US Politics

US politics’ post-shame era: how Republicans became the party of hateFar from entering the midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, the Republican party has shown itself to be the opposite Republicans were in trouble. Mitt Romney, their US presidential nominee, had been crushed by Barack Obama. The party commissioned an “autopsy” report that proposed a radical rethink. “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans,” it said, “we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”Ten years after Romney’s loss, Republicans are fighting their first election since the presidency of Donald Trump. But far from entering next month’s midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, they have shown itself to be unapologetically the party of hate.The ‘election-denier trifecta’: alarm over Trumpists’ efforts to win key postsRead morePerhaps nothing captures the charge more eloquently than a three-word post that appeared on the official Twitter account for Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee – ranking member Jim Jordan – on 6 October. It said, simply and strangely: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”The first of this unholy trinity referred to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has recently drawn fierce criticism for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at Paris fashion week and for antisemitic messages on social media, including one that said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”.The second was billionaire Elon Musk, who published a pro-Russian peace plan for Ukraine and denied reports that he had been spoken to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.The third was former president Donald Trump, who wrote last weekend that American Jews have offered insufficient praise of his policies toward Israel, warning that they need to “get their act together” before “it is too late!” The comment played into the antisemitic prejudice that American Jews have dual loyalties to the US and Israel.It was condemned by the White House as “insulting” and “antisemitic”. But when historian Michael Beschloss tweeted: “Do any Republican Party leaders have any comment at all on Trump’s admonition to American Jews?”, the silence was deafening.Republicans have long been accused of coded bigotry and nodding and winking to their base. There was an assumption of rules of political etiquette and taboos that could not be broken. Now, it seems, politics has entered a post-shame era where anything goes.Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank, said: “The type of things they would say in closed rooms full of donors they’re just saying out in the open now. It’s a cliche but I always remember what I heard growing up which is, when people tell you who they are, you should believe them.”The examples are becoming increasingly difficult to downplay or ignore. Earlier this month Tommy Tuberville, a Republican senator for Alabama, told an election rally in Nevada that Democrats support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people because “they think the people that do the crime are owed that”. The remark was widely condemned for stereotyping African Americans as people committing crimes.And Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, echoed the rightwing “great replacement” theory when she told a rally in Arizona: “Joe Biden’s 5 million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school and, coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture.”Such comments have handed ammunition to Democrats as they battle to preserve wafer thin majorities in the House and Senate. Although the party is facing electoral headwinds from inflation, crime and border security, it has plenty of evidence that Trump remains dominant among Republicans – a huge motivator for Democratic turnout.Indeed, Trump did more than anyone to turn the 2013 autopsy on its head. In his first run for president, he referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and pledged to build a border wall and impose a Muslim ban. Opponents suggest that he liberated Republicans to say the unsayable, rail against so-called political correctness and give supporters the thrill of transgression.Antjuan Seawright, a senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said: “He has been the creator of the permission slip and the validator of the permission slip. For many of them, he is their trampoline to jump even further with their right wing red meat racial rhetoric.”Beyond Republicans’ headline-grabbing stars, the trend is also manifest at the grassroots. In schools, the party has launched a sweeping assault on what teachers can say or teach about race, gender identity, LGBTQ+ issues and American history. An analysis by the Washington Post newspaper found that 25 states have passed 64 laws reshaping what students can learn and do at school over the past three academic years.There are examples of the new extremism all over the country. The New York Republican Club will on Monday host an event with Katie Hopkins, a British far-right political commentator who has compared migrants to cockroaches and was repeatedly retweeted by Trump before both were banned by the social media platform.In Idaho, long a deeply conservative state, Dorothy Moon, the new chairwoman of the state Republican party, is accused of close associations with militia groups and white nationalists. Last month she appeared on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to accuse the state’s Pride festival and parade of sexualising children.A recent headline in the Idaho Capital Sun newspaper stated: “Hate makes a comeback in Idaho, this time with political support.”Michelle Vincent, a senior adviser to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stephen Heidt, noted the such currents have long been a problem in Idaho but said: “Trump made hate OK. He made bad behavior seem OK because of the extremes of what he was doing. They started emulating him. People were were abused here during Black Lives Matter protests. We have so much militia here and they are out of control.”In many cases, the naked bigotry goes hand in hand with Trump’s “big lie” that the last election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud. A New York Times investigation found that about 70% of Republican midterm candidates running for Congress in next month’s midterm elections have either questioned or flat-out denied the results of the 2020 election.They can now count on support from Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who in 2017 met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and dismissed his entire opposition as “terrorists” Gabbard this week defected to the Republicans and campaigned for Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona and an unabashed defender of the big lie.Another election denier is Doug Mastriano, a political novice running for governor of Pennsylvania with the help of far-right figures. He was outside the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and photographed watching demonstrators attacking police before he supposedly walked away.Mastriano has repeatedly criticised his opponent, attorney