US Politics

In a huge blow to Democrats’ hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party’s flagship bill – because of Republican opposition to it.The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim CrowManchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.” More

The morning after Donald Trump returned to frontline politics with a speech in North Carolina, a close adviser poured cold water on his reported belief that he will be reinstated in the White House when it is proved Joe Biden beat him thanks to electoral fraud.Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager in 2016 and a loyal sidekick since, told Fox News Sunday Trump “lost the election”.Indeed he did, by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump called a landslide when it was in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016.Experts agree there was no mass voter fraud in 2020. Nonetheless, according to multiple reports Trump has told aides he believes he will be reinstated.Lewandowski said he had “spoke to the president dozens, if not more than 100 times since he has left the White House and I have never had that conversation about him being reinstated”.But, he added: “I know of no provision under the constitution that allows it to occur, nor do I know of any provision under the constitution that allows an individual who lost an election to come back in if a recount is dubbed inaccurate.”On Friday, Facebook announced that it was suspending Trump for two years, over the nadir of his push to overturn his defeat: his incitement of the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.In Greenville on Saturday, Trump said he was “not too interested” in returning to Facebook in 2023. Facebook is however a vital fundraising and communications resource for candidates for office, which Trump could yet be in 2024. He also called the decision to suspend him “so unfair”.On Sunday Nick Clegg, the former British deputy prime minister who is now Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs, told ABC’s This Week: “For Donald Trump, of course we don’t expect him to welcome [our] decision. We do hope, though, that reasonable observers will believe that we are acting as reasonably and proportionately as we can in these very difficult circumstances.”In North Carolina, Trump also repeated his lies about the election, which he called “the crime of the century”, and referring to Republican attempts to restrict voting and overturn results, said: “I am not the one who is trying to undermine American democracy, I am the one who is trying to save it.”Clegg was asked: “If the president gave the speech he gave last night in January 2023, would the suspension be extended?”The Facebook executive declined to answer, saying he had not heard the whole speech, but did say he thought people did not want Facebook “to be a sort of truth police” and said inciting violence was more of a concern than telling lies.“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Clegg said, “you can be the pope, the queen of England, the president of the United States, you cannot use our services … to aid, abet, foment or praise acts of violence.”Trump’s spoke for 90 minutes on Saturday, ranging over familiar subjects as he began a series of appearances some think presage another run for the presidential nomination in a party he still dominates.Repeatedly hitting out at Biden, Trump touched on hot topics among conservatives. His successor, he said in one such jab, was “pushing toxic critical race theory … into our nation’s schools. Joe Biden and the socialist Democrats are the most radical Democrats in our nation’s history.”Trump also took sustained aim at Dr Anthony Fauci, the senior public health official with whom he was often at odds in his last year in office, as the coronavirus took hold.Fauci, 80, has served seven presidents since 1984 and is now Biden’s chief medical adviser. Trump said he was “not a great doctor but he’s a hell of a promoter, he’s been wrong on almost every issue”.On Sunday, Lewandowski said: “If we’re going to follow the science and listen to Dr Fauci, who has been lifted up by the media as the foremost expert on this matter in the world, listen to what Dr Fauci said.”Lewandowski mentioned Fauci’s initial advice against the need to wear masks, which Fauci has said was meant to preserve supplies for medical personnel; Fauci’s view of travel bans, which he said would prove irrelevant if a pandemic began; and a claim that “through his government agency [Fauci] funded at least $800,000 of government taxpayer money to the Wuhan laboratory”.US funds were routinely allocated to laboratories in China.Republicans have seized on new interest among US intelligence agencies in the theory that the coronavirus escaped a Chinese lab. Most public health experts still think it more likely the virus reached humans via the consumption of animals, but Fauci is among those who have said the lab leak theory could prove true.Lewandowski suggested the formation of an unlikely investigatory commission, featuring two former secretaries of state.“Let’s appoint Secretary Mike Pompeo and maybe Secretary Clinton to look into why 600,000 Americans have died because of this. Let’s hold China accountable.”Repeating a line from Trump’s speech, he also said the US should “ask for the reparations which they owe not only us but probably the world, and I think $10tn.” More

