US Politics

One week after the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States, we asked Americans how they feel about the election result and what their hopes are for the next four years.‘Biden and Harris can show that we have a genuine desire to overcome the problems Trump has exposed’I’m a Democrat and a secular humanist and voted for Biden and Harris. I believe in making the world a more equitable place. For 12 years, Donald Trump has pushed a racist agenda that has divided us, starting with his birther attacks on President Obama. Having exposed the rifts in our country, I believe Biden and Harris can show that we have a genuine desire to overcome the problems Trump has exposed.The pandemic has shown us the fragility of our lives and how we need to work together to solve problems. I hope the Green New Deal can be implemented. The food industry is an example of how broken we are, and how we can make meaningful, just and environmental changes. Trump built a wall to keep people out, but agriculture depends on undocumented migrant workers. Every aspect of the food industry depends on immigrant labor, from harvesting to planting.There’s also the pandemic and racial inequality, and the need to engage with people to understand what the Black Lives Matter and defund the police movements are. Biden needs to meet with the leadership of these movements. Joy Feasley, 54, arts worker, Philadelphia – voted for Joe Biden‘The future is bright’I proudly voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. My belief is that they will get the virus under control, provide immediate financial relief to everyone in need, reopen/open small minority-owned businesses, get the kids back to school (at least part-time by the summer months), and get everyone to continue to wear a mask.My concern is the pushback from the GOP and the lingering bad blood from the Trump era. We have to find a way forward together and heal the divide.I am especially elated we African Americans played such a huge role in electing Joe and Kamala. The power of black voices is growing stronger and I truly believe if we are to save the American democracy it will be because of African Americans. We hold fast to the American idea that all of us are created equal, entitled to justice and you cannot wish us away, as much as you would like to. We will beat back white supremacy and render their whole movement impotent through love, determination and fight. The future is bright. Robyn McGee, journalist, Los Angeles – voted for Joe Biden‘It’s just more of the same’The Democrats and the Republicans are as one. If you’d lived through [2020’s] horrifying fire season, you’d vote Green, too. If we don’t do something about this right now, we’re all doomed.I’m not buying the “Uncle Joe” routine – it’s just more of the same. I have very few hopes for this administration. The corporate sponsors made it very clear. People want commonsense gun reform; a Green New Deal; an end to corporate tax loopholes; and Medicare for All, but they’re not gonna get any of it.The most important thing that needs to happen is that the media needs reform. Some news channels spend every night spewing hate propaganda, often about each other. I’m from the UK, so imagine turning on Channel 4 News and having Jon Snow spew vile drivel at you for two hours about Sophie Raworth. It’s insanity. John, 47, commercial property developer, San Francisco – voted for Howie Hawkins and the Green party‘We should cancel student loan debt that is crippling an entire generation’I voted Biden/Harris, not because I like them, but because I honestly only wanted to see the “orange one” out of office. I believe Biden could do significant things for everyone but it’s hard to not see them in the pockets of lobbyists. I personally will not be putting hope in any Biden basket until I see significant changes.I’d like to see universal healthcare; navigating a Covid-19 mass vaccination; more unemployment opportunities, especially for gig workers and people paid under the table; and consistent stimulus checks so we can all stay home and kill the spread of the virus. I also think he should cancel all federal and state student loan debt that is crippling an entire generation from any upward mobility (I have been living in a house with five roommates since I left high school); and pass significant environmental bills to protect wild areas and return land back to indigenous people.Oh, and please can we paint the White House something a little more uplifting? Maybe a nice lavender or at the very least some shade of gray? Katy, 32, manager of a tattoo studio, Oregon – voted for Joe Biden‘The administration should be careful about what they mess with’I voted for Donald Trump. I don’t like him as a person, but I believe that good politicians don’t exist and that instead of voting for a personality you should vote for policy – I agree and support his policies on things like immigration, abortion and economics. I think that Joe himself is a weak person that will be easily influenced by the far-left members of his party. I think that the Biden administration should be very careful about what they mess with. If they’re smart, they won’t touch guns and they won’t even mention the word “reparation”. There are still over 70 million people, myself included, who voted for Trump that they shouldn’t forget about, even if they have marginalized and alienated them. Liam Cawood, 18, student, Georgia – voted for Donald Trump‘We need to rein in corporations’I voted Harris/Biden but it wasn’t a decision that I felt at ease with, because of Biden’s background and circle of influence. I felt that Kamala grew up in such a way that would give her some kind of somatic sense of what would support a large portion of people in our country who have not had care in a big way. They both seem to speak to care for all.My greatest hope for the next eight years – because I think