US Politics

On 20 March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was rampaging through New York, Andrew Cuomo announced new restrictions on home visits for older and vulnerable people. Unveiling the rules, named Matilda’s Law after his mother, at his televised daily briefing, the governor spoke passionately about the need for New Yorkers to care for one another.“Those three-word sentences can make all the difference,” he said. “ ‘I miss you’, ‘I love you’, ‘I’m thinking of you’, ‘I wish I were there with you’, ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this’.”It was, he later recalled, “a very emotional moment for me, and it was reported that I shed a tear. I do know that I welled up with emotion that day.”Cuomo’s Matilda’s Law moment – tears and all – was made for TV. Such displays of unrestrained emoting rapidly turned him into an American icon, the Italian American tough guy in touch with his tender side fighting for people in the heart of a dreadful pandemic.His daily briefings became obligatory viewing, pushing Cuomo to the center of the national stage as the empathetic antithesis to Donald Trump. The New York Times declared him “politician of the moment”, CNN fantasised about a “President Andrew Cuomo”, and even the far-right Fox News guru Sean Hannity heaped praise on him on his radio talk show.To cap it all, Cuomo, 63, got a book deal out of it. With characteristic hubris, he titled the work: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic.What a difference a few months make.Fast forward to today, and Cuomo is now facing calls for his resignation, an investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors, and angry state legislators from his own Democratic party who want to strip him of the emergency powers they granted him during the pandemic.As for emoting, there is still plenty of that. But it’s not of the “Matilda, I miss you” variety. One of the New York Democrats who signed a letter calling for the withdrawal of Cuomo’s emergency powers told the New York Post that last week he received an unexpected phone call from the governor.According to Ron Kim, an assemblyman from Queens, New York City, the call began with silence before Cuomo said: “Mr Kim, are you an honorable man?” He then proceeded to yell down the phone at Kim for 10 minutes, shouting: “You will be destroyed” and “You will be finished”.When the Post’s report came out, Cuomo responded by devoting a large chunk of his press briefing to an all-barrels attack on Kim, accusing him of a slew of unethical practices.The contrast between the untethered attack-machine of this week’s Cuomo, and the teary-eyed empathist he projected last March is so startling it has left many outside observers bemused. But to New York politicians who have for years been in the Cuomo orbit, it was as surprising as the spaghetti and meatballs the governor likes to cook his family every Sunday dinner.“Meet the Governor Cuomo we’ve known all along, beneath the Emmy-winning performance he put on for months,” was how Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, put it on Twitter this week.The pandemic has exposed many things, and this is one of themThe Guardian asked Williams, who acts as official watchdog for New Yorkers, to elucidate. “The pandemic has exposed many things, and this is one of them,” he said. “It’s been like a secret that up to now Cuomo’s got away with – his lack of accountability, the way he responds to political winds only when forced to.”Ironically, the area that has landed Cuomo in such hot water is precisely the same as the one that inspired his tear-laden announcement named after his mother – caring for older and vulnerable New Yorkers through the pandemic. Three days after he executed Matilda’s Law, he created a new provision shielding hospital and nursing home executives from potential liability for decisions that might lead to people’s deaths from Covid.As the journalist David Sirota has noted in the Guardian, Cuomo had received more than $2m from the Greater New York Hospital Association and its associated executives and lobbying firms – the very healthcare industry group that claims to have “drafted” the immunity clause.The immunity provision has had a detrimental impact on the ongoing investigation into Covid deaths in New York nursing homes which accounted for almost a third of the total death toll of about 46,000. In a withering report released by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, last month, she says that it has led to confusion about whether homes that failed to meet health standards for containing the pandemic could ever be held accountable.James has demanded that the new immunity rules be scrapped.That wasn’t the end of it. Two days after creating the immunity provision – five days after announcing Matilda’s Law – Cuomo released an advisory notice. It directed nursing homes to accept patients back from hospital who were infected or might be infected with coronavirus.The homes had to admit anyone who was “medically stable” – no resident was to be denied readmission “solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of Covid-19”.The motivation behind the notice was clear – there was an “urgent need” to expand hospital capacity in order to meet the surge in Covid cases. In other words, free up hospital beds by getting older patients back to their nursing homes.The rest is history. A