US Politics

The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell has the latest about the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, and the federal laws investigators believe Donald Trump may have broken:Donald Trump is under criminal investigation for potential violations of the Espionage Act and additional statutes relating to obstruction of justice and destroying federal government records, according to the search warrant executed by FBI agents at the former president’s home on Monday.The explosive search warrant – the contents of which were confirmed by the Guardian – shows the FBI was seeking evidence about whether the mishandling of classified documents by Trump, including some marked top secret, amounted to a violation of three criminal statutes.Most notably, the search warrant granted by US magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart and approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland authorized FBI agents to seize materials that could form evidence that Trump violated the Espionage Act under 18 USC 793, and Obstruction, under 18 USC 1519. Trump under investigation for potential violations of Espionage Act, warrant revealsRead moreThe FBI cited potential violations of the espionage act and two other federal statutes when it searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to the warrant released today. They also turned up classified and top secret documents. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives was still debating the Biden administration’s marquee plan to fight climate change and lower health care costs, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act.Here’s what else happened today:
House Republicans hope to undercut the spending bill by challenging its passage using proxy votes – which a top deputy to Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi condemned as “pointless theatrics”.
Pelosi meanwhile accused Republicans of “instigating assaults on law enforcement” amid the uproar from the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.
China’s president Xi Jinping is considering a face-to-face visit with Biden amid soaring tensions over Taiwan, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Biden is potentially considering an early announcement of his 2024 re-election campaign to build on recent positive developments in his presidency, Reuters reports. Meanwhile, there are more signs that his approval rating is on the upswing.
Wisconsin Republicans have fired a special counsel they hired to probe the 2020 election results, concluding a messy and widely-criticized probe that ended in bitter sniping.Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin assembly, said Friday he had fired Michael Gableman, a former supreme court justice hired to review the election. The announcement came days after Gableman endorsed Vos’ opponent in an unsuccessful primary bid, and Vos said Gableman was an “embarrassment” to the state.“After having many members of our caucus reach out to me over the past several days, it is beyond clear to me that we only have one choice in this matter, and that’s to close the Office of Special Counsel,” Vos said in a statement to the Associated Press, which first reported the firing.Gableman was hired last year by Vos as the speaker faced pressure from Donald Trump to review the election. The probe wound up costing taxpayers over $1 million and failed to turn up any evidence that the results of the presidential election in Wisconsin, where Joe Biden defeated Trump, were not accurate.Gableman nonetheless urged lawmakers to consider “decertifying” the election, which is not legally possible. He also threatened to jail other elected officials in the state, screamed at lawmakers, and earned a rebuke from a judge for misogynistic comments during a court hearing. A Dane county judge also fined Gableman for failing to comply with the state’s open records laws and referred him to the state’s office of lawyer regulation.Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, has no time for the Republican plan, reported by Axios, to challenge the Inflation Reduction Act in court over the use of proxy voting in its passage.Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have clearly ruled that the House resolution establishing proxy voting is a legislative act that is covered by Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. (1/2) https://t.co/2oAQPnRBFx— Drew Hammill (@Drew_Hammill) August 12, 2022
This is utterly pointless theatrics from a party caught in a toxic MAGA echo chamber and struggling to explain its defense of wealthy tax cheats and Big Pharma profits to the public. (2/2)— Drew Hammill (@Drew_Hammill) August 12, 2022
The issue of proxy voting may be more important than it initially appeared. Though House lawmakers from both parties take advantage of the unique rule to head out of town or to other engagements during votes, Axios reports that Republicans hope to use it to mount a legal challenge to the Inflation Reduction Act.Republicans’ hope is that a company affected by tax changes brought about by the bill will sue, arguing that the legislation wasn’t properly passed in the House because not enough congress members were there to create a quorum, according to the report, which cites Republican aides.The supreme court is dominated by conservative justices, but earlier this year, they declined to hear a challenge to the House’s proxy voting rules brought about by the House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy. However, Republicans view this issue as unique from the previous case, and hope they can get the justices to reconsider.The House of Representatives is continuing to debate the Inflation Reduction Act, a top Biden administration priority. You may be picturing a packed legislative chamber filled with deliberations over the measure, which Democrats hope will lower healthcare costs and fight climate change.You would be (somewhat) wrong. There are plenty of Congress members in the chamber, but about a third of the House has taken advantage of its unique rules allowing proxy voting, and is off doing other things. Here’s a rundown from congressional reporter Jamie Dupree:For all of the GOP complaints about proxy voting, it remains popular with Republicans. I counted 143 House members voting remotely earlier today. My breakdown was 81 D, 62 R.You can check the list for one of today’s votes at https://t.co/iHGXjhW3ih pic.twitter.com/rizETzJ4qp— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) August 12, 2022
Among those who have skipped town is Republican representative Brad Wenstrup, who was in the Capitol this morning for a press conference on the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, CNN reports:9:30am: Rep. Brad Wenstrup was in the Capitol for a news conference with House Republican Intel committee members. Right now: At Dulles airport and casting his votes by proxy, signing a letter saying he can’t vote in person because of the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/2h6564syyY— Kristin Wilson (@kristin__wilson) August 12, 2022
Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich, an opponent of the proposal, has weighed in on the absences:Some 143 house members have asked to vote by proxy friday on a bill that would add 87,000 IRS agents more than doubling the government’s anti-citizen police force. This is a very dangerous and destructive way to undermine a free society as the elected officials decide not to work— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) August 11, 2022
The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell has the latest about the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, and the federal laws investigators believe Donald Trump may have broken:Donald Trump is under criminal investigation for potential violations of the Espionage Act and additional statutes relating to obstruction of justice and destroying federal government records, according to the search warrant executed by FBI agents at the former president’s home on Monday.The explosive search warrant – the contents of which were confirmed by the Guardian – shows the FBI was seeking evidence about whether the mishandling of classified documents by Trump, including some marked top secret, amounted to a violation of three criminal statutes.Most notably, the search warrant granted by US magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart and approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland authorized FBI agents to seize materials that could form evidence that Trump violated the Espionage Act under 18 USC 793, and Obstruction, under 18 USC 1519. Trump under investigation for potential violations of Espionage Act, warrant revealsRead moreA federal magistrate has granted the justice department’s request to release the warrant and redacted property inventory from the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this week, according to a court filing.Attorney general Merrick Garland announced yesterday that he would ask for the documents to be unsealed. Trump later said he would not object, and the Associated Press reports his lawyers made no attempt to stop the motion:WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Dept. says ex-President Donald Trump’s lawyers will not object to release of Mar-a-Lago search warrant.— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) August 12, 2022
