US Politics

In her lifetime, India Walton has been a 14-year-old working mother, a nurse, a union representative and a socialist community organizer.On Wednesday, she was on the cusp of yet another career change and a series of “firsts” after defeating a four-term incumbent in the Democratic primary race to become the mayor of Buffalo, New York state’s second largest city.With no Republican challengers in the general election later this year, Walton is all but guaranteed to ascend to the mayoralty in solidly Democratic Buffalo.She would not only become the city’s first female mayor but also the first self-declared socialist to lead a major US city in decades.Walton would be the first socialist mayor of a major American city since 1960, when Frank Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor, the New York Times reported.“This victory is ours. It is the first of many,” Walton said, adding: “If you are in an elected office right now, you are being put on notice: we are coming.”Although the current Buffalo mayor, Byron Brown, did not immediately concede his bid for a fifth term, the Associated Press called the primary race for Walton on Wednesday “after it became clear that there weren’t enough absentee ballots for Brown to overcome Walton’s lead,” the wire service reported.“Mommy, I won!” Walton told her mother over the phone. “Mommy, I’m the mayor of Buffalo – well not ’til January, but yeah!”Walton’s platform outlines plans to tackle a local affordable housing crisis and declare Buffalo a sanctuary city for immigrants, which limits a local jurisdiction’s cooperation with federal enforcement o f immigration law. And also the intention to convert the city’s fleet of public vehicles to electric cars in an effort to address climate change.One of her key proposals foreshadows sweeping reforms to “public safety”, focusing on harm prevention, restorative justice and the root causes of crime instead of punitive action, according to her campaign platform.Under her watch, police will no longer respond to most mental health calls and will stop enforcing low-level drug possession offenses. She also intends to require unpaid leave for officers under investigation for police brutality, among other measures.Last year, Buffalo police sparked outcry when two officers pushed 75-year-old Martin Gugino to the pavement during anti-racism protests, causing a severe head injury.Walton also focus on economic development and food access in Buffalo by prioritizing local, minority and women-owned businesses for contracts, establishing a public bank and supporting community gardens, her website says.More than 30% of the city’s residents live in poverty, and in the local county, employment rates for low-income workers plummeted during the coronavirus pandemic.“My plan is to put our resources into community, into neighborhoods, and govern in a deeply democratic way, that the people who are governed have a say over the decision-making process and how resources are deployed in our community,” Walton said.“We are looking forward to doing things differently, and I am so excited that we are ushering a new era of progressive leadership in Buffalo, NY.”In nearby Rochester, the third largest city in New York state, another incumbent mayor was ousted when city councilman Malik Evans easily overcame mayor Lovely Warren, whose administration has been rocked by scandal for months.Warren was indicted on felony campaign finance charges and has been accused of bungling the Rochester police killing of Daniel Prude, a Black man last year who died after police tackled him to the ground during a mental health episode and put a hood over his head, in part by misleading the public about what she knew. More

An investigation into the Michigan election by state Republican lawmakers has concluded that there is no evidence of widespread fraud and dismissed the need for an Arizona-style forensic audit of the results.The news comes amid a broad push by many Republicans – from Donald Trump to state parties – to push unfounded lies about Joe Biden’s victory, often promoting baseless conspiracy theories and evidence-free accusations of fraud.The Michigan Republican report released on Wednesday followed 28 hours of legislative hearings starring local and national pro-Trump conspiracy theorists such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. The report labeled many of their claims “ludicrous” and called on the state Democratic attorney general to open investigations into those who may have profited from making false claims.The report was authored by the Republican-controlled senate oversight committee and it said it found no evidence of dead voters, no precincts with 100% turnout and no evidence of a Detroit ballot dump that benefited Biden, as GOP activists have claimed occurred.“There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters,” the report reads.“Citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.”The report represents a stunning repudiation of the unsubstantiated claims made by the state’s pro-Trump activists and Trump himself in their bid to overturn the critical battleground state’s results. Biden won Michigan by about 154,000 votes, or three percentage points. The tally was upheld by judges appointed by both parties in state and federal court, the bipartisan boards of state canvassers and reviews by election officials.Still, Trump supporters have been applying intense pressure on state Republican officials to work to overturn the election results, and have censured or promised primary challenges for those who reject their far-fetched claims.Trump had not responded to the report as of Wednesday afternoon, but in May issued a characteristic threat to his party when he said that Michigan’s senators “should be run out of office” if they haven’t reviewed “the Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020”.In the report, state senator Ed McBroom took aim at the pro-Trump activists who “who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain”.“If you are profiting by making false claims, that’s pretty much the definition of fraud,” McBroom said.The office of Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, said on Wednesday that it’s still reviewing the report.Despite that the report rebukes the conspiracy theories, the investigation found “glaring issues that must be addressed” in state election law, and the party is still pushing forward with a package of 39 controversial voting restrictions that it plans to ram through using a constitutional loophole that can bypass the veto of the Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer.The Democrat state senator Jeff Irwin, who serves on the oversight committee, was the lone vote against the report. He noted that Michigan has paper ballots that confirm the results and praised Republican committee members for being “willing to stand and say that Michigan has free and fair elections”, but he added that the recommendations for new restrictions are unnecessary.“They are responding to their GOP constituency more than they are offering good policy ideas,” he said. More

When the New York Democratic congressman Mondaire Jones, a freshman, was at the White House last week for the signing of the proclamation making Juneteenth a national holiday, he told Joe Biden their party needed him more involved in passing voting legislation on Capitol Hill.Biden “just sort of stared at me”, Jones said of the US president’s response, describing an “awkward silence” that passed between the two.Jones and a growing number of Democratic activists are becoming more vociferous about what they portray as a lackluster engagement from Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris on an issue they consider paramount, as Republican-led state legislatures pass local laws that will lead to restricted voting for many.The White House has characterized the issue as “the fight of his presidency”.But as Democrats’ massive election legislation, the For the People Act, was blocked by Republicans on Tuesday, progressives argued Biden could not much longer avoid the battle over Senate filibuster rules that allow a minority – in this case the Republicans – to block such bills.And questioning whether he was using all of his leverage to prioritize it suggested risk of a first major public rift with his party’s progressive wing if a breakthrough is not found soon.“President Obama, for his part, has been doing more to salvage our ailing democracy than the current president of the United States of America,” Jones said, referring to a recent interview in which the former president pushed for a compromise version of the voting rights legislation put forward by conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia.Jones tweeted on Monday: “Our democracy is in crisis and we need @Potus [the president of the United States] to act like it” with reference to activists complaining that Biden was not holding public events to lobby for the voting rights bill.Biden met with Manchin at the White House, and Manchin at the last minute declared support for the bill’s advance in the Senate on Tuesday, before the Republicans used the filibuster to kill it. But Biden did not meet with Republicans on the issue.The White House argues that both Biden and Harris have been in frequent touch with Democratic leadership and key advocacy groups. Biden spoke out forcefully at times, declaring a new Georgia law backed by Republicans an “atrocity” and using a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to say he was going to “fight like heck” for Democrats’ federal answer, but he left negotiations on the proposal to congressional leaders.On Tuesday the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Biden was “absolutely revolted” by Republicans’ efforts to suppress access to the ballot box in ways that have greater chilling effects on Democratic voters.Biden tasked Harris with taking the lead on the voting rights issue, and she spent last week largely engaged in private meetings with voting rights advocates as she traveled for a vaccination tour around the nation.But commentary in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday remarked at “how little we saw of her” publicly lobbying for the legislation.Biden and Harris’s efforts haven’t appeased some activists and progressives, who argue that state laws tightening election laws are designed to make it harder for Black, young and infrequent voters to cast ballots.Some argue Biden ought to come out for a change in the filibuster rules that require 60 votes to advance most legislation, while Democrats only have 50 seats in the 100-seat chamber and Harris as a tie-breaker because the vice- president can preside in the Senate on such matters.