US Politics

Holocaust book Maus hits bestseller list after Tennessee school board banAuthor Art Spiegelman says decision to ban Pulitzer-winning novel that depicts Jewish people as mice is ‘demented’ The Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale has become a bestseller on Amazon, after a Tennessee school board banned it.Last week, according to meeting minutes, 10 school board members in McMinn county agreed to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing “rough, objectionable language” and sketches of naked women they deemed unsuitable for 13-year-old students.By the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman and first published in 1986, Maus describes the experiences of Spiegelman’s parents in Nazi concentration camps and his mother’s suicide. The book depicts Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats.“We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff,” McMinn county board member Tony Allman said, adding in reference to the murder of 6 million Jewish people in the second world war: “I am not denying it was horrible, brutal and cruel.“It shows people hanging,” he said. “It shows them killing kids. Why does the education system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.”Another board member, Mike Cochran, said: “If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.”Spiegelman, 73, told CNBC he was “baffled”.“It’s leaving me with my jaw open, like, ‘What?’” he said, adding that the board was acting in “Orwellian” fashion.“I’ve met so many young people who … have learned things from my book,” he said. “I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”As news of the McMinn ban spread, Maus shot on to multiple top 10 lists in Amazon book categories. As of Monday morning, The Complete Maus was second in Amazon’s overall bestseller category. In history, it ranked first. In second world war history, Maus I, the first installment of the novel, also ranked No 1. Variations took the first, second and third spots as bestsellers in literary graphic novels.Efforts have also emerged to make Maus more accessible to students. One professor at a North Carolina college offered eighth-grade and high-school students in McMinn county a free online class.“In response to Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II being removed from the schools by McMinn county, Tennessee school board members, I am offering this free online course for any McMinn county eighth-grade or high school students interested in reading these books with me,” said Scott Denham of Davidson College.“I have taught Spiegelman’s books many times in my courses on the Holocaust over many years,” he added, on his website.Richard Davis, owner of the Nirvana Comics bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, offered to loan The Complete Maus to any student. Davis also set up a GoFundMe campaign to buy additional copies. Created with a target of $20,000, it had raised more than $80,000 by Monday.“Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece is one of the most important, impactful and influential graphic novels of all time,” the page said. “We believe it is a must-read for everyone.”TopicsHolocaustTennesseeUS educationSecond world warUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politicsMichael HarriotThere has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions, even as gerrymandered maps diminish the power of Black voters Although the phrase “All politics is local” is usually attributed to Tip O’Neill Jr, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, the aphorism probably originated in the February 1932 Associated Press column “Politics at Random”, when the Washington bureau chief, Byron Price, wrote: “All politics is local politics.” As valid as Price’s summarization of inside-the-Beltway politics may be, there is probably a more accurate way to describe the All American sport of civic power-brokering:All politics is racial.Over the last quarter-century, white voters have overwhelmingly identified with the GOP while every other racial and ethnic group – Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters – consistently identify with the Democratic party. This unwavering reality reduces the machinations of each political party to a game of demographic mathematics, especially in racially diverse parts of the country, where one truisim dominates local politics: when non-white people can’t vote, Republicans win.Perhaps the starkest example of this racial divide is Alabama, where white people make up 69% of the population and are 89% of the Republican electorate. By comparison, the state is 27% African American, 80% of whom identify as Democrat. Six of the seven Democrats in the Alabama senate are Black, as are 26 of the 27 Democratic members of the house. In 2022, Kenneth Paschal became the first Black person to represent the Republican party in the Alabama state legislature since Reconstruction. Contrary to what Price would say, politics is not local here. In Alabama, regardless of the location, “white voter” is synonymous with “Republican” and “Black” means “Democrat”.Perhaps this reality is why last Monday, a federal court threw out the state’s congressional map that disenfranchised Black voters across the state. The three-judge panel explained that the congressional redistricting plan created by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature meant that “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.” The previous map packed the two Blackest cities in one congressional district, splitting the rest of the state’s Black population – three of the five largest cities in the state – among three majority-white districts that have been safely Republican for years. The judges gave the white (Republican) lawmakers 14 days to draw new districts that did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Alabama Republicans vowed to appeal the ruling to the US supreme court, where the court’s conservative majority ruled in 2019 that disenfranchising Black voters is perfectly fine as long as the gerrymanderers’ intent was partisan and not racial. “If district lines were drawn for the purpose of separating racial groups, then they are subject to strict scrutiny because ‘race-based decisionmaking is inherently suspect,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. “But determining that lines were drawn on the basis of partisanship