US Politics

One day in March 2015, I sat in a theater in New York City and took careful notes as a series of personages led by Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates described the dazzling sunburst of liberation that was coming our way thanks to entrepreneurs, foundations and Silicon Valley. The presentation I remember most vividly was that of a famous TV actor who rhapsodized about the wonders of Twitter, Facebook and the rest: “No matter which platform you prefer,” she told us, “social media has given us all an extraordinary new world, where anyone, no matter their gender, can share their story across communities, continents and computer screens. A whole new world without ceilings.”Six years later and liberals can’t wait for that extraordinary new world to end. Today we know that social media is what gives you things like Donald Trump’s lying tweets, the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol riot of 6 January. Social media, we now know, is a volcano of misinformation, a non-stop wallow in hatred and lies, generated for fun and profit, and these days liberal politicians are openly pleading with social media’s corporate masters to pleez clamp a ceiling on it, to stop people from sharing their false and dangerous stories.A “reality crisis” is the startling name a New York Times story recently applied to this dismal situation. An “information disorder” is the more medical-sounding label that other authorities choose to give it. Either way, the diagnosis goes, we Americans are drowning in the semiotic swirl. We have come loose from the shared material world, lost ourselves in an endless maze of foreign disinformation and rightwing conspiracy theory.In response, Joe Biden has called upon us as a nation to “defend the truth and defeat the lies”. A renowned CNN journalist advocates a “harm reduction model” to minimize “information pollution” and deliver the “rational views” that the public wants. A New York Times writer has suggested the president appoint a federal “reality czar” who would “help” the Silicon Valley platform monopolies mute the siren song of QAnon and thus usher us into a new age of sincerity.These days Democratic politicians lean on anyone with power over platforms to shut down the propaganda of the right. Former Democratic officials pen op-eds calling on us to get over free speech. Journalists fantasize about how easily and painlessly Silicon Valley might monitor and root out objectionable speech. In a recent HBO documentary on the subject, journalist after journalist can be seen rationalizing that, because social media platforms are private companies, the first amendment doesn’t apply to them … and, I suppose, neither should the American tradition of free-ranging, anything-goes political speech.In the absence of such censorship, we are told, the danger is stark. In a story about Steve Bannon’s ongoing Trumpist podcasts, for example, ProPublica informs us that “extremism experts say the rhetoric still feeds into an alternative reality that breeds anger and cynicism, which may ultimately lead to violence”.In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.“Debunking” was how the literary left used to respond to America’s Niagara of nonsense. Criticism, analysis, mockery and protest: these were our weapons. We were rational-minded skeptics, and we had a grand old time deflating creationists, faith healers, puffed-up militarists and corporate liars of every description.Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right: those were their means of lashing out against rap music or suggestive plays or leftwingers who were gainfully employed.What explains the clampdown mania among liberals? The most obvious answer is because they need an excuse. Consider the history: the right has enjoyed tremendous success over the last few decades, and it is true that conservatives’ capacity for hallucinatory fake-populist appeals has helped them to succeed. But that success has also happened because the Democrats, determined to make themselves the party of the affluent and the highly educated, have allowed the right to get away with it.There have been countless times over the years where Democrats might have reappraised this dumb strategy and changed course. But again and again they chose not to, blaming their failure on everything but their glorious postindustrial vision. In 2016, for example, liberals chose to blame Russia for their loss rather than look in the mirror. On other occasions they assured one another that they had no problems with white blue-collar workers – until it became undeniable that they did, whereupon liberals chose to blame such people for rejecting them.To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itselfAnd now we cluck over a lamentable “information disorder”. The Republicans didn’t suffer the landslide defeat they deserved last November; the right is still as potent as ever; therefore Trumpist untruth is responsible for the malfunctioning public mind. Under no circumstances was it the result of the Democrats’ own lackluster performance, their refusal to reach out to the alienated millions with some kind of FDR-style vision of social solidarity.Or perhaps this new taste for censorship is an indication of Democratic healthiness. This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent that’s who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat – defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off America’s many burbling fountains of bad takes.Let me confess: every time I read one of these stories calling on us to get over free speech or calling on Mark Zuckerberg to press that big red “mute” button on our political opponents, I feel a wave of incredulity sweep over me. Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This can’t really be happening here in the USA.But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief. To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the right’s class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for – a betrayal that we will spend years living down – may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true. More

