US Politics

Joe Biden has made a heartfelt plea for Republicans to work with him on a $2tn infrastructure plan, casting it as essential to preserving America’s superpower status and warning: “Inaction simply is not an option.”The US president signalled that he is open to negotiating his proposed corporate tax rate of 28% to fund the package. It represents a sharp increase from the 21% levy set by his predecessor Donald Trump’s tax bill in 2017, though is lower than the 35% rate under Barack Obama.But Biden also became fiery as he sounded the alarm about a nation in decline, investing less in infrastructure now than it did 25 years ago and in danger of losing an existential struggle with China.Biden’s promise as a candidate to seek bipartisanship has run into a wall of Republican opposition so far, first to his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package and now to his $2tn infrastructure investment – though opinion polls suggest both are popular with Republican voters.On Wednesday, with Kamala Harris, the vice-president, at his side at the Eisenhower Office Building in Washington, he continued to walk the line of trying to appeal across the aisle while bluntly making clear that he will push ahead if necessary.Promising that he and Harris will meet both Democrats and Republicans in the next few weeks, Biden said: “Debate is welcome. Compromise is inevitable. Changes are certain … We’ll be listening. We’ll be open to good ideas and good faith negotiations but here’s what we won’t be open to. We will not be open to doing nothing. Inaction simply is not an option.”Republican opposition to the American Jobs Plan has focused on the tax hikes and what they contend is an overly broad definition of infrastructure. The president sought to neutralise that argument.“Two hundred years ago, trains weren’t traditional infrastructure either, until America made a choice to lay down tracks across the country,” he said. “Highways weren’t traditional infrastructure until we allowed ourselves to imagine that roads could connect our nation across state lines.“The idea of infrastructure has always evolved to meet the aspirations of the American people and their needs, and it’s evolving again today. We need to start seeing infrastructure through its effect on the lives of working people in America.”High-speed internet, an electric grid that will not collapse in a winter storm, investing in “Made in America” goods from every community, pipes that provide clean drinking water, clean energy and facilities for military veterans are all part of the foundation of 21st-century living, Biden continued.The job creation potential is immense, he said, including for a people without a college degree – a demographic that has backed Donald Trump in presidential elections. “This is a blue-collar blueprint for increasing opportunity for the American people.”Biden attempted to draw a line from the personal – “How many of you know when you send your child to school the fountain they’re drinking out of is not fed by lead pipe?” – to the geopolitical, suggesting that in coming months much will be written about how China and the rest of the world is racing ahead of the US in investing in the future.“It used to be we invested almost 2.7% of our GDP in infrastructure. Now it’s about 0.7%. When we were investing it, we were the leader in the world. I don’t know why we don’t get this. One of the few major economies in the world whose public investment in research and development has declined as a percentage of GDP over the last 25 years.”These aren’t Republican bridges, Democratic airports, Republican hospitals or a Democratic power gridVisibly angry, he boomed: “Declined! The United States of America, that led the world!”As in previous speeches, Biden framed the imperative as in the context of competition with China and a fundamental battle for the future between democracies and autocracies.Beijing is not waiting to invest in digital infrastructure, research and development, he said. “But they’re counting on American democracy to be too slow, too limited and too divided to keep pace.“We have to show the world and, much more important, we have to show ourselves that democracy works, that we can come together on the big things. It’s the United States of America, for God’s sake.”Partisan divisions should not stop America doing the right thing for the future, Biden added. “These aren’t Republican bridges, Democratic airports, Republican hospitals or a Democratic power grid … We’re at an inflection point in American democracy. This is a moment where we prove whether or not democracy can deliver.”Biden insisted he is open to ideas on how to pay for the plan but again ruled out tax increases on people making less than $400,000 a year. The corporate tax rate used to be 35%, he noted, but Trump reduced it to 21%. “What I’m proposing is we meet in the middle: 28%.”Later, questioned by reporters, he said he might accept a rate below 28% so long as the projects are financed. “I’m willing to listen to that. I’m wide open, but we gotta pay for this. We gotta pay for this.“There’s many other ways we can do it. But I am willing to negotiate that. I’ve come forward with the best, most rational way, in my view the fairest way, to pay for it, but there are many other ways as well. And I’m open.”But a Twitter exchange on Wednesday made clear the steep climb Biden faces to work with Republicans, many of whom remain in thrall to Trump.Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democratic senator, tweeted: “Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.”Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, replied: “So what ISN’T infrastructure?” More

