US Politics

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The US Capitol, the seat of American democracy, has been stormed by a pro-Donald Trump mob, egged on by the president in a desperate and violent effort to overturn the results of the election.
Minutes after the news spread that the vice-president had announced he would not do the president’s bidding and reverse Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden at the ballot box, hundreds of pro-Trump rioters broke down the barriers around the Capitol building, and surged forward.
Footage from inside the building showed that some pro-Trump rioters had reached one of the doors to the Capitol and smashed out the glass. A group managed to make their way to the atrium of the Senate Rotunda, carrying confederate flags. The Capitol police were outnumbered and seemed to melt away. More

The Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta has witnessed tides of history ebb and flow during its 134 years. Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights leader, often preached here. Now its pastor, Raphael Warnock, has added a new chapter by becoming the first African American senator from Georgia.The storied church was firmly closed as votes were tallied on Tuesday night and its doors were plastered with coronavirus warnings, but there was a palpable surge outside as expectation turned to elation.“We know that Georgia is in the midst of a great change,” said Cheryl Johnson, a voting engagement activist and community historian. “We believe that we can lead the country forward as we have always led the country in many different ways. We have a history of great leadership. We have always been change makers.”Johnson, 54, has heard the deep-voiced Warnock preach at the church.“He can break it down intellectually but when it comes to talking about the issues that impact our community – social justice issues, homelessness, healthcare issues, police reform – he comes in the tradition of the Baptist church, which is passionate, engaged. He challenges people to think, who are you and, if you say that you are this, what does that mean?” she said.Opposite the church a sign announces the Martin Luther King Jr National Historical Park. Beside it is King’s tomb, surrounded by a reflection pool near an eternal flame. In contrast to the unfolding drama in election offices across the state, the memorial was silent and still on Tuesday night.Warnock’s staff were watching the count anxiously at a campaign office and bar behind the church, which is in the former district of Congressman John Lewis, another civil rights hero who died last summer. Ifeanyichukwu “Chuke” Williams, 24, co-owner of a nearby clothing store and recording studio, said: “There is definitely a connection there: it’s in the ether. In a way Warnock is taking up the mantle, taking up the reins, trying to be the change.”Jalen Smith, 26, a chef at a home for the elderly, added: “I didn’t vote but I’m familiar with the people and probably would have voted for Warnock. It’s good to see more Black politicians getting in and making a difference. He’s done a lot for the Black community and shown that he actually cares about people.”Warnock, 51, defeated Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, an ardent Trump supporter who boasted she was more conservative than Attila the Hun. In a speech to his supporters on Wednesday, Warnock paid tribute to his 82-year-old mother, Verlene Warnock, who as a young woman spent summers on a south Georgia farm picking cotton and tobacco.Georgia, where about a third of the population is Black, voted Democratic at November’s presidential election for the first time since 1992 and is on the verge of delivering the Democrats control of the Senate. It has seen years of voter registration efforts, including to engage liberals from other states who moved to Atlanta for work.It is a state, and a region, in cultural, demographic and political transition. Georgia was a linchpin of the Confederacy during the civil war and bears the scars of slavery, segregation and hundreds of lynchings. But it was also the birthplace of King and a key theatre of the civil rights struggle.It is now home to a booming TV and film industry dubbed the “Hollywood of the South”. Once famous for local author Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the superhero movie Black Panther, which proved a huge hit with African American cinemagoers, is now a more fitting symbol.After voting on a sunny but crisp Tuesday, Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff, who worked as an intern for Lewis, stood under a tree outside a community centre and told reporters: “I’m a John Lewis Democrat, I’m a civil rights Democrat and that’s the kind of Democrat that’s running in the south right now.“Think about how far we’ve come in the American south that the Democratic standard bearers in these races are the young Jewish son of an immigrant and a Black pastor who holds Dr King’s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist church. That is the new south.” More

Joe Biden will nominate the federal appeals judge Merrick Garland to be the next US attorney general, a transition official for the president-elect said on Wednesday, a choice most Americans know as the supreme court nominee of Barack Obama who was memorably blocked by Republicans.Garland, 68, serves as a judge on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. Obama, a Democrat, nominated him to the supreme court in 2016 while Biden was vice-president, but the Republican-controlled US Senate refused to hold hearings on the nomination.Biden, who takes office in two weeks, also intends to nominate justice department veterans Lisa Monaco as deputy attorney general and Kristen Clarke as the assistant attorney general to the civil rights division, the official said.During his election campaign, Biden pledged to take steps to end racial disparities in sentencing by eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, ending the use of the federal death penalty and restoring the justice department’s role of investigating and holding police departments accountable for “systemic misconduct”.While many of these initiatives would require approval from Congress, Garland as attorney general will still have significant power to address these topics through changes in policy, such as by instructing prosecutors not to seek the death penalty or to make charging decisions that will not trigger mandatory minimums.The news came as Democrats looked set to win two US Senate seats up for grabs in Georgia runoff elections held on Tuesday, which would give the party control of both houses of Congress and give Biden more leeway to enact his agenda.Garland, who has served on the federal appeals bench since 1997, is no stranger to the justice department.Before becoming a judge, he worked as a federal prosecutor where he helped secure a conviction against Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. He was also on the team that helped secure a conviction of former District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry for cocaine possession.Garland held other key posts at the justice department, including serving as principal deputy associate attorney general to the deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, starting in 1994.Obama nominated Garland in March 2016 to replace the long-serving conservative justice Antonin Scalia, who died on 13 February 2016. But the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican, refused to consider the nomination on the grounds it should not occur in a presidential election year.That stance, assailed by Democrats at the time, came under further criticism two months before the 2020 presidential election, when McConnell rushed to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to fill the vacancy of the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.While serving as attorney general under Trump until last month, William Barr faced criticism for his willingness to intervene in criminal cases in ways that benefited Trump’s political allies, such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. More

