US Politics

Republicans in Congress are rebelling against the mask requirement on the House chamber, which remains in place due to Covid-19 safety concerns from Democrats, who hold the majority.During votes on Tuesday, several Republican lawmakers refused to wear masks as they stood in the chamber and encouraged other members to join them.Lawmakers who refuse to wear a face covering are subject to a fine of $500 for the first offense and subsequent offenses can result in a $2,500 fine. In practice, however, the House sergeant-at-arms gives a warning for the first offense.The seven lawmakers who received warnings include Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Chip Roy of Texas, Bob Good of Virginia, Louie Gohmert of Texas and Mary Miller of Illinois, according to the Associated Press.Greene, a Republican extremist, posted a photo of herself with three other Republicans on the House floor without masks. The Georgia lawmaker tweeted: “End the oppression!” along with: “#FreeYourFace.”Massie also tweeted a card casting a “No” vote, along with a caption estimating that 10 Republicans were going maskless on the floor on Tuesday.The Republican stunt comes after the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Thursday that she would continue requiring masks to be worn on the floor of the chamber. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said earlier that day that fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in almost all settings, including indoors.When asked why she kept the mask rule for the chamber, Pelosi told Bloomberg that it’s not known how many lawmakers and their staff are vaccinated.Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have a 100% vaccination rate against Covid-19, according to answers from a CNN survey of Capitol Hill published on Friday. However, for Republicans, the numbers are less clear.In total, it is estimated that at least 44% of House members are vaccinated and at least 92% of senators are. More

Dr Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday that Americans will probably need a Covid-19 booster shot “within a year or so” as Americans continue to receive vaccinations across the country.The booster may be needed because the durability of protection against the virus is “generally not lifelong”, the chief medical adviser to the president told Axios during a virtual event.On Tuesday, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Dr Peter Marks, also said Covid-19 booster shots, similar to the flu shot, could be needed for fully vaccinated people within a year.Vaccine makers have shown so far that their shots offer strong protection for at least six months, and US health agencies are tracking the impact of new variants on Covid-19 vaccine development.During the interview, Fauci also clarified the new federal guidance on mask-wearing, stating that Americans were “misinterpreting” the announcement.“I think people are misinterpreting, thinking that this is a removal of a mask mandate for everyone. It’s not,” Fauci told Axios’s Mike Allen. “It’s an assurance to those who are vaccinated that they can feel safe, be they outdoors or indoors.”According to Fauci, the mandate “did not explicitly say that unvaccinated people should abandon their masks”.The mask guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last Thursday said fully vaccinated people did not need to wear a mask indoors or outdoors with the exception of healthcare settings, homeless shelters, prison and jails and on public transportation.While some are feeling a sense of freedom after 15 months of face coverings, others have met the guidance with confusion and skepticism. The agency’s announcement prompted major retailers, including Walmart and Starbucks, to lift mask mandates, and some states, including California, will keep their mask orders in place for another month.At least 37% of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. People are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after they receive a second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. More

Joe Biden wears his Catholicism on his sleeve. The American president carries the rosary beads of his late son, Beau, around his wrist, and each Sunday he attends mass in Washington, or in his home state of Delaware. After Mr Biden’s election to the White House last year, Pope Francis sent him a copy of his book on the Covid pandemic, Let Us Dream. In it, Francis calls for a new spirit of solidarity in societies which have learned the hard way that “no one is saved alone”.Through his $2tn American Rescue Plan, Mr Biden hopes to turn that theological claim into public policy, deploying the resources of the state in the name of a more equal, sustainable society. “I grew up with Catholic social doctrine, which taught me that faith without works is dead,” he has said.For millions of ordinary American Catholics, disillusioned and alienated by their church’s shameful handling of sex abuse scandals, the Biden presidency is therefore an uplifting source of celebration and hope. But within the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), it is instead treated as an insidious threat to ecclesial authority. As Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas put it recently: “Because President Biden is Catholic, it presents a unique problem for us.”The reason is Mr Biden’s backing of abortion rights, which goes against Catholic teaching. On issues such as the rights of refugees, concern for the poor, the dignity of work and the climate emergency, the president and Pope Francis march in virtual lockstep. But figures such as Archbishop Naumann and the president of the USCCB, José Gomez, believe that the president’s position on abortion confuses the faithful and brings his own Catholicism into disrepute. In such circumstances, they speculate, it may be appropriate to take the extreme step of denying him holy communion at mass.The last similar discussion took place in 2004, when the pro-choice Catholic John Kerry was running for the White House. The issue was eventually parked and Mr Kerry didn’t win. Now the bishops have announced a vote next month on the subject, with a view to issuing a clarificatory document. The arch-conservative cardinal Raymond Burke is already on the record stating that “apostate” politicians backing abortion rights should be denied communion. As the conciliatory Mr Biden makes a credible fist of uniting a nation divided by decades of culture wars, it is tempting to despair. The USCCB has no power to order the withholding of communion, and the Vatican has already made clear its disapproval of the proposed June vote. But this may cut little ice with prelates who have fiercely resisted the liberal priorities of Francis’s papacy from its inception eight years ago.The weaponising of the eucharist illustrates the extent to which much of the hierarchy of US Catholicism has become the theological wing of extreme Republicanism. The end result, as one prominent theologian has warned, may be some kind of “soft schism” as conservative bishops try to pull the church further to the right. Surveys indicate that a majority of US Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.The extraordinary violent denouement of Donald Trump’s polarising presidency meant that dialling down division became an urgent national priority. Mr Biden, in both tone and substance, has done a pretty good job on that front so far. If only the national leaders of his church could follow suit. More

