US Politics

Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’ The extremist who has supported QAnon is firmly on her way to becoming a senior figure in the party as a key ally of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthyWhen Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to America’s House of Representatives in 2020, she became one of the most visible of a wave of extremists to enter the Republican party whose often bizarre utterings stretched the bounds of what had previously been the norm of US politics.The Georgian congresswoman, who has suggested Jewish space lasers are responsible for wildfires, speculated whether 9/11 was a hoax and supported the QAnon conspiracy theory, was part of a new wave of Trumpian Republicans and was mocked, ridiculed and reviled in equal measure – including by some in her own party.‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of liesRead moreBut in 2023, Greene is now firmly on her way to becoming one of the senior figures in the Republican party. She has become a favorite, and key ally, of Kevin McCarthy, the new House speaker, and preparing to take up assignments on some of Congress’s most prominent committees.It’s been a remarkable rise that few could have seen coming during a checkered first half of 2021, when Greene was making her name known through her penchant for unhinged conspiracy theories and strange remarks, but her ascension to the upper echelons of the GOP was confirmed this week by McCarthy, in an interview with the New York Times.“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said.“When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”This apparent fondness for a tussle has seen Greene rewarded with positions on the homeland security committee, despite her previously musing that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, and on the oversight committee, where she is expected to be part of a subcommittee investigating the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.If the latter seems problematic, given Greene’s loudly stated suspicions and conspiracy theories about the pandemic – in January she was permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly violating rules about Covid-19 misinformation – then that’s only because lots of things Greene has said and done are problematic.In 2021 Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, condemned Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” in relation to Greene having claimed support for executing Democratic politicians and harassing the survivor of a mass school shooting.Later that year McCarthy himself, who had earlier attempted to avoid conflict, felt compelled to step in after Greene compared Covid masking rules to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said.“The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling,” he said.The multiple rebukes, and the egregiousness of Greene’s beliefs – whether disavowed or not – make her rise to prominence, as she takes up her seat on some of Congress’s most powerful committees, all the more remarkable.Greene’s rapid recent rise began when she backed McCarthy for the House leadership, two months ahead of the ultimately farcical vote that saw him elected after 15 ballots. Greene had got in early, declaring her support in November on Steve Bannon’s podcast.For McCarthy, who has been an unpopular figure among far-right voters and politicians – it was a selection of the latter that meant the manner of his ascension to speaker was embarrassing at best, it was a boost he needed.McCarthy and Greene had spent months forging a working relationship they believed could be beneficial for both, with Greene placating the zaniest wing of both Republicans in the House and voters at home, and McCarthy providing relevance to someone who had been stripped of her committee assignments in 2021, leaving her, essentially, having nothing to do in Washington.The New York Times reported that McCarthy, as he prepared to take up the speakership, had been mindful of the problems his centrist predecessors, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faced in dealing with their furthest-right colleagues.Both Ryan and Boehner – who would later describe some of his rightwing colleagues as “assholes” – endured battles with the Freedom Caucus, a conservative and often obstructionist group of GOP congressmen, when trying to pass legislation.Greene remains one of the most popular figures among Trump supporters and believers, evidenced by her 758,000 followers on Trump’s Truth Social website – McCarthy has 113,000, Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, has 109,000 – and enjoys a close relationship with the former president, even calling Trump from the House floor during the debacle of January’s leadership vote.Greene is also a successful fundraiser, bringing in $12.5m in the 2021-22 election cycle, the fifth most of any Republican representative, her popularity among the base and alignment with Trump making her the model of the new Republican politician.On Greene’s part, she has sought to sanitize, somewhat, the ill-informed, conspiracy-minded viewpoints that have characterized her political career. In early 2022 Greene began a deliberate, “methodical” reinvention, a confidante told the Washington Post.From her position on the sidelines, with a congressional office but no meaningful role in the House, she began to think of the future. Greene, like most observers, believed McCarthy would be the next House speaker, and saw a role for herself as a bridge between the far right and the less kooky Republicans, the Post reported.As she tried to make herself palatable to a wider audience, Greene set about trying not to speak at any more white nationalist rallies, or discuss the “gazpacho police” who are apparently patrolling the US Capitol. (Her remark was widely understood to mean Gestapo.) She is also yet to repeat her 2018 claim that the Clinton family orchestrated the plane crash that killed John F Kennedy Jr more than two decades ago.In addition to this new reserve, Greene hired a new aide with a track record in conventional conservative politics, and eventually began meeting with McCarthy once a week, as the pair forged a close bond, each aware of the potential benefits.McCarthy would go on to win the speakership. But his concessions to the right, personified by his promotion of Greene, have come at a cost. Already McCarthy has pursued Greene-backed, far-right strategies on vaccines and treatment of January 6 perpetrators, something that has left Greene delighted.“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Greene told the New York Times.“It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”If Greene was displaying an amount of faux humility, her conviction that she is channeling the will of the people and willingness to make it heard are a warning as to the level of influence she now wields.In her new roles Greene said she will be investigating: “How many of our enemies got pallets of cash!?” from Covid-19 unemployment benefits, a question she posed without any context or explanation, and has pledged to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his perceived failures in handling immigration.From Greene’s political position in February 2021, when she was removed from her committee assignments by Democrats – and some Republicans – in a rebuke over incendiary and racist statements, which included her posting a mocked-up image of her holding a gun next to three Democratic lawmakers, all women of color, on Facebook, it has been a remarkable turnaround.Less than two years on, Greene has taken up positions on two of the most prominent committees in the House. She has a metaphorical seat at the House speaker’s right hand, and will enjoy the visibility that all this brings.It’s a testament to how quickly things can change in politics, but also a very visible reminder of what the Republican party increasingly stands for.Greene may have sought to sanitize her image, but it is clear that her brand of populism, outrage and misinformation is not the embarrassment it once was to the party leadership: this is the modern version of the Republican party.TopicsRepublicansKevin McCarthyHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