does not indicate that the districting was improper. A permissible intent – securing partisan advantage – does not become constitutionally impermissible, like racial discrimination, when that permissible intent “predominates”.Herein lies the problem with politics, conservative ideology and America in general. For years, there has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions. According to this new American translation, disenfranchising entire communities by suppressing their voting power is not necessarily racist as long as the person didn’t mean to be racist. And, because there are very few people willing to stand in front of the world and confess to their racial prejudices, anyone is allowed to discriminate as long as they don’t articulate their racism out loud. However, this cleverly constructed loophole only applies to racism. America’s jurisprudence system has found a way to convict people for unintentional murder and hold people accountable for car accidents, but somehow white people are innocent until proven racist.But in the case of the Alabama Republican-controlled legislature, there is actual proof.A few weeks after justices sitting on America’s highest court decided that there was nothing they could do about North Carolina disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black citizens, the daughter of the man who pioneered using race to redraw political maps leaked the contents of her recently deceased father’s hard drive, revealing that North Carolina’s redistricting plan was about race all along. Known as the “Master of the Modern Gerrymander”, Thomas Hofeller had only considered race when drawing the maps for North Carolina. The proposed maps even included a plan that would have allowed the state to elect an all-white legislature.But the leaked files also revealed that Hofeller was the main architect of redistricting plans for states across the country, including Alabama. Hofeller’s files included emails and proposals from then Alabama state House redistricting commission chair Representative Jim McClendon, who included racial data, census maps broken down by race and … well, nothing else. The basis for McClendon and Hofeller’s plan for Alabama wasn’t mostly about race; it seems as if it was only about race. After serving in the Alabama house for 12 years, McClendon was elected to the state senate in 2014, where he co-chaired the senate commission whose gerrymandered maps were thrown out by the federal court. It was probably a coincidence. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it.Alabama is not an outlier in this phenomenon. Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri and Wisconsin have submitted gerrymandered maps that diminish the power of Black voters. Of course, they won’t admit that the redistricting plans are solely motivated by race because, according to the New American definition, that would make it racist. According to America’s highest legal authorities, there is nothing wrong with stealing the voices of Black people and accidentally murdering their opportunity to participate in democracy. After all, it has nothing to do with racism.It’s just politics.
Michael Harriot is a writer and author of the upcoming book Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America
TopicsUS voting rightsOpinionRaceUS politicsAlabamaRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

Sweeping bill on inquiry into US Covid response sees bipartisan supportNew Covid commission would inform the US response to future outbreaks as well as the current impact of the virus A sweeping new bill with powerful bipartisan support in the US Senate would establish an inquiry into the country’s Covid-19 response similar to the 9/11 Commission, among other provisions aimed at preventing the next pandemic.The new Covid commission would inform the US response to future outbreaks as well as the current impact of the disease. The bill will be co-sponsored by Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who plan to mark it up in committee in coming weeks.“The pain of this pandemic is unforgettable, and we have a responsibility to make sure its lessons are unforgettable, too,” Murray said.The legislation, called the Prevent Pandemics Act, would lay the groundwork to enshrine new powers in federal health agencies.It would also require Senate confirmation to appoint the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it would better outline the duties of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, a position Burr created in a 2006 law on pandemic preparedness.Murray, chair of the Senate health committee, first raised the idea of a Covid commission in March 2020. “Because even back then it was clear: we have to learn from this pandemic to make sure we are never in this situation again,” she said on Thursday.In November 2021, another bipartisan group of senators – Dianne Feinstein of California, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Joni Ernst of Iowa – also introduced a bill to establish a Covid commission.US scientists develop cheap smartphone-based test kit for CovidRead moreThis wider bill represents months of work across the aisle between Murray and Burr, the committee’s Republican ranking member.An independent taskforce would “conduct a comprehensive review of the federal Covid-19 response, fully account for consequential gaps and breakdowns in our response, and issue recommendations to correct them”, Murray said.In November 2019, the US was ranked first of 195 countries for pandemic preparedness in a report co-produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security – but it has consistently had one of the worst responses to the actual Covid-19 pandemic, said John Farmer Jr, the senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission and director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.“And there’s very little apparent effort to figure out exactly why it was so ineffective and what we can do in the future,” he said.Farmer was among those calling for an inquiry early in the pandemic, he said, “because it was clear that the United States’ response was almost completely ineffective in containing the pandemic and preventing future variants from emerging”.The US response involved “basically 50 governors going 50 different ways, and no one effectively containing the virus”, Farmer said.That happened in part because the president doesn’t have the authority under current law to establish temporary public health measures, even during a pandemic.Legislation such as the proposed bill could lay the groundwork for changing these laws, though such changes would be likely to face sharp scrutiny in a highly divided Congress.The 9/11 Commission was created by Congress soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It was independent and non-partisan, staffed with officials who had investigative power, funding and time to create an authoritative report.