US Politics

Police arrest New York man accused of slapping Rudy Giuliani on backEmployee Daniel Gill, 38, apparently asked Giuliani, 78, ‘What’s up, scumbag?’ during incident in ShopRite store on Staten Island A 38-year-old Staten Island store employee was arrested for allegedly hitting Rudy Giuliani on the back, an attack that the former New York City mayor says felt as if he had been “shot”.A surveillance video showed Giuliani standing inside a ShopRite store with a group of people he later identified as his supporters. As he was standing, 38-year-old Daniel Gill walked up from behind Giuliani, slapped his back and continued to walk, the video showed.The video, obtained and published by the New York Post, also showed Gill saying something to Giuliani as Gill walked past the group standing with the 78-year-old, who has also previously served as a lawyer to Donald Trump.Gill asked Giuliani, “What’s up, scumbag?”, according to a statement from the New York police department. As the group of onlookers watched, the woman next to Giuliani immediately began patting his back as if to soothe him.Gill continued to say something while he walked away into an aisle, and another person in a cap tried to talk to him. It was not clear from the video if that man was also a store employee.As Gill walked into one of the aisles, Giuliani was seen shaking his finger and saying something back.The New York police department confirmed the encounter to the Guardian and said Gill has been charged with two counts of assault. One of the counts alleges assault on someone 65 or older, the NYPD said.According to an interview with the Post, Giuliani said he felt “this tremendous pain in my back”.Giuliani claimed Gill said: “You … you’re one of the people that’s gonna kill women. You’re gonna kill women.” That appeared to be reference to the decision by the supreme court’s conservative majority to overturn the right to abortion that had been established nearly 50 years ago by Roe v Wade.“Then he starts yelling out all kinds of, just curses, and every once in a while, he puts in that woman thing,” Giuliani added.The encounter occurred during a campaign event for Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who is running to become New York’s next governor.Father and son have turned the incident into a part of their political pitch, with the younger Giuliani claiming the slap was the latest example of “​​the left wing … encouraging violence”.The elder Giuliani – who refused medical treatment – reportedly said he was pressing charges against Gill to create “an example that you can’t do this”.Neither ShopRite nor Andrew Giuliani’s campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.In a statement, Andrew Giuliani said: “Innocent people are attacked in today’s New York all of the time. This particular incident hit very close to home. The assault on my father, America’s Mayor, was over politics.“I will stand up for law and order so that New Yorkers feel safe again.”Mentions of Giuliani have been frequent during the recent series of public hearings held by the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.For instance, the committee aired evidence that, in attempting to overturn election results in service of Trump’s lie about voter fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, Giuliani told an official the battleground state of Arizona: “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.”A purportedly “inebriated” Giuliani also urged Trump to falsely claim victory on election night, according to evidence that the committee aired during the hearings.TopicsRudy GiulianiNew YorkUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for supreme court justices to be impeachedThe congresswoman says Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch lied under oath to Congress about their views on Roe Political pressure is mounting on Joe Biden to take more action to protect abortion rights across the US as firebrand New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for supreme court justices to be impeached for misleading statements about their views on Roe v Wade.Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks took aim at justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. Both were appointed by former president Donald Trump and had signaled that they would not reverse the supreme court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v Wade during confirmation hearings as well as in meetings with senators.On Friday, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch formed part of the conservative majority which in effect ended legal access to abortion in most states, and Ocasio-Cortez said “there must be consequences” for that.‘They set a torch to it’: Warren says court lost legitimacy with Roe reversalRead more“They lied,” the leftwing, second-term representative said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I believe lying under oath is an impeachable offense … and I believe that this is something that should be very seriously considered.”Ocasio-Cortez added that standing idly by “sends a blaring signal to all future nominees that they can now lie to duly elected members of the United States Senate in order to secure … confirmations and seats on the supreme court”.She also mentioned impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni emailed 29 Republican lawmakers in Arizona as she tried to help undermine Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Thomas has not recused himself from election-related cases, drawing criticism.