US Politics

Joe Biden set out a $6tn budget proposal on Friday that, if passed, would fund a sweeping overhaul of US infrastructure and pour money into education and climate action, while driving government spending to its highest sustained levels since the second world war.The president’s first budget is largely a political document, and faces months of difficult negotiations in Congress where Republicans are already balking at the scale of his spending plans. But it clearly sets out Biden’s ambition to remake the US after the coronavirus pandemic.“Now is the time to build on the foundation that we’ve laid, to make bold investments in our families, in our communities, in our nation,” Biden told a crowd in Cleveland on Thursday. “We know from history that these kinds of investments raise both the floor and the ceiling of an economy for everybody.”Republicans immediately attacked the plan. Senator Mitch McConnell said it would “drown American families in debt, deficits, and inflation.”The White House has set out a two-part plan to overhaul the US economy by upgrading its infrastructure and expanding its social safety net. The costs of the programmes would lead to the US running annual deficits of over $1.3tn over the next decade and debt rising to 117% of the value of economic output by 2031.Alongside rebuilding bridges, roads, airports and other infrastructure, Biden has proposed a $13bn federal investment to roll out broadband internet access. Democrats are also pushing to expand and reform the US’s social programmes with government money for paid family leave and universal pre-school.In part the plan would be funded by tax increases on corporations and the very wealthy. Biden has already proposed increasing US corporation taxes to 28% from 21%, a plan opposed by all Republicans and some Democrats.Biden has said he is willing to negotiate with his political opponents on the shape and size of his proposals, but he will struggle to find Republican support for his agenda. No Republicans voted for his $1.9tn Covid stimulus bill and he has already been forced to scale back his infrastructure bill to $1.7tn from the originally proposed $2.2tn effort.The economy has improved markedly since Biden took office and the pandemic began to wane in the US. More than half of the country is now fully vaccinated and hiring has picked up as the economy has reopened.But the Biden administration believes the pandemic highlighted many structural issues with the US economy that need to be addressed by federal spending.Unemployment rates for Black and Latino Americans remain disproportionately high and women were hit particularly hard by the pandemic recession – in many cases because a lack of affordable childcare prevented them from working.A huge increase in government spending has fueled concerns about rising inflation. Prices on goods including lumber, cars and chicken have soared in recent months, and the commerce department said on Friday that the personal consumption expenditures index, a key measure of inflation, increased by 3.1% in April from a year ago, its highest level since 1992.On Thursday the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said the budget would push US debt above the size of the US economy, but said the proposed plan was responsible and would not contribute to inflationary pressures.“I believe it is a fiscally responsible program,” Yellen told a House appropriations subcommittee. More

The question now is not so much whether the Republican party can be saved any time in the foreseeable future. It is what Joe Biden and the Democrats should do when faced with a party determined to subvert democracy through any means necessary, including violence.On Friday Republicans in the Senate torpedoed an effort to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January, deploying the procedural move known as the filibuster to stop it even being debated.Fearful perhaps of what such a commission might uncover about their own role as co-conspirators, most brushed aside personal pleas by Gladys Sicknick, the mother of a police officer who was that day sprayed with a chemical, collapsed and later had a stroke and died.“A country that cannot even agree to investigate an assault on its Capitol is in big trouble, indeed,” observed Susan Glasser in the New Yorker magazine.Tellingly Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who previously condemned Trump’s role in the riot, reportedly asked senators to nix the commission as a “personal favour”. It was a sign that the rot now goes deeper than a cult of personality into the foundations of the Grand Old Party (GOP).It is a party that still has room for Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman under investigation over sex trafficking allegations, who this week appeared to incite supporters to take up arms. “We have a second amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it,” he said.Gaetz was speaking in Georgia on his “America First” tour alongside local congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently compared coronavirus mask mandates to the Holocaust. The pair of mini-Trumps are taking his playbook of attention-grabbing outrage to new extremes.Bill Kristol, director of the Defending Democracy Together advocacy organisation, tweeted on Friday morning: “Marjorie Taylor Greene bragged yesterday that she and Matt Gaetz are taking over the GOP. Today Senate Republicans are set to block a January 6th commission