The US state department said on Tuesday the Biden administration is consulting with allies about a joint approach to China and its human rights record, including how to handle the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics.The department initially suggested that an Olympic boycott to protest China’s human rights abuses was among the possibilities, but a senior official said later that a boycott has not yet been discussed.The official said the US position on the 2022 Games had not changed but that the administration is in frequent contact with allies and partners about their common concerns about China. Department spokesman Ned Price said earlier the consultations were being held in order to present a united front.“Part of our review of those Olympics and our thinking will involve close consultations with partners and allies around the world,” Price told reporters.Human rights groups are protesting China’s hosting of the Games, which are set to start in February 2022. They have urged a diplomatic or straight-up boycott of the event to call attention to alleged Chinese abuses against Uyghurs, Tibetans and residents of Hong Kong.Price declined to say when a decision on the Olympics would be made but noted there is still almost a year until the Games are set to begin.“These Games remain some time away. I wouldn’t want to put a timeframe on it, but these discussions are underway,” he said. “It is something that we certainly wish to discuss and it is certainly something that we understand that a coordinated approach will be not only in our interest, but also in the interest of our allies and partners. So this is one of the issues that is on the agenda, both now and going forward.”The Beijing Winter Olympics open on 4 February 2022, and China has denied all charges of human rights abuses. It says “political motives” underlie the boycott effort.Rights groups have met with the International Olympic Committee and have been told the Olympic body must stay politically “neutral.” They have been told by the IOC that China has given “assurances’’ about human rights conditions.Both the IOC and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee have said in the past they oppose boycotts.In March, IOC president Thomas Bach said history shows that boycotts never achieve anything. “It also has no logic,” he said. “Why would you punish the athletes from your own country if you have a dispute with a government from another country? This just makes no real sense.”The USOPC has questioned the effectiveness of boycotts. “We oppose Games boycotts because they have been shown to negatively impact athletes while not effectively addressing global issues,” it said. “We believe the more effective course of action is for the governments of the world and China to engage directly on human rights and geopolitical issues.” More

The rising number of migrant children and families seeking to cross the US border with Mexico is emerging as one of the most serious political challenges for Joe Biden’s new administration.
That’s exactly what Donald Trump wants: he and other Republicans believe that Americans’ concerns about a supposed “border crisis” will help Republicans win back political power.

But Harsha Walia, the author of two books about border politics, argues that there is no “border crisis,” in the United States or anywhere else. Instead, there are the “actual crises” that drive mass migration – such as capitalism, war and the climate emergency – and “imagined crises” at political borders, which are used to justify further border securitization and violence.
Walia, a Canadian organizer who helped found No One Is Illegal, which advocates for migrants, refugees and undocumented people, talked to the Guardian about Border and Rule, her new book on global migration, border politics and the rise of what she calls “racist nationalism.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Last month, a young white gunman was charged with murdering eight people, most of them Asian women, at several spas around Atlanta, Georgia. Around the same time, there was increasing political attention to the higher numbers of migrants and refugees showing up at the US-Mexico border. Do you see any connection between these different events?
I think they are deeply connected. The newest invocation of a “border surge” and a “border crisis” is again creating the spectre of immigrants and refugees “taking over.” This seemingly race neutral language – we are told there’s nothing inherently racist about saying “border surge”– is actually deeply racially coded. It invokes a flood of black and brown people taking over a so-called white man’s country. That is the basis of historic immigrant exclusion, both anti-Asian exclusion in the 19th century, which very explicitly excluded Chinese laborers and especially Chinese women presumed to be sex workers, and anti-Latinx exclusion. If we were to think about one situation as anti-Asian racism and one as anti-Latinx racism, they might seem disconnected. But both forms of racism are fundamentally anti-immigrant. Racial violence is connected to the idea of who belongs and who doesn’t. Whose humanity is questioned in a moment of crisis. Who is scapegoated in a moment of crisis.
How do you understand the rise of white supremacist violence, particularly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence, that we are seeing around the world?
The rise in white supremacy is a feedback loop between individual rightwing vigilantes and state rhetoric and state policy. When it comes to the Georgia shootings, we can’t ignore the fact that the criminalization of sex work makes sex workers targets. It’s not sex work itself, it’s the social condition of criminalization that creates that vulnerability. It’s similar to the ways in which border vigilantes have targeted immigrants: the Minutemen who show up at the border and harass migrants, or the kidnapping of migrants by the United Constitutional Patriots at gunpoint. We can’t dissociate that kind of violence from state policies that vilify migrants and refugees, or newspapers that continue to use the word “illegal alien”. More