“I believe that not recusing from cases that one clearly has family members involved in with very deep violations of conflict of interest are also impeachable offenses,” Ocasio-Cortez said.House members can impeach a judge with a simple majority vote. But to be removed from office a justice would need to be convicted by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.Biden’s Democratic party controls the House with a clear majority, but its standing in the Senate is much more tenuous. The Senate is split 50-50, though Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, can serve as a tiebreaker for votes that can be carried by a simple majority.The president dismissed the overturning of Roe v Wade as “cruel” but stopped well short of calling for the impeachment of any justices. He has also rejected the strategy proposed in some quarters to expand the supreme court in a way that would allow for the addition of more liberals and blunt the bench’s current conservative majority.Joining Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas as conservatives on the supreme court are justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts. The liberals are Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.Breyer is retiring and due to be replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, another liberal.Nonetheless, on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez urged Biden to personally take steps to address what she called the supreme court’s “crisis of legitimacy”.“President Biden must address that,” she said.Ocasio-Cortez suggested Biden could order the opening up of abortion clinics on federal lands in states where terminating pregnancies has been outlawed “to help people access the healthcare services they need”, echoing an idea from the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren.In states where abortion is no longer allowed because of Friday’s ruling, residents who need to terminate pregnancies must now travel hundreds of miles – if not more – to get access to the procedure.Many US corporate giants have taken steps to provide support and financial assistance to employees seeking abortions in states where that is outlawed in most cases. But such measures won’t help millions of people who need abortions but are not employed by a large international or national company.That’s where an order from Biden to allow abortion on federal lands in anti-abortion rights states would come in and help.Ocasio-Cortez also discussed possibly expanding access to abortion pills that could be mailed to those in need, though Republican politicians are gearing up to limit access to those as well.For instance, South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, said her state would move to block medical providers in states where abortion is legal from mailing to South Dakotans pills that could end a pregnancy.The pressure on Biden follows Ocasio-Cortez’s remark earlier this month that she could not yet commit to endorsing him for another run at the White House in the 2024 election.Roe v Wade: senators say Trump supreme court nominees misled themRead moreHer comments on Sunday also came after senators such as Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia said they felt deceived by Friday’s controversial supreme court decision to end nearly 50 years of protections granted by Roe v Wade.Collins, a Republican, said she felt “misled” after Kavanaugh and Gorsuch had said they would leave in place “longstanding precedents that the country has relied upon” during their confirmation hearings and in meetings with her.Meanwhile, Manchin said he had trusted both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch when they “testified under oath that they … believed Roe v Wade was settled legal precedent”.Manchin was the lone Democrat to support Kavanaugh’s appointment.TopicsRoe v WadeAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS supreme courtAbortionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

QAnon’s ‘Q’ re-emerges on far-right message board after two years of silenceCryptic posts on 8kun ask ‘Shall we play a game once more?’ and ‘Are you ready to serve your country again?’ The leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which captivated a wave of Donald Trump supporters and infiltrated the Republican party, began posting again over the weekend, after nearly two years of silence.“Q”, as the figurehead of the movement is known, published three cryptic posts on a message board on Friday night – the account’s first posts since December 2020.“Shall we play a game once more?” the account posted on the far-right board 8kun. The post was signed: “Q”.The account had a unique identifier, the New York Times reported, which had been used on previous Q posts.When a user asked why Q had been absent, the account replied: “It had to be done this way.”Later, the account posted: “Are you ready to serve your country again? Remember your oath.”QAnon is an antisemitic internet conspiracy theory that swept the US right wing in 2017. Proponents claim that Trump was waging a secret battle against a cabal of pedophiles and its “deep state” collaborators.Posts from Q are known to followers as “Q drops”, and they gripped thousands of Trump supporters during his presidency. QAnon T-shirts are still a common sight at Trump rallies, and the baseless theory has also entered Republican politics.Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, US congresswomen who represent Georgia and Colorado respectively, have previously expressed support for QAnon, and other QAnon followers are running for Congress in the November midterm elections.Earlier this year two separate linguistic studies determined that Paul Furber, a South African software developer, was behind Q’s early posts, before Ron Watkins took over the account in 2018.Watkins’ father, Jim Watkins, owns the 8kun site – previously called 8chan – where Q posted their drops, and Ron Watkins is a former administrator of the platform.Watkins has denied any involvement with QAnon, and the account stopped posting after Trump’s defeat. However, the silence failed to dampen enthusiasm among the right for the conspiracy theory.Q’s new posts come as Watkins is running as a Republican for a congressional seat in Arizona. He has raised little money and secured no notable endorsements, and pundits are widely expecting him to be eliminated from the race when the primary is held 2 August.TopicsQAnonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

