US Politics

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has stepped into the intensifying dispute around the treatment of women and people of color nominated to top jobs in the Biden administration, as the confirmation process in the US Senate begins to sour.The leftwing Democratic congresswoman waded into the debate amid growing concerns in progressive circles that Joe Biden’s nominees from minority backgrounds are being singled out for especially harsh scrutiny.Several women of color are facing daunting hurdles to confirmation with Republicans withholding backing and the Democratic majority in the Senate imperiled by the opposition of the conservative Democrat, Joe Manchin.The senator from West Virginia announced on Friday he would oppose the candidacy of Neera Tanden to become the first Asian American woman to fill the post of budget director. On Monday he also indicated that he was having doubts about Deb Haaland, who would become the first Native woman to take a cabinet seat.With the Senate evenly divided at 50-50 seats, Manchin’s no vote can only be overturned if moderate Republicans can be found willing to back the nominees. So far, however, such cross-aisle support has been hard to find, with Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and Rob Portman of Ohio all expressing likely opposition to Tanden.In a tweet on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez turned the spotlight onto the record of Manchin himself. She pointed out that the Democratic senator had voted to confirm Jeff Sessions as Donald Trump’s first attorney general despite the fact that the former senator from Alabama was dogged with accusations of racism throughout his career.“Jeff Sessions was so openly racist that even Reagan couldn’t appoint him,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that as attorney general, Sessions went on to preside over the brutal family separation policy at the US border with Mexico.“Yet the first Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?” she posted.The apparent targeting of Biden’s nominees of color has started to generate mounting frustration and anger. Judy Chu, a Democratic congresswoman who leads the Congressional Asian Pacific American caucus, told Politico that “there’s a double standard going on” in the treatment of Tanden whose prospects of leading the Office of Management and Budget are now dwindling.The president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, told Politico that the outcome of the confirmation votes would make clear “whether or not those individuals who are women or people of color are receiving a different level of scrutiny. I hope we will course-correct, quickly, and not allow that to be a legacy of the Senate”.The sense of unequal treatment has been heightened by the heavy focus by Manchin and others on Tanden’s Twitter feed. In her current role as president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, she frequently posted spiky and direct tweets without mincing her words, more than 1,000 of which she has since deleted.Tanden notably called Collins, one of the Republican senators who has declined to come to her rescue, “the worst”.Yet Manchin was content to confirm some of Trump’s nominees with highly controversial social media histories, while Trump himself made many racist and sexist tweets and is now permanently suspended from Twitter.“We can disagree with her tweets, but in the past, Trump nominees that they’ve confirmed and supported had much more serious issues and conflicts than just something that was written on Twitter,” the Democratic congresswoman Grace Meng told Politico. More

If Donald Trump’s presidency was a lesson in how symbolic acts of cruelty can be used to consolidate power, then his successors are trying to demonstrate that the same is true for benevolence. In just over a month, the Biden-Harris administration has issued a flurry of new directives aimed at reversing some of the worst aspects of the former president’s immigration policy.Biden has declared an end to the travel restrictions imposed on numerous Muslim-majority countries, and committed to both reviving and expanding the US refugee resettlement scheme. The administration has presented sweeping new immigration reforms to Congress, which if passed would offer a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people, promised a moratorium on deportations in most instances, and announced a plan to reunite children and parents torn apart by the grotesque family separation policy. On Friday, the US began allowing asylum seekers to cross its southern border for the first time since Trump’s “remain in Mexico” initiative was launched in January 2019.Will the reforms go further than merely reversing those of the previous president? Some of the measures, such as a request last week that officials use the term “noncitizen” in place of “alien” when referring to immigrants, indicate that this is as much about a shift in tone as about substantial changes in policy. But others could have wide-reaching global effects. On 4 February, Biden ordered a report on the impact of climate migration, including a study of “options for protection and resettlement of individuals displaced directly or indirectly from climate change”.This official acknowledgement that climate change forces people to leave their homes is unprecedented – at least