US Politics

Chris Cuomo accused of sexual harassment days before CNN fired himLawyer says accuser came forward after New York’s AG office showed Cuomo took much more active role in helping brother Chris Cuomo was hit with a new allegation of sexual harassment days before CNN announced it was firing him amid an investigation into work he did defending his brother from similar harassment allegations.Chris Cuomo fired by CNN for helping brother Andrew fight sexual misconduct chargesRead moreAn attorney, Debra Katz, said on Sunday her client alleged “serious sexual misconduct” by Cuomo and had contacted CNN about the allegation on Wednesday.CNN suspended Cuomo earlier this week after details emerged about how he assisted his brother, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, as he faced sexual harassment allegations.CNN officials said “additional information has come to light” when it announced Chris Cuomo’s firing, but did not elaborate.Katz said the accuser decided to come forward after the New York attorney general’s office released evidence showing Cuomo had taken a much more active role than previously thought in strategizing and helping to craft a response to the allegations his brother was facing.When the initial allegations surfaced against Andrew Cuomo, Chris Cuomo told viewers he had “always cared very deeply about these issues”, Katz said.“Hearing the hypocrisy of Chris Cuomo’s on-air words and disgusted by his efforts to try to discredit these women, my client retained counsel to report his serious sexual misconduct against her to CNN,” Katz said in the statement.CNN was reviewing Chris Cuomo’s conduct following the new information. A law firm recommended his firing.“It goes without saying that these decisions are not easy, and there are a lot of complex factors involved,” CNN chief Jeff Zucker wrote in an email to CNN staff on Saturday.Cuomo issued a statement on Twitter, calling the decision disappointing.“This is not how I want my time at CNN to end but I have already told you why and how I helped my brother. So let me now say as disappointing as this is, I could not be more proud of the team at Cuomo Prime Time and the work we did,” he said.The new misconduct allegation comes after a veteran TV executive, Shelley Ross, wrote a column for the New York Times in September saying Chris Cuomo groped her at a party 16 years ago, when they both worked for ABC News.Cuomo told the newspaper: “I apologized to her then, and I meant it.”TopicsAndrew CuomoUS politicsNew YorkCNNnewsReuse this content More

Bob Dole: soldier, politician and Republican of the old school The senator and presidential pick was a political animal for sure – it is sad that his belief in service, decency and compromise should come to seem so remote0In the Apennine mountains in 1945, Bob Dole was hit by fire from a German machine gun. Through sheer force of will, endless hours of strengthening, an experimental drug and the extraordinary kindness of a doctor who performed seven operations for free, Dole was able to rebuild his life. His right arm had limited motion. His left suffered numbness. It was painful to write. A signed note from Dole is a treasure.Bob Dole, giant of Republican politics and presidential nominee, dies aged 98Read moreBeating the governor of Kansas to win a Senate seat in 1968, he rose to Republican leader. When Gerald Ford selected him as his running mate in 1976, his initial impression on Americans was a bit sharp: “Democrat wars” was the most famous line from his debate with Walter Mondale. But he recovered and spoke of “hard choices”, basically code for reducing the federal deficit.He called himself the “heartland candidate” and that was true. His speech accepting the nomination for president in 1996 was roundly criticised for its line about “a bridge to the past”. In response, Bill Clinton proposed a “bridge to the future”. But Dole had a point. That glance to history was essential: “Whenever we forget its singular presence, it gives us a lesson in grace and awe.” Few were quite sure where Clinton’s bridge was going – or when it might be completed.Dole offered a moral vision. “What is more important, wealth or honor? Only right conduct distinguishes a great nation from one that cannot rise above itself … All things flow from doing what is right.” This was sincerity, not sentiment. Rare indeed the politician who could say with integrity, “I do not need the presidency to make or refresh my soul. For greatness lies not in what office you hold, but on how honest you are in how you face adversity and in your willingness to stand fast in hard places.”His was an older Republicanism, one that said: “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you, tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits which are clearly marked are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.” Ever the party loyalist, he called himself a “Trumper” but also “sort of Trumped out” – and he flatly rejected the lie of electoral fraud in 2020.His voice calls out in today’s deep troubles: “Is the principle of unity, so hard-fought and at the cost of so many lives, having been contested again and again in our history, and at such a terrible price, to be casually abandoned to the urge to divide?”In their debate, Clinton said, “I like Bob Dole. You can probably tell that.” Dole asked viewers to check his website, a first for presidential candidates. His wry humor and distance from hoopla struck a chord with some Gen X voters.Running against peace and prosperity is hard. Ross Perot’s second bid did not help. Yet Dole pressed on, loyal to the party and the ticket he led. Then he moved on.Losing “hasn’t been all bad”, he said. He did a commercial for Viagra – but only after he could vouch for it following prostate cancer. Addressing stigma was his life’s work. If speaking up could help, why not risk the jokes?He could happily discuss deficiency payments for farmers for hours – that’s what senators do – and to him that sort of thing mattered more than personal revelations. Referring to himself in the third person was mocked, but one knew where he stood.When he was introspective, one had the sense the past, of good people making a living on the unforgiving prairie, was never far away. There was an earthy honesty too often missing in politics today but popular when it appears: “Facts are better than dreams and good presidents and good candidates don’t run from the truth.”The charge of being an intellectual lightweight was unfair. Dole just didn’t agree with some of the new Republican intellectuals. The man whose father ran a creamery knew budgets had to be balanced, a lesson learned on the prairie, where “a man is very small, and if he thinks otherwise, he is wrong”.The Americans with Disabilities Act was his proudest accomplishment. Strongly committed to civil rights, he worked with former rival George McGovern to develop an international school lunch program and received the World Food Prize. A lion of the Senate, his cross-party friendship with Daniel Inouye, also grievously wounded in the second world war, is a telling reminder of what Washington once was.Dole may remind British readers somewhat of Denis Healey. As the Guardian wrote in its obituary of Healey, “it is rarely enough in politics to say: ‘I’m here if you want me.’ Always wanting to ‘do something rather than be something’, Healey was too busy to be a faction-fighter or plotter.”The White House losersRead moreFor Dole, “honorable compromise is no sin. It is what protects us from absolutism and intolerance”.It was said Dole wanted to be president in case decisions needed to be made – a reminder of another Kansan, Dwight Eisenhower. After all, he might have reasoned, the big issues were decided – democracy, decency, honour, economic opportunity, civil rights, a strong defense, support for allies – but the small decisions mattered too. Why not Bob Dole to make them honestly?The substance of those decisions would generally have been wise and, as with Eisenhower, likely bolder than expected. A Dole presidency would have reset the country for the new millennium: less talk, more action, less fluff, more substance.He carried a pen in his disabled right hand. As in 1945, he was always ready for work.
