US Politics

Sanders: ‘anti-democratic’ Republicans to blame for Biden woes, not just Manchin and SinemaSenator confirms he will campaign against moderate Democrats if they face primary challenges

Robert Reich: Manchin and Sinema are all about their egos
Bernie Sanders on Sunday sought to turn fire aimed by Democrats at two of their own, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, onto Republican senators he said were “pushing an anti-democratic agenda”.Kyrsten Sinema: Arizona Democrats censure senator for voting rights failureRead more“Republicans are laughing all the way to election day,” the Vermont senator told CNN’s State of the Union. “They have not had to cast one bloody vote which shows us where they’re at.”But the Vermont progressive also confirmed that he will campaign against Manchin and Sinema, both Democrats, should they face viable primary challengers.Manchin, from West Virginia, and Sinema, from Arizona, have blocked Democratic priorities including the Build Back Better spending plan and, this week, voting rights reform.Their refusal to contemplate reform to the filibuster, the rule which requires 60-vote majorities for most legislation, meant two voting rights bills in answer to Republican attacks on voting in states were always doomed to fail.On Saturday, Sinema was formally censured by her state party. Sanders said he supported that move. He also confirmed his threat to campaign against Sinema and Manchin in 2024.“If there was strong candidates prepared to stand up for working families who understand that the Democratic party has got to be the party of working people, taking on big money interests, if both candidates were there in Arizona and West Virginia, yes, I would be happy to support them.”But, Sanders insisted, “it’s not only those two. It is 50 Republicans who have been adamant about not only pushing an anti-democratic agenda but also opposing our efforts to try to lower the cost of prescription drugs, trying to expand Medicare … to improve the disaster situation in home healthcare, in childcare, to address the existential threat of climate change. “You’ve got 50 Republicans who don’t want to do anything except criticise the president and then you have, sadly enough, two Democrats who choose to work with Republicans rather than the president, and it will sabotage the president’s effort to address the needs of working families in this country.”Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders insisted the Biden administration made “a great start”, in part with a Covid relief bill passed with just 50 votes and the casting vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, but was now bogged down thanks in large part to Manchin and Sinema.“The president and the Democratic Congress,” Sanders said, “… looked at the economic crisis that was caused by Covid. We passed the American Rescue Plan … and we also passed along the way the strongest infrastructure bill that has been passed since Dwight D Eisenhower … We were off to a great start. “And then I will tell you exactly what happened. Fifty members of the Republican party decided that they were going to be obstructionist … and then you had two United States senators joining them, Mr Manchin and Senator Sinema. “For five months now there have been negotiations behind closed doors trying to get these two Democratic senators on board. That strategy, in my view, has failed. It has failed dismally. We saw it last week in terms of the Voting Rights Act. We now need a new direction.”Asked if he was frustrated, Sanders told CNN he was.But, he insisted, “we need to start voting. We need to bring important pieces of legislation that impact the lives of working families right onto the floor of the Senate. And Republicans want to vote against lowering the cost of climate change, home healthcare, whatever it may be. And if the Democrats want to join them, let the American people see what’s happening. “Then we can pick up the pieces and pass legislation.”Abolishing the filibuster won’t lead to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. It’s quite the opposite Read moreSome Democrats advocate splitting Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan into separate bills, in order to pass what they can.Sanders conceded that most such legislation will not pass, given Republican obstruction and the machinations of Manchin and Sinema. Bringing bills to the floor, he conceded, would really be about electoral politics ahead of midterms this year in which Republicans expect to take back the House and possibly the Senate, and the presidential contest in two years’ time.“Once we know where people are at,” he said, “then we can say, ‘All right, look, we have 50 votes here, we have just one vote here, 49 votes here. “But what has bothered me very much is Republicans are laughing all the way to election day. They have not had to cast one bloody vote, or two, which shows us where they’re at. And we’ve got to change.”TopicsBernie SandersUS SenateUS CongressDemocratsBiden administrationUS politicsUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More

