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      House and Senate negotiators reach agreement to prevent shutdown – report

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      With government funding set to partially expire on Friday, House and Senate negotiators have reached an agreement to prevent a shutdown, Politico reported.Funding for some federal departments was previously set to expire after Friday, while the rest faced an 8 March deadline. Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress met with Joe Biden yesterday at the White House, where all sides expressed their desire to avoid a shutdown that the president warned would damage the economy.More details soon … More

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      ‘Biden needs to be pro-peace’: Michigan anti-war campaign hails huge vote tally

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      A last-minute push by anti-war activists to reject President Joe Biden over his unwavering support for Israel far exceeded expectations in the Michigan Democratic party primary on Tuesday night.Leaders from the grassroots campaign, called Listen to Michigan, said ahead of the primary that they would count 10,000 “uncommitted” votes – roughly Trump’s winning margin in Michigan eight years ago – as a victory.Instead they surpassed that goal by an order of magnitude, earning the support of more than 100,000 Democrats who checked the “uncommitted” box, and 13% of votes overall. That should weigh heavily on Democrats, who could lose the pivotal state – and even the presidency – in November if these sentiments persist. Biden won Michigan by about 150,000 votes in 2020 – less than 3% of the overall vote.It remains to be seen how many of the Michigan voters who withheld their support from Biden during the primary will abandon the president in the general election, where he will most likely face former president Donald Trump, whose brash Islamophobia and policies targeting Muslims defined his 2016 campaign and early presidency.“This is a victory of American democracy,” said former US congressman Andy Levin, addressing a crowd of Listen to Michigan supporters as the results trickled in last night. “There is no time to waste – we need a permanent ceasefire right now.” In 2022 Levin, a progressive Jewish politician, faced a primary opponent in a new district and lost. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) spent more than $4m to support his opponent.Michigan is home to one of the largest concentrations of Arab and Muslim Americans in the US, many of them living in the greater Detroit area. Those voters formed an important part of the Democratic coalition in 2020, but their support for Biden has plummeted as the president continues to support Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of nearly 30,000 Palestinians in just five months.According to exit polling by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), 94% of Muslim voters who cast their ballots in Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday voted “uncommitted”. There are about 200,000 registered Muslim voters in Michigan.The “uncommitted” campaign formed quickly in early February with just weeks to spare ahead of the primary. Spurred by younger and Arab organizers, it was also supported by labor activists and progressive Jewish voters. Dozens of elected officials in the Detroit area and several national Democrats also registered their support. In a video posted to social media, Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian American congresswoman representing Dearborn and Detroit, explained why she voted “uncommitted”.“President Biden is not hearing us,” said Tlaib, noting that according to recent polling, about 74% of Michigan Democrats support a ceasefire in Gaza. “This is the way we can use our democracy to say ‘listen – listen to Michigan.’”In a New York Times opinion column that ran a week before the primary, the mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, who also backed the “uncommitted” campaign, described the “visceral sense of betrayal” his constituents feel toward the Biden administration. “President Biden,” Hammoud wrote, “is proving many of our worst fears about our government true: that regardless of how loud your voice may be, how many calls to government officials you may make, how many peaceful protests you organize and attend, nothing will change.”But it isn’t only Muslim and Arab American voters who the president stands to lose in the November general election. Biden’s support among younger voters and Black voters, who formed key blocs in 2020, also threatens to collapse as the Israel-Hamas war, which has decimated Gaza, wears on.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSo far, the Biden campaign has barely registered a response to the high turnout for the “uncommitted” campaign vote, and made no mention of it in a more than 300-word statement issued on Tuesday night – instead focusing on his record on infrastructure, healthcare, labor and the threat of a second Trump term.“It’s astounding how many words that statement used to describe and distract from the reality that over 100,000 Democratic presidential primary voters in Michigan showed up to vote for peace and against war,” Abbas Alawieh, a spokesperson for the Listen to Michigan campaign, told the Guardian. “My advice to President Biden and his team would be not to ignore this movement but to engage productively with us.”The formal demands of the Listen to Michigan campaign are for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to unconditional US military aid to Israel.“President Biden needs to emerge as a pro-peace president if he’s going to earn our vote,” said Alawieh. More

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      Mitch McConnell to step down as Republican leader in US Senate