Academics rarely agree about the big issues, and generally hesitate to enter the political fray by signing collective public statements. Yet a few days ago, more than 100 leading scholars of democracy endorsed a remarkable Statement of Concern, which I also signed, warning about grave threats to American democracy and the deterioration of US elections.“We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary – including suspending the filibuster – in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”Why the alarm? Is this warranted?On 14 December 2020, after courts litigated challenges and all 50 states certified the count, the electoral college formally declared the defeat of Donald Trump. Most assumed that the peaceful and orderly transition in power would follow, following historical traditions for over 200 years. Instead, the world was shocked to witness the violent Capitol insurrection on 6 January, triggering five deaths, 140 people injured and more than 400 arrests.But even this unprecedented attack on Congress was not the end of the assault on the unwritten norms and practices of American democracy and the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win.For months, the big lie claiming a “stolen election” has continued to be spread relentlessly by the former president, his close advisers, Republican lawmakers and rightwing sympathizers on cable news and social media. According to many polls, two-thirds of Republicans continue to believe that Biden’s victory was fraudulent. In Arizona, the Republican party hired a private firm to conduct an audit of the certified vote count.It is reported that Trump is obsessed about the use of audits to overturn results in other close states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, believing that he will be returned to office in August. In state houses, Republicans have long expressed concern about the risks of electoral fraud and the need to tighten registration procedures and balloting facilities. The Brennan Center reports that since January this year, 22 new laws restricting voting rights have been enacted in 14 states. For the 2021 legislative session, almost 400 bills restricting voting rights have been tabled in 48 states.Challenges to democracy are increasing worldwide. The long spread of “third-wave” democracies across the globe from the mid-1970s stalled around 2005 – since when scholars have noted accumulating indicators of democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism in many countries.Contrary to popular commentary, signs of democratic deterioration in America were on the wall well before Trump became president – such as persistent gridlock in US Congress, deepening cultural polarization and the corrupting role of dark money in politics. The backsliding has accelerated during the last four years, with attacks on the news media, risks to the impartiality of the courts, and the weakening role of Congress as an effective check and balance on executive power.The US electoral system has also long been problematic, notably extreme partisan gerrymandering, the composition of the electoral college, rural over-representation in the Senate, lack of electoral standards as the supreme court rolled back federal oversight of state elections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, low turnout and the expansion of misinformation in the media. Since Bush v Gore in 2000, serious challenges to electoral legitimacy, and growing party polarization over the rules of the game, have gradually deepened. The Electoral Integrity Project has used expert surveys to evaluate the quality of national elections around the world since 2012 and found that US elections have persistently been graded poorly by EIP experts, scoring next to last among the world’s liberal democracies, and ranking about 45th out of 166 nations worldwide.Unfortunately, Republican federal and state lawmakers have no rational incentives to abandon Trump and the big lie about electoral fraud, even if they recognize the falsehood. Most incumbents are nominated through party primaries and hold safe districts due to partisan gerrymandering, so Republican chances of re-election depend on throwing red meat to the Maga base, not building a broader coalition among moderate independents.What is to be done?To fix the system, two steps are essential. Both need to be enacted before the November 2022 midterm elections, when the Democrats are likely to lose control of the Senate, if history is any guide.First, the Senate filibuster has to go as a relic of a bygone era. Worldwide, about 41 national legislatures have some supermajority rules but in nearly all cases these are only used, quite sensibly, for constitutional amendments, not for routine legislation (like establishing the 6 January commission). The rule benefits the opposition party seeking gridlock in DC and stymies effective electoral reform.The Senate rules are not fixed in stone and they can be amended by their own members through various procedural initiatives. The benefits of the filibuster rule for non-constitutional amendments are doubtful and the harm for gridlock has never been more serious. The Senate needs to act urgently to change its procedural rules to protect American democracy.Second, the US Senate needs to pass the HR1 For the People Act. This offers a comprehensive