report by the New York department of health found that between the issuing of the advisory on 25 March and 8 May more than 6,000 Covid-positive residents were allowed back into nursing homes and long-term care facilities.There has been a great deal of debate about the extent to which the governor’s March advisory was to blame for large numbers of nursing home deaths from Covid. When the Poynter Institute’s fact-checking arm, Politifact, reviewed the question it concluded that Cuomo had not forced nursing homes to take in sick patients as his Republican detractors had claimed.But Politifact did conclude that the notice give care managers the distinct impression that they had no other option than to take the residents back in.As with so many other political scandals before it, the real trouble with “Cuomo-gate” was not the arguable errors that were made but the lack of transparency about what happened next. That’s what really bugs the public advocate.“My problem with Cuomo’s leadership is not that mistakes were made – mistakes are always made. But if you can’t take accountability for them and debrief what went wrong, then mistakes get made over and over again and people are dying for it,” Williams said.The unravelling began with the attorney general’s report last month which revealed that deaths of New York nursing home residents were substantially higher than had been recorded by the Cuomo administration. Residents who had fallen sick and died after they were transferred to hospital were mysteriously left off the official count.Then the New York Post dropped a bombshell. The paper reported that Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, had admitted to Democratic leaders in a conference call that the administration had withheld the true nursing home death toll from state lawmakers.DeRosa told them in the leaked conversation that “we froze” because Donald Trump was trying to use the deaths as a “giant political football”.What began as a dispute over health guidelines and immunity quickly morphed into a fully-fledged cover-up scandal. In the wake of the Post story, the state revised its official tally from 8,500 to more than 15,000 deaths – making a mockery of Cuomo’s long-standing boast that his state had among the best records in the country with regard to nursing homes Covid fatalities.On Monday Cuomo was forced to issue an apology, of sorts. “We made a mistake,” he said, before swiftly going on to clarify that the mistake was to create a “void” that had “allowed misinformation and conspiracy” to flourish.But he continued stubbornly to deny that death numbers had been massaged and insisted that everything had been done that could have been done to save lives.The semi-apology has left many dissatisfied. “It sounds to me like the ‘I’m sorry I got caught’ kind of apology,” Williams said.On Friday Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens in Congress, added her powerful voice to calls for a full investigation into Cuomo’s handling of the nursing homes crisis. “Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic,” she said in a statement. “Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership.”The public advocate wants an even more thorough accounting – a full investigation into every aspect of Cuomo’s response to the health crisis. There are leadership lessons to be learnt here, he thinks – rather less rosy ones than those the governor implied in the title of his book.Williams points to the stuttering start of the pandemic when the state took several days to close schools and ban gatherings; the classification of “essential workers” who were obliged to keep on working and who were overwhelmingly drawn from black and Latino communities; and evidence of glaring racial disparities now just surfacing in the distribution of the vaccine.“From infection to injection, the governor’s decisions have been wrong at almost every step,” Williams said. “He writes a book on leadership during the pandemic while at the same time hiding data, and people are dying. The arrogance is incredible.” More

One of the most powerful prosecutions of former US president Donald Trump last week came from Stacey Plaskett of the US Virgin Islands, the first delegate from an American territory to hold the position of impeachment manager.Yet Plaskett’s status meant that she was unable to vote for Trump’s impeachment because she has no vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. The US Virgin Islands has no representation at all in the Senate. Its residents cannot even vote for president.The anomaly illuminates America’s long unaddressed colonial history that leaves five territories floating in constitutional limbo, their residents – most of them people of color – effectively treated as second-class citizens.But with the impetus of last summer’s protests against racial injustice, and the election of a Democratic president, one of those territories – Puerto Rico – is aiming to become the 51st state of the union. A parallel effort by Washington, District of Columbia (DC), is also closer than ever to its similar goal.