The Biden doctrine: Ukraine gaffe sums up mixed year of foreign policy On Russia and Putin, the president said the quiet part loud. Re-engagement has been welcomed but the exit from Afghanistan was a disaster. Analysts see much to do to rebuild US credibilityJoe Biden marked his first anniversary in office with a gaffe over Ukraine that undid weeks of disciplined messaging and diplomatic preparation.Russian ships, tanks and troops on the move to Ukraine as peace talks stallRead moreThe president’s suggestion that a “minor incursion” by Russia might split Nato over how to respond sent the White House into frantic damage limitation mode.Officials insisted Biden had been referring to cyber attacks and paramilitary activities and not Russian troops crossing the border. That failed to entirely calm nerves in Kyiv and other European capitals, especially as Biden also raised eyebrows by predicting that Vladimir Putin would “move in” to Ukraine because “he has to do something” and would probably prevail.The analysis of Nato’s weaknesses and Putin’s intentions was no doubt widely shared but Biden had said the quiet part loud, contradicting what his own officials had been saying. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, had just been telling Foreign Policy that one of the great successes of the Biden administration was that “the 30 allies of Nato [were] speaking with one voice in the Russia-Ukraine crisis”.Aides who have shadowed Biden through his long career as senator and vice-president are used to his prolix ways, his tendency to draw on his deep foreign policy expense to over-explain, but the stakes are immeasurably greater as a president, trying to stare down Putin as Europe stands on the threshold of war.The stumble distracted from some of the foreign policy achievements of Biden’s first year – the mending of transatlantic ties, the bolstering of US support for the embattled government in Kyiv and the development of a consistent policy towards Moscow – which combined a openness to talks with a readiness to inflict punitive measures and a refusal to be divided from Nato allies.None of those gains were a given in US foreign policy after four years of Donald Trump, a president who frequently put domestic political and business advantage ahead of strategic national interests, particularly when it came to Russia. Mending alliances, returning to multilateralism and restoring predictability to US policy after the volatile Trump era is widely regarded as Biden’s greatest success so far in foreign policy.His claim on taking office that “America is back” was backed up by a quick deal to extend the New Start treaty in Russia and thereby salvage the only major arms control agreement to survive Trump. The US rejoined the Paris climate accord and the United Nations Human Rights Council, re-engaged with major powers in nuclear talks with Iran, and convened a virtual Summit for Democracy in December.All those steps were in line with a broad strategy which Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs, describes as a Biden doctrine.“I think it’s a strategic reorientation towards competition/conflict with China and, the other side of that coin, strengthening relationships with partners in Europe and in Asia, both bilaterally and multilaterally,” Tocci said. “And relying less on the military instrument in order to pursue US foreign policy goals.”The Ukraine stumble was not the first time that strategy has been impaired by its execution. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was intended to be a decisive break with the past, extricating the US from its longest war so it could focus on its most important geopolitical challenge, the rapid rise of China.The departure turned to chaos when the Afghan army, which the US had spent $83m and 20 years trying to build, collapsed in a few days in the face of a Taliban offensive. The scenes of desperate Afghans trying to cling to departing US planes, some dying in the attempt, are an inescapable part of Biden’s legacy.Biden has argued he was boxed in by the Doha agreement the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in February 2020, under which the US was due to leave by May 2021. Biden was able to stretch that deadline by four months but maintained that staying any longer would have led to renewed attacks on US troops.Nathan Sales, an acting under secretary of state in the Trump administration, argued that the Doha deal was no longer binding on Biden, and he could have left a force to maintain US leverage.“When one side of an agreement breaches it serially and flagrantly like the Taliban did, I think the Biden administration would have been well within its rights to say: ‘We’re not bound by it either,’” said Sales, now a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.Current US officials argue that whether the US declared the Taliban had been in violation or not, there would have been renewed attacks on US troops, forcing a decision to cut and run or send large-scale reinforcements. The status quo, they say, was not sustainable.Putin, a ‘rogue male’ on the rampage, threatens to start a war no one wants | Simon Tisdall Read moreEven considering the constraints imposed by the previous administration, the withdrawal was a fiasco. US planners failed to anticipate the speed of the collapse even though a government watchdog, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, had warned in 