US Politics

Republicans cry foul: FBI raid could re-tighten Trump’s grip on partyTrump’s influence seemed to be waning – but the sight of federal agents searching Mar-a-Lago has rallied Republicans The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago on Monday has galvanized the American right, raising the prospect that Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican party could strengthen at a time when the former president had been losing it.After Trump announced in a statement that his resort and residence was “currently under siege, raided, and occupied”, angry supporters rushed there to protest as police with rifles looked on. “All the media are against Trump, and I’m fed up with it,” a supporter holding a sign saying “Fake news” told a Reuters reporter.FBI raid on Trump’s residence takes US into uncharted territoryRead moreTrump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump declared on Fox News that the raid – which sources previously told the Guardian was in search of documents that the ex-president may have taken from the White House – was intended to foil him from running for the Oval Office again.The political establishment is “terrified he’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024”, she said, “and this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump, as though they haven’t already done enough”.Trump’s influence on the Republican party had appeared to wane somewhat in recent months. His interventions in the Republican primaries have had mixed results. Some of his endorsed candidates won – often in tight races – and others lost.Similarly, Republican voters’ enthusiasm for the idea of Trump running for president again had been declining. A New York Times/Siena College poll in July found that almost half of Republican primary voters preferred someone other than Trump for 2024. Younger Republicans and those with college degrees preferred Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who has worked in recent years to position himself as Trumpism’s shrewder and more disciplined heir.Now the US justice department may have handed Trump a gift in disguise. Trump could download footage of the raid from his home security cameras and “have one of the most gripping campaign ads of all time, ready made”, the novelist Walter Kirn suggested on Twitter.By Tuesday morning, Trump had already posted a lengthy campaign-style ad to social media describing the US as “a nation in decline” and saying that the country “has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before”.His “Save America” Pac blasted out fundraising texts directing supporters to a landing page reading: “It’s time for EVERY PATRIOT to step up and stand against the Left’s reckless WITCH HUNTS and political persecution of President Trump! Please rush in a donation IMMEDIATELY to publicly stand with President Trump against this NEVERENDING WITCH HUNT!”A person close to the Trump operation told Politico: “They’re going to drastically use this to rally their allies, [Republican] leaders on Capitol Hill and juice for his political agenda and run for 2024.“If there was a 99% chance” of Trump running again, “it’s 100% now,” Politico’s source added. The outlet also reported that the Trump camp was keeping a careful eye on which Republicans rally to the former president and which do not.The Republican National Committee has seized on the news as ammunition for midterm elections this fall, with fundraising texts reading: “THIS IS NOT A DRILL: UNPRECEDENTED move [Joe] Biden’s FBI RAIDS Pres. Trump’s home. Time to take back Congress.”DeSantis, who is widely viewed as a major obstacle to Trump if he were to run again, came to his rival’s defense, though without mentioning Trump directly by name. The raid on Mar-a-Lago “is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves”, he said on Twitter, adding that America was becoming a “Banana Republic”.The Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio disparaged the raid on similar lines. “Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships,” he said on Twitter. “But never before in America.”In Townhall, a rightwing online magazine, a columnist argued: “If Trump was ever on the edge of not running, and I don’t think he ever was, then this act sure as hell is going to make him run again in 2024.“The FBI, not the media, may have given the most significant in-kind political contribution to a candidate in American political history.”A column in RedState, another conservative website, warned fellow Trump supporters: “Don’t Take the Bait.” The column sought to portray the raid as a last-ditch effort to boost Democratic prospects for this fall’s midterm elections.“Why?” asked the column. “Because they believe it can save them from certain destruction in November.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

