US Politics

The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old Kermit Roosevelt III, descendant of Theodore, sees lessons for today’s divided nation in Reconstruction and the civil rights era As with the climate, in politics we are running out of time. America’s retreat from democracy cannot persist. Though Native Americans, Black people, women and plenty others of us were excluded from America’s compact of equality and opportunity, many are still nostalgic for once upon a time. Some see even so flawed a quest for “a more perfect union” as admirable enough to deem it beyond reproach. After all, the argument goes, the American experiment always included and valued most. So that’s alright. All do not think that way.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreKermit Roosevelt III illuminates tumultuous today by examining the contentious beginning. With The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, he thoughtfully explains our growing confusion as to what the creation meant and means.How can so many, looking back to the intentions of the founders, be so misled now? How have we misinterpreted what America has always been about? Citing an evolution as profound as “an eye for an eye” metamorphosing to “God is love”, Roosevelt’s investigation gives lie to every originalist argument today. One might even be tempted to view the United States’ contradictory impediment of slavery like Christianity’s “blessing” of original sin, the absence of which, theologians say, precludes salvation.Roosevelt is a Penn law professor and a great-great grandson of the “trust-busting” 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. He is careful to give credit where credit is due. He notes his book was prefigured by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s powerful 2019 essay, Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.Created for the New York Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones’s piece relates: “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie … despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans … have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”Roosevelt endorses this sentiment by stating that the Declaration of Independence was not conceived as a document dedicated to impartiality. Au contraire. As he puts it, it protected the rights and interests of “insiders” from the striving and ambitions of “outsiders”, a push and pull, he says, that remains in effect.The nub of the Declaration, Roosevelt asserts, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. Ironically, it was only with the arrival of the civil war, rebelling southern states invoking the supposed tyranny of efforts to end their oppression of others, that America was redeemed.The result was not just a second revolution. It presented us with a second constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first constitution.And yet despite the indifference of that document to individual rights, Roosevelt writes: “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime – Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution – to which we are not the heirs … We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime”, who “defeated it by force of arms”.Abraham Lincoln appreciated this. So did Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Yet each strategically choose to give credence to the more broad appeal of the founding myth. Both the Gettysburg Address and the I Have a Dream speech do this. So many, their authors understood, find embracing an origin story based on the ideal of universal inclusion more palatable than our tainted reality.Moreover, the second constitution, contingent and evolving, requires both “the blood of patriots and tyrants” Thomas Jefferson proscribed to sustain liberty and the “eternal vigilance” he also recommended. To ward off neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, far-right Christians and the like takes the fortitude of activists like Black Lives Matter combined with the sacrifice of a Bobby, Martin, Malcom or John. There is no less grievous way.Realizing our promise, Roosevelt insists, requires completing the reform of Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Relics supporting the privilege of “insiders” – the electoral college, encumbrances of voting rights, pay-to-play election financing – all must be banished.The Nation That Never Was makes one all too aware of the ways insiders protect their advantage. Always they urge patience in what they see as a benevolent, color-blind system. Professing that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”, even King grew weary waiting.So have I. Concerned about the modest size of a newly protected historic district, Harlem residents were reassured by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission that they needn’t worry.“This is our opening salvo. We’ll be back to do more…”Their return only took 44 years.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead moreRoosevelt is at his poignant, tragicomic best when calling-out perennial efforts to rationalize and justify the biases of white supremacy into public policy and law. Did the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, really believe his 2013 ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act? He said racially motivated voter suppression was a problem of the past, that “the nation is no longer divided” into states with a recent history of voter suppression and those without.Plessy v Ferguson, the overturning of Roe v Wade, depriving the franchise to so many inhabitants. American history is not a saga of anomalous outrage. Every incident of persisting misogyny, homophobia or racism brings to the fore the problem Roosevelt seeks to address.No matter how familiar Laozi’s truism, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, some people today are just like those in all the other volumes I’ve reviewed here. Wether in Wilmington’s Lie, Learning From the Germans, The Other Madisons or The Groundbreaking, the common obstacle to change and healing is reluctance to even admitting that anything bad ever happened – much less that an injustice stands unamended.
