US Politics

Texas’ Republican-led House of Representatives impeached state attorney general Ken Paxton on Saturday on articles including bribery and abuse of public trust, a historic rebuke of a GOP official who rose to be a star of the conservative legal movement despite years of scandal and alleged crimes.Impeachment triggers Paxton’s immediate suspension from office pending the outcome of a trial in the state Senate and empowers Republican governor Greg Abbott to appoint someone else as Texas’ top lawyer in the interim.The 121-23 vote constitutes an abrupt downfall for one of the Republican party’s most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the US supreme court to overturn president Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of Donald Trump. It makes Paxton only the third sitting official in Texas’ nearly 200-year history to have been impeached.Paxton, 60, decried the move moments after many members of his own party voted to impeach, and his office pointed to internal reports that found no wrongdoing.“The ugly spectacle in the Texas House today confirmed the outrageous impeachment plot against me was never meant to be fair or just,” Paxton said. “It was a politically motivated sham from the beginning,”Paxton has been under FBI investigation for years over accusations that he used his office to help a donor and was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial. His fellow Republicans had long taken a muted stance on the allegations, but that changed this week.“No one person should be above the law, least not the top law enforcement officer of the state of Texas,” David Spiller, a Republican member of the committee that investigated Paxton, said in opening statements. Another Republican committee member Charlie Geren said without elaborating that Paxton had called some lawmakers before the vote and threatened them with political “consequences”.Lawmakers allied with Paxton tried to discredit the investigation by noting that hired investigators, not panel members, interviewed witnesses. They also said several of the investigators had voted in Democratic primaries, tainting the impeachment, and that they had too little time to review evidence.“I perceive it could be political weaponization,” Tony Tinderholt, one of the House’s most conservative members, said before the vote.Paxton is automatically suspended from office pending the Senate trial. Final removal would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, where Paxton’s wife, Angela, is a member.Representatives of the governor, who lauded Paxton while swearing him in for a third term in January, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on a temporary replacement.Before the vote on Saturday, Trump and senator Ted Cruz came to Paxton’s defense, with Cruz calling the impeachment process “a travesty” and saying the attorney general’s legal troubles should be left to the courts.“Free Ken Paxton,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, warning that if House Republicans proceeded with impeachment, “I will fight you.” More

Negotiations over America’s looming debt crisis pushed into Saturday amid signs that a deal between Joe Biden’s administration and Republicans was close to being struck even as the deadline for a potentially catastrophic US default was nudged by a few days.The Associated Press reported that work requirements for federal food aid recipients have emerged as a final sticking point in talks, even as Biden had said on Friday that a deal on raising the debt ceiling was “very close”.Biden’s optimism came after the deadline when the US government would run short of funds to pay all its bills was pushed back to 5 June, giving both sides more breathing room but also raising the prospects that talks – which had seemed almost at a deal on Friday evening – could now stretch into next week.On Saturday, Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters that he was making “progress” in negotiations with Biden, saying: “We do not have a deal … We are not there yet. We did make progress, we worked well into early this morning and we’re back at it now,” according to Reuters.When asked if Congress is able to meet the 5 June deadline, McCarthy swiftly responded: “Yes,” the Hill reports.Asked if a deal could be announced on Saturday, he replied: “I don’t know about today”.Biden and McCarthy have seemed to be narrowing on a two-year budget-slashing deal that would also extend the US debt limit into 2025 past the next presidential election.Both sides have suggested one of the main holdups is a Republican effort to boost work requirements for recipients of food stamps and other federal aid programs, a longtime Republican goal that many Democrats have strenuously opposed.The White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Republican proposals on the issue were “cruel and senseless” and said Biden and Democrats would oppose them.But at the same time the Louisiana congressman Garret Graves, one of McCarthy’s negotiators, was blunt when asked if Republicans might relent, saying: “Hell no, not a chance.”Bates condemned House Republicans in a statement to Politico, accusing them of “threatening to trigger an unprecedented recession and cost the American people over 8 million jobs unless they can take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans.”Americans and the world have watched with growing fear and and anger as the negotiating brinkmanship that could throw the US economy into chaos has dragged on in yet another repeat of the regular political