for the US, which is the world’s largest historical polluter. “I never thought that this would be a part of any American president’s priorities, especially within the first 30 days of their administration,” said Kayly Ober of the US-based NGO Refugees International, expressing the surprise shared by many climate policy experts.Calculating the number of people displaced by climate change is tricky, since people can move for a variety of reasons, and the subject is prone to alarmist predictions. Of the estimated 24 million people forced to leave their homes by extreme weather in 2019, most stayed within their country of residence. But there is currently no coherent international framework for protecting those who cross borders due to climate change: refugee law only deals with people fleeing persecution or war.Trump has already shown how the US can drag the rest of the world downwards in terms of humanitarian standards: his choking-off of refugee resettlement, for instance, was part of a wider decline. Last year, according to the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), was the worst on record for resettlement. The situation was made worse by the pandemic, but the UN was already warning in 2019 about low resettlement rates. If the US revives such schemes, and expands them to address the realities of the 21st century, then other countries may be encouraged or persuaded to follow suit.Yet the fact that a liberal president currently occupies the White House is no reason to abandon our critical faculties. As the climate migration expert Alex Randall notes, Biden’s report, which is due in six months’ time, is being produced by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Will this security-focused framing dispel or encourage the xenophobic responses to climate change that are emerging in various parts of the world?According to the Center for American Progress, there is already a renewed effort among US conservatives to link environmental damage to immigration, while some prominent far-right parties elsewhere are attempting to give their nationalism a green hue. In 2019, Marine Le Pen launched an election campaign in France by promising that a “Europe of nations” could become the world’s first “ecological civilisation”. Borders, claimed her party’s chief spokesperson, “are the environment’s greatest ally”.This points to a more fundamental question, which is whether to address a migration “crisis” by making a humanitarian exception to the existing system of border control, or by rethinking the principles on which the system exists. Formal refugee resettlement programmes, for instance, make a huge difference to the lives of people who benefit from them, yet less than 1% of those registered by the UNHCR are resettled each year.Many refugees who cross borders do so via informal routes, at risk of death and injury, and often to the displeasure of the governments that receive them. Look, for instance, at the way the British government is creating increasingly harsh conditions for asylum seekers who arrive in the UK under their own initiative. Biden’s proposals contain admirable rhetoric about the need to address “root causes” of migration – but Europe’s recent history shows us how, under xenophobic pressure, this noble-minded language can be used to adorn schemes whose ultimate effect is to keep people out, at considerable human cost.Indeed, so does the recent history of the US, where the new moratorium on deportations has already met judicial resistance. In a new book, Border & Rule, the scholar and activist Harsha Walia reminds us that Trump’s cruelty sat atop foundations laid by previous presidents. From the 1990s onwards, there was an increasing effort to criminalise unwanted migration and accelerate border security measures. In 2014, writes Walia, under Obama’s presidency – in which Biden, of course, served as vice president – about half of all federal arrests were immigration-related. A similar process has been under way in most advanced economies: Walia makes a persuasive argument that we should see this not as a domestic policy issue, but as part of a global system in which border control, alongside military and economic policy, is a way for wealthy countries to maintain their power.There is a risk that this wider context induces a kind of paralysis: what’s the point of changing anything if you can’t change everything? But the reason Biden is able to take these bold-sounding steps now is because of the space created by ordinary people who resisted Trump’s crackdowns and brought their political demands to bear on the Democrats in the run-up to last year’s election. They didn’t wait for a president’s permission to demand better – and, despite the change of leadership, there’s no reason to stop now. More

