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    Look at the Capitol Hill rioters. Now imagine if they had been black | Derecka Purnell

    By now, the world has witnessed white rioters seize the Capitol building in Washington DC. After hearing Donald Trump encourage them to reject the presidential election’s outcome, thousands reportedly pushed through cops to storm ongoing congressional debates and reign supreme over politicians who fearfully scurried out of the halls of power. Draped in American, Confederate, and Trump flags, the raiders invaded the House floor, occupied representative offices, and filled balconies and scaffolds that line the windows. Joe Biden took to a podium to respond, cautioning the country that “our democracy is under unprecedented assault”.On television, I saw paramedics rush a stretcher in the pandemonium. The woman bearing a bloodied face laying on top startled me, the anchor, and the cameraman. Please God, don’t let that woman be dead, I prayed, though her eyes lacked an animating essence. When I saw the video of the Proud Boys burn a Black Lives Matter banner a few weeks ago, I knew there would be more violent acts of desperation because they need a cause to feel empowered. Envying the resistance of the oppressed, Trump supporters want reasons to march and chant, so they create enemies and feign vulnerability as their cause grows lost. They sacrificed their lives to save white supremacy, even though it threatens them, too, materially and morally. And Black lives may never matter to people, like the woman, who will risk their own white lives during a pandemic to attack the nation’s capital to protect Donald Trump.A senior Capitol police officer reportedly shot and killed her. But even the police shooting of the Trump supporter did not immediately catalyze significant law enforcement action to stop the conservative Caucasian invasion. Later, I watched a group of unmasked white men and women chase down a Black law enforcement agent who wielded only a stick in return. I was angry. Not because I felt bad for the cop, but because in that moment, I watched him realize that he was Black, outnumbered, and per the Dred Scott supreme court decision, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”Wednesday was a reminder of one difference between white rebellion to feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression: where there is radical Black resistance, there is state repression. Where there is white rebellion for conservative causes, there is collusion with the state. Even when the white cops are outnumbered, like the McKinney, Texas, cops who assaulted Dajerria Becton in her swimsuit, they escalate; he just pulled the gun out on Black teens who came to her rescue. Police have stomped, beat, shot, teargassed, and arrested protesters who organize, march, pray and sing for our multi-racial liberation movements. Including me. Yet on Wednesday, activists and bystanders knew damn well that if the election refusers who raided the Capitol were Black, then the same politicians who kneeled for George Floyd and painted yellow “Black lives matter” letters onto the streets would have sent the full force of the law to stop it. However, calling for the police to treat white election-outcome deniers like they treat Black people fighting for social justice misses the purpose and function of police, which is largely to manage inequality. No parity exists for these protesters. When the political activist Bree Newsome scaled a pole to pull down the Confederate flag following the Charleston Massacre in 2015, a diverse pair of cops promptly arrested her. On Wednesday, police stood by as the Capitol raiders scaled a window to replace the United States flag with Trump’s. White rowdy groups like this do not threaten the fundamentally racist, militarist, and capitalist foundation of the country; they are molded by it. So local and federal government usually let them have their way, from raiding and occupying federal property in Oregon, to massive biker shootouts that killed nine people in Texas; from the Oathkeepers militia group patrol in Missouri, to the militia groups that police thanked in Wisconsin, right before Kyle Rittenhouse did when he killed two men.“Trumpism” is the predominant paradigm that accounts for the current capitol siege. Trump is obviously to blame for the most recent events. But only partly. I even forget this sometimes. Last year, I shared a story about an anti-immigration rally that I counter-protested in college. Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Kris Kobach were the headline speakers. White Republicans filled the packed Kansas auditorium, angry that they were losing their country to Mexicans that colonizers forced further south. Each speaker’s xenophobic and racist rhetoric was so violent and familiar that I finally said, “It was like a Trump rally, seven years before he took office.”Ousting Trump is a good start…But changing the president only changes the spectacle; the mundane violence will remainWhat racial justice activists make plain in the spectacle of Trumpism, law and order, and white nationalism is the violent failure of liberals and conservatives to foster any real democracy within these borders. Most of America’s violence is mundane and happens on the floors that were taken over by rioters. Just last week, Congress issued meager $600 pandemic relief checks to people facing widespread hunger, eviction, unemployment, disease and distress. There were no riots. Senate Republicans refused to raise the relief to $2,000 but rallied bipartisan support to override Trump’s veto of a nearly $800bn military budget. Biden, the president-elect, has veto dreams of his own. If Congress passes universal healthcare during the deadliest month of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden will kill the bill. Unless we organize, there will be little resistance.Trump refuses the legitimate election results, which is staunchly anti-democratic. However, the legitimate election results are also anti-democratic. The financial and social costs to run for most offices run high, though less violent than stealing an election or staging a coup. Candidates spent $14bn alone on advertising for the 2020 election cycle, and at nearly $1bn, the most recent Georgia special and runoff senate elections were the most expensive of any state in history. Democrats presented two billionaires and five millionaires as presidential candidates last year. The race, gender and sexual orientation diversity of the field obscured the desperate need for wealth redistribution, campaign finance reform and publicly funded elections. But without resistance, many of us celebrate the few people who overcome the barriers, and carry the “our ancestors fought and died for this right” card in our pockets, all the way to our own graves.And while witnesses are now championing for DC police to quiet and quell the white riots tonight, Muriel Bowser, the mayor, will have additional support to secure the tens of millions in police overtime pay that will be most practiced on the Black and brown residents in the city. Why would a Black mayor concede to defunding the police when she can be celebrated nationally for renaming a plaza “Black lives matter?”Ousting Trump is a good start to changing the Oval Office. But changing the president only changes the spectacle; the mundane violence will remain. As much as we ought to condemn the nationalists outside the walls of Congress, we must continue to organize against the politicians inside who maintain the racist, capitalist, and militaristic agendas that wreak their destruction beneath the galleries – away from the cameras, away from the scrutiny, and away from the rest of us who actually have good reason fill up the streets. More

