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      Tommy Tuberville is not acting: he really is Trump’s useful idiot | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Tommy Tuberville plays the fool with such conviction that he makes it difficult to imagine a motive behind his idiocy. He is really, truly, actually not acting. In ordinary times others might qualify as the stupidest member of the Senate, but none have matched his performance at a moment of profound and precarious international crisis. Tuberville’s freeze on promotions of general staff officers unless the federal government denies reproductive health services – abortions – to women in the military has significantly disrupted readiness, upended the chain of command and otherwise endangered national security. Of 852 general and flag officers, he has placed 387 holds so far. By the end of the year, 90% of generals and admirals will be out of position. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, says it will take two or three years to fix. One hundred and twenty officers are now being forced to perform two jobs.When General Eric Smith, the commandant of the Marine Corps, who was performing several jobs at once, suffered a heart attack, Tuberville cavalierly dismissed any responsibility. “Come on, give me a break. This guy is going to work 18-20 hours a day no matter what. That’s what we do. I did that for years,” he said.Tuberville was a football coach before he was elected the senator from Alabama. Denigrating the marine commandant, Tuberville suggested that coaching a game was as hard as running the Marine Corps. “Coach” is his identity. “Email Coach” reads the contact information on his Senate website.Donald Trump first gave Tuberville his seal of approval in Tuberville’s fight against the former attorney general Jeff Sessions. Trump had fired Sessions for recusing himself instead of suppressing the justice department investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sessions attempted a comeback in 2020, running for his old Senate seat from Alabama; Tuberville, with Trump’s support, won the GOP nomination. The Coach had no qualifications for public service other than fame as Coach: he just happened to be the lucky dummy in one of Trump’s grudge matches.By freezing military appointments, Tuberville keeps the cameras focused on himself as he struts up and down the field. He is not up for re-election until 2026, but since he has placed his hold on military officers his campaign contributions have rocketed from a negligible amount at the beginning of this year to nearly half a million dollars by July. His hold has turned into his sweet spot for a Trumpian grift. Every day is game day.But Tuberville’s gain is more than the military’s defeat; it is the Republican party’s loss, at both ends of Tuberville’s play. He is wilfully and enthusiastically hammering national security while inflaming the abortion issue. Since the Dobbs decision Republicans have been desperately seeking to escape the political consequences of their decades-long crusade culminating in the supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade. Tuberville has contrived a unique formula to wage the culture war by undermining the military, or, more likely, had that formula engineered for him.Idiots can still be useful idiots. There are larger purposes involved in his scam kulturkampf. His subversion of the military is not just collateral damage. It is not the unintended consequence, but the overriding motive. His abortion ban is both context and pretext. Tuberville has opened Trump’s strategy for a second term to replace the professional class of officers pledged to the constitution with a collection of flunkies who will salute his command, legal or not. Tuberville is a blunt instrument, but, however crude, he is the available tool.The Heritage Foundation – which has produced a blueprint for a Trump second term, the 2025 Transition Project, which includes firing the entire federal civil service and replacing it with Trump loyalists, and invoking the Insurrection Act on day one of Trump II to deploy the military against political dissidents – has evidently been behind Tuberville’s attack on the military. It circulated a letter of several far-right ex-military figures to Senate leaders demanding that they “Support Senator Tuberville’s Fight Against Woke Military”, which they denounced for “advancing the leftwing social agenda”.Heritage published an article by one of its fellows claiming that Tuberville is the “one man” standing in the way of a dastardly conspiracy led by Biden: “Replacing the officer class of police and military ranks with politicized ideologues who will bend to a transformative dogma is a strategy that has worked in places like the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela … Tuberville, thus, is stopping the promotion of woke apparatchiks.” Like Trump, the Heritage cadres project their own scheme on to their enemies.For months, the leaders of the Senate of both parties allowed Tuberville to stand on the rule that gives every senator the right to put a hold on an appointment. They tolerated Tuberville’s stupidity in order not to alter the sacrosanct rule, an anachronism that makes every senator a king. Behind the scenes, they importuned him to relent. Some Republicans suggested that if he lifted his hold on the entire military officer corps, they wouldn’t care if he chewed on a smaller bone. Perhaps he might put a hold on Derek Chollet, the highly competent and experienced counselor in the state department, who has been nominated to be the under-secretary of defense for policy, or maybe other worthy appointees. Their broader cynicism fell before his dim-witted cynicism. No dice.Coach is not team friendly. He is not clubbable in the most exclusive club in the country. Tuberville was unembarrassed when a group of military spouses, the Secure Families Initiative, blasted his “political showmanship” and urged him to stop using “military families as leverage”. He was unashamed when veterans’ groups pointed out that he had failed to donate his Senate salary to veterans’ charities as he had promised. He did not care when the Veterans of Foreign Wars begged him to stop. He was indifferent when the secretaries of the army, navy and air force asked him to end his blockade. “Just another example of woke propaganda,” Tuberville tweeted.The former CIA director Michael Hayden, a retired air force general, tweeted in response to a question about whether Tuberville should be removed from the armed services committee: “How about the human race?” Tuberville, in faux alarm, called the sarcastic remark a “politically motivated assassination” and reported Hayden to the Capitol police – a good basis for another fundraising plea to the yahoos. Hayden replied: “I was surprised to wake up this morning and discover that many Maganuts had lost their minds over my suggestion that ‘Coach’ Tuberville not be considered a member of the human race. I stand by that view. I’m wishing you all a nice day even the intransigent Tommy Tuberville.”Finally, on 1 November, several Republican senators, all veterans, vented their wrath in an extraordinary display of exasperation. They blew away Tuberville’s excuse that he wasn’t damaging readiness as “ridiculous”.