ReviewMyth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nation Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse marshal a fine array of historians for a bestselling assault on rightwing nonsenseThis collection of essays by 21 exceptional historians has an ambitious mission: the re-education of Americans assaulted by lies more systematically than any previous generation.‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964Read moreThe editors are two Princeton history professors, Kevin M Kruse and Julian E Zelizer. They begin with a concise history of how we reached this zenith of misinformation.The assault on truth by a right-wing “media ecosystem” began with Rupert Murdoch’s invention of Fox News, augmented in recent years by even more fantasy-based cable networks like Newsmax and One America News.The shamelessness of these sham journalists was best summarized by lawyers defending the most successful one, Tucker Carlson, in a suit accusing him of slander. The preppy anchor’s statements “cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts”, they said, because he so obviously engages in “non-literal commentary”.Another foundation of the disinformation crisis was the deregulation of broadcast by the Reagan administration, which eliminated the fairness doctrine in 1987. That simple change insured the pollution of the radio airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, creating the first echo chamber.Of course, the internet allowed these waves of lies to reach warp speed, more destructive than anything humanity has experienced. In the understated description of this volume, “the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by … Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths.”These venues have given “far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans” and allowed “ordinary Americans to spread lies to one another”, instantly. “As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political problem.”The vastness of the problem is underscored by the fact that Fox News Digital ended 2022 as “the top-performing news brand” with more than 18bn multi-platform views and an average of 82.7m monthly multi-platform unique visitors. Not to mention 3.4bn Fox News views on YouTube. It was the first time Fox had surpassed CNN in these categories since 2019.The essays in Myth America attack right-wing myths about everything from immigration to Reagan. The authors were chosen in part because they are already “actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media”.In one of the very best chapters, Ari Kelman, a professor at the University of California Davis, tackles the foundational American myth: “Vanishing Indians.” He begins with the former Republican senator Rick Santorum’s assertion in 2021 that colonists arrived with a “blank slate” because there was “nothing here”. (Santorum said he had been misunderstood but was booted off CNN nonetheless.)Kelman documents how such remarks can be traced back to myths started by the New England colonists, who “systematically erased evidence of long-standing Indigenous cultures … as a way of legitimating Euro-American land claims”. Portraying native Americans as hopelessly primitive, they “turned imperial violence into innocent virtue”.The alliance of some native tribes with the British during the War of 1812 made it even easier to marginalize them. “That Indigenous peoples might disappear” began to “look like just desserts.”A counter-narrative began in the 1880s, when Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which described “robbery” and “cruelty … done under the cloak” of 100 years “of treaty-making and treaty breaking”. Hunt described the culpability of white settlers in what we now realize was genocide: “This history of the United States government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians … convicts us, as a nation” of “having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law.”Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the 1970 book by Dee Brown which sold millions, did more than any other modern work to explain how the conquering of the west was only possible because Americans assumed “treaties could be shredded” and the slaughter of Native Americans was just part of the natural order of things.The book described a vanished Native American culture, at a moment when Native Americans had experienced enough of a resurgence to become “the nation’s fastest growing minority”. As a result, “a book written to debunk one pernicious myth unwittingly reifies another, hammering home the message that by the start of the 20th century, Indians had vanished”.Another compelling chapter, The Southern Strategy, dismantles the assertion of the conservative political scientist Carol Swain “that this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth … fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists”.Written by Kruse, the chapter traces the Republican party’s decision to embrace racism to a cross-country tour in 1951 by a South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt, who was the first to propose a merger of Republicans and southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats committed to segregation. In 1952, the Republican platform endorsed every state’s right “to order and control its own domestic institutions”.The election of the Republican John Tower to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961 made him the first Republican to enter the Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction – and showed “the segregationist vote was up for grabs”.Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend “had his suit set on fire”. The Black baseball star Jackie Robinson, a longtime Republican, declared that he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany”.Goldwater was crushed by Johnson but as well as his native Arizona, he carried South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.There is a great deal more surprising, fact-based history in these 390 pages. In an era notorious for an attention span demolished by the internet, it is buoying indeed that a volume of this seriousness has spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past is published in the US by Basic Books
TopicsBooksHistory booksUS politicsUS educationHistoryreviewsReuse this content More