“Good reports are important because they create the historical record, and they can also inform how we respond to the crisis to avoid it happening again,” said Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.Another reason to create a Covid commission would be to garner high-profile support from all branches of government, which could bolster public trust in institutions, Rozenshtein said.“Those are the benefits – if you can pull it off,” he said.Rozenshtein doesn’t believe it’s possible to create a report on Covid that accomplishes what the 9/11 Commission did, however.“It will be very rigorous and professional and it will produce an excellent report – but because that will be attacked the whole way through by Trump and his enablers in the Republican party, that report will not then have anything like the impact of the 9/11 Commission.”A Covid commission would surely face bipartisan scrutiny even if it finds bipartisan support, Rozenshtein and Farmer said.“I think any sitting administration is going to feel vulnerable to the conclusions of such a commission,” Farmer said. “This is such a calamitous response that I’m not sure that either administration is really going to want a close look at what went wrong.”At the same time, he added, “the public interest has to outweigh that kind of partisan consideration.“We failed, as a society and as a world, to contain Covid, and we really need to look at more effective ways to handle future pandemics – or we could be in worse shape the next time,” Farmer said.TopicsUS CongressCoronavirusUS politicsTrump administrationBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

US Senate panel close to approving ‘mother of all sanctions’ against RussiaNegotiations for package of sanctions against Putin ‘on the one-yard line’, says Bob Menendez of foreign relations committee

Opinion: Russia’s phony war is playing out as surreal theatre
The leaders of the Senate foreign relations committee said on Sunday they were on the verge of approving “the mother of all sanctions” against Vladimir Putin, warning there would be no appeasement as the Russian president contemplates an invasion of Ukraine.UK to bring in measures to allow for tougher sanctions on Russia, says TrussRead more“We cannot have a Munich moment again,” the panel’s Democratic chair, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the 1938 agreement by which allies ceded parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, believing it would stave off war.“Putin will not stop if he believes the west will not respond,” Menendez said. “We saw what he did in 2008 in Georgia, we saw what he did in 2014 in pursuit of Crimea. He will not stop.”Menendez said he believed bipartisan negotiations for severe sanctions were “on the one-yard line”, despite disagreements with Republicans over whether measures should be imposed before or after any Russian invasion. The UK government promised to ramp up sanctions against Putin and his associates.Tensions on the Ukraine border continued to escalate with Reuters reporting the Russian military build-up included supplies of blood in anticipation of casualties. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, told Fox News Sunday: “Putin has a lot of options available to him if he wants to further invade Ukraine, and he can execute some of those options imminently. It could happen really, honestly, at any time.”Seeking to show bipartisan resolve, Menendez gave CNN a joint interview with his committee’s ranking Republican, James Risch of Wisconsin.Menendez said: “There is an incredible bipartisan resolve for support of Ukraine, and an incredibly strong bipartisan resolve to have severe consequences for Russia if it invades, and in some cases for what it has already done.“We are building on the legislation that both Senator Risch wrote independently, and I wrote, which I called the mother of all sanctions. It’s to include a variety of elements, massive sanctions against the most significant Russian banks, crippling to their economy, Russia sovereign debt. These are sanctions beyond any that we have ever levied before.”Risch said talks had been a “24 hour-a-day effort for the last several days” in an attempt to reach agreement over sanctions timing and content, and that he was optimistic.“That’s a work in progress,” Risch said, when pressed over discussions about pre-emptive sanctions or measures to be taken in the event of an invasion. “[But] I’m more than cautiously optimistic that when we get back to DC tomorrow that we’re going to be moving forward.”Menendez said he believed western allies did not have to wait to start penalising Putin.“There are some sanctions that could take place up front because of what Russia has already done, cyber attacks on Ukraine, false flag operations, the efforts to undermine the Ukrainian government internally,” he said.“But then the devastating sanctions that ultimately would crush Russia’s economy, and the continuing lethal aid that we are going to send, means Putin has to decide how many body bags of Russian sons are going to return to Russia.“The sanctions we’re talking about would come later on if he invades, some sanctions would come up front for what has been done already, but the lethal aid will travel no matter what.”Risch criticized the stance of several far-right figures, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, who have questioned why the US is backing Ukraine and opposing Russia. Carlson said “it makes sense” that Putin “just wants to keep his western border secure” by opposing moves by Ukraine to join Nato.“We side always with countries that are democracies, and certainly there isn’t going to be a truce committed in that regard,” Risch said.