‘It is incredibly important to take a step back and look at who actually has real representation in democracy,” said Stasha Rhodes, campaign manager of 51 for 51, an organization pushing for DC statehood. “If you think about all the players that you mentioned, they all have a common thread: they’re all people of color. Does America have a true democracy if so many people of color are standing outside looking in and are not able to fully participate?”There are five inhabited US territories: American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Apart from American Samoa, people born in the territories are US citizens and pay federal taxes such as Medicare and social security, though not federal tax on locally sourced income. Each territory sends a delegate to the House who can debate legislation and sit on committees but is not able to actually vote.Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony until 1898 when it fell under US control as part of the terms that ended the Spanish-American war. In 1917 the Jones Act granted Puerto Ricans US citizenship and in 1952 it became a commonwealth of the US – but still without voting rights in American presidential elections.Over the past half century Puerto Rico has held six non-binding referendums on its status and last November voted 52%-47% in favor of statehood, a cause boosted by grievance over the federal government’s inadequate response to Hurricane Maria in 2017. In an interview last week with Axios on HBO, Governor Pedro Pierluisi said “Congress is morally obligated to respond” and predicted that a House bill will be introduced next month.George Laws Garcia, executive director of the Puerto Rico Statehood Council, said: “You have a bunch of unelected individuals making decisions on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico over the desires and ideas and perspectives of the local elected officials, which I think is basically blatant colonialism.“We had Hurricane Maria and the earthquakes and now Covid and, in all these instances when Puerto Rico needs federal resources, federal support, federal action, we don’t have the capacity to hold elected officials in Washington accountable for what they do because they don’t ever get any votes from Puerto Rico, and that includes the president as well as members of Congress.”It is Congress that would have to approve the creation of any new state for the first time since Hawaii in 1959.Republicans have cast the move as an unconstitutional power grab likely to give Democrats two extra seats in the Senate. Martha McSally, then a senator for Arizona, told NBC News last year that should Puerto Rico gain statehood, Republicans will “never get the Senate back again”.Although Democrats control the House, a statehood bill would face a far tougher passage in the evenly divided Senate, where 60 votes are required to thwart the “kill switch” of a Republican filibuster. Despite progressives pointing to the racist history of the filibuster, key Democrats Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema have already indicating unwillingness to eliminate it.Garcia added: “The prospects of statehood are incredibly challenging, but they’ve been challenging for every other territory that has ever been admitted as a state. In my lifetime, it’s certainly the best possible odds that we could have.”Almost all of Puerto Rico’s residents are Hispanic while nearly half of DC’s are African American. But as the nation’s capital, DC comes from a different historical, economic and constitutional perspective.Its 700,000-plus residents – higher than the populations of Vermont and Wyoming – pay more per capita in federal income taxes than any state. They gained the right to vote in presidential elections in 1961 but still lack a voting member in the House or a voice in the Senate.The movement for DC statehood is bigger and better organized than ever before. Last June the House passed a bill that approved it, the first time a chamber of Congress had advanced a DC statehood measure. It never stood a chance in the Republican-controlled Senate but Black Lives Matter protests in Washington gave the cause added potency.Rhodes of 51 for 51 said: “Our most celebrated civil rights leaders were fighting for access to democracy. If you think about John Lewis and Martin Luther King, they were all fighting for access to voting and access to representation and so here in 2021 we’re still fighting in Washington DC for equal representation and a clear chance at participation in democracy.”One key obstacle was removed when Trump, who had vowed “DC will never be a state” because it would be sure to elect Democratic senators, was beaten in the presidential election by Joe Biden, who has voiced support for the campaign.Then came the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, told reporters earlier this month: “If the District of Columbia could operate as a state, (what) any governor can do is to call out the National Guard without getting the permission of the federal government. It shouldn’t have to happen that way.”Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC’s nonvoting member in the House, reintroduced the statehood bill last month, while Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware reintroduced his companion statehood bill which currently has 39 Democratic cosponsors.