Joe Biden spoke with the parents of Tyre Nichols, according to the Washington Post.The paper released a brief clip of the conversation, where the president mentions how Nichols’ father is “devastated” by the death of his son, and invokes his own experience of losing a child:🚨President Biden just called Tyre Nichols’ parents. He talked to them for more than 10 minutes.”He actually tattooed my name on his arm,” his mom told Biden.”That’s what you call something special,” Biden replied. We were in the room for the call. Here’s a snippet. pic.twitter.com/0gpfU1wmv6— Emily Davies (@ELaserDavies) January 27, 2023
Earlier, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had been briefed on the video of Nichols’ beating that will be released later today, but has not seen it:.@PressSec on Tyre Nichols video expected to be released tonight says @POTUS has “been briefed, but he has not seen the video, nor has anyone at the White House seen the video.”— Allie Raffa (@AllieRaffa) January 27, 2023
Acclaimed author and anti-racism activist Ibram X Kendi has condemned the beating and death of Tyre Nichols while criticizing police brutality on Friday.In a statement on Twitter, Kendi wrote:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}“Tyre Nichols should be with us skateboarding and looking up and admiring the sunset. But instead the sadistic scourge of police violence claimed its latest innocent victim.
“The history of the police is the racist history of violence. Cops of all races have been empowered and socialized to brutalize and terrorize and exploit and sexually assault and harass and lynch people, particularly Black people with near total impunity.
“There’s no reforming an inherently violent institution with a pervasively violent history. How many more Black people have to be brutally killed before we realize the obvious? How many more? How many more?”Several groups are organizing rallies across the country tonight as Memphis police prepares to release footage of Tyre Nichols this evening. According to the Instagram accounts of various chapters of the political party PSL, or Party for Socialism and Liberation, rallies titled “Justice for Tyre Nichols” are scheduled in major cities including New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Asheville and Chicago. Meanwhile, the Youth Communist League is scheduled to host a rally in Philadelphia tonight. Other rallies are set to be held in Dallas and Washington DC. The White House has released more details of Joe Biden’s call with the family of Tyre Nichols.“President Biden spoke with Mrs RowVaughn Wells and Rodney Wells, Tyre Nichols’ mother and stepfather, this afternoon to directly express his and Dr Biden’s condolences for Tyre Nichols’ death. During the conversation, the president commended the family’s courage and strength,” a readout of the call said.The Guardian’s Maya Yang is now taking over this blog to cover the latest developments in this story.Former vice-president Mike Pence said he takes “full responsibility” for the secret materials found at his residence, CNN reports:Former Vice President Mike Pence, speaking to a crowd in Miami, says he was not aware classified documents were at his house. But he adds: “Those classified documents should not have been in my personal residence. Mistakes were made. And I take full responsibility.”— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 27, 2023
Pence’s disclosure this week that documents dating from his time in the White House under Donald Trump were discovered in his Indiana home came after both Joe Biden and Trump were found to have similar materials in their possession. Attorney general Merrick Garland has appointed two special counsels to handle the investigations of the current and ex-presidents’ documents, but hasn’t done the same for Pence.A network of racial justice activist groups is asking the public not to share footage of Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating at the hands of police, which is scheduled for release at 6 pm eastern time.Here is the message from Movement for Black Lives:Today a video of Tyre Nichols’ murder will be released. Do not share it. Do not traumatize our people further by putting it in front of us. We feel the overwhelming rage and grief without subjecting ourselves to a video of his life being taken.To protect yourself online: ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/EytQUlWvQ0— Movement 4 Black Lives (@Mvmnt4BlkLives) January 27, 2023
Separately, the Republican National Committee re-elected Ronna McDaniel as its chair, overcoming concerns about her leadership after the party underperformed in last November’s midterm elections.McDaniel’s main challenger was Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer for Donald Trump who handled his challenge to a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell and former congressman Lee Zeldin were also on the ballot, which McDaniel won easily:RNC Chair Election First Ballot Results:167 votes cast. 84 needed to win. Ronna McDaniel – 111Harmeet Dhillon – 51 Mike Lindell – 4Lee Zeldin – 1Ronna McDaniel reelected RNC Chair.Watch LIVE on C-SPAN2 https://t.co/uYWdF9rUK2— CSPAN (@cspan) January 27, 2023
Joe Biden spoke with the parents of Tyre Nichols, according to the Washington Post.The paper released a brief clip of the conversation, where the president mentions how Nichols’ father is “devastated” by the death of his son, and invokes his own experience of losing a child:🚨President Biden just called Tyre Nichols’ parents. He talked to them for more than 10 minutes.”He actually tattooed my name on his arm,” his mom told Biden.”That’s what you call something special,” Biden replied. We were in the room for the call. Here’s a snippet. pic.twitter.com/0gpfU1wmv6— Emily Davies (@ELaserDavies) January 27, 2023
Earlier, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had been briefed on the video of Nichols’ beating that will be released later today, but has not seen it:.@PressSec on Tyre Nichols video expected to be released tonight says @POTUS has “been briefed, but he has not seen the video, nor has anyone at the White House seen the video.”— Allie Raffa (@AllieRaffa) January 27, 2023
From the Capitol, Punchbowl News reports Nancy Pelosi told journalists she will not be watching the video of the attack on her husband:Nancy Pelosi says “she has absolutely no intention” of watching the attack on Paul Pelosi pic.twitter.com/vG5HMkb3XQ— Max Cohen (@maxpcohen) January 27, 2023
The top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, reacted to the release of video showing the attack on Paul Pelosi.Jeffries took over from Nancy Pelosi as the party’s leader in Congress’s lower chamber at the start of this year. Here’s what he had to say:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The violent attack on Paul Pelosi was unconscionable and his assailant must be brought to justice. We live in dangerous times of unprecedented extremism and political violence which have no place in our democracy or in the everyday lives of elected officials and their loved ones. The prayers of the Caucus, the Congress and the Country are with Paul, Speaker Emerita Pelosi and their wonderful family. May God watch over Paul in his continued recovery.Hello US live blog readers, we are continuing to follow developments in the news relating to the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis after a fatal encounter with the police – and political reaction to that and related developments in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. Please stick around as we take you into the afternoon and evening, ahead of the release later tonight of police video of what’s described as a brutal police beating of Nichols.Here’s where things stand:
Tyre Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, said at a press conference in Memphis that ended a little bit ago that she has not been able to bring herself to watch the video of her son’s beating by five police officers earlier this month, following which he died in hospital, but she’s been told it’s “very horrific” and she urged carers not to let children watch it when police release footage tonight.
FBI director Christopher Wray said he was “appalled” by video of Nichols’s beating at the hands of Memphis police, and that the bureau has opened a civil rights investigation into the fatal incident.
Footage was released of the brutal hammer attack last year on Paul Pelosi, the husband of California congresswoman and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last October. A right-wing, allegedly politically-motivated intruder broke into their home in San Francisco, with the stated intent of kidnapping Nancy, who was in Washington, DC. Instead he found Paul and attacked him.
Joe Biden sent condolences to the family of Tyre Nichols in a statement released yesterday, while issuing a vague call for “meaningful reform” of policing, an issue on which he has had mixed success during the first two years of his presidency. The US president appealed for calm at protests that are expected in several cities tonight after the video of Nichols’s beating is released.
Police body-camera video was released on Friday afternoon of the brutal hammer attack last October on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Democratic congresswomen and then House speaker Nancy Pelosi.The shocking footage shows officers arriving at the front door of the Pelosi residence in San Francisco and knocking loudly on the door.Paul Pelosi opens the door and can be seen with an intruder as the two wrestle over a hammer. Police can be heard asking “What’s going on, man?”, then they tell the suspect to drop the hammer. But he says “Nope”, then manages to grab it and swing it and, just off camera, hits Pelosi in the head.Police charge in to find Pelosi collapsed on the floor, unconscious and struggling to breathe, as they grapple with the suspect, who has fallen on the floor partially on top of Pelosi, then arrest him.Pelosi, 82, suffered a skull fracture and injuries to his hand and arm in the attack, requiring him to undergo surgery. He remained hospitalized for nearly a week as he recovered.The video was released Friday, after a state judge dismissed efforts by the San Francisco district attorney’s office to keep the footage sealed from the public. The suspect in the attack, David Wayne DePape of Canada, faces state and federal criminal charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, among others. DePape has pleaded not guilty to the charges.DePape’s comments to authorities in the wake of the attack indicated that his actions were politically motivated. In court testimony last month, a San Francisco police investigator recounted how DePape claimed there was “evil in Washington” and described his initial plans to kidnap the House speaker.She was in Washington, DC, at the time and swiftly flew back to California to be with her husband.Democrats performed better than expected last November’s midterm elections, but Republicans narrowly won control of the House of Representatives and, after a fraught election earlier this month at the start of the 118th Congress, California congressman Kevin McCarthy took over the speakership.Pelosi had announced after the midterms that she would step down from her leadership role while continuing to represent her district in Washington, and she effectively handed the baton to New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, who became House minority leader in the new congress.Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis explained that the decision to release the video of Tyre Nichols on Friday evening is to reduce the impact it may have on the surrounding communities and schools. “Friday evening will be a good time to try to get people home, try to have our children safe and have a means of being able to manage any type of response,” Davis told NBC. She added that police will be monitoring parts of Memphis and that they have increased their staffing. “We don’t want to overreact. But the reality is, is that there are individuals that may want to exercise their First Amendment right and come out and protest,” she told the outlet. “My son is looking down smiling because, you know, it’s funny, he always said he was going to be famous one day. I didn’t know this was what he meant,” RowVaughn Wells, Tyre Nichols’s mother said.“I‘ve never seen the video. But what I’ve heard is very horrific, very horrific. And any of you who have children, please don’t let them see it,” she added.“To the five police officers that murdered my son, you also disgraced your own families when you did this but … I’m going to pray for you and your families, because at the end of the day, this shouldn’t have happened. This just shouldn’t have happened. We want justice for my son, justice for my son,” she added.“We’re very satisfied with the charges,” said Tyre Nichols’s stepfather, Rodney Wells, referring to the second-degree murder charges against the five officers.“More importantly, we want peace. We do not want any type of uproar, we do not want any type of disturbance. We want peaceful protests. That’s what the family wants, that’s what the community wants,” Wells said ahead of the planned protests across the country later today as the footage of Tyre Nichols gets released.“We want to know, where are the unions? Where does the fraternal order of police unions stand on this? We want to hear…that you condemn the savagery…heinousness…brutality of this attack?” said Antonio Romanucci, one of the attorneys representing the family of Tyre Nichols. Romanucci also called upon Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis to disband the specialized police unit known as the ‘Scorpion’ unit which the five police officers were a part of. “The intent of the Scorpion unit has now been corrupted. It cannot be brought back to center with any sense of morality and dignity, and most importantly, trust in this community. How will the community ever, ever, trust a Scorpion unit?” he said. “Officers have a duty to intervene in crimes being committed, even if it’s intervening with their own officers,” Crump said, calling for legislation to be passed which would require police officers to intervene when they see their colleagues exercising excessive force.“We have never seen swift justice like this,” said Crump, referring to the five officers who have since been charged with murder. “We want to proclaim that this is the blueprint going forward for any time any officers, whether they be Black or white, will be held accountable. No longer can you tell us we got to wait six months to a year,” he added. “It is the culture that allows them to think that they can do this to Tyre,” Crump said, saying that it does not matter if the officers were Black, Hispanic or any other ethnicity. “Call out the culture, call out the culture,” he said, as family members of Nichols chanted back. “It is the institutionalized police culture that is on trial today,” he added. More

