US Politics

Almost 1,800 students at Columbia University in New York are threatening to withhold tuition fees next year, in the latest signal to US academia of widespread preparedness to act on demands to reduce costs and address social justice issues relating to labor, investments and surrounding communities.In a letter to trustees and administrators of Columbia, Barnard College and Teachers College, the students said: “The university is acutely failing its students and the local community.”They accused the university of “inaction” since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, when students began demonstrating against what they say are exorbitant tuition rates “which constitute a significant source of financial hardship during this economic depression”.The letter referred to national protests over structural racism, accusing the university of failing to act on demands to address “its own role in upholding racist policing practices, damaging local communities and inadequately supporting Black students”.Emmaline Bennett, chair of the Columbia-Barnard Young Democratic Socialists of America and a master’s student at Teachers College, told the Guardian the university and other colleges had made no effort to reduce tuition fees as they moved to remote learning models necessitated by pandemic conditions.“We think it says a lot about the profit motive of higher education, even as the economy is in crisis and millions of people are facing unemployment,” Bennett said. “This is especially true of Columbia, which is one of the most expensive universities in the US.”Demands outlined in the letter include reducing the cost of attendance by at least 10%, increasing financial aid by the same percentage and replacing fees with grants.Such reforms, the letter said, should not come at the expense of instructor or worker pay, but rather at the expense of bloated administrative salaries, expansion projects and other expenses that do not directly benefit students and workers.The university, the letter said, must invest in community safety solutions that prioritise the safety of Black students, and “commit to complete transparency about the University’s investments and respect the democratic votes of the student body regarding investment and divestment decisions – including divestment from companies involved in human rights violations and divesting fully from fossil fuels.“These issues are united by a shared root cause: a flagrant disregard for initiatives democratically supported within the community. Your administration’s unilateral decision-making process has perpetuated the existence of these injustices in our community despite possessing ample resources to confront them with structural solutions.“Should the university continue to remain silent in the face of the pressing demands detailed below, we and a thousand of fellow students are prepared to withhold tuition payments for the Spring semester and not to donate to the university at any point in the future.”A Columbia spokesperson said: “Throughout this difficult year, Columbia has remained focused on preserving the health and safety of our community, fulfilling our commitment to anti-racism, providing the education sought by our students and continuing the scientific and other research needed to overcome society’s serious challenges.”The university has frozen undergraduate tuition fees and allowed greater flexibility in coursework over three terms. It has also, it said, adopted Covid-related provisions including an off-campus living allowance of $4,000 per semester, to help with living and technology expenses related to remote learning.Columbia is not alone in facing elevated student demands. In late August, for example, students at the University of Chicago staged a week-long picket of the provost’s house as part of a campaign to disband the university police department, Chicago’s largest private force.The issue of student debt remains challenging. In a nod to progressives, President-elect Joe Biden last month affirmed his support for a US House measure which would erase up to $10,000 in private, non-federal loan debt for distressed individuals.Biden highlighted “people … having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent” and said such debt relief “should be done immediately”.Some Democrats say relief should go further. In September, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren co-authored a resolution which called for the next president to cancel up to $50,000 of outstanding federal loans per borrower.At Columbia, students say their demands for Covid-related fee reductions are only a starting point.“In the long-term, we need to reform the educational system entirely,” said Bennett. “We need to make all universities and colleges free, and to cancel all student debt to prevent enduring educational and economic inequalities.” More

Let’s plunge into the gap between what people say and what other people hear. All kinds of things can grow in that space, many of them poisonous. In that gap, friendships, even marriages, have come apart; wars can start.This week, Barack Obama shone a light into that zone when he talked about the slogan that many Democrats believe cost the party seats in the House of Representatives and Senate last month, a phrase that took flight during the summer of protests against the killing of George Floyd: defund the police. The former president said he too wanted to reform the criminal justice system, ridding it of racial bias, but he feared that using that “snappy slogan” meant “you lost a big audience the minute you say it”. The very change activists wanted moved further out of reach.Far better, said Obama, to say that some of the resources now spent on militarised police should be diverted to other