The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, is published in the US by University of Chicago press
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery‘By the grace of God, I am now cancer-free’, Sanders, 42, formerly Trump’s press secretary, says after successful operation Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Donald Trump White House press secretary turned Republican candidate for Arkansas governor, said on Friday she was “cancer-free” after undergoing surgery for thyroid cancer.In a statement, Sanders, aged 42, said the cancer was discovered during a check-up this month.“Today I underwent a successful surgery to remove my thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes and by the grace of God, I am now cancer-free,” she said. “I want to thank the Arkansas doctors and nurses for their world-class care, as well as my family and friends for their love, prayers and support. I look forward to returning to the campaign trail soon.”Sanders added: “This experience has been a reminder that whatever battles you may be facing, don’t lose heart. As governor I will never quit fighting for the people of our great state.”In May this year, Sanders strolled to victory in the Arkansas Republican primary to succeed Asa Hutchinson, a relative moderate in Trump’s GOP, as governor next year.She will face the Democrat Chris Jones in November. All major polling and predictions sites rate Arkansas “solid Republican”.Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, was governor of Arkansas and twice ran from the Christian right for the Republican presidential nomination.His daughter became Donald Trump’s second White House press secretary after the resignation of Sean Spicer, the party operative who endured a hapless spell in the role.Under Sanders, White House press briefings were first combative then dwindled as Trump sought to bypass what he deemed hostile media coverage.As the Guardian said when Sanders left the White House in 2019, as press secretary she “provided stability after Spicer’s series of wayward gaffes and, unlike other Trump officials, stayed in his good graces with her unswerving, often ostentatious shows of loyalty.”02:43Earlier that same year, she told the Christian TV network CBN that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president”.Sanders featured in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. The special counsel showed that her claim that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”, James Comey, was a lie.As reported by Mueller, Sanders called the remark a “slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.After leaving Trump’s employ, Sanders took aim at Arkansas politics, releasing a typically loyal memoir, Speaking for Myself, in September 2020.Among other anecdotes about her time working for Trump, the book did reveal the odd potentially embarrassing story. In one such passage, Sanders said Trump joked about her “tak[ing] one for the team” when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un apparently took a liking to her during summit talks.TopicsUS politicsArkansasnewsReuse this content More

DeSantis criticized for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard: ‘It’s un-American’Democrats outraged at the ‘reckless’ and ‘soulless’ actions and question the legality of what some called a political stunt Joe Biden has accused Ron DeSantis of “playing politics with people’s lives” for flying Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal island community of Martha’s Vineyard without warning, while the legality of the Florida governor’s move is also under scrutiny.In what immigration activists and Democratic politicians have decried as a “political stunt”, DeSantis, who is expected to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, arranged for two charter planes of about 50 migrant adults and children to fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday. DeSantis sends migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, causing ‘humanitarian situation’ Read moreClaiming that “every community in America should be sharing in the burdens,” DeSantis told a press briefing he wanted to draw attention to what he claimed was a failure by the Biden administration to secure the US-Mexico border.The president attacked DeSantis’s action in a speech late on Thursday, also criticising Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott.Abbott arranged for two buses from his state to drop off more than 100 migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela at the Washington DC residence of the vice-president, Kamala Harris, on Wednesday, shortly before the Massachusetts planes landed.The leader of the anti-trafficking charity Polaris on Friday issued a strongly-worded statement that pointedly questioned whether the governors’ actions amounted to human trafficking, citing migrants’ claims that they were deceived about where they were going.“Acts of calculated deception were reportedly used to trick migrants onto buses and planes,” the statement from Polaris chief Catherine Chen said. “Unfortunately, this tactic is one that we know far too well in the anti-trafficking world. Migrants are regularly tricked and defrauded as part of their trafficking experience, with traffickers and exploiters taking advantage of their recent arrival, limited English proficiency, and unfamiliarity with our government systems and labor laws.”Chen added: “If migrants were defrauded, and if this fraud was intended as a vehicle for anyone’s material gain, including that of an elected official, then there is a case for investigating it as trafficking.”DeSantis, Abbott and Doug Ducey, governor of Arizona, have sent thousands of migrants to predominantly Democratic-run “sanctuary” states and cities they deem to be liberal over immigration, although Massachusetts has a Republican governor, Charlie Baker.Attack on asylum seeker in New York sparks outrage over conditions Read more“Instead of working with us on solutions, Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props,” Biden said at a gala for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington DC.“What they’re doing is simply wrong. It’s un-American, it’s reckless and we have a process in place to manage migrants at the border. We’re working to make sure it’s safe and orderly and humane.“Republican officials should not interfere with that process by waging these political stunts,” he added.Veronica Escobar, a Democratic congresswoman from Texas, meanwhile, said DeSantis was “a soulless human being”.On Friday, as Baker said he had ordered up to 125 members of the Massachusetts national guard to help move the migrants to more secure accommodation at a military base in Cape Cod on the mainland, questions were mounting over the legality of DeSantis’s action.The US attorney for Massachusetts, Rachael Rollins, said she planned to speak with the justice department, and Nikki Fried, a member of the Florida cabinet and the only statewide-elected Democrat, wrote to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to demand a federal investigation into potential human trafficking.California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said he had also written to the justice department, which declined comment when contacted by the Guardian on Friday.Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for Florida governor, who will challenge DeSantis in November’s midterm elections, said he had filed a sunshine law request demanding information about the state’s legislature-approved “relocation programme”.Earlier this year politicians granted $12m (£10.5m) for DeSantis’s plan to relocate migrants to other states, but the language is specific to undocumented immigrants physically in Florida.Both flights to Massachusetts touched down briefly in Florida en route between San Antonio and Martha’s Vineyard, but DeSantis’s office did not say if that was an attempt to meet the requirement of the programme.The southern Republican governors have been transporting migrants who are, at least temporarily, legally in the US waiting for their immigration cases, such as seeking asylum from violent regimes, to be processed.Crist in a statement accused DeSantis of trafficking humans with Florida taxpayer money. “He owes the people of our state answers,” Crist added.In Edgartown, the Martha’s Vineyard county seat and old whaling port, on Friday, residents and aid groups were working to care for and relocate the Venezuelan families, many of whom speak no English and say they were not told of their destination when they boarded the plane.Several told journalists there was nobody at the airport to greet them, and they walked almost four miles to find help in the town, where they were put up in a church overnight.“They were told there was a surprise present for them, and that there would be jobs and housing awaiting for them when they arrived. This was obviously a sadistic lie,” Rachel Self, a Boston immigration attorney assisting with the migrants’ cases, said at a press briefing.Self said she believes the migrants in question were kidnapped and defrauded, and any who cooperate with investigators may become eligible for a visa granted to crime victims.On Friday afternoon, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre accused Republican governors involved of lying to migrants, and said DeSantis did not notify Massachusetts that “migrant children, in need of food and shelter, were about to land on their doorstep”.“These vulnerable migrants were misled about where they were headed.”She condemned what she called Abbott and DeSantis “creating political theater [without] creating actual solution.She noted, however, that any legal challenge would have to come from the US Justice Department rather than the White House.Shaw Drake, senior policy counsel on border and immigration at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the Martha’s Vineyard case has raised “particular concerns about the level of coercion and lack of informed consent”.“The issue of consent is of core legal concern,” Drake added.Meanwhile, NBC News reported friction between the White House and the Department of Homeland Security about how to cope with the latest rise in unauthorized border crossings.TopicsUS immigrationJoe BidenRon DeSantisUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

The House committee investigating January 6 plans to release preliminary findings into the attack on the Capitol sometime in October, meaning voters may be digesting new details of the insurrection as the midterms approach, Axios reports.The committee has tentative plans to hold its first public hearing since July on 28 September, and Axios reports that its members are meeting today to flesh out the rest of their schedule. The Democratic chair Bennie Thompson said an early version of its report into the attack will come out in October. “The goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election,” he said, adding that the time between the late-September hearing and the 8 November election “won’t be a quiet period.”The committee’s public hearings held in June and July dredged up highly publicized details of the attack and Donald Trump’s actions before, during and after that put the former president and his Republican allies on the defensive. That dynamic may repeat in the two months ahead, assuming the committee is able to match its earlier revelations.For a sense of how the committee is thinking in relation to its impact on the midterms, here are the thoughts of one of its Democratic members, Jamie Raskin: “There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.Here’s what else happened today:
President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.
The White House condemned GOP governors’ transportation of migrants to Washington, DC and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.
Lawmakers faced rancor and strife of all kinds, including a condemnation at a committee hearing, a feud on a flight and a kicking outside the Capitol.
No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.
West Virginia’s Republican governor Jim Justice has signed a recently passed abortion ban into law, making it the latest state to crack down on the procedure after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last June.Today I signed HB 302 – a bill that protects life.I said from the beginning that if WV legislators brought me a bill that protected life and included reasonable and logical exceptions I would sign it, and that’s what I did today.Read the bill ⬇️https://t.co/G7i9DTirSN— Governor Jim Justice (@WVGovernor) September 16, 2022
The legislation approved by the GOP-controlled state legislature is intended to shut down the state’s only abortion clinic, but contains some exceptions for minors and victims of rape and incest.West Virginia passes sweeping abortion ban with few exceptionsRead moreElsewhere on Thursday, the partisan venom went airborne, when Senator Ted Cruz encountered a supporter of Democrat Beto O’Rourke on a flight.The Texas senator’s camera-wielding foe, whose identity remains unclear, captured their encounter on video, in which he challenged Cruz’s stance on gun control and asked him to name a victim of the May shooting in the town of Uvalde:Senator Cruz was on my flight, and I asked him to name any of the Uvalde victims. He couldn’t. Texas deserves better than spineless hacks like this. Right the wrongs of 2018, and make @betoorourke our next Governor. #betoforgovernor #cancuncrus #uvaldestrong pic.twitter.com/AW34oxuUNv— Beto For Everyone (@Nathan_VBB) September 15, 2022
Cruz defeated O’Rourke when he stood against him for Senate in 2020. O’Rourke is currently trying to unseat Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is running for a third term.The congressional tumult extended beyond committee chambers on Thursday, when video appeared to show rightwing Republican House representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicking an activist as they argued about gun control.The Georgia lawmaker herself posted a lengthy video of the encounter. The alleged kicking happens at about the 1:15 mark:These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns & the rights of parents to defend their children in schools.You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law.“Gun-free” zones kill people. pic.twitter.com/1T37HH8jEO— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) September 15, 2022
