US Politics

Wearing dark suit and sunglasses reminiscent of a character in The Matrix, Brian Fallon pointed a finger at the gleaming US Capitol building to his left, then to the marble edifice of the supreme court to his right.“If you look at any point in the last 40 years, Congress’s public approval always hovers around 10%,” said Fallon, a former justice department official who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “But the [supreme] court’s is now in the 30s and that’s a historical anomaly because there’s always at least been the benefit of the doubt conferred upon the court.”There is no better symbol of the crisis of trust in American institutions than its highest court, pummeled by partisan appointments, divisive rulings and ethical scandals. In a University of Chicago survey last year just 18% of Americans said they had a great deal of confidence in the supreme court – the lowest in half a century.Congressional Democrats and allies such as Fallon, now head of the pressure group Demand Justice, believe that they have a solution: expand the court by adding four seats to counter a rightward tilt during the Donald Trump administration that, they say, put it out of step with mainstream public opinion.This week a group including Senators Ed Markey, Tina Smith and Elizabeth Warren, and representatives Jerrold Nadler, Hank Johnson, Cori Bush and Adam Schiff announced the reintroduction of legislation that would create a 13-justice bench.At a press conference in front of the supreme court steps, surrounded by activists holding “Expand the court” signs as tourists and school groups wandered by, they pointed out that, while Democrats gained more votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections and represent 40 million more people in the Senate, Republicans have appointed 15 of the last 19 justices.These two “stolen” seats, the group argues, after Republicans blocked the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 only to ram through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett 10 days before the 2020 election, even as millions of votes were being cast for Joe Biden.Now, Markey said, it is time to “fix this broken and illegitimate court” with a forceful response. He said: “When a bully steals your lunch money in the schoolyard, you have to do something about it, or else the bully will come back over and over again,” he said. “So we’re in this fight, and we’re going to reclaim these seats. We’re not going to allow the bully to win.”The Massachusetts senator also called for the resignation of Justice Clarence Thomas over his failure disclose gifts provided by the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow and his wife Ginni’s more than $680,000 in unreported income from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank. “We’ve got to remind him that we have a system of constitutional checks and balances, not cheques or balances.”The speakers argued that, given recent decisions on abortion rights, voting rights, gun control measures and environmental regulations, the supreme court is beholden to rightwing special interests and facing a crisis of legitimacy.Schiff, a congressman from California, said: “This is not a conservative court, not in a legal sense. A conservative court would have some respect for precedent. This is instead a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda and the only question, Mitch McConnell having packed the court, is will we do anything about it or will we subject an entire generation of Americans to the loss of their rights?“Dirtier air and dirtier water and dirtier elections? Is that the fate we would have for the next generation? My kids are both in their early 20 and I am not satisfied that they should have to live under a reactionary supreme court for their entire adult lives and I don’t want anyone else’s kids to have to suffer that fate.”The legislative effort was first launched two years ago but this time it is backed by Planned Parenthood and Naral Pro-Choice America, spurred by the court’s decision last year to overturn the constitutional right to abortion after nearly 50 years.Jacqueline Ayers, senior vice-president of policy, campaigns and advocacy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, noted that 19 states have since moved to ban the procedure. “The moment is calling for us to realise that it’s necessary that we have fairness, that we have balance in our supreme court,” she said. “The bottom line is the courts are being used as a weapon to take away our rights.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCongress has added and removed seats on the supreme seven times throughout its history – though the most recent example goes all the way back to the presidency of Ulysses S Grant in 1869. Supporters also contend that 13 is not an arbitrary number but based on sound logic: it would mean one justice per circuit court of appeals, consistent with how the number of justices was originally determined.But they face an uphill battle to persuade Biden and other senior Democrats to put the issue front and centre of next year’s election campaign. In 2021 a report by the president’s supreme court reform commission suggested that “court packing” would be a cure that is worse than the disease, citing autocrats using it to shore up power in Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary and Poland.Biden, who hangs a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office, may also be wary of what happened when the 32nd president, up against a supreme court that ruled parts of his New Deal unconstitutional, floated a plan in 1937 that could have expanded the bench to 15 seats. It was unpopular with the public and failed to clear the Senate.Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “I don’t think the Biden White House are going to walk down that road during a presidential election. You don’t need to know a lot of American history to remember what happened the last time a president tried to do this – that was a president at the very peak of his popularity and no one can say that President Biden is at the very peak of his.”Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, added: “The general Democratic narrative is that Republicans are trying to change the rules to their advantage and a White House-led effort to expand or, as the Republicans would say, instantly pack the supreme court would blow up that narrative and create a new centre of attention with the Democrats on the defensive.”Conservatives would indeed cry foul at any such proposal and accuse Democrats of hypocrisy. Curt Levey, president of the advocacy group Committee for Justice, said: “If you could just add seats every time one party controls both Congress and the presidency then the supreme court would reflect whatever party was in power at the time and it would be a completely politicised supreme court. It would be very dangerous.”He added: “It strikes me that the Democrats are sore losers here. You had a liberal activist supreme court arguably from 1937 to as late as 2015 and during that entire 80-year period Republicans did not call for packing the court and they did not question the court’s legitimacy. They complained about the court’s decisions but they really never tried to undermine the court.“It’s only been three years since Barrett was appointed and there was a real conservative majority in the court and the Democrats just can’t stand it. They have used the court to implement their agenda for so many decades that the idea that they’ve lost that is just driving them crazy.”Democrats contend, however, that in recent years Republican dominated state legislatures have been content to expand the number of seats on their states’ respective supreme courts.The national effort has a new sense of momentum with the backing of dozens of civil liberties, education, climate and labour organisations, while last year’s midterm elections showed the political potency of abortion rights. Fallon described the presence of Planned Parenthood and Naral this week as “a gamechanger”.Acknowledging that Biden will be “one of the last dominoes to fall”, Fallon predicted that supreme court expansion could be on the agenda for Democrats in next year’s congressional elections, for example in Senate primary races in California and Maryland and in House races in New York and Los Angeles.He said in an interview: “If you want to be a Democratic candidate speaking to that outrage, if you want to mobilise those voters upset about rulings that come out of the court on reproductive rights, now you need to have this as part of your arsenal and what you’re going to promise in terms of what you’ll support when you get to Washington.“It might not be on the timeline of Joe Biden in 2024 but certainly in 2028, when there’s another open contested presidential primary, I would expect by then that every candidate has to be for it.”
This article was amended on 21 May 2023 to replace an incorrect photograph of Ed Markey. More

The episode is called “America Decides”. But fans of HBO’s widely watched satire, Succession, will not have been shocked to see scions of the eminently dislikable Roy dynasty showing little respect for who Americans elect as president when it collides with the family’s financial and political interests.It’s also no secret that Succession’s story of a domineering father and the cutthroat rivalries of his offspring draws heavily on Rupert Murdoch’s family, his media empire and its ugliest creation, Fox News.In Succession, the Fox News stand-in, ATN, declares the probable loser – the Republican neo-fascist Jeryd Mencken – as the winner of a presidential election in an attempt to overturn the vote. Parts of the storyline mirror the turmoil of several American elections, from what many regard as George W Bush’s daylight robbery of the Florida vote in 2000 to Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat two decades later. But Succession veers from history at a crucial juncture.Clearly, the series writers drew inspiration from Fox News’s nightly ventures into what an ATN executive calls its “unique perspective” on the news, not least the recently departed Tucker Carlson’s campaign to paint the 2020 election as rigged against Trump.But what if Fox News starts taking inspiration from Succession? Could the news channel that cared so little for the truth it was forced to pay $787.5m over false accusations of rigged voting machines go all the way and declare Trump the winner of next year’s election – even if he loses – just to keep its viewers happy? And, if it did, what would be the consequences?Succession has yet to reveal whether ATN and Mencken pull off their coup. But Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is sceptical that reality would prove so straightforward.“I can believe that Fox would cheat. I can believe that Fox would try to miscall an election or insist that these four, five, six states are just too close to call, and that means the election is up in the air when others are saying it’s over. I can see all kinds of things like that. I just don’t think it would produce a crisis as serious as [Succession] is trying to suggest, because we’re on to Fox. We know what they’re up to,” he said.“And while there’s a tiny chance that some weird scenario could develop because we’ve had weird scenarios develop before, it’s difficult to create a crisis of legitimacy unless there are several other factors besides Fox.”In Succession, we see Mencken facing, but not accepting, defeat.“If I lose, I want it correctly characterised as a huge victory,” he tells Roman Roy, the ruthless, snarky chief executive of ATN’s parent company. “I want to be the president.”The tone of ATN’s coverage is already set. In an echo of revelations about Fox News, the character overseeing election night on ATN, Tom Wambsgans, is worried about losing viewers to other rightwing broadcasters. He pushes to report anything that will call into question the legitimacy of votes for Mencken’s Democratic opponent, Daniel Jimenez.“Did you see the viral thing about the woman who voted, like, 40 times for Jimenez under her dead mom’s name?” Wambsgans asks the station’s news manager.The manager says the woman making the claim is “not a well person”.“You’re not a doctor,” Wambsgans responds. “Until you qualify, why don’t you get her on the air?”Shortly afterwards, a report comes in of a fire at a vote-counting centre in a heavily Democratic part of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 100,000 destroyed ballots look almost certain to decide the election.Roman Roy characterises the blaze as an “antifa firebombing”, even though it advantages Mencken. On air, ATN’s version of Tucker Carlson pushes that line.“Maybe some of the crazies heard they were underperforming, and decided to stop the counting and destroy the evidence,” he says.Roman Roy seizes the chance to declare Wisconsin for Mencken in a move that swings the entire election in his favour.