US Politics

Pelosi confident of Build Back Better plan’s passage as bill advancesDemocrats have a slim majority on the $2tn package that would offer reduced costs for child care and prescription drugs House Democrats on Thursday moved to advance an ambitious $2tn domestic policy package that would overhaul large swaths of the American economy, with House speaker Nancy Pelosi confident they would ultimately deliver the second pillar of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.“This is historic; it is transformative,” Pelosi said during a press conference on Thursday, as lawmakers debated the measure on the House floor.After months of gridlock and intra-party warring, Pelosi expressed optimism that the House was on the cusp of passing the measure, just two weeks after the House gave final approval to a separate effort investing in the nation’s aging infrastructure.‘We’re here to deliver’: Biden touts infrastructure win as midterms loomRead moreWith their paper-thin majority, Democrats can spare only a handful of defections on the package, called Build Back Better. Party leaders had hoped to pass the measure in tandem with the infrastructure bill, but a last minute objection from a small band of centrist Democrats concerned over the cost of the package derailed those hopes.Pelosi said the House would proceed to a vote on the measure following the release of a cost estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as requested by the group of centrists. The agency said it would complete the analysis on Thursday.The package, which would spend nearly $2tn over 10 years, is expansive: it aims to dramatically reduce child care costs, provide universal pre-kindergarten for children, lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, expand Medicare to cover hearing aids and provide the largest ever investment in efforts to combat the climate crisis.Biden argues that the plan is fully paid for by a slew of new proposals targeting millionaires and big corporations that currently pay nothing in federal tax.Even if the House approves the legislation on Thursday, it faces a complicated path forward in the Senate, where any single Democrat could upend the fragile state of negotiations.Two of the Senate’s 50 Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have not yet committed to supporting the package, even as negotiators reshaped the climate and tax portions of the package to meet their demands.Opening the debate on Thursday, Democrats touted the historic nature of the legislation. Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chair of the House budget panel, which played a critical role in shaping the package, said any single element of the bill alone would be significant, but together they represent the “most consequential legislation for American families since the New Deal”.“It’s a hell of a bill,” he said.Democrats and Republicans sparred on the House floor over the economics of the plan. Republicans assailed it as reckless spending that would exacerbate the trend of rising inflation and slow economic growth. Democrats argued the opposite, that the bill would actually combat inflation while relieving many of the financial stressors Americans face, such as the cost of child care and prescription drugs.Though many of the bill’s provisions remain broadly popular, including among Republicans, boiling economic discontent have sent Biden’s approval ratings tumbling.Despite a mass vaccination campaign, falling unemployment and legislative achievements that include the passage of a nearly $2tn relief package in March and the bipartisan public works bill this month, 63% of Americans say he has not accomplished much after 10 months in office, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.Facing daunting challenges in next year’s midterm elections, Democrats are hopeful that enacting Biden’s agenda in full will bring something of a reversal of fortunes for the party. TopicsUS politicsBiden administrationHouse of RepresentativesDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

‘Professor or comrade?’ Republicans go full red scare on Soviet-born Biden pickSenator asks Saule Omarova, nominated to be comptroller of the currency, if he should call her ‘professor or comrade’

US politics – live coverage
Three decades have passed since their hero, Ronald Reagan, went to Berlin to exhort Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”, the Soviet Union collapsed and America claimed victory in the cold war.Paul Gosar retweets same video aimed at AOC after House censures him – reportRead moreFor Republicans in Washington, however, these appear to be mere historical footnotes. On Thursday they dusted off the “red scare” playbook to portray Joe Biden’s choice to run one of the agencies that oversees the banking industry as a dangerous communist.Saule Omarova, 55, was nominated in September to be America’s next comptroller of the currency. If confirmed, she would be the first woman and person of colour in the role in its 158-year-history.Omarova was born in Kazakhstan when it was part of the Soviet Union and moved to the US in 1991. For John Kennedy of Louisiana, a member of the Senate banking committee, this was like a red rag to a bull.Questioning whether Omarova was still a member of communist youth organisations, Kennedy said: “I don’t mean any disrespect: I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”The remark prompted gasps in the hearing room on Capitol Hill.Omarova replied, slowly and firmly: “Senator, I’m not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.