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      Mitch McConnell of Kentucky will step down as Republican leader in the US Senate at the end of this year, a move that will shake up US politics yet more in a tumultuous election cycle.McConnell is 82 and the longest-serving Senate leader in history. He is also a highly divisive figure in a bitterly divided America and the subject of fierce speculation about his health after recent scares in public.Aides said the decision to step aside, which McConnell announced on the Senate floor on Wednesday, was not related to his health.“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” McConnell said. “So I stand before you today … to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”From the White House, Joe Biden, who was a senator alongside McConnell for more than 20 years, said: “I’ve trusted him and we have a great relationship. We fight like hell. But he has never, never, never misrepresented anything. I’m sorry to hear he’s stepping down.”McConnell was concurrently the subject of reporting about when he will endorse Donald Trump for president in his expected rematch with Biden this year.McConnell and Trump have been at odds since 6 January 2021, when Trump incited supporters to attack Congress in an attempt to stop certification of Biden’s win. McConnell voted to acquit the former president in his resulting impeachment trial, reasoning he had already left office, but excoriated him nonetheless. Trump responded with attacks on McConnell and racist invective about his wife, the former transportation secretary Elaine Chao.Nor did Trump leave the scene, as McConnell apparently thought he would. Withstanding 91 criminal charges, assorted civil defeats and attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection, Trump stands on the verge of a third successive nomination.On Wednesday, Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and House impeachment manager, told reporters: “I have a lot of feelings about Mitch McConnell from the second impeachment trial because I felt that he was appalled by what Donald Trump had done, he knew the truth about what Donald Trump had done, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to vote to convict along with seven other Republican colleagues who joined the Democrats.”“I understand [McConnell has] been in a tough situation with Donald Trump taking over his party and I think he’s tried to do what he can but he didn’t show the ultimate courage, which would have been to vote to convict him, to find enough other senators so that we wouldn’t be back in this nightmare again with Donald Trump.”Amid gathering warnings of the threat Trump poses to American democracy, all bar one of McConnell’s leadership team have endorsed Trump regardless. The holdout, Joni Ernst of Iowa, has indicated that she could still do so.“Believe me,” McConnell said in the Senate chamber, “I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time. I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them. That said, I believe more strongly than ever that America’s global leadership is essential to preserving the shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan discussed. As long as I am drawing breath on this earth, I will defend American exceptionalism.”McConnell entered the Senate in 1985, when Reagan was in the White House.“When I got here,” McConnell said, “I was just happy if anybody remembered my name. President Reagan called me Mitch O’Donnell. Close enough, I thought.”McConnell was elected to lead Senate Republicans in 2006. He was majority leader from 2015 to 2021, a momentous term in which he not only coped with Trump but secured three supreme court justices, tilting the court decisively right.He did so by upending Senate rules. First, McConnell refused even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the conservative Antonin Scalia, saying the switch would come too close to an election and voters should indicate the sort of justice they wanted. After Trump won the White House, McConnell filled the seat with the Catholic, corporately aligned Neil Gorsuch.McConnell next oversaw the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, an anti-Clinton operative and aide to George W Bush, to replace Anthony Kennedy. A staunch conservative replaced a frequent swing vote, even after a tempestuous confirmation.McConnell was memorably reported to have said he stood “stronger than mule piss” behind Kavanaugh, despite the claim by Christine Blasey Ford, a college professor, that the nominee sexually assaulted her at a high-school party, an allegation Kavanaugh denied.Finally, at the very end of Trump’s term, McConnell abandoned the argument he used to block Garland and rammed the hardline Catholic Amy Coney Barrett on to the court in place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero to progressives.On Wednesday, Adam Parkhomenko, a Democratic strategist, told followers they should “never forget” what McConnell “did to the supreme court and this country”.Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said McConnell would “enjoy a tremendous legacy”, not only through his supreme court work, which led to epochal decisions including Dobbs v Jackson, which removed the federal right to abortion, and rulings on gun control and affirmative action every bit as divisive.“McConnell also contributed substantially to Trump’s nomination and confirmation of 54 ideologically conservative appeals court judges and the filling of all 179 appeals court judgeships at one point in Trump’s tenure,” Tobias said. “The last time that the courts had all of the active judges was in the mid-1980s.”McConnell said he still had “enough gas in my tank to thoroughly disappoint my critics. And I intend to do so with all the enthusiasm with which they have become accustomed.”His desire to win back the majority – in a chamber skewed in Republicans’ favour – will fuel his final months as leader. A new leader will be elected in November to take over in January, he said.Leading contenders to succeed McConnell – and to attempt to match his ruthless politicking and powerful fundraising – include his No 2, John Thune of South Dakota, and two more leadership figures, John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming. Last November, McConnell defeated a challenge from Rick Scott of Florida.Among Republican tributes, Thune said simply: “He leaves really big shoes to fill.”Among Democrats, Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate majority leader, said he and McConnell “rarely saw eye to eye … but I am very proud that we both came together in the last few years to lead the Senate forward at critical moments when our country needed us, like passing the Cares Act in the early days of the Covid pandemic, finishing our work to certify the election on January 6, and more recently working together to fund the fight for Ukraine”.Americans, it seems sure, will remember Addison Mitchell McConnell III in very different ways.The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group founded by former Republican operatives, said McConnell would “go down in history as a spineless follower who cowered to a wannabe dictator clown. He chose the power of a tyrant over protecting democracy.” More