We Americans are dancing on the Titanic. Our iceberg is not far awayFrancine ProseThe greatest shock of all would be to wake up and find that while we were driving the kids to soccer practice and enjoying cocktails, autocracy took hold By now the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade hardly comes as a surprise. We’ve known this was imminent since the leak, a month or so ago, of Justice Alito’s memo. And yet it still delivers a profound shock – in fact, a series of shocks. Stunned, we ask, how could this happen? as if we hadn’t known, for weeks, that it was a more or less done deal.What’s shocking is the actualization of the scary Handmaid’s Tale scenario: our growing suspicion that Margaret Atwood’s fictional dystopia – a society in which women are forced to bear children and brutally punished for disobedience – is nearer to becoming a reality than we might have imagined. What’s shocking is this proof of the court’s desire and ability to control and punish women, to deprive us of our constitutional rights. What’s shocking is the justices’ reckless disregard for the additional suffering that this ruling will cause poor women, women of color and those living in rural areas. What’s shocking is the memory of three of the current justices swearing, under oath, to preserve the precedent established by Roe v Wade.It’s time to say it: the US supreme court has become an illegitimate institution | Jill FilipovicRead moreWhat’s shocking is the realization that we are living in a country that now boasts some of the world’s most misogynist and repressive laws. What’s shocking is the knowledge that the institution I grew up seeing as committed to the most precious guarantees of the constitution and to the highest and most sensibly bipartisan ideals of justice is now in the hands of a powerful faction of extremists.But what shocks me most is the fact that, according to surveys that keep surfacing and being reported, a substantial majority of Americans support abortion rights and oppose the outright ban. According to the latest Gallup poll, 85% of the population believes that abortion should be legal under some circumstances. What’s noteworthy is not that high number so much as the discrepancy between that figure and the substance of supreme court ruling. What’s shocking is yet another fact that we have known or suspected for some time: that we are living under minority rule, that, in some of the most essential ways, the wishes of the majority no longer determine government policy, and that it has become a kind of joke to suggest that our government, at the highest level, is responding to “the will of the people”.Meanwhile these shocks are intensified and amplified by how little we seem willing or able to do about the slow-motion stealth with which the seeds of autocracy are being planted. “We’re living under minority rule,” we say, and then go on to plan the kids’ birthday parties, to try to find a job and pay the bills, to complain at the gas pump, see our friends, celebrate the good weather and the new freedom occasioned by the latest downturn in the pandemic. Social media is abuzz with valuable – and necessary – suggestions for circumventing the new measures: how to obtain abortion pills from abroad, how to help women travel to states where abortion is still permitted. But I have yet to see a truly viable and broad-based plan for influencing the legislators of the so-called “trigger states” that have outlawed abortion in the immediate wake of the supreme court ruling.It’s hard not to notice that our passivity is being encouraged by the mainstream media’s commitment to “fair and balanced” reporting. In the coverage I watched on the night of the ruling – not only on the primetime channels but on PBS – equal time was given to the exultation of the “pro-life” (that regrettable term suggesting that its opponents are anti-life) faction and to the anger and disappointment of women who wish only to maintain control over our own bodies. How can it not add to our sense that the country is equally divided, deeply and hopeless factionalized, and therefore that nothing can be done? In fact the two sides are not equal, but one side is grievously underrepresented in the places where it matters most.It’s never been more important to insist on our rights – not only as women, not only as Americans, but as human beings. We need to talk to our friends, make plans, apply unceasing pressure on our state and local governments, hold every political candidate accountable. We may need to forget our pressing worries over inflation and gasoline prices just long enough to take to the streets, with unceasing frequency and in greater numbers, in order to make our beliefs and our voices heard.Because the greatest shock of all would be to wake up one morning and find that while we were driving the kids to soccer practice and enjoying that welcome after-work cocktail, more and more of our rights had been stripped away, as has happened in so many countries in which democracy vanished, overnight and in darkness –when, as it were, no one was looking. The overturning of Roe v Wade should shock us even more than it already does – shock us into looking beyond the dance floor of the Titanic and spotting that iceberg, looming in our path, not so very far away.