that could make that somewhat more difficult. Violence and authoritarianism has enablers as well as instigators.”One of America’s two major parties now falls outside the democratic mainstream – think “far right” in European terms. But are Democrats taking the existential threat sufficiently seriously or sleepwalking towards disaster in the next election cycle?Joe Manchin, a moderate senator from West Virginia, had said Republicans have “no excuse” to oppose the commission. Yet he also repeated his refusal to contemplate abolishing the filibuster, effectively giving Republicans carte blanche to block infrastructure spending, voting rights legislation, statehood for the District of Columbia and more.Minutes after Friday’s vote, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, seemed to get it, arguing that Republicans acted out of “out of fear or fealty” to Trump and made his false claim of a stolen election their official policy. “Trump’s big lie is now the defining principle of what was once the party of Lincoln,” Schumer said. “Republican state legislatures, seizing on the big lie, are conducting the greatest assault on voting rights since the beginning of Jim Crow.”But national voting rights legislation that would counter such steps is in deep trouble on Capitol Hill. Biden’s deadline for a police reform law named after George Floyd has come and gone due to Republican objections. His ambitious infrastructure investment is stalling as Republicans seek to shave billions off.Whatever the president’s head tells him, his heart has always favoured bipartisan compromise. He may also feel obliged to make a show of reaching across the aisle to satisfy moderates such as Manchin. Yet Democratic majorities are painfully narrow and each day brings the midterm elections closer.Fred Wellman, a military veteran who is executive director of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, tweeted: “We need to fight for our Republic. I don’t understand at all what the Democratic leadership is thinking. Stop fucking around. Stop letting McConnell walk all over you. For God’s sake act like you are the majority. We are all out here fighting. Where are you?”That question just became even more urgent and the case for abolishing the filibuster, passing Biden’s agenda and acknowledging that the Republican party has gone rogue just became stronger. More

The idea that all bias is some deviation from an unbiased center is itself a bias that prevents pundits, journalists, politicians and plenty of others from recognizing some of the most ugly and impactful prejudices and assumptions of our times. I think of this bias, which insists the center is not biased, not afflicted with agendas, prejudices and destructive misperceptions, as status-quo bias. Underlying it is the belief that things are pretty OK now, that the people in charge should be trusted because power confers legitimacy, that those who want sweeping change are too loud or demanding or unreasonable, and that we should just all get along without looking at the skeletons in the closet and the stuff swept under the rug. It’s mostly a prejudice of people for whom the system is working, against those for whom it’s not.I saw a tweet the other day that said the Secret Service and US Capitol police must have been incompetent or complicit to be blindsided by the 6 January insurrection. The writer didn’t seem to grasp the third option: that the Secret Service was unable to see past the assumptions that middle-aged conservative white men don’t pose a threat to democracy and the rule of law, that elected officials in powerful places weren’t whipping up a riot or worse, that danger meant outsiders and others. A decade ago, when I went to northern Japan for the first anniversary of the Great Tohuko Earthquake and tsunami, I was told that the 100ft-high wave of black water was so inconceivable a sight that some people could not recognize it and the danger it posed. Others assumed this tsunami would be no bigger than those in recent memory and did not flee high enough. A lot of people died of not being able to see the unanticipated.People fail to recognize things that do not fit into their worldview, which is why those in power have not adequately responded to decades of terrorism by white men – anti-reproductive-rights-driven killings, racial violence in churches, mosques, synagogues and elsewhere, homophobia and transphobia, the pandemic-scale misogynist violence behind a lot of mass shootings, attacks on environmentalists, and white supremacy in the ranks of the police and the military. Finally, this year the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, called this terrorism by its true name and identified it as “the most dangerous threat to our democracy”. The constant assumption has been that crime and trouble comes from outsiders, from “them”, not “us”, which is why last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were constantly portrayed by conservatives and sometimes the mainstream as far more violent and destructive than they were and the right has had such an easy time demonizing immigrants.People fail to recognize things that do not fit into their worldview, which is why those in power have not adequately responded to decades of terrorism by white menWhat violence and destruction did take place in or adjacent to Black Lives Matter protests was often the work of the right wing. That includes the murder of a guard at a federal court in