China has labelled the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, “full of lies and disinformation” after her calls for a diplomatic boycott of next year’s Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics on human rights grounds.“Some US individuals’ remarks are full of lies and disinformation,” a foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said on Wednesday. “US politicians should stop using the Olympic movement to play despicable political games” or using “the so-called human rights issue as a pretext to smear and slander China”, he added.Zhao hit out at the US’s human rights record, citing “the continuing spread of xenophobia, white supremacy and discrimination against people of African and Asian descent and Islamophobia”.On Tuesday Pelosi criticised China’s human rights record and urged global leaders not to attend the Winter Olympics scheduled to be held in Beijing in February.“What I propose – and join those who are proposing – is a diplomatic boycott,” Pelosi said at a bipartisan congressional hearing, adding that leading countries should “withhold their attendance at the Olympics”.“Let’s not honour the Chinese government by having heads of state go to China,” she added. “For heads of state to go to China in light of a genocide that is ongoing – while you’re sitting there in your seat – really begs the question: what moral authority do you have to speak again about human rights any place in the world?”Joe Biden’s administration has called China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority “genocide”, a charge Beijing has vehemently denied. The US president has said his administration hopes to develop a joint approach with allies on participation in Beijing’s Olympics.US legislators have been increasingly critical of China’s human rights record of late, and talk of shunning the Beijing Winter Olympics has been growing among some US allies and human rights activists since last year.The Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern has proposed relocating the Winter Olympics. “If we can postpone an Olympics by a year for a pandemic, we can surely postpone the Olympics for a year for a genocide … This would give the IOC time to relocate to a country whose government is not committing atrocities.”The Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey said corporate sponsors should be called to testify before Congress and be “held to account … big business wants to make lots of money, and it doesn’t seem to matter what cruelty – even genocide – that the host nation commits.”In Britain, several MPs have joined the calls for a boycott. However, a separate online petition in February calling for the UK parliament to debate a motion that would lead to a boycott from Team GB was rejected.Washington led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In retaliation, the Soviet bloc snubbed the 1984 Los Angeles summer Games.The recent calls for a boycott are reminiscent of the international response to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But Sarah Hirshland, the chief executive of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said past Olympic boycotts had failed to achieve their political ends.She said her organisation was concerned about the “oppression of the Uyghur population” but barring US athletes from the Games was “certainly not the answer”. More