At campaign rallies, Donald Trump specialized in crafting political slogans whose catchiness obscured the lack of actual policy behind them: lock her up, America First, build the wall, drain the swamp.But there was one Trump slogan that turned out to have a shocking amount of policy behind it – hundreds of pieces of legislation nationwide in just the last three months, in fact, constituting the most coordinated, organized and determined Republican push on any political issue in recent memory.The slogan was “stop the steal,” a tendentious reference to Trump’s big lie about the November election result.And the policy behind it was aggressive voter suppression, targeting people of color, urbanites, low-income communities and other groups whose full participation in future elections is seen by Republicans as a threat.For decades, conservatives have made limited government, lower taxes, “family” values, religious freedom, public safety, national security and restrictions on abortion the centerpiece of their pitch to voters.In 2021, those issues have been joined on the party platform by – and sometimes seem to be eclipsed by – a bold new policy proposal: prevent voting.“What’s different now is the absolute overt nature of this,” said the political analyst Lincoln Mitchell, an author and international elections observer.“In fairness to the Republicans, voter suppression has a long history in the United States that is not located in one party, but it’s located in one ideology, and that ideology is white supremacy,” Mitchell continued. “So for much of the post-Reconstruction period, until say 1970 or 1980 or so, that was either primarily the Democratic party – think of the old Dixiecratic south – or in both parties.”“It is only in the last 40ish years that it has become a Republican issue.”Since the November election, Republican state legislatures across the country have introduced more than 250 bills creating barriers to voting, cutting early voting, purging voter rolls, limiting absentee options and now, in Georgia, outlawing giving someone stuck in a 10-hour line a bottle of water.John Kavanagh, a Republican state representative from Arizona, articulated the underlying thinking in an interview last month on CNN. “Everybody shouldn’t be voting,” he said. The lawmaker later clarified that he thinks “all legally eligible voters should vote, but I do not want to register people who are disinterested and do not want to be registered to vote.”The same, less subtle message was delivered by Trump himself at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past February. In his speech, the former president unraveled a 10-minute-long list of proposed suppression tactics, all of which state legislatures have since attempted to make into law, with some success.It’s not a coincidence that these bills are being introduced after a free and fair and secure election with record turnout“We should eliminate the insanity of mass and very corrupt mail-in voting,” Trump said, additionally calling for strict new voter ID laws, signature matching and citizenship verification at polling stations.Sylvia Albert, national voting and elections director of the government watchdog group Common Cause, called Republicans’ voter suppression efforts “shameless”.“These bills are shameless, partisan efforts to silence us,” Albert said in a media briefing last week. “And it’s not a coincidence that these bills are being introduced after a free and fair and secure election with record turnout. Americans exercised their right to vote and, in response, these politicians are saying, ‘actually, we didn’t really want you to vote’.”In Georgia, the Republican governor signed a law last month making it harder to vote by mail, nearly eliminating ballot drop boxes and giving the state legislature more power over elections. In the Pennsylvania state general assembly, Republicans have introduced more than 50 voter suppression bills. A Texas bill would require proof of disability if voting by mail.The Michigan legislature is set to consider 39 bills targeting voting rights, especially voting by mail. Arizona Republicans have introduced vote-by-mail restrictions, the purge of more than 100,000 people from a permanent early voting list with little notice, and a bill making it a potential felony to forward a ballot to a relative.“The Republican party is aware that in their current ideological formation, that if American democracy is modernized so that people have voting rights comparable to other democracies, they will lose control for a generation,” said Mitchell. “They will basically be out of national politics.”Quentin Turner, Michigan program director for Common Cause, said that Republican suppression efforts in the state targeted communities of color, particularly a proposal to restrict access to absentee ballot drop boxes after 5pm.“A lot of working-class people in Michigan, in Detroit especially, may not be out or done with their day by 5pm,” said Turner. “So they may not be able to go to a drop box that’s close to them.“While it doesn’t specifically say in the bill that it’s targeting Black and brown voters, the nature of the specifications of the prohibition would have a larger adverse impact in those communities.”The overtly racist nature of voter suppression has created what could be a political hazard for Republicans. Under pressure from activists, corporations have begun to condemn the laws, with American Airlines announcing on Thursday that it was “strongly opposed” to suppression legislation in Texas. Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot face a boycott call for what activists say was too little action, too late, against voter suppression in Georgia.Voter suppression efforts could also backfire on Republicans if they limit the participation of an unintended group of voters – for example elderly voters no longer able to vote by mail – or increase the turnout of targeted groups galvanized by the assault on the franchise, as in Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections this past January.“African Americans in the south have gone through a lot to vote, historically,” Mitchell said. “This is an undemocratic, racist barrier, but it’s a barrier put in front of a people that are used to undemocratic, racist barriers. And they are not afraid of that. And we saw that, twice, in Georgia.“‘They’re trying to stop us from voting? Screw them, let’s get even more people out.’” More

