US Politics

This week, Donald Trump will undermine democracy in the US by supporting the claim that Democrat Joe Biden did not fairly win last November’s presidential election. A peaceful handover of power in a democracy requires losing candidates and their followers to admit defeat. But Mr Trump has manufactured a controversy purely to maintain power and to overturn a legitimate election.US courts have repeatedly thrown out Mr Trump’s evidence-free cases. This has not stopped the president’s accomplices in Congress. They, backed by Mr Trump’s vice-president, on Wednesday plan to challenge Mr Biden’s win to force a debate and votes in Congress. Some scholars point to a historical precedent as offering a slim, perhaps vanishing, chance that the nightmare will continue. Mr Trump will not let an opportunity pass to relitigate an election he lost.For the good of America, he must fail. The alternative is ultimately the collapse of political norms and civil strife. A classic demagogue, Mr Trump is signalling to his supporters that they, like him, should refuse to respect the election’s outcome and reject Mr Biden’s presidency. There is a well-grounded fear that protests could erupt, some of them armed. Mr Trump might call out the national guard or send federal agents to deal with demonstrations. This chaos, Mr Trump no doubt hopes, will pave the way for an autocratic takeover.Mr Trump is a sore loser who cannot stand that he was beaten in a fair election. He should move on but sees no reason why he should yield. After all, Mr Trump has not been punished for his transgressions against tradition, decency and the law. Instead, he has been rewarded. He thinks he can get away with almost anything. The Republican party has only itself to blame for incubating Trumpism, a parasitical ideology that threatens to take over the host.Mr Trump has thrown open the door to the argument of power rather than the power of argument in US electoral politics. With the help of social media, the president has polarised the electorate, building a “counter Republic” online, in which anger and fear are motivating emotions. In this world, the US apparently is being engulfed by socialism and liberal values. Mr Trump sells his chimerical fight as a necessary one, even if it cheats democracy itself. This has allowed him to frame the undoing of a presidential election as just an extension of other anti-democratic Republican tactics – such as gerrymandering and voter suppression – to constrain political opponents.Politicians in the US need to give up on the fantasy of a Trump second term. Questioning the integrity of the presidential election without proof of wrongdoing threatens the idea of liberal democracy. It leaves the US distracted by canards when its real problems are painfully obvious. No one outside of Trump’s orbit thinks that Washington DC ought to play host to rival inaugurations on 20 January. Mr Trump is not embracing chaos to express dissent. He is seeking to bring down the system that defeated him. More

[embedded content]
American vice-presidents occupy what can be one of the most powerful positions in all of the federal US government and yet it can also be one of the least powerful. Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris is going to soon find out where her tenure will land.
Harris is in a unique position among the near 50 vice-presidents in American history. She enters the office with the strong possibility that the incoming president, Joe Biden, won’t run for re-election, thus teeing her up as a future occupant of the Oval Office far more than normal.
That has triggered intense speculation on how Harris will approach her job over the next four years as she treads a fine line between being Biden’s loyal deputy but also his heir apparent.
Thus far the division of labor between Biden and Harris has only been described in broad terms. Incoming administration officials expect Harris not to have a separate policy portfolio and the issues Biden focuses on will be the ones she focuses on.
Biden and Harris have said the Biden administration will follow the example of the Obama administration when Biden was President Barack Obama’s go-to man for greasing the wheels of Congress. Even before he nominated Harris, Biden described his own vice-presidential relationship with Obama as a model for the way he would work with his own deputy.
Yet Biden and Harris bring remarkably different experiences and assets to the role. While Biden helped offset criticism that Obama was too young and inexperienced, Harris has helped ease concern about Biden’s age and excite legions of Democrats who were disappointed to see a white man lead the ticket.
Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, will be the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice-president.
“She comes into office with real star quality and that goes a long way because she’s got sway with various constituencies,” said Roy Neel, who served as chief of staff to Vice-President Al Gore during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “She ran for president. She’s smart and able and she’s got relationships in the Senate – not as deep as Biden. They have an opportunity to be a helluva team.”
