US Politics

Happy Thursday,In the United States, a quiet army of people work in towns, cities, and states across the country to make sure that elections hum along smoothly. They’re responsible for all the mechanics that ensure Americans can exercise their right to vote – like keeping track of complex data files, making sure that mail-in ballots get printed and go out on time, ensuring that polling places have enough workers, and making sure that every valid vote gets counted.For a long time, these officials – elected in some places, appointed in others – have been largely invisible. That invisibility evaporated last year.When Donald Trump began raising baseless claims about things like ballots being smuggled in and votes being flipped, these election officials became the target of his supporters’ rage. From state election officials to lower-level workers, they started receiving death threats, were followed in their cars, and even had people break into family-members’ homes, according to a harrowing Reuters report. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, even had to move out of his home because of vicious threats.About a third of election officials surveyed this spring said they felt unsafe because of their job, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Brennan Center for Justice. And about a fifth of the 223 officials described threats to their lives as a concern related to their work.Nearly 80% of the officials surveyed said social media conspiracy theories and misinformation made it harder for them to do their jobs. And more than half said the platforms had made their jobs more dangerous.US attorney general Merrick Garland condemned attacks against election workers in a speech last week, and pledged law enforcement would investigate when federal laws were violated.“We have not been blind to the dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats against all manner of state and local election workers, ranging from the highest administrators to volunteer poll workers,” he said. “Such threats undermine our electoral process and violate a myriad of federal laws.”The Brennan Center report offers a range of suggestions for reform that can better protect election officials, including establishing a DoJ taskforce focused on threats against election workers, passing laws that give workers more privacy protections, and implementing measures that insulate officials from political pressure.But the attacks have already taken their toll – many election officials retired or left their jobs after a bruising 2020 election. That’s alarming to many voting rights groups because it could lead to a loss in institutional knowledge as well as a drop in the polling place workers and other staff needed to ensure elections run smoothly.A swell of candidates who embraced the baseless idea that the election was stolen are also running for key election administration positions. If elected, those officials would be able to wield enormous power over implementation of election rules, including ballot counting.“A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count,” Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an op-ed earlier this month. “The danger of manipulated election results looms.”Also worth watching…
The New York Times had an extraordinary story detailing how GOP-backed voting restrictions moving through state legislatures would curtail ballot access for people with disabilities.
Senator Joe Manchin released a list of provisions he would support in a sweeping voting reform bill in congress. That’s a welcome sign to many advocates, who feared Manchin’s recalcitrance would kill any hope of voting reform. Manchin still does, however, support the filibuster, which would block Democrats from advancing any measure.
Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives, heralded for halting a sweeping voting restrictions bill in their state, met with both Senate Democrats and Kamala Harris this week to urge them to pass sweeping voting reforms in Washington.
Attorney General Garland gave a speech last Friday on increasing voting rights enforcement by the department. Garland announced that the department’s voting section was doubling the number of attorneys there in the next 30 days. While that was a welcome announcement, observers are still waiting to see what kinds of voting challenges and cases the DoJ chooses to bring. More

