US Politics

The hosts at Fox News have been furious in recent days. The mainstream media, they say, has been “gushing” over Joe Biden, offering “nauseating” coverage of the new president and “not hiding their excitement”.Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are some of the rightwing commentators at the conservative channel getting good mileage from the alleged Biden-fawning – but their accusations have raised eyebrows among those who watched Fox News’s hosts spend four years largely functioning as an extension of Donald Trump’s White House.Fox News, however, is not known as a place for self-reflection, or irony, which meant Hannity – who has literally campaigned with Trump – was able to chide other journalists’ coverage of Biden.“The tingling sensation up and down the media mobs’ legs,” Hannity noted last week, “Well they are throbbing like never before.”Hannity’s comments will have struck many observers as hypocritical, given Hannity’s own unbridled passion for the previous president.“Promises made, promises kept,” Hannity told the crowd at a Trump rally in 2018. “Mr President, thank you.”The sight of a journalist campaigning for a political candidate would have been strange, had it not been for Hannity’s long-running fascination with the twice-impeached president. The host has spent years lauding Trump, and has repeatedly contorted himself to support the ex-president when praise barely seemed possible.“You were very strong at the end of that press conference,” Hannity assured Trump during a Fox News interview in July 2018. The press conference Hannity was referring to was the infamous, widely condemned, Helsinki joint press conference by Trump and the Russia president, Vladimir Putin, where Trump sided with the Kremlin over its denial of election meddling.A couple of months earlier, Hannity had kicked off a segment on his show with the words: “President Trump has already accumulated an amazing record of accomplishments.” According to Hannity, those accomplishments included Trump’s approval ratings. At the time, 42% of Americans approved of Trump, and 52% disapproved.More recently, Hannity approvingly compared Trump – then stricken by coronavirus – to Winston Churchill. Hannity, however, was far from alone in his fawning attitude towards Trump – as a “Then and now” video montage by the Daily Show illustrated on Tuesday.“Well get ready, it’s gonna be four years of nauseating, gauzy coverage,” thundered Laura Ingraham on Fox News this week. “The watchdogs? Well, they’re just lapdogs.”Ingraham, host of the Ingraham Angle Fox News show, is something of an expert in this field.“I don’t see anybody else on the horizon that’s fighting for the American people like he is,” Ingraham said of Trump in 2017, while she has also suggested Trump will be viewed similarly to Ronald Reagan, which in Republican circles is considered a compliment. In December 2020, Ingraham even dedicated a segment to Trump’s “triumphs”, while when granted an interview with Trump, in 2017, she posed questions that brought a new meaning to the term softball.“Are you having fun in this job?” Ingraham asked Trump, later asking the president: “Look at the economy. Are you getting credit for this economic revival?”Two years later, Ingraham used an interview with Trump to praise his “incredible trip” to France and to criticize Nancy Pelosi, asking Trump: “How do you work with someone like that?”Another Daily Show clip captured Jesse Watters as he used his show on Fox News to lay out accusations of media bias. “They continue to fawn over this guy like he’s Jesus Christ!” said Watters, who outside the rightwing media world is mostly known for presenting a segment in New York City’s Chinatown which was widely condemned as racist.Like his hosts, Watters has done his fair share of fawning, including over Trump’s botched coronavirus response and the ex-president’s warmth towards North Korea.Tucker Carlson, whose professionally enraged shtick – and closeness to Trump – has made his show the highest-rated cable news program in the US, was also upset at the treatment of Biden, as the TV host laid out in a heavily sarcastic segment on 20 January.“He will fill the yawning void where our empathy should be. He is medicine,” was Carlson’s recap of inauguration day, after he played a selection of clips of people on TV suggesting Biden might be a healing presence in the White House.In recent days Steve Doocy, a host on the show Fox and Friends, also got in on the act and proclaimed “the mainstream media loves him!” of Biden. Doocy had previously used an interview with Trump to praise the then president’s “beautiful hotel”.Doocy’s colleague Jeanine Pirro was also upset with Biden’s treatment, in contrast to her own interactions with Trump. “Given your ability, your successes,” Pirro told Trump in an interview during his presidency that functioned more as a campaign huddle, “How are we going to get that across to the American people?” More

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Donald Trump’s hopes of avoiding conviction by the US Senate received a boost on Tuesday when 45 Republicans tried to dismiss his impeachment trial before it even began.