2021 that without US contractors to service planes and helicopters, the Afghan air force would no longer be able to function, depriving troops on the ground of a key advantage.For Afghans who worked with the US and its allies, and for the country’s women and girls, the departure seemed like a betrayal, raising a serious question mark over the administration’s claims to have restored human rights to the heart of US foreign policy.Its record in that regard was already mixed.On one hand, the administration had taken a firm stand against China’s mass persecution of Muslim Uyghurs, declaring it a genocide. Furthermore, the assembly of a coalition of some 130 countries to establish a global minimum tax was, according to Matt Duss, foreign affairs adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, “a step toward addressing global economic inequality which is one of the drivers of conflict and authoritarianism”.“It’s an important first step and a courageous one,” Duss said. He also pointed to the sanctions against surveillance companies like the Israeli NSO group, whose software was used by authoritarian regimes to target dissidents.“​​That was a very consequential move, and there has been a massive pressure campaign trying to get them to roll it back, but they’ve stood firm,” he said.However, the steps taken against the Saudi monarchy for the heavy civilian toll from its air war in Yemen and the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi felt well short of what human rights campaigners and progressive Democrats had hoped for. The Biden administration continued to sell Riyadh substantial quantities of advanced weaponry.“We’ve basically returned to the traditional US approach of supporting human rights in countries that don’t buy our weapons,” Duss said. “I very much hope that changes.”‘A lot of bad blood’Another way in which the manner of the US exit from Afghanistan undermined the administration’s wider objectives was by alienating European allies, who felt left out of a decision they were obliged to follow.“The pull-out really caused a lot of bad blood unnecessarily,” Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said. “You can call it the root cause of unhappiness within the alliance.”The formation in September of Aukus, a partnership with the UK and Australia to help the latter acquire nuclear-powered submarines, was another sweeping move in the pivot towards Asia.Confusion over UK claim that Putin plans coup in UkraineRead moreBut the protagonists had omitted to inform France, who discovered on the same day that their contract to sell Australia diesel submarines had been cancelled. Biden was forced to acknowledge the “clumsy” way it had been handled, and the rift clouded bilateral relations for months.Putin’s threat to Ukraine has helped rally the transatlantic alliance but as Biden revealed in his own public reflections, there are still serious divisions below the surface, limiting his room for manoeuvre.The president’s freedom of action on other global issues, like making progress in climate action or finding a nuclear compromise with Iran, will be hindered still further if Republicans gain control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections. In that case, the administration’s record until now, mixed as it is, may prove to be the high point of the Biden doctrine.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS foreign policyUS national securityUS militaryUS politicsUkrainefeaturesReuse this content More

Florida man pleads guilty to threatening to kill Ocasio-Cortez and PelosiPaul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, also pleads guilty in federal court to threats against Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in Illinois A Florida man has pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, two leading Democrats in Congress, and Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in Illinois.‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacksRead moreThe US attorney’s office for the southern district of Florida said Paul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, entered his plea in federal court in Fort Pierce on Friday.Hoeffer admitted calling Pelosi’s Washington office in March 2019, threatening “to come a ‘long, long, way’ to rattle her head with bullets and cut her head off”.He admitted a call to Foxx on the same day, saying bullets would “rattle her brain”.In November 2020, Hoeffer called the office of Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive from New York. This time, the DoJ said, Hoeffer “threatened that he would ‘rip her head off’, and told her to sleep with one eye open”.Citing the plea agreement, NBC News reported that Hoeffer also “warned of ‘all-out war’ and a ‘civilian army’” and made racist remarks in his call to Foxx.Hoeffer made his calls before the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 2021, in which supporters of Donald Trump sought to overturn his election defeat.Some looked for lawmakers to capture or kill. One rioter, from Texas, faces charges including a threat to “assassinate” Ocasio-Cortez. His case has yet to be tried.Capitol police have reported an increase in threats against lawmakers. NBC cited the chief of Capitol police, J Thomas Manger, as saying there were around 9,600 threats in 2021, up from more than 8,000 in 2020.As prominent Democratic women, Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi are common targets for threats, from within the walls of Congress as well as without.Ocasio-Cortez was elected in 2018, as Democrats took the House in opposition to Trump. She quickly became a national star. In 2019, Time magazine began a profile by describing nerves in her Washington office.US man charged with threatening to ‘assassinate’ Alexandria Ocasio-CortezRead more“Every 10 minutes or so,” the magazine said, “someone knocks on the big wooden door of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office on Capitol Hill. The noise makes staffers stiffen.