“We’re not waiting for burned votes, so call it,” Roy demands of ATN’s editors.Mencken gives a victory speech in which he declares his win has been called “by an authority of known integrity” and that, in effect, there is no need to wait for the official results.There are reasons to doubt that such a move would be successful in reality. As cumbersome and compromised as the US’s electoral machinery may be at times, it can also prove resilient.Trump’s repeated efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, governor and other officials to “find” the extra votes to overturn Biden’s victory in 2020 met with a wall of refusal, despite Fox News’s backing. The courts wouldn’t play ball, either. The system held, and the former president may well be on his way to prison for his efforts, along with some of his cronies.In fact, some key events in 2020 played out in a mirror image of the Succession scenario in which ATN calls Wisconsin for Mencken.Fox News’s data team actually played it straight in 2020 and infuriated Trump by going out on a limb and calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night before other news organisations. It turned out to be the right call, even if it was based on unreliable exit polls, and the outcome proved to be a lot closer than they suggested.But Succession did capture one consequence of the Fox News call.Once Fox gave Arizona to Biden, the numbers meant the network could not call another state for him without also declaring that he had therefore won the presidency and, more importantly to Fox News viewers, that Trump had lost. When Fox News’s Washington team was ready to call Nevada for Biden, it was blocked by some presenters and the network held off on a result until every other network had declared more than 14 hours later.In Succession, Roman Roy understands that with Wisconsin as a win for Mencken, he can use the result from one of two remaining states in play to declare total victory for the Republican even if the votes aren’t really there.That scenario requires that the election come down to a single state, a rare occurrence. Even if Fox News had called Arizona for Trump in 2020, he would still have had to take two or three of the other closely run states to win the electoral college.But Craig Harrington, research director at Media Matters for America, which tracks misinformation in the conservative media, said the election did come down to a single state two decades ago in Florida and Fox News was instrumental in determining the outcome.“Succession was uncomfortable to watch because we have already lived an entire lifetime in a world where Fox News’s decision to pre-emptively call an election on behalf of their political ally arguably changed the course of history. So “Could this happen again?” is the question rather than “Could this happen at all?” he said.Harrington sees the fictional burning of the ballots in Wisconsin as modeled on the wiping out of thousands of votes in Florida in 2000 which delivered the state and the presidency to George W Bush.On the night, the TV networks, including Fox, initially called Florida for Al Gore. But then Bush’s team began calling. As it happened, the head of Fox News election night decision desk was George W Bush’s cousin, John Ellis.Before long, George W and his brother, Jeb, who was Florida’s governor, were on the phone to Ellis telling him that the election was much tighter than the polls said and urging him to rescind the declaration for Gore. Ellis obliged. Then Fox News called the state for Bush. The other networks rapidly followed. Gore called Bush to concede.Fox News had got it wrong. The vote was still too close to call and the networks reversed themselves a couple of hours later. Gore withdrew his concession. But by then a large number of Americans thought Bush had won the presidency, and it had consequences.Hundreds of Republican party staffers and lawyers led what became known as the Brooks Brothers riot, named after shop selling suits, that shut down a recount of votes and froze Bush’s claim to victory in place until the US supreme court handed him the keys to the White House.“Because of Fox News’s decision to make the call when they did not have the data to back it up, the whole nation was informed that George W Bush had won the presidency,” said Harrington. “He started to become the president in waiting. The government began to transition. It set a tone in public that changed the course of history.”Sabato regards 2000 as a “terrible breakdown in the system” but thinks a repeat remains unlikely.Harrington agrees and said that without other factors at play, Fox News could only get so far in trying to push any particular candidate into the White House.“In order to actually rig an outcome, you have to have processes in place or individuals in place to interdict operations and to slow things down intentionally,” he said.In the Succession story, Harrington said it’s quite likely that ATN’s guns would have been spiked in real life by Milwaukee election officials finding a way to fix the issue of the burned ballots. But he added that might be different if the Trump camp had succeeded in its attempt to place supporters in strategic roles.“We saw this effort in 2022 to get election deniers elected to key roles in local government, state government, county governments all around the country during the midterm elections. We saw election deniers run and overwhelmingly they lost. And so we kind of dodged this attempt to infiltrate the election system,” said Harrington.Still, as Fox News attempts to paint the 2020 election as stolen from Trump showed, its ability to stir up trouble should not be underestimated. The network’s persistent pushing of vote fraud claims played an important part in rallying support for Trump after the election, and in fuelling the myths and anger that drove the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol.Sabato said that Fox News may not decide the winner but it can still stir up “small numbers who can cause great tumult in free societies”.“Fox could easily be the match that started a prairie fire, at least in deeply red states or in places where white nationalists or supremacists are prominent,” he said.“I do believe that the democratic process would win out but there are other points in American history where it’s gotten very messy. That’s what I’m worried about.” More

Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin Luther King Jr was only published last week but it has already been hailed by the Washington Post as “the most compelling account of King’s life in a generation”. The documentarian Ken Burns described it as “kind of a miracle” and the New York Times declared it “supplants David J Garrow’s [Pulitzer-winning] 1986 biography, Bearing the Cross, as the definitive life of King”.In a remarkable act of generosity, Garrow opened his files to Eig and acted as his consultant. Garrow now agrees with other critics, calling Eig’s book “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” and “the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years”.Eig is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written five other highly regarded books, including bestselling biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali. This week, Eig chatted about how his book on King came about and what he hopes readers will take from it.The Guardian: I read somewhere that the new book came out of your work on Ali.Eig: Yeah, it was completely organic. I was interviewing people who knew both of them and every time they would start talking about King, I would just get more curious. So I felt like I already had their phone numbers. I could call them back and get another meeting and this time talk about King. And I could do that before they got any older.The Guardian: When I wrote The Gay Metropolis I started with the oldest people I could find. Did you do that?Eig: 100%. It was like actuarial tables: factor for age and health and go after those who are the most frail. I hate to be crude about it, but that’s exactly what I did. Basically I was calling everybody all at once.The Guardian: How long did this one take?Eig: This one was six years. That’s full-time work, like 60 hours a week for six years.The Guardian: You had access to thousands of FBI files that weren’t available to previous biographers. How did that come about?Eig: I got somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 new documents. Donald Trump signed an order to release documents that were gathered during congressional hearings on JFK’s assassination. And I think accidentally that also led to the release of all the MLK FBI stuff, because the Church committee [a 1975-76 Senate panel on government intelligence activities] investigated them both.I really think Dave Garrow was the only one who went through every file. I went through a lot of them and Garrow was kind of like the first reader and he would tell me what was important and I, of course, looked through a lot on my own. But I don’t really know that too many other people were out there looking at this stuff.The Guardian: You did more than 200 interviews. Why were there so many people who knew King who were much more forthcoming than they had been before?Eig: Because they were older and because Coretta [Scott King, King’s wife] was gone. They were more comfortable saying things that they wouldn’t have said before. Certainly when it came to talking about Dorothy Cotton [one of King’s mistresses], people were really reluctant to say anything while Coretta was alive.The Guardian: I always tell my young friends writing a great book is all about what you leave out. Do you agree?Eig: (chuckling) Yeah. Even at 600-something pages! I left out a lot. At one point – I’ll be honest – I asked Colin Dickerman [his original editor] if I could do a three-volume work. I wanted to do one from childhood to Montgomery and then from Montgomery to maybe Selma and then Selma to death. Wisely, Colin disabused me of that idea. I’m trying to give the reader not just a good book but a readable book. I told my wife, I want people to cry at the end of this book – and they’re not gonna cry if I’ve put them to sleep!The Guardian: What do you know now that you didn’t know when you wrote your first book, about Lou Gehrig?Eig: It took me a couple of books to figure out that journalists’ archives are really valuable … When you find a good interview a journalist did with one of your subjects, go to his archives and see if the notes are there, see if the tapes are there.I got David Halberstam’s notes from his interview with King and he describes King taking his kids to the swimming pool and his daughter falls and scrapes her knee. And King grabs a piece of fried chicken and rubs it on her knee and says, “You know, chicken is the best thing for a cut.” It’s just a sweet little moment that didn’t make Halberstam’s story. But it was in his notebook.The Guardian: You describe King as one of America’s founding fathers. I’d never seen that before.Eig: Yeah. It was my idea. It was inspired somewhat by reading some of the 1619 Project. They talk about the idea that Black activists were seeking to force the country to live up to the words of the founding fathers. And that’s what kind of triggered it for me. I think you can make an argument that King more than anyone else is a founding father. He’s trying to create the nation as it was meant to be.The Guardian: The great Texas journalist Molly Ivins said something similar: “There’s not a thing wrong with the ideals and mechanisms outlined and the liberties set forth in the constitution of the US. The only problem is the founders left a lot of people out of the constitution. They left out poor people and Black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our constitution to everyone in America.”Eig: Yeah, I, I like that.The Guardian: What would you most like people to feel from reading your book?Eig: I hope people see King as a human being and not this two-dimensional character we’ve made him into since he became a national holiday and monument. [They should know] he had feelings and suffered and struggled and had doubts, because I think that makes his heroism even greater.I certainly want people to appreciate just how radical he was. A lot of people reduce him to this very safe figure who was all about peace, love and harmony. But he was challenging us in ways that made a lot of people uncomfortable, which is partly why the FBI came down on him the way they did.The Guardian: The thing that I think is probably most forgotten about him is that he was as anti-materialism as he was anti-militarism. Would you agree?Eig: That’s right. And it drove Coretta crazy because he would never even buy nice stuff for the house. And of course he left no money behind when he died. So he took it really seriously.