theater that always seems to surround the issue in Washington.Yet Biden was upbeat as he left for the Memorial Day weekend at Camp David, declaring: “It’s very close, and I’m optimistic.”In a blunt warning, the Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said on Friday that failure to act by the new date for default would “cause severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests”.Anxious retirees and others were already making contingency plans for missed checks, with the next Social Security payments due next week.Any deal struck by the White House and Republican negotiators would need to be a political compromise, with support from both Democrats and Republicans needed to pass the divided US Congress.McCarthy has promised to give his Republican members 72 hours to go through any deal, pushing back a vote to at least Tuesday and possibly much later in the week, depending on when a deal can be announced.On Saturday, Axios revealed that independent senator Kyrsten Sinema has joined the negotiations, according to sources familiar with the matter.The outlet reported that as Sinema attempts to use her newfound independent position to help negotiators reach a compromise, some Democratic lawmakers are privately concerned that her involvement might limit key renewable energy proposals.Currently, Republicans are seeking to make modifications to the National Environmental Policy Act in order to remove legal restrictions for oil and gas companies. Meanwhile, Democrats have urged the Biden administration and Democratic congressional leaders to oppose any Nepa changes.Earlier this month, Arizona’s representative Raúl Grijalva, a ranking member of the House natural resources committee, sent a letter – along with 79 other Democrats – to Biden and Democratic leadership, urging them to oppose environmental rollbacks in any deal.Ultimately, focus would especially be on the reaction to rightwing Republicans in the House, especially those in the Freedom Caucus mostly aligned with former US president Donald Trump.“Raising the debt ceiling is not a ‘concession’ by Republicans – it’s their constitutional duty,” the New York Democratic representative Dan Goldman tweeted on Friday.“Republicans are extorting the American people by threatening to crater the economy to extract unreasonable demands they’d never be able to get in the ordinary appropriations process,” he added.Several credit-rating agencies have said they have put the US on review for a possible downgrade, which would push up borrowing costs and undercut its standing as the backbone of the global financial system.A similar 2011 standoff led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its rating on US debt, hammering markets and sending the government’s borrowing costs higher. More

Texas’s Republican-led house of representatives launched historic impeachment proceedings against attorney general Ken Paxton on Saturday as the scandal-plagued lawyer called on supporters to protest a vote that could lead to his ouster and Donald Trump came to his defense.The house convened on Saturday afternoon to debate whether to impeach and suspend Paxton from office over allegations of bribery, abuse of public trust and that he is unfit for office. They’re just some of the accusations that have trailed Texas’s top lawyer for most of his three terms.In opening statements, the state congressman Charlie Geren, a member of the committee that investigated Paxton, said the attorney general had called lawmakers and threatened them with political “consequences”.As the charges against Paxton were read, some lawmakers shook their heads. Impeachment is expected to be debated for four hours, followed by closing remarks and the vote.The hearing could result in a remarkably sudden downfall for one of the Republican party’s most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the US supreme court to overturn president Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of Donald Trump. Only two officials in Texas’s nearly 200-year history have been impeached.Paxton, 60, has called the impeachment proceedings “political theater” and on Friday, he asked supporters “to peacefully come let their voices be heard at the Capitol tomorrow”.Paxton has been under FBI investigation for years over accusations that he used his office to help a donor and was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial.If impeached, Paxton would be removed from office pending a senate trial, and it would fall to the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to appoint an interim replacement. Final removal would require a two-thirds vote in the senate, where Paxton’s wife’s, Angela, is a member.To Paxton’s detractors, the rebuke was years overdue.In 2014, he admitted to violating Texas securities law, and a year later he was indicted on securities fraud charges in his hometown near Dallas, accused of defrauding investors in a tech startup. He pleaded not guilty to two felony counts carrying a potential sentence of five to 99 years.He opened a legal defense fund and accepted $100,000 from an executive whose company was under investigation by Paxton’s office for Medicaid fraud. An additional $50,000 was donated by an Arizona retiree whose son Paxton later hired to a high-ranking job but was soon fired after displaying child pornography in a meeting. In 2020, Paxton intervened in a Colorado mountain community where a Texas donor and college classmate faced removal from his lakeside home under coronavirus orders.But what ultimately unleashed the impeachment