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else happened today:
Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that the state remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
Mitt Romney says donors should cut off support to Republican presidential contenders who have no hope of winning the nomination, in an effort to winnow the race to two candidates and defeat Trump.
House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
Special counsel Jack Smith has obtained documents from Bernie Kerik, who advised the Trump campaign’s attempt to prove fraud in the 2020 election.
Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 2012 but lost to Barack Obama, has proposed a strategy to unite the current crop of GOP contenders for the White House against Donald Trump.Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Romney, one of Trump’s most outspoken opponents in Congress, calls on donors backing Republican presidential candidates to withdraw their support once it becomes clear that their choice can’t win. The goal is to winnow the field to a two-person race, in hopes the other candidate can keep Trump from returning to office.Here’s more of what he has to say:
Despite Donald Trump’s apparent inevitability, a baker’s dozen Republicans are hoping to become the party’s 2024 nominee for president. That is possible for any of them if the field narrows to a two-person race before Mr. Trump has the nomination sewn up. For that to happen, Republican megadonors and influencers – large and small – are going to have to do something they didn’t do in 2016: get candidates they support to agree to withdraw if and when their paths to the nomination are effectively closed. That decision day should be no later than, say, Feb 26, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
There are incentives for no-hope candidates to overstay their prospects. Coming in behind first place may grease another run in four years or have market value of its own: Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum got paying gigs. And as former New Hampshire Gov John H Sununu has observed, ‘It is fun running for president if you know you cannot win.’
Left to their own inclinations, expect several of the contenders to stay in the race for a long time. They will split the non-Trump vote, giving him the prize. A plurality is all that is needed for winner-take-all primaries.
…
Our party and our country need a nominee with character, driven by something greater than revenge and ego, preferably from the next generation. Family, friends and campaign donors are the only people who can get a lost-cause candidate to exit the race. After Feb 26, they should start doing just that.
CNN has reported new details of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2022 election loss, including that Bernie Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who worked with the Trump campaign to uncover fraud, has turned over a trove of documents to the prosecutor.The materials include research and witness statements produced by the team, which was led by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. CNN reports that Kerik will meet with Smith’s prosecutors next month for an interview.Here’s more from CNN’s story:
Former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik was part of the team led by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani trying to uncover fraud that would swing the election in favor of Trump.
For months, Kerik had tried to shield some of the documents from investigators, citing privilege.
But in recent weeks, Kerik gave the documents to the Trump’s 2024 campaign to review. After that review, the campaign declined to assert privilege, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who turned over the documents to Smith’s office on Sunday.
“I have shared all of these documents, approximately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about 2 weeks to discuss.” Parlatore said.
Kerik is scheduled to sit down for an interview with the special counsel’s office next month, CNN has learned.
Among the materials now in Smith’s possession are witness statements, research and other documents produced by Giuliani’s team.
When the January 6 congressional committee subpoenaed Kerik for documents, he provided a log of his communications that he said he was withholding due to privilege. Those communications have never been disclosed publicly, as the committee did not challenge Kerik’s privilege claims in court.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax authority today announced it would end the practice of sending its employees on unannounced visits of the homes of people who owed taxes.The IRS received a major infusion of funds to modernize its systems under last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, but wound up in the crosshairs of Republicans, who claimed, without evidence, that the money would pay for armed agents.In a statement, IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said the decision to end the decades-old practice of dispatching unnamed agents to homes and businesses was part of its modernization plan.“We are taking a fresh look at how the IRS operates to better serve taxpayers and the nation, and making this change is a common-sense step. Changing this long-standing procedure will increase confidence in our tax administration work and improve overall safety for taxpayers and IRS employees,” Werfel said. The IRS added that the change in policy was supported by its employee union.In an interview with CNN, a top official with the NAACP civil rights group explains the problems with Alabama’s new congressional maps: Nonetheless, the GOP-led state has gone ahead with maps that appear to violate a supreme court ruling ordering lawmakers to draw a second majority African-American congressional district.Israel’s far-right government today won a battle in their case to reform the judiciary, but as the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports, American Jews opposed to the government’s policies against Palestinians say they are feeling optimistic about changing minds in the United States:Mike Levinson has been pushing back for 40 years and finally thinks he might be getting somewhere.“There’s a change and the politicians see it. I think it scares them,” said Levinson, holding a sign demanding “Stop Israeli settler violence” as he marched through New York on Thursday.“There’s a tremendous change going on in the American Jewish community. There are a lot of Jews, especially young people, who are not so quick to automatically and unconditionally support everything that Israel does. People are accepting the fact that it’s OK to be Jewish and criticise Israel.”Levinson, a Jewish New Yorker, began protesting against Israeli government policies during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It’s been a long and often lonely road since then as he has sought to get his fellow Americans to pay attention to decades of Israeli occupation, military assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, and the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was seen joining striking writers and actors on a picket line outside Netflix’s Manhattan offices today.An overwhelming majority of voters in Ohio support a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee access to abortion in the state, according to a new poll. A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed 58% of Ohio voters backed the amendment enshrining abortion rights. Among those who backed the amendment included a third of Republicans and 85% of independent women.The proposed amendment states that:
Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.