that’s the minimum time it would take the administration once it sets this intention – is to rein in corporations. We are far past a point where technology influences people. As far as I can see it, as long as corporations have legal entity status like people, and corporations are driven by resource accumulation, we will continue to remove power, voice and decision-making from people, which will self-perpetuate systems that are harmful. Isa Stewart, 28, works at a non-profit, New Mexico – voted for Joe Biden‘My expectations are low’I chose not to vote. The US has two capitalist parties and no working-class ones. This is seen most clearly in the lack of socialized medicine. However, in the past four years, the Republicans have moved towards neo-fascism, and the Dems have become the main capitalist party. I would vigorously support a labor party if I felt there was one. My expectations are low. [Biden’s] embrace of progressive cultural issues helps disguise the fact that the Dems’ only political program is maintenance of the status quo. Joy, 68, retired, Louisiana – chose not to vote‘I hope the two parties can move towards the middle’I learned a lot from this election. Joe was not my first pick as I wanted Kamala. After he won the primary and was nominated I realized that Joe was the perfect candidate all along. I didn’t think about the mess our country was in. I wanted a female Potus. I’ve learned that you have to think hard and long. You cannot always have the candidates your heart wants. It’s bigger than your own needs and concerns, and this election needed a leader that would not be starting from scratch. Joe is ready for this role in every way and was ready to take on this mess from the second he won the election. I’m relieved and confident and trust him with our country and even my own life. Kamala is the perfect VP, by the way.My hopes are that the two parties can move towards the middle for human’s sake. Covid is the enemy, not red v blue. I hope that Joe can reach the hearts and minds of the people left on the fence, so to speak. Get them to climb down on to his side – the side of democracy, truth and fairness.I’m concerned that the hate left in people’s hearts will not fade away and Joe will be hindered by the rift. And lastly, Joe has to bring back the trade unions to our country. Gayle, 55, San Diego – voted for Joe Biden More

“Culture war” used to be a term inextricably linked with the maelstrom of US politics. Popularised by American sociologist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, it described how socially progressive and conservative coalitions were locked in a seemingly eternal conflict. It could make for surprising alliances, he noted, citing Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy joining forces in anti-abortion movements during the late 1980s.The battlegrounds of the US culture war are familiar ones, long regarded with bafflement by patronising and complacent European eyes: God, guns, abortion, gay rights and, of course, race. In a moment that threatened to temporarily derail his 2008 presidential bid, Barack Obama said of working-class rust-belt Americans: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” As the Tea Party movement’s backlash against his Medicare proposals underlined, culture wars became a highly effective means to mobilise low-income white Americans to vote against their economic interests.Brexit proved the detonator for the British culture war, which became not so much about our relationship with a trading bloc but about identity: we were no longer Labour or Tory, or working class or middle class, but remainers and leavers. As polling by Lord Ashcroft after the referendum showed, pro- and anti-EU were equally divided about whether capitalism was a force for good or ill. But while leave voters overwhelmingly believed multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism and the green movement were forces for ill, remain supporters believed the opposite.This set the basis for a clash of values that proved electorally fatal for Jeremy Corbyn: after all, the basis of any authentic leftwing project is class politics – “for the many, not the few”, as his Labour party put it. Culture wars are the toxic reaction to class politics.Yet culture wars continue not simply to shape politics on both sides of the Atlantic, but to define it. According to the Financial Times, just as Joe Biden swept the rust-belt states, Keir Starmer believes he can win back Labour’s lost red wall by copying the US president’s “emphasis on ‘family, community and security’ … and avoiding endless arguments about ‘culture war’ issues such as trans rights and the destruction of historic statues”.Yet this is a curious lesson to draw from the US. It is true that Biden’s past record can hardly be described as a beacon of progressive social norms: he backed crime legislation that led to the mass incarceration of Black people; his chosen vice president, Kamala Harris, was among those who assailed him for once working with segregationists, and said she believed the women who had accused him of inappropriate sexual behaviour. But progressive movements have succeeded in shifting the centre of gravity within the Democrats to an extent no nominee can ignore.Take trans rights, which has become one of today’s totemic “culture war” issues. Harris has her pronouns in her Twitter bio; Biden campaigned promising trans people, “We see you, we support you, and we will continue to do everything we can to ensure you are affirmed and accepted just as you are.” He became the first president-elect to thank trans people in his victory speech, issued an order expanding LGBTQ protections and repealed the ban on trans military personnel.There were, of course, howls of outrage: one Republican senator questioned “Another ‘unifying’ move by the new Administration?” But according to the polling, it was indeed unifying: more