“We are going to look back at this episode and just be stunned at what a national-security suicide mission this became,” said Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska. “I do not respect men who do not honor their word,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa.The Senate rule may now be amended. With the approval of the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, Senator Jack Reed, the chairman of the armed services committee, has introduced a bill to allow a vote on military nominations in batches without unanimous consent. The Reed bill would pass if nine Republicans joined the Democrats.Tuberville remains unyielding despite the equivalent of his blackball from the club. His communications director, Steven Stafford, a longtime Republican operative, sent an email to anti-abortion groups to mobilize them, so “that any Republican who votes for this will be primaried. In my view, if enough mushy middle Republicans come out in opposition, then this is over. But they only need nine squishes. And they will get there if we don’t act.”The email violated Senate ethics rules prohibiting “official resources” for being used for campaign purposes. Republican senators were enraged at the threat. “I have some words and they’re not polite so I’m not going to say them,” said Senator Ernst. The chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, Senator Steve Daines of Montana, issued a statement calling for Stafford’s “termination”.Tuberville instinctively reacted with abject cowardice. “That was not me,” he said, blaming his staffer. “He did a ‘no no.’ It wasn’t my statement. I totally disagree with that. We’re teammates here.” He wanted back in the good graces of the club. Stafford was compelled to make a Soviet purge-trial like confession: “It is not the opinion of Coach, it was not on behalf of Coach.” Coach left his wounded behind. Think Ted Lasso as moronic and malignant.Tuberville’s stupidity is both vain and in vain. By his damage to others he invariably damages himself. He projects his stupidity through blind arrogance and compounds it through pride in his presumption of superior knowledge. “Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government – wasn’t set up that way,” Tuberville has said. “You know, the House, the Senate and the executive.”Defending his hold on military promotions, Tuberville treated an interview on CNN in July as a teaching opportunity. “I’m totally against anything to do with racism,” he began, before instantly going off the rails. “But the thing about being a white nationalist is just a cover word, for the Democrats, now, where they can use it, to try to make people mad across the country. Identity politics. I’m totally against that. But I’m for the American people. I’m for military.” When the interviewer told him that white nationalists believe in white supremacy, he replied, “Well, that’s some people’s opinion … My opinion of a white nationalist, if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist, to me, is an American … Well, that’s just a name that it’s been given.” When the interviewer raised “real concerns about extremism”, Tuberville answered: “So, if you’re going to do away with most white people in this country, out of the military, we got huge problems.”In his stupidity, Tuberville confuses his ignorance with ingenuity. He is scornful when challenged. His stupidity may appear to be a brand of fanaticism, but that would mistake his mule-like stubbornness for a leap of faith. On his mission from God, Coach thinks he is the highest authority. His smugness protects against doubt. Nobody can fool the fool who fools himself. He plays three-card monte tricking himself that wrecking the military is owning the libs. His malice is a defense mechanism. The greater the outrage against him, the greater his certainty, if not celebrity and fundraising. Coach wants to be seen as the hero. The greater his apparent futility, the more he believes he is a giant among men. He is fourth and goal, calling the play for a touchdown. Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war!Before the 2020 election, even though he was not yet elected to the Senate, Tuberville plotted the rejection of electoral college certification of the results. “You’ll see what’s coming,” he said. “You’ve been reading about it in the House. We’re going to have to do it in the Senate.”On January 6, as the mob rampaged through the Capitol, approaching the Senate chamber, Tuberville, sworn in as a senator three days before, played a sycophantic Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern bit role. Trump phoned Tuberville. At first, he misdialed Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who handed Tuberville his phone. Tuberville informed Trump that the Secret Service had just evacuated Mike Pence, who Trump was pressuring to reject certification. “They’ve taken the vice-president out,” Tuberville told Trump. “They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go.” Later, Tuberville had lapses of memory of the time of the call and what Trump said to him. “I don’t remember, because they were dragging me. They had me by the arm.” Tuberville was one of eight Republican senators to vote against certification.One obscure aspect of Trump’s coup was his foiled attempt to place his loyalists within the CIA and the Pentagon. He was resisted by the CIA director Gina Haspel, the secretary of defense Mark Esper and chairman of the joint chiefs, General Mark Milley. Trump had come into the presidency thinking of the senior military as “my generals”, a personal palace guard, but one by one he forced them out. “A bunch of dopes and babies,” he called them. “Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life,” he said. He has been especially hostile to former chairman of the joint chiefs, Milley, who resisted Trump’s idea to bomb Iran after he lost the election to foster a crisis before the electoral college vote on January 6. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley told him.Milley believed that Trump might stage a coup, a “Reichstag” moment to precipitate the suspension of the constitution, and he told the congressional leadership about the military: “Our loyalty is to the US constitution.” After January 6, Trump felt “my generals” had betrayed him. Where was his Mike Flynn?When Milley’s thwarting of Trump’s secret plan to strike Iran was exposed in an article by Susan Glasser in the New Yorker in July 2021, Trump was furious. He had brought the memo he had ordered Milley to produce to Mar-a-Lago along with other national security documents. Agitated by the revelation, he waved the papers before some supporters at his Florida estate, saying of Milley and the military “these are bad, sick people”. He falsely claimed that it was Milley who was pushing him to attack Iran. “This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the defense department and him … This was done by the military and given to me.” This incident at Mar-a-Lago now figures in the federal indictment of Trump for mishandling classified documents.At his retirement on 29 September, Milley pointed said: “We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Trump responded by trashing him as a “Woke train wreck,” whose treason was “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”Now, Tuberville is performing Trump’s early retribution against a military that he believes confounded his coup and preparing the groundwork for his takeover in 2025, which will include replacing the nation’s top military command with his lackeys to impose the Insurrection Act against opponents – “my generals”, at last. It doesn’t matter whether Tuberville fully understands the play. He just has to run his pattern.
      Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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      Billion-dollar prisons: why the US is pouring money into new construction

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      At a time when the US has narrowly skirted a recession, and people around the country are still struggling with the cost of living, a curious number of states have found billions of dollars for one thing: building prisons and jails.In September, Alabama announced that a new prison, currently under construction, would have a final cost of $1.082bn. The same month Indiana broke ground on a $1.2bn prison. Nebraska is spending $350m on a new prison, while some in Georgia are lobbying for $1.69bn for construction of a jail in Fulton county.The willingness to spend vast amounts of money on locking people up, particularly in states like Alabama, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, is staggering. It’s also wrong-headed, experts say.“Any money spent on caging human beings is not money well spent, period,” said Carmen Gutierrez, an assistant professor in the department of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research specializes in the connection between punishment and health.“We have decades of research showing that incarceration does not improve public safety, and that it in fact harms individuals who themselves are incarcerated. It also harms their families and it harms the communities that they come from. So the damage outweighs any potential benefit.”The US has an incarceration rate of 664 people in every 100,000, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, far higher than other founding Nato countries. (The next highest is the UK, where 129 out of every 100,000 people are behind bars.)That amounts to 1.8 million people incarcerated across the country, but the numbers are not spread evenly. In Alabama, Georgia and other southern states about one in every 100 people is incarcerated in prisons, jails, immigration detention and juvenile justice facilities.The number of people being locked up has declined, somewhat, since the middle of the last decade, but some facts about incarceration remain the same: not all races are incarcerated equally.Black people make up 13% of the US population, but 38% of the prison, jail and other detention facility population, according to Prison Policy Initiative data. White people are far less likely to be caged: despite 60% of the US identifying as white, they also account for 38% of incarcerated people.“Incarceration is a highly gendered and racialized phenomenon,” Gutierrez said. “People who are males make up around 90% of people who go to jail and prison, and people who are black and brown – typically people who are Latino or Indigenous – are making up those who are disproportionately incarcerated.”The mammoth US prison population can be traced to the 1970s, with Richard Nixon’s “tough on crime” and “law and order” rhetoric, but it really exploded in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president.The Fair Fight Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration and systemic racism, says there are a multitude of reasons why the US cages so many people – including the disastrous “war on drugs”, mandatory minimum sentences, exorbitant bail and a lack of mental health services.The tough on crime rhetoric has endured to this day. Violent crime was a huge focus for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterm elections, while Donald Trump has taken to describing big cities as “cesspools of bloodshed and crime”.Trump, who lives in a spa resort in Florida and generally travels only for political rallies or court appearances, has offered no evidence for his claim.Despite the raft of research showing incarceration does more harm than good, few states are seriously attempting to reduce the number of people in jail.In January, Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, introduced new laws concerning how inmates could earn early release for good behavior, in a move critics said would lead to more overcrowding in the state’s prisons. Ivey has also been a key driver behind the state’s costly new prison.“The new prison facilities being built in Alabama are critically important to public safety, to our criminal justice system and to Alabama as a whole,” Ivey said in September.Alabama, which was ranked as the seventh poorest state by US News, has the fifth lowest household income in the country and is a place where a child born in 2020 could expect to live to be only 73 years old.It is also one of 10 largely Republican-led states that has declined to use federal government resources to expand Medicaid – a healthcare program for low-income residents – to more residents, which Gutierrez said can lead to people ending up in incarceration, or being re-incarcerated.“To deny Medicaid expansion in a state is to exacerbate the health and wellbeing issues of poor people who are the ones cycling through jails and prisons due to their poverty and poor health,” she said.“Folks who are formerly incarcerated, their health status may be determining their likelihood of going to jail and prison in the first place. Because if I’m sick, and I’m not working because I’m sick, and if I have mental illness or a substance use disorder, I’m more visible to the police, I’m more visible to punishment, and that thus increases my chances of being sent to jail or prison.”In Georgia, which has also opted out of expanded Medicaid, officials are attempting to source $1.7bn for a new prison near Atlanta, with little sign that politicians are considering spending the money elsewhere. Indiana’s $1.2bn facility is scheduled to open in 2027.One thing most can agree is that conditions in many of America’s jails are dire.Earlier this year, Atteeyah Hollie, deputy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, told the Guardian there “are daily horrors that are happening” in Georgia’s Fulton county jail – which the new facility would replace.The Department of Justice opened an investigation into the jail in July, citing reports that “an incarcerated person died covered in insects and filth, that the Fulton county jail is structurally unsafe, that prevalent violence has resulted in serious injuries and homicides”.In Alabama, a majority of prisons don’t have air-conditioning, which the Montgomery Advertiser reported made conditions “hell” during a summer where the heat index reached 115F (46C).Both states have committed to improving conditions, but it is hard to shake the sense that the billions being spent on new prisons and jails would be better used elsewhere.Jacob Kang-Brown, senior research fellow at Vera Institute, which works to end over-criminalization and mass incarceration, said the funds should be put towards education and affordable housing, and supporting robust access to healthcare.