US Politics

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday sued Republican congressman Jim Jordan to stop what Bragg called an “unconstitutional attack” on the ongoing criminal prosecution of former US president Donald Trump in New York.The lawsuit aims to block a subpoena of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who had led the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Trump. The subpoena, issued last week by the House of Representatives judiciary committee, which Jordan chairs, seeks Pomerantz’s appearance before the committee for a deposition.Trump pleaded not guilty last week to charges brought by Bragg’s office of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment made ahead of the 2016 election. The funds allegedly were used to buy adult film star Stormy Daniels’s silence about an affair she said she had with Trump, which the former president denies.Bragg, a Democrat, accused congressional Republicans of an “incursion” into a state criminal case.“Members of Congress are not free to invade New York’s sovereign authority for their or Mr Trump’s political aims,” Bragg’s office wrote in the lawsuit, accusing Jordan of searching for a pretext for “hauling Mr Pomerantz to Washington for a retaliatory political circus”.Pomerantz left his job at the district attorney’s office shortly after Bragg took over in early 2022, when the new DA declined to pursue an indictment of Trump based on a sprawling probe of his business practices.Earlier this year, Pomerantz published a book criticizing Bragg’s decision not to pursue those charges. He also said prosecutors had previously examined potential charges against Trump over the hush money payments, but were concerned the case would rest on a novel legal theory that may not hold up in court.In announcing the subpoena of Pomerantz last week, Jordan said Pomerantz’s public statements showed that Bragg’s prosecution of Trump was politically motivated. Bragg has said Pomerantz’s case was not ready.“If he wishes to argue that his prosecution is ‘politically motivated,’ he is free to raise that concern to the New York state criminal court,” Bragg’s office wrote in the lawsuit.“Chairman Jordan is not, however, free to unconstitutionally deploy Congress’s limited subpoena power for raw political retaliation, intimidation, or obstruction,” it added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe judiciary committee said on Monday it would hold a field hearing next week in New York about what it called “an increase in violent crime” caused by Bragg’s policies.Bragg said murder, shooting, burglary and robbery rates were all lower in Manhattan so far this year compared with last year.On Tuesday afternoon, Jordan, who represents Ohio, tweeted: “First, they indict a president for no crime. Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it.” More

Joe Biden spoke to the parents of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on Tuesday, nearly two weeks after the Moscow-based journalist was detained in Russia and charged with espionage.The president made the call as he flew to Belfast to start a four-day trip to Northern Ireland and Ireland. The call happened one day after the Biden administration formally declared the reporter had been “wrongfully detained”.The designation elevates Gershkovich’s case for the US government and means that a particular state department office will take the lead on seeking his release.Before departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden again condemned the journalist’s detention. Both the US government and Wall Street Journal have vehemently denied the Russian accusation that Gershkovich is a spy.“We’re making it real clear that it’s totally illegal what’s happening, and we declared it so,” Biden said. “It changes the dynamic.”The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters after the call that Biden “felt it was really important to connect with Evan’s family, his parents”. She said that Gershkovich, 31, has been “top of mind” for the president.The White House’s national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said that the Russian government has yet to grant US consular access to Gershkovich.“It’s not for lack of trying,” Kirby said, adding that the state department has been seeking access “ever since the moment we found out that he was detained”.Russian authorities arrested Gershkovich in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, on 29 March. He is the first US correspondent since the cold war to be detained in Russia for alleged spying.In their own statement Tuesday, Gershkovich’s family members issued a statement thanking Biden for the call and saying they had “a hole in [their] hearts … that won’t be filled” until the journalist’s return.“We are encouraged that the state department has officially designated Evan as wrongfully detained,” the Gershkovich family’s statement said. “We appreciate President Biden’s call to us today, assuring us that the US government is doing everything in its power to bring him home as quickly as possible.“In addition to being a distinguished journalist, Evan is a beloved son and brother. There is a hole in our hearts and in our family that won’t be filled until we are reunited. We are grateful for the outpouring of support from his colleagues, friends and everyone standing with Evan and advocating for his immediate release.” More