The Guardian view on the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago: what’s past is prologue EditorialThe seizure of documents on Monday relates to records of Donald Trump’s presidency, but may help to shape the political future The FBI’s search of and seizure of documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is not only dramatic and serious, but unprecedented: no other former president has faced such an action. Yet Mr Trump’s ability to survive and thrive politically on similar moments is also without precedent. Even when damaging evidence emerges, he has walked away largely unscathed in the eyes of his base, while the US itself has been diminished. Nor has he yet experienced legal consequences for his actions in office.Monday’s search was reportedly part of the ongoing investigation examining his potentially unlawful removal and destruction of White House documents. Accurately recording the actions of a country’s executive is part of democratic accountability. But this investigation will also help to determine the future: first, and most importantly, because upholding standards maintains the difference between honest and transparent systems and dishonest and unaccountable ones, and second, through its electoral impact.Mr Trump has long been known for extreme carelessness at best regarding records. Earlier this year, a senior official said that “he never stopped ripping things up”, and a new book will report that White House staff believed he clogged toilets by attempting to flush away wads of paper. In February, 15 boxes of documents and other items were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago by the National Archives. The legal requirements for a search such as Monday’s are substantial, and the likely fallout such that it was almost certainly approved by the attorney general, Merrick Garland, who is known for his caution. It is hard to imagine that mementoes of office were all that was at stake.Moreover, this is only one of multiple investigations involving Mr Trump, and not the most important. The Department of Justice has expanded its investigation into the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 to cover his statements and behaviour, as well as requesting evidence from the House select committee’s inquiries.The search comes on top of a welcome streak of good news for Joe Biden, albeit not yet enough to provide the kind of shift in polling that Democrats need before November’s midterms. Yet Mr Trump has prospered by weaponising such moments. (It is typical that he should invoke Watergate, thinking not of presidential wrongdoing, but the illegal break-in at Democratic headquarters.) Just as worryingly, senior Republicans have again rallied to him as a Maga martyr pursued by a “witch-hunt”, with no shame about their desire to “lock her up” when the FBI investigated Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Beyond that, 6 January was horrifying evidence of the peril of deep political divides mutating into outright violence and attacks upon democratic institutions.It is surely not narcissism alone which impels the former president to signal that he wants to run again. A campaign would not prevent him being prosecuted (and it is far from clear that conviction under the law on removing official records would bar him from office, as some hoped). But it would raise the political stakes, and might lead to him enjoying presidential immunity again. If he believes he is in a race with investigators, he may be prompted to make an early announcement.Nonetheless, pursuing Mr Trump over serious allegations is essential. To simply ignore potential crimes because the investigations might be exploited politically would amount to granting de facto immunity to those who stir up the most turmoil. Worse, if action is not taken now, it could become impossible in a second Trump term, under a president and aides who have already shown their eagerness to eradicate the country’s checks and balances, and who will have learned better how to do so.TopicsDonald TrumpOpinionUS politicsFBIeditorialsReuse this content More

Yet more disgrace for Trump as the FBI raid Mar-a-Lago. Of course, he’s milking itMarina HydeLaw enforcement agents searched the 45th president’s mansion – and gave him another reason to run in 2024 Devastating news for the future Trump Presidential Library, already suffering acute supply problems after recent reports that the former US president frequently ripped up presidential papers and clogged toilets with them (home and abroad). Last night, the FBI carried out a raid on Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach mansion in which Trump currently resides, sharing only several of its communal areas with paying Floridians. The raid – or “assault”, as Trump would have it – is thought to be related to his already-proven removal of records from the White House at the end of his administration, but could reasonably be linked to a number of active lawsuits and investigations currently being faced by the 45th president.Even so, it’s a development that has hit Trump and his family hard. Or opportunely, depending on how you look at it – and more on that later. “These are dark times for our Nation,” began an overnight statement by the former president, talking like a Star Wars opening crawl. Trump went on to say his property was “under siege”, which feels a little histrionic. Surely this was just a harmless law enforcement rally that mildly got out of hand, though not in a way that saw five people end up dead, a gibbet erected on the croquet lawn and small-state golfers barricading themselves into executive restrooms in genuine