push was Paxton’s relationship with the Austin real estate developer Nate Paul.In 2020, eight top aides told the FBI they were concerned Paxton was misusing his office to help Paul over the developer’s unproven claims that an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200m of his properties was afoot. The FBI searched Paul’s home in 2019, but he has not been charged and denies wrongdoing. Paxton also told staff members he had an affair with a woman who, it later emerged, worked for Paul.The impeachment accuses Paxton of attempting to interfere in foreclosure lawsuits and issuing legal opinions to benefit Paul. Its bribery charges allege that Paul employed the woman with whom Paxton had an affair in exchange for legal help and that he paid for expensive renovations to the attorney general’s home.A senior lawyer for Paxton’s office, Chris Hilton, said on Friday that the attorney general paid for all repairs and renovations. More

Never work with animals, children or egotistical space billionaires. There’s a lesson in there that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida learned the hard way when he used Elon Musk’s Twitter Spaces social media platform to announce his run for US president.Thousands of listeners were greeted with long silences, odd snatches of music and the sound of Musk, would-be kingmaker of the American right, muttering that the “the servers are straining somewhat”. The glitch was soon being described as a “DeSaster”, one of the most embarrassing campaign fiascos in memory.No one was more gleeful than Donald Trump, who regards DeSantis as his principal rival for the Republican nomination in 2024. But for those in the party who crave an alternative to the disgraced former president, it fueled disquiet about his putative rival’s big match temperament – and encouraged them to seek other options. No one is writing DeSantis off, but he enters the race weakened and in a wide, scattered field of lesser candidates that Trump now dominates.“DeSantis’s launch was awful; Trump’s comments are nuts,” tweeted Bill Kristol, a founding director of Defending Democracy Together who served in the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations. “Doesn’t every normal Republican elected official and donor think the party can (and should!) do better?”The Grand Old Party has been transformed since the moment that Trump staged a comparatively lo-tech campaign launch by trundling down an escalator at Trump Tower in New York in 2015. The celebrity businessman soon energised grassroots supporters, shook the Republican establishment and prevailed in the primary election against divided opposition.Eight years on, Trump, now 76 and facing myriad criminal investigations, has again established himself as the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination. He has spent the months since he launched his own campaign working to destroy the once-ascendant DeSantis, 44, who has tried to remain above the fray.In the end Trump did not succeed in knocking the man he brands “Ron DeSanctimonious” out of the race but did sow doubts about his record, personality and loyalty. The governor did himself no favors by giving mixed messages on US support for Ukraine, picking a thankless fight with Disney and failing to impress during in-person meetings.Last month, when DeSantis went overseas on a “trade mission” and met business leaders in London, the Politico website quoted attendees as saying he “looked bored” and “stared at his feet” and describing him as “horrendous” and “low wattage”. One reportedly said: “It felt really a bit like we were watching a state-level politician. I wouldn’t be surprised if [people in attendance] came out thinking ‘that’s not the guy.’”Far from closing the gap on Trump during a book tour, DeSantis instead saw it widen to 30 percentage points or more in some opinion polls. Some of his potential donors have expressed buyers’ remorse and put their financial backing on hold.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, said: “Everybody thought it was a two-horse race; it’s a one-horse race. The Republican establishment, the Republican donors, Republican media, everybody wants Trump gone so they’ve all put their hopes in DeSantis and now that’s gotten pretty shaky over the last four months because the more people get to know him, they don’t like him.”Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 primaries, added: “You’re going to see a bunch of people get in now because they think DeSantis is weak and so they want to be the number two guy.”This week’s shambolic campaign launch only reinforced the view that DeSantis was overhyped as a “Trump slayer” and peaked too soon. But there is a constituency of Republicans unwilling to return to twice-impeached, once-indicted Trump, especially after disappointing midterm election results. They hunger for another choice to take on Joe Biden.Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times in Iowa, which holds the first Republican caucuses early next year, said: “I was talking with a moderate retired Republican schoolteacher just this morning from western Iowa and she doesn’t like the meanness of Trump and DeSantis, so she’s looking for an alternative. Whether that’s Tim Scott or Asa Hutchinson or Chris Sununu, who knows?”Ambitious Republicans smell blood. This week saw Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator, throw his hat in the ring with a brand of optimism that contrasts with Trump and DeSantis’s dark rhetoric. But Scott, 57, has only 1% of support among registered Republicans, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.He joined fellow his South Carolinian Nikki Haley, a former governor of the state and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. The 51-year-old has emphasised her relative youth compared with Biden and Trump as well as her background as the daughter of two Indian immigrants. She attracts about 4% support among Republican voters.Notably DeSantis, Scott and Haley have been reluctant to directly denounce Trump, preferring to let allies do the dirty work or make oblique remarks about the need to end a culture of losing or embrace greatness rather than grievance. Their reticence is a striking insight into Trump’s lock on the party’s base.But one candidate, the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, has been more forthright in calling for Trump to drop out of the race to deal with his hush money criminal case in New York. Hutchinson, 72, has touted his experience leading the deeply conservative state but has limited name recognition nationwide.Other potential contenders include Mike Pence, 63, a former vice-president who broke with Trump over the January 6 insurrection; Chris Christie, 60, a former governor of New Jersey who is a pugnacious Trump critic; and Chris Sununu, 48, the governor of New Hampshire who has said he does not believe Trump can beat Biden.Glenn Youngkin, 56, a hedge fund manager turned Virginia governor who has made much of parents’ rights in schools, is said to be reconsidering a White House bid after previously ruling it out. Meanwhile Vivek Ramaswamy, 37, a former biotechnology investor and executive, is already waging a quixotic campaign.The bigger the field, the more that Trump stands to benefit. As in 2016, a bevy of candidates may well divide the anti-Trump vote while his base holds fast. It could put pressure on DeSantis to set himself apart by taking off the gloves against the former president, a risky strategy that backfired for fellow Floridians Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in 2016.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “The only way Ron DeSantis peels off Trump voters is if he fights as hard and dirty as Trump because they’re looking for a champion who will break boundaries, break the rules and really go for it. That’s what they’re looking for: are you willing to go toe to toe and stand up to Trump in every way?”DeSantis is still relatively well placed. He was polling in double digits and boasted of a war chest of more than $110m before he even entered the race. His team said he brought in $8.2m in the first 24 hours after his campaign launch, breaking a record of $6.3m held by Biden.DeSantis can also point to a list of rightwing legislative accomplishments to make the case that he is effectively Trump without the drama. His opposition to coronavirus pandemic restrictions and his “anti-woke” agenda guarantee favorable coverage from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network and other rightwing media.He has many friends in the Florida Republican party despite Trump having made the state his adopted home. Christian Ziegler, the state party chairperson, said he had a “great relationship” with both men. “The organisation is going to stay neutral and I encourage all our party leaders to do the same because, no matter who wins the primary, we’ve got to make sure that we go get the voters of whoever loses to cross over and shake hands and vote for whoever our Republican nominee is.“We’ve got to keep our eye on what the reality is and what the real goal is. The real enemy here are the Democrats and what they’re trying to do to our kids, our communities, our state, our country.”Democrats, for their part, exulted in DeSantis’s campaign launch debacle and give his candidacy short shrift.Antjuan Seawright, a party strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “He has a math problem, meaning he is always going to be considered a runner-up to Trump, who is the leading candidate in their party. He has a policy problem because in many cases he’s trying to out-Trump Trump when it comes to policy.“He has a political problem: he has not had his hood checked or his tyres kicked outside of Florida and so he’s never been battle-tested. He has a constituency problem because with so many people in the race, where does his following come from?”Seawright added: “The Republican primary, quite frankly, has calcified around the idea of nominating Trump again.” More

Henry Kissinger turns 100 on Saturday, but his legacy has never been in worse shape. Though many commentators now speak of a “tortured and deadly legacy”, for decades Kissinger was lauded by all quarters of the political and media establishment.A teenage Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany, Kissinger charted an unlikely path to some of the most powerful positions on Earth. Even more strangely, as national security adviser and secretary of state under Nixon and Ford, he became something of a pop icon.Back then, one fawning profile of the young statesman cast him as “the sex symbol of the Nixon administration”. In 1969, according to the profile, Kissinger attended a party full of Washington socialites with an envelope marked “Top Secret” tucked under his arm. The other party guests could hardly contain their curiosity, so Kissinger deflected their questions with a quip: the envelope contained his copy of the latest Playboy magazine. (Hugh Hefner apparently found this hilarious and thereafter ensured that the national security adviser