In The Green and White House, an account of the ancestral ties that have linked so many American leaders to Ireland since the 19th century, Joe Biden is described as the most deeply “connected” president of all. Throughout his career, Mr Biden has placed his Irish roots at the heart of his political identity, and played an influential role in promoting the Northern Ireland peace process.Cometh the hour, cometh the Potus? As he visits Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement, there is widespread hope that Mr Biden can put his backstory to profitable use at a delicate moment, along with the unique clout that goes with his office. As a kind of restless, ominous gridlock grips Northern Ireland’s body politic, that would constitute a notable success.In recent months, the Democratic Unionist party’s ongoing boycott of the Stormont parliament has created a corrosive power vacuum at the heart of Northern Irish politics. Democratic stasis has been accompanied by a rise in politically motivated violence by dissident groups. On the eve of Mr Biden’s visit, petrol bomb attacks on police in Derry underlined the sulphurous mood on the dissident fringes.Mr Biden’s personal sense of commitment is unlikely to mean he can single-handedly broker a solution to the impasse. Its root cause is structural, residing in the hard Brexit irresponsibly pursued by successive Conservative governments, which resulted in a border in the Irish Sea. Despite improvements to the Northern Ireland protocol negotiated by Rishi Sunak in the Windsor framework, Brexit has undermined the meticulous balancing of unionist and nationalist interests that lay at the core of the Good Friday agreement. Trust has been eroded; rebuilding it will be a slow process.The immediate priority is persuading the DUP to rejoin power-sharing arrangements at Stormont. Mr Biden will doubtless do his best to cajole. But given the party’s fears of being outflanked to its right by the still more hardline Traditional Unionist Voice, any return seems highly unlikely until after the mid-May elections. Nevertheless, Mr Biden can usefully focus minds on the merits of being on good terms with the world’s largest economy.Writing in a unionist newspaper prior to the trip, the US trade envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy, who is accompanying Mr Biden, emphasised that over the past decade, political stability had attracted almost £1.5bn of US investment to Northern Ireland. Rather than refighting old conflicts, Mr Kennedy wrote, families and communities are interested in the opportunities that a spirit of pragmatism and compromise can bring. Overwhelming public support for the Windsor framework, which the DUP continues flatly to reject, testifies to the truth of Mr Kennedy’s claim. That is a platform to work from.Before flying to Belfast, Mr Biden told reporters that the main aim of his visit was to safeguard the legacy of the Good Friday agreement. Acknowledged as a peacemaking model around the world, the power-sharing logic of the 1998 accords saved hundreds of lives that could otherwise have been lost. Northern Ireland today is a transformed place as a result of the peace dividend, and a rising proportion of the population eschews old sectarian identities. But as Mr Biden is well aware, in the wake of Brexit’s disastrous impact, there is more work to be done. More

One in five Americans has lost a family member to gun violence, an alarming survey published on Tuesday claims.The research came out one day after five people were killed by a gunman at a Louisville bank, at least the 15th mass shooting of the month, and 146th this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.The resource website defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded.The new study reflects the increasing commonality of gun-related incidents across the US. The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 19% of Americans said they had a family member killed by a gun, including by suicide, and one in six said they had witnessed a shooting.Among respondents who are Black, the already shocking figure in both categories jumped to one in three.The fear of gun violence is also prevalent, the study found. In particular, an epidemic of school shootings, from Columbine high school in 1999 to last month’s murder of six – including three nine-year-old students – at the Covenant school in Nashville, appears to have left parents more concerned than others.Asked if they were worried “daily or almost daily” about a family member falling victim to gun violence, 24% of parents with children under 18 said they were, compared with 15% for the adult population at large.“Unfortunately when we allow guns everywhere, for anyone with no questions asked, nowhere is safe from this gun violence epidemic,” said the founder of the gun safety advocacy group Moms Demand Action, Shannon Watts, in response to the Nashville school shooting.