US Politics

In a year, the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, has gone from revered national voice of reason on the Covid-19 pandemic and potential presidential material, to facing demands for his resignation and even calls for his impeachment.He faces a federal inquiry into his administration’s alleged undercount of coronavirus nursing home deaths, accusations of bullying and, most recently, an external investigation led by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, following sexual harassment allegations by two women.After a decade in power, has the 63-year-old former US housing secretary and son of the former New York governor Mario Cuomo, reached the end of the lineWhat are the allegations?The governor was first accused of sexual harassment by former aide Lindsey Boylan in December, and she gave further details last week. In a Medium post she claimed he subjected her to an unwanted kiss and made comments about her appearance, allegations which Cuomo has denied.On Saturday, a second former aide, Charlotte Bennett, 25, also accused the governor of sexual harassment. She alleged in the New York Times that Cuomo asked her about her sex life, including whether she had ever had sex with older men, and made comments that she interpreted as assessing her interest in an affair. Cuomo has said he wanted to mentor her.On Sunday, he released a statement in which he acknowledged that “some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.”Separately, also last month, his administration was forced to revise its figures for nursing home deaths after it was revealed they were severely undercounted by thousands. He was also accused of threatening to “destroy” the Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim over the scandal, which a Cuomo adviser has denied.How have politicians reacted?In Washington, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has said Joe Biden supports an independent review and the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has called the sexual harassment allegations “credible”.Closer to home, the Republican state senate minority leader, Robert Ortt, has called for him to resign, as have the Democratic state senator Alessandra Biaggi and congressman Kim. New York’s US senators, Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all called for an independent investigation.What consequences has Cuomo faced so far?There is a federal inquiry into the nursing home deaths.Following the sexual harassment allegations, James said on Monday that she had received a formal referral from the executive chamber which gave her the authority to “move forward with an independent investigation into allegations of sexual harassment claims made against Governor Cuomo”. She said the investigation’s findings would be made public in a report.Cuomo’s approval rating dropped last week, but remained relatively high.Could Cuomo resign or be forced from office?Kim told the Guardian on Monday that many legislators were “urging him to step down”. Whether or not Cuomo does will perhaps depend on what the investigation finds. His longtime rival Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York suggested on Monday that if the allegations are found to be true, he should step down.Cuomo is up for re-election next year. He has previously said he intends to run again in 2022, but conversations are reportedly taking place among Democrats about who could challenge him.The governor has also faced some calls for impeachment. Eric Lane, professor of public law and public service at Hofstra University and a former counsel to New York state Democrats, said if the investigation found evidence of criminal behaviour he could face impeachment. But if his behaviour was found to be inappropriate but not criminal then it would be down to the legislature to decide.“I doubt if that turns out to be true that he could get re-elected. I don’t know about it as an impeachment issue,” he said, adding that the allegation over the call to Kim is also a “very serious allegation”.Is there any precedent for impeaching a New York governor?The only time a New York governor was impeached and removed from office was William Sulzer in 1913.Under the state’s constitution, the assembly would have to vote by a simple majority to impeach and then it would go to trial in the state senate, where a two-thirds majority would be needed to convict, but it does not lay out a standard for impeachment.If removed from office, the governor would be replaced by the lieutenant governor, a post currently held by Kathy Hochul.On the prospect of impeachment, the Republican state senator George Borelli told Pix 11: “I think it’s unlikely. But I think it’s possible.” More

In the United States, the Republican party has been unmistakably corrupted by power. Its leadership did not call out Donald Trump for his “high crimes and misdemeanors”, his savage politics, his cruelty, his lies and his conspiracy theories. Voters had to wait until Senate Republicans had refused to convict Mr Trump of impeachable crimes before their leader, Mitch McConnell, would speak truth to power. By then, the question was not whether there was a war over the soul of the party but whether Republicans had a soul worth fighting for.At the weekend Mr Trump revealed that there would be payback for Mr McConnell and other Republican lawmakers for their “disloyalty”. In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr Trump flirted with running again in 2024 and took swipes at the Biden White House. But he reserved his punches for his own side – targeting “Republicans In Name Only” who voted to impeach him and criticised his incitement of the mob that stormed Capitol Hill in January.Mr Trump has radicalised the base of his party to a troubling degree by restricting and distorting their view of the world, patterns of thinking and value systems. In a forthcoming paper, Professor Gary Jacobson of the University of California San Diego, writes that Republican politicians who humoured the former president’s “seditious urgings put protection of their own futures within the party above concern for that party’s collective future if devotion to Trump remains its defining feature”.Nationally, Mr Trump’s a vote loser. There’s no question that Republicans would be better off without him. Polls suggest a majority of Americans want him convicted and barred from holding future office. But he has a vice-like grip over