US Politics

OpinionUS politicsThe Republicans’ racial culture war is reaching new heights in VirginiaSidney BlumenthalWhy is the Republican running for governor of Virginia going after Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel Beloved? Sat 30 Oct 2021 06.22 EDTLast modified on Sat 30 Oct 2021 13.29 EDTRunning for governor of Virginia as the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin appears to have a split personality – sometimes the generic former corporate executive in a fleece vest, the suburban dad surrounded by his sun-lit children and tail-wagging dogs, and sometimes the fierce kulturkampf warrior and racial dog-whistler. His seemingly dual personality has been filtered through a cascade of Republican consultants’ campaign images. His latest TV commercial attempts to resolve the tension by showing him as a concerned father who shares the worries of the ordinary Trumpster. In the closing hours of the campaign, he has exposed that his political identity can’t be separated from Republican identity politics in the decadent stage of Trumpism.The Republican party has long specialized in fabricating esoteric threats, from the basements of Pizzagate to the stratosphere of “Jewish space lasers”. Youngkin’s campaign, though, has contrived a brand-new enemy within, a specter of doom to stir voters’ anxieties that only he can dispel: the Black Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved.His turn to a literary reference might seem an obscure if not a bizarre non sequitur, at odds with his pacifying image, but the ploy to suppress the greatest work by the most acclaimed Black writer has an organic past in rightwing local politics and an even deeper resonance in Virginia history.In his first TV ad, introducing himself as a newcomer who had never before run for political office, Youngkin warned voters not to misperceive him as yet another nasty Republican and to dismiss not-yet-stated “lies about me”. They should ignore whatever negative material they might hear about how he “left dirty dishes in the sink”. “What’s next, that I hate dogs?” Big smile. Cue: cute kids and puppies. Soundtrack: bark, bark.For a while the nice guy Youngkin tried to walk his thin line, lest he lose the party’s angry base voters. He attempted to use the soft image to cover the hard line. He is vaccinated, but against vaccine mandates. He is inspired by Donald Trump, has proclaimed his belief in the need for audits and “election integrity”; opposed to abortion, but was careful not to appear with Trump at his “Take Back Virginia” rally. He appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News in a ritual cleansing to profess that his motive is pure.“You know, Tucker, this is why I quit my job last summer,” Youngkin said. “I actually could not recognize my home state of Virginia.” He had, he explained, left the corporate world to take up the sword for the Republican culture war.Actually, according to Bloomberg News, he “flamed out” as co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, with a “checkered record”, losing billions on “bad bets”, and “retired after a power struggle”. In May, just before leaving the firm and speaking to Carlson, after the murder of George Floyd, Youngkin signed a statement affirming that contributions to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund would receive matching grants from Carlyle. When asked about this later, however, a campaign spokesperson fired back, “Glenn has never donated to the SPLC and does not agree with them. He is a Christian and a conservative who is pro-life and served in his church for years.”Youngkin’s seeming confusion around controversial racial issues highlighted his conflicting roles. In Washington, while at Carlyle, he was the responsible corporate citizen practicing worthy philanthropy. In the Republican party, where that sort of non-partisan moderation is not only suspect but mocked as a source of evil, he has had to demonstrate that he is not tainted.Soon enough, Youngkin waded into the murky waters of racial politics. He offered himself as the defender of schoolchildren from the menace of critical race theory, even though the abstruse legal doctrine is not taught in any Virginia public school. Yet he suggested that his opponent, former governor Terry McAuliffe, would impose its creed on innocent minds, depriving parents of control. “On day one, I will ban critical race theory in our schools,” Youngkin has pledged.But his brandishing of critical race theory, nonexistent in the schools’ curriculum, has been apparently insufficiently frightening to finish the job. Perhaps not enough people know what the theory is at all. He needed one more push, searched for one more issue and produced one more ad.So, Youngkin seized upon a novel racial symbol, in fact a novel. The danger, he claimed, comes from Beloved by Toni Morrison – the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by the Nobel prize-winning author, about the psychological toll and loss of slavery, especially its sexual abuse, and considered one of the most important American literary works.While no other Republican has ever before run against Beloved as a big closing statement, there is a history to the issue in Virginia.“When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk,” Laura Murphy, identified as “Fairfax County Mother”, said in the Youngkin ad. “It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine.” She claimed that her son had nightmares from reading the assignment in his advanced placement literature class. “It was disgusting and gross,” her son, Blake, said. “It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.” As it happens, in 2016 Murphy had lobbied a Republican-majority general assembly to pass a bill enabling students to exempt themselves from class if they felt the material was sexually explicit. Governor McAuliffe vetoed what became known as “the Beloved bill”.“This Mom knows – she lived through it. It’s a powerful story,” tweeted Youngkin. Ms Murphy, the “Mom”, is in fact a longtime rightwing Republican activist. Her husband, Daniel Murphy, is a lawyer-lobbyist in Washington and a large contributor to Republican candidates and organizations. Their delicate son, Blake Murphy, who complained of “night terrors”, was a Trump White House aide and is now associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which sends out fundraising emails reading: “Alert. You’re a traitor. You abandoned Trump …”The offending novel is a fictional treatment of a true story with a Virginia background, a history that ought to be taught in Virginia schools along with the reading of Beloved. In 1850, Senator James M Mason, of Virginia, sponsored the Fugitive Slave Act. “The safety and integrity of the Southern States (to say nothing of their dignity and honor) are indissolubly bound up with domestic slavery,” he wrote. In 1856, Margaret Garner escaped from her Kentucky plantation into the free state of Ohio. She was the daughter of her owner and had been repeatedly raped by his brother, her uncle, and gave birth to four children. When she was cornered by slave hunters operating under the Fugitive Slave Act, she killed her two-year-old and attempted to kill her other children to spare them their fate. Garner was returned to slavery, where she died from typhus.In the aftermath of her capture, Senator Charles Sumner, the abolitionist from Massachusetts, denounced Mason on the floor of the Senate for his authorship of the bill, “a special act of inhumanity and tyranny”. He also cited the case of a “pious matron who teaches little children to relieve their bondage”, sentenced to “a dungeon”. He was referring to Margaret Douglass, a southern white woman who established a school for Black children in Norfolk, Virginia. She was arrested and sent to prison for a month “as an example”, according to the judge. When she was released, she wrote a book on the cause of Black education and the culture of southern rape. “How important, then,” she wrote, “for these Southern sultans, that the objects of their criminal passions should be kept in utter ignorance and degradation.”Virginia’s racial caste system existed for a century after the civil war. In 1956, after the supreme court’s decision in Brown v Brown