US Politics

Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,The baseless conspiracy theories that Donald Trump spread about the 2020 election are about to have some of their starkest real-world consequences to date in Arizona.Republicans in the Arizona state senate are set to begin an unprecedented audit of the presidential vote in Maricopa county, the most populous of the state, this week. Part of the audit will consist of a hand recount of all 2.1m votes cast for president there.Voting rights advocates told me they’re deeply concerned about the audit for a few reasons. First, they said, Maricopa county has already performed two audits of the election and found no irregularities in the vote. Second, the effort is being led by a Florida-based firm with a CEO who voiced support for election conspiracies after the election. Third, the audit will probably only breathe new life into Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 race in Arizona.Republicans in the legislature will likely use that uncertainty to justify new voting restrictions. One expert I spoke with said the entire effort seemed so shoddy that he was hesitant to even call it an “audit”.“It’s ludicrous,” the Arizona secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told me this week. “We cannot set a precedent where people that are mad can just bring this on every election. It’s just not how we do things.”There are a ton of other important concerns. Private donors, reportedly including rightwing lawyer L Lin Wood, are helping finance the effort. And a spokesman for the audit told a reporter for the Arizona Mirror this week that there would be significant restrictions in place for reporters who covered the event.The Maricopa county board of supervisors, which is controlled by Republicans, isn’t on board with the effort. It agreed to turn over ballots and election equipment after Republicans got a court order, but refused to allow the audit to take place in a county-owned facility. Republicans are now paying to rent out an entire stadium to conduct the audit.“This audit, it seems as if they are seeking a predetermined outcome. They want to find fraud,” said Martin Quezada, a Democrat in the state senate. “They need to find fraud in order to justify all of their actions and in order to keep this radical wing of their constituency happy. They need to find fraud. So they are intent on finding it.”Also worth watching …
The Senate confirmed Vanita Gupta to be the associate attorney general, placing one of the nation’s leading civil rights lawyers in the number three role at the justice department.
Florida Republicans are advancing legislation to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting, despite objections from election officials across the state, including Republicans. The move to curtail mail-in voting in Florida is notable because the state has been held up as a national example – including by Trump – of how to successfully run a vote-by-mail system.
Montana Republicans enacted a law that ends same-day voter registration in the state and another that tightens ID requirements for voting. Democrats are already challenging the measure. More

Good morning.The US will cut its carbon emissions by at least half by 2030, the White House has promised. The news comes before a two-day virtual White House climate summit, beginning today. The summit brings together 40 world leaders to discuss how to fulfil the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and speed up their plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.But poorer countries have said they need the money to be able to make environmental change happen, and argue that richer countries, which have more capital and emit more carbon dioxide, should be putting their hands in their pockets. Poorer countries were promised $100bn a year in climate finance from 2020, but last year that was not met.
The summit also marks the first meeting of Biden and China’s president, Xi Jinping. With their interests overlapping on climate, will it be a step in the right direction for their fraught relationship?
Offering money is not the right approach to Brazil’s climate denial, two former Brazilian environment ministers argue. “Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is not the result of a lack of money,” they write, “but a consequence of the government’s deliberate failure of care.” They say giving Brazil money to stop chopping down the Amazon could funnel funds to the “very land-grabbers behind the destruction”.
The justice department is going to investigate the Minneapolis police forceThe justice department will launch a sweeping investigation into policing practices in Minneapolis, it announced yesterday. The news came less than a day after a former police officer in the force was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, after kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes during an arrest.
What will the investigation look into? The attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the investigation would determine whether the force had “engaged in a pattern and practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing”. It will examine the use of force by officers, including during protests, potential discriminatory practices, and accountability.
Biden briefed on the fatal police shooting of a 16-year-oldJoe Biden has been briefed on the fatal shooting of a black teenage girl by police in Ohio, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said. An officer shot dead 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant on Tuesday, just minutes before the jury convicted a former police officer of murdering George Floyd.Psaki said Ma’Khia’s death cast a shadow “just as America was hopeful of a step forward”, adding: “She was a child. We’re thinking of her friends and family, in the communities that are hurting and grieving her loss.”