“I do not remember joining any Facebook group that subscribes to that ideology. I would never knowingly join any such group. There is no record of me actually participating in any Marxist or communist discussions of any kind.”Omarova then told how her family suffered under the communist regime.“I grew up without knowing half of my family. My grandmother herself escaped death twice under the Stalin regime. This is what’s seared in my mind. That’s who I am. I remember that history. I came to this country. I’m proud to be an American and this is why I’m here today, Senator.”Omarova has worked mainly as a lawyer and most recently as a law professor at Cornell University. She has testified often as an expert witness on financial regulation and even worked briefly in the administration of George W Bush.But in a letter to Omarova after she was nominated, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania requested a copy of a graduation paper she wrote about Karl Marx when she was an undergraduate at Moscow State University – “in the original Russian” .At Thursday’s hearing, Toomey noted that Omarova has written several academic papers that propose sweeping changes to the banking system.“Taken in totality, her ideas do amount to a socialist manifesto for American financial services,” he said.The attacks, echoed by rightwing media, earned rebuke from the Democratic chairman of the committee, Sherrod Brown of Ohio.He said: “Senate Republicans have a formula. Start with a passing and inaccurate reference to her academic work, distort the substance beyond recognition, mix in words – Marx, Lenin, communism. End with insinuations about Professor Omarova loyalties to her chosen country.“That’s how Republicans turn a qualified woman into a Marxist boogeyman … Now we know what happens when Trumpism meets McCarthyism.”This was a reference to the 1950s “red scare”, when the Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, of Wisconsin, insisted hundreds of communists had infiltrated the US government, pursuing a witch-hunt that reached into the army and Hollywood.On Thursday, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts added: “This is a vicious smear campaign, coordinated by Republicans who are doing the bidding of the large banks.“Sexism, racism, pages straight out of Joe McCarthy’s 1950s red scare tactics … welcome to Washington in 2021.”TopicsUS politicsUS SenateBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

Paul Gosar retweets same video aimed at AOC after House censures him – reportRepublican congressman retweeted conservative podcaster Elijah Schaffer’s tweet of the violent video Just minutes after being censured by the US House, the Republican congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona retweeted the violent video that depicts him murdering Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, US media reported.While Gosar had previously deleted the video, after the House voted to censure him, Gosar retweeted the conservative podcaster Elijah Schaffer’s tweet of the video that was captioned: “Really well done. We love @DrPaulGosar, don’t we folks?” The retweet appears to have since been undone.Gosar also retweeted other Republican politicians and public figures, both on his personal and congressional Twitter accounts, that have called Gosar a political “martyr” and denounced his censure.Gosar has not apologized for the video and called the censure “kabuki theater” and a “hysterical mob” in a series of new tweets published after the vote.Following the censure vote, Gosar also released a statement saying that his censure could incite violence, comparing the censure to the events that led up to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre.“I remind everyone that pretending to be upset over a cartoon is what happened to the Charlie Hebdo magazine in France,” said Gosar. “All right-thinking people condemned that then, and they should condemn the Democrats now for their violation of free speech.”On Wednesday the House voted to censure Gosar, with 223 in favor and 207 against. While the vote occurred mostly along party lines, three Republicans broke with their party line. Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming voted in favor of censuring Gosar, and Congressman David Joyce of Ohio voted “present”, the lone Republican member to do so.Republican members have been called out in the past for threatening violence against Democratic representatives, particularly women of color. In February, the House stripped the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments after her social media posts were flagged for supporting violence against Ocasio-Cortez, the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsAlexandria Ocasio-CorteznewsReuse this content More