of Education ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, Virginia’s general assembly, with Confederate flags flying in the gallery, declared a policy of massive resistance that shut down all public schools for two years. The growth of all-white Christian academies and new patterns of segregation date from that period. Only in 1971 did Virginia revise its state constitution to include a strong provision for public education.Youngkin’s demonizing of Toni Morrison’s Beloved may seem unusual and even abstract, but it is the oldest tactic in the playbook. It was old when Lee Atwater, a political operative for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, explained, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”Youngkin well understands the inflammatory atmosphere in Virginia in which he is dousing gasoline and lighting matches. The violence and murder at Charlottesville are still a burning issue. The trials of racist neo-Nazis have just begun there. Prominent Lost Cause statues of Robert E Lee have been removed within the past few months. Branding Beloved as sexually obscene was always an abstracted effort to avoid coming to terms with slavery, especially its sexual coercion. Parental control is Youngkin’s abstract slogan for his racial divisiveness. Beloved is his signifier to the Trump base that he is a safe member of the cult, no longer an untrustworthy corporate type.Youngkin’s reflexive dependence on the strategy reveals more than the harsh imperatives of being a candidate in the current Republican party. It places him, whether he knows or not, cares or not, objects or not, in a long tradition in the history of Virginia that the Commonwealth has spent decades seeking to overcome.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Senator 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 politicsOpinionRepublicansVirginiaToni MorrisoncommentReuse this content More

US elections 2020‘A roadmap for a coup’: inside Trump’s plot to steal the presidency A startling memo, a surreal Oval Office encounter – just some of the twists in the unfolding story of Trump’s bid to cling to power, which critics say was no less than an attempted coupEd Pilkington in New York@edpilkingtonSat 30 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 30 Oct 2021 02.36 EDTOn 4 January, the conservative lawyer John Eastman was summoned to the Oval Office to meet Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Within 48 hours, Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election would formally be certified by Congress, sealing Trump’s fate and removing him from the White House.The atmosphere in the room was tense. The then US president was “fired up” to make what amounted to a last-ditch effort to overturn the election results and snatch a second term in office in the most powerful job on Earth.Eastman, who had a decades-long reputation as a prominent conservative law professor, had already prepared a two-page memo in which he had outlined an incendiary scenario under which Pence, presiding over the joint session of Congress that was to be convened on 6 January, effectively overrides the votes of millions of Americans in seven states that Biden had won, then “gavels President Trump as re-elected”.The Eastman memo, first revealed by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril, goes on to predict “howls” of protest from Democrats. The theory was that Pence, acting as the “ultimate arbiter” of the process, would then send the matter to the House of Representatives which, following an arcane rule that says that where no candidate has reached the necessary majority each state will have one vote, also decides to turn the world upside down and hand the election to the losing candidate, Donald Trump.Eastman’s by now notorious memo, and the surreal encounter in the Oval Office, are among the central twists in the unfolding story of Trump’s audacious bid to hang on to power. They form the basis of what critics argue was nothing less than an attempted electoral coup.In an interview with the Guardian, Eastman explained that he had been asked to prepare the memo by one of Trump’s “legal shop”. “They said can you focus first on the theory of what happens if there are not enough electoral votes certified. So I focused on that. But I said: ‘This is not my recommendation. I will have a fuller memo to you in a week outlining all of the various scenarios.’”Inside the Oval Office, with the countdown on to 6 January, Trump urged Pence to listen closely to Eastman. “This guy’s a really respected constitutional lawyer,” the president said, according to the book I Alone Can Fix It.Eastman, a member of the influential rightwing Federalist Society, told the Guardian that he made clear to both men that the account he had laid out in the short memo was not his preferred option. “The advice I gave the vice-president very explicitly was that I did not think he had the authority simply to declare which electors to count” or to “simply declare Trump re-elected”.Eastman continued: “The vice-president turned to me directly and said, ‘Do you think I have such powers?’ I said, ‘I think it’s the weaker argument.’”Instead, Eastman pointed to one of the scenarios in the longer six-page memo that he had prepared – “war-gaming” alternatives. His favorite was that the vice-president could adjourn the joint session of Congress on 6 January and send the electoral college votes back to states that Trump claimed he had lost unfairly so their legislatures could have another go at rooting out the fraud and illegality the president had been railing about since election day.“My advice to the vice-president was to allow the states formally to assess the impact of what they had determined were clear illegalities in the conduct of the election,” Eastman said. After a delay of a week or 10 days, if they found sufficient fraud to affect the result, they could then send Trump electors back to Congress in place of the previous Biden ones.The election would then be overturned.“Those votes are counted and TRUMP WINS,” Eastman wrote in his longer memo, adding brashly: “BOLD, certainly … but we’re no longer playing by Queensbury rules.”Eastman insisted to the Guardian that he had only been presenting scenarios to the vice-president, not advice. He said that since news of his memos broke he had become the victim of a “false narrative put out there to make it look as though Pence had been asked to do something egregiously unconstitutional, so he was made to look like a white knight coming in to stop this authoritarian Trump”.The problem is that for many close observers of American elections, Eastman’s presentation to Pence just two days before the vice-president was set to certify Biden’s victory leaves a very different impression.Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a leading authority on US election issues, sees Eastman’s set of alternative scenarios as nothing less than a “fairly detailed roadmap for a constitutional coup d’état. That memo was a plan for a series of tricks to steal the presidency for Trump.”The 2020 presidential election was the largest in US history, with a record 156 million votes cast and the highest turnout of eligible voters since 1900. By all official accounts, it was also among the most secure and well-conducted in US history.“It was something of a civil miracle,” Waldman said. “To have this massive turnout, an election that was extraordinarily well run, in the middle of a pandemic – this was one of America’s finest hours in terms of our democracy.”And yet, Waldman went on, what happened next? “Trump’s big lie, his campaign to overturn the election, the insurrection.”Alarm bells began to ring months before America went to the polls on 3 November 2020. As early as July Trump was laying into mail-in voting, which was seeing huge voter take-up as a result of Covid-19, deriding the upcoming poll as the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history” and calling for it to be delayed.At the time, Biden was holding a steady opinion poll lead over Trump in battleground states.By September, Trump was refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He told reporters: “We’re going to have to see what happens.”When we did see what happened – Biden winning the presidency by a relatively convincing margin – Trump refused to concede. Now, something that had only been posited as a remote and extreme possibility was unfolding before Americans’ eyes.