Harris has been active in the weeks since Biden won the election. She headlined a rally for the Democratic candidates in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections that will decide control of the US Senate. The vice-president-elect has had a major role in Biden’s cabinet selections as well. More

On New Year’s Day 2014, the New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, entered office promising to end the “tale of two cities” with a progressive agenda that he said would address the economic and social inequalities that “threaten to unravel the city we love”.But seven years and a global pandemic later, campaigning to decide the Democrat’s successor is heating up, and the next mayor looks set to inherit a city where experts say those disparities are not only on the rise, but are in a state of crisis.In the wake of coronavirus, which to date has killed more than 25,000 people in the city, New York faces an unemployment rate of 12.1% – almost double that of the US overall – the threat of mass evictions, surging gun violence and burglary, a multibillion-dollar funding gap and an exodus of more than 300,000 residents.“This is undoubtedly the toughest situation any mayor has had to face,” said Kathryn Wylde, the president and CEO of business group the Partnership for New York City. “9/11 was difficult, but it was contained to one geographic area of the city.”While she said the health implications of Covid-19 were becoming better understood, the economic impact is only just unfolding. “So nobody really knows the consequences there, that’s still a moving target and an increasing number.”And yet despite the unprecedented challenges, there is no shortage of people vying to become the next mayor. So far, 32 candidates have filed paperwork to participate in the 2021 race, according to the city’s Campaign Finance Board (CFB).It is a diverse field that includes several former members of the De Blasio administration, a member of Barack Obama’s White House cabinet and a former New York police officer. The former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has filed paperwork and is reportedly preparing to launch a run in early or mid-January.De Blasio’s term does not officially end until 31 December 2021. But with less than six months to go until the Democratic primaries on 22 June – which, due to the left-leaning politics of the city, will probably decide the winner of November’s election – candidates will not have long to make their case.With industries including retail, tourism, restaurants, culture and entertainment suffering, and a third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses predicted not to reopen, the city’s economic recovery is likely to take centre stage.Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future said the city was on the verge of a “potential fiscal catastrophe” if it did not get the help it needs from the federal government, which could lead to major cuts in subways, sanitation and parks.This is undoubtedly the toughest situation any mayor has had to faceAlthough the $900bn stimulus bill passed by Congress in December included some funding for public transport, it did not include aid for state and local governments, and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority still faces an $8bn deficit.“Even as the city is losing all sorts of revenue, tax revenue, the needs for the safety net are growing. People are going hungry, they’re standing in line for soup kitchens, there are more people becoming homeless, so these are massive issues that are facing the city,” said Bowles.“At the same time, the way that the pandemic has changed the economy, with people working from home, it creates all sorts of risks that some people will move out of New York or people that have moved temporarily may not come back.”The next mayor needs to prioritise building back more inclusively, he said, because “too few New Yorkers got ahead during the boom times of the last decade and a lot of those disparities, those racial and ethnic disparities, have been accelerated in this pandemic.”Other issues likely to be on the incoming mayor’s immediate priorities are education, social and racial justice and crime.“The first thing is jobs, schools, crime. That’s it. You get any one of those working, you’ll be better than the current mayor,” said Mitchell Moss, an NYU professor of urban policy and planning. De Blasio, he said, had “clearly checked out” and lost the trust of teachers, police, parents and his own staff.While his successes include implementing free prekindergarten for all, the mayor has faced criticism of his leadership – including his handling of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of George Floyd – and his failed 2020 presidential run. He has also been known to publicly bicker with the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo.Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for the mayor, said: “Mayor de Blasio just made the single largest move in decades to integrate public schools on the same day as committing to over 20 new NYPD reforms … If someone doesn’t believe that work is important or urgent, then I’m not sure what to tell them.”At the moment, Moss said, it is a “wide open race”. As well as campaigning during a pandemic, candidates will also be faced with educating voters on a new ranked-choice voting system, which critics argue has not been sufficiently explained to voters.They will also need to convince New Yorkers to come out to vote. In 2013, De Blasio won the Democratic mayoral primary – in which only registered Democrats can vote – with the votes of only about 3% of all New Yorkers.Among the frontrunners so far are the city comptroller, Scott Stringer; the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams; the lawyer and civil rights activist Maya Wiley; Obama’s housing secretary and the budget director Shaun Donovan; the ex-sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia; the former non-profit executive Dianne Morales and the former Citigroup vice-chairman Ray McGuire, who launched his campaign with a video narrated by Spike Lee.Adams, 60, was a New York City police department (NYPD) officer for 22 years and in 2013 was elected Brooklyn’s first Black borough president. He decided to join NYPD after he was beaten by police when he was 15 because he wanted to change it from within.“I know New York City, I’ve had some challenging times, I’ve overcome them and now we need a mayor that can overcome and help people overcome the challenging times that they’re facing,” he said.He does not believe in “defunding” the police, but says police spending could be improved to “move from being reactionary to crime and become proactive”.He wants to improve relations between New Yorkers and its police force by hiring more officers from the city and would also have a “zero tolerance” approach to abusive police officers.He called for ranked choice voting to be postponed because he said the city has failed to educate voters on the new system which in effect will “disenfranchise voters”.Stringer, 60, who has been city comptroller since 2013, said if he became mayor he would “turn the page on the last eight years”.His first order of business, he said, would be to “close our budget gap and get to work on kickstarting the economy in a just and equitable way”.Donovan, 54, said his experience with crises, budget handling and relationships with the Biden administration from his time at the White House would serve him well as mayor. He added: “Building back has to begin with repairing our civic fabric and repairing our quality of life.”He plans to focus on equity and to appoint the city’s first chief equity officer and make New York “the leading equity city in the world”.If Wiley, 55, who was a top counsel to De Blasio and has worked as a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, becomes mayor she would be the first woman and only the second Black person in the role.She said New York needs to learn from the city’s previous crises where the city recovered but did not fix its underlying problems.“For every single time we have had crises in this city, we have recovered – we just haven’t recovered everyone.”Instead, she said, the city should invest its budget “fairly and justly” and in ways that preserve its diversity.She said coronavirus has created a “historic humanitarian crisis” in the city and the subsequent loss of life has caused “unspeakable” trauma.“We are traumatised as a city, we are afraid, we have lost. And that’s why we need a leadership that actually calls us together to pull on our strengths, to pull us together.” More

“Georgia, Georgia,” sings musician John Legend, before Barack Obama’s narration takes over. “When the moment came to reject fear and division and send a message for change, Georgia stepped up,” says the former US president, referring to Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the state. “Now, America is counting on you again.”This is a glossy campaign ad for Jon Ossoff, one of two Democratic candidates challenging two Republican incumbents in the final election of 2020 – actually taking place on the first Tuesday of 2021. With November’s vote for Georgia’s two Senate seats proving inconclusive, the runoffs will not only decide the state’s direction but could strike a blow to Biden’s presidency before it has even begun.At stake is the balance of power in the 100-member US Senate. If Republicans win one or both of the Georgia seats, they will retain a slim majority and can block Biden’s legislative goals and judicial nominees. If Democrats prevail in both seats, however, there will be a 50/50 split in the chamber, giving Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, the tie-breaking vote.Harris will campaign in Savannah on Sunday and Biden will join the Democratic candidates in Atlanta on Monday, while the president will rally with the Republicans in Dalton on the same day.Once again, two radically different visions of the nation will collide. Republicans Kelly Loeffler, 50, and David Perdue, 71, have embraced the president’s “Make America Great Again” agenda so tightly that defeats for both would be a stark repudiation of his legacy.Trump is already smarting from a narrow defeat by Biden in the presidential election in Georgia, making him the first Republican to lose it since George HW Bush in 1992. It was the most concrete proof yet that a southern state that fought for slavery during the American civil war and was dominated by Republicans for decades is now among the most competitive political battlegrounds in the country.