Under this proposal, abortion could still be banned after “fetal viability”, or whether it can live outside the womb.Republican congressman of Florida Matt Gaetz has been defending his decision to introduce legislation to defund investigations into Donald Trump led by special counsel Jack Smith.Gaetz made the announcement last week, just hours after the former president said he had received a letter identifying him as a target of the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, led by Smith.In an interview with Newsmax, Gaetz said he didn’t “need Jack Smith to tell me what happened on January 6”. He said:
I was there. I saw President Trump encourage people to peacefully and patriotically go into places where permits had been reserved with city government for lawful protest activity.
A key group of Senate Democrats have urged the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to pressure Senator Tommy Tuberville to end his “reckless, dangerous” hold on military nominations.The letter, led by armed services committee member Senator Mazie Hirono and obtained by NBC, calls on McConnell to “exercise your leadership to protect the readiness of our military”.Tuberville, who for months has been blocking military nominations in protest of the Pentagon’s policy to reimburse travel expenses for those seeking reproductive care, including abortions, across state lines, has been “threatening our national security”, the letter says. It continues:
We know you share our concerns about the consequences of this hold on our Armed Services, and as the leader of your conference, we urge you to take stronger action to resolve this situation.
The Democratic signatories to the letter all serve on the Senate armed services committee with Tuberville.Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president Mike Pence is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House has expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that it remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
Republicans have hammered Joe Biden over migration at the southern border ever since he took office, but over the weekend, one GOP lawmaker said he believed both state and federal authorities had mishandled the crisis, the Guardian’s Maya Yang reports:A Texas Republican representative, Tony Gonzales, has called the current tactics used to deter migrants at the US-Mexico border “not acceptable” and urged the Biden administration and Congress to focus more heavily on legal immigration.In an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation on Sunday, Gonzales, whose 23rd district in Texas includes 800 miles of the US-Mexico border, said that the border crisis “has been anything but humane” and called recent reports of Texas troopers allegedly pushing small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande “not acceptable”.“It’s not acceptable and it hasn’t been acceptable for two years … Everything that is happening along the border is just adding fuel to the fire,” Gonzales said. He went on to say that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who has come under fire from human rights groups over his controversial Operation Lone Star border security program, “is doing everything he can to secure the border”.A battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
“They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers. More

The US-led United Nations Command has initiated talks with North Korea about the American soldier who ran into that country and crossed one of the most militarized borders in the world, according to an official.But a British lieutenant general who helps lead the UN command stopped short of saying exactly when talks about Travis King began, whether they have been constructive or how many exchanges there have been. The lieutenant general, Andrew Harrison, also would not address any known details about King’s health condition.“None of us know where this is going to end – I am, in life, an optimist, and I remain optimistic,” Harrison told reporters at a news conference in the South Korean capital, Seoul. “But … I will leave it at that.”Harrison added that the communications between the UN Command and North Korea about King kicked off through mechanisms which were set up under a 1953 armistice that halted fighting during the Korean war.He did not elaborate, but the Associated Press reported that Harrison may have been referring to a telephone line between the UN Command – which was created to fight that war – and the North Korean People’s Army at Panmunjom, the border truce village where King crossed on 18 July.Harrison’s comments about the beginning of a dialogue centering on King’s fate came about four days after the US said North Korea had been unresponsive to its attempts to start talks.King was supposed to be heading to Fort Bliss, Texas, after finishing a prison sentence in South Korea for assault. Potentially facing discipline from the army as well as discharge from the service, he took a civilian tour of Panmunjom on Tuesday and ran into North Korea.He was reportedly laughing as he bolted across the border separating the Koreas, which technically remain at war because no treaty was ever signed.King, 23, is the first known American to be held in North Korea in nearly five years.The US fought alongside the South during the Korean war and has never set up a diplomatic relationship with the North. The two countries sometimes talk through the armistice telephone line, but North Korea could be reluctant to release King quickly to the US given the political history lurking over the situation, according to experts in some quarters.The last three known American detainees in North Korea were released in 2018. Back then, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, engaged in nuclear diplomacy with the Donald Trump White House.But just a year earlier, the American student Otto Warmbier died within days of his being released in a coma after 17 months in captivity.Warmbier and other American detainees in North Korea were imprisoned over various accusations, including of subversion, anti-state activities and spying.King had served in South Korea as a cavalry scout with the US army’s 1st Armored Division. A court in Seoul sentenced him to prison and fined him 5m won (about $3,900) for assault on an unidentified person as well as damaging a police vehicle.His relatives have said he may have been overwhelmed by his legal issues and potential discharge from the army when – like many tourists do – he programmed a tour of Panmunjom, an area without civilian residents that is jointly overseen by the UN Command and North Korea.King’s detention in North Korea came at a particularly fraught time in that region politically speaking. North Korea on Monday fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast, the latest in a recent streaks of weapons testing which is apparently meant to protest against naval assets which the US sent to South Korea.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

The Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville’s block on senior US military promotions in protest of Pentagon policy on abortion is “reckless and dangerous”, eight Democratic senators told Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, in a letter published on Monday.“It falls to you to act now, for the safety and security of our nation,” the Democrats wrote to McConnell, of Kentucky. “We urge you to exercise your leadership and prevail on senator Tuberville to end his reckless hold.”The protest by the former football coach and Donald Trump ally has stretched for months, leaving the US Marine Corps without a permanent leader for the first time since before the civil war and even threatening leadership of the joint chiefs of staff.Tuberville is seeking to bring down a Department of Defense policy that allows service members based in states which restrict abortion rights to travel to ones where such healthcare remains available.The secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has defended the policy. He has also said nearly 650 senior posts requiring Senate confirmation could be unfilled by the end of the year.Tuberville wants a Senate vote on the policy. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said last week Democrats “would not object to” a vote but added: “The bottom line is it’s up to the Republican leadership. They are risking our security, and it’s up to them to fix it.”In their Monday letter, the eight Democratic senators – led by Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and including Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Tammy Duckworth (Illinois) and Jacky Rosen (Nevada) – expressed “deep concern for the stability of our armed services and national security and call on [McConnell] to exercise your leadership to protect the readiness of our military”.Tuberville’s block was “threatening our national security”, the senators said, adding: “We know you share our concerns … and as the leader of your conference, we urge you to take stronger action to resolve this situation”.McConnell has said he does not support Tuberville’s protest but has not moved to end it.The senators added: “Although there are numerous ways to legislatively change this policy, senator Tuberville has failed to convince a majority of the Senate to agree with his position.“He continues to try to force his personal beliefs on the women and men who volunteer to serve our country, creating unnecessary havoc and punishing service members for a policy they had no part in writing.”Describing the effects on service members denied promotions, the senators said: “Families who were ordered to move are now living in temporary family housing, children aren’t able to ready themselves for new schools, and spouses are missing vital employment opportunities.”Also on Monday, Tuberville took delivery of a petition from the Secure Families Initiative, an advocacy group for military families.It said: “No matter your political beliefs, we must agree that service members and military families will not be used as political leverage. It’s time to end this political showmanship and recommit to respect the service and sacrifice of those who pledge to defend this nation.”The petition was also sent to Schumer and McConnell. In his own petition last week, Tuberville claimed support from more than 5,000 military veterans.The eight Democrats who wrote to McConnell also said the Kentuckian, as Republican leader, should hold “colleagues accountable when they recklessly cross boundaries and upend senatorial order.“Senator Tuberville’s continuation of this stalemate is reckless, dangerous, and must end.” More

