US Politics

Steinway is a bustling and noisy street in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria. The area locally referred to as “Little Egypt” is brimming with people grocery shopping and bicyclists rushing in and out of shawarma shops to deliver their next order. It’s a north African, south-west Asian neighborhood made up of small businesses like halal butcher shops, hookah lounges and Middle Eastern restaurants.For Rana Abdelhamid, this neighborhood is home. On 14 April, Abdelhamid announced her run against the incumbent Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney to represent New York’s 12th congressional district, a region made up of a significant portion of Manhattan’s East Side, Astoria and north Brooklyn. It ranges from the fantastically wealthy penthouse apartments that line Manhattan’s Central Park to the struggling working-class areas where Abdelhamid grew up.If elected, Abdelhamid would be one of the youngest members to ever serve in Congress and the third Muslim woman ever elected to the House.She has received the endorsement of Justice Democrats, a powerful progressive activist group that was instrumental in the victories of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman in their respective New York primary elections.Just as AOC and Bowman beat long-established Democrats and then rapidly ascended to prominence on left of the party, so Justice Democrats hope Abdelhamid will continue the trend of a leftwing revolution sweeping across New York City that has already had a major impact on national American politics.“My history in this district is rooted in my organizing, in my community, in my spirituality, in my education. I feel really connected. It comes from a place of love. This is why I’m doing it,” she told the Guardian in an interview at an outdoor cafe in Astoria.Abdelhamid is confident she can win too.“[Justice Democrats] know we can win this. It gives me, my team and my community a lot of confidence. It makes me feel like I’m a part of a broader movement – a movement for progressive politics in this country,” she said.In Maloney, Abdelhamid faces a formidable opponent. Maloney, who has been in office since before her opponent was born, is one of the most senior Democrats in the House. The chair of the powerful oversight committee, Maloney has called herself a progressive in the past but Abdelhamid said that couldn’t be farther from the truth.“This is someone who voted yes on the Iraq war. Quite frankly, leadership isn’t just a word. It’s a practice. It’s outcomes. It’s how you’re connected to communities. It’s how people who are represented experience life. If she’s calling herself a progressive, it’s because she understands the tide is turning. People want to elect progressives. She recognizes that,” she said.Twenty twenty-one is shaping up to be a busy year for the 27-year-old political hopeful who began her campaign just one day after the start of Ramadan. On top of hitting the campaign trail and planning a wedding, Abdelhamid is now also fasting. The young candidate has already had to break her fast in the middle of meetings, but she called the chaotic timing of her political debut “actually kind of beautiful”.Abdelhamid’s father ran a highly sought after halal deli, one of the first of its kind in the community. When he couldn’t make the rent to keep the shop open, the business closed and he drove a taxi cab to make ends meet.Born to Egyptian immigrant parents, Abdelhamid grew up in a one-bedroom apartment alongside her three siblings in the 12th district. Now, she’s looking for a chance to represent it.“A lot of working-class immigrants came here in the 80s and early 90s, like my father and my mom. They basically built this neighborhood from scratch. There were no shops like this,” she said, pointing to Duzan, the quick and casual Middle Eastern shawarma restaurant behind her. “There was one Greek pastry shop. There was definitely no mosque. I saw growing up how aunties and uncles built these institutions, built these small businesses with so little. Mothers selling their gold as Egyptian women to be able to fundraise to build these walls.”Steinway is now home to the Al-Iman Mosque, a tall, bright pink center point in the street. The grand building replaced a smaller version nextdoor due to a growing demand for a place of worship for Muslims in the area. For Abdelhamid, it served as a community center where she could make friends and take karate lessons, in which she now has a first-degree black belt.In the years following the attacks of 9/11, she recalled her mosque being surveilled by the FBI and NYPD advertisements for voluntary informants.“Overnight, I was seen as a Muslim. They would make terrorist jokes [at school] and so I felt a deep sense of isolation. People were very scared. They would change their name if they could. For me, this neighborhood was so important because I went to the mosque every single week. It was the only place where I felt not ashamed of my identity as a young girl. Where people said my name right. I felt comfortable in hijab and didn’t feel the need to take it off as soon as I walked down the street,” she said.At a time when Muslim American women were removing their hijabs out of fear of being profiled or harassed, Abdelhamid decided to embrace one. Two years later, she was attacked by a man who tried to rip off her headscarf.“Right after that incident, I just remember not speaking. I remember that because I talk a lot. I didn’t tell my parents for such a long time. My parents were scared and heartbroken but also defiant. That gave me strength. They’re not scared and I shouldn’t be scared either. For a lot of Muslim women post 9/11, it was a reclamation of identity. Definitely early on, when I wore my hijab, it was an act of ‘I‘m not gonna be ashamed. I’m going to be proud. I’m not going to fall to these narratives that are vilifying people that I love the most.’ ”Maloney was criticized for a 2001 stunt in which she donned a burqa on the House floor in an attempt to garner support for the United States invasion of Afghanistan. In her speech, she said: “I salute the Bush administration for balancing war with compassion, for dropping food as well as bombs,” which struck a chord with Abdelhamid who said she feared for her and her mother’s life at the time.“This is someone who wore a burqa on the House floor as a costume. When you look at the time in which she did that, as hijab-wearing women, we were afraid to walk down the street,” Abdelhamid said. “To this day, women who wear hijab, burqa, niqab are criminalized across the world. She was wearing it to justify a narrative that we are oppressed. My activism and organizing started both because of my class identity and because of my ethno-religious identity growing up Muslim in post-9/11 New York. They are both connected to this neighborhood.”At the top of Abdelhamid’s agenda is housing justice. Abdelhamid herself has been priced out of her neighborhood, along with her family, which means she does not live in the district – a fact the New York State Democratic Committee was quick to point out.“Right now, my family and I live a couple of blocks outside of the district. Like many working-class people, you don’t base where you live off district lines, it’s based off of community and where you can afford to live,” she said.A staunch supporter of AOC’s Green New Deal for public housing, Abdelhamid blames gentrification and soaring rent prices for her family’s living situation which forced them to move several times throughout her childhood.“I remember the first time we received an eviction notice. Our landlord sold the business to a developer and just kept increasing the rent. They were really trying to push us out. Oftentimes, it happens when there are massive real estate developers that don’t take into account the cultural needs, the economic needs, the needs of working-class communities, the needs of communities that built neighborhoods,” she said.Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman won their elections while Trump, who served to galvanize progressives, was in office. Asked if she was worried about energizing leftwing support post-Trump, Abdelhamid said: “I’m not concerned. I feel really strongly that we’ll be able to excite young people, people of color, Black folks, working-class people, immigrant communities across this district. Anyone who is really excited about a progressive ideology who wants to see something different is going to rally behind this campaign. People understand that progressive movement and progressive change is a long fight that is not going to happen overnight. The change that we’re seeking is going to require sustained levels of organizing, and this is part of that.” More

When I reach Jimmy Carter’s grandson by Zoom, he answers wearing a Raphael Warnock campaign T-shirt. Jason Carter is a lawyer and politician himself, mid-40s, animated and well-read, with blue eyes reminiscent of his grandfather’s. He’s just got off the phone with his 93-year-old grandmother, Rosalynn. It’s a special day; Joe Biden is on his way to the Carter house in Plains, Georgia.“My grandfather has met nearly everyone in the world he might want to,” Jason Carter says. “Right now, he’s meeting with the president of the United States. But the person he’d say he learned the most from was Rachel Clark, an illiterate sharecropper who lived on his family’s farm.“He didn’t pity her,” Carter says. “He saw her power. My grandfather believes in the power of a single human and a small community. Protect people’s freedoms, he says, and they can do great things. It all comes back to an enormous respect for human beings.”Carter is openly moved speaking about his grandfather, though it’s also clear he does so often. A spate of recent biographies and documentaries shows not just a renewed interest in the former president, but a willingness to update the public narrative surrounding his time in office. Recent biographer Jonathan Alter calls Carter “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history”.Carter, who lost his bid for re-election in a so-called landslide to Reagan in 1980, is often painted as a “failed president” – a hapless peanut farmer who did not understand how to get things done in Washington, and whose administration was marked by inflation, an energy crisis and the Iran hostage disaster.Subsequent presidents, especially fellow southern Democrat Bill Clinton, kept a distance – assumably not wanting to be seen as part of a political narrative that emphasized piety over getting things done. Even Obama was apparently wary of being associated with the sort of soft-hearted ineffectuality ascribed to Carter.But was Carter actually so ineffectual?In his 2020 biography of Carter, Alter speaks to a more nuanced interpretation of Carter, calling him “a surprisingly consequential president – a political and stylistic failure, but a substantive and far-sighted success”. It is, perhaps, the far-sighted nature of Carter’s ambitions, particularly around energy, that allows us to appreciate him more four decades after his term concluded.Born in 1924, Carter is now 96. Americans must process his mortality and the onset of climate change, which Carter explicitly warned the nation about 40 years ago.Carterland, a just released documentary, offers a particularly sharp focus on Carter’s extensive work on conservation, climate and justice.