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      Nebraska may change its electoral system at the last second to help Trump win | Stephen Marche

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      American democracy is in a fragile place. If you haven’t figured that out by this point, you haven’t been paying attention. The dangers are coming from all sides. Donald Trump has just survived his second apparent assassination attempt. The governor of Ohio has had to call in the state police to monitor a spate of bomb threats to local schools after falsehoods about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in the area began circulating. That’s aside from all the usual mass shootings, Proud Boy marches and the rest of it. But inside this fomenting turmoil, the most dangerous spot in the whole country, the rock on which the American state may well founder, is the quiet congressional district of Omaha, Nebraska, the very heart of the American heartland.Omaha is dangerous, not in itself, but due to the entirely weird position it inhabits inside the electoral college. In one of those strange freaks of American politics, Nebraska has a split electoral college vote, and for the past few elections the city of Omaha has reliably voted Democrat. The other two electoral districts vote solidly Republican. Ordinarily, this little hiccup in the system wouldn’t matter much. But 2024 represents a uniquely precarious moment.As it stands, once you remove the settled Democrat and Republican states, the most direct path to a Kamala Harris victory is by way of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. With those three states, she would receive exactly 270 electoral college seats, the number she needs to win. In that case, she would win if, and only if, she holds that one electoral college vote in the congressional district of Omaha, Nebraska.The Omaha congressional district hasn’t mattered much due to a kind of bipartisan detente, a balance of power. Nebraska is not the only state that splits its electoral system by district. So does Maine. And Maine, while mostly Democratic, has a similarly reliable Republican constituency, which will almost certainly give its electoral college seat to Trump. If Nebraska changes its system to give Trump an advantage, Maine has said it will reciprocate in order to cancel out any attempt to shift the balance of power.Largely for this reason, the inclination to change the law has been muted in Nebraska, even though Republicans control the statehouse. Having a contested electoral college seat also makes Nebraska slightly more worthy of attention from both national parties, meaning the current division is, to some small degree, in the interests of Nebraskans on the whole.Yet that state of detente may be set to unravel. The Maine legislature has now gone out of session, and last Friday, Jim Pillen, the governor of Nebraska, made a public statement: “I strongly support statewide unity and joining 48 other states by awarding all five of our electoral college votes to the presidential candidate who wins the majority of Nebraskans’ votes,” he said. “As I have also made clear, I am willing to convene the Legislature for a special session to fix this 30-year-old problem before the 2024 election. However, I must receive clear and public indication that 33 senators are willing to vote in such a session to restore winner-take-all.”Pillen is effectively deflecting the electoral college question onto the state senators, but he is also opening the door to the possibility of the switch, which could alter the course of the election.Republicans would not even need to switch the electoral college seat to win. They only need to muddy the waters. If, for example, the Nebraska legislature ensured that their electoral college votes were in dispute, and the courts had not decided the matter by 6 January, and no one had reached the threshold of 270, that state of affairs would automatically trigger a contingent election. In a contingent election, another abstruse mechanism of the US electoral system, each state delegation, whether it’s California or Wyoming, gets a single vote, which means that the Republicans would always win. (This possibility is the subject of a book I wrote with Andrew Yang, The Last Election.)The sheer boredom of what I’m describing here, the banal technicalities of the complex legal structures in place, may, on the surface, seem less frightening than assassination attempts and bomb threats and cooked pets and armed militias. But don’t misunderstand: this is the real danger America faces. The complexity is the trap. The complexity makes it easy for people to believe that somehow they haven’t been tricked, that a functioning democratic system, however bizarre, is still in place, even when it clearly isn’t anymore.It goes without saying that the nightmare I’ve described here – which could absolutely happen – is only one of several glitches in the electoral system which could undo the United States. (Georgia is a whole other nightmare.) The Republicans have set themselves up to maximize incoherence, exactly because they are aware of the vulnerability of the system.Needless to say, incoherence of outcome is precisely the opposite of what the founders intended when they established the electoral college 240 years ago. They were living in a different world, though. The electoral college was the product of an 18th-century agrarian society whose Capitol sat a hundred miles from virgin forest. At this point in history, it is little more than a legitimacy crisis in progress.The founders built their system to avoid exactly the kind of situation that the erasure of the district Omaha, Nebraska, would represent: the possibility of democracy in bad faith and by name only.

