US Politics

Arizona governor candidate refuses to say if she will accept midterms resultKari Lake, who has echoed Trump’s claims the 2020 election was stolen, refuses three times to answer when pressed on CNN The Republican gubernatorial nominee in Arizona, Kari Lake, refused to say whether she would accept the results of the election if she loses in November.Lake, a former Phoenix-area news anchor, has made denying the 2020 election results that her preferred candidate, Donald Trump, lost a pillar of her campaign. She has said she wouldn’t have certified the 2020 vote that the former president lost – and which the Democratic victor, Joe Biden, won in Arizona by just over 10,000 votes – saying the election was “corrupt, rotten”.Georgia Senate contender Herschel Walker fails to show for key debate – liveRead moreAppearing on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Lake was asked three times by host Dana Bash whether she would accept the results of next month’s election. She avoided the question twice, before saying she would accept it if she won.“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” she said. She declined to answer when Bash followed up to ask if she would accept the result if she lost.“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” she repeated.Denying the results of the last presidential election has become orthodoxy in Republican politics. On the ballot this fall, 291 Republican nominees – a majority of those running – have denied or questioned the election results, according to a Washington Post analysis.Arizona is one of several states across the country where Republicans who deny the results of the 2020 election are on the cusp of winning offices in which they would have oversight over how elections are run and play a role in certification. Lake is in a tight race against her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. Lake has hammered Hobbs recently over her decision not to debate her, and there are grumblings among Arizona Democrats about Hobbs’s campaign.In addition to Lake, Mark Finchem, a state lawmaker who played a key role in Trump’s failed efforts to overturn his ouster from the Oval Office, is also in a close race. He’s vying to be Arizona’s secretary of state. Finchem, who introduced a resolution to decertify the 2020 election earlier this year, led Democratic candidate Adrian Fontes 49%-45% in a recent CNN poll, which was within the poll’s margin of error. iVote, a group that works to elect Democratic secretaries of state, recently announced it would spend $5m on the race.Appearing in Arizona recently, Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the January 6 committee, warned voters against backing Lake and Finchem. “They both said that they will only honor the results of an election if they agree with it,” she said.“We cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections. Elections are the foundation of our republic and peaceful transfers of power are the foundation of our republic.”TopicsUS politicsArizonaDonald TrumpRepublicansUS midterm elections 2022newsReuse this content More

As the population of the U.S. has grown over the past century, the House of Representatives has gotten worse at being representative of the people it serves. That doesn’t have to happen – and it wasn’t always the case.

The House is the one segment of the federal government that was created from the beginning to directly channel the views of the people to Washington, D.C. But over the past century, the ability of any individual members of the House to truly represent their constituents has been diluted.

When the nation was founded, there were 65 members of the House, representing 3.9 million people in 13 states. On average, that’s one House member for every 60,450 people.

Today, there are 435 members representing 331 million people in 50 states – or one House member for every 761,169 people.

This means American democracy is less representative, and not all citizens are politically equal.

Changing sizes

Since 1913, the number of House seats has remained constant. But in the early years of the United States, the size of the House grew as the nation expanded. From 1791 to 1913, the House passed laws adding more seats in ways that reflected the admission of new states and the growing population. During the Civil War, when some Southern states seceded, the House actually shrank in size – and then resumed expanding as those states rejoined the Union and others were added.

The Congress that began in 1913 was the first to have 435 seats, representing just over 97 million people in 46 states – an average of 223,505 people per member of the House.

The number of seats in the House was fixed at 435 by law in 1929. But it is not a constitutional provision. It is a federal law, so it can be repealed or amended just like any other.

Since that time the country’s population has more than tripled.

Potential solutions

Any changes would require a new law expanding the House, determining how many seats each state would get and drawing new districts based on U.S. Census Bureau data to achieve relatively equal representation.