package of moderate reforms designed to protect voting rights in US elections, reduce partisan gerrymandering, make campaign spending more transparent and tighten ethics in public life. Getting rid of extreme partisan gerrymandering and ultra-safe districts is vital to incentivize House candidates to appeal broadly to all citizens well beyond their base. The Senate also needs to pass HR4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, restoring provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring certain states to pre-clear changes to their voting laws with the federal government, which had been struck down earlier by the US supreme court in Shelby County v Holder.A series of other reforms are highly desirable in the long term but impractical right now.One is adopting non-partisan blanket primaries, as in Washington and California, where the two candidates with the highest vote share get to run in the general election, irrespective of their party affiliation. This increases the incentive for all candidates to reach out to a broader constituency than the party base, so it is likely to encourage the election of more moderate lawmakers in Congress.Another is designed to break the stranglehold on two-party winner-take-all competition, ideally by implementing a mixed-member proportional electoral system for the US House, like Germany and New Zealand, with an enlarged number of members, or ranked-choice voting in multimember districts.Yet another reform is adopting a compulsory retirement age for members of Congress, like the minimum age requirement, to increase incumbency turnover, limit gerontocracy and expand representation for the younger generation of leaders, women and minorities.These are all worthy matters for future debate about long-term constitutional and legal reforms to American elections, a generational project. But, in the short term, the most urgent and practical priorities right now facing the Senate majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, means wrangling the US Senate to abolish the filibuster rule and then to pass some version of HR 1 and HR 4. The laws would still face major challenges through the courts. But if they don’t get enacted, American democracy is at risk.The sixth of January was the warning bell. The stress test of the 2022 midterm elections is fast approaching. Other countries have seen democratic breakdown. This is not alarmism. Alas, it’s real. More

The supreme court of Virginia will this week hear arguments in legal challenges to Governor Ralph Northam’s plan to take down a 131-year-old statue of Confederate Gen Robert E Lee, a move met with widespread praise from activists who had long seen it as a symbol of white supremacy.A year after Northam’s announcement, the enormous bronze equestrian statue still towers over a traffic circle on Monument Avenue in downtown Richmond, kept in place by two lawsuits.Among the central issues to be decided by the court whether the Commonwealth of Virginia is bound by a decision made by state officials more than 130 years ago, or can it undo that decision because the public’s attitude toward Confederate symbols has changed?Attorneys for the plaintiffs will argue that the governor does not have the authority to remove the statue, while attorney general Mark Herring will ask the court to uphold a lower court’s rulings.Northam’s decision to take down the statue was announced 10 days after George Floyd was murdered under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, during nightly protests over police brutality and racism around the country, including Richmond.Separate lawsuits were filed by residents who own property near the statue and a descendant of signatories to a 1890 deed that transferred the statue, pedestal and land they sit on to the state.In the latter lawsuit, William Gregory argues that the state agreed to “faithfully guard” and “affectionately protect” the statue.In the other suit, five property owners, including lead plaintiff Helen Marie Taylor, say an 1889 joint resolution of the Virginia general assembly accepting the statue and agreeing to maintain it is binding. They say Northam’s order to remove the statue exceeded the governor’s authority.During a trial in October, the state argued that it cannot be forced to maintain a statue that no longer reflects its values. Richmond circuit court Judge W Reilly Marchant agreed, finding that enforcing the 19th-century deed would violate “current public policy”.The judge cited two budget bills approved by the general assembly last year that repealed the 1889 act authorizing the then-governor to accept the gift of the monument and directed the Department of General Services to remove the 13-ton sculpture. The plaintiffs argue that the budget bills were unconstitutional.“What the residents are asserting is that the state cannot arbitrarily take away their property rights, or remove a historic landmark, in violation of the Constitution of Virginia. If the Governor finds this assertion staggering, it can only be because he has an unlimited vision of governmental power. The state must comply with its contractual obligations, just like private citizens,“ attorney Patrick McSweeney argues in a legal brief filed with the supreme court.The city of Richmond, which was the capital of the Confederacy for most of the civil war, has removed more than a dozen other pieces of Confederate statuary since Floyd’s death, which prompted the removal of monuments around the country.Herring argues that leaving the massive monument to Lee in place will continue to cause pain to many people who see it as a symbol of oppression.