Oakland, allegedly by an air force sergeant and Boogaloo Boy, while a BLM protest was going on nearby. It also reportedly includes some of the arson in Minneapolis shortly after George Floyd’s murder, as well as attacks on protesters. USA Today reported 104 such attacks by cars driven into crowds, many of them apparently politically motivated.No one has ever loved the status quo more than the editorial board at the New York Times, which recently composed an editorial declaring it a misstep for “the city’s Pride organizers … to reduce the presence of law enforcement at the celebration, including a ban on uniformed police and corrections officers marching as groups until at least 2025”. They found a lesbian of color who is also a cop and focused on this individual feeling “devastated”, rather than the logic behind the decision. Pride celebrates the uprising against longtime police violence and criminalization of queerness at the Stonewall Bar in 1969.Police officers are in no way banned from participating out of uniform, if they so desire, but that’s not enough for these “can’t we all get along” editorialists, who also wrote: “But barring LGBTQ officers from marching is a politicized response and is hardly worthy of the important pursuit of justice for those persecuted by the police.” You want to shout that the whole parade is political, because persecution and inequality have made being LGBTQ political, and the decision to include the police would be no less political than to exclude them. And who decides what’s worthy? The idea that there is some magically apolitical state all should aspire to is key to this bias and to why it refuses to recognize itself as a bias. It believes it speaks from neutral ground, which is why it forever describes a landscape of mountains and chasms as a level playing field.The status-quo bias is something I’ve encountered over and over again as gender violence, particularly as the refusal or inability to recognize that a high-status man or boy, be he film mogul or high-school football player, can also be a vicious criminal. Those who cannot believe the charges, no matter how credible, often dismiss and blame the victim instead (or worse: reporting a rape too often leads to death threats and other forms of harassment and intimidation intended to make an uncomfortable truth go away). Society has a marked failure of imagination when it comes to grasping that such predators treat their low-status victims in secret differently than their high-status peers in public, and that failure of imagination denies the existence of such inequality even as it perpetrates it.It’s a failure born out of undue respect for the powerful. (Here I think of all the idiots who kept discovering “the moment Trump became presidential” over and over again, unable to comprehend that his incompetence was as indelible as his corruption and malice, perhaps because their respect for the institution inexorably extended to the grifter who barged into it.) Centrist bias is institutional bias, and all our institutions historically perpetrated inequality. To recognize this is to delegitimize them; to deny it is to have it both ways – think yourself on the side of goodness while insisting no sweeping change is overdue. A far-right person might celebrate and perpetrate racism or police brutality or rape culture; a moderate might just play down its impact, past or present.To recognize the pervasiveness of sexual abuse is to have to listen to children as well as adults, women as well as men, subordinates as well as bosses: it’s to upend the old hierarchies of who should be heard and trusted, to break the silences that protect the legitimacy of the status quo. More than 95,000 people filed claims in the sexual-abuse lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America, and what it took to keep all those children quiet while all those hundreds of thousands of assaults took place is a lot of unwillingness to listen and to shatter faith in an institution that was itself so much part of the status quo (and in many ways an indoctrination system for it).Centrists in the antebellum era were apathetic or outright resistant to ending slavery in the US and then in the decades before 1920 to giving women the vote. The civil rights movement was not nearly as popular in its time as moderates who like the more polite quotes from Martin Luther King Jr think it was. King himself famously declared, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice …” As King notes, the status quo is always changing, and the centrists are often resistant to change that expands rights and justice, more mild about efforts by the right to shrink those things in favor of more inequality and more authoritarianism.A recent study seems to contain the same biases, asserting, “We measured the brain activity of committed partisans watching real political video footage. Although all participants viewed the same videos, brain responses diverged between liberals and conservatives, reflecting differences in the subjective interpretation of the footage. This polarized perception was exacerbated by a personality trait: intolerance of uncertainty.” The research seems to assume that many at either end of the spectrum hold strong beliefs and are intolerant of uncertainty, but who is more intolerant of uncertainty than those who want to believe that authority is trustworthy, no secrets need sunlight, and urgent change is unwanted?What gets called the left