“But the people who were saying that we shouldn’t be engaged in this at all are going to be singing a very different tune when they go to fill up their car with gas, if indeed there is an invasion. There are going to be sanctions that are going to be crippling to Russia, it is going to cripple their oil production. And as we all know, Russia is simply a gas station that is thinly disguised masquerading as a country. It is going to have a devastating effect on the economy around the world.”UK ready to commit extra forces to Nato allies as Russia tension mountsRead moreOn NBC’s Meet the Press, Dick Durbin, co-chair of the Senate Ukraine caucus, addressed concerns aired by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday that growing rhetoric over the crisis was causing panic and destabilising his country’s economy.His comments followed a call with Joe Biden that Ukraine officials said “did not go well”.“Any decision about the future of Ukraine will be made by Ukraine,” said Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. “It won’t be made in Moscow or in Washington, in the European Union or in Belarus. It’s their future and their fate and their decision as far as that is concerned.”The caucus co-chair, Republican Rob Portman of Ohio, who is also on the foreign relations committee, told NBC he believed Putin had underestimated the unity of Nato and others.“One thing Vladimir Putin has done successfully is he has strengthened the transatlantic alliance and countries around the world who are looking at this and saying, ‘We cannot let this stand, we cannot let this happen’,” Portman said.“For the first time in nearly 80 years we could have a major and very bloody conflict in Europe unless we stand up together and push back, and so far so good.”TopicsUkraineRussiaUS foreign policyUS national securityUS militaryBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ – Nixon aideTrump makes promise at rally in Texas on SaturdayJohn Dean: ‘Failure to confront tyrant encourages bad behavior’ Donald Trump’s promise to pardon supporters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was “the stuff of dictators”, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel warned.Trump tours the country endorsing candidates to reinforce the ‘big lie’Read moreTrump made the promise at a rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.“If I run and if I win,” he said, referring to the 2024 presidential election, “we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”More than 700 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, around which seven people died as Trump supporters tried to stop certification of his election defeat, in service of his lie that it was caused by electoral fraud. More than 100 police officers were hurt.Eleven members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Trump himself was impeached for inciting the riot. Ten House Republicans voted to impeach but Trump was acquitted when only seven Republican senators found him guilty. That left him free to run for office again.John Dean, 83, was White House counsel from 1970 to 1973 before being disbarred and detained as a result of the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Dean responded to Trump on Twitter.“This is beyond being a demagogue to the stuff of dictators,” he wrote. “He is defying the rule of law. Failure to confront a tyrant only encourages bad behaviour. If thinking Americans don’t understand what Trump is doing and what the criminal justice system must do we are all in big trouble!”Trump was generous with pardons in office, recipients including Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, both now targets of the House committee investigating January 6 and with Trump in its sights. On Sunday morning, the New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, widely seen as a relative moderate in Trump’s Republican party, was asked if pardons should be offered to Capitol rioters.“Of course not,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “Oh, my goodness. No.”Even Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and dogged Trump ally, said the former president was wrong.“I don’t want to send any signals that it was OK to defile the Capitol,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation. “I want to deter what people did on January 6, and those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it.”But a moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, indicated the hold Trump has on the party. Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the senator said Trump should not “have made that pledge to do pardons. We should let the judicial process proceed.”But Collins, who voted to convict Trump over the Capitol attack, would not say that she would not support him if he ran for president again.“Well certainly it’s not likely given the many other qualified candidates that we have, that have expressed interest in running,” she said. “So it’s very unlikely.”Trump dominates polling concerning potential Republican nominees for 2024.Others deplored Trump’s words in Texas. Richard Painter, a White House ethics counsel under George W Bush, said the promise of pardons should, constitutionally speaking, stop Trump running again.“This alone is giving aid or comfort to an insurrection within the meaning of the 14th amendment, section three,” Painter wrote. “Trump is DISQUALIFIED from public office.”Trump also complained about investigations of his business and political affairs which have landed him legal jeopardy. On Sunday, Graham, whose actions in support of Trump are being investigated in Georgia, said he would cooperate if asked.“Yeah,” he said. “Give me a call.”But he also complained about a supposed “effort here to use the law, I think inappropriately. So I don’t know what they’re going to do in Fulton county [Georgia]. I don’t know what the January 6 committee is going to do. I expect those who defile the Capitol to be prosecuted. But there’s a political movement using the law to try to knock Trump out of running. And I, particularly, don’t like it or appreciate it.”Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreIn Texas, Trump urged supporters to protest.“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal,” he said, “I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.”Prosecutors, he said, were “trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the supreme court or most other courts.”Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor now a legal analyst for NBC, said: “Trump is not only encouraging his supporters to violence if he’s arrest[ed], he’s also signaling that he’ll pardon them, just as he’ll pardon the [January 6] insurrectionists.“Will this finally move prosecutors to hold him accountable for his crimes?”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2024TexasnewsReuse this content More