services. If a person, homeless and distressed, is causing disruption in the street, a mental health professional should be dispatched rather than “an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy”. Put it that way, said Obama, and people start listening.As it happens, plenty of campaigners insist that that’s exactly what they meant by “defund the police”. But what too many voters heard was “abolish the police”, by starving them of funds. And those voters didn’t like it, because they reckon that, every now and again, you need a police force. The word “defund” was sufficiently ambiguous – hazy on whether police budgets should be eliminated or merely reduced – that it opened up the gap, that space where distrust, confusion and eventually fear grow.The evidence supports Obama, and not only in the form of the assorted congressional Democrats who say the phrase cost them votes. One Democratic consultant ran a focus group of wavering voters who had considered backing Joe Biden but eventually plumped for Donald Trump. Intriguingly, 80% of these Americans – Trump voters, remember – agreed racism existed in the criminal justice system, and 60% had a favourable view of Black Lives Matter. When the policy was expressed the way Obama put it, 70% of them backed it. But they drew the line at “defund the police”. In other words, the slogan hurt the cause.Obama has been attacked on the Democratic left, criticised for failing to see the urgent necessity of police reform. But that is to miss the point. It’s because change is urgent and necessary that Democrats need to argue for it in a way that wins, rather than loses, support.None of this should be new. The centrality of language to politics is ancient and recurrent. In the 1990s, Republicans had an uphill battle fighting against an “estate tax” on inheritance bequeathed to the wealthy – until they rebranded it “the death tax”. Then they won. But it’s harder for the left which, by its nature, is asking for permission to change the status quo. For that reason, it has to craft language that reassures voters that it understands, and even shares, their starting assumptions – or, at the very least, does not play into their worst fears.The psychologist Drew Westen, whose book The Political Brain has become a classic in this field, counsels that the same voters who might reject “gun control” – fearing an over-mighty state trying to dominate them – often warm to “gun safety” laws. “Medicare for all” might sound wonderful to progressive ears, but what many Americans hear is a proposal to impose a one-size-fits-all system on everyone, even if that means stripping you of a coverage plan you already have and quite like: “Medicare for all who want it” has wider appeal. This has resonance in Britain too. There is nobody on even the mildest wing of the left who is not in favour of equality, and yet even that sacred word might not be quite as appealing as you think. James Morris, onetime pollster to Ed Miliband, has seen how many of the voters that Labour needs to win associate “equality” with levelling down. They think it means everyone getting the same, no matter how hard they work. Those voters don’t like that notion, believing it robs them of the opportunity to get on. And, says Morris, “they also have a moral objection”. They reckon your actions should have consequences, that if you work hard you deserve to be rewarded. For them, “equality” contradicts that. More effective is “fairness”, and the insistence that everyone deserves a fair shot.Keir Starmer might find such advice helpful, but the “defund the police” episode offers another lesson. It is that leaders of political parties don’t get to define their message alone. Biden never uttered the words “defund the police”. Indeed, very few Democratic politicians ever did. And yet, in several key contests that slogan played a crucial role. The Democratic party was held to account for a movement, and a wider cultural left, that went far beyond the precincts it could hope to control.Labour is all too familiar with that danger. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher ran against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the women of Greenham Common, the miners, the universities and often obscure local councillors, as much as she did against Neil Kinnock. Even if he could control his own message, he couldn’t control theirs.In Beyond the Red Wall, another Labour pollster, Deborah Mattinson, reports how distant former Labour voters in Accrington, Stoke and Darlington felt from questions that often exercise the vocal left, whether it be statues, gender or the more outlandish antics of Extinction Rebellion. It’s not that they disagreed necessarily on the issues themselves, rather that they sensed that these were the concerns of people with whom they had nothing in common: “people who didn’t worry about paying for the supermarket shop on a Friday”. And if the left’s loudest voices, amplified by social media, cared so deeply about those other things, surely that meant they didn’t care about people like them.This is the challenge for Starmer and his party. As the row over US police reform illustrates, it doesn’t mean softening the policy, but rather selling it right – and knowing that if you don’t define yourself, somebody else will.Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Join Sarah Churchwell for a conversation with Joe Biden biographer Evan Osnos in a Guardian Live online event on Thursday 21 January at 7pm GMT, 2pm EST. Book tickets here More

Joe Biden’s incoming economic team is filled with firsts. The lineup that the incoming president introduced this week will, if approved, place women and people of color at the controls of the US economy during one of the darkest periods in recent history.
