US Politics

US Capitol attackCapitol attack panel’s message to Steve Bannon: we won’t forget about youRepublican Adam Kinzinger says pursuit of a criminal contempt referral was ‘the first shot over the bow’ for Trump allies Richard Luscombe@richluscSun 17 Oct 2021 13.36 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 13.37 EDTAdam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the special committee investigating the deadly 6 January US Capitol attack, said on Sunday the pursuit of a criminal contempt referral against Steve Bannon was “the first shot over the bow” for allies of Donald Trump defying subpoenas to testify.“It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re going to be able to just kind of walk away and we’re going to forget about you’,” Kinzinger, a vocal critic of the former president, told CNN’s State of the Union.He added that the committee would not rule out calling Trump himself to testify, though he acknowledged that such a move was not imminent.Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, has declined to appear before the committee, or respond to the subpoena demanding documents and testimony, claiming executive privilege. The committee will decide on Tuesday whether to make a criminal contempt referral to the full House of Representatives.Kinzinger, an Illinois congressman who was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment in January following the insurrection, also said that Joe Biden was right to call for the prosecution of those who resisted subpoenas. Republican criticism of the president’s comments forced the justice department to issue a rare statement on Friday reaffirming its independence from the White House.“The president has every right to signal, I think he has every right to make it clear where the administration stands. God knows the prior administration every two hours was trying to signal to the justice department,” Kinzinger said, referring to Trump’s prolific pressuring of the DOJ.“But that has to do with other pretty horrific things, and I think the president has made it clear that we need answers to this. The vast majority of Americans agree, so this potential criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon is the first shot over the bow.”The 6 January committee has issued a number of subpoenas in recent days and weeks to former Trump acolytes or administration officials thought to have key knowledge of the events of the day.Last week’s subpoena for the former top DOJ official Jeffrey Clark was seen as an escalation of its investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his election defeat and subsequent false claims that he was cheated out of victory, otherwise known as the big lie.The Guardian reported earlier this month that Trump had directed aides including Bannon, the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and defense department aide Kash Patel not to testify.Trump granted clemency to Bannon over federal fraud charges in one of his last acts before leaving office on 20 January. Kinzinger was also asked if Trump would receive a subpoena.“We want to make sure we’re getting every piece of this puzzle, that’s going to include people that have already come in talking to us, it’s going to include people that we’ll potentially subpoena in the future, whose names you probably never heard [and] will have a very good incentive to come in and talk,” he said.“That begins to put the building blocks in this together. Speaking honestly, if we subpoena all of a sudden the former president, we know that’s going to become kind of a circus, so that’s not necessarily something we want to do up front. But if he has pieces of information we need, we certainly will.”TopicsUS Capitol attackSteve BannonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

TexasRepublicans move to tighten grip on Texas after redistricting map approvedRedrawn map, expected to strengthen Republican numbers, faces final negotiations before being sent to Governor Greg Abbott Edward Helmore and agenciesSun 17 Oct 2021 12.27 EDTRepublicans have moved to tighten their grip on power in Texas after a late-night vote in the state’s legislature approved an early sign-off to new congressional boundaries at the expense of communities of color.The Republican-led effort will give the party powers over redrawn US House maps and shore up its eroding dominance in Texas, whose demographics are becoming less white in a shift that most experts see as favoring Democrats.The redrawn congressional districts would make make it easier for many Republican incumbents to hold their seats, but critics say they also threaten Black and Hispanic communities’ political influence.The district map contained in Senate Bill 6 is expected to strengthen Republican numbers in the state’s delegation to Washington from the current 23-13 split in favor of Republicans to a 24-14 or 25-13 advantage, according to the Austin American-Statesman.Republicans say the districts, which were drawn by the Texas state senate, adhered to federal voting rights law. Texas Democrats objected to the proposed districts, arguing that Republicans had failed to respect or reflect the sharp increase in Latino, Black and Asian populations who make up more than half of the nearly 4m new Texans over the past decade. The increase gave Texas two seats in Congress last year.