general Josh Shapiro, for attending and sending his children to what he brands a “privileged, exclusive, elite” school, suggesting that this demonstrates Shapiro’s “disdain for people like us”. It is a Jewish day school where students receive both secular and religious instruction.After a long courtship, Trump himself has in recent months begun embracing the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon in earnest. In September, using his Truth Social platform, the former president reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming”. A QAnon song has been played at the end of several his campaign rallies.Ron Klein, chair of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said: “It’s very unfortunate that the Republican party is either silent and complicit in this antisemitic language that’s being put forward by Donald Trump and others that align with him. But it’s very indicative of a Republican party that does not want to take on rightwing extremists.”Klein, a former congressman, added: “Some members of Republican party did use dog whistles and symbolic language to make their points about minorities, including the Jewish community, and that was very troubling. But the era of Donald Trump has just lifted the rock under which these people now feel it’s OK and even helpful for them to make these kinds of statements and use these kinds of words to gain political power and political stature, which is very troubling in our American political system.”The 2013 autopsy now looks like a blip, an outlier, in half a century of Republican politics. Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” message stoked racial fear and resentment in the south. Ronald Reagan demonised “welfare queens” in 1976 and, four years later, launched his election campaign with a speech lauding “states’ rights” near the site of the “Mississippi Burning” murders – seen by many as a nod to southern states that resented the federal government enforcing civil rights.A political action committee linked to George HW Bush’s campaign in 1988 paid for an attack advert blaming Democratic rival Michael Dukakis for the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed rape during a furlough from prison. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, bragged that he would turn Horton into “Dukakis’s running mate”.The Atwater playbook is being deployed again in Senate midterm races as Republicans Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania run attack ads accusing their Democratic opponents, Mandela Barnes and John Fetterman, of being soft on crime, often with images of Black prison inmates.Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican campaign strategist who wrote a withering indictment of the party’s trajectory, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it.”Stevens, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, continued: “It’s a party of white grievance and anger and hate is an element of that.”Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, agreed: “The real consequence of Donald Trump’s presidency is it did give permission to so many people within the party who used to try to mask or hide their racism. They now feel like they can proudly wear it and they do.”With hate crimes on the rise across America, there are fears that comments by Trump, Tuberville, Greene and others will lead to threats and violence that put lives in danger. Bardella added: “We learned after January 6 that, to the Republican party faithful, these aren’t just words, they are instructions. It’s a very dangerous development that one of the major political parties in America has made the conscious decision to wrap itself in the embrace of white nationalism.”TopicsRepublicansUS midterm elections 2022US politicsDonald TrumpfeaturesReuse this content More

Penn State students outraged over invitation to far-right Proud Boys founderUncensored America, a conservative student group, has invited Gavin McInnes to speak at the school in late October Students at the prestigious US university Penn State are outraged that Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys, is coming to speak at their Pennsylvania college on Monday.The Proud Boys, an often violent US extremist group, have been labeled a terrorist organization by New Zealand and Canada. Many of its members align with white supremacist, antisemitic or Islamophobic ideologies. And five of its members were charged for their actions during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.‘Start smashing pumpkins’: January 6 panel shows Roger Stone discussing violenceRead more“My friends and I are pretty disgusted,” said Sam Ajah, a third-year student. “The university can’t just abdicate all responsibility. They’re giving [McInnes] a platform, access, legitimacy.”Ajah, a 21-year-old geography major and president of the Penn State College Democrats club, is one of many students who feel strongly about the university hosting McInnes. Although organized by Uncensored America, a conservative student-led group at the cost of roughly $7,000, Penn State is holding out against pleas to cancel or ban the event.“As a public university, we are unalterably obligated under the US constitution’s first amendment to protect various expressive rights,” the school said in a statement. It also acknowledged and criticized the hateful rhetoric that speakers like McInnes are known to espouse.Such an event is not a first for Penn State. Last year, Milo Yiannopoulos, a British “alt-right” political commentator, was hosted by Uncensored America at a talk on campus.Yiannopoulos, who told a crowd at the University of Massachusetts a few years prior that “feminism is cancer”, often plays off his offensive remarks as ironic jokes. “Pray the Gay Away” was printed on a red poster advertising his talk in Penn State’s student union hall.Students were opposed to that earlier event too, but the tension surrounding this upcoming talk is different – it is palpable.“I mean, Yiannopoulos is offensive and kind of a clown,” said Mia Bloom, a former professor at Penn State who researches extremism, conspiracy theories and the far right.“But Gavin McInnes is actually dangerous. This event is deliberately provocative. It’s not a free speech issue if it endangers the student community.”McInnes established the Proud Boys during the 2016 presidential elections. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, white nationalists and neo-Nazis cite him as a gateway to the far right.Since then, members of his organization have been regulars at Make America Great Again rallies, recognizable for wearing black and yellow clothing, and they are frequent participants in street riots across the country.“We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you,” McInnes said during his Compound Media show in 2016.Ajah and many of his peers will not attend the protest against the talk scheduled for 24 October, partly out of fear of violence. They feel this is the best message to send. Ajah wants students to think twice about their safety.“It’s not my place to go as a black queer person,” he said. “Why would I when people are espousing hateful rhetoric at you for just being you.”Ajah disagrees with Penn’s “lackluster and hands-off approach”, which the school also came under criticism for after the Yiannopoulos talk last year.