Along the winding road which follows the Rio Grande west from Mission, Texas, dozens of armed border patrol agents, state troopers, soldiers, and state and local police are dotted about to catch undocumented migrants entering the country from Mexico.This is a so-called hotspot for irregular migration – folks crossing the border river without permission to enter the US – in what the Republican party and anti-immigrant activists are calling a crisis at the border. During one afternoon this week, there were more law enforcement vehicles cruising along this dusty 15-mile stretch towards Los Ebanos, a tiny border community connected to Mexico by a hand operated cable ferry, than there was local traffic.For a couple of hours nothing much happens, until agents chase down a group – six men, and one woman – trying to hide in the dry vegetation.They are handcuffed and processed on the side of the road, each giving their name, age and country of origin to a bilingual border patrol agent, before placing personal belongings – wallet, jewellery and phone – into individual plastic bags. The sun is piercing; the migrants look exhausted.Christian, a lanky 20-year-old from Santa Bárbara,Honduras, seems utterly bewildered by what’s just gone down. His family’s crops were destroyed last November when two deadly hurricanes – Eta and Iota – struck within two weeks of each other. The land was flooded for two months, leaving them no harvest and unable to prepare for next season. “There are no jobs, and we have no money or food,” he said, shaking his head.Christian is among a rapidly rising number of climate refugees from Central America – one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to the impacts of global heating.Emerson, 25, a member of the indigenous Maya Q’eqchi community from Puerto Barrios in Izabal, Guatemala, left behind his wife and two young daughters, hoping to find work. “I’m a machinery mechanic, but the work went down with the pandemic and then things got much worse with Hurricane Eta.”Ingrid, one of two Salvadorans, said she’s 18 but looks much younger. She’s wearing two plastic wristbands – one red, the other white – which reports suggest are used by coyotes (smugglers or guides) to indicate payments had been made to organized crime groups who control the border.Ingrid lived with her uncle in Ilopango, a sprawling town on the outskirts of the Salvadoran capital with high levels of gang violence and police brutality, but said she’d come looking for work and a better life after the pandemic left them struggling to make ends meet. Covid has deepened poverty and hunger across Central America and Mexico, and governments have failed to provide adequate, if any, relief.The migrants were given disposable face masks before being searched and loaded into a green and white border patrol van. They will be expelled; some of them will undoubtedly try to cross again.The border patrol agents won’t answer any questions, but one said to his colleagues: “This is a good day’s work.” Another said he hoped we would give them good publicity.After four years of racist, chaotic, anti-immigration policies by the Trump administration – as well as growing desperation fuelled by the pandemic and extreme climate events – the number of people seeking to enter the US is rising.But advocates in the Rio Grande Valley, where undocumented migrants have long been relied upon for cheap farm labour, reject incendiary claims that the numbers are overwhelming.“Migration goes up and down, that’s the reality of the border. Biden has different values and has given people hope, but there’s no border crisis, to say so is political manipulation,” said Ramona Casas, director of the migrant advocacy group Arise. “We need to address the root causes and transform the broken immigration system, not more militarization.”The current uptick started before Biden’s election, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures.Jenn Budd, a former senior border patrol agent turned whistleblower, said: “The only crisis at the border is the children, which the administration is trying to deal with, anything else is simply not true and an attempt to play politics, make Biden look bad and ensure the money keeps flowing to the border security industry.”In 2000, a total of 9,212 border patrol agents detained an average of almost 137,000 undocumented migrants per month on the southern border. In the 2021 fiscal year until February, the average was just over 76,000 per month, but the number of agents is more than double compared to 2000.Earlier this month, the Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed state troopers and the national guard to the border after claiming, without evidence, that illegal immigrants were spreading the coronavirus.