US Politics

As a Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis was a supporter of legislation that made moderate reforms to the federal prison system intended to reduce recidivism and mass incarceration – a cause that was also championed by then president Donald Trump and his deputy, Mike Pence.Five years later, DeSantis, now Florida’s governor, and Pence are struggling to overtake Trump’s lead among Republicans as they vie for the party’s presidential nomination, and have turned against the criminal justice measure they both supported in an effort to win over conservative voters.“Under the Trump administration, he enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill. It’s called the First Step Act. It has allowed dangerous people out of prison, who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people,” DeSantis told the rightwing pundit Ben Shapiro in a May interview, vowing that “one of the things I want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act.”Pence echoed a similar message, telling the Washington Examiner that as president he would “take a step back from” the law.Their comments were the latest instances of Republicans wooing voters with promises to crack down on crime, a time-tested tactic for the GOP that last year helped the party win back control of the House.But conservatives who supported the First Step Act in 2018 say there’s no reason to repeal it, nor do they believe attacking it will help Pence and DeSantis overtake Trump’s substantial popularity advantage among Republican voters.“You’re in a political, what I call, silly season of you say a lot of things, and crime is a concern, public safety is a concern across the country,” said Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who introduced an early version of the act.He said the law was “not an issue until it was brought up, and it’s not an issue that seems to be gaining a lot of traction out there, especially when the facts of the bill were put out there for Republican voters.”One of the biggest pieces of criminal justice reform legislation Congress has passed in years, the First Step Act reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, created new rehabilitation programs for released inmates, banned the shackling of pregnant women and expanded time-served credit for most federal prisoners.Only a minority of America’s prison population, the largest in the world, is incarcerated in the federal system, but one of the act’s chief goals was to create programs that helped people released under the act keep out of prison for good.According to justice department data, the recidivism rate for those released under the law is just over 12%, as compared to the 45% rate the Government Accountability Office says is the baseline for federal prisoners overall.“When we see policymakers talking about the First Step Act, and trying to make some sort of misguided connection with crime, we have to be really realistic that the research and the evidence doesn’t point that way,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive non-profit.The act’s passage represented one of the few instances in which Trump and his Republican allies in Congress joined together with Democrats, and their legislative push was endorsed by outside groups as diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative benefactors Koch Industries.The version of the act Collins introduced mostly dealt with ways to reduce recidivism, and DeSantis voted for the bill before resigning later in 2018 to mount his successful campaign for Florida governor. The Senate then added provisions dealing with sentencing reform, and as he signed it, Trump said the legislation “brings much-needed hope to many families during the holiday season”.Two years later, Covid-19 broke out and crime spiked nationwide, a phenomenon that appears to be relaxing but which has had an enduring impact on American politics. The former president currently leads the polls among Republican presidential candidates, but doesn’t say much about the First Step Act, having now shifted his demands to calling for Congress to slash the FBI and justice department’s funding over their investigations against him.DeSantis, meanwhile, has made an about-face on criminal justice policy since announcing his presidential run in May. While he signed a major criminal justice reform bill in 2019, he last month vetoed two measures dealing with expungements and probation violations, despite them passing with overwhelming support in Florida’s GOP-dominated legislature.Writing in RealClearPolitics, Steve Cortes, a spokesman for the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down Pac, said that as a congressman, the governor only supported the initial “law-and-order version” of the First Step Act, and not the one that Trump enacted.“This obfuscation on Trump’s jailbreak points to an even more serious problem for the 45th president as he seeks re-election: he remains unable or unwilling to admit policy mistakes and to propose appropriate reversals or reforms,” Cortes wrote.Arthur Rizer, a conservative advocate for the act who co-founded ARrow Center for Justice Reform, remembers DeSantis as a supporter of the law during his time in Congress. Pence, meanwhile, at one point went to the Capitol to personally negotiate with GOP senators on getting the bill passed.The former vice-president is currently polling in the single digits among Republican candidates, while DeSantis is in a distant second place to Trump.“I think that they sense that there is a potential to create another wedge issue. And they are taking this opportunity to distinguish themselves from Trump. They can’t go out for Trump for the indictment stuff, so they’re looking for ways to pick at him,” Rizer said of the attacks on the First Step Act.“It actually breaks my heart to see people turning on something that’s done a lot of good for people who were in prison for relatively minor stuff. And now that they’re out with their families, and we’re using it as a political football, to score points and to dunk on the other side.” More

