US Politics

How overturning Roe v Wade could supercharge the 2022 midterm campaignsSwing state Democrats are calling for a defense of abortion rights and Republicans doubling down on ending them As the US waits to see whether the supreme court will follow through on its provisional decision to end the federal right to abortion, Democrats and Republicans are already preparing for how a reversal of Roe v Wade would affect the 2022 midterm elections.Republicans have been heavily favored to retake control of the House and probably the Senate as well, but the court’s forthcoming final opinion in the crucial Mississippi case now before it, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, could alter those predictions.Since the court’s draft opinion leaked on Monday night, vulnerable Democrats have made a point to portray themselves as champions of abortion rights.“My opponent says that overturning Roe v Wade and ending protections for a woman’s right to choose is a ‘historic victory’,” Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democratic senator who is up for re-election in the swing state of Nevada, said on Tuesday. “I trust women and their doctors to make the healthcare decisions that are best for them – not politicians.”My opponent says that overturning Roe v. Wade and ending protections for a woman’s right to choose is a “historic victory.”I trust women and their doctors to make the health care decisions that are best for them — not politicians. https://t.co/4SxpKdKEBC— Catherine Cortez Masto (@CortezMasto) May 3, 2022
Speaking to reporters on a Thursday press call, Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, argued that abortion rights will become a critical issue in the November midterms if the 1973 landmark decision in the Roe case is overturned.“The Republican attacks on abortion access, their attacks on birth control and women’s healthcare – these things have dramatically escalated the stakes of the 2022 election,” Harrison said. “In November, we must elect Democrats who will serve as the last lines of defense against the GOP’s assault on our established and fundamental freedoms.”But Republicans have insisted that issues such as record-high inflation and Joe Biden’s handling of the US-Mexican border will weigh far more heavily on voters’ minds in November.“Could be wrong, but I’d predict that all those issues that have 60% of Americans [feeling] we are on the wrong track (high inflation, rising crime, the border, etc.) will play a bigger role in the elections [than] a Supreme Court decision on Roe,” Republican strategist Doug Heye said on Twitter.Rather than celebrating the news of Roe’s likely demise, Republican leaders have mostly tried to focus on the leak itself, saying it represents a break in court decorum and blaming the incident on Democrats. (It is not known who leaked the draft opinion.)Asked about the court’s provisional decision on Tuesday, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, told reporters: “You need, it seems to me, a lecture to concentrate on what the news is today. Not a leaked draft, but the fact that the draft was leaked.”Even the de facto leader of the Republican party, Donald Trump, has been hesitant to address the content of the court’s decision. The normally verbose former president has not yet released a statement about the draft opinion, although he has commented on the leak when asked by reporters.“Nobody knows what exactly it represents, if that’s going to be it,” Trump told Politico on Wednesday. “I think the one thing that really is so horrible is the leaking … for the court and for the country.”Trump’s reluctance to address the draft opinion is even more notable considering his three supreme court nominees – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – all initially voted to overturn Roe, according to the leaked provisional opinion published on Monday night.US supreme court justices on abortion – what they’ve said and how they’ve votedRead moreThe former president also promised during his 2016 campaign to select supreme court nominees who would help reverse the landmark 1973 case.Now Republicans stand on the precipice of achieving their decades-long goal, and many of them seem hesitant to declare victory. However, some Republican primary candidates are using the draft opinion to draw a contrast between themselves and their opponents.David Perdue, the Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, condemned Governor Brian Kemp’s “bureaucratic response” to the news of Roe’s likely reversal.I’m calling on Brian Kemp to join me in calling for an immediate special session of the legislature to ban abortion in Georgia after Roe v. Wade is overturned. You are either going to fight for the sanctity of life or you’re not. (2/2)— David Perdue (@DavidPerdueGA) May 5, 2022
“I’m calling on Brian Kemp to join me in calling for an immediate special session of the legislature to ban abortion in Georgia after Roe v Wade is overturned,” Perdue said on Thursday. “You are either going to fight for the sanctity of life or you’re not.”Perdue and Kemp will face off in the Georgia gubernatorial primary later this month, providing an early test of how Republican voters feel about the looming end of Roe. But other Americans’ thoughts about the matter will not be fully known until November.Meanwhile, new metal barriers went up in front of the marble steps and columns of the majestic supreme court building in Washington DC, close to the US Capitol, this week, a stark symbol of the sudden politicization of the court that has always preferred to keep itself above the partisan fray.This came after fierce protests erupted there within minutes of the leak on Monday, with police separating protesters in rival camps the following day.Tears and tension as protesters swarm outside US supreme courtRead moreNow law enforcement officials in many places across the US are braced for potential civil unrest and women’s rights groups are planning massive protests in several cities for next weekend to demand the protection of the right to choose in reproductive healthcare.TopicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