The Washington Post has a write-up about the encounter between Voters of Tomorrow, a group representing Gen Z, and Greene, whom Democratic leadership booted from her committee assignments for a series of offensive remarks last year.The entire encounter is reminiscent of what Greene used to do before being elected to Congress in 2020. She appeared in Washington the year prior to follow for several blocks and heckle gun control activist David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida.Meanwhile in the House of Representatives, rancor was the order of the day in a Thursday committee hearing when one Republican lawmaker’s comments to a witness prompted a rebuke from his Democratic colleague.“I’m trying to give you the floor, boo,” Republican Clay Higgins said as Raya Salter, a clean energy advocate, spoke before the House oversight committee.New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not pleased by how her colleague from Louisiana treated Salter, who was talking about how the fossil fuel industry affected Black people and other racial minorities.“In the four years that I’ve sat on this committee, I have never seen members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, disrespect a witness in the way that I have seen them disrespect you today,” Ocasio-Cortez told Salter. “Frankly, men who treat women like that in public – I fear how they treat them in private.”In a statement to the Hill, Higgins said, “When radicals show up in front of my committee with an attitude talking anti-American trash, they can expect to get handled. I really don’t care if I hurt anybody’s feelings while I’m fighting to preserve our Republic.”Here’s a video of the exchange:Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis said bringing migrants to Democratic-led areas of the country was necessary to draw attention to the government’s failures at the southern border, Richard Luscombe reports:Joe Biden has accused Ron DeSantis of “playing politics with people’s lives” for flying Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal island community of Martha’s Vineyard without warning, while the legality of the Florida governor’s move is also under scrutiny.In what immigration activists and Democratic politicians have decried as a “political stunt”, DeSantis, who is expected to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, arranged for two charter planes of about 50 migrant adults and children to fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday.Claiming that “every community in America should be sharing in the burdens,” DeSantis told a press briefing he wanted to draw attention to what he claimed was a failure by the Biden administration to secure the US-Mexico border.DeSantis criticized for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard: ‘It’s un-American’Read moreOne migrant had to be taken to urgent care upon arriving in Washington. Another wasn’t aware that he was arriving on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard until his plane began its descent.Those were some of the anecdotes White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre relayed as she continued her condemnation of Republicans governors sending migrants from the southern border to Democratic-run communities.“This should not be happening,” she said. “Republican officials should not be using human beings as political pawns.”White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is echoing Joe Biden last night in slamming Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, after he arranged for a group of migrants from Venezuela to be flown to the small Massachusetts island, without warning to the state or a true explanation to the people being transported.She said DeSantis did not notify Massachusetts that “migrant children, in need of food and shelter, were about to land on their doorstep.”Jean-Pierre added: “These vulnerable migrants were misled about where they were headed.”She said they were told they were going to Boston and misled about what benefits they would be provided when they arrived, “promised shelter, refuge benefits and more”.She accused the Florida leader, and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who has unilaterally been bussing thousands of migrants awaiting the processing of their immigration applications in the US to Democratic-led cities New York, Washington and Chicago, of “the tactics of smugglers in places like Mexico and Guatemala”.“And for what? A photo op? Because these governors care about creating political theater, not creating actual solutions,” Jean-Pierre fumed.She accused Republicans of treating humans like “chattel in a cruel, pre-meditated political stunt”.From the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. https://t.co/kKrEtpMa1q— Danny Usher (@dsurte66) September 16, 2022
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is due to brief the media shortly, in Washington DC. The session has been put back slightly from its original 1pm ET scheduling.Joe Biden is due to meet South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House early afternoon.The US president plans to fly to the UK tomorrow, ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral on Monday.But on Sunday he plans to have his first meeting with the brand new British prime minister, Liz Truss. She met the Queen as incoming prime minister just two days before the monarch’s death last Thursday, providing the world with the last official photographs of the Queen, at Balmoral, smiling and wearing a tartan skirt.And as the campaigns rev up for the US midterm elections in early November, the White House has just said that Biden will hit the trail, traveling to Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday to attend a Democratic National Committee rally.Then next Wednesday, Biden plans a major speech in New York at the United Nations general assembly, where he will expand on the theme he is hammering on this autumn – the battle between the forces of democracy and autocracy, including within the US.Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also now been confirmed as a speaker at UNGA and will address world leaders via a video-link from is country, embattled since the invasion by Russia six months ago.If readers want to dive into live news of all the developments in the war, do follow our global blog on the topic, here.And for news on Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family, as thousands queue to see the casket of the monarch as she lies in state in London, follow developments in our blog out of London, as they happen, here.The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.Here’s what else has happened today:
President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.
Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.
No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.
One of the biggest outstanding questions the January 6 committee is trying to answer is what the Secret Service knew about the attack, and why agents acted the way they did as the Capitol was being stormed.Questions have swirled around the Secret Service as its actions were brought to light, particularly after it was revealed that it deleted much of agents’ communications from around the time of the insurrection. Bloomberg reports that the committee has obtained documents, text messages and other materials from the Secret Service that could answer some of those questions. “It’s a combination of a number of text messages, radio traffic, that kind of thing. Thousands of exhibits,” the committee’s chair Bennie Thompson said earlier this week.It was unclear if any of what had been turned over were the communications from January 5 and 6 that were reported as erased. Another committee member, Zoe Lofgren, said some of what had been obtained was “relevant”.Secret Service watchdog suppressed memo on January 6 texts erasureRead moreThe House committee investigating January 6 plans to release preliminary findings into the attack on the Capitol sometime in October, meaning voters may be digesting new details of the insurrection as the midterms approach, Axios reports.The committee has tentative plans to hold its first public hearing since July on 28 September, and Axios reports that its members are meeting today to flesh out the rest of their schedule. The Democratic chair Bennie Thompson said an early version of its report into the attack will come out in October. “The goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election,” he said, adding that the time between the late-September hearing and the 8 November election “won’t be a quiet period.”The committee’s public hearings held in June and July dredged up highly publicized details of the attack and Donald Trump’s actions before, during and after that put the former president and his Republican allies on the defensive. That dynamic may repeat in the two months ahead, assuming the committee is able to match its earlier revelations.For a sense of how the committee is thinking in relation to its impact on the midterms, here are the thoughts of one of its Democratic members, Jamie Raskin: “There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”If there’s one thing Donald Trump likes, it’s people who like him. The Associated Press reports that the former president has reached out to a new group of friends: QAnon supporters.While saying as recently as 2020 that he didn’t know much about the convoluted conspiracy theory-turned-movement, he has lately made several social media posts embracing some of its ideas. The AP reports that it may be a way to shore up his support base as he deals with an array of legal troubles, like the Mar-a-Lago investigation:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The former president may be seeking solidarity with his most loyal supporters at a time when he faces escalating investigations and potential challengers within his own party, according to Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University who has studied QAnon and recently wrote a book about the group.
“These are people who have elevated Trump to messiah-like status, where only he can stop this cabal,” Bloom told the AP on Thursday. “That’s why you see so many images (in online QAnon spaces) of Trump as Jesus.”
On Truth Social, QAnon-affiliated accounts hail Trump as a hero and savior and vilify President Joe Biden by comparing him to Adolf Hitler or the devil. When Trump shares the content, they congratulate each other. Some accounts proudly display how many times Trump has “re-truthed” them in their bios.
By using their own language to directly address QAnon supporters, Trump is telling them that they’ve been right all along and that he shares their secret mission, according to Janet McIntosh, an anthropologist at Brandeis University who has studied QAnon’s use of language and symbols.
It also allows Trump to endorse their beliefs and their hope for a violent uprising without expressly saying so, she said, citing his recent post about “the storm” as a particularly frightening example.A survey published earlier this year found that belief in QAnon has surged ever since Trump left the White House.Belief in QAnon has strengthened in US since Trump was voted out, study findsRead more More

California governor’s ad campaign offers help to women in anti-abortion statesBillboards will be displayed in states including Texas, Mississippi and Ohio but have some questioning Gavin Newsom’s ambitions “Need an abortion? California is ready to help.”That’s one of the billboard advertisements that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is paying to display across seven of America’s most aggressively anti-abortion states, including Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and South Dakota.The advertising blitz in states outside California is being funded by Newsom’s re-election campaign for governor – Newsom is expected to easily win re-election in November in his deep blue state. But the move is renewing questions about the Democratic politician’s national ambitions.Democrats call Indiana’s near-total abortion ban a ‘death sentence’ Read moreA recent poll found that the majority of California voters do not think Joe Biden should run for re-election in 2024, and that Newsom was one of the leading contenders to replace him.The California governor has repeatedly denied having any interest in running for president, while simultaneously paying for high-profile ad campaigns in states outside the one in which he is running for office. In July, he launched a television ad campaign in Florida, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is considered a leading replacement for Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential race, focused on the state’s attacks against LBGTQ+ people, book bans and abortion restrictions.This week, Newsom also asked the US attorney general to investigate the governors of Texas and Florida for transporting migrants across the country to wealthy Democratic enclaves such as Washington DC, and Martha’s Vineyard, in what has widely been criticised as a political stunt.What @GovRonDeSantis and @GregAbbott_TX are doing isn’t clever, it’s cruel.I’m formally requesting the DOJ begin an immediate investigation into these inhumane efforts to use kids as political pawns. pic.twitter.com/x2sBa06nSw— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 15, 2022