“We cannot and will not accept this reality. Our lawmakers must take action to keep us safe.”The survey was conducted in the week before the 27 March shooting in Nashville and delved deeper into Americans’ experiences with guns as well as gun crime.More than one in five, 21%, said they had personally been threatened with a gun, and 17% said they had witnessed somebody being shot. Those who said they had been injured by a gunshot, or had fired a weapon in self-defense, totaled 4% in each category.The results also revealed, unsurprisingly, that gun violence affects racial minorities at a far higher rate.Black adults (34%) are about twice as likely as white (17%) or Hispanic (18%) adults to say that they have a family member who was killed by a gun. They are also more than twice as likely – 31% to 14% – as white adults to say they witnessed someone being shot, with Hispanic adults in between at 22%.Overall, the survey found a majority of US adults, 54%, have either personally been affected or had a family member affected by a gun-related incident, such as witnessing a shooting, being threatened by gun, or being injured or killed by a gun.Amid the recent rise in mass shootings in the US, almost all of which were committed using AR-15 style rifles, Joe Biden has repeated his call for Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, which was not included in a bipartisan gun reform package that the president signed into law last year.But Democrats, despite controlling the Senate, have been unable to make headway and in the last Congress lacked the two-thirds majority needed to approve the assault weapons ban approved by the House of Representatives.The Connecticut US senator Chris Murphy, who was elected after a gunman murdered 26 people – including 20 children – at his state’s Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, has been among the most vocal Democrats criticizing the opposition party’s unwillingness to pass more substantial gun control.“It is beyond me why Republicans who claim to care about the health of our kids don’t seem to give a crap about our children who are being exposed to these epidemic, cataclysmic rates of gun violence,” Murphy said in an interview with Salon.“I don’t really think people understand how big a problem this is and how quickly it has come to overwhelm us.” More

A Republican Florida state lawmaker has made a partial apology for calling transgender people “demons”, “imps” and “mutants” during a hearing on a contentious bathroom bill.Webster Barnaby, a self-described “proud Christian conservative”, said his “indignation was stirred” by members of the transgender community who spoke out on Monday against the bill banning them from bathrooms not aligned to their gender at birth.The controversy comes just days after conservatives elsewhere in the state forced the removal of an illustrated novel about Anne Frank from a high school library, claiming it contained inappropriate sexual material that “minimized” the Holocaust.By Tuesday, Barnaby’s Twitter account appeared to have been removed from the platform after his outburst the previous day at a Florida state house commerce committee hearing in Tallahassee.“The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,” he told the speakers at the hearing. “That’s right, I called you demons and imps who come and parade before us and pretend you are part of this world.“We have people that live among us today on planet Earth that are happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet. This is the planet Earth where God created men male and women female.”The British-born Barnaby, 63, made a tempered apology from the floor soon after the House bill passed. “I referred to trans people as demons – I would like to apologize to the trans community for referring to you as demons,” he said.But his expressed regret cut no ice with LGBTQ+ activists, who have been protesting against a slew of anti-trans proposals placed before the Republican-dominated Florida legislature this year, championed by the state’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis.The bills include banning pronouns, drag shows and pride flags; criminalizing certain medical care for trans youth; and expanding the “don’t say gay” law that outlaws discussion of sexual preference and gender identity to all Florida’s classrooms.“When Republican Webster Barnaby called trans people ‘demons’, ‘imps’, and ‘mutants it wasn’t a mistake or gaffe,” Democratic former state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith wrote in a tweet. “It was the hatred and bigotry that’s really motivating Florida’s 20+ anti-LGBTQ proposals finally being spoken into words. Now it’s exposed.”The advocacy group Equality Florida called on Webster to resign and on the Florida house speaker, Paul Renner, to condemn “this bigoted vitriol from his own caucus”.The Guardian has contacted Barnaby for comment.School officials in Florida’s Indian River county, meanwhile, are defending a principal’s decision to remove the book Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation from his school library last month at the behest of the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty.Florida has become a stronghold of the conservative book banning movement in recent months, with a new law threatening educators with felony charges for exposing students to material deemed “inappropriate”.According to Moms for Liberty, the illustrated novel, based on Frank’s wartime memoir, contains sexual content that “minimizes the Holocaust” that involved the murders of 6 million Jews in Europe during the second world war.In one scene, it shows the teenager in a park looking at nude statues of females and later proposing to a friend that they show each other their breasts.“Even her [own] version featured the editing out of the entries about sex,” said Jennifer Pippin, the chairperson of the group’s Indian River chapter.“The publisher of the book calls it a ‘biography’, meaning it writes its own interpretive spin. It quotes the work, but it’s not the diary in full. It chooses to offer a different view on the subject.”A spokesperson for the school district of Indian River county, Cristen Maddux, said the principal of Vero Beach high school, Shawn O’Keefe, followed protocol by removing the challenged book, a decision that can be reviewed by a district committee.“The feedback that the Holocaust is being removed from the curriculum and students aren’t knowledgable about what happened, that is not the case at all. It’s just a challenged book and the principal removed it,” she said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