“It’s almost always a harmless fan, one of dozens who arrive each day, leaving neon-colored Post-it notes as devotional offerings.“But in her first three months in Congress, aides say, enough people have threatened to murder Ocasio-Cortez that Capitol police trained her staff to perform risk assessments of her visitors.”This, the magazine said, was “the daily reality for America’s newest human Rorschach test. Wonder Woman of the left, Wicked Witch of the right”.At sentencing in April, Hoeffer will face up to 15 years in prison.TopicsDemocratsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezNancy PelosiUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacks It was a terrible seven days, with major developments in investigations of his election lies and the Capitol riot reaching into his inner circle

‘House of Trump is crumbling’: why the legal net is tightening
The last time Donald Trump heard such hammer blows, they were from renovations at Mar-a-Lago that displeased the former president. But not even that sound would have left his ears ringing like last week’s avalanche of bad news that some believe nudged a criminal indictment one step closer.Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn to see honorary university degrees revokedRead moreNo single week in the year since Trump left the White House has been as dramatic, or for him as potentially catastrophic, as the one just passed.It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.The week ended with the leaking of a document showing that Trump at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.It all left the former president with plenty to ponder.“He’s Teflon Don, he said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and survive it, his supporters are going to support him no matter what, but I’m starting to think more and more that the walls are closing in on this guy,” said Kimberley Wehle, a respected legal analyst and professor of law at the University of Baltimore.“The most immediate thing is the grand jury in Georgia because there’s audio of him trying to get [secretary of state] Brad Raffensperger to ‘find’ votes. Under Georgia election laws as I read them that is potentially a crime.“The looming question is whether Trump will be indicted along with 11 others so far for seditious conspiracy [over the 6 January Capitol attack]. To me that’s the biggest turn of events … the justice department believes they have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of an agreement, a meeting of minds to overturn a legitimate election.“And that there are a lot of high-level people that are looped into it, including potentially Donald Trump himself, and of course he’s not president, so he’s not immune from prosecution any more.”It is that Department of Justice investigation into the deadly Capitol assault, parallel but separate to the 6 January House committee, which harbors the most legal peril for Trump. Some believe sedition charges for members of the Oath Keepers militia indicate that the inquiry has moved into a higher gear.Others, most recently Preet Bharara, former district attorney for the southern district of New York, have questioned why it appears members of Trump’s inner guard, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, have not yet been questioned.“It’s just not a possibility they’ve tried to interview, you know, a dozen of the top people at and around the White House like the [6 January] committee has [because] they squeal like stuck pigs when people approach them,” Bharara told The New Abnormal podcast, a Daily Beast podcast.“It’s odd to have allowed all this testimony to be collected, all these documents to be subpoenaed and compiled, and they don’t look like they’ve done any of these interviews. There are some lower-level people who breached the doors to the Capitol, but I don’t think those people are giving it up in a straight line to Trump.”At a rare press conference earlier this month, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, did not mention Trump by name but sought to reassure critics of his investigation.