and rational fear of their lives? Alas, that wasn’t the line which the presiding inspo for the Capitol riots decided to go with, with Trump instead putting the monstrous impertinence of the FBI in perspective with the howl: “They even broke into my safe!” Lest you imagined you had hallucinated this attack line, Donald’s etiolated adult son Eric could be found honking it over on Fox News, where, as I am typing this, the story is currently being headlined “BIDEN’S FBI RANSACKS THE HOME OF POTENTIAL 2024 OPPONENT”. As Eric declared with incredulity: “They broke into a safe?! … I mean gimme a break!”You’ll be hugely taken with this notion that a safe is your special private place that NO ONE should ever touch, a kind of supra-legal repository whose contents are automatically placed beyond the legitimate attentions of any and all law enforcement agencies, no matter the gravity of federal crimes being alleged, and no matter how loudly your political opponents shriek “but his safe!” or simply “LOCK HIM UP”.As yet, there are no details of where in Mar-a-Lago Trump’s safe was located, though students of the resort’s interiors style will hope it was concealed behind the 1989 portrait of him entitled The Visionary. To be clear, I’m not talking about the nine-foot painting of himself that Trump paid for with $60,000 meant for charity, but the one where he’s wearing cricket whites as sunbeams break through some celestial clouds behind his head, and his expression says simply: “I dare you to report what I’m about to do to you, sweetheart”.FBI raids on former presidents; filing stuff in the U-bend – another hugely uplifting 24 hours in politics. Not for the first time, much of the most unwittingly revealing commentary on it all comes from Trump himself, who says of the raid, “nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before”. Well quite. Meanwhile, plenty of his most powerful supporters have lost no time in informing Americans that if this can happen to the former president, then the ordinary people are next. And yet, and yet … are they? Of all the things to lose sleep over in the contemporary US, the imminent peril of dozens of FBI agents turning up on your doorstep and finding classified presidential records among your ironing is arguably not one of them.Still, what kind of world are we living in when a man of the people is treated like one of the people? The whole business has appalled freedom-loving anti-elitist Nigel Farage, who this morning announced himself to be “shocked” by the FBI’s presence at Trump’s property, before concluding that “the deep state truly does exist”. Carry yourself with the moral and intellectual consistency of Nigel, who believes that rich and powerful men who are the subject of multiple active criminal investigations should be above the law, while he himself has previously endorsed a US political candidate who – among other things – believes that all homosexuality should be made illegal. A huge number of grim prospects are coming down the slipway, but the virtually locked-on prospect of Nigel using the cost-of-living crisis to respawn over the next year or so is definitely up there.For now, more immediate respawnings are available. Trump is already fundraising off the outrage his winged monkeys are whipping up after last night’s raid, and attacking its very legitimacy. “Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President,” was the way he characterised the actions of an FBI whose lifelong Republican director he personally chose for the job.As so often in the rabbit hole down which Trump has led us, I fear the news of the raid is not the unalloyed delight that many of his detractors may be celebrating it as. It surely makes it more, not less likely, that his 2024 presidential run will be announced in short order, very possibly breaking his agreement to hold off before the midterms. After days like these, what does he really have to lose, barring other people’s money? Each new probe is an added incentive to win and shut it down, pausing or permanently halting any number of lawsuits, and painting all reasonable investigation as clearly politically motivated, or – just like before! – an attempt at simple electoral theft. Never mind five towns ago, we passed “rational” five years ago. For all the drama of last night, the way back still remains entirely unclear.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde is published by Guardian Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Finally, Donald Trump’s misdeeds are catching up with himRichard WolffeThe FBI Mar-a-Lago search suggests that the former president is no longer living in a protective bubble For a party that loves to stand on the thin blue line, Donald Trump is a curiously crooked leader. Here is a party, a grand old one, that is merrily revving up the old scare machine about crime in time for November’s congressional elections. Yet its likely presidential nominee finds the whole notion of laws and law enforcement an entirely alien concept – intended literally for aliens.Never mind that he may have broken multiple laws in taking classified materials to his private residence after leaving office. Never mind that he apparently flushed papers down the presidential toilet in breach of