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      Tate Reeves beats Brandon Presley in race for Mississippi governor’s office

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      Brandon Presley conceded to the incumbent governor Tate Reeves on Tuesday night after the Republican managed to hold on to his position.During the state’s only gubernatorial debate this season, Reeves and Presley, who is related to Elvis Presley, had exchanged verbal blows, with Reeves alleging that Presley had been bought by out-of-state, liberal political interest groups. Presley hammered Reeves on his and his family’s alleged involvement in the state’s ongoing corruption scandal.Corruption, the state’s ongoing healthcare crisis and education were at the forefront of voters’ minds this election season. In commercials and during his 82-county campaign, Presley missed no opportunities to reference Reeves’s alleged involvement in the TANF fund corruption scandal, the largest such scandal in state history, or to remind voters of Reeves’s refusal to expand Medicaid.Though pointedly asked about it twice during the debate, Reeves refused to say whether or not he would support the efforts of the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, to receive information about women who travel out of state to receive abortions.After Presley pushed the issue of the state’s collapsing healthcare system, including closing hospitals and blamed the collapse on Reeves’s refusal to expand Medicaid access, Reeves announced plans to solve the hospital crisis, just months before the election, despite him and his team saying a similar plan would not work earlier this year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe night before the gubernatorial debate, Reeves received an 11th-hour endorsement from Donald Trump. With his victory over Presley, Reeves continues his streak of not having lost a statewide election since he entered Mississippi politics two decades ago. More

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      Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear re-elected in win for abortion rights

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      Andy Beshear, the Democratic incumbent governor, won a second term in the Republican-leaning state of Kentucky on Tuesday.Beshear’s hope that his support of abortion rights would persuade voters was realized even as skepticism of the national Democratic party grows in the state.While much of Beshear’s first term was dominated by his response to a series of natural disasters and the pandemic, his re-election campaign was often focused on dire warnings about the future of abortion rights. He portrayed his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, as too extreme on the issue, pointing to his support for the state’s abortion ban, which lacks exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.Beshear’s gubernatorial tenure also included a high-profile mass shooting in Louisville that killed five people, including one of Beshear’s friends. In response, Beshear called on the Republican-led state legislature to enact a red flag law that would allow a judge to order someone’s firearms be removed if they posed a risk to themselves or someone else.While Beshear has affirmed his belief in the second amendment, days after the 2023 shooting, he said: “I’d like to think Democrats and Republicans – red or blue, anybody on the ideology – can come together and say, ‘If we know somebody is right on that brink of going out and committing a horrendous action, don’t you think we should be able to take action?’”The election pitted two former law firm colleagues against each other in one of this year’s most high-profile contests. Beshear’s win signals to Joe Biden and other Democrats that they should continue to focus on abortion rights in 2024, when control of Congress and the White House are at stake.In 2019, Cameron became the first Black candidate to be elected as Kentucky’s attorney general, and he would have been the nation’s first Black Republican governor.During his campaign, he was lambasted by the family of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman who was killed by three white Louisville police officers during a botched raid on her apartment in March 2020. As attorney general, Cameron oversaw the investigation into Taylor’s killing, and faced criticism for the lack of criminal charges in her death. (Cameron recommended that only one of the officers involved be indicted, and only for the wanton endangerment of Taylor’s neighbor.)Cameron has affirmed his support for the current Kentucky abortion law, which bans all abortions except when carried out to save a pregnant woman’s life or to prevent a disabling injury.Kayla Long cited abortion rights as an important issue for her as she cast her ballot for Beshear in Shelbyville, between Louisville and Frankfort, on a mild fall morning.“I think it’s a woman’s right to choose,” she said. “And I don’t think politicians should be involved in that choice at all.”Another Shelbyville voter, Kent Herold, backed Cameron and shared his candidate’s criticism of Biden for his handling of the economy amid surging inflation during his term.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Do you go grocery shopping? Do you buy gas? Let’s be real. I’m not sure he knows what he’s doing,” Herold said.Beshear played up his stewardship of the state’s economy, pointing to record high economic development and historically low unemployment during his term, while promising the state is poised for more growth. And he pushed back against his challenger’s efforts to turn the election into a referendum on Biden, at one point dismissing party affiliation as a box to be checked off.“This attorney general knows that if this race is about me versus him, that you know who I am and how I’ve led and how I’ve shown up every day,” Beshear said during another of their debates.The election might also signal dwindling enthusiasm for the “parents’ rights” movements, which Republicans have increasingly touted. In a message tailored to the state’s legions of conservative voters, Cameron had criticized Beshear’s veto of a sweeping bill that banned gender-affirming care for young transgender people. The veto was overridden by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature. Beshear said the bill “rips away” the freedom of parents to make medical decisions for their children, adding that “all children are children of God”.With this win, Beshear continues his family’s political winning streak in a state that has trended heavily toward Republicans. Beshear’s father, Steve Beshear, is a well-regarded former two-term governor. Andy Beshear was narrowly elected as attorney general in 2015 and as governor in 2019, when he ousted the Republican incumbent, Matt Bevin. More