Trump sought strike on top Iran military figure for political reasons – Esper bookRobert O’Brien told top general shortly before 2020 election that Trump wanted to kill unnamed official, according to Esper memoir Shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, “stunned” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by saying the president wanted to kill a senior Iranian military officer operating outside the Islamic Republic.“This was a really bad idea with very big consequences,” Mark Esper, Trump’s second and last secretary of defense, writes in his new memoir, adding that Gen Mark Milley suspected O’Brien saw the strike purely in terms of Trump’s political interests.I warned national guard of possible coup, Trump defense secretary saysRead moreA Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Throughout the memoir, Esper presents himself as one of a group of aides who resisted bad or illegal ideas proposed by Trump or subordinates – such as the proposed strike on the Iranian officer.Among other such ideas that were discussed, Esper says, were sending “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”; sending 250,000 troops to the southern border; and dipping the decapitated head of a terrorist leader in pig’s blood as a warning to other Islamist militants.Trump made belligerence towards Tehran an important part of his administration and platform for re-election, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and regularly warning in bombastic terms of the cost of conflict with the US.He also ordered a drone strike on a top Iranian general blamed for attacks on US targets. In January 2020, Qassem Suleimani, the head of the elite Quds force, was killed in Baghdad.At a meeting in July 2020, Esper writes, O’Brien pushed for military action against Iran over its uranium enrichment – work that accelerated after Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal.Esper’s book is subject to occasional redactions. In this case, it says “O’Brien was pushing for” one blacked out word “and military action”. Esper says the vice-president, Mike Pence, “subtly lean[ed] in behind” O’Brien, who said: “The president has an appetite to do something.”Esper writes that Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, “jumped in to contradict this statement” and the moment passed.However, a month or so later, on 20 August, Esper says Milley told him O’Brien had called the evening before, to say “the president wanted to strike a senior military officer who was operating outside of Iran”.Esper writes: “Milley and I were aware of this person and the trouble he had been stirring in the region for some time. But why now? What was new? Was there an imminent threat? What about gathering the national security team to discuss this?“Milley said he was ‘stunned’ by the call, and he sensed that ‘O’Brien put the president up to this,’ trying to create news that would help Trump’s re-election.”Milley, Esper writes, told O’Brien he would discuss the request with Esper and others.“I couldn’t believe it,” Esper writes. “I had seen this movie before, where White House aides meet with the president, stir him up, and then serve up one of their ‘great ideas’. But this was a really bad idea with very big consequences. How come folks in the White House didn’t see this?”Fears that Trump might provoke war with Iran persisted throughout his presidency, stoked by reports of machinations among hawks on his staff. Such fears intensified as the 2020 election approached and Trump trailed Joe Biden in the polls.Esper book details Trump rage at Pence and proposal to hit Mexico with missilesRead moreIn September 2020, Trump tweeted: ““Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!”In the case of O’Brien’s suggested strike on the Iranian officer, Esper writes that he told Milley he would do nothing without a written order from Trump.“There was no way I was going to unilaterally take such an action,” he writes, “particularly one fraught with a range of legal, diplomatic, political and military implications, not to mention that it could plunge us into war with Iran.”He also says the O’Brien call to Milley in late August was “the last time something involving Iran seriously came up before the election”.TopicsBooksIranMiddle East and north AfricaDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS national securitynewsReuse this content More