Francine Prose is the author, most recently, of The Vixen. She was also the president of Pen America
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‘A matter of life and death’: maternal mortality rate will rise without Roe, experts warn Pregnancy in the US is already dangerous, disproportionately so for people of color – and without abortion access for those who need it, there will likely be more deathsAfter the revocation of the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, pregnancy-related deaths will almost certainly increase – especially among people of color, experts say. They called for urgent action to protect reproductive rights and the health of patients around the country.“There are going to be more people who are forced to carry a pregnancy to term, which means that there’s going to be a greater number of people who are at risk,” said Rachel Hardeman, a reproductive health equity professor and researcher at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “More pregnancy means more likelihood of deaths.”Existing state bans could lead to an additional 75,000 births a year for those who can’t access abortions, according to one estimate. The bans will disproportionately affect younger, poorer people of color and those who already have children.But America is an incredibly difficult place to be pregnant, with the highest maternal mortality rate by far of any developed country – and it’s rising sharply. For every 100,000 births, 23.8 people died from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes in 2020 – a total of 861 women – according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).As Roe fell, states immediately moved to ban abortion, with more than half of US states expected to ultimately do so. But some, like former Vice-President Mike Pence, want lawmakers to go even further, calling for a nationwide ban on abortion.A nationwide ban would result in a 21% increase in pregnancy-related mortality across the country, but it would be even worse for people of color, with a 33% rise in deaths, according to a study by Amanda Jean Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder.“Pregnancy is really quite dangerous,” Stevenson said.And it’s disproportionately more dangerous for people of color, including Black, Indigenous and Latino people.Country comparison“The truth of the matter is, it’s already hitting people [of color] harder than others – that’s been the reality,” said Monica McLemore, an associate professor of family healthcare nursing at University of California, San Francisco.Black people in the US were already 3.5 times more likely than white peers to die because of pregnancy and childbirth, according to one study looking at data from 2016-2017, and 2.9 times more likely according to a CDC analysis in 2020. They are also more likely to need abortion services.“Because Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities are going to be disproportionately impacted by lack of access to abortion services, it’s going to exacerbate the maternal mortality racial gap that we’ve already seen in the United States,” Hardeman said.Pregnant people of color have long been marginalized and neglected in the medical system, frequently experiencing racism and discrimination at all points of care.“It’s translating into not getting the care they need, which can be a matter of life and death,” Hardeman said. And racism also takes an immense physical toll, so “by the time that person becomes pregnant, they are at less optimal health than their white counterparts who haven’t experienced racism across the life course”.The cumulative and chronic effects of living in America as a person of color increases stress, which can also affect reproductive health. “We know that the stress pathway is what leads to infant mortality, preterm birth, and other outcomes,” Hardeman said.Even living in a community or neighborhood with disproportionate levels of police surveillance and police contact, for instance, is associated with a greater risk of preterm birth – which can be dangerous for both the birthing person and the infant.“We have to be thinking about the Scotus decision and abortion bans generally as a racist policy, because the burden will fall the hardest on Black pregnant people, it’s going to fall hard on Indigenous people and other people of color, people living in rural areas as well and people of lower socioeconomic status,” Hardeman said.The supreme court decision on Friday and bans on abortion instituted at the state level “disproportionately harm people of color and reinforce a system of inequity and, frankly, of white supremacy”, Hardeman said.The states that have now banned or restricted abortion also have some of the highest mortality rates around pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the highest child mortality rates. Mississippi, for instance, where the supreme case that overturned Roe originated, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates – almost twice as high as the rest of the country – and the highest infant mortality rate in the country.US ethnicitySome people seek abortions because they are at high risk of dying from a pregnancy – because of a health condition, an unsafe home environment, harassment because of their identity, or another reason.