What do we know about Ma’Khia’s death? Police in Columbus, Ohio, were called to reports of someone being attacked. Bodycamera footage released by Columbus police shows Ma’Khia appearing to hold a knife and clashing with two people, before an officer shoots her four times and she falls to the ground. Authorities in the city said police intervened to save the life of another girl whom Bryant had closed in on.
Columbus has one of the highest rates of fatal police shootings in the US, according to a recent study, but is by no means the only area grappling with issues around police conduct:
In North Carolina, a sheriff’s deputy shot dead a black man while serving a search warrant, according to authorities. Andrew Brown was killed yesterday morning, apparently while driving away. Details about the warrant have not been released, but court records show Brown had a history of drug charges.
A Virginia police officer has been sacked after the Guardian revealed he had donated to and expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager accused of killing two people during a protest against police brutality last year.
More than 200m coronavirus shots have been administered in the USThe US has administered 200m vaccine doses since Biden took office, achieving the goal he set for his first 100 days. He had initially promised 100m doses in his first 100 days, but doubled the goal after the program gained unexpected pace. As of this week, all US adults are eligible to a receive a vaccine.
More than 80% of Americans over 65 will have had one dose by today, according to Biden. More than 50% of adults are at least partially vaccinated, with about 28m vaccine doses being administered each week.
The president also announced a new federal programme to give workers paid leave to receive their vaccination, saying: “No working American should lose a single dollar from their paycheck because they chose to fulfil their patriotic duty of getting vaccinated.”In other news …
Biden is likely to formally recognise the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman empire during the first world war, according to officials. As a candidate, Biden promised this, but it could add to an already tense relationship with the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Four people have been killed in a car bomb at a hotel hosting a Chinese ambassador in Pakistan. A dozen others were wounded at the luxury hotel, but the ambassador was out for a meeting when the bomb exploded. The Pakistan Taliban has claimed responsibility.
Stat of the day: in Corona, Queens, just 37% of residents have received their first Covid vaccine dose. In the wealthier Upper East Side, the figure is 64%. Why is the difference so stark?Corona, Queens, is home to many of New York’s undocumented migrants and essential workers. Last year, when the city was the centre of the global coronavirus outbreak, the neighbourhood was considered the “epicenter of the epicenter”. But now it has one of the lowest rates of vaccinations, 37% compared with 64% in the Upper East Side. Amanda Holpuch asks what coronavirus has shown us about inequality in the city.Don’t miss this: a globally unprecedented coronavirus surge is pushing India to the brinkA new increase in coronavirus in India is pushing hospitals to the brink of collapse. The unprecedented spread resulted in India recording 314,835 new cases over the previous 24 hours, the highest daily increase of any country during the pandemic. Rebecca Ratcliffe shares more information about this dire situationwhich, Peter Beaumont argues, serves as a warning to other countries.Last Thing: an Italian man managed to skip work for 15 years An Italian man been coined the “king of absentees” after skipping work for 15 years. The 67-year-old hospital employee in the Calabrian city of Catanzaro continued to take home a salary of €538,000 ($648,000), despite not having turned up to work since 2005. Now the holiday is over and he is facing charges of abuse of office, forgery, and aggravated extortion.Sign upSign up for the US morning briefingFirst Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you are not already signed up, subscribe now. More

It was during the administration of Fiorello LaGuardia that the position of New York City mayor became known as the “second toughest job in America”.LaGuardia, New York’s 99th mayor and a man whose name now graces the city’s streets, parks, schools and an airport labeled one of the worst in the country, became regarded as one of the city’s greatest ever leaders, despite facing a collapsing economy, all-powerful crime mobs and civic unrest when he took office in January 1934.When New York City’s next mayor takes office, however, they will face problems on perhaps an even larger scale, with the Covid-19 pandemic having ravaged a city already beset by deep income inequality and facing a reckoning over racial discrimination in policing and governance. The job could prove, once again, to be second only in difficulty to being the occupant of the Oval Office. Despite the challenges, dozens of candidates are running in June’s Democratic mayoral primary – which, given New York City’s left-leaning political makeup, is likely to decide the city’s next leader.The most pressing issue will be leading New York City out of the pandemic. The city was one of the worst hit by Covid-19, and many residents are still haunted by the scenes of April 2020, when ambulance sirens were a near-constant sound as hundreds of people a day succumbed to the virus.In total, more than 32,000 people have died, and in the most densely populated city in the country, the need for a successful, continued rollout of vaccinations will be essential, as will guiding economic and emotional recovery.