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      Biden faces calls not to seek re-election as shock poll rattles senior Democrats

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      Senior Democrats have sounded the alarm after an opinion poll showed Joe Biden trailing the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump in five out of six battleground states exactly a year before the presidential election.Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, with Biden ahead in Wisconsin, according to a survey published on Sunday by the New York Times and Siena College. Biden beat Trump in all six states in 2020 but the former president now leads by an average of 48% to 44% across these states in a hypothetical rematch.Additional findings released on Monday, however, showed that if Trump were to be convicted of criminal charges against him, some of his support in some swing states would erode by about 6%, which could be enough to tip the electoral college in Biden’s favour.Even so, the survey is in line with a series of recent polls that show the race too close for comfort for many Trump foes as voters express doubts about Biden’s age – the oldest US president in history turns 81 later this month – and handling of the economy, prompting renewed debate over whether he should step aside to make way for a younger nominee.“It’s very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden’s team says his resolve to run is firm,” David Axelrod, a former strategist for President Barack Obama, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “He’s defied CW [conventional wisdom] before but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party – not ‘bed-wetting,’ but legitimate concern.”Bill Kristol, director of the Defending Democracy Together advocacy organisation and a former Republican official, tweeted: “It’s time. President Biden has served our country well. I’m confident he’ll do so for the next year. But it’s time for an act of personal sacrifice and public spirit. It’s time to pass the torch to the next generation. It’s time for Biden to announce he won’t run in 2024.”Andrew Yang, who lost to Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, added: “If Joe Biden were to step aside, he would go down in history as an accomplished statesman who beat Trump and achieved a great deal. If he decides to run again it may go down as one of the great overreaches of all time that delivers us to a disastrous Trump second term.”The New York Times and Siena poll suggests that Biden’s multiracial and multigenerational coalition, critical to his success in 2020, is decaying. Voters under age 30 favour the president by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Trump’s edge in rural regions.Black voters – a core Biden demographic – are now registering 22% support in these states for Trump, a level that the New York Times reported was unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times. The president’s staunch support for Israel in the current Middle East crisis has also prompted criticism from young and progressive voters.Survey respondents in swing states say they trust Trump over Biden on the economy by a 22-point margin. Some 71% say Biden is “too old”, including 54% of his own supporters. Just 39% felt the same about Trump, who is himself 77 years old.Electability was central to Biden’s argument for the nomination three years ago but the poll found a generic, unnamed Democrat doing much better with an eight-point lead over Trump. Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota has launched a long-shot campaign against Biden in the Democratic primary, contending that the president’s anaemic poll numbers are cause for a dramatic change of course.Next year’s election could be further complicated by independent runs from the environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr and the leftwing academic Cornel West.Trump is dominating the Republican presidential primary and plans to skip Wednesday’s third debate in Miami, Florida, in favour of holding a campaign rally. He spent Monday taking the witness stand in a New York civil fraud trial. He is also facing 91 criminal indictments in four jurisdictions.The Biden campaign played down the concerns, drawing a comparison with Democratic incumbent Obama’s 2012 victory over Republican Mitt Romney. Biden’s spokesperson, Kevin Munoz, said in a statement: “Predictions more than a year out tend to look a little different a year later. Don’t take our word for it: Gallup predicted an eight-point loss for President Obama only for him to win handedly a year later.”Munoz added that Biden’s campaign “is hard at work reaching and mobilizing our diverse, winning coalition of voters one year out on the choice between our winning, popular agenda and Maga [Make America great again] Republicans’ unpopular extremism. We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about a poll.”The margin of sampling error for each state in the Sunday poll is between 4.4 and 4.8 percentage points, which is greater than Trump’s reported advantage in Pennsylvania.Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast and a former conservative radio host, wrote on X: “Ultimately, 2024 is not about re-electing Joe Biden. It is about the urgent necessity of stopping the return of Donald J Trump to the presidency. The question is how.” More