“The events of 2020 were unprecedented,” said Ned Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University. “A sitting president was trying to get a second term that the voters didn’t want him to have – it was an effort to overturn a free election and deprive the American people of their verdict.”Since the violent incidents of 6 January when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people, information has begun to amass about Trump’s extensive ploy to undo American democracy. Congressional investigations by the US House and Senate have added granular detail that has astonished even seasoned election-watchers in terms of the scale and complexity of the endeavour.For Foley, a picture has come into focus of a “systematic effort to deny the voters their democratic choice. It was a deliberate, orchestrated campaign, and there’s nothing more fundamentally undemocratic than what was attempted.”Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has written a report on 2020 election subversion, said that as time has passed the scope of Trump’s ambition has become clear. “There was much more behind the scenes than we knew about. We came much closer to a political and constitutional crisis than we realized,” he said.In his Guardian interview, Eastman justified his Oval Office presentation to Pence on scenarios of how to overturn an election by pointing to widespread irregularities in the 2020 voting process. He claimed there were “violations of election law by state or county election officials” and “good, unrebutted evidence of fraud”. Asked how he would answer the charge that has been levelled at him that he had sketched out an electoral coup, he replied: “That begs the question: was there illegality and fraud? If there was, and it altered the results of the election, then that undermines democracy, as we have someone put in office who has not been elected.”But why would such widespread fraudulent activity be directed against Trump and not, say, Biden, or before him Barack Obama? Eastman said that it was because Trump was “pushing back against the deep state in American politics”.The “deep state” had become such an entrenched bureaucracy that it was “unaccountable to the ultimate sovereign authority of the American people”, Eastman said. “Trump’s punching back had all of the forces aligned with that entrenched bureaucracy doing everything to stop him.”.Contrary to Eastman’s claim that widespread fraud occurred during the election, all the main federal and state authorities charged with safeguarding the 2020 election, including law enforcement, have declared it historically secure. In several instances, that conclusion was reached by Trump’s own hand-picked Republican officials.They included Chris Krebs, who had been appointed by Trump to be director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) in charge of protecting the integrity of the 2020 election. On 12 November, Cisa put out a joint statement from election security officials that found the presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history”.Five days later Krebs was out of a job. “He fired me by Twitter,” Krebs told the Guardian. “One of Trump’s own nominees saying the election was legitimate was a credibility issue for him. What he did to me shows there were lengths to which the former president would go which were well beyond any previous norms.”Bill Barr, then US attorney general, was another Trump appointee who challenged the false claims of mass election fraud. Two days after the election, Barr bowed to pressure from the president and allowed federal prosecutors to investigate allegations of voting irregularities, a break with a longstanding justice department norm that prevented prosecutors from interfering in active election counts.Yet later in November, Barr met Trump at the White House and told him bluntly, according to Peril, that stories of widespread illegality were “just bullshit”. Then, on 1 December, the attorney general told Associated Press that the FBI and prosecutors had found no fraud on a scale sufficient to impact the election result.Barr stood down as the nation’s top prosecutor two weeks later.Another prominent Republican lawyer who thoroughly rejects Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen from him is Ben Ginsberg. For almost four decades, Ginsberg was at the center of major election legal battles as counsel to the Republican National Committee as well as to four of the last six Republican presidential nominees, through his law firm, Trump included.Ginsberg was also a central figure in the white-hot recount in Florida in 2000 that handed the White House to George W Bush.“What we’ve seen has been different from anything in my experience, because Donald Trump has made an assertion about our elections being fraudulent and the results rigged,” Ginsberg told the Guardian. “I know from my 38 years of conducting election-day operations that that simply is not true, there is no evidence for it. What Donald Trump is saying is destructive to the democracy at its very foundations.”Ginsberg likened Trump to an arsonist firefighter. “He is setting a fire deliberately so that he can be the hero to put it out. The problem is that there is no real fire, there is no systemic election fraud. The destruction is unnecessary.”Trump’s campaign to subvert the election began with a flurry of tweets after election day. The New York Times calculated that in the three weeks from 3 November he attacked the legitimacy of the election to his vast social media following more than 400 times.In the past few weeks, as congressional investigations have deepened, it has become clear that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election result were much more extensive and multi-layered than his Twitter rages. “This wasn’t just some crazy tweets,” Waldman said. “There was a concerted effort to push at every level to find ways to cling to power, even though he had lost.”Politico estimated that in the month after the election, the sitting president reached out to at least 31 Republicans at all levels of government, from governors to state lawmakers, members of Congress to local election officials. Such was the obsessive attention to detail, the sitting US president even called the Republican chairwoman of the board of canvassers in Wayne county, Michigan, to encourage her not to certify Biden’s victory in a heavily Democratic area.At the centre of the operation was a ragtag bunch of lawyers assembled by Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who was acting as Trump’s personal attorney. Few of the team had experience in election law; Barr referred to them, according to Peril, as a “clown car”.Among the comical conspiracy theories amplified by Giuliani and the Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell was “Italygate”, the idea that an Italian defense company used satellites to flip votes from Trump to Biden.Such florid fantasies, and the accompanying absence of hard and credible data, did little to endear Trump’s legal team to the courts. By the end of December, 61 lawsuits had been lodged by Trump and his acolytes in courts ranging from local jurisdictions right up to the US supreme court. Of those, only one succeeded, on a minor technicality.Yet the epic failure to persuade judges to play along with Trump’s efforts at subversion should not disguise the seriousness of the endeavour, nor how far it was allowed to proceed. “What I find most disturbing is how far this plot got with such thin material to work with,” Foley said.One of the most alarming aspects of the fraud conspiracy theories peddled around Trump was that so many senior Republicans and the Republican party itself endorsed them.On 19 November, Powell was invited to appear in front of cameras at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Four days earlier, the Trump campaign had circulated an internal memo that thoroughly debunked a bizarre claim championed by Powell – that Biden’s victory was the product of a communist plot. Yet Powell went ahead nonetheless, using her RNC platform to double down on the palpably false claim that Dominion voting machines created by Venezuela’s deceased president Hugo Chávez (they weren’t) had been manipulated to redirect Trump votes to Biden (they hadn’t).Complicity in the lie of the stolen election reached right to the heart of the Republican party. Even on 6 January, while shattered glass lay strewn across the corridors of Congress following the violent insurrection hours earlier, 139 House Republicans – more than half the total in the chamber – and eight Senate Republicans went ahead and voted to block the certification of Biden’s win.Many other Republicans also acted as passive accomplices in Trump’s subversion plot, by failing publicly to speak out against it. Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the US Senate, waited until 15 December to recognize Biden as president-elect.For six weeks, McConnell watched and waited. He remained silent, as every day the big lie grew stronger, amplified through the echo chambers of Fox News, the far-right OANN news network and a web of Trump benefactors including the MyPillow founder, Mike Lindell.Ginsberg told the Guardian that “the greatest disappointment to me personally is seeing people I know to be principled, with only the best intentions for the country, stand aside as Donald Trump wreaks havoc through American democracy. I don’t understand that, and I think it has really negative ramifications.”Ginsberg added: “Many of them are guilt-ridden about that. It is a very unfortunate, disappointing situation.” On 7 November, the Associated Press called Pennsylvania, and with it the presidency, for Biden. At that point, Trump’s efforts to subvert the election went into hyper-drive.“Trump appeared to think he had a viable path to staying in power,” said Hasen. “His outlook morphed into an actual attempt to use the claims of fraud to try and overturn the election.”Trump turned to what has been dubbed the “independent state legislature doctrine”. This is a convoluted legal theory that has been increasingly embraced by the right wing of the Republican party.Those who adhere to the doctrine point to the section of the US constitution that gives state legislatures the power to set election rules and to determine the “manner” in which presidential electors are chosen under the electoral college system. If those rules are changed by other legal entities without the approval of the state legislatures, then, the theory goes, election counts can be deemed illegitimate and an alternate slate of electors imposed.“It’s an extreme legal theory that does not depend on fraud but on claimed irregularities between the way 2020 was conducted and how the states had set up the election,” Hasen said.Trump and his legal advisers began bearing down on critical swing states which Biden had won, attempting to browbeat state legislators into taking up the doctrine and using it as a means of overturning the result. Lawmakers in Arizona, Pennsylvania and other battleground states were encouraged to call a special session to highlight the disparities in election procedures, with the end goal being to replace Biden’s presidential electors with an alternate slate of Trump electors.In his Guardian interview, Eastman said he was part of this effort. “I recommended that the legislatures be called into special session to assess the impact of the illegality. If there were cumulative illegal actions greater than the margin of victory, then the legislature needed to take the power back.”A month before Eastman gave his presentation to Trump and Pence in the Oval Office, he appeared before the Georgia legislature. By that point Georgia had already held a full hand recount of the almost 5m votes cast and was poised to announce the results of a third count – all of which confirmed Biden had won.In a half-hour presentation on 3 December, Eastman called on Georgia’s lawmakers to effectively take the law into their own hands. “You could adopt a slate of electors yourselves,” he told them. “I don’t think it’s just your authority to do that, but, quite frankly, I think you have a duty to do that to protect the integrity of the election in Georgia.”And then Trump took the fight to the next level: into the heart of US law enforcement. An interim report from the Senate judiciary committee published earlier this month chronicles the bombardment to which senior Department of Justice officials were subjected in the days leading up to 6 January.It is a fundamental DoJ norm that the president and his allies should never interfere in any investigation, let alone to undermine American democracy. Yet the Senate report shows that on the day after Barr’s departure was announced, 15 December, Trump began ratcheting up pressure on his replacement to try to get him to adopt the big lie.When Jeffrey Rosen, the new acting attorney general, demurred, Trump turned to a relatively lowly justice official, Jeffrey Clark, and propelled him into the thick of a mounting power struggle that had the potential to turn into a full-blown constitutional crisis. Clark, who was recently subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the 6 January insurrection, drew up a draft letter which he intended to have sent out to six critical swing states.In essence, it called on state legislatures won by Biden to throw out the official will of the people and reverse it for Trump.When Rosen refused to authorize the letter, Trump prepared to fire him and put Clark in his place. It took a showdown in the Oval Office at which key justice department officials threatened to resign en masse, accompanied even by the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, before Trump stood his threat down.That volatile three-hour meeting on 3 January was one of the most dramatic incidents in which US democracy was pushed to the brink of collapse. It was not the only one.As the clock ticked down towards Trump’s final appointment with fate on 6 January, he grew more and more agitated. On 27 December, he called Rosen to make another attempt at cajoling the justice department to come on board with his subversion plot.Handwritten notes taken by Rosen’s deputy record an astonishing exchange:Rosen: “Understand that the DoJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way.”Trump: “Don’t expect you to do that, just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] congressmen.”Then, on 2 January, Trump made his by now notorious call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official as secretary of state. A recording of the conversation obtained by the Washington Post captured Trump telling Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes” – one more vote than Biden’s margin of victory in the official count.Raffensperger politely rejected the request. Four days later, Pence turned his back on Eastman’s scenarios, and announced that he would do his constitutional duty and certify Biden as the 46th president of the United States.Trump had run out of road. He had nothing left, nowhere else to turn. Nothing, that is, except for his adoring, credulous and increasingly angry supporters.“Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Trump exhorted his followers in a now excised tweet.Just how direct was Trump’s involvement in inciting the insurrection is now the stuff of a House select committee inquiry. The committee is aggressively pursuing Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, over any role he might have played in the buildup towards the violence.Bannon, who faces criminal charges for defying congressional subpoenas, was among a gathering at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the eve of 6 January that the House committee has dubbed the “war room”. Also present were Giuliani and Eastman. According to Peril, Trump called into the meeting and spoke with Bannon, expressing his disgust over Pence’s refusal to play along and block the certification just as Eastman had outlined.When 6 January finally arrived, all eyes were on the Ellipse, the park flanking the White House where Trump was set to headline a massive “Stop the Steal” rally. Before he spoke, Eastman said a few words.The law professor recounted one of his more lurid conspiracy theories – that voting machines had secret compartments built within them where pristine ballots were held until they were needed to increase Biden’s numbers and put him over the top. “They unload the ballots and match them to the unvoted voter and … voilà!”Then Trump took the stage. He encouraged his thousands of followers to march to the Capitol. “Fight like hell. If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”The Guardian asked Eastman whether he had any regrets about what happened, personal or otherwise. A week after the insurrection he was pressured into stepping down from his post at Chapman University in California.