the party rank and file. A recent survey by the American Enterprise Institute found that 79% of Republicans view Mr Trump favourably; two-thirds agreed with his disproven belief that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate; a majority “support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life”; and almost a third sympathise with the QAnon conspiracy theory that insists Mr Trump was fighting a global child sex-trafficking ring.Mr Trump, perhaps more than any other post-war US leader, has been helped by a rightwing news media that trades in contrived alternatives to unwelcome truths. Governing becomes almost impossible without adherence to norms such as truth-telling. Mr Trump’s would-be successors peddle a populist narrative of fears and grievances aimed at consolidating support in a predominantly white evangelical base. They are building what appears to be an extreme rightwing political party in plain sight.The Republican leadership has for decades given a monstrous politics a thin veneer of respectability. But Mr Trump is a monster they could not contain. No doubt some think that without his Twitter megaphone and facing lawsuits Mr Trump might give up. Teasing the voters with a 2024 run suggests this is a forlorn hope.Republicans may come to their senses. US demographics point to a more younger and diverse population, while Trumpism festers in shrinking parts of the electorate. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are not long-term strategies to win. Mr Trump aims to be a force within the party. Republicans have a good chance at retaking both the House and the Senate in 2022. Failure in two years’ time might spell the end of the Trump insurgency. A victory might spark its rebirth. However the Republican leadership responds, it reveals them – with consequences not just for the US but the rest of the world. More

Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned on Monday that a recent increase in coronavirus cases indicated a “fourth surge” could occur before a majority of the US is vaccinated.“At this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” Walensky said, during a White House briefing.“Now is not the time to relax the critical safeguards that we know can stop the spread of Covid-19 in our communities, not when we are so close. We have the ability to stop a potential fourth surge of cases in this country.”According to Johns Hopkins University, the US has recorded more than 28.5m Covid-19 cases and nearly 513,000 deaths. Daily case numbers fell steeply after a peak in January but have started to increase again.Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response team, said the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine which was approved for use on Saturday would start to be delivered “as early as tomorrow”.According to Zients, Johnson & Johnson is ready to distribute 3.9m doses over the coming days, adding to a vaccine stockpile already supplied by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which both developed two-shot vaccines.But he added: “J&J has indicated that the supply will be limited for the next couple of weeks.”Johnson & Johnson is expected to deliver 16m additional doses by the end of March, but the White House coronavirus response team has warned governors that those deliveries will occur “predominantly in the back half of the month”.Zients assured Americans that the federal government is ready to deliver the vaccine as soon as doses become available, saying: “We’ve done the planning. We have the distribution channels in place.”He also announced that the US distributed an average of 1.7m doses a day over the past week. Vaccine distribution had rebounded after a winter storm affected deliveries across the central US, he said.According to Bloomberg, about 2.4m vaccine doses were administered in the US on Sunday.Also on Monday, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, said some people who have Covid “may not be on a path to get better in a few months and this could be something that becomes a chronic illness”.“When you consider we know 28 million people in the United States have had Covid,” Collins told NBC Nightly News, “if even 1% of them have chronic, long-term consequences, that’s a whole lot of people. And we need to find out everything we can about how to help them.”Collins also said scientists had not expected Covid-19 to lead to long-term illness.“There’s really no precedent I know of,” he said. More

Calls for a boycott of Goya beans, chickpeas and other foodstuffs have grown louder after chief executive Robert Unanue made a series of false claims about the presidential election in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Florida on Sunday.Unanue has previously courted controversy with praise for Donald Trump, which last year prompted Ivanka Trump to pose, infamously, with a can of Goya beans.Onstage in Orlando, Unanue called Donald Trump “the real, legitimate and still actual president of the United States”.He also falsely claimed the presidential election that Trump lost conclusively to Joe Biden and the state contest in Georgia, which Biden won narrowly, were “not legitimate”, and claimed mail-in ballots were fraudulent.“We still have faith,” Unanue said, “that the majority of the people of the United States voted for the president … I think a great majority of the people in the United States voted for President Trump, and even a few Democrats.”Biden won more than 81m votes, or 51.3% of the total cast, to more than 74m for Trump. The Democrat won the electoral college 306-232, a margin Trump called a landslide when it was in his favour over Hillary Clinton.Trump has continued to lie about the election, in January inciting supporters to attack the US Capitol in a bid to stop the ratification of results. That led to his second impeachment, which ended with his second acquittal. The former president repeated his lies about the election in his own speech at CPAC, on Sunday night.Unanue has previously been censured by his company for speaking in support of Trump. In January, owner Andy Unanue told the New York Post: “Bob does not speak for Goya Foods when he speaks on TV. The family has diverse views on politics, but politics is not part of our business. Our political point of views are irrelevant.”Robert Unanue said then: “I don’t believe I should speak politically or in a faith-based manner on behalf of the company. But I leave open the possibility of speaking on behalf of myself.”After his remarks at CPAC on Sunday, the journalist Soledad O’Brien tweeted: “Folks at Goya should be embarrassed.”The speech also prompted renewed calls for a boycott of Goya products.“No more chickpeas from Goya for me,” tweeted one famous consumer, Joy Behar, a cohost of The View on ABC. More

