US Politics

US Capitol attackHouse Capitol attack panel issues subpoena to Trump official Jeffrey ClarkIn targeting Clark, House investigators followed up on a Senate report that detailed his efforts to abuse the DoJ to support Trump Hugo Lowell in WashingtonWed 13 Oct 2021 17.22 EDTLast modified on Wed 13 Oct 2021 17.52 EDTThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Wednesday issued a subpoena to top Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark, escalating its inquiry into the former president’s efforts to reinstall himself in office and the 6 January insurrection.The new subpoena underscores the select committee’s far-reaching mandate in scrutinizing the origins of the Capitol attack, as it pursues an investigation into Donald Trump’s role in pressuring the justice department (DoJ) to do his bidding in the final weeks of his presidency.Capitol attack panel prepared to pursue charges against those who defy subpoenas, Schiff says – liveRead moreIn targeting Clark, House select committee investigators followed up on a Senate judiciary committee report that last week detailed his efforts to abuse the justice department to support Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.The House select committee chairman, Bennie Thompson, said in a statement that he authorized a subpoena for testimony from Clark to understand how the Trump White House sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory during the joint session of Congress.“We need to understand Mr Clark’s role in these efforts at the justice department and learn who was involved across the administration. The select committee expects Mr Clark to cooperate fully with our investigation,” Thompson said.The new subpoena targeting Clark came a day before the select committee was scheduled to conduct depositions against top Trump administration officials over their potential role in the 6 January insurrection and what they knew in advance of the Capitol attack.But it was not clear hours before the deadlines whether the Trump officials – former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel – would testify on Thursday and Friday.The Guardian first reported that the Trump aides were expected to largely defy the subpoenas for documents and testimony under instructions from the former president and his legal team led by the ex-Trump campaign lawyer Justin Clark.Trump instructed his former aides to defy the subpoenas issued under the threat of criminal prosecution on grounds of executive privilege, in an attempt to slow-walk the select committee’s investigation, according to a source familiar with the strategy.The select committee had said in a recent statement that Meadows and Patel were “engaging” with House investigators ahead of the deposition dates, but declined to comment on the extent of their cooperation. Bannon has vowed to defy his subpoena in its entirety.The House select committee investigators’ demand for testimony from Clark amounts to a significant development for the second investigative track pursued by the panel – in addition to their investigation into the organization of the Capitol attack.The select committee had sought to negotiate with Clark for voluntary testimony but a breakdown in discussions led Thompson to move ahead with a subpoena compelling a deposition under oath, according to a source familiar with the matter.The Senate report, among other things, described how justice department officials and Trump’s White House counsel scrambled to stave off pressure during a period when Trump was being told about ways to block Biden’s certification by a lawyer he saw on television.Senator Dick Durbin, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said the report’s findings led him to believe that Trump – who is expected to run for the presidency in 2024 – would have “shredded the constitution to stay in power”.The report reaffirms previous accounts of Trump’s attempts to return himself to the Oval Office. But in drawing on testimony from the former attorney general Jeffre Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, it brought new light to Clark’s role in the conspiracy.Clark in particular played a leading role in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, having participated in multiple conversations with Trump about how to upend the election and pushed his superiors to entertain debunked claims of fraud, the report said.The Senate judiciary committee report detailed a 2 January confrontation during which Clark demanded that Rosen send Georgia election officials a letter that falsely claimed the DoJ had identified fraud – and threatened to push Trump to fire him if he refused.In a subsequent 3 January meeting in the Oval Office, Trump appeared to entertain the threat against his acting attorney general: “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election,” Rosen recounted Trump saying.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