This is what gerrymandering looks likeWe zoomed in on four districts that provide some of the clearest examples of how US politicians are locking in election results for the next decade Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHello, and Happy Thursday,A few months ago, I sat down with my colleagues Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon on the Guardian’s visual team asked to do something that I thought would be exceedingly difficult: could we show what gerrymandering looks like to our readers?While there’s a growing awareness of how gerrymandering “debased” American democracy, in the words of supreme court justice Elena Kagan, articulating exactly how it works can be extremely difficult. The boundaries that make up our political districts are invisible, so when politicians move them every 10 years, voters don’t feel it in their everyday lives. Looking at gerrymandered districts can feel like you’re just looking at a bunch of squiggly lines (trust me, I’ve been there).Over the last few weeks, Andrew put together four maps that overcome this problem. And the final product is, I believe, the best visualization of how gerrymandering works that I’ve seen to date.We zoomed in on four districts – two in North Carolina and two in Texas – that provide some of the clearest examples of how politicians are gerrymandering this cycle. Using the 2020 election results and demographic data, we showed how politicians are transforming districts to virtually lock in election results for the next decade.Just take a look at what happened to the sixth congressional district in the north-central part of North Carolina. It’s currently represented by Democrat Kate Manning, and Joe Biden won the district by 24 points in 2020, a sign that it’s a heavily Democratic area. But when Republicans in the state legislature drew the new lines, they cracked the district into four pieces. The Democratic voters in the sixth district were tossed into four districts that strongly favor the GOP, ensuring Republicans will have a powerful advantage in elections for years to come.All four districts we focused on were drawn by Republicans, who have an immense advantage across the country in drawing district lines this year. But where Democrats do have the upper hand, in places like Oregon and Illinois, they’ve shown a willingness to gerrymander as well.Amid the complexity of redistricting, there’s an important, and often ugly, story about how voters are grouped based on race. In north-eastern North Carolina, for example, we showed how Republicans lowered the share of Black voters in a district, probably making it harder for Black voters there to elect the candidate of their choice. GK Butterfield, a Black Democrat who has represented the district since 2004, is now likely to announce his retirement this week. While courts have historically protected the ability of Black voters to elect the candidate in their choice in the district, that’s now in jeopardy.“I’m fairly certain that this district, if GK were to retire, would be a district that Black voters don’t have the opportunity any longer to elect their candidates of choice,” Allison Riggs, a prominent voting rights attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in North Carolina, told me last week.We also showed how Hispanic voters in the Democratic-leaning suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth are being tossed into a largely rural district where Republicans dominate.Civil rights groups are bringing a flood of lawsuits to challenge these maps. But they face a huge uphill battle. In 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that federal courts can’t address partisan gerrymandering. And while plaintiffs can challenge discriminatory maps on different grounds, those suits can take years to resolve in court, enabling politicians to hold several elections using discriminatory maps.Reader questionsRobert writes: With all the talk about eliminating the filibuster, what do you suppose is going to happen to it if Republicans once again achieve a solid majority as now appears likely? Just sayin’.This is a concern that some Democrats who defend the filibuster share. But those who support getting rid of the rule point out that Republicans have distorted the filibuster from a tool that is supposed to forge compromise to one that prevents the majority party from governing at all. And I think there’s also a belief that Republicans might be willing to do away with the filibuster when they get back into the majority, regardless of what Democrats do.Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at [email protected] or DM me on Twitter at @srl and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.Also worth watching …
Ohio Republicans were so secretive in drawing new gerrymandered state legislative maps that they shut out members of their own party. Now, they’re pushing ahead with drawing a gerrymandered congressional map.
Georgia Republicans unveiled a new congressional map that heavily favors the GOP.
Civil rights groups have filed a challenge to Texas’s new electoral maps.
TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t want people discussing her clothes – she could distract them by communicatingArwa MahdawiThe Arizona senator’s flamboyant attire and ever-changing style has inspired headlines and intrigue The Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who memorably posted a photo of herself wearing a ring that said “Fuck Off”, thinks it is offensive that the media keeps discussing her sartorial choices. Sinema has become a household name in recent months because of her resistance to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, but her flamboyant attire and ever-changing style has also helped keep the senator in the news. She’s inspired headlines such as Kyrsten Sinema’s Style Keeps Us Guessing (The New York Times) and Take note, AOC – Kyrsten Sinema’s bad style actually makes a statement (The New York Post).“It’s very inappropriate,” Sinema told Politico on Wednesday. “I wear what I want because I like it. It’s not a news story, and it’s no one’s business. It’s not helpful to have [coverage] be positive or negative. It also implies that somehow women are dressing for someone else.”‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met GalaRead moreIt doesn’t matter whether you’re a senator or a schoolkid, female clothing is unfairly policed. Professional women often find themselves getting scrutinized for their fashion choices in ways that their male counterparts are not. But does that mean, as Sinema seems to be suggesting, that it is automatically sexist or inappropriate to comment on what a female politician is wearing? Of course not. Fashion has always been used to make political statements and there are plenty of examples where a woman’s clothing or appearance is a legitimate news story. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as congresswoman, for example, she wore all-white to honour the suffragettes and Shirley Chisholm. In this instance, she was very much dressing for someone else.Style can have substance. One of the most famous examples of this is Madeleine Albright who used jewelry to communicate her views when she was secretary of state. “I found that jewelry had become part of my personal diplomatic arsenal,” Albright has said. “While President George HW Bush had been known for saying ‘Read my lips’, I began urging colleagues and reporters to ‘Read my pins.’”Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters, hasn’t explicitly urged anyone to “read her pins”, but it often seems like she wants people to pay attention to her wardrobe. Last year she wore a bright purple wig on the Senate floor; after voting she pointed at her wig, just to make sure everyone knew it was her. “Kyrsten is continuing to call attention to the need for all of us to stay home as much as possible and practice social distancing – which she is diligently practicing, including from her hair salon,” her spokeswoman later said. So are her fashion choices no one’s business, as she told Politico, or is she using them to make a political statement? I’m confused.But that’s the Sinema effect: she’s the former Green party-aligned activist who ran on a progressive policy platform then, as soon as she got into power, became one of the biggest roadblocks to getting any progressive policies passed. She’s nominally a Democrat, but is so chummy with the GOP that the Republican senator John Cornyn has said he “would be surprised if Republicans tried to unseat” Sinema in 2024. (He’s since walked that back a little.) She’s nothing if not inconsistent.One reason that so much attention is paid to the senator’s clothes is that people are desperate to understand what (if anything) she stands for, and clothes seem to be one of the main ways she expresses herself. Sinema seems to have forgotten that she is a public servant and that part of her job is communicating with the people she represents. She doesn’t hold public events for her Arizona constituents; she doesn’t communicate with the local progressive groups who got her elected or even her previous allies; she rarely gives interviews and, when she does speak to the press, says little of substance. The New York Times has described her as “one of the most elusive senators on Capitol Hill”; the Politico piece noted that “even after an extended interview, the first-term Democrat holds onto the air of mystery that’s become a signature part of her political brand”.Sinema owes no one an explanation for how she dresses, but there are plenty of other things she owes us all an explanation for. Like whether all the money big pharma has been sending her way has anything to do with her U-turn on drug prices. Sinema campaigned on lowering drug prices and making healthcare more affordable in her 2018 Senate race; as a senator she had the opportunity to help Biden do just that but instead was instrumental in massively watering down drug pricing reforms. She hasn’t given the public any details regarding this shift – just as she hasn’t given the public any meaningful details on why she is raking in so much money from multilevel marketing businesses (often criticized as pyramid schemes). If Sinema wants people to focus on her work instead of her wigs, then maybe she should remember who she is supposed to be working for. If Sinema starts providing much-needed explanations about what she stands for, there might be rather less talk about the thigh-high boots she’s standing in.TopicsFashionArizonaUS politicscommentReuse this content More