It became known as the winter of discontent. After the Labour government tried to freeze wages to stem inflation, Britain was convulsed by labour strikes and disruptions in public services. Rubbish piled in the streets, bodies went unburied – and a fierce political backlash swept Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives into power.Forty-five years later a summer of strikes is roiling industries from coast to coast in America.Unions have launched or are threatening stoppages that could affect everything from airline travel and parcel deliveries to car manufacturing and film and TV production. They could also disrupt the economic growth that Joe Biden wants to campaign on in 2024.“It takes him off message because strikes are visual, strikes are hot video, and they’re a focal point for media,” said John Zogby, an author and pollster. “It becomes lame trying to explain, ‘But the numbers are good, but the numbers are good, but the numbers are getting better,’ when the video just doesn’t appear to show it.”The coronavirus pandemic had many aftershocks and labour turmoil may be among them. Hollywood production is shut down as the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild are striking, partially over concerns about streaming revenues as well as artificial intelligence taking away jobs from creative workers. The action has put films and TV shows in limbo and could cost the economy an estimated $3bn.There is also the prospect of a United Auto Workers strike as contract talks get under way and the industry wrestles with a transition toward electric vehicles. The Teamsters union said its drivers might walk off the job as they struggle to reach a new contract with UPS (United Parcel Service). And more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines are set to hold a strike vote over the coming weeks.Among other examples mushrooming across the country, thousands of hotel workers in Los Angeles have also been striking this month while healthcare workers at a major Chicago hospital are planning to do likewise in a dispute over wages and lack of staffing.And last month there were localised walkouts at Amazon, McDonald’s and Starbucks, while hundreds of journalists across eight states went on strike to demand an end to painful cost-cutting measures and a change of leadership at Gannett, the country’s biggest newspaper chain.Drexel Heard, a public affairs strategist based in Los Angeles, said: “This is what I believe is the start of a trend that was inevitable post-pandemic: workers knowing and understanding that things cannot go back to normal. We all work hybrid now, for the most part.“People are understanding that their need for healthcare is something that’s critical. Their need for better pay and better work hours is essential, especially when we have things that happen like a pandemic, and people want to feel safe. The only people who are fighting for workers’ rights are unions.”Scenes of industrial strife heading into winter would provide fodder for rightwing media who already accuse Biden of embracing the leftwing ideas of Senator Bernie Sanders. It might also create a headache for a president who is focusing much of his re-election campaign on the strength of the economy.On Thursday he was at the Philadelphia Shipyard in Pennsylvania to promote “Bidenomics”, a recently adopted slogan. The president said: “We have a plan that’s turning things around pretty quickly. ‘Bidenomics’ is just another way of saying ‘Restore the American Dream’.”But that message is still struggling to break through with voters. In a CNBC All-America Economic Survey released this week, 37% approve of Biden’s handling of the economy and 58% disapprove. In a Monmouth University poll, only three in 10 Americans feel the country is doing a better job recovering economically than the rest of the world since the pandemic.There is a baffling disconnect between these opinions and data that shows America defying predictions of recession and curbing price rises faster than other major economies. Inflation has fallen from 9% to 3% and is now at its lowest point in more than two years.Indeed, Biden may have helped create the very conditions that make strikes more likely. White House officials say that unions are empowered to press for more benefits and better pay because of the strong job market. Unemployment is just 3.6% and job openings are relatively high.This is one reason why Robert Reich, a former labour secretary under President Bill Clinton, does not believe that the current wave of strikes and potential strikes will overwhelm Biden’s effort to highlight economic growth.He explained in an email: “(1) the strikes and potential strikes still represent a tiny segment of the American workforce, (2) overall job gains and wage gains continue to roar, (3) a big reason workers feel able to strike is that the labor market continues to be tight, which is another good sign for Biden.”Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a Guardian US columnist, added: “The potential problem for Biden isn’t the wave of strikes and potential strikes but the seeming determination of the Fed to continue to raise interest rates, thereby risking a recession before Election Day.”Widespread industrial action would pose a fresh test for Biden, a self-proclaimed “union guy” born in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania. Past attempts to intervene in such disputes have not always gone smoothly.Last year his administration helped forge a tentative agreement between rail companies and their unionised workers to avoid a strike that could have rocked the economy before the midterm elections. The tentative deal prevented a strike but failed to appease workers, and Congress ultimately had to intervene by imposing an agreement.Biden, who is pushing the Senate to confirm Julie Su as his new labour secretary, has already expressed support for the striking Hollywood actors and writers, insisting that all workers deserve fair pay and benefits. Such an approach could work to his advantage against Republicans seeking to rebrand themselves as the party of the working class.Faiz Shakir, chief political adviser to Sanders, who met with Biden and young labour organisers at the White House this week, said: “When you think about some of the working-class people who are in the swing voter category, they tend to carry an anger and frustration about an economy that hasn’t been working for them.“It would be wrong to go back to them and tell them, ‘Hey, everything is much better since I was president.’ I think you want to say, ‘I’m fighting for you and I’m improving the situation for you. However, there’s way more work to do and the people who are standing in the way are these corporate bosses, and I’m taking them on from you.’In the UPS dispute, Shakir argues, Biden should make clear he stands with the workers. “Stand boldly with those workers. Say, ‘I stand with you. You want to go on strike? That’s fine. Yes, there will be costs to consumers, yes, there will be some challenges in the economy, but your work is essential and important and you deserve your fair share.’“What I think will end up happening is you usually get some criticism from the business elite who are going to say, why is the president of the United States siding with these workers and making it even harder for these people to reach a negotiated outcome? To that, I say that is good for politics, because when working people see that you’re sticking your neck out for them, they will reward you. They see you taking arrows for them.”Shakir also believes that the dispute will be resolved in a few weeks with a positive outcome for labour, and that Biden will be able to justifiably claim that he helped improve the lot of hundreds of thousands of workers.In his remarks in Philadelphia on Thursday, Biden was again careful to align himself with workers and unions against Wall Street and companies that made record-high profits during the pandemic. If a disruptive wave of strikes comes to pass, this is likely to be the least risky strategy.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank, said: “It’s my distinct impression that support for labour unions has gone up significantly so we’re not talking about [British miners’ leader] Arthur Scargill in the 1970s. We’re talking about an extended period during which a lot of Americans believe that workers have got the short end of the stick.“They’re much less worried about ‘big labour’ than they used to be, in part because labour isn’t as big as used to be, especially in the private sector where labour unions have weakened enormously. There’s a basic sense of fair play operating to increase support for not just working people but organised labour, so I don’t think this is a bad time to strike and I don’t think that will necessarily redound to Joe Biden’s discredit.” More

Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security who catapulted himself to nameless fame in the fall of 2018, when he published an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times under this headline: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”Taylor described himself then as one of many senior officials “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations … To be clear, ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the administration to succeed … But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”The article set off a firestorm, Trump and his allies demanding to know the identity of this “traitor” while some on the left questioned the morality of continuing to work for an administration after you’ve realized it is a clear and present danger to the health of the country.In his new book, Taylor reveals that debate was as vivid inside him as it was within the rest of the body politic. He has now concluded that anonymity, which he carried into a first book, A Warning, was a mistake, “a gift to authoritarians. They thrive on fear and the suppression of dissent.”The subtitle of his new book is “A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump”, and there is certainly plenty of that in its 300-plus pages. But there is also lots about Taylor’s “mentally, emotionally and physically” painful “journey to the truth”, which included the break-up of his marriage, bouts of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse.Even after the scores of Trump books which have assaulted our bookshelves, Taylor still manages to reveal a few fresh moments of astonishing evil or narrow escapes from Armageddon. These include Trump’s musings to his then chief of staff, John Kelly, “that he badly wanted to strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon”; the president talking about his daughter Ivanka’s “breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her”; Steven Miller’s eagerness to eliminate the judiciary (“Yes sir, a country without judges would help”); and Miller’s equal affection for genocide, revealed when he interrogated the commandant of the US coast guard about why he couldn’t use a drone with a missile to “obliterate” a “boat full of immigrants” in “international waters”. International law would be a problem, the commandant explained.The substantive part of Taylor’s book is devoted to waking up Americans to the very real dangers of a second Trump presidency, including plans to “manipulate the justice system to cover up corruption, punish political enemies and reshape US courts”.Taylor reminds us once again of how completely the Republican party has been corrupted by Maga ideology, with powerful allies of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling for “defunding the FBI” while the Texas senator Ted Cruz wants “a complete house cleaning” at the same agency.