OpinionUS news We kayaked to Joe Manchin’s yacht, and we’d do it againAngi Kerns and Loretta YoungWe needed our senator to hear how desperate West Virginians like us are for Congress to pass the Build Back Better Act Wed 13 Oct 2021 06.25 EDTFor most people, kayaking on the Potomac is a leisure activity. For us, it was a desperate attempt to have our voices heard. We left our families and jobs in West Virginia to travel to DC in order to make sure Senator Manchin heard loud and clear from his constituents: it’s time to pass the Build Back Better Act. It just so happens that one of the only ways to get Senator Manchin’s attention is to launch a flotilla of boats around his yacht, where he lives when in DC.We’re proud to be West Virginians, and we’re proud to be “kayaktavists”, as our effort was called. What we’re not proud of is how Senator Manchin is putting big money interests over the needs of West Virginians and working-class people across the country.After days of protesting on the water outside his yacht, we finally got Manchinto agree to sit down with us. And we stand by what we told him: he needs to pass the full reconciliation bill. It’s time to put the interests of working-class people first. For people like us, investments like an expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), paid family medical leave and childcare subsidies are a matter of life or death.Angi told him about her life as a young mother, working three jobs, barely seeing her kids and still needing to use food pantries. Loretta described a mom who was able to keep the lights on only because the CTC hit her bank account just in time. She explained that CTC work requirements punish children and hurt parents who can’t afford to pay for childcare to go to low-wage jobs.Our friend Zachary Fancher told the senator about how he was denied loans and grants to finish his schooling and how free community college would help young people get good jobs and slow the rate of exodus from the state, which is the highest in the country. Katonya Hart told Manchin about her struggles to assist elderly neighbors who cannot afford home care and about others attempting to perform their own medical and dental care.West Virginians also know better than anyone that the fossil fuel industry is dying. We’re bleeding jobs, and the Build Back Better Act is a prime opportunity for us to use federal dollars to move from the fossil fuel past into the clean energy future the world is already shifting to. We would rather have thousands of good union jobs than continue sending billions of our tax dollars to fossil fuel companies.The senator expressed concern that West Virginians will have an “entitlement mentality.” Well, our children are entitled to food, clean air and clean water. Our seniors and disabled community members are entitled to dignified home care, parents are entitled to stay home with sick kids and we all are entitled to healthcare, including vision, dental and hearing. Or at least we should be.We’d like to know why our senator is one of just two Democratic members of Congress keeping these necessities from us – especially when they’re fully funded by taxing the rich.This is what Manchin can’t see from his yacht: West Virginians are working hard to make ends meet, and we’re still struggling. The rich are getting richer, buying yachts and airplanes, while working-class people like us barely get by.West Virginians know that we need this investment: whether or not the senator acknowledges the polls, a bipartisan majority of us, nearly 80% of West Virginians, want Congress to pass the full Build Back Better agenda.Give our communities good jobs, better healthcare, healthy environments, higher education, childcare, and watch what we’ll achieve.We’re done being ignored by our own senator. We’re done being told by our senator that we want too much for our children, for our neighbors, for our communities. West Virginia deserves a senator who will fight to invest in our working-class people, not protect the interests of the wealthy elite. It might have taken several days sitting in kayaks in DC to get Senator Manchin to acknowledge us, but we’re not going away until West Virginians have their voices heard: we want to Build Back Better.
Angi Kerns is an organizer with Young West Virginia and Loretta Young is executive director of Race Matters West Virginia. Both authors took to the waters last week alongside numerous West Virginians, CPD Action and Greenpeace USA
TopicsUS newsOpinionUS politicsDemocratsUS CongresscommentReuse this content More