“The Biden administration is recklessly releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants who have Covid into Texas communities,” said Abbott in a tweet on 3 March.But illegal or undocumented migrants are not being released into the US. The two groups being allowed in are some existing asylum seekers, thanks to the repeal of Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, and some new arrivals presenting at legal ports of entry, including unaccompanied children and young families, who have been permitted to remain in the country pending asylum court hearings. In Texas, everyone else continues to be turned back, say advocates.Abbott’s unsubstantiated Covid claims came shortly after he announced plans to end the state mask mandate and ordered businesses to reopen at 100% capacity. Texas has one of the slowest vaccination rates in the country. The White House has called out Abbott for refusing federal funds to pay for Covid mitigation measures for migrants.Last week, speaking at a press conference in Mission, Abbott said he’d seen people crossing the river illegally during an aerial tour of the area. “There is a crisis on the Texas border right now with the overwhelming number of people who are coming across the border. This crisis is a result of President Biden’s open border policies,” he said.A couple of days later CNN and Breitbart reported a story after coming across an alleged human trafficking incident within minutes of setting off on the river, from a launchpad behind the wall south-east of Mission where access is controlled by border patrol, which multiple advocates claim was staged to fuel rightwing propaganda.In the video, a man wearing a black balaclava is seen bringing a handful of migrants wearing facemasks and life vests across the river in a raft, with scores more lined up on the Mexican side, waiting to cross. The so-called smuggler then sets off to bring over another load.In general, smugglers try to blend in and so do not cover their faces, in order to pass off as a migrant and avoid trafficking charges if caught. The Guardian travelled 20 miles along the river, which is full of sensors, cameras, and other tracking devices, as well as regular patrols on the levy and river, making it unlikely that such a large group of people could go undetected. The Guardian did not see any people crossing the river.In downtown McAllen, the biggest city in the Rio Grande Valley, a young female volunteer gripping a clipboard leads a small group of Central American families from the Covid rapid testing site to the Catholic Charities respite center where they can shower, rest, make phone calls and eat a modest meal before heading to be with relatives with whom they should stay until their asylum case is ruled on by an immigration court.CBP has released a hundred or more new arrivals every day – all families with children under the age of six seeking asylum at a port of entry – for the past few weeks compared to just a handful before Biden took office.The largest Rio Grande Valley detention center is closed for remodeling, which along with Covid restrictions has reduced capacity and partially explains the transfer of unaccompanied children to other sectors and the release of families into the care of relatives.The rise is significant but manageable, according to Norma Pimentel, director of the respite center.On arrival, the exhausted families are ushered into large white tents erected opposite the bustling bus terminal, where everyone is tested for Covid – a service run by local health officials. Anyone who tests positive must quarantine in a local hotel for two weeks.“There’s a pandemic, so of course some migrants will have Covid, that’s why we’re testing them to keep everyone safe. If the governor cares about the community, why did he refuse federal funds? He’s not interested in solving the problem, he’d rather spend money militarizing our communities and creating an illusion of war,” said Pimentel. “Everyone should be given a fair chance to claim asylum safely, but we need to address the root causes, we will never fix this at the border.”CBP did not respond to questions. As the partisan finger pointing intensifies, desperate people try to change their lives.On a bench in front of the respite center, Alicia Barrios, 31, from Guatemala City, cannot hold back the tears. Barrios, who is seven months pregnant, arrived at the border last week with her husband Nelson Gonzales, 27, and four-year-old daughter Brittany, after a gruelling, four-week overland journey through Mexico. Both have lost weight, and Barrios recalls long nights sleeping in the open air, comforting her daughter as she cried because she was hungry and cold.In Guatemala, they barely had enough to eat over the past year as the economy collapsed and a strict curfew made many odd jobs impossible; Barrios hasn’t had any antenatal care as the hospitals are overwhelmed. She’s waiting for her brother in Houston to send them bus fare, and doesn’t yet understand the lengthy legal process which lies ahead.“The journey was very hard, but we don’t want our children to suffer like we did. I’m so grateful that we made it.” More

The United States and China publicly rebuked each other in the first face-to-face talks between senior officials from the two countries since Joe Biden took office. Representatives from the two countries met in Alaska, where a highly unusual extended back-and-forth took place in front of the cameras. When US secretary of state Antony Blinken pointed out “deep concerns” over China’s actions relating to “Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion of our allies”, China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi responded with a 15-minute speech in Chinese lashing out out at what he called a struggling democracy in the US, poor treatment of minorities and foreign and trade policies.