Women know how choice and freedom feel – and we will never give that upV (formerly Eve Ensler)The supreme court draft ruling on abortion shows how desperate some are to control our bodies. But we are never going back To All Those Who Dare Rob Us of Our Bodily Choice, I ask you:What is it about our bodies that makes you so afraid, so insecure, so cruel and punishing?Is it their singular autonomy or mere existence?Is it their capacity for immense and unending pleasure – orgasms that can multiply orgasms inside orgasms? Is it our skin? Is it our desire?Is it our openness that rattles you and reminds you of where you are closed?Is it the pure strength of our bodies that allows us to bleed and birth and bend and carry and continue on in spite of all the ways you have reduced us and objectified us, humiliated us and disrespected us and tried to shape us into baby-making machines? Our strength that is inherent and doesn’t need to prove itself or show off or rely on weapons or violence to control and terrorise? Doesn’t need to abolish laws, or lie to become supreme court judges or president or rig the decks when they get there.Do you know this power? Can you imagine it? A power that comes from respecting life, caring for others before oneself, holding communities together?Do you think we are naive enough to believe that you are motivated by your care for life when you have shown so little respect for it and us? Instead you spend your days unravelling and resisting all that makes life possible for those mothers and people with babies you claim to protect – fighting against free universal healthcare, parental paid leave and child allowance. Where’s your outrage that the US has the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world?Do you think we have forgotten that some of those (Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas) who are making the most crucial decisions about millions of our bodies and the one (Donald Trump) who chose three of the people on the court currently making these decisions, are men who have been accused of violating other women’s bodies, harassing women’s bodies, humiliating and proudly bragging about grabbing the genitals of women’s bodies?What is it about our bodies that make you think you have the right to invade them, determine them, control and legislate them, violate and force them to do anything against their will?Perhaps you mistake our generosity for weakness, our patience for passivity, our vulnerability for fragility.This might be why you are unable to see that there is no chance in hell that we are ever going back. This is not a law yet and we will never accept this ruling.Perhaps because you have never known what it is like to have your body controlled by the vindictive anonymous state, to be raped and forced to keep your baby, to be so desperate that you destroy your uterus with a hanger or bleed to death in a back alley, you do not understand that once you have tasted the sweetness of freedom, of choice, once you have come to know your body as your own, once you have freed yourself and felt the expanse of your body, the aliveness in every pore that rises from autonomy, there is no way you will ever give that up. Ever.And because you do not know this, you do not know how dangerous we are, how organised we are, how willing we are to go any lengths to preserve our freedom.It’s been 50 years. We have summoned our due. We actually have bank accounts now. We have credit cards and we can buy a house. We can serve on juries. We hold offices and are lawyers. We write for newspapers and we run them. We host TV shows and direct movies. We run hospitals and universities and non-profits and write plays about vaginas and books about fascists and fascism. We can’t be tossed aside.This is our world now. And these are our bodies. We know what you are up to – this is just the beginning of your diabolical plan to rob us of contraception and marriage equality and civil rights and on and on. This is all part of your desperation to prevent the future that is on the verge of being born – a future where we know our past and begin to reckon with it, a future where we teach critical race theory and the truth about white supremacy and sexism and transphobia.A future where we care for our Earth and devote our lives to protecting air and water and forests and animals and all living things, a future where people have autonomy over their bodies and wombs and gender and marry who they want to, and don’t get married if they don’t want to, and have babies if they want to, and don’t have babies if they don’t want to. Despite all your lies, strategies and devious ways you are simply never going to stop us.You have unleashed our fury, our solidarity, our unity.We know that our future and everything we have fought for is at stake. I am willing to lay my body down for this freedom, for every freedom and I know there are multitudes who will do the same.
V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at [email protected] v WadeOpinionWomenAbortionUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)commentReuse this content More

Reproductive rights have been an urgent topic of discussion around the world in recent days, following the leak of a draft opinion of the US supreme court, written by Justice Samuel Alito, in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. If enacted by the court, this opinion would overturn the landmark 1973 case of Roe v Wade. Roe instated the constitutional right to abortion in the US under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, which references a woman’s right to privacy.

Overturning Roe would mean that abortion, no longer deemed a constitutional right, would return to the individual US states to legislate. So far, 12 states have so-called “trigger laws”, which would immediately criminalise or ban abortion in the case of Roe falling. This would clearly be disastrous for the rights of women and pregnant people in the US, many of whom would lose all access to abortion healthcare services.

The potential loss of Roe’s constitutional protection for abortion highlights the need for a framework of not just reproductive rights, but reproductive justice. Reproductive justice is about creating a society where principles of equity and inclusion mean that every woman has the right to exercise control over their own body. It is a concept developed by Black American feminists in the 1990s. Reproductive justice goes beyond merely the “right to choose” upheld in a case such as Roe, and asks broader intersectional questions of society.

The global picture

Reproductive justice frameworks have become a hallmark of recent movements to legalise abortion in Ireland, the UK and Latin American countries such as Argentina and Mexico. In Ireland, the “Repeal the 8th” campaign also included calls for the provision of free contraception and comprehensive sex education in state schools. Ireland voted to remove a ban on abortion from its constitution in 2018.

Read more:
Ireland votes to repeal the 8th amendment in historic abortion referendum – and marks a huge cultural shift

In the UK, Northern Irish activists, including those from Alliance for Choice, have emphasised the need for “free, safe, legal, and local” abortion provision including telemedicine for community members who cannot otherwise access abortion, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Argentina, the “¡Aborto legal ya!” (Legal Abortion Now) campaign took the form of a “marea verde” or “green wave” of feminist campaigners who took to the streets to protest in favour of legalising abortion. One of the hallmarks of the campaign was an awareness of the socioeconomic divide in the country.

‘Green wave’: pro-choice activists in Argentina have chosen a simple and effective branding for their fight for reproductive rights.
Hernan Caputo/Alamy Stock Photo

Although people from all backgrounds were accessing illegal abortion before the new law, people living in poverty were far more likely to die from it.

Standing strong and united

Reproductive justice therefore requires an intersectional approach, viewing society as a community in which demographic factors require that particular care and attention is given to certain parts of the whole. In the US, it is clear that people of colour, LBTQ+ people, undocumented immigrants, disabled people, and people living in poverty will be the first and worst hit by the fall of the Roe doctrine. Women and pregnant people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, including many of the aforementioned marginalised communities, will find themselves unable to find the means to travel to a state where abortion remains legal.