The US supreme court will hear a case on Tuesday that could allow the court’s conservative majority to deal a major blow to the most powerful remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law designed to prevent racial discrimination in voting.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe case, Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, involves a dispute over two Arizona measures. One is a 2016 law that bans anyone other than a close family member or caregiver from collecting absentee ballots, sometimes called ballot harvesting. The second is a measure that requires officials to reject ballots cast in the wrong precinct, even if the voter has cast a vote in statewide races.Arizona rejected more than 38,335 ballots cast in the wrong precinct between 2008 and 2016 and minority voters were twice as likely as white voters to have their ballots rejected, the DNC noted in its brief. Minority voters, including the state’s Native American population, are disproportionately harmed by the ballot collection ban because they are more likely to lack reliable mail service.The DNC argues that the policies violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting laws that discriminate based on race. A trial court ruled in 2018 that the policies did not violate the law, and a three-judge panel on the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit later upheld that ruling. But the full circuit voted to rehear the case and last year found that the policies did violate the Voting Rights Act. Now, the Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, and the Arizona Republican party are appealing that ruling to the US supreme court.And though the facts in the case are about Arizona, the stakes could extend far beyond it. Brnovich and the Arizona Republican party are urging the court to use the case as a vehicle for announcing a narrower view of section 2 than the one currently in use.Such a ruling would take away one of most powerful tools that voting rights groups have to challenge discriminatory voting laws. Section 2 was elevated after the supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder that struck down another Voting Rights Act provision requiring certain places with a history of voting discrimination, including Arizona, to submit voting laws to the federal government for pre-clearance before they went into effect.“Without preclearance on the books, we’ve all had to rely more heavily on section 2 in order to address racial discrimination in voting,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who helped author an amicus brief in the case in support of the DNC’s position. “If section 2 is limited, then we have even fewer tools.”Losing the full power of section 2 would also make it harder for litigants, including the justice department, to challenge the wave of restrictive bills bubbling in Georgia and other state legislatures that would make it harder to vote, added Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which also filed an amicus brief in support of the DNC.The case arrives at a supreme court where conservatives now have a powerful 6-3 majority that appears increasingly hostile to voting rights. It repeatedly refused to expand access to the ballot during the pandemic last year. And since its decision in Shelby County v Holder, the court has given the green light to aggressive voter purging and severe partisan gerrymandering.Brnovich and the Arizona GOP want the supreme court to clarify the approach courts should take when they are evaluating whether a law violates section 2. Brnovich is also asking the supreme court to set a high bar for minority voters and their lawyers to clear in order to prove that a law runs afoul of section 2. Generally, he argues that courts should use an approach for evaluating section 2 claims that would make it harder to challenge facially neutral measures, such as voter ID laws, that do not explicitly make it harder for a specific group to vote. And if minority voters are able to prove that a law has a “substantial disparate impact” on them, Brnovich argues, they should be required to show that disparity is directly connected to the voting policy.But discriminatory voting laws often don’t work that way. There is a long history in the US of using policies that, taken in a vacuum, appear racially neutral because they apply to everyone, but are designed to interact with economic, social and other factors to make it harder to vote, LDF wrote in its amicus brief. Literacy tests and property requirements, the suppressive devices used in Jim Crow, applied to everyone, but made it harder for Black voters to register because of unequal education and economic factors, the group noted.“You’re talking about two very specific voting laws that have a really obvious connection to the history of discrimination against indigenous, Black and brown voters in this state,” said Allison Riggs, the interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which filed an amicus brief in support of the DNC’s position. “Poverty, lack of transportation, lack of access to flexible work and living wages is why out of precinct voting is important and why ballot collection, particularly on indigenous lands is so important.”One of the most interesting votes in the case will be that of Chief Justice John Roberts. When he authored the Shelby opinion in 2013, he specifically pointed to section 2 as one of the most powerful tools still in place to combat voting discrimination. But in 1982, then a young lawyer in the justice department, he strongly advocated against expanding section 2 and keeping it only limited to cases in which there was evidence of intentional discrimination. Roberts ultimately lost the argument.Democrats argue in their brief that Arizona is proposing an “overly narrow” way of looking at section 2. The ninth circuit, Democrats say, appropriately analyzed the measures, finding that it disproportionately affected minority voters and worked in combination with social and historical conditions in Arizona to make it harder for those voters to cast a ballot.Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, noted in a blogpost last month that voting rights litigators have generally been hesitant about pushing section 2 claims too far. The Democratic party, he wrote, didn’t seem to have that concern in this case, opening up an opportunity for Republicans to narrow the law.“Section 2 has done important work to rein in some of the worst forms of vote denial in recent years, and it would be a tremendous shame if this overreach of a case ends up serving as the vehicle to eviscerate what remains of the crown jewel of the civil rights movement,” he wrote in a post on SCOTUSBlog.In December, Donald Trump’s justice department filed an amicus brief backing Brnovich and endorsing a narrower framework for interpreting section 2. But in February, the Biden administration filed a letter with the court abandoning that position. The justice department said it still believed the Arizona measures did not violate the Voting Rights Act, but no longer backed the framework for interpreting section 2 put forth by the Trump administration.There are multiple ways the court could choose to rule in the case without weakening the scope of section 2. Morales-Doyle, the Brennan Center attorney, said he hoped the court recognized the climate around elections and race in which they were hearing the case.“There’s a big-picture narrative as to what’s going on with our democracy and race in American society. The court’s going to get to weigh in right now,” he said. “I think our hope is that the court instead sees it as an opportunity to reaffirm the values and the protections we have in place for our democracy.” More

When a Republican is president, Democratic politicians, pundits and activists will tell you that the presidency is an all-powerful office that can do anything it wants. When a Democrat is president, these same politicians, pundits and activists will tell you that the presidency has no power to do anything. In fact, they will tell you a Democratic president cannot even use the bully pulpit and other forms of pressure to try to shift the votes of senators in his own party.A tale from history proves this latter myth is complete garbage – and that tale is newly relevant in today’s supercharged debate over a $15 minimum wage.In that debate so far, we have seen Democratic senators prepare to surrender the $15 minimum wage their party promised by insisting they are powerless in the face of a non-binding advisory opinion of a parliamentarian they can ignore or fire.That explanation is patently ridiculous and factually false, so Democratic apologists are starting to further justify the surrender by suggesting that even if the party kept a $15 minimum wage in the Covid relief bill, conservative Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would block it anyway.The White House itself is now falling back on the idea that it doesn’t have the votes to do much of anything, insinuating that Joe Biden – who occupies the world’s most powerful office – somehow has no power to try to change the legislative dynamic. And this spin is being predictably amplified across social media.To be sure, there is no guarantee that Manchin or Sinema could be moved. Maybe they couldn’t, but maybe they could, considering they have both previously supported bills to increase the minimum wage. And we know they may be sensitive to pressure. After all, Manchin recently freaked out and whined that “no one called me” when Vice-President Kamala Harris dared to do one straightforward interview with a West Virginia television station.Whether such pressure ultimately works, the point is indisputable: it is laughable and preposterous to argue that a newly elected president has zero power to even try to shift the dynamic.And yet, whether you call this all deliberate deception or learned helplessness, this fantastical myth of the Powerless President will inevitably be used to shield Biden from criticism for abandoning his pledge to fight for a $15 minimum wage.The apologism is particularly absurd because unlike his predecessor Barack Obama, who was a relative newcomer to politics, Biden’s major selling point was that he knows “how to make government work”. The guy explicitly pitched himself as the best Democratic presidential candidate by suggesting that in an era of gridlock, he knows how to make the Democratic agenda a reality and Get Things Done™, like master of the Senate Lyndon Baines Johnson.That’s where LBJ himself comes in to destroy the narrative that Democratic presidents in general – and Biden specifically – are inherently helpless.‘Lyndon told me to’In 1964, Johnson was trying to pass Medicare, but two conservative Democratic senators threatened to take down the entire legislation over a tax issue. In a story flagged by economist Stephanie Kelton, the New York Times noted that months before that legislation passed: “Opponents proposed a large and popular increase in Social Security benefits (and taxes) which would have made passage of new Medicare taxes almost impossible. At the last minute, Senators George Smathers of Florida and Russell Long of Louisiana, both Democrats but Medicare opponents, switched and voted to save Medicare. ‘Lyndon told me to,’ Senator Smathers explained.”The pivotal story was recounted in more detail in The Heart Of Power by Harvard University’s David Blumenthal (a former Obama administration official) and Brown University’s James Morone. They noted that presidents can play a particularly unique role in these situations, and they warn against presidents who refuse to leverage their offices to push their agendas:
Johnson knew there was an indispensable role that only he could play: he could best publicize the idea, build support, jawbone interest groups into line, and organize (and lobby) the congressional coalition. When reporters asked Senator George Smathers (D-FL) why he had switched his vote and salvaged the administration’s Medicare proposal in 1964, he responded, simply, “Lyndon told me to.” Presidents win complicated reforms by doing what the office of the presidency is uniquely designed for – publicizing and persuading …
There is, of course, a danger at the other extreme – that of the disengaged executive. The president chooses his analysts, gives them directions, and decides when the debate is over. The staff always knows when the boss has lost interest – and the issue, no matter how well staffed, is probably doomed.
