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      ‘Disgusting’: Republican Senate hopeful condemned over ‘showdown’ TV ad

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      ‘Disgusting’: Republican Senate hopeful condemned over ‘showdown’ TV adJim Lamon’s ad depicts ‘shootout’ with Democrats including Mark Kelly, senator whose wife Gabby Giffords was shot in deadly attack A Republican Senate primary candidate in Arizona has been condemned for a “disgusting” campaign ad in which he shoots at lookalike actors portraying Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the incumbent Arizona senator Mark Kelly.Biden says Americans in Ukraine ‘should leave now’ as diplomatic talks falter – liveRead moreJim Lamon, an energy executive, shared the ad on Twitter, saying it would be aired at this year’s Super Bowl.Lamon would face Kelly in a general election in the autumn should he secure the Republican nomination.Kelly is the husband of the former Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot in the head in 2011 while greeting constituents outside of a local grocery store.In Lamon’s ad, styled as a western, figures identified as the “DC gang” enter a town wearing cowboy boots and carrying firearms, their faces half-covered by bandannas. Onlookers are upset by their presence, with one declaring: “We’re tired of being pushed around!”Lamon enters, along with Mark Lamb, a real-life local sheriff, and Brandon Judd, the current president of the National Border Patrol Council. Lamon addresses the three actors playing Biden, Kelly and Pelosi, saying: “The good people of Arizona have had enough of you.”“It’s time for a showdown,” Lamon adds.When the Democrats draw their firearms, Lamon fires his own gun, shooting the weapons out of their hands as the rest of the town cheers. The three Democrats run away.Criticism towards the ad has been swift, with many people pointing out other recent instances of violent imagery used by members of the Republican party. Last November, Paul Gosar, Republican representative for Arizona, was officially censured by the House after sharing an animated video depicting him killing the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Biden.Shannon Watts, founder of the group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, called Lamon’s ad “disgusting”.A spokesperson for the Lamon campaign refused to respond to the Washington Post about criticism of the ad, but said it “shows the DC gang drawing on Lamon and he merely shoots the weapons out of their hands”.“Unlike Kelly, Jim Lamon will shoot straight with Arizonans and take the fight to Biden – and he damn sure won’t let the left bully him into backing down,” the spokesperson said.TopicsRepublicansArizonaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Arizona Republicans Sought to Overturn Votes. Rusty Said No.

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      The speaker of the Republican-controlled Arizona House — who supported Donald J. Trump in 2020 — just torpedoed a bill that would have let lawmakers reject the results of an election.It is a dark time in the life of the American experiment. The world’s oldest democracy, once assumed to be unbreakable, often appears to be coming apart at the rivets.From his Florida exile, a defeated leader, whose efforts to overturn the last election are still coming into view, is working to place loyalists in key offices across the country, and his followers are racing to install themselves at the controls of future elections.Yet in Arizona this week, the unlikeliest of characters just stepped forward with a palm raised to the forces of Donald J. Trump.When right-wing lawmakers there pushed a bill that would have given the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to unilaterally reject the results of an election and force a new one, Rusty Bowers said no.For decades, Bowers, the unassuming speaker of the Arizona House, has represented die-hard Republican beliefs, supporting the kinds of low-tax, limited-government policies that made the state’s Barry Goldwater a conservative icon.Bowers could have sat on the bill, letting it die a quiet death. Instead, he killed it through an aggressive legislative maneuver that left even veteran statehouse watchers in Arizona awe-struck at its audacity.“The speaker wanted to put the wooden cross right through the heart of this thing for all to see,” said Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant who has known Bowers for some 30 years.A line drawnThe bill’s sponsor, John Fillmore — who boasts of being the most conservative member of the Arizona State Legislature — told us in an interview that Bowers’s tactics amounted to saying: “I am God. I control the rules. You will do what I say.”But to the 69-year-old Bowers, a Mormon and father of seven who first entered politics in 1992, it was clearly a matter of something bigger than parliamentary procedure.By sending Fillmore’s legislation to not one but 12 committees, effectively dooming it, he was also sending an unmistakable message about the direction of his party — a G.O.P. that is unrecognizably different from what it was back when Goldwater-style conservatism itself represented an insurgency.Fillmore’s bill would have eliminated early voting altogether and mandated that all ballots be counted by hand.Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks election laws, called it “one of the most comprehensive attacks on nonpartisan election administration and voter access that we have seen.”Most troubling, to voting rights advocates and independent experts, was a provision that would have empowered the Arizona Legislature to “accept or reject the election results” and given a single elector the power to demand that a fresh election be held.And while the bill was never likely to become law, it was an expression of what Barnes called a “cathartic moment” for the Republican Party. “And I think Rusty is not excited about that,” he said.