“The social welfare safety net in the US has been underinvested in for decades. That is part of the reason why we have such a huge investment in incarceration. It’s really a negative cycle,” Kang-Brown said.As president, Trump signed the bipartisan First Step Act, a prison and sentencing reform bill which expanded rehabilitative opportunities for incarcerated people, increased the possibility of early parole for good behavior and reduced mandatory minimum sentences for a number of drug-related crimes.At the time, the act was championed by Republicans, Democrats and advocates.But in the 2022 midterm elections, amid a rise in some forms of violent crime, Republicans began to distance themselves from the First Step Act, while Trump, despite his role in the legislation, would not say whether he still supports it when asked by the New York Times. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival for the GOP presidential nomination, has said he would repeal it.“There are a lot of concerns about public safety, and politicians want to throw money at that problem often, as opposed to thinking hard about what that might mean and how to best address those problems,” Kang-Brown said.“Many people are seemingly more comfortable with investing in law enforcement and prisons to address those things, other than the real kind of investments, like affordable housing, for instance, that can actually improve public safety in a real substantive way.” More

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      The California town that could hold the key to control of the House in 2024

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      When customers come in for a cut and a conversation at Miguel Navarro’s barbershop, there’s one topic they raise more than any other: gas prices.A gallon of regular goes for about $5 in Delano, a farming town in California’s Central Valley where in 1965, grape pickers staged a historic strike over bad pay and working conditions that led to the creation of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, led by Cesar Chavez. Today, everyone in the city who can afford to do so drives, which means feeling the pain of California’s pump prices, the highest in the nation.“You kind of think about it twice before you go out,” said Navarro as he cut a customer’s hair in his eponymous barbershop on Delano’s Main Street. His shop sits among a strip of tax preparers, taquerias and leather goods stores, in an area that also happens to be some of the most fiercely contested political territory in the nation.The city of nearly 51,000 is in the middle of a California congressional district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, Joe Biden won overwhelming support in 2020, but despite its apparent blue lean, voters have repeatedly sent the Republican David Valadao to be their voice in the House of Representatives over the past decade.Next year, Democrats hope to change that as part of their campaign to seize back control of Congress’s lower chamber, which hinges on flipping 18 districts won by Biden in 2020 that are represented by Republicans like Valadao, a dairy farmer who is one of just two Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump and managed to keep their seats.That battle, which will play out alongside Biden’s re-election campaign and Senate Democrats’ defense of their small majority in the chamber, may well be the easiest for the party to win in 2024.Though the numbers appear to favor Democrats in California’s 22nd congressional district, several hurdles stand between the party and victory. Nearly a year and a month before the general election, the down-ballot races that are crucial to deciding the balance of power in Washington DC are far from the minds of many in Delano.“People here are just living day by day, and if you do not remind them about elections, they might not remember,” said Susana Ortiz, an undocumented grape picker who lives in Delano and has campaigned for Rudy Salas, Valadao’s unsuccessful Democratic opponent in last year’s election.Democrats must gain five seats to win a majority in the House, and Valadao’s district – encompassing dozens of farming communities and half of Bakersfield, California’s ninth most-populous city – is one of 33 targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2024.Beyond campaigning, Democrats are expected to benefit from a supreme court decision that has forced Alabama, and potentially Louisiana, to redraw its congressional map. The party also has a good shot of gaining a seat in New York City’s Long Island suburbs, where voters are reeling after discovering their Republican congressman George Santos is a fabulist who is now facing federal charges.The GOP has its own redistricting advantages, particularly in North Carolina, where new congressional maps could knock at least three Democrats out of their seats. The National Republican Congressional Committee is targeting Democratic lawmakers in 37 seats, five of whom represent districts that voted for Trump three years ago.“I think the House is going to come down to redistricting fights, candidate recruitment and, probably, most importantly, the top of the ticket and what that does to down-ballot races,” said David Wasserman, an election analyst who focuses on the chamber at the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.No race has a dynamic quite like the contest to unseat Valadao, whose spokesperson declined to comment. The 46-year-old won election to the California state assembly in 2010, and then to the US House two years later. Valadao defeated successive Democratic challengers in the years that followed, until TJ Cox ousted him in a close election in 2018, a historically good year for the party.Valadao triumphed over Cox two years later. The January 6 attack on the Capitol occurred just as he was to take his seat in the House, and a week after that, Valadao joined nine other Republicans and all Democrats to vote for impeaching Trump.“Based on the facts before me, I have to go with my gut and vote my conscience. I voted to impeach President Trump. His inciting rhetoric was un-American, abhorrent and absolutely an impeachable offense,” Valadao said at the time. The decision ignited a firestorm among Republicans in his Central Valley district.“It was ugly, man. I mean, it was really, really, really ugly,” said James Henderson, a former GOP party chair in Tulare, one of the three counties that make up Valadao’s district. Donors threatened to withhold their funds, but Henderson said arguments that Valadao was uniquely able to hold the vulnerable seat, and crucial to representing the county’s agriculture interests, prevailed.