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    How Black voters lifted Georgia Democrats to Senate runoff victories

    Black voters showed up in record numbers for Georgia’s Senate runoff election on Tuesday, handing the Democratic Senate candidates the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff decisive victories against the Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively.According to the Associated Press, more than 4.4m votes were cast, about 88% of the number who voted in November’s contest, when turnout was 68% overall.Just weeks after flipping the conservative stronghold in the general election, local strategists and community organizers across the state are being credited with once again galvanizing a voting bloc critical in delivering Democrats’ victory.“Black runoff turnout was phenomenal and the [Donald] Trump base just couldn’t keep up,” the political analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted shortly after being one of the first to call the race for Warnock.Tuesday’s win makes the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist church the first Black senator from Georgia and the first Black Democrat in a former Confederate state since Reconstruction. The milestone is considered by some analysts to be a factor in the surge in participation.Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, given the stakes of the race and the political moment, but this was a remarkable and high turnout. I mean, yea, there was probably slightly more Trump vote dropoff–see the result–but the turnout in >80% Trump areas was still at 88% of general— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) January 6, 2021
    Black voters in the state were the deciding force in both Democratic victories, particularly in urban and rural communities with large Black populations. Typically, these groups are less likely to vote in state and local contests than their white counterparts.The runoffs garnered national attention after Black voters – along with new Georgia residents of all races – successfully flipped the state from reliably Republican to a competitive purple in November, with the Democrat Joe Biden narrowly winning over the incumbent president by more than 11,000 votes.“The margins are so small that every action, including your vote, matters and will make a difference,” Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, told CNN. “Black voters got that message. Black voters recognized that we need to complete the task.”According to exit polls, turnout for the Senate races was high overall, reaching more than 80% of the turnout in the November general election. That rate was slightly higher in predominantly Black districts.Roughly 93% of Black voters supported Ossoff and Warnock. Ossoff earned 92% of Black voters in Tuesday’s contest compared with 87% in November. According to NBC data, Warnock won 92% of Black voters against Loeffler.Meanwhile, although Republicans Loeffler and Perdue received 71% of the white vote, turnout was slightly down from the general election.“Democrats need to get at least 30% of the white vote to be competitive in any race,” Andra Gillespie, political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, told the Guardian. “But Black voter turnout, when reaching record levels, will ultimately decide the race every time.”Gillespie noted that as Georgia continues to attract young, more liberal populations, residents will see many competitive election cycles to come. According to Pew Research Center, the Black voting bloc has grown to make up a third of Georgia’s electorate in the last two decades. Other analysts also credit new Black residents with making more southern states like North Carolina, and Texas and Florida more competitive.Black women did this—but this isn’t just “Black Girl Magic.” This is the result of pure organizing, labor, and love that Black women have poured into GA.Gratitude to every one of my sisters who willed the possibilities of this moment into existence. We see you and we love you.— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) January 6, 2021
    Front and center amid post-election praise are the former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and the Black Voters Matter founder LaTosha Brown, who, along with Black grassroots organizations, have led campaigns to reach hundreds of thousands of Georgia residents since November’s general election.“Across our state, we roared,” Abrams tweeted as votes were counted, calling on Georgians to “celebrate the extraordinary organizers, volunteers, canvassers & tireless groups that haven’t stopped going”.Adopting a strategy that Brown called “meeting voters where they are”, voting rights activists spent the last weeks traveling to typically low-turnout areas to knock on doors, register voters and combat an onslaught of conservative disinformation attempts.Many advocates say these get-out-the-vote efforts were effective in driving Black voters who otherwise wouldn’t have voted, or perhaps didn’t in November. According to a state vote tracker, more than 100,000 Georgians who didn’t vote in the presidential requested a mail-in ballot for the runoff.Georgia residents largely rejected Republicans Loeffler and Perdue, who backed Trump’s conspiracy theories questioning the election’s legitimacy. Just this week, leaked audio revealed that the president had urged Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” votes that would overturn the election.The president and campaign surrogates have launched dozens of legal challenges, primarily in cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit, alleging fraud.In the same vein, both Loeffler and Perdue have refused to concede so far, challenging election results and calling on officials to count every legal vote. Meanwhile, Raffensperger has maintained that the election was secure and the results accurate.Activists argue schemes to toss out votes in primarily Black, Democratic strongholds follow a history of Republican efforts to disenfranchise primarily African Americans.For Georgia activists, Black voters flipping the state and reclaiming Democratic control of the Senate reinforces African Americans’ influence in the conservative south when they show up to the polls.“Black voters matter,” Brown succinctly tweeted. More

