US Politics

Republicans and Democrats sent dueling delegations to the southern US border on Friday, in an attempt to frame perceptions of the Biden administration’s immigration policy amid an uptick in recent weeks in border crossings by undocumented migrants.A group of Republican senators led by Ted Cruz of Texas presented their trip as an exposé of dire circumstances, with Cruz sharing video of himself on Thursday night standing in darkness next to the Rio Grande river and falsely warning about a “flood” of human smuggling.A group of Democratic members of the House of Representatives led by Joaquín Castro of Texas described a different vulnerability at the border, that of unaccompanied children held by the US government.The Democratic delegation planned on Friday to visit children at a Department of Health and Human Services facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, to ensure “that they’re treated humanely”, Castro said.Beto O’Rourke, the former representative from El Paso, Texas, blasted Cruz on Twitter on Friday for what O’Rourke implied was a political charade designed to slow the momentum of Joe Biden, who has presided over a successful coronavirus vaccine rollout, signed an $1.9tn economic relief package and announced plans for a similar big spend on infrastructure.“The truth is, the number of individual asylum seekers and immigrants seeking to come to this country is the SAME or LOWER than it was in 2019 when [Donald] Trump was President (and you were, apparently, Senator),” O’Rourke sniped at Cruz. “This isn’t any more of a crisis today than it was then.”After two election cycles in which the former president’s strategy of fearmongering about supposed pressure on the border produced a Republican rout in midterm elections and then his own defeat, Cruz and colleagues returned to the strategy once again with a two-day, high-profile tour of border areas that included almost one quarter of the party’s senators.One member of the delegation, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, tweeted video from a visibly crowded border detention facility on Friday, claiming the facility was holding almost 10 times its intended capacity.Cruz was trying on Friday to get the hashtag “#Bidenbordercrisis” going on Twitter.Biden said in a news conference on Thursday: “I’m ready to work with any Republican who wants to help solve the problem. Or make the situation better.”But the president sought to draw a sharp line between his border policies and those of his predecessor.“The idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, ‘If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side’ – no previous administration did that either, except Trump,” Biden said. “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it.”Trump enacted a policy of family separation at the border, taking more than 5,500 children from their parents and then failing to keep track of the separated families, ultimately stranding hundreds of children whose parents could not be found, according to court documents.Biden has placed Kamala Harris in charge of addressing the situation on the border. In an interview earlier this week the vice-president said that she and Biden would “absolutely” visit the border in person.“They should all be going back. All be going back,” Biden said of people crossing the border. “The only people we are not going to leave sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children.”Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said a nine-year-old child from Mexico died last week while trying to reach the US border.“US border patrol agents assigned to Del Rio sector’s marine unit rescued two migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande, March 20,” the agency said in a statement released on Thursday. “US border patrol marine unit agents responded to assist three individuals stranded on an island on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande River.”Border agents administered first aid to the three migrants. Two of them, a woman from Guatemala and her three-year-old child, regained consciousness, but the third, a child from Mexico, did not and was later pronounced dead by medical officials.“We extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of this small child,” the Del Rio sector chief patrol agent, Austin L Skero II, said in the statement.A member of the Democratic border delegation, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, spotlighted the plight of children held in US border detention facilities.“Heading to the southern border with 7 year old Jakelin Caal on my mind,” Tlaib tweeted on Friday morning. “She died in detention, in our care, in 2018. I want to make sure no child dies like this, with conditions that we control.” More

China’s response to criticisms of horrifying human rights violations in Xinjiang is clear and calculated. Its aims are threefold. First, the sanctions imposed upon individuals and institutions in the EU and UK are direct retaliation for those imposed upon China over its treatment of Uighurs. That does not mean they are like-for-like: the EU and UK measures targeted officials responsible for human rights abuses, while these target non-state actors – elected politicians, thinktanks, lawyers and academics – simply for criticising those abuses.Second, they seek more broadly to deter any criticism over Xinjiang, where Beijing denies any rights violations. Third, they appear to be intended to send a message to the EU, UK and others not to fall in line with the harsher US approach towards China generally. Beijing sees human rights concerns as a pretext for defending western hegemony, pointing to historic and current abuses committed by its critics. But mostly it believes it no longer needs to tolerate challenges.Alongside the sanctions, not coincidentally, has come a social media storm and consumer boycott targeting the Swedish clothing chain H&M and other fashion firms over concerns they voiced about reports of forced labour in cotton production in Xinjiang. Nationalism is a real and potent force in China (though not universal), but this outburst does not appear spontaneous: it began when the Communist Youth League picked up on an eight-month-old statement, and is being