      Stephen Marche is a Canadian essayist and novelist. He is the author of The Next Civil War and How Shakespeare Changed Everything More

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      With their lies about Haitian immigrants, Trump and Vance have reached a new low | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      During his debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September, Donald Trump proffered the outrageous lie that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating residents’ pets. He wasn’t alone in promoting this little bigoted nugget, either. Earlier that day on X, formerly known as Twitter, JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, had already pushed the idea that Springfield’s residents “have had their pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants”.Vance subsequently tripled down on the falsehood, even later admitting to CNN: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”Behold, the political lie. We’re not talking about spin, which bends the truth to something usable. We’re dealing with an outright fabrication. None of what Trump and Vance are saying about the Haitian community is true. Not a single bit of it. The Haitian community of Springfield is there because its members have been granted temporary protected status, a US government program that allows them to live and work legally in the United States for a defined period of time. And none of them have been known to eat your pets.But there is something almost refreshing in Vance’s moment of honesty about his own dishonesty. In an era where cynicism prevails, it feels almost naive to believe in something, and Vance and Trump are showing us they do believe! But what they believe in is the power of spreading the most shocking, contemptible and brazen lies possible to secure their political victory.What’s a little lie, after all, if it helps their cause? Or, as Vance put it on X: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”The luxury of the political lie, however, is that the tellers of the lie never have to live directly with the consequences of their actions. But others do.On 12 September, Springfield’s city hall was forced to close because of a bomb threat, and all Clark county buildings, including the offices of the department of job and family services, the common pleas court, and the board of elections, were similarly closed “out of an abundance of caution”.By Friday, four other schools had been evacuated due to bomb threats, which similarly emptied the bureau of motor vehicles and the Ohio Southside license bureau. Then, on Saturday, two hospitals, the Springfield regional medical center and the Kettering Health Springfield medical center, were also forced into lockdown. By Sunday, Springfield’s Clark State College received emailed threats of violence and subsequently moved all its classes online for a week due. The local Wittenberg University was also threatened with a mass shooting, forcing it to cancel all its events on Sunday and move classes online for Monday.When Monday rolled around, two more of Springfield’s elementary schools, the Simon Kenton elementary school and Kenwood elementary school, also had to be evacuated “based on information received from the Springfield Police Division”, the Springfield city school district announced. The city of Springfield also axed its CultureFest, the city’s annual celebration of diversity. At a press conference, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, announced that he is deploying the Ohio state highway patrol to schools in Springfield after they received nearly three dozen bomb threats since late last week.Fox News and Trump’s partisans on the media responded to this harrowing turn of events by emphasizing something that DeWine said during his press conference. The bomb threats had thus far (thankfully) been hoaxes, and many of them seemed to originate abroad. “We have people, unfortunately, overseas who are taking these actions,” the governor said.What Trump’s supporters fail to mention is that Trump and Vance created the conditions for these hoaxes to happen in the first place. But, true to form, it seems they would rather blame shadowy foreigners instead.You can’t blame foreigners for the arrival of armed neo-Nazi members of the Blood Tribe, an extremist North American white supremacist group that marched through Springfield in August while carrying swastika-emblazoned flags. You can’t blame foreigners for a member of the Blood Tribe addressing a Springfield city commission meeting days later, telling Rob Rue, Springfield’s mayor: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” You can’t blame folks overseas for the fact that Springfield’s Haitian church has been vandalized twice in one month. You can’t blame foreigners for the increased racism that many Haitians are reporting.Springfield’s already vulnerable Haitian community (particularly after a tragic traffic accident in August that left an 11-year-old boy dead) is now living on a razor’s edge. Fleeing Haiti for their lives, members of his community currently live as if their “temporary protected status” has been summarily taken away from them while they live in the United States, where they are supposed to be safe.Meanwhile, the work they perform sustains the Springfield’s businesses and can be felt far beyond. Springfield’s Haitians are legally employed in local microchip manufacturing and Amazon fulfillment centers. Your Toyota may have an axle fabricated at the hands of a member of this community, and that salad you’re eating may have been packaged by them at a Dole Fresh Vegetables in Springfield.Springfield has seen a substantial increase in Haitian immigration in recent years. A city of 58,000 is hosting 12,000 to 15,000 newcomers. That puts pressure on city services while also adding to the city’s tax revenue. Time and proper planning can pave a path of prosperity forward for everyone.On the other hand, a new Black population moving into a largely white town is a huge temptation to those who want to stoke division. It looks like a windfall. Spin a lie about immigrants and their barbarism and you get to hate on Democrats, the media and immigrants, simultaneously.But at the heart of it is a lie, a cowardly invention that you knowingly want others to promote. That basic fact ought to reveal the salient truth of today’s political lie. If Trump and Vance can’t take responsibility for their actions now, why would anyone think they could take responsibility for the country later?