Roe was decided based on the right to individual privacy. But what the Alito/Dobbs leak has shown is that rights are fragile things, easily removed. A reproductive rights framework is only as strong as the law it is written in. The constitutional foundations of Roe were criticised by many – including former Supreme Court Justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg – as not being rooted firmly enough in principles of liberty and equality.

This constitutional weakness is what enabled Justice Alito to write his opinion overturning it, using an originalist view of the Constitutional text that sees abortion rights – as Alito reportedly wrote in his leaked opinion – as not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”.

What the US will see now, and where a justice framework proves strongest, is a culture of mutual aid springing up to circumvent or defy abortion bans in states where the legislature chooses to render the procedures illegal. Already, these informal support networks have been seen in countries such as Poland, Malta, and Gibraltar, where Abortion Support Network aims to fund procedures and travel for women and pregnant people who cannot afford to leave their jurisdiction to access abortion care.

Other campaigns such as Women on Waves have taken part in direct action, performing abortions in international waters near countries where it is illegal. The National Network of Abortion Funds in the US will no doubt attract significant support.

The potential overturn of Roe signals dark days ahead for women and pregnant people in the US. But the international abortion and reproductive justice movements show that people stand strongest when they are united. More

Biden isn’t serious about forgiving student debt. ‘Means-testing’ is a conDavid Sirota and Andrew PerezThe Biden administration’s proposal is cynicism masquerading as populism – and it will enrage everyone and hurt the Democrats’ electoral chances During the 2020 Democratic primary, Pete Buttigieg’s personal ambition led him to poison the conversation about education in America. Desperate for a contrast point with his rivals, the son of a private university professor aired ads blasting the idea of tuition-free college because he said it would make higher education “free even for the kids of millionaires.”The attack line, borrowed from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was cynicism masquerading as populism. It was an attempt to limit the financial and political benefits of a proposal to make college free. Worse, it was disguised as a brave stand against the oligarchs bankrolling Buttigieg’s campaign, even though it actually wasn’t – almost no rich scions would benefit from free college.Buttigieg and copycats like Amy Klobuchar were pushing a larger lie. Call it the means-testing con – the idea that social programs should not be universal, and should instead only be available to those who fall below a certain income level. It is a concept eroding national unity and being carried forward by wealthy pundits and a Democratic party that has discarded the lessons of its own universalist triumphs like social security, Medicare and the GI Bill.This week the Biden administration tore a page from Buttigieg’s book. The White House leaked that it is considering finally following through on Joe Biden’s promise to cancel some student debt – but not the $50,000 pushed by congressional Democrats, and only for those below an income threshold.In trial-ballooning the college debt relief proposal, the president is boosting the media-manufactured fiction that real, universal college debt relief would mostly help rich Ivy League kids – even though data from the Roosevelt Institute conclusively proves that canceling student debt “would provide more benefits to those with fewer economic resources and could play a critical role in addressing the racial wealth gap and building the Black middle class”.As the report points out: “People from wealthy backgrounds (and their parents) rarely use student loans to pay for college.”But setting aside how the media-driven discourse omits those inconvenient facts, what’s noteworthy here is the underlying principle.This latest discussion of means-testing follows Biden and congressional Democrats pushing to substantially limit eligibility for Covid-19 survival checks and the expanded child tax credit. Taken together, it suggests that Democrats’ zeal for means-testing is no anomaly – it is a deeply held ideology that is both dangerous for the party’s electoral prospects and for the country’s fraying social contract.The superficial appeal of means-testing is obvious: it promises to prevent giving even more public money to rich people who don’t need it.But in practice, means-testing is a way to take simple universal programs and make them complicated and inaccessible. Calculating exact income levels and then proving them for eligibility means reams of red tape for both the potential beneficiary and a government bureaucracy that must be created to process that paperwork.Data from the food stamp and Medicaid programs illustrate how means-testing creates brutal time and administrative barriers to benefits, which reduce payouts to eligible populations. In the case of means-testing student debt relief, those barriers may end up wholly excluding large swaths of working-class debtors.This is a feature, not a bug – it is means-testers’ unstated objective. They want to limit benefits for the working class, but not admit that’s their goal.Universal programs like social security and Medicare were what we once defined as “society” or “civilization”. They may be derided as “entitlements”, but the reason they have (so far) survived for so long is because their universality makes them wildly successful in their missions and more difficult to demonize. Their universality also precludes austerians from otherizing and disparaging the programs’ recipients.Means-testing destroys that potential unity. It may initially poll well, but it turns “entitlements” into complicated “welfare” programs only for certain groups, which then makes those programs less popular and makes the beneficiaries easy scapegoats for political opportunists. Think of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” trope vilifying recipients of means-tested food stamps.Now sure, billionaires