“The justice department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” he said in a carefully worded address.The objectives of the House committee are easier to divine and more likely in the immediate term to cause political harm to Trump as he mulls another White House run.Thursday’s request for testimony from his daughter Ivanka, a former White House adviser, brings the investigation to the heart of Trump’s inner circle. Trump’s actions are also set to be explored in primetime TV hearings that Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the committee, has promised will “blow the roof off the House”.The panel also scored a big victory on Wednesday when the supreme court ended Trump’s efforts to shield more than 700 pages of White House records. The treasure trove of documents included a draft executive order directing the Department of Defense to seize voting machines, and appointing a special counsel to look into the election, in support of Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen.“Documents don’t die, they don’t lie,” Wehle said. “A witness can say, ‘Oh, I don’t recall,’ and dance around it. Documents cannot. Secondly, the documents will lead to more people to discuss what happened, including Ivanka Trump.”Trump himself has been uncharacteristically quiet about his week of setbacks, other than two statements attacking Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, for requesting a grand jury to assist her investigation into his election interference.Draft Trump order told defense chief to seize swing-state voting machinesRead more“The people looking for the crime are being hounded and the people who committed the crime are being protected,” he said. “This is not the American way.”To Wehle, the week’s developments have significance not only for Trump but for November midterm elections in which Republicans are tipped to reclaim Congress.“We have to think about the January 6th committee as getting information to voters before November about sitting members who might be up for reelection,” she said.“The question is not so much whether Trump will be indicted, but who in a seat of power in the US Congress was potentially involved in this conspiracy.“Frankly, if American democracy is to be saved from single-party minority rule, November is absolutely vital.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2020US midterm elections 2022US elections 2024US CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corruptsRobert ReichThe two Democratic senators chose to wreck American democracy, simply to feed their sense of their own importance What can possibly explain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to sink voting rights protections? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone, themselves included, knew bipartisanship was impossible?Arizona Democrats censure Kyrsten Sinema for voting rights failureRead moreWhy did they say they couldn’t support changing Senate filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes?Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?Part of the answer to all these questions can be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But if you want the whole answer, you need also to look at the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: ego. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had heard of Manchin and almost no one outside Arizona (and probably few within it) had ever heard of Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated.I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood and the United States Senate.Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told Manchin asked Joe Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of Build Back Better and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on Build Back Better, he’s got to rename it because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office.Yet out of 100 senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for attention.Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her national celebrity as a spoiler.Biden prides himself on having been a member of the senatorial “club” for many years before ascending to the presidency and argued during the 2020 campaign that this familiarity would give him an advantage in dealing with his former colleagues. But it may be working against him. Senators don’t want clubby familiarity from a president. They want a president to shine the national spotlight on them.Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreSome senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological.Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsUS voting rightsOpinionUS politicsDemocratsUS SenateBiden administrationUS CongressJoe ManchincommentReuse this content More

Kyrsten Sinema: Arizona Democrats censure senator for voting rights failureDemocrat opposed move to carve voting rights issues out of filibuster and thereby overcome GOP opposition

Republican resistance to Trump rings hollow on voting rights