[embedded content]“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic problems – and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”Will’s brother, Jim, agrees. “A question folks should be asking themselves is: what catastrophes would have befallen this country had anyone other than Jimmy Carter been at the helm during that critical time in the late 1970s?”Those late 1970s were defined by inflation, the cold war, long lines at gas pumps, and a shift in cultural mores. Carter himself showed a willingness to grow. Although Carter served in the navy himself, he pardoned Vietnam draft-dodgers. Though from a segregated and racist background in Georgia, Carter pushed for affirmative action and prioritized diversity among judicial nominees, including the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amalya Lyle Kearse. He employed Mary Prince, a Black woman wrongly accused of murder, as his daughter Amy’s nanny, a move criticized by some contemporary thinkers as perpetuating domestic servitude.What was radical in the 1970s can appear backwards decades later; the public narrative works in both directions. Carter is, in some respects, difficult to narrativize because he could be both startlingly conservative – financially, or in his appeal to the deep south’s evangelicals – and progressive, particularly on human rights and climate. He seemed to act from his personal compass, rather than a political one.He startled the globe by personally brokering the critical Middle East peace treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David. He ceded access to the Panama canal, angering conservatives who thought he was giving away an American asset. Through the Alaska Natural Interests Lands Conservation Act, he doubled the national park system and conserved over 100m acres of land – the most sweeping expansion of conserved land in American history.He was not afraid to make unpopular moves, or ask for personal sacrifice. He was old-fashioned and a futurist, and nowhere did his futurism matter more, or seem more prescient, than on climate and conservation. He risked speaking directly to the American public, and asking them to do a difficult thing – focus on renewable energy and reduce reliance on oil.He paid the price for this frank ask, and so did we.In advance of his trip to Plains, Georgia, Biden participated in a video tribute to Carter, joining an all-star cast of Georgia politicians, the familiar faces of Senator Jon Ossoff, Senator Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams serving as an affirming nod to Georgia’s return to political importance.The messages address the substance of the film, but also serve as a heartfelt thank you to a former president who has only recently begun to look prescient on climate, and singular in his moral bearing.“He has always lived his values,” Abrams says in the video.“Our world cries out for moral and ethical leadership,” Warnock offers. “Few have embodied it as clearly and consistently as Carter.”“He showed us what it means to be a public servant, with an emphasis on servant,” Biden says.[embedded content]Many Americans can’t help but spot a link between Carter and Biden – who became the first elected official outside of Georgia to support Carter’s bid for the presidency in 1976. Biden’s colleagues decried him as an “exuberant” idealist at the time.There’s also an increasingly stark comparison between the Carter and the Trump administration.James Gustave Speth served as the chairman of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality. As Carter’s chief adviser on environmental matters, Speth helped brief Carter on climate change and direct policy. He finds the contrast between Carter and Trump “striking”.“People see now that Carter was at a pole,” Speth tells me. “Carter was the opposite of Trump – and everything that people despised about him. Carter had integrity, honesty, candor and a commitment to the public good of all else. Carter was a different man, totally.”Carter’s vice-president, Walter Mondale, died a month ago at 93, perhaps putting an exclamation mark on the need to expedite overdue praise and understanding. Speth agrees that it would be best to speed up our recognition of Carter. “So many fine things are said over the bodies of the dead,” Speth said. “I’d love to have the recognition occur now.”Speth is also working on his own book on the Carter administration, that covers the Carter and subsequent administrations on climate and energy and highlights the failure to build on the foundation that Carter laid. His project, soon to be published with MIT, carries a damning title: They Knew.One of the most profound– even painful – parts of watching documentaries like Carterland is bearing witness to the fact that Carter was right on asking us to drive less, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to focus on conservation and renewable energy. Not only was Carter’s vision a path not taken, it was a path mocked. Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House, politicized the environmental movement and painted it as a fringe endeavor.“Carter was our only president who had a visceral environmental and ecological attachment. That was part of his being,” Speth says. “We had an opportunity in 1980 – but we’ve lost 40 years in the pursuit of a climate-safe path. We can no longer avoid serious and destructive changes, period. That didn’t have to happen.”I ask Speth why getting Carter’s legacy right matters. First, Speth says, it’s important to recognize the example Carter set for looking ahead, in a culture that prizes soundbites and short-term gains. “Carter was a trained engineer who believed in science,” Speth points out. “He understood things on a global scale, and believed in forecasting. Preparing for the long run is rare in politics.”Carter’s biographer Alter agrees. “If there is a gene for duty, responsibility and the will to tackle messy problems with little or no potential for political gain,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was born with it.”While none of these recent documentaries or biographies seeks to portray Carter as a saint or even politically savvy, they do insist that his presidency was more successful than history has acknowledged, particularly on the energy, conservation and human rights fronts. Still, there are aspects of his single term that will probably remain embedded in his narrative, such as his tenuous relationship with Congress, early catering to segregationists to win votes, and Iran’s hostage crisis.What can we learn from the shifting narrative around Carter’s presidency?