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      With bombast and defiance, Trump stages first rally since apparent assassination attempt

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday night staged his first rally since he became the target of a second attempted assassination in as many months, telling his supporters in a sports venue outside New York City that what he called “these encounters with death” had only hardened him.“God has now spared my life. It must have been God, not once, but twice,” Trump said to loud cheers from the ecstatic crowd.The former president took his usual ragbag of lies, hyperbole, and dark and racist invective to the Nassau Coliseum in the suburbs of Long Island, just seven miles from the borders of New York City. It was an audacious choice of location, given that there are just 48 days til the election and New York is on neither main party’s list of priorities.The state is reliably Democratic, having last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984 with Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Even Nassau county, where the arena is situated, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by 54% to Trump’s 45%, while the latest New York state polls show Kamala Harris comfortably ahead of him by double digits.Yet Trump clearly saw method in his madness. Long Island, the leafy suburbs that stretch east from the city, has shifted towards the right in recent years, becoming something of an incubator for the Make America Great Again (Maga) upheaval.A large crowd descended on the Coliseum, packing the arena full after hours of waiting in line. Supporters appeared to vie with each other for the most provocative Maga clothing.Men wore “Women for Trump” T-shirts. Several supporters wore “Fight, Fight, Fight” slogans, which shot to popularity after an assassination attempt against the former president in Butler county, Pennsylvania in July.One man sported a black T-shirt with a golden bullet etched on it, and the words: “Just the tip, I promise”. Flyers were handed out by a group calling itself “Japan for Trump”, proclaiming that “God chose Trump” and insisting that the former president was immortal and had been George Washington in a past life.View image in fullscreenSecurity was tight, with helicopters buzzing overhead as Trump arrived, police dogs patrolling wooded areas, and the entire perimeter swept – a lesson learned from the drubbing the US secret service has received in the wake of the Butler county and last Sunday’s Palm Beach, Florida shooting incidents.Despite the violent shocks of recent weeks, Trump took to the Coliseum stage with trademark braggadocio. The arena that once hosted Elvis Presley, Elton John and The Beach Boys now had a new star to accommodate.“We are going to win New York!”, he boasted to a packed arena, disregarding the polls which suggest otherwise.Trump returned to the vexed topic of Springfield, the town in Ohio which was the subject of his racist dog-eating remarks at last week’s presidential debate. He repeated his denigration of Haitian immigrants there as “illegal aliens”, when in fact most are legally resident on temporary protected status.Then he derided the local mayor for offering Haitian children English lessons and interpretation in local schools.“What the hell is wrong with our country,” Trump spluttered, vowing to pour yet more fuel on the fire by visiting Springfield personally within the next two weeks. A long diatribe about the heinous acts of “migrant criminals” followed.Other dystopian stories and falsehoods featured in the 90-minute speech. If Harris wins in November, he claimed, New York state “will be like a third-world country, if it isn’t already”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also got back on his election-denial hobby horse, lying that the 2020 election had been “rigged and stolen”. He called the battle against climate change a “green scam”, claiming that the planet was getting cooler, when in fact this summer was the hottest on record in the northern hemisphere.As he returned to a favoured theme – – bashing the “fake news media” – what was notable was how the crowd met him, and raised him.“Fuck you media!” a man shouted within earshot of the Guardian.“We’ll get you later!”, said another.“Enemy of the people!”The last time Trump had the gall to enter New York territory for a rally was May in the South Bronx. The event was designed to highlight Trump’s support among Black and Latino voters – a theme he returned to on Wednesday, claiming that his standing among both groups was “way off the charts, and they don’t know what to do about it”.What he didn’t say was that recent opinion polls suggest that his support among these critical communities might be slipping following Harris’s entry into the race.So much bombast. So much adoration. Trump was back in the state he used to call home – at least the Maga part of it – and he was loving it.“I can save New York in three months,” he bragged. “November 5 will be your liberation.” More

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      Civil rights groups condemn senator’s questioning of Arab American witness