“This map is a bad map,” said Democratic representative Chris Turner of Grand Prairie, a city in Dallas County. “It’s a map that does not reflect that the tremendous growth of our state is 95% attributable to Texans of color. It gives the two new districts that Texas received to Anglos.”Another Dallas-area democrat, Rafael Anchía, said that SB 6 would increase Anglo-majority districts from 22 to 23, while districts where Hispanics make up the majority of voters would be reduced from 8 to 7. The state’s sole majority-Black district would disappear.“That doesn’t work morally, it doesn’t work mathematically, and it shouldn’t work in redistricting,” Anchía told the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. But Houston senator Joan Huffman, the Republican author of SB 6, has said that she created a redistricting plan “blind to race” that meets the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.The redistricting maps still face final negotiations between the Texas upper and lower chambers before being sent to Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, who is expected to sign them.The measures are expected to trigger court challenges by Democrats and voting rights advocates in what could be another high-profile, high-stakes legal battle that has already made Texas the center of abortion rights and immigration battles.Republicans, who control both chambers, have nearly complete control of map-making process, and are working off maps that the courts have already declared as tilted, or gerrymandered, in their favor.Representative Van Taylor, for example, whose district in Dallas’ exurbs went for Donald Trump by a single percentage point last year. Under the new maps, reports the Associated Press, Trump would have won the district by double-digits.Michael McCaul, representative of Texas’ 10th Congressional District, stretching from Austin to Houston could now represent a solidly pro-Trump district, after Houston’s exurbs were peeled away.Furthermore, the district stretching from the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio that President Joe Biden won by just over 2% would now slightly tilt toward Trump voters.But some incumbent Democrats, too, came away with advantages by changing the configuration that placed two Democratic African-American representatives, Sheila Jackson Lee and US Representative Al Green, in the same Harris county district. Another Democratic amendment returned Fort Bliss to the district based in nearby El Paso.TopicsTexasRepublicansGreg AbbottUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Pete ButtigiegButtigieg warns Manchin of resistance to Biden’s climate plan: ‘It will cost lives’White House has said clean energy provisions likely to be dropped from bill to secure support of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Richard Luscombe@richluscSun 17 Oct 2021 11.43 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 11.44 EDTThe transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg delivered a blunt warning on Sunday to Joe Manchin and other Senate Democrats who are forcing Joe Biden to scale back his climate crisis agenda: your resistance is going to cost lives.Manchin, senator for the coal-dependent state of West Virginia, opposes elements of the president’s clean energy performance program (CEPP), a $150bn central plank of his Build Back Better plan and $3.5tn spending bill.White House officials have acknowledged that clean energy and clean electricity provisions are likely to be dropped from the bill to secure the support of Manchin and fellow sceptic Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both votes are critical in a divided 50-50 Senate.Buttigieg appeared to express his disappointment in Manchin’s stance on Sunday, telling CNN’s State of the Union that the holdout politicians’ stonewalling of Biden’s ambitious climate plan could be deadly.“The longer you take to do something about it, the more it’s going to cost in livelihoods as well as lives,” he said.“The administration and the president are committed to bold climate action, exactly what legislative form that takes is what’s being negotiated right now. But the bottom line is we have to act on climate for the good of our children and for the good of our economy. This is kind of like a planetary maintenance issue.”Biden is attempting to broker a deal with Manchin and Sinema that would allow the bill to pass, though the president has already conceded that cuts will be made. “I’m convinced we’re going to get it done. We’re not going to get $3.5tn. We’ll get less than that, but we’re going to get it,” Biden said on Friday.Buttigieg’s criticism was more veiled than that of the progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who lambasted Manchin last week in an opinion piece in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.