While the team is historic, it also faces a historic challenge. Unemployment has fallen dramatically since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. It fell to 6.7% in November. But it remains 3.2 percentage points above its level before Covid-19 struck, jobs growth is slowing sharply, long-term unemployment is growing and people of color are still suffering hardship at far higher levels than white Americans.
The pandemic has also exacerbated already worrying levels of income inequality, and across the US, shocking lines are forming at food banks as the country’s already frayed social safety net collapses.
Congress has been deadlocked on a new round of stimulus money for months. A compromise now seems to be in the works but will come too late for many.
The future looks difficult too. The US now has a $21.2tn national debt – up from $14.4tn on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. Republicans, who helped fuel that enormous rise, are now talking about the need for fiscal responsibility.
Biden’s team is strong on progressive talk. Its members have championed the need for more government intervention, greater equality and a stronger safety net. A look at the team’s own words shows just how ambitiously they are thinking.
Whether they can achieve those goals looks set to hang on two crucial Senate races in Georgia in January that will decide who controls the Senate.
Janet Yellen, treasury secretary
The first woman to head the Treasury if confirmed, Yellen has had a long and distinguished career and was the first woman to head the Federal Reserve.
This week Yellen called the pandemic recession “an American tragedy” and said: “It’s essential that we move with urgency.”
An expert on labor markets, she has long highlighted income inequality and its disproportionate impact on people of color in the US. “There really is a new kind of recognition that you’ve got a society where capitalism is beginning to run amok and needs to be readjusted,” she told Reuters recently.
In a 2014 speech, she said: “The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me.” Yellen noted: “The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades, to a greater extent than in most advanced countries.”
But her long-term views on the nation’s debts have some progressives worried that she may look to cut welfare programs once Covid-19 is, finally, behind us. “The US debt path is completely unsustainable under current tax and spending plans,” she said in February.
Neera Tanden, head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
The president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress will be the first woman of color to head the OMB if she is confirmed. But Republicans, angered by her partisan tweets, have said she stands “zero chance” of being approved if they keep control of the Senate.

Neera Tanden
(@neeratanden)
Imagine a world where Mitch McConnell is not in the Senate. Now let’s go make that happen. https://t.co/iOwO3GgDf1

February 13, 2019

Her India-born mother, Maya, relied on food stamps and other government programs to raise her children after her divorce and Tanden is a strong supporter of a better social safety net.
“I’m here today thanks to my mother’s grit, but also thanks to a country that had faith in us, that invested in her humanity, and in our dreams,” she said this week.
The OMB is the largest office within the executive office of the president and oversees the development and implementation of the federal budget. Her priorities are unmistakable.
“Budgets are not abstractions,” Tanden said. “They are a reflection of our values. They touch our lives in profound ways and sometimes they make all the difference.”
Adewale ‘Wally’ Adeyemo, deputy treasury secretary
If confirmed, Nigerian-born Adeyemo will be the first Black person to serve as deputy Treasury secretary.
“Public service is about offering hope through the dark times and making sure that our economy works not just for the wealthy, but for the hard-working people who make it run,” he wrote on Twitter this week.
Like Yellen he has emphasized the need to address income inequality. “In California’s Inland Empire, where I had grown up in a working-class neighborhood, the Great Recession hit us hard,” he said this week. “We were one of the foreclosure capitals of the United States. The pain of this was real for me.”
But his work as a senior adviser to BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and past positions calling for “avoiding protectionism” and asserting the need to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal are likely to cause problems with progressive Democrats and even many Republicans in the post-Trump era.
Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
Another first, Rouse will be the first Black chair of the Council of Economic Advisers if she is confirmed.
Currently dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Rouse is another expert in labor markets. Among her most famous research papers is a study of sexism in auditions and hiring for symphony orchestras.
An expert on the impact of education on the labor force and long-term unemployment, Rouse has also championed paid sick leave. Last year, nearly 34 million workers – about a quarter of the US workforce – lacked paid sick leave.
While supportive of the private sector, she recently wrote that the pandemic had exposed “a ‘Franken-system’ of support that is inadequate, costly, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and ultimately not trusted by many Americans”. More

At a recent anti-lockdown protest in London, thousands of people gathered to oppose what they saw as a clandestine power grab taking place under the cover of a pandemic. Some protesters carried cardboard signs bearing the name of the alleged takeover: “The great reset”. “They thought they could easily get their great reset,” one man shouted. “Little did they know! The pandemic’s a hoax!”The great reset, both the title of an airport book by the creative economy guru Richard Florida and a slogan favoured by corporate do-gooders, is also the term for a web of ideas that has become increasingly popular among the anti-lockdown right. In its most implausible version, this conspiracy imagines that a global elite is using Covid-19 as an opportunity to roll out radical policies such as forced vaccinations, digital ID cards and the renunciation of private property.Though a poor diagnosis of the causes of global events, the great reset offers a grim insight into the public mood. An unlikely source provided its initial spark. On 3 June, as the UK’s Covid death toll reached 50,000, the royal family’s YouTube account posted a video about a new sustainability drive headed by the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Titled #TheGreatReset, the initiative called for “fairer outcomes” and the redirection of investment towards a more “sustainable future”. It had all the slick branding one has come to expect from the WEF, with a cinematic video of ice floes and beached whales, and a sonorous monologue by Prince Charles.The initiative joined a line of similar proclamations riffing on Karl Polanyi’s 1944 urtext, The Great Transformation. In the past decade, authors and politicians have talked of the “great financialization”, the “great regression”, the “great reversal”, the “great acceleration”, the “great unraveling” and the “great uncoupling”, to name just a few. The WEF’s great reset went largely unnoticed at first, arriving at the same time as George Floyd’s death spurred Black Lives Matter protests across the world. But the idea later caught on – in a way that organisers most likely didn’t expect.Weeks after the WEF’s announcement, Justin Haskins, the editorial director of the libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, sounded klaxons about the great reset on Fox Business, Fox News and Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. “The rough outline of the plan is clear,” he said. “Completely destroy the global capitalist economy and reform the western world.” Yet, apart from a few isolated yelps in the rightwing echo chamber, the great reset failed to catch on as a fully fledged conspiracy theory until Joe Biden’s victory in early November, when Google Trends shows that searches for the term surged online.The most obvious spark for this growing interest was a segment on Laura Ingraham’s television show on Fox News, which averaged 3.5 million viewers in 2020. “You know the idea, ‘never let a crisis go to waste’,” said Ingraham on 13 November. “Well, with the coronavirus, that idea went global. And since last spring, powerful people began to use this pandemic as a way to force radical social and economic change across the continents.”Years after the journalist Naomi Klein first identified the “shock doctrine” of radical policies that conservatives rolled out during disasters, the right was now appropriating this narrative for its own ends.A few days later, Ingraham returned to the theme. In a clip viewed some 2.4m times, she said Biden’s “handlers” believe in “the great reset of capitalism. It’s a plan to force a more equitable distribution of global resources.” The same day, another conservative commentator, Candace Owens, tweeted: “They are using Covid to crash western economies and implement communist policies. That’s what’s going on.” And in Australia, the Spectator columnist James Delingpole was interviewed on Sky News Australia (which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch). “Anyone who doesn’t realise that the great reset is the biggest threat to our form of life right now hasn’t been paying attention,” he said.The great reset theory is nonsense, and will probably become a prime target for the many new research centres and initiatives studying “disinformation” that have mushroomed on university campuses since 2016. But although we may scorn the ideas of anti-lockdown protesters, we ignore the unequal reality of the pandemic at our peril. Many of the world’s tech companies and CEOs have done well from this crisis. Indeed, in the same week that many Americans lost their jobs, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, added $13bn to his fortune in just a day. With surreal realities like these, where prominent members of the 1% really do appear to