“This monument to Virginia’s racist history has held a place of honor in Richmond for too long. The Lee statue does not represent the ideals Virginians live by today and the inclusive community that we strive to be and it is time to bring it down,” Herring said.Gregory’s attorney, Joseph Blackburn, argues that removal of the statue would cause irreparable harm.“For 130 years, his family has taken pride in the Lee Monument and his family role in the placement of the Monument on land originally belonging to his family and given to the Commonwealth in consideration for the Commonwealth’s guarantee that it would perpetually care for and protect the Monument,” Blackburn wrote in a brief.It is unclear how long the supreme court will take to issue its decision. The court generally averages about six to nine weeks to issue rulings after oral arguments, but there are wide variations among cases.The statue is now covered with graffiti. More

Donald Trump’s final White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, pressured the acting attorney general to help push the lie of electoral fraud in Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden – even asking him to investigate a conspiracy theory which said people in Italy used military satellites to make US voting machines switch votes for Biden.So reported the New York Times on Saturday night, even as Trump made a return to the public stage with a speech to Republicans in North Carolina.In Greenville, Trump repeated his lies about his clear defeat by Biden, which he called “the crime of the century”.Before he became Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff, Meadows was a hard-right congressman from North Carolina and a loyal Trump supporter. The Times said he emailed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen five times in December and January.One email dealt with the “Italygate” conspiracy theory, the Times said, adding that Rosen refused to set up a meeting with a former CIA agent pushing the claims online.Another email reportedly echoed claims by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who led a legal challenge to election results largely laughed out of court, that results in New Mexico were affected by fraud. There is no evidence that was the case.Rosen resisted Meadows and also rebuffed Trump directly, citing former attorney general William Barr’s view that there was no large-scale fraud in the 2020 election, the Times said.Trump reportedly considered replacing Rosen with an official more amenable to attempts to overturn the election. But Rosen stayed in place through the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, when Trump supporters sought to disrupt the certification of election results.W Neil Eggleston, White House counsel under Barack Obama, told the Times DoJ “enforcement mechanisms should not be used for political purpose or for the personal benefit of the president … if the White House is involved in an investigation, there is at least a sense that there is a political angle to it.”Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent turned CNN analyst and editor for Just Security, tweeted: “We are at a place where Republican voters can more easily be convinced that Italy (?) secretly altered ballots using remote technology than that simply more people voted for a normal candidate from the opposing party.”The academic and author Norman Ornstein said pushing the Italygate conspiracy theory made Meadows an “unAmerican traitor to our fundamental values [who] does not belong in a civil and democratic society or political system.”The emails were discovered by the Senate judiciary committee.In a statement, the Democratic committee chairman, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said: “This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification.“I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponise the justice department in his election subversion scheme.” More

Joe Biden will use his visit to Europe this week to “rally the world’s democracies” in a reset of US foreign policy after four turbulent years under Donald Trump – all while threats to American democracy, stoked by Trump, proliferate at home.The president’s plan for the trip was set out in a column for the Washington Post on Saturday night, as Trump spoke to Republicans in North Carolina.Previewing meetings with “many of our closest democratic partners” and Vladimir Putin, Biden promised to “demonstrate the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age”.Critics may point out that the president would do well to face up to attacks on democracy at home. He has put Vice-President Kamala Harris in charge of the matter but there are many fronts to the battle.In the states, Republicans have passed laws to restrict ballot access and to make it possible to overturn election results.On the stump, Trump continues to peddle his lie that Biden’s victory in November was the result of fraud. In Greenville on Saturday, the former president called his defeat “the crime of the century”.In Washington last month, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” in his cause.In Biden’s own party, centrist senators stand in the way of voting rights protections.In his column for the Post, Biden tied another domestic priority – infrastructure spending, currently tied up in seemingly doomed negotiations with Republicans – to a chief foreign policy aim.