is often just ahead of the game, when it comes to human rights and environmental justiceAnother fallacy of the centrist stance is that right and left are symmetrically extreme. Leftwing violence is largely a failed experiment that faded away in the 1970s. Also, in recent years the strongest voices on the left have mostly told important truths and those on the right have promulgated lies while arguing against basic human rights. One obvious example is all the falsehoods about abortion used to justify undermining abortion access. Another is the conversation around the climate crisis. Activists and scientists have been saying for a long time that we’re in a dire situation that demands profound change. Yet the call for change is painted as extreme – rather than as the necessary response to an extreme planetary crisis. On the right, the call has been for inaction and denial of the science. This week the International Energy Agency belatedly got on board with what climate groups have been insisting on for years: an end to new fossil fuel exploration and extraction, a major shift now recognized as a reasonable and necessary one to preserve a liveable planet.Was it radical to be correct too soon? What gets called the left is often just ahead of the game, when it comes to human rights and environmental justice; the right is often denying the existence of the problem, whether it’s pesticides and toxic waste or domestic violence and child abuse. There is no symmetry. A lot of what are now considered moderate – AKA centrist – positions were seen as radical not long ago, when this country supported segregation, banned interracial marriages and then same-sex marriages, prevented women from holding some positions and queer people from others, and excluded disabled people from almost everything. The center is biased, and those biases matter. More

The state of Arizona is preparing to kill death row inmates using hydrogen cyanide, the same lethal gas that was deployed at Auschwitz.Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients to make cyanide gas. The department bought a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530.It also purchased sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid which are intended to be used to generate the deadly gas. The gas chamber itself, built in 1949 and disused for 22 years, has been dusted off and, according to the department, “refurbished”.Over the past few months the Republican-controlled state has moved aggressively to restart its deeply flawed execution system. The death penalty has been in abeyance in Arizona for seven years following the gruesomely botched lethal injection of Joseph Wood in 2014.Last month, the Guardian revealed that Arizona spent a jaw-dropping $1.5m on a batch of pentobarbital in October, a sedative which it now hopes to use as its main lethal injection method.The Guardian’s documents, obtained through public records requests, show that officials have also gone to considerable lengths to revive the state’s mothballed gas chamber, housed at ASPC-Florence. A series of tests were conducted last August to appraise its “operability”.Seals on windows and the door were checked to ensure airtightness, and drains cleared of blockage. Water was used in the tests in place of the deadly chemicals, with a smoke grenade ignited to simulate the gas.Some of the techniques used to test the safety of the chamber were astonishingly primitive, the documents reveal. Prison officials checked for gas seepages with a candle.The flame of the candle was held up to the sealed windows and door and if its flame remained steady and did not flicker the chamber was deemed to be airtight. In December staff declared the vessel “operationally ready”.The preparation of cyanide gas executions presents Arizona death row inmates with a Hobson’s choice between two questionable ways to die. Should they opt for the gas chamber, they should be mindful of the last time anybody was gassed by the state.Walter LaGrand, a German national, was sentenced to death for a 1982 bungled armed bank robbery in which a man was killed. The Tucson Citizen published an eyewitness account of his 1999 execution in which he displayed “agonizing choking and gagging” and took 18 minutes to die.“The witness room fell silent as a mist of gas rose, much like steam in a shower, and Walter LaGrand became enveloped in a cloud of cyanide vapor,” the Citizen reported. “He began coughing violently – three or four loud hacks – and made a gagging sound before falling forward.”The newspaper recorded that over many minutes the inmate’s head and arms twitched, and his hands were “red and clenched”.Should an inmate choose death by lethal injection – the method widely deployed among death penalty states as the supposedly scientific and humane alternative to gas, electric chair or firing squad – they will also find the last time it was used in Arizona it was anything but humane.Joseph Wood took almost two hours to die when Arizona experimented on him with 15 doses of a then little-used concoction of lethal injection drugs. An eye witness told the Guardian that he counted Wood gasp and gulp 660 times.In its current rush to restart executions, Arizona has selected two inmates as likely candidates to go first out of a current death row population of 115 people. They are Frank Atwood, 65, sentenced to death for killing an eight-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson, in 1984; and Clarence Dixon, 