“They will be unconstrained and untethered,” former homeland security general counsel John Mitnick says. “What little restraint was exercised in terms of respecting the rule of law will be gone.”Like many other George W Bush Republicans, Taylor is weakest when he argues that Trump is an outlier to “ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people”. This ignores the party’s historic affection for racism and homophobia, which dates at least to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, or Bush’s advocacy for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, a cornerstone of his re-election campaign in 2004. When Taylor casually accuses Barack Obama of backing away “from America’s allies” and “bowing down to its adversaries”, we are reminded the author is indeed an old-fashioned Republican.But his book is still important because it rings alarm bells about the huge danger of fascism and authoritarianism that would come with Trump’s return to the White House, in a moment when many Washington reporters are silent. This journalistic impotence was evident in two recent stories co-authored by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman.The first, published last month, described Trump’s promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden as part of “a larger movement on the right to gut the FBI, overhaul a justice department conservatives claim has been ‘weaponized’ against them and abandon the norm – which many Republicans view as a facade – that the department should operate independently from the president”.The second piece by the same trio described Maga plans to eliminate the independence of all federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve board, and laid out Trump’s “plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the state department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country’”.These two articles totaled 4,800 words but included less than a hundred words from anyone questioning the morality or legality of these plans to politicize the justice department and destroy the federal civil service. This single quote, from Kelly, was the only significant balance provided in either piece: “It would be chaotic. It just simply would be chaotic, because [Trump would] continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a non-stop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”The Times reporters did not respond to an email asking why they thought a hundred words of opposition to the Maga agenda were sufficient to make their stories balanced.With that kind of laissez-faire attitude prevailing among too many journalists, books like Taylor’s, which focus on the imminent dangers from a Maga revival, are crucial to a broader effort to rescue American democracy.
Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump is published in the US by Atria Books More

A school district in southern California has decided to adopt the state’s new social studies book and curriculum after previously rejecting it for its reference of LGBTQ+ figures in history.The Temecula Valley unified school district voted to accept the curriculum following a lengthy meeting on Friday where parents, teachers and community members spoke for and against it. The decision has been welcomed by Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, for thwarting an attempt to “whitewash history” and removed the threat of sanctions against the school district for not adopting the curriculum.The board voted to reject the material in May and even in its acceptance of the curriculum on Friday it said it would strike out anything mentioning Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and politician who was assassinated along with San Francisco mayor George Moscon in 1978. Milk, who has become a totemic figure in the push for LGBTQ+ equality in the US, is thought to have been the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California.Milk does not feature in the new social studies textbook, a school board member told CNN, but is listed in supplemental material along with a range of other historical figures’ biographies.“Fortunately, now students will receive the basic materials needed to learn,” said Newsom. “But this vote lays bare the true motives of those who opposed this curriculum. This has never been about parents’ rights. It’s not even about Harvey Milk – who appears nowhere in the textbook students receive. This is about extremists’ desire to control information and censor the materials used to teach our children.”California’s department of education will investigate the school district over the episode, which pitted some board members against a 2011 state law that requires students to get instruction about “the role and contributions” of LGBT people, as well as those of different ethnicities, cultures and disabilities.The president of the school board, Joseph Komrosky, called Milk a “pedophile” during a May meeting that resulted in the textbook being barred. Komrosky has said he will resist any attempt to implement the new textbook and accused Newsom of overstepping his authority.“I’ve already instructed the superintendent, if books come from shipping and receiving, to say ‘no,’ and we’ll ship them right back,” Komrosky said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe furor in California follows a wave of book bans in schools and libraries across the US, often driven by conservative activists who have opposed mentions of LGBTQ+ people, or accurate portrayals of America’s history of slavery. Meanwhile, least 492 bills attacking LGBTQ+ rights have been introduced in state legislatures, according to the ACLU. More