Supreme court: Stephen Breyer ‘did not want to die on bench’, says brotherPressure campaign was fired by fear of repeat of disaster when Republicans replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Biden poised to appoint first Black female justice
01:03Stephen Breyer, the supreme court justice who announced his retirement this week, “did not want to die on the bench”.White House burns Wicker for criticising Biden supreme court pickRead moreSo his brother, the federal judge Charles Breyer, told the Washington Post at the end of a momentous week in US politics.Democrats, meanwhile, rejected Republican complaints that Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the court meant he was prioritising politics over qualifications, or endorsing racially based affirmative action, or that the new justice would be too liberal.The Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee hinted at claims some criticism may be racially motivated, saying he hoped Republicans were not “doing it for personal reasons”.Breyer’s decision to step down, at 83, gives Biden the chance to nominate a liberal replacement. The pick will not alter the balance of the court, which conservatives dominate 6-3 after Donald Trump capitalised on ruthless Republican tactics to install three justices in four years.But progressives campaigned to convince Breyer to quit, many citing what happened when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on the court in September 2020. Republicans who held the Senate confirmed her replacement – the hardline Catholic Amy Coney Barrett, nominated after Trump promised to pick a woman – before the November election.Democrats should be able to confirm Biden’s pick without Republican votes but they face losing the Senate in November. With that in mind, the campaign to convince Breyer picked up speed. Breyer spoke about how the court should not be politicised but one activist, Brian Fallon of Demand Justice, told the Post: “You have to view this as a political fight. It’s not a legal fight.”Charles Breyer told the Post his brother “was aware of this campaign. I think what impressed him was not the campaign but the logic of the campaign.“And he thought he should take into account the fact that this was an opportunity for a Democratic president – and he was appointed by a Democratic president [Bill Clinton] – to fill his position with someone who is like-minded. He did not want to die on the bench.”On Sunday, Dick Durbin of Illinois, chair of the Senate judiciary committee, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I didn’t feel that external pressure was really helpful at all. [Breyer] had to make this decision. It is an important and timely decision in his life as to the right moment. And I didn’t want to push him, and I didn’t.”But a congressman who campaigned for Breyer to retire, Mondaire Jones of New York, told the Post that though “people adore Ruth Bader Ginsburg … the fact is, due to decisions or non-decisions around retirement, made by her, we got Amy Coney Barrett.”The Post said the White House did not pressure Breyer.“None of the justices want to be told when to leave,” Charles Breyer said. “They want to decide themselves. And that, I think, the president and others recognised. It actually worked out.”Republicans have signaled a willingness to make life uncomfortable for Biden’s nominee – as revenge for what happened to Brett Kavanaugh.Trump’s second pick, replacing the retiring Anthony Kennedy, faced accusations of sexual assault. He vehemently denied them. Democrats prominently including Kamala Harris, then a California senator, vehemently attacked him. Harris is now vice-president, presiding over the 50-50 Senate with a vote to confirm Biden’s pick.On Friday, the Republican senator Roger Wicker told Mississippi radio the Kavanaugh confirmation was “one of the most disgraceful, shameful things and completely untruthful things that [Democrats have] ever, ever done”.Wicker also predicted that Biden’s nominee would get no Republican votes. He said so in part because the GOP expects a more progressive choice than Breyer, who Wicker called a “nice, stately liberal”. But Wicker also complained about “affirmative racial discrimination [for] someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota”, at a time when the court seems poised to rule such practices unconstitutional.The White House reminded Wicker of his unquestioning support for Barrett.Speaking to ABC’s This Week, Durbin said Republicans should “recall that it was Ronald Reagan who announced that he was going to appoint a woman to the supreme court, and he did, Sandra Day O’Connor, and it was Donald Trump who announced that he was going to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a woman nominee as well.“African American women, if they have achieved the level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence, they’ve done it against great odds. They’re extraordinary people … they’re all going to face the same close scrutiny.US supreme court will hear challenge to affirmative action in college admissionRead more“… I just hope that those who are critical of the president’s selection aren’t doing it for personal reasons.”Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican senator, told Fox News Sunday Republicans would probably not support Biden’s pick “because I’ve seen dozens of his nominees to the lower courts and they’ve almost to person been leftwing ideologues”.Cotton also complained about Democrats’ treatment of Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment in a stormy confirmation process, Biden playing a leading role as a senator from Delaware, in 1991.Most expect Democrats to move quickly. Durbin told NBC: “A great deal depends on the nominee. If the person has been before the committee seeking approval for a circuit court, then the committee knows quite a bit about that person.“If there are no new developments for someone who’s been before the committee in the previous year or two, it makes a real difference.”A leading contender, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was confirmed to the DC appeals court last June with Republican support. She replaced Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general who was nominated to the supreme court by Barack Obama in 2016 but blocked by Republicans.“I can just say this,” Durbin said. “It’s going to be fair, it’s going to be deliberate and we’re going to be timely about it too. This is a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. We should take it seriously.”TopicsUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsBiden administrationJoe BidenDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