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      Rashida Tlaib claims in video that Biden supports Palestinian genocide

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      Michigan Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, has released a video accusing Joe Biden of supporting the “genocide of the Palestinian people”.Tlaib has been a withering critic of Biden’s staunch backing of the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza and the White House refusal to listen to demands from some progressive Democrats to back calls for a ceasefire.The video represents by far her most blunt criticism of Biden and his administration and includes a warning that she believes his stance on the war will hurt his re-election chances in 2024, as Michigan has a significant Arab American population.“Mr President, the American people are not with you on this one,” Tlaib, who has called for an immediate ceasefire in the Israeli offensive on Gaza, said in the video on the platform X, warning: “We will remember in 2024.”The post continues with an overlay of lettering: “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people. The American people won’t forget. Biden, support a cease-fire now. Or don’t count on us in 2024.”This week Tlaib fought off an attempt in Congress led by extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene to formally reprimand her for “antisemitic activity, sympathizing with terrorist organizations and leading an insurrection” after she participated in a pro-Palestinian protest in which she aired the accusation of an Israeli genocide of Palestinians.Tlaib has faced criticism from within her own party. Last week, a pro-Israel Democratic group began airing a TV ad in Detroit criticizing the congresswoman, one of two Muslim women in the legislative body, for voting against US funding of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and a resolution condemning the 7 October Hamas cross-border attack.Tlaib’s video post highlights a growing issue for Biden, one that often splits Democratic support down generational lines as well as political ones. Tlaib is among 18 Democrats from the mostly younger, progressive-leaning wing of the party co-sponsoring a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.Last week, a senior Democratic senator, Dick Durbin of Illinois, also called for a ceasefire – but only if Israeli hostages held by Hamas were released. “Whatever the rationale from the beginning has now reached an intolerable level. We need to have a resolution in the Middle East that gives some promise to the future,” Durbin told CNN.The video posted by Tlaib counter-posed comments by Biden on US support for Israel with film of bodies lying in the rubble of Gaza, children wounded by Israeli airstrikes and global protests against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in response to the deadly 7 October Hamas cross-border attack.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne clip features a demonstration in Michigan in which protesters chanted “from the river to the sea” – a chant that many Jews and Israelis view as calling for the eradication of Israel, though others say it can have a multitude of meanings.In a follow-up post on X, formerly Twitter, Tlaib stated: “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.”Tlaib has become a lightning rod for divisions in the US with some of her own party and Republicans saying she has not condemned Hamas fervently enough and others saying she is a victim of Islamaphobia and hostility toward those who advocate for Palestinian civil rights. More

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      Who is Democratic congressman Dean Phillips – and why is he taking on Biden?