“Poll after poll shows overwhelming support for this legislation. Yet… in a 50-50 Senate we need every Democratic senator to vote ‘yes.’ We now have only 48. Two Democratic senators remain in opposition, including Manchin.” he wrote.“This is a pivotal moment in modern American history. We have a historic opportunity to support the working families of West Virginia, Vermont and the entire country and create policy which works for all, not just the few.”His comments drew swift rebuke from Manchin, who in a tweet attempted to portray Sanders as a socialist out-of-stater trying to “tell West Virginians what is best for them”.“Millions of jobs are open, supply chains are strained and unavoidable inflation taxes are draining workers’ hard-earned wages as the price of gasoline and groceries continues to rise,” Manchin said.“I will not vote for a reckless expansion of government programs.”Buttigieg on Sunday responded to criticisms of the administration’s handling of the supply chain crisis, telling CNN that it was caused at least partly by the success of Biden’s economic policies.“If you think about those ships waiting at anchor on the west coast, every one is full of record amounts of goods that Americans are buying because demand is up, because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession,” he said.He praised Biden’s efforts last week to ease bottlenecks, which included ordering ports in California to operate 24 hours a day, but said in a separate interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to solve what he said was a “very complex problem”.“You got the terminals, the rail piece, you got the warehouses, the drivers, and we’re working on all of those angles,” he said. “But these are private-sector systems, this is a capitalist country. Nobody wants the federal government to own or operate the stores, the warehouses, the trucks, or the ships, or the ports. Our role is to try to make sure we’re supporting those businesses and those workers who do.”TopicsPete ButtigiegJoe BidenBiden administrationUS domestic policyClimate crisisUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Bill ClintonBill Clinton released from hospital after infection treatmentFormer US president was admitted to California hospital on Tuesday with an infection unrelated to Covid Associated PressSun 17 Oct 2021 11.19 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 15.35 EDTBill Clinton was released Sunday from the Southern California hospital where he had been treated for an infection.The former US president was released around 8am from the University of California Irvine medical center.Clinton, 75, was admitted Tuesday to the hospital south-east of Los Angeles with an infection unrelated to Covid-19, officials said.Clinton spokesperson Angel Urena had said on Saturday that Clinton would remain hospitalized one more night to receive further intravenous antibiotics. But all health indicators were “trending in the right direction”, Urena said.An aide to the former president said Clinton had a urological infection that spread to his bloodstream. In the years since Clinton left the White House in 2001, the former president has faced several health scares.In 2004, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery after experiencing prolonged chest pains and shortness of breath. He returned to the hospital for surgery for a partially collapsed lung in 2005, and in 2010 he had a pair of stents implanted in a coronary artery.Clinton has responded to worries over his health by embracing a largely vegan diet that has seen him lose weight and report improved health.TopicsBill ClintonUS politicsCalifornianewsReuse this content More

OpinionUS supreme courtThe courts have a new chance to block Texas’s abortion law. They must take itLaurence H Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, Jeffrey Abramson and Dennis AftergutSB 8 not only stripped Texan women of their rights under Roe v Wade, it made a mockery of the US constitution and the supremacy of the federal courts Sun 17 Oct 2021 06.24 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 06.25 EDTSadly, predictably and appallingly, on October 14, a three judge panel of the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit has allowed Texas’s “Bounty-Hunter” anti-abortion law to go back into effect while the court considers the case on the merits. Every day that the fifth circuit panel’s unlawful order keeps the statute in operation brings irreversible injury to women in Texas. US Attorney General Merrick Garland has properly decided to seek emergency relief from the US supreme court.The justice department is right to accuse the State of Texas of seeking to destroy not only abortion rights but also the foundation of our constitutional Republic. In a nation whose history is fraught with battles between states’ rights and national sovereignty, the case of United States v Texas raises issues basic to our national compact.Texas set the current controversy in motion by passing SB8, an anti-abortion law that legislators knew was unconstitutional. In doing so, they violated what Chief Justice Marshall explained two centuries ago was the bedrock of our young nation’s rule of law – that our constitution reigns supreme.