US Politics

The soft launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign appears to be stuttering further after a report emerged claiming Florida’s Republican governor was calling members of the state’s congressional delegation to persuade them to stop endorsing Donald Trump.DeSantis has yet to formally declare his pursuit of his party’s 2024 nomination, but has seen an erosion in recent weeks of his formerly strong support, with Trump pulling further ahead in polling.According to NBC News, DeSantis is irked that he has no endorsements, while the former president has already picked up four from Republican Florida Congress members.Operatives for DeSantis have been calling others to beg them to back off, the network said, with four of six congressmen and women its journalists spoke to confirming they had received an approach.Those who have publicly declared their backing for Trump are Matt Gaetz, Anna Paulina Luna and Cory Mills, all vocal supporters, and, surprisingly according to NBC, Byron Donalds, a DeSantis ally.“There is clearly some angst from the DeSantis camp that so many members of the state’s congressional delegation are throwing their support behind Trump,” a consultant for one of the contacted Congress members told NBC on condition of anonymity.“Gaetz going with Trump is one thing, but Byron’s endorsement of the former president undoubtedly rattled some cages.”According to the report, the effort is being led by Ryan Tyson, a longtime DeSantis acolyte, who has scheduled direct calls between the delegation and the governor. The six who have been asked to delay their endorsements, NBC said, are Aaron Bean, Vern Buchanan, Kat Cammack, Mario Diaz-Balart, Laurel Lee and Greg Steube.DeSantis has become increasingly authoritarian in his second term as Florida governor after winning a landslide re-election in November. Analysts say his clampdowns on immigration, and LBGTQ+ and voting rights, are designed to appeal to Trump’s base of voters. More

Last week, Lauren Book, the top Democrat in the Florida senate – was placed in handcuffs, arrested and charged with trespassing, after refusing to leave an abortion rights demonstration near the state capitol building in Tallahassee.Hours before, Republican lawmakers in the state senate advanced the legislation, which would dramatically restrict the state’s current ban on abortion from 15 weeks of pregnancy to six weeks – before many women even realize they’re pregnant. Critics say the narrow window would amount to a “near-total” ban on abortions in the state.The bill would have far-reaching implications across the south. After the supreme court’s decision to eliminate a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, Florida became a haven for women seeking reproductive care from states where access was prohibited or severely restricted, including Louisiana and Alabama.“It’s a scary time,” Book told the Guardian ahead of the vote. “Women are being put in very, very dangerous situations to get the healthcare they need and deserve.”Republican dominance in the state legislature means the bill’s fate is “all but sealed”, she acknowledged. The Republican-controlled house is expected to give the bill final approval as soon as this week. It will then be sent to Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is widely expected to run for president and who has signaled his support.But Book, who has led the opposition to this bill in the state senate, vowed to keep fighting – as a political leader and, she said, as a mother furious that her twins – a boy and a girl – no longer have the same rights to bodily autonomy.“In the course of just two generations, we’ve seen our rights won and lost,” she said in a floor speech last week. “It is up to us to get them back. No one is going to save us but ourselves.”Book became senate minority leader in 2021, having served in the chamber since 2017. The following year, DeSantis signed into law a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape or incest.A sharp backlash to last summer’s supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade fueled a string of ballot-box successes for abortion rights and powered Democrats to victory in states across the country in the 2022 midterm elections. But not in Florida.In November, DeSantis won re-election by nearly 20 points in a state that was once a presidential battleground, while Republicans claimed a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature.Emboldened, Republican lawmakers have advanced a dizzying array of legislative proposals that have thrilled conservatives, alarmed liberals and offered a policy platform from which the governor could launch a presidential bid.As minority leader, Book believes it is her role to rally the opposition – and help Democrats claw back power in 2024. “We are going to do the work to get the numbers out in ’24,” she said, “because the alternative is not acceptable. It’s dangerous and it is killing women.”In addition to the abortion bill, the state’s Republican lawmakers are pressing forward with legislation that would impose new controls on trans youth, limit drag performances, ease media defamation suits, expand the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law, ban diversity and equity programs at public universities and colleges, place new restrictions on public-sector unions, and allow a divided jury to impose a death sentence. Already this session, DeSantis signed a law expanding Florida’s school voucher system, and another allowing Floridians to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.But while DeSantis’s conservative crusade may excite his base, Book said she expects it will backfire on him.