are eligible for social security and Medicare, and their kids are eligible for free K-12 education – and that aristocracy doesn’t need that help. But when those programs were created, we accepted that rich people being granted access to those programs along with everyone else was the relatively small price to pay for simplicity, universalism and the attendant national unity that comes with it.Not surprisingly, Democrats’ creation of popular universalist programs coincided with the most electorally successful era in the party’s history.Equally unsurprising: the shift to fake means-test populism has coincided with rising popular hatred of liberal technocrats and the Democratic party they control.What is surprising is that Republicans may be starting to understand all this better than Democrats.For instance, Donald Trump’s signature spending legislation offered direct, non-means-tested aid to small businesses during the pandemic. The former president touted a plan to just pay hospital bills for Covid patients who didn’t have coverage. The programs were hardly perfect, but they were straightforward, universal, relatively successful and extremely popular because they embodied a powerful principle: keep it simple, stupid.When it comes to student debt relief, there’s a rare chance for Democrats to also embrace simplicity – and prevent Republicans from outflanking them.More specifically, they can use the student debt crisis to finally return to their universalist roots – and they don’t have to skimp and provide merely $10,000 worth of relief.Biden could simply send out a one-page letter to every student borrower telling them that their federal student debt is now $0.Yes, Republican lawmakers would try to block it and affluent pundits would tweet-cry about it to each other.But amid all that elite whining and couch-fainting, Democrats would be launching a battle against an immoral system of education debt – and directly helping 40 million voters ahead of a midterm election.It’s so easy and simple – which is probably why they won’t do it.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
Andrew Perez is a senior editor at The Lever and a co-founder of the Democratic Policy Center
A version of this piece was first published in the Lever, a reader-supported investigative news outlet
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Unless Democrats start fighting like they mean it, they’re going to lose CongressSteve PhillipsWe are engaged in an existential battle over the identity of this nation. The Biden administration’s tepid midterm strategy is failing The surest way to lose a battle is to not fight. Despite this fairly obvious logic, President Joe Biden and too many Democrats seem to have adopted a political strategy for the midterm elections of avoiding as many fights as possible. This path-of-least-resistance approach has resulted in plummeting presidential approval numbers and will further plunge the party off the cliff in the midterms if Democrats do not quickly reverse course. To turn things around, Biden should leap into the fundamental fights over what are called “culture wars” – and he should do so with gusto.It is unmistakably clear that we are engaged in an existential battle over the very identity of this nation. Is the United States of America primarily a straight, white, cisgender, male, Christian country, or is it a multiracial and multicultural democracy? The adherents of the former view are waging war with glee and abandon. From rightwing state legislatures to the supreme court, they are holding nothing back in attacking voting by people of color, the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, multicultural education, reproductive freedom and commonsense public health protections during a global pandemic, to name just a few fronts in this fight.With the heartening exception of the attempts to defend Roe v Wade, Democrats, for their part, are shying away from almost all of these fights beyond tepid words of disapproval, hand-wringing, and low-profile and lethargic counter-measures such as lawsuits and investigations. The result is a sharp decline in enthusiasm among the people who put the White House and Congress in Democratic hands, contributing significantly to the drop in polling approval numbers. Support among people of color has dropped 24% from its highs of last year. At this pace, Democrats will in fact lose the midterm elections, but it does not need to be so, and they can absolutely turn things around if they engage the fight.The misguided strategy that got us here results from bad math and electoral myopia by Democratic strategists and advisers. Despite an avalanche of empirical data, Democrats still do not believe that the majority of people are on their side. Yet with one exception (in 2004), the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1992. The progressive trend is only accelerating as more and more young people – the majority of whom are people of color or white progressives – turn 18 every day. Every eight seconds, someone turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote.Democrats are so obsessed with wooing conservative white working-class voters that they fail to see the ever-increasing ranks of people of color who can strengthen their political hand. I call this phenomenon being “blinded by the white”. Fear of alienating an elusive white constituency has paralyzed a party in desperate need of decisive and bold action.The very fact that Democrats control the executive and legislative branches is proof that the worldview that America is and should be a multiracial nation enjoys majority support. In high-turnout elections such as presidential races, the majority usually supports the Democrat. The question for the midterms is how much of that majority will be sufficiently motivated to come back out and vote. The reason that the party that controls the White House typically fares poorly in midterm elections is that that party’s supporters tend to get complacent and do not see the urgent need to turn out and vote again. That is why it’s essential to engage in the fight. The failure to fight is dispiriting to one’s supporters and a significant contributor to falling polling numbers.Biden’s advisers believe that engaging in fights will harm their popularity, but the painful reality