than seven in 10 Americans support trans people serving in the military. Here is an instructive example. Rightwingers often push back at moves to secure rights for minorities on the grounds that they are “divisive”: yet, though noisy and obsessed, they are also unrepresentative.As it does in the US, polling in Britain consistently shows women and younger people are most supportive of trans rights, with older men least supportive. There is a complication here: while support for trans rights is a given in US feminist, “centrist” and progressive circles, transphobia is a permissible prejudice across the political spectrum in Britain. This week the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, condemned transphobia in her party’s ranks after it had led to an exodus of younger members. But while anti-trans activists are vocal, for the majority of people it’s not an issue on their radar. As the Democrats underlined, what is needed is leadership – or a vacuum will be filled by increasingly emboldened bigotry.But there are other lessons too. Rather than treating claims for racial justice as risking the support of white floating voters, the Democrats embraced Black Lives Matter. After the killing of George Floyd this spurred a surge in Black voter registration, and the relationship between grassroots Black organisers and the Democrats played a pivotal role in flipping several states in the presidential race. As well as working with movements representing the struggles of minorities – rather than treating them as unhelpful – a progressive political project needs policies that unify working-class people, regardless of background. Take the New Labour period: policies such as tax credits and investment in public services made a considerable difference to millions of lives; yet in its final years, wages began to stagnate or decline for the bottom half, and an escalating housing crisis hit living standards.The resulting grievances among struggling people can be exploited by savvy rightwing populists claiming progressive politicians only care about minorities rather than “people like me”.The answer, then, isn’t to swerve the culture war, or stick fingers in our ears and pretend it isn’t there. It is to offer political leadership, work closely with minorities to expand the electorate, and stand on a policy platform that uplifts the living standards of the majority, irrespective of their identity. To throw minorities under a bus is not only immoral: it’s a recipe for electoral defeat. More

Jonathan Freedland speaks to the Pulitzer prize-winning author and journalist Laurie Garrett about what Joe Biden needs to do to get a grip on the Covid crisis in the US

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When Joe Biden entered the Oval Office as president, he got to work trying to figure out how to mitigate the coronavirus situation in the US, and what exactly he was up against. Jonathan speaks to the expert on how governments plan for pandemics, Pulitzer prize-winning author and journalist Laurie Garrett about how she knew a crisis like this was coming but why no one in government chose to act. They also discuss what the Biden administration needs to do next. Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

The former White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has raised more than $1m in the first four days of her bid for Arkansas governor, her campaign has said.Sanders announced on Monday she was running for Arkansas governor with a nearly eight-minute video that embraced former president Donald Trump, even as the Senate prepared for an impeachment trial on charges he incited the deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January.The fundraising haul shows how much more expensive the 2022 GOP race for Arkansas governor will become with Sanders in it. Lieutenant Governor Tim Griffin has raised $1.8m since March for the race while attorney general Leslie Rutledge has raised $1m since July.No Democrats have announced a run for governor.The three are running to succeed GOP Governor Asa Hutchinson, who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election next year.Arkansas is a solidly red state, with Republicans holding all its statewide and federal offices.Sanders, the daughter of former governor Mike Huckabee, left the White House in 2019 to return to her home state. Trump, who publicly encouraged her to run for Arkansas governor, endorsed her candidacy on Monday night.Sanders’ campaign released few details on the fundraising, but said she had contributions from donors in each of the state’s 75 counties. It also didn’t release any information on how much she has spent since Monday’s launch.The deadline for this quarter’s fundraising report, which will have more details on donors and spending, is in April.Republican senator Jim Hendren, a nephew of Hutchinson’s, has also said he is considering running for governor and planned to make a decision within the next three weeks. More

Health groups around the world are celebrating the end of a harmful policy banning US funding for overseas aid organisations that facilitate or promote abortion, which was scrapped by the US president, Joe Biden, in a presidential memorandum on Thursday.Reproductive rights advocates are urging the new administration to now go further and permanently repeal the Mexico City policy – known as the “global gag rule” – to prevent it being reinstated by a future Republican president. The policy has been blamed for contributing to thousands of maternal deaths in the developing world over the past four years.The gag rule prevents overseas organisations that receive American aid from using their own money to provide information about abortion, or carry out abortions. First adopted by the Reagan administration in 1984, it has been repealed by every Democratic administration and reinstated by every Republican one in the years since.In a short appearance in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, Biden said he ended the policy as part of an effort to “protect women’s health at home and abroad”.But Donald Trump went further than previous Republican presidents. The policy usually applies to family planning organisations. But the Trump administration expanded the policy to include all global health programmes, including programmes that address HIV, nutrition, malaria and cholera.Widening the rule increased the pool of aid funds it affected from roughly $600m to about $12bn (£8.7bn), according to the Guttmacher Institute, a health policy research group.