Details of the warrant have already been released by news organizations, and show investigators cited potential violations of three federal statutes to search his Florida resort, including the Espionage Act.One important clarification to the statutes cited in the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, from The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell:18 USC 793 is the Espionage Act— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) August 12, 2022
The Espionage Act is seldom used but fearsome. Former president Barack Obama used it to prosecute government employees for leaking information, and Donald Trump used it against Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents about Russian interference in the 2016 elections.NSA contractor faces 10-year sentence in first Espionage Act charge under TrumpRead moreHouse intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff has released a statement regarding the revelations about classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.“If reports are accurate and contained among these documents are some of the most highly classified information our government holds — information classified as Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information — then it would explain a great deal about why the Department and the FBI took the step of obtaining a warrant to recover the documents,” Schiff said.“It appears that the FBI sought to remove those documents to a safe location previously, but Trump did not fully cooperate. Every day that information of such a classification sits in an unsecure location is a risk to our national security. If any other individual had information of that nature in their possession, the FBI would work quickly to mitigate the risks of disclosure.”The committee the California Democrat chairs oversees the FBI as well as other federal law enforcement agencies. He noted he had confidence in the justice department, while adding, “The protection of classified information, and particularly the protection of sources and methods, is an issue of the highest priority for the Intelligence Committee, and as we learn more, we will responsibly discharge our oversight responsibilities.”While the word “Trump” is never used, the National Archives has released a statement earlier today regarding former president Barack Obama’s own records.Trump this afternoon put out a press release disputing that the FBI found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and asking “what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?” The archives’ statement would appear to be their attempt to clear the matter up.“The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama Presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” according to the statement from its public and media communications office. “NARA moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area, where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama Presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, DC, area. As required by the PRA, former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”Rightwing Breitbart News has obtained the warrant used by the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago, which contains details of the laws cited to justify the application.“What it does is list three criminal statutes under which items are to be searched and seized,” according to Breitbart’s report. “They are: 18 U.S.C. section 793, which deals with defense information; 18 U.S.C. section 1519, which deals with destroying federal documents; and 18 U.S.C. section 2071, which deals with concealing, removing, or damaging federal documents. The first statute is the one that has likely provoked media speculation about so-called ‘nuclear’ documents: it applies to a broad range of defense ‘information,’ from code books to ordinary photographs.”Donald Trump has put out yet another statement about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.“Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything”, it begins, in apparent reference to reports that classified and top secret documents were found among his possessions.The statement continues:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request. They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?Yesterday, top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer asked voters to keep his party in control of the upper chamber of Congress next year, and in return, they’ll pass bills to lower costs for elder and child care.Those were priorities of party leaders and president Joe Biden, but they couldn’t find the support in Congress to enact them. Today, a House Democrat made a similar, although perhaps more controversial, plea. According to Bloomberg News, Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, would resurrect the party’s attempts to raise taxes on businesses and individuals:TAXES: @RepRichardNeal says if Dems keep the House will look to raise corp and individual tax rates next year— Erik Wasson (@elwasson) August 12, 2022
The National Republican Congressional Committee quickly pounced on his comments:Vote. Them. Out. https://t.co/NxQ16UzEfw— NRCC (@NRCC) August 12, 2022
Slate writer Jordan Weissman highlighted the opposition such proposals might get from other Democrats, such as Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who resisted several tax proposals over the past year. He tweeted the well-known moment when she nixed raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour with a thumbs down.https://t.co/RiGKKe5QBj pic.twitter.com/iaEtXjLFHS— Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann) August 12, 2022
Back in the House of Representatives, Democrats are likely hours away from passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which would be a major win for the Biden administration.They have a slim but workable majority in the chamber, and their members are believed to be ready to approve the bill. That doesn’t mean Republicans aren’t objecting vociferously to it. Indeed, rightwing congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado got her microphone turned off as she railed against the legislation, which is intended to lower health care costs and help cut into America’s carbon emissions:she then got yielded more time. but rare to get your mic cut like this. https://t.co/R1GgcuRpc0— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) August 12, 2022
Federal investigators found sensitive government documents in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club during their search there earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reports, including some marked top secret.The article based on the search warrant obtained by the FBI and a list of property seized appears to confirm that the former president possessed documents in his private residence that normally require special handling and a formal government process before they can be declassified.The FBI took about 20 boxes of items during the search on Monday, according to the Journal, including documents that were marked as top secret, secret and classified. They also found information about the “President of France” and Trump’s grant of clemency for Roger Stone, one of his allies.Attorney general Merrick Garland said yesterday the justice department would move to release the documents allowing the search, which Trump’s attorneys must respond to by 3pm eastern time today. Trump has said he does not plan to object to the department’s motion.Washington awaits more details on the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, while Democrats in the House of Representatives are on the verge of passing Joe Biden’s landmark climate change and healthcare plan. Meanwhile, author Salman Rushdie was attacked in upstate New York, and his condition at this time is unknown.Here is a rundown of what has happened so far today:
House Republicans showed no signs of backing down in their support of Trump, holding a press conference where they accused the Biden administration of politicizing the FBI.
Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi meanwhile accused Republicans of “instigating assaults on law enforcement”.
China’s president Xi Jinping is considering a face-to-face visit with Biden amid soaring tensions over Taiwan, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Biden is potentially considering an early announcement of his 2024 re-election campaign to build on recent positive developments in his presidency, Reuters reports. Meanwhile, there are more signs that his approval rating is on the upswing.
China’s president Xi Jinping is making plans to potentially meet with Joe Biden in November, in what would be the first face-to-face encounter between the leaders since Biden took office last year, The Wall Street Journal reports.Tensions between the United States and China have risen since House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan earlier this month, sparking the ire of Beijing, which considers the island a breakaway province.While Biden has traveled regularly since taking office, Xi has not left China since January 2020 after the country adopted some of the strictest measures of any major economy to stop the spread of Covid-19. According to the Journal, his meeting with Biden could take either in Bangkok, Thailand or the Indonesian island of Bali, likely on the sidelines of one of two major summits being held in those locations. The White House declined to comment, according to the report, but an official said the two leaders did discuss an in-person meeting during a recent phone call.Author Salman Rushdie has been attacked at an event in upstate New York, the Associated Press reports. Rushdie has been the subject of death threats from Iran since the 1980s.The Guardian has started a live blog covering the attack, which you can read below.Salman Rushdie attacked at book event in New York state – latest updatesRead more More

Can Biden’s climate bill undo the fossil fuel industry’s decades of harm?The US spent six decades losing the climate war as fossil fuel companies spread misinformation. It has finally gained significant ground The scientists’ warning to the US president on climate crisis was stark: the world’s countries were conducting a vast, dangerous experiment through their enormous release of planet-heating emissions, which threaten to be “deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Some sort of remedial action was needed, they urged.This official alert was issued not to Joe Biden, who is poised to sign America’s first ever major legislation designed to tackle the climate crisis, but in a report given to his presidential predecessor Lyndon Johnson in 1965, a year when the now 79-year-old Biden was still in college.That it has taken nearly six decades for the US to tackle global heating in a significant way, despite being responsible for a quarter of all emissions that have heated the planet during modern civilization, is indicative of a lengthy climate war. Pernicious misinformation of the fossil fuel industry, cynicism and bungled political maneuvering have stymied any sort of action to avert catastrophic heatwaves, floods, drought and wildfires.If on Friday, as expected, the House of Representatives assents to the landmark $370bn in climate spending hashed out in the US Senate and sends it for Biden’s signature, it will be a watershed moment in a saga that can be measured in whole careers and lifetimes.Al Gore was a fresh-faced 33-year-old congressman from Tennessee when, in 1981, he organized an obscure hearing with fellow lawmakers to hear evidence on the greenhouse effect from Roger Revelle, his former professor at Harvard and one of the scientists who had cautioned Johnson 16 years earlier of a looming climate disaster.Gore is now 74, a former US vice-president and veteran climate advocate whose increasingly urgent warnings on the issue won him the Nobel peace prize when Greta Thunberg was barely four years old. “I never imagined I would end up devoting my life to this,” Gore said.“I thought, naively in retrospect, that when the facts were laid out so clearly we would be able to move much more quickly. I did not anticipate the fossil fuel industry would spend billions of dollars on an industrial scale program of lying and deception to prevent the body politic acting in a rational way. But here we are, we finally passed that threshold.”Gore considers the bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, as a “critical turning point in our struggle to confront the climate crisis” that will supercharge deployment of renewable energy such as wind and solar and push fossil fuels towards irrelevancy.Al Gore hails Biden’s historic climate bill as ‘a critical turning point’Read moreMany current Democratic lawmakers, who narrowly passed the bill through the Senate, also felt the weight of the moment, with many of them wearing the warming stripes colors showing the global heating trend. Some burst into tears as the legislation squeaked home on Sunday.“We’ve been fighting for this for decades, now I can look my kids in the eye and say we’re really doing something about climate,” said Brian Schatz, a senator from Hawaii and one of the tearful. “The Senate was where climate bills went to die and now it’s where the biggest climate action by any government ever has been taken.”The list of previous failures is lengthy. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, only for Ronald Reagan to rip them down. Bill Clinton attempted a new tax on pollutants only for a sharp backlash from industry to see the effort die. The US, under George W Bush’s presidency, declined to join the 1997 Kyoto climate accords and then, when Barack Obama was in the White House, botched climate legislation in 2009 despite strong Democratic majorities in Congress.Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, torched most of the modest measures in place to curb planet-heating gases and campaigned wearing a coalminer’s helmet. “I didn’t doubt we’d get there but there were times when the struggle became harder than I thought it would be, such as when Trump was elected,” Gore said.Climate change has inflicted increasingly severe wounds on Americans as their politicians have floundered or dissembled. Enormous wildfires are now a year-round threat to California, with the US west in the grip of possibly its worst drought in 12 centuries. Extreme rainfall now routinely drowns basements in New York, Appalachian towns, and Las Vegas casinos. The poorest fare worst from the roasting heatwaves and the continued air pollution from power plants, cars and trucks.James Hansen, the Nasa scientist, told Congress in a landmark 1988 hearing that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here” and yet the escalating subsequent warnings appeared to make little difference. Shortly before a Senate deal was brokered, the climate scientist Drew Shindell said that the lack of action made him “want to scream” and that “I keep wondering what’s the point of producing all the science” if it’s only to be ignored.Much of the blame for this has been laid on the fossil fuel industry, which has known for decades the disastrous consequences of its business model only to fund an extensive network of operations that concealed this information and sought to sow doubt among the public over the science.