“We’ve heard for years that Georgia is changing, Georgia is changing, and it finally changed and it was a brilliant moment,” said Carter Crenshaw, a Republican who founded a group called GOP for Joe to support the Democratic nominee. “As a lifelong Georgian, it’s funny or almost ironic that a state in the solid Republican south is about to determine the future of the country. As Joe Biden said in the election, this is a referendum about the soul of our nation.”Such is the national resonance of the contests that record amounts of money are poured in. Ossoff, the 33-year-old chief executive of a company that makes investigative TV documentaries, became the best-funded Senate candidate ever after raising $106.7m between mid-October and mid-December.His opponent, Perdue, trailed with $68m and suffered a further setback on Thursday, announcing that he will quarantine for an unspecified period after being exposed to someone infected with coronavirus. In the other runoff, Democrat the Rev Raphael Warnock, 51, raised $103.3m over the two-month period, while his opponent, Loeffler – among the wealthiest and least experienced members of Congress – had a haul of nearly $64m.About 3m people have already cast their votes early, in person or by absentee ballot, way higher than the last statewide runoff in 2018. Democrats are depending on voters of colour, young people and college-educated white people to turn out in urban and suburban areas, particularly in and around Atlanta. These include disaffected Republicans like Crenshaw.“Part of the reason I made the decision to vote for Ossoff and Warnock was I have seen first-hand how Donald Trump has been so destructive to the party and overall trust in our elections,” he said. “It’s hard when the two Republicans have gone along pretty much consistently and regularly with every conspiracy theory that he and his supporters have come up with.”Crenshaw, a pharmacy technician and student, added: “It wasn’t just a vote against Donald Trump. It was also the recognition that character still does matter and the character of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff is at this point miles ahead of what Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have exhibited in the last several months.”But the likely deciding factor will be African American turnout. Democratic activist Stacey Abrams, who lost a race for Georgia governor in 2018, has done much to mobilise the party’s base and fight voter suppression in a state with a long history of racial segregation. The runoffs have led to court battles over the state’s removal of nearly 200,000 people from voter registration rolls, and a Republican effort to curb the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots.As of last Tuesday African American turnout was 31% of the total vote so far, higher than its 27% share in November, according to Cliff Albright, cofounder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter. “You’ve still got some people thinking that what happened in Georgia for the presidential was just a fluke and that’s actually part of the reason why Black voters are so intent on showing up in such numbers right now,” he said.“Trump and his supporters are reminding us of the same issues, the same racism, the same voter suppression that had us so energised in the general election, and that energy is spilling over into the runoffs.”Republican infighting over Trump’s baseless allegations of election fraud could cause some of the president’s base to stay at home in protest. Brian Kemp, the state governor, has confirmed Biden’s victory but Loeffler refuses to acknowledge the Democrat as president-elect, bragging that she has a “100% Trump voting record” and is “more conservative than Attila the Hun”.Her challenger, Warnock, is an African American pastor at the Atlanta church where the civil rights leader Martin Luther King often preached. Albright observed: “Sadly enough, many of the issues that King was trying to address are the same issues today. He was talking about racism and capitalism and military exploitation and here we are facing those same three evils.”The Democratic duo accuse their Republican rivals of abusing their office for self-enrichment and neglecting Georgians’ plight in the Covid-19 pandemic. Republicans are appealing to diehard Trump supporters in small towns and rural areas with lurid messaging that portrays the Democrats as radical socialists hellbent on defunding the police and destroying the American dream.Ann Jones, a farmer from Flowery Branch, said of Ossoff and Warnock: “They don’t give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. I think their agenda leads you way far from agriculture and way far from common sense. Both of them are virtually unknown. What is socialism? We jump right over into communism. They’re way far off the map.”Jones plans to vote for Loeffler and Perdue and would back Trump again if he is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. “I don’t have a problem with him. I mean, do I want him to live in my house? Probably not. But he’s done a good job for the country and he’s done a whole lot for agriculture and you can’t throw any rocks at that.”Opinion polls suggest both races could go either way. John Zogby, a pollster and author, said two Republican wins on Tuesday night would deal a “horrible blow” to Biden’s presidency. Conversely, a Democratic sweep would diminish Trump’s credit for recent Republican gains in Congress and weaken his grip on the party as he teases another bid for the White House.“Here’s a guy we know is making every indication that he wants to run again and so this could potentially stop him in his tracks,” Zogby added. “It also would be part of his legacy, not only losing the election but losing the Senate. Kind of a capstone.” More