Whatever Republican politicians and rightwing media are referring to when they talk about “critical race theory”, it has little to do with critical race theory as an actual discipline. Developed in the 1970s and 80s by law professors – notably Derrick Bell and his acolyte, Kimberlé Crenshaw, at Harvard – the real CRT is analytic framework through which academics can discern the ways that racial disparities are reproduced by the law, and how the legacies of historical racism can persist even after discriminatory policies are revised.But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was. The phrase itself sounds distant, lofty, and abstract – “critical”, “theory” – the kind of thing that comes out of the mouths of people in tweed blazers who think they’re better than you. The very opacity of the words made them the perfect vehicle for what the right wing wanted: a new vessel for white racial anxiety and grievance.And so it is that something Republicans are calling “critical race theory” became the center of a series of statehouse bills – some proposed, others already signed into law – that aim to ban honest conversations about race and sex oppression in America from classrooms. Casting themselves in opposition to a supposed ideology of white sinfulness and inferiority that they claim is sweeping through the nation and indoctrinating children, Republicans are using “critical race theory” as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.Laws claiming to ban critical race theory from public school curriculums have been passed in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, and have been advanced in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia. The bills themselves are patently unconstitutional and will not hold up in court, and they are so non-specific regarding what exactly they oppose that it’s also hard to imagine how they could ever be meaningfully enforced, even if they were not destined to be thrown out.But the bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to revoke speech protections and crush academic freedom, a tendency that has recently been modeled in other nations with rising authoritarian sentiment. Some instructors have already been affected by the bans.The wording of the bans is vast enough to prohibit vast swaths of discursive territory. In the North Carolina law, among those “concepts” that public schools “shall not promote” are “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” and “that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex for the purpose of oppressing members of another race or sex”. A proposed bill in Connecticut, meanwhile, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” or content that causes “any individual to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex”.This last item – with its concern for the emotions of white, male students – may be the most telling. The move to ban discussions of racism and oppression as systemic and socially foundational comes on the heels of the University of North Carolina’s decision to deny tenure to the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, following the interventions of a major donor. It comes, too, a year after the nationwide uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Both of these events garnered a passionate backlash in rightwing media, which have depicted them as assaults on police, “order” and white people. Packaged together as “critical race theory”, these conversations have been demonized on the right in an attempt to reassert understandings of race, racism, and American history that center white people as the primary moral players.The bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to crush academic freedomFor Republicans, the preferred narrative of race and American history is one that minimizes the harm done to Black people, overstates white virtue and insists that racism is a personal prejudice in the minds of misguided or amoral people, rather than a system that structures cultures and institutions. Racism was a problem, this story tells us (with an emphasis on the past tense) because some white people made an error; it’s not a problem any more, because those white people have been edified. This version of American history has placed racist injustice squarely in the past, but also, it quarantines racism in individual minds, rather than recognizing it as an infection that has contaminated our culture. Racism, in this telling, is primarily a matter of personality, of individual white people’s souls.But much modern anti-racist thinking rejects this. The 1619 Project positions Black people, and their enslavement, as central to America’s history, positioning the enslaved not merely footnotes or minor characters, but protagonists. And the real critical race theory that is practiced in law schools does not seem to be concerned with white people’s souls so much as with Black people’s material conditions. Maybe this is part of what Republicans don’t like about these versions of anti-racist thought: they remove white people, and white people’s feelings, from the center of the story.After all, when racism is merely a personal idiosyncrasy, and not a systemic condition, nothing is required of white people, or of the institutions they control, except to deny that they feel hate in their hearts. But if racism is a foundational reality, and not just a personal prejudice, then much bigger changes have to be made – and more is required of white people than personal innocence. More