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy for the grassroots movement Indivisible, said: “It’s an issue of basic fairness. DC is not all government bureaucrats and lawyers. There are actual real people who live here, many of whom were tasked with cleaning up the mess of the January 6th insurrection. Those are DC residents and they have no vote in Congress at all and so it would seem to me that it would be a pretty easy lift for every Democrat in the Senate to say that’s wrong.”Hatcher-Mays, a former aide to Holmes Norton, added: “We need to eliminate the filibuster to make DC the 51st state. This is the closest we have ever been to getting DC statehood and, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen this Congress, and it really has to happen or otherwise the Senate is in trouble. It’s really unrepresentative of the country as a whole and making DC a state would go a long way towards fixing that problem.”This is about making America a more perfect unionThe issue has cast light on the democratic deficit of the Senate, where small predominantly white states get two seats each, carrying as much weight as vast, racially diverse states such as California. In 2018 David Leonhardt, an opinion columnist at the New York Times, calculated that the Senate gives the average Black American only 75% as much representation as the average white American, and the average Hispanic American only 55% as much.Furthermore, in the 232-year history of the Senate there have only been 11 Black senators and Plaskett was the only elected Black woman at the impeachment trial. In such a context, Republicans’ opposition to statehood has been described as a bid to protect white minority rule.LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, said: “At the end of the day, you have states from Utah to Montana to others that have gained statehood early on with less question, with less critique than DC and Puerto Rico. It is a fundamental democratic flaw and it reeks of hypocrisy. The only reason why it is a debate or even a question is because of who makes up the majority of both of those places.”A previous bid for DC statehood was defeated in the Democratic-controlled House by an almost 2-1 margin in 1993 with President Bill Clinton reluctant to engage. This time, with Biden making racial justice a priority, the mood is different. There is a sense that Democrats’ control of the White House, Senate and House provides a historic opportunity.Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “This is about making America a more perfect union. It’s the oldest constitutional democracy in the world and yet some of its citizens do not have all the full voting rights because of where they reside. If we’re going to end racial injustice in America and talk about a new beginning for the country, we can’t sidestep old issues.” More

The Texas power outage, which has left millions without power, happened for a multitude of reasons. But it’s important to understand how those causes are connected, because they’ll continue to be relevant as the state experiences more extreme weather events.
It all starts with the winter storm that began on 13 February, which brought some of the coldest weather the state has experienced since 1989.
Normally the power grid can meet the energy demands of consumers. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined growing calls for an investigation into New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.“I … stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during Covid-19,” the high-profile progressive congresswoman, who represents a New York City district, said in a statement on Friday.Last week, it was revealed that a Cuomo aide told New York legislators the true picture of nursing home deaths wasn’t given last year, for fear it would be used against the governor during an investigation launched by Donald Trump’s justice department.Cuomo, who has already published a book about his handling of the crisis, has dismissed claims of wrongdoing. On Friday, he said information was not produced fast enough, which created “a void. And conspiracy theories and politics and rumors fill that void and you can’t allow inaccurate information to go unanswered.”But in January, New York state attorney general Leticia James said nursing home deaths from Covid-19 were undercounted by as much as 50%. Now, federal prosecutors in New York City and the FBI are reported to be investigating and state officials are seeking to strip Cuomo of emergency powers.The governor is under increasing pressure and Ocasio-Cortez’s intervention adds drama to a combustible mix.As a former federal housing secretary and son of former governor Mario Cuomo, the governor is a pillar of the Democratic centrist establishment. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez has rapidly risen to become a prominent voice on the progressive wing of the party.In her statement, she said: “Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership, and the secretary to the governor’s remarks warrant a full investigation.”In March, at the outset of the pandemic, New York reeled from a surge in cases. While Cuomo rose to worldwide prominence as the face of efforts to tackle the problem, an administration directive said nursing homes should not deny admission or readmission to a patient because they had Covid-19.That policy was rescinded two months later. Keeping the true number of nursing home residents who died hidden would theoretically deflect any blame for a bad policy choice. Cuomo has blamed staff entering nursing homes for spreading the virus to the vulnerable population, not patients brought in with Covid-19. He has said it would be discriminatory not to let those patients into nursing homes.The scandal has spread to CNN, a network which has a major presence in New York and for which Cuomo’s younger brother, Chris Cuomo, is a primetime host.Interviews between the two brothers went viral last spring but the network has now reinstated a prohibition on Chris Cuomo interviewing or covering his brother.The last time the governor appeared on his brother’s show, in June, Chris Cuomo asked: “Nursing homes. People died there. They didn’t have to. It was mismanaged. And the operators have been given immunity. What do you have to say about that?”Andrew Cuomo replied that some of what his brother said was incorrect, adding: “But that’s OK. It’s your show. You say whatever you want to say.” More