“You can talk about how Carter was an underrated president,” film-maker Jim Pattiz says. “But can you ask yourself: what qualities do you actually want in a leader? Do you want someone who will challenge you to be better, or speak in catchphrases and not ask much of you?“This film is a cautionary tale,” Pattiz says. “We can elect another Carter. Let’s reward leaders willing to do the right thing.”Jason Carter has lived with the nuances and inconsistencies in the narrative surrounding his grandfather’s presidency his entire life. “Stories are always summaries,” he says. “They leave out so much so that we can understand them in simple terms. Public narrative, these days, is so often about politics. It should really be about the great, public problems we’re solving. There’s a difference.“I don’t want history to be kind to my grandfather,” Jason Carter tells me. “I just want history to be honest.” More

On 20 May 2019, the freshly elected Chicago mayor, Lori Lightfoot, delivered her inauguration speech to a jubilant audience.It was imbued with promises of fundamental change – tailored care for blighted neighborhoods, solutions to government corruption and endemic violent crime, an ambitious agenda for tackling deep-rooted faults in the city.“For years they’ve said Chicago ain’t ready for reform. Well, get ready, because reform is here,” Lightfoot, Chicago’s first Black woman and openly gay mayor, and a former federal prosecutor, said.She pledged to reform the Chicago police department, promising to “continue the hard but essential work of forging partnerships between police officers and the community premised on mutual respect, accountability and a recognition that the destinies of police and community are inextricably intertwined”.Police reform seemed like a perfect task for Lightfoot given one of her prior roles of leading the city’s special taskforce on police accountability and reform.She issued a scathing report on the department in 2016, addressing broken trust between police and community and noting: “A painful but necessary reckoning is upon us.”It urged sweeping change and backed a “widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color”.But sweeping change awaits. Almost two years into office, Lightfoot is under fire, accused of back-pedaling on accountability and reform while botching some high-profile cases involving police killing or misconduct.There’s outrage over Chicago police earlier this month killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo after a chase that ended with the boy being shot dead after stopping and putting his hands up as ordered by the pursuing officer.Elizabeth Toledo, Adam’s mother, had not been notified about his death until two days after the shooting, leaving her to think her son was missing. Lightfoot choked up while admitting “we failed Adam”.He was one in a growing record of police killing children across America, with victims disproportionately being Black and Hispanic youth.But the Mapping Police Violence project found that between 2013 and 2021, Chicago police killed more under-18s than any other local law enforcement agency in the country – at least 12.And Lightfoot last December bungled the fallout from an incident that had happened before her mayorship, where Anjanette Young’s home was raided by police who had the wrong address, guns drawn, and she was handcuffed while naked.The mayor admitted she knew about the raid in 2019, contradicting previous claims otherwise, and the city also attempted to block the video release of the raid, Lightfoot later calling the attempt a “mistake”.Activists called for Lightfoot’s resignation in both instances, and all amid a surge in shootings within city communities.Progress on police reform is close to fruitless, leaving activists, many city council members, or aldermen, and Chicagoans distrustful.“I view her as not having fulfilled those campaign promises, because she hasn’t,” said Chicago’s first ward alderman Daniel La Spata, bluntly.Lightfoot succeeded Rahm Emanuel, whose mayorship was controversial on several fronts. Emanuel was accused of an attempted cover-up of the murder of Laquan McDonald, a Black 17-year-old, by Jason Van Dyke, a white officer.McDonald was shot 16 times by Van Dyke in 2014 as he was moving away from the police.Following McDonald’s death, a Department of Justice investigation into Chicago police delivered a blistering report that found an epidemic use of racist, excessive force as well as corruption among officers.The new mayor said in 2019: “I campaigned on change, you voted for change.”But is change coming?“When you’re replacing a mayor like Rahm Emanuel – who in many ways had to leave office because he covered up the murder of Laquan McDonald – and you look at the way that the murder of Adam Toledo has been handled, you begin to see a lot of similarities,” said the 35th ward alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa.For decades, rectifying Chicago’s broken policing system has remained a vital priority.The shooting death of Cedrick Chatman, 17, by officers in 2013, and the 2015 killing of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd made national headlines, as well as McDonald’s murder.And there was “Homan Square”, a notorious interrogation warehouse used by Chicago police, which ignited international outrage after the Guardian reported in 2015 on thousands of people being illegally detained and tortured by police into false confessions.Alongside more well-known travesties, there are also thousands upon thousands of allegations made against Chicago police, according to data from the Citizens Police Data Project, a tool created to publicize allegations of Chicago police abuse, with little result.Lightfoot promised to “implement civilian oversight of CPD”, according to her campaign platform on public safety. And she vowed to produce a civilian oversight board in her first 100 days of office, but it hasn’t happened.She had supported a plan for a local law to create such a board, generated by the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA), until she backtracked in October last year.The mayor renounced her support of the GAPA ordinance after claiming activists were unwilling to compromise or “come forward with a proposal that solves … outstanding issues”.But Carlil Pittman, a youth organizer with Southwest Organizing Project, co-founder of the Goodkids Madcity advocacy and a representative of GAPA, described an unproductive environment, saying the mayor would lapse in communication with organizers, cancel public safety committee meetings and refuse to negotiate ordinance policy.