US Politics

A Democratic US senator at the forefront of a push to enact new gun control measures has said Republicans “don’t give a crap” about children or gun violence.Connecticut’s Chris Murphy – who has been a leading force for Democrat gun control efforts since the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting killed 26 people in his state, 20 of them children – made the comment in a wide-ranging interview with Salon that was published on Tuesday.In the interview, Murphy said that it was inexplicable for Republicans to claim they care about the wellbeing of children while thwarting efforts to shield them from gun violence, including by blocking legislation that would restrict sales of assault-style weapons.“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.The senator also said that a surge of gun violence in the US is being fueled by an increasing number of guns that was “really supercharged during the pandemic”.“I don’t really think people understand how big a problem this is and how quickly it has come to overwhelm us,” Murphy added. About all that the Republican party could agree on, he continued, was “sticking up” for those who staged the deadly 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol as well as politically bludgeoning Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.Murphy’s comments were published on the same day that the president is planning to announce he is ordering the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to crack down on gun sellers who break the law as well as to move the country “as close to universal background checks as possible”.On a conference call with reporters, a senior administration official said last year’s bipartisan gun safety legislation – the most sweeping of its kind in three decades – “created an opening” for Biden to issue his directive to Garland without additional legislation.The legislation last year expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while providing funds to mental health and violence intervention programs.Biden’s administration believes the measure would mean fewer guns being sold without background checks.In his comments to Salon, Murphy said a recent US supreme court decision – which found the constitution protects individuals’ right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense and said that any restrictions on gun possession must be in line with the nation’s historical tradition – contained language that was “very purposefully, very clinically” designed to allow lower courts “to bring their politics into the courtroom”.Murphy warned that the so-called Bruen decision hinted that the supreme court “may rule that any prohibition or any regulation of guns that didn’t exist at the founding of this country is unconstitutional” – a judicial direction he called “absolutely absurd”.He warned that this is “a pathway to invalidate almost all of our gun laws”.“We’re definitely headed towards a very dangerous place, where Congress and state legislatures may be prohibited from passing many of the common sense gun laws that enjoy broad public support today,” Murphy said. “That’s how radical this court is.” More

Pat Schroeder, a pioneer for women’s and family rights in Congress who confronted and angered conservatives, has died. She was 82.Schroeder’s former press secretary, Andrea Camp, said the former congresswoman suffered a stroke recently and died on Monday in Celebration, Florida.Schroeder took on the elite for 24 years, shaking up institutions by forcing them to acknowledge women had a role in government. Her unorthodox methods cost her key committee posts but Schroeder said she wasn’t willing to join “the good old boys’ club”. Unafraid of embarrassing colleagues in public, she became a feminist hero.Schroeder was elected in Colorado in 1972 and won re-election 11 times from a safe district in Denver. Despite her seniority, she was never appointed to lead a committee.She helped forge several Democratic majorities before leaving in 1997. Her parting shot was a book, 24 Years of Housework … and the Place is Still a Mess: My Life in Politics.In 1987, Schroeder tested the waters for the presidency, after her fellow Coloradan Gary Hart pulled out. Announcing she would not run, she said her heart was not in it and fundraising was demeaning.Schroeder said legislators spent too much attention on donors. When in 1994 House Republicans gathered on the Capitol steps to celebrate 100 days in power, she and several aides climbed to the dome and hung a 15-ft red banner reading: “Sold.”She was the first woman on the House armed services committee but was forced to share a seat with Ron Dellums of California, the first African American. Schroeder said the chair, F Edward Hebert of Louisiana, thought the committee was no place for a woman or an African American and they were each worth only half a seat.Republicans were livid when Schroeder and others filed an ethics complaint over a televised lecture series given by the speaker, Newt Gingrich, charging that free cable time amounted to an illegal gift. Gingrich became the first speaker reprimanded by Congress. He said he regretted not taking Schroeder and her allies more seriously.According to her House biography, Schroeder once told Pentagon officials that if they were women, they would always be pregnant because they never said no.Asked by one congressman how she could be a mother of two small children and a congresswoman, she replied: “I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.”It was Schroeder who branded Ronald Reagan the Teflon president for his ability to avoid blame.One of her biggest victories was the signing of a family leave bill in 1993, providing job protection for care of a newborn, sick child or parent.“Pat Schroeder blazed the trail,” said Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat who took over from Schroeder as chair of the congressional caucus on women’s issues. “Every woman in this house is walking in her footsteps.”A pilot, Schroeder earned her way through Harvard law school with her own flying service. She became a professor at Princeton and led the Association of American Publishers. But she continued working in politics after moving to Florida. She campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2016.Schroeder was born in Portland, Oregon, on 30 July 1940. She graduated from the University of Minnesota before earning her law degree. From 1964 to 1966 she was a field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board.She is survived by her husband, James W Schroeder, whom she married in 1962, their children, Scott and Jamie, her brother, Mike Scott, and four grandchildren. More