‘We gave the authority to the people’The Arizona dispute comes amid a national convulsion within the Republican Party, which has split into two unequal factions — the pro-Trump forces, who have rallied behind the former president’s calls to overturn the 2020 election, and a dwindling establishment, which has either avoided the subject or faced the wrath of Trump’s allies.On Friday, the Republican National Committee moved to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. In so doing, the R.N.C. officially declared that the attack was “legitimate political discourse.”Bowers did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but his public comments indicate a deep unease with how Trump and his base of supporters have promoted wild theories about election fraud and have pushed legislation that voting rights groups say amounts to an undemocratic, nationwide power grab.“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told Capitol Media Services, an Arizona outlet, earlier this week. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’Among Arizona political insiders, Bowers is known as a Renaissance man — an artist who’s equally comfortable rolling up his sleeves to fix a broken vehicle in the middle of the desert as he is painting landscapes in watercolor. A 2015 profile describes him as “a beekeeper and an orchardist” who once trekked to Mexico to live with a remote native tribe.“He has always struck me as independent, his own man,” Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, told us. “He’s a doctrinaire conservative on some things, but a pragmatic, conservative problem-solver on others. Very principled, straight-shooter, full of integrity.”Bowers, a libertarian-style conservative who came of age in Goldwater’s Republican Party, backed Trump in 2020. But he resisted calls after the election to overturn the results — dismissing his colleagues’ claims, which courts and independent experts have said are unfounded, that President Biden did not win Arizona fair and square.“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” he said in December 2020. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to re-elect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”The Arizona G.O.P.’s civil warBowers’s resistance to the shifting currents of Republican politics has made him a frequent target of the pro-Trump right.Last year, when he survived an attempt to recall him from the Legislature, he complained about the aggressive tactics of the Trump supporters behind it.​​“They’ve been coming to my house and intimidating our family and our neighborhood,” Bowers said, describing how mobile trucks drove by his home and called him a pedophile over a loudspeaker.He is term-limited, but his stance could revive efforts to oust him from the speakership — a move that would have national reverberations.Fillmore, who insisted he was willing to bargain over any aspects of his bill, said he was “disappointed that members of my caucus do not have the testicular fortitude” to stand up to Bowers.But he hinted at moves afoot to remove the speaker, whom he accused of sabotaging what he said was a good-faith effort to rein in voting practices that, in his view, have gone too far.“I’m an old-school person. I do not go calmly. I do not go quietly,” Fillmore warned. “I believe Republican voters are solidly in line with me.”Arizona political observers told us it was unlikely that the right wing of the Republican caucus could find a suitable replacement for Bowers, who has survived thus far through a combination of inertia and disorganization among his critics.Fillmore, who said he did not support Trump in 2016 and hadn’t spoken with him, said he had received death threats over the bill from people who accused him of racism for wanting, as he put it, to restore Arizona’s voting laws as they were when he grew up in the 1950s.He expressed his own fortitude pithily. “You know what, people?” he said. “Kiss my grits.”What to readThe Republican Party censured Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and called the events of Jan. 6 “legitimate political discourse.” Party leaders later said that the language didn’t apply to the attack on the Capitol, report Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein. Read the censure resolution here.Former Vice President Mike Pence told the Federalist Society today in Florida that “President Trump is wrong,” and that Pence “had no right to overturn the election.” Lisa Lerer reports that his remarks “offered his most forceful rebuke of Donald Trump.”Biden celebrated the Labor Department’s January jobs report today. Ben Casselman and Talmon Joseph Smith explain that the “overreaching message of the report was one of resilience in the face of a resurgent pandemic.”viewfinderIn Upper Marlboro, Md., President Biden signed an executive order on Friday requiring project labor agreements on many federal construction projects.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesEye contact, with echoesOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. On Friday, Sarahbeth Maney caught President Biden looking up at three ironworkers, their legs hanging in the air, just before he signed an executive order benefiting construction trade unions. Here’s what she told us about capturing it:I like how all three of them are looking at Biden, and he’s looking at them. I was hoping there would be some sort of interaction. He thought it was fun. “You’re nuts,” he joked, comparing them to workers who were similarly situated at a job site when he got his first-ever union endorsement. It was a little offbeat moment that makes a speech a little more personal and interesting.They seemed like they were in their natural element. They looked really relaxed. Everyone in the crowd was sitting up very straight — very attentive, just like the men above — but down below, people had their phones out and were recording. When Biden signed the executive order, a lot of people stood up, which actually made it hard for me to take a picture — because their heads and phones were in the way.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      For Many Who Marched, Jan. 6 Was Only the Beginning

