US Politics

The Biden administration is holding tens of thousands of asylum-seeking children in an opaque network of some 200 facilities that the Associated Press has learned spans two dozen states and includes five shelters with more than 1,000 children packed inside.Confidential data obtained by the AP shows the number of migrant children in government custody more than doubled in the past two months, and this week the federal government was housing around 21,000 kids, from toddlers to teens.A facility at Fort Bliss, a US army post in El Paso, Texas, had more than 4,500 children as of Monday. Attorneys, advocates and mental health experts say that while some shelters are safe and provide adequate care, others are endangering children’s health and safety.“It’s almost like ‘Groundhog Day’,” said the Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Luz Lopez, referring to the 1993 film in which events appear to be continually repeating. A US Department of Health and Human Services spokesman, Mark Weber, said the department’s staff and contractors were working hard to keep children in their custody safe and healthy.A few of the current practices are the same as those that Joe Biden and others criticized under the Trump administration, including not vetting some caregivers with full FBI fingerprint background checks. At the same time, court records show the Biden administration is working to settle several multimillion-dollar lawsuits that claim migrant children were abused in shelters under Donald Trump’s presidency.Part of the government’s plan to manage thousands of children crossing the US-Mexico border involves about a dozen unlicensed emergency facilities inside military installations, stadiums and convention centers that skirt state regulations and do not require traditional legal oversight.Inside the facilities, called emergency intake sites, children are not guaranteed access to education, recreational opportunities or legal counsel.In a recent news release, the administration touted its “restoration of a child centered focus for unaccompanied children”, and it has been sharing daily totals of the number of children in government custody as well as a few photos of the facilities. This reflects a higher level of transparency than the Trump administration. In addition, the amount of time children spend, on average, inside the system has dropped from four months last fall to less than a month this spring, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.Nonetheless, the agency has received reports of abuse that resulted in a handful of contract staffers being dismissed from working at the emergency sites this year, according to an official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.Attorneys say sometimes, even parents cannot figure out where their children are.Jose, a father who fled El Salvador after his village was targeted in a massacre, requested asylum in the US four years ago. He had hoped to welcome his wife and eight-year-old daughter to southern California this year, but the pair were turned around at the border in March and expelled to Mexico. The little girl crossed again by herself and was placed in the government shelter in Brownsville, Texas, on 6 April. Jose called a government hotline set up for parents seeking their migrant children repeatedly but said no one would tell him where she was.“I was so upset because I kept calling and calling and no one would tell me any information about where she was,” said Jose, who asked to be identified only by his first name out of fear of endangering his immigration case. For nearly three weeks, his daughter was held inside the Brownsville facility before finally being released to him in late April after an advocacy organization intervened to get the government to foot the bill for her airfare, as is required by the agency.HHS declined to say whether there are any legally enforceable standards for caring for children housed at the emergency sites or how they are being monitored. The Biden administration has allowed very limited access to news media once children are brought into facilities, citing the coronavirus pandemic and privacy restrictions.“HHS has worked as swiftly as possible to increase bed capacity and to ensure potential sponsors can provide a safe home while the child goes through their immigration proceedings,” HHS spokesman Weber said in a statement. Weber confirmed a number of specific shelter populations from the data the AP obtained.Of particular concern to advocates are mass shelters, with hundreds of beds apiece. These facilities can leave children isolated, less supervised and without basic services.The AP found about half of all migrant children detained in the US are sleeping in shelters with more than 1,000 other children. More than 17,650 are in facilities with 100 or more children. Some shelters and foster programs are small, little more than a house with a handful of kids. A large Houston facility abruptly closed last month after it was revealed that children were being given plastic bags instead of access to restrooms.“The system has been very dysfunctional, and it’s getting worse,” said Amy Cohen, a child psychiatrist and executive director of the non-profit Every. Last. One., which works to help immigrant families fleeing violence in Central America. Although there have been large numbers of children arriving in the US for years, Cohen said she had never seen the situation as bad as it is today.Cohen described parents receiving calls from people refusing to identify themselves. They are told to be at an airport or bus station in the next two hours to pick up their children, who have been held for more than a month without notice, or they would not be released. Some parents are told to pay a travel agency thousands of dollars to have their child sent to them, she said.