A small business owner in Italy is preparing to sue the US Treasury after accidentally being put on a sanctions blacklist before Donald Trump left the presidency.Alessandro Bazzoni, who owns a graphic design company in Sardinia, has been unable to trade since 19 January, when his business was slapped with sanctions as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on blacklisted Venezuelan crude oil.In a case of mistaken identity, the US Treasury erroneously blacklisted Bazzoni’s graphic design company, SeriGraphicLab, along with a restaurant and pizzeria in Verona owned by another businessman called Alessandro Bazzoni. Both were removed from the blacklist on 31 March. But while the restaurant owner’s bank account has been reactivated, the blunder led to the Sardinian businessman’s account being closed.“It was a momentous error on their part, and one that is having serious implications as it is preventing me from working,” he said.Bazzoni, who works independently, was able to withdraw the money that was in his account but can no longer trade because, as per Italian law, he needs a bank account in order to receive payments from clients. The absence of a bank account also means he cannot access the financial support he is entitled to receive as part of the Italian government’s Covid-19 relief scheme.“I have to go to another bank to see if I can open an account there,” he said. “But for now, I cannot sufficiently operate my business, so much so I have started to look for other jobs.”Bazzoni claims the US Treasury did not notify him about being on the sanctions blacklist, nor did it apologise for the mistake.“The only notification I got was from my bank telling me my account was closing,” he said.He has made a legal complaint to the Italian police, with the aim of suing the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a unit of the US Treasury.In 2019, Trump’s government imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), in an attempt to force the resignation of the president, Nicolás Maduro, whom the US accused of corruption, human rights violations and rigging his 2018 re-election. On his last day in office, Trump sanctioned a network of oil firms and individuals tied to PDVSA.A US Treasury official told Reuters that the department realised the companies were owned by different individuals than the Bazzoni it blacklisted in January.The Guardian has contacted the US Treasury for a response to the Sardinian businessman’s case. “First and foremost, I want an apology,” said Bazzoni. More

Alcee Hastings, a fiercely liberal Florida congressman who was dogged by an impeachment that ended his career as a federal judge, died on Tuesday. He was 84.