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      For people who know the Democratic Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips, his run for presidency is perplexing. For some of them, it’s also disappointing, maybe even enraging. But they also think he’s genuine in his quest to go up against Joe Biden in the Democratic primary, despite how it might affect his own political career and how it could damage Biden in one of the most consequential elections in recent US history.Phillips announced his run for the presidency in New Hampshire last week, saying it was time for the next generation to lead in a pointed reference to concerns about Biden’s age. He says he is a fan of Biden’s and a supporter of his policies, but he is 54, while Biden is 80. Phillips, the heir to a distilling empire who also co-owned a gelato company, is injecting his own wealth into his presidential campaign – solving any problem of raising funds.In Minnesota, where Phillips represents a purple district filled with wealthier suburbs of Minneapolis, Phillips first ran for Congress in the state’s third congressional district and flipped a longtime Republican seat blue. In his next two elections, he won more and more voters to his side, preaching pragmatic politics and driving a “government repair truck”.Ann Gavin helped him. She knocked on doors, delivered campaign signs. The 70-year-old Democratic voter from Plymouth, Minnesota, admires the congressman and the work he’s done for the district. She thinks he would be a great president someday, too, with his business savvy and political skills.“I’ve got friends who are upset. I’m more confused than upset,” she said. “I just think the timing is wrong. And he probably knows that too. So I’m not sure if he’s going to accomplish much.”Steve Schmidt, the anti-Trump Republican strategist, serves as a campaign adviser to Phillips. Schmidt said all the polling he’s seen shows Biden losing to Trump in 2024. Biden’s vulnerability is a private concern for Democrats, yet none of them will publicly admit it, he claims. The idea that voters having a choice in the primary will ultimately threaten democracy by throwing the election to Trump “demonstrates how far off the rails we’ve gotten”, he said.Phillips was not made available for an interview himself.In his run for the White House, the little-known Phillips now has to introduce himself to key early voting states then possibly the whole country. Schmidt sees that as an asset: he doesn’t have decades of “political stink on him” to overcome, and he can build up a lot of name recognition quickly because “you can get famous very fast in American politics”, he says.Phillips plans to run in New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina, then reassess from there. If he drops out, he will concede with dignity and throw all his weight behind defeating Donald Trump, Schmidt said.In Minnesota, at least, voters in his district and active Democrats know him. To some of them, his decision to run felt more personal – and also potentially disastrous.Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, recruited Phillips to run for Congress after trying for many years. Martin and others worked hard to get Phillips elected and flip the seat in the third district. He saw Phillips as a “rising star” in the party who was charting his path in Washington.Now he thinks that’s all gone.