“We can breathe,” said Serra Sippel, the president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, of Biden’s plans to repeal the policy. “There’s just so much hope and optimism in Washington DC right now. We have a lot of work to do, but it’s so much better.”The consequences of Thursday’s memorandum will ripple out from Washington into more than 70 countries including some of the poorest places in the world, where essential women’s health operations were abruptly halted or scaled down after Trump reinstated the rule in January 2017.In Zimbabwe, a women’s health team run by Abebe Shibru, from the organisation MSI Reproductive Choices, cut its operations by 60%. “We reduced our outreach from 700,000 women to about 300,000,” Shibru, who now heads the organisation’s Ethiopian operations, told the Guardian.“Women missed out on information, they had no access to family planning, and in return they were exposed to unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion, which contributed to higher maternal mortality.”Zimbabwe’s teenage pregnancy rate increased by 2% over the past four years, according to Unicef data, a trend Shibru said was exacerbated by cuts as a result of the gag rule.“We were not providing services to rural women, so they had no choice but to get pregnant against their wish,” he said.Pledging conferences attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from governments and private groups to try to bridge the gap in American funding, but could not meet the total shortfall.An assessment of the rule’s impact released last year, surveying health organisations in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Nepal, found a sector in “crisis” with confusion over what was banned and permitted using US aid, a growing stigma around reproductive health services and widespread closures and scaling downs of programmes.Trump’s ban also spawned a new wave of activism, including a new grassroots movement, SheDecides, which is pressuring policymakers around the world to commit to upholding reproductive and sexual health rights.Zara Ahmed, the associate director of federal issues at the Guttmacher Institute, said repealing the gag rule “is just the first step in undoing [the US’s] current status as the greatest global hindrance to reproductive health”.“We are glad that the Biden-Harris administration is addressing the global gag rule …… But let’s be clear, repealing the global gag rule is the bare minimum this administration can do to address the harm caused by the previous administration’s coercive and spiteful approach to foreign policy,” she said.“The Biden-Harris administration can, and must, take a comprehensive approach to unravelling the dangerous, punitive and coercive policies the outgoing administration has woven into our foreign policy, and it must take action to address longstanding harmful policies like the Helms amendment.”The Helms amendment has been widely misinterpreted as a total ban on US funding used for abortion overseas, when in fact it can be used to support abortion in cases of rape, incest or a woman’s life being in danger. A bill to permanently repeal it was introduced last year.On Thursday, the Global Health, Empowerment and Rights Act (Global HER Act) to permanently repeal the global gag rule will be introduced for the third time in Congress. The bill, cosponsored by the new vice-president, Kamala Harris, has received cross-party support, and hopes are high it will pass.“It’s not automatic and it’s not going to be easy but we’re starting in a very strong place to get the act passed,” said Sippel. “If not the bill itself, but the language of the bill incorporated into another bill. Getting rid of the GGR, that’s what we’re striving for.”Sippel also called on the Biden administration to disavow the “Geneva consensus declaration” – an anti-abortion policy Trump promoted last year – to “signal to the world that abortion and LGBTQ rights and sexual and reproductive rights are important, and to state that loudly to the world”.She added that some activists wanted the Biden administration to issue a formal apology for US policies on sexual and reproductive health and rights over the past four years.Biden also ordered funding restored to the UN population fund, UNFPA, which Trump stopped.The agency’s executive director, Natalia Kanem, hailed the “enormous” impact of the decision.“Ending funding to UNFPA has become a political football, far removed from the tragic reality it leads to on the ground. Women’s bodies are not political bargaining chips, and their right to plan their pregnancies, give birth safely and live free from violence should be something we can all agree on,” she said. More

A visibly angry Nancy Pelosi accused Republican leaders of showing disregard to the victims of school shootings after the QAnon-supporting congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was assigned a seat on the House education committee. Greene has previously suggested the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida was a ‘false flag’ and was filmed harassing a teenage survivor on Capitol Hill in 2019. ‘She has mocked the killing of little children,’  Pelosi said. ‘What could they be thinking? Or is thinking too strong a word for what they might be doing?’
