US Politics

Protesting voting rights activists arrested as Biden meets with ManchinSixty were detained as the president met with the key Democrat who has become a roadblock to his agenda During a crucial week for Joe Biden’s agenda that will likely feature a political showdown on his Build Back Better legislation in the Senate, voting rights activists are turning up the pressure in Washington.As the US president met with a key centrist Democrat who has acted as a roadblock to his plans – West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin – more than sixty demonstrators were arrested as they protested: singing songs and blocking traffic near the US Capitol.The diverse group of activists came to Washington from around the country and were focused primarily on issues around voting rights and poverty. When the focus turned to voting rights, the talk became more focused on Manchin and the White House’s apparent inability to apply all of its power to pass federal legislation to protect the vote.Arizona students stage hunger strike to urge Sinema to support voting reformRead more“I think we’re moving the ball but we have to get it across the finish line – we’re going to have to keep pushing. They don’t need to be going home for Christmas. We need to get voting rights taken care of,” said Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, as she waited to speak to the assembled crowd of more than 500 people.As news spread that Manchin was signaling he wants more changes to Biden’s already stripped back Build Back Better legislation because of his concerns over inflation, activists at the rally were not impressed.“That’s his whole game. Slow it down, block it, get things get done for the billionaires, his corporate donors – then to undermine voting rights let all the voting suppression bills get passed that wouldn’t get passed if we had the Voting Rights Act restored and we had federal protection,” said the Rev William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach.“He’s a trickster. The president needs to go to West Virginia. Stop meeting with him in his office. Go to his state,” Barber added shortly before leading activists into a street protest.With talk of direct actions and in-office protests directed at Manchin and others, Barber and other activists promised to apply more pressure on lawmakers this week.Barber and several other voting rights activists have been frustrated by what they view as a lack of focus and from the Biden administration regarding voting rights.Many have warned the White House that Biden’s 7m vote victory, buttressed by strong turnout in predominately Black cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, will be difficult to repeat without cementing the support of those same voters.With 2022 midterm elections on the horizon, the urgency about which agenda items Biden will focus is a hot topic in the activists community.“We go to the streets for non-violent direct action. This is just the precursor,” Barber told the crowd of activists.“If you think this is an action, you watch how we mobilize when we don’t have to be so Covid safe,” said Barber.“There is only one answer to nineteen states that have passed voter suppression laws. There’s only one answer to all this election subversion. There’s only one answer to all this work that they’re doing to purge people from election boards. There’s only one answer to gerrymandering. That is, ‘Pass the acts now!’” said Barbara Arwine, who leads the Transformative Justice Coalition to the crowd.Arnwine was referring to the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would restore provisions in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that were removed by the supreme court’s Shelby v Holder decision in 2013.TopicsUS voting rightsJoe ManchinBiden administrationUS politicsJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

America witnessed a coup attempt. Now it’s sleep-walking into another disasterRebecca SolnitWhat happened on 6 January was an attempt to overturn the election results and the rule of law. The threat is far from over Even as the mob ran screaming and smashing through the capitol on 6 January , it was clear this was a coup attempt. It was equally clear that it had been instigated by the then president and his circle, much of whose audience in the “stop the steal” rally would become that mob. Everything since has been fill-in, important in building the legal case against the leaders of this attempted coup and establishing the facts for history and public knowledge – and, one hopes, for efforts to prevent another such attempt.That the goal was a coup is a solemnly horrifying fact. That those who orchestrated it and those who have excused and dismissed it afterward continue to conspire against the rule of law and the right of the people to choose their leaders is another such fact. Documents such as the Powerpoint presentation turned over to the 6 January commission by Trump’s then chief of staff Mark Meadows confirm the details and build our understanding of the threat. On the basis of sometimes ridiculous pretexts, the circle around Trump intended to steal the election and seize power. Many, including Utah senator Mike Lee and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, reportedly knew the agenda.Had they succeeded in grabbing power with such an openly lawless act, they could have kept it only by suspending the rule of law. This is what a dictatorship is, and this is what they wanted: a government in which laws are nothing and the ruling junta or thug is everything. What the American people and foreign nations would have done in response might have overturned it further down the road, had it not failed that day, but the whole business is still terrifying, and the threat is not over.It was clear the military leadership was already alarmed: on 3 January , all 10 living secretaries of defense coauthored an editorial declaring, “Efforts to involve the US armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”That few Republicans would defend the US constitution, the voice of the voters and the orderly transition of power was also obvious. At 1.09pm that day, the Capitol police chief said he wanted to declare an emergency and call in the National Guard. At 1.11pm, Trump ended his speech with the words “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore…” At 1.12pm, two of America’s slimiest elected officials, Congressman Paul Gosar and Senator Ted Cruz, were objecting to certifying Arizona’s electoral votes. Gosar, according to two participants in the riot, seemed to know what was coming and had promised “blanket pardons”. The evacuation of the House and Senate would begin an hour later. At 2.24, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…”Two conservative Republicans, Vice-President Mike Pence and