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      To many of those who attended the Trump rally but who never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.PHOENIX — There were moments when Paul Davis questioned his decision to join the crowd that marched on the United States Capitol last January. When he was publicly identified and fired from his job as a lawyer. When his fiancée walked out.But then something shifted. Instead of lingering as an indelible stain, Jan. 6 became a galvanizing new beginning for Mr. Davis. He started his own law practice as a “lawyer for patriots” representing anti-vaccine workers. He began attending local conservative meetings around his hometown, Frisco, Texas. As the national horror over the Capitol attack calcified into another fault line of bitter division, Mr. Davis said his status as a Jan. 6 attendee had become “a badge of honor” with fellow conservatives.“It definitely activated me more,” said Mr. Davis, who posted a video of himself in front of a line of police officers outside the Capitol but said he did not enter the building and was expressing his constitutional rights to protest. He has not been charged with any crime from that day. “It gave me street cred.”The post-mortems and prosecutions that followed that infamous day have focused largely on the violent core of the mob. But a larger group has received far less attention: the thousands who traveled to Washington at the behest of Mr. Trump to protest the results of a democratic election, the vast majority of whom did not set foot in the Capitol and have not been charged with any crime — who simply went home.For these Donald Trump supporters, the next chapter of Jan. 6 is not the ashes of a disgraced insurrection, but an amorphous new movement fueled by grievances against vaccines and President Biden, and a deepened devotion to his predecessor’s lies about a stolen election.In the year since the attack, many have plunged into new fights and new conspiracy theories sown in the bloody chaos of that day. They have organized efforts to raise money for the people charged in the Capitol attack, casting them as political prisoners. Some are speaking at conservative rallies. Others are running for office.Interviews with a dozen people who were in the large mass of marchers show that the worst attack on American democracy in generations has mutated into an emblem of resistance. Those interviewed are just a fraction of the thousands who attended the rally, but their reflections present a troubling omen should the country face another close presidential election.Many Jan. 6 attendees have shifted their focus to what they see as a new, urgent threat: Covid-19 vaccine mandates and what they call efforts by Democratic politicians to control their bodies. They cite Mr. Biden’s vaccine mandates as justification for their efforts to block his presidency.Some bridled at Trump’s recent, full-throated endorsements of the vaccine and wondered whether he was still on their side.“A lot of people in the MAGA Patriot community are like, ‘What is up with Trump?’” Mr. Davis, the Texas lawyer, said. “With most of us, the vaccines are anathema.”In interviews, some who attended the Capitol protests gave credence to a new set of falsehoods promoted by Mr. Trump and conservative media figures and politicians that minimize the attack, or blame the violence falsely on left-wing infiltrators. And a few believe the insurrection did not go far enough.“Most everybody thinks we ought to have went with guns, and I kind of agree with that myself,” said Oren Orr, 32, a landscaper from Robbinsville, N.C., who had rented a car with his wife to get to the Capitol last year. “I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back. That is what I believe.”Mr. Orr added that he was not planning to do anything, only pray. Last year, he said he brought a baton and Taser to Washington but did not get them out. Some supporters bridled at Mr. Trump’s recent, full-throated endorsements of the vaccine and wondered whether he was still on their side.Stephen Goldstein for The New York TimesMore than a year later, the day may not define their lives, but the sentiment that drove them there has given them new purpose. Despite multiple reviews showing the 2020 elections were run fairly, they are adamant that the voting process is rigged. They feel the news media and Democrats are trying to divide the country.The ralliers were largely white, conservative men and women who have formed the bedrock of the Trump movement since 2016. Some describe themselves as self-styled patriots, some openly carrying rifles and handguns. Many invoke the name of Jesus and say they believe they are fighting a holy war to preserve a Christian nation.The people who went to Washington for Jan. 6 are in some ways an isolated cohort. But they are also part of a larger segment of the public that may distance itself from the day’s violence but share some of its beliefs. A question now is the extent to which they represent a greater movement.A national survey led by Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, concluded that about 47 million American adults, or one in every five, agreed with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, about 21 million, or 9 percent of American adults, shared the belief that animated many of those who went beyond marching and invaded the Capitol, Mr. Pape said: that the use of force was justified to restore Mr. Trump to the presidency.