It might not be widely popular to send even more politicians to Washington, D.C. A larger House would also cost more to operate: The total cost for the House now averages US$3.4 million per member. But an improvement in democratic representation might be worth the effort.

If the House had kept pace with population growth since 1913, I calculate that there would be 1,560 seats now.

Comparative political analysts have identified a general mathematical principle about the size of a properly representative national legislature, called the “cube root law”: Many legislatures around the world have, by various processes, ended up with a number of seats roughly equal to the cube root of the population they represent. That is the number which, when cubed, or multiplied by itself and itself again, equals the population. That would put the U.S. House size at 692, with each seat representing an average of 478,480 people.

The Wyoming Rule

Another way to consider expanding the House would be to use what is known as the “Wyoming Rule.” It ensures the least populated state – currently Wyoming – would receive one House seat and uses its population as the basis for House districts in the other states. Each state’s House delegation would change in size over time, to remain roughly proportional to its population even as the nation grew and its people moved from state to state.

According to the 2020 census, that would mean each House district would represent approximately 577,719 people. There are several technical methods for assigning districts to the states, because no other state’s population is evenly divisible by 577,719. But using a very basic method would produce a House with 571 seats.

California, the most populous state, has roughly 68 times as many people as Wyoming does. Under the current House size, it will have 52 seats in the Congress that begins in 2023. But under a simple version of the Wyoming Rule, it would have 69.

This would ensure all U.S. residents have roughly equal representation in the House, and it would better balance the Electoral College, though less populous states would continue to have an advantage because each voter has a larger influence on the two electoral votes from their senators. While the Electoral College will always disproportionately favor states with small populations, the more seats in the House means more electors to distribute, and the more electors there are the more fair the relative voting strength of each state.

Some states would be slightly over- or underrepresented, even under the Wyoming Rule, because state boundaries don’t line up evenly with population locations. But the disparity would be less than under the current 435-seat cap.

And it’s worth noting that this method would not address the fact that 670,000 Americans live in Washington, D.C.; 3.2 million live in Puerto Rico; and about 340,000 live in the other U.S. island territories of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. None of them have ever been represented by full voting members of the House. More