“The alternative is, if you lose this seat, you lose this seat forever,” Henderson said. It was nonetheless close: styling himself as a Trump-aligned conservative, Chris Mathys, a former city councilman in the Central Valley city of Fresno, challenged Valadao in the primary, and came within 1,220 votes of beating him.Mathys was assisted by the House Majority Pac, which was linked to the then Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi and spent $127,000 on television advertisements boosting his candidacy and attacking Valadao, according to the analytic firm AdImpact.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt was one of many instances across the country in which Democratic groups channeled dollars to rightwing Republicans in their primaries, betting that they would be easier to defeat in the general election. Valadao would go on to triumph over state assemblyman Salas, and make an unlikely return to the House.Valadao’s re-election fight is shaping up to be a repeat of what he faced the year prior. Mathys is running again, and has once more put Valadao’s vote against the former president at the center of his campaign. Trump is the current frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, and California Republicans will vote in primaries for both races on the same ballot.“The big issue, clearly, is the impeachment issue. It looms very large. People remember like it was yesterday,” Mathys told the Guardian in an interview. “With President Trump being on the ballot, it’s going to even resonate stronger, because he’ll be on the same ballot that we’re on.”CJ Warnke, the communications director for the House Majority Pac, said the committee would “do whatever it takes” to defeat Valadao and Mathys, but did not say whether that would include another round of television advertisements supporting the latter.Salas is also challenging Valadao again, and another Democrat, the state senator Melissa Hurtado, is in the primary. Salas believes that next year will be when Valadao falls, due to the presidential election driving up turnout in the majority Latino district.“The fight is making sure that people actually get out to the polls, vote, or that they turn in their vote-by-mail ballots,” Salas said in an interview. “That’s what we fell victim to last year and something that we’re hoping to get correct going into 2024.”Then there is the ongoing mess in the House, which could have direct effects on Valadao. He’s referred to Kevin McCarthy, who represents a neighboring district, as a “friend”, and opposed removing him as speaker. Valadao three times voted to elect the Republican Jim Jordan as his replacement, unsuccessfully, but also supports giving the acting speaker, Patrick McHenry, the job’s full powers.Jordan is a rightwing firebrand, and an advocate of Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Wasserman said Valadao’s support for him could undercut the reputation he has built for himself as an “independent-minded farmer”, while the downfall of his ally McCarthy may affect Valadao’s ability to benefit from his fundraising.Delano has a reputation as a pivotal community in Valadao’s district, and winning over its voters may come down to money and messaging.A member of the UFW, Ortiz has for several years campaigned for Salas in the spare time she has when she’s not picking grapes for minimum wage. She knocks on doors in Delano’s sprawling neighborhoods, believing Salas is the kind of politician who can bring solutions for undocumented people like herself: she has not seen her father in Mexico since leaving the country 18 years ago, and her oldest son is also undocumented but, for now, protected from deportation by the legally shaky Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) policy.Among the voters who open their doors for her, disillusionment is high, and there’s one phrase Ortiz hears repeatedly: “I don’t even vote because after, they do not help you.”Meanwhile, as an independent, Navarro, the barber, said he would probably vote for Trump next year, as he had in the past, citing his hope the former president would bring, among other things, lower gas prices.“I think we were a little bit more peaceful with him,” Navarro said. But he’s not sure whom to support for Congress, and would probably go for whichever candidate he hears from the most: “We’re meant to vote for whoever has more to offer.” More

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      Alabama’s new congressional map increases power of Black voters

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      Alabama officially has a new congressional map that will increase the power of Black voters in the state, giving them the chance to elect their preferred candidate in at least two of the state’s seven congressional districts in 2024. The decision could help Democrats secure a majority in the US House next year.After the US supreme court twice rebuffed Alabama’s request to block drawing an additional district, a three-judge panel chose the new map on Thursday from three proposals offered by Richard Allen, a court-appointed special master. Black voters make up about a quarter of the population in the state, but comprised a majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts under the map Republicans adopted.The new plan maintains a majority in one of the state’s districts and creates a second district where Black voters make up 48.7% of the population. That percentage is enough to allow Black voters in the district a chance to elect the candidate of their choosing, the special master’s analysis showed.Black-preferred candidates in the district would have won 16 or 17 recent elections analyzed by the special master. The plan the judges chose splits just six counties and left the cities of Mobile and Birmingham largely whole. In total, the panel ruled, the proposal they adopted made as few changes necessary from the plan the legislature adopted to cure the illegal dilution of Black votes.The new district stretches from the city of Mobile across Alabama’s Black belt, named for its rich topsoil. The region has been marked by extreme poverty and the new district will give voters there more of a voice at the federal level.