“He just pissed it all away on this vanity project that’s not really going to end up with him being the nominee of the party,” Martin said. “Here he is, 54 years old, and he basically blew his whole political career on something that was never going to be, just to make a point, and I’m not even sure what the point is.”Whenever Phillips would appear in the media over the past year talking about how someone else should run against Biden, Martin said he would reach out to express his disappointment and share how it wouldn’t be a good move politically or personally.He is not alone. Among some of Phillips’s previous donors and supporters, there is a sense of betrayal and abandonment. For Martin, it’s not clear who, if anyone, is encouraging Phillips to run, despite it also seeming like he’s earnestly made the decision.“One thing you can say about Dean Phillips: he is a very genuine and sincere guy. He’s thoughtful,” Martin said. “This is not just some sort of kneejerk deal. I don’t think he came to this conclusion lightly, and as much as I disagree with that conclusion, I think it would be hard-pressed for anyone who actually knows Dean to suggest that he’s not sincere or genuine in his belief on why he’s doing this.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe legislators who represent the areas Phillips’s district covers released a statement this week detailing their support for Biden, who visited Minnesota this week. Phillips won’t get organizational or financial support from the Democratic National Committee or state parties, making campaigning more difficult in an already-difficult run against a sitting president.Not having the support of the party infrastructure isn’t the same as not having support from Democratic voters, Schmidt said. “The most out-of-touch people in the country work at the DNC.”.There are two schools of thought among Democrats on how this could play out: Phillips could undermine Biden by hitting on his weak points during a primary, leaving the president all the more vulnerable in the general election. Or Phillips’s campaign could energize Biden and his supporters, buoying them up as they fend off a challenger.The Phillips v Biden matchup is likely to focus mostly on Biden’s age, given the two don’t differ much on policy. While primary candidates often launch long-shot campaigns as a way to move the leading candidate closer to their positions, in this instance, Phillips’s presence in the race can’t make Biden younger. And a focus during the primary on Biden’s age can play into Republicans’ hands, as it’s already something they use to attack the president.Schmidt said the question of whether Phillips’s run brings attention to Biden’s age is “premised on the absurdity that something Congressman Phillips is doing is bringing attention to something that is clearly evident”.“The congressman isn’t taking the paper off of the package, so to speak, on that question, and he’s not going to talk about the president’s age,” he said. “Why would anyone talk about the president’s age? The president’s age is what the president’s age is.”Back at home, Democrats aren’t just grappling with seeing a friend or someone they respected make a decision they don’t agree with. They’re also worried about what could happen in the third district.Phillips’s district isn’t deep blue – it’ll require more money and effort from Democrats to keep it in their hands without Phillips. Phillips hasn’t said whether he’ll continue to run for re-election in his district, though he will face a primary if he does. In Minnesota, the state party has an endorsement process that assesses all candidates instead of immediately throwing its weight behind incumbents.Phillips’s presidential campaign might not last until Minnesota’s primary, on 5 March. If he’s still in it, Gavin, who knocked doors for Phillips, probably wouldn’t vote for him. She’d consider it, if he got a lot of traction in prior states and was pulling ahead, but she doesn’t want Trump to return to office.“Would I vote for him?” Gavin said. “Boy, certainly not if I thought it was going to hurt Biden’s chances, so I guess maybe I wouldn’t. That says it all, right?” More