“Just as it does at home,” he wrote, “honing the ability of democracies to compete and protecting our people against unforeseen threats requires us to invest in infrastructure. The world’s major democracies will be offering a high-standard alternative to China for upgrading physical, digital and health infrastructure that is more resilient and supports global development.”In North Carolina, Trump said China should pay the US and the world $10tn in reparations for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, while nations should cancel debt to Beijing.Biden touted domestic successes – progress against the coronavirus and the passage of his relief and stimulus package (without a single Republican vote) – and said: “The United States must lead the world from a position of strength.”He saluted the announcement on Saturday by G7 finance ministers of a global minimum corporate tax rate. Further distancing himself from Trump, who withdrew from the Paris climate deal, he said: “We have an opportunity to deliver ambitious progress that curbs the climate crisis and creates jobs by driving a global clean-energy transition.”In office, Trump attacked Nato. Biden saluted the “shared democratic values” of “the most successful alliance in world history. In Brussels, at the Nato summit, I will affirm the United States’ unwavering commitment to … ensuring our alliance is strong in the face of every challenge, including threats like cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure.”Amid proliferating such attacks, he said, it was important that “when I meet with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, it will be after high-level discussions with friends, partners and allies who see the world through the same lens as the United States”.Trump famously caused consternation among the US press corps in Helsinki in 2018, meeting Putin without aides and seeming cowed in his presence.Biden said the US and its allies were “standing united to address Russia’s challenges to European security … and there will be no doubt about the resolve of the United States to defend our democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests.”Some have asked what Biden hopes to gain from meeting Putin – former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Guardian this week, “You meet when you have a strategy in place of how to deal with Russia and I don’t think he has one.”In the Post, Biden heralded his extension of the New Start nuclear arms treaty and responses to cyberattacks.“I will again underscore the commitment of the United States, Europe and like-minded democracies to stand up for human rights and dignity,” he wrote.“This is a defining question of our time: can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world? Will the democratic alliances and institutions that shaped so much of the last century prove their capacity against modern-day threats and adversaries?“I believe the answer is yes. And this week in Europe, we have the chance to prove it.” More

On a hot, sunny day in Michigan, Joe Biden zoomed around in a new electric version of the Ford F150, one of the automaker’s most famous vehicles.“This sucker’s quick,” Biden said as he drove up to reporters at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center last month.Biden, a self-proclaimed American “car guy”, was there to tout electric vehicles, a key component of his administration’s trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure proposal.“The future of the auto industry is electric. There’s no turning back,” Biden said. “The question is whether we will lead or we will fall behind in the race to the future.”The proposed $174bn investment in electric vehicles represents the biggest ever White House push from fossil-fuel based vehicles and toward battery-powered cars. The Biden administration has made environmentalism and sustainability a key pillar to its job creation efforts, and the president wants to dramatically increase the number of electric vehicles on the road and the infrastructure for manufacturing them.This, Biden says, would create a wave of new green energy jobs and also help to fight climate change.At the beginning of the year, electric vehicles made up less than 5% of automobile sales in the US. But Biden’s proposal aims to dramatically push the American auto industry toward electric vehicles, mainly through incentives and tax credits. It would use funds to transition the fleet of federal agency cars such as those used by the US Postal Service, and the plan includes $45bn towards increasing the number of electric school buses and transit buses.It would also set up a national network of charging stations across the country, the current lack of which is seen as one of the bigger advantages combustion engine cars still have over electric vehicles. There are are only 41,400 electric vehicle charging stations (including fast-charging stations) in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. There are omore than 130,000 gasoline stations.It’s not clear, however, how those charging stations would be distributed – and what portion of them would go to poorer parts of America.But the plan aims to change the supply chain so the US depends less on other countries for batteries and other car parts. The administration wants to become less dependent on foreign countries for manufacturing electric vehicles and the parts that go into them.