OpinionUS newsIs America experiencing an unofficial general strike?Robert ReichAcross the country, people are refusing to return to backbreaking or mind-numbing low-wage jobs Wed 13 Oct 2021 06.16 EDTLast modified on Wed 13 Oct 2021 06.18 EDTLast Friday’s jobs report from the US Department of Labor elicited a barrage of gloomy headlines. The New York Times emphasized “weak” jobs growth and fretted that “hiring challenges that have bedeviled employers all year won’t be quickly resolved,” and “rising wages could add to concerns about inflation.” For CNN, it was “another disappointment”. For Bloomberg the “September jobs report misses big for a second straight month”.‘I have never felt so hopeless’: millions in US fear utility shutoffs as debts riseRead moreThe media failed to report the big story, which is actually a very good one: American workers are now flexing their muscles for the first time in decades.You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions.No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it’s related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land – Hollywood TV and film crews, John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Nabisco workers, Kellogg workers, nurses in California, healthcare workers in Buffalo.Disorganized or organized, American workers now have bargaining leverage to do better. After a year and a half of the pandemic, consumers have pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services.But employers are finding it hard to fill positions.Last Friday’s jobs report showed the number of job openings at a record high. The share of people working or actively looking for work (the labor force participation rate) has dropped to 61.6%. Participation for people in their prime working years, defined as 25 to 54 years old, is also down.Over the past year, job openings have increased 62%. Yet overall hiring has actually declined.What gives?Another clue: Americans are also quitting their jobs at the highest rate on record. The Department of Labor reported on Tuesday that some 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August. That comes to about 2.9% of the workforce – up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting.All told, about 4 million American workers have been leaving their jobs every month since the spring.These numbers have nothing to do with the Republican bogeyman of extra unemployment benefits supposedly discouraging people from working. Reminder: the extra benefits ran out on Labor Day.Renewed fears of the Delta variant of Covid may play some role. But it can’t be the largest factor. With most adults now vaccinated, rates of hospitalizations and deaths are way down.My take: workers are reluctant to return to or remain in their old jobs mostly because they’re burned out.Some have retired early. Others have found ways to make ends meet other than remain in jobs they abhor. Many just don’t want to return to backbreaking or mind-numbing low-wage shit jobs.The media and most economists measure the economy’s success by the number of jobs it creates, while ignoring the quality of those jobs. That’s a huge oversight.Years ago, when I was secretary of labor, I kept meeting working people all over the country who had full-time work but complained that their jobs paid too little and had few benefits, or were unsafe, or required lengthy or unpredictable hours. Many said their employers treated them badly, harassed them, and did not respect them.Since then, these complaints have only grown louder, according to polls. For many, the pandemic was the last straw. Workers are fed up, wiped out, done-in, and run down. In the wake of so much hardship, illness and death during the past year, they’re not going to take it anymore.In order to lure workers back, employers are raising wages and offering other inducements. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour – or 4.6% – over the last year.Clearly, that’s not enough.Corporate America wants to frame this as a “labor shortage.” Wrong. What’s really going on is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a healthcare shortage.Unless these shortages are rectified, many Americans won’t return to work anytime soon. I say it’s about time.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsUS newsOpinionUS economyEconomicsUS politicscommentReuse this content More

US CongressHouse passes bill to raise US debt ceiling through early DecemberLegislation raises government’s borrowing limit to $28.9tnHard-fought House vote passes entirely along party lines Guardian staff and agenciesTue 12 Oct 2021 19.57 EDTLast modified on Tue 12 Oct 2021 21.57 EDTThe US House of Representatives gave final approval on Tuesday to a Senate-passed bill temporarily raising the government’s borrowing limit to $28.9tn, putting off the risk of default at least until early December.Kamala Harris: European colonizers ‘ushered in wave of devastation for tribal nations’Read moreDemocrats, who narrowly control the House, maintained party discipline to pass the hard-fought, $480bn debt limit increase. The vote was along party lines, with every yes from Democrats and every no from Republicans.Joe Biden is expected to sign the measure into law this week, before 18 October, when the treasury department has estimated it would no longer be able to pay the nation’s debts without congressional action.Republicans insist Democrats should take responsibility for raising the debt limit because they want to spend trillions of dollars to expand social programs and tackle climate change. Democrats say the increased borrowing authority is needed largely to cover the cost of tax cuts and spending programs during Donald Trump’s administration, which House Republicans supported.House passage warded off concerns that the world’s largest economy would go into default for the first time, but only for about seven weeks, setting the stage for continued fighting between the parties.