King is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

Recent reports about how migrants displaced unhoused veterans from upstate New York hotels have turned out to be false after circulating widely among rightwing media outlets.In an odd saga involving apparently altered receipts and paid unhoused actors, the chief executive of Yerik Israel Toney Foundation (YIT) – a non-profit organization focused on housing military veterans – has been accused of fabricating stories about unhoused veterans getting kicked out of hotels to make space for migrants.Last week, the conservative tabloid New York Post ran a viral story about nearly two dozen unhoused veterans who were purportedly booted out of hotels in upstate New York because of a surge of migrants in search of asylum in the state.The YIT foundation leader, Sharon Toney-Finch, spoke on the record to the outlet, whose story caught the attention of the local Republican state assembly member Brian Maher.Maher told the New York Post that officials’ priority should be serving Americans over “asylum seekers”.However, an investigation by local news outlets Mid Hudson News and the Times Union found several holes in Toney-Finch’s claims.Mid Hudson News reported that Maher provided a copy of a credit card receipt that purportedly showed a payment of more than $37,000 for rooms at the Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh for the unhoused veterans who were then allegedly displaced.The Times Union also published an image of the receipt, along with a copy of what appears to be Toney-Finch’s credit card. The pictures were allegedly sent to Maher to confirm that YIT had booked and paid for hotel rooms for the unhoused veterans.However, according to a graphics expert who examined the document, the receipt appeared to have been “altered with smudges behind the darker type and [had] different fonts”, Mid Hudson News reports.Mid Hudson News also contacted the hotel manager who said: “I checked the dollar on the net on the credit card … and the screen shows no transactions. The hotel has no record of this transaction.”He added that not only were there no veterans at the hotel, none were kicked out and no other guests were forced out of their rooms. The manager also told Mid Hudson News that although the hotel does have several asylum seekers there, it was not booked to capacity, and rooms were still available.After concerns that the receipt had been edited, Maher asked Toney-Finch to meet him outside a local bank to provide further evidence that her foundation had indeed paid for the veterans’ rooms. Toney-Finch never appeared, however, the Times Union reported.Additionally, several unhoused men proceeded to tell Mid Hudson News and Times Union that they were actually recruited to pose as displaced veterans.Douglas Tery, Eric Brown and William – who asked Times Union not to use his last name – told the outlet that recruiters had come to their shelter in Poughkeepsie saying that they had work for 15 men between 40 and 60 years old, adding that they were offered $100 for two to three hours of work and that no heavy lifting would be required.Several of the unhoused men from the shelter also told Mid Hudson News that they were asked to take a trip to meet with an elected official and discuss homelessness while being promised food, alcohol and money in return.After they were recruited, the men were driven to a diner where they were joined by Toney-Finch, who told them that they could order freely from the menu, Mid Hudson News reports. “We ate like kings,” said one of the men, who wished to remain anonymous.Following their meal, Toney-Finch gathered the men in a parking lot and asked them to act as if they were veterans who had been displaced, one of the men told Mid Hudson News.The man also said that he and the others were instructed to say: “I am too traumatized to talk about it,” if asked to elaborate.After local reports contesting Toney-Finch’s original claims emerged, Maher told Times Union that he was “devastated and disheartened” following a conversation with Toney-Finch which revealed the story to be a hoax.“She alluded to the fact that, ‘Maybe it’s not exactly how I said it was,’” Maher recounted to Times Union, adding: “This is something I believe hurt a lot of people.”Speaking to the Associated Press, Toney-Finch refused to say that her claims were fabricated and instead said: “We should have verified better.”The Associated Press reported that Toney-Finch abruptly ended the phone call upon further questioning.On Friday, a spokesperson from state attorney general Leticia James’s office told Politico that the office is aware of the situation and is “looking into it”.The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, has condemned the apparent ruse, telling reporters that people seeking asylum “were sent there with a legal contract between the city of New York and a hotel owner”.The governor added: “They are allowed to contract that way and if people want to fabricate stories to undermine the whole process, I think it’s reprehensible.”Meanwhile, after aggressively covering Toney-Finch’s claims as if the channel believed her, Fox News on Saturday issued a rare, on-air correction. Network host Laura Ingraham said: “Turns out the group behind the claim made it up. We have no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing, but we’ll bring you any updates should they come.” More

Watching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx’s quip about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Except this time it’s the other way round. Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry.Why tragedy? Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: “It’s when you can see the disaster coming but you can’t do anything to stop it.” The trigger moment was when Altman declared: “We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” Warming to the theme, he said that the US government “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities”. He believed that companies like his can “partner with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes that develop and update safety measures and examining opportunities for global coordination.”To some observers, Altman’s testimony looked like big news: wow, a tech boss actually saying that his industry needs regulation! Less charitable observers (like this columnist) see two alternative interpretations. One is that it’s an attempt to consolidate OpenAI’s lead over the rest of the industry in large language models (LLMs), because history suggests that regulation often enhances dominance. (Remember AT&T.) The other is that Altman’s proposal is an admission that the industry is already running out of control, and that he sees bad things ahead. So his proposal is either a cunning strategic move or a plea for help. Or both.As a general rule, whenever a CEO calls for regulation, you know something’s up. Meta, for example, has been running ads for ages in some newsletters saying that new laws are needed in cyberspace. Some of the cannier crypto crowd have also been baying for regulation. Mostly, these calls are pitches for corporations – through their lobbyists – to play a key role in drafting the requisite legislation. Companies’ involvement is deemed essential because – according to the narrative – government is clueless. As Eric Schmidt – the nearest thing tech has to Machiavelli – put it last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, the AI industry needs to come up with regulations before the government tries to step in “because there’s no way a non-industry person can understand what is possible. It’s just too new, too hard, there’s not the expertise. There’s no one in the government who can get it right. But the industry can roughly get it right and then the government can put a regulatory structure around it.”Don’t you just love that idea of the tech boys roughly “getting it right”? Similar claims are made by foxes when pitching for henhouse-design contracts. The industry’s next strategic ploy will be to plead that the current worries about AI are all based on hypothetical scenarios about the future. The most polite term for this is baloney. ChatGPT and its bedfellows are – among many other things – social media on steroids. And we already know how these platforms undermine democratic institutions and possibly influence elections. The probability that important elections in 2024 will not be affected by this kind of AI is precisely zero.Besides, as Scott Galloway has pointed out in a withering critique, it’s also a racing certainty that chatbot technology will exacerbate the epidemic of loneliness that is afflicting young people across the world. “Tinder’s former CEO is raising venture capital for an AI-powered relationship coach called Amorai that will offer advice to young adults struggling with loneliness. She won’t be alone. Call Annie is an ‘AI friend’ you can phone or FaceTime to ask anything you want. A similar product, Replika, has millions of users.” And of course we’ve all seen those movies – such as Her and Ex Machina – that vividly illustrate how AIs insert themselves between people and relationships with other humans.In his opening words to the Senate judiciary subcommittee’s hearing, the chairman, Senator Blumenthal, said this: “Congress has a choice now. We had the same choice when we faced social media. We failed to seize that moment. The result is: predators on the internet; toxic content; exploiting children, creating dangers for them… Congress failed to meet the moment on social media. Now we have the obligation to do it on AI before the threats and the risks become real.”Amen to that. The only thing wrong with the senator’s stirring introduction is the word “before”. The threats and the risks are already here. And we are about to find out if Marx’s view of history was the one to go for.What I’ve been readingCapitalist punishmentWill AI Become the New McKinsey? is a perceptive essay in the New Yorker by Ted Chiang.Founders keepersHenry Farrell has written a fabulous post called The Cult of the Founders on the Crooked Timber blog.Superstore meThe Dead Silence of Goods is a lovely essay in the Paris Review by Adrienne Raphel about Annie Ernaux’s musings on the “superstore” phenomenon. More

The mother of an eight-year-old girl who died in US border patrol custody said on Friday that agents repeatedly ignored pleas to hospitalize her medically fragile daughter as she felt pain in her bones, struggled to breathe and was unable to walk.Agents said her daughter’s diagnosis of influenza did not require hospital care, Mabel Alvarez Benedicks said in an emotional phone interview. They knew the girl had a history of heart problems and sickle cell anemia.“They killed my daughter, because she was nearly a day and a half without being able to breathe,” Alvarez Benedicks said. “She cried and begged for her life and they ignored her. They didn’t do anything for her.”The girl died on Wednesday on what her mother said was the family’s ninth day in border patrol custody. People are to be held no more than 72 hours under agency policy, a rule that is violated during unusually busy times.The account is almost certain to raise questions about whether the border patrol properly handled the situation, the second death of a child in federal officials’ custody in two weeks after a rush of unlawful border crossings severely strained holding facilities.Roderick Kise, a spokesperson for the border patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, said he could not comment beyond an initial statement because the death remained under investigation. In that statement, Kise’s agency said the girl experienced “a medical emergency” at a station in Harlingen, Texas, and died later that day at a hospital.Alvarez Benedicks, 35, said she, her husband and three children, aged 14, 12 and eight, crossed the border to Brownsville, Texas, on 9 May. After a doctor diagnosed the eight-year-old, Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez, with influenza, the family was sent to the Harlingen station on 14 May. It was unclear why the family was held so long.Anadith woke up her first day in the Harlingen station with a fever and had a headache, according to her mother, who said the station was dusty and smelled of urine.When she reported her daughter’s bone pain to an agent, she said he responded: “Oh, your daughter is growing up. That’s why her bones hurt. Give her water.”“I just looked at him,” Alvarez Benedicks said. “How would he know what to do if he’s not a doctor?”She said a doctor told her the pain was flu-related. She asked for an ambulance to take her daughter to the hospital for breathing difficulties but was denied.