egged on by state media.China has used its economic might to punish critics before – Norway’s salmon exports slumped after dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel peace prize – and often with the desired results. But this time, it is acting far more overtly, and it is fighting on multiple fronts. Some clothing companies are already falling into line. Overall, the results are more complex. The sanctions have drastically lowered the odds of the European parliament approving the investment deal which China and the EU agreed in December, to US annoyance. Beijing may think the agreement less useful to China than it is to the EU (though many in Europe disagree). But the measures have done more to push Europe towards alignment with the US than anything Joe Biden could have offered, at a time when China is also alienating other players, notably Australia. Foreigners – who in many cases have offered more nuanced voices to counter outright China hawks – are already becoming wary of travelling there, following the detention and trial of two Canadians, essentially taken hostage following their country’s arrest (on a US extradition request) of a top Huawei executive. The sanctioning of scholars and thinktanks is likely to make them more so. Businesses, though still counting on the vast Chinese market, are very belatedly realising the risks attached to it. Those include not only the difficulty of reconciling their positions for consumers inside and outside China, but the challenges they face as the US seeks to pass legislation cracking down on goods made with forced labour, and the potential to be caught up in political skirmishes by virtue of nationality. For those beginning to have second thoughts, rethinking investments or disentangling supply chains will be the work of years or decades. But while we will continue to live in a globalised economy, there is likely to be more decoupling than people foresaw.The pandemic has solidified a growing Chinese confidence that the west is in decline, but has also shown how closely our fates are tied. There can be no solutions on the climate emergency without Beijing, and cooperation on other issues will be both possible and necessary – but extraordinarily difficult.Beijing’s delayed response to the UK sanctions suggests it did not anticipate them, perhaps unsurprising when the integrated review suggested we should somehow court trade and investment while also taking a tougher line. But the prime minister and foreign secretary have, rightly, made their support for sanctioned individuals and their concerns about gross human rights violations in Xinjiang clear. Academics and politicians, universities and other institutions, should follow their lead in backing targeted colleagues and bodies. China has made its position plain. So should democratic societies. More

A national moratorium on water shutoffs could have prevented almost half a million Covid infections and saved at least 9,000 lives, according to new research.Good hygiene is essential to preventing the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus. Amid pressure from public health experts and rights groups, hundreds of utilities and states suspended disconnections for overdue bills to ensure households kept running water for hand-washing and sanitation.But many refused, others let the bans expire after a few months, and Congress refused to step in with a national moratorium. By the end of 2020, 211 million Americans – including a disproportionate number of households of color – faced the threat of having their taps turned off during the worst public health and economic crisis in modern history.This patchwork protection cost thousands of American lives between April and December last year, according to research by Cornell University and the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch (FWW).Researchers found that states which suspended disconnections significantly reduced their growth rates of Covid infections and deaths, compared to states without similar orders. The biggest reduction was seen in states with comprehensive bans covering all private and public utilities.If similar policies had been adopted across the US, the study model shows that Covid cases might have been reduced by 4% and deaths by 5.5% in the 41 states without a full moratorium.“This research clearly shows us that the pain and suffering caused by the pandemic was exacerbated by political leaders who failed to take action to keep the water flowing for struggling families,” said Wenonah Hauter, FWW’s executive director.The findings come amid growing pressure on Michigan and New York state officials to extend their state moratoriums, both of which expire at the end of March. Failure to do so would leave a further 27 million people at risk of losing their water supplies for unpaid bills, as concerns grow about a potential third wave.Advocates are also urging Joe Biden to impose a national moratorium and make water a priority in the forthcoming infrastructure bill.An investigation by the Guardian last year found millions of Americans were facing unaffordable bills even before the pandemic as ageing infrastructure, environmental clean-ups, changing demographics and the climate emergency fuelled exponential price hikes in almost every corner of the US.Federal funding for water systems has plummeted since peaking in 1977.Mildred Warner, a professor of local government at Cornell University, said: “This study shows the importance of a national standard for access to water, especially for low-income households.“The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed so many structural inequities in our society, and access to drinking water is one that demands our attention.” More