US and China publicly rebuke each other in first major talks of Biden era More

The Guardian health reporter Jessica Glenza steps in for Jonathan Freedland this week. She speaks to Dr Abdul El-Sayed, co-author of a new book, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, about why the concept of providing healthcare coverage for all Americans is so politically vexing

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No three words are likely to elicit a more divisive response in Washington than “Medicare for all”. From the outside looking in, some might wonder why any politician – Republican or Democrat – would hesitate to provide universal health coverage to all Americans. The answer goes to the core of American ideas about the role of government and the free market. This week Jessica Glenza speaks to Dr Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and epidemiologist and co-author of a new book, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide. He also ran for governor of Michigan, where he advocated for universal healthcare. Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

Asian American lawmakers and leaders warned that violence and discrimination targeting their community have reached a “crisis point” following the shootings in Atlanta this week that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.The hearing, the first to examine anti-Asian discrimination in more than three decades, had been scheduled weeks ago amid a surge in violence against the Asian community since the pandemic began. But it took on heightened urgency after the mass shooting that left Asian Americans in Atlanta and across the country shaken and afraid.“What we know is that this day was coming,” Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told a subcommittee of the House judiciary committee on Thursday. “The Asian American community has reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored.”Grace Meng, a Democrat of New York, said: “Our community is bleeding. We are in pain. And for the last year, we’ve been screaming out for help.”Meanwhile police in Atlanta revealed new details about the investigation. At a press conference, Charles Hampton, deputy chief of the Atlanta police, said “nothing was off the table”, including whether the killings were motivated, at least in part, by race or gender.“We are looking at everything to make sure that we discover and determine what the motive of our homicides were,” he said, adding that they were still determining whether the murders constituted a hate crime.The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Long, who is white, told police that he had a sex addiction and targeted the spas to eliminate “temptation”, denying any racist motivations.Hampton said on Thursday that Long had “frequented” two of the spas where four women of Asian descent were killed. Four more people were killed at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor, on the outskirts of the city.The Cherokee county sheriff’s department announced on Thursday that Capt Jay Baker had been replaced as the spokesman on the investigation.Frank Reynolds, the sheriff, expressed regret amid widespread outrage over comments Baker had made a day earlier. Baker drew criticism for saying Long had had “a really bad day” and “this is what he did”. Reynolds released a statement on Thursday acknowledging that some of Baker’s comments stirred “much debate and anger” and said the agency regretted any “heartache” caused by his words.“Inasmuch as his words were taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate, they were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,” Reynolds said in a statement, adding that Baker “had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his 28 years in law enforcement”.In response to the shootings, the White House announced that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were canceling a political event in Atlanta on Friday as part of their Help is Here tour to promote the administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package. Instead, they will spend their visit meeting with local leaders and elected officials from the city’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community.Biden on Thursday ordered flags at the White House and all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff through sunset on Monday to honor the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings.At the hearing on Capitol Hill, Meng was joined by experts and advocates who told the panel that the rising tide of anti-Asian bigotry was fueled in part by rhetoric from Donald Trump and his allies, who referred to Covid-19 as the “China virus” the “China plague” and the “kung flu”.Nearly 3,800 hate incidents, spanning the spectrum of verbal harassment to physical assault, have been reported against Asian Americans nationwide since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Stop AAPI Hate. Asian American women reported nearly twice as many incidents as men, at nearly 70%.During the hearing, the subcommittee chairman, Steve Cohen, recounted a number of brutal incidents that included a Filipino man being slashed across the face with a box cutter and an 89-year-old Asian American woman being lit on fire.“All the pandemic did was exacerbate latent anti-Asian prejudices that have a long, long and ugly history in America,” he said.In a particularly impassioned exchange, Meng confronted one of the panel’s Republican members, the Texas congressman Chip Roy, who said, after a lengthy exhortation of China’s handling of the coronavirus, that he was concerned the hearing amounted to a “policing” of free speech.