got a free subscription.)What the envelope really contained was a draft copy of Nixon’s “silent majority” speech, a now-infamous address that aimed to draw a sharp line between the moral decadence of antiwar liberals and Nixon’s unflinching realpolitik. The actual top-secret work he was doing in the 1970s aged just as poorly. Within a few short years he masterminded illegal bombings in Laos and Cambodia and enabled genocide in East Timor and East Pakistan. Meanwhile, Kissinger was known among Beltway socialites as “the playboy of the western wing”. He liked to be photographed, and photographers obliged. He was a fixture on gossip pages, particularly when his dalliances with famous women spilled into public view – like when he and the actor Jill St John inadvertently set off the alarm at her Hollywood mansion late one night as they stole away to her pool. (“I was teaching her chess,” Kissinger explained later.)While Kissinger gallivanted with Washington’s jet set, he and Nixon – a pair so firmly joined at the hip that Isaiah Berlin christened them “Nixonger” – were busy contriving a political brand rooted in their supposed disdain for the liberal elite, whose effete morality, they claimed, could lead only to paralysis.Kissinger certainly disdained the antiwar movement, disparaging demonstrators as “upper-middle-class college kids” and warning: “The very people who shout ‘Power to the People’ are not going to be the people who take over this country if it turns into a test of strength.” He also scorned women: “To me women are no more than a pastime, a hobby. Nobody devotes too much time to a hobby.” But it’s indisputable that Kissinger held a fondness for the gilded liberalism of high society, the exclusive parties and steak dinners and flashbulbs.High society loved him back. Gloria Steinem, an occasional dining companion, called Kissinger “the only interesting man in the Nixon administration”. The gossip columnist Joyce Haber described him as “worldly, humorous, sophisticated, and a cavalier with women.” The Hef considered him a friend, and once claimed in print that a poll of his models revealed Kissinger to be the man most widely desired for dates at the Playboy mansion.This infatuation didn’t end with the 1970s. When Kissinger turned 90 in 2013, his red-carpet birthday celebration was attended by a bipartisan crowd that included Michael Bloomberg, Roger Ailes, Barbara Walters, even “veteran for peace” John Kerry, along with some 300 other A-listers.An article in Women’s Wear Daily reported that Bill Clinton and John McCain delivered the birthday toasts in a ballroom done up in chinoiserie, to please the night’s guest of honor. (McCain, who spent more than five years as a POW, described his “wonderful affection” for Kissinger, “because of the Vietnam war, which was something that was enormously impactful to both of our lives”.) The birthday boy himself then took the stage, where he reminded guests about the “rhythm of history” and seized the occasion to preach the gospel of his favorite cause: bipartisanship.Kissinger’s capacity for bipartisanship was renowned. (Republicans Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld were in attendance early in the evening, and later in the night Democrat Hillary Clinton strode in through a freight entrance with open arms, asking: “Ready for round two?”) During the party, McCain gushed that Kissinger “has been a consultant and adviser to every president, Republican and Democrat, since Nixon”. McCain probably spoke for everyone in the ballroom when he added: “I know of no individual who is more respected in the world than Henry Kissinger.”In fact, much of the world reviles Kissinger. The former secretary of state even avoids visiting several countries out of fear that he might be apprehended and charged with war crimes. In 2002, for example, a Chilean court demanded he answer questions about his role in that country’s 1973 coup d’état. In 2001, a French judge sent police officers to Kissinger’s Paris hotel room to serve him a formal request for questioning about the same coup, during which several French citizens were disappeared.Around the same time, he cancelled a trip to Brazil after rumors began circling that he would be detained and compelled to answer questions about his role in Operation Condor, the 1970s scheme that united South American dictatorships in disappearing one another’s exiled opponents. An Argentinian judge had already named Kissinger as one potential “defendant or suspect” in a future criminal indictment.But in the United States, Kissinger is untouchable. There, one of the 20th century’s most prolific butchers is beloved by the rich and powerful, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Kissinger’s bipartisan appeal is straightforward: he was a top strategist of America’s empire of capital at a critical moment in that empire’s development.Small wonder that the political establishment has regarded Kissinger as an asset and not an aberration. He embodied what the two ruling parties share: the resolve to ensure favorable conditions for American investors in as much of the world as possible. A stranger to shame and inhibition, Kissinger was able to guide the American empire through a treacherous period in world history, when the United States’ rise to global domination sometimes seemed on the brink of collapse.The Kissinger doctrine persists today: if sovereign countries refuse to be worked into broader US schemes, the American national security state will move swiftly to undercut their sovereignty. This is business as usual for the US, no matter which party sits in the White House – and Kissinger, while he lives, remains among the chief stewards of this status quo.The historian Gerald Horne once recounted a story about the time Kissinger nearly drowned while canoeing beneath one of the world’s largest waterfalls. Tossed in those churning waters, the statesman was finally forced to confront the terror of losing control, of facing a crisis in which even his own incredible influence could not insulate him from personal disaster. But the panic was only temporary – his guide righted the boat, and Kissinger again escaped unscathed.Perhaps time will soon accomplish what the Victoria Falls failed to do so many decades ago.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in An Era of Extreme Inequalities