As everyone from President Joe Biden to the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin to liberal groups now push to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.“Letting the majority do everything it wants to is not what the founders had in mind,” said the Senate Republican whip, John Thune, in a floor speech defending the filibuster this week. “The founders recognized that it wasn’t just kings who could be tyrants. They knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority if unchecked could trample the rights of the minority … so the founders created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives.”But an inconvenient fact undermines Thune’s argument and should set pluralists at ease: even if the filibuster were eliminated and bills could advance on a simple majority vote, the Senate would still be giving a minority of the American population enough Senate representation to block legislation supported by the majority of the country.In the debate over the filibuster, then, the question is not whether you believe the majority should rule. Instead, the question is this: how small a minority should be given legislative veto power over the rest of the country?Back in 2010, the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was not wrong when he said the founders were “quoted as saying at the constitutional convention the Senate was going to be like the saucer under the teacup, and the tea was going to slosh out and cool off”.To that end, the founders created a Senate giving large and small states equal representation. The idea was for the upper chamber to act as a stately bulwark against the more uncouth ideas that could bubble up from the rabble and its representatives in the lower chamber. In the words of James Madison, the Senate’s undemocratic structure was designed as a “necessary fence” against “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the people.In the modern era, the structure of the Senate has often turned the upper chamber into a place that does not merely respect minority rights – it has actually allowed the minority to rule, regardless of the status of the filibuster. As CNN’s Ronald Brownstein recounted last year, “While the [Republican party] has controlled the Senate for about 22 of the past 40 years, Republican senators have represented a majority of the nation’s population for only a single session over that period: from 1997 to 1998.”Maybe you like this undemocratic dynamic, because you believe it represents the founders’ ideals. Maybe you hate this dynamic, because you believe it makes a mockery of democracy. Whichever side you are on, here’s the point that is germane to the renewed debate over Senate rules: even if the filibuster is eliminated, a minority of the American population will still retain disproportionate, outsized power in Congress’s upper chamber, just as the founders desired.That is because under simple-majority voting rules, the majority of the country’s population does not necessarily rule the Senate. Even without the filibuster, the Senate is still a place where the 265,000 South Dakotans who elected Thune get as much representation as the 2.2 million Georgia voters who elected Raphael Warnock. Consequently, a filibuster-free Democratic Senate would still allow a minority of the population’s senators to rule, if they so choose – because the Senate still provides far less than half the country with the 51 votes necessary to stop any legislation in its tracks.To understand how, let’s do some math.Right now, the 50 Senate Democrats represent roughly 61% of the country’s population, according to census data. The 50 Senate Republicans represent just 49% of the population. All of the Republicans plus Manchin (the Democrat most likely to oppose progressive legislation) represent less than half the country’s population. And yet in a filibuster-free Senate, they could still use a simple-majority vote to stop anything pushed by 49 Senate Democrats who represent 61% of the country. (Note: the percentages don’t add up to 100 because six states have one Democratic and one Republican senator.)If you happen to be one of those constitutional originalists worried about preserving the power of small states, don’t fret. The power imbalance becomes more pronounced when you take party out of the equation and just look at states with the least population. A whopping 52 senators from the least populated states currently represent just 17% of America’s total population – but they would still be able to stop all legislation in a filibuster-free Senate under simple-majority rules.A different way to consider the situation is to think of each American being represented by two Senate votes. Right now, 49 Democrats represent 56% of all those votes. The Republican-Manchin caucus represents just 43% of all of those Senate votes. But again, even without the filibuster, conservatives would have 51 Senate votes to stop anything.These numbers actually understate the situation. That’s because while senators technically represent their entire states, they only need half the voter turnout in their states to actually get into the Senate.Filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% of the population to gridlock the governmentThe point here is simple: no matter what is done with the filibuster, the much-worshiped “cooling saucer” is preserved, and every armchair constitutional scholar with a high self-regard will still get to smugly tell others we are a republic, not a democracy.But these figures underscore not just that the filibuster can be safely discarded without trampling minority rights. They also spotlight how insane the filibuster actually is.Using the same aforementioned math, the filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% percent of the population to gridlock the government. Again, considering that it only takes 50% of the vote to get elected, the filibuster means that about 11% of the voting-age population has successfully elected Republican senators who can theoretically block anything that polls show the overwhelming majority of the country might want.Part of what makes the filibuster discourse so confusing is the differing definitions of “minority”.When the founders created the Senate, they aimed to guarantee that the minority of the population still had rights – they didn’t care about the rights of political parties or factions (which many of them hated).By contrast, when Republicans like Thune depict the filibuster as a noble bulwark protecting “minority rights”, he is not talking about protecting a minority of the population. He is talking about fortifying the power of the chamber’s minority political factions, regardless of how small a segment of the population those factions actually represent.That’s