US Politics

“Covid’s over, baby!” So proclaims a bare-chested man, wearing face paint like the Joker, nemesis of Batman, as he stands atop a car and waves the American national flag.This was the scene last weekend in Miami, Florida, a state that moved quickly to lift lockdowns, reopen schools, shelve mask mandates and become, in the words of its governor, Ron DeSantis, an “an oasis of freedom” during the coronavirus pandemic.This approach has dismayed health experts but delighted Republicans and cemented DeSantis’s reputation as perhaps the most high-profile keeper of Donald Trump’s legacy as a swath of party figures jostle to become his political heir. Last month the governor proposed a raft of new election laws that would make it harder to vote. He relishes sparring with the media and is now claiming victory over his pandemic critics.“Floridians have been flouting the rules since the beginning of the pandemic,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York. “That said, they seem to be fairly happy with DeSantis’s performance overall and he certainly thinks he’s the heir apparent to Donald Trump at this point. He’s very proud of himself and he’s touting himself as being the next great wunderkind of the Republican party.”While Trump and Joe Biden hogged the limelight, the coronavirus has done much to shape the fortunes of state governors across America. Democrats Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California went from heroes to zeroes after a series of missteps. DeSantis – at 42 the nation’s youngest governor – and fellow Republican Kristi Noem of South Dakota both worked hard to create a perception of success despite their uneasy relationship with science.[DeSantis] certainly thinks he’s the heir apparent to Donald Trump at this pointFlorida has hardly escaped unscathed: its death toll of more than 32,000 is the fourth highest in the country after California, New York and Texas. A year ago DeSantis reluctantly bowed to pressure by issuing a stay-at-home order and requiring non-essential businesses to close. But like Trump, he was eager to restart the economy and moved more swiftly than many states to reopen schools.DeSantis faced widespread opprobrium even as Cuomo was publishing a book lauding his own pandemic response. But now the tables have turned.John Zogby, a pollster and author, said: “Bluntly, he was the village idiot at the beginning of all this and it was hard to understand what he was doing in a state like Florida. He’s riding a crest now because it appears to be working. We don’t know what happens next but, providing this crest continues, he’s positioning himself as the non-Trump to Trump’s base.”In a piece of political theatre last week, DeSantis hosted a handpicked panel of health experts at the state capitol in Tallahassee to publicly vindicate his opposition on lockdowns and mandates. Among them was Scott Atlas, a radiologist who had no formal experience infectious diseases when Trump hired him last summer as a coronavirus adviser.DeSantis boasted: “The data could not be clearer that our state has fared far better than many others, particularly those that imposed harsh lockdowns on their residents.”His supporters point out that, despite California’s more cautious approach, its Covid-19 case rate is similar to that of Florida according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy last month found DeSantis with a 53% approval rating.Although the 2024 presidential election is a political aeon away, there is early chatter that the Ivy League-educated lawyer, Iraq war veteran and former member of Congress, who emulates Trump’s in-yer-face style, could become the torch bearer for the “Make America Great Again” movement.Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “He benefits from the same model that Trump benefited from, which is a lot of media criticism. The media castigated him day and night for his handling of coronavirus versus California but then, when he can point that he has better numbers than California, he can say ‘Ah ha!’ That is something that Trump voters love to hear when it’s at the media’s expense.“He is starting to check off boxes that will be important to Trump voters in 2024. One of those is obviously your handling of the pandemic; he doesn’t pray at the altar of Dr Fauci.”Like Ronald Reagan and George W Bush before him, DeSantis would be running for the Republican nomination with executive experience as a state governor and could pitch himself as a Washington outsider.Whalen added: “So he could say, just as Trump did, ‘I’m not part of the problem, I’m part of the solution’. It’s just so fundamentally awkward if you’re Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or even Josh Hawley or Ben Sasse – the legions of senators all looking to run – to divorce yourself from Washington and Congress.”DeSantis is also in a strong position because Florida, the third most populous state, carries huge electoral clout and appears to have shifted decisively to the right. Trump is now based at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach while his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have set up home in Miami.Meanwhile Florida’s two Republicans senators, Rubio and Rick Scott, are seen as potential contenders for 2024. And the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz is one of Trump’s most combative champions and imitators.Roger Stone, a Florida-based political consultant pardoned by Trump on seven criminal counts in the Russia investigation, said: “Florida remains the last bastion