Chances are it is the most influential amendment to the US constitution that you aren’t familiar with. Given its impact, it is astonishing how little the 14th amendment is discussed in public life. Americans can’t rattle it off like the first and second amendments – but its words have fundamentally shaped the modern definition of US citizenship and the principles of equality and freedom entitled to those within the country’s borders.Sitting at the crux of these key ideals, the 14th amendment is cited in more litigation than any other, including some of the US supreme court’s most well-known cases: Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v Board of Education, Loving v Virginia, Roe v Wade, Bush v Gore, Obergefell v Hodges. And because these noble notions are embedded in the 14th, it has the remarkable ability to generate both boundless hope (for the promises of that more perfect union aspired to in the constitution’s preamble) and crushing misery (for the failures to achieve such promises).The new six-part Netflix docuseries Amend: The Fight for America is a deep dive into the 14th amendment. Ratified in 1868, it gave citizenship to all those born or naturalized in the country and promised due process and equal protection for all people. Amend threads the amendment through the fabric of American history, from its origins before the American civil war to the bigoted violence of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, through the tumultuous years of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, right until today’s feverish debates over same-sex marriage and immigration. The show is a journey into America’s fraught relationship with its marginalized peoples, who have fought to fully be a part of the country.It’s heady stuff for sure, but portrayed with an eye toward educating and entertaining, employing a blend of performance, music and animation, in addition to the requisite experts and archival images. Acclaimed actors breathe life into speeches and writings of key historical figures: Mahershala Ali as Frederick Douglass, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Andrew Johnson, Diane Lane as Earl Warren, Samira Wiley as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Laverne Cox as James Baldwin, Pedro Pascal as Abraham Lincoln, and Randall Park as Robert F Kennedy, among many others.Amend is infotainment expertly done, with the host Will Smith’s affable yet engaged approach gently guiding viewers through moments joyful and difficult. Smith executive-produced the series with the Emmy-winning writer Larry Wilmore, who exhibited his skill at finding humor in dark moments as the “senior black correspondent” on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. “People just don’t know what the 14th amendment is,” Wilmore said to the Guardian. “The first, second and fifth are hogging up most of the oxygen. And yet the 14th has been the most resilient and durable. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, but a lot of light has not been shown on it.”Amend helps viewers appreciate the 14th amendment’s unwavering relevance by delving first into its origins. After the Emancipation Proclamation, some 4 million enslaved people were free – but they weren’t citizens, even after fighting to preserve the union during the civil war. The 14th amendment changed that, circumscribing citizenship and providing a roadmap for formerly enslaved people to fully actualize their economic, political and familial lives. It is the first appearance of the word equal in the constitution. “In a lot of ways, our country wasn’t founded in 1776,” said K Sabeel Rahman, a Brooklyn Law School professor. “It was founded by [Ohio representative] John Bingham and Congress passing the 14th amendment because that’s the modern constitution.”The system of labor, wealth and politics by which white southerners had defined themselves was crumbling – but they wouldn’t let it go easily. While citizens and terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan waged violence on black Americans, a popular, persuasive new medium helped propagate the mythologies of the lost cause – and it is partly why many aren’t familiar with the 14th amendment: “The former Confederacy got the final cut on the movie of civil war,” as Smith puts it, with films like Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation shaping the dominant historical narrative.The gauzy fantasy of the noble civil war, coupled with supreme court–sanctioned segregation, ensured the scourge of open racism endured for another century after the 14th amendment’s passage. The 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision ruled that “separate but equal” violated the 14th’s equal-protection clause, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banished Jim Crow segregation. But the calls to enforce the 14th can be heard just as loudly today as in the 60s and 70s: Amend’s third episode draws a tight parallel between the non-violent activism of the civil rights movement and last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, both eschewing moderate calls for patience in favor of Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now”.