“We’re not doing the things that matter to Floridians. We’re not doing the things that make life here better,” she said, arguing that the legislature should be focused on tackling the rising cost of property insurance. “Instead, we’re attacking small groups of people, we’re taking away women’s rights, all under the banner of freedom and allowing this guy to run for president.”The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.With the abortion bill barrelling toward the governor’s desk, Book said she and her Democratic colleagues are using every legislative tool at their disposal to draw attention to the “dangerous consequences” of the legislation.They offered numerous amendments, including one that would allow women seeking abortions to cite religious exemption. Another put forward by Book would have renamed the so-called “Heartbeat Protection Act” to the “Electrical activity that can be manipulated to sound like a heartbeat through ultrasound protection at the expense of pregnant people’s health and well being act.” All were rejected.When the bill came before the senate health policy committee for debate, Democrats extended the session so medical providers and opponents would have more than the allotted “30 seconds” to testify, Book said. In speeches, she shared the stories of women, including a constituent, who faced life-threatening complications after the loss of desired pregnancies because their states new abortion restrictions prevented doctors from administering miscarriage care.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd last week, senate Democrats engaged in an emotional floor debate ahead of the senate vote on the six-week ban. From the public gallery overlooking the chamber, protesters repeatedly disrupted the proceedings, shouting down lawmakers who spoke supportively of the legislation. Several were removed before the senate president ordered the gallery cleared.The displays of opposition have had little effect.State senator Erin Grall, a Republican sponsor of the bill, said during the debate that “bodily autonomy should not give a person the permission to kill an innocent human being”. Republicans have sought to emphasize that the measure allows for exceptions in cases of rape, incest or human trafficking until 15 weeks of pregnancy – additions DeSantis has called “sensible”.Critics counter that the exceptions are narrow, noting that the proposal will require victims to “provide a copy of a restraining order, police report, medical record, or other court order” before they can receive an abortion.Book, a sexual assault survivor, says the paperwork requirement will keep women from seeking care. “Show your documents to prove that you were raped?” Book said. “You don’t even need to do that now to carry a gun.”The bill’s proponents also tout provisions that would expand funding for anti-abortion pregnancy centers and provide families car seats, cribs and diapers. Book called the initiatives “insulting”.“You’re going to give them car seats or a crib? What about healthcare? What about child care? Those are things that people need,” Book said. “They’re not pro life. They’re pro-birth.”Book sees a backlash brewing in Florida, though it won’t come in time to stop Republicans from passing the ban.According to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, nearly two-thirds of Floridians believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Another poll published last month found that roughly three in four Florida voters, including 61% of Republican respondents, say they oppose a six-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. (Notably, the measure that passed the Florida senate does allow for exceptions, which was not asked as part of the polling question.)Activists on both sides of the abortion debate are, meanwhile, waiting on a decision by the Florida supreme court, which is weighing a challenge to the state’s current 15-week ban. The six-week proposal would only go into effect if the 15-week ban is upheld.Book said she would like to see the matter settled by Florida voters in the form of a ballot initiative, like it was in Michigan and other states. In the meantime, she is urging women in Florida and around the country “not to take matters into your own hands”.Protesters have once again gathered in Tallahassee, as the Republican-controlled house charges ahead with a debate on the measure scheduled for Thursday. Among them will be Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic party, who was arrested alongside Book last week. For Book, the women’s resistance is proof that however bleak it may appear now, the fight for abortion rights in Florida is only just beginning.“​I’m heartened by the women who are now occupying Tallahassee and not going quietly into the night,” she said. “I think that is emblematic that this is not over.” More