“Senate bill 8 (SB8) flouts that principle,” Monday’s DoJ brief in the fifth circuit reads. The law does that “by blatantly violating constitutional rights and severely constraining judicial review of its unconstitutional restrictions.” That “sets this case apart.”Put bluntly, Texas has sought not only to virtually eliminate women’s rights under Roe v Wade, but also to reduce our Constitution’s supremacy to a relic. Those twin dangers are why the stakes are high in the suit by the United States to enjoin the Texas anti-abortion statute. And that’s why the October 14 Fifth Circuit order keeping the law in effect is so troubling.This case stands on a very different footing from the one that a conservative 5-4 supreme court rejected on September 1 on procedural grounds. With the United States now suing, there is plenty of precedent for the federal government to come into court challenging a state law before it is enforced, and a state cannot hide behind sovereign immunity as a defense. The cases that the fifth circuit cited on Friday as reasons for refusing to block SB8 were entirely inapplicable because they have no relevance to a suit brought by the United States to force a recalcitrant state to obey the constitution. Texas’s reason for not arguing SB8’s constitutionality is obvious. The supreme court has affirmed many times since Roe v Wade in 1973 that states cannot prohibit abortions before the fetus is viable and capable of surviving outside the womb. Viability occurs at about the 24th week of pregnancy.Nonetheless, Texas’s law makes all abortions illegal, without exceptions for rape or incest, once fetal cardiac activity can be detected – usually around six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period.The fact that the law is enforced by vigilantes’ private civil suits rather than by government prosecutions only aggravates its unconstitutionality. It is a Texas law that opens Texas courts to these bounty-hunting lawsuits. Since 1948, it has been settled law that individuals may not use state courts to deprive others of constitutional rights.On Wednesday, 6 October, in a 113-page opinion, with some of the strongest language ever heard from a federal judge, US district court Judge Robert Pitman blocked Texas from enforcing this near-total ban on abortions. Judge Pitman’s opinion explained that Texas concocted a transparent “scheme” to “end run” the constitution. The court laid out the elaborate “machinations” Texas devised to avoid a court doing anything about a clearly unconstitutional law.Judge Pitman also documented cases of women – sometimes minors – suffering “grievous wrong”, as they are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies or travel, if they can afford it, to another state to access their constitutional rights: “The court can only speculate as to the hardships” these women have “had to endure”.Having temporarily reinstated SB 8, the Fifth Circuit noted that it will expedite review of the merits of Judge Pitman’s decision. That could affect the supreme court’s consideration of emergency relief to the United States. Whether now or later, this case will land on the court’s docket. Even justices who disagree with Roe v Wade should recognize the dire implications of letting any state deliberately design a blatantly unconstitutional statute in such a way that no court can block its enforcement until it’s too late to prevent the statute from doing irreparable harm by deterring people from exercising their rights.In the 1950s, states tried to disregard supreme court decisions interpreting the constitution when they engaged in a concerted effort to thwart desegregation orders. Then, too, the United States government interceded against the states. When the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus attempted to block desegregation, the supreme court, in Cooper v Aaron, unanimously and emphatically reaffirmed the supremacy of the constitution and federal law.The court declared: “No state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against the constitution without violating his undertaking to support it.” All nine justices joined in declaring: “If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.”That would be the result if Texas could destroy the constitutional rights of women before any court could enjoin its devious scheme. To ensure the constitution remains the supreme law of the land, and to protect all rights it guarantees, the fifth circuit and the supreme court must uphold Judge Pitman’s injunction.
Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University Professor emeritus and a professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School. Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Jeffrey Abramson is Professor of Law and Government at the University of Texas, Austin. Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor
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US elections 2020Pressure mounts on ex-DoJ official Jeff Clark over Trump’s ‘election subversion scheme’ Former assistant attorney general faces possible disbarment and charges after report details machinations on Trump’s behalfPeter Stone in WashingtonSun 17 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTJeffrey Clark, a former top environmental lawyer at the Trump justice department accused of plotting with Trump to undermine the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, is facing ethics investigations in Washington that could lead to possible disbarment, as well as a watchdog inquiry that might result in a criminal referral.Steve Bannon: Capitol attack panel to consider criminal contempt referralRead moreThe mounting scrutiny of the ex-assistant attorney general, who led the justice department’s environment division for almost two years and then ran its civil division, was provoked by a report from the Senate judiciary committee whose Democratic chairman, Richard Durbin, has asked the DC bar’s disciplinary counsel to examine Clark’s conduct and possibly sanction him.The panel’s exhaustive 394-page report followed an eight-month inquiry, and included voluntary testimony from former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, revealing how Clark schemed privately with Trump about ways to pressure Rosen to help launch an inquiry into baseless charges of voting fraud in Georgia and other states that Joe Biden won.The report noted Clark repeatedly tried to “induce Rosen into helping Trump’s election subversion scheme”, including by telling Rosen that if he agreed to join their cabal to overturn election results, Clark would turn down an offer Trump had made him to become attorney general in place of Rosen.Clark was asked by the Senate panel to testify voluntarily in July but declined, according to a source familiar with the matter.The Senate report was shared with the House select committee that has been investigating the 6 January attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results. On 13 October, the committee issued a subpoena seeking deposition testimony, and it requested records from Clark on 29 October, after reportedly struggling to get his cooperation.“It’s no mystery why Clark is playing hard to get with Congress,” said former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich in an interview with the Guardian. “He faces a meaningful threat of criminal liability based on the facts contained in the Senate report.“The Senate report provides overwhelming evidence that Jeffrey Clark became a witting pawn of Trump’s in trying to launch a coup in the justice department, which would then serve as the launching pad for the broader coup whose aim was to overturn the results of the election.”Clark’s covert efforts to help Trump have been under scrutiny by the current inspector general at the justice department, Michael Horowitz, since January, when news reports surfaced about his machinations with Trump to help overturn the election results by spurring an investigation in Georgia focused on baseless claims of voting fraud.It’s unclear when the inspector general inquiry will be concluded, but depending on the findings, a criminal referral could result.The Senate report provided new details about the secretive pressure tactics deployed by Trump and Clark to persuade Rosen to accede to their schemes to help nullify Biden’s win, even after Trump staunch ally, attorney general William Barr, publicly stated on 1 December that the election results were not marred by fraud that “could have effected a different outcome in the election”.Strikingly, the report described a bizarre multi-hour White House meeting on 3 January that was attended by Trump, Rosen, Clark and other top administration lawyers, where Trump initially showed strong interest in ousting Rosen, who had been resisting pressures from Clark to open an inquiry into fraud allegations, and replacing him with Clark.According to Rosen’s testimony, Trump began the meeting by taking an aggressive posture and declaring: “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”At the end of the meeting, Trump dropped the covert scheme to oust Rosen after Rosen’s deputy Donoghue told Trump that he, Rosen and others, including the two top White House attorneys, would resign in protest.Pat Cipollone, the top White House lawyer, condemned Trump’s plan as a “murder-suicide pact,” according to the Senate report.The Senate report formally recommended that the DC bar’s disciplinary counsel “evaluate Clark’s conduct to determine whether disciplinary action is warranted”.