“We have a set of ideals in this country, and we continue to fail to live up to them,” the activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham said to the Guardian. “Every single time the police shoot another unarmed black or brown or indigenous person, every single time an LGBTQ+ person is fired from their job or left houseless, every time immigrants are stripped of the rights that should belong to them, we are experiencing the gap between what is written and what is true. And the more we grapple with these challenging conversations, the more real we can get not just about the scale of the problem we have to fix but how exactly we can go about handling it.”The amendment is a lodestar for all claiming the constitutional right to be treated fairly. Women, with the help of then attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, convinced the court in the 1970s that the 14th’s equal protection clause should apply to gender in the same way it is applied to race, both being immutable characteristics that don’t affect one’s ability.But women’s equality depends on control over their own bodies and the choice of when and whether to have children. In 1965, the right to privacy was established, founded on the 14th amendment’s due process clause, and this new concept was applied to Roe v Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion by determining that the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman, not the state. “It’s an unfolding process,” said Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard law professor, of the 14th amendment extending to the right to abortion. “It may not seem obvious as a path, but that is the process of constitutional law.”Indeed, the 14th touches Americans’ most intimate moments. Its passage finally allowed formerly enslaved people to legally marry, and later it was applied to protect the right of interracial couples to marry in 1967 and the right of consenting adults to engage in intimate sexual conduct in 2003. Amend devotes one powerful episode to the story of Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the 2015 supreme court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and proved that marriage equality too was at the heart of the 14th. (Obergefell admits he had no idea what the 14th amendment was before his case.)More than 150 years after the passage of the 14th, many groups are still actively struggling to realize its promises. Immigrants have long devoted backbreaking labor to this country, only to see intolerant policies, racism and violence trample their dreams. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only major federal legislation to explicitly stop immigration for a specific nationality, was the result of the supreme court putting fear and misguided claims of national security above the constitution’s expressly provided protections. Dehumanizing and criminalizing immigrant groups to deny their 14th amendment rights has been part of America’s playbook ever since. “We’ve just survived four years of a president who’s been openly racist and has targeted particular immigrant communities based on their race,” said Alina Das, the co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU’s law school. “Equality under the law is something that the immigrant-rights community is still striving for in many ways.”After all, says Cunningham, “the biggest misconception [about the 14th] is that once it’s written on paper, the work is done. The truth, of course, is very different, and I think that Amend really pushes people to see past the veneer of American exceptionalism.” The show sadly but clearly illustrates how ignorance and hate have long fomented misunderstanding, anger, violence and inequality in America and how potently fear and intolerance have prevailed.But it is also just as clear who has the power to make the 14th amendment’s promise of an equal society a reality: not the courts, but we the people, ordinary folks taking to the streets, sacrificing our time, privacy, and sometimes safety, and doing the courageous, often unglamorous hard work of making sure its words have meaning for all of us. “We’re all part of the story of the 14th amendment, and it’s a continuing story,” Das notes. “And the documentary does a wonderful job of inviting people to be part of the living history of the amendment.” As Smith says at the conclusion of the series: “We have to choose to bring 14 to life.”“We’re giving an uplifting message here, not a dour or bleak one, said Wilmore. “There’s a lot of tough material here, but at the end of the day, we’re saying that this is what allowed the promise to happen – this document is the pathway for the promise.” More

Five hundred thousand deaths can be hard to picture. But we have to try. Imagine, for instance, that everyone in Miami, Colorado Springs or Minneapolis died in the course of a single year. If that seems too absurd, combine the number of Americans who died in the second world war, Korea and Vietnam, then imagine that they too had been killed in a single year, on American soil.But such thought exercises only get us so far. They help us understand the scale and speed of the coronavirus crisis, but not much else. In particular, they don’t help us appreciate the ways in which death has been unequally distributed across America, and how that has affected society’s response. The disappearance of an entire city would affect a broad cross-section of society, while wars tend to unify the whole nation even as they kill mostly the young. But coronavirus is different, generating neither equal suffering nor equal concern. Instead, it disproportionately kills the elderly, the poor and racial minorities.These inequalities have shaped America’s response to the virus profoundly, with Republicans minimizing its risk and Democrats seeing it for the national emergency which it is. Republican dismissal of the virus has in part been due to the tooth-and-claw individualism that forms a key part of American identity, but it would not have been possible without something more. It has also been based on the idea that the dead were somehow expendable