The Democratic candidate has given a speech thanking the people of Georgia for electing him to the US Senate before the final tally is formally announced.
In his speech, Jon Ossoff asked the country to unite to beat the coronavirus pandemic and said he would fight both for people who voted for him and those who did not in the second of two runoff elections in Georgia
US Georgia senate election: latest updates More

It appears, at the moment I’m writing this, that Democratic candidates have won both of the US Senate races in Georgia, with the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeating the Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. If these results are confirmed, the incoming US Senate will be split 50-50 between the two parties but Democrats will hold de facto control, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote. This further will mean that the Republican party under Donald Trump lost control of the House of Representatives in 2018, the White House in 2020 and the Senate in 2021 – a trifecta of defeat that may finally convince the party of the need to liberate itself from Trump’s malign domination.Credit for the victories must go to the candidates themselves, get-out-the-vote organizers in Georgia’s minority communities (Stacey Abrams above all), and Democratic donors and volunteers from all over the country. But the Republicans did as much to lose these elections as the Democrats did to win them.Although Trump lost by less than 12,000 votes in Georgia – as the nation recently was reminded with the release of the phone call in which Trump brazenly attempted to badger state election officials into overturning the results – the down-ballot Republican candidates performed well in those November elections. Perdue actually ran ahead of Trump and led Ossoff by about 88,000 votes, garnering 49.7% of the vote to Ossoff’s 47.9%. In nearly every other state this would have meant Perdue’s re-election, but a Georgia law from the 1960s requires a runoff election when no general election candidate receives an outright majority.Loeffler ran in a special election in November – the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, had appointed her to the Senate in 2019 following the previous incumbent’s resignation for health reasons – and trailed Warnock in the vote tally. In aggregate, however, Republican candidates outperformed Democrats by a full percentage point. And both Loeffler and Perdue benefited from ticket-splitting in Atlanta’s wealthy suburbs, where predominantly white and traditionally Republican voters rejected Trump (or at least withheld their votes for the presidency) but continued to support Republican candidates for other offices.These factors, combined with a record of Republicans outperforming Democrats in past runoffs, meant that the odds favored Loeffler and Perdue. And if the rematches had taken place in mid-November, both would probably have won handily.But in the nine weeks that followed election day, Trump broke with the tradition of conceding defeat (graciously or otherwise) and facilitating a peaceful transition of power – the tradition that makes possible our national experiment in republican self-government. Instead, he claimed without evidence that the election had been stolen from him and dragooned much of the Republican party into his grotesque crusade to overthrow democracy.In the immediate aftermath of the election, Republicans could have made a strong case for re-electing Loeffler and Perdue in order to maintain control over the Senate as a check on the incoming administration. But evidently in the minds of many Georgia swing voters, the Trump-dominated Republican party has itself become the threat to the nation that needs checking.The election returns from Georgia are showing a consistent pattern of Democrats having shown up at the polls at rates approaching their general election turnout, while significant numbers of Republicans stayed home. Democrats did a superb job of voter mobilization, including the door-to-door efforts that they chose not to undertake for pandemic-related reasons in the lead-up to the November elections. But they also made the straightforward argument that the Georgia elections mattered because Biden’s success in appointing officials and passing progressive programs would depend upon Democrats retaking control of the Senate.Republicans, however, were forced by Trump’s pretenses to address their voters in Georgia in a tortured syntax that might be called the future fraudulent conditional: if control of the US Senate were at stake in this election, which it wasn’t because Trump actually won a second term, then voting for these Republican candidates would be important even though Democrats probably would steal this election too. Republicans thus depressed their own voter turnout and ensured their own defeat.Republicans will push this program of self-sabotage even further by objecting to the electoral college vote-count in the US CongressIn addition, since Republicans have largely given up on governing, they had no positive program to run on other than supporting Trump and no policies to advance for coping with the economic and human toll of the pandemic. And the extent to which Loeffler and Perdue abased themselves before Trump’s demands – including their call for Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to resign for alleged “mismanagement and lack of transparency” in the November elections – confirmed public cynicism about politicians’ willingness to do and say anything in order to get re-elected.Republicans will push this program of self-sabotage even further by objecting to the electoral college vote-count in the US Congress. It’s likely that a dirty dozen or so of Republican senators and more than a hundred Republican representatives will try to disenfranchise millions of voters in order to throw the election to Trump. The fact that it’s foredoomed to failure doesn’t lessen the dishonor of the attempt or the damage to American democracy.The Republican National Committee is unlikely to engage in the kind of agonized reappraisal that followed Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election, because any new “autopsy report” would have to confront the extent to which Trump has divided the party. The Republican civil war in Georgia, in which populist radicals claim that establishment leaders like Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp colluded with Democrats and nefarious elites to betray Trump, will play out across the country.An honest autopsy also would have to acknowledge that even many of the establishment Republican leaders who upheld the law in the face of Trump’s authoritarian demands have themselves acted undemocratically in attempting to suppress minority votes, as Kemp did in 2018 when he was Georgia’s secretary of state. The present election results in Georgia demonstrate that such efforts are not only immoral but self-defeating, as African Americans’ high turnout was powered by a determination not to allow Republicans to deprive them of the civil rights for which their forbears fought and died.The next few years will witness a titanic struggle within the Republican party between Trump’s fanatical grassroots supporters and whatever elements in the party still care about governing and holding the country together. But even the comparatively responsible actors will have to change course if the Republican party will ever deserve to hold power again. More