Tennessee, already one of the strictest and most complicated states in the country for voting rights restoration, has enacted a new policy that makes it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to regain their right to vote.Tennessee has one of the highest rates of disenfranchisement in the United States. More than 9% of the voting age population, or around 471,600 Tennesseans, can’t vote because of a felony conviction, according to a 2022 estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. More than 21% of Black adults are disenfranchised.The vast majority of people who can’t vote have completed their criminal sentences but have outstanding court debt, including unpaid child support payments.Previously, someone with a felony who wished to vote again had to pay all debts and then get government officials to sign off on a form – called a certificate of restoration – affirming their eligibility to vote. The process was burdensome, especially compared to the automatic restoration that occurs in a majority of states upon release from prison or after a period of probation or parole.But on Friday, the state’s division of elections added another hurdle. It said that someone with a felony had to first successfully receive a pardon from the governor or have a court restore their full rights of citizenship. Once that is done, the person must then complete the certificate of restoration process to get their rights restored.Mark Goins, the state’s director of elections, said in a Friday memo the change was necessary because of a recent state supreme court decision in a case called Falls v Goins. In that decision, the state supreme court ruled that a man who had been convicted of a felony decades ago in Virginia and had his voting rights restored there still had to go through Tennessee’s process for restoring voting rights.The court read two different portions of Tennessee law, one from the 1980s and one from 2006, to say that there was a two step process for those with out of state convictions to become eligible to vote: first they had to receive clemency from the state where the conviction was, and then they had to go through the Tennessee process. The court made it clear that its ruling was narrow. “We limit the scope of our analysis to these facts and these facts only,” it said. But Goins interpreted the decision broadly, saying it applied to anyone with a felony conviction in Tennessee, even though the case did not address that issue.A representative for the secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“It’s very hard to get your restoration of citizenship – even harder than getting a Certificate of Restoration,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who has been involved in a number of lawsuits challenging Tennessee’s rules around felon disenfranchisement, including the Falls case.“The new process is more difficult than the procedures that existed before the legislature created Certificates of Restoration in 2006 and it puts Tennessee in the bottom of the barrel on rights restoration as one of the only states with a fully discretionary process, alongside Mississippi and Virginia.”In Virginia, anyone convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting unless the governor restores their voting rights. In Mississippi, those with certain felony convictions must have an individualized bill approved by a supermajority of both chambers of the legislature and the governor before they can vote again. Very few people have successfully made it through that process, and Mississippi is the only state that disenfranchises more of its citizens than Tennessee.Tennessee’s confusing process for restoring voting rights has already come under considerable scrutiny. In 2022, a Memphis woman named Pamela Moses was sentenced to five years in prison for submitting a Certificate of Restoration when she was ineligible to vote. Moses said she believed she was eligible and a probation officer who filled out her form made a mistake and said she had completed her sentence.A judge overseeing the case overturned her conviction after the Guardian published documents that had not been turned over to Moses in which probation officials acknowledged the errors. More

When Covid-19 materialized as a serious threat, Richard Burr took action. As chair of the Senate intelligence committee, the North Carolina Republican had access to information on the pandemic that was unavailable to the American public. He unloaded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks, including investments in the hospitality industry that was likely to be hard-hit. Burr also contacted his brother-in-law, who made his own stock dump. After the trades were publicized, Burr resigned as chair of the intelligence panel. But he was not charged with a crime.For the reporter Matt K Lewis, the story is part of an ever-increasing problem: the outsized role of wealth in Washington. The Daily Beast journalist has written a book, Filthy Rich Politicians, that was published in the US this week. The extent of the problem is reflected by Lewis’s subtitle: The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling Class Elites Cashing In on America.“Rich people get elected, and people, when elected, tend to get richer,” Lewis says. “Over time, it has gotten worse.”The narrative is bipartisan and includes progressives and populists from members of the Squad to election deniers.“I think it’s just an irony that I wrote the book Filthy Rich Politicians in a moment when all the politicians in America … one thing almost all have in common is trying to position themselves as being populist outsiders attacking elites,” Lewis says.He is concerned by politicians bolstering their finances during moments of crisis, as Burr did during Covid.