US Politics

Pronoun fines and jail time for librarians: Republicans target LGBTQ+ rights with new lawsMore than 100 laws targeting LGBTQ+ communities have been filed across the US as attacks persist Several anti-LGBTQ+ laws are being passed or proposed across the US as political attacks against the communities continue.In North Dakota, conservative lawmakers have introduced at least eight laws targeting LGBTQ+ communities, many of which target transgender people.Republican legislators introduce new laws to crack down on drag shows Read moreOne bill, rejected on Friday, mandated people affiliated with schools or institutions receiving public funding having to pay a $1,500 fine for using gender pronouns other than those assigned at birth for themselves or others, the Grand Forks Herald reported.Many in the state’s senate judiciary committee that voted down the bill noted that they agreed with the bill’s intention to limit transgender rights, but they felt that the bill was poorly written and difficult to enforce, according to ABC News.Christina Sambor of the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition testified against the bill on Wednesday, noting that “its very purpose is gender-based discrimination”, ABC reported.In a separate proposal, Republicans lawmakers introduced a bill to ban “sexually explicit” materials from libraries, with possible jail time for librarians that do not comply.Under house bill 1205, public libraries could no longer provide books on a range of topics, including any on “sexual identity”, and/or “gender identity”, the LGBTQ+ magazine Them reported.North Dakota has long been problematic to LGBTQ+ communities. The state was among the last to recognizesame-sex marriage.In the US, several states have filed over 100 laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, NBC News reported. Such bills have targeted almost all aspects of life, ranging from sports to healthcare to education.Texas has filed the most anti-LGBTQ+ laws, a total of 36. Missouri has introduced or passed 26 bills, followed by North Dakota, and Oklahoma with six.Several states have attempted to limit gender-affirmative healthcare options for transgender people.West Virginia lawmakers advanced a bill last Thursday that would ban doctors from performing gender-affirmative surgery on transgender youth, a proposal that many in the medical community and advocates have decried as transphobic and unnecessary.“This doesn’t help anybody,” the Democratic representative Mike Pushkin said to West Virginia’s state house health and human resources committee. “This is just an insult to people who are already marginalized.”In Mississippi, state house legislators passed a bill that bans physicians from administering gender-affirmative care to people under 18, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal reported.Last year, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, faced nationwide outrage after instructing the state’s child protection services to investigate any parents providing their children with gender-affirming care, accusing them of “abuse”.Florida has initiated a number of anti-LGBTQ+ laws since the passage of what has been coined as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.That state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has targeted gender-affirmative healthcare at Florida universities. The DeSantis administration issued a blanket request to 12 Florida universities, asking for information on the number of students diagnosed with gender dysphoria or receiving on-campus treatments, Politico reported.His office has not elaborated on what will be done with the collected data but noted that it was for “governing institutional resources and protecting the public interest”.Republican lawmakers have also taken actions to crack down on drag shows.Lawmakers in at least eight states have taken steps to either restrict or ban drag shows, with at least 14 states introducing such bills.Drag show performances across the country have faced increasing violence from anti-drag protests. In December, an anti-drag protest with 500 participants targeted a public library in the Queens borough where drag queens were reading books to children, NBC News reported.Cities in Illinois and California reported protests, with participants shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs at drag queens participating in similar story times, according to the Associated Press.TopicsLGBTQ+ rightsUS politicsNorth DakotanewsReuse this content More