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a top Democrat on the judiciary panel, in a statement to the Guardian said: “Either Jeffrey Clark was an enterprising sycophant looking to score points with a transactional president, or he was a cog in a much larger election-theft scheme.“Clark’s testimony under oath will be very important to arrive at the full truth, which is why it’s very hard to imagine he avoids testifying – either before Congress or a grand jury.”Before the release of the Senate report, ABC News unearthed emails revealing that Clark tried to get Rosen and his deputy to approve a letter he drafted on 28 December that would have pressed Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp to “convene a special session” of the state legislature to examine unfounded allegations of voting fraud before 6 January, when Congress met to certify the results.The Senate GOP’s minority in a separate report offered a tepid defense for Trump and Clark’s actions, stating that Trump “listened to all data points” at the White House meeting where several resignations were threatened, and “rejected” the path Clark promoted with Trump’s apparent blessings. Grassley also faulted the Democrats for issuing their report before hearing from Clark and receiving more documents.Still, two days before the majority report, about three dozen prominent lawyers and former DoJ officials signed an ethics complaint orchestrated by Lawyers Defending American Democracy which also asked the DC disciplinary counsel to investigate Clark’s conduct with an eye to sanctions.The lawyers wrote that Clark “made false statements about the integrity of the election in a concerted effort to disseminate an official statement of the United States Department of Justice that the election results in multiple states were unreliable”.Trump nominated Clark in mid-2017 to serve as assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, but he was only narrowly confirmed in October 2018.During his tenure running the division, Clark reportedly often was at odds with veteran lawyers there, because of his narrow reading of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. By late 2020, Clark had become acting chief of the civil division at the DoJ.Previously, Clark had been a partner at the powerhouse law firm Kirkland & Ellis, where he defended BP in Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation and represented the US Chamber of Commerce in litigation that challenged the federal government’s power to regulate carbon emissions.Barr and Rosen were also top partners at the firm before their stints leading the Department of Justice.Clark’s distaste for strong environmental rules during his tenure at the department was presaged by some of his earlier comments about climate change in which he derided the need for more regulations to address it.Clark, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, gave a talk at its 2010 convention, where he bitterly denounced the Obama administration’s policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions as “reminiscent of kind of a Leninistic program from the 1920s to seize control of the commanding heights of the economy.”Given Clark’s anti-regulatory background in the private sector and his stint at the DoJ, it’s perhaps not surprising that he landed a top post working for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative law firm funded by the Charles G Koch Foundation.Clark was tapped in July to be the alliance’s chief of litigation and director of strategy. Two calls to the alliance’s press office to reach Clark and seeking comment about his status there in the wake of the Senate report did not get responses. But on Wednesday Clark’s name had disappeared from its website’s roster of staff.TopicsUS elections 2020Trump administrationUS politicsUS SenateDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

BooksRigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s baseMollie Hemingway says the 2020 election ‘went terribly wrong’. In a divided America, her deeply flawed book will find readers Lloyd GreenSun 17 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTThe state of the union is sulfurous. Donald Trump’s defeat did not change that.More than 80% of Trump and Biden voters think elected officials from the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Half of Trump supporters and two-fifths for Biden think secession would be a good idea.Into the fray leaps Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway with Rigged, 488 pages on “How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections”. Hemingway’s is an immovable feast. It’s about owning the libs.“If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone,” she writes. “But most of all, you’re not wrong.”In 2015, Hemingway branded Trump a “demagogue with no real solutions”. Now, like so many Republicans, she’s a fan. She discounts Charlottesville, where in August 2017 far-right marchers earned kind words from the president, as a “hoax”. She castigates those who denounce the events of 6 January this year, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol.“People who call the few-hour riot at the Capitol by unarmed protesters an ‘insurrection’ are bad people who are harming the country,” she tweeted in July.The riot was an attempt to overturn the election. Five people died, a police officer among them. Rigged is catnip for Trump’s base.