“That, I think, is one of the most interesting and disturbing parts of the book. Everybody kind of knows politicians are rich and some of what they do is sketchy. This, I think, most Americans don’t fully appreciate.”Whether regarding Covid or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lewis says, “These are the moments when it really pays off to have inside information.” He points out that the list of members of Congress who made advantageous stock purchases ahead of the Ukraine war included Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a Democrat, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a notorious hard-right Republican.The House of Representatives has become a flashpoint. In the lower chamber, where members are ostensibly closer to average Americans, incomes have climbed quite high. The average member of Congress is now 12 times wealthier than the typical US household.“In the last four decades, the gap has demonstrably widened between politicians and ‘We, the people,’” Lewis says.Causes range from insider trading to book deals to lobbying, family members and friends getting in on the action through paid positions as campaign or office staffers. Lewis cites numerous examples.The former Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, have netted millions from his stock deals, outperforming top investors including Warren Buffett while Nancy Pelosi fended off attempts at reform.In the annals of lobbying, there is Billy Tauzin, a former Republican congressman from Louisiana. On Capitol Hill, Tauzin helped then-president George W Bush pass a Medicare bill. His term done, Tauzin became a lobbyist for Big Pharma.Running for office is a perfect fit for high net-worth individuals. After all, it requires significant time off from work and enough campaign funds to draw in outside donations. It helps if you’re born into wealth, marry into it – or both.Lewis comes from a different background – though he notes that his wife, Erin DeLullo, is a political consultant who has worked with some of the Republicans he criticizes as self-proclaimed populists, despite their Ivy League degrees.Lewis’s father was a prison guard for three decades. The family never lacked for food on the table, but Lewis got a rude introduction to the wider world when he made his own foray into campaign politics. A $1,000 check was late to his bank account, giving him an impromptu lesson in how much it costs to be poor in Washington.Then, after becoming an opinion journalist at the Daily Caller, a conservative site, Lewis learned how rich people populate the DC landscape. One day, he was researching a tip that a prominent liberal family was polluting the environment with its penchant for boating. A family member contended otherwise, asking if Lewis knew anything about sailing or yachting. Lewis confessed he did not, asked his colleagues if they did, and saw a sea of hands.“For me, it really hit home that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, so to speak,” he recalls.Lewis planned his book as a survey of America’s 100 richest politicians. It evolved into a more substantive project, although the original idea is reflected by two lists in the appendix: the 25 wealthiest members of Congress and the 10 richest presidents.The Florida Republican senator Rick Scott – who before entering politics ran a company fined $1.7bn for Medicare fraud – leads the congressional list with more than $200m. Top of the presidential list is Donald Trump, whose net worth topped out at $3.1bn.“Putting money aside, [Trump] changed the game in many ways,” Lewis says. “It’s never going to be the same, and not primarily because of his wealth – he’s such a different type of human being and president than we’ve ever seen.”Ironically, Trump’s populist denunciations of corruption and the DC “swamp” resonated strongly with voters.Citing a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, Lewis says: “Three-quarters of Americans believed politicians were primarily selfish and interested in feathering their own nest. I don’t think it’s any surprise that one year later, Donald Trump was elected. He talked about how the game was rigged, he talked about elites and the establishment and the need to drain the swamp.”The Biden family has also been doing quite well for itself financially – not just the president’s scandal-embroiled son, Hunter, but Hunter’s uncles Frank and James.“There are a lot of ways politicians and their families can become enriched, sort of trading off the family relationship, name and access,” Lewis says.He mentions a story in the Atlantic about Joe Biden’s 1988 run for president: the campaign took in over $11m, with around 20% of that amount going either to the candidate’s family or to companies they worked for.“You have an example of other people’s money – in this case, campaign donors – being transferred to the family of Joe Biden,” Lewis says. “Given my druthers, I would make this illegal.”He offers more suggestions for limiting the influence of wealth in politics, including a counterintuitive proposal: raise congressional salaries.“I firmly believe in it,” Lewis says. “This will happen after we ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, after we impose a 10-year moratorium on the revolving door of lobbying, after we ban the ability to make millions from a book deal while you’re serving the country, after we ban the hiring of family for congressional offices and campaigns.“It’s not cheap to live in Washington DC. Once we have curtailed the ability to get rich from nefarious or certainly questionable means, I would compensate them even more so they could focus on the actual job.”