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    Don't blame Trump for the chaos in Washington DC. Blame his enablers | Lawrence Douglas

    The Trump supporters who stormed the Congress were not the only insurrectionists in the Capitol building yesterday; a sizeable number were already gathered in the lawmakers’ chambers well before any barriers were breached. In contrast to the agitators in their MAGA hoodies and army fatigue coats, these insurrectionists were seated in their crisp suits when Nancy Pelosi gaveled the opening of the joint session. They are products of our elite schools: Stanford and Yale Law School, Princeton and Harvard Law. They are fully aware that Trump decisively lost a fair election. Yet they have opportunistically chosen to ally themselves with a potentially mortal attack on our democracy.Yet blaming Trump for the violence is pointless. Those who have followed this president knew he would never concede defeat. For the last two months, Trump has essentially become our subversive-in-chief, working overtime to overturn a democratic election. Yesterday, Mitch McConnell finally said, “back in your cage”— overlooking the fact that for years he had fed and nurtured the beast. Yet McConnell’s belated defense of democracy rings heroic compared to the tinny sounds emerging from Ted Cruz.Cruz is already positioning himself as Trump 2.0; as a smoother, more intelligent and articulate demagogue. Trump lies in gross profusion; Cruz dresses his lies in the mantle of reasoned argument. Yesterday, we heard him speak of a “better way” that would help lawmakers avoid two “lousy” choices. The first lousy choice was “setting aside the election”. Only that choice wasn’t lousy, it was seditious – and two-thirds of congressional Republicans were, before the ugly scenes, scurrying to embrace it.The second lousy choice was the one mandated by our constitutional democracy – certifying the results that had been duly ratified by the states and upheld by the courts. What makes that choice lousy? The fact, Cruz said, that “nearly half the country believes the election was rigged”.Well, yes, but perhaps the senator might have mentioned that this is only because of the disinformation that he and the president have been force-feeding the American people. In a gesture of grand statesmanship, Cruz then proposed a third alternative—the creation of an electoral commission like the one forged to resolve the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. Never mind that the Hayes-Tilden commission was confronted with a genuine electoral dispute involving states that had submitted dueling electoral certificates. Here there is no dispute, except the bogus one Cruz has helped invent. Cruz’s proposal is a perfect expression of Trumpian politics: lie often enough and you can create your own potent reality.No sooner had Cruz finished his speech and that potent reality was on all-too visible display. We can already imagine the indignant denials and reverse-accusations that Cruz would deploy should anyone try to draw a line from his stance to the violence that followed. How dare you? If anything, it’s the Democrats who are to blame. This is what happens when you ignore the legitimate concerns of millions of Americans. It appears that Wednesday’s violence has shocked some congressional Republicans into rethinking the wisdom of this particular exercise in constitutional brinkmanship. But whether any real lessons have been learned remains to be seen.We are not Germany in 1933. But we may be Munich, 1923. On 8 November of that year, a couple of thousand Nazis staged a failed putsch to topple the Weimar Republic. Ten years later the same insurrectionists seized power in Germany – through electoral means.Lawrence Douglas is the James J Grosfeld professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought, at Amherst College, Massachusetts More