because of who they were.It comes as no surprise that Republican politicians show little concern for the poor or minorities. But for the lack of concern to extend even to seniors, who form such a key Republican voting bloc, the ideological blinkers must be powerful indeed.Not all prominent Republican voices went as far as the Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who suggested that the elderly ought to be willing to sacrifice their lives in order to save the economy. But the general drumbeat of misinformation and minimization, from Donald Trump on down, showed at best a profound indifference to the fates of the senior Americans who make up the vast proportion of the dead, and yet whose fate is presented as incidental to the need to “reopen the economy”.If the Republican response has been based on a characteristically narrow definition of which Americans are worthy of saving, the response of other parts of society has been much more uplifting. The challenge of the coronavirus has also called forth exactly the things which have always made America truly great but which the contemporary political right stands against: expertise, technological progress, a sense of civic duty, and an inclusive definition of Americanness. Although these ideas remain under assault, Joe Biden’s victory represents the triumph of these values over their opposites – and most of all a victory for the idea that all American lives are worth saving, regardless of whether they are considered economically valuable or not.For this reason, it has been incredibly encouraging to see that the Biden administration has recognized that the response to the virus must also involve addressing the structural inequities revealed by it. Measures such as raising the minimum wage to $15 are morally required after low-paid, disproportionately non-white essential workers have kept society humming at great personal risk during the pandemic. They are also popular among the public at large. Support for raising the minimum wage is at 61%, and 68% of Americans support Biden’s broader economic relief plan.Although Biden’s victory was a necessary first step, the deep callousness revealed by the pandemic will take much more than one election to address. In 2012, Mitt Romney famously lamented the 47% of the population who he said could never be convinced to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives”. But the pandemic has shown that this gets the American problem precisely backwards. The real problem isn’t people who refuse to take responsibility for themselves, but those who refuse to take responsibility for others – including the 47% of the electorate who voted for Donald Trump despite the complete disregard for America life he showed in the handling of the pandemic.What can be done about this 47%? In the short-term, not a great deal. There is little reason to believe they can be won over. Another lesson of the pandemic has been just how deep America’s divisions are – not even a deadly plague has brought together the two sides in what Biden has called America’s “uncivil war”. If the Republican party remains a primarily destructive rather than constructive force, then Democrats must abandon their hopes of bipartisanship and push on without it.Ultimately, Democrats must demonstrate to people the value of a government which cares for their wellbeing, materially, medically and otherwise. Building a coalition of care ought to be easier than a coalition of indifference. But in order to do it, Democrats must seize the opportunity to address the deeper American problems which the virus has revealed. Offering meaningful improvements to people’s lives isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s also the best way of guarding against the return to power of those who couldn’t care less whether their fellow Americans live or die. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterGet-out-the-vote efforts hampered by the coronavirus pandemic and an 11th-hour voter registration surge for well-funded Republicans thwarted ambitions of a blue wave in Texas during the 2020 election, according to a new postmortem that state Democrats shared with the Guardian.“The majority of Texans, if they were in the ballot box, would vote for Democrats. The problem is that Republicans have a higher likelihood of turning out,” said Hudson Cavanagh, the Texas Democratic party’s data science director who authored the post-election report.Texas generated outsized buzz last year, as a spike in early voting made much of the nation wonder whether its 38 electoral college votes were finally up for grabs. Yet former president Donald Trump still triumphed by more than a five-point margin – a much closer presidential contest than any other in recent years, but one that reinforced Republicans as the state’s dominant party.Now, Democrats are blaming last fall’s defeat mostly on programmatic difficulties, which allowed Republicans to best them in get-out-the-vote operations. “Texas is still the next frontier,” said Abhi Rahman, the communications director for Texas Democrats.Despite record turnout in 2020, Texas ranked 44th out of 50 states in terms of ballots counted as a proportion of the total voting-eligible population, according to the United States Elections Project. High Asian voter participation marked “a major shift”, but still, “the electorate was whiter