Filthy Rich Politicians is published in the US by Center Street More

When the US supreme court upended the federal right to abortion enshrined in Roe v Wade, the immediate task before Democrats seemed simple: keep abortion legal in as many states as possible.But over a year since Roe’s demise, some leaders in the reproductive rights movements worry that Democrats have tunnel vision, focusing their messaging and resources entirely on the legal tug-of-war over abortion bans in the midwest and south.“Voters want to understand: what are you going to do to make things better? They don’t want to just hear, oh, we’re not going to ban abortion. That’s important, but that’s not good enough,” said Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, which supports abortion rights.Miller said the fight to keep abortion legal is just one frontier in the larger battle for reproductive healthcare. She spent the past year pushing blue states to pass legislation that makes abortion easily accessible, affordable and without stigma for patients and providers.In recent months, Maryland has emerged as an example of how Democratic lawmakers can take proactive steps to bolster abortion access, even in states where the procedure is and will likely remain legal.Maryland is one of just eight states that require private insurers to cover abortion care with no cost-sharing.In April 2022, in anticipation of the supreme court ruling on abortion, Maryland Democrats passed a bill that allows nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, and other medical health professionals to supervise abortions.“Before, we would only allow doctors to do it, even though nurse practitioners, midwives, all these other medical professionals are able to handle the similar things like miscarriages and deliveries,” said Maryland House Delegate Joseline Peña-Melnyk, one of the bill’s sponsors.The law also directs the state to invest $3.5m a year for abortion-care training.If Roe fell, Maryland’s solidly Democratic legislature could ward off any attempts at criminalizing abortion patients or providers. But keeping abortion legal was not good enough. Peña-Melnyk and her colleagues wanted to ensure that Maryland’s abortion clinics would have the capacity to deal with an inevitable surge of out-of-state patients.“This case ending Roe didn’t come out of nowhere, we saw it coming, so when the legislative session started in 2022, we started preparing,” Peña-Melnyk said.She said Maryland’s investment in reproductive healthcare helped prepare the state for the coming months, when West Virginia, Ohio and other neighbors enacted a dizzying web of abortion restrictions.The push to bolster abortion resources in Maryland is part of what attracted Dr Anne Banfield to the state.Dr Banfield spent over a decade of her career as an OB-GYN at a rural hospital in West Virginia. She relocated to Maryland in spring 2022, just after a leaked draft opinion revealed that the supreme court was poised to upend abortion rights.“When I was in West Virginia, there was this constant hum in the background of, oh, what are the politicians going to do next,” she said. “You don’t realize how much that negatively impacts your overall outlook until the pressure is gone.”One year after Banfield moved, Maryland governor Wes Moore signed a new set of protections for abortion providers and patients, including a measure that shields the state’s doctors from legal liability if they provide an abortion to out-of-state patients.“Listen, we are a rural hospital, it is a place that typically has challenges recruiting providers,” Banfield said.But in the past few months, Banfield said she has been able to hire recent graduates from top residency programs.“I can look at these candidates and say, this is a place where you can come and practice full-spectrum reproductive healthcare,” she said. “Here is a place where you will be protected.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStates without affirmative protections for patients and providers could see increased “brain drain”, with doctors like Banfield relocating to places like Maryland. Reproductive health workers are increasingly wary of states that do not proactively push to make abortion more affordable and freely accessible, beyond basic questions about legality.Hanan Jabril, a full-spectrum doula and abortion rights organizer in Wisconsin, is preparing to apply to medical school in hopes of becoming an OB-GYN.“Where I’m applying, where I want to end up, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for years, and the political climate of different states is a huge part of that decision,” said Jabril. “States like Wisconsin are just hemorrhaging residents in OB-GYN especially, because the work is being criminalized by these bans.”When Roe was overturned last year, an 1849 law banning abortion went back into effect in Wisconsin. The 19th century ban is currently facing a legal challenge that is expected to land before the Wisconsin supreme court.Jabril was part of a coalition of progressive organizers that helped elect a liberal justice to the state supreme court in April. With a liberal majority on the court, Wisconsin is poised to overturn the state’s 1849 law.But Jabril said that overturning the ban on abortion isn’t good enough.“It’s important, but I think people forget that this fight didn’t start last year,” they said.Jabril said there are cost barriers to accessing abortion that have long predated the overturn of Roe. Because of the Hyde amendment, passed in 1977, states are banned from using federal Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions, with very narrow exceptions.Of the 32 states following the Hyde amendment, just four states help pay for abortion in cases where a pregnancy could cause long-lasting damage to a patient’s physical health.Jabril wants to train and practice medicine in a state like Maryland or Illinois, which has voluntarily opted to use state dollars to cover all or most medically necessary abortion.“People don’t realize how much more there is to abortion access than just, the law says it’s OK,” said Jabril. “If you can’t pay for it, or if there’s no provider within driving distance, then abortion is still not accessible.” More