“Your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want,” Meng said through tears. “But you don’t have to do it by putting a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across this country, on our grandparents, on our kids.”“This hearing was to address the hurt and pain of our community, to find solutions – and we will not let you take our voice away from us,” she said.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would give undocumented immigrants, including “Dreamers”, a pathway to citizenship. The House on Thursday voted 228 to 197, largely along party lines, to set up a legal pathway to citizenship for Dreamers – people who came to the US as undocumented minors and who received temporary protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.The bill, called the American Dream and Promise Act of 2021, would also grant green cards for many immigrants who have fled war or natural disasters and are residing in the US with a temporary protected status. In all, it could make 4.4 million people eligible for permanent residence in the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute.Nine Republicans joined Democrats in support of the measure.Representatives also voted 247-174 Thursday on a second bill, which would grant legal status for undocumented farmworkers. Both measures passed in 2019, as well, with some Republican support – but the measures are likely to join a growing list of legislation that will hit a wall in the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans have vowed to block proposals with the filibuster.The measures are among several attempts by Democrats to reverse Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies. They also coincide with Joe Biden’s efforts to address the number of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border, many of whom are fleeing dangerous conditions in Central America.The Dreamer bill would grant conditional legal status for 10 years to many undocumented immigrants who were brought into the US as children. During Thursday’s debate, the Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal noted she had come from India to the US alone at the age of 16, saying: “Let’s stop the hypocrisy of criminalizing immigrants.”Immigrant rights groups celebrated the news of its passage. “This is a result of years of organizing and pressure from the immigrant rights movement, but we’ll continue to hold our celebration until the very end,” tweeted the advocacy group Raices.As president, Trump rescinded the Obama-era Daca program, which offered temporary protection from deportation to Dreamers. However, the supreme court ruled in 2020 that Trump’s move had been unlawful.The Biden White House backed both bills. But it also urged lawmakers to adopt broader reforms in Biden’s sweeping immigration bill introduced last month, saying this would secure the border and “address the root causes of instability and unsafe conditions causing migration from Central America”.“We can’t keep waiting,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “I urge Congress to come together to find long term solutions to our entire immigration system so we can create a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system, tackle the root causes of migration and legalize the undocumented population in the United States.”Biden’s wide-ranging plan would provide a path to US citizenship to the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. But the Senate’s No 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, said this week that goal does not have enough support in the House or Senate.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, panned the House efforts on Thursday, saying they would exacerbate problems at the border, further dimming prospects in that chamber, where a supermajority of at least 60 of 100 members are needed for most legislation to advance.And even if the Dreamers bill were to pass the Senate, it would still have limitations, including provisions around criminal history that could bar some young immigrants from legal status if they have committed a misdemeanor. It also gives the Department of Homeland Security discretion over which youths can be excluded from the path to citizenship, based on alleged gang affiliation or dispositions in juvenile court.Human Rights Watch and other groups have written to Democratic legislators asking them to strike provisions that would bar young immigrants who have been criminalized from becoming citizens.“If we learned anything in 2020, it’s that the policing and mass incarceration systems in this country are fundamentally rigged against Black and Latinx people,” said Jacinta González, the senior campaign organizer for the advocacy group Mijente, who criticised the bill for being “designed to strip access to Biden’s promise of immigration reform from people who have experienced police contact. Criminalization born of a racist system cannot be the measure by which we determine who belongs and who goes.” More