“The children are coming out sick, with Covid, infested with lice, and it will not surprise me to see children dying as a consequence, as we saw during the Trump years,” Cohen said. “The Biden administration is feverishly putting up these pop-up detention facilities, many of which have no experience working with children.”One reason so many children are now arriving without their parents dates back to a 2020 Trump administration emergency order that essentially closed the US-Mexico border to all migrants, citing public health concerns about spreading Covid-19.That emergency order still applies to adults, but the Biden administration has begun allowing children traveling without their parents to stay and seek asylum if they enter the country. As a result, some parents are sending their kids across the border by themselves.Most already have a parent or other adult relative or family friend, known as a sponsor, in the US waiting to receive them. But first they are typically detained by US Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, then turned over to a government shelter.Over the course of 2019, the federal government held nearly 70,000 children in a system of contracted shelters, mass detention camps and foster parents. This year those numbers are expected to be even higher.Some of the facilities holding children these days are run by contractors already facing lawsuits claiming that children were physically and sexually abused in their shelters under the Trump administration, while others are new companies with little or no experience working with migrant children. Collectively, the emergency facilities can accommodate nearly 18,000 children, according to data the agency provided earlier this month.“There are a lot of questions about are there standards and who is ensuring that they are meeting them, and what kind of transparency and accountability will there be,” said Jennifer Podkul, a vice-president at Kids in Need of Defense, which represents children in immigration court.Several organizations have filed legal claims against the federal government seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for parents who said their children were harmed while in government custody after being forcibly separated at the border under Trump administration policies. In some lawsuits, families claim children suffered physical and sexual abuse while in government custody, at both foster homes and private shelters.Biden’s justice department is defending the government against these claims, which were filed in 2019 under the Trump administration. But the federal response has been mixed since the change in leadership. Some cases continue to be argued, while others are in settlement discussions.In a recent filing in one case currently in litigation, federal attorneys agreed with the assertion that these policies indeed inflicted harm.As for the eight-year-old girl, her father, Jose, said she was adjusting to life in Los Angeles, enjoying playing with her older brother and, bit by bit, opening up.“She keeps asking me where her mom is, and I keep telling her not to worry, that she is in Mexico and she is OK,” he said. “Soon I hope she’ll tell me what it was like inside.” More

Two Trump family members got “inappropriately – and perhaps dangerously – close” to agents protecting them while Donald Trump was president, according to a new book on the US Secret Service.Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by the Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, is published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Leonnig won a Pulitzer prize in 2015, for her reporting on security failures at the Secret Service. She was also part of the Post team which won a Pulitzer for its work on Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance techniques and reported extensively on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. She has also won three Polk awards.With Philip Rucker, Leonnig also co-authored A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America, a well-received 2020 White House exposé.In her new book, she writes that Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump, the wife of the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, “started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family”.Vanessa Trump filed for an uncontested divorce in March 2018. Leonnig reports that the agent concerned did not face disciplinary action as neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point.Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail”.Secret Service leaders, the book says, “became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent”.Agents are prohibited from forming personal relationships with those they protect, out of concern that such feelings could cloud their judgment.Both Tiffany Trump and the agent said nothing untoward was happening, Leonnig writes, and pointed out the nature of the agent’s job meant spending time alone with his charge. The agent was subsequently reassigned.Leonnig also reports that it was not clear if Donald Trump knew what Secret Service personnel were saying about his daughter and daughter-in-law.But she says the president did repeatedly seek to remove Secret Service staff he deemed to be overweight or too short for the job.“I want these fat guys off my detail,” Trump is reported to have said, possibly confusing office-based personnel with active agents. “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?” More