Democracy in the US teeters on the edge of a figurative sword. On Wednesday, the US Congress will convene to formally receive the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Unfortunately, Donald Trump and his allies have converted a legal formality into a blatant coup attempt.
The ex-reality television host is like none who have come before him. Presidents Hoover, Carter and Bush Sr all suffered rejection at the ballot box after just one term. However painful, they accepted the electorate’s verdict. In the end, personal pride took a backseat to the orderly transition of power. The nation had spoken.
Likewise, in 2000, Al Gore ultimately acquiesced to a split US supreme court decision, which the late Justice Antonin Scalia later confessed was “as we say in Brooklyn, a piece of shit”, and conceded to George W Bush. Adding insult to injury, Gore, who was then vice-president, presided over the joint session of Congress where the results were announced and certified. Fealty to the American experiment came first.
Not any more. The US confronts a president determined to hold on to power past the constitutionally mandated expiration of his term, and congressional Republicans hellbent on aiding and abetting this desperate bid to overturn the election’s outcome.
Last Thursday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, told his caucus that the upcoming votes were the “most consequential” of his career. It was not hyperbole. More than two centuries of supremacy of consent of the governed and We the People are riding on it.
Beyond that, McConnell could be a witnessing a civil war among his own ranks. What was supposed to be his own post-election victory lap has evaporated in the face of a president who demands the self-sacrifice of others like a modern-day Moloch. Nancy Pelosi is not the only person on Capitol Hill with a headache. More

Welcome to another edition of the Guardian Weekly. Monday should have been a celebratory day in the United Kingdom as the potentially game-changing Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was administered for the first time since being approved. Alas … it was also the day when it became clear that the country’s Covid crisis had moved drastically out of control.The spread of a new, more transmissible variant of the virus has seen infections in the UK soar and hospitals at breaking point. In a primetime television address, Boris Johnson informed the nation that all schools in England – openings had already been delayed elsewhere in the UK – would be closed until at least mid-February and that already-tight lockdown restrictions would be extended further.Will vaccines offer a way out of this disaster? And when? In this week’s cover story, Observer science editor Robin McKie looks at how we might judge the success of mass inoculation programmes. Then Peter Beaumont considers the global vaccine picture and Oliver Holmes reports from Israel which has stormed ahead, having already given more than 10% of its population the jab.Elsewhere, it’s a vital week in American politics. As the Weekly was being printed, Georgians were voting in a double special Senate election that could tip the balance of the upper house. That vote was preceded by the wild phone call made by Donald Trump to Georgia state election officials demanding that they find him enough votes to reverse the decision of the state to elect Joe Biden in November. There were also extraordinary, dangerous moves by other Republicans to challenge the electoral college results in Congress on Wednesday. David Smith tries to make sense of Trump’s final, desperate attempt to subvert democracy.This week’s edition also features reporting from Sally Williams on how people in Mozambique recovered from Cyclone Idai, which caused havoc in early 2019. Ed Pilkington looks at the case of Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row in the United States. And, in a fascinating report, Laura Spinney looks at the future and history of hospital design in the post-Covid era. If we ever get to it …Get the Guardian Weekly delivered to your home More

Shortly after midnight, Rev Raphael Warnock delivered a message of hope to Georgians and declared his win in the Senate runoff election: ‘Whether you voted for me or not – know this: I see you. I hear you. And I will fight for you.’ He beat Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, a Trump loyalist. This is the first time for 24 years that a Democrat will represent Georgia in the Senate
Georgia Senate runoffs: Democrat Raphael Warnock wins against Kelly Loeffler
Georgia runoffs: Democrat Raphael Warnock wins in Senate battle – live More