“Her words were, ‘If you’re here to negotiate [that] policymaking power be in the hands of this community commission, we can stop this conversation now’. Her exact words? ‘I’m not giving up policymaking powers’,” Pittman told the Guardian.Alderman Rosa called Lightfoot “obstructionist” over civilian oversight of police.Lightfoot, instead, has repeatedly asserted that her own ordinance on civilian oversight is coming.In the meantime, a joint proposal called the empowering communities for public safety ordinance, created by GAPA and the Civilian Police Accountability Council that would lead to a referendum on creating an elected policing oversight body, has gained support among progressives, with many calling for the mayor to support it.Lightfoot has celebrated progress on transparency, including reforms in police union contracts and a creation of guidelines to release materials about police misconduct.However, a proposal requiring Chicago to publish closed complaints against the police dating back to 1994 received her public disapproval.“She doesn’t want any of the drama that comes with the acknowledgment that for years, for decades, [Chicago] police have been operating in a disturbing and disgusting way,” said Trina Reynolds-Tyler, a human rights organizer and the director of data at the Invisible Institute, a journalism production company on Chicago’s Southside focused on holding public bodies to account.In a recently passed $12.8bn budget, Lightfoot allocated $65m to housing and anti-homelessness efforts. She also included $20m in community mental health programs and $1m for a new program to pair police with mental health workers on some emergency calls.Amid calls for reorganization she reduced the police’s eye-popping $1.69bn budget by just $58.9m.Chicago’s population of 2.6 million makes it the third largest US city, but it has the second highest per capita spending on police after New York, according to US News & World Report, and the most officers per capita, according to the Injustice Watch journalism non-profit.Yet many Chicagoans feel underprotected. And the city is still far behind on goals set under yet another indictment of its track record, a court-ordered consent decree to overhaul policing.It was issued in February 2019 but also stemmed from the murder of McDonald, with legal action involving the state attorney general, Black Lives Matter Chicago and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.Last summer, in light of George Floyd’s murder by a white officer in Minneapolis, Lightfoot was part of a group of city mayors who promoted reform while rejecting defunding as a route to transformation.The Guardian contacted Lightfoot’s office about progress of her promised reforms, but they declined to comment.But while Lightfoot’s limited results may seem surprising, a look further back shows a pattern of sidestepping real reform, Reynolds-Tyler argued.In 2002, as chief administrator of the Chicago Office of Professional Standards (OPS), a weak and now defunct police oversight body, Lightfoot rarely managed to get any cases of police misconduct prosecuted, according to the Appeal non-profit site, and backed officers in some highly contentious cases.The outlook is grim, and yet the need for transformation is as great as ever.Alderman Ramirez-Rosa said: “The people of the city of Chicago are crying out for change as it relates to our broken policing system. We owe it to Anjanette Young, we owe it to Laquan McDonald, we owe it to Rekia Boyd, we owe it to Adam Toledo to pass police reform as a first step to ending racist policing.” More

Thousands of miles from the US capital, a group of progressive protesters recently marched to the office of their senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, to demand that she support statehood for Washington DC.The protest was notable because of its setting of Anchorage, Alaska, and similar demonstrations have recently been popping up all across America. Progressives from Arizona to New York have taken pictures with 51-star flags to show their support for making DC the first new state to join the union since Hawaii in 1959.Previously dismissed by its critics as a regional issue, DC statehood has gained national prominence in recent years, and that increased attention has now translated into legislative action. Late last month, the House passed a DC statehood bill with a record number of co-sponsors, and Joe Biden has offered a full-throated endorsement of the proposal.This momentum has given activists hope that now – with Democrats controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress – DC statehood may finally become a reality. However, numerous challenges remain in the evenly divided Senate, and Republicans are determined to keep just 50 stars on the American flag.For statehood advocates, this moment feels like an opportunity to correct a 200-year-old injustice. The District’s population of 700,000 is more than that of Wyoming and Vermont, and DC residents pay more in federal taxes than their counterparts in 22 states, yet they do not have congressional representation. Perhaps even more infuriating for statehood supporters is the fact that DC laws are subject to congressional review, meaning lawmakers from around the country have an effective veto on local proposals.The issue of race if also front and center, given that DC’s citizens are predominantly people of color and their full rights as Americans are being curtailed mostly by Republicans in the Senate, who skew heavily white.DC residents themselves largely support statehood. In 2016, the District held a referendum on the issue, and 86% of voters backed statehood.