Voter suppression has been around for as long as the republic. Stories of subterfuge and ballot box-stuffing schemes are such a part of American political folklore, there’s an entire book about them. So in one sense, there is nothing particularly novel about Republican politicians’ efforts to rig the vote, or the important revelations that rightwing groups and corporate officials are coordinating state-level campaigns to make it harder to vote.However, a new nugget of polling data illustrates that something more fundamental has happened: voter suppression is no longer a plot engineered in the shadows and denied in public, for fear of criticism by a population that considers such measures grotesque. Instead, voter suppression is having its coming-out party – because more and more Americans now consider it to be a perfectly legitimate and even laudable campaign tactic.The data point comes in a new CBS/YouGov survey, buried under the topline finding that almost two-thirds of Republican voters do not consider Joe Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, despite Biden’s electoral college and popular vote victories.Further down in the survey, pollsters asked GOP voters whether in advance of the 2022 election, they would advise Republican leaders to “tell the public about popular policies and ideas” or instead “push for changes to voting rules”, on the basis that Republicans “will win once those changes are in place”.Nearly half of Republicans surveyed supported the latter move, with the strongest demographics in support being female Republicans, non-white Republicans and white Republicans with no college degree.This wouldn’t be so profound if this were a survey only of cynical, campaign-hardened GOP consultants. But here we see that a near-majority of rank-and-file Republican voters have internalized the soulless cynicism of their party’s political class.In the same way so many Democratic voters have become calculated TV pundits who decide whether something is good policy based only on how they perceive it will supposedly play with moderate voters, many Republican voters have become dead-eyed operatives who actively support voter suppression regardless of how it might conflict with their party’s bromides about freedom and democracy.Liberals keep hoping that exposing the latest voter suppression scheme might miraculously shame GOP lawmakers into backing off, but those Republican leaders are absolutely proud of their efforts, because a sizable chunk of their voters want that.In effect, Roger Stone, Karl Rove and Lee Atwater have created a GOP electorate of Roger Stones, Karl Roves and Lee Atwaters. Shaming alone will not combat that kind of mercenary amorality – ending the filibuster and passing federal legislation to protect and expand the franchise is probably the best hope.The new CBS poll doesn’t appear to be an outlier. An Economist/YouGov poll from March found that 57% of Americans say they would support or aren’t sure they would oppose “laws that would make it more difficult to vote”. An Associated Press poll in April found that while a majority of the country supports making it easier to vote, a majority of Republican voters do not. And voter ID laws – which are sculpted to make it harder to vote – are wildly popular, according to various surveys.It’s hard to overstate the significance of this change of norms.For most of my lifetime, campaigns and elections have been considered a bloodsport – but they at least had a few unwritten rules. Typically, it was assumed that the outer limits of acceptable tactics were negative ads and Super Pac expenditures, with anonymous dark money spending tipping over into that gray area between what was seen as legit and not legit.Though chicanery to drive down turnout was always a threat to steal an election, straight-up voter suppression was generally perceived as something looked down upon if not criminal – a tactic that would always be confined to the shadows, deterred by public shaming. Campaigns and politicians rarely copped to the idea that they were actively trying to make sure people didn’t vote – they either denied it, or dressed it up as some necessary way to ensure ballot-box integrity.But now, another Overton Window has shifted. Super Pac and dark money spending flooding elections are the norm, and voter suppression tactics and legislation are considered by many to be just another totally permissible aspect of the political competition.Maybe it was always like that – maybe conservative voters have always been win-at-all-cost automatons. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that women and people of color were explicitly barred from voting, which is the ultimate form of voter suppression.But maybe in the modern era – after the right to vote was putatively extended to everyone – the revanche is part of the larger Trump effect, which among more and more Republicans has legitimized literally anything required for them to seize power. This effect is clearly reverberating not just among paid political pros, but also among rank-and-file GOP voters.It’s important to remember that the psychological shift isn’t in reaction to actual proof that Democrats are pilfering elections. On the contrary, the normalization of voter suppression is happening even though there is no concrete, substantiated evidence that voter fraud systemically plagues American elections.In other words, this is all happening without the kind of proof that might justify cynicism about elections. (And after the 2000 election shenanigans in Florida, it is Democratic voters who arguably have the most reason to question the integrity of elections.) The shift is a product of both the GOP’s fact-free “voter fraud” propaganda, and also a win-power-at-all-costs mentality among a large subset of conservative voters.The former is an obvious problem that’s being supercharged by the miasma of disinformation unleashed by social media and exacerbated by the decline of fact-based journalism that anchors the news.The latter is arguably even more troubling, because it is operating on the synaptic level. Politics has apparently become such a red-versus-blue tribal war that a significant chunk of Republicans now seem willing to trample the very ideals America is supposed to represent in the name of rescuing the country.They are willing to sacrifice democracy in order to supposedly save it – an authoritarian mentality that never ends well.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
This piece was originally published in the Daily Poster More