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the picket line of film and television actors and writers represented by Sag-Aftra and WGA in front of Netflix’s New York City office on Monday.The liberal congresswoman from New York criticized the wealth of studio executives as new contract negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – which represents the studio bosses – and unions have been at loggerheads.The Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents about 11,500 film and television writers, began striking on 2 May. The US actors’ union Sag-Aftra, which has 160,000 members, called their strike on 13 July.Both unions are pushing for residuals from streaming services and terms on how the industry uses technology such as artificial intelligence. The strikes have halted the majority of film and television production in the US.“How many private jets does David Zaslav need? For real. How many private jets do the CEOs need?” Ocasio-Cortez said on the picket line, referring to the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, who received a $246.6m compensation package in 2021.As the Hollywood Reporter noted, Ocasio-Cortez continued: “It is insatiable. It is unacceptable. I do not know how any person can say I need another $100m before another person can have healthcare.”Liz Shuler, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the US, also attended the picket line.The picket line on Monday included high-profile actors such as Tatiana Maslany, Sandra Bernhard and F Murray Abraham.“We have workers all across the country either currently on strike or gearing up to be on strike because at the end of the day we are all facing the same challenge, which is the concentration of wealth and corporate greed in America,” Ocasio-Cortez added.She also expressed encouragement to workers on strike and emphasized the effect their strike is having on the labor movement throughout the US.“Direct action gets the goods, now and always,” she said. “The only way that we can do this is by showing them that we are stronger. That our solidarity is stronger than their greed, that our care for one another will overcome their endless desire for more.” More

Not once has Donald Trump veered from his core campaign theme.Recall the first rally of his 2024 election campaign on 25 March in Waco, Texas – exactly 30 years after a deadly siege between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians resulted in the deaths of more than 80 members of that religious cult and four federal agents.He opened with a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing “Justice for All”, intercut with the national anthem and with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with his hand on his heart. Behind, on big screens, was footage from the Capitol riot.Trump then repeated his bogus claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. He praised the rioters of January 6.He raged against the prosecutors overseeing multiple investigations into his conduct as “absolute human scum”. He told the crowd that “the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”He then declared:“Our enemies are desperate to stop us and our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”Since then, as indictments have piled up against him and his poll numbers among Republicans have risen, Trump’s “final battle” comes into ever sharper focus: it is a battle against the rule of law and democracy.The mega indictment we have all been waiting for – the indictment against Trump for his attempted coup against the United States – will be announced very soon.Trump is prepared to use it in his final battle.Tuesday, on an Iowa radio show, he warned it would be “very dangerous” if Special Counsel Jack Smith put him in jail, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020”.Unfortunately for the nation, the Republican party is uniting behind Trump’s side of this battle line.If not defending the January 6 rioters outright, Republican lawmakers are attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith, the justice department, the Manhattan district attorney, and other current and prospective prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable.A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.Recall that last November, virtually every 2020-election-denying Republican who sought office in a truly contested election went down to defeat.Those who care about democracy and the rule of law should welcome the battle, and not just because it will help Biden and the Democrats.It will also help clarify what’s at stake for the nation in 2024 and beyond.It will show how eager Trump and the Republican party are to abandon democracy and the rule of law in order to gain power. It will show that the vast majority of Americans reject their position.Americans hold different views about many things, but most of us oppose authoritarianism. We reject fascism.We value the constitution and the Bill of Rights. We are committed to democracy, even with its many flaws. We support the rule of law.We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.The pustule of Trump has been growing since 2016, and the authoritarian impulses underlying this infection have been allowed to fester for decades.Folks, it is finally time to lance this boil. It is time to decidedly rescue democracy and the rule of law. It is time to defeat Trump and his enablers who are determined to defy the core values of America.Let the battle begin.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

Researchers at the University of California-Riverside recently released a study showing poverty is the fourth leading cause of death nationwide. Poverty kills more people than homicide, respiratory disease, gun violence and opioid overdoses, the study showed.It’s stress, it’s starvation, it’s disease. And it’s all unnecessary.Policymakers have many tools to counter the death by poverty that is ravaging America. But they have neglected the simplest one in their toolkit for far too long: raising the federal minimum wage. Monday marks 14 years since the last federal minimum wage increase, the longest period America’s lowest-paid workers have gone without a raise since the minimum wage was first put into effect in 1938.The minimum wage has been stuck at an unlivable $7.25 an hour under three presidents. Adjusting for inflation, today’s minimum wage is now worth less than at any point since 1956. Nearly a third of the workforce, or 52 million people, earn less than $15 an hour, including 47% of Black workers, 