65, convicted of the 1978 murder of a college student, Deana Bowdoin.A member of Atwood’s legal team, Joseph Perkovich of Phillips Black, told the Guardian that it was improper for the state to be hurrying towards setting an execution date when the pandemic had impeded investigation into his client’s possible innocence for more than a year. As for Atwood’s choice between lethal injection or gas, Perkovich said: “Neither option is tenable.”The attorney pointed out that there is a discrepancy between the potassium cyanide that has been obtained by the corrections department and the state’s execution protocol which stipulates that sodium cyanide must be used. “This is not a small detail – the specific compound is vitally important,” he said.Perkovich added that “Frank Atwood is prepared to die. He is a man of Greek Orthodox faith and is preparing for this moment. But he does not want to be tortured and subjected to a botched execution.”Inmates who choose the gas chamber are strapped into a chair in the centre of the vessel. Coloured levers are then used to drop the sodium cyanide into a pot of sulfuric acid under the chair, releasing the deadly hydrogen cyanide into the air.Once the prisoner is dead, the gas is neutralized with ammonia until the chamber is safe to enter. “As a precautionary method,” the death chamber protocol says, “it is recommended that the team removing the body wear gas masks and rubber gloves and that the hair of the deceased inmate be ruffled in order to allow any residually trapped gas to escape.”The documents record how prison staff engaged in role play during last year’s tests. Guards acted out as inmates who resisted going to their death, screaming: “This is murder”, “I’m innocent”, “You’re putting me down like an animal”, and “This is against everything America stands for”.Despite Arizona’s best efforts to present its gas chamber as a reputable institution, the horrors of the past hang heavily over it. The Nazis used hydrogen cyanide under the trade name Zyklon B to kill more than 1 million people in gas chambers in Auschwitz and other extermination camps.Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said: “You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas. Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?” More

Last week, the US supreme court agreed to hear a case that could significantly roll back abortion rights. This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Christopher Kang, former deputy counsel to President Obama, about calls to restructure the highest federal court in the country

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Christopher Kang spent several years working in the White House when Barack Obama was in office. Now he is the co-founder and chief counsel of Demand Justice, an organisation pushing for Congress to pass a bill that would allow the addition of four seats to the US supreme court, diluting the majority conservatives currently have on the bench. Jonathan questions the consequences of such an act, whether there is another way to restore balance, and the politics behind such a radical move. More

A co-founder of Black Lives Matter announced Thursday that she is stepping down as the executive director of the movement’s foundation following what she has called a smear campaign from a far-right group and recent criticism from other Black organizers.Patrisse Cullors, who has been at the helm of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation for nearly six years, said she is leaving to focus on other projects, including the upcoming release of her second book and a multi-year TV development deal with Warner Bros. Her last day with the foundation is Friday.“I’ve created the infrastructure and the support, and the necessary bones and foundation, so that I can leave,” Cullors told the Associated Press. “It feels like the time is right.”Cullors’ departure follows a massive surge in support and political influence in the US and around the world for the BLM movement, which was established nearly eight years ago in response to injustice against Black Americans. The resignation also comes on the heels of controversy over the foundation’s finances and over Cullors’ personal wealth.The 37-year-old activist said her resignation has been in the works for more than a year and has nothing to do with the personal attacks she has faced from far-right groups or any dissension within the movement.“Those were rightwing attacks that tried to discredit my character, and I don’t operate off of what the right thinks about me,” Cullors said.As she departs, the foundation is bringing aboard two new interim senior executives to help steer it in the immediate future: Monifa Bandele, a longtime BLM organizer and founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in New York City, and Makani Themba, an early backer of the BLM movement and chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies in Jackson, Mississippi.The BLM foundation revealed to the AP in February that it took in just over $90m last year, following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man whose last breaths under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer inspired protests globally. The foundation said it ended 2020 with a balance of more than $60m, after spending nearly a quarter of its assets on operating expenses, grants to Black-led organizations and other charitable giving.Some critics of the foundation contend more of that money should have gone to the families of Black victims of police brutality who have been unable to access the resources needed to deal with their trauma and loss.