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      LGBTQ+ people protest in Florida over Republican conversion therapy bill

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      Hundreds of LGBTQ+ people gathered on the steps of the Florida state house on Wednesday to protest against a first-in-the-nation bill that critics say would raise health insurance costs for all state residents.The Republican-backed proposal, house bill 1639, mandates that insurance carriers cover conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice whose practitioners falsely claim to be able to change the sexual orientation or identity of LGBTQ+ people.“We hope that legislators wouldn’t vote for a health insurance mandate that would increase everyone’s costs as a way to just demonize LGBT people,” said Quinn Diaz, public policy associate for Equality Florida. “But we really don’t have any faith in this state government, at this point.”Diaz said the proposed legislation would also force trans people to “out themselves” on state-issued identification cards, requiring Florida residents to list the sex they were assigned at birth on their driver’s licenses.The bill comes amid a mounting assault by Florida Republicans on LGBTQ+ rights, a legislative project that has cost Florida taxpayers millions in legal fees. Last year, the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the so-called “don’t say gay” law banning classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. Earlier this year, the Florida legislature introduced and advanced 11 bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights, including a proposed ban on Pride flags in public buildings, schools, and universities across the state.Now, Florida leaders have opted to focus on driver’s licenses and healthcare. Just last month, a leaked internal memo from the Florida department of highway safety and motor vehicles revealed that the state would no longer allow trans residents to change the gender marker on their driver’s license.“Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record,” said the memo, written by the deputy executive director of the Florida department of highway safety and motor vehicles, Robert Kynoch.Kynoch warned that “misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license” amounts to fraud and “subjects an offender to criminal and civil penalties”.LGBTQ+ advocates say the quiet rule change has sown fear and confusion among trans and non-binary people across Florida.“Folks were afraid to just drive their car and go pick up their kids from school, because if they get a traffic infraction and are pulled over, ‘would I be automatically arrested for fraud by the police officer who checks my license?’” said Diaz.Though there is no legal way to retroactively prosecute a trans driver for the gender marker on their license, Diaz said, “the point of that memo was to make people scared.”Protesters at Wednesday’s rally also expressed outrage that the bill will probably raise health insurance costs.The Florida legislature passed a statute last year that requires lawmakers to commission an economic impact study any time a bill proposes the creation of a health insurance mandate. According to the 2023 law championed by Florida Republicans, any proposed “mandate that certain health benefits be provided by insurers” needs to first be assessed by the Florida agency for healthcare administration, so that the state can understand how the bill will “contribute to the increasing cost of health insurance premiums”.But House Republicans have not commissioned an economic impact study to understand how mandating conversion therapy might raise monthly insurance premiums, according to Equality Florida.Despite widespread criticism, the bill’s lead sponsor, the state representative Doug Bankson, said during a house committee hearing earlier this month that his proposal did not target transgender people.“It doesn’t mean we’re standing here and saying that the people in this room don’t have the right to seek their wholeness,” Bankson said. “This bill is about making sure that everyone has the right to seek that wholeness.”He described gender as a “subjective issue that is going on socially”, arguing instead that a driver’s license should display a person’s sex, “something concrete medically”.Florida Democrats remain unconvinced by Bankson’s characterization of the proposed legislation as the “compassion and clarity” bill.“What’s going on in the Florida capitol? We should be moving forward as a state, not going backwards,” said the state representative Anna Eskamani, speaking at Wednesday’s rally.Testifying against the bill earlier this week, Eskamani said Bankson’s proposal was a poorly disguised way to score political points with other Florida conservatives.“When we get in between people and their doctors and start to decide what coverage is appropriate versus not, it’s not about safety, now it’s just about political parties, it’s about the latest Fox News headline,” she said. “Nobody is asking for this.”As protesters marched through the streets of Tallahassee on Wednesday, the memory of Nex Benedict – a non-binary teenager who died last week following a fight in their public high school bathroom – loomed overhead.Angelique Godwin, a trans activist and drag artist who helped organize Wednesday’s rally, thought of Benedict’s early death as she looked up at protest signs with the words “Let Us Live” emblazoned on the blues and pinks of the transgender Pride flag.“The tragedy of Nex’s death is something that I think has lit a fire in all of us,” said Angelique Godwin. “We want justice for Nex, and we are also aware that their death is a warning of what could happen here in Florida if they continue to push the anti-trans narrative in legislation.” More