and it is definitely the centre of action in terms of conservative Republican ‘America first’ politics. We could have as many as three candidates here.We are the blue-collar party now, we’re the working-class party“Or four: if the president runs, I think he clears the field. The nomination is his if he wants it. This is his party now. We’re never going to go back to being the country club party of the Bushes. We are the blue-collar party now, we’re the working-class party.”But for now, DeSantis appears to have the edge in what the Politico website dubbed the “if-Trump-doesn’t-run” primary as it noted that several candidates are already networking in Iowa, traditionally the first state to have a say.At last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, the governor finished runner-up to Trump in one straw poll for the 2024 Republican nomination and first in another that excluded the 45th president.And on Monday, in a podcast interview with Lisa Boothe, Trump mentioned DeSantis first when listing Republicans he believes have a bright future. “Ron DeSantis is doing a really good job in Florida,” Trump said, going on to cite Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and the Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Sarah Sanders.Trump also praised Noem, the South Dakota governor who has vied with DeSantis in the anti-shutdown stakes, infamously allowing the Sturgis biker rally to take place. She has been travelling widely to address state Republican parties and chalking up appearances on Fox News. Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, are also potential candidates for 2024. If Trump decides to play kingmaker, his endorsement could be decisive.His 2018 endorsement played a crucial part in DeSantis’s unlikely victory in the Republican primary for governor. Stone observed: “DeSantis’s rise on Fox television as a defender of Trump is really what won him the gubernatorial nomination in the primary. He’s been very loyal to the president since he’s been president and their governing style is very similar.“So in that sense, I think policy-wise, he would be solid. I just wonder whether he has the showmanship that Trump has, that Matt Gaetz has, that Josh Hawley has, for example. We are in the television age, still. Charisma matters and I think to a certain extent the governor doesn’t have the kind of connection with voters that the president has, just in terms of his personal gravitas.”First, however, DeSantis must win re-election as governor of Florida next year. His handling of the pandemic will be a key issue. Critics argue that his vaccine distribution programme favours rich donors and blame his laissez-faire approach for chaos in Miami Beach last weekend that saw fighting in the streets, restaurant property destroyed and more than 1,000 arrests made.Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic congresswoman from Florida who is among leaders of a Ron Be Gone campaign, told NBC News: “His arrogance and complete detachment from the pain and suffering of our communities is very telling of someone that is in this position to advance his political ambitions, and it’s obvious because they’re already discussing 2024.” More

For Terrence Wise, a McDonald’s employee from Kansas City, Missouri, the battle for a raise in the federal minimum wage is far from over.
Joe Biden campaigned on a raise, the first since 2009, and the majority of Americans of both parties support an increase. And yet, last month, Congress blocked an increase from the paltry $7.25 an hour where it has been stuck since 2009. Now there are signs of new momentum for change.
If Washington can’t find a solution, Wise had a warning for politicians of both sides. “If you’re not going to make $15 a reality for workers, if you’re not going to create an environment for workers to join a union and make that possible, you will not be re-elected. You will not have your seat again,” Wise said, an organizer with the Fight for $15 movement. “We will not continue to choose representatives who are truly not representing us or who are out of tune with the working class.
“We say don’t take it as a threat – take it as a promise.”

High hopes that the federal minimum wage would be lifted for the first time in over 10 years came with the introduction of Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus package. The wage hike, which Biden tucked into his original stimulus plan, would have been the largest victory for the Fight for $15 movement since it started to mobilize fast-food workers in 2012.
But when the bill hit the Senate, the wage increase faced two major hurdles: moderate Democrats who said that $15 was just too high and a ruling from the Senate’s parliamentarian on whether including an increase in the spending bill would break Senate rules.
Ultimately, both factors stopped the increase from going into law.
While Congress’s failure to raise the minimum wage dealt a blow to the Fight for $15 movement, advocates say there is still enough momentum behind the issue to build pressure on lawmakers in DC to bring a $15 minimum wage back to the table. Activists also say the Democratic party risks losing the support of some of its base if a new minimum wage fails to pass.
“It’s such a core priority for so many organizations, for so many people, so many of the voters that put a lot of these elected officials into office,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, director of work quality at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s the top economic policy priority this year.”