In February, Ron DeSantis led Donald Trump 45% to 41% in the Yahoo/YouGov poll. But Trump’s indictment has reversed the race.Just after Trump said he would be arrested, he moved into the lead – 47% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters preferred him, compared with 39% for DeSantis. Now, after his arraignment, Trump’s lead has widened – 57% to 31%.What’s going on? Trump’s high-decibel howls of anger and grievance and his vitriolic charges of a “deep state” aligned against him are rallying Republicans to his side.He has raged against his indictment in language evoking racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. He has whipped up a fury of threats against the judge, the prosecutor and their families. And of course he continues to repeat his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.But the commotion isn’t increasing Trump’s odds of being elected president in November 2024. To the contrary, it’s reducing those odds.Only about 28% of American voters identify as Republican. And as Republicans move back to Trump, another group of voters that will probably determine the outcome of the 2024 election is turned off by his vitriol.I’m talking about independents.Those who describe themselves as independent compose over 40% of American voters – a larger percentage than either self-described Republicans or Democrats.This independent share of the voting population is on the rise, as young people decline to identify with either party.You wouldn’t know any of this from media coverage of politics, which focuses almost entirely on the deepening, bitter conflict between red and blue America. Hey, conflict sells.Not that independents are moderates. They simply dislike angry partisanship.Independents also oppose the Republican party’s stances on abortion, transgender rights, gun controls and the climate.In Wisconsin, where about the same number of voters have registered Democratic as have registered Republican, independents make all the difference.Last Tuesday’s victory of Judge Janet Protasiewicz – flipping control of the state’s supreme court to liberals for the first time in 15 years – was presumably due to independents who favor abortion rights and oppose the state’s radical gerrymandering.Nationally, independents helped stop the “red wave” in the 2022 midterms (albeit by a slim margin of 49% to 47%), breaking their tendency to vote against the party holding the White House in midterm elections.Why? Because most independents loathe Trump as much as Democrats do and they oppose everything Trump has inflicted on America – including an army of election deniers and an anti-abortion supreme court.In 2020, independents preferred Biden over Trump, 52% to 37%.True, independents haven’t been wildly enthusiastic about Biden. They’ve worried about the economy, and, like other voters, tend to blame or credit the occupant of the Oval Office for the economy’s performance.When Trump’s star was fading and DeSantis’s brightening, it seemed possible that some independents might be drawn back to the Republicans in 2024. But if Trump is the Republican candidate, as seems increasingly likely, most independents will support Biden, as they did in 2020.Trump’s indictment – presumably to be followed by other indictments – is reminding independents of Trump’s broader attack on democracy that culminated on 6 January 2021.In the four weeks following the attack, so many voters abandoned the Republican party that about 50% of Americans briefly identified as independents.Trump’s latest rounds of incendiary posts and speeches are reminding independents that he represents everything they most detest about American politics.So, as fast as Trump blasts his way to the Republican nomination, he’s turning off independent voters who will be crucial in the general election.The prospect of a 2024 contest between DeSantis and Biden might seem less terrifying than one pitting Trump against Biden, but the latter is more winnable by Americans – including independents – who favor democracy over autocracy.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