Joe Biden has picked the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel to be his ambassador to Japan.The selection ends months of speculation over whether Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, a former congressman and longtime Democratic operative, would be nominated to an administration role.In the first days of the Biden presidency Emanuel, 61, was mentioned as a possible secretary of transportation. Biden ended up picking Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran strongly in the Democratic presidential primary.Some progressives view Emanuel as a major antagonist within the party. He is often criticized among liberals, for example, for his handling of a shooting of an African American teenager during his time in Chicago.Emanuel served two terms as mayor but opted not to run a third time, in the face of a potentially brutal campaign.His selection as ambassador was first reported by the Financial Times. The Guardian confirmed it on Tuesday.The selection, which will be officially announced later this month, is one of a number of appointments Biden plans to make in full ambassadorial roles. There has been grumbling among Democratic donors that the president has not followed in a longstanding tradition of appointing major donors to plush diplomatic posts.Biden has reportedly eyed major American political figures for diplomatic jobs. In April, for example, Axios reported that he plans to pick Cindy McCain, the wife of the late Republican senator and presidential nominee John McCain, to be ambassador to the United Nations World Food Programme.Biden reportedly plans to nominate Ken Salazar, a former cabinet secretary and senator from Colorado, as ambassador to Mexico. More

First President Obama was coming for your guns. Didn’t happen. Then President Trump said the socialists were going to take away our energy. The lights are on after 100 days, although it got dicey in Texas for awhile (and no, wind turbines didn’t cause the ice storm).But whoa, Nellie! We hear a Hamburglar will steal your right to beef before you can say “pass the ketchup”.Since I don’t even own a BB gun, I was not alarmed by Obama. Since I barely have enough energy to get out of bed I ignored Trump’s warning. But I can get worked up if you have your eyes on my ribeye.Turns out Fox News had to eat crow and retract a story claiming that Joe Biden will foreclose your divine right to slay a fatted calf. It was a Big Lie like all the rest – that your property rights will be denied for the sake of the endangered Topeka shiner minnow; that the election was fraudulent, except in Iowa where Trump won in a rout; that Obamacare would divorce you from your doctor.This lie started in the Daily Mail, which of course would know exactly what the US secretary of agriculture is thinking. The Daily Mail insisted that meat consumption would need to be cut 90% to meet President Biden’s climate goals, citing part of a University of Michigan study.Meanwhile, here is what the secretary, Tom Vilsack, is really thinking about: cow burps and pig poop. He wants more cattle on grass as part of a system with reduced emissions resilient to extreme weather. He is proposing money for methane digesters on hoghouses to power farms and sell dry compost – and getting a ton of flak from the left for it.After Biden’s first 100 socialist days, Tyson is running full tilt cranking out pork and turkey from Storm Lake with non-union labor. Hoghouses are going up everywhere, spreading up the Missouri into South Dakota. Chicken hind quarters were only 69¢ a pound at the grocery store last week.There are a fair number of NRA members deeply suspicious of Obama and Hillary Clinton who also want cleaner rivers and lakes, more grass buffers for habitat and limits on livestock confinements. They know the difference between BS and apple butter.The ‘take away your meat’ scare belies the fear felt by Big Meat when its own system crashedAnd they sense the real threat to their way of life – including Saturday night sirloin – is an ossified oligopoly food system that teetered on the brink of collapse last spring when its workers were overcome by Covid. Meat prices shot up 50% when the Waterloo and Sioux Falls pork plants shut down for a week. There was no way they could let the squeal go out of Storm Lake. For the first time in my life, meat counters were empty. The system failed. We have wrung the diversity out of the food supply chain. Just a few producers and packers stand, and when one of them falls we are all the hungrier.The “take away your meat” scare belies the fear felt by Big Meat when its own, unsustainable system crashed up against its limits.Livestock can be sheltered humanely for efficient food production and better protection from disease. We can finish a lot more cattle on grass for the benefit of the planet. We can enhance food security with more diversity in production and open, competitive markets. Almost everyone in the midwest understands those basic facts.So when the meat scare is propagated it makes the messenger look stupid. It’s not going to sell, just like the idea that wind turbines kill geese. We know better.Eventually, the stupidity becomes obvious to the semi-zealous. The rush on bullets turned out to be a ruse from the ammo makers. It took a lot of shine off the gun lobby as the dues-paying members figured out they were getting played so prices could take a nice run. The organization’s membership dues are drying up accordingly.The more lies they tell, the worse they get.Eventually, people figure it out. Even the “QAnon shaman” who crashed the Capitol wearing a horn helmet realized he got duped when they didn’t serve organic in jail.Vilsack reassured the public that USDA loves it some more red meat. Biden gave a shout-out to cover crops in his address to Congress – foretelling a huge step in environmental progress broadly supported by agribusiness. In Iowa, Republicans and Democrats are working to strengthen small meat processors.Despite several fish kills from floods of manure in north-west Iowa rivers this spring, nothing will be done to prevent the next one. A meager fine will be assessed. People do care about that. They do care about antibiotic resistance and viral pandemics inherent in our system. They want reasonable solutions based on science and reality. When there is enough BS, they begin to think it stinks. That can have consequences.