“Under the Voting Rights Act and binding precedent, the appropriate remedy for racially discriminatory vote dilution is, as we already said, a congressional districting plan that includes either an additional majority-Black district, or an additional district in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice,” the judges said in their order. “This plan satisfies all constitutional and statutory requirements while hewing as closely as reasonably possible to the Alabama legislature’s 2023 plan.”Voting in Alabama is highly racially polarized, with Black voters preferring Democrats and white voters preferring Republicans in a general election. Any district that allows Black voters to elect the candidate of their choosing is therefore likely to favor Democrats. Republicans currently have a razor-thin 221-212 advantage in Congress’s lower chamber.The Alabama secretary of state, Wes Allen, a Republican elected last year, said in a statement the state would “facilitate the 2024 election cycle in accordance with the map the federal court has forced upon Alabama and ordered us to use”.Alabama Republicans fought aggressively to try and stave off creating an additional Black opportunity district. After the three judge panel initially struck down its map last year, it appealed to the US supreme court, which upheld the lower court’s ruling in a surprise move. Alabama then essentially defied both courts, drawing a new map that preserved a Black majority in just one district and increased the Black population in a second district to 41%, not enough to give Black voters the chance to elect the candidate of their choosing.The three-judge panel bluntly rejected that effort, saying it was “disturbed by the evidence that the state delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy”.Alabama again appealed to the US supreme court, which declined to step in and stop redrawing of the map.The case is seen as a major victory for section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any practice that discriminates on the basis of race. Conservatives have long sought to hollow out the law by making it harder to prove racial discrimination under section 2. The fact that the conservative US supreme court agreed Alabama had crossed a line in this case was understood as a signal that the provision still has some force. Litigation is proceeding on similar grounds in Louisiana and Georgia, which could result in similar additional Black opportunity districts. Last week, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit took the highly unusual move of stepping in to halt the redrawing of the state’s congressional map.“In spite of the shameful intransigence of Alabama Republicans, justice has finally prevailed in the state. With this new, fairer map, and for the first time ever, Black voters in Alabama could have two members of Congress representing their interests at the same time. This historic development will strengthen voting rights and ensure equal representation for so many Americans,” said the former attorney general Eric Holder, whose non-profit backed some of the plaintiffs in the case.He added: “Other states with pending section 2 cases should view this map, and this process, as both an example of basic fairness and a warning that denying equal representation to Black voters, violating the Voting Rights Act, and defying federal court orders is a direct tie to an odious past and will no longer be tolerated.” More

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      Supreme Court Declines to Revisit Alabama Voting Map Dispute

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      For the second time in recent months, the Supreme Court ruled against Alabama lawmakers and their proposed congressional district map.The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused Alabama’s request to reinstate a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers that had only one majority-Black district, paving the way for a new map to be put in place before the 2024 election.Alabama’s request to keep its map was the second time in under a year that it had asked the Supreme Court to affirm a limited role of race in establishing voting districts for federal elections in what amounted to a defiant repudiation of lower-court rulings. In the latest twist in the case, the lower court had found that the state had brazenly flouted its directive to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”The court’s order gave no reasons, which is often the case when the justices decide on emergency applications. The ruling clears the way for a special master and court-appointed cartographer to create a new map.The outcome of the dispute could ultimately tip the balance of the House, where Republicans hold a thin majority. The trajectory of the case is also being closely watched by lawmakers in Washington and other states where similar battles are playing out.In a surprise decision in June, the Supreme Court found that Alabama had hurt Black voters in drawing its voting map, reaffirming part of a landmark civil rights law.Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has long been skeptical of race-conscious decision making, wrote the majority opinion. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined him, along with the courts three liberal justices — Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.At issue was Alabama’s congressional map. Its Republican-controlled legislature sliced up the state into seven districts, continuing to maintain only one majority Black district, although about a quarter of state’s population is Black.After the Supreme Court’s decision, state lawmakers scrambled to draw a new map. Over the objections of Democrats, the legislature pushed through a version that changed district boundaries but that did not include an additional majority-Black district. Instead, it increased the percentage of Black voters in one district to about 40 percent, from about 30 percent.The federal three-judge panel overseeing the case found lawmakers had, yet again, likely violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965.“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” the panel wrote. The judges added that the Legislature’s proposal “plainly fails to do so.”In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, acknowledged that the Legislature had not added a second majority-Black district to its map as dictated by the federal court, but said its new map still complied with the law.Unless the court acted, he wrote, “the state will have no meaningful opportunity to appeal before the 2023 plan is replaced by a court-drawn map that no state could constitutionally enact.”In their brief, the plaintiffs, including a group of Black voters and advocacy organizations, urged the justices to reject Alabama’s request for relief and said the state had “unabashedly” sought to defy the courts using “recycled arguments.”After the Supreme Court’s decision in June, the plaintiffs wrote, Alabama’s Legislature had drawn its plan in secret, with no opportunity for public comment, and had enacted it “over alternative plans that were supported by Black Alabamians.”“Disagreement with this court’s ruling is not a valid reason to defy it — and certainly not a basis for a grant of an emergency stay application,” they wrote. More

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      Federal judges reject Republicans’ redrawn congressional map in Alabama