record retention laws, if not the plumbing protocol of half of the country.Trump is most outraged by the obviously criminal gang of people pretending to catch criminals, otherwise known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Such an assault could only take place in broken, third world countries,” he said, elevating such countries from the shithole status he previously conferred on them.FBI seizes documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home – live reactionRead more“They even broke into my safe! What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.”Well, Mr President, that’s quite an interesting question.Watergate was a criminal act ordered by an almost-impeached president, whereas Mar-a-Lago is the home of a twice-impeached president. Easy to confuse the two, obviously. Watergate is the tasteless home of ageing has-beens who hanker after the 1970s and 1980s. Mar-a-Lago is a spiritual twin.Sources close to the FBI (normally the secret code for the FBI press office) say that Monday’s raid was concerned with finding any more of those rogue records that mysteriously accompanied Trump to Florida. Trump somehow purloined 15 boxes of materials requested by the National Archives.In the hands of any other president, these records might have helped with the writing of those all-important presidential memoirs. But in the tiny hands of Donald Trump, they are unlikely to be intended for book-writing purposes. After all, his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz famously doubted that Trump had ever read an entire book in his adult life – not even the ones published under his name.That leads us to speculate what kind of probable cause the FBI has to seek a warrant to bust open Trump’s safe. The pressing needs of the National Archives are almost certainly not the foundation for this particular exercise of law enforcement powers.We obviously could speculate about the kind of papers the FBI might be looking for. There has been a singular tear in the time-space continuum around the person of Donald Trump on January 6 last year. Secret service texts have disappeared down digital wormholes, along with Pentagon records. Presidential call logs appear mysteriously blank.Perhaps the entire contents of the phone of Alex Jones might have prompted some new lines of inquiry. Or perhaps it was the sight of Trump’s fine profile at the Saudi-funded golfing boondoggle at his very own country club turned cemetery.Ours is not to question the motive or the conduct of the fine boys and girls who stand between us and the criminal elements destroying our civilization.Just listen to Trump’s own home-state senator, “Little” Marco Rubio, who just entertained the Senate with a rousing speech against the climate change bill that might stop Florida from disappearing into the ocean. In between talking about his cancelled flight and a Cuban bakery he loved, Rubio said he overheard a few regular people complaining about inflation, immigration and – worst of all – rampant crime.“I’m telling you that what the people by the millions, registered to vote, people that voted for Biden, people that voted for Trump, I’m telling you what they are worried about is the fact that the streets and many cities in this country have been turned over to criminals,” he claimed. “There are prosecutors funded by Soros who refuse to put people in jail. They won’t do it. Entire categories of crime they won’t even prosecute.”Well thank goodness the United States Department of Justice is not funded by the great boogeyman of antisemites the world over. Thank goodness it has finally recognized the entire category of crime known as the corrupt and seditious acts of a former president called Trump.FBI searches Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and seizes documentsRead moreBecause, seriously, we were getting worried that there was some kind of protective bubble that allowed all sorts of stuff to happen in Mar-a-Lago. A bit like international sports organizations in Switzerland.This latest turn of the screw leaves Trump’s cultish lackeys – sorry, Republican leaders – in a bit of a pickle. Given a choice between following the rule of law or the whims of a sociopathic narcissist with no scruples, the choice is obvious for the party of law and order.Almost the entire body of elected Republican officials in the nation’s capital, with a tiny handful of notable exceptions, find it impossible to muster a single word to condemn the ringleader of the brutal attack on the police who protected their lives and limbs on January 6.“These are dark times for our nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said, helpfully distinguishing his own residence from an identically named bungalow in Boise, Idaho.“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before,” he added, before bleating on about Hillary Clinton’s emails.Who wants to tell him that his presidency vanished almost 18 months ago, along with a justice department that could not prosecute him, a white nationalist mob intent on murdering his vice-president, and a bunch of fake electors ready to commit treason?Trump is a unique figure in our lifetime of American presidents. The clear and present danger is that he might not be the last.