John S Gardner is a writer. He was special assistant to George HW Bush and deputy assistant to George W Bush
TopicsUS politicsRepublicansSecond world warUS CongressUS SenateBill ClintonfeaturesReuse this content More

Republicans confident supreme court will overturn abortion rightsMississippi governor Tate Reeves says state ‘snap-back’ legislation will ban almost all abortion if Roe v Wade is thrown out entirely

Opinion: the supreme court is coming for women’s rights
As the supreme court weighs the future of abortion access in America, Republicans on Sunday expressed confidence that the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision would soon be overturned, paving the way for a raft of anti-abortion legislation around the country next year.‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical angerRead moreOn Wednesday, the supreme court heard arguments over a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Observers suggested that the conservative supermajority on the court appeared poised to uphold the law and potentially go further by overturning Roe, which protects a woman’s right to choose. A decision is not expected until June next year.Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, told CNN’s State of the Union he had “some reason for optimism” after this week’s arguments.He also confirmed that if the landmark ruling was overturned entirely, Mississippi would enforce a ban on almost all abortions in the state under a so-called “trigger law”.“That is a yes,” Reeves said when asked if he would enforce the “snap-back” legislation.“Because if you believe as I believe very strongly that that innocent, unborn child in the mother’s womb is in fact a child, the most important word when we talk about unborn children is not unborn, but it’s children.”The position is not representative of the majority of Americans. According to recent polling, seven in 10 are opposed to overturning Roe v Wade while 59% believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances.Nonetheless, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a global research and policy organisation “committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights”, 21 US states are certain to attempt some form of ban on abortion should Roe be overturned, using laws already on the books.Reeves caveated his answer by cautioning that Mississippi’s response to the forthcoming supreme court ruling would be “dependent upon how the court rules and exactly what those opinions allow us to do”. He also noted that any decision would not lead to a national ban but could permit states to make their own determinations.Mike Braun, a Republican senator for Indiana, echoed a number of Reeves’ arguments. He told NBC’s Meet the Press he wanted “abortions to be eliminated from the landscape” but would not be drawn into specifics regarding potential laws in his state.Indiana has enacted 55 abortion restrictions and bans in the past decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, but does not have a “trigger law” or equivalent on the books. It is listed by the institute as one of five states without these laws that are still likely to move towards almost total bans should Roe be overturned.“When it comes to things like abortion, I think it’s clear it’s time to turn it back to the states,” Braun told NBC.Since former president Donald Trump installed three conservative justices to the supreme court in just four years, both sides of the fight over abortion rights have been preparing for a legal showdown.According to the Associated Press, campaign finance data reveals that pro-abortion-access groups donated $8m in 2018 and more than $10m in 2020.Those numbers outpace the public contributions of anti-abortion groups, which donated $2.6m in 2018 and $6.3m in 2020, according to data. But the complexity of the network of nonprofits and “dark money” funds makes it difficult to produce a full accounting of the money flows.TopicsRepublicansMississippiUS supreme courtAbortionUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US healthcarenewsReuse this content More

Bob Dole obituaryLongstanding Republican leader in the US Senate who lost the 1996 presidential election to Bill Clinton0In late 1995, one of the US’s shrewdest political observers, Michael Barone, wrote of Senator Bob Dole that he “towers over everyone else in the political landscape, even the president”. Less than 12 months later, Dole, who has died aged 98, had given up his prized leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate to run one of the most inept presidential campaigns in modern US history. It ended with his hard-won reputation as a master politician in tatters and his opponent, Bill Clinton, becoming the first Democratic president to be voted a second term for 52 years.By the time Dole felt obliged to surrender his Senate seat in a desperate effort to revive his flagging campaign, he had represented Kansas on Capitol Hill for 36 years, the longest Republican incumbency of his generation.He served first, for eight years, in the House of Representatives. His election in 1960 had come after a long apprenticeship making himself known to all levels of the deeply conservative society of the rural midwest. He reached Washington only after service in the Kansas state legislature and eight years as a county prosecuting attorney in his small home town of Russell. Elected to office as a staunch conservative, he retained that view for the rest of his political life.As a young man, he had been hit by a shell during wartime service in Italy. The shoulder injury, from which he nearly died, became the overriding influence on the rest of his life. The determination he had mobilised to fight his disability was harnessed to his political career and early on he revealed two characteristics that were to mark his campaigning style – readiness to fight a deeply partisan battle and the acerbic wit he often employed to further his cause.During his four terms in the House of Representatives Dole carved out a solid enough reputation to secure him victory when he ran for the Senate in the watershed year of 1968, amid the turmoil of the Vietnam war and the social cataclysm set off by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. It was a good year for the Senate Republicans, who gained seven seats from the Democrats, but they still did not control the chamber.Dole soon found himself mounting a vigorous defence of Richard Nixon as the new president settled in to face a hostile Congress. It was plain that the two men had much in common, both politically and personally. In short order Dole was fighting the Democrats’ effort to stop US military action in Cambodia and coming under fire for procedural manoeuvres that the chairman of the Senate armed services committee said “bordered on the ridiculous”.It won him enough points