“In communities across the city Covid is related to severe job loss in industries and occupations. It’s been differentially hard on the everyday workers of the city as opposed to the professional workers. So there’s a lot to be done to heal and revitalize those communities,” John Mollenkopf, distinguished professor of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said.“All the candidates have lined up policy position papers on what they’ll do [regarding the recovery from the pandemic], but there’s also a kind of symbolic and emotional dimension to it – of going out to the communities and healing their pain, of inspiring them and giving them confidence in the future. That’ll be a very important thing the mayor will do.”The winner of a mayoral election is frequently a reaction to how voters feel about the incumbent – in this case the term-limited Bill de Blasio, whose popularity has waned dramatically since his election in 2013. This year, however, with Covid recovery dominating the election “that dynamic is a lot less at play”, said Neal Kwatra, a Democratic strategist who has been active in New York politics for years.A key issue for the incoming mayor will be schooling, Kwatra said – dealing with the lost year many children have experienced but also the struggle many New Yorkers have faced in balancing work and childcare.“Especially for working-class, middle-class, poor New Yorkers, for whom there is no choice, they have to go to work, they are frontline workers in many of these industries that are helping to bring the city back on its feet,” Kwatra said.“Figuring out how we get our schools open safely and securely for parents for teachers and for students is going to be an enormously important task for the next mayor.”As if wrestling with the 1,700 schools, and more than 1.1 million students, isn’t enough, the city’s next leader will need to breathe life back into a hospitality industry that has been decimated by the pandemic.“The job creation connected to those industries is enormous and significant, so I think part of what the next mayor is going to also have to do is figure out how to send a message to folks that New York is open for business, that New York is safe,” Kwatra said.Looming over any recovery is the racial inequality and police brutality that many New Yorkers or color have faced.In the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter protests intensified the focus on racial issues, and the Democratic primary could yet yield only the city’s second non-white mayor. New York is still seeking its first non-male leader, with at least six women, two of them women of color, among the main contenders and a non-binary candidate also in the running.The demonstrations of 2020, which brought out tens of thousands of protesters in New York, means the winner of the mayoral race will be under pressure to reimagine law enforcement in New York.“I think it will be very high [on the next mayor’s agenda], but it also will depend on who is ultimately elected,” Kwatra said.There have been demands among the left to defund, either completely or partially, the police, and the next mayor will be expected to take a firm line with the New York police department, the largest force in the country which employs 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees.Some candidates have pledged to reform the NYPD, to various degrees. Dianne Morales a former public school teacher and non-profit executive, has arguably gone furthest. Her website has a section dedicated to “defund the police”, and if elected Morales would reallocate $3bn of the police’s budget to more socially minded services.“As Black men continue to be essentially executed by the state day in and day out in America, it’s impossible for that to not begin to more profoundly affect this mayoral race,” Kwatra said.Maya Wiley, a lawyer and civil rights executive with experience in New York City government, could lean on her experience as chair of the agency responsible for handling complaints about the New York police department. Eric Adams, the current borough president of Brooklyn, who joined the NYPD after being beaten by police aged 15 with the aim of changing the department “from within” has also pledged reform.Andrew Yang, the tech entrepreneur who ran for the US presidency in 2020, has drawn much of the early media attention in the mayoral race, but in recent weeks has also attracted scathing criticism from his rivals, who have attacked his commitment to the city and his governing experience.It is a point they are likely to continue making, as whoever wins will have a battle on their hands as they grapple with the city’s post-pandemic finances.Reuters reported that a net total of 70,000 people left New York City in 2020, but the data is less straightforward. According to location analytics company Unacast, 3.57 million people left the city between 1 January and 7 December , and “some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period”. Unacast claims that this resulted in a scarcely believable $34bn in lost revenue.As government income has dropped, fears have been raised that the situation could be as dire as that of the financial crisis the city faced in 1975. Back then the city nearly went bankrupt, and leaders attempted to rectify it by introducing swingeing budget cuts.Kimberly K Phillips-Fein, a professor of American history at New York University and author of Fear City: New York’s fiscal crisis and the rise of austerity politics, said the current situation does not rival the fiscal chaos of the 1970s, but said it was important any incoming mayor “recall the dangers of widespread service cuts as a way of addressing fiscal shortfalls”.