The Arizona Democratic party has formally censured Kyrsten Sinema, the US senator whose opposition to filibuster reform helped sink attempts to protect voting rights.The three lessons for the voting rights struggle from the latest Senate setback | Steve PhillipsRead moreIn a statement on Saturday the Arizona party chair, Raquel Terán, said: “While we take no pleasure in this announcement, the ADP executive board has decided to formally censure Senator Sinema as a result of her failure to do whatever it takes to ensure the health of our democracy.”The attempt to pass voting rights legislation died in the Senate this week, a huge blow to Joe Biden and his party in a year which finishes with midterm elections in which Republicans are expected to prosper.Sinema supported two bills but they were blocked by Republicans after hours of emotional and at times deeply personal debate over voting rights, racism and the fragility of American democracy.Republicans were able to block the bills because Sinema and another moderate Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, opposed a move to carve voting rights issues out of the filibuster, the Senate rule by which most legislation requires 60 votes to progress.Saying she opposed reform because the filibuster protected the rights of the minority, Sinema said in a floor speech she was “committed to doing my part to avoid toxic political rhetoric, to build bridges, to forge common ground, and to achieve lasting results for Arizona and this country”.Critics pointed out that no only do Republicans in the 50-50 Senate represent millions fewer Americans than Democrats, but the GOP itself was recently happy to change filibuster rules to require only a simple majority to confirm supreme court justices.Donald Trump was therefore able to nominate three hardline conservatives to a court which had already gutted federal voting rights protections.Since that supreme court decision, in 2013, and at a growing pace since Trump refused to concede defeat in 2020, Republican state governments have passed laws which critics say are meant to make it harder for communities which lean Democratic, particularly Black voters, to cast their ballots.Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, stoked uproar this week when, after the failure of the Democratic voting rights push, he said: “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”Diana DeGette, a Democratic representative from Colorado, said: “African American voters ARE AMERICANS and to suggest otherwise is about as racist as it gets.”00:33Other Republican measures, critics say, will make it easier for the GOP to overturn results.In her statement on Saturday, Terán said: “The Arizona Democratic party is a diverse coalition with plenty of room for policy disagreements.“However, on the matter of the filibuster and the urgency to protect voting rights, we have been crystal clear in the choice between an archaic legislative norm and protecting Arizonans rights to vote. We choose the latter and we always will.”Terán praised Sinema’s role in passing Covid relief and a bipartisan infrastructure bill, key parts of Biden’s agenda. But she also highlighted Republican attempts to audit and overturn Trump’s defeat in Arizona and election laws being passed nationwide.“The ramifications of failing to pass federal legislation that protects [the] right to vote are too large and far reaching,” she said.A spokeswoman for Sinema said: “During three terms in the US House, and now in the Senate, Kyrsten has always promised Arizonans she would be an independent voice for the state – not for either political party. She’s delivered for Arizonans and has always been honest about where she stands.”Nonetheless, the senator has suffered significant blowback.Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and leading progressive, said this week he could back primary challengers to Manchin and Sinema in 2024. Sinema also saw Emily’s List, a powerful abortion rights group, withhold its endorsement.In a statement, Emily’s List president Laphonza Butler said: “We believe the decision by Senator Sinema is not only a blow to voting rights and our electoral system but also to the work of all the partners who supported her victory and her constituents who tried to communicate the importance of this bill.”A Democratic fundraising juggernaut, Emily’s List was Sinema’s top political donor in her 2018 Senate race, according to opensecrets.org.Another abortion rights group, Naral Pro-Choice America, said it would only endorse senators “who support changing the Senate rules to pass the critical legislation that will protect voting rights”.Who is Kyrsten Sinema? Friends and foes ponder an Arizona Senate enigmaRead moreArizona’s other Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, was on Saturday fundraising off his decision to support filibuster reform on voting rights matters, which he said was “a tough one – but [the] right one for Arizona and our country”. The effects of censure by a state party are debatable. In Arizona, the Republican John McCain was censured in 2014 for what his state party deemed too liberal a voting record. The senator and 2008 presidential nominee took it in his stride, as part of his public image as a political maverick.Sinema won the Arizona Senate seat vacated by Jeff Flake, an anti-Trump conservative, and also presents herself as unbound by traditional political codes.Last year, Chuck Coughlin, a former Republican operative in the state, told the Guardian Sinema was a “pragmatist” who “understands that if she is to succeed in Arizona, she must succeed in this lane”.However, Saundra Cole, a Democrat who once campaigned for Sinema, said: “She’s not John McCain. She’s not a maverick. I didn’t agree with him on many things but at least we knew where he stood.”TopicsArizonaUS SenateUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn to see honorary university degrees revokedUniversity of Rhode Island board votes unanimously to revoke degrees given to key allies of Donald Trump in 2003 and 2014