Trump’s allies think they can defy the Capitol attack panel. History suggests otherwiseSidney BlumenthalIn the infancy of the Confederacy, Congress formed a committee to investigate – and everyone cooperated Donald Trump’s extraordinary claim of executive privilege as a former president to prevent any of his aides and agents from testifying before the House select committee to investigate the 6 January attack on the US Capitol rests on the premise that the privilege resides with a president even after he leaves office. Trump is asserting that the position of former president is a recognized constitutional office with permanent rights and privileges. President Joe Biden, the incumbent president who rightfully holds executive privilege, has waived that privilege from covering the relevant documents and potential witnesses Trump wishes to keep secret and silent.Want to make Jim Jordan sing about the Capitol attack? Ask Jefferson Davis | Sidney BlumenthalRead moreStanding behind Trump’s supposed shield, a number of those subpoenaed by the committee refuse to cooperate with the investigation. Stephen Bannon, a Trump White House aide early in his term but not during the insurrection, has been cited for criminal contempt and indicted by the Department of Justice. Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, who was at the center of the plot, and Jeffrey Clark, the former assistant attorney general, who plotted to have states overturn lawful election results on baseless theories of fraud, have refused to cooperate on the grounds of an unspecified legal executive privilege.The US court of appeals for the DC circuit has granted Trump a temporary administrative injunction against the National Archives from turning over certain subpoenaed documents to the committee, in order to hear full arguments in the case on 30 November. In a prior ruling, however, Judge Tanya S Chutkan stated, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”Trump’s claim of executive privilege is based on his claim that as a former president he retains a “constitutional and statutory right” to protect his “records and communications” under any and all circumstances. His lawyer, in his emergency appeal to stay the disclosure, denies that the House committee has any “legislative purpose” and is merely “a rival political branch” – a rival apparently to a former president, who is implicitly another “political branch” even though he is no longer in office. President Biden, the appeal alleges, is simply a member of “rival political party”, acting on naked partisanship. Release of Trump’s communications in question, far from serving any legitimate government purpose, is designed only to “meet a political objective”.The attempted coup to overthrow a democratic election seems so astonishing and novel that the filings in the case have failed to come up with any remotely similar situation. But there is a precedent as exact and specific as it could be – and it directly contradicts Trump’s contentions.In fact, there was a House select committee empaneled to investigate an insurrection. That committee requested the papers of the president, subpoenaed the testimony of his cabinet secretaries and members of his administration, and called for the appearance of senior military officers. No one resisted. No one invoked executive privilege. There were no legal challenges, not a single one. Everyone fully cooperated. The president handed over his records and communications, the cabinet secretaries testified under oath, and the top general forthrightly answered questions.That insurrection began with the election of Abraham Lincoln on 6 November 1860. In a planned sequence, the federal courthouse, custom house and post offices in South Carolina were seized, and secession of the state from the Union proclaimed. President James Buchanan issued a statement declaring that while secession was illegal he had no constitutional power to prevent it.Buchanan’s passivity permitted the insurrection to advance. The small garrison of US troops stationed in Charleston was menaced by local militia. Major Robert Anderson removed his troops to the safety of Fort Sumter, located on an island in Charleston Harbor. The other forts and the Charleston arsenal were at once overrun. Soon, six other states in the lower south held elections of delegates to secession conventions, which were marked by the coercion of armed militias. To whip up the secession movement, the southern governors coordinated armed attacks from 3 January to 14 January 1861 on eight federal forts and arsenals, capturing 75,000 weapons.Washington, surrounded by Maryland and Virginia, where secessionist militias had been organized, was awash in rumors of armed assaults, including on the Capitol, and of Lincoln’s assassination to prevent his inauguration. (Indeed, there would be an assassination attempt on Lincoln’s life as he passed through Baltimore in February.) On the advice of Gen Winfield Scott, Buchanan reluctantly summoned several hundred troops to guard the capital to assure the peaceful transfer of power. The Capitol itself became a veritable army base.On 9 January 1861, in the midst of the seizure of federal forts, the House created a select committee to investigate the rolling coup that was under way. The committee demanded and received the internal correspondence of the president. It held extensive hearings and examined witnesses, including cabinet members on far-ranging elements of the subversion, from Buchanan’s dealings with the South Carolina secessionists to “the “alleged hostile organization against the government within the District of Columbia” and the “seizure of forts, arsenals, revenue cutters, and other property of the United States”.