On Wednesday, the Rev Raphael Warnock, elected in January as Georgia’s first African American US senator, gave his first speech in Congress. He used the opportunity to condemn voter suppression and urge his colleagues to support legislation to make it easier for Americans to vote. Here are his remarks:Before I begin my formal remarks today, I want to pause to condemn the hatred and violence that took eight precious lives last night in metropolitan Atlanta. I grieve with Georgians, with Americans, with people of love all across the world. This unspeakable violence, visited largely upon the Asian community, is one that causes all of us to recommit ourselves to [preventing] these kinds of tragedies from happening in the first place. We pray for these families.I rise here today as a proud American and as one of the newest members of the Senate – in awe of the journey that has brought me to these hallowed halls and with an abiding sense of reverence and gratitude for the faith and sacrifices of ancestors who paved the way.I am a proud son of the great state of Georgia, born and raised in Savannah, a coastal city known for its cobble-stone streets and verdant town squares. Towering oak trees, centuries old and covered in gray Spanish moss, stretched from one side of the street to the other, bend and beckon the lover of history and horticulture to this city by the sea. I was educated at Morehouse College and I serve still in the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist church; both in Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights movement. Like those oak trees, my roots go down deep and stretch wide in the soil of Waycross, Burke county and Screven county. In a word, I am Georgia. A living example and embodiment of its history and hope, the pain and the promise, the brutality and the possibility.At the time of my birth, Georgia’s two senators were Richard B Russell and Herman E Talmadge, both arch-segregationists and unabashed adversaries of the civil rights movement. After the supreme court’s landmark Brown v Board ruling outlawing school segregation, Talmadge warned that “blood will run in the streets of Atlanta”. Senator Talmadge’s father, Eugene Talmadge, former governor of our state, had famously declared: “The South loves the Negro in his place, but his place is at the back door.” When once asked how he and his supporters might keep Black people away from the polls, he picked up a scrap of paper and wrote a single word on it: “Pistols.”Yet, there is something in the American covenant – in its charter documents and its Jeffersonian ideals – that bends toward freedom. Led by a preacher and a patriot named King, Americans of all races stood up. History vindicated the movement that sought to push us closer to our ideals, to lengthen and strengthen the cords of our democracy, and I now hold the seat – the Senate seat – where Herman E Talmadge sat.And that’s why I love America. I love America because we always have a path to make it better, to build a more perfect union. It is the place where a kid like me who grew up in public housing, the first college graduate in my family, can now serve as a United States senator. I had an older father, he was born in 1917; serving in the army during World War II, he was once asked to give up his seat to a young teenager while wearing his soldier’s uniform, they said, “making the world safe for democracy”. But he was never bitter. By the time I came along, he had already seen the arc of change in our country. He maintained his faith in God, in his family and in the American promise, and he passed that faith on to his children.My mother grew up in Waycross, Georgia. You know where that is? It’s way ‘cross Georgia. Like a lot of Black teenagers in the 1950s she spent her summers picking somebody else’s tobacco and somebody else’s cotton. But because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls in January and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator. Ours is a land where possibility is born of democracy. A vote, a voice, a chance to help determine the direction of the country and one’s own destiny within it. Possibility born of democracy.That’s why this past November and January, my mom and other citizens of Georgia grabbed hold of that possibility and turned out in record numbers, 5 million in November, 4.4 million in January. Far more than ever in our state’s history. Turnout for a typical runoff doubled. And the people of Georgia sent the state’s first African American senator and first Jewish senator, my brother Jon Ossoff, to these hallowed halls.But then, what happened? Some politicians did not approve of the choice made by the majority of voters in a hard-fought election in which each side got the chance to make its case to the voters. And, rather than adjusting their agenda, rather than changing their message, they are busy trying to change the rules. We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow in new clothes.Since the January election, some 250 voter suppression bills have been introduced by state legislatures all across the country – from Georgia to Arizona, from New Hampshire to Florida – [all] using the Big Lie of voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression. The same Big Lie that led to a violent insurrection on this very Capitol – the day after my election. Within 24 hours, we elected Georgia’s first African American and Jewish senators, hours later the Capitol was assaulted. We see in just a few precious hours the tension very much alive in the soul of America. And the question before all of us at every moment is what will we do to push us in the right direction.So politicians driven by that big lie aim to severely limit, and in some cases eliminate, automatic and same-day voter registration, mail-in and absentee voting, and early voting and weekend voting. They want to make it easier to purge voters from the voting roll altogether. As a voting rights activist, I’ve seen up close just how draconian these measures can be. I hail from a state that purged 200,000 voters one Saturday night – in the middle of the night. We know what’s happening – some people don’t want some people to vote.I was honored on a few occasions to stand with our hero and my parishioner, John Lewis. I was his pastor but I’m clear he was my mentor. On more than one occasion we boarded buses together after Sunday church services as part of our Souls to the Polls program, encouraging the Ebenezer church family and communities of faith