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      US courts hear efforts to remove Trump from 2024 ballot – will they work?

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      When Scott Gessler stepped up to the lectern in a Denver courtroom on Monday, he opened with a full-throated defense of American democracy.“When it comes to decide who should lead our nation, it’s the people of the United States of America who should make those decisions,” he said. “This court should not interfere with that fundamental value – that rule of democracy.”It wasn’t so much the argument that was significant as much as who Gessler was representing: Donald Trump. The same Donald Trump who fought doggedly to have courts, state legislators, his vice-president and members of Congress throw out valid electoral slates from several states and declare him the winner of the 2020 presidential election.Gessler is defending the former president in a novel case in Colorado seeking to block him from appearing on the state’s ballot – a case that centers around whether Trump is disqualified from running for president under section 3 of the 14th amendment. The Reconstruction-era provision disqualifies anyone from holding office if they have taken an oath to the United States and subsequently “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” unless Congress votes to remove that disqualification by two-thirds vote.It is not the only one of its kind: the Minnesota supreme court heard a similar case this week and there is also a similar case already pending in Michigan, a key battleground state. States are tasked with ensuring that candidates for office meet the qualifications so the challenges to Trump’s candidacy are bubbling up through state court.The 14th amendment cases are part of a mosaic of legal efforts that seek to hold Trump and his allies accountable for overturning the 2020 election, but they are among the most important. While the cases are dry – steeped in legalese and historical understanding of constitutional text – they get at Trump in a way that none of the other suits can: blocking his return to political life.While the other cases could require Trump and his allies to face jail time, lose their law licenses, and pay damages for defamatory lies, none of them would block Trump from returning to the White House in 2024 (a criminal conviction does not disqualify someone from running or serving as president). If he wins the election, he could theoretically pardon himself in the federal cases against him or dismiss the prosecutions. And while no pardon would be available in the Georgia criminal case, it’s untested whether the constitution would allow a state to incarcerate a serving, elected president.Simply put, winning the election is widely seen as Trump’s best chance at escaping the criminal charges against him. Losing the 14th amendment cases would cut off that possibility.“Let me be clear. The purpose of our actions is to obtain rulings that Trump is disqualified from the ballot, not merely to have a political debate. Not at all to have a political debate. Not merely to air issues,” said Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, a left-leaning group that filed the challenge in Minnesota.“The dangers of Trump ever being allowed back into public office are exactly those foreseen by the framers of section 3. Which is that they knew that if an oath-taking insurrectionist were allowed back into power they would do the same if not worse.”The 14th amendment measure was passed after the civil war and has never been used to block a presidential candidate from the ballot. It picked up steam this summer after a pair of conservative scholars authored a law review article saying that it applied to Trump.Trump’s lawyers have defended him by arguing that his conduct on January 6 did not amount to an insurrection, that Congress needs to pass a law to enforce the 14th amendment, and that its language does not apply to the president.But expert witnesses for the challengers in the Colorado case offered a wealth of historical and other evidence this week suggesting that what Trump did on January 6 was an insurrection as the framers of the 14th amendment would have understood it.Legal observers almost universally agree that the US supreme court, where Trump appointed three of the six members of the court’s conservative super-majority, will ultimately decide the issue and whether Trump is eligible to run for re-election. There is not a clear legal consensus and since the law is so untested, it’s not clear what the court will do.Outside of the courtroom, the biggest challenge may be getting a wide swath of Americans to accept the idea that someone they support may not be eligible to run for president. In a democracy, there is something viscerally distasteful about not being able to vote for the person we support, Ned Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University, noted earlier this year.It’s a question the supreme court justices in Minnesota seemed to be wrestling with as well, acknowledging the case was coming up on a line between politics and the law.“Let’s say we agree with you that section 3 is self-executing, and that we do have the authority under the relevant statute to keep Mr Trump’s name off the ballot. Should we – is the question that concerns me the most,” Natalie Hudson, the chief justice of Minnesota’s supreme court said on Thursday during oral argument.But the challengers in the cases, which are supported by left-leaning groups, argue that disqualifying Trump based on the 14th amendment is no different than disqualifying someone because they are under the age of 35, a naturalized citizen, or because they have served two terms as president.“In many ways, section 3 sets forth a qualification for president that is far more important than the other constitutional criteria,” Fein said. “Most Americans are not too worried about whatever dangers might have once been posed by somebody who was not a natural born US citizen.“But someone who broke an oath to the constitution and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the constitution poses a real danger if they’re ever allowed back into power.”Rachel Leingang contributed reporting from Minneapolis More