in the White House, however, for the president to appoint him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1971, his first rise to national prominence. He carried out the role assiduously, building up the party in preparation for the 1972 re-election battle, until obliged to fall on his sword in 1973 when Nixon needed something for George HW Bush, newly replaced as UN ambassador, in the post-election reshuffle. That proved an unexpected blessing for Dole as the Watergate scandal unravelled and Bush found himself forced to defend the indefensible.It may have been this relative obscurity that narrowly saved the senator’s bacon after Nixon’s unprecedented resignation. He had to fight for his seat in a deeply hostile mid-term election which saw the Democrats in Congress achieve a large enough majority to override any presidential veto, the first time that had happened for nearly 40 years.Two years later, the 1976 general election found the unelected President Gerald Ford under siege not only because of the circumstances of his arrival at the White House and his decision to pardon Nixon but because his own Republican right thought him too soft. He won the party nomination by a majority of only 4% over Ronald Reagan and, in an effort to appease his opponents and unify the party, chose Dole as his running mate.It was a disastrous move. Dole’s combative style in the campaign soon had the country in a furore, particularly after he had characterised the century’s two world conflicts as “Democrat wars”. Jimmy Carter squeaked into office with just 50.1% of the popular vote – a margin of 1.6m in a total of just over 80m – and Dole was widely blamed for the outcome.However, as the country swung to the right in the Reagan years, Dole’s reputation recovered. He was chairman of the Senate finance committee during the White House tax-cutting campaign of 1981 and demonstrated his exceptional skill at managing the intricate legislative process.But he was far from happy about the budgetary consequences of the measures and successfully manoeuvred an offsetting bill through the Senate the following year in an attempt to stop the federal deficit ballooning uncontrollably. The clumsily named but effective Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act led the then fiery young congressman Newt Gingrich to dub Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state”.But, generally speaking, Dole’s legislative record was poor: he was a manager rather than an innovator. As leader of the Senate Republicans for more than a decade his unrivalled talent, of inestimable value in a constitutional structure designed to reduce intransigence to deadlock, was to wheel and deal until common ground had mysteriously surfaced from the party quagmire.Among the fruits of his efforts were such laws as those extending food stamp relief for very poor people, the 1982 Voting Rights Act, and important new federal support for disabled people.But his lack of specific ideological aims repeatedly undermined his wider ambitions. His first bid for the presidency ended abruptly in 1980 with a derisory vote of 607 in the New Hampshire primary. His second attempt in 1988 appeared at first to be going far more smoothly until George HW Bush’s spin doctors successfully induced Dole to lose his temper during a televised debate in New Hampshire and snarl at his opponent “stop lying about my record”. Bush romped through the subsequent primaries.In 1996 Dole secured the Republican nomination but seemed wholly unable to mount a credible campaign against an ostensibly vulnerable Clinton. The president had a poor legislative record and there was a host of allegations of sexual and financial misconduct. But Dole’s electioneering was marked by poorly delivered speeches whose content baffled many of his audiences. He seemed to have no clear electoral strategy and constantly reshuffled his staff in the effort to develop one.In the final stages, with the opinion polls swinging steadily towards the Democrats, even his own party gave up the fight to sit resignedly awaiting the inevitable defeat. That dismal 1996 campaign persuaded only 49% of eligible voters to turn out (the second lowest figure in US history) and Dole’s failure to address issues important to female voters proved to be critical. While he and Clinton each secured 44% of the male vote, Dole could attract only one third of women’s ballots.Born in Russell, Kansas, Robert was the son of a small dairy retailer, Doran Dole, and his wife Bina (nee Talbott). There were few indications in his early life that he would emerge from the pack. His formative years were spent in that disastrous period of the 1930s when poor farming methods had turned the Great Plains into a dust bowl and the Depression had limited the few alternative ways of making a living. Government relief was the only lifeline for many families, a deeply traumatic experience for homesteaders whose principal creed was self-reliance.The six members of the Dole family kept going by moving into their basement and renting out the rest of their house to an oil prospector, but they were obliged to pinch and scrape for years. Doran gave up the dairy business for the more secure post of managing a grain storage unit and his mother sold sewing machines door-to-door.Robert, who had shown himself a formidable athlete during his school career but not much of an academic, nonetheless gained the financial support of a local banker to enrol at the University of Kansas. He wanted to become a doctor but the US was pitched into the second world war and the 18-year-old student found himself in the US army, fighting in Europe.On 14 April 1945, three weeks before the end of the European campaign, he was leading an assault on a German machine gun position in the Po valley in Italy when a shell smashed his spine and tore his right shoulder apart, leaving him temporarily paralysed. On his return to Russell, local people raised a fund to send him to Chicago for treatment by one of the leading neurosurgeons of the day, Hampar Kelikian. During the three-year course, for which the doctor refused payment, Kelikian became one of Dole’s closest friends and eventually persuaded the young man that he would have to cope with the permanent disablement of his right arm.The occupational therapist brought in to train him for this disability, Phyllis Holden, became Dole’s first wife in 1948, and they had a daughter, Robin.Under the spur of the doctor and the therapist, Dole settled down to cope with the pain he would endure for the rest of his life. He resumed his university career but diverted to a law degree. Since he was still unable to write with his left hand, his wife sat with him to take lecture notes and write out examination answers to Dole’s dictation.To outsiders the young man seemed to overcome most of his physical problems, but