No public school teacher or college professor in Florida has been more outspoken in his criticism of Governor Ron DeSantis than Don Falls. In the spring of 2022, the 62-year-old social studies high school teacher became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the governor to block enforcement of the recently approved Stop Woke (Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees) Act.The DeSantis-backed legislation banned the supposed teaching of critical race theory – a scholarly examination of how social conceptions of race influence laws, political movements and history – in the Sunshine state’s public schools and universities. When Falls heard that a Jacksonville law firm was drafting litigation to stop the new law from taking effect, the grandfather of five decided to raise his head above the proverbial parapet.“One thing I’ve taught my students is that there are certain fundamental values associated with a democracy, and if they’re going to work, you’ve got to stand up for them,” recalled Falls, who has taught for 38 years. “I couldn’t have taught that to my students and then, when the ball was in my court, pass it on to somebody else.”In his first year as Florida’s chief executive, DeSantis raised public school teachers’ salaries and paid tribute to the mostly gay, lesbian and transgender victims of one of the country’s most deadly mass shootings in recent times. But as he built his national profile, attracting attention for his controversial views on masks and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, he took a sharp swing to the right and stepped up his courtship of the party’s Trump-loving base.Now, with rumors he is close to launching his presidential bid, DeSantis is highlighting his crusade to “reform” public education in Florida and restrict the rights and freedoms of the state’s transgender population as centerpieces of a nationwide agenda for what he calls “America’s revival”.Last year, DeSantis and his Republican allies went further and rammed house bill 1467 through the state legislature, requiring all reading material used in public schools to be reviewed by a “trained media specialist” to ensure that the material be “free of pornography” and “appropriate for the age level and group”. Critics say it empowers conservative groups to ban books whose contents they disagree with, even if they are age appropriate.Falls continued to resist. Confronted with a choice of either removing the estimated 250 to 300 books in his classroom or submitting them to the vetting process, he and other colleagues at the school opted to conceal their covers by enveloping them in plain brown paper, thereby shielding themselves from possible criminal prosecution or civil liability.He posted a wryly written sign inside his classroom that read: “closed by order of the governor”.Book bans, pronoun bansOn 23 February hundreds of college students walked out of their classrooms at six public universities to protest against DeSantis’s decision to abolish diversity, education and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies that had been mandated in 2020 in all of Florida’s dozen institutions of higher education by other political appointees, including the former governor Rick Scott.Demonstrations were also held in early March to denounce HB 999, legislation that would eliminate college majors and minors in “critical race theory, gender studies or intersectionality”, render a professor’s tenure subject to review at any time, and require colleges to offer general education courses that “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents”. It would also formally outlaw spending on DEI programs, which seek to promote the participation and fair treatment of people from all walks of life.“We’re seeing more and more students who, emboldened by some faculty members, shout people down and shut down viewpoints they don’t agree with,” the chief sponsor of the legislation, state representative Alex Andrade, told the Guardian. “People are forgetting that public universities are a component of a state government’s executive branch, and when we’re trying to encourage and enforce discrimination in the name of diversity and equity, we’re getting it wrong.”The sweeping scope of that legislation, coupled with three other education bills that would, among other things, forbid school staff and students from using “pronouns that do not correspond with a person’s sex”, has left educators in Florida feeling incensed and dumbfounded.“There aren’t actually any majors in critical race theory or intersectionality,” noted Andrew Gothard, an English instructor at Florida Atlantic University and president of United Faculty of Florida, the union that represents more than 25,000 faculty members in the Sunshine state’s dozen public universities and 16 state and community colleges. “The goal is to eliminate all thought that diverges from the governor’s political platform, and it’s absolutely terrifying.“Any time you’re telling people they can only teach history in a way that praises the motherland, you’re straying into Hitler Youth territory.”Multiple requests from the Guardian for an interview with Governor DeSantis went unanswered. But in a recent statement, DeSantis defended HB 999 because it seeks to push back “against the tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination”.DeSantis called a press conference on 8 March to debunk what he termed “the ‘book ban’ hoax” in relation to the Stop Woke Act, asserting that books containing pornographic content and other kinds of violent or age-inappropriate content had been discovered in libraries and classrooms in 23 school districts statewide. These included Maia Kobabe’s widely acclaimed Gender Queer: A Memoir, one of 10 books that received an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020 for having “special appeal for young adults ages 12 through 18”.