“If you think about why people get abortions, it’s often because it’s not safe for them to stay pregnant,” Stevenson said. “The people who are currently having abortions are very likely to actually have higher rates of pregnancy-related deaths and maternal mortality than the people who are currently giving birth.”Having an abortion is “much, much, much safer than staying pregnant”, Stevenson said. Researchers estimate that childbirth is 14 times more deadly than having an abortion.But childbirth is just one risk of pregnancy. “It’s way, way more than 14 times more deadly to stay pregnant – that’s a massive underestimate,” Stevenson said.While roughly half of the country is poised to ban abortion, other states and cities have worked to expand access – including to out-of-state patients.But significant limitations on getting to those sanctuaries remain.“The question is, who is going to be able to access it?” Hardeman asked. Many people of color who face systemic barriers to healthcare may not have the tools, resources, money, time off work and childcare to travel to a sanctuary state or city to receive care, she said.“We have to be thinking about the fact that because we live in a society where access to resources is based on racism and race, there are people who are not going to be able to access the services that are available.”For many reproductive rights researchers, the court’s decision came as no surprise. “This has been coming for a long time,” McLemore said. “I get very grumpy when people just want me to regurgitate statistics about how Black people are going to be dying – we know that. What are we doing?”First, she said, “Congress could act right now and render Scotus’s decision irrelevant” by enshrining reproductive rights into national law. If this Congress doesn’t, she said, the six in 10 Americans who support abortion rights should vote for a new Congress that will.Members of the Black Maternal Health Caucus in Congress have been advocating for laws that would protect the well-being of birthing people, including the Momnibus Act of 2021.Lawmakers could also expand the social safety net, including paid family leave and health insurance for lower-income and postpartum patients, for the swelling number of people giving birth.All of these strategies wouldn’t just ensure that reproductive health continues to be offered to those who need it – they will also keep patients from dying, McLemore said.“We need an all-hands-on-deck approach here – with brilliance, not fear.”TopicsRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Lauren Boebert: could the rightwing extremist be re-elected to Congress? The controversial House member from Colorado is facing a challenger from the center, complicating her hopes of a smooth sailing primary“The tip of the spear”, that’s how Lauren Boebert described herself, on a bluebird Saturday in June, to a group of her supporters at a small town Republican party barbecue. Other members of the GOP shy away from the most inflammatory issues and controversial fights, she said – but not her.Extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are the future of the Republican party | Thomas ZimmerRead moreBoebert’s extreme rightwing stances range from absolute opposition to gun control to questioning the effectiveness of vaccines and the outcome of the 2020 presidential elections. All are conveyed by a social media persona fine-tuned to inflame the culture wars.It was sweltering inside the gazebo, even with the windows and doors thrown open, but the first-term congresswoman seemed unfazed. Dressed in jeans, a black ballcap and several-inch high heels, she guided her supporters through a litany of inflammatory talking points including immigration, critical race theory, gender transitions and Joe Biden’s mental capacity. The crowd was captivated, with regular shouts of approval and cheering when Boebert paused her careering delivery for effect.“I’m proud to have brought home 100% conservative voting records to each and every one of you,” she told the crowd at the June barbecue. “From gun rights, to immigration, to border security, to life.”In just two years in Congress, Boebert has become one of America’s most famous political figures. Along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, JD Vance and others, she is among a vanguard of younger, stridently conservative politicians following former president Donald Trump’s path to prominence.Boebert’s public battles against Colorado’s Covid-19 business shutdowns at her restaurant, Shooter’s Grill, in the small town of Rifle (the servers carry sidearms), catapulted her to local fame, helping her unseat several-term incumbent Scott Tipton in the 2020 Republican primary. She won the general election for Colorado’s third congressional district that fall.Upon arriving in Washington DC she pledged to carry her handgun on to the floor of Congress, heckled President Biden during his first State of the Union, and was censured by the House for racist remarks made about the Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar. In a May debate, Boebert said she was proud of her attempt to block the certification of President Biden’s election.At the June rally, Boebert spoke to an adoring crowd of core GOP primary voters. If this group and their peers across western Colorado were the sole voters Boebert needed to capture Tuesday’s 2022 Republican primary, she would be a lock. But they are not.Colorado holds what are known as open primaries. This means independent voters automatically receive election ballots for both Republican and Democratic party elections. These unaffiliated voters outnumber both Republicans and Democrats in Colorado’s third district, making up about 44% of active voters. With the Democratic party’s failure to come up with a high-profile candidate, there has been a concerted anti-Boebert push among quietly dissenting Republicans, angry unaffiliated voters and even Democrats who renounce their party registration to vote in the GOP primary against Boebert.