West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has emerged as one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the passing of Joe Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda, declaring he will vote against a key voting rights bill and also blocking reform of the filibuster – a rule that at the moment allows Republicans to kill Democrat legislation.Yet Manchin is no Republican. He is a key member of Biden’s party, and in a 50-50 Senate his vote is the lynchpin of political power and crucial for passing Biden’s plans. Yet Manchin is seen by many Democrats as sabotaging his own president’s efforts to be a transformational leader who can help the US recover from the pandemic in the same way Roosevelt helped America recover from the Great Depression.To many people outside West Virginia, Manchin’s behavior is a mystery: how does someone take such a stand against their own side? But for many West Virginian Democrats Manchin’s tactics and those of his state West Virginia Democratic party leadership are no surprise at all.In fact, examining West Virginia’s Democratic politics shows that Manchin’s undermining of Biden’s efforts, especially around voting rights, should have been entirely expected.Manchin’s opposition to the For the People Act, a bill that aims to expand voting rights and reduce the influence of money in US elections, has angered Black Americans across the country. But earlier this year, West Virginia’s all-white Democratic party leaders submitted a draft affirmative action plan to the national party without input or approval from a newly formed affirmative action committee, a group whose membership includes women, people of color and people with disabilities.Affirmative action committee co-chair Hollis Lewis said moving the plan forward without any input from the committee – or any Black Americans at all – was unacceptable for communities of color in the state. “As a Black West Virginian, this is a slap in the face,” he said.Lewis linked Manchin’s stance against the national voting rights bill to the Democratic fight over the affirmative action plan in West Virginia, saying it showed he and party leaders in his state would rather maintain control than work to empower traditionally marginalized people.“These two incidents happened the very same week – and they parallel each other,” said Lewis. “You’re making a decision based on how you feel about something that’s not necessarily going to affect you.”In numerous interviews, West Virginia Democrats and people of color described a party at odds with their needs and belief and in thrall to Manchin’s power and conservatism.Mary Ann Claytor, an affirmative action committee member and 2020 candidate for state auditor, said she felt ignored by West Virginia’s party leadership when she won her primary race. Claytor, who is Black, says a county-level leader told her in confidence that members of party leadership said they didn’t think a Black, working-class woman could win an election in West Virginia.In an interview with the Guardian, Claytor said Manchin’s decisions in the Senate plus West Virginia’s state party politics are indicative of an issue that extends beyond race: a resistance by Democratic power structures in West Virginia to bring working-class people, women or any marginalized group into the party.“We hear a lot about how progressives can’t win,” she said. “They kept putting people down. Like, ‘Oh, they’re not going to win. [Manchin] is the only person going to win, because he has that much money in his war chest.’”Manchin’s office rejected an interview request for this article. Multiple interview requests sent to the West Virginia Democratic party leadership went unanswered.Critics say the state party and power-brokering Democrats such as Manchin are quick to dismiss the loyalty Black Americans have consistently put forth in supporting Democratic candidates. “They want the power concentrated where it’s at,” Peshka Calloway, a Black organizer for Democratic issues and a US army veteran, said of the WVDP leadership.A native of Parkersburg, West Virginia, Calloway was working for Planned Parenthood when Manchin unexpectedly showed up at an NAACP state conference she was attending in 2018. She confronted him afterwards about whether he would support former President Trump’s nomination of supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, a controversial candidate because of views on abortion and historical allegations of sexual assault.“How are you voting on Kavanaugh?” she asked. “I hope it’s a no because I’m a survivor of military sexual assault, and what I’m hearing about him is absolutely disgusting.” Manchin replied that he “was facing a hard decision” and would do his best.Two months later, he was the only Democrat in the Senate who voted to appoint Kavanaugh.Natalie Cline sees the Democratic party as excluding working-class constituents in the state. Cline secured the Democratic nomination for the US House of Representatives in 2020, when she won her primary race with 74% of the vote. She identifies as a “true blue Democrat” and grew up in a working-class family where both of her grandfathers had union jobs.After winning her primary, she said the state party offered her campaign no support or publicity despite endorsements from well-known names such as Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and actors Debra Messing and Rosie O’Donnell.“I can’t tell you how many times I would send emails to the state party and say: ‘Can you please share this information? We need people to watch’ – to no response.”Cline now believes that promoting inclusion within the party puts a target on a candidate’s back: seek to make good on the Democratic promise of being a “big-tent” party and get shut out by Manchin and his state party.One of the most baffling moments from her campaign and a sign, she said, of party’s disconnect with working-class people, came when the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) simultaneously endorsed Manchin and her opponent – a Republican who months later would vote to restrict individuals’ rights to unionize.“I didn’t feel that they [the Democratic party] cared. If they cared, they would be yelling and screaming,” she said. “They would have called the UMWA out on it. But heaven forbid they do that, because that might jeopardize Manchin’s endorsement.”David Fryson, who retired this year as a vice-president at West Virginia University, said the decline of the WVDP can be traced back to 1996. Before Manchin was senator, he lost his gubernatorial primary to Charlotte Pritt, an environmentalist hailed as a forward-thinking Democrat. Instead of throwing his weight behind Pritt, Manchin actively campaigned for Pritt’s Republican opponent, Cecil Underwood, who went on to win.Manchin’s embrace of conservatism continued. In 2012, he was listed as the only Democratic senator to serve as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a conservative nonprofit that focuses on reducing business regulations, weakening labor unions, loosening environmental conservation efforts and restricting voting rights.“What I’m trying to do, in my little way, is convince the Democrats to be careful going down the rabbit hole with with Joe Manchin,” said Fryson. “He will end up … doing to the national Democratic party what he’s done to the West Virginia Democratic Party. And he’s already doing it.” More