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland More

While congressional Democrats hope to make dramatic changes to a controversial legislative tool that has stalled bills in the Senate and could be used to frustrate Joe Biden’s ambitious agenda, Republicans are mounting an all-out defense to protect it.Conservative outside groups have been organizing overtly and covertly to counter Democratic pressure to gut the filibuster – a Senate device that in effect allows the minority party to halt proposed legislation.While Democrats have been struggling to unite members of their Senate caucus, especially the more centrist holdouts, to get rid of the filibuster, their Republican counterparts have been lockstep in opposing changes.Meanwhile, Republican outside groups have churned out polling, aired ads, organized gatherings and released statements warning of the long-term consequences of changing the rule. It is a concerted program that Republicans see as vital to preserving their power in the Biden era, while Democrats see it as a potential threat to their attempts to bring in meaningful legislation.The cause has reunited Republicans after the divisiveness of the Trump era – bringing together business interests, Trumpist politicians and their anti-Trump opponents in the party, as well traditional big donors to conservative causes.For Republicans involved in the fight, the campaign to preserve the filibuster is a historically important one. “The filibuster really serves as that backstop against heat-of-the-moment politics,” said Garrett Bess, vice-president for government relations for Heritage Action for America, a non-profit group aligned with the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank.Bess said his group sought to ensure “that people understand what is on the other side of changing the filibuster. So when we’re talking to a conservative audience or a right-of-center audience, on the other side of the filibuster is higher taxes and gun control and taxpayer-funded abortion. Those kinds of things.”In front of a more moderate audience, Bess said, the argument is to warn about statehood for Washington DC or Democrats’ voting rights package. Bess said Heritage Action had focused on talking with “constituencies of Democratic senators in which we have a very large footprint – Arizona, Georgia, West Virginia” and was expanding into New Hampshire, Bess said.In late April, One Nation, an outside group aligned with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican Senate minority leader, released polling from Arizona and New Hampshire, Nevada and West Virginia to argue against filibuster reform. Arizona and West Virginia are the two states with the most conservative Democrats in the caucus. The polling found that voters were largely unaware of the filibuster and when they were made aware “in fairly neutral terms, support for keeping the filibuster is solid”.“On the filibuster, voters are much more aligned with the position and statements of Senator Kyrsten Sinema than they are with the position and statements of Senator Mark Kelly,” the One Nation polling memo said. Sinema has expressed stubborn opposition to changing the filibuster while Kelly has expressed openness to some kind of reform.The fact that one of the primary McConnell-aligned groups published those results underscores congressional Republicans’ position on the filibuster. McConnell has warned about longer-term consequences of filibuster reform and has argued it would change change the Senate to a “scorched-earth” body.“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, can even begin, to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like,” the top Republican said in March. Heritage Action and 28 other groups published a letter in January urging every member of the Senate to oppose filibuster reform.“The legislative filibuster is an essential part of ensuring a strong system of checks and balances,” the letter read. “While we typically do not weigh in on Congressional procedure, we believe elimination of the filibuster could result in a slew of destructive policy changes.”Manchin and Sinema are favorite targets for conservatives looking to fight support for filibuster reform. Americans for Prosperity, another outside group, funded by Charles Koch, has launched a six-figure ad campaign focused on those two senators.Similarly, Ken Cuccinelli, a former official in the Department of Homeland Security during Donald Trump’s presidency and a former attorney general of Virginia, is leading a conservative group that has encouraged Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to oppose filibuster reform.Even the US Chamber of Commerce, which at times has worked with Joe Biden’s administration and endorsed a set of congressional Democrats, has voiced opposition to filibuster reform. Suzanne Clark, the president and CEO of the chamber, tweeted the group’s statement.Issues of national importance deserve the time, thoughtfulness, and deliberation that the #filibuster provides. Debate doesn’t have to mean obstruction—lawmakers should be able to have passionate convictions AND find solutions. Read our full statement: https://t.co/z9YPkm7x3E— Suzanne Clark (@SuzanneUSCC) March 16, 2021
Thank you @Sen_JoeManchin for your principled stand on preserving the #filibuster. American businesses—together with the West Virginians you serve so well—appreciate your commitment to solving our nation’s problems through collaboration and consensus-building. #leadership— Suzanne Clark (@SuzanneUSCC) April 9, 2021