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    Trump adviser resigns and two other senior officials consider quitting

    Donald Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger, has resigned, and two other senior White House officials – the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, and the deputy chief of staff, Chris Liddell – are reportedly considering stepping down after a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building.Pottinger’s departure comes amid speculation that others will also quit after the US president incited and praised rioters while continuing to air baseless grievances over his loss of the presidency.So far six officials associated with Trump and his inner circle have said they are quitting, including members of the first lady Melania Trump’s team, after the deadly violence that surrounded the Congressional vote to certify Joe Biden’s presidential election victory in November.Senior Republican figures have also indicated splits from the president.Tweeting from his personal account, O’Brien – a staunch Trump loyalist – praised the behaviour of the vice-president, Mike Pence, who resisted Trump’s pressure to overturn the election certification, , while making no mention of Trump.“I just spoke with Vice President Pence. He is a genuinely fine and decent man,” he tweeted. “He exhibited courage today as he did at the Capitol on 9/11 as a Congressman. I am proud to serve with him.”In further fall out that underlined the fracturing of the Trump administration’s inner circles, Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, indicated to journalists he had been banned from the White House by Trump after the president “blamed” him for advice he gave to Pence on Trump’s demands he overturn the election result.According to reports in the US media, some senior administration officials have also begun talking informally about invoking the 25th amendment to remove the president before his term expires on 20 January, while calls are also growing for a second impeachment to ensure Trump cannot run for public office again.In stark language that underlined the toxic and swirling sense of crisis, the Washington Post quoted one administration official describing Trump’s behaviour on Wednesday as that of “a monster,” while another said the situation was “insane” and “beyond the pale”.Two of the first lady’s top aides resigned on Wednesday night including Stephanie Grisham, a longtime Trump loyalist who previously served as White House press secretary. Anna Cristina Niceta, the White House social secretary, also resigned.The deputy White House press secretary, Sarah Matthews, also announced her resignation, saying she was “deeply disturbed” by the storming of the Capitol.“I was honoured to serve in the Trump administration and proud of the policies we enacted. As someone who worked in the halls of Congress I was deeply disturbed by what I saw today,” Matthews said in a statement. “I’ll be stepping down from my role, effective immediately. Our nation needs a peaceful transfer of power.”The sense of anger within a Republican party at war with itself was increasingly in full view. “[Trump] screwed his supporters, he screwed the country and now he’s screwed himself,” a 2016 Trump campaign official told Politico.The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie – who said he repeatedly tried to call Trump during the crisis – also laid the blame squarely at Trump’s feet.“The president caused this protest to occur,” Christie told ABC News. “He is the only one who can make it stop.” More

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    Congress certifies Biden and Harris win hours after deadly attack on Capitol – video

    With all electoral college votes counted, the US Congress has certified Joe Biden’s win in the election. Biden and Kamala Harris will take over as president and vice-president on 20 January. The confirmation of the vote was delayed when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol building in the afternoon of 6 January
    Congress certifies Joe Biden as next US president hours after pro-Trump mob storms Capitol – live
    America shaken after pro-Trump mob storms US Capitol building More