“Regrets, yes, that people are taking action against me for telling the truth,” he said. “Regrets that I told the truth and that I continue to do so? Absolutely not.”Eastman’s pledge to continue “telling the truth” will not soothe the anxieties of those concerned about American democracy. Already, speculation about another Trump run in 2024 is causing jitters.Liz Cheney, a member of the House committee inquiry into the insurrection, has issued a stark warning to her Republican colleagues. Unless they start really telling the truth, she has told them, and countering the lies about election fraud, the country is on the path of “national self-destruction”.Rick Hasen shares her fears. “Donald Trump has been underestimated before,” he said. “He is telling us he’s planning on running. He’s continuing to claim the election was stolen. The situation in the United States right now is desperate.”TopicsUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpfeaturesReuse this content More

DemocratsSenate’s 50-50 split lets Manchin and Sinema revel in outsize influence Joe Biden, whose Build Back Better bill has been slashed by the two holdouts, said with ‘50 Democrats, every one is a president’David Smith in Washington@smithinamericaFri 29 Oct 2021 14.46 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 15.11 EDTJoe Biden recently summed up his problems getting things done.In an America where the US Senate is split 50-50, then effectively any single senator can hold a veto over the president’s entire agenda. “Look,” laughed Biden at a CNN town hall, “you have 50 Democrats, every one is a president. Every single one. So, you got to work things out.”Joe Manchin single-handedly denied US families paid leave. That’s just cruel | Jill FilipovicRead moreIt explains why the most powerful man in the world is currently struggling to get his way in Washington – and why two members of his own party, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are standing in his way.Such is the distribution of power that American presidents can only impose their will up to a point if Congress refuses to yield. While the White House can do much with executive orders and actions, major legislation must gain a majority of votes in the House of Representatives and Senate.Democrats do currently control both chambers – but only just. The Senate is evenly divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, meaning that Vice-President Kamala Harris must cast the tie-breaking vote. That means all 50 Democratic senators must be on board in the face of united Republican opposition – an increasingly safe (and bleak) assumption in polarised era.By contrast, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats reached 59 seats in the then 96-member Senate, while President Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats had 68 in what by then was a 100-seat chamber. Biden is trying to match the scale of both men’s ambition with no room for error.This is why his agenda – huge investments in infrastructure and expanding the social safety net – depends on the blessing of Manchin and Sinema in what might seem to the watching world as a case of the tail wagging the dog.Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont defeated by Biden in last year’s Democratic primary, tweeted earlier this month: “2 senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want.”But the cold reality is that, after months of painful wrangling and concessions, Manchin and Sinema have almost single-handedly narrowed the scale and scope of Biden’s grand vision.This week it emerged that Build Back Better plan would be halved from $3.5tn to $1.75tn, axing plans for paid family leave, lower prescription drug pricing and free community college. Sanders’s dream of including dental and vision care also failed to make the cut.Biden insists that the framework still represents the biggest ever investment in climate change and the greatest improvement to the nation’s healthcare system in more than a decade.He said at the White House on Friday: “No one got everything they wanted, including me, but that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on. I’ve long said compromise and consensus are the only way to get big things done in a democracy, important things for the country.”But what makes it especially galling for many is that opinion polls show the eliminated measures are highly popular. Manchin and Sinema have ensured that the US is destined to remain one of seven countries – along with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tonga – without paid leave for new mothers, according to UCLA’s World Policy Analysis Center.Biden met late on Tuesday evening with both senators at the White House. Countless newspaper columns and hours of airtime have been expended trying to understand the motives of the two holdouts, who can effectively decide whether Democrats keep their campaign promises – with huge implications for next year’s midterm elections.Manchin is not so mysterious. He hails from coal-rich West Virginia, a conservative state that Donald Trump won twice in a landslide, and once ran a campaign ad in which he shot a rifle at a legislative bill. He owns about $1m in shares in his son’s coal brokerage company and has raised campaign funds from oil and gas interests.Critics accuse him of putting personal and local concerns ahead of his party, the nation and the world. The USA Today newspaper wrote in an editorial: “It’s no stretch to conclude that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is risking the planet’s future to protect a dwindling pool of 14,000 coal mining jobs in his home state of West Virginia.”Sinema, however, has been described as enigmatic, sphinx-like and whimsical. In 2018 she became Arizona’s first Democratic senator for more than two decades and, despite progressive credentials and a flair for fashion statements, has taken conservative positions on several issues.She also provokes the left with stunts such as a thumbs-down gesture on the Senate floor when she voted against raising the federal minimum wage and, on Thursday, a parody of the TV comedy Ted Lasso with the Republican senator Mitt Romney. Perhaps tellingly, Sinema raised $1.1m in campaign funds in the last quarter with significant donations from the pharmaceutical and financial industries.In a divided Senate, where Republicans are consumed by Trump’s election lies, this duo holds the fate of Biden’s presidency in their hands. The haggling could go on for weeks more, granting Manchin and Sinema continued outsized influence and guaranteeing that their every move and word will be avidly scrutinised.Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, tweeted: “My dream? Democrats pick up a few more Senate seats in 2022 and when Joe Manchin holds a press conference to declare what he can live with and what he can’t, nobody shows up.”TopicsDemocratsUS politicsUS SenateJoe BidenUS domestic policyUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