Issues of national importance deserve the time, thoughtfulness, and deliberation that the #filibuster provides. Debate doesn’t have to mean obstruction—lawmakers should be able to have passionate convictions AND find solutions. Read our full statement: https://t.co/z9YPkm7x3E— Suzanne Clark (@SuzanneUSCC) March 16, 2021
Whether the filibuster will be dramatically altered depends on Democrats. No Republican senator has expressed support for it – and at this point, there are not enough Democratic votes to change it.Democrats who do not usually weigh in on Senate procedure or legislating have begun to argue for reform, however.And more than 350 prominent historians published a letter arguing for getting rid of the filibuster.“Only in recent decades have filibusters effectively created a regular supermajority threshold for routine legislation, with prior norms of restraint all but disappearing,” the letter, first reported by Talking Points Memo, said.Fix Our Senate, an alliance of about 70 groups that aims to get rid of the filibuster, has launched a six-figure ad buy urging Democrats to gut the mechanism. The group will also be holding a town hall with senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to argue for its elimination.“It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Republican leaders and their special interest allies are pulling out all the stops to protect the filibuster as the best weapon they have to block President Biden’s agenda and prevent Democrats from delivering on their promises,” Eli Zupnik, a Fix Our Senate spokesman, said in a statement. “But voters across the country are learning more about this ‘Jim Crow relic’ and will see through these desperate attempts by Senate Republicans to maintain power from the minority.” More

The Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger said on Monday he warned the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, about potential violence at the US Capitol on 6 January, but McCarthy dismissed his concerns.“A few days before Jan 6 , our GOP members had a conference call,” Kinzinger said on Twitter. “I told Kevin that his words and our party’s actions would lead to violence on January 6th. Kevin dismissively responded with ‘OK Adam, operator next question.’ And we got violence.”Five people died amid and after scenes of chaos at the Capitol, as supporters told by Donald Trump to “fight like hell” in his attempt to overturn his election defeat broke into the building, in some cases allegedly looking for lawmakers to kill.On Monday, Kinzinger also said he had considered trying to force a vote of no-confidence in McCarthy after the insurrection.“I don’t consider him to be speaking on behalf of the Republican party any more,” Kinzinger told Bloomberg News, adding: “I actually thought the person that should have their leadership challenged was Kevin McCarthy after 6 January because that’s why this all happened.”Kinzinger said he abandoned such plans to keep the focus on the impeachment vote against Trump which followed the insurrection. Ten House Republicans voted with Democrats to impeach Trump for inciting the riot but only seven Republican senators followed, too few to return a guilty verdict.Liz is the one playing defense, for what? Telling the truth and not ransacking the Capitol on 6 January?McCarthy did not immediately comment.Kinzinger has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump and others peddling the “big lie” that there was widespread fraud in the presidential election.But like most of his party McCarthy has sided with a former president whose grip on the party seems set to strengthen this week with the ejection from leadership of Liz Cheney, a Wyoming conservative who has also spoken against him.Kinzinger has been one of Cheney’s few Republican defenders in Congress. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said: “Liz is the one playing defense, for what? What’s she playing defense for? Telling the truth and not ransacking the Capitol on 6 January?“If you think about it from the forest, it’s ludicrous that she’s having to defend herself. That’s insane, but that’s where we are.”Speaking to CBS News on Sunday, Kinzinger said his party was “going to get rid of Liz Cheney because they’d much rather pretend that the conspiracy is either real or not confront it than to actually confront it and maybe have to take the temporary licks to save this party and the long-term [future] of this country”.McCarthy told Fox Business he was endorsing the New York representative Elise Stefanik to replace Cheney in “a position in leadership. As conference chair, you have one of the most critical jobs as a messenger going forward.”Trump weighed in on Monday, issuing a statement in which he said: “The House GOP has a massive opportunity to upgrade this week from warmonger Liz Cheney to gifted communicator Elise Stefanik.”The “warmonger” jibe was in part aimed at Cheney’s father, the former vice-president Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the Iraq war.“We need someone in leadership who has experience flipping districts from blue to red as we approach the important 2022 midterms,” Trump added, “and that’s Elise! She knows how to win, which is what we need!”Trump formally endorsed Stefanik last week. In congressional votes to recognize electoral college results, held in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, Stefanik objected to results from Pennsylvania. She did not object to results from Arizona, as many other Republicans did.Before the votes, she indicated plans to object to results in Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. No senator supported challenges to results from those states, however, so none were mounted.Cheney is set to be replaced in a closed vote on Wednesday. On Sunday, Kinzinger also compared the trajectory of his party to the sinking of the Titanic, saying leaders were not acting responsibly.