Florida Republican sends welcome grenades to fellow Congress membersInert projectiles came with a note that among other things said ‘let’s come together and get to work on behalf of our constituents’ A newly elected Florida Republican sent grenades to fellow members of Congress, prompting one aghast Democrat to say “not even George Santos could make this stuff up”.US voting rights champion Jasmine Crockett: ‘I need everyone to feel a sense of urgency’Read moreSantos is the scandal-plagued New York congressman whose largely made-up résumé and questionable finances have threatened to blow a hole in House Republicans’ narrow majority.The grenades were sent by another freshman, Cory Mills, a member of the armed services and foreign affairs committees.Stamped with a Republican elephant, the inert projectiles came with a letter in which Mills said: “It is my pleasure to give you a 40mm grenade, made for a Mk19 grenade launcher. They are manufactured in the Sunshine State and first developed in the Vietnam war.“Let’s come together and get to work on behalf of our constituents.”As pictures of the grenades spread online, a spokesman for Mills told the Washington Post: “Per the letter, the grenades are inert, and were cleared through all security metrics. I just wish they tagged our official account.”The comparison to Santos was made by congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, a member of the House intelligence committee.Mills, 42 and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, won the contest to succeed the Democrat Stephanie Murphy in Florida’s seventh district last year.Murphy was a member of the House January 6 committee. Mills is endorsed by the man who incited that deadly insurrection, Donald Trump, and supports Trump’s lie that Joe Biden won the 2020 election thanks to electoral fraud.A defense and security contractor before entering Congress, he has boasted about selling teargas used against protesters for racial justice.Weapons are banned in Congress and subject to strict restrictions in Washington DC. There is, however, an exception for members, under federal law.A spokesman for Mills told Florida media “Capitol police even escorted staff into the building” as they carried the grenades.After January 6, amid fears of congressional violence unmatched since the years before the civil war, metal detectors were installed outside the House chamber.Republicans chafed at the security measure. Andy Harris of Maryland was found to be carrying a gun near the House chamber.In 2020 a Republican from Colorado, Ken Buck, made waves when he said advocates of an assault weapons ban would have to forcibly remove an AR-15-style rifle he kept in his Washington office.Buck’s hardline posturing was undercut, however, when reporters dug up a 2015 interview in which he described the bureaucratic hoops he jumped through to have the gun in his office.“I went to the ethics committee,” he told the Post, “I got permission to accept the gift. I went to Capitol Hill police; I got permission to bring it into my office.“They went to the DC police; they got permission for me to transport it into the District [of Columbia]. I went to [the Transportation Security Administration], and followed all of the regulations in getting it on to the plane and getting it here.”The brightly painted rifle was unloaded and carried a trigger lock, even though it lacked a bolt carrier assembly and thus could not be fired.“Putting a trigger lock on an inoperable gun is like putting a chastity belt on a eunuch,” Buck said. “The only dangerous thing about that gun is if someone took it off the wall and hit somebody else over the head with it.”TopicsHouse of RepresentativesRepublicansFloridaDemocratsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

When the US Department of Justice revealed on January 21 that its investigators had found classified materials in Joe Biden’s Delaware home, there was outrage – or, to be more accurate in most cases faux outrage – in Republican party circles. They wasted no time in demanding further investigation into what appeared to be a mishandling of classified documents.