“That is the most tragic aspect,” said the Rev T Sheri Dickerson, the president of an Oklahoma City BLM chapter and a representative of the (hash)BLM10, a national group of organizers that has publicly criticized the foundation over funding and transparency.“I know some of [the families] are feeling exploited, their pain exploited, and that’s not something that I ever want to be affiliated with,“ Dickerson said.Cullors and the foundation have said they do support families without making public announcements or disclosing dollar amounts.In 2020, the BLM foundation spun off its network of chapters as a sister collective called BLM Grassroots, so that it could build out its capacity as a philanthropic organization. Although many groups use “Black Lives Matter” or “BLM” in their names, less than a dozen are considered affiliates of the chapter network.Last month, Cullors was targeted by several conservative-leaning publications that falsely alleged she took a large annual salary from the foundation, affording her recent purchase of a southern California home.In April, the foundation stated Cullors was a volunteer executive director who, prior to 2019, had “received a total of $120,000 since the organization’s inception in 2013, for duties such as serving as spokesperson and engaging in political education work”.“As a registered 501c3 non-profit organization, [the foundation] cannot and did not commit any organizational resources toward the purchase of personal property by any employee or volunteer,” the foundation said in a statement. “Any insinuation or assertion to the contrary is categorically false.”In 2018, Cullors released When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, which became a New York Times bestseller. She has also consulted on a number of racial justice projects outside of BLM, taking compensation for that work in her personal capacity.She and the BLM movement have come a long way since its inception as a social media hashtag, after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida.Cullors, along with BLM co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, pledged then to build a decentralized movement governed by consensus of a members’ collective. In 2015, a network of chapters was formed, while donations and support poured in. Garza and Tometi soon stepped away from day-to-day involvement in the network to focus on their own projects.Cullors, who has arguably been the most publicly visible of the co-founders, became the foundation’s full-time executive director last year purely out of necessity, she said.On 5 October, St Martin’s Press will release Cullors’ latest book, titled An Abolitionists Handbook, which she says is her guide for activists on how to care for each other and resolve internal conflict while fighting to end systemic racism. Cullors is also developing and producing original cable and streaming TV content that centers on Black stories, under a multi-year deal with Warner Bros.The first of her TV projects will debut in July, she said. More

Natalie Jackson, a prominent Florida attorney whose clients include Trayvon Martin’s family, is running to replace Representative Val Demings in Congress next year.Just days into her campaign for the Orlando-based House seat, Jackson has already garnered endorsements from two powerful civil rights champions: attorney Benjamin Crump and Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s brother.In recent years, Jackson has collaborated with Crump on some of the nation’s most high-profile police violence cases, representing the families of Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, according to Florida Politics.“What we saw with George Floyd, we saw his family get justice in court. But that five minutes of justice didn’t address the entire criminal justice system, nor did it address the economic inequality in Orange county,” Jackson said.“We need to bring about that type of change. So I feel I can be best suited in the legislature to do that.”After enlisting in the navy at 18 years old, Jackson won an NROTC scholarship to Hampton University. She then served as a naval intelligence officer among one of the first groups of women deployed on an aircraft carrier, the USS Roosevelt.Jackson started her legal career at a public defender’s office and now goes by the nickname the “justice gladiator”. But she has also experienced scandal after poor bookkeeping got her temporarily suspended from the Florida bar, issues she blamed on her overwhelming work schedule and stress.She decided to run for Congress while working for the family of Andre Hill, an unarmed Black man who was fatally shot by police in Columbus, Ohio, trying to deliver his friend Christmas money.“While I think a lot of people who get into these races, they say they’re excited, I’m really prayerful about it. I feel it’s not something I wanted to do. I feel it’s something I’m called to do,” Jackson said.The contest to succeed Demings – who is eyeing a Senate bid to unseat incumbent Marco Rubio – has already attracted other big names in Florida politics, including former state attorney Aramis Ayala and state senator Randolph Bracy.Florida’s 10th congressional district usually trends Democratic, though it is unclear how redistricting could affect partisanship going into the election. More