Democrats and Republicans fight to make inroads with Latinos ahead of midtermsHispanic voters could tip the scales next month in a number of battleground states Arizona’s Democratic senator Mark Kelly frequently consults his “Latino kitchen cabinet”. In south Texas, the Democratic House candidate Michelle Vallejo hosted a neighbourhood quinceañera. And in Georgia, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams appeared on stage at La Raza’s Fiesta Mexicana. Across battleground states this midterm cycle, Democrats are urgently working to engage and mobilize Hispanic voters.Their push comes two years after Donald Trump made surprising but substantial inroads with Latinos despite his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race. Democrats started to fear their party was losing its hold on a historically reliable cohort, while Republicans became hopeful.Now Democrats and Republicans are engaged anew in a pitched – and expensive – political battle for Hispanic voters, an electorate both parties see as critical not only to their chances this November but also to their electoral hopes in the future.Latino voters are a significant part of the electorate in battleground states likely to decide control of the US Senate, including Arizona, Nevada and even Georgia. They also form a powerful cohort in districts with highly competitive House races across California, Texas and Florida.US midterms 2022: the key racesRead more“Latinos get to decide the future of these states, which means they get to decide the future of our entire country with their vote,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of the progressive youth voting group, NextGen America.That wasn’t always the case. In 1970, just 5% of the US population was Hispanic. But now, they represent nearly one in five Americans. In the last decade, Latinos accounted for 52% of the nation’s population growth.They also make up one of the largest and fastest-growing parts of the electorate. Latino voters cast roughly 16m votes in 2020, accounting for more than 10% of the total vote share.Most Hispanic voters – 56% – say they plan to vote for Democrats in November, compared with 32% for Republicans, a New York Times/Siena College poll found. But the survey showed Democrats’ support was weaker than in previous years, primarily over economic concerns.America’s ‘weird’ economy isn’t working – can Democrats convince voters they can fix it? Read moreSimilarly, a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll found Democratic support among Latino voters lagged behind the 2018 level.The economy and rising cost of living is by far the top issue for Latinos this year, yet the Times/Siena poll indicated that they are evenly split over which party they agree more with. And after the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, several surveys – including the Post/Ipsos poll – have found that abortion rights are now also among the top voting issue for Latinos.“What we’re seeing here is Latino voters very much concerned about their quality of life as they consider who they’re going to vote for and how they’re going to vote,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund (Naleo), which has commissioned a tracking poll of Latino voters this cycle.‘Win enough’Like the rest of the country, Latinos are dissatisfied with the direction of the country and divided over Joe Biden’s handling of the economy. Republicans see that as an opening to peel away disaffected Latino voters.“Republicans are not going to win the Hispanic vote but they don’t need to,” said Mike Madrid, a veteran Republican strategist who co-hosts the Latino Vote podcast. “They’re just trying to win enough at the margins to win statewide contests.”Madrid says neither party has an obvious grip on the future of the Latino electorate. He argues that Latinos’ preference for Democrats in the past has been driven by their opposition to Republicans’ embrace of hardline anti-immigrant policies – not loyalty to the Democratic party.Younger voters tend to be more ambivalent about party politics. And Latino voters are young, and they are getting younger. It is estimated that each year 1 million US-born Latinos turn 18 and become eligible to vote.“The party that is able to capture the hearts and minds and loyalty of a multi-ethnic working class will be the dominant party of the next generation,” Madrid said.Hoping to capitalize on the gains they made in 2020, Republicans have ramped up their outreach to Latino voters. They celebrated victories by Republican Latinas like Mayra Flores in Texas. And in battleground states across the country, the Republican National Committee has invested millions in community outreach centers targeting Latinos, along with Black voters and Asian Americans.Those efforts are bolstered by the work of groups like the Libre Initiative. For the past decade, Libre – an arm of the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity – has worked to build support for conservative economic principles in Hispanic communities.The Libre Initiative’s president, Daniel Garza, said they are playing a long game, investing in states where the Latino population is still relatively small but growing: Georgia, Virginia, Wisconsin, even Arkansas. The organization has helped Latinos learn English, get driving licences and even attain high-school equivalency degrees.“The end game is not electing politicians,” Garza said. “It’s not even policy. The idea is for Latinos to become the ‘vanguard of the kinds of free market policies that allow waves of poor immigrants to achieve the American dream.’”A historic underinvestmentFor years, Latino Democratic leaders and strategists have warned the party that it needs to invest more money in outreach, hire Latino staff and engage voters on issues beyond immigration.Democrats have indeed spent more than $54m in elections ads on Spanish-language TV and radio stations since the beginning of 2021 as compared to $19m from Republicans, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact. Yet advocates argue that more can be done.“The fact is that we need a lot more resources, coming in early so that we can do the appropriate work needed to reach out to the Latino community, and especially young voters,” said Lizet Ocampo, executive director of Voto Latino, an online voter registration organization.Ad campaign targets Latino voters as key bloc for Democrats in midtermsRead moreOcampo said there have been improvements this cycle, but more money is needed to be in constant contact with these voters.“We know that consistent engagement around the year is better at getting folks out, especially young people,” she added. “They do not like when people parachute in at the last minute and ask for their vote.”And what worries leaders like Ocampo is not that Latinos may vote for Republicans. It’s that Latinos may not vote at all.Ramirez, whose group, NextGen, works to mobilise young voters, says both parties are guilty of a “historic underinvestment in the Latino community”. But she argues that Democrats have the better economic message: lowering the cost of prescription drugs, raising the minimum wage and guaranteeing parental leave are popular policies.“The solutions and economic policies of the Democratic party speak to the greatest number of Latinos’ pain, but that’s not enough to make sure that they come out and vote for Democrats,” she said. “If Democrats want their vote, they need to spend more money and time speaking to the Latino community, especially younger Latinos.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