a huge difference – and it helps explain the filibuster’s practical application.Remember, the filibuster is not known as the instrument preventing the majority of the population from trampling the rights of racial or ethnic minorities. Quite the opposite: it has in practice empowered an ideologically conservative political faction to both deprive certain minority groups of their rights and block what the majority of the population wants.When it comes to racial equality, Martin Luther King III noted in an op-ed this week: “The filibuster has historically been used as a tool to try to keep segregationist policies in place. In the 1920s, it was employed to stop anti-lynching legislation from moving forward. In the 1950s, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina famously held the longest filibuster on record to delay, unsuccessfully, civil rights measures. And in a failed effort to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern segregationists filibustered the bill for 60 working days.”Similarly, think about the debate over firearm policy in the wake of yet more mass shootings. The Nation’s Ari Berman notes that after the Sandy Hook massacre, “bipartisan legislation requiring background checks for gun sales was supported by 86% of Americans and 54 senators but blocked by 46 senators representing just 38% of the country.”In both cases, we see that Madison’s desire to restrict democracy in order to limit “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the public wrongly presumes that the only way those impulses are expressed is through the passage of new legislation. In practice, blocking legislation has been an equally pernicious expression of such volatile impulses and passions by a motivated but tiny segment of the population. The filibuster allows those impulses and passions to not just influence legislation but to wholly dominate public policy through that minority’s political factions.In light of this history and the math of the Senate, proposals to merely reform the rules with half measures like a “talking filibuster” seem at best unnecessarily cautious, especially since the filibuster is now so routinely invoked to halt legislation.Fully eliminating the filibuster would still allow a minority of the population to wield disproportionate power, because the chamber’s structure has baked-in rights for the minority of the population even in straight up-or-down vote situations.Put another way: even without the filibuster, there can be a Senate majority party whose senators represent less than half the country. There can also be a transpartisan coalition of 51 senators who represent less than half the country and who can stop essentially anything.The filibuster just makes this undemocratic system more undemocratic, in ways that cannot be justified. In the name of preventing a tyranny of the majority, it creates what I have called a tyranny of the tiny minority. It takes a House of Lords-style institution that has been rationalized by glib “we’re a republic, not a democracy” logic and transforms it into a cartoonishly undemocratic weapon of reactionary power.The rationale for that transformation has amounted to vapid paeans to the founders. Everybody seems to have forgotten that Alexander Hamilton admitted: “To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.”Even without the filibuster, the lesser number of the country will have more than enough Senate representation to express many of its political desires. Keeping the filibuster simply lets that lesser number completely rule everything.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter More

This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican national committee. The pair discuss why he chose to campaign for a Joe Biden victory, and how the Republicans are getting it wrong when it comes to Black and minority voters

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Michael Steele was the first Black chairman of the GOP, but in 2020 he decided to join the Lincoln Project, a group of disaffected Republicans who grouped together to campaign against Donald Trump winning a second term. Still a Republican, he believes his party needs to abandon its recent populist rhetoric and widen the net of potential voters beyond older white Americans. As he explains in this fascinating interview with Jonathan, if it doesn’t do so, the party could rue the decision for years to come. Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

For the first time in US history, members of the House agriculture committee heard from Black farmers on the impact of systemic discrimination by the department of agriculture (USDA).Thursday’s hearing came on the heels of $5bn being allocated to socially disadvantaged farmers of color earlier this month as part of the coronavirus relief and economic stimulus package. The funding – $4bn for debt forgiveness, $1bn for other forms of support – is meant to account for generations of mistreatment of farmers of color by the USDA.“This festering wound on the soul of agriculture must be healed,” said congressman David Scott of Georgia, who was born on a farm in South Carolina owned by his grandparents and now serves as the first ever Black person to chair the committee. Black farmers offered familiar testimonies of racism in the industry and from the USDA. Sedrick Rowe, an organic peanut farmer in Georgia, spoke of crop buyers telling him they are done buying peanuts for the day when he shows up. PJ Haynie of the National Black Growers Council told of Black farmers getting by on non-irrigated land while their white neighbors used USDA assistance to irrigate theirs.Once making up about 14% of US farmers, Black farmers make up less than 2% today. Many were forced out by racist lending practices by the agriculture department that led to vast losses of land, income, profits and generation wealth. That wealth cannot be regained. Black farmers will never get the land they lost back. But the USDA seems to be trying to foster a renewed trust in the department.In addition to Scott’s landmark appointment in December, the USDA, perhaps as an acknowledgment of Tom Vilsack’s second term as agriculture secretary being met with disappointment by many Black farmers and leaders, named Dewayne Goldmon, former executive director of the National Black Growers Council, as the USDA’s first-ever senior adviser for racial equity. And, if confirmed, Jewel Bronaugh will be the first Black woman to serve as deputy secretary for the department.Still, Black farmers remain skeptical. “That’s all very much good intention. But the foundation of the USDA is crooked,” said Michael Carter, a Virginia farmer, of the seemingly reactive diversity efforts. “You can’t put a new roof on and expect the foundation to be straight again.”Scott asked Vilsack on Thursday how much of his time will be devoted to getting the $5bn in stimulus funds in the hands of Black farmers. Vilsack responded that he has no doubt his staff understands this is at the top of his list in terms of priorities.