Ruben Gallego to run for Arizona Senate seat held by Kyrsten SinemaDemocratic congressman and ex-marine faces potential three-way race with newly declared independent and a Republican next year The Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona announced on Monday that he will run for the Senate, teeing up a potential battle against incumbent Senator Kyrsten Sinema next year.Gallego, a marine combat veteran who has served in the House of Representatives since 2015, made the widely expected announcement in a campaign video that was filmed in his Phoenix area congressional district.Kyrsten Sinema goes independent days after Democrats secure Senate majorityRead moreIn the video, Gallego explains his unlikely journey to the House as the son of an immigrant mother who struggled to make ends meet. If elected, Gallego, who is of Mexican and Colombian descent, would be the first Latino to represent Arizona in the Senate.“Growing up poor, the only thing I really had was the American dream,” Gallego says. “I’m running to be the senator of Arizona because you deserve somebody fighting for you and fighting with you every day to make sure you have the same chance at el sueño americano.”The announcement comes after months of speculation. Whispers of Gallego’s plans grew louder last month, when Sinema announced she would switch her party affiliation from Democratic to independent, although she continues to caucus with Senate Democrats.“At a time when our nation needs leadership most, Arizona deserves a voice that won’t back down in the face of struggle,” Gallego said at the time. “Unfortunately Senator Sinema is once again putting her own interests ahead of getting things done for Arizonans.”Sinema has not yet officially announced whether she will seek re-election. If she does choose to run as an independent, it could set up a three-way race between Sinema, Gallego and a Republican. It is unclear who the Republican nominee will be, although the former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is reportedly considering entering the race. According to the Washington Post, Lake plans to make a final decision at the conclusion of her current court case, which centers on baseless claims of election fraud in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race.One of Gallego’s potential opponents for the Democratic nomination, congressman Greg Stanton, announced on Thursday that he will not run for the Senate seat. Democrats have notched some important wins in Arizona in recent years, but their candidates have frequently won by narrow margins. Joe Biden carried the state by just 0.3 points in 2020.Some party members fear that Sinema and Gallego may split the Democratic vote in the event of a three-way race. A recent survey conducted by Public Policy Polling on behalf of Gallego’s campaign showed him running neck and neck with Lake in a hypothetical matchup, while Sinema trailed in a distant third.The National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, mockingly celebrated Gallego’s entry into the race on Monday. The group released a statement attacking Gallego’s “radical” views on immigration, and questioning whether the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, will back Sinema if she runs for re-election.“The Democrat civil war is on in Arizona,” NRSC spokesperson Philip Letsou said.Gallego would probably enter the general election with strong support from progressives, who have repeatedly attacked Sinema over her close ties to Wall Street. Over the past decade, Sinema has received at least $1.5m in campaign contributions from private equity professionals, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists, and progressives say those donors’ policy preferences have substantially affected the senator’s voting record.When Democrats were debating the Inflation Reduction Act last year, Sinema successfully lobbied against increasing the tax on carried interest, which are profits collected by private equity executives. A year earlier, Sinema reportedly pushed to raise the income threshold for a new tax on the wealthiest Americans from $5m to $10m.Most recently, Sinema caught flak for traveling to Davos, Switzerland, to attend the World Economic Forum last week. During one panel discussion, Sinema and fellow senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat of West Virginia, shared a high five over protecting the Senate filibuster, a chamber rule that Republicans have repeatedly used to block key pieces of Biden’s legislative agenda.“As she jet-sets with the international elite and does favors for her Wall Street donors at the expense of working Arizona taxpayers, Kyrsten Sinema shows us daily that she is only out for herself, and it’s time for new leadership,” said Sacha Haworth, a spokesperson for the Replace Sinema campaign at the progressive Change for Arizona 2024 Pac.Gallego joined in on criticizing Sinema over her Davos appearance, accusing her of neglecting her duties to Arizonans.“Kyrsten Sinema hasn’t held a town hall in Arizona for years,” Gallego said on Twitter last week. “Instead, she flies to Switzerland for a town hall with the rich and powerful. Not a Joke!”The tweet included a link to donate to Gallego’s potential Senate campaign, although he had not yet officially announced his intention to run. As of late last year, Gallego’s House campaign committee had $1.1m on hand, and he can now use that money for his Senate race.TopicsArizonaDemocratsUS politicsKyrsten SinemaUS SenatenewsReuse this content More

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The discovery of batches of classified documents on Joe Biden’s property presents a headache for the president – but his case is quite different from that of Donald Trump, reports David Smith in Washington