Jonah Walters is a freelance writer and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics More

In the crowded field of books about social activism, truth is the element that distinguishes good from great. In his first book, David Dennis Jr has mastered the process.The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and a Legacy of a Freedom Ride is written with his father, David Dennis Sr, a hero of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The book opens with raw truth and maintains that standard, never using ambiguity as a shield against accountability.Dennis Sr never intended to be involved in the movement. In fact, the life he dreamed of when he went to Dillard University in New Orleans had nothing to do with activism at all. He wanted to be an engineer.When he started attending meetings of the Congress of Racial Equality (Core, which he would direct in Mississippi), he did so not out of bravery, nor driven by a desire to fight for a better world for Black people. Nor was he driven by a refusal to stand idle against white nationalism. At first, he was driven by motives familiar to any freshman who finds himself the first in his family to attend college. He wanted to meet attractive girls, keep his head down, finish school and get a job.Whether you consider that selfish, or self-preservation, it is unmistakably human. The Movement Made Us never shies away from the humanity of our civil rights heroes and heroines and the truth about a country that forced even the least prepared “soldiers” to fight a war that still hasn’t ended.In a chapter entitled God and Fear, Dennis Sr and Jr invite readers to experience the tension in the room as figures including John Lewis, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Andrew Young, CT Vivian, Wyatt Tee Walker and the director of Core, James Farmer, discuss whether a freedom ride – an organized incursion into the south, by public transport and in support of voting rights – should be cancelled because of extreme threats and the promise of jail on arrival.King objects. Questions arise about whether he is too important to the movement to ride. “He ain’t special,” one attendee shouts. King’s commitment was never in question but something far worse was being projected to other leaders: his assumed “superiority”. Dennis Sr and Jr draw readers into such tensions, allowing them to sit with the fear, anger and authenticity of the moment.Describing pivotal historic moments, the authors use truth as their compass, unafraid of where it may lead. No subject is above examination. The truth of our country is far more brutal than many Americans want to believe.Americans often see their history through rose-colored glasses. The Movement Made Us holds history to the sun, willing to let the rays burn. In a chapter entitled A Weekend in Jackson, the young activist Joan Johnson is questioned by the police who want to know about the “leaders” of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.“Lil’ [n-word] you in the NAACP,” the cop spat.“Yes,” she declared.Her words met with a beating. She fell to the floor, tried to protect her head. The police kicked her and demanded to know “who runs the NAACP?”“The people.”Each time she was asked the same question, Johnson gave the same answer. She was beaten unconscious, left in a pool of her own blood. The authors reveal that she was 16 years old at the time. The rawness of the image leaves no room to pretend that such domestic terrorism precluded the torture of women and children.America and the police force it protects and serves are not alone in being held to the light. The authentic life of David Dennis Sr, college student turned civil rights veteran, is examined closely too.After his close friend Medgar Evers was shot dead on his own front lawn, Dennis Sr nearly succumbed to survivor’s guilt and grief. The trauma and turmoil he describes will pose questions in the mind of the reader. Questions like, “What becomes of those who survive when their fellow soldiers are murdered with impunity? Where do their bodies and minds store the pain from the emotional and physical violence inflicted? What happens to marriages and families when one spouse promises for ever but can barely imagine a world beyond tomorrow?”This book addresses these questions with truth. Father and son wrestle with their answers. There are no clear winners. Noting how the family became an unwilling casualty in the war, Dennis Jr shares what it was like to be the son of a civil rights legend who barely escaped his own share of assassination attempts:
The white men who fired shots at your back may have missed you but they hit our lineage. They left bullet holes in the foundation upon which your future families are built.”