Multiple polls have shown there is broad support for a $15 minimum wage. One Pew Research poll from 2019 found that 67% of Americans support a minimum wage increase. An Amazon/Ipsos poll released this month found approximately the same percentage of support.
With inaction from Congress, 29 states have increased their own minimum wage above the federal rate. Seven states have passed legislation increasing their minimum wage to $15 gradually, Florida being the most recent state to pass the measure by a ballot initiative. A few companies have also taken things into their own hands, with Costco, Amazon and Target increasing their minimum wage to at least $15 in recent years. More

Two and a half years ago, at a naturalization ceremony for newly minted Americans, Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked: “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City’s garment district and a supreme court justice?”Her answer: “One generation … the difference between opportunities available to my mother and those afforded me.”From this new selection of Ginsburg’s arguments, speeches and opinions – the justice’s greatest hits – it is clear she deserves at least as much credit as any other American for that remarkably rapid transformation.This book is full of evidence that even in a nation like ours, where over the last 50 years the concentration of power in the hands of the top 1% has steadily worsened, a brilliant and determined individual with the right alliances can still bring about extraordinary change within her own lifetime.The book’s co-author, Amanda L Tyler, writes that Ginsburg’s work for gender equality is comparable to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s trailblazing quest to dismantle segregation.The burning determination of the gay activist Frank Kameny similarly transformed the status of LGBTQ people – and Ginsberg’s commitment to equal rights for all meant that she ended up doing just as much to expand the rights of sexual minorities as she did for the rights of women.Looking back from the third decade of the 21st century, the breadth and depth of the discrimination women of Ginsberg’s generation faced at the beginning of their careers is astonishing.Harvard Law School never allowed a woman student until 1950. When Ginsburg entered, in 1956, she was one of just nine women in a class of 500. Across America, women were routinely excluded from jury pools. Through the 1960s, the supreme court even declined to disturb a law that prohibited women from bartending “unless they did so under the auspices of a husband or father”.In 1963, when she started teaching law at Rutgers, Ginsburg was only the 19th woman professor at an American law school – and the dean proudly disobeyed the newly passed Equal Pay Act by paying her much less than her male colleagues, because she had a “husband with a well-paid job”.Ginsburg’s determination was obvious. When she was still in law school, her husband, Marty, developed a virulent form of cancer. They also had an infant daughter. But neither handicap prevented her or her husband from excelling in their studies and she actually described her child-rearing duties as an advantage in law school, because they gave her a more balanced life than most of her classmates.“Each part of my life was a respite from the other,” Ginsberg explained, six decades later. “After an intense day at the law school, I was glad to have the childcare hours. And then when Jane went to bed, I was ready to go back to the books. I think it was an appreciation that there is more to life than law school that accounts for how well I did.”In one of the first cases she litigated with her husband, in 1971, Moritz v Commissioner of Internal Revenue, they argued that Charles Moritz, a never-married man who cared for his mother, was denied a caregiver deduction a woman in his position would have received.Congress amended the law to permit all caregivers to claim the deduction going forward, but the government kept the appeal going anyway. It was then that Ginsburg received her greatest gift from her adversary: a list of every provision in the United States Code that differentiated on the basis of sex.“There it was, right in front of us,” she recalled, “all the laws that needed to be changed or eliminated … it was our road map, a pearl beyond price, that list of federal statutes.”In the 60s, excelling in law school didn’t mean a woman would be a strong candidate to be hired by any of the fanciest firms. But in retrospect Ginsberg agreed with the first woman on the supreme court, Sandra Day O’Connor, that even this kind of adversity had its advantages.Ginsburg often repeated O’Connor’s comment: “Suppose you and I had gone to law school … when there was no barrier to women in the legal profession. Where would we be now? We would be retired partners of a large law firm.” But because they had to find a different path, “both of us ended up on the US supreme court.”This book is also a reminder of the wisdom of Vincent Scully, the great Yale architectural historian, who noted just two years after Ginsburg was appointed to the court that “ours is a time which, with all its agonies, has … been marked most of all by liberation” – black liberation, women’s liberation and gay liberation.“Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred,” Scully said. “Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.”Ginsberg’s energy and perspicacity gave her a singularly important role in bringing about many of those fundamental changes. More

Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration”. The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims, “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks – they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28% more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31% during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25% from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by US policies over the years, that drives migration in the first place.But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.The core message of the Republican party now consists of liesRepublicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented migrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people and Hispanic Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering and keeps dark money out of elections. It passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented migrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent migrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic demands voting be restricted to counter it.The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law and human rights.Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.In his maiden speech at the state department on 4 March, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States”.The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican party, but there was no mistaking his subject.“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.Not since the years leading up to the civil war has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy. More

A Republican lawyer who advised Donald Trump on his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results is now playing a central role coordinating the Republican effort to tighten voting laws around the country.