46% of Hispanic workers, 20% of Asian American and Indigenous workers, 40% of working women and 50% of working women of color. Raising the minimum wage to even $15 an hour would lift 7.6 million people – many of whom are women, immigrants, Black, Latinx or parents – out of poverty and give more than 50 million people a raise.According to the Economic Policy Institute, a worker paid the $7.25 federal minimum wage earns 27.4% less in inflation-adjusted terms than what their counterpart was paid in July 2009 when the minimum wage was last increased, and 40.2% less than a minimum wage worker in February 1968, the historical high point of the minimum wage’s value.Courageous workers in the Fight for $15 and the union movement have pushed 14 states and the District of Columbia to adopt $15 minimum wage laws. We’re proud to have marched with, prayed with, and even gotten arrested with these workers as they’ve demanded living wages and a union. But the sad fact is that 20 states remain stuck at the federal minimum of $7.25 – and working people in those states, the majority of which are in the south, need help now. That’s why, earlier this year, we hit the road with Bernie Sanders and stood alongside workers across the south to demand living wages.These workers are 46% more likely to be paid less than $15 than workers in the 30-plus states with minimums higher than $7.25, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And, according to EPI, there isn’t a place in the country where even a single adult without children can get by on less than $15 an hour. There’s no city, county or state where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom rental, a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed.Yet instead of raising pay for fast-food cooks, home care aides, warehouse workers, retail clerks and others, politicians push a false moral narrative of religious nationalism, trying to trick us into believing that poverty is a moral failing on the individual and that the real moral issues of our time are standing against LGBTQ+ people and a woman’s right to choose while defending tax cuts and gun rights.We will not be duped: the real moral question for our country is where we stand in relation to the poor. Instead of pushing culture wars and partisanship, lawmakers should focus on the 800 people dying each day from poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth. Our politicians have failed to act, and leaders who stand silent in the face of these injustices are guilty of policy murder.Indeed, our demand for a living wage is the moral issue politicians should be focused on. Isaiah 10 says, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights, and make women and children their prey.” And President Franklin D Roosevelt adopted the moral argument of the Social Gospel when he declared that “no business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” It is a moral travesty that as a nation we continue to expand the military budget in surplus, but refuse to guarantee basic human rights like healthcare and living wages.We are putting our nation’s leaders on notice, across party lines, that we need living wages now. If they don’t act, we’ll vote them out. Poor and low-wealth people make up nearly 40% of the electorate and have the ability to decide elections. We are calling for a Third Reconstruction to lift our nation’s 140 million poor and low-wealth people from the bottom up. This includes raising the outdated minimum wage to a living wage as well as updating the also-obsolete official poverty measure to reflect what it takes to secure a decent standard of living today.America has gone 14 years without a raise. It’s literally killing us. And it’s time for it to change.
The Rev D William J Barber II is founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School
The Rev A Kazimir Brown is executive director of Repairers of the Breach More

For Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, there were boos and chants of “Trump! Trump!”. For Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, there were jeers and cries of “Traitor!” And perhaps most tellingly, there was no Florida governor Ron DeSantis at all.The recent Turning Point USA conference brought thousands of young conservatives to Florida and there was no doubting the main attraction: former president Donald Trump, who made a glitzy entrance accompanied by giant stage sparklers. In a less than rigorous poll, 86% of attendees gave Trump as their first choice for president; DeSantis, who polled 19% last year, was down to 4%.Events and numbers like this are cause for sleepless nights among those Republican leaders and donors desperate to believe it would be different this time. The Never Trump forces bet heavily on DeSantis as the coming man and the premise that Trump’s campaign would collapse under the weight of myriad legal problems.But six months away from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, none of it seems to be working. DeSantis’s campaign is flailing and leaving some with buyers’ remorse. Hutchinson and Chris Christie, outspoken Trump critics, are polling in single digits, sowing doubts about voters’ appetite for change. Never Trumpers have reason to fear that his march to the Republican nomination may already be unstoppable.