“They are combustible material, like an amount of dry brushwood that could be set off during wildfire season by a lightning strike or by a spark,” he said.Some downplay Jan. 6 as a largely peaceful expression of their right to protest, comparing the Capitol attack with the 2020 racial-justice protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder. They complain about a double standard, saying that the news media glossed over arson and looting after those protests but fixated on the violence on Jan. 6.They have rallied around the 700 people facing criminal charges in connection to the attack, calling them political prisoners.Earlier this month in Phoenix, a few dozen conservatives met to commemorate the anniversary Jan. 6 as counterprogramming to the solemn ceremonies taking place in Washington. They prayed and sang “Amazing Grace” and broadcast a phone call from the mother of Jacob Chansley, an Arizona man whose painted face and Viking helmet transformed him into an emblem of the riots. Mr. Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison after pleading guilty to federal charges.A counterprotester in Phoenix, right, attempted to disturb a vigil commemorating the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Antranik Tavitian/The RepublicThen it was Jeff Zink’s turn at the microphone. Mr. Zink is one of several people who attended the Capitol protests and who are running for public office. Some won state legislature seats or local council positions in last November’s elections. Now, others have their eyes on the midterms.Mr. Zink is making an uphill run for Congress as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic swath of Phoenix and said he will fight for Jan. 6 defendants — a group that includes his 32-year-old son, Ryan.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts

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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corruptsRobert ReichThe two Democratic senators chose to wreck American democracy, simply to feed their sense of their own importance What can possibly explain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to sink voting rights protections? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone, themselves included, knew bipartisanship was impossible?Arizona Democrats censure Kyrsten Sinema for voting rights failureRead moreWhy did they say they couldn’t support changing Senate filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes?Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?Part of the answer to all these questions can be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But if you want the whole answer, you need also to look at the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: ego. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had heard of Manchin and almost no one outside Arizona (and probably few within it) had ever heard of Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated.I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood and the United States Senate.Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told Manchin asked Joe Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of Build Back Better and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on Build Back Better, he’s got to rename it because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office.Yet out of 100 senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for attention.Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her national celebrity as a spoiler.Biden prides himself on having been a member of the senatorial “club” for many years before ascending to the presidency and argued during the 2020 campaign that this familiarity would give him an advantage in dealing with his former colleagues. But it may be working against him. Senators don’t want clubby familiarity from a president. They want a president to shine the national spotlight on them.Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreSome senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological.Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS voting rightsOpinionUS politicsDemocratsUS SenateBiden administrationUS CongressJoe ManchincommentReuse this content More

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      Arizona Democrats Censure Sinema After Filibuster Vote

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      Kyrsten Sinema, a first-term Arizona senator, was rebuked by fellow Democrats in her state after her vote on the filibuster helped sink the party’s voting-rights legislation.PHOENIX — A rift between Senator Kyrsten Sinema and fellow Democrats back home in Arizona deepened on Saturday as the state party formally rebuked Ms. Sinema for refusing to change the Senate’s filibuster rules to pass sweeping voting rights legislation.The censure from the party’s executive board was symbolic, but it crystallized a growing sense of anger and frustration among liberal activists and Democratic voters aimed at Ms. Sinema.They accuse Ms. Sinema, a first-term senator, of impeding key parts of President Biden’s agenda, and have vowed to withhold donations and search for a liberal primary challenger when she is up for re-election in two years. Activists have staged protests outside her office and begun a hunger strike to urge Ms. Sinema to support changing the Senate rules to allow voting-rights legislation to pass with a simple majority of the 100 senators rather than the 60 votes required under Senate rules.But she has steadfastly refused, and