The moves comes as Trump himself signaled his support for new Republican-pushed legislation in Georgia which critics have slammed as being a major blow to voting rights for communities of color, especially Black voters. Joe Biden called the Georgia laws “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “an atrocity”.

But Trump, whose grip on the Republican party remains strong, welcomed the Georgia developments. “Congratulations to Georgia and the Georgia state legislature on changing their voter rules and regulations,” Trump said in a statement through his Pac, Save America, which repeated his baseless allegation that fraud was a factor in his election loss to Biden. “They learned from the travesty of the 2020 presidential election, which can never be allowed to happen again. Too bad these changes could not have been done sooner!”
Trump is still a dominant force among the party’s Republican base and his backing for clamping down on voting rights – and the involvement of people close to him – reveal the likely future direction of the party as it faces up to diversifying demographic trends in America at odds with its mostly white support.
Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican lawyer and advocate for conservative causes, was among the Trump advisers on a January phone call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to declare him, and not Biden, the winner of the battleground state.
Now Mitchell has taken the helm of two separate efforts to push for tighter state voting laws and to fight Democratic efforts to expand access to the ballot at the federal level. She is also advising state lawmakers crafting the voting restriction proposals. And she is in regular contact with Trump.
“People are actually interested in getting involved and we have to harness all this energy,” Mitchell said in an interview with the Associated Press. “There are a lot of groups that have projects on election integrity that never did before.”
Trump’s false claims of fraud during and after the 2020 election have fueled a wave of new voting restrictions.
More than 250 proposed voting restrictions have been proposed this year by mostly Republican lawmakers, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
On Thursday, Georgia’s GOP governor signed into law a measure requiring voters to present ID to vote by mail, gives the GOP-controlled state legislature new powers over local elections boards and outlaws providing food or water to people waiting in line to vote.
In response, Democrats have stepped up the push for a massive federal election overhaul bill. That proposal, known as HR1, would effectively neuter state-level voter ID laws, allow anyone to vote by mail if they wanted to and automatically register citizens to vote. Republicans view that as an encroachment on state control over elections and say it is designed to give Democrats an advantage.
“The left is trying to dismantle 100 years of advancement in election administration,” Mitchell said, expressing bafflement at Democrats’ charges that Republicans are trying to suppress votes. “We’re watching two different movies right now.”
Mitchell’s most public involvement in the voting wars came in participation on Trump’s call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on 2 January. During that call, Mitchell insisted she had evidence of voting fraud, but officials with the secretary of state’s office told her that her data was incorrect.
Mitchell has two new roles in an emerging conservative voting operation. She’s running a $10m initiative at the limited government group FreedomWorks to both push for new restrictions in voting and help train conservatives to get involved in the nuts and bolts of local elections.
She’s also a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization run by former Republican Senator Jim DeMint. She says she’ll use that role to “coordinate” conservative voting positions, particularly in opposition to HR 1.
Mitchell, 70, has links to other influential players in the conservative movement and serves as outside counsel to the American Legislative Exchange Committee, a conservative group that provides model legislation to state lawmakers and organized a call with state lawmakers and Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, on opposing HR 1.
Mitchell told the Associated Press she’s been talking regularly with Republican state lawmakers about the need for new election laws. She would not identify whom she speaks with but said it’s been a longtime passion.
She similarly would not detail her conversations with Trump or say whether they involved the new voting fights. “I’m in touch with the president fairly frequently,” she said of Trump.
Repeated audits have shown no significant problems with the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters lost more than 50 court cases challenging its results. More

A ‘Reclaim These Streets’ protest outside Cardiff Bay police station on 15 March. The Labour party announced it would oppose the government’s plan to give police greater powers to crack down on peaceful protest.

Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty More

A few months into the pandemic the tooth fairy didn’t show up. Mary Beth Cochran was caring for her six-year-old grandson, Howie, in the small town of Canton, North Carolina, and having lost her Kmart job and with it more than half her income, she couldn’t afford food let alone a dollar under the pillow.Howie woke that morning and shouted out to his grandmother: “Memaw, my tooth’s still here, what happened?” He frantically scoured the bedding for a note or coins, then slumped to the floor and cried.Cochran was tempted to say to the boy: “Tooth fairy couldn’t come because she’s run out of money.” But she didn’t. “You know, sometimes tooth fairy can’t get to all the children,” she said.Cochran, 52, is no stranger to the hardships that living in poverty in the United States can bring. She has had to put her marriage on hold because she can’t afford it – living together with her husband would cost them hundreds of dollars in lost benefits.But the Covid-19 crisis has pushed her to new extremes that have tested her ability to provide for Howie and his sister Annie, 11. Cochran has cared for the children over the past five years after her eldest daughter, their mother, fell into drug addiction and homelessness. Howie and Annie’s two other siblings are looked after by another of Cochran’s daughters who lives nearby.With $814 a month in disability pay and $236 in child support, from which she must subtract $600 in rent, Cochran has $450 a month and food stamps to feed and clothe the two children in her care.As weeks of the pandemic passed by and resources tightened, necessities started to peel away. Clothes and shoes that Cochran used to buy for the kids from thrift stores and bargain basements now became strictly second-hand.When even cast-off shoes for the rapidly growing Howie became beyond her reach, Cochran skipped buying the medicines she takes for her own chronic back problem and bipolar disorder.The toughest part has been the knowledge that there have been nights when the children have gone to bed hungry. “It breaks my heart,” she said. “I know it’s not my fault, but I wish things could be different. I wish I could give them everything they need.”Now Cochran has a chance to give her young charges everything they need. Joe Biden’s $1.9tn pandemic relief package, the American Rescue Plan, signed into law by the president earlier this month, contains a relatively unheeded feature that could radically improve the lives of Annie and Howie and millions of other American children like them trapped in poverty.The provision, known as the child tax credit, is so much more than the cold, bureaucratic transaction suggested by its title. It will transform the way that welfare is addressed in the US, bringing it into line with European and other wealthier countries by discarding the old shibboleth of deserving and undeserving poor that has dogged America’s approach for a quarter of a century.Most significantly, it will have the potential to cut child poverty in the country in half by lifting more than 5 million American kids out of its iron grip.“Millions of children will benefit,” said Kathryn Edin, professor of sociology at Princeton. “It’s amazing. It’s dignifying, it doesn’t stigmatize, it no longer segregates poor children but tells them they are important and allows them to live as part of society.”It no longer segregates poor children but tells them they are important and allows them to live as part of societyUnder the new provision, families will receive $3,600 a year for each child under six, and $3,000 a year for each older child. The money will be paid monthly, rather than the current annual lump sum, easing the burden throughout the year, and it will no longer be tied to any work requirements.Its impact will spread far and wide. A family like Cochran’s will benefit with $500 a month, no strings attached, doubling her available cash for her grandkids.Almost 70 million children will be included in the scheme – that’s more than 90% of all American kids. And the impact, social scientists believe, will be transformative.The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University has calculated that about 5.5 million children will be lifted out of poverty – more than half those currently plagued by it. The injection of cash support will have a stunning effect especially in communities of color.One in five Black children are currently locked into poverty in America; they are projected to see a 55% drop in poverty rates. Hispanic children too are expected to see a boost, with 53% lifted out of poverty.“This would be the biggest poverty reduction legislation since the introduction of social security in the 1960s,” said Zachary Parolin, one of the Columbia authors. “We could look back on this moment, and this legislation, as an historic turning point in the development of the US welfare state.”So what does all this mean to the actual kids – to the Howies and Annies of America?Edin has a strong take on that question, having helped focus public attention on the crisis of child poverty in America with her 2015 book, $2 a Day. It delivered the gut-wrenching news that there were 1.5 million families in the US – including 3 million children – eking out a virtually cashless existence on no more than $2 a person a day.Edin began studying poverty in the early 1990s, and had a front-row seat on the 1996 welfare reforms that dramatically changed the way the US interacted with its poor. The move scrapped cash aid for low-income families with children and replaced it with a work requirement that meant that those without a job were disconnected from state help.The sociologist watched aghast as more and more families – especially those which were African American, Hispanic or headed by a single mother – were forced into direst need by a diabolical catch-22. Many of them were too poor to work, and because they weren’t in work they were deemed undeserving of benefits.