“They used Covid to rig an election,” Trump whines, in an interview. “There was nothing I could do.” He has been singing that song since May 2020. And then there is reality: the administration’s performative nonchalance in the face of Covid undermined Trump’s chances of reelection.That was understood by his campaign as early as spring 2020. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, in April Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, warned that Covid could cost the boss re-election.“We have seen the enemy and it is us,” Fabrizio wrote. “It isn’t [Trump’s] policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters’ reactions to his temperament and behavior.”Hemingway looks in other directions, pointing a finger at Democratic lawyers and voters for supposedly gaming the system amid a pandemic, berating Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for pursuing the wrong legal strategies, and ignoring comments by Bill Barr, who she interviews but who as attorney general let Trump know he had not “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election”.It’s true that Trump might have mounted more of a fight. His campaign and the GOP had real lawyers on the payroll and Republicans were secretary of state in Arizona and Georgia. But the party had squandered the advantages of incumbency. Trump and Hemingway both go at Silicon Valley with a vengeance, reserving a special place in hell for Mark Zuckerberg.“Big tech got meaner, bigger, stronger, and they were crazed,” Trump says. As for Zuckerberg, he “should be in jail”. One suspects many Americans might agree.Hemingway criticizes the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) for funding election operations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. She contends that such private-public partnerships undermine the public’s faith in electoral integrity. For the record, courts repeatedly denied pre-election efforts to block CTCL funding. One federal judge, William C Griesbach, a George W Bush appointee, acknowledged the “receipt of private funds for public elections may give an appearance of impropriety” – but dismissed the lawsuit. Hemingway does not examine Team Trump’s own relationship with Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company part-owned by the Mercer family, Trump benefactors, used Facebook to illegally harvest personal data. Steve Bannon, who would become Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, was a board member and officer. He denies personal culpability.There’s more that Hemingway leaves untouched. According to The Contrarian, a recent book by Max Chafkin of Bloomberg News, in a 2019 meeting between Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and Trump ally, Zuckerberg basically agreed to champion “state-sanctioned conservatism”. Zuckerberg has called the claim “pretty ridiculous”. Thiel, an original Facebook investor, still sits on the board.It doesn’t end there. A recent lawsuit commenced by the Rhode Island Retirement System against Facebook, Zuckerberg, Thiel and his company, Palantir, alleges “significant damage” caused by the data-harvesting scandal. The suit quotes the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, in alleging that Palantir employees “regularly worked in person, during normal business hours, at the offices of Cambridge Analytica in London”.Back on the page, it seems Hemingway cannot resist the siren song of race. In Justice on Trial, her last book, about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, she rubbished the legal underpinnings of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court ruling that made state-imposed school segregation unconstitutional. Such decisions, she wrote, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.It’s a unique take, with which even Trump’s three supreme court picks would not agree. Amy Coney Barrett has called Brown a “super-precedent … unthinkable” to overrule. Kavanaugh has said the same. Neil Gorsuch concedes it was properly decided.Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreUndeterred, Hemingway now takes aim at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, resurrecting Barry Goldwater’s contention that it evinced “an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the federal government”. Hemingway also derides Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights as a blatant appeal to black voters.In 1964, Senator Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide. That was the last time a Democrat accomplished that feat – or won the “white vote”, for that matter.The news remains a battleground. Ryan Williams, president of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has made it known his mission is to save western civilization.“We believe in truth and reason,” he recently told the Atlantic. “The question is whose truth and whose reason.”Williams also said “a third of the country thinks the election was given to Biden fraudulently”. Hemingway is sure to find an audience.