reiterated her opposition to scrapping the filibuster in a Jan. 13 speech on the Senate floor, arguing that the parliamentary tactic “has been used repeatedly to protect against wild swings in federal policy.”Ms. Sinema said that she supported the Democratic voting-rights legislation, but that she believed doing away with the filibuster would worsen America’s political divisions.The opposition from Ms. Sinema and Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to changing the 60-vote threshold required in the Senate to move major legislation forward has all but doomed the Democrats’ hopes of passing federal voting legislation.The Arizona Democratic chairwoman, Raquel Terán, said on Saturday that the party’s executive board had voted for the censure because of Ms. Sinema’s “failure to do whatever it takes to ensure the health of democracy.”State Representative Raquel Terán during a vote on the Arizona Budget in Phoenix last year.Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressMs. Terán said voting rights were already being threatened in Arizona, and cited Republican proposals to limit mail-in voting and a widely criticized Republican-run audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 60 percent of the state’s registered voters. Democrats nationally cite a barrage of Republican legislation aimed at the rules for voting, as well as counting and certifying votes as a fundamental threat to American democracy.“The ramifications of failing to pass federal legislation that protects their right to vote are too large and far-reaching,” Ms. Terán said in a statement.Hannah Hurley, a spokeswoman for Ms. Sinema, said in a statement that Ms. Sinema had been consistent about her opposition to changing the filibuster.“Kyrsten has always promised Arizonans she would be an independent voice for the state — not for either political party,” Ms. Hurley said. “She’s delivered for Arizonans and has always been honest about where she stands.”Arizona’s other senator, Mark Kelly, also a Democrat, said last week that he would support weakening the filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation.Ms. Sinema, a onetime Green Party-affiliated activist, has won praise from Republicans and infuriated Democrats by bucking her own party as a senator who represents a closely divided swing state.In being censured by her own party, she joins a club that includes former Senator John McCain, former Senator Jeff Flake and the state’s sitting Republican governor, Doug Ducey, who have all been censured by the Arizona State Republican Party.Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist, said that those censures of prominent Arizona Republicans by their own party had little effect, and that he doubted the censure alone would hurt Ms. Sinema’s political fortunes. But, he said Ms. Sinema’s problems go far deeper than the censure vote.“The censure in and of itself means absolutely nothing,” Mr. Marson said. “It’s a feckless move. However, Senator Sinema certainly has a broader problem than just a censure from the party faithful.”Those problems include fierce discontent among Democratic voters, who have signaled that they might prefer a liberal alternative to Ms. Sinema, such as Representative Ruben Gallego, a Phoenix congressman some activists are hoping to draft into a primary.The fund-raising group Emily’s List, a major supporter of Ms. Sinema in her 2018 run for Senate, has also threatened to pull its support, and she has recorded flagging numbers among her Democratic base in recent polls.A new survey of Arizona voters, conducted this month, but not yet released, by OH Predictive Insights, a Phoenix polling and research firm, found a 30-point gulf in support for Arizona’s senators among Democrats. While 74 percent of Democrats said they had favorable views of Mr. Kelly, just 42 percent of Democrats felt the same about Ms. Sinema. At the same time, the survey also found some evidence that Ms. Sinema could be vulnerable among the wider electorate as well. On the whole, by a nine-point margin, voters said they viewed her unfavorably, while they were about evenly split on their opinions of Mr. Kelly. “To be under all this pressure for so long, and she hasn’t wavered — you’ve got to give a little credit for that,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research at OH Predictive Insights. “But she’s not going to be on a lot of people’s Christmas card lists next year.” More

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      in US Politics

      Arizona Democrats censure Kyrsten Sinema for voting rights failure

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      Kyrsten Sinema: Arizona Democrats censure senator for voting rights failureDemocrat opposed move to carve voting rights issues out of filibuster and thereby overcome GOP opposition

      Republican resistance to Trump rings hollow on voting rights
      The Arizona Democratic party has formally censured Kyrsten Sinema, the US senator whose opposition to filibuster reform helped sink attempts to protect voting rights.The three lessons for the voting rights struggle from the latest Senate setback | Steve PhillipsRead moreIn a statement on Saturday the Arizona party chair, Raquel Terán, said: “While we take no pleasure in this announcement, the ADP executive board has decided to formally censure Senator Sinema as a result of her failure to do whatever it takes to ensure the health of our democracy.”The attempt to pass voting rights legislation died in the Senate this week, a huge blow to Joe Biden and his party in a year which finishes with midterm elections in which Republicans are expected to prosper.Sinema supported two bills but they were blocked by Republicans after hours of emotional and at times deeply personal debate over voting