Sanders: Democrats shouldn’t court far-right ‘racist, sexist, homophobic’ votersSenator says nonetheless Democrats should appeal to ‘millions of … working-class people’ who can’t afford healthcare or tuition Democrats should give up trying to appeal to racist, sexist or homophobic voters on the far right even as their party tries to preserve thin majorities in both congressional chambers, the progressive US senator Bernie Sanders said on Sunday.Sanders’ remarks came during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press after host Chuck Todd asked a question about attempting to woo over supporters of Donald Trump, which include white nationalists who helped stage the deadly January 6 Capitol attack on the day that Congress certified the former Republican president’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.Todd said Sanders “made a big deal about wanting to court Trump voters” in both the 2016 election that Trump won as well as the 2020 race that he lost and wondered if the Vermont senator still felt they were worth that.“There are some extreme rightwing voters who are racists, who are sexists, who are homophobes – xenophobes,” Sanders said. “No, I don’t think you’re ever going to get them.”Sanders nonetheless said Democrats should sympathize with “millions of … working-class people” who can’t afford healthcare, college tuition for their children or their prescription drugs. And he said one way to appeal to undecided voters is to have the political resolve to punish corporate greed from insurance firms, drug companies and Wall Street traders.“Some of those people – I’m not saying all – will say, ‘You know what, I’m going to stand with the Democratic party because on these economic issues, they’re far preferable to right-wing Republicans,” Sanders told Todd.Sanders is an independent but votes in line with the Democrats’ agenda on Capitol Hill.He recently wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian that warned Democrats should not only focus on protecting abortion rights in the closing phases of this midterm election cycle but also needed to communicate a plan for the economic woes facing Americans that Republicans as a party purport to care more about.Sanders said his voting record starkly illustrates his opposition to the US supreme court’s decision in June to eliminate federal protections for abortion, which a majority of voters believe should be legal in most cases, according to some polling.The supreme court’s ruling overturning the nationwide abortion rights established by the 1973 Roe v Wade case has led to fears that the justices could also target the elimination of same-sex marriage.But Sanders said his party should also be concerned about how six in 10 Americans live paycheck to paycheck. And he has said Democrats should be more vocal about how they have better ideas than Republicans on rectifying that reality, including through methods such as ending tax breaks, raising the federal minimum wage and even providing universal healthcare.The Democrats go into the midterms with an eight-seat advantage in the House. The Senate is split evenly but Biden’s Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris currently gives their party a tiebreaker.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Bernie SandersUS politicsReuse this content More