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      What’s Left Unsaid review: Andrew Cuomo and the case for his defense

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      Andrew Cuomo resigned as governor of New York in August 2021, amid a blizzard of sexual harassment allegations. None were prosecuted. Against this backdrop, he smolders. Once a giant figure in the Democratic ranks, he is out of a job. He “died as he lived”, Lis Smith, a former adviser, wrote in Any Given Tuesday, her memoir published last year. Cuomo had “zero regard for the people around him and the impact his actions would have on them”.Enter Melissa DeRosa with What’s Left Unsaid, a full-throated defense of her own former boss. On the page and while promoting her book, Cuomo’s chief adviser and most senior aide generally wields a sledgehammer. Except when she doesn’t.“I don’t want to comment on Lis’s book,” De Rosa said, when asked by Vanity Fair. “We all lived through this in our own ways. We all had to cope with the fallout of it.”Subtitled My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis, DeRosa’s memoir is pocked with scenes of a marriage gone south, of trying to cope with Covid-19 and of general governmental strife. She punches hard. Her anger is white hot. Her book is deliberate and focused.She slams Cuomo’s accusers. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Kathy Hochul, Cuomo’s successor as governor, get it in the neck. Aides to James had sexual harassment-related problems of their own, DeRosa charges. She also calls out CNN and the New York Times for their own alleged deficits on that score.DeRosa has connections. She interned in Hillary Clinton’s office, when Clinton was a New York senator. She thanks Clinton for helping put steel in her spine. She gives a shoutout to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s close aide. DeRosa led New York operations for Barack Obama’s political action committee. She rose through the ranks of state government and Cuomo’s office. She charges Hochul with administrative and political ineptitude, echoing criticism, leveled by Nancy Pelosi, that Hochul cost the Democrats control of the US House by screwing up the New York redistricting process, handing Republicans seats.“The governor didn’t realize soon enough where the trouble was,” Pelosi told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. But here, DeRosa can be myopic. According to Bill de Blasio, the former New York mayor, Cuomo was also at fault in the process that most observers say facilitated Republican gains. If a mere 89 more New Yorkers had been counted, the size of the state’s congressional delegation would have suffered no loss in size.“For God’s sake, if the state had invested in the census, could you have found 89 more people to count? Sure, easily,” De Blasio has said. “This was a lost opportunity by the state government to get the count right.”DeRosa acknowledges tensions between mayor and governor but takes De Blasio to task for his embrace of leftwing politics.“That meant staking out a position that actively opposed police presence,” she writes, blaming De Blasio for problems related to crime. She also calls him out for sidling up to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive star in Congress, and mocks his presidential run to nowhere.DeRosa also deals with the fractious relationship between Cuomo and the White House of Donald Trump, for so long a New York fixture and a former client of the Cuomo family law firm, Blutrich, Falcone & Miller.In 2020, under Covid, New York lockdown policy put it at odds with the administration.“We’ve done polling, and you guys are in the wrong place on this,” a “smug” Jared Kushner is quoted as telling DeRosa, saying New York was out of sync with Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Florida.“We were in the middle of a pandemic, one that had already killed tens of thousands of people, and I was talking with President Trump’s top adviser … about polling in swing states,” DeRosa writes.In fall 2021, Ron DeSantis actively discouraged vaccination. The grim reaper had a field day on the governor’s front lawn. Florida came to surpass New York in fatalities, in absolute and relative numbers. According to the Lancet, Florida’s unadjusted death rate (per 100,000) was 416, for New York 384.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeRosa also attacks Trump for reneging on federal assistance to infrastructure projects. Why? Cuomo publicly criticized Trump. To quote DeRosa, “the president of the United States had lost his mind over four sentences in a convention speech.”Yet Cuomo has more in common with Trump than DeRosa acknowledges. It went beyond being “two tough guys from Queens, raised by larger-than-life fathers”, as the author puts it. Confronted with pushback over his decision in 2014 to disband an anti-corruption commission which he himself appointed, Cuomo bellowed: “It’s my commission. I can appoint it, I can disband it. I appoint you, I can un-appoint.”L’état, c’est moi.DeRosa pays tribute to family. In summer 2021, as Cuomo was brought crashing down, she repaired to her sister’s in-law’s place on Cape Cod, away from prying eyes.She also deals with friends – some of them now former. Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican congresswoman who become a top Trump toady, was a buddy and classmate. DeRosa “knew her as ‘Little Elise’”. Stefanik landed at Harvard, DeRosa at Cornell. DeRosa reports a heated discussion over same-sex marriage that left Stefanik shaken. DeRosa compared her to a segregationist.The fact that Stefanik called for Cuomo and his senior staff to resign probably triggered this trip down memory lane. Left unmentioned: Stefanik was one of 39 Republicans, and the sole member of House GOP leadership, to vote in favor of federal protection for same-sex and interracial marriage.Promoting her book, DeRosa was asked by Vanity Fair about Cuomo, karma and payback. She said: “I don’t like to think that we live in a world where the answer is, ‘Well, you got it because you deserved it.’”Vanity Fair’s headline? “Melissa DeRosa Isn’t Done Defending Andrew Cuomo”. She and her boss are not about to disappear.
      What’s Left Unsaid is published in the US by Sterling Publishing More

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      Leftist Democrats invoke human rights law in scrutiny of Israel military aid