The North Carolina supreme court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a major gerrymandering case that could have significant implications for US voting rights.In a highly unusual move, the North Carolina court appears poised to overrule itself and get rid of congressional and state legislative districts it approved last year. The GOP-drawn map that was struck down could have produced a 11-3 advantage for Republicans in the congressional delegation. The one that replaced it was far less advantageous to the GOP and wound up producing a 7-7 split in the 2022 midterm elections. The court’s decision would likely allow Republicans to get a more advantageous map back in place.Demonstrators gathered outside the state supreme court in Raleigh on Tuesday as the justices heard oral arguments in the case, Harper v Hall. Much of the back-and-forth at the hearing focused on whether there were metrics the court could use to measure partisan gerrymandering. Phil Strach, a lawyer for the legislature, argued that because there were no clear metrics, it was not something the court could regulate.Anita Earls, a Democrat on the court, pushed Strach to explain whether that meant the legislature could essentially do whatever it wants when it comes to drawing districts. If the state legislature were to adopt a rule that explicitly said any congressional plan had to result in an 11-3 advantage for Republicans, she asked, could the state supreme court do anything to stop it? Strach suggested it could not.“Some things, your honor, are beyond the power of this court,” he said.Lali Madduri, a lawyer representing those challenging the map, accused lawmakers of playing a “cynical game, hoping that this newly constituted court will reverse course and abdicate its fundamental duty of judicial review”. Sam Hirsch, another lawyer for the challengers, said that an effort to impose new legislative districts could be unconstitutional since North Carolina’s constitution prohibits mid-decade redistricting for the state general assembly.Republicans won control of the North Carolina supreme court last fall and the new 5-2 GOP majority granted a request from the legislature to reconsider its redistricting ruling last month. The court had only granted similar requests twice before in the last 30 years. US courts do not typically grant requests to overrule their own rulings absent a major change in the case. The only thing that changed in the North Carolina case was the makeup of the court, Earls wrote in a searing dissenting opinion earlier this year.“It took this court just one month to send a smoke signal to the public that our decisions are fleeting, and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench,” she wrote. “I write to make clear that the emperor has no clothes.”That rehearing decision could have reverberations at the US supreme court, which is separately considering the case and could issue a decision that could upend US election law.In December, lawyers for the legislature asked the justices to overrule the state court and endorse a fringe legal theory that would prohibit state courts from policing the drawing of congressional districts and other federal election rules. Such a ruling from the US supreme court would upend US election law, removing state courts from policing federal elections. Earlier this month, the US supreme court asked for briefing on how the decision to rehear the case in North Carolina affected its own authority to issue a ruling.In addition to the redistricting case, the North Carolina supreme court is also set this week to rehear a previous decision striking down the state’s voter ID law. More

Queen Elizabeth II, Diana, Princess of Wales, Richard Nixon, Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton and other correspondents will be shown to have “kissed my ass”, Donald Trump said on Tuesday, promoting a forthcoming book of their letters.Letters to Trump will contain 150 missives from figures also including Kim Jong-un and Ronald Reagan. Drawn from Trump’s life before and after he ran for president, the book is due to be published next month.“I think they’re going to see a very fascinating life,” Trump told the far-right Breitbart News of what readers might expect.“I knew them all – and every one of them kissed my ass, and now I only have half of them kissing my ass.”His son Donald Trump Jr told Breitbart his father had corresponded with “some of the most interesting people in the world” but “it’s amazing how quickly their adoration of him changed when he ran for office as a Republican.