Whistleblower Trump Media executive says firm violated federal securities laws Will Wilkerson, co-founder of Trump’s media company, also alleges that ex-president pressured executives to give shares to Melania The co-founder of Donald Trump’s beleaguered social media company has turned whistleblower, alleging the firm violated federal securities laws and that the former president pressured executives to hand over lucrative shares to his wife.Will Wilkerson, a former Trump Media and Technology Group executive, has told the US government’s financial watchdog that the company’s bid to raise more than $1bn via an investment vehicle known as a special purpose acquisition company (Spac), relied on “fraudulent misrepresentations … in violation of federal securities laws.”Trump Media and Technology Group is the company that launched Trump’s Truth Social platform after Twitter and Facebook banned the ex-president for his role in the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol.Wilkerson, who was sacked from his role as senior vice-president for operations last week after speaking to the Washington Post, filed a whistleblower complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in August. He backed his complaint with a cache of emails, documents, messages and audio recordings which detail a pattern of rancorous infighting, technical incompetence and power struggles inside Trump Media since its launch last year.Among the emails is an exchange between Wilkerson and fellow co-founder Andy Litinsky, who was allegedly fired as payback for refusing to hand over some of his shares, worth millions of dollars, to former first lady Melania Trump, according to the Post. Trump had already been given 90% of the company’s shares in exchange for the use of his name and some minor involvement.In the email provided to the SEC, Litinsky, who first met Trump in 2004 as a contestant on the TV show The Apprentice, said that Trump was “retaliating against me” by threatening to “‘blow up the company’ if his demands are not met”.The SEC was already investigating the merger between Trump media and the Spac, Digital World Acquisition Corp, which has been on hold since last October due to civil and criminal investigations as well as lacklustre investor backing.Wilkerson’s lawyers have said that he is cooperating with investigators at the SEC, and New York-based federal prosecutors are also looking into alleged criminality at Trump Media in relation to the merger which would have led to a $1.3bn cash injection. Digital World’s share price dived to under $18 on Friday from a high of $175.Investors were promised more than 50 million users by 2024, but so far Trump, the main attraction on the platform, has less than 5 million followers – just a fraction of the 88 million he had on Twitter.The whistleblower complaint was first reported by the Miami Herald, but Trump Media fired Wilkerson last Thursday, citing his “unauthorized disclosures” to the Post. His lawyer Phil Brewster described the move as “patent retaliation against a SEC whistleblower of the worst kind”.Trump’s and the company’s legal woes – and desperate actions – are mounting as he contends with federal and state investigations in New York, Georgia and Washington DC over his business practices and his lies about being robbed victory during the 2020 presidential race.Last month, New York attorney general Letitia James’s office sent a criminal referral to federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the IRS regarding multiple possible crimes including bank fraud uncovered. In a separate civil suit, the attorney general is seeking $250m in damages, alleging that Trump, three of his adult children, his business organization and others of submitting years of fraudulent financial statements.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Republican Adam Kinzinger: election deniers won’t ‘go away organically’January 6 committee member speaks days after panel voted to subpoena Trump and says ex-president ‘required by law to come in’ Election deniers are not “going to go away organically”, and if they are ever to vanish, US voters must signal “that truth matters” beginning with the upcoming midterms, according to a Republican member of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.Adam Kinzinger’s latest remarks on the baseless insistence by Donald Trump’s allies that fraudsters denied him a second term in the Oval Office and handed the 2020 election to Joe Biden came Sunday, days after the House January 6 select committee unanimously moved to subpoena the former president’s testimony over his knowledge of the deadly Capitol attack.Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the nine-member January 6 panel, has long called the Capitol attack the inevitable culmination of Trump’s lies – buoyed up by supporters in and out of elected office – that he was robbed of victory over his Democratic rival Biden. On Sunday he made arguably one of his most impassioned pleas yet for voters to realize the only way to minimize chances of a Capitol attack repeat, or even an escalation, was to punish candidates denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential race at the ballot box.“I don’t think this is just going to go away organically – this is going to take the American people really standing up and making the decision that truth matters,” Kinzinger said on ABC’s This Week when host George Stephanopoulos mentioned the large number of midterm candidates in state and federal races amplifying Trump’s electoral lies.“I don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democrat because the battle right now is truth and the battle is the preservation of democracy.”Kinzinger, in his conversation with Stephanopoulos on Sunday, reiterated that the subpoena which the House Capitol attack panel was working on issuing to Trump wouldn’t be a request. Trump’s rambling, 14-page reply to the subpoena, titled “the presidential election of 2020 was rigged and stolen”, never said whether he intends to comply – he once was eager to speak on his own behalf before the panel, but he since has appeared to grasp the potential pitfalls of making statements to investigators.Nonetheless, “he’s required by law to come in” and either testify or invoke his rights against self-incrimination, Kinzinger said. “And he can ramble and push back all he wants – that’s the requirement for a congressional subpoena to come in.”The Illinois congressman said he anticipated a negotiation between the committee and Trump’s camp about whether the former president’s testimony in front of the panel would be live. The panel has rarely accepted testimony with conditions from any witnesses, with the notable exception of former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.Kinzinger also wouldn’t say whether he believed federal prosecutors would charge Trump with criminal contempt of Congress if he defies the subpoena.“Look, that’s a – that’s a bridge we cross if we have to get there,” Kinzinger said.Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon was found guilty of criminal contempt of Congress in July after he refused to provide testimony and documents subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee. But Trump could avail himself of immunity which Bannon could not.At least nine deaths, including the suicides of officers traumatized by having to respond to the scene, have been linked to the Capitol attack staged by Trump supporters on the day Congress was supposed to certify his defeat at the hands of Biden.Members of the congressional committee investigating the attack have said the subpoena to Trump is necessary because his singular role at the center of events leading up to January 6 required a full accounting.They reportedly believe Trump’s testimony could resolve a number of pending issues, including his contacts with political operatives at the Trump war room at an upscale hotel near the Capitol on the day before the building was attacked.The work of Kinzinger and fellow Republican Liz Cheney on the House January 6 committee has been costly for both. Cheney lost a bid for another term to Trump-backed primary challenger Harriet Hageman.Kinzinger, whose office has reportedly been inundated with death threats, chose to not run for re-election and has started a political action committee, Country First, which in part aims to recruit candidates from both parties for local election clerk offices who wouldn’t subvert the results of races.“I would love to say this was going to happen easily,” Kinzinger said. “It’s going to take everybody’s work out there working hard because I don’t think you want to leave your kids a country … like what we’ve been living in.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