Congresswoman Liz Cheney, have been among the few to refuse to participate in the coup, the big lie and the surrounding corruption, and have paid for it. That terrible day, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly called Trump to rage and curse at him and demand he call the mob off, but he would then fall in line and fudge the reality and significance of what happened. That day, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell noted that to overturn the election results would send democracy into a “death spiral”. Afterward he was furious and shaken, but he too squirmed his way back into alignment with the big lie. By May he was trying to block the formation of the 6 January committee to investigate what had happened.The crisis isn’t just that we had a coup attempt almost a year ago, but that the Republican party has itself become so venal, so corrupt, so ruthless in its quest for power, that it seems assured that we will see further attempts to overrule any election outcomes they don’t like. Already the kind of election laws they’ve pushed across the country seem aimed at such goals, and voter suppression has long been one of their anti-democratic tactics (it played a substantial role in Trump’s 2016 win, and the genuine illegitimacies of that election – foreign interference, anomalies the recount might have uncovered had the Republicans not stopped it – were appropriated as false claims for 2020).The Republicans made a devil’s bargain decades ago, when they decided that they would not change course to win the votes of an increasingly nonwhite, increasingly progressive people, but would try to suppress those who would vote against them. That is, they pitted themselves against democracy as participatory government and free and fair elections. The rhetoric of the far right makes it clear they are fearful and know their power will ebb if they cannot command and subvert the laws and elections of this nation, and they are aiming at some form of minority rule.That’s perfectly clear from their attack on the constitutional process unfolding that afternoon of 6 January, which was itself a refusal to accept a loss. The refusal to recognize the authority of Congress by Trump associates, including Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, is a further sign of their belief, emboldened by Trump’s four years of criming in public, that they make their own rules. Both have been found in contempt of Congress.The crisis isn’t just that we had a coup attempt and have a political party that has gone rogue, but that much of the rest of the nation seems to be normalizing or forgetting or sleepwalking through the crisis. The warnings are getting more urgent.“They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside,” said NBC anchor Brian Williams on Thursday, in his parting words before leaving the network. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii stated Sunday: “The road to autocracy is paved with overly chill responses from people who would see this all with great clarity if only it were happening in a faraway place.” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy declared, “This is nation-ending stuff we’re dealing with here and folks better wake up soon. I’ll do my part. Think about what yours is.”
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
TopicsUS Capitol attackOpinionUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

Fauci urges Americans to get Covid booster as US nears 800,000 deathsLeading infectious diseases official warns Omicron variant appears to be able to ‘evade’ protection of two initial doses The US government’s leading infectious diseases official, Anthony Fauci, on Sunday stepped up calls for Americans to get a Covid-19 booster shot, as the US is approaching 800,000 lives lost to coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.Fauci warned that the Omicron variant appeared to be able to “evade” the protection of two initial doses of the mRNA-type Covid vaccines – Pfizer/BioNTech’s and Moderna’s – as well as post-infection therapies such as monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma.Omicron is spurring new fears as US infections begin to surge again, with infections currently still led by the highly-transmissable Delta variant that has dominated since the summer.Fauci said an extra vaccine shot provides “optimal” protection against Omicron, even though the government’s official designation of “fully vaccinated” remained at two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, or one of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which was developed by another method.“Preliminary data show that when you get a booster, for example a third shot of an mRNA, it raises the level of protection high enough that it then does do well against the Omicron,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the president, said on ABC.It was, he said: “Another reason to encourage people who are not vaccinated to get vaccinated, but particularly those who are vaccinated to get boosted because that diminution in protection seems to go way back up again. If you want to be optimally protected, you really should get a booster.”Although vaccination rates, particularly boosters, have picked up significantly in recent weeks, about 40% of eligible adults in the US are still not fully protected, and the take-up rate for children ages five to 11, who are newly eligible, remains below 20%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.“Follow the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines, that when you are in an indoor congregate setting and you don’t know the vaccination status of the people around you, wear a mask. Masking is not going to be forever but it can get us out of the very difficult situation we’re in now,” Fauci said.Experts are still discovering the characteristics of Omicron. CDC director Rochelle Walensky last week said that very preliminary data so far showed Omicron was comparatively mild.Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, meanwhile, defended his new vaccine mandate for private employees.“Omicron is here, it’s all over the country, this variant moves fast,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union show.“We have to move faster. What I hear from our business community, their greatest fear is shutdowns, going back to where we were in 2020, to restrictions, to people losing their livelihood.“The greatest threat to employment is that Omicron and the cold winter months are going to supercharge Covid and take us backwards. Since I put mandates in place starting in August, we have seen over a million more doses, 71% of our people fully vaccinated. A lot of those people made the decision because the mandate was there,” he said.A federal judge is set to rule on Tuesday on a challenge to De Blasio’s vaccine mandate for the city’s 160,000 public sector employees, including police, firefighters and sanitation workers.TopicsAnthony FauciCoronavirusInfectious diseasesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