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell wrote to Biden on Friday that he would not work with Democrats on another debt limit increase. McConnell was harshly criticized by Trump, the Republican party’s leader, after the Senate vote.Lawmakers also have only until 3 December to pass spending legislation to prevent a government shutdown.The Senate’s vote last week to raise the limit – which had been more routine before the current era of fierce partisanship – turned into a brawl. Republicans tried to link the measure to Biden’s goal of passing multitrillion-dollar legislation to bolster infrastructure and social services while fighting climate change.At a news conference on Tuesday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said she was optimistic that Democrats could work out changes to reduce the cost of their social policy plans “in a timely fashion”.In another sign compromise was possible, progressive Democrats told reporters that most of them wanted to keep all the proposed programs in the multitrillion-dollar plan, while shortening the time period to cut its overall cost.Biden has suggested a range of more like $2tn rather than the initial $3.5tn target. At a briefing today, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters: “We are at a point where there are choices that need to be made, given that there are fewer dollars that will be spent.”Psaki said that the conversations are ongoing between White House senior staff and the president as well as key Democrats such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona about how to trim the bill and what a smaller package would look like.Psaki was asked if the president supported Pelosi’s strategy for the “Build Back Better” bill outlined in a letter she sent to caucus members on Monday, passing a bill with fewer programs that will receive more funding. Though she wouldn’t confirm if the president supported that specific strategy, Psaki noted that the bill would be smaller versus the $3.5tn Biden originally proposed and referred to comments Pelosi made during her press conference.“What [Pelosi] said in that press conference is that ‘if there are fewer dollars to be spent, there are choices that need to be made’, and the president agrees … If it’s smaller than $3.5tn, which we know it will be, then there are choices that need to be made,” said Psaki.“A bill that doesn’t pass means nothing changes,” Psaki said.Gloria Oladipo contributed reportingTopicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsUS economyEconomicsnewsReuse this content More

OpinionIvanka TrumpSurprised that Ivanka Trump was almost head of the World Bank? You shouldn’t beArwa MahdawiDonald Trump wanting his daughter to have the top job at the World Bank is no great surprise. What intrigues me is the thought of Steven Mnuchin blocking it Tue 12 Oct 2021 11.34 EDTLast modified on Tue 12 Oct 2021 14.01 EDTIt’s no secret that Donald Trump has something of a soft spot for his eldest daughter, Ivanka. He’s constantly tooting her horn and gushing over her talents. Not only does Ivanka have a “very nice figure”, Trump has boasted, but “she’s very good with numbers”. She’s so good at all that numbers stuff that the former president even considered her for the top job at the World Bank in 2019. And that wasn’t just a fleeting fantasy, either; according to a recent report by the Intercept, Ivanka’s nomination for World Bank president “came incredibly close to happening”. The reason it didn’t is that Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, intervened. Which, by the way is a rather different story from the one Ivanka tells. The former first daughter has said she passed on the job because she was very happy with the high-powered White House position she’d appointed herself to.I can’t say I’m surprised that Ivanka was a stone’s throw away from a(nother) prestigious job she was laughably unqualified for. What does intrigue me is why Mnuchin might have blocked her nomination. Trump has a knack of surrounding himself with sycophants who do his bidding; what could have prompted Mnuchin to break ranks? Could it possibly be that the guy finds brazen nepotism distasteful? Alas, it seems unlikely, considering he’s a product of it himself. Mnuchin’s first job out of Yale was at Goldman Sachs, where his dad just happened to be a general partner. According to a New York magazine profile, Mnuchin’s colleagues at Goldman Sachs didn’t consider him “especially book smart”, but that didn’t stop him becoming partner himself. The same profile notes that his elevation to partner came at the expense of an African American trader from a working-class background who struck one colleague as being “much smarter than Steven” and having “accomplished a lot more”. I don’t know how fair that profile is, but I’d bet both my kidneys that Mnuchin isn’t someone who stays awake at night fretting about nepotism.So perhaps Mnuchin was afraid Ivanka’s appointment might be unethical or make the US look