is that there is not much popularity left to harm. By throwing himself into the raging battles with gusto, he can reverse his polling descent and save Democratic control of Congress. Here are four examples of how he can send a strong signal to the electorate and inspire his supporters to mobilize to vote this fall.Reproductive freedom summit: The White House should host a strategy summit with leaders in the reproductive rights movement and women’s healthcare field to discuss ways to fight back on restrictive legislation and expand access to healthcare for all women.Say gay conference: Biden should organize a presidential “We Say Gay” conference in Florida as an in-your-face rebuttal to the homophobic legislation by Florida’s governor and legislature. In fact, he could hold the conference in Disneyworld, which is the target of punitive measures by the state government for its gay-friendly policies. That would have the added advantage of engaging the business community in the fight for equality.Read banned books: Biden should go to Texas, where nearly 1 million eligible African Americans didn’t vote in 2020, and hold an event at a school where he reads to students from Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, a book about Black identity. Multiple school districts in Texas have banned Morrison’s books, and Biden would send a strong signal by reading from the book and even bringing copies to hand out to students.Go door-to-door with voter registration groups: In the face of all of the voter suppression legislation sweeping the south and south-west, Biden should show his solidarity with groups working to expand democracy and encourage Americans to register to vote. He can go to Phoenix, where the Arizona legislature is trying to make it harder to vote, and go precinct-walking with members of a Latino-led, community-based organization such as Lucha. He could couple that with a speech at a local high school where he encourages senior-year students to come forward and register on the spot.These are just a few examples of how Biden could use his bully pulpit to lead the fight to make America the multiracial democracy that the majority of people want it to be. Such high-profile and, yes, controversial initiatives are both the right thing to do and the smart strategic step. They will inspire and mobilize the base, redefine the nature of the fight so that Democrats are on the offensive, and solidify Biden’s role as a strong and resolute leader. If he can find the courage to take such steps, Biden will reshape the political debate and put the Democrats on the path to victory in the midterms.
Steve Phillips is a Guardian columnist, host of the Democracy in Color podcast and author of the forthcoming book How We Win the Civil War
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Ending Roe v Wade could badly backfire on Republicans during elections this yearLloyd GreenThe Democrats now have a fighting chance to maintain control of the Senate. Their odds of retaining and flipping seats have improved overnight On Monday night, Politico reported that a majority of the US supreme court is poised to overturn Roe v Wade, eviscerate a half-century of precedent, and leave the issue of abortion to the states. Five of the court’s nine justices are prepared to give the Republican base exactly what it demanded. The remaining question for the Republican party is whether answered prayers are the most dangerous.Through the Trumpian looking glass, forcing women to die from illegal abortions is ‘pro-life’ | Marina HydeRead moreIf the leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization is close to the final cut, the court stands to energize otherwise dejected Democrats and put Republican members of Congress in Democratic-leaning states at risk. Expect the anticipated Republican House majority in the midterms to be smaller than currently projected.Indeed, the Democrats also now have a real shot to maintain their control of the Senate. Overnight, their odds of retaining seats in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and New Hampshire, while flipping Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, improved.Beyond federal offices, fights will now be waged this fall over governorships and legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, but where the incumbent governor is a Democrat, and the legislature is in the hands of the Republican party. In a post-Dobbs world, look to the states to emerge as roiling battlegrounds.Make no mistake, the draft opinion is sweeping. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Samuel Alito writes for himself and four of his colleagues. “It is time to heed the constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Along the way, the ruling also offers implicit criticism of the court’s prior decisions on personal autonomy.Prior precedents on contraception, interracial marriage, consensual sex and gay marriage are now at risk. At a February debate among Michigan’s prospective Republican candidates for attorney general, all three men, including Matthew DePerno, Donald Trump’s choice, criticized Griswold v Connecticut. In that case, the US supreme court struck down a state law that barred the sale of contraceptives to married couples.DePerno, an advocate of election conspiracy theories, framed his understanding of this this way: “The supreme court … has to decide, mark my words, that the privacy issue currently is unworkable. It’s going to be a states’ rights issue on all these things, as it should be.” DePerno is also the state Republican party’s officially preferred candidate.Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Michigan Democrat, tweeted on Monday night: “If tonight’s news is true, Michigan’s 1931 state law banning abortion would snap back into effect, making any abortion illegal in our state – even if the mom will die, or if she was raped by a family member. No exceptions.”A former member of the US intelligence community and the wife of a retired army helicopter pilot, Slotkin added: “My poor mother is turning over in her grave. The House has already voted to codify Roe – let all Senators be on record on this one in an up or down vote.”In the same neo-Confederate spirit as Michigan’s DePerno, the Indiana senator Mike Braun offered up his benighted take on interracial marriage. Braun argued that like abortion, interracial marriage should be left to the states to decide – not the federal judiciary. Said differently, he was arguing that the supreme court got it wrong in Loving v Virginia.