The Movement Made Us is not for those unprepared for veracity. Readers will experience a father sometimes reluctant to revisit the past and a son navigating his identity as a griot, recording history while protecting the father he loves.At its core, The Movement Made Us is about legacy, leadership, healing and accountability. It is more than a story about a father and his son. It is more than a story about the civil rights movement. It is a master class on allowing truth to anchor you and finding the balance between accountability and honoring. This is a lesson that should be replicated in America as a whole.Dennis Jr states: “This is the part where we break and tear the things that have been fixed in place.” His words are directed towards his father, but for a country in need of real healing, it is an evergreen declaration.
The Movement Made Us is published in the US by Harper More

The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has urged his supporters to protest at the state capitol when Republicans in the House of Representatives take up historic impeachment proceedings against him.The state House has set a Saturday vote to consider impeaching Paxton and suspending him from office over allegations of bribery, unfitness for office and abuse of public trust – just some of the accusations that have trailed him for most of his three terms.Paxton, a 60-year-old Republican, decried the impeachment proceedings as “political theater” that will “inflict lasting damage on the Texas House”, adding to his earlier claims that it was an effort to disfranchise the voters who returned him to office in November.“I want to invite my fellow citizens and friends to peacefully come let their voices be heard at the capitol tomorrow,” he said at a news conference, without taking any questions. “Exercise your right to petition your government.”The request echoes former president Donald Trump’s call for people to protest against his electoral defeat on 6 January 2021, when a mob violently stormed the US Capitol in Washington. Paxton, who spoke at the rally that preceded that insurrection, called his supporters to the Texas capitol on a day when the governor is supposed to deliver a Memorial Day address to lawmakers.If impeached, Paxton would be suspended from office immediately and the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, would appoint an interim replacement.The Republican-led committee spent months quietly investigating Paxton and recommended his impeachment on Thursday on 20 articles. Paxton has said the charges are based on “hearsay and gossip, parroting long-disproven claims”.As reported by the Texas Tribune, four investigators, testifying before the House general investigating committee on Wednesday, described in “painstaking and methodical detail” ways in which they said Paxton violated multiple state laws.Investigators said they believed Paxton wrongly spent official funds and misused his authority to help a friend and financial backer, the Tribune said.Prominent conservatives have been notably quiet on Paxton, but some began to rally around him on Friday. The chairman of the state Republican party, Matt Rinaldi, criticised the process as a “sham” and urged the Republican-controlled Senate to acquit Paxton if he stood trial in that chamber.“It is based on allegations already litigated by voters, led by a liberal speaker trying to undermine his conservative adversaries,” Rinaldi said, echoing Paxton’s criticism of Republican House speaker Dade Phelan. He said the Senate would have to “restore sanity and reason” by acquitting Paxton.It’s unclear how many supporters Paxton may have in the House, but only a simple majority is needed to impeach. That means just a small fraction of the 85 Republican members would need to vote against Paxton if all 64 Democrats do. Final removal would require two-thirds support in the Senate, where Paxton’s wife, Angela, is a member.The move to impeach Paxton sets up what could be a remarkably sudden downfall for one of the Republican party’s most prominent legal combatants, who in 2020 asked the US supreme court to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.Paxton has been under FBI investigation for years over accusations that he used his office to help a donor. He was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, but has yet to stand trial.When the five-member committee’s investigation came to light on Tuesday, Paxton suggested it was a political attack by Phelan, calling for his resignation. Phelan’s office brushed this off as an attempt to “save face”. More

Democratic and Republican negotiators struggled on Friday to reach a deal to raise the US government $31.4tn debt ceiling, as a key Republican cited disagreements over work requirements for some benefit programs for low-income Americans.On Friday, the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said the US would run out of money to pay its bills by 5 June, a slight extension of her earlier 1 June prediction.Talks had been reported to be close to conclusion, as lawmakers sought to avoid a disastrous and unprecedented default. Wall Street and European shares rose as the White House and congressional Republicans worked on the final touches of a package to present to Congress.Negotiators appeared to be nearing a deal to lift the limit for two years and cap spending, with agreement on funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the military, Reuters quoted a US official as saying. But a White House official told the same outlet talks could easily slip into the weekend.Lawmakers were placed on call after leaving Washington for the Memorial Day holiday.