US politicsBiden’s agenda remains unrealized as Democrats fail to close deal againPelosi forced to postpone infrastructure vote on Thursday ahead of Biden’s meeting with world leaders in Rome Lauren Gambino in Washington@laurenegambinoFri 29 Oct 2021 13.53 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 14.31 EDTJoe Biden’s nearly $3tn domestic agenda remains unrealized after an 11th-hour push to rally Democrats around a pared-down package that he framed as historic, failed to close the deal in time for his meeting with world leaders in Rome at the G20 summit.Capitol attack panel faces pivotal moment as Trump allies stonewallRead moreBut after a dramatic Thursday of bold promises and dashed hopes, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to postpone a vote on a $1tn infrastructure bill for a second time in a month, as progressives demanded more assurances that a compromise $1.75tn social policy plan would also pass.It was a setback – though perhaps only a temporary one – for Democratic leaders, who had hoped to hand the president a legislative victory that he could tout during his six-day trip to Europe for a pair of international economic and climate summits.The delay underscored the depth of mistrust among Democrats – between the House and Senate, progressives and centrists, leadership and members – after a lengthy negotiating process yielded a plan that was about half the size of Biden’s initial vision.Biden’s proposal includes substantial investments in childcare, education and health care as well as major initiatives to address climate change that, if enacted, would be the largest action ever taken by the US Congress. Revenue would come from tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy.But in concessions to centrists like the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, paid family leave, free college tuition and efforts to lower prescription drug prices were stripped from the latest iteration of the plan. Progressives were left disappointed by the cuts but their desire to pass the legislation ultimately held little leverage to force major changes.In a speech before departing for Europe, Biden acknowledged the bill fell short of his legislative ambitions, but reflected the limits of what was politically possible given Democrats’ narrow governing majorities and unified Republican opposition.“No one got everything they wanted, including me,” he said. “But that’s what compromise is.”As lawmakers and activists digested the newly released details of the plan, there seems to be a growing consensus among progressives that, while insufficient, the plan makes critical investments in many of their top priorities, especially in the field of tackling the climate crisis.“The newly announced Build Back Better Act can be a turning point in America’s fight against the climate crisis – but only if we pass it,” leaders of the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action wrote in a memo on Friday.Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, said unified control of the White House and Congress can, perhaps paradoxically, make governing harder. Because these moments are rare and often fleeting, there is a rush by the president and his party to pursue an ambitious, legacy-defining agenda, he said.“But the challenges of legislating don’t go away,” Zelizer said. “And in some ways, the tensions within the party are exacerbated by the stakes being so high.”Some have argued that scaling back key programs could make it harder for Americans to feel the impact of the new benefits, despite the substantial size of the legislation. That could make it difficult for Biden, whose approval ratings have slid in recent weeks, to sell the plan he told House Democrats would determine the fate of his presidency and their political futures.TopicsUS politicsJoe BidenDemocratsHouse of RepresentativesUS SenateNancy PelosiRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

OpinionJoe ManchinJoe Manchin single-handedly denied US families paid leave. That’s just cruelJill FilipovicAll of America’s economic peers have a paid family leave policy. Why would a Democrat oppose such a basic measure? Fri 29 Oct 2021 06.30 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 16.40 EDTAmericans will remain some of the last people on the planet to have no right to paid leave when they have children, and for that, you can thank Joe Manchin.Biden pitches $1.75tn scaled-down policy agenda to House DemocratsRead moreManchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, tanked the paid leave portion of an increasingly narrow domestic policy package. Manchin had already gotten Democrats to make what was once a sweeping and ambitious bill smaller and less effectual. Even though the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House, and are not expected to maintain control of Congress after this year’s midterm elections, they still can’t get it together to deliver what the American people put them in office to do. And that’s because of Manchin, as well as his fellow centrist holdout, Kyrsten Sinema.To be fair, 50 Republicans are to blame for this as well. All 50 of them oppose Biden’s paid family leave plan, and none were expected to vote for this bill. If even a few of them had been willing to cross the aisle to support parents and new babies – to be, one might say, “pro-life” and “pro-family” – then Manchin would not have the power he does to deny paid family leave to millions of American parents. So let’s not forget this reality, too: most Democrats want to create a paid family leave program. Republicans do not.But Manchin’s actions are particularly insulting and egregious because he is a Democrat. He enjoys party support and funding. He benefits when Democrats do popular things. And now, he’s standing in the way of a policy that the overwhelming majority of Democrats want, and that is resoundingly popular with the American public, including conservatives and Republicans.Paid family leave brings a long list of benefits to families, from healthier children to stronger marriages. And it benefits the country by keeping more working-age people in the workforce – when families don’t have paid leave, mothers drop out, a dynamic we’ve seen exacerbated by the pandemic. By some estimates, paid family leave could increase US GDP by billions of dollars.This is good policy. But it’s also a policy that is, in large part, about gender equality. While paid leave is (or would have been) available to any new parent, the reality is that it’s overwhelmingly women who are the primary caregivers for children, it’s overwhelmingly women who birth children, and it’s overwhelmingly women who are pushed out of the paid workforce when they have kids.As it stands, many well-paid white-collar employees do get some paid leave. It’s working-class parents who often don’t – and who can’t afford to take several weeks off of an hourly-wage job, even to recover from childbirth or to care for a brand-new infant who needs 24/7 attention. These workers, and particularly the women among them, are put in an impossible bind: money but no ability to care for a child, or caring for a child and no money. A paid family leave program would put an end to that particularly American cruelty.We are one of the most prosperous societies in the history of the world, and yet our lack of paid leave policies means that new mothers are back working at fast-food restaurants days after having major abdominal surgery, leaving their infants home with whoever is free to watch them. Or, our lack of paid leave policies mean that new mothers simply quit their jobs, pitching themselves into financial precarity at the exact moment they need greater stability, more money and less stress.It’s astoundingly cruel. And it’s entirely unnecessary – all of America’s economic peers have a paid family leave policy, and most of them have policies that are far more generous and far more sensible than even the plan Democrats were debating. This is not a mysterious or unsolved problem; every other wealthy and developed country on Earth has largely solved it. We are an outlier because we are simply choosing to make life unnecessarily brutal for families, and for women in particular.And this week, it’s Joe Manchin in particular who is choosing, single-handedly, to continue making life unnecessarily brutal for families, and for women in particular. He’s not the only bad actor, but right now, he’s the most powerful one.And he’s using his political power not to advocate for what his constituents want and need, but simply to demonstrate that he has it – to show that he is more influential than the American president, that American social and economic policy lies in his hands.It’s a pathetic, petty little narcissistic display. And it’s American families, and particularly American mothers, who suffer so that Joe Manchin can feel like a big man.
Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
TopicsJoe ManchinOpinionParents and parentingDemocratsUS politicsFamilycommentReuse this content More

US Capitol attackCapitol attack panel faces pivotal moment as Trump allies stonewallQuestions about Trump’s role in 6 January may go unanswered unless House investigators can secure a breakthrough to obtain documents and testimony Hugo Lowell in WashingtonFri 29 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 16.20 EDTThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is confronting a pivotal moment as resistance from top Trump administration aides threatens to undermine their efforts to uncover the extent of the former president’s involvement in the 6 January insurrection.The select committee remains in the evidence-gathering phase of the investigation that now encompasses at least five different lines of inquiry from whether Donald Trump abused the presidency to reinstall himself in office or coordinated with far-right rally organizers.These Trump fans were at the Capitol on 6 January. Now they’re running for officeRead moreBut unless House investigators can secure a breakthrough to obtain documents and testimony from Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and others in the next few weeks, the most pressing questions about Trump’s role in 6 January may go unanswered, two sources said.The select committee has designated its “gold” team to examine the extent of Trump’s personal involvement in the events that left five dead and more than 140 injured as his supporters stormed the Capitol in his name, the sources said.One major focus of the investigation is whether Trump had advance knowledge of the insurrection, the sources said – since if they uncover evidence of conspiracy to violently stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, that could constitute a crime.But to make that kind of case, which would then guide Congress on how to draft laws to avert a repeat of the Capitol attack, may be impossible without clear insight into Trump’s movements inside the White House both on 6 January and the days before, the sources said.The select committee, the sources said, effectively needs to know what Trump’s top aides know about what the former president thought would allow him to remain in office – and whether that extended to encouraging surrogates to physically stop the certification.To that end, House investigators last month subpoenaed Meadows, his deputy, Dan Scavino, former chief strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel, while asking the National Archives to turn over Trump White House records.Meadows is of special interest since he remained by Trump’s side as the Capitol attack unfolded and, in the final weeks of the administration, sat in on 6 January strategy meetings with the former president.The former chief strategist Bannon was similarly subpoenaed for documents and testimony as he was in constant contact with Trump in the days before the Capitol attack, and played a major role in drawing up the legal arguments for Pence to return Trump to office.Bannon also appeared to have prior knowledge of the Capitol attack, which former White House aides say would not have escaped Trump’s attention. “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast the day before the insurrection.The select committee, meanwhile, also asked the National Archives for Trump White House materials since they are the custodian for visitor logs and Oval Office memoranda – records that could shed light on the interactions Trump was having with Meadows and Bannon.But under orders from Trump to defy the subpoenas on grounds of executive privilege, the select committee is yet to obtain any materials or testimony from the four aides, while the National Archives is unable to release records until Trump’s lawsuit on the issue is resolved.The collective efforts from Trump and his aides mean that unless House investigators can find a way to circumvent the logjam, the gold team may ultimately find themselves unable to ever uncover whether 6 January was a White House-sponsored insurrection.Bannon, for instance, was last week referred to the justice department for prosecution after he defied his subpoena in its entirety, but a source at the US attorney’s office cautioned a decision on his case could take months of deliberations.The delay stems in part from the fact that the justice department is now examining whether they can successfully secure an indictment in the Bannon case and are indifferent to the select committee’s need to finish a report before the 2022 midterms, the source said.The US attorney’s office, the source added, may not be able to proceed with a potential prosecution against Bannon until the justice department first resolves other constitutional complaints raised by Trump in his lawsuit against the National Archives.Taken together, staff on the gold team are now starting to think the most likely avenue for securing Trump White House materials is not through the former president’s aides but through the National Archives request, since Biden has the final say over executive privilege.Still, given Trump’s pending lawsuit lodged against the National Archives – a move described by a source close to the Trump legal effort as a way to stymie the investigation – the select committee may run out of time before being able to examine the materials.Tim Mulvey, a spokesperson for the select committee, on Friday rejected the internal concerns, saying in a statement: “While we don’t comment on the specifics of our investigation, we are moving ahead expeditiously to uncover the facts, get answers for the American people, and make legislative recommendations to help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again.”“The select committee won’t be derailed by those seeking to obstruct our investigation, and we won’t be distracted by anonymous sources posing as experts and insiders,” Mulvey added.The select committee’s struggle to enforce orders against the Trump aides shows the lack of teeth carried by congressional subpoenas, with its power systematically eroded by a Trump administration that has found, since 2016, that defiance carries scant penalties.But the difficulty in obtaining any formal Trump White House materials – either through the former president’s aides or even through the National Archives – also underscores how what could be the most consequential lines of inquiry appear to be dangling by a thread.The select committee has had success eliciting information elsewhere, most notably with individuals connected to the Trump-supporting Women for America First organization that planned the 6 January “Stop the Steal” rally subpoenaed earlier in October.House investigators also heard voluminous testimony from Trump’s former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen over seven hours of voluntary testimony, that could help the gold team establish whether the former president unlawfully pressured the justice department.But without knowing what Trump’s top aides know of the former president’s connections to the Capitol attack, the sources said, it could mean that Congress is left unable to write legislation to avert a different effort to stop the certification in 2024.