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      Mitch McConnell’s time in the Senate will be remembered as sad and cynical | Moira Donegan

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      For a moment, it looked like his face was going to fall off. At a press conference at the Capitol last July, Mitch McConnell, a senator for Kentucky since 1985 and the Senate Republican leader since 2007, abruptly stopped speaking, mid-sentence. He curled his lower lip inward, like a small child about to cry, and his eyes drifted to the side. He gripped the podium tightly and seemed to sway, as if uneasy on his feet. A few seconds later, he recovered, and began answering press questions again, without acknowledging the episode.A few months prior, McConnell, now 82, had suffered a fall, and had been concussed as a result. He’d been away from the Capitol for six weeks. Once, in 2020, he’d appeared with dramatic purple blisters on his hands and around his mouth, which were never explained. There had been rumors of other falls, but that’s all they were – rumors. Maybe, the thinking went, the episode at the press conference was just the after-effects of McConnell’s recent concussion. But then again, maybe not.That was the first time. The second time, McConnell was at another press conference, this one in Kentucky. On 30 August 2023, a reporter asked McConnell for his thoughts on running for re-election; if he were to run again and win an eighth term in 2026, he would be 90 by the end of that term. McConnell at first seemed not to hear the question. When the reporter repeated it, he chuckled, then went quiet. He gaze again veered to the side; his lips curled in.Aides rushed to McConnell and stood closely around him at the lectern, partially obscuring the view of the news cameras. His office later said that he had felt dizzy, and simply paused. A vaguely worded report from a doctor indicated that he was safe to continue working. But neurologists from Yale and UCLA each independently told Slate that they believed that in both incidents McConnell had been having seizures; another, from NYU, also diagnosed seizures in the New York Times.When McConnell announced on Wednesday that he will step down, the move was momentous, historic, a mile marker in the transformation of the Republican party that has played out before our eyes. But no one was probably surprised. It does not seem to have surprised Kentucky Republicans, either: faced with a Democratic governor in Andy Beshear, Republicans in the Kentucky statehouse worked last year to weaken the governor’s customary authority to fill Senate vacancies. It is a move that McConnell would likely have approved of.In one of his first political jobs, when he worked in Gerald Ford’s justice department in the 1970s, McConnell was known as a moderate. He supported abortion rights and labor unions; he had a reputation for a certain compromising pragmatism. As time went on, his pragmatism became less compromising – more hard-nosed and Machiavellian.His party moved steadily rightward, and so did he. By the time he became Senate Republican leader in the 2000s, he was presiding over an upper chamber that was losing its aura of deliberative dignity and becoming rowdier, more partisan, and more acrimonious, like the House. McConnell’s leadership accelerated that trend.He was willing to break legislative norms, alter Senate rules and undermine the spirit of representative democracy in order to get what he wanted. He focused particularly on the federal judiciary: throughout the Obama administration, McConnell organized a blockade of federal judge confirmations. Later, after the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia, he delayed filling the open supreme court seat for months, making a nakedly pretextual claim that Scalia’s death occurred too close to an election.When Donald Trump came into office, McConnell eliminated all remaining filibuster requirements for judicial confirmations in order to cram through Trump’s archconservative judicial nominees, rapidly filling the backlog of vacancies that he had deliberately created during the Obama years. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks before the 2020 election, he ensured that Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, brakes-screechingly-fast, in the final days before voters went to the polls to expel Trump.Before McConnell, judges nominated by Democratic presidents could conceivably be confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate. After McConnell, Senate Republicans no longer acknowledged presidential appointment power, at least not in the instances when the president in question was a Democrat. The result has been a warped and extremist federal judiciary, one stuffed with rightwing partisans and scandal-courting careerists. It is a federal bench that we will have to live with for decades, and it is one crafted in McConnell’s image.For those of us who have watched people we love be robbed of their dignity by the ravages of old age, the visible sight of McConnell’s decline could give us, even in spite of ourselves, pangs of pity for the man. For those of us who grieve what McConnell has made our country into, his succumbing to mortality even from the heights of malignant power can feel like a certain kind of ironic justice, an Ozymandias-like contrast between how much he was able to hurt people and how weak he has been made.To me, there was something in McConnell’s visible decline that recalls the final years of his fellow conservative stalwarts Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who in their old age both reportedly descended into dementia so acute that they could no longer remember having been the leaders of their respective countries.What are we to do with these contrasts – between the contemptible evil of McConnell’s career, and the pitiable frailty of his age? Mostly, I think, we can direct our attention to those victimized by the impact of McConnell’s leadership – who do not have the comfort or the money to receive the quality of healthcare he did, or the opportunity to indulge their vanity by staying in power long after it was time to go.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Senate Democrats to force vote on protecting IVF access across the US