The messaging in many of Newsom’s new abortion ads is sharply critical of Republicans’ successful efforts to ban abortion, with phrases like, “Texas does not own your body. You do,” and an image of a woman with her hands cuffed behind her back.The 18 billboards point viewers to a new California state-funded website, abortion.ca.gov, which offers guidance on how people outside California can access abortion care in the state, an effort that Planned Parenthood’s California affiliate praised as a good model for increasing abortion access.“Here is my message to any woman seeking abortion care in these anti-freedom states: come to California,” Newsom said in a statement announcing the campaign, saying that abortion bans “are literally killing women”.On his personal Twitter account, Newsom launched the ad campaign by tagging seven anti-abortion Republican governors in tweets showing images of the billboards.“The people of Mississippi deserve to know they have access to the care you are refusing to provide. This will be launching in your state today,” he told the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves.@tatereeves the people of Mississippi deserve to know they have access to the care you are refusing to provide. This will be launching in your state today. pic.twitter.com/8qg7psYT2j— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 15, 2022
The Newsom campaign noted that it expects the Mississippi billboards could face a legal challenge in the state. A spokesperson for Reeves told the Washington Post that it was “interesting to see Governor Newsom’s 2024 primary campaign extend to Mississippi” and that they thought most residents “will not be interested in what he’s selling”.Newsom himself told the Washington Post that he had launched the abortion ad campaign “because the people that support my candidacy support this. And when many heard about this, they wanted to support additional efforts like it, to be fully transparent with you.”Polls show that Newsom is expected to cruise to victory over his little-known Republican opponent in the California governor’s race this November, after triumphing over an expensive attempt to recall him as governor in 2021.TopicsCaliforniaAbortionGavin NewsomUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to kick teenage gun control activistFar-right congresswoman tweets footage of her seeming to kick Marianna Pecora during exchange in Washington on Thursday Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted footage to Twitter in which she appears to kick an 18-year-old activist pressing her on gun control outside the Capitol in Washington.The activist, Marianna Pecora, indicated she could press charges.The encounter, in which Pecora and others asked about gun control in light of recent mass shootings in the US, happened as the Georgia congresswoman left the Capitol on Thursday. Greene has championed gun rights.January 6 panel could release report on Trump and Capitol attack before midterms – liveRead moreIn her tweet, Greene wrote: “These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns and the rights of parents to defend their children in schools.“You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law. ‘Gun-free’ zones kill people.”Pecora is deputy communications director for the group Voters of Tomorrow.On Twitter, she said: “Our team is in DC this week to lobby for youth rights. All the members of Congress we’ve met with so far (both Republicans and Democrats) have been nothing but respectful – except for Marjorie Taylor Greene. She kicked me.”In the footage, Pecora and others argue with Greene and film with their phones. Pecora walks in front of Greene, who appears to tread on her heel. Greene repeats “excuse me” and appears to kick Pecora’s leg from behind.Pecora then protests and Greene waves her off.Nick Dyer, Greene’s communications director, says: “You’re blocking a member of Congress. You can’t block members of Congress.”On Twitter, Pecora said she “started out Hispanic Heritage Month by getting kicked by [Greene]. I’ve never been prouder to be a Mexican-American.”She also wrote: “First month living in DC and I get featured in” the Washington Post.Pecora told the paper: “It’s honestly, like, really disheartening to think that a bunch of kids can hold themselves with better composure than a sitting member of Congress.”The Post said Dyer “voiced objections to the description of the video and described a version of events unsubstantiated by video evidence”.Greene has initiated other public confrontations, including harassing the gun control campaigner David Hogg, also 18 at the time, and the New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, incidents that achieved online infamy of their own.Pecora pointed to a message from Santiago Mayer, the Mexican-born founder of Voters for Tomorrow whom Greene said should “move to another country”.Mayer wrote: “To answer the most prevalent question about pressing charges: we’re talking to our legal team and keeping our options open. Love y’all.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

Biden says US democracy is under threat. Here’s what he can do to help fix itStephen MarcheWe don’t need lofty rhetoric about democracy. We need to pack the courts, fight partisan gerrymandering, campaign finance reform and more In the run-up to the midterm elections, liberal America is starting to realize how much danger it’s in. The right has been openly, defiantly stoking the fires of civil war since at least 2008 – openly promoting secession, political violence and the overturning of electoral outcomes. Now the left, slowly, probably too late, is having some of the same discussions about the catastrophic failure of American political institutions. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, his attempt to set the agenda for the midterms, mattered in this respect if in no other. The Democratic leader has finally, against all instinct, acknowledged the risk of national collapse.I’m 65 and have $300,000 in student debt. I and other older debtors are going on strike | Lystra Small-CloudenRead more“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault,” the president declared. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.” He even allowed himself to be specific, going so far as to call the Republican party under Trump “a threat to democracy”. Biden has a gift for stating what has been obvious to everyone as if he were thinking it for the first time. Still, his diagnosis was accurate, which is what made his proposed solution to the threat so frighteningly shallow: “I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology.”That’s not good enough. It’s nowhere even close to good enough. If the president of the United States declares that democracy in his country is under assault, then he needs to announce in the next breath what he’s doing about it, not try to exploit it for temporary political gain in a single election cycle.A recent poll found that more than 40% of Americans believe that a civil war is likely with the next decade. The past two years have seen the rot of American government accelerate, even as Biden has made real legislative progress. That’s the irony of these midterms. Biden has made hugely significant strides on matters of policy, on climate crisis, on infrastructure, on education during his first two years. At the same time, the forces tearing America apart are more intense than they were during the Trump years.Since the Dobbs decision, American women have come to exist in a patchwork of legal statuses, not only between states but even on county level. Just as before the first civil war, the question of free movement between different jurisdictions is once again unclear. The Mar-a-Lago raid has created a situation in which there are no good options: the government must either arrest an ex-president or allow classified secrets to fill up random closets. Already the fundamental question of civil war is in the air: how do you deal legally with citizens who want to destroy the basis of law? The success of election deniers across American states has created inevitable conflict over 2022 and 2024. The peaceful transition of power is more doubtful now than it has been at any period since the 19th century.The drift towards disunion is not in Biden’s control if, indeed, it is in anyone’s control at this point. Hyper-partisanship is increasing and increasingly violent. Trust in institutions continues to decline. The sense of legitimacy in the press and the courts continues its long slide. Biden’s approach to the collapse of American institutions is institutionalist, and he is trying to make his faith in institutions the focus of the next election cycle. But the current crisis requires more than politics as usual, and more than Biden is providing.If you want to take America off the high boil, promote open primaries, not vacuous calls to national unity. Independent redistricting commissions to fight partisan gerrymandering, campaign finance reform to pull America back from the black hole of dark money, and a general overhaul of the Federal Election Commission are, at this point, obviously necessary on the most basic level if American democracy is to survive. They are also against the interests of both parties. They are not on the table in 2022.A pro-democracy agenda also requires a genuine reckoning with the opponents of democracy. The US supreme court is already dive-bombing into illegitimacy, passing through theocracy on its way to irrelevance. Biden is not preserving the legitimacy of the court by choosing not to stack it. He is only ensuring that an already illegitimate court will be opposed to democracy.How far Biden can enact a pro-democracy agenda is dubious, of course, and every year, from now on, it will become more dubious. Biden seems to have nothing more to offer than the old soaring rhetoric that somehow still has people who will listen to it: “This is where the United States constitution was written and debated. This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known,” he said, flanked by marines. Then he put the onus for defending that experiment on the American people.That’s an alibi, an abrogation of responsibility. Biden was elected in 2020 to defend US democracy, but the solution to America’s crisis is not political but structural. It doesn’t require the American people to vote one way or another in order to enact one or another legislative agenda but to find a different way to govern themselves.The first portion of the Biden administration has revealed a clandestine tragedy: the president has loved American institutions so much that he cannot bring himself to do what’s required to save them.
Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War
TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenBiden administrationDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

Rightwingers threaten legal action on Biden’s student loan debt reliefRepublicans seek to challenge loan forgiveness in the courts and are making it a key talking point in the midterm elections Even before Joe Biden announced his recent plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans for Americans burdened by their unprecedented debt from higher education, the US president was threatened with legal action by his adversaries on the right.Since the plan was put forward, chatter about a legal threat has grown even louder as Republicans have said they will seek to formulate opposition in the courts. But what remains unclear is how big of a threat those legal challenges actually pose.Student loan forgiveness: what you need to know about Biden’s planRead moreMeanwhile, supporters of debt forgiveness are also working on challenging the political threat to the plan as Republicans have also sought to make the program a key talking point during the upcoming midterm elections.The plan, which includes the forgiveness of federal student loans of up to $20,000 for Pell grant recipients and up to $10,000 for all others, with some exceptions, will provide a substantial amount of relief for the millions of Americans encumbered with student loan debt.Those ineligible for student debt cancellation include individuals who make over the income limit of $125,000 annually, for example.One of the plan’s staunchest opponents is rightwing Texas senator Ted Cruz. He laid out plans for pursuing legal action against the Biden administration in an interview on a rightwing podcast.Cruz explained that he and others would have to actively seek out someone that makes over the income limit – and is thus ineligible for any student debt forgiveness – who would be willing to be the plaintiff in a lawsuit, illustrating how they were “harmed” by Biden’s