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American presidents face many era-defining challenges: wars, pandemics, recessions. But one that gets less attention seems to keep haunting them: paperwork. Last November, at Joe Biden’s thinktank in Washington DC, aides to the US president were packing up and they found something that shouldn’t have been there: a stash of classified documents. As David Smith tells Michael Safi, that was not the end of the matter. A further search of Biden’s property turned up more secret documents that needed to be handed over to the national archives. It’s left Biden with a legal headache, but perhaps more pressing: a political one. The revelations have been leapt upon by supporters of Donald Trump, wasting no time in calling for Biden to face the same scrutiny as the former president, whose own home was raided by the FBI after ignoring demands to hand over documents he had taken without authorisation. Read more: Justice department finds more classified documents at Joe Biden’s home Biden, Trump and two very different classified document scandals, explained There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald Trump More

Is Joe Biden a viable candidate for 2024?Robert ReichThe discussion about Biden’s re-election conflates five different questions. Let’s look at them one by one Reports that justice department investigators on Friday seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, from President Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Delaware – including documents from his time as a senator and others from his time as vice-president – have shaken Washington, worrying some Democrats about Biden’s viability as a candidate in 2024.The imminent departure of Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, is also being read as a sign that Biden and his administration are turning a corner – reviving questions about whether the 80-year-old president should run again.But the discussion about Biden’s re-election conflates five different questions. Reporters, pollsters and pundits continue to confuse them. A clear-eyed view requires that the five be addressed separately.1. Has Biden done a good job so far?My answer is, by and large, yes. He wasn’t able to achieve nearly everything he aimed for when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, but Democrats held only a razor’s edge majority against an increasingly rabid Republican party, and Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema put up additional roadblocks.Biden’s accomplishments on the economy, climate, infrastructure and defending democracy have been significant nonetheless – far more significant than his lapses on withdrawing from Afghanistan and mistakenly keeping some classified documents.While not a stirring speaker or a charismatic public presence, he has shown steadiness and resolve. And he has staffed his administration with highly capable and dedicated people.2. Should he run again if he wants to?Almost certainly. Unless a president commits such heinous acts in the first term that their party can’t possibly support his re-election, an incumbent president always has the prerogative of running for a second term.Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’ll get a free pass for the nomination (recall Senators Eugene McCarthy’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assaults on Lyndon B Johnson and Teddy Kennedy’s bid against Jimmy Carter). But I don’t see a serious Democratic opponent on the horizon. Biden should have a straight shot.3. If not Biden, who?This is a trick question because as long as Biden says he’ll be the Democratic nominee, other highly qualified Democrats are unlikely to identify themselves. There’s still time for them to do so if Biden steps aside.Two years before they were elected president, few people had heard of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. But unless Biden announces within the next six months or so that he won’t be running again, it will be difficult for potentially attractive Democratic candidates to gain enough traction to have a good chance in 2024.4. Will Biden be the best candidate to beat Trump or whomever else Republicans are likely to nominate, given his age?This is a very tough call. Last year a New York Times/Siena College poll showed nearly two-thirds of Democrats didn’t want Biden to run again, and concerns about his age ranked at the top of the list. Younger people were even more adamant that Biden is too old.To be sure, he’s beaten Trump once, which would suggest he can do it again. And a sitting president has many advantages over a non-incumbent.But Trump will almost certainly frame the election just as Trump frames everything else – strength versus weakness – and will use Biden’s age against him (even though Trump is only four years younger). If the Republicans put up a younger candidate, the age issue will loom even larger.5. Would he be a capable leader of the United States when he’s in his mid-80s?I’ve had the privilege of working with four presidents, and I can tell you from my experience and observation that the job of the American presidency is physically and mentally grueling, even for people in their 40s, 50s and 60s.If re-elected, Biden would be 86 at the end of his second term. That’s deeply worrying, given what we know about the natural decline of the human brain and body. This isn’t an “ageist” prejudice against those who have reached such withering heights so much as an understanding that people in their mid-80s do wither.My bottom line: (1) Yes, (2) Yes, (3) We can’t know, (4) Doubtful, (5) Almost certainly no.In the months ahead, each of these five questions needs to be thoroughly debated.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley
TopicsJoe BidenOpinionUS politicscommentReuse this content More

AnalysisHow the US far right and progressives ended up agreeing on military spending cutsJoan E GreveProgressives and ‘America first’ Republicans in Congress both want to re-examine US military budget – but for vastly different reasons Progressives have recently found themselves in an unfamiliar position: in agreement with members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.Some of the latter caucus’s members have recently called for re-examining the amount of money spent by the US military, echoing demands that progressives have issued for years. Although progressives are clear-eyed about their ideological differences with “America first” Republicans on foreign policy, they encourage a renewed debate over the Pentagon’s budget.McCarthy may be speaker, but Trump is the real leader of House RepublicansRead more“The idea that effective American foreign policy requires this [level of spending], I think, is not only wrong,” said Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to progressive senator Bernie Sanders, “it’s just absurd and unsustainable.”The Freedom Caucus reportedly pushed for spending cuts as part of their negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, who offered concessions to fellow Republicans to secure the House speakership earlier this month. One of those concessions involved a promise to cap fiscal year 2024 discretionary spending at fiscal year 2022 levels, after Republicans expressed outrage over the $1.76tn omnibus funding bill that Joe Biden signed into law last month.If such a fiscal policy were evenly applied to all federal agencies, the department of defense would see its budget cut by $75bn compared with this fiscal year.That possibility has simultaneously sowed division among House Republicans and attracted the interest of progressives. They hope the latest dust-up over the Pentagon’s budget will spark what they consider to be an overdue conversation over US defense spending, which will hit a record high of $858bn this fiscal year. Among House Republicans, the proposal to cut the Pentagon’s budget has won some support from far-right members who have embraced Donald Trump’s “America first” approach to foreign policy. Speaking to Fox News this month, Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of the Republican holdouts in the speakership battle, partly blamed the Pentagon’s large budget on America’s financial assistance to Ukraine amid its war against Russia.“We can defend this country and project power more efficiently and more effectively than we do,” Gaetz said. “How about we start with Ukraine?”McCarthy himself previously promised that Republicans would not provide a “blank check” to Ukraine if they won back the House. But aid to Ukraine has continued to win bipartisan support in Congress.“I do not see that money getting taken away from us,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said earlier this month. “It is there. It is rock solid through nearly all or all of 2023.”McCarthy has expressed openness to examining the Pentagon’s budget, but the proposal has stoked outrage among many of the more hawkish members of his conference. Republican congressman Tony Gonzales of Texas cited the potential cuts to explain his opposition to the House rules package, saying he thought the proposal was a “horrible idea”.“How am I going to look at our allies in the eye and say, I need you to increase your defense budget, but yet America is going to decrease ours?” Gonzales told CBS News.Republicans’ dysfunction over speaker threatens the health of US governmentRead moreWhile a number of House Democrats have joined Gonzales in rejecting the idea of defense spending cuts, the idea of reconsidering the Pentagon’s budget has long held sway with progressives. When Biden called for an increase in funding for the defense department last year, leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus attacked the proposal as “simply unacceptable”. Progressive activists and their congressional allies note that the US military has a larger budget than the next nine largest militaries combined and urged lawmakers to reallocate some of that funding to other needs, such as healthcare or education.“For far too long, we have blindly and excessively pumped money into the Pentagon, which – despite its massive budget – has yet to pass an audit,” said the progressive congresswoman Barbara Lee, who has long championed fiscal reform at the defense department. “Imagine what we could do with even a fraction of [the Pentagon’s funding]. We need to rethink our foreign policy priorities and invest in diplomacy first and defense second.”Ro Khanna, a progressive congressman from California, said he would welcome a bipartisan conversation about the Pentagon’s budget, but he rejected Republicans’ efforts to tie spending cuts to the looming fight over the debt ceiling. The US hit its debt limit this month, and the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has warned that the government is at risk of defaulting this summer if Congress does not increase its borrowing capacity – a move that would have catastrophic effects on the US economy. Democrats fear that House Republicans will attempt to extract concessions on government spending in exchange for helping to raise the debt ceiling.