Parkland survivors call for GOP extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene’s censure
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Pervasive fear among some members of Congress that they will be the targets of further politically motivated violence following the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol has led more than 30 of them write a letter to House leaders.The group sent the letter to the House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, asking for more support over security concerns.As the less senior politicians do not have personal protection services provided by the government around the clock, they are asking if they may use their personal allowances for additional security costs in their home districts, such as for hiring local law enforcement or other security personnel.The letter, first obtained by CBS News, reveals an enduring anxiety and sense of unease among lawmakers. It was sent by the Democratic representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Dean Phillips of Minnesota.And it was signed by 29 other Democrats who represent states all across the country, including Texas, Rhode Island, Washington, Georgia, Illinois, Alabama and Kansas, and one Republican, the Michigan representative Fred Upton.“Today, with the expansion of the web and social media sites, so much information about members is accessible in the public sphere, making them easier targets, including home addresses, photos, personal details about members’ families, and real-time information on member attendance at events,” they wrote.Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterFears are heightened in the wake of the Capitol riot on 6 January by supporters of the then president, Donald Trump, after he exhorted them at a rally near the White House beforehand to march on Congress and overturn his election defeat.White supremacists, rightwing extremists and conspiracy theory followers were among the mob of several thousand that broke into the halls of Congress while the House and Senate were meeting officially to certify Joe Biden’s presidential victory.The representatives, who spend most of their time in their home districts, wrote that the attack “reminds us of the grim reality that Members of Congress are high-profile public officials, and therefore, face ongoing security threats from the same domestic terror groups that attacked the Capitol”.The signatories pointed to a “surge of threats and attacks” on members of Congress, including the 2017 shooting that severely wounded the Republican whip, Steve Scalise, at a baseball game practice.The letter called current rules governing how their personal allowances can be spent as “constrictive and anachronistic” and have not kept up with current threat levels.The letter was sent as the homeland security department issued a bulletin on Wednesday that the domestic extremists behind the Capitol attack “could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence”.“We’re all totally freaked out about this,” one House member told the online outlet Politico.While lawmakers are afforded Capitol police protection while in Washington DC, they do not have the kind of permanent security details that party leadership is assigned.“Protecting members in their district is much harder because local law enforcement agencies are stretched and limited, and often don’t have sufficient staffing or money to provide regular protection to members,” the letter said.They added that “current legal statutes make it extremely difficult to prosecute most threats” made against them.Under current House rules, lawmakers are permitted to use their $1.4m office allowances, known as MRAs, to reimburse themselves for security equipment such as bulletproof vests, as well as funds for security at local public events.But given raised political tensions, they requested that their allowances should also cover security upgrades at their district offices, local law enforcement or other security personnel, and other security measures to protect them in their homes.According to the letter, there has been a nearly fivefold increase in threats against members in recent years.In 2016, there were 902 investigated threats against members; by 2018, the Capitol police chief, Steven Sund, had testified that there were 4,894 threats against members, a number that was on track to rise the following year.Soon after the riot this month, police officers based at the Capitol briefed lawmakers about plots by armed militias against Democratic party members.“The idea that everyone is untouchable? No, we’re all touchable now. If there’s a nuclear bomb, we accept we’re probably the first to go. But we never though that a mob would be able to get into the Capitol,” a House staff member told CBS.Later on Thursday, Pelosi said lawmakers would probably need more funding for security as “the enemy is within”.Asked what she meant when referring to the “enemy within”, Pelosi said: “It means we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and who have threatened violence against other members of Congress.” More