“It’s not our job to verify or take into consideration speakers like this just because they are palatable to a certain student audience,” Ajah said. “In ignoring the hateful stuff McInnes has done, the university is just accepting it.”When Kevin McAleenan visited Georgetown University’s law school in 2019 to give a lecture, he was effectively driven from the stage. McAleenan, then the acting secretary of homeland security under Donald Trump, could not be heard over chants such as “Hate is not normal” and “Stand up, fight back” from the audience.Georgetown has since re-evaluated the school’s free speech policies.TopicsThe far rightUS universitiesPennsylvaniaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Weapons of Mass Delusion review: Robert Draper dissects the Trumpian nightmare The New York Times reporter shows Kevin McCarthy to be the enabler of all Republican enablersNot so long ago, fake news stories were routinely smothered, simply by being ignored by the biggest newspapers and the major TV networks, their storylines safely confined to the National Enquirer and its tabloid competitors.‘A nutso proposition’: Robert Draper on Trump, Republicans and January 6 Read moreRogue legislators with histories of racism or addiction to conspiracy theories usually suffered the same fate for the same reason – nobody gave them ink or air time. Their leaders in the House and Senate could complete their marginalization.These gatekeepers did not have perfect judgement, but in our time it has become obvious that they provided essential protections for democracy. The internet and its infernal algorithms are the main reasons no institution or congressional leader retains the power to protect the public from outright insanity.Robert Draper’s new book about Washington in the 18 months after January 6 is all about the fatal consequences of the brave new world the internet created, in which Republican outliers the like the Arizona congressman Paul Gosar and his mentee, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are much more likely to be rewarded for “outrageous, fact-free behavior” than to be penalized for it.The author, a New York Times magazine contributor, begins with a confession: all his previous books and articles about the Republican party “tended to bear the telltale influence of my father, a lifelong Republican”.Since his focus is “the tension between the party’s reality-based wing and the lost-its mind wing”, this confession reinforces the idea that all the book’s harsh judgements are coming from a dispassionate observer.But later on in the book this feels less like a confession and more like a mea culpa, when Draper describes three common notions about Donald Trump’s successful putsch: the idea it was accomplished through “force and surprise”; the notion “that the party was fully functioning and purposeful” before Trump took it over; and the contention “that the GOP bore no responsibility for the crime committed against it”.As Draper writes, “Each of these notions is false.”Unlike Mark Leibovich’s recent book, Thank You for Your Servitude, which covers much of the same territory but does not manage to tell us anything new, Draper provides pungent new anecdotes about and original analysis of the most outrageous actors, like Gosar and Greene, and their main enabler, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy.Gosar spent a decade in Congress “building a portfolio of outrageous conduct even before social media’s ‘attention economy’ was fully capable of rewarding him for it”. One Gosar staffer was “advised by a top Republican operative, ‘You need to get out of there, that man is insane”. Another GOP aide called the congressman “my nominee to be that guy who comes in with a sawed-off shotgun one day”.But what Draper finds most astonishing is that Greene, who attributed forest fires to (possibly-Jewish connected) space lasers and openly promoted QAnon conspiracies, would only need a year in Congress before becoming “the party’s loudest and most memorable messenger outside of Trump himself”.Draper provides an excellent description of how Greene’s personal wealth and determination made it possible for her to move to an adjoining district and win the primary after the incumbent retired. She loaned her own campaign $500,000 and by March 2020 the extreme House Freedom Caucus had contributed nearly $200,000 more.After she won the first round in her primary, before the run-off, Politico ran this pithy summary of her greatest hits: Greene “suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people ‘are held slaves to the Democratic party’; called George Soros … a Nazi, and said she would feel ‘proud’ to see a Confederate monument if she were Black because it symbolizes progress made since the civil war”.McCarthy and the rest of the House leadership denounced her. But then a funny thing happened – “or rather did not happen – back in Georgia. The attack on Greene by “fake news” and “the equally fake Republicans” delighted her new constituents and she won the run-off by 14 points. At her victory party, she said of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker: “We’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress.”The intellectual bankruptcy Draper chronicles pivots around McCarthy, whose blind ambition to become the next speaker leads to a series of despicable choices. First, he decides he must push Liz Cheney out of Republican leadership, because she refuses to pretend Trump lost the election because of fraud. Then he goes out of his way to mend his friendship with Trump and turn a blind eye to Greene’s outrages, because he is convinced he cannot win a House majority without Trump’s craziest supporters.Draper makes a couple of small mistakes, describing an amendment McCarthy opposed that would have removed “language that could enable discrimination against LGBTQ+ members of the military”. The amendment actually would have banned military contractors from discriminating against LGBTQ+ employees, and it was debated five years after Congress finally ended discrimination against gay and lesbian sailors and soldiers. He also describes the New Jersey Democratic congressman Tom Malinowski as Jewish. He is not.‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican partyRead moreThe exact moment the Republican party lost its soul probably came after the January 6 rioters tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the duly elected new president by storming the Capitol – and a few hours later seven Republican senators and 138 representatives still voted to sustain spurious objections to the electoral votes of Pennsylvania.McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, were not among those election deniers – although McCarthy earlier voted to object to results from Arizona. But their refusal to convict Trump in his subsequent impeachment trial, or to stand up to any allies of the insurrection, guaranteed their party’s addiction to the lie that the presidential election was stolen.Draper has performed an essential service by documenting the details of this singularly destructive cowardice.
Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind is published in the US by Penguin Press
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Trump Organization to face criminal tax fraud charges in New York court on MondayFormer CFO is expected to testify about off-the-books compensation scheme to evade paying payroll taxes The Trump Organization is set to face criminal tax fraud charges on Monday in New York in a trial that could start to tease out the many allegations against the company and by extension its patriarch, Donald J Trump.It comes as the former US president faces a maze of legal troubles and mounting costs – by some estimates running at close to $4m a month to his leadership Pac – over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, the removal of government documents from the White House when he left office and a defamation case relating to a rape allegation.Republicans’ lawless leaders at odds with midterm law and order messageRead moreMonday’s case is centered on charges that his Manhattan-headquartered real estate company defrauded New York tax authorities by awarding “off the books” compensation over 15 years to company executives, including lease payments for cars, apartment rent and tuition fees for relatives in lieu of some salary, enabling the company to evade paying payroll taxes.If found guilty, the company, which is run by Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, could face $1.6m in fines and find its ability to operate hotels, golf courses and other assets impeded.But the trial will likely be most interesting for its subplots and how it intersects with a separate, civil investigation by New York state attorney general Letitia James that harvested a 200-page indictment last month accusing the Trump Organization, Trump and three of his adult children of overstating property values and Trump’s net worth to get favorable bank loans and insurance coverage.The Manhattan investigation into Trump’s company has followed its own rocky path to a jury trial. It began under district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr and is now in the hands of his successor, Alvin Bragg. Two prosecutors who led the investigation resigned in February, with one saying felony charges should be brought against the former president.Lawyers for the Trump Organization have claimed the case is a “selective prosecution” motivated by opposition to Trump’s political views – a claim that the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, has rejected. They also said that prosecutors are seeking to punish Trump’s company because “a handful of its officers allegedly failed to report fringe benefits on their personal tax returns”.But the stakes for both parties – prosecutor and defendant – are high. Unlike Trump’s floundering efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, the Trump Organization has brought in an A-team of lawyers to counter claims by a matched array of prosecutors to meet a high burden of proof in criminal trials.Eyes and ears will be on the testimony of the Trump Organization’s then chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, 75, who was charged in the DA’s 2021 indictment but has since pleaded to 15 counts ranging from grand larceny to tax fraud to falsifying business records in exchange for his testimony.Weisselberg has been subpoenaed to testify but he is not a cooperating witness. Still, his five-month sentence agreed to with prosecutors depends on truthful testimony. Crucially, the Manhattan DA ensured that Weisselberg’s sentencing would be deferred until after the case.To prove the company is guilty, the government is entitled to impute liability from not only Weisselberg but also other executives at the firm, potentially including Donald Trump himself, who they may try to show were aware of the alleged tax scheme.“It’s strategically a really difficult case both for Weisselberg and Trump because they could end winning the battle and losing the war,” says Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at New York University.“If they do a typical defense cross-examination of Weisselberg and they catch him in some sort of lie then his deal is over and the pressure on him to flip [on Trump] is going to be that much greater.”Under the circumstances, the Trump Organization’s lawyers can’t simply try to eviscerate the credibility of Weisselberg, Weissmann points out, without potentially rewarding investigators with evidence that their larger quarry, Trump himself, knew of the arrangements to reward executives with untaxed compensation.“The idea that Trump didn’t know is going to be the critical thing that Weisselberg is asked about. If he denies that Donald Trump knew, you can see the judge saying, ‘I don’t believe it and I’m going to take that into account when I sentence you.’”Under those circumstances, Merchan could kick Weisselberg’s sentence up to 15 years in prison, not five months on Rikers Island – an onerous sentence for a 75-year-old.Further, Letitia James’s civil complaint makes an allegation that Weisselberg committed fraud by make false representations to the Zurich North American insurance company. In theory, Weisselberg could be still charged by Bragg if his testimony is deemed untruthful.“Clearly, they still want Weisselberg to cooperate,” Weissmann says.But as the trial gets under way next week, there is a sense that Bragg’s case could be easier to prove than James’s complaint, which centers on building valuations but requires a lower burden of proof.“Bragg’s allegations are much more concrete because they allege making payments that were clearly part of the person’s salary, keeping track of them, but only reporting what was listed as salary,” Weissmann says.“The problem for the defense is that if they say this is a gray area and isn’t a crime, they have to say that Weisselberg is lying. If the judge agrees, Weisselberg is in a tough position.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS crimeNew YorkDonald Trump JrUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