“I do not support any debate on spending demands that threaten a debt-ceiling showdown. If Republicans want to have conversations about future defense cuts that are strategic, then I am open to that,” Khanna told the Guardian. “While I support the funding for Ukraine’s defense, we need to take ourselves off the path to a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.”Progressive advocates similarly rejected the notion that the US must choose between cutting the Pentagon’s budget and supporting Ukraine. Stephen Miles, president of the progressive group Win Without War, blamed the Pentagon’s ballooning budget on ineffective weapons systems and excessive contracts to private companies, which have accounted for as much as half of US defense spending in recent years.“The spending on Ukraine is not what’s driving the Pentagon’s growth,” Miles said. “We’re talking about major weapon systems procurement; we’re talking about private service contracting. We’re talking about a lot of things that aren’t being driven by Ukraine.”Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the war in Ukraine should not prevent any debate over defense spending. He noted that politicians like Sanders and Lee have demanded reductions in the Pentagon’s budget for years, long before the war in Ukraine began.“There’s always going to be some crisis of the moment that prevents us from thinking about how to spend less on defense,” Duss said. “But this is a conversation that we absolutely have to have.” As of now, the prospects for enacting Pentagon budget cuts appear bleak. Even some of the House Republicans who, like Gaetz, initially opposed McCarthy’s speakership bid have downplayed the possibility. Congressman Chip Roy of Texas, a key negotiator in the talks between McCarthy and his Republican detractors, claimed that “cuts to defense were NEVER DISCUSSED” during the speakership fight.“In fact, there was broad agreement spending cuts should focus on NON-DEFENSE discretionary spending,” Roy’s office said on Twitter.US heads for debt-ceiling standoff as House Republicans refuse to budgeRead moreA funding bill that solely cut non-defense discretionary spending would almost certainly be rejected by Democrats, who still control the Senate and the White House. In addition to the procedural hurdles of Roy’s proposal, Miles mocked the idea of excluding defense spending from potential cuts as utterly unrealistic.“You can’t look at the level of spending that the US government is doing and say we’re going to exempt more than half of discretionary spending,” Miles said. “When you have the Pentagon taking up as much money as it is now, there’s no way to look at cutting government spending without it.”Even if Congress could somehow reach an agreement on the need to reduce the Pentagon’s budget, conservatives would inevitably clash with progressives over what programs to cut and how to reallocate that funding.“The reason Matt Gaetz wants to cut defense spending is not the reason why I would,” Duss acknowledged.Still, Duss argued that progressives and some lawmakers on the right have a “shared interest” in starting a reinvigorated conversation over defense spending. That communal goal could work to progressives’ advantage.“If Republicans want to prize this open and look inside this budget … that’s a debate I think everyone should welcome,” Duss said. “And I think it’s quite telling who’s not welcoming it.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressUS militaryJoe BidenDemocratsUS national securityanalysisReuse this content More

ExplainerWhat is Georgia’s Trump election inquiry and will it lead to charges?The investigation looks at if Trump and his allies committed a crime in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election A court hearing on Tuesday will mark one of the most significant developments in a Georgia investigation examining whether Donald Trump and allies committed a crime in their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Here’s all you need to know about that hearing and what to expect next.Trump’s political fate may have been decided – by a Georgia grand juryRead moreWhat exactly is happening on Tuesday?Since May of last year, a special purpose grand jury in Fulton county, Georgia has been investigating whether Donald Trump committed a crime under state law when he tried to overturn the 2020 election by pressuring state officials to try and overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.The grand jury concluded its work earlier this month. On Tuesday, there will be a hearing to determine whether the grand jury’s report should be made public. The special grand jury – which consisted of 23 jurors and three alternates – has recommended its report be made public.Why is this investigation such a big deal?Trump and allies have yet to face any criminal consequences