Rigged is published in the US by Regnery
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VirginiaObama and Trump wade into key battle over Virginia’s governor seat The race is unpredictable and tight, with former governor Terry McAuliffe up against Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin Edward HelmoreSat 16 Oct 2021 15.41 EDTLast modified on Sat 16 Oct 2021 15.43 EDTJoe Biden faces a key test of public standing in a tight and closely watched campaign for governor in Virginia next month. So important has the fight now become in being seen as a bellwether for the 2022 midterm elections, that two ex-presidents are weighing in on the battle.For Biden and the Democrats winning Virginia would hold out the prospect of keeping a grip on congress next year and avoiding being seen as a lame duck administration. For Republicans, a win could pre-sage a major comeback in 2022 and a return to electoral strength of a party still dominated by Donald Trump.The stakes are so high that both Trump and Barack Obama are intervening in the race.Why Virginia holds the key to the 2022 US midterms: Politics Weekly Extra podcastRead moreLast week, Trump called in to a gathering of Virginia supporters, urging them to vote for the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, and calling him “a great gentleman”. Meanwhile, Obama will later this month arrive in the state to boost turnout among Black voters. “The stakes could not be greater,” Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe said, as he announced Obama’s campaign support on MSNBC last week.The proxies in the contest, McAuliffe, a former governor running for the job he held from 2014-18, and first-time Republican challenger Youngkin, are currently polling relatively closely at 48.5% and 46.4%, according FiveThirtyEight – making the race unpredictable and tight.The men are running to replace the state’s Democratic governor Ralph Northam who has been in the party’s political doghouse since 2019 when it was revealed his 1984 medical school yearbook page contained a photo of one person dressed as a member of the KKK and another in blackface impersonating an African American.The Virginia race comes against a backdrop of bad news for Biden, who has seen his popularity fall in the aftermath of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and legislative gridlock on the main plans of his domestic agenda and growing uncertainty of post-pandemic economic recovery. His approval rating has sunk from 55% in March to about 44% now.But so, too, does the contest present a test for Trump, who lost Virginia by 10% in 2020, but is increasingly seen to be gauging his hold on the Republican party and its voters ahead of the midterms, which could then swing his decision to run for re-election in 2024.Nor is Trump’s intervention in the race a win-win for Youngkin. The two men are not likely to campaign in person as Youngkin must simultaneously appeal to pro-Trump rural voters, but not telegraph any association so blatantly that he turns off moderate Republican voters in Virginia’s Washington-centric northern suburbs where elections in the state are often decided.Bob Holsworth, a longtime political analyst in the state, told the Washington Post that if Trump were to hold a rally in the state, it would be a “disaster” for Youngkin. “The more he shows up and he more he participates, the worse off it is for Youngkin,” he added.But Trump countered that political wisdom with some of his own: “The only guys that win are the guys that embrace the Maga movement,” Trump said in an interview with conservative talkshow host John Fredericks. Instead of overtly embracing Trump, Youngkin has campaigned with Texas senator Ted Cruz and with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. But he steered clear of an event hosted by Trump strategist Steve Bannon who may face contempt charges on Tuesday for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into the 6 January Capitol riot. Youngkin was also careful to criticize the Bannon event’s use of a flag that had reportedly been flown at the 6 January insurrection.Youngkin’s hands-off, hands-on approach is also designed to not raise the hackles of relatively unengaged democratic support for McAuliffe, who has his own endorsement issues to deal with. For his part, Virginia’s former governor comes with the baggage of close ties to the Clintons, whose popularity among independents and left-wing Democrats is far from assured. Last month, Hillary Clinton, whose first, failed presidential nomination campaign was co-chaired by McAuliffe sent out a fundraising email. That was followed by a fundraising event hosted by Bill Clinton.But other Democratic heavy-weights are traveling to Virginia to soothe Democratic anxiety and try to propel McAuliffe’s campaign toward the decisive victory they need. Georgia Democratic star Stacey Abrams and Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and first lady Jill Biden are also expected in the state’s northern suburbs, while House speaker Nancy Pelosi plans a fundraiser.But Biden himself has and will likely remain absent from Virginia. Mirroring Youngkin’s relationship to Trump, McAuliffe and his aides have expressed fears over associating with Biden. McAuliffe recently described the president as “unpopular” in Virginia.McAuliffe has also indicated that legislative impasse in Washington is damaging to Democrats in the country at large. “Democrats have got to quit talking, and they’ve got to get something done,” McAuliffe told The Washington Post. “You got elected to get things done. We have the House, Senate and White House.”Hanging over Democratic heads are the memories of losing the midterm elections in 2010, a crushing defeat for Obama that was predicted when Democrats lost a Senate seat in Massachusetts while trying to push through a controversial healthcare reform bill. TopicsVirginiaUS politicsJoe BidenRepublicansDemocratsBarack ObamaDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More