this was really because of a great deal of backstage manoeuvring. As he embarked on his political career his wife padded his suits to disguise his injured arm and shoulder and arranged for his food to arrive ready cut at public functions. Dole took to carrying a pencil permanently in his right hand to avert the agony of anyone trying to shake it.In 1950, at the age of 27, he became one of the youngest state legislators in the history of Kansas. In an overwhelmingly Republican state he naturally ran as a steadfast conservative. He also began to show the obsession with every aspect of politics for which he later became renowned. He was far from the favourite in the 1960 Republican primary for the first congressional district, covering about three-quarters of Kansas, but eventually won the election, embarking on a Washington career that would last nearly four decades.After standing down as a senator, and his defeat in the 1996 presidential election, he did not seek public office again. It was a sad ending at the age of 73 to a career in which he had served his country well in war and in peace. Many of his most significant contributions were made well away from the public eye. In the words of one of his staff, “people never just knew what Bob Dole achieved late at night in the Senate”.He wrote a number of books, including a memoir of his second world war experiences, One Soldier’s Story (2005). The only former Republican nominee to endorse Donald Trump, he was awarded the Congressional gold medal in 2018 for his service as “soldier, legislator and statesman”. In 2019 Congress made him an honorary colonel.His first marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Three years later he married Elizabeth Hanford, who – as Elizabeth Dole – became a leading political figure in her own right, serving in the administrations of Reagan and Bush Sr, and later as a senator. She survives him, along with his daughter. Robert Joseph Dole, politician, born 22 July 1923; died 5 December 2021TopicsUS politicsRepublicansUS CongressBill ClintonRichard NixonGeorge HW BushSecond world warobituariesReuse this content More

InterviewCongressman Jamie Raskin: ‘I’ll never forget the terrible sound of them trying to barrel into the chamber’David Smith in Washington The congressman was in the Capitol the day it was stormed by Trump supporters, and led the impeachment prosecution. The fight, he says, is far from over

Chris Bryant: ‘Nearly everyone I meet says: “I wouldn’t want your job”’
See more of the Observer’s faces behind the 2021 headlines
He spent 5 January at a graveside service for his son, Tommy, who had taken his own life after years shadowed by depression. He spent 6 January under siege at the US Capitol as a mob of Donald Trump supporters staged a deadly insurrection. Nearly a year on, Jamie Raskin wonders whether he could have prevented either tragedy.“Just as I have blamed myself for missing cues that I might have picked up with Tommy, I blame myself for cues I missed relating to the violence as well,” says Raskin, carefully measuring each word. “I spent many, many sleepless nights in self-blame and self-prosecution over everything that had happened with Tommy and with the insurrection.”Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, took office in January 2017. Four years later, and a day after burying his 25-year-old son, he was at the US Capitol under coronavirus restrictions to help certify Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. He witnessed the citadel of American democracy come under attack from a frenzied mob convinced by Trump’s “big lie” about vote rigging.“I heard this terrible sound that I’ll never forget of some people trying to barrel into the House chamber,” the 58-year-old recalls in a phone interview from his home in Takoma Park, Maryland. “I don’t know to this day exactly what kind of physical objects they were carrying, but they kept slamming up against the central door to the House of Representatives and so lots of people began to move over there to try to reinforce it.“But then Capitol police officers came running in with their guns drawn, telling all of us to get back, and they went up and guarded that door. There were people screaming and it was very chaotic. You could hear people yelling, ‘We want Trump!’ and ‘Hang Mike Pence!’” – a reference to the vice-president who ignored Trump’s pleas to overturn the election.Members of Congress were evacuated through the speaker’s lobby, tunnels and stairwells. “We would see members of the mob running by in different directions. It was like a zombie movie. Whenever we saw them, everybody would accelerate efforts to get away. An insurrection is a pretty intimate thing. These people were all over the place. It’s remarkable more people did not die.”Finally, they reached the safety of a committee room in a House office building. But Raskin’s daughter Tabitha, 23, and son-in-law, Hank, who had accompanied him to the Capitol that day, were trapped in the office of Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. They barricaded themselves in with furniture and hid under Hoyer’s desk.“I was obviously very concerned,” says Raskin. “I was an emotional wreck anyway but I felt now intensely responsible for having brought them with me and put them in harm’s way. It had never occurred to me that the Capitol of the United States would not be secure.”Eventually the building was cleared by security forces and the family was reunited. “I hugged them and kissed them and I told Tabitha how sorry I was and I said it would not be like this the next time she came to the Capitol. That’s when she said, ‘I don’t want to come back to the Capitol again’. The immensity of these events just hit me at that point. They had fundamentally changed everything by unleashing this violence to support their political coup.”That night Congress returned to the building to complete the electoral college counts and confirm Biden as the next president. In a stunned nation, there were demands for Trump to face a reckoning over his role in inciting the riot. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, asked Raskin to become lead prosecutor.He says: “For me the trial was a kind of salvation because I was so deeply in shock and trauma about Tommy and what had just taken place in the Capitol. It was a time of great confusion.