Joe Biden is poised to sign legislation aimed at curtailing a striking rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, after Congress approved the bill in a bipartisan denunciation of brutal attacks that have proliferated during the pandemic.The bill, which the House passed on Tuesday in a 364-62 vote, will expedite the review of hate crimes at the justice department and make grants available to help local law enforcement agencies improve their investigation, identification and reporting of incidents driven by bias, which often go underreported. It previously passed the Senate, and Biden has said he will give it his signature..“Asian Americans have been screaming out for help, and the House and Senate and President Biden have clearly heard our pleas,” said Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman who helped lead efforts to pass the bill in the House.To many Asian Americans, the pandemic has invigorated deep-seated biases. Donald Trump repeatedly referred to the virus, which emerged in Wuhan, China, as the “China virus” or the “Kung flu.” And as cases of the illness began to rise in the US, so too did the attacks, with thousands of violent incidents reported in the past year.Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat of California, said it’s painful for many to “open up the newspaper every day and see that yet another Asian American has been assaulted, attacked and even killed”.In February, an 84-year-old man died after he was pushed to the ground near his home in San Francisco. A young family was injured in a Texas grocery store attack last year. And in Georgia, six Asian women were killed in March during a series of shootings targeting workers at massage parlors. Prosecutors are seeking hate crimes charges. The women who were killed are mentioned in the text of the bill.“You start to think, ‘Well, will I be next?”’ Chu said.Yet to some activists, including organizations representing gay and transgender Asian Americans, the legislation is misguided. More than 100 groups have signed on to a statement opposing the bill for relying too heavily on law enforcement while providing too little funding to address the underlying issues driving a rise in hate crimes.“We have had hate crimes laws since 1968, it’s been expanded over and over again, and this new legislation is more of the same,” said Jason Wu, who is co-chair of GAPIMNY-Empowering Queer & Trans Asian Pacific Islanders. “These issues are about bias, but also rooted in inequality, and lack of investment and resources for our communities. Not a shortage of police and jails.”The group Stop AAPI Hate said the bill was step but lamented that it centers a law enforcement approach over community-led reform.“Because the act centers criminal law enforcement agencies in its solutions, it will not address the overwhelming majority of incidents reported to our site which are not hate crimes, but serious hate incidents,” the group said in a statement.The bill also represented a rare moment of bipartisanship in a Congress that has struggled to overcome partisan gridlock, while underscoring an evolution in Republican thought on hate crimes legislation. Many conservatives have historically dismissed hate crimes laws, arguing they create special protected classes so that victims of similar crimes are treated differently.“I’m glad Congress is coming together in a bipartisan way,” said congresswoman Young Kim, a California Republican who is Korean American. “Let’s also recognize that we cannot legislate hate out of our people’s hearts and minds.” More

The Trump administration subpoenaed Twitter for information related to a parody account that criticized Devin Nunes, a close ally to the former president, according to federal court records released on Monday.Investigating messages related to the parody Twitter account @NunesAlt, which poses as the California representative’s mother, the Department of Justice (DoJ) sought to identify the user behind the account, according to a motion to quash the subpoena.“It appears to Twitter that the subpoena may be related to Congressman Devin Nunes’s repeated efforts to unmask individuals behind parody accounts critical of him,” the document states.In 2019, Nunes filed a $250m lawsuit that accused the media giant of defamation while profiting from abusive behavior and language. The lawsuit also sued @NunesAlt and another parody account posing as the representative’s cow, @DevinCow.Last summer, a judge ruled that the representative could not sue Twitter, citing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects sites from liability for what users may post.Twitter has not complied with the demand to share the identities. A lawyer for the site said last summer it had no intention of doing so.In the DoJ investigation, a gag order prohibiting Twitter from talking about the subpoena was issued along with the document.According to the motion to quash the subpoena, Twitter asked the justice department for an explanation regarding the criminal investigation. The government said messages by the parody account were a possible violation of a federal statute that makes it a felony to use interstate communications to threaten to injure someone – but did not point to any tweet that made a threat.A Twitter account holder would typically be notified of any legal request – such as subpoenas, court orders or other legal documents – regarding their account, according to Twitter’s rules and policies. However, in this case, prosecutors got a court order in November to keep the subpoena secret, citing a fear that its disclosure could harm the investigation.On Tuesday, a Twitter spokesperson said the company was “committed to protecting the freedom of expression for those who use our service. We have a strong track record and take seriously the trust placed in us to work to protect the private information of the people on Twitter.”The user behind @NunesAlt wrote that the release of the court records was “the closest thing I’m gonna get to a Mother’s Day card”.He or she also quoted Eric Garcia, a Democrat running against Nunes in California, who referred to Nunes’s prominent opposition to the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.“So,” Garcia wrote, “the person who claims secret courts and organizations and trying to destroy our country tried to use a secret grand jury subpoena to find the identity of @NunesAlt. How many other times did Devin use the DoJ to try and attack private citizens?”A GoFundMe campaign has been created by the user behind @DevinCow to pay for the costs related to the congressman’s lawsuit against both parody accounts.“These parodies are anonymous on Twitter, however, they are real people behind these accounts who have retained attorneys to respond and fight these allegations in court,” reads the fundraiser description.By Tuesday, the fundraiser had raised more than $146,000.Nunes has filed several defamation lawsuits, including one against the political journalist Ryan Lizza and Hearst, which owns Esquire, over a 2018 article about his family farm. The lawmaker also filed a $435m libel suit against CNN over a report about his contacts with a Ukrainian prosecutor. More