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Cop26Biden heads to crucial climate talks as wary allies wonder if US will deliver President faces challenges to reassert US credibility after Trump but critics say Biden’s actions have yet to match his wordsOliver Milman@olliemilmanFri 29 Oct 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 04.17 EDTWith no major climate legislation firmly in hand and international allies still smarting after four bruising years of Donald Trump, Joe Biden faces a major challenge to reassert American credibility as he heads to crucial UN climate talks in Scotland.Is Joe Biden about to show up to Cop26 empty-handed? | Kate AronoffRead moreThe US president, who has vowed to tackle a climate crisis he has described as an “existential threat” to civilization, will be welcomed to the Cop26 talks with a sense of relief following the decisions of his predecessor, who pulled his country out of the landmark Paris climate agreement and derided climate science as “bullshit”.But Biden, who departed to Europe on Thursday and arrived in Rome on Friday morning for a G20 summit, will head to Glasgow with his domestic climate agenda whittled away by a recalcitrant Congress and a barrage of criticism from climate activists who claim Biden’s actions have yet to match his words.This disconnect has perturbed delegates keen to see a reliable American partner emerge from the Trump era, amid increasingly dire warnings from scientists that “irreversible” heatwaves, floods, crop failures and other effects are being locked in by governments’ sluggish response to global heating.“The US is still the world’s largest economy, other nations pay attention to it, and we’ve never had a president more committed to climate action,” said Alice Hill, who was a climate adviser to Barack Obama. “But there is skepticism being expressed by other countries. They saw our dramatic flip from Obama to Trump and the worry is we will flip again. A lack of consistency is the issue.”Laurence Tubiana, a French diplomat who was a key architect of the Paris agreement, said that Biden had put climate “at the top of his agenda” and that US diplomacy has helped eke some progress from countries such as Saudi Arabia, South Africa and India.But she added the US had a “historical climate credibility problem” and that other leaders fret about its domestic political dysfunction and long-term commitment.“We do worry, because it has happened before and could happen again,” she said. “The US is the world’s largest historical emitter and never passed a significant climate bill. [Biden] has still got a long way to go to make up for Trump’s lost years.”In a show of soft American power, Biden is bringing a dozen of his cabinet members to Glasgow, where delegates from nearly 200 countries will wrangle over an agreement aimed at avoiding a disastrous 1.5C of global heating, a key objective of the Paris deal. But perhaps the most consequential figure to the American effort, rivaling the president himself, is remaining at home – the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.Manchin, a centrist Democrat, looms large at the talks having derailed the centerpiece of a landmark reconciliation bill that would slash US emissions. The White House still hopes the bill, which would be the first major climate legislation ever passed in the US, will help convince other leaders to also increase their efforts in Glasgow to head off climate breakdown.Cop26 delegates have become acutely aware of how Biden needs the vote of Manchin, who has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, to pass his agenda and help determine the future livability of places far from the West Virginia senator’s home state.“Bangladeshis probably know more about American politics than the average American does, people know about Joe Manchin,” said Saleemul Haq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Bangladesh, which faces looming devastation from flooding. “Joe Manchin is in the pocket of the fossil-fuel industry and is trying to cut everything the coal lobby doesn’t want.“Biden’s agenda is stuck in Congress with his own senators and he hasn’t delivered anything near what the US should deliver. It’s just words. His actions are woefully inadequate.”Biden has admitted that “the prestige of the United States is on the line” over the reconciliation bill, according to Democrats who met with the president, but publicly he has remained upbeat. When John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, said that the failure to secure the legislation would be like “President Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement, again”, Biden gently rebuked him, saying that Kerry had indulged in “hyperbole”.“In every single day of this administration we’ve been driving forward a whole of government approach that sets us up to go into this climate conference with an incredible deal of momentum,” said an administration official.The White House has pointed to the rejoining of the Paris accords, the resurrection of several environmental rules axed by Trump and what it is calling the “largest effort to combat climate change in American history” with the reconciliation bill, which is still set to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars in support for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles.Progressives argue, however, that the Biden administration has done little to curb the fossil fuel industry, most notably in allowing two controversial oil projects, the Dakota Access pipeline and the Line 3 pipeline, to proceed. Just a week after the end of Cop26, the administration will auction off 80m acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling, an area larger than the UK.“The president is doing so much, but he is simply not doing everything he can to deliver climate justice and save lives – and we need him to now,” said Cori Bush, a progressive Democratic congresswoman who has visited the site of the Line 3 construction in Minnesota.Protests have erupted in front of the White House over this record, with several young climate activists currently staging a hunger strike to demand Biden does more.“President Biden started very strongly by rejoining the Paris agreement but it’s been a frustrating past few months, things have slowed down,” said Jade Begay, a climate activist who is part of a White House advisory council. “Joe Manchin is holding hostage our survival on planet Earth for his own political career and people are really questioning if Biden will stick to his promises.”05:18The US has also declined to set an end date for the coal sector, unlike countries such as the UK and Germany. This position runs contrary to a key objective of the British government as Cop26 hosts, with Alok Sharma, the conference’s president, pledging the talks will help “consign coal to history”.Asked by the Guardian about the US’s stance on coal, Sharma said progress on the issue has been slow until now but “we want to see what is going to be possible” at the Glasgow summit. “I welcome the fact we now have an administration in the US that is very focused on taking climate action and supporting the international effort,” he said.Sharma added: “It is ultimately on world leaders to deliver. It is world leaders who signed up to the Paris agreement and … if I can put it like this, it is on them to collectively deliver at Cop.”TopicsCop26Joe BidenClimate crisisUS politicsUS foreign policyJoe ManchinnewsReuse this content More

In the aftermath of the 6 January attack on the Capitol, Donald Trump was impeached and acquitted for a second time. Jonathan Freedland talks to Congressman Eric Swalwell who talks about what a special select committee is doing to hold those deemed responsible for inciting the mob accountable

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