March of the Trump memoirs: Mark Meadows and other Republican reads The former chief of staff has written the most consequential Trump book – if not, thanks to the revelation of the great Covid cover-up, in quite the way he planned. In contrast, McEnany, Navarro and Atlas just play fast and loose with the truthThe Chief’s Chief is the most consequential book on the Trump presidency. In his memoir, Mark Meadows confesses to possibly putting Joe Biden’s life in jeopardy and then covering it up – all in easily digested prose and an unadorned voice. If nothing else, the book has provided plenty of ammunition for Donald Trump to have concluded that Meadows “betrayed” him.Trump tested positive for Covid few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new bookRead moreTrump has trashed The Chief’s Chief as “fake news”, derided Meadows as “fucking stupid”, and falsely claimed that the book “confirmed” that he “did not have Covid before or during the debate”.Actually, when it comes to events in Cleveland on 29 September 2020, Meadows writes: “We’ll probably never know whether President Trump was positive that evening.” But we know he very well might have been.And to think Trump gave Meadows a blurb for his cover: “We will have a big future together”. Hopefully, Meadows received at least 30 pieces of silver as an advance.By the numbers, Trump came in contact with approximately 500 people between the time he received his first positive test, which was followed by a negative one, and his announcement that he did indeed have Covid. Not surprisingly, Trump blamed others for giving him the virus, even intimating that gold star military families did it.Last week, after the Guardian broke news of Meadows’ book, Michael Shear of the New York Times recalled: “Hours after he received the call from Meadows informing him of a positive test, Trump came to the back of AF1 without a mask and talked with reporters for about 10 minutes.”“Several days later”, Shear himself tested positive.The 45th president looks like “patient zero”, a one-man super-spreader.Switching topics, Meadows tags Biden for getting overly handsy and says Andrew Cuomo ogled Hope Hicks. Unsurprisingly, Meadows omits mention of allegations against his own boss. Just one example? E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against Trump, arising from an alleged rape in a department store dressing room.Turning to Republican politics, Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, accuses John Boehner, once House Speaker, of acting like a “Mafia Don”. Again, Meadows does not mention the boss’s behavior.As reported by Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain, Trump once laced into Paul Manafort, his sometime campaign manager, thus: “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”Manafort was convicted on bank and tax charges in 2018. But he stayed a loyal foot soldier and received a pardon from Trump.With Christmas just weeks away, Meadows throws in the following Trump quote as a holiday bonus: “I’m the only one who can save us.”Meadows isn’t the sole Trump administration alum doing his darnedest to portray their guy as America’s saviour. But he is the only one who lets us know Trump tested positive before he tested negative. And that makes his book one for the ages.Other would-be stocking stuffers by Trump insiders convey that they were either in the dark about that fateful Covid test or took care not to share. Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s final press secretary; Peter Navarro, an economics adviser; and Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser, are out with books of their own.Kayleigh McEnany’s book claims don’t stand up to assurances that she didn’t lieRead moreIn her non-tell-all, McEnany makes sure we know of her academic credentials and reiterates her claim that she never lied to reporters. After all, she writes, her education at “Oxford, Harvard and Georgetown” meant she always relied on “truthful, well-sourced, well-researched information”.She doesn’t mention her time at the University of Miami much. But no matter. Elite degrees say more about future earnings and marriage prospects than a penchant for truth. Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania. Boris Johnson, Oxford. Richard Nixon went to Duke and Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale.Nixon was disbarred, Clinton’s law license suspended. Boris is Boris.McEnany thanks the deity repeatedly. Her title, For Such a Time as This, riffs off the Book of Esther. She stays on message for more than 200 pages, lauding Trump for standing for “faith, conservatism and freedom”. But that first positive Covid test, on 26 September, described by Meadows and since confirmed by Maggie Haberman and other pillars of the Washington press? Nada.McEnany writes that on 1 October 2020, two days after the Trump-Biden debate, she learned for the first time that Trump and Melania had “tested positive for Covid-19”. On 2 October, Trump was helicoptered to hospital. On 5 October, McEnany was told she had the virus too. She does not draw a line to Trump’s recklessness.“Thankfully,” she writes, “everyone in the White House made a full and complete recovery, including me.”Not true. McEnany does not mention Crede Bailey, head of the White House security office. When she was Trump’s press secretary, she did.Asked about Bailey at a briefing, McEnany said: “Our heart goes out to his family. They have asked for privacy. And he is recovering, from what I understand. We are very pleased to see that. But he and his family will be in our prayers.”On a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for Bailey’s treatment, a friend wrote: “Crede beat Covid-19 but it came at a significant cost: his big toe on his left foot as well as his right foot and lower leg had to be amputated.” Bailey also suffered long-term lung, heart, liver and kidney damage. According to his family, Trump has never publicly acknowledged Bailey’s “illness”.McEnany delivers a bouquet to Meadows.“You were a constant reminder of faith,” she gushes. “Thank you for being an inspiring leader for the entire West Wing.”Navarro would probably disagree. In fact, it’s a good bet he would concur with Trump’s new assessment of Meadows’ intelligence.In his book, In Trump Time, Navarro repeatedly takes Meadows to task for insufficient loyalty and accessibility. According to Navarro, after Trump lost to Biden, the White House chief of staff’s heart and body were too often not at the White House.