America is built on a racist social contract. It’s time to tear it up and start anewSteve PhillipsFrom the civil war to the January 2021 insurrection, the white nationalist response to democratic defeat has been to attempt to destroy US institutions and our national agreements. We shouldn’t tolerate this The current social contract in America is not an expression of our deepest values, greatest hopes and highest ideals. Quite the contrary, it is the result of a centuries-long series of compromises with white supremacists.Republicans are trying to win by spreading three false talking points. Here’s the truth | Robert ReichRead moreIn his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson included a forceful denunciation of slavery and the slave trade, condemning the “execrable commerce” as “cruel war against human nature itself”. The leaders of the states engaged in the buying and selling of Black bodies balked at the offending passage, and Jefferson explained the decision to compromise, writing, “The clause … was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”The Constitution itself, the governing document seeking to “establish justice” and “secure the blessings of liberty”, is replete with compromises with white supremacists’ demands that the nascent nation codify the inferior status of Black people. The “Fugitive Slave Clause” – Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution – made it illegal for anyone to interfere with slave owners who were tracking “drapetomaniacs” fleeing slavery.And, of course, there was Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, which contains the quintessential compromise on how to enumerate the country’s Black population, resulting in the decision to count individual human beings – the Black human beings – as three-fifths of a whole person.The whites-first mindset about citizenship and immigration policy that still roils American politics to this day is not even really the result of compromise. It is in essence a complete capitulation to the concept that America is and should primarily be a white country. The 1790 Naturalization Act – one of the country’s very first laws – declared that to be a citizen one had to be a “free white person.” That belief was sufficiently uncontroversial that no compromise was necessary, and the provision was quickly adopted.In a unanimous opinion in the 1922 Ozawa v United States case, the supreme court ruled firmly and unapologetically that US law restricted citizenship to white people because “the words ‘white person’ means a Caucasian”, and Ozawa “is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian, and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone” of citizenship. The racial restriction was official law until 1952, and standard practice until adoption of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This centuries-long, whites-first framework for immigration policy was most recently articulated by Donald John Trump – the man for whom 74 million Americans voted in 2020 – when he asked in 2018, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”The sweeping social programs of the New Deal were the result of compromises with Confederate congressmen working to preserve white power. In a Congress that prized seniority, many of the most senior and influential members came from the states that barred Black folks from voting. In his book When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson breaks down how “the South used its legislative powers to transfer its priorities about race to Washington. Its leaders imposed them, with little resistance, on New Deal policies.”Social Security is perhaps the signature policy of the New Deal era, but in deference to white Southerners, the program explicitly excluded farmworkers and domestic workers. As Katznelson explains, “These groups – constituting more than 60 percent of the black labor force in the 1930s and nearly 75 percent of those who were employed in the South – were excluded from the legislation that created modern unions, from laws that set minimum wages and regulated the hours of work, and from Social Security until the 1950s.”Even the cornerstone of democracy – the right to vote – remains to this day the result of a creaky compromise with white nationalists. Most constitutional rights don’t require regular legislation to be renewed. There are no Freedom of Speech or Right to Privacy or Right to Bear Arms acts. We don’t revisit those fundamental rights every 10 or 20 years. When it comes to the fifteenth amendment, however, the right to vote has necessitated further legislation to guarantee enforcement, and the opposition has been so intractable and longstanding that the Voting Rights Act has to be regularly renewed by Congress, necessitating negotiation and compromise with those who fear the power-shifting implications of letting everyone of all races actually cast ballots.Even after extracting a cavalcade of compromises over the centuries, Confederates have consistently demonstrated that they do not feel obligated to honor any agreements or democratic institutions if those agreements or institutions fail to adequately protect whiteness. From the civil war itself to the January 2021 insurrection, the white nationalist response to democratic defeat has been to attempt to destroy American institutions and shred our national agreements. In contract law, a contract becomes null and void if one party did not enter into it in good faith, or if one party breaches the agreement and walks away from its mutual commitments. Given the clear bad faith and contempt for any allegiance to the common good, why do we have to cling to the old frameworks?The answer is we don’t. We do not have to stifle our dreams and surrender our principles. We can now craft a new, fundamentally different social contract.
Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. This is an extract from his latest book, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good (New Press, October 2022)
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Judge dismisses fraud case against Texas man who waited seven hours to voteHervis Rogers, who drew national praise, was arrested by state attorney general Ken Paxton for voting illegally while on parole A Texas judge has dismissed voter fraud charges against Hervis Rogers, the Houston man who drew national attention– – and praise– – for waiting seven hours in line to vote in the March 2020 presidential primary.Rogers, who is Black, became a symbol of tenacity when news of the circumstances surrounding his voting experience surfaced. He stuck around– – despite working two jobs, including one beginning at 6am– – and was among the last, potentially the last, Texas resident to vote, according to KERA news.New Mexico official first politician removed over January 6 attackRead more“I wanted to get my vote in, voice my opinion,” he said to a local ABC affiliate. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me, so I waited it out.”But Republican Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, ordered Rogers’ arrest in July 2021, for casting a ballot while on parole. Rogers became one of the dozens of voters nationwide swept up by heightened GOP efforts to pursue election fraud cases; while many Republicans insist there is widespread voting fraud, there is no evidence to support this claim, according to the Associated Press.This prosecution did not succeed, however. The state’s court of criminal appeals said on several occasions that Paxton did not have the authority to unilaterally prosecute voting crimes, according to the Texas Tribune. The judge’s decision earlier this week to dismiss two illegal voting counts against Rogers comes more than one year after the appeals court repeated their position, the news outlet stated.“I am thankful that justice has been done,” Rogers reportedly commented. “It has been horrible to go through this, and I am so glad my case is over. I look forward to being able to get back to my life.”Rogers had been on parole since 20 May 2004 following a 1995 prison conviction for burglary. His parole was scheduled to end on 13 June 2020, according to Houston Public Media.Under Texas law, knowingly casting a ballot while on probation or parole is a second-degree felony, carrying a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Rogers maintains that he didn’t know about his ineligibility, the Texas Tribune said.Since Paxton assumed office in 2015, most of the people his office has prosecuted for voter fraud have been persons of color. The American Civil Liberties Union found that a minimum of 72% of these election fraud cases were against Black and Latino persons, according to the Houston Chronicle.The ACLU analysis also found that at least 45% of these cases were against Black and Latino women.Rogers’ court victory this week is not the only high-profile legal setback for Republican-led election fraud cases. A Miami judge on Friday dismissed two felony counts against Robert Lee Wood, who was recently arrested in a crackdown led by Florida governor Ron DeSantis.Florida prosecutors alleged that Wood, who is Black, was ineligible to vote due to a 1991 felony conviction. Wood– – who was approached by a voter-registration canvasser, and subsequently sent a registration card– – said he didn’t know about his ineligibility.Florida officials said they would fight the judge’s decision.“Given that elections violations of this nature impact all Florida voters, elections officials, state government, and the integrity of our republic, we continue to view the Florida office of statewide prosecution as the appropriate agency to prosecute these crimes,” Bryan Griffin, a DeSantis spokesman, commented in a statement. “The state will continue to enforce the law and ensure that murderers and rapists who are not permitted to vote do not unlawfully do so. Florida will not be a state in which elections are left vulnerable or cheaters unaccountable.”“We believe this was an incorrect analysis of jurisdiction and OSP will appeal,” the statewide prosecutor, Nicholas Cox, said in a statement.TopicsUS newsThe fight to voteUS politicsTexasFloridanewsReuse this content More

Early voters in Georgia face obstacles under state’s new election lawUnlimited challenges to eligibility and poorly trained poll workers cause frustration in key gubernatorial and US Senate contests Jennifer Jones, a Morehouse School of Medicine PhD student, showed up to her precinct in Fulton county, Georgia, on the second day of early voting for the midterm elections. She was excited to cast her ballot for her chosen candidates in the gubernatorial and Senate races, Stacey Abrams and Senator Raphael Warnock. However, when she reached the check-in station at the polling site, she was informed that she would be unable to cast a regular ballot because her validity as a voter was challenged.“When I handed in my ID, the poll worker said I was being challenged,” said Jones. “They said I had to complete a provisional ballot, but I wasn’t really comfortable doing that, so I didn’t get to cast my ballot that day.”Early voters in Arizona midterms report harassment by poll watchersRead moreUnder the state’s new Election Integrity Act, Georgia citizens can challenge a voter’s eligibility on the state’s voting rolls an unlimited number of times. Right-wing groups, spurred by baseless claims that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud, have mounted thousands of organized challenges across the state, putting even more pressure on the election process for voters, poll workers and election officials. While most have been dismissed already, more challenges cropped up ahead of early voting.In most cases, voters like Jones don’t know why their status is being challenged in the first place, causing even more confusion.“The poll worker didn’t tell me why I was being challenged, even after calling someone else for assistance,” said Jones. “They just kept telling me I would have to vote with a provisional ballot.”Georgia voters turned out in record numbers for the first week of early voting, casting their ballots in the two critical elections, the gubernatorial and Senate races. However, as the election progresses, the impact of Georgia’s new voting laws continues to unfold. Election and voter protection organizations across Georgia have been preparing for moments like this, working to educate voters on what to do if they experience issues when voting.