“This is a meeting I’ve been advocating for for 30 years,” said John Boyd Jr . “On behalf of every Black share cropper and Black farmer we thank you for finally hearing our cries.”But as president and founder of the National Black Farmers Association, Boyd said his phones were ringing off the hook with farmers asking when they will get the relief. By the end of the four and a half hour hearing, that rollout was still not clear. Boyd, who has advocated on behalf of Black farmers and brought issues of inequality to the forefront for decades, urged swift movement to implement this debt relief.“This should’ve been doing in the first place,” he said over the phone. Reminded of his own advocacy towards Thursday’s hearing, he remained resolute. “You don’t think about it. You got so many hurdles, so many fights,” More

Georgia lawmakers on Thursday gave final approval to legislation to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting access in the state that make it harder to vote by mail and give the state legislature more power over elections.The measure was signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, on Thursday evening. “Significant reforms to our state elections were needed. There’s no doubt there were many alarming issues with how the election was handled, and those problems, understandably, led to a crisis of confidence,” Kemp said during prepared remarks shortly after signing the bill.It requires voters to submit ID information with both an absentee ballot request and the ballot itself. It limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited challenges to a voter’s qualifications, cuts the runoff election period from nine to four weeks, and significantly shortens the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe legislation also empowers the state legislature, currently dominated by Republicans, to appoint a majority of members on the five-person state election board. That provision would strip Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who stood up to Trump after the election, from his current role as chairman of the board. The bill creates a mechanism for the board to strip local election boards of their power.Gloria Butler, a Democratic state senator, said the bill would make it harder to vote, especially for poor and disabled people. “We are witnessing a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era,” she said just before the bill passed.“This bill is absolutely about opportunities, but it isn’t about opportunities to vote. It is about the opportunity to keep control and keep power at any cost,” Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator, said on Thursday.Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative, was arrested on Thursday after knocking on the door of the governor’s office during a protests against the legislation’s signing. Video captured by a bystander shows Cannon, who is Black, handcuffed with her arms behind her back and being forcibly removed from the state Capitol by two officers, one on each arm. She says, “Where are you taking me?” and, “Stop” as she is taken from the building.The legislation comes after Georgia saw record turnout in the November election and January US Senate runoffs, including surges among Black and other minority voters. It has become the center of national attention because many see it as a crystallization of a national push by Republicans to make it harder to vote. Alluding to a measure in the Georgia bill that bans providing food or water to people standing in line to vote, Joe Biden called that national effort “sick” during a Thursday press conference. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said.Facing opposition from top Republicans in the state, Republicans dropped a push to require voters to give an excuse to vote by mail. And amid national outcry, they backed away in recent weeks from proposals to prohibit early voting on Sundays, a day that Black voters have traditionally used in disproportionate numbers to cast ballots. The measure that passed on Thursday actually expands weekend early voting in the state, requiring an additional Saturday and authorizing counties to offer it on two Sundays if they choose.Republicans seized on that provision in the bill on Thursday to claim that they were actually expanding voter access in Georgia. “The bill greatly expands the accessibility of voters in Georgia and greatly improves the process of administration of elections while at the same time providing more accountability to provide that the vote is properly preserved,” Barry Fleming, a GOP state representative who spearheaded the legislation, said on Thursday.They offered little substantive justification for why the measure was necessary after an election in which there was record turnout, and in which multiple recounts in the presidential race found no evidence of fraud. Instead, they said the bill was necessary to preserve voter confidence.The nearly 100-page measure was only formally unveiled last week, when it was abruptly inserted into another two-page bill. While the legislation includes several of the measures lawmakers debated, it included some new ideas that had not been fully debated. Democrats and voting activists have accused Republicans of trying to ram through a bill without fully vetting it.Democrats and voting rights groups are expected to swiftly file a slew of lawsuits challenging the measure.The Associated Press contributed reporting More