“These forces have been far more active and effective in the United States than in other countries,” said Naomi Oreskes, an American historian of science who has written on the false information spread by industry on climate crisis.“For more than 20 years, American public opinion has been heavily influenced by the ‘merchants of doubt’, who sold disinformation designed to make people think that the science regarding climate change was far more uncertain than it actually was.”Industry lobbying and generous donations have ensured that the Republican party has fallen almost entirely in line with the demands of major oil and gas companies. As recently as 2008, a Republican running for president, John McCain, had a recognizable climate plan but the issue is now close to party heresy, despite rising concern among all Americans, including Republican voters, about climate-induced disasters.The strategy of misinformation “worked even more than its originators imagined”, Oreskes said, noting that every single Republican senator voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, lambasted the bill as “Green New Deal nonsense” out of step with Americans’ priorities, even as much of his home state of Kentucky lay underwater from its worst flooding on record, killing dozens and inundating whole towns.The continued, staunch opposition to any meaningful climate action by Republicans means the climate wars in American politics are not likely to draw to a close anytime soon. But climate advocates hope the gathering pace of renewable energy and electric car adoption will soon be unstoppable, regardless of any attempted backsliding if Republicans regain power.The question will be how much damage to a livable climate will be done in the meantime. The climate bill is expected to help slash the emissions of the US, the world’s second largest carbon polluter, by about 40% this decade, which should prod other countries to do more. Crucial, upcoming UN climate talks in Egypt suddenly look a more welcoming prospect for the American delegation.“In the prior administration, I think the rest of the world lost faith in the United States in terms of our commitment to climate,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser. “This doesn’t just restore that faith in the United States, but it creates an opportunity zone that other countries can start thinking about.”But almost every country, including the US, is still not doing enough, quickly enough, to head off the prospect of catastrophic global heating. The climate wars helped enrich fossil fuel corporations but cost precious time that the new climate bill does not claw back.“It was a celebratory and joyful moment when the legislation finally passed but we can’t let this be a once in a lifetime moment,” Gore said. “The path to net zero (emissions) requires us to move forward and a lot of the hard work lies ahead.”TopicsClimate crisisAl GoreUS politicsBiden administrationTrump administrationObama administrationfeaturesReuse this content More

The Democrats’ climate bill is a historic victory. But we can’t stop hereDaniel SherrellPassage of the Inflation Reduction Act filled me with joy and rage, relief and apprehension, exhaustion and vigilance. We must celebrate, but also mourn, rage and organize I was at a Mets game when news broke that the climate bill had enough votes to pass in the Senate. It was the bottom of the eighth, and Edwin Díaz had just struck out the heart of the Braves’ lineup. The crowd at Citi Field was feeling good. Everyone could sense a win was at hand.I read the push notification then sat there stunned for several minutes, watching the Mets clinch the game, waiting for the world-shaping news to register. Then suddenly I was tearing up, rising from my seat in a daze, the man down the row giving me a look somewhere between embarrassment and admiration (Jesus, he probably thought. This guy really loves the Mets).Congress is about to pass a historic climate bill. So why are oil companies pleased? | Kate AronoffRead moreUp in the nosebleeds, moths were circling in the glare of the floodlights. The players looked like figurines, tiny and detailed, far below in their bright diamond. From where we were sitting, we could see tens of thousands of people, every one of whom would be affected – in some way, at some point – by the news that had just buzzed in my pocket. Over the whole scene loomed the logo of Citibank corporation. In the coming days, Citi – along with its peers in the Business Roundtable and US Chamber of Commerce – would abet an all-out blitz to kill the bill.In the week since the Senate voted 51-50 in favor of the Inflation Reduction Act, I’ve felt a rush of emotion unlike any I’ve experienced in my time as a climate organizer. Joy and rage, relief and apprehension, exhaustion and vigilance – a knot too tight to unravel.Joy because there is much in the bill that warrants it. According to multiple independent analyses, the bill’s $370bn worth of climate investments will reduce US emissions somewhere in the ballpark of 40% by 2030, equivalent to 4bn metric tons of CO2. According to one recent study, this level of carbon abatement will prevent millions of avoidable deaths, most of them in the global south. The investments are also predicted to generate about 9m domestic jobs, many of them in purple states, potentially creating new and lasting constituencies in support of climate action. And the bill invests $60bn to aid the low-income and communities of color who for decades have served as dumping grounds of our nation’s dirtiest and most dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure. This is an unprecedented increase in federal environmental justice funding – and a far cry from the climate reparations that are actually owed.Long the villain of global climate talks, passage of the bill will go a long way toward helping the US meet its obligations under the Paris climate agreement, and afford it newfound leverage in convincing other nations to do the same. Combined with recent climate policy breakthroughs everywhere from Chile, to Germany, to Australia, the bill makes it somewhat less likely (though still far from impossible) that we will breach a civilization-ending tipping point – and significantly more likely that the 2020s will witness a marked acceleration in renewable energy deployment.These moral goods are worthy of real celebration, especially given the bill’s almost miraculous resurrection: killed twice over by Joe Manchin before being passed at the last possible moment with the thinnest possible Senate majority.Like all historical inflection points, its passage was the product of a complex interchange between individuals and institutions, singular moments and longstanding movements. Thank Senator Chuck Schumer, sure, but also thank the staffers who sat in his office, demanding he restart negotiations on a bill most of Capitol Hill had left for dead. Thank President Biden, but also thank the legions of young people who transformed the mainstream Democratic consensus and forced the climate crisis to the top of his policy agenda. Thank the organizers, scientists, wonks and artists who have labored for decades to create the political conditions under which this bill could be passed. Thank the people who put their bodies on the line to block new fossil fuel infrastructure – without their grassroots embargo of the Mountain Valley pipeline, for instance, Schumer might not have had the leverage to finally coax Manchin