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      A panel of federal judges has struck down Alabama’s redrawn congressional map, saying the state clearly continued to violate the Voting Rights Act and had ignored a clear mandate from the federal judiciary to increase the political power of Black voters in the state.The panel said a court-appointed special master and cartographer would draw a new map before the 2024 election. Alabama is expected to appeal the decision to the US supreme court, which upheld an earlier ruling ordering the state to redraw its map.The decision is a win for Black voters in Alabama, who have long had their political influence cracked among several congressional districts.“We do not take lightly federal intrusion into a process ordinarily reserved for the state legislature,” the panel wrote. “But we have now said twice that this Voting Rights Act case is not close.“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”Analyses have shown voting in Alabama is highly racially polarized – Black voters prefer Democrats while white voters prefer Republicans. So an additional majority-Black district is likely to favor a Democratic congressional candidate in a general election. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker of the House, was in touch with Alabama Republicans while they redrew their map as he prepares to try to hold on to the narrow advantage Republicans have in the US House next year.The order on Tuesday strikes down a remedial map Alabama Republicans passed earlier this summer after the three-judge panel ruled the congressional plan that the state passed in 2021 violated the Voting Rights Act.Black people comprise about a quarter of the eligible voting population in Alabama, but they were a majority in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts. Plaintiffs showed it was easy to draw a reasonably configured second majority-Black district that stretched across the Black belt, a rural swath of Black voters in Alabama that is one of the poorest regions in the US. The three-judge panel told the state last year it needed to draw a map that had a second-majority Black district “or something quite close to it”. The US supreme court agreed in June.But Alabama lawmakers did not appear to make much of an effort to comply with the ruling. The new map they enacted still had one majority-Black district and a second one that was only about 41% Black.“We are disturbed by the evidence that the state delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy,” the three-judge panel wrote on Tuesday. “And we are struck by the extraordinary circumstance we face.“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature – faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district – responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district.”The decision was unanimous from Stanley Marcus, an appellate judge on the 11th circuit, as well as US district judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer. Marcus was appointed by President Bill Clinton while Manasco and Moorer were appointed by Donald Trump.“Once again, Alabama has openly defied our laws in order to disenfranchise Black voters. Thankfully, the district court has rejected Alabama’s defiance. The court has once again confirmed that Black voters deserve two opportunity districts. We look forward to ensuring that the special master draws a map that provides Black voters with the full representation in Congress that they deserve,” said Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, that represents some of the challengers in the case, which include Alabama voters and civic action groups.The court-appointed special master, Richard Allen, a former deputy chief attorney general and commissioner of the Alabama department of corrections. The cartographer is David Ely, a California-based redistricting expert who has advised numerous states and localities on redistricting issues.The court gave the two men until 25 September to come up with three proposals that “include either an additional majority-Black congressional district, or an additional district in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice”. Their proposals must also comply with the Voting Rights Act and other constitutional requirements.“Sixty years ago, former governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to stop Black people from desegregating the University of Alabama. He moved only when the federal government forced him to do so. History is repeating itself and the district court’s decision confirms that Alabama is again on the losing side. We demand that Alabama again move out of the way and obey our laws – we demand our voting rights,” groups representing the plaintiffs said in a joint statement. 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      Federal Court Again Strikes Down Alabama’s Congressional Map

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      Republicans failed to comply with a court order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it,” the judicial panel said.A panel of federal judges rejected Alabama’s latest congressional map on Tuesday, ruling that a new map needed to be drawn because Republican lawmakers had failed to comply with orders to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”In a sharp rebuke, the judges ordered that the new map be independently drawn, taking the responsibility away from the Republican-controlled legislature while chastising state officials who “ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”The legislature had hastily pushed through a revised map in July after a surprise Supreme Court ruling found that Alabama’s existing map violated a landmark civil rights law by undercutting the power of the state’s Black voters. The revised map, approved over the objections of Democrats, increased the percentage of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to about 40 percent, from about 30 percent.In its new ruling, the district court panel in Alabama found that the legislature had flouted its mandate.