The US is back in the Paris climate accord, just 107 days after it left.While Friday’s return is heavily symbolic, world leaders say they expect the US to prove its seriousness after four years of being mostly absent. They are especially keen to hear an announcement from Washington in the coming months on the US’s goal for cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2030.The US return to the Paris agreement became official on Friday, almost a month after Joe Biden told the UN that the US intended to rejoin.“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now.”The president signed an executive order on his first day in office that reversed the withdrawal ordered by his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump.The Trump administration had announced its departure from the Paris accord in 2019 but it did not become effective until 4 November 2020, the day after the election, because of provisions in the agreement.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Thursday the official US re-entry “is itself very important”, as was Biden’s announcement that the US would return to providing climate aid to poorer countries, as promised in 2009.“It’s the political message that is being sent,” said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief. She was one of the leading forces in hammering out the 2015 mostly voluntary agreement where countries set their own goals to reduce greenhouse gases.One fear was that other countries would follow the US in abandoning the climate fight, but none did, Figueres said. She said the real issue was four years of climate inaction by the Trump administration. US cities, states and businesses still worked to reduce heat-trapping carbon dioxide, but without the federal government.“From a political symbolism perspective, whether it’s 100 days or four years, it is basically the same thing,” Figueres said. “It’s not about how many days. It’s the political symbolism that the largest economy refuses to see the opportunity of addressing climate change. We’ve lost too much time,” Figueres said.The UN Environment Programme director, Inger Andersen, said the US had to prove its leadership to the rest of the world, but she said she had no doubt it would when it submits its required emissions-cutting targets. The Biden administration promises to announce them before a summit in April.“We hope they will translate into a very meaningful reduction of emissions and they will be an example for other countries to follow,” Guterres said.More than 120 countries, including the world’s biggest emitter, China, have promised to have net zero carbon emissions around mid-century.The University of Maryland environment professor Nathan Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal, said he expected a 2030 target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions between 40% and 50% from the 2005 baseline levels. A longtime international target, included in the Paris accord with an even more stringent goal, is to keep warming below 2C above pre-industrial levels. The world has already warmed about 1.2C since that time. More

Ted Cruz has provoked an outcry after the Republican senator from Texas left the state for a trip to the sunny Mexican tourist resort of Cancún, as millions of his constituents endured deadly power outages and freezing temperatures.
Cruz was spotted waiting for, then later boarding, a flight to Cancún on Wednesday night.
A day later, after the images went viral, he returned to Texas
Ted Cruz flies to Cancún as millions of Texans freeze in the dark
Ted Cruz can’t escape Mexico vacation memes More

As Joe Biden visited Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week, our guest presenter Kenya Evelyn spoke to the state representative David Bowen about the administration’s early obligations to the Black voters who swung the election in the Democrats’ favour, racial equity in pandemic and vaccine plans, and how the president should combat white supremacy

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Joe Biden took the stage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week for his first town hall since entering the White House. For some, it was a necessary first step toward combatting racial inequities in the economy and healthcare made worse by the coronavirus. People in the audience asked the president how he was going to make sure everyone got a vaccine, and how he planned to combat white supremacy in the country. Watching intently was David Bowen, a state lawmaker and one of the young progressive Democrats leading the party forward. He told Kenya about his thoughts on the new Biden administration. Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More