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      Leftwing Democrats in Congress have invoked a landmark law barring assistance to security forces of governments deemed guilty of human rights abuses to challenge the Biden administration’s emergency military aid program for Israel.Members of the Democratic party’s progressive wing say the $14.3bn package pledged by the White House after the 7 October attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis breaches the Leahy Act because Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has overwhelmingly harmed civilians. An estimated 9,000 people have been killed in Gaza so far, among them 3,700 children, according to the Gaza health ministry, run by Hamas.The act, sponsored by the former Democratic senator Patrick Leahy and passed in 1997, prohibits the US defence and state departments from rendering security assistance to foreign governments facing credible accusations of rights abuses. The law was originally designed only to refer to narcotics assistance, but was later expanded, with amendments covering assistance from both state department and Pentagon budgetsSeveral governments, some of them key US allies, are believed to have been denied assistance under the law, including Turkey, Colombia and Mexico.Proponents of applying the act to Israel point to the rising death toll in Gaza from military strikes on the territory, the displacement of more than 1 million people from their homes and a surging humanitarian crisis after Israeli authorities cut water, food, fuel and electricity supplies.“I am very concerned that our taxpayer dollars may be used for violations of human rights,” said the congressman Andre Carson of Indiana in an email to the Guardian, in which he accused Israel of “war crimes”, citing this week’s deadly bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp and the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) alleged use of white phosphorus.“Last year, I voted to provide $3 billion dollars of strategic and security assistance to Israel. But we must absolutely make sure that none of those funds are used inappropriately, in violation of US law like the Leahy Act, or in violation of international law.”But earlier this week, the Biden administration said it was not placing any limits on how Israel uses the weapons provided to it by the US. “That is really up to the Israel Defense Force to use in how they are going to conduct their operations,” a Pentagon spokesperson, Sabrina Singh, said on Monday. “But we’re not putting any constraints on that.”The Israeli government and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have so far not responded to calls for a humanitarian pause and have rejected calls for a ceasefire, as demanded by some progressive Democrats.Joe Biden promised a lavish military aid package to Israel in an Oval Office speech after visiting the country following the Hamas attack. US commandos are currently in Israel helping to locate an estimated 240 hostages, the number given by IDF, including American citizens, seized in the assault, the Pentagon has confirmed.Carson, one of three Muslims in Congress, said he previously raised concerns about possible Leahy Act violations last year after the shooting death of the US-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank. An Israeli investigation subsequently admitted there was a “high probability” that she had been killed by Israeli gunfire, after initially blaming Palestinians.Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for Justice Democrats – a political action committee that helped elect leftwing House members nicknamed “the Squad”, which include some of Congress’s most vocal advocates for Palestinian rights – also invoked the Leahy legislation.“I think the Leahy Act should absolutely be looked into right now, when we are seeing gross violations of human rights,” he said. “[The Israelis] are targeting refugee camps, hospitals, mosques all under the guise of self-defense or that one or other member of Hamas is hiding there. It doesn’t matter whether Hamas is there or not, because you are targeting civilians. No amount of tax dollars should be justified for that.”Like Carson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most high-profile members of “the Squad”, specifically identified the supposed use of white phosphorus – as claimed by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International – as a transgression that should disqualify Israel from receiving US assistance. The IDF had said it does not use white phosphorus against civilians, but didn’t clarify whether it was used at the time.“Deployment of white phosphorus near populated civilian areas is a war crime,” she said. “The United States must adhere to our own laws and policies, which prohibit US aid from assisting forces engaged in gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.”Congressional calls for scrutiny over US funding for Israel predate the current war in Gaza.Last May, Betty McCollum, a Democrat from Minnesota, introduced the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation bill, designed to prohibit US funds from being used to enforce Israeli occupation policies in the West Bank.“Not $1 of US aid should be used to commit human rights violations, demolish families’ homes, or permanently annex Palestinian lands,” McCollum said at the time. “The United States provides billions in assistance for Israel’s government each year – and those dollars should go toward Israel’s security, not toward actions that violate international law and cause harm.”The bill, which has not passed, was co-sponsored by 16 other House Democrats – including some who have not supported the current calls for a ceasefire – and endorsed by 75 civil society groups, including Amnesty, HRW and J Street.McCollum’s office did not respond to questions over whether she now supported extending her bill to Gaza or using the Leahy Act to block Biden’s emergency fund package.In a speech on the Senate floor this week, the senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont called Israel’s Gaza campaign “morally unacceptable and a violation of international law” but stopped short of opposing Biden’s assistance program.Instead, he demanded a “clear promise” from Israel that displaced Palestinians will be allowed to return to their homes after fighting stops and for the abandonment of efforts to annex the West Bank, a territory claimed by Palestinians as part of a future state.“The United States must make it clear that these are the conditions for our solidarity,” he said.In a letter to the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, Sanders and five other Democratic senators – Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Ed Markey, Peter Welch and Mazie Hirono – said they supported approving Biden’s proposed overall $106bn aid package to Israel, Ukraine and other foreign crisis areas “without delay”.But they demanded that an equal sum be allocated to “domestic emergencies”, including childcare, primary health care and the opioid epidemic.A separate letter the six sent to Biden asks a series of searching questions about Israel’s invasion of Gaza.“We have serious concerns about what this invasion and potential occupation of Gaza will mean, both in terms of the long-term security of Israel and the well-being of the Palestinian residents of Gaza,” it says. “Congress needs more information about Israel’s long-term plans and goals, as well as the United States Government’s assessments of those prospects.” More