The procedural vote was not enough to prevent the trial going ahead, since 55 senators voted that it should, but it did suggest that Democrats face an uphill battle to get the 67 senators they will need for a conviction on a two-thirds majority vote.
Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives on the charge of “incitement of insurrection” following the storming of the US Capitol, including the Senate chamber, by an angry mob on 6 January. Senators gathered at the scene of the crime on Tuesday to begin his trial.
After they were sworn in and signed the oath book – each using a different pen due to coronavirus precautions – Rand Paul of Kentucky challenged the legitimacy of the trial.
He argued on a point of order that, since Trump is no longer president, pressing ahead with it “violates the constitution”.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, dismissed Paul’s theory as “flat-out wrong”, contending: “It’s been completely debunked by constitutional scholars from all across the political spectrum … The history and precedent is clear. The Senate has the power to try former officials.”
Schumer said: “The theory that the Senate can’t try former officials would amount to a constitutional get-out-of-jail-free card for any president who commits an impeachable offence.”
Senators then voted 55-45 against Paul’s point of order, ensuring the trial will proceed – but also signalling the strength of Trump’s residual support among Republicans in the Senate and beyond.
The only five Republicans who voted to go ahead with the trial were the longtime Trump critics Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Romney was the sole Republican to vote for Trump’s removal from office at his first impeachment trial a year ago.
Trump is the first president to have been twice impeached by the House of Representatives and the first to face a trial after leaving power.
The House approved a single article of impeachment – the equivalent of an indictment in a criminal trial – on 13 January, accusing him of inciting an insurrection with a speech to supporters before they stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. A police officer and four other people died in the riot.
The nine House Democrats who will serve as prosecutors set the trial in motion on Monday by delivering the article of impeachment to the Senate in a solemn march along the same halls where the mob rampaged three weeks ago.
The supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, is not presiding at the trial, as he did during Trump’s first impeachment, because the president is no longer in office. Instead, Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat who serves in the largely ceremonial role of Senate president pro tempore, oversaw proceedings.
The trial will begin in earnest in the week of 8 February. Despite his departure, Trump remains a significant force among Republicans and his supporters have vowed to mount election challenges to senators who support conviction.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, tweeted: “45 GOP Senators just voted that Trump’s trial is unconstitutional since he isn’t in office now. Those who thought 17 R Senators would somehow vote to convict Trump have presumably awakened from their dream. As guilty as Trump is, Rs still cower before him.”
Joe Biden told CNN that the trial “has to happen” but doubted the chances of conviction. More

The US and Russia have agreed to extend an arms control treaty limiting their deployed nuclear warheads after Joe Biden’s first phone call as president with Vladimir Putin.At the same time, Biden took a firm position on Russian actions that Donald Trump largely ignored, raising concerns about the poisoning and arrest of the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, warning Putin that the US supported Ukraine against Russian “aggression”, complaining about Russian interference in last year’s US presidential election, and the “Solar Winds” cyber-attack on US government agencies last year.Biden challenged Putin on US intelligence reports that Russia had offered bounties to the Taliban and other extremist groups in Afghanistan for the killing of US soldiers.The White House account of the call said: “President Biden made clear that the United States will act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to actions by Russia that harm us or our allies.”The White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said that Biden had also expressed opposition to the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, as being a “bad deal” for Europe, one example of continuity with the Trump and Obama administrations.The Biden team is seeking to take a tougher line on Russia’s violations of human rights and international law while seeking to make progress on arms control with Moscow, which crumbled under the Trump administration.The two leaders formally exchanged notes extending the 2010 New Start agreement by five years, assuring the survival of the last remaining arms control treaty between the US and Russia in the wake of the Trump era.The extension was agreed just 10 days before New Start was due to expire. It keeps in place a limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on either side, imposes limits on delivery systems, and enforces verification and transparency measures, helping ensure the two biggest nuclear weapons powers do not take each other by surprise.According to the White House the two leaders also talked about re-establishing a regular “strategic stability dialogue” between senior officials, at which frictions in the relationship, and possible new arms control agreements, could be discussed.The Kremlin’s readout of the conversation said that “the presidents expressed their satisfaction with the exchange of notes of extension of the New Start, which happened today”.