“I felt like they didn’t believe me,” she said.Anadith received saline fluids, a shower and fever medication to reduce her temperature, but her breathing problems persisted, her mother said, adding that a sore throat prevented her from eating and she stopped walking.At one point, a doctor asked the parents to return if Anadith fainted, Alvarez Benedicks said. Their request for an ambulance was denied again when her blood pressure was checked on Wednesday.An ambulance was called later that day after Anadith went limp and unconscious and blood came out of her mouth, her mother said. She insists her daughter had no vital signs in the border patrol station before leaving for the hospital.The family is staying at a McAllen, Texas, migrant shelter and seeking money to bring their daughter’s remains to New York City, their final destination in the US.Anadith, whose parents are Honduran, was born in Panama with congenital heart disease. She received surgery three years ago that her mother characterized as successful. It inspired Anadith to want to become a doctor.Her death came a week after a 17-year-old Honduran boy, Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, died in US health and human services department custody. Maradiaga traveled alone.A rush to the border before Covid-19 asylum limits known as Title 42 expired brought extraordinary pressure. The border patrol took an average of 10,100 people into custody a day over four days last week, compared to a daily average of 5,200 in March.The border patrol had 28,717 people in custody on 10 May, one day before pandemic asylum restrictions expired, which was double from two weeks earlier, according to a court filing. By Sunday, the custody count dropped 23% to 22,259, still historically high.Custody capacity is about 17,000, according to a government document last year, and the administration has been adding temporary giant tents like one in San Diego that opened in January with room for about 500 people.On Sunday, the average time in custody was 77 hours. More

A new Texas bill could soon establish a taskforce using civilians that would have the authority to “arrest, apprehend or detain persons crossing the Texas-Mexico border unlawfully”, raising concerns around state-sponsored vigilantism.House Bill 20, authored by Republican state representative Matt Schaefer, seeks to create a new “border protection unit” that would deter migrants from unlawfully entering Texas using non-deadly force. It could include civilians with prior military experience among its members – such as national guards or former border patrol agents – who would be granted some immunity from prosecution for actions they carried out as members of the force.The HB20 bill itself was killed last week in the Texas legislature but then quickly resurrected as HB7 – a slightly different amendment to existing immigration legislation. The proposed unit was renamed the “Texas border force” and put under the command of the Texas ranger division.With a Republican majority in both the state house and senate, the fresh bill seems likely to pass.Bernardo Cruz, an attorney for the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told the Guardian: “It’s really an unlawful action or exercise by the state government. We are really afraid it’s going to lead to more racial profiling of current migrants, and also that it affects everyone who lives across the border and the states.”Although immigration law and enforcement on the US border is under federal jurisdiction, border states like Texas argue they have the right to protect themselves if the federal government fails to do so, as per the “invasion” clause of the US constitution.Such a drastic move by a state to enforce federal immigration law is likely to end up in court.Schaefer, one of the Texas legislature’s most conservative members, said in a statement: “Enough is enough. If [Joe] Biden won’t defend this country, we will.”The news of the bill comes shortly after the expiration of Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that gave US officials authority to turn away migrants who came to the US-Mexico border claiming asylum in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19.Immigration and civil rights activists have condemned the legislation and said its potential passage was “disheartening”. These critics of the bill, such as the non-profit Human Rights Watch, say it will embolden state-sponsored vigilantism.Testifying in front of the Texas house state affairs committee in April, Bob Libal of Human Rights Watch said the border protection unit would lead to the “codification and expansion of a border policing, court and jailing system that has to date resulted in injuries, deaths, racial discrimination, abusive detention conditions, and a chilling effect on freedoms of association and expression.”The unit would be overseen by the Texas public safety department and would controversially give its officers broad authority to make arrests, build border barriers and search vehicles they deem suspicious.Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, told the Dallas Morning News that she was “appalled by this dangerous and unconstitutional proposal designed to violate federal law at the expense of the border community I call home”.She added: “Not only does this bill mobilize a new military force under the governor, it also allows the head of the force to deputize almost anyone to enforce federal immigration law, including vigilante groups that have targeted Texas border communities.”The ACLU’s Cruz said the unit would be an extension of Operation Lone Star, another state effort to secure the US border with Mexico, launched by the rightwing Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in March 2021.Operation Lone Star is a joint operation between the public safety department and the Texas national guard. It was established during an increase of migrants at the state’s border for which Abbott issued a disaster declaration.“Texas does not have the authority to enforce immigration law,” Cruz said. “There’s clear both federal law and supreme court precedent that establishes that the appropriate entity to enforce immigration laws in this country are federal law enforcement agencies.”Like Operation Lone Star, Cruz said the new border protection unit would lead to racial profiling.In a federal complaint filed in July last year, the Texas ACLU, along with the Texas Civil Rights Project, alleged state troopers excessively pull over Latinos as part of Operation Lone Star. The complaint also said at least 30 people were killed in state police car chases connected to Texas’s expansive border security operation.“We really afraid it’s going to lead to more racial profiling of migrants and also that it affects everyone who lives across the border and the states. There’s nothing in the language it just narrows it to specific area of Texas. So this really is an extremely broad attempt by the state of Texas, to really just militarize communities.“And that, of course, impacts everyone’s day-to-day life in a negative way.” More