than projected”, Cavanagh noted in his analysis.Latinos – who are considered a key demographic to move Texas to the left – also eclipsed turnout projections. But Latino Republicans voted at a higher rate than Latino Democrats, and that differential turnout created a largely false impression that Democrats were losing ground with one of their most crucial blocs, too often lumped together as a monolith.One exception was the Rio Grande Valley, a typically Democratic stronghold where Latinos did in fact gravitate more toward Trump at the top of the ticket.While “Latino voters continue to strongly support Democrats,” the party needs “to empower Latino voices at the ballot box”, Cavanagh wrote in his report.On top of Texas’s reputation as a voter suppression state – based on voter ID requirements, a difficult registration process, restrictions on mail ballots and other barriers – Covid-19 added yet another obstacle for Texas voters in 2020. Polling locations closed because of infected workers, while long lines of constituents who weren’t required to wear masks threatened exposure to the virus.“It took a lot of bravery for a lot of these Democrats who understood the risk that, you know, they were putting themselves in to go vote,” Cavanagh told the Guardian. “I’m incredibly proud of the folks that did, frankly.”Amid the public health crisis, Texas Democrats decided against knocking on doors for face-to-face voter engagement, because “even one life lost is too many”, Cavanagh said. Republicans, on the other hand, connected with eligible voters in-person, a clear advantage in one of the few states where residents still cannot register to vote online.In the last months leading up to the election, a gargantuan push by Republicans to register new voters wiped out the gradual advantage Democrats had been honing for years, especially given that almost all of those new Republican registrations turned into net votes.“Their willingness to put people at risk to win the election, you know, made it really hard for us to keep up,” Cavanagh said.As Democrats turned to virtual registration drives and phone banking, they spent too much time speaking with reliable party members who would have voted regardless. Likewise, a dearth of contact information for young and rural Texans – as well as people of color – and the inability to canvas made it difficult to connect with voters who were less likely to turn out.Estimates indicate that there are still more than 2 million solidly Democratic unregistered voters in the state, and Cavanagh said the party needs to focus on registering them, then actually building relationships so they make it to the polls.“We know that that’s how Democrats win across this country,” he said. “We look people in the eyes, we tell them our values, we tell them what we believe in, and that’s how we get people to turn out.” More

Donald Trump will reportedly tell the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this week he is Republicans’ “presumptive 2024 nominee” for president.Trump will address CPAC on Sunday, his subject the future of the party he took over in the 2016 primary then led from the White House through four tumultuous years. On Monday, citing anonymous sources, the news site Axios reported his plan to assume the mantle of challenger to Joe Biden – or another Democrat, should the 78-year-old president decide not to run for a second term.An unnamed “longtime adviser” was quoted as saying Trump’s speech to the rightwing event will be a “show of force” with the message: “I may not have Twitter or the Oval Office, but I’m still in charge.”A named source, close adviser Jason Miller, said: “Trump effectively is the Republican party. The only chasm is between Beltway insiders and grass-roots Republicans around the country. When you attack President Trump, you’re attacking the Republican grass roots.”Thousands have left the party since the Capitol riot of 6 January, which Trump incited in his attempt to overturn an election defeat he has not conceded, and in which five people including a police officer died. Trump lost his Twitter account, his favoured means of communication throughout his time in office, and access to other social media over his lies and inflammatory behaviour before, during and after the attack on Congress.Polling of Republicans who have not left the party, however, shows the former president with a clear lead over a range of potential 2024 candidates, supportive of him or not, in a notional primary.Ten members of the House voted to impeach Trump a second time over the Capitol attack and seven senators voted with Democrats to convict. That was short by 10 votes of the majority needed but it made it the most bipartisan impeachment ever.