“Progressives are losing patience, and I think particularly African American Democrats are losing patience,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne, a longtime aide to the former Senate majority leader and Nevada senator Harry Reid.“They feel like they have done the kind of good Democrat thing over the last year-plus, going back to when Biden got the nomination, unifying support around Biden, turning out, showing up on election day.”“Progressives feel like, ‘Hey, we did our part.’ And now when it’s time for the bill to be paid, so to speak, I think some progressives feel like, ‘OK, well, how long do we have to wait?’”The progressive congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tweeted: “The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists. Abolish the filibuster so we can do the people’s work.”Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former presidential candidate, focused her ire on Republicans, but supports the campaign to overturn the Senate filibuster.“We cannot throw our democracy over a cliff in order to protect a Senate rule that isn’t even part of the Constitution. End the filibuster,” she tweeted.And the former Obama cabinet member and presidential candidate Julián Castro cranked up the pressure on fellow Democrats.“Senate Democrats have a choice: end the filibuster and safeguard our democracy or let an extremist minority party chip away at it until it’s gone,” he tweeted after Tuesday’s legislative defeat.Harris is expected to continue to meet with voting rights activists, business leaders and groups working on the issue in the states and speak out on the issue in the coming weeks.Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots group, said advocacy on the the $1.9tn infrastructure bill has been stronger from the leadership.“The president has been on the sidelines. He has issued statements of support, he’s maybe included a line or two in a speech here or there, but there has been nothing on the scale of his public advocacy for recovery for Covid relief, for roads and bridges,” Levin said.“We think this is a crisis at the same level as crumbling roads and bridges, and if we agree on that, the question is, why is the president on the sidelines?”White House aides point to Biden’s belief that his involvement risks undermining a deal before it’s cut.But in private, advisers, speaking anonymously, currently see infrastructure as the bigger political winner for Biden because it’s widely popular among voters of both parties. More

Andrew Yang, who led the polls in the New York mayoral election in the early months of the race, conceded defeat on Tuesday night, after results from the first vote count showed him slumping and former police officer Eric Adams in the lead.The concession capped a disappointing performance for Yang, a former tech entrepreneur and long-shot presidential candidate, with early tallies showing him in fourth place for the race to lead the largest city in the US.While Adams led on Tuesday, however, he is a long way from being confirmed as the Democratic candidate for mayor – a nomination almost certain to guarantee a win in the election proper this November in the overwhelmingly Democratic-voting city.Tens of thousands of mail-in ballots are yet to be counted, and with ranked choice voting being used in a New York mayoral election for the first time, counting will continue for weeks, and it could be 12 July before the victor is declared.On Wednesday morning Adams was at 31.7% with 84% of early and on-the-day votes counted, with Maya Wiley, a progressive civil rights lawyer, trailing on 22.3%. Kathryn Garcia, a former New York sanitation commissioner, was third with 19.5% of the vote.“I am not going to be the mayor of New York City based upon the numbers that have come in tonight,” Yang said in a speech on Tuesday night.By Wednesday he had 11.7% of the vote.“I am conceding this race. Though we’re not sure who’s the next mayor is going to be, but whoever that person is, I will be very happy to work with them to improve the lives of the 8.3 million people who live in our great city, and I encourage everyone here to do the same.”Under the ranked-choice system, a candidate must receive 50% of the vote to win the primary, which gives hope to Wiley and Garcia for the coming weeks. Voters’ second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-choice candidates will be added to the totals in the coming weeks until a winner emerges.“This is going to be about not only the ones. But also about the twos and threes – and to be honest, we’re not going to know more tonight than we know now,” Garcia said on Tuesday night.Speaking to supporters, Adams acknowledged the fragility of his early lead but also struck a victorious tone.“We know that there’s going to be twos and threes and fours,” Adams said.“But there’s something else we know. We know that New York City said: ‘Our first choice is Eric Adams.’” More