If America learns nothing else from these dark times, here are seven lessons it should take from 2020:1 Workers keep America going, not billionairesAmerican workers have been forced to put their lives on the line to provide essential services even as their employers failed to provide adequate protective gear, hazard pay, or notice of when Covid had infected their workplaces. Meanwhile, America’s 651 billionaires – whose net worth has grown by more than $1tn since the start of the pandemic – retreated to their mansions, yachts and estates.Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, sheltered in his 165,000-acre west Texas ranch while Amazon warehouse workers toiled in close proximity, often without adequate masks, gloves or sanitizers. The company offered but soon scrapped a $2 an hour hazard pay increase, even as Bezos’ wealth jumped by a staggering $70bn since March, putting his estimated net worth at roughly $186bn as the year came to an end.2 Systemic racism is killing Black and Latino AmericansBlack and Latino Americans account for almost 40% of coronavirus deaths so far, despite comprising less than a quarter of the population. As they’ve borne the brunt of this pandemic, they’ve been forced to fight for their humanity in another regard: taking to the streets to protest decades of unjust police killings, only to be met with more police violence.Among Native American communities, the coronavirus figures are even more horrifying. The Navajo Nation has had a higher per-capita infection rate than any state but cannot adequately care for the sick, thanks to years of federal underfunding and neglect of its healthcare system.Decades of segregated housing, pollution, lack of access to medical care, and poverty have left communities of color vulnerable to the worst of this virus, and the worst of America.3 If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to help peopleThe Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, continues to insist the nation cannot “afford” $2,000 survival checks for every American. But the latest relief legislation doled out more than $220bn to powerful business interests that could have been used for struggling working families.Another way of looking at it: the total cost of providing those $2,000 checks ($465bn) would be less than half the amount America’s 651 billionaires added to their wealth during the pandemic ($1tn).4 Healthcare must be made a rightEven before this crisis struck, an estimated 28 million Americans lacked health insurance. An additional 15 million lost employer-provided coverage because they lost their jobs. Without insurance, a hospital stay to treat Covid-19 cost as much as $73,000. Remember this the next time you hear pundits saying Medicare for All is too radical.5 Our social safety nets are woefully brokenNo other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the US. Our unemployment insurance system is more than 80 years old, designed for a different America. We’re one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide all workers some form of paid sick leave.Other industrialized nations kept unemployment rates low by guaranteeing paychecks. Americans who filed for unemployment benefits often got nothing, or received them weeks or months late. Under new legislation they get just $300 a week of extra benefits to tide them over.6 The electoral college must be abolishedJoe Biden won 7m more votes than Trump. But his winning margin in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin totaled just 45,000. Had Trump won those three states, he would have gained 37 electoral votes, tying Biden in the electoral college. This would have pushed the election to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House, more state delegations have Republican majorities. Trump would have been re-elected.The gap between the popular and electoral college vote continues to widen. The electoral college is an increasingly dangerous anachronism.7 Government mattersFor decades, conservatives have told us government is the problem and we should let the free market run its course. Rubbish. The coronavirus has shown yet again that the unfettered free market won’t save us. After 40 years of Reaganism, it’s never been clearer: government is in fact necessary to protect the public.It’s tragic that it took a pandemic, near-record unemployment, millions taking to the streets and a near-calamitous election for many to grasp how broken, racist and backwards our system really is. Biggest lesson of all: it must be fixed. More

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, decried what he called a “radical tantrum” on Saturday after his home in Kentucky was vandalised with messages apparently protesting against his refusal to increase Covid aid payments from $600 to $2,000.
The attack followed a similar one on the home of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, in San Francisco.
Democrats under Pelosi supported the move to increase payments but McConnell blocked it, despite its origin in a demand from Donald Trump.

According to local media reports, on Saturday morning the majority leader’s home in Louisville was spray-painted with slogans including “Weres [sic] my money?” and “Mitch kills the poor”.
Police reported minor damage. It was not immediately known if McConnell and his wife, the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, were home at the time.
In California, Pelosi’s home was graced by a pig’s head, red paint and messages including “cancel rent” and “We want everything”.
In a statement on Saturday, McConnell said: “I’ve spent my career fighting for the first amendment [which protects free speech] and defending peaceful protest. I appreciate every Kentuckian who has engaged in the democratic process whether they agree with me or not.
“This is different. Vandalism and the politics of fear have no place in our society. My wife and I have never been intimidated by this toxic playbook. We just hope our neighbours in Louisville aren’t too inconvenienced by this radical tantrum.”