Joe Biden warned Russian president Vladimir Putin that the US has significant cyber capability as he looked to pressure his counterpart over cyber-attacks. The US leader says Putin wasn’t seeking to intensify confrontation with the west after the two held “good and positive” talks. “I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War,” Biden said

Biden warns US will hit back if Russia continues with cyber strikes More

A hotly anticipated US government report on decades of mysterious sightings of UFOs is due for release this month. The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt and former Ministry of Defence employee Nick Pope investigate

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In December 2020, just before Donald Trump left the White House, the CIA was given six months to release all of the evidence it had gathered in the last 14 years about UFOs. So later this month a highly anticipated report will be released. Guardian reporter Adam Gabbatt tells Anushka Asthana that in recent years a series of government videos showing unidentified objects have been released, including footage from a navy F-18 fighter jet which showed an oblong object flying through the sky near San Diego in 2004. The wave of recent videos and the imminent release of the government report has ignited excitement around unidentified flying objects not seen for years. Nick Pope spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence. He tells Anushka that despite mockery from some of his colleagues, the idea that we are not alone in the universe and may have been visited is worth serious consideration. More

The United States will soon have a new federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the nation.Congress has approved a bill that would make Juneteenth, or 19 June, a holiday – a bill Joe Biden is expected to sign into law. Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the people of Galveston, Texas, freeing slaves in the last rebel state. Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, freeing enslaved people in the southern states, and Confederate soldiers surrendered in April 1865. But the proclamation wasn’t enforced in Galveston until federal soldiers read out the proclamation on 19 June 1865. “Our federal holidays are purposely few in number and recognize the most important milestones,” said the Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. “I cannot think of a more important milestone to commemorate than the end of slavery in the United States.”Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, speaking next to a large poster of a Black man whose back bore massive scarring from being whipped, said she would be in Galveston this Saturday to celebrate along with Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas.“Can you imagine?” said Jackson Lee, who made a joke about her height. “I will be standing maybe taller than Senator Cornyn, forgive me for that, because it will be such an elevation of joy.”The Senate unanimously passed the measure yesterday, and the House voted to pass the bill on Wednesday afternoon.About 60% of Americans knew “nothing at all” or just “a little bit” about Juneteenth, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. And federal recognition of Juneteenth comes as Republican officials across the country move to ban schools from teaching students “critical race theory”, the history of slavery and the ongoing impacts of systemic racism.“Congress overwhelmingly voted to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday. But let us not forget that in Florida and Texas, educators are banned from teaching critical race theory,” wrote human rights advocate Martin Luther King III, the son of Martin Luther King Jr. “Let Juneteenth be both a day of celebration and a day of education of our nation’s true history.”For some critics, the move felt like a hollow gesture. “No more performative gestures for Juneteenth,” said Janeese Lewis George, a District of Columbia councilmember. “Stop giving us things we didn’t ask for and ignoring the things that matter.”Cori Bush, a Democratic representative of Missouri, called for broader reforms to address systemic racism.It’s Juneteenth AND reparations.It’s Juneteenth AND end police violence + the War on Drugs.It’s Juneteenth AND end housing + education apartheid.It’s Juneteenth AND teach the truth about white supremacy in our country.Black liberation in its totality must be prioritized.— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) June 17, 2021
Fourteen House Republicans opposed the effort. Congressman Matt Rosendale said creating the federal holiday was an effort to celebrate “identity politics”.“Since I believe in treating everyone equally, regardless of race, and that we should be focused on what unites us rather than our differences, I will vote no,” he said in a press release.The vast majority of states recognize Juneteenth as a holiday or have an official observance of the day, and most states hold celebrations. Juneteenth is a paid holiday for state employees in Texas, New York, Virginia and Washington.Under the legislation, the federal holiday would be known as Juneteenth National Independence Day.The Republican congressman Clay Higgins said he would vote for the bill and he supported the establishment of a federal holiday, but he was upset that the name of the holiday included the word independence rather than emancipation.“Why would the Democrats want to politicize this by co-opting the name of our sacred holiday of Independence Day?” Higgins said.“I want to say to my white colleagues on the other side, getting your independence from being enslaved in a country is different from a country getting independence to rule themselves,” the Democratic congresswoman Brenda Lawrence replied, adding: “We have a responsibility to teach every generation of Black and white Americans the pride of a people who have survived, endured and succeeded in these United States of America despite slavery.” More