“It’s a systemic transition,” said John Paul MacDuffie, a University of Pennsylvania professor of management and vehicle expert. “Often if you just tackle one narrow piece of it you don’t make progress, because you bump into constraints in the system. So I think the ambition to be systemic is really good, and probably essential, to make progress.”As Biden drove around the Ford campus, hundreds of miles away Republicans in Congress were planning to gut the electric vehicles proposals in his American Jobs Plan.Negotiations over the entire infrastructure bill are continuing, but the last counter-offer made by Republicans slashed spending on Biden’s plan by about $170bn. It’s not clear what exactly the remaining $4bn would be spent on if the Republican proposal went into effect. A factsheet distributed by the office of Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the lead negotiator, did not specify.In their criticisms, Republicans have cited the price tag on the electric vehicles provision. They say the government should not pour so much money into electric vehicles, and that doing so would end up killing jobs in other alternative vehicle areas, like ethanol.“For a person like me, from Iowa, if you have all electric cars, there’s going to be 43,000 people making ethanol and biodiesel that won’t be employed,” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa told E&E News.Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, another Republican who opposes government spending on electric vehicles, told the Guardian electric vehicles are prohibitively expensive.“My concern about an all-electric car policy is that it’s truly a social injustice. These electric cars are very expensive. Only the wealthy can afford them, and the wealthy benefit from the tax credits,” Marshall said.“I think we’re getting policy way ahead of technology. Certainly way ahead from a price point … But right now the big picture scares me. I think we’d have to increase our electric grid by 60%. That would take, theoretically 20, 40, 60 years to double or to increase the electric grid by 60%.”The price of electric vehicles varies widely. The Mini Cooper SE starts at about $30,000. The cheapest Tesla, the Model S, starts at about $40,000. More expensive models can run as high as $150,000. The price of electric vehicles is likely to drop if and when they become more popular and the technology improves. And the cost of batteries is dropping – rapidly. It’s going so fast that there’s evidence to expect most cars to be battery-powered by 2035.Marshall also said the environmental cost of battery-powered cars is high.“I think we have to look at the environmental footprint in looking what goes into a battery. The making of the battery,” Marshall said. “And eventually the disposal of these batteries.”Even electric vehicle advocates concede that the environmental impact of the raw materials used for electric batteries are not perfect. And there are also human rights concerns about mining those materials.But in Michigan, state senator Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat, said the technology around batteries and electric vehicles was getting better and more environmentally friendly.“I think that there’s a fair criticism in terms of the environmental impact of batteries from the mining perspective. But I think, like everything else, that’s improving,” McMorrow said.Even accounting for battery mining, petrol and diesel cars still have a far more negative impact on the environment than electric vehicles.Right now the American Jobs Plan is still a framework, and the gulf between Republicans and Democrats is vast. It’s unlikely that if a compromise is reached on the entire proposal, Biden will get all the funding he’s looking for. But it’s also unlikely that Republicans will have shrunk that funding to the minuscule amount they have offered so far.And around the country, lawmakers are making moves to nudge the country further toward electric vehicles. Governor Kate Brown of Oregon recently signed a bill to expand electric vehicle infrastructure in her state. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker has set a goal of 750,000 electric vehicles by 2030.McMorrow in Michigan has helped craft a proposal to encourage electric vehicles in the state.Congressman Andy Levin of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have introduced legislation that aims to set up a nationwide network of charging stations over the next five years. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, also introduced legislation in 2019 that would help set up a network of charging stations also. Biden added that proposal to his American Jobs Plan in March.Even with a huge investment in electric vehicles, transitioning to where combustion cars are the minority on the road and electric vehicles are the majority will take time.“If you don’t start at some point making some move for the US to have a piece of the supply chain you’ll never be ready for the EV transition – and it will take a long time,” MacDuffie said. More