on board.Already, public discourse around the IRA is ossifying deep contingency into settled history, transforming the incredibly precarious chain of events that resulted in its passage into the self-evident monolith of “what ultimately happened”. But it remains the case – and this seems vital to keep in mind – that it almost didn’t happen at all. Why? Because our democracy is under siege.As soon as Schumer announced the deal, much of corporate America mobilized to destroy it. The Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce penned letters and blanketed Arizona with ads, railing against its proposed 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and urging Kyrsten Sinema to vote no. Many of their members, including CEOs like Tim Cook of Apple and Andy Jassy of Amazon, have talked a big game on climate in recent years, burnishing their corporate reputations. But faced with the prospect of paying their fair share in taxes, they fought hard to derail the most important climate legislation in US history.The Republican party, likewise, did everything in its power to kill the bill. Every single Senate Republican voted no, including those few – Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski – who occasionally affect concern over soaring temperatures. This despite American voters supporting the IRA by a 51-point margin, despite Senate Republicans representing 40 million fewer Americans than Senate Democrats. There are various plausible articulations of what the Republican party has become: a protection racket for fossil fuel executives; a millenarian cult, too dug in to change course. Either way, the GOP has proved willing to undermine democracy itself, all to prevent the public from trying to avert disaster.And then there were Senators Sinema and Manchin, who took the bill hostage out of fealty to their corporate donors. Sinema, who since 2018 has received over $2m in Wall Street campaign donations, managed to preserve indefensible tax breaks for private equity executives, carve-outs that even Larry Summers found appalling. Manchin used his leverage to force through multiple handouts to the fossil fuel industry – an industry that was already one of the richest in world history, and that in recent months has made record profits gouging working people at the pump.The handouts will allow the industry to force new oil and gas infrastructure into communities that are already suffering the fallout of fossil fuel extraction: cancer clusters, lung disease, ecological devastation. The damage will be felt worst in low-income and non-white communities, particularly in Alaska and the Gulf – communities that the industry has spent decades sacrificing on the altar of their quarterly profits. Manchin, meanwhile, has made millions from his family’s coal business and is one of the biggest beneficiaries of oil and gas dollars in the Senate. No doubt he will make off handsomely.There is a certain strain of triumphalism that would have us believe these tragedies are necessary and normal: simply the compromise inherent in a democracy. But the grievous flaws in this bill represent a failure, not a triumph, of democracy. In both process and content, the IRA has demonstrated the extent to which our public policy is perverted by unelected corporate shareholders and the politicians they’ve purchased. Legally constituted to hoard profit and distribute risk, many large corporations continue to engage in a kind of normalized depravity, choosing – and this is difficult to overstate – modest tax breaks over the integrity of life on Earth. They are sociopaths in the Athenian forum, amassing power and deflecting accountability, masking their monomania with expensive public relations. Almost everyone suffers from their ruthlessness, but none more so than the communities where they site their drill rigs and pipelines. This is less a commentary on any individual executive than it is on the structure of the limited liability corporation. No entity with so little allegiance to the public should be granted such determinative control over its fate.When Senator Bernie Sanders tried to make this point on the floor of the Senate (before ultimately voting in favor of the IRA), he was effectively dismissed by Democratic colleagues. Their reluctance to engage was hardly surprising. With the thrill of victory comes the temptation to conflate the world that now is – the new world that has just come into being – with the world as it should be. Maintaining the gap between the two takes moral discipline and political imagination, the kind of cognitive load that few in Congress seem willing to take on. But maintain it we must, or we risk losing the only well from which progress has ever sprung.It makes sense to celebrate the enormous, hard-won, life-saving victories in this bill. As the longtime climate movement organizer Daniel Hunter reflected in a recent essay, celebrating achievements is crucial for the health of any social movement. “Who will want to join … if it’s all sadness and misery?” he asks. “Who will acknowledge our contributions if we fail to name them ourselves?” Cynicism, in other words, does not build power – only hope can do that.At the same time, it also makes sense to mourn, to rage, and above all, to organize. The IRA has made abundantly clear that we need to wrest the wheel of our democracy from those who would drive us all off a cliff. As the climate movement recalibrates post-IRA, a political program can be seen emerging from this fact.It goes back to the movement’s bread and butter: fighting fossil fuel infrastructure tooth and nail, starting with Manchin’s side deal to fast-track pipeline permitting. This struggle must involve everyone, but it should follow the lead of frontline communities who have been fighting pipelines, drill rigs and refineries for decades. It should use IRA-driven declines in fossil fuel demand to its advantage.There are many other worthy fronts emerging: passing state and local laws that close the still significant distance to our 2030 climate goals; ensuring all new clean energy jobs are also good union jobs; ensuring climate investment dollars flow into the hands of working families, not Wall Street middlemen; incubating a clean energy industry that is regenerative and respectful, not extractive and exploitative. Electorally, it will involve supporting candidates brave enough to channel waxing anti-corporate sentiment across the left and the right in order to discipline corporate overreach – up to and including nationalizing those industries not decarbonizing at the pace required by physics.All of this will require a new level of emotional acumen, a structure of feeling that permits both fierce jubilation and exacting critique, that sees the big picture without disguising the brush strokes, that can balance priorities when it needs to but also, sometimes, kick down the scales. This is work that never ends, but you can already see it beginning, incubated by the honest, searching debates taking place right now across the climate movement.As we question, grapple and experiment – as we lead, in other words – our opponents hold fast to their myopia. Blinkered, rigid, selfish to a fault, theirs is a losing ethic, a worldview in retreat. Ours, on the other hand, is advancing toward the helm. May we occupy every inch they concede. May the IRA be the floor, not the ceiling, of our ambition.