rights, racism and the fragility of American democracy.Republicans were able to block the bills because Sinema and another moderate Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, opposed a move to carve voting rights issues out of the filibuster, the Senate rule by which most legislation requires 60 votes to progress.Saying she opposed reform because the filibuster protected the rights of the minority, Sinema said in a floor speech she was “committed to doing my part to avoid toxic political rhetoric, to build bridges, to forge common ground, and to achieve lasting results for Arizona and this country”.Critics pointed out that no only do Republicans in the 50-50 Senate represent millions fewer Americans than Democrats, but the GOP itself was recently happy to change filibuster rules to require only a simple majority to confirm supreme court justices.Donald Trump was therefore able to nominate three hardline conservatives to a court which had already gutted federal voting rights protections.Since that supreme court decision, in 2013, and at a growing pace since Trump refused to concede defeat in 2020, Republican state governments have passed laws which critics say are meant to make it harder for communities which lean Democratic, particularly Black voters, to cast their ballots.Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, stoked uproar this week when, after the failure of the Democratic voting rights push, he said: “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”Diana DeGette, a Democratic representative from Colorado, said: “African American voters ARE AMERICANS and to suggest otherwise is about as racist as it gets.”00:33Other Republican measures, critics say, will make it easier for the GOP to overturn results.In her statement on Saturday, Terán said: “The Arizona Democratic party is a diverse coalition with plenty of room for policy disagreements.“However, on the matter of the filibuster and the urgency to protect voting rights, we have been crystal clear in the choice between an archaic legislative norm and protecting Arizonans rights to vote. We choose the latter and we always will.”Terán praised Sinema’s role in passing Covid relief and a bipartisan infrastructure bill, key parts of Biden’s agenda. But she also highlighted Republican attempts to audit and overturn Trump’s defeat in Arizona and election laws being passed nationwide.“The ramifications of failing to pass federal legislation that protects [the] right to vote are too large and far reaching,” she said.A spokeswoman for Sinema said: “During three terms in the US House, and now in the Senate, Kyrsten has always promised Arizonans she would be an independent voice for the state – not for either political party. She’s delivered for Arizonans and has always been honest about where she stands.”Nonetheless, the senator has suffered significant blowback.Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and leading progressive, said this week he could back primary challengers to Manchin and Sinema in 2024. Sinema also saw Emily’s List, a powerful abortion rights group, withhold its endorsement.In a statement, Emily’s List president Laphonza Butler said: “We believe the decision by Senator Sinema is not only a blow to voting rights and our electoral system but also to the work of all the partners who supported her victory and her constituents who tried to communicate the importance of this bill.”A Democratic fundraising juggernaut, Emily’s List was Sinema’s top political donor in her 2018 Senate race, according to opensecrets.org.Another abortion rights group, Naral Pro-Choice America, said it would only endorse senators “who support changing the Senate rules to pass the critical legislation that will protect voting rights”.Who is Kyrsten Sinema? Friends and foes ponder an Arizona Senate enigmaRead moreArizona’s other Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, was on Saturday fundraising off his decision to support filibuster reform on voting rights matters, which he said was “a tough one – but [the] right one for Arizona and our country”. The effects of censure by a state party are debatable. In Arizona, the Republican John McCain was censured in 2014 for what his state party deemed too liberal a voting record. The senator and 2008 presidential nominee took it in his stride, as part of his public image as a political maverick.Sinema won the Arizona Senate seat vacated by Jeff Flake, an anti-Trump conservative, and also presents herself as unbound by traditional political codes.Last year, Chuck Coughlin, a former Republican operative in the state, told the Guardian Sinema was a “pragmatist” who “understands that if she is to succeed in Arizona, she must succeed in this lane”.However, Saundra Cole, a Democrat who once campaigned for Sinema, said: “She’s not John McCain. She’s not a maverick. I didn’t agree with him on many things but at least we knew where he stood.”TopicsArizonaUS SenateUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Republicans Want New Tool in Elusive Search for Voter Fraud: Election Police