“The law has been defied, the Constitution thrust aside, and the government itself assaulted,” the committee concluded, and rebuked Buchanan for claiming the president is impotent before an attempt “to overthrow the government”. Rather than being helpless before an insurrection, the committee declared that a president must suppress it. “The Constitution makes no provision for releasing any of its officers or agents from the obligations of the oath it requires them to take.” The committee’s report quoted from the oath of office for the president: “The Executive must take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” And it cited from article 1 on the “Powers of Congress” that “Congress shall have the power” to “execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections …”Less than three weeks after the committee report was released, Lincoln was inaugurated, on 4 March 1861. A month later, on 12 April, with the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter, the insurrection crossed into civil war. By the end of war’s first year, Lincoln said in his annual message to the Congress, “It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government – the rights of the people.” He cautioned against the clear and present danger of tyranny: “Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people. In my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.” Lincoln closed, “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today – it is for a vast future also.”In ruling whether a former president is entitled to the immunity of a king, the DC court of appeals should be informed by the precedent of the House select committee investigating the insurrection that led to the civil war, its clarion call for the president and other elected officials to uphold their constitutional responsibility to act decisively against the destruction of democracy, and the words and example of Lincoln.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS Capitol attackAmerican civil warDonald TrumpAbraham LincolncommentReuse this content More

Why are Americans so unhappy with Joe Biden?Robert ReichOne answer might be that expectations were so high that hopes were bound to be dashed America is overflowing with good news. Unemployment is down, wages are up, consumer confidence is rebounding, and consumers are spending more (retail sales jumped 1.7% in October, the third monthly increase). Covid seems to be in retreat, at least among those who have been vaccinated. And two big parts of Biden’s legislative agenda – last spring’s $1.9tn American Rescue Plan, and his recent $1.2tn infrastructure plan – have been enacted.So what’s not to be happy about? Apparently, plenty. Biden’s job approval rating is 12 points lower than when he took office – now just 41% (around where Trump’s was for most of his presidency). Most registered voters say that if the midterm elections were today, they’d support the Republican candidate. Even Trump beats Biden in hypothetical matchups. More than 60% of Americans say the Democrats are out of touch with the concerns of most Americans. And Republican congressional candidates now hold their largest lead in midterm election vote preferences dating back 40 years.How can the economic and pandemic news be so good, and so much of Biden’s agenda already enacted – yet the public be so sour on Biden and the Democrats?Some blame Biden’s and the Democrat’s poor messaging. Yes, it’s awful. Even now most Americans have no idea what the “Build Back Better” package is. It sounds like infrastructure, but that bill has been enacted. “Human infrastructure” makes no sense to most people.Yet this can’t be the major reason for the paradox because the Democrats’ failure at messaging goes back at least a half century. I remember in 1968 after Nixon beat Humphrey hearing that the Democrats’ problem is they talk policy while Americans want to hear values – the same criticism we’re hearing today.Some blame the media – not just despicable Fox News but also the corporate mainstream. But here, too, the problem predates the current paradox. Before Fox News, Rush Limbaugh was poisoning countless minds. And for at least four decades, the mainstream media has focused on conflict, controversy and scandal. Good news doesn’t attract eyeballs.Some suggest Democrats represent the college-educated suburban middle class that doesn’t really want major social change anyway. Yet this isn’t new, either. Clinton and Obama abandoned the working class by embracing trade, rejecting unions, subsidizing Wall Street and big business and embracing deregulation and privatization.So what explains the wide gap now between how well the country is doing and how badly Biden and the Democrats are doing politically?In two words: dashed hopes. After four years of Trump and a year and a half of deathly pandemic, most of the country was eager to put all the horror behind – to start over, wipe the slate clean, heal the wounds, reboot America. Biden in his own calm way seemed just the person to do it. And when Democrats retook the Senate, expectations of Democrats and independents soared.But those expectations couldn’t possibly be met when all the underlying structural problems were still with us – a nation deeply split, Trumpers still threatening democracy, racism rampant, corporate money still dominating much of politics, inequality still widening, inflation undermining wage gains, and the Delta variant of Covid still claiming lives.Dashed hopes make people angry. Mass disappointment is politically poisonous. Social psychologists have long understood that losing something of value generates more anguish than obtaining it generated happiness in the first place.Biden and Democrats can take solace from this. Hopefully, a year from now the fruits of Biden’s initiatives will be felt, Covid will be behind us, bottlenecks behind the current inflation will be overcome, and the horrors of the Trump years will become more visible through Congress’s investigations and the midterm campaigns of Trumpers.Most importantly, America’s irrational expectations for quick deliverance from all our structural problems will have settled into a more sober understanding that resolving them will require a huge amount of work, from all of us.Then, I suspect, the nation will be better able to appreciate how far we’ve come in just two years from where we were.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsJoe BidenOpinionUS politicsBiden administrationcommentReuse this content More