Republicans see a double opportunity in the US president’s sloppy handling of what is reported to be a small number of papers from his days as vice-president. It was a God-given opportunity to embarrass a sitting president gearing up to launch his re-election bid. But many in the GOP hoped it would also take the heat off an outwardly similar investigation into former president Donald Trump.

Trump allegedly took thousands of classified documents to his Florida home, Mar a Lago, when he left the White House in January 2021 – a matter that has been under FBI investigation since 2022.

Both the current president and his immediate predecessor have been found in possession of classified materials which should have been passed to the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara). This has been US law since the passage of the Presidential Records Act in 1978, which states that any records created or received by the president as part of his constitutional, statutory or ceremonial duties are the property of the US government, to be managed by Nara at the end of the administration.

As a result, US attorney general Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate each president’s actions. Jack Smith has been appointed to Trump’s case. Smith is a career prosecutor whose CV boasts a range of achievements including convicting gang members of killing New York cops, prosecuting a sitting US senator, and bringing war crimes cases at The Hague.

Robert Hur, the US attorney in Maryland during the Trump administration and now a litigation partner at a top Washington law firm, has been appointed to investigate Biden’s case.

While Garland has no power to indict a sitting president, the US Congress could impeach Biden if his actions are found to be a “high crime and misdemeanour”. But in Trump’s case, if he is found to have broken the Presidential Records Act after leaving office, he could face a fine or even a three-year jail term.

As you’d expect, the US media has been quick to compare Biden’s actions with those of Trump. Yet as of now, the cases appear very different.

In Biden’s case, investigators have reportedly found a very small number of papers – seemingly from his final year as vice-president – at his home and at the Penn Biden Center, a thinktank that the president founded in Washington DC. It has yet to be revealed how many documents there are or their level of classification.

As soon as they were unearthed, the Biden team handed them over to Nara and has cooperated with the authorities ever since, proactively inviting a search of Biden properties. Interestingly, a cache of similar papers has reportedly been found at the Indiana home of Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence.

The contrast with Trump is stark. He left the White House with thousands of pages of classified documents. Among the first batch recovered by Nara a year after they were discovered were documents described by national archivist Debra Steidel Wall as:

Classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials.

Rather than acquiesce to Nara’s demands under the law, Trump refused to return them, had to be raided by the FBI for the state to get them back, and then fought in court for months to keep them.

Under investigation: Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Pennsylvania.
EPA-EFE/Tracie van Auken

It’s not clear why Trump took these documents. Speculation ranges from covering his back to seeking financial gain by using the materials in post-presidential dealings. It’s also possible he may have been trying to preserve his reputation prior to launching his third bid for the presidency.

So far then, two very different actions by the two most recent incumbents of the White House. However, for all Biden’s insistence in following the process, he made one crucial political misstep that could dog the remainder of his first term in office.

Biden’s misstep

On November 2 2022, Biden’s personal lawyers found the first batch of classified documents from the Obama-Biden era locked in an office that Biden had used since leaving office.

They informed Nara the same day, and its officials took possession of the papers the following day. This was five days before the crucial US midterm elections – yet Biden did not go public about the find until January 9 2023, having been tipped off by CBS News that it was running the story.

This was manna from heaven for Republicans. The party had failed to achieve the massive gains it had expected in the midterms, and was disheartened by Trump’s lacklustre return to the campaign trail. Biden’s approval rating, meanwhile, had ticked up six points from a July 2022 low of 38%. So, with new House speaker Kevin McCarthy in place, it was a chance to raise a stink in Congress at the very least.

Why did Biden wait? Undoubtedly, he recalled the devastation to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid when the then FBI director, James Comey, announced a week before the election that he had reopened the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server to send classified emails while secretary of state, potentially breaking the Federal Records Act of 1950.

While Comey confirmed to Congress two days before the election that Clinton had no case to answer, the damage was done. Clearly Biden didn’t relish his own Clinton moment as a knife-edge midterm approached.

It is unlikely Biden will face charges over the papers found so far. But the discovery of any more caches of documents would be highly damaging for the president. And that’s the last thing the Democrats need if he plans to run in what is likely to be a close and rancorous 2024 election. More

In the end there was no red wave. And there was no blue wave.

There was an independent wave.

Pollsters and pundits were counting on independent voters in the 2022 midterm elections to swing to the Republicans as they did in 2014 when Barack Obama was president. That’s when independent turnout in the midterms added up to 29% of all voters, and the GOP won an additional 13 seats in Congress.

Expectations for the 2022 midterm elections also were based on a similar pattern in the 2018 midterms, when Donald Trump was president. Independents then represented 30% of the voters, and they broke for Democrats 54% to 42%.

Almost the mirror image. But mirrors don’t always reflect reality.

Ongoing surveys by the Gallup organization show that self-identified independents have averaged 42% of the U.S. public over the past year. Their influence was felt in the 2022 midterms.

Nationally, these nonaligned voters were 31% of voters in the 2022 midterm. Despite the fact that the sitting president was a Democrat, they broke for Democrats by 2 percentage points, according to Edison Research Survey. They voted for Democrats by far bigger margins in key states with competitive Senate races – by 20 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 11 percentage points in Georgia and 16 percentage points in Arizona, where independents were fully 40% of those who voted.

Independent voters in the 2022 midterms made a decisive difference in close elections.

This came as a surprise to many pollsters and pundits who had predicted that independents would break for the GOP. They chalked up the pro-Democratic leanings of these unaligned voters to independents’ distrust of Republicans’ eclipsing their anxiety and distrust about inflation and the economy.

Maybe so. But as someone who studies independent voters in the U.S., I believe pollsters got it wrong because so little is known about the voting patterns of independent voters.