“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the judges wrote. Responsibility for a new map now falls to a special master, Richard Allen, a longtime Alabama lawyer who has worked under several Republican attorneys general, and a cartographer, David Ely, a demographer based in California. Both were appointed by the court. The decision — or the independent map to be produced — can be appealed. State officials have said that a new congressional map needs to be in place by early October, in order to prepare for the 2024 elections.The litigation has been closely watched in Washington and across the country, as several other states in the South face similar voting rights challenges, and control of the U.S. House of Representatives rests on a thin margin. Prominent lawmakers in Washington — including Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California and Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus — have kept careful tabs on the redistricting effort.At least one nonpartisan political analysis has predicted that at least one Alabama district could become an election tossup with a new map, given that Black voters in Alabama tend to vote for Democratic candidates.The decision was joined by Judge Stanley Marcus, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton; and by Judges Anna M. Manasco and Terry F. Moorer, both named to their posts by former President Donald J. Trump. (Judge Marcus typically sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta.)For Alabama, the ruling caps off nearly two years of litigation, marking yet another instance in the state’s tumultuous history where a court has forced officials to follow federal civil rights and voting laws.Two decades ago, a lawsuit forced the creation of the Seventh Congressional District, the state’s sole majority-Black district, in southwest Alabama. (Under the Republican-drawn map rejected on Tuesday, the share of Black voters in that district dropped to about 51 percent from about 55 percent.)“It’s really making sure that people who have consistently been kept at the margins or excluded as a matter of law from politics have a chance — not a guarantee — but a realistic chance of electing candidates of choice,” said Kareem Crayton, the senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center for Justice and a Montgomery, Ala., native. “The fact that we’re having to fight over that principle is really sad in 2023.”After the 2020 census, which began the process of setting district lines for the next decade across the country, the Alabama legislature maintained six congressional districts with a white Republican incumbent. A group of Black voters challenged the map under a landmark voting rights law, given that more than one in four residents of Alabama is Black.The Birmingham court said the map would need to be redrawn, but the Supreme Court intervened and said a new map could not be put in place so close to the primary races ahead of the 2022 election. In doing so, the Supreme Court unexpectedly affirmed the key remaining tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bars any voting law that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” The court had gutted much of that landmark civil rights law a decade earlier, and many had expected a similar result with the Alabama case.But in a weeklong special session, Republicans refused to create a second majority-Black district, and shielded their six incumbents from a potentially brutal primary at a moment when the party has only a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.Republicans defended their revised map, calling it a fair attempt to keep counties and communities with similar economic and geographic issues together, while adhering to the Constitution. Democrats and the Black voters who brought the challenge called it a squandered opportunity to provide equal representation to a historically disenfranchised bloc of voters.At a hearing in August, the panel of judges sharply pressed the state’s attorneys on whether the revised map had done enough to adhere to their guidance on how to address the voting rights violation, making their skepticism clear.“What I hear you saying is that the state of Alabama deliberately disregarded our instructions,” Judge Moorer said at one point. More

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      Alabama Republicans refuse to create second majority-Black district

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      Alabama Republicans on Monday defended their decision not to create a second majority-Black district in a hearing before a panel of federal judges over the state’s redrawn congressional maps.State Republicans continue to resist court orders, including from the supreme court in June, to amend the congressional maps to give Black voters increased political power and representation.Lawyers for voters called Alabama’s plan, which maintains one majority-Black district, discriminatory. Abha Khanna, an attorney representing one group of plaintiffs in the case, said Alabama chose “defiance over compliance”.“Alabama has chosen instead to thumb its nose at this court and to thumb its nose at the nation’s highest court and to thumb its nose at its own Black citizens,” Khanna said.The three-judge panel, which blocked the use of the state’s old map last year, will decide whether to let Alabama’s new districts go forward or step in and draw new congressional districts for the state. The results of the extended court battle could also determine whether Democrats pick up another seat in Congress, where Republicans currently hold a slim majority.In a surprise June decision, the supreme court upheld the panel’s earlier finding that the state’s then map – which had one Black-majority district out of seven in a state where more than one in four residents is Black – likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act.In response to the ruling, Alabama Republicans boosted the percentage of Black voters in the majority-white second congressional district, now represented by Republican representative Barry Moore, from about 30% to 39.9%, failing to give Black voters a majority which would allow them to elect their candidate of choice.A lawyer for the state accused plaintiffs of seeking a “racial gerrymander” over traditional guidelines for drawing districts, such as keeping districts compact and keeping communities of interest together.“It’s unlawful to enforce proportionality over traditional redistricting principles,” Edmund LaCour, Alabama’s solicitor general, told the three-judge panel.Alabama claims the new plan complies with the Voting Rights Act. State leaders are hoping the panel will accept their proposal or that the state will prevail in a second round of appeals to the supreme court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe judges did not indicate how quickly they will rule.The high-stakes hearing drew a large number of spectators to the federal courthouse in Birmingham where an overflow room was opened to accommodate the large crowd. Plaintiffs in the supreme court case attended with many wearing T-shirts printed with their proposed map which would have two majority-Black districts.“Alabama’s latest congressional map is a continuation of the state’s sordid history of defying court orders intended to protect the rights of Black voters,” former US attorney general Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement. More