“Boebert is an embarrassment to our district,” said Susan Reed, a retired cultural archeologist, who decided to change her registration from Democrat to unaffiliated. This was a first for Reed, but Boebert offends her. “We need a legislator and not a Fox News personality,” she said.Reed is not alone. Across the district, Democrats are de-registering in some numbers. According to an analysis by Colorado Public Radio, the Democratic party lost about 3,700 registered voters between February and May in Boebert’s congressional district (Boebert won the primary two years ago by fewer than 10,000 votes). None of Colorado’s other House districts saw a comparable shift.Tomorrow, these voters will cast their votes for Don Coram, a 74-year-old state senator from the small, conservative town of Montrose. Coram’s family has ranched in the arid Uncompahgre valley for generations, where, today, he grows hemp, in addition to running cattle. He is well-known in this deeply red part of the state, an important source of votes for Boebert’s dark horse primary win two years ago. He has a reputation for expertise in water and mineral policy, as well as for moderation and frequent deal-making with Democrats.“My politics are very similar to my driving,” Coram said at a recent campaign event. “To the chagrin of both my wife and my Republican colleagues, I tend to crowd the center line and sometimes I veer over a bit.”Colorado’s third congressional district is enormous, blanketing the state’s entire western half. High in the Rockies near the Continental Divide, there are posh, well-educated ski towns that attract the wealthiest people in America and vote blue. Several thousand feet of elevation down and to the west are some of Colorado’s most impoverished and least populated areas. The district includes some of Colorado’s most intensely conservative counties. There are two sovereign tribal nations, the Ute Mountain Indian and Southern Ute Indian tribes. The seat is also nearly a quarter Hispanic.Western Colorado includes the state’s last active coalmines, many oil and gas wells, and millions of acres of federal public land. Outdoor recreation and tourism on these public lands have become enormously important revenue sources. The Colorado River’s headwaters emerge here, on the western slope of the Rockies, making water policy existentially important, not only locally, but for the entire south-western US.Truly representing the interests of such a complex assortment of people and communities would be hard for any politician. But Boebert’s critics argue that she does an especially poor job. Voting analyses consistently rank her as one of the most conservative and least bipartisan members of Congress.Coram’s primary challenge rests on the idea that western Colorado voters feel inadequately represented by this hard-right stance. His campaign touts his centrist reputation developed during his 11 years as a state politician. Coram has been an important Republican backer of bipartisan bills on rural hospitals, broadband and water conservation. “The ‘R’ next to my name stands for rural,” he said during a phone interview.At times, Coram’s politics veer beyond the normal GOP boundaries. In 2015, he helped write a bill to provide millions in state funding to provide free contraceptives to teenagers. Coram opposes abortions. Preventing them, in his view, requires easily available contraception. While promoting his bill in the state capitol, Coram wore an IUD pinned to his lapel. “It was rather funny,” he said in a phone interview, “because a lot of my redneck Republican friends looked at me and said, ‘is that some kind of a fishing lure?’”Boebert has seized on these and other votes as evidence that her opponent is a liberal in disguise, an accusation that Coram brushes off – to an extent.“We’re concentrating on what we refer to as kitchen table Republicans, the more moderate Republicans that aren’t all driven by theories and agendas,” he said. “We’re concentrated on them and the unaffiliated vote.”In 2020, Boebert won the general election with 51.4% of the vote, suggesting a competitive seat. After the district’s boundaries shifted last year, Republicans now hold a 9% advantage. J Miles Coleman, an election analyst with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said that between this redistricting and a tough national atmosphere for Democrats, Boebert is likely to be re-elected – if she wins tomorrow’s primary, as Coleman thinks she will.Three candidates are competing in the Democratic primary: Sol Sandoval, Adam Frisch and Alex Walker. All are seen as long shots against Boebert.“It’s a conservative seat with a libertarian streak, especially on guns, taxes and government regulation,” he said. “Boebert checks a lot of those boxes.”Not so long ago, though, Democrats were competitive, even successful. The third district was represented for years by Democrat John Salazar, who lost in 2010. His brother, Ken, did well in the area during his successful 2004 Senate campaign. Another Democrat, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, held the seat for several terms in the late 1980s and early 90s. Part of the issue, as Coleman noted, is that the Hispanic vote is no longer staunchly blue. Pueblo county, which is 43% Hispanic or Latino, voted for Trump in 2016 after going for Obama in both elections. Biden barely clawed the county back in 2020.Based on numerous interviews with western Colorado Democrats, there’s a clear sense of frustration with the state party leadership, overwhelmingly concentrated in the Denver area, hundreds of miles away on the other side of the Continental Divide.