“I felt discouraged, but I knew I needed to reach out to someone for help and knew I could call Fair Fight and get help,” said Jones.Fair Fight, a national voting rights organization based in Georgia, has used grassroots campaigning since its founding to educate voters on the resources at their disposal each election season. When Jones called Fair Fight, the organization connected her with Helen Butler and the Election Protection Project.“I informed [Helen Butler] what happened and told her that I had my ID and precinct card and everything,” said Jones. “She seemed surprised that they wouldn’t let me cast a regular ballot.”Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, believes Jones’s ordeal points to a more significant issue this election season.“This whole thing, and the new law, is alienating more people about the election process,” says Butler. “Especially people like Ms Jones, who was targeted and shouldn’t have been, just because the poll worker wasn’t aware of the additional instructions from the secretary of state’s office.”These additional instructions from the secretary of state explain that counties should work in favor of the challenged voter, granting poll workers the ability to verify a voter’s residence at the precinct when provided with documentation of the voter’s address or by having the voter sign a residency affirmation form. Once a voter completes these steps, which can be done on the spot, the voter should then be given access to a regular ballot.However, Butler asserts that this process was not initially made clear. “The first notice they sent out was not very clear, but the second notice gave clearer guidance,” she said. “Somewhere along the line, maybe by the county not updating the poll workers, there is miscommunication.”To Butler and other voting rights organizers, these instances of miscommunication at the polls stem from the state’s new voting law.“SB202, this Election Integrity [Act], has highlighted that folks can now do unlimited challenges,” said Butler. “And though people have always been able to challenge the voting rolls, this again creates a problem and creates distrust and is ultimately trying to limit who has access to the ballot.”Jones is just one of the voters whose distrust of Georgia’s electoral process has grown this election season. “I do feel disenfranchised, especially as a Black voter, and because of the way I vote,” she said. “I know they offered a provisional ballot, but I just didn’t know if it would be counted properly.”Another aspect of the new voting law includes new rules surrounding provisional ballots. While Jones’s case would not necessarily fall under this aspect of the law, which states that provisional ballots submitted outside of a voter’s precinct will not be counted, she says her broader distrust of the electoral process deterred her from voting with a provisional ballot that day. Still, Jones knows the importance of seeing this process through and clearing the challenge against her voting eligibility. She still plans to vote this election.“My grandmother marched with Dr Martin Luther King; my family fought for this,” said Jones. “I am the next generation that she was fighting for, and I am not about to let up. I will not risk getting to cast my vote. I will not stop fighting, and I will not be complacent in the difficulty of this process.”TopicsUS newsThe fight for democracyGeorgiaUS midterm elections 2022US politicsnewsReuse this content More

‘I just care about change’: Nevada’s Latinos on their cost-of-living fears Nevada has an acute shortage of affordable housing – but do Republicans or Democrats have practical answers to curb one of America’s most pressing issues?Claudia Lopez, 39, is worried for her children.As her curly haired seven-year-old daughter bounced around a play area inside El Mercado, a shopping center within the Boulevard Mall in Las Vegas where the smell of arepas and tacos hovers over the shops, Lopez soaked in her day off from knocking on doors and talking to residents about the upcoming election.Latino activists have been changing Arizona politics. The midterms are their biggest challenge yetRead moreFor much of her life, Lopez, whose parents emigrated from Mexico to California, where she was born, didn’t care for politics. This year, that changed: since Lopez moved to Las Vegas seven years ago, rents have rocketed. In the first quarter of 2022, the Nevada State Apartment Association found that rent had soared, on average, more than 20% compared to the same period last year. That growth has since slowed, but the self-employed house cleaner worries about her children’s future: their safety, their schools, their shelter.“I don’t care about Democrats or Republicans,” Lopez says. “I care about change. I just want change for the better. Everything’s getting worse. You see little kids like, ‘Are they going to live to my age?’”In Nevada, the political stakes of this election are high. Latino voters are projected to account for one for every five potential voters in November, turning the state into a microcosm of the national influence voters of color will have on the election. While Nevada voted Democrat in the last election, its contests were won by slim margins. And as a voting bloc, Latinos are not monolithic: what they care about ranges from immigration to the economy and depends on where throughout the country they live.An emerging, central, and practical concern for this group, however, rests in the rising costs of living – especially housing. The state has the steepest affordable housing shortage in the country. For every 100 renters in Nevada, there are just 18 affordable homes available to extremely low-income households, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. By comparison, Mississippi, which has the highest poverty rate in the country, has 58 homes available for every 100 renters.“It’s a perfect storm,” said Melissa Morales, founder of Somos Votantes, a non-profit focused on encouraging Latino voter participation. “You have the state that was hardest hit by unemployment and its economy was the hardest hit by the pandemic. You have the first Latina US senator ever in American history that’s up for re-election.”