“We’re like in the middle of this slow sink,” he said. “We have a band playing on the deck, telling everybody it’s fine, and meanwhile as I’ve said, Donald Trump is running around trying to find women’s clothing to get on the first lifeboat.“I think there’s a few of us saying, ‘Guys, this is not good, not just for the future of the party, but this is not good for the future of this country.’”On Monday a new report warned that many lawmakers are receiving threats and worry for their safety after the Capitol was so easily breached by extremist Trump supporters.The Capitol police force was hobbled by inadequateintelligence gathering ahead of time, according to the inspector general, Michael Bolton.The House is holding hearings this week on what went wrong duringthe insurrection, as lawmakers contemplate overhauling congressional security.The Capitol police said that there has been a 107% increase in threatsagainst members of Congress this year compared to 2020 and “providedthe unique threat environment we currently live in, the department isconfident the number of cases will continue to increase”. More

JD Vance, author of the bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, wants to be a senator. He’s fresh off a trip to visit Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago and he’s solicited the support of the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel has contributed $10m to a new Pac – Protect Ohio Values – created to support a possible Vance bid for the Senate seat of the retiring Republican Rob Portman next November.While elite donations roll in, Vance is playing up his rightwing-populist credentials to the Republican base, praising Tucker Carlson as “the only powerful figure who consistently challenges elite dogma” and complaining about corporations who have opposed state voter suppression efforts. But Vance has a secret he doesn’t want voters to find out about: in form, and substance, he’s a 1990s Clintonite.Behind a mantra of “opportunity, responsibility, and community” and through institutions like the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill Clinton pushed back against liberal orthodoxy within his party. When running for president in 1992, in the same breath he called for an end to “welfare as we know it” and described his hardscrabble upbringing in the little country town of Hope, Arkansas. He admonished “deadbeat fathers” and reminded people that “governments don’t raise children; parents do”, while lamenting the fact that battles for social justice were being lost at home. In other words, he had his cake and ate it too – appealing to popular disgust with inequality, while supporting the economic policies that fueled that inequality, and blaming America’s problems on “welfare cheats” and corporate greed in equal measure.Clinton and the Clintonites – the so-called New Democrats – rejected both Reaganism and welfare-state liberalism. They offered a balanced-budget populism, hoping that free trade and deregulation would boost growth and spur job creation. But unlike Reagan, Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and increased the earned income credit as a mild redistributive measure. As Clinton put it: “Trickle-down economics has sure failed.” Rather than restore government programs, however, he said that the government was “in the way” and had to be radically streamlined. Those within the Clinton administration who hoped to invest in public infrastructure and expand social goods, like the labor secretary Robert Reich, were ignored. The president told voters he could feel their pain, but in practice he preferred the market (and people’s bootstraps) to deliver relief.They offer Americans rhetoric about elites and hard work, but don’t actually take power away from those elitesToday, some of those searching for a new Third Way between a leftward-moving Democratic party and traditional business conservatism have found a home in the post-Trump Republican party. Hillbilly Elegy effectively took Reagan and Clinton-era rhetoric about the culture of poverty and applied it more generally – not just to black Americans, but to poor whites, as well. In the book, Vance describes how his grandparents escaped Appalachian poverty by moving to Middletown, Ohio, during the postwar boom. They and others found good manufacturing jobs and adopted an ethos of hard work and community. But by the time Vance was around, the jobs were gone, poverty was soaring, and drug abuse was rampant.In “a town where 30% of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week”, Vance complained, he could not find “a single person aware of his own laziness”. Yet instead of seeing the Middletown’s malaise as rooted primarily in economic collapse and the failures of free-market policies, Vance mused about a Scots-Irish American culture “that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”.