“At this moment in particular, such cuts could be disastrous. We need more faith in our public sector, not less. We need a coherent plan for reopening schools safely, and a commitment to use resources to accomplish this; we need public health programs that we can trust to protect us,” Phillips-Fein said.“Should budget shortfalls emerge, the city should strive to find ways to address them without stark service cuts. In the 1970s these helped to accelerate political and economic polarization, and the same might well happen today.”The picture does at least look rosier than it did a few months ago, after New York agreed on a $212bn state budget in April. The budget, if signed by Andrew Cuomo, the state’s governor, will increase taxes on the wealthiest residents in New York City, and, Democratic lawmakers say, release money for schools, rent relief and childcare, but the next mayor will inevitably face tough decisions over spending.The mayor’s spending will be fraught with danger as they bid to rectify wealth disparity in the city. The Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York found that income inequality, even pre-pandemic, has grown over the past 10 years, and the issue of affordable housing has been highlighted by the fact that Covid-19 rates were particularly high in neighborhoods already suffering from soaring rents.Data from Streeteasy revealed traditionally lower-income areas like Elmhurst, Corona and Jackson Heights saw dramatic numbers of coronavirus cases, whereas wealthy neighborhoods like Battery Park City and the West Village saw the lowest numbers. In the last six years, according to Streeteasy, it is the former that were already struggling to cope with rising rent.“Between July 2014 and July 2020, rents in the zip codes that would be most affected by Covid-19 rose by 22%. That’s twice the rate of the city overall, where rents grew 11%. In what would turn out to be low-Covid-19 zip codes, rents rose by 10% in the same period,” Streeteasy said.Putting all these issues together, it is clear that the next mayor will have a daunting task ahead in terms of hauling New York City back on track. But as the city reports an encouraging vaccination rate, and as bars, restaurants and sporting venues begin to reopen, there are plenty of people who think reports of the city’s demise are exaggerated.“We’ll need a mayor that understands that the Covid crisis revealed in new ways the underlying class and status divisions in the city,” Mollenkopf said.“But New York is going to come back faster and better than the skeptics think. There’s a reason that the [population] concentration levels were as high as they have been in New York City – very good economic, social and political reasons. And the virus has given that a bruise but it hasn’t really changed anything.“So yes, it’s going to be a challenge. But it’s a great opportunity, also, for the next mayor.” More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden is expected to formally recognize the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the first world war as an act of genocide, according to US officials.The anticipated move – something Biden had pledged to do as a candidate – could further complicate an already tense relationship with the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Administration officials had not informed Turkey as of Wednesday, and Biden could still change his mind, according to one official who spoke to the Associated Press.Lawmakers and Armenian-American activists are lobbying Biden to make the announcement on or before Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which will be marked on Saturday.One possibility is that Biden would include the acknowledgement of genocide in the annual remembrance day proclamation typically issued by presidents. Biden’s predecessors have avoided using “genocide” in the proclamation commemorating the dark moment in history.Turkey accepts that many Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during the first world war, but contests the figures and denies the killings were systematically orchestrated and constitute a genocide.A bipartisan group of more than 100 House members on Wednesday signed a letter to Biden calling on him to become the first US president to formally recognize the atrocities as genocide.“The shameful silence of the United States government on the historic fact of the Armenian genocide has gone on for too long, and it must end,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge you to follow through on your commitments, and speak the truth.”Turkey’s foreign minister has warned the Biden administration that recognition would “harm” US-Turkey ties.The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal first reported that Biden is preparing to acknowledge the genocide.Should Biden follow through, he’ll almost certainly face pushback from Turkey, which has successfully pressed previous presidents to sidestep the issue.The relationship between Biden and Erdoğan is off to a chilly start. More than three months into his presidency, Biden has yet to speak with him.Biden drew ire from Turkish officials during his presidential campaign last year, after an interview with the New York Times in which he spoke about supporting Turkey’s opposition against “autocrat” Erdoğan. Still, Turkey was hopeful of resetting the relationship. Erdoğan enjoyed a warm relationship with former Donald Trump, who didn’t give him any lectures about Turkey’s human rights record.“In the past, the arm-twisting from Turkey was, ‘Well we’re such a good friend that you should remain solid with us on this’,” said Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, whose members have started a campaign to encourage Biden to recognize the genocide. “But they’re proving to be not such a good friend.”Hamparian said he’s hopeful that Biden will follow through. He noted that the sting of Barack Obama not following through on his 2008 campaign pledge to recognize the Armenian genocide still lingers for many in the Armenian diaspora. More