“National and state Democrats have lost virtually every line of communication with working-class voters in places like the western slope,” said Joel Dyar a longtime community organizer in Grand Junction (Dyar co-founded a Super Pac that opposes Boebert). “They’ve had three decades to work on strategies and they still have no real strategies. There’s no storytelling, no cultural competence, no ladders for new rural talent. They’ve got to make big, brave, generational investments in rural organizing.”Kathleen Sullivan Kelley encountered this obstacle in the 1980s, when, as a young, single woman in her 20s, she unseated an incumbent Republican state senator in one of the most deeply conservative parts of western Colorado.“It was a problem back when I ran for the legislature,” she said in a phone interview. “The Democratic party didn’t want to spend money on this area.”Kelley would eventually lose her seat and return home to Rio Blanco county, where she bought some of her family’s ranch and went into regenerative agriculture. In 2020, the county voted 82% for Donald Trump. Even so, she sees opportunity for Democrats, if only someone would seize it, especially in fighting consolidation and monopoly power in agricultural markets.For the upcoming primary, she dropped her party registration, in part so she could vote for Coram, but also out of frustration with the Democratic party.“I think any Democrat who would get in their pickup truck and get out there and knock on doors and show the heck up would have a shot,” she said. “There are so many people in this district who are embarrassed by what is going on.”Boebert remains the strong favorite against Coram. She has a more than $4m fundraising advantage, on top of a bedrock of support, even beyond registered Republicans. An analysis of the 2020 election by the Colorado Sun found that western Colorado unaffiliated voters have a noticeably conservative bent.Coram’s uphill battle was evident in early June, at a campaign event he held at a coffee shop he co-owns with his son. Dressed in cowboy boots and a pink shirt with his name and state senate seat stitched on the front, Coram chatted casually with a number of supporters, framing himself as a pragmatic deal-maker.But one young woman seemed skeptical. She pressed him repeatedly on core GOP issues like abortion and gun control. A student at Colorado Christian University who wants to enter the air force, Marissa Archuletta said later that she wanted a more partisan Republican stance from Coram. On abortion, she said, he promised to work with both sides, “but he never really said that he would work with Republicans”. Archuletta would not reveal which candidate she planned to vote for, but said of Boebert, “I like what she’s doing.”Among liberal Democrats, there’s an impulse to doubt that public support for candidates like Boebert is sincere and deeply held. But Coleman, the election analyst, explained that the median Republican primary voter today is much more aligned with Boebert than Coram. Her success is not an illusion. She wins because she’s doing what voters want her to do.Some Republicans are privately frustrated. One state-level elected official praised Boebert’s energy, but wishes it would be directed toward useful things. “I can’t put my finger on anything she’s done to help,” the official said. “She’s hard to take very seriously.” I asked if they have any hope that she might improve with more time in office. “Well, no,” the official said with a laugh. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, because of Boebert’s popularity among the GOP base.This was evident at the small town Republican event that Boebert headlined. That she angers and offends Democrats is intrinsic to her appeal. During her speech, Boebert recounted several instances of fighting Democratic legislation in Congress – at one point, she took some credit for killing a bill that in fact passed the House and stalled in the Senate. (The campaign did not respond to a list of questions sent by the Guardian). “I led the tweets,” Boebert said more than once. “I got loud,” she said repeatedly.At the end of the speech, a woman took the microphone and stood to praise her congresswoman’s work in office. “I don’t have time to waste my vote on a centrist,” the woman told Boebert. “I want a fighter.”TopicsColoradoRepublicansUS politicsThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

‘Watergate for streaming era’: how the January 6 panel created gripping hearingsThe committee have put on hearings that feel more like a Hollywood prestige limited series than a congressional inquiry There is a certain kind of ritual that has come to define a blockbuster congressional hearing in Washington.The star witnesses take their seats facing the dias, swamped by photographers. The committee chairman gives a solemn opening statement, followed by a statement from the ranking member of the minority party. There is some bickering over the rules for the hearing, whether it is a sham, sometimes followed by a theatrical effort to postpone the session. Eventually, the star witness gets to speak, and parries questions from the committee members, each party asking either friendly or aggressive questions, depending on the politics. The whole thing often lasts hours and can get somewhat confusing to follow. At the end of the day, newscasts are filled with highlight reels of the can’t miss moments.