“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” Vance wrote. “We buy giant TVs and iPads.”Hillbilly Elegy made quite a splash when it published in 2016, in part because it simultaneously appealed to anxious liberals keen to “understand” Trump voters and to anti-Trump Republicans who wanted to blame Trumpism on what they perceived as sheeplike and undereducated poor whites. At a time when conservative commentators such as National Review’s Kevin Williamson were claiming that white workers weren’t “victimized by outside forces”, but rather had failed themselves through welfare dependency, drug and alcohol addiction, and family anarchy, the New York Times was lauding Hillbilly Elegy’s similar narrative as “a message of tough love and personal responsibility”.Bill Clinton made it; why didn’t you? JD Vance made it; why didn’t you?Today, Vance seems to be setting himself up as the Ohio version of Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who trumpets himself as a champion of the American worker. But Vance’s post-2016 evolution from the media’s chosen interpreter of poor whites and Trump critic (while getting rich as a tech venture capitalist) to the populist Hawley wing of the Republican party didn’t necessitate a policy shift. Sure, he has to tweet more about Dr Seuss now, but Vance’s new model, Hawley, has only a 5% rating from the AFL-CIO, the largest working-class organization in the country.Hawley and Vance try to balance pro-working class appeals with the fact that their party is funded by rich donorsWhen it comes to rhetoric, the new breed of conservative populists – Carlson, Hawley, Vance – love saber-rattling against “cosmopolitan elites”. When it comes to actual policy, they have no interest in challenging corporate power and few plans to invest in working-class communities. Take Vance’s recent opposition to universal childcare, which he called “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent”.Vance’s alternative idea to help American parents, who frequently face a crushing, Catch-22 style choice between giving up their full-time jobs or paying astronomical amounts of money on childcare? Instead of an expanded social wage through a government program, Vance lauds a plan, proposed by Hawley, to give a tax credit to married parents with children under the age of 13. Not exactly transformative, New Deal-style reform to aid struggling Americans; if anything, it’s the kind of tepid, wonkish program that the New Democrats could have very well dreamt up 30 years ago.Recall the words of the then candidate Bill Clinton, who in 1992 pined for “an America in which the doors of colleges are thrown open once again to the sons and daughters of stenographers and steelworkers. We will say: everybody can borrow money to go to college. But you must do your part. You must pay it back.”Like the Clintonites, Republicans such as Hawley and Vance are trying to find a way to balance pro-working class appeals popular with voters with the enduring fact that their party is largely funded by rich donors and powerful business interests. Their solution is to offer Americans rhetoric about elites and the importance of hard work, but not to actually take power away from those elites or, say, enact job programs.It took decades, but millions of voters came to see the New Democrats as frauds. The same, I hope, will be true of the New Republicans. More

Ron DeSantis was exultant. “The way Florida did it I think inspires confidence; I think that’s how elections should be run,” the state governor told reporters last November. “Rather than us be at the centre of a Bush v Gore in 2020, we’re now being looked at as the state that did it right.”This boast of a smoothly run election just six months ago makes DeSantis’s actions this week all the more curious. The governor suddenly found it necessary to impose sweeping reforms that limit mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes – and signed the new law live on the Fox News network on Thursday with no other media allowed.It was perhaps the most brazen example yet of a renewed assault on American democracy crafted and led by former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies, electrified by the false claim “the big lie” of a stolen election in 2020.Far from losing influence over the party, critics say, Trump has in fact burrowed far into its DNA so that the two are now all but inseparable. And far from treating the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol as a catharsis to break the spell, Republican-controlled state legislatures are using his false claim of election fraud to justify a sweep of anti-democratic measures across America.On Friday the Texas house of representatives backed a bill to bar election officials from sending voters unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, while giving party-affiliated poll watchers greater access to voting sites. Restrictions on voting rights have also been signed into law in Georgia and Iowa with similar moves afoot in Ohio and Michigan. Activists warn that people of colour will be disproportionately prevented or discouraged from voting.Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for Common Cause, which campaigns for expanded voter access, told the Associated Press: “We are seeing the strong effect of President Trump’s big lie. We are seeing the Republican party go all-in on supporting him and his lies. We are seeing them use this opportunity to create deliberate barriers to voting for Black and brown voters. It’s un-American.”We are seeing the Republican party go all-in on supporting him and his liesHopes that Trump would fade quietly into retirement and golf at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida were shattered last week. Having remained relatively marginal during Joe Biden’s first hundred days, which restored a calm of sorts to Washington, the former president launched a new web page and posted several tirades reviving his preposterous claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 election.Notably he challenged Democrats and the media’s use of the label “the big lie” as shorthand for his bogus allegations of election fraud, stating: “They are right in that the 2020 Presidential Election was a Big Lie, but not in the way they mean.” His own definition, he said, is the stolen election itself, “the greatest Fraud in the history of our Country!”, even bigger than the Russia investigation and his two impeachments.Trump’s