“When you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules and proceedings, they’re going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do,” Braun announced.“It’s the beauty of the system, and that’s where the differences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves.”After the ensuing uproar, Braun walked his words back. But in light of Politico’s reporting, the Democrats now have names, faces and an issue. Think ready-made campaign ad.To be sure, clearer Republican heads viewed the wholesale gutting of Roe as a threat to the Republican party’s elected officials. In the summer of 2021, they attempted to guide the court’s hand; they failed.Last July, 228 Republican members of Congress, 44 senators and 184 House members, filed an amicus brief in support of the Mississippi abortion law in question. Nowhere did the Republican submission refer to contraception, interracial marriage, or individual autonomy. Likewise, the word “privacy” only appeared as a part of a title of a footnoted law review article. Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert couched their arguments in pastels. Words like “previability” filled the page, as did polling data.Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, however, were having none of that. For them, it is time to return to what they consider the original constitution.More than seven in 10 Americans oppose overturning Roe even as the public is split over where to draw a line. In Texas, 77% support legal abortions in case of rape and incest. Not all restrictions are the same. America’s cold civil war just got really hot.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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Interview‘Name names? Never, never, never!’ Lee Grant on her decades of defianceEmma Brockes The Oscar-winning actor lost 12 years of her career refusing to out her partner as a communist, then had to endure his lectures about Marx while being treated as a ‘maid’. But a remarkable third act as a documentarian showcased her unique voiceLee Grant, child of the Depression, survivor of the anti-communist blacklist, director, Oscar winner and – incredibly – 95 and looking nothing of the sort, is standing in her Manhattan kitchen. It is the size of a medieval castle’s, with copper pots hanging from the ceiling, a catering-size fridge and what appear to be three ovens. “They’re all used,” says Grant, triumphantly, a tone she has earned. For 12 years during the McCarthy-era witch-hunt of the 1950s, Grant was banned from working in Hollywood, re-emerging in the 60s to become not only a wildly successful actor, but one of the US’s finest documentary makers of the late 20th century. Over the course of our conversation, the phrase she uses most often is “I was lucky”.If you have seen Grant on screen, it was most likely in one of her two best-known roles, from very different, seminal films. In 1967, she appeared as Mrs Colbert, the grieving widow, in the classic Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night. Eight years later, she played opposite Warren Beatty in the cult favourite Shampoo, for which she won an Oscar. Grant is a terrific actor, with a Zelig-like performance history that begins as a child dancer at the New York Ballet under George Balanchine (“My only memory of him is of my mother flirting with him; I was a fat little girl, that’s how I got in”), on through a scholarship at New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theater under Martha Graham, and, after her acting career was unfrozen at the age of 33 – “old for Hollywood!” – includes a heady decade living in Malibu knocking around in Joan Didion’s circle. “It was like entering The Truman Show. I get to live here? On the beach? With my eight-year-old daughter? Are you sure?! It was so delicious. And then I met Joey.”Grant sits at her kitchen table, her second husband, Joe Feury, working in the vast living room next door. Together, they ran a successful production company specialising in documentary film, a genre in which Grant says she would never have been successful had she not survived those 12 years on the blacklist – or met Feury. (“Joey thought I could do anything,” she writes in her memoir, I Said Yes to Everything. “And I could.”) Grant grew up 50 blocks north of where we are sitting in Washington Heights, the only child of successful immigrants to New York. Her mother’s family were from Odessa, in present-day Ukraine, her father’s from Poland. Her father ran the YMHA, the Hebrew youth hostel in the Bronx, and her devoted mother and aunt Fremo ran a nursery school from the brownstone where they lived.It was a charmed childhood. “Fremo!” Grant’s mother would exclaim, pointing at four-year-old Grant, or Lyova Rosenthal as she was, then. “Look how she walks! How she talks! Sing something! Did you see that, did you hear that? Genius!” Grant bursts into laughter, remembering the scene. “I knew it was crazy; it was so theatrical. And delicious. They were very delicious, and funny.” And although it wasn’t a political household, they were political times, not only as the Depression raged across the US, but closer to home. Walking down Convent Avenue in the early 30s, says Grant, “the little girls who were on the steps of the Catholic school would shout: ‘You killed our Lord!’” She found this both surprising and comic. “I don’t think I felt sad about it; it was more like: ‘That’s strange. Me? I killed your Lord?’”Grant was innately confrontational, “something I was born with, no question about it”. The first time she recalls standing up for something in public, she was a teenager, walking along a stretch of Broadway near her house when she witnessed a man attacking a woman. The woman tried, desperately, to board a bus, but when the bus driver clocked the commotion, he shut the doors and drove on. Others in the street ignored it. Only Grant reacted. “I ran for a cop.” She ran three blocks, and the couple were gone by the time they returned. “Oh,” said the cop, “they’re probably in a bar now. It’s just a normal thing, don’t worry.” She did worry. “They didn’t have the kind of sensibility that I had. And then I married a blacklisted writer. And there was no hesitation. I certainly was not going to give names in order to work in film or television.”There wasn’t a second when …?