“Our mantra in Florida has been education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis wrote in his recent memoir, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. He hailed Florida as one of the first states to enact a parents’ bill of rights, which in his telling guarantees mothers and fathers “the right to inspect the materials being used in their kids’ schools”.Yet DeSantis also omits any reference to the state’s grossly underpaid public school teachers, who rank 48th nationwide in average salaries according to the National Education Association.‘Slate of hate’Another target of the 44-year-old governor is the state’s LGBTQ+ community and, in particular, the transgender population. A new bill, house bill 1421, titled “Gender Clinical Interventions”, would prohibit transgender individuals from amending their own birth certificates and eliminate transition-related care such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers for minors.The chief sponsor of the bill, state representative Randy Fine, tweeted in March that the legislation would outlaw the “butchering of children” and free Florida taxpayers from having to subsidize “the sexual mutilation of adults”. In reality gender-confirming surgical procedures are seen as lifesaving, and are mostly offered to teenagers who are at least 15 years of age or older. Even among this group such operations are “exceedingly rare”, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.Not to be outdone, state senator Clay Yarborough introduced senate bill 254 that would allow the state to take temporary custody of children who may be receiving gender-affirming care now or in the future. (Yarborough declined the Guardian’s request for an interview.)The barrage of bills focusing on transgender people is part of a broader onslaught by far-right thinktanks and consultants on democracy, abortion rights and racial progress, according to Nadine Smith, a co-founder and executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ+ community rights organization.“It’s not surprising to see this slate of hate introduced,” said Smith. “This rightwing shift has everything to do with usurping Trump on the right in the forthcoming Republican presidential primary elections. DeSantis is not driven by convictions or a core set of values, he is driven only by ambition and his desperation to become president.”The civil rights advocate remembers a different Ron DeSantis four years ago. Elected governor for the first time in 2018 by a razor-thin margin of about 32,000 votes, the former congressman and co-founder of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus gravitated towards the center-right during his early time in office.DeSantis issued a proclamation on the third anniversary of the 2016 mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub that paid tribute to the 49 people who died but failed to mention the targeting of the LGBTQ+ community as a possible motive of the killer.The governor came under fire for that omission and reissued the proclamation with amended wording. He even met with a survivor of the shooting and other members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community as a sign of solidarity.“The DeSantis we are seeing now doesn’t sound like the DeSantis who ran for governor the first time,” said Smith. “He went from being someone who went to the Pulse nightclub and responded to the criticism to someone who routinely calls LGBTQ+ people groomers and incites violence towards us.”The number of anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations in Florida has soared in recent months. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project documented 17 such episodes during 2022, up sharply from the six that the organization chronicled in 2021 and the five that were recorded in 2020. Some degenerated into riots. Nationwide, Florida ranked third in these incidents, surpassed only by California and Texas.Members of the state’s transgender population say they are feeling the intensifying heat.Morganti (not his real name) moved to the Gulf coast city of Bradenton from Louisiana in 2016. The 35-year-old New College of Florida student still identified as a woman at the time, and struck up a relationship with a local woman. “She and I could hold hands walking through a shopping mall, and when I first came down here it wasn’t a big deal,” said the third-year marine biology major.But the bearded trans man has noticed a palpable change in the political climate during the intervening six years. No violent confrontation has occurred to date, but he has dealt with comments about his voice and body.The hostile takeover of New College by six of DeSantis’s rightwing allies on its board of trustees earlier this year has not helped matters, and Morganti says he will move abroad to obtain his master’s degree once he has finished his undergraduate studies in January 2025.“If Ron DeSantis doesn’t make it to the White House, he will still be our governor – and that means Florida isn’t going to be a safe place to live in,” he said.If the 2022 and 2023 sessions of the Florida legislature are anything to go by, DeSantis is betting that legislation targeting the state’s transgender population and consolidating Tallahassee’s control over the curricula of the state’s public schools and universities will also strike a chord among voters in the Sunshine state and beyond.Whether or not DeSantis does mount a presidential bid in 2024 remains to be seen, as would the eventual success of such a campaign.In the meantime, university professors, schoolteachers and members of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community will continue to feel besieged for the foreseeable future. Some educators predict the departure of many colleagues in the coming months and years.“We have a governor and a legislature who are going rogue to harm the state,” said the union president, Andrew Gothard. “These laws are going to cause a major exodus of faculty and students from Florida’s system of higher education.” More