Georgia county purges Democrats from election board and cancels Sunday votingThe takeover in Spalding county is part of Republican efforts to dominate elections mechanisms nationwide The judges met, in private, over a two-day period in May, for what might seem like a minor task: to choose the fifth member of an elections board in rural Spalding county, Georgia.But the meetings were by no means routine. There is no record of their vote or their discussions. The interviews with Democratic and Republican applicants were conducted in private, via Zoom calls. And the position was only vacant because of a new law, specific only to Spalding county, recently introduced by the area’s two Republican state lawmakers.In the end, the judges chose a Republican, someone who had never served in a government position related to elections, to be the fifth and deciding vote for the Spalding county board of elections and registration. Almost immediately, that Republican, James Newland, cast that deciding vote to cancel Sunday voting – a historically heavy turnout day for Black, largely Democratic voters.It was just the latest blow to the county’s Democrats, and another loss for a party that is losing control of election boards across the state as Republican laws make GOP takeovers possible. But what happened in Spalding county is also just a fragment of GOP efforts nationwide to take over the apparatus of American elections. Their goal? To secure party control at every level of government – from the White House to state legislatures and election offices, all the way down to the precinct level, by employing thousands of poll watchers to potentially call into question Democratic votes.Across the US, Republican legislatures have introduced more than 200 bills aimed at reducing local control over elections and restrict voting access, according to the States United Democracy Center. All of it is aimed at ensuring that Republicans will have control over voting and elections rules, in support of Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.And the Peach State is ground zero, thanks to its increasingly central roles – as a swing state, and as the center of bogus disputes over the 2020 election results.The turn of events in Spalding county might have come as a shock to locals – a majority Democratic election board, with three Black women, becoming majority Republican, with two white men and another of Cherokee descent, virtually overnight – but Spalding county is no outlier. In at least five other Georgia counties, local election authorities have been restructured in favor of Republicans. It’s all part of the same story: the nationwide push to place GOP officials in positions of authority over elections.“The news isn’t really covering it because it’s so local,” said Zachery Fuller, a political organizer and former Democratic candidate for office in Griffin, the county seat. “But when it happens to so many counties it’s the same thing, even though it’s different laws: it’s voter suppression.”At the heart of what happened in Spalding county is that new law, which itself is an example of the tactics Republicans are pursuing across the country to ensure they control elections.Passed in March, HB 769 changed the rules for determining the tie-breaking vote for Spalding ounty’s election board. The five-person board always has two Democrats and two Republicans; previously, Democrats and Republicans would often flip a coin to determine the fifth member. But Republican state representatives David Knight and Karen Mathiak introduced a law requiring that the fifth member be chosen by a majority vote of the county’s superior court judges.Those judges – Chief Judge Fletcher Sams, Scott Ballard and Benjamin Coker – advertised the position in the local press for 30 days. All three judges are white; Sams said he identifies as an independent, while the other judges did not comment on their political affiliations. In the end, the judges chose the inexperienced Newland over at least two Black Democrats, including Vera McIntosh – who had been removed from her position on the board because HB 769 also required board members to live in Spalding county, which she did not – as well as Elbert Solomon, a longtime Democratic operative here.“All they wanted to see was the fact that I was Black – because they couldn’t tell by looking at my résumé,” Solomon said. “I went to white colleges, I was an executive at Procter & Gamble, even my last name wouldn’t tell you that I was Black. That’s all they wanted to know.”“I can’t help what people think but that’s ridiculous,” Sams said, denying that race played any role in the judges’ decision. “I was very impressed with at least one or two Democratic candidates, and they were seriously considered.”Regardless, the new law didn’t come out of nowhere. Ever since election day of 2020, Republicans in Spalding county have used alleged problems with voting to justify their efforts to replace Democratic election officials. On election day 2020, some voters had initially been prevented from casting their ballots on machines equipped with software from Dominion Voting Systems. Marcia Ridley, the county’s former Democratic elections supervisor, said it was a temporary software problem caused by Dominion, but soon the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, was calling for Ridley to step down, citing “serious management issues and poor decision-making”. Knight and Mathiak joined Raffensperger in calling for Ridley’s removal, and less than two weeks later asked the state’s attorney general to investigate her for failing to properly post information about board meetings.It didn’t end there. After the election, local Republicans were up in arms over claims of mishandled ballots. Mathiak and a former Republican elections board member, Betty