“In the coming days the parties will complete all the necessary procedures to ensure that this important international legal mechanism for the mutual limitation of nuclear missile arsenals functions in the future,” the Kremlin account said.The Kremlin’s account described the conversation as “frank and businesslike” – a turn of phrase often used to describe tense discussions.It added that the two leaders had also discussed the Open Skies treaty, another arms control agreement allowing transparency through mutual aerial surveillance, which Trump also withdrew from, and from which Moscow has said it was also preparing to leave.Biden and Putin discussed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump left but Biden has said he is willing to rejoin, and the conflict in Ukraine between the government there and Russian-backed separatists. Putin, now dealing with his fifth US president, restated his proposal for a summit of the five permanent members of the UN security council.Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Centre, tweeted that: “[The] Putin-Biden phone conversation today promises no reset, but suggests a degree of predictability to the badly strained relationship. Confrontation needs to be managed safely.”The change in course in US foreign policy is likely to accelerate after the Senate confirmed the appointment of Antony Blinken as secretary of state on Tuesday, one of his first actions was to co-sign a statement with other G7 foreign ministers condemning the poisoning and arrest of Navalny and the mass detention of protesters and journalists.The statement said the G7 ministers “call upon Russia to adhere to its national and international obligations and release those detained arbitrarily for exercising their right of peaceful assembly”.At the UN, the acting US ambassador announced another sharp break with Trump-era policy, the restoration of diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority and renewing aid to Palestinian refugees as part of its support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Trump, a close ally of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had broken US ties with the Palestinians.The Biden team has said its first foreign policy goal would be to repair relations with allies and global institutions ruptured by Trump. The state department said on Tuesday it would “thoroughly review” sanctions the Trump administration imposed on the prosecutors office of the international criminal court (ICC), over investigations it launched into war crimes committed by all parties in Afghanistan, and by Israeli and Palestinian forces in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.“The United States shares the goals of the ICC in promoting accountability for the worst crimes known to humanity. At the same time, the United States has always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for countries that consent to it, or that are referred by the UN security council,” a state department spokesperson said.“Much as we disagree with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Israeli/Palestinian situations, the sanctions will be thoroughly reviewed as we determine our next steps.” More

Joe Biden signed four more executive orders on Tuesday, as he aimed to fulfill a campaign promise to increase racial equity in the US.The orders were the latest in a volley since Biden’s inauguration as president last week, meant to undo the legacy of Donald Trump’s time in the White House. The new orders related to housing and criminal justice reform. Broadly, Biden and his aides framed it as a step in their broader hopes to heal racial tensions across the country. In a speech before he signed the orders Biden recalled the death of George Floyd, who was Black, at the hands of police.“What many Americans didn’t see or simply refused to see couldn’t be ignored any longer,” Biden said. “Those eight minutes and 46 seconds that took George Floyd’s life opened the eyes to millions of Americans and millions of people all over the world. It was the knee on the neck of justice and it wouldn’t be forgotten. It stirred the consciousness in millions of Americans and in my view it marked a turning point in this country’s view toward racial justice.”He also noted that the mob attack by Trump supporters on the US Capitol was just a few weeks ago.“It’s just been weeks since all of America witnessed a group of thugs, insurrectionists, political extremists and white supremacists violently attack the Capitol of our democracy,” Biden said. “So now – now’s the time to act. It’s time to act because that’s what faith and morality calls us to do.”“We’ll hold the federal government accountable for advancing racial equity for families across America,” said Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy council director.Speaking at the White House daily briefing, the former Obama national security adviser and UN ambassador said Biden was looking to address some of the intractable problems facing US society. Throughout his campaign for the presidency, Biden promised to help Americans of color.“Every agency will place equity at the core of their public engagement, their policy design and delivery,” Rice said, “to ensure that government resources are reaching Americans of color in all marginalized communities – rural, urban, disabled, LGBTQ+, religious minorities and so many others.