Daniel Sherrell is a climate organizer and the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of our World (Penguin Books)
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Republicans vote against insulin bill as price soars, dismaying diabeticsCost of the life-saving drug will remain many times higher than in other affluent countries after Republicans defeated the measure During the Covid-19 pandemic, Erin Connelly had to ration insulin while transitioning to a different health insurance plan. When Connelly heard the Biden administration was planning to cap the price of the life-saving drug, she was delighted. She was soon to be disappointed.The prices of insulin has soared in the US in recent decades and is more than eight times higher in the US than in 32 comparable, high-income nations, according to a Rand Corporation study.With an average list price of $98.70 per unit in the US, compared with $7.52 in the UK, US insulin sales account for nearly half the pharmaceutical industry’s insulin revenue, though the US makes up only about 15% of the global market.Many diabetics require several vials of insulin a month, in addition to the costs of medical supplies and monitoring equipment. A 2022 study by CharityRx found 79% of Americans with diabetes or who care for someone with diabetes reported taking on credit card debt to pay for insulin, with an average debt of $9,000. One in four Americans have reported rationing insulin due to the high costs, which can be fatal.As part of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the Senate this week, the Biden administration proposed a $35 monthly cap on the cost of insulin in the private market. But the proposal was blocked by Republicans. Connelly, a type 1 diabetic from Illinois who was diagnosed at the age of 33, said she was “devastated”.“I believe the profit margin on my life must be really good, otherwise, we would be a bigger focus and a bigger part of these healthcare negotiations,” she said. “People are actually dying from this and it’s beyond price gouging. They’re holding us for ransom.“As we see things like Covid and different viruses come in and attack bodies in ways that we don’t understand, we’re seeing higher rates of people with type 1 diabetes later in life like I was, so this should be a primary concern for public health officials,” she said.Thanks to budgetary rules the proposal needed 60 votes to pass in the Senate. It received 57, with all Democrats and seven Republicans voting in favor of the proposal, though the Senate parliamentarian did allow the cap on co-pays for Medicare, the government health insurance program for those 65 and older.The vote incited criticism against Republicans from diabetes advocates who have been pushing for legislation to cap the cost of insulin in the US.But even a cap on private insurance co-pays wouldn’t have affected the real price of insulin in the US. The proposal would merely have limited the co-pay for the price of insulin to $35 for those with private insurance, with insurance expected to cover the difference. It would also probably have resulted in increases for insurance premiums. Those without insurance would still have been expected to pay exorbitant prices for insulin.“The co-pay caps aren’t price caps. All they effectively do is if you have insurance or Medicare, the $35 is your maximum co-pay,” said Laura Marston, co-founder of the advocacy group the Insulin Initiative and a type one diabetic. “That doesn’t change the underlying price of what someone without insurance pays for insulin, which in and of itself is concerning and scary from a patient’s point of view because I know first-hand how hard it can be as a type 1 diabetic in this country to get and keep health insurance.”Marston pointed out that pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly have supported the insurance co-pay caps. While she was disappointed by the failure of the co-pay cap proposal, even if she feels it fell short of a real solution to the problem, she is also concerned about the lack of political will to take on the pharmaceutical industry and cap the actual prices of insulin.More than 100,000 Americans died in 2021 from diabetes. More than 30 million Americans are diagnosed with type 1 or type 2 diabetes and over 7 million require daily insulin – all type 1 diabetics and many type 2 diabetics.For now diabetics and their families who were hoping for some relief are back where they started – paying exorbitant fees for a life-saving medicine.“We’ve been trying to no avail to get an actual insulin price cap introduced that would say to insulin makers, you cannot charge more than say, we’ll just say $20 a vial, or basically you cannot charge more than what you charge in other countries for insulin. And it felt like it fell on deaf ears as soon as this co-pay cap was introduced,” said Marston. “I don’t know why they introduced something seemingly half hearted, not really designed to be a solution to the problem.”TopicsDiabetesPharmaceuticals industryBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Inflation Reduction Act will be ‘life-changing’ for Black and Latino seniorsMillions of Americans could benefit from provisions in the bill that reduce prescription drug costs, experts say Millions of older American could benefit from provisions in the new climate and healthcare spending package that lower prescription drug costs. For Black and Latino seniors, who disproportionately suffer from chronic diseases and struggle with high costs, the package, if passed and signed by Joe Biden, could be especially life-changing.The Inflation Reduction Act, which the US House is expected to pass on Friday, would give Medicare the power to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies for up to 10 drugs starting in 2026. But other provisions could make the annual out-of-pocket costs for US seniors more affordable, which could disproportionately help low-income Americans and Black and Latino seniors on Medicare, who are up to twice as likely to struggle with paying for medication as white Americans.“This is a population that’s more likely to live with certain diseases that are often treated with expensive medications. It’s also a population with relatively limited income and assets,” says Tricia Neuman, executive director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Program on Medicare Policy. “It’s a double whammy that makes Black and Latino beneficiaries more vulnerable but also puts them in a place where they’re likely to be helped by the provisions.”The legislative package, lauded for its sweeping $369bn investment toward addressing climate change, would include a $2,000 annual cap on drug costs for seniors and a monthly cap of $35 for insulin. The spending bill would also eliminate the cost of vaccines for seniors and a three-year extension of federal subsidies for lower-income Americans who buy private insurance through the Affordable Care Act, helping up to 15 million Americans.