The continuing flight of millions of voters from the Republican and Democratic parties is reshaping the nation’s political landscape in ways no one can control or even predict. It threatens the very basis on which campaigns and elections have been analyzed.

This is a challenge to how America has for generations thought about politics: that it’s a two-party game and people vote for the party they’re loyal to. With growing numbers of independent voters, that’s changing.

Independent voters made a decisive difference in close elections in the 2022 midterms.
iStock / Getty Images Plus

Independent voters or shadow partisans?

As outlined in our recently released book, “The Independent Voter,” my co-authors Jacqueline Salit and Omar Ali and I outline how political scientists and the media have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of independent voters. They often conclude that independents are uninformed, uninvolved “leaners” or “shadow partisans” who are likely voters for Democrats or Republicans but just don’t want to say so out loud.

We believe that conclusion is based on the two-party bias that is baked into the U.S. political system. That bias has misshaped the research and analytical tools used to understand this community of Americans.

A fundamental misunderstanding

Beginning in 1952, when individuals identified themselves to pollsters and researchers as independent voters, they were then asked a follow-up question: Did they prefer one party over the other?

Since most independents indicated a lean toward one of the two major political parties’ candidates, political scientists have labeled them as “leaners,” independents who are likely to vote for one party or another. Political scientists also created a category called the “pure independent,” which was used to describe the fewer than 10% of people who truly refused to say whether they leaned one way or another.

Based on our research, we believe that this conclusion is a fundamental misunderstanding of independent voters and their voting patterns. This misunderstanding has led to mistaken assumptions about this growing population of U.S. citizens who have chosen to distance themselves from the two major parties.

Currently, 42% of Americans identify as independents. This is the highest percentage of independents in more than 75 years of public opinion polling. They rarely numbered more than 20% of voters from 1940 to 1960.

Independents move around

The choice to identify as an independent is a meaningful one, especially so in these politically hyperpolarized times, when many Americans do not feel or no longer feel at home in either party.

This is the reason Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema gave for her December 2022 decision to change her party affiliation from Democrat to independent. Sinema said she believes that “[e]veryday Americans are increasingly left behind by national parties’ rigid partisanship, which has hardened in recent years. Pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges, allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities.”

Surprisingly, little research has been done to investigate the meaning and culture of political independence, including very basic research into independent voting patterns over time.

U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, right, with GOP Sen. Susan Collins from Maine in the background, announced in December 2022 that she had left the Democratic Party and become an independent.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

In our recently published research in the journal Politics & Policy, my colleague Dan Hunting and I analyzed American National Election Studies data on political identification and voting choices from 1972 to 2020.

We observed significant volatility in loyalty to party among independent voters over more than one election. We found that independent voters were not reliably tied in their votes to one party or the other. From one election to another, they voted for Democrats, then Republicans and back again.

We also found evidence that a sizable number of independents move in and out of independent status from one election to another and in many cases actually register as members of one party or another, sometimes differently from one election to the next.

We suspect this a function of the political candidates running at any given time. It also reflects the fact that many states don’t allow independents to vote in primaries, or otherwise restrict their participation in primaries by requiring them to choose a major party ballot in order to vote. Currently, independents are barred or restricted from primary voting in half the states. And a sizable number of independents are similarly locked out of presidential primaries and caucus voting.

They’re unpredictable

Why does this matter?

We believe that classifying independent leaners as Republicans or Democrats mischaracterizes the partisanship of Americans and overestimates the rate of party voting. Most studies that find leaners are partisans simply do not account for a sizable number of independents who move in and out of independent status. Those studies also do not account for the voting patterns of independents over time.

In our research, we found that independents who vote as Democrats or Republicans in one election are often less likely to vote that way in the next election.

Which party’s candidates or initiatives they vote for often depends on specific candidates or issues on the ballot and on the political circumstances of any given election cycle.

Consequently, independents may have voted against the party in power in midterm elections for a decade. But when circumstances and options change, their voting patterns change, too.

This may well turn out to be a defining feature of being an independent: that individual candidates, issues and the broader social environment – not party loyalty – drive their choices.

Unpredictability characterizes independent voters in modern times. This is what gives them their power – and it is why a deeper understanding of this group is urgently needed. More