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      Senate Democrats are moving to push through a bill that would protect Americans’ access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, after an Alabama supreme court ruling that frozen embryos are children led to the closure of a number of infertility clinics in the state.The Democratic Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth said she would try to force a vote on the legislation on Wednesday which would establish a federal right to IVF and other fertility treatments that are at risk in the post-Roe era. Duckworth’s two children were conceived through IVF.“I’m headed to the Senate floor to call on my colleagues to pass via unanimous consent my Access to Family Building Act, which would ensure that every American’s right to become a parent via treatments like IVF is fully protected, regardless of what state they live in – guaranteeing that no hopeful parent or doctor is punished,” Duckworth said at a news conference on Tuesday.Duckworth’s move comes as Democrats vow to make IVF a campaign issue as they look to squeeze Republicans and highlight the continuing fallout of the overturning of Roe v Wade.“I warned that red states would come for IVF. Now they have. But they aren’t going to stop in Alabama. Mark my words: if we don’t act now, it will only get worse,” Duckworth added.The bill would require unanimous consent in order for it to pass, meaning that any one senator can block its passage. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said it was unlikely to receive unanimous consent from the chamber to rush the bill through.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile many Republican lawmakers registered disappointment over the Alabama ruling, at least one conservative senator was expected to object.Blumenthal said Democrats would not be deterred. He would not say what the next legislative steps would be, but he said Democrats, who control the Senate, would look for other ways to protect IVF and reproductive healthcare.“The IVF dilemma for Republicans is they are down a path that is not only unpopular, it’s untenable as a matter of constitutional law and basic moral imperative, and we’re going to pursue it vigorously,” Blumenthal said.“Today’s vote, the effort to seek a unanimous consent, we know is unlikely to be successful. Failing today is only the prelude to a fight ahead on women’s reproductive care centered on IVF and other steps that have to be taken to protect basic rights.” More

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      Marianne Williamson ‘un-suspends’ campaign after Michigan primary

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      The self-help author Marianne Williamson “un-suspended” her quixotic, all-but-certainly doomed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, saying she did so because Joe Biden could not defeat Donald Trump, who she called a “fascist” and a “juggernaut of dark, dark vision”.“I am un-suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States,” Williamson said, in a social media video the morning after a Michigan primary in which despite having suspended her campaign she finished third, way behind Biden and “uncommitted” but slightly ahead of the Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips, another rank outsider.“I had suspended it because I was losing the horse race,” Williamson said, though she is still clearly losing the horse race. “But something so much more important than the horse race is at stake here. And we must respond.“Right now we have a fascist standing at the door. Everybody’s all upset about it. Well, we should be upset about it. But we’re not going to defeat the fascist by, well, by what? What is President Biden offering? He says, ‘Let’s finish the job.’ Well, I hope you realise we’re talking about millions of voters [who] can’t even survive unless they work two or three jobs.”Williamson, who also ran in 2020, had suspended her campaign on 7 February, after failing to make an impact in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.“I hope future candidates will take what works for them, drinking from the well of information we prepared,” she said. “My team and I brought to the table some great ideas, and I will take pleasure when I see them live on in campaigns and candidates yet to be created.”She changed her mind after Michigan. Citing economic difficulties faced by many Americans including medical debt and an insufficient minimum wage, she also quoted a bygone Republican president Abraham Lincoln.“We the people basically don’t own this country right now. Abraham Lincoln said that people who died in the civil war for the union had died so that a government of the people, by the people and for the people would not perish from the earth. It’s perishing now on our watch.”Promising to end “government of the corporations by the corporations”, and to achieve an “economic U-turn”, Williamson said America needed a response to Trump’s “dark vision” better than that offered by Biden.“We need to say to the American people, ‘We see your pain.’ And we need to say to Donald Trump, ‘We see your BS.’ Let’s do this. Thanks so much. Spread the word.”The campaign now moves on to 5 March, Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one territory will vote. The territory, American Samoa, may offer Williamson hope, given that in 2020 it was the sole prize claimed by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor whose campaign also went nowhere fast.Still, in national polling averages, Williamson lags about 70 points behind Biden. More