for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The Fulton county probe could be the first time that charges are filed against Trump and allies for those efforts. The US House committee that investigated the January 6 attacks also made a criminal referral to the justice department, which is also investigating Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.What is a special purpose grand jury?A special purpose grand jury is seated to investigate one topic and has no time limit. It can subpoena witnesses, unlike a regular grand jury, but can’t indict someone. Instead, it makes a recommendation to prosecutors on whether to move forward with charges.A regular grand jury is seated for a set amount of time and hears a wide range of cases. It ultimately can issue an indictment.Will we know if Trump is going to be charged with a crime on Tuesday?Not necessarily. The special grand jury likely has made a recommendation on whether to bring charges to Fani Willis, a Democrat serving in her first term as the Fulton county district attorney. Willis can go to a regular grand jury and seek indictments. Tuesday’s hearing could provide a glimpse into Willis’ thinking about how to move forward.Why is this all taking place in Fulton county, Georgia?After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and allies made repeated efforts to get Georgia state officials to try and overturn the 2020 election. Many of those actions were in Atlanta, which is in Fulton county.Those efforts included Trump’s infamous call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger asking him to overturn the election. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have because we won the state,” Trump told Raffensperger, who rebuffed the request.In 2020, Trump campaign officials also appeared at a Georgia legislative hearing and put forth false allegations of fraud.Willis also has told Rudy Giuliani, who played a key role in spreading election misinformation in Georgia and elsewhere, that he is a target of her investigation. Other targets reportedly include those who participated in the attempt in Georgia to send fake presidential electors to Congress. Those targets include David Shafer, the chair of the Georgia GOP, and Burt Jones, a Republican state senator in 2020 who is now the state’s lieutenant governor.Willis’ investigation also reportedly includes a phone call from Senator Lindsey Graham to Raffensperger in which Graham asked if Raffensperger had the power to throw out absentee ballots. Willis is also investigating efforts to remove BJ Pak, the former US attorney with jurisdiction over Atlanta, who refused to go along with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.Grand jury in Georgia’s Trump 2020 election investigation finishes workRead moreWhat criminal charges could Trump face?There are a menu of legal charges that could be available to prosecutors, legal experts have noted. Georgia law makes it illegal to intentionally ask, command, or get someone else to engage in election fraud. Another state statute makes it a crime to interfere with an election official as they try to carry out their official duties.Willis may also pursue RICO – Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations – charges against Trump and his allies. Relying on RICO, Willis could pursue charges against multiple defendants at once, showing that they were part of a broader conspiracy to interfere with the election. Willis has used the statute in the past and hired a lawyer who specializes in RICO cases to assist with the Trump investigation.Who has testified before the special grand jury?Top elected officials, both nationally and in Georgia, have appeared before the panel. It has heard testimony from Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Raffensperger as well as Giuliani, Graham, and Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. The latter three went to court to block them from having to appear. All three were unsuccessful.TopicsGeorgiaUS politicsDonald TrumpexplainersReuse this content More

‘We may have lost the south’: what LBJ really said about Democrats in 1964Bill Moyers was there when Lyndon Johnson made his memorable assessment of the Civil Rights Act’s effects The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history, giving protections and rights long denied to Black Americans. Like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Medicare for senior citizens, it was a pillar of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.LBJ OK? Historian Mark Lawrence on a president resurgentRead moreThe Civil Rights Act also had a profound effect on the American political landscape, triggering a reshaping that still influences the fortunes of Democrats and Republicans, particularly in the south.A brilliant political analyst, Johnson foresaw the consequences of his civil rights legislation on the day he signed it into law. He is said to have remarked: “We’ve lost the south for a generation.”Indeed, the south has become steadily more Republican since then, the victories of Joe Biden and two Democratic senators in Georgia in 2020 and 2022 rare blue successes in a Republican stronghold.But did Johnson really say it? He didn’t mention it in his memoir – and he died 50 years ago on Sunday, aged just 64. In his absence, historians debate and write.So the Guardian went to the source: the legendary journalist Bill Moyers. Now 88, he was Johnson’s special assistant when the Civil Rights Act passed.Moyers responded with a detailed e-mail.On 2 July 1964, “the president signed the Civil Rights Act around 6.45pm. Before he went into a meeting in his office with some civil rights leaders and [the deputy attorney general] Nick Katzenbach, he pulled me aside and said, sotto voce, ‘Bird [Johnson’s wife] and I are going down to the Ranch. I’d like you to come with us … I practically ran to my office to pack.’”Moyers made it to the airport in time.