“They’re experiencing a brutal wake-up call that the party is not interested in hearing critiques of Trump,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. “The Trump challengers’ candidacies have been astonishingly poor and learned nothing from 2016. When the leading candidate gets indicted and all of his opponents besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson just echo his fake persecution complex talking points, it’s going to be hard to beat him.”The Never Trump movement is almost as old as the celebrity businessman’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. In 2016, 50 senior Republican national security officials from past administrations signed a letter saying they would not vote for him, even though Trump was the nominee. Republicans including Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, openly backed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, albeit in vain.Hopes that Trump would “grow” into the presidency were soon dashed. In 2018, White House whistleblower Miles Taylor wrote an anonymous column in the New York Times under the headline “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, describing the president as unfit for office. Taylor went on to build a network of former government officials and advisers aiming to deny Trump a second term.Former Republican operatives in groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project welcomed Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and hoped his part in a subsequent insurrection at the US Capitol would finally break the fever. But Senate Republicans squandered a chance to end his political career by failing to convict him in an impeachment trial.Since then certain members of Congress have proved willing to criticise Trump on certain issues and a few, such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, are implacably opposed to him. But many others, such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have either retired or been purged.As the 2024 election looms, there is no coordinated plan on how to derail the Trump train or alter the trajectory of a race that is still his to lose. Even critics admit that the external events many were counting on to thwart his candidacy have not hurt his standing.Indeed, criminal indictments in New York and Florida have led some voters who were entertaining an alternative to return to Trump’s fold while handing him another fundraising bonanza. His campaign announced that he raised more than $35m during the second fundraising quarter, nearly double what he raised during the first three months of the year and well ahead of his competitors.Trump’s opponents within the party are running out of time and ideas. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said: “They were all hoping that Trump’s legal troubles would kick him to the side of the road but every indictment or potential indictment just strengthens him among the base, eats up all the oxygen in the room and makes him the likely nominee. They’re probably as frustrated as can be.”Many Never Trump hopes were pinned on DeSantis but the governor is already cutting staff and experiencing fundraising setbacks. Donors ignored the warnings of longtime political operatives who said DeSantis was “undercooked”, had a glass jaw and lacked the personal warmth and charisma required for retail politics. These appear to be have been borne out by a stagnant campaign in which the more exposure he receives, the less popular he becomes.Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, said: “They all bet on DeSantis without knowing who the fuck he was, without understanding that he’s really bad and weird with people and also mean and cruel, even more so than Trump. They put all their chips on DeSantis before they knew who he was. That was a mistake because they don’t have an alternative.“There’s only one lane in this Republican party. That’s the Trumpy lane and DeSantis is in that lane with Trump. His problem is he can’t get past Trump but the base wants somebody like that and so there’s no other alternative. They’re really kind of screwed.”Ominously for DeSantis, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, who had previously given the governor copious airtime and favourable coverage, has reportedly gone cold on him and resigned himself to the prospect of another Trump nomination. Fox News this week unveiled a line up of prime time hosts who have lauded the former president.Republicans are doing little to dispel an air of inevitability around the former president securing the nomination again. When it emerged this week that he faces a third indictment, this time over his attempt to subvert democracy, rivals including DeSantis again parroted his claim that the cases are politically motivated.Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, where Trump had notched far more endorsements than his rivals, told reporters: “If you noticed recently, President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for reelection. So what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their number one opponent.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust as in 2016, Trump is also benefiting from a divided opposition. Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggests that Never Trumpers coalesced around DeSantis too soon. “The strategy shouldn’t have been necessarily backing that horse but sitting out a little bit to see how the field settled, to see if someone would emerge. Then you come in.”Individual ambition has prevented Republicans from uniting around a strategy to stop Trump. Steele observed: “The party was unwilling in the first instance to have a come to Jesus meeting with all the candidates other than Trump and say, ‘OK, I get it, y’all want to be president but none of you is going to get there if you all stand so I need one of you to do that duty. So that means the rest of you get behind that one.“‘Is it Nikki? [Haley] We’re all behind Nikki. Is it Christie? We’re all behind Christie. But one of you.’ And so that’s the word we send out to the party faithful … At the end of the day, this game is about winning general elections, not winning primaries and the Republican party is stuck on winning primaries to prove a point. And what’s that point? Oh, we lose general elections.”The election is still more than 470 days away and the race is far from done. During the 2008 election campaign, for example, Hillary Clinton appeared to have a decisive lead for the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama while the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain, did not emerge as the frontrunner until January 2008.In theory, Trump should be vulnerable. He comes with excess personal baggage including legal troubles that appeared to converge this week with fresh momentum. On Tuesday Trump revealed that he had been named as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of interference in the 2020 election.On the same day Dana Nessel, the attorney general of Michigan, announced criminal charges against 16 people who signed paperwork falsely claiming Trump won the election in that battleground state. Meanwhile Fani Willis, district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, is preparing to present a case to a grand jury over Trump’s election subversion efforts there.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “There’s still a chance that the steady drip, drip, drip of indictments and other problems will open up a larger portion of the party to an alternative because they see him as increasingly risky, as someone who might well not only be indicted but convicted of a major crime, or more than one, during the presidential campaign.“Will a lot of Republicans quietly come to the conclusion that’s not a risk worth taking? I don’t know. I find it very difficult to understand my own party and impossible to understand the other side.”Christie and other critics have also made the case that Trump is an electoral liability, pointing out that, after his narrow win in 2016, Republicans lost the White House, House and Senate. They did regain the House in last year’s midterms but underperformed expectations. Trump’s campaigns are always risky and haphazard: he recently criticised Iowa’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds, for her seemingly cosy relationship with DeSantis while she purports to be neutral.Several groups that oppose Trump’s candidacy have begun spending big money on efforts to undermine his support. Win It Back Pac, an independent Super Pac with ties to the conservative Club For Growth Action, recently spent $3.6m on an advert that features a purported Trump supporter who has grown tired of the former president’s antics. Americans for Prosperity Action, part of a network founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, has also sought to weaken Trump through door knocking and phone calls.But for now, Trump is still the 800lb gorilla of the Republican party. He is dominating polls, drawing huge crowds and shaping the narratives by which other candidates define themselves. Just as in past recent elections, that leaves Never Trump Republicans with few palatable options except to put country before party.Walsh, the former congressman, said: “If you really believe Trump is unfit then you have to do what me and Liz Cheney and so many others have done and that’s just say we’re going to throw our support behind the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, even though it goes against our policy interests, because Trump has to be stopped. Clearly he can’t be stopped in the primary so he has to be stopped in the general.” More

As a UPS delivery driver in Dallas, Texas, Seth Pacic is intimately familiar with the dangers of extreme heat. After a long day’s work through record-breaking temperatures in summer 2011, he found himself dry heaving in the parking lot, incapable of driving home until he spent an hour and a half in the air-conditioned office.“It was one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had in my entire life,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I fully recovered for a couple of weeks.”For some, the heat has had even more serious consequences. Last June, Pacic’s friend and coworker had a heat stroke while driving home from work; he is still recuperating, Pacic said. That same summer, 24-year-old UPS driver Esteban Chavez collapsed and died in California as temperatures soared into the high 90s; his family filed a wrongful death lawsuit and later settled with UPS. And the year before that, Jose Cruz Rodriguez Jr, 23, died of a heatstroke while driving a UPS truck in Waco, Texas.It’s a widespread issue. At least 143 UPS employees were hospitalized for heat injuries between 2015 and 2022, according tothe company’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration records obtained by the Washington Post. As the climate crisis pushes up temperatures, the problem could get even worse.At the state level, only California, Oregon and Washington require heat breaks for all outdoor laborers, and during a record-breaking heatwave last month, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, eliminated municipalities’ ability to mandate water and shade breaks for laborers.This summer, amid record-shattering heat across the US, Pacic and some 340,000 other unionized UPS workers have made heat a central issue of their ongoing contract negotiations with their employer.On 16 June, UPS’s 340,000 Teamsters union members said if their demands for improved working conditions – including heat protections – are not included in UPS’s new five-year contract, they will be prepared to hold one of the largest single-employer strikes in US history starting on 1 August.This week, UPS agreed to resume bargaining with the Teamsters, following a collapse of negotiations earlier this month.The union notched a major win last month, when the company tentatively agreed to equip all new delivery trucks in its 94,000-vehicle fleet with air conditioners starting in 2024, and also install new heat shields and fans.The victory showed how worker organization can be a key tool for climate justice, said Mijin Cha, an urban and environmental policy professor at Occidental College who studies labor and climate issues.