“This fight is the most pressing voting rights fight and the most pressing civil rights fight of our lifetime,” said Jamal Holtz, a leader of 51 for 51, which advocates for statehood. “We should not be okay with American citizens not having voter representation.”The lack of representation for DC residents has been the subject of international condemnation. The United Nations human rights committee has repeatedly said DC’s current political status is a human rights violation that flies in the face of America’s international treaty obligations.Arturo Carrillo, the director of the International Human Rights Clinic at George Washington University law school, said the injustice of the situation is somewhat ironic. In the capital of one of the oldest democracies in the world, citizens are not represented at the federal level.“The paradox is so profound that you almost don’t believe it,” Carrillo said. “It can’t really be like that, can it? But it is. It is exactly as bad as it looks. And all you’ve got to do is drive around Washington DC, and look at our license plates. You’ll see they say, ‘End taxation without representation.’”But for Republicans, the true injustice would be if DC, a city of just 68 sq miles, were granted statehood and the two US senators that come with it. Republican leaders have criticized the statehood push as a Democratic “power grab” that contradicts the founders’ wishes for the capital district to be completely under federal control.“If DC were to become a state, Democrats would gain two reliably liberal seats in the US Senate,” said Emma Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. “They cite various reasons for why they want DC statehood, but the truth is that these extra Senate seats would be a rubber stamp for their radical, far-left agenda.”Statehood advocates acknowledge DC would probably elect two Democratic senators if it becomes a state. In 2020, just 5% of DC voters backed Donald Trump, while 92% supported Biden. But activists say DC residents should not be deprived of basic democratic rights because of their political leanings.Republicans are afraid of admitting DC as the first plurality Black state in the nation“It is a much larger power grab to deny representation to people because you don’t think that they would vote for you. That’s the power grab,” said Meagan Hatcher-Mays, the director of democracy policy for the progressive group Indivisible.Holtz also described Republican arguments against statehood as “racist dog whistles”, given that the majority of DC residents are people of color.“Republicans are afraid of admitting DC as the first plurality Black state in the nation,” Holtz said. “Regardless of occupation and political party, all Americans deserve representation.”Holtz’s organization is urging Senate Democrats to end the filibuster to get statehood passed, hence the group’s name of 51 for 51, meaning 51 votes for the 51st state. (With the filibuster mechanism in place, Democrats need 60 votes to advance the statehood bill, which is considered an impossible task given Republicans’ fervent opposition.)But even if Democrats do end the filibuster, it may not be enough to get the statehood bill to Biden’s desk. Senator Joe Manchin said on Friday that he does not support the legislation, and four other Senate Democrats have not taken a stance on the bill.Without the filibuster, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, would still need all five of them on board to pass the proposal. Those five holdouts are probably why Schumer has not committed to a timeline for voting on a bill, instead simply saying the Senate is “working to make [statehood] a reality”.Hatcher-Mays urged Democratic senators to move quickly on statehood, noting that the party’s hold on the White House and both chambers of Congress is unlikely to last long.“History does tell us that trifectas are pretty rare, and they’re pretty fleeting,” Hatcher-Mays said. “We really need Democrats in the Senate to understand that this is what we gave you this majority for, so it’s really urgent to take this up and get this passed as soon as possible.”For Holtz and many other District residents, the wait for statehood has already been long enough.“Our moment is now,” Holtz said. “We cannot continue to count our days where there are people disenfranchised in our nation’s capital.” More

Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic champion and reality TV personality now running for California governor, has said she opposes transgender girls competing in girls’ sports at school.The 1976 decathlon Olympic gold medalist, who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, told a TMZ reporter it was “a question of fairness”.“That’s why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls’ sports in school,” Jenner said on Saturday in a brief interview conducted in a Malibu parking lot. “It just isn’t fair. And we have to protect girls’ sports in our schools.”It was Jenner’s first comment on the controversial issue since announcing her candidacy to replace Governor Gavin Newsom in a recall election.Dozens of US states propose to ban transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports, moves at odds with President Joe Biden’s push for greater LGBTQ inclusion.In March, the International Federation of Sports Medicine (IFSM), which represents 125,000 physicians in 117 countries, said data is scant on the advantages or otherwise of trans athletes, but that each sport needed rules to meet its own physical demands.Trans men have sparked less controversy, as the extra strength that comes from testosterone taken for transitioning is widely seen as no barrier to safe and fair competition.The global debate has united social conservatives and some top sportswomen against trans activists and supportive athletes. Opponents say trans women have advantages gained in male puberty that are not sufficiently reduced by hormone treatment.Jenner was married to Kris Kardashian, creating the setting for the Keeping Up with the Kardashians reality TV show. A Republican, she supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election but criticized his administration for discriminatory actions against transgender people.Many transgender-rights advocates have criticized Jenner, saying she has failed to convince them that she is a major asset to their cause. More