A few years ago a former student of mine, one for whom I had particular respect, stopped me on the street and handed me a copy of The Road to Serfdom by the British-Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.For reasons I cannot reconstruct, I had already read that book and forgotten it, except for the impression it left of being very much a product of its place and time, the London School of Economics, 1945. Since then I have learned that, fairly or not, it is read as a supporting document for the slippery-slope catastrophism that now casts the American government, insofar as it enacts policies favored by Democrats, as a sinister and quite absolute threat to individual freedom. My student told me that a reading group had formed and I was invited. He had the glow of the convert.This fine youth was starting out on what most would consider an enviable life, free as precious few of his fellow mortals are or have ever been. Yet he was excited by a new insight, that there was a plot afoot to plunge us into serfdom, fascism, Nazism. This alarm has surged, and now we have men in combat gear standing around at public events, absolutely defying anyone to take away their freedom. If they had not hit upon that one most provocative freedom, the right to menace with firearms, probably no one would ever have given a thought to their rights except to assume that they had the normal set of them. And where is the drama in that? They are standing boldly against an insidious foe, or so they and their friends imagine.These “enemies” against whom they are armed are Americans who disagree with them.I am trying to describe a Trumpism that anticipated and continues to enable Trump, that makes a kind of sense of his wild rhetoric and the reaction to it among his loyalists. A historically privileged group – whom it is, sadly, fair to call Republicans – indulge in a fear amounting almost to panic, which has become endemic, stimulated continuously by the presence of those Americans who differ from them, for example about whether the ready availability of guns is related to the criminal use of them.There is nothing new about fantasies of peril or heroism. Boredom might be a factor among the fairly prosperous, especially as they enter middle age. Resentment is a stimulant. But there is something strange, even weird, in the climate we are seeing now that evades explanation in conventional terms.Americans have argued for generations about the deleterious effects, if any, of an active central government. Once the peril was that one morning we would all wake up communists. It was a furious and intractable debate that led to character attacks and so on, but no one mentioned civil war. There is a virulence in our present divisions that hardens and sharpens them radically. It comes with the insistent association by Republicans of Democrats – the plurality or majority of the American people, a huge, unorganized swath of the population – with perversion involving children.It should be possible to dismiss an accusation like this as proof of a diseased imagination in the accuser. But the slur is important in the behaviors that increasingly displace actual politics. Who would compromise with, let alone be persuaded by, people given to this lowest of vices? Who would believe that such people had any commitment to justice or could really act in good faith? The Democratic party as a whole tolerates and enables this abuse, they say. In this imagined context Trump’s sleaziness is shining virtue. No need to be specific when dealing in slurs. No need to prove anything. The Nazis taught us all how to stigmatize entire groups. Surely Hayek mentions this somewhere.Republicans are, of course, another huge swath of the population who identify as partisans on grounds of perceived interest or affinity, just like the Democrats. So it should not be possible to generalize about them as I am about to do. Trump enters the discussion here. Over the coming days we will learn more about the character and strength of his support among his followers. There is the very real possibility that it will be of a size and kind to cause problems, if not the “death and destruction” he foresaw as a consequence of his arraignment.There is more to this than mere loyalty to one jaded billionaire, odd as that is. There is the matter of serfdom. If the word describes anything in contemporary American life, it is surely the self-subordination of respectable people with ordinary lives to a movement that requires belief in bizarre and incendiary ideas, as well as flagrant offenses against decency, for example the heaping of opprobrium on immigrants. Trump joined this choir as he descended his escalator, announcing in effect liberation from old obligations to generosity or fairness.He has enlisted followers who might very well engage in acts