“We’re seeing a fundamental reshaping of what we consider ‘occupational safety,’” said Cha. “In the extreme heat, any kind of work outside is dangerous … and as more workers organize, they’ll be better able, hopefully, to stay safe.”Driving for UPS is a grueling job in any season, said Matt Leichenger, who works in Brooklyn, New York. On a typical day, he makes up to 150 stops to deliver hundreds of packages, often having to walk long distances and climb up multiple flights of stairs while carrying large items such as mattresses.In the summer, things get even harder. Temperatures in the back of the truck can top 130F (54.4C) as the dark brown steel radiates heat “like an oven”, he said. Because loads are not always well organized, workers must root through piles of boxes that can weigh up to 150lb each.“There are days where you step out of the back of the truck into 95F weather and you feel like you’ve entered blissful, perfect temperatures, but in reality, you’ve just escaped hell,” said Leichenger, who helped organize a rally outside the UPS’s Foster Avenue warehouse in Brooklyn last summer demanding that the company provide air-conditioned trucks.Jim Mayer, a spokesperson for UPS, said the company has taken steps to protect workers from heat this summer, including distributing cooling sleeves and hats and installing fans in some of their delivery vehicles.“The health and safety of our employees is our highest priority,” he said.He also said employees are encouraged to stop working when they’re feeling the effects of the heat.“Our policy is simple: stop work, contact your manager, and when in doubt, call emergency services/911,” he said.Leichenger said workers feel pressure to move quickly. UPS measures efficiency with surveillance cameras and sensors inside trucks, and uses a computer program to calculate how long a route should take.Juley Fulcher, a worker health and safety advocate with the nonprofit Public Citizen, said surveillance can also make workers feel less comfortable taking bathroom breaks, causing them to drink less water.“If you add dehydration to heat stress, that’s something that can make you ill very, very quickly,” she said.It’s not just UPS workers who are suffering amid the heat. A Texas United States Postal Service driver last month died of heat exposure amid triple-digit temperatures.Right now, dozens of striking Amazon drivers in California are also demanding better heat protections.“The back of the truck is basically hell,” Rajpal Singh, a striking Amazon delivery worker in Palmdale, California, said. “I’ve been back there to the point where I’ve actually seen spots and started feeling like I was about to pass out.”(Eileen Hards, an Amazon spokesperson, said that the striking laborers work for a third party company called Battle Tested Strategies, with which Amazon terminated its contract last month; the workers said that the company only ended the contract after they formed a union, prompting Teamsters across the country to picket in solidarity.)Because UPS is such a large employer, new official heat protections could spur change across the logistics sector.“Amazon workers, FedEx workers, postal workers are all dealing with similar issues,” he said. “I’m proud of Teamsters for starting to trailblaze.”The new UPS contract language on heat could inspire other workers to push for climate-related protections in their contracts. But the tentative agreement won’t be enacted until a final contract agreement is signed.Even when that happens, the language will leave something to be desired, according to Seth Pacic, the Dallas-based UPS driver. UPS agreed to install ACs in every car purchased after 1 January 2024, dispatching new vehicles to the hottest parts of the country first. But it could still be years before all delivery drivers have access to air conditioned trucks, he said.“Until then, I think we’re still going to see workers die,” Pacic said.Before they reach a final agreement, the UPS union is still holding out for other protections like increased wages, the elimination of a two-tiered employment system, and an end to harassment from managers. These protections could provide additional protection from the heat, Pacic said.Workers who are free from harassment will be more likely to take breaks. And higher wages could ensure workers don’t take second jobs which can increase their heat exposure, and help them to afford equipment like UV cooling sleeves, ice pouches, coolers and pricey electrolyte drinks.Experts say these provisions are all the more necessary in the absence of strong governmental heat protections.Biden’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2021 said it would publish a heat standard to protect workers from high temperatures, but Juley Fulcher, the safety advocate, said it could be years before it’s completed – and that the agency has not initiated an interim heat standard.Actions like Texas governor Abbott seeking to eliminate water and shade breaks showed what workers are facing, said Cha, the urban and environmental policy professor.“It’s part of a larger war on workers. With the dominance of capital in our system, any kind of concession toward workers is seen as a loss – even something as simple and necessary as water breaks,” she said. “The only challenge to capital is labor … so the more workers are able to organize, the better.” More