“In $2 a Day we told the story of the woman who couldn’t work because she couldn’t put gas in her car. Once you end up in that kind of spiral it’s very hard to get out of, and it puts your kids at risk.”As a result of what Edin calls the “toxic alchemy” of the 1996 welfare reforms, by the mid-2000s one in five single mothers were neither working nor receiving any welfare benefits. They were dependent on food stamps and living essentially cashless in the richest nation on Earth.The terrible hardship that Edin watched unfolding is prevalent today. A separate 2019 Columbia University study found that more than one in three children in the US are penalized because their families earn too little to be fully eligible for benefits.That includes 23 million children who are too poor to receive state aid.This hard-edged approach has separated the US from many other high-income nations such as Canada, the UK and Australia, which offer large swaths of their populations a guaranteed income to rear their children. The work-related path taken by the US essentially abandoned its most vulnerable children to the vagaries of food insecurity, eviction and all the mental and physical health problems that flow from being poor.You can see what those harsh winds can do through the experiences of the Cochrans during the pandemic. Every month when Mary Beth received her disability money, Annie, a nervous child racked by anxiety instilled by her unstable early childhood, would approach her.“Memaw, are you OK?” she would say. “Do we have enough food to last this month?”The honest answer was, no. By the third week in the month the cash was gone, the food stamps dried up. Cochran stopped buying fresh salad – Annie’s favorite – because it was too expensive, turning to less healthy packaged foods such as hotdogs and burgers.Even then, there was not enough to feed the children. By the end of the month there was no way out of it. Cochran, who doesn’t own a car, would have to beg a lift to the soup kitchen.“It hurts so much,” she said. “I feel like I’m letting them down. I knew they were hungry, and there was nothing I could do to change it.”The devastating shift in 1996 away from cash aid to work-related tax credits was founded upon the view that poverty is a moral deficiency, a form of victim blaming that stems back generations in America. It was signed into law by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and received strong backing from Biden, then a US senator from Delaware.Biden tried to justify the reform’s tough work requirements by arguing at the time that “too many welfare recipients spend far too long on welfare and do far too little in exchange for their benefits”.Today, Biden finds himself at the forefront of a movement that is beginning to undo some of the damage wrought by that legislation he supported 25 years ago. But his about-turn hasn’t come without a shove.Until relatively recently, Biden remained agnostic about the idea of addressing child poverty amid the destruction of the pandemic. It took the energetic intervention of a Democratic congresswoman to force the child allowance on to his coronavirus relief package.That congresswoman was Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who has been striving to get subsidies for children on to the statute books for almost two decades. In 2003 she introduced her first “advancement of the child” bill, re-entering it every two years only to see it die repeatedly for lack of political support.These were the lonely years in the wilderness when child poverty was considered insignificant. “It wasn’t a question of opposition, it was a question of indifference,” she told the Guardian. “So for a while, yes, I was a lone voice.”But she kept her eyes doggedly on the prize, driven by her deep understanding of children in need based on her own personal experiences. When she was nine, her family in New Haven fell on hard times and were evicted from their home.She went to live, like Annie and Howie, with her grandmother. “My family struggled financially for most of my parents’ lives. My own background inspires me to keep pushing,” she said.Now all those years of effort have paid dividends. “For the US this is historic,” she said of the new child allowance. “It’s akin to what Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal through social security which lifted 90% of seniors out of poverty – President Biden is lifting millions of children out of poverty.”So what changed? What led the US to pull back from 25 years of a policy that, at best, could be described as tough love, at worst looks like cruelty towards its most defenseless children?DeLauro ascribes the shifting mood to the pandemic, which she says has “shone a bright light on the health and economic inequities and the racial disparities in our system”.Edin agrees that if it hadn’t been for the pandemic we might not be here. Such glaring hardship for so many Americans has made it impossible to continue to victim-blame the “undeserving” poor.