that lead to death and destruction, assuming that some deaths will be their own, and the destruction will befall their own country. This makes sense only if the reward is self-submission, the craving for an identity that supersedes the autonomy of democratic citizenship. No need to weigh the merit of the claim that immigrants are rapists. No need to consider the impact of assault weapons on public life. These issues do not invite thought or debate. They occasion demonstrations of loyalty. Yes, children die, and we all pray. I tremble to think what a God’s-eye view of this ritual would be.History proves that solid-seeming populations do succumb to fascism. The word “serfdom” in Hayek’s title suggests that people would be passively subjugated, succumbing to a dirigiste economic order. But his real subject is fascism, whose worst cruelties always depend on the active participation of a significant part of these populations, even though they sacrifice what they might have thought they valued in order to be bound up in the unity the word “fascism” promises. Fascism is not a politics, it is a pathology compounded of nostalgia and resentment.European fascism has had clear markers, three being white supremacy and Christian nationalism, and, of course, charismatic leadership. In using the word “pathology” I put aside the idea of politics as usual. Other patterns are easily discernible within our American strain of this virus.It is classically fascist to influence opinion by the threat of violence. We have actual violence that lacks rational motive, but which is strikingly consistent over all in that it targets – not a metaphor – the tenderest places in our society, elementary schools, churches, outdoor festivals. It targets custom, community, contentment and hope to very great effect, dispossessing us of much of the pleasure of our national life. Weighing one thing against another, presumably, we are to accept this. At the same time the example we offer to the world of constitutional democracy is disgraced.Fascism is an autoimmune disease. Under the banner of patriotism it hates its nation and people and oversteps all civilized limits in its zeal to bring about fundamental change, whatever the damage. Something of the kind is discernible in the talk of secession, national divorce, civil war.So far, the indictment of Donald Trump has passed quietly. He may emerge for his loyalists as martyr/hero, more exalted, even as his speeches become more fuddled and monotonous, even as he keeps tapping them for money. Not much is required of the Glorious Leader once he achieves that status. Trump the opportunist has understood tendencies in American culture that most of us prefer to ignore or deny. If he has taught us one thing, it is that we have to learn to pay a different kind of attention.
Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. She has received several awards including the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2005 and the 2012 National Humanities Medal More

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Local government officials in Memphis, Tennessee, voted on Wednesday to return the second of two Democratic state lawmakers expelled from the statehouse last week by Republicans over a gun safety protest following another school shooting.The Shelby county commission voted to nominate Justin Pearson, 29, as interim state representative to fill the vacancy created when he and fellow Democrat Justin Jones were ousted for taking part in a gun reform protest in the chamber following the murders of six people last month at a Nashville school.The two Black men had recently joined the legislature and condemned their expulsion as a racist action. Joe Biden had criticized the expulsion as unprecedented and Kamala Harris railed against the action on a hastily-arranged trip to Nashville last Friday less than 24 hours after the two lawmakers were ousted.Jones, 27, was returned to his seat on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Nashville council.On Wednesday afternoon, the Shelby county board of commissioners, where Democrats hold a supermajority, voted in favor of doing the same for Pearson at a special meeting in Memphis, where Pearson’s district is located.In announcing the meeting, Mickell Lowery, the board’s chairman and a Democrat, had called the expulsions “unfortunate”.The commission meeting was preceded by a protest rally at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in support of Pearson, who said in a powerful New York Times opinion essay on Wednesday that he “wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced”.A community organizer before entering politics, Pearson condemned what he saw as hypocrisy from Republican lawmakers.“There is something amiss in the decorum of the state house when GOP leaders like Representative Paul Sherrell, who proposed death from ‘hanging by a tree’ as an acceptable form of state execution (Mr Sherrell later apologized for his comment), feel comfortable berating Mr Jones and me for our peaceful act of civil disobedience.