Governor Ron DeSantis went to the Florida capitol earlier this month to sign a bill behind closed doors with a handful of his allies. The bill, one of many hard-right proposals that Florida Republicans hope to pass during this legislative session, has stoked fear and outrage among gun safety advocates: permitless carry.With Republicans’ sweeping control of the state legislature and governorship, the bill – which would allow Floridians to carry guns without a permit or training – easily passed both chambers before being signed into law by DeSantis. The Florida house approved the bill late last month in a vote of 76 to 32, and the senate then passed the proposal in a vote of 27 to 13.The Republicans’ latest push reflects a broader rightward lurch in Florida’s politics since DeSantis took office in 2019, even though Trump carried the battleground state by just three points in 2020. Polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose the policy, and previous surveys have indicated that Florida voters overwhelmingly support other gun safety measures like universal background checks and mandatory waiting periods.Gun safety groups have provided evidence suggesting the permitless carry law will contribute to an increase in violence. They accuse the governor of prioritizing presidential ambitions over his constituents’ safety in a state that has witnessed two of America’s deadliest mass shootings.“It all has to do with talking points and setting him up to run for higher office,” said Congressman Maxwell Frost, a Democrat of Florida. “And as a result, people will die.”No ‘permission slip’ requiredRepublican legislators across the country have embraced permitless carry, or “constitutional carry” to its supporters, in recent years. The policy has won praise from rightwing activists who view any firearm-related regulation as a violation of their second amendment right to bear arms. Florida law previously stipulated that those who wish to carry a concealed gun must complete safety training and undergo a more detailed background check, but Republicans moved to do away with those requirements.“I believe that this comes down to one pretty clear thing that shall not be infringed,” the Republican state senator Jay Collins said at a committee hearing last month. “We don’t need to have the government get in the way of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”Twenty-five states have already enacted laws allowing residents to carry concealed firearms without a permit, and Florida will become the 26th in July, when the policy goes into effect.“A constitutional right should not require a permission slip from the government,” DeSantis said in his State of the State address last month. “It is time we joined 25 other states to enact constitutional carry in the state of Florida.”The proposal had been endorsed by the Florida Sheriffs Association, which represents the 67 elected sheriffs across the state.“Violent career criminals are not applying for a state permit to carry a gun,” Al Nienhuis, the association’s president and sheriff of Hernando county, said at a January press conference. “Removing the permitting process will assist our law-abiding citizens with the protections they need to defend themselves and their families from those criminals who intend to do them harm.”Florida crime statistics appear to challenge that argument. The 2021 Annual Uniform Crime Report showed Florida’s crime rate had reached a 50-year low, a fact that DeSantis himself touted in his state of the state address.Research suggests that removing the permitting requirement to carry concealed guns may instead contribute to a rise in violent crime. One study released in 2019 found that states saw an increase of 13% to 15% in violent crime rates in the years after they loosened regulations on carrying concealed firearms.Those concerns have fueled a divide among Florida’s law enforcement officers. Although the Florida Sheriffs Association supported the bill, a number of officers said they fear the policy will only further endanger them and their colleagues.“It’s not going to make our communities safer,” Sheriff John Mina of Orange county said on The Problem With Jon Stewart. “It’s going to make them more dangerous.”At the March committee hearing on the permitless carry bill, dozens of Florida residents echoed those fears. Isabella Burgos, a volunteer with the gun safety group Students Demand Action and a first-year student at Florida State University, gave emotional testimony about how she regularly fears for her life as she walks around campus. Burgos spoke just weeks after a gunman attacked Michigan State University, killing three students.“I’m at war with the terrors of the chance I may die young,” Burgos said through tears. “This epidemic will turn to utter war with this bill in place. So I urge you all to oppose this deadly bill that would be destructive to our minds and destructive to society – vote no. My life, my children’s lives and your children’s lives depend on it.”A ‘uniquely heinous proposal’In February, Florida marked five years since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, which claimed the lives of 14 students and three educators. The attack came less than two years after a gunman killed 49 people at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub, in Orlando.For gun safety advocates, Republicans’ introduction of a permitless carry bill on the heels of the Parkland anniversary feels cruel. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic congresswoman from Florida and now senior adviser to the gun safety group Giffords, described Republicans’ actions as “shameful”.“We are one of the largest states in the country, where we have seen two of the worst mass shootings,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “And we have to continue to do the work to make sure that we protect the lives of Floridians.”As Mucarsel-Powell noted, Florida legislators came together in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting to craft a bipartisan gun safety bill. The legislation, which raised the age requirement for buying a long gun from 18 to 21 and established a “red flag” law allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from those deemed to be dangerous, was signed by the then governor, Rick Scott, a Republican.