“The president has put equity at the center of his response to the Covid-19 and economic crises.”Biden has issued a run of executive orders in the first days of his presidency, while Congress sorts out the balance of power and settles into its new configuration. On Monday night, Senate leaders announced an agreement over the filibuster, the voting threshold which protects minority rights. The deal allowed the new Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer to move ahead with preparations for handling Biden’s legislative agenda.That agenda will compete for time and space with Trump’s second impeachment trial, sparked by his incitement of the attack on the Capitol on 6 January, which left five people dead. The trial is due to start after 8 February but senators were sworn in as jurors on Tuesday.Conviction, and with it the possible barring of Trump from running for office again, will require a two-thirds majority, a high bar for a set of Republicans who have mostly voiced opposition to impeaching the former Republican president a second time.Biden has said impeachment “has to happen”, despite worries it could hinder his push for legislation to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic crisis and other issues.On Tuesday, the Senate followed its confirmations of defense secretary Lloyd Austin and treasury secretary Janet Yellen – who were both sworn in to office by the vice-president, Kamala Harris – by confirming Antony Blinken as Biden’s secretary of state.As part of his attempt to reinvigorate the federal government after the Trump years, Biden picked Rice to run the domestic policy council – an obscure organization the new administration is looking to elevate in visibility as it handles issues like racial equity and immigration reform.“These [orders] are a continuation of our initial steps to advance racial justice and equity through early executive action,” Rice told reporters on Tuesday. “Beyond this, the president is committed to working with Congress to advance equity in our economy, our criminal justice systems, our healthcare systems, and in our schools.”One executive order directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to look at the effects of Trump administration actions on housing. Any actions that “undermined fair housing policies and laws” will prompt the implementation of new requirements set by the Fair Housing Act.Another order planned to end the use of private prisons. Specifically, it directed the federal government not to renew contracts with such companies. A third order was concerned with “tribal sovereignty and consultation”, according to an administration handout. It will order the federal government to retain a dialogue with tribal governments.The fourth Biden order was aimed at fighting xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific islanders. The order acknowledged the history of discrimination and harassment against those groups, and said the federal government would recognize “the harm that these actions have caused” and condemn xenophobic actions against those groups.Biden also ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to weigh whether to issue guidance “to advance cultural competency” for these groups as part of the administration’s efforts to battle Covid-19. The executive order also directed the justice department to work with Asian American and Pacific island communities to fight harassment and hate crimes.“These are desperate times for so many Americans and all Americans need urgent federal action to meet this moment,” Rice said. More

Black-owned fashion label Telfar has won the Fashion Design of 2020 award from London’s Design Museum for its vegan-leather, gender neutral shopping bag, capping off a change-making period for the brand.In a 12-month period where fashion has been forced to question its eurocentric outlook in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, Telfar has upended the idea of luxury fashion as white, privileged and purely aspirational.The Telfar shopping bag has doubled as a celebrity favourite (fans include Solange, Issa Rae and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and a symbol of the brand’s community-led outlook.“In an era where true luxury is having a functioning health and social security system, I think their slogan – ‘Not for you, for everyone’ – rings very true,” Emily King, guest curator at the Design Museum said, celebrating their win.Since designer Telfar Clemens and his business partner Babak Radboy created the label in 2005, the duo have been early outliers in fashion’s inner circle. In September they created a range of luxury durags – a cornerstone of black haircare yet banned by the NBA, the NFL, malls, schools and workplaces across America.“[They] magnify the importance of black style,” said author Carol Tulloch. “Telfar Clemens believes in ‘living your fashion life’ – that is, being who you are on a day-to-day basis.”Embossed with the TC [Telfar Clemens] logo, the award-winning shopping bag was dubbed the “Bushwick Birkin” to articulate that this “it” bag wasn’t just for a chosen few.“Well, there is some truth to that – it’s everywhere in Brooklyn. But it’s not the whole story,” Clemens told the Guardian. “The thing we are really proud of is that we sell a lot of bags in places that do not have a single fashion store – that are off the radar for fashion and culture: Chattanooga, Birmingham, Oakland, [Washington] DC, Baltimore.“Bushwick is cool, but what is really unique to our bag is those other cities.”Clemens said he realised gradually the bag was part of a bigger moment.“It was when we would see it several times in a day and definitely not know any of the people who were wearing it! Also when our families started requesting them.” More

On Monday, Rudy Giuliani called a $1.3bn lawsuit brought against him by Dominion Voting Systems “another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech”. But Giuliani has himself previously threatened to censor the exercise of free speech with legal action.
The former New York mayor turned Trump attorney was invoking current rightwing complaints against so-called “cancel culture”, in which freedom of speech is supposedly curtailed.
But in June 2001, the New York Post ran a story about an extra-marital affair. Giuliani told reporters: “I will consider suing them for libel – defamation. What the New York Post did is scurrilous, I believe it’s malicious and I’m prepared to prove that in court if I have to.”
First amendment protection of freedom of the press makes it difficult for US public officials to mount libel lawsuits, even if reports are proved to be wrong. Giuliani did not take the Post to court.