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterBut over the last few weeks, the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US capitol has broken that mold.Instead of just presenting the facts from their investigation, the committee has generated a clear narrative, teasing how each piece will connect to the next at a future hearing. They have promised and delivered on new sensational details making the hearings can’t miss television. The committee, which is getting advice from a former ABC News executive, have put on hearings that felt more like a Hollywood prestige limited series than a congressional inquiry.“They have put on the Watergate hearings for the streaming era,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House judiciary committee during Trump’s first impeachment.The committee has done this in a few key ways. They’ve broken up the hearings into several pieces, keeping each hearing to just a few hours (short by Congress’s standards) and focused on a particular topic. A single member of the committee, or professional staff, has handled the questioning, without interruptions from the opposing party. And the committee has placed a beating heart at the center of its investigation, featuring testimony from police officers, elected officials, and election workers who have all emotionally laid out the severe consequences of Trump’s investigative work.“What they’ve done brilliantly is use video, kind of the newest techniques of presenting narrative through video, with the most traditional, but powerful approach of having live witnesses. And they’ve blended the two and managed to tell a gripping account of a criminal conspiracy,” said Eisen, who now serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.Perhaps most significantly, the committee has made extraordinary use of over a year of investigative work. They frequently play video clips of government officials at the highest levels of government and in Trump’s inner circle detailing what was going on behind the scenes as Trump tried to overturn the election. In many of those clips, the officials have said they knew Trump’s claims about massive fraud were bunk and told him so. Their close ties to Trump make their words all the more damning.“Video is the top of the pyramid of what gets people’s attention,” said David Litt, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama. “The same set of words, if it’s a quote, it’s less valuable than audio, and audio is less valuable than video. I think they understood that.”The committee has also done a good job of feeding the appetite for constant new information by carefully meting out and teasing bombshell information, Litt said. During the first impeachment hearing, for example, Liz Cheney said that multiple Republican congressman sought presidential pardons, but didn’t reveal who. Cheney opened another hearing by saying that Rudy Giuliani was “apparently inebriated”, before later playing a clip of Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser telling investigators that was the case. At one hearing, the committee also teased a video in which Eric Herchmann says he told John Eastman: “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer.”“They went out and they got the receipts and now they’re deploying them in a smart way where there’s this constant drip,” Litt said. “They understand that the drip drip drip is what holds interest in a story. Unfortunately we’ve seen this time and time again where there’s a bombshell, but someone just waits it out because all the shoes drop at once.”Some of the committee’s biggest success may also be the result of a strategic error by Republicans. After Nancy Pelosi blocked two Republicans who voted to overturn the election from serving on the January 6 committee last year, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican said he wouldn’t appoint any Republicans to the panel. That decision left Trump without any allies on the commission to challenge the committee’s inquiries or throw out distracting questions to muddy the water during hearings. Trump has said in recent days that McCarthy’s decision was a mistake.Now, the committee has shown a remarkable discipline in its effort to investigate witnesses without having to worry about sideshows. Republican witnesses who might otherwise have been reluctant to testify publicly and face grandstanding from Republican members, might now feel more comfortable coming forward, Litt said.But even though the committee has succeeded in creating remarkably compelling hearings, will the hearings actually break through? Part of that depends on who the audience is. In one sense, the entire investigation has a very specific audience, the US justice department, which is weighing whether to bring criminal charges against Trump and allies. And it’s difficult to say whether the hearings will sway Attorney General Merrick Garland and other justice department officials one way or the other.For another audience, the committee’s work may be succeeding. The committee’s work is never going to convince diehard Trump supporters that the election wasn’t stolen, Litt noted. But more than a year and a half after January 6, the committee is forcing the events of January 6 to be at the center of America’s political discourse.“When I was writing speeches, the important thing I used to say is that you can’t tell people what to think, but you can tell them what to think about,” Litt said. “And a large percentage of the most influential people in American media, business and politics are thinking about what happened on January 6 and why. And whether the people responsible have been held accountable.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

Republicans have hijacked the US supreme court. It’s time to expand itD More