The state Republican party demanded Democrats denounce the vandalism. In a tweet, Democratic governor Andy Beshear called the vandalism “unacceptable”.
“While the first amendment protects our freedom of speech,” he wrote, “vandalism is reprehensible and never acceptable for any reason.”
Protesters both against McConnell and for Trump in his attempts to hold on to power – which McConnell has opposed – gathered outside the majority leader’s home.
“We all know that Trump supporters and what everyone wants to call Black Lives Matter has their differences,” one protester said, in footage broadcast on social media.
“But collectively we are here because Mitch is a bitch and he owes the American people money … we are here together to protest because the government, the system, has been ripping us all off in many different ways.” More

Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and nine other Republican US senators or senators-elect said on Saturday they will reject presidential electors from states where Donald Trump has contested his defeat by Joe Biden, “unless and until [an] emergency 10-day audit” of such results is completed.
The move is largely symbolic and unlikely to overturn the presidential election. Nonetheless, it adds to a sense of deepening crisis affecting US democracy.
Trump has refused to concede, though Biden won more than 7m more votes nationally and took the electoral college by 306-232, a margin Trump called a landslide when he won it over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Trump campaign has lost the vast majority of more than 50 lawsuits it has mounted in battleground states, alleging electoral fraud, and before the supreme court.
On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a suit lodged by a House Republican which attempted to give the vice-president, Mike Pence, who will preside over the certification of the electoral college result on Wednesday, the power to overturn it.
Nonetheless, the senators and senators-elect who issued a statement on Saturday followed Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri in committing to challenging the result.
Objections are also expected from a majority of House Republicans. Objections must be debated and voted on but as Democrats control the House and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other senior Republicans have voiced opposition, the attempt to disenfranchise a majority of Americans seems doomed to fail.
On Saturday, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she would vote to certify the results, writing: “The oath I took at my swearing-in was to support and defend the constitution of the United States, and that is exactly what I will do.”
But Cruz and Johnson were joined by Senators James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy (Louisiana), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Mike Braun (Indiana). Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) also signed on.
“The election of 2020,” they said, “like the election of 2016, was hard fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”
No hard evidence for such claims has been presented. Federal officials including former attorney general William Barr and Christopher Krebs, a cyber security chief fired by Trump, have said the election was secure.
Regardless, the senators said Congress “should immediately appoint an electoral commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”
The senators made reference to the contested election of 1876, which ended in the appointment of such a commission.
“We should follow that precedent,” they said.
Most well-informed observers would suggest otherwise, given that process put an end to post-civil war Reconstruction and led to the institution of racist Jim Crow laws across the formerly slave-owning south.
In August, the Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “The election of 1876 would not have been disputed at all if there hadn’t been massive violence in the south to prevent black people from voting and voter suppression like we have today. Now, voter suppression is mostly legal.”
Presciently, given baseless claims that voting under a pandemic was abused by Democrats, he added: “Today, I can certainly see the Trump people challenging these mail-in ballots: ‘They’re all fraudulent, they shouldn’t be counted.’ Challenging people’s voting.”
Cruz, like Hawley, is prominent among Republicans expected to run for president in 2024, and thus eager to appeal to supporters loyal to Trump. On Saturday, Christine Pelosi, daughter of House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a member of the Democratic National Committee, referred to the bitter 2016 primary when she tweeted: “Ted Cruz is defending Trump’s assaults on democracy with more energy than he defended his own family against Trump’s assaults on his wife and father.”
The Democratic strategist Max Burns wrote: “The exact same Senate GOP that refused to allow a single witness during President Trump’s impeachment trial now wants to … call a bunch of witnesses to ‘investigate’ Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.”