Hastings’ death was confirmed by his chief of staff, Lale Morrison. The Democrat announced two years ago that he had pancreatic cancer.
Hastings was known as an advocate for minorities, a defender of Israel and a voice for gays, migrants, women and the elderly. He held senior posts on the House rules committee and the Helsinki Commission, which works on multinational issues.
But his impeachment remained a nagging footnote. It was repeatedly invoked in news accounts and seen as derailing his ambitions for a greater leadership role.
“That seems to be the only thing of significance to people who write,” Hastings said in 2013, predicting that the impeachment would be in the lead paragraph of his obituary.
Hastings was passed over for chairmanship of the House intelligence committee when the Democrats took Congress in 2006.
“Sorry, haters,” he said then. “God is not finished with me yet.”
Under Florida law, Governor Ron DeSantis will now call a special election to fill the vacant seat.
Hastings’ district is overwhelmingly Democratic – he received 80% of the vote in November. But his death lowers the Democrats’ majority to 218-211. The narrow margin is forcing the party to muster nearly unanimous votes to push legislation and bolstering Republican hopes for 2022. There are six vacancies, four from seats that were held by Democrats, two by Republicans.
Hastings was born on 5 September 1936 in Altamonte Springs, Florida, a largely black Orlando suburb, the son of a maid and a butler. He attended Fisk University and Florida A&M. After a law degree he went into private practice, taking on civil rights cases. He made a bid for the US Senate in 1970, then earned a state judgeship.
In 1979, Jimmy Carter named him to the federal bench. He was the first Black person to hold a federal judgeship in Florida since Reconstruction.
His career was marked by controversy. His harsh criticism of Ronald Reagan, his appearance at a rally in 1984 for the then presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and other moves raised questions about his impartiality. He insisted he was doing nothing wrong.
“Outside the courtroom, I speak out because I’m a citizen and I have the interests of a great number people of this country at heart,” he said. “I think it’s better to have public officials express themselves. I don’t think being a judge means I’m neutered.”
It wasn’t long before he became the first sitting US judge tried on criminal charges. Along with the Washington lawyer William Borders Jr, Hastings was accused of soliciting a $150,000 bribe from two racketeers seeking to shorten their sentences.
Borders was convicted and sentenced to five years. Hastings contended Borders acted without his knowledge and was acquitted but a judicial panel accused him of fabricating his defense. The House impeached him in 1988 and the Senate convicted him in 1989.
A federal judge reversed the impeachment, saying Hastings was improperly tried by a 12-member panel instead of the full Senate, but his exoneration was short-lived. Ruling in the case of another ousted judge, the US supreme court decided 7-2 that courts could not second-guess the Senate’s power to remove federal officials.
By then, Hastings had won a seat in Congress. He won the seat after two bitter runoffs fueled by accusations of racism in the largely Black district. At one point, in his heated race against Lois Frankel, he snapped to a reporter: “The bitch is a racist.” He went on to win and was re-elected time after time.
Frankel earned her own ticket to Congress 20 years later, as a Democratic colleague.
Hastings remained no stranger to controversy. In 2011, a former aide filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, claiming he hugged her against her will and suggested they go to his hotel room. Hastings called the accusations “ridiculous, bizarre, frivolous”. The House ethics committee cleared him.
“I’ve enjoyed some of the fights, and even the process of being indicted and removed from the bench,” he said in 2013. “All of those are extraordinary types of circumstances that would cause lesser people to buckle. I did not and I have not.” More

Donald Trump’s obsession with the Deep State conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent secret government of bureaucrats and intelligence officials existed to thwart his agenda in office, was destructive and delusional, John Boehner says in a new book.“Let me be diplomatic here,” the former speaker writes in the memoir, On the House. “That’s horseshit.”Boehner’s view chimes with that of Steve Bannon, a key propagator of the theory who was Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 and a senior White House strategist.Trump, senior aide Stephen Miller and others have repeatedly blamed the Deep State for their problems. Bannon has said the theory is “for nut cases” and “none of this is true”.Boehner was a congressman from Ohio for 24 years, a figure in the Washington firmament, House speaker from 2011 until his retirement in 2015 – a period he spent in fierce opposition to Barack Obama.His memoir will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.His criticism of Trump comes as no surprise, not least because an extract of the book ran in Politico last week. Boehner is heavily critical of Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. Leading figures in the pro-Trump establishment duly lashed back.The Fox News host Sean Hannity responded to being called “one of the worst” by tweeting: “John Boehner will go down in history as one of the worst Republican speakers in history. He’s weak, timid and what’s up with all the crying John?”Boehner was a famously lachrymose House speaker, apt to tear up in simple nostalgia or when in the presence of the pope.Hannity added: “There was not a single time I was around him when he didn’t just reek of cigarette smoke and wine breath.”Boehner plays up to his somewhat clubbable image, his cover image a portrait with wine glass and cigarette. But his rebuke over the Deep State theory, which Trump, key aides and reporters continue to espouse now he is out of power, may still sting.Boehner examines the wellsprings of the theory, writing: “The Deep State as a boogeyman is not an idea the Trump Republicans invented out of whole cloth.“As long as I’ve been in politics, politicians have railed against this group or that group in Washington as the villains standing in the way of whatever they’re trying to do. I too railed against ‘the establishment’ as a young hothead.”Boehner says there is indeed “an entrenched bureaucracy that likes to protect the status quo”. But he says posturing against it took a “nastier turn” under Trump.Even before the former president took up the lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden which was repeatedly thrown out of court but still sent supporters to storm the US Capitol, he claimed the Deep State posed “a threat to democracy itself”.Boehner calls such talk “very destructive – not to mention delusional”, and defends the work of most bureaucrats and also lobbyists.“Playing hardball or ‘creative disruption’ or whatever you want to call it can and does work sometimes,” he writes. “Knee-jerk defenders of President Trump would often say that’s what he was up to whenever there was some new pronouncement of action that didn’t make sense.“Well, they may have been right in some cases … but having to constantly point to the Deep State as this boogeyman responsible for all these problems just seems … weird.” More