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
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Congress is about to pass a historic climate bill. So why are oil companies pleased?Kate AronoffThe bill is a devil’s bargain between the Democrats, the fossil fuel industry, and recalcitrant senator Joe Manchin. Yet it’s better than nothing “We’re pleased,” ExxonMobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, said on an earnings call last month, speaking about the Inflation Reduction Act. He called the bill, now making its way through the US Congress, “clear and consistent”. After it passed the Senate Sunday evening, Shell USA said it was “a step toward increased energy security and #netzero”. The world is currently on track to produce double the amount of coal, oil and gas in 2030 than is consistent with capping warming at 1.5C. To state the obvious: climate policy should strike fear into the hearts of fossil fuel executives, not delight them. So what have some of the world’s worst polluters found to like about a historic piece of climate legislation?Guilt by association only goes so far: that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed is undoubtedly good news. It will do a lot of good things. Democrats face the distinct possibility of being locked out of power for at least a decade after midterm elections this November, when they’re expected to lose the House of Representatives. Republicans won’t be keen to recognize that another party’s candidate could win the presidency, let alone reduce emissions. That something being called climate policy passed at all is thanks to the tireless work the climate movement has done to put it on the agenda, and the diligent staffers who spent late nights translating that momentum into legislation.But it also reflects just how much power the fossil fuel industry has amassed. The IRA is the product of a devil’s bargain struck between (among others) Democrats and Joe Manchin, speaking on behalf of his corporate donors. In exchange for his agreeing to vote for some $370bn worth of genuinely exciting climate spending, the West Virginia senator has demanded sweeping permitting reform and an all-of-government greenlight for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Many of the worst provisions are slated to be passed in future legislation this September. The IRA itself contains a remarkable poison pill, requiring that 60m acres of public waters be offered up for sale each and every year to the oil and gas industry before the federal government could approve any new offshore wind development for a decade.Then again, maybe the oil and gas CEOs have finally come around, and such sweeteners are a distraction from the real story. After decades of lobbying against climate policy perhaps they’ve seen the inexorable march of history towards decarbonization and decided to hitch their wagons to it. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this show before. Over a decade ago the likes of BP and ConocoPhillips joined the US Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of green groups and corporations that set about trying to pass climate legislation at the start of the Obama presidency. The House of Representatives went on to pass the hulking carbon pricing bill it supported, only to see it die in the Senate.For corporate members of USCAP the situation was a win-win. With one hand they helped craft legislation so friendly to their interests that it would leave their core business model – pouring carbon into the atmosphere – mostly untouched. With the other hand they tried to make sure nothing passed at all. As the political scientist Jake Grumbach has shown, several corporate members of the coalition were simultaneously paying generous membership fees to the American Petroleum Institute, the Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations working actively to kill it. The same was true this time around; the critical difference this time is that their bill passed.Understanding what’s just happened demands a longer view. For decades, oil and gas executives have worked to create a political climate wholly allergic to comprehensive climate action. Part of that has been lobbying against climate legislation, of course, working to undermine bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and spread disinformation. But for nearly a century the same corporations have conducted an all-out attack on the ability of the US government to get big, good things done.Climate change is ultimately a planning problem: there is no entity other than the state that can electrify the country, expand the grid, build prodigious amounts of mass transit and wind down coal, oil and gas production in time to keep warming short of catastrophic levels. For all its many shortcomings, the FDR-era New Deal sought to construct a state capable of tackling such complicated problems. The right – supercharged by fossil fuel funding – set out to destroy it, polluting our politics with the idea that efficient markets are the only reasonable answer to what ails society. Predictably, they railed against the Green New Deal, too, which rejected that logic. That’s not the result of some cadre of conniving CEOs waking up every morning and deciding to destroy the planet. They just happen to sell the lifeblood of capitalism and aren’t eager to be booted from that business.That the IRA’s most promising elements are a series of modest incentives to get corporations to do the right thing on climate – that demanding they actually do so feels so far out of reach – is the result of this long-running and largely successful ideological quest. This bill is woefully inadequate, featuring a cruel, casual disregard for those at home and abroad who will live with the consequences of boosting fossil fuel production as a bargaining chip for boosting clean energy. And it’s almost certainly better than nothing.