Susan Wright, the widow of the Republican congressman whose death prompted a special election in Texas on Saturday, made the runoff after reporting to law enforcement a bizarre robocall in which she was accused of murdering her husband by contracting Covid-19.The election in the sixth congressional district on Saturday drew 23 candidates and was seen as a key test of both a Republican party under Donald Trump’s sway and of Democratic hopes of making inroads in Texas.Endorsed by the former president, Wright led with 19% of the vote. The lone anti-Trump conservative in the field, former marine Michael Wood, was way off the pace.A Republican, Jake Ellzey, edged out a Democrat, Jana Lynne Sanchez, for second place and a spot in the runoff.Ellzey, a state representative and navy veteran, drew 13.8% of the vote. Just 354 ballots and less than half a percentage point separated him from Sanchez, a journalist and communications professional who ran for the seat in 2018, with 13.4%.In a statement, the chairman of the Texas Democratic party, Gilbert Hinojosa, put a brave face on the outcome.“The new Democratic south is rising,” he insisted, “and we will continue to rally our movement to take back our state – including as we look toward the 2022 governor’s race. We’re ready to build Democratic power, ready to defeat Texas Republicans, and ready to elect leaders who defend our rights and put Texans first.”Nonetheless, the sixth district, close to Dallas and Fort Worth, will again send a Republican to Washington despite trending Democratic for years. Trump won it in 2020 but only by three points after winning by 12 in 2016, that lead down five points on Mitt Romney four years before.In Utah on Saturday, Romney, the only Republican senator to vote to convict in both Trump’s impeachment trials, was booed and called a “traitor” when he spoke at a state convention.NBC News reported the split of the vote in Texas at roughly 60%-40% in Republicans’ favour. Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told Reuters: “Democrats didn’t get their people out there, and then to the extent to which they did … they split up a lot of the Democratic votes.”The contest was to fill a seat vacated when congressman Ron Wright died in February, after contracting Covid-19. Trump endorsed his wife this week.The day before the election, Politico reported that Susan Wright sought help from local and federal law enforcement after voters received a robocall which said she “murdered her husband” and was “running for Congress to cover it up”.The robocall claimed Wright “obtained a $1m life insurance policy on the life of her husband … six months before his death” and “tearfully confided in a nurse that she had purposely contracted the coronavirus”.The call, in a female voice, did not say who paid for it.“This is illegal, immoral, and wrong,” Wright said. “There’s not a sewer too deep that some politicians won’t plumb.”Matt Langston, an aide, said: “Susan’s opponents are desperate and resorting to disgusting gutter politics.”Other Republican candidates condemned the call.Before polling day, Wood, the anti-Trump conservative, told CNN he ran because he was worried about Trump’s influence and “somebody needed to stand up and say this isn’t what the Republican party should be”.He also said he was “afraid for the future of the country”, given the prevalence of belief in Trump’s lie that the election was stolen – 70% of Republicans in a CNN poll this week said they believed Joe Biden did not win enough legitimate votes to win the White House – and conspiracy theories such as QAnon. More

A top White House adviser who made headlines for saying “Covid is the best thing that ever happened” to Joe Biden said on Sunday the president still wears a mask outdoors out of habit, even though federal guidance says he need not do so.This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said fully vaccinated people need not wear masks outside if alone or not in the company of strangers.Announcing the change at the White House, Biden wore a mask as he walked to the microphone. Asked what message that might send as his administration seeks to overcome widespread resistance to vaccines and public health guidelines, the president said Americans should watch him “take it off and not put it back on until I get inside”.He wore a mask for parts of outdoor appearances in the week that followed.On Sunday, Anita Dunn told CNN’s State of the Union: “I myself found that I was still wearing my mask outdoors this week, because it has become such a matter of habit. I think the president takes the CDC guidelines very seriously. And he’s always taken his role as sending a signal to follow the science very seriously as well.“We do take some extra precautions for him because he is the president of the United States. But I would say that people should follow the CDC guidelines, and they should take advantage of getting the vaccine, getting fully vaccinated, and taking that mask off, particularly as the weather grows so beautiful and we all want to be outside.