“If you remember back to 9/11 and what that was like, everyone walking around buffeted and dumbfounded, there was that feeling. But by becoming the lead impeachment manager, I quickly had to develop a focus on what needed to be done.”Previously a constitutional law professor, Raskin made a compelling case and was not afraid to display his anger, grief and vulnerability. A majority of senators voted to convict Trump but fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority required by the constitution. The ex-president was acquitted. But Raskin was not done.He is now a member of the House of Representatives select committee investigating the events of that day. It has been gathering documents and phone records and subpoenaing witnesses in an effort to produce the definitive account of an event that Raskin says was “as close to fascism as any of us wants to come in our lifetime”.The congressman, who has written a book to try to make sense of the 50 days that upended his life, says: “I would like to say that 6 January was the end of something but it feels much more to me like the beginning of something.“Ultimately, that’s up to us. We are definitely in a struggle over the future of democracy. Joe Biden is the right president to try to lead us out of this period of emotional devastation but at this point Donald Trump’s ‘big lie’ lives and his control over the Republican party is absolute. So we are still very much in the fight of our lives.” Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin will be published by HarperCollins on 4 JanuaryTopicsUS Capitol attackThe Observer’s faces of 2021DemocratsUS politicsJoe BidenDonald TrumpfeaturesReuse this content More

The latest challenge to Joe Biden’s presidency: the Omicron variantAnalysis: after he promised to crush the coronavirus, the rise of a new strain could be a blow to perceptions of his competency Joe Biden looked out at an audience of government scientists last week and recognized a mask-wearing Anthony Fauci, his top adviser on the coronavirus. “I’ve seen more of Dr Fauci than my wife,” he joked. “Who’s president? Fauci!”The US president was visiting the frontline of the Covid-19 struggle, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he unveiled a winter plan that includes a drive for vaccine boosters, free at-home testing and fresh requirements for international travelers.Easy access to tests could play a key role in fighting the Omicron variantRead moreBut even as Biden preached to the converted on Thursday, he faced a new political threat. The Omicron variant was spreading rapidly from state to state, trailing uncertainty in its wake. “We’re going to fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion,” he promised, “just like we beat back Covid-19 in the spring and more powerful Delta variant in the summer and fall.”Yet the Delta variant itself is far from beaten, underlining the perils of what may prove the defining issue of Biden’s presidency and the measure of its success or failure. He came into office promising to crush the coronavirus but, after at least one false dawn, that goal remains frustratingly elusive – and now Omicron could deliver another hammer blow.Indeed, Biden’s aura of competence took a hit over the summer, partly because of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, partly because the Delta variant appeared to catch him by surprise. Its persistence has made a mockery of his July declaration that Americans could soon declare independence from the virus.Laurie Garrett, an award-winning science writer, said: “I don’t think that anybody in the spring in the United States was operating with the correct level of alarm about the Delta variant.“I would forgive many leaders for having an inability to read the situation adequately and recognise how dangerous it was but, once it was clear that the Delta variant was far more contagious, everybody should have gone into high gear and I do think there was a slowness in response.”Biden’s swift travel bans on southern African countries in response to Omicron suggested a resolve to learn lessons from Delta; to some it looked like overcorrection. But the challenge this time is compounded by new extremes in the Republican party and rightwing media’s politicization of the pandemic.On Thursday, the president acknowledged: “It’s become a political issue, which is a sad, sad commentary. It shouldn’t be, but it has been.”His stated hope that the nation could now come together around his new plan will have struck some as optimistic to the point of naivety. Democrats accuse Biden’s opponents of weaponizing the virus and its variants against him with the long-term objective of denying him a second term.Eric Schultz, a communications strategist who worked in the Obama administration, told the Associated Press: “It’s clear that Republicans have decided that the fate of the Biden presidency is tied to Covid. And Republicans have chosen to be on the side of the virus.”Some Republicans have all but entrenched an anti-vaccination culture. Senators this week briefly threatened a government shutdown over mandates. Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have extended benefits to workers who are fired or resigned over their employers’ vaccine requirements.Leslie Dach, chair ofProtect Our Care, a healthcare pressure group, said: “They’re literally sacrificing the lives of their own voters on the altar of their personal politics. That’s just incontrovertibly true when you know that the death rate is 15 times higher and you see who is choosing not to be vaccinated in America. They’re basically meting out a death sentence for people.”It seems to be getting worse. A day after news broke about the Omicron variant, Ronny Jackson, a Republican congressman from Texas and former doctor to Donald Trump, floated a groundless conspiracy theory. He tweeted: “Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant. They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”Meanwhile, Lara Logan, a Fox News anchor, compared Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death for the experiments he carried out on prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp. Michael Bornstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, described the comments as “disgusting”.But Logan was not sanctioned by Fox News and, with Holocaust comparisons proliferating on rightwing social media, including even in merchandise, there are fears that America’s hyperpartisan atmosphere may have passed a point of no return, paralysing its Omicron response.Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, warned: “There is no possibility of working together. If you were going to write a scenario that was perfect for a virus to spread rampantly, having the humans at the edge of civil war every five minutes would be a perfect scenario.”Despite these forces, the White House points to dramatic progress over the past year. Last Christmas less than 1% of adults were fully vaccinated; this Christmas that share will be 72%, including more than 86% of elderly people. More than 20 million children have been vaccinated – though under-fives still await approval – and 99% of schools are open.But the pandemic has proved a tenacious foe with renewed surges in Michigan and other midwestern states threatening to overwhelm hospitals. About 40 million adults refuse to get vaccinated. Take-up of boosters – more essential than ever due to Omicron – has been sluggish: more than 100 million eligible people have not yet received the shot. Masks, empty offices and unpredictability persist.The conflicting picture has left the president to juggle duelling messages, one encouraging a return to life as normal, the other urging continued precautions. There seems little prospect of a definitive ending or declaration of victory. Roughly 47% of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the pandemic while 49% disapprove, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll.Biden announces plan to get booster shots to 100m Americans amid Omicron arrival in USRead moreMichael Steele, former chairman of the RNC, said he would award the president about five marks out of 10 so far. “Given the success they had early on in getting the vaccine programme put in place, shots in arms and all that, when the [Delta] variant hit it caught them flat-footed and took them by surprise.“The administration lost a lot of the gains it had made coming in the door because it shattered people’s confidence in their ability to not only handle what was going on but to actually know what was going on.”Steele, a longtime critic of Trump, noted that calculated attacks and obstruction from the right present a further obstacle to the nation’s recovery from the pandemic. “Biden doesn’t want to further politicize Covid and yet you have Republicans and that’s all they know how to do.”The situation, he added, is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans spent years trying to repeal without offering a replacement.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, awards Biden a more generous eight of out of 10 for his coronavirus approach to date. “The reason that’s two clicks short of 10 is that I think the White House really went astray in early July when it did everything but hang a mission accomplished banner over the subject.“As I recall, the president announced a summer of freedom. One of the things they have surely learned is that they’re at the mercy of events that they can neither foresee nor control in advance and so creating hopes that are then extinguished by events is really counterproductive.”More than 780,000 Americans have now died from Covid-19. This week, at a White House press briefing, the Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked: “Whatever happened to President Biden’s promise to shut down the virus?”The press secretary, Jen Psaki, replied: “We’re working on it.”TopicsJoe BidenCoronavirusUS politicsBiden administrationVaccines and immunisationAnthony FaucianalysisReuse this content More

To Rescue the Republic review: Grant, the crisis of 1876 … and a Fox News anchor reluctant to call out Trump Brett Baier has an eye on unity as well as compelling history. So why not say Trump refused to face the truth as Grant did?For a group of TV anchors and reporters, the team at Fox News are keen scribblers. Often with co-writers, former host Bill O’Reilly writes of assassinations and Brian Kilmeade authors histories. Bret Baier is chief political anchor but has also written several books as a “reporter of history”. Now comes a biography of Ulysses S Grant which focuses on the grave constitutional crisis following the disputed election of 1876.A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876Read moreMagnanimous in civil war victory, Grant was elected in 1868 on the theme of “Let us have peace”. By the nation’s centennial eight years later, Americans had wearied of scandals, economic troubles and federal troops in the south, seeking to enforce to some degree the new civil rights of Black Americans, notably the vote. In 1874, Democrats took the House. Now they wanted the presidency.They nominated the New York governor, Samuel Tilden, a moderate nevertheless supported in the south. The Republicans picked Rutherford Hayes of Ohio. It was a bitter campaign, filled with threats of violence, each side playing to its base.Tilden performed surprisingly well in the north, winning his home state and four others. Hayes winning Indiana and Connecticut alone would have prevented the subsequent controversy. He did not, but he did win Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, southern states with Republican governors.Hayes needed all three states to win. “Self-appointed Democratic counters”, however, submitted results for Tilden. As Grant said: “Everything now depends on a fair count.”Tensions ran high, with rumors of southern militia marching on Washington and US troops on standby. Baier writes that Grant “had influence, and he decided to use it to expedite a fair result – even if that result required sacrificing his own achievements”.Grant knew that to be seen to be fair, the result must “appeal to [the people’s] sense of justice”. For that, both parties had to agree – and the south had to support Hayes. At Grant’s insistence, an electoral commission was formed, the deciding vote given to the supreme court justice Joseph Bradley. Bradley chose to support the states’ official electoral certifications. Hayes won. Tilden did not pursue extraordinary means to ensure victory, stopping a bribery effort in his favor.But the battle was not over. Grant believed Louisiana’s certificate was probably fraudulent, and there was bedlam in Congress. Grant favored compromise and Edward Burke of Louisiana effectively proposed a trade: Hayes for the presidency, Democrats for the disputed governorships of Louisiana and South Carolina.A separate group of Republicans – acting without Grant – then promised Democrats Hayes would withdraw troops from the south. In return, Democrats would agree that Hayes was duly elected, along with vague and worthless promises to respect Black rights. At this point, Baier writes, “the nation breathed a sigh of relief”.Baier clearly admires Grant – and there is much to admire. Though betrayed by false friends, as president Grant exercised his office with firmness where necessary and with a passionate desire to inspire Americans towards greater unity. Political inexperience cost him dearly.But what of the big issue? Did Grant really put an end to Reconstruction and consign Black Americans to nearly a century under Jim Crow?Hayes had shown a willingness to end Reconstruction. Tilden would certainly have done so. Grant strongly supported Black suffrage and kept troops in the south to ensure the rights of people increasingly threatened by armed violence. He sent troops to an area of South Carolina especially marked by Klan violence and vigorously promoted and enforced an anti-Klan act. He sent troops to Louisiana to enforce voting rights and secured passage of the 1875 Civil Rights Act.Nonetheless, the supreme court reduced Black rights, and as Baier writes, “the country no longer supported the use of federal troops”. Grant had his army but had lost his people.He promoted a compromise in 1877 not from any desire to abandon the Black community but from the painful realization that America had tired of the journey. Whether Hayes or Tilden had been elected, Reconstruction was over and a more painful era in the south was about to begin.The problem wasn’t Grant, but that America was not ready to live up to its promises.Baier begins and ends his book with the events of 6 January 2021.