‘House of Trump is crumbling’: the legal net tightens
The University of Rhode Island will revoke honorary degrees given to Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn, key allies of Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Michael Flynn allies allegedly plotted to lean on Republicans to back vote auditsRead moreThe URI board of trustees on Friday voted unanimously to revoke the degrees, which were given to Giuliani in 2003 and Flynn in 2014.Giuliani’s doctorate of laws was given for his leadership as mayor of New York City after the 9/11 attacks, the Providence Journal reported.Flynn, a retired general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who graduated from URI in 1981, was given a doctorate of humane letters.The trustees voted on the recommendation of the URI president, Marc Parlange, who said the two men “no longer represent the highest level of our values and standards that were evident when we first bestowed the degree”.Giuliani has acted as Trump’s attorney, work that led to the suspension of his law licenses in New York and Washington DC.A leader of legal attempts to overturn election results in key states, Giuliani spoke at a rally near the White House on 6 January, urging “trial by combat”.Parlange said Giuliani “encouraged domestic terrorist behavior aimed at preventing Congress from certifying the outcome of the 2020 presidential election”.Seven people died around the storming of the US Capitol. Trump was impeached but acquitted. More than 700 people have been charged. Eleven members of a far-right militia have been charged with sedition.This week, Giuliani was among Trump allies served subpoenas by the House select committee investigating the attack. Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of contempt of Congress arising from a refusal to co-operate. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, could face the same charge. Leading Republicans in Congress have also refused to co-operate.On Friday, the Washington Post reported that a judge has released to prosecutors more than 3,000 of Giuliani’s communications, in an investigation of work in Ukraine which contributed to Trump’s first impeachment, for seeking dirt on rivals including Joe Biden.Flynn, who was fired from the Defense Intelligence Agency by Barack Obama, became Trump’s national security adviser before being fired for lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials.He pleaded guilty but was pardoned by Trump. A leading figure on the far right, he has advocated a military coup and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion.Texts show Fox News host Hannity’s pleas to Trump aide after Capitol attackRead moreFlynn has been implicated in aspects of Trump’s attempt to stay in power including plans to seize election machines, the subject of a draft executive order revealed on Friday by Politico. He has resisted a subpoena from the 6 January committee.Also on Friday, the Guardian reported that law enforcement agencies have learned of an alleged plan by “allies of Flynn” to “gather ‘intelligence’ on top Republicans”, in order to compel them to back election audits in key states.Recommending the revocation of the honorary degrees, Parlange said: “As a civic institution, URI has the privilege and responsibility to sustain and preserve American democracy by insuring and modeling good citizenship. Revoking these honorary degrees reinforces our values and allows us to lead with truth and integrity.”The chairwoman of the URI trustees, Margo Cook, said the board “supports the university and its mission to uphold its values, especially its commitment to intellectual and ethical leadership and fostering an environment of diversity and respect”.TopicsRudy GiulianiThe ObserverMichael FlynnDonald TrumpTrump administrationRhode IslandUS educationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Abolishing the filibuster won’t lead to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. It’s quite the opposite Jan-Werner MüllerWhat defenders of the filibuster want is minority rule – and a government unable to deliver anything meaningful to its people On Joe Manchin’s US Senate website, you can click on “Help from Joe”. American democracy (not to speak of another Joe) desperately needed his help this week. What it got instead was notes cribbed from constitutional law 101, selective and self-serving worship of a distant deity known as “the Founders”, and sanctimonious invocations of bipartisanship.The battle to secure free and fair conditions for voting through a simple Senate majority seems lost for the moment; and Republicans – who call for bipartisanship only when they happen to be in the minority – are gloating. But we should not move on so quickly. Otherwise, like dirt, the deeply misleading claims about the filibuster preventing a “tyranny of the majority”, advanced by Manchin and commentators thinking the point of politics is moderation for its own sake, might come to stick.Republican voter suppression is rampant. Manchin and Sinema are complicit now | Moira DoneganRead moreThe authors of the US constitution did indeed fear a tyranny of the majority. And they