“It’s a lot more fun to take that outside walk without a mask, that outside bike ride. And I think that as people get vaccinated … they’re enjoying that freedom. So, as we move forward, I think that you will see more and more people … getting the vaccine and realising it’s one big step towards normalcy in this country.”Dunn’s remark about Covid being the “best thing” to happen to Biden was reported by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in Lucky, a book about the 2020 election. Made to an associate, the authors write, the remark dealt with something “officials believed but would never say in public” as the US reeled under the virus last year.Touting his experience in government and commitment to bipartisan co-operation, Biden beat Donald Trump by more than 7m votes and a clear electoral college result.The Biden White House has set goals for progress on vaccine delivery which have been easily met. This week, Biden said public schools should “probably all be open” in September.Asked if that was a definite goal, Dunn said: “Given the science, if the vaccination programme in this country proceeds, if people do go get their vaccines, he does believe that schools should be able to reopen in September, and reopen safely, following the CDC guidelines.“But he said probably. He did not say absolutely, because we have all seen since, unfortunately, January of 2020, it’s an unpredictable virus.” More

Tim Scott, the Republican senator leading negotiations with Democrats over police reform, who insisted during his rebuttal to Joe Biden’s address to Congress the US was not a racist country, said on Sunday he was “hopeful” a deal can be reached. Scott, from South Carolina and the only Black Republican in the Senate, said he saw progress in talks which stalled last summer as protests raged following the killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans.“One of the reasons why I’m hopeful is because my friends on the left aren’t looking for the issue, they’re looking for a solution, and the things that I offered last year are more popular this year,” the senator told CBS’s Face the Nation.“The goal isn’t for Republicans or Democrats to win, but for communities to feel safer and our officers to feel respected. If we can accomplish those two major goals, the rest will be history.”The talks are intended to break an impasse over the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House in March but is frozen by the 50-50 split in the Senate.Negotiations have taken on increasing urgency following the high-profile killings of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis and Andrew Brown in North Carolina, Black men shot in their vehicles by officers, killings which sparked outrage.“The country supports this reform and Congress should act,” Biden said on Wednesday during his address on Capitol Hill.I personally understand the pain of being stopped 18 times driving while BlackA panel including Scott, the New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker and Karen Bass, the author of the House bill and a Democrat from California, met on Thursday to discuss key elements including individual liability for officers who abuse their power or otherwise overstep the line.Republicans strongly oppose many of the proposals but Booker said it had been “a promising week”.Scott, a rising star in Republican ranks, said he was well-placed to help steer the discussion.“One of the reasons why I asked to lead this police reform conversation on my side of the House is because I personally understand the pain of being stopped 18 times driving while Black,” he said.“And I have also seen the beauty of when officers go door to door with me on Christmas morning, delivering presents to kids in the most underserved communities. So I think I bring an equilibrium to the conversation.”Scott said he was confident major sticking points in the Senate version of the proposed legislation could be overcome and the bill aligned to that which passed the House.“Think about the [parts] of the two bills that are in common … data collection,” he said. “I think through negotiations and conversations we are closer on no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and then there’s something called Section 1033 that has to do with getting government equipment from the military for local police.“I think we’re making progress there too, so we have literally been able to bring these two bills very close together.”The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, placed no timeline on when a revised version of the bill would get a vote.“We will bring it to the floor when we are ready, and we will be ready when we have a good, strong bipartisan bill,” she said on Thursday. “That is up to the Senate and then we will have it in the House, because it will be a different bill.”On the issue of whether lawsuits could be filed against police departments rather than individual officers, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said: “We’re moving towards a reasonable solution.”Scott said the issue was “another reason why I’m more optimistic this time”.He said: “We want to make sure the bad apples are punished and we’ve seen that, through the convictions of Michael Slager when he shot Walter Scott in the back to the George Floyd convictions.“Those are promising signs, but the real question is how do we change the culture of policing? I think we do that by making the employer responsible for the actions of the employee.”Others senators in the negotiations include Dick Durbin of Illinois and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, senior figures in their parties.Scott also broke with Republicans who support Donald Trump’s big lie that the presidential election was rigged, saying the party could only move on once it realised “the election is over, Joe Biden is the president of the United States”.On CNN’s State of the Union, Susan Collins, a moderate Republican senator from Maine, appeared to acknowledge Scott’s rising profile.“We are not a party that is led by just one person,” she said. “There are many prominent upcoming younger men and women in our party who hold great promise for leading us.” More