“We have made progress,” the lead Republican negotiator, Garret Graves, told reporters. “I said two days ago, we had some progress that was made on some key issues, but I want to be clear, we continue to have major issues that we have not bridged the gap on, chief among them work requirements.”The Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, told reporters at the Capitol: “We know it’s crunch time. We’re not just trying to get an agreement, we’re trying to get something that’s worthy of the American people, that changes the trajectory.”Democrats indicated Joe Biden was willing to consider spending cuts, including to planned extra funding for the IRS, a target of rightwing attacks, the Washington Post reported. Citing an anonymous official, Reuters said the deal would raise the ceiling for two years “while capping spending on everything but military and veterans”.On Thursday night, the North Carolina congressman Patrick McHenry, a Republican negotiator, said: “I think there’s a sense of understanding from both teams that we have serious issues still to work out and come to terms with, and that’s going to take some time. That’s all there is to it.”Any deal would have to pass the House and Senate, which typically takes days to complete.Yellen has warned for months that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be a “catastrophe”. In a letter to Congress released on Friday, she said the federal government was due to make more than $130bn in payments in the first few days of June, including payments to veterans and social Security and Medicare recipients, and leaving the treasury with “an extremely low level of resources”.Raising the debt ceiling is usually a formality, if subject to political grandstanding. Republicans raised the ceiling without preconditions three times under Donald Trump, while adding to the debt with tax cuts and spending rises.But McCarthy has only a five-seat majority and is beholden to the far right of his party, which is demanding stringent cuts.On Thursday the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters: “We’re fighting against Republicans’ extreme, devastating proposal that would slash … law enforcement, education, food assistance, all of these things are critical to American families who are just trying to make ends meet.”Most analysts say a default would cast the global economy into market chaos and probable recession. This week, the US treasury cash balance dropped to $49.5bn, prompting Bloomberg TV to report: “There are 24 individuals on the Bloomberg Billionaires list who have more money than the treasury does right now.”Reuters spoke to David Beers, a former head of sovereign ratings for Standard & Poor’s, which in 2011 reacted to a similar Republican-fueled debt standoff by downgrading its US credit rating, a move that stoked market instability.“We thought that the political polarisation in the country was likely to endure, and secondly, we were also concerned about the rising trajectory of debt,” Beers said. “On both of our counts, our expectations, if anything … have been exceeded. I have no doubt in my mind that was the right call.”Now, some on the Republican right, including Trump, the former president and current presidential frontrunner, say the party should let the US default if Biden refuses to cave.The deputy treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, told CNN the government did not have the capability to “triage” payments if the debt ceiling is not raised. Adeyamo also said invoking the 14th amendment – which says public debt “shall not be questioned” – would not solve the problem.Adeyemo said: “I don’t have any confidence that we have the ability to be able to do a type of prioritisation that will mean that all seniors, all veterans, all Americans get paid.”Some House Democrats are upset at being kept out of negotiations, and at how Biden has fielded advisers rather than consistently getting involved himself. Democrats have also bemoaned how Republicans seem to be winning the messaging war, public polling showing support for spending cuts – and a ceiling raise.Rosa DeLauro, from Connecticut, told Politico: “The scale of the cuts [demanded by Republicans] is staggering, which really the public knows very little about. The president should be out there.”Biden was due to meet winning basketball teams at the White House on Friday, then travel to the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland.Steven Horsford of Nevada, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said: “They need to use the power of the presidency … I need the American people to know that Democrats are here fighting, working, prepared to reach an agreement to avoid a default and only the White House, the president, can explain that in this moment.”Biden has not been silent. On Thursday, at the White House, he said Republicans wanted “huge cuts” that would hurt ordinary Americans.“It’s time for Congress to act, now,” he said, adding: “Under my administration, we’ve already cut the deficit by $1.7tn in our first three years. But Speaker McCarthy and I have a very different view of who should bear the burden of additional efforts to get our fiscal house in order.“I don’t believe the whole burden should fall on the backs of middle-class and working-class Americans. My House Republican friends disagree.”
Reuters contributed reporting More