were agitated by the thought of decisions taken without proper deliberation; after all, even these men of the Enlightenment could not shake longstanding prejudices about the great unwashed masses falling victim to their “passions wresting the sceptre from reason”, as James Madison put it (adding for good measure that “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.)Yet the framers worried no less about a tyranny of the minority. While they built in plenty of checks and balances, they did not seek to give veto powers to a minority within the Senate. After all, the latter was already through other designs the place for what Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy” to cogitate and deliberate. The chamber was not directly elected by the people before 1913, but both before and after, it has had an inbuilt bias for minorities, since every state, no matter how small, gets two senators. Never mind the filibuster: we have long been in a situation where Republicans can rule without a majority of the country behind them (for instance, by ramming through appointments to the US supreme court).Politicians like their constitutional legacies a la carte: what better than having the imperative to preserve your personal power be directly deduced from the wisdom of the framers? Yet an honest reckoning with history must face up to the fact that much we take to be indispensable for democracy was not only unforeseen in the 18th century, but positively abhorrent to the men meeting in Philadelphia.Most important, the Framers sought to avoid the very thing that today makes Manchin’s calls for consensus an act of bad faith: political parties, and an uncompromising spirit of partisanship (or what the Founders called “faction”) in particular. Evidently, Manchin himself does not quite believe in deliberation; why else have a huge placard with big, shouting letters next to him while delivering his speech? And just as evident: were he really so concerned about policies always having “input from all corners of the country”, why not require unanimity? If 51 can constitute a tyranny of the majority, why can’t 60?Biden asks what Republicans are for, and what McConnell wants, but the answer has been obvious for a decade or so: make his presidency fail. After all, the present minority leader honed his dark arts of political destruction during the Obama years. Of course, there is nothing wrong with an opposition opposing. In fact, that’s its job: it is supposed to offer a systematic alternative to what those who gained a majority are trying to do and hold those in power accountable. But that’s really as far as it goes, when it comes to what Manchin calls “the opportunity for the minority to participate”.A minority should have its say – but a majority must get its way. To enact what you have been empowered to enact does not mean, as Manchin puts it, “abandoning our Republican colleagues on important national issues”. It means not abandoning the people who put their trust in your ability actually to get stuff done.What defenders of the filibuster want is for the minority de facto to hold power. A supermajority requirement is not somehow neutral. It means opting for the status quo in a political system that its defenders, from the ancient Athenians onwards, always admired for its capacity to learn and innovate. Innovation does not mean you rush headlong into things – again, ancient prejudices echo when Manchin associates abolishing the filibuster with encouraging “volatility”, “haste” and “transitory passion”.The Trump tax cuts were the most rushed legislation in recent years; the measure was as incomprehensible to many senators voting for it as it was a delight for the lobbyists who had written it. Conversely, laws to reduce gun violence have been debated for years and have enormous, well-considered support among the supposedly fickle and irrational people – and yet something like the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey Bill, agreed after the Sandy Hook massacre, died in a political institution that makes some more equal than others.Plenty of historians have pointed out the use of the filibuster to preserve white supremacy. But even if the filibuster were not what Obama called a “Jim Crow relic”, the willful misunderstanding of legitimate minority input as minority rule is unacceptable: it disrespects the majority of citizens. There is no evidence that it leads to more bipartisanship; and there is no reason to believe that, as the master of mixing the maximum number of metaphors from West Virginia says, its end would “pour fuel on to the fire of political whiplash and dysfunction that is tearing this nation apart”.Even if one is not particularly concerned with the finer points of democratic theory (such as: if you get fewer votes, you lose the election), one should find the filibuster unacceptable because it disables government. As Biden keeps saying, democracy has to deliver for citizens. A system that turns into what Francis Fukuyama – not exactly a raving lefty radical – calls a vetocracy cannot do so.
Jan-Werner Mueller teaches at Princeton and is a Guardian US columnist. His most recent book is Democracy Rules
TopicsUS SenateOpinionUS politicsUS CongressJoe ManchincommentReuse this content More