Oliver Laughland, the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, covered the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd on Tuesday – a landmark moment in US criminal justice history. Oliver looks at what the verdict means for America

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Former police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of murder for killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes, a crime that prompted waves of protests in support of racial justice in the US and across the world. The jury swiftly and unanimously convicted Chauvin on Tuesday of all the charges he faced – second- and third-degree murder, and manslaughter – after concluding that the white former Minneapolis police officer killed the 46-year-old Black man in May through a criminal assault, by pinning him to the ground so he could not breathe. Anushka Asthana talks to the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, who has been in Minneapolis covering the trial. He discusses the case and whether the verdict will usher in police reforms. On Wednesday, US attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced that the Department of Justice would investigate the practices of the Minneapolis Police Department. More

A jury has found Derek Chauvin guilty of all charges against him for killing George Floyd, including unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. A judge remanded Chauvin in custody after the verdict and a cop quickly cuffed the dazed defendant to carry him out of the courtroom. Chauvin will remain in jail until his sentencing hearing in two months.Presidents did what presidents do after the criminal justice system seems to work for the people who it exploits, but this time with a twist. Neither Obama nor Biden considered the verdict justice, but rather accountability and “a step in the right direction”. Obama emphasized eliminating racial bias in policing and implementing concrete reforms for change; Biden explained that the verdict was a giant step forward towards justice in America.There are two fatal flaws with these statements. The first is that reforms cannot fix racial bias in policing because police was formed as a system of racial and economic control, and remains so. As I’ve written before: if Derek Chauvin were the kindest cop in Minnesota and did not have a biased bone in his body, he still would have been able to arrest George Floyd for any number of alleged illegal acts. Because of capitalism, racism and ableism, the darkest and poorest peoples in the United States are relegated to live precarious lives where they do what they can to survive, sometimes including breaking the law. Rather than eliminating the unjust conditions, cities and the federal government send in police to manage the inequality.Additionally, even if we could remove racial bias from police, this would not solve the underlying problems of inequality and exploitation. If it did, then there wouldn’t be so many poor, white people in prison. Last week, I watched a video of three cops arresting and slamming a 73-year-old white woman with dementia who was picking flowers on her way home. She’d forgotten to pay for her groceries at Walmart. Police dislocated her shoulder, and tied her hands and feet like a hog. She repeatedly cried that she wanted to go home and they chuckled at her. If removing racial bias in police is supposed to ensure that that Black people will be treated like white people under the law, then equal protection is completely insufficient for anyone’s freedom and safety.Additionally, we cannot expect cop convictions to save anyone’s lives because prior cop convictions did not even save George Floyd’s life. Thousands of cops have killed more than 10,000 people of all races between 2005 and 2017; only 82 cops have been charged with murder or manslaughter. According to criminologist Phil Stinson, only 19 cops were convicted and mostly on lesser charges in that time period. A judge sentenced former South Carolina cop Michael Slaeger to 20 years in prison in 2017 for shooting Walter Scott several times in the back. A judge sentenced former Chicago PD officer Jason Van Dyke in 2019 to a little over six years in prison for fatally shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times. Despite the increasing convictions, the police nationwide still kill about three people a day. Just a few years ago, Minnesota convicted a cop for a murder while on duty for the first time. Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor was sentenced to about 12 years. Why didn’t all of these convictions save the thousands of people who were killed after them? Why didn’t Chauvin get the message?The celebration of the conviction as “accountability” or “justice” that will send chills down the spines of police simply doesn’t comport with the law, which protects the police’s right not to think before they act. The US supreme court opined in Graham v Connor that cops “are often forced to make split-second judgments – in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation”. This means that police currently have the constitutional authority to quickly decide when to use force. Every now and then, a conviction will slip through the cracks and people will celebrate, similar to how slave patrols were punished and sometimes sent to prison for their mistreatment of slaves. But, the underlying power to be violent will remain virtually unchanged and many more people will die because of it.Even if we could remove racial