On Monday, Dominion sued Giuliani in federal court in Washington, over his claims about supposed electoral fraud, made as part of Donald Trump’s baseless attempts to overturn defeat by Joe Biden, efforts which culminated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.
“Dominion brings this action to set the record straight,” the complaint said, “to vindicate the company’s rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, and to stand up for itself, its employees, and the electoral process.”
Dominion’s lawyer, Thomas Clare, told the New York Times the company could sue others, including Trump.
“We’re not ruling anybody out,” he said. “Obviously, this lawsuit against the president’s lawyer moves one step closer to the former president and understanding what his role was and wasn’t.”
Some experts said Dominion might itself count as a public figure, and thus have a hard time winning its case.
Giuliani said he might counter-sue Dominion.
“The amount being asked for is, quite obviously, intended to frighten people of faint heart. It is another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech, as well as the ability of lawyers to defend their clients vigorously. As such, we will investigate a countersuit against them for violating these constitutional rights,” he said.
It remains to be seen if Giuliani will follow through. Nearly 20 years ago, he did not.
Giuliani threatened to sue the Post over its story about how, as the New York Daily News described it, the mayor and his “girlfriend Judith Nathan [were] using the posh St Regis Hotel as a ‘secret love nest’”.
Negotiations between Giuliani and the Post followed but nearly six weeks later, on 18 July, the Daily News reported that Giuliani had not made good on his threat.
“When I’m ready to decide, you’ll be the first to know,” he said. “But I don’t get rushed into anything.” More

In July 1964, Georgia restaurateur Lester Maddox violated the newly passed Civil Rights Act by refusing to serve three Black Georgia Tech students at his Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta. Although this new federal law banned discrimination in public places, Maddox was determined to maintain a whites-only dining room, arming white customers with pick handles – which he called “Pickrick drumsticks” – to threaten Black customers who tried to dine there.
Endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan in his successful 1974 bid for the governorship, Maddox was once called “the South’s most racist governor.” But hostile treatment of minorities has often been Georgia’s chosen style of politics.
Until recently. On Jan. 5, Georgians chose a Black pastor and a 33-year-old son of Jewish immigrants – Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff – to represent them in the Senate. They also elected Democrat Joe Biden for president in November.
Georgia’s turn from blood red to deep purple gave Democrats their slender majority in the Senate, surprising Americans on both sides of the aisle. This historic moment was a long time coming.

I am a political scientist who studies American politics, with a focus on minority voters and urban politics. In my research, I have examined the peculiar mix of factors that led to Warnock’s and Ossoff’s victories, chiefly an electorate that had been diversifying for years and the effort of many hardworking Black women.
The New South
The elections of Biden, Warnock and Ossoff are the culmination of a years long tug of war among the members of Georgia’s racially, ethnically and ideologically diverse electorate.
Lester Maddox – a future Georgia governor – closed his Pickrick Restaurant in 1964 rather than integrate it. Bettmann Collection via Getty
Georgia’s demographics are changing fast. In 2019, it was ranked fifth among U.S. states experiencing an influx of newcomers. According to census data, 284,541 residents arrived from out of state that year.
Many of Georgia’s newest voters come from groups that lean Democratic: minorities, young people, unmarried women. Between 2000 and 2019, Georgia’s [Black population increased by 48%], mostly because people moved there from out of state. African Americans now make up 30% of Georgia’s population. The Latino population increased by 14% since 2000, and Latinos now comprise 9% of Georgians.
Meanwhile, Georgia’s white population declined slightly, from 57% in 2010 to 54% in 2019. Non-Latino whites are projected to be a numerical minority in Georgia within the next decade.
Just 30% of white Georgia voters chose Warnock and Ossoff on Jan. 5. But the pair, who often campaigned together, both won about 90% of the Black vote and about half of Latinos. Two-thirds of Asian Americans – a small but fast-growing electoral force in Georgia – voted for Ossoff, Warnock and Biden, exit data shows.
Black women bring new voters
Georgia’s changing electorate began producing new kinds of elected officials a few years back.
In 2017 Bee Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, became the first Vietnamese American elected to the Georgia state Legislature. She won the seat vacated by Democrat Stacey Abrams when Abrams ran for governor after a decade in the Statehouse.
Abrams lost her 2018 race to become America’s first Black female governor by 55,000 votes, or 1.4 percentage points. Analysts attributed her defeat, in part, to low turnout rates, especially among Black voters.