“For Latino voters, they are less interested in a blame game and much more interested in solutions,” she added. “When they’re placing the economy and these sorts of costs that are at the top of their list, they are really looking at which party is providing hard solutions to these issues.”In the governor’s race, the Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak, who approved $500m in federal funds from the American Rescue Plan toward developing housing, plans on working with state lawmakers to curtail corporations from buying properties, reform evictions and impose rent control. He extended an eviction moratorium through last May in the midst of the pandemic.But on his website, his opponent Republican Joe Lombardo slammed Sisolak’s administration as a “roadblock for affordable housing”, stating that Lombardo would streamline permitting and licensing for housing.Despite political posturing, there’s concern about whether Latino voters will show up at all. That presents a vexing question for organizers attempting to cut past political rhetoric to capture Latino voters’ attention: who has the practical answers to curb America’s most pressing issues: the rising cost of living? And what will convince them that politicians will actually make good on these promises?Advocacy groups have taken to the pavement to try and bridge any voter education gaps.Morales says that of their canvassing operations in Nevada, Arizona and Michigan, those in Nevada spoke the most about the rising costs of housing and healthcare.Morales serves as president of Somos PAC, which has supported Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the US Senate, who is vying for re-election against former Nevada attorney general and Republican Adam Laxalt. While Cortez Masto’s website lauds her work to “expand affordable housing” and “combat housing discrimination”, Laxalt’s makes no mention of housing as an issue, focusing instead on the economy, crime, immigration and other issues.The Culinary Workers Union, whose membership of 60,000 hospitality workers is mostly made up of people of color, are also engaging in what they hope will be their largest canvassing operation in history, dispatching at least 350 canvassers, with more closer to election day, to neighborhoods six days a week.With hopes of reaching 1 million households, the union’s canvassers’ focus on calling for blocking rent hikes and curtailing the cost of living, responding to a national crisis that upended the lives of voters of color in the area.On a recent trip to a quiet neighborhood in north Las Vegas, where roughly four in 10 Latinos live, Miguel Regalado trudged from door to door under the sweltering desert heat.A lead canvasser who has embarked on multiple campaigns since 2016, Regalado, like hundreds of others, had taken a leave of absence from his job to talk with voters. So did Rocelia Mendoza and Marcos Rivera, who joined him to stroll through the neighborhood full of nearly identical houses, with white exteriors and red roofs, Halloween decorations on their front yards.Regalado, a utility porter at The D Casino, and Mendoza, a dining bus person at the Wynn who worked her fourth campaign since 2017, checked their tablets for the list of addresses. When knocks went unanswered, they affixed literature and endorsement guides to people’s doors.Those who answered were largely Black and Latino residents, with Regalado and Mendoza relating to some in Spanish. They often framed their pitches around signing a petition calling for “neighborhood stability” – a collection of proposals to stop rent increases in Clark and Washoe counties, where Las Vegas and Reno are – and to support candidates, largely Democrats, who have signed on to support the cause. Those two cities represent battlegrounds for Republicans and Democrats alike as Republicans managed to persuade more Latino voters in Las Vegas since 2020 but lost ground with them in Reno.David Damore, chair of the political science department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said that the door-knocking operations were key to encouraging turnout from Latino voters. Without door-knocking from the union, whose membership is majority people of color, “Nevada would not have shifted from red to blue,” Damore wrote in an email. “There are hard-fought wins on the line this cycle.”Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer for the Culinary Workers Union, told the Guardian that working-class Nevada residents across racial and ethnic backgrounds have expressed concern to members about rent, the cost of inflation and rising healthcare costs.“Our members can’t afford homes like they used to,” Pappageorge, who spent a decade as the union’s president, says. “We’re finding that folks are concerned, and they want to know what to do. And we have a plan to win.”The canvassers themselves are dealing with the housing constraints. Before the pandemic, Regalado tried to buy a house. He made offers and felt qualified. “I got outbid every time I did it,” Regalado says. He worried about what he had heard from community members about companies that have bought properties in Las Vegas as investments and the pressure that puts on people’s lives.“The price-gouging is making it harder for everyone to buy a house and find a place to live. They are buying up the rentals and jacking up all the prices at the same time, making it harder and harder for the community to have a decent place to live. We’ve seen eviction notices in apartment complexes, too, because of rents going up.”Marcos Rivera, who was canvassing for the first time, noted that he too wanted to buy a house but was forced to rent an apartment. His family’s rent rose more than 40 percent. He worried about landlords lobbying to raise rents mid-year.“If we don’t do something about it, it’s going to continue to grow. It’s absolutely insane,” Rivera says. “We should just have one job to support our family and our rent. We shouldn’t have to have two jobs to have a decent living.”In its latest canvassing operation announcement, the union noted that its goal of 1 million door knocks in Reno and Las Vegas would reach “more than half of the Black and Latinx voters and more than a third of the Asian American Pacific Islander voters in Nevada”.While her daughter fiddled with food at El Mercado, Lopez, who doesn’t support abortion rights, recounted how since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, questioned what other constitutional rights would be taken away from women like her and her daughter.Underpinning that was the anxiety that she would be unable to provide the life her parents had for her, that as the costs of living in America, she would be unable to buy a home, even as her parents owned two houses.“As a Hispanic woman, I would love to say that we’re able to do what my parents came out to do,” Lopez says. “It’s crazy how my parents came here illegally. They own two houses. And I was born here and I’m not able to afford a house because they’re going up sky-high.”Lopez, who canvasses for the Culinary Workers Union, registered herself and her family to vote for the first time. She understood those she had encountered who were disenchanted with politics, who faced the evictions and instability from unaffordable living situations as their jobs were upended by the pandemic. But she is determined to make sure they have a say in the state’s political future.“Our voice does count,” Lopez told the Guardian when asked about the collective power of Latino voters. “We can make a change.”TopicsNevadaUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansDemocratsRacenewsReuse this content More