US Politics

Liz Cheney says Republican leadership has ‘enabled white supremacy’Her scathing tweet may have targeted Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who has complained of immigrants replacing white voters Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney has accused her Republican party leadership of enabling “white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism”, in a scathing message after the racist massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo.Cheney, who was removed from her position as the No 3 House Republican last year after she joined the panel investigating the 6 January Capitol attack, urged party leaders in a tweet to “renounce and reject these views and those who hold them”.The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) May 16, 2022
Her remarks were made amid increasing scrutiny of Republican figures who have embraced the racist “great replacement theory” the Buffalo killer is said to have cited in a manifesto he used to justify the murders.The far-right ideology expounds the view that immigration will ultimately destroy white values and western civilization.Although a growing number of Republican lawmakers and hopefuls have promoted the discredited conspiracy theory, including JD Vance, the Donald Trump-endorsed candidate who won last week’s Republican Senate primary in Ohio, many believe Cheney’s message is directed at one person: the Republican House conference chair, Elise Stefanik.The New York congresswoman, who was swiftly installed to replace Cheney when the House minority leader and Trump loyalist, Kevin McCarthy, orchestrated Cheney’s ouster last year, has used the great replacement theory to make false accusations that Democrats were plotting a “permanent election insurrection” by replacing white voters with immigrants.The Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, who is the only other Republican on the House panel investigating Trump’s insurrection efforts, posted his own tweet slamming Stefanik’s promotion of the theory as “despicable”.On Sunday he added another post, demanding that Stefanik, McCarthy and extremist Republican congress members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn be “replaced”.McCarthy is one of five Republicans who received subpoenas from the House panel last week as it seeks more information about Trump’s actions to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, including the deadly riots at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.Stefanik, meanwhile, has been furiously tweeting this morning, doubling down on her claims that Democrats are purposely manipulating immigration policy “specifically for political and electoral purposes”.TopicsRepublicansRaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Are culture wars really a distraction?Olúfẹ́mi O. TáíwòWe shouldn’t abandon the culture wars, but we shouldn’t take the bait either. We should build a political culture built around mutual goals In the United States, fights are raging over cultural issues: constant coverage of “cancel culture”, pitched battles over teaching “critical race theory” (CRT) in classrooms or the definition of the term “woman”. For years, many on the left have argued that such battles were “distractions” from the real fight over class and economic issues. They are only half right.These supposed sham battles are simply the most recent moments in a loosely organized cultural rightwing insurgency. The Federalist Society has been incubating rightwing legal careers since the 1980s. The fight against critical race theory continues a longstanding rightwing offensive against public education, whose roots go back as far as the backlash to racially integrated schooling.It’s right to note, as detractors of the “culture wars” have, that something is dishonest about these battles. The details have always been squishy in the particulars: defending constitutional analysis of the “original intent” of the slaveowners of yesteryear has long been difficult to take seriously on the intellectual merits. The standard bearers of the opposition to critical race theory have had a tough time saying what it even is that they oppose, and Florida textbook reviewers assigned with rooting out CRT from math textbooks didn’t fare much better.But this vagueness on the side of justification is paired with a frightening clarity of tactical purpose on the side of action. Florida legislators may have a problem articulating the reasons for banning the books, but they have banned 40% of math books anyway.Meanwhile, Alabama and Texas have criminalized care for trans youth. Perhaps most dramatically, the recent leak from the supreme court suggests that the court may strike down Roe v Wade, a critical blow against the bodily autonomy of women, trans men and non-binary people with uteruses (even more legislation aiming at uncomplicating this sentence will surely be forthcoming).It couldn’t be clearer, then, that the view of “culture wars” as purely distractions from “real”political struggle is seriously mistaken. The idea that concrete, “material” issues ought to mean a narrow focus on jobs and the economy – and not, say, uteruses – seems hard to justify.Even the most hard-nosed materialist, ought to notice that decisions about school curricula determine whose values are listened to, and whose aren’t. That is, in even the most realpolitik of terms, the struggle being waged has real-world effects on redistribution of social and political power. And that redistribution is shifting power in the direction of the least honest, most bigoted and most authoritarian social forces on the political right.In one sense, the reduction of politics to “culture wars” has never made less sense. The material stakes of the climate crisis is that it threatens regular heatwaves like the one that south Asia is still reeling from. Meanwhile, state conflict is taking a worrying turn: Russia and Ukraine are fighting a great power war between states, the Ethiopia and Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front navigate an uneasy ceasefire in a civil war, and Mozambique is contending with a wave of Islamic State militants. These aren’t problems that can be solved by clarifying the content of math textbooks or being clear about who uses which bathrooms.But from another vantage point, focusing on “culture” makes perfect sense. After all, it’s not simply that global ruling class lacks answers in the United States and elsewhere. The situation is even more dire: the ruling class lacks questions.The dramatic shift in state response to the Covid-19 pandemic after mass vaccination evidences that elites believe their interests are so far removed from living conditions for the rest of us that they simply lose interest as soon as they feel their own security is assured. This also makes sense of policymakers’ tepid action on the climate crisis, the national and global housing crisis, and selective empathy for refugees and immigrants in general. You’re cordially invited to participate vigorously in the project of harassing school board officials, but leave the big war and climate stuff to the idle experts.Addressing these crises would involve redistributing political and economic power away from the present powers that be, and offering people concrete solutions rather than outlets for rage and self-expression. The answer from on high is clear: no redistribution, just fighting over culture and “vibes”.That’s why an entire cottage industry spanning from YouTube to outrage radio to legacy media has arisen to play off our most legitimate grievances with others, our most petty jealousies and bigotries, and everything in between. Many of these are suspiciously well resourced and funded, and few of them pose any serious challenge to the profit, property and social position of the people who actually hold most of the cards in our political contests. These astroturfed political battles are simply the latest page of the oldest playbook, where the 1% attempts to divide the rest in pursuit of private profit and social domination.We shouldn’t abandon the culture wars, but we shouldn’t take the bait either.Instead, we should build a political culture built around mutual goals that address concrete problems head on – a constructive politics organized around what we want to build for ourselves and our children instead of who we resent. Many such campaigns are alive and well. Across the country, groups are fighting to guarantee reproductive justice. Tenants’ organizations in Kansas City and Los Angeles are making their presence and power felt at eviction hearings and state legislatures, and campaigners for reparations for African American descendants of the enslaved have moved millions of dollars in Evanston. And a wave of unionizations at Starbucks and Amazon may signal a resurgence of organized labor.As demonstrated by unions in Illinois, West Virginia and Minnesota, these organizations have the power to advance not only wages and working conditions for their members, but also the common good of entire communities. And, unlike the vibes offered in the culture war, those are things you can eat.
Olufemi Taiwo is assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
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Republicans are fueling extremism and terror like the Buffalo shootingCas MuddeThere is no easy fix to dealing with far-right terror. But we should stop assuming Republicans can help, when they are part of the problem On Saturday a white teenager traveled almost 200 miles to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, where he brutally killed 10 people and injured three others in a grocery store. Like other far-right terrorists in the past years, he livestreamed his terrorist attack and left a “manifesto.” And, as after other terrorist attacks, experts and journalists are happily amplifying his message and blaming social media and the government for this tragedy.The problem is, we can talk endlessly about better regulating social media or calling for even more funding and powers for public and private “counterterrorism” organizations, but none of that will make us safer as long as the broader conservative movement embraces and propagates far-right propaganda. This is a point worth repeating, even if I and others have made it many times before.The so-called “manifesto” of the terrorist included a lot of the standard tropes of the far right, including the so-called Great Replacement Theory. Often linked to antisemitism, this conspiracy theory holds that “the Left” is supporting “open borders” to replace the “original people” with “immigrants”, who are inferior and therefore easier to control. Variants of this theory go back to at least the original Populists of the mid-19th century, but in its current iteration it has been around since the start of the 1980s postwar far right in Europe.When I started to study the far right in the early 1990s, similar theories were pushed by radical right parties like the Dutch Center Party or the French National Front. At that time, these parties polled in the single digits and were kept out of political coalitions and the media by a so-called cordon sanitaire. Today, these actors and ideas have become part of the political mainstream.In few countries has this process of mainstreaming has been as successful and visible as in the United States, where the main representatives of the mainstream right-wing, like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, are propagating the Great Replacement Theory with great success. Just a few days before the terrorist attack, a poll showed that nearly half of Republicans believe the conspiracy theory.Since the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, I have had various informal conversations with people who work in Congress or in other state agencies about the far-right. They tell me that they want to talk about the threat it poses, but then rapidly narrow the focus to “online radicalization” and violent groups with scary names like Atomwaffen Division or Feuerkrieg Division. This is not just because these groups get disproportionate attention in the media and the counter-terrorism industry, but because they are politically safe. These groups are so extreme that they are out of bounds for almost all political elites, even on the right. But they are also small and marginal.This is not the case for most other more mainstream actors and ideas of the far right. In fact, their power is now so great in Washington, that it is almost impossible to come up with a term that is acceptable to both sides of the political spectrum. Republicans are skeptical about terms like “far right” and “racism,” fearing this would include groups and ideas they sympathize with. This is not without reason. The Grand Old Party has become a far-right party that advances racist arguments in both implicit and explicit form. And many organizations within the broader “conservative” movement have followed suit, from Fox News to Turning Point USA.I am not arguing that Tucker Carlson is responsible for the terrorist attack in Buffalo. But that terrorist did not develop his racist ideas by himself. There are few if any real “lone wolves.” Far-right terrorists are part of a larger subculture, online and offline, which is connected to the broader conservative movement. We can ban a few more individuals from Twitter, but as long as similar conspiracy theories and ideas are propagated in Congress or on Fox News, these bans will not help much.Similarly, most preventative and repressive policies will have little positive effect, and possibly even have a negative effect. I am a big fan of the work of my colleague Cynthia Miller-Idriss and her team at Peril, one of the few prominent voices that argues against further securitization of the far right. Inspired by efforts in Germany, she calls for a non-repressive measure to counter the far right, including some type of “civil education.” The problem is, while that might make sense in California or New York, it would be impossible, even illegal, in states like Florida and Georgia, where recent “anti-CRT laws” have criminalized real anti-racism.Obviously, I am not arguing that we should not do anything about this threat. The Democratic party and President Joe Biden should do more. In his inaugural speech, Biden said that “we must confront and we will defeat” the rise of political extremism, white supremacy, and domestic terrorism. One and a half year later, the Republican Party has declared the storming of the Capitol to be “legitimate political discourse” and is attacking both human rights and the democratic system across the country.The sad reality is that fighting the far right has become a highly partisan affair in the United States. Any attempt to make this a bipartisan effort means watering down of measures and limiting them to the most extremist fringes. If Biden and the Democrats really want to fight white supremacy, including institutional racism, they must do it without the Republican party. Not only is the current Republican party not part of the solution, it is a big part of the problem.
Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor in the school of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia
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Former Trump official Kash Patel writes children’s book repeating false claim over Steele dossierStory with characters such as King Donald and his enemy Hillary Queenton gives revisionist account of FBI inquiry that dogged Trump presidency Kash Patel, a former Republican aide on the House intelligence committee who Donald Trump weighed installing as deputy CIA director, is publishing a children’s book on Monday that perpetuates the false claim the Steele dossier sparked investigations into Russian collusion.The book features characters such as “King Donald” and his enemy “Hillary Queenton”.In the book, titled “The Plot Against the King” and set to be published by Brave Books, Patel repeats Trump’s false claim that the FBI began investigating links between his campaign and Russia based on a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy.The 35-page tome, complete with an epilogue that details Donald Trump’s false claims about the FBI inquiry, bizarrely uses the tool of children’s fictional characters to provide a revisionist account of the probe that dogged the first two years of the Trump presidency and eventually led to a special counsel investigation.Over the course of the book, the narrative lionises Patel and depicts him as a wizard who supposedly shows how “the King” Trump was wrongly accused of “cheating” to take the throne.‘Sinkhole of corruption’: Trump Organization sells Washington hotelRead moreThe book claims the king was accused of cheating by a “shifty knight” – a reference to the Democratic chair of the intelligence committee, Adam Schiff, who claims to have a “paper” from a “steel” box attesting to wrongdoing.But Patel writes that he then found evidence that the slug “Keeper Komey” – a reference to former FBI director James Comey – put slugs in the “steel” box at the behest of “Hillary Queenton”, who was also vying for the throne – a reference to Clinton.The wizard Patel then proclaims to the kingdom, the book says, that “the king, King Donald, is innocent” and “did not work with the Russonians” – a reference to Russia – and “Hillary wrote that paper and had her sneaky slugs slide into the steel box”.In reality the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign after a foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, told an Australian diplomat that Russia had political “dirt” on Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 presidential election.The information in the Steele Dossier did not reach FBI officials involved in the investigation until almost a year after the 2016 election, and even the then-Republican House intelligence committee for which Patel worked found no evidence for Trump’s claim.But the illustrated children’s book authored by Patel, a pre-publication copy of which the Guardian received unsolicited, makes no mention of that conclusion, or an additional memo stating conclusively that the FBI investigation did not originate with the Steele Dossier.Patel enjoyed a rapid rise from an obscure staffer on the Republican staff of the House intelligence committee after he endorsed Trump’s false claims that the FBI wiretapped Trump’s phones and was eventually promoted to chief of staff at the Department of Defense.TopicsUS newsTrump-Russia investigationDonald TrumpTrump administrationRussiaRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

John Fetterman, Democratic Pennsylvania Senate candidate, suffers strokeLieutenant governor and frontrunner in Democratic primary says he’s recovering and insists ‘campaign isn’t slowing down one bit’ John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and frontrunner in the state’s Democratic US Senate primary, suffered a stroke Friday, and is recovering, he said in a statement.“On Friday, I wasn’t feeling well, so I went to the hospital to get checked out. I didn’t want to go – I didn’t think I had to – but Gisele insisted, and as usual, she was right,” Fetterman said in a statement posted to Twitter, referring to his wife. “I hadn’t been feeling well, but was so focused on the campaign that I ignored the signs and just kept going.”“On Friday it finally caught up with me. I had a stroke that was caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long,” the statement continued.“The good news is I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery,” Fetterman said.The doctors are keeping Fetterman in hospital for observation, he said in the statement, but “I should be out of here sometime soon.”“The doctors have assured me that I’ll be able to get back on the trail, but first I need to take a minute, get some rest, and recover,” he also said. “There’s so much at stake in this race, and I’m going to be ready for the hard fight ahead.”Fetterman insisted “our campaign isn’t slowing down one bit, and we are still on track to win this primary on Tuesday.”Fetterman also posted a video from hospital where he is recovering.TopicsPennsylvaniaUS politicsDemocratsStrokenewsReuse this content More

Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murderJason StanleyThis once fringe ideology, which was at the heart of Nazism, has gained mainstream traction thanks in part to the likes of Tucker Carlson on Fox News On Saturday, 18-year-old Payton Gendron parked his car in front of the entrance to a Tops Supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Exiting the car wearing metal armor and holding an assault rifle, he shot and killed a female employee in front of the store, and a man packing groceries into the trunk of his car. After entering the store, he murdered the store’s guard, and by the end of his killing spree, he had shot 13 people, killing 10 of them.Eleven of the people he shot were Black, and two were white. As the manifesto he left behind makes clear, this was fully intentional. The first listed goal in his manifesto was to “kill as many blacks as possible”.Gendron was a meticulous planner. He live-streamed his massacre, and the video begins with him following to the letter the beginning of the plan he lays out in the manifesto.. But the manifesto – which is meant to inspire and instruct subsequent attacks – also outlines the ideology that inspired the murders. Gendron was motivated by a classic version of White Replacement Theory, the view that a cabal of global elites is trying to destroy white nations, via the systematic replacement of white populations. According to White Replacement Theory, the strategies employed by these “global elites” include the mass immigration of supposedly “high fertility” non-whites, and encouraging intermingling between members of non-white races and whites. Gendron was deeply influenced by a series of recent mass killers who were animated by white replacement theoryincluding Brenton Tarrant, whom Gendron openly acknowledges as his model. In Christchurch, New Zealand, Tarrant massacred 51 people at a Mosque in the name of White Replacement Theory, also live-streaming his actions.Gendron’s manifesto begins in a similar fashion to Tarrant’s, by decrying the “white genocide” that will result from the supposedly low fertility rates of white populations and the high fertility rates of non-white immigrants brought in to “replace” them. It is more openly anti-Black than Tarrant’s manifesto – it is a deeply American version, with roots in Jim Crow and lynching. It is also vastly more explicitly antisemitic. Ten pages of Gendron’s manifesto are devoted to arguing for a genetic basis for the racial IQ gap, as well as (ironically) a genetic basis