“NOT EVEN A SECOND!” she booms. “Never, never, never!” Decades later, when she started to make searing documentaries about homeless Americans, victims of domestic violence and women in prison, she says, “I’d been there. I’d been on the other side almost all my life.”The man she married was called Arnold Manoff, and it cost her the first 12 years of her career. In 1951, straight out of acting school, Grant won a role in a Hollywood movie, Detective Story, with Kirk Douglas, and was promptly nominated for a best supporting Oscar. She was 23 years old and a huge future awaited. But by the time the film came out, Manoff, a communist writer, had been blacklisted – and so, by association, had Grant. A different person would have been furiously bitter. Grant was furious all right: “I was filled with rage and frustration at the blacklisters, who I was living among.” But she wasn’t bitter. She was ignited by a sense of injustice and common cause. In the beginning, she says, “we all stuck together and I really loved those people. And respected them. And they educated me. I had no education, I never went to college. I went right into acting. I felt lucky.”Soon, however, the situation curdled. Manoff was a bully and a hypocrite. “I was living with a man who had nothing but contempt for me,” says Grant. He tried to make her read Marx and Engels. “But I couldn’t get it,” she says. “I didn’t know what it meant.” She found a box of old letters she wrote to him, recently (he died in 1965), and was horrified. “They’re all supplications: ‘I can’t learn Marx, I’m sorry but I can’t.’” Looking back, she understands that he married her mainly to have someone to look after this two children from his first marriage. He belittled and controlled her. When, after the birth of their daughter, Dinah, Grant had an opportunity to appear in a play in upstate New York, her husband said he’d leave her if she took the job. Without hesitation, she took it. “I knew I had to go. Life was over. He didn’t like me at all. He was attracted to me in the beginning, and then it was over. I was the maid, I really was.” The funny thing is, I say, you ended up making a more political body of work than any of the men lecturing you to read Marx before putting on the dinner.“Lecturing the women around them, yes,” she hoots, then looks infinitely fierce. “Those fuckers.”The takeaway from those years was that Grant learned how to fight. She and some of her friends took on the fanatically pro-McCarthy clique that ran the TV union, and slowly, methodically lobbied members to vote them out and replace them with moderates. Eventually, she was permitted to return to Hollywood – three years after everyone else, “because they still thought I’d name my husband”. (She didn’t.) By then she was ancient by the standards of the era. She booked a very good facelift, lied about her age for the next four decades and started another phase of her career. After moving to Malibu and working a stint on the hit soap Peyton Place, offers started to flood in, particularly from liberal and leftwing film-makers, who “were stumbling over each other to give me work. Me first, me first! And they were artists, and brilliant.” She met Joe, 12 years her junior, and the opposite of her domineering first husband: “This really cute boy, and so dear, and so in love. A working-class Italian non-intellectual. It was like the biggest nourishment I could’ve had.”The greatest shift came, however, when Grant started to make documentaries. Before preparing for this interview, I had never seen any of them, but they are available on Amazon and I urge you to watch. They are staggeringly good. The first, made at the suggestion of Grant’s friend Mary Beth Yarrow, was about the Willmar Eight, a group of female bank tellers in a tiny town in Minnesota, who went on strike in 1977 after years of being paid a fraction of what their male colleagues earned. It is a deeply moving and shocking film – “A hell of a little piece that was really a calling card,” says Grant – and more were to follow, all for HBO. In 1986, Grant’s documentary Down and Out in America, in which she investigates the homeless and impoverished underbelly of Ronald Reagan’s America, won the Oscar for best documentary.What is striking about all her films is just how much she gets out of her subjects, who speak with an unselfconsciousness you no longer see on TV. Grant says much of this was down to her brilliant producers finding the right case studies. But her direction, and questioning, was a large part of it, too. In her 1989 film Battered, about domestic violence, she coaxes extraordinary testimony out of victims and perpetrators. One particular man, convicted of beating his wife, tells Grant how he can pick the one woman out of a hundred who is a soft target for abuse. “That’s the guy who stayed in my mind, too, that devil,” she says. “And he was attractive. Scary attractive. That was my first marriage! That guy who said I can come into a room and pick them out – that was me.”The Big Scary ‘S’ Word: why are people so terrified of socialism?Read moreGrant went on to make films about her old friend Sidney Poitier, and about Kirk Douglas and his family, and to strike a huge development deal with the US cable channel Lifetime. If she was shooting now, where would she look? “I would be fighting with HBO to let me go to Ukraine.” She thinks: “Or I’d be looking at Elon Musk, or at January 6th.”As it is, she says, “I’m old. I don’t look that old; I don’t feel that old, probably because I have a young husband – but …” In her memoir, she writes, “death makes me furious, which is a pity because I’m really up there myself”. But having survived all those waves of oppression in her youth, she isn’t done yet. “I feel there’s some way that I can still somehow do something. I don’t know what.” Experience makes her confident: something always turns up. “Life is like that. You slip to another place, go into another world, and you’re curious, and you take sides. And it’s a kind of miracle.”TopicsFilmDocumentary filmsFilm industryUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More