On a small stage in New Hampshire this week, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and former Republican Governor Jon Huntsman sat together extolling the virtues of bipartisanship and talking very much like running mates. They were there on behalf of the centrist political advocacy organization No Labels, which is considering fielding a third-party ticket in the 2024 presidential election, and had enlisted the two men to debut its 67-page policy manifesto.Early on in the evening, the moderator asked the question looming over the event: were Manchin and Huntsman running for president? After a smattering of applause died down, Manchin deflected, saying they were simply there to “explain to you that we need options”. But Manchin’s refusal to announce whether he will seek re-election for the US Senate next year, and his presence at the town hall, has drawn speculation that he and No Labels may combine to upend the 2024 election.No Labels has been around since 2010, largely promoting centrist policies and occasionally working to elect moderate Democrats to Congress. Its recent ambitions are far grander, as it plans to raise $70m, get on the ballot in every state across the country, and build a third-party ticket for the presidency. The group has become a specter looming over the 2024 election for Democrats, with polls showing that a centrist third-party candidate would draw votes away from Joe Biden and tilt the race toward Donald Trump.The growing prominence of No Labels and its potential to run a third-party candidate has resulted in backlash from Democrats and more centrist Republicans as a result. Democratic representatives and political organizations such as MoveOn have mobilized to oppose the group, including holding briefings for congressional staffers on the risk of a third-party ticket. Democratic and Republican strategists additionally commissioned a poll that showed how an independent centrist candidate would act as a spoiler against Biden.But efforts to show that No Labels could take a significant portion of the vote and effectively hand Trump the presidency have only emboldened the group. No Labels’ chief pollster told Axios that the recent survey – which showed a moderate independent candidate would receive around 20% of the vote and shift the election to Trump – was proof that their strategy was sound and that they had a viable chance at the presidency.“The people who are spearheading this are not doing it cynically. They have convinced themselves that this is a unique historical moment and they intend to seize it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who co-founded No Labels in 2010 before leaving it earlier this year.Galston disagreed with the group’s decision in 2022 to focus on fielding a third-party candidate, he said, and after a year of offering arguments against the shift decided to quit the organization in April of this year. Although he still supports the group, he sees its current mission as misguided and has spoken out about how it’s likely to benefit Trump’s presidential hopes.“I could not go along with the formation of an independent ticket,” Galston said. “I saw no equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and feared that this ticket would, on net, draw support away from Biden’s candidacy.”No Labels, and its potential candidate Manchin, reject the notion that they will act as spoilers. The group has claimed it will not go ahead with its plans if it appears to shift the election to one party, though has been vague on its criteria for such a decision, and Manchin on Monday told the audience in New Hampshire that “if I get in a race I’m gonna win”.Undisclosed donorsAs No Labels moves forward with its fundraising and attempts to get on nationwide ballots, it has faced increased scrutiny over who exactly is backing their efforts. The group refuses to disclose its donors, which it is not obligated to do, but a Mother Jones investigation identified dozens of wealthy contributors affiliated with No Labels.Although it includes several major Democratic donors, many of the contributors favor conservative causes and Republican candidates. A separate investigation from The New Republic found that conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, most recently known for his close ties with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, donated $130,000 to the group between 2019 and 2021.No Labels officials have cited privacy concerns as the reason that the group will not release its donors, while chief executive Nancy Jacobson told NBC News this week that there is “nothing nefarious” about its fundraising. Galston brought up to Jacobson in the early days of the group’s operations that a lack of transparency might become an issue, he said, but she told him “in no uncertain terms” that was how things would be run.Jacobson and No Labels did not respond to a request for comment on this article.It is unclear just how much of its $70m goal No Labels has raised, although previous years and Jacobson’s status as veteran fundraiser show that it is able to draw large sums. No Labels’ 2021 tax forms, the most recent year publicly available, state that it took in just over $11.3m in revenue that year. The organization’s highest paid staffer was former political commentator Mark Halperin, according to the 2021 tax form, who made around $257,000 as No Labels chief strategist. The organization hired Halperin despite allegations from multiple women of sexual harassment and assault against the once-prominent journalist. Halperin, who has previously apologized for some of the harassment allegations against him while denying other allegations including physical assault, left No Labels in March of this year. He could not be reached for comment.The tax forms also show that No Labels paid top Democrat-run consulting firms for their advocacy and communications work. It gave around $946,000 in compensation to communications firm Rational 360 in 2021. Rational 360 did not respond to a request for comment on this article.The group has faced criticism from Democrats before, including when it endorsed an anti-LGBT, anti-abortion Illinois Congressman during the 2018 midterms. A Super PAC tied to No Labels spent aabout $1m backing the campaign, according to the Intercept. But previous backlash against the group is nothing compared to what it currently faces, with growing concern among Democrats that No Labels has the potential to lose them the White House.“It’s pretty clear that a No Labels candidate would help re-elect Donald Trump,” Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen told the Hill.No Labels has given itself until Super Tuesday – when a large number of states hold primaries in early March of next year – as a deadline for announcing whether or not it will run a third party. The group’s national co-chair Pat McRory stated on Monday that if Biden and Trump are the likely match-up by then and the group sees a path to victory, it will run a candidate. More