“Everybody can say that partisanship has increased and the partisan divide is getting bigger, and I think that’s really evident in Florida,” said Cate Allen, a survivor of the Parkland shooting and leader of Students Demand Action. “Our representatives, our congressmen are pursuing political ambitions and personal gain over what their constituents actually want.”Surveys indicate that Florida residents broadly oppose permitless carry. One recent poll conducted by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab showed 77% of Florida voters, including 62% of Republicans, do not support the proposal.“I’m not going to say that the bills that [DeSantis] pushed in the past were good, but I think this one in particular is uniquely heinous,” said Alyssa Ackbar, a Tallahassee-based organizer for the gun safety group March for Our Lives. “The notion of getting rid of the permitting for concealed carry is honestly devastating.”To DeSantis’s critics such as Frost, the governor’s robust support for permitless carry is a particularly alarming example of how his political aspirations have endangered Floridians.“This is just one in a laundry list of legislation that will result in deaths, that will result in harm, that will result in trauma,” Frost said. “But it’s all part of a greater plan here because he’s more interested in running for president than he is in running the state of Florida.”‘Bullying people into submission’Although the permitless carry bill has now passed, gun safety advocates say they are still committed to holding Republican legislators accountable for supporting the widely unpopular bill.“I think it’s important to let lawmakers know that we’re watching them,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action. “If they do the right thing, we’ll have their back, and if they do the wrong thing, we’ll have their job.”Advocates put a significant share of the blame for the bill on the shoulders of DeSantis, accusing Republican legislators of allowing their allegiance to the governor to take priority over the wishes of their constituents.“We’re seeing a rise of extremism and radicalism from DeSantis and the legislators that are completely loyal to him,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “They will not do anything that he doesn’t support.”Ackbar said she had heard from legislators that some of their colleagues only expressed support for the permitless carry bill because they want to stay in DeSantis’s good graces.“DeSantis has a way of bullying people into submission, into doing what he wants, and I truly believe that this bill is part of that as well,” Ackbar said.Gun safety advocates fear DeSantis will only escalate his demands to relax Florida’s gun regulations as he prepares to launch a presidential campaign, given that he has previously received criticism from hardline gun rights activists. The governor faced accusations of hypocrisy from gun safety advocates and gun rights activists alike in February, after the Washington Post reported on emails showing that DeSantis’s campaign team quietly sought to ban concealed weapons from his own election night party in Tampa last November.Watts mocked DeSantis’s stance as “guns everywhere for thee but not for me”, adding: “The governor knows that it is dangerous for people to have easy access to guns and then show up at his events. And yet, he wants those same people in our schools and in public places. It is the height of hypocrisy.”Gun rights activists have similarly criticized DeSantis for holding events where firearms are prohibited. A gun rights protester was arrested in October for trespassing at an Alachua county Republican party event where DeSantis was speaking, although those charges were later dropped. The protester held a sign reading: “I will not be disarmed by DeSantis.”Even the permitless carry proposal has sparked frustration among gun rights activists, who say the legislation does not go far enough. Those activists instead want a law similar to the one used in Texas, which allows residents to openly carry a gun in public without a permit instead of limiting the policy to concealed weapons. DeSantis’s failure to enact an open permitless carry law reflects “political impotence”, as one gun rights supporter put it at the committee hearing last month.Given those complaints from rightwing activists, gun safety advocates worry that DeSantis will eventually push for an open permitless carry policy in his quest to woo Republican primary voters. The human toll of such a political strategy, they say, could be devastating.“All of his political moves and all of the bullying that he does to have people vote his way, it costs lives,” Ackbar said. “They’re not just talking points. They’re not just political notions. They are real, and there are young people in communities in this state that are constantly harmed by the ways that he pushes these bills.” More

Nashville’s governing council on Monday afternoon voted unanimously to return expelled Black lawmaker Justin Jones to the Tennessee state legislature. The body’s Republican majority expelled Jones and fellow house member Justin Pearson late last week because they led protests in the chamber demanding stricter gun control after a mass shooting at an elementary school in the city days before. Jones took his oath of office on the Capitol steps before speaking on the house floor More