After nearly six months of watching Republicans relentlessly make it harder to vote in the US, Democrats suffered a major blow on Tuesday after GOP senators used a legislative maneuver to halt a sweeping voting rights and ethics bill.The vote doesn’t kill the bill, but it marks one of the most significant setbacks for Democrats in Joe Biden’s presidency so far. Democrats heralded the legislation as their No 1 priority, even knowing they were unlikely to get any Republican votes for it. The bill would amount to the most significant expansion of the right to vote in a generation, requiring early voting and automatic and same-day registration, while prohibiting excessive manipulation of electoral district boundaries, a process often called gerrymandering.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterIt wasn’t an unexpected result. Democrats control only 50 seats in the Senate and a procedural rule, the filibuster, blocks most legislation from proceeding to a full debate on the floor unless it has 60 votes. A handful of Democratic senators, most notably Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, support keeping the filibuster in place, saying it helps ensure the minority party has a say. But while the rule remains, Democrats have virtually no chance of passing sweeping voting rights legislation.Democratic senators are now in a quagmire amid escalating concerns that Democrats, who control both Congress and the White House, might not be able to use their power to stop what many experts see as openly anti-democratic efforts by Republicans across the country to make it harder to vote after an election in which there was record turnout, including surges among Black, Asian American and Hispanic voters.Republicans have used partisan majorities in statehouses across the US to pass these measures, even as they have accused Democrats of acting with partisan intent to pass voting reforms.Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, harshly criticized Republican colleagues for refusing to even allow a vote on the bill on the Senate floor.“Surely, some of my Republican friends believe – at the very least – that in this chamber, we should be able to debate about voting rights,” he said. “Voting rights are preservative of all other rights. And what could be more hypocritical and cynical than invoking minority rights in the Senate as a pretext for preventing debate about how to preserve minority rights in the society?”Tuesday’s vote on whether to allow debate on the bill was widely seen as a maneuver to pressure Republicans into taking a public stance on the bill and to pressure moderate Democrats, including Manchin and Sinema, to take a position.In a statement a few hours before the vote, the White House offered a blunt assessment of the attack on voting rights across the United States. “Democracy is in peril,” it said, urging senators to support the bill.“This kicks off the next phase of the fight,” said Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United and Let America Vote, a group running a $30m campaign in support of the bill. “If I had a nickel for every time someone wrote ‘this bill was dead’, I would have enough to fund the entire campaign. People have been counting this bill and these efforts out for the entire year, and not really seeing what was happening across the country.”Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, a Georgia-based group that has worked for years to mobilize voters in the state, called on the White House to increase its efforts to pressure senators who opposed the bill.“Where is the fight?” she said. “I understand that the upper house, the upper chamber, there’s a focus on collegiality … [but] collegiality at the expense of actually getting stuff done, collegiality at the expense of preserving Americans’ ability to participate in our elections, seems misguided.”It’s not clear what the path forward might look like. Last week, Manchin released a compromise that maintained some of the most important provisions in the bill – including making election day a federal holiday, requiring two weeks of early voting, allowing automatic registration at motor vehicle offices, and mandating that states give voters seven days’ notice of a polling place change. However, the proposal does include a voter ID requirement, allowing for more aggressive voter purging, and does not require states to create independent redistricting commissions, which reformers see as a gold standard in curbing excessive gerrymandering.Manchin wound up voting with Democrats on Tuesday to move to advance the bill, an encouraging sign to bill supporters that further highlights Republican obstructionism.“These reasonable changes have moved the bill forward and to a place worthy of debate on the Senate floor,” Manchin said in a statement. “Unfortunately, my Republican colleagues refused to allow debate of this legislation despite the reasonable changes made to focus this bill on the core issues facing our democracy.”Republicans appear unlikely to come around on Manchin’s compromise bill. And while Barack Obama endorsed the compromise on Monday, more than 20 civil rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Black Voters Matter, said the proposal was inadequate.“Senator Manchin’s compromise fails to adequately address the more than 400 voter suppression measures that are being introduced across the country,” they wrote in a joint statement. “Most damaging is its neglect of protections for formerly incarcerated and justice impacted voters; voters with disabilities; Black and all multi-marginalized voters. There has been no indication from Senator Manchin’s reported conversations with conservatives that he has been able to secure Republican support for any of the core elements of [the legislation] which is disappointing to the many activists who are pushing for passage of the bill.”It’s also not clear how Democrats plan to get around the filibuster. Manchin has been steadfast in his commitment to the rule, though privately he has left the door open to lowering the threshold of votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Sinema, another staunch supporter of the filibuster, also authored an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday evening saying she was committed to keeping the procedure in place.Muller pointed to the Senate’s August recess as a deadline to pass a bill, when many states are set to begin drawing electoral districts for the next decade. Republicans control the redistricting process in many states and without the anti-gerrymandering provisions of the bill in place, lawmakers would be free to manipulate districts to give them a significant advantage in elections.