bias from police, this would not solve the problems of inequality and exploitationTragically, we witnessed this on Tuesday. As the nation awaited the jury verdict’s reading against Chauvin, a white cop in Columbus, Ohio killed Ma’Khia Bryant, a 15-year-old Black girl. According to Bryant’s family, the teen reportedly called the police for help because older kids were trying to assault her. Police arrived during the altercation and shot Bryant four times.There will be calls for justice for Ma’Khia, just as there were calls for justice in the recent police killings of Daunte Wright in Minnesota and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago. Clearly cops did not get the message about justice because all of these victims were killed in the course of the Chauvin trial. But we will never know what accountability or justice means for George, Daunte, Adam or Ma’Khia because justice requires the participation of the people impacted by it. The dead cannot participate. Convictions only provide relief for the living, and they surely do not save lives. The question is: do we want convictions or do we want to live?If we want to live, then we must continue to join, support and create social movements and protests to end policing. Police abolition is not mere police absence. It is a political commitment and practice to recreate the society that thinks it needs police in the first place. People must avoid repeating the same tired reforms in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act which does not undermine police power, and look to more transformational demands, such as those in the Breathe Act. We need abolition. Organizations like Critical Resistance, the Movement for Black Lives, Dream Defenders and various “defund the police” campaigns across the country are articulating ways to make change. We have to decide whether we have the will and imagination to join them.
Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom More

Simon & Schuster has said it will not pull out of a seven-figure book deal with Mike Pence after some of its employees called for the contract to be scrapped, stating that “we come to work each day to publish, not cancel”.An open letter circulated by staff at S&S said that the publisher had “chosen complicity in perpetuating white supremacy by publishing Pence”, in a two-book deal struck earlier this month and reported to be worth $3-4m (£2.1-2.8m). The letter, which did not reveal how many members of staff had signed, said that the former vice-president had “made a career out of discriminating against marginalised groups and denying resources to BIPOC and LGBTQA+ communities”, and demanded his book deal be cancelled.“By choosing to publish Mike Pence, Simon & Schuster is generating wealth for a central figure of a presidency that unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence,” says the letter. “This is not a difference of opinions; this is legitimising bigotry.”Though in January S&S pulled out of publishing Republican senator Josh Hawley’s book over his part in the Capitol riot, S&S president Jonathan Karp told staff on Tuesday that the publisher would not cancel Pence’s deal.“As a publisher in this polarised era, we have experienced outrage from both sides of the political divide and from different constituencies and groups. But we come to work each day to publish, not cancel, which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives,” wrote Karp. “We will, therefore, proceed in our publishing agreement with vice-president Mike Pence.”The employees also called for the publishing house to refrain from signing any more book deals with former members of the Trump administration, and demanded S&S stop distributing books for Post Hill Press. An independent publisher which focuses on “conservative politics” and Christian titles, Post Hill hit the headlines last week when it announced it would be publishing a book by by one of the police officers who shot Breonna Taylor, officer Jonathan Mattingly. While S&S subsequently announced it would not distribute Mattingly’s book, staff at S&S pointed to Post Hill titles which S&S still distributes, including embattled Republican congressman Matt Gaetz’s Firebrand.“We impart to you the sad and unfortunate truth that we are actively making history right now,” says the open letter. “People will look back on this one day, and see that through our complicity, we chose to be on what is clearly the wrong side of justice.”Karp said the decision not to distribute Mattingly’s book was “immediate, unprecedented, and responsive to the concerns we heard from you and our authors”. But he added that S&S has “contractual obligations and must continue to respect the terms of our agreements with our client publishers”.Post Hill confirmed last week that it would go ahead with publishing Mattingly’s book without S&S, and declined to comment further.Karp described the publisher’s role as “to find those authors and works that can shed light on our world — from first-time novelists to journalists, thought leaders, scientists, memoirists, personalities, and, yes, those who walk the halls of power”.“Regardless of where those authors sit on the ideological spectrum, or if they hold views that run counter to the belief systems held by some of us, we apply a rigorous standard to assure that in acquiring books, we will be bringing into the world works that provide new information or perspectives on events to which we otherwise might not have access,” he wrote.“When we allow our judgment to dwell on the books we dislike,” he added, “we distract ourselves from our primary purpose as a publisher – to champion the books we believe in and love.”Pence’s currently untitled autobiography is set to be released in 2023. More