executive action.Cruz conceded that courts won’t accept just any plaintiff – for example, any taxpayer outraged by Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. “Well, that may prove a real challenge. The difficulty here is finding a plaintiff whom the courts will conclude has standing to challenge this,” he said.Loan service providers stand to lose from Biden’s plan, but whether or not companies will legally challenge the cancellation and also claim to be “harmed” remains to be seen. Since Biden’s announcement, it was reported that the websites of nearly every major loan servicer crashed or experienced severe traffic-related problems as borrowers scrambled to check the latest status of their loans or get more information.Jim Hawkins, a law professor at the University of Houston and an expert in lending law, said Cruz is right to worry about the amount of work it will take to sue the Biden administration for student debt cancellation.He said: “One problem is identifying a plaintiff who has standing to sue. Who got hurt from loan forgiveness? I think the Republicans will have to work to find someone who was injured in order to sue them.”But while it’s unlikely that Republicans will find a plaintiff who has standing, Hawkins said it’s not impossible.“There’s uncertainty until a court makes a decision interpreting a law or applying the law to the facts of the specific case,” Hawkins said. “So for a lot of people, it’s going to be up in the air until we have decisions from courts.”Another uncertainty is how far some are willing to go to question the constitutionality of Biden’s use of executive authority to cancel the debt. Biden invoked the 2003 Heroes Act in order to cancel student loan debt, which gave the secretary of education authority to make changes to any provision of the law applicable to student aid programs in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.Hawkins said the Heroes Act “has broad language, giving the president power. But it might be a bit of a stretch to think that the act written in response to 9/11 applies to Covid. It applies to anyone affected by an emergency. The question is, how much authority does that give Biden?”Hawkins said there is a chance a court could say the act is more narrow than Biden thinks. Cruz and others argue student debt cancellation is an overreach of power, despite Trump invoking the same act to pause student loan payments at the start of the pandemic.Biden’s secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, sought to clear up confusion by publicly releasing a legal opinion from the Department of Justice that states the Covid-19 pandemic qualifies as a national emergency.One speculative lawsuit has already been launched by an Oregon homeowner who once ran for the US Senate as a Republican. Daniel Laschober is arguing both that Biden overstepped his authority and that as a homeowner he will suffer damages because the program could stoke inflation and raise interest rates on his mortgage.But the rightwing pushback over student loan forgiveness is also a political fight in the court of public opinion, and one where supporters of the program are also gearing up to have their say, especially when it comes to false narratives pushed by the right that the program will largely benefit an elite class of people.That is certainly the tone of the Republican response so far. Ron DeSantis, the far-right governor of Florida, argued that Biden’s student debt cancellation plan benefits members of high society. He said: “It’s very unfair to have a truck driver have to pay back a loan for somebody that got like a PhD in gender studies. That’s not fair. That’s not right.”DeSantis joined 21 other Republican governors across the country to publish a joint letter condemning Biden’s plan to forgive student debt. “We fundamentally oppose your plan to force American taxpayers to pay off the student loan debt of an elite few,” the letter read. Astra Taylor, a film-maker and activist who founded Debt Collective, a union of debtors, said that those condemning people with student loans fail to take into consideration that these borrowers are in reality anything but the elite. They are usually working-class Americans, many of whom went into debt for trade school or community college rather than for a top university degree.“I’m just not sure that they’re playing to the base the way they think they are,” Taylor said. “Obviously, [Republicans] are very invested in a kind of anti-intellectual, anti-academy politics. But people go to trade school and get student debt. People go to cosmetology school and get student debt.”Taylor is right. Ten per cent of those with student debt received a professional certificate from institutions like trade schools, according to Upjohn Institute labor economist Aaron Sojourner.In an interview with Axios, Sojourner said: “Many Americans understandably, but mistakenly, assume that the vast majority of student loan debtors have four-year degrees, when in fact about half do not.”And on the whole, 90% of relief dollars will go to people making less than $75,000 annually, according to the Department of Education.So far, polling shows Republicans may not have found the winning issue some of them might think they have. Surveys on the plan usually show majority support for it and two recent polls – by Quinnipiac and the Economist/YouGov – have registered voters backing it by 51% and 52%, respectively. That support rises among Latino and Black voters and those aged under 50.While Taylor, like many others across the country, believes the student debt forgiveness plan doesn’t go nearly far enough, she said she understands its significance and that it is worth fighting hard for.“My position is very clear in that I think all student debt should be lost and we should return and expand the model of higher education that was the standard in this country a few generations ago,” she said. “But on paper, it’s enormous. It’s an incredibly significant political victory for progressives.”She added: “We’ve had all sorts of debt relief over the last decade plus, for more affluent people and corporations, so I think this is really significant in terms of showing that for working class and middle class people, debt can also be canceled. It’s just the beginning of a real reckoning with the scale and scope of the student debt crisis.”TopicsUS student debtUS politicsJoe BidenRepublicansUS student financefeaturesReuse this content More