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back
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Oklahoma lawmakers urge pause amid fears innocent man to be executedBipartisan group calls for new hearing over lack of evidence in case of Richard Glossip, 59, as state rushes to speed up executions A letter signed by 61 Oklahoma lawmakers – most of them pro-death penalty Republicans – has been sent to the state’s attorney general calling for a new hearing in the case of Richard Glossip, a death row inmate scheduled to be executed next month.Forty-four Republican and 17 Democratic legislators, amounting to more than a third of the state assembly, have written to John O’Connor pleading for the new hearing.Alabama executes Joe Nathan James Jr despite opposition from victim’s familyRead moreThe outpouring of concern is an indication of the intense unease surrounding the Glossip case, and the mounting fear that Oklahoma is preparing to kill an innocent man.Glossip, 59, is due to be killed on 22 September as part of a sudden speeding up of capital punishment activity in Oklahoma. He was sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of a Best Budget motel in Oklahoma City, where Glossip was manager.Justin Sneed, the motel’s maintenance worker, admitted that he had beaten Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. But Sneed later turned state’s witness on Glossip, accusing the manager of having ordered the murder.As a result, Sneed, the killer, avoided the death penalty and was given a life sentence. Glossip was put on death row almost entirely on the basis of Sneed’s testimony against him, with no other forensic or corroborating evidence.In their letter, the 61 legislators ask the attorney general to call for a hearing to consider new evidence that has been uncovered in the case. Last year a global law firm, Reed Smith, was asked by state lawmakers to carry out an independent investigation.Their 343-page report found that the state had intentionally destroyed key evidence before the trial. The review concluded that “no reasonable juror hearing the complete record would have convicted Richard Glossip of first-degree murder”.Glossip’s scheduled execution forms part of an extraordinary glut of death warrants that have been issued by Oklahoma in recent weeks. In July, the state received court permission to go ahead with 25 executions at a rate of almost one a month between now and December 2024.Should all those executions be carried out, Oklahoma’s current death row would shrink by almost 60% from its current occupancy of 43 prisoners.The first scheduled execution of the 25 is that of James Coddington, 50, on 25 August. Coddington’s fate is now in the hands of Kevin Stitt, Oklahoma’s Republican governor, after the state’s parole board recommended that he commute the prisoner’s sentence to life without parole.The clemency petition pointed out that Coddington had been impaired by alcohol and drug abuse starting when he was a baby. It said he had shown full remorse for having murdered Albert Hale, a friend who had refused to lend him $50 to buy cocaine.Glossip is the second of the 25 death row inmates to be booked for execution.The Republican-controlled state is rushing to kill so many prisoners over the next two years as it rebounds from a six-year capital punishment moratorium that was forced upon it following a spate of gruesomely botched executions. In April 2014 Clayton Lockett writhed and groaned on the gurney after lethal injection drugs were administered into his flesh rather than a vein – he took 43 minutes to die.In January, 2015 Charles Warner was heard to say: “My body is on fire” as he was being killed. It was later discovered that the state had used an unauthorized drug in the procedure.Glossip was set to be the next one to die in September 2015 but the execution was postponed after it emerged that the same mistaken drug was about to be used. Oklahoma halted executions for six years before the practice was cranked up again last October.Remarkably, the first execution carried out after the hiatus in October 2021 was also botched. Witnesses saw John Grant displaying full-body convulsions and vomiting for 15 minutes.TopicsOklahomaRepublicansCapital punishmentDemocratsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Landmark US climate bill will do more harm than good, groups sayBill makes concessions to the fossil fuel industry as frontline community groups call on Biden to declare climate emergency The landmark climate legislation passed by the Senate after months of wrangling and weakening by fossil-fuel friendly Democrats will lead to more harm than good, according to frontline community groups who are calling on Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.If signed into law, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) would allocate $369bn to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy sources – a historic amount that scientists estimate will lead to net reductions of 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.Democrats celebrate as climate bill moves to House – and critics weigh in Read moreIt would be the first significant climate legislation to be passed in the US, which is historically responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country.But the bill makes a slew of concessions to the fossil fuel industry, including mandating drilling and pipeline deals that will harm communities from Alaska to Appalachia and the Gulf coast and tie the US to planet-heating energy projects for decades to come.