“What happens,” he asks, “when the fairness of an election is in doubt, when the freedom of the people is constrained, and when the divisions on the public square strangle the process?“What can we learn from the healing mission of our 18th president that might show us a path towards union?”Baier answers the second question only implicitly. He echoes the historical consensus that the “sad and inescapable truth is that there was no way of knowing the right verdict”.True in 1877. Clearly not in 2021.After Appomattox, the Confederate general James Longstreet, a friend of Grant, asked “Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”Liberty is Sweet review: an American revolution for the many not the fewRead moreThe answer frequently involves failures of political leadership. Baier writes that Grant “knew that in times of great national conflict there are only two choices – to stand for division or to stand for peace”.Grant used his power for good, to promote national unity. Donald Trump did not say the words or take the actions that Grant did during an equally if not more severe challenge to democracy. Baier misses an opportunity for Grant-like firmness in not asking why Trump failed to call on his supporters to accept the result. Rather than simply speaking of America’s strength and resilience, why not point out directly the contrast with a president who stood for division?In 2021, the national sigh of relief did not come until after noon on inauguration day, as President Biden took the oath.The danger persists, and not every president is Gen Grant.
To Rescue the Republic is published in the US by Custom House
TopicsBooksHistory booksPolitics booksUS politicsAmerican civil warUS Capitol attackreviewsReuse this content More

‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical angerA short history of the Roe decision’s emergence as a signature cause for the right Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalized the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades, which have only grown more profound in recent years of polarization. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.This schism played out in the US supreme court on Wednesday, when the new conservative-dominated bench heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most important abortion rights case since Roe.In somber arguments, justices questioned whether the state of Mississippi should be allowed to ban nearly all abortions at 15 weeks gestation, nine weeks earlier than the current accepted limit. While the ruling, expected by the end of June next year, is far from a foregone conclusion, justices in the conservative majority appeared to signal their support for severely restricting abortion access, a right Americans have exercised for two generations.The divisive question among the conservative majority appeared to be whether abortion should be restricted to earlier than 15 weeks, weakening Roe, or if the precedent set in Roe should be overturned entirely.Summarizing Mississippi’s argument, the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was controversially nominated to the court by Donald Trump in 2018, said “the constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice … and leaves the issue to the people to resolve in the democratic process.” If the issue is returned to the states, 26 states would be “certain or likely” to ban or severely restrict abortion access.The religious right in the US has been laying the foundations of this decisive challenge to abortion rights for years. According to historians and researchers, it has taken decades of political machinations for the campaign to reach this zenith. The movement has intersected with nearly every major issue in American politics for the last five decades, from segregation to welfare reform to campaign finance.The conservative anti-abortion movement “was a kind of historical accident”, said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Dartmouth University and author of the recently released book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.It wasn’t until Republican strategists sought to “deflect attention away from the real narrative”, which Balmer argues was racial integration, “and to advocate on behalf of the fetus”, that largely apolitical evangelical Christians and Catholics would be united within the Republican party. Balmer argues that advocacy was nascent in 1969.Although the supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education called for an end to racial segregation in schools in 1954, many schools continued de facto segregation 14 years later.Then, the supreme court weighed in again, and ordered schools to integrate “immediately”. This prompted white southerners to form “segregation academies”, whites-only private Christian schools which registered as tax-exempt non-profit charities. African American parents in Mississippi sued, arguing this was taxpayer-subsidized discrimination. They won, and in 1971, tax authorities revoked the non-profit status of 111 segregated private schools.In Balmer’s view, revoking the non-profit status of segregated private schools catalyzed evangelical Christian leaders, but even in the early 1970s defense of racial segregation was not a populist message. However, defense of the fetus could be.Republican operations began to test abortion as a vessel for the collective anxieties of evangelical Christians, and Roe as a shorthand for government intrusion into the family after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Eventually, abortion became the reason for evangelicals to deny the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, himself an evangelical Christian, a second term.Evangelical opposition to abortion “wasn’t an anti-abortion movement per se”, said Elmer L Rumminger, an administrator at the then whites-only Christian college Bob Jones University, said in Balmer’s book. “For me it was government intrusion into private education.”At the same time, the anti-feminist Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly was connecting anxiety about women’s changing roles in society with abortion. In a 1972 essay, she described the feminist movement as “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion,” and the writing of contemporaneous feminists as “a series of sharp-tongued, high-pitched whining complaints by unmarried women”.By the 1978 midterm congressional elections, Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of modern conservatism, was testing abortion as a campaign issue with evangelical Christians with a small fund from the Republican National Committee. Roman Catholic volunteers distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets in church parking lots in Iowa, New Hampshire and Minnesota, and their efforts prevailed. Four anti-abortion Republicans ousted Democrats.The groundwork laid by Schlafly and Weyrich made “Roe shorthand for a host of worries about sex equality and sexuality”, wrote Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and author of After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate.“Even as late as August 1980, the Reagan-Bush campaign wasn’t certain abortion would work for them as a political issue,” said Balmer. However, as Reagan sailed to victory, he was carried in part by religious voters hooked on the promise of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. When a constitutional amendment failed, a new strategy took hold: control the supreme court.Historians said segregation was only one part of a complex and multifaceted movement, which has long seen itself as a human rights campaign. By the 1970s, “there was an anti-abortion movement which was influential and pretty effective in the states that was ready for the new right to work with,” said Ziegler.In the coming years, Reagan would recast the politics of reproduction through a new racist prism, as he introduced the mythical stereotype of the “welfare queen”. The image allowed politicians to portray “all single mothers as persons of color and all persons of color as dependent on public assistance”, wrote the reproductive rights activists Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger in their 2017 book Reproductive Justice: An Introduction.The image divorced family wellbeing and welfare support from abortion access and rights. Thus, the “broad middle ground” of issues that anti-abortion and pro-choice voters agreed on became “firmly partisan”, said Julia Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, and professor and chair of women, gender and sexuality studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.By the 1990s, anti-abortion activists had professionalized. So called “right to life” organizations rallied the base, and religious law firms dedicated themselves to fighting abortion in courts. The supreme court weighed in on abortion again in 1992, in another watershed case called Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey. The case allowed states to restrict abortion, as long as such restrictions did not create an “undue burden” on the right to abortion and served the purpose of either protecting the woman’s health or unborn life.States hostile to abortion passed “Trap” laws, or targeted regulations of abortion providers, which required abortion clinics to become the “functional equivalents of hospitals”, according to legal scholars. States instituted 24-hour waiting periods for abortion, state-mandated inaccurate information and invasive sonograms.Many clinics went out of business as they struggled to meet the expensive new requirements, and pregnant people struggled to obtain abortions as they had to travel further and spend more to find a provider.These laws would also play an outsized role in the Dobbs hearing. Conservative justices debated whether they could keep the “undue burden” standard while jettisoning a central tenet of Roe, that women can terminate a pregnancy until a fetus can survive outside the womb, or “viability”.“Why is 15 weeks not enough time?” asked Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, in the hearings.The politics of reproduction spurred new debates on acceptable restrictions on birth control, stem cell research and sex education during the George W Bush administration. But it was the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, that supercharged Republican opposition.In 2010, the Tea Party swept the midterm elections. More extreme candidates entered Congress and statehouses through the practice of challenging incumbents in districts gerrymandered to be reliably Republican. And, in a decision not typically thought of as an anti-abortion victory, the chief counsel for National Right to Life successfully argued a supreme court case that would unleash vast sums of dark money into American elections – Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.“The anti-abortion movement, over time with other conservative allies, worked to change things like the rules of campaign finance for the conservative movement,” said Ziegler. “Anti-abortion lawyers played an integral part in cases like Citizens United.”By the time Donald Trump ran for president, evangelical Protestants had become more anti-abortion than the Catholic voters who were once the bedrock of anti-abortion advocacy. Seventy-seven per cent of white evangelical Christians say the procedure should be illegal, compared with just 43% of Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center.Trump harnessed the anger of white evangelicals for a victory in 2016, with a mix of hardline anti-abortion politicsand xenophobic nativism. Trump abandoned his 1999 stance as “very pro-choice”, saying there should be “punishment” for women who have abortions, and promised to nominate conservative supreme court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe v Wade.Today, overwhelmingly white “Christian nationalist” voters believe their religion should be privileged in public life, a goal to be attained “by any means necessary”, according to social researchers such as Indiana University associate professor Andrew Whitehead.Supreme court decisions are notoriously difficult to predict, but abortion rights activists believe Wednesday’s hearing shows that conservative justices are ready to significantly weaken or perhaps overturn Roe v Wade. If that happens, young, poor people of color will disproportionately suffer, forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Such an outcome is so severe human rights advocates have said state abortion bans would violate United Nations conventions against torture and place the US in the company of a shrinking number of countries with abortion bans.On Wednesday, the court’s three outnumbered liberal justices argued neither the science, the enormous consequences of pregnancy nor the American polity had changed since the court last decided a watershed abortion rights case. But, because of the work of anti-abortion politicians, the makeup of the court’s bench had.“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?” asked the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. “I don’t see how it is possible.”TopicsAbortionRoe v WadeUS politicsRaceUS supreme courtfeaturesReuse this content More