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    Twitter and Facebook lock Donald Trump’s accounts after video address

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    Twitter and Facebook took unprecedented actions to address the spread of misinformation and the incitement of violence by Donald Trump on their platforms on Wednesday, after supporters of the president stormed the US Capitol.
    Both companies locked Trump’s accounts and removed several posts from the president that cast doubt on the election results and praised his supporters, who forcibly took to the government building as lawmakers attempted to tally votes for the election.
    Facebook has suspended Trump from posting to his account for 24 hours. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, also locked Trump’s account. Twitter locked Trump out of his account for 12 hours and is requiring him to delete three tweets the company says violates its policies. If he does not delete them, his account will remain suspended indefinitely, the company said in a public statement. If Trump again violates the policies, his account will be permanently suspended from Twitter.
    The action is the most aggressive yet from Twitter and it comes after it joined Facebook and YouTube in removing a video post from Trump’s account in which the president praised the protestors. More

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    'Morale has been gutted': can Biden restore the DoJ's battered reputation?

    When Bill Barr was invited to speak at the conservative-leaning Hillsdale College, Michigan, in September, he leapt at the chance to respond to criticism that he had politicized the justice department that he led in order to benefit his political master, Donald Trump.The then US attorney general, who stepped down from the post last month , began his speech by arguing that there had to be political input at the top of the Department of Justice (DoJ) in order for it to be publicly accountable. Then he turned to his own staff and, in response to recent complaints that he had improperly overruled the decisions of career prosecutors, gave them a good tongue-lashing.“Name one successful organization where the lowest-level employees’ decisions are deemed sacrosanct,” he said. “Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it’s no way to run a federal agency.”Comparing hard-working, highly trained public servants to kindergartners might pass as motivational leadership in the Bill Barr school of management. But to many DoJ attorneys, it summed up life in the Trump era.For four years, they have watched the president trash the historic norm of the agency’s independence from White House interference. Trump has referred to the DoJ as “the Trump justice department”, and made repeated vicious attacks on top officials, including the attorney generals whom he himself appointed.Senior officials have resigned in unprecedented numbers after Trump attempted on multiple occasions to use the justice department as his own personal weapon in battles with his political enemies.The morale and the reputation of the department has been gutted because of undue political influenceBarr, who was Trump’s longest-serving attorney general, behaved in similar fashion, leaving the impression with many observers that the department under his leadership was in the pocket of the president. He sought a more lenient sentence for Trump’s buddy Roger Stone, and moved to drop the criminal case against the former national security adviser Michael Flynn.“The morale and the reputation of the department has been gutted because of undue political influence on the decisions of career staff,” Vanita Gupta, a former head of the DoJ’s civil rights division, told the Guardian. “Barr literally compared career prosecutors to toddlers.”Barr’s derisive comment is symbolic of the challenge now facing President-elect Joe Biden as he seeks to restore confidence in this battered and bruised pillar of American democracy.“The department needs to be rebuilt by new leadership committed at every turn to decisions made on the law and on the facts, and not on what the president wants,” said Gupta, who now heads the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights.The first priority for Biden as he seeks to put the DoJ back on the rails will be to show to the American people, in both word and deed, that he intends to respect the independence of the agency with respect to specific criminal cases. Where Trump stated that he had the “absolute right to do what I want with the justice department”, Biden has pledged to take a different path.In a joint CNN interview with the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, Biden guaranteed that he would avoid telling the justice department how to do its job. “Any decision should be based on the law, should not be influenced by politics,” was how Harris put it.Biden may well find his best intentions sorely tested early on in his presidency. The Trump administration has been busy planting legal landmines in his path.Last month, the US attorney in Delaware – a Trump appointee – opened an investigation into the tax affairs of the president-elect’s son, Hunter Biden. What happens to that inquiry once the new administration takes office may define just how much independence the 46th president is willing to grant his attorney general.In any case, merely abiding by the traditional norm of DoJ prosecutorial independence may be insufficient to repair the damage of the Trump era. Gupta said: “We came dangerously close to our democratic norms being undermined, so it won’t be enough to go back to the old ways – it’s going to be incumbent on the new administration to learn the lessons and act on them.”Bob