This – along with credible allegations of voter suppression – is one reason Abrams soon ramped up her voter registration effort.
Abrams had begun organizing voters when campaigning for the Legislature in 2006. By 2018, her nonpartisan voter registration group, the New Georgia Project, was working with the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Pro Georgia, the Black Voters Matter Fund, Georgia STAND-UP and others to mobilize Black voters.
Abrams at a campaign stop on Nov. 6, 2018. Jessica McGowan/Getty Images
These groups, all led by Black women – Nse Ufot, Melanie Campbell, Helen Butler, Tamieka Atkins, LaTosha Brown and Deborah Scott, respectively – helped register an additional 800,000 Georgia voters between 2018 and 2020. Black voters and young people were particular targets.
Exactly two years after Abrams’ November 2018 loss, Joe Biden won Georgia by 13,000 votes – the first Democratic presidential candidate to win there since Bill Clinton in 1992. Warnock and Ossoff benefited from all these new Georgia voters, too.
Georgia’s Democratic electorate is young, Black, Latino and Asian American. It is the new South – and Black women helped create it.
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Record turnout
Ossoff and Warnock were always going to have a hard race in Georgia, but the nature of Georgia’s runoff elections compounded their underdog status.
In Georgia, if neither candidate wins 50% or more of the vote in the general election, the top two candidates compete in a runoff. This system supposedly ensures that those elected have the support of a majority of voters, but in practice minorities usually lose to whites because of racially polarized voting. Historically, white and Black Georgians vote for the candidate from their racial group. Because white turnout was higher, white conservative candidates have won.
The Jan. 5 runoff upended tradition. Over 4.4 million Georgians voted – a 60% turnout rate, almost doubling that of Georgia’s last Senate runoff, in 2008.
In this year’s runoff election, Democrats went to the polls in droves during early voting, giving Warnock and Ossoff an edge. Republican turnout lagged in mostly white rural areas during the early voting period. It increased statewide on Election Day, but Democrats kept voting that day, too. Republicans could not make up the difference.
Before Warnock and Ossoff, Georgia had never elected an African American to a statewide office. And it had never elected a Jewish senator.
Republican failures
The Republican Party had a role in its losses in Georgia, too.
Some analysts blame Trump for low Republican turnout in the Senate runoff. After his loss in November, he claimed Georgia’s elections were “rigged” against his party. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition to increasing stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000 in a time of acute joblessness, poverty and hunger also likely hurt the Republican Senate candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
Ultimately, though, it was Georgia’s changing electorate that put Democrats in office. The 2022 midterm elections will start to show how far Georgia has really come from the politics of Lester Maddox’s Pickrick Restaurant. More

An expanded no fly list. New crimes put on the books. Increased use of the death penalty.These are some of the ways that politicians, pundits and law enforcement want to head off a repeat of the 6 January attack on the Capitol. But a renewed national security push aimed at addressing domestic terrorism has civil liberties groups steeling themselves, concerned that moves to combat far-right extremism will instead redound against communities of color and leftwing activists.Last summer’s racial justice protests jump-started a national conversation over the endurance of racism within America’s law enforcement and security apparatus. But despite campaigning on the need to reform those institutions, some mainstream Democrats are now taking the lead on calls to expand them.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has called for the Capitol rioters to be placed on the no fly list. President Joe Biden, whose campaign website pledges his administration will “work for a domestic terrorism law”, has ordered a comprehensive assessment of domestic violent extremism. House speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a new “9/11-type commission”. And the first domestic terrorism legislation to follow the Capitol attack was introduced in the House last week by Illinois Democrat Brad Schneider.The Democratic party, however, isn’t entirely united on the issue.Ten progressive members of Congress, led by Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib have sent a letter to congressional leadership expressing opposition to an expansion of national security powers.“The Trump mob’s success in breaching the Capitol was not due to a lack of resources at the disposal of federal law enforcement,” the letter reads. “We firmly believe that the national security and surveillance powers of the US government are already too broad, undefined, and unaccountable to the people.”“Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people,” the letter continues.It cites as examples the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee, the surveillance of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the invention of a category in 2017 called “Black Identity Extremism” the FBI claimed posed a risk of domestic terrorism.More than 100 civil and human rights organizations have also joined in a statement of opposition to any new domestic terror legislation.Since 6 January, security officials have resurrected the same well-honed argument trotted out when the debate around domestic terrorism resurfaces: that the law hamstrings police from effectively fighting white nationalist violence. “There are so many limitations on law enforcement,” Bill Bratton, former commissioner of the NYPD, recently told CNBC. “We don’t have many of the tools to battle domestic terrorism that we have to battle international terrorism.”Civil rights and civil liberties experts say that argument is disingenuous, a ploy to seize power in a time of national crisis, and point to the many laws at the disposal of law enforcement in fighting domestic extremism. What they lack, they say, is the will to go after white supremacists the way they do communities of color, despite white supremacists accounting for the vast majority of criminal acts that are classifiable by law as domestic terrorism.