Survivors of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, are asking congressional Republicans to publicly censure Marjorie Taylor Greene for suggesting the school shooting was a “false flag” and for harassing a teenage survivor on Capitol Hill in 2019, as well as calling for Greene’s resignation.Greene, the newly elected Georgia congresswoman who is known for her support of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, was filmed in March 2019 as she followed 18-year-old David Hogg, one of the students who survived the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school, outside Capitol Hill.In the clip from 25 March, Greene can be heard calling Hogg a “coward”, demanding that he explain how the students were able to set up meetings with so many lawmakers, and telling him that she herself was a gun owner. Greene tells Hogg that gun control will not work, and that his classmates would not have been killed if one of the law enforcement officers assigned to guard the school had “done his job”.She later addresses her viewers, echoing false yet frequently spread conspiracy claims that mass shooting survivors and family members of victims are “crisis actors” and the attacks that killed their loved ones were staged as a plot to pass gun control laws.“She hasn’t disowned any of it,” Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was among the 17 students and staff killed in the shooting, told the Guardian on Wednesday. “She hasn’t said, ‘I was wrong.’ She hasn’t said, ‘I’m sorry to the families I’ve hurt.’ She hasn’t said, ‘I accept the truth around Parkland, Sandy Hook, and 9/11.’ She has let the lie live. That makes her incapable of serving as a representative in Congress.”Guttenberg said he had told Greene publicly via Twitter that he would be “more than happy to share proof with her” that his daughter’s murder was real, but that he received no response.Guttenberg called on the top Republican in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, to take a public stand against Greene. “McCarthy loses any ability to talk about integrity, about unity, about service to the country if he refuses to deal with this,” Guttenberg said.Hogg himself wrote to McCarthy on Twitter, arguing Greene “basically has threatened to kill” gun violence survivors, “trying to trigger our PTSD”. “In that video you see a group of people most of whom are 18 or 19 acting calm, cool and collected – what you don’t see are the sleepless nights, the flashbacks, the hyper-vigilance and deep pitch-black numbness so many of us feel living in a society where we are told our friends dying doesn’t matter, “ Hogg wrote.“Take her Committee assignments away,” Hogg pleaded. Greene’s committee assignments have not yet been announced, but the congresswoman has said she will sit on the education panel.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, protested on Thursday.“Assigning her to the education committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook, when she mocked the killing of teenagers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas – what could they be thinking?” she said, referring to the 2012 elementary school shooting in Connecticut and the school at Parkland.The committee chair, Democrat Bobby Scott, said in a strongly worded statement that House Republicans must explain why they appointed Greene to the committee, after her documented history of promoting conspiracy theories.On Wednesday, the California representative Jimmy Gomez said he would be introducing a resolution to expel Greene from Congress.Hillary Clinton said she should be “on a a watch list”, not in Congress.March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention advocacy group founded by students from Parkland, is collecting signatures on a petition calling for Greene to resign, with the message: “Conspiracy theorists have no place in Congress.”Greene in recent days has faced renewed scrutiny of her past social media comments, with CNN reporting that past posts indicated support for executing Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Responding to those revelations, McCarthy has said that he “planned to have a conversation” with Greene.Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.On the day of the incident, Hogg was on Capitol Hill along with other student activists to mark the anniversary of the 2018 March for Our Lives, delivering letters from constituents pushing senators to pass a law mandating criminal background checks on every gun sale. Greene was a rightwing commentator at the time.“I’m a gun owner, I’m an American citizen and I have nothing. But this guy with his George Soros funding and his major liberal funding has got everything. I want you to think about that,” Greene told her viewers.In reality, said Eve Levenson, one of the college students who helped organize the advocacy event, the advocacy event and the meetings with senators had been organized by college kids, including herself, from the floor of her dorm room.Another student activist who was present that day said Greene’s behavior had been “scary” and had left her shaken. Linnea Stanton, a college student and March for Our Lives activist from Wisconsin, recalled that Greene had first confronted the students as they delivered letters to lawmakers inside a Senate office building.“All of a sudden, this blonde woman was yelling, and someone was recording us with an iPhone,” Stanton said.After the students started chanting to get the Capitol police to intervene, Greene left, but she waited for the group outside the building, where she continued to harass and film them once they exited, Stanton said.Stanton said she had only learned on Wednesday that the woman who had harassed her group in 2019 was now an elected member of Congress. “It’s just kind of horrifying,” she said. “It’s bizarre to me that someone who can act like that towards another human being, much less towards a teenager who survived a mass shooting, is allowed to hold power.“I would love to see some accountability, or her acknowledging what she did, but it feels like wishful thinking,” Stanton added. “The last four years have showed time and again there will be no consequences.”Additional reporting by Amanda Holpuch in New York More