From The Big Lebowski to Alice on The Brady Bunch, depictions of bowling abound in American pop culture. The sport’s real-life adherents included Richard Nixon, who installed bowling lanes in the White House and was known to play between seven to 12 games late at night. Characteristically, he played alone. This is one of many athletic accounts from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a new book, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency, by the longtime political journalist Chris Cillizza.Bowling solo personified “Nixon the loner”, Cillizza says. “He didn’t play tennis or golf with friends. He did enjoy bowling by himself. It’s a powerful image, a telling image.”Tricky Dick’s love of bowling also helped with a crucial voting bloc: “Nixon viewed it as the sport of the Silent Majority – white, blue-collar men who sort of made up his base. He was very aware of this.”A Washington journalist for four decades, most recently for CNN, Cillizza pitched the book as about “the sports presidents play, love, spectate, and what it tells us about who they are and how they govern. That was the germ of the idea, the seed going in.”Power Players surveys 13 presidents of the modern era, from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Some of its narratives are well-known – think Ike’s extensive golf-playing, John F Kennedy’s touch football games or Barack Obama’s pickup basketball on the campaign trail. The book explores less-remembered sides of these stories, including a scary moment on the links for Eisenhower.While golfing in Colorado in 1955, he fielded multiple stressful phone calls from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After eating a hamburger with onions and getting yet another call from Dulles, Ike felt too angry to keep playing. Chest pains followed that night. The White House initially claimed indigestion but an electrocardiogram found something more serious – a heart attack. At the time, there was no 25th amendment specifying the chain of command if a president became incapacitated. Fortunately, Ike never lost consciousness during the episode.Golf was a popular sport for many presidents, as reflected in a previous book about White House athletics, First Off the Tee by Don Van Natta Jr, whom Cillizza interviewed. Yet the list of presidential pastimes is long and diverse, from Nixon’s bowling to Jimmy Carter’s fly fishing to George HW Bush’s horseshoes. Yes, horseshoes. In addition to Bush’s well-known prowess on the Yale University baseball team, he was a pretty good horseshoes player who established his own league in the White House, with a commissioner and tournaments. The White House permanent staff fielded teams; Queen Elizabeth II even gifted Bush a quartet of silver horseshoes.In the greatest-presidential-athlete discussion, Cillizza lands in Gerald Ford’s corner.“No debate, he’s the best athlete ever, I think, with [George HW] Bush a distant second, among modern presidents.”Ford sometimes lived up to the bumbling stereotypes made famous by Chevy Chase and Bob Hope – including when he accidentally hit people with golf balls. Yet he was an All-American center on the national-champion University of Michigan football team and received contract offers from two NFL squads, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.In addition to the sports presidents play, Cillizza’s book examines how presidents use sports to connect to the public.Calling sports “a common language that lots and lots and lots of Americans speak”, Cillizza says: “I think politicians are forever trying to identify with the average person … I think sports is a way into that world for a lot of presidents.”There’s the practice of inviting championship teams to the White House, which Cillizza traces to Ronald Reagan, although instances date back decades. While not much of a sports fan, Reagan came from a sports radio background, played the legendary Gipper in the film Knute Rockne, All American and understood the importance of proximity to winners, Cillizza says.There’s also the tradition of presidential first pitches at baseball games, arguably the most iconic thrown by George W Bush at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Cillizza notes Dubya’s baseball pedigree as president of the Texas Rangers, and that he reportedly contemplated becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball.Of the presidents surveyed, Cillizza says George HW Bush had the most sportsmanship, thanks to early lessons about fair play from his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, a strong tennis player herself. The least sportsmanlike, according to the author? Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump. Cillizza cites an account of Trump’s time on the Fordham University squash team. After a loss to the Naval Academy, he drove to a department store and bought golf equipment. He and his teammates vented their frustration by hitting golf balls off a bluff into the Chesapeake Bay, then drove away, sans clubs.“That’s Trump, in a lot of ways,” Cillizza says. “He’s not a good sport who’s going to be genteel.”The author notes similar behavior throughout Trump’s career, including bombastic performances in World Wrestling Entertainment storylines and a whole recent book about his alleged cheating at golf, as well as a recent news item about the former president going to Ireland to visit one of his courses.“He hit a drive, and said Joe Biden could never do this,” Cillizza recalls. “It went 280ft right down the middle of the fairway. He talks about his virility, his health, through the lens of sports.”Not too long ago, two ex-presidents from rival parties teamed up as part of a golf foursome. George HW Bush joined the man who beat him in 1992 – Bill Clinton – en route to an unlikely friendship. Rounding out the foursome were the broadcasting legend Jim Nantz and NFL superstar Tom Brady.“It’s remarkable what sports can do to bring presidents together,” Cillizza says. “This day and age, it’s hard to consider … I don’t think Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be playing golf together anytime soon.”
Power Players is published in the US by Twelve More