Biden did not immediately comment. In Congress, the Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal branded the statement “pathetic”, “un-American” and “an attack on our democracy”. Amy Klobuchar, from Minnesota, said Biden “will be inaugurated on 20 January, and no publicity stunt will change that”. More

It’s always risky making predictions about the tech industry, but this year looks like being different, at least in the sense that there are two safe bets. One is that the attempts to regulate the tech giants that began last year will intensify; the second that we will be increasingly deluged by sanctimonious cant from Facebook & co as they seek to avoid democratic curbing of their unaccountable power.On the regulation front, last year in the US, Alphabet, Google’s corporate owner, found itself facing major antitrust suits from 38 states as well as from the Department of Justice. On this side of the pond, there are preparations for a Digital Markets Unit with statutory powers that will be able to neatly sidestep the tricky definitional questions of what constitutes a monopoly in a digital age. Instead, the unit will decide on a case-by-case basis whether a particular tech company has “strategic market status” if it possesses “substantial, entrenched market power in at least one digital activity” or if it acts as an online “gateway” for other businesses. And if a company is judged to have this status, then penalties and regulations will be imposed on it.Over in Brussels, the European Union has come up with a new two-pronged legal framework for curbing digital power – the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. The Digital Markets Act is aimed at curbing anti-competitive practices in the tech industry (like buying up potential competitors before they can scale up) and will include fines of 10% of global revenues for infringers. The Digital Services Act, for its part, will oblige social media platforms to take more responsibility for illegal content on their platforms – scams, terrorist content, images of abuse, etc – for which they could face fines of up to 6% of global revenue if they fail to police content adequately. So the US and UK approach focuses on corporate behaviour; the EU approach focuses on defining what is allowed legally.All of this action has been a long time coming and while it’s difficult to say exactly how it will play out, the bottom line is that the tech industry is – finally – going to become a regulated one. Its law-free bonanza is going to come to an end.Joe Biden’s choices for top staff in his administration include a depressing proportion of former tech company stalwartsThe big question, though, is: when? Antitrust actions proceed at a glacial pace because of the complexity of the issues and the bottomless legal budgets of the companies involved. The judge in one of the big American antitrust cases against Google has said that he expects the case to get to court only in late 2023 and then it could run for several years (as the Microsoft case did in the 1990s).The problem with that, as the veteran anti-monopoly campaigner Matt Stoller has pointed out, is that the longer monopolistic behaviour goes on, the more damage (eg, to advertisers whose revenue is being stolen and other businesses whose property is being appropriated) is being done. Google had $170bn in revenue last year and is growing on average at 10-20% a year. On a conservative estimate of 10% growth, the company will add another $100bn to its revenue by 2025, when the case will still be in the court. Facebook, says Stoller, “is at $80bn of revenue this year, but it is growing faster, so the net increase of revenue is a roughly similar amount. In other words, if the claims of the government are credible, then the lengthy case, while perhaps necessary, is also enabling these monopolists to steal an additional $100bn apiece.”What could speed up bringing these monopolists to account? A key factor is the vigour with which the US Department of Justice prosecutes its case(s). In the run-up to the 2020 election, the Democrats in Congress displayed an encouraging enthusiasm for tackling tech monopolies, but Joe Biden’s choices for top staff in his administration include a depressing proportion of former tech company stalwarts. And his vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, consistently turned a blind eye to the anti-competitive acquisitions of the Silicon Valley giants throughout her time as California’s attorney general. So if people are hoping for antitrust zeal from the new US government, they may be in for disappointment.Interestingly, Stoller suggests that another approach (inspired by the way trust-busters in the US acted in the 1930s) could have useful leverage on corporate behaviour from now on. Monopolisation isn’t just illegal, he points out, “it is in fact a crime, an appropriation of the rights and property of others by a dominant actor. The lengthy trial is essentially akin to saying that bank robbers getting to keep robbing banks until they are convicted and can probably keep the additional loot.”Since a basic principle of the rule of law is that crime shouldn’t pay, an addition of the possibility of criminal charges to the antitrust actions might, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning (pace Dr Johnson), concentrate minds in Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. As an eternal optimist, I cannot think of a nicer prospect for 2021 than the sight of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai in the dock – with Nick Clegg in attendance, taking notes. Happy new year!What I’ve been readingWho knew?What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy is a great Bloomberg column by Noah Smith.Far outIntriguing piece on how investors are using real-time satellite images to predict retailers’ sales (Stock Picks From Space), by Frank Partnoy on the Atlantic website.An American dream Lovely meditation on Nora Ephron’s New York, by Carrie Courogen on the Bright Wall/Dark Room website. More