Bauer, who was White House counsel from 2010 to 2011, also believes that special measures are now needed to shore up the independence of the agency. “You cannot expect everything to return to normal just because Donald Trump has left the scene,” he said.Bauer took a leave of absence as a law professor at New York University to advise Biden during his presidential campaign. Speaking to the Guardian in a personal capacity, he said that he was fearful that norms that just about survived the Trump onslaught could be shattered if a more efficient demagogue entered the White House in future.You cannot expect everything to return to normal just because Donald Trump has left the scene“Somebody could come along and execute on the threat to use the department to pursue political enemies more effectively than Trump did. Rather than wait for a more shrewd, deft, competent Trump to appear, it makes sense to deal with this as an institutional crisis that needs addressing.”In his new book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, Bauer and his co-author Jack Goldsmith set out reforms they would like to see put in place to protect the DoJ from any future authoritarian president. They include introducing a new executive rule that would overtly instruct all 115,000 employees of the justice department to “answer in all their actions not to partisan politics but to principles of fairness and justice”.The authors also propose that Congress put in writing that any prospective attorney general must satisfy the Senate confirmation process that they are a “person of integrity”. Changes would be made to the special counsel system to clarify in what circumstances presidents can be investigated, and to shield the investigators from White House efforts to remove them.Any move by the Biden administration to introduce new rules on DoJ independence is likely to face opposition. Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge who served as US attorney general under George W Bush, told the Guardian that in his view any such measures would be unnecessary and unfounded.Mukasey said that criticism that the DoJ had been politicised in its decision making within the Trump administration was inaccurate. “There have been many actions by the justice department that were directly contrary to the president’s wishes.”He pointed to the decision of Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian collusion – an action which mightily displeased the president. He also cited Barr’s lament to ABC News in February that Trump’s tweets were making it “impossible for me to do my job”. “That was hardly consistent with the White House view,” Mukasey said.In Mukasey’s analysis, attempts by the incoming administration to try to change the department either through internal procedures or legislation would be misplaced. “I think we in this country sometimes have a fascination with mechanical solutions to problems – if we tinker with this or that, we can fix things.”Instead, the focus should be on finding the right caliber of personnel to fill top jobs. “The principal lesson of the past four years is that we need good, sound people in all positions from the White House on down. If you have them you are fine, if you don’t have them, then you can have all the mechanical bells and whistles you like” but they won’t make a difference.The Biden administration will also be under pressure to restore the central role played by the DoJ in combatting police brutality and discrimination in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Under Trump, the department’s engagement in policing reform has withered on the vine.On his final day in office as attorney general, Sessions issued a memo that scrapped consent decrees – court-backed agreements that allowed the DoJ to drive through essential reforms within police forces found to be engaging in racial profiling, excessive use of force, or unjustified killing of unarmed black men.Under Barack Obama, 14 consent decrees were imposed on wayward police agencies; under Trump, there have been none.Gupta said that the Biden administration needed to withdraw the Sessions memo on day one. “The gutting of civil rights enforcement across the board has been such a setback for communities around the country, and restoring it has to be a priority,” she said.Similarly, Gupta urged the incoming Biden team to move swiftly to rebuild the civil rights division as a key defender of the right to vote. In the Trump era, that feature of the justice department’s work faded too, with Barr accommodating the president’s baseless claims of massive voter fraud in the election by allowing federal prosecutors to investigate the matter – prompting another high-profile resignation. Barr waited until well after the 3 November election to announce publicly that there was no evidence of widespread voter irregularities.“It’s high time in this country that we stopped politicizing voting rights and treat it like it is – a core value,” Gupta said. More

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    Democratic and Republican senators unite to condemn deadly US Capitol violence – video

    Senators from both sides of US politics have condemned the violence unleashed on the Capitol building on Wednesday.  The vice-president, Mike Pence, described it as ‘a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol’. The Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, labelled the Trump supporters as ‘goons’, ‘thugs’ and ‘domestic terrorists’, while Republican Mitt Romney labelled the events ‘an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States’
    American carnage: how Trump’s footsoldiers ran riot in the Capitol
    Maga mob’s Capitol invasion makes Trump’s assault on democracy literal More