“When a patient has several different conditions that they come into the office to see us with, $2,000 can be what they pay for a month for their medications, $2,000 can be what some patients pay for for a single prescription,” Utibe Essien, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied prescription drug inequity, said. “To limit that to the annual cost of prescriptions is going to be life-changing for a lot of patients and their families.”While the healthcare provisions will impact older Americans on Medicare nationwide, the reality is that the burden of high prescription drug costs falls unevenly on Black and Latino Americans, who are more likely to work in lower-paying jobs with fewer retirement benefits, earn less income and hold less savings than their white peers. At the same time, in a country where people pay more than twice as much for prescription drugs as other countries, Black and Latino Medicare beneficiaries “are more likely to report being in relatively poor health, have higher prevalence rates of some chronic conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes than white beneficiaries”, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis in 2021.The combination of disparate suffering and the struggle to afford the significant costs to address that suffering, in turn, forces Black and Latino seniors into a devastating dilemma.KFF researchers found that the median income per capita for white seniors on Medicare was double that of Latinos and one and a half times that of Black Americans. What’s more, researchers found that white Medicare beneficiaries overall held a median savings per capita of more than $117,000, more than eight times that of Black beneficiaries and a staggering 12 times that of Latinos.Under the bill, a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket drug expenses would go into effect in 2025. Currently, in an environment where there is no limit on costs, 1.4 million seniors on Medicare spent more than $2,000 on prescription drug costs in 2020, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.What’s more, the monthly cap on insulin, which goes into effect next year, would aid the more than 3 million Medicare beneficiaries who use insulin. But the disparities go beyond: nearly half of Black and Latino seniors on Medicare reported having diabetes, compared to less than a third of white beneficiaries. And while more than 3 million seniors covered by Medicare struggled to afford medications in 2019, Black and Latino seniors were nearly twice as likely to report not getting their necessary prescriptions because of costs than white seniors.Essien says that the bill will reduce the costs that drive health disparities among seniors. Yet, for some provisions, its true impact may not be felt for years: Medicare negotiation of drug prices, for instance, fully goes into effect in 2026 and will be limited to 10 drugs to start. What’s more, the cap on monthly insulin costs leaves out those who are covered by private insurance.Though the bill focuses on reducing healthcare costs, it fails to address the underlying causes of racial health disparities such as people’s unequal access to pharmaceutical care and the biases Black and Latino patients face within the medical system. Essien hopes the savings from drug costs in the bill would “allow us to start to address some of these fundamental root causes of health inequities in our country”.“We must applaud this bill because it is going to reduce costs of drugs for millions of Americans each year, specifically for older Americans,” he says. “Why these disparities exist is what we have to get to the bottom of. A bill that reduces medication costs isn’t necessarily alone going to address that.”TopicsUS politicsUS healthcarenewsReuse this content More

FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified nuclear weapons documents – reportSuspected presence of such documents could explain why US attorney general took step of ordering FBI agents into a former president’s house FBI agents were looking for secret documents about nuclear weapons among other classified material when they searched Donald Trump’s home on Monday, it has been reported.The Washington Post cited people familiar with the investigation as saying nuclear weapons documents were thought to be in the trove the FBI was hunting in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. They did not specify what kind of documents or whether they referred to the US arsenal or another country’s.DoJ has asked court to unseal Trump search warrant, Merrick Garland saysRead moreThe report came hours after the attorney general, Merrick Garland, said he had personally authorised the government request for a search warrant and revealed that the justice department had asked a Florida court for the warrant to be unsealed, noting that Trump himself had made the search public.The justice department motion referred to “the public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred in its contents”.Trump later released a statement saying he would not oppose but rather was “encouraging the immediate release of those documents” related to what he called the “unAmerican, unwarranted, and unnecessary raid and break-in … Release the documents now!”Garland’s announcement followed a furious backlash to the search from Trump supporters who portrayed it as politically motivated. On Thursday a man who tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati office was shot and killed by police after he fled the scene.01:56The court told the government to present its motion to Trump’s lawyers and to report back by 3pm on Friday on whether Trump objected to the warrant being unsealed.The suspected presence of nuclear weapons documents at Mar-a-Lago could explain why Garland took such a politically charged step as ordering FBI agents into a former president’s house, as retrieving them would be seen as a national security priority.Trump was particularly fixated on the US nuclear arsenal while he was in the White House, and boasted about being privy to highly secret information.In the summer of 2017 he told US military leaders he wanted an arsenal comparable to its cold war peak, which would have involved a ten-fold increase, a demand that reportedly led the then secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, describe him as a “fucking moron”. Trump publicly threatened to obliterate both North Korea and Afghanistan.In his book on the Trump presidency, Rage, Bob Woodward quoted the former president as telling him: “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody – what we have is incredible.”Woodward said he was later told the US did indeed have an unspecified new weapons system, and officials were “surprised” that Trump had disclosed the fact.Cheryl Rofer, a chemist who worked on nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos national laboratory said there were varying classification levels applying to different kinds of documentation.