Revealed: Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’ Funding for controversial review of state’s vote count in 2020 election can be traced to former president’s PacOne of the enduring mysteries surrounding the chaotic attempts to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential battle has been solved: who made a secret $1m donation to the controversial election “audit” in Arizona?The identity of one of the largest benefactors behind the discredited review of Arizona’s vote count has been shrouded in secrecy. Now the Guardian can reveal that the person who partially bankrolled the failed attempt to prove that the election was stolen from Trump was … Trump.Documented logoAn analysis by the watchdog group Documented has traced funding for the Arizona audit back to Trump’s Save America Pac. The group tracked the cash as it passed from Trump’s fund through an allied conservative group, and from there to a shell company which in turn handed the money to contractors and individuals involved in the Arizona audit.Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that led the Arizona audit, disclosed in 2021 that $5.7m of its budget came from several far-right groups invested in the “stop the steal” campaign to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory. It was later divulged that a further $1m had supported the audit from an account controlled by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican election lawyer who advised Trump as he plotted to subvert the 2020 election.But who gave the $1m to Mitchell? In September 2021, as Cyber Ninjas was preparing to deliver its findings, the New York Times reported that unnamed “officials” had denied that Trump had played any part in securing the funds.Republican leaders of the Arizona senate who asked Cyber Ninjas to carry out the audit also publicly denied that Trump was involved, saying “this absolutely has nothing to do with Trump”.Documented’s analysis pierces through that denial. Basing its research on corporate, tax and campaign finance filings, as well as emails and text messages obtained by the non-partisan accountability group American Oversight through public records requests, the watchdog has followed the money on its circuitous journey from the former US president’s Pac to the Arizona review.‘Highly hypocritical’Cyber Ninjas’ widely lambasted inquiry was focused on Maricopa county, Arizona’s most populated area. Biden won the county by 45,109 votes.The purported investigation was suffused with wild conspiracy theories, including the claim that bamboo fibers found in ballot sheets proved they had been printed in Asia. The review was decried even by local Republicans as a “grift disguised as an audit”.Arizona: elections director in county that refused to certify results quitsRead moreBill Gates, the Republican vice-chair of the Maricopa county board of supervisors at the time of the Cyber Ninjas audit, said he was “disappointed, but not surprised” by the Guardian’s revelation that Trump had helped to pay for it. “I have no problem with audits,” Gates said.“What I have a problem with is an audit that is undertaken with a goal in mind, and that is literally being funded by one of the candidates. This is absolutely what we do not want to happen.”Gates pointed out that under Arizona law, electoral candidates are not allowed to fund vote recounts which have to be financed with taxpayer dollars. Though the Cyber Ninjas review was technically not a recount, it served a similar purpose.“At the very least, it is highly hypocritical for the Arizona state senate to have allowed the audit to be funded in this fashion,” Gates said.Diagram of the flow of money and communication that led to Donald Trump’s super Pac paying $1m to the Arizona 2020 election auditThe money trail exposed by Documented begins with Trump’s loosely regulated leadership Pac, Save America, which raised millions in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat on the back of the false election fraud narrative. In its final report released in December, the bipartisan January 6 committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol highlighted how Save America Pac gave $1m to the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).The committee did not say what the money was for, or where it ended up.Top CPI officials include Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, along with other senior Trump insiders after they left the White House. The organization is developing a political infrastructure to sustain the former president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement.Documented’s research shows that discussions around a possible payment from Trump to the Arizona audit began in June 2021. Records obtained by American Oversight reveal that on 27 June, the retired army colonel and arch election denier Phil Waldron texted the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, Doug Logan, saying: “Kurt is going to talk to 45 today about $$.”The “45” in the text is a reference to Trump – the 45th president of the US – and “Kurt” may have been a reference to the election-denying lawyer Kurt Olsen. Waldron added: “Mike L talking to Corey L” – alluding to Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow who is a devotee of Trump’s stolen election lie, and the former Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.On 16 July 2021, Waldron asked Logan if he had received “a 1mil [payment] from Corey Lewendowsk [sic]”. He went on: “Supposedly Kurt talked to trump and they got 1 mil for you,” but that “I couldn’t verify who sent and who received.”Logan responded that he had not yet received payment from Trump.Ten days later, on 26 July 2021, Trump’s Save America Pac made its $1m transfer to CPI, according to Federal Election Commission records. Two days after that, on 28 July, a new group called the American Voting Rights Foundation (AVRF) was registered as a corporation in Delaware.Tax filings obtained recently show that CPI in turn gave $1m to AVRF in 2021 – the only known donation that the group has ever received. The date of CPI’s donation to AVRF is not a matter of public record, but other details – including CPI’s relationship with AVRF, the timing and amounts of the known transfers, and the discussion among Trump allies about the former president’s plans to give $1m to the audit 10 days before Trump gave $1m to CPI – clearly indicate that it was the money that came from Trump’s Pac.Arizona’s new attorney general to use election fraud unit to boost voting rightsRead moreRecords obtained by American Oversight showed that AVRF was connected to Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who is now a senior fellow at CPI. She is best known for having taken part in the infamous phone call in January 2021 that is now being weighed by an Atlanta prosecutor, in which Trump tried to pressure Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes” needed for him to win.Documented has discovered that the ties between CPI and AVRF went even deeper. CPI entities effectively controlled AVRF.Tax records show that AVRF’s “direct controlling entity” is America First Legal, the CPI-launched project led by Trump’s former speechwriter Stephen Miller. Tax records also show that another CPI project, the Center for Renewing America, lists AVRF as one of its “related organizations”.The final stage in the money’s journey was from AVRF to Cyber Ninjas and the audit itself. The same day that AVRF was registered in Delaware – 28 July 2021 – Mitchell sent an email connecting the Cyber Ninjas CEO Logan, together with the spokesman of the audit Randy Pullen, to AVRF’s treasurer, Tom Datwyler.The email, contained in the documents obtained by American Oversight, spelled out that money was about to be transferred from AVRF to Arizona contractors approved by Cyber Ninjas.The last step was recorded in an email sent the following day, 29 July, in which Mitchell itemized $1m split into three separate payments going to two entities supporting the audit and to individuals “working at the audit site”. CPI’s president, Ed Corrigan, is cc’ed on the email.The money had reached its destination, with no Trump fingerprints anywhere in sight.The Guardian has invited both Save America Pac and CPI to comment but they did not immediately respond.‘Counter to transparency’A final mystery remains: why would Trump and his inner circle go to such lengths to keep the former president’s bankrolling of the audit secret? One theory is that Trump might have been worried that the audit would look less credible should he be seen to be funding it.Another possible scenario is that he feared that the review might prove to be such a shambles that he wanted to keep his distance.On Thursday, the Arizona Republic reported further fresh evidence that despite the denials Trump was intimately involved in the audit. New records obtained by the newspaper show that Trump was being directly informed about the progress of the audit as it was being conducted.‘I see things now that I’ve never seen before’: the Maricopa county attorney fighting false election claimsRead moreNewly released messages from the Cyber Ninjas chief Logan also show that he discussed the need for any Trump donation to be made in secret. “I told them there was no way I could take funds directly,” he said in a private digital chat.In the end, the Cyber Ninjas audit not only lacked credibility, it also spectacularly failed to meet its goal. In September 2021, the firm released the results of its investigation and found that Biden had indeed won Maricopa county by 360 more votes than the official count.No conclusive evidence of fraud was uncovered, and the claims raised by the audit were thoroughly debunked in a 93-page report. Cyber Ninjas went out of business in January 2022.Gates, the Maricopa county supervisor, said that a large portion of the $1m that ended up with the Arizona audit would have come from small donations to Trump’s Pac.“It’s sad that so many small donors had their money used for this effort, and Trump’s attempt to hide that was certainly counter to transparency.”This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is a campaign finance specialist with DocumentedTopicsDonald TrumpThe fight for democracyArizonaUS politicsUS political financingRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