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      A congressional hearing on hate crimes drew charges of the bigotry it was meant to address after a Republican senator told the female Muslim head of a thinktank to “hide your head in a bag” and accused her of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.John Kennedy, the GOP senator for Louisiana, drew condemnation from Democrats as well as Muslim, Jewish and civil liberties groups for the remark, aimed at Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, at a hearing staged by the Senate judiciary committee.The proceedings witnessed further disruption when Ted Cruz, the Republican senator for Texas, was interrupted by a spectator protesting the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza. “You talk about the fucking Jews and the Israelis. Talk about the 40,000. Talk about all these people. Why is it about antisemitism?” the protester shouted, before being ejected from the chamber.Cruz responded: “We now have a demonstration of antisemitism. We have a demonstration of the hate.”Republicans criticised the theme of Tuesday’s hearing – set by the committee’s Democratic chair, Dick Durbin – for conflating antisemitism with bigotry against Muslims, Arabs and other groups.“The goal was to have a hearing about why it’s so hard to go to school if you’re Jewish,” said Lindsey Graham, the Republican ranking member of the committee and the senator for South Carolina. “If you’re Jewish, you’re being knocked down. You’re being spat on. It is just completely out of control. This is not the hearing we’re getting, so we’ll work with what we’ve got.”A Republican-led subcommittee in the House of Representatives has already staged a series of highly charged hearings focused on the rise of antisemitism on university campuses following Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel last October, which saw around 1,200 people killed and 250 taken hostage, and which triggered a devastating ongoing Israeli military retaliation.The House hearings prompted the resignations of two university heads after they gave responses to questions about their institutions’ policies on calls for genocide against Jews that were deemed insufficiently condemnatory.Graham tried to enter similar territory when he asked Berry whether she believed that it was goal of Hamas, the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah or Iran to destroy the only Jewish state. Berry answered that “these are complicated questions”.That eventually led to Berry’s hostile exchange with Kennedy, who asked her: “You support Hamas, do you not?”“Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support,” Berry replied. “But you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.”When Kennedy followed up by asking whether she supported Hezbollah or Iran, Berry answered: “Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing.”Finishing his interrogation by expressing “disappointment” at Berry’s unwillingness to declare outright opposition to the three named entities, Kennedy declared: “You should hide your head in a bag.”Invited by Durbin to respond to the outburst, Berry said: “It’s regrettable that I, as I sit here, have experienced the very issue that we’re attempting to deal with today. This has been, regrettably, a real disappointment, but very much an indication of the danger to our democratic institutions that we’re in now. And I deeply regret that.”The judiciary committee – with Durbin’s approval – later endorsed Berry’s response by posting it on X, with accompanying commentary reading: “A Senate Republican told an Arab American civil rights leader that ‘you should hide your head in a bag.’ We will not amplify that horrible clip. But we WILL amplify the witness’s powerful response calling it out.”The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) accused Kennedy and other Republicans of treating Berry with hostility.“Maya Berry went before the committee to discuss hate crimes. Both Ms. Berry and the topic should have been treated with the respect and seriousness they deserve,” said Robert McCaw, Cair’s government affairs director. “Instead, Sen Kennedy and others chose to be an example of the bigotry Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims have faced in recent months and years.”Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, condemned what he called a “discriminatory and vitriolic attack” on Kennedy.“To use a hearing about the disturbing rise in anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and antisemitic hate crimes to launch personal and discriminatory attacks on an expert witness they’ve invited to testify is both outrageous and inappropriate,” he said.Sheila Katz, chief executive officer of the National Council of Jewish Women, called Berry’s treatment “heartbreaking”.“[T]he only Muslim witness faced biased questions about supporting Hamas & Hezbollah despite her clear condemnations,” she wrote on X. “This hearing should combat hate, not perpetuate it. The Senate must do better.” More

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      US House will vote on funding bill as shutdown deadline nears