‘Inciting violence begets violence’: Paul Gosar censured over video aimed at AOCTrump loyalist removed from committee assignments for video showing him killing Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden The House delivered an extraordinary rebuke of congressman Paul Gosar on Wednesday, by formally censuring the Arizona Republican and removing his committee assignments for posting an animated video that depicted him killing Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Joe Biden.Gosar, a loyalist of Donald Trump and one of the most far-right members of Congress, sat in the chamber and listened as his colleagues debated the censure against him – the harshest form of punishment the chamber can mete short of expulsion.“This is not about me. This is not about Representative Gosar,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech before the vote. “This is about what we are willing to accept.”“What is so hard about saying that this is wrong?” she asked.03:04The sanction was approved on a largely party-line vote, 223 to 207, with all Democrats and just two Republicans – Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois – voting in favor. Gosar was also stripped of his membership on the House Oversight Committee, where he serves alongside Ocasio-Cortez, and the Natural Resources Committee, which deals with issues critical to his state.Shortly after the vote, Gosar was called to stand in the “well” of the chamber as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi read aloud the resolution. The formal ritual, intended as a public rebuke of the censured member, was over moments later. Republicans encircled Gosar, shaking his hand and patting him on the back.Gosar posted the video earlier this month from his congressional Twitter account, asking, “Any anime fans out there?” The video, which Gosar called a “cartoon” and has since removed, depicts the Arizona congressman as an anime character slashing another figure with the face of Ocasio-Cortez in the neck with a sword. The cartoon version of Gosar then menaces his swords at Biden.The censure comes just 10 months after pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January hunting for lawmakers and threatening to “hang” the vice-president. As supporters of continue to Trump lash out and threaten Republican lawmakers who they deem insufficiently loyal, party leaders have become increasingly tolerant of violent rhetoric within their ranks.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, condemned Republicans’ overwhelming silence as “outrageous”.“These actions demand a response,” she said.House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republican leaders have refused to publicly condemn Gosar for sharing the video and urged their caucus to oppose the sanction.McCarthy called the censure vote an “abuse of power” by Democrats, designed to distract from their legislative agenda and other national issues, such as rising inflation and immigration. He also accused Democrats of imposing a double standard that failed to hold members of their own caucus accountable for controversial rhetoric.Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California who introduced the resolution, said partisanship was not the issue.“Inciting violence begets violence,” said Speier, a survivor of the 1978 Jonestown massacre. “Let me be clear, if a Democrat did the same thing, I would introduce the same resolution.”“Threatening and showing the killing of a member of this House. Can’t that appall you?” asked House majority leader Steny Hoyer, staring at the Republican side of the aisle. “Do you have no shame?”Far from being chastened, Gosar was defiant.“No matter how much the left tries to quiet me, I will continue to speak out,” he said. He did not apologize and instead insisted that the video was not intended as a threat.Democrats argued that depictions of violence and violent rhetoric from public officials can incite actual violence, pointing to the insurrection at the US Capitol as an example.“We cannot dismiss representative Gosar’s violent fantasies as a joke, because in this decade, in this American, someone’s going to take him seriously,” said congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat from Pennsylvania.Gosar, a dentist who was first elected in 2010, has been tied to white nationalist and rightwing militia groups. In Arizona, his own siblings have appeared in campaign videos urging voters to remove their brother from office. On 6 January Gosar objected to the certification of Arizona’s electors for Biden. In the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol, the Arizona congressman amplified the “Big Lie” conspiracy that baselessly claims the election was stolen from Trump. He has since defended the rioters and falsely claimed that the insurrection was a leftwing provocation.In its history, the House has censured members on nearly two dozen occasions, only six of which occurred in the last century.The most recent censure was in 2010, after a lengthy congressional investigation found congressman Charlie Rangel, a Democrat of New York, guilty of a series of ethics violations. Pelosi presided over the censure of Rangel, a member of her own caucus, and a majority of his party supported the sanction.Earlier this year, House Democrats took the unprecedented step of ousting Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Trump ally from Georgia, from her committee assignments for spreading dangerous and hateful conspiracy theories.Ocasio-Cortez has tied Gosar’s behavior to a larger pattern of abuse and harassment by Republican members of Congress. In a floor speech last year, Ocasio-Cortez publicly denounced congressman Ted Yoho of Florida for calling her a “fucking bitch” during a heated exchange over rising crime rates and poverty.In the resolution, Democrats excoriate Gosar for targeting Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress.“Violence against women in politics is a global phenomenon meant to silence women and discourage them from seeking positions of authority and participating in public life, with women of color disproportionately impacted,” it states.TopicsHouse of RepresentativesAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More