ridiculous? Again, these theories seem unlikely. Mnuchin and his (third) wife, the Scottish actor Louise Linton, don’t seem particularly bothered by ethics or looking ridiculous. Mnuchin, after all, is nicknamed the “foreclosure king” because he made a ton of money evicting elderly people from their homes. Linton, meanwhile, is notorious for having written a “white saviour” memoir full of dubious claims. The pair haven’t exactly kept a low profile since getting together. Remember when the lovebirds did a very weird supervillain-style photoshoot with a sheet of new dollar bills? Not exactly something someone concerned about optics might do. Then there was the time they took a government plane to see a solar eclipse in Kentucky. Linton posted the trip on Instagram and hashtagged all the designer labels she was wearing: “#rolandmouret pants”, “#tomford sunnies”, “#hermesscarf”, “#valentinorockstudheels”. The whole thing was #inverybadtaste.The pair haven’t exactly tried to tone it down since then. Linton recently made a movie called Me You Madness where she plays a “materialistic, narcissistic, self-absorbed misanthrope” who hates commercial air travel, loves high fashion and eats men for fun. It also contains spider sex. Mnuchin has been very supportive of the movie, calling the escapades of a greedy sociopath “highly entertaining”. Again, he doesn’t seem like the sort of guy who cares what other people think. Rather, he seems like the sort of guy who actively supports narcissistic blonds (Linton looks quite a bit like Ivanka) with white saviour complexes and enormous egos doing whatever the hell they like. If he blocked Ivanka’s nomination then I’ll once again wager my kidneys that it wasn’t for the common good, but it was somehow for his own good. After all, nepotism simply isn’t a problem for people like Mnuchin. It’s just the way the world works.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
TopicsIvanka TrumpOpinionDonald TrumpUS politicsWorld BankEconomicsGlobal economycommentReuse this content More

OpinionUS newsProgressives are now heavyweights in the Democratic partyGary GerstleThe ambition of Biden’s spending package reveals the distance that US politics has travelled since the Great Recession Tue 12 Oct 2021 06.18 EDTLast modified on Tue 12 Oct 2021 08.32 EDTThe stench of defeat has clung to the Democrats’ failure to get either of their major infrastructure bills passed by Congress during the last week of September. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had committed herself to 27 September as the date by which she would bring to a vote the smaller, bipartisan bill infrastructure package already passed by the Senate. This was going to happen, she said, even if no progress had been made on meeting the progressive Democrats’ key demand: passing the larger reconciliation infrastructure bill at the same time. But Pelosi held no vote that day or even that week, even as she vowed with increasing frequency (and seeming desperation) that one was imminent. The week ended not with a dramatic roll call but with plenty of Democratic handwringing and gleeful Republican predictions that the collapse of Democratic rule and, with it, of Biden’s presidency, was at hand.Treating that fateful week as the moment when the promise of the Biden presidency vanished may be too hasty a conclusion, however. The difficult challenge facing Pelosi was to unite Democrats behind a second infrastructure bill much larger and more ambitious than the first. It was never going to be easy to pass that second bill, and not just because the Democrats were holding a slim majority in the House and the thinnest of majorities in the Senate. It is also the case that a bill of this size and scope has no clear precedent. We hear a lot about FDR’s remarkable accomplishment, passing 15 separate bills in the first 100 days of his New Deal administration in 1933. The Democrats’ second infrastructure bill, if passed, would have been equally remarkable. It is best understood as an attempt to compress the equivalent of Roosevelt’s fifteen separate initiatives into one giant piece of legislation.It’s exhausting simply to read through the list of the second infrastructural bill’s major provisions: universal preschool, subsidies for child and elder care, a program of school lunches, paid medical leave, expansion of Medicare (and Obamacare and Medicaid), massive investments in a green economy, additional investments in physical infrastructure, a Civilian Climate Corps (modelled on FDR’s storied Civilian Conservation Corps), affordable housing, Native American infrastructure, support for historically black colleges and universities, and an expanded green card program for immigrant workers and their families. We’ve heard a lot about the way in which the filibuster warps American democracy and about the arcane process of “reconciliation” that, in a few instances, allows for a filibuster “workaround.” We’ve heard a lot less about how the Democrats, in difficult political circumstances, have come within two Senate votes of achieving a legislative breakthrough on a scale that rivals FDR’s