Joe Biden calls Liz Truss tax cuts a ‘mistake’ as political fallout continuesUS president rejects ‘cutting taxes on the super-wealthy’ and says he is not the only world leader critical of abandoned plan00:39Joe Biden has called Liz Truss’s abandoned economic plan that sent financial markets into chaos and caused a sharp drop in the value of the pound a “mistake” as criticism of her approach continued.The US president hinted that other world leaders felt the same way about her disastrous mini-budget, saying he “wasn’t the only one” who had concerns over the lack of “sound policy” in other countries.Biden said it was “predictable” that the new British prime minister was forced on Friday to backtrack on plans to aggressively cut taxes without saying how they would be paid for, after Truss’s proposal caused turmoil in global financial markets.His comments on Sunday to reporters at an ice-cream parlour in Oregon marked a highly unusual intervention by a US president into the domestic policy decisions of one of its closest allies.“I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” Biden said. “I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when … I disagree with the policy, but it’s up to Britain to make that judgment, not me.”Labour leapt on the US president’s remarks. The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “As well as crashing the economy, Liz Truss’s humiliating U-turns have made Britain’s economy an international punchline.“President Biden knows the dangerous folly of trickle-down economics. His comments confirm the hit our reputation has taken thanks to the Conservatives.”Biden has repeatedly poured scorn on so-called trickle-down economics and before his first bilateral talks with Truss in New York last month tweeted that he was “sick and tired” of the approach, which he claimed had never worked.Mini-budget went ‘too far, too fast’, says Jeremy HuntRead moreBiden’s comments came after weeks of White House officials declining to criticise Truss’s plans, though they emphasised they were monitoring the economic fallout closely.The US president was speaking during an unannounced campaign stop for the Democratic candidate for governor, Tina Kotek. Democrats face a tough US political environment amid Republican criticism of their handling of the economy.Biden said he was not concerned about the strength of the dollar – it set a new record against sterling in recent weeks, which benefits imports but makes US exports more expensive to the rest of the world.He claimed the US economy was “strong as hell” but added: “I’m concerned about the rest of the world. The problem is the lack of economic growth and sound policy in other countries. It’s worldwide inflation, that’s consequential.”Truss’s own new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has said Truss and his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget went “too far, too fast” as he effectively signalled the demise of the prime minister’s economic vision.“We have to be honest with people and we are going to have to take some very difficult decisions both on spending and on tax to get debt falling, but at the top of our minds when making these decisions will be how to protect and help struggling families, businesses and people.”Hunt is expected to announce that plans to reduce the basic rate of income tax next April will be pushed back by a year. The cut to 19% will now take effect at the time previously proposed by Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor who was Truss’s main leadership rival.TopicsUS foreign policyJoe BidenLiz TrussEconomic policyUS politicsConservativesnewsReuse this content More