Bryant – who believes the 2020 election was “robbed” from Trump – both claimed they had heard from a person who had received 12 mail-in ballots. As a crowd gathered outside the board of elections, a Republican on the county commission recorded a video of the protesters, and posted it to Facebook. Later, he posted a picture of a ballot envelope that contained no ballot, apparently in an attempt to suggest electoral fraud. As the mood darkened, concerned for their safety, Glenda Henley, a former Democratic board member, asked police to escort election workers to their cars.Next, the crowds started showing up at previously sleepy elections board meetings. “We had so many people coming, and the audience would disrupt the meeting by shouting or saying ugly things,” Henley said. One particularly loud voice was Roy McClain, a shooting range coach with a lengthy military career who had replaced a previous Republican board member. McClain had ties to Mathiak: he had fundraised for her and appeared alongside her at numerous events.McClain “was always loud, always negative”, according to Henley. “When he came in, it was just turmoil, anything to disrupt the business of elections.” (McClain did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Knight or Mathiak.) Then, in April, just days before the end of the 2021 legislative session, Mathiak and Knight escalated the situation: they introduced HB 769. The bill caught some county officials off-guard, according to emails obtained by American Oversight. Former elections board members told the Guardian they had no prior warning that the bill was coming.But Solomon said the bill’s purpose was obvious. He and others had worked in 2020 to register new county voters, most of them African American – a get-out-the-vote effort that produced results and nearly led to the election of the Democratic candidate Daa’ood Amin as mayor of Griffin.“What happened is we increased registered voters here by 900 people in less than a year,” Solomon said. “We had a mayor’s race here and a Black person almost won – and only lost by 15 votes.”Demographics in Spalding county are changing, according to Solomon and Fuller: what was solidly Republican territory is now becoming more Democratic-leaning.“They see the writing on the wall,” Solomon said. If the new law was intended to increase Republican power, it worked: Newman was swiftly installed on the elections board. In an interview, Newman said he was chosen by the judges because they believed he would be an impartial tie-breaking vote – despite the fact that he is a self-proclaimed Republican – and rejected the notion that race played a role, noting that he is of Cherokee descent.Newland claimed the judges told him that they chose him “because I was the closest they could find, out of the people who applied to the job, to a neutral party.” As for why he voted to cancel Sunday voting, Newland claimed the county couldn’t afford a seventh day of voting.Even less neutral is the man appointed by the local GOP to one of the other two Republican board positions: Ben Johnson, a former election board member who resigned as head of the county Republican party to take the job. Johnson, a fervent proponent of the false belief that the 2020 election was beset with widespread voter fraud, also runs an IT firm, Liberty Technology, that does maintenance for the county’s computer equipment.Fuller calls it a clear conflict of interest for Johnson. “If his company has direct control over the servers for Spalding county and the city of Griffin, he can see all of the data from anyone who uses these public servers,” Fuller said. “[That] could be data collection used against voters to help organize – and that is data that other members of the board wouldn’t have access to.”Asked whether there was a conflict of interest, Mike Windham, the county’s IT manager, said, “Off the top of my head, no, but the optics are a little funny.”Johnson ignored repeated requests for comment, and at an election board meeting in early January responded to the Guardian’s questions by saying, “I don’t talk to fake news.”But Johnson’s beliefs are well documented on his Facebook page. A little more than a year after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Johnson posted about the “hours upon hours of video-taped ballot harvesting in Georgia, the phantoms all over, the dirty voter rolls, the withholding of subpoenaed materials, the list goes on”.In person, Johnson is generally known as an intelligent and capable member of the board of elections, according to current and former colleagues from both parties. But his social media posts show a different side than the calm and polite face he presents to election board meetings.Specifically, Johnson has taken issue with Dominion Voting Systems, which handles election software throughout Georgia and is the frequent target of conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Only last month, Johnson attacked Dominion at a board meeting, making a false claim that a judge in a Georgia lawsuit, brought by a Republican, had ruled that its software in Georgia was “illegal”.“[R]ight now, the judicial opinion is that the equipment we’re using is illegal, which blows my mind,” Johnson said.That’s not true. The judge has not ruled on the matter; a trial is pending.Then, last month, if all this turmoil weren’t enough, board members were hit with nearly 2,000 emails demanding yet another audit into the 2020 presidential election – despite three previous reviews, conducted by the Republican Raffensperger, which all confirmed the win for Biden. While it remains unknown who prompted more than 1,900 people, all from outside Spalding county, to join the email deluge, some clues can be gleaned from the demands themselves. The emails were form letters and include references to a notorious conspiracy theorist, Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, who was involved with the controversial and unnecessary audit by the Cyber Ninjas firm in Maricopa ounty, Arizona (which again confirmed Biden won there). According to Jim O’Brien, one of the two Democratic board members in Spalding county, the campaign has all the markings of an organized effort.It was a “cyber-attack intended to intimidate and harass”, O’Brien said. “I’d like to know if any local Republican officials knew about this.”Slowly, the sense is dawning in these communities that individual cases like Spalding county’s are not one-offs but are part of a pattern emerging nationwide. Henley, too, is concerned about the way things are going, and who is behind it. After more than six years on the board, she wants to know why the new law that allowed a Republican takeover in Spalding county was passed when it did, and who might be pulling the strings even higher up than the state Republicans who made it happen.