InterviewUS voting rights champion Jasmine Crockett: ‘I need everyone to feel a sense of urgency’Kira LernerThe congresswoman reflects on a whirlwind rise from Texas politics to Washington, and her hopes of passing a critical bill In July 2021, Jasmine Crockett entered the US Capitol for the first time. Then a state representative, Crockett was a lead architect of Texas Democrats’ unprecedented plans to board a flight and travel to Washington to break quorum in Texas and block Republicans from enacting the voting restrictions they were steamrolling in the state.Less than two years later, Crockett came back to the Capitol, this time to be sworn in to the House of Representatives – one of 22 women and 13 women of color in the class of 74 new freshmen.Back in her district in Dallas for the first time since officially becoming a member of Congress, Crockett has had to hit the ground running. “I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” she told the Guardian in a phone interviewy. “Everybody wants to get their meetings in, and I’m like, ‘Guys, we have a full two years. And it’s not like we’re going to be that legislatively aggressive this season, so we’ve got time.’”Will this Ohio judge’s retirement spell the end of fair elections in the state?Read moreCrockett saw her opening to join Congress in November 2021, when the Dallas Democratic congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson announced her retirement after almost three decades. Four days later, Crockett announced she would run for her seat, with Johnson’s support. She won the primary in May by over 20 points thanks to the name recognition and political prominence she earned by leading the plans to break quorum. Supporting a range of progressive policies from healthcare to workers’ rights, she went on to easily secure the seat in the solidly Democratic district in November.Coming into a chamber with a slim Republican majority, Crockett said she knows it will be important to keep the pressure on voting rights reform.A civil rights attorney and former public defender, Crockett was labeled the most liberal member of the Texas house in her freshman year. In her first year, she introduced more than 60 bills, including measures to create online voter registration and same day voter registration, increase ballot drop boxes, permanently allow drive-thru voting, and allow voters to vote in primaries if they turn 18 in time for the general election.None of her bills passed, but she made a name for herself as a defender of voting rights, which she has called the “modern-day civil rights movement”.Crockett said she came to voting rights accidentally. When she was a student at the University of Houston Law Center, she was late to sign up for a seminar class “so all of the ‘good ones’ were gone”, she said. She ended up in an election law seminar, and remembers thinking: “What am I going to do with this?”“Little did I know,” she said. “I always tell people that God had this amazing, beautiful plan that I was definitely not clued in on.”She wrote her final paper on felony disenfranchisement laws and their Jim Crow-era roots, a topic that got her thinking about the racist history of US voting policy. After law school, she volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign and was inspired to become engaged beyond her work as a public defender. “Obama made me feel like we could all fly,” she said. She became chair of the Democratic party in Texarkana, Texas, and worked to make sure that people waiting for trial in jail knew they were eligible to vote.Her next foray into voting rights came after she was elected to the Texas legislature and assumed office in January 2021. That session, Republicans prioritized pushing through legislation to protect “election integrity”, capitalizing on former president Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud. Crockett quickly found herself on the defensive, given the importance of defending Texans’ voting rights.But she would soon meet the legislative brick wall that was state representative Briscoe Cain, a conservative attorney who helped Trump attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Cain chaired the House’s elections committee in 2021 and blocked Democratic-sponsored bills.When asked what it was like to propose dozens of bills to protect voting but to watch them all fail, Crockett laughed. “Is this your way of asking me what it feels like to be a loser?“No, listen,” she said. “I went in and I told people all the time that I was green and I was excited and I was believing, and the Texas house has a way of showing you the realities of what it is to be in Texas.”After Republicans initially failed in an attempt to pass a sweeping bill they said would protect against widespread voter fraud, Governor Greg Abbott called a special session for July to address voting. Crockett said she knew then that it was time to take extreme action on behalf of her majority non-white constituents.“I always describe the Texas house as a kind of abusive relationship, and there are those that have gotten used to the abuse and conditioned – meaning senior members – and then there’s me, who’s hit over the head for the first time,” she said. She described Republicans’ effort to pass an omnibus restrictive voting bill as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.Though getting a large enough group of colleagues in agreement to take action took some time and negotiating, Crockett said she was grateful that the conversations happened. According to Texas House rules, at least two-thirds of the chamber’s 150 members must be present to conduct business – Crockett said they reached a point where there was enough interest to officially break quorum.Eventually, Crockett and a group of Democratic lawmakers chartered the plane to take them to Washington, where they held protests and met with members of Congress. Crockett spent weeks in the capital, refusing to return to Austin even as some of her colleagues struck deals to come back home.Now back in Washington, Crockett has no illusions about the possibility of passing an omnibus voting rights bill in this Congress. Despite the Democrats controlling the House for the last two years, their efforts to enact voting rights legislation were blocked in the Senate, where the party didn’t have a filibuster-proof majority.But she does see some room for compromise.“I am going to try to attack this from a very simple, singular, non-omnibus way,” she said. “Something simple like online voter registration is where I’m going to start.”Currently, 42 states and Washington DC allow people to register to vote online, but Texas is one of the small number that still don’t allow it, though lawmakers of both parties have shown support of moving it through the legislature. She said the infrastructure exists nationally to expand online voter registration across the nation. “We wouldn’t be burdening the states,” she said.She also said she plans to introduce legislation to allow young people to vote in primaries if they turn 18 by the time of the general election.While Crockett is in DC now, she’s still worried about what her former colleagues are doing in the legislature. Texas Republicans have introduced dozens of bills that would make voting more difficult, including one proposal that would give the attorney general power to prosecute alleged instances of voter fraud.“There is no reason for the AG’s office to handle these cases,” she said, adding that she knew it was part of a larger plan to “specifically target the large urban centers and those areas that make up the majority of the color in the state of Texas”.“They will pick on them and they will try to make sure that they’ve got an example so that more people of color are intimidated and afraid to go to the polls because even if they make a mistake, they can potentially go to prison,” she said.Crockett often compares the modern-day struggle for voting rights with the civil rights era. A few days after Martin Luther King Day, she lamented that there’s no one figure right now organizing people and pushing them to fight for their rights.“I need everybody in this country to feel a sense of urgency,” she said, especially during elections. “I need you to say, ‘I know I’m standing here for hours, but I have to because John Lewis marched and almost died just so I can have a chance to stand here.”TopicsUS newsThe fight for democracyUS politicsTexasDemocratsHouse of RepresentativesinterviewsReuse this content More