legendary 100 days.And despite pundit declarations to the contrary, Democrats’ attempt at breakthrough is not yet dead. It is true that the reconciliation infrastructural bill no longer has a chance of reaching an expenditure level of $4tn. If such a bill passes, it is likely to be in the $1.5-2tn range. The many major initiatives currently contained within it may have to be shrunk by a third. That will disappoint Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their supporters, who had originally set their eyes on a $6tn package. Yet, history offers a different perspective. The Biden administration might still deliver a package of programs across its first year totaling $5tn: an estimated $2tn for a downsized reconciliation infrastructural bill; $2tn for America’s Rescue Plan already approved; and the $1tn for the bipartisan infrastructure bill that is sure to pass the House at some point. This “shrunken” 2021 package as a whole would still rival (as a percentage of GDP) government expenditures during the most expensive years of the second world war. It would exceed by more than five times the size of Obama’s 2009 economic recovery plan.The ambition of Biden’s spending package reveals the distance that US politics has travelled since the Great Recession, when Obama relied for economic guidance on a group of economic advisors drawn from the neoliberal world of Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs, and of Wall Street more broadly—figures such as Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and Michael Froman. Elizabeth Warren had not then launched her political career, and Sanders was a lonely voice in the Senate. They were certainly not regarded as Democratic Party heavyweights. They now are. That Biden ultimately sided with the progressives during the 27 September week is a sure sign of their influence.The progressives’ influence is equally apparent in Biden’s decision, in the days leading up to the expected vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, to nominate Saule Omarova to be Comptroller of the Currency. Omarova, a law professor at Cornell University, is a radical who wants to democratize and nationalize finance in America in ways never done before. In her legal writings, she has argued that the Federal Reserve ought to be turned into a people’s bank where Americans would keep their deposit accounts (rather than in private banks, as is currently the case). This newly configured Fed, in her vision, would also establish a “national investment authority” charged with directing Federal Reserve capital to projects that serve the public interest. Omarova may not receive confirmation from the Senate; even if she does, she may simply be a pawn in Biden’s campaign to get the mainstream Jerome Powell reappointed as Fed chairman. But by nominating Omarova, Biden has spurred a conversation already underway about how to restructure the Fed in ways that make it less of a cloistered institution serving elite interests and both more transparent and more responsive to the democratic will.Omarova is hardly a singular figure in Biden circles. Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at Binghamton University and a former chief economist for Democrats on the US Senate Budget Committee, has argued in a widely-read book (The Deficit Myth) that governments can sustain much larger deficits than conventional economic theory prescribes. High-volume government expenditures, properly targeted, she asserts, will not slow economic growth but enhance a “people’s economy.” Lina Khan, appointed by Biden to chair the Federal Trade Commission, believes that social media and e-commerce giants such as Amazon exercise the kind of monopoly power that damage both the economy and American democracy. She has authorized the FTC to scrutinize the practices of these corporate titans with a view toward either breaking them up or subjecting them to much stricter public regulation than they have yet known. More generally, she aims to restore a regime of public regulation of private corporate power that FDR and his New Dealers did so much to bring into being—and that the Reagan Revolution did so much to break up. The bipartisan fury directed at Facebook during congressional hearings last week suggest that Khan’s views may have broad popular appeal.It is still too soon to know which of these progressive views and the governing proposals that issue from them will prevail. The Democrats are operating in a political environment far more hostile than what Roosevelt faced in 1933, when he enjoyed large majorities in the House and the Senate. If they fail to pass versions of both infrastructural bills this autumn, the Democrats will seriously damage their chances of maintaining their majorities in the House and Senate in 2022. But it is also true, as is the case with the populist mobilization that Trump has engendered on the right, that the new progressivism is not going away anytime soon. We have entered a new political era, one in which the principles and strategies that guided the party during the Clinton and Obama eras no longer suffice.