have gained from the pandemic, how much of a leap is it to persuade someone that the crisis has been orchestrated deliberately so that elites can amass power?The genius of Murdoch’s hosts was giving people a place to direct their anger. With his thick German accent and outpost in the Swiss Alps, the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, labelled a “charismatic German” and “dangerous Marxist leader” by Sky News Australia, was the perfect villain for this conspiracy. For rightwing pundits, the great reset was also a welcome distraction from their own complicity with power and wealth, having spent four years cheerleading a president whose major legislative achievement was a mammoth tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich.That the WEF has inspired a conspiracy about elites is unsurprising; the organisation is best known for its annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, when top corporate executives arrive in fleets of private jets to pay lip service to climate change. While Schwab has pronounced that “neoliberalism has had its day”, it is left to his critics to remind the WEF of its record, such as its publication of an annual “global competitiveness index” that has, since the 1970s, flogged national governments into a race to the bottom to adopt lower taxes and slash regulations.If the great reset tells us anything about political reality, it’s that corporate elites can’t win legitimacy through vacuous initiatives. People recoil, it turns out, at being treated like buggy hard drives that can be reset from above. Changing the conditions of people’s lives and the causes of political alienation will take far more than the WEF’s tone-deaf video about the opportunities of a pandemic, fronted by the royal family. It’s social movements such as Black Lives Matter and the climate strikers, not boardroom initiatives, that offer a better lesson in how to gather popular support for the transformations we need.• Quinn Slobodian is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, Massachusetts• This article was amended on 4 December 2020 to reflect the fact that Candace Owens is not a Fox News host More

Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, was supposed to be a whole lot poorer by now.On 11 November, eight days after the presidential election and four days after the networks called the race for Joe Biden, the conservative talk radio host turned Republican politician launched a bounty hunt. Any tipsters who could provide evidence of voter fraud that led to a criminal conviction would receive at least $25,000, up to a grand total of $1m. The money was set to come from Patrick’s campaign, not his personal account. Still, the point remains: if voter fraud was rampant, as President Trump and leading Republicans have repeatedly claimed, Patrick’s million-dollar fund should have run dry long ago.As it stands, Patrick’s campaign finances are in far better shape than his credibility. To date, it appears he has paid out a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents.Patrick stands out for his willingness to put his donors’ money where his mouth was. But his million-dollar effort was just a small part of the largest voter-fraud hunt in American history. Never in American history have self-proclaimed fraud-fighters been given more attention, resources and time to prove their case – that a major election was stolen through what they’ve dubbed “illegal votes”.Instead, they’ve done the opposite. The 2020 election, and Trump’s attempt to overturn it, will leave us with plenty of reasons to remain concerned about the health of our democracy. But the idea that our political process has been compromised by widespread fraud isn’t among them. It’s time to retire the voter-fraud myth for good.Falsely claiming voter fraud is a tradition nearly as old as American democracy itself. Take, for example, early 19th-century New Jersey. Under the state’s original constitution, some women had the right to vote, and some politicians (namely those of the Federalist party) felt they would be more likely to win elections if those rights were taken away. But stripping eligible voters of their rights for purely partisan reasons was unseemly, even by 1800s standards, so ambitious lawmakers came up with an excuse. Men, they charged, were casting their ballots, slipping into petticoats, and then voting a second time. The only way to prevent this gender-bending fraud was to eliminate women’s voting rights entirely.As a logical argument, the anti-fraud case for disenfranchising women made little sense. But logic was never the point. In 1807, aided by their theoretically principled excuse for their blatantly partisan power grab, the New Jersey legislature ended their state’s experiment in women’s suffrage.As more Americans won voting rights on paper, and the two-party system became more entrenched in our political process, voter fraud remained a convenient excuse for disenfranchising eligible voters. In the 1830s, on the theory that cities couldn’t be trusted to hold honest elections, Pennsylvania passed a voter registration law that applied to the city of Philadelphia and nowhere else. “Although the proclaimed goal of the law was to reduce fraud,” writes Alexander Keyssar in The Right to Vote, “opponents insisted that its real intent was to reduce the participation of the poor, who were frequently not home when assessors came by.”Not surprisingly, false claims of fraud also played an important role in propping up segregation. In 1959, Washington parish, Louisiana, “purged” its voter rolls. Local officials claimed