Donald Trump has returned to the stage in predictable fashion as he launched a more active phase of his post presidency: criticising Covid expert Anthony Fauci, calling for China to pay reparations over the pandemic and denouncing the New York attorney general’s criminal investigation into his business dealings.At a GOP convention in North Carolina on Saturday night, Trump was introduced by the state’s party chairman Michael Whatley as “our president”, a nod to Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through voter fraud, which Trump branded on Saturday “the crime of the century”.His appearance had all the hallmarks of his signature campaign rallies, complete with a musical playlist heavy on Elton John.Urging Republicans to support only Trump loyalists in next year’s midterm elections, Trump teased the prospect of another presidential bid of his own in 2024, but vowed first to join the campaign trail for those who share his values in next year’s fight for control of Congress.“The survival of America depends on our ability to elect Republicans at every level starting with the midterms next year,” he said early in a rambling speech that lasted nearly an hour-and-a-half.Some party leaders worry that a rise of pro-Trump candidates in the coming months could jeopardise the GOP’s fight for control of Congress in 2022. While Trump remains a dominant force within his party, he is deeply unpopular among key segments of the broader electorate. He lost the last election by 7 million votes after alienating Republican-leaning suburban voters across the country.The former president joined wider Republican criticism of Fauci – the US’s leading infectious diseases official – for asking Americans to wear masks to guard against the virus and for at times being sceptical of a hotly contested theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.He called Fauci “not a great doctor but a great promoter” for his frequent television appearances. “But he’s been wrong on almost every issue and he was wrong on Wuhan and the lab also,” Trump said.Trump’s own handling of the pandemic, in which nearly 600,000 people in the United States have died and he himself was infected, was a factor in his loss to president Joe Biden in 2020. He also called on China to pay $10tn in reparations to the US and the world for its own handling of the virus, and he said nations should cancel their debt to Beijing.Trump said a criminal investigation launched by the New York attorney general’s office was “the ultimate fishing expedition” and the latest attempt by Democrats to bring him down after two impeachment sagas when he was president. “It’s been a five-year witch hunt, hoax after hoax,” said Trump. “They’ll never stop until November of 2024.”New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has been investigating whether the Trump Organization falsely reported property values to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.Trump’s speech to hundreds of Republican officials and activists was the opening appearance in what is expected to be a new phase of rallies and public events. Out of office for more than four months and banned from his preferred social media accounts, the former president hopes to use such events to elevate his diminished voice.His advisers are already eyeing subsequent appearances in Ohio, Florida, Alabama and Georgia to help bolster midterm candidates and energise voters.On Friday, Facebook decided to suspend his account for two years, after he incited supporters to attack the US Capitol in service of his lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud. At the end of the suspension period, Facebook said, it would work with experts to assess the risk to public safety posed by reinstating Trump’s accountIn contrast to the mega rallies that filled sports arenas when Trump was president, on Saturday he faced a crowd that organisers estimated at 1,200 seated at dinner tables inside the Greenville convention centre. Many more followed along on internet streams.The former president waited more than an hour to advance falsehoods about the 2020 election, which he described as “the crime of the century”.Since leaving the White House, Trump has regularly made baseless claims that the last presidential election was stolen. The claims have triggered a wave of Republican-backed voting restrictions in state legislatures across the country, even though Trump’s cries of voting fraud have been refuted by dozens of judges, Republican governors and senior officials from his own administration.Trump focused his early remarks on Biden’s White House, which he called “the most radical left-wing administration in history”. “As we gather tonight our country is being destroyed before our very eyes,” he said.Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa took a shot at Trump in a statement released ahead of his speech.“More than 400,000 dead Americans, millions of jobs lost, and recklessly dangerous rhetoric is apparently not enough for Republicans to break with a loser president who cost them the White House, Senate, and House,” Moussa said.Invited to the stage briefly, Trump daughter-in-law and North Carolina native Lara Trump announced she would not run for the Senate because of family obligations. “I am saying no for now, not no forever,” she said. 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