“We are literally seeing this very direct undermining of our democracy. And if that goes unchecked, I am very concerned about the future of our democracy,” she said.Nearly 500 state lawmakers wrote to Senate leadership on Tuesday begging them to pass the sweeping bill.“We have attempted again and again to work with our Republican colleagues to set policies that safely and securely expanded voting access – but they simply refuse to act in good faith,” they wrote. “We are out of options. We need your help.” More

The US government will investigate the troubled legacy of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of the institutions, which over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.The US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, has directed the department to prepare a report detailing available historical records relating to the federal boarding school programs, with an emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites.“The interior department will address the inter-generational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said in a secretarial memo. “I know that this process will be long and difficult. I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss we feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”Haaland announced the review on Tuesday in remarks to the National Congress of American Indians during the group’s midyear conference.Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the US enacted laws and policies to establish and support Indian boarding schools across the country. For more than 150 years, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools that focused on assimilation.Haaland talked about the federal government’s attempt to wipe out tribal identity, language and culture and how that past has continued to manifest itself through long-standing trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, premature deaths, mental disorders and substance abuse.The recent discovery of children’s remains buried at the site of what was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school has magnified interest in that legacy in Canada and the US.In Canada, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into society. They were forced to convert to Christianity and were not allowed to speak their languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.After reading about the unmarked graves in Canada, Haaland recounted her own family’s story in a recent opinion piece published by the Washington Post.“Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people,” she wrote. “It is a history that we must learn from if our country is to heal from this tragic era.”She continued: “I am a product of these horrific assimilation policies. My maternal grandparents were stolen from their families when they were only eight years old and were forced to live away from their parents, culture and communities until they were 13. Many children like them never made it back home.”Haaland cited statistics from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which reported that by 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations. Besides providing resources and raising awareness, the coalition has been working to compile additional research on US boarding schools and deaths that many say is sorely lacking.Officials with the interior department said aside from trying to shed more light on the loss of life at the boarding schools, they would be working to protect burial sites associated with the schools and would consult with tribes on how best to do that while respecting families and communities.The report from agency staff is due by 1 April.During her address on Tuesday, Haaland told the story of her grandmother being loaded on a train with other children from her village and being shipped off to boarding school. She said many families had been haunted for too long by the “dark history” of these institutions and that the agency has a responsibility to recover that history.“We must uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of these schools,” she said. More

Democrats demonstrated unity in the US senate as the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said he would vote in favor of advancing voting rights legislation known as the For the People act to the debate stage.
The Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, denied any voter suppression was happening despite around 400 bills introduced in more than 43 states which could restrict the right to vote. The legislation would remove hurdles to voting.
In the evenly split Senate, Republican votes mean the bill will not garner the necessary 60 votes to advance.

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