“Wherever the heck” Meadows was, Navarro says, he sounded “like Napoleon after Waterloo, getting ready to be shipped out to Elba”.Navarro also blames Meadows for failing to heed a purported warning in 2019 from Cleta Mitchell, a Republican activist and lawyer, that the Democrats “were getting ready to steal the election”. When Meadows was pressed in September 2020 about his failure to act on this tip, Navarro says, all he could muster was, “It just didn’t happen.”The fact that both the House and Senate have documented Meadows’ efforts to put the squeeze on Republican election officials fails to impress Navarro.The Chief’s Chief may have also waived Meadows’ claim of executive privilege. Either way, Meadows’s latest about-face on cooperating with the House select committee investigating the events of 6 January is unlikely to alter Navarro’s impression of him.As for Mitchell, she resigned from her law firm over her role in an infamous call between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.On top of pushing the line that the Democrats stole the election, Navarro lambasts numerous officials for failing to confront China, Mike Pence among them. Significantly, as he goes after Trump’s star-crossed vice-president, Navarro sounds a now-familiar trope of the anti-democratic right.He brands Pence a treacherous “Brutus” who betrayed Trump, an “American Caesar”. Did Navarro forget those gallows bearing Pence’s name? Regardless, the shoutout to a murdered Roman emperor is meant as a full-throated compliment.During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. Last May, Michael Anton of the rightwing Claremont Institute pondered whether the US needed a caesar. Anton was joined on air by Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, a self-described monarchist and pillar of the Dark Enlightenment, a take embraced by the alt-right.Navarro demands “full forensic audits” of the 2020 election and posits that the 6 January insurrection may have been “perpetrated by those who sought to provoke an attack on our Capitol as a means of derailing” a Trump electoral college win.In A Plague Upon Our House, Scott Atlas goes after Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for grabbing headlines but ignores both Trump’s prediction that Covid, “one day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear” and his admission to Bob Woodward that Covid would be worse than he told the public.Former Trump adviser claims to ‘expose unvarnished truth’ of Covid in new bookRead moreCovid has killed nearly 800,000 Americans – and counting. The US faces another Covid winter, with more than 100,000 new cases daily and the Omicron variant looming. Vaccine resistance and Covid deaths have become red-state hallmarks.Atlas is a radiologist and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He joined the Trump White House in August 2020 and resigned after the election.As a Covid adviser he opposed expanded testing and isolation, calling such measures “grossly misguided”. Rather, he argued that the virus could be stymied and herd immunity attained once 20% to 25% of the population contracted it. In his book, he appears to discount the impact of long Covid.Confronted by an open letter from Stanford faculty, challenging his credentials, Atlas threatened legal retaliation. Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s lawyer, demanded immediate retraction. None followed.Atlas, however, did get one big thing right: opposing school closures, which he characterized as an “egregious and inexplicable” policy failure. Closures helped cost the Democrats Virginia. Glenn Youngkin’s win in that race for governor was about more than critical race theory.Trump and Trumpism will remain a force in the Republican party in the years to come. Meadows, McEnaney, Navarro and Atlas are counting on it.Earlier this month, however, Chris Christie spoke at a dinner of DC poohbahs.“I gave Donald Trump my undying loyalty,” he said. “And as we learned this week, he definitely gave me Covid.”Just a reminder, folks.TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsPolitics booksCoronavirusfeaturesReuse this content More

The supreme court’s abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seemMoira DoneganIn allowing Texas’s outrageous abortion ban to stay in place, the court signaled that it is willing to sacrifice its own legitimacy and power in order to destroy Roe Don’t be fooled by the supreme court’s nominal hedging on its endorsement of SB8, the Texas abortion ban that deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion after six weeks’ gestation. In a ruling on Friday, the court held that a lawsuit by Texas abortion providers could go forward – but only on narrow grounds. Only those state officials responsible for licensing medical providers may be sued, the court ordered – no one else involved in the state’s practical maintenance of SB8 is liable. The ruling said, for instance, that the providers could not sue court clerks, those bureaucrats tasked with actually docketing the lawsuits that would enforce SB8.For providers, it seems that the best possible outcome for the suit now is that they may be able to secure an injunction preventing medical providers from being delicensed. These perplexing limits placed by the court on which parties can be sued to challenge SB8 ensures that though the suit against the law will be at least partly allowed to go forward, it will be largely toothless.In the meantime, SB8 will remain law. Women in Texas are effectively banned from securing a legal abortion in the state, even though the still-standing Roe v Wade decision says that they have a right to one. It’s likely that SB8 will remain in effect at least for the duration of Roe’s lifetime – meaning that Texas women will not be able to obtain legal abortions after six weeks for the foreseeable future. Many of the initial media responses to the court’s opinion emphasized that since the suit was allowed to go forward, on technical grounds, the ruling was a narrow win for the abortion providers. But in reality Friday was a massive win for the rightwing Texas government, and for anti-choice forces nationwide.That SB8 has been allowed to take effect – now for the second time – by the supreme court reflects the justices’ eagerness to gut abortion rights. The fact of the matter is that the court is already set to overturn Roe and allow states to ban abortion outright. That much was clear to anyone who listened to last week’s oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, a case surrounding the constitutionality of a 15-week ban in Mississippi, which devolved into grim misogynist spectacle as the Republican appointees held court on the supposed ease of giving infants up for adoption and their own robust comfort with overturning long-settled precedent.That ruling is scheduled to come down in late May or early June. When it does, a slim majority of states are expected to ban