“When I boarded the Jet Star, the president was reading the latest edition of the Washington Post. We took off around around 11pm … I sat down across from him. Lady Bird was in the other seat by him … the papers were celebrating what they described as a great event.“I said, ‘Quite a day, Mr President.’ As he reached a sheaf of the wire copy he tilted his head slightly back and held the copy up close to him so that he could read it, and said: ‘Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.’“It was lightly said. Not sarcastic. Not even dramatically. It was like a throwaway sidebar.”To Moyers, “all these years later”, Johnson’s remark seems “maybe … merely a jest, lightly uttered and soon forgotten”. But after Moyers “repeated it publicly just once, it took on a life of its own.“Unfortunately, various versions appeared: ‘for a generation’, ‘once and for all’. I couldn’t keep up. I finally stopped commenting.”And so a legend grew.As Moyers pointed out, in summer 1964, Johnson’s “immediate concern was to carry the south in his own election for president”, against the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, a hard-right senator from Arizona.“He briefly threatened not to go to the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, because he was very tense and uneasy about the fight over seating the Mississippi delegation, and especially the role of Fannie Lou Hamer.”Hamer was a legendary civil rights activist, beaten and shot at for registering Black voters in Mississippi. At the convention, she mesmerized a national audience when she testified in an unsuccessful effort to get the new Freedom Democratic Party seated as the official delegation from Mississippi.“As we all know,” Moyers wrote, “Johnson went on to the convention and lapped his nomination … Now he seemed fully in the game and determined to carry the south.“He called meetings with his campaign team, over and again. He talked often to our people on the ground, from Louisiana to North Carolina. He made the campaign south of the Mason-Dixon Line his personal battlefield. He wanted to win there. And he did – in five states.”Johnson won in a landslide. In the south, he took Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.Moyers remembered that “on election night, as the results rolled in, [Johnson] was elated. His dreaded private vision of losing the south … would have cost [him] the election.“I think he had doubled down on not handing Republicans the south. That would come with [Richard] Nixon’s southern strategy, four years later. For now, [Johnson] was spared what would have humiliated him.”TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsUS domestic policyRaceDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

In a more just world, this would be the 50th anniversary of Roe v WadeMoira DoneganUntil last year, Roe made it more possible for women’s lives to be determined by their choices, not merely by their bodies If the supreme court hadn’t overturned it last June, undoing a longstanding precedent and inflicting untold harm to women’s well-being and dignity, Sunday 22 January would have been the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v Wade.Over those 50 years, Roe changed American life dramatically. Abortion became a routine part of life, a resource people planned their lives around having. In contrast to its political controversy, abortion in the Roe era was – as it is now – aggressively common. Approximately one in four American women will have an abortion at some point in the course of their reproductive lives.The figure lends credence to the pro-choice assertion that everyone loves someone who had an abortion – and the accompanying quip that if you think you don’t know a woman who has had an abortion, you really just don’t know any women who trust you enough to tell you. But part of the legacy of Roe is not just that these women you know and love have been able to have freer, healthier, more volitional lives, but also that their abortions, for many of them, are not worth confessing. For most, abortions were not tragedies to be whispered about, or life-altering moments of shame, but banalities, choices to which they were unquestionably entitled, and from which they could move unconflictedly on. But Roe is gone. Now, for many women, these choices are crimes.It’s worth reflecting on what we had during those 49 years. While it stood, Roe offered a promise: that women’s lives need not be circumscribed by so-called “biological destiny”; that gender – its relations, performances, and obligations – might not be something