“This, in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan, a land stained with the blood of lynchings of my people.”The Republican majority opted not to expel a third member of the so-called Tennessee Three, Democrat Gloria Johnson, 60, who is white.In his op-ed, Pearson also called out Republicans, in Tennessee and elsewhere, for promoting a swath of pro-gun legislation he said left the US “a nation in pain and peril”. Thousands were drawn to the statehouse in Nashville to protest the Covenant school shooting, he said, but were ignored by his Republican colleagues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Some have averted their eyes and hurried into the chamber, walking through hundreds of mourning protesters to discuss a bill to further expand gun rights by allowing teachers to carry weapons on campus,” he said.“But many of us did not. We stopped and embraced traumatized children, parents and elders. We prayed. We protested.”On Tuesday, Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor, said he would sign an executive order to strengthen background checks for weapons purchases in the state, and called on lawmakers to pass a red flag law to keep guns away from those who pose a danger to themselves or others.“We should set aside politics and pride and accomplish something that the people of Tennessee want to see get accomplished,” Lee said. The governor and his wife, Maria, were friends with two teachers killed at the Covenant school.Pearson acknowledged Lee’s action in his essay as “a small victory for our people clamoring for change”. More

Will 2024 be a repeat of 1992 or 1997, is the (binary) question people ask: a repeat of Neil Kinnock’s shock defeat to the Tories in 1992 or Tony Blair’s triumphant landslide victory in 1997.But while we are talking about the what will happen next time, we had better discuss the how. The means matter. The means help shape society. They impact how cohesive we are, how we treat each other. The means last longer than victory or defeat. And by many current indications, the means suggest we are looking at neither 1997 nor 1992, but at a mirror image of the 1988 US presidential election.The name might not mean much, but the brutal political genius of Lee Atwater looms large over today’s British politics – to such an extent that even he would not believe it. Atwater was a highly influential strategist who helped shape modern presidential campaigning for the Republicans. Perhaps the foremost part of his legacy was the ruthless, nihilistic mainstreaming of dog-whistle racism into political campaigning. He explained how that worked.“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.” Atwater’s crowning achievement, having advised President Ronald Reagan, was masterminding Vice-President George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential election victory against the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis. And to do so, he leveraged the most reliable of western tropes: the Black bogeyman. Atwater conceived and created the now notorious Willie Horton ad. The advert offered a simple juxtaposition: George Bush, a tough-on-crime Republican who believed in the death penalty for murderers, or Michael Dukakis, a wet liberal who allowed murderers to have weekend passes to get out of jail.And then came the money shot: a menacingly scary black-and-white mugshot of William Horton (his name was altered by Atwater from William Horton to Willie Horton; the intended effect is self-explanatory), a Black man who had been convicted of murder and rape in Dukakis’s Massachusetts, yet was granted a temporary release from prison pass (otherwise known as a furlough). While out on furlough he carried out even more horrific crimes. The advert did what it intended: to make Horton and Dukakis look like an inseparable couple, the Democrats and the black felon as running mates: a racist signal to rally the vote.Intentional or otherwise, I see a clear link between the Willie Horton advert and Labour’s “soft on paedophiles” attack advert on Rishi Sunak. Sadly, given the chance to pull back from his Willie Horton moment, the Labour leader stood “by every word”.But then, looking across the divide, Atwater would see much to admire in Tory politics as well. Last week the home secretary, Suella Braverman, pointed at Pakistani Muslim men with the message that she would not let “political correctness” get in the way of apprehending grooming gangs – despite the fact that her own department had found it was overwhelmingly and disproportionately white men who constituted grooming rings. But why stop there? Atwater wouldn’t. There goes Braverman apparently upholding a landlord’s decision to display golliwogs in his pub.There she goes, telling some of the world’s most desperate people that, should they dare to show up here, they’ll end up on prison barges. Just the place for the political scapegoat. Atwater would have loved those barges.In his pomp, he would have loved the intolerance, the viciousness, the very British race struggle in our politics right now: the tussle of one side to out-racist the other, to make complexity and decency look weak, often leveraging polite and innocent sounding substitutes and subtleties for race along the way – think: wokeness, political correctness, virtue signalling. Call it Atwater signalling perhaps, make a dead man happy. But ultimately we must decide if we are happy with politics conducted like this.Because the next election will have a victor and a vanquished, and the victor will feel the means justified the ends. But if both parties continue down this dark and dirty path, what will the following election be like, and the next? And what kind of country will emerge from them?Look at what devil-take-the-hindmost politics has done to America. We know it can work – that’s the tragedy. And we know where it ends.
Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of the satirical book Think Like A White Man

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On Friday, the nation faced dueling decisions from federal judges regarding the first drug in a medication abortion: mifepristone. A judge in Texas ruled that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) likely improperly approved the drug, putting mifepristone’s approval on hold while the case plays out (though this order won’t take effect until late Friday this week). Minutes later, a judge in Washington state ruled that the FDA could not change the status quo regarding mifepristone’s availability.In response to these two cases and two other less-publicized cases involving the FDA and medication abortion, the agency needs to chart a course consistent with its mission to protect patient health and to follow the evidence. As the Biden administration has stated, protecting medication abortion is a public health imperative now that states can ban all abortion outright. If the agency does not respond to these conflicting rulings in a manner tailored to provide the greatest access possible to medication abortion, it will be telling of Biden’s commitment to reproductive justice.Though the case in Texas has garnered enormous attention, it is not the only case thrusting the FDA into the center of the abortion debate. The others have the opposite goal of improving access to the drug. The litigation in Washington state, not widely discussed until Friday, centered around the FDA’s special and onerous regulation of medication abortion. Eighteen state attorneys general sued the FDA arguing that the agency’s overregulation is not justified by the statute or the drug’s safety and must be lifted. If successful on appeal, this would ensure mifepristone is treated like other prescription drugs – prescribed through any provider and accessible at any pharmacy.Plaintiffs in two other cases are pushing even further, trying to use the FDA’s special regulation of mifepristone to argue that a state cannot ban or overregulate the drug. These lawsuits, filed respectively by the generic manufacturer of mifepristone in West Virginia and a physician in North Carolina, might restore access to medication abortion across the country. The plaintiffs argue that federal approval of mifepristone trumps state abortion laws, essentially forcing all states to allow medication abortion as regulated by the FDA.The FDA is caught in the crosshairs. Though the agency prides itself on scientific independence and seeks to avoid the appearance of partisanship, any reaction the agency has to these cases – even a decision not to act – will appear political to one side. Nonetheless, the FDA must push forward to ensure access to this critical drug.Starting with the two cases just decided, the agency can comply with both by announcing that it will exercise enforcement discretion. Enforcement discretion allows the agency to provide safe harbor for technical violations of law. So even if mifepristone becomes an unapproved drug per the Texas order, the agency could announce that it would not pursue action against the entities that market or dispense the drug to maintain the status quo as required by the Washington case.This would not require the agency to “ignore” the Texas order, as some have suggested. Rather, enforcement discretion is a normal part of the FDA’s operation and only relevant if the drug becomes unapproved as ordered. The FDA could exercise this discretion without being ordered to by the Washington court, but the Washington case provides enormous political cover for the agency to use this discretion.Repercussions for patient and public health could result from the FDA failing to clearly exercise its enforcement discretion. Clinicians may turn to a different medication abortion regimen that does not include mifepristone and is outside of current FDA regulation. Though alternative regimens will be vital to maintaining abortion access if mifepristone becomes inaccessible, they are slightly less effective and, more importantly, will upend what has been the uniform, established protocol for a medication abortion in the United States for over two decades. Relatedly, confusion is sure to reign after the Texas decision unless the FDA speaks in a clear and timely voice. Already, certain abortion providers have indicated that they will continue to dispense mifepristone regardless of the order in Texas unless the FDA tells them they cannot.As requested by plaintiffs in the Washington case, the FDA could also start the process to remove the unnecessary barriers to accessing mifepristone, which every relevant medical organization agrees are not medically necessary. These barriers make abortion less accessible without any benefit for patient safety. Though the FDA has repealed parts of these unduly restrictive rules over the last decade, the FDA should abandon the remaining restrictions, which are also contradicted by the best evidence. These policies do not make the agency seem evenhanded; they make it seem unscientific. The agency should not wait for the Washington court to order this – it should start the process now.In the pre-emption cases, the FDA could help the effort to restore access to early abortion in states with abortion bans by embracing the theory that the federal agency’s regulation of medication abortion trumps state law. The Department of Justice has already signaled its agreement, but the FDA has been silent. The FDA has spent decades assessing the risks and benefits of medication abortion, examining and re-examining the evidence even decades after its approval in 2000. States should not be able to override that authority and create a public health crisis by banning a safe and effective medication.The agency, however, has appeared unwilling to remove the remaining unnecessary barriers to mifepristone or support pre-emption at this juncture. Indeed, it has said nothing about pre-emption and is opposing the attorneys general in the Washington case – a fact that may surprise people who think the Biden administration is doing all it can to support abortion access. Given the current public health crisis, the FDA must be bolder in its support of reproductive healthcare.Try as it might, the FDA cannot escape the abortion debate. Instead of trying to play both sides, the agency must act now by following the science and protecting the public’s health to the best of its ability. Protecting access to safe abortion is the way to do that.
David S Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, is a co-author of Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America, a board member of the Abortion Care Network and a consulting attorney with the Women’s Law Project
Greer Donley is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a board member of the Women’s Law Project
Rachel Rebouché is the dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Center for Public Health Law Research More