“Information about the design of nuclear weapons is called Restricted Data and is ‘born classified’. That means it is assumed to be classified unless declassified,” Rofer, who writes a blog titled Nuclear Diner, wrote on Twitter. But she added: “There’s no reason for a president to have nuclear weapons design information that I can see.”Among the nuclear documents that Trump would routinely have had access to would be the classified version of the Nuclear Posture Review, about US capabilities and policies. A military aide is always close to the president carrying the “nuclear football”, a briefcase containing nuclear strike options, but it would be unusual for those documents to be taken out of the football.Another possibility Rofer pointed to is that Trump could have retained his nuclear “biscuit”, a piece of plastic like a credit card with the identification codes necessary for nuclear launch. Those codes would have been changed however the moment Biden took office at noon on 20 January 2021.TopicsDonald TrumpFBIMar-a-LagoUS politicsMerrick GarlandnewsReuse this content More

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As the Inflation Reduction Act heads to the House floor, many Democrats are hoping the landmark legislation to tackle the climate crisis, which passed in the Senate last week, will result in more votes in the November midterm elections. Some experts aren’t convinced the bill goes far enough.
Joan E Greve speaks to Leah Stokes, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, about what the bill – if passed into law – will mean for Americans, and for the planet

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Archive: MSNBC, NBC, C-Span Listen to Thursday’s episode of Today in Focus, as Hugo Lowell and Michael Safi discuss the FBI raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this week. Send your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

Secret Service watchdog suppressed memo on January 6 texts erasureOfficials at the DHS’s office of inspector general said their attempts to inform Congress in April were thwarted Top career officials at the Department of Homeland Security’s office of inspector general tried to alert Congress in April that Secret Service texts from the time of the January 6 Capitol attack had been erased, but their efforts were nixed by its leadership, documents show.House panels: DHS officials interfered in effort to get lost Secret Service textsRead moreThe officials inside the inspector general’s office – the chief watchdog for the Secret Service – prepared a memo that detailed how the Secret Service was resisting the oversight body’s review into January 6, and delayed informing it about the lost texts.But after the memo was emailed to the DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari’s chief of staff, its contents were never seen again, and the disclosure about the erased text messages was never included in Cuffari’s semi-annual report to Congress about oversight work.The revelation shows that the Secret Service only admitted texts from January 6 were lost months after they were requested by the inspector general’s office, and that Cuffari might have violated federal law in not reporting the matter in the report to Congress.As noted in the memo, obtained by the Project on Government Oversight and reviewed by the Guardian, the Inspector General Act of 1978 required Cuffari to report “significantly delayed access to information, including the justification of the establishment for such action”.The circumstances around the erasure of the Secret Service texts have become central to the congressional probe by the House January 6 select committee, as it examines how agents and leaders planned to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence as violence unfolded at the Capitol.The Secret Service is a division of DHS, and the chairman of the select committee Bennie Thompson in recent weeks has escalated the loss of the texts with the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, according to sources familiar with the matter.Thompson has spoken with Mayorkas at least twice, the sources said, and the secretary has deputized an attorney in the DHS counsel’s office to oversee the transfer of materials from the agency to Congress, as investigators examine whether the texts can be reconstructed.The memo – approved by the DHS office of counsel, the office of investigations, as well as the office of inspections – is particularly significant because it amounted to a compendium of efforts by the Secret Service to seemingly stymie the review.“Secret Service has resisted OIG’s oversight activities and continued to significantly delay OIG’s access to records, impeding the progress of OIG’s January 6, 2021 review,” the memo said.Secret Service interviewees, the memo said, regularly indicated that they would not provide documents to the DHS inspector general’s office unless they first went through an internal review, a move potentially in violation of the Inspector General Act.The memo also noted that on multiple occasions, when the Secret Service produced documents months after they were requested, they contained redactions. The Secret Service did not indicate who approved or applied the redactions or why they were made, the memo said.Finally, career officials inside the DHS inspector general’s office wrote, the Secret Service claimed they could not access crucial texts from January 6 because of an April 2021 phone system migration that wiped all data from the devices of agents.The memo was sent to an office overseen by Cuffari’s chief of staff, Kristen Fredericks, on 1 April 2022, according to materials reviewed by the Guardian, so that it could be included in the DHS inspector general’s report to Congress – only for it to be excluded.TopicsSecret ServiceUS Capitol attackJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More