that is imposed on women, but something that they take up and discard on their own terms. In the Roe era, this frank entitlement by women to determine the courses of their own lives was the decision’s greatest legacy. Individual women’s distinction and determination, or their conflictedness and confusion, or their ambivalence and exploration: once, before Roe, these parts of a woman’s personality almost didn’t matter; they were incidental eccentricities along the inevitable road to motherhood. Roe made it more possible for women’s lives to be determined by their characters, not merely by their bodies.It is easy to speak of Roe’s impact in material terms – the way it enabled women’s long march into paid work and into better paid work, how it was a precondition for their soaring achievements in education and the professions, their ascents into positions of power and influence. So little of the vast and varied lives of twentieth-century American women could have been achieved in the absence of abortion or birth control – these women, their minds and careers, are gifts the nation could never have received if they’d been made to be pregnant against their wills, or made to care for unplanned, unlonged-for babies.But it is less easy to discuss the sense of dignity that Roe gave to American women, the way that the freedom to control when and whether they would have children endowed American women, for the first time, with something like the gravitas of adults. Roe opened a door for women into dignity, into self-determination, into the still wild and incendiary idea that they, like men, might be endowed with the prerogatives of citizenship, and entitled to chart the course of their own lives.This, at least, was the aspiration that Roe came to stand for: women’s freedom, their independence, their acceptance as equals in the American project. Of course, it never quite did work out that way: the Hyde amendment, which banned Medicaid funding for abortions, was passed just three years after Roe, in 1976, and effectively excluded poor women from Roe’s promise. Black women faced the dual barriers of moral judgement and eugenicist legacy – for them, often neither the choice to abort nor the choice to parent were fully free. Members of the anti-choice movement, assisted by a judiciary that became increasingly willing to do their bidding, were inventive and sadistically persistent in chipping away at abortion access, making it more expensive, more onerous, and more stigmatized than other kinds of medical care.Even in robustly liberal states, where support for abortion was high and restrictions were few, walking into a clinic still felt like doing something illegal – there was the gauntlet of protestors outside, the receptionists seated behind bulletproof glass. If Roe was supposed to make women equals, why were they made so unequal when they tried to access its protections?Maybe part of the answer is that Roe’s authors never intended the decision to take on the symbolic value that it did. Justice Harry Blackmun’s 1973 opinion famously treats abortion legality as a matter of the rights of doctors, a reasoning that derived from his own respect for medical professionalization, and a legal theory, en vogue at the time, that found privacy protections in the 14th amendment. Like many of his successors on the bench, Blackmun adopted pretensions to medical and moral expertise when confronted with abortion cases that he did not in fact possess. Largely absent from his reasoning were women’s claims to liberty and equality. For the court, for decades, women’s self-determination was largely an afterthought.It was the women’s movement – feminists and pro-choice activists – that transformed Roe into a symbol of women’s aspiration to equality; it was the abortion patients, hundreds of thousands of them, who embodied Roe’s promise when they lived lives they chose for themselves.It was this symbol that the anti-choice movement attacked, and this aspiration that the supreme court, in its ruling overruling Roe, cut down. For 49 years, Roe dignified American women; it outlawed the abortion ban, one of the most egregious attempts to dominate us by force, and it endowed us with the trust and respect of physical freedom. While it lasted, the abortion right was a promise: that the state would not commandeer our insides, could not turn our own bodies against us in order to thwart our desires. This was what the court imposed when it struck down Roe. One day, self-determination, liberty, and autonomy were women’s constitutional right. The next day, women were reduced – in their status, in their citizenship, and in their safety.We still haven’t seen the full extent of what the overturning of Roe will take from us. We haven’t yet seen women’s numbers diminish in public life; we still haven’t grasped the human cost of the lost dreams, the damaged health, the foregone curiosity. Maybe part of the inability to mourn is related to how much we took for granted in the Roe era. As a nation, we became so accustomed to women’s reproductive freedom that we didn’t realize the extent of what it gave to us. We will miss it now that it is gone.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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