Republicans are trying to win by spreading three false talking points. Here’s the truthRobert ReichRepublicans want midterm voters to believe lies about crime, inflation and taxes. This is what they’re claiming – followed by the facts Republicans are telling three lies they hope will swing the midterms. They involve crime, inflation, and taxes. Here’s what Republicans are claiming, followed by the facts.1. They claim that crime is rising because Democrats have been “soft” on crimeThis is pure rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.Here are the facts:While violent crime rose 28% from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose 35%. States that have weakened gun laws have seen gun crime surge. Clearly, a major driver of the national increase in violence is the easy availability of guns.The violence can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points about “soft-on-crime” Democrats.Lack of police funding? Baloney. Democratic-run major cities spend 38% more on policing per person than Republican-run cities, and 80% of the largest cities increased police funding from 2019 to 2022.Criminal justice reforms? Wrong. Data shows that wherever bail reforms have been implemented, re-arrest rates remain stable. Data from major cities shows no connection between the policies of progressive prosecutors and changes in crime rates.Research has repeatedly shown that crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states. The thinktank Third Way found that in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Trump than in those won by Joe Biden.Let’s be clear: it’s been Republican policies that have made it easier for people to get and carry guns. Republicans are lying about the real cause of rising crime to protect their patrons – gun manufacturers.2. They claim that inflation is due to Biden’s spending, and wage increasesBaloney. The major cause of the current inflation is the global post-pandemic shortage of all sorts of things, coupled with Putin’s war in Ukraine and China’s lockdowns.The major domestic cause of the current inflation is big corporations that have been taking advantage of inflation by raising their prices higher than their increasing costs.Here are the facts:Inflation can’t be explained by any of the Republican talking points.Biden’s spending? Rubbish again. That can’t be causing our current inflation because inflation has broken out everywhere around the world, often at much higher rates than in the US.Democrats shouldn’t focus only on abortion in the midterms. That’s a mistake | Bernie SandersRead moreBesides, heavy spending by the US government began in 2020, before the Biden administration, in order to protect Americans and the economy from the ravages of Covid-19 – and it was necessary.American workers getting wage increases? Wages can’t be pushing inflation because wages have been increasing at a slower pace than prices – leaving most workers worse off.The biggest domestic culprits are big corporations using inflation as an excuse to raise prices above their own cost increases, resulting in near-record profits.US corporate profits are at the highest margins since 1950 – while consumers are paying through the nose.Let’s be clear: the biggest domestic cause of inflation is corporate power. Republicans are lying about this to protect their big corporate patrons.3. They say Democrats voted to hire an army of IRS agents who will audit and harass the middle classNonsense. The IRS won’t be going after the middle class. It will be going after ultra-wealthy tax cheats.Here are the facts:The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in July, provides funding to begin to get IRS staffing back to what it was before 2010, after which Republicans diminished staff by roughly 30%, despite increases since then in the number of Americans filing tax returns.The extra staff are needed to boost efforts against high-end tax evasion – which is more difficult to root out, because the ultra-wealthy hire squads of accountants and tax attorneys to hide their taxable incomes.The treasury department and the IRS have made it clear that audit rates for households earning $400,000 or under will remain the same.Let’s be clear: the IRS needs extra resources to go after rich tax cheats. Republicans are lying about what the IRS will do with the new funding to protect their ultra-wealthy patrons.None of these three lies is as brazen and damaging as Trump’s big lie. But they’re all being used by Republican candidates in these last weeks before the midterms.Know the truth and share it.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsUS midterm elections 2022OpinionUS politicsRepublicansUS economycommentReuse this content More