There has been a lot of dishonesty and deception floating around Democratic Washington these days. There was the lie two months ago that $2,000 checks would be coming “immediately” to a desperate nation struggling through a pandemic. There is the lie about the parliamentarian supposedly being the reason the $15 minimum wage is stalled. There is once again the lie of a forthcoming “public option”, which Democrats promised but which is barely being discussed at all, and is not part of the Covid relief legislation.But the LBJ story shows that the mendacious narrative of a helpless Democratic president is the most pernicious lie of all.‘Fighting our guts out’ v pre-emptive surrenderIf this lie about a Powerless President seems familiar, that’s because it was trotted out during the last Democratic presidency, when Barack Obama refused to lift a finger to pressure similarly conservative Democratic senators to support a wildly popular public insurance option or a union card check initiative that he explicitly promised. He had enormous congressional majorities and a huge election mandate, but didn’t bother to go to Democratic states to build Democratic voter pressure against recalcitrant Democratic senators.On the contrary, Obama’s chief of staff berated progressives trying to pressure conservative Democrats over health care reform and Obama simply surrendered. Meanwhile, obsequious liberal pundits scoffed at a so-called “Green Lantern Theory”, mocking those who suggested that the most powerful man on Earth has any power to influence elected officials in his own party. Obama is still pretending he couldn’t do anything.Now we see this same Powerless President narrative in the minimum wage fight – and if you look closely, the Biden administration is all but admitting it’s a lie.After all, the White House continues to say it is “fighting our guts out” for Neera Tanden’s nomination, even though it might not have enough Senate votes for her confirmation. And yet, the same White House is simultaneously retreating on the minimum wage, seemingly unwilling to force a floor vote on the issue, even though presidential pressure, legislative brinkmanship, and negotiation could change the outcome.In the Tanden situation, in fact, the Biden team is acting like a White House’s power of persuasion and legislative arm twisting can potentially move votes for something a president cares about – in this case, the nomination of a Washington insider to a fancy White House job.The real story, then, is that Biden seems unwilling to use the same influence to push as hard as possible for a minimum wage increase that would boost the pay of millions of Americans during an economic emergency.He has the power to at least try – he just seems unwilling to.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

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A former digital strategist for Barack Obama has demanded an end to big tech’s profit-driven optimization of outrage and called for regulators to curb online disinformation and division.
Michael Slaby – author of a new book, For All the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life – described tech giants Facebook and Google as “two gorillas” crushing the very creativity needed to combat conspiracy theories spread by former US president Donald Trump and others.
“The systems are not broken,” Slaby, 43, told the Guardian by phone from his home in Rhinebeck, New York. “They are working exactly as they were designed for the benefit of their designers. They can be designed differently. We can express and encourage a different set of public values about the public goods that we need from our public sphere.”
Facebook has almost 2.8 billion global monthly active users with a total of 3.3 billion using any of the company’s core products – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – on a monthly basis. Its revenue in the fourth quarter of last year was $28bn, up 33% from a year earlier, and profits climbed 53% to $11.2bn.
But the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg stands accused of poisoning the information well. Critics say it polarises users and allows hate speech and conspiracy theories to thrive, and that people who join extremist groups are often directed by the platform’s algorithm. The use of Facebook by Trump supporters involved in the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol has drawn much scrutiny.
Slaby believes Facebook and Twitter were too slow to remove Trump from their platforms. “This is where I think they hide behind arguments like the first amendment,” he said. “The first amendment is about government suppression of speech; it doesn’t have anything to do with your access to Facebook. More