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      Republicans in three states have proposed strike forces against election crimes even though fraud cases remain minuscule.WASHINGTON — Reprising the rigged-election belief that has become a mantra among their supporters, Republican politicians in at least three states are proposing to establish police forces to hunt exclusively for voter fraud and other election crimes, a category of offenses that experts say is tiny at best.The plans are part of a new wave of initiatives that Republicans say are directed at voter fraud. They are being condemned by voting rights advocates and even some local election supervisors, who call them costly and unnecessary appeasement of the Republican base that will select primary-election winners for this November’s midterms and the 2024 presidential race.The next round of voting clashes comes after the apparent demise of Democratic voting rights legislation in Washington on Thursday. It is a reminder that while the Democratic agenda in Washington seems dead, Republican state-level efforts to make voting harder show no sign of slowing down.Supporters say the added enforcement will root out instances of fraud and assure the public that everything possible is being done to make sure that American elections are accurate and legitimate. Critics say the efforts can easily be abused and used as political cudgels or efforts to intimidate people from registering and voting. And Democrats say the main reason Republican voters have lost faith in the electoral system is because of the incessant Republican focus on almost entirely imagined fraud.The most concrete proposal is in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the State Legislature last week for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office. The plan, which Mr. DeSantis has been touting since the fall, would include 20 sworn police officers and field offices statewide.Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the Florida Legislature for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office.Chris O’Meara/Associated PressThat was followed on Thursday by a pledge by David Perdue, the former Georgia senator who is a Republican candidate for governor, to create his own force of election police “to make Georgia elections the safest and securest in the country.” Mr. Perdue, who lost his Senate seat in 2020, claimed that Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is seeking re-election, weakened election standards and refused to investigate claims of fraud following President Biden’s narrow win in the state.And in Arizona, a vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, State Senator Wendy Rogers, has filed legislation to establish a $5 million “bureau of elections” in the governor’s office with the power to subpoena witnesses and impound election equipment.Ms. Rogers’s bill probably faces an uphill road in the Legislature, where Republicans are only narrowly in control and have been battered for their support of a widely ridiculed multimillion-dollar inquiry into 2020 election results. Prospects for the Florida and Georgia proposals are less clear.The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him.Mr. DeSantis took a tough line in November when he unveiled his proposal, saying that the new unit would chase crimes that local election official shrug at. “There’ll be people, if you see someone ballot harvesting, you know, what do you do? If you call into the election office, a lot of times they don’t do anything,” he said at an appearance in West Palm Beach.“I guarantee you this,” he added. “The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that.”None of the three states — and for that matter, none of the other 47 and the District of Columbia — reported any more than a minuscule number of election fraud cases after the 2020 races. Mr. DeSantis said after the 2020 vote that his was “the state that did it right and that other states should emulate.” The only notable hint of irregularity in Florida was the recent arrest on fraud charges of four men in a retirement complex north of Orlando. At least two of them appeared to be winter Floridians accused of casting ballots both there and in more frigid states to the north.Trump supporters gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in downtown Phoenix as ballots were counted in November 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesBut Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Perdue say their strike forces are still needed to root out other election irregularities and to bolster their constituents’ sagging faith in the honesty of the vote. The same rationale has powered so-called audits of election results and clampdowns on election rules by Republican-run legislatures across the country.Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.Mr. Trump comfortably won Florida by about 370,000 votes in 2020, and his narrow losses in Arizona and Georgia were confirmed by expert audits, recounts and even the notorious Cyber Ninjas inquiry into the vote in Maricopa County.“We don’t need further investigations into elections that are freely and fairly conducted,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local. “We’ve established that again and again and again. This is more pablum to the people who believe in fraud and conspiracy theories and lies that the last election was stolen.”Neither the new laws nor election autopsies appear to have shaken the conviction of many Trump supporters that the election system is suspect. Some scholars say they see the police forces as the latest bid by politicians to scratch that itch.Bids to curb so-called fraud are becoming standard for Republican candidates who want to win over voters, Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview. “Whoever is the nominee in 2024, whether it’s Trump or anyone else, it will likely be part of their platform,” Mr. Burden said.The idea of an election police force is not new, even in the states where they are being proposed. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger already oversees 23 investigators whose purview includes election irregularities, and an assistant state attorney general exclusively prosecutes crimes in elections, the judiciary and local governments. The Arizona attorney general manages a relatively new “election integrity” investigative unit, and Florida election violations are prosecuted by both state and local authorities, as is true in most states. More