abortion, either immediately or very soon thereafter. That means that soon SB8 – and the copycat bills that it has inspired in states like Florida and Arkansas – won’t be necessary for the anti-choice lobby to achieve their aims. Instead of concocting an elaborate enforcement process in which rogue anti-woman vigilantes enforce their abortion bans, the states will be able to enforce their bans themselves.SB8, then, and the supreme court’s embrace of it, can be understood not only as a harbinger of the justices’ deep contempt for the abortion right, but also of their childish impatience to exert this contempt upon American women. They can’t even wait six months. They want to ban abortion right now. In pursuit of this goal, the supreme court has proven itself willing to undermine its own capacity to oversee state laws, to enforce federal supremacy, and to protect constitutional rights.The anti-choice substance of the court’s decision in SB8 was not surprising; its embrace of Texas’s tactics perhaps was. Aside from its direct attempt to undermine women’s rights, SB8 also took aim at judicial authority. By banning abortion long before viability, the law flouted the supreme court’s precedents in Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey. But that much a slew of vehemently anti-choice justices would probably forgive: all six of the Republican appointees clearly believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and at least five of them (all but Roberts, who seems more trepidatious) appear eager to overturn it. But in its novel enforcement mechanism, SB8 sought specifically to evade judicial review – not just to give the court an opportunity to overturn its own precedent, but to make it so that within Texas borders supreme court precedent didn’t matter.In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared SB8 to the views of John C Calhoun – a nineteenth-century pro-slavery campaigner who argued that states have the right to nullify federal laws that they do not like. America fought its civil war in no small part over this question. By first allowing the SB8 to go into effect, in September, and then by gutting the lawsuit against it this Friday, the supreme court has, shockingly, endorsed a scheme to undermine its own power, and granted a state the ability to evade federal precedent. Nullification, it seems, is back in style.For years, court watchers have wondered whether the justices’ institutionalist instincts would overcome their misogynist ones: if the Court had to choose between maintaining its own power and legitimacy, and overturning Roe, which would it choose? Now, it seems, we have our answer.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
TopicsUS politicsOpinionRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)AbortioncommentReuse this content More

In 1970, David Attie was sent to photograph the birth of the kids’ landmark TV show as part of a cold war propaganda drive by the US government. But these newly found images are just one part of the programme’s radical historyby Steve Rose“I’m still pinching myself that my dad, my own flesh and blood, had Ernie on one hand and Bert on the other,” Eli Attie says. “It is like he got to sit at Abbey Road studios and watch the Beatles record I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Attie’s father was the photographer David Attie who, in 1970, visited the set of Sesame Street in New York City during its first season. His images lay forgotten in a wardrobe for the next 50 years, until Eli recently discovered them. They are a glimpse behind the curtain of a cultural phenomenon waiting to happen. Here are not only Bert and Ernie but Kermit, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch with his original orange fur (he was green by season two). And here are the people who brought these characters to life, chiefly Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the Lennon and McCartney of Muppetdom. What also stands out in Attie’s images are the children visiting the set. As in the show itself, they are clearly so beguiled by the puppets, they completely ignore the humans controlling them.Eli himself was one of those visitors, although he has no memory of it. “I was in diapers, and as the story goes, I was loud and not to be quieted down, and was yanked off the set,” he says. His parents and older brother Oliver at least made it into the photos. Oliver was even in an episode of the show, in the background in Hooper’s Store, Eli explains, with just a hint of jealousy.Fifty-two years and more than 4,500 episodes later, Sesame Street remains the premier address in children’s entertainment. It is still watched by hundreds of millions around the world, and broadcast in more than 140 countries. One attempt to statistically measure the show’s impact on American society failed because nobody could find a large enough sample group who hadn’t watched it. Sesame Street’s place in US culture was bizarrely underlined last month when Big Bird announced on Twitter: “I got the Covid-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” He was promoting the rollout of vaccinations to five- to 11-year-olds, but Big Bird’s tweet, combined with Sesame Street’s recent introduction of a new Korean American muppet, has prompted a conservative backlash. Texas senator Ted Cruz responded: “Government propaganda … for your 5 year old!” Cruz later doubled down, tweeting a cartoon of the Sesame Street characters sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, with a dead, cooked Big Bird in place of a turkey.Others piled in. The influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) expressly banned Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters from its next conference, and CPAC organiser Matt Schlapp called for PBS, which broadcasts the show (although new episodes now air on HBO Max), to be defunded. “They just won’t stop in their push for woke politics,” he complained. Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers went even further, declaring: “Big Bird is a communist.”Beyond the optics of beating up on universally beloved children’s characters, in the context of David Attie’s images, these takes could hardly be more wrong. Attie had been commissioned to photograph Sesame Street by Amerika, a Russian-language magazine funded by the US state department and distributed in the Soviet Union. Essentially, it was a cold war propaganda project. Soviet officials would regularly return copies of Amerika to the US embassy unsold, saying their citizens were not interested. In truth, the magazine was so sought after, it became a black-market commodity, explains Eli Attie. “One embassy official said to me they had traded two copies of Amerika for these impossible-to-find ballet tickets in Moscow at the time,” he says. So Sesame Street was used as government propaganda, just not in the way Cruz and Rogers might imagine.You could say that Sesame Street had a political mission from the outset, as the new documentary, Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (to which Attie’s book is a companion piece), lays out. One of the show’s co-founders, the broadcaster Joan Ganz Cooney, was involved “intellectually and spiritually” with the civil rights movement. The other, psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, was concerned about a widening education gap in the 1960s US, which was leaving behind socioeconomically deprived children, particularly African Americans. These children were often spending long hours at home watching television while their parents were busy working. Instead of jingles for beer commercials, Cooney and Morrisett reasoned, why not use television to teach them literacy and numeracy?With an $8m federal grant, the newly formed Children’s Television Workshop spent two years researching how to make content that would not only be educational but entertaining. That’s where The Muppet Workshop came in (even if the hippy-ish Henson was initially distrusted by his more academic colleagues). Not to mention the songs, the anarchic comedy sketches, the surreal animations, and the improvised child-with-muppet segments. The whole thing was an experiment. Nothing like it had been done before and there was no guarantee it would be a success, but everyone seemed to be on the same page.As Cooney puts it in the documentary: “We weren’t so worried about reaching middle-class children but we really, really wanted to reach inner-city kids badly. It was hardly worth doing if it didn’t reach them.” This explains why the show was set on an ordinary New York street – a radical move for children’s TV, a familiar place for the target audience. Equally radically, the show was multicultural and inclusive from the start, with white, Black and Latino actors alongside non-human characters of all colours. Even the title sequence and the guests reflected the US’s diversity (the first season featured James Earl Jones, BB King, Mahalia Jackson and Jackie Robinson). As the long-running writer and director Jon Stone said of the show’s inclusive approach: “We’ve never beaten that horse to death by talking about it; we simply show it.”Sesame Street has taught kids about all manner of life topics. Not only racism (most recently with the introduction of two new African American characters, post-Black Lives Matter) but also poverty, addiction, autism, HIV and Aids, public health (Covid was not Big Bird’s first jab, he also got a measles vaccination in 1972), and gentrification (in 1994, the street was under threat of demolition from a loud-mouthed property tycoon named “Ronald Grump”, played by Joe Pesci). Sesame Street has even tackled the concept of death: when Will Lee, who played storekeeper Mr Hooper, died in 1982, the show featured a wrenching segment in which neighbours, clearly tearfully, explain to Big Bird that Mr Hooper is dead and is never coming back.It wasn’t just “inner-city kids” Sesame Street was popular with. While his father was working, Eli Attie’s artist mother would also put him and his brother in front of the TV to watch it so she could paint. “There was a block of hours that it was on public broadcasting stations in the New York region. So she just thought: ‘Hallelujah. I can place them here, they’re entertained,’” he says. “We were learning to count, we were learning to spell and we were learning a kind of comedy: we both became fans of Monty Python and standup comedy and I’m sure this was the gateway.” Attie went on to become a TV writer and producer, working on shows such as The West Wing, House and Billions.Sesame Street’s inclusive, humane, progressive agenda has always had its enemies. Mississippi broadcasters refused to air the first season back in 1969 on account of the show’s desegregated setting (they backed down after a few weeks). In the past decade, the conservative chorus of disapproval has been getting louder. Before Cruz and co, the show and PBS have been targeted by the likes of Mitt Romney, Fox News, and, inevitably, Donald Trump.“Sesame has never been a political show; it has been a very socially relevant show,” says Trevor Crafts, producer of the Street Gang documentary. Although the political climate today has echoes of the 1960s, when Sesame Street was created, he feels. “It was a very similar time. There was a lot of social unrest, and here we are again. It just shows that you need something like Sesame Street to sort of increase the volume of good in the world. And also to know that through creativity, you can make change. Positive change can occur if you’re willing to see a problem and try to fix it and do it creatively.”Where some might see a political agenda, many more would simply see a model for the kind of society the US would like to be. “I think it showed everybody: ‘This is who we should be in our hearts,’” Eli Attie says. “It was utopian. It was optimistic, it was challenging and smart. And it didn’t talk down to children.” As well as a family album, his father’s photos capture that spirit of playful idealism. “I see now that’s part of who I am,” he says. “And it’s part of who we all are.” TopicsChildren’s TVUS televisionTelevisionPhotographyThe MuppetsArt and design booksfeaturesReuse this content More

How dismantling Roe v Wade could imperil other ‘core, basic human rights’Supreme court appears inclined to severely curtail or overturn Roe v Wade after hearing Mississippi case, which could have affect gay rights, contraceptives and fertility treatments Constitutional scholars in the US said a litany of rights, from same-sex marriage and sex to birth control and in vitro fertilization, could come into question if the country’s highest court moves to overrule or weaken Roe v Wade.The supreme court last week heard arguments in the case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which centers on whether the state of Mississippi can ban abortion at 15 weeks gestation, roughly nine weeks before bans are permitted under current law.The Mississippi case is widely regarded as the most important abortion rights case since Roe v Wade, when the supreme court effectively legalized abortion nationally in 1973. A decision in the Dobbs case is expected June 2022.Although supreme court opinions are notoriously difficult to predict, a majority of justices on the conservative-leaning court appeared inclined to severely curtail or overturn Roe v Wade, which protects abortion rights in states hostile to the procedure.Legal scholars warned that the impacts of such a move would likely be widespread, because abortion rights are rooted in the same implied constitutional right to privacy that is the foundation for other intimate personal decisions Americans now take for granted.Gay rights, contraceptives, certain fertility treatments and even interracial marriage, “are imperiled because they’re all rooted in that right to privacy,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University law school and an expert in constitutional, family and reproductive rights law, told the Guardian.