“Letters to Trump shows you exactly how they felt about him and how phony their newfound disdain truly is.”Trump has not announced a deal to write a conventional memoir of a presidency which ended in disgrace and a second impeachment after the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. His reputation has not improved out of office.Running for the Republican nomination in 2024, Trump remains under the threat of criminal indictments including a reportedly imminent New York charge related to hush money paid to a porn star. He is also under investigation for retaining classified material, reportedly including letters from Kim Jong-un.Trump continues to claim his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 was the result of electoral fraud, the lie that incited the Capitol attack.Far-right support courted by Trump, meanwhile, includes devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that leading Democrats are members of a cannibalistic, paedophilic cabal.QAnon followers also believe John F Kennedy Jr, the son of President John F Kennedy, did not die in a plane crash in 1999 and will soon come to their aid.Trump shared with Breitbart a letter in which JFK Jr, then a magazine publisher, thanked Trump for visiting his office to “discourse on politics, New York, men and women”.Trump said JFK Jr was a friend, “even though we were of a different persuasion”.The Kennedy family is one of the most powerful in the Democratic party. In fact, Trump was a Democrat too for a while.Trump said: “I believe [JFK Jr] would have run for the Senate and that he would have been president someday. He was a handsome guy. He was a fantastic guy. He had the ‘it factor’ and he would have gone to the top of the world in the Kennedy family.”Trump’s admission that many correspondents no longer flatter him was telegraphed in the first report on the new book, by Axios last week.Axios said an Oprah Winfrey letter from 2000 says: “Too bad we’re not running for office. What a team!” Thanking Trump for compliments, the TV host says: “It’s one thing to try and live a life of integrity – still another to have people like yourself notice.”According to Axios, Trump writes: “Sadly, once I announced for president [in 2015], she never spoke to me again.”Letters to Trump will sell for $99 unsigned or $399 signed. It follows another pricey tome, Our Journey Together, a primarily visual account of Trump’s time in the White House.Trump published his picture book after blocking plans for a White House photographer to publish a book of her own. More

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It is common for British and American leaders to try to show the “special relationship” between their two countries extends to them personally.When Rishi Sunak landed in San Diego for a flash visit to see Joe Biden, the world’s media were spared any such attempts verging on the grandiose.There was some light banter from Biden about Sunak’s home in California and carefully coordinated invites between the two leaders for future visits.It was a far cry from the scenes of David Cameron playing table tennis with Barack Obama, or Theresa May holding hands with Donald Trump.But when journalists were ushered out of the gym on the naval base in Point Loma, where the leaders of the three Aukus powers had gathered for a summit, the real strength of the relationship between Sunak and Biden became clear.Instead of reams of officials sitting round listening closely, the two leaders spent nearly an hour alone, preferring to have a more personal conversation.There was plenty for them to bond over, before they got into the nitty gritty. Sunak is a big college football fan, from his days as a business student at Stanford. He still has a house in Santa Monica, around three hours’ drive up the west coast. The prime minister also remains so fond of chocolate chip muffins and Mexican cola that he brought a stash of both home.Of course, Sunak is not always keen to talk publicly about his close ties to the US – particularly the green card he held until 2021 and whether he will publish his US taxes.Biden’s angling for an invite to Sunak’s California home may have left the prime minister wanting to wince.But such encounters are highly valuable.Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to Washington, has made persistent requests for a bilateral meeting between the two leaders. They appear to have paid off, with the prospect of a visit by Biden to Northern Ireland in April, before Sunak returns for a longer trip to the US in June, this time to Washington DC.In between, they will meet again at the G7 summit in Japan in May. Three such meetings in as many months means hopes are not high Biden will come to the UK for the king’s coronation.There are plenty of issues requiring joint engagement by both leaders that will continue in the background. As well as fulfilling plans to give Australia a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and working through Britain’s concerns about the US Inflation Reduction Act, the question of how to deal with China’s growing “aggression” is a live one.It is likely to have been one of the main topics the two leaders discussed when they held talks away from prying eyes this week.Biden joined the US Senate in 1973, meaning he has been in frontline politics for longer than Sunak, 42, has been alive. There is a wealth of wisdom and experience for the prime minister to admire, especially when it comes to China.During a career keenly focused on foreign affairs, Biden is said to have spent about 100 hours speaking to President Xi Jinping. Much of that was face to face, instead of on long-distance phone calls, making Biden the western world leader with perhaps the greatest personal insight into Xi’s character.At Monday’s summit of the three Aukus powers, they agreed that the “challenge” posed by China stretched decades ahead.So for Sunak to be able to draw on reflections from Biden looking back long term may prove a helpful counterbalance to hot-headed Tory backbenchers. More