“In the last four years, white supremacists and far-right militias have engaged in public violence, and have made public statements about their intent to do so,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the Brennan Center for Justice. “So it’s a little hard for me to understand how the FBI and local law enforcement had no idea that the attack on the Capitol was being planned.”The government does have more expansive powers – powers that ballooned in the decades since 9/11 – to target Americans it claims are associated with groups designated by the State Department as “Foreign Terrorism Organizations”. While the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 authorities did expand the government’s ability to investigate and prosecute domestic terrorism, it has so far avoided extending all of those authorities to domestic groups. That’s in part due to First Amendment-related concerns, as the US Constitution permits nonviolent association with hateful groups.Advocates also point out how damaging those anti-terrorism powers have been to Muslim-American communities and the rule of law. The “terrorism” label has been used to justify the surveillance of entire communities, mass arrests and deportations, entrapment, harassment, an inflated watchlist system and, of course, the Muslim ban, one of the original sins of the Trump presidency.“An expansion of domestic terrorism won’t mean more focus on white terrorism,” said Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “When you consider the biases that law enforcement has – with its focus on black political dissent, Muslim political dissent, Palestinian organizing – it’s not far-fetched to imagine that those are the groups that will be disproportionately represented in any so-called domestic terrorism framing.”Shamas says the concept of terrorism can’t be divorced from its legacy of politicization and abuse. “The caution I urge in using that terminology is because of this acute awareness that it ends up triggering such expansive state action.”Asad Dandia, a Brooklyn-based community organizer, has firsthand experience with the upheaval the terrorism label can wreak.When Dandia was a teenager, his charity was infiltrated by an informant working for the NYPD who spent months spying on Dandia, his family and friends, as part of the police department’s notorious, years-long surveillance program of the city’s Muslim communities. Dandia joined a lawsuit against the NYPD in 2013 that settled in 2017 after the NYPD agreed to a series of reforms.He recently reread the confession the informant posted on Facebook. “I was an informant for the NYPD, for a little while, to investigate terrorism,” it read.“I had totally forgotten that keyword was there,” Dandia says of the word terrorism. “We, my community and my friends, were given that designation. To argue for that designation for another community would implicitly mean to accept it for myself. And I refuse to accept it for myself.”Policymakers are currently considering a number of options. The bill introduced last week calls for the creation of domestic terrorism offices within the FBI and the departments of homeland security and justice, and for increased monitoring and reporting on threats and investigations.The proposal that has civil liberties most concerned is a bill first introduced in 2019 by House intelligence chair Adam Schiff, which would give the attorney general the authority to identify certain crimes as acts as terrorism. Given the aggressive policing and prosecutions of last summer’s racial justice protesters – in just one example, an Indigenous man now faces 10 years in prison for his Facebook posts – they say it’s easy to imagine charges against protesters inflated even more with a terrorism designation green-lit by an unsympathetic attorney general like William Barr.“In addition to further harming already marginalized communities, these charges could be used to brand as terrorists people who protest against government injustices by engaging in civil disobedience or actions that result in property damage,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a letter opposing that bill.German, the former FBI agent, recently published a report tying biased policing to the extensive infiltration of police departments by white supremacists.German charges the FBI with playing a “semantic game” in claiming the US lacks a domestic terrorism law, pointing to the dozens of statutes relating to what the law defines as domestic terrorism. The best way for police to target white supremacist violence, he says, is by rooting out racists within their ranks and enforcing laws that already exist.Shamas and German both point to the need for a broader reckoning with the reasons the government has historically turned a blind eye to far right extremism. “In my view, the real problem with white supremacy is the proximity to the state,” says Shamas. “It’s the fact that we have representatives in Congress who are white supremacists, it’s the fact that police departments are being infiltrated by these groups.“None of that is captured when you say, ‘these are terrorists.’ The relationship with the state gets blurred.” More