Gary Gerstle is Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge and is writing The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022). He is a Guardian US columnist
TopicsUS newsOpinionAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsBernie SanderscommentReuse this content More

OpinionTrump administrationThe Senate’s findings on the last days of Trump’s presidency are grim. Will it matter?Lloyd GreenDon’t expect the report to change minds: for Republicans, fealty to Trump is the acid test Tue 12 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 12 Oct 2021 08.51 EDTLast week, the Senate’s judiciary committee released its staff report on Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and bend the justice department to his will. Subverting Justice: How the Former President and his Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election lays out in grim detail the ex-reality show host’s concerted effort to weaponize the government’s legal machinery in his desperate bid to cling to power.One conclusion reads: “President Trump repeatedly asked DOJ leadership to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to assist his efforts to overturn the election results.” Another informs us that “Trump allies with links to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ.”As if we didn’t already know. Don’t expect the report to change hearts or minds.On a Saturday night visit to Iowa, Trump told the crowd that he had not conceded defeat. Indeed, one day later, Steve Scalise, the No 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, refused to say that the election wasn’t stolen. Trump has the Republicans in a hammerlock. The impact of the Senate report is likely to be negligible.Since Trump’s backers pillaged Congress back in January, the Republican party has selectively forgiven and forgotten. By the numbers, 57% of Republicans now believe “too much attention” has been paid to the 6 January riot. Only roughly a third of Republicans concede that storming the Capitol was about overturning the election. Too many Republicans still blame it on antifa.The new normal is neither particularly normal nor new. As America’s cold civil war continues, hyper-partisanship is the rule, not the exception. And among Republicans, fealty to Trump is the acid test.Look at Mike Pence, Trump’s hapless vice-president and an aspiring 2024 presidential nominee. Even after having been kicked to the curb by his former boss and targeted for hanging by Capitol rioters, Pence continues to play political lapdog.He is all too aware that Trump remains the Republican party’s boss and that his future rests in Trump’s hands. “I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January,” Pence told Fox News.“One day in January” – really?Apparently, signs that screamed “Hang Mike Pence” were an illusion, as were the gallows near the Capitol. Then again, Pence’s brother Greg, a congressman from Indiana, voted against certifying the election despite his having seen first-hand what his sibling had endured.Although the report will not change the political landscape, it is likely to have real consequences for Jeffrey Clark, a former assistant attorney general and the most senior justice department official to plot with Trump. The report recommends that the DC bar’s disciplinary counsel “evaluate Clark’s conduct to determine whether disciplinary action is warranted”.Republicans overplayed their hand in California – and Democrats are laughing | Lloyd GreenRead moreIn plain English, the Senate’s Democrats are inviting the DC bar to strip Clark of his law license. Working for Trump frequently comes with a downside.Tellingly, the committee’s Republicans do not offer a particularly full-throated defense of Clark. Instead, Senator Charles Grassley, the committee’s ranking Republican, intimated that Clark had failed to receive sufficient due process. “Committee Democrats opted to release their report having not yet received requested government documents and having not yet heard from Jeffrey Clark,” Grassley said.Substantively, the Republican party appears ready to sacrifice Clark to spare Trump. The president “listened to all data points”, they wrote in a competing report, and the path advocated by Clark “would be rejected”. In all fairness, he wouldn’t be the first person to thrown in a front of the proverbial bus for the sake of a sitting president.Not surprisingly, where there’s a raging dumpster fire, Rudy Giuliani is close by.According to the committee, Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, asked the justice department to investigate a theory pushed by Giuliani known as “Italygate”, which “held that the Central Intelligence Agency and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes”.Let that sink in.As the Senate report recedes from the voters’ consciousness, expect the House’s investigation to emerge as a focal point for all things Trump, with the ex-president seeking to block the cooperation and testimony of his former aides, including Meadows, all in the run-up to the midterms.Beyond that, Trump is also invoking “executive privilege” to keep Steve Bannon, his 2016 campaign chairman, from testifying. To be sure, Bannon was not a member of the administration when 2021 rolled around. He had left the White House in the summer of 2017.Instead, Bannon was goading Trump, telling him, according to Peril, the latest Bob Woodward book, co-authored with Bob Costa: “People are going to go, What the fuck is going on here? We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th, fucking bury him … We’re going to kill it in the crib, kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”For the record, Bannon had previously suggested that Anthony Fauci’s head be severed from its body. Whether Bannon is found to be in criminal contempt for refusing to testify before Liz Cheney and others is a live question.The bottom line remains that Trump was never going quietly into the political night. Short of his own re-election, he viewed the process as “rigged” and “corrupt”.How the House and the courts handle all this remains to be seen. Right now, the broader public is far from riveted, and the Republicans are either on board with Trump or simply cowed.TopicsTrump administrationOpinionRepublicansUS politicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS SenatecommentReuse this content More