The Willow project is an act of terrorism against the climate, and the Biden administration has just approved it. This massive oil-drilling project in the wilderness of northern Alaska goes against science and the administration’s many assurances that it cares about climate and agrees that we must make a swift transition away from fossil fuel. Like the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden seems to think that if we do some good things for the climate we can also do some very bad things and somehow it will all even out.To make that magical thinking more obvious and to try to smooth over broad opposition, the US federal government also just coughed up some protections against drilling in the Arctic Ocean and elsewhere in the National Petroleum Reserve (and only approved three of the five drilling sites for ConocoPhillips’ invasion of this wilderness). Of course, this is like saying, “We’re going to kill your mother but we’re sending guards to protect your grandmother.” It doesn’t make your mom less dead. With climate you’re dealing with physics and math before you’re dealing with morality. All the carbon and methane emissions count, and they need to decrease rapidly in this decade. As Bill McKibben likes to say, you can’t bargain with physics.You can try to bargain with the public, but the motivation behind this decision is hard to figure out. The deal was inherited from the Trump administration, and rejecting it would have been a break with convention, but convention dooms us, and we need the break.Biden was elected in no small part by the participation of young voters who supported his strong climate platform. As a candidate he promised: “And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” Six million letters and 2.3m comments opposed to the project were sent to the White House, many from young people galvanized by social media. The American public, Republican minority aside, is strongly engaged with the reality of climate crisis now and the urgency of doing something about it.I call it an act of terrorism, because this drilling project in Alaska produces petroleum, which will be burned, which will send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it will contribute to climate chaos that will affect people in the South Pacific, the tropics, the circumpolar Arctic, will affect the melting of the Greenland ice shield (this month reaching a shocking 50F warmer than normal). It doesn’t just produce petroleum; it produces huge quantities of it, resulting in an estimated 278m metric tons of carbon emissions.This makes it, like the Permian Basin oil extraction in the US south-west and the tar sands in Alberta, a carbon bomb. Former vice-president Al Gore recently put it this way: “The proposed expansion of oil and gas drilling in Alaska is recklessly irresponsible … The pollution it would generate will not only put Alaska Native and other local communities at risk, it is incompatible with the ambition we need to achieve a net zero future.”Earlier, the New York Times reported, “The administration says the country must pivot away from fossil fuels but backed a project set to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil each day for 30 years.” In 30 years it will be 2053, three years after we are supposed to have achieved a fully fossil-free future.There is actual bargaining in the government’s record of decision, stating that “Permittee shall offset 50% of the projected net [greenhouse gas emissions] … in accordance with US commitments under the Paris Agreement. GHGs shall be offset through reforestation of land …” Pretending that trees are our atmospheric janitorial service belies both the ways that forests across the globe are devastated by climate crisis – burgeoning pests, drought, fire, ecosystems changing faster than trees can adapt – and that planting trees does not necessarily result in a healthy long-lasting forest.Each tree, according to this document, can sequester 48lbs of carbon dioxide a year. Except that tiny saplings will not be doing that, and it will be too late to help our current climate goals by the time the trees, if they survive, are full-grown. I asked a friend with a talent for math to crunch the data; he concluded that “12.8bn trees could sequester the produced carbon in one year; or, 1/100th of that – 128m trees – could sequester the produced carbon in 100 years”. That’s not a solution to emitting those 278m metric tons of carbon dioxide in the next few years.Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, an Indigenous Alaskan organization, pointed out in a letter to Biden that this project means devastation: “Approval of a project the size of Willow would be climate suicide. Coastal villages in Alaska are losing land to erosion at breakneck speed, permafrost thaw is causing dramatic changes to the ecosystem and the destruction of oil and other infrastructure, and Alaska Natives are at risk of losing their jobs, homes, and lives in a place which is warming at four times faster than the rest of the world.”We are already failing to stop runaway climate change. Adding this carbon bomb to the total makes it worse – both for the actual damage to the climate and for the signal the US is sending to the world. The Biden administration has made a colossal mistake.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses More