“The undeserving-deserving divide breaks down when people who do deserving things don’t get what society has promised them. The labor market is so fragile, and so many people feel on the edge, you really don’t have two groups any more.”The other great driving force behind the new provisions has been race. The eruption of racial justice protests last summer following the death in police custody of George Floyd has led to a renewed focus on police brutality and the treatment of Black communities within the criminal justice system.But it has also put new vigor in movements to challenge the growing inequality between racial groups in the US and push back against the white supremacist narrative unleashed by Donald Trump. One of the beneficiaries of this new energy has been the cause of child poverty.The Rev Dr Starsky Wilson is himself an example of the links between the struggle for racial justice and the battle to lift children out of poverty. He was co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, an independent review of the impediments to racial equality convened in the wake of the 2014 police killing in Ferguson, Missouri, of the unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown.Today Wilson is president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a leading US advocacy group whose mission is to make sure every child in America has what they need to thrive. He views the new child allowances as a corrective to generations of public policy skewed against communities of color, which resulted in the vast 90% wealth gap between African American families and their white counterparts.“The movement for racial justice, starting in Ferguson and culminating in the largest racial justice mobilization in history in 2020, has absolutely changed our ability to talk about public responsibility to respond to racial inequality,” he said.It’s going to mean food on the table in July when they are out of school and there is no summer feeding programsWilson evoked a young child living in Lower St Louis where he used to pastor, and pondered what the new $300-a-month allowance for their family would mean for them. “It’s going to mean food on the table in July when they are out of school and there is no summer feeding programs. It is going to mean the child feeling settled and safe, each and every day.”The challenge now for Wilson and all the others who have campaigned for so long for a better deal for America’s children is to make this victory last. Under the pandemic relief package, the new allowances will be in place for one year only, but the hope is that they will prove so popular that Congress will be obliged to make them permanent.Mary Beth Cochran would certainly welcome that. Once she starts receiving the $500-a-month checks this summer she plans to pay off her bills and then maybe buy a used car. She won’t have to skip her meds any more or go to the soup kitchen, and when the pandemic lifts she plans to drive to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee so Annie and Howie can play in the rivers.And the tooth fairy will be back. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterAs a photo of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, circulated around the internet, showing the politician signing the sweeping voting restrictions bill while surrounded by other white, male politicians, some Twitter users homed in on a previously undetected detail.The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch created a Twitter thread about a painting of a Georgia plantation that is hanging behind Kemp in the photograph. Writing about the history of the Callaway plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia, Bunch said the place depicted “thrived because of the back-breaking labor of more than 100 slaves who were held in cruel human bondage”.The columnist, who later published an op-ed about the discovery, said the symbolism of Kemp signing a bill that Joe Biden has referred to as “Jim Crow in the 21st century” is no coincidence.The 98-page Election Integrity Act of 2021 has garnered criticism for the additional ID requirements it has added to absentee voting, and making it a crime for many volunteers to hand out water or food within 150 feet of polling precincts.The practice of handing out food and water became popular as a method of keeping exhausted voters in line at precincts where wait times can span hours. The law also places drop boxes inside voting sites. These drop boxes, which have been in place since last year, will only be accessible during early voting hours instead of 24/7.1. You’ve probably seen this picture of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his gaggle of white men signing the state’s voter suppression law — the new, new Jim Crow. But there’s a shocking angle to this story that you haven’t heard. Sit down for this one… pic.twitter.com/edHPmyeoiu— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
“Brian Kemp and his white henchmen have created an image for our times, in working to continue a tradition of inhumanity and white supremacy that now spans centuries, from the human bondage that took place behind the placid scenery of Brickhouse Road in Wilkes county, to the suppression now hidden behind a phony facade of ‘voter integrity’. This legacy is a crime against humanity, and it cannot stand,” Bunch tweeted.The imagery garnered outrage from other people on Twitter, too.The signing of the Georgia Voter Suppression law yesterday was done under the backdrop of Callaway Plantation in Georgia. Having a bunch of white men under a plantation signing a massive voter suppression bill lets everyone know EXACTLY what they want to have happen. https://t.co/QeXMoPqXQj— ProfB (@AntheaButler) March 26, 2021
Mounted behind white enslavers’ descendants signing a law to make it hard for Black people to vote is Callaway Plantation, a concentration camp where Callaways forced 319 Black Georgians to work free and build southern wealth that gave these men power they’re trying to maintain. pic.twitter.com/kSvFmOF1gM— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) March 26, 2021
Thursday’s signing of the law also garnered criticism after a Democratic representative, Park Cannon, was arrested for knocking on the office door as Kemp signed the bill in a closed-door ceremony. More