to participate in the democratic process. Now just a few months after Congressman Lewis’s death, there are those in the Georgia legislature, some who even dared to praise his name, that are now trying to get rid of Sunday Souls to the Polls, making it a crime for people who pray together to get on a bus together and vote together. I think that’s wrong. In fact, I think a vote is a kind of prayer about the world we desire for ourselves and our children. And our prayers are stronger when we pray together.To be sure, we have seen these kinds of voter suppression tactics before. They are a part of a long and shameful history in Georgia and throughout our nation. But refusing to be denied, Georgia citizens and citizens across our country braved the heat and the cold and the rain, some standing in line for five hours, six hours, 10 hours just to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Young people, old people, sick people, working people, already underpaid, forced to lose wages, to pay a kind of poll tax while standing in line to vote.And how did some politicians respond? Well, they are trying to make it a crime to give people water and a snack, as they wait in lines that are obviously being made longer by their draconian actions. Think about that. Think about that. They are the ones making the lines longer – through these draconian actions. Then, they want to make it a crime to bring grandma some water as she is waiting in the line they are making longer! Make no mistake. This is democracy in reverse. Rather than voters being able to pick the politicians, the politicians are trying to cherry pick their voters. I say this cannot stand.And so I rise because that sacred and noble idea – one person, one vote – is being threatened right now. Politicians in my home state and all across America, in their craven lust for power, have launched a full-fledged assault on voting rights. They are focused on winning at any cost, even the cost of the democracy itself. I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.That’s why I am a proud co-sponsor of the For The People Act, which we introduced today. The For The People Act is a major step forward in the march toward our democratic ideals, making it easier, not harder, for eligible Americans to vote by instituting common-sense, pro-democracy reforms like:
Establishing national automatic voter registration for every eligible citizen, and allowing all Americans to register to vote online and on election day;
Requiring states to offer at least two weeks of early voting, including weekends, in federal elections – keeping Souls to the Polls programs alive;
Prohibiting states from restricting a person’s ability to vote absentee or by mail;
And preventing states from purging the voter rolls based solely on unreliable evidence like someone’s voting history, something we’ve seen in Georgia and other states in recent years.
And it would end the dominance of big money in our politics, and ensure our public servants are there serving the public.Amidst these voter suppression laws and tactics, including partisan and racial gerrymandering, and in a system awash in dark money and the dominance of corporatist interests and politicians who do their bidding, the voices of the American people have been increasingly drowned out and crowded out and squeezed out of their own democracy. We must pass “For The People” so that people might have a voice. Your vote is your voice and your voice is your human dignity.But not only that, we must pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue. The last time the voting rights bill was re-authorized was 2006. George W Bush was president and it passed its chamber 98-0. But then in 2013, the supreme court rejected the successful formula for supervision and pre-clearance, contained in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They asked Congress to fix it. That was nearly eight years ago, and the American people are still waiting. Stripped of protections, voters in states with a long history of voting discrimination and voters in many other states have been thrown to the winds.We Americans have noisy and spirited debates about many things. And we should. That’s what it means to live in a free country. But access to the ballot ought to be nonpartisan. I submit that there should be 100 votes in this chamber for policies that will make it easier for Americans to make their voices heard in our democracy. Surely, there ought to be at least 60 people in this chamber who believe, as I do, that the four most powerful words uttered in a democracy are “the people have spoken”, and that therefore we must ensure that all the people can speak.But if not, we must still pass voting rights. The right to vote is preservative of all other rights. It is not just another issue alongside other issues. It is foundational. It is the reason why any of us has the privilege of standing here in the first place. It is about the covenant we have with one another as an American people. E pluribus unum: out of many, one. It above all else must be protected.So let’s be clear, I’m not here today to spiral into the procedural argument regarding whether the filibuster in general has merits or has outlived its usefulness. I’m here to say that this issue is bigger than the filibuster. I stand before you saying that this issue – access to voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to restrict voting – is so fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hostage by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict the expansion of voting rights. It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society. Colleagues, no Senate rule should overrule the integrity of the democracy and we must find a way to pass voting rights whether we get rid of the filibuster or not.As a man of faith, I believe that democracy is a political enactment of a spiritual idea – the sacred worth of all human beings, the notion that we all have within us a spark of the divine, to participate in the shaping of our own destiny. Reinhold Niebuhr was right: “[Humanity’s] capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but [humanity’s] inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”John Lewis understood that and was beaten on a bridge defending it. Amelia Boynton, like so many women not mentioned nearly enough, was gassed on that same bridge. A white woman named Viola Liuzzo was killed. Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, two Jews and an African American standing up for the sacred idea of democracy, also paid the ultimate price. And we in this body would be stopped and stymied by partisan politics? Short-term political gain? Senate procedure? I say let’s get this done no matter what. I urge my colleagues to pass these two bills. Strengthen and lengthen the cords of our democracy, secure our credibility as the premier voice for freedom-loving people and democratic movements all over the world, and win the future for all of our children. More

“I’m taking on the queen of Qanon: Marjorie Taylor Greene,” reads one tweet from Holly McCormack. “Retweet if you think Marjorie Taylor Greene is an embarrassment to our country,” says another.America’s midterm elections may be 20 months in the future, but a campaign is already under way to unseat the extremist Republican congresswoman and Donald Trump devotee. In a rural district of Georgia that Taylor Greene won last November with three-quarters of the vote, effectively unopposed after her Democratic opponent quit the race, no one thinks it is going to be easy.But McCormack, 36, an insurance agent, singer-songwriter and Democrat, thinks her opponent’s far-right shock tactics have run their course. “People are sick of it,” she told the Guardian. “People are tired of the rhetoric and the division, and people are hungry for a real person who treats people well, and actually shows empathy with action and not words. She claims to be a Christian and then she shows us with her actions the hate.”Taylor Greene, 46, has been throwing procedural wrenches in the works of Congress since she was stripped of her committee assignments last month for antisemitic and other inflammatory statements.She has previously made comments on social media supporting the QAnon conspiracy movement, suggesting mass shootings were staged by gun control activists and proposing a Jewish cabal started a deadly California wildfire with a laser beam directed from outer space. And last month she posted an anti-transgender sign across the hall from a congresswoman who has a transgender child.McCormack’s social media sorties appear to have caught her attention. On Wednesday the Democrat tweeted a screenshot showing Taylor Greene had blocked her on Twitter, asking: “Was it something I said, Marjorie?”She commented: “It’s mind-boggling how many people she’s attacked, from school shooting survivors to the LGBTQ community to Jewish space lasers. Those are real people behind all of these attacks that are just spewing out of her continually. My team can’t keep up and it zones me out to read too much of it.“It’s honestly dangerous for our democracy. It’s not just for Georgia 14th; this is important for the country that we get rid of someone that is sowing so much hate and so much division. If we’re going to get better as a country, we’re going to have to stop the right versus left nonsense and see each other as people and as Americans first.”For McCormack, the daughter of an army veteran, the turning point was the deadly insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January. “That was the day that I quit kicking around running and I said, I’ve got to do this. We have to do this.“I’ve got two teenagers and the representation that we’re having is unacceptable. It’s just horrible and it doesn’t represent how I was raised, how I’m raising my kids. I really hammered into them since they were born to be kind and how you treat people matters and that they should fight for other people. They should stand up if something’s wrong and so, even though it’s hard, it’s the right the right thing to do.”McCormack regrets the political tribalism that means the first question asked is whether someone is Democratic or Republican. She added: “People are wanting healing, and they’re wanting to be able to get along with their neighbours again, and they’re wanting to not have families broken apart over this. It’s not OK, and I think people are ready for a refreshing change.”McCormack, who argues that rural areas like hers have been left behind by noisy politicians, will not have a clear run for her party’s nomination as several so-far unnamed Democrats have filed to run in 2022, according to Federal Election Commission records. The odds against any of them in this ruby red district are daunting, but McCormack finds inspiration in Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock’s victories in January’s Senate runoffs.Her career as a musician – she last released an album in 2012 and a single in 2014 – also offers a chance to stand out from the crowd. “It’s acoustic, folky – chick-rock is the best way to say it,” she laughed. “I should have been of age recording music in the 90s and I would have fit right in. We’re looking forward to some creative fundraising and festivals during the summer.”Among the songs that McCormack has written, her favorite is Fire. Should she unseat Taylor Green in November 2022, the headline will write itself. More