“Once again, the only climate proposal on the table requires that the communities of the Gulf south bear the disproportionate cost of national interests bending a knee to dirty energy – furthering the debt this country owes to the South,” said Colette Pichon Battle from Taproot Earth Vision (formerly Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy).“Solving the climate crisis requires eliminating fossil fuels, and the Inflation Reduction Act simply does not do this,” said Steven Feit, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel).Overall, many environmental and community groups agree that while the deal will bring some long-term global benefits by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it’s not enough and consigns communities already threatened by sea level rise, floods and extreme heat to further misery.The bill is a watered-down version of Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better bill which was blocked by every single Republican and also conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have both received significant campaign support from fossil fuel industries. West Virginia’s Manchin, in particular, is known for his close personal ties to the coal sector.“This was a backdoor take-it-or-leave-it deal between a coal baron and Democratic leaders in which any opposition from lawmakers or frontline communities was quashed. It was an inherently unjust process, a deal which sacrifices so many communities and doesn’t get us anywhere near where we need to go, yet is being presented as a saviour legislation,” said Jean Su, energy justice program director at the Center for Biological Diversity.The IRA, which includes new tax provisions to pay for the historic $739bn climate and healthcare spending package, has been touted as a huge victory for the Biden administration as the Democrats gear up for a tough ride in the midterm elections, when they face losing control of both houses of Congress.The spending package will expedite expansion of the clean energy industry, and while it includes historic funds to tackle air pollution and help consumers go green through electric vehicle and household appliance subsidies, the vast majority of the funds will benefit corporations.A cost-benefit analysis by the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), which represents a wide range of urban and rural groups nationwide, concludes that the strengths of the IRA are outweighed by the bill’s weaknesses and threats posed by the expansion of fossil fuels and unproven technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen generation – which the bill will incentivise with billions of dollars of tax credits that will mostly benefit oil and gas.“Climate investments should not be handcuffed to corporate subsidies for fossil fuel development and unproven technologies that will poison our communities for decades,” said Juan Jhong-Chung from the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, a member of the CJA.The IRA is a huge step towards creating a green capitalist industry that wrongly assumes the economic benefits will trickle down to low-income communities and households, added Su.Many advocacy groups agree that the IRA should be the first step – not the final climate policy – for Biden, who promised to be the country’s first climate president.People vs Fossil Fuels, a national coalition of more than 1,200 organisations from all 50 states, recently delivered a petition with more than 500,000 signatures to the White House calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency, which would unlock new funds for urgently needed climate adaptation in hard-hit communities, and use executive actions to stop the expansion of fossil fuels.Siqiniq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, said: “This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it. This is a life or death situation and the longer we act as though the world isn’t on fire around us, the worse our burns will be. Biden has the power to prevent this, to mitigate the damage.”TopicsUS politicsClimate crisisDemocratsRepublicansJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

Supporters of former US President Donald Trump have gathered outside the Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, after the FBI executed a search warrant at his residence. The move by the FBI is the latest indication of an intensifying criminal investigation by the justice department into his affairs

What lawsuits and investigations is Donald Trump facing?
What is Mar-a-Lago? Trump’s ‘winter White House’ at the centre of FBI investigation
FBI searches Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home More