for higher rates of violent crime. It’s clear that Gendron closely follows various academic debates about race, IQ, and crime. According to the ideology guiding Gendron, Black people are not intelligent enough to engineer the replacement of whites, and the destruction of their civilization. The real actors behind White Replacement, according to Gendron, are the Jews, a topic which occupies the subsequent 29 pages of his manifesto.Gendron’s lengthy section on Jews purports to document Jewish hatred of non-Jews. It includes a section of Talmud quotes supporting Gendron’s thesis that Jews hate Christians, and a section documenting supposed control of academia, media, and industry (focusing on the pharmaceutical industry). Gendron ties Jews to child abuse and pedophilia. The section mocks a supposed Jewish fixation on environmental causes of Black crime. Gendron argues that Jews are behind Black social and political movements and organizations, including the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.Gendron also argues that Jews are behind the movement for transgender inclusivity, supposedly sponsoring transgender summer camps for “Scandinavian style whites”.The section ends by blaming Jews for creating “infighting” between people and races. The example Gendron’s manifesto provides is that “Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people”.The ideology that motivated Gendron’s mass murder in Buffalo, White Replacement Theory, has a lengthy and blood-soaked 20th century history. Since 2011, it has been the explicit motivation for over 160 murders, including Norway’s Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people, mostly immigrants, in 2011, Dylann Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the Tree of Life Synagogue killings in 2018, and the murder of 23 people, mostly immigrants, in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.Mass atrocities do not occur in a vacuum. They are enabled by a present normalization of a lengthy previous history, a process that the philosopher of mass killing Lynne Tirrell labels the social embeddedness condition. White Replacement Theory was the dominant structuring narrative of Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler also announced his genocidal intent in a lengthy manifesto about the supposed Jewish threat to white civilization, entitled Mein Kampf, which was published in 1924. Hitler also was obsessed by mass immigration, and the threat it posed to “white civilization.”Currently, White Replacement Theory has been mass popularized and normalized, perhaps chiefly by the American political commentator Tucker Carlson. It is rapidly moving to the center of the mainstream narrative of America’s Republican party. In this form, it appears stripped of its explicit connection to antisemitism. You will not find Tucker Carlson asserting that the Jews are behind the mass replacement of American whites that he bemoans regularly in what is regularly the most watched cable news show in the United States among adults 25-54.But what Carlson has been doing is spending an entire year repeating a conspiracy by Christopher Rufo that says that American education has been infected by a pro-Black ideology (CRT) that was created by German Jewish Marxist intellectuals (the Frankfurt School). And that while the CRT version of this conspiracy theory is new, it is a direct descendent of the “cultural marxism” conspiracy theory, which was a primary topic of Breivik’s manifesto.The fact that Carlson does not mention American Jews as a target by name should be cold comfort to American Jews. Every single right wing anti-Semite in America who watches Tucker Carlson’s show hears him as denouncing Jews when he regularly platforms the 20th century’s worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.Some American Jews hope that by identifying as white, and lending their support to racist narratives about IQ and crime, they can diminish rightwing American antisemitism. This is a terrible error. American Ku Klux Klan ideology in the 1920s strongly overlapped with Nazi ideology, placing Jews at the center of a conspiracy fomenting a supposed race war to overthrow white civilization. American Jews who support Tucker Carlson and his ilk, that is, others who repeat the White Replacement narrative, are supporters both of anti-Black racism, and antisemitism in its most violent form.It is in the tracts of the 20th century’s most explicit antisemites that we find the development of White Replacement Theory, who used it to justify the mass killing of Jews. Gendron’s manifesto reveals yet again the unbreakable historical link between anti-Black racism and antisemitism. Any supporter of White Replacement Theory is a clear enemy of the Jewish People.America has many mass shootings. But this mass killing of Black Americans in a Buffalo supermarket must serve as a wake-up call to our country. White Replacement Theory is deeply ingrained in the worst aspects of American and European history. With its attacks on “Critical Race Theory”, this is a fact that the American political right is deliberately and knowingly trying to erase from our collective consciousness, so they can appeal to it again as a political weapon against liberal democracy.As Gendron’s manifesto makes clear, White Replacement Theory is not just an attack on minorities. It is a weapon directed by fascists at American democracy itself.TopicsUS newsOpinionBuffalo shootingNew YorkAntisemitismRaceUS politicsThe far rightcommentReuse this content More

Nancy Pelosi: supreme court ‘dangerous to families and to freedoms’House speaker rails against conservative judges appointed by Trump as justices prepare to finalize draft abortion ruling The supreme court is “dangerous to families and to freedoms in our country”, Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday, as justices prepare to finalize a draft ruling stripping almost have a century of abortion rights in the US.The House speaker railed against conservative judges appointed by former president Donald Trump in an interview Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, in which she urged Democrats to keep their “eye on the ball” to protect other freedoms she sees under threat.“Beware in terms of marriage equality, beware in terms of other aspects,” she said.“Understand this. This is not just about terminating a pregnancy. This is about contraception, family planning.“This is a place where freedom and the kitchen table, issues of America’s families, come together. What are the decisions that a family makes? What about contraception for young people? It’s beyond just a particular situation. It’s massive in terms of contraception, in vitro fertilization, a woman’s right to decide.”Speaking the day after hundreds of protest events took place nationwide, Pelosi insisted Democrats had done what they could in terms of protecting abortion rights through legislation. She pointed out the House had passed a bill before the women’s health protection act failed in the Senate on Wednesday, and she said she was still optimistic of a resolution with the support of pro-choice Republicans.But she said the 60-vote requirement in the Senate was “an obstacle to many good things”, and that Democrats needed to rally ahead of November’s midterm elections to “get rid of the damage” caused by conservative justices, including Trump’s three appointments, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.“Whoever suspected a creature like Donald Trump would become president, waving a list of judges he would appoint, therefore getting the support of the far right and appointing those anti-freedom justices to the court?” she said.“This is not about a long game. We played a long game, we won Roe v Wade a long time ago, we voted to protect it over time. Let’s not take our eye off the ball. The ball is this court, which is dangerous to families, to freedoms in our country.“The genius of our founders was to have a constitution that enabled freedom to expand. This is the first time the court has taken back a freedom that was defined by precedent and respect for privacy.”Independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, on NBC’s Meet the Press, said he remained hopeful that abortion rights legislation could be resurrected before the midterms.“Nobody should think this process is dead. We should bring those bills up again, and again and again,” he said.“People cannot believe you have a supreme court and Republicans who are prepared to overturn 50 years of precedent. What we should do is on this bill end the filibuster, do everything that we can to get 50 votes on the strongest possible bill to protect a woman’s right to control her own body.”An NBC News poll conducted after the leak of a draft opinion and reported by the network Sunday showed six out of 10 voters were in favor of abortion rights, and that 52% of voters were “less likely” to support a candidate who backed the supreme court’s draft ruling.But the poll found that inflation and the economy remained the biggest concerns for voters as the midterms approach.TopicsUS supreme courtNancy PelosiHouse of RepresentativesAbortionUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

Republican Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz calls far-right rival’s comments on Islam ‘reprehensible’Kathy Barnette, who is challenging Dr Oz in the GOP Pennsylvania primary, tweeted in 2015 that ‘pedophilia is a cornerstone of Islam’ Republican Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz has stepped up his criticism of far-right candidates in Pennsylvania who are gaining traction ahead of Tuesday’s primary election.After spending much of the campaign steering clear of fellow Republican Senate contender Kathy Barnette, Oz said she was out of step with the Republican party and would be unable to win the general election in November.In an interview, he took issue with a 2015 tweet from Barnette in which she wrote that “Pedophilia is a Cornerstone of Islam”. Oz, who would be the nation’s first Muslim senator, described the comments as “disqualifying”.“It’s reprehensible that she would tweet out something that is defamatory to an entire religion,” Oz told the Associated Press. “This state was based on religious freedom. I’m proud as a Pennsylvanian to uphold those founding beliefs that every faith has its merits.”The Barnette campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Earlier in the week, Barnette told NBC News that she did not make the statement, though it was still live on her Twitter feed on Saturday.For months, the race for the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat has been an expensive fight between former hedge fund CEO David McCormick and Oz, who have spent millions of dollars attacking each other on television.But in the final days of the Republican primary, a third candidate – Barnette, a conservative commentator who has courted hard-line pro-Trump groups – has emerged. Trump himself has warned that Barnette’s background hasn’t been properly vetted.With the election just days away, polls show a tight three-way race with a sizable number of undecided voters who could sway the results next week.Oz has won Trump’s endorsement in the Senate contest, although some Trump supporters continue to question his conservative credentials.TopicsPennsylvaniaUS SenateUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More