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, voted to acquit but then turned on Trump, branding him responsible for events at the Capitol. But House leaders have not followed suit, as they deal with vocal extremists in their caucus and the loyal party base.As Trump lashed out at McConnell, calling him “a dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack”, so Republicans in the House and Senate who turned against Trump have been censured by state parties and reported vitriol aimed their way from the grassroots – and even family members.Trump’s grip on his party is clear. New polling from Suffolk University and USA Today showed 46% of Trump voters would follow him if he formed his own party while 42% said his impeachment had strengthened their support. The same poll said 58% of Trump voters subscribed to an outright conspiracy theory: that the Capitol riot was “mostly a [leftwing] antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters”.In reality, many of more than 250 individuals charged over the attack have been found to have links to far-right groups.On Sunday a key member of House leadership, Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say Trump lost the election or bore responsibility for the Capitol breach.The former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said Scalise was “saying that America isn’t a democracy. That’s become the new standard of the Republican party. Not since 1860s has a large part of the country refused to accept election. The Republican party is an anti-democratic force.”Scalise also told ABC News he had visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.“I noticed he was a lot more relaxed than in his four years in the White House,” he said. “He still cares a lot about this country and the direction of our country. But, you know, it was a conversation more about how he’s doing now and what he’s … planning on doing and how his family is doing.”Axios cited an unnamed source as saying some potential 2024 contenders have sought Trump’s endorsement. It also noted that the former president, who would be 78 on election day and faces considerable legal threats now he has left office, may be planning to string the party along but ultimately not to run.Funds raised around Trump’s lie about his clear election defeat by Joe Biden being the result of fraud may be ploughed into funding primaries against those who have crossed him.Either way, CPAC has obligingly moved close by, from its usual venue in Maryland. Party moderates and figures who have criticised Trump, among them the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, and the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, have not been invited to speak. Mike Pence, the vice-president whose life was placed in danger during the Capitol attack, reportedly turned down an invitation.Crowds at the conservative event were initially suspicious of Trump when he emerged on the national Republican scene, but came to embrace his flag-hugging displays with evangelical fervour.Axios’s source reportedly said: “Much like 2016, we’re taking on Washington again.” More

Neera Tanden, president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, seemed unlikely to be confirmed as budget director in the Biden administration after Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, two moderate Republican senators, said they would not vote in her favour.In a statement on Monday, Collins said Tanden was unfit to run the Office of Management and Budget, which plays a powerful role in overseeing federal finances and regulation.“Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,” the Maine senator said.The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, backed Tanden, who she said was “an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent budget director”.“We look forward to the committee votes this week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties,” Psaki said.But then a spokesperson for Romney said the Utah senator would not back Tanden. Romney had been “critical of extreme rhetoric from prior nominees”, the spokesperson said, “and this is consistent with that position. He believes it’s hard to return to comity and respect with a nominee who has issued a thousand mean tweets.”Such a position might seem paradoxical for a party that just endured four years of Donald Trump’s offensive and intemperate tweets. But much of the Republican attack on Tanden, who has strong links to Hillary Clinton, has focused on her social media record.Collins noted Tanden’s decision quietly to delete more than 1,000 tweets in the days after the election. Several of the tweets attacked Republican members of Congress, including Collins, whom Tanden described as “the worst”. Collins said the deletion of the tweets “raises concerns about her commitment to transparency”.Collins and Romney’s opposition delivered a blow to Joe Biden as he struggles to fill his cabinet. Several other key nominations are lining up for confirmation in the Senate but Collins made her move just three days after the Democratic senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, said he would vote against Tanden.With the Senate split 50-50, Manchin’s defection meant the administration already needed to persuade at least one moderate Republican to come on board. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a possible vote for Tanden, has not yet indicated her intention.The White House is on tenterhooks with its efforts to fill cabinet posts. On Monday one of the most critical positions – that of attorney general, the country’s top prosecutor – went before the Senate judiciary committee.It was an especially poignant moment for the nominee, Merrick Garland, who five years ago was denied a confirmation hearing for a seat on the supreme court by the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.Beyond Garland, Deb Haaland is up for confirmation hearings as interior secretary and Xavier Becerra as health and human services secretary. More