“All of this has been implied because they’re understood to be core, basic human rights,” said Murray. “You don’t need the state to recognize them because they are vested in you by virtue of being a human.”Currently, states are prevented from banning abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb, a concept known as “viability”. But at the hearing on 1 December, a majority of justices appeared ready to uphold Mississippi’s law, which would require either invalidating the “viability” standard or overturn Roe v Wade entirely.In arguments, justices pointed to several ways they may reinterpret the Roe v Wade decision. Some, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, were skeptical there is a right to privacy and were swayed by the lack of an explicit reference to the right in the constitution, a concept known as “textualism”.“If we were talking about the second amendment, I know exactly what we’re talking about,” said Thomas. “If we’re talking about the fourth amendment, I know what we’re talking about because it’s written. It’s there.”That argument could be paired with one pushed forward by conservatives, such as Mississippi solicitor general Scott Stewart, who argued a right to abortion is not grounded in the “history or tradition” of the country.“A right to abortion [is] not grounded in the text,” said Stewart. “It’s grounded on abstract concepts that this court has rejected in other contexts as supplying a substantive right”.The theory underlying that right to privacy is called “substantive due process”, or the doctrine that the constitution protects both the procedures of due process, such as how criminal law is applied, and “substantive” guarantees of life, liberty and property.“If you ask where rights come from in the US constitution there’s basically two general answers,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and a historian who has studied abortion rights since Roe v Wade. “There’s the rights spelled out in the text of the constitution,” such as rights to bear arms or against unreasonable search and seizure, “and there’s other rights, like the right to marry and the right to parent that are not in the text of the constitution”.Those are rights established by substantive due process. For example, in 1965 the court struck down birth control bans for married couples in Griswold v Connecticut. In 1967 with Loving v Virginia, the court invalidated anti-miscegenation laws that barred interracial marriage. In 1972 in Eisenstadt v Baird, the court found people who were not married also had a right to birth control. In 1973, the court recognized a right to terminate a pregnancy.“These rights of parental autonomy are underpinnings of the right to privacy, marriage is included in this,” said Murray. “In a later case, the state says marriage [and] procreation are basic civil rights of man.”Cases based in substantive due process continued into the modern era, when in 2003 the court invalidated anti-sodomy statutes in Lawrence v Texas, and established a right to same-sex conduct. In 2016, the court found same-sex couples also had a right to marry in Obergefell v Hodges.Attorneys for Jackson Women’s Health Organization responded on the principle of substantive due process when quizzed on this principle by Thomas.“If I were to ask you what constitutional right protects the right to abortion, is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What would it be?” asked Thomas.“It’s liberty, Your Honor,” said Julie Rikelman, litigation director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented the abortion clinic.Briefs to the court in Dobbs directly challenge that principle, such as from the conservative, anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life. Attorneys for the group, the conservative legal activists Adam Mortara and Jonathan Mitchell, argued the court does not necessarily need to overturn decisions protecting gay rights.“But neither should the court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread,” wrote Mortara and Mitchell. “Lawrence and Obergefell, while far less hazardous to human life, are as lawless as Roe.” The same brief argued women could control their reproduction by refraining from sex. Neither Mitchell nor Mortara responded to an interview request.Until the supreme court issues a decision, it is unclear exactly how rights protected by substantive due process might be affected. However, scholars consider same-sex and reproductive rights to be the most vulnerable because there is an active political campaign to circumscribe them. By contrast, there is little contemporary criticism of interracial marriage.If Roe v Wade is overruled, “It will be on the ground it was a right that was untethered from constitutional text,” said Murray. If that view prevails on the court, rights to contraception, gay rights and in vitro fertilization could also be quickly implicated, since, “all of these things are untethered from constitutional text and historically were not available in the US”.What’s more, the history of abortion rights may provide a roadmap for other rights to be hobbled, even if substantive due process prevails.Murray offered the example of a 2017 case, in which three conservative justices, led by justice Neil Gorsuch, argued states could restrict birth certificates of same-sex parents. Gorsuch argued there appeared to be nothing unconstitutional about a “biology-based birth registration regime” where only one same-sex parent would be listed on the certificate.“It is a really good example of how they have dismantled Roe piecemeal and incrementally could be applied to these other rights,” said Murray.TopicsRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsAbortionfeaturesReuse this content More

Pence appears to set up a presidential run – can he win over Trump’s base?The former vice-president seems to be playing a long game for the 2024 election, possibly betting Trump’s influence over the Republican party will wane “Hang Mike Pence!” was the chilling chant of the mob at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Can the same constituency be persuaded to vote Mike Pence on 5 November 2024? He, for one, appears to think so.The former vice-president this week travelled across New Hampshire, host of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary elections, to meet local activists, raise money and deliver a speech attacking potential opponent Joe Biden.‘It’s who they are’: gun-fetish photo a symbol of Republican abasement under TrumpRead morePence, who has nursed White House ambitions since his teens, has also paid recent visits to the early-voting states Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, implying that a run is more likely than not. But there is one problem.Donald Trump.The ex-president, whom Pence served faithfully – or obsequiously, in the eyes of critics – has not forgiven him for ignoring his plea to overturn the result of the 2020 election. That Pence, presiding over the Senate at it certified Biden’s victory, had no such power has become irrelevant at this stage.Pence’s continued insistence that he did his constitutional duty on 6 January has done little to assuage the sense of betrayal among livid Trump supporters. In June he was heckled as a “traitor” during a speech to a gathering of religious conservatives in Orlando, Florida – hardly a positive omen.“His biggest challenge is the people that he’s going to need to vote for him – the Republican primary base – are also the people who wanted to hang him on January 6,” said Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee. “I don’t see how you overcome that.”Yet the former Indiana governor appears to be playing a long game, perhaps betting that Trump’s influence over the party will wane over the next three years. He may also be calculating that the stand he made for democracy on 6 January – a day on which he refused to flee the Capitol, taking cover in an underground car park – will resonate with moderate Republicans and independents.Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist in Indiana, said: “He’s doing everything he needs to set himself up to run and, if Trump is not the nominee or is not running, I think he’s clearly the frontrunner.”“I think people are realising that he was an unlikely hero on January 6. In the end, even for people who disagree with him for many other policy positions he’s taken, whether it was as a governor or as a vice-president, he did the right thing when the pressure was on on January 6.”Pence’s visit to New Hampshire was his second to the state, which has a huge say in choosing the party nominee, since leaving office. He attended holiday parties, raised money for state Republicans and posed for photos at at the Simply Delicious bakery in Bedford.In a speech hosted by Heritage Action, a conservative policy advocacy organisation, the 62-year-old accused Biden of fuelling inflation and lambasted the president’s social and environmental spending plan, warning: “Keep your hands off the American people’s pay cheques.”As is customary at this stage of an election cycle, Pence did not confirm or deny whether he was running for president, insisting that his priority was next year’s midterm elections for Congress.He told the Associated Press: “To be honest with you, all of my focus is on 2022 because I think we’ve got a historic opportunity for not just a winning election, but a realignment election. So I’m dedicating all of my energy to the process of really winning back the Congress and winning statehouses in 2022. And then in 2023, we’ll look around and we’ll go where we’re called.”The campaign-style tour did not go unnoticed by Trump, who released a statement that said: “Good man, but big mistake on not recognizing the massive voter fraud and irregularities” in the 2020 election. There is no evidence of any such fraud or irregularities.Pence, however, may choose to borrow from the playbook of Glenn Youngkin, who recently won election as governor of Virginia by keeping Trump at arm’s length without overtly denouncing him, thereby reaping the best of both worlds: the party establishment and “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base.There are already signs of Pence having his cake and eating it too. In a radio interview on Wednesday he repeated a now familiar line that he and Trump may “never see eye to eye” on the events of 6 January, but he also told several news outlets “there were irregularities that happened at the state level” in the election. He also insisted that he parted with his boss on good terms.This Trump-lite approach might do just enough to satisfy the former president’s followers while promising other Republicans a lower political temperature.Michael D’Antonio, a Pence biographer, said: “What’s weird is he earned his bona fides with Trump by being so craven in his loyalty and then he expressed his independence in that one moment when it really mattered. So he could make a play in both directions and say, ‘Look, I’m Donald Trump but without the violence.’” There are signs of the Maga core “cooling off” or losing interest in politics, D’Antonio added. “I also knew a number of Trump voters who chose him in 2016 because of Pence. So Pence may have built up a lot of credibility with people. And I guess the last point is, you don’t need to win 50% to get the nomination.”Some Republicans, including former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have said they will not contest the primaries if Trump throws his hat in the ring. Others, such as ex-New Jersey governor Chris Christie, have rejected the idea that a Trump candidacy should prevent others running.Florida governor Ron DeSantis, South Carolina senator Tim Scott and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo are seen as potential contenders to be party standard bearer. Pence, however, might hope that his status as a former vice-president would count in his favor, just as it did for Biden last year.Clues to his intentions include the fact he is writing a book and recording a regular podcast: in the latest episode of American Freedom, the devout Christian says “we hope and pray” the supreme court will overturn Roe v Wade, its 1973 decision upholding a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.Should he secure the nomination, however, Pence would be hard pushed to win over millions of Trump critics who have not forgotten how he failed to speak out or take a principled stand during four years of chaos. There are countless hours of footage of him giving speeches in which he mentions “President Trump” over and over again, praising his “leadership” and calling him “my friend”.Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide, said: “Mike Pence will be regarded for what he is, which is a coward void of any real moral conviction or principles.“The fact that he is turning around now, still trying to court the hearts and minds and votes of the very people who perpetrated the domestic terrorist attack on our country illustrates that he is the worst kind of political figure because, even though he may not believe these things, he’s still pandering and catering to those elements. I don’t believe that history will look back on him kindly at all.”TopicsMike PenceRepublicansUS elections 2024US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More