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. While, tragically, there are almost too many victims to tally from this criminal act of America’s making, the notion of truth must certainly count as primary among them.We must not forget how the George W Bush administration manipulated the facts, the media and the public after the horrific attacks of 9/11, hellbent as the administration was to go to war in Iraq. By 2.40pm on 11 September 2001, mere hours after the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld, the then secretary of defense, was already sending a memo to the joint chiefs of staff to find evidence that would justify attacking the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (as well as Osama bin Laden).Days later, on 14 September, President Bush had his first post-9/11 phone call with Tony Blair, the UK prime minister. According to Bruce Riedel, who was present at the call as a member of Bush’s national security council, Bush told Blair about his plans to “hit” Iraq soon. “Blair was audibly taken aback,” Riedel remembers. “He pressed Bush for evidence of Iraq’s connection to the 9/11 attack and to al-Qaida. Of course, there was none, which British intelligence knew.”American intelligence also knew there was no connection, but that didn’t stop the administration from concocting its own truth out of blood and thin air, so determined were they to invade Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US had captured a man, Ibn al Shaikh al-Libi, whom they suspected of high-level al-Qaida ties. The US flew their captive in a sealed coffin to Egypt, where the Egyptians tortured him into stating that Iraq supported al-Qaida and was assisting with chemical and biological weapons.This was a confession extracted under torture, and therefore – as the Senate select committee on intelligence’s 2014 “Torture Report” points out – fundamentally unreliable. Al-Libi later recanted his statement, the report explained, saying that he had simply told his torturers “what he assessed they wanted to hear”, Regardless, the information, which US intelligence believed was false on its face, made its way into Colin Powell’s speech before the UN security council in February 2003.In other words, it was all lies, lies and more lies. In the two years following 9/11, Bush and his top officials publicly uttered at least 935 lies about the threat that Saddam posed to the United States, according to the Center for Public Integrity. In the run-up to war, Bush & associates flooded the airwaves with the talking point “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” so often that it began to sound like a jingle from a cheap law firm commercial. Needless to say, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.Bush succeeded at the time because the public, primed to be afraid, was susceptible to his lies and the American media was pliable. The New York Times, as the nation’s leading newspaper, played a key role in disseminating the administration’s lies with, well, let’s call it questionable professionalism.By 2004, the paper was issuing its own mea culpa, admitting it had misled readers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and more, because accounts by anti-Saddam exiles “were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq”.In all its agonized self-reflection, the Times’ editorial somehow managed to blame foreign exiles above the US government or even the Times. “Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources,” the editorial said. “So did many news organizations – in particular, this one.”This, you might say, is old news. Why should it matter today? For one thing, the US-led invasion not only destroyed Iraq, but it displaced some 9 million people, killed at least 300,000 civilians by direct violence, and devastated Iraq’s already precarious environment. Over 4,400 Americans were also killed and close to 32,000 have been wounded in action in Iraq alone.The invasion also destabilized the region and is certainly a leading cause for today’s global migration crisis. Brown University’s Costs of War project notes that the number of people displaced by all of the US’s post-9/11 wars, at least 38 million people, “exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II”.The Iraq war ushered in a style of politics where truth is, at best, an inconvenience. Long before Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway stood on the White House lawn in 2017 and told NBC’s Chuck Todd about “alternative facts”, far prior to Donald Trump exploiting the term “fake news”, and much before a current lawsuit revealed the nefarious coordination of a rightwing media empire and a lying government, we were already living in a post-truth world, one created in part by an established media willing and able to amplify government lies.Of course, politicians have been proffering lies from the moment lies were invented. (Which was probably when politicians were also invented.) And Bush is hardly the first US president to march the country into war based on a lie. Goaded on by the media baron William Randolph Hearst, William McKinley led the US into the Spanish-American war on a lie. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which ushered the US fully into Vietnam, was almost certainly a lie.But the difference, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, was how the apparatus of lying became institutionalized in our government and abetted by our media: if you don’t like the information that your own intelligence agencies are providing, simply create your own agency, the office of special plans. By the time Bush left office, US troops may have begun to leave Iraq’s major cities, but the larger “war on terror” had truly become a way of life.The world is still reeling from the consequences of these lies and the institutions built on them. In the US, they continue to corrode our politics. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars are overrepresented in far-right movements in this country. Public trust in government is near an all-time low, having fallen precipitously during the Bush years. And social media companies have taken up the mantle of amplifying the lies our politicians tell.Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, the misbegotten war continues to degrade our national political life. This may be a hard reality to confront, but it’s also the truth.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More