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      The US House will vote Wednesday on a government funding bill that appears doomed to fail, with less than two weeks left to prevent a partial shutdown starting 1 October.The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced Tuesday that the chamber would move forward with the vote, despite vocal opposition from members of his own conference. The announcement came one week after that opposition forced Johnson to delay a planned vote on his bill, and the speaker has only faced more resistance in the days since.Donald Trump has increased pressure on Johnson to reject any funding measure unless it includes “election security” provisions, a stance that the former president doubled down on hours before the vote.Johnson’s proposed bill combines a six-month stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote.“It’s very, very serious stuff, and that’s why we’re going to do the right thing,” Johnson said Wednesday. “We’re going to responsibly fund the government and we’re going to stop non-citizens voting in elections.”Critics of the Save Act note that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, and they fear such a law would hinder legitimate voters’ efforts to cast their ballots. House Democrats remain overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal, and only a few of them are expected to support Johnson’s bill on Wednesday.“Speaker Johnson must reject the most extreme voices in his party and quick move toward a four corners agreement so we can avoid a costly Republican-led shutdown,” said Pete Aguilar, the House Democratic caucus chair, on Wednesday. “The American people want to see an end to the chaos and division.”Given Republicans’ narrow House majority and Democrats’ widespread opposition to the bill, Johnson can only afford a handful of defections within his conference on Wednesday. But a number of hard-right Republicans have already indicated they will vote against the bill, as many of them have rejected any kind of continuing resolution amid demands for more budget cuts.Hard-right Republicans worry that, once the vote fails on Wednesday, Johnson will turn his attention to passing a more straightforward continuing resolution without the Save Act attached, although the speaker has dismissed those concerns. Asked on Wednesday about his next steps if the bill failed, Johnson deflected.“Let’s see what happens with the bill,” Johnson told reporters. “We’re on the field in the middle of the game. The quarterback is calling the play. We’re going to run the play.”Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-right Republican congresswoman from Georgia, attacked Johnson’s strategy as a “classic bait and switch that will enrage the base.“Johnson is leading a fake fight that he has no intention of actually fighting,” Greene said Tuesday on X. “I refuse to lie to anyone that this plan will work and it’s already [dead on arrival] this week. Speaker Johnson needs to go to the Democrats, who he has worked with the entire time, to get the votes he needs to do what he is already planning to do.”Trump, who has championed baseless claims of widespread non-citizen voting, has has similarly insisted that the SAVE Act must be congressional Republicans’ top priority before election day.He said Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social: “If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form.”But even if Johnson could get his bill across the finish line in the House, the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has made clear that the proposal faces no chance of passage in the upper chamber. In a floor speech delivered Wednesday, Schumer reiterated that only “bipartisan, bicameral cooperation” would prevent a shutdown next month.“For the last two weeks, Speaker Johnson and House Republican leaders have wasted precious time on a proposal that everyone knows can’t become law. His own Republican Conference cannot unite around his proposal,” Schumer said. “I hope that, once the speaker’s [continuing resolution] fails, he moves on to a strategy that will actually work: bipartisan cooperation. It’s the only thing that has kept the government open every time we have faced a funding deadline.”At a press conference on Tuesday, McConnell issued a severe warning to House Republicans that a shutdown so close to election day could jeopardize the party’s standing with voters and thus cost them seats in Congress.“The one thing you cannot have is a government shutdown,” McConnell said. “It would be, politically, beyond stupid for us to do that.” More

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      Teamsters decline to endorse election candidate – but claim majority backs Trump

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      The Teamsters International, which represents over 1.3 million workers, declined to endorse a candidate ahead of November’s presidential election – but released data suggesting most of its members backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.The union’s decision to not make an election endorsement, for the first time in almost three decades, comes in the wake of scrutiny of its president, Sean O’Brien, becoming the first Teamsters leader to address the the Republican national convention in July. John Palmer, vice-president at large at the Teamsters, called the decision to appear at the convention, “unconscionable” given Trump’s record opposing labor unions.Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, met with the Teamsters this week for a roundtable discussion prior to the decision. Trump and Joe Biden attended roundtable with the union earlier this year.“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before big business,” O’Brien said in a statement on Wednesday. “We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries – and to honor our members’ right to strike – but were unable to secure those pledges.”Polling data released by the union ahead of the announcement showed that its members supported Biden over Trump, though more recent surveys conduct by the union revealed membership supported Trump over Harris.The Teamsters National Black Caucus endorsed Harris last month.In response to the non-endorsement, Teamsters against Trump, a grassroots group of Teamster members and retirees, announced they will expand campaigning efforts to elect Vice President Kamala Harris.The California Teamsters also came out on 18 September to endorse Harris in response to the Teamsters International’s lack of endorsement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When it comes to my vote for President, as a proud Teamster there’s no contest. Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn about the working class. As President, Trump didn’t lift a finger to help Teamsters whose pensions were in danger. Instead, he installed his billionaire friends in the White House and did everything he could to stop workers from organizing into unions,” said James Larkin, a member of Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, Michigan and member of the group, in a statement. More