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      If we the Black voters ‘get loud’, neither the Tories nor Donald Trump will survive | Al Sharpton

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      Donald Trump’s racist mentality has long been an open secret. In the 1970s, a federal lawsuit was brought against him for alleged racial discrimination on one of his housing developments in New York. He led the campaign calling for the death penalty against the Central Park Five, who were accused of a brutal rape but later vindicated. Even after that exoneration, he continued to suggest they were guilty.So are Black Americans flocking to support Trump? Reports are mixed. Trump himself would tell you he has a unique affinity with the Black community, but personally, I don’t buy it. Polling in 2020 estimated Trump would take 20% of the black vote. The real number was closer to 8%.After all, let’s remember what he says about us. Just this weekend, he said that Black Americans identified with him because he had faced criminal charges and we embraced his criminal mugshot. That was outright racist and insulting. For him to say that during Black History Month in the US is the epitome of an insult.And the irony is that he is the one being prosecuted – and by Black professionals at that. The New York state attorney general, Letitia James, brought the financially ruinous civil financial fraud case against Trump. Fani Willis, Fulton county district attorney, was responsible for challenging Trump’s alleged election interference in Georgia.I spend a lot of time speaking with Black voters. I host a US radio show six days a week – and from what I hear, I’m not alone in thinking that claims that he has growing support among our community are grossly exaggerated. But I do think it is fair to say that Black citizens are asking questions of the Democrats.Joe Biden has simply not done a good enough job on messaging. He needs to be more aggressive in speaking to Black voters – laying out his record, such as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (which Trump opposed) and his support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which almost every Republican voted down). Biden should not assume people know what they haven’t been reminded of.US liberals must understand that if you take the high road and are not making noise about it, no one knows that you’re taking any road. They have to be more vocal, they have to challenge more, and not run away from the issue of race.That goes for the left in the UK, too. Arriving yesterday, I was disgusted to hear racist, Islamophobic language being used by members of the Conservative party. The Tories seem to be alarmingly Trump-like in their language. And that should be a mobilising cry to millions of Black British voters to register to vote.It shocks me that the wider British public doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of the threat to Black voting in the UK. The UK’s new photo ID legislation disproportionately disadvantages Black and minority voters. We know – similar legislation was used against us in the US. But Black people mobilised against it, and in 2021 helped to elect Raphael Warnock as Georgia’s first Black US senator. It shows the importance of fighting back.That’s why I came here: to tell leaders to use our playbook to challenge laws that suppress the Black vote – and to impress on Black communities the importance of turning out. It is imperative to democracy that we awaken the black vote in the UK and bring it alive. And we must do it simultaneously in the US.Biden has an opportunity to expose Trump’s lies and get disenfranchised communities back on side. To do that, he must be candid: he must openly call out Trump’s blatant racism for what it is. He must tell Black voters how Trump stacked the courts in a way that is detrimental to them, and that he will aggressively fight that. The Democrats still have time to recapture those whom they think they are losing. If they do that, Trump will have no recourse. He can’t undo things he has already said and done.You have to turn people on before you can turn them out. And if you turn them on to what is being done to us – what has already been said about us – you can turn people out. Liberal movements in the US and the UK have been blindly hoping that people will turn out on their own. But leaders must understand they won’t mobilise without a reason. It’s not enough to be proud in silence – we need to get loud again.
      The Rev Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader, activist and founder and president of National Action Network (Nan). As told to Lucy Pasha-Robinson.

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