The US government on Wednesday ended two Trump administration policies that made it harder for immigrants fleeing violence to qualify for asylum, especially Central Americans. Attorney general Merrick Garland issued a new policy saying immigration judges should cease following the Trump-era rules that made it tough for immigrants who faced domestic or gang violence to win asylum in the United States. The move could make it easier for them to win their cases for humanitarian protection and was widely celebrated by immigrant advocates. “The significance of this cannot be overstated,” said Kate Melloy Goettel, legal director of litigation at the American Immigration Council. “This was one of the worst anti-asylum decisions under the Trump era, and this is a really important first step in undoing that.” Garland said he was making the changes after President Joe Biden ordered his office and the Department of Homeland Security to draft rules addressing complex issues in immigration law about groups of people who should qualify for asylum. The changes come as US immigration authorities have reported unusually high numbers of encounters with migrants at the southern border. In April, border officials reported the highest number of encounters in more than 20 years, though many migrants were repeat crossers who previously had been expelled from the country under pandemic-related powers. The number of children crossing the border alone also has been hovering at all-time highs. Many Central Americans arrive on the border fleeing gang violence in their countries. But it isn’t easy to qualify for asylum under US immigration laws, and the Trump-era policies made it that much harder. More than half of asylum cases decided by the immigration courts in the 2020 fiscal year were denials, according to data from the department of justice’s executive office for immigration review. Four years earlier, it was about one in five cases. In the current fiscal year, people from countries such as Russia and Cameroon have seen higher asylum grant rates in the immigration courts than people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the data shows. One of the Trump administration policies was aimed at migrants who were fleeing violence from non-state actors, such as gangs, while the other affected those who felt they were being targeted in their countries because of their family ties, said Jason Dzubow, an immigration attorney in Washington who focuses on asylum. Dzubow said he recently represented a Salvadoran family in which the husband was killed and gang members started coming after his children. While Dzubow argued they were in danger because of their family ties, he said the immigration judge denied the case, citing the Trump-era decision among the reasons. Dzubow welcomed the change but said he doesn’t expect to suddenly see large numbers of Central Americans winning their asylum cases, which remain difficult under US law. “I don’t expect it is going to open the floodgates, and all of a sudden everyone from Central America can win their cases. Those cases are very burdensome and difficult,” he said. “We need to make a decision: do we want to protect these people?” More

Key events

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5.53pm EDT
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Governor signs law allowing Texans to carry handguns without a license

5.23pm EDT
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Academics: Breyer must retire from supreme court

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Today so far

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DoJ moves to drop lawsuit over Bolton’s tell-all book – reports

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Biden – ‘Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now’

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Democrats ready to advance infrastructure plans on their own – report

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Biden rejects Putin’s ‘ridiculous comparison’ between Capitol rioters and Navalny

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5.53pm EDT
17:53

Governor signs law allowing Texans to carry handguns without a license

Texas governor Greg Abbott has signed a law allowing residents to carry handguns without a license or training starting in September.
My colleague Erum Salam wrote about the controversial law in April:

The law mirrors measures passed in 20 other states. It comes at the heels of several mass shootings around the country, and in Texas. In April, a man in Bryan, Texas opened fire at the cabinet company where he used to work, killing one person and injuring five people.

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The Justice Department thew out a Trump-era ruling that made it virtually impossible for immigrants fleeing domestic violence to seek asylum in the US.
Former attorney general Jeff Sessions had overruled a previous court decision that people facing domestic violence in their home countries were eligible for asylum. Today, the Justice Department “vacated” that decision. Attorney general Merrick Garland wrote that questions about which groups be considered for asylum “should instead be left to the forthcoming rulemaking, where they can be resolved with the benefit of a full record and public comment.”
Garland’s move had been celebrated by immigrant rights advocates. “Around the world, in Central America and elsewhere, women struggle to have governments ensure, or in some cases recognize, their right to protection,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

5.23pm EDT
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Academics: Breyer must retire from supreme court

David Smith

A group of 18 legal academics has issued an extraordinary joint letter urging US supreme court justice Stephen Breyer to retire so that Joe Biden can name his successor. More