“It was a sneak attack,” she said. “I think we were targeted, but I don’t have the evidence of what they were doing. I think it was even higher up. I think it’s more convoluted and embedded.”TopicsUS voting rightsRepublicansGeorgiaRaceUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRo Khanna represents Silicon Valley and the best of Capitol Hill and wants to help. His aims are ambitious, his book necessary Just on the evidence of his new book, Ro Khanna is one of the broadest, brightest and best-educated legislators on Capitol Hill. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School who represents Silicon Valley, he is by far the most tech-savvy member of Congress.Silicon Holler: Ro Khanna says big tech can help heal the US heartlandRead moreAt this very dark moment for American democracy, this remarkable son of Indian immigrants writes with the optimism and idealism of a first-generation American who still marvels at the opportunities he has had.Even more remarkable for a congressman whose district includes Apple, Google, Intel and Yahoo, Khanna is one of the few who refuses to take campaign money from political action committees.Once or twice in a “heated basketball game” in high school, he writes, someone may have shouted “go back to India!” But what Khanna mostly remembers about his childhood are neighbors in Pennsylvania’s Bucks county who taught him “to believe that dreams are worth pursuing in America, regardless of one’s name or heritage”.His book is bulging with ideas about how to transform big tech from a huge threat to liberty into a genuine engine of democracy. What he is asking for is almost impossibly ambitious, but he never sounds daunted.“Instead of passively allowing tech royalty and their legions to lead the digital revolution and serve narrow financial ends before all others,” he writes, “we need to put it in service of our broader democratic aspirations. We need to steer the ship [and] call the shots.”The story of tech is emblematic of our time of singular inequality, a handful of big winners on top and a vast population untouched by the riches of the silicon revolution. Khanna begins his book with a barrage of statistics. Ninety percent of “innovation job growth” in recent decades has been in five cities while 50% of digital service jobs are in just 10 major metro centers.Most Americans “are disconnected from the wealth generation of the digital economy”, he writes, “despite having their industries and … lives transformed by it”.A central thesis is that no person should be forced to leave their hometown to find a decent job. There is one big reason for optimism about this huge aspiration: the impact of Covid. Practically overnight, the pandemic “shattered” conventional wisdom “about tech concentration”. Suddenly it was obvious that high-speed broadband allowed “millions of jobs to be done anywhere in the nation”.The willingness of millions of Americans to leave big city life is confirmed by red-hot real estate markets in far flung towns and villages – and a Harris poll that showed nearly 40% of city dwellers were willing to live elsewhere.“The promise is of new jobs without sudden cultural displacement,” Khanna writes.He suggests a range of incentives to spread tech jobs into rural areas, including big federal investment to bring high-speed connections to the millions still without them. This is turn would make it possible to require federal contractors to have at least 10% of their workforces in rural communities.The congressman imagines nothing less than a “recentering” of “human values in a culture that prizes the pursuit of technological progress and market valuations”. A vital step in that direction would be a $5bn investment for laptops for 11 million students who don’t have them.The problems of inequality begin at the tech giants themselves. Almost 20% of computer science graduates are black or Latino but only 10% of employees of big tech companies are. Less than 3% of venture capital lands in the hands of Black or Latino entrepreneurs.If redistributing some of big tech’s gigantic wealth is one way to regain some dignity in the digital age, the other is to rein in some of the industry’s gigantic abuses. Data mining and the promotion of hate for profit are the two biggest problems. Khanna has drafted an Internet Bill of Rights to improve the situation.Throughout his book, he drops bits of evidence to suggest just how urgent it is to find a way to make the biggest companies behave better.“Algorithmic amplification” turns out to be one of the greatest evils of the modern age. After extracting huge amounts of data about users, Facebook and the other big platforms “push sensational and divisive content to susceptible users based on their profiles”.An internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”. The explosion of the bizarre QAnon is one of Facebook’s most dubious accomplishments. In the three years before it finally banned it in 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles. Twitter also recommended Qanon tweets”. The conspiracy theory was “actively recommended” on YouTube until 2019.And then there is the single greatest big tech crime against humanity. According to Muslim Advocates, a Washington-based civil rights group, the Buddhist junta in Myanmar used Facebook and WhatsApp to plan the mass murder of Rohingya Muslims. The United Nations found that Facebook played a “determining role” in events that led to the murder of at least 25,000 and the displacement of 700,000.The world would indeed be a much better place if it adopted Khanna’s recommendations. But the question Khanna is too optimistic to ask may also be the most important one.Have these companies already purchased too much control of the American government for any fundamental change to be possible?
Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
TopicsBooksSilicon ValleyDemocratsUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS domestic policyreviewsReuse this content More