characteristically judo-like move – flipping the weight of his opponents against them – was reminiscent of the way he appropriated the phrase “fake news”, once used to describe misinformation widespread on the web, and weaponised it to go after the media.The 45th president also used his playbook to sow doubt and distrust by egging on his supporters’ legally meaningless investigations of an election that he lost by 7m votes six months ago. The Republican-controlled senate in Arizona, for example, has ordered a private recount of 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county, hiring a Florida-based contractor called Cyber Ninjas.The justice department has expressed concern about ballot security and potential voter intimidation arising from the extraordinary audit. Katie Hobbs, Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, warned in a letter that parts of the recount “appear better suited for chasing conspiracy theories”, including one that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Asia using paper with bamboo fibres.But the former commander-in-chief is deadly serious about it. Maggie Haberman, Washington correspondent for the New York Times, tweeted: “Trump is obsessed with the controversial Arizona audit and has told people he thinks it could undo the election.” In fact the audit cannot change the outcome of the election because the results were certified months ago in the state and Congress.In another statement this week, Trump recycled his spurious claims of late night vote “dumps” in Michigan and Wisconsin and demanded a review. Perhaps most bizarrely, he also saluted Windham, a town of 14,000 people in New Hampshire, where it transpired there had been an undercount of Republican votes in the election for the state legislature.It would be easy for sceptics to dismiss 74-year-old Trump as a sore loser ranting into the void. But according to a CNN poll, 70% of Republicans believe that Biden did not win enough legitimate votes to be president. From the 30 state house controlled by Republicans to the party leadership in Capitol Hill, Trump’s power and influence now appear absolute and fealty to the “big lie” is the ultimate test of devotion.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas this week proudly tweeted a photo of himself dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, assuring fans: “He’s in great spirits!” Dissenters, by contrast, face hostility and political exile. Senator Mitt Romney, the sole Republican to vote to impeach Trump twice, was loudly booed and called a “traitor” at a Utah Republican party convention.Liz Cheney, the party’s number three in the House of Representatives, is set to be ousted this week after urging colleagues to renounce the “cult of personality”. Senator Lindsey Graham countered that Republicans cannot “move forward” without Trump, telling Fox News: “I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made a determination that the Republican party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”Cheney voted to impeach Trump after the US Capitol riot that left five people dead but her greatest offence appears to be denouncing “the big lie” for “poisoning our democratic system” and her call for true conservatives to abide by the rule of law. This is tantamount to heresy in the Republican party of 2021.Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman and senior adviser on the House oversight committee, said: “What we’re seeing is the new really ideological core of the Republican party is fidelity to this lie that fueled an insurrection attempt on January 6. It’s something that I think is even bigger than Trump at this point because it’s really rooted in truth versus lies and it says a lot that the only ‘transgression’ that Liz Cheney is guilty of is telling the truth about the results of a free and fair election.“When that is cause to purge somebody from your leadership ranks, what that says about your party is that you are codifying your status as an anti-democratic force in America. The things that are happening here are so radical that if they were happening anywhere else in the world, we would call that a lurch towards extremism, a lurch towards the ingredients that result in terrorism.”The imminent demise of Cheney suggests that Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House, and other senior Republicans have concluded that throwing in their lot with Trump is key to winning next year’s midterm elections, which often depend on a party’s most committed supporters.There was evidence for this in Texas last weekend when Susan Wright, the widow of the first member of Congress to die after contracting Covid-19, advanced to a House runoff for her late husband’s seat with Trump’s endorsement, whereas an avowed anti-Trump candidate crashed and burned.Now, as his return to the spotlight gathers pace, the reality TV star turned politician is set to endorse more “America first” candidates committed to “election integrity” and return to campaign rallies. He is also said to be considering another run for the White House in 2024 – a further stress test of America’s perilously fragile democracy.Tara Setmayer, a political analyst and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “They learned no lessons whatsoever and it’s clear that the Republican party can no longer be considered a party that supports our American democracy. It’s no longer a party that values our constitutional institutions because everything that Donald Trump represents and what he continues to spew – implying that there was some massive fraudulent election that delegitimises Joe Biden – is so antithetical to everything that the Republican party claims to stand for.” More