they were merely remove illegally registered names from the rolls. In fact, they purged 85% of the parish’s African American voters. This proved too audacious even for the Jim Crow era, and a federal court overturned the parish’s purge. But in most cases, courts have given lawmakers the benefit of the doubt. So long as they can plausibly claim to be fighting fraud – or more accurately, so long as they can’t be proven not to be fighting fraud – legislators can pass bills restricting access to the ballot, even for eligible voters, and even if the voters affected are clearly more likely to belong to one party than the other.In other words, when conservative pundit Dick Morris claimed that over a million people voted twice in the 2012 elections, when President Trump alleged that millions of undocumented immigrants cast ballots in 2016, or when Rudy Giuliani dropped his sweaty dud of a bombshell at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, they were taking part in a timeless American tradition. From a moral standpoint, falsely claiming fraud is despicable. But from a political standpoint, it’s historically been a win-win: in a best-case scenario you disenfranchise voters in an election that already occurred, and in a worse-case scenario you lay the groundwork for disenfranchising them next time.Already, Republican politicians are once again using the fear of voter fraud – a fear that exists, to the extent it does, entirely because of baseless claims they generated – as a pretext to attack the voting rights of eligible American citizens. The Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw recently argued that the only way to restore confidence in our elections is to make voter registration far more difficult and outlaw mail-in voting for many if not most Americans. The Florida senator Rick Scott has gone even further. His “fraud-fighting” bill would throw out ballots if a county can’t tally them within 24 hours, even if those ballots are legally cast.When Giuliani dropped his sweaty dud of a bombshell, he was taking part in a timeless American traditionIt’s hardly surprising that politicians like Crenshaw and Scott believe they can get away with turning false claims of voter fraud into the very real disenfranchisement of eligible voters. It’s happened many times before. But this time ought to be different. Egged on by the would-be authoritarian in the White House, election results have been challenged in at least six states. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed in an attempt to delay or overturn the certification of the final tallies. Hearings have been held. The attorney general, Bill Barr, in a frightening break with established Department of Justice procedure, authorized federal prosecutors to investigate credible fraud claims even if doing so would appear political.The results? The Trump administration is now a 39-time loser in court. A parade of frustrated judges, many appointed by Trump himself, have written blistering opinions pointing out that the president and his allies have no basis for their claims. Even Trump’s own lawyers have admitted under questioning that they’re not alleging fraud because they have no evidence with which to do so. Inside the conservative echo chamber, the Republican party’s attacks on the integrity of our elections will sow doubt and distrust in our political process. But in the real world, the idea that marquee elections are being stolen via voter fraud has now been disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.Which means that, barring real evidence to the contrary, it’s time for our institutions to stop taking partisan claims of voter fraud seriously. Reporters should treat allegations of a fraudulent election the way they treat birtherism or QAnon – as pure conspiracy theory. Courts should stop giving self-proclaimed fraud-fighters the benefit of the doubt, and instead demand that they substantiate their allegations before barring eligible Americans from the ballot box. The handful of Republican politicians who, to their lasting credit, condemned Trump’s attempts to manipulate the most recent election should be equally forceful about attempts to manipulate future ones.This year, false claims of fraud weren’t enough to overturn an election. But next time we may not be so lucky. Trump is not the first American to embrace the voter-fraud myth for his political advantage, but if American democracy is to survive, he ought to be the last. More

First Dog on… presidential pardons! More

As the US justice department investigates an alleged ‘bribery for pardon’ scheme at the White House, Jonathan Freedland and David Smith delve into the many possible legal issues Donald Trump could face after 20 January

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Might Donald Trump, once stripped of the near-total immunity that came with his office, face the full might of the law? Could he be charged with crimes, or even go to jail? Or might he pardon himself in advance? Jonathan Freedland and the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, David Smith, go through the many potential scenarios that could play out once Trump is no longer the commander-in-chief. Let us know what you think of the podcast and send us your questions to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

Wisconsin’s supreme court has refused to hear Donald Trump’s lawsuit attempting to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the battleground state, sidestepping a decision on the merits of the claims and instead ruling that the case must first wind its way through lower courts.
The defeat on a 4-3 ruling on Thursday was the latest in a string of losses for Trump’s post-election lawsuits. Judges in multiple battleground states have rejected his claims of fraud or irregularities. Dissenting conservative justices said the decision would forever “stain” the outcome of the election.
Trump asked the conservative-controlled court to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots in the state’s two biggest Democratic counties, alleging irregularities in the way absentee ballots were administered. His lawsuit echoed claims that were earlier rejected by election officials in those counties during a recount that barely affected Biden’s winning margin of about 20,700 votes.
Trump had wanted the court to take the case directly, saying there wasn’t enough time to wage the legal battle by starting first with a lower court given the looming 14 December date when presidential electors cast their votes. But attorneys for the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, and the state department of justice argued the lawsuit had to start with lower courts.
The swing justice Brian Hagedorn joined three liberal justices in denying the petition without weighing in on Trump’s allegations.
Hagedorn said the law was clear that Trump must start his lawsuit in lower courts where factual disputes can be worked out.
“We do well as a judicial body to abide by time-tested judicial norms, even – and maybe especially – in high-profile cases,” Hagedorn wrote. “Following this law is not disregarding our duty, as some of my colleagues suggest. It is following the law.”
It was not immediately known if Trump would still pursue the case through lower courts. His campaign spokeswoman did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Trump filed a similar lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday.
Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, in her dissent, said she would have taken the case and referred it to lower courts for factual findings, which could then be reported back to the supreme court for a ruling.
The conservative justice Rebecca Bradley wrote that the court “forsakes its duty” by not determining whether elections officials complied with the law and the inaction will undermine the public’s confidence in elections.
“While some will either celebrate or decry the court’s inaction based upon the impact on their preferred candidate, the importance of this case transcends the results of this particular election,” she wrote in a dissent joined by Roggensack and Justice Annette Ziegler. “The majority’s failure to act leaves an indelible stain on our most recent election.”
Trump’s lawsuit challenged procedures that have been in place for years and never been found to be illegal.
He claimed there were thousands of absentee ballots without a written application on file. He argued that the electronic log created when a voter requests a ballot online – the way the vast majority are requested – doesn’t meet the letter of the law.
He also challenged ballots where election clerks filled in missing address information on the certification envelope where the ballot is inserted – a practice that has long been accepted and that the state elections commission told clerks was OK.
Roggensack said the supreme court owed it to the public to determine whether that advice was correct, especially for future elections.
“However, doing so does not necessarily lead to striking absentee ballots that were cast by following incorrect WEC advice,” she wrote. “The remedy Petitioners seek may be out of reach for a number of reasons.”
Trump also challenged absentee ballots where voters declared themselves to be “indefinitely confined”, a status that exempts them from having to show photo identification to cast a ballot, and one that was used much more heavily this year due to the pandemic. The